Peter gidal biography
•
Peter Gidal
Peter Gidal is an English film writer, theoretician, and filmmaker. Born in 1946. Gidal studied theatre, psychology and literature at Brandeis University, Massachussets, 1964-68, and the University of Munich from 1966-7. He studied at the Royal College of Art from 1968-71 where he went on to teach Advanced Film Studies until 1984. He was an active member of the since 1969, and Cinema Programmer there from 1971-4. Co-founder of the Independent Film-makers' Association, 1975, he served as a member of the British Film Institute Production Board, 1978-81.
His films have been screened nationally and internationally, including the Tate Gallery, the Hayward Gallery, and yearly since 1969 at the Edinburgh Film Festival and the National Film Theatre. Gidal has had retrospectives of his films at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1983, Centre George Pompidou, Beaubourg, Paris, 1996, amongst others. International screenings include several each at the Museum of Modern Art, N
•
Peter Gidal
Peter Gidal (born 1946 in New York) is an influential British film theorist and avant-garde filmmaker, associated with the English "Structural/Materialist" movement (along with Malcolm Le Grice notably). He has published in numerous magazines (Studio International, Screen, October, Undercut) and is the author of several books, including Andy Warhol: Films and Paintings (1971), Materialist Film (1988) and Understanding Beckett: A Study of Monologue and Gesture in the Works of Samuel Beckett (1986).
The Author as Producer of Nothing
2021
English edition
Rab-Rab Press
sold out
The first publication of a lost 1978 text by Peter Gidal—one of the most influential experimental filmmakers ever.
•
Peter Gidal was born in 1946 and grew up in Switzerland. After studying psychology and German literature at Brandeis University and the University of Munich, he enrolled at the Royal College of Art in London and began his career as an experimental filmmaker. In the 1960s his films were shown at such 'underground' London venues as the New Arts Lab in Drury Lane and the London Film-Maker's Co-op (which he helped to establish) in Chalk Farm. An beundrare of American structuralist filmmakers such as Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton, Gidal's own works are also interrogations into the formalist aspect of film, with an emphasis on grain, duration, tempo and editing structures. This is accompanied by an almost wilful insistence on the filmskapare as the ultimate arbiter of the construction of any work. As he puts it:
The question of making things difficult for the spectator in my films fryst vatten absolutely crucial and historically so, because that fryst vatten where the break always comes. In th