LUX / Blog
Editorial
10 Dec 2009
Image: David Dinnell (photo by S. Connolly)
Many of the larger Universities in the US have campus cinemas. David Dinnell has programmed a fascinating and eclectic range of work at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee’s 315 seat Union Theatre where he is just completing his fifth and final season. He also programs for the Ann Arbor Film Festival, a key annual showcase of artist’s moving image in the USA. David took time out to meet and have a chat with Stephen Connolly during the artist's recent tour through the States.
Stephen Connolly: How did you start?
David Dinnell: My programming came out of a specific desire. I was living in Detroit, interested in artist-made cinema and was not able to see much of this kind of work. Detroit had a profound lack of moving-image culture outside of annual film festivals like Media City in nearby Windsor (Canada) and Ann Arbor.
The Detroit Film Center, a non-profit media arts centre with a 16mm film workshop, was the single exception. Through the DFC a small group of us worked sometimes with the museum (DIA) or rented a black-box-type space to set up temporary film screenings. This soon led to the creation, from scratch, of our own micro-cinema which had a really good five-year run where we brought in visiting filmmakers from both the US and from abroad.
The focus of the University run cinema here in Milwaukee, where I have been programming for the last three years, is mostly contemporary work with some classics. There is a broad mandate, committed to experimental film, documentary and contemporary international cinema.
There already existed a history of programming avant-garde film here, largely because of the Film Department. Because I was coming from a background of exhibiting artist-made work, I was interested to see this work in this institutional setting.
I wanted to 'equalize', if you will, the exhibition of avant-garde work so that it is experienced in ways such as how international narrative film is experienced in the cinema – utilizing the same resources dedicated to the showing of features including all the publicity and advertising that one might expect to go along with that, plus program notes, paying rental fees that are decent and useful to the filmmaker and, most crucially – to aim for a high standard for film projection and sound.
SC: Cultural Ambitions for the Space? Documentary?
DD: For me documentary is a particularly exciting area of cinema and I have been able to program a considerable amount during my time at the Union Theater. There are a lot of makers doing interesting things with the languages of non-fiction filmmaking.
Documentary in the United States has been pretty homogenized by public television. The filmmakers that interest me the most are the ones who work outside of that mold, sometimes radically so.
A couple of years ago I showed Ulrike Ottinger’s film Taiga. She shot it in Northern Mongolia, it is a 16mm work – over eight hours long – documenting the nomadic life of the Darhkad people. Although it has discrete chapters, and they work well as individual documents, it is also a film that functions as a whole, contained unit. It is a really amazing portrait and it really needs the eight hours to unfold fully.
The Union Theater has received good support from the university for this kind of programming, enabling us to show this somewhat expensive film that, despite having a smaller audience given its duration, was a very powerful experience for those who did see it.
The film is important – this kind of artifact of culture can coexist with very different kinds of films in this space for a community. It doesn't become a footnote, and it exists in a cinema within the flow of all the other varied works we show.
SC: The cinema as a social/experiential space?
DD: I do wonder about the future of cinema, about its value as a physical and social space, with the ubiquity of computer or home-viewing. I will only watch at home out of necessity - I research almost all of my programming here in the cinema.
I need to see things with other people, even a film I have seen many times – it is essential for the experience. It’s exciting that this cinema is also the first place many students will experience non-commercial cinema. We’ve been able to present expanded-cinema programs that also challenge the boundaries of what is possible for this space.
SC: Cinema and Art Gallery?
DD: There is a powerful dynamic in the act of going to see a film in a theater – you cross a threshold and enter into this dark room and you are really being asked to suspend a lot of control, to submit to whatever the room brings.
Many people may be uncomfortable with that dynamic. I like setting up this situation – experienced collectively it feels different and changes the way you see the film.
Viewers can leave, of course, but the act of leaving in the middle of a film takes more work to arrive at as a decision. In a gallery situation – it has its own challenges for the way in which an audience might come and go.
SC: Film workshops in the US – is there a screening economy/community?
DD: One catalyst for us in Detroit for the start of our programming early this decade, was Bill Brown and Tom Comerford’s Lo-Fi Landscape tour [1]. There is a network of (alternative) cinemas, ranging from the very DIY to the relatively organized.
If filmmakers can do a tour, it becomes economically viable for them to show in universities while screening in micro-cinemas in cities en-route for a split of the door – there is an audience. A film print can also travel in this way – a university rental will subsidize a tour of a print, as it might be passed along to a number of other exhibition venues in the region. The number of micro-cinemas has increased and it keeps things living – the country is too big to have nothing going on outside of a few major cities!
SC: Does avant-garde film still have a critical function – do these terms still resonate?
DD: I think the term 'avant-garde' is still relevant but in the last 15 years or so things have grown more complex in really interesting ways. There is less of a singular 'avant garde' than before. You can see this with some micro-cinema programs that will take a very particular focus.
There are a few really well-developed film programs in American museums that feature avant-garde work, and it’s heartening when artists’ films are carefully presented and there is compensation involved [2]. I’m really interested in keeping this work vital and accessible to people and conversant with a larger film culture.
At this cinema in Milwaukee I’ve been gratified to be able to program avant-garde films that have drawn a wider audience, not just the initiated. People have been able to experience these works alongside many other kinds of films over the course of a season, this as a part of rather than apart from daily life.
Notes
[1] Writer Ed Halter puts this into context within the larger micro-cinema movement of the 1990s to the beginning of this decade in an essay entitled 'HeadSpace'.
[2] Filmmaker Hollis Frampton’s 1973 letter to curator Donald Richie of MoMA contributed to a change of how museums compensated artists (and it’s a very good read!).
Stephen Connolly's works are represented in the LUX Collection. http://www.bubblefilm.net
© The speakers 2009
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Tags: curating
David Dinnell
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