V. Primary Challenges Facing Performance Cinema

There are many, and they are varied. For the sake of simplicity (as all of the problems are complex and cross a variety of boundaries) I’ll be dualistic for a moment and generally categorise the problem as Internal and External.Internal Problems.
I’ll address the internal problems first, because they are larger and more immediate. The internal problems follow along some familiar lines: personalities and technology. People are so complex, that I’ll address the technology issues first, as they are also the most promising and easily solved problems facing Performance Cinema. The technology problems are projection, processing, storage and software. These problems will be solved by Moore’s law in the long run, and by clever software programming in the short run. I am firmly convinced that the technology problems facing Performance Cinema will largely sort themselves out over time, facing their greatest challenges over the next several years as the technology commoditises and filters through society.

The Personality Issues.

These are the larger problems, and much of them depend on the vagaries of human interaction and the puzzling habits of the creative Muse. I don’t mean Personality Issues as in various affective disorders or compatibilities, but more in terms of how we as artists take on our work in Performance Cinema relative to a world of people who may or may not share our enthusiasm.

I think the real touch points for this will be in the areas where Performance Cinema art works intersect with narrativity. I believe an analogy is appropriate here: Performance Cinema is in a place not dissimilar to nickelodeons were relative to the Movies we all know and love. Technological developments (development of film, projectors, and then film with sound) completely "solved" the problem of the nickelodeon. Technology will solve some of the problems of Performance cinema, but not all, and it is the historical development of passive cinema that is a source of much of the turbulence.
If one thinks of the world as a University, film left the engineering department, and went to the art department. But very quickly, the theatre department took it over, and over the past century has been utterly dominating in the form. It is true enough that experimental film and video has been the predominant property of the Art Department, but this fact only serves to underline the hegemony of the theatrical nature of modern cinematic practice. This was reinforced by early film theorists like Musterberg, Eisenstein, and Bazin, who often saw fictional narrative cinema as the preferred method of working in Cinematic Art.

As a consequence, several generations have grown up on the assumption that cinema is passive and should tell a story. The amazing commercial success of passive narrative cinema, compared to any other form of cinematic art, needs little elaboration – just mentioning the word "HOLLYWOOD" says it all, really.

As cinematic artists systematically rejected related features and methods within passive cinema, and evolved different uses for projected imagery in experimental films, one of the first things that was jettisoned was narrative story telling and the fictive space it requires. In fact, these kinds of non-narrative works had always been in cinema from the start: some of the first films were simply recordings of daily life on street corners – no story, no fictional space, no mis en scene. Just people walking past a camera… Various Modernist art movements through the 20th century brought other considerations to bear upon experimental film .

The 1960s saw a great investment in experimental film, and with the development of light shows for psychedelic rock music concerts, increasingly complex light shows were produced and with the development of the VHS deck in the early 1980s, video soon came into play, helping create the VJ phenomenon as discussed by Stefan and Michael Heap. It’s this older heritage of experimental film that has largely informed many, if not most, of the subsets that form the superset of Performance Cinema. The very narrative structures that Experimental Passive Cinema, most VJs and abstract cinema, and many others have historically rejected or avoided, have historically proven crucial to the social and commercial success of passive cinema. I believe the inclusion of this kind of narrativity will also prove to be crucial to the success of Performance Cinema in larger social and historical contexts.

I’m not saying that narrative fictional Performance Cinema is somehow primary or more important than other ways of working. However, given the structures inherent to Performance Cinema and its aesthetic heritage from avant garde and experimental cinema and light show experiments, narrativity is going to be a distinctive challenge to the practice of Performance Cinema and will need to be addressed in the very practice of Performance Cinema. Just as "THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY" and "BIRTH OF A NATION" were two important, if deeply flawed, works that helped define a century of cinematic story telling, Performance Cinema will need equally great works. What those works will be will only be known in hindsight, but we need to start making them.

The External Problems.

The external problems are not to be underestimated. They are, very simply,

1. access to public mindshare
2. "places to play".

The "places to play" problem is more easily solved than the mindshare issue. As the distribution of passive cinema becomes increasingly digital, and theatres install high res projectors for standard theatrical releases, the Performance Cinema Artists only needs to insert themselves in the cinematic datastream.

It is not likely that Performance Cinema will be found regularly in theatre #22 at the AMC UltraJumbo Gigaplex next year, but AMC isn’t the only game in town, and I think it is unfair to assume that all theatre managers, even at AMC, are witless automatons mindlessly doing the bidding of their corporate capitalist taskmasters. Corporations are made of people, and like most people, not all corporations are the same. While something as huge and automated as the AMC theatre chain might prove difficult to engage, there are plenty of independent cinemas and cinema chains, and many of them already have or will soon be installing digital projectors, and I’m quite certain that some of them will be quite receptive to the notions of Performance Cinema. And with the success of Performance Cinema at smaller scales at various "art house" theatres and independent chains, larger theatres will take notice, and things will naturally scale.

Also, it is important to keep in mind the portability of this medium, which makes it such a hands on DIY way of working : If one is performing in a small place, the use of a 10,000 lumen projector that weighs 40kg and costs $130,000 is not indicated. A 2000 lumen projector that weighs 4kg and costs $1300 is perfectly indicated with a laptop computer, external high speed hard-drive, and keyboard. Hence, it is logical to set up a tour of a work by working within pre-existing networks of art spaces, independent theatres, and concert halls.

I do not see any limitation to the development of Performance Cinema as a vibrant and creative medium that can inspire, inform, and entertain many thousands of people, and this leads to the Mindshare issue. Passive cinema as a social palliative is not to be underestimated in its importance in maintaining social order in contemporary political economies. Contrary to 1984, social control is not maintained by the TV watching you, but by YOU watching TV. Whether it is a movie or a TV show, people who are engaged in that ritual are not connecting to each other, or even to a performer. They may have deep affective responses to what is presented, and this is one of the great powers of passive cinema, but they are not "present" or "in the moment" as they might be in, say, a musical concert (at minimum) or a vibrant political protest (at maximum).

Performance Cinema can engage an audience and the audience cathexis in a way that is completely unique and fundamentally antithetical to the exigencies of passive cinema. Those people most invested in the hegemony of passive cinema are not stupid and will, of course, seek to trivialise, marginalise, balkanise, divide, and co-opt performance cinema .
However, a fundamental point of performance cinema is that it is a LIVE phenomenon, it requires an audience, and this runs counter to the politics and fundamental intentions of passive cinema and its electronic stepchild, Television. Given the capitalisation of passive electronic media conglomerates and their vested interest in keeping people afraid and in their homes watching TV and buying consumer products, performance cinema certainly has some challenges ahead, but I don’t see any of them as insurmountable.