When's the last time you had no idea what you were getting yourself into? For a time before the pandemic, you could slink off Brick Lane in east London and step in under a low black ceiling for just such a flirtation with the unknown. The Liberated Film Club ran as an irregular night at Close-Up Film Centre for a month in 2016 and then again from 2019 into 2020. Orchestrated by the artist Stanley Schtinter, it offered a unique proposition: a speaker was invited to introduce a film neither they nor the audience knew beforehand - an intensification of the original promise of going to the cinema.
A cast of underground stalwarts provided the introductions. The London-based Mexican novelist Chloe Aridjis told an alternative history of the world; the writer Juliet Jacques (Trans: A Memoir, 2015) held a quiz. The writer Stewart Home spoke about the post-Bruce Lee Bruceploitation genre while in a headstand. John Akomfrah spoke about rebirth. Ben Rivers read from the French surrealist René Daumal. The screenwriter Tony Grisoni spoke about the late British film producer Tony Garnett and the avoidance of writing as a creative act in itself. If the speaker faltered, there was a willing audience at hand to encourage and heckle.
Schtinter answered what he saw as a need for a void that audiences could jump into. The format parodied the quantified known-ness and staid thematicism of most film events. One of the ways this manifested was in Schtinter's sung introductions to the introductions. When absent, he sent a video recording in lieu: forDesert awkward: Stanley Schtinter in Wadi Rum.
Tony awards: Tony Grisoni pays tribute to Tony Garnettfilmmaker and theorist Laura Mulvey he sang a Sinatra-style karaoke version of 'Laura', the haunting jazz standard from the Otto Preminger film, in the desert valley of Wadi Rum in Jordan, in a white shorts-suit, holding a baby. Another time, he pretended to be Alan Titchmarsh.
The films included a lot of "really forgotten Eastern European stuff" and a short documentary by the transgressive German filmmaker Jan Soldat about a man who has sex with his dog. The artist Adam Christensen played the accordion as prelude to a recent Russian feature in which a head in the ground in nondescript Eastern European landscapes shouted at people things like "I wantIt was never clear how long the screen was going to require you, and while people rarely left, they sometimes fell asleepsome fucking muffins" before getting pissed on. Christensen, leaving to use the bathroom midway through, said to Schtinter, "I'm not sure people are enjoying themselves in there."
The no-holds-barred approach was sometimes turned against its host, as during the six-and- a-half-hour programme of the influential cult Hungarian director Gábor Bódy, introduced by cinematographer Sean Price Williams (who shot the Safdie brothers' Good Time, 2017), on which Close-Up pulled the plug. In retaliation, for the next edition Schtinter programmed Bódy's entire body of work: they cut off the power again. The club played with expectations of time-it was never clear how long the screen was going to require you, and while people rarely left, they sometimes fell asleep.
At a later event, Canadian-American documentary filmmaker and activist Astra Taylor opened with a round of the surrealist writing or drawing game Exquisite Corpse; the anthropologist and anarchist activist David Graeber went first: it was extraordinarily unsuccessful and hilarious. The film that followed was a 1983 Channel 4 documentary, The Skin Horse, about sex, intimacy and people with disabilities. It is named for a character in Margery Williams's children's story The Velveteen Rabbit. Taylor-whose sister is severely disabled-nearly walked out in the opening scene, in which a disabled man in a wheelchair goes on stage at a comedy club to make jokes at his own expense. She had been read The Velveteen Rabbit countless times by her father as a child; by the end, all these years later, she tearfully realised what her father was getting at - the right for disabled bodies to have access to love.
Here lies the exquisite corpse of the Liberated Film Club, to align in ways you never expected in order to show you something new. The caper was discontinued in part because of the pandemic but in part to stop it, Schtinter says, becoming "a victim of its own success". To commemorate the events and cement the community they birthed, the Liberated Film Club is set to release an anthology of the contributions this summer.
Ladies & Gentlemen, the Liberated Film Club, curated by Stanley Schtinter et al, will be published later this summer by Tenement Press. Visit tenementpress.com
A cast of underground stalwarts provided the introductions. The London-based Mexican novelist Chloe Aridjis told an alternative history of the world; the writer Juliet Jacques (Trans: A Memoir, 2015) held a quiz. The writer Stewart Home spoke about the post-Bruce Lee Bruceploitation genre while in a headstand. John Akomfrah spoke about rebirth. Ben Rivers read from the French surrealist René Daumal. The screenwriter Tony Grisoni spoke about the late British film producer Tony Garnett and the avoidance of writing as a creative act in itself. If the speaker faltered, there was a willing audience at hand to encourage and heckle.
Schtinter answered what he saw as a need for a void that audiences could jump into. The format parodied the quantified known-ness and staid thematicism of most film events. One of the ways this manifested was in Schtinter's sung introductions to the introductions. When absent, he sent a video recording in lieu: forDesert awkward: Stanley Schtinter in Wadi Rum.
Tony awards: Tony Grisoni pays tribute to Tony Garnettfilmmaker and theorist Laura Mulvey he sang a Sinatra-style karaoke version of 'Laura', the haunting jazz standard from the Otto Preminger film, in the desert valley of Wadi Rum in Jordan, in a white shorts-suit, holding a baby. Another time, he pretended to be Alan Titchmarsh.
The films included a lot of "really forgotten Eastern European stuff" and a short documentary by the transgressive German filmmaker Jan Soldat about a man who has sex with his dog. The artist Adam Christensen played the accordion as prelude to a recent Russian feature in which a head in the ground in nondescript Eastern European landscapes shouted at people things like "I wantIt was never clear how long the screen was going to require you, and while people rarely left, they sometimes fell asleepsome fucking muffins" before getting pissed on. Christensen, leaving to use the bathroom midway through, said to Schtinter, "I'm not sure people are enjoying themselves in there."
The no-holds-barred approach was sometimes turned against its host, as during the six-and- a-half-hour programme of the influential cult Hungarian director Gábor Bódy, introduced by cinematographer Sean Price Williams (who shot the Safdie brothers' Good Time, 2017), on which Close-Up pulled the plug. In retaliation, for the next edition Schtinter programmed Bódy's entire body of work: they cut off the power again. The club played with expectations of time-it was never clear how long the screen was going to require you, and while people rarely left, they sometimes fell asleep.
At a later event, Canadian-American documentary filmmaker and activist Astra Taylor opened with a round of the surrealist writing or drawing game Exquisite Corpse; the anthropologist and anarchist activist David Graeber went first: it was extraordinarily unsuccessful and hilarious. The film that followed was a 1983 Channel 4 documentary, The Skin Horse, about sex, intimacy and people with disabilities. It is named for a character in Margery Williams's children's story The Velveteen Rabbit. Taylor-whose sister is severely disabled-nearly walked out in the opening scene, in which a disabled man in a wheelchair goes on stage at a comedy club to make jokes at his own expense. She had been read The Velveteen Rabbit countless times by her father as a child; by the end, all these years later, she tearfully realised what her father was getting at - the right for disabled bodies to have access to love.
Here lies the exquisite corpse of the Liberated Film Club, to align in ways you never expected in order to show you something new. The caper was discontinued in part because of the pandemic but in part to stop it, Schtinter says, becoming "a victim of its own success". To commemorate the events and cement the community they birthed, the Liberated Film Club is set to release an anthology of the contributions this summer.
Ladies & Gentlemen, the Liberated Film Club, curated by Stanley Schtinter et al, will be published later this summer by Tenement Press. Visit tenementpress.com