Little Jewel Cinema Diamond Season Oct 06 - Jan 07

 

Tally’s Electric Theatre is listed as the first permanent movie theatre designed specifically for the exhibition of films. It was opened in the spring of 1902 by Thomas L. Tally in Los Angeles, six months later it closed and was converted into a vaudeville theatre. Although the technology for projecting moving images was in place, people were reluctant to enter a dark room to see a few minutes of pictures projected on a sheet. From 1905 onwards arcade owners and vaudeville managers set up their own nickel picture shows and popularity grew, largely due to the emergence of the movie star. The advent of cinema and television destroyed various forms of peep show entertainment provided by travelling fairs, theatres and the arcades.

The Peep Show describes single viewer attractions, where the audience has to peep into an eye-hole to view the show. The earliest known peep shows are the perspective views said to have been painted in transparent colours on glass and lighted from behind for various effects, from sunshine to moonlight, by Alberti in 1437. A popular early form was the Peepshow Box, followed by 17th century cabinets often exhibited in the streets by itinerant showmen. The early peep show was the precursor of many types of optical toys, including the stereoscope and the magic lantern, which until Edison’s Kinetoscope, was the sole projection device available. By 1892, Edison and Dickson had their Kinetoscope viewing box ready for demonstration, instead of crafting larger than life images for a big screen, they made and marketed films for peep hole viewing by one person at a time. A couple of years later they developed The Black Maria film production studio and a series of vaudeville performers became some of the first subjects to feature. These included such well known acts as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, the strongman Eugene Sandow, the Spanish dancer Carmencita, and Annabelle Whitford performing her famous Butterfly Dance. This phenomenon is discussed by Lev Manovich in What is Digital Cinema, he considers an interesting transformation occurring at the birth of cinema...

‘while the body as the generator of moving pictures disappears, it simultaneously becomes their new subject’.
www.manovich.net/TEXT/digital-cinema.html

Waygood’s Little Jewel Cinema diamond season will be showing work by thirteen artists through ten peep holes on the shopfront of 37 High Bridge. It will be joined monthly by The Mobile Cinema, a nomadic venue in a converted 1970s Sprite caravan, extending the intimate viewing experience by a capacity audience of six. Like Tally’s storefront arcade containing automatic phonograph and peepshow machines, The Little Jewel Cinema will provide audiences with flickering moving images and recorded sound. As with Edison’s Kinetograph sound will be separately piped external to the building, broadcasting the work onto the street. Audiences will individually experience a different short looped work every six weeks. Many of the works, like the early Black Maria films, deal with the human body in performance, demonstration or action.

Early peep shows were designed as miniature scenes or stage settings, offering a representation of the scenery of the period. If 37 High Bridge is the cabinet/theatre presenting the moving image work, then the backstage area is where the scenery itself is being transformed. Behind the street and behind The Little Jewel Cinema is the Waygood warehouse. At regular intervals the film programme will be interrupted by live webcam footage of the redevelopment of this home to many artists and exhibitions. This real time intervention breaks cinematic illusion, providing selected audiences on the street with a voyeuristic viewing of hidden activity.

If cinema replaced the single viewer experience of the peep show and Kinetoscope, then new technology has reclaimed this through a range of individual interactive audiovisual experiences, both inside and outside of the gallery. From the push button activation of kinetic art installations such as Moholy-Nagy’s Licht-Raum Modulator, to online art, gaming, sofa cinemas and virtual reality. In Lev Manovich’s Little Movies project the introduction of QuickTime in 1991 is compared to the introduction of the Kinetoscope in 1892: both were used to present short loops, both featured the images approximately two by three inches in size, both called for private viewing rather than collective exhibition. Waygood’s Little Jewel Cinema combines these individual and collective viewing experiences, emphasising the active role of the spectator in his expanded environment.

Many of the artists showing work at Waygood’s Little Jewel Cinema have strong connections with Waygood. Some rent studios or offices, others have exhibited and performed. The programme includes members of the FilmBee and The Star and Shadow Cinema, who have recently moved from Waygood offices to their own independent cinema venue in the Ouseburn. William Raban, whose 1977 film Fergus Walking opens the Diamond season, has been commissioned by Waygood to make a new film to mark the transformation of the building. Using similar techniques to Fergus Walking, the film will be a literal walk through time and space during the period of refurbishment. The film follows single performers walking down High Bridge on the approach to the gallery and then through into the interior spaces of the building. The built environment around the performers will transform, as the redevelopment progresses, but the walk will appear continuous.

William Raban is interested in the medium of film itself, and has made pioneering work in the areas of structural and landscape film and expanded cinema. Previous work has played with the magic of cinema, experimenting with live performance, running speeds, moving viewpoints, various formats and installations. His 1977 film Illusionists deliberately references George Melies film magic, with Marilyn Halford performing an acrobatic accompaniment to the screen image. As Raban himself explains

‘I am motivated by the basic material quality of film: the production of an illusion by a series of still images’.
William Raban, Autumn Scenes.

It is this illusion of cinema as a series of moving pictures, the magical intimacy of watching flickering light in a darkened space that Waygood’s Little Jewel Cinema captures. But it also presents audiences with a form of sociable street entertainment, the looped artwork is accompanied by the artists talking heads and the regular visits of the itinerant Mobile Cinema. Each work seductively entertains us, some reference slapstick entertainment others boredom, some seem to be human figures performing directly for us - walking, hand gliding, drawing, decorating and having their own mini vaudeville adventures in front of the camera.

Rebecca Shatwell