The Grip of the Octopus (A Schematic Serial in Black and White). 15 parts. Narrator – Richard Mitchley. Music – Florian Schelzig.

In 1928, chief surrealist André Breton recalled the powerful effect that an episode of a film serial had had on him nearly a decade earlier. In Breton’s native France the serial in question bore the title The Grip of the Octopus. The original title of this American serial, however, was The Trail of the Octopus. As Breton perhaps sensed, the murky repercussions of the serial’s stranding between Trail and Grip and its resultant identity crisis are not insignificant; only a lost manuscript sketching out an alternative version of The Grip of the Octopus can help us measure the extent…

Barnaby Dicker is an artist-filmmaker, researcher, lecturer and curator based in Swansea. His practice is generally aimed at dismantling meaning and notions of ‘content,’ this is achieved through attention to visual rhythm and, more often than not, a degree of playfulness. He is currently working with Cardiff-based Sound Affairs on an Arts Council of Wales funded cross-media tour combining music, dance and video entitled Michelangelo: Drawing Blood that will premiere next spring. He holds a doctorate in experimental stop-frame cinematography and teaches on BA Film Production at University for the Creative Arts, Farnham and at the Royal College of Art, London.

soundaffairs.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/barnaby-dicker-filmmaker-biography