Simon Field & The Original SHADOWS

Written for the FIPRESCI website in February 2004. For more on the original Shadows, go here.

To the best of my recollection, the first time I ever met Simon Field, the departing artistic director of the Rotterdam International Film Festival, was in the early 1970s — either 1970 or 1973 — when he was programming a festival of experiment filmmaking at the National Film Theatre in London (something he informs me he did both of those years). From the beginning of his eight years at the Rotterdam Festival, a major part of Simon’s special contribution has been not simply an emphasis on experimental film but also a kind of investment in that branch of cinema that perceives and highlights its interconnections with the other arts as well as with other kinds of cinema. There has always been something refreshing about his pluralistic and nonsectarian way of defining film experiment, and one can see this in the range exhibited by Afterimage, the invaluable magazine he coedited in England with Ian Christie for many years — an occasional publication which found room for Raoul Ruiz as well as Michael Snow, Noël Burch as well as Steve Dwoskin, and Jean-Luc Godard as well as Stan Brakhage. Read more