Mare’s tail

David Larcher has always had an exceptional position as an avant-garde film-maker in England. Nic Houghton: ‘Mention the name David Larcher to almost anyone in the avant-garde film scene and you’ll get stories of excess, wild times and Bohemian highlife’. He is a pioneer of diary filming. Three films will be screened from his opulent and versatile production.Mare’s Tail(1969) is a home movie in every respect. The pictures are not constructed but ‘found’ in the everyday life of the film-maker and his family. Larcher himself called the film ‘the first home movie which has been through the washingmachine’. This ironic remark confirms the household background to the film and indicates that the maker does not disavow his experimental background. The film has a legendary reputation and is being screened again (it was previously screened at Rotterdam twenty years ago) because it is a historic high-point in the genre of the home movie. Stephen Dwoskin called the film ‘an epic film flight in an inner world’.