This was the first 16mm colour film by Malcolm Le Grice. The work assembles a poetic carousel of images which overlap and transform into a brightly coloured finale of two sequences: a horse being exercised in a village near Hamburg and an early 20th century newsreel of horses being led from a burning stable by pioneer film maker Cecil Hepworth.

“The film began with a sequence of 8mm film I shot of a horse being exercised in the village of Berlin near Hamburg, northern Germany. This was refilmed from the screen in 16mm black and white, running the film at different speeds and directions, and with the camera at different angles to the screen. I then made a series of short loops that were superimposed with the same material in negative, but where the loops were of different lengths, so they produced a phase shift. The material generated in this way was then re-coloured using small pieces of theatrical lighting colour filters which I pulled by hand through the contact film-printer installed at the London Filmmakers Co-operative. The material produced was then used to make multiple superimpositions. It was finally combined with some early newsreel material of horses being led from a burning barn that were treated to the same colour transformation processes. There was no initial plan to the work – it developed as I responded to the processes of transformation – rather in the manner of a Jazz improvisation on a theme. It is a kind of visual poetic drama where the sequence of image transformations and the ‘narrative’ are integrated as the content. The music was made for the film by Brian Eno who at the time was exploring, in sound, a similar use of loops that changed their phase shift.” (Le Grice, Malcolm, ‘Berlin Horse’ in Moure, Gloria, ed., 2004. Behind the facts. Interfunktionen 1968-1975, 416)

Exhibitions

1973. Filmaktion, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK

1974.Projekt '74, Cologne, Germany

1976.Arte Inglese Oggi, Palazzo Reale, Milan, Italy

1977.Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany

1977.Film als Film, Cologne, Berlin and Essen, Germany

1979.Film as Film, Hayward Gallery, London, UK

2000.Live in Your Head, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, UK

2002. Shoot Shoot Shoot, Tate Modern, London (touring), UK

2003.A Century of British Artists Film and Video, Tate Britain, London, UK

2003. X-Screen, MUMOK, Vienna, Austria

2003. Behind the facts. Interfunktionen 1968-1975. Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (travelling:Seralves, Porto, Portugal, 2004; Kusthalle Friedricianum, Kassel, Germany, 2005; Museum of Modern Art, Bogota, Colombia, 2008)

2011. Malcolm Le Grice: Le Temps des Images, Espace Multimédia Gantner, Bourgogne, France

2012. Filmaktion, Tate Modern, London, UK

Literature

Beauvais, Yann, ed., 2015. Malcolm Le Grice: Le Temps des Images. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 328-329.

Michalka, Matthias, ed., 2004. X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the 1960s and 1970s. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 112-115.

Moure, Gloria, ed., 2004. Behind the facts. Interfunktionen 1968-1975. Barcelona Ediciones Poligrafa, 416.