Shepherd’s Bush

Taking re-found image of a patchwork of black and white confusion and working on it using the Debrie Printer neutral densities and aperture band, the resultant image is re-related into the environment of the cinema.
” …concerned with post-camera structuring. Again the range is wide, including systematic procedure in printing as in Shepherd’s Bush… the system is not ‘content’ to be ‘discovered’…a loop of film shot from a fast moving camera, presumably close to the ground, is repeatedly printed, each time with a change in the exposure, so that its visual quality alters in imperceptible stages from totally black to totally white, while the soundtrack, also a continuously repeated pattern, gets lower and lower in pitch. The systematic or structural aspect of this film is again partly directed towards the appreciation of duration through attention of minimal developments in the image.” – From Abstract Film and Beyond by Malcolm Le Grice, Studio Vista 1977.
” Shepherd’s Bush was a revelation. It was both true film notion and demonstrated an ingenious association with the film-process. It is the procedure and conclusion of a piece of film logic using a brilliantly simple device; the manipulation of the light source in the Film Co-op printer such that a series of transformations are effected on a loop of film material. From the start Mike Leggett adopts a relational perspective according to which it is neither the elements or the emergent whole but the relations between the elements (transformations) that become primary through the use of logical procedure. All of Mike Leggett’s films call for special effort from the audience, and a passive audience expecting to be manipulated will indeed find them difficult for they seek a unique correspondence; one that calls for real attention, interaction, and anticipation/correction, a change for the audience from being a voyeur to being that of a participant.” – Roger Hammond