Hand Grenade

Starting out working with painting and drawing, at the beginning of the 1970s Gill Eatherly joined the London Filmmakers' Co-op and began working with film. It was in the same period that she became part of the Filmaktion collective (in which Malcolm Le Grice also took part) who organised a number of expanded cinema events around London. Unlike other British experimental film-makers of the period, Eatherley does not exclusively anchor her work in structuralist theories of movement. Her films are perhaps more connected to the interdisciplinary concepts that were around at the time in the fields of music and art, as shown by Hand Grenade. This is a playful work where three orchestrated screens accompany music by the group Neu. It may seem that the images in Hand Grenade are those of an oscilloscope, or are generated by a computer. However, the film was actually created by painstaking work with an optical printer.