16mm structural film by John Du Cane.

Images of windows interspersed with solid black.

John Du Cane’s rarely shown films are amongst the most pure and radical of their period. In Cross, he uses the drawing of a cross (made without lifting the pencil) as a model for the camera movements and a score for the film. “The films are very physical, they are polyrhythmic and they are patterned in a manner designed to create a very definite way of seeing, of experiencing ... The films are silent to the extent that there is no soundtrack ... I believe films’ light capable of creating sound ... the films are there to be listened to. They are there to be felt." (John Du Cane)

Du Cane describes his cinema as “as close as I can get to an immediate transference onto celluloid of my flux-like process in response to being here now, filming.” Sign is a “room film”, shot entirely in what appears to be the filmmaker’s studio: film cans, reels and other cinematographic can sometimes be distinguished amongst the rapid camera movements. Du Cane’s rarely shown films are amongst the most pure and radical of their period. Instinctive yet formal, structured and organic, the physical world is turned into a screen-based labyrinth that is both surface and depth, through the retinal rush of incremental superimpositions and delicate cameral control.

“I intend my films to jump out at you from their dark spaces, their gaps, their elisions, to vibrate in your whole being in the very manner and rhythm of felt experience” (John Du Cane) In Variant, objects and spaces (trees, ships in the harbour, a teapot and cups on the table, grassy fields) do appear to jump out at the spectators, moving rapidly towards them. The film’s speed suggests the idea of an impermanent flux, attempting to create a transient, felt experience. Variant “pushes to experiential and formal extremes the deployment of schematic and repetitive structures.” (Federico Windhausen)

The zoom lens - with its ability to bring the distance close, then throw it back again - is the protagonist in John Du Cane’s film. Its action here is combined with a time exposure on each film frame. Thus both time and distance are compressed within the same image. ‘I wanted the viewer to be pretty conscious that what they’re seeing is not something that exists on celluloid; that there’s a way it’s manufactured in the viewing process.’ John Du Cane 2002