The London Film-Makers' Co-operative (LFMC) was founded in October 1966, and soon grew from its beginnings as a film-viewing group to become one of the major centres of a worldwide network of avant-garde film culture. In contrast to similar co-operative endeavours, the LFMC's activity was not limited to distribution – within a few years it was also running a regular program in its own cinema and, most notably, it democratized the means of production by establishing a film workshop that enabled filmmakers to control every stage of the creative process.

The motif of the loop, or more precisely repetition with variations, is one of the formal and thematic principles recurrent in experimental cinema, one of its major functions being to defamiliarize the gaze in a strange paradox. This selection of films offers an overview of different techniques and conceptual variations of this fascinating and troubling motif.