Malcolm Le Grice – Threshold [Single Screen Version] (1972)
Quote:
(…) one and four screen versions (…)
Threshold is based on a small number of component sequences. It begins with abstract colour fields filling the whole screen then develops through other simple abstract images created by accidental exposure of film stock – edge fogging. The main image of the film is of border guards at a frontier post.
The film explores a range of film printing techniques using colour filtering, mattes and multiple superimpositions. It also includes a short section of computer generated abstract animation made at the Government Atomic Energy Laboratory in Britain in 1969.
The title is intended to imply various forms of threshold or edge when significant transformations occur or are inhibited – the border of a state, the perceptual points when one optical experience transforms to another the point at which an image becomes an abstraction of its shape or movement.
The performance version of the film is an improvisation – moving the projectors and superimposing the image as the projection takes place.
Deke Dusinberre wrote:
Threshold, made five years later, aptly offers points of comparison with Little Dog For Roger. Le Grice no longer simply uses the printer as a reflexive mechanism, but utilises the possibilities of colour-shift and permutation of imagery as the film progresses from simplicity to complexity. The initial use of pure red and green filters gives way to a broad variety of colours and the introduction of strips of coloured/celluloid which are drawn through the printer begins to build an image which becomes graphically and spatially complex – if still abstract – and which evokes the paintings of, say, Clifford Still or Morris Louis. With the film’s culmination in representational, photographic imagery, one would anticipate a culminating ‘richness’ of image; yet the insistent evidence of splice bars and the loop and repetition of the short piece of found footage and the conflicting superimposition of filtered loops all reiterate (as in Little Dog) the work which is necessary to decipher that cinematic image.
Malcolm Le Grice - 1972 - Threshold (Single Screen Version) [DVD-PAL].mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 13 min 23 s
Size: 326 MiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 718x572 ~> 762x572
Aspect ratio: 4:3
Frame rate: 25.000 fps
Bit rate: 3 207 kb/s
BPP: 0.312
Audio
#1: zxx 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Main)
Language(s):None
Subtitles:None
