Photography, film and video have been my medium of choice. They are all linked with my obsession and passion for the image in a variety of forms and manifestations.

The Moving Image
I spent my adolescence taking pictures. In Marseilles I went to night classes in photography. Then, in 1976, I went to Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham to study film and photography. My first two films A Sentimental Journey (1978) and Clear Cut (1979) where shot on a beaulieu 16mm in reversal ectachrome. It was fairly cheap, you could cut your own master and make just one 16mm reversal print. You had to be careful, very little exposure latitude and just don't scratch the master! Sound was magnetic stripe and non sync, voice over, effect and music. This was film, the thought of 24 frames a second after having worked each frame with such attention in photography seemed at best excessive. My shooting ratio was 2 to 1 and I was really aiming at 1 to 1. To my mind each lost shot represented hundreds of negatives, gone for ever, useless, sad, forgotten, dying, dead. I was a celluloid fetishist.

Until then, the nearest I had got to theory was Gombrich's The story of Art but Gidal had just published the seminal Structural Film Anthology, a battle cry to all film-makers against the illusionary narrative cinema. I had been reading Huxley. In an attempt to catch up I proceeded to devour semiology, art theory and politics, the writings of Peter Gidal, Malcolm Le Grice, Stephen Heath, P.Adams Sitney, journals such as Afterimage, Frameworks and for afters... Screen. Once a week, first thing in the morning Simon Field showed us the best of the (mostly American) avant-garde: Stan Brakhage, Paul Sharits, Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Bruce Baillie, Hollis Frampton, Peter Kubelka, George Landow, Warhol but also Melies, Eisenstein and Godard. The tension, beauty and subjectivity of Brakhage's Anticipation of the Night (1958) was a revelation - it looked like the mind's eye.

There was difficult theory and aesthetic dogma in film practice. Reconciling an intuitive artistic practice and an extremely dense and watertight theoretical discourse was hard work. For those early structuralists whose theory had come hand in hand with the labour of filmmaking it made sense. My work was already becoming too aesthetic, colourful and "beautiful" to fully fulfill the structuralist agenda. Yet in Clear Cut, I placed side by side a voice over reading of Stephen Heath's brilliant essay Narrative Space (1) with a sequence of fragmented shots of camera movements, zooms, tracking sequences shot from buildings, cars and streets. The text said cinema was phallocentric but the film wasn't sure. It was shown at the London Film-makers' Co-op (LFMC) Summer show in 1980, my first public screening at the LFMC.

Ascetic Practice
The Royal College of Art's film and TV School was a microcosm of the British left intellengentsia in all its most extreme manifestations. Although Peter Gidal, Steve Dwoskin, Lutz Becker, Howard Brenton were the tutors, it was extremely difficult to make films due to the atmosphere of ideological cannibalism. The left, defeated and divided with Thatcher in her ascendance was in a bad way. Political gangs formed and Lucy Panteli, Joanna Millet and myself became branded as post structuralists, making films with a collective ideology of anti narrative under the guidance and influence of Peter Gidal, whose weekly seminars and screenings of structuralist films were inspirational. Peter's position was to sustain and promote structuralist film over all of cinema as only such a brilliant mind could.

I wanted to make films that were challenging but visually accessible and would also convey the processes of perception. Untitled (1980) now seems as much a claustrophobic existential nightmare (à la Lynch) as a treatise on perception. I was reading Merleau Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception and was interested in the way that perception is the result of a process; that we are active in it and bring an equal share to it. There was connections with Huxley's Doors of Perception, a search for a hidden aspect to the visual world which bordered on mysticism, an aspect of experimental film which was constantly and severely denied by structuralist theory. Watch Gidal's best and beautiful Room Film 1973 (1973) and feel the metaphysical...

Impressionism...
Mediterranean...
The Drunken Boat...
Cinema and memory...

Michael Mazière, October 1999

(1) "Narrative Space", Stephen Heath, Screen, Autumn 1976, Volume 17, Number 3