I realised that what you actually film is secondary to how you control its representation, that a film’s ‘drama’ can as easily be created by its material construction as its subject matter, and that meaning in film (and life) is infinitely malleable. I learnt through our often heated and invariably politicised discussions that you didn’t have to like a film to get something from it, and that arguments can be stimulating and enjoyable. Focussing mainly on British and American experimental film but also taking in the likes of Dreyer, Godard and Straub/Huillet, Peter exposed us to a broad range of work that stretched from Vertov to Valie Export. Over the course of three years those Thursday morning sessions contributed enormously to my development as a filmmaker. It took me some weeks to inflate myself again, but eventually I managed to open my mouth and learn to speak. I shrank, even more than in the secondary school English class where I had pronounced ‘hyperbole’ as ‘hyperbowl’.
Quick as a flash, Peter came back at me with the response “And we all want healthy relationships, don’t we?”. I tried to explain why this felt so important to me and said that the combination of elements gave the viewer “a healthy relationship to the image”. I was bowled over by the tension between representation and abstraction and how the work managed to incorporate illusionistic pseudo-narrative elements within a film which nevertheless made one constantly aware of its artifice and material construction. However, when he showed us Back and Forth (1968-9), my first encounter with the work of Michael Snow, the film made such a big impression on me that I felt compelled to speak. I was also slightly in awe of Peter, so I was terrified of saying the wrong thing in his presence. Everyone, that is, except me, who lacked the confidence and articulacy of my middle class contemporaries (I thought that I was middle class myself until I went to the RCA). Every Thursday morning Peter would introduce and screen a selection of films (always 16mm, video was from another planet), which everyone would then argue passionately (or bloody-mindedly) about until hunger got the better of them. I first met Peter Gidal at the Royal College of Art in 1974, where a diverse group of students that included myself would enthusiastically gather each week for his seminar.
Flare Out will be launched at Tate Britain on Thursday 14 April 2016 with a screening of Peter Gidal’s films followed by a conversation between Gidal and the book’s co-editor Mark Webber. On the occasion of the publication of Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966-2016 a collection of writings by Peter Gidal published by The Visible Press, John Smith reflects on his time as a student of Peter Gidal’s at the RCA in the 1970s.
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