Capital Celluloid 2016 - Day 141: Fri May 20

Close Up (Gidal, 1983): Close-Up Cinema, 8pm

Close-Up Cinema introduction:
Peter Gidal
 and Mark Webber will introduce a screening of Gidal’s feature-length film Close Up to coincide with the publication of Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966–2016, a collection of essays by one of film’s great polemicists. Gidal was a central figure during the formative years of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative and made some its most radical works. His cinema is anti-narrative, against representation, and fiercely materialist.
In Close Up, Peter Gidal’s political, ultra-leftist practice is augmented by the disembodied voices of two Nicaraguan revolutionaries heard of the soundtrack. These voices punctuate a film whose representation of a room, an inhabited space, is one in which the viewer must consciously search for recognition, for meaning-making. The image-content is muted and abstract, but fascinating, with moments of (no-doubt) inadvertent beauty.
"Close Up is crystal hard, intransigent, and film in extremis. In short, one of the best 'political' films made in this country." – Michael O’Pray

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