A film in seven parts for continuous single screen projection (or the reels can be screened as distinct separate reels: Parts 1-7, Projection order can be at the discretion of the curator or venue.) 

The series takes landscape as Object in front of the filmmaker and the 16mm film system, a combination of photo/chemical materials and procedures selected by the filmmaker. It is not about rural life or the mythology of The land, neither does it seek to present a personalised impression of living in a rural district of the South West of England. The coincidence of flora, fauna and man-made object, processes and activities with the film frame are not paramount to an engagement in the total filmic process and founding concept. Specific conditions to do with both the natural world and human activity with it are recorded with the camera, subject to the observations and reactions of the filmmaker.

Citation.   Darryl Chin, Soho News (NYC) 28 Oct 1976

Deke Dusinberre:

‘one is immediately struck by both the disperateness of the Seven parts of Mike Leggett's Sheepmen and the Sheared and by the ambitiousness of the film when seen in its entirety. The apparent discontinuity may lead to initial frustration resulting from incomprehension, but the very ambitiousness of the work ultimately enables one to see the continuity of ideas and unity of thought behind it. (In a long multi-section film such as this, spectators who find the going difficult in any one section are encouraged to sit it out until the next section re-focuses attention or less fruitfully, to drift out and return at a later point in the film.) The scope of the film merits critical attention of a similar scope but these brief notes limited in length and insight merely point to two of the directions in which an overall continuity can be traced.

The first direction leads to an appreciation of the formal strategies employed in each part and an awareness that the sum of these strategies serves as a compendium of approaches to Landscape as Filmed Image. The essential qualities of repetition / rhythm, light / colour, texture and movement recur in differing ways and through differing material.[1] DD, catalogue;Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film, (tour) 1978

Citation:Rod Stoneman:

"Sheepman is a largely systemic work and offers a different inflection of the conception and role of the filmmaker - the author is no longer seen as the creative source but as an effect of the film text. ... This textual practise can also be said to offer a different articulation of the maker 'outside' the work affecting one of the elements central to the relationship of the text to the spectator - often somewhat over determined by aesthetic critical discourses. This relates to Constructivist notion of the 'artworker' as a scientific experimenter, which counters idealist ideology of the artist as transcendent individual who occupies a position outside (and above) society and its historical process. This position has been developed by Birgit Hein [i]  

R.S.November/December 1975 and 'The Avant- Garde and Politics', Millenium vol 1 no 2, Spring/Summer 19789/80

[i] This position has been developed by Birgit Hein in 'Return to Reason', Studio lnternational,