Imperial College, London, late August. Empire is everywhere. The entrance to the Faculty of Mines is guarded by two stolidly Victorian marble men and surrounded by pseudo-classical visions of ‘mining, but make it sexy’. Nearby, the Royal Geographical Society is also rich in compromising regalia, with the old globes and treasure chests that represent the material and symbolic plunder of the four corners of the world. I am here for my first visit to the annual RGS conference. The chimney of the old aristocratic house (Hyde Park as a front garden, no less) where the conference takes place is tiled with hand-painted coats of arms, blue on white. One of the tiles says that they were painted by a lady of the house, and as a female presence in a patriarchal institution, I can’t help but see it as an analogy of white feminism. The little tiles are still a thousand times more interesting than the garish, useless Albert Memorial across the road. On the day that the Prime Minister suspended Parliament, London was hot and exciting as ever, an everchanging bloom eating away at its own monumentality, and the conference played out its own tensions between insurgence and academic inertia.

People protesting the suspension of Parliament on 28 August 2019

In the first panel I attended, about the everyday spaces of the hostile environment, Phe Amis historicised the emergence of categories like ‘foreign national’ and ‘illegal immigrant’. To historicise means to show that something is made up. But witness how quickly these made-up borders and imaginary lines crystalise as common sense, as in the mostly uncritical compliance of British universities with the UK border regime. As Sanaz Raji explained, and as I have seen in my own experience, very few staff know how the process for criminalising international students works. Meanwhile, the proliferation of surveillance in students’ everyday lives means that even those students subject to immigration control via the university are unlikely to challenge it. While in higher education, everyday bordering has become normalised through unthinking bureaucracy, in the health services it draws on professional attributes like ‘clinical acumen’. As Tarek Younis explained, based on his ethnographic work in the NHS, Prevent training uses the idea of ‘gut feeling’ to disavow the role of race – and racism – in the implementation of the policy.

Against this reductive, administrative way of thinking about people and territory, other models exist. Anticolonial and indigenous perspectives were often cited at the conference. Refreshingly, with a couple of exceptions they are not presented as untainted epistemologies but as pragmatic understandings that can form their own banalities and corruptions. Joanna Morley mentioned the framework of ‘buen vivir’ in Ecuador, now being mobilised by local elites in pursuit of extractive development, and Mfaniseni Sihlongonyane showed how post-apartheid elites have adopted African words and metaphors as empty signifiers of transformation. If the coloniality of power pervades intersubjective relations (Quijano, 2007), and capitalism has been able to hybridise and engulf its contradictions, is resistance ever imaginable? Geography offers its own ways of rethinking the world. It is about undoing borders, changing scales, seeing multiplicity. For instance: seeing the global – national – local not as scales but as entangled dimensions; or understanding that a neighbourhood is a political entity, as Francisco Letelier argued in his paper about ‘lo vecinal’ in Chile and Spain. In her study of national park frontier expansion in Mozambique, Kei Otsuki challenged bienpensant environmentalism, pointing out that in many contexts, the prohibition of hunting has been imbricated with racialised ruling, while current rights-based approaches to environmental justice often fall back on ‘procedural equity’, where a technocratic solution is meant to be found. Otsuki sought instead an anarchist framework that can make sense of free interaction and conflict with no easy consensus, which seems necessary in the frontier conditions that she studies. The frontier, which is not identical to the border, can be a site for remaking society.

The garden at the Royal Geographical Society

The squat is also a frontier. Mara Ferreri argued for vacancy as a way of thinking, where the appeal of the temporary can prepare the ground where communing can root. In her study of squats that turned housing cooperatives, Ferrari does not only trace what may look like a typical process of enbourguoisement and co-optation, but instead offers a non-purist account of resistance. She seeks to understand housing co-ops ‘beyond the mythologies of autonomy’, as antagonistic but negotiated practices that solved specific problems for the people who lived in them, in more or less lasting or ideologically coherent ways. This sense of pragmatic collective action was very clear in Julia Vilela Caminha’s work on occupations in Brazil, where this is less a countercultural movement and more an extension of the same self-building resourcefulness that has shaped the cities of the Global South. Arguments of justice and legitimacy surround these acts of reclamation, again threading a fractious relationship with the State and the law.

The geographies I am drawn to are these: Grounded, messy, borderless. These are not necessarily the geographies you will find in my own work. Film studies and geography have a long and inconclusive affair, where it feels like both parties have used each other without undergoing much internal transformation. Cartographical approaches are by now comfortable and generally uncontroversial, and so it seems we’re back to the stories. Ealasaid Munro and Ian Goode told adventurous tales of operators and audiences of the Highlands and Islands Film Guild, and screened this gem of a film about non-theatrical exhibition. People are seen walking up the road to the village hall; you can almost feel the chill of the rain on your coat. These are stories of journeys, like those related by Italian oral history interviewees, memorably including a long donkey ride into the nearest village in one case recounted by Daniela Treveri Gennari. There were some maps on my slides about the use of village halls as cinema spaces, but what I really wanted to talk about were the patient record cards used by a Kirkcaldy doctor to sketch out the meeting halls where he put up his projector and screen, each with a paper trail of local philanthropy and corporate film services. Like the halls, these bits of card were repurposed, used efficiently for the common good rather than profit. I saw in them a tiny glimpse of what a degrowth cinema may be like.

A few days later I was again showing some maps, the kind that come in film festival brochures and invite people to explore new places in their home town with the pretext of watching a film. This time I was in Liverpool, taking part in a workshop on Mapping Music History, organised by Jonathan Hicks. There were clear parallels with cinema history in Lawrence Davies’ research on the history of jazz clubs and the journeys that bookended participants’ experiences, as well as their use of multipurpose and civic spaces, which touched on dynamics of distinction and respectability not dissimilar to those of the film society movement. Solene Heinzl told the fascinating story of a squatted industrial complex in the outskirts of Paris, where art-led insurgence reclaimed the site as a ‘free space’ (or TAZ), but where legitimation as an art space can run counter to the principle of commoning. Putting some place on the map, making it visible to cultural tourists, is not always an unmitigated good.

When I started dabbling in cartography, satellite and drone imaging were only starting to become available to ordinary users and non-specialist commercial users. The books all spoke about the military roots of cartography, the inseparability of mapping and dominating. At the RGS, Oliver Belcher presented a fascinating and extremely persuasive case study of MIT’s collaboration with the Pentagon in the development of a GIS for counterinsurgency in Vietnam. As a complement to aerial photography, the GIS synthesised data collected ‘on the ground’. Perhaps in the familiar critique of the all-seeing-eye of cartography there was not enough emphasis on the importance of the individual data point: It is all about aggregation. This was a point that became a focus for discussion at the Mapping Music History event. Adam Behr talked about mapping as shorthand for communication with bureaucrats and with the general public. Phil Nelson later argued that the most efficient way of mapping a music scene in this day and age was letting people map it themselves, either by volunteering the information or through the traces of their digital activity. The view of mapping as surveillance was easy to identify here. Nelson, for instance, found that some people were reluctant to contribute information because their venues or events were not fully compliant with licensing rules. (This is also easy to understand in the context of film exhibition, as compliance is relatively expensive and complicated for small-time exhibitors).

In these cases, where information flows need to be understood in the context of a power imbalance, storytelling can again offer an alternative. Fay Young talked about the playful experience offered by her audio tours and quizzes on Glasgow history, and Jonathan Trew talked about the Glasgow City Music Tours, where physical landmarks serve as ‘technologies of memory’ for people to tell their own stories. As a tour guide, Trew also gathers and recounts these memories, so that the commentary has an accretion of unverifiable personal stories. This starts to take on the character of a folklore. In the closing paper, Les Roberts offered a provisional theorisation of songlines as a non-representational way to hold stories without trying to pin down lived memory. While in both cases the appeal to traditional or ‘other’ forms of knowledge poses its own problems (not least the violence of cultural appropriation), they are part of a search, a dissatisfaction, a sense of urgency and realisation that the perfectly compiled database won’t save us.

The kind of ‘epistemic disobedience’ (Mignolo, 2013) that may be needed now is that of refusal, of strike. Anything else will be appropriated: by REF, by Western academia, by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (as bell hooks names it).

At the end of my stay in Liverpool, I went to see Shezad Dawood’s installation Leviathan. Dawood’s use of archive footage of whaling makes her post-apocalyptic short fictions unwatchable at times. “The bodies of Leviathan were the pilings on which our world stood”. Dawood tells a story, a mix of past and future, neither true nor a lie, both archive and myth, about greed, extraction, and divine retribution. Comfortably ensconced in the art gallery, this won’t make it stop, like an academic conference in an imperial institution won’t dismantle the master’s house. But it could at least help break the spell, the illusio, and make us question whether we need to put our energies into sustaining the institutions that oppress us.

Last month I attended the ‘Circuits of Cinema‘ conference at Ryerson University in Toronto. The conference was impeccably hosted by Paul Moore and Jessica Whitehead, with an excellent team of student volunteers. It was part of the research project of the same name, and also doubled as the annual meeting of the HoMER (History of Moviegoing, Exhibition and Reception) Network. As with any conference, I could only be at one panel at a time, so my notes can only reflect one perspective of a rich and varied event (you can browse the abstracts by location and timeline on this Prospect visualisation). Luckily it was possible to catch up with the presenters you had missed over generous lunch and coffee breaks, the all-day workshop on Quantum GIS, and at a superb after-hours programme which included the premiere of an oral history project with some of the pioneers of Canadian distribution, many of whom attended the screening; and a memorable visit to the Elgin Theatre and Winter Gardens. You may get other glimpses of the conference’s topics under the #Circuits2017 hashtag.

These social aspects are part of individual and collective scholarship, which is why the difficulties that most researchers from the Global South face to travel to conferences are an obstacle to our full participation in any field. The acknowledgement by Paul of those missing voices was an important gesture that should be amplified in future conferences. Also very important is the decision by the organisers to programme plenary panels including emerging scholars, rather than ‘big name’ keynotes. This is important because it makes people more visible to one another, which is one of the roles of a research network. In that sense HoMER is thriving. But there is one of its old objectives that comes back time and again as a horizon to hope for: data integration. With the loss of Karel Dibbets, we lost one of the main champions for the development of common standards and shared datasets for cinema history, and it’s natural to want to take stock.

While Karel’s project, Cinema Context, will continue to develop and to lead the way as a hub for comparative cinema history, I think it is also important to recognise that research in the field is blooming in all sorts of other ways. There has always been a methodological eclecticism in this field that allows people to follow their curiosity, and the disparate nature of our projects is a strength rather than a problem to solve. The platforms for sharing datasets have existed for many years now, but the fact that we have been slow to use them suggests that it is not a priority for everyone, and I think that’s fine.

Perhaps the biggest dataset used by a HoMER researcher is the Kinomatics dataset of global movie times, but unfortunately that is not licensed to be shared. Deb Verhoeven, however, opened the conference with new work on a different, smaller dataset on gender in the Australian film industry. This is an example of where empirical analysis of a relatively modest dataset can generate new insights into how domination actually works. That men dominate the film industry is a trivial observation, but the precise mechanisms through which they maintain this control need to be understood in order to be fought, whether through policy or direct action. Verhoeven gives substance to the concept of network domination, which needs to be brought into play alongside more established notions of hierarchical power and hegemony – but it takes a very skilled data wrangler to spot and name these patterns. It takes a feminist to identify these specific forms of male domination; it takes some theory.

The ‘Gender Offender’ visualisation, using Gephi to show connections between producers and other creatives in Australian film production. By Deb Verhoeven with Stuart Palmer (click on the image to go to Deb’s analysis).

Similarly, studying distribution demands data, but it also demands a certain literacy to make sense of it. Distribution is an ideal arena for modest, grounded theorising. This has been one of the tenets of new cinema history, and so it was not surprising to see this approach articulated with particular clarity in one of the plenary sessions dedicated to more established scholars: Judith Thissen, Keff Klenotic, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, conference organiser Paul Moore, and Project Arclight‘s Eric Hoyt all had their own ways of weaving historical understanding between the particular and the emergent. The conference also marked the retirement of Richard Maltby, who named New Cinema History and has written and edited some of its key texts. Richard’s recent work on Hollywood’s constant engagement with monopoly law is another example of this multi-level approach. Operating in the high spheres of politics as well as on the fine print of a provincial renter’s agreements, film distribution demands a structural view. However, it is easy to imagine this structure to be more solid, logical and efficient than it actually is. It is made of many overlapping patterns and localised interactions, and the kind of data required to be able to see this is not necessarily “big”. Instead, it might be more useful to have deliberate slices of data collection, used comparatively (I tried to do this when studying early distribution in Scotland, by looking at programming on two single dates across Scotland). In her presentation, for instance, Andrea Cominsky used a sample of 120 films across two seasons in ten exchange areas, allowing her to discuss the granular nuances of film selling during the classical period. This challenges the assumption of rigidity of the run-zone-clearance system, showing that less prestigious films could bypass first-run houses and premiere elsewhere.

One potential problem with film distribution research that places emphasis on systematic data collection is that it excludes most of the more informal types of circulation, and it risks privileging the types of research that are mostly available in Global North countries with reliable government records and digitised newspapers. The risk of overplaying data compatibility is to underplay, for instance, the story of film recycling in Iran as told by Kaveh Askari, where the paperwork indicates a destruction date for films at the end of their distribution, but the reality was that of prints continuing to circulate with a magnetic dubbed track pasted on top of the optical soundtrack, in a local enterprise that grew into its own production studios (and continued to recycle music). Or the story of the circulation of Cantinflas films in Brazil through RKO (as researched by Nilo Couret), or the active role of French distribution monopolies in blocking the circulation of African cinema (researched by Nikolaus Perneczky). The fact that indigenous communities in Brazil are exchanging DVD recordings of their rituals (as Samuel Leal showed) would be invisible from a data perspective.

Cara Caddoo argued that the first African-American distribution outfit, the Lincoln Film Company, were rebuffed in their efforts to market film independently as the kind of ‘hustling’ that was already untenable in the late 1910s. There’s certainly a lot of hustling in today’s film landscape, from crowdfunding indie producers to scrappy new festivals and trendy ‘start-ups’, as well as the vast informal/pirate sector. But the forces of consolidation are always closing in. Witness the missed opportunity of digital cinema, which instead of removing the access constraints posed by the materiality of a film print that cannot be in two places at once, replaced them with digital locks and arcane ways to maintain exclusivity. Leo Rubinkowski traced the emergence of ‘end-to-end facilitators’ in the exhibition industry, that is, companies concerned with the delivery of digital content to screens. Through Digital Cinema Distribution Coalition’s command of 70% of the US theatrical market, satellite delivery of DCPs to proprietary hardware has become the industry standard. However, as Rubinkowski argues, this model doesn’t serve the needs of the independent market, which cannot justify the costs for a smaller release. While there are smaller companies serving that market, the general trend is towards a standardisation of the theatrical film market, with a handful of companies becoming gatekeepers. Ian Robinson’s work on event cinema, Carter Moulton’s work on opening weekends, and Charlotte Orzel’s paper on ‘branded premium experiences’ now constituting almost half of the box office at multiplexes, all show that mainstream commercial exhibition isn’t giving up its love of exclusivity and tight grip on audience choice.

Toronto’s Cineforum, holding out against premium branded experiences.

On the other hand, non-theatrical exhibition was represented by a wild array of historical and contemporary practices. Nora Stone talked about the ITV Community Cinema, which toured PBS documentaries, pointing out that while commercial media counts on the market to increase diversity, public TV does it as part of its remit. In her talk about left-wing film distribution, Tanya Goldman pointed out that, while mainstream cinema distribution consolidated its corporate hierarchies, alternative left-wing film distribution was a collaborative process. The ideal of counter-cinema thus involved both content and context, using politically charged spaces and activating relationships between local organisations and global struggles in a practical way, through propaganda and fundraising. Diane Wei Lewis also talked about Japan’s Prokino (the Proletarian Film League), which took this grassroots approach to filmmaking and exhibition as “everyday interventions”, using first an underground mobile unit and then a network of local organisers. Politics aside, this has interesting parallels with the Highlands and Islands Film Guild, or the National Film Board of Canada, which also combined mobile units and fixed outposts, feeling that the latter allowed for a closer connection with the community.

It is a complex ecosystem, except that that metaphor suggests some kind of symbiotic harmony. There is interdependence, to be sure, but there is also domination. Not all networks are the same. It is hard to think of a historical example in which systematised data collection hasn’t led to an entrenchment of power and exclusion – and yet any emancipatory theory worth its salt has to be able to grasp and act on patterns. So in an academic world dominated by too much comparison, by constant rating and ranking, by shrinking research budgets given to fewer, bigger projects, I am glad cinema history retains its obscure nooks and crannies, its Luddite corners, its little ad-hoc datasets and its irreducibility. I’m glad too for the patient work of formatting data, cleaning spreadsheets, running stats, plotting graphs and maps to find out where all those anomalies fit in or stick out (or where, as Laura Isabel Serna reminded us in the last plenary, the margins constitute the centre). And I’m especially grateful for these opportunities to plug into other people’s curiosity, to weave this web knot by knot whether offline or on – opportunities that I certainly don’t take for granted.

Conference delegates at the Winter Gardens (photo: Paul Moore)

I’ve been thinking about Secret Cinema a lot this week. I used their short video of the Back to the Future screening in two lectures: First, in relation to Sarah Atkinson and Helen Kennedy’s work on the performative and gaming-inflected practices of SC audiences (and their pitfalls); and second, as part of a discussion about the way ‘pop-up’ cinema is so strongly associated with particular London happenings. In both cases, as the students watched the pyrotechnics and synchronised stunts in awe, I was once again transfixed by the spectacle (ok, also by the brief glimpse of a bearded Jarvis Cocker). The amount of preparation and precision, the commitment of the participants to dress codes and choreographed behaviours, the sheer scale of the thing are hugely impressive, especially when cut in the style of a music video to great tunes and presumably blending together the best bits over several runs of the event.
The massive, spectacular nature of Secret Cinema, its steep ticket prices, and its move from underground-ish to premium release window for films like Prometheus and The Grand Budapest Hotel have made it an obvious flashpoint for discussions of gentrification, pointing to an entitled relationship to urban space as a playground that obscures very real conflicts. Similar critiques have been directed at many other temporary uses of urban space conforming to a familiar pattern: white, young, relatively privileged entrepreneurs setting up a ‘pop-up’ shop/café/gallery/etc in a bit of the city seen as in need of regeneration, where that ‘regeneration’ implies the displacement of existing communities – either priced out of the area or straight-up evicted when housing states are condemned. (Lots of people have written about this; see for instance the work of Jen Harvie and Ella Harris) Most of these entrepreneurs have good intentions, but the playfulness of the ‘pop-up’ is often bound up with privilege, and always at risk of being co-opted. This year’s Turner Prize winners, the London collective Assemble, are arguably much more committed to grassroots, community engagement (not just the dressing-up-and-dancing-along variety); and yet, their very influential pop-up projects have encountered similar distrust.
Of course people will be suspicious when the posterboys and girls of the ‘creative economy’, whatever that is, suddenly turn up to places they had ignored before. Urban space is rife with tension, as the public becomes privatised and the state curtails its functions to focus on upholding the interests of a corporate elite. Glasgow City Council’s aborted idea of blowing up the Red Road flats as part of the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games showed us just how blatant this spectacularisation of working-class erasure could be. So I was not surprised when I read this morning that a group of Tower Hamlet residents had posted an ‘open letter’ to Secret Cinema, with regards to their forthcoming season of immersive screenings of the zombie film, 28 Days Later. Promotional images had emerged of Ernö Goldfinger’s brutalist masterpiece, the Balfron Tower, which seemed to imply that the Secret Cinema event would take place there or nearby. The Balfron Social Club called this ‘distasteful and inappropriate’, and furthering ‘an aggressive social cleansing agenda that is destroying our communities’.
The blog post was widely retweeted – with increasing levels of outrage, as tends to be the case in recent social media debates.

Only a couple of hours later, the Balfron Social Club reported that they had received a reply from Secret Cinema, which was posted under the original blog entry. This was a brief and informal email explaining that Secret Cinema did not plan to use that location, and that ‘we’ve used images of the tower because it’s a prominent part of the original film, not because it’s the location for our event.’ This seemed to calm things down, and yet what had surfaced was a long-held suspicion that this is the kind of thing they would do.

In short, most people were prepared to believe that ‘Secret Cinema are dickheads (again)‘, and even when the confusion was cleared up, the perception persists. This is partly explained by the very real sense of exclusion produced by £65 tickets. On the other hand, there is growing weariness with and suspicion of pop-up everything. The rather uninformed idealism that propelled the start of the pop-up trend is being replaced with cynicism. A critical eye on all and any appropriations of public and community spaces is healthy, no doubt. But it is also dangerous to reject anything that looks like spectacle, or like fun, because it won’t address structural injustice: If I can’t dance, etc. Amongst all the scripting and rules and fireworks, there is a playfulness in lots of pop-up stuff that shouldn’t be ignored. We can have the playfulness without the sense of entitlement, can’t we?