ROMANA SCHMALISCH “MOBILE CINEMA”
Romana Schmalisch“Mobile Cinema”
“Mobile Cinema” is an apparatus that unites experimental lecturing and moving to different places. To be more concrete: it is a reconstruction of a film prop from Alexander Medvedkin’s film “The New Moscow” (1938): a projection and viewing table where an engineer on his journey to Moscow presents his designs and urban visions for the new city – a bizarre model that is somewhere between urban model, cinema, and plate camera.
Similar to the engineer in the film, the artist travels to various places with the “
Mobile Cinema” and presents some of her films and filmic research on urban space and urban visions, among them a filmic collage of many of her own films as well as film materials not previously used. The film clips address in different ways the changes of urban space and the social changes that come with them.
Four finished independent sequences are presented in the cinema: “The Theatre and the Small Spectacle”, “The Model and the City in Soviet Film”, “Views of Remote Countries/A Visual Archive”, and “A View into Space”. Following to a short introduction
by the artist, readings of texts in the artificial light beam alternate with projections
of the sequences in the darkened room. The text passages read by the artist between the film sequences are authored by invited guests and refer to the existing films.
For the moment there are texts by Esther Buss, Clemens Krümmel, Megan Sullivan, Marina Vishmidt, Robert Schlicht and a song by Angie Reed. New film sequences and text parts may be altered and expanded according to the place of the presentation.
In his text for the sequence “The theatre and the small spectacle”, Clemens Krümmel explores the figure of the film narrator, called benshi, in Japan. The benshi developed to a group of individual artists producing their own culture, and in the course of time in many cases became the real reason for viewing a film, and enjoyed the same public esteem as other ‘actors’, like the stars of Kabuki theatre. These events around the film, or rather, between the film and the audience, events that the purists were already capable of declaring superfluous at the time, is now directed towards the entertainment
value of appropriating an entertaining and carefully manipulated displacement activity before a gathered and participating audience. For the sequence “The Model and the City in Soviet Film”, Marina Vishmidt describes three different types of the model: the Model as Ruin, the Ruin as Model and the Cinema as Model, and combines it with the presentation of the Mobile Cinema and the Film “Walking to the Club. Recreation
through Culture” (2007). Esther Buss invents a showman who comments upon the journeys and different film material of the artist and talks about the tradition and the significance of the art of projection. With a song by Angie Reed, the viewer travels into space as the first space tourist.
As a special appearance in Yerevan, Robert Schlicht presented a film lecture that follows the traces of a ghostly figure of film’s history: the vampire. Delivered with the help of the “Mobile Cinema”, a device itself resurrected from the archives of film history, the lecture superimposes the history of the cinematographic figure of the vampire with early Soviet utopias that pursued projects of immortalisation and resurrection. His lecture examines the historical, historiographic, cinematographic and biopolitical implications of these undead vampirist projects of the early 20th century.
At the same time, new film parts are shot during the travels, new collaborations and texts are created, which then become part of the projection and presentation and reflect the new locations. Thus the “Mobile Cinema” is in constant movement and undergoes continued change. The object itself can be quickly folded up and moved in two easily transported suitcases on wheels to another place, to be reassembled there. It thus stands in the tradition of travelling miniature theatres at fairgrounds from the 18th and 19th century, which offered ‘small spectacles’, views of far-away countries on painted glass panes and transparent images to a broad and always new audience. The “Mobile Cinema” unites this cinematographic predecessor with modern digital technology (projector, DVD player). The size of the screen is similar to that of a flat TV screen, dressed in an old garb. The viewer looks to the semicircular screen, like through a telescope, and is transported by the short clips of various cities to these places and their history, like in a ‘time machine’. The shape of the projection screen gives the films a new framing. This state between an open workshop and film screening
allows for the inclusion of additional materials, say from local archives. This leads to always new combinations of ‘old’ and ‘new’ materials. The films shown, as well as the new films shot, will always be seen, edited, presented, and commented upon in the context of the model. Thus the films, the lecture and the “Mobile Cinema” merge into a whole.