Three ways to expand Cinema.
– Utilize film stock and analogue projectors and sound to make formidable and piercing performances
– Create riveting, structuralist and in the moment live cine-sculptures and interactions
– Re-imagine the actual building, so luring the viewer out of their here-and-now into a intimate new space
standing outside the cube holding pen car park, my heart sank as on a second strained listen I heard a clear high pitched human wail emanating from the top floor of the cube.
a wide range of aged visitors also shifted around waiting for the doors to open. No-one else seemed alarmed which alarmed me more. This was what I was dreading. Something challenging and 'arty'.
getting annoyed when I visit the cube feels like getting testy with a well meaning child. It's all so earnestly ropey, sticky floors, moth eaten blankets to throw over your knees if the temperature in the cinema hall hasn't risen above 10 degrees in the summer. The fact the volunteers seem to make up with enthusiasm and bad fringes for their lack of common sense and queue hearding when it comes to admitting paid customers. They always lose count.
But where else can you still buy sesame snaps and a cuppa before triggering your sciatica watching a film in a dark room with red velvet curtains? It's a bristolian twin peaks experience without the soundtrack or kinkiness. I always find myself checking my shoes to see if I can pull off an ounce of alternative geek-chic when i'm there. I'm going to be caught out for not being intensely out there enough, I don't really know my godards from my tatis but to be honest, everyone that turns up seems so lovely that it's wasted awkwardness and we all love film, nostalgia and a community run cinema that gives free tickets to asylum seekers.
which brings me back to the beginning. of the wailing.
if you've managed to escape eritreat or some kind of death camp nightmare, I'm not sure that getting into a building that you can wailing coming out of would be that comforting to be honest. But it's art.
Louisa Faircloughs installation upstairs was heard before it was seen. I spoke to a bloke about it who told me he remembered when the space upstairs was the community art room. It looked like the doors had only been opened for the installation recently.
Dark, except for a high dirty window on the front wall, the tall room was crammed with stacks of boxes and chairs. It didn't feel precarious but the lighting flicks of light and sudden piercing noises coming from the various projectors was. I think i counted 8? loops of film, proper old film were strung, moving, looped across the room from high to low and back again. Black film porjected, dust dancing in the light which came on abruptly in synch with different audible wails/drones of varying pitches every half a minute or so.
The sound wasn't pleasant, I ended up sat down, jerking my head around the room, like you do when you're trying to settle your eyes on an errant irritaing fly so you can swot it. Where was that bloody noise coming from? Which projector. After a while, the gloom and jarring repeated loops and noises faded a bit, chinese water torture made bearable. It wasn't enjoyable, uplifting or thought provoking but you couldn't not engage with it unless you stuck your fingers in your ears and went in with your eyes shut. Creeping up the creaky stairs to get to the loft, it did give the experience of stumbling into some lunatic lair. An annexe from the shining. disembodied voices with no faces,
spooky.
Unfortunately the Bruce McClure film, which was to be shown twice during the evening wasn't being shown until an hour after letting people into the building. There's only so many sesame snaps and ginger beers a woman can drink before I got even more tetchy, wired andhad to leave silently because of the screaming upstairs.
