Two new Peter Gidal publications

It’s the old story: you wait for a Peter Gidal publication, and then two arrive at once!

September sees the release of LUX’s new limited-edition DVD of Gidal’s Performance of Sorts with Brecht, documenting Gidal’s rare performance at Chisenhale in 2009 in which he interrogated his own practice as a filmmaker and theorist via his long-standing engagement with Brecht’s theories of theatre. The original performance was packed-out and the subject of much fevered discussion afterwards, so if you missed it this is a unique opportunity to catch up. The disc also features two of Gidal’s key later films, both rarely seen: Volcano (2005) and Denials (1985).

By a happy coincidence, also published this month is Ciao Peter Gidal, the first issue of artists Patricia Lennox-Boyd and Jamie Stevens’ Benedictions project. The project circulates around a periodical publication, each issue of which features a variety of responses to a single piece of correspondence that is printed on the dust jacket. For this first issue, the correspondence in question is an email from Gidal to David Curtis, scholar and archivist of British experimental filmmaking; those responding include J. A. Harrington, Anja Kirschner and David Panos, Helena Vilalta, Robert Leckie, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Louis Henderson, Phillida Cheetham, Morag Keil, and LUX’s own Gil Leung. It’s a fascinating anthology of contemporary artists and writers responding, with various degrees of obliqueness, to Gidal’s text, and also very beautifully produced, with a screen-printed dust jacket.