Meanwhile Back in the Cave

: the Metaphysics of British Artists’ Film and Video

I met Pete at the Clean Spoon café. He was in the gloom of a corner booth at the back, nursing a
double espresso and a custard tart. I hadn't see him for a while. As I slid onto the vinyl bench I
asked him if he had been waiting long.
'No I just got here..' He replied, leaning into the light. ' The last time we met, you were on on your
way to some symposium..'
‘Yes’ I said ‘You mean ‘Lighting the Cave’ organised by the British Artists’ Film and Video Study
Collection at Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, May 11 th 2012 ?’
‘Certainly’ he said ‘What’s their new campus like ?’
‘Fabulous’ I replied ‘It’s vast. It cost £200 million and there’s provision for 4,500 students. It has
glass lifts. It’s like T.H.R.U.S.H. headquarters, I kept expecting to see the security guards riding on a
monorail. 1 That whole Kings Cross area is being regenerated, there’s going to be a free unlimited
wi-fi zone and public LED screens in Granary Square. And the college has had real involvement in
the design process. There’s a lot of research expertise gone into it, they’ve used some cutting edge
guerilla style interventions and Situationist marketing techniques (Austin 2012). It’s a great
example of how Art is pioneering contemporary urban regeneration. Many businesses have failed
and many properties are abandoned but the depression is actually a great opportunity for Artists.
There’s a boom in cheap studio space and pop-up galleries and events. And it’s great for the
developers because they’re not paying tax on empty buildings, the Artists pay rent, police the
property and keep squatters out, and the developers get good publicity for supporting Culture.'
‘That must be a consolation to the unemployed’ said Pete ‘but tell me, what was the symposium
about ?’
‘Well it was to complement the exhibition of Mischa Kuball’s ‘Platon’s Mirror’ which was on in the
gallery there.’
‘What was that like ?’ he asked.
‘There were some large canvases made of a kind of slightly rumpled silver reflective polyester foil
and there was some photo scans of imaging technology. But the core of the exhibition was a video
installation in a blacked out gallery. About half way down the gallery was a very large sheet of
slightly rumpled silver reflective polyester foil. From the entrance end of the gallery a video
projector was screening moving images onto the foil which, because it was semi transparent, also
allowed the images to hit the back wall behind the foil. The video images seemed to depict the
flickering ceiling of a crowded dance-club but the foil reflected this representation as an abstract
and ethereal polychromatic glow. And if you touched the foil this glow would swim like a cloud of
spectral plankton.’
‘That sounds charming’ said Pete.
‘Yeh it sounds better than it was…’ I replied ‘It was actually rather banal and it certainly couldn’t
bear the weight of the symposium.’
‘How do you mean ?’
‘Well both the exhibition and the symposium were themed around the ‘Allegory of the Cave’ which
appears in ‘The Republic’ written by Plato around 380 BC. Do you know it ?’
‘Of course’ he replied ‘It’s the most celebrated and influential allegory in Western philosophy…’
‘Nevertheless’ I continued ‘Let me summarise. Plato describes a great subterranean cavern in
which there are prisoners who have spent all their lives shackled so that they are forced to
perpetually face a far wall. Behind their backs is a fire. Between the fire and the prisoners people
pass holding up figures of men and animals which cast shadows on the far wall. Since they have
never known anything else, the prisoners mistake the shadows on the wall and the echoes in the
cave for real life.
Now, if you were to release one of the prisoners and reveal the mechanism of the cave to them,
they would be cast into confusion. Further, if you were to take this prisoner out of the cave and up
into the real world, he would at first be distressed and blinded by the sunlight. But eventually he
would realise that his life in the cave had been a meaningless illusion and that the true light and
cause of the world was the sun. Later, if you were to return him to captivity in the cave, he would
then be blinded by the darkness and the other prisoners would not believe his testimony and they
would even attack him and blame the sun for blinding him.’
Pete frowned and slurped his coffee. ‘What does it mean ?’
‘It’s an allegory for the philosopher’s ascent to the highest enlightenment. Plato divides reality into
a hierarchy of ascending planes. At the bottom is the realm of shadows, reflections and
representations. Above that is the material world of objects. Above these visible worlds is an
intellectual realm of imagination and reason. Above that, is the highest intellectual reality, the
realm of the Forms which are the absolute, original, eternal and universal abstracts of the real
world. And the highest of these Forms is ‘the Good’, the absolute virtue, which like the sun in the
visible world, is the source of all illumination. The Good exceeds true knowledge, but it is the cause
and the end of all truth.’
‘Alright, but what is the purpose of this enlightenment ?’
‘Well, Plato’s Republic is essentially a proposal for a communistic city state ruled by a class of elite
philosophers. The final lesson of the allegory of the cave is, that it is the duty, of the enlightened,
to descend into darkness and take responsibility for government and justice. Paradoxically,
although his philosophic system is based on illuminated truth, Plato suggests that the social
hierarchy of the philosopher state should be reinforced by a fabricated mythology which divides
the social classes into the ascending ranks of Bronze (farmers, workers, merchants etc.), Silver
(young auxiliary philosophers) and Gold (Guardian philosophers).’
‘And was this state ever constituted ?’ Pete asked.
‘No’ I replied ‘The lasting institution founded by Plato was actually his school for philosophers, ‘the
Academy’, which was active in various forms for around 300 years and gave it’s name to the
highest institution of western education.’
‘Sure, but what has this to do with Artists film and video ?’
‘Well that is the critical question and it’s why the symposium was so frustrating, because no one
really engaged with the relevance of Plato’s metaphor to Artists film and video. Rather than a
rigorous investigation of the cave metaphor, most of the speakers took Plato’s allegory as a loose
theme. The most pertinent talks were Sean Cubitt who gave a mesmerising historical survey of
illumination, shadow and penumbra, and Lucy Reynolds who came closest to the flame with her
paper : A ‘Precarious Vision’: the “Natural Magic’ of Annabel Nicolson’s Film.’
‘It seems strange’ Pete said ‘that you should convene a symposium to consider a profound and
fascinating analogy and then fail to investigate it. So what do you think is the relevance of Plato’s
cave to Artists film and video ? ’
'The secret is aura' I replied ‘ ‘What interest me is the striking similarity between the allegory of
the cave and the seminal theory of postwar British Avant Garde film, which still remains the
political presumption underpinning British Artist's Film and Video. The modern Avant Garde
emerged from the London Film Makers Co-Op (LFMC) in the 1970s, the key activist was Malcolm
LeGrice, but the purest expression of the theory can be found in the writing of the Structural
Materialist film-maker Peter Gidal (Reekie 2007 : 175). In a series of manifestos beginning around
1970 Gidal theorised a Marxist dialectical praxis for Avant Garde film. Fusing elements of
Greenberg's Modernism, May’ 68 radicalism and Cine Structuralism, he argued that the function of
mainstream cinema is to captivate the viewer in an authoritarian, manipulatory and mystifacatory
illusion. Gidal argued that this illusion is fabricated from narrative, representation and
identification :
'The commercial cinema could not do without the mechanism of identification. It is the cinema of
consumption, in which the viewer is of necessity not a producer, of ideas, of knowledge. Capitalist
consumption reifies not only the structures of the economic base but also the constructs of
abstraction. Concepts, then, do not produce concepts; they become, instead, ensconced as static
'ideas' which function to maintain the ideological class war and its invisibility, the state apparatus
in all its fields. The mechanism of identification demands a passive audience, a passive mental
posture in the face of a life unlived, a series of representations, a phantasy identified with for the
sake of 90 minutes' illusion.’

(Gidal 1976 : 4)

In opposition to this illusion the Structural/Materialist film maker annihilates narrative, content,
signification, representation, identification, voyeuristic pleasure and authorship and engages
strategies of structure, repetition, duration and reflexiveness. The work of the S/M Avant Garde is
to demystify cinema; to strip away the phantasy and reveal the true material of film.’
‘You mean like sprocket holes and grainy celluloid ?’ asked Pete.
‘No…the true material of film is the dialectic between the film and the viewer :

‘Each film is a record (not a representation, not a reproduction) of its own making. […]
Suffice it to say here that it is the core of meaning which differentiates illusionist from anti-
illusionist film. When one states that each film is a record of its own making, this refers to
shooting, editing, printing stages, or separations of these, dealt with specifically. Such film
mitigates against dominant (narrative) cinema. Thus viewing such a film is at once viewing a
film and viewing the 'coming into presence' of the film, i.e. the system of consciousness
that produces the work, that is produced by and in it. ‘
(Gidal 1976 : 2)

As the S/M film demystifies the codes and conventions of capitalist cinema so the viewer is
liberated from illusion and the revolutionary truth is revealed.’
‘So this was the project of the British Avant Garde ?’
‘Well there was a spectrum of inflections, but essentially demystification was the core of the Avant
Garde’s claim to a radical politic. If you follow my comparison, then the project of the Avant Garde
was to materialise Plato’s cave as an aesthetic process. Each screening of the work replays the
potential of an ontological revelation : it is philosophy by practice. ’
‘So what is the revealed 'Good' of the Avant Garde ?’ asked Pete.
‘Well that depends on whether you are interested in theory or history.’
The waitress arrived with my Americano, as she left I noticed a dark bruise on the back of her leg.
‘In theory’ I continued ‘the Good of the Avant Garde is a new revolutionary consciousness free
from capitalist hegemony. Those enlightened by this revelation would then become the pioneers of
the new socialist society. And this is where the metaphor gets complex and interesting, because
although S/M theory often conceptualises the viewers consciousness there is no discussion of who
the Avant Garde audience are, who they should be, or how the Avant Garde cinema will reach
them. Nevertheless, If we first accept the S/M methodology of the Avant Garde then we could
suppose four distinct political strategies. The first would be a direct strategy which would target
the audience most captivated by capitalist hegemony and so most in need of enlightenment : the
masses. The second strategy would be to target a ruling class audience in the hope of subverting
capitalist hegemony at an executive level. The third would be the Underground Cinema strategy
which would seek to mobilise the bohemian counterculture at the border of Art and the popular.
The fourth strategy would be to develop an elite academic audience for a new film Art.’
Pete stroked his jaw ‘Are these strategies mutually exclusive ? Could you not target a range of
audiences ?’
‘Sure…” I replied ‘In theory…But if we turn to history, it is clear that it was actually the fourth
strategy which was implemented by the Avant Garde and that although there may have been
conscious individual and collective decision making involved in this trajectory, it was predominately
determined by cultural and institutional factors which pre-existed the formation of the theory.
Further, I would suggest that the theory did not determine the history, it was history which
determined the theory.’
‘What do you mean ?’
‘Well, the L.F.M.C. initially emerged from the countercultural revolution of the Sixties, a movement
driven by the subversion of bourgeois institutions and the formation of new underground
subcultures. The ascent of the Avant Garde in the early Seventies was a shift away from the radical
anti-Art of the counterculture and towards the institutionalism of fine Art. This shift was driven by
the cultural and economic imperatives of Art, and the essential strategy was the infiltration and
inclusion of the Avant Garde film movement into the institutions of Art. The key agents of this
process were trained as fine Artists, their work was funded by state Art agencies and most of them
subsequently became academics in the nations leading Art schools and pioneered the
development of a new fine Art : Artists film and video. In retrospect this trajectory seems
inevitable. The aspiration to a new film Art is the origin and motor of the Avant Garde, and it can
be traced back to the earliest speculations of Ricciotto Canudo, Jean Epstein, Fernand Leger and
the debates of the 1920’s. The primal articulation of this aspiration is a theory of medium
specificity derived from modernist painting/sculpture. According to this logic the ascension of film
Art is a process which eliminates all theatricality, all literariness, all traces of mass culture, all
elements which are extrinsic to film. It is the autonomisation of film. The problem confronted by
the L.F.M.C. in the early seventies was how to reconcile their imperative to autonomise
experimental film with their radical countercultural ideology. The solution to this paradox was
Structural Materialism.'
'So let me get this straight' Said Pete, furrowing his brow. 'You're saying that like Plato's fable, the
British Avant Garde believed it was possible to free the people from an oppressive illusion and
reveal to them the liberty of truth. Only with the Avant Garde the illusion was bourgeois
hegemony and the truth was a revolutionary consciousness. But what actually happened was they
didn't liberate film from bourgeois hegemony, they recuperated it into the institutions of Art.'
'That's right, which is why the Plato's cave analogy is so interesting. Earlier you asked what the
revealed 'Good' of the Avant Garde was and I replied that in S/M theory it was revolutionary
consciousness. However, in the lens of history it is clear that 'the Good' of the Avant Garde is far
closer to Plato's ultimate Form. Instead of scientific Marxists, the Structuralists and their modern
disciples, can be conceived as mystic agents in the Neo-Platonist tradition.'
Pete closed one eye 'Remind me...' he said 'What is Neo-Platonism ?'
'It's the term given to the school of philosophy which developed from the work of Plotinus in the
third century C.E.' I replied 'The influence of Neo-Platonism on Christian and Islamic mysticism is
fundamental. The philosophic tradition runs through Western philosophy from the Renaissance to
Hegel to Gilles Deleuze. Basically it's a synthesis of Platonism with elements from Aristotle,
Judaisim and other ancient monotheistic religions. For our purposes there are two key revisions.
First, in Neo-Platonism 'the Good' becomes 'the One' : the infinite creator of the cosmos who is the
source of all beauty and love, who transcends all forms, who is beyond all description, activity and
being. The world of matter is a shadowland of illusion. The work of philosophy is not to build the
republic, it is to escape from the evil world of matter and attain mystical union with 'the One'. The
second revision was developed by the later followers of Plotinus who believed that the quest for
mystical union could be pursued through the practice of divine rituals, theurgy, or what came to be
known as the occult.'
Suddenly the gloom of the café seemed to deepen and the noise from the kitchen dropped away.
'So your telling me..' Said Pete 'That British Avant-Garde film and video was really an occult sect ?'

'It's more complex than that. The influence of Neo-Platonism on Western Art has always been
prodigious. But what interests me is the significance of Neo-Platonism in the origins of the Avant-
Garde. The critical thing is to understand that culture is not a succession of discrete ideologies or
epochs but a syncretic process in which older ideologies are incorporated, hybridised or even
renewed within cultural change. Neo-Platonism can be traced through Christian mysticism into the
Renaissance and on into Romanticism and modern occultism. The decisive influence on Avant
Garde Art comes with the agency of the Theosophical movement on Symbolism and the key
pioneers of abstract Art in the early 20th century : Wassily Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka, Piet
Mondrian, and Kazimer Malevich. The dilemma facing these Artists was articulated by Kandinsky as
a crisis of meaning ; if Art was to transcend the representation of objects then what would replace
the object ? (Ringbom 1986 : 131). The solution was found in the occult theories of Helena
Blavatsky, P.D. Ouspensky, Rudolph Steiner and the Theosophical Society. Theosophy as it
developed in the late 19th century was an eclectic amalgam of philosophy, spiritualism, Buddhism,
Hinduism and other Eastern mysticism. But at it's core it was structured and named after Neo-
Platonism (Blavatsky 2006 : 11). Like Neo-Platonism, Theosophy taught that beyond the illusion of
the objective world there could be found the true spiritual reality of the eternal absolute. The
cosmic 'science' of Theosophy sought to unite the diverse spectrum of world religions into a white
ray of illuminated truth; to ascend beyond the material life and even beyond the alien life of
distant planets. Abstract Art was initiated as the attempt to realize this transcendent realm, and as
Kandinsky proclaimed, to do so in the service of spiritual enlightenment (Kandinsky 1977 : 53).
The links between the occult and cinema are likewise generative. The history of the development
of projection is entwined with alchemy and metaphysics. At the core of Athanasius Kircher's
magisterial study of optics The Great Art of Light and Shadow (1671) there is a complex Neo-
Platonist cosmology of illusion and darkness. As the magic lantern developed into the 18 th century
it was intimately associated with the manifestation of spectres, visions and the supernatural realm.
When cinematic technology developed in the late 19th century it was immediately
integrated into the popular culture of Ghost Shows and magic spectacles : when R.W.Paul began
manufacturing cine equipment in 1896 two of his earliest customers were the magicians David
Devant and Georges Melies.
From the first glimmerings of experimental film the aesthetic was understood by it's adepts to be a
new occult that could transcend time, space and the material realm. The earliest experiments in
abstract cinema and light organ technology were developed by key pioneers with theosophical
backgrounds: the composer Alexander Scriabin and the artist inventors Claude Bragdon and
Thomas Wilfred (Morritz 1986) . Further, as Rachel Moore has observed, early film theorists such
as Walter Benjamin, Jean Epstein and Sergei Eisenstein invoked the occult as a magic technology
that could heal the wounds of modernity :

'Undergirding these early theorists' thoughts on primitive beliefs and customs is the
suspicion that film signals a significant cultural change on the one hand, and a new, or
renewed, mode of perception on the other. The primarily cultural importance of such
changes, along with the primitive nature of the encounter with the form, prompted not
only a look inward toward psychoanalytic theory, nor only outward toward theories of
language, but also backward to primitive religion, language and gesture. Nourished by the
parallels found between film identification and primitive beliefs and customs, the cinema
emerges in these theories both as an advanced form of modern communication and as a
renewal of primitive faculties lost to postenlightenment culture.'
(Moore 2000 : 10)

This latent occult became explicit in the postwar American experimental movement when
Underground cinema emerged from the Beat counterculture. The exemplary agents in this
hybridisation were Maya Deren, Harry Smith and Kenneth Anger. Deren became a voodoo
priestess, Smith claimed to be the love child of Aleister Crowley (Sitney 1971 : 264) and Anger
transformed his film practice into magick vision. '
'Sure' said Pete 'the magic power of the Underground is infamous. But I thought you said that the
Structuralist Avant-Garde was a decisive move away from the counterculture ?'.
'It was, but in the move to the institutions of Art the Underground occult was recouped. This
recoupment can be traced as the continuity of occult elements in the work of key originators of the
American Structuralist genre, a striking example is the Neo-platonic element of Hollis Frampton's
Zorn's Lemma. However the significance of the occult for the British Avant-Garde is not in the
continuity of a culture but the persistence of a method. Leigh Wilson's recent study Modernism
and Magic (2013) proves invaluable on this point. According to Wilson the key to understanding
the modernist fascination with the occult is 'magical mimesis', an experimental revision of
representation that transcended the modernist crisis :
 'Modernism did not need spiritualism, theosophy or the occult generally to recognise the
significatory and semantic crises of modernity, but it needed the magical practices at the
heart of contemporary occult discourses in order to be experimental – precisely to treat
the signifier as if it were real – to bring into existence a space that could transform the
world, that could go beyond the crises and reassert the possibilities of meaning.'
(Wilson 2013 : 16)

The magic of 'magical mimesis' is the occult belief that the copy has the power to change the
original ; that by changing the representation of the world you can change the world. This is the
key to understanding the theurgy of the S/M Avant Garde. The radicalism of the S/M depended on
occult ritual. That the participants in this mystique may deny the occult tradition is irrelevant. They
believed that it was possible to create signifiers that could transcend signification, their films were
not copies of anything, they were not illusions, they were absolute film. The S/M film transcends
the illusion of cinema and reveals the ultimate truth. The radical agency of the work is not upon
the masses or the film industry; it has an immediate magical agency upon capitalist hegemony
itself. This pioneering occult is now the intrinsic assumption of radicalism behind Artists Film and
Video. This is what enables Artists to claim that there Art is subversive when there audience is
totally bourgeois, their work is traded as a luxury consumer item and their institutions are
sponsored by the capitalist state, criminal banks and corrupt multi-nationals. '
'So Artists' film and video is actually a magic ritual ?' said Pete.
'If an Artist claims that their work has an effect upon the material world by sole means of its
symbolic agency then that agency must be supernatural'.
Pete wiped his fist across his mouth and a crumb of custard tart rolled off his raincoat.
' Alright, but the Co-Op Avant Garde didn't only have symbolic agency, they were a working co-
operative, they produced, exhibited and distributed films, they produced magazines and held
festivals, they taught students....'
'Of course' I replied 'But as I have already explained, their activity did not have the agency that
their theory affirmed. Which brings us to the aura.
The theurgy of Structuralism was never going to liberate the proletariat. But there is a practical
magic behind the cult of Artists film and video and that is the aura. As conceived by Walter
Benjamin in the mid 1930's, the aura is the quintessence of an Art object's authenticity : its
physical presence, its uniqueness as an object, its history and the tradition of its ownership. 2 The
aura has its origin in the ancient ritualistic function of the arts and the work of Art always has its
basis in ritual. The viewer perceives the aura as a mystic distance ; the liberation of Art is the
liquidation of the aura. As Michael W. Jennings has observed :

'If the work of art remains a fetish, a distanced and distancing object that exerts an
irrational and incontrovertible power, it attains a cultural position that lends it a sacrosanct
inviolability. It also remains in the hands of a privileged few. The auratic work exerts claims
to power that parallel and reinforce the larger claims to political power of the class for
whom such objects are most meaningful: the ruling class. The theoretical defence of
auratic art was and is central to the maintenance of their power. It is not just that auratic
art, with its ritually certified representational strategies, poses no threat to the dominant class,
but that the sense of authenticity, authority, and permanence projected by the auratic work of art
represents an important cultural substantiation of the claims to power of the dominant class. ' 3

According to Benjamin the advent of technologies of mass reproduction constituted a

revolutionary threat to the power of the aura, and the most radical agent of this subversion was
film. 4 However Benjamin's conception is incomplete, the key to the power of the aura is to
understand that it is a bourgeois fetish which only develops as feudal society is superseded and the
arts are commodified. 5 Aura is the fetish of noble and sacred power ; for the bourgeoisie it is both
the trophy and the nostalgia for class triumph. This was Benjamin's mistake, technological
reproduction could not reconsecrate Art because aura is the commodity value of Art. The
modernist crisis of meaning that motivated Kandinsky's question is this : if the object can now be
industrially manufactured, copied and mass produced how can Art preserve the aura ? By invoking
a realm beyond the material world the occult furnished Art with a radical new strategy.
By which I mean that the development of abstract Art is the discovery of pure aura: an occult
power detached from the material world and authorised by the mystic Artist. If film was the most
radical threat to the aura of Art then the most urgent project for Art was to aurify film. In these
terms the S/M Avant Garde can be viewed as the precursor of a cinema of aura : Artist's film and
video . An elite craft cinema of ritual symbolism which invokes for film a unique authenticity. '
'You're so right' said Pete ' and that would explain why the Artist fetishisation of celluloid has
become increasingly triumphalist. It's like now that popular culture has migrated to video the
Artists have finally got film to themselves. '
'You mean work like Tacita Dean's installation FILM (Unilever Series) at the Tate Modern ?' I asked.
'Yes and the Retro-Structuralists associated with Sequence magazine. Pete replied. 'But there's still
something I don't understand, are you saying that the aurification of experimental cinema was
inevitable ? That the revolutionary experiments of Anti-Art and the Counterculture were actually
unwitting strategies in the recoupment of radical cinema ?'
' At this point in history, that seems to be the dominant trajectory. Artist's Film and Video is now
the accepted taxonomy of experimental film and over the last decade the academification of the
field has accelerated into a new elite realm of professional expertise. But history is not over yet
and the anarchic magic of Underground Cinema is still practiced in the squats, pubs and festivals of
Albion.'
I had been so rapt in the conversation that I had not noticed the fall of evening. Through the café
blinds I could make out the lights of the great city beyond. Pete looked at his watch.
'I must go..' he said, and vanished like a map folding into itself.
http://www.studycollection.co.uk/maziere/interviews/LeGrice.html
1
The Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and Subjugation of Humanity see
2
 Benjamin, Walter, (2008) The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduction and Other 
Writings on Media , (Jennings, Michael W. ed.) the Belknap Press of Harvard University, Cambridge, 
Massachusetts.
3
Jennings, Michael W. in the introduction to Benjamin, Walter Ibid. (2008)
4
Benjamin, Walter, Ibid. (2008) P.22
5

The Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and Subjugation of Humanity see
http://www.manfromuncle.org/thrush.htm
See Tricia Austin, Culture-led City Regeneration: Design Methodologies (2012) at
http://cumulushelsinki2012.org/academic_papers/

The key documents are Peter Gidal, ‘Film As Materialist Consumer Product’, Cinemantics No.2,
1970.
Gidal, Peter ‘Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film’, Studio International
Nov./Dec. 1975 Vol. 190, No. 978
Gidal, Peter (ed.), Structural Film Anthology, BFI, London, 1976.
Gidal, Peter, Materialist Film, Routledge, London.1989.
Gidal, Peter (Ibid) 1976 p. 4
Gidal, Peter (Ibid) 1976 p. 2
For LeGrice’s subscription to Gidal’s politic see LeGrice, Malcolm, ‘Some Introductory Thoughts
on Gidal’s Films and Theory’ (1979) in LeGrice, Malcolm, Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age BFI,
London.
For a detailed history of British independent fim distribution see Knight, Julia and Thomas,
Peter, Reaching Audiences: Distribution and Promotion of Alternative Moving Image Intellect Books,
Bristol 2011
See Abel, Richard, French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, Vol 1: 1907-1939/
Vol 2: 1929-1939 Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1993.
Burger
For Deleuze and Neo-Platonism see : Terry Lovat & Inna Semetsky (2009)Practical mysticism
and Deleuze’s ontology of the virtual, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social
Philosophy, Vol 5, No 2
Gregory, John (1991) The Neoplatonists London : Routledge
A key instance would be the influence of Christian Neo-Platonistism theories of light on
Medieval cathedral design see JAMES, LAURENCE J., 'Pseudo-Dionysius' Metaphysics of Darkness and
Chartres Cathedral', Essays in Medieval Studies 2 (1985).
Sixten Ringbom Transcending the Visible: The Generation of the Abstract Pioneers in Maurice
Tuchman, ed., The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
1986) See also Webb, James The Occult Establishment Open Court Publishing Company, Illinois 1976
and Webb, James The Occult Underground Open Court Publishing Company, Illinois 1974.
Blavatsky, H.P. (1889) The Key to Theosophy (The Theosophy Trust, 2006)
http://theosophytrust.org/Online_Books/The_Key_to_Theosophy_V1.5.pdf
Kandinsky, W. Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Trans. Sadler, M.T.H.) Dover, NY 1977.
Morritz, William, Abstract Film and Colour Music in Maurice Tuchman, ed., The Spiritual in Art:
Abstract Painting 1890–1985
Moore, Rachel O. (2000) Savage Theory : Cinema as Modern Magic, Duke University Press,
Durham P.10.

For Harry Smith's parentage see Sitney, P.Adams, Harry Smith Interview in Sitney, P.Adams 
(1971) (ed.) Film Culture: An Anthology, Secker and Warburg, London.

Benjamin, Walter, (2008) The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduction and 
Other Writings on Media , (Jennings, Michael W. ed.) the Belknap Press of Harvard University, 
Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Jennings, Michael W. in the introduction to Benjamin, Walter Ibid. (2008)

Benjamin, Walter, Ibid. (2008) P.22

Athanasius Kircher's The Great Art of Light and Shadow (1671)