Underneath the Arches
27/08/09
Beneath a roaring concrete flyover in Clifton, just south of Nottingham on the river Trent, hundreds of people gathered last night for the launch of the latest phase of Hinterland.
The location was typical. The Hinterland curator Jennie Syson has been animating the Trentside with artists’ projects over the last 3 years. The inspired combination of a pedal powered cinema beneath an oil and testosterone fuelled highway made for dramatic context for the films being shown.
The cinema activists, Annexinema, organised the programme. www.annexinema.org
With their roaming series of in shows over the last 2 years in unexpected locations in Nottingham they have become the liberators of films trapped in the ghetto of the back catalogue. Last night they seized this opportunity to create a programme which gave 12 short films a chance to breath again in a fresh and challenging context.
In terms of location, it really was the arse end of the river- a disregarded and neglected underpass sacrificed to the rumbling highway above.The event reclaimed this unpromising space and made a creative place out of it for one night. The films picked up on these elements beautifully with a range of subtle portraits of outsiders and marginal landscapes, like Esther Johnson’s portrait of the crumbling coastline of East Yorkshire and Ben Rivers view of the loner Jake Williams in the forest of Aberdeenshire. Stories of survival on the margins.
Chris Marker’s Junkopia featured sculptures made from junk on the shoreline at San Francisco and echoed the theme of the discovery of unexpected riches in unusual places.
On a similar theme Moot Gallery served smoothies made from the blackberries picked just down by the Trent rivers edge- with customers pedaling to power the blender. At times the setting visually chimed well with the films, enriching the experience enormously and adding new layers of meaning and pleasure. As twilight fell around the flyover Emily Richardson’s time-lapse nightscapes in Redshift found echo in the shape of the trees against the sky, the moving traffic and the flow of the river.
The vulnerability of Mischa Leinkauf’s film of his journey on a simple handcart through the intimidating tunnels of the Berlin U-Bahn railway was made more thrilling and dramatic through being accompanied by horn blasts from passing lorry drivers as they rumbled above us and signaled their greetings.
George Barber’s River Sky, a disorientating upside down film set under the bridges of the Thames, became an infinitely more relevant and meaningful piece of film as it bled into the surroundings. It’s potential for mere quirkiness was offset by the location, which transformed it into an altogether grander sight specific experience.
A film like Aerial by Margaret Tait, a modest and subtle series of impressionistic observations, was effective in carrying its poetic charge lightly. The very busy-ness of the screening location, with the large audience, the roar of the traffic, the ranks of cyclist generators and night falling all around was often surprisingly complementary to the most vulnerable and subtlest of films.
Now that the technology is available to exhibit high quality images and sound – and to show work independent of location through generating separate power-then film is freed from the multiplex shed. All of the filmmakers would, I am sure, be pleased to see how much the meaning and pleasures of their work was extended and enhanced by the location. A lot of this work would, in the past, have been seen as the exclusive preserve of the avant-garde, marginalised as quirky, willfully obtuse or discursive. It now seems to be coming into its own and audiences, perhaps familiar now with a wider range of forms through YouTube are able to enjoy the work on a range of levels. Imaginative programming like this treats the work with respect but not reverence and liberates it from the hushed confines of the ‘retrospective’ screening. It returns it to a functionality within the culture and politics of today, which is part and parcel of what seems to characterise the whole Hinterland project.
The programme completed itself with Downside Up, Derby film maker Tony Hill’s epic of the world turned upside down -spinning domestic life, buildings, countryside and children through a simple movement of the camera-and echoing the themes of the upside down world we had occupied for that evening under the flyover.
No report on the event would be complete without mentioning the Magnificent Revolution www.magnificentrevolution.org and their presence throughout, ensuring the pedals delivered the power and quietly managing the event through their radical new technology. Making it independent and self-sustaining. The quality of the sound and the visuals were so good that they almost had me thinking they were using real electricity.Perhaps in the end they also had the last laugh. The coach taking home those of us who chosen not to cycle broke down.
We had to get a fleet of taxis to ferry us back home via another world turned upside down – the Nottingham city centre on a Friday night.
Frank Abbott is a filmmaker and leads the Visual Arts Masters Programmes (Fine Art, Creative Collaborations and Film) at Nottingham Trent University School of Art and Design.
The event was preceded by talks previewing the coming attractions of Hinterland over the next few weeks, including Rebecca Beinart's ‘Field Kitchen’.
Go to www.hinterlandprojects.com to make sure you don’t miss any more of them
Hinterland Launch: Cycle powered cinema with Annexinema & The Magnificent Revolution
27/08/09
Photographic documentation of Hinterland's launch underneath Clifton Bridge.
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