Frieze Video and LUX present Soft Floor, Hard Film: 50 Years of the London Film-Makers’ Co-op.

Formed on October 13th 1968, the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative (LFMC) grew out of a series of screenings in the basement of counter-culture book store, Better Books, on Charing Cross road to become a pioneering organisation incorporating a film workshop, cinema space and distribution office. Radical in its early ideals, the Co-op played a crucial role in establishing moving image as an art form in the UK and internationally.

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the London Filmmakers’ Cooperative (LFMC) and the fortieth anniversary of London Video Arts (now LUX), articles are invited that reflect upon the histories, contexts and legacies of artists’ film and video practices in Britain since 1966. Both organisations played a significant role in the development of the distinctive and diverse artists’ moving image culture experienced in the UK today. This double issue of MIRAJ marks these anniversaries in order to draw forth new scholarship and research in a vital field of study and practice. This issue will be guest edited by Benjamin Cook and Lucy Reynolds.

In conjunction with ‘The Man with the Film Projector’ (23 April – 5 May 2015), Kao Chung-li’s first solo exhibition in the UK, LUX is hosting a screening and panel discussion which aims to explore the history of experimental film in Taiwan as well as Kao’s specific film aesthetics.

The screening will showcase a number of rare films, never previously shown in the UK, including Zhuang Ling’s Life Continued (1966) and Chang Chao-tang’s Face in Motion (1970). Zhuang Ling was one of the core members of Theatre Quarterly, a self-funded avant-garde magazine which introduced European art and film theory to Taiwan, and was published in Taipei by a group of young film aficionados and intellectuals in the 1960s during the martial law era. In a claustrophobic environment that exercised strict thought control, Western modernity represented for these young people an attempt to break free. Chang Chao-tang participated in Theatre’s second experimental film screening with his short film Diary (1967). He later worked at a government-controlled TV station where he made Face in Motion as a result of being bored beyond belief. Kao Chung-li’s early experimental film Home Movies (1988), which inspired Yu Wei-yen’s film Gang of Three Forever (1989), will also be shown at LUX.