Live Cinema: Cultures, Economies, Aesthetics 9781501324840, 9781501324833, 9781501324857

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To our other engaging and highly participatory lifelong project, our children: Robbie, Maisie, Ella & Martha

Preface The research collaboration that underpins our work in this area began when a call for papers was issued by G|A|M|E – the Italian Journal of Game Studies – in 2014, for a special issue entitled ‘Re-framing video games in the light of cinema’ which was being edited by Federico Giordano, Ivan Girina and Riccardo Fassone. With our overlapping interest in innovative interactive stories, emergent audience behaviours, the evolution of new aesthetics and complex affective experiences; this seemed a perfect opportunity to collaborate. Drawing on our distinct backgrounds in cinema studies and game studies, we were keen to explore the experience design strategies of Secret Cinema in particular, as this was an organization Sarah had profiled in her earlier monograph Beyond the Screen which she was writing in 2012/2013. During the final write up of the manuscript Secret Cinema had engaged in their first-ever ‘new release’ – Prometheus (2012) – and they were clearly emerging as an organization of particular significance in relation to innovative practices in cinema distribution and exhibition and had become the topic of much conversation between us. Given the timeframe of the journal, we decided that we would attend the very next event, at the time this was The Grand Budapest Hotel, which only had limited tickets available. It was not to be however and this opportunity did not materialize. Very soon thereafter though, it was announced that the next Secret Cinema Presents event would be Back to the Future and that tickets would be released for sale on 4th June 2014. We signed up to participate having established that we would pay particular attention to the deployment of game rhetorics and strategies in the appeal to and communication with their audience and pay attention to the playful aesthetics of the embodied live experience. We were both agreed that this was an ‘object of study’ too complex for just one discipline alone! Sarah had her first of many challenging experiences with the online ticket purchasing system – the ticket servers failed at the point at which the tickets became available and would-be customers were advised that they would be put back on sale the following day. We were both able to track the way in which the community reacted to these challenges. Unexpectedly, we became fascinated witnesses to a drama as it unfolded, this was Secret Cinema’s most elaborate experience design so far, they had taken over the Olympic Site in London and more or less built a replica not just of the Back to the Future film set but elements of the sets of the two sequels. The process was fraught with difficulties and delays and initially the tension focussed on whether or not the events would actually open on time (which it didn’t) but then we were able to observe and capture a social media maelstrom which followed, as angry fans clashed, not just in relation to the delays but in relation to some fundamental differentials of expectation between die-hard Back to the Future fans (a large subsection of the audience for this event) and Secret Cinema fans. As known researchers in the area we were telephoned

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by the press (the Independent), BBC Radio, BBC News Night (and later by Le Monde) all requesting interviews – the details of the opening night failure made headlines in online versions of the mainstream news media. Our initial proposition of a single article in this area soon expanded as we shaped another set of arguments and observations, one of which we presented at SCMS in Montréal in 2015, with title of ‘Not So Secret Cinema: When Independent Immersive Cinematic Events Go Mainstream’. Elements of this presentation were later formulated into an article that focussed on an analysis of the clashing fandoms mentioned above and the use of social media through which to articulate and disseminate their subjectivities, pleasures and displeasures: ‘ “Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need an Effective Online Audience Engagement Strategy”: The Case of the Secret Cinema Viral Backlash’ which was published in FRAMES Special Issue ‘Going Viral: The Changing Faces of (Inter)Media Culture’ edited by William Brown. It was quickly becoming apparent that this was a growing area of creative and commercial significance, and one worthy of further academic enquiry and by this point we had successfully pitched for a Special Issue of Participations to capture emergent work in this area and it was there at SCMS that we spread the word and publicized our call for contributions with a publication date in 2016. We had adopted the catch all title ‘Live Cinema’ (a term taken from the Secret Cinema Back to the Future advertising – ‘The Live Cinema Experience’) as an umbrella term through which to capture the broad range of emergent creative art practices and novel commercial strategies that we were identifying. This nomenclature was used to make reference to a film screening with additional elements – at this stage the conception of ‘live’ indicated that something was happening in tandem with or around the screening space. 2015 turned out to the UK’s very own Summer of Live during which there was a sudden mushrooming of new forms of experience being promoted as bringing a new ‘liveness’ to immersive, interactive theatre, augmented cinematic experiences, live scorings and re-scorings (Atkinson and Kennedy 2016a) It was around this point, in 2015 that Lisa Brook from an organization called Live Cinema UK contacted us, enthusiastic about our work and seeking to enlist us to her own forthcoming project. Lisa was at that moment poised to submit an Arts Council England application to research, document and chart what she also described as Live Cinema as an emergent but increasingly popular and significant area of creative practice across the UK and she hoped to be able to enlist us as academic partners. We immediately saw a unique opportunity for partnership and there was a clear synergy between aspects of our research ambitions and a compatible area of expertise appropriate to the scope of her project. For our part, we saw a collaboration of this nature – with modest but high-profile Arts Council funding – as a powerful mechanism through which to gain access to other artists, practitioners and cultural organizations in the field. As a key aspect of our involvement, alongside designing audience research protocols, we proposed that we would organize a symposium to coincide with the launch date of our Participations Special Issue (May 2016). The funding application was successful and we immediately started work on plans for the symposium, forming a steering group based at Sarah’s new institution King’s

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College London and we began making connections with appropriate organizations. We formed the Live Cinema Steering Group to develop and promote our event and we very quickly established the idea of a Live Cinema Network to sustain, support and grow this activity beyond the lifetime of the grant and our event itself. At the time, we were bringing another AHRC collaborative project to its conclusion (TRI-PACT – Tracking Intellectual Property Across the Creative Technologies) and we were able to apply insights from this project to highlight the complex intellectual property wranglings that were a key challenge facing the designers of innovative augmented experiences involving making use of or repurposing props, characters, music or stories from films. The small symposia that we had originally envisaged as our part of the Arts Council England grant very quickly snowballed, with an overwhelming response from individuals and organizations who were very keen and excited to hear that this was taking place, all wanting to come on board, to offer speakers, and we even secured a commercial sponsor in the form of Bombay Sapphire (as enthusiastic gin drinkers this was a triumph!). Our symposium mushroomed in to a very high-profile conference, networking event and exhibition which included the National Theatre’s virtual reality exhibit Fabulous Wonder.land. As well as high-profile speakers throughout the day we were able to coordinate workshops and master classes to address challenges and opportunities identified in the funded research project. For an in-depth discussion of the conference themes see Atkinson and Kennedy 2016c and chapter 15 of this volume. At the conference, we formally launched the Live Cinema network; the completed Live Cinema Report, the Participations Journal Special Issue and the landmark academic, cultural and creative sector collaboration that underpinned it all. Our Participations Special Issue included our own article advancing our Secret Cinema research through an analysis of their Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back experience and an overarching state-of-the-field piece through which to share our development of new terminologies, conceptual frameworks and methodologies through which to approach the articulation and critical discussion of this novel form. The Live Cinema report has since been referenced in the Nostradamus Report (2017) and the typologies and terminologies that we developed have been built on in the ‘From Live to Digital’ Report (2016) for which Sarah was also a consultant. By this point we also now had our Bloomsbury book contract secured and we were able to take forward the collaborations that we had developed in the work for Participations and to cast our net even further to put together a volume that truly captured the international dimension of this compelling new area of scholarship. It was our intention to identify and showcase innovative work in this area, particularly research which crossed and blurred disciplinary distinctions – and this is our resultant volume. A book which we hope evidences the vibrancy of this area. From observing on the periphery, to blending chameleon-like into the field of research, our extensive infiltration into these emergent and ephemeral experience communities has been facilitated through ongoing partnerships with cultural institutions, commercial organizations, exhibitors and creative producers. This work

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has afforded extraordinarily productive collaborations which continue to provoke new questions and new avenues of research. For us both, whilst this volume is the culmination of a great deal of intellectual and affective labour, it is not a final destination but a significant stopping off point in a longer journey of enquiry as we pursue an area of research that continues to afford compelling, and invigorating experiences. Sarah Atkinson Helen W. Kennedy

Foreword During the 2016 holiday season I attended The American Blues Theater’s It’s a Wonderful Life—Live in Chicago! In their production of this cult Christmas classic, the theatre aimed to reproduce the kind of live radio play performance that dominated radio drama’s heyday from the 1930s to the 1950s. The American Blues Theater’s small auditorium was filled to capacity with viewers who reacted with laughter and tears while watching a troupe of actors with the script in their hands perform the characters’ lines in costume on a sparsely furnished stage with microphone stands. After the performance, actors served cookies and milk to the audience, clinching the associations among Old Time Radio, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), holiday good cheer in the form of food, homespun family fun and nostalgia, and an independent theatre in a major US city. This performance may appear to be a minor footnote in the history of Capra’s film, especially given its live status and, with that, its ephemerality. But it is, in fact, part of the film’s significant continuing history of appearances on radio and television and in motion picture theatres during the winter holiday season in the United States. More subtly, this presentation of the film also reveals a close interrelation between media and media experiences that complicates our notions of mechanically reproduced art. During its heyday, US radio adapted hundreds, if not thousands, of Hollywood films, including multiple productions of It’s a Wonderful Life, making film content a regular feature of prime-time broadcast programming well before television. The contemporary staging of Capra’s film in Chicago recalls this Old Time Radio past. In doing so, it gestures not only to the transformation of two mediums in the process of adaptation, but also to the intricate interweaving of liveness and mediation. For many years, radio shows were performed in front of live audiences while being aired nationally to the larger public. Broadcast adaptations of Hollywood films were thus able to make headway into people’s private space, enhancing intimacy between films and their audiences by allowing cinema in its remediated form to enter into the home’s everyday rituals. In the meantime, forging another connection between live and mass media and experiences, films too were exhibited in front of audiences who experienced their screenings as real time-and-space events even as they watched fictionalized versions of these dimensions on the screen. Amplifying the sense of immediacy and presence, The American Blues Theater’s show offered gustatory pleasures in the form of milk and cookies to its audiences as part of a localized media event that established the theatre as a home away from home. Such pleasures, though in the form of popcorn, candy and more upscale food on offer today, also define the familiar contours of moviegoing. As this aspect of entertainment suggests, media are wrapped in experiences that tap into senses beyond those required for engaging the medium itself, expanding the spectrum of activities that shape the consumer’s encounter with it.

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By performing a film-based story live, the restaging today of It’s a Wonderful Life is thus characterized by strata of intermedia affiliations and entangled modes of mediation and liveness at the event as well as over time. Since the OTR stage today is related to the dramatization of numerous films for Broadway as well as to stage productions on film, the revolving door that materializes between live and mechanically produced media swings fluidly in both directions. This state of affairs suggests that, in examining media, we need to reckon not only with the intermedia associations that define them, but also with the liveness that such associations may bring to media otherwise customarily defined, like cinema, through their technological base, through their origins in mass reproduction. Part of the reason film theorists have rarely addressed liveness as essential to cinema lies in the medium’s historical intervention in moving image culture as the first to be able to automatically reproduce continuous movement in its duration and space. From Sergei Eisenstein’s and Andre Bazin’s iconic work and later apparatus theory of the 1970s and 1980s to debates regarding cinema’s digital turn, formulations of the medium’s ontology and epistemology have been strongly influenced by its indebtedness to technology – the apparatus of camera, projector, screen, and auditorium and the spectatorial position these fundamentals construct. From this perspective, cinema depends on machinery for its effects and is a medium that is definitively not live, although it has powers of simulation. While cinema’s affiliations with other media have been a rich source of theoretical inquiry, how these affiliations or aspects of cinematic experience might productively destabilize comprehension of film as a technological medium shown in motion picture theatres has remained relatively unexplored in this tradition of theory. However, other approaches have questioned this canonical sense of cinema. Among them, film historians and theorists have researched the raucous or distracted activities of early moviegoers as they interacted with each other and the screen; cinema’s early exhibition in vaudeville venues; the performances of orchestras and other musical troupes at silent cinema screenings; and numerous contexts of movie exhibition and moviegoing that deeply affect film in relation to place, time and experience. Fan and cult media studies have invested in defining participatory movie, television and other media cultures that demonstrate the close connections between media and avid engagement – conventions, cosplay, quotation of movie dialogue, sing alongs, reenactments, fan art and filmmaking, and social media engagement. Meanwhile, new media studies has analysed forms of interactivity and immersion with respect to VCR and DVD players, video gaming, theme park rides, performance art, virtual reality, social media and more. Particularly with a more traditional medium like cinema, though, film’s mechanical base as the medium’s essence still seems to exist apart from organizations, technologies, or viewers that might challenge this verity. How can we argue that an ethos of liveness deeply affects the very core of cinema? Stepping back from this question for a moment, defining liveness is itself a slippery proposition. Philip Auslander has argued that in industrialized countries, media systems based on mass technologies have long pervaded live performances, making clean distinctions between what constitutes live and mediated events difficult to

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sustain. These cloudy areas extend from live stage plays of films to ball games that use Jumbotrons for instant replay. However, as Auslander further contends, while differences cannot be precisely drawn, the categories of liveness and mediation have not disappeared from public discourse and thus remain important for analysis. Rather than indicating absolutes, these terms maintain cultural viability as ‘historical and contingent rather than determined by immutable differences’. The most persistent definition of a live performance applies to events such as concerts, wherein ‘performers and the audience are both physically and temporally co-present to one another’. Yet this understanding has made room for altered concepts that now include technologically mediated senses of co-presence that exist, for example, among social media users (2008, 7–8, 60–61). The specificities of liveness and their changeability in social and historical context thus call for a case-by-case charting and exploration of the values this particular kind of performance represents. At the very least, the exclamatory part of the OTR stage production’s title, Live in Chicago! signals that liveness is a value to be sold to the public on the basis of its rarity in an overly technological and hyper-mediated contemporary environment. Posed as a form of exceptionalism in this climate, liveness can be seen as a commodity, even as this particular performance draws part of its credibility and allure from the mechanically and electronically produced arts of classic Hollywood cinema and Golden Age radio. While Auslander strives to conceive of liveness in a mediated society, we can reverse the polarity to consider the status of mass media systems in the face of liveness, that is, live performances that involve forms of co-presence and interaction with others as well as with technologies and spaces that enable these activities. Liveness penetrates the mechanical and otherwise mass mediated arts. In this vein, I would argue that cinema has always included it as part of its medium specificity and of the experiences it offers audiences. At the very least, each film screening in movie theatres, film festivals, the home, or other locales is a distinct performative event. As such, it involves different audiences, conditions of viewing and levels of interactivity, while drawing on our senses, including eating, drinking, conversation, physical comfort or discomfort and other variables that might appear to be banal, but are nonetheless among requisite features of cinematic experience. Although cinema as an apparatus – camera, projector, screen, theatre – is not live, to capture its full specificity as a medium we thus need to enlarge our conception of media to include such considerations. To return to my question, how does liveness affect cinema’s core as a medium? Lisa Gitelman’s remarks on medium specificity are relevant here, as she defines media not only as specific technologies, but also through their inextricable connection to the protocols surrounding them. Protocols are composed of a ‘clutter of normative rules and default conditions’ that express a ‘variety of social, economic, and material relationships’ subject to change over time (2006, 7–8). In relation to cinema, we can see that organizations shape protocols, as do, for instance, commercial movie theatres when they provide instructions regarding audience behavior before the feature film begins. Today they remind audiences to silence their cellphones and familiarize themselves with the location of exits. These instructions aim to discipline viewers in an era of technological distraction and maintain the theatre as a special quiet space worth

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the money they have spent, while reminding them to be prepared in case of emergency. Protocols also involve how to use cinema, from reading VCR operation manuals to on-screen instructions for downloading a movie on one’s mobile phone, and the activities that audiences engage, from food consumption to more overt participation. Each of these and other protocols involved in cinema’s existence inescapably elicit actions and responses that are co-present and/or interactive with the medium. Shutting off one’s phone or manipulating it correctly for download also indicates the significant presence of other media and technologies. Hence, a more fulsome definition of media means addressing the role played by affiliated forms in a specific medium’s experience while studying applicable ritual protocols that characterize it within an historical era or nation. This is indeed a tall order and I do not mean to suggest that the chapters in this anthology have undertaken this work. Rather my point is that, in different guises, the live dimension of cinema has been and is evident – in full view – and invites theorizing, critical analysis and research. Yet, up against the enduring idea of cinema as an art bound by its rootedness in mechanical, electronic and digital reproduction, film’s liveness has not materialized until recently as worthy of vigorous inquiry in film and media studies. As its title suggests, Sarah Atkinson and Helen W. Kennedy’s Live Cinema: Cultures, Economies, Aesthetics addresses this situation by naming and identifying live cinema both as an established and growing phenomenon and as a field of study without which we cannot fully understand cinema’s existence. By revealing cinema’s multimedia alliances and experiential dimensions as crucial to the way we conceive of it, the authors in this collection provide an alternative vision of cinema as a flexible, performative and portable medium. Redefined as such, cinema consists of multiple ways of enhancing, augmenting, or otherwise transforming films and film screenings into happenings that engage the sensorium and participation of audiences as a definitive aspect of film culture. The editors have assembled rigorous, broad-ranging case studies that focus on organizations or developments in contemporary media that help to comprise what they call the ‘experiential cinema economy’. This neologism consolidates diverse areas of inquiry in the field, while also purposefully advancing an agenda under new terms that reformulates the centrality of liveness in its complexity to the constitution of cinema. By offering analyses of a series of different ventures that strive to capitalize upon or amplify cinema’s immersive and participatory potentials, Live Cinema’s contributors thus provide an opportune and fascinating intervention in the discipline that calls attention to cinematic phenomena that could otherwise be considered as marginal, ephemeral, and/or simply the practice of fans. As the anthology collectively insists, however, coming to terms with cinema means acknowledging and exploring diverse articulations of its multimediated and live dimensions. In the process, Live Cinema not only unites areas of sympathetic study in the field that have not been identified as flying under the banner of liveness, but also provides a critical and theoretical vocabulary for investigating the medium’s numerous and growing public manifestations as a live experience.

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The anthology’s contributors demonstrate that, especially once we leave the dedicated commercial motion picture theatre, rich worlds of films that have been reconfigured and reimagined through artistic, industry and audience practices await. Live Cinema is a major signpost on this road, analysing cinema’s reach beyond its typical boundaries into situations and spaces that foreground its possibilities of liveness as part of its potential as a medium. As this volume examines a contemporary cinematic culture especially invested in immersive, participatory and interactive experiences that draw upon co-presence, forms of embodiment and fellow technologies in different spaces, we find at once a more expansive and experimental concept of cinema than we might have imagined, but that, upon reflection, has long been an intimate part of the seventh art. I am grateful for the existence of this anthology and look forward to the conversations that will undoubtedly ensue from its ways of seeing cinema and the cinema experience through the lens of live media. Barbara Klinger

Acknowledgements We are deeply indebted to our esteemed board of peer reviewers for their generous engagement with the work collected here; their thoughtful comments, feedback and insight have ensured that every aspect of this volume has been thoughtfully and expertly scrutinized. All our chapters received two highly considered and thoughtful open commentaries from this distinguished list of theorists and researchers. They have been our attentive collaborators throughout the process, assisting us in ensuring that the final collection meets our ambitions to represent and significantly develop this nascent field. The reader will discern from this list – representing Media and Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Film Festival Studies, Practice-based researchers, Theatre and Performance Studies, Music Studies, Cultural Geographers, New Media theorists and Game Studies scholars – that this is a truly multi, inter and transdisciplinary volume. Monia Acciari, Adam Alston, Karina Aveyard, Martin Barker, Tom Brown, Charlotte Crofts, Antoine Damiens, Marijke de Valck, Josie Dolan, Alex Fischer, Mattias Frey, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Seth Giddings, Frank Gray, Janet Harbord, Sarah Hibberd, Keith Johnston, Brendan Kredell, Philippa Lovatt, Steve Mallinder, Holly Maples, Jenna Ng, Tom Rice, Les Roberts, Christine Sprengler, Kirsten Stevens, Michael Talbott, Beth Tsai, Mike Walsh and Anna Wilson. We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to: Live Cinema UK and Lisa Brook; The King’s Cultural Institute, Kate Dunton and Kaye Mahoney; King’s College London Arts & Humanities Research Institute; Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries, King’s College London; The School of Media, University of Brighton; The Live Cinema Conference & Network Steering Group, including: Emma Keith, Vic Murray, Claire Lester, Guy Morley, Jade Desumala, Manel Carrereas, Colm McAuliffe, Jay Arnold, Kate Wellham and Polly Betton, National Theatre Digital Studio – Joel Enfield, Johanna Nicholls and Toby Coffey, King’s Venues – Sally Talbot and Ian Huges. Maria McCarthy, Sarah Weatherall, Diana Whitehead, Omnibus Clapham, all the Hangmen Rehanged cast and crew, Emily Brown and Dr Alana Harris King’s College London. Our Conference support helpers: Iris Pintiuta, Augustin Wecxsteen, Marie LangdaleDemoyen, Jordan Read, Karolina Wasikowska, Eveline Kaethoven, Wayne D’Cruz, Kaleesha Rajamantri and Matt Homer, researcher from the University of Brighton. Thanks also to Shai Kassirer, PhD student at University of Brighton, for compiling our bibliography. Thanks also go to Carly Adkinson, Robbie Cleary and Lisa Cooper for their research support and to Emma Lawrence, Live Cinema King’s Undergraduate Research Fellow. We are extremely grateful for all of their support.

List of Tables I.1 The key distinctions between ‘event cinema’ and ‘live and experiential cinema’ (authors’ own, first published in Atkinson and Kennedy 2016: 134, with illustrative examples now included). I.2 ‘Participation to Immersion Continuum’ model of engagement. 5.1 Festival programme typology. 6.1 Schematic classification of festival venues according to ordinary access. A.1 Live cinema researcher subjectivities and characteristics.

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List of Figures I.1 One of the many applications of the term ‘Live Cinema’, taken from the promotional materials for ‘Secret Cinema Presents … Back to the Future’, London 2014. https://www.secretcinema.org/tickets, accessed 4 June 2014. 2 I.2 Pictured from left to right at the Live Cinema Conference 2016: George Wood, Founder and Managing Director of Luna Cinema; Dominic Davies, Founder & Creative Director of Backyard Cinema and Gerry Cottle Jr., Founder and Director of Rooftop Film Club. Photo: Dominic Davies. 6 3.1 Inflatable pop-up screen on Hastings Pier open-plan deck – author’s own. 47 3.2 Audience waiting for the sun to set at Clevedon Pier screening of Pirates of the Caribbean – author’s own. 56 3.3 The Luna Cinema, Kino Digital & Hastings Pier premier screening of Re: A Pier – author’s own. 57 4.1 The Floating Cinema boat: promotional image from their website. http:// www.somewhere.org.uk/projects/floatingcinema/ 66 4.2 Yan’s sound equipment – author’s own. 71 4.3 Yan and participant recording the sounds of Brentford – author’s own. 72 4.4 Possible sounds to record – author’s own. 72 5.1 Percentage of festival programme (2011–2013) represented by each type of event in the festival programme typology. 88 5.2 85A presents: Jan Svankmajer was held at The Glue Factory, a cross-arts exhibition space in Glasgow during GFF12. Source: Glasgow Film. Photo by Stuart Crawford. 93 5.3. Screening of The Warriors in one of Glasgow’s subway stations during GFF13. Source: Glasgow Film. Photo by Alistair Devine. 94 5.4. Glasgow Cathedral during the screening of The Passion of Joan of Arc at GFF13. Source: Glasgow Film. Photo by Eoin Carey. 95 5.5. The hull of the Tall Ship set up for the screening of The Maggie at GFF12. Source: Glasgow Film. Photo by Ingrid Mur. 97 6.1 Audiences before GFF screening of Romeo+Juliet (27 February 2016). From left: photography, themed cocktails, scene re-enactment with ‘fish-tank’ prop, character cosplay. 109

List of Figures 6.2 7.1

Comparison of areas covered by maps in festival brochures. The audience at the main entrance of the Main Theatre in San Sebastian, 2015. Courtesy Donostia Kultura. 7.2 Shinya Tsukamoto being heckled by a member of the audience, 2008. Courtesy Donostia Kultura. 10. 1 The Funfear Affect Writ Large: 4 “infected” players visibly communicate their delight – stills from post-event video interviews – author’s own. 10.2 The ranked viewing beds at Secret Cinema’s 28 Days Later – publicity photograph. 11.1 Actors playing usherettes in military-inspired uniforms holding replica copies of the ABC Film Review – author’s own. 11.2 The cinema manager in front of a modern video screen displaying digitized publicity materials – author’s own. 15.1 The peep-through specially designed and strategically placed to ‘delay’ audience members as they left the venue, in order to capture their initial responses to the experience – author’s own. 15.2 The Anatomy Lecture Theatre at King’s College London. In the foreground, in amongst the audience, sits the character of Mahmood Mattan played by Jack Benjamin. Photograph: Richard Eaton. 15.3 The front page of the four-page newspaper that was distributed to audience members by the seller and the student protestors as part of the performance, to signal the abolition of hanging, 29 October 1965 and as a diegetic mechanism which took the audience members to their temporal point of departure into the story time of the play. Text by Sarah Weatherall, design by Stephanie Prior. 15.4 The Edible Cinema trays, complete with menus. 15.5 The menu which was provided with each Edible Cinema tray; the eight different elements were carefully designed to match a particular moment of dialogue in the narrative, ranging from the obvious to the abstract. Menu Design by Edible Cinema. 15.6 This sequence of images pictures the various different physical and temporal performative sites of Hangmen Rehanged. Photographs: Richard Eaton. 15.7 Timothy Evans, Ruth Ellis and Mahmood Mattan played by Gavin Duff, Madeleine Hyland and Jack Benjamin. Photo: Juliet Clark.

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Live Cinema Presents … Cultures, Economies, Aesthetics Sarah Atkinson and Helen W. Kennedy

Cultures S pectacular, Spectacular, No words in the vernacular, Can describe this great event … ‘The Pitch (Spectacular Spectacular)’ from Moulin Rouge1 In another dimension, With voyeuristic intention … ‘Timewarp’ from The Rocky Horror Picture Show2 We have used these lyrics in two titles of recent talks that we have given about our work in Live Cinema.3 Both are polysemic in their inferences – in our borrowing of the words from ‘Spectacular, Spectacular’, we were, first, making explicit reference to Secret Cinema’s (SC’s) production of Moulin Rouge which had launched the day prior to the talk we were giving.4 Secondly, we were attempting to communicate the definitional debates that characterize this area of cultural and creative practice. The words capture the challenges that we faced in aptly titling this volume, where we discussed various options, such as ‘Live & Experiential’ and ‘Live & Immersive’, before eventually settling on ‘Live Cinema’, since we believe it captures the broad range of practices and experiences contained within. Our research has revealed that the term ‘Live Cinema’ has been applied in a number of different contexts. We first picked up the term to attempt to frame this area of research from the promotional materials of SC’s Back to the Future event, the promotional tag line for which was ‘The Live Cinema Experience’ (see Figure I.1). The term is also used as the name of Lisa Brooks organization Live Cinema UK, which was established to ‘bring artists, exhibitors, distributors and producers closer together to create amazing experiential cinema events’.5 59 Productions and Katie Mitchell refer to their Forbidden Zone Production as ‘Live Cinema’ – which is the presentation of a theatre production which is simultaneously being performed, filmed, projected and observed live on a screen above the stage. On the stage below the screen, audience members are able to see the inner workings of the film set in which the on-screen action is being shot. Film Live in Italy are a group

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Figure I.1  One of the many applications of the term ‘Live Cinema’, taken from the promotional

materials for ‘Secret Cinema Presents … Back to the Future’, London 2014. https://www. secretcinema.org/tickets (accessed 4 June 2014).

of artists whose practice is to make and broadcast films live – ‘a movie that is filmed at the same time that it is screened. A real immersive live cinema experience’.6 Francis Ford Coppola has also worked in a similar mode with his project Distant Vision,7 which he also refers to as ‘Live Cinema’. He positions this work in contradistinction to live

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multi-camera broadcast, associated with the televisual, by stating, ‘I felt the need to experiment in order to learn the actual methodology of live cinema, which is a hybrid of theater, film and television. The shot is the basic element, as in film; the live performance is from theatre; and the advanced television technology to enable it is borrowed from TV sports.’ Through an examination of the genealogy of ‘rescoring’ practice, a more experimental approach is accounted for under the heading of ‘Live Cinema’, which stems from expanded cinema and audiovisual cinema practices – including the work of Peter Greenaway – this will be discussed in more detail in our introduction to section 4. Our use of the term ‘live’ is consistent with Philip Auslander’s helpful definition; it refers to events in which there is ‘physical co-presence of performers and audience […] production and reception, experience in the moment’ (2008: 61). As such, in our work, the term ‘Live Cinema’ has experienced significant and broad application. It was adopted as the name of our landmark conference and the resultant academic/practitioner network.8 The title is significantly open such that it has enabled several of our contributors to offer their own suggestions, interpretations and extensions to this term such as shifting from live to ‘living’ cinema. Returning to the discussion of the ‘Spectacular, Spectacular’ lyrics, thirdly, these are suggestive of the widespread tendency within live cinema marketing discourse to ignore all and any cinematic antecedents in hyperbolic proclamations of the instantaneity of the new. Marketing materials are peppered with statements such as ‘like never before’ and ‘first-of-a-kind’ whilst also heavily underlining the novelty of the immersiveness of ‘live’ in the use of phrases such as ‘in the moment’ and ‘as it happens’. Finally, the use of the word ‘event’ also strikes a chord with the debates and politics of this area of cultural production. We don’t want to open that up for debate here since we have done so elsewhere (see Atkinson and Kennedy 2016a, 2016c), rather we present the summary of these discussions in Table I.1, and acknowledge that this book encompasses both this establishing territory of live and experiential cinema and the territory described as ‘event cinema’. Bringing these together in this way continues to help us to understand their distinctions as well as the intersections. The second lyric with which we have chosen to open this collection, and which we also used in a recent keynote speech, is taken from The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s (1975) signature Time Warp song. The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a watershed moment for the field of live, immersive and participatory cinema in at least two ways. First, it is the most famous example of participatory cinema, it is used as the cornerstone through which to anchor discussions and debates in this field of study, and it is also an immediately recognizable exemplar of what is meant by participatory and live cinema, which involves dressing up, singing, dancing, quoting and gesturing. Also, importantly, the participatory element was embedded as a real embodied aspect of the experience of the film, not a marketing add on. The film is cited in most studies into this form, and indeed features in this volume a number of times. Secondly, the film viewing experience was subject to one of the first empirical participatory audience studies by Bruce A. Austin’s 1981 seminal work – ‘Portrait of a Cult Film Audience: The Rocky Horror Picture Show’, which through the analysis of interviews conducted outside the cinema in 1979 revealed that ‘the social experience promised by Rocky Horror’s reputation and satisfaction of one’s curiosity are

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Table I.1  The key distinctions between ‘event cinema’ and ‘live and experiential cinema’ (authors’ own, first published in Atkinson and Kennedy 2016: 134, with illustrative examples now included). Event cinema

Live and experiential cinema

Examples

NT Live, English National Opera Live, Royal Shakespeare Company Live, Royal Opera House Live Cinema, The Metropolitan Opera Live in HD, Royal Ballet Live

Secret Cinema, Sneaky Experience, Backyard Cinema, Luna Cinema, Rooftop Film Club

Space and place

Cinema auditoria

Outdoor, urban locations, heritage sites, theatres and concert halls

Pricing structure

Standard cinema ticket price + small premium

Prices vary considerably depending on level and type of experience (£15, £30, £70 +), and these can also be stratified within the experience (e.g. Secret Cinema and Backyard Cinema)

Rights clearances

Standard screen licence and partnership agreements

Highly complex range of licences and protracted rights negotiations. Context and differentiated between artists and exhibitors

Core technology

Outside broadcasting and satellite transmission

Pop-up screens, directional audio, multiple projections, sound engineering requirements, live video mixing techniques

Content

Opera, theatre, dance, sport, concerts, games

Pre-released feature films not normally new releases

Temporality/ duration

Two to three hours – standard duration of performance

Three to eight hours with activities and interactions pre- and post-screening

Artistic diversity

Rich high culture offering spanning the arts

Rich experiential innovations around what are predominantly films from the 1980s cult catalogue

Scaleability

Global recognition of brand and high cultural value, international market penetration

One-off special events in the UK or seasonal runs

Economic models

Cultural Partnerships across high ranking, well-established organizations

Local, grass roots, community, entrepreneurs, start-ups and SMEs

Funding streams

Public funding, corporate high-end sponsorship

One-off quirky brand sponsorship, arts funds, ticket revenue

Impact on artistic practices

Stage performers now on screen: ‘lens responsive performance’

Performers respond to the screen: ‘screen responsive performance’

Audience communications

Mainstream media channels

Social media and word of mouth

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potent drawing cards for first-time viewers’ (Austin 1981: 52). The audience research methodologies deployed here build on but significantly extend a trajectory that can trace its origins to this groundbreaking study. As such it is positioned as an ideal antecedent for the thematics of this volume. The specific lyric of the title ‘In another dimension, with voyeuristic intention’ is chosen to capture the sense of this other ‘dimension’ of participatory cinema – the sense of a new territory to explore, whilst also invoking the subjectivity of the audience researcher in this domain who has to assume a dual participatory and observational role. The challenges of such a positionality are a core concern for many of the volume’s contributions. It resonates with the energetic and embodied challenges of the researching subject in this field of participation and interaction. As we acknowledged in the preface, this frequently begins with a highly fraught period of time working across multiple devices trying to secure tickets whilst battling mass competition and technical failures. And so we begin the work of this volume – drawing on our combined years of research in our respective fields of film and game audience cultures, along with those of our sixteen other contributors, we examine the opportunities and challenges of engaging with live and experiential cinema phenomena.

Economies As we have insisted in our work and as mentioned earlier in this chapter, it is crucially important not to exclusively position this work within discourses of the ‘new’ and to be cautious and critical of claims of originality and innovation. Rather, within this work, it is key to acknowledge and examine the cyclical nature of audience and reception practices in cinema, and this includes the various emergent economic models and business structures. For example, a significant amount of work undertaken in this field so far examines new and alternative exhibition and screening spaces, since ‘pop up’ technologies have rendered previously inaccessible spaces open to new types of location-based viewing experiences. Rather than being a new practice, Chanan’s study of early cinema viewing practices reveals the antecedents of this form: ‘Fairground showmen built special trailers and tents. Others covered the music halls. Then, in the early years of the new century, disused shops and small halls were converted, and the first fixed cinemas appeared’ (1976: 1). As we examine new business models and the entrepreneurial drive of contemporary live cinema proprietors such as Luna Cinema (LC), Rooftop Film Club (RFC), Backyard Cinema (BYC) and, of course, SC – these all have in common the fact that they emerge from within a model of the lone entrepreneur, starting with a modest one-screen venture and then experiencing and sustaining fast and significant growth. LC – founded by George Wood, an actor – began with just one screen, and now delivers expanded summer seasons across multiple locations in the UK, with mainstream poster and billboard advertising campaigns across the London Transport Network. RFC, launched by Gerry Cottle Jr. (son of the famous circus owner – in an instance where the links between fairground and cinema are made most explicit!), started in East London and now has multiple permanent rooftop sites in London and the United States. Dominic Davies, founder of BYC, currently

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the smallest of these concerns, stated in a recent recruitment drive: ‘I started this business in my own back garden only a few years ago.’ At the time of writing, he is delivering a Quentin Tarantino season at a London location he regularly uses. Fabien Riggall is the founder of SC and initially a would-be film producer, whose organization now produces experiences which generate millions in box office revenue (Figure I.2). In these examples, we can already see history repeating itself, as these businesses become more established and are based in semi-permanent or repeat locations; rather than a set of new industrial or creative practices, we see them fit very well in to the framework through which modern cinemas emerged: Bigger and better premises were converted into cinemas, purpose-built halls began to appear, and the travelling showmen were slowly driven out of business or forced to play the same game and settle down. Haggar, for example, gave up making films and travelling with them, and settled down as a cinema proprietor in 1909. New cinemas were opened by successful butchers and fishmongers. (Chanan 1976: 2)

The forebears and the processes which Chanan illuminates offer a challenge to the current framing of these lone entrepreneurs as a product of neoliberal capitalism.

Figure I.2  Pictured from left to right at the Live Cinema Conference 2016: George Wood, founder

and managing director of Luna Cinema; Dominic Davies, founder and creative director of Backyard Cinema; and Gerry Cottle Jr., founder and director of Rooftop Film Club. Photo: Dominic Davies.

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We also see aspects of these endeavours sharing a common political or social motivation alongside their economic imperatives. The contemporary drive in the UK to fund the opening up of high cultural offerings such as national theatre, orchestral performance and opera to a wider audience also has its own roots in particular historical practices. Dimaggio (1982) has traced the work of Henry Lee Higginson, for instance. Higginson was the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1881 his vision was to offer quality orchestral concerts at a price that anyone could afford. He stated: ‘My hope was to draw in by degrees a larger and less-educated class of society – offering the best music at low prices’. He later evolved this business model through touring the orchestra to other cities. The event cinema and livecasting phenomena can be seen on a continuum of accessible arts strategies, which take high cultural events and make them available to these wider audiences for a more attainable ticket price. The ‘films with live orchestra’ series at the Royal Albert Hall are a part of such an audience engagement strategy. As Lucy Noble, director of events at The Royal Albert Hall, stated: Some of these people have never watched a live orchestra and for them the experience is fantastically overwhelming in a really positive way, and for us it’s bringing more people to see live performance in terms of the classical and orchestral side, which has been very important to us, but we’ve tried to make them as accessible as possible.9

Paradoxically, where we see these inclusive motivations and principles at work in these discourses and practices of audience expansion, we also see a corollary process whereby stratification is built back into these experiences through complex pricing structures and ticketing strategies. With the exception of RFC, LC, BYC and SC all present a stratified system, where those paying a premium ticket price experience and receive added extras – reserved and more comfortable seating, food and drink, access to different areas of the experience. These more expensive tickets receive additional well-targeted marketing to increase their desirability. BYC amongst others, offers a particular ‘date night’ package that includes premium seating, Prosecco and expensive snacks. SC’s Moulin Rouge, offered an ‘aristocrat’ ticket which provided a raft of enhancements to the experience. This pricing strategy translates across to other areas of the experience economy, such as The Drowned Man’s ‘premium ticket’ for the Encino Cinema experience (see Chapter 13) – a stratification system which would be more in tune with the higher cultural arts (Chan and Goldthorpe 2005). Such practices invoke earlier cinemagoing practices, whereby attempts to ‘elevate’ the popular culture status of cinema to a higher-class art form and to augment cinema as social event prioritized the surroundings and the experience over the film text itself. Writing about the period between 1910 and 1925, Richard Maltby describes a similar form of extended viewing experience and the elaborate surroundings: The two-hour show included a live orchestral overture and stage show, a comedy short and newsreels as well as the feature film. Despite their grandeur, the American

8

Live Cinema picture palaces were insistently egalitarian, places where the architectural and decorative styles of the wealthiest estates and hotels were made available to all […] The ‘Million Dollar Theaters’ sought to convince all their clientele that, as viewers, they could become part of the glamorous life they watched on the screen. Many cinemas provided free baby-sitting. Mirrors encouraged patrons to recognize themselves amidst the chandeliers and fountains, so they could feel that escaping from the cramped anonymity of the office or the apartment house into these gilded mansions of romance should not be an occasional luxury, but a necessary regular respite from all that was oppressive in metropolitan life. (1989: 86)

There are emergent event-led release strategies which boost the box office of lesserknown independent films and form part of the pre-release marketing campaigns. SC has a production strand in which the experiences are less extravagant, of smaller scale and less expensive. The idea is to take independent new releases and showcase them to new audiences. At the time of writing, their most recent production in this vein drew 5,500 people to the SC X secret previews of Handmaiden (2017) – Park Chan-wook’s reinterpretation of Sarah Water's novel Fingersmith. As a result, the film entered the UK box office charts at number six during the week of its preview release, taking £474,752,10 a significant achievement for a foreign independent release. SC had previously had success in this area, with the experience designed around the release of the more mainstream Prometheus, which generated more income than the BFI Imax release11 This marks another important milestone in Rigall’s drive for a much wider application of an event-led distribution model – across the commercial and more independent sectors of film. Rigall has spoken of his ambitions to advance this event-led distribution further by stating: ‘If a filmmaker thinks of a building instead of a screen, it opens up so many opportunities for how you can make films.’12 There are at least two scenarios in which exhibition practices and viewing apparatus influenced and shaped the types and genres of films that were produced in the history of cinema – to satisfy the voracious appetite of nickelodeon audiences in the 1910s and the burgeoning teenage audiences of driveins in the 1950s. During a recent interview with Walter Murch after the performance of THX1138 (1971), he revealed that live distribution strategies were now a key point in distribution discussions.13 He stated: ‘It’s just now a fairly standard thing, that you say – should we have an IMAX version of this film? – yes, Should we have a 3D version? – yes, should we have a live orchestra version of this film? That’s a routine conversation now for films.’ This recently manifested in an announcement that La La Land (2016) is to be screened in venues across the UK with the score recreated live by an orchestra and choir. The experience which opened in the United States at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on May 26 involved a 100-piece orchestra, jazz ensemble and chorus conducted by Justin Hurwitz, who composed the original film score. Despite the clearly articulated continuities that shape our understanding of these forms, there are a number of emergent issues impacting upon the sector which are new and specific to our current cultural, political, social and economic moment. Our wider live cinema project seeks to address these and does so through two major strands of activity:

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firstly through industry collaboration and partnerships and secondly through critical academic enquiry. The issues relating to the economies of live cinema were identified in the Live Cinema Report and taken forward through discussions by the steering group and then implemented as a series of master classes and workshops at the Live Cinema Conference. These were Intellectual Property (IP) and Licensing;14 Audience Development and Marketing; Funding and Training, Development and Education. The latter issue acknowledged that as is the case in many areas of the culture and creative industries, this sector is buttressed by the freelance market, internships and volunteers, and in many cases the contributions of performers and artists go uncredited.15 These dimensions are not the direct focus of the work of this volume but are part of a parallel research project that forms the context within which these contributions need to be understood.

Aesthetics New creative practices were also explored at the Live Cinema Conference through the Hangmen Rehanged collaboration (see Chapter 15), and the Wonder.land VR and ROAD exhibits. These represented innovations at the point of convergence between games, theatre, cinema and digital technologies. Manifestations of live cinema tend to sit at the exciting intersection of a number of different art forms – film, music, theatre and performing arts. Very often they become situated in technologically deterministic discourses, but again we need to exercise caution in assigning these phenomena to the new. As we have argued ‘There is a need to establish connections with and position these contemporary experiences as continuous with previous cultural practices such as travelling exhibition and itinerant cinemas’ (Atkinson and Kennedy 2016: 148). As history reveals, early cinema reception was a live occasion and also a live medium through the live musical accompaniment of silent films. The live performance of the films soundtracks came in a form which spanned full orchestras, to solo organists or pianists to the playing of a phonograph record. Larger cinemas were designed and built to accommodate an orchestral pit. This practice dissipated with the introduction of sound film. In present-day live scores, we simply see a return to these very early practices. We also see an extension of promotional Ballyhoo practices (see Atkinson 2014; Lyczba, 2015; and Chapter 11) which extended the filmic world of the narrative into the auditoria, and out in to local streets around the vicinity of the cinema (see Chapter 11). What we attempt to illuminate in our work – and through the curation of the contributions in this book – are the subtle complexities of merged or hybrid aesthetics, what Kennedy (Chapter 10) describes as the ‘recombinatory aesthetics’. These are the aesthetics that emerge where film meets game (Atkinson and Kennedy 2015; Chapter 10), where screen interfaces with stage (Atkinson, this book) and where live music performance intersects with cinema projection (see Chapter 12). We also attend to other aesthetic collisions: the interaction of situated screens with their environments, when films are sensorally augmented. These all present a confluence of opportunities and challenges for academics engaging in meaning-making, interpretative and analytical practices.

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Within the genealogy of the rise of experiential cinema (as driven by commercial imperatives within a burgeoning experience economy), the various experiences all signal a nostalgic turn to key points in cinematic history, where technological developments and social practices conflate and are the subject of a collective celebration of cinematic heritage, the aesthetics of which are bound up in the codes and conventions of cinema’s representational practices and cinematic sign system. These are all instances in which it is not just the filmic text that is the sole foundation on which the experiences are constructed, but that the historical production and reception practices which surround them and are embedded within them are also revisited, reimagined and re-experienced in a complex interplay by contemporary audiences. There is already an established history and scholarly engagement within cinema of the various attempts to stimulate the senses of the audiences, within a ‘cinema of sensations’ modality. It is our contention that these live cinema experiences should be seen on an aesthetic continuum, as presented in Table I.2. As our ‘Participation to Immersion Continuum’ model of engagement illustrates, live participatory cinema is based on an aesthetic principle of an engaged and interacting body, taken with the events as they unfold but, crucially, bringing the experience in to existence through their shared performance (as set dressing, extras, interactors etc.). We have previously referred to this collective as an ‘experience community’ which we define as: ‘temporally fleeting and shallow gatherings of people brought together in elaborate, highly constructed and crucially commodified narrative environments’ (Atkinson and Kennedy, 2017). At the other extreme of this continuum we see an aesthetic practice in which the viewing and immersed body is largely immobile, acted upon and enclosed by the technological apparatus and taken by and immersed in the cinematically rendered environment of virtual reality (VR). We have experienced a number of collective VR experiences which have attempted to bring the participants together and to cohere it as a communal activity. These have included Breaking Fourth’s VR experience Ctrl (2016), which we experienced in a studio theatre at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Before donning the headsets and earphones, we were welcomed into the collective space by a performer playing a character connected to the VR story world that we were about to enter; the experience was capped by a similarly performative conclusion. The sense of VR ‘occasion’ has also been underscored at other events through the engagement of collective viewing, the Edinburgh Digital Entertainment Festivals’ Virtual Reality Studio and Björk Digital (2016) which involved moving through differently configured viewing spaces. Our model includes some examples of the modes in between – it is intended as an illustrative rather than an exhaustive list, and we imagine that other readers and researchers will immediately identify hybrid forms, overlaps and gaps. As well as spanning participatory modes, the examples also span the technological, with the most advanced examples on the right-hand side of the table. The positioning of the ‘smell-a-long’ example may not initially strike you as being a technologically driven – but as history shows, the advancement of this is based on technological innovation. The 2011 and 2014 screenings of Polyester (1981) were accompanied by Odorama

Table I.2  ‘Participation to Immersion Continuum’ model of engagement Participatory (collective) Secret Cinema

Social embodied

Immersive (individualistic) Sneaky Experience

Rocky Horror

Singalong

Open-air cinemas/ live (Re) scores

Traditional cinema Multiplex

IMAX

Smell-a-long Taste-along

Stereoscopic 3D

Visceral corporeal sensory

Cinema 4 DX

Group virtual reality

Solo virtual reality

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‘Scratch n’ Sniff ’ cards which were industrially reproduced for the films redistribution by ‘The Aroma Company’, who specialize in the production of perfume samplers and air freshener promotional displays.16 The concept of adding an olfactory dimension, a spatialized emanation of the film within the cinema auditorium, through the simulation of different odours, manifested as early as 1906 when, reportedly, a ‘movie theatre impresario dipped a cotton ball into rose essence and held it before a fan during a screening of the Pasadena Rose Parade’ (Paterson 2006). Later, ‘SmellO-Vision’ was invented by Hans Laube in 1960 and only ever used in one film, Scent of Mystery (1960). Laube’s system involved the fitting of pipes to individual vents underneath the seats in the cinema through which odours were projected at synchronized moments using a device that timed with key scenes and plot points of the film. A competing technology: the AromaRama, which distributed scent through the theatre’s ventilation system, was used to augment the film ‘Behind the Great Wall’, a travelogue that used the odours of orange, jasmine, grassland, incense, spices and pine forest and pungent waterfront in an attempt to spatialize the geographic locations and landscapes of China (Gilbert 2008). The use of the Scratch N Sniff cards transforms the cinema auditorium into an augmented social space in which audience members connect, acknowledge and engage with one another. The 2014 redistribution of Polyester and the recreation of Odorama represent both a celebratory engagement (to mark its thirtieth anniversary) and a nostalgic moment of a failed and thus amusing cinematic innovation, which is imbued both in the diegesis of the filmic text and in its collective mode of reception. Its status as a ‘cult film’ object is also reaffirmed through its repackaging and reconsumption by a contemporary cult-cine-literate audience on a ‘so bad, it’s good’ premise. Still further along this continuum towards the right-hand side of the model, we position 4DX cinema experiences (sometimes referred to as 5D/6D) which are theme park ride–styled experiences which are delivered within small venues that have begun to emerge at entertainment complexes, in the high street and at amusement parks – the idea being to trigger the entire sensorium within a cinematic and simulated environment. The commercial instantiation of 4D cinema, as discussed by Geoff King, which includes the Terminator 2: 3D experience and Disney’s Honey I Shrunk the Audience, both of which involved spraying of liquids into the audience and also motion and vibration effects built in the seats which were synchronized with the on-screen action; precursors to these ‘novel’ experiences include vibrating cinema seats in the 1950s (Atkinson 2014: 88). Contributions in this volume largely focus on those types of experience in the lefthand side of the table – our volume examines the social, the embodied, the participatory and the collective end of this continuum. We have curated the contributions to these debates into four thematic areas that we have identified as significant in our research: spaces, temporalities, audiences and creative and artistic practices. These themes are not ‘distinct’ areas as there is important overlap between methods, theories, analyses and emphases in the chapters that are situated in each of these thematic areas.

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Spaces This theme enables an examination of the politics of the reterritorialization of space for cinematic practices. The re-emergence and reappropriation of urban, rural, rooftop and post-industrial spaces as places of film consumption bring with them questions of exploitation and all the challenges posed by regeneration strategies. Our contributors examine the extent to which the space of consumption affords a novel form of cinematic spectatorship where the eye travels beyond the frames of the screen to the vistas beyond. The contributions all show the extent to which the audience experience and the pleasures they derive are heavily determined by these novel spaces. For example, LC and RFC draw large and loyal audiences to their innovative spaces of consumption whilst continuing to recycle a very limited back catalogue of old cult classics.

Temporalities Experiments and innovations in this field are most likely to find their audience via festival programming. It is film festivals that play a critical role in commissioning, championing, showcasing, reviewing and distributing novel and artistic interventions such as emergent augmented exhibition practices. Temporality functions not only in the time-bound, delineated sphere of the festival, however it is also a critical promotional strategy for these offerings which are frequently branded as “once in a lifetime”. Furthermore, this much-lauded quality of ephemerality and uniqueness poses an enormous challenge for the researcher trying to study this form.

Audiences As innovations in both popular and cutting-edge creative practice are increasingly predicated on an active and participatory audience, the question of what this audience experiences in the moment of engagement is crucial to the exploration of the cultural significance of Live Cinema. Researchers are exploring the affectual, the sensory and the momentary in their cinematic encounters, embracing the challenges of capturing these fleeting events in the live and lived moment of their occurrence. Our selected contributions use a range of methods through which to provide rich, vivid and distinctive accounts of these embodied, socially situated and passionately invested audiences. The case studies traverse established distinctions between high and low culture and between cult and mainstream tastes.

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Creative and artistic practices Our interest in foregrounding creative and artistic practice has two valences: the first is to privilege these as a critical object of study through which to fully apprehend the motivations, determinations and aesthetics in the process of their emergence; the second is to explore the potentialities of artistic and creative practice as a distinct method through which to directly intervene into and fully comprehend the challenges and affordances of these hybrid live cinema modes of production. Again, this is about operating at the boundaries of forms that are still at their point of experimentation where forgotten or marginalized practices are invigorated by fresh ideas, novel contexts and new collaborations.

Contribution We believe we have curated some of the most exciting and new research in this area, purposefully seeking out those working at the edges of established intellectual territories, those innovating in terms of method of enquiry and those pushing at the divisions between academic and creative practice. This means that we have assembled a wonderfully varied group of early career academics and artists alongside very wellestablished and internationally known scholars.

Introduction Sarah Atkinson and Helen W. Kennedy

We open this volume with a focus on space: the initial typology of live cinema that we proposed (Atkinson and Kennedy 2016) took the alternate spaces and locations of screens, whether enhanced, augmented or participatory as a key definitional characteristic of the form. This increasingly pervasive relocation of screen away from the auditorium, and into exterior locations, on the one hand was made possible and ‘easy’ through new, accessible technologies – such as inflatable screens and directional audio – thus increasing the frequency of these types of screenings and a diversification in the types of spaces of screenings. On the other hand, these new possibilities posed difficulties due to limited flexibility of alternative internal venues – the lack of technical and acoustic infrastructure for the aesthetically satisfactory screening of films in concert halls and music venues. This lack of flexibility is innate in traditional cinema auditoriums as conventionally designed, and their limited capability to provide the specialist technologies for different types of screenings (i.e. those requiring audio mixing, lighting and performative elements, for example). This section provides us with some rich examples of emergent forms of unbounded cinematic exhibition and the alternative sites of spectatorship in non-auditorium external spaces, including urban, rural, coastal and waterway contexts. These case studies are set within the wider context of cinema as a potential site of critique and for wider debates into placemaking, which both respond to and feed in to emergent tensions that exist between the reclamation of community spaces on the one hand and the impacts of regeneration and gentrification on the other. One particular example of this tension emerged in the ‘Hit and Run Kino’ in Berlin: ‘an urban hunting experience combined with the chill atmosphere of a great movie night. Hundreds of people meeting up at a seemingly random place somewhere in Berlin, to be lead to an unused, unknown place where they’ll watch a movie somehow connected to it’. This ‘guerrilla tactic’ (de Certeau 1984) of Hit and Run Kino can be seen as a way for audiences to simultaneously reclaim films and urban spaces, in fleeting moments of community building. It is also suggestive of a cinema culture that is inherently democratic and egalitarian. These values are made manifest in one of the participant’s comments on the organization’s website: ‘Are you aware of the fact that you’re about to ruin this phenomenon with your

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coverage? Boost your ego with something else!’1 This remark illuminates tensions between the ideals of Hit and Run Kino and the commercialized iteration of this type of ‘underground’ experience, which are reminiscent of the clandestine and underground origins of Secret Cinema. The elaborate stagings of contemporary Secret Cinema are a throwback to these renegade roots and are more comparable to a contemporary theme park replete with transactional opportunities and very often compulsory purchases, for food, drink, merchandise and disposable cameras. In the Back to the Future experience there was even an actual fairground – connections between film and fairground or theme park experiences are never far away. The pier (the focus of one of this section’s contributions) has its own histories of attractions that also belong within this trajectory. They also invoke new viewing regimes and the alternative and augmented vistas of open-air screenings – a screen set against a coastal landscape, against the backdrop of a distant horizon and sunset opens up new aesthetic experiences, invoking the ‘mobile gaze’ (Anne Friedberg 2002) and the emergent ‘cinematic’ ways of seeing into urban space. The particular spatiovisual qualities of alternatively sited cinema and the ‘dramatically different ambiance of an outdoor screening can transform the reception of a film’ (Levitt, this section). The theoretical bases for the studies within this section are varied – from film history – to apparatus theory, and this variety is echoed in the histories within which these contemporary examples are situated. Indeed, these works invoke many of the historical precursors that we cited in the introduction to this volume. All contributions situate their studies within a contemporary history of outdoor and open-air film screenings. The methodological approaches include socio-demographic statistical data, qualitative data gathered in interviews with those who attended, and an analysis of the critical and popular reception of the events. The first contribution in this section (‘Nostalgia and Placemaking at Los Angeles’ Outdoor Movies’ by Linda Levitt) is focused on the nostalgic outdoor moviegoing experience in Los Angeles, through the case studies of Cinespia, Street Food Cinema and Eat|See|Hear, with a particular focus upon how these events contribute to place - making and place shaping. Levitt adopts an online audience reception approach in order to examine how these particular experiences contribute to a sense of community amongst the audience. She provides interesting insights into how personal memory and the shared experience of moviegoing come to ‘turn space into place’. Levitt explores the relationship between space and community, where the film text is less the focus of conversation and features less in memories and feelings of cinemagoing than the site of the experience. The audience data taken from social forums provides a rich form of oral history and presents a methodological intervention into capturing and analysing film audience histories. In the second contribution of this volume – ‘Beyond the Metropolis: Immersive Cinema in a Rural Context’ – Emma Pett provides an analysis of a rural film audience in contradistinction to representations of the metropolitan audience (particularly the

Introduction

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pleasures, behaviours and preferences of those studied by Richard McCulloch and Virginia Crisp, in Chapter 9). Pett illuminates the connections between the site – rural and outdoor – and the audience by focusing on two case studies of rural immersive cinema productions in the UK: Picnic Cinema in Cumbria and Cine North’s immersive productions for the BFI Love season, staged in the Yorkshire towns and villages of Masham, Pateley Bridge and Amerdale in late 2015. The research aligns with broader studies of contemporary rural cinemagoing which have focused on issues of community and cross-generational social relations (Aveyard 2015). In her analysis, Pett also pays attention to the continued role of the immersive cinema screening in community building. Drawing on the work of Aveyard, Pett examines the way in which rural event cinema interconnects with some of the distinctive social characteristics associated more generally with rural cinemagoing, such as resourcefulness, co-operation and an anti-commercial sentiment. Audience research has tended to be metrocentric and there has been little work conducted in the area of immersive cinema in a rural environment, Pett’s work provide a valuable contribution to the overall understanding of audience behaviours through the close study of these under-examined phenomena. The third chapter, ‘Pop(-up)ular Culture at the Seaside: The British Pleasure Pier as Screening Space’, by Lavinia Brydon and Olu Jenzen, is based on practice-based research project entitled ‘The People’s Pier’ which was funded by the AHRC in the UK. The overall project examines the form of expanded cinema events that are situated on piers. The chapter examines the seaside pier as an alternative and distinctive space for live cinema, through insights garnered through their active participation in and observation of live cinema events. The live cinema offerings are situated within the broader context of seaside entertainment in general and the urban geographies of coastal leisure spaces. This chapter explores a set of enquiries situated at the intersections of cinema-as-event, community cinema and the current cultural and economically regenerative development or ‘re-purposing’ of pleasure piers as community spaces. Jenzen and Brydon’s account of the pier screenings describes them as affording a double-layered immersive experience; the first aspect of immersion is produced through the environmental framing of the sea and sky which is enabled by the physical structure of a seaside pier, and the second form of immersion is provided by the frame of an outdoor cinema within this setting. Their chapter also examines the continuities of these apparently novel experiences with the piers’ own histories of attractions and entertainments. Drawing on empirical research conducted in collaboration with the Clevedon Pier and Heritage Foundation and the Curzon Community Cinema Clevedon, the chapter considers the traditional British seaside pier as a site-specific location for outdoor screenings, and examines how local communities can ‘reclaim’ a place via site-specific screenings. As a practice-based project, it had two distinct aims: one was to advance techniques through which to engage new or hard-to-reach local audiences, and the other was to explore the potentials and challenges that the open-air pier space offers for the cultural organizations who manage these sites, where their motivations are to avoid the ‘warehouse on stilts’, or commercially driven pleasure piers that are now a dominant feature of our coastal towns.

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In ‘Serious Play’: Encountering Urban Space Live at The Floating Cinema’, Ella Harris examines how pop-up cinemas as a social model of film spectatorship are seen to afford and potentially stimulate a critical perspective on urban space through a case study into the London-based ‘Floating Cinema’. The Floating Cinema is a pop-up cinema that operates out of a purpose-built canal boat. The cinema travels the waterways of London bringing pop-up film screenings and related workshops to urban communities. Harris explores a series of events that The Floating Cinema held in the London suburb of Brentford in the summer of 2015 offering a critical account of the modes of encountering public space, cinematic ways of seeing the city and the conflicted instrumentalities those ways of seeing have at a time of rapid urban change. In each of these chapters, the site of the viewing experience takes precedence over the film text itself, and cinema is foregrounded as a spatialized event that mobilizes new forms of spectatorship, new forms of embodiment and new possibilities for community engagement and participation.

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Nostalgia and Placemaking at Los Angeles’ Outdoor Movies Linda Levitt

Family movie night. A first date at the cinema. The must-see cult classic. Sharing films is a way for people to share their lives, their identities and parts of their emotional fabric with others. Movies help audiences make sense of the present and the past, while also connecting viewers to a larger cultural history. Over the last 100 years, the experience of movies has shifted dramatically. From movie palaces to drive-ins to multiplexes to home theatre, ‘going to the movies’ carries different meanings and social weight. The recent renovation and resurrection of movie palaces and driveins show the significance of place in the moviegoing experience. The emphasis on place and experience is in part a response to a cultural moment in which movies can be screened instantly in home theatres and on mobile devices or collected for easy access on DVD or Blu-ray. To bring people back to the cinema, some theatre owners are creating the movie theatre as a high-end destination with state-of-the-art audio, unmatched video quality, plush seating and, in some instances, alcoholic beverages and gourmet refreshments. Yet another new development acknowledges that moviegoing is inherently a social event: screening movies outdoors, often in a historic or culturally significant setting, draws audiences to the shared experience of watching a film in the company of others. While outdoor film screenings are commonplace in many part of the world, the United States has not had a significant tradition of outdoor movies since the prevalence of drive-ins in the post-war years. Anne Friedberg notes that the introduction of television in the years between 1947 and 1957 reduced the moviegoing audience by one - half. Promotions for drive-ins worked to leverage this transformation by encouraging Americans to get out of the house, but with the convenience of not having to get out of the car (2002: 193). The drive-in, with its accessory entertainments of food, music and playgrounds, reached its peak with 4,603 theatres in 1958. As of 2016, only 325 remain. A renegade move to create outdoor cinema experiences began in 2002 with the Santa Cruz Guerilla Drive-In, a group in California that held flash mob screenings in random locations as a way to assert the use of public space outside of restaurants, shopping malls and other corporate-run locations. Building on the guerilla screenings, many cities in the United States, including Chicago, Tucson and Austin, now host

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outdoor movies throughout the summer months each year. Because sites that host seasonal outdoor screenings are often rich with cultural history, organizers tie moviegoing to placemaking as an exemplar of cultural heritage tourism. Moviegoing draws visitors to a historical site for an experience: not merely a tour or an education visit, but a leisure activity that is meaningful and memorable. In this regard, outdoor movie screenings can function as a part of placemaking, turning space into place and tying people meaningfully to their communities. This study focuses on Los Angeles: as home to Hollywood, films are deeply rooted in the city’s economy as well as in its identity as an urban destination and tourist attraction. The sheer volume of films being screened on any given day in Los Angeles is extraordinary. From IMAX to historic movie palaces, from art cinemas to university auditoriums to multiplexes, movies are ubiquitous in the Los Angeles metroplex. The city is unsurprisingly an early adopter of cinema outside, with several screening series vying for the attention of moviegoers across the city. Los Angeles is geographically diverse and large enough to support multiple screenings on a single night, some of which draw visitors as much for the location as for the film itself. Like Cindy Wong’s assertions about film festivals, outdoor film screenings ‘celebrate place’ and can ‘define the very cultural capital that cities and nations embrace as brand name events for cities of the creative class’ (2011: 2). This essay argues that outdoor screenings in Los Angeles celebrate the constellation of place and memory by locating films that reflect Hollywood’s best-known productions consumed in some of Los Angeles’ beloved outdoor places. The desire to keep the past as part of the present makes Los Angeles a suitable venue for practices that articulate and perform cultural memory. Through tourism and film as nostalgic practices, culture holds onto Hollywood, marking and remarking the palimpsest of the city. The city is a centre of nostalgia, not only for ageing cinephiles but also for young audience members caught up in a passion for the more recent films they have enjoyed, whether on home video or at the IMAX or cineplex. Since the early 2000s, outdoor settings in Los Angeles have increasingly attracted film audiences, many of whom are watching a film they have seen countless times before. This study considers audience response to three specific outdoor movie-screening series in Los Angeles: Street Food Cinema, with its array of food trucks that turn moviegoing into an event; the Eat|See|Hear series, which screens movies in a variety of significant destinations throughout the city; and Cinespia, which projects films on the exterior wall of the Cathedral Mausoleum at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. While audience members at outdoor screenings use social media sites including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to share images and publicly share their moviegoing experiences, these tend to be brief notifications and status updates that are quickly posted without much reflection. More extensive discussion of outdoor movie experiences occurs at Yelp.com, a popular site for reviewing businesses and events in specific urban areas. Posts at Yelp are detailed reviews, providing significantly more depth and detail than social media posts. This study analysed 490 reviews for Cinespia Cemetery Screenings, 175 reviews for Street Food Cinema and 91 reviews for Eat|See|Hear at Yelp to determine what audience members found noteworthy and

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chose to report about the screenings. The earliest review for Cinespia, the longest running of the three series, was posted in September 2005. Themes were limited to mentions of location and atmosphere to determine how outdoor movies help create a sense of place for moviegoers.

Moviegoing and audiences Outdoor movies are best considered within the realm of what Richard Maltby aptly calls ‘new cinema history’ (2011), a critical approach focused more on moviegoing and the social and cultural impact of film rather than the formal properties of film production and authorship. Maltby sees this perspective as coexisting alongside traditional film studies, bringing a different critical perspective to bear that can enhance film history by extending an eye towards both place and reception. He notes that moviegoing does not occur in a vacuum; rather, audience members bring their lifeways, their experiences and their social circumstances to the cinema. To not take context into account is to fail in understanding ‘the interpretive frameworks likely to have been available to particular audiences’ (2011: 14). This approach is especially necessary in a post-cinema landscape, where going to the movies in a public venue takes on a new set of meanings with the ready accessibility of movies for private consumption. As the cinematic experience changes, outdoor film series draw attention to the social qualities inherent in moviegoing. Whether screenings are at a historic theatre or in a city park, place has a strong effect on the interpretive lens moviegoers bring to the film experience. Film and media studies scholar Barbara Klinger argues that ‘if the same film were to be shown at an art house and a drive-in theatre, the patterns of consumption already associated with each venue would influence the audience’s viewing attitudes and behaviors’ (2006: 19). The filmic experience is influenced significantly by context, and the dramatically different ambiance of an outdoor screening can transform the reception of a film. While nostalgically drawing on social practices of the drive-in, audiences at outdoor screenings create and perpetuate new patterns of consumption as repeat visitors. Outdoor movie screenings seldom show first-run films. Rather, the typical fare for outdoor screenings tends towards the popular: movies that audience members have already seen and will enjoy for repeat viewings. Many of these films are what will be called ‘cult contemporary’ here because of the cultlike following that results from watching the same film over and over again, to the point where each line of dialogue is familiar if not memorized. Movies create a sense of identification for audiences and help to establish and change worldviews: how we should understand ourselves, how we should interact with others and how our identities are shaped by the communities with which we affiliate. For a generation that grew up watching movies everywhere but the cinema, the relationship to film is different from that of preceding generations. Generation X has a mix of experiences including the early years of cable television, limited experiences of movie palaces and drive-ins, but also the movie theatre in the mall that became the bane of moviegoers seeking a more refined experience. Initially, however, these multiscreen venues were considered partly responsible for a cinema revival. Karina

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Aveyard and Albert Moran note that the downturn in cinema attendance in Australia, concurrent with that in the United States, did begin to turn around in the mid-1980s, when major exhibitors began building large multi-screen film venues in retail malls and self-contained entertainment precinct developments. The success of these initial ventures, and the boom in multiplex theatre construction that followed, has widely been attributed to the dramatic resurgence in the popularity of cinemagoing as a leisure activity around the world over the past three decades. (2011: 74)

For many Millennial viewers, home viewing took precedence over going to the cinema as the primary childhood experience of film. Movies on the VCR and later DVD became part of the background of everyday life, with a child’s favourite film often played several times in a given week. This kind of familiarity with the text carried over into Millennials’ teenage years, creating a taken-for-granted sense of presence for film. If movies are ever-present, why go out of one’s way, having to pay to view a movie in a theatre crowded with strangers? Over time, going to the movies was less likely to be a habitual pastime and more typically reserved for a special event, like opening weekend of a movie with strong appeal or a film with cinematography best experienced ‘on the big screen’. With the ubiquity of movies at home, on laptops, tablets and smartphones or on screens in SUVs, moviegoing experiences a shift in personal and cultural significance. When a film can be screened almost anywhere, place matters: audiences may seek meaningful or unique spaces when going to the movies. It is difficult to separate movies from their social role. As film scholar Robert C. Allen posits, for other than those wealthy enough to own a private screening room or theatre, film was a social event for 100 years. The social aspect of moviegoing is not merely a fact; it is also the basis for a gathering becoming an event. Allen notes that “what makes events eventful is that they are unique convergences of multiple individual trajectories upon particular social sites’ (2011: 51). Whether drawn to the movies because of an interest in the film or its cast, the occasion of a social event with friends or family, or a routine of going to see a movie, the common bond of presence – at the cinema or another screening site – takes precedence over the different motivations of moviegoers. The long history of movies as social events still affects the cultural role of films. Even if one watches a film in isolation, media coverage, interpersonal conversations and social networks keep movies in the realm of the social. Klinger notes that ‘the film experience is a living part of what it means to be socially connected in the early twenty-first century. Movies have the power to entertain, confront and transform – they can influence our outlook on life, death and everything in between’ (2006: 73–74). Through their narratives, films offer examples of how to overcome obstacles, how to treat others, how to fall in love and thousands of other life lessons. Movies can function as sites of cultural memory when those narratives resonate broadly. In his studies of commemorative practices, historian Barry Schwartz argues that ‘people do not always know what ideas they share with others, or even whether they share any ideas at all’. Commemoration ‘makes consensus explicit’ (1996: 918), but requires ritual practice

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to make it so. As expressions of a particular cultural place and time, movies can both bring to light and reflect a common cultural feeling. Viewing movies together can also make clear connections between another place and time and our current situation, particularly when the film offers a social commentary on its time. This is especially poignant in locations that carry cultural history: as tourists often wish to stand in the place where an event occurred in order to feel the aura of the occasion, so do some moviegoers seek locales significant to film history as a proper fit for screening a movie.

Place The sense of history and the compelling need to ‘make’ history – to archive, to mark as meaningful, to store away cultural memory – play a significant role in contemporary culture. French historian Pierre Nora points out that ‘our very perception of history has, with much help from the media, expanded enormously, so that memory, once the legacy of what people knew intimately, has been supplanted by a thin film of current events’ (1996: 288). Nora sees memory as ‘rooted in the concrete: in space, gesture, image and object’. Memory is not just fixed to a particular site but is activated by contact with that site. That places hold memory makes a sense of place a vital part of how we construct our relationships to the world and to each other. How does a space come to be meaningful? Cultural critic Lucy Lippard draws a distinction between space and place, asserting that ‘[s]pace defines landscape, where space combined with memory defines place’ (1998). A significant thread in Lippard’s work is that while memory is indeed rooted in place, it takes lived experience to turn space into place. Outdoor movie screenings are now frequently common events intended to draw people together for a shared experience that can create a sense of communal life among residents and visitors. Henri Lefebvre’s seminal work on the social construction of place posits that place and social relations are created in conjunction with one another: social relations ‘project themselves into a space, becoming inscribed there, and in the process producing that space itself ’ (1998: 181). When social interaction is lacking, so is sense of place. In the absence of a public life that finds its rich presence on city sidewalks, in parks or in public squares, privately owned places like coffeehouses, barber shops or neighbourhood bars can fill this space for community life. The need for community life resonates in the recent placemaking movement, which aspires to make public spaces valuable by creating a sense of community through shared efforts and meanings. Writing ahead of the recent prevalence of the placemaking movement, Ray Oldenburg noted in The Great Good Place that ‘the problem of place in America manifests itself in a sorely deficient informal public life. The structure of shared experience beyond that offered by family, job, and passive consumerism is small and dwindling’ (1999: 13). The kind of shared experience Oldenburg refers to is important to one’s quality of life. The comfort of feeling welcomed and at ease in a familiar place can create a sense of belonging that grants individuals some respite from the alienation increasingly typical of everyday urban life. Oldenburg uses the term ‘third place’ to designate ‘a great variety of public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and

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happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work’ (1999: 16). Events like outdoor movie screenings can be a first step in the placemaking process to create a space that people will desire to return to for what Oldenburg calls ‘happily anticipated gatherings’ (1999: 16). Outdoor screenings, some by coincidence and others by deliberate planning, are helping to create place. That outdoor movies can establish a powerful sense of place comes forward from decades of experience with cinema. Recent research (Jones 2016, Kuhn 2011, Maltby 2011, Staiger 2005, Jancovich et al. 2003) into moviegoing histories shows that the experience is remembered more than the films themselves: moviegoers remember their companions, their snacks and the cinema itself, far more regularly than they recall the plots and details of the films they watched. Here too is the intersection of personal memory and public memory: moviegoers establish personal meanings associated with particular places, and even though those meanings are individual, the extent of those varied connections creates an important space in a community. This is true even when shared meanings are somewhat limited. As public venues, movie theatres change over time, and so do the public’s experiences. A theatre that is a technological wonder at its opening may become a cozy second-run venue in the decades that follow. Or, a renovated movie palace may inspire cultural nostalgia for its audiences, decades after its heyday. Maltby points to the oral histories conducted with cinema audiences that show ‘the local rhythms of motion picture circulation and the qualities of the experience of cinema attendance were place-specific and shaped by the continuities of life in the family, the workplace, the neighbourhood and community’ (2011: 10). In the introduction to Cinema, Audiences and Modernity: New Perspectives on European Cinema History, Maltby and his co-editors Daniel Biltereyst and Philippe Meers refer to André Breton’s 1928 description of going to the movies and deliberately avoiding any information about what might be playing. They describe Breton’s writing as ‘a mixture of provocation, nostalgia, and humour’ in which he recalls going to movie houses where ‘people talked loudly, gave their opinions about what was happening on the screen, and where he and his friends could openly eat and drink while consuming a picture’ (2011: 1). As Breton’s reminiscence indicates, nostalgia can relate to a particular place or time in an individual’s lived experience, or it may be brought about through cultural memory and the desire for an emotional state perceived as preferable to the present. A familiar film can evoke a unique nostalgia as the audience enters into the world of the film, whether the time and space of the narrative, the time and space of a prior screening, or a combination of both. For the brief time of being immersed in that world, one can revisit one’s past self and experiences, although the respite from the present is bittersweet with the realization that it is merely a way of revisiting a time that is no longer accessible.

The drive-in Outdoor movies create a panoply of nostalgia: for the experience of a kind of moviegoing that is no longer possible, for the place and time of the drive-in or the movie palace and the cultural accoutrement that it calls to mind, for friendships from the past in

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which watching movies together was a common shared experience, and for films themselves that can create nostalgia for their place and time or for the familiar comfort of an oft-watched film. In her discussion of the nostalgic aesthetic of American Movie Classics (AMC), Barbara Klinger points out that the primary audience for AMC, ‘baby boomers and their parents [who] grew up watching many of these films in theaters or on network television’ are therefore ‘primed for reminiscence’ (2006: 102), recalling not just the time of the film but also the idealized time of watching it. The pleasure of viewing again, especially as home access to classic and contemporary films becomes immediate and expected, shifts the experience of moviegoing. As audiences are familiar with the films they watch – or the films that become comfortable background noise to other everyday activities – characters and dialogue easily invoke nostalgia for seemingly simpler times of previous screenings. Running alongside the novelty of outdoor movies is the resurrection of traditions, particularly those associated with the drive-in. Like the drive-in, the pleasures of an outdoor screening far exceed merely watching a movie. In a 1982 survey of drive-in audiences, Bruce Austin found that ‘to see the movie’ accounted for only 7.5 per cent of the reasons for attending the drive-in. Affordability and comfort versus the walk-in theatre, privacy, having fun and being outdoors were all considered more significant factors than the film itself (1989: 91). Despite their disappearance from the landscape, the drive-in remains a part of the cultural imaginary, and has been re-presented to a younger audience through mediated experiences such as Grease (1978), The Outsiders (1983), and several video games including SimCity 2000 (1993) and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) that feature drive-in scenarios. Nostalgia for the drive-in is rooted in a yearning for an idyllic communal filmgoing experience, in which each individual or group occupies their own private space within the context of a larger public setting.

Outdoor movies Writing in 1995, media scholar John Ellis addressed the distinctions between film as an individual experience and as a shared, cultural experience. Noting that ‘the form of spectatorship offered by entertainment cinema is open to various kinds of social manifestation’, he adds that ‘it tends to remain an individual experience’ (1995: 87). The cinematic experience described by Ellis, along with scholars like Laura Mulvey, evoked images of the darkened theatre in which an orderly audience sat silently in their neat rows, eyes fixed on the bright screen. The post-cinematic era sees Ellis’ world as increasingly exceptional. He saw the circumstances that inspire social interaction during a film as rare, such as ‘when one or more members of the audience demand an explanation of a particular aspect of the plot, and someone volunteers this’. Another instance would be when the audience’s wilful suspension of disbelief breaks down, and together, the audience will ‘make fun of it, laughing, mocking the film for being an ineffective piece of work’ (1995: 87). The physical arrangement of outdoor screenings is quite different from the orderly rows of the movie theatre: individuals and groups will spread a blanket or create makeshift seating wherever a desirable space is available,

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sitting facing one another or engaged with their surroundings, then shifting slightly to direct their attention to the film being screened. These casual seating arrangements invite the possibility for comment and conversation, blending social space and cinematic space. Outdoor film series in Los Angeles typically screen an array of contemporary films popular for Millennial and Generation X audiences. These are films that audiences grew up watching, often repeatedly, on cable, broadcast, VHS, DVD and Blu-ray, from Purple Rain (1984) to Sixteen Candles (1984) and The Princess Bride (1987). In Ellis’ examples, conversation occurs when audience members seek an explanation or join together in mocking a film. Yet the knowledge of plot, scene and dialogue typical among those who have a cult attachment to a particular film also promotes interaction about the film during the screening. Typical at outdoor movies are the kind of interruptions, smartphone flashes and casual conversations that are the bane of cinemagoers as the culture of the cinema is in transition, accommodating audiences that do not maintain a silent and attendant reverence for film. Clearly, the pleasure of an outdoor screening has little to do with quality of the presentation; cinephiles cannot have premium audio or video quality in that setting. Thus, the pleasures of outdoor screenings around the United States are social and nostalgic – and engaged with just being outside – more than they are purely cinematic. While its primary function is entertainment, classic film offers a lens into the lifeways, practices and ethics of another era. This pedagogical element – teaching about the past – is inevitably intertwined with its entertainment value of classic film. Thinking of film as a contained site for cultural memory is an effective exemplar of cultural memory as discursive. Rather than being fixed, cultural memory is fluid: what a film like Dr. Strangelove (1964) may have meant at the time of its release in 1964 likely differs from how that film is understood now. Film enables ideas about the past, and how it constitutes the present, to be adapted to current social needs and desires.

Cinespia Hollywood Forever Cemetery is a physical and psychological retreat from its exurban surroundings, with an array of exquisite statuary and architecture, tall palms and cypress trees, and a vast and welcoming lake. Formerly called Hollywood Memorial Park, the cemetery was purchased out of bankruptcy in 1998. During the restoration process, the cemetery maintained the tradition of the Rudolph Valentino Memorial Service, adding an outdoor screening of one of the silent film star’s classic movies. The event provided the impetus for Cinespia, a weekly summer film series that began in 2002. The Fairbanks Lawn, stretching behind the sarcophagus of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Jr., is a broad grassy expanse on which moviegoers spread their blankets and picnic dinners. Although the majority of the cemetery is cordoned off for Cinespia screenings, the overflow area and smoking area place visitors among monuments in areas adjacent to the Fairbanks Lawn. Moviegoers could ignore the notion that they are spending a leisurely evening in a cemetery, although the

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cemetery itself becomes part of the atmosphere for a screening like Poltergeist (1982) or Night of the Living Dead (1968). Since it began in 2002, Cinespia has expanded the event-oriented aspects of its screenings. From the time the cemetery opens to moviegoers until the film begins after dark, DJs play music and snacks and drinks are available for sale. A themed photobooth is also available at most screenings, leading many moviegoers to turn Cinespia into a cosplay event. Since 2009, Cinespia has also hosted an annual allnight screening, inviting visitors to bring pillows and blankets to watch – or sleep through – contemporary cult films like Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Cry Baby (1990). Spending the night in the cemetery not only revives long-standing fears about cemeteries and related taunts and dares, it also creates a powerful sense of place. At a Cinespia screening in 2006, tour guide Aaron Rosenberg used the idea of sleeping in the cemetery to express his comfort with Hollywood Forever. Rosenberg said, ‘I came here and I saw North by Northwest. And I was tired, and I feel asleep, and I woke up, and I was like, “Oh god! I fell asleep in a cemetery, at nighttime? Let that be the last time I ever do that!” Until the next time.’ Rosenberg is not alone in feeling this sense of ease at the cemetery. In addition to outdoor films, Hollywood Forever also hosts concert performances and an annual celebration of Dia de los Muertos that sees more than 30,000 attendees. On any given day, visitors to the cemetery will include bicyclists, joggers, tourists, mourners and those who enjoy its parklike qualities. The Project for Public Spaces (PPS), a nonprofit agency that works to help cities create and revitalize public places that have a positive impact of communities, identifies the basic characteristics of a great public space: ‘They are accessible; people are engaged in activities there; the space is comfortable and has a good image; and finally, it is a sociable place: one where people meet each other and take people when they come to visit.’ While there is no certainty that effective public spaces will create a lasting sense of place for visitors, the qualities to which PPS aspires are the same qualities that create a meaningful sense of place and belonging. John Wyatt, who founded Cinespia in 2002 and has directed its growth over the years, said in a 2004 interview, ‘I love that there’s a lot of Hollywood history and beautiful architecture at the cemetery. The surroundings are quiet, serene and natural. It’s the perfect atmosphere to watch classic films’ (in Barge, 2004: par. 8). Many moviegoers who have posted reviews on Yelp.com agree with Wyatt, writing about how they enjoy the atmosphere at Hollywood Forever. Rachel R. posted about her experience at the July 2016 screening of Purple Rain, which she experienced as a celebration of Prince’s life as well as a mourning of his death: That night gave us a wake, there was a feeling of his presence, so much love, as the movie ended I looked around and people were dancing, fireworks were going off, they threw a dance party afterwards. The graveyard was filled with magic that night. I’m so grateful to have been able to have been a part of something so amazing and unexpected. You never know what you will get at these screenings. I got true magic that night. It was a gift. An experience I won’t soon forget.

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Rachel R. mentioned that she has been to Cinespia many times, and her experience of a celebratory community at the cemetery enhances the ways that Hollywood Forever has a strong sense of place for her. Yelper Carrie S. describes herself as ‘being a youngster in a grown-up body’ who ‘had a blast’ at Cinespia. She adds: ‘It was cool walking through the headstones particularly with my psychic and medium abilities to be able to pick up on Happy deceased folks. Since they were partygoers in their day, they probably enjoyed all the festivities going on around them. The place was packed, but everyone was behaving and enjoying themselves.’ Carrie S. especially notes the idea that Hollywood Forever is a sociable place, and many other Yelpers similarly write about the pleasures of Cinespia as an outing with friends. These posts affirm Habermas’s assertion that a disregard for rank, replaced with a sense of equality among participants, is a sign of a well-established public space (1991: 36). Although as Wong points out with regard to film festivals, outdoor movie screenings are not fully democratic events because they require economic capital for admission, even when cultural capital is not a demand placed on the audience in social interaction (2011: 160–161).

Street Food Cinema Where Cinespia projects movies on the mausoleum wall, Street Food Cinema employs portable screens at a variety of city parks and other public venues throughout the greater Los Angeles area. As the name implies, Street Food Cinema also enhances its offerings with a variety of food trucks, drawing a so-called ‘foodie’ audience to its screenings as well. Because there is no fixed location, Yelp reviewers for Street Food Cinema are less likely to discuss place than Cinespia reviewers; watching a movie in a cemetery remains an important part of Cinespia’s quirky appeal. Terrance Y., who attended a Street Food Cinema event at Will Rogers State Historic Park, parenthetically remarks that ‘the venue moves from park to park so everyone may have different experiences’ but in the end comes back to the significance of place in his experience: ‘Highly recommend those who want to revisit an oldie movie but are tired of staying home on a Saturday night. Why not spend it in one of LA’s beautiful outdoor parks!’ Reviews of Street Food Cinema often recall the qualities of the drive-in as being as much about experiencing the setting as a night out, rather than simply about watching a movie. Herbert Ochs, who owned a chain of drive-ins in the 1940s, polled his customers about their experiences. He said that ‘in almost every instance, they said they did not know what picture was being shown when they drove into the parking space. They just came to the drive-in for whatever type of entertainment was presented’ (quoted in Segrave 2006: 39). M.C., for example, notes that this is her second year attending Street Food Cinema and that it is ‘the perfect event to get your family to attend or it’s an adorable date night plan. There are always great food truck options and their popcorn vendor is amazing! …The perfect summer event! I’ll definitely be back!!’ The enthusiasm expressed here seems somewhat excessive, yet is also testament to this reviewer’s pleasure in attending outdoor screenings. She makes no mention of

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what films she has seen but instead recommends the screenings based on an enjoyable experience in general. Turning an experience into a habit or ritual is also a sign of sense of place and the desire to return to a space that is meaningful because of what has occurred there in the past. Moana N. notes that she took her boyfriend to Street Food Cinema when he visited from New York. She does not mention what film they saw, but says that ‘the Q&A, music, food, and ice cream was a great way to pass the time’ while waiting for the movie to start. She closes by asserting that Street Food Cinema ‘will be a tradition for my boyfriend and I every year … loved it!!’

Eat|See|Hear Santa Monica Pier was an early adopter of the now-common screening of feature films in familiar outdoor venues. A tourist destination for over 100 years, the Pier’s attractions include a brightly lit Ferris wheel, a boardwalk, shops and restaurants, stretching out over the water. The original outdoor film series, Santa Monica Drive-In at the Pier, played on the Cinespia slogan of screenings ‘below (and above) the stars’ to claim ‘movies over the water and under the stars.’ Now called Front Porch Cinema, movies at the Pier are included under the Eat|See|Hear flag, which screens films at various locations. Griffith Park, La Cienega Park in Beverly Hills and the Santa Monica High School Amphitheatre are among the venues that transform existing public spaces into moviegoing sites. Bruce E. begins his Yelp review by noting he has attended Eat|See|Hear screening at the Autry Museum as Griffith Park, which he notes is his favourite, as well as Santa Monica High School and Paul Revere Middle School, near Will Rogers State Historic Park. Perhaps there is some nostalgia in his encouragement to ‘think of it as a beach outing when packing up your goodies but with food trucks and movies at nighttime lol’. Santa Monica High School is about a mile from the Pacific Ocean, and the beachside atmosphere and ocean breeze cast an aura over the amphitheatre. Place was an important quality of the Eat|See|Hear screening for Harmony D., who writes: ‘I came to the Back to the Future (1985) movie night at Pasadena City Hall, aka Pawnee City Hall from Parks and Recreation. What an amazing venue. They had the movie screen right in front of the giant mission style City Hall building and it made for a beautiful backdrop.’ The post refers to a popular sitcom that aired on NBC from 2009 to 2015 and used Pasadena City Hall for its location shots. Mediated experiences of place can create powerful draw for visitors who want to have the experience of visiting sites they have seen on television and film. Harmony D.’s review points to Eat|See|Hear as offering the benefits of excellent public spaces as defined by Project for Public Spaces. With regard to accessibility and sociability, she writes, ‘We brought our dog and he had a great time walking around meeting all the new people and other dogs.’ Engaging in activity – watching Back to the Future with a few hundred strangers – created a sense of community when she notes that ‘the crowd was great, clapping and cheering at all the right points’.

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Griffith Park is one of the largest urban parks in the United States and is a familiar landmark from many films, television series and music videos. For film fans, the Griffith Observatory will be familiar as a prominent location in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Movies are screened on a large grassy lawn adjacent to the Autry Museum, as opposed to the more rugged, natural areas of the park. Despite the screening being on a manicured lawn, Angela W. wrote in her Yelp review for Eat|See|Hear, ‘I love the glam atmosphere at Hollywood Forever, but Griffith Park gives you more of that feeling like you are camping out in the California wilderness, which was a nice change.’ In both instances, moviegoing is used as a means of reinvigorating interest in existing spaces that invite public use for entertainment and enjoyment.

Conclusion Robert C. Allen notes that while cinema studies has made a significant investment into exploring the idea of the spectator, ‘it has left largely unexplored what it might have meant to play the role of moviegoer at particular times and in particular places’ (2011: 53). The need for research that addresses the experience of moviegoers, particularly with regard to how going to the movies can create a meaningful and lasting sense of place for audience members, is even more evident in our post-cinematic era. Live cinema events like outdoor movie screenings show a changed relationship to film, yet film is still strongly anchored at the centre of these events. This chapter also shows the need for ethnographic research that would enable in-depth discussion about the significance of sense of place for moviegoers. Continuing to examine the intersection of a film screening, its location and the events surrounding it can provide a clearer idea of the role of movies in cultural and personal memory.

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Beyond the Metropolis: Immersive Cinema in a Rural Context Emma Pett

Introduction This chapter considers the under-researched area of participatory and immersive cinema within a rural context.1 As with studies of film audiences more broadly, recent empirical work on immersive cinema has focused on metropolitan filmgoing cultures and practices. From analyses of the ambitious productions of Secret Cinema (Atkinson and Kennedy 2015, 2016; Pett 2016) to investigations of more exclusive cult screenings at cinemas such as the Prince Charles in London (McCulloch and Crisp 2016), these studies have explored issues such as production design, branding and audience engagement. Audience research on rural and outdoor cinema exhibition of this kind is relatively scarce, and most often considers the drive-in experience (Levitt 2016; Nowell 2016). In this chapter, I offer a brief overview of some of the recent developments in rural immersive cinema within the UK, contextualizing the movement with discussions of similar exhibition practices in Australia, Indonesia and the United States. Drawing primarily on the work of Aveyard (2015), I examine the way in which immersive and participatory cinema intersects with many of the distinctive characteristics associated more generally with rural cinemagoing, such as resourcefulness, co-operation and an anti-commercial sentiment. A range of sources, including industry reports, newspaper articles and existing audience surveys, are used to investigate the ways in which the rural contexts and cultures surrounding these events resonate with the broader appeal of immersive cinema. Additionally, this chapter considers how these developments can be understood within wider discussions circulating around increasing audience mobility, the decentring of the film text and what has been described as the ‘post-moviegoing age’ (Allen 2011).

Participatory and immersive cinema in a rural context The development of themed and participatory cinema screenings in rural locations is a relatively recent phenomenon, and one that has become increasingly popular (Hayes 2016; Smith 2016). It can partly be understood within what Kehoe and Mateer have

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described as a turn towards demand-led, bespoke film distribution strategies, which cater to an increasingly diversified and fragmented market (Kehoe and Mateer 2015). A new generation of technologically savvy consumers has, they argue, created an ‘alwayson’ consumer culture which ‘will pay a premium for authentic personal experiences, such as live concerts and sporting events’ (Kehoe and Mateer 2015: 100). This trend has been driven by a range of technological developments which have facilitated a marked growth in mobile, non-theatrical forms of film exhibition (Aveyard 2016: 2). A progressively more diverse marketplace for film exhibition practices has also been discussed by Atkinson and Kennedy in relation to what they term as an ‘increasingly participatory cultural and creative economy’ (Atkinson and Kennedy 2016a: 139). The popularity of participatory and immersive film screenings, particularly within the UK, is evident in the growing number of specialized and interactive screenings being staged in non-metropolitan locations. Cosmopolitan journalist Martha Hayes recommends her readers should ‘forget hoofing it to a warehouse after being instructed to “tell no one”’ and instead ‘head to a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in North Yorkshire to watch the 1951 version of Alice In Wonderland [or] see Labyrinth (1986) at Picnic Cinema in a Cumbrian castle’ (Hayes 2016). Hayes’ report points to a growing interest in participatory cinema throughout the UK, and a significant increase in such screenings outside metropolitan areas. These specialist, short run or one-off-screenings form part of an emerging culture around non-traditional cinema exhibition that ranges from themed nights in village halls to highly commercial, interactive productions of blockbuster films. Atkinson and Kennedy offer a typology of three categories for classifying the current range of immersive film exhibition in the UK. The most rudimentary of these categories is that of ‘enhanced’ screenings, which they describe as films screened in their usual format but with a themed aspect. These are particularly popular and well suited to small rural film exhibitors, as exemplified by a recent collaboration between Penryn Picture House and the Salvador Thali Café in Cornwall, which involved serving curry at screenings of The Lunchbox (2013).2 A second category Atkinson and Kennedy identify is that of ‘augmented’ screenings, at which additional dimensions to the film screenings are developed, such as staging them in a location relevant to the film itself, for instance Picnic Cinema’s annual screenings of Withnail and I (1987) at an isolated farmhouse in Cumbria (Smith 2013). Finally, a third category Atkinson and Kennedy outline is that of ‘participatory’ screenings, which involve productions with an added element of audience participation, such as a singalong or cult screenings with ritualized audience participation; these are perhaps most closely associated with cult cinema texts, such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), and are generally more popular in urban locations than rural settings.3 One significant element of Atkinson and Kennedy’s typology is the emphasis they place on the role played by the exhibition space itself, observing that immersive film screenings typically offer ‘a cinema that escapes beyond the boundaries of the auditorium’, (Atkinson and Kennedy 2016a: 139–140). This is particularly resonant in relation to rural and community cinemagoing cultures, which are more typically located in non-traditional exhibition spaces such as village halls, community centres,

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barns and other makeshift venues. This can also be observed in alternative rural cinemagoing cultures in North America, Asia and Australia. Rebecca M. Alvin’s study of the micro-cinema movement in North America discusses the emergence of small community-led cinemas across the United States over the last twenty to thirty years. Alvin notes that makeshift theaters have spread across a wide range of communities and are taking up residence not only in actual movie theaters, but also in alternative spaces like tractor trailers, cafes and bars, church basements, and even health clubs. They call themselves micro-cinemas, and they bring with them the promise of a communal cinema experience, showing films with virtually no marketing campaigns, no stars, and no budgets. (Alvin 2007)

The micro-cinema movement, as described by Alvin, is characterized by the exhibition of low-budget, non-commercial films in alternative ‘communal’ spaces. These characteristics have also been observed in rural cinema cultures in parts of Asia. In his study of the layar tancap tradition of mobile cinema exhibition in Indonesia, Ekky Imanjaya describes the popularity of low-budget films in rural parts of the country. Imanjaya’s study describes a travelling programme of films being screened in outdoor public spaces within rural Indonesian communities, usually between dusk and dawn (Imanjaya 2016: 78); he notes that these all-night exhibition practices frequently facilitate rowdy, interactive behaviour amongst audiences, occasionally leading to newspaper reports of ‘immorality’ (Imanjaya 2016: 84). An informal, communal screening culture combined with the absence of a designated auditorium area are two of the key features that are common, then, to both rural cinema exhibition spaces and those used to stage immersive film events; both characteristics of non-traditional cinema exhibition facilitate increased audience mobility and a decentring of the film text. This chapter now considers the role of the unconventional exhibition spaces in bringing these two forms of film culture together and enabling their growing popularity in rural areas.

Castles and country houses: The significance of the exhibition space It is widely acknowledged that there has been a ‘spatial turn’ in film studies, resulting in greater attention being paid to exhibition spaces and social practices (Hallam and Roberts, 2014; Maltby et al. 2007). However, there still remains a tendency to focus on metropolitan contexts of film consumption and exhibition, despite the significance of the viewing environment for rural audiences. Just as there are many forms of rural participatory cinema, ranging from village hall productions to nationally advertised events, so too do the exhibition spaces for these events vary greatly. Picnic Cinema, based at Eden Arts in Cumbria, has staged immersive events in a wide range of impressive historical locations. In 2016, these included Sleddale Hall for Withnail and I, Muncaster Castle for Labyrinth (1986) and Kirklinton Hall for Trainspotting (1994).

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While Eden Arts produce these events in order to facilitate and fund some of their less profitable community arts projects in Cumbria, other venues such as Carlton Hall, a country house in Yorkshire, produce one-off enhanced film screenings and themed events as part of a broader programme of events to attract tourists and visitors; in 2016, this included a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party and screening of Alice in Wonderland (2010). Whilst events such as these held at high-profile locations are at one end of the rural immersive cinema spectrum, other themed events within rural communities are held at comparatively low-key venues. Cine North’s immersive productions for the BFI Love season, staged in the Yorkshire towns and villages of Masham, Pateley Bridge and Amerdale in late 2015, were mainly screened in local town halls. Those attending were encouraged to come in 1940s fancy dress to screenings of classic films such as Casablanca (1942) and Brief Encounter (1945). Themed evenings such as these are much more typical of rural participatory cinema events at a grass-roots level. However, while they seem to have little in common with grander and more commercial productions held at castles and country houses, they nevertheless share one important common feature: they are non-traditional auditorium spaces, and in this key respect they differ from participatory film screenings at urban venues such as the Prince Charles Cinema in London. To date there has been minimal audience research conducted on the growth of participatory cinema in rural areas. However, the few empirical studies of immersive cinema screenings in urban locations suggest that there may be a distinctive difference in the way audiences value participatory film exhibition in rural and metropolitan environments. Richard McCulloch and Virginia Crisp’s recent study, conducted at the Prince Charles Cinema in London, concludes that the culture of engaging in participatory or social behaviour while watching the film is not greatly valued by urban cinemagoers. McCulloch and Crisp’s survey reveals that the norm of silent and somewhat reverential film spectatorship was the only way to enjoy a film screening. Even those audience members who were curious and somewhat tentatively interested in such events were nevertheless concerned that this sort of viewing environment might ‘ruin’ the film, and that event-led screenings therefore ran contrary to how films were supposed to be seen. (McCulloch and Crisp 2016: 206)

Their research implies that while other aspects of specialist screenings such as Q & As with the directors or talks from film experts are appreciated, the patrons of the Prince Charles Cinema are not so keen on interactive screenings. More significantly, McCulloch and Crisp also note that ‘our respondents consistently told us that the single greatest threat to the cinema experience is that the “wrong” audiences might attend and behave “badly” – laughing or talking during the film and breaking the reverential silence’ (McCulloch and Crisp 2016: 207). This study indicates that, within a British context, metropolitan audiences at alternative or specialist film venues are more inclined to adopt a deferential, text-centric attitude towards both the film and the exhibition space.

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The findings of McCulloch & Crisp’s study of a metropolitan specialist cinema are thus revealing when compared with the data available on audiences for immersive and themed screenings staged by rural exhibitors. Information provided by Cinema for All on effective community exhibition strategies suggests that rural cinemas experimenting with non-traditional seating arrangements and themed evenings are exemplary models for successful exhibition.4 One of these is West Side Cinema in Orkney, Scotland, whose experimentation with informal exhibition practices are valorized by Cinema for All as follows: While traditional tiered seating may offer a comfortable viewing experience, West Side found it to be restrictive when it came to the social side of cinema. With this in mind, the committee settled on a cabaret style, round table, candle – lit set up – creating an intimate environment which encourages interaction between audience members … the organisers have found that the sharing of food and drink encourages communication between audience members, and helps create a convivial atmosphere. (Cinema for All 2014)

This report suggests that, unlike the ‘reverential silence’ of the Prince Charles Cinema patrons observed by McCulloch and Crisp, attendees of the rural West Side Cinema engage in convivial conversation and demonstrate an appreciation for the communal exhibition environment. These community values are at odds, then, with the cultural capital displayed by cinephiles engaged in alternative exhibition cultures within a metropolitan context. A broader report on community cinema in Scotland also notes audiences’ growing appreciation of themed evenings and the atmosphere of community screenings, which they feel provides ‘a magical quality that no other cinema experience can compete with … there is a sense of being part of something adventurous and cool’ (Social Value Lab/Regional Scotland 2016: 17). Reports such as these invite comparisons between British rural participatory cinemas and studies of the micro-cinema movement in the United States. These sources suggest that a key reason for their popularity with audiences lies in the informality of the viewing spaces, though there is clearly scope for further empirical research to be undertaken in this area. These findings are also echoed by audience research on drive-in screenings. Linda Levitt’s study of the renaissance of drive-ins in the Los Angeles area concludes that being outdoors in open space eases some of the constraints of social decorum that traditionally dictated behavior in an indoor theater. This openness is enhanced by socializing and entertainment before the screening, which evoke a more partylike atmosphere and recall the customs of drive-ins with their accompanying playgrounds, entertainment areas, and extensive snack offerings. (Levitt 2016: 221)

Levitt’s research on the popularity of cult contemporary films at outdoor screenings documents a developing trend in US film exhibition. In particular, Levitt argues that ‘where cinema audience members have been irate over the behavior of other

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moviegoers, especially those who do not hesitate to use smartphones while the movie is playing, outdoor movie audiences talk, singalong, and shout out lines of dialogue during the film. These behaviours are not only acceptable, they are desirable’ (Levitt 2016: 232). Levitt’s analysis of the contemporary drive-in experience positions it as a nostalgic experience capitalizing on pleasures associated with moviegoing in the past, such as ‘community spirit’. The study is relevant in that it implies that audience expectations around behaviour during the screening of the film are very closely linked to the exhibition environment, thus reinforcing observations made by Barbara Klinger on the differences in audience behaviour when films are shown in art house and drivein locations. Klinger notes that art house cinemas ‘recommend an observant and deferential mode of viewing, associated with overt aesthetic experience, while drive-ins include a host of “unaesthetic” distractions associated with family life and courtship, from squalling infants to backseat romances’ (Klinger 2006: 19). This overview of academic and commercial research investigating this emerging area of film exhibition clearly indicates, then, that whereas traditional theatrical environments facilitate conservative, text-centric modes of film spectatorship, drive-ins, outdoor spaces and community settings are more likely to enable social interaction between audience members. These differences are further highlighted by the contrasting cultural values of urban cinephiles and rural filmgoers.

Community values: Resourcefulness, co-operation and anti-commercialism The significance of the exhibition environment in understanding rural participatory cultures is reinforced when considered in the context of broader academic research on rural and community cinemagoing cultures (Aveyard 2015; Thissen and Zimmerman 2017). Aveyard highlights the importance of cinema as a social space and meeting place within Australian rural communities, frequently in terms of what it offers an alternative to. For example, she focuses on the significance of film culture for women as an alternative to ‘the boorish atmosphere of the local pub’ (Aveyard 2011: 298). Likewise, for teenagers the cinema space offers an attractive environment that ‘can represent social freedom, one which lends a sense of purpose to “going out” and provides a welcome contrast to the aimlessness, and sometimes destructive, alternative pastime of hanging around in public parks or streets’ (Aveyard 2011: 298). Aveyard’s study of rural cinema audiences in Australia and the UK also establishes that the community cinema sector has grown significantly over the last two decades. She notes three key factors contributing to this trend – rural policy, rural socio-economic conditions and technological change. Of particular relevance to discussions of rural immersive cinema are Aveyard’s observations on the importance of social interaction and co-operation within these communities: For audiences, the quality and quantity of interpersonal interactions that occur around local cinemas are often very important. Confirming the social nature of cinemagoing, the vast majority of respondents to the written audience surveys

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I conducted in Australia and the UK indicated that they usually watch a movie in the company of another person … cinemas can provide forums for conversation before and after the film screening, which can lead on to other activities. (Aveyard 2015: 138)

This discussion is particularly pertinent to the phenomena of immersive and participatory cinema, in that it reinforces the importance of film screenings as a starting point for further social activities and interaction; while communities might initially gather for the purpose of watching a film, this can frequently form a backdrop for facilitating other community relations. An additional characteristic of rural cinema culture revolves around a particular set of ideological values. Aveyard observes that rural cinemas are ‘sites of consumption where commercial imperatives are set aside in favour of ideals centred on cultural and social enrichment and community advancement’ (Aveyard 2015: 128). While it is clear that immersive cinema staged within urban settings can facilitate important social interactions, what Aveyard highlights in this discussion is the importance of an altruistic, anti-commercial sentiment amongst many rural communities. This contrasts strongly with her findings on cinemagoing in metropolitan areas, where ‘the quality of the films and the exclusivity of the cinema release window are considered crucial factors in attracting patrons’ (Aveyard 2015: 144). Aveyard’s findings thus resonate with those of Alvin, who notes that micro-cinemas ‘bring with them the promise of a communal cinema experience, showing films with virtually no marketing campaigns, no stars, and no budgets’ (Alvin 2007). Whereas attendees of Secret Cinema events are issued with complicated instructions on the costume and props they will need to engage in the experience, participants at rural immersive events are encouraged to adopt a budget, do-it-yourself (DIY) approach to costume and participation. This also reinforces the voluntary, non-commercial characteristic of the sector, as discussed in Francois Matarasso’s study of Creative Arts East’s rural cinema organization. Matarasso notes that rural touring has always been run by volunteers. It is estimated that promoting groups contribute 100,000 hours of voluntary time each year in organising their events. In truth, people probably give much more time than this to setting out chairs, making teas and cleaning up afterwards: there is no line to separate ‘volunteering’ from mucking in. The thousands of theatre, music and film evenings that take place in villages across England would be far too expensive to put on without all this help. Only people’s willingness to invest themselves in their community makes it possible. (Matarasso 2014: 90)

The significance of community investment is key, and it is why immersive film screenings work so effectively in rural areas. Another such example is Handmade Cinema, an immersive touring organization based in the Sheffield area. Handmade Cinema consciously sets out to counter what they perceive to be the impersonal experience of commercial, cosmopolitan film viewing. Their founder, Ellie Ragdale,

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explains this, stating, ‘I wanted to create something that was immersive, affordable and involved the audience in a way that gave them a sense of ownership and involvement in the film’ (Film Hub North, 2016). Ragdale discusses a future immersive production of Moonrise Kingdom (2014) which local scout and cub groups have helped them to prepare: As well as artwork created by the local scouts, cubs and beavers being on display, there will be plenty of opportunities for people to get involved – designing their own scout badges, balloon modelling and some outdoor scouting crafts. (Ragdale 2016)

The emphasis here on an affordable, communal experience is echoed in other accounts of rural immersive screenings. It is the focus on accessibility and social inclusion in the design of these events that marks them out as being almost antithetical to big budget operations like Secret Cinema.

Shenanigans and Tomfoolery: Bridging the generation gap? The question of audience demographics has been a long-standing issue for rural cinema exhibitors in the UK, Australia and elsewhere. The rural cinema sector has acknowledged that their audiences tend to be constituted of older people, with a high percentage of retired attendees. In her study of rural audiences in the UK and Australia, Aveyard notes that ‘while Village Screen cinemas do well in catering to the older rural audiences, to date they have had limited success in attracting younger patrons including families’ (Aveyard 2015: 125). Part of the issue for some rural film exhibitors is that multiplexes in local towns not only offer a wider range of current releases, but also the opportunity for teenagers to have a night out with peer groups, away from the watchful eye of their parents. However, the playful appeal, physical stimulation and outdoor locations frequently involved in immersive cinema productions have contributed to a more alluring prospect for younger audiences than the more conventional rural cinema cultures. Alongside Picnic Cinema’s immersive productions, for example, they advertise ‘dancing’, ‘shenanigans’, ‘discos’ and ‘tomfoolery’ as key attractions at their events.5 An interesting development in the phenomenon of immersive cinema within a rural context, then, is the focus on young people, families and intergenerational social activity. Handmade Cinema also emphasize the family friendly character of their immersive screenings, promoting craft activities, live music, themed food and interactive workshops as a means to entice a wider age range of participants. Reports on other outdoor rural screenings, though not all as interactive as Handmade Cinema, indicate they are popular with families and attract large audiences. At a recent picnic cinema experience staged in Ely, Cambridgeshire, it was reported that ‘families flocked’ to two sell-out screenings of The Secret Life of Pets (2016).6 Other immersive film exhibitors argue this is true of immersive film experiences more broadly. Fabien Riggall, founder of Secret Cinema, contends that ‘Kids go crazy over immersive

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theatre, and the Secret/Future Cinema concepts are inspired by films from our own childhoods’ (Riggall/Edwards 2014). The growing interest children and young people are taking in immersive and experiential cinema also complicates broader analyses of film consumption that have emerged in the twenty-first century. In his discussion of the ‘post movie-going epoch’, Robert C. Allen asserts that ‘not only has the principal site of the experience of cinema in the US been relocated from 15,000 theaters to hundreds of millions of domiciles, the character of the experience of cinema has undergone a profound generational change’ (Allen 2011: 42–43). It certainly cannot be contested that there has been a dramatic shift, primarily due to technological developments such as VCR, DVD and the Internet, in the places and platforms used for contemporary film consumption. However, what is interesting about Allen’s description of the domestic film viewing habits of his daughter’s generation – walking around, eating, dressing up as characters, acting out favourite sequences, social interaction with other generations and so on – is that he could describing an immersive cinema event. In Allen’s summary of all the off-putting aspects of conventional cinemagoing for young people, he neatly outlines many of the characteristics of formal film consumption that immersive film exhibitors attempt to eschew: Seated upright in chairs bolted to the floor, limited in the range of comestible accompaniments to criminally overpriced popcorn, candy and soft drinks, discouraged from talking, singing or walking around, unable to pause, fast-forward or replay, deprived of director’s commentary track … my daughter understands cinema as a textually disintegrated phenomenon experienced through multiple and unpredictably proliferating sites and modalities. For her, the experience of cinema has always been decentred and fissiparous. (Allen 2011: 43–44)

Allen’s observations about the viewing habits of younger consumers being ‘decentred and fissiparous’ resonates with recent calls to rethink methodologies for investigating cinemagoing practices to incorporate strategies for observing media use across a range of platforms and non-theatrical environments (Aveyard 2016; Couldry 2012). The culture of immersive and participatory cinema thus offers a relevant and pertinent development in this context, in that the design of the events themselves frequently involves a decentring of the filmic text and a range of mobile viewing practices.

Conclusions This overview of current developments of immersive cinemagoing within rural contexts points to some of the key characteristics of this evolving exhibition sector, and highlights the need for further empirical research to be undertaken in this area. First, it reveals rural immersive film cultures to be highly diversified in terms of the scale, design, exhibition space and economic model; the eclectic character of the sector reflects an increasingly fragmented market, as identified by Kehoe and Mateer.

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However, despite this diversification, the commonalities of alternative screening spaces enable a distinctive form of mobile, interactive audience behaviour which appears to be markedly different to that witnessed at urban immersive screenings – though this observation requires substantiation through further empirical research. A second characteristic of some rural participatory screenings is an anti-commercial, DIY sentiment that promotes events on the basis of inclusivity, as opposed to the exclusivity that is common to productions by Secret Cinema and other high-end immersive exhibitors. Finally, there is some evidence that rural immersive cinema can offer an effective way of attracting cross-generational, family audiences in a way that more traditional rural cinemagoing cultures have not experienced in recent decades. In this respect, it is a particularly interesting development within the landscape of contemporary cinema exhibition, and one that calls for further empirical research and analysis.

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Pop(-up)ular Culture at the Seaside: The British Pleasure Pier as Screening Space Lavinia Brydon and Olu Jenzen

Introduction This chapter explores a set of enquiries situated at the intersections of cinema-asevent, community cinema and the current cultural development of ‘re-purposing’ seaside piers as community spaces. Drawing on empirical explorations of pop-up cinema on seaside piers, it seeks to historicize the relationship between cinematic viewing practices and Victorian seaside piers, and to investigate the role of outdoor cinema in the changing landscape of contemporary seaside resort entertainment. The case studies presented here also illustrate the potential of outdoor deck top cinema as an immersive cinema experience when the seascape and the sounds of the natural surroundings blend with the film’s mise-en-scène. In their earliest incarnation piers were practical structures, serving as landing stages for goods and holidaymakers arriving to seaside resorts via boat. While this functionality remained important throughout the nineteenth century, at least until an expanded rail network offered an alternative means of accessing coastal locations, their pleasurable aspects soon became apparent. This led them to evolve in many different directions over the years, with well-documented fluctuating fortunes (see, for example, Fischer and Walton 1987; Gray 2006; Shaw and Williams 1997). Today only fifty-nine of the original hundred or so British seaside piers remain, and many of those are under threat. Despite this downturn, piers remain important to the coastal communities in which they are situated – in terms of serving as a landmark that gives the town a sense of identity (no two piers are the same), in terms of the local economy and in terms of community heritage – aspects which, we argue, are made manifest in their use as twenty-first century screening spaces. Since the post-war decline in British seaside resort culture, it has been a battle for most pleasure piers to survive. Exposed to sea and weather, the Victorian constructions are expensive to maintain and, due to the social stratification of cultural consumption, their offerings of popular entertainment have typically not been considered worthy of investment. Anya Chapman identifies this as an area where more academic work is needed and notes that ‘research into the sustainability of these iconic structures is a matter of urgency’ (2015: n.p.).

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Piers that have fallen into permanent disrepair include Birnbeck Pier in Westonsuper-Mare, South West England, while those that have survived, like the neighbouring Grand Pier, often adopt warehouse-like structures to house amusement arcades in a move to make their business less weather dependant. In recent years, however, several seaside resorts have sought a community solution to owning and managing the local pier, for example, Clevedon Pier, also on England’s southwest coast, and Hastings Pier in South East England. These two community piers are the focus of this chapter. Piers are more than just Victorian structures of metal and wood and, indeed, more than treasured architectural landmarks – they are lived experiences with a rich popular culture history fuelled by a liminality whereby they are positioned at a slant in relation to onshore life. In an increasing number of cases, it can be argued that seaside piers are potentially reinventing themselves as twenty-first century community spaces, as explored in the Connected Communities themed ‘The People’s Pier’ research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2015–16).1 This project is a collaboration between four UK universities2 and two community partners, the Hastings Pier Charity and the Clevedon Pier and Heritage Trust. Together we have explored ways of utilizing the popular cultural heritage of the seaside piers to engage with groups in the local communities that the pier organizations have identified as under-represented in their target audience, or otherwise marginalized, thus further empowering the organizations in the work they do for the benefit of the community. This has included piloting immersive sound and visual activities on the piers, such as a lively audio tour inspired by the silent disco format, as well as the film screenings that are the focus of this chapter. These activities were designed with the aim of potentially changing perceptions among young people by giving them new reference points to the pier, replacing negative associations of dereliction and disinterest. The respective piers’ popular cultural heritage, not only as music and dance venues but also in terms of the end-of-pier entertainment genre and protofilmic devices, has been at the heart of these initiatives and the project has drawn on materials from both community archives and oral history research conducted as part of the project. Investigating the emergence of pop-up cinema in this environment, the chapter gives particular attention to the potential of this contemporary mode of film exhibition for the purpose of community cinema and the rejuvenation of piers. We use qualitative data gathered through an audience survey and interviews conducted in conjunction with a pilot outdoor cinema event on Clevedon Pier as well as through participant observation at the first deck top cinema on Hastings Pier. Unlike the more traditional sites for outdoor summer screenings in the UK, such as the grounds of English castles or the country’s numerous parks, piers as temporary film exhibition sites are especially significant in their offer of repurposing and, therefore, rejuvenating spaces that for several decades have been threatened with permanent closure or disrepair. This kind of culture-led regeneration is evident elsewhere (see, for example, Lashua 2013) but it is especially welcome at the seaside resort which was once replete with spectacle and performance-based pleasures and a ‘happy hunting ground for cinema promoters’ (Walton 2000: 97).

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From coastal scenes to coastal screens: Researching the seaside spaces of cinema Costal locations have piqued the interest of Film Studies scholars in recent years. Steven Allen’s examination of a ‘converse representation of the seaside’ (2008: 54) in British film; Brady Hammond and Sean Redmond’s shoreline-themed edition of the journal Continuum that considers ‘those directors and films for which the relationship between sea and land at the shoreline and beach is of particular narrative, aesthetic and ideological significance’ (2013: 601); and Fiona Handyside’s sustained analysis of the beach in French cinema (2014) are a welcome addition to place-based studies of film, especially in further shifting attention from the once almost obsessive analytical focus on the city–cinema relationship. The work conducted thus far, however, is frequently attached to the representational possibilities that the coast affords filmmakers. The sensorial properties of beaches, ports, cliff tops and coastal resorts – from the striking vistas afforded by the sharp lines of the horizon to the cacophonous soundscapes produced by seaside amusements – indeed offer dynamic spaces in which to display and develop narrative, thematic and aesthetic interests. As Murray Pomerance comments in his analysis of the young body on the beach, sandy shores on screen often become ‘a setting for notable drama either emphatic, or romantic or apotheotic’ (2013: 619) or as Lara Feigel notes in her work on 1930s British films, the popular seaside resort in the early twentieth century was an artistically potent setting: ‘The seaside filmmaker could dizzy his audience as it bounced with the camera along the rollercoaster’ (2009: 15). Though, undeniably, there is still more work to be done regarding the on-screen embodiment of coastal locations, there is also a concurrent need for further work that explores how these sites serve the industrial practices of film including networks of exhibition and reception. The aims of this chapter thus intersect with those of the HoMER network (homernetwork.org) and the recently completed ‘Early Cinema in Scotland, 1896–1927’ research project (earlycinema.gla.ac.uk), especially María Antonia Vélez-Serna’s work on ‘mapping [a] landscape of non-metropolitan film exhibition’ (2016: 286). In Fiona Handyside’s analysis of the ‘mythical Riviera’ she offers the Cannes Film Festival as one example of how seaside locations serve cinematic systems of display. Her study shows how the festival, through its signifier of a sun-drenched beachscape and its connection to the stardom of (an oft bikini-clad) Brigit Bardot, had a particularly significant impact on the cultural economy of 1950s France (2014: 49–62). The UK may not have similarly glamorous resorts in which to host an international film festival but seaside towns, such as Blackpool on England’s northwest coast and Brighton in the southeast, prove to be important locations when tracing developments in the country’s filmgoing culture. Sue Arthur, for example, identifies Blackpool as ‘an accelerator for national trends in entertainment’ in the first half of the twentieth century (2009: 37), noting how the town’s early conversion of cinemas to sound (from 1929 onwards) responded to growing demands from the pleasure-seeking British public. Technological advancements in today’s world open up further possibilities for the UK’s seaside locations, especially those seeking to become (re-)established as exciting

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centres of popular culture. Lightweight (often inflatable) screens, powerful projectors, portable sound systems and silent generators that make mains power sources redundant allow coastal locations to not only use their traditional indoor spaces for film screenings – whether purpose-built cinemas or multipurpose pavilions – but, also, make use of the outdoor spaces – from shingle beaches to deck top piers – that make these coastal locations so appealing in the first place. With the ‘growing trend toward the creation of a cinema that escapes the boundaries of the auditorium’ (Atkinson and Kennedy 2016a: 139) it thus seems an opportune moment to consider how exterior sites of exhibition at the seaside might work in practice, and how such screening events might feed into current developments in UK cinemagoing as well as resonate with older traditions of seaside entertainment. Celebrations for the fortieth anniversary of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) in 2015 fuelled this line of inquiry. Intersecting with the increased demand for experiential cinema, these celebrations prompted various screening events that relate to what Sarah Atkinson and Helen W. Kennedy term ‘augmented cinema’ (2016a: 141). Typically these events focused on situating the audience in locations relevant to the film’s story of a great white shark attacking beachgoers in the fictional New England resort town ‘Amity Island’. The highest profile screenings for Jaws in summer 2015 were organized by the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema based in Austin, Texas. Known for its attention to detail in film presentation and a decade-old ‘Rolling Roadshow’ that has presented outdoor film screenings and ‘unique movie adventures’ (drafthouse.com/series/ rollingroadshow), the Alamo Drafthouse hosted its anniversary screenings of Jaws on a human-made lake surrounded by sandy beaches, with audiences invited to swim or float on rubber tubes as they watched the drama unfold. The evocative staging of the screenings prompted CNN’s Karla Cripps to ask, ‘Could there possibly be any scarier way to watch “Jaws”?’ (2015: n.p.), while, writing for British newspaper The Independent, Christopher Hooten stated, ‘This is surely the best way to watch Jaws’ (2015: n.p.). By comparison, experiential cinema events for the fortieth anniversary of Jaws in the UK were more muted affairs. Following Atkinson and Kennedy’s typography, some offered creative interventions more akin to ‘enhanced cinema’ (2016a: 141) whereby an outdoor setting unrelated to the film text was used to screen the film (e.g., Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London). There were, however, several outdoor cinema companies who perceived the anniversary as an opportunity to extend their offer into the realm of ‘augmented cinema’. If not quite matching the scope of the Alamo Drafthouse’s efforts, companies such as The Luna Cinema and Motely Movies worked with venues across the UK to screen Jaws in a range of outdoor settings that feature water. These included London’s Brockwell Lido, Bournemouth’s Pier Approach and Cardiff Bay’s waterfront. The two seaside screenings that serve as our case studies were not dissimilar, both in terms of setting and in terms of being designed and delivered as special one-off events (Figure 3.1). The impermanence of the Clevedon and Hastings pier screenings as regards time (each screening was for one night only) and space (the pier deck is otherwise used for other purposes) suggests a fit with the term ‘pop-up’, used increasingly across a wide range of contexts and discourses including pop-up shops, restaurants, nightclubs and art

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Figure 3.1  Inflatable pop-up screen on Hastings Pier open-plan deck – author’s own

exhibitions as well as cinema. As Cultural Geographer Ella Harris notes, ‘Pop-up is an arena in which space-time is being reimagined in ways that are increasingly influential’ (2015: 592). Pop-up can be described as a form of ‘insurgent place making’ (Merker 2010 cited in Harris 2015: 593) constructed in a contemporary neoliberal context through discourses of flexibility (Harris 2015), immersion (Lashua 2013) and urban redevelopment of ‘residual spaces’ (Villagomez 2010 cited in Harris 2015: 596) or ‘zombie places’ (Lashua 2016). The concept of pop-up has several interesting and creative aspects, such as the way it allows for a playful reimagining and sometimes radical repurposing of a space (albeit a temporary one), but also how its temporariness often brings a new energy to a place. Donna de Ville (2013) emphasizes site specificity as a primary characteristic of pop-up cinema, suggesting that an entanglement of the activity of spectatorship and the exhibition space lies at the heart of this mode of film consumption. In terms of cinematic culture, more specifically, the term ‘micro-cinema’ (de Ville 2015) has been coined to describe ‘communal nontheatrical practices’ that de Ville argues ‘not only offer alternatives to standardized, impersonal megaplex viewing but also attempt to introduce sociability into increasingly pervasive individualized moving-image reception in much the same way that book clubs work to give the solitary practice of reading a social dimension’ (de Ville 2015: 105). This resonates with the sociability impetus of the community piers and captures the motivation for the deck top popup cinema events discussed in our case studies. Furthermore, the pop-up mode of exhibition has several characteristics in common with micro-cinema, not least the do-

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it-yourself (DIY) ‘can do’ ethos and the appetite for unusual spaces and places for cinema. However, they stem from different motivations; micro-cinema came about as a post– art house cinema alternative to mainstream viewing venues and retains a specialized cinema profile, whilst pop-up cinema is more about the social or communal activity of enjoying a film in a familiar space that resultantly is thought about and appreciated in a new way. It is not driven by the cineaste’s desire for consuming avant-garde or rare films in a quirky location; rather, it is rooted in popular culture entertainment, both in terms of content and the deliberate appeal to a wide audience. Thus different in both ambience and content, the pop-up cinema mode of exhibition signifies a different value system whilst operating according to several of the principles of micro-cinema. As mentioned earlier, technological developments within the area of digitalized projection3—which have made the equipment more mobile and the cost less prohibitive— can be identified as facilitating factors behind the surge of independent companies offering cinema experiences in alternative spaces. The lowering of these barriers affords more freedom in the choice of venue and arguably enables pop-up cinema in unconventional and imaginative spaces. It should be noted though that pop-up strategies have attracted criticism; particularly as concerns how they both express and to an extent reinforce economies of precarity and the mechanisms of marginalization associated with heavy-handed gentrification, operating as a ‘mechanism through which to mobilize the turbulence of recession and austerity towards a new normal characterised by profitable flexibility and a related precarity’ (Harris 2015: 596). The pop-up phenomenon has also been linked to austerity policies where it operates as a strategy to fill loss-making sites in a flexible way that is both low cost and low risk (Harris 2015). That said, as Amanda Randall notes, it was the drop in cost for 16 mm technology and the fact that cinema exhibition equipment became more portable that enabled the development of community cinema in the post-war period (2016: 44). This enabled community groups to utilize mixed-use or occasionally available venues for film screenings. For both local communities and communities of interest, Randall points out, this repurposing of venues is a key factor for a more social- and interest-driven approach to film viewing, but also presents a significant challenge as the organizers are often faced with having to overcome difficulties associated with operating in a nonpurpose-built venue, on a small budget. Nevertheless, she concludes, ‘Community cinemas prove that in the most unexpected places there is thirst for diverse films that challenge, excite and entertain’ (216: 45). With the new pop-up cinema technologies we see this legacy of communities repurposing unconventional venues or locations being developed into new imaginative ventures. Randall also offers a clue as to why outdoor and enhanced cinema in unusual spaces has become a commercial success, estimating that the equivalent commercial value of community cinemagoing, as recorded in a 2014–15 survey through the Cinema for All network, would be in the region of £900,000. The marketization of previously DIY community cinema exhibition is not a strand that this chapter will be able to develop further in detail, but it is nevertheless relevant to mention here as in

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two case study community piers the mainstream popular entertainment economy and the community engagement project clearly overlap. The seaside piers discussed in this chapter are community heritage assets, but they are also heritage attractions that operate in a neoliberal market structure. The flexibility and temporality of the pop-up model is conducive for their needs to stay relevant and interesting to mixed audiences whilst also serving to widen the range of purposes that the open-air space can accommodate. This includes not only events such as food festivals, speciality markets and fairs, concerts and outdoor cinema, but also private hire events or the use of the space for family attractions or community events during the day and something more young adult orientated, like a ‘zombie walk’ dress-up event, at night. Particularly in the case of Hastings Pier, which is purposefully exploring what a twenty-first century and community-orientated pier can be the opportunity to try out different activities without the costly construction of further permanent purposebuilt buildings is important for the freedom to experiment that the pop-up model offers. So, in this case the pop-up cinema is given a particular context that is different from other venues, as it is slotted in on a regular basis in-between other pop-up features. Cultural historians and geographers have theorized seaside resorts as ‘landscapes of pleasure’ (Bull and Hayler 2009: 282) characterized by sites of ‘performative play for adults as well as children’ (Jarratt and Gammon 2016: 126). However, more recently, attention has shifted onto the 'economic restructuring and regeneration in response to economic decline’ (Bull and Hayler 2009: 282) in coastal towns. Both Hastings Pier and Clevedon Pier are implicated in visions for regeneration in their respective localities. The success of the Hastings and Clevedon Piers’ community share schemes suggests that local seaside communities do take action that actively contributes to the regeneration and preservation of their heritage assets. However, community participation is a complex and shifting process. A venture like a community pier brings with it an array of ambiguous relationships and competing agendas that reflect ‘inequalities of resources and power’ in the community (Cairns 2003: 112). Researchers critiquing arts-led regeneration strategies have concluded that such strategies are by and large ‘congruent with the consumption preferences of the culturally dominant and politically influential’ middle classes (see Griffiths 1993: 41). Some of these tensions are played out in discourse around the restoration and rejuvenation of the two case study piers. Members of the local community resisting the gentrification of the pier typically express this through a dislike of the modern architecture, concerns over pricing structures – including the premium ticket prices for The Luna Cinema screenings in the case of Hastings Pier – and general concerns about repurposing the pier (see, for example, comments in the on-line open forum hastingsforum.co.uk). Discourses of taste in entertainment and leisure actives aside, it is clear to us that the affordability of events is a key factor when it comes to community inclusivity, and this comes into play in particular when cinema might be used as a means of outreach work among underrepresented groups such as youth or families.

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Testing the water: Designing and implementing a methodology This study draws on empirical data collected in relation to two case studies: one purpose designed and the other participant observation. The authors attended the premier of the documentary Re: A Pier (2016) on Hastings Pier on 12 May 2016 for the purpose of conducting participant observation. Building on this and encouraged by the popularity of events such as the augmented screenings of Jaws, discussed above, the research team resolved to include a pop-up cinema event on Clevedon Pier as part of their immersive pier activities despite the anticipated logistical difficulties. Thus, we subsequently designed a pop-up cinema event together with Clevedon Pier and Heritage Trust staff and volunteers—an outdoor screening of the family adventure film Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) that took place on the pier, on 17 September 2016. On both these occasions, the authors collected data through participant observation and correspondence with the community partners. In addition, data was collected via a survey and interviews during the Clevedon Pier screening. Observations made at a screening of Jaws at Brockwell Lido in 2015 undoubtedly helped with the event’s design, in particular the offer of pre-show entertainment (a capella group of sea shanty singers), use of film-themed accessories (pirate hats), encouragement of picnics as well as consideration of how and when to conduct data collection. The exhibition of Pirates of the Caribbean on Clevedon Pier was designed as a pilot for outdoor cinema on the pier and the audience was invited to partake in the research conducted as part of this pilot. The Re: A Pier screening was not organized around the present research but nevertheless offered a valuable opportunity for participant observation due to the exhibition resonating so strongly with the local audience. In fact, Re: A Pier was included in a series of screenings on Hastings Pier run by Kino Digital & The Luna Cinema. It differed significantly from the rest of the summer programme in that it is an independent documentary film as opposed to a popular ‘classic’ such as Dirty Dancing (1987) or a commercially successful British indie film, for example Pride (2014). However, given that Re: A Pier is the story of how the people of Hastings saved their pier and the journey of its rebuilding and transformation after the devastating fire in 2010, the documentary by local filmmaker Archie Lauchlan was an ideal title to screen to introduce open-air pop-up cinema onto the pier for the first time. The partly crowd-funded documentary had a significant interest for the local audience and the evening was well attended, with an audience size of nearly 350 people. During the Clevedon Pier event, a questionnaire was distributed to the audience at the screening of Pirates of the Caribbean. Twenty-eight respondents aged 16 and over completed the questionnaire (out of a total number of seventy-three visitors). Seventy-five per cent of respondents were from the Clevedon area. The questionnaire focused on two areas of enquiry: the cinema experience and the conception of the pier as a community space. It contained both structured and open-ended questions. A set of twenty-six very short exit interviews was also conducted. Consideration was given to the timing of the data collection so as not to unduly alter or interrupt the cinema experience; time spent on the questionnaires was kept to the beginning of the

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programme (while the sea shanty singers performed topical songs to welcome the audience) and the interviews were conducted at the end. Audience members were invited to partake in the research on a voluntary basis, but equally could just come to watch the film. The two case studies differ in that one was part of a commercial programme by a leading brand in the UK’s open-air cinema events market and the other was more in line with DIY community cinema events, organized by the pier’s staff and volunteers in collaboration with the research team and the Clevedon Curzon Community Cinema. The screen, digital projector and sound equipment for the latter event were hired from a local media events company. The positioning of the screen on Clevedon Pier was on the pier head facing the shore end, whilst on Hastings Pier the screen was set up just inside the pier entrance facing the sea. The hands-on involvement in the organization of the Clevedon event provided us with a valuable understanding of the site as a venue from behind the scenes so to speak, noting challenges such as its vulnerability to the elements (light, wind, rain, the tide) as well as its immersive potential via the layered creation of the pier head as a cinematic space where the seascape and screen blended and the film soundtrack played against a backdrop of the shoreline soundscape.

Aesthetic pleasures: The pier–cinema relationship As mentioned above, piers were originally built to serve as landing stages but strolling over water soon became a pleasurable pastime. Seaside tourists, promenading on the pier enjoyed defying the physical impossibility of ‘walking on water’, marveled at views inaccessible from shoreline vantage points and, in line with coastal resorts’ earlier therapeutic discourse, reaped the health benefits of exposure to invigorating sea air. In response to this shift in purpose, the architecture of piers quickly adapted to incorporate dedicated walkways and, later, introduced small-scale artificial attractions that mostly pertained to further consumption of the immediate landscape. As well as benches and ‘floating baths’, these attractions often included viewing apparatus at the pier head, such as a telescope or camera obscura (for more detail, see Gray 2006: 201–243). The popularity of these protofilmic devices, combined with the early piers’ more basic offer that promenading gives rise to unparalleled panoramas, suggests a connection with cinema that predates the arrival of the pleasure pier proper in the Victorian era and its subsequent twenty-first century use as a pop-up cinema venue. For further consideration of a relationship between piers and cinema, that draws on a shared spatiovisual bond, it is useful to consult Guiliana Bruno’s innovative work on cinema as ‘born of a topographical “sense”’ and a practice that has ‘established its own sentient way of picturing space’ (2002: 8). Her discussion on the genealogy of cinema takes into account the new forms of architecture and aesthetic design that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and paved the way for a modern construction of space in which bodily motion is key. Bruno singles out the English picturesque (as elaborated by William Gilpin amongst others) as a particular significant step in this development, one that anticipated the invention of the moving image. She states: ‘As

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an essential moment in the formation of travelling space, the picturesque revolution took part in the modern making of haptic space and, in so doing, prepared the ground for elements of travelling space in film’ (2002: 192). However, her consideration of picturesque spaces, including the picturesque garden as ‘an object of mediated views, where views were a desirable objective’ (2002: 193) also holds true for piers, especially in the earliest phase of their pleasure-giving ventures when the simple act of walking offered the joys of unfolding vistas, a form of visual storytelling. As Fred Gray asserts: ‘There were new panoramas of the coast to view, storms and sunsets to marvel at, and horizons to contemplate’ (2006: 201). Following Bruno’s line of inquiry then, at its inception the ‘promenade pier’, like the picturesque garden, was ‘a product of imaging and sequentially assembled’ and ‘thus deployed for viewing as an actual spatiovisual apparatus’ (Bruno 2002: 193). It is through this lens that the pier’s structure and function can be seen to anticipate the very mechanisms of cinema. While the UK’s surviving piers have responded to the declining popularity of the coastal resort by offering increasingly complex elements of entertainment, the fundamental space-viewing activity that this type of seaside architecture facilitates can still appeal. This is especially true of Clevedon Pier, which remains an uncluttered promenade structure with only a small pavilion (serving as a refreshment room) at the pier head to divert attention away from the seaside panoramas. In the questionnaire responses, this pier’s spatiovisual pleasures are laid out explicitly. Out of twenty-eight respondents, eight answered the question ‘why do you normally come to the pier’ by focusing on the remarkable views obtained from promenading, with a further five suggesting that the privileged perspective of the surrounding coastline plays some part in their decision to frequent the structure. Although clear and succinct phrases – ‘to admire the view’, ‘to enjoy the view’, ‘for the view’ – dominate these answers, two respondents offered a little more detail about the scenes and sites that can be enjoyed specifically from a pier vantage point. In these answers further indication of how pier architecture relates to the architectronics of cinema can be found. In the first of these answers, the respondent highlights the unusual angles that the pier offers the shoreline by singling out Clevedon beach as a particularly interesting view. Naming a site that is clearly visible from the shore suggests that walking the pier and looking back towards land encourages visitors to contemplate the customary perception of the coast’s spatial relations and to move into spaces (thus adopt perspectives) traditionally inaccessible. This practice can be likened to certain film techniques that disrupt the consistency of an audience’s perspective, such as breaking the 180-degree rule. In contrast, the other respondent’s answer suggests that the pier’s spatiovisual pleasures are more apparent when maintaining the traditional perspectival gaze that looks out to sea. In this answer, the pier’s west-facing position comes into focus as the respondent considers how the structure offers a particularly good spot from which to watch sunsets. Beyond the pier’s position on the English coast, however, it is the structure’s design that ensures especially attractive views by guiding visitors towards a complex composition whereby they look down the pier

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groin, past the pier head pavilion and beyond the seawater until their gaze finally meets the sun setting on the distant horizon. The resultant aesthetic effect, in which several distinctive planes are incorporated, suggests the later wide-angle and deepfocus techniques seen in cinema. In the pop-up cinema event at Clevedon Pier, the dynamic natural vistas proved a crucial element in the evening’s entertainment. With the screening area consciously made accessible from 6:00 pm, many audience members were seated in time to watch a spectacular mid-September sunset – clear blue skies giving way to bright yellows and warm pinks – before the end of nautical twilight signalled the film’s start (8:45 pm). It is thus unsurprising that many respondents to the questionnaire make reference to the ‘excellent sunset’ or ‘stunning surroundings’ when asked what aspects of the screening they had most enjoyed. These answers, however, do prompt consideration of past and present practices regarding the traditional window of time that occurs between entering a cinema and the beginning of a feature-length film. Whereas early twentieth century audiences typically admired the spectacular interiors of their picture palaces and enjoyed various forms of live entertainment and vaudeville as well as short films before the main feature, current audiences are more likely to be situated in a featureless multiplex and bombarded by lengthy advertisements that serve to promote the exhibition space primarily as a venue for commercial enterprise rather than as a space for viewing pleasures. With this unwelcome challenge to one of the fundamental pleasures of cinema, is it any wonder that venues that maintain focus on spectacular enjoyment are proving so successful, or that alternative exhibition sites that use ‘stunning surroundings’ are becoming so popular? The aforementioned Alamo Drafthouse theatres in the Unites States and The Luna Cinema screenings in the UK are key examples. The Alamo Drafthouse’s appeal is born from a ‘simple passion for watching movies’ (drafthouse.com/about/history) that includes an unflinching resistance to advertisements: ‘We’re vigilant about never letting ads hit our screens […] we don’t want ANYTHING to disrupt your experience of the show’ (drafthouse.com/ about). Instead, they opt to create custom ‘preshows’ themed to the features they programme. By comparison, The Luna Cinema has found remarkable success with their ‘formula’ of a ‘classic film on a big screen in a beautiful or prestigious setting’.4 Despite the screening of Lauchlan’s film not strictly adhering to this ‘formula’, the distinctive structure of Hastings Pier combined with the natural scenery clearly played a significant role in the framing of the consumption of the film. Marketing the documentary to the audience The Luna Cinema emphasized both the popular appeal of the documentary: 'Re: A Pier tells the rock and roll story of #HastingsPier' (Twitter, 9 May 2016) and the location and surrounding scenery: ‘a very special screening all about the restoration of this iconic landmark, on our huge screen, with the pier and the sea at sunset as an unforgettable background!’.5 As with the outdoor screening on Clevedon Pier, viewing pleasures arose from the beside-the-screen spectacle as much as the on-the-screen spectacle, helping to secure ‘brilliant cinematic experiences’ as detailed below.6

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Immersive and social pleasures: Popular pop-up cinema and the community pier The essential spectacular element of cinema, however, does not account for the entire cinematic experience. As Richard Maltby (amongst others) has pointed out, ‘for most audiences for most of the history of cinema’ the relationship with ‘the cinema’ has been founded upon the ‘social experience of cinemagoing’ (2007: n.p.). For the respondents to the Clevedon Pier questionnaire, this certainly holds true. Beyond the scenic views, audience members cite the social nature of the event – ‘everyone together’, ‘great company’, ‘night with wife’ – as another pleasurable element of the evening. Although these comments could pertain to any collective viewing experience, once placed in dialogue with others that emphasize the pier as a community hub (e.g. ‘[I came] to support the pier and local events’), they suggest that the social lived experience of cinema is more cohesive in smaller, regional locales. The sizeable ticket sales for Re: A Pier on Hastings Pier and the frequent cheers and claps Lauchlan’s film received while it screened support this claim. In doing so, these seaside pop-up cinema events resonate with work by Karina Aveyard and Albert Moran (2014) on rural cinemagoing, taken forward in this volume by Emma Pett, that considers collective action and interaction as distinctive markers of cinema attendance outside the big city. Importantly, the meaningful interpersonal encounters encouraged by the outdoor screenings at Clevedon and Hastings feed into the current rejuvenation of Britain’s coastal resorts, allowing a tradition of pleasurable social exchange to re-emerge. As Rob Shields asserts: ‘The chief importance of the seaside resorts had always been social’ (1991: 81). Indeed, Shields notes the suspect promotion of the seaside for ‘medicinal’ purposes during the nineteenth century, suggesting that it was little more than ‘a justification for pleasures […] controlled through a complex set of regulating social rituals’ (79). Contemporary understandings of seaside resorts as spaces of leisure, however, did not truly take shape until the late 1800s and early 1900s with the growth of mass tourism, helped by newly opened rail lines, and a subsequent upsurge in artificial attractions. Chief amongst the ‘peculiar menu of seaside entertainments’ (Walton 2000: 94) now on offer at the British seaside was the pleasure pier. In this new era of pier design and development, the early promenade structure that had offered its visitors a wealth of spatiovisual delights usually remained in some form but a completely open-deck appearance was fast becoming a rarity; numerous covered buildings (pavilions and theatres) increasingly appeared on the wooden slats, allowing for indoor entertainments that protect the pier’s revenue from the temperamental British weather. John K. Walton offers a detailed description of the pier in its twentieth century incarnation: There was the pleasure pier, as promenading area and a place of assignation, with its distinctive architecture of eclectic frivolity and its musical, comic and dramatic entertainments, from the unpretentious band for open-air dancing and the small

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‘end-of-the-pier show’ or ‘concert party’ comprising comic and sentimental songs and sketches, to the substantial orchestra with real (if intermittent) pretensions to ‘high culture’. (2000: 94) At Clevedon, the pier’s delicate design refused to accommodate many of the structural additions required for the more ambitious entertainments, but a small, makeshift ‘Nissen hut’ appeared at the pier head around 1913, presumably first used as a waiting room for those taking pleasure trips on the sea but certainly facilitating indoor pleasures by the 1930s (see the TV documentary Tis Clevedon Pier). Used as a dance hall, the hut on the pier had enormous cultural and social value for the local population, especially those too young to venture into local pubs or drive to more exciting attractions in the larger city of Bristol. As the visitors first waltzed and, then, in the post-war era jived the night away, romances were initiated, friendships were strengthened and, in line with the vagaries of the country’s youth population, cultural battle lines were drawn. In the 1950s, for example, Teddy Boys from nearby Weston-super-Mare often spent the early part of their night out lingering at the shore end of Clevedon Pier, disrupting their teenage neighbours’ evening activities (Brennan et al. 2016). The pop-up cinema event at Clevedon thus served, in part, to re-establish the pier’s popular cultural heritage. Having been somewhat sidelined in the redevelopment of the pier over the years, acknowledging and rekindling a vibrant past of youthful entertainments fits with the recent repurposing of the pier as a community space (emphasized by its community share offer) and, in particular, the desire to have the local population ‘see their pier differently’ (Edbrooke 2016: n.p.). Responses in the questionnaires evidence the event’s success on this point: when prompted to sum up their experience of the event answers such as ‘unexpected’, ‘lively’, ‘fun’, ‘great idea’ and ‘I wished you’d thought of this sooner’ dominated. In this way, it tallies with Brett Lashua’s (2013) discussion on pop-up cinema at Marshall’s Mill, a protected heritage site in Leeds, northern England, as well as Linda Levitt’s consideration of certain sites that host outdoor screenings in Los Angeles, discussed in this volume. In these instances, one-off film screenings can be understood to simultaneously recover lost layers of meaning and prompt new contemporary ideas about the sites used for exhibition, especially in terms of their capacity to facilitate youthful entertainments. Admittedly, at our Clevedon Pier event there were few teenagers in the audience (although there were several preteens present), but it remains significant that the largest proportion of the responses to the questionnaire came from the twenty-five to thirty-four year old age range, offering a welcome expansion to the pier’s traditional demographic of visitors aged forty and above (71 per cent)7 and suggesting the value of cinemagoing to placemaking in the twenty-first century (Figure 3.2). The appropriateness of the screening to the pier’s popular cultural heritage and, concurrently, its appeal to younger visitors was clearly further strengthened by the film selection. With an age rating of ‘12’ in the UK, Pirates of the Caribbean was a family friendly choice but, more significantly, its sea-themed content positioned the pop-up event in a long lineage of pleasure pier spectacles and performances that make use of their distinctive seaside settings, from the once-popular acrobatic efforts of

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Figure 3.2  Audience waiting for the sun to set at Clevedon Pier screening of Pirates of the Caribbean – author’s own

humans diving off pier heads to the aquaria that still mark several of the country’s pier entrances, for example the Oceanarium in Bournemouth. As with these earlier or more established attractions, the film’s sea-themed content worked with its setting to enliven the audience experience, offering in this instance a level of ‘immersion’ (Griffiths 2013: 3) impossible to achieve in a traditional screening space. This ‘bodily participation in the experience’ (Griffiths 2013: 3) was not only aided by the sea views that extended well beyond the frame, filling the audience’s peripheral vision in a way that can only be achieved in a covered auditorium via IMAX technology, but also by the sounds, smells and tactile sensations offered by the natural surrounds. Several respondents commented on how they thought the ‘pirate atmosphere’ was key to their enjoyment of the evening, and although only three respondents indicated they would not watch Pirates of the Caribbean in the cinema, this still gives an indication about the perceived added meaning or value the site brought to the experience. One questionnaire respondent, for example, favourably noted how ‘smelling the sea’ added to the evening’s pleasures, while a staff member from the Clevedon Curzon Community Cinema remarked: ‘It was great fun, with high tide happening below us and the waves rocking the pier slightly!’ (Wade 2016: n.p.). At the Hastings Pier screening the immersive qualities were heightened by Re: A Pier’s content, which revealed an indelible connection to the location via the mirroring of the on-screen landscape and Hastings town as its backdrop, the sea soundscape

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blending with the film soundtrack and the situating of the audience on the pier deck where much of the film’s narrative unfolds. The augmented cinematic experience was cued by the seemingly spontaneous arrival of the local Section 5 drummers, featured in the film, prior to the screening commencing. This created an atmosphere and level of engagement that gestured towards ‘participatory cinema’ events (Atkinson and Kennedy 2016a: 142), such as London-based Secret Cinema, which combine film screenings with interactive performances in venues that echo the film’s setting. In the film, the extravagantly dressed band is featured to illustrate the town’s community spirit and endearingly idiosyncratic penchant for spectacular forms of street entertainment, so when they entered onto the pier in front of the inflatable screen in May 2016, the event of screening the film in itself was integrated into the continuum of such public displays of local community celebration (Figure 3.3). The town’s sea-front promenade and historical houses as a backdrop to the film created an immersive feeling of being ‘in the film’ landscape, as did the sound of the waves and the nightlife – youth larking about on the beach punctuated by the sound of an emergency vehicle rushing by in the background. This immersive impression was further underpinned by the wind catching the screen and the ripple animating in ‘3D’ the waves crashing on the shore as shot on film. On the one hand, this created the subtle effect of the film’s diegetic world bleeding into the exhibition environment, and on the other hand it offered a historicizing continuum as the documentary concentrated on

Figure 3.3  The Luna Cinema, Kino Digital & Hastings Pier premier screening of Re: A Pier – author’s own

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people’s memories of growing up on the pier and being immersed in its vibrant youth culture stretching back half a century. The fact that the exhibition arrangement was not designed specifically with this experience in mind did not take away from its impact. Deliberately designed immersive cinema events, Atkinson and Kennedy point out, work to produce increasingly elaborate surroundings to offer ‘compelling, navigable and immersive extensions of the film’s fictional environment’ (2016b: 257) that have the effect of blending the exhibition environment and the film scenography. Whilst the Re: A Pier screening offered a more serendipitous and inconsistent blend of the film’s diegesis and the viewing experience, it nevertheless achieved the effect of bringing the film ‘off the screen’ (2016b: 257). In the case of the Clevedon screening, several respondents saw the pop-up cinema as breaking new ground in terms of what the space might mean to them. This came through in how they tolerated with good humour some technical problems at the beginning of the evening and in questionnaire responses and exit interviews that both indicate they experienced the event as ‘unique’ and as the beginning of something new and positive: ‘please do more, my family will come’. In their responses to what the notion of a ‘community pier’ means to them, respondents emphasize three themes in particular: inclusivity, community cohesion and taking ownership—‘a place for the community to come together and enjoy’, ‘run by and for the community’, ‘for the whole community to enjoy and cherish’ and ‘bring[s] the community together’. Noting the enthusiasm with which the older-generation volunteers embraced the tasks of ‘setting the scene’ for the evening and stewarding throughout the event, dressed in pirate outfits, opportunities for cross-generational exchange were plenty in evidence. To build on this, young people could become more involved in the cinema programming and organizing of future events.

Conclusion This chapter has probed the potential for open-air cinema as a means to engage local audiences to enjoy their pier as a community space, tapping into the site’s history of spatiovisual pleasures whilst also making productive use of its more youth-orientated (audiovisual) popular cultural heritage. We argue that the popup cinema is conducive to the architecture of the open-plan piers and fits the more events-orientated operational model adopted by pier organizations aspiring to set new goals for the functions of traditional Victorian seaside piers in the twenty-first century. However, whether open-air pop-up cinema on piers is sustainable and can offer significant value in relation to the more long-term project of seaside regeneration is open to questioning. A number of factors, such as their dependency on suitable weather, the varying standard in terms of vision and sound quality, and the economic uncertainty associated with securing revenue from one-off events, suggest a limited value and legacy. Nevertheless, innovative and quirky cinema events in unusual spaces clearly do have a place in contemporary seaside culture and, as this chapter concludes,

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open-air cinema is increasingly accessible to community organizations due to new technologies for projection and models of affordability. We posit that open-air cinema enthusiasts will continue to explore exhibition spaces in creative ways that stimulate not just new experiences of films, but new experiences of the exhibition space as impacted by cinematic ‘insurgent place making’ (Merker 2010 cited in Harris 2015: 593). With this in mind, any further redevelopments of British pleasure piers should be wary of building too many sealed structures that deny these enthusiasts the aesthetic, immersive and social pleasures of being outside. Further, pop-up cinema has proved to be conducive with the economic model of the community pier in the twenty-first century, which requires flexibility and adaptability. It also fits with an approach that seeks to strike a balance between commercial and community orientated strategies, as demonstrated by Clevedon Pier and Heritage Trust’s preference for a mainstream film for their pier’s screening whilst embracing the DIY set-up. Repurposing a pier for film screenings in the context of the community pier model inevitably involves a consideration of a multitude of complex issues, including questions around programming, audiences’ appropriation of the space and opportunities for collaborations with other business or community organizations. This complexity should not, however, dissuade the custodians of community piers from designing and delivering outdoor screenings. As this chapter has explored, such special events renew enthusiasm for these Victorian structures, tap into a latent pier–cinema relationship and fuel the UK’s developing live cinema culture.

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Encountering Urban Space Live at The Floating Cinema Ella Harris

Live cinema has been defined as cinema that ‘escapes beyond the boundaries of the auditorium’ (Atkinson and Kennedy 2016) to occupy ‘real’ space. In live cinema screenings elements of ‘performance or interactivity inspired by the content of the film’ (Live Cinema 2016), such as in-fiction sets or live music, serve as a ‘real’ accompaniment to the ‘reel’ cinematic spectacle. If live cinema is usually understood in terms of the expansion of cinematic spectacle into real space, by adding live elements of performance, then in this chapter I argue that when thinking about what ‘escapes beyond the boundaries of the auditorium’ (Live Cinema 2016) in live cinema it is also crucial to consider the transference of cinematic ways of seeing into the off-screen world. If live cinema brings the cinematic into real (usually urban) space, then in doing so it transfers cinema’s modes of attention beyond the screen too. In particular, I argue two key things. First, if cinema is a ‘spectactorial means of transportation’ (Bruno 2002: 20), engaging a sense of voyage and discovery, then The Floating Cinema transfer this exploratory mode of encounter beyond the film auditorium. And secondly, if cinema presents space-time as open and generative, as famously argued by Deleuze (Deleuze 2013), then live cinema expands this cinematic way of seeing into real city spaces, casting urban space-time too as dynamic. Embedded in this argument are two key propositions about what the ‘live’ in live cinema could encompass. First, there is the suggestion that ‘live’ could correspond to a ‘bringing to life’ of cinematic ways of seeing, a transference of particular kinds of cinematic viewing practices onto the everyday, urban world. Secondly, there is the related proposition that, through this ‘bringing to life’ of cinematic ways of seeing, urban space is revealed to be in itself lively and therefore open to being transformed. In this chapter I will explore live cinematic ways of seeing through a detailed exploration of The Floating Cinema, a London-based mobile cinema who operate out of a purpose-built canal boat. I consider a collection of events that The Floating Cinema held in the London suburb of Brentford to mark the beginning and end of a tour they undertook of the waterways between London and Bristol in the summer of 2015. The Floating Cinema are an unusual example of live cinema exhibition because they programme workshops and events which, while inspired by their film screenings, are not necessarily simultaneous with them, often occurring on different days all together.

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They call this model ‘expanded cinema’, and work on the premise that, as articulated by their Education and Participation Curator, Anna Ramsay, ‘you can experience things cinematically without necessarily sitting and watching a film’.1 My discussion of The Floating Cinema takes up this assertion and investigates how, and with what consequences, The Floating Cinema extend cinematic ways of seeing beyond the event of film spectatorship, bringing cinematic viewing practices to bear on the urban. The chapter begins with an introduction to The Floating Cinema and their events in Brentford. It then moves on to an exploration of what it means to ‘see cinematically’, laying the ground work for the chapter’s consideration of how this way of seeing is transferred beyond the site of spectatorship by The Floating Cinema. In this section I survey prominent theorizations of cinematic perception to identify two interrelated elements of what it means to ‘see cinematically’, both of which can be defined as types of sensitivity to motion. First, I consider how cinema engages ways of seeing routed in travel and urban mobility (Bruno 2002; Friedberg 1993). Secondly, I explore arguments that cinema illuminates the more radical form of motion that Deleuze terms ‘the virtual’, the capacity of all things for generative transformation (Benjamin 2008; Clarke and Doel 2005). After this, my arguments progress through four main empirical sections across which I demonstrate how The Floating Cinema engage this cinematic way of seeing in real, urban space. In the first, I consider The Floating Cinema’s material site of exhibition, the boat out of which they operate. I examine the role that the boat, as an object, plays in inviting viewers to take on the spirit of an imaginative journey. In the second empirical section I discuss the films The Floating Cinema screened in Brentford Life in a Day (2011) and Barging Through London (Again) (2011) and consider how they introduced themes of motion and transformation taken up by the ‘live’ events programmed alongside them. In the third section I explore the way in which The Floating Cinema use artistic programming to draw out particular invitations of the films they showed and encourage participants to see urban spacetime cinematically. In the fourth section I consider the instrumentalities this mode of cinematic encounter might have by thinking through the enabling context of The Floating Cinema’s screening and the changes currently facing Brentford. I suggest that if live cinema reveals urban space-time as lively, always in process and open to change (Massey 2005), then that liveliness can lead to contestation, as a malleable space-time can be wrought in multiple and conflicted ways. In concluding, I suggest that live cinema can be understood as a way of seeing urban space that, while formulated in sites of film exhibition, can be taken up by other urban actors. I argue that addressing live cinema’s viewing practices is therefore crucial to understanding contemporary processes of urban change.

The Floating Cinema The Floating Cinema is run by the London-based company ‘Up Projects’, who are an organization that ‘curates, commissions and produces contemporary art that explores heritage, identity and place, engaging citizens of London, the UK and across the globe’.

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Up Projects aims to ‘empower communities and enrich the public sphere’ by working with artists (UpProjects 2016). The proposals for The Floating Cinema were developed by Up Projects in response to the 2012 Olympic Games held in London. As Anna explained, the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC), who managed the Olympic park, wanted cultural activities to ‘connect people living around the park with what was happening inside of it and make it feel like it was sort of a space for them’. As the Olympic park, situated in the Lea Valley area of East London, is strewn with canals, Up Projects came up with the idea to produce a floating cinema that could reach those who do not normally attend cultural events by literally going to them, pitching the boat up at various points along East London’s waterways. After beginning in this context The Floating Cinema soon expanded into a Londonwide project. Each season The Floating Cinema develop a programme of events that use film and activities to respond to urban, environmental and heritage issues along the waterways. For example, their event ‘Come Fishing’ (June 2014) included a screening of Kiss the Water (2013), a ‘homage to fly fishing’ (The Floating Cinema floatingcinema 2016), followed by a trip to a fishery to engage with issues of water pollution in London’s waterways. Or, their event ‘Vertical Living’ (June 2014) explored ‘the impact of urban renewal’ and took place by the Balfron Tower, a housing block in East London that, having formerly been social housing, is set for regeneration. My focus here is the series of events which The Floating Cinema held in the London suburb of Brentford in the summer of 2015 as part of their tour from London to Bristol. Brentford lies to the west of London and was incorporated into Greater London in 1965 having previously been a separate town. It has one of the highest deprivation levels in the borough of Hounslow (Hounslow.gov.uk 2015). Regeneration schemes are currently under way, much of which centre around the redevelopment of the canal front areas at Brentford Lock and the creation of new housing. The Floating Cinema held two weekends worth of events in Brentford at the start and end of the tour, securing a mooring and event space for their boat through a collaboration with Brentford Lock West, one of the housing developers working along the lock. Brentford was picked as the start and end point for the tour because it is the farthest place you can go along the canal before leaving London. The Floating Cinema commissioned a sound artist, Yan Seznec, to accompany the boat for the tour’s duration. Yan worked with interested people at various points along the waterway to explore and record the sounds of their area. He spent a week in Bristol in the middle of the tour compiling these collected sounds into a full piece.2 The events in Brentford included three events at the start of the tour. First, there was a sound recording workshop with Yan. Secondly, there was an open-air screening of the feature film Life in a Day (2011) along with the short film, Barging through London (Again) (2011), a shot-by-shot remake of a 1924 original Barging Through London (Parkinson) made by artists Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie. Thirdly, there was an afternoon of on-board screenings of archive footage of Brentford held on the boat which visitors could drop in and out of. Two events also occurred to mark the boat’s return to Brentford. There was a daytime event where Yan exhibited his finished sound piece and an evening event where two films were screened, another film by Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie, Repeat to Flourish (2015),

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along with Penny Woolcock’s From the Sea to the Land Beyond (2012). As a whole, the tour aimed to encourage ‘a playful discovery of local landscapes and heritage’ (The Floating Cinema, floatingcinema 2016). At each stop along the way from Brentford to Bristol The Floating Cinema programmed events, including sound workshops, walks, artist talks and, of course, film screenings that were tailored to the specific locations they moored the boat.

Cinematic ways of seeing As stated in the introduction, this chapter argues that The Floating Cinema’s ‘expanded’ model of film spectatorship produces a ‘live’ mode of cinematic seeing, transferring the ways of seeing engaged by cinema beyond the event of film exhibition. But what does it mean to ‘see cinematically’? Before exploring The Floating Cinema’s live mode of cinematic seeing, this section considers some of the ways in which cinema is argued to have reformulated vision. I explore arguments that cinema fosters enhanced attention to motion, first, to travel and urban mobility and, secondly, to the potential for motion inherent in all things, what Deleuze terms ‘the virtual’. It has long been argued that cinema responds to ways of seeing generated by mobility. Cinema has been described as ‘A means of travel-dwelling’ (Bruno 1997) where, despite the spectator’s physical immobility, imaginative journeys take place. Cinema’s tracking shots, pans and tilts ‘aspire to motion’ (Bruno 2002), creating a sense of mobility and discovery which pertains to that of physical, geographical explorations. The sense of motion within the cinematic gaze is also routed in specific forms of urban mobility. Scholars such as Giuliana Bruno and Anne Friedberg have suggested that because cinematic technologies evolved at a time of rapid urbanization, coming of age with the modern city, they developed a ‘mobile gaze’, one which responds to the forms of viewing-on-the-move that typified modern cities, for example train travel, window shopping and urban wandering (Bruno 2002; Friedberg 1993). For Bruno, ‘the language of cinema was born out of ’ these ‘urban motions’ emerging as part of ‘a changing relation between spatial perception and bodily movement’ (Bruno 1997). The ‘moving image’ provided an imaginative counterpart to the modes of transit and wandering that were distinctive of urban life at the time. It solidified these modes of mobile viewing into a new way of seeing, and, as Fredric Jameson has argued, recalibrated perception in response to that changing relation between the body and the city (1991). This recalibration to new urban environments, as Jameson suggests, functions specifically by adjusting sensitivity to space and time. Indeed, as well as engaging the ‘mobile gaze’ afforded by travel and urban mobility, cinema is also argued to produce a refined perceptive sensitivity to spatio-temporality, creating ways of seeing that anticipate the motion, fragmentation, simultaneity and dislocation experienced in modern cities. Furthermore, as David Clarke and Marcus Doel have explored, cinema develops attentiveness not just to existing spatio-temporal distributions but also to the as yet unactivated capacities of urban environments to change. They argue that film

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draws attention to the fact that ‘everything is suspended in movement’ (2005: 603– 604), that all things are in the process of undergoing continuous, unfinished changes. Clarke and Doel’s argument that cinema draws attention to the capacities of cities to change mobilizes Deleuze’s influential writing on cinema and, specifically, on the ability of the film image to express time and space as open and generative. For Deleuze, postwar cinema in particular marked a shift in the signification of temporality (Deleuze 2013). Early cinema, he argues, produced a mechanistic version of temporality (the movement-image), in which movement corresponded to the unfolding of parts making up an already-defined, and therefore closed, set. Post-war cinema, however, thinks time as open. Rather than movements being produced mechanically through the linking of parts it generates ‘time-images’, images which evoke their own virtual capacities to be otherwise and thus produce qualitative and non-linear changes in the ‘whole’ that is the film. As well as asserting that film expresses time as open, Deleuze also argues that post-war cinema produces sensitivity to the openness of space. He argues that postwar films are remarkable for what he calls the ‘any-space-whatever’. In the aftermath of the war’s momentous destruction, European cities were full of ruined buildings and deserted sites (Pratt and San Juan 2014: 36), and these were reflected in filmic spaces. Deleuze argues that such sites are ones that, having had their usual functions disturbed, have lost their determination (Deleuze 2013: 113), revealing their openness to being unmade and reproduced differently. They therefore create a way of seeing space that is attentive to its contingent distribution and its ability to be continuously reformulated. What the time-image and the any-space-whatever both achieve, for Deleuze, and therefore what makes cinema so compelling, is the illumination of the ‘virtual’ capacities of assemblages, as well as their ability to undergo transformations. The ‘virtual’ is defined in opposition to the ‘actual’, where the actual corresponds to the assemblage’s currently manifested qualities and the virtual corresponds to its capacities to be otherwise. Crucially though, the virtual does not become actual in entirely predictable ways; the process of actualization is a generative act which involves qualitative, novel changes. This transformative relationship between the virtual and the actual means that ‘everything is suspended in movement’ (Clarke and Doel 2007: 603–604) as all forms, because of their virtual capacities, are open to constant and unpredictable changes. To ‘see cinematically’ can therefore be understood as taking on a mode of perception that ‘aspires to motion’ (Bruno 2002: 19), which includes a sense of transit and voyage through the urban environment as well as an attentiveness to the virtual capacities of urban space. In this chapter I argue that The Floating Cinema’s live events make these ways of seeing ‘live’, extending them beyond the immediate act of film spectatorship to bring ongoing and latent changes in the urban fabric of Brentford into focus.

The boat The Floating Cinema’s boat is as much a transport vessel as a space of cinema screening. It was designed to enable The Floating Cinema to navigate the waterways of London and reach communities living along them (Figure 4.1). This practical functionality of

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Figure 4.1  The Floating Cinema boat: promotional image from their website. http://www. somewhere.org.uk/projects/floatingcinema/

the boat as a mode of transport is foundational to the expanded cinematic way of seeing that The Floating Cinema engage. More than just serving as a site of exhibition, the boat is an affective object that, by signifying the journey it has undertaken, invites participants to take up a way of seeing routed in journey and discovery. In this section I explore how the boat signals an invitation into The Floating Cinema’s live cinematic way of seeing by encouraging the sense of imaginative voyage and discovery engaged by cinema. As a mobile site of spectatorship, The Floating Cinema’s boat is reminiscent of historical itinerant sites of pre-cinematic and cinematic exhibition (Clarke and Doel 2005; Crary 2002; Della Dora 2009; Griffiths 2013). It recalls, for example, the peep show boxes which itinerant showmen in the seventeenth century and onwards would carry to towns and villages, bringing images of distant lands to relatively immobile populations (Della Dora 2007). Equally, the boat echoes the function of the panoramas popular in the nineteenth century which Griffiths has argued served as ‘moving geography lessons’ (2013: 72), providing communities with images of exotic travel destinations or detailed renditions of important events. However, while these devices brought viewers experiences of being elsewhere, The Floating Cinema, rather than bringing exotic images of faraway places to its spectators, uses its ‘mobile gaze’ to make the locations it visits exotic in themselves, programming events that are designed to draw out what is interesting or unique about the location they arrive in. Despite being a mode of transport, the journey the boat enables is primarily imaginative, and it is in this sense that it evokes a cinematic way of seeing, one in which the spectator takes on an attitude of discovery while remaining in situ. Yet The Floating Cinema’s cinematic way of seeing is distinctive in that it offers a journey into new ways of perceiving familiar spaces along the waterways, rather than into encounters with the unknown. Through this reversal The Floating Cinema evokes a way of seeing one’s own place as if travelling to it from afar. The aesthetics of the boat assist in the production of this exploratory mode of encounter. For Della Dora, the materiality of the peep show box was key to the aura of discovery it created. She discusses how ‘much of the charm derived from the very

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physical structure of the peepshow: from it being a hidden space’ (2007: 290). This comment is strikingly similar to a comment Anna made during our interview, where she suggested that The Floating Cinema’s boat has a ‘charm’ that generates a ‘sense of wonder’. This charm, as with the peepshow box, derives from the enticing physicality of the boat. Anna described that whenever they travel the waterways, people hang out of windows, looking at the curious boat and wondering ‘what is this!?’ Della Dora suggests that, for the peep show, it is precisely the physical act of looking through the eyepiece which lent mystique to the worlds pictured within. Likewise, the materiality of The Floating Cinema’s boat is crucial to its immersive view. Throughout my interview with Anna she used the phrase ‘get on board’ in two senses: a literal sense – meaning to get on board the boat; and a metaphorical sense – meaning to get on board with the spirit of the project. This dual usage of the term is telling; for Floating Cinema, the boat acts as a kind of portal through which spectators can enter into a cinematic way of seeing, to get on board, and to engage with the boat as an object is to take on that orientation to the world. As well as encouraging a sense of discovery, the boat also provides tools with which to investigate the urban world. As mentioned in the introduction, the boat was purpose-designed by architects. In a promotional video about the boat’s making, the architects, Duggan Morris, describe the impetus for its design. Having researched the history of the Lea Valley area they discovered that it was, historically, a hub of invention where British aviation technologies were pioneered and where petrol was developed and named. Responding to this, they wanted to make a boat that would evoke that history. The tag line for the design project became ‘a cargo of extraordinary objects’, a phrase that was meant to evoke the fascination that would have been felt when watching industrial hoppers carry new inventions along London’s waterways. The original plan was to use a refurbished industrial hopper boat, so that the vessel would grow, quite literally, out of the area’s history of invention. However, the repairs and adjustments needed proved too extensive so a boat was designed and built from scratch. To keep the idea of invention alive without the ex-industrial boat, Duggan Morris worked on a new design that would make the boat look ‘magical’, evoking the fascination of inventions being transported along the canals. In manifesting this, they also drew aesthetically on cinema’s own magic. They designed a boat with a shell made from translucent materials so that it would light up at night like a classic cinema light box. This ‘cargo of extraordinary objects’ therefore came to conflate two kinds of technological invention: on the one hand, it evoked East London’s history of industrial invention, and on the other it evoked cinema as another kind of magical technology. The mixing of these two kinds of fascination – fascination with invention and fascination with cinema – recalls the way in which film, in its early years, was itself seen as a kind of scientific innovation (Gunning 1997). At travelling fairs in the Victorian era, moving images were often shown alongside other technologies of vision, including x-ray, and presented as another example of inventions to enhance human perception. The Floating Cinema’s boat – designed to evoke both the magic of cinema and the magic of invention – recalls this former understanding of film as an invention and, in particular, one that would offer, like x-ray, new ways of

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seeing and understanding the human condition. Indeed, Anna talks about The Floating Cinema as a set of tools for discovery. She explains how lots of different equipment is contained on the boat, hidden away in its tardis-like structure, so that it ‘unpacks into many different versions of itself ’. Specifically, the boat contains tools for three methods modes of discovery. First, an internal screen, sound equipment and moveable seating allow films to be screened inside the boat so that small groups can watch and discuss films in an intimate setting. Secondly, the boat also serves as a site from which to project films onto a much larger pull-down screen that can be placed on land to create an open-air screening space, complete with cushions and deck chairs to sit on. In this mode, The Floating Cinema are able to turn any urban space into a site of exhibition. Thirdly, the boat can also be used as a base for workshops. Tables and chairs as well as basic tools like pens, paper and notice boards are stored in its backrooms and can be used to turn the boat into a site for contemplation and creativity. The boat can thus transform to offer various tools through which to explore the city and, as the next sections will discuss, uncover its complexities and concealed capacities.

Live cinematic seeing: Film as the point of departure Although my main argument in this chapter is that The Floating Cinema’s live practices of exhibition move cinematic seeing beyond the immediate act of film spectatorship, it is still, of course, important to explore the role that the film screenings themselves play in this process. In this section, I start with a discussion of the film that The Floating Cinema’s tour opened with, a screening of Kevin Macdonald’s Life in a Day (2011) to consider how this screening fed into The Floating Cinema’s live events. At The Floating Cinema’s event, Life in a Day was projected from the boat onto a large screen set up at Brentford Lock. The event was free to attend, and priority for tickets was given to local residents. Life in a Day is a crowdsourced documentary made from 80,000 YouTube clips, recorded by ‘ordinary’ people on one particular day: 24 July 2010. The film spans twenty-four hours, showing self-recorded clips of people’s lives from around the world. The clips foreground the common, emotional dimensions of human experience, but also the multiplicity of human life on earth, the manifold disparate ways in which humans inhabit the plan we share. The neat unit of time that Life in a Day traverses is expanded open to show how this finite period contains innumerable differentiated experiences of life. If it is a film about commonality across cultures, it is also a film about differentiation, about the various trajectories which can unfold from a common spacetime. This theme was reinforced by the short film programmed alongside Life in a Day: Barging Through London (Again), made by artists Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie, who have been working with Up Projects for several years. Nina and Karen reshot the 1924 travelogue Barging Through London, a film which documented the diversity of urban life along the waterways of London. In their remake they used dual projection to show their contemporary version side by side with the original footage. If Life

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in a Day demonstrated the different trajectories that lives can take even as they inhabit the same 24 hour period, then Barging Through London (Again) suggested the transformations a place can undergo over time. The dual projection technique presented the archival and the contemporary footage as two manifestations of the same places’ multiple potentials or, in Deleuze’s terms, two actualizations of the waterways virtual capacities. In addition, the two films screened together foregrounded the agency that we have over the transformations that lives and places take. Nina and Carol gave a short talk in which they urged spectators to approach Life in a Day in the context of the film just shown and, in doing so, to reflect on the idea that ‘archive footage is something we are all making all the time’. Whereas Barging Through London is a film maker’s representation of London’s waterways, Life in a Day is made up of selfshot footage. In this context, Nina and Carol encouraged the spectators to consider that whereas archive footage may seem to capture an ‘objective’ image of place as defined by experts, they are in fact the ones who – by taking pictures on mobile phones or by recording videos of friends and families – are making the images of life in Brentford that will come to define how it is imagined in future years. This was an assertion that, rather than image making being the preserve of professional film makers, ‘ordinary’ people also have agency over the way we imagine the spaces we inhabit. The significance of this, for The Floating Cinema, was that if ‘ordinary’ people have agency over how spaces are imagined, they thereby have agency over how spaces transform. As Anna elucidated, their Brentford events were concerned with how residents can not only make sense of changes happening in their area but also ‘make change’ themselves, so that ‘this is not just something happening to them’ but a process they have agency within. The screenings of these two films therefore encouraged spectators to imagine space-time as something open to be shaped through their actions.

Live cinematic seeing: Serious play at the sound workshop The Floating Cinema’s ‘expanded’ model of film spectatorship includes events and workshops that respond to, but are not simultaneous with their film screenings. Recalling the expanded cinema movement of the 1970s, which used multiscreen projections, multimedia and audience participation to rethink film as an immersive experience in real space, The Floating Cinema’s version of expanded cinema also involves the creation of an off-screen cinematic environment. In this section, I examine how the cinematic ways of seeing space-time as open engaged by the films screened are transferred beyond the screen by The Floating Cinema’s live programming. I characterize this way of seeing as ‘serious play’, a term which Geraldine Pratt and Marie San Juan have used to explore the ludic, investigative orientation to urban space engaged by pop-up cinemas (2014: 171). For me, serious play is a mode of encounter which is playful, because it reveals space-time to be lively and therefore something that can be creatively interacted with and altered. Yet, it is also a ‘serious’ mode of encounter

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because, as the final section will explore in more depth, these ludic experiments have significant consequences for the trajectories of the city. The ideas set up by the screening of Life in a Day were present across the events that The Floating Cinema undertook for the rest of the tour. The day after the screening of Life in a Day, The Floating Cinema held on board screenings of archive footage of Brentford, borrowed from the Hounslow local archives. The footage was played on a loop and anybody could drop by and come on board to watch. The archive footage demonstrated many things that Brentford once was (and still is) – a destination for fishing, holiday making and a boating community. It also pointed towards past visions of the future of Brentford. The footage showed how Brentford, when it first became part of Greater London, was a site in which new visions of the urban were played out as rows of terraced housing were knocked down to make way for the now hated high-rise blocks that were at the time seen as groundbreaking architectural design. The archive footage included disparate materials, from public safety adverts broadcast in the 1950s to footage of local fairs. Much like the way in which Life in a Day showed multiple experiences of the world, the archive footage showed the many ways in which Brentford has, over the years, been experienced and imagined. On the day leading up to the Life in a Day screening, Yan, the artist in residence, held his first sound workshop. Yan’s workshops were integral to his artist in residence project, which aimed to create ‘a digital sound library, including “forgotten sounds” from the canal’s industrial past’. Yan worked with time-lapse and underwater recording to engage with the fabric of the waterways and the themes of change and continuity, focusing on ‘embedded memories, histories, and identities inherent in the canal’ to explore ‘its character in both past and present functions’ (The Floating Cinema, Floatingcinema, 2015). At the workshops, he enlisted participants to take part in ‘sound gathering walks’. The invitation to gather sounds anticipated the proposition introduced at the screening of Life in a Day, that we are all making archive footage, giving participants the ability to coproduce an account of the canals. There was no film screening accompanying Yan’s event. Rather than inviting participants to a film screening and using that to inspire an exploratory orientation to urban space, it was the boat, outside which Yan set up his workshop, that enticed passers-by to ‘get on board’ with Yan’s workshop and adopt a cinematic way of seeing. As the previous section explored, the boat functions as an affective object which engages spectators in cinema’s sense of imaginative, rather than physical exploration. Meanwhile, the workshops held on board orientate this investigate way of seeing towards the place in which the boat is pitched, drawing out undiscovered aspects of familiar places. Here, Yan’s workshop, set up outside the boat, encouraged spectators to take an imaginative journey into Brentford, not by watching a film, but by ‘getting on board’ with a cinematic mode of encounter. Yan enlisted visitors and passers-by to use his sound equipment to explore the noises of Brentford. As the workshop began, I watched as Yan laid out his recording tools across the table. He tested them out, fiddling with them, dipping them in the water and noting the sounds coming through the large headphones he had connected up to them. He did seem much like an inventor, bringing a ‘cargo of extraordinary

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Figure 4.2  Yan’s sound equipment – author’s own

objects’ to offer to passers-by. As people dropped into the workshop, Yan showed them how to use the sound recorders, and they came back with recordings of various sounds including water fountains, factories, dogs or the hum of the M4 motorway (Figure 4.2). The equipment Yan supplied to participants, on a very literal level, enabled a deepening of sensory perception comparable to the kind of intensification of visual and acoustic perception that Walter Benjamin famously ascribed to film (Benjamin 2008: 28). I followed Yan and one participant as they walked down the canal, aiming to record the sounds of a nearby pharmaceuticals factory (GlaxoSmithKline). On the way, Yan stopped to record the sounds of a metal fence. We watched as Yan shook the fence, nodding at the noises it was making. The headphones seemed to communicate something to him that we, without them, could not hear. Yan turned enthusiastically to his participant, ‘Wanna hear it?’ he said. The participant put the headphones on and nodded appreciatively at the noise’s new qualities, transmitted through the headphones. He handed the headphones back to Yan. ‘It’s kind of amazing,’ Yan said. The dislocation between what could be heard through the headphones and what could be heard by others created the sense that Yan’s sound equipment gives access to a usually hidden layer of reality, to elements of the soundscape that usually go unnoticed (Figure 4.3). For Walter Benjamin, film’s enhanced perceptual capacities, including acoustic perception had radical implications for experiences of the urban. Film’s new way of seeing ‘exploded’ ‘imprisoning’ imaginaries of the city, allowing urban space-time to be rethought (2008: 28). Yan’s enhanced acoustic perception worked, similarly, to foreground the open possibilities for imagining and producing space-time, as I will explore, by bringing different sensory experiences into co-presence. As we can see from the list of sounds Yan and his participants aimed to record (Figure 4.4), the sound equipment was used to focus attention on fading, enduring and emergent elements of Brentford. Participants were interested in recording remaining evidence of Brentford’s history as a destination for boating and wildlife. They also wanted to record more recent elements of Brentford’s soundscapes, such as the variety of accents that people in Brentford have, the trains and planes that run regularly over the canal, and the industries now located there such as the huge GlaxoSmithKline factory. In addition, participants were keen to record features of Brentford that relate specifically to the post-recession climate, including ‘austerity’ and ‘apathy’, and in using sound to trace the processes of gentrification beginning to take hold in Brentford (Figure 4.4).

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Figure 4.3  Yan and participant recording the sounds of Brentford – author’s own

The soundscape pointed towards the ongoing becoming of Brentford as a place that, like all places, is in transition (Massey 2005), a place made up of processes originating from and moving in contrasting, sometimes conflicting, directions. In lived experience, some of these qualities of place are more dominant in others; for example, apathy is far less notable in the sensory landscape than fountains. They also belong to different temporal registers; some evoke fading versions of Brentford, for example its amount of wildlife has waned significantly since the building of the M4 in the area, while others, such as gentrification, point to new processes beginning to take hold. Yan’s practice

Figure 4.4  Possible sounds to record – author’s own

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brought these sounds belonging to different characterizations and eras of Brentford together in co-existence, encouraging participants to distribute their attention across these disparate articles evenly and therefore to explode, as Benjamin describes, rigid imaginaries of the area. The final piece that Yan produced, which included sounds not just from Brentford but from the whole tour, blended geographical and temporally disparate recordings to create a soundscape of the waterways that undermined their linearity and instead asserted the co-presence of these various elements of the waterways as capacities in the present. This co-presence of capacities can be understood through a closer look at Deleuze’s theorization of time as open. Deleuze follows Bergson in characterizing time as non-linear. What this means is that the past is not a finished event, but continues to structure and interact with the present. This occurs because past events create the virtual capacities of a system that can then be activated in unpredictable ways by future processes (Deleuze 1988). The past is therefore not left behind but contracted into the present moment where it continues to play an active role in the system’s trajectories. Similarly, the sounds Yan and his participants recorded drew attention to the virtual capacities that continue to exist in and structure the possibilities of Brentford as well as to the trajectories it is currently following and embarking on. They brought boating and nature back to the forefront of imaginations of Brentford, focusing attention on its changing demographics and industries, and tried to capture nebulous changes in its contemporary atmosphere by finding auditory traces of apathy and austerity. In assembling these different sounds Yan made co-present the various capacities structuring what Brentford has been and could be. If we read this process through Pratt and San Juan’s discussion of ‘serious play’, we can see that it engaged a critical attuning to urban space through which nascent processes such as gentrification and austerity could be brought into focus, and overlooked characteristics of Brentford could resurface and influence its future developments. This can be seen as a cinematic way of seeing because it asserts the openness of space-time, the multiple transformations which its virtual capacities afford. Brentford is revealed as a place which has taken many forms for many people, and can be assembled into multiple more. Moreover, participants are encouraged to position themselves as active agents within this process, able to imagine and produce their own versions of the area.

Navigating tensions Through this live cinematic way of seeing, urban space-time is itself shown to be lively. Space has been characterized as lively (Massey 2005: 14) within contemporary geography, where liveliness indicates the metastability of space-time as something that is ‘always in the process of being made’ (Massey 2005: 14). For Geographer Doreen Massey, space should be understood as a ‘simultaneity of stories so far’, as a fabric produced through interactions and therefore open to reformulations. However, this liveliness of space-time also means that its trajectories can be pulled in multiple ways by different actors. Indeed, if Yan’s cinematic way of seeing enabled

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critical attention to urban space for his participants, they also navigated the desires of others to act in and alter it. On the one hand, the Brentford events aimed to strengthen imaginaries of Brentford’s past, present and future and, in particular, help the local community connect more deeply with Brentford as a place to live. However, when interviewing Anna, it was apparent that the processes by which local residents were able to become more connected to the places they inhabited were also those mobilized by developers with potentially conflicting intents. As Anna describes, The Floating Cinema ‘try and spread the programme out across London’ to ‘places where harder to reach audiences would feel comfortable coming to as well, and we quite often work with the housing development agencies around there to make sure that those communities feel like this is something for them, that they are involved and they are invited’. This was very much the intention in Brentford where, as previously stated, tickets were put aside for local residents. Yet, as well as targeting the existing community of Brentford, the events were also aimed at the new residents of the flats being put up by Brentford Lock West. As mentioned, Brentford Lock West gave The Floating Cinema access to the mooring site and partly funded the event. Anna explains that they were ‘really keen that this was something for their residents too’, so tickets were offered to residents of Brentford Lock West’s housing as well as to other local residents. Yet, as is clear in the clips about The Floating Cinema, the new developments happening around the canal as part of the Brentford Lock development are not necessarily properties designed for those you might consider as ‘harder to reach’ audiences of cultural events. They are high-spec flats which are much more likely to attract wealthier newcomers to Brentford. So, if The Floating Cinema’s Brentford events worked with ‘harder to reach audiences’ to deepen imaginaries of the local area, they simultaneously played into the desires of developers to brand Brentford as an exciting destination for new residents and potential buyers. Describing the difficulties of working in Brentford Anna explained Brentford wouldn’t really be considered a cultural destination, but we like that kind of challenge, we’re inviting an audience from all over London; ‘come to Brentford’, cause nobody else is going to ask you to do that, but we can make it look amazing, and it is a great space around the lock. And to think about celebrating everything that is Brentford, we did a thing about the M4, so really thinking about how to make the ordinary into something exciting.

Here, the suggestion that The Floating Cinema can ‘make the ordinary into something exciting’ has particular implications, given their collaboration with Brentford Lock West. The intention to ‘change how people think about Brentford, who comes here, would they again’ is potentially at odds, given the pressures on housing in the capital, with the intention to make Brentford a more exciting and meaningful place to live for its existing residents, because the increased popularity of the area furthers the seemingly inevitable process of displacement and gentrification. These were issues that were very apparent in Yan’s sound work explorations of Brentford. As we have seen, Yan’s list of sounds to record, made in collaboration

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with participants, included ‘austerity’, ‘apathy’, ‘gentrification’ and ‘capitalism’. As he made this list, Yan sat at the workspace he had set up, just in front of billboards advertising Brentford Lock West’s new development, behind which building work was taking place. While I was present, one participant went to record the sounds of the construction, and then returned to tick off ‘gentrification’ from the list. Interestingly, here, the participant’s critical exploration of urban space involved critiquing the very same development that was sponsoring The Floating Cinema. The incongruity between The Floating Cinema’s critical function and the negotiations and collaborations necessary for them to function is also an issue beyond the Brentford screenings. All their events, Anna says, take the canals as a starting point to think about ‘London as a transient city’. The canals are a good way into thinking about industrial decline and reuse and ‘to try and capture some of that and think about what it means for the people who live there now’. Yet, as Anna notes, the canals are also rapidly changing as sections of them are redeveloped and the waterways are getting busier, especially as London’s housing crisis pushes more people to think about living on the water. The canals, for The Floating Cinema, are then at the centre of a tension between London’s industrial history and its imagined futures. Although Anna suggests that the cultural events going on around the canals, including their own, have positively changed perceptions of them, making them ‘a lovely place to go’, she also describes the difficulty of navigating the desires of developers to capitalize financially on that reimagining. She says, ‘It’s something we’re really aware of … not using art as a tool for regeneration but as a place to talk about regeneration, a place to think about how communities remain resilient within a time of change.’ She adds, ‘We have to find our own ethics in how we work with developers’ and try and make it a learning process for them too. The difficulty Anna points to suggests that the live application of a cinematic way of seeing to urban space has potentially contradictory impacts because, in asserting the openness of space to being reproduced, it paves the way for both local groups and commercial developers to enact their own reimaginations.

Conclusions In this chapter, I have argued that The Floating Cinema’s expanded model of film spectatorship brings cinematic ways of seeing into urban space. I suggested that, in this context, the ‘live’ in Live Cinema could indicate a bringing to life of cinematic viewing practices, through which an attitude of discovery is adopted and the same encounter with space-time as that which film produces is enacted in urban space. Exploring this assertion at The Floating Cinema, I have detailed how this cinematic way of seeing urban space generates a critical engagement with what places are and could be, an orientation of serious play. However, I have also considered the ways in which these viewing practices can play into the hands of developers keen to capitalize financially on the reimagining of place. Given the burgeoning interest in live cinema, and other immersive and site-specific modes of spectatorship, understanding the ways in which their viewing practices seep

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out into the city is of upmost importance. Building on the long-standing tradition of scholarship on cinema and the city (Clarke 1997), live cinema poses an invitation to think about film and the urban afresh. Events like those held by The Floating Cinema extend the spectacular elements of film exhibition beyond the screen and, in doing so, bring cinema’s ways of seeing to bear on urban space. Furthermore, as I have explored, these ways of seeing, while formulated in sites of film exhibition, can be mobilized by other urban actors. Exploring these viewing practices is therefore crucial not just for studies of contemporary film spectatorship, but for understanding contemporary urban change. In this chapter, I have embarked on explorations of this sort. In identifying cinematic encounter as a means of critical exploration but also a force that can be mobilized by developers, I have demonstrated the importance of detailed and specific explorations of how live cinema is developed and deployed as a way of seeing the city.

Introduction Sarah Atkinson and Helen W. Kennedy

The act of film viewing is inherently a time-based, temporally specific occasion. Nowhere more is this the case than in film festivals which work to a large extent to a specific annual or biannual calendar, take place over a clearly defined number of days and are usually very heavily and carefully scheduled. The temporality is also signalled in elements of ritual and the imbuement of the festival with a sense of ‘event’ – a buzz of excitement and that feeling of time marked out as distinct and separate from the routine, quotidian cycle of a particular city or community. It is this sense of occasion that is bound up in the ontology of the festival that is captured and communicated by all three contributions to this section. Temporality has been a cross-cutting theme across all of our work, and indeed many contributions to the overall book could have been included under this section thematic. We have chosen to bring together contributions that have a particular focus upon live cinema within the context of film festivals within this section, taking forward a recommendation that we proposed in our Participations-themed section where we identified that ‘work is needed to connect this up [i.e. the work of live cinema] with the blossoming field of Film Festival Studies’ (Atkinson and Kennedy 2016a). It was our intention to solicit work that built specifically on this field, since it is principally the context of film festival programming and curation activity in the UK that affords and supports experimentations and innovations in exhibition practices. Festivals have encouraged new commissions in this area which further augment the sense of occasion and event of the festival itself and provide another means through which to encourage a diversity of audiences. The programming of festivals provides for the establishment of temporally fleeting but affective rich formations of different social groupings, different crowds, communities and audiences. Of course, temporalities provide the overarching theme for this chapter, but clearly the spatial and place-based themes of the previous chapter continue within all of these location-specific contributions, which all also provide important insights into placemaking, cinematic geographies and cartographies. The conception of Glasgow as a cinematic city and the geo-specific activities of the San Sebastian film festival bring spatial as well as temporal dimensions to the fore. As such, this section provides a collective interrogation into how festivals temporally and temporarily shape their

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environments and what effect this has on their participants, local communities and placemaking. The temporal and the temporary dimension of the work in this section plays out in four key ways: 1. The time-based and temporally specific nature of film festivals (they occur at a certain point each year, are of a specific duration and are then subject to meticulous programming and time management) 2. The temporary formation of social groupings (they bring disparate groups together in a set of temporal engagements and encounters in the formation of transitory ‘experience communities’ (Atkinson and Kennedy 2017)) 3. The rhetoric of temporal uniqueness, where marketing materials are peppered with statements such as ‘like never before’ and ‘first-of-a-kind’ whilst also heavily underlining the novelty of the immersiveness of ‘live’ in the use of phrases such as ‘in the moment’, ‘as it happens’ and ‘unrepeatable’ 4. The temporally fleeting opportunities for researchers to be able to capture this work effectively and to study it rigorously, leading to innovation in methodological approaches In the chapters which follow, these different qualities of festivals are analysed in much greater depth, Dickson refers to this first quality of festivals, for instance, as ‘spatiotemporal programming’, whilst Vélez-Serna examines how these events become imbued with a sense of ‘appointment’ (Vélez-Serna). Secondly, the social dimensions and instances of situated sociality are what Dickson refers to as ‘festivalisation’ with specific qualities that relate to this. The social and/or community dimension allows for the emergence of audience behaviours and practices and audience subjectivities as ‘festival-goer’ (Dickson) as ‘tourist’ (Vélez-Serna) and as ‘cult film fan’ (Vivar). The contributions tease out these festivalizing practices, the spaces and times of tourist performance, the role of playfulness and audience participation in the unfolding of these events. Thirdly, the rhetoric of the ‘live’ is writ large within event and live cinema industry discourse and marketing hyperbole. This is compounded by terms such as ‘event’ and ‘live’ being used interchangeably to underscore their uniqueness which further operates within a rubric of exclusivity and within an economy of scarcity. This instantaneity of the new is illuminated by each of the accounts within this section, including the ‘in the moment offerings’ (Dickson) and the suggestion of ‘re-incident ephemerality’ (Vélez-Serna). Fourthly, these contributions all represent a range of different methodological approaches including participant ethnography, autoethnographic, participant observations and interviews. These works provide empirical insights into localized contexts. All three researchers provide vivid and acute insights from their privileged positions as audience/insiders. It is important to acknowledge that all of these contributions speak to the key themes of the preceding chapter, in their consideration of the broader transformation of the cities in which they are set, in the context of city branding, placemaking strategies and ‘programmable cities’.

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There has been limited work undertaken on audience festivals and audience studies in relation to film festivals. Also lacking has been a focus upon the operational challenges of film festivals. Positioned squarely in the field of Film Festival Studies, Dickson’s chapter addresses such a gap. Based on a three-year ethnography of Glasgow Film Festival (GFF) in Scotland, Dickson interrogates event-led exhibition practices within the context of a localized audience festival. She pays specific attention to the heightened engagement and experiential overlay of film screenings evolved through ‘eventised’, ‘festivalised’, ‘spatio-textural programming’ strategies which become aestheticized in space–text relations (links between the spatial conditions and the textual content on screen), and embodied spectatorship. Dickson presents her evidence and observations from a rich data set gathered over the extended threeyear case study – which includes content analysis of archival material and film festival ephemera, interviews, audience research and participant observation. Through a valuable industry partnership which enabled deep/high levels of access, Dickson is able to provide unique and nuanced insights through her audience–insider–researcher subjectivity. She evolves a festival programme typology through considerations of ‘experiential value’ and eventfulness in programming strategies, which include surprise films, interactive events and unorthodox screening environments. Through this work, Dickson successfully maps a rich picture of the texts, contexts and people that constitute the temporary festival ecosystem. Vélez-Serna’s work is positioned within audience and exhibition studies, but this work offers an interesting intervention into the fields of film festival studies both through the data and findings that she presents, as well as through a new methodological approach and conceptual framework around this notion of ‘tourist performance’. VélezSerna examines tourist performances in film festivals, through her own subjectivity as tourist engaging in tourist practices, planning, journeying, visiting new places, taking photographs, collecting souvenirs, inquisitions, which all serve to underscore the temporal dimension of cinemagoing. She considers four Glasgow-based film festivals – GFF, Southside Film Festival, Radical Film Network Festival and Unconference and Restless Natives. These four case studies provide a rich and detailed local perspective that has the potential to be mapped onto international contexts by future researchers who pick up and adapt her framework. The reflexivity of her tourist performativity approach is one that should provide scholars with new methods and approaches in film festival analysis. Vélez-Serna presents insights into the ways in which these events call upon new ways of understanding film spectatorship and audience behaviour. VélezSerna brings historical research into film exhibition and tourism studies to bear on these contemporary case studies, offering a deep understanding of the relationship between space, time and subjective performance. Vélez-Serna’s useful inclusion of maps and tables helpfully schematize and visualize festival organization through the ways in which they represent, navigate and map the city. Vivar’s chapter focuses on San Sebastian Horror and Fantasy Film Festival, otherwise known as ‘Horror Week’, as a temporary site which provides a space for a high-intensity celebration of cult film fandom. The festival is renowned for its participatory emphasis where auditoriums are transformed into sites of rowdy bacchanals – where eating,

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drinking and singing are not only allowed but positively encouraged by organizers. Vivar brings audience research and sociological accounts of play into dialogue with her field research in order to extend understandings of audience behaviour in event-led cinema. Vivar negotiates these disruptive terrains as a participant observer, amongst the cacophony and affective excess of the festival experience. The chapter provides an analysis of how this festival in particular promotes alternative modes of engagement – it is a longitudinal study of the annual event from 2012 to 2015, paying particular attention to resistant and disruptive audience practices. The depth and breadth of the study offers interesting insights into both how we conceive film festivals and how we may make assumptions or overly generalized characterizations of their participants. As indicated, the work here stages a very timely and appropriate engagement between the frameworks of live cinema and the temporalities of specific film festivals. In doing so, the authors draw on intensive, deeply immersed insider research subjectivities which provide rich and compelling insights, some valuable novel conceptual frameworks and terminologies and offer methodological innovations which will resonate far beyond the immediate contexts which are analysed here.

5

‘Beyond Film’ Experience: Festivalizing Practices and Shifting Spectatorship at Glasgow Film Festival Lesley-Ann Dickson

Introduction As ‘festivities’ film festivals are characterized by temporal structures (a distinct beginning and end), which present audiences with a momentary departure from the norm, that is, from more routine, or habitual, modes of film engagement. Stringer has suggested that the film festival is an ‘external agency that creates meanings around film texts’ and one could argue that these events offer engagements with film that are more heightened – in experiential terms – than that of the year-round cinema visits1 or indeed other modes of domestic or mobile film consumption (2003: 6). Within said temporalities, the cinematic experience at film festivals is eventized – or ‘festivalized’ – through multilayered programming (introductions, after screening debates, drop-in salons, screenings in non-cinematic spaces) and by way of ‘classic’ liveness2 (physical co-presence of special guests, performers, festival curators, audiences), each of which is narrativized in the ‘written festival’3 as a series of unique, one-off, temporal encounters by way of promotional motifs (‘rarity’, ‘first-timedness’, ‘seeing it first’, ‘one-off moments’, ‘something different’). These components come together to form multifaceted experiences that reach beyond the typical screening and reception of film texts in cinema. While acknowledging that all cinemagoing is experiential on some level, the chapter argues that film festivals are true manifestations of the live cinematic event and offer fertile ground for exploring shifting modes of cinematic exhibition and spectatorship both in the festival context and in year-round event-led cinema. It is now thought that a film festival opens every thirty-six hours somewhere in the world (Archibald and Miller 2011: 249). Indeed, the extraordinary rate at which the number of festivals has increased signals a growing appetite for the consumption of film in event contexts, and points to the increasing importance of ‘total experiences’ within the experience economy (De Valck 2007: 19). As multifaceted agents, film festivals take various thematic forms from business festivals (Cannes, Venice) to identity festivals (Frameline, UK Jewish Film Festival) to genre festivals (Sheffield Doc/ Fest, Screamfest Horror Film Festival). With such a spectrum of characterizations,

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much effort has gone into organizing and defining these phenomena. Indeed, since the late 2000s,4 film festivals have gained an increasing level of academic attention and Film Festival Studies has developed as an independent, multidisciplinary research field with growing prominence within the international research community.5 Nevertheless, although shifting somewhat, a significant proportion of festival research has focused on the industry and/or political role of these events (Archibald and Miller 2011; Cheung 2010; De Valck 2007; Iordanova 2006). Indeed, much attention has been directed at the functioning of international film festivals on the global festival circuit, as well as the historicization of these events as economic and political power forces (De Valck 2007; Iordanova and Rhyne 2009; Wong 2011). With such a global outlook, many of the smaller-local ‘audience’ festivals, which unlike exclusive entities like Cannes and Venice exist and thrive because of attendance by the general public and local communities, are largely underexplored from a critical perspective. Here attention turns away from the mega-festivals to consider a local audience festival, Glasgow Film Festival (GFF), which occupies an important position within the year-round cultural calendar for cinemagoers in Scotland’s most populated city. The chapter acknowledges that while it may be taken for granted that film festivals offer an experience that is distinctly more heightened, eventful, than that of year-round cinema, the experiential characteristics that might allow for these enhanced cinematic engagements needs empirical explanation. Thus, a key concern is the creative and innovative practices of festival exhibition – that is, modes of event programming – that serve to purposely construct eventfulness and festivity. Furthermore, the chapter serves to further understand the shifts in film audience experience and spectatorship that are signalled by such festivalization practices. Hence, a central aim of this chapter is to explore event-led cinema in the context of the quintessential film event in terms of the ‘constructed’ experience by festival producers, and to highlight the ‘lived’ experience by festival audiences.

Research design The chapter joins film festival research (De Valck et al. 2016), which has, in various ways, challenged the historic tensions that exist between text and context within Film Studies. Here, there is a conscious sidestepping of the restrictive ‘text above context’6 hierarchy that, arguably, still lingers within our discipline (although collections such as this are testament to the ongoing development of research that moves beyond the privileging of textual analysis). Thus, to develop an understanding of the eventized film experience in the context of festivity, the textual and the contextual are taken to have equivalent significance. Much like the approach taken by Atkinson and Kennedy (2016) in their investigation of Secret Cinema, an overarching event – in this case, a specific film festival – is taken as the principal object of study. Likewise, a holistic approach to the components that assemble to make up events within the overarching festival occasion is taken, considering texts (film, programmes, written festival), contexts (space, place, apparatus) and people (audiences and other stakeholders).

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Drawing on a three-year empirical case study of GFF (2011–2013), the chapter uses a range of materials – internal reportage and archival material on GFF ephemera, sources – interviews and informal discussion with festival programmers and focus groups with audiences, and a mix of desk research and fieldwork methods – interviews, archival research, content analysis, audience research and participant observation. The research took place within the context of industry-partnered research,7 which allowed for unrestricted access to the festival’s key research assets (documentation, people, screenings). As discussed elsewhere (Dickson 2016), film festival research relies on access due to the often-exclusive nature of these events. Indeed, a tacit view has emerged within Film Festival Studies that research which does not go ‘behind the velvet rope’8 is less reliable, lacking the legitimacy that comes with unrestricted access and insider knowledge (Dickson 2016). First, the chapter considers the ‘types’ of events programmed at film festivals – what content is on offer and what each type of event offers audiences in terms of distinct experience: asking what the ‘experiential value’ of events might be. Adopting Klinger’s notion that consideration of the ‘material’ is vital in order to understand reception of the ‘textual’,9 an extensive analysis of the festival programme and its presentation in brochures was undertaken. This involved content analysis of each festival programme over the research period (2011–2013), an approach first used by Nichols (1994) in his pioneering work on film festivals and new cinema. In doing so, the experiential value of each of the 880 screenings/events included in these programmes was considered. This allowed for the systematic categorization of types of experiential offerings at the festival, and further understanding of the programming practices that shape the overarching festival portfolio. Moving from programming practices and event typology, the chapter turns its attention to one particular type of festivalized event, which embodies GFF’s augmented approach to text and space. In agreement with Stringer that there is a need for more ethnographic approaches to the study of film festivals (2003: 242), the chapter draws on participant observation of a selection of events during the 2012 and 2013 festival editions. In Brewer’s view, the researcher – as participant observer – must play a double role in which they act as ‘part insider and part outsider […] simultaneously member and non-member’ (2000: 60). To explore both exhibition and reception of event-led cinema required fluidity concerning researcher positioning, which was not without its challenges, as I have discussed elsewhere (Dickson 2016). A fluid approach allowed me to experience events as a legitimate audience member and as a festival insider. As festival insider, I was able to observe and informally discuss the decisionmaking processes and practices of the GFF organization thereby gaining in-depth understanding of the ‘behind the scenes’ exhibition practices and ideologies that come together to construct the creative programme. Furthermore, drawing on observational accounts of attending these events as ‘audience member’ and pulling testimony from a larger piece of audience research with festival patrons10 allowed consideration of the alternative forms of spectatorship incited when audience attention is deliberately shifted off-screen, out towards the material characteristics of the physical spaces in which audiences consume film texts.

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A case study: Glasgow Film Festival GFF defines itself as an open-access, audience festival that provides films for all tastes and types of cinemagoers (multiplex to art house). The event is run by the not-forprofit organization, Glasgow Film,11 and operates out of a hub venue, Glasgow Film Theatre (GFT), in Glasgow’s city centre each February. Although the event remains a youth on the festival circuit, launched in 2005, seventy-three years after the world’s first film festival (Venice in 1932),12 the festival has matured and developed at a rapid speed, increasing from just below 5,000 attendances in 2005 to just below 40,000 in 2013 when the research concluded, representing around 700 per cent increase in just nine years. The festival’s success narrative is steeped in tribute for its audience with achievements enthusiastically ascribed – via press interviews, screening introductions, marketing materials – to local resident audience’s love of film and appetite for unique cinematic experiences. Nevertheless, while festival organizers are keen to attribute success to audiences, achievements are testament to the distinct identity its organizers have carved out for the event as a populist, inclusive and non-hierarchical festival that celebrates its linkage with Glasgow’s heritage as a ‘cinematic city’,13 its programmers’ creative and curatorial approach which involves layered programming and the nuanced use of non-cinematic spaces throughout the city, as well as its apparent reverence for festival attendees. While its identity is somewhat hyper-localized on the ground, GFF exists within broader discourses regarding the value of festivals for cultural tourism and cultural regeneration. Funded in part by Glasgow City Marketing Bureau,14 the festival forms part of a wider strategy that seeks to strengthen and develop the city’s image as a cultural location by ‘grow[ing] the shop window on Glasgow’ and making it a ‘premier winter destination’ (GFF 2010: 36).15 Indeed, for almost four decades, cultural events have aided the transformation of Glasgow from its former image as a grimy, decayed and impoverished location to a ‘vibrant, post-industrial, fashionable city’ (Mooney 2004: 329). The city has undergone numerous branding campaigns that have attempted to rejuvenate its profile, for instance the 1983 ‘Glasgow Miles Better’ campaign aimed to reinvigorate Glasgow’s image following deindustrialization and attract inward investment (Alderson 2008: online). However, the city’s 1990 reign as European City of Culture was arguably the most significant period in the city’s reimaging, and marked the initial stirrings of a growing demand for the city to have its own film festival.16 Aside from civic strategy, the festival’s inception was also driven by a local audience development project called the Cinezone initiative.17 The initiative involved the collaboration of three different types of cinema exhibitors on a central strip within the city: a multiplex (now Cineworld, formerly UGC); a cultural cinema/former art house (GFT); and a cross-arts venue (Centre for Contemporary Arts) that would come together to present Glasgow’s first film festival.18 The event would programme a diverse range of films from ‘mainstream to art house, vintage to futuristic’ (Anon 2011) and map audiences across these three types of exhibition sites during ‘festival time’. Thus, the logic behind Cinezone was both cultural and economic. On the one hand it would

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cultivate a more eclectic cinematic culture and complicate the mainstream–art film divide, yet it would also serve to increase box office figures at venues outside festival time. Harbord suggests that film culture is ‘institutionally and spatially located’ and that ‘the context of exhibition contributes to the social value of film cultures’ (2002: 39). With Cinezone, it was thought that film culture would become less ingrained in specific venues and that each space would become accessible, inclusive and familiar to audiences through their festival experiences, increasing the likelihood of ‘crosspollination’ year round (GFF 2004). Hence, the festival was spatially characterized from the outset – in terms of its emplacement within Glasgow and its attempt to address the ways in which cinema culture was spatially structured around particular ‘types’ of cinemas and the cinematic experiences they offer. It is often necessary for film festivals to expand their venue numbers or move to larger sites because of exponential growth. As De Valck points out, International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) began renting the Pathé Multiplex in 1997 because its core venues – performance art spaces and old cinema/theatres – were literally bursting at the seams (2007: 188). However, in contrast to the IFFR narrative, GFF began life as a spatially diverse institution and despite its links with art film culture – through its hub venue GFT – it functioned in harmony with the postmodern multiplex from the outset, a relationship that, as De Valck notes in relation to IFFR, ‘reveals itself as a hopeful metaphor for the event that nurtures cinephilia in its multiple forms’ (2005: 108). As GFF grew in attendances, and number and variety of films screened, it began to spill out of cinema auditoria across the city, transforming non-traditional sites – such as the city cathedral, museums, public transportation– into cinema spaces, producing a programme which was both textually diverse and spatially transgressive. Since 2005 GFF programmers have continually increased the number of festival spaces in the programme,19 exercising an enhanced level of creative licence, which goes beyond the booking and scheduling of films. The mounting spatial itinerary of the festival enhances the festival’s inherent connection to Glasgow, creating an ephemeral ‘filmic public sphere’, and demonstrates the festival’s commitment to the experiential possibilities of the aesthetic and narrative qualities of space (Wong 2011: 13).

Festival programme typology Of central concern here are the programming practices that serve to festivalize these events – in this case, GFF. This requires systematic consideration of the components of the overall festival programme: What types of content/events are programmed and under what principles? Consideration of the types of films/events programmed at film festivals is a less problematic task when examining specialist events such as genrebased festivals (horror, fantasy), type festivals (documentary, silent) or identity-based festivals (queer, Jewish, etc.) because programming strategies are based on an explicit correlation between the festival’s identity and the content it exhibits. When correlation between narrative image and festival image does not exist – as is the case with many

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audience festivals with diverse programmes – the process of understanding what types of film events are programmed becomes, arguably, more complex. Yet, understanding of the types of events programmed is crucial if we are to understand the ways in which film festivals offer something different from cinema, and indeed, the ways in which festival-like event programming might appear in year-round event-led cinematic programming. However, it would be infeasible to establish aesthetic distinctions of text throughout the GFF programme, given its diversity and scope, yet it is possible to look at patterns of film selection based on festivalization processes whereby the ‘experiential value’ of exhibition is considered alongside the narrative or aesthetic characteristics of film. Experiential value is taken to encompass the combined features and conditions of film/event presentation at film festivals: the film’s availability within its territorial context, its prospective paratextual elements, the meanings of its exhibition venue outside of festival time, its ability to be localized and the various rhetorical categories relatable to its exhibition (‘scarcity’, ‘discovery’, ‘limitedness’, ‘hand-picked’ and ‘firsttimeness’ ‘unique cinematic experience’). Ongoing observation of programming practices suggests that programmers process a series of non-textual questions when programming films: Will it be at another festival within the UK before GFF? Does it have a distributor? Is there any way of localizing the event or making its screening more eventful? Such questions sit alongside questions of aesthetics, cinematic style and narrative quality in the minds of festival programmers. Having considered these non-textual deliberations in relation to all films programmed between 2011 and 2013, a typology of festival programming is proposed, which includes the following: unique to festival (UF) in its locality film, returning to local cinema (RLC) films and beyond the film (BF) events (see Figure 5.1 and Table 5.1).

Figure 5.1  Percentage of festival programme (2011–2013) represented by each type of event in the festival programme typology

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Film type/characteristics Release/ distribution status

Premium value

Table 5.1  Festival programme typology 1. Unique to festival (UF)

2. Returning to local cinema (RLC)

3. Beyond the film events (BF)

‘Seeing It At All’

‘Seeing It First’

‘Experience beyond film’

New release. No UK distributor.

New release. Scheduled UK cinematic release, often in local cinemas in the weeks following the festival.

Already released on film or TV, or newly restored work.

Foreign-language film, independent film, often with ‘serious’ subject matter.

Tent-pole films, ‘specialised’ but lean towards mainstream tastes.

Repertory films from the canon, genre-based texts, and cult films/ TV, although not always a screening and includes film and non-film events.

Can include ‘classic’ liveness – physical co-presence of film talent.

Likely to have wellknown director or cast member/s. Mainly English-language but also includes some foreign-language titles, although mostly French or Italian. Can include ‘classic’ liveness – physical co-presence of film talent.

Live performance aspect (theatre, film, music, games, literature). Relies on paratext and forms of ‘classic’ liveness – physical co-presence of commentator or local personality (unlikely to be original film talent). Likely to be highly participative with audience being a crucial part of the event itinerary. Element of ‘game-play’ at some events through audience interactions.

GFF examples

Festival status

Festival audience

Content often taps into film education/history and features an educational/learning element. Attracts a small audience of cinephiles and a generally more risk-taking audience.

Attracts cinephiles, highlight seekers and festival scenesters.

Taps into fan culture. Attracts a more diverse audience – cinema-goers, music lovers, gamers, academics.

Reserved for ‘Gala’ strands and peak slots in the schedule.

Programmed across multiple non-conventional spaces and thus relies on partnership with local spaces.

Hard-sell, popularized through festival rhetoric and associations (“reminiscent of the Coen Brothers”) Will often have one screening. Will secure a prime spot on the schedule only if it has visiting talent. Examples: Chinese Takeaway (2011) and Banaz: A Love Story (2012)

Will usually have two screenings. Examples: Arbitrage (2012), Stoker (2013) and Bel Ami (2012).

Mode of spatio-textual programming. Examples: Jaws (1975) at The Tall Ship, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) at the Cathedral, and Surprise Films.

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Unique to festival (UF) The lifespan of a film in the festival’s geographical context is a key factor in programmers’ decision-making practice.20 When programming at GFF begins in October/November (five to six months before the event), programmers are aware of the titles that have done particularly well at Cannes, Berlin, Venice, London and Toronto and those that sit on the margins as obscure content, and so by the time a film is booked for GFF its cinematic future in the UK is usually determined. Those that have failed to secure UK distribution, and will not, therefore, have a UK release, are attractive to GFF programmers as they offer the chance to present rare content that, without the festival, will be inaccessible for local audiences. These films – which I term unique to festival in its locality films (UF) – represented 40 per cent of the overall GFF programme over the research period and were the dominant event mode.21 They tend to be independent, smaller-budget productions and are often foreign-language films. On account of their rarity, the premium ‘experiential value’ and source of eventfulness is: The chance to see it. UF film events, and their promotional narratives, are principally centred on film text, and so the cinematic experience at these events mirrors that of conventional cinema exhibition. Given the dominant position of text, UF events take place in the conventional cinema auditorium so that the screening is, technologically, one of cinematic standard. However, these events can – via supplementary content – take on a live cinema experience with the appearance of live guests and after screening debates. Nonetheless, although festivalized by means of their rarity, they are distinct from event-led cinema because they do not depend of live content and ancillary material, functioning – in experiential terms – on the strength of geographical scarcity.

Returning to local cinema (RLC) Janet Harbord suggests that the film première is the ‘premium value of a film festival’ because it creates temporal dimension and sense of liveness, of being in a ‘unique moment’ (2002: 68). Certainly GFF has adopted the festival traditions of programming premières, by presenting content prior to cinematic release. These films I term returning to local cinema (RLC) films. The key characteristic of RLC films is that they have UK distribution and will have a cinematic release in local cinemas after GFF. Therefore, the premium value and source of eventfulness of RLC film is: The chance to see it first. These titles represent around 31 per cent of the overall festival programme over the research period. They tend to appear across various strands from World Cinema to Best of British, but most often appear within the Gala strand. They are mainly Englishlanguage films but also include some foreign-language films, mostly French and Italian. Like UF films, these events centre on the film text and therefore occur within cinema spaces. They are described as ‘tent-pole’ films because they are guaranteed sellers and ‘hold the festival up’, as such they often occupy the largest auditoria and prime-time slots on the programme.

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Beyond the film (BF) events In her monograph on film festivals, De Valck argues that ‘it is not simply the artwork itself [film], but more specifically its spectacular exhibition that has become a commodified product in the cultural economy’ (2007: 19).22 This view aligns with the third and final category, beyond the film (BF) events, which represent around 29 per cent of total events programmed at GFF, and is the most pertinent event type to the concerns of this edition. BF events vary greatly but their consistent attribute is that they are purposefully constructed to offer audiences an experience that extends beyond the consumption of text. Thus, the premium experiential value and source of eventfulness is: Experience beyond film. That is to say that for BF events, the film text is only one component, albeit an important one, in the total experience. A main form of the BF event is repertory content (restored classics, 35 mm prints and cult films) that has previously had cinematic release and has since amassed an established audience following – mainstream, cult or otherwise. As such, the majority of audiences will have seen the film text before in some other context. These texts are layered with rich content to provide an experience that is distinct from previous textcentric engagements. For repertory films, the programming strategy is to present old content with new contextual frameworks, promoting these events as rare opportunities to ‘re-discover’ seen texts alongside nuanced interpretative frames of reference and meaning. An example of this type of BF event is the ‘Retrospective’ strand, during which each year celebrates the career of an eminent star. A single subject, often from the Star System, is chosen and branded – for instance, The Gene Kelly Retrospective – and over the course of the festival a repertoire of his/her work is screened alongside lengthy biographies from festival directors and film historians. For these events, the focus is the broader historical narrative surrounding a specific text and its functioning within the context of the chosen star’s career.23 Another rendition of the BF event is exhibition of unknown texts: surprise films. Surprise screenings are promoted to risk-taking audiences via mystery, discovery and suspense narratives. Surprise screenings are ‘festivalized’ via a sense of secrecy, mystery and playfulness – as Atkinson and Kennedy (2016) have discussed elsewhere, which is rolled out in the festival brochure and through social media in the run up to screenings. In looking at the festival programmes over the research period, surprise films are framed as ‘The annual treat […] one of the Festival’s best-kept secrets’ (GFF 2013: 36). These events are also framed with narratives of ‘trust’ in the festival programming (‘trust us, we’re festival programmers!’; GFF 2013: 36). Such playfulness encourages interactivity and participation from the audience, who actively try to guess surprise texts, demonstrating their awareness in various ways, via social media or in the auditorium. For instance, at the surprise screening at the 2013 festival, audience members – who correctly suspected the film would be Spring Breakers (2012) – brought along inflatable beach balls, which were bounced around the auditorium in the lead up to the film’s announcement. Thus, these events are more about circling prescreening narratives, participations and performances of knowledge than the film texts themselves. Indeed, during audience research, festivalgoers demonstrated recurring

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attendance at the surprise film screenings, yet were unable to recollect which films were screened: I’m looking forward to that (Surprise Film). I thought that was really good last year, I really like that idea, it’s really good, you don’t know what you’re going to get you know! Last year it was the Keira Knightly, Carey Mulligan and it was filmed in Scotland. I can’t remember the name of it but it was brilliant, it was maybe not one I’d have picked to see but I really enjoyed it because it was a surprise. It’s the whole thing that the projectionist isn’t meant to know until half an hour before; it gives it a real buzz. And everyone tries to guess what it is; everyone was trying to guess you know. (FG3, GFF12)24

Another sub-theme of the BF event is the interactive event. Interactive events are themed around film, cinema or some other medium (video games, animation) but their distinct characteristic is that they require a level of audience participation in order to function. Predicated and programmed on account of their interactive nature, examples include: Cinema City Walking Tour, a guided tour of historic picture palaces throughout Glasgow; Cinema City Treasure Hunt, a smartphone-led game throughout Glasgow; Rab’s Video Game Empty, a gaming event that enables the audience to challenge one another on a cinema screen. Interactive events rely heavily on fan culture, whereby ‘spectatorial culture [becomes] participatory culture’ (Jenkins 2006: 41). Live performance events also fall within the BF category. In his research on theatrical live streaming, Barker draws attention to ‘the dominant emphases of thinking about liveness within theatre and performance studies’, noting that ‘physical co-presence is the key component and technologies are only permissible to the extent that they do not inhibit, even might enhance, that sense of shared physical space’ (2013: 43). Thus, the premium value of these events is their liveness/performativity and the physical co-presence of performer and spectator in a shared space. In the context of the film festival, the performance aspect of these events must have some connection with moving image. For instance, the Calamity Jane Barn Dance at Glasgow’s Grand Ole Opry during GFF13 involved multiple experiential components: a screening of Calamity Jane (1953), a live band and barn dancing lessons for audiences. Live theatre also features in this programming category. GFF’s experimental strand dedicated to crossover between cinema, theatre and visual art, ‘Crossing the Line’, often includes high-concept theatrical presentation. As example, an event, entitled ‘85A presents: Jan Svankmajer’, celebrated the experimental work of the Czech filmmaker with short film, installations and theatrical staging and acting, which ‘[coaxes] … surreal imagery off the screen into life in front of you [with] tailor-made installations, costumed performers’ (GFF 2012: 15). Promoted as ‘a night at the multiplex it is not!’, what we see here is film exhibition take on a live performativity whereby the materiality of setting/staging transport the audience into an intermediate space between diegesis and real-world setting (see Figure 5.2). This aligns with Annette Kuhn’s work on memories cinemagoing of the 1930s in which she draws on Foucault, stating that ‘the temporality [and spatiality] of cinema in the world conjoins the temporality [and spatiality] of

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Figure 5.2  85A presents: Jan Svankmajer was held at The Glue Factory, a cross-arts exhibition space in Glasgow during GFF12. Source: Glasgow Film. Photo by Stuart Crawford.

the world in the cinema: and at the point where the two meet, cinema becomes, in Foucault’s sense of the term, a heterotopia: ‘a sort of place that lies outside all places and yet is actually localizable [sic]’ (Foucault 1986: 12; Kuhn 2004: 109)

Spatio-textual programming and embodied spectatorship In considering film festival management, Alex Fischer argues that programming texts is ‘only a single aspect of the larger and infinitely complex system of exhibition’ (2009: 154). Alongside print acquisition, film scheduling, writing reviews and coordinating media events, he notes that ‘securing appropriate venues’ is a key component of the system of festival exhibition (2009: 154). There is a unanimous perception across the GFF organization that the festival audience is one that it is keen to experiment with cinema contexts: ‘GFF audiences love to see films in unique settings’ (STV 2013: online). As noted, GFF has expanded in spatial terms and is now presented across twenty-seven venues around Glasgow, many of them public spaces that would not traditionally be associated with the screening of film. Festival organizers now employ a specific mode programming – which I term spatio-textual programming – that celebrates a connection between the ‘spatial conditions’ of the exhibition site and the ‘narrative images’ on-screen. The qualifiers of this type of programming are space-text relations in which content (usually repertory) is presented in particular

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spaces that share some synergy with the on-screen narrative/aesthetic. Thus, spatiotextual programming deliberately draws attention away from the screen out towards the material characteristics of exhibition space. This manner of programming sees programmers match spaces with texts according to the aesthetic characteristics of both story world space and physical screening environments, and so decisions are made on the basis of the aesthetics of site and its experiential possibilities, as opposed the technological specifications. In 2013, GFF programmers featured a screening of Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979) in a subway station in Glasgow city centre (see Figure 5.3). The film was an ‘unknown text’ event and was promoted to audiences via textual mystery and spatial setting as ‘The Secret Subway Event’. The programme synopsis for film, in which the New York City subway plays a prominent narrative setting, invited audiences to move away from conventional cinema to experience something different: Are you hungry for a different kind of film experience? Feeling adventurous? Step away from the cinema for one night only and follow us as we head to a land where commuters roam and films are never seen – until now! […] Only fifty lucky souls can boldly go where no projector has gone before so book early for this mystery screening. (GFF 2013: 54)

A more spectacular example of spatio-textual programming was the use of the city’s Cathedral for a screening of The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) with live musical accompaniment in 2013 (see Figure 5.4). For this screening audiences were led inside

Figure 5.3  Screening of The Warriors in one of Glasgow’s subway stations during GFF13. Source: Glasgow Film. Photo by Alistair Devine.

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Figure 5.4  Glasgow Cathedral during the screening of The Passion of Joan of Arc at GFF13. Source: Glasgow Film. Photo by Eoin Carey.

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the cathedral by church ushers (as opposed to GFF volunteers) and directed to their seats in the pews, where they then experienced a spiritually charged rendition of the film with overlaid live score with soprano, church organ and electronics. What was particularly interesting at this screening was the new forms of behavioural practice that played out in the space – the audience was eerily silent and took on a uniformed formality with limited pre-screening prattle and hesitant applause at the film’s conclusion. This indicates the varying forms of behavioural norms that are understood and adopted across ephemeral sites, which, outside of festival time, have very different purposes. Here the audiences’ festival practice moved away from active debate and discussion, more orientated towards a practice that signalled respectfulness and reserve. In each of these examples, festival programmers are encouraging an embodied spectator experience whereby the material and aesthetic characteristics of site are fundamental to the overall experience and the festival practices and performances it implies. In doing so, it potentially incites an immersive experience that differs from conventional notions of cinema spectatorship and indeed festivalgoing practice. Here, a multi-sensorial experience encourages audiences to consume texts textually and spatially, behaviourally and corporeally, diegetically and non-diegetically. Consequently, the experience becomes one of shared symbolic space between virtual setting and real setting, which allows for the momentary transportation to the story world. This prompts connection with notions of the tourist gaze whereby there is a ‘constant push and pull of distanced immersion […] a desire to be fully immersed in an environment yet literally or figuratively distanced from the scene in order to occupy a comfortable viewing position’ (Strain 2003: 27) In 2012, a nineteenth-century ship featured for the first time as an ephemeral festival space. Berthed on the River Clyde, The Glenlee – a former cargo ship built in 1896 and now maritime museum called The Tall Ship – was used for screenings of the maritime-themed film The Maggie (1954). The event was so successful that the following year the site was used for screening other films with maritime themes such as Jaws (1975), Dead Calm (1989) and Peter Pan (1953). Again, spatial aesthetic was the principal motivation for programmers, and films with maritime themes were then sourced to complement the space, rather than the other way around. The screening of The Maggie involved a heated cargo hold filled with chairs and a DVD screened on a 16 mm projector, making the technical standard no better than home-viewing (see Figure 5.5). Rather, it was the fact that the ‘aesthetics of site create a homology with the content of the film’ – the spatial characteristics of the site and the familiarly between real space and narrative image – that came to the fore as both a motivation for attendance and an experiential pleasure (Harbord 2002: 67). As one participant attending a retrospective screening of The Maggie notes: What motivated you to come to Glasgow Film Festival this year? (Researcher, FG2) For me, it’s the special things, like I went to The Maggie the other night on the boat. It was great. You’re looking at a guy on the screen and he’s surrounded by rivets and you look around and there are rivets all about you! And the boat is creaking. (Attendee, FG2, GFF12)

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Figure 5.5  The hull of the Tall Ship set up for the screening of The Maggie at GFF12. Source: Glasgow Film. Photo by Ingrid Mur.

This experiential account focuses not on technical specifications or the film itself, but instead on the spatial qualities of the venue and space–text relations. Gratification emerges from historical, aesthetic and thematic allegiance between the text and the space, which I have termed elsewhere as ‘space-text-body pleasures’ (Dickson 2015). This experience is not predicated on distance or otherness (other space), rather the account suggests an experience of shared aesthetics, which sees this spectator actively locate cohesion between virtual and real space identifying visual homology (‘rivets’) and acoustic homology (‘creaking’). This implies a synchronic extension of the aesthetics and narrative of the film text, in which the audience and the exhibition space occupy a key role in the lived experience of the event. Moreover, when audience gaze is purposefully directed off-screen onto the physical environment in which they consume film, they arguably adopt a heightened awareness of their physical emplacement and embodiment within the cinematic space (Dickson 2015). This incites an acute awareness of the presence of ‘other bodies’ and proximate positioning between the self and other spectators within the real-world setting (Dickson 2015). I argue that this consequently produces an unconventional form of gaze wherein viewers not only observe the film text as object, but also fellow audience members as subjects in the non-diegetic scene/setting: There was actually a gentlemen there watching the film. My friend overheard him talking. He had sailed the Glenlee back from Canada. He looked about a hundred. And they’ve got an area for children where they can hit a wee button and

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In this spectator’s view, the spatiality of the event and its features provoked a strong sense of nostalgia for his fellow audience member. For the festivalgoer, observing a pleasurable moment experienced by another audience member compounded the overall experience as something special – a unique moment that made his nondiegetic experience something of beauty. Moreover, his articulation of the experience in spatial terms – both in relation to space–text homology and being close enough to this participant to observe his emotions – indicates that for this participant the spatial characteristics, as opposed to the purely textual, are what made his festival experience a memorable one. That is to say that his festivalgoing experience was about the consumption of space, as well as the consumption of text. Likewise, the spatial attributes of the ship arguably provoked perceived notions of nostalgia and memory through sight, sound and place, which in many ways aligns with Edward Casey’s notion that ‘places serve to situate one’s memorial life’ (1987: 183– 184). Much like Kuhn’s work on memories of cinemagoing, this testimony – in which connections between the real world and the story world come to the fore – demonstrates audience understanding of the ‘difference between the world in the cinema on one hand and cinema in the world on the other’ (2004: 113). The experience is enhanced by a homologous relationship between these worlds, yet, while the attendee imaginatively takes meaning from space–text, off-screen–on-screen homology, he remains corporeally present and critically reflective. Interestingly, these observations were made in the gantry on the upper deck of the ship after the film screening, which implies a more diachronic experience in which narrative meaning-making occurs beyond both the screen and the duration of the film and provides a vivid and materially grounded version of the kinds of expanded interpretative time frames suggested by Janet Staiger (2000). As such, there is suggestion here that the festival experience extends beyond the visual pleasures of the screen, offering a more multi-sensory (physical/visual/aural/ auditory), and temporally and spatially extended, experience.

Conclusion A central argument made in this chapter is that in order to understand the popularity of film festivals – and indeed event-led cinema – we must consider the construction of eventfulness through creative programming. Here I suggest that local audience film festivals, which unlike mega-festival function because of mass attendance by the general cinemagoing public, are model entities for exploring the multifaceted assembly of ‘eventfulness’ in live cinema exhibition, and are, therefore, a rich area for research that seeks to understand the construction of event-led cinema and its reception. Nevertheless, as I have argued here and elsewhere, festival research relies on limited gatekeeping and access to a range of festival assets for analysis.

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As indicated, festival programmes are eventized through various festivalization practices. One way in which events are festivalized is through the layering of film texts with ‘classic liveness’ whereby special guests – academics, visiting talent, specialists – attend screenings in order to supplement textual content with contextual discussions and interactions. Likewise, the multilayering of ancillary content constructs the event atmosphere and offers interpretative and reflexive frameworks in relation to the production and reception of particular texts. Thus, a methodological contribution of this work is the way in which it moves away from a fixation with the aesthetics and textual value of festival content (Wong 2011), to consider films as ‘events’ and in relation to their contextual value: distinctiveness within their exhibition environment, that is, their territorial context and paratextual possibilities within that context, and the various rhetorical categories relatable to exhibition (‘scarcity’, ‘discovery’, ‘limitedness’, ‘hand-picked’ and ‘first-timeness’). As the GFF case demonstrates, there are patterns of festivalization practice in terms of exhibition and programming whereby the ‘experiential value’ of events can be understood in terms of three typological categories: films that audience will only have the chance to see (in cinemas) during the festival, films that audience will have the chance to see first and events that go beyond the film to offer audiences a unique experience that is textually and contextually compelling. What is clear is that film festivals, in light of their unyielding temporal composition and ‘in the moment’ offerings’, operate within a discourse of opportunity or as I have termed elsewhere within a series of ‘narratives of chance’ (Dickson 2014: 180). Thus, while I agree that a film’s appearance on a festival programme is connected to its narrative, aesthetic and production values, I argue that ‘exhibition value’ is a dominant aspect of event-led programming practice. A key function of the festival programmer is not only the imagining of reception of text for audiences, but the consumption of total experience. It is worth adding that the proposed typology is by no means exhaustive, but it is hoped that it might be adaptable in the context of other film festivals as research on festival programming continues to grow and new understandings emerge. The final category proposed – beyond the film events – highlights the ways in which eventfulness is a complex blend of multiple experiential components that have congruent significance. In these instances, the traditions of text above context are undermined in favour of experiences that rely as much on the contextual, material and aesthetic conditions of space (whether it is exhibition space or online media space) as they do on text. Furthermore, in the context of spatio-textual events, the physical setting where audiences experience these events often takes precedence over text in this mode of programming practice, in terms of the process of curation (site selection before textual programming). What is more at stake in the spatio-textual event context is the shifting modes of spectatorship that are signalled when programmers deliberately draw audience attention off-screen to observe, interpret and consume the material and aesthetic properties of the exhibition site. Here I argue that in the context of these events, spatial pleasure comes to the fore for attendees because it offers them a multisensory experience through shared space immersion – that is, inhabiting a similar spatial setting to the characters in the story world (Dickson 2015). Although there is

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no suggestion here that conventional cinema is not experiential – as McCulloch and Crisp (2016) note elsewhere: ‘all cinema is experiential’ – this chapter does argue that festivals are in the business of producing heightened experiences that are promoted and received as distinct ‘in the moment’ engagements that are multi-sensorial and corporeally charged, and that spatio-textual programming must be considered more than novelty events. Through the use of a mixed-method approach and by focusing on a single case study, a key suggestion that is made here is that festival programming does not rely on the overarching event as a means of festivalizing content. The grandiose of the umbrella event as ‘festivity’ is not sufficient in itself. Ruoff notes that ‘the best programming has an inner logic, or narrative structure, that finds audiences for films and films for audiences’ (2012: 17). Indeed, one might argue that in the context of the audience festival event, the latter comes to the fore. Indeed, festival programmers find themselves responding to shifts in cultural consumption signalled by the experience economy wherein cinemagoers are becoming more inclined to experience film in event contexts and experiment with unorthodox screening environments. That is to say, that this work suggests that in the temporal context of film festivals – and indeed other modes of event-led cinema – we see shifts in spectator practices whereby audiences live out their cinematic engagements through embodied experiences, consuming film in highly complex and active ways.

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Maps, Grids, Instructions: Pop-up Cinemagoing and Tourist Performance María A. Vélez-Serna

Cinema and tourism intersect in many ways, from cross-promotional strategies to aesthetic regimes and representational conventions. The proliferation of film festivals, and of film festival studies, has brought to the fore the politics of space that frame cinematic encounters (Harbord 2002: 67). Meanwhile, a very visible resurgence of non-theatrical exhibition, along with greater recognition of its place in history, draws attention to how cinema, ‘unleashed from its customary domain’, encounters viewers in their own everyday spaces (Klinger 2007: 274). The ‘pop-up’ cinema trend, with its temporary repurposing of shops, pubs, parks and walls for collective film viewing, further destabilizes the assumed correspondence between cinemagoing and cinema buildings. This chapter looks at non-theatrical festival screenings as a prime site to observe how the flexibility of the cinema situation enables other social activities to cluster around it. Cinemagoing is a use of time and space that enables collective experience through ritualized practices. When the screen leaves its habitual realms, these practices are transformed and hybridized; cinemagoers find themselves in a new context, where other ways of being are possible. Tourist performances are one of those scripts that may be activated alongside or in competition with practices of film spectatorship. This chapter examines the use of non-theatrical spaces by four film festivals in Glasgow (Scotland), arguing that, in a festival context, pop-up cinema events often enable tourist performances as part of the attraction of the show. The differences between the four events, all during the 2015–2016 season, shed light on the patterns of access and choice that structure audiences’ relationships to cinematic spaces, the material and discursive actions required to turn a place into a cinema/festival space, and the reconstruction of cinematic modes of behaviour and attention in new contexts. Film festival literature offers numerous studies on the role of festivals as instigators of tourism, and on the fraught relationships between global film flows and local agendas Research for this article was funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the University of Stirling as part of a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. I would like to thank Prof Karen Boyle for her mentorship, Dr David Archibald for the opportunity to be involved in festival activity, Dr Sarah Atkinson for opening up the live cinema field to my attention and Dr Lesley-Ann Dickson for kindly sharing and discussing her work with me. Special thanks and great admiration to everyone involved in organizing the screenings reported here.

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(Loist and de Valck 2012, Section 3). This chapter offers an approach informed by the concept of tourist performance in relation to my own participation in these events. As a researcher engaged in participant observation, some of what I do at screenings overlaps with tourist modes of interaction: I have been planning itineraries using festival brochures, undertaking urban journeys to places I do not know, exploring new spaces, taking photographs, asking questions and keeping souvenirs. Through this multimodal fieldwork I have become more aware of how these practices are facilitated or resisted by the different situations in which cinema appears. Taking this situated perspective as a starting point, I explore how non-conventional screening spaces create opportunities for tourist performances. To be clear, I am not suggesting that attendance to these events is ‘merely’ a form of tourism, as tourist performances are optional and indeed only available to some. When enacted, they become part of a repertoire of para-cinematic practices and pleasures, which can also include, for instance, gameplay (Atkinson and Kennedy 2015) and parenting (Boyle 2010). Furthermore, I do not intend the term ‘tourist performance’ as an accusation of falseness or a value judgement, but rather as a first step towards a more nuanced description of what I have encountered in my (ongoing) fieldwork. Looking at tourist interactions as performances recognizes people’s agency and creativity (compared to the more passive notion of the ‘tourist gaze’), while also observing how these practices are situated in space and time, and subject to social and spatial regulation (Adler 1989; Edensor 2000). The ‘material affordances’ of the space ‘enable and disable particular performances’ (Haldrup and Larsen 2009: 7–8). Similar ideas about the located and embodied dimensions of the cinema experience have been prominent for some time (Allen 1990, 2006; Bowles 2011; Hubbard 2003; Jancovich et al. 2003, Kuhn and Stacey 1998; Maltby et al. 2011; Waller 1995). ‘Performance’ is also one of Francesco Casetti’s ‘seven keywords for the cinema to come’, highlighting all the forms of doing that audiences need to master (2015: 186–190). This book itself can attest to the currency of liveness and performance in academic and industry agendas, and to the mix of empirical and theoretical work that this perspective allows. What I propose here is that there is another side to the experience of watching films collectively in non-conventional spaces, which is not fully accounted for if we focus on the cinema event itself. At the same time as performing as a cinemagoer, the visitor to the screening space can also be enacting tourist performances. These practices, such as photography, sightseeing and commentary, can clash with expectations around cinematic spaces and modes of attention, but they are also part of the pleasure and overall experience of the event. Throughout the history of collective cinemagoing, people have paid for access to a space at least as much as access to a movie. Gerben Bakker offers a formalization of this when describing the ‘spectator-hour’ as the unit of product sold by the cinema industry (2008: 320). In the current media environment, where access to moving image content is decoupled from its traditional spaces, cinemagoing is a choice of place through which audiences seek a situated type of social experience (Acland 2003: 46). This is even clearer in the rise of ‘pop-up’ and site-specific exhibition. On the one hand, as Kay Armatage notes, festivals tend to see extramural screenings as a form of outreach,

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bringing films to audiences who would not go to the cinema (2008: 38). On the other hand, an important part of the appeal of non-traditional cinema venues is that they give audiences the chance to be in a space where they are usually not allowed to be, as cinemagoing provides an excuse and a script for this presence, removing or lowering some access barriers. This opening up of spaces is entangled in unequal relationships of power, and can have a reifying effect in which I feel able to purchase access to urban space through the familiar transaction of acquiring a ticket. Film festivals blend media consumption and place-based tourism in a more explicit way. They produce ‘eventfulness’ – a limited-time appointment – but also a heightened relevance of place. Hence, festivals have long obtained public and commercial support on the back of their supposed or actual ability to attract visitors to a city. Glasgow is not alone in its attempt to overcome industrial decline by rebranding as a creative, cultural and ‘programmed’ city (Elsaesser [2005] 2013). However, this market-focused view of film festivals underrepresents many events throughout the world that aim to bring the cinema closer to localized audiences who are not in a position to travel – perhaps not even in their own cities (Dovey et al. 2013). Furthermore, the growing prevalence of non-theatrical exhibition sites as film festival venues demands a more localized analysis. At this scale, going places in your own city can also be an opportunity to engage in tourist practices. The limited duration of a film festival, its re-incident ephemerality, can be manufactured into the ‘buzz’ that city-marketers crave. From a less mercenary perspective, however, the temporality of the festival encourages the emergence of specific modes of attention and behaviour (de Valck 2005). The ‘time out of time’ of the festival extends its roots back to the carnival, or perhaps, as André Bazin argued in 1955, the monastic retreat. Tourism is a homologous ritual way to break with the mundane. However, the performance turn ‘problematizes the notion of tourism as involving predominantly extraordinary and non-routine experiences’ (Rakić and Chambers 2012). This tension between the everyday and the extraordinary is fundamental to current understandings of the cinema experience (Allen 2011:52; Kuhn 2002). Through the spatio-temporal compression of the festive frame, Film Festival Studies has contributed to a vocabulary of eventfulness which can also be used at smaller scales. In his well-known anthropology of Sundance, which starts with an explanation of Goffman’s performative approach, Daniel Dayan wrote of his initial interest in ‘the possibility of analysing a social phenomenon of brief duration […] a world meant to function for a rather brief period, proposing interactions both intense and ephemeral, relying on rules at once effective and largely improvised’ ([2000b] 2013: 46). This project is conducted in that spirit.

Festival spaces: Necessity and choice The four events I will consider are: Glasgow Film Festival (GFF), Southside Film Festival (SFF), Radical Film Network (RFN) Festival and Unconference, and Restless Natives (RN). All of these events comprised a variety of activities besides film screenings, but

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the following analysis focuses on film events within the main festival exclusively. I attended a total of thirty-three screenings across these events as part of my research project ‘Ephemeral Cinemas in Historical Perspective’, and was part of the broader organizing group for the Radical Film Network festival. Having lived in Glasgow for almost nine years, I cannot help but be acquainted with many of the organizers and party to casual conversations and social media dialogue. However, the analysis below is mainly grounded on the festival brochures and my own autoethnographic notes. Digital copies of the brochures are available online and the links are included in the bibliography. GFF started in 2005 and has become the main event in the local cinema calendar. It is an audience-focused festival showing mostly art house, European and world fiction features, but also including retrospective, Scottish and other strands. The popular success of its programme and marketing efforts has allowed the festival to grow very rapidly (see Lesley-Ann Dickson’s contribution to this volume). Its hub is Glasgow Film Theatre (GFT), a long-established, three-screen cultural cinema, but in 2016 there were festival events at twenty other locations. Most of the festival screenings are charged at standard GFT ticket prices, but the ‘special events’ tend to have a higher cost. When free tickets are available, the ability to claim these depends on flexible time and mobility, as they are quickly snapped up. The SFF was started in 2011 by freelance producer Karen O’Hare, ten years after the last cinema in the area closed. As a direct response to this lack of infrastructure in a large, mostly residential part of Glasgow, SFF has used all kinds of spaces in the area, through collaborations with local organizations and businesses. SFF has an eclectic programme that builds on local connections and includes free and paid events; in most cases the tickets are under standard cinema price, unless they include a meal. Southside Film runs other events occasionally throughout the year. The RFN Festival and Unconference was a one-off event organized by a large group of organizations and activists, linking to the aims of a pre-existing AHRC-funded Research Network, but organizing in an independent manner with support from Film Hub Scotland. It took place over four days in the May Day weekend of 2016 and spanned twenty-four locations, including an ‘unconference’ space where discussions took place in the mornings. All the events were run autonomously by the groups involved, and were free of charge. Finally, RN is a new initiative by music and cultural promoters in the Barras and Calton areas on the East of Glasgow’s city centre, aiming to create, as they say, ‘a cross-platform multi-venue cultural festival championing independent purveyors of music, film, food, drink, business and numerous other fields within Scotland.’ (RN website 2016) The seven days of programming include high-profile music gigs alongside a cuttingedge selection of local bands, food stalls, arts and crafts. The cinema programme was organized partly in collaboration with other organizations, including many other local film festivals, and it was arranged at seven different venues.1 One of the recurring motifs for GFF is the notion of ‘Cinema City’: a historical view of Glasgow inhabitants as particularly keen cinemagoers, who sustained over 110 cinemas at certain points of the twentieth century (Barr and Painter 2012). Cinemagoing is still the most common form of cultural engagement outside the home;

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in 2014, 59 per cent of Glasgow residents sampled had attended the cinema at least once (Scottish Government 2014: 138). The local average of 3.1 cinema visits a year is higher than UK figures, but a far cry from the fifty-one attendances that Glaswegians claimed in 1950 (BFI Research and Statistics 2016: 6; Griffiths 2012: 1). In Scotland as a whole, the BFI’s figures record 65 permanent exhibition sites in 2015, while historians have estimated the number of fixed exhibition sites at over 600 by the 1940s (Griffiths 2012: 1). Even though the busiest multiplex is in the city centre rather than out of town, the disappearance of neighbourhood theatres means that most people in Glasgow are now much further from their nearest cinema than they were in the 1950s. This drop in provision, however, does not necessarily entail an absolute lack of access to the big screen. From its very early days, film exhibition in Scotland has taken place in multifunctional spaces and mobile venues, and some of these forms of cinema activity are still thriving (Early Cinema in Scotland 2016; Goode 2013; Vélez-Serna 2011). Besides its 279 multiplex screens, then, the Scottish exhibition sector is already quite diverse, encompassing different types of spaces, audiences and organizations (Drew Wylie Projects 2016). Festivals add another layer of complexity to this landscape. Their temporary occupation of permanent spaces coexists with the ephemeral activation of noncinematic spaces. In a city like Glasgow, which concentrates substantial infrastructure for film exhibition, the patterns in the uses of space by different festivals tell a story. GFF started with a premise to consolidate a city-centre area as a cinemagoing district (or ‘cinezone’) (Dickson 2014: 109–110). This centripetal impulse is kept in tension by a more general view of Glasgow as ‘Cinema City’, which extends beyond this small area. While this was initially a rhetorical gesture, GFF started to stage more and more events at venues outside the ‘Cinezone’, reaching a peak in 2013 with twenty-six spaces, including cultural institutions, community centres and more unexpected places, such as those described by Lesley-Ann Dickson in the chapter 5 in this collection. GFF’s use of non-theatrical spaces, then, is in dialogue with its theatrical programme. If the festival is an extraordinary event, non-theatrical screenings are able to provide something still more scarce. The other festivals under consideration, meanwhile, do not have a fixed cinema as their base. They exist purely as a constellation of ‘pop-up’ events; indeed, in the case of the RFN the festival itself was a one-off, and SFF and RN labour against the very precarious landscape of project funding. When articulating their appeal in relation to an institutional form of cinema experience, non-theatrical screenings position themselves through a dynamic of distinction. In the case of GFF, this is constructed as additional customer choice and exclusivity. For the RFN, the distinction was oppositional, aimed at showing how ‘[f]ilm is finding its way out of mainstream cinemas and isolated viewing experiences at home’ (RFN 2016: 2). RFN’s decentralized, low-budget model of organization meant that the over thirty organizations putting on events tended to work with spaces to which they had access. While the choice of venues was partly pragmatic, it resonates with Armatage’s claim that ‘the transformative potential of film screenings in community spaces informs an alternative festival paradigm’ (2008: 37). The geographically bounded nature of SFF and RN means that the location of the venues, and their place

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in local community networks, is also an important part of their appeal. Their attraction ostensibly lies in the transformation of everyday spaces, rather than the opening up of ‘novelty’ spaces. But even though the pre-existent relationships to the space are very different, by making these spaces into festival venues, all four festivals make them available to forms of practice that are not an option at other times. Obviously, this includes practices of film exhibition and reception – but also tourist performances. The tourist relationship to the space tends to be one of choice rather than necessity, which mirrors the process of distinction mobilized by the exhibitors. It is telling that in Dickson’s study of GFF audiences they see the festival as ‘supplementary’ to their year-round cinemagoing, while at the same time highlighting the perceived value of unique opportunity (2014: 180). While cinemagoing is an alwaysavailable activity for some audiences, others who may want it have limited access to permanent or regular screening venues. Non-theatrical screenings often attempt to address some barriers to access to cinema, by being local (as in the case of SFF) or free of charge (as in the case of RFN). In order to understand how audience practices in a non-permanent cinema venue can be understood as tourist performances, we need to observe the patterns of access that characterize the normal use of those spaces. While there are many ways to classify the types of contexts in which we live our lives, for the present case studies I have found useful to think of two parameters. In the first place, it is useful to know if the place normally grants access to a casual visitor (open), if it only opens for specific events (restricted), or if it does not normally grant access to the public (not public). This allows us to establish a measure of scarcity that contributes to the value of a venue for a tourist experience. The second parameter refers to the role that a potential audience member would expect to play in that space at the times when it is not a cinema. With this optic, the film screenings I am talking about mostly took place in venues that are either consumption or co-production spaces. These pre-existing modes provide the starting point for the performances that are enacted when cinema comes around. Consumption spaces can be commercial or not, but the activities that happen in them uphold a clear separation of roles, between consumer/spectator and staff/performers. These include bars, art centres, museums and shops, amongst others. Most people living under capitalism have a naturalized sense of what is expected of them in these places in general; however, the position of each specific situation in a class-inflected cultural field produces various forms of exclusion. So, for instance, even if the entrance is free and the place is physically accessible, you might not want to go to a bar because you cannot afford the drinks; or you might feel put off by the austere silence of the art gallery. The transformation into cinema works within those frames and can shift them a little, by, for instance, letting people linger in spaces usually designated for transit. Co-production spaces are those that are commonly used for activities such as community projects and arts workshops. Most people will only visit these spaces if they are somehow involved in the activity or interested in taking part. Otherwise, it is difficult to know what is expected of you and where you should go, which leads to a lot of standing around in corridors pretending to look at yoga class schedules. The space is not organized for the benefit of the casual visitor, but it is intimately known

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Table 6.1  Schematic classification of festival venues according to ordinary access Access

Open

Use

Consumption

Co-production

Restricted Consumption

Co-production

Not Public

SFF

Glad Cafe [1/4] Rum Shack [1]

Govanhill Baths [2] Kinning Park Complex [2]

Pollok House [3] Queen’s Park Church [3]

Glad Foundation [2] Pollokshaws Burgh Hall [2/3] St Francis Community Centre [2] Toryglen Community Base [2] Queen’s Park Camera Club [6]

GFF

Drygate [1]

Kinning Park Complex [2]

IMAX [5]

Glad Cafe [1]

Barrowland Ballroom [4]

Grand Ole Opry [1/4]

Trades Hall [3]

Old Hairdressers [1/4] St Lukes [1/3] The Experience Art School [1]

Andrew Stewart Cinema [8] Mackintosh Church [3] Planetarium [5] Royal Concert Hall [4]

BBC Scotland [9]

CCA [6] GFT [5] Kelvingrove Museum [3] The Lighthouse [3] Tramway [6] RFN

Bike Station [7]

Glasgow Women’s Library [2/3]

GEAR auctioneers [7]

Gilmorehill [8]

Erin’s house [10]

Old Hairdressers [1]

Flourish House [2]

Greencity Wholefoods [7]

GMAC [6]

Nerea’s house [10]

South Block [1]

GalGael [2]

Caledonia Road Church [3]

STUC [9]

Marzanna’s house [10]

Laurieston Arches [3/6]

Glad Foundation [2]

Ellie’s house [10]

Market Gallery [6]

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Open

Use

Consumption

Restricted Co-production

Consumption

Common Guild [6]

Not Public Co-production Plantation Productions [6]

Fourwalls Housing Co-op [10]

Soil City Lab [2] RN

Drygate [1]

GMAC [6]

The 13th Note [1]

MANY studios [6]

Lodging House Mission [2]

St Luke’s [1] People’s Palace [3] Legend: Typology of venues [1] Bar, restaurant [2] Community centre, voluntary organization, day centre [3] Heritage attraction, museum, library [4] Live venue, concert hall [5] Permanent cinema [6] Art gallery, artist studio, workshop, creative space [7] Shop, warehouse, retail premises [8] University lecture theatre [9] Screening space within studio/office complex [10] Private residence

to its habitual users. The appearance of cinema destabilizes this power differential, explaining the space to those who do not know it and disrupting the activities of those who use it. Table 6.1 offers a classification of the spaces used by the four festivals. As with any set of social constructions, the divides are never watertight, but they provide building blocks for qualitative comparison. Although there are a few venues that are used by more than one festival, distinct approaches are observable. GFF uses almost exclusively consumption spaces, most of them commercial. Furthermore, almost all of the venues are open to the public on most days, if not continuously, then for regular events, at prices that are comparable to the cost of a festival ticket. Thus, the audiences that come to these screenings could, in principle, visit these places any other day – just as they could watch the films any time, as they are repertory titles. And yet, at this year’s screening of Con Air (1997) at The Experience, an indoor go-kart racetrack in an industrial estate, there was genuine surprise and excitement when we arrived at this ‘secret location’ on buses from the GFT. While GFF’s incursions into immersive or experiential cinema have been lower key, cheaper and less demanding for participants than Secret Cinema events,

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this case featured elements of immersive cinema, in which the film is ‘literalized’ on location and ‘embedded with a performative dimension for the audience to engage within’ (Atkinson 2014: 47). The pleasures of ‘spatio-textual curation’ were also activated, even if the link was somewhat tenuous: The warehouse had once been a plane engine factory and, since becoming a game space, has had a cockpit built into it; the film features planes (Dickson 2015). We were given orange overalls, and the cockpit offered an opportunity for character play and selfies. Similarly, a screening of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet (1996) staged in a luxurious reception hall featured a ‘fish tank’, referencing a scene in the film that could be re-enacted, while also clearly inviting photography. The ludic mode, and the immersion in character and diegesis, is in these cases kept in tension with the opportunities for tourist practice, such as taking pictures, exploring the space and buying fast food and drinks (there were no souvenirs available at these events, as far as I could tell). In their study of Secret Cinema’s Back to the Future season, Atkinson and Kennedy had also found such moments of nondiegetic ‘tourist/flaneur’ performance that co-existed with the playful immersion in the spectacle (2015a) (Figure 6.1). While Secret Cinema is nowadays known for the expanse and meticulous staging of spectacles that extend the diegetic world to involve spectators, its origins were linked to an earlier era of ‘pop-up’ activity that favoured disused or ruined urban landscapes.

Figure 6.1  Audiences before GFF screening of Romeo+Juliet (27 February 2016). From left: photography, themed cocktails, scene re-enactment with ‘fish-tank’ prop, character cosplay.

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Glasgow Short Film Festival has used such sites, as appropriate to their interest in the site-specificity of experimental and artists’ moving image. Other festivals, however, have been more reticent. The only examples that could be aligned with this mode were in the RFN programme, which included events in railway arches and a ruined church. These two spaces had already been made secure and accessible by arts organization WAVEparticle, and had been used as a venue for art festivals in the previous years. The screening in Gorbals Caledonia Road Church – which was bicycle-themed – was preceded by a mass bike ride starting in the West End of the city. This action, in which participants would go from the affluent university district to a zone of relative deprivation, and arguably aestheticize the ruin while the neighbourhood was in the throes of high-rise demolition, was carefully planned to focus attention on the bike ride itself (as a Critical Mass event) rather than the potentially more problematic aspects of this use of space. In a surprisingly fine evening, the ride along the River Clyde, followed by free hot drinks, sweets and a bonfire, was an extraordinary and pleasurable experience. Since there is official permission to use the ruin (thanks to an overarching art project), another type of tourist performance, a comfortable form of ‘urban exploration’, becomes possible. The fascination with the ruin is separated from the thrill of transgression. Before we mourn the domestication of these ruins, it is worth remembering that, as Carrie Mott and Susan Roberts argue in their critique of the masculinist rhetoric of urban exploration, these performances do not carry the same risks and difficulties for everybody. Assuming an able-bodied, male, white subject, ‘discourses of urban exploration, like older discourses of exploration in geography, clearly privilege particular bodies and spatial engagements while discounting others’ (Mott and Roberts 2014: 237). Entering ‘forbidden’ and derelict spaces, or ‘loitering’ in public, for those more likely to be harassed or racially profiled, is too dangerous a game. By providing explicit permission, an excuse to enter, a reason to linger and like-minded company, cinema makes certain uses of space available for more people. Having said that, the tension between ‘explorer’ practices and their socio-geographic contexts remains. Like a map opens up a region for the explorer, the festival shines a spotlight (a projector beam?) on places that were there all along, but are now explicitly open to the visitor. The brochure, website, media and social media outlets for the festival provide the necessary information, and the programme and scheduling set an appointment and a motivation to take oneself there. A completely different approach to this opening up of spaces otherwise closed to us is that of Radical Home Cinema, a project from Glasgow-based collective CinemaUP which had its first outing during RFN. The idea of the project is to invite people with some connection to Glasgow’s cultural life, to organize a screening in their own homes – if possible – or at another space of their choosing. Small groups of people then gathered, as guests, and were treated to the host’s choice of film, plus other forms of hospitality such as snacks and drinks. The exact locations of the events were not included in the published programme; instead, they were sent to those registered to attend, or a meeting point was agreed. The generosity and trust offered by the hosts, and the domestic spaces in which these gestures took place, resisted a touristic form of engagement. And yet, the appeal of novelty was perhaps strongest in these cases, as

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they blended the known pleasures of home cinema with the frisson of the festival and the slightly more formal expectations of collective viewing (such as start/end times). In this case, the screening made it easier for hosts and guests to share space, by defining the boundaries of the invitation (time, activity, topic), utilizing the logistic and textual apparatus of the festival and legitimizing their use of space. The cartographic effect of non-theatrical programming, its ability to reveal sites to the cinemagoer, is also observable in relation to community centres, which normally host a variety of free, subsidized or paid activities from citizen advice to exercise classes. Amongst the four festivals studied, SFF and RFN used the most community venues. This is in part a choice out of necessity, but it is also coherent with an implicit or explicit support for the functions of these centres and a desire to contribute to their activities. In some cases, they offer a specific kind of ‘spatio-textual allegiance’ when screening locally made films, as in the case of Plantation Productions, the Govanhill Baths and Glasgow Women’s Library showcasing productions made or supported by the organizations. A looser thematic allegiance can also work, contextualizing films that engage with the themes that motivate the facility’s central activities. So, for instance, Flourish House, run by a mental health charity, showed a feature on recovery from heroin addiction, while Queen’s Park Camera Club showed a documentary about mysterious US photographer Vivian Maier. In the cases above, the choice of the space follows from, but also enables, the contextualized and interactive reception of the films. It is this collective performance that constitutes the unique attraction of the event, rather than the space itself. Indeed, community centres and working spaces do not tend to provide ‘ideal’ screening conditions (e.g. no rake, no soundproofing, small projection surface) or spectacular architectures (there are exceptions; Pollokshaws Burgh Hall’s stately building and unique Wurlitzer organ is one). They do not tend to be seen as tourist attractions and are not spatially organized to afford tourist performances. However, as festival venues, they hope to attract visitors from beyond their usual constituency. From my point of view as a potential spectator, the cinema excuse offers a low-commitment, unthreatening way to enter the spaces of a community of which I am not part. But the patterns of community use of these spaces extend into the screening and complicate my ability to perform as a cinema-tourist. Photography is awkward. Looking around the building is allowed but not signalled. While the tourist experience, like the cinema experience, is always co-produced, I may be invited to do more than in other contexts – moving chairs, participating in discussion, talking to others. In other words, I am invited to perform in a way that is closer to the regular uses of the space. Thus, the tourist performance becomes a performance of authenticity which, like the performances of exploration discussed above, does not escape the unequal relationships of choice (as power) inscribed in our uses of space. Along with this metaphorical cartography, festivals also produce actual maps for their printed brochures and websites. As devices to communicate and organize tourist practices, these maps represent the festival in relation to the city, and to ways of moving in it. As ‘an intertext between the filmic event and the location’, the brochures and guide books are part of a discursive apparatus that organize the definitions and limits of film

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Figure 6.2  Comparison of areas covered by maps in festival brochures

cultures (Harbord 2002: 60). They are part of the ‘written festival’, helping constitute a ‘sense of a common space’ (Dayan [2000] 2013). Hence, the areas covered in the maps give us some idea of the proposed boundaries of this space, and by extension of a local moment of film culture. Figure 6.2 offers a comparison of the areas covered by the maps in the festival brochures for the 2015–2016 editions of each festival. It is initially surprising that SFF, a ‘smaller’ festival, covers an area as big as that included in the GFF map. On the SFF brochure, it is an extremely schematic representation, with the names of the main roads and train stations. There would scarcely be room for more in the double-sided A4 programme. This contrasts with the highly detailed GFF map, which for 2016 adopted the cartographic style of Glasgow City Council’s tourist office and its ‘People Make Glasgow’ campaign, launched for the 2014 Commonwealth Games. This map includes other attractions and commercial sites, apart from the transport hubs. However, between its first appearance in the 2008 brochure and 2015, the printed map of GFF venues was only of the city centre, as shown in Figure 6.2 as a dotted line. As the number of venues increased, this map was increasingly insufficient; in the 2013 brochure, only twelve of the twenty-six exhibition

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spaces are represented on the map; the reader was asked to go to the website for the full map and accessibility information. The extension of the GFF map reflects a move away from the ‘cinezone’ idea. The beginnings of this process are visible in the 2009 brochure’s claim that ‘[t]he diversity of the programme and our venues mirrors the uniqueness of Glasgow’s cultural scene’ (GFF 2009). This rhetorical link between the liveliness of local film culture and the variety of spaces was also present in RFN’s brochure introduction: Audiences are invited to join events that aim to highlight the vibrant alternative film culture and wide-ranging social movements within the city from Govan to the Gorbals, the Southside to the West End, and from the Barras to Bridgeton. (RFN 2016: 2)

In this paragraph, a verbal mapping of the city serves to shore up the festival’s claims to inclusivity and breadth. It works in writing better than it does on the ground, since Govan and the Gorbals are relatively close, while the Barras and Bridgeton are practically adjacent. But the alliterative enunciation of place names has an evocative, rather than geographical, intention. It is justified by the actual locations of some of the screenings and corresponds to the extents of the printed map, but its main purpose is to conjure up that ‘sense of common space’ that Dayan describes as one of the festival’s ‘catalysts for community’ ([2000] 2013: 49).

Cinematizing the space In her chapter in this collection, Lesley-Ann Dickson explores the processes of ‘festivalization’ that seek to enhance the experiential value of GFF events. For venues that do not include film screenings in their ordinary activities, this festivalization is preceded by the transformation of the space into a temporary cinema. These transformations, effected through physical means, ensure that the situation is still recognizable as a ‘cinematic’ one. A projector, sound system, screen, chairs and blackout curtains are practical requirements, but they also offer clues, the ‘familiar traits that allow cinema to reemerge even beyond its canonical contexts’ (Casetti 2015: 38). They are preceded by information – the brochure, a poster, a Facebook event. I have been told a film will be shown, hence I expect cinema to happen. This recognition of cinema has thus started to shape the cinemagoer’s performance long before it actually takes place, but on the evening of the screening the material affordances of the space produce an embodied framework for it. Routes of access are opened or blocked, paths and gathering points are marked more or less explicitly and a blueprint for spectatorship is produced through the relationship between screen, seating arrangements, decoration and so on. At this point, different types of performance might come into contradiction. For instance, a tourist might want to look around, but in order to maintain the boundaries of the collective cinematic experience they may be required to take a seat. Atkinson and Kennedy have explored the frustrations

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that participants report when ‘immersive’ cinema events shift to conventionalized spectatorship positions. In a situation which otherwise encourages playfulness, they argue, ‘the very presence of the cinema screen on-site calls to attention the mediation of the spectacle, and underlines the ultimate position of the audience member as spectator’ (Atkinson and Kennedy 2016b: 273). A similar disciplining takes part in the less intensely interactive contexts of non-theatrical exhibition discussed here, which still require a concerted effort to conjure up a recognizable instance of cinema. The kind of visual intervention identified by Dickson as part of the construction of the festival’s ‘enveloping address’ was carefully produced at GFF events (Dickson 2014: 248–253). On arrival, there was always already on screen a slide in the distinctive festival colours and format, with the title of the event and a rundown of times for the different parts of it. Importantly, this timetabling not only reinforced the sense of appointment in relation to the film, but also gave explicit permission and protected time for other practices. These included various forms of live entertainment (a lasso demonstration, Elvis impersonators, Indiana Jones-type stunts), but also optional audience activities such as getting food and drinks, playing videogames (game consoles lined the edges of the projection space for the screening of Man vs Snake at Drygate brewery) and, of course, taking photos. In other cases, the dissemination of this kind of information and the gentle encouragement of a collective behaviour is in the hands of volunteers and front of house staff. By announcing that it is time for the movie to start and people should take their seats, it is possible to turn a chattering crowd into an audience. Delays and changes in the programme demanded skilled communication to retain the goodwill that tends to underpin leisure pursuits. Preserving that relaxed attitude is particularly challenging because the transformation of existing spaces encounters resistance, endangering the cinema experience the participants expect. The habitual uses of a space can be in tension with its cinema use. For instance, in commercial spaces, the bar usually remains open, which is conducive to more audience movement and noise than you would expect in a conventional cinema. Creating darkness can also be a problem, sometimes an intractable one – especially in the Glasgow summer with its very long hours of sunlight. This was the case at a RN screening of Couple in a Hole (Geens 2015) at the Winter Gardens, a large Victorian glasshouse. The setting had all the appeal of novelty, comfort, excellent projection and sound quality, and the presence of some of the film’s creators. But before the screening could start, we had to watch the sun go down agonizingly slowly into the long June evening, our patience aided by the free beer offered by the organizers. Audiences have different tolerance thresholds, of course, but the space’s resistance to becoming a cinema is not simply a negative factor. In fact, the ‘shortcomings’ of the space, its differences from a multiplex screen, can be part of the attraction, creating, for instance, a closer and more intimate space, where unexpected encounters can happen (Dickson 2014: 265). The visibility of the projector is a source of curiosity and encourages a sense of complicity and co-production of the experience. This allows audiences to be more patient with technical breakdowns and unforeseen obstacles; it

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can even be argued that it opens up spaces of empowerment for the audience, who are called upon to help fix the issue (Dovey et al. 2013). The many different types of performances that can be activated in relation to a cinema event create a complex weaving of individual practices only partially interlocking into a collective experience. By focusing on the practices related specifically to ‘new’ spaces – as defined by my own relationship to them – I have drawn on the notion of tourist performances to understand my pleasures and discomforts in these places, as a way to open up avenues for more structured investigation. While empirical audience research is beyond my remit, this chapter has offered a new frame of analysis for audience appeal in relation to ephemeral cinema spaces. If touristic performances co-exist with the scripts of film spectatorship and cinemagoing, it is important to understand the opportunity to visit and explore a new space as an element in audience choice and pleasure. Cinema events offer a frame of reference in which access to a place is authorized, accompanied and linked with the familiar practice of cinemagoing. In that frame, we enact various performances that relate to our notion of ‘cinema’, to the characteristics of the space and to the people around us. Film exhibition in unfamiliar spaces gives us the opportunity to do tourist things. In a world where tourists’ whims often trump the needs of the locals, it may be important to keep an eye on how those public interventions play out.

Festival brochures and websites Please note: The article refers to web content available as of August 2016. This is likely to change. Copies of the sites were saved to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine on 31 August 2016. Please refer to these if original links are broken or have been updated. Physical copies of Glasgow Film Festival’s programmes were consulted at the National Library of Scotland. Glasgow Film Festival (2016) http://www.glasgowfilm.org/festival/brochure Radical Film Network Festival and Unconference (2016) https://rfnscotland.com/ festival/ Restless Natives (2016) http://restlessnativesfestival.org/film/ Southside Film Festival (2015) http://southsidefilm.co.uk/festival/2015-festival/

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Never Seen a Shot Like that Before!Playfulness and Participatory Audiences in San Sebastian Horror and Fantasy Film Festival Rosana Vivar

Introduction It was 2 November 2015 and The Howl (Paul Hyett, 2015) was playing on the screen when, like a young Quaker, I was overtaken by the need to speak. The room was incandescent, and after four intense years of attending the San Sebastian Horror and Fantasy Film Festival (SSHFFF) as a researcher and audience member, it felt like the perfect moment for my debut. I took a deep breath and spoke out for the first time. I did not have to wait for a reaction: after a few soft giggles from the back rows, a loud voice invited me to leave the room (and festival) and go to the more mainstream and, therefore, more appropriate for the style of my comment, horror film festival in Catalonia with a ‘Bugger off to Sitges!’ This being my first and last intervention to date, I felt really proud to get that sort of reaction. This personal anecdote is typical of any given moment at the festival’s screenings and represents part of the normal routine that takes place each year in the last week of October in the Main Theatre (Teatro Principal), a picturesque old venue in the heart of the northern seaside town of San Sebastian, in the Basque Country (Spain). It is here that festivalgoers engage in boisterous acts of disapproval towards films and guests that are introduced during the screenings. Almost any film that is part of the line-up as well as anyone who ventures on to the stage will be the target of crude witticism and the catalyst for a whole dictionary of in-jokes that have developed over the years. Given the highly restricted protocol that rules the interventions of the audience, it is not surprising that some have seen the audience performance as an ‘endogamic ritual’ (Cueto 2013: 72). Yet, throughout its twenty-seven years of existence the festival has been firmly supported by the San Sebastian city council. What is more, it is publicly funded by San Sebastian City Council, the Basque Country Government and Spain’s Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport. In this sense, SSHFFF stands out as an example not only of cult films and cult audiences being included into the institutional dialogue of a particular cultural place such as San Sebastian, but of an uncouth

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subcultural event, seemingly at odds with conceptions of civic life, becoming part of the public/local cultural agenda. In this chapter I contemplate the peculiar performance of the SSHFFF audience as an example of how audiences can, in a ludic manner, interfere and negotiate with pre-existing discourses and ideologies in horror and fantasy film viewing contexts. Considering the specifics of the audience’s viewing protocol, I argue that by playfully interacting with films, the audience not only legitimizes and regulates an internal hierarchy that enhances discourses of disaffection, aspiration and power among the Horror Week fans, but also establishes a protocol which enables them to take part in the creation of new engagement strategies that sometimes challenge the dominant groups in the theatre. This is not to suggest that audiences in the Horror Week enjoy complete sovereignty, but that play works against and for status quo and social norms, something that becomes clear in the social context of the Horror Week. Drawing upon Roger Caillois’ sociology of play (1961), I argue that play offers contexts for pleasure and invention while teaching the importance of complying with rules and submitting our instincts to social order. Since play creates controlled models of reality, it happens within condensed spatial and temporal limits, and often combines freedom with convention, mimesis, repetition or principles such as competition or creativity. But more than that, play is a recurring, habitual performance through which we see and therefore approach familiar things and situations under a new light. When everyday life tends to be repetitive and end up being meaningless to us, play helps us to engage with it differently. From this perspective, play is a notion worth paying attention to when studying the social construction of events; as they periodically return to people’s lives, events introduce newness within routine and allow festive and unruly behaviours; they are cultural landmarks and they bring stability to the community. By interpreting qualitative responses of members of the audience, I am first going to examine dominant discourses in the performance that takes place during the screenings, and then, give examples of how the audience, through their subversive readings of horror and fantasy films, playfully reinterprets traditional film viewing protocols. Ultimately, I expect that the examination of the playful attitude of the audience will provide insight into the larger study of both cult film cultures and other film spectacle experiences that are taking up the baton and writing the future of collective cinema viewing in Spain.

Method: Film festivals and ethnography Several researchers involved in the study of film festivals have referred to the challenge of researching and writing about an event while it is happening, even when the researcher is able to be present for the entire duration of the festival (Chan 2014; de Valck 2007; Iordanova 2009; Lee 2016; Vallejo 2014). In her essay about the methodological challenges that researchers face when approaching a film festival, Aida Vallejo reflects on the benefits of conducting on-site ethnographic fieldwork: ‘This methodology [ethnography] implies attending the festival where professionals are

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working, observing the conditions under which they carry out their tasks, how they interact with each other, how they organize their work’ (2014: 25). While most scholars involved in the study of film festival audiences have engaged with the social world of the festival and collected data on-site, only a few have approached the audience for interviews and qualitative data analysis. In her study of the audiences of Glasgow Film Festival, Lesley-Ann Dickson draws attention to the frequent disregard for audience opinion when drawing conclusions about their performance in the event. According to Dickson in a previous work concerned with the role of the audience in film festivals (Czach 2010; de Valck 2005; Koehler 2009), ‘Observations of the event operate as a stand-in for the voice of the festival audience’ (2015: 704). The result is that even when the work provides an account of audience experiences, their voices are hardly present. More than immersion in the social setting of the festival, Dickson calls for consideration of interviews, questionnaires and qualitative responses when approaching and interpreting the audience’s motivations to attend the festival. In a similar fashion, Toby Lee (2016) draws attention to the need for an approach that considers the study of film festivals from the bottom up. According to Lee, unlike systemic approaches to festivals, microscopic ethnography allows relevant information that is found at the margins of the event to be unveiled (2016: 127). These ‘unexpected stories’, which the researcher might come across when engaging in conversation with locals or participating in different ongoing events, might throw light on the different stories that make up the multilayered and complex experience of the film festival. While most of the information I present here comes from interviews and conversation with the audience and organizers, I also include the opinion of locals who have an indirect relationship with the festival in order to get a wider view of the reputation that the Horror Week has in the town of San Sebastian. In order to gain insights into the audience’s habits and to acknowledge what elements constitute their sense of community, I decided to approach the event ‘from within’, attending the screenings, visiting the exhibitions and events, and getting involved with members of the audience, guests, journalists, programmers, organizers and local people of San Sebastian. Since this chapter is part of my doctoral thesis research, what I describe here represents a work in progress based on ethnographic engagement with the festival audience and guests on-site, as well as on several visits to San Sebastian outside the festival period in order to do archive research, analysis of printed materials and interviews with the festival directors, programmers and festival organizers.1 This chapter relies upon material collected during my visits to the 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 editions of the festival and it presents results from audience members’ responses to questionnaires and group interviews carried out in the 2014 edition of the festival. Given the complexity of the discourses that circulate within film festivals (Harbord 2002: 60), attending the event for four consecutive editions allowed me to detect differences in the audience performance in the auditorium, as well as to identify  recurrent patterns of conduct that would explain certain hierarchical dynamics. Following the lead of previous ethnographic work carried out on audiences of film festivals (Dickson 2015; Ethis 2001; Martínez et al. 2015; Unwin et al. 2007; Van

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Extergem 2004), I used online questionnaires with 108 respondents (September– November 2014) and I conducted face-to-face focus groups with forty people in total that complemented the questionnaires with qualitative responses (November 2014). The people interviewed during the focus groups represent 8 per cent of the audience who attended the screenings at the Main Theatre in 2014 while questionnaire respondents represent 19 per cent. Online questionnaires included twenty closed questions that allowed me to collect demographic data, how long the individuals had been attending the festival, their favourite activities during the event, their film tastes and habits and their film practices outside the festival. While some focus groups were deliberately organized to contain only younger and less-experienced members or only veterans, other groups combined both inexperienced and veteran members of the audience who attended the festival in 2014. The questions that I devised for the group interviews mostly focused on the participants’ experience and their feelings towards what happens during the screenings as well as their feelings towards each other: 1. How would you describe the Horror Week to any friends who have never been before? 2. Are there any rules that a first-timer must know? 3. How would you describe a typical festivalgoer in this festival? 4. How does shout-a-long affect your viewing experience? 5. Can you think of anything that you don’t like about the Horror Week? 6. Would you say that the festival has changed in the past few years? If so, how? Since the purpose of my research was to interpret the interaction dynamics of this temporal community, being a participant as well as a researcher proved to be useful for getting an insider view of the event. Nevertheless, I must note that presenting myself as a researcher meant that I was never considered a member of the community, but a distant observer-anthropologist with a bird’s-eye view. As such, I believe that my recurrent presence in the festival not only triggered a stronger sense of community among the people interviewed, but even occasionally elicited a performance of the community in opposition to the outsider-academic. This behaviour has been previously noticed in ethnographic research (Hammersley and Atkinson 2003). My observations on this matter are supported by the comments of interviewees who defined themselves with regards to the research as ‘like National Geographic’ (Respondent A: 45: Male), or ‘strange and endangered species’ (Respondent B: 37: Male). Regarding my relationship with the subjects under research, it must be noted that particularly at the first stage of my research, not only was I perceived by them as an academic, but as a first-timer and therefore as someone with no insider’s knowledge of the event. Seeing that a substantial number of festivalgoers showed scepticism towards my work at first, I slightly changed my discourse and adjusted my behaviour so it matched the audience’s expectations of a new festivalgoer. In this matter, engaging in conversation about films and past events from the festival, proved to be useful when drawing the audience’s attention towards my research and gaining some level

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of acceptance. Furthermore, conducting group interviews two years after my first visit meant that even when participants were fully conscious of my role as an ethnographer, they would open up more during the focus groups.

Categorizing the Horror Week as a cult event SSHFFF, commonly known as the ‘Horror Week’ among regulars, is located in San Sebastian, one of the most culturally active towns in the Basque Country and in Spain. An old bourgeois town, summer residence to royalty and aristocrats in the nineteenth century, San Sebastian became in the 1990s a focal point for cultural tourism and seasonal events, and is currently a worldwide reference in the culinary arts. To this cultural and economic prosperity contributed the creation in 1953 of the first film festival in Spain: San Sebastian International Film Festival, which has become a landmark in the A-festivals circuit. Since then, the city has developed a thriving film culture, hosting over ten film festivals every year and offering multiple options for cinema viewing in art galleries and art houses. Despite the fact that the Horror Week was a consequence of the town hall investing in cultural events in the early 1990s, the festival has never reached the high-profile level of San Sebastian International Film Festival. In fact, in contrast to the extensive media coverage of the larger festival, the Horror Week’s avoidance of media coverage across time is mostly due to organizers trying to keep the festival in small scale by offering a narrow range of features in the Main Theatre, 576 seats, where most of the cult action happens. While the event’s small proportions have reinforced its only-for-hardcorefans image, this has also resulted in a small local community of fans appropriating the festival over the years. Consensus among audiences seems to be that, as there is little chance for audience renewal, the audience – most of them local in their forties – is ageing (Figure 7.1). Although the festival has now been held for over twenty-seven years, the participatory performance and playful behaviour that the audience of the festival engages in echo current emerging contexts of film reception in which audiences’ involvement goes beyond ‘traditional’ moviegoing practices. In the last five years, several experiences that invite the audience to sing, dance, shout, dress up and celebrate the act of viewing have taken off in different towns in Spain. Festive experiences such as Phenomena Experience (Barcelona), Sunset Cinema (Madrid), Bang Bang Zinema (San Sebastian), Voodoo Cult Horror Movies Club (Madrid), singalong and quote-along sessions or itinerant initiatives such as Trash entre amigos (Trash with friends) are attracting larger and larger audiences to classic cult films of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and are starting to assume an important role in the cultural programme in big cities such as Madrid and Barcelona. The current popularity of these experiences and the fact that they bear a resemblance to other ‘experiential’ film screenings such as those set up by the company Secret Cinema (Atkinson and Kennedy 2015) or at Prince Charles Cinema in London (McCulloch and Crisp 2016) leads us to categorize the Horror Week as a pioneering example of event-led cinema in Spain. This argument is reinforced by the fact that

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Figure 7.1  The audience at the main entrance of the Main Theatre in San Sebastian, 2015. Courtesy Donostia Kultura.

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some of these events have been set up by early members of the Horror Week who are still today well known by the audience. This is the case of the Horror Week veteran Nacho Cerdà, who today runs the profitable Phenomena Experience in Barcelona, while Nacho Vigalondo, Rubén Lardín and Raúl Minchinela are all founders of Trash entre amigos, an event that according to Lardín ‘wants to take the spontaneous and genuine self-releasing experience of the Horror Week to other parts of Spain’ (Lardín 2014). Nevertheless, we must point out that the Horror Week has had a life on its own, which long precedes the so-called event-led cinema phenomena. The festival came about as a city council project in 1990 with the ambition of attracting young San Sebastian residents to the local film programme. With this main concern the project was passed on to José Luis Rebordinos, a young cinephile who in the 1980s had gained some local recognition for running a prominent film society. In order to meet the city council’s requirements, he brought to the project his own knowledge of his contemporaries’ film tastes and practices, and envisaged an event that would show international horror, fantasy and sci-fi-related films, genre classics and recent production. In its golden era, the festival introduced high-profile guests such as Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson, and introduced cult directors to Spain such as Takashi Miike, Takashi Shimizu and Hideo Nakata. By the mid-1990s, the festival had become widely known by fans of the genre for the participatory and intentionally annoying behaviour of the audience during the theatrical screenings. A regular evening in the festival would typically include concerts by anti-establishment bands; spontaneous interventions of the audience showing amateur material; and fanzine competitions along with heavy drinking and habitual drug consumption. Although the Horror Week fits within horror and fantasy-themed film festivals, its programme actually spans films concerning a variety of issues and genres that aren’t always related to fantasy or horror. As happens in many other genre film festivals, fantasy, horror and science fiction, are rather loose categories that incorporate a broad scope of meanings, styles and subgenres. Taken together, the body of films that the festival screens could easily fall under the category of cult cinema, an eclectic category that Cristina Pujol links to fantastique, a genre that derives from French literature: ‘This genre has been adopted by comic books and especially by cinema, which has given it one of its most popular forms, a hybrid between science fiction and horror without forgetting other genres such as noir, giallo,2 adventure, porn, horror comedy, etc.’ (2011: 153). In the case of SSHFFF, horror and fantasy have been present throughout the years in many shapes and fashions, spanning from crime and Italian giallo to slasher and found footage, from neo-monsters and viral infections to haunted houses and Arthurian fantasies. While programmers have tried to keep the festival line-up as varied as possible, Asian horror, animé and horror comedy are among the festival’s favourites. As the current director of the festival, José Miguel (Josemi) Beltrán, explains in a personal interview ‘The extent of the presence of vampires, werewolves, blood or superheroes, will be determined by each year’s harvest of films’ (Beltrán 2013). Given the fact that programming a film festival is subjected to commercial interests and to

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distributors’ requirements, the selection process is often determined by whatever is available after the festival high season is over, and by the personal criteria of the small team of programmers who, according to Beltrán, ‘also try to keep the program close to the audience’s taste for the bizarre’ (Beltrán 2013). This ‘taste for the bizarre’, which is indeed a motive of celebration in the Horror Week, allows us to interpret the festival as a cult event that is better understood through its audience’s protocols of reinterpretation of films than for the group of films it shows. In fact, according to Jeffrey Sconce, this is ultimately what characterizes cult films, a group of films which he defines through the category of what he calls Paracinema: ‘Paracinema is thus less a distinct group of films than a particular reading protocol, a counter-aesthetic turned subcultural sensibility devoted to all manner of cultural detritus’ (1995: 372). However, Anne Jerslev (2007), in her essay ‘Semiotics by Instinct’, writes about how it is cult events that can help us to understand cult films. In this essay, she makes the case for two different contexts of reception of two classic cult movies, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and The Big Sleep (1946), which have since the 1970s been projected in collective/cathartic screenings. Adding to Andrew Tudor’s account of genre as a reception concept, Jerslev argues that cult films need to be conceptualized historically in terms of their reception, meaning the conditions (contexts of film circulation, spaces, practices) that enable the act of viewing to shape the understanding and categorization of a film as a cult film (Jerslev 2007: 92). By doing this she demonstrates that cult audiences work as temporary communities that are motivated by sharing their film textual knowledge in a social context. Using Jerslev’s account of a cult event as a point of departure, I want to examine the Horror Week audience as a unique community that has created a playful and highly restricted protocol to mediate with the films and the guests of the festival.

Never seen a shot like that before! Aspiration and power in the Horror Week’s ritual Who are these people who religiously attend the festival year after year? First of all, to an outsider, or a non-specialized spectator who is unfamiliar with the horror and fantasy milieu, the large number of men that attend the festival could come as a surprise. However, the overwhelming presence of men in horror-themed events has also been noticed by Van Extergem, in his study of the Brussels International Festival of Fantastic Film (2004).3 In addition, the Horror Week’s reception protocols and behaviours bond it with quote-along sessions, which have also been identified as largely masculine (Klinger 2008). However, although this gender imbalance was the tendency when the festival started, the festival has now expanded to an increasingly mixed audience of men and women. In 2013, over 20 per cent of the respondents to my questionnaires were female and over 12 per cent of focus group participants were also women. I should add that it is my belief that men and women responded with equal enthusiasm to my request to participate in my research.

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While 63 per cent of the people interviewed make time to visit the exhibitions (centred on props, special effects, comic writers and illustrators), watching the competing films in the Main Theatre remains the main attraction for hard-core followers that year after year reconfirm their loyalty by buying a weeklong special pass. Regardless of age or geographical origin, 77 per cent of the questionnaire respondents chose ‘the atmosphere in the Main Theatre’ as their main motivation to attend the festival. In answer to the question ‘Why do you attend the festival?’ a survey respondent explained: ‘For fun. To see the same old faces and get together with people you haven’t seen for a year. We just come every year and get together. Some might have changed job, they might bring another girlfriend, but they keep coming and get drunk, and talk about films as we always do’ (Respondent C: Forty-two: M). For many members of the audience, the festival is a nostalgic revival, a space where people return and where some continuity with the origins of the festival is perpetuated. The emphasis that many members of the audience placed on the past confirms that the Horror Week shares a series of formal features with traditional festivals, either secular or religious. Like traditional festivals, the Horror Week provides exceptional conditions for communication and opens a chance for both perpetuation and renewal of the community, it commemorates the past periodically and by doing so, it keeps believers believing. When studying film festivals as social phenomena, a wide list of scholars have assumed that film festivals can be studied as festivals from the viewpoint of anthropology, folklore studies, sociology or history of religion (Dayan 2000; Elsaesser 2005; Koven 1999; Zielinski 2012). For instance, Zielinski (2012) and Elsaesser (2005) have noted that due to their level of excess and festive ways, film festivals present elements of the unruliness of carnival, a quality that is favoured by the special time/ space frame in which the event takes place. Other scholars have demonstrated that film festivals play a significant part in fostering and consolidating a sense of community among the participants of the event and, occasionally, among residents who feel the festival is an expression of their local identity (Derret 2009: 107). For example, in his ethnographic study of Toronto Jewish Film Festival (TJFF), Mikel Koven (1999) highlights how this event becomes through the 1990s a meaningful space that keeps the Jewish community relevant in the context of Toronto’s film cultures. Equally, the Horror Week has become a classic in San Sebastian cultural calendar, well established through its different events, street parades, zombie walks and cultish and sometimes uncivilized audience who for a week take over the old town of San Sebastian. At the Horror Week, the ritual aspect of watching the film is enhanced by the collective performance that not only helps the audience to consolidate a long-lasting sense of community, but also transfers knowledge of the community to the locals (Figure 7.2). Over a long period, the festival has developed a reputation for its rowdiness as well as for its uncivil and politically incorrect ways among uninformed and uninitiated audience members who, according to Beltrán, have at times asked for their money back. This was corroborated by the testimony of different passers-by and locals who reacted in different ways to my inquiries about the Horror Week. Although not everyone that I engaged in conversation with knew the event, a considerable number of the people that I approached were familiar with it and its unusual conventions. ‘I

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Figure 7.2  Shinya Tsukamoto being heckled by a member of the audience, 2008. Courtesy Donostia Kultura.

am not from here, but I have been living in San Sebastian for six years and apparently the horror film festival is a classic. I have never been to it, but I know it’s very popular among people who like horror and that kind of stuff ’ (Passerby A: F). ‘I like horror films, and that’s why I don’t go to the horror festival. I’d rather watch films at home, where no one’s howling and getting on my nerves behind me’ (Passerby B: M). What we can learn from these comments is that while outsiders might not identify with the festival milieu or its films, they recognize the event as ‘an event from the town’. In this regard, we can assume that film events can work as a marker of time and local identity even for those who do not feel they are part of that community. Furthermore, for those who have heard of the event or even have attended once or twice, what marks the festival out from other events that take place in San Sebastian is its exclusive, impenetrable audience, something that becomes apparent through the specific ritual that takes place in the sitting area during the screenings. As we have noted before, the concept of the ritual is not unfamiliar. Particularly, it has been through the work of Victor Turner (1984, 1977) and Alessandro Falassi (1987) that the concept has become useful to the ethnographic study of film festivals (Dayan 2000; Koven 1999; Regev 2011). In order to engage with the film experience, the audience collaboratively follows a sequence of rites and cathartic moments that guide them through the ceremony. What is more, if we look closely at the festival structure, we find that this performance presents some mimesis with expressions of idolatry and the sacred. Rites of passage, of reversal, of competition or of conspicuous consumption that Falassi considers essential at festive times are to be found at the Horror Week. While food and drink are forbidden at all events that take place in the main theatre, the Horror Week is the one exception to this rule. Copious drinking and eating is not only permitted during the

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Horror Week screenings but also encouraged by organizers who keep the theatre bar open ‘to keep the spirits up during the sessions’, according to Beltrán. Furthermore, drinking and eating, as expressions of abundance and gorging, echo with dressing up, which suggest rites of reversal and the carnivalesque. While certain costumes at the Horror Week (such as childhood icons and religious idols and figures) clearly hold a rebellious attitude towards mainstream culture, reversal is also heavily present in the transgressive use of space at the Horror Week. The classicist-inspired Main Theatre, also the oldest theatre in the city, is converted into a ‘film bacchanal’ where patterns of proper viewing are inverted. Not only the radical selection of films, surely difficult to watch for a mainstream audience, but also the audience’s behaviour seems always to border on excess and transgress most civic conventions. The stage and seating area are used ‘in reverse’ and almost tarnished by the obscene comments audiences throw at guests, particularly at women. ‘Take your panties off!’ or ‘I just got a hard on!’ are some of the most recurrent phrases dedicated to female guests that venture on to stage. The shouting at the Main Theatre often incorporates elements of religious provocation; there is a recurrence of profane war cries and sexually perverse humor; pagan-like attitudes such as the use of animal noises to distinguish the members of the audience; jeering at the local authorities when mentioned as sponsors of the event and cosplay using childhood icons (like Winnie the Pooh) exemplifying the ironic embodiment of naïve popular culture are some of the routine reversal activities of the audience. Rites of competition are also essential to the spirit and the structure of the Horror Week through different contests and quizzes. For instance, at the 2014 and 2015 editions, the organizers set up The Master of Doom, a quiz that takes place in two phases (prior to the event and at the midpoint of the festival), where participants’ encyclopaedic knowledge of classic, fantasy and horror films is tested. The winner holds the Horror Scepter until the following year, an award that is given ceremoniously in an act that works as a reminder that not everybody holds the same status in the worship. Additionally, The War of Fanzines, a competition where audience teams competed to create ‘the best fanzine’, was hosted between 1996 and 2003. Competing ’zines would be passed around the Main Theatre to be voted on by the punishing audience. Although, according to long-standing member of the organization Carlos Plaza, The War of Fanzines was cancelled ‘because fanzines ended up being private jokes among their creators’ (Plaza 2013), organizers brought the event back for the 2016 edition. While competitions help to indicate a hierarchical order among the members of the audience, it is through their verbal interaction with films and fellow audience members that the members of the audience make a play for status within the group since every intervention must pass audience judgment. Except for some rare moments of silence, the audience spends most of its time commenting on bad acting, slip-ups they have picked up on and genre clichés such as the much-celebrated (by the audience) ellipsis of coitus, or simply bullying Beltrán for his unfortunate film (and clothing) choices. For example, visualize a man who we know is a werewolf stumbling through the forest, as the action cuts to a close-up of the moon, within a fraction of a second someone with fast reflexes shouts out ‘Never seen that shot before!’ to much appreciation of the sarcasm. Another phrase from the festival lexicon, ‘Oh, very effective!’ is brought out

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every time someone detects a too-obvious or cheap mise-en-scène such as a crossfade that lasts too long. Cries such as these are some of the classics that the audience uses to point out the narrative ineptitude and clumsiness of some films. In the same way that Sconce characterizes the para-cinematic community as embodying an ‘educated’ perspective on cinema (1995: 375), in the Horror Week the heckling becomes a substantial part of the audience’s self-construction as experts. By being fastidious and witty, the members of the community ritualistically demonstrate their authority as well-informed spectators and dispute their position within the audience hierarchy. That such a hierarchy exists is reaffirmed by some participants who declare that ‘yelling out has crossed my mind but I have restrained myself since I’d rather leave that to those who have been coming here for longer’ (Respondent D: Twenty-six: F) or ‘people can detect when someone is trying too hard’ (Respondent E: Twenty-seven: M). These statements provide evidence that inside knowledge of who is who in the festival hierarchy is crucial in order to act and respond to others’ actions accordingly. In this sense, the viewing protocol holds a pedagogical purpose for both older fans and newcomers, since the audience performs its own structure by individuals patenting witticisms, occupying the same seat year after year. These marks of expertise and commitment draw a line between the older, genuine fan that is ranked higher in the festival hierarchy, and the younger and therefore less-invested fan who is regarded as not being experienced enough. Several participants expressed this idea in the following way: ‘It’s true that there are new people coming to the festival, younger people who come sporadically and, maybe, don’t buy the whole-week pass. They don’t stay for the whole week and they don’t participate as much as we do … probably it’s not so easy for them’ (Respondent F: Forty-three: M). ‘I found the hard-core audience quite intimidating. When I first queued up to get a whole-week pass, I was like … who shall I talk to? What should I do? To me those who got the whole-week pass were like a superior race (laugh)’ (Respondent F: Twenty-eight: F).4 Different authors have pointed out that cult audiences possess a subcultural sensibility oppositional to legitimate film culture, which they display by attending cult events, writing in blogs, magazines, fanzines or engaging with other fans (Hills 2010; Stringer 2008; Van Extergem 2004). Does the Horror Week audience’s ritual work as a marker of a sense of cultural distinction? Koven’s work on TJFF offers an interesting viewpoint on how audiences work for and against mainstream discourses of identity at film festivals. According to Koven, by annually celebrating Jewish ethnicity around the screenings, in coffee shops and in casual encounters at local venues, the TJFF creates a safe and meaningful space for discussion among members of the audience, who take a dialogical position towards films and what it means to be Jew (Koven 1999: 123). Drawing upon Victor Turner’s anthropological definition of the liminoid, Koven argues that the special occasion of the event provides a liminal context that gives voice to a unique cultural dialogue where contradictory discourses collide. Using the context provided by TJFF, audiences ‘either support or reject the cultural values inherent within the cultural hegemony, in this case, the voice of mainstream Judaism’ (Koven 1999: 124). Although the ways in which TJFF audiences engage with the event are substantially different to those followed by the individuals under research here, the

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audiences of the Horror Week function in a similar way to the audiences in Koven’s study. Through the ritual, audiences of the Horror Week not only find an institutional space to communicate their disengagement from the ‘more “normal” popular audiences’ – as John Fiske has referred to the socially legitimated audiences (Fiske 2007: 446) – but also personalize their fandom and differentiate themselves from other cult communities in Spain. In particular the audience takes pleasure in attacking Sitges Film Festival, its big name and its ‘pretentious’ film programme. Even though for many members of the audience Sitges Film Festival remains a not-to-be-missed, cult event of the season, it is also home to the more mainstream genre aficionados and, therefore, the object of constant mockery among insiders. The fact that Sitges attracts such a large and diverse audience is looked on with suspicion by the majority of the audience at the Horror Week. In fact, one of the most celebrated cries ‘¡Vete a Sitges!’ (‘Bugger off to Sitges!’) is heard in the theatre every time the audience considers that a film (or an audience comment) is too pretentious and therefore would find a better home in Sitges. By incorporating Sitges into the insiders’ vocabulary of the ritual, the audience reaffirms its own identity in opposition to Sitges’ fans who lack the transgressive attitude of the fans in the Horror Week.

The pleasures of shouting-a-long: Between play and resistance In her text about dialogue quotation in participatory film viewing contexts, Barbara Klinger explores the viewing pleasures derived from quoting lines of classic and cult films. As she suggests, audiences take pleasure in repeated viewing and immersion in the film where quoting ‘acts as an unexpected getaway to narrative engagement’ (Klinger 2008). According to Klinger, these pleasures are neither limited nor restricted to fandom or to other niche film viewing communities, but are common to all spectators, and different forms of viewing. Nevertheless for Klinger, pleasures in movie quotation are best defined by their ‘role in presenting private and public faces of masculinity’ (Klinger 2008). Although the behaviours and discourses under analysis in Klinger’s work present similarities to our case study, there are important discursive differences in the ways audiences respond to films in the Horror Week. While quote-alongs are based on memorizing and shouting out movie lines and dialogues while rewatching the film together, the Horror Week screenings are built around a dialogue with the film and fellow spectators where the audience creates and reiterates a private library of comments as they go along. In fact, this particular type of critique is a genuine initiative of the SSHFFF audience, which for twenty-seven years has scripted a repertoire of in-jokes that has become the central motive of the ceremony. Despite the fact that many of these jokes are anticipated by the audience – which takes pleasure in shouting out and listening to the same gags over and over again – novelty and creativity are also central to the enjoyment of the audience. In fact, my study shows that off-script interventions are highly valued by the audience. During the focus groups, several participants remarked on this aspect of the ritual: ‘There are sessions when all the gags sound repetitive and

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are just not right. But then when the mood is low, someone says something new that really hits the spot and brings the audience back. I love when that happens. People love it’ (Respondent G: Twenty-three: M). ‘There are really funny people that know what to say at the right time. The usual suspects. It’s not only about what they say, you know? Is mostly when they say it’ (Respondent H: Thirty-one: M). A good sharp comment that arrives at the right time makes the whole auditorium break into laughter and applause. While audience testimonies reveal that the reiterative use of ritualized catchphrases are an important source of pleasure, challenging the script is also key to the enjoyment of the audience. As Paco confesses: ‘I love when someone speaks out of time and gets heckled for it’ (Respondent I: Forty-six: M). To understand the importance of improvisation in the Horror Week, it must be stressed that unlike quote-alongs, all the action happens around films that most of the audience watch together for the first time. Furthermore, improvisation and creativity are also often rewarded by the audience who allow its creators to own their punchlines and use them accordingly in the future. This is the case of witticisms such as ‘Telephone!’ (shouted out loud when someone makes a call on screen or when a telephone rings in the seating room) and ‘Subtitles!’ (shouted out when subtitles are not working). These are two of the most celebrated gags whose masterminds have been using for over fifteen years. Given that spontaneous attempts to diverge from the text often find a way in the ostensibly rigid pantomime, I argue that being playful with the rules inevitably goes hand in hand with the ritual as it opens a door for change, renovation and survival. Therefore, rather than confirming the general idea that the festival is ageing, it seems more appropriate to describe the performance of the audience as a vivid dialogue, a living text that is under slow but constant transformation. Sometimes, these transformations are the expression of a certain resistant sensibility that sporadically takes the lead in the auditorium. While most of the time the play of the audience does not go far from playing with the rules that are already set, on other occasions interventions seem to challenge the very structure of the whole performance and, even, the community. A good example of this is the occasional, but courageous, interventions of women in the predominantly masculine milieu of the Horror Week. Klinger finds that in movie quotation women tend to quote male characters as consequence of Hollywood’s stronger characters being predominantly heterosexual white males. According to Klinger, this demands women ‘to be more flexible in their choice of objects of identification as a condition for being able to experience spectatorial pleasure’ (Klinger 2008). This is also true of some discourses in the Horror Week where women seem to accept and validate sexist comments by being silent or even by adding (in very few occasions) to the chain of discriminatory comments. Nevertheless, in two occasions I was witness to how the response of a woman to a sexist comment while viewing It Follows (David Robert Mitchell 2014), led not only to agitation in the auditorium but also to a stimulating competition between the two authors of the gags to see whose comment was the wittiest. When asked about these incidents, veterans confirmed that ‘girls are getting cockier lately’ (Respondent J: Forty: M). Even though scarce, these experiences confirm the changing character of the ritual and of the festival audience.

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The modes of interaction between members of the audience and films explained above connect some aspects of the audience performance to the playful and resistant viewing that according to John Fiske (2007) is typical of television audiences by the end of the 1980s. In his renowned study of television audiences, play becomes a way of disengaging from the social clichés and archetypes that television bestows. Fiske notes that by involving themselves in different kinds of pleasurable forms of identification with television texts, audiences playfully appropriate mainstream discourses as a way of transgression (Fiske 2009: 183–195). In other words, they are capable of choosing in what way they want to identify with the text and of rejecting dominant mass media meanings while taking pleasure from popular television narratives. Adding to Fiske’s reading of the resistant pleasures in television audiences I would further argue that while the ritual in the Horror Week sustains its social structure and, therefore, legitimizes certain members of the audience as a source of authority and dominant discourse, it is through play that some take action and shake the very structure of things by pushing conventional boundaries.

Conclusion Roger Caillois (1961) points out that play happens between two extremes that constantly interrelate in life: paidia and ludus. On the one hand, play manifests itself through spontaneous behaviour that leads to free improvisation (paidia); on the other, we become social through play: when playing we create rules that channel our volatile and cheerful impulses towards common goals. In other words, as we play we imagine possible paths of action, and by doing so we increase our productive capacity as a society (ludus) (Caillois 2001: 32–33). Likewise, Horror Week fans enact a similar tension, as their rigid performance must be matched by the creation of new rules and therefore by engaging with newness and creativity, as well as deal with the unexpected. This is somehow facilitated by the spatial and temporal nature of the film festival. While the enthusiasm that the fans display for the happening of the event provides room for improvisation and unconventional thinking, the iteration of the event sets up a series of liaisons among fans and organizers and creates a habit that ultimately institutionalizes the viewers’ rituals. My argument is that by attending the festival and by being part of this ritual play, audiences find different ways of disengaging with regular and more civic contexts of film viewing. Furthermore, my study shows that being part of the ritual means being able to express disaffection towards certain dominant discourses that are part of its very structure. Yet, more than an expression of rivalry or resistance towards mainstream discourses (and conservative discourses where they emerge within the auditorium), play is the way the audience reassures and confirms their loyalty to the community. By collaboratively constructing films as ‘bad films’, viewers elaborate their private, encoded protocol that more than anything confirms their love for films and for the community. As Klinger wisely points out: ‘In any circumstance, movie quotation can operate as the verbal, cinematic equivalent of a secret handshake’ (Klinger 2008).

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This study, eventually, raises questions about the role that shout-a-longs and horror film events play in challenging institutional film cultures (such as the parallel film cultures that circulate in the city of San Sebastian). My view is that the Horror Week’s playful performance is not so much an expression of resistance to dominant encoded meanings of official culture as it is a way of negotiating a privileged cultural position within the SSHFFF hierarchy as well as within the Spanish sphere of cult film fans, where Sitges Film Festival is the main reference. Additionally, the Horror Week is a good example of horror and fantasy film viewing contexts being sites that provide room for certain conservative facets of masculinity in the public sphere. Therefore, in this area of study, there is still is a lot to be said regarding the role of women in cult film events where it is still assumed that men must take the lead. For future research we might wonder where this will go from here. Ultimately, the considerable similarities between the protocols and ‘plays’ in different cult film contexts (Austin 1981; Jerslev 2007; McCulloch 2011; McCulloch and Crisp 2016; Van Extergem 2004) seem a very good opportunity to make researchers aware of the contrasting experiences that emerge from different live cinema experiences and how, in each case, ‘participation’ must be put under scrutiny.

Introduction Sarah Atkinson and Helen W. Kennedy

Our readers will have already discerned that audiences feature a great deal in the first two sections of this volume – populating and negotiating the spaces and temporalities of live cinema; audiences are indeed key to animating live cinema spaces. Their significance is paramount in all studies of live cinema phenomena – as such, they have already been crucial in the research methods of several contributions (Levitt, VélezSerna and Vivar). In this section, we further extend those considerations, putting the audience at the centre and examining the varied embodied subjectivities that emerge in live cinema experiences. In our own work we have long since been concerned with the lived experience of emergent cinema phenomena which we have mapped across the spectrum of full participation (collective) to total immersion (individual), which you can see in our model presented earlier in this volume. In this section then, we take forward a consideration of the participatory mode of live cinema, in particular, and we identify the following: The participatory category always includes some element of audience direct engagement in elements of the originary text and this category itself includes its own spectrum of immersive intensity. At one end we might situate sing-along-a (which has become its own genre with some commercial success); cult quotealongs (including some shout-alongs) […] moving through to cosplay, dancealongs, (The Rocky Horror Picture Show being the most well-established example which features all of these elements). At the furthest extreme we would situate Secret Cinema. (Atkinson and Kennedy 2016a: 142)

This section is about mapping those experiential modalities and intensities, as such it covers a diverse range of subject matter: mapping high to low cultural experiences – opera, singalongs, games and play, moving into creative, innovative and alternative practices. The objects of study are equally diverse, from the audience of ‘opera cinema’, to the tastes and pleasures of a loyal clientele at a small repertory cinema, to participatory thrill seeking audiences of Zombie experiences on to our final chapter in

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this section that is both a study and an instantiation of the audience experience of the 1960s. The final diversity resides in the theoretical and methodological approaches that are deployed – from audience, reception and spectator studies, approaches drawn from game studies and historiographical research. Our contributors are all highly reflexive in their application of these methodologies, attentive to the nuance and sensitivity required in a commitment to capture, describe and analyse lived experiences. As they proceed, these authors provide novel insights in to the embodied pleasures of cinemagoing – the continuities and the novelties afforded by innovations in experience design. Many of the contributions to this chapter are empirically based. Attard, for example, deploys a highly structured and formal approach in the establishment of his ‘opera virgins’ focus group (those who had never attended opera before) who attend both a live opera occasion and a recorded screened in cinema version. He analyses his questionnaire responses using Q-Methodology1; McCulloch and Crisp undertake questionnaires and analysis; and Kennedy takes a more experimental approach as participant observer, and draws on detailed research assistant and individual accounts – both written and verbal. In the final chapter, Jones constructs a practice-as-research performance through which he examines and disseminates his study of 1960s audiences. In ‘The Opera Virgins Project: Operatic Event Cinema as a New Cultural Experience’, Attard examines the form of live opera, digitally streamed to movie theatres as a hybrid medium that offers a unique audience experience and occupies a particular position within the cultural field. This chapter reports on an experiment in which Attard took a sample of seventeen ‘opera virgins’ to watch the Royal Opera’s 2015 production of Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny both live in a cinema and on the stage. Attard usefully charts the history of the live broadcast of opera to cinemas contextualizing its origins on the one hand and providing an analysis of the new cultural experience it offers on the other. He maps not just the histories themselves, but the way in which they have been received and articulated including the most recent claims of audience ‘cannibalisation’. Utilizing a mixed-methodological approach – incorporating this Q-Methodology and focus groups – this chapter presents his ‘opera virgins’ subjective responses to opera–screen encounters. He positions this case study within discourses of ‘inclusivity and innovation’ in the culture sector, which in turn affect arts organizations’ access to state subsidy in a period of economic austerity. In ‘Against Participation: Cinephilia, Nostalgia, and the Pleasures of Attending an “Alternative” Cinema Space’, McCulloch and Crisp examine the Prince Charles Cinema and the social and cultural motivations of their loyal cinemagoers. In their chapter they challenge the emphasis on and potentially overblown celebration of participatory, experiential and immersive cinematic experiences. They argue that this focus potentially marginalizes or obscures the more ‘traditional’ or ‘trivial’ aspects of cinemagoing. Their survey responses demonstrated: ‘an overwhelming emphasis on the affective and social value of far more quotidian evaluative criteria, including the cinema’s facilities, amenities, ticket prices and membership scheme’ (p. 157, this

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volume) The Prince Charles Cinema audience respondents clearly identify themselves as an alternative audience – with alternative tastes not catered for by the ‘mainstream’. In their responses they position themselves as different to this mainstream audience and the places with which they are associated – which are described as bland and ‘monochrome’ spaces of consumption. For this audience in particular, they demonstrated an appetite for a varied diet of cinematic offerings, not a requirement for more participation overall. The audience showed a tendency for nostalgia – at times for a relatively ‘near’ past – and a longing for cinemas that retained longevity and a sense of history in its programming. The overwhelming view of this audience is that some participatory activities around a screening were okay but these should not take place during a screening as this would disrupt the viewing pleasures. As McCulloch and Crisp put it in Chapter 9, ‘cinemagoing is always experiential’, and the contemporary rise in demand for innovative forms of experience is, they argue, ‘the desire for cinemas to get better at what they have historically always done, not for them to change in to something entirely different’. The latter two contributions from Kennedy and Jones have in common an aesthetic of re-enactment – enactments have a long-established trajectory, in contemporary cinema practices; this would include the artist Jeremy Deller’s re-enactment of The Battle of Orgreave (2001) which was a live installation performance that took place on the site of the original incident and involved some of the original participants. This was a unique combination of theatre and cinema as Mike Figgis captured this live event to be replayed to screen audiences. This hybrid of theatre and film clearly belongs amongst our wider conception of live and experiential cinema, indeed when we present at conferences and symposia, audience members and other academics are often keen to interrogate the potential links between the phenomena we are presenting and antecedents within historical re-enactments. In this section, we have curated two chapters that engage with re-enactment in quite distinct ways, the two experiences that Kennedy analyses re-enact powerful tropes from a fictional cinematic history, whereas Jones provides a performative re-enactment of a particular cinemagoing history. In ‘Funfear Attractions: The Playful Affects of Carefully Managed Terror in Immersive 28 Days Later Live Experiences’, Helen W. Kennedy examines the audience experience of the highly acclaimed zombie street game 2.8 Hrs Later and the Secret Cinema 28 Days Later experience. The 2.8 Hrs Later street game repurposes the city as a play space through which the player is guided by trained ‘zombie’ pursuers and tightly scripted and performed interactive theatrical vignettes which reveal clues about the next destination and allude to a ‘secret hideout’. The Secret Cinema experience makes use of a decommissioned printing press to construct their own fast-paced and minutely controlled, rule-bound version of the 28 Days Later film narrative. Here, Kennedy teases out the intersections between bodies, spaces and pleasures uniting many of the thematics of the volume overall. Her contribution provides valuable new concepts and methodological resources that will be invaluable in future close analyses of participatory cinematic events. She also provides further insight through situating

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these experiences within the framework of an overall ludification of cultural experience to which we might argue a large number of these experiences belong. In ‘Living Cinema Memories: Restaging the Past at the Pictures’, Matthew Jones presents insights into two live cinema events which he staged in March and June 2016 around the fiftieth anniversary of Hammer Film Production’s One Million Years B.C. Rather than attempting to immerse the audience in the diegetic world of the film, Jones’ recreated the experience of 1960s cinemagoing in order to stage memories collected from the era’s cinemagoers in the environment in which they took place. Drawing on the findings of the AHRC-funded ‘Cultural Memory and British Cinemagoing of the 1960s’ project, a larger research project located at the intersection of British Cinema Studies of the 1960s, Memory Studies, Oral Cultural History, Performance and Living Cinema. From continuous on-screen programming and the behaviour of other audience members to encounters with commissionaires, usherettes, ice cream sellers and cinema managers, Jones examines the potential and the limitations of using live cinema as a form of immersive public education, in which audiences are invited to learn about historical cinemagoing by experiencing an approximation of it for themselves. In doing so, Jones distinguishes live cinema from what he terms ‘living cinema’, in which the film is not the focus of the world created by the performance, the focus is the cinema itself. Jones offers a fascinating account, and an experience which we were able to attend the second iteration of this event at the Picturehouse Central in Leicester Square, London. Not having seen Matthew for a while, we approached him on arrival at the stairwell of the cinema, only to be confronted by his alternate 1960s persona of the ‘cinema manager’, puffing on his cigarette and swiftly and officiously guiding us to an usherette to collect one of the ABC Film Review programmes. Adopting a researcheras-performer subjectivity, Jones was afforded a unique vantage point and presented a novel approach to both uncovering and disseminating an illuminating understanding of a historically specific moment of cinematic experience. Jones’ chapter and approach serves as a useful bridge to the final section in that the author deploys creative practices in the expository process of research dissemination.

8

The Opera Virgins Project: Operatic Event Cinemaas a New Cultural Experience Joseph Attard

The ten-year anniversary of the Metropolitan Opera House’s first live cinema broadcast presents a suitable milestone for assessing the maturation of operatic event cinema, which has developed into a distinct art form with particular aesthetic, technical and experiential characteristics. What I shall hereafter refer to as opera cinema is more than a vehicle for virtually extending opera audiences: it is a unique cultural experience with a complex genealogy encompassing telegraphy, radio and cinema. In this chapter I defend opera cinema’s status as medium in its own right, beginning by tracing the key technologies, events and attractions that have contributed to its genetic makeup. My introduction also touches on the politically sensitive issue of cannibalization: the capacity of digital broadcasting to compete with regional and touring companies, with supposed deleterious effect on the operatic ecology. I then present findings from an audience research project I conducted in March 2015, in which I invited twenty subjects to watch their first-ever opera ‒ both in the Royal Opera House and at a cinema of their choosing ‒ and empirically analysed their subjective engagement. The results of this small-scale study (a pilot for my PhD research project) carry no statistical weight, nor do they offer generalizable insights into new audiences’ engagement with opera cinema. Rather, they illustrate the discrete clusters of subjectivity facilitated by a particular operatic event, serving as proof of concept for ongoing research wherein I explore how variables such as location, repertoire and different movie houses influence audience engagement with opera cinema.

An electric performance: The 150-year history of mediatized opera Opera cinema has existed in its digital incarnation for a decade, but its genealogy encompasses a much more extensive history of interlocking media technologies and experiences. A key 1878 article by Louis Figuier presents the ‘Le Télectroscope’: a conceptual precursor to the television that would permit a user in San Francisco to watch a live opera performance 5,560 miles away in Paris (Wyver, 2015). It is not by accident that Figuier envisioned opera as the natural partner to his theoretical broadcast device.

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Under a burgeoning capitalist economy, opera underwent a democratization process in the nineteenth century that was accelerated and consolidated by the development of novel media technologies. Opera has never been an exclusively aristocratic art form, but Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker contend that up until the nineteenth century it was typically ‘the province of elite groups’ even in its Italian homeland (2012: 10–11). By the early 1800s ‒ with European class society still trembling from the impact of the great 1789 French Revolution and its aftershocks ‒ the economic dominance of the bourgeoisie meant that private enterprise began to supplant patronage and state funding of the arts, which gradually transformed the composition of opera audiences. In Paris, for instance, Napoleonic laws mandated three distinct (and rigidly policed) types of operatic entertainment, with their own particular venues and audiences. The Opéra was reserved for the ‘grand opera’ ‒ epics of five hours or more that are nigh watchable by modern standards, but were favoured by Parisian high society at the time (Abbate and Parker 2012: 318). The Théàtre Italien staged Italian works for equally elevated clientele, while the Opéra-Comique put on comic opera and singspiel to a more plebeian crowd (ibid.). The flowering of communication technologies at the turn of the twentieth century dovetailed with a democratization of opera under the pressure of a market economy, turning these quantitative developments into a qualitative shift. The phonograph record allowed opera fans to enjoy the tones of their favourite singers from the comfort of their homes (Abbate and Parker 2012: 234), while the théâtrephone and its British counterpart, the electrophone, connected home audiences to live performances by telephone – albeit with rudimentary sound quality (Snowman 2009: 282). With new forms of distribution came an almost paternal urge to ‘bring opera to the masses’. This spirit of operatic evangelism was demonstrated as early as 1910 when American inventor and entrepreneur Lee de Forest persuaded the Metropolitan Opera House in New York to mount a transmitter on its roof. On two successive nights, a handful of radio hams in Manhattan and New Jersey received a garbled transmission of a live Enrico Caruso performance (ibid.) – an aesthetic and commercial failure that is notable as the first ‘mass’ wireless broadcast by a major opera company (Heyer 2008: 592). Later, commercial radio opened musical performance to a genuinely mass audience, which ballooned to forty million listeners in American alone by 1928. That same year, the National Grand Opera Company inaugurated a weekly broadcast of abridged operas, which was followed by the famous Live from the Metropolitan Opera series in 1931 (Snowman 2009: 282). The special historical relationship between opera and cinema forms another tributary to the genealogy of opera cinema. Many early cinemas were euphemistically called ‘opera houses’ to skirt over the less-than-salubrious connotations of a medium that mixed genders, races and classes in a darkened room. The ‘twilight reverie’ of the movie theatre (Barthes 1986: 346) owes much to Richard Wagner, who was the first theatre producer to demand silence of his audiences and total darkness during performances (Abbate and Parker 2012: 19). While operatic etiquette varied across different countries and venues, rapt engagement was by no means the default prior to this. William Gladstone’s descriptions of Italian opera houses in the 1830s recount

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patrons showing up halfway through the show to catch the highlights, nobles chatting and playing chess in the boxes and spitting on the heads of the commons below (Snowman 2009: 46). The evolution of cinema from a sideshow attraction to a mass medium housed in a silent, darkened movie theatre took inspiration from postWagnerian opera houses (Corbett 2001: 17–18). Classical Hollywood soundtracks, with their romantic swells and hummable melodies, were also directly inspired by late nineteenth-century Italian opera. In fact, Marcia Citron contends that cinema was the successor to verismo opera as ‘[b]oth stress spectacle and melodrama, and both have mass appeal. Both offer a vast canvas of emotions, and both air political and social concerns’ (Citron 2000: 24). An important precursor to event cinema emerged in the 1930s in the form of theatre television ‒ live images electronically transmitted to cinemas (Gomery 1985: 54). The biggest draws were sporting events (particularly boxing matches) (Gomery 1989: 120), but near the end of theatre television’s lifecycle the Metropolitan Opera also broadcast its 1952 production of Carmen to thirty-one cinemas in twenty-six American cities (Wyver 2015). Across the pond, television patent holder John Logie Baird had struggled from 1925 to install television technology in cinemas, which he regarded as its natural home. Baird eventually managed to convince the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation to install a large-screen receiving apparatus at the London Dominion, with moderate success. Smelling profits, rival company Scophony broadcast a 1938 title fight between Eric Boon and Arthur Danahar at a department store down the road in Kensington. This system was picked up by the Odeon cinema chain, which installed television systems in five of its London cinemas (Wyver, 2015). The Second World War put these developments on hold, and disastrous technical issues during a large-screen transmission of the Victory Parade on 6 June 1946 proved a major setback. With a few exceptions (including a broadcast of Elizabeth II’s coronation), live content vanished from cinema screens in the 1950s. It would remain for digital technologies to make such events sustainable, half a century later (Wyver, 2015). In the interim, televised opera found much more success. Approximately 500,000 homes tuned in to a 1947 ABC telecast of Otello from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera – an impressive figure, given the relatively low penetration of television at the time (Citron 2000: 43). However, rather than inspiring imitations, studio-produced performances were initially the favoured mode of television opera. NBC Opera Theatre ran annually for fifteen seasons between 1949 and 1964, showcasing established repertoire as well as newly commissioned works such as Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951), Griffelkin (1955) and Labyrinth (1963) (ibid.) Benjamin Britten’s Owen Wingrave was composed specifically for television and beamed to Britain, Canada and the United States in May 1971 by the non-commercial NET Opera Company (Senici 2010: 46– 7). Telecasts started to overtake studio productions in the 1970s when technological advances reduced the costs of transmission, a trend supported by home video (ibid.). A 1987 Met telecast of Turandot set the aesthetic standard for future relays. Its lengthy exterior shots of the opera house, pans across the audience and reverse shots of the musicians and conductor became established conventions of what James Steichen describes as ‘institutional dramaturgy’, presenting the viewer with a virtual ticket to

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the opera house (Steichen 2009: 25). Around this time open-air transmissions and screenings of opera entered a certain vogue. Some of these events were extremely creative, such as a spectacular 1992 production of Tosca that was filmed by a mobile film crew and broadcast live ‘on-site’ from various parts of Rome (Citron 2000: 65). The changeover to digital projection was instrumental in the rise of event cinema. The 1990s saw a boom in film attendance and cinema construction, but this was followed by a catastrophic downturn in the 2000s (Barker 2013: 2). The promise of ‘alternative content’ (and thus higher ticket prices) convinced the industry to overcome its initial hesitancy and invest in digital equipment. Live sporting events and pop concerts, rather than theatrical performances, were initially floated as the presumed money spinners, but the Met’s new general manager Peter Gelb (who had the ear of the cinema industry, having joined from Sony) had other ideas. Ticket sales at the Met had fallen below 75 per cent in 2006, private donors were deserting and the average age of attendees was 65 (ibid.). In light of these figures, Gelb hoped that cinema broadcasting would attract ‘a younger, more hip audience to opera … people in their 30s or 40s who, for example, like art-house cinema’ (ibid.). The Metropolitan Opera inaugurated its live cinema series in 2006 with Julie Taymor’s abridged, English-language version of The Magic Flute, targeting 100 movie theatres in America, Britain, Norway and Japan. The relay cost $1million to produce, but Gelb’s experiment paid dividends, with 91 per cent of available seats filled for the 2006/7 cinema season (Ouzounian 2007: 5–11), amounting to around 324,000 tickets sold worldwide (Watkin 2007). My research partners at the Royal Opera House pioneered cinema broadcasting in Britain, successfully transmitting a 2008 production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.1 As early adopters, the Royal Opera House has exerted a particular influence over the development and public perception of event cinema in Britain. At present, the company relays productions to 1,500 sites across thirty-five territories (Butler, 2015). While opera remains the most common form of event cinema, it has been outflanked by theatre in terms of box office revenue (Tuck 2016: 15) ‒ a third of the 4.3 million tickets sold by the National Theatre in 2013/14 were for NT Live (ibid.: 7). The total global gross revenue generated by event cinema was $277.2 million in 2014 and is expected to exceed $1 billion in 2019 (ibid.: 17). The UK has become a world leader in this industry, with thirty-five distributors and the world’s only trade body for event cinema, the Event Cinema Association (ibid.: 2). Reasons for this include Britain’s geographical position, which results in beneficial time differences with multiple key markets, making it possible to distribute and receive programming from the US and Russia, for instance (ibid.: 24). The UK also boasts a number of globally visible organizations (such as those with the Royal Charter) and full-digital adoption by a strong cinema network (ibid.). I have scantily related the genealogy of opera cinema, and there are many related phenomena I have not addressed (free live streams to content-sharing platforms like YouTube, for instance). However, I have hopefully demonstrated that opera tends to lead the other dramatic arts in expanding its live audience through novel forms of mediatization, while the cinema (as an exhibition context) shares a direct genetic link to the post-Wagnerian opera house. Digital broadcasting technologies have united these historical threads into a unique new medium. However, this medium has not

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imbricated itself into the cultural landscape seamlessly or without controversy. Daniel Snowman argues that the recent history of opera has revealed the struggle of ‘serious music theatre’ to ‘widen the social base of its audiences while at the same time maintaining aesthetic standards’, a struggle he situates within a ‘gradual democratisation of culture’ (Snowman 2009:3). Such democratization is conceptually complex and currently exists on multiple levels in the British arts sector. In the first instance, cultural inclusion policies enacted by the New Labour government during the 1990s and early 2000s entrenched a data-led approach to arts funding that called on the culture sector to ‘reach out’ beyond ‘traditional’ audiences (more specifically to people from low economic backgrounds, people of colour and the young) (Turnbull 2008:192–193). More fundamentally, the provision of art and culture is usually perceived as a zero-sum game between accessibility and quality, with any attempt to bring newcomers into the fold equated with dumbing things down. New technologies and distribution channels have always been bound up in this alleged tension between artistic quality and popularity, but livecasting has come under particularly intense scrutiny. In 2012 the English National Opera’s director, John Berry, attacked the Royal Opera House’s ‘obsession about putting work out into the cinema’ for distracting ‘from making amazing quality work’ (Clark 2015) (although the ENO eventually capitulated and launched its own event cinema screenings). In the same year, theatre critic Alexandra Coghlan compared opera broadcasts to the pavilions of Epcot’s world showcase: ‘Everything might be visually tidier, more convenient, more heightened in close-up, but is also hollow – a cartoonish reality’ (Coghlan 2012). Responding to these criticisms, Royal Opera House chief executive Alex Beard was quoted in the Financial Times as subscribing to ‘democratising access’ but not ‘democratising art’ ‒ whatever that means.2 A 2014 study by Karen Wise, conducted in collaboration with the English Touring Opera, brought a new dimension to this debate by suggesting that, far from democratizing opera, cinema broadcasts cannibalize existing audiences by drawing attendees into movie houses at the expense of auditoria (Wise 2014). Evidence of cannibalization is mostly anecdotal at present, while the political intricacies of democratization mean it cannot be approached (much lest empirically tested) uncritically. However, it is certainly true that modern opera companies are under pressure to broaden their audience bases. Further to the issues already discussed, ageing opera audiences make the acquisition of younger layers a matter of necessity for the art form. Opera cinema is not achieving this. Research conducted by the Royal Opera House on its cinema audiences in 2014 found that 53 per cent of respondents were over the age of 65 (a far higher proportion than the Covent Garden audience) and 43 per cent already attended staged operatic performances ‘more than once a year’ (Butler, 2015).

‘How I lost my opera virginity’: Research methodology The decision to recruit novices for my study might seem counterintuitive, given that cinema broadcasting currently services a more mature and seasoned audience even than the Royal Opera’s auditorium on average. However, I am curious about the

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role that mediatized opera could play in ‘audience acquisition’ (a less-loaded term I shall henceforth use in lieu of democratization). I hypothesize that certain aspects of event cinema, such as relatively inexpensive tickets and the visual vocabulary of film, have intrinsic appeal for newcomers that for whatever reason is not translating to attendance at live screenings, and certainly not at the opera house. My upcoming thesis will deal directly with this question. Of more relevance to this chapter is the fact that experienced opera cinema audiences are inclined to view broadcast opera in comparison to the staged experience they know and love, rather than viewing it on its own merits. This is not to say that novices approach opera cinema as a tabula rasa, but they do not treat live broadcasts as simply a way of engaging with a known art form. Instead, my participants structure their subjective engagement in relation to familiar experiences. Theirs is a new perspective, if not a neutral one. Between March and May 2015 I invited twenty subjects to watch John Fulljames’s production of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (composed by Kurt Weill and scripted by Berthold Brecht in 1930) both at Covent Garden and at a cinema of their choosing. Mahagonny is less acclaimed than Kurt and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera (1928), and is definitively not a canon piece. It also has a troubled history on the stage, having previously ‘bombed’ at both ENO and the Salzburg Festival (Christiansen 2015). Famously loathed by Adolf Hitler and banned under the Nazi regime, Mahagonny wryly satirizes Weimar-era Berlin through its depiction of the hyper-capitalistic, gangster utopia of Mahagonny. Brecht depicts the exploits of purposeless drifters, prostitutes and strays who become ensnared by the dark delights of Mahagonny like flies caught in a spider’s web ‒ for which the city is named. Musically, the opera incorporates a number of popular idioms from the 1930s including jazz, ragtime and music hall. In short, the opera is very un-opera-like by the standards of the Italian verismo works that dominate modern stages, being more literary, more cynical and more musically promiscuous. The Royal Opera House’s production was performed in English and enlivened by Fulljames’s visually arresting staging, which evoked the sleaze of the titular city through a cacophony of neon street signs and shipping crates. The cinema broadcast was filmed with a seven-camera set-up and edited on-the-fly according to a pre-rehearsed shooting script. The architectural constraints of the Royal Opera House (and the mores of its auditorium audience) precluded the cranes, dollies and tracks that embellish NT Live’s shot vocabulary, for instance. Much of the action was filmed in long shots at varying scales, from two and three shots during dramatic scenes to extreme long ensemble shots. As is standard for mediatized opera, extreme close-ups on principal performers were deployed relatively sparingly to mitigate against unflattering glances at the singers’ tonsils. All of my subjects were given circle seats for the auditorium, so their physical proximity to the stage action was comparable. Given the small scale and experimental nature of this study, I was not concerned with demographic sampling and recruited on the basis of goodwill and availability. However, as the majority of my respondents were King’s College London students, the following results sketch a very particular perspective on opera cinema; predominantly that of young, tech-literate, formally educated inhabitants of a culture-saturated metropolitan centre. I divided my

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respondents into two pools of ten each, one of which viewed Mahagonny first in the cinema, followed by the Covent Garden auditorium, and the other vice versa. My rationale for this was that my subjects would technically no longer be opera virgins at the halfway point of the project and that their responses might be skewed one way or the other depending on which venue came first. I hoped that by splitting my sample in this way, I would be able to balance for this. Ultimately, I observed nothing in my results to suggest that either group was consistently biased towards either the stage or the screen. I assessed my respondents’ experiences via Q-Methodology: a hybrid method incorporating qualitative and quantitative elements that is designed to ‘objectively uncover and analyse similarities and differences in the subjective viewpoints of individuals’ (Davis: 561). I adopted this methodology for its capacity to identify groupings of common impressions within one’s sample, which has specific utility for my PhD project ‒ as I shall explain in my conclusion. Q-Methodology requires respondents to sort a series of up to five dozen items, typically on a scale of +4 (entirely agree) to –4 (entirely disagree). These items are lifted from a concourse surrounding the phenomenon under scrutiny, which can consist of pre-existing material (such as photographs, music and news articles) or can be generated by the researcher: through group interviews, for example. The Q sorting process is often combined with qualitative data sources such as subject testimonies and focus groups to aid in the final analysis. Once participants have sorted their items, the researcher performs a factor analysis on the resulting data, creating a ‘matrix of correlations among the set of Q sorts’ (Davis 2011: 570). In short, subjects are placed in groups (called ‘factors’) based on how much they agree with one another. Interpretation of the results rests on the insight of the researcher, in accordance with Charles Peirce’s principle of abduction (Schrøder et al. 2003: 45). I derived fifty-nine items from eighty different sources, including the popular and industry operatic press, interview scripts from meetings with Royal Opera House staff, academic texts, social media and fan blogs. These items were grouped under six categories: accessibility, context, enjoyment, liveness, esteem and value. For instance, the following item (lifted from the Royal Opera House’s comments section) fell under ‘value’: The cinema will only ever be second best to seeing an opera in the theatre. People should always choose to see an opera in the auditorium if possible.

My subjects conducted their sorts online, with seventeen of my original twenty respondents providing usable evidence (two subjects severed contact without explanation and another completed the sort incorrectly). The total number of factors produced is described as a ‘factor solution’. After analysing my Q Sorting evidence, I arrived at a three-factor solution for my sample ‒ although it should be noted that none of the findings presented here are not generalizable, owing to the limited sample size. The purpose of this chapter is to report on the clusters of engagement within a particular group of subjects (viewing a very particular opera) and demonstrate how I used Q-Methodology to examine their subjective experiences concretely.

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Factor one: New Purists The most populous factor (eight participants) was made up of instinctual traditionalists who felt that opera can only be experienced to its full potential in an opera house. These New Purists also expressed feelings of responsibility towards the future of the medium, evidenced by their most agreed-upon item: ‘I feel like people make a greater contribution to the art form by seeing an opera in the opera house compared to going to the cinema. It’s important to keep this medium alive.’ In addition to emphasizing the aesthetic superiority of staged opera to broadcasts, these subjects expressed a general disdain for cinema, which they associated with populism, mundanity and low culture. One subject commented: ‘In my opinion, people who go to watch opera shows in the cinema instead of the latest blockbuster do so for a reason. They are likely to be more cultured and aware of opera and what it entails.’ The assessment resonates with Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, wherein participation in the ‘correct’ kinds of culture assists in class differentiation: ‘Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier’ (Bourdieu 1984: 5–6).Opera cinema’s constant reminders to audiences that they are not at the opera house could be said to enforce this cultural stratification. Describing a 2009 Met stream of Carmen, Steichen argues that ‘by leveraging the prestige of the Met … [opera cinema] can’t help but reinforce the inherent exclusivity of the real thing’ (2009: 25). A recurring theme across the New Purists’ written testimonies is their lack of emotional engagement with the cinema broadcast (e.g. ‘You don’t feel the raw passion and emotion conveyed by the cast and orchestra’). Opera’s wild histrionics and dramatic flourishes (conventions that Lesley Stern describes as ‘operality’) (Stern 2002: 45) are esteemed by acolytes for their emotional impact. Sinéad O’Neill, Joshua Edelman and John Sloboda’s research on the cultural value of opera found that the emotive power of operatic scores brings ‘a sense of reality to the drama’ as it ‘enables audience members to fully enter into the narrative and situations of the plot, and to relate more strongly to the characters than they would in spoken theatre’ (O’Neill et al. 2016: 44). However, several respondents in this study considered remediated opera to be less emotionally engaging than staged opera because the performers were not physically present (ibid.: 37). Given that this applied equally to cinema broadcasts and DVD recordings, the authors conclude that ‘physical co-presence was a more important aspect of liveness than simultaneity’ for their subjects (ibid.). ‘Liveness’ is a vexed term in media theory, with Philp Auslander and Peggy Phelan’s oppositional concepts forming a centre of gravity around which several ongoing debates circulate. Where Auslander argues that liveness is a historical by-product of recorded media (nothing was live before it could be recorded) (2008), Phelan emphasizes the radical potential of live performance to resist the ‘smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital’ (1993:106). In my estimation, different audience members associate particular experiential cues with liveness. The New Purists, for example, equated liveness with a physically co-present cast rather than simultaneity, as evinced by the following comment from one participant: ‘It didn’t feel like a special occasion (watching the show in cinema). I am inclined to compare it to watching play productions of Romeo and

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Juliet on a widescreen TV in GCSE English Literature class.’ Ergo, liveness constitutes an effect produced by audiences rather than an intrinsic ontological feature of different cultural phenomena.

Factor two: Awed Initiates Respondents in my second-largest factor (six participants) were ambivalent about their experience. They broadly concurred with the New Purists that the broadcast was inferior to the staged performance, but expressed a significant amount of discomfort with the opera house. Not only did these respondents reach a looser consensus in general, but their two most-agreed-upon statements were contradictory: ‘The operatic voice is incredible in person. Hearing a human voice fill a huge space without amplification is something the cinema can never recreate.’/‘I felt totally out of place in the Covent Garden auditorium. Seeing my first opera was hard enough, but the whole setting just made me self-conscious and uncomfortable.’ It had been my intention to supplement my q-sorts with a focus group containing at least one respondent from each of my three factors ‒ unfortunately, all five of the respondents who agreed to participate in this focus group were Awed Initiates. While the overall usefulness of this data stream was therefore limited, it furnished me with additional insight into the Awed Initiates that helped unpick the paradox. Evidence from the q-sorts suggests that these subjects generally preferred the auditorium experience to the cinema, a point reinforced by testimonial evidence: (e.g. ‘[The relay] lacked the incredible atmosphere that a live performance has, there is only so much sound that can be digitally reproduced’). However, unlike the New Purists, who regarded the cinema broadcast as simply ‘not opera’, the Awed Initiates were more equivocal. In the main, these subjects felt that opera cinema represents a valuable cultural experience in its own right that facilitates a greater sense of occasion than pre-recorded cinema. They also expressed a different conception of liveness to the New Purists, identifying the simultaneity of the broadcast as intrinsic to its appeal. Their comments evoke Chris Morris’s contention that visual evidence of simultaneity at opera cinema broadcasts ‒ images of audience members gathering at the auditorium, the on-screen countdown clock ticking towards curtain up ‒ helps to foster a ‘sense of now’ (2010: 106). Consequently, the broadcast event is rooted in time, assembling an ‘imagined community’ and conveying an impression of collective engagement. Morris’ view was endorsed by the Awed Initiates, one of whom commented that: ‘[The broadcast] really had this immediacy about it, you knew that it was happening even though it was somewhere else. The fact that it was happening and kind of unfolding in real time really did bring out the edge. I wouldn’t want to watch the DVD at home or something.’ Subjects also praised the visual language of cinema for making the oftenoverwhelming experience of opera more legible. One of the Awed Initiates in my focus group described the clarifying effect of cinema during protagonist Jimmy Mahoney’s execution in Mahagonny’s climactic final act:

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I didn’t think that I was forced into viewing a specific way; instead it felt more like I was being shown everything that was being shown … the close-up when Jimmy has the ‘electric chair’s headpiece’ fixed onto his head allowed me to instantly see the allusions to him being a Christ-like figure well before the other symbols were put into play, I appreciated that a lot as I felt like I may have missed it otherwise and was able to notice it much more readily during the auditorium performance.

In a 2014 interview, chorus manager of the Royal Opera House Sophie Wilkinson remarked that audiences should visit the ‘auditorium for the music and the cinema for the story’.3 This comment led me to consider Emanuele Senici’s writings on the conventions of live opera videos, which share many of their aesthetic conventions with livecasting. Senici describes how filmed performances are ‘rhythmized’ (2010: 68), arguing that ‘live opera videos feature a quadruple mise-en-rythme, so to speak: verbal text, music, mise-en-scène, and video’ (ibid.). The language of cinema interacts with and re-narrates the music and stage action, resulting in a new preferred reading, fashioned by the stage director and screen director in concert. Experienced attendees cited in other studies have protested this aspect of opera broadcasts as obtrusive, particularly in relation to extreme close-ups (Wise 2014). Operaphiles might not require or appreciate further clarification of the dramatic action, but a significant proportion of my sample of opera novices were grateful for additional visual guidance. However, the Awed Initiates were especially sensitive to what they identified as opera’s elitism ‒ especially in the opera house itself. Subjects described this positively as a source of cultural esteem (e.g. ‘My friends definitely were impressed when I mentioned I was going to an opera’) but negatively in relation to their perceived inadequacies and the attitude of other auditorium attendees (e.g. ‘I felt underdressed, and encountered a number of snooty audience members’). One focus group participant spoke especially vividly about a member of the Covent Garden audience castigating him for fiddling with his phone before the performance. This accusation evokes the ‘formal process of initiation’ to opera detailed in Claudio Benzecry’s ethnography of Argentinian opera fans (2011: 138). Buenos Aires is a very different city to London, making Benzecry’s research a somewhat tenuous touchstone, but nevertheless there are points of commonality that bear consideration here. Benzecry relates how experienced operagoers in Buenos Aires regulate the behaviour of novice audience members, leading by example (e.g. applauding at appropriate moments) and scolding noisy or unruly patrons so as to ‘socialise the rest of the house into their understanding of opera’ (ibid.: 93). This hierarchical system of self-policing by the audience constitutes a ‘complex system whereby rules of civility both constrain and enable emotion and allow for its proper public display’ (ibid.). Benzecry discusses this arrangement positively, as an intrinsic part of opera novices’ matriculation. My subjects’ less-than-appreciative response to similar treatment in London might be explained by the fact that they attended Mahagonny as part of a research project, rather than being self-motivated to see an opera, and were thus less primed for well-intentioned micromanagement. There is also a detectable degree of romanticism on Benzecry’s part ‒ I am not convinced

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that every Argentinian at their first opera enjoys being shushed for opening a candy wrapper at an inopportune moment. Cultural specificity may also play a role. Benzecry notes that opera in Buenos Aires is more detached from the national culture than in many Western European cities, mitigating against snobbery and elitism (ibid.: 29). It should also be noted I rather threw my novice subjects in at the deep end by sending them to the most prestigious (and expensive) opera house in Britain. A multitude of regional and touring companies in Britain (such as Opera North and the English Touring Opera) perform at smaller, less formal venues throughout the country, meaning my subjects’ negative impressions might have less to do with opera in general than with Covent Garden in particular.

Factor three: Opera Cinephiles Opera Cinephiles constituted the smallest factor (three participants), small enough that their impressions could be dismissed as a random aberration. However, these subjects reached a very close consensus and their top-scoring items indicate a clear preference for the cinema broadcast over the opera house: 1. Being in the auditorium was less enjoyable than the cinema. Three hours is a long time to sit in a small seat and I couldn’t see the stage as clearly. 2. Watching an opera in the cinema was far less tiring than spending three hours cooped up in the auditorium. 3. Being in the opera house is different to watching a relay at the cinema, but not necessarily better. I think people get just as much out of going to the cinema. 4. It was much harder to follow the story in the opera house compared to the cinema. I feel like the cinema helps communicate the drama. The first two items stress respondents’ familiarity and comfort with the cinema as an exhibition context, an advantage elaborated on in their testimonies (e.g. ‘I’d admit I found quite a lot of it difficult to get into in the opera house but [not] in the more familiar environment of the cinema’). The latter items suggest these subjects regarded both experiences as having equivalent cultural value and that they concurred with the Awed Initiates about the legibility of opera cinema. The small amount of evidence yielded by this factor makes further analysis difficult. However, we can derive some insight by drawing on Jennifer Radbourne, Hilary Glow and Katya Johanson’s 2009 research on theatrical performances in Melbourne, Australia (Radbourne et al. 2010). The authors suggest that cultural events can impart value by ‘providing audiences with information to enable a better understanding of the performance leading to an enriched experience and likely return visit’ (ibid.). Opera cinema broadcasts typically incorporate pre-recorded featurettes that play during the interval(s) and provide additional information about the opera and the production process. Data obtained from experienced opera cinema audiences suggest a mixed reception for these diversions in general, while Steichen is sharply critical of

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what he regards as an attempt by opera companies to ‘monetize the backstage’, making ‘“creative content” out of what otherwise would languish behind the scenes’ (Steichen 2011: 447). However the Opera Cinephiles seemed to appreciate the educative value of these embellishments: (e.g. ‘With the interviews etc. I came away feeling I’d got more out of it’/‘The background information and interviews at the start and during the interval were interesting’). A consensus of three offers slim grounds for speculating on the deep predilections or future behaviours of these subjects, but the additional knowledge bestowed by the cinema broadcast clearly enhanced their experience on this occasion.

Conclusion While I cannot make generalizable claims about wider populations of opera virgins on the basis of this evidence, my pilot project served its purpose by confirming the viability of Q-Methodology as a means of describing patterns of subjective engagement within a sample of novice respondents. Rather than simply correlating enjoyment with demography (e.g. ‘age group A was more positive about this event than age group B’), Q-Methodology gives a more holistic picture of cultural engagement, especially when combined with other qualitative methods. My participants were positive about their first encounter with opera in the main, and their adaptation to an unfamiliar medium ‒ complete with growing pains ‒ demonstrates the active and intellectual process by which audiences engage with new cultural experiences. My ongoing research adapts my pilot design to a larger sample and aims to describe the clusters of audience experience that emerge at the intersections of repertoire, region and venue. I have already engaged in fieldwork around four cinemas in Hertfordshire and Hereford (two multiplexes and two independents in each location), investigating the subjective engagement of forty novice participants across three operas (Boris Godunov (1872), Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) and Werther (1892)). Mahagonny could scarcely be less akin to a bel canto work like Lucia, while director Katie Mitchell’s feminist reinterpretation made for a unique cinematic experience in which the camera assisted in drawing out political subtext. Furthermore, the virtually expanded reach of opera cinema is paradoxically not reflected in the London-centric research that presently exists on the subject. I am curious about how filtering livestreams through the particular cultural scene and demographic peculiarities of my regional case studies affects their reception. Finally, cinemas are no more uniform than theatres: each presents a different visual and acoustical environment that distinctly nuances audiences’ engagement with live opera. By empirically assessing the extent to which these variables shape virgin encounters with the medium, I will demonstrate the rich and complex patterns of subjective engagement facilitated by this new cultural phenomenon. Any historical differentiation of old and new must avoid ‘setting up the new as a culmination, telos or fulfilment of the old, as the onset of utopia or dystopia’ (Poster 1999: 12). Nevertheless, opera cinema can plainly be described as a new medium to

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the extent that it has only been feasible for a decade, and typifies the networked, digital experiences that have come to define contemporary media culture. Moreover, as a seventeenth-century art form broadcast to a twentieth-century exhibition space via twenty-first-century transmission technologies, the ontology of opera cinema suggests that stable categories of old and new were probably not particularly helpful in the first place. In terms of experience, there is surely nothing that quite approximates going to the opera, live at the movies.

9

Against Participation: Cinephilia, Nostalgia and the Pleasures of Attending an ‘Alternative’ Cinema Space Richard McCulloch and Virginia Crisp

In September 2010, Secret Cinema founder Fabien Riggall explained the growing popularity of immersive film events in the following terms:1 The more we become [physically] disconnected, with the Internet and social media, the more people want to share experiences. The multiplex is not dead, it’s a great business model, but some people want a different cinema experience. They want to be challenged, they want to be inspired, they want a reason to connect. (Quoted in Gant 2010: 9)

These words rely on some spurious claims about the Internet and social media (Rainie et al. 2011), but they also hint at two problematic assumptions about the nature of contemporary film consumption. First, Riggall relies on an overly homogenous definition of ‘the cinema experience’, which he very clearly sees as being synonymous with multiplex cinemas. His description of this kind of cinema as ‘a great business model’ that is ‘not dead’ may sound supportive, but it also very clearly invokes discourses of commercialism and obsolescence. By extension, then, ‘different cinema experiences’ – like the events his company runs – are positioned as forward thinking and more artistically worthy. Second, by referring to people who like to be ‘challenged’ and ‘inspired’, he suggests that there is also a difference in the audiences who seek out these alternative cinema experiences. In his view, such people are in pursuit of something more intellectually stimulating than the implicitly throwaway experience of the multiplex. But how might we begin to test these claims? Talk of ‘new’ cinema experiences and audience pleasures are fairly typical throughout discussions of event-led or ‘experiential’ cinema – that is, film screenings that are supplemented with live (and often interactive) events. Media coverage of this trend in the UK has invariably fixated on event-led cinema in its most exaggerated form, especially Secret Cinema’s ‘immersive’ screenings, which typically involve

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elaborately designed sets and scores of actors. Yet, as Ali Plumb has noted in Empire magazine, this is by no means the only ‘alternative’ experience available: While Secret Cinema attracts attention for its every-once-in-a-while grand plans … interactive, audience-involving, as-fun-as-three-bags-of Haribo moviegoing has a more regular home in the form of the Prince Charles Cinema … in London’s Leicester Square. (Plumb 2014)

It is this ‘more regular’ incarnation of event-led cinema that we aim to explore throughout this chapter, and so a sustained focus on the Prince Charles Cinema (PCC) and its audiences seems appropriate. The venue is a two-screen independent cinema in central London that shows a range of recent releases and repertory film screenings. As Plumb’s article points out, however, the cinema is arguably best known for hosting cinematic ‘events’, including all-night movie marathons, themed screenings (e.g. the Labyrinth [1986] Masquerade Ball), Q&A’s with stars and filmmakers and singalong and quote-along screenings of films like The Sound of Music (1965), Wayne’s World (1992) and The Room (2003) (cf. McCulloch 2011). Using the PCC as a case study, this chapter questions the extent to which people who attend a renowned ‘event’ venue actually talk about it as an ‘alternative’ space whose product differs from other cinemas. In a space that seems to offer a little bit of everything – from conventional programming through to participatory events – what is it about the cinema that patrons really find appealing? What do they want to see more, or less, of? Our findings surprised us. While respondents to our survey clearly saw the Prince Charles as an ‘alternative’ cinema, they largely rejected the appeal of its participatory events in favour of the ‘authentic’, or even ‘nostalgic’, cinematic experience they considered it to be offering. There was a strong emphasis on cinephilia, defined less by ‘good taste’ in films and more by the way in which films should be enjoyed. Ultimately, we argue that cinemagoing is always experiential, and so the search for ‘alternative’ cinema experiences seems to be more about the desire for cinemas to get better at what they have historically always done, not for them to change into something entirely different.

Method This chapter relies upon questionnaire data collected throughout the latter half of 2015 as part of a wider research project on the PCC. We wanted to find out two things: (1) To what extent do audiences see cinematic ‘events’, and the spaces that play host to them, as being different from more ‘conventional’ cinemagoing? (2) What pleasures or displeasures do audiences associate with such events? Specifically, then, our discussion focuses on responses to just three of the qualitative questions we asked: 1. How would you describe the PCC to someone who had never heard of it? 2. What appeals to you the most about the PCC? 3. What appeals to you the least about the PCC?2

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After having sought permission to conduct our research at the cinema, the management kindly agreed to assist us with distributing our questionnaire.3 They circulated it to their mailing list in conjunction with a website usability survey of their own, which eventually led to us receiving 220 unique responses.4 Collecting our data in this manner was practically beneficial, enabling us to elicit a high volume of responses in a short period of time. However, using the Prince Charles’s own mailing list as a recruitment tool also means that our audience sample cannot be seen as representative of the cinema’s audiences as a whole. These are self-selected members of the cinema’s own mailing list, so are more likely to respond to survey questions in the first place, and also more likely to be positively predisposed to the cinema. That said, 220 responses is far from an insignificant return, and certainly high enough number for us to be able to confidently identify some consistent, fascinating patterns across the dataset. Thus, the chapter should be seen as a series of tentative arguments about the nature and appeal of participatory film events, and the spaces where those events take place.

‘Eclectic (But Not Too Much)’: The Prince Charles as ‘Alternative’ cinema Broadly speaking, this chapter is concerned with questions of value in relation to eventled cinema, and the extent to which some film audiences may be seeking alternatives to more ‘conventional’ cinemagoing experiences. The Prince Charles represents an intriguing case study in that regard, precisely because its programming seems to cater towards such a wide range of tastes; one could just as easily define its product as ‘familiar’ as they could ‘unusual’. In this section, we demonstrate that although the audience members we heard from justified their opinions in very different ways, the notion of distinction (and in some cases ‘uniqueness’) is absolutely central to the way in which many people spoke about the venue and the films/events that take place there. In the following quote from a January 2015 article entitled ‘Inherent Vice: Why Fleapits Make the Perfect Film Venue’, The Guardian’s Ryan Gilbey neatly demonstrates just how central ‘uniqueness’ is to the cinema’s identity: Stand in London’s Leicester Square, throw a fistful of popcorn and you will hit several cavernous Odeons and a neon-fronted Empire. Stroll a little further and the hip Curzon Soho will sell you yoghurt-flecked loganberries to nibble while you watch the latest Hou Hsiao-hsien. But [Paul Thomas] Anderson had chosen to unveil Inherent Vice at the deliciously crummy Prince Charles Cinema, where they serve free beer and greasy pizza with screenings of gore-fests unseen since top-loading VHS recorders walked the earth. (Gilbey 2015)

What is striking from this quotation is the way in which Gilbey distances the Prince Charles from other cinemas in central London – not only from ubiquitous nationwide chains like Odeon, but also from respected independent cinemas like the Curzon Soho.

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What is important here is that rival multiplexes and independents are both positioned in stark opposition to the PCC. Responses to our questionnaire reveal similar patterns, with even very brief answers placing a clear emphasis on the differences between the Prince Charles and all other cinemas. Words such as ‘unique’ and ‘different’ appear throughout, as do more obviously positive adjectives like ‘cool’, ‘quirky’, ‘funky’ and ‘offbeat’. As James MacDowell has argued in relation to American independent films, terms such as ‘quirky’ can have a number of possible value-laden meanings. In marketing terms, ‘quirky’ is often used to indicate an accessible yet ‘unique, and therefore desirable, product’, but from an audience perspective it gestures towards moviegoers who have ‘a sense of belonging to a particular kind of interpretive community’ – specifically one that is ‘at or beyond the margins’ (2010: 1). We might say that to describe a cinema as ‘quirky’ is therefore to suggest that there is something attractively unusual or ‘alternative’ about its character – whether in relation to its programming, attendees, staff, atmosphere, or even the building itself – that sets it apart from its rivals. It certainly seems relevant that responses to our survey were peppered with positive comments about the somewhat tatty décor at the Prince Charles. For instance, one woman expressed her fondness for the fact that ‘it is not as “glossy” as the other cinemas on Leicester Square’ (P063), while a man described it as a ‘slightly quirky, slightly sleazy, slightly cheezy, old fashioned independent cinema that, frankly, gives absolutely zero fucks and is going to continue being awesome and fabulous despite the raised eyebrows of the boring’ (P094).5 Notice the way that this second response moves from what appears to be a physical description of the cinema’s appearance, through to an evaluation of its overarching attitude towards movies and the moviegoing experience. His final words are particularly revealing, with his insistence that it will ‘continue being awesome and fabulous’, implying a complex, decisionmaking entity – one with a distinct personality that permeates all of the activities that take place there, the employees who work there and the people who attend. There are clear indicators of a cult or ‘paracinematic’ reception strategy at work here, in the sense that such comments so clearly ‘exemplify the pride its audiences take in standing in opposition to official culture’ (Mathijs and Sexton 2011: 36; Sconce 1995). Indeed, while cult cinema is a somewhat amorphous category, most scholarly work on the subject stresses its contextual as well as its textual dimensions. Mathijs and Sexton, for instance, define cult cinema as being ‘identified by remarkably unusual audience receptions that stress the phenomenal component of the viewing experience, that upset traditional viewing strategies, that are situated at the margin of the mainstream, and that display reception tactics that have becomes a synonym for an attitude of minority resistance and niche celebration within mass culture’ (2011: 8). Seen in this way, P094’s comment about ‘the raised eyebrows of the boring’ stands out as overtly oppositional, expressing broad positivity towards the distinctiveness of the Prince Charles by pushing back against the imagined gatekeepers of ‘legitimate’ culture. The cinema’s appeal is therefore, for some people, very much tied to its identity as a site of cult appreciation. While some responses invoked this cult/mainstream dichotomy far more than others, one very clear pattern throughout our data was the notion that the PCC’s

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diverse programming made the venue ‘unique’. Almost exactly one-third of our survey respondents (33 per cent, n=73) cited this variety of films and events as the cinema’s most appealing selling point – more than any other category that we eventually coded for.6 Interestingly, it was common for our respondents to explicitly tie the PCC’s programming to its ‘unique’ identity, as the following example demonstrates: I think it’s good to support cinemas like the Prince Charles as what they offer is unique in London. A bit of blockbuster, a bit of retro and a lot of quirky. (P175)

This quotation points to the fact that the Prince Charles is highly valued for its diverse programming, which, at least in our research, has emerged as the cinema’s single most appealing quality. The question, then, is about why this variety is valued so highly. While there is some indication that the PCC’s wide selection of films is especially appealing to those with a very broad taste in cinema, there is far more evidence for diverse programming becoming a marker of distinction in its own right – not just its most attractive quality, but the central way in which the Prince Charles differs from other cinemas. As this chapter will go on to discuss, while the PCC is renowned for displaying the phrase ‘sod the sunshine come and sit in the dark’ on the cinema’s facia, this plea for passers-by to ‘sod the sunshine’ is in one sense a playful invitation to reject ‘mainstream’ culture, but ‘come and sit in the dark’ makes it clear that the idealized alternative is firmly entrenched in very traditional notions of the authentic cinema experience – watching a film in a dark room.

Are you sitting comfortably?: Rethinking ‘Experiential’ cinema As Mark Jancovich and Lucy Faire note, existing research into film exhibition has repeatedly shown that there is, and has always been, ‘more to film consumption than the watching of films’ (2003: 10). Thus, the meanings and significances of moviegoing are often not defined by the movies themselves, and to choose between different cinemas is to choose between different types of experience (ibid.: 12; also cf. Snelson and Jancovich 2011). When we first began planning this research project, terms like ‘experiential’, ‘participatory’ and ‘immersive’ cinemagoing were high on our agenda, as was a focus on the many singalong and quote-along screenings that routinely take place at the Prince Charles. What we found in our survey responses, however, was an overwhelming emphasis on the affective and social value of far more quotidian evaluative criteria, including the cinema’s facilities, amenities, ticket prices and membership scheme. Thus, in this section we argue that terms such as ‘experiential’ and ‘immersive’ are potentially misleading and risk downplaying the importance of more traditional and even seemingly trivial aspects of cinemagoing, all of which contribute significantly to the cinemagoing experience.

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For example, when we asked people to discuss the aspect(s) of the cinema that appealed to them the most, some did mention its event screenings, but a far greater number were keen to talk about issues such as the standard of the cinema’s seating. ‘The seats are very comfortable with a great view’ (P192), wrote one, while another described them as ‘the most comfortable seats ever’ (P170). Others went into slightly more detail about why this should be important, describing the cinema as ‘perfect for a date because the arms [on the chairs] can go up (or down if a bad date)’ (P095). These comments are also significant, especially given that seating also features prominently in references to audiences’ least favourite aspect of the PCC: In the main (downstairs) screen, the chairs are comfortable, but the way the seats are all on a decline can mean that watching long/multiple films can result in neck ache. (P199)

Clearly, there is a certain amount of disagreement over precisely how comfortable the cinema’s chairs are. Yet, the preponderance of discussion on this topic is a strong indicator of the importance placed on comfort by attendees. The implications here go far beyond seating or the ‘strange’ viewing angle; what is at stake here is the extent to which audiences are identifying the cinema’s amenities and layout as capable of facilitating, enhancing or disrupting the overall cinema experience – even becoming important for social reasons like dating (P095) or aesthetic reasons (‘I like the quirks – like the cool seating’ [P192]). Our point here is that to think of event-led cinema in terms of ‘experiential’ or ‘immersive’ elements is to deny the immersive and experiential qualities of more common aspects of cinemagoing; for many people, a comfortable cinema facilitates greater engagement with the film being shown, whereas an uncomfortable one can interfere. The audiences we heard from seemed far more concerned with the affective value of doing cinema the ‘right’ way, not in a ‘new’ way, and they consistently repeated this idea across a variety of ostensibly everyday criteria. Beyond debating how comfortable the cinema is, our questionnaire respondents were also keen to discuss its prices. In contrast to Secret Cinema, whose elaborate film events have increasingly come in for criticism in the British press for being too expensive (Dunne 2015; Lee 2015), the PCC was consistently lauded by our respondents for its affordability, with comments such as, ‘bargain’ (P021), ‘day tickets are CHEAP!’ (P069), ‘insanely cheap’ (P089), ‘much cheaper than the BFI’ (P200), ‘for a central London cinema it’s cheap’ (P215), ‘good value for money’ (P016; P193; P036), ‘extremely good value for money’ (P152) and ‘fantastic value’ (P015). It should not come as a surprise to find audiences who prefer to pay lower prices than higher ones, but what is surprising is the way in which low prices are seen to be symptoms of the cinema’s ethos. Quite simply, reasonable ticket prices are seen as the by-product of something larger – a sign that the Prince Charles sees its patrons as more than just a source of income, as the following comment illustrates: It’s got a lot more heart than most cinemas. It doesn’t feel like it’s trying to eke more money out of you by upgrading your popcorn size or paying more for a ‘premium’ seat. I appreciate that. (P168)

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This response focuses on the distinctive aspects of the cinema experience – what a trip to the Prince Charles ‘feels like’ compared to attending other cinemas – and this distinction emerges directly from a strong sense of the PCC as an ‘authentic’ space. References to the cinema’s ‘personality’ and ‘heart’ were commonplace, as were lines such as ‘it feels like a real place’ (P213) and ‘it has a soul unlike the big American money grabbing companies … and I like to support independent places that have soul’ (P173). These comments match closely with Sarah Banet-Weiser’s definition of ‘authentic’ spaces, which she describes as being ‘positioned and understood as outside the crass realm of the market. What is understood (and experienced) as authentic is considered such precisely because it is perceived as not commercial’ (2012: 10). While its prices are by no means the only factor contributing towards the formation of the cinema’s reputation, it certainly seems to be one of the most significant. The PCC absolutely must be seen to be pushing back against notions of the commercial in order for audiences to describe it in terms such as ‘a unique nugget of cinematic gold amidst a sea of popcorn hangars’ (P162).

‘A Step Back in Time’: Nostalgia and the value of anachronism Again and again throughout the responses we received, audiences talked about the Prince Charles as ‘old school’ or ‘retro’, and referred to its ‘old fashioned atmosphere’ (P150). In some cases, this sense of ‘the past’ being invoked was not even a particularly distant one. For example, respondents commented that: ‘I really appreciate the extended releases of particularly popular recent films’ (P091), and ‘I like being able to catch films that are not quite recent releases: i.e. not “classic” rep screenings, but films that were released more than six months ago and are unavailable elsewhere in London’ (P151). Each of these comments uses different wording to describe the original release date of the films in question (‘recent films’ and ‘not quite recent releases’), yet each is essentially referring to the same quality: the PCC consistently screens movies that most other cinemas have dispensed with. In a sense, then, the venue is valued by sections of its audiences for its ability and willingness to keep the cinematic past alive, even if that past is a relatively recent one. Film history is embraced, rather than discarded. Most prominently in this regard, we received repeated responses linking the cinema’s meaning and value to patrons’ own nostalgic memories and feelings. Numerous respondents’ descriptions of the PCC explicitly drew attention to its anachronistic qualities, as the following examples all indicate: It’s different [from other cinemas]. A bit like going back in time. (P145) A step back in time to when Cinemas were Cinemas and not audiovisual entertainment megaplexes. In short a ‘proper’ cinema. (P94) The PCC to me feels like a truly traditional cinema experience with a very intimate setting. It reminds me of when I was small and cinemas only had about two screens and you had to be quite selective when you went and what you saw. (P123)

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For many attendees, then, visiting the Prince Charles has more in common with the ‘authentic’ cinemagoing experience of a distant (but nonspecific) era than it does with the live, interactive and immersive events that some commentators have dubbed ‘the future of cinema’ (Plumb 2014; Wagner 2015). This seems especially relevant, given the profound changes that digital culture has had on the film industry in recent years (Tryon 2013), and most notably, the transition from celluloid to digital film as the preferred production, distribution and exhibition format (Crisp 2015; Rapfogel 2012).7 In this context, the Prince Charles’s decision to break ranks and retain its 35 mm projection facilities (and, since our survey was conducted, installing a new 70 mm projector) has become a clear point of distinction for some of its attendees, several of whom singled this out in relation to our question about the most appealing aspects of the cinema. Furthermore, while speaking passionately about the perceived qualities of 35 mm projection, comments also displayed a strong awareness of film being in the midst of a historically significant moment of transition (cf. Sperb 2014), as audiences referred to the Prince Charles’ ‘Dedication to 35 mm’ (P099), ‘Commitment to 35 mm’ (P188), its ‘Commitment to … keeping 35 mm alive’ (P088) or declaring, ‘You don’t do 3D, plus you are keeping 35 mm screenings – thank you’ (P195). ‘Commitment’, ‘dedication’ and ‘keeping’ all suggest a conscious, principled decision to persist with an increasingly unpopular format, while the reference to 3D appears to be a rejection of a more contemporary exhibition trend. Thus, the reverence for celluloid appears to go hand in hand with descriptions of the Prince Charles as being like ‘a step back in time’ – motivated by a nostalgic desire to recapture authentic viewing experiences associated with earlier, and implicitly more authentic audiences (cf. Cubbison 2005; Hills 2010). Similarly, numerous responses indicated that the appeal of the cinema’s repertory programming is partly rooted in the opportunity it presents for embracing nostalgia, although there are nuances within this. While some commenters made specific nods to the recovery of their own past – ‘they show classic movies from your childhood that you can’t see anywhere else’ (P067) – we also heard from respondents who acknowledged that reclaiming the past is not always about returning to real, prior experiences: I normally mention [to other people] the fact I saw 28 Days Later for a £1 and how that’s good because I was too young to see it at the cinema the first time round. (P102)

As Michael Dwyer has argued, while nostalgia has often been thought of pejoratively and criticized for being ahistorical, it is ‘the product of an affective engagement with the present that produces a sense of loss. Whether that loss is real or perceived is not the point. The point is that we find something lacking in our current conditions’ (2015: 10). So, when audiences at the Prince Charles refer to the cinema’s ability to figuratively transport them back in time, this is not necessarily about gaining access to previously inaccessible films. After all, as Jeffrey Sconce notes, ‘there have never been more opportunities to sample the entirety of film history […] Between Netflix, bit torrent, TCM, and international Amazon, any reasonably motivated person can probably track down almost any extant title in the world in less than a few weeks’ (Briggs et al. 2008:

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48). Rather, the nostalgia that some audiences feel the PCC nurtures so well is more about gaining access to particular kinds of cinema experience that are perceived as increasingly rare. In fact, for our respondents, there is a strong sense that films should be seen in the cinema, regardless of when they were first released, or whether the person in question has seen the film before or not.

‘That ruins the movie for me’: Opposition to events and participation While the original impetus behind this research was to consider the nature and appeal of event-led cinema at the PCC, the venue’s events were far less of a central draw for our survey respondents than we had originally anticipated. One of the reasons we found this surprising was because the Prince Charles so clearly foregrounds the status of its events within their promotional materials (e.g. printed event schedules, as well as an editorial emphasis on their website and in subscriber emails), and this was picked up by our respondents, seventy-three of whom mentioned events when asked to describe the cinema. While forty-two of these did so in a positive sense, a further twenty-nine were simply neutral statements along the lines of ‘it has gained a reputation for “event” screenings involving audience participation’ (P188), and two referred to events in explicitly negative terms. Furthermore, when asked to comment upon the most appealing aspects of the PCC, the numbers drop, with only thirty-four participants citing events as holding particular appeal for them. Even more pertinently, twenty-seven respondents described certain types of events – especially singalongs and quote-alongs – as the cinema’s least appealing quality. Acrimony towards singalongs and quote-alongs was often communicated quite bluntly through comments like ‘Singalong musical stuff. I hate it’ (P122) or ‘I will never attend Sing or quote-alongs’ (P054). The firm, unambiguous tone of these comments stood out as unusual in the context of other answers we received to the same question, the majority of which were either left blank or littered with caveats. The following comment is fairly typical: ‘My one selfish wish would be that they only show rep[ertory] cinema but I understand why they have to show the recent stuff too. The popcorn could be better but I’m splitting hairs’ (P068, emphasis added). Audiences were often quick to offer justifications and/ or excuses for their own complaints, which is a testament to the high regard most of them seem to hold towards the cinema as a whole. Importantly, though, this tempering of criticism seemed to disappear when it came to discussing events, with respondents seemingly far more convinced by their aversion. We are not suggesting that people either ‘loved’ or ‘hated’ PCC events; there are certainly interesting nuances to their negativity, with a number of people describing participatory screenings in terms such as the following: ‘Brilliant idea, … but not for me’ (P163); ‘Sing-alongs don’t really appeal to me, but I appreciate that others love them’ (P193); ‘Can’t see myself at a quote-along, but that’s just personal taste’ (P194); and ‘I’m not interested in many of the event screenings, but I’m glad they happen’ (P215). These responses suggest that the idea of event-led cinema is attractive to some

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extent – as evidence of diverse programming, perhaps – but the actual practice of attending such screenings may well remain unappealing. Moreover, it is significant that concerns over event-led cinema operated in relation to such a narrow definition of cinematic events; respondents almost exclusively reserved their negativity for singalong and quote-along screenings, whereas other events like double bills, guest speakers and all-night marathons were rarely mentioned.8 Crucially, audiences consistently objected to the fact that interactive screenings actively encouraged participation during the screening itself, whereas references to other participatory activities around the screening (e.g. Q&A’s, fancy dress competitions, staying overnight in the cinema) were generally praised or simply not mentioned. The concern here seems to be that these forms of audience participation might be disruptive, and would ruin an otherwise enjoyable film screening. As one respondent explained, ‘I much prefer my film-viewing to be quiet + only hear the film, not anybody else’ (P163). In other words, numerous people saw the ‘event’ format of the screening as a threat to the sanctity of the cinematic atmosphere. Cinemagoing was frequently described as a uniquely ‘immersive experience’ that ‘audience participation tends to obliterate’ (P091). Notably, unlike the tempered criticism mentioned above, people who expressed this viewpoint were also far less likely to acknowledge that their opinion was simply a matter of personal preference. Instead, their comments implied that the norm of silent and somewhat reverential film spectatorship was the only way to enjoy a film screening. For instance: I like films and want to enjoy them as they were meant to be enjoyed so I hate any audience participation things like sing-along and quote-along. That ruins the movie for me. If I wanted some idiot to speak the lines over the actors I could do that myself at home. (P149)

Concern over certain screenings transgressing the ‘normal’ and ‘proper’ way to enjoy films within cinematic space was often accompanied with a specific vitriol towards the audiences for such screenings, who were marked as major contributors to the ruination of the cinematic experience. For instance: I prefer a quiet, reverent audience to a rowdy one. I think the audience participation events attract a different crowd, one looking for a ‘fun’ social experience rather than a purely cinematic one. (P188)

This comment is illustrative of our two central arguments in this section. First, audiences readily invoked two possible ways of watching a film – the ‘“fun” social experience’ versus the ‘purely cinematic’ – but the latter is clearly positioned as the ‘right’ one. Secondly, our respondents consistently told us that the single greatest threat to the cinema experience is that the ‘wrong’ audiences might attend and behave ‘badly’ – laughing or talking during the film and breaking the reverential silence. Again, all of this is in spite of the fact that participatory event-led screenings are one of the cornerstones of the Prince Charles’s reputation, both in terms of how the cinema is promoted and its

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reception in the national and regional press. As Richard McCulloch’s research into The Room has shown, even audiences who attend unequivocally participatory events will still have a strong sense of etiquette, and are more than capable of becoming frustrated when audience interaction is deemed ‘excessive’ (McCulloch 2011: 208–211). In the following section, however, we demonstrate that the PCC audiences’ views on cinema etiquette are actually more of an expression of how one should feel about film than arbitrary rules about how they should behave.

‘There’s Nothing Like It’: Cinephilia and the big-screen experience As we have seen, the idea that films should be experienced in a certain way was a recurrent theme throughout our questionnaire data, and the PCC seems to be highly valued for its ability to ‘capture the essence of cinemagoing’ (P186). In other words, not only do some respondents clearly seem to see cinema patronage as having certain proper codes and conventions, but they also see the Prince Charles as a cinema that embodies the ethos of those experiential norms. By far one of the most consistently repeated of these norms was the superiority of the cinematic experience. The importance that our respondents placed on ‘the big screen’ is especially interesting in relation to wider discussions about the ‘withering away of cinema culture’ and the concurrent rise of ‘home cinema’ (Tryon 2009: 4). In Beyond the Multiplex, Barbara Klinger describes this conflict in detail, identifying what she sees as a kind of schizophrenic identity for cinema, derived from its shifting material bases and exhibition contexts: it exists both as a theatrical medium projected on celluloid and as a nontheatrical medium presented […] in a video format on television. [T]his double identity assumes an immediate comparative aesthetic and experiential value. The big-screen performance is marked as authentic, as representing bona fide cinema. By contrast, video is characterized not only as inauthentic and ersatz but also as a regrettable triumph of convenience over art that disturbs the communion between viewer and film and interferes with judgments of quality. (2006: 2)

Klinger goes on to argue that this ‘value-laden dichotomy’ between cinema and home video is something of a fallacy, and convincingly demonstrates that ‘new’ technologies like video and DVD are as significant for film reception and cinephilia as they are for distribution (ibid.). Yet, our research indicates that, for some audiences at least, the cinema experience very much retains its superior cinephilic value. Several comments explicitly lauded the Prince Charles as ‘the place to go to see classics on the big screen and not just your TV’ (P43), or noted that watching ‘old films on the big screen [is] always infinitely better than any small screen’ (P184). At this stage in our research, it is unclear whether these responses are literal statements about the size of the screen or metonymic references to the ‘cinema experience’ more broadly. What we can say, however, is that these comments explicitly distinguish between the quality of

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the experience offered by the movie theatre compared to the more ‘routine’ viewing context of one’s own home. It is also significant that the PCC is seen to be ‘run by people who love film showing films for people who love films‘ (P167). Camaraderie is not just with the audience, but also with the cinema itself. Importantly, then, when audiences make claims such as ‘a movie should be experienced on the big screen’ (P220), this is not solely a question of seeing films in the ‘right’ way; there is a social side to this too, as the following comment demonstrates: The atmosphere creates the experience and the PCC feels like you’re with friends. Apart from the obvious reliving my youth aspect of seeing the older movies, it also allows me the chance to introduce others to them in the format they should be seen (e.g. My partner had never seen The Blues Brothers and getting to see it on the big screen with friends cemented it as one of her new favourites). (P179)

Here, there is a clear emphasis on sharing beloved films with friends and loved ones. At first glance, P179’s reference to seeing movies ‘in the format they should be seen’ could be interpreted as another reference to 35 mm projection, but the explanation makes it clear that ‘format’ in this context has more to do with the combination of the ‘atmosphere’, ‘the big screen’ and ‘friends’. In fact, several responses went as far as comparing a trip to the Prince Charles with a visit to a close friend’s house. For example: [The PCC is a] cinema with a personality and a sense of humour! I like that there is personal touch to the experience which is completely non-existent in other cinemas. It feels very much like you’re seeing a film at a mate’s house who has a big screen and not a business that takes itself too seriously. (P075)

In addition to the ‘mate’s house’ and ‘big screen’ references, this comment emphasizes the importance of individuality, fair pricing and a prioritization of ‘fun’ over ‘seriousness’. What is particularly interesting, however, is that this conception of the ideal viewing experience combines traditional ideas about the value and distinctiveness of the cinema space with an acknowledgement of the familiarity and comfort of ‘home cinema’. It is crucial that we do not conflate sociality with participation, since the above-mentioned emphasis on etiquette tells us that attending with friends and partners may be more about a shared affective experience than, say, being able to talk to each other during the film. The optimal viewing environment therefore requires considerable unity between audience members, and in that sense, it is significant that respondents frequently described the PCC as being best suited to ‘film fans’ (P033) and ‘film buffs’ (P178). Contained within some of these responses was an implicit suggestion that if you adhered to a ‘correct’, ‘preferred’ or ‘authentic’ version of film fandom, then this was absolutely the cinema for you. As one person put it, ‘If you’re a real film fan it’s a joy to visit’ (P199, emphasis added), while P036 stated, ‘I know that if I go with the right friends I will be guaranteed a good night’ (emphasis added), seemingly acknowledging

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that they are agents of their own enjoyment to some extent. In other words, the ‘proper’ way to experience a film is simultaneously linked to the communal efforts of the ‘right’ audiences, as well as a decidedly fannish attitude towards cinema more generally. Thus, in spite of the prominent role that film events play in its marketing, for many of the mailing list members, participation is surprisingly anathema to their own preferences for behaviour within a cinema. To them, a good cinema is a ‘respectful’ one in which the absence of visible or audible participation is what signifies true cinephilia.

Conclusion The rise of event-led cinema has undoubtedly resulted in a widening of the concept of what it means to ‘experience’ a film. Yet, throughout this chapter, we have demonstrated that debates surrounding companies like Secret Cinema may well have exaggerated the extent to which audiences are embracing these changes. Interestingly, for many of the PCC’s patrons that we heard from, event-led participatory screenings seemed peculiarly at odds with the kind of cinemagoing experience that they considered the ‘correct’ one. Despite the cinema’s emphasis on events and participation, large sections of its audiences demonstrated a preference for a more traditional, reverential, even nostalgic cinematic experience. Audiences or events that became (or were imagined to be) too rowdy were deemed to significantly disrupt or even ruin the experience of film viewing. While there was an openness to a wide variety of different kinds of film being on the PCC’s programme (often accompanied by a rejection of a specific film canon), there was also an overriding sense that ‘proper’ film fans would share codes of cinematic practice, if not necessarily preferences for the same films. For these respondents, then, cinephilia is less about the screening of particular films and more about experiencing them in the right way. Inevitably, this raises a number of fascinating questions that lie beyond the scope of this chapter – questions that we would encourage students and scholars reading this to follow up on. There are two, in particular, that stand out. First among these is whether the patterns of reception we uncovered are being mirrored in other places. How widespread is this participatory backlash, and where else might we find similar pockets of resistance? The idea that the PCC is ‘unique’ may be rife among its own audiences, but we know there are other ‘alternative’ exhibition sites (at least in the UK and the United States) that attract similarly devoted, eclectic, cinephilic audiences. The Alamo Drafthouse, a US cinema chain in Austin, Texas, is perhaps the best-known comparison, given its commitment to repertory screenings and film events and its decision to actively ‘invest in movie nerds’ (Jervis 2016). What, then, are the factors that allow such venues to prosper? Does location play a part – either in terms of proximity to other cinemas (where value is defined in relation to rival cinemas) or in terms of the kinds of towns, cities and neighbourhoods where such venues tend to be found? Secondly, the somewhat divisive appeal of audience participation suggests that our questionnaire may actually have been completed by two very distinct groups of Prince Charles audiences – those who attend for the perceived ‘specialness’ of its event-led

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programming and those who prefer its more traditional repertory screenings. So, who are these audiences? We are only in a position to offer very tentative answers here, but at least within our data, age and gender do seem to be predictors of sorts. While most age groups were slightly more likely to reject PCC events rather than celebrate them, respondents in the twenty- to twenty-nine-year-old bracket were the only group where this trend was reversed. Men were also proportionally more likely to reject the singalongs and quote-alongs than women. Again, the nature of our sample requires us to treat these trends with caution, but the pattern is an intriguing one that warrants more rigorous quantitative analysis. Could it be that participatory event-led cinema appeals the most to young adult women? And if so, why? Does a trend like this imply a continuation of what Joanne Hollows (2003) terms ‘the masculinity of cult’, whereby female pleasures are downplayed in subcultural spaces? Or is this merely a reflection of the Prince Charles’s programming, which, aside from The Room, mostly slants towards ostensibly more female-oriented films like Dirty Dancing (1987), The Sound of Music (1965) and Labyrinth (1986)? For now, what we can say is that terms such as ‘immersive’ or ‘experiential’ – both so often used in relation to event-led cinema – are both problematic and misleading. Not only do they imply a hierarchical relationship between event-led and more conventional cinema, but they also deny the experiential qualities of non-event-led cinemagoing, in which audiences are not inherently less immersed, more passive or less engaged with the film. Indeed, most of the responses we received pointed towards a strong, affective bond between audiences and the cinema – the embodiment of a rare form of cinematic authenticity – both of which work together to facilitate a positive, shared, meaningful film experience. For all of the innovative and unusual events that it runs, to its audiences, the Prince Charles succeeds largely because it represents a place that is run by and for people like them – ‘proper’ film fans who are committed to the value of preserving the authentic cinemagoing experience.

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Funfear Attractions: The Playful Affects of Carefully Managed Terror in Immersive 28 Days Later Live Experiences Helen W. Kennedy

This chapter examines the audience experience of the highly acclaimed zombie street game 2.8 Hrs Later, which was launched in 2010 and successfully ran for five years in cities across the UK, and the 2016 Secret Cinema’s offering 28 Days Later, which ran in April and May 2016 in London, UK. These two examples are chosen for the extent to which they provide an insight into a novel form of experience design which takes familiar cinematic tropes and recognizable story worlds as the basis for the development of playful, interactive yet also highly controlled and tightly structured entertainment. These novel forms have developed new economic models and new modes of participations and audience expectations. I will be focusing on the intersection between the narrative content (the familiar narrative of zombie apocalypse in general and the highly popular film 28 Days Later in particular), the space of interaction and the audience experience and behaviours. The 2.8 Hrs Later street game launched at 9 pm concluding at just before midnight (roughly 2.8 hours later!) enabling the designers to maximize the use of the deep shadows and dingy alleyways of the dark urban sprawl. Players received limited instructions (and a GPS coordinate) and were told that if they have seen a zombie movie, then they know what to do – RUN! The street game repurposed the city as a play space through which players were guided by trained ‘zombie’ pursuers and tightly scripted and performed interactive filmic vignettes which revealed clues about the next destination. The Secret Cinema experience makes use of different kind of space (a decommissioned printing press) to construct their own fast-paced and minutely controlled, rule-bound versioning of the 28 Days Later film narrative – the entire event is designed to culminate in a screening of the film. In this chapter, I am positioning these two examples as evidence of a wider ludification of cultural experience – that is, experiences in which principles of play and an assumption of a play or games literate subject underpins the interaction design. The analysis of these case studies situates the player behaviours and pleasures as dependent upon a ludic cultural imaginary, in which popular game tropes, affects and energies underpin and determine our

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inhabitation of the required subjectivities produced by these designs. What emerges in these live and immersive cinematic experiences is not just the powerful influence of film aesthetics but also, I argue, a ludoaesthetics – embodied play-specific pleasures. These hybrid experiences afford what Giddings and Kennedy (2008) described as a ‘recombinatory aesthetic’ an ‘amplification of affect’ through this complex interplay of tropes, literacies, energies and behaviours. It is this interrelationship between ludoaesthetics and film aesthetics that is key to the discussion and analysis that follows. In this chapter, I am also positioning these experiences at the intersection of the wider critical fields of pervasive games (Adams et al. 2009; Montola 2009), the experience economy (Pine and Gilmore 2011) and the emergent field of live cinema (Atkinson and Kennedy 2015). The chapter draws on the complex and innovative methodologies which have emerged from my collaboration with Sarah Atkinson, a collaboration which brings together our distinctive expertise in the area of film (Atkinson) and games (Kennedy) but also provides a platform for innovation in the study of participation (as designed and lived) in complex conditions of interactivity – an area of long-standing common interest for us both. In this work and in the collaborative project within which it is situated, we are aligning with influential work that ‘draw[s] attention to the aesthetic and affective dimensions of cultural experience as lived and embodied alongside significant critical work which has deployed early twentieth century play theory in the examination of contemporary games in terms of formal qualities but also in terms of player experience’ (Dovey and Kennedy 2006; Giddings 2008; Giddings and Kennedy 2009; Atkinson and Kennedy 2015a). The experiences we undertake to analyse are richly complex; embodied, live, immersive, compelling, tightly controlled, highly designed and elaborately conceived, as such they demand an innovative and nuanced methodological and conceptual approach.

Film–game hybridity The intersection of the ludic and the filmic is key to both of the examples – they are both contemporary hybrids that defy easy categorization. The 2.8 Hrs Later game is designed and marketed as a game but it is my contention that it is a game that would make very little sense outside of the context of cinemagoing and film literate culture and without the cinematic imaginary shaping player expectations and behaviours. Secret Cinema’s 28 Days Later is clearly and distinctively marketed as an augmented cinematic experience. It is my contention here (and see also Atkinson and Kennedy 2015a, 2015b) that these are experiences that require playful behaviours and attitudes on the part of their participants. Furthermore they are experiences which are designed using gamelike mechanics and gamelike rule structures and which finally also require certain participant competencies – game literacies – in comprehending and acceding to these ludic frames. Both share a common assumption of a willing ‘playing’ subject as their imagined participant.

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Each of these experiences has distinctive game mechanics underpinning the design, 2.8 Hrs Later follows now recognizable format of pervasive games that take place on the streets. It is the sprawling undefined and unbounded space of the city that forms the game map, and the player behaviours evolve through exploration of this territory in the context of a ‘known’ threat. The game requires stealth but also involves elements of puzzle-solving, navigation and the structure rewards group and collaborative play. No two players will have quite the same experience, and the city space is a sandbox in which player behaviour is key to determining the pathway through the game. Secret Cinema’s 28 Days Later experience is gamelike in two important qualities – a lusory attitude (Suits 2014) is required to engage in the experience from the outset and during the event playful behaviour is required. This is not about a temporary suspension of disbelief for the engagement in narrative pleasures but a much more playful active willingness to be taken along with, and to be taken by the experience – it is a willing subjugation to the rules of the event or as I would argue – the game. This ‘lusory attitude’ is critical to the subjective state of ‘being at play’; it is this that transforms the exhausting chase around the city into a thrilling escape from marauding zombies; it is this attitude that turns the barrage of sound, light and loudly shouted orders into a frenzied and exciting game. In both these cases, a fixed text and audience distinction is unhelpful. In the case of 2.8 Hrs Later, for instance, the film text might very well be the film alluded to in the title (Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later) or it may be the sequel (28 Weeks Later) or it may be a combination of these more recent films with elements of Romero’s originary zombie text, or it may be the incredibly successful small-screen series The Walking Dead or it may be the a game or combination of games based in or on these worlds that is ‘imagined’ in the moment of becoming a ‘playing’ subject and entering the game fiction. The images, sounds and effects that pervade but also haunt the player experience relate to, depend upon and reinforce this prior experience, knowledge and this assumed Zombie literacy. The concept of audience (whilst we will see how an audience subjectivity does re-emerge in both these cases) is also unhelpful here. In these experiences we are engaged as ‘participants’ in very distinct ways: In 2.8 Hours Later, I am myself but in an altered universe in which my immediate surroundings are familiar; it is my city, unchanged and recognizable, but now recast with a fictional layer in which ravenous and fast-moving zombies hide ready to devour my flesh. In Secret Cinema’s 28 Days Later, there is no ‘I’ in this experience, all participants are dressed the same and are largely manipulated and managed through the space as an undifferentiated mass. The designed interaction drives the participant through a series of spaces, assaults their senses with sounds and images and drives the experience forward according to a tightly defined spatial and temporal schedule. The ‘scenography’ of the film is the place of the experience, the abandoned printworks within which it is situated is re-dressed – replicating details and textures of the film itself with elaborate precision.

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Post-apocalyptic methodologies Here, I am addressing the critical challenge of representing the complexity of player– participant engagement and the immediate affective charge of these experiences. This remains an enduring challenge partly because as ‘events’ they have a specific temporality, rhythm and energy that are hard to capture through a single method (Dovey and Kennedy 2006; Giddings and Kennedy 2008, 2010). Writing about the distinction between these novel ludic experiences and other cultural objects Ericsson asserts: ‘Pervasive games are ephemeral, distributed, and exist as rules, materials, procedures, players and events’ (Ericsson in Montola et al. 2009: 246). As indicated, the subjective and affective nature of these ‘events’ is not something that is straightforward to capture. The two case studies which are the focus of the chapter – taken from two distinct territories – pervasive and street games on the one hand, and live and experiential cinema on the other – are both positioned within this trajectory of experimental methodologies that seek, through a combination of qualitative, quantitative, embedded and participatory approaches, to really get ‘amongst’ the affective and aesthetic dimensions of ‘new’ and often hybrid experiences (Geertz 1973; Giddings 2008). In these particular case studies, the methodological challenge is further compounded by the problem of capturing and analysing both the means through which the ‘funfear’ element of the experience is ‘engineered’ and how this affect is then experienced and evidenced in the playing subjects or participants. Qualitative, ethnographic, embedded and participatory research has been transformed by the availability of very-easy-to-use digital cameras, particularly handheld and in-obtrusive devices capable of capturing very-high-quality moving images in indoor and outdoor environments with ease. The use of such devices have been critical in evolving the capture and analysis of live experiences as they unfold, as well as capturing the immediacy of post-event affects and impressions (Dovey and Kennedy 2006; Giddings 2008; Giddings and Kennedy 2009). Capturing all these rich, expressive and invaluable data does however bring a couple of further hurdles for the researcher who wishes to disseminate these analyses; one of which is storing, reviewing and analysing the extraordinary amount of material that can now be captured and the other is the extent to which discussions that depend upon rich visual data can struggle to convey the ‘sense of the affect’. In 2.8 Hrs Later, for instance, the richly evocative, vivid images captured in the post-event video are easily flattened and distanced by academic description, as their communicative power as moving images threaten to exceed the capacity of written publication. In the Secret Cinema experiences, however, these tools for data capture are not available – there is no possibility of capturing and recording the experiences and impressions as they occur. Secret Cinema events require you to leave your mobile phone in the hands of the security, or to seal it away and to willingly subject yourself to a barrage of (usually) loudly bellowed instructions. There is no possibility of note taking, or recording, participants are surveilled and tightly controlled. If you are caught disobeying, you will receive a very public telling off and any illicit

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devices will be confiscated; in the past our attempts at subversion of these rules have been unsuccessful due to intensity of the scrutiny and the very tight security. In a previous Secret Cinema research, it was essential to use a variety of methods to capture the experiential qualities in more detail. In the design of the research framework for their examination of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Atkinson and Kennedy developed a range of approaches through which to capture as much detail and texture of the experience as possible (Atkinson and Kennedy 2016b). One element within this approach was to make use of multiple fellow participants as co-researchers to augment the ability to capture the complexities and peculiarities of the event as it unfolds. This chapter is based on a similar approach. For Secret Cinema’s 28 Days Later, five participants were recruited to attend as co-researchers, attendance at the experience was followed up with detailed interviews and the participants captured their experiences via immediate written accounts of impressions and feelings of the experience. Whilst the Secret Cinema formula does not allow for the use of digital image and video capture during the event, new digital tools and techniques are still significant for the research process; in this case, it is the extent to which Secret Cinema themselves promote the use of social media channels to communicate with and engage their participants. For the researcher this is augmented by the enthusiastic use of social media by the participants themselves – they display a keen willingness to share their accounts and to be engaged in critiquing, commenting, rating these events and activities (a double-edged sword when things go wrong – see Atkinson and Kennedy 2015b). Social media then has been a really effective way of capturing some of the post-event ‘sentiment’. For 2.8 hrs I participated in the event with one close collaborator, recruited my ingame group in to my research process, conducted detailed interviews with participants during the game ‘after party’ and captured footage of the game as it took place. I also sent a number of students and a research assistant to the event to capture further testimony and detailed description regarding the event. Feedback on 2.8 Hrs Later was also gathered from 147 participants via a survey monkey questionnaire.

Zombie researching subjects: Playful labours of participation In the work of researching these new forms, there are various novel labours that are worthy of note. In 2.8 Days Later, the playful labour (activities that might align with what Kücklich (2005) describes as playbour) takes the form of participation in the game and a great deal of physical exertion. In the words of one of the players: ‘Lots of running, put your running trainers on. I was going to wear like leather shoes but at the last minute said “running trainers”. That was the best decision I made’ (MR003). For Secret Cinema’s experiences, the labours are often more diverse and begin from the moment of ticket purchase. You will be instructed on the dress code or costume you are required to wear; you may be asked to learn new materials (such as song lyrics or poems); you may be asked to source objects or props to bring with you to the event. Secret Cinema will invite you to create a Facebook identity or to celebrate your

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attendance via multiple channels of social media. There will be an expectation and a continual invitation to tweet, blog, instagram about your identity and your anticipation of the event. Many of these are also resource intensive financially – ticket prices for lead researcher, research assistants, costume hire and so on can all add up, and these expenses don’t necessarily fit with either temporalities or rationalities of funding grants or institutional support – it is not easy to convince department heads that your 1950s dress, your hospital scrubs and your watermelon are all valid research expenses!

The rise and rise of the zombie genre In these two case studies, we have the presence of the ready-at-hand zombie trope and its ubiquity across the contemporary cultural imaginary. Our popular notion of the zombie – a by-product of science gone wrong in some way – appears at least as long ago in Mary Shelley’s dark and terrifying story of just how dangerous it is to meddle in the natural forces of life and death. The resultant ‘walking dead’ monster exposes our inhumanity in the face of difference and prefigures the dramatic impact of these monsters on the future of humanity. But what is this thing called zombie? Although they are, of course, a fantasy, we know enormous amounts about them – their tastes, appearance, biology, reasons for their emergence, how to neutralize them, why we should despise and fear them. (Webb and Byrnand 2008: 83)

We know these things due to the legion of popular cultural representations of zombies across forms such as comics, games, novels, television but most dominant of all, we know these things from film. Our contemporary shared knowledge of the ‘Zombie’ – the sounds, signifiers and the behaviours – is dependent on cinema in general and George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead in particular. These powerful popular texts have shaped and determined the extent to which as a collective we can recognize subtle sound and visual cues that trigger our immediate transfer in to the uncanny and its powerful affective charge. It is to cinema that we are principally indebted for this collective immediate grasp of the tropes of this world (although latterly we have seen these tropes widely disseminated via television with the advent of the highly successful The Walking Dead series, for instance). As Todd Platts and many others have argued, the zombie trope has come to symbolize different fears and anxieties as each decade has repurposed and adapted the imagery to its own needs: Popular culture tells us something about society; we can learn much about a culture by understanding how it scares itself and the zombie’s ‘blank slate’ is perfect for this endeavor. (Platts 2013: 553)

In both the case studies under examination here, zombie literacy is a critical part of the assumed knowledge of the participant – in Secret Cinema’s 28 Days Later, as with their

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other events: ‘What we experience is Secret Cinema’s evocation of a navigable, thinly interactive but immersive scenography true to the topologies of the originary text(s)’ (Atkinson and Kennedy 2016b: 259). In this case, it is a detailed realization of Danny Boyle’s particular zombie universe; the design of the pre-screening activity follows the rules of that film in terms of narrative flow and development of the experience. In 2.8 Hrs Later, the zombie world is loosely invoked. It is a world where ‘there are Zombies’ and there are corollary ‘survivors’ and a ‘resistance’ familiar but only very faintly drawn. The only further relevant detail of the zombie universe is that – unsurprisingly, given the naming of the game – these are not the slow-moving zombies of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, but the superfast-moving zombies of Boyles’ imagining.

2.8 Hrs Later The designers behind 2.8 Hrs Later – Slingshot Effect – were a small and innovative street and pervasive game design company which originated in Bristol. The company was established through a collaboration between Simon Evans and Simon Johnson in 2009. Simon Johnson originally worked for the internationally renowned and influential performance and pervasive media experience designers Blast Theory, and the influence of these origins is clear in the early work of the collaboration. As a pervasive games design company, Slingshot Effect formed part of an eclectic international group of creatives experimenting in this domain over the past twenty years. The most well known within this community would be Jane McGonigal from the United States; other organizations in the UK would of course be the critically acclaimed Blast Theory, Hide and Seek (who now also have a US sister organization) and fellow Bristol-based organization Splash and Ripple. 2.8 Hrs Later is their most successful and well-known game, but they were also collaborators in a innovative experimental game lab called ‘IgLab’, which staged a series of monthly events to design and test novel game formats – these eventually led to the formation of Interesting Games Festival (IgFest), which was launched in 2008 in Bristol and brought together an international community of street and pervasive games designers. Description and analysis of pervasive games makes allusion to the quality that I described earlier, whereby much of the narrative, the diegesis of the game, is internally rather than externally enforced: ‘This is the first rule of pervasive role-playing: Reality is not objective and external; it is subjective and internal’ (Ericsson 2009: 243). Discussing street games in particular, Ericsson contends: when you play on the streets… very little outside your own mind helps you slip into the game state. Instead, pervasive games must use internal methods to establish the game world, the diegesis. External aids such as technology and special effects may give this process a boost, but in the end it is a feat of the imagination. (242, my emphasis)

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The title of the 2.8 Hrs Later street game initiates this ‘feat’ of the ‘imagination’ – it is an instant cue to the entire cultural lexicon within which the zombie abounds. The game centres on a narrative of a zombie apocalypse; the streets are now riddled with the ‘undead’ and players must navigate their way to a possible ‘safehouse’, where survivors are gathering to resist the zombie invasion. As suggested earlier, players are given very little by way of narrative instruction or story overlay before they are released in to the city, The game masters or instructors preparing the players ask us, ‘Have [we] seen any Zombie movies’; and upon receiving a resounding positive from the group, they state, ‘You know all you need to know to survive this game.’ Play unfolds as soon as the players are released on the streets armed with the first set of GPS coordinates and the safety warning regarding the rules of gravity, laws of traffic all still being in place despite their occupation of a nowcreated ‘play space’. One review remarks on the validity of this warning – indicating the immersive nature of this experience: 2.8 Hours Later is a mind-altering experience, one in which concepts of personal safety and appropriate behaviour in public quickly evaporate. Reality becomes a squiffy mess of imagined threats and genuine zombies. https://www. shutupandsitdown.com/review-28-hours-later/

Although gameplay is exploratory, players are clearly guided through the city by strategically positioned ‘zombie’ pursuers and tightly scripted and performed interactive cinematically instantiated – but highly theatrical vignettes which reveal clues about the next destination. Successful arrival at the first set of GPS coordinates affords the players access to a short theatrical set piece – involving scripted interaction with zombies and resistance operatives. This scene provides the clues which players have to decipher to identify the next destination and so on throughout the evening. Negotiating the city between these set pieces involves hiding from, sneaking past or outrunning the well-trained zombies. Occupying the streets in this aberrant way, whilst ordinary citizens pass by or stop and gape, is a feature of many pervasive games; the temporary playing community produced by the ‘lusory attitude’ and the ‘imagined’ story world tempers the potential embarrassment. These are elements of what is described in play theory as the ‘magic circle’ that defines a space or context as a play space in which new rules and norms of behaviour abtain. In this context, it is this magic circle (manifest in venue, costumes and characters) [which] keeps the players safe from social blame and encourages trust. Everyone in the game is in the same boat, sharing an aberrant interpretation of reality, putting all faculties to play to make it seem real. (Ericsson 2009: 253)

The game culminates in a testing scenario – all players who had been caught by a zombie are marked with luminous ink which was revealed on arrival – and those who had been caught are separated off to ‘quarantine’ – a process that involves being ‘made

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Figure 10.1  The Funfear Affect Writ Large: 4 “infected” players visibly communicate their delight – stills from post-event video interviews – author’s own.

up’ with zombie faces (see Figure 10.1) and then released in to the ‘survivors’ party. The players’ experiences are carefully prefigured in all aspects of the designed interaction; the actors’ performances are very tightly choreographed, scripted, directed and then improvised. These set pieces feature in many of the player accounts of the event as ‘phenomenal’, ‘compelling’, ‘terrifying’, ‘disgusting’ and ‘awe-inspiring’. They clearly had a critical impact on the overall aesthetic experience and brought an immersive hybrid film/theatre/video game element to the overall design. The game was first instantiated in Bristol but was subsequently delivered across the UK – in Cardiff, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow and London – with over 50,000 players engaging in the game across the five-year period.

2.8 Hrs Later: The funfear factor It’s terrifying from beginning to end, but it’s amazing! The costumes, the makeup – terrifying. I pretty much died of a heart attack half way through the mall. But it was just absolutely fantastic. Probably the best thing we’ve done in Bristol. (SM63)

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The figure shows four players who were clearly infected – only the infected were ‘madeup’ at the end – the stills show their enormous smiles, the excitement evident in their entire expression. They look clearly and abundantly delighted. As the interviewer it was impossible not to be infected by their palpable pleasure. What the stills cannot show is the disjuncture between the visible expressions of delight and the spoken words that articulate the extent to which the experience had successfully engineered their fear. It feels like being dropped in a horror film. You’re literally, you feel like you’re running for your life. It’s like absolutely terrifying! One second you’re like – ooh where should we go, and the next it’s like ‘there’s a zombie behind us!’ – just oh my god it’s horrible. It’s so like intense and non-stop.

The words used were exclamatory: ‘absolute terror’, ‘horrified’, ‘scared out of my wits’. Other survey respondents articulate a similar level of hyperbole in their responses: I am a zombie FREAK! and this was as close to a real zombiepocolypse as I am gonna get, I’d like to think my years of prep were the reason I survived lol (SM003)

Asked to describe the game to someone who had never played it, this player captures it thus: 2.8 Adrenalin Fear Bravery Cowardice Fun Immersion Meeting New people and running away from Zombies with them. (SM007)

These players capture perfectly the affective domain that is the ‘funfear’ attraction of these immersive experiences in the Zombie story world. Avoidance of the zombies shapes the gameplay activity – sneaking stealthily or running like heck are both options. The zombies in this game have the speed and unpredictability of those suggested by the name. These are not the slow-moving, sound-activated zombies of the TV series The Walking Dead; these are superhumanly fast-moving zombies of 28 Days Later and World War Z (Foster 2013). This combination of the adrenalin driven by the ‘imagined’ threats of the narrative, coupled with the presence of zombie actors to reinforce the danger is clearly fuelling a level of pleasure derived from being immersed in a much-loved fiction. Their accounts of their pleasures also continually articulate its relationship to both films and video games. Love horror films and turning the city into a zombie film-like experience was amazing and unlike anything I’d heard of before – seriously the best 3 hour game experience ever!! (SM002) The rush and hype of 2.8 hours later was legendary, so realistic, it was the sum of all the games and movie’s I’ve watched – a real homage to them. (SM070)

The intense, frenetic and panicky hide-and-run aspects followed by checkpoint interactions seemed also to replicate the balance of some video games – intense

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gameplay rewarded by the spectacle of a cut scene through which elements of narrative and clues to future action are revealed which allows for a moment of calm. Some players compared it to the intensity of Paintballing and Bungie Jumping but insisted that it was more immersive, more thrilling and more consistently filmic for all its playfulness. The energy of the game was described by players as akin to live action childhood games such as ‘chase’ and ‘British Bulldog’, and for many of the players the frenetic pace reminded them of the ‘feeling’ of playing intense video games. The game also included more configurative elements of solving clues, map reading and strategizing, but for many players these were described as being subordinated by the overriding affect of ‘fear’ and the adrenalin-fuelled drive to ‘escape’. The atmosphere at the ‘safe-house’ after party that is the culmination of the experience was described by many as phenomenal – comparable to the high experienced following a truly well-crafted cultural experience. For many, there was an interesting sense of community, belonging and new affiliations and alliances that had formed during the game. As a group, there is a sense of community and solidarity emerging from such a collective assumed sillyness, resulting in a stronger and longer lasting bonds between players. (MR002)

A temporary ‘experience community’ was formed during the intense chase and co-elements of the gameplay, a community feeling that is argued to be a common potentiality of pervasive games: ‘A strong bond of trust is created rapidly between the players. […] The essence […] is to create a place to go temporarily insane for fun and personal exploration. The perfect player in a game like this throws all care to the winds and dives right in; she is a bold explorer of the threshold realm – a liminaut. (Ericsson 2009: 242)

Secret Cinema’s 28 Days Later Secret Cinema (SC) (2007–), founded by Fabian Rigall, was launched in the UK with an immersive screening of Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park in a disused railway tunnel, and has since delivered a range of cinematic experiences. The experiences are promoted in a clandestine way via word of mouth and social media in which (in keeping with their ‘Secret’ motif) participants are instructed to ‘tell no one’. Secret Cinema’s 28 Days Later ran for two months during April and May in 2016, with 25,000 participants. These events follow a few key formula that are now well advanced (see Atkinson and Kennedy 2015a, 2015b, 2016a, 2016b); in this case, the formula is that the participants are taken to a secret location to view a known and popular or cult film (28 Days Later). The viewing of the film is preceded by a series of activities and interactions based on the film’s narrative – a common feature of the design is the production of ‘compelling, navigable and immersive extensions of the

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film’s fictional environment’ – blending space and place of exhibition with highly detailed replications of the scenography of the film’ (Atkinson and Kennedy 2016b). Participants were instructed to turn up wearing scrubs (if you turned up without them, you were marched to a pay point to buy some). They play a dual role in these experiences, and they are also a critical aspect of the set -dressing, completing the mise-en-scéne through their heavily proscribed (in the case of 28 Days Later – fully dictated) costumes and behaviours. As well as instructions on costume, there was a requirement to bring particular props, and before the event instructions were drip-fed regarding the overall narrative within which the player/participant subject was being framed. In this case, the frame was that there had been an outbreak of a deadly virus and ‘you’ were to turn up ready to be screened at a quarantine centre. Entry to the event was carefully staged and managed so that a controlled number of participants were accessing at any one moment over the course of the first two hours of the scripted, managed and controlled pre-screening experience. Once entry had been achieved, participants were closely guided to ‘examination areas’ and moved through a series of simulated emergency medical spaces in smaller groups. The actors populating the environment dictated behaviour through bellowed orders, and interaction was extremely limited – there was little by way of exchange, as the activity mainly required the participants to follow instruction in a docile and controlled manner. These set pieces and loosely interactive moments did not necessarily draw on the props brought by the participants, nor did most of these interactions require any of the information participants to prepare in advance.1 These tightly controlled sequences led all the participants (in small manageable groups) to a large temporary ‘hospital ward’, where they were ‘put to sleep’. A few moments later in real time, but some hours later in the fictional world, the participants are woken up and are swiftly under attack by zombies and must run through a tightly constructed series of corridors, up stairs, round more corridors, down stairs and so on, pausing only to interact with key scripted moments that took place in lavish reproductions of a simulated film set. Secret Cinema describe their events and their cultural offering thus: We create 360-degree participatory worlds where the boundaries between performer and audience, set and reality are constantly shifting. We are storytellers, inventors, explorers, place-makers, cultural entrepreneurs, film fans fuelled by a desire to fill the void left by an over-saturated technological world. (https://www. secretcinema.org)

Rigall describes 28 Days Later concept as their most ambitious event to date, The initial idea was to make people feel like they were inside a horror film: The concept I came up with originally was, ‘how can we have the audience become Jim? How can we have this audience that has woken up in a post apocalyptic world and has to move through this abandoned hospital to find Balfron Tower? (creativereview.co.uk)

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This ‘feeling’ of being in the film was repeatedly articulated by our researcher participants, in participant blogs and on social media generally: For one researcher, this feeling shifted from ‘initially, I felt almost like I was part of a film set’ (MR01), to then I kind of forgot about that pretty quickly as I went through the door and I went from that to feeling like I was in a big film. […] in those early stages looking round I felt that I was a character in a film and that I was maybe a particular character in a film. (MR001)

The ‘funfear’ factor follows similar lines to 2.8 – it is the combination of recognizable tropes of the presence of zombies, but in this case the ‘scares’ and ‘jumps’ are managed much more precisely. As the participants are very tightly directed around the gamespace according to heavily dictated sound effects and carefully placed lighting, it is possible to further control very precisely the exact moments at which they are exposed to a sudden leaping and snarling zombie, the fierce banging of a temporary barrier, or scenes of a zombie being beaten to the ground. Each of such moments provokes participant screams which are immediately taken up and repeated by other participants which have the effect of accelerating the speed at which they are moving through the space. Our researchers and social media participant feedback contain hundreds of ecstatic proclamations of their ‘horrified’ pleasures in the experience, most containing reference to ‘terror’ and ‘running for their lives’. An aesthetic principle is that along with the engagement in a hyper-mediatized representation of these zombie chase sequences, these high-octane moments in 28 Days Later are accompanied by sound effects, a cacophonous sound track and a tightly defined, frenetically paced journey through the gamespace that is interspersed with these detailed re-enactments of scenes from the film that provide for moments of pause, much-needed rest and a shift in participatory mode. One of our researchers described the value of the pacing in making the experience manageable: And then we ran some more and when we felt like we could not run another step an appropriately timed live action scene took place. Before having to run some more. (F001 my emphasis)

These scenes, which provide the temporary pause in the intensity of the running sequences, follow the same cutscene aesthetic familiar to many cinematic games (see Klevjer 2002; King and Kryzwinska 2002), in this case these cutscenes are pivotal memorable moments from the plot of the film. The attention to detail in these scenes is a critical factor in audience feedback: But my personal highlight was entering Frank and Hannah’s flat. Wow. Wow wow wow. A real goosebumps moment when looking around, especially with the Christmas lights flashing to hopefully let survivors know that they were not

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alone. A beautiful touch. And of course, we were offered a Creme De Menthe. You don’t go to Frank and Hannah’s gaff without the complimentary beverage. (Popcorn Heart)

After the intensity of the zombie chase sequence, the groups of participants are marshalled through a final set piece drawn from the film and then released in to a ‘social space’. The options for activity at this point are banal (performing exercises with no clear motivation or relevance) or commodified – loosely themed but expensive food and beverage consumption. The area is still bedecked with the trappings of the story world but the experience ‘suspends’ the participant /subject in an abjected liminal space without purpose, meaning or direction. There are signs that these spaces are intended for social encounters but there is no means or motive for interaction with participants other than with those individuals in your own preformed group. There were some ‘out of character’ interactions regarding the exhausting nature of experience, the price of the drinks, the quality and fidelity of the site design to the film location – all topics of conversation overheard by myself or my group of fellow participant/researchers – but these were shallow and fleeting encounters.

Pervasive play space and scenographic architectures The role of space is crucial in both these examples, which follow distinct trajectories in the spatialization of the narrative. In 2.8 Hrs Later, it is the player as subject who imposes a narrative upon the space, through a willing immersion into the context of the action, and the imagined fiction ‘we are now in the zombie apocalypse’. This single instruction and the insertion of costumed/makeupped zombie ‘actors’ is sufficient to turn every side street, pathway, car park, alley, churchyard, shop doorway, mall interior, motorway underpass into the scenography for the unfolding internal narrative. This is a common feature of pervasive games that are played out on the streets in this way, this expansive terrain of play, set within: Geographic boundaries, […] boundaries [that] are sufficiently expanded to preserve the sense that ‘nowhere is safe,’ which could just as easily be phrased at ‘everywhere is play.’ (Patton 2014)

In this example, the story is also both everywhere and nowhere. The player/participant in this mode has a great deal of agency in determining the action and the sequencing of events. In 2.8 Hrs Later, the action is directed but very loosely. In Secret Cinema’s 28 Days Later, every aspect of the space is very tightly controlled and this is not limited to the scenography: ‘[The] entire thing is really controlled by light and sound’, explains Riggall. ‘The music cues the whole experience, including the actors’ performance…. They had to almost learn the soundtrack to understand how to move – for example, a certain

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beat would kick in and a zombie might have to attack. Our sound designer worked on the Olympics and he said this is the most complicated job he’s done since. (Creative Review)

The movement of bodies through the narrative architecture, and the detailed reproduction of key scenes from the film, was all orchestrated by light, sound and carefully choreographed zombie ‘attacks’. Critically, the journey through the space is not ‘exploratory’ in the sense described in relation to pervasive games in general and 2.8 Hrs Later in particular. The journey around the location was managed and all participants experienced the space in precisely the same order with the same number of orchestrated ‘screams’ and frenzied dashes which raised the adrenalin of the participants (there was no option but to run, the music was deafening and the lights were blinding). A participant account renders the experience very vividly: We sprinted, desperately trying to stay together as everyone else was doing the same to stay with their loved ones too. They were coming from everywhere – Underneath the railings to our left and right and definitely behind us. We did what any self respecting zombie apocalypse survivor would do. We ran. And screamed. (F001 my emphasis)

Another participant characterized the experience in more functional terms but notes the affective impact of the tight control of the participants through the space to finally arrive at the moment of film viewing (Figure 10.2): Finally we came to the screening, high on adrenaline, and settled into military cots beneath an impressively assembled array of screens to watch the main feature, which I felt was added to by my slightly altered state of mind – it’s not often you sprint through a warehouse just before you sit down for a film. (M002 my emphasis)

Throughout this experience, the participants are controlled and must perform in a manner akin to the: ‘the tightly conscripted behaviours of the film industry extra populating the film set’ (Atkinson and Kennedy 2016b: 274). I would argue however, that in contradistinction to the 28 Days Later design, the playing subject of 2.8 is in many ways a more active agent within and producer of the spatialized narrative in a way that is critically absent from the SC event. It is the imaginative affective investment of the player that turns the cityscape and urban environment into the gamespace. There is no narrative, diegetic overlay given to the spaces – except in the very specific locations of the set pieces, which are treasures to be uncovered through active negotiation of the urban space, transformed through imagination into a treacherous zombie-ridden post-apocalyptic environment. The playing subject is configuratively and affectively engaged in the process of bringing this world into existence. The fragmentary, isolated moments of film/theatre/game vignette

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Figure 10.2  The ranked viewing beds at Secret Cinema’s 28 Days Later – publicity photograph

and the intense adrenalin-fuelled evasion of the zombies are not set apart from the navigation and occupation of the urban spaces; they are continuous with it, and it is the player’s imagination and investment that create this continuity.

Player subjectivity and ludoaesthetic imaginary It is my contention that whilst there are large areas of overlap in these two experiences, there are also clear points of departure where we should see these works as positioning their subjects at opposite ends of a ludic cultural imaginary. In both examples, the participant/player is assumed to be a willing (and crucially not resistant) subject to the design and control of the creators/producers. They are also and, importantly, assumed to be adopting a ‘lusory attitude’ – as we have seen, this is crucial for these playful, interactive encounters to function. This lusory attitude captures this willing imbrication in the interaction and unfolding events, and the willingness of the player/ participant to engage in behaviours ‘as if ’. In short, it is an attitude of playfulness, of active engagement in the holding of the fiction required for the event. It does not automatically assume the suspension of any critical faculties or prevent moments when this lusory attitude may be interrupted, disrupted or spoilt by elements of the experience as lived. Specific assumptions are made regarding the playing subject of 2.8: that they will readily comprehend an imagined world in which there has been some kind of apocalyptic event, that the uncanny bodies in blood-stained ragged clothes are zombified creatures to be eluded at all costs and that these playful participants will be

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willing to subject themselves to a process of map reading, navigation, puzzle solving, strategic plotting and intense running over the course of around 150- 170 min. The playing subject is as already indicated assumed to be ‘playful’ and to have a command of the certain game mechanics as already described – configuring, navigation, stealth strategy and so on. In Secret Cinema’s 28 Days Later, the participant is subjected to an elaborate construction. This is true of all Secret Cinema events – identities, names, costumes, dialogue prompts, props are all ascribed in advance; for 28 Days Later, these were entirely undifferentiated – we were not ascribed a particular identity but were constructed as a ‘patient’ or medical ‘subject’ through the requirement to wear ‘scrubs’. Assigning this particular costume underscored the extent to which within this experience design Secret Cinema had constructed the audience as an undifferentiated ‘mass’ to be addressed not as individuals but as a ‘group’ to be manoeuvred through space and time with maximum efficiency and speed (see also Pett 2016 in relation to this treatment of participants as a ‘group’ to marshal). The participant subject, for all the investments in the development of an interactive layer, is in this design almost entirely lacking in agency and has little role in determining the unfolding of events. There are interesting continuities in the playing subjectivities across these two examples. The interactive vignettes or ‘cut scenes’ position the playing subject in a complex dual role – as audience and critical respondent to the quality of the performance and as participant in the story world. Our critical argument here is that this experience design shapes a particular kind of audience and subject behaviour where there is an oscillation between observer/ participant leading to a complex hybridity that results in moments of disjuncture and fissures in the immersion. (Atkinson and Kennedy 2016b: 256)

The dual nature of this role was highly evident in player behaviours during these scripted encounters. Group members would smile broadly at each other in response to the detailed costumes and the mise-en-scène (some of this was decidedly grisly with blood and gore in abundance), occasionally offer a qualitative comment and then shift mode to engage in urgent whispered and intense engagements with the actors/ characters in a manner appropriate to the diegesis. If the players were caught apparently smiling at the actors, this was swiftly responded to within the narrative frame – usually underscoring the urgency and seriousness of the situation.

Conclusion: Ludoaesthetic subjects and the ludification of culture Innovations in contemporary interactive experience design show a tendency towards a general principle of ‘ludification’ in that they increasingly deploy the rhetorics and mechanics of games and play in their construction. As I have argued above, these experiences all depend upon a player/participant who will willing adopt the ‘lusory

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attitude’ appropriate to occupy and instantiate these novel experiences. The extensible and labile nature of our cinematic pleasures and film literacies are a critical aspect of the innovations discussed here – they both draw on and extend our affective investments in popular narratives and cinematic tropes. The two case studies here are a simulation of a mediation of the cinematic – they depend upon our imaginative investment in the cinematic representations of the zombie – placing players in a familiar and much reworked cinemascape. These are not just fictional worlds but explicitly familiar wellrendered filmic worlds. The case studies reveal a distinction in the assumed playing subject; in 2.8 Hours Later, the underlying ludoaesthetic ascribes a certain individual responsibility and agency to the player. As indicated earlier, the player retains an individuality and differentiation in their actions and the role they play in physically and imaginatively upholding the game world. In Secret Cinema’s 28 Days Later, however, the player/participant is ascribed a role in advance and treated as an undifferentiated subject. This distinction may prove to have a wider relevance in understanding the pleasures and displeasures of novel forms of interaction, and it is hoped that others will pursue this further as a critical point of comparison. A further consideration in the comparison of these two case studies relates to broader issues regarding the intensity of the commodification of these playful experiences. Whilst Secret Cinema are still growing, with plans to expand their reach to America, working to a clearly scaleable model, in marked contrast, Slingshot went in to liquidation in 2015, forced to cancel scheduled 2.8 games and closed up that aspect of their operation entirely. Participants of both experiences express joy and extreme pleasure at their experience (of course, there are criticisms but the overwhelming consensus for both is highly positive) and affirm that the resultant pleasures and affects correspond to those intended. However, these pleasures feel undermined by the extent to which our willing acquiescence and generously given ‘playbour’ is so thoroughly commodified and exploited in the highly successful formula that Secret Cinema has evolved. These complex interactive and immersive live events are also driving innovations in our methodologies and our critical vocabularies; as the aesthetics of play take ever deeper hold in the design of popular interactive entertainment, our language has to shift in response. The hybrid nature of these experiences – drawing on film, theatre and games for their ontology – will continue to require a corresponding hybrid methodology, evolving terminologies and new conceptual frameworks in which play theory as well as film theory has a significant place.

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Living Cinema Memories: Restaging the Past at the Pictures Matthew Jones

Introduction Between 2013 and 2016, I was part of a team of researchers at University College London, led by Melvyn Stokes and also including Emma Pett, which collected people’s memories of visiting cinemas in Britain’s villages, towns and cities during the 1960s.1 Aiming both to ‘build up a detailed picture of cinemagoing in 1960s Britain’ and to ‘encourage people across the country to remember their own cinemagoing histories and to reconsider the importance of these experiences to them’, the ‘Cultural Memory and British Cinemagoing of the 1960s’ project was intended not solely to address the historical significance of cinema during this decade, but also to understand more precisely the nature and character of the cinemagoing experience itself (Stokes and Jones 2013: 15).2 As such, the stories shared with the project explore both the ways in which films were seen to speak about and comment on the changes that Britain experienced during this period of social and cultural transformation, and also the sounds, sights, tastes and often smells of British cinemas at this time. The evidence collected consequentially captures not only the historical significance of cinemas and cinemagoing, but also their sensory and experiential qualities. While the findings of this research are being published in traditional formats (see, for example, Jones 2016; Stokes and Jones 2017), journal articles, monographs and conference papers offer a poor means of communicating the emotional characteristics and lived experience of 1960s cinemagoing, which are key to many of the memories shared with the researchers. To overcome this problem, a non-traditional, heuristic means of disseminating the project’s findings became necessary to offer an embodied encounter with 1960s cinemas and their patrons. This ultimately led to the creation of ‘A Night at the Cinema in the 1960s’, an immersive performance event that attempted to recreate, through the memories collected by the research project, the world of a 1960s cinema for audiences to explore. Consisting of a one-hour interactive performance in a cinema’s lobby and other public spaces, a screening of a film accompanied by the antics of 1960s

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audience members in the auditorium, and a celebratory drink and dance in the bar afterwards, which had been decorated to resemble a 1960s club, the performance invited its audience to meet the employees and patrons of the cinema and to join them as they recreated many of the most common and some of the more esoteric memories collected by the project. Two performances took place, on 3 March 2016 at the Phoenix cinema in Leicester’s Cultural Quarter and on 29 June 2016 at Picturehouse Central, the Picturehouse Cinemas chain’s flagship venue on Shaftsbury Avenue in London, within the historic Trocadero building. These events, devised and overseen by the current author and funded by De Montfort University, were large scale and highly ambitious. They involved twentyseven actors, two directors, two producers, two advisors, two photographers, a stage manager, a production assistant, a hairstylist and a significant amount of support from the staff at both venues, a range of local businesses and Hammer Film Productions, whose film, One Million Years B.C. (1966), was screened during the events to mark its fiftieth anniversary. Set at the time of the film’s initial release in the winter of 1966, the events reflected the culture of ‘swinging London’, a limited period that began in 1965 and ended in the early 1970s, and which is consequently not contiguous with the broader decade. They also problematized the popular perception of 1960s Britain through the presence of characters from beyond central London, for whom the new cosmopolitanism was an alien phenomenon, and also older or more conservative characters, many of whom were based on respondents who did not feel that they participated in the so-called cultural revolution. As such, the performance sought to encapsulate something of the complexity of a nation caught between the political earthquake of the Profumo affair and the hippy experimentalism of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. This was a country at the start of a rapid and substantial social transformation, but whose traditionalism remained strong in many quarters. While the initial impetus behind the productions was educational, this was balanced against the need to entertain an audience who had given up their time and money, and whose expectations of such an event would likely have been formed by the work of purely commercial enterprises, such as Secret Cinema (see Atkinson and Kennedy 2016b). This exerted sometimes competing pressures on the performances, with the desire for historical authenticity pulling against the knowledge that a typical night in a 1960s cinema, while certainly very different from today’s iteration of this cultural activity, would not have been sufficient to hold an audience’s attention for the five-hour duration of the events. This chapter explores this tension by describing the ways in which the research that underpinned this project was incorporated into the events themselves, locating these events in the context of other types of historically informed performance, considering their place in the burgeoning live cinema sector, and assessing the potential for events of this type to serve as sites of embodied and experiential learning. Ultimately, it is hoped that these events might provide a blueprint for future creative encounters between the public, live cinema and historical research, and that the analysis provided here will act as a useful starting point for their creators.

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Affective history The ‘Cultural Memory and British Cinemagoing of the 1960s’ project collected memories from almost 1,000 people via a questionnaire and eighty interviews, while focus groups were used to capture the experiences of otherwise underrepresented ethnic minority and queer audiences. Building on the ethnohistorical tradition of research into the behaviours, preferences and experiences of historical audiences established by, for example, Jackie Stacey (1994), Annette Kuhn (2002) and Helen Taylor (1989), the project asked respondents from a range of backgrounds and localities about the films they watched, the cinemas they visited, their journeys to those cinemas, the routines and habits that shaped their cinemagoing, the food and drink they consumed in cinemas, what they did after they left and a wealth of other topics besides these. Although this process is here referred to as collecting memories, the inherent implication that memories are fixed, immutable objects that can be captured and stored is obviously misleading. Memories are perhaps better understood as being discursively produced, shaped as much by the original event as by the act of recitation, the intervening years, the moment and environment in which they are recounted and so forth. In this sense, their mutability suggests that memory is a process rather than an end result. Myra McDonald describes this as ‘cultural memory’, in that it acknowledges that memory is ‘never static, but open to constant reconfiguration in line with evolving personal and cultural circumstances’. She argues that by ‘acknowledging the inevitability of a conflict over interpretations of the past’, cultural memory ‘draws our attention to the interaction between culture and subjectivity in the formation of that contrast’ (McDonald 2006: 329). This has a useful symmetry with the practice of immersive theatre, where audience members meet and interact with a range of characters, which allows various perspectives to emerge and produce the ‘conflict over interpretations of the past’ that characterizes cultural memory. Such performances can also make visible the interactions between these different subjectivities and the cultures in which they are situated, but this requires the researcher or performer to engage creatively and imaginatively with the memory narrative that a respondent has shared in order to conceptualize its place in a broader culture. Inevitably, this requires some interpretation of the memory stories recorded by the project, but this is not unexpected since, as Annette Kuhn writes, ‘informants’ accounts’ ought to be ‘treated not only as data but also as discourse, as material for interpretation’ (Kuhn 2002: 9). As such, it is perhaps more useful to consider the performances that are the subject of this chapter not as re-enactments of incidents from the 1960s, but rather as dramatizations of stories told about that period. Although respondents did explicitly discuss the genres, stars, directors and individual films that they remembered from the 1960s, in line with the findings of previous projects it was the social experience of cinemagoing that remained most vivid in memory (Allen 2006; Kuhn 2002: 100). These memories were often highly sensory or emotional in nature and captured, for instance, the feeling of queueing outside a cinema as the rain grew evermore intense, the joyous anarchy of sneaking into the auditorium without paying through doors left propped open by friends, the shock of finding a back-row tryst suddenly interrupted by the beam of an usherette’s torch, the

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fear inspired by severe cinema managers as they emerged disgruntled from their offices, the taste of choc-ices and Kia-Ora bought from an usherette’s shoulder-mounted tray, the look of the glamorous stars on the cover of the ABC Film Review and other periodicals that cinema chains produced, and the agonizing few moments when the national anthem began to play at the end of the night and one could not decide whether to stand dutifully and be bored or dash for the exit and risk the ire of the other patrons. While such information can be described in traditional dissemination formats, descriptions of experiences cannot capture fully the experience itself. As Sarah Amira de la Garza observes, during the euphemistic ‘winter’ of ethnography, when the researcher begins to reflect on, analyse and write about their data, ‘it is necessary for the human instrument to physically retreat. This is not in order to leave one’s subjects and setting, but rather to contemplate the separations one will create with writing’ (2014: 170). This is as true for the memory collector as it is for the traditional ethnographer, with a necessary distance opening up between respondents, who are embedded within their own histories, and the author, who wishes to take a broader perspective across all their respondents’ stories. As such, a triple distancing occurs, in which the original event is separated from the respondent by the passing of time, the respondent is separated from the researcher by the fact that they are only able to describe rather than share their remembered experiences, and the researcher is then separated from his respondents again by the need to withdraw, analyse and write. This is further complicated by the concept of cultural memory, which understands memories not as recordings of the past but as products of discourse and as always-incomplete processes. The emotional, experiential qualities of the initial event are thus held at some remove from any written account the researcher may produce. As de la Garza notes, ‘The very act of recording in writing the essence of culture changes it to something it is not. It freezes it’ in a static form when the recollection itself may have been warm and fluid, alive with feeling, sentiment and sense memory (170). Written descriptions of emotion and sensation will always struggle to communicate to the reader how it felt to be in such a situation oneself, meaning that the specific value of memory, which often lies in its relationship to lived experiences, is diminished. While journal articles and monographs are excellent means of summarizing, analysing and exploring the historical significance of memories of 1960s cinemagoing, they will inevitably fail to fully communicate the embodied experience of visiting a cinema during this decade and other methods must be utilized. Of course, attempting to reconstruct something of 1960s cinemagoing in the present day can also offer specific benefits for the researchers beyond dissemination. While one member of the research team was able to visit 1960s cinemas for himself, the others were born too late to enjoy such pleasures. They are, in effect, writing about experiences that they have only been able to live vicariously. While it must be acknowledged that the past can never be wholly resurrected, providing these researchers with a sense of how the activities they are recording felt can only serve to develop their understanding of their respondents’ memories. This recasts ‘A Night at the Cinema in the 1960s’ not only as dissemination activity, but also as research in its own right, since it delivers to the investigators an affective, rather than purely intellectual, engagement with their material.

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Recreating the 1960s To maintain the connection between the memories collected by the project and the immersive experience that would eventually emerge from them, it was agreed that this material would serve as the starting point for all creative work that was undertaken and would be revisited throughout the development of the project to ensure that the events remained authentic. However, the notion of authenticity in a project such as this is, as a result of the need to foster a creative engagement with the data, problematic. Questions of historical verisimilitude will be returned to later in this chapter but, to offer a sense of the variety of ways in which the memories informed the ensuing productions, what follows here is a description of several of the key aspects of the performance and their relationship to the material collected by the researchers. In some instances, particularly in relation to employees of 1960s cinemas, the initial genesis of the characters was informed not by memory but by more traditional scholarship. Balogh (2016), Geraghty (2000), Richards (2010) and Miskell (2000) and Kuhn (2002) have discussed the functional roles of usherettes, cinema managers and commissionaires either in the 1960s or before. This offered insight into the types of activities these characters would need to perform during the events, which provided the actors with structure and purpose. However, the focus on audience experience led the directors to supplement this more basic information with the impressions cinema employees left on their patrons as recorded in the project’s archive of memories. As such, actors playing usherettes were encouraged to craft personas that would cause audiences to see them as either coquettish or stern, sometimes gently crossing social boundaries with mildly suggestive dialogue, sometimes singling out and embarrassing amorous couples with the beam of their torches (Figure 11.1). Their costumes, too, were designed to reflect this duality, with skirts that mimicked the increasingly short ‘minis’ that could be found in Mary Quant’s Bazaar and London’s other fashionable boutiques coupled with jackets that suggested in their epaulettes and brass buttons the fad for military clothing that had been popular amongst London’s youth in late 1966 and 1967 (see Breward et al. 2004: 133). Similarly, the cinema manager developed from the memories a dual personality that was obsequious and sycophantic around guests, but aggressive and dismissive towards his employees. When interviewing audience members for the opportunity to join his staff as trainee usherettes, which three attendees did for the duration of the performance, his manner shifted to hint towards the possibility of unwelcome future sexual impropriety, which helped to establish the problematic gender norms of the period and the potential this afforded for authority figures to abuse their power. Alongside a formal yet friendly commissionaire who met guests at the door and saw them out at closing time, these characters thus followed routines and fulfilled duties as required by the roles they occupied during the 1960s, but their personalities and interactions with the audience were constructed in such a way as to reproduce the affective memories that audiences had of those who had once performed their jobs. Modern cinemagoers were consequently invited to experience for themselves both the allure and unease that historical audiences described when recounting their reactions to these cinema employees in the past.

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Figure 11.1  Actors playing usherettes in military-inspired uniforms holding replica copies of the ABC Film Review – author’s own

As indicated above, more than cinema employees or even the films themselves, it is the social experience of cinemagoing that lingers longest in the memories of cinema-goers. As such, many memories collected by the project refer to either specific companions with whom respondents went to the cinema or the other customers who were encountered there. These figures tend to have become archetypal in memory and include, for example, fashionable but unruly teenagers, courting couples and, disturbingly, sexually aggressive men in raincoats who would often attempt to molest single women or young girls and boys in the dark. This latter category required careful consideration, but given the frequency with which such memories were shared with the project, it became important to represent this unpleasant aspect of cinemagoing too, alongside the misogyny of the cinema manager and other characters, in order not to present a falsely unproblematic and progressive version of the 1960s. While being careful only to target his most excessive physical advances at other actors, with whom these moments had been choreographed, the performer playing Keith Ball, who arrived at the cinema complete with hipflask and mackintosh, did make lurid comments to audience members and occasionally moved to sit next to and slide an arm around them. Particular care was taken in preparing this actor to withdraw should there be any indication that an audience member was unhappy to be a part of this aspect of the performance, but attendees who were willing were able to experience first-hand some of the horror and discomfort expressed by 1960s cinemagoers while still being safe in the knowledge that, as part of a public performance, the situation would not escalate.

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Alongside Keith Ball, some twenty other actors became 1960s cinema patrons, with their characters being developed directly from extracts of the memories shared with the project. Amalgamating aspects of a range of respondents, these actors worked to fashion identities that reflected the different types of people one might encounter in 1960s cinemas, from swinging Londoners and conservative families to recent immigrants from the West Indies, artists and political activists. Outside the cinema, where the commissionaire asked the arriving guests to queue until the performance began, children who would need to be accompanied by an adult due to the film receiving an ‘A’ certificate by the British Board of Film Censors begged audience members to take them in. Inside, a group of riotous youths recruited people to their gang who snuck into the screening room via a back door, an up-and-coming photographer took artistic shots of those who caught his eye, and in the auditorium itself couples enjoyed elaborate picnics on their laps and later canoodled in loveseats, which lacked a middle armrest, while trying to avoid the steely gaze of the usherettes. Each of these activities, directly derived from audience memories, contained participatory elements, allowing audiences to be invited into the performance to share the sensory experiences of 1960s cinemagoing. For example, during the film older audience members passed crinkly paper bags of sherbet lemons and pear drops down the rows, perfuming the room with their scent, while ice cream was sold by usherettes during the interval. Similarly, stage cigarettes, which emit a puff of light, white powder that lingers in the air, were used by actors throughout to recreate the prevalent memory of seeing smoke hanging in the projector’s beam. In this way audiences were invited to experience the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of 1960s cinemas, activating their senses and providing an embodied understanding of the experience, which written accounts could not impart. Equally as significant to both the memories and the performance was the material culture of 1960s cinemagoing. One frequent memory shared by respondents was of publications such as the ABC Film Review, which was produced by the ABC cinema chain to advertise forthcoming films. The Review was published on a monthly basis between 1952 and 1972, making it a common and often highly anticipated part of the 1960s cinema experience for ABC patrons. The December 1966 edition, a copy of which is held in the Steve Chibnall Collection at De Montfort University, dedicates both its cover and a two-page article to One Million Years B.C., the film shown during the events. Reproducing this issue, including its adverts, cartoon strips and other material, and distributing it to audience members via an usherette recreated for attendees the fascination and excitement of receiving the magazine in the 1960s. Decontextualized from its historical moment, perhaps the Review lost some of the specific pleasure of seeing familiar stars and anticipating upcoming attractions, but the excitement generated by its materiality and faithful reproduction was evident amongst the audience. While some creative licence was deployed to allow for the insertion of a cast list, an introduction to the research project and a note from the cinema manager to draw attention to some of the various participatory activities available during the performance, the hybrid ABC Film Review/event programme, replica cinema tickets and fifteen original quad posters for films released during 1966 and 1967, which were displayed in frames throughout the cinema’s corridors and lobby,

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enabled the performance to use the physical culture of 1960s cinemagoing to connect contemporary and historical audiences. There are many other ways in which the immersive nature of the event facilitated the reconstruction of specific affective encounters with people, objects, spaces and situations recalled by 1960s cinemagoers, such as the simulation of continuous programming, whereby the audience entered the darkened auditorium halfway through the ‘B’ film, the rush of younger actors towards the door as the national anthem began playing at the end of the film, and the discovery by an usherette that her ex-boyfriend had brought another woman to see the film, resulting in her spending much of the night sobbing on audience members in the women’s lavatory. However, perhaps the most unusual of all was the restaging of the publicity stunts that 1960s cinema managers were encouraged to organize by the film’s publicity manual. Lifesize cardboard cut-outs of the film’s star, Raquel Welch, wearing her now-iconic fur bikini decorated the venues and photographers invited audience members to pose with them in front of a copy of the film’s original quad poster. Elsewhere, cinema employees dressed as cavepeople from the film and improvised a ritual dance, involving members of the audience as they did, to entertain the crowd and to entice people into the cinema from the street. These stunts, now all but unheard of, were not a feature of the memories collected from 1960s cinemagoers, but did occasionally take place in British cinemas. As such, they sit uncomfortably alongside other aspects of the events, but did offer audiences the opportunity to experience the joyous excesses that more creative cinema managers pursued as ticket sales fell during the decade and the pressure to draw an audience increased. Finally, and most problematically, actors restaged the ‘Girl in a Million’ competition, a type of beauty pageant that was held in ABC cinemas across the country to mark the film’s release. In association with Hammer and Breck Hair Preparations, each ABC cinema selected its most beautiful female patron, who then went on to regional and, eventually, national finals at Elstree Studios, with the winning woman receiving £1000 and, though little evidence suggests this ever happened, a part in the next Hammer production. Since it would be both controversial and undesirable to host such a competition in the twenty-first century, even as a reconstruction of the 1960s original, it was reimagined for the events as a ‘star quality’ contest, in which women were asked to demonstrate their best caveperson impersonation and a red carpet pose. Although even this diluted version of the competition retained many of the problematic gender politics of the original, efforts were made to highlight and challenge this through the eruption of a protest as the contest reached its climax. A group of activists, led by an actor but primarily constituted of audience members who had been recruited to the cause throughout the evening and who had been invited to deface posters for the competition and produce placards emblazoned with protest slogans, derailed the competition leading to its rapid termination by the flustered cinema manager. In this way, and also through the insertion of replica Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament literature into copies of the ABC Film Review by a subversive usherette, the political tensions of the era were allowed to rupture the otherwise carefully managed edifice of the event, highlighting the strains of a period when the country was changing as

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the age of deference waned. This was made most poignantly clear when a Jamaican immigrant, irked at being preened and manhandled into a suitable pose during the Girl in a Million competition, burst into a defiant rendition of a Caribbean folk song. This and the other instances of political friction during the performance brought audiences into contact with the dissatisfaction and burgeoning revolutionary mood of the decade, encouraging them to reflect on the mistreatment of women and people of colour that they had witnessed during the evening and to question their own lack of protest throughout the night. As such, it was hoped that the audience was placed in the position of ordinary people in the 1960s who frequently witnessed sexism and racism in their everyday lives, but often did little to intervene.

Problematizing authenticity As these details suggest, there were several elements of ‘A Night at the Cinema in the 1960s’ that drew into conflict the desire to provide an authentic experience of 1960s cinemagoing and the realities of staging such an event. The distillation of nearly 1,000 people’s memories, the general political mood of the period and a series of infrequent publicity stunts, some of which could not be staged in their original form, into a single cinema visit inevitably calls into question the seeming authenticity of the events. While this may have made for a lively, enjoyable evening, in reality the vast majority of cinema visits in the 1960s were uneventful and would make for a relatively tedious performance. As a result, some dramatization, condensation and sensitive embellishment of the historical material was necessary, which to some extent undermined the historicity of the experience. Furthermore, there are also clearly areas in which authenticity was sacrificed for reasons other than providing entertainment. The feminist protest, for example, was not a restaging of any specific historical event, but was rather a concession to modern political attitudes. In this sense, the protest served not only to allow audiences to experience something of the revolutionary mood of the period, but also as a distancing device that enabled the performance to briefly step outside the sexism of 1960s society and draw attention to it from a twenty-first- century perspective. In addition, the venues could not be stripped entirely of all the vestiges of their identity as modern cinemas. Although posters for upcoming features were replaced with 1960s equivalents and advertisements for snacks, drinks and other consumables were removed or hidden as far as was possible, some inevitably could not be obscured, while large video screens were present on the walls of both venues. Digitized lobby cards, publicity stills and other promotional materials for the film were displayed on the screens, with background images used to make them resemble felt-covered noticeboards, but this was inevitably a poor disguise for the bulky and intrusive modern technology. It also had to be recognized that modern body shapes differed from those of the 1960s, and numerous other intrusions, such as the audience’s modern dialects, phraseology and mobile telephones, would disrupt any attempt to perfectly capture the past. For these reasons, authenticity remained an elusive goal (Figure 11.2).

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Figure 11.2  The cinema manager in front of a modern video screen displaying digitized publicity materials – author’s own

As such, an ethos developed during the preparation of the events in which authenticity was strived for wherever possible within individual moments and encounters in order to deliver a meaningful engagement between the audience and the memories collected by the project, but these moments were located within a more playful approach to the past that acknowledged its irrecoverable nature and the presence of practical constraints and other agendas at work within the events. Where it was not possible to imbue an element of the event with an air of authenticity, which was understood always to be produced as much by the believability of the actors’ performances as by the quality or totality of the historical evidence, a sense of knowingness and ebullience was allowed to fill the gap. In short, the events were produced with an awareness of the futility of their own desire to return the 1960s to life and consequently used the performances to construct specific types of historical verisimilitude, largely in the experiential and emotional aspects of the audience experience, while withdrawing from the aim of convincingly turning back the clock. In this regard, it is important to differentiate between the playful mode of immersive performance deployed by these events and other models of historically informed performance that seek to unproblematically resurrect, access or otherwise experience the past. These can primarily be found in two key areas, the living history museum and the historical re-enactment. The former is a mode of historical interpretation that uses actors in historical dress in a museum setting as an educational device. It has its roots in Stockholm in 1891, when Skansen, an open-air museum on the island of Djurgården

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that is constituted of a range of historical buildings transported there from across the country, opened to the public. People from Sweden’s various regions would dress in traditional attire and talk to visitors about life in their province or sing traditional folk songs (Conan 2002: 93). From this point onwards living museums developed in popularity, particularly during the latter half of the twentieth century when, in the 1960s, the American National Park Service was, as Warren Leon and Margaret Piatt put it, ‘bitten by the living-history bug’ (1989: 66). In the United States, these practices are now most commonly associated with historic houses and museums dedicated to the colonial era, while in the UK the most famous examples are perhaps Beamish, an open-air museum in North East England that attempts to preserve through collections, buildings and performance both rural and urban experiences of the latter stages of the industrial revolution, and the Black Country Living Museum, which does much the same with a focus on the West Midlands between the mid-nineteenth and midtwentieth centuries. Although living history museums can be considered a form of historical reenactment, this second term is more commonly used to refer to comparable amateur activities. Often without the benefit of historical collections or buildings to frame their activities, enthusiasts of particular historical periods have sometimes taken to restaging episodes from the past, most notably significant battles, either in the place where they occurred or in a suitably analogous area. Dora Apel has observed the growth of this type of activity in the United States, where ‘in 1998 as many as twenty-five thousand “troops” took part in a huge re-creation of the 1963 Battle of Gettysberg’ (2012: 47). Despite the similarities between these events and the work of living history museums, Apel identifies a key difference in that the latter ‘perform for the public only while reenactors perform both publicly and privately’ (47). This public, institutional nature of living museums introduces layers of complexity to their operations, which often restrict them to telling relatively broad histories since they would need to ‘work harder to include stories of those formerly relegated to the margins of history: blacks, women, the poor, native people, and others’ (Magelssen 2007: xiii). On the other hand, the frequently informal nature of historical reenactments allows for the possibility of ‘keeping alive moments of resistance’ or ‘making visible what has been publicly forgotten’ (Apel 2012: 47). However, this is largely only done ‘in the art world’ and, as with living museums, most re-enactments ultimately ‘recapture an imagined nostalgic past that focuses on individual experience while affirming dominant historical assumptions’ (Apel 2012: 47). Given the performance-based nature of both types of activity, the lack of voices from the margins of history is particularly worrying since the opportunity to comment on the limitations of the historical account afforded by, for example, the monograph or journal article, are absent. To comment on the performance would require an actor to step outside the performance, thereby destroying the illusion of a living past. As such, although these modes of historical performance sometimes differ in relation to their intended audience and their level of access to historical sources, they can be seen, as they have most frequently been practised at least, as attempts to capture, freeze and display a particular version of history, which simultaneously obscures its

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uncertainties and other stories that might be told. As a result of these issues, both living history and historical re-enactment often become totalizing activities that imagine history to be fully retrievable and which present their versions of the past as accurate and complete. ‘A Night at the Cinema in the 1960s’ sits in contrast to these models of engagement between performance and history. The ‘top-down’, totalized history that they rely on is undermined by the presence of multiple voices, which were built into the performance from its very conception as a result of the use of almost 1,000 people’s memories as sources. Indeed, the project paid particular attention to historically marginalized communities and their memories found representation in, for example, immigrant, feminist and queer characters. Similarly, as discussed above, the events acknowledged the problematic nature of moves to resurrect the past by reframing their understanding of historical authenticity and striving only to offer authentic experiences rather than an accurate reconstruction of the 1960s. This stands in marked contrast to the usual practices of living museums and historical re-enactments, which have tended to take as a starting point the assumption that history is something that can be reactivated and, with sufficient hard work and attention to detail, revisited. For Scott Magelssen, their performances are ‘grounded in nineteenth-century notions of time and space’ (2007: xii). In this approach to the past, it is imagined that one could ‘retrace history, backward, along a developmental timeline in order to arrive at the past event. If time is viewed as a homogeneous continuum in this mode, then the assumption is that one simply needs to reverse the formula and work backward in order to “undo” the progress that has accompanied the elapse of time’ (xii). This has led to most discussion of living history in particular being focused on questions of accuracy, authenticity and verisimilitude. However, Magelssen seeks an alternative model, which accepts that ‘living museums are also historiographic operations, that is, they produce history, as does any textbook, history film, or classroom lecture’, which is to say historical re-enactment in all its various forms does not ‘undo’ history and reverse the passage of time, but instead ‘is a form of theatre’ that can be used ‘to represent’, not to reconstruct, the past (xii). This initially appears obvious, but the zeal for entering the past via performance that gave birth to the living history museum and which still drives historical re-enactors to pass weekends on rain-sodden battlefields dressed in chainmail and leather has often obscured the impossibility of retrieving moments that are lost to time. As such, the playfulness that characterized ‘A Night at the Cinema in the 1960s’, which enabled it to acknowledge its own theatricality and the constructed nature of its history, distances it from other types of historically informed performance. Rather than attempting to enter the past, these events instead aimed to allow their audiences to share similar experiences to the project’s respondents, while simultaneously crafting opportunities to observe and question the attitudes and behaviour of the characters from a critical distance. In this sense, notions of immersion and knowingness competed with one another to alternatively reaffirm and undermine the historical authenticity of the events.

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Conclusion: From live cinema to living cinema Just as ‘A Night at the Cinema in the 1960s’ attempted a different approach to the use of performance in re-enactment practices, it is also difficult to categorize the events in relation to other productions that occupy the boundary between performance and cinema. In particular, this production presents a specific challenge to the increasingly dominant term ‘live cinema’. Live cinema has been described as ‘a film screening utilising additional performance or interactivity inspired by the content of the film’ (Live Cinema UK 2016). This definition has been developed further by Sarah Atkinson and Helen Kennedy (2016a) to categorize such activities into three distinct groups. In ‘enhanced’ screenings the ‘social experience of film reception is given some degree of enhancement’, as in ‘outdoor and open air screenings’, but crucially ‘the filmic text itself is left entirely untouched’ (141). ‘Augmented cinema’ enriches a screening through specific resonances between the film and the site at which it is shown, ‘through sensory enhancement’ or through ‘elements of non-interactive performance’, though these experiences also remain orientated around ‘the filmic text’ (141). Atkinson and Kennedy’s final category of live cinema addresses ‘participatory’ events, in which there is ‘some element of audience direct engagement in elements of the originary text’, ranging from singalong screenings to Secret Cinema’s expansive and explorable reconstructions of a film’s diegesis (142). Crucially, both for Atkinson and Kennedy and Live Cinema UK, the unifying aspect of live cinema events seems to be their connection to and enhancement of a specific film. This taxonomy of live cinema is consequently problematic in the case of ‘A Night at the Cinema in the 1960s’ since the genesis of this performance was not a film, but audience memories of cinemagoing. While it is possible to see elements of enhancement, augmentation and participation in the events, and while a film was screened during the evening, the choice of film had little bearing on the nature of the performance beyond dictating the types of promotional stunts that were staged. Indeed, any exploitation film of the 1960s could have been screened within the performance with only a few elements of the event and some design work needing to be altered. This indicates that the connection between the performance and the filmic text itself is weak and, in most meaningful senses, broadly irrelevant to the aims of the events. As such, it would be difficult to classify ‘A Night at the Cinema in the 1960s’ as live cinema, though it clearly belongs within this constellation of practices, without further refining the definitions offered by Atkinson and Kennedy. This performance’s refocusing on the cinema, its employees and its customers, rather than the filmic text, reflects the earlier observation that audiences tend not to recall films as clearly as they recall the social contexts and physical spaces of cinemagoing. In line with this broader understanding of the value and significance of cinema to its audiences, which reaches beyond the filmic text and into the place of cinema in our everyday lives, it may be desirable to open up definitions of live cinema to allow for productions that focus on aspects of the cinema experience other than the films themselves. The ‘cinema’ portion of ‘live cinema’ needs to refer not only to what is on screen, but also to the practices, rituals and behaviours that surround it.

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Activating these components of cinemagoing through enhancement, augmentation and participation offers new possibilities for this emergent art form that, while certainly valuable for educational purposes, can also offer unique pleasures for audiences. In this sense, it may be useful to develop the term ‘live cinema’ to also encompass what might be thought of as ‘living cinema’, in which it is not the film’s diegesis that becomes the locus of additional elements beyond the screening, but rather the cinema itself. The term ‘living cinema’ is particularly useful in the case of the events described here since it foregrounds both the presence of the audience within a reanimated past and also the mediated nature of both the experience and the historical stories it narrates. In this sense, it is intimately connected with what Alison Landsberg has termed ‘prosthetic memory’ (2003). In this form of memory, ‘the person does not simply apprehend a historical narrative but takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live’ (Landsberg 2004: 2). Such memories usually emerge ‘at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as a movie theatre or a museum’ (Landsberg 2004: 2) and rely on capitalist structures of ‘commodification and mass culture’ and the ability ‘to generate empathy’ (Landsberg 2004: 151). Given the commodified nature of ‘A Night at the Cinema in the 1960s’, which offered to sell a historical experience to its audience for the price of admission, its reliance on mass culture through the cinema, its encouragement of a personal engagement with a historical narrative, its explicit desire to communicate the emotional and sensory aspects of cinemagoing in the swinging 1960s, and its location at an experiential site that is at once a cinema and a theatre, these events are well positioned to facilitate the production of prosthetic memory. By offering a personal and highly subjective historical experience, the events encourage the audience to generate new memories that are associated as much with the 1960s as with the present day. However, as Landsberg suggests, this need not be seen as problematic since it opens up ‘the potential for a progressive, even radical politics of memory’ (2003: 146) as prosthetic memories ‘cannot be owned exclusively’ and instead are commodities that ‘individuals can only share with others’ (151). This suggests that audience memories of ‘A Night at the Cinema in the 1960s’ may themselves contribute to the broader discourse around competing interpretations of this contested decade as they are circulated, retold and redefined.

Introduction Sarah Atkinson and Helen W. Kennedy

This section brings together cutting-edge, practice-based enquiry into different aspects of live cinema production. The contributions take creative practice forwards in a number of key ways: 1. They examine advances in creative practice in live cinema contexts. 2. They represent developments and innovation in methods. 3. They provide examples of the potentials of the creative presentation of creative, practice-based research. First, these chapters collectively make a contribution to the creative art of live cinema production. All contributions present an examination of instances of live cinema production that are situated at the intersection of different expressive artistic forms: music and film; immersive theatre and film; culinary arts and film; live broadcast, stage performance, promenade performance and film. Sarah Atkinson and Josephine Machon examine the challenges of the moment of co-presence of creative producer and the experiencing audience. The ‘live’ moment stages a confrontation between the creative ambition of the producer and the audience interpretation, engagement, pleasures and critically the audience displeasures. As Atkinson so aptly demonstrates, the audience can easily overlook, fail to appreciate or even downright dislike aspects of a production that have been carefully wrought and passionately produced. Phil Brophy and Brendon Wocke do not engage directly with the audience but their chapters examine in very close detail works that track the leading edge of artistic practice. Brophy’s allusive and sensual writing aims to capture leading work in soundtrack design and live scoring. Wocke engages in an intimate reading of the sensory augmentations and gustatory pleasures afforded by Edible Cinema. This section extrapolates what these new unions and collaborations bring to live cinema, identifying the fault lines, and the creative challenges, whilst also exploring what audiences bring within these encounters. Secondly, in their critical approach and methodological enquiry, the authors each deal with ‘production’ in very different ways and from different perspectives: Brophy as a producer, Machon as a participant, Wocke as an observer and Atkinson’s dual subjectivity as producer and performer. Each of these subjectivities affords unique

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insights and a depth of understanding of the production techniques and the creative processes of live cinema. The authors deploy a range of theoretical approaches through which to illuminate their study: theatre and performance; psychoanalysis; live cinema studies; and creative and critical practice. Thirdly, all of the four chapters in this section engage in a form of creative writing in their presentational practices and rhetorical strategies. Brophy’s article is written in vivid, evocative prose, his arguments pivot around linguistic flourishes, his overall style is a means through which the musicality of his subject pervades the discursive analysis of the form. Machon makes use of the formatting and succinct script writing conventions with which to switch between the two written registers of her work – to distinguish between her own reflections as participant (in the script format), and the critical academic discussion and a more formal register. This assists her in marshalling the complexities of the case study which merges both theatre and cinema production practices and aesthetics. Again, here we see the form – a hybrid of creative and academic writing style – mirroring the content of the analysis – a hybrid of theatre and cinema. Each chapter, in turn, takes a particular form of live cinema production, or set of practices: live scoring/rescoring; immersive theatre/promenade performance; sensory engagements; the final chapter examining a blend of these forms and approaches. Brophy’s chapter opens this section with a focus on ‘scoring/rescoring’ – this is generally the term given to the practice of devising and performing a brand new soundtrack over the top of a silent film – although we would argue that there is no such thing as ‘silent film’ since all film screening were generally accompanied by music. At Battleship Potemkin’s Moscow premiere in January 1926 for instance, its live orchestral accompaniment comprised a medley of existing pieces by Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, amongst others. When the film was screened in Berlin later that year, Sergei Eisenstein commissioned an original score which was composed by Edmund Meisel. Live scoring tends to refer to a live performance of the original score to accompany a screening of the film. As we noted in the introduction to this volume, the term ‘live’ cinema originates from these forms of creative practice which are part of a historical lineage of Audio Visual and Artist Moving Image performance, emerging from the Expanded cinema practices of the 1960s. Famous renditions of silent film rescores include Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) by bands such as Document 12, In the Nursery1 and Michael Nyman. The Pet shop boys rendition of Battleship Potempkin2; Run Lola Run by The Bays3; La Haine in 2001, The Battle of Algiers in 2005 by Asian Dub Foundation. High-profile ‘live scores’ (of original scores by original artists) include Suspiria4 and Dawn of the Dead,5 both by Goblin, and Under the Skin by Mica Levi. Brophy presents an artistic essay on this format from a practitioner perspective, providing deep insights into the creative process and the visual–auditory relationship. Brophy’s chapter takes us through the process of two live quadraphonic rescores that he produced for pre-existing films – Philippe Garrel’s Le Révélateur (1968) and Andy Warhol’s Kiss (1963). Brophy positions his own artistic practice within the wider domain of rescoring and its history, and proposes within this history two distinct

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strands of rescoring – the ‘neutralizing’ rescore and the ‘radicalizing rescore’. Brophy positions his own work as a ‘radicalizing rescore’ practice. Brophy offers interesting observations and insights into how production practices inflect the creative process; his analysis affords piercing insights and acute criticisms such that an artist working within these creative constraints can articulate and express. For instance, Brophy describes the ‘temp tracks’ (a collection of tracks put together as auditory placeholders) which are used in the edit process to establish a mood upon which the director and editor can build. Brophy argues that these uncritically collated stand-in pieces of music exert an influence over the composers work when it comes to the final creation of the soundtrack. Brophy is highly critical of this process, which he argues leads to the copying of the temp track in melody, timbre and mood, a practice that he asserts lies at the core of a ‘general avoidance of intellectual or analytic assessment of a film’s scenography’. Through this subjective account of scoring/rescoring films, Brophy illuminates the synergy between experimental film and progressive music forms. The creative practices of immersive experience design that are so fundamental to so many of the formats covered in this volume share specific talents and conventions with immersive theatre which has seen a parallel rise in the apparent complexity and popularity of its form. Immersive theatre has seen a significant growth in the popularity for some of its key proponents; Punchdrunk – an organization that was launched in 2000 – for instance, produces sell-out performances and receives enthusiastic five-star reviews in the popular and critical press. They are viewed by many as the leaders in the field of interactive experience design. A more recent experimental organization You Me Bum Bum Train, which designs and markets individual complex interactive stories populated by legions of trained volunteers are similarly drawing critical acclaim and registering some commercial success – in 2010, the company won the prestigious Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award and was nominated for an Olivier Award. The contribution of this parallel field was key to this volume and we commissioned a contribution from one of the foremost authors in the field – Josephine Machon. Machon provides an in-depth study of Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable (2013–2014). It is one of Punchdrunk’s most expanded productions, covering 200,000 square feet, and able to accommodate a capacity of 600 audience members per show with a cast of nearly 40. Set in the fictionalized Hollywood film studio of Temple Pictures, it offers another alternative perspective on the idea of cinema as a ‘lived experience’ and the ‘living’ cinematic event (Jones, this volume). Machon mobilizes this case study as a mechanism through which to outline the aesthetics of immersive theatres in general providing a theoretical study of immersive performance’s cinematic roots. She particularly focuses upon how the immersive qualities of this particular production are augmented by a ‘film within a film’ aesthetic through the complex blurring between the ontologies of film production, and the manufactured fictional world. In Wocke’s chapter, we turn to the sensory and synaesthetic dimensions of novel cinematic experience design. There have been a number of kinesthetic and participatory

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engagements in recent years: Polyester, for instance – the 1981 John Waters film – was rescreened at thirty-five UK cinemas, accompanied by audience interaction with the Odorama ‘Scratch n’ Sniff ’ cards, first at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2011, then on a much wider national redistribution in putatively ‘one-off ’ novelty screenings in 2014. The re-emergence of this novel trend of sensory augmentation is evidenced in a 2015 immersive art experience at Tate Britain, London, UK, the ‘Tate Sensorium’, which promised to ‘stimulate your sense of taste, touch, smell and hearing.’6 Wocke’s analysis of the gastronomic cinematic experience of Edible Cinema should be understood within this broader history and context of sensorial augmentation. A collaborative effort between Soho House and unusual event specialists Teatime Production, Edible Cinema pioneers experiment with ‘eat-a-longs’. Their chefs design food to augment and enhance specific moments in the film through taste, just as the smell-along example did with synchronised olfactory sensations. Wocke draws on psychoanalysis to interpret and analyse the Edible Cinema experience which synthesizes ‘oral gustatory pleasure’ with ‘cinematographic visual stimulation’. Films which have received the Edible Cinema treatment include Our Little Sister, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Some Like it Hot, Pan’s Labyrinth and Beetlejuice. As an organization, Edible Cinema pitch their offering at a sophisticated clientele seeking an alternative and provocative leisure experience. Their endeavour is not unique; as Wilinsky (2001) and others have shown, there has been a parallel development at art cinemas – since at least the 1940s – that has used the provision of a more elevated food and beverages choices as a means of distinguishing their overall offering from the standard hot dog and popcorn offerings. Wocke’s close analysis is blended with insights drawn from interviews with Edible Cinema founder Polly Betton. Finally, Atkinson’s chapter presents a richly illustrated practice-based case study of Hangmen Rehanged – a showcase collaboration between the National Theatre, Omnibus Theatre Company, Edible Cinema and Kings College London which staged the first-ever immersive cinema event which united the forms and aesthetics of ‘event’ cinema, ‘live’ cinema, ‘sensory’ cinema and promenade theatre. The collaboration centred around the themed screening of Martin McDonagh’s Olivier Award-winning play first produced at the Royal Court Theatre and streamed live to cinemas on 3 March 2016. This chapter draws together themes and ideas of the previous chapters – immersive theatre and gustatory pleasures. Atkinson takes on a researcher-asproducer and researcher-as-performer subjectivity, in order to examine the dyad of on-screen and off-screen performative spaces. In this section, all contributions allude either implicitly or explicitly to what Atkinson has coined as ‘screen responsive’ practices: Brophy in his artistic response to the work of Warhol and Garrel; Machon in reflecting on the Punchdrunk experience – which is also screen industry responsive in its simulation of a Hollywood film studio complex; Wocke and Edible Cinema – which combines culinary responses by the creative team and taste responses by the audience; and in Atkinson, screen response as a specific artistic practice, and mode of performative engagement. These contributions all mark a vital contribution to the development of a more precise critical vocabulary through to apprehend, describe and analyse these novel formats.

12

Pseudo Soundtracks: Reconsidering the Rescore Philip Brophy

Audiovisual amnesia: Presumed invention in newly commissioned rescores Rescoring a pre-existing silent film strangely activates a mute dialogue with the film, mostly because the composer/musician is not required to communicate to or with the film. Put simply, the film cannot talk back to the rescorer. The composer/musician generally operates in one of two ways. He or she will be melodramatically reverent, wishing the music to sound like it has been magically transported from the past to our present. Or, the composer/musician will be salaciously presumptive of how an aleatory response to projected imagery somehow redefines audiovision anew. The former drive seeks to seal music to image like the illusory toning of a Renaissance landscape; the latter impulse seeks to fracture music from image like shards in a Cubist landscape. Both are arguably rooted in a Romantic synaesthesia which dreams of music and image determining the other. It’s a bad marriage, grounded in co-dependent presumption largely extrapolated from circulated altruisms of how a film score is negotiated in a film’s commissioning. These tendencies have pushed two polarities in rescoring. The ‘neutralizing’ rescore (preferring nineteenth-century instrumentation, ideally with a humble folksy bent) upholds conservative notions of music being mere accompaniment to images. The ‘radicalizing’ rescore (turntables, samples, wild fuzz, free jazz, ethnographic sounds) implies that film scoring is allergic to lateral experimentation. Neutralizing rescores and radicalizing rescores have grown within the progressivist remit of international film festivals and arts festivals. Returning the film form to its status as a live event enlivens these institutions of curation in a win-win situation. Curatorially, they either mourn the death of celluloid with faux-nostalgic sad tones or wave revolutionary flags of modernist intervention by commissioning clashes between hoary old films and modish contemporary musical identities. I remain cynical of many of these ventures despite the undeniable success of this programming strategy in numerous festivals over the last two decades. Their purported vibrancy and vitality implies that by interfacing, interacting or plain interfering with the ontological

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stability of a projected film betrays both a short technological memory and a meagre assessment of the squirming complexity withheld by the innocent term ‘medium’. No technological medium remains fixed across time, between cultures, or across industry. All technological media are in transition, due to the proprietary territorialization of its hardware and demands generated by or created for target audiences. Rick Altman’s definitive archaeology of the origins of the American film soundtrack Silent Film Sound (2006) cogently details the ‘crisis historiography’ of the medium’s aural dimension. By investigating the noise channels and overloaded fields of communication of late nineteenth-century American musical culture and its mechanics, he demonstrates the manifold pressures and influences upon the random appearance of many potential encoding formats and delivery systems through which cinema would attain the status of a dual-system audiovisual encoding medium. Cinema’s phenomenal sealing, technological fusion and sensory modulation result equally from the medium’s lack of fixity and film history’s reduction of its complexity. Altman notably put sounds where his thoughts lie. His series of performances throughout the 2000s of The Living Nickelodeon aimed to recreate the general sensation of being at a storefront Nickelodeon venue at the dawn of the twentieth century. Essentially a jaunty slide show with piano playing and singalongs, Altman chose this method of presentation to demonstrate how the site-specific interaction between an emergent unformed audience and the live happenstance performance of music to slide sequences triggered risky clashes between an image channel (the slides with their text–image configuration and controlled timing and sequencing) and a sonic channel (Altman’s accompaniment – either cued by the slides, separately chosen, or improvised on the spot) and the conducted involvement and uncontrolled contributions by the ideally rowdy audience). Silent Film Sound makes a special point towards its conclusion in doubting the value of cinema’s controlling of audiences’ synchronized emotional experience through the clarification of musical codes mandated by cinema’s evolving industrial apparatus. The birth of classical film narrative can be regarded as the death of the audiovisual multiplicity and density which reigned, however chaotically and precariously, at the turn of that century. The Living Nickelodeon sits well away from both the neutralizing rescore and the radicalizing rescore. Understandably, its maudlin songs, sentimental lyrics, cloying involvement and soft ribaldry aspire neither to bourgeoisie grandeur or avantgarde fantasy. However, neutralizing scores’ symphonic splendour often amounts to harmonious kitsch, while radicalizing rescores’ musical strategies are often past their modish use-by-dates. So maybe the means of differentiating audiovisual form is limited when one approaches it through criteria of artistic expression or entertainment value. Altman’s project is a discursive interrogation of historiography, not a declaration of artistic essentialism or entertainment. Crucially, his cartography of cinematic audiovision morphing from one ontological possibility to the next grants an overview of how (1) no technologically determined ‘new medium’ is born fully developed, and (2) no matter how dominant and secure a single medium’s position and utilization, its effects can be short-circuited by encroaching and enveloping forces. Zooming out from Altman’s focus on fin de siècle audiovision, one can perceive similar climatic

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whorls in cinema’s modern regime. Audiovision would continue to resist definition by problematizing extant ontological paradigms collectively defended by reviewers, audiences and industry professionals. Three pressure zones which resist the normative notions of how sound should service cinema are clearly audible: (1) the spatiotemporal cinematizing of Broadway musical effects from the 1930s to the 1950s (from Busby Berkeley spectaculars to the canny collaborations of Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen); (2) the importation of phonological presence in teen movies from the 1960s to the 1980s (from Roger Corman’s wild and twanging youth exploitation flicks to John Hughes’s synth-pop dramedies); and (3) the immersive spatialization of expanded frequency and dynamic range in Dolby applications from the 1970s into the 1990s (from Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas’s early experiments to the complex orchestrations of Martin Scorsese, Jean-Luc Goddard, David Lynch, Robert Zemeckis, P.T. Anderson, et al.). These three arcs of twentieth-century invention – only loosely itemized here due to the focus and scope of this chapter – are notable for two key reasons. The first is that they constitute a rich and available history which most rescoring strategies either ignore, unconsciously mimic, or of which they are simply ignorant. A strange uncritical situation indeed, considering that rescoring necessitates a critical response based on becoming aware that the film one is rescoring pre-exists one’s connection with it. The most vulgar rescoring is that which presumes a Pavlovian one-to-one correspondence can be enacted. Both neoclassical claims and para-modernist assertions made by composer/musician-centric rescore projects can easily be countered by the bounty of imaginative audiovision in the historical catalogue of the aforementioned three arcs. Secondly, their pressure zones are framed by controversy and contention. Far from supporting Hollywood’s hegemonic adoption of high-art academicism touted by the early to mid-twentieth-century influx of émigrés from Europe’s venerated conservatoria, these contentious epochs of audiovision are firmly grounded in technological enquiry and embrace, musicological heterogeneity and exploration, and pop cultural assimilation and regurgitation. As such, they have generated an energizing current through the voluminous spread of genuflective image accompaniment, mood generation and emotional cueing, which to this day constitute the commonplace purpose of film music. To bypass the criticality of these streams in cinema amounts to audiovisual amnesia.

Audiovisual imagination: Defining new modalities of audiovision in rescores Fortunately, there are examples of rescoring which ward off audiovisual amnesia. Choosing to acknowledge legacies of invention in film scoring rather than prostrating themselves to the conventions which blindly corral rescoring, they proffer a type of audiovisual imagination which is derived from an open cinematic investigation. Brief mention will be made of two. The first is Pierre Henry’s rescores to Walter Ruttman’s

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Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), premiered in 1991, and Dzhiga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), premiered in 1993. Both projects are designed for large-scale multi-speaker configurations, often referred to as an ‘acousmonium’ after the eighty-speaker array designed by François Bayle for the GRM in Paris in the mid-1970s. Capitalizing on Henry’s forty years as a key innovator and craftsman in composing musique concrète, these two rescores are semiotically dense, symbolically rich and aurally amazing. Watching a film while listening to music and sound effects is achievable largely through one’s instantaneous discernment of sound from music and vice versa. But musique concrète is predicated on sculpting sonic symphonies from sounds which confound and astound in equal measure. The rescore to Man with a Movie Camera achieves a heightened status of Russian self-reflexivity by sonically symbolizing mechanical schematics for the cinematic apparatus. Just as Vertov posited the eponymous cameraman as an industrial spirit of kinetic motion (montaging optical effects and snapshots of industrialization), so does Henry express this idea through mechanical loops and aural patterns to simulate cinema’s inner factory. The rescore to Berlin: Symphony of a Great City responds to the film’s documentation of a day in the life of a busy metropolis. It comprises a suite of topological soundscapes, layering sensations of space, territory and terrain in concert with the film’s roaming travelogue through urban minutiae. From the sparse mechanized rhythms which grind, grate and galvanize in Man with a Movie Camera, to the dense sheets of layered textures which flap, fringe and float throughout Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, one can hear Henry ‘reading between the images’. He is looking elsewhere – beyond the image, past the narrative, through the scene. His choice of sounds empties them (and, to a degree, their matched visuals) of overt content and expected denotation. In place, the newly articulated musique concrète sounds enliven the dormant energy of both presumed sound and projected image. Connections arise which suggest not that this sound goes with that image, but that the fullness of the image is best serviced by an openness to its potential sound accompaniment. In Berlin: Symphony Of A Great City, Henry even included reel countdowns and black spacing – not to make a self-reflexive comment on the medium, but to make the images conform to the durational shape of his composed sections. Henry’s background in musique concrète is crucial to his approach to film sound and to our awareness of the wide-ranging techniques that shape the audiovisual event. By the mid-1950s, musique concrète signposted all the transgressive traits which would mark the following forty-odd years of recorded rock music. Inverting signal to noise ratios, privileging background hum, overloading electromagnetic systems, distorting parameters of reproduction, collapsing purposeful amplification, excessively rendering the flow between inputs and outputs – these are as much the base manoeuvres of musique concrète’s apparatus as they are the technical fissures of rock music production. The highpoint of this legacy comes with the beautifully perplexing trowelling of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar in Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. Cinema. Musique concrète. Noise. Rock. Cinema. Despite their superficial differences, the genealogical loop is sonically discernible: cinema bore musique concrete which in turn bore rock which in turn rebirthed both.

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Equally, both rescores unleash tangential attacks on the notion of accompaniment. They eschew answers for questions: What music goes with these images? What do they contain that needs to be brought out? Every sprocketed strip of film music is beaded with the sweat of such ponderous deliberation. Its composer has mused over which music to fuse with which image, settling on cues which silently insist that only this music could go with that image. It’s part illusion, part trickery, part chance, part chaos. Many film composers know this musical existentialism intimately. It is both the source of frustration which hinders and constricts their art, and the impetus for the reactionary stance they have collectively struck throughout film history. There is film music which figures meaning is to be unravelled from image, a desperate reason for syncing to an action. Then there is music that embraces the essentially detached nature of the film score, casting wild sonic gestures while inventing a narrative logic to govern its audiovisual realm. Any sound or music or atmosphere will go with images. The question is not why: it is why not. The second example of audiovisual imagination I offer is Jack DeJohnette’s rescore to William Clayton’s Jack Johnson (1970), entitled Jack Johnson – Portrait of a Legend and premiered in 2005. Clayton’s film features an original score by Miles Davis, the final tracks of which appear on Davis’s album A Tribute to Jack Johnson (1971). The film is a compilation of archival footage collected, owned and restored by Clayton, one of the visionary sports promoters who saw television as a major medium for sports presentations. Accompanying the footage is a bravura first-person narration performed by actor Brock Peters, voicing Johnson’s bold thoughts and reported retorts. The film poetically lionizes Johnson – world heavyweight boxing champion from 1908 to 1915 – as the original African American super-sportsman, unafraid of white oppression and emboldened by his own independent drive. The commission for Davis coincided with Davis’ growing awareness of outwardly voiced black politics, and the album A Tribute to Jack Johnson opts for a heavy rock-influenced energy with looping rhythms and angry interjections, synchronous with counterculture sensibilities of the time. Strangely, both the film and Davis’s album have become footnotes. DeJohnette’s rescore Jack Johnson – Portrait of a Legend opens up a loud chapter on the two. When archival footage of Klu-Klux-Klan meetings, Chicago nightclubs and a towering black man K-O-ing white men in a boxing ring are accompanied by the film’s voice-over declaring “I’m black allright – and I won’t let them forget it!” one is reminded of how much was at stake for Johnson to play out his desires so publicly in the 1910s. And when this is matched to DeJohnette’s all-black quintet (with David Fiuczynski, Jerome Harris, Byron Wallen, Jason Yarde) performing DeJohnette’s newly composed themes, the audiovision is even further emboldened with musicological politics. Davis’s score experimented with rock, influenced in part by the explosive freeform sonic clusters of Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys at the time. But in line with the project’s commission, Davis also based some of his ideas for the session on the shuffling patterns of boxers. DeJohnette’s rescore returns to jazz: modal, bop, textural, free, harmodelic and ecstatic approaches are all mined for the film’s biopic narrative. And echoing Davis’s foot-shuffling boxer-dancing, DeJohnette’s live drums often punch, undercut and uppercut tempos and grooves. In one memorable scene, a solo

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by DeJohnette perfectly matches a section in the film which appropriates a hilarious boxing scene from Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (1931). One is reminded of the importance of trap drummers to the production of live sound effects in vaudeville and early silent cinema (an area clearly outlined in Silent Film Sound), just as one is enthralled by the contrapuntal networking of instruments and voicings throughout DeJohnette’s rescore. Regarded conservatively, DeJohnette’s rescore would be celebrated for its championing of jazz and jazz alone. Viewed more imaginatively, his rescore extenuates a thesis on how jazz is less about writing and more about rewriting. Davis’s original score quotes fragments of James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone. DeJohnette obliquely references both artists in a number of funk passages, but he also notably ‘rewrites’ Davis by composing new music which scores the film’s myriad parallels of blackness: between sportsmen, entrepreneurs, musicians, composers, martyrs and messiahs. DeJohnette is famously the funkiest member of Davis’s rotating ensembles, being the primary drummer on Bitches Brew (1970) and On the Corner (1972) (as well as many of the studio laboratory sessions Davis conducted for the recording of A Tribute to Jack Johnson), and thus ‘rewrites’ himself into this rescore, the original of which coincided with his recordings and tours with Davis. Contrary to the presumptive ‘dialogue’ between the cavalier musician and his radicalizing rescore, DeJohnette offers a multivoiced musical narration based on shared musical connections and newly formed tangents of musical commentary. Just as the original film rewrites pre-Depression racial strictures as inflammatory harbingers of revolutionary foment, DeJohnette rewrites Davis’s rock-toned violence as jazz-framed dynamics, revoicing the politics of African American culture sounded equally by Bojangles-style shuffling, jazz’s secondline rhythmatics, Davis’s transcendent breath and Johnson’s spring-loaded punches. DeJohnette’s masterful all-live rescore, replete with on-a-dime transitions which shift tone-like hallucinatory breaks in emotional composure, might seem to be the polar opposite to Henry’s hyper-produced musique concrète, compacted with cacophonous irruptions and glaring sonic beams. In fact, they are conjoined by their jubilant departure from the image track. While the aural ghost of Hendrix appears in both (as phonological incursion in Berlin: Symphony Of A Great City; as mythological preverb in Jack Johnson – Portrait of a Legend), both rescores chose to imagine operations beyond the visual.

Audiovisual textuality: Voicing narrative meaning through composing rescores Two rescores I have produced are aligned with the critical concerns of the work cited by Altman, Henry and DeJohnette. Each is quadraphonic a presentation (partially pre-recorded, their mixes supplemented by live performance) for pre-existing films: Philippe Garrel’s Le Révélateur (1968) and Andy Warhol’s Kiss (1963). Retitled respectively Aurévélateur (premiered in 2004) and Kissed (premiered in 2007), they form part of an ongoing project to produce scores for post-war films whose

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experimental base rationalizes their refutation of a soundtrack. Rather than work with a historical film from the so-called silent cinema, or take a near-contemporary or modern film which already features a commissioned score and compose a new adjunctive score, the rescores Aurévélateur and Kissed seek to formulate a musical text which in effect speaks to their images. Exploiting the specific conditions of films which have chosen to mute their soundtrack – profoundly and excitingly so in these two cases – my rescores attempt to retain the images’ muteness, and to overlay an audio-track conveying musicological, sono-semiotic and psycho-acoustic effects. The results straddle the binaries of neutralizing and radicalizing rescores. Traditional dramaturgical and musical methods are mostly employed, as the aim is not to pose an avant-garde stance against the films, but rather to amplify their internal textual resonance. I am most concerned with how my rescores constitute an analysis and commentary on these films – a process which requires listening to their silent images to ensure that the rescore remains disconnected, parallel and extemporized. *** Philippe Garrel’s family psychodrama Le Révélateur is an infamous internalization of the student protests of May 1968 in Paris. Involved in the barricades at the time, Garrel later that year went to Munich and filmed this silent black-and-white re-enactment of primal scenes, biblical allegory and political subtext. Working closely with three actors (Laurent Terzieff as the man, Bernadette Lafont as the woman, Stanislas Robiolles as the child) and two camera personnel, he shaped a non-narrative cine-tract which complexly maps its dramatic arcs through a series of mesmerizing moments generated by the characters’ psychological schisms expressed through body language without dialogue. Viewed over thirty years later beyond the mythologized glory of May 1968, the film’s originating symbolic layers can still be gleaned, but only through a cinematic sheen which renders the film more like a Lumière Brothers’s anthropological document than a graphic political poster. The raw cinematography and brutishly arcane lighting ‘reveals’ (as per the title) the palpable quality of the actors’ facial nuances, their ragged clothes, the awkwardness of their bodies, the flat beauty of landscapes and interiors. Rather than pretend that one can go back to May 1968 by experiencing Le Révélateur in 2004, the rescore Aurévélateur disavows historical illusion and instead focuses on the emotional fissures of the film’s drama as forensic data. The rescore attempts to track on-screen evidence from the actors that suggests motivation to the couple’s cyclical embrace and rejection. In this light, the film’s twists and turns seem more a matter of emotional instability than dramatic action. In one sense, Le Révélateur employs ‘romantic agony’ stereotypical of French cinema as the couple’s love/hate encounters are melodramatically played out. But Aurévélateur aims to forward an aural explication of the psychological nodes that direct the film’s momentum, providing a sensory synaptic read-out of the characters’ interior states. The result is a parallel text that literally and figuratively ‘plays with’ (in the musical sense) the primary visual text, working musically and musicologically in a cinephilia mode by generating texts that talk back to the film rather than accompany it as per the method used mostly

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in film scoring. Responding to the actors’ mute performances, I envisaged the music as ‘backing’ the performers, as a group would back a singer on stage. In the case of Aurévélateur’s sections which feature sung lyrics, the performers are treated virtually as mime artists. The aural energy and musical dynamics of each track directly respond to my perception of the psychological dimension of the man/woman’s love–hate drama as it unfolds in a compressed ‘micro-theatre’ in front of the audience. (One scene notably occurs on a small stage, with the parents fighting while the child observes from the audience.) It is worth noting here that rescores mostly work from an edited film rather than a script. This majorly accounts for the Pavlovian responses which characterize neutralizing and radicalizing rescores. The composer/performer is more responsive than analytical; more subjectively swayed to compose impressionistic music than objectively or critically concern themselves with dramaturgy. This in turn exaggerates an empathetic bond with the audience, as the rescore feels (speciously) like it is sounding the audience’s own internal responses who emotionally synch to the composer/performer’s live response. Comparatively, a film score feels like it is addressing the audience, due to its non-live pre-produced analysis of the film’s dramaturgy. Aurévélateur grapples with a film which was likely born sans script. Its dramaturgy – the prime means by which a film composer will divine thematic logic from the film script – is highly performative and improvizational. The actors carry out their assigned tasks less as expressive objectives and more as workshop experiments. Furthermore, there was no authoritative text I could consult for comprehending the highly disjunctive sequence of dramatic encounters which comprise the film’s sequence of reels. The primary phase of the rescore, then, involved drafting a detailed breakdown of what happens on screen, not to fully understand the film’s mysterious inner workings, but at least to register its shifts in staging. With the log completed, I reflected on what the imagery of Le Révélateur evoked: rebellious young students, artful stylized theatrics, archly symbolic gestures, stagy photographic stances. At this juncture, I was mindful of how Garrel – along with many of the Zanzibar group of filmmakers working at the end of the 1960s in Paris – was more in tune with rock music than were the Nouvelle Vague or Nouvelle Roman film directors in France. Le Révélateur resembles a desultory rock video clip despite its silence. One key underground figure for this Parisian subculture was the Velvet Underground, notably associated at the time with Andy Warhol via their incorporation into his touring events entitled The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. This is no slight historical synchrony: Garrel would go on to live with Nico – chanteuse of the Velvet Underground and a Warhol superstar in her own right – for nearly ten years, from 1969 to 1979, starring her in four of his features. This inferred musicological backdrop to the film and its cultural specificity inspired me to forward-trace the influences that have accrued in the proceeding thirty-six years, founded on the major nexus between the Velvet Underground’s US drone rock and its European assimilation into German ‘Krautrock’ and its chugging repetitive ‘motorik’ drive. The musical content for Aurévélateur is laid like a musicological map – quite possibly a true historical palimpsest rather than a metaphorical assertion. Just as DeJohnette revisions how jazz

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modes intersected with Davis’ rock augmentation for the Jack Johnson – Portrait of a Legend rescore, Aurévélateur considers the state of rock at the historical moment of Le Révélateur’s production. Yet the issue remained as to where exactly to place the tracks in the film’s cryptic non-narrative. After completing the aforementioned log, a series of temp tracks (from the Velvet Underground and their progeny) were placed alongside the scenes, mainly using the actors’ body rhythms to determine tempo selection. This aleatory process resulted in shaping the film into a suite of ten movements, each drawing a distended shape around the on-screen action. Refinement of the beginning and end of each movement was achieved by relating to the camera movements, most of which were clearly defined arcs or tracks. Serendipitous synchronicity came to the fore in this process: no matter where the tracks were placed, they grounded the actors’ oblique signage with determined gravitas, emotional momentum and spatial purpose. But final positioning was triggered by two surprising factors. The film’s opening sequence filmed in a dark bedroom and a narrow corridor unexpectedly reminded me of the original video clip to Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ (1980). Both feature thrift store clothing, punky amateur haircuts, self-conscious posturing, dilapidated indoor spaces and archly symbolic doors being opened. Bizarrely, the placed track climaxed with the film’s title card. Then, when I casually placed David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ (1977), I was amazed to see the histrionic peak of the song (when Bowie angsts about the couple ‘standing by the wall’) synchronize with the film’s image of the couple mock-crucified on the wire fence surrounding a German military camp in Munich while the child blithely walks by holding a spray can. Once the temp tracks were assessed against the image track, they sonically and musicologically drew a map referencing and intertwining Garrel’s background with Nico, the time of the film (May 1968), its filming in Munich (including scenes on the Autobahn and in the Black Forest) and rock music of the time and shortly thereafter (from Krautrock to electronic-Glam to Post-Punk). The other temp tracks used for Aurévélateur were: The Velvet Underground & Nico’s ‘Venus In Furs’ and ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ (both 1966); Nico’s ‘Desert Shore’ (1970 – produced by John Cale); Neu’s ‘Helden’ (1975 – the inspiration for Bowie’s ‘Heroes’); The Modern Lovers’s ‘Roadrunner’ (1976 – produced by John Cale); and Lou Reed’s ‘Street Hassle’ (1978). These dates of course do not comprehensively align with May 1968, but the tracks bear sonic timestamps which place them inside a European take on countercultural aesthetics. Normally, temp tracks are the last thing one could utilize as an imaginative compositional strategy. In conventional English-language film production, the temp track is a temporary placement of music to generate mood while the editor and director spend hours assembling the film’s internal rhythms and meta-structure. Unfortunately, temp tracks tend to be halted at this early stage of empathetic response, moving forward only by coercing the commissioned composer to mimic and replicate the temp tracks’ tone. As a widespread industrial practice, they lie at the root of film music’s general avoidance of intellectual or analytic assessment of a film’s scenography (although stellar exceptions to this include Bernard Herrmann, Ennio Morricone, Toru Takemitsu and Quincy Jones, among others).

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Apart from deciding to do two cover versions of Bowie’s ‘Heroes’, new compositions were then ‘rebuilt’ over these temp tracks which referenced the feel and tempo of each track. There are also numerous harmonic/tonal cross-references (melodies from one song played on another; actual melodies from the original sources sounded in contra-keys; etc.) within the networking of the ten movements in the film. Rather than directly responding to an empathetic interpretation of on-screen action, I sought to write into the images by overwriting the historically loaded temp tracks. The decision was made to emulate the harmonic formulae of mid-to-late 1960s French rock/pop chansons: lightly rocking, slightly jangling, smeared with detached vocals. The rescore employs a studio-based ensemble of organ, vibraphone, guitars, bass and drums for stylistic reference. Their recorded passages have then been dressed with studiophonic effects and accented digitally processing, all mixed in quadraphonic sound. Embellished by live keyboards and guitars by two performers, Aurévélateur’s spatialization and anacoustic mode (swirling, artificial, electrified, ornate) create an appropriately dysfunctional sono-drama to match the disjointed beauty of the original film. Aurévélateur is a dedicated phonological rescore: its production is intended to sound like recorded songs rather than composed cues. *** Kissed is a rescore to Andy Warhol’s silent film series Kiss (1964), presented in quadraphonic sound with live keyboards. Based around a series of recorded and processed acoustic drum recordings, it creates a pulsating rhythmic dialogue with the film’s kissing couples. In contrast to the musicological approach taken in Aurévélateur, the rescore for Kissed takes what could be termed a ‘psychosexual’ approach. It employs a fixed ensemble palette (drums, fretless bass, electric piano, synthesizer embellishments and occasional sampled strings) in order to chart erogenous envelopes in each couple’s sexual performance. Musical accompaniment in cinema is largely a compromised dance around performers exchanging dialogue. Industry standards insist that audiences become aurally fatigued when they strain to discern dialogue when busy or loud music is simultaneously audible. Kissed exploits the freedom of rescoring not simply a silent film, but one whose actors’ lips are disallowed speech. The rescore sculpts dramatic shapes by ‘reading into’ the performers’ interior states of mind. Warhol’s screen reels clinically depict each couple’s kiss, while simultaneously hiding all that they might be feeling emotionally and physiologically. Taking Bernard Herrmann’s lead that film music is better at voicing interior psychological states than emotional cuing or pastoral description, I composed musical passages for the couples’ invisible interactions. Kissed is set to the 1989 compilation of single reels from the Kiss series. In this compilation, twelve reels are included. Gerard Malanga appears in a few, while Naomi Levine appears in about four, suggesting that many of the Kiss reels were shot at the one time. It is also possible that different people operated the camera, as the framing and photography change substantially from reel to reel: some feature zooms, some are fixed on faces set against blank backgrounds, and others show the couple on the

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infamous Factory couch. All reels commence in white and fade to white, evidencing the Warhol technique of utilizing every frame of the exposed roll, complete with its imperfections normally excised from release prints. Warhol’s original intention was to have the films projected at the silent rate of 16 fps, and Kissed is set to a screening of the 1989 compilation played on a variable speed projector running at 16 fps. The compositions for each reel are strictly repetitive – minimalist, even. This is in keeping with how Warhol’s fascination with bland repetition belied a surfeit of charm and warmth in contents and themes presumed to be bereft of such depth. The music is thus lush while adhering to a gridlocked structural development. This also relates to the on-screen action of performers locked into position, forced to perform their sensual act while being boxed within the screen’s territorial scopic zone. The drum parts were recorded first, freely disengaged from watching the Kiss reels. Each is built upon two live drum recordings (originally lasting around six minutes, from which a four-minute excerpt is used per Kiss reel). The second performance is multitracked on top of the first performance; the rhythmic intermeshing of the dual drum tracks symbolizes the energy being forged by the couple’s embrace. The drum performances are recorded with varying ten-microphone configurations designed to be played back in quadraphonic surround. The interplay of the dual drum tracks is intensified by the co-habitative spatialization of each drum track: their rhythmic blend is compounded by the spatial patterns generated by shifting individual track components (snare, kick, cymbal, etc.) across the quadraphonic space. Once all the drum tracks were recorded, their tempos and sonic density was gauged in order to see which Kiss reel complemented the energy of the drums. After each dual drum track was accorded a reel, the rest of the composition of bass and keyboards was undertaken in consideration of the relative couple’s performative energy. Continuing the textual compositional strategy established with Le Révélateur, each reel of Kiss necessitated a holistic yet separate reading. In some of Warhol’s early sound films (like Vinyl, etc.) music appears in the form of whatever records were lying around the Factory. Interestingly, Velvet Underground-style rock-droning never figures. In place, scorching opera, hot soul and froogalicious pop yelped from the portable record player. The Factory years are now mythically soundscaped with The Velvet Underground’s seminal sonic scrawl, but there are indications that such dark angel tonality was not the diegetic ambience in the Factory. Kissed extends this reading through its acceptance of melodic pop-oriented figures. In the second reel, the couple stay clinched in a classic 1950s film poster embrace. The stillness and softness of the slightly out-of-focus image inspired the distant reverbed drums which slowly fade up in layers in the surround mix. A vibraphone accordingly ‘shimmers’ to reflect the inner glow this idealized couple are potentially experiencing. Baby Jane Holzer – one of Warhol’s richest muses – features in the fourth reel with John Palmer. Her blonde bountiful hair blooms as she manages to pout while kissing. Playing upon the exaggerated sex doll persona she projects, the score ironically exudes a soft jazzfunk slickness which (still) tends to symbolize ‘rich people with taste’. Warbling synth overlays build with modulating intensity to reflect the gaudy emotional display of this reel. While the Factory epoch has been historicized as a decadent period born of

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Warhol’s fascination with the hedonistic Others of the early 1960s lower village, many of his silent films from the time depict some remarkably ‘clean’-looking types. The couple in the sixth reel (Naomi Levine and The Fugs’s Ed Sanders) evoke a mythical princess and prince, perhaps sardonically synchronizing with the ‘Camelot era’ of the JFK/Jackie union. The keyboards riff on these associations in a maddened overlay of music box tinkling, sparkling yet oppressive in its harmonic density. Mock French horn lines mimic the moustachioed allure of Nordic lover as his follicles are gently tongued by his maiden in waiting. Many of the Kiss reels perform an anthropological function, documenting mannerisms and behaviour of people at a certain historical juncture. The intriguing quaintness of Kiss is best documented in same-sex couplings. Filmed in a pre-gay/preStonewall era, the blunt depiction of two men kissing is equally radical for both its time (1964) and by today’s standards. The third reel exemplifies this, depicting two barechested teenage boys locked in a particularly feverish tongue-fest. Their gangly bodies and arms flail about in an unabashed erotic display. Improvised gestures performed on prepared drums and cymbals generate a heat haze of sizzling textures to reflect the suggestive danger of this couple’s knife-edge consumption of each other. Similar suggestive undercurrents course through the fifth reel’s unflinching emotionless capture of two young men (Gerard Malanga being one) French kissing. A set of twonote motifs gurgle in the low register and bubble towards upper registers in gravelly timbrel arcs, as three military-style drum tracks build in a slow frenzy. The idea was to take a celebratory tune like Village People’s In The Navy (1979) and time warp it a decade earlier to project how it might sound in Warhol’s gay bacchanalia. The drums are harshly compressed into sheets of hissing noise which gradually clears to reveal their constituent parts, at which point they are obliterated by the thud of a bare disco kick drum. Other unexpected schisms reveal themselves in Kiss. Racial issues never figured prominently in Warhol’s early prints, painting and sculptural installations; however, it undeniably comes to the fore in some of his early films. While social histories point to cinematic advents as signs of how ‘the times are changing’, the taboo of the interracial kiss does not mark the Hollywood screen until the late 1960s (and even then, under the most distilled conditions). In contrast, the eighth Kiss reel gives the interracial kiss deliberate and provocative prominence. This is no guarded peck on the cheek or brush of the lip: a sensual tango of labials unfolds as the frame captures theatre actor Rufus Collins towering over a lithe white woman – risible to conservative America yet titillating all the same. The rescore plays upon this exploitative thrill of the scene with pumping primal drums topped by a slinky string section to match the unbridled sexuality of the couple’s embrace. If this reel confronts through its societal rupture, the final twelfth reel sheds all protocols by most resembling the corporeal abstraction typical of pornography. Its moist slug-like performance is palpable. The couple’s faces are heavily cropped, leaving us with a fleshy morph of lips and noses. Their jaw-lock is total, formidable and final. The death aesthetic arises from the morbid stillness of their action – a hallmark of Warhol’s take on cinephilia. Somewhere between narcolepsy and necropsy, the image is part sleeping princess being kissed by a prince and part

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deviant suckling on the dead. The rescore here is distilled into these two parallel thematic lines: a lulling chord sequence gently cycles against a three-octave pattern filtered with saliva-bubble crackling. Truly a goodbye kiss. *** My rescores are neither reinventions of the cinematic wheel nor revolutionary decimations of what is increasingly belittled as a quaint twentieth-century medium. By divining dramaturgy in experimental works, locating archaeological and semiotic undercurrents in on-screen action, and voicing interior psychological states of apparitional characters, I regard my methods as being part of established traditions of film scoring for the cinema – indeed, I employ the same methods for film scoring. As discussed in relation to Aurévélateur and Kissed, they include the following: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Measuring duration not to write cues but to draw distended shapes Perceiving on-screen events as asynchronous occurrences to the music Layering harmonic and timbral information to increase a sense of simultaneity Accepting performers on-screen as life forces, not humans, and allowing screen energies to co-exist 5. Structuring songs to perform as backing to the ‘silent lyrics’ of the screen performers 6. Composing for interiority and allowing music to ‘unexplain’ characters and their motivations 7. Avoiding emotional synchronism and precoded mimicry 8. Gauging flux in sexual, neural and emotional states on screen 9. Producing a mix with a phonological consciousness rather than acoustic– symphonic artifice 10. Exploiting quadraphonic immersive space for musical instrumentation I perceive these methods as neither museographically frozen in bygone epochs (the rationale of neutralizing rescores), nor essentially determining of limited scope (the stance of radicalizing rescores). The pseudo status of the live rescores discussed here indicate how audiovision can bloom outside of audience expectations, industrial standards and artistic rhetoric.

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The Aesthetics of Immersion in Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable Josephine Machon

Introduction The Legendary Temple Studios was established in 1942…. In the early 1960s the output of the studio waned and employees were sworn to secrecy about the studio’s projects…. In October 1962 the studio was closed overnight. The dramatic events that led to the building being condemned have been a closely kept secret ever since.1

Sarah Atkinson and Helen W. Kennedy posit that screening environments borrow various forms and techniques from immersive theatre to initiate new aesthetics and new types of audience engagement (2016). In response, this chapter outlines a general aesthetics of immersion in live performance, recapitulating ideas presented in my previous publications (2013, 2015, 2016) to identify forms and processes that define this heterogeneous style of theatre. ‘Immersive’ is shorthand for a particular type of experiential practice that has evolved out of a broad, interdisciplinary and participatory arts inheritance.2 I use the term ‘aesthetics’ in this discussion to encompass its forms (the ways in which the work is created and presented) and dramaturgies and appreciation of those forms. In immersive theatres, production is usually multi-sensory and moves appreciation of aesthetics beyond ‘the look’, to incorporate the smell, touch, feel (and so on) of the work, typically involving some kind of direct interaction within the piece. In this way, the audience-participant is directly implicated in the aesthetics of immersive work, from concept through to production. Furthermore, the sensually participatory forms correlate to subsequent embodied appreciation. To illustrate immersive aesthetics at work, I turn to Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable (2013–2014). Punchdrunk, led by founder and artistic director, Felix Barrett, has innovated with a signature approach to large-scale immersive performance. Sited in vast, disused buildings, these combine intricate installations as scenic design with high-octane dance, omnipresent soundscapes and live music in bars housed within – and component of – the performance world.

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For The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable (2013–2014), up to 600 people per night, staggered over a three-hour run, entered what was once the vast, abandoned site of a disused sorting office in Paddington, reinvented as the densely designed world of Temple Studios. Punchdrunk’s work is heavily influenced by film and The Drowned Man extends this by inviting the audience to enter a world dominated by cinema, to step into the threshold between reality and fantasy. In light of this, my discussion identifies the immersive forms and techniques that have influenced screen-dominated practice, while examining Punchdrunk’s use of cinematic techniques, to locate The Drowned Man somewhere in the realm of ‘living’ cinema. Already familiar with the writings of Laura Marks in regard to haptic vision and the tactility of film (2000), examining Punchdrunk’s aesthetics in relation to its filmic qualities has led me to Irving Singer’s philosophizing around the blurring and transformation of ‘realities’ in film form and appreciation (1998). Vivian Sobchack’s arguments for audience as ‘cinesthetic subjects’ who interpret ‘the carnal sensuality of film’ (2004) closely connect with my own theorizing.3 I have also reconsidered Viktor Schlovsky’s ‘ostranenie’ (‘making strange’) as reassessed through cinema by Annie van den Oever et al. (2010), influential here in relation to the aesthetic blurring of imaginative/dreamed worlds. With reference to these theories, while always drawing implicitly on ideas originally expounded in (Syn)aesthetics (2011) and Immersive Theatres (2013), this essay merges film and performance theories in a manner that corresponds to a critical attitude required by interdisciplinary, intertextualized practice. My reflections incorporate firstperson recollection (in the typeset of Temple Studios) and shift across present to past tense intentionally to indicate my sensual recall of the live moment within a retrospective analysis of its aesthetics.

The aesthetics of immersion INT: ELEVATOR, TEMPLE STUDIOS. Side by side with ten masked strangers. Our hostess (gold sequinned dress, glamorous up-do, flirtatious) welcomes us to Temple Studios, invites us to look at the framed shots of the stars that cover the walls. Headshots with fake smiles, facades instead of faces, hark back to golden era Hollywood allure. Dramatis personae in visual form. Our hostess hints at the dangerous pleasures we have in store as she reminds us of some studio rules (keep your mask on, split up from your friends, look for clues, follow your own path, find the bar), runs her finger down my spine, pulls open the cantilevered door and sends us swiftly on our way.

Immersive theatres (intentionally pluralized to indicate the varied types of performance included) encompass minimalist, one-to-one encounters through to large-scale spectacles. Given the varied approaches that can be included under this banner term, it is impossible to locate this as a specific genre with fixed, codified conventions of

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practice. However, there are identifiable features of immersivity that demonstrate the intention and expertise of its creators to immerse the audience deeply within an experience to artistic ends.4 Here ‘experience’ incorporates the event itself, the way in which the audience participant has direct, practical contact with the work and the undergoing of its related activity. It equally refers to the human capacity for intense feeling within said event. To feel feelingly within (and about) any process and its outcomes can result in that encounter leaving a deep impression with lasting effects.5 Though heterogeneous in form, there are shared features attributable to immersive theatres that account for how far total immersion is achieved. A defining feature is that the event should establish an ‘in-its-own-world-ness’, where space, scenography (combining scenic design, sound and/or light) and duration are palpable forces that comprise the world. Immersive worlds are hybridized artworks, offering complexity in the ways in which central ideas and themes emerge and are expressed. These worlds have an affective quality, submerging its audience in an alternative medium where all senses are engaged. Audience is integral to this world in concept, content and form. The audience-participant’s direct insertion in, and interaction with, the world shapes and transforms potential outcomes of the event, in narrative, theme or form. This aesthetic interaction immediately breaks down the traditional auditorium/stage, spectator/ performance set-up and relocates the relationship conceptually, spatially and physically. To allow for interaction, an important feature of this work is that some kind of ‘contract for participation’ is shared early on between audience-participant and artists. This sets up the mechanisms by which audiences are invited into the world and guided to engage with it. Expertise in the handling of these conventions, involving sensitivity to the principles behind any invitation to participate, is vital if the desired experience and outcomes are to be achieved.6 These ‘contracts’ may be explicit in written or spoken guidelines shared prior to entering the space or implicit within the structures of the world that become clear in a tacit fashion as an individual journeys through the event, or a combination of both approaches. The contracts employed are an indication of artistic intention and expertise in realizing an immersive aesthetic and influence how far any immersive experience can be entered, experienced and valued as a work of art. If the immersive experience is conceived, developed and framed as an artistic performance, if it intends to work as a sensual, philosophical, creative project, there should be a strong degree of critical engagement with form in order to explore and express the feeling and thinking that exists in conceptual, thematic and narrative ideas underpinning the work. Contracts for participation constitute acts of caretaking by practitioners and are vital in terms of securing the governing principles of the world, facilitating willingness to interact on the part of the audience member and establishing structures by which the safety of participant and artist alike is supported. These regulations are different to the ‘rules and conventions’ expected in any spectatorial, theatre production where the audience–performance relationship is defined by the segregation of space (auditorium vs. stage) and role (static–passive observer vs. active-moving performer). Often initiated during preparation strategies (as my description of The Drowned Man’s initial elevator sequence indicates), they alert

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audience-participants to ways of being with/in the world and acclimatize individuals to its aesthetics. When inside the world, unspoken codes might be prioritized. Punchdrunk employ light and sound as signposts to beckon participants to central points of action; attendants silently signal pathways one way, and deny access another. Contracts and codes encourage varying levels of creative agency according to the parameters of the event. Individual responses to these mechanisms, which shape activity and interpretations, underlines how no two participants can have exactly the same involvement, despite shared qualities of experience overall. An individual and subjective stance thus underpins any critical engagement with narratives, themes and forms. The focus on the senses in these worlds underscores another defining feature; the prioritization of bodies, especially the embodied experience of the audience. The live, immediate and active experience, the physical body of the audience-participant responding within an imaginative environment, is a pivotal element of any immersive event and accentuates the ‘live(d)ness’ of the performing moment. Sensory aesthetics should be controlled carefully to avoid overindulgence in sensuality ‘for the sake of it’, enabling measured reflection on the ideas underpinning the work during or subsequent to the event. Scent, texture, sound and physical proximity in the space elicit awareness of inhabiting the world. Sensual features may become doubly experiential via an individual’s corporeal memory. Something as straightforward as the scent of lipstick and powder could trigger a visceral comprehension of those items and their significance in that place, corporeally reiterating those artefacts, the room, its stories. This inflects understanding of character, narrative and theme in an embodied manner and impacts on interpretation in the moment and in recall. These sensual details can affect the breaking down of the boundary between the real and the imaginary to establish environments that occupy in-between realms. Punchdrunk’s practice is exemplary of these forms and techniques. Its unique approach to immersive aesthetics have directly influenced the ‘new chimeric form’ reproduced at interactive, spectacular screened environments, such as those organized by Secret Cinema (Atkinson and Kennedy 2016: 274). With this in mind, I will now examine Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man to demonstrate how immersive/filmic aesthetics are employed to create an equally hybridized and live(d) mode of theatre.

The Drowned Man: Filmic worlds within worlds The Drowned Man is constructed through a clever synthesis of sources. Punchdrunk’s adaptation of any text is ‘always of a film persuasion’ (Barrett in Barrett and Machon 2007). Here Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck (1837) is the primary source, while Nathaneal West’s novel The Day of the Locust (1939) is equally prevalent. Both are reinvented through the lens of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) and suffused by a film noir aesthetic, nuanced by touches of Edward Hopper (himself heavily influenced by Hollywood’s Golden Era).7 In a kaleidoscopic fashion, references turn in on themselves to form new patterns and perspectives, colouring the new narratives and wider themes with the hues of the originals.

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Having finished Day of the Locust hours before entering Temple Studios, this was the source that proved more present for me and through which the intertwining of themes became clear. West’s ‘Hollywood system’ parallels ‘the social-economic structures of the military that was around in Büchner’s time’ (Barrett qtd from Barrett and Doyle 2013). The novel is set in Depression Era LA, a time when the Hollywood film industry grew rich in stark contrast to the extreme poverty of the masses. Transposed to the early 1960s, the brink of the demise of the all-powerful studio system, Büchner’s protagonist, driven insane by a desperate urge to escape his reality, is drawn through West’s twentieth-century counterparts and a setting that demands everyone escape their realities. Maxine Doyle, co-artistic director and choreographer, refers to the ‘juxtaposition of those worlds, those themes’ and the stark sexuality in West’s writing, ‘super detailed in terms of the physicality, presence and objectives of these unpredictable and desperate characters’ (in Barrett and Doyle 2013). The layering of historical periods emphasizes the existential condition at the heart of both sources. It provides a context that reveals the realities of the Technicolor, American dream: that it is a dangerous lie (how prescient this feels now looking into the abyss of a Trump presidency). The inference of Hopper adds to its liminal planes, caught between night and day, fantasy and reality, on the cusp of the 1960s, on the borders of the Hollywood hills. The wheelchair-bound studio mogul of Mulholland Drive is reinvented as the omnipotent Leland Madison Stanford. The forbidding forests of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, which cast strange light and lead to alternative realities, are evoked in the wood surrounding the trailer park at the edge of Temple Studios. A hallucinatory, orgy scene occurs in The Drowned Man, in a red-curtained, black–and-white tiled basement that immediately references Twin Peaks’ sadistic Black Lodge and its dream sequences, the forest a pathway between these realms. This play between nightmare and reality, and the fact that audience-participants follow the twists and turns of the plot according to their own journey, shares some affinity with Lynch’s approach to narrative construction where individual, non-linear and illogical interpretations are celebrated. The magnification of detail and layering of themes from these intertwined sources is translated in a multidimensional way, through space, scenography and dance.8 Singer’s theorizing helps to unpack Punchdrunk’s play between fantasy and reality. He considers Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) (also set in America’s Depression Era) to illustrate the ways in which the narrative device of characters stepping through the screen and into the world of the film self-reflexively highlights the film’s own ontology and how it uses the audience’s pre-existing understanding of ‘the ontology of cinema’ to function ‘as an important part of [the film’s] content’ (1998: 56). This approach draws attention to the fantasy world presented, blurring the ‘realties’ within the film while doubling the manner in which the audience invests (rather than suspends) its (dis)belief (1998: 15–78). In Singer’s reference to the mythical notion of ‘the double’ in films, doubling of character (portrayed by the same performer in his examples) indicates mirrored themes and/or characters divided within themselves. For Singer, film is ‘an analogue of this theme, its mobile images being awesome doubles for the objects they represent’ (1998: 62).

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The Drowned Man consciously plays with the doubling communicated by the trappings of film itself. First, via the setting, film sets, offices, executive suites, dressing rooms, seamstresses and adjacent shacks, fountain and wood with trailers, are sited in such a way that boundaries blur and certainty about ‘faked’ film set and ‘real’ setting becomes unfixed. The audience travels between the (doubly) make-believe set and the implied ‘real’ locations outside of the studios, which, in terms of the wood, become locations used by the studio. Inhabiting spaces that are ‘real’ and ‘fake’, invites a double reading of any events in that space. Connotations of Charlie Kaufmann’s Synecdoche, New York (2009) emerged for me through the artifice of this fabricated world, layered storey-upon-storey, and its resonant forms and themes, a movie about a movie that, as Peter Bradshaw summarizes, ‘doubletakes and hallucinates about itself ’ postulating the ‘terrible twin truths of existence: life is disappointing … death inescapable’, ergo, ‘art is part of life and so doomed to failure in the same way’ (2009). By exposing the interior/exterior of the medium, the film within a film motif always draws attention to its representational form and presentation of unreal realities. This is exemplified in The Drowned Man by the inclusion of Encino Cinema, a fully functioning, movie theatre where, screenings of 16 mm original versions of The Day of the Locust, Sunset Boulevard, Touch of Evil and Wozzeck were on offer prior to certain performances. Coiling the world around its sources, layering interpretations sourced from the ‘real world’ within this ‘makebelieve’ world and (con)fusing live(d) experiences for those audience-participants that watched ‘real’ screenings within a fictional set-up. The Drowned Man utilizes mythical doubling by combining characters and plotlines from its sources. Reflected and refracted plots are physically present in the storylines of William and Mary versus Wendy and Marshall.9 To emphasize the psychological mirroring, the Dramatis Personae in the programme notes is presented across a black ink blot–styled image, on the left side listing the characters on the ‘outside’ of Temple Studios (who may enter ‘the inside’ transitorily as temporary staff, film extras or guests), their mirrored counterparts who inhabit Temple Studios on the right side, and the characters who reside in the liminal locations (notable that this section of the listings is headed up by ‘The Gatekeeper’) in-between both domains, traversing from one to the other as ‘permanent’ staff, B-list actresses, PAs or Doctors to the moguls and divas (2013: 4–5). The audience-participant is also cast in a liminal role between audience-voyeur, party reveller, studio visitor and cinematographer, invited to step into its film sets and locations as much as placed among the twists and turns of the plot. The intention is that audience-participants become a ‘camera floating around’ (Barrett 2013). Rather than fixating on a linear plot, each narrative plays out on a reel ‘like unedited rushes’, which the audience must ‘cut together’ (Barrett 2013). Dance and fragmented speech allows for a fluidity of expression that supports this. Each sequence, motif and improvisation is inspired by the dancers’ early explorations across the site, touching surfaces, attending to textures, noticing temperature, finding spaces and objects to support their individual plotlines as much as leading the audience through the site (see Doyle and Machon 2007).

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Plots and subplots abound as focus is shifted away from one protagonist. Lead characters with the main narrative arcs from which all others are developed have stories that chart a journey across set locations throughout the building. These enable overlapping narratives to be physically evolved in the space. Characters that only have brief moments in the original sources are adapted and elaborated. Figures from different sources are combined into one so that what was a B-character is expanded across a one-hour storyboard, repeated across a three-hour cyclical run, to become the focus of attention should that story be followed. Characters share transitory meeting points as their stories, literally, shift across each other’s paths. This compositional device allows for an experience that is reminiscent of a tracking shot, with audience as camera. It is possible to chart the narrative of chosen characters by sticking with them on their journeys. Equally, it is possible to lose them behind closed doors, pick up a different lead. These narratives magnify the destructive passion and jealousy at the heart of the sources. They expose a brutal system that nurtures the self-destruction of the powerless while supporting the sordid proclivities of the tyrants at large. The contrast between the disenfranchized poor and the affluence and power of studio executives seethes underneath the dusty soil of this world. The audience-participant can literally see the dirt under the fingernails of all of the characters. Whether at the inner sanctum of Temple Studios or on the outskirts, in separate ways, these individuals are all parasitically living off the industry. Encounters with characters become electric when you are the only audience member to be present with them in the space.10 Away from the communal activity, in such instances time stands still, resonates, until broken by other audienceparticipants entering or the character leaving. Such moments feel intensely personal and can impact potently on that audience-participant’s involvement with the event. INT: SECRETARY’S OFFICE, TEMPLE STUDIOS. Just her, there at the wooden desk, and me, here in the corner. I’m invisible to her. Watching her. She’s typing at the desk. I take in her outfit, pale green, modest; scarlet lipstick; guarded manner. Mr. Stanford’s PA? She’s acting like she shouldn’t be in here. I want to know what it is she types. I move in, lean over her shoulder. Too late. She whips the document from the typewriter (Courier typeset, shooting script layout, thick cream paper), simultaneously rising from her seat causing me to step back, let her pass, give chase.

This details my first witnessing of Romala Martin. She provides an interesting illustration of the ways in which B-characters in source material become fully formed characters in Punchdrunk worlds. In Day of the Locust, Romala is a flashback in a lead character’s backstory. In Punchdrunk’s reinvention, holding on to the original’s alcoholic tendencies and her inability to pay her rent, Romala takes on characteristics of Rita from Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, involving a car wreck, amnesia and resultant perspectival shifts and alternate endings. She is a fusion of texts, an amalgam of these fictions and caught in-

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between the interior turnings of Temple Studios and its trailer park exterior. Punchdrunk’s Romala can be seen as a paradigm for the production’s overarching aesthetics. She is a physical representation of the mythical double comprising West’s Romala and Lynch’s Rita (already a mythical double in Mulholland Drive). She blurs textual narratives and themes; interiors and exteriors, fantasy and ‘reality’. Her narrative highlights the film within a film motif; in the trailer park she is manipulated, behind on her rent; at the studios a casting-couch exchange sets her up as fledgling star, vulnerable, controlled to the extent that she is unsure if her life is real or role. Her individual narrative begins and ends with a car accident, from which she stumbles, dazed, attempting to piece together who she is and how she got here, played on repeat, never reaching a conclusion. This plotline not only directly references Rita’s, furthermore, inside Temple Studios, it refracts that of Wendy, similarly manipulated by Stanford to violent ends, driven mad, unsure if the murder she finally commits is the manufactured storyline of a film or the nightmare of her reality.

Scenography: being inside Temple Studios CONTINUOUS: A dusty, sweltering small-town on the outskirts of Californian desert, a fountain. Forbidding trees in shadows. Trailers, home to extras, workers and wannabes. Fabricated sets ready for ‘action’. Pan across to the dissolute glamour of the Diva’s boudoir. Cut to the detritus of the fledgling actresses’ dressing room. Back through shooting stages, to a desert, The Last Chance Saloon, a wrecked Studebaker wagon, a passionate, desperate dance. Porch. Rest on the swing-seat. Enter a bedroom cluttered with books, clothes, perfume where the transistor plays soulful, unsettling, doo-wop.

The scenography is a vital component to the ‘in-its-own-worldness’ of Temple Studios, responsible for physically taking the audience into the source material. Sound and spatial design develop organically alongside the choreography to accompany the audience on its journey. Sound is a spatial as much as an atmospheric device, establishing a sonic architecture across the site, and eerie underscores through contiguous chambers, evocative of era and emotion in set environments. The omnipresence of sound, designed by Stephen Dobbie, is intended to serve the audience-participant’s ‘cinematic experience’, (Dobbie 2013). It manipulates how audience-participants feel within, and how they feel about, the world created.11 As with cinema, it is vital to the atmosphere, the overarching narrative and the penetration of character psychologies. Abstract soundscapes create an expressionist audio-plane, eliciting an imagining beyond, a feeling rather than a seeing. Conjuring the edges of this world, beyond the touchable surfaces and inhabitable spaces, these suggest the haze of deserts, oil pumping, the rhythmic toil of derricks. Soundtracks are plundered from film references as audio citations and reset signals, functioning as a cue for performers to return fluidly to the beginning of the loop. Angelo Badalamenti compositions lurk throughout and suffuse the

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salacious underworld of the studio, tapping into the idiosyncratic ‘impactive’ and ‘visceral’ quality of Lynch’s scores (Barrett in Barrett and Machon 2007). Popular songs and music of the era evoke historical period and geographical setting. As with a film soundtrack, these songs play out through specific scenes, provide the tempo and emotional resonance for choreography, tap into nostalgia. Where received through a transistor in a bedroom, the sound then expands to fill the space, reverberates against the walls as much as through the body, envelops the audience in time and travels with it to wider locations. The sonic collage from space to space establishes a blurring and blending, as opposed to a clashing, of audio. The forensic attention to detail in scenic design also seeks to replicate the intimacy of cinematic experiences. Punchdrunk’s associate designers, Livi Vaughan and Bea Minns, work with Barrett to ensure that the long-shot experience of the spatial scene setting fuses with the sharply focused close-ups of the detail in space. The attention to detail in design allows for an immediate, visual scene setting, while scent, texture and solidity of objects in space make the imagined world palpably present. The forest is full of shadows, and bedside lamps, candles or office lamps cast chiaroscuro light. Densely designed rooms require whole-body attention where hands, nose and ears do as much work as the eyes: touching, sifting, sniffing, listening. By substantiating a ‘living’ environment, the ‘touch-real’ extends Singer’s ideas. The audience is encouraged to invest belief in the ‘reality’ of the fantasy because we feel it; we actually inhabit space, respond to its proxemics as much as to temperature and texture. Hand-to-hand contact with performers similarly confirms a ‘reality’ of experience, blurring the sensual fact of bodily interaction with the sensual fiction of the performance. The scenography entices audience-participants to come in close, sift through drawers for clues, feel and inhale the fabric of the characters moods by touching clothes on scented hangers in wardrobes. One can hone in on detail in extreme close-up: read books, open boxes, find handwritten messages, smell bottled scents, imbibe drink in the saloon. Equally one can pan across the space, adjust to its temperature, ground oneself directly through the dusty soil underfoot, note sensations shift with each surface, feeling as much as seeing the desolation of this world, the dirt that surrounds it. These private moments encourage a sense of being in the moment, in the world. They can transport the audience-participant deep within the original material, inviting a (syn) aesthetic interpretation. The body as a whole is required to be the conduit and interpreter of the event. In ‘perceiv[ing] the details corporeally’, the original visceral experience is affective in the moment of interpretation and remains so in subsequent recall and analysis (Machon 2011 [2009]: 16–24). Sobchack describes an equivalent ‘cinesthetic’ experience with sensually styled films; ‘vision and hearing are informed and given meaning by our other modes of sensory access to the world’, which results in the subjective body being accented, ‘diacritically invested and active in making sense and meaning in and of the world’, instinctively (2004: 60).12 For Sobchack, when a sensual styling in the cinematic experience is foregrounded, the experience ‘is meaningful not to the side of our bodies but because of our bodies’ so that instinctive ‘carnal thoughts’ are provoked, which ground and inform more conscious analysis’ (2004: 60, emphasis original). In Punchdrunk’s immersive worlds, the ‘cultural hegemony of vision is overthrown’ (Sobchack 2004: 64), reoriented around ‘haptic visuality’ (Marks 2000: 162).13 Sight

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is physically recalibrated through the sensations of touch and proprioception. The audience is invited to dwell within the interior/exterior worlds of Temple Studios, to make sense of each through the whole sensorium. Where film might make one aware of a sense modality that is influencing vision and visual interpretation (such as touch, with Sobchack’s example of The Piano), the sensuality of Punchdrunk’s immersive environments is interpreted wholly through the body. I am not watching and translating a bodily reference on screen but engaging all senses without screen mediation, in direct contact with surface, flesh, scent via sole of foot, fingertip, nostril and so on. Haptic vision is activated as I translate the performer’s dance in front of me, and there is comprehension of psychologies and situations via the shapes they create. The dance is equally absorbed through my haptic perception of what it might feel like to recreate those shapes through torso and limbs. Such moments are a layered sensory engagement that draws attention to bodily comprehension of the work because we ‘feel ourselves feeling’ (Sobchack 2004: 77). Where Sobchack’s ‘lived body senses itself in the film experience’ through the ‘bodily provocation on the screen’ (2004: 77–79, emphasis original), I have a similar heightened and intensified sensorial comprehension as a physical presence within the world of Temple Studios, unmediated by a screen. This, alongside the close proximity to sweating bodies of performers playing out their roles with intensity, affects my awareness of the blurring between the tangible and imaginable. My (syn)aesthetic comprehension is exercised further by images elicited from within my subconscious, my own archived traces of Lynch’s films, and image-based recall of play, novel and artworks. This evocation of stored images, in tandem with my sensually activated imagination, results in the spaces and scenarios I witness taking on an uncanny filmic/dreamlike quality. The lasting effects is a blurring of the touchreal, the remembered and the imagined in immediate experience and interpretation. This palpable sensation of inhabiting ‘two worlds at once, like being half awake yet still anchored in a dream’ (Richard E. Cytowic in Machon 2011: 17–18) further transforms ‘realities’. The dreamlike sensation I perceive is aroused not only by embodied memories of film but also by my recourse to film aesthetics to describe dream experiences, elusive and abstract in definition and always imbued by traces of the emotions and sensations of the dream.14 Audience in The Drowned Man becomes part of its uncanny aesthetics, influencing the tempo of the movement through the space and impacting on proxemics and scenography, aided by the wearing of a carnivalesque mask. This device is intended to support audience involvement, shifting status and inviting engagement in various ways. The shape and look of the masks suggestive of the ludic worlds of masked balls and comparable with those used in the clandestine world of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999).15 In The Drowned Man, set in a comparably treacherous Hollywood world where masked voyeurs can indeed become witnesses to a macabre orgy, this reference resonates. The skeletal design, when brought together with others, sculpts the audience as part of the scenographic installation, casting collective onlookers as ornate framing devices within the space, as much as strangely silent observers. The Drowned Man thus reconfigures ‘cinematic’ ways of visually reading the work to a whole-body inhabiting of narrative and theme. Space and scenography, work

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independent of, as much as in collaboration with, the sweating, dancing bodies of the performers to allow for a touch-real, three-dimensional reworking of Singer’s ‘mobile images’ becoming ‘awesome’ multilayered, visceral ‘doubles’ that blur the tangible and imaginable (1998: 62). Touch-real readings inject an (oxymoronic) authenticity into the fantasy world. Objects and characters are touch-real yet ‘not real’, always being ‘only’ a representation in this imagined world. The settings are themselves in-between inviting a constant questioning of situations and scenarios: Are these ‘real’ settings or is this a film location? Is this a ‘real’ character or is she a celluloid creation of Temple Studios, an actor playing out a role? The answer is always yes and yes. Fact and fiction are hand in hand throughout, merging the corporeal, live(d) experience of the audience, within a fictional framework that is in a constant process of refracting realities and fantasies.

Conclusion: Immersed in The Drowned Man In The Drowned Man, ‘the ontology of cinema functions as an important part of its content’ (Singer 1998: 56) and is a significant aspect of its aesthetic construct. This is a living world that uses filmic devices and plays with cinematic references in a multidimensional, multi-sensory manner. Reworked characters and narratives, combined from the deconstructed worlds of Büchner, West and Lynch, displace original interpretations and elicit new points of view. The world of Temple Studios thus feels strangely familiar, made (strange) from this fusion of source material, that invites a (re)cognition of the images, narratives, themes and forms of those original filmic worlds. The piecing together of narrative occurs as much through space and scenography as it does from character-led scenarios. Visual and cinematic references are not merely employed as a knowing comparison but to emphasize visceral forms and disturbing undercurrents in theme. The intertextualization of literary and celluloid sources establishes a complex, kaleidoscopic world. The critical agency offered relates to the ways in which one pieces together the narrative and themes, whether from interaction with performers or scenography or both. All the inhabitants are outcasts in this world, powerless against looming, mass-mediatized forces. The indifference of executives to human suffering and the terrible consequences of desire and despair are writ large. The tension between individual dreams and desires versus a disempowering, destructive reality are a constant presence. The looped composition of The Drowned Man provides a stark reminder of the cyclical turning of it all in a world where the haves and have-nots are increasingly at odds. When Stanford’s reverberating, tannoyed voice calls ‘that’s a wrap’, it suggests that this was all merely the workings of a film. Yet the whirling crescendo of the hoedown, wrap party culminates with the mirrored revelation of the murdered bodies of Mary and Marshall in the arms of William and Wendy. Standing in shallow pools into which they will sink, as rain sleets on their broken bodies, they deny a Hollywood ending and throw easy resolution into doubt. In collaboration with its sources, Punchdrunk’s immersive practice communicates within and beyond its signature aesthetic. Although a more detailed examination of

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the political and economic arguments are required than those just touched on here, this does point up the ways in which, as Harris posits, ‘a more general consideration of the relationship between the prevailing aesthetics of politics and current thinking around the politics of aesthetics’ is a necessary area for analysis in the arts in general as much as in relation to immersive aesthetics (2017). Immersion in the world of The Drowned Man invites a live(d) appreciation of its aesthetics, enabling audience-participants to inhabit narrative and theme. It encourages its audience-participants to attend to their ‘carnal bodies’ in a (syn) aesthetic comprehension of narrative and theme (Machon 2011; Sobchack 2004). There is a suggestion of creative freedom and a sense of audience liberation in this work; however, the multifarious ways in which one might compose one’s own experience is carefully constructed by the company, embedded in the look, feel and sound of the design, led by the paths forged by performers to be curated by the audience, individually or collectively. The creative agency offered is one of narrative construction and interpretation. Creative licence is allowed but absolute freedom is simulated within its aesthetic construct. Like the narrative threads of the sources, in the immersive aesthetics of Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man, absolute freedom is part of the fantasy.

14

Eating with Your Eyes: Edible Cinema and Participatory Synaesthesia Brendon Wocke

A substantial amount of research has, and with reason, been devoted to the subject of gastronomic representation and consumption upon the silver screen. It goes without saying that this most fundamental and necessary human activity allows the filmmaker to portray, and the audience to glimpse, not only the structure of an individual character’s pleasure and needs, but also the dynamic that exists between several characters as they share a meal. Food, and the theatre it offers, in films as diverse as La Grande Bouffe (1973), Chocolat (2000) and Julie and Julia (2009), or in the more commercially saccharine Hollywood comedy, She’s All That (1999), can nevertheless be seen as a barrier for audience engagement insofar as the primarily scopic (visual) and aural medium of cinema more or less excludes the tactile, gustatory or odorous participation of the audience. This is, however, not to say that experiments and ventures in this field have not been attempted. The cinematographic use of odour has, for example, been the subject of a series of niche experiments such as General Electric’s 1953 invention of Smell-O-Vision and Mike Todd Jr.’s subsequent film Scent of Mystery (1960), which, through the transmission of thirty scents into the theatre, evoked aromas as diverse as garlic, tobacco and coffee (Slide 1998: 12), or John Water’s 1981 film Polyester, which featured a scratch and sniff card allowing viewers to partake in the olfactory prowess of the lead character. Similarly, the cinematographic exploration of touch has not entered the mainstream and essentially remains tied to the manner in which tactile sensations are portrayed on the screen, eliciting a more metaphorical use of the word. Drawing on the manner in which the visual expression of touch can nevertheless affect the audience, and on phenomenology more generally, Jennifer Barker, in The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience, explores the ‘specifically tactile structure of embodied cinematic perception and expression that are taken up by on-screen bodies […], filmgoers, and films themselves’ (2009a: 4). Barker’s further research, published in two articles of note, ‘Neither here nor there: synaesthesia and the cosmic zoom’ (Barker 2009b) and ‘Out of Sync, Out of Sight: Synaesthesia and Film Spectacle’ (Barker 2008), regards the particular manner in which cinema translates the experience of synaesthesia in visual terms, tying together a translation of scent, touch and taste through the use of optical metaphors such as the ‘cosmic zoom’, describing the ‘visual rendering of the

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phenomenological process of synaesthetic experience itself, as a moving experience and a subjective experience of movement, rather than as a static, universal effect’ (Barker 2009b: 313). Yet this conception of sensory intermediality nevertheless relies on primarily traditional forms of filmmaking and film projection in which the visual and aural senses are foregrounded as the privileged expression through which the other senses are to be imaginatively apprehended. Within this context, Edible Cinema, a gastronomic cinema experience in London, has begun to redraw the line between the representation of food on the screen and its consumption within the theatre, using carefully prepared dishes in order to encourage a deeper experience that moves beyond the visual and into the realm of the concretely tactile and the gustative.1 By presenting the audience with a number of snacks that are timed to certain moments and scenes within a given film, Edible Cinema offers a metaphorical interpretation of the visual action in gastronomic terms. In so doing Edible Cinema attempts to bridge the gap between the screen and the theatre, displacing the centre of action and laying the groundwork for a truly synesthetic experience insofar as the audience experiences the film visually, gustatively and, also, in a tactile manner; opening themselves up to the experience of surprise, flavour, odour and texture that Edible Cinema strives to provide. Founded in 2012, the very first of Edible Cinema’s screenings was of Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) at the Electric Cinema in London’s Notting Hill. This initial foray into experimental food and cinematographic projection was followed by screenings pairing a wide variety of films such as Spirited Away (2001), Beetlejuice (1988) and Some Like It Hot (1959) to specifically curated and selected menus of snacks. While the exclusivity of the events and the care with which the menus are created form part of a strategy aimed at enhancing the reputation and the attractiveness of the cinema, it must nevertheless be said that the unique constraints of this particularly challenging exercise, bringing together elements of supper theatre and of technological gimmickry, such as smell-o-vision, constitute significant economic headwinds. The degree to which such events may be economically viable in terms of a revival of art house cinema and experiential luxury, a phenomenon to which Barbara Wilinskiy refers in Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema (Wilinsky 2001: 113), is also debatable, given the less than robust returns that Polly Betton described in her interview for this chapter. This means that, barring the 2013 El Somni project in Barcelona (Aleu 2014), few explorations of cinemato-gustatory synaesthesia have been undertaken. The enduring uniqueness of London’s Edible Cinema, despite several events further afield, such as a recent event in Copenhagen, underlines this point. For the approach taken by London’s Edible Cinema can be seen to differ from events such as ‘Street Food Cinema’ in Los Angeles2 insofar as Edible Cinema offers a truly novel experience tailored to a specific film, and to specific scenes within a given film, whereas Street Food Cinema more closely resembles an outdoor picnic. More importantly, the experience that is offered by Edible Cinema does not merely involve a form of augmented reality; rather, the psychoanalytic implications of the experience form the underlying structure for an exchange between the oral and the scopic drive, ultimately leading to a form of sensorial crosstalk that is all the more

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important, given the correlation, interpretation and sublimation that Edible Cinema deploys in preparing the various menus. Within these ‘eat-alongs’ we can trace a quest for a fundamentally synesthetic experience: in the dark of the cinema, as lights flicker on the screen, we are invited to see with our tongues and taste with our eyes, producing a radically new understanding of cinematographic stimulus that has substantial psychoanalytic resonance. This chapter proposes an exploration of the synesthetic implications of Edible Cinema by working through the psychoanalytic notions of incorporation and the scopic drive, relating oral gustatory pleasure to cinematographic visual stimulation in a theoretical framework that will enable us to consider its broader signification. Drawing on the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok as ‘concerns incorporation’ (Abraham and Torok 1994), a process which underscores oral (gustative) pleasure as well as on Lacan’s Seminar XI ‘The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychanalysis’, wherein he describes the scopic drive in precisely cinematographic terms (Lacan 1998), this chapter will seek to underline the intensity and creativity inherent in the synesthetic approach taken by Edible Cinema. Particular attention will be paid to the creative processes that establish the various snacks and the manner in which the visual cinematographic material is interpreted in culinary terms, forming the foundation for a participative, enhanced cinema of experience. The value of such an approach, as opposed to a more traditional field of reference including audience and reception theories, lies in the manner in which it allows us to tie the creative structure of Edible Cinema to audience experience. That is to say that Edible Cinema does not propose a carbon copy of what is eaten on-screen (as we shall see), but rather provides a sublimated, interpreted and restructured offering, accomplishing in its culinary preparation the psychoanalytic work that is dominated by compression, intensification and sublimation. Furthermore, by returning to a more direct reading of Lacan and Freud unmediated by more contemporary theorists of film and cinema, such as Slavoj Zizek for instance, we are struck by the manner in which these texts remain forward thinking, and by the manner in which the processes of Edible Cinema are so fundamentally informed by an underlying psychoanalytic structure.

The oral drive Within the context of a synesthetic experience, it can be difficult to separate the order and primacy of sensation. Edible Cinema proposes an intertwining of the oral and the scopic drive that problematizes the regular cinematographic hierarchy between the film and any secondary gustatory stimulation provided by popcorn. The innovative and dynamic approach of Edible Cinema is to effectively recentre the visual action of the cinematic experience upon the palate – reinvigorating the scopic experience through the gustative. Thus, in the context of this chapter, and in following the developmental order of the psychosexual drives established by Sigmund Freud, it would seem appropriate to begin with a consideration of the oral drive, moving on to the scopic drive and the interrelation between the two drives.

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The oral stage of psychosexual development is perhaps one of the most fundamental elements of psychoanalysis, at least in the manner in which Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan conceived of it. The oral stage is formed in the foundational relationship between the body of the mother and the child, through breastfeeding. The stimulation of the lips which causes the infant to latch is followed by a consequent sensation of fulfilment and contentment which arises not only out of being fed but also from the intimate connection in which the bodies of the mother and child, separated at birth, are rejoined. This sensation then forms the subsequent basis for the sublimative and regressive generation of comfort through oral stimulation. As Freud, in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, states: No one who has seen a baby sinking back satisfied from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life. The need for repeating the sexual satisfaction now becomes detached from the need for taking nourishment. (Freud 1953: 182)

As the infant grows older, the oral drive, that is the desire for stimulation of the lips and the contentment that arises out of such stimulation, is sublimated. The oral drive thus takes on other, less direct forms as the infant progresses through the further psychosexual phases (a progression which is outside of the realm of this essay). It is, in fact, easy to see the comforting value of the consumption of moviehouse popcorn as repetitively stimulating the lips in the dark escapist womb of the cinema, in which popcorn can be seen to replace ‘the projected sensation of stimulation of the erotogenic zone by an external stimulus which removes that sensation by producing a feeling of satisfaction’ (Freud 1953: 184). Lacan, in considering the nature of the Freudian drive in Seminar XI (entitled The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis), reminds us that the distinction between auto-eroticism of the erogenous zone and the drive lies in the manner in which the drive closes in on a ‘lost object’ of fantasy: ‘The objet petit a is not the origin of the oral drive’ (Lacan 1998, 180). That is to say that ‘the objet petit a is not introduced as the original food, it is introduced from the fact that no food will ever satisfy the oral drive except by circumventing the eternally lacking object’ (ibid.). This is particularly interesting if considered in light of the gastronomic delights proposed by Edible Cinema: for Edible Cinema does not so much propose the consumption of what we see on the screen but rather reinterprets the dishes and snacks proposed moving them towards the idea of what we see on-screen as a whole, circling around an impossible incorporative or participative fantasy. In a brief interview and discussion undertaken for this essay, Polly Betton, the creative director of Edible Cinema, neatly illustrated the manner in which Edible Cinema attempts to circle around, to reinterpret and to sublimate the visual feast on screen and render it in more gustatory terms. She mentions, for instance, that it is important for the chefs who prepare the various dishes and snacks for Edible Cinema to remember that the food served cannot, in the context of its consumption in the

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darkness of the theatre, be seen. Presentation and the visual aspect of a given dish is thus a far more secondary consideration to its taste, texture and smell, defying much of the current attention paid to the visual aspect of gastronomic creation. Betton and her creative team seek to challenge cinemagoers, although this can run awry as was the case with the Edible Cinema screening of Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. For Betton this was at once due to the audience expectation of a simple tea and cake–aligned cinema experience, mirroring their idea of a pleasant snack to accompany the movie: chocolate on-screen led to a belief in chocolate snacks. However, as Betton pointed out, not only do both Roald Dahl and Tim Burton have notoriously twisted senses of humour, but, in reinterpreting the on-screen ‘delights’, Betton presented her audience with treats such as roast beef–flavoured chewing gum (representing Violet Beauregards’s three-course dinner gum) (Dahl 2001: 94) or ‘green caterpillar goo’ (Dahl 2001: 70), which were not altogether well received, given that this particular audience expected a more conventional ‘eat-along’ and not a multi-sensory exploration of the palate. In an article for The Culture Trip, an online cultural magazine, Emma Cooke goes as far as to qualify the latter dishes as ‘weird’ (Cooke 2015), placing the emphasis in her article on the more conventional (and less ‘challenging’, as Betton said) aspect of the gastronomic presentation. In the beginning, the audience experiences Prince Pondicherry and his melting chocolate palace with spiced truffle dripping in chocolate sauce and Mr Bucket’s sad ejection from the toothpaste factory with gin-laced edible toothpaste. They journey through the factory’s smells and tastes before ending with Veruca Salt’s nutty end – viewed while drinking a gorgeous concoction of Jägermeister, gin, amontillado sherry and hazelnut syrup – and Willy Wonka’s reunion with his father, symbolised by literal sweet teeth. (Cooke 2015)

The public reaction to the more obtuse snacks that Betton reported and the manner in which Cooke qualified the three-course dinner gum as ‘weird’ are illustrative of both the intimate nature of the affair and of the manner in which Edible Cinema does not present the thing-in-itself but rather an interpretation of the on-screen action which circles around and hints at the object itself. That is to say that Edible Cinema, and activities which evoke the oral drive, are intimate insofar as they play with a fundamental language and flavour profile dictated by experience and emotion. One can easily imagine a Proustian moment in which cinema, flavour and personal memory unite in a particularly powerful sensory experience. This also underlies one of the fundamental contradictions at the heart of Edible Cinema – the impossibility of an independent reinterpretation and sublimation of the visual activity to precisely express the thing-in-itself that the cinemagoer imagines. For there is a degree to which the audience may expect a more visceral and engaging experience than is possible, seeking to, as Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok would say, incorporate (Abraham and Torok 1994) elements of the film. In L’écorce et le noyau (translated as The Shell and the Kernel), a collection of essays written conjointly by Abraham and Torok between 1959 and 1975, the authors, taking

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the Freudian notion of the oral drive as a point of departure, develop the notion of incorporation. While for Abraham and Torok the question of incorporation is related to mourning and the psychoanalytic integration of the missing object within the subject, we can nevertheless consider it in less oblique terms, the incorporation of the audience’s cinematographic fantasy through gastronomic ingestion. In the chapter entitled ‘The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse’ (Abraham and Torok 1994: 107) Abraham and Torok are particularly lucid as concerns the notion of incorporation: Incorporation may operate by means of representations, affects, or bodily states, or use two or three of these means simultaneously. But, whatever the instrument, incorporation is invariably distinct from introjection (a gradual process) because it is instantaneous and magical. The object of pleasure being absent, incorporation obeys the pleasure principle and functions by way of processes similar to hallucinatory fulfilments. (1994: 113)

If we take the definition of introjection elaborated by Freud in his paper ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ (which draws on Sandor Ferenczi’s earlier use of the term) to be the unconscious, and lengthy, process through which external elements are integrated into the subject’s personality, we can better understand the distinction between introjection and incorporation that Torok draws in the above citation (ibid.). For ‘The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse’ deals precisely with what Torok sees as a shift in Freud’s use of the term (1953) as opposed to the original definition proposed by Ferenczi (ibid.). This debate is however secondary to our interest in incorporation and its application to the gastronomic and psychoanalytic processes that Edible Cinema evokes. Keeping in mind that cinema is an art form based upon projection; it is also an art form that relies upon the absence of the object of pleasure. Characters, scenes and landscapes are not truly present; they are ‘larger than life’ and ephemeral structured along the axes of desire and affect. While cinema as a general art form may open the audience up to an incorporative experience, Edible Cinema moves much further along this track. Betton and her team, through the double representation of the visual and the gastronomic as well as through the elaboration of the surprise and pleasure of the oral drive, elicit a magical almost transformative bodily state. In the interview undertaken for this chapter, Betton, on several occasions, recalled the manner in which the audience gave a burst of surprised laughter when surprised by a visual/ gastronomic combination. This was, for instance, the case when the audience, during the final scene of the film Perfume (2006), was invited to snack upon a dish entitled ‘Flesh’. In the course of a scene in which Jean-Baptiste, the film’s anti-hero is ripped limb from limb and consumed by a mob, his perfume serving only to fan the flames of their desire, ‘Flesh’, a mini Cumberland sausage, aromatized with sticky plum and ginger syrup and with civet tincture, formed a fitting counterpoint. The audience’s laughter can almost be interpreted as a rhetorical question: ‘Are we really being asked to engage in this most violent of the films scenes?’ The answer is, of course, yes, and the sausages are consumed with gusto.

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This example furthermore illustrates the importance of, and the dynamic effect that food texture, ‘mouth feel’ if you will, has within the context of Edible Cinema. The subtle crunch of the Cumberland sausage skin, and the liberation of the juicy and fragrant flesh inside, draws the audience into the cinematographic action itself. As Torok underlines, incorporation is marked not only by its immediacy but also by the air of mystery that surrounds it. Thus, the almost hallucinatory sensory experience that the visual and gastronomic combinations of Edible Cinema evoke leads the audience into a moment of incorporation where they become part of the action – in a form of magical fulfilment they incorporate the film itself. The secret and transgressive nature of incorporation and of the manner in which it deals with prohibition and fantasy is further elucidated by Torok in the course of her essay: the recuperative magic of incorporation cannot reveal its nature. Unless there is an openly manic crisis, there are good reasons for it to remain concealed. Let us not forget that incorporation is born of a prohibition it sidesteps but does not actually transgress. The ultimate aim of incorporation is to recover, in secret and through magic, an object that, for one reason or another, evaded its own function: mediating the introjection of desires. (Abraham and Torok 1994: 114)

When considered within the context of Edible Cinema, and especially in terms of the aforementioned example, we are struck by the manner in which Edible Cinema deals with the sociocultural prohibition against cannibalism. As Torok suggests, without actually transgressing the taboo – Edible Cinema provides a sublimated experience. At the same time, this is something that takes place in secret – in the flickering twilight of the cinema – through a strange gustatory alchemy that remains somewhat mysterious to the audience insofar as they are unable to visually inspect their food. A similar liberation of desires and taboos can be seen in the ‘BBQ Tramp Finger’ served as the penultimate snack during a screening of An American Werewolf in London (1981). As an erstwhile tramp meets an unfortunate end, the audience delights on a ‘coco-cola soaked quail with bourbon & Agen prune stuffing & charcoal “finger nail”’, and partakes in the violent cannibalism of the aforementioned werewolf. This is however not quite as unseemly as it sounds, for the snack itself reflects some of the comedic aspects of the film in its reference to stereotypical American fare through the use of Coca-Cola as a basting sauce for the quail. In this we see the manner in which the cinematographic action is reinterpreted, sublimated even, working with the originality and the exclusivity of the event to craft a form of gastronomic alchemy. Perhaps what is most important in considering the manner in which Edible Cinema deploys the oral drive through incorporation is the fact that the process resolutely refuses the physical and literal inaccessibility and impermeability of the screen. Edible Cinema allows the audience to undertake an incorporative experience that is nothing less than the incorporation of the film itself. That is to say that, gastronomically, the audience gains a greater freedom of agency and a deeper participative experience, accomplishing the fantastic escapist desire that lies at the heart of the cinematographic experience.

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The scopic drive If in the case of Edible Cinema we might consider the primacy of the oral drive, it is certainly true that the more general cinematographic field is dominated by the structure of the scopic drive which Freud initially defined in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Freud writes: Visual impressions remain the most frequent pathways along which libidinal excitation is aroused […] It can, however, be diverted (‘sublimated’) in the direction of art. (Freud 1953: 156)

Defining the scopic drive in terms of scopophilia, which is the pleasure that can be derived from viewing, Freud nevertheless underlines the possibility of sublimation in the redirection of the pleasure thus procured. In Seminar 11, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan develops the notion of the gaze that represents (on the most basic level) the split between the subject as capable of seeing and as, in turn, subjected to the gaze of the other. This impacts the scopic drive insofar as the subject both finds himself to be the object of the gaze, and furthermore becomes aware of the limits of his own scopic prowess (Lacan 1998: 83). The gaze is at once tied to the notion of the mirror phase, to the manner in which the subject perceives himself and to the manner in which the subject integrates himself socially, thereby exposing himself to the gaze of the other. This is the essential vacillation of the gaze, between subject and object, and herein lies the power of film. For if as Lacan suggests, we can see a certain ‘taming of the gaze’ in painting (ibid.: 109), cinema is ever so much more an art form dedicated to the structuring of the gaze. Moreover, Lacan tells us that ‘anything resembling a drive […] is a montage’ (ibid.: 169), allowing us to read the cinematographic process as an essential mise-en-scène of the scopic drive. In The Structure of Semiotics, Kaja Silverman emphasizes the manner in which scopic structure of the cinema, through its deployment of the gaze, allows the audience to engage with the images and the characters: the only truly productive gaze in the cinema is that of the camera; that gaze produces the images with which the viewer identifies, and which he or she loves. In short, the camera ‘looks’ the viewer as subject. (Silverman 1983: 223)

One could say that the agency of the audience is, by the very nature of cinema, ceded to the director, the cinematographer and ultimately to the film itself. This is what Silverman means when she says that the only productive gaze within cinema is that of the camera – the audience’s interaction with the medium being driven by the scopic impulse as it is defined through frame and shot. The gaze that the audience produces is for this reason essentially trapped, channelled by the fourth wall which, even in the most avant-garde forms of cinema, nevertheless separates audience and performance through a chronology of editing, production and distribution.

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This is where the interest of Edible Cinema lies, in the manner in which it breaks with predefined notions of performance and of participation. For it must be said that Edible Cinema is not the only form of participative film experience, and cult films such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show attract costumed audiences who fling toast, produce impromptu indoor rainstorms and undertake the memorable steps of the time walk again (and again). Yet such spectacles nevertheless remain anchored within a visual universe that is predominantly directed by the cinematographic action, and even public outdoor screenings which tie picnicking and more open camaraderie – thereby bringing food to the cinematographic table so to speak – lack the subtlety of approach that is the hallmark of an Edible Cinema event. For what is more visceral than a Proustian moment of madeleine-inflected vision? Edible Cinema even goes so far as to play with the scopic nature of food itself, abandoning the overwhelmingly visual aspect of contemporary dining for a more visceral concentration on texture, odour and practical ease of consumption in the twilight of the silver screen. Polly Betton, in the interview undertaken for this chapter, emphasized both the need to encourage her chefs to think of food and its presentation in non-visual terms and the manner in which she enjoyed offering dishes whose visual aspect was designed to be minimal – dusted with black sesame seeds, or encrusted with poppy seeds in order to reduce their visibility in the theatre. This flies in the face of the massive amount of attention that is placed upon the visual presentation of food among contemporary gastronomes. Books and essays such as Ferran Adria, l’art des mets (Jouary 2011) and Food for Thought, Thought for Food (Hamilton and Todoli 2009) make explicit reference to the creative processes that have driven the particular visual style of contemporary gastronomic cuisine. Restaurants such as elBulli (Adrià and Soler 2008) and El Cellar Can Roca (Roca, Roca and Roca 2013), are keenly aware of the power of the visual medium and of the manner in which presentation alters the senses, often seeking to play with the visual appearance of a dish or of a preparation in order to elicit surprise and wonder from their guests. Their use of visual aids goes as far as the commissioning of digital video projections as during the El Somni project which was undertaken by El Cellar de Can Roca in 2013 (Aleu 2014). In enlisting a large number of artists in order to produce customized cutlery and crockery, and in commissioning an opera as well as a full-length 360-degree video projection, El Cellar de Can Roca sought to achieve the Wagnerian ideal of the total artwork. The project was however predicated upon the visual aspect of the twelve-course meal and the various accompaniments, were one to take a conservative view, served only to augment the impact of each plate. Which is why the movement away from the gastronomically visual is all the more interesting when we consider Edible Cinema. For while this event embraces the scopic drive in its cinematographic articulation, it nevertheless closes the door on a more direct expression of scopophilia which could be articulated through the gastronomic presentation of the various different snacks themselves. Rather, and this is perhaps one of the most important aspects of Edible Cinema, the scopic gives way to the live. That is to say that the concerns of Betton and her team in imagining the various meals and menus turn on particularly practical issues such as the ease with which a given snack may be eaten, or the limitations of the food in terms of wilting

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or ideal serving temperature. For insofar as the dishes are served at the beginning of a feature-length film, the final surprise should hold just as much delight as the very first snack despite having been at room temperature for the length of the film.

An eyeful of popcorn, a mouthful of cinema Ultimately, the impact of Edible Cinema lies in the manner in which it exposes the audience to a double mediation, both oral and visual, offering a particularly vibrant and reflective way of storytelling. That is to say that the combination of the carefully selected dishes (a culinary mediation) with the cinematographic spectacle (a visual mediation) offers the audience something more than the sum total of two individual and contemporaneous experiences in an alchemy that recalls the lexicon deployed by Maria Torok in her description of incorporation. Take, for instance, the Cumberland sausage served during the final scene of Perfume – what could be more dull than ‘sausage-on-a-stick’? However, when taken in the context of the visual narrative on-screen, the metaphorical and quasi-transubstantiative play gives the humble Cumberland sausage all the allure of flesh. Furthermore, the subtle hint of musk, recalling the broader subject matter of the film Perfume, piques the senses in a manner that makes the film come alive. The synesthetic experience does much to restore audience agency and reduce the inherent passivity in a medium whose visual field is mediated by a camera and crew far removed from the projection that any given audience witnesses. The audience participates in something that is not a movie of their own making, for this would merely double down on the scopic aspect of the endeavour, but rather in a hybrid experience that moves closer to something that could be categorized in terms of the Futurist view. In The Futurist Cookbook, Filippo Tommase Marinetti’s part artistic manifesto, part avant-garde gastronomic revolution and part poetic play on the cookbook genre, we read of dishes such as aerofood replete with accompanying sounds and scents (Marinetti 2014: 105) and of an emphasis on the aesthetic experience of food – moving away from an economy of nourishment and towards one that deploys technology, art and science in service of experience (ibid.: 36). Referring to critics of his gastronomic programme, Marinetti writes: Some of them say that perfumes and music etc. can only be compared to stimulants, whereas we consider them as actions to create in a diner an optimistic state of mind singularly conducive to a good digestion. And not only that: the perfumes, music and tactilisms which season Futurist foods bring about that playful and virile state of mind indispensable after lunch and at night. (ibid.: 41)

If we sidestep Marinetti’s deep-seated nationalism which later in the manifesto articulates itself in an attack on what he sees as a ‘xenomania’ for foreign cuisine to the detriment of local creativity, we can see the continuity the lies between the Futurist gastronomic manifesto and Edible Cinema. That is to say that the use of sight and

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sound (whose relation to Lacan’s notion of the auditory drive is beyond the scope of this chapter) seasons Edible Cinema in a similarly optimistic and experiential manner to that which Marinetti describes. Further on, Marinetti underlines the manner in which Futurist cooking tends […] towards new culinary horizons to restore taste and enthusiasm to eating, to invent dishes that induce happiness and optimism and multiply infinitely the joy of living: this is something that we cannot possible get from the dishes we have the ‘habit’ of eating. (ibid.: 83)

Indeed, as we have repeatedly seen, the entire (and elegantly simple) thrust of the Edible Cinema project is to destabilize the audience and move them beyond the conventional coordinates of both a cinematographic (and thus purely visual) and a gustatory (and thus predominantly oral) experience. The question of habit and the manner in which Edible Cinema breaks with both our habitual forms of viewing and eating, and with the habitual flavours and presentations of food, can be seen in the repeated appearance of popcorn-based dishes upon the tasting menus which accompany various films. The final dish that was presented during the screening of Miyazaki’s masterpiece Spirited Away was entitled ‘Popcorn or Pork?’ wherein the peanut butter popcorn and pork crackling with sour apple powder parallels the scene in which the films central character, Sen, must choose her transformed parents from a selection of pigs lest they be eaten. The dish contrasts the notion of a popcorn-cheerful happy ending that only the silver screen can provide with the menace of porcine disaster that awaits Sen should she choose incorrectly. This breaks not only with the habitual salty or sweet flavour of moviehouse popcorn but also, as we have already seen, with the conventional oral and scopic relational hierarchy. We can furthermore see a cannibalistic shadow in the manner in which the pork crackling is representative of the impending consumption of Sen’s parents – echoing the use of the Cumberland sausage in Perfume and of the tramp’s finger in An American Werewolf in London, and thereby offering a destabilizing and unsettling aspect to the dish. By contrast, the first dish served during the screening of Pan’s Labyrinth, entitled ‘Forest Floor’ and containing Scots Pine forest floor–scented handkerchief together with pine and oak–smoked popcorn, reflects nothing more sinister than Carmen, the central character’s, walk through the pine forest. However, the crunching of the pine nettles underfoot, which is matched by the crunching mastication of the popcorn, lends an even deeper aspect to the synaesthesic nature of the initial proposition which touches on smell, sight and taste. More conventional in approach, but nevertheless reflective of a participatory synaesthesia, is the ‘Christmas Tree Popcorn with Bombay Butter’ that is presented as the penultimate course during the screening of When Harry Met Sally (1989). In this dish (fir-smoked popcorn coated in Bombay butter and served with mincemeat mix), we read a gastronomic metaphor of all of the cliché symbols of the Christmas holiday season, reflecting Christmas trees, mincemeat pies and all of the delectable trappings that seem only to underline the fact that Harry and Sally are facing

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the festive season alone. Even in this more conventional example, the deployment of novelty, of images and of technology in order to raise a meal to the level of an artistic experience follows many of the precepts developed by the Futurist Cookbook. As one might imagine, this idea is never far from the minds of Polly Betton and her team, who, as she mentioned in the interview, count The Futurist Cookbook as one of their points of inspiration for the creation of Edible Cinema. Aside from the novelty, the impact of Edible Cinema is the manner in which it allows audiences to project themselves within the film. That is to say that whereas within the realm of a regular cinematographic experience we, as audience, surrender our agency to a visual structure defined by shot countershot, Edible Cinema allows us to recuperate a measure of agency in so faras we consume the film. By foregrounding the oral experience, Betton and her team underline the incorporative power of the cinematic experience, in the sense in which Abraham and Torok (1994) consider the manner in which an experience or a vision can become part of us. Despite all of the psychoanalytic heft that underlies Edible Cinema, one could nevertheless ask if it is little more than a publicity ‘gimmick’, the latest in a long line of efforts to bolster the art cinema as a space apart that enables one to share particularly intense and rarefied experiences with like-minded people. Research such as Douglas Gomery’s Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (1992) and Charles R. Acland’s Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes and Global Culture (2003) would certainly point in this direction. Yet, beyond the economic question lies a fundamental creativity and an almost utopic desire to share an experience of cinematographic and gustatory communion and to playfully experiment with projection and presentation. Most importantly though, Edible Cinema stages a scene of psychoanalytic incorporation altering the manner in which the audience engages with the film. As Dani Cavallaro argues in Synesthesia and the Arts, insofar as a synesthetic experience reflects a return to a prelinguistic state: Synaesthesia, like the semiotic, holds the power to unlimit experience […] an artifact endowed with synesthetic qualities has the capacity to generate a playful excess which defies any definitive meaning, and hence inaugurate the possibility of textual jouissance. (Cavallaro 2013: 26)

Referring to Julia Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic, a pre-syntactic, prelinguistic process of signification (1974: 28) that is tied into and synchronous with the subject’s process of signification, Cavallaro underlines the power of the synesthetic experience insofar as it escapes articulation (2013: 28). For insofar as the semiotic is, in a certain sense, a melting pot of sensation, so too, is synaesthesia. So by breaking with the habitual grammar of cinema and of snacks in a movement towards the ineffable synaesthesia of sight and taste, Edible Cinema evokes the possibility of an unlimited experience, breaking the passivity of the silver screen in order to evoke an incorporative jouissance wherein the audience comes alive in the incorporative consumption of the film itself. Live cinema (adjective) becomes live cinema (verb).

15

Hangmen Rehanged – Fusing Event Cinema, Live Cinema and Sensory Cinema in the Evolution of Site and Screen Responsive Theatre Sarah Atkinson

Prologue On Friday 27 May 2016, the inaugural Live Cinema Conference was held at King’s College London. The day involved a number of panels, workshops, master classes and installations and was attended by professionals, practitioners and academics working, studying and leading this emergent area of the film exhibition sector. The day conference concluded in the College’s historical Anatomy Lecture Theatre on the sixth floor of the King’s building at 1800 hours, at which point delegates were ushered down onto the first floor into the Chapters room for a reception and the opportunity to network with one another. Other VIP members, including conference funders, King’s alumni and the conference-steering group were taken to a smaller room to be served sparkling wine and canapés. Shortly after entering this room, a mysterious man entered, and the attendees were instantaneously transported back in time to 1952: ‘Good evening Ladies and Gents.’ He gives a cursory nod to all those assembled. Then he walks up to his food and turns on the radio: Radio broadcast: Big Ben Chimes. This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the news at 6 o’clock on the 6th March 1952. Computer scientist Alan Turing was convicted of gross indecency after pleading guilty today at Cheshire Crown Court. Turing [aged 40] was handed a suspended sentence and agreed to undergo treatment at the Royal Manchester Infirmary. HANGMAN turns up the RADIO as he listens to the next item: Ships were kept in port and Cardiff’s docks were closed after a murder took place in the Tiger Bay Area last night. Lily Volpert a 41-year-old spinster had her throat cut in a shocking and brutal

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attack say police. Those responsible stole items and cash valuing £100.

(Script excerpt, Weatherall 2016) As he listened, the hangman calmly and deliberately ate a plate of plaice and potatoes which sat steaming on the bench. He then proceeded to give all of those in attendance a lesson in hanging. And so commenced the immersive, promenade theatre performance of Hangmen Rehanged.

Introduction This chapter reports upon an innovative piece of practice-based research – Hangmen Rehanged – a showcase collaboration between the National Theatre, Omnibus Theatre Company, Edible Cinema and King’s College London. It provided the climax to the Live Cinema Conference (see Atkinson and Kennedy 2016c). It was the first-ever immersive cinema event which united the forms and aesthetics of ‘event’ cinema, ‘live’ cinema,1 ‘sensory’ cinema and promenade theatre. The collaboration centred around the themed screening of Martin McDonagh’s Olivier Award-winning play Hangmen produced at the Royal Court Theatre and streamed live to cinemas on 3 March 2016. The play is a dark comedy set in 1965 in a pub in Oldham on the day that hanging was abolished. The central character is Harry Wade, a hangman who finds himself out of work. As the marketing materials for Hangmen Rehanged described: Hangmen Rehanged aims to deliver an enthralling, sensory experiment for audiences: fusing live performance, verbatim reportage and culinary sensations; to evoke an unforgettable, indelible impression of England in the era of her last executioner.

The practice-as-research experiment of Hangmen Rehanged and the critical response expounded within this chapter collectively propose a new model of ‘site & screen responsive theatre’. Through the mapping of the entire creative process, through my own reflections as co-producer2 through interviews with my collaborators, performers and audience members, I explore two critical areas within this chapter. First, I examine the tension between audience expectations of screen-based engagements and their attendant potentially more passive pleasures in contrast with the demands of immersive, lively, potentially challenging, interactive experiences. I explicitly seek to interrogate ‘the inherent dichotomy in immersive cinema events – the very presence of the cinema screen on-site calls to attention the mediation of the spectacle, and underlines the ultimate position of the audience member as spectator as opposed to participant’ (Atkinson and Kennedy 2016: 273). Secondly, I interrogate the challenges and opportunities to innovative creative production afforded by the advent of live experiential cinema. I detail its emergent techniques, practices and pleasures providing

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new insight to inform audience studies in the domains of film and theatre in the context of a burgeoning experience economy (Pine and Gilmore 2011). Although it is important to signal the distinction between this creative and experimental endeavour from the highly commercial practices upon which Pine and Gilmore developed their model of the experience economy. Thirdly, this chapter offers a unique practicebased contribution providing a holistic insight into the conception, creation, delivery and evaluation of a live cinema experience, which is a rare opportunity due to the limited access generally given to the production elements of these type of immersive experiences (Atkinson and Kennedy, 2017). Hangmen Rehanged uniquely fused of a number of distinct and emergent creative practices and cultural forms – event cinema, live cinema, sensorial cinema and promenade theatre. It therefore requires a new critical framework through which to describe and analyse its novel format and its resultant aesthetics. In the context of a growing body of scholarship which addresses ‘the significant gaps in knowledge that exist around the experience of film screening and viewing in spaces outside the cinema’ (Aveyard and Moran 2013: 4), this interdisciplinary work sits at the intersection of a number of fields of critical enquiry. These are the study of promenade performance and immersive theatre; the examination of event cinema broadcasts; and the emergent scholarship related to live cinema. This chapter draws on work from all three of these fields in order to offer further understandings of the fused form, whilst contributing new insights and methodological frameworks back to all three fields. Hangmen Rehanged was a multifaceted undertaking, each dimension bringing its own practices and processes, as a consequence it is a highly complex object of study where research is the thing itself. To encapsulate this in this study I have to contend with the constituent, interwoven and deeply imbricated elements: the entire creative process, the finished piece and audience response and reaction. I have structured the chapter in the following way to embrace this complexity. I firstly detail the overall research methodology including the approach to the creative process, I then detail the ensuing writing process, before outlining the sensory elements, these all then inform the development of the performance methodology. I conclude with an analysis of the site and screen-responsive theatre elements that evolved through the process and were manifested in the performance.

Research methodology and creative process The project drew on a number of different methodological approaches in its enquiry. The practice-led approach taken in this project is that of the researcher as Producer (Atkinson and Kennedy 2017) – that is, when the researcher takes on the subjectivity of a creative producer, in order to experience first-hand the challenges and opportunities of a hybrid and immersive form of creative practice: in the case of these complex new experiences, the only way to understand the precise nature of the ‘production’ process is to step into this role and engage in an embodied approach to praxis. In the specific context of the emergent field of live

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and experiential cinema and related creative practices, it has been very difficult to meet with the creative teams to discuss their approaches. So this producerly mode became a means through which to embrace and understand the subjectivity of the artist or creative producer. This study also involved a form of participant ethnography in which the researcher engages in the creative processes, a method I have taken on before in other work (Atkinson 2018), but never before in such a leading role, making key creative decisions and commissioning various artists and practitioners. The research included in-depth semi-structured interviews with key members of the creative team, a short post-event audience questionnaire on-site immediately after the event, with a more detailed follow-on online audience questionnaire. For the on-site questionnaire, a strategy was evolved to attempt the capture the audiences before they exited the building. Chris Yarnell, one of the performers, took on the role of guiding audience members to the seaside peep-through that had been especially created (see Figure 15.1).3 The idea was that audience members would stay for photographs, while the four student researchers4 armed with iPads asked a series of short questions which they recorded on the iPad audio recorder and took a photo of the interviewees, using the ‘Live Toolkit’ – research and evaluation process for live events (Kennedy 2016). Twenty-five post-experience questionnaire responses were also elicited in the days following the event. The creative process commenced when NT Live initially agreed to the screening of the recording of McDonagh’s Hangmen5 on the evening of the Live Cinema Conference. It was suggested that this would fit really well with the proposed conference setting, since the play was set in a pub in Oldham, which could be an environment that was instantly emulated in the conference venue of the woodpanelled Anatomy Theatre6 at King’s College London (see Figure 15.2). The play also had the potential to involve the consumption of food and drink (given the pub setting in which the play’s characters engage in eating and drinking) – an important factor, in order to bring on board another Live Cinema Network partner – Edible Cinema. This was indeed a hybrid genesis amalgamating the conference context, with a multipartnered showcase in what became a unique opportunity to evolve this as a piece of practice-based research. The challenge for this project was figured as how to reinstate the ‘live’ element into the aesthetic practices of pre-recorded Event Cinema. As a ‘relay’ screening this had the potential to fall victim to what has been described as the ‘denial of the theatrical aesthetic’ (Cochrane and Bonner 2014: 5) as a result of the audience’s surrender of their ‘rights of reception’ (Cochrane and Lawrence 2012). Here, Bernadette Cochrane and Alan Lawrence refer to the audience’s ability to make their own choices of what to focus their attention upon on stage. According to them, the audience’s own unique vantage point is removed in relay screenings as decisions are made on their behalf in terms of choice of perspective and pace of cutting. What we intended to reinstate in the viewing of Hangmen was aspects of the originary live theatrical experience in which

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Figure 15.1  The peep-through specially designed and strategically placed to ‘delay’ audience members as they left the venue, in order to capture their initial responses to the experience – author’s own.

‘for every viewer there is a different compendium of observations – a discrete visual and audiological experience’ (Cochrane and Bonner 2014: 7).

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Figure 15.2  The Anatomy Lecture Theatre at King’s College London. In the foreground, amongst

the audience, sits the character of Mahmood Mattan played by Jack Benjamin. Photograph: Richard Eaton.

The final element of the collaboration was the commissioning of Omnibus Theatre Company to design the theatrical augmentation which would be added before, during and after the screening. Initial meetings took place with various ideas for extended storylines and additional characters, and the writer and director from Omnibus were provided with McDonagh’s original script and access to the recording of the live broadcast. As Sarah Weatherall, the writer, described the challenges of approaching such a task: ‘The play is a whole world. What could I add?’7 The director Marie McCarthy commented that Hangmen was: a distinctive entity, there was no space in between the dialogue, so it was really interesting to me about how we were going to connect with it because it felt so distinctly different and separated. It was complete, it was totally complete. The other thing also is when we went to the Edible Cinema laboratory, and I was thinking, ‘How do we connect with these elements as well?’ This is already made, it’s already been decided, so we have to respond, not only to ‘Hangmen’, but we have to respond to food.8

Weatherall and McCarthy took an approach to augment the story using the expanded canvas of the physical location of King’s College London. They purposefully did not try to emulate the content, characters or settings of McDonagh’s original play in anyway – the locations would not mirror those seen on screen (which are predominantly set in

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a pub and a café) nor did they choose to recreate the characters of the play – which is the modus operandi during Secret Cinema screenings in which performers mimic, lip sync and mirror the action of the on-screen characters within the immersive setting (see Atkinson and Kennedy 2015, 2016). As one of the performers, Gavin, describes: ‘What we were doing was kind of commenting on the action of the play, and also being distinct from it.’ Weatherall reflected on how to frame this approach or ‘medium’ or ‘genre’ as ‘debate cinema’: I think in the heart of any play there is a debate in the central character. I think we were adding to it, we were adding a voice to the debate of that play, and I think most plays do have a debate in them.9

The theatre company responded to the script and the performance of Hangmen in order to develop new characters based on historical factual research. Weatherall and McCarthy started to develop the concept of the ghosts of the exonerated returning to join the audience for the screening. The historical research was undertaken by a King’s undergraduate history student, Emily Brown, who was tasked with uncovering the stories of various miscarriages of justice. They eventually settled upon three key characters who became the central element of the ‘off-screen’ performances, they were Timothy Evans, Ruth Ellis and Mahmood Mattan (see Figure 15.7), along with a newspaper seller and Magician/lecturer (Chris Yarnell), and ten student protestors. Weatherall used an illuminating metaphor through which to describe their approach to the process of devising the script for these off-screen performances: Writing a script around a whole play like that was like drawing classes at art school when we were asked to draw the negative spaces around a chair, so you draw the spaces between the chair legs and then the chair, and that’s what I felt like I was doing with the film. I didn’t want to touch the film [Hangmen] in any way that would ruin a brilliant play. I had to find those negative spaces, whilst honoring the play.10

Writing for the space and context The writer and director visited the site numerous times in the development period, and reflected on how it would be built into the narrative. The director talked about the external spaces: I was very interested in those arches and making approaches, we then spotted the DNA plaques […] we got cues from the building, we didn’t change them.11

McCarthy refers to the blue plaques which detailed the discovery of DNA – commemorating the significant role that research undertaken at King’s College

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London12 played in the process. McCarthy also reflected on the internal space, the Anatomy Lecture Theatre, which was to be the site of the screening: It always looked like a courtroom, and because of budget limitations, we played to its strength, the architecture of the entire building, so the playing space of the Anatomy theater. When you said to me, the cadavers were on that plinth and when we discovered the coffin lift, that was brilliant, because suddenly it was all about an exploration or examination, it’s an examination of bodies, and we’re talking a lot about identity, which is what this play about.13

It was at that point that Brown, the researcher, discovered the link with a King’s alumnus, Michael Sherrard QC, who was the junior barrister defending James Hanratty, in the A6 murder.14 This provided the link between the present day and the past. As the writer stated: ‘We wrote the barrister into the pre-show script, arriving at King’s to talk about his experiences to patrons, as he might have conceivably done in 1965.’15. Brown also found out that King’s students had been directly involved with protesting against hanging. She then mobilized her connections within the university drama society to draw together the ten-strong company who would play the parts of the student protestors and an even bigger part in marshalling the audience through the spaces. Much of this research became the basis of the copy for a fictional in-world newspaper The Evening Standard, dated on the eve of the Common’s vote [29 October 1965] (see Figure 15.3). The approach taken was always about maintaining the highest level of historical verisimilitude possible, within a limited budget, but as the writer explained, there needed to be some attuning: The real Evening Standard made no mention of the abolition of hanging at all on the day, so we used sources from the Daily Mirror and Mail. What was on the front page of the Standard, however, was the first appearance of the Moors Murderers in court and the haunting photo of Lesley-Ann Downey’s father being held back from attacking Brady and Hindley.16

The newspaper also served as the event programme as the rear pages were used to acknowledge the contributors, credit lists and funders and to provide detailed context of the event.

Sensory elements Edible Cinema17 along with Bombay Sapphire as sponsors18 designed the menu to accompany the screening which consisted of eight canapés of food and drink which would be consumed at specific timed moments during the screening as prompted by the ringing of a bell. Themed welcome drinks were also served on arrival (Figure 15.4).

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Figure 15.3  The front page of the four-page newspaper that was distributed to the audience

members by the seller and the student protestors as part of the performance, to signal the abolition of hanging, 29 October 1965 and as a diegetic mechanism which took the audience members to their temporal point of departure into the story time of the play. Text by Sarah Weatherall, design by Stephanie Prior.

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Figure 15.5 shows the menu which was provided with each tray. The eight different elements were carefully designed to match a particular moment of dialogue in the narrative, which ranged from the obvious to the abstract. For example, the ‘proper pub’ Pork scratchings were timed to be consumed with the on-screen characters in Hangmen eating peanuts and the blancmange was designed to be simultaneously eaten as it was discussed by the characters on-screen. The second example ‘Electric Sensation’ was slightly more oblique – a small drink, to be taken and held in the mouth for ten seconds. The effect, caused by the blend of alcohol and szechuan peppers, caused a simulation of an electric shock to the tongue: a fizzing, uncomfortable sensation, and one which viscerally drew attention to the on-screen morbid discussion of alternate forms of execution. CLEGG: But how do you know, Harry? You haven’t seen any of the other methods of execution, the electric chair, or the firing squad… HARRY: Of course I bloody haven’t, I’m from Lancashire not Arkansas! ‘The electric bloody chair.’ I’m told when that goes wrong they come out sizzling like a bloody steak! No thank you! I’ll have my executions without the need for fried onions if it’s all the same to you. Yank claptrap!

(McDonagh 2016) These visce engagements continue in dish three – with Neck – which references a ‘neck and neck’ pun in the dialogue. One audience respondent stated: ‘I think it was certainly more provocative than it was meant to be entertaining.’ These particular synaesthetic engagements aimed to inculcate the audience members into moments of sensory transgression such as minor electric shocks or eating neck meat. There is a recurring motif of cannibalism in Edible Cinema design as noted by Wocke (this volume), and Hangmen is particularly suited to the rendering of these macabre moments, given its dark comedic overtones. This also manifest in the ‘Rice Krispies’ dish, which is timed to be consumed when the Hangmen character Mooney implies that he has left Shirley locked in a garage with her head in a noose balanced on a box of cereal, again designed to implicate the audience in the sinister on-screen act. However, this had rather a different response in the room; since the on-stage moment also had the sound effect of heavy rainfall, which was augmented by the sound of popping candy emitting from the 150 audience members in the room. An unexpected aural landscape was created which enveloped the room and the audience invoking a ‘collective awareness function’ (Hanich 2014: para 2). Julian Hanich here refers to the moment of laughter in cinema, but in this instance the reactive collective response, brought the audience together in a shared moment of pleasure and excitement. There was lots of chattering and giggling and shared glances. Many respondents also commented on this when recounting their most memorable moment, one respondent stated – ‘the film and “the rain” – popping candy and saké – excellent!’ and another cited the ‘Snap crackle and pop drink’ as the most memorable part of the experience.

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Figure 15.4  The Edible Cinema trays, complete with menus

Many attendees commented on the opaque nature of the choice and timing of the food. Many of these comments referred to the distraction it caused to the on-screen action. There was certainly inadequate time for rumination, given the density of the dialogue in the play in contrast to the more frequent expanded cinematic moments of traditional narrative cinema that provide space for contemplation, where food

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Figure 15.5  The menu which was provided with each Edible Cinema tray; the eight different elements were carefully designed to match a particular moment of dialogue in the narrative, ranging from the obvious to the abstract. Menu Design by Edible Cinema.

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can relate to image, sound and other cinematic elements. In Hangmen Rehanged, the tastings were all moments that connected explicitly to dialogue. But as one audience member commented: I was slightly disappointed as I would have liked for there to be pots of food/drink during the most shocking moments of the film rather than random moments during the characters’ conversations.

The carefully designed menu meant that these moments were far from random, but carefully timed, thought through and tested – but based on this particular audience members response they became seemingly buried, lost and misunderstood. The process of Hangmen Rehanged had the effect of transforming parts of the historical King’s College London campus into an immersive theatrical spectacle. In this chapter, I am drawing on Gareth White’s useful definition of ‘Immersive theatre’ which he argues ‘has become a widely adopted term to designate a trend for performances which use installations and expansive environments, which have mobile audiences, and which invite audience participation’ (2012: 221). Adam Alston accounts for the particular qualities of such performative environments by stating: ‘Immersive theatre is … broadly premised on the production of experiences … that surrounds audiences within an aesthetic space in which they are frequently, but not always, free to move and/or participate’ (2013: 128, emphasis added). The idea of the creation of an ‘aesthetic space’ is key to articulating the audience experience of Hangmen Rehanged. This was not to be immersive theatre at the level of Punchdrunk with: ‘high production levels [and] an increased degree of audience freedom’ (Wilson 2016), nor was this event intended to emulate the expanded cinematic experiences of Secret Cinema. Rather the specific augmentations centred around the screening of a conventional stage play.

Performance methodology In trying to articulate our methodology of the immersive performance design and the subsequent aesthetics of Hangmen Rehanged, I build on Wilkie’s definition: ‘Site-sympathetic (an existing performance text physicalised in a selected site)’; as opposed to ‘site-generic (performance generated for a series of like sites)’; or ‘site-specific (performance specifically generated from/for one selected site)’. (In Pearson 2010: 8)

In its response to the physical environment and the richness of the historical context of the site, the approach to Hangmen Rehanged was clearly site specific. But this category doesn’t explicitly account for the rich response that the theatre company elicited;

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rather, this was a site-responsive performance, which attempted to unify the physical location with the screen-based text of Hangmen through elements of immersive theatre, hence the term I have chosen is ‘screen-responsive theatre’. Thus, I propose that the approach developed in the production of Hangmen Rehanged was both site and screen responsive. Moreover, the performative elements were key to cohering and suturing the links between the site and the play. This is in contradistinction to Secret Cinema where locations are dressed with extensive scenographic detail – in this sense, any warehouse/expansive space would suit (see Kennedy, this volume), which is then rendered into a fully simulated replica of an imagined film set. Backyard Cinema’s augmentations take a site-sympathetic approach – particularly in their screening of Baz Lurhman’s Romeo+Juliet (London, July 2016) in an evocatively decorated and repurposed St Mary’s church in Marylebone, London. But this could take place in any church – this is an augmentation without any attempt at simulation related to the film set or film scenography. In the case of Hangmen Rehanged, the specific space was being directly responded to in a tight ‘spatio-textual’ relation such as described by LesleyAnn Dickson (this volume). The creative, financial and temporal constraints meant that no set dressing could be used aside from the performer’s costumes and props. The fabric of the building, the live performances and the audience’s affective responses constructed and animated the space. Much of the audience feedback that was gathered post-event was regarding the improvement of the experience related to the physical and environmental conditions of the lecture theatre. Audience feedback tended to reflect on the negative aspects of the space whilst failing to register the affordances of the environment. One respondent commented that they would have preferred ‘less uncomfortable seats’ and for it to be ‘less hot’; another commented that they would have liked ‘easier access to toilets’; and another said that there could have been ‘better explanation of what to expect before hand, different venue.’ As I will go onto expound, the most appreciated element for the writer, director and performers was the location, which appeared to be, on the basis of these comments, at least in the case of the screening venue, the least appreciated by the audience. Despite lacking what Josephine Machon describes as one of the characteristics of immersive theatre performance – the quality of ‘in-its-own-world-ness’ (2013: 57) – which is a quality created by and through detailed set dressing and expansive scenography – the aesthetic space of Hangmen Rehanged was not physical, but imagined and affective. The production established a simulated historical verisimilitude in the context of a multi-functioning publicly accessible building populated by staff, students and members of the public. As White contends: ‘We experience it as an atmosphere, and perceive it according to our mood, as much as we understand it in response to a performer’s explicit activity’ (2013: 168). Geraldine Harris has proposed that techniques of extensive detailing of an immersive performance environment suggests ‘a lack of trust in the spectator’s ability to become imaginatively immersed in the world depicted’ (2017). One of the student performers commented on the textural quality of the performative augmentation in Hangmen Rehanged as ‘quite like visceral because of the things they were giving you, the tastes and then the sounds and the

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silence when you were going up in the lift. You felt quite a lot of like the texture of the evening.’ There was also no explicit ‘contract for participation’ which is characteristic of immersive theatre (Machon, this volume). Hangmen Rehanged audience members were not expected to dress up, to perform or participate beyond their subjectivity as themselves as audience members. No Secret Cinema style preparatory email communiques were issued prior to the event. It was my role as a familiar figure – the conference organizer to initiate this ‘switch’ as I stepped into an alternative version of myself to introduce the character of Michael Sherrard to the audience, gradually marshalling audience members with me back into 1965, to prepare them for the abrupt disruption into a conventional conference reception area as student protestors armed with anti-hanging placards noisily spilled into the space. As producers, we engaged in a process of crowd control, and performance had to be designed to guide the audience through the space. This involved moving 150 audience members through a busy public building and up six floors to the screening site.

Performing and moving through time and space The characters guided the audience through time and space, not just through the physical spaces, but through temporal moments, the different temporal registers shifted as audience members moved from space to space. See Figure 15.6, which pictures these different locations: in the Alumni Room, the year is 1952; in the main café area, audience members are transported from 2016 to 1965, the year in which they remain throughout the building until returning to 2016 in the screening space of the Anatomy Lecture Theatre. The production was stretched to capacity by having no single entry point for audiences. The writer explains the creative complexity behind the marshalling of audience members through the different spaces: ‘Moving an audience through a space, requires a narrative gear-change with a “logic” accompanied by a reasonable request to audiences to move on.’19 This was sometimes a challenge since it became the logistics dominating the creative process: ‘This is all about having to write and react to events that sort of justified rather than creative.20 The director referred to this approach as a ‘solution based process’21 – an approach which was inherently responsive and reactive to the constraints that were imposed. Some of the audience members reflected upon being on the receiving end of this ‘directive’ performance and the marshalling of movement through the space – ‘the audience so readily obeyed instructions: it was fascinating to see so many of us being herded about by random actors’. A moment which resonated with a number of audience members was ‘the little cards handed out by the steward/actors that said “follow me” – very effective and visually interesting to see people suddenly converge and follow them’.

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The key challenges were logistical, with performances staged across multiple locations, in the café area, corridors and stairwells, outside, lifts and in the theatre space itself (Figure 15.6). The role of the extensive production team on the night of the performance was to effectively move the characters from space to space without revealing the ‘backstage’ elements (which were blended with on-stage, since this was a public building with no ‘private’ egress). Atkinson and Kennedy (2016) had previously critiqued the seeming privileging of design and space of movement, through careful control but here found themselves in this very same subjectivity of crowd manipulation and control.

Figure 15.6  This sequence of images pictures the various different physical and temporal performative sites of Hangmen Rehanged. Photographs: Richard Eaton.

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The performances The premise of the main performative action was to explore the overarching theme of miscarriages of justice through the characters of Ellis, Evans and Mattan. Timothy Evans was wrongly accused of murdering his wife and daughter whilst living at 10 Rillington Place. He was convicted and hanged in 1950 (John Christie later confessed to the murders). Mahmood Mattan was wrongly convicted for the murder of Lily Volpert on 6 March 1952, and Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in the UK in 1955, following the murder of her lover. These ‘ghosts from the gallows’, who all originate from the same historical homology as those in the Hangmen play, appear in order to attend the screening to respond to the character of Hangman Harry Wade22 before returning back to the dead. The writer explains the approach to developing the character’s dialogue: Evans’ was a known liar and his family called his lies ‘storyfying’ so we used a famous Welsh myth for his monologue; Ruth Ellis’s speech was inspired by her immaculate appearance in the dock and her letters written from her condemned cell; and Mahmood Mattan's speech was a mix of verbatim, police evidence and family memories.23

The director talks about the idea behind the pre-screening prolonged approach scene, in which the audience are introduced to the three main characters. As the audience are reading their newspapers, having engagements with the student protestors and the newspaper seller, the three ‘ghosts’ slowly approach from three different directions to enter the King’s building. The tolling of a bell plays out loudly from a concealed speaker, as the director describes: we had very little time to build relationship between the audience and those characters as well, so if they were given time to look at them and make their own decisions from a distance […] I love this idea of long shots in filmmaking […] and where theater and film, kind of collide and partner.24

This particular aspect of the performance enabled audience agency in their preferencing of view point through a visually and affectively arresting sequence. One of the characters is the instantly recognizable figure of Ruth Ellis in striking blonde wig and red lipstick. It is a highly cinematic moment replete with different visual focal planes of site and depth of field, to the left, the arches of King's College London and in the background the river Thames. The sequence afforded a range of cinematic perspectives: close-up, mid-shots, wides and cutaways, audience reactions, to observe both performers reactions and other audience reactions some of whom were bystanders sitting on nearby benches and those looking out through various windows at Somerset House. Audience members could pan, zoom and cut. This optionality is taken away in event cinema, but the audience members in this case were given choice and agency. In these moments the ‘denial of the theatrical aesthetic’ (Cochrane and Bonner 2014: 5)

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Figure 15.7  Timothy Evans, Ruth Ellis and Mahmood Mattan played by Gavin Duff, Madeleine Hyland and Jack Benjamin. Photo: Juliet Clark.

was replaced with the possibility of individually cinematically rendering a theatrical performance. The audience were taken back in time in the external settings, but then rejoined the present-day moment as they were guided by the student protestors who wore cards around their necks, with written instructions to follow them as silent interlocutors into the NT Live screening of Hangmen. The audience entered the lecture theatre and were addressed by Ben Asher, a fictional lecturer who welcomed them to the NT Live Screening. The three characters of Timothy Evans, Ruth Ellis and Mahmood Mattan came from another ‘world’ as spectres from the past and temporally inhabited and haunted the space. Expectations on the audience for a reactive and involved form of participation were tempered; instead, a cognitive participation was engendered through their positioning as onlookers and observers. Conversely, it was the three fictional characters of Evans, Ellis and Mattan who joined the audience members in their spectatorial subjectivity, as fellow audience members of the screening, as opposed to the audience members being expected to ‘meet’ the performers in an alternative or imagined space beyond the immediate physical surroundings of the lecture theatre. Audience members were not implicated in the fictional world beyond their status as embodied viewing subjects. Our participants were merely asked to reinhabit a familiar space in an alternatively textured and reanimated milieu. There was a complexity in the dual nature of audience – there were those who had attended the conference for the full day and were witness to this ‘shift’ in the nature of the

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environment, and there were members of the public, immediately entering into the ‘aesthetic space’ as they entered the building – a ‘shifted’ or displaced reality – uncanny in its apparent normality but populated by figures raised from the dead. Both groups of people were unexpectedly required to switch their viewing and participation registers. When the characters enter the screening space, they are dispersed throughout the audience awaiting their particular ‘live intervention in the screening.’25 In the screening of Hangmen itself, each of the Hangmen Rehanged characters delivers a monologue which intimates their predicament, and they engage in a performance interacting with the character of Ben – who uses his close-up magician skills to augment their performances. In the case of Evans, Ben magics a medal from behind his ear, and he conducts a rope trick as he encircles a noose around Ruth Ellis’ neck in order to emulate her hanging. All of the characters join together in song at the conclusion of the performance in a rendition of ‘Every Little Kiss’ by Mike Berry. Within these ‘response moments’,26 a number of different performative modes of screen response manifested  which I refer to as ‘character direct-address screen response’; ‘character indirect-address screen response’, ‘synchronized screen response’ and ‘on-screen extensions/merges/transitions. Character direct-address screen response: This happened on two occasions: when Ruth Ellis directly addresses the on-screen Hangmen characters of Wade and Shirley, and when Ben Asher holds newspaper up to the screen as the character Alice picks up a newspaper on screen. Character indirect-address screen response: In the pre-screening introduction, the Hangmen Rehanged characters are all established through their initial responses: Ruth Ellis asks to see Harry Wade, Timothy Evans ‘storyfies’ in response and Mahmood Mattan asks if there’s pork in any of his Edible Cinema tray. The character of Ben introduces the screening and its premise in the spatial and temporal context of the 2016 Live Cinema Conference. The Writer reflects on the distinctiveness of writing for this type of performance compared to ‘traditional’ theatre where ‘you’re kind of writing to a big blank wall that you just talk to. Whereas with the audience being face-to-face, close to you, actually the writing has to give the space for the fact that you’re having a conversation with the audience, rather than just talking to them.’27 Synchronized screen response: This occurs in only one occasion in the case of Hangmen Rehanged where both the on-screen actors and off-screen characters take their bow at the end of the performance – this particular moment is actually pictured on the front cover of this book. This elicits a dual round of applause, that heard onscreen from the theatre and that emitted from the lecture theatre audience. Martin Barker relays a number of accounts from audience members reflecting upon moments of audience applause in the cinema screenings of live opera, which range from being welcome and acceptable in some cases, and awkward and inappropriate in others (2013:

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32, 36–37, 62, 64, 65–67). Conversely, in immersive theatre performances, performers are rarely applauded as they dissipate back into their fictional surroundings, as audience members leave the space. These performers do not break the fourth wall of the immersive space in the same way that traditional proscenium-arch performances do. This is a distinctive moment to what I would refer to as ‘simulated screen responses’ which are endemic of the Secret Cinema model and involve the copying of the action on the screen by the ‘simulated’ versions of the character in the performance space. This is not the case in this particular moment in Hangmen Rehanged, since the off-screen characters are different to the ones portrayed on the screen, they are merely mirroring their physical actions. This moment and the associated image captured a ‘play within a play’ aesthetic. On-screen extensions/merges/transitions: In the case of Hangmen Rehanged, this happened when the music segues of the theatre play were used to transition from on-screen action, to the off-screen action using the tune of Every Little Kiss. In one instance, Mahmood plays guitar as he exits the lecture theatre space at the conclusion of his dialogue as the song plays on screen. The director reflected on these moments as drawing on the conventions and traditions of filmmaking: I love the sound, it’s like a brilliant segue between the performance and what's going on the screen, and I think we used that a lot to … Almost like an editor will use it to across the slides and edit, we used it quite a lot in that sort of light, the space between the live performance and to do the threshold stuff.28

These moments are all in contrast to the Secret Cinema model previously described in which on-screen action and performance is mimicked by characters made to replicate their own screen double. In Backyard Cinema’s rendition of Romeo+Juliet – the mode of on-screen augmentation manifests in the live choir’s extension of onscreen songs. The film is paused during these moments, and this allows the audience to engage in the aesthetic enhancement and aural pleasures of the choir in and of itself.

Binding immersive performance and sensory elements In order to unify the different elements of this complex experience, the writer and director endeavoured to bind them together by engendering a performative dimension in their delivery and consumption. The pre-screening drinks of Old Ale and Babycham were distributed at the start of the screening by the student protestors weaving throughout the audience with trays. Men were given Old Ale and women received Babycham to reflect the gender stereotypes of the period – it also tied in with the latter on-screen action in which they joke about Babycham. One of the questionnaire respondents commented on this:

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A friend and I wanted to try both of the welcome drinks, but were both given the yellow ones. we asked to be given different ones, but the actors wouldn’t allow us to. we later found out that men and women were given different drinks for the experience to be more true to the time period. Interesting touch!

The sensory elements were further embedded into the performance – the Edible Cinema concept and instructions were also scripted and then verbally delivered by the fictional character of Ben at the start of the screening (in Edible Cinema events, one of the staff would normally deliver this non-diegetic instruction before the start of the screening). The performers all engaged in the consumption of the food in-character alongside the audience. These were all strategies devised to weave and cohere this element of the experience into the overall fabric of the environment and the performances.

Conclusion One of the key concerns of this practice-based experiment was to seek to establish different modes of screen and site performative interaction in an attempt to break the subjective impasse between that of audience member and participant. One of the key strategies in this endeavour was to position the Hangmen Rehanged characters as fictional audience members in the real-world space of the screening, therefore reducing the sense of a conflicting intersubjectivity within the audience. One of the performers (Duff) reflects on the relationship between the on-screen action and that which was played out in the theatre space: ‘You’re still in the same performance world […] you’re not asking the audience to suddenly deal with sort of two completely different conventions of acting, as much as working in the same way.’29 This approach appears to have been successful in terms of invoking what I would refer to as ‘residual affective impact’ – that is how, and to what extent the experience emotionally and mentally resonated with the audience members - as a means through which to gauge the effectiveness of the experience. ‘Residual affective impact’ is an intangible element of the live experience, but this was investigated through the rigorous evaluative process. One of the student performers explains the reaction of an audience member which takes the form of a kind of affective hangover: After the show I was leading these people off and this woman genuinely asked me if I was going to do something weird to her, like if I was taking her somewhere dangerous and I was like ‘no!’ But I think because the play is about, you know, someone taking off someone where you shouldn’t go.

This was also apparent in the questionnaire responses where audience members were asked to reflect on the most memorable aspects of the experience: ‘The moment when one of the theatre actors performed a fake hanging in front of the audience.’ Another stated of the same moment: ‘That was a moment that stuck in my mind, for some

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reason. It was moving, I was moved.’ One of the performers reflects on the affective aesthetic of this moment: One of the most powerful images I thought was the way that the main room was constructed. The well in the middle that’s very reminiscent of a courthouse, where the prisoner is taken down. So when she [Ruth Ellis] was killed, and carried as a corpse in there, and it didn’t matter where you sat, she just vanished from view.30

Through this project a number of different performative modes of site and screenresponsive theatre have been established and identified as a result of the fusion between cinema and theatre. Despite the presence of a screen, the ‘cinematic’ played out in other aspects of the performance. The format of the play is at odds with cinema aesthetics, and in some ways irreconcilable, where there are moments of natural contemplation, within non-dialogue scenes in which the culinary storytelling-moments of Edible Cinema would normally play out were compressed and illegible to some audience members. The play-on-screen imposed certain limitations to creativity and possibilities of augmentation as noted by the creative team and their need to find ‘negative spaces’ in order to cohere a pre-recorded play, with live performance and with the consumption of thematic food. This was challenging to design and to comprehend as an audience member. It transpired within the audience feedback that it was problematic, to be eating, rustling and being able to appreciate the food, whilst also being able to concentrate and follow the on-screen action. Edible Cinema’s work creates a response to the screen which evokes a sensation in the negative spaces within the narrative, which as indicated by audience members is normally better suited to familiar films. Comments included: “Perhaps the Edible experience would have been better with a film or play I had seen before and knew well.” “The Food elements during the screening were sometimes a distraction, meaning that plot elements were easily missed.” As I have discussed, there were many moments of happenstance and serendipity that contributed to the evolution of this ambitious experiment. But the genuine spirit of experimentation emerged from the creative partners and collaborators who all embraced this unique opportunity for innovation. From the generosity of NT Live to facilitating the screening to Weatherall and McCarthy’s risk-inclined approach, boundless creativity and illimitable resourcefulness, to the evocative, versatile and arresting performances of the actors, to the culinary acrobatics of Edible Cinema in collaboration with Blanch and Shock and the alchemy of Bombay Sapphire mixologist Sam Carter, this was a truly collaborative and interdisciplinary endeavour. This creative project provided a unique opportunity to extend and evolve new practices in the domains of immersive cinema, promenade theatre and sensory film. Furthermore, the complexity of the endeavour required the development of new analytical tools . These can be used to evolve understandings of future manifestations’ where the range and scope of performative modes identified here will undoubtedly be further developed, expanded and deepened.

Afterword In its fertile interdisciplinarity, this volume makes an important contribution to the description and understanding of an emergent and fast-moving field of creative and cultural production. The contributions gathered here provide compelling new theorizations and cross-cutting terminologies, novel conceptual frameworks and evolved research methodologies. This volume provides a novel critical vocabulary such as Atkinson’s evocative discussion of the ‘residual affective impact’ of rich, participative experiences and distinctions between augmented performances that are either ‘site responsive’ or ‘screen responsive’. There have been many advances to the specificity of our understandings of the ‘liveness’ of live cinema with contributors such as Wocke offering the precision of ‘to live’ cinema, and Jones and Machon deploying the term ‘living’ cinema. Other contributions attempt to provide some distinction to those cultural forms currently massed together under the potential unhelpful and occluding title of event cinema. In this volume, Attard, for instance, describes ‘opera cinema’. We would propose that this more precise terminological approach would work well in this field to clearly describe it as a cultural form, and we could see some value in evolving a further typology around sports cinema, e-sports cinema, theatre cinema, dance cinema and concert cinema to help differentiate and distinguish between the different forms. These refinements are a welcome contribution to a fuller understanding of the complexities of this emergent area. Over the course of the intellectual journey so far, we have come to inhabit a range of different researcher subjectivities which we describe as distinct modes: participant, pursuer, producer (Atkinson and Kennedy 2017) (Table A.1). Each of these subjectivities requires a particular level of labour on the part of the researcher. The pursuer mode is that which enables the serendipitous achievement of unique experiences by dogged pursuit of tickets via frequently overloaded online purchasing sites. It is a mode which depends upon the researchers’ ability to move swiftly to fit in an experience at relatively short notice and certainly outwith a time frame that might suit institutional or research council funding. In the participant mode, this labour often begins well in advance of the experience (particularly in relation to Secret Cinema) whereby we might be assigned tasks to complete, costumes to prepare, song lyrics to rehearse and so on. These are also resource intensive financially in comparison with other forms of research. The producer mode enables the creative exploration of the processes and potentials of these new art forms at a time when access to other producers seems hopeless – for instance, despite our invaluable network, we have found it difficult to make direct contact with some of the more successful and highprofile practitioners in the field. Since the completion of the work of this book, a number of further innovations have emerged in the field of Live Cinema. The evolution of creative arts practices has continued unchecked. One particular innovation of note was the one-off rescoring event of The

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Table A.1  Live cinema researcher subjectivities and characteristics Research subjectivity

Opportunities

Challenges

Outcomes

Pursuer

Serendipitous and unexpected access Exclusivity

Dead ends/closed doors Mistaken identity Mistrust/excessive trust

Stimulating new methodological and critical insights

Participant

Rich experiential, embodied and affective data

Cost, resources, capturing data ‘in the field’

Experience community/ Experiencing communities

Producer

New collaborations, new forms of access

Privileged access, funding, resources

Screen-responsive, siteresponsive performance

Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London on 19 September 2016. This ‘Silent Film Screening Accompanied by Live Orchestra’ was a combination of silent cinema, experimental orchestra and the theatrical and atmospheric surroundings of the starlit Globe Theatre. The score was composed by Adrian Utley (Portishead) and Will Gregory (Goldfrapp), who also performed the soundtrack on the night in an eclectic group including six electric guitars, members of the Monteverdi Choir, percussion, horns, harp and synthesizers in a mesmerizing, moving and spell-binding performance of vocals and music. This was an ecstatic, affectively dense and triumphant experience, yet it is also ephemeral; and besides the extraordinary ‘residual affective impact’, there are barely any traces of this monumental occasion through which we can further examine and appreciate its contribution to the field. It was performed for just one evening, to one fortunate group of individuals, who watched in rapt attention as this unique experience unfolded. A further very recent innovation was Lost in London LIVE (to be presented in detail in a forthcoming publication) Lost in London LIVE (2017, Dir. Woody Harrelson) – ‘a first-ofits-kind film event’ – marked a watershed moment for mainstream cinema. Shot in real time on location in London in the early hours of Friday 20 January 2017, it was simultaneously broadcast live to over 500 cinemas in America (and to one cinema in the UK). This one-hour and forty-minute feature film unified three never-before combined phenomena, it blended event cinema – the streaming of live events into cinema auditoria, including theatre, music, sport and dance – with ‘one-take’ cinema conventions along with live televisual drama broadcast (such as one-off live commemorative soap opera episodes). But in this case, the film wasn’t shot on multiple cameras in a purpose-built studio facility. Lost in London LIVE was shot in real time with one camera and no cuts, on location of the streets of London. For the first time in mainstream narrative cinema history, the time of production was collapsed into the time of exhibition and reception. Cinema audience members witnessed the moments of the film’s making, whilst simultaneously being exposed to the mechanics of its creation. The unmixed audio, unpolished dialogue, dimly lit spaces and muted (unbalanced) colour both exposed and revelled in the artifice of the film’s live construction. It afforded an authentic closeness – a sense of proximity – to the action and the actors, normally subjected to the distancing veneer imposed through intense postproduction

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manipulation. This aesthetic, coupled with the preceding ‘making of ’ behind the scenes materials and the post-film interactive and intimate Q&A, combined to afford a different type of audience engagement to a traditional film screening. The associated hashtag of this was trending – before, during and after the screening. Authored by performers, crew members, press and publics (both inside and outside of the auditoria), this flurry of social media activity captured the affective responses to the liveness, immediacy and proximity unique to this experience. As a very recent case study, it is yet to be understood whether the Lost in London LIVE format heralds a disruption to traditional exhibition and distribution practices, a new aesthetic form, a new marketing strategy or a new economic mode of production, but what we reveal through our analyses are the new ways in which live cinema formats impact upon audience motivations, expectations and pleasures. In the context of an increasingly ondemand culture, these expectations of instantaneous access always threaten to exceed the technical, aesthetic and material limitations of the form. As we indicate above, the field of creative practice continues to be an exciting, rich and burgeoning area in which we see the UK taking a leading role in influencing and shaping emergent practices. The recently funded Creative Europe Project (2017) for instance is taking the expertise of our collaborator organization – Live Cinema UK – to other European cities to support their implementation of live and experiential cinema techniques to enhance audience participation. Another one of our collaborators – Edible Cinema – received funding to take their gustatory talents to Demark1 for a screening of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Secret Cinema has recently announced further expansion in to the United States.2 Ephemeral and hybrid events, such as those examined in this volume, need a framework (and a shared promotional language) to assist the audience in understanding and appreciating what it is. Live cinema literacies are still underdeveloped for many audiences; they remain illegible and are hard to apprehend without this common understanding and shared language. It is this challenge of interpretation and translation that we capture in our use of the lyric ‘another dimension … voyeuristic intention’ in a recent paper (Atkinson and Kennedy 2017). This territory still remains largely uncharted, and there is still much ground to cover before the field becomes fully visible and apprehendable to a wider academic community, let alone a more general public. We therefore call to all researchers to take up the continued mapping and critical study of this ever-evolving field and its ecosystems of production and participation. Sarah Atkinson and Helen W. Kennedy 23 May 2017

Contributors Sarah Atkinson is Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures at King’s College London. Sarah has been publishing, researching and teaching in the areas of Digital Storytelling and Digital Audience Cultures for 15 years. The main body of her work is focused upon the nature of emergent narratives, and new modes of audience access and engagement. Along with Helen W. Kennedy, Sarah jointly undertook the first piece of national industry research into the Live Cinema sector with Live Cinema UK, funded by Arts Council England Grants, and she is currently collaborating on a Creative Europe-funded project: Live Cinema in the EU. Joseph Attard is a PhD student at King’s College London, investigating how novice audiences engage with opera via digital simulcasts to cinemas (‘opera cinema’). This research is jointly supervised by King’s College London and the Royal Opera House, with whom he has organized the first academic symposium on the specific topic of opera cinema. More generally, his academic interests straddle media theory and the social sciences. He is particularly interested in exploring subjective audience experience to interrogate the intersections of media technologies, exhibition spaces, audience formations and political economy. Philip Brophy is a filmmaker, composer, musician and writer with general and specialist interest in audiovision across media. www.philipbrophy.com Lavinia Brydon is Lecturer in Film at the University of Kent, UK. Her research interests centre on space and place in film culture, extending from questions of representation to current debates on pop-up cinema, location filming and screen media tourism. She has published on these topics in several journals, including SERIES: International Journal of TV Serial Narratives and Journal of British Cinema and Television. Virginia Crisp is Lecturer in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London. She is the author of Film Distribution in the Digital Age: Pirates and Professionals (Palgrave, 2015) and co-editor of Besides the Screen: Moving Images through Distribution, Promotion and Curation (Palgrave, 2015). She is the co-founder, with Gabriel Menotti Gonring (UFES, Brazil), of the Besides the Screen Network (www. besidesthescreen.com). She has published widely on film distribution, media piracy and film cultures.

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Lesley-Ann Dickson is Lecturer in Film and Media in the division of Media, Communication and Performing Arts at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh and Director of the Edinburgh International Film Audiences Conference. Her main area of research is film exhibition (film festivals in particular) and film/media audiences, and she has conducted longitudinal research on Glasgow Film Festival. She is an active member of the film festival studies research network and has recently published in Film Festivals and Anthropology (2017). Ella Harris is a PhD student in Cultural Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her work uses interactive documentary to explore imaginaries of space-time in London’s pop-up culture. She has published on pop-up culture and its politics (Geography Compass 2015), pop-up cinema (Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 2016) and interactive documentary (Area, 2016). She also has forthcoming publications on the craft economy (The Craft Economy, forthcoming) and the cultural geographies of precarity (Cultural Geographies, forthcoming). Olu Jenzen is Principal Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Brighton, UK. Her research focuses on the politics of aesthetic form and popular culture. She has also published on popular culture and youth activism and the aesthetics of protest on social media. She is the principal investigator on the AHRC project ‘The People’s Pier’. Matthew Jones is Associate Professor in Film Studies at De Montfort University. He is a specialist on mid-twentieth-century cinema audiences and memories of cinemagoing. He is the author of Science Fiction Cinema and 1950s Britain: Recontextualising Cultural Anxiety (Bloomsbury, 2017) and was awarded a British Academy Rising Stars Engagement Awards grant for his workshop series, ‘Cinema, Memory and the Community’. Drawing on almost 1,000 people’s recollections of attending British cinemas, collected through an AHRC project at UCL, he produced ‘A Night at the Cinema in the 1960s’, an immersive experience that was performed in Leicester and London in 2016. Helen W. Kennedy is Head of Media at the University of Brighton. Her research interests are feminist games culture, innovations in experience design and the cultural evaluation of live experiences. She is lead researcher on REFIG – an international project that seeks to transform the games industry, games education and games culture funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Publishing widely in game studies and the emergent field of live cinema, her work focuses on the intersections between performance, play and narrative in the design and experience of live cinema. Barbara Klinger is Provost Professor Emerita in The Media School at Indiana University. Along with numerous articles, she has published Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Indiana University Press, 1994) and Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (University of California Press, 2006). She is

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currently working on books on Casablanca's history of exhibition and on transnational crime TV. Linda Levitt teaches communication and media studies at Stephen F. Austin State University. Her primary research sits at the intersection of memory studies and media, considering media’s role in shaping understandings of the past. She has published essays in Participations, Radical History Review and Velvet Light Trap, along with book chapters in edited academic collections. Dr. Levitt’s book, Hollywood Forever: Culture, Celebrity, and the Cemetery, is forthcoming from Routledge. Josephine Machon is Associate Professor in Contemporary Performance at Middlesex University, London. She is the author of Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (2013), (Syn)aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance (2009, 2011), and has published widely on experiential and immersive performance. Josephine is Joint Editor for The Palgrave Macmillan Series in Performance & Technology. Her broad research interests address the audience in immersive theatres and the creative intersections of theory and practice in experiential performance. Richard McCulloch is Lecturer in Film and Cultural Studies at the Centre for Participatory Culture, University of Huddersfield. His research interests lie in media audiences and reception studies, and he has published widely on topics such as fandom, branding and cult cinema. He is currently writing a monograph on the Pixar Animation Studios brand, and he is co-editor of The Scandinavian Invasion (Peter Lang, forthcoming) as well as the two-volume anthology Disney’s Star Wars (University of Iowa Press, forthcoming). Richard is co-director of The World Star Wars Project, and he sits on the board of the Fan Studies Network. Emma Pett is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of East Anglia. She specializes in audience and reception studies and has published in The New Review of Film and Television Studies, Cultural Trends, Transnational Cinemas and The Journal of British Cinema and Television. María Antonia Vélez-Serna is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Stirling, working on non-theatrical exhibition and temporary cinema spaces. She is the co-editor and co-author of the Early Cinema in Scotland website and forthcoming book. Rosana Vivar is a researcher on the project ‘Transmedial Narratives: New ways of audiovisual fiction, informative communication and performance at the digital era’, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Industry, and the University of Granada. Her work focuses on film festival audiences in Spain, involving the study of the ludic aspects of these film events and the use of new media by festivalgoers. Rosana holds a PhD from the University of Granada, and her work has appeared in Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies.

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Brendon Wocke held a fellowship in the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate: Cultural Studies in Literary Interzones programme, and pursed his doctorate at the University of Perpignan and University of Tuebingen (co-tutelle), having spent a research semester at the University of Paris X Nanterre. He is currently preparing his thesis for publication and lectures in the south of France.

Films, Broadcasts, Performances and Experiences 28 Days Later (2002) Director Danny Boyle. Film. Alice in Wonderland (1951) Director Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske. Film. Alice in Wonderland (2010) Director Tim Burton. Film. An American Werewolf in London (1981) Director John Landis. Film. Arbitrage (2012) Director Nicholas Jarecki. Film. Back to the Future (1985) Director Robert Zemeckis. Film. Banaz: A Love Story (2012) Director Deeyah Khan, Darin Prindle. Film. Barging Through London (1924) Director Harry Parkinson. Film. Barging Through London (Again) (2011) Director Nina Pope, Karen Guthrie. Film Beetlejuice (1988) Director Tim Burton. Film. Bel Ami (2012) Director Declan Donnellan, Nick Ormerod. Film. Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) Director Walter Ruttmann. Film. Björk Digital, Somerset House, London 2016. Exhibition including Virtual Reality Installations. Blade Runner (1982) Director Ridley Scott. Film. Brief Encounter (1945) Director David Lean. Film. Calamity Jane (1953) Director David Butler. Film. Casablanca (1942) Director Michael Curtiz. Film. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) Director Tim Burton. Film. Chinese Takeaway (2011) Director Sebastián Borensztein. Film. Chocolat (2000) Director Robert Iscove. Film. City Lights (1931) Director Charles Chaplin. Film. Con Air (1997) Director Simon West. Film. Cry Baby (1990) Director John Waters. Film. Ctrl (2016) Created by Breaking Fourth. Virtual Reality Experience. Dawn of the Dead (1978). Director George A. Romero Film. Dead Calm (1989) Director Phillip Noyce. Film. Dirty Dancing (1987) Director Emile Ardolino. Film. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) Director Stanley Kubrick. Film. Edward Scissorhands (1990) Director Tim Burton. Film. Eyes Wide Shut (1999) Director Stanley Kubrick. Film. Forbidden Zone (2014) Director Katie Mitchell, Writer: Duncan Macmillan, Theatre Production. From the Sea to the Land Beyond (2012) Director Penny Woolcock. Film. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) Director Dan Houser, Navid Khonsari. Video Game. Grease (1978) Director Randal Kleiser. Film.

Films, Broadcasts, Performances and Experiences

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Hangmen. (2015) Written by Martin McDonagh. Play. Hangmen Rehanged. Directed by Marie McCarthy, written by Sarah Weatherall, concept and commission by Sarah Atkinson and Helen W. Kennedy, performances by Jack Benjamin, Gavin Duff, Madeleine Hyland and Chris Yarnell, NT Live, Omnibus, Edible Cinema and King’s College London, UK, 2016. Inherent Vice (2014) Director Paul Thomas Anderson. Film. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) Director Frank Capra. Film. Jack Johnson (1970) Director Jim Jacobs. Film. Jaws (1975) Director Steven Spielberg. Film. Julie and Julia (2009) Director Nora Ephron. Film. Kiss (1963) Director Andy Warhol. Film. Kiss the Water (2013) Director Eric Steel. Film. Labyrinth (1986) Director Jim Henson. Film. La Grande Bouffe (1973) Director Marco Ferreri. Film. La Haine (1995) Director Mathieu Kassovitz. Film. La La Land (2016) Director Damien Chazelle. Film. Le Révélateur (1968) Director Philippe Garrel. Film. Life in a Day (2011) Director Loressa Clisby, Kevin Macdonald et. al. Film. Man with a Movie Camera (1929) Director Dziga Vertov. Film. Moonrise Kingdom (2014) Director Wes Anderson. Film. Mulholland Drive (2001) Director David Lynch. Film. Night of the Living Dead (1968) Director George A. Romero. Film. Nobody Else But You (2011) Director Gérald Hustache-Mathieu. Film. One Million Years B.C. (1966) Director Don Chaffey. Film. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) Director Guillermo del Toro. Film. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) Director Tom Tykwer. Film. Peter Pan (1953) Director Clyde Geronimi et al. Film. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) Director Gore Verbinski. Film. Polyester (1981) Director John Waters. Film. Poltergeist (1982) Director Tobe Hooper. Film. Pride (2014) Director Matthew Warchus. Film. Prometheus (2012) Director Ridley Scott. Film. Psycho (1960) Director Alfred Hitchcock. Film. Purple Rain (1984) Director Albert Magnoli. Film. Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) Director Woody Allen. Film. Re: A Pier (2016) Director Archie Lauchlan. Film. Rebel Without a Cause (1955) Director Nicholas Ray. Film. Repeat to Flourish (2015) Director Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie with Alice Powell. Film. ROAD (2016) Director Nick Driftwood and Donna Close. Music by Kevin Matthews. Immersive Screen Installation. Romeo+Juliet (1996) Director Baz Luhrmann. Film. Romeo+Juliet Backyard Cinema screening with live choir, London, July 2016. Live event. Run Lola Run (1998) Director Tom Tykwer. Film. Scent of Mystery (1960) Director Jack Cardiff. Film.

274

Films, Broadcasts, Performances and Experiences

She’s All That (1999) Director Robert Iscove. Film. SimCity 2000 (1993) Director Will Wright. Video Game. Sixteen Candles (1984) Director John Hughes. Film. Some Like It Hot (1959) Director Billy Wilder. Film. Spirited Away (2001) Director Hayao Miyazaki. Film. Spring Breakers (2012) Director Harmony Korine. Film. Stoker (2013) Director Chan-wook Park. Film. Sunset Boulevard (1950) Director Billy Wilder. Film. Suspiria (1977) Director Dario Argento. Film. Synecdoche, New York (2009) Director Charlie Kaufmann. Film. ‘The A6 Murder’ [Documentary] Thursday, 16 May 2002, BBC 2. The Battle of Algiers (1996) Director Gillo Pontecorvo. Film. The Big Sleep (1946) Director Howard Hawks. Film. The Day of the Locust (1939) Director John Schlesinger. Film. The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable (2013–2014) [Performance] Concept, CoArtistic Director, Designer, Felix Barrett. Co-Artistic Director and Choreographer, Maxine Doyle. Associate Design Artists, Livi Vaughan and Beatrice Minns. Sound Design, Stephen Dobbie. Created by Punchdrunk. Presented by Punchdrunk and the National Theatre. Paddington, London, UK. The Fifth Season (2012) Director Peter Brosens, Jessica Woodworth. Film. The Lunchbox (2013) Director Ritesh Batra. Film. The Maggie (1954) Director Alexander Mackendrick. Film. The Outsiders (1983) Director Francis Ford Coppola. Film. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) Director Carl Theodor Dreyer. Film. The Princess Bride (1987) Director Rob Reiner. Film. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) Director Jim Sharman. Film. The Room (2003) Director Tommy Wiseau. Film. The Secret Life of Pets (2016) Director Chris Renaud, Yarrow Cheney. Film. The Sound of Music (1965) Director Robert Wise. Film. The Walking Dead (2010–) Created by Frank Darabont. TV Series. The Warriors (1979) Director Walter Hill. Film. THX1138 (1971) Director George Lucas. Film. THX1138 Asian Dub Foundation rescore. Brighton Dome, May 2016. Live Performance. Tis Clevedon Pier (1990) Director Susannah Shaw. Broadcast. Touch of Evil (1958) Director Orson Welles. Film. Trainspotting (1994) Director Danny Boyle. Film. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) Director David Lynch. Film. Under the Skin (2013) Director Jonathan Glazer. Film. Wayne’s World (1992) Director Penelope Spheeris. Film. When Harry Met Sally (1989) Director Rob Reiner. Film. Withnail and I (1987) Director Bruce Robinson. Film. Wonder.land (2016) VR, Produced by The National Theatre and Play Nicely. Creative Director: Lysander Ashton. Virtual Reality Installation. World War Z (2013) Director Mark Foster. Film. Wozzeck (1947) Director Georg C. Klaren. Film.

Notes Introduction 1 2 3

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Lyrics by Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce, from the film Moulin Rouge, Dir: Baz Luhrmann, 2001. Lyrics: Richard O’Brien, from the stage musical The Rocky Horror Show, 1973; and the film The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Dir: Jim Sharman, 1975. ‘In another dimension, With voyeuristic intention’ Researching participatory cinema audiences in the 21st century, Keynote talk by Sarah Atkinson & Helen W. Kennedy, The Edinburgh International Film Audience Conference, 30 March 2017, Filmhouse, Edinburgh and ‘Spectacular, Spectacular, No words in the vernacular, Can describe this great event …’: Attention and Experience in Live Cinema Cultures, A Centre for Film and Media Research seminar with Sarah Atkinson and Helen Kennedy, University of Kent, 15 February 2017. 14 February 2017. At the time of writing, over 50,000 people had attended, and it has been in the top ten of the UK box office charts since its week of release amongst titles such as. In the second month of the show, Baz Lurhmann attended and was pictured with actors and audience; he tweeted: ‘Moulin Rouge … one crazy majestic night – part theatre, part cinema, part dance rave, all spectacular! Congrats to you all’ (11 March 2017). http://livecinema.org.uk/about/ http://film-live.org http://www.indiewire.com/2016/07/francis-ford-coppola-completes-distant-vision -live-cinema-workshop-at-ucla-1201709229/ Bill Desowitz, 23 July 2016, IndieWire, ‘Francis Ford Coppola Completes “Distant Vision” Live Cinema Workshop at UCLA’. http://www.livecinemanetwork.org Noble, Lucy. ‘Live Cinema Sound: Soundtracks, Singing & Scoring’ Panel. Live Cinema Conference, 27 May 2016, King’s College London, UK. BFI Weekend Box Office Report 14–16 April 2017. http://www.bfi.org.uk/education -research/film-industry-statistics-research/weekend-box-office-figures Cath Clarke, ‘Summer Love-In: London’s Favourite Pop-Up Cinema Hits Town This Weekend with a “Grease” Extravaganza’, Time Out, 6 September 2012. At the REMIX conference, Google HQ, London, 19 January 2017. 27 October 2015 at the Brighton Dome Concert Hall, UK. The master class associated with this strand of activity was devised and developed as part of my Tracking Intellectual Property Across the Creative Technologies project, AHRC project reference AH/M010481/1. Secret Cinema, for example, does not supply cast and crew lists at their events, nor on their website. The only one we have managed to find related to their 28 Days Later production, on the Creative Review website where only the key above-the-line personnel (but not the performers) were listed: https://www.creativereview.co.uk/ secret-cinema-turns-its-hand-to-horror-with-28-days-later/ (accessed 22 May 2017). They were sourced by Michael Pierce, who was responsible for the films’ revival.

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Section 1: Introduction 1

16 February 2011, http://www.findingberlin.com/hit-run-kino/ (accessed 22 May 2017).

Chapter 2 1

2 3

4 5 6

Although sometimes discussed in the same bracket as event cinema, I am avoiding this term as it can also refer to the streaming of live events, such as theatre and opera. The live streaming of arts events to cinemas is not the subject of this chapter – for a discussion of this, see Barker (2012). ‘Mmmmmm … the delicious Lunchbox menu for September 10th is listed here’, https:// penrynpicturehouse.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/mmmmmm-the-delicious-lunchbox -menu-for-thursday-september-10th-is-listed-here/ (accessed 10 August 2016). For example, the screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Abertoir horror festival, Aberystwyth (2012), involved audience members being provided with crib sheets and props, and resulted in a very high level of participation: https://www .aberystwythartscentre.co.uk/music/abertoir-rocky-horror-picture-show (accessed 19 July 2017). Cinema for All is the trading name for the British Federation of Film Societies, formed in 1946. More information about the organization can be found at http:// cinemaforall.org.uk/ (accessed 19 July 2017). See the website at http://picniccinema.co.uk/ (accessed 19 July 2017) for further details of their marketing strategies. ‘First ever picnic and cabaret film screenings at Ely Cinema are both sell-outs’, Ely News, 22 August 2016.

Chapter 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

AHRC project reference AH/M009300/1. These are University of Brighton, University of Bristol, University of Edinburgh and University of Kent. Here we mean the affordances of various kinds of digital projection, as opposed to the more specific understanding of ‘digital projection’ as a Digital Cinema Package (DCP) system. Available at www.thelunacinema.com/about/4560279330 (accessed 15 July 2017). The Luna Cinema’s 2015 and 2016 summer programmes both contained over 100 outdoor screenings. Available at The Luna Cinema Facebook event page, https://www.facebook.com/ events/1541161999520772 (accessed 5 July 2017). Available at www.thelunacinema.com/about/4560279330 (accessed 5 July 2017). See Clevedon Pier and Heritage Trust Business Plan 2016–21. Available at: https:// www.ethex.org.uk/medialibrary/2015/08/13/90c36657/Business%20Plan%20-%20 Final%20-%20Launch%2015.pdf (accessed 27 October 2016).

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Chapter 4 1 2

All quotations from Anna relate to an interview conducted in December 2015. Available online at: https://soundcloud.com/yannseznec/neither-here-nor-therestereo-mix/s-ve4VB (accessed 19 July 2017).

Chapter 5 1

This relates to the standard cinema screening. It is acknowledged that the types of eventized cinema discussed throughout this volume aim to create a distinct and arguably more experiential cinematic experience than the conventional cinema screening. 2 In Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Philip Auslander charts the historical development of the concept of liveness. He defines ‘classic’ liveness as the ‘Physical co-presence of performers and audience; production and reception; experience in the moment’. See Auslander (2008). 3 Daniel Dayan coined the term the ‘written festival’ to describe the circling narratives of the festival which are found in press and marketing communications. See Dayan (2000). 4 Although studies of film festivals emerged in the mid-1990s (see Nichols 1994), the subject gained real momentum in the late 2000s with the introduction of the Film Festival Yearbook Series (Iordanova et al. 2009–2014), the advent of the Film Festival Research Network (FFNR, 2008) and the publication of various monographs dedicated to the subject (de Valck 2007; Fischer 2013; Lloyd 2011; Wong 2011). For FFNR, see: http://www.filmfestivalresearch.org/ 5 The FFNR coordinates panels/workshops at most major cinema/media conferences: Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS), Screen Studies Conference (SSC) and European Communication Research and Education Association. Film Festival Studies now has two international research groups which meet annually: the Film and Media Festivals Scholarly Interest Group (SCMS) and the Film Festival Research Work Group (NECS). 6 See Douglas Gomery (1992: 43). 7 This research emerges from my doctoral research at the University of Glasgow. The PhD was an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project entitled ‘Film Festival and Cinema Audiences: An Investigation of Glasgow Film Festival Audiences’ and their relationship with Glasgow Film Theatre.’ The project was supported by the AHRC’s Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) scheme. A key distinction of these collaborative PhDs is the contractual partnering of a non-academic institution (organization, company) with a higher education institution (HEI). For the CDA researcher, access is the key advantage of this kind of doctorate as they ‘[…] provide access to resources and materials, knowledge and expertise that may not otherwise have been available’ (AHRC 2013). 8 This question of ‘access’ was raised at a workshop I attended at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in Chicago in 2013. The workshop was entitled ‘Behind the Velvet Rope: Insider/Outsider Dilemmas for Film Festival Researchers’. Over the course of

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Notes this research I have spoken informally with many festival practitioners (programmers, directors, marketers, founders) and, at times, there has been a sentiment that festival scholarship does not always reflect actual festival practices. In her research on melodrama spectatorship, Barbara Klinger notes a revived importance placed on film reviews as objects of study, arguing that reviews are ‘type[s] of social discourse, which, like film advertisements, can aid the researcher in ascertaining the material conditions informing the relationships between films and spectators at given moments’ (1994: 69). Seven focus groups with GFF audiences took place in 2012. For a more extensive look at audience research conducted as part of this wider project, see Dickson (2014) and Dickson (2015). Glasgow Film is an operating name of Glasgow Film Theatre (GFT). GFT is company limited by guarantee, registered in Scotland No. SC097369 with its registered office at 12 Rose Street, Glasgow, G3 6RB. It is suggested elsewhere that the very first known film festival took place in Monaco in 1898, see SCMS Film and Media Festivals Scholarly Interest Group homepage: http:// www.cmstudies.org/?page=groups_filmfestivals. However, Venice is mainly acknowledged as the first recurring film festival. There is very little known about the event in Monaco. The festival’s identity is inextricably linked to its historical position as a cinematic city. In 1930s Glasgow, cinemagoing was considered the social habit of the age and thought to be embedded in the patterns of everyday life for many of the city’s residents (Scullion 1990: 42–43). Indeed, in the late 1930s Glasgow was reported to have had more cinemas per head of population than anywhere else in the world outside of America (Historic Scotland 2007: 6; Scullion 1990: 42–43). This linkage is communicated via press materials, marketing and branding. The event is publically supported at local and national level. The initial funding proposal for the festival positioned the event as a way of developing and marketing Glasgow’s image as a ‘festival city’ and tourist destination. The proposal was framed by an argument that film festivals were proven to boost the image of their host cities: Thessaloniki Film Festival had ‘injected new life into the city and, above all, contributed towards giving it an image abroad’, Tampere Film Festival had ‘enliven[ed] municipal policy on image and culture’, Oberhausen Film Festival had contributed to the ‘birth of a film production centre’, Cologne Film Festival had advanced the city’s profile as a media centre; Valladoid Film Festival was a ‘benchmark for the image and attractiveness of the city and the development of quality tourism’; and Cork Film Festival had increased tourism and improved the city’s cultural image despite its long held struggle with ‘second city syndrome’ (GFF 2004: 4). The inaugural festival in 2005 was supported by Visit Scotland (Scotland’s national tourist organization), which suggests that the ‘tourism’ narrative was an effective one. Although Glasgow’s role as ECOC has been criticized for failing to resolve many of the city’s social problems (Mooney and Danson 1997; Spring 1990), Beatriz García’s longitudinal study of the event suggests that ECOC 1990 has had a lasting cultural legacy for the city (García 2005: 841). Accompanied with the slogan ‘there’s a lot Glasgowing on’, Glasgow ECOC involved 700 cultural organizations and around 3,500 events and was critical in transforming the city into a cultural space and promoting cultural tourism (Myerscough 1991). Cinezone was the brainchild of Glasgow Film Theatre CEO, Jaki MacDougall, drawn up in the early 2000s. Harbord notes that the three principle ‘types’ of cinematic space used for public film

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exhibition and consumption are the art house cinema, the multiplex and the art gallery, which very much chimes with GFF’s spatial structure at inception (Harbord 2002: 39). GFF has increased its number of venues from three in 2005 (inception year) to twenty-six venues in 2013. In part this increase is to accommodate more titles but it also enables the festival to expand its reach throughout the city, create collaborations with venue partners and include unique events. Of course, at times a certain mystery surrounds potential GFF titles, for instance if a film has not yet been ‘picked up’ by a distributor, then sales agents often hold out before committing to smaller festivals or in some cases a title enters a state of limbo when protracted negotiations between distributors and sales agents take place (Interview Allan Hunter, GFF Co-Director, April 2013). Although the most dominant mode of programming, UF films tend to be a ‘hard sell’ as they usually feature unknown cast and crew and often deal with thornier subject matter. They are discursively positioned in festival brochures and via other marketing channels as relational to other well-known content, cast or crew – sold to audiences by linking established filmmakers with new talent through patterned phrasing; ‘echoes of … reminiscent of … influenced by …’ Take for instance, the positioning of UF film The Fifth Season (2012), which was linked to contemporary and historical auteurs: ‘Earning comparisons with the cinema of Michael Haneke and Andrei Tarkovsky’ (GFF 2013: 31). Likewise, UF film Nobody Else But You (2012) was promoted to audiences through hypothetical alignment with the Coen Brothers: ‘If the Coen Brothers ever make a film in Europe, it might look like Nobody Else But You’ … (GFF 2012: 48). In the original PhD thesis this category was split into three categories: ‘Festivalised Films’, ‘Interactive Events’ and ‘Live Performance’. However, in revisiting the data it was clear that all films undergo some process of festivalization during the event, including UF and RLC films (for instance, they might have additional content: special guests, after parties, Q&A, etc.). As such, it would be problematic to suggest that only one programming mode was ‘festivalised’. Likewise, there was a great deal of crossover between these three categories. For example, the Calamity Jane Barn Dance event included a repertory film screening followed by audience participation in dance lessons with live musical performance, which meant it fit within each of the initial categories. Indeed, on further reflection and analysis, it was found that that the shared characteristic of these events was their ‘beyond the film’ offering and the fact that the film text was not privileged as the premium source of value, but one component of a multifaceted experience. As a consequence, the typology evolved from its initial conceptualization. With the exception of 2011 when the festival dedicated its retrospective to working actress Meryl Streep, the format has tended to feature a deceased star from the Golden Age of Hollywood: John Wayne (2007), Bette Davis (2008), Audrey Hepburn (2009), Cary Grant (2010), Gene Kelly (2012) and James Cagney (2013). Participants are identified by their focus group number only to preserve anonymity.

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Chapter 6 1

An interactive map of the events analysed, with more information and archived links, can be viewed here: http://bit.ly/2bGNfEZ

Chapter 7 1

2 3

4

This chapter constitutes an extension of previously published work on SSHFFF: Rosana Vivar, ‘A film bacchanal: Playfulness and audience sovereignty in San Sebastian Horror and Fantasy Film Festival.’ Participations. Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 13, no. 1 (May 2016): 234–251. Giallo (also called Spaghetti Slasher) is an Italian film subgenre that features murder mystery thrillers. It proliferated in the late 1960s and the 1970s with the films of Dario Argento. Van Extergem’s study of Brussels International Festival of Fantastic Film provides testimony of an event that features not only a similar programming vocation to SSHFFF, but also a cult audience that partakes in a series of behaviours and reception modes similar to those under analysis here. Respondent F alludes to the queue La cola de los sustitos (the spooky queue) which has become a ritual in itself as well as an enjoyable experience that followers look forward to. For residents in the Basque Country, owning the precious tickets means queueing up for forty-eight hours in front of the theatre’s entrance as whole-week passes are sold on a first come, first served basis and seats are assigned in order of purchase. Being part of the queue not only means getting the well-deserved tickets, but becoming part of the festival’s legend and, ultimately, a visible personality in the community.

Section 3: Introduction 1

This is a systematic technique used predominantly in the social sciences and psychology to capture and analyse respondent’s subjectivity.

Chapter 8 1 2 3

‘Exploring the market for Live to Digital Arts’, MTM (2015). ‘Royal opera house head rejects “democratising art”’, Financial Times, 31 March 2014, accessed 5 May 2015, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8fc034fe-b8f2-11e3-98c5 -00144feabdc0.html#ixzz2xnHrfYB2 Personal interview with Sophie Wilkinson, 17 October 2014.

Chapter 9 1

Secret Cinema is a British company that specializes in ‘immersive’ cinema events. Previous examples include inviting customers to become 1940s prisoners in a former school for a screening of The Shawshank Redemption (1994), the recreation of

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fictional 1950s town of Hill Valley for a series of Back to the Future (1985) screenings and, most recently, at the time of writing, elaborately constructed intergalactic sets from The Empire Strikes Back (1980). The word ‘secret’ in the company’s name refers to the fact that, from its beginnings in 2007 up until 2014, audiences were required to buy tickets in advance without knowing either the film that would be shown or the location of the screening. See Snetiker 2014. The first of these was accompanied by the sub-question: ‘To what extent is it similar to or different from other cinemas you have attended?’ This wording was designed to encourage audiences to reflect upon particularly interesting or noteworthy aspects of the cinema, hopefully leading them to discuss its ‘event’ screenings while also allowing for other issues to be raised. However, respondents’ repeated emphasis on the ‘distinctive’ nature of the PCC has led us to wonder whether our phrasing might have inadvertently influenced participants’ responses. As such, while this chapter explores the importance of ‘distinction’ within our findings, it is with the caveat that this was something that we specifically asked respondents to comment upon. Both authors would like to express their sincere gratitude to all the staff and management at the PCC for their assistance with this research, but especially to Gregory Lynn, Simon Thomas and Paul Vickery. Of course, we are also extremely grateful to all of our 220 respondents for agreeing to share their views with us. Without them, there would be no data to present. Within this article all survey participants have been referred to by number only (e.g. P144 or P076) so as to preserve their anonymity. All quotations taken from our survey responses have been reproduced verbatim. The only exception to this is with obvious typographical errors and spelling mistakes, which we have corrected as a courtesy to our participants. Remember that the questions being asked here were all open-ended and qualitative, designed so that audiences could tell us what they considered to be important. Our codes therefore emerged out of a process of analytic coding and hermeneutic interpretation (Kozinets 2010: 118–135). Other commonly referenced points of appeal were: the cinema’s repertory programming (29 per cent, n = 63); distinction (i.e. value defined in relation to other cinemas) (26 per cent, n = 57); the quality of films shown –in terms of both established taste distinctions (‘great movies’, ‘classics’) and personal preference (‘my favourite movies’) (24 per cent, n = 52); price and/or membership scheme (26 per cent, n = 56). All percentages have been rounded to the nearest whole number. The sharp decline of celluloid as a filmmaking format has been resisted, including a successful campaign by prominent directors such as Christopher Nolan, J. J. Abrams, Judd Apatow and Quentin Tarantino. Collectively, this resistance led to an agreement between ‘industry leaders’ and Eastman Kodak, who in 2014 announced that they would be continuing their production of celluloid film. See Hamedy 2014. Criticisms of other, less participatory events (i.e. anything other than singalongs or quote-alongs) were rare, and tended to be restricted to relatively ‘practical’ considerations, such as ‘there’s not enough time between films during double bills & marathons’ (P074).

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Chapter 10 1

A few people were singled out but it was a very small minority who were asked to produce the blood sample and other props.

Chapter 11 1 2

For further information on this project, see www.ucl.ac.uk/cinemamemories (accessed 1 August 2016). This project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Section 4: Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6

29 May 2011, at the Barbican, London 11 January 2008 at the Barbican, London with the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Jonathan Stockhammer. Music composed by Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe with orchestrations by Torsten Rasch. 5 May, 2007, rescored by The Bays at the Brighton Dome Concert Hall, UK, as part of the Brighton Festival. 19 August 2014, Union Chapel London. 18 August 2014, Union Chapel London. http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/display/ik-prize-2015-tate-sensorium 26 August–4 October, 2015.

Chapter 13 1 From The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable programme notes (2013: 1). 2 The wealth of books, articles and chapters that are now available are testament to the diverse theorizing around the forms and functions of immersive performance. Adam Alston surveys the breadth of work recently published, offering a useful guide for any reader who wishes to give attention to a range of arguments within this discourse (2016). 3 Sobchack’s ‘cinesthetic subject’ and my theory of (syn)aesthetics both draw on neuroscientific research and artistic studies of the condition of synaesthesia, a complex mode of human perception where the experience of one sense involuntarily stimulates the perception of another. A synaesthete might experience names as colours, tastes as shapes and so on (see Machon 2011: 13–24; Sobchack 2004: 67–80). The appropriation of features associated with the condition, is implicit in the playful reworking of the terms ‘cinesthetic’ and ‘(syn)aesthetics’, each aligning itself to the medium of film or live performance to which the terms are applied. 4 There are a number of publications that consider immersive performance as collusive with a wider, neoliberal ‘experience economy’ as proposed by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore (1998), for example see Jen Harvie (2013) or Alston (2016). Cinematic

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events, such as those organized by Secret Cinema, can be seen to fit this remit as can The Drowned Man’s ‘premium ticket’ or Encino Cinema experiences. However, my consideration here examines Punchdrunk’s commitment to ‘art as experience’, as opposed to art as experience economy (see Dewey 2005). 5 Immersive practice, as with any performance practice, can be delightfully whimsical or profoundly significant (or both). The Drowned Man did not result in affecting me profoundly but has lasting effects in my corporeal memory when I recall its sensual aesthetics and relate these to my interpretation of the themes embedded in the work. 6 Gareth White examines the aesthetics of this invitation in a range of performance contexts including immersive events (2013). 7 Punchdrunk has interwoven film references into each production since its inception in 2000, where the drowning sequence from Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) was used as a preparation device, played on a small TV screen in a flat to initiate the audience in the emotional resonance of an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, hinting at the constant presence of Grisha’s drowning to come (see Machon 2015: 259–260). 8 In terms of cinematic references and magnification of detail, in very early analysis of Punchdrunk’s work I referred to how the deconstructive nature of the practice reminded me of the scene in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) where Deckard inserts a photograph into digital equipment that allows him to enhance the image, to see into the corners and crevices of the room in a, seemingly, three-dimensional way (see Barrett and Machon 2007). 9 The synopses for these mirrored storylines are provided in The Drowned Man programme notes (2013). Loosely hung on the deconstructed plot of Büchner’s Woyzeck, the edited version is as follows: ‘William works a night shift with his friend Andy. He starts to experience apocalyptic visions … William takes his beloved Mary for a night out. A handsome drugstore cowboy called Dwayne catches Mary’s eye … William takes Mary far out of town and murders her in the wilderness’ vs ‘Wendy, an actress, is shooting a film with her friend Andrea. She is suffering from violent hallucinations … Wendy takes her husband Marshall to the birthday party of Dolores Grey, the studio diva. Dolores spots Marshall across the room … Wendy finds the penitent Marshal and murders him’ (24–26). 10 Here I am not referring to the infamous Punchdrunk one-on-ones (planned moments where individual performers capture an audience-participant behind a closed door, remove her mask and play out a scenario before sending her on her way) but to those moments where the performer effectively ignores the lone audience-voyeur as the sequence plays out. 11 Geraldine Harris argues that sound along with the ‘obsessive level of naturalistic detail in many parts of the set’ are indicative of ‘a lack of trust in the spectator’s ability to become imaginatively immersed in the world depicted, or perhaps in the power of that world to engage them in the first place’ (2017). In contrast, I experience it as an invitation to be curious about, and sensually implicated in, the world. 12 Where Sobchack highlights the film scholar’s ‘confusion and discomfort’ when confronting sensual experiences of cinema, quick to explain somatic responses as ‘“mere” physiological reflex’, its meaning as no more than ‘metaphorical description’, theatre scholars, working with the materials of live performance, are more readily cognisant of affective aesthetics, prepared for the ways in which ‘unruly responsive flesh and sensorium’ influences artistic interpretations (Sobchack 2004: 58–59).

284

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13 For Sobchack and Marks, this remains a form of vision, albeit one ‘in the flesh’ (Sobchack 2004: 8), that is affective in a mimetic and/or body-trigger way in relation to the image perceived; ‘the haptic image’ is a particular kind of ‘affection-image’, which ‘connects directly to sense-perception … Haptic cinema … encourages a bodily relationship between the viewer and the image’ (2000: 163–164). 14 See van den Oever et al. for a range of essays covering ideas around ‘the “uncanny” experience of a world “made strange”’ as styled by film aesthetics, informed by Shklovsky’s theories (18). 15 Harris also draws comparison to film; for her the mask is reminiscent of those in ‘the Scary Movie series’ (2017).

Chapter 14 1 2

See, for instance, their website at http://www.ediblecinema.co.uk See, for instance, their website at http://www.streetfoodcinema.com

Chapter 15 As defined both in the introduction to this volume and taken forwards in the From Live to Digital Report, AEA Consulting 2016. 2 Alongside Helen W. Kennedy. 3 Kind thanks to Jeremy Radvan and Jim Wilson from the University of Brighton who created this. 4 Kind thanks to Matt Homer, Wayne Dcruz, Augustin Wecxsteen and Marie LangladeDemoyen. 5 At a Live Cinema Conference-steering group meeting, 18 February 2016, many thanks to Emma Keith, Head of Broadcast and Producer, National Theatre Live, and Flo Buckeridge, General Manager of National Theatre Live, for facilitating this. 6 The Anatomy Theatre was built in 1927. It was used as an anatomical theatre for dissections and demonstrations up until 1997. The nearby elongated ‘body’ lift designed to accommodate a body laid out on a trolley, now used as a goods lift, was utilized as part of the immersive performance in which audience members, guided by performers were brought from the ground floor to the sixth floor. The performance also made use of the adjacent anatomy museum space in which drinks were served in the interval. 7 In an interview with the author, 20 July 2016. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 ‘Two of the three historic papers about the structure of DNA published in Nature on 25 April 1953 were written by scientists from the Randall Institute at King’s College London. ‘Photo 51’, taken by Rosalind Franklin and Ray Gosling at King’s in 1952, can claim to be one of the world’s most important photographs. It demonstrated the helical structure of DNA and, with their own deductions, enabled James 1

Notes

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Watson and Francis Crick of the University of Cambridge to build the first correct model of the DNA molecule. Professor Maurice Wilkins and his colleagues later verified the Cambridge hypothesis about the structure of the molecule, and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize with Crick and Watson in 1962 for his work on DNA over many years’ (King’s College London, http://www.kcl.ac.uk/newsevents/news/ newsrecords/2013/04-April/The-discovery-of-the-structure-of-DNA.aspx, 25 April 2013, accessed 12 May 2017). 13 In an interview with the author, 20 July 2016. 14 The crime for which he was hanged, he was subsequently exonerated in 1997. http:// www.independent.co.uk/news/wrongly-hanged-hanratty-is-found-innocent-1285402 .html. The character James Hennessy in Hangmen appears to be based on the real-life James Hanratty, who was convicted for the A6 murder in 1962 and subsequently hanged by Harry Allen from whom the central character of Hangmen Harry Wade takes his first name, his second from another prolific hangman, Stephen Wade. 15 In an interview with the author, 20 July 2016. 16 Ibid. 17 See Wocke (this volume), for further elucidation of Edible Cinema’s principles and processes. 18 Alston considers the role and impacts of product placement upon immersive theatre performances – ‘What happens to immersive theatre when product placement enters its world?’ (2012), this discussion is beyond the current purview of this chapter. 19 In an interview with the author, 20 July 2016. 20 Weatherall, in an interview with the author, 20 July 2016. 21 In an interview with the author, 20 July 2016. 22 The main character in Hangmen, played by David Morrisey. 23 Weatherall, in an interview with the author, 20 July 2016. 24 In an interview with the author, 20 July 2016. 25 Weatherall, in an interview with the author, 20 July 2016. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 McCarthy, in an interview with the author, 20 July 2016. 29 In an interview with the author, 20 July 2016. 30 Ibid.

Afterword 1 2

At the Cinemateket, Gothersgade 55, Copenhagen, Denmark http://www.dfi.dk/ Filmhuset/Cinemateket/Billetter-og-program/Serie.aspx?serieID=14186 At the REMIX conference, Google HQ, London, 19 January 2017.

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Index Abbate, Carolyn 140 ABC Film Review 138, 188, 190–2 Abraham, Nicolas 233, 235–6, 242 Acland, Charles R. 242 aesthetics audience 9–10 of immersion 220–2 nostalgic 27 pier–cinema relationship 51–4 pleasures 43–4, 49, 51–3 Alamo Drafthouse Cinema 46, 53, 165 Alice In Wonderland (2010, Burton) 34, 36 all-night exhibition/events 35, 154, 162 Allen, Robert C. 24, 32, 41 Allen, Steven 45 Alston, Adam 255 alternative screening 18, 42 alternative sites 5, 17–19, 35–8, 42. See also alternative cinema experience; alternative screening Alvin, Rebecca M. 35, 39 An American Werewolf in London (1981, Landis) 237 A Night at the Cinema in the 1960s 185, 188, 193, 196–8 anti-commercialism 19, 33, 38–9, 42 Apel, Dora 195 apparatus theory 18 Arbitrage (2012, Jarecki) 89 Armatage, Kay 102 Aroma Company 12 AromaRama 12 Arthur, Sue 45, 141 Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) 19, 44, 104, 138 A6 Murder’ The (Documentary) 250 Atkinson, Sarah 1, 17, 46, 79, 135, 201, 219, 267 Attard, Joseph 136, 139, 265 audience aesthetics 9–10

alternative cinema experience 153–6, 158–65 cult-cine-literate 12 cultures 1–5 economies 5, 7–9 Generation X 28 live cinema 138 Millennial 28 moviegoing 23–5 nostalgic aesthetics 27 opera cinema 139, 142–4, 147 outdoor movies 22–4, 26–7 participatory 121, 123, 129, 135–7, 154–5, 157, 161–3, 165–6, 170, 178–9, 191, 197, 203, 219 queer 87, 187, 196 rural 33–8, 40, 42 audiovisual practices 3, 58, 159, 205–10 augmented cinema 46, 57, 197 Auslander, Philp 146 austerity 48, 71, 73, 75, 136 Austin, Bruce 27 Aveyard, Karina. 24, 40 Back to the Future (1985, Zemeckis) 1, 18, 31 Backyard Cinema (BYC) 4, 5–7, 256, 262 Bakker, Gerben 102 Barker, Jennifer 231 Banaz: A Love Story (2012, Khan) 89 Banet-Weiser, Sarah 159 Bang Bang Zinema (San Sebastian) 121 Bardot, Brigit 45 Barging Through London (1924, Parkinson) 68–9 Barging Through London (Again) (2011, Pope and Guthrie) 62–3, 68–9 Barrett, Felix 219, 222–3, 227 Basque Country 117, 121 Battle of Algiers, The (1996, Pontecorvo) 202

306 Bazin, André 103 Beetlejuice (1988, Burton) 232 Behind the Great Wall (2016, Yimou, Zhang) 12 Bel Ami (2012, Donnellan and Ormerod) 89 Beltrán, Josemi 125, 127 Benjamin, Walter 71 Benzecry, Claudio E. 148–9 Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927, Ruttmann) 208 BFI Love season 19, 36 Big Sleep, The (1946, Hawks) 124 Biltereyst, Daniel 26 Birnbeck Pier 44 Bjork Digital (2016, Somerset House) 10 Black Country Living Museum 195 Blackpool 45 Blade Runner (1982, Scott) 283 n.8 Blanch and Shock 264 Bombay Sapphire 252, 264 Boris Godunov (1872, opera) 150 Bournemouth Pier 46 Bradshaw, Peter 224 Brief Encounter (1945, Lean) 36 British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) 191 Brockwell Lido 46, 50 Brophy, Philip 201–5 Bruno, Giuliana 51 Brydon, Lavinia 43 Caillois, Roger 118, 131 Carlos Plaza 127 Carlton Hall 36 Carrie S. Yelper 30 Carter, Sam 264 Casablanca (1942, Curtiz) 36 castles 35–8 Cathedral Mausoleum 22 Cerdà, Nacho 123 Chapman, Anya 43 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005, Burton) 204, 235 Chinese Takeaway (2011, Borensztein) 89 Chocolat (2000, Iscove) 231 Cine North 19, 36

Index Cinema City 104–5. See also GFF cinema exhibition 33–5, 42, 48, 61, 90, 98 Cinema for All network 37, 48 cinema managers 138, 188–9, 192 Cinema, Audiences and Modernity: New Perspectives on European Cinema History (Maltby and co-editors) 26 cinema-as-event 43 cinemagoer 28, 36, 84, 86, 100–2, 104, 111, 113, 138, 190, 192, 235 cinemagoing practices 7, 19, 33–5, 38–9, 41–2, 101, 105–6, 136, 138, 157, 166, 168, 197, 198 collective 102–3 conventional 154–5 immersive 157–8, 162 1960s 185, 188, 191–3 tourist performance 101, 115 twentieth century 104–5, 185 cinematic practices artistic and creative 14 audiences 13 contribution 14 drive-in 26–7 outdoor movies 27–8 place 25–6 space 13 temporalities 13, 49, 64–5, 79, 83, 90, 92, 98–100, 103, 170 CinemaUP 110 Cinespia 18, 22–3, 28–31 cinesthetic 220, 227 Cinezone initiative (project) 86–7, 105, 113 City Lights (1931, Chaplin) 210 Clarke, David 64–5 Clevedon Pier 19, 44, 49–56, 59 CNN 46 coastal towns 19, 49 collective film viewing 10, 54, 101, 111 commercial imperatives 10, 39 community cinema 19, 34–5, 37–8, 43–4, 48, 51, 56 community piers 44, 47, 49, 59 community values 37–40 Con Air (1997, West) 108

Index concerts 7, 34, 49, 123, 142 Connected Communities 44 Continuum (journal) 45 Cooke, Emma 235 Coppola, Francis Ford 2 Cosmopolitan (journal) 34 cosmopolitan culture 39–40, 186 Cottle Jr., Gerry 6 Couple in a Hole (2015, Geens) 114 Covent Garden auditorium 143–5, 147–9 Creative Europe (project) 267 creative process 12, 14, 202–3, 233, 239, 244–6, 257 Cripps, Karla 46 Crisp, Virginia 19, 33, 36–7, 100, 121, 132, 136–7, 153, 160 cross-generational relations 19, 42, 58 Cry Baby (1990, Waters) 29 Ctrl (2016, Breaking Fourth creation) 10 Cubism 205 cult audiences 117, 124, 128 cult directors 123 cult films 12, 29, 80–1, 91, 117–18, 121, 124, 129, 132, 177, 239 cultural capital 22, 30, 37 cultural consumption 43, 100 cultural experience 27, 135–6, 138, 139, 147, 150, 167–8, 177 Cultural Memory and British Cinemagoing of the 1960s (project) 138, 185, 187 Curzon Community Cinema (Clevedon) 19, 51, 56 Davies, Dominic 5–6 Dawn of the Dead (1978, Romero) 172–3, 202 Day of the Locust, The (1939, Schlesinger) 222–5 Dayan, Daniel 103 Dead Calm (1989, Noyce) 96 de la Garza, Sarah Amira 188 Deleuze, Gilles 62, 64–5, 73 Della Dora, Veronica 66–7 Dickson, Lesley-Ann 80–1, 83, 85, 97, 99, 101, 104–6, 109, 113–14, 119, 256 Dirty Dancing (1987, Ardolino) 50, 166 Distant Vision (project) 2

307

do-it-yourself (DIY) approach 39, 42, 47–8, 51, 59 Doel, Marcus A. 64–5 Doyle, Maxine 223–4 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, Kubrick) 28 Drew Wylie Projects 105 drive-in theatre 21, 23, 26–7, 30–1, 33, 37–8 Drowned Man, The: A Hollywood Fable (2013–2014, Barrett) 7, 203, 220–5, 228–30. See also Punchdrunk; Temple Studio aesthetics of immersion 220–2 new patterns and perspectives, 222–6 ontology 229–30 scenography 226–9 DVD 21, 24, 28, 41, 96, 146–7, 163 Dwyer, Michael 160 Early Cinema in Scotland, 1896–1927 (research project) 45 Eat|See|Hear flag 31–2 economic model 5, 41, 59 Edelman, Joshua 146 Eden Arts 35–6 Edible Cinema 201, 204, 231–42, 244, 246, 248, 252–3, 261, 263–4, 267 gustatory pleasure 231–4, 236–7, 241–2 oral drive 233–8, 240–2 psychoanalytic implications 232–3, 236, 242 psychosexual drive 233–4 scopic drive 238–40 synesthetic experience 232–3, 240, 242 Edward Scissorhands (1990, Burton) 29 85A presents: Jan Svankmajer 92–3 Eisenstein, Sergei 202 El Cellar de Can Roca 239 El Somni (project) 232, 239 Ellis, John 27–8 Ellis, Ruth 249, 259–61, 264 enhanced cinema 46, 48 Ephemeral Cinemas in Historical Perspective (research project) 104 ethnography 80–1, 118–19, 148, 188, 246

308

Index

event cinema 3–4, 7, 19, 139, 141–4, 204, 244–5, 259, 265–6 Every Little Kiss (2014, Berry) 261–2 expanded cinema 3, 19, 62, 66, 69, 202, 255 experience community 10, 177, 266 experience economy 7, 10, 83, 100, 168, 245 experiential cinema 1, 3–5, 10, 41, 46, 108, 137, 153, 157, 170, 244–246, 267 Eyes Wide Shut (1999, Kubrick) 228 Faire, Lucy 157 fairs 49, 67, 70 Falassi, Alessandro 126 Feigel, Lara 45 Ferran Adria, l’art des mets 239 festivalgoers 117, 120 festivalization 84, 88, 99, 113 Fifth Season, The (2012, Brosens and Woodworth) 279 n.21 59 Productions 1 film aesthetics 168, 228 film festivals 83–5, 87–8, 91, 98–100. See also Glasgow Film Festival (GFF); horror film festival Brussels International Festival of Fantastic Film 124 Cannes Film Festival 45, 83–4, 90 ethnography 118–21 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 87 international film festivals 84, 205 market-focused view 103 research design 84–5 Screamfest Horror Film Festival 83 Sheffield Doc/Fest 83 Southside Film Festival (SFF) 103–6, 107, 111–12 Film Hub Scotland 104 film viewing 39, 41, 48, 79, 101, 118, 129, 131–2, 162, 165, 181 Fischer, Alex 93 5D/6D cinema 12 Floating Cinema 20, 61–75 food festivals 49 Food for Thought, Thought for Food 239 Forbidden Zone, (2014, Mitchell) 1

Foucault, Michel 92–3 4DX cinema 12 fragmented market 34, 41 Frameline 83 French cinema 45, 211 Freud, Sigmund 233–4, 236, 238 From the Sea to the Land Beyond (2012, Woolcock) 64 Front Porch Cinema 31 genre festivals 83, 87 gentrification 17, 48–9, 71–5 Gilmore, James H. 245 Girl in a Million competition 193 Glasgow Film Festival (GFF) 92, 95 attendances 86–7, 105 audiences 83–94, 96–100, 106 beyond the film (BF) 88–9, 91–2 Cinezone initiative 86 geographical context 90 modes of film engagement 83–4, 99–100 programming practices 87–9 Returning to local cinema (RLC) 88–90 spatial conditions 87, 89, 92–4, 96–100 success narrative 86, 104 temporalities 83, 90, 92, 98–100 typology of events 88–91 Unique to festival (UF) 88–90 Glasgow Film Theatre (GFT) 86–7, 104, 108 Glasgow Short Film Festival 110 GlaxoSmithKline 71 Grand Pier 44 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004 Houser and Khonsari, video game), 27 Gray, Fred 52 Grease (1978, Kleiser) 27 Great Good Place, The (Oldenburg) 25 Griffith Park 31–2 gustatory pleasures 201, 204, 231–4, 237, 242, 267. See also Edible Cinema Habermas, Jürgen 30 Hammond, Brady 45 Handmade Cinema 39–40 Handmaiden (2017, Chan-wook) 8

Index Handyside, Fiona 45 Hangmen Rehanged creative process 245–9 cultural forms 245 performance methodology 256–8 performative action 259–63 practice-based research 244–5 sensory elements 252–5, 262–3 space context 249–52 time and space in 258–9 haptic visuality 227 Harbord, Janet 87, 90 Harrelson, Woody 266 Harris, Ella 20, 47–8, 59, 61 Harris, Geraldine 256 Hastings Pier 44, 46–7, 49–51, 53–4, 56–7 Hayes, Martha 34 Heritage Foundation 20 Heritage Trust 44, 50, 59 Higginson, Henry Lee 7 historical re-enactment 137, 194–6 Hit and Run Kino 17 Hollywood Forever Cemetery. 22, 28–30, 32 home cinema 111, 163–4 HoMER network 45 Honey I Shrunk the Audience (Disney) 12 Hooten, Christopher 46 horror film festival 117, 126–7, 132, 176, 178 Horror Week 81, 118, 120–1, 123–32. See also SSHFFF as cult event 121–4 Howl, The (2015, Hyett) 117 identity festivals 83, 87 IMAX technology 8, 11, 22, 56, 107 immersive cinema community pier 54–8 cultural and creative practice 1–3, 11, 19 featured elements 109 participants report 114 pop-up culture 54–8 rural 33–42 seascape and natural sounds 43–59 sensory elements 262–3 urban space 61–82

309

immersive screenings 40, 42, 153, 177 Independent, The (British newspaper) 46 informal exhibition 25, 35, 37 Inherent Vice (2014 Anderson) 155 intellectual property (IP) 9 Internet 41, 153 Jack Johnson – Portrait Of A Legend (1970, Clayton) 209–10, 213 Jackson, Peter 123 Jameson, Fredric 64 Jancovich, Mark 26, 102, 157 Jaws (1975, Spielberg) 46, 50, 89, 96 Jenzen, Olu 19, 43 Jones, Matthew 26, 114, 136–8, 185, 203, 213 Julie and Julia (2009, Ephron) 231 Kehoe, Keith, 41–2 Kennedy, Helen W. 1, 17, 46, 79, 135, 201, 219, 267 King, Geoff 12 Kiss (1963, Warhol) 202, 210 Kiss the Water (2013, Steel) 63 Klinger, Barbara 23–4, 27, 38, 85, 101, 124, 129–31, 163 Kuhn, Annette 26, 92–3, 98, 102–3, 187, 189 La Cienega Park 31 La Grande Bouffe (1973, Ferreri) 231 La Haine (1995, Kassovitz) 202 La La Land (2016, Chazelle) 8 Labyrinth (1986, Henson) 34–5 Lardín, Rubén 123 layar tancap tradition 35 Le révélateur (1968, Garrel) 202, 210–12, 215 Leon, Warren 195 Levitt, Linda 18, 21, 33, 37–8, 55, 135 Life in a Day (2011, Clisby and Macdonald et.al) 62–3, 68 Lippard, Lucy 25 live and experiential cinema 3, 5, 7, 137, 170, 246, 267 Live Cinema aesthetics 9–10 audiences 13

310

Index

definition 61 experiential cinema events 1–2 hybrid modes of production 14 initial typology 17 manifestations 9 outdoor movie screenings 32 subjectivities and characteristics 266 terminology, use of 3 2016 Conference 6, 9 living cinema 3, 138, 197–8, 203, 220, 265 living history 194–6 living museums 195–6 Living Nickelodeon 206 London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) 63 Lost in London LIVE 266–7 Lucia di Lammermoor (1835, opera) 150 ludic 69–70, 109, 118, 167–70, 182, 270 ludification 138, 167, 183–4 ludoaesthetics 168 Luna Cinema (LC) 4–6, 46, 49–50, 53, 57 Lunchbox, The (2013, Batra) 34 MacDowell, James 156 Machon, Josephine 201–4, 219, 222, 224, 227–8, 230, 256, 265 Magelssen, Scott 196 Maggie, The (1954, Mackendrick) 96–7 Maier, Vivian 111 Main Theatre (Teatro Principal) 117, 120–1, 125, 127 audience 122 mainstream culture 13, 48–9, 59, 86–7, 91, 105, 117, 127–9, 131, 137, 156–7, 231, 266 makeshift theatres 27, 35 Maltby, Richard 7, 23, 26, 35, 54, 102 Man Vs Snake 114 Man With A Movie Camera (1929, Vertov) 202, 208 maps 81, 111–13, 136, 211 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. 240–1 Marks, Laura 220, 227 Massey, Doreen 73 Matarasso, Francois 39 Mateer, John 41–2

Mathijs, Ernest 156 McCarthy, Marie 248–50, 264 McCulloch, Richard 19, 33, 36–7, 100, 121, 132, 136–7, 153–4, 163 McDonagh, Martin 204, 244, 246, 248, 252 McDonald, Myra 187 Meers, Philippe 26 mega-festivals 84 Meisel, Edmund 202 memory corporeal 222 cultural 22, 24–5 enduring 18 interpretation 187 lived experiences 188 nostalgic 98 Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006, Tykwer) 204, 267 personal 18, 26, 28, 32, 187–8, 235 place and 22, 25–6 prosthetic 198 shared 191 Metropolitan Opera House 139–42 micro-cinema movement 35, 37, 39, 47–8 Miike, Takashi 123 Minchinela, Raúl 123 Mitchell, Katie 1, 130, 150 mixed-use venues 48 mobile gaze 18, 64, 66 mobile viewing 18, 21, 34–5, 41–2, 64, 83 modes of screen 261, 263 Monteverdi Choir 266 Moonrise Kingdom (2014, Anderson) 40 Moran, Albert 24 Morris, Chris 147 Morris, Duggan 67 Mott, Carrie 110 Moulin Rouge (2001, Luhrmann) 1, 7 moviegoing experience 18, 21–4, 26–7, 31–3, 38, 121, 154, 156–7 Mulholland Drive (2001, Lynch) 222–3, 225–6 Nakata, Hideo 123 National Grand Opera Company 140

Index neoliberalism 6, 47, 49 Netflix 160 neutralizing rescore 205–6, 211–12, 217 Night of the Living Dead (1968, Romero) 29 1960s cinemas audience experience 136 authenticity 193–6 collected memories 138, 185, 187–8 cultural activity 186 employees of 189 historical verisimilitude 189, 194, 250, 256 immersive experience 189–93 live cinema to living cinema 197–8 presence of characters 186 Nobody Else But You (2011, HustacheMathieu) 279 n.21 non-purpose-built venues 48 non-theatrical environment 34, 41, 101, 103, 105–6, 111, 114 Nora, Pierre 25 Ochs, Herbert 30 Oldenburg, Ray 25–6 olfactory dimension 12. See also Smell-OVision Olympic Games 2012 63 O’Neill, Sinéad 146 One Million Years B.C. (1966, Chaffey) 186 open-air cinema 18, 19, 49–51, 54, 58–9, 63, 68, 142 open-air museum 194–5 openness of space 65, 73, 75 Opera Virgins Project: Operatic Event Cinema as a New Cultural Experience, The (project) 136, 139, 145, 148, 150 outdoor cinema. See also outdoor movies companies 46 seaside resort 43–4, 49, 51–3 outdoor movies 21–3, 25–32, 33, 35, 37–8, 40 Outsiders, The (1983, Coppola) 27 paidia and ludus 131 Pan’s Labyrinth (2006, Toro) 204, 232, 241

311

para-cinematic community 128 Parker, Roger 140 Parks and Recreation 31 participatory cinema 3, 5, 10, 33–7, 39, 41, 57, 137 Pasadena Rose Parade (2006, Paterson ) 12 Passion of Joan of Arc, The (1928, Dreyer) 89, 94–5 Pavlovian response 207, 212 ‘People’s Pier, The (project) 19, 44 Peter Pan (1953, Geronimi) 96 Pett, Emma 33, 54, 185 Phelan, Peggy 146 Phenomena Experience (Barcelona) 121, 123 Phoenix Cinema 186 photography 102, 109, 111, 214 Piatt, Margaret 195 Picnic Cinema 19, 34–5, 40 Picturehouse Cinemas 186 pier organizations 44, 58 Pine, B. Joseph 245 Pirates of Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003, Verbinski) 50 Platts, Todd 172 play 6, 13, 20, 25, 29, 32, 49, 68–9, 73, 75, 82, 106, 109, 115, 118, 125, 127, 129–32, 135, 137, 144, 146, 148–9, 154, 165, 167–9, 173–4, 180, 183–4, 188, 204, 209, 222–3, 227–8, 235, 239–40, 244, 246, 248–51, 255–6, 259, 264 players 167, 169–71, 174–7, 183–4 Plaza, Carlos 127 Plumb, Ali 154, 160 plush seating 21 Poltergeist (1982, Hooper) 29 Polyester (1981, Waters) 10, 12 Pomerance, Murray 45 pop-up cinema 20, 43–4, 46–51, 53–5, 58–9, 69, 101–2, 105, 109 Portrait of a Cult Film Audience: The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1981 Austin's, seminal study) 3 post-war cinema 65 Pratt, Geraldine 69, 73 Pride (2014, Warchus) 50

312

Index

Princess Bride, The (1987, Reiner) 28 Prince Charles Cinema (PCC) 33, 36–7, 154, 156–9, 161, 163–6 “event” screenings 161–3 alternative cinema 155–7 experiential norms 163–5 nostalgic memories 159–61 Princess Bride, The (1987, Reiner) 28 producers (creative and event) 1, 6, 84, 104, 140, 181–2, 186, 201, 204, 245–6, 257, 265–6 Project for Public Spaces (PPS) 29, 31 Prometheus (2012, Scott) 8 protocols 118, 124, 132, 216, x, xv–xvi Punchdrunk 203–4, 219–30, 255 Purple Rain (1984, Magnoli) 28–9 Purple Rose of Cairo (1985, Allen) 223 pursuer mode 265–6 Q & As 36 Q-Methodology 136, 145, 150 Queen’s Park Camera Club 107, 111 queer audiences 87, 187, 196 Radbourne, Jennifer 149 Radical Film Network (RFN) 81, 103–4, 106–7, 110–11, 113 Radical Home Cinema 110 radicalizing rescores 205–6, 211–12, 217 Randall, Amanda 48 Re: A Pier (2016, Lauchlan) 50, 53–4, 56–8 Rebel Without a Cause (1955, Ray) 32 Redmond, Sean 45 Repeat to Flourish (2015, Pope, Guthrie and Powell) 63 rescoring practice 3, 202–3, 205, 207, 214, 265 residual affective impact 263, 265–6 Restless Natives (RN) 81, 103–5, 108, 114 Riggall, Fabien 6, 40–1, 153, 180 Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, The (2015, Weil and Brecht) 136, 148 ROAD (2016, Driftwood and Close) 9 Roberts, Susan 110 Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975, Sharman) 1, 3, 34, 124, 135, 239 Rolling Roadshow 46

Romeo+Juliet (1996, Luhrmann) 109 Romeo+Juliet (Backyard Cinema screening with live choir) 109, 256, 262 Rooftop Film Club (RFC) 4–6 Room, The (2003, Wiseau) 154 Rosenberg, Aaron 29 Run Lola Run (1998, Tykwer) 202 Ruoff, Jeffrey 100 San Sebastian City Council 117 San Sebastian Horror and Fantasy Film Festival (SSHFFF) 117–18, 121, 123, 129, 132 audience 118–31 Santa Cruz Guerilla Drive-In 21 Santa Monica Pier 31 scenography 58, 169, 173, 178, 180, 203, 213, 221, 223, 226–9, 256 Scent of Mystery (1960, Cardiff) 12, 231 Schwartz, Barry 24 Sconce, Jeffrey 124, 128, 156, 160 Scratch N’ Sniff cards 12, 204 screen response and responsive 4, 204, 244–5, 256, 264, 265–6 direct 261 indirect 261 synchronized 261–2 seaside piers 19, 43–4, 49, 58 aesthetic pleasures 43–4, 49, 51–3 resort culture 43–4, 49, 54 technological advancements 45–6, 48 Victorian 43 Secret Cinema (SC) 2, 4, 11, 18, 33, 39–40, 41, 42, 109–10, 121, 153–4, 158, 167–9 Back to the Future (1985, Zemeckis) 109 Moulin Rouge (2001, Luhrmann) 1 Secret Life of Pets (2016, Renaud and Cheney) 40 Semiotics by Instinct (essay, Jerslev) 124 Senici, Emanuele 148 Sexton, Jamie 156 Seznec, Yan 63 Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre 266 She’s All That (1999, Iscove) 231 Shields, Rob 54

Index Shimizu, Takashi 123 silent cinema 210–11, 266 Silent Film Sound 206, 210 Silverman, Kaja 238 SimCity 2000 (Wright, video game) 27 Singer, Irving 220, 223, 227, 229 site responsive 256, 265–6 Sixteen Candles (1984, Hughes) 28 Sloboda, John 146 Smell-O-Vision 12, 231–2 Snowman, Daniel 143 Sobchack, Vivan 220, 227–8, 230 Some Like It Hot (1959, Wilder) 204, 232 Sound of Music, The (1965, Wise) 154, 166 Spielberg, Steven 46 Spirited Away (2001, Miyazaki) 232, 241 Spring Breakers (2012, Korine) 91 Stacey, Jackie 102, 187 Stoker (2013, Park) 89 Stokes, Melvyn 185 Street Food Cinema 22, 30–1, 232 Stringer, Julian 83, 85 Sunset Boulevard (1950, Wilder) 224 Sunset Cinema (Madrid) 121 Suspiria (1977, Argento) 202 (Syn)aesthetics (2011) 220 synchronized screen 261–2 Synecdoche, New York (2009, Kaufmann) 224 Taylor, Helen 187 technologies 9–10, 26, 34, 38, 41, 45, 48, 67, 90, 94, 141, 178, 206–7, 232 Temple Studios 219–20, 223–6, 228–9 temporalities 12–13, 49, 64–5, 79, 92, 103, 170 Terminator 2:3D experience 12 Terrance Y. 30 themed screening 29, 33–4, 36–7, 40 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud) 238 THX1138 (1971, Lucas) 8 Time Warp (song) 3 Tis Clevedon Pier (1990, TV documentary) 55 Toro, Guillermo del 123

313

Torok, Maria 233, 235–6, 242 Toronto Jewish Film Festival (TJFF) 125, 128 Touch of Evil (1958, Welles) 224 tourism 22, 54, 81, 86, 101–3, 121 tourist performance 80–1, 101–2, 106, 110–11, 115 Trainspotting (1994, Boyle) 35 Trash entre amigos (Trash with friends) 121 Tsukamoto, Shinya 126 Turandot (video) 141 Turner, Victor 126, 128 28 Days Later (2002, Boyle) 137, 160, 167–9, 171–2, 176–84 audience experience 167, 169, 178–9, 183 funfear elements 170, 175–7 ludoaesthetic imaginary 182–3 twentieth-century invention 140, 151, 207, 217, 223 Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992, Lynch) 222–3 2.8 Hrs Later (2009, videogame by Evans, Simon and Johnson Simon) 137, 167–71, 173–5, 179–83 3D 8, 57, 160 UK Jewish Film Festival 83 uncanny 172, 182, 228, 261 Unconference 81, 103–4 Under the Skin (2013, Glazer) 202 urban space 61–5, 67–71, 73–6. See also Floating Cinema usherettes 138, 189–91 Vallejo, Aida 118 Van Extergem, Dirk 124 VCR 24, 41 Velez, Serna, María Antonia 45, 80–1, 101, 105, 135 Venice Film Festival 83–4, 86, 90 Vigalondo, Nacho 123 Village Screen cinemas 40 virtual capacities 65, 69, 73 virtual reality (VR) 9–11 Vivar, Rosana 80–2, 117, 135

314 Voodoo Cult Horror Movies Club (Madrid) 121 Wagner, Richard 140 Walking Dead, The (2010, Darabont. TV Series) 169, 172, 176 Walton, John, K., 43, 54 Warriors, The (1979, Hill) 94–5 WAVEparticle 110 Wayne’s World (1992, Spheeris) 154 Weatherall, Sarah 248–9, 264 Werther (1892, opera) 150 West Side Cinema 37 When Harry Met Sally (1989, Reiner) 241 White, Gareth 255 Wilinsky, Anna 204

Index Will Rogers State Historic Park 30 Wise, Karen 143, 148 Withnail and I (1987, Robinson) 34–5 Wocke, Brendon 201, 203–4, 231, 252, 265 Wonder.land VR 9 Wood, George 5–6 World War Z (2013, Foster) 176 Wozzeck (1947, Klaren) 224 Wyatt, John 29 Yelp.com 22, 29 zombie 47, 167. See also 2.8 Hrs Later audience experience 135–6, 169 walks 49, 125