»Invisible Cinema« in the digital era
An Installation by Hannah Sioda
The Invisible Cinema was a theatre built in 1970 by Peter Kubelka in the Anthology Film Archives in New York. It was based upon the notion that, like the other machines a film is dependent on (cameras, developers, printers, editing machines, and projectors), the room in which one sees a film, should also be a machine designed for film viewing.
»A machine that permits an experience of the filmic image and sound, without distractions, where the viewer should not have any sense of the presence of walls or the seize of the auditorium. He should only have the white screen isolated in darkness as his guide to scale distance. All the other elements of the cinema are black: the rugs, the seats, the walls the ceiling. Seat hoods and the elevation of the rows protect one’s view of the screen from interception by the heads of viewers in front. Blinders eliminate the possibility of distractions from the side. We call it The Invisible Cinema.»(Anthology Film Archives in The Filmmakers Newsletter, 1971)
Workers taking over the Factory is a film about the installation of 8mm film activated through a sewing-machine by Ahmet Ogut in collaboration with Ozgur Kazova: Workers Self-managed Textile Cooperative, and commissioned by the 13th Biennale de Lyon.
Screened in this reproduction of the Invisible Cinema, the film enables a dialogue with the space it is hosted in – a dialogue reflecting our own viewing position within and outside of the black room. This is a sometimes contradictory exchange between Lumières Film Sortie de l’usine, a sewing-machine that activates celluloid, a film documenting the installation itself and it’s projection inside this gallery-room transformed into a viewing-machine.
– Text by Hannah Sioda –
Further Reading:
Manifesto of the Anthology Film Archive:
Englisch
