Towards a practice of Experimental Cinema-making,

Can the descriptor “experimental film” expand outwards from its central category of making films, to accommodate a spatial practice of constructing cinema commons? With a special focus on the Kino-Climates network of alternative cinema practitioners, this essay chronicles types of experimental film exhibition that are being practiced on the European continent. Three thematic approaches are given attention, to account for the variety of screening projects and their different motivations, revolving around the inhabitation of space as either a momentary encampment or long-term home with an emphasis on collectivity and “living” cinema together; the occupation of either pre-existing cinemas or other urban spaces as a direct action to make certain demands; and the retreat to a space of nurture and reconnection often outside of the urban zone, but which can also be a conclave that sustains the participants without necessarily seeking dominant visibility.

This chapter was published in Kim Knowles and Jonathan Walley (Eds.), A Handbook of experimental film, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. The book is a collection of newly commissioned essays by established and emerging scholars that maps out the current landscape of experimental cinema studies and sets agendas for future work in the field. Introducing new critical methodologies and calling overdue attention to neglected artists, regions, and topics, the contributions to this volume reassess and reassert experimental cinema as a site of formal exploration and interrogation as well as resistance to institutional, political, and social norms. This collection articulates what it means for experimental cinema to be these things in the contemporary moment, staking out new directions in thinking about the subject not only as a growing sub-field of cinema studies, but as an artistic and scholarly tradition in dialogue with art history, visual culture, philosophy, and the sciences. The contributions reflect a diversity of voices and perspectives, weaving together theoretical, poetic, and personal modes of writing and traversing questions of form, emotion, materiality, nationality, postcoloniality, the body, and ecology.