The extinction of movie theatres is a global phenomenon that has been
observed in the past 30 years across many countries. This can be related to the
culture of fear, that has been redefining urban spaces and pushed cinemas into
shopping centres; but also to new ways of film distribution – television, home
video, internet – in which cinemas are no longer a privileged
space.
If one can say that cinema has always been a ghost – a spectre in a way
- what could the ending of old movie palaces teach us about the nature of
cinema?
To use the portmanteau coined by Gregory Ulmer, what is the mystory in the decadence of these
buildings?
Ghost Cinema looks for answers to these questions
through a series of video interventions, which occupy façades of deactivated
movie theatres. Starting from an affective cartography of buildings abandoned,
demolished or simply transformed into another activity, the project counts on the
spontaneous collaboration of cinema spectators.
The memories shared in a collaborative digital network are indexed in a
database, including old photographs of the cinemas, movie extracts, poems,
posters, newspapers, memoirs etc. The data is combined and projected over the
buildings in a Live Cinema session, mixing materiality, mediality and
temporality. As Jacques Derrida affirms, archives are not dealing with the
past, but with the future. Ghost Cinema pays a tribute to dead
cinemas, bringing them back to life in a mediumistic session, but more than
that, it wants do discuss new architectures for image sharing.
Com um retroprojetor fixado em um carro, o grupo exibia diversas imagens nostálgicas de filmes passados décadas atrás FOTO: TUNO VIEIRA
