Room Film

Room Film

Synopsis

"The anti-illusionist project & the materialist dialectic are no more mechanistic goals than for example Marxist political theory and practice. This film is a consequent continuation and contraction of my film work, research which began with Room (1967). The film is not a translation of anything, it is not a representation of anything, not even of consciousness." – Peter Guidal

"I liked your Room Film very much. It is very good... I felt as if my father had made it, as if it was made by a blind man. I liked the tentativeness... sometimes the repeating shots would be clear, other times one couldn't tell if it was continuous. One had to work at it. I think it is a really beautiful film. I liked the splices! I feel that searching tentative quality a lot, that quality of trying to see." – Michael Snow

"I was particularly impressed with Gidal's film, which from what I've seen may be his best to date. Very subtly and very plastically it deals with light. The film is uncompromisingly rigid in its minimality of action. A very beautifully realised piece of work... it is definitely contemporary in feeling and substance. It is one of the best films to come out of the London School." – Jonas Mekas, Village Voice (1973)

"...there is no describable content, but one watches with fascination the representation of the objective world through the agency of light and its absence. An important enlargement of the historical conception of modernism, Gidal also poses the problem of the dialectic of representation, through representation (Rembrandt, Giacometti, etc)." – Malcolm Le Grice, Studio International (1973)