EXPLODING CINEMA, 1991 -
1999:
culture and democracy.
Introduction
In
the packed back-room of a pub the place is dark, except for a crossfire of
light coming from a multitude of projectors. The crowd of two to three hundred
are yabbering furiously at the back, swigging beer, checking out the book and
zine stalls from the 121 and 56a bookshops and the nutsoid offerings of mail
art superstar Mark Pawson. Down at the front the people are attentive to the
main film. It could be a short documentary someone's made on their pet
hamsters; a paranoid sci-fi horror about the underground trains in London
really being giant flesh eating worms; or some cataclysmic animation, with
unnamable debris seething into chaotic life. There is undoubtedly some compere
berating or coaxing the crowd between each film. (Mathew Fuller 1995)[1]
The
Exploding Cinema can be described as a hybrid fusion of projection, performance
and social space. It began in South London in late 1991.
Architectural spaces, transformed with the use of slides
and loop film projections are used as an environmental context for a programme
of short films and video. A 'master of ceremonies' sets up a dialogue with the
audience and introduces the films. He or she encourages filmmakers who are
present to speak or be questioned. The audience are even encouraged to make
films themselves and invited to show them at future Exploding events with a
promise that nothing will be rejected. By thoughtful programming this inclusive
process of soliciting material, along with printed invitations and the work of
the members of the group, results in a varied and lively programme which can
regularly attract lively audiences of 100 - 300.
The Exploding Cinema has been run by a core group of
six to eight people, helped by a wider network of friends and enthusiasts since
1994. In the last 9 years it has put on more that 100 events and shown the work
of over 1000 filmmakers. It is unfunded, and supports itself entirely from
admission prices of £3 - 4.
Previously I had played a central or
active role in other similarly inclusive groups. These included: Portsmouth
Artsworkshop (1969-71), The Scratch Orchestra (1971-73), New Dance Magazine
Collective (1977-79), The International Mail Art Network (1981-1986), Brixton
Artist's Collective (1983-87), Bigos Artists of Polish Origin (1986-92),
Working Press (1987-97). It is my involvement with these artists groups that
have led to this thesis.
My foundational assumption is that democracy, in the sense of people inclusively participating in evaluation and decision making, is intimately connected to the processes of culture. I understand culture as the processes by which we evaluate, think and adapt to changing circumstances using all of our sense media.
My central research questions are, did these open
groups of cultural producers, which often flourish on the margins of society,
play an important role in cultural processes of adaptation and re-evaluation?
Why are they, for various reasons, under represented within our accepted body
of knowledge?
Of course there have been movements, networks and
groups throughout Art history, which have been well documented. We can mention
Dada, Fluxus and Situationism as large and important collective sites of
cultural production, which have been widely influential.[2]
However it was my perception that there were problems in the historicisation of
the groups I had been part of. And that as a whole our perception of art is as
an activity by a gifted individual rather than as a process which is often much
more social.
To remedy this lack I propose to create the basis of a
historical account of one such group, Exploding Cinema. And to do this using
disciplined and considered methodologies which will allow this account to be
legitimated by the accepted practices of communications studies and social
sciences.
The study of the Exploding Cinema is used as material
to locate and ground a theoretical investigation into the relationship between
autonomous cultural production and models of culture that nurture or expand our
notions of democracy. The theorist I have chosen is Jurgen Habermas, with a
focus on his key work The Theory of Communicative Action. I will aim to provide a theoretical frame through
which the significance of such groups can be evaluated.
My
basic research method has been that of participant observation. I joined the
group in 1997 and made my research from this insider position.[3]
The Exploding Cinema also leaves traces of its history in written and published
materials, as well as on video and audiotape. This allows the construction of
conventional historical representations through the summary and analysis of
these materials referenced to primary source documents. I have used content
analysis and semiotics as methodologies with which to analyse this material. The
existing archival material has been augmented with my participant observations
and focused oral history interviews. From the sum of these materials I have
generated an open-ended and multi-layered historical narrative of this group's
activity.
The first two chapters of the thesis examine the
interwoven historical provenances that are the background of this research. The
first chapter is a set of short studies of the other inclusive cultural groups
in which I have been active. Some of these groups may have had some influence
on Exploding Cinema but the focus here is more on a reflexive construction of
my research position. It also underlines the different forms that such groups
have taken in the last twenty years and how little they have been studied and discussed.
The second chapter is a study of the film provenances
of Exploding Cinema. I start by looking at early cinema. Exploding Cinema has
empathy with the musichall background of early film and with the oral nature of
its discourse. I chose to take this line further with look at amateur film in
general, as a cinematic expression of oral culture. I then go on to outline its
influence on and relation to the US underground of the late Fifties and early
Sixties.[4]
The US underground films came over to Britain in the mid Sixties and inspired
the formation of the London Filmmakers Co-op. Politicised film workshops also
appeared as autonomous production companies. Finally I make a case study of a
film club started by a later LFMC member that immediately preceded Exploding
Cinema and has many of the same characteristics - David Leister's Kino Club.
This is not intended to be a complete history of
British Collective film endeavors. Notable amongst the omissions are the
Workers Film groups of the Thirties,[5]
and the Film Society movement, which started in 1925 but was almost a mass
movement in the Fifties.[6]
Chapter Three opens my theoretical considerations with
a preliminary discussion of the meanings of my key terms culture and democracy.
A particular understanding of culture as a process of 'total qualitative
assessment' is taken as central to this thesis.[7]
Culture is then described as the agreements reached through the fundamental
expressions of human sense media along with the meta-code of verbal language.
The main argument here is that culture is
fundamentally about reaching agreements and it is such agreements based on
ongoing qualitative assessments that provide the ground of any formal
democratic discourse. This constitutes a call for a greater permeability between
the categories of culture and politics.
The next chapter considers the use of Jurgen
Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action (1981) to further theorise this concept of culture. This is then
followed by a chapter that discusses the relevant critical responses to
Habermas with an emphasis on a Foucauldian position. Having considered the
historical provenances and the theoretical framework chosen I now move into the
meat of the thesis with five chapters on the methodologies of collection and
interpretation I have used.
The Exploding Cinema keeps its own records simply
within the domestic environs of its members. To use these records for the
academic production of knowledge they need to be gathered together, ordered and
brought into the public realm so they can be referred to by future researchers
who would undoubtedly bring their own interpretations to the primary source
material. This was one of my first tasks to fulfill the goal of making a
historical assessment of the Exploding Cinema possible in the above terms.
Once these materials were collected I analysed them
using two methodologies. Chapter Six uses Content Analysis to measure
attendances at meetings and uses these to follow the ebb and flow of
participants. A similar approach of measuring intensities of involvement is
used with filmmakers. Chapter Seven uses semiotic analysis to further
understand the complex use of imagery in the programmes and how this conveys a
group ethos.
The next two chapters deal with the two methodologies
I used to collect new data. Chapter Eight reports on Participant Observation
and uses the observer notes written up in logbooks to discuss key aspect of the
group. These are, open access, independence and its financial base, and
questions of group identity. Chapter Nine considers Oral History using the
transcripts of the interviews to show how the precedents of Exploding Cinema
can be seen reflected in the biographies of the participants.
Unlike the London Filmmakers Coop of the Seventies the
films shown at Exploding Cinema have not been archived or made available for
distribution.[8] I did not
study the films directly for two main reasons. Firstly because the diverse
films shown at Exploding Cinema would constitute an entity by the context that
the Exploding Cinema has given to them. It would be necessary to have this
context mapped out before setting out to understand the films as a set. This
thesis does this preliminary work and should provide strong grounds to argue
for the need to collect, archive and analyse this body of work.[9]
Secondly, before this study could occur there is considerable archiving work
required.[10] Within this
milieu there are rarely multiple film prints and sometimes the show copy may
consist of a spliced edit direct from the camera. There are similar problems
with video. The material shown has been VHS copies, which are currently
considered unsuitable as archive material. Obtaining a satisfactory archive
copy of the edit master tape is often a complex and expensive process both
technically and administratively. With up to one thousand films to archive,
this is a project well beyond the resources of an individual PhD research
programme.
Finally Chapter Ten is an account based on the
archived materials. This translates a mass of raw data into a readable account
without rendering a banal simplification. As I have said I joined the group in
1997. At this point the style of the narrative changes from a translation of
archive materials to a use of my own account as a witness. I also make
occasional further use of the oral history transcripts to investigate areas in
which little or no archive records exist.
I hope the reader will bear
with a few such changes of style in reading this thesis. From the account
of my own experience of past collectives in Chapter One to the more academically
distanced historical account in Chapter Two and from there to the abstract
theoretical reasoning in the next three chapters. The styles of writing required
by each methodology also vary. This variegated style seems appropriate to
deal with the hybridity of my subject.
Footnotes:
[1] An interview by Mathew Fuller entitled 'Now Make a
Film: The Exploding Cinema' published in The American Book Review (V 16 No 5 Feb 1995 p7). The 121 (Railton Road) and
56a (Crampton Street) bookshops were South London, broadly anarchist bookshops.
[2] Dada was an influence as soon as I went to college in
Portsmouth in 1967. Apart from the practice of collage it was the performance
and 'cabaret' aspects of Dada that were of most interest. See the chapter in
RosaLee Goldberg's Performance: live art 1909 to the present (Thames & Hudson 1979).
Fluxus was really a
contemporary and live influence on both The Scratch Orchestra and Mail Art,
which I write about in Chapter One. The relationships are complex and could not
be accommodated within the scope of this thesis. Contemporary accounts that
influenced me are Adrian Henri's Environments and Happenings (Thames & Hudson 1974) and Udo Kultermann's Art-Events
and Happenings (Mathew Miller Dunbar
1971). Perhaps more fundamental texts are John Cage's Silence (1961) and A Year from Monday (1967).
The texts of the
Situationists have a constant companion or irritant since the heady days of
1968. On my bookshelf are such volumes as: Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord (Black & Red, Detroit 1970); Leaving
the 20th Century: the incomplete work of the Situationist
International, Translated and edited
by Christopher Gray (Free Fall Publications 1974); and The Revolution of
Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem parts
1 & 2 (No publisher or date given, probably early to mid '70s). More
recently many younger colleagues have published studies of aspects of
Situationism. E.g. James Burch 'Situationist Poise, Space and Architecture' in Transgressions, A Journal Of Urban Exploration, (Newcastle 1995), and, 'Divided We Stand: an outline
of Scandinavian Situationism' by Howard Slater with Jakob Jakobsen in (Infopool, No4 Copenhagen, 2001). I prefer to give these more
personal references than to choose authoritative collections of writings.
[3] Participant observation is a research position that
has been critically examined in ethnography, which will be considered in more
detail later.
[4] The US influence is evident throughout early Exploding
Cinema programmes. See Chapter 10 section 2
[5] A programme of these was curated and shown by Duncan
Reekie as part of the Volcano Festival 'Film on Fire' programme 9-11-97. The
programme notes, included with the archive materials that accompanied the
presentation of this thesis, were derived from Don MacPherson's compilation of
articles, Traditions of Independence,
BFI 1980.
[6] The Film Societies movement of the Fifties has no
authoritative study as yet. Articles can be found scattered in the specialist
magazines of the time such as Amateur Movie Maker, Amateur Filmmaker and
Amateur Cine World, some copies of which are archived at the BFI library.
[7] This idea of culture is traced back to Raymond
Williams (1959) to show an English background to my later discussion of
Habermas' idea that culture can be seen to be elementally composed of
communicative actions.
[8] Exceptions are the 1996 Vacuum compilation tape (See
chapter 10 and the appendices) and individual artists showreels.
[9] As we shall see even theorists sometimes seem to
overlook that the context is actively produced by human agency as much as the
work itself is.
[10] I often harangued the collective on the need for
consistent archiving of the work shown but it was never seen as a priority.