Codex (1979) 16 mm colour 60 mins.
Divided into two half-hour parts, punctuated by ideograms which give clues about the emerging narrative. Codex opens as a kind of crazed, electric parody of "tourist London ", a zany city nightscape full of motion. The basic device is a special reverse printing process that animates every image, the result is both a teasing juxtaposition of 'picture' (the frame) and 'story' (the continuity of the material world, the city ), plus a delightful way of raising the ghost of silent cinema; flurried images that somehow 'speak'. Add a love story, a technology / privacy / paranoia theme, and a great musical soundtrack, and you've got a really good piece of avant-garde cinema; rich, agile, and accessible.
Chris Auty, Time Out: London

Stylus (1980) 16 mm colour 60 mins.
Stuart Pound's previous and highly successful film, Codex, was based around livid night-time cityscapes and a special printing process that 'staggered' the image - all within a cautious structural framework. Now Stylus takes similar material but adds fragments from a broken narrative in the style of a Robbe-Grillet novel - a clock around which a camera waltzes; a man waking; a woman entering a room again and again; the facade of a night-time building examined in minute and structural detail. Where Codex was zippy, Stylus allows itself a dark, brocaded texture, playing formal 'structure' (time, editing, the frame) against iconic moments (faces, objects) to suggest the birth of a story. A clock makes time; a stylus is the point at which sound is born; Stylus celebrates the dreamlike point at which a narrative begins .. and marks an important step forward in Pound's filmmaking.
Chris Auty, Time Out: London