This 16mm program features four films engaged variously with ideas of "text-as-image." Whereas Chaplin and Murnau once rejected silent era intertitling practices as "unfilmic," these filmmakers explore how text on screen could be just the opposite. Proposing self-consciously literal responses to longstanding scholarly questions about "film language," these conceptual works are as playful and comedic as they are formally rigorous.

In celebration of John Smith’s 50 years of radical filmmaking, purge.xxx and Close-Up present the most extensive survey of his work to date: screening 50 films by Smith, organised into ten weekly programmes, seven at Close-Up and three at the ICA. The screenings are arranged chronologically, combining rarely screened works with well-known favourites. Guests in conversation with Smith include Erika Balsom, Ian Bourn, Jarvis Cocker, Gareth Evans, Juliet Jacques, Carol Morley, Jocelyn Pook, Stanley Schtinter, Iain Sinclair and Alia Syed.

The London Film-Makers' Co-operative (LFMC) was founded in October 1966, and soon grew from its beginnings as a film-viewing group to become one of the major centres of a worldwide network of avant-garde film culture.