Exploding Cinema

What might cinema look like without programmers, funding bodies, cultural gatekeepers or even conventional cinemas? 

In this episode, we discuss BOOM! The Exploding Cinema and the New London Underground with filmmaker, writer and longtime Exploding Cinema participant Duncan Reekie. Emerging from London’s squatted cultural spaces in the early 1990s, Exploding Cinema developed a radically open approach to exhibition: films were shown without curatorial selection, anyone could become involved in organising, and screenings could take place wherever the necessary space, equipment and collective energy could be assembled. Reekie reflects on the institutional gatekeeping that shaped experimental film culture in the period, and on how projects such as the London Filmmakers’ Co-op, CoolTan and other underground screening spaces helped make a different model possible. Exploding Cinema was not simply another outlet for films excluded elsewhere. Its screenings attempted to create a different relationship between filmmakers, organisers and audiences, with exhibition itself becoming a form of collective cultural practice.

The conversation also explores the collective’s refusal of professionalisation and careerism, including its suspicion of individual recognition and the continuing power of institutions of taste and selection. What does it mean to build autonomous cultural forms without simply reproducing the structures they set out to escape? Finally, the episode considers what has changed over more than thirty years. Digital technologies have made filmmaking far more accessible, while gentrification, rising costs and the disappearance of cheap or squatted spaces have made the social conditions for underground culture harder to sustain. Online distribution may make films easier to circulate, but it cannot fully replace the conviviality of gathering together to watch, argue and continue the conversation. Exploding Cinema remains a striking example of autonomous media not simply as radical content, but as the collective creation of other ways to make, show and encounter culture.

More On the Book

Intro / Outro: Breach the Peace –  Spiral Tribe 

Made in collaboration with Firefly Frequencies

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Now is the time.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
To let yourself go to free mankind from the negative thoughts.
Let's see a positive influence because positive thinking bears no hate.
Now is the time to evaluate.

Speaker 3 (00:23):
Connect, Hello and welcome to Minor Compositions. Tonight we are
joined by Duncan Rieke. Thanks for coming along, Duncan.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
Thanks for asking me. Cool.

Speaker 3 (00:48):
And Duncan's come along to talk about his book, Boom!
The Exploding Cinema in the New London Underground. And it's
a really interesting book, really beautifully produced, really well illustrated, really,
really a fun to read book. And what's really great
about it is it explores sort of, um, the history
of Exploding Cinema, which is the kind of thing that

(01:11):
I personally have seen a lot less of happening these
days and wish I could see more of. But Exploding
Cinema coming out of sort of, you know, London's squatted
underground cultural spaces for the 90s and how it sort
of develops a sort of radically open space to showing
films outside of the, let's say, the gatekeeping cultural world

(01:33):
of cinema and arts. and going with it, trying to
get rid of all those gatekeepers, trying to get rid
of elitist funders, trying to create an inclusive space. And
I think that's really, really cool. So it was really
fun to read, and it's great to have you come
along to talk about the book.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
Good.

Speaker 3 (01:54):
So one of the things I found really interesting reading
the book is that, how should I put this? It
strikes me that it wasn't, just about creating an alternative
distribution channel for, for work that couldn't find a home,
a home elsewhere. Although that's part of it. It also
seems like it's like, like maybe this is my interpretation.
It seems to me that part of exploding cinema is

(02:15):
about creating a different kind of audience, creating a different
kind of public, creating different kinds of relationships between people who,
who make cinema, who engage with cinema, trying to really
almost like change the, like, I guess the production distribution, um,
audience relationship. So maybe we can start off by talking

(02:36):
about a little bit about sort of where splitting cinema
comes from. What, you know, what was that context like? Like,
what were you trying to do by saying, hey, we're
going to make, we're going to take, make these sort
of like wonderful weirdo films and show them.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:50):
So the.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
Context. So I guess there's a few things. first of all,
this kind of my context as a filmmaker. Then there's
the context of how the Exploding Cinema began. And overall,
the Exploding Cinema is a collective. So it's a collective

(03:18):
book and a collective endeavor. So it's kind of, you know,
there's a kind of ambivalence between me as an individual
maker and the collectors. But so the context was the
late 80s, really, which was a very sort of grim

(03:40):
historical context for experimental film for various historical reasons. I
was making experimental films at that point, and I was
trying to apply to state agencies to get funded. And
at that point, there was basically a duopoly, which was

(04:04):
the BFI, the British Film Institute, and the Arts Council.
And the duopoly divided itself up between the BFI was
funding sort of narrative films, and the Arts Council was
funding what it called art films or avant-garde films. And
if you made sort of experimental narrative films like I did,

(04:28):
then you got sort of caught between the two and
you got sort of looped, that they would reject you
and say, the BFI would say you're too experimental, the
Arts Council would say you're too narrative, so you'd get
bounced around. And I'd also been trying to get into

(04:49):
the industry at that point, but that was really difficult
because You basically had to know someone in the industry.
And there was a union closed shop as well. So
in order to get a union card, you had to
have a job. But in order to get a job,
you had to have a union card. So it was

(05:10):
kind of grim. There was an independent sector. That was
the sector that I was interested in. It was the
most kind of liberated sector and radical sector. And it
was a kind of, it was a residual sector, which

(05:31):
had originally come out of the countercultural underground of the
late 60s. And then developed into a sort of a
unified front of the experimentalists and the documentarists who came
together to lobby for independent film. And they'd been very successful.

(05:58):
And their tactic had been a kind of entrism. So
a lot of them had got jobs or created jobs
within state agencies. And by the late 80s, they had
lobbied for Channel 4 as well. I mean, the thing,
technology was a big thing then. It's hard to remember,

(06:23):
but It was almost impossible to get access to filmmaking technology.
It was certainly almost impossible to get access to professional equipment.
And you could kind of get your hands on amateur equipment.
Even 16mm film at that point was seen as amateur,

(06:45):
although it was used on TV. But TV had this
thing called broadcast quality. and they would and if you
didn't have broadcast quality films they wouldn't show them and
uh you couldn't get into the cinema the cinemas weren't
interested in short film at all i mean there was
adverts i guess advertising was a way in and there

(07:06):
was a developing um sort of pop promo video scene
as well so there was some stuff going on but
there was grin and uh I had been going to
a lot of, uh, avant-garde and independent film screenings at
this point, trying to find out what was going on
and how to get my films made or, or how

(07:27):
to get them into screenings and things like that. And, uh,
they were just miserable. They were miserable events. They were
a kind of weird mixture of a sort of, uh,
church-like worship and networking and, uh, So I was looking, personally,

(07:48):
as a filmmaker, I was looking for something else. And
the only beacon of hope at that point was the
London Filmmakers' Co-op, which was a long-running survival from the
radical 60s, from the underground, that had begun as a
sort of exhibition organization, then went into distribution, and then

(08:13):
went into sort of production workshops. And it had a
base in Camden. And it was a co-op. You could
join the co-op. It had an open access distribution catalog.
So you could put your films in. And you could
use that. They had a big sort of film processing

(08:36):
lab that you could get access to. And they had
some editing facilities. And I joined that. And I kind
of really... I guess I kind of fell in love
with the kind of collective co-op structure. But at the
same time, it was riven with all these rivalries and
factional infighting and terrible feuds and things and scandals that

(09:01):
were going on between various factions. And so I kind
of was disenchanted. And then I.
Heard about some film screenings that were going on near
where I was living in Brixton in a squatted suntan

(09:24):
oil factory called the Cool Town. And I went to
the Cool Town, and the Cool Town was an amazing
sort of collective art center. So it was not just
sort of galleries. It had a theater. It had a cinema.
It had a... Raves were going on in the evenings

(09:46):
and there were various different sort of subgroups within the
wider organization. And at that point, this is about 1990, 91,
and then I got involved with the cinema group, which
at that point was just sort of having meetings and

(10:08):
talking about doing some screenings. And out of that group,
the Exploding Cinema emerged. And the main sort of motivation
for it was that we were all filmmakers and we

(10:28):
all wanted to show our films, but we had nowhere
to show them. So it was exhibition from the very beginning.
And I guess we had some, we all had different experiences.
Some of us had been involved in sort of underground
film and some people were performers. And we started putting

(10:53):
on these screenings. There were a couple of other groups
in London at this point who were doing similar things.
There was a group led by David Lester called the
Kino Club. And then there was another group called Real Love.
Ken MacDonald ran that. And they were really interesting. Ken

(11:16):
MacDonald was doing stuff at the Cool.

Speaker 3 (11:20):
Tank.

Speaker 1 (11:22):
But David Lester was around the corner somewhere in Keddington.
And David Lester had a kind of cabaret sort of
structure in which he would sit at the projector. The
projector would be in the middle of the room. So
you saw him using the projector. And he would then

(11:43):
also introduce the films. And he had a house who
would play along. They'd play sort of live soundtracks. live
jazz soundtracks with the show. And he would have novelty
films and all kinds of stuff. So he was kind
of like very sort of a very seminal influence on

(12:06):
the Exploding. But it wasn't a collective. I guess the
major difference between David's outfit and us was that we
were a collective. And then we kind of stumbled into
what we were doing because we developed this sort of
structure of because we were showing downstairs in an old
cold storage room, which was, and then it was winter 1990,

(12:30):
going 91. And it was freezing cold. So we were
all sitting there like, you know, in duffel coats and
hoodies and things. And it was so cold. We then
moved to what used to be the works canteen in
the squat. And it had a kitchen and it had
tables like dining areas. It wasn't laid out like a

(12:53):
cinema at all. It was laid out like a restaurant.
And then we started putting on screenings there. But at
the same time as the screenings, we were cooking food.
So we're cooking food, serving food. People are eating and
watching the films. And this kind of completely changed the atmosphere.
It was a kind of revelation to us that you

(13:17):
didn't have to have, you know, like this whole, the
cinema of total silence. was kind of not necessary. It
wasn't actually an interesting thing to do. It was much
more interesting to have some kind of human activity going on, eating,
some kind of convivial atmosphere. And we introduced an emcee

(13:44):
who would introduce the films. And one of the things
that happened was, although we were all filmmakers, we didn't
really know much about projection and stuff like that. So
we would, with the machines would constantly go wrong. The
projector would go wrong or the sound system would go
wrong and stuff like this. And, uh, rather than sort

(14:05):
of be incredibly embarrassed about it, we would, we would
make it part of the show and, uh, we would have,
we would be, it would become an act in the
show and we would get people in the audience. come
and help us to fix the projection and stuff like
this and we integrated it totally into the show and
so and part of that was also like we wanted

(14:28):
to show the audience that uh how incapable and incompetent
we were so that they would so that anybody could
do it anyone can do this anyone can put on
this show anyone can make these films anyone can be
part of the exploding cinema. That was the whole kind

(14:49):
of dynamic behind it.

Speaker 3 (14:52):
So what it kind of sounds like to me, like
you're describing, is the problem you're starting with is like
there being different groups of people or factions who control
little patches of the world they're in, whether it's the
people at the BFI or people getting funding for certain ways.

(15:14):
And the problem is that they control that space very tightly,
such that you can't access it. But also that there
are certain rules about how cinema is supposed to work.
And so almost like you're trying to exit both those
tightly controlled spaces and that particular notion of, oh, we
have to have this kind of like white cube experience

(15:34):
of like the silent audience and everyone has to be
fixated on the great work and there is no sociality.
And it seems to me that a lot of that
maybe is possible because of your moving into a squatted
space where you can have a different kind of relation there. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:52):
Yeah. I think that's, I think that was true. I
think when we moved it, the squatted space already had
a sort of a DIY freedom to it that you
could do, as long as you kind of negotiated with
the rest of the, you know, the users, you could
do whatever you wanted. Really. It was like total freedom.
And yeah, I mean, another thing was we were intoxicated,

(16:15):
you know, which changed things a lot. So we were
drunk or stoned. So that kind of, or whatever. And
that kind of totally changed the atmosphere as well. So that,
I mean, and this is something that I came to
realize was the difference between the sort of, the 1990s
avant-garde and the counterculture of the 60s. was that if

(16:41):
you're watching, you know, if you're watching abstract cinema, abstract
flashing spectrums of lights in an experimental film, when you're
stoned or drunk, it's much more fun. It's much more entertaining.
And I mean, and also the contemporary avant-garde at that

(17:03):
point was not interested in entertainment. It was entertainment was
perceived as being part of a kind of hegemonic hypnosis
or brainwashing for the workers. And even pleasure itself. I mean,
it was a very sort of Puritan type of avant-garde.

(17:24):
So a pleasure... Bourgeois decadence! Exactly, it was bourgeois decadence.
So you'd go to these screenings and they were serious.
I mean, they were so serious, you know, that you
had to sit there in like absolute silence. I mean,
a lot of films were silent films as well. They
didn't even have musical soundtracks because that was part of
the kind of avant-garde genre was to sit there in

(17:46):
total silence, you know. And you would sit there and
then your stomach would begin to make, you know, strange
gurgling noises and the rest of the audience would look
at you with horror. But yeah. So, yeah, we were
reacting against all that stuff. And We were reacting, but
we were also discovering. We were like, oh, you don't

(18:08):
have to be quiet. You don't have to, you can,
you know, you can eat, you can have a convivial atmosphere.
You can have a different kind of cinema, completely different
kind of cinema that isn't a suspension of life.

Speaker 4 (18:24):
Because the two types of cinema, the avant-garde cinema and
the kind of mainstream Odeon cinema, was a suspension of life.

Speaker 1 (18:34):
You went in there and life stopped for an hour
and a half or two hours, you know, and you
were in a sort of little dream palace in your
little bed or whatever, the velvet seat in the dark
and life just stopped for, you know, for an hour
and a half or two hours. And we were discovering

(18:55):
that maybe that's not what, there could be another kind
of cinema, which was a convivial live cinema.

Speaker 3 (19:03):
I quite like the idea of building it into the
event and performance when things break. And almost that being
part of performing and emphasizing the DIY aspect that you
could be doing this. And there was you being the
theory guy. What's the word that Breck has? It's a
very long V word that basically means like alienation effect,

(19:24):
basically like fourth wall breaking. And it's almost like by
not hiding the breaking of the apparatus, you're making it,
you know, very clear that like, yeah, this is taped
together by gaffer tape and that's not a problem. It's
part of actually what makes it what it is.

Speaker 1 (19:42):
Yes. Yes, absolutely. And I mean, it harks back to
this guy, Tom Gunning, who read this influential essay called
The Cinema of Attractions, where he's talking about how the
very earliest cinema, you know, was completely unlike modern cinema.

(20:05):
Because one of the attractions was to go and see
the projector. you know, that's what you wanted to see.
So because it had just been, you know, it was
a new technology. So you went to this hall, or
you went to the musical or whatever, the magic show,
and there was this incredible machine. So the idea of
hiding it behind the sort of, you know, a piece

(20:28):
of glass up in the ceiling was completely alien. The
idea was you had this machine, and you saw the
machine working. And then you saw a whole series of
like short films, you know, all kinds of evening of
short films and the films would be sort of, there'd
be attractions in themselves. There would be sort of effects
and sort of, you know, the actual cinema itself was

(20:50):
an attraction. And then it was only when you got
sort of like, uh, complex sort of continuity narrative techniques
later on that, that, that, that you, you, cinema began
to go into this kind of dream type, the dream
palace in which, you know, it became a suspension of

(21:11):
life or, and I mean, the other thing about a
suspension of life is, is that in a way it's
not a night out, you know, going out for a
good night out. Uh, if you go to the cinema,
it's really just before you get to the cinema. And
then when you come out and go down the park,
you know, it, Whereas if you go to an expo

(21:33):
in the cinema, that's the night. It's a show, you
can talk to your friends, you can go outside and
have a fag and go back in, heckle, whatever you
want to do.

Speaker 3 (21:47):
I'm imagining these nights, and perhaps tell me if I'm
wrong here, I'm imagining the vibe being more like a
DIY punk gig. In the sense of, are people there
to support their friends who have made a film? And
so there's almost like, yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:05):
Yeah. I mean, the good thing about the kind of
model that we discovered was that you'd have a guaranteed
audience because, uh, you showed 15 films. Then there's like,
if they're all from London, it would be 15 filmmakers.
And then all their friends would come and the people

(22:28):
would see themselves in the film. The actors would come
and see themselves in the films. Or, you know, people,
if it was a documentary, you might get people who
were interviewed coming to see themselves in the films. So, yeah.
And it was, I mean, it was very much like
punk gigs. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (22:50):
Over time, did you get people that were more like,
let's say, really get the vibe of the events and
go and keep coming, even if they don't know anyone
just because they know it's a good time?

Speaker 1 (23:00):
Yeah, I mean, that happened with the membership as well.
We got people joining the collective who weren't filmmakers, who
just loved the shows. I mean, they just wanted to
go to the show. And then helping to put the
shows on was just another sort of dimension of coming
to the show. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, we do have,

(23:27):
we usually have a band in the middle in Interval
as well. So in that way, it really is like
a punk gig. We have punk bands in the middle,
but it's not always punk. We try and go with, yeah, historically,
we mostly had sort of more acoustic bands just because
it's such a palaver to set up all the kit.

Speaker 3 (23:48):
But if you have like a bunch of different films,
you have a bit of music, you have a bit
of a party atmosphere, Is there any sense in which
it sort of like borrows from like history of like
musical and vaudeville of being into this kind of like
variety type performance or?

Speaker 1 (24:03):
Yeah, yeah, very much so. It's like, it's very much
like a sort of musical bill of variety bill. I mean,
literally the variety is always incredible. So you get like,
you know, you might get some kind of animation with
toys and And then you get like a documentary about

(24:24):
a local sort of campaign against some tree being cut down.
And then you might get like a little drama and
then you might get something completely abstract with shapes hurtling about. And,
you know, so it is very much kind of like
a variety show in that way. But then you also
have the master of ceremonies who introduced it to films.

(24:46):
And I mean, the thing is, you introduce the film
and then you get the filmmaker up. to answer a
few questions. And they talk about their film and how
they made the film and people's, you know. And I mean,
when we started off back in 1991, most of the
audience was either people who were already coming to the

(25:09):
cool town for other things, or it was the filmmakers
and it was us. So we started with quite a
small audience. But then as we moved from venue to venue,
we attracted more and more people. And as we attracted people,
more and more people started sort of getting interested in

(25:29):
showing their films. And some people started making films specifically
for us. And a lot of the filmmakers changed the
films they were making so that they became sort of
exploding cinema films because they could see what the audience liked.
So they would kind of make, you know. I mean,
and that's what happened to me as a filmmaker. I

(25:50):
was making, I was trying to make scripted dramas. And
then once I got into the Australian cinema, I ended
up doing sort of experimental stuff, but also live performances
where I would have music and images, but I would
stand in front of them with a microphone and kind

(26:11):
of rant into the microphone and do these kind of
ranted pieces, sort of. And there, Because I could do
them fast. I could do, you know, it was like
we had a show. At that point, we had a
show every two weeks. So I could knock one up
real fast. I mean, and that's the other thing. The

(26:32):
thing about not having... The reason we got into doing
this was not simply because we had nowhere to show
our films, but the duopoly that existed between the state
agencies meant that... And it was a vertical duopoly. So
what they would do is they would fund a film

(26:55):
and then the film would perhaps go into some kind
of touring package where it would go around these regional
art house cinemas and people would write about it. And
then also it would be seen as a significant film
and then it would be taught in the art colleges

(27:16):
and the universities. So there was a whole sort of
like alternative sector, an independent sector. And it was independent,
but it wasn't independent of the state. It was basically
the state-funded sector, which is what other people called it.
And if you didn't get in at the ground level,
if you didn't get your work funded at the very

(27:37):
lowest level, you didn't get into the circuit. There was
no way in. Also, I mean, you couldn't really make
any money whatsoever out of making experimental films. So one
of the ways that you could make money was by
getting into universities and art schools and teaching. And obviously
what you needed to do that was a successful film.

(27:59):
So if you had a couple of successful films and
you got funded, you could then probably get a job
in a university or an art school teaching. So it
was independent, but it was incredibly exclusive and elitist. And also...
What tended to happen was that there was a pool

(28:23):
of filmmakers trying to get their films made, like me
and a pair of some people. And we would spend
our entire time doing funding applications and thinking about funding
applications and talking to each other about funding applications and
who'd been funded and why wasn't I funded and stuff
like this. And all this energy going into like writing

(28:44):
forms And what do they call proposals and pitches like this?
And it was just like, why are we doing this? Why?
You know, when we could just bypass the system and
go straight to an audience and, you know, and create
a new audience. Yeah. Because I believed quite passionately that

(29:06):
there was a popular audience for short experimental and underground
film if you could just find them.

Speaker 3 (29:14):
Well, it sounds to me like the duopoly you're describing
are tightly controlling how they perceive their own audiences. But
it sounds to me like what you're describing is not
just fighting an audience, but creating an audience that wants
to engage with sort of like popular, enjoyable, experimental culture.

Speaker 1 (29:32):
Yes, exactly. Yeah. And I mean, and the model we
had for that was the 60s underground because the 60s
underground especially in North America was popular I mean it
was literally popular and it was also highly influential on

(29:53):
popular culture you know it changed popular culture and Hollywood
you know immediately tried to appropriate and co-opt it and
copy it and stuff like that. And stylistically, it was
highly influential. So we kind of knew, and we kind
of knew there were sort of isolated pockets of underground

(30:17):
countercultural filmmaking that still existed. So we had a kind
of model for But then, in the 90s, it was
really difficult to see a lot of underground film anywhere.
It was pre-internet, so it was very difficult to get
a hold of it. What I thought was really interesting

(30:45):
as well was that as we were improvising and doing
these things, we were actually reproducing what had happened already.
but we didn't know. So we were kind of reproducing
some of the kind of structures and styles of the
original underground in the 60s. That was really interesting.

Speaker 3 (31:09):
So would you say that this is more a sort
of a process of happy accidents rather than a sort
of like a collective genius strategy that you figured out?

Speaker 1 (31:21):
Yeah, I think so. I think so. I mean.
Yeah, happy accents. But I think... I mean, when I
wrote my first book, I kind of did a lot
of research into popular culture. And you kind of realize

(31:43):
that there's this whole, you know, this tradition of sort
of conviviality, of different kinds of live events, you know, that...
like the music hall or like early melodrama or like
the free and easies, which was sort of, um, Victorian

(32:04):
karaoke in a way. And, uh, you kind of realize
that there is this tradition of these events, like even
going back to shadow puppets, you know, shadow puppetry and
stuff like that in, in, in, uh, in, which is international,
but I mean, in, Britain, it was at the fairs

(32:25):
and you'd go into tents and you'd watch. And this convivial,
you know, especially like you realize that melodrama theater, melodrama
in the 19th century was incredibly sort of raucous and
live and people would eat and people would shout people
would interact with the characters on the stage you know

(32:46):
if they didn't like what was going on on the
stage they would shout what are you doing leave her
alone you know i mean it was so so there
was this kind so there is this cult so a
lot so i think some of what we were doing
was a rediscovery of that you know that you that
there is this kind of sort of utopian convivial uh

(33:09):
you can create these kind of zones of like liberty,
you know. But I think there's also... I was just
saying we were doing it with cinema rather than, you know.

Speaker 3 (33:22):
But I think there's also a sense that there was
there also in bits of the avant-garde. So for instance,
like Cabaret Voltaire is drawing directly from like, you know,
vaudeville cabaret traditions, like very literally.

Speaker 1 (33:33):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (33:34):
And not from like, you know, the tradition of like
white cube, no lifism, you know?

Speaker 1 (33:40):
Yeah, absolutely. Cabaret Voltaire. And then before that, the great
influence was, um, uh, the Chat Noir in Paris. Like
that cabaret was, was incredible, you know, and that even had, um, the, the, the,
It had shadow puppetry. In fact, that was the main draw,

(34:01):
apart from the singers at Chat Noir in 19th century Paris,
was that they did these shadow puppet shows with a
little sort of cinema, pre-cinema. So, yeah, there is this
kind of amazing sort of tradition of that. And it's
the white cube thing is, yeah, that's got to do with,

(34:23):
you know, art. Art. and the avant-garde, really, I think.
Which is kind of a different kettle of fish.

Speaker 3 (34:37):
How much do you think the audience got this vibe?
I mean, because you were saying before that some of
the audience actually went and became filmmakers and started making
their own stuff. But was there kind of an understanding
of this was the vibe? Once, Logan, I remember you
used a book that related this idea No stars, no funding,

(34:59):
no taste.

Speaker 1 (35:02):
Yeah, I think the audience, so this was really sort of,
it was 1991, but it was really a punk audience
and they really got it almost, you know, really got
it almost immediately. There was no, I mean, there was
a few, there was a few people who were just,
you know, They were looking at us like, you don't

(35:24):
know what you're doing. But most people immediately got it
and immediately understood what it was. And I mean, one
of the other things we do is we have the
main screen where the show is, where the main show is.
But we project moving images and still images as well

(35:47):
all over the room, all over the room. and in
the corridor as you arrive. So when you arrive, you're
met with this kind of, whatever venue it is, you
walk into a sort of environment of light in which
on the ceiling and on the walls, there are moving
images and film loops and slides. And then you enter

(36:10):
whatever room it is and the same thing, and it's
this huge sort of moving, you're inside a kind of
moving environment. So, you know, and people, get that you
know they get it straight away they're like oh i'm
inside the show this is the show and i'm inside
the show you know it's not like i guess it

(36:33):
changes kind of the idea of participation and and you
know what that means within cinema so weird because it's
quite interactive as well also because.

Speaker 3 (36:46):
Like it's not like the The art only happens in
this frame. It's the environment, it's the space, it's the vibe,
it's everything. And you're in it.

Speaker 1 (36:57):
Yes, yes, you're in it. It's all around you. And
you're actually sort of interacting with it. And we're all
moving around. We have to constantly check the projectors and
things go wrong the whole time. So we're constantly... threading
our way amongst them. And all the projectors are amongst

(37:21):
them moving. So, you know, it's a kind of, it's
a material way of kind of exposing the means of production.
Like here is the means of production. We are the
means of production. And these projectors are doing, and people
become fascinated with them. So sometimes you get somebody, you know,
who will, who comes to see the show and then

(37:44):
ends up in the corridor just, watching this machine and
trying to figure out what it's doing, you know, because
we have like old cine projectors and stuff like that.
I mean, originally it was all cine, but now we
just have a few cine projectors and a few, you know,
mostly video projectors. But yeah, so it's quite stunning to

(38:09):
some people in a way.

Speaker 3 (38:12):
Was it difficult for the collective to almost maintain that
level and degree of openness. I'm also thinking about, you
just started the cool tab, but that's there for what,
a few years and then it gets closed and you
have to move somewhere else. And how does that work
with trying to keep this kind of like very open
vibe and environment in different kinds of spaces? And at

(38:35):
this point, I'm guessing London has probably started its first
or second or third wave of gentrification. I never know
which one we're on, it's because it never ends.

Speaker 1 (38:47):
Yeah, I mean, it is difficult. I mean, you must
know how difficult klept is that. But I think the
exploding persisted and persists because it's very, very sort of
like the demarcation of what we do is very simple.

(39:11):
It's a very simple thing. We get together. We decide
what we're going to do for the next show. We
decide who's going to do what in the next show.
And then we do it. And then, and we show
all we have no decision making over what's being shown

(39:31):
because we show everything that's given to us there's just
a long waiting list so if you put a film
in it will be shown so there's no curation or
selection so whoever's given the job of being the programmer
their job is fairly simple they just contact you know
15 people and say your films are on. So it's

(39:55):
very simple in that way. And it works. And also
it's very informal as well. It's an informal collective. We
used to have quite sort of like strict meetings where
we would have a chairperson and then we'd take minutes and,
you know, and then we'd go around the room and

(40:16):
try and be as... kind of inclusive as possible but
that just in the end that just kind of we
just stopped doing it because it was it didn't really
work and what tends to happen is people find the
degree of involvement they want so some people want to
be very involved some people just want to come to
the shows and then and and just come to the

(40:38):
shows and help out of the shows and some people
want to so so that having the degree of openness
works really well. But I mean, one of the barriers
is that people don't believe we're as open as we are.
I mean, they think there's a catch or there's some

(41:01):
kind of, you know, secret sort of agenda or something.
We feel a bit like the Moonies sometimes or something
that we're recruiting. We're recruiting people. Would you like to
join our collective? And it's, and, and, And they just
can't believe that. Why, you know, you don't, especially after,

(41:21):
in the 1990s, it wasn't so bad. But by the
sort of 2010, people just didn't understand why we were
doing it. Well, why are you doing this? You're not
making any money. You're not, you know, your films aren't,
you're not becoming, you've got no careers. There's no career route.

(41:42):
You know, why would you do this? And it was so,
that's kind of a barrier now, really, to getting people
to join the Collective, simply because there's nothing, there's no
sort of, you know, I mean, I guess money and
a career path are the two things people want. But

(42:03):
we kind of went out of our way in the
early years to kind of deny any career opportunities whatsoever.
So we had a ban for the first 10 years
on people, on using, individual's names. So no one could
be like, we had a collective name so that if
you were interviewed, you had to use this collective name.
That's interesting because I'm friends with Alan W.

Speaker 3 (42:29):
Moore, who's written a lot of interesting stuff about art
and calendar culture. He wrote a book called Art Gangs
about sort of art and calendar culture in the early
80s in New York. And one of the things his
history there is talking about is that like, the ways
that collectives would get sort of torn apart as people
would develop career opportunities out of what they were making,

(42:52):
and that would break apart that sense of collectivity because
all of a sudden they could get a better deal
for themselves and then they wouldn't want to put the
effort into vacating the shared open space anymore.

Speaker 1 (43:05):
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think if you were a
production collective, that would happen. And if you, maybe even
if you were distribution, that would be a problem, but
because we're just exhibition, we're very simple. We're like, we
do a show. We're going to show about 15 films. Uh,
if you're part of the collective, you get the only

(43:29):
perk you get is you kind of get a guaranteed spot.
That's it. There's no other. So that's it really. So
you're only as good as your film and you're up
against 14 other films. So there really wasn't any kind
of career opportunity. And we even had at one point,
we had the filmmaker come to us and she said,

(43:53):
I'm going to show my film with you. And we're like, oh,
that's great. But my tutor told me I shouldn't show it.
She was being warned off by her art school teacher.
lecturer from showing at this floating because it was such
a dead end you know and we've had we've had

(44:16):
a bit of that stuff but.

Speaker 3 (44:21):
I find that really odd because I would think I
mean I've never been in art Twitter but I would
think getting to show your work with a really engaged
interesting audience of people who are engaged in similar work
would seem to be like.

Speaker 1 (44:33):
What you want to do yes I know I've heard
various arguments against the exploding for that reason. There was
an argument that if people were drinking, it was an unserious...
A drunken audience was not a serious audience. Or, I

(44:55):
don't know, it was a male environment because it was
a pub. And then there was an argument that we
were just a kind of like... treadmill grinding through you
know like 15 films a night so there was a
lot of but i don't think those people ever came

(45:15):
to the show i just think they heard about it.

Speaker 3 (45:18):
But it sounds like that gets back to the po-faced
avant-gardism like someone experienced pleasure in this space of art
it is destroyed by credibility.

Speaker 1 (45:28):
Exactly i mean that was exactly it because i mean
the the the the you know, the, the avant-garde from the,
which came out of the seventies was so, it was,
it was incredibly perfect. And also, I mean, we were challenging,
we were quite aggressively anti the funding agencies that we
would attack them in writing. And they knew we, you know,

(45:49):
they would, they would, they knew we were doing this. And, uh,
so we weren't very, you.

Speaker 3 (45:56):
Know, so one thing I've always wanted to do and
never managed to is, um, There's this quite funny story
I love when Jean-Luc Godard visits the University of Essex
while making British sounds. And he annoys the students. So
they throw him into the lake. So I would like

(46:19):
to establish the Jean-Luc Godard Memorial Film Prize where you
give the award for the filmmaker who's getting thrown.

Speaker 1 (46:26):
In a lake. Yes. That would be, but then you
need some kind of catapult or something to launch them out.
My cat's come to visit. Yeah, well, I mean, oh,

(46:47):
I guess the thing about the avant-garde was it was
based on a kind of, perception. And this was kind
of true of both sort of the 70s avant-garde, which
was structural materialism, which was kind of founded at the

(47:09):
film co-op by Peter Goodall and Malcolm McGrice and some
other people. But also some of the kind of documentary
independent make. was this kind of model, it was a
kind of, it was the hegemonic view of popular culture

(47:31):
that the mass culture was this kind of hypnotic sort
of drug. And so the theoretical, the radical theory against
this or the practice against this would be demystification. You
had to demystify the working classes and the way to

(47:53):
demystify them was to, uh, expose the, uh, the means
of production of cinema, but within the films themselves. Uh,
but in the case of structural materialism, that meant, uh,
that you, you, you had to proceed with film as film,
which meant no narrative, basically no images, no images, no soundtrack. And, uh,

(48:21):
certainly no pleasure.

Speaker 3 (48:24):
I guess i find it strange maybe this because again
i'm not i'm not so much a film person as
much but to me the answer to this seems to
be like gang of four like you can have all
interesting critical ideas and it can also be danceable.

Speaker 1 (48:39):
Yes yes well exactly that's what i think yes exactly
but it could be yeah you can you can Why
can't radicalism be entertainment? Why can't it be popular entertainment?
I spent quite a long while pondering the radical effect

(48:59):
of film. What was the radical effect of film? And
how can a film be a radical film in terms
of what it does and how its effect upon society?
The model really, the only really work model is that

(49:21):
it reaches the working classes, I think. I mean, you
could have a model in which you're only aiming at
the most powerful, you know, a specific filmmaking practice where
you only aim at the most powerful sort of corporate
masters and oligarchs because maybe then you could sort of

(49:42):
like change their minds or you could just have a
model in which you get the information out there to
people but the problem is that with art art is
amazingly efficient at appropriating and co-opting any kind of radical
message so you're always caught in that kind of conundrum

(50:07):
Because art tends to neutralize and co-opt any radical material
that enters its institution, really. But also the other problem
was that you had this kind of, along with the
idea of demystification, you had this kind of.

(50:32):
Theoretical sort of concept that you could work outside of capitalism.
You could leave capitalism. You could be independent and autonomous
in some kind of space that was completely, you know,
outside of any influence. And this always seems kind of

(50:53):
absurd to us, I think. But not that you shouldn't try.
Trying was fun, I think. But the But the trouble
was that we looked at the independent sector in the
1980s who had set out to be independent. And what
they'd actually done was rather than become independent, they'd become

(51:14):
completely sort of captured by the state. It was a
complete state agencies and universities and arts schools. It was
completely working within the state and its agencies.

Speaker 3 (51:33):
It would seem to me the question of what is
or could be radical film has to work at at
least three different levels, if not more. Like one at content,
two at the relations of producing, and three at the
relations of circulating and engaging with an audience. And it
seemed to me that what you were doing was trying
to focus, I guess, primarily on the third aspect.

Speaker 1 (51:55):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (51:58):
Which seemed to be a part because that seemed to
be what the other projects, kind of projects, were actually missing.

Speaker 1 (52:05):
Yes. Yes, exactly. I mean, is a film radical if
no one sees it? Or the only people that see
it is a small group of, you know, learned intellectuals
who then What will happen to it? What is the message?
So our idea was to reach as wide a popular

(52:27):
audience as possible. And exhibition was the thing that could
do that. But also the idea was to, and is,
I guess, to create a kind of temporary sort of
utopian zone for an evening in which There's total democracy,

(52:55):
total sort of media democracy. So that anyone can make
a film, anyone can show a film, anyone can be
part of our group. All you've got to do is
just do it. And I mean, that's one of the
great things that we did, I think, is people would
come to a show and they would say to us,

(53:16):
I'm going, I'm going to make a film. I'm going
to go away now and make a film for one
of your shows. And they did. because, you know, that
kind of liberty was there, I guess.

Speaker 3 (53:32):
How do you think it changed as some of the
conditions changed? So I'm thinking about not just the changes
in London, but before you also talking about the problem of,
at the beginning, access to production tools, access to film,
access to, so for instance, as London changed, but then
also you get the sort of, I'm going to say,
what I think is the, greater access to digital tools,

(53:56):
different access to sort of distribution tools, the conditions of
film production and distribution somewhat change. Maybe not, maybe not
it becomes like totally open, but it does become, let's
say somewhat more accessible or maybe not, but like how
do those shifts influence what you do collectively?

Speaker 1 (54:17):
Well, yeah, I mean, Obviously, since we started, the whole
technological media thing has been transformed. That's the first thing.
So when we started out, we were making films on
celluloid and a limited amount of home video. But we

(54:38):
had a big TV, which we hung from the ceiling
with chains at one point for quite a while. Then
we got our hands on projectors, which changed everything. Video projectors,
I mean. We had silly projectors. And then there was
nonlinear editing, which changed, which made everything, which meant you
could edit. I mean, prior to nonlinear video editing, it

(55:00):
was a nightmare. You couldn't get, you had to have
like an enormous room full of machinery with the, you know,
three machine editing and stuff or a spin back for
16 mil. So it became easier and easier to make films.
That was the first time. Then, of course, you got

(55:22):
the internet and that transformed everything. In terms of sort
of the social set up environment, when we started, it
was possible to squat in London and live on the dole.
And most of my friends and acquaintances, that's what they

(55:46):
were doing. They were musicians or performers of some kind
and you could either squat or you could get very
very cheap housing hard to let housing and there were
various sort of government schemes for sort of self-employment where
you could work a bit or I mean the other

(56:10):
thing you could do was you could get you could
get teaching jobs you could get like visiting tutor jobs
which is what I did I worked in For most
of my life, I've worked in sort of further education
colleges as a visiting tutor. So you could do a
sort of like, you know, a sort of range of
this stuff. And venues were pretty easy to come by.

(56:35):
There was a lot of squatted venues, but there was
a lot of rooms above pubs and there were also...
Later on, there was a lot of former working men's
clubs and social clubs. So it was much easier to

(56:56):
lead the sort of bohemian countercultural life. And then it's
become increasingly difficult. Of course, university education was free when
we started out. And now, you know, students are leaving
with 30 grand worth of debt or more or whatever
so yeah things are so there's been a counterbalance I

(57:20):
think I think the technology has democratized filmmaking amazingly amazingly
you know so that now anybody can really make a
sort of broadcast quality film you know with with very
few people and and and Even the equipment, you can

(57:44):
make it on your phone. You can use your phone.
But the living conditions are much worse, I think. And
the gentrification is closing down everything, really. Sector by sector.
The Exploding was mostly based around Brixton. And Brixton's been

(58:06):
totally gentrified. There's a few sort of holdouts. and Peckham
as well. There's a great, we've been doing shows at
a place called Set in Peckham, which is like a
time warp. You walk in and it's like 1995 or something.
It's incredible. But it is increasingly difficult, yeah.

Speaker 3 (58:27):
So it seemed to me that, okay, for a second,
let's bracket the question of gentrification. It seemed to me
that even if it's easier to distribute and share video
in cinema today, that what Exploding Cinema was offering in
terms of a kind of collective convivial space is you
can't get a convivial space on video.

Speaker 1 (58:50):
No, you can't. You can't get a convivial space on video,
and you can't get live feedback from an audience, which
is the most incredible thing you can get when you've
made a film. If you've made a film, to have
a live audience, first of all, greet it with great

(59:12):
pleasure and then to engage you in conversation afterwards is irreplaceable.
Whereas you can be sitting in your garret posting your
stuff on Vimeo and it's a very cold, isolating experience,
I find, anyway. I don't find any kind of... Maybe

(59:38):
some people do. But, yeah. And also, it's been kind
of leveled. As the technology has become more democratic, so
the kind of terrain has been leveled so that it
can be... It's very easy to dismiss people and films

(01:00:02):
and filmmakers, because everyone's doing it. Oh, everyone's doing it.
So it's kind of like, I think what's happened to
a certain extent, because the agencies are still there and
the curators are still there. The institutions of taste and
authority still abide. And what they've done is they've kind

(01:00:26):
of like hardened up their hierarchies and You know, they're
fighting a sort of rearguard action, sort of maintain their
power of taste and selection. So the conflict is still there.

Speaker 3 (01:00:49):
Yeah. It's a bit depressing, but I can understand how
it happened.

Speaker 1 (01:00:54):
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. I don't really find it depressing.
I find it... I think it's just inevitable, really, to
a certain extent. Although some people say, I mean, when
we started out and you wanted to get funding, I mean,
people still are slavishly, you know, applying for funding. And

(01:01:15):
now you even get people who make a living out of,
you know, sort of counselling people on how to apply
for funding. They're sort of funding counsellors or something or funding,
you know, consultants. But now I think with funding, it's
actually less democratic than when we started. You can't even

(01:01:36):
find out who's on the funding boards and who's made
the decisions, whether your film gets made or not. But
I think it's a mug's game. I wouldn't do it.
Better off just do a DIY film and come to

(01:01:58):
the exploding or set up your own I mean we
did try my dream was always that we would sort
of do short film and underground film would become sort
of similar to sort of you know the punk scene
or the music scene and every town would have its
own exploding cinema and then and every small you know

(01:02:21):
provincial centre would have a playing cinema type organisation and
then we could sort of create a circuit where we
would we would sort of circulate films around the circuit
and then there'd be a natural sort of like uh
you know you could actually build up some kind of
uh not a hierarchy but at least some kind of

(01:02:43):
hit parade if you see what i mean in the
same way that music had that so some films would
become more popular because i mean but in explaining we
don't we never even do that we never even sort
of uh create hierarchies of taste in that way. Although
we did, we've done various other things, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:03:02):
I mean, it's almost like what we sort of need
is like a sort of like underground cinema version of
record store per day.

Speaker 1 (01:03:11):
Yes. Yes. It's like that. It's like every, you know, yeah.
Every town can have its own, you know, one day
where everyone, they show loads of short films and all
the makers go to, that would be a great thing.
I mean, we've had ideas like that, but the problem
is just running the Australian cinema is so taxing that

(01:03:32):
we never really got much off the ground. We did
a festival at the end of the 90s, in the
early 2000s, called the Volcano Film Festival, which was, because
at that point, by the end of the 90s, there
was a whole slew of groups that was similar to

(01:03:55):
the Exploding Cinema. So it wasn't just the Exploding Cinema.
There was a whole gang of underground film groups. Each
one had its own character in London. So some would
be quite traditional. They'd be run by one or two people.
And there were other collectives. And then there were groups
where they would... So they each had their own character.
And then we had this idea, well, we're a collective.

(01:04:17):
Why don't we do a collective of the collectives? like
a grand council. So we got all the other film
groups together into a larger collective and then put on
this volcano festival. And at first we thought, well, what
we'll do is a bit like Record Store Day. We

(01:04:39):
won't actually have one centralized venue where the festival is.
We'll just have one week. And every one of these
groups in London then puts on their show in that
week and then that will be the festival and we'll
keep it sort of like each group can be kind
of independent within the larger collective and we did that

(01:04:59):
a couple of times but then we ended up doing
getting a venue and doing loads of stuff in this
one venue and then we were so exhausted afterwards doing
all this we thought well if we go on doing
this we can't do the regular exploding shows so we
kind of stopped doing it but it was very successful
at the time.

Speaker 3 (01:05:20):
There's only so much time everyone has. You can't do everything.

Speaker 1 (01:05:24):
Yes. Yes. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And then we did, what
else did we do? We did a collective feature film,
which was between me and a German film collective. And
we took the book, L'Autrement, no, Maldora by L'Autrement. And, uh,

(01:05:51):
We then divided it up into chapters and then each
collective in Germany and in London made their own short
film in the larger narrative. And then we assembled it
all into a large narrative, all the different films. So yeah,
we've done all these kinds of collective things.

Speaker 3 (01:06:16):
I hope to get to see that someday. I will
have to come along to one of your events.

Speaker 1 (01:06:21):
Yeah, yeah. We don't show it that often. It was
much more successful in Germany than in Britain because I
think they're just more energetic than us. They did a
better job. We kind of got bored of it after
it was finished. We were like, ah, it's done now.
But of course it's not. You have to distribute it
and exhibit it and everything. But it exists anyway somewhere.

Speaker 3 (01:06:46):
So I should probably nudge us to not say her conclusion,
but sort of getting towards the end. And so maybe
it's something to think about. One of the things I
find really interesting about this book is that you're, well,
two things. You're writing a history of all these things happening,
but you're writing it yourselves. So you're writing it through

(01:07:07):
a sort of the kind of institutional lens or the
lens you get where You know, you get the perspective
of people who have gotten very good at writing the
right grants and saying the right things for the right institutions.
So it's very much a sort of messy history, which
I like because counterculture is messy.

Speaker 1 (01:07:24):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (01:07:25):
So I guess I'm thinking that the 30 some years
into Exploding Cinema, what feels like it's not done yet?
What can keep going? What's unexpected?

Speaker 1 (01:07:35):
Where are you going?

Speaker 3 (01:07:37):
How can we still get lost?

Speaker 1 (01:07:42):
Well, I suppose, I guess I hark back to what
I said earlier, that we never managed to kind of
expand into a circuit of any kind, because I think
that's the secret. And we did have a period where
we kind of promoted filmmakers in other cities to start

(01:08:07):
their own other exploding cinema and use our name. And
that was semi sort of successful. So there was a
group in Los Angeles and there was a group in Amsterdam.
And closer to home, there was a group in Brighton.
But I don't think they ever really had the cohesion
that we had as a sort of collective. So they

(01:08:27):
didn't last that long. And what else could I... I
can't say that all our ambitions are fulfilled. We're still,
I mean, because we're still doing shows. There was a
show in Wales this weekend just gone. I didn't go
for various reasons, but there was a show in Wales

(01:08:51):
in a, and you can find, that's on our website.
people will be putting up the latest photos and stuff
like that it sounds like it was very successful yeah
I mean the book is a collective book I wanted

(01:09:11):
it to be a collective book so I got as
many members and ex-members to contribute to it like that
and then all the artwork is sort of collectively made.
And then the booklets, that's one of the major sort
of activities of The Exploding is we do these booklets,
which are like little sort of fanzines, which are the

(01:09:33):
program for each show. And they're kind of made in
a collective way, which is just that there's an evening
and anyone who wants to turns up and then we
all sort of collectively collage with Pritt Stick and old magazines.
We make these collective collage pages. And so they're great.

(01:10:00):
I mean, there's a sort of, they're in the book.
There's lots of them in the book. There's a strange
sort of, I guess I have a strange sort of ambivalence,
which is that One of the key things about the
project was that we kind of negated success and we

(01:10:21):
negated sort of mainstream popularity and sort of career popularity.
And we were very successful in doing this. And also
the old guard independent movement and the old avant-garde quite

(01:10:44):
slyly and strategically have ignored us. That was their technique
for dealing with us. They've just ignored us for 30 years,
although there's a little bit of recognition now. But they
totally ignored us for 30 years. And even they ignored
our arguments, which I think they ignored them because they
would lose. But yeah, so you have the strange ambivalence.

(01:11:07):
You think, well, what we did was amazing and it
should be more widely known. But at the same time,
you kind of went out of your way to be underground.
I mean, that's the great paradox of the underground. It's underground.
And if you stop being underground, you know, and become
part of the mainstream, then you lose the spirit and

(01:11:33):
the strategy and the function. You lose it all. So,
you know, we are absolutely still underground.

Speaker 3 (01:11:43):
I think in some ways the signs of success of
what you're doing are not in getting BFI grants or
art grants, but in, in buying other people to pick up,
pick up and do similar things. And, and, and, and
that to me seems more significant than other forms of recognition.

Speaker 1 (01:12:01):
That's the way I was. I mean, that's, I think
that's why we had to do the book, you know,
because we, we, we needed to put it out there
so that people could see that it was possible. You know,
this is possible. It's possible to do this. And, you know,
with no money and no support of any kind. So,

(01:12:28):
and it's, and it's, you know, I mean, I think
if you, you must come to a show and see
what it is. I'm talking about. It's, it's, it's quite marvelous. Still,
I'm still, I still think it is. Yes.

Speaker 3 (01:12:47):
I will very much do that in the very, in
the very near future. Um, but, um, thank you for
coming along, Duncan, that this was super interesting and I
hope everyone goes and, and it reads the book because
it really is quite, quite a lot of, it's quite,
quite good.

Speaker 1 (01:13:02):
Yes. It's not easy to get it in bookshop, but
you can buy it from our website. Uh, www.explodingcinema.com.

Speaker 3 (01:13:14):
I'll put a link in the show notes.

Speaker 1 (01:13:16):
Oh, great. Great. Great. Well, thanks for having me on.

(01:13:44):
Thank you.