ARGUMENT

Morgan Fisher
Picture and Sound Rushes

Ecran d’Art is pleased to present a digital restoration of the feature-length film Argument (1978) by Anthony McCall and Andrew Tyndall. The film, first screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1978, has been almost unseen for the last twenty years. Three male voices dissect one edition of The New York Times through a series of locked-off shots, revealing the prejudice and latent content of news and advertisements, reading images as texts and presenting text as an image. Fashion photographs are used as a starting point for a political investigation of news, advertising, and images of masculinity - while at the same time, the filmmakers reflect on their own position and the possibility of radical film practice. Influenced by both the American and European avant-gardes, notably Godard and Hollis Frampton, Argument is stylistically beautiful and relentless in its enquiry. Argument is a self-reflexive film that analytically comments on the relation between image and sound, (ideologically or not biased) codes of mass culture, the economic position of avant-garde film and the responsibility of the artist. The film at the time attempted to provide a context for the problems that radical film was by definition engaged in and in a more indirect way is still topical today.

Argument will be preceded by Picture and Sound Rushes (1973), a short structural film by Morgan Fisher that starts also from a semiologic investigation. Like many of his other films Picture and Sound Rushes is concerned with the machinery of cinema. Morgan Fisher creates systems and rules that exploit the apparatus, physical material and production methods of the movies. Picture and Sound Rushes takes the form of a lecture in which his deadpan discourse describes the various permutations of sound/silence and picture/no picture.

Morgan Fisher, Picture and Sound Rushes (1973)
16mm, b&w, 11’

Anthony McCall & Andrew Tyndall. Argument (1978)
16mm min transferred to video, colour, 84’

The Ecran d’Art series is a monthly screening of artists’ film and/or video jointly organised by argos and Cinema Arenberg, in collaboration with La Cambre Academy .