Peter Gidal’s anti-narrative: An art of reprisal reappraised

Abstract

In this article I will reassess the ideas of artist, intellectual and educator Peter Gidal, who, unlike his similarly positioned contemporaries Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, is not well remembered today outside avant-garde film histories and readerships. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, in a series of publications through the BFI press, in more artists’ film-focused journals such as Afterimage and Undercut, and, most significantly in the then leading film theory journal Screen, Gidal argued the centrality of the avant-garde, especially a local British expression he termed ‘structural/materialist’ film. Drawing on previous studies of Gidal by Deke Dusinberre (1976) and D. N. Rodowick (1988)..