Inflatable Media: Film Festivals, Microcinemas, and Ephemeral Media

Discrete spaces and events offer unique experiences tied to subjectivity (past experiences), personal history, and the phenomenologies of place. My specific focus in this chapter is on DIY cultures, new forms of media distribution and mobile spectatorship that grew out of the experimental cultures of the 1950s and 1960s in the United Kingdom and later in Canada. While this chapter straddles analog and digital media, I am interested in how digital media do not represent a break from postwar experimental media but work to enhance certain characteristics (asynchronicity, assemblage, expanded cinema, etc.) present in “older” forms of media like photography, video, film, radio, etc. The rise of translocal and transnational networks of artist cultures, film and media festivals, cultural events, and activist cultures emphasizing locatedness—the temporalities of being there, of performance and events as against global media⁵—might well represent the design aesthetic needed in the age of the Anthropocene, one that Bruno Latour describes as a “modest,” nimble, flexible, responsive design architecture in our dematerializing/disappearing and deeply present world.⁶ It is also through such events that a common world—utopian in an imminent way—might be created. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put it in Multitude (2004), “The Common we share, in fact, is not so much discovered as it is produced.” Communication and collaboration are not based on the common but rather “produce the common in an expanding spiral relationship.” Here we might comprehend the critical role of diverse forms of creative, social, and digital practice as that of creating places for “uncontrolled conversation” and being together (whatever form that takes in digital age).⁷

Writing in 2005, Thomas Hale and Anne-Marie Slaughter summarize the intentions of Hardt and Negri’s book: “The multitude is not ‘the people,’ but rather many peoples acting in networked concert. Because of its plurality, its ‘innumerable internal differences,’ the multitude contains the genus of true democracy. At the same time, the multitude’s ability to communicate and collaborate—often through the very capitalist networks that oppress it—allows it to produce a common body of knowledge and ideas (‘the common’) that can serve as a platform for democratic resistance to Empire.”⁸ Hale and Slaughter are critical of the book, though they praise the authors for recognizing the new forms of democracy growing out of the decentralized and diverse global networks that “define the contemporary zeitgeist.” Indeed, over ten years later the book may not seem so “silly” given the emergence of so many new forms of protest pushing for democracy, pushing against Empire and oppressive political regimes—from the protests and demonstrations across the Middle East and North Africa in 2010 (the “Arab Spring”) to the iterations of the Occupy movement and the 99%. In Canada the spread of Idle No More’s “peaceful revolution, to honour Indigenous sovereignty, and to protect the land and water”⁹ has become a global movement supporting diverse forms of solidarity connected to a multiplicity of political networks in the environmental movement. And what better illustration of the “expanding spiral” of solidarity than the protests of January 21, 2017, when an estimated 673 Women’s Marches were held in cities around the world protesting the newly elected US government and affirming that “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights.”¹⁰ All this makes Hardt and Negri’s 2005 book incredibly prescient.

Festival cultures, art biennales, microcinemas, site-specific “urban interventions”, and diverse forms of locative urban media all reflect the dynamic, networked, mobile cultures of the “Media City” as Scott McGuire has described it.¹¹ The media city reframes the way that media function, not as representations nor simply as dematerialized circuits, but as experiences that co-constitute, and help us navigate, our environments. Such a conceptualization of the public domain emerges in the complex interface between material and immaterial spaces and requires us to rethink how we understand the place of media, and how they function to make our ecologies and mobile umwelts.

Ecology of Images

I begin with images in movement. Susan Sontag’s notion of an “ecology of images” will give us some understanding of how images function to intertwine (Merleau-Ponty) the inside and the outside, to create environments that are not separate from their imaging but deeply connected to and embedded in them. In her celebrated book On Photography (1977), Sontag detected a new cultural ecology in which the “real world” is not separate from its imaging; rather, through this ecology, a new ethics of making and reading photographs might develop. Sontag explains: “Images are more real than anyone could have supposed. And just because they are an unlimited resource, one that cannot be exhausted by consumerist waste, there is all the more reason to apply the conservationist remedy. If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.”¹² The idea of an ecology of images, as I have been arguing throughout this book, concerns the dynamic and changing ontologies of photographic and digital images of the world. Most people live in and through a kinetic ecology of images that are of the world, which augment the world and sometimes make it legible. Such an ethics of the image works against any simple understanding of either appropriation or remediation as one-way actions that depart from originary sources and simple ownership. We live in a world drenched seemingly in discontinuous assemblages that interact with one another, with our bodies and with the physical environment. Images are both ubiquitous and precious, anonymous and personal. This phenomenological dimension necessarily underscores any ecological approach. Not simply visual, images are also auditory and tactile; they are intricately bound up with embodied experience. While they can, as it were, take us out of ourselves, they also affect our bodies in a singular manner.

In her last book of nonfiction, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Sontag complicated her earlier position, which she characterized as “a defense of reality and the imperilled standards for responding more fully to it.”¹³ Sontag is critical of the idea that we live in an image-saturated world that assumes the existence of a reality which can be rehabilitated outside the realm of images. Jean Baudrillard affirms this idea, however, in his classic book The Ecstasy of Communication (1988), in which he decries the spectacular “pornographic objectivity of the world” that has colonized reality. Baudrillard’s brilliant reconstruction of the world through the eyes of an “imaginary traveler” (à la Borges)¹⁴ describes a cool universe (in McLuhan’s sense of the term) that thrives on “Ecstasy, fascination, obscenity” (rather than desire, passion, or seduction), and enforces the “extraversion of all interiority” and the “categorical imperative of communication.”¹⁵

As has been well rehearsed, Baudrillard’s diagnosis, articulated through a metaphor drawn from psychopathology, is a new form of schizophrenia: “no more hysteria, or projective paranoia as such but a state of terror which is characteristic of the schizophrenic, an over-proximity of all things … the absolute proximity to and total instantaneousness with things, this overexposure to the transparency of the world.”¹⁶ In Baudrillard’s narrative, this victim of (post)modernity becomes a medium, an ecstatic screen of “influent networks.” Sontag challenges this totalizing view, which, she claims, “universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world.”¹⁷ She proposes instead that we think about images in terms of affects, as bearing witness to the specific and particular situations in which images are made, experienced, and contemplated. She cites the example of photojournalists in Sarajevo during the war in Bosnia, who worked at great personal risk to produce their images—images that cannot simply be reduced to the commodification of atrocity, as Baudrillard would characterize them. According to Sontag, “the Sarajevans did want their plight to be recorded in photographs: victims are interested in the representation of their own sufferings.”¹⁸ But she adds a caveat. In a crumbling art gallery in Sarajevo, Paul Lowe, the celebrated English photojournalist who had worked in the besieged city for more than a year, mounted an exhibition of his photographs. He chose to include in the show photographs he had produced a few years earlier in Somalia. Sarajevans, while eager to see images of the ongoing decimation of their city, were offended by the juxtaposition. “To set their suffering alongside the sufferings of other people was to compare them,” Sontag commented, “demoting Sarajevo’s martyrdom to a mere instance.”¹⁹ Sontag is critical neither of the Sarajevan response nor of Lowe’s desire to show his other work; rather, she underscores the incommensurability of the experiences depicted in the photographs of the Sarajevans and the Somalians. Lowe’s credits include many of the major events of the late twentieth century: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 1989 Romanian revolution, the release of Nelson Mandela, famine and civil war in Somalia and Sudan, and the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Chechnya. Lowe’s exhibition of photographs from the Somalian famine and civil war, shot a few years earlier and placed alongside photographs of an ongoing war that people were then enduring made evident a number of incongruous and interdependent spheres: the profound struggles of the people in Sarajevo and Somalia, the photojournalist’s body of work as an “envoy” bearing witness, and perhaps most importantly, the political economy of global media news and photojournalism. To create an exhibition that pairs the seemingly unrelated events in Sarajevo and Somalia moves them out of their respective local situations and into a visual register in which their situatedness and complexity is, arguably, distanced and serialized, rather than lost.

Such a juxtaposition would not have seemed so disturbing had the photographs not been exhibited in a gallery in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war. Certainly, Sontag’s review of Steichen’s “Family of Man” was critical of the exhibition’s use of decontextualized photographs for the same reason. The juxtaposition that Lowe created in his exhibition is familiar to cosmopolitan gallery-goers and consumers of most contemporary forms of media, at least those able to access the multifarious networks of the global media. These juxtapositions of “influent networks,”²⁰ the ubiquity of screens that create “giddy transparencies,”²¹ are part and parcel of the fragmentary and confused experience of Baudrillard’s imaginary traveler. This incredible proliferation of images is a contributing factor to the financial crisis currently facing the global practice of photojournalism. It is not that there isn’t sufficient space for these images, but rather that a surfeit of images is being produced everywhere in the world. At the same time, large news services increasingly control the stock of images and photo archives, and are prone to use generic scenes as stand-ins for particular wars and specific events. Sontag’s engagement with the ecologies of images—her questioning of the function (affective and political) of photographs and images in our everyday lives, and of how these images connect us to one another and to the world—provides a materialist frame for situating the “blizzard” (to use Kracauer’s term) or hemorrhaging of images that surrounds everyday lives in the industrialized cities of the world. I construe this materialism to include an understanding of the ubiquity of images, as well as their fantastic decontextualization and incommensurability, which Baudrillard eloquently described. Though it may be difficult to think about “the outside” of ideology—the world beyond the image—it is precisely by thinking this outside in a manner inspired by Bataille that Baudrillard is able to describe the fundamental shift in the technological mediation of reality that took place in the postwar era. This is why someone like McLuhan is so useful to read. Working with the Explorations Group at the University of Toronto,²² he and the group’s other members were among the first to think about and compare the effects of these media on the human sensorium in the early 1950s; to focus on medium specificity; to develop comparative media studies using television, public lectures, and radio; and to analyze these media in terms of their pedagogical potential.²³

Both Sontag and Baudrillard draw on Bataille’s concept of ecstasy. Bataille, like McLuhan, recognized that an important transformation had occurred in postwar forms of media, especially with the invention and commercial development of television. As we saw in our examination of Jacques Cousteau’s underwater explorations, remote sensing and changes in media technologies (underwater television) served to render accessible previously remote parts of the earth. Bataille died a year after the publication of his book Tears of Eros (1961), which concerned the communifying aspects of images. Writing in ill health and anxious about his eldest daughter, who had been arrested for her political activities on behalf of Algeria, Bataille was seeking to understand the relationship between eroticism and death as a challenge to scientific codification: “The ambiguity of this human life is really that of mad laughter and of sobbing tears. It comes from the difficulty of harmonizing reason’s calculations with these tears … with this horrible laugh.”²⁴ Bataille’s last book brings together a historical and cross-cultural archive of images—drawings, engravings, paintings, and photographs—that engage, in one way or another, with the meeting of eroticism and death. Censored when it first appeared, the book aimed to “[open] up … consciousness” to this relationship through the visual traces (“remnants”) of its pulsions, and was intended to elicit an emotional response through its juxtaposition of images. Bataille entreats us to know the world through death in life (a gap opened by Eros), to consider new epistemologies in which seemingly opposite affects (e.g., repulsion/attraction) become indistinguishable.²⁵

Remarking upon Bataille’s book, Sontag focused on one particular photograph of an anonymous man’s execution by ling chi—death by a thousand cuts—taken in 1905. Bataille reportedly kept the photograph in his desk, forcing himself to look at it every day. Including it in Tears of Eros, he wrote: “This photograph had a decisive role in my life. I have never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain at once ecstatic and intolerable.” Bataille is uncertain about the expression of pain on the man’s upturned face, which, though it belongs to a mutilated and tortured body whose arms have been cut off, looks up in a manner that resembles that of ecstatic saints of the Italian Renaissance. According to Sontag,

Bataille is not saying that he takes pleasure at the sight of this excruciation [the photo of “death by one thousand cuts”]. But he is saying that he can imagine extreme suffering as something more than just suffering, as a kind of transfiguration. It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, rooted in religious thinking that links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation—a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility that regards suffering as a mistake or an accident or a crime; something to be fixed; something to be refused; something that makes one feel powerless.²⁶

With this book, Bataille’s aim was not to shock (he was a bad surrealist); he wanted to elicit a response, forge an affective connection with the world. For her part, Sontag was interested in a depiction of suffering that leads to action rather than a turning away from the world, writing: “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”²⁷ But she was also sympathetic to Bataille’s fixation on this image and the complexity of his relationship to it. The Tears of Eros suggests that representations (all different kinds of media from painting and engraving to photography) can be “communifying” environments that force us into recognition or empathy of a shared corporeality—what we share as sentient animals. Sontag’s essays are premised on a materialist approach to the analysis of the place of images. She considers not only who produces images and for what purposes they are produced, but also how they circulate and in what contexts and for what purposes they are consumed.

Sontag’s involvement with the project SA-Life (1993) and the North American version of the film Sarajevo Ground Zero: SaGA’s Films of Crime and Resistance (1993), which sought to mobilize responses to the Bosnian war, might well have given her insight into the critical role played by new forms of distribution. SA-Life is a collective compilation film put together by one of Bosnia’s foremost filmmakers, Ademir Kenović, along with other filmmakers in Sarajevo who used small documentaries and video diaries to document the atrocities of the war as they unfolded around them. SA-Life was distributed through the important international film festival circuit, which I discuss below (Cannes, San Francisco, New York, Montreal, and others) to educate the general public about the war in Bosnia.²⁸ Kenović and SaGA, a multiethnic group of Bosnian filmmakers, worked with American producer Danny Schechter to reedit the images into a news magazine called Sarajevo Ground Zero to be shown on American television. After failing to secure a broadcaster, the filmmakers decided to make a video chain letter that included a fervent commentary by Sontag (who was directing Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo) and New York Times correspondent John Burns about the atrocities of the Bosnian genocide. A flyer accompanied the video letter:

Most chain letters are idiotic. Or a way of having fun. This one is serious. Deadly serious. It is about a city and its people. Who face death. In this holiday season of 1993. Sarajevo is the city. Genocide is the threat. No joke. That’s why we have sent you this video tape. So that you can’t say you didn’t know. So you will act. And get your government to respond. A documentary that TV stations won’t show. Please watch it. Bosnians are “living” it. Show it to at least five friends. Alert the Press. Lives are at stake. Don’t Break the Chain.²⁹

Scott MacKenzie has noted that the images in these documentaries could not be separated from their processes of distribution:

What is left, then, is not images themselves, but the process of distribution. The “video chain letter” is based on the premise that the simple existence and distribution of images will lead to social awareness and political intervention. It does not matter if the images offer access to the “real” in an unmediated fashion; what matters is their circulation in a manner whereby each viewer decides who the next one will be, and thereby becomes part of a process which builds a web of connections that is intended to produce discourse and action in the public sphere, away from the video monitor. Image-makers, then, no longer need to be concerned with “accurate” representations of the unrepresentable; instead they should be concerned with distributing their images in ways that generate discussion, debate, and affinities within the public sphere.³⁰

The images in this video chain letter, as MacKenzie points out, were somewhat secondary to the very process of distribution which creates a network, an opportunity for social exchange, for talking, for discovering political affinities and planning actions.

In effect, SaGA’s videos would necessarily undergo degradation as the video chain grew. The image quality would become “poor,” in the sense that German artist Hito Steyerl describes in her manifesto, “In Defense of the Poor Image”: “The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.”³¹ Though the video letters were analogue, Steyerl’s analysis of poor images is still relevant. Images that are created to be shared and exchanged trade “quality” for “accessibility.”³² This tradeoff is indeed part of the history of DIY, from the Lettrists to the Situationists—as Amy Spencer has described in DIY: The Rise of Low-Fi Culture (2008)—which either consciously or by happenstance works to build community by relying on smaller, lower forms of media.³³ It is in this spirit that Steyerl cites the landmark Third Cinema manifesto “For an Imperfect Cinema” by Cuban filmmaker Julio García Espinosa; that is, a revolutionary cinema that breaks down the divide between artists and spectators, that “rejects exhibitionism in both (literal) senses of the word, the narcissistic and the commercial,” that celebrates the amateur and the popular, and that incorporates the very conditions of production into the process of making. For Espinosa, the new DIY media of the 1960s enabled a democratic transformation away from elite perfect cinema toward new forms of making and seeing films:

Imperfect cinema is no longer interested in quality or technique. It can be created equally well with a Mitchell or with an 8mm camera, in a studio or in a guerrilla camp in the middle of the jungle. Imperfect cinema is no longer interested in predetermined taste, and much less in “good taste.” It is not quality which it seeks in an artist’s work. The only thing it is interested in is how an artist responds to the following question: What are you doing in order to overcome the barrier of the “cultured” elite audience which up to now has conditioned the form of your work?³⁴

Thus, like “Imperfect Cinema,” the “Poor Image” is defended as a practice tied to freeing the image, to opening images up to as many voices, subjectivities, and experiences as possible, fostering an infinite number of remixes and appropriations. Steyerl argues that the poor image acquires a new value “defined by velocity, intensity, and spread.” Of course she recognizes the darker side of the utopian mandate of her defense of poor images, which cannot escape the contradictions of capitalism and the commodification of everything. Take, for example, the photographs of the torture of Iraqi prisoners of war by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib, which Sontag reflects upon in her essay “Regarding the Torture of Others” (2004). There, Sontag addresses the double horror of photographs that represent torture and the act of photographing torture: “what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken—with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives.”³⁵ The fact that the photographs contain victims and torturers within the same frame is, Sontag tells us, exceedingly unusual. Like American photographs of black victims of lynching produced as “trophies” between the 1880s and 1930s, the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib are “souvenirs” of sorts. Yet they reflect an important shift in the purpose and function of photographs as well as the ways in which photographs are collected and stored. The photographs at Abu Ghraib were taken “less [as] objects to be saved than [as] messages to be disseminated, circulated.”³⁶ Indeed, this marks an important change in what motivates the photographic act; even the most private moments of criminal behavior are subjected to, even driven by, the “extraversion of all interiority,” the “categorical imperative of communication,” as Baudrillard, following McLuhan and William Burroughs, put it.³⁷ It is precisely the material reality of circulation—of images being inseparable from their mode of circulation, from their mobility—that marks twenty-first-century images.

In this new context, Sontag has argued in “The Decay of Cinema,” cinephilia too has undergone a profound transformation. She attributes this transformation to two things. On the one hand is the loss of the traditional movie theater, which cannot be replaced by domestic home screens, no matter how big they are. “To be kidnapped, you have to be in a movie theater, seated in the dark among anonymous strangers,” she comments. This is a perfect definition of an ecstatic experience. On the other hand, she attributes the transformation to the “sheer ubiquity of moving images which has steadily undermined the standards people once had both for cinema as art and for cinema as popular entertainment.”³⁸ Similarly, Francesco Casetti asserts that two of the most characteristic traits of cinema—“its status as a photographic medium and its identity as a collective show”³⁹—have been profoundly transformed in the twenty-first century. Inadvertently, both Sontag and Casetti are referring to what Steyerl and Espinosa were espousing, which is the democratization of image making, the reality that there are more films and media being made around the world than are being widely seen. As Jean-Michel Frodon has emphasized, there are more people making media than ever before—“it is not only about quality; it is about diversity of style, geographical and cultural origin, format, purpose, etc.”—which can be understood as a product of globalization and of digital media in the last decade of the twentieth century. The contradiction is that this exponential growth coincides directly with the narrowing of traditional distribution channels for both television and film.⁴⁰ The expansion also coincides with the invention and reinvention of smaller, fragmentary, and distributed forms of collective and ecstatic experience.

Festival Effervescence

Over the last three decades, cultural festivals have emerged as important channels for the distribution and promotion of independent, experimental, and commercial media. Film festivals, in particular, have grown in number from a dozen international festivals in the early 1960s to a network of over one thousand synchronized annual “events” and innumerable nonsynchronized festivals and parties in cities around the world—and this does not include the innumerable local scenes and specialized film screenings that appear alongside the larger festivals.

For Bataille, the festival is everything; it is “the only serious language.”⁴¹ He developed his theory of general economy inspired by the idea of the potlatch, a form of gift giving tied to social life studied by Marcel Mauss in precapitalist indigenous cultures. Mauss and his uncle Émile Durkheim profoundly influenced the surrealists, including Bataille, in their understanding of the central importance of collectivity as energy, as enthusiasm, and as communication/community. The phenomenon of the potlatch is articulated through complex social rituals in which expenditure is privileged over acquisition. Such relational forms are completely foreign to the linear rationality of production and restriction that defines capitalist modes of production. The idea of “expenditure without return” and personal and collective enthusiasm, along with the movement hors de soi (beyond the self), were concepts that Bataille developed through Durkheim’s sociology. As Bataille puts it in “L’économie à la mesure de l’univers” (Economy on the scale of the universe):

You are only, and you must know it, an explosion of energy. You can’t change it. All these human works around you are only an overflow of vital energy. … You can’t deny it: the desire is in you, it’s intense; you could never separate it from mankind. Essentially, the human being has the responsibility here [a la charge ici] to spend, in glory, what is accumulated on the earth, what is scattered by the sun. Essentially, he’s a laugher, a dancer, a giver of festivals. This is clearly the only serious language.⁴²

Festivals are forms of intimacy, giving, and community. Durkheim developed the idea of “collective effervescence” in his work on religion to understand how collective experience at communal gatherings intensifies and augments individual experiences: the gathering of crowds in close proximity “generates a kind of electricity that quickly transports them to an extraordinary degree of exaltation.”⁴³ Bataille extended Durkheim’s ideas into his own theory of religion and to wider spheres of experience including sacred festivals: “The festival is the fusion of human life. For the thing and the individual, it is the crucible where distinctions melt in the intense heat of intimate life. But its intimacy is dissolved in the real and individualized positing of the ensemble that is at stake in the rituals.” For Bataille the festival, like “the essence” of religious experience, is always “limited,” because the “fusion of human life” which breaks down the borders of the self fails at the very limits of self-consciousness.⁴⁴

On a less sacred note, Bataille’s ideas can tell us something about the feeling of excitement, effervescence, and shared affinity that film festivals, at their very best, can foster. The expansion of the film festival circuit in the twenty-first century can be seen as a significant cultural expression of globalization and of media democracy organized around a “circuit” of events and screenings.⁴⁵ On the one hand, it represents unequal economic development that defines neoliberalism, as large corporate festivals dominate the circuit with timetables and locations. On the other hand, the growth of grassroots festival cultures and their changing appearance—the development of social media (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook etc.), database cinema (i-docs), and different media platforms (augmented reality, virtual reality, architectural projection) and games as new screens—enable different kinds of stories and documentary forms to develop. As a result, diverse public spheres are created that can give a voice to what Guattari calls “collective singularization,” thus expanding the democratic public sphere as visual media become more integrated and embedded into everyday environments.

Film festivals are a postwar phenomenon, and the mid-1960s in particular represents the moment when they expanded film cultures globally. National cinemas (Italy, Spain, Poland, France, Sweden, Argentina) and art cinema (often one and the same) were valued by a new generation of cinephiles who recognized film’s distinct expressive capacity to reflect on modernity and to disseminate political messages through festival circuits. During this period, the notion of a global political stage defined a new mandate for international film festivals, as they became forums for the assertion of cultural difference, political views, and counterpublics. It is fair to say that the new global reality of the mid-1960s was not only captured on American television, but was also created through television, particularly the idea, inaugurated by TV reporting and satellite technology during the Vietnam War, that “the world is watching.”⁴⁶ This sense of an international viewership was reinforced through the cosmopolitan film festival circuit.

Third World film collectives challenged the art cinemas of Western Europe just as these art cinemas had denounced the commercial distractions of mainstream media. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Third Cinema movement emerged in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, where filmmakers were called upon to help to create a politicized film culture that would engage with issues of neocolonialism and subdevelopment as well as race, religion, and national identity. The pivotal manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World” by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino (published in Havana in 1969) defined “first cinema” (commercial cinema) and “second cinema” (art films) as modes of production that create a film language conducive to their respective national concerns. Solanas and Getino called for both types of cinema to be challenged by a “third cinema” that would undo their universalist discourses.⁴⁷

Films from directors such as Ousmane Sembene, Patricio Guzman, Glauber Rocha, and Julio Garcia Espinoza supported collective practices and used international festivals as a means to spread political messages. Moreover, films censored in one country could be screened in the new international public sphere. Many larger events contained dynamic and ephemeral film festivals at their core, as we saw with both the Festival of Britain and Expo 67. It is not surprising that film festivals were tied not only to cities⁴⁸ but also increasingly to social identities—women’s and feminist film festivals, film festivals by diasporic communities or indigenous communities, LGBTQ festivals, festivals centered on mental illness, and more. Such film festivals sought to consolidate a community voice and gain recognition within the collective fabric of civil society while creating spaces for the particular community to gather to be together and to participate in cultural exchanges. Festivals enable alternative public spheres and open spaces for the incommensurable.⁴⁹ As events, they must often balance the demands of governments with those of the commercial media industries that are often their sponsors. Today film festivals are spaces of contradiction as capitalist enterprises. Indeed, there is little doubt that the larger corporate festivals bear little trace of the search for intimacy (the “fusion of human life”) of the sacred ethos described by Bataille.⁵⁰

In many ways, in the context of the “Decay of Cinema” described by Sontag at the turn of the twenty-first century, and in the context of the ubiquity of images and media, the film festival serves to reinstate into the filmgoing experience the aura that Benjamin described as “the unique phenomenon of a distance.”⁵¹ Film festivals are distinctly exciting, mimetic forms of leisure. All festivals bring a sense of excitement to a place. While they highlight mechanically reproduced art, they reinvent a role for the original and the singular in the age of the poor image: the premiere, the presence of stars, and the sensorial materiality of the event (architecture, landscape, live music, food, fashion, general ambiance) are all central to bringing people together and creating a sense of excitement through the event.

In their sociology of leisure, Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning situate excitement as a quality characteristic of certain kinds of social occasions. In highly organized, postindustrial state societies, the “civilizing process” has relegated violent and spontaneous outbursts of passion and overt emotionality to the sphere of leisure (or crime). Leisure replaces the older functions of religious “enthusiasm” as described by Aristotle. Mimetic activities “from sports to music and drama, from murder films to Westerns, from hunting and fishing to racing and painting, from gambling and chess to swinging and rocking” are “quests for excitement” that serve as a kind of escape from the self-restraint practiced in everyday life.⁵² What unites film festivals with this list of leisurely activities is that they incorporate the object of consumption with the action of consuming in a performative mix that belongs to the expressive order of the cosmopolitan experience. No individual film stands out in particular (although there are discoveries by the ever-more-important film critic and audience preferences conveyed through social media), but what is experienced is the collective adventure of movie going, of experiencing an ecology of images. Indeed, while the festival ecology is collectively experienced, the festival program is also highly individualized, as viewers must chart their own viewing trajectories because the program content, even for smaller festivals, generally exceeds any one viewer’s screening capacity—it is generally impossible to see everything. Biennales offer expressly this sense of an open cultural database, an environment that invites visitors to carve out their own creative pathways. This collective experience is a counterpoint to the solitary act of spectatorship in the private sphere that mirrors the decentralized media spectatorship of the global mediascape. Moreover, the cultural offerings of films, videos, art installations, and new media that stretch the boundaries of screen culture (cross-platform, VR, etc.), conferences, and technical and creative workshops are far more diversified than what is usually on offer. This is best summarized in the Toronto International Film Festival’s most successful advertising campaign, its 2003 slogan “Lose yourself in film.”

I would like to turn now to examine another aspect of ephemeral festival culture that is often neglected—the sites and places of projection, and the work of extraordinary projectionists who materialize the technological complexities of festivals with their different viewing formats, theater spaces, and distribution and projection mechanisms. In particular, I will ground this discussion in a more specific focus on the place, ecology, and economy of these new kinds of ephemeral viewing, by examining a highly robust microcinema called CineCycle that was established in 1991 by artist-projectionist Martin Heath in Toronto. Heath’s commitment to microcinema began with his involvement in the rich cinematic landscape of London. But, first, a few words about microcinemas and what Allan Stoekl has called “the postsustainable economy.”⁵³

Projecting in a Postsustainable Economy

The term “microcinema” was first established by Rebecca Barten and David Sherman in 1994 with their project Total Mobile Home microCINEMA in San Francisco, a few years after Heath founded CineCycle, but with a shared aesthetic sensibility for mobility, portability, and movement. The word encompasses both inexpensive forms of media production and small, makeshift cinemas in which to show such works. I situate these media practices in the cinematic experiments and DIY cultures of the 1960s that we saw were an intrinsic aspect of Expo 67’s utopian energies. Such media practices are very much tied to, and in Heath’s case, grow out of the rich experiments with cinema, place making, and architecture that defined London of the 1950s and 1960s. Very small spaces, often improvisational architectural forms, harken back to an earlier time in the film culture of nickelodeons, storefronts, and small cinemas. They also point toward a future of maker cultures that belongs to what Stoekl has called the “postsustainable economy”—an economy that is beyond a sustainable economy, that is the aftermath of anthropogenic climate change. This economy makes its first appearance with the oil crisis of the 1970s and early 1980s when many of the industrialized nations of the world (the United States, Canada, Western Europe, England, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand) were severely affected by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)’s oil embargo of October 1973. The embargo, which was imposed to retaliate against the economic aid that the United States had given to Israel, was lifted by March 1974. By then the cost of oil had gone from US$3 per barrel to nearly $12 globally.⁵⁴ The repercussions of this “crisis,” described as an “oil crisis,” were felt in many areas of the North American economy, especially the car industry—leading to a shift away from the large “gas-guzzling” American cars that dominated the 1960s and to the development of a political discourse in the United States about crisis that could be used to justify all kinds of political maneuvers, wars, and invasions against oil-rich countries.⁵⁵

Many countries were awakened to the idea that fossil fuels were limited and that alternative energy sources would have to be found. Energy itself became visible. US President Jimmy Carter is famous for having introduced energy policies and conservation measures for dealing with this scenario of future scarcity.⁵⁶ Stoekl’s book Bataille’s Peak situates notions of the postsustainable economy within a context of energy use (in particular oil) and depletion. As I shall examine, many artists were deeply responsive to this problem and began experimenting with inflatable forms of sustainable architecture. Martin Heath’s longtime practice as a projectionist and a builder of inflatable cinemas will guide us through this very fertile period of creative and utopian experimentation.

Heath’s interest in cinema began with his involvement in the film societies in London, England. The Festival of Britain, fueled by the British Film Institute’s pedagogical imperative, had encouraged cinephilia and created an openness to film culture in Britain that is still alive today. Heath was first exposed to the architectonics of cinema circuits through his job at Contemporary Films in London in the mid-1960s. Established in New York in the late 1940s by the socialist film distributor Charles Cooper, Contemporary Films became one of the foremost nontheatrical distributors in the postwar 16mm market, expanding distribution to school libraries, film societies, churches, and community groups. Cooper’s ambitions, however, exceeded the limits of underground film distribution. When he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, Contemporary Films was taken over by Leo Dratfield, who continued to build on Cooper’s political mandate. Cooper then created another branch of the company in London. During the early 1950s, the Communist Party of Great Britain experienced a mini-renaissance. The New Era Film Club, conceived as a film society, a 16mm projection service for clubs and trade unions, and a production group, established branches in several cities.⁵⁷ Through Cooper’s connections with a number of Soviet film directors, Contemporary Films Ltd., along with Ivor Montagu’s Plato Films Ltd. (which replaced the defunct Progressive Film Institute in 1951), received some of its funding from the British-Soviet Friendship Society. Committed to distributing the work of socialist directors from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China, both Plato and Contemporary Films used the motto “See the Other Half of the World.” Cooper was licensed to show the re-released prints of many of Eisenstein’s films.⁵⁸ With an extensive 16mm library of international art and avant-garde films, Cooper built a distribution circuit in England much as he had done earlier in the United States, and by the late 1960s he had purchased two cinemas in London. It was in this context that Martin Heath began a lifelong career in film when, as a young man, he was hired to manage the film library at Contemporary Films.

Heath also began to build his own film collection. Although he was required to destroy damaged film prints (respecting the integrity of the original film), only a photograph of someone taking an axe to the film can was needed as evidence of a print’s destruction. Adept at faking these deaths by axe, Heath rescued many films. Thus began his love affair with film repair and projection. But the job also introduced him to Cooper’s highly politicized vision of film distribution, according to which the creation of circuits of distribution was an implicit but all too often neglected component of politically committed filmmaking. The refinement of 16mm projection technologies enabled the development of film screenings outside the realm of commercial cinemas. Although Cooper opened several conventional cinemas in the late 1960s, his early strategy focused on distributing films and projectionists to alternative screening spaces.

As a result of his employment at Contemporary Films, Heath was hired to help construct a cinema for the Russian Pavilion at Expo 67, an experience that further influenced and extended his conception of film distribution and exhibition. Heath had earlier been impressed by the Canadian National Film Board’s mobile cinema experiments, which took filmmaking into more remote parts of Canada. Such experiments were themselves inspired by the Soviet mobile-cinema projects (using trains and automobiles) of the 1920s.

Heath left Contemporary Films and began working for the English event producer Rita Jarvis at a company called Fair Enterprises, which screened music films like Monterey Pop (D. A. Pennebaker, 1968) and Don’t Look Back (D. A. Pennebaker, 1967) at makeshift venues and concert halls across England. Heath also worked as an independent projectionist offering his skills and services to small venues and for special screenings. In 1968, he joined forces with the Electric Cinema Club, a cinema operated by several Canadians, including Deanne Taylor, who was fresh out of film school. The group had rented a defunct porno theater on Portobello Road with the intent of creating an avant-garde cinema. Heath worked with Taylor to update the facility and install proper 16mm and 35mm projection. Taylor had starred in Jean-Luc Godard’s political collage One Plus One (1968) which intercut footage of the Rolling Stones in a London sound studio recording “Sympathy for the Devil” with images of the Black Panthers in a Battersea junkyard, a movie production crane and crew shooting a film on a beach, and a reading from Mein Kampf in a bookshop, among many other elements—all geared toward conceptualizing a post-1968 anticapitalist revolution. When Godard discovered that the film’s producer, Iain Quarrier, had retitled the film Sympathy for the Devil and added a complete version of the Rolling Stone’s song to the end of the film, he told an audience at the London Film Festival to come and watch his own version of the film at the Electric Cinema Club. This event, of course, became mythic for the club. All of these activities throughout the 1960s served to support what would become Heath’s one true love: inflatables.

Inflatable City

Heath’s mobile structures and events owe much to the rich architectural and art experiments that came of age in 1960s London. Heath’s ideas for mobile structures grew out of a utopian spirit, influenced by, among other things, Cooper’s Contemporary Films, the dynamic designs for public space developed through the work of the Eventstructure Research Group, the pneumatic artist Graham Stevens, the radical architecture magazine Archigram, and especially the Fun Palace project imagined by Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood which sought to reinvent urban public space. All of these activities were commonly inspired by the ecological designs of Buckminster Fuller and grew out of the dynamic art discourse of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) along with the Independent Group.

Anthony Vidler maintains that Buckminster Fuller’s 1958 lecture delivered at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) exerted a tremendous influence over a new generation of architects and artists in the United Kingdom. As Vidler recalls it, Fuller spoke for three hours about his world system project which was materializing an integrated framework of ecology and economy. As Fuller’s own chronology underlines, 1957 was the first International Geophysical Year and the year “the first satellite (Sputnik) was launched by Earthians” as “humanity initiate[d] the Space Age.”⁵⁹ Vidler, a student at Cambridge University’s neo-Corbusian School of Architecture, recalls that Fuller’s ideas were fervently received by a new generation of architects and artists hungry for more contemporary aesthetic engagements with the environment and ecology. This new generation’s appreciation was grounded in another enthusiasm to reconnect man, machine, and nature—a connection that had been ripped apart by the dehumanizing atrocities of the Second World War.⁶⁰ In particular, architects, designers, and critics involved with the ICA and the Independent Group, such as Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, Magda Cordell, Reyner Banham, Nigel Henderson, Alison and Peter Smithson, James Sterling, Lawrence Alloway, John McHale,⁶¹ and others, were creating a rigorous and dynamic art-science discourse that sought to challenge the established regimes of architectural and planning practices associated with Le Corbusier and the Athens Charter. In his landmark essay of 1955, Banham described the aesthetics of the Independent Group in terms of “New Brutalism” for its emphasis on materials and structures minus the gloss and elegance of the older movement.⁶² These artists sought to reimagine architecture in terms of time, form, and nature. Beginning a few months after the Festival of Britain opened in 1951, they staged a series of polemical and experimental exhibitions at the ICA, starting with “Growth and Form” which engaged with the work of Scottish mathematical biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson. These explorations culminated with the polemical proto-consumerist sci-fi exhibition “Living City” by Archigram in 1963.⁶³ For Vidler, these nonutopian research-oriented exhibitions—which included “Parallel of Life and Art” (Reyner Banham, 1953), “Man, Machine and Nature” (Richard Hamilton, 1955), and “This Is Tomorrow” (Bryan Robertson, 1956)—stood in stark contrast to the nostalgic longing for the past celebrated by the Festival of Britain.⁶⁴

The sardonic humor and pop art sensibility of the Independent Group offered a much more discursive approach to the past and future than did the Festival of Britain—a standout is McHale’s extraordinary Americana collage poster Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Home So Different, So Appealing? produced for Group Two’s (Hamilton and John Voelcker) contribution to the landmark exhibition “This Is Tomorrow.” The poster, which was a collage made from magazines McHale had brought back from the United States, featured all the consumer items of the new home (television, tape recorder, vacuum cleaner, and Spam!); significantly, McHale placed on the ceiling of the home a cutting from Look magazine of the first photograph of a half earth as seen from a mile-high rocket in orbit, predating NASA’s photograph of the whole earth by over a decade.⁶⁵

Martin Heath was exposed to this artistic context in London over a decade later, in the 1960s and early 1970s. His ambition was to create shared spaces and collective cinematic experiences that were adaptable to different environments as well as mobile and portable. This desire was furthered by his collaborations with the great pneumatics artist and environmental scientist Graham Stevens, who was among the first to create massive inflatable balloon-like structures in the mid-1960s as environmental conceptual art forms. Beginning with early experiments such as Elastic Touch (1965), which featured three balloons filled with liquid, gas, or solid material, Stevens’s ideas were expanded into a 75-foot-by-30-foot Spacefield (1966), the first “monochromatic” pneumatic environment, where participants experienced physiological sensory changes in situ. Stevens’s kinetic sculpture Walking on Earth, Air, Fire and Water (1966) invited participants to interact with the elemental environment by stepping inside pneumatic shapes. Heath would reproduce a similar experimental structure in Canada. Due to their size, the works were exhibited outside gallery spaces to interact with environments, which became an inherent part of the project.

One of Stevens’s largest and most famous constructions was Desert Cloud (1972), a massive inflatable flying Mylar platform which he filmed in Kuwait as it drifted through the desert like a large cloud, creating shade patches on the ground. The inflatable cloud housed tools that conducted a multifaceted exploration of the transformation of energy in weather systems (particularly evaporation, condensation, and precipitation). This experiment with sustainable energy offered a potential tool against drought.

In his article “Pneumatics and Atmospheres” published in Architectural Digest in 1972, Stevens describes the new medium of air:

Air is in our bodies, our bodies live in air and the planet earth we live on is housed in air. Air is the physical connection between us and our environment, transmitting our sense experience of light, heat, sound, taste, smell and pressure. But its very transparency prevents us from observing its continuous transformations. Atmosfields and pneumatic environments aim to reveal the aesthetic of air, both in the natural states which make up the atmosphere and by using thin membranes to manifest their motions and forces, in order to extend and change our direct experience of air and our relation to our atmospheric environment.⁶⁶

Such experiments were openly inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s concern with energy and natural resources, and responded to his Design Science Decade challenge to find expedient solutions to environmental problems. Architecture was no longer a static construction, imposed on the environment; it was the environment: responsive, transparent, interactive, flexible, and immersive. Often only two elements were needed in the construction: soft, flexible membranes often made of polyethylene (plastic) and air.⁶⁷ Stevens’s inflatables expressed a new affective materialization of the atmospheric environment as immersive architecture.

Heath and Stevens met in 1971 at a large outdoor cinema event called Phun City held in Brighton. Stevens produced a large inflatable “atmosfield” that could hold four hundred people and accommodate different performances, happenings, and events. The event included film screenings, music, and readings by the likes of William Burroughs—no doubt organized through one of the many alternative book stores in Brighton, which was also known to be a haven for hippies, gay men, and lesbians in the 1960s and 1970s. Heath was the projectionist for the Phun City event, where he was also enlisted by Stevens to fill up hundreds of inflatable water seats which served as anchors to keep the structure from floating away. After Phun City, Heath collaborated with Stevens on numerous other inflatable architectures for cultural events in the United Kingdom.

Figure 5.2 Exterior view of Graham Stevens’s “Pneumatic Environment (1968)” at Phun City, 1970–1971. Photographer: Andrew Tweedie. GASACT © Graham Stevens.

Figure 5.3 Interior of “Pneumatic Environment (1968)” at Luton Arts Festival, January 1970. Photograph courtesy of Graham Stevens. GASACT © Graham Stevens.

According to Stevens, Phun City was the brainchild of architect Cedric Price who, along with the radical theater director Joan Littlewood, had imagined a new kind of public gathering called Fun Palace.⁶⁸ As Littlewood would lay out the project in the New Scientist (1964):

In London we are going to create a university of the streets—not a gracious park—but foretaste of the pleasures of the future. The “Fun Arcade” will be full of the games that psychologists and electronics engineers now devise for the service of industry, or war. Knowledge will be piped in through jukeboxes. … An acting area will afford the therapy of the theatre for everyone: men and women from factories, shops and offices bored with their daily routine, will be able to re-enact incidents from their own experience, wake to a critical awareness of reality. … But the essence of the place will be informality—nothing obligatory—anything goes. There will be no permanent structures.⁶⁹

As early as 1961, Littlewood imagined a nonsegregated open space that preserved the best of the pleasure gardens and working men’s institutes. Visitors from all backgrounds were invited to stroll or sit for hours—educational and creative activities ranging from the theatrical and artistic to the cybernetic and scientific were multiple, variable, and intended to commingle in a novel interdisciplinary pedagogical experience. To build this “University of the Streets,” Littlewood approached the young architect Price, whom she had met in 1962, to design this structure. Price was the perfect architect for the project. He was heavily influenced not only by Buckminster Fuller’s ideas of architecture in movement (time), but also by the work of the Independent Group and by the discourses of cybernetics. Price was also interested in a new kind of “active and dynamic architecture which would permit multiple uses by constantly adapting to change.”⁷⁰ As Stanley Mathews points out, it was a space that was conceived in temporal terms, and in terms of process: “The Fun Palace would have to be an entity whose essence was continual change, which permitted multiple and indeterminate uses. His designs began to describe an improvisational architecture of constant activity, in a continuous process of construction, dismantling, and reassembly.”⁷¹ If Phun City was an experimental offshoot of Fun Palace, its combination of media and architecture enabled a decentered gathering of people from different backgrounds to escape their everyday lives for a weekend “laboratory of fun.”⁷² In effect, Stevens’s and later Heath’s inflatable architectures were the quintessential answer to the process-oriented architecture that Price was looking to devise for the Fun Palace.

When Heath moved to Toronto in the early 1970s, he lived for two years at Rochdale College, an experiment in student-run education at the University of Toronto that opened in 1968. Canada’s first free university, Rochdale was also the largest cooperative student-housing residence in North America, and was named after a town in England that had been home to the first cooperative society, founded in 1844—the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers. Rochdale College, some would argue, was the quintessential, utopian expression of the “Expanded Cinema University,”⁷³ and certainly it was framed, and is remembered, as a utopian undertaking.⁷⁴ Opening as a non-degree-granting pedagogical experiment with more than eight hundred students, the residence consisted of a large high-rise tower at the center of the city specifically designed for communal living. The residence housed a theater specifically devoted to film and performance and was inspired by the ideas of McLuhan, who was teaching his unique vision of media studies only a few blocks away.⁷⁵ Film and theater were regarded as the principal experimental media for creating new kinds of awareness at Rochdale in the late 1960s.

Figure 5.4 Sale held at Rochdale College on August 26, 1971, to raise funds for legal fees the residents believed would be needed when Canada Mortgage and Housing (CMHC) assumed management. Photograph courtesy of John Wood.

While at Rochdale, Heath worked with Deanne Taylor, whom he had met at the Electric Cinema Club in London. Together they made the rock documentary Son of Tutti Frutti (1972), an anthology of clips from the history of rock ’n’ roll music (1955–1965), which screened weekly at Toronto’s Roxy Cinema throughout 1972. Taylor and Heath adapted the film from an eight-hour, two-screen happening that they had designed for various music events in England in the late 1960s and 1970s, including a very successful Grateful Dead concert. In Toronto, Taylor cofounded VideoCabaret with Michael Hollingsworth, which combined video, performance, and theater. Heath worked with both of them on many of their early presentations and innovative events that incorporated multiple video broadcasts of live screen performances—benchmarks in the early history of video and performance art.

Heath was always interested in the performative aspects of distribution. When he decided to remain in Toronto, he initially worked with Linda Beath at New Cinema Enterprises, a distribution company. Beath, along with Taylor and others, organized the Toronto Women and Film International Festival (WFIF) in 1973, one of the first women’s film festivals in the world, which was tied to a growing network of feminist film events and publications.⁷⁶ As codirector of VideoCabaret, Taylor would continue to experiment with live video performance at various theaters and alternative gallery spaces throughout Toronto.

From the mid-1970s onward, Heath became involved in most of the major film events in the city, either as a technology consultant, a “revisionist,” a projectionist, or a builder of cinemas. WFIF was the precursor to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF, formerly the Festival of Festivals), established in 1976. While continuing to work on different events involving film and video, Heath invented a position for himself at TIFF as a “film revisionist” and projectionist, managing two screens at the St. Lawrence Centre. He argued, correctly, that union projectionists would be unable to handle the varied and special needs of diverse film materials arriving from around the world. He continued in this position for more than three decades—a position unique to the Toronto Festival, now the largest film festival in the world. So omnipresent was he in Toronto’s film community that the first photograph in Brian Johnson’s Brave Films Wild Nights (2000), a history of TIFF, is a full-page photo of Heath at the helm—spooling films onto 35mm reels.

In 1975, Heath received a Canada Council for the Arts Explorations Grant along with artist Chris Clifford to produce a series of inflatable mobile cinemas that would tour throughout Ontario and other parts of Canada for three summers (1976–1978). The inflatable “Cinema Mobile” expanded out of a van, inverting the meaning of what was originally a large sculpture produced from an inflatable penis created by Harry Pasternek and Michael Hayden, which Heath and Clifford transformed into a womblike vessel that could contain people, film projections, and screens.⁷⁷ Able to seat about thirty people at a time, this inflatable cinema was transported to and set up in communities, in parks, and on beaches in cities and small towns across Canada to create an ephemeral sense of togetherness and a mobile experience of cinema.

Figure 5.5 Martin Heath’s “Cinema Mobile” on location in northern Ontario. Photograph courtesy of Martin Heath.

Figure 5.6 Inside Martin Heath’s inflatable cinema during a screening in northern Ontario. Photograph courtesy of Martin Heath.

The inflatables used a portable aircraft heater, formerly property of the Royal Canadian Air Force, to preheat the inflatable, the cinema projectors, a generator, and a sewing machine. Inside his inflatables, Heath screened works from his growing collection of art and avant-garde films (today numbering two thousand) by using a variety of projectors from his collection of historical and state-of-the-art film projectors (numbered at more than fifty). He also screened National Film Board documentaries for some of the more organized community-based screenings, especially among Aboriginal communities in northern Ontario. Along with his inflatable mobile cinema, Heath produced a series of inflatable Walking on Water structures as part of his overall mobile cinema experience. No doubt Heath had learned the technique from Stevens, who had produced a piece called Walking on Air. For Walking on Water, cubes or spherical membranes were filled with air to allow participants literally to walk on this element, offering a utopian expression of architecture as corporeal extension.

Figure 5.7 Martin Heath, *Walking on Water* sculpture (1975). Photograph courtesy of Martin Heath.

All of these environmental structures emphasized the relation between inside and outside, which shifted depending on the nature of the construction—encouraging reflection on the elemental connection (air, water) to the outside and inside of our bodies. These environments also created new kinds of acoustics and ways of being together as a collective. Stevens explains: “as internal pressure varies so does body movement.” He writes that participation in environmental structures is bodily because

People are completely integrated and become part of the structure.

Body Energy activates the structure.

The structures are tools, relating the body to the environment and relating people to people.

Mental Valency—the ability to combine with the minds and lives of the participants.

Practicality—the experience is easy is to repeat.

The structures respond on the human scale.⁷⁸

Stevens goes on to discuss a waterbed that had been the first Walking on Water structure, which was repurposed as a floor in the “Structures gonflables” (Inflatable Structures) exhibition in Paris in 1968.⁷⁹

Experiments with inflatable structures and pneumatic art forms were unfolding all over Europe (especially in France and Germany) and the United States from the late 1960s onward. Knowledge and techniques were shared through international experimental art and performance events, DIY magazines, through popular music cultures (the Rolling Stones’ inflatable penis was their concert icon from the mid-1970s on), through protest cultures, and through a growing industry in sustainable architecture. As discussed in the previous chapter, along with Fuller, Frei Otto was a forerunner in lightweight tensile and membrane construction. Fresh from his massive success at Expo 67, Otto hosted the first International Colloquium on Pneumatic Structures at the University of Stuttgart. Convened by the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS), the colloquium had an impressive list of attendees,⁸⁰ and this is where Stevens first met Cedric Price.⁸¹

Unmade Space

CineCycle’s urban vernacular, intimate size, and idiosyncratic blurring of the boundaries between work and leisure, bikes and films (referencing a post-Fordist economy), and finally its insistence on the ride rather than the destination, are intrinsic aspects of its character and design. The fact that Heath must clear his bicycle shop out of the way and set up chairs before each screening produces the sense of a collapsible, mutable space. Indeed, as Littlewood had conceived of the Fun Palace, CineCycle is constantly being made and remade—it is adaptable; it can be appropriated by different events and media. There is something else about CineCycle, something rarely mentioned, which is nevertheless very much part of its blurring of “the rim of the frame”: CineCycle is also where Martin Heath lives. The space has no visible evidence of this domesticity, however; it is something that is just known. But this, perhaps, is what produces, in the experience of entering the cinema, a feeling of belonging or being at home.

Designed and built by a cinephile, CineCycle is a space dedicated to film and media history, with old bicycles and film posters mounted on the walls, a variety of projectors stored at the back (now including a hand-cranked 35mm projector), and the old espresso machine brewing freshly roasted coffee beans. It is very much like specialized music scenes, which Will Straw has argued can be read as spaces “organized against change,” through which “regularized obsolescence” can be resisted and minority tastes supported by networks of small-scale institutions.⁸⁴ Resistance to obsolescence—the use of recycled, historical or found footage, and home movies—is common to many alternative and experimental film and media practices. These methods of appropriation correspond perfectly with CineCycle’s original mandate to maintain a screening space for obsolete formats such as 8mm film (artist Petra Chevrier custom-built Toronto’s only Xenon-lamp 8mm projector, which features a 2,000-foot reel), technologies such as Fisher-Price’s PixelVision, and famously, the bicycle-powered Super-8 projector built by Heath himself. As the locus of a scene, CineCycle constitutes a shared project of giving that exceeds the simple avant-garde dictate to create the new. Cinema is more than movies; it consists of the place, the material culture of film/media, the projectors, the spaces of gathering, the events, and the people who are part of it. It is the web of relationships, networks, systems of exchange and energy. In that way, CineCyle, like Heath and Stevens’s inflatable structures, is an umwelt—a shared environment. Human relations (labor and imagination) are embedded in and performed through the material culture of Heath’s cinema (bikes, wheels, reels, film, cameras, projectors, screens, chairs, coffee, etc.). The cinema fosters a scene, which makes of history an unfinished project—a living archive that is found, given, and shared collectively. CineCycle is not simply the vision of a single individual. Rather, as Hardt and Negri describe “the common,” it belongs to the “spiral” that is produced by a dynamic experimental film scene, by a network of artists, places, events, films and media, projectors, programmers, curators, and archives.

In this sense, I want to situate CineCycle within the framework of postsustainable culture. Allan Stoekl proposes the term “postsustainable” as an extension of Bataille’s notion of general economy, writing: “The peak of consumption and the revelation of the finitude, the depletion, of the calculable world is the opening of another world of energy expenditure and the opening of a wholly different regime.”⁸⁵ Stoekl is referring to forms of culture that take an integrated approach to expenditure. Bataille’s system, presented in the three volumes of The Accursed Share, is based on his knowledge of the history of expenditure (he was, after all, a medievalist and a librarian) and his notion of general economy, which, as noted above, derived from the potlatch. His conceptualization of general economy, then, begins by proposing an integrated view of energy expenditure. Taking the car industry as an example, Bataille declares that it is possible to change a tire without considering “the whole, of which the tire … is an integral part.” He goes on:

Between the production of automobiles and the general movement of the economy, the interdependence is rather clear, but the economy taken as a whole is usually studied as if it were a matter of an isolatable system of operation. Production and consumption are linked together, but, considered jointly, it does not seem difficult to study them as one might study an elementary operation relatively independent of that which is not. … In other words, isn’t there a need to study the system of human production and consumption within a much larger framework?⁸⁶

Bataille advocates a transformation of the ethics upon which capitalist economies have been erected. He calls for a shift from a restrictive economy (i.e., an economy based on scarcity) to a general economy that does not uncritically encourage economic growth without considering the materiality of the earth. He proposes a cosmic ecology in which processes of energy expenditure (economies) and the nature on which these processes depend are considered together. Finally, he articulates that “[a]n immense industrial network cannot be managed in the same way that one changes a tire. … It expresses a circuit of cosmic energy on which it depends, which it cannot limit, and whose laws it cannot ignore without consequences. Woe to those who, to the very end, insist on regulating the movement that exceeds them with the narrow mind of the mechanic who changes a tire.”⁸⁷

In reading The Accursed Share, one is struck by a seeming shift in Bataille’s writing from eroticism and sacrifice to a focus on the material life of human existence and a radical proposal for rethinking political economy and community in ecological terms. Indeed, Cédric Mong-Hy has argued that the book is in actuality the work of two men. Bataille’s correspondence indicates that he and his longtime friend and advisor, the nuclear physicist Georges Ambrosino, were both involved in its early formulation. Since Ambrosino was Bataille’s scientific tutor and intellectual companion from 1934 to 1947, Mong-Hy speculates that in all likelihood Ambrosino introduced Bataille to Vernadsky’s thought.⁸⁸ Yet the book also takes an approach to culture that is consistent with Bataille’s earlier work: the “unemployed negativity,” or unproductive consumption, like the capacity for slippage and excess, enables thinking beyond oneself in order to disclose the world in relation to a universe beyond. Such a project, Giorgio Agamben suggests, is a kind of “epilogue” in which “human negativity is preserved as ‘remnant.’”⁸⁹ Such an undertaking arguably culminated in Bataille’s final book, Tears of Eros (1961)—a historical/anthropological/archaeological collection of representational “remnants” of the relationship between death and eroticism across the ages, building on ideas he developed in Eroticism and Prehistoric Painting.

Though Bataille still relies on the fundamental oppositions of life and death, eroticism and horror, luxury and waste, and so on, he proposes a practice of philosophy through negation: philosophy as a practice, and theory as a processing, that is incomplete, unfinished, and open: “We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity.” Bataille reclaims and redeems this lost continuity through fusion with another body or object in extreme moments when the singular self dissolves into unity, like “one wave lost in a multitude of waves.”⁹⁰ And both laughter and eroticism are pathways into the unknowable, the sacred, or the beyond.

Stoekl analyzes the practices of gleaning, collecting, and recycling in Agnès Varda’s beautiful film Les glaneurs et la glaneuse / The Gleaners and I (2000) as an engagement with the concept of general economy. He argues that this film captures the zeitgeist of new forms of “remediation” or gleaning in the digital age. Defining history as an intrinsic aspect of postsustainable culture, Stoekl asserts: “The recycled object is also violently riven by the trace, the scar of its former appropriation.”⁹¹ This materiality of media is inherent to Varda’s film, which reflects upon its means of production in a manner that is constantly folding back on itself and is deeply reflexive of its own material conditions. In this small and profound documentary about gleaning objects and food, images of waste situate the act of recycling in the contexts of Varda’s aging body, her own collection of things, and her travels, which she archived with the then newly available lightweight camcorder (Sony DV CAM DSR 300), itself becoming part of her collection.⁹² Varda breaks down without collapsing the tension between subject and object, objectifying and losing herself (she records her gray hair and her wrinkled hands). The camera is the tool by means of which fragments of her life and her own connection to the land will endure as memory objects (including the camera) long after she is gone. Les glaneurs et la glaneuse frames Varda in a history and ecology of gleaning, and ultimately connects her to the world of things—networks, relations, and histories. Her film is not, therefore, about death, but about life after death—with its myriad of things, the film is a kind of festival of general economies, each object pointing beyond itself. While it was shot using the small-scale video camera, its intimate views nonetheless offer a larger vantage point onto the terrestrial world, onto discarded objects, disregarded people, invisible histories, and their connection to the planet. Varda is able to link an ethics of the real with an ethics of capitalist consumption. Her integrated approach to expenditure reveals scarcity for what it is (in this instance, an unethical fiction), and her documenting of gleaning practices in a postsustainable context, as Stoekl argues, suggests possible futures.⁹³ Varda not only succeeds in tapping into the turn-of-the-twenty-first-century zeitgeist, but effectively foregrounds, in a most prescient manner, the crisis—of hunger, poverty, homelessness—that is now upon us and will continue to grow. She sees the profound disconnection between earth, worlds, and planet within capitalist modes of production and consumption, and within the capitalist agricultural model.

In the film, small gestures of gleaning food, objects, and images are juxtaposed to create a kind of manifesto on food and material security—one of the major issues facing twenty-first-century cities around the planet (which is why Varda’s film has aged so well). This act of gleaning is framed as a simple “right to the city,” to use Henri Lefebvre’s now famous decree: “the right to the city is like a cry and a demand … a transformed and renewed right to urban life.”⁹⁴ Gleaning speaks to the smaller economies of scale, of sharing and gifting. It points to the need for setting up alternative locally based food economies alongside the support of new kinds of maker cultures—from crafting recycled things into new artistic collages to small-scale media making. I am reminded of Hito Steyerl’s thesis on “the poor image,” discussed above, which refers to images made to be shared and circulated rather than copyrighted and commodified, or Espinoza’s “For an Imperfect Cinema,” which demands a more democratic and open public sphere for audiovisual cultures. And it is with the poor image and the imperfect cinema that CineCycle stands as a public space that is open to being appropriated.

Notes

75. McLuhan and his collaborator, the radical anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, were rethinking university education, and proposed experimental curricula starting in their early essay “The Classroom without Walls,” first published in their interdisciplinary journal Explorations in 1957. Within the pages of the journal, Carpenter and McLuhan would regularly espouse the need to understand the new grammars of media: “Today we’re beginning to realize that the new media aren’t just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression. Historically, the resources of English have been shaped and expressed in constantly new and changing ways. The printing press changed not only the quantity of writing but also the character of language and the relations between author and public. Radio, film, TV pushed written English toward the spontaneous shifts and freedom of the spoken idiom. They aided us in the recovery of intense awareness of facial language and bodily gesture. If these ‘mass media’ should serve only to weaken or corrupt previously achieved levels of verbal and pictorial culture, it won’t be because there’s anything inherently wrong with them. It will be because we’ve failed to master them as new languages in time to assimilate them to our total cultural heritage.” “Classroom without Walls,” Explorations 7 (1957): 24–25. Though the text is not signed, it was later published under McLuhan’s name in Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan, eds., Explorations in Communication: An Anthology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), 1–3.

79. “Structures gonflables” was an international exhibition devoted to the art, technology, and imaginary of inflatable structures in all domains. The exhibition included marine, air, and spatial vehicles, and terrestrial engines; dispositifs, apparatuses, and tools; works of art; toys, furniture, and beach accessories; and arrangements for games and parties. The exposition was organized by the group Utopie at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris / ARC from March 1 to 30, 1968. The Utopie group included theorists Jean Baudrillard, René Lourau, and Catherine Cot; architects Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungmann, and Antoine Stinco; and landscape architect Isabelle Auricoste. Beginning in 1966 and lasting for more than a decade, the group sought in both theory and practice to develop a radical leftist critique of architecture, urbanism, and everyday life.