The beginning and end of Disbanded Cinema

1 : the remains of something broken down or destroyed digging through the storm’s debris in search of survivors sifted through the debris of his flooded house. 2 geology : an accumulation of fragments of rock. 3 : something discarded : rubbish picking up debris after the parade.

I am hoping to hold an exhibition at my studios next year. It will be a mixture of sculpture, video and installation and will reflect on decades of collecting machinery associated with Cinema.

In marked contrast to Expanded Cinema which largely aims to enlargen conventional applications of projection technologies (albeit in inventive, experimental and innovative ways) my aim is to celebrate the metallic presence of film machines as artifacts, sculptures, bodies.

Through simple and crude reinterpretations and reimaginings of their design, aesthetic, function and mechanical operation, objects will explore the inner space of their own legacy of purpose.

Alongside these sculptural works will be several moving image works including one made using a 3 colour b/w seperation film preservation technique.

It struck me recently, when unloading a final lorry load of gear that all these strange objects and parts all have their own sculptural presence. And when some are combined they take on new forms that contribute to an extension, an expansion of their lifes, or afterlifes. That is they keep giving, even in advanced redundancy and obsolescence they provide ideas, materials, toolsets, techniques, functions and value, that are far from exhaustion.

An old carbon arc mirror for instance, used in pre-XENON eera lamp houses finds a calm place when combined with the crudest light source, a candle.

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I love wasting time with useless junk pic.twitter.com/fbk8A14XmA

— hogge (@photosonics) September 10, 2021

Or here, where a cinema platter table, used to manage 35mm prints in cine-multiplexes combines with a completley stripped down steenbeck frame. Any use value or functional purpose this editing table had in a previous life is now dismantled to reflects it core being, a big metal welded frame that can act as a base for all kinds of projects.

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I will construct a new version of this arrangement where a large horn speaker, used as the centre speaker for over 10 years in an old cinema in Bristol is combined with some heavy studio ‘legs’ or tripod which I was gifted by the late Dave Borthwick from Bolex Brothers animation studio.

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My old friend, the Kalee 21 (above) that we ran at the Cube Cinema from 1998 to around 31st January 2016 will be placed, like a bust, on a plinth inside which I might try and build a loop holder (like a Kinetoscope). It will sit on some scales as if to weigh its soul.

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None of these objects is in fact ‘junk’ in any way. Their reorientation as objects in a gallery show is booked into their diaries. The rest of the time they are all employed in other ways, some reflecting their designed use and sometimes revealing re-purposings.

I have in mind about 10 pieces and am working from now until next year with the exhibition planned for March possibly.

I will use this blog as a diary/note book/sketch book/scrap book as I go along to document the whole process.

 

I’ll be doing these studio tours during the Cinema Rediscovered Film Festival in late July at watershed (mainly).

They are tours designed to verbalise what I am doing on several levels. In this regard they are also performances and presentations about ideas, processes, thinking and working collaboratively.

There is an assumed ‘intrigue’ or ‘fascination’ with machines that often forms the basis of inquiries into or explorations of apparatus and historic mechanisms and this is especially true of  ‘Cinema’ being principally an art that was an expression of/through/with technical apparatus.

Not in totality of course but a large part of its formations and developments were precisely applications of ‘tools’ that were in themselves defined by their own materiological conditions.    Its my conviction that these tools don’t just disappear when Cinema decides to adopt a different toolset (semiconductor based currently) but rather they are free from the  over riding economic and industrial restraints of the past and are never exhausted as creative instruments.

But they are also necessary for any future generation to understand the history of their use and their place in the working systems that frame their development as creative tools.

Alexander Horwath recently said, (p27 JPF 96 | 04:2017. FIAF)

“…the actual content of film….is inseparably bound to its writing instruments, its technological basis and material tools. Thus in the future….analogue films will remain fully understandable if analogue film, including its parts of which the film strip is only one, remains accessible as a working system”