Exploding Cinema: the DIY projectors

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/dec/06/exploding-cinema-guerrilla-projectors

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Ships, churches, car parks, roofs, drained swimming pools, bank vaults, derelict coaches… Exploding Cinema will put on a film screening just about anywhere in the UK. Well, except for actually in a cinema. It’s been 23 years since the London-based democratic collective was founded in a squatted sun tan oil factory in Brixton. Since then they’ve screened more than 1,000 films, taking in everything from French pop hits subtitled with anarchist philosophy to darkly surreal shorts. One thing remains constant: their dedication to screening everything and anything they get sent.

“We make no distinction between a film that cost £10 or £10,000,” explains member Ben Slotover. “We will show a film-maker’s first film or their hundredth film. A film shot on a VHS camera? A film spitting rage and bile which will offend everybody? We’ll show it. We are the stock ticker of new short films, and we are answerable to no one.”

Slotover argues that their central tenet of inclusiveness gives their work a real value in a film scene dominated by corporate or government-sponsored bodies. “[Mainstream bodies are] curated by someone whose taste and agenda informs their selection,” he says. “You are always seeing it through someone else’s filter, and the filter can and will prevent amazing work from being seen.”

Another criticism they level at the mainstream is the lack of female voices. Angel Daden got involved in Exploding Cinema 15 years ago and says: “What pulled me in was going to shows and having the opportunity to see female film-makers such as Jennet Thomas and Colette Rouhier strutting their stuff. What a revelation!”

Adam Hodgkins attended some of the earliest shows that Exploding Cinema put on in the early 90s, and says there was a “punkish DIY feeling in the air” which continues to this day. The biggest change since then has been the ease with which people can now film and submit videos online. “We’ve been snowed under and have a big backlog to get through,” says Slotover. “We don’t have the luxury of picking and choosing so we’ll just keep putting on show after show to get them screened.”

While they point to good work being done across the county by independent cinemas such as The Star And Shadow in Newcastle upon Tyne, The Cube in Bristol, Cherry Kino in Leeds and Deptford Cinema in London, the Exploding Cinema say that, instead of being a scene, what really ties these all together is their firm belief that everyone can be a film-maker. “This was at the heart of the surrealist revolution,” says Hodgkins. “They too pronounced the death of art in a bourgeois culture. Plus ça change.”