Sign (1973)

Du Cane describes his cinema as “as close as I can get to an immediate transference onto celluloid of my flux-like process in response to being here now, filming.” Sign is a “room film”, shot entirely in what appears to be the filmmaker’s studio: film cans, reels and other cinematographic can sometimes be distinguished amongst the rapid camera movements. Du Cane’s rarely shown films are amongst the most pure and radical of their period. Instinctive yet formal, structured and organic, the physical world is turned into a screen-based labyrinth that is both surface and depth, through the retinal rush of incremental superimpositions and delicate cameral control.