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.

'I'm still standing'

This cinema originally opened as the 'Empress Electric Theatre' in 1910. Situated on Upper Street in the London Borough of Islington, the 'Screen on the Green', as it is known today, is one of the few cinemas still standing in the Islington - a borough which has been home to more than 45 cinemas since 1900.

James Benning - RUHR

 

Still from RUHR, James Benning 2010


I saw RUHR by James Benning on Saturday as part of the London Film Festival.

Comprising seven fixed frame composition that range in length from seven minutes to one hour, the film is primarily an exercise (as Benning himself proclaims) in looking and listening. The footage is all shot in the heavily industrialized region of Ruhr in Germany; however, these images could be of anywhere in the world, as the intention here is not really about place, but about the viewers relationship to observing place.

Watching the film, which at times can be challenging, (as you are watching the same scene/object/setting for up to one hour with very little change taking place) is what I can only describe as what it might be like to watch the world with your eyes closed. To explain what I mean by this it is first necessary to consider the way the philosopher Henri Bergson chose to talk not of things or appearances, but rather to speak everything in the world as ‘images’ and how images can be both matter and perceptions at the same time (see Bergson: Matter and Memory). Therefore, as I watched RUHR the line from the first page of Matter and Memory came to mind, ‘Here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of the word, images perceived when my senses are open to them, unperceived when they are closed.’ What I experienced in RHUR felt like what it might be like to see what happens in the world when my eyes are closed, in other words to perceive (to see) without perception. For Bergson perception serves action; that is, unable to take in all sensory information in the world, perception filters images that make up the external world; meaning that the images that do not concern our needs and actions pass right by us. What I see or perceive in the images on the screen in RHUR is that which is present, but without potentiality for action - in other words that which perception normally filters out.

A different way of thinking about the seven fixed framed composition that make up RUHR is to consider them as 'animated photographs'. Animated photography was the name frequently given to very early films in the period 1895 - 1906. These films normally lasted from anything from 20 seconds to 3 minutes and were fixed frame (the camera did not move) and the action, which was usually of a simple city scene, unfolded gradually in front of the camera. The movement that was witnessed by those early audiences often seemed to take place as if by magic. In these films, which were also referred to as living pictures, the movement was not the big movement that cinema would soon be so proud of as it demonstrated it’s array of techniques; instead, these were the detailed movements of smoke drifting out of a factory chimney (just as smoke drifts out of the coke quenching tower in RUHR) or leaves blowing down the road (just as in watching RUHR attention falls on the subtle rustling of a leaf blowing in The Matenastraße Tunnel). Animated photographs did not yet have the techniques of pan, zoom, edit and montage that came with the 'movement-image'. Another comparison between RUHR and animated photographs could be seen as both having durational equivalence between the time taken to film and the time taken to play back the film to audience. In many ways RUHR could be compared to animated photograph; however a big difference is technology and its ability for manipulation. Benning made it very clear in the Q&A that followed the screening that in this film small manipulations had taken place to give a truer feel of the place being portrayed. Elsewhere he has stated ‘sometimes irregular events give a false sense of reality and by removing them the truth becomes more apparent; but of course any truth is only the perception of the viewer ...’ What that perception might be brings us back to my starting point ...

In Time @ 272 High Holborn Oct 15 & 16

In Time is a group show that explores the subject of time and is taking place this Friday and Saturday at Blueprint, 272 High Holborn, London, WC1V 7EY.

The show comprising screenings, installation and performance seeks to examine time as duration, material, and as concept and process.

RSVP: info@samnightingale.com


Olympic Changes: an inadequate document of life will be screened during the exhibition, between 5.30 - 6.30pm on Friday 15th October and again on Saturday 16th of October between 2.30 - 3.30pm.

Olympic Changes: an inadequate document of life addresses time through the relationship between the still and moving image. The film looks at the concept of time as it is first arrested in the still photographic image (as a moment that is isolated and taken out of time) and then (re)animated as a moving image in digital video. This experimental film takes the analogue photograph as its source material and transforms the still-ness of photography into the dynamic movement of film. 

Olympic Changes originates from six medium-format photographic negatives taken from a moving train. Each of the negatives were digitally scanned and repeatedly divided and cropped to make 600 separate images – each becoming a frame in the film. Movement is re-animated through digital video to reflect the play of motion present at the original moment of capture. The frames of the film are sequenced in such a way that the viewer not only journeys through the changing urban landscape, but also journeys through each of the six still photographs. Witnessed is the banality of an everyday train journey, entwined with the structural changes taking place to the urban environment around the Olympic site in East London.


Further details concerning In Time can be found at: http://intimeexhibition.wordpress.com/