An Outline for Exploded View Microcinema

An Outline for
EXPLODED VIEW

Microcinema

 

Levitation

LEVITATING MAN
Tucson, Arizona: October, 2013. A new microcinema improbably rises from the parched cityscape of the paved-over Sonoran Desert.

 

Time Travel
Once upon a time, we moved with our young son from a San Francisco Mission District rental to an 1880s primitive boarding house in a former mining town in Arizona. Under the SF apartment, we left behind the skeleton of a basement  venue that had been a thriving 30-seat microcinema through the mid-1990s. Tiny Bisbee, AZ, though considered an “artist town” is one-thousand miles and light years from San Francisco’s singular and voluptuous spillage of all manners of creative film activity. Operating remotely then, in the experimental film community, we used the space of the desert to question and reinvent our individual practice. Last year, dynamics changed and we found ourselves moving on to the minor metropolis of Tucson, Arizona.

How can we make a microcinema here and now in 2013?
It’s a different question now than it was 20 years ago.
VIOLIN MAN
But still, how can we not?

 

A Venue
EXPLODED VIEW
While it is remarkable that people can now access an endless array of high and low troves of artist-made and rare films on the Internet, we’ve opted to design a very particular kind of public space. Over several decades, we’ve witnessed seismic changes in exhibition: As the venue-based experience of cinema is replaced by virtual online communities, appetites have weakened for the kinesthetic realm of experience unique to actual public spaces where people watch projected media together. In our own microcinema, we hope for shifting possibilities of energy exchange to remain relevant and surprising.

 

Tectonic Shifts…
DOUGLAS CINEMA CHAIRS
We love projected celluloid and if you truly witness film, you know that at one point it was fragile, cherished, and unique. Even though the community-based experience of microcinema is itself more important than any individual medium, to insist upon projecting celluloid along with other mediums in a microcinema is to keep alive the material potency of specific durational works. Moving-image art requires time, space, and consideration to be felt as exquisitely as the endangered ribbon of film running through a projector.

 

ev_6-zebra
Microcinema
A small cinema devoted to screening film works in a context that dissolves the boundaries of authority between the screened image, the artist & the audience, creating an active autonomous community of discourse and experience.

 

Mission Statement of a Desert Microcinema
EXPLODED VIEW
Established in 2013 in downtown Tucson, Arizona, Exploded View is a storefront microcinema and arts space supporting the exhibition and presentation of contemporary and historical visual, sonic and film arts. The Exploded View facility aims to provide a flexible space of operation that may be re-configured to encourage experimental, innovative, and challenging projects.

 

You can grow anything you want in the desert, especially a cactus.
The possibilities of desert materials in filmmaking…

 

Tucson
KEEP TUCSON SHITTY
It’s a flat bicycle town with a huge university, excellent poetry and photography centers, a good co-op, too many great musicians, and a historic downtown that’s having a “revitalization.” The low cost of living lures a lot of creative people here; there’s not much of an art market but there’s a lot of “content” being created in this town.

 

Audience
Tucson hasn’t yet had much exposure to experimental film. EV is a new enterprise for this time and place, making our endeavor both scary and profound in its potential. We remind ourselves that even cities with vibrant experimental film cultures have unpredictable audiences. In touring with programs, we’ve learned that venues in remote places are sometimes rewarded with robust audiences planting seeds and establishing roots for future incarnations of alternative film practice.

 

Reasons that filmmakers will come to Tucson and show their work at Exploded View:

  1. A fresh audience.
  2. Temperate winters.
  3. “Keep Tucson Shitty” tote bag.
  4. Unparalleled astronomical observation and bird watching.
  5. Hiking in the desert.
  6. Historic barrio neighborhoods.
  7. 40,000 college students.
  8. The Southern Pacific train route runs right behind our building—your screening will be punctuated with screaming whistles and rumbling iron.
  9. We’re reasonably close to…Mexico!

 

EXPLODED VIEW
Make Exploded View your landing pad in AZ!

Lets connect and see what can happen! Visiting a retired relative? Robert Breer retired & died in Tucson! Or, traveling cross-country between Austin’s Experimental Response Cinema, Albuquerque’s Basement Films, and Echo Park Film Center in LA? Exploded View is now turning on curious poets, musicians, the neighborhood, and the world to new experiences in cinema art! Brothers and sisters, let’s share a microcinema revolution in the desert!

 

 

4 comments for “An Outline for Exploded View Microcinema

  1. Tim Kelly
    September 10, 2013 at 9:36 pm

    inspiring David! Rock on completely.

  2. Brett Kashmere
    September 16, 2013 at 11:17 am

    A beautiful endeavor… best of luck with it, and thanks for keeping the microcinema spirit & practice alive!

  3. Christy LeMaster
    November 17, 2013 at 12:28 am

    Microcinemas for the World! Best of Luck from The Nightingale in Chicago.

  4. December 7, 2013 at 10:37 am

    Wonderful! I am a video artist and filmmaker from Tucson, currently studying in L.A. in many places, including echo park. I was so happy to read about this endeavor on the frameworks listserve, you seem to have really captured the spirit of Tucson, and I think the people will respond. I have watched the interest in alternative film grow significantly in the last decade with the re opening of the fox, the international film festival at the screening room, the Gallagher at the uofa, and the ongoing work the loft does to bring people in. However there has not yet been an active micro cinema, everything has centered around events that come and go but do not build a community. With the trolly connecting the youth and preventing yuppies from taking over downtown, it is getting better and staying shitty at the same time. People are walking the streets and looking to expand their minds, I hope exploded view can be an outlet for this, and a community that supports the alternative energy throught Tucson towards moving image expression in addition to what is already thriving. I recommend talking about your mission on Arizona Illustrated, and will look forward to checking out the venue when I visit this winter for the holidays. Cheers!

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