Gidal's materialist film

This paper belatedly re-evaluates Peter Gidal’s texts Materialist Film (1989) and Structural Film Anthology (1976) for contemporary use within digital media moving image production. Materialist film’s direct methods reproduce Abstract Expressionism’s essentialism in painting and sculpture and can be related to Samuel Beckett’s minimalism, of which Gidal has also written. Gidal’s texts are recounted in relation to the splitting of the avant-garde in two by Peter Wollen in 1975, a move that subjugated materialist film in favour of an emergent feminist counter cinema.