Experiencing Cinema

Participatory Film Cultures, Immersive Media and the Experience Economy

Emma Pett

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781501374883
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501352058
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

Film is often conceived as a medium that is watched rather than experienced. Existing studies of film audiences, and of media reception more broadly, have revealed the complexity of viewing practices and cultures surrounding cinema-going and its exhibition spaces. Experiencing Cinema offers the first in-depth study of participant engagement with a range of experiential media forms derived from cinema culture. From sing-a-long screenings to theatrical extravaganzas, a broad spectrum of alternative film-going practices and immersive spaces are explored and analysed in this original audience study.

Moving from intimate community gatherings to blockbuster urban venues, from isolated farmhouses to Olympic stadia, Experiencing Cinema considers the lure and value of these popular events. Often attracting a diverse, intergenerational range of participants, from early-adopter urban hipsters to DIY rural communities, the growing demand for participatory cinema within the contemporary marketplace is analysed alongside broader debates circulating around the move away from traditional tiered seating and increased audience mobility and the de-centring of the film text.

Part One

Live cinema, pop-up media and the experience economy

1

Immersive cinema-going and the pop-up economy

And then she saw that there was a light ahead of her; not a few inches away where the back of the wardrobe ought to have been, but a long way off. Something cold and soft was falling on her. A moment later she found that she was standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis, 1950

Introduction

Cinema as a cultural form is always already temporally limited and thus lends itself well to ephemeral spaces and transient exhibition formats, such as festivals and pop-up film experiences. While open-air and drive-in cinemas date back to the early twentieth century (Levitt 2016; Nowell 2016; Church 2020), pop-up cinemas incorporating participatory elements into their event design have become increasingly ubiquitous throughout the cities of the global north in the early twenty-first century (Lashua 2013; Harris 2016, 2018). In London, the prototype pop-up exhibitor, Secret Cinema, began operating in 2007 with a screening of Gus van Sant’s Paranoid Park (2007) staged in the vaults of London Bridge.¹ Several academic studies have already documented how other pop-up exhibitors quickly followed suit, incorporating elements of spectacle, interactive performance and participatory theatre into the exhibition of films (Atkinson and Kennedy 2015, 2016, 2018; Pett 2016, 2018). Indeed, the sector expanded rapidly in the UK, resulting in what Atkinson and Kennedy dubbed the ‘Summer of Live’ in 2015 (Atkinson and Kennedy 2016: 140), and shows little sign of abating. Secret Cinema’s global multi-title partnership with Disney, along with their recent foray into immersive television, indicates that screen experience economy is still expanding.² This chapter examines the contemporary pop-up screen sector in the UK and argues that it constitutes an ‘experiential turn’ in cinema exhibition which extends beyond the parameters of the millennial experience economy established in the 2016 Harris Report.

In the UK, pop-up cinema forms part of a recent trend within the exhibition sector for one-off, unconventional cinematic events, in what has variously been described as ‘event cinema’ (Follows 2018) and ‘live cinema’ (Atkinson and Kennedy 2018), and within an industrial context, ‘immersive cinema’.³ An independent survey of the event cinema exhibition market in 2017 revealed that

In the early 2010s, the UK event cinema business grew at breakneck speed. In the five years between 2008 and 2012, the sector grew fourfold. However, over the past few years, we’ve seen a levelling off of revenues, at around £33m a year. . . . In 2017, event cinema releases grossed £32.4m, more than crime movies, thrillers, biopics, romances and documentaries. (Follows 2018: 1–2)

While this survey also includes the screening of live-streamed events to cinemas, which complicates the data, it nevertheless establishes a rapid growth in the bespoke exhibition sector of the market during the post-crash years of 2008–12. This has continued, as evidenced by Secret Cinema productions, consistently making high entries in the annual UK box office from 2015 to 2019.⁴ The two categories of ‘live cinema’ and ‘event cinema’ are used differently by the industry and the academy to refer to overlapping forms of exhibition. However, an industry report on audiences of live cinema found that ‘consumers do not recognize a difference between event, live and outdoor cinema, seeing the brands as a type of cinema, rather than a unique product’.⁵ For the purpose of clarity throughout this book, I will use ‘event cinema’ to refer to live broadcasts of opera, theatre and so on that are streamed to cinemas, and ‘live cinema’ or ‘immersive cinema’ to refer to experiential cinema, whereby the exhibition of a film is combined with aspects of interactive performance, spectacle and other extra-textual features to create a ‘live’ experience.⁶ Atkinson and Kennedy (2016) have proposed a typography of live cinema for categorizing this sector, whereby film events are either enhanced (site-specific and outdoor screenings), augmented (involving an added dimension, such as performance and music) or participatory (including direct audience engagement). These types are useful for thinking about how the sector has evolved and for capturing the range of events that live cinema encompasses. The UK, in particular, has witnessed a plethora of new pop-up cinema businesses offering experiential cinema of varying types in non-theatrical locations. In 2018, UK-based pop-up cinema businesses included Secret Cinema (founded 2007), the Luna Cinema (founded 2008), Nomad Cinema (founded 2010), the Rooftop Film Club (founded 2011), Backyard Cinema (founded 2012), Picnic Cinema (founded 2012), Edible Cinema (founded 2012), Hot-tub Cinema (founded 2012), Vintage Cinema, the Floating Cinema (founded 2016), and Neighbourhood Cinema (founded 2017). This is not offered as an exhaustive list but gives some indication of the exponential growth in this aspect of the live cinema sector.

This chapter primarily focuses on audience experiences of pop-up immersive cinema in the UK, where the sector is particularly buoyant. While there is some indication that pop-up cinemas have started to emerge in the global south, in cities such as Bangkok, Hyderabad and Kolkata, the evidence is limited.⁷ Although these developments might indicate that the pop-up trend could potentially become a more globally ubiquitous feature of late capitalism, the live cinema culture that has become pervasive in the first two decades of the twenty-first century has predominantly been located in the global north. This has been understood by some scholars within the framework of austerity politics (Lashua 2013; Harris 2015). This chapter therefore begins by outlining the spaces and economies of pop-up cinema and evaluates the extent to which both neoliberal entrepreneurialism and the cultural policies of austerity governance have facilitated various developments in film exhibition over the last decade. It then offers a five-part investigation of audiences for commercial forms of experiential cinema, considering some of the key characteristics of this emergent sector such as nostalgia, seasonality, participation, economics and generational engagement. In doing this, the analysis also identifies a number of aesthetic features that characterize this exhibition sector, such as ‘the Narnia moment’ that frames many immersive events, and the implications this has on audience evaluations of their experiences.

Austerity culture and pop-up cinema’s entrepreneurs

Pop-up culture has become increasingly pervasive in the twenty-first century, manifesting most conspicuously in the retail sector, but also in the form of pop-up restaurants, hotels and cinemas.⁸ This trend for temporally limited versions of the established cultural markers of capitalist society reflects the inherent instabilities of neoliberal politics. In her study of pop-up cinema in London, Ella Harris argues that the pop-up category needs to be understood in the context of austerity politics (Harris 2015, 2018). The economic crash of 2008 resulted in austerity budgeting across the public sector in many countries in the global north, most notably in Europe and the United States. While the piecemeal erosion of the welfare state is a long-established policy of neoliberal governance, it was pursued with a renewed vigour in the post-crash period and had a particularly marked impact on the urban landscape. In particular, the increased prevalence of disused retail outlets and run-down urban areas reflects an economic downturn and decrease in public spending. Harris identifies three characteristics as pop-up’s ‘key spatiotemporal imaginaries’: flexibility, interstitiality and immersion. She contends that these ways of imagining and distributing space-time have a particular instrumentality in recessionary cities. Of these, the concept of interstitiality is most pertinent to claims regarding the relationship between pop-up cinema and austerity politics, in that it is understood as pop-up culture’s tendency to occupy ‘the cracks of neoliberal space–times’ and carries the potential to ‘smooth over those cracks and perpetuate the dominance of neoliberal ideals’ (Harris 2015: 592). There is some evidence of pop-up cinemas emerging in these insterstitial spaces. Secret Cinema’s Paranoid Park was staged in an old railway tunnel under the arches of London Bridge, while The Empire Strikes Back was housed in a disused warehouse in Canary Wharf. Pop-up cinemas have also fleetingly manifested in heritage sites earmarked for regeneration, such as Marshall’s Mill in Yorkshire (Lashua 2013). The transformation of these neglected or abandoned spaces into exhibition venues illustrates the versatility of pop-up cinema and a certain entrepreneurial creativity on the part of the exhibitors.

North American cultural geographers adopt a similar perspective to Harris in their research on pop-up culture in the United States. Jamie Peck coins the term ‘austerity urbanism’ to problematize the impact of post-crash neoliberal policies on urban planning and regeneration in North American cities (Peck 2012, 2014). Peck investigates the uses made of abandoned and derelict spaces in recessionary cities during the period immediately following the economic crash of 2008. This scholarship tends to focus on the activities of two oppositional groups: the city planners and big architectural companies on the one hand, and the multiple groups of guerrilla activists working at the margins on the other. Other scholars usefully interrogate the multiple ways in which ‘the promised magic of pop-up, interim and meanwhile uses has rapidly become a panacea for many urban ailments, shifting from the margins to the very centre of cities’ (Ferreri 2015: 183).

However, the relationship between pop-up cinema and austerity politics is not simply about the availability of disused urban spaces or heritage sites where pop-up cinema can be staged. Recessionary cities are also characterized by widespread redevelopment and gentrification. Indeed, many pop-up cinemas in the London area are located at established, well-maintained venues such as bars and restaurants, and the food industry also has a thriving pop-up culture of its own. These two industries frequently engage in collaborative ventures as a means to maximize their profits and reduce risk . In this respect, pop-up cinemas offer the ‘generation of a form of capital flow, which does not come into conflict with the immobility of real estate’ (Bishop and Williams 2012: 25) and promote the ‘innovation, fluidity and flexibility’ needed in twenty-first-century cities (Bishop and Williams 2012: 220). Pop-up’s imaginary of a flexible, future-orientated city therefore intensifies both the fast capital turn over and the ideals of individualized risk, which have long been prerogatives of capitalist development. Post-recessional geographies, typified by empty properties, forestalled development, and funding cuts are reimagined as a landscape of opportunities.

The creative range of pop-up enterprises emerging across the cities of the global north also illustrates an opportunistic entrepreneurialism associated with neoliberal deregulation and short-termism. Pop-up is now a fashionable choice for creative start-ups and a commonplace marketing tactic for global brands. However, while it has found success as a business tactic, pop-up is also recognized as a ‘compensatory or diversionary urbanism in the face of political retreat and economic recession’ (Tonkiss 2013: 316). Aneta Podkalicka and Dominika Potkańska’s study of Polish austerity cultures ‘reveals and theorises a curious mix of economising practices distributed along class lines and based on choice or necessity, while morphing “old” socialist into “new” aspirational and trendy lifestyles associated with “collaborative”, “low-budget”, “value-led” or “eco-consumption” aspects’ (Podkalicka and Potkańska 2015: 95). In this context, pop-up also offers a model of reduced economic risk for entrepreneurs, promising short-term profits without the long-term investment needed to regenerate areas of deprivation. Harris contends that pop-up culture should be understood as part of a broader response to the economic recession that characterizes the era, arguing that it

normalises precarity for artists, charities, welfare services and creative entrepreneurs, while keeping the city open to development. Pop-up emerges as a mechanism through which to mobilize the turbulence of recession and austerity towards a new normal characterised by profitable flexibility and a related precarity. (Harris 2015: 596)

However, it is difficult to assess with accuracy the extent to which recessionary politics facilitates pop-up culture. Although much less visible, the existence of pop-up cinema before the onset of austerity politics suggests that, while the recession has clearly shaped and facilitated pop-up culture in cities particularly affected by the economic crash, that it already featured on the consumer landscape of the twenty-first century.

The thriving business of pop-up cinema has been characterized by the emergence of a new generation of entrepreneurial exhibitors, keen to capitalize on the popularity of this innovative form of cinema-going while it lasts. Many of these emergent pop-up exhibitors, such as Luna Cinema and Backyard Cinema, appear to adopt a similar business model, thus exemplifying Burkett’s model of bottom-up entrepreneurship powered by self-reliance (Burkett 2011: 119). Atkinson and Kennedy also observe that pop-up exhibitors ‘emerge from within a model of the lone entrepreneur, starting with a modest one-screen venture and then experiencing and sustaining fast and significant growth’ (Atkinson and Kennedy 2018: 5). The business model facilitating pop-up cinema is therefore a complex one. On the one hand, the risks taken by many exhibitors in relying on outdoor weather conditions make it a hazardous sector to work in. As one pop-up exhibitor explained, ‘as a seasonal, outdoor cinema, we only screen at sunset, we can only screen once a day, and in the UK we are greatly limited by weather conditions’ (Interviewee #24). However, despite these risks, it is a business that remains highly popular and lucrative, with insider-industry reports noting,

they recently found that regular cinemas are running on average at 20% capacity. We run at 90%. When you look at our venues in the States, we run at 100%. It’s a little beyond me as to why a lot of the major distributors can’t overlook our shortcomings, . . . and not look at what a sociable cinema we are, how much people talk about us, how much press coverage we get.⁹

While the opportunistic character of the pop-up business mode...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Experience, immersion and participation
• Part One: Live cinema, pop-up media and the experience economy
• Part Two: Participatory cultures of resistance and the alternative experience economy
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright