Imagining the Cinema Project

The bio box at the Strand Cinema, Creswick

While I am based in Australia I am working on a research project tracking down the sites of historic cinemas in regional Victoria. It’s a rewarding project, which have so far lead me to unearthed more than 300 spaces that have been used to show film at one time or another since the early 1900s. Somewhat like Islington’s Lost Cinemas, a project of mine that focuses on the history of movie-theatres in the London Borough of Islington, many of the old cinemas, public halls or Mechanics Institutes that have brought people together to watch moving images have long gone. Yet both in Islington and the regional towns in Victoria that we are visiting traces of the buildings still exist; be this in the bricks that still stand, in the remembrance of local people or through their imagined projection onto the contemporary spaces of the everyday, such as my aim when photographically documenting the sites as they stand today.

Imaging the Cinema Project is part of a larger and ongoing curatorial and commissioning programme (The Cinemas Project) by Bridget Crone that is developed in partnership with NETS, Victoria and supported by Monash University Faculty of Art and Design.

There is a blog that charts the research project as we journey both into cinema history and across the regional towns in Victoria, Australia. The Imaging the Cinema Project blog can be found here.


ABOUT “THE CINEMAS PROJECT”
The Cinemas Project is an exciting new framework for the commissioning and development of projects by contemporary artists working with the moving image and live performance in relation to the sites of historic cinemas across regional Victoria. The Cinemas Project addresses cinemas as spectral sites, places that are in existence or existing only in memory, and so are full of spirited visions and ghostly images. The Cinemas Project will focus on commissioning new contemporary art work that involves aspects of live performance or the moving image in order to address the type of work initially presented in these spaces.

The Cinemas Project takes these various possibilities as a starting point to invite artists who take these differing approaches to participation and spectatorship, matching one artist to one of the six participating locations across Victoria.

Traversal - First Passage screening at Ear Me Now

Traversal - First Passage is to be screened as part of 'Ear Me Now' an evening of performance, film, installation and conversation celebrating and investigating the dialogue between hearing and seeing. Ear Me Now takes place on Friday 17th September, at Second Floor Cafe Netil House, Bocking Street Entrance, E8 3RL, 8pm / doors open 7pm.

In Traversal - First Passage the image is not constrained to visuality – but it attempts to utter its own existence in the sonic realm. The overarching soundtrack in Traversal is made as ‘visual sound’, an experimental procedure I use that connects with the way sound is transmitted in optical sound films – a process first developed in the 1920’s to allow sound to be synchronized to images in cinematic film. The technique of 'visual sound' that I have developed in this film translates light frequencies, read with a specially designed microphone, into sonic frequencies, which become the film’s abstract and vibrational soundtrack, and in turn offer a non-visual perception of the image.

The idea of the utterance of the image, in Traversal, is literally the graphical inscription of the image running through the projector to external speakers as a kind of activation of the material trace between sign and object. In this journey the sound goes from visible (what we see on the screen), to invisible (sound waves), to the physical (the vibration of tiny hairs in our ears to enable audition), offering a tangible trace and a material connection between object and sign. In this process, no longer satisfied to appear before the eyes, the image translates its being to the sonic realm where it presents itself in a new form of perception, one which looks to conquer the historic dominance of visuality which as Douglas Khan puts it ‘overwhelms aurality in the cultural balance of the senses’.

Field Trip Magazine

This week saw the launch of Field Trip Magazine; the first of edition of which is dedicated to analogue photography and includes a small selection of photographs taken from my latest film Traversal - Third Passage. The film Traversal - Third Passage is the third instalment of a trilogy of work occupied with the Australian landscape as perceived from the train window as I travelled from Melbourne to Darwin and back again.

All elements of Traversal are in some way are concerned with exploring perception and blurring the boundaries between the still and moving image. In Third Passage, a film made from 54 single photographs, the still image is animated and gives the viewer no opportunity for the considered observation of the single image which we tend to expect from photography. Instead in the film the 54 still images flick by in a frenzy of changing patterns and rhythms that build towards an overwhelming crescendo. 

In Field Trip Magazine 12 of these images are isolated and time is frozen on the page giving opportunity for observation of these normally fleeting photographs.

The spread as it appears in Field Trip Magazine, Issue 1, Summer 2010.

A Small Project on Australian Cinemas

A small project on Australian cinemas stems from a curiosity and appreciation for 1930's cinema architecture. The era of these buildings has gone, but many of the buildings still remain in Australia's cities and towns - though now disappearing at a fast pace. This project document's a small sample of these buildings that housed the special occasion that going to the picture palace once was. At that time, the event of going to the cinema was not only about the image projected on the screen, but also an engagement with the building in which the film was shown, an engagement that was to transport the patron to another world; separated from the realism and drudgery of daily life they found themselves in a splendid and out-of-the-ordinary environment in which to escape for a few hours. The buildings photographed stand in varying conditions and some no longer operate even as cinemas, however, each façade is embedded with a glamorous memory of the silver-screen.

See parts 1-3 of the project below.

A Small Project on Australian Cinemas: Part Three

Capri Theater, Adelaide. Still in use as a cinema


Glenelg Cinema Center, Adelaide. No longer in use as a cinema


Westgarth Theater, Melbourne. Still in use as a cinema


Coburg Drive-in, Melbourne. Still in use as a cinema

Ideas / thoughts on Traversal: A work in progress part one

Traverse (verb)

Move across an area: transitive verb to travel or move across, over, or through an area or a place

To go back and forth across something: transitive and intransitive verb to move backwards and forwards across something

Traverse (noun)

Movement across an area: a movement or journey across, over, or through something

Route taken: a route or way across, over, or through something


Traversal is a new project that I am working on that intends to explore the relationship between the embodied and disembodied travel experience.

The framework for this project is grounded in historical changes that took place in the 19th century with the emergence of the railroad as a dominant form of transportation - taking over from the stage coach and walking, for example. I am particularly interested the effect this development had on perception for those traveling. Wolfgang Schivelbusch1 has suggested that the railway journey made possible a new way of perceiving the landscape that was very different from earlier forms of travel experience. Schivelbusch claims that, for the passenger, rail travel supported a panoramic perception of the terrain; this suggestion is put at odds to a multi-sensual engagement with the environment that was much more the case in pre-industrialized forms of transportation. In panoramic perception, Schivelbusch suggests, the traveler sees objects and landscapes mediated through the apparatus of the train. In this, the space of the traveler and the space of the perceived objects is separated and there is dissolution of the embodied experience. The landscape becomes a moving panorama, passing at speed outside the train window - one could imagine this like a movie projected on the window, where the only sensory experience of the landscape is vision - a vision that is separated from any further bodily experience.

To explore these ideas I undertook to traverse the landmass of Australia by train - from the bottom of the country to the top and back again. A journey of 6786km, comprising three train journeys, totaling 124 hours of train travel made during seven days travel. The journey started in Melbourne, Victoria; traveling to Darwin in the Northern Territory and ended in Adelaide, South Australia. All the railroads taken had played a historical role in the industrialization of Australia's transportation system; the earliest route taken was completed in 1888.

The experience of the journey was translated to visual, sonic and written representation using various apparatus, such as: still photography - digital and celluloid, moving image - video, field recordings and written observations.

My main attention was directed to the grand vista and the subtle detail.


1. Schivelbusch, W., The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, New ed., Leamington Spa, UK: Berg. 1986.

A Small Project on Australian Cinemas: Part Two

Rivolio, Melbourne, Victoria. Still in use as a cinema



Palais Theater, Melbourne, Victoria. No longer in use as a cinema



Palace Brighton Bay, Melbourne. Still in use as a cinema



The Astor, Melbourne. Still in use as a cinema

A Small Project on Australian Cinemas: Part One

Theater Royal, Castlemaine, Victoria. Still in use as a cinema



The Palais, Hepburn Springs, Victoria. No longer in use as a cinema



The Rex, Daylesford, Victoria. No longer in use as a cinema



Alpha Hall, Daylesford, Victoria. No longer in use as a cinema

Tacita Dean

Still from Prisoner Pair, 16mm colour film, Tacita Dean 2008.

Tacita Dean makes beautiful films. Her small observation speak in such a way that you taste, feel, hear and see the subject matter of her film making. Tacita Dean's films are about the past, the present and the future all at the same time. They are the about the materiality of the film they are made on, they are about the light that is reflected and refracted off the surface of the objects that her gaze falls upon. The repeated long takes within her films tell us she is in no rush. Time just takes its course; stillness stays still.

A major survey of Tacita Dean's work appeared at the Australia Centre of Contemporary Art (ACCA) from 6 June - 2 August 2009.