Projecting Film, Expanding Cinema
If alternative spaces of production and education have become central to photochemical film culture, ensuring the circulation of technical expertise and maintaining a continued interest in a now marginal art form, they are also closely connected to practi
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Projecting Film, Expanding Cinema
If alternative spaces of production and education have become central to photochemical film culture, ensuring the circulation of technical expertise and maintaining a continued interest in a now marginal art form, they are also closely connected to practices of film exhibition. Independently organised film screenings, small-scale festivals and dedicated platforms in larger events provide a context for radical and thoughtful programming outside the mainstream fare of commercial multiplexes and the taste-dictated content of repertory or arthouse cinemas. Like the London Film-maker’s Co-op in the 1960s and 1970s, the majority of film labs host public screenings of work by members and visiting artists, as well as staging their own annual or biannual festivals.1 In recent years, a number of international film festivals have placed emphasis on analogue film practice (the International Film Festival Rotterdam through the curatorial work of Erwin van ’t Hart or my own Black Box strand at the Edinburgh International Film Festival), with the Oberhausen Film Festival introducing a ‘Film Labs’ section in 2017, curated by Vassily Bourikas.2 These initiatives of varying size, scale and regularity play a vital role in disseminating photochemical film techniques, communicating the medium’s ongoing artistic relevance, connecting practitioners and potentially reaching out to new audiences. Given the increasing scarcity of 16mm and 35mm film exhibition in cinemas, art centres, festivals and other cultural institutions, safeguarding and celebrating the projection event takes on particular significance. Discussions about the cultural status of photochemical film in © The Author(s) 2020 K. Knowles, Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices, Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44309-2_5
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the digital era have tended to emphasise production contexts and material practices, often neglecting to consider the physicality of the screening or performance environment. In this chapter, I will extend the discussion of institutional infrastructures and alternative communities to the sites and forms of embodied experience. I will outline some of the key contemporary concerns in relation to photochemical film exhibition, before moving on to assess the importance of expanded film performance, material presence and the live context. In many sections of this chapter, my position as an academic researcher and writer intersects with my activities as a curator, and the many years of presenting films to public audiences in a largely cinema-based setting significantly informs my reflections. Likewise, the examples of live film performance that I discuss are drawn from personal experience—they are amongst those that I have had the opportunity to witness physically and speak about directly with the artists. Like Catherine Elwes, who, in her book Installation and the Moving Image, ‘nail[s] [her] colours to the mast’, I privilege the embodied encounter as a so
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