Cinema in a suitcase

I'm not sure if I can count this as my January fulfilment of Resolution No.4 'Try and visit a new-to-me Cinema/film screening venue once a month' as I've been to the ICA bar before and their cinema, however it was the first time I've seen a film screened in their bar. Also the first time ever I've seen film I've 'made' screened!

So, I better back up and start at the beginning.  When my friend Sarah said she was coming down for the weekend and did I want to meet up I said of course! I happily cancelled my plans for, well, having no plans and staying in, and went out to meet up with Sarah and Bob instead.  We headed down to the ICA for the launch night of the London Short Film Festival as Sarah had spotted that Suitcase Cinema were going to be doing an event/workshop in the ICA bar.

Now I had never heard of Suitcase Cinema before but one look at their website and I knew I wanted to go.  Suitcase Cinema are all about the celluloid and for this particular event this meant salvaged 16mm films they had found in skips and at flea markets.  Here was the event information from the LSFF website:
write and draw directly onto transparent film, or deface a strip of their flea market found film by bleaching, scratching, rewriting and re-imagining. When your work is done, they’ll thread it up and feed it straight into their projector, so you can see your images instantly transformed into moving, living beings.

choosing my tools, Suitcase Cinema event, 06/01/2012

What an amazing opportunity to try making a piece of film (however short it was - as it turned out very short due to my previous lack of understanding of how quickly the piece of film I'd drawn, scraped & bleached on would move through the projector!).  Also looking at it very simplistically it's the very antithesis of my professional work - defacing and altering something rather than preserving it as it is.  My only previous experience of working with film was running it through a Steenbeck and using a splicer to repair film. 

Me and Sarah, at work/play!

As the films were salvaged and bought second-hand this was film strip with content and a story already on it. We were given pens, scrapers, paint and bleach to alter/deface this film and create our own images and ideas on top of it. The effect of the bleach on the film was pretty dramatic and I liked using the scraper as well to create lines and patterns. Sarah pointed out to me that any patterns would have to be continued over a number of frames in order to show up when projected - I hadn't realised how much so until I saw the tiny bit of film I'd worked on projected - it was pretty much a case of 'blink and you'd miss it'. It really made me appreciate just how much work must go into any experimental film - Norman Mclaren's work immediately sprang to mind - not, I hasten to add, out of any parallels I drew between his work and my own meagre attempt - just in terms of drawing straight onto film.

I had so much fun at this event and I really think that the experience of making films - even just playing about with it a wee bit like we did - would do so much to enrich the experience of film preservation.  I'm sure that most archivists working in film preservation also have experience of film making, definitely of film projection but for me it was a first-time of film-making (however short-lived and fleeting it was).  All in all, I'm so glad we went (thanks Sarah, for bringing the event to my attention - and for coming down as I probably wouldn't have gone alone!).  And of course a big thanks to Suitcase Cinema, and to the LSFF and the ICA for hosting the event - what a fun and creative way to spend a Friday night.
Long live Celluloid!!

'The only reality which counts in the end is the interpretation', John Grierson

© Sean Snyder, Index, 2008-9 Courtesy the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; Lisson Gallery, London; Galerie Neu, Berlin

Ok, so I've cut the quote slightly but it just seemed so relevant to Index, an exhibition currently showing at the ICA in London by the American artist Sean Snyder. Index is a manifestation of a research project Snyder has been working on, going back, examining and digitising his own archive of images and recordings. In his own words
"Using archival and media resources, as well as references from the history of cinema, photography and art, the research attempts to define a cumulative vocabulary to approach the vast role that imaging technologies play in the construction of ideology."
'Optics. Compression. Propaganda', Sean Snyder in Art and Research: a Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, Vol. 2, No. 1 Summer 2008

The eponymous Index part of the exhibition is photographs of his archive of images and recordings, including photographs of tapes and other analogue recording materials as well as the digital devices he was transferring his archive to. Maybe this is just the archivist in me but I found it quite frustrating that there wasn't much, if any, contextual information given about most of these photographs. Maybe this was the point, to think on them as art objects themselves rather than repositories of information. However if this was the case then it seems to conflict with another part of Snyder's research project, a website from which the digital archive will be able to be accessed (which gives some information about the content and context of the photographs in the exhibition). However, even with the lack of information about the information in the photographs, they still make interesting images and it's always great to get a glimpse into the world of information that informs artists' work.

© Sean Snyder, Exhibition, 2008, DVD projection, 7 minutes, Installation view at ICA, 2009
Courtesy: The artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; Lisson Gallery, London; Galerie Neu, Berlin

In addition to Index there are three video installations: Exhibition; Afghanistan, circa 1985; and Casio, Seiko, Sheritan, Toyota, Mars. I thought they were all really interesting but I particularly liked the first film Exhibition which uses a Soviet propaganda film from 1965 about an exhibition of contemporary Mexican art by Riviera and other Mexican artists I hadn't heard of before and mixes this with film footage of an art history lecture in a rural community. I liked the similarities it pointed to between the art in the exhibition space in the gallery and then the art lecture in the rural community where the art works were hanging on the outside walls of a farm building. Even in the rural setting the conventions of the art world were adhered too, the work was framed, revered and examined just as it would be in a gallery setting. I read, in the programme for the exhibition, that it was meant to be 'exploring the ideological basis of the original documentary' but it was the similarities, the adherence to cultural conventions, that I thought was most interesting.