David Leister's Kino Club.

Words 2619 (missing a few reference details and the illustrations David supplied for the printed article in Filmwaves.)

The Eighties is often seen as a period of decline for independent film - before Exploding Cinema and all the other London film clubs burst onto the scene in the Nineties, and after the heyday of the London Film-Makers Co-op in the Seventies. This is partly an illusion caused by considering film as a self-contained area of study when in fact, outside of the professional industry and the field occupied by the academic subject, there is a great deal of cross fertilisation between different cultural arenas.

In order to understand what happened to film in the Eighties it is helpful to take a wider view of culture. At the time unlicensed warehouse dance parties or 'raves' were sweeping the country and there was a revival of live performance, particularly in the area of stand-up comedy. This resurgence of live urban culture had a direct influence on the format of the subsequent London film clubs. This is well illustrated through the activity of the filmmaker David Leister.[1]

US born filmmaker and performance artist David Leister came to live in London in 1979 with a background in photography. In 1984 he joined the London Film Makers Coop. At that point in time the LFMC was right next door to the London Musician's Collective. Both had old warehouses by the railway tracks in Camden town. Leister remembers trundling the LMC piano along a corridor into the LFMC. This was in preparation for a musical accompaniment to the screening of his first film at the LFMC's cinema.[2] But Leister was more comfortable being busy in the workshop part of the LFMC and was only occasionally included in their screening programme. His later events were in sharp counterpoint to the more rarified and exclusive atmosphere of the LFMC screening programme.

Leister had been collecting 'found' movie footage since his cousin gave him a cardboard box full of 16mm footage when he was 15 years old. Most of the films were of men in hardhats walking around a heavy industrial complex, but at the bottom of the box, along with a splicer, he found a film of a beauty contest with the title ‘Miss Northern Electric’. He then cut the scenes of men looking into a peephole (to inspect the blast furnace) with scenes from the beauty contest. Cut - the men are making notes on their clipboards. The result was 'Beauty Contest in a Blast Furnace' (3mins, 16mm)

The archive has since grown to some 2600 films, particularly 16mm educational and industrial training films dating back to the 1930's. Shown now these have an other-worldly quality that is partly comic and partly surreal. A sinister morality seems to lurk behind each frame. These films are often low-budget productions and share a certain 'production value' empathy with underground productions. Also included in the archive is an extensive collection of British amateur home movies from the 1920s to the 1970s on 16mm, 8mm and Super 8 formats.

He had shown some of these films 'for laughs', at the Comedy Store in 1985/6, for which he would splice up a 20 minute compilation reel from his archive.[3] Around the same time he was also showing this material at Tony Allen's influential 'Hecklers Graveyard' club and at a 'New Varieties' type alternative cabaret at the White Horse on Brixton Road. The comic potential of these types of films has since become part of British mainstream comedy vocabulary being used by Simon Day and David Baddiel, parodied by Harry Enfield and most recently by Harry Hill, with whom Leister has worked with in the recent past.

The first of his own shows was around the same time (c1983) at an early Klinker club event in North London.[4] It was at one of these shows that the musician Frances Knight was the first to improvise a live accompaniment to one of Leister's films which initiated a long series of events in collaboration with musicians.[5]

His first venue was the 'Armchair Cinema' which ran three or four evenings in the basement of a restaurant called The Dining Room in Borough Market, near London Bridge. This was run by the filmmaker William English and his partner Sandra Cross. These shows were based on films from his archive fortified with extracts of works by classic experimental filmmakers such as Joseph Cornell and Rene Clair.[6] The programme was interspersed with his own 'works in progress'.[7] Leister did his own projection, but would also interject live comments along with the inevitable (and welcome) heckles from the audience. The show was live in every sense. I went along to two or three of these shows and enjoyed the congenial cafe atmosphere, which was a welcome break from the sometimes pretentious atmosphere at the Film Co-op screenings in Camden.

As we have seen this relaxed cabaret context for showing short films had been influenced by the prior explosion of alternative comedy venues. It was here that the cutting edge of improvisation and spontaneity could be found in the early Eighties. This was a context that cinema had lost sixty or seventy years before, when it moved from the fairs and variety theatres to purpose-made cinemas with fixed seating.

The Kino Club, which Leister started in 1987, was based at the Two Eagles pub in Kennington. Improvising musicians such as Ian McLachlan, Dave Fowler, Parney Wallace, Aleks Kolkowski and Steve Noble were invited to collaborate live with Leister's programmes of film. The programmes would start with a single archive film. There would then be some image manipulation of archive footage with prismatics or filters with a live music element. This would be followed by the compilation film made of clips cryptically linked under a theme for the evening. These were added to live, by the rudimentary technique of rapidly inserting carefully cued cassette tapes into a player. A hectic performance in itself! The club nite would culminate with three projectors pouring images onto a single screen, with extensive live visual mixing and musical accompaniment.

A classic example of this tri-image manipulation was 'Underwater Midnight Cowboys'. In this a cowboy would open a door only to have a fish swim through the doorway - A woman looks out of a window to see a diagrammatic animation of the changing phases of the moon. At one point, by careful masking of projectors, a cowboy appears to be riding a fish.[8] The frantic efforts of the live musicans to keep up with all of this embellished the surreal effect.

The Kino Clubs occurred twice a month for two years and then continued monthly in the Two Eagles, and more sporadically in other spaces throughout the Nineties.[9] A review in What's On, December 19th, 1990 by David McGillivray describes a typical Kino Club:

Live music might be provided by an accordionist and violinist playing Argentinean Tangos. A telephone may ring on one of the candle-lit tables and whoever picks up the receiver may be asked to identify three Beatles songs played in the style of hotel lobby muzak; the prize for correct answers might be a pomegranate or a tin of processed peas. On the other hand there might be a slide show or a look-a-like contest.

A later review by Jonathan Romney in 1993 describes the Kino Club as "a cross between Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable and Olde-Time Music Hall" (New Statesman & Society, 30-4-93). In the same article Leister is quoted as saying:

"I'm very much a member of the low-tech society, film is about the machinery and the clattering. The sound of the projector becomes an instrument."

These shows recreated an aspect of the early cinema era in which projections would regularly be accompanied by live music. But unlike the music improvised to the projection, here the projection was also improvised live.

"Films were manipulated with additional lenses, prisms, coloured gels, double projection, superimposition, etc. as the musicians played. So in effect, the projectionist was also engaging in a real time dialogue with the musicians. This aspect is what made the Kino Club unique."[10]

Leister developed these techniques in years of involvement in the London club scene, providing projected imagery as a backdrop for DJs and live performers. Club visual had declined since their heyday in the late Sixties hippie clubs, like Middle Earth in Covent Garden, and so Leister found himself to be something of a novelty. The Albany in Deptford hosted their 'Speako' disco in the early Eighties and Leister provided projections on to improvised drapes. Later he did shows at the Fridge in Brixton, with a legendary session at the Brixton Academy, which had fairground dodgem cars on stage. Leister provided a cinema scale backdrop of roller coasters loops and car crashes. This was the first time that he noticed a club audience taking time out to look at the films![11]

Leister saw Kino Club as a meeting place for artists working in lens based media, and musicians, as well as an entertainment for Joe Public. At the time he was also participating in other events and offering his burgeoning collection of projection equipment and technical expertise for low-cost hire.[12] His collection of projection equipment is still an invaluable practical resource to a wide field of short film culture.[13]

It may be useful to list the ways in which Leister's Kino Club was similar to the London film clubs of the Nineties such as Exploding Cinema or Halloween Society. Similarities included: the use of MC; live music/action with film; cabaret mix of film and performance; an emphasis on love of film technology rather than video; audience participation games such as film quizzes and raffles; cabaret audience layout; humour valued over a high art reverence; use of found footage; the idea of an event being the focus of socialising; eating and drinking (and even talking) whilst consuming film; incomplete blackout; the use of 'décor' slides.

Although it is true that key differences gave rise to completely different events, Leister's events are undoubtedly one of the precedents to the form of clubs like Exploding Cinema and Halloween Society.[14] Several of the key people who led these film clubs had attended early Kino Club events. Of course it is also likely that these people had also been to the same comedy clubs that Leister had, and in a broader sense had been exposed to similar cultural influences. Underground culture tends to be a dynamic unity with trends flowing between media and people in unpredictable ways.[15]

Leister can be seen as a second wave of influence from the USA some twenty years after the Sixties underground imports that had sparked off the London Filmmakers Coop. His own early influences had included the drive-in cinema. Here was a form of cinema in which you could eat, drink and talk with friends. The black-out was not complete so that the immersion that is typical of mainstream cinema was not in place.[16] Another influence was that of showing home movies at birthday parties - put on by the same cousin, Henry Serdy, that later gave him the box of films. Henry remembers the young David facing the 'wrong way'. Instead of facing the screen he was always staring back at the projector. Home movie shows was a practice that was in its heyday during Leister's youth in the Milwaukee area of the US.[17]

Leister has shown regularly at the Exploding Cinema, from his 'Underwater Garden' in the seminal and massive Exploding show at Brockwell Lido in 1993, to 'Buying Beer' that was shot on a very low definition toy format called 'Pixel Vision' that was shown in August 1999.[18] Leister was also the 16mm projectionist at Halloween Society shows, one of the few projectionists unafraid to project double band (separate sound and image) films for a waiting audience.

He has also continued to do occasional 'Kino Club' shows. On Saturday 28th November 1998 I visited one of these events at the Lux Cinema in Hoxton which had the title 'Sell Out'[19]. This was a showing of commercial footage from his archive. Typically these were an odd '70s beer 'commercial' or a '40s film made to recruit 'retail assistants' for a department store, introduced or followed, and very occasionally accompanied by, wry comments from DL intended to illustrate shifts in cultural values, and our reactions to them. But the projection booth, separated as it was from the auditorium, did not allow Leister's usual rapport with the audience. In fact the museum atmosphere at the Lux, with its flat floor and hard upright chairs was hardly that of a comedy club of the Eighties. Kino Club did however provide a relatively relaxed and informal event and was one of the few times live music got past the Lux's portals.[20]

If we use amateur in its best sense, many of those active in the underground film scene are amateurs in that they work without pay. They do it for love. And they follow other traits of lower class amateurism: they contradict good taste; they deny the importance of the professional standards; they are inclusive rather than exclusive.

Leister's recognition of the amateur idiom to both learn from and even as a frame to show his own work has been quite explicit. In 1999 Leister had a recent work of his own included in a show of 'archival' home movies at the NFT's MOMI Museum.[21] Leister's film was called 'Ritual Tendencies'. An old 16mm sound film showing a Sixties backyard barbecue (made by the same cousin who provided the box of film in his youth) was intercut with newly shot footage from the same location and family, thirty years on. Contrived post-production effects, especially the sound that had been ineffably distorted, created a detachment from the home movie material. There was a sense of loss.

Later that year David Leister showed a tongue in cheek 'Brief History of Home Cinema' in the same MOMI theatre. This comprised 16mm amateur films selected from his own archive.[22] The films were grouped in thematic sections with informative notes for the audience. The show was accompanied by the Dutch DJ's 'The Easy Alohas' in contrast to the piano that accompanied some of the films in the 'Home Truths' show.

One senses that it is this ease of engagement with popular formats that is at the heart of Leister's contribution to the London film scene over the last 20 years. It has enabled him to subvert the 'normal' contexts within which film is expected to be seen. He has taken film out of its isolation and insisted on its compatibility with live music, performance, and the culinary arts. He has extended the types of films that can be seen together. The overall result is an expansion of the useful meanings that can be extracted from film by a widening of the audience who can see them.

"My own work often appears to originate from another era. This is a result of the process of hand developing and using the chemistry of still photography that was my background. The projection and spectacle of a moving image draws together an audience in an environment that could then be turned into an event. As with early magic lantern shows I wanted to conjure up images and reactions that could not be done in a normal screening environment. So the Kino was constructed as a performance space where film, music and audience could happily collide." David Leister 2002

This article started life as an excerpt from my recent doctoral thesis at the RCA; 'Exploding Cinema 1991 - 1999, culture and democracy' and was considerably developed in close collaboration with David Leister.

Stefan Szczelkun Autumn 2002

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[1] This article is written in close collaboration with David Leister using his own archival records.

[2] 'Wind-Up' (1985, 16mm, 12mins, 18FPS) The process of collaboration also went the other way. Leister had a permanent coffin box screen set up in one of the LMC spaces. His 'Note on a Line' was a silent film of two musicians improvising (Aleks Kolkowski and Alex Maguire). This film was projected and accompanied by their live playing. (1987, 16mm, 14mins)

[3] The Comedy Store in London opened in 1979 and was the centre of the development of 'alternative comedy'. See 'Alternative Comedy: where's it gone?' by Danny Wallace on www.comedynet.demon.co.uk

See also 'A History of Alternative Comedy', (BBC2 6-4-02 R) 90 mins.

[4] This was an experimental music and performance art venue at The Sussex Pub in London N1. It recently restarted and Leister did two solo performances there in 2001.

[5] The film was ‘A Magic Act’, 1984 7 mins & 16mm

[6] Joseph Cornell is perhaps best known for ‘Rose Hobart’ (1936 USA) and Rene Clair for ‘Le Million’ (1931 France). Other films shown included ‘Nosferatu’ by F.W. Murnau (1922 Germany) and ‘The Cabinet of Dr Caligari’ by Robert Weine (1920 Germany).

[7] Films such as 'The Timepiece' (1986 3mins), 'Faith Triumphant' (1986 3mins), and 'Smoke' (1985 8mins)

[8] For archivists having palpatations David assures me the compilations were only made from broken fragments of found footage and were only cut on an existing splice or at a fade to black point.

[9] These spaces included the ICA (30 April - 1 May 1993), The Purcell Rooms (15 April 1994), and one show which was part of the South Banks 'Great Outdoors Festival' in 1995. More recently there have been a series at the Lux (see below).

[10] Excerpt from a letter to the author from David Leister.

[11] "Later I did the visuals for an early Dazed & Confused club in Leicester Square in the Nineties (Blow Up) where early slide portraits by the photographer Rankin were projected as part of the visuals. I also did some work with musician Talvin Singh projecting abstract text and a floating 'ektachrome' garden using slide projections at a couple of his initial performances." Excerpt from letter to the author. (dates?? will check)

[12] In April 1988 Leister contributed to my 'Skyline' event in Borough market (a Bookworks commission). This involved me performing in a house like shed structure built onto a hydraulic platform and hoisted 50ft above the market: "The house until then lit by a powerful follow-spot had images of activity within a house projected onto it. Leister's projection was then turned onto the cathedral with a stop frame film of a plant growing and dispersing seed. Plaintive whistles in the background played 'London Bridge is Falling Down'" (Szczelkun, Class Myths & Culture, Working Press, 1990).

[13] It was recently used in the seminal Shoot! Shoot! Shoot! Festival held at London's Tate Modern - a retrospective of the early LFMC era (which, of course, did not include any of Leister's work of that period).

[14] Other precedents might include The Plunge club and Nosepaint, both of which were performance art orientated.

[15] Exploding Cinema is different in many ways: it espoused an open access policy to filmmakers; it was run by an open democratically run collective, which allowed a higher level of energy and more intense décor; it had a collectively made photocopied programme and finally it had a more counter cultural stance. BFI library and special collections now holds some material on Exploding Cinema.

[16] See the chapter on Drive-Ins in Barbara Stone's America Goes to the Movies: 100 years of motion picture exhibition (National Association of Theatre Owners 1993).

[17] See Patricia R. Zimmerman's 'Reel Families, a social history of amateur film', Indiana U.P. 1995

[19] The Lux Cinema, set up in Hoxton, London in 1997, was part of the institutionalisation of the LFMC. It has now closed (Autumn 2001) due to funding problems. For a discussion see 'The Last Picture Show' by Benedict Seymour, Mute magazine, Issue 22, December 2001, pp12/13.

[20] Other Kino Clubs at the Lux included:

Safety Night at the Kino Club - Lux 30 Nov 1997 (in which the audience were invited to wear hard hats.)

KINO PpizZa at the Lux Friday 26 June 1998 (which included food delivered during the show and reheated on stage.)

KINO Xmas at the Lux 5 December 1999.

Kino Club in Orbit Lux 22 July (date?) (marking the anniversary of the first moon landing)

[21] Home Truths, 10th March 1999. An article containing a detailed review of this event was published in the public history section of the Oral History, the Journal of the British Oral History Society, entitled 'The Value of Home Movies' by Stefan Szczelkun, Autumn 2000 (Vol.28 No.2 pp94/98).

[22] The Kino Club Presents: A Brief History of Home Cinema, MOMI London, 26th May 1999. The collection had previously been on a tour of Holland in May 1998. A Brief History of Home Cinema Part 2 was shown at the Lux on 22nd June 2000.