{"id":24990,"date":"2025-06-25T07:00:39","date_gmt":"2025-06-25T07:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/?p=24990"},"modified":"2025-06-29T23:15:39","modified_gmt":"2025-06-29T23:15:39","slug":"the-phantoms-of-film-curation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/issue-3-2\/the-phantoms-of-film-curation\/","title":{"rendered":"Natasha Palmer \u2013\u00a0The Phantoms of Film Curation"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n\r\n\r\n\t
\r\n\r\n\t\t<\/i><\/span> Download PDF<\/a>\r\n\r\n\t<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Let us go then, you and I,
\nWhen the evening is spread out against the sky
\nLike a patient etherized upon a table;
\nLet us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
\nThe muttering retreats
\nOf restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
\nAnd sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
\nStreets that follow like a tedious argument
\nOf insidious intent
\nTo lead you to an overwhelming question…
\nOh, do not ask, \u201cWhat is it?\u201d
\nLet us go and make our visit.<\/p>\n

(Eliot 1961:11)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Introduction<\/h4>\n

As a festival comprising small gestures with large implications, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (BFMAF) takes place annually in the most northern town of England, Berwick-upon-Tweed. The festival\u2019s 2019 programme, in its 15th<\/sup> edition, combined old and new cinema, artists\u2019 moving image, performance and seminar discussions. Their annual presentation sees films and artworks spread around historical venues throughout the town. The topographical experience which this adds for the spectator evokes situationist theory, expanded cinema as well as May Adadol Ingawanij\u2019s research on itinerant cinema. The intermedial approach BFMAF employs \u2013 one that fuses together film, art and performance \u2013 can be traced to film festivals such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland or on a smaller scale, the European Media Art Festival in Osnabr\u00fcck, Germany. What may distinguish BFMAF from these other events, however, is its desire to experiment with curatorial practices that derive from the collaboration and research of scholars and academics which are as investigative as the artworks that inhabit the town for the duration of the festival.<\/p>\n

This article seeks to explore the ways in which Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival anticipates shifts in contemporary intermedial approaches to art and film, and how far BFMAF chooses to exhibit moving image works in modes that are resistant to the conventions of established exhibition practices. It begins by discussing the curious short-term temporality of the festival, in comparison to the extended duration of display inside galleries and cinemas. It explores to what extent this shift in temporality creates liminal spaces to hold viewers\u2019 experience of film. Following this, it then looks to the festival\u2019s distinctive \u2018mapping\u2019 technique of using old and disused spaces to exhibit moving image work. It examines how this in turn creates spectatorial encounters, as viewers enact a journey whilst they traverse the town in a balade<\/em>, in search of chancing upon a new piece. [1]<\/a> This article then examines the festival\u2019s curatorial project Animistic Apparatus<\/em> to analyse specific moving image works and the effect of projection displacement. Above all, it discusses the ways in which the festival proposes its own new curatorial language.<\/p>\n

Topographic Mappings and Temporalities<\/h4>\n

Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival 2019 took place over four cool September days during one weekend towards the end of summer. It found visitors lurking inside old ice rooms or gunpowder shelters, encountering South-East Asian curating and projection practices, or wandering through the topography of the city\u2019s cobbled streets looking for the next haunt. Film curator and writer Vera Mey (2019: 37) recounts her experience thus:<\/p>\n

Often one would walk the empty streets of Berwick, as if perhaps in Bangkok, happening upon outdoors cinemas largely empty of an audience [\u2026] which felt symptomatic of our attention-deficit era \u2013 who has the time to see and experience filmic works? Berwick\u2019s programme, however, drives a complex reversion of long-form cinema\u2019s demands on the viewer \u2013 one that keeps playing regardless of your attention, or indeed, presence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As the spectator strays in and out of once neglected spaces, often experiencing the moving images alone or with only one or two others, one is reminded of how unlike this experience is to the more traditional ways in which the spectator conventionally views and encounters film, such as in the gallery and the cinema. Fireworks<\/em> (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2014), for example, was projected in the Bankhill Ice House, which was originally used for packing fish in the late 18th<\/sup> century and later as an air raid shelter during the Second World War. Central Region<\/em> (Tanatchai Bandasak, 2019) was screened in Coxon\u2019s medieval Tower, built in the early 14th<\/sup> century, which sits on the walls surrounding the town of Berwick. Originally it was attached to the Berwick castle and served as a watchtower for the town\u2019s guards to look over the river estuary. Central Region<\/em> explores the animistic practice of communicating with spirits amongst the prehistoric standing stones in Laos. The artist himself (Bandasak 2019) describes the work in the festival\u2019s catalogue as such:<\/p>\n

Central Region <\/em>combines dissolves and superimpositions with ambient sound, exploring gradual shifts of light, and indexing movements and vibrations illuminating the spaces surrounding the stones. The process evokes the spectral way in which standing stones in Sam Neua, though appearing as inert ruins randomly scattered throughout the landscape, powerfully demarcate potent territories of the undead and the nonhuman sovereign.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Encountering the work within the stoned walls of Coxon\u2019s Tower creates a distinct physical sensation for the viewer, a reverberation of the textures and sounds from the images being reflected in and echoed onto the space that surrounds them. By placing these artworks in these unprecedented spaces, historical buildings that were once the home of commerce, defence, or rites and rituals, BFMAF recontextualises not only the work but also the spectator\u2019s encounter with it. The festival proposes an interrogation of customs, of traditional practices and codes, by asking the viewer to go searching for and to discover the work themselves whilst simultaneously exploring the passages of town. In this way, the festival posits that \u2013 in the same manner as an investigator \u2013 each visitor embarks upon their own process of discovery and study. The visitor\u2019s geographic explorations and cinematic findings transform the role of the viewer into the role of experimental researcher.<\/p>\n

Fireworks<\/em> and Central Region,<\/em> along with a number of the other moving image works screened at BFMAF, were projected continuously on a loop for the duration of the festival. It is possible to deduce from this curatorial decision that the artworks were not exhibited solely for human presence. As such, it could be asked, where does this leave the role of spectator? The spectator has but four days, perhaps sometimes only one, to view films, talks, performances or Taipai Movement workshops \u2013 until, once again, it is over. The work, having allowed us a quick glance, disappears, leaving the old town almost as if in a silent whisper, where, from then onwards, only the festival\u2019s ghosts remain. The short lifespan of the festival exists, in itself, as a liminal time and space, a fleeting meeting between spectator, historical walls and moving images.<\/p>\n

Existing on the threshold of time, as a collection of questions and propositions, BFMAF is consequently embodied in its own temporality and spatiality. It is subsumed by the serendipitous flow of moving spectators taking leaps in the dark, full of speculation and venture. For the visitor, the possibility for investigation is enriched by the unpremeditated nature of encounters haunted by their ephemerality as they move through the town guided only by a map, with the possibility of running into other attendees in an alley or walking into a screening that is already halfway through. In this way, BFMAF is both a sensorial and corporeal setting for display, as opposed to its temporal and spatial nemeses, the gallery and the cinema. These latter two spaces exhibit under conventions in either \u2018white cube\u2019 (gallery) or the \u2018black box\u2019 (cinema), their walls \u2013 even if once historic \u2013 are freshly painted as if to hide contextualisation. In the cinema, the projectors are hidden in boxes at the back of theatres, and in the gallery, images must be screened into clinical whitewashed spaces. In contrast, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival proposes that both the form of display and the ecology of projection can be as radical as the artwork itself, as will be explained in more detail later. This small gesture is paradoxically sizeable in its proposition: that the work exists not by itself, but only via specifically designated spaces opposed to their institutional other, the black (box) or white (cube).<\/p>\n

The festival creates its own spatio-temporality by drawing a set of transitory paths on the map of the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed. During the festival, the town acts as a geographic display of moving images and the materiality of the festival becomes, for a few days, the materiality of the town. The artworks exist in the inhabitancy of their particular spaces; the curation of images for a festival is what organises this meeting of the viewers\u2019 glance, or the transient encounter between spectator and artwork. Thus, the festival\u2019s determination to create situations in the city replaces the conventional and isolated experience of interacting with art or moving images for a balade<\/em>, whereupon hazard and surprise take the leading role. The spectator moves as if in a state of Guy Debord\u2019s d<\/em>\u00e9<\/em>rive<\/em> (drifting), displaced by the currents of their voyage and under the influence of the festival\u2019s mapping of their passage. [2]<\/a><\/p>\n

Animistic Apparatus<\/em> and Projection Displacement<\/h4>\n

The malleable cartographic make-up of BFMAF\u2019s 15th<\/sup> edition was metamorphosed by the exhibiting of Animistic Apparatus<\/em>, a co-curated project by scholars May Adadol Ingawanij and Julian Ross.\u00a0 Interwoven with discourse and cinematic practices, the project\u2019s research derives from rural and urban Thailand in the twentieth century, a period when attendance of itinerant makeshift cinema projections made up a significant portion of the experience of narrative films in the country. As Ingawanij\u2019s research illuminates, these outdoor shows were organised by mobile film troupes who travelled across Thailand to borderlands, islands and remote villages to screen 16mm films with their projectors. Their shows were often intended as offerings to spirits, for the advertising of goods and to spread anti-communist messages. As Ingawanij (2018: 9) proposes, this travelling makeshift cinema can be understood as a<\/p>\n

cinematic apparatus [\u2026] a dispositive whose ontological basis for manifesting moving images and occasioning bodily experiences of images are grounded in itinerancy of display, intensified durational dilation and indeterminacy, and a logic of transmission that associates presence and transformation with the exchanging and channelling of forces between the human and non-human.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ingawanij seeks to de-mythologise the perception that cinematic exhibition history is limited to the locality of a theatre with the projector hidden and protected in a glass booth at the back. In Bangkok, films were first experienced as outdoor live performance events, and small groups of film troupes \u2018criss-crossed the country\u2019 (Ingawanij 2018: 9), wandering across territorial boundaries with their equipment and props. The mobile cinema troupes projected films outdoors in site-specific locations, offering their moving images as nocturnal rituals addressing spirits. For BFMAF, knowledge of these practices was translated from research into installation, performance, and movement workshops \u2013 scattered around the town for spectators taking on the itinerant role \u2013 as films were projected with or without their presence. Animistic Apparatus<\/em> included five South-East Asian artists: Lucy Davis, Lav Diaz, Chris Chong Chan Fui, Tanatchai Bandasak and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.<\/p>\n

To view Fireworks<\/em> (Archives) by Weerasethakul, spectators passed two black iron gates and entered what seemed like a hidden cave built inside a hill. This building, originally constructed as an icehouse, is in fact built into a steep hillside and covered with soil, originally meant to act as an insulating layer, which gives the impression it was designed to be hidden from view. It contains an entrance tunnel which leads to the main chamber where, during the festival, the film was projected. Usually closed to the public for preservation, the festival permitted access to this dark space, where the spectators wandered up a small dark stone passage into the main chamber, a secret passage of time, whilst a projector played on a continuous loop. The darkness of the interior was immediately illuminated by the projection of flashes of light and fireworks, a sequence of images blinking infinitely, illuminating statues of fantastical animals. Shot in the Sala Keoku sculpture park of a temple in northeast Thailand near to the Mekong River and where the artist grew up, Weerasethakul evokes the history of this land, one that was for a long time oppressed by the central government in Bangkok, which led to many revolts. Weerasethakul casts a light on this history, and the statues commemorate both the land\u2019s destruction and liberation. Inside the former icehouse, the projection beams and rotating flickers of light recalled pre-cinema\u2019s magic lantern transposing images through shafts of light. [3]<\/a> Fireworks<\/em> is a nocturnal dream, with figures and animals displaced through space into memory, into images \u2013 and inside the Icehouse it was accompanied by floating dust irradiated by the light of the projector.<\/p>\n

As Liz Kotz (2008: 372) contends, \u2018projection, \u2013 from the Latin projectionem<\/em>, meaning \u201cthrowing forward, extension\u201d \u2013 indicates displacement, dislocation, transfer\u2019. Kotz argues that projection is a form of geometry, an arrangement of light rays over space, which calls to \u2018perspective rendering, cartography and architecture\u2019. Projection transforms information yet displaces it. Its rendering concurrently implies distortion, illusion and fantasy \u2013 three adjectives evocative of Weerasethakul\u2019s Fireworks<\/em>. This equally runs true for Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery<\/em> (2016), Lav Diaz\u2019s eight-hour mystic fable, which was also presented as part of Animistic Apparatus<\/em>. The film was screened overnight in Berwick\u2019s Rose Garden, from sunset to sunrise, as Ingawanij (2019: 36) puts it in the festival\u2019s catalogue, \u2018as an offering to our host town\u2019. The film was projected in the open, \u2018as if it were a breathing, vulnerable body, and as a quiet gesture of bringing the film to life\u2019. In his article \u2018Animistic Apparatus: Cinema for the Spirits\u2019 (2019), Matt Turner notes the sensorial experience this created:<\/p>\n

Approached from a distance, the site offered strange sensations: sounds of indiscernible rumbles and distant cries; dialogue from the film spilling further than the light of the projector itself. All this in the kind of darkness provided by an outdoor projection where the only light source is the moon and the stars.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As the film\u2019s soundtrack combined with the soundscape of the surrounding wildlife and nature, the observer was transported into a tactile and immersive cinematic experience. As the characters in Lullaby<\/em> encountered the half horse Tikbalang and other mythical creatures, the spectators encountered, as Marcus Jack (2019) noted, \u2018bats, moths and other nocturnal sprites [\u2026] this material quality makes conventional Western viewing \u2013 linear, narrative uninterrupted \u2013 an impossibility\u2019. The screening, designed for the night and its creatures, reshapes our predetermined notion that films are conceived for human discourse, by transcending human exceptionalism and disrupting conventional cinematic practices.<\/p>\n

Diaz\u2019s cinema recalls early itinerant cinema troupes as well as the itinerant journey BFMAF spectators undergo in their excursion around the festival. Robert Nervy (2016: 3) asserts that every Diaz film \u2018regularly returns, as if to touch ground, to a shot of a landscape or streetscape; after a while, someone enters, then walks across it in real time\u2019 \u2013 someone whose journey, as Ingawanij (2015: 109) <\/span>proposes, \u2018constructs a symbolic map of the Philippine archipelago\u2019. Ingawanij suggests that we read Diaz\u2019s work as \u2018cartographic acts\u2019, which \u2018mesh the world of the living with the spaces and temporalities of those who have died but whose presence endures\u2019. Long temporal duration and mythological traces of the body passing through frames are two key elements of Diaz\u2019s work. In a desire to cut compositions and landscapes with movement, Diaz privileges the part played by what occurs off-screen, just as do the films playing alone, out of sight, in Berwick-upon-Tweed.<\/p>\n

A New Curatorial Language: Itinerant Curation<\/h4>\n

In Thai, \u2018to miss\u2019 (kit theung<\/em>) is the same phrase as the less sentimental \u2018to think of\u2019. The word theung<\/em> exemplifies the Thai sense of distancing, which is irreducible to either the temporal or the spatial: meaning \u2018to arrive at\u2019 or \u2018to reach\u2019, its span may be temporal, spatial or conceptual.
\n(Teh 2011: 606)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Traversing towns and landscapes might inevitably lead to the nomadic roaming of artistic practices. For BFMAF, the wandering of human bodies and temporalities allows for an examination of interdisciplinary experiments. In her rejection of traditional film viewing, Miriam Hansen (1997: 32) asserts that films \u2018afford us an opportunity to meander across the screen and away from it, into the labyrinths of our own imagination, memories and dreams\u2019. As if BFMAF had tried to physicalise this metaphor, its meandering spectators wander the labyrinth of the map of Berwick-upon-Tweed, as well as their imagination \u2013 as location takes over subject and encounter replaces intention. In her writings on architecture and the moving image, Giuliana Bruno (1997: 8) observes the mobile spectator\u2019s awareness of \u2018film\u2019s spatio-corporeal kinetics\u2019, where \u2018the spectator is a voyageur rather than a voyeur\u2019. To change the role of the spectator from one that observes into one that moves \u2013 an itinerant viewer caught up in the web of an itinerant curation \u2013 highlights a reemerging movement in artists\u2019 moving image within the exhibition practices of film festivals. In this way, the festival\u2019s curation could be read as in part inspired by the avant-garde experiments of Expanded Cinema that began in the 1960s and 70s. [4]<\/a> Notoriously difficult to define, Expanded Cinema could be described as practices that comprise moving image works fused with live art-film and projection events. Shortly after the term had been coined, Sheldon Renan (1967: 227) was quick to highlight Expanded Cinema\u2019s indefinable quality, stating that, \u2018it is a name for a spirit of inquiry that is leading in many different directions\u2019. Andrew Uroskie (2020: 14\u201315) explains how Expanded Cinema wanders beyond familiar filmmaking practices and traditional film exhibition:<\/p>\n

As both a conceptual inquiry and an aesthetic practice, the expanded cinema sought to break free of the norms of industrial exhibition and spectatorship by returning to forgotten models of early and precinematic history, locating the cinematic event somewhere between the immersive tradition of the movie theater\u2019s black box and the more distanced perception characteristic of the gallery\u2019s white cube.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As Uroskie suggests, expanding cinema outside of institutional realms recalls some of cinema\u2019s forgotten pasts. Perhaps he is alluding to the figure of the travelling lanternist in 18th<\/sup> century Europe, who would roam across countries performing alongside their magic lantern. In this light, the curatorial possibility of itinerant curation echoes pre-cinema but transforms it into contemporary terms. To propose that the human is not the sole and highest value in the viewing of moving images, as is the case with Animistic Apparatus<\/em>, supersedes all concerns of profit, capital, and the legal and licensing structures of film distribution. To imagine film exhibition as an offering, a ritualistic dialectic between light, night, space, nature, history and projection \u2013 a gesture to spirits, ghosts, the unseeable \u2013 reconstructs and metamorphoses not only prevailing concepts of what was perhaps film\u2019s original gesture (that it was made for, and to be viewed by, humans) but also how it is experienced.<\/p>\n

The unseeable is exactly what the contemporary viewer\u2019s experience depends upon in this new curatorial language at BFMAF. What the spectator feels<\/em> when strolling around the town discovering cinematic projections is possibly of greater value than what the spectator sees<\/em> \u2013 thus radically changing the experience of the work. In a gesture that goes even beyond the spectator, as film screenings are offered to more-than-human inhabitants of Berwick, this new curatorial language is a critical language, one of projection and of experience; it is felt and not necessarily viewed. It relies on miscalculations; it won\u2019t know who will chance upon which scene, who may have already fallen asleep during the eight-hour overnight screening, who saw in a small glance with their left eye a flash of fireworks coming from the old iceroom. The chance, the accident, the occasion, the serendipitous encountering of work is what forms this new language of curation.<\/p>\n

Expanding the curatorial experiments being carried out by BFMAF, curators May Adadol Ingawanij and Julian Ross gathered moving image works that called upon memories, ghosts and mysticism which evoke the phantasmic notion of itinerant curation. Just as itinerant curation echoes cinema\u2019s past yet remoulds it, David Teh (2011: 596) argues that Apichatpong Weerasethakul enacts a similar process in his cinematic apparatus through \u2018an attentive appropriation of old media forms, repurposed not for the sake of nostalgia but for their richly multivalent channelling of social reality and collective memory\u2019. Teh explains that Weerasethakul\u2019s framing is predominately \u2018psycho-geographic\u2019 \u2013 what he calls \u2018the poetics of itinerancy\u2019. He draws his inspirations from filmmakers Abbas Kiarostami or Tsai Ming Lian, two precursors of \u2018slow cinema\u2019, a school of thought that examines reformed notions of viewing and concepts of bodies in traversal.<\/p>\n

Like the French balade<\/em>, Weerasethakul\u2019s work may be analogous to the Thailandese nirat<\/em>, the travel poem.\u00a0 Teh (2011: 605) explains that in the nirat<\/em> it \u2018is typical for each of its verses to begin with a place name that sparks recollections of a lover and whose connotations prompt the verse\u2019s sentiment \u2013 not exoticism or adventure but usually weariness, longing and the alienation of the miserable, home-sick traveller\u2019. The melancholic yearning for a distant lover permeates the restless traveller, as well as Weerasethakul\u2019s cinematic landscapes of desire. Here, Teh calls into question the romanticism associated with the figure of the nomad, replacing this with the darkness and isolation it truthfully entails. Essential to the form of nirat<\/em>, as Teh (2011: 606) puts it, \u2018are itinerancy and movement; its aesthetic power rests on the psychology of displacement, on the melancholy of separation\u2019. The poetic stanzas within nirat<\/em> \u2018laid a thematic and psycho-geographic template\u2019 (Teh 2011: 607) for Thai culture \u2013 its implication of distance, longing and displacement is echoed in the moving makeshift cinema troupes and their discourse between projection, light and spirits.<\/p>\n

The psychogeographic make-up of BFMAF is intertwined with Ingawanij\u2019s itinerant Animistic Apparatus<\/em>, which is constituted by, as she puts it,<\/p>\n

the inter-twining of technologically mobile cinematic apparatuses and exhibition conventions with traditional and indigenous practices of art as ritual and affective modes of mobilisation effecting the connecting between the human and the non-human, and the crossing of thresholds and boundaries between spaces, times and worlds. (2018: 34)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thus, at the screening events of Animistic Apparatus<\/em> at the 15th<\/sup> Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, an amalgamation of contexts and of re-constructions took place. As with the many layers that make up Animistic Apparatus<\/em>\u2019s travelling exhibitions, its travelling spectators create experiences of feeling. These feelings are of displacement, longing, a passing of time \u2013 through \u2018worlds\u2019 and through images. Itinerant cinematic practices join spectators as they traverse through Berwick-upon-Tweed, joining the mystical phantasmal creatures shown in Weerasethakul\u2019s film, or those that hide in the dark amidst the roses of the Rose Garden. Bats, owls or unknown spirits dance amongst the imagined and fantastical figures captured by Diaz and Weerasethakul as they play infinitely into the night.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/h4>\n

The Berwick Film & Media Arts festival maps out its terrestrial dimensions in a series of pre-conceived currents, ones that the spectator traverses, like a Lav Diaz frame, on their itinerant expedition in search of moving images, leaving the trace of their balade<\/em>, creating their own trail of ephemeral encounters. Like the original Thai makeshift cinema groups, BFMAF crisscrosses the town in a series of experiments and projections, offering shapes of light and shadow to the night. The festival evokes a return to the origins of cinema, which it transforms into a new experiential encounter. BFMAF not only reflects a desire to supersede exhibition conventions but also to take the risks other institutions fail to take: to frame moving image work in unfamiliar ways, unbound by fears of procedural orthodoxy.<\/p>\n

Does exhibiting moving images in unconventional spaces augment or obscure cinema\u2019s original symbolic gesture? BFMAF suggests that there are cartographic and hazardous ways for spectators to view or experience film, ways that encounter the work in unexpected spaces. The festival proposes a critical language that speaks of an inter-disciplinary corpus, which defies modern nomenclature and, instead, embraces a contemporary intermedial methodology. The corpus of contemporary film experimentation shown at the festival \u2013 cinema, artists\u2019 film, expanded cinema, performance \u2013 is bounded by its temporal setting. This setting is the fleeting encounter, devised, drawn up by the festival to create a spectator-artwork-meeting haunted by its own ephemerality, by the festival\u2019s mortality. BFMAF proposes a new phantasmagorical curatorial language, a language of ghosts, memories, displays, spectatorial experiences, projections \u2013 all full of darkness and light.<\/p>\n

Since this new curatorial language was proposed and investigated at BFMAF in 2019, the world has seen dramatic changes in the way in which artworks are encountered in cinema. The global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated what has been an ongoing crisis of experiencing cinema, arguably launched with the growing popularity of accessing films on computers and the distribution of digital copies. Fifteen years ago, in her book Death 24x a second: stillness and the moving image<\/em>, Laura Mulvey (2006) explored the ethics of stopping and starting a film while watching it at home on the computer. Today, Mulvey\u2019s questions have pertinent and darker significations, as more audiences opt for watching films at home or on computers. The COVID-19 crisis, where sitting at home to view films was the sole possibility, perhaps illuminated a social and ethical crisis in cinema that has been brewing for a long time: one that has to do with the experience of a physical versus virtual space, collective versus individual viewing: the key foundations of cinema spaces and communal encounters disappeared with the announcement of \u2018lockdowns\u2019 across the globe.<\/p>\n

In 2020, cinemas were forced to shut down and cinema workers were faced with redundancies. However, the desire to experience film did not weaken or disappear, as during confinement, festivals and communities adapted their programmes to online viewing experiences. [5]<\/a> In 2020, BFMAF transformed the festival into an online edition, which included access to the whole programme of films through the festival\u2019s website. It also presented a series of live online events, such as discussions with artists and a live mix by sound artist Martin Parker using sounds recorded in Berwick at night. [6]<\/a> Despite the limitations of the online sphere, the festival experimented with the possibilities of live virtual encounters as viewers on the \u2018opening night\u2019 tuned in from around the world to listen to a coalescence of the night-time cries of birds, the sound of the sea foaming on Berwick\u2019s shore and the dance of wind in trees in the dark.<\/p>\n

Since this time, film exhibition has been able to reemerge from the virtual restraints created by the constraints on social life and mobility during the pandemic. Today, film festivals have returned, and cinemas are still attended with long queues of audience members waiting in line. Cinema\u2019s ability to adapt to the many crises since its birth shines a positive light on its future. [7]<\/a> But due to the current economic crises, the rapid increase of the cost of living \u2013 and of cinema tickets \u2013 paired with the speed of capitalism\u2019s production, cinema and its exhibition may have to become the subject of new critical interventions. If cinema is to endure survival under the current structure of capitalism, more radical transformations of thought and theory in regard to seeing and experiencing film, such as those dealing with new cinematic apparatuses, will be needed to expand its practices and discourses. So, where to end with Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival? Oh, do not ask, let us go and make our visit.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> The French word balade<\/em> is used throughout this article as a homophone, intended to convey the shared pronunciation of balade<\/em> and ballade<\/em>, and their two significations respectively, a stroll and a ballad.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/sup><\/a> In this way, the festival\u2019s spatiotemporal design pertinently echoes the situationist theories of the 1950s; as Xavier Costa writes, while drawing on Guy Debord: \u2018in the emotional disorientation of the d\u00e9rive<\/em>, the Situationists experienced a distancing, an estrangement of their environment \u2013 termed as a “psychogeographic\u201d experience; that is, one in which passions dominate over the spatial orientation\u2019 (Costa 2020: 78-9).<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> The collection of Magic Lantern slides at the Cinemath\u00e8que Fran\u00e7aise in Paris contains around 17,000 hand-painted and photographic slides that illustrate the possibilities of the pre-cinema era, a great number of which can be viewed online, see https:\/\/europeanfilmgateway.eu\/search-efg\/slide%20cf\/showOnly:image<\/a> and http:\/\/www.laternamagica.fr\/collection.php?collection=Plaques+anim%E9es<\/a>. For images of the magic lantern, see https:\/\/www.cinematheque.fr\/fr\/catalogues\/appareils\/collection\/lanterne-magiqueap-20-3425.html<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Coined by the French experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek in 1966, Expanded Cinema as a term today can be applied to a diverse range of artistic practices and experiences, often within the context of live art-film and projection events. It was born out of a period in the 1960s and 70s of experimentation with form and space, namely from the artists, designers, and poets in the Fluxus community, who staged improvisational happenings, performance art events and mixed-media installations. See Rees (2011), Uroskie (2014) and Walley (2020) for detailed studies of the form.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Including BFMAF, a considerable number of film festivals reimagined their programmes as online or digital events. See https:\/\/www.indiewire.com\/features\/general\/film-festival-market-2020-in-person-online-1202232252<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> The festival has created an archive of previous editions on their website and the programmes can be explored in detail. They also publish their annual catalogues online. See https:\/\/bfmaf.org\/festival<\/a> and https:\/\/bfmaf.org\/catalogue-archive<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> For further reading on how film exhibition has been affected by and responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and on how the crisis opens opportunities for the discussion of film\u2019s resistance to crises historically, see de Luna Freire, Melnick and Orzel (2023).<\/p>\n

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Download PDF Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":24992,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":null,"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":null},"categories":[128],"tags":[112,109,110,108,111],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24990"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24990"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25237,"href":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24990\/revisions\/25237"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hy-phen.space\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}