In this communiqué I reflect on cinema closures and consider their blank screens as mute monuments to this odd, dangerous age. Also, I begin by nostalgically revisiting a film screening that seems to epitomise my love for the much-missed collective filmic encounter, a showing of Cronenberg’s chilly, genuinely outrageous Crash (1996). These meditations are coupled with some of my own recent film news, including links to two works of mine from 2019, which are now available to watch online. Until we meet again in the post-apocalyptic screening rooms of the future…
Crash, film still, 1996
Car Crash Cinema
The machinery of cinema is engineered to summon our dream’s desires. Cinema shows us the secret longings of the culture, as we submit to films that make manifest the pleasures and terrors of the age.
Whilst a student at art college, I attended a screening of Cronenberg’s notorious Ballard adaptation Crash at a cinema on National Cinema Day (a short-lived UK initiative where all cinemas screened their films for £1.00). The book by J.G. Ballard, upon which the film is based, had been published in 1973 and a lurid paperback edition of it was available in the art college library. Ballard’s novel takes us into the niche world of a group of car crash enthusiasts, for whom the potent energies emanating from traffic accidents are linked to the freeing of a new, emergent sexuality. The cold, forensic style of Ballard’s text, coupled with the sexual imagery, made the book a bizarre, unsettling read. When making the film, Cronenberg assumed that the controversies contained in a book that was then over 20 years old would have long been subsumed into the culture. Something strange seemed to happen though, when the book’s intense, alienating imagery was enlarged and projected onto the screen. The film’s premiere at Cannes in 1996 unleashed volcanic uproar. At its thronging press conference, 300 journalists feasted on the outrage. Ballard, present in the melee along with the cast and crew, defended the film, claiming it was, in fact, better than his original novel, going far further in its explorations of forbidden themes. True to the novel, Cronenberg’s film delved into the dark, subconscious appeal of the motor car, linking these potent machines to submerged sexual drives. The characters in the film might be seen as fringe oddities but, also, they could be seen as the discoverers of an emergent psycho-sexual terrain where human beings and the technologies they increasingly surround themselves with can couple in transcendent, mechanised union. A heady atmosphere hovered at the UK screening I attended, a charged mood impossible to recapture when re-watching the film at home on DVD. Entering the cinema I found that the unusually packed auditorium was crowded with animated, probably drunken, revellers who, as the film began, proceeded to greet the film’s glacial sex scenes rapturously, cheering and encouraging the outrageous action onscreen. The enlivened audience that later staggered deliriously from the screening hadn’t been put off by the ridiculous tabloid hysteria that greeted the film’s initial UK release, indeed, perhaps they had been enticed by it. Looking back on the film from today’s perspective, Crash might be seen to represent the ecstatic, death-embracing climax of the motor car, a genuine love letter to one of the most iconic symbols of the 20th Century. Driverless cars and electric engines will, most likely, end up neutering the potent charge generated by these polluting, often recklessly driven, revved-up machines. We’re probably better off without them but it’ll take a long time before the thrilling roar of the engine and the corrupting stink of their high-octane fuels finally dissipates.
For the uninitiated, the orgasmic trailer for Cronenberg’s Crash is online here.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Regency, San Francisco, 1992
The Void
As the above text hopefully testifies, I love attending the cinema. No amount of home streaming can really compete for the totality of its vision and the sense of occasion engendered by watching films as part of an enraptured audience. That said, the symbol of the now empty cinema holds, for me, a peculiar, apocalyptic appeal. Ordinarily the screens of the world’s now shuttered cinemas would be housing a constant parade of shimmering, fleeting visions on their surfaces. These vast, dormant screens, hanging in their silent auditoriums, have now grown dusty, long emptied of imagery. Do these pale, unused screens retain traces of the innumerable films that have flowed across them? Might some vestige of the dreams of the age still linger on the vacant fabric? To me, the blank cinema screen might represent the sum of everything, or the depiction of a mystery that can’t be represented. Although we’ve had screen gods and goddesses before, perhaps it is this empty screen itself that is most suggestive of divinity? Hiroshi Sugimoto’s cinema photographs seem to address these ideas and to anticipate our era’s blank screens. In this series of works, begun in 1978, Sugimoto photographs the entirety of a film on a medium format camera using a long exposure, allowing the unspooling film’s images to run together to form a blinding white light, which, in turn, radiates back out from the screen, illuminating the seemingly empty cinema (his process of long exposure photography also eerily erases the spectators). These photographs seem like the sum of cinema, or perhaps they represent its moment of apocalyptic erasure. To me, Sugimoto’s cinema images also highlight a vacancy that was present in cinema all the time, hiding beneath, or in between, the flickering frames of restless, onrushing imagery. As a film-maker I’ve often pondered the nature of my temporal, elusive art. Film conjures a fleeting pageant of images as airy and insubstantial as a dream. This intangibility can be unsettling, though. It is a medium easily dispelled by bright lights, devoid, in its digital form, of physical properties. The nature of the digital medium itself, with its frantic reinventions, seems inherently unstable. In gloomy moments I imagine my entire output becoming unwatchable after an unfortunate upgrade. This ephemerality is key to cinema though, and seemingly to life in general, where everything, no matter how solid or seemingly permanent, will ultimately be erased. We needn’t worry though, I’m sure that if we wait patiently enough the next screening is bound to start soon…
Lost Gardens, film still, 2017
Now Showing
Responding to the ongoing cinema closures, most festivals and moving image exhibitions have now gravitated onto the sprawling dreamscapes of the internet. Whilst this is a sign of the adaptable resistance of culture, I worry that some of the cinemas I’ve loved attending might not be there when we all re-emerge. My 2017 film Lost Gardens features as part of a programme of films that would have formed part of a planned series of UK cinema screenings, had the pandemic not intervened. This programme of works is entitled The World With And Without Us and is programmed by the tireless cineastes at Moving Image Artists. I’m very grateful to the programmers for persevering with this project and for now making these works available to watch worldwide. The World With and Without Us also features moving image works by Peter Treherne, Daniel & Clara, Amy Cutler, Katie McFadden, Edwin Rostron, Susu Laroche, and Scott Barley. The works, framed by a thoughtful essay by the project’s curators, are online here.
I’ve recently made my two works from 2019, Night on the Riverbank and The Garden available to watch online. The Garden is probably my most formally radical work to date. The film, at 15 minutes in duration, is also my longest, inviting the spectator to fully immerse themselves in a shimmering, drowned world. During the film one paradoxical garden transitions, under the cover of weird night, into another, even stranger garden, where the rocks and flowers subtly glow with supernatural fire. If you’d like to visit The Garden you can journey beyond the liminal here. Please bear in mind that if you do decide to take the trip, I’d sincerely recommend submitting to the aqueous flow of images in the dark.
Night on the Riverbank is another seemingly uncharacteristic work, this time derived from found images, borrowed from a half-forgotten black & white children’s programme. The film is notable for its marvellous original soundtrack by my frequent collaborator Abi Fry, who has created music that is intoxicatingly romantic. See and hear for yourself here.
Lost Gardens, film still, 2017
Tatum International
Paris-based film distributor Collectif Jeune Cinéma has added several of my recent films to its collection, making Lost Gardens (2017), Blacklands (2018) and The Loom (2018), available for screenings in perpetuity. I’m proud to add these works to the cooperative’s burgeoning collection. For me, growing up in the UK suburbs, Paris represented the unattainable heights of art and sophistication, a cliched view, no doubt, but one that has never been fully dispelled. In adding my works into the collection I feel that I’m connecting a part of myself to the vast dream-fabric of this wonderful city. I’ll be in good company: Collectif Jeune Cinéma’s new acquisitions list includes work by some of my favourite film-makers, including fellow Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival alumni Jacques Perconte and the late, great, Robert Todd. Collectif Jeune Cinéma is planning a series of events in 2021 to mark its 50th anniversary, with a film from each of its associated film-makers screening as part of the celebration.
The world of Collectif Jeune Cinéma can be explored here.
Lost Gardens, film still, 2017