Local and international artists,residents, shop-owners and visitors are working in collaboration in the distinct London neighbourhood of Edgware Road as part of this major Serpentine Gallery Project. The Centre for Possible Studies on Porchester Place is the project’s base.
Free Cinema School
20 July – 20 September
The Centre for Possible Studies
14 Porchester Place, London W2 2BS,
Artists collectives CAMP and no.w.here – working with actors Khalid Abdalla and Cressida Trew – are in residence at the Serpentine Gallery’s Centre for Possible Studies (CfPS). Part of the Serpentine’s Edgware Road Project, the CfPS hosts collaborations between artists, local residents, shopkeepers, students and community activists.
This summer, the CfPS is transformed into a Free Cinema School, a space for collaborative film production, annotation, skills-sharing, workshops, and archiving. The Free Cinema School picks up the spirit of the original 1950s Free Cinema movement that called for a ‘belief in freedom, in the importance of people and in the significance of the everyday’.
Revisiting the Free Cinema concept in the here and now, the school is open to anyone, and especially those with a relationship to the Edgware Road. Together, local people and artists ask questions about their experiences of regulation and openness in the neighbourhood, asking what can be ‘free’ in the free cinema of today?
Their collaborative production will be presented at the Serpentine Pavilion on 11 September.
We invite you to get involved through:
Young Peoples’ Cinema Courses
Community Workshops
Drop In
Open Evening
Edgware Road: Cinema
And you can read more about the ideas surrounding the project in Why Free Cinema Today?
NEWS UPDATE
Artist collective no.w.here (London) work with actors Khalid Abdalla and Cressida Trew (London/Cairo) to re-visit the Free Cinema concept, inviting you to collaborate on producing scenes for a film set on the Edgware Road that will be screened at the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009 on 11 September 2009 at 8 pm.
Would you like to make a film with us? Do you have any images, text, sounds or memories you can share about the Edgware Road neighbourhood? Are you interested in developing your skills in acting, writing or filmmaking?
Drop in to The Centre for Possible Studies 14 Porchester Place London W2 2BS on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays from 1-6p m. For more information please see the Serpentine Gallery website or contact Amal Khalaf on 020 7402 1004 or amalk@serpentinegallery.org.
Young Peoples’ Cinema Courses
20–24 July - SOLD OUT
17–21 August - SOLD OUT
11–5pm daily
Young people aged 13 to 19 take part in a five-day cinema course, working with artists from no.w.here and actors Khalid Abdalla and Cressida Trew to make scenes for a collaborative film drawn from experiences of the Edgware Road.
Booking places:
Booking is essential as places are limited. Please contact Eleanor Farrington
+44 (0)20 7298 1516
eleanorf@serpentinegallery.org
Local groups are invited to book a workshop to make a scene for a collaborative production to be screened at the Serpentine Pavilion on 11 September.
To book a session, contact Eleanor Farrington
+44 (0)20 7298 1516
eleanorf@serpentinegallery.org
Drop In
Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays
1-6 pm
Drop in to view documentation of a collaborative neighbourhood film in the making, visit a growing film and video archive, and contribute to a collaboratively edited collection of histories of the spaces along the Edgware Road.
On Thursday evenings there are screenings of the work done so far as well as discussions from 6 pm – 8 pm.
For information, contact Amal Khalaf
amalk@serpentinegallery.org
Open Evening
Thursday 27 August
7-9 pm
Free of charge
Centre for Possible Studies
14 Porchester Place, London W2 2BS
Local people working with artists no.where and actors Khalid Abdalla and Cressida Trew have been making scenes for a collaborative film production. Others have been working with artists from CAMP to make an archive of histories along the Edgware Road. Come and participate in the editing of the work before it is screened in the Serpentine Pavilion.
All are welcome!
Contact Amal Khalaf
amalk@serpentinegallery.org
Edgware Road: Cinema
Friday, 11 September, 8 pm
Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA
Artists from no.w.here (London), actors Khalid Abdalla and Cressida Trew (Cairo/London) and Edgware Road neighbourhood collaborators present scenes from a film produced by the students and teachers of a Free Cinema School hosted by the Centre for Possible Studies between 20 July and 20 September, 2009. Revisiting the traditions of popular, participatory and political cinema production, contributors spent only six weeks assembling a film from scenes of the neighbourhood. The product of skills-exchanges, discussions, workshops and collaborative editing, the film will be screened and participants invited to comment on the experience and their understanding of a ‘free’ cinema today.
They are joined by Mumbai-based collective CAMP, who will present excerpts from their Block Study, a collaboratively edited and annotated archive of histories of one block of the Edgware Road. Bringing together contemporary zoning laws, future plans and the past lives of buildings, the study has uncovered both the residents’ relationships to cinema and the role of the Edgware Road in a broader global cinematic imaginary. Remixing and annotating films that range from Helga (experimental German sex education) to the Kuwaiti play and television programme Bye Bye London, excerpts from the archive will be played and played with in the Pavilion.
All Park Nights tickets £5/£4 (concessions)
Available from the Gallery Lobby Desk or from Ticketweb on 08700 600 100) or at
www.ticketweb.co.uk
The drive to produce a Free Cinema School of the present in part emerges from a historical place. Among the many histories of the Edgware Road is the prominence it gained in the field of social and community education through the work of George Goetschius and Joan Tash. Their study Working with Unattached Youth, first published in 1967, was derived from field notes of a team of five community educators working in Marylebone and along the Edgware Road for three years. Originating from a coffee stall, their study became one of the founding texts on working with young people in Britain. A reflective work, their project centred on their own processes of forming relationships with people in the Edgware Road neighbourhood, particularly those they described as ‘the unattached’, people actively disengaged from government services.
George Goetschius, the leader of the study, was an advocate of autonomous local community work. Trained in New York by the radical Sicilian social activist Danilo Dolci – organiser of ‘the strike in reverse’ (the development of unauthorised public works projects for the poor) – Goetschius was also a central part of a social circle in the mid-1950s that founded the Free Cinema movement.
While unarticulated in his studies of young people and community-organising in Britain, the link between community work and a cinema that aimed to ‘capture the experiences of ordinary Britons away from studio aesthetics’ shares with Goetschius’s work a deep commitment to practices of self-organisation and the democratic making of culture.
While we live in very different times than those of the Free Cinema movement, the artists or ‘fellows’ selected to lead this first manifestation of the Free Cinema School at the Centre for Possible Studies share some if its original preoccupations.
Artists from no.w.here have since the early 1990s worked collectively to share access to the means of cinema production, by allowing members to use and make cinema, producing work that poignantly challenges current conventions of commercial cinema. As well as being artists and film-makers, no.w.here has also been deeply committed to educational practices, extending skills and equipment to young people and other groups in London and internationally. Like the work of those in the study of ‘the unattached’, its work also supports and questions modes of relationship-building. These relationships range from those cultivated between artists in London through a regular programme of screenings and discussions between people from other parts of the world, through an ongoing series of residencies, or through the relationships formed with neighbours of no.w.here’s studio in Bethnal Green, which is also used to hold an English-Urdu language exchange. During its residency at the Free Cinema School, no.w.here will lead workshops with local groups but also foray into the realm of the unattached, meeting and inviting people on the street to work on a series of scenes for a collaborative film production.
Working in another context, actors Khalid Abdalla and Cressida Trew share many commitments with the impetus of Free Cinema. As members of Zero Production, an independent film production house in Cairo, they have been working alongside film-makers from Egypt, Lebanon, and Iraq, trying to develop a different model for cinema production in the region, through their work-in-progress film In the Last Days of the City. Working on the borders where documentary and fiction meet, in and around the highly regulated spaces of urban Cairo and on location in Baghdad, Beirut and Berlin, Zero Production is part of a generation of film-makers working on semi-improvised and politically engaged cinema. Khalid and Cressida will be contributing their experience from filming everyday life and shooting on the streets of Cairo to the Cinema School’s ongoing film project.
Artists from the Mumbai collective CAMP come at the notion of a Free Cinema through another trajectory. Part of a global movement for free access to knowledge, CAMP produces infrastructures and platforms for sharing information in the fields of media production and social/architectural design. From making CCTV surveillance available to the public to inviting local people to make and broadcast their own media and design strategies, its work marries popular methods of research with openly produced, stored and activated archives. Its project pad.ma, a free platform for the collection of moving image materials in India, for example, invites people to upload and annotate images, ranging from those of classic cinema to those used strategically by activists across a range of issues. Animated by a series of archive-making events, image histories in this archive are understood as living and contested, existing beyond the hierarchies of knowledge-production (such as the institution of the university) and current regimes of intellectual-property ownership. At the Free Cinema School, CAMP will continue its ongoing Block Study of the Edgware Road, inviting a local editorial team to come together to produce a series of episodes to be broadcast online and in other forms, including a night at the Serpentine Pavilion 2009.
No artist involved in the Free Cinema School approaches the idea of what is ‘free’ naively. Rather, each questions what freedom might mean in the highly regulated and very complex moment in which we live, a time in which the very idea of freedom is mobilised regularly – as much in the debate surrounding the deregulation of an economy in crisis as within ongoing projects of emancipation from cultural and economic oppression.
What is it to revisit the practices of Free Cinema from the complexity of individual desires, public mandates and private interests that currently shape the making of culture today? Or at a moment in which individuals produce and circulate their own media constantly? And where does freedom lie in relation to ongoing initiatives to regulate movement between countries and monitor behaviours within neighbourhoods?
As the first proposition of the Centre for Possible Studies, the Free Cinema School takes its cue from the original movement, proceeding with the idea of understanding cinema as a way of both reflecting contemporary life and inserting the poetic into its daily negotiations.
References
CAMP
Goetchius, George & Tash, Joan, Working with Unattached Youth, (New York: Routlege, 1967)
www.infed.org
no.w.here
Free Cinema
www.lastdaysofthecity.com
You can also follow the Edgware Road Project on Facebook.
The Edgware Road Project is in collaboration with Ashkal Alwan: The Lebanese Association for the Plastic Arts, Beirut, and Townhouse Gallery, Cairo.
Edgware Road Project
Film still from Young Person’s Course at the Free Cinema School (July 2009)
Courtesy City of Westminster Archives Centre
