Film Graffiti

Sorry, it has been awhile! My screening season has been extended to include even more festivals! YAY! I am so excited to continue to help films find audiences! But...it also means my free time is at a premium (looks at empty fridge, eats non-rotten parts of an apple...and some rotten parts). A few days ago I read about a project that made me so excited about film that I felt the need take a moment and share: Peephole Cinema.

The kinetoscope was one of the first ways moving images were brought to people. In the 1890s Edison & his colleagues, inspired by Eadweard Muybridge, began creating a way to show successive images to create the illusion of continuous movement. A viewer would peer into the eye-holes of a large box-like contraption outfitted with lights and motors and lenses and be able to see the first films ever created, the beginning of a keyhole voyeurism that soon turned into a communal experience.

The Peephole Cinema project harkens back to these early days of small scale watching, a "miniature cinema collective" with locations in Brooklyn (hosted by Uniondocs), L.A. (hosted by Automata) and San Fran (Out of the Box Projects). The curatorial direction of these films seems to favor the artistic but since each curator chooses the next the range of projects featured is limitless! Right now Sam Green's dreamy cable car film that captures the hazy familiar randomness of public transportation is on view in SF,  a beautiful piece whose meaning takes on even more when displayed in this medium and in this city.

The idea of someone randomly happening on a beautiful moment of moving image makes me so happy! Democratizing the artistic beauty of film! Sharing visions of the world! The potnetial for localized filmmaking/screening! Superb film graffiti! Whether you just happen by or you knowingly find these places it is a platform for cinema that I really hope can become a ubiquitous artform! Hmm...maybe this is what we should be using dead drops for?