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A full theatre looks back at the camera

Screening Room & Teatro Amazonas

Screening Room & Teatro Amazonas

Screening Room, Dir. Morgan Fisher, 1968/2010, USA/UK, 6 mins

WHO

It’s (wry commentator on the tacit conventions of cinema) Morgan Fisher, again.¹

PROPOSAL

A simple first person, Dundee-specific tracking shot that approaches the cinema/ screen/ space the film will eventually be shown in.

WHY

Brimming with paradox, Screening Room asks you to think about: conventional cinema as the projection of non-site-specific identical films/experiences everywhere, the physical traditions of a cinema space (which should normally be invisible), and the reality of our (collective, site-specific) viewing.

A special version of Screening Room was filmed by Andrew Begg for this screening.

Teatro Amazonas, Dir. Sharon Lockhart, 1999, USA/Brasil, 40 mins

WHO

It’s (the politically astute ethnographic attention and unfazed photographic formalism of) Sharon Lockhart, again.²

PROPOSAL

Investigate first and second order viewership. You are hereby invited to watch and listen people listening to other people (in the same space but out of sight), and to think about that.

WHY

Set in a Brazilian opera house³, a fixed camera gazes at a local audience from the stage: a choir, hidden in the orchestra pit, sings and gradually fades to silence, slowly allowing the sounds from the audience to become increasingly noticeable and eventually merge with the sounds of you, our audience in Dundee. In doing so, the film explores what it is to view collectively (and how even a fixed camera position doesn’t let us see everything) and how that collective can be constructed across space and time, by film.

¹ Morgan’s about for the festival, and his films are interspersed through the programme.

² Come and see her film Lunch Break on Wednesday 24.

³ made famous by Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo

Documentation

1 image
A close up of a label on a 16mm film tin from Soho Film Lab
A close up of a label on a 16mm film tin from Soho Film Lab
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