EMERGENT-C!     The Emergent Cinema Project

Because of this, perhaps it is now time to practice a kind of generosity, a spirited inclusiveness which welcomes in sights and sounds which have been unseen and unheard of: to trade fear for an embrace, and to realize that to abuse power you first must have it. And those who have had it must know who they are. But those who have been largely excluded from power are also vulnerable to the inducements of its siren song, of its excesses and abuses. So the idea is not to replace one hero with another, one quality with another, one canon with another, one hierarchy with another: but to attempt a critique which is systemic rather than substitutional, which questions the methods of our madness and is interested a little less in the singer and a little more in the song. Perhaps we must remain perpetually vigilant in guarding against becoming what we fear. Perhaps we must first work to recognize the full breadth and depth of our cultural qualities and only then begin the stringent framings of our taste, the anointed namings of our judgments, and the moist choices of our desires.

Barbara Kruger, 1991

Origins:

The concept for Emergent Cinema began with a conversation between me and Jesse Fabian after a Friday film speaker at UB. The speaker was distributing his own independent film. He closed his talk with a request that anyone interested in helping him distribute his film should write their contact information in a book he had; they would later be contacted with tasks to help him distribute the film in Buffalo. Jesse asked me, "Did you write your name in the adventure book?" I said we should make our own adventure book, where we gather contacts that are willing to help produce a film, and each would be contacted with a separate cellular task. Roy Roussel and Vince Mistretta joined the conversation. It got into the territory of cell based secret societies and automatic creativity (exquisite corpse and such). Roy envisioned a production where one person was told to perform on a certain street corner on a certain day and time, and another was separately contacted to shoot the streetcorner at the same day and time, and so on, so that the camera would just be pointed around town and the film would occur in front of it.

That evening the following manifesto was composed:

EMERGENT CINEMA: THE DEATH OF THE DIRECTOR

The goal of Emergent Cinema is a common goal, to create a cinema that is liberated from the fascistic ideology inherent in the contemporary film production structure. This cinema project will attempt this through embracing the mathematical structures of production while removing the ‘king’. What we have left is a monster with no head—a film that in its very production is a time-image montage, removed from causal relationships.

Filmmakers know that on the Hollywood set, either Story is king, or the Director (if not money). These will be removed. In the Automatic Cinema production—which embraces the hierarchical militant structure of film production—the highest ranking officer is the Assistant Producer. This is the man (or woman) that performs the script breakdowns to be disseminated to an individual cellular volunteer crew by the Production Manager. The Assistant Producer—contaminated through knowledge of the script—is then removed from the scene. The true authority then becomes the database structure of the breakdown sheets, which are disseminated by the Production Manager to the cellular crew.

This is how we’d proceed:

First, a pool of volunteers is gathered, each describing briefly their skills and interests, and they are told that each will be asked to perform one task to produce a film. A script for a short film is written; an Assistant Producer then performs a breakdown of the script, separating the whole into scenes, then each scene is broken down into a list of cast, crew, props, sound fx, other fx, setting, costumes, etc. (it may be preferable to plan a non-sound sync film, as to remove the problems of dialogue). As well, a schedule is designed, complete with call sheets for the entire crew and cast. This material, minus the script, is delivered to the Production Manager. The Production Manager then organizes this information into a database and delivers it, with some redundancy, to the pool of volunteers as tasks without context. Cast & crew positions are filled; call-times are confirmed; props are gathered and fabricated, each individual knowing only their own task, and the shoot date and location (once secured by the Location Scout). The filming then occurs.

It is difficult to know whether the film, the documentation of the event, or the event itself would be the final product…