Cinema has taken up the role of a social agent that introduced a variety of images and events to the public during critical times. The social relationship between society, spaces, and cinematic narration has become a vital tool to raise awareness about the right to the city.
Public screenings have redefined mass intervention within public space encompassing a major impact in its physical transformation via the exchange of value and ideas. They are considered novel ways to imagine and practice democracy associated with public visibility and imagery. Most importantly, they reveal different perspectives of spatial change.
The Intervention of Films in the Social Framework
The metropolitan city, being accumulated with inequality and uneven access to services, successfully showcased the effective role of public spaces. It was this vagueness that mobilized artistic civic initiatives to revitalize the terrains vagues, i.e. the empty spaces between buildings representing spatial forms of transition. The decision to make use of such spaces poses novel questions about the current time and culture reflected in the setting of the space itself.
Aligning with this reading, past scholars have identified the outcome as the creation of the spectator’s engagement with the physical space coinciding with the notion of the spectacle. The spectator’s spectacle in space via existential intervention, then, becomes the main core of spatial analysis, translating Paul Klee’s quotation, “now the objects perceive me” into a dominant spatial tool. Here, Klee’s interpretation of the visual entity is embodied as an intellectual machine that is capable of recognizing shapes and analyzing complex environments. On the other end of the spectrum, Guy Debord overviews a more advanced stage of the spectacle, i.e. social relations mediated by images. He defines the spectacle as the means for societal unification, a vital part of our modern social fabric.
Previous historical examples, from the early 1920s in New York till present-day public screenings in Germany, have redefined public spaces produced through collective actions and performances. These practices are considered novel ways to imagine and practice democracy associated with public visibility and imagery. Most importantly, these practices reveal different perspectives of spatial change. Urban theorist Karl Kropf puts forward the notion of evolutionary conception of change of the built environment. He describes the movement from one morphological period to the next causing long-term transformation of features defining a culture as periodic change.
This is an analytical outlook on such transformation revealing the potential role of cinema as a revolutionary catalyst in reclaiming public space. The article sheds light on Karl Kropf’s conception of the phylogenesis of urban space which is then mapped on the phenomenon of public gatherings during the screening events.
The Social Role of Public Screenings & Revolutionary Filmmaking: A Brief Historical Outlook
In June 2017, the small town of Schoharie, New York, was celebrating the 100th anniversary of the first commercial outdoor movie preview. Schoharie residents would watch movies projected on a sheet stretched across lampposts in front of a courthouse. The first film, ‘The Awakening of Helena Richie’, was shown at the height of World War I to boost the soldiers’ wartime morale. According to Carl Kopecky, the Old Stone Fort Museum’s director which showed archived pictures of outdoor truck screens, the residents came for the social aspect, as seasonal attendance reached 100,000 by the end of the 1920s. Initially, the Board of Trade had to pool in an amount of $600 for a projector that stayed open until midnight to stimulate sales. Eventually, the social dimension of the outdoor screening was the main engine for the cultural imagery of Schoharie.
On a similar cultural frequency, in the small district of Bermondsey in South East London, the local municipality used cine-motor vans to screen films to the working class as part of a health campaign entitled ‘Education of the Public Hygiene’. By the mid-1930s, the local council had produced more than 30 films that have successfully improved the working-class conditions. To promote the significance of the campaign, the films previewed to the local community avoided the use of cinematic luxurious imagery and tended to appear as raw as possible, mixing documentary with newsreel footage. One of the films shown, 'The Empty bed', made in 1937 by two doctors, was about the consequences of not immunizing children against diphtheria, a potentially fatal but completely preventable disease.
A similar manner operates within revolutionary filmmaking. In May 1968, protests in Paris sparked French filmmaker Philippe Garrel's most radical period of political actions in association with students. Alongside several other filmmakers, Garrel took to the streets documenting a collection of spaces in the city that became embroiled with strikes. His efforts, in addition to others as well, resulted in a short real-time document of the upheaval known as Actua One – characterized by the layering of political speeches over raw footage of the revolution. Through the collaboration between Garrel’s 35mm and film students’ 16mm, Actua One was an early testimony to the poetic revolutionary voice of the French cinema at the time, and was interpreted, in Godard’s words, as “Une camera à la place du Coeur” (English: A Camera instead of the Heart). The film ignited a change of perception on the city of Paris as a transformational zone from the Bourgeoisie to the Left, as well as experimentation.
Kropf highlights the concept of spatial phylogenesis as the collective expenditure of societal physical and mental energy capable of changing and redefining the built environment. His Lefebvre-ian analytical outlook conveys a three-way interaction between humans, ideas, and the environment, the ideas are fundamentally social that emerge through the continuous communication of shared cultural habits. In the case of Bermondsey, urban space was the main core of political and civic engagement empowering informal autonomous technicalities away from the mainstream conservative medical profession. The significance of the interaction between the community and the mobile screens further empowered their sense of right not just to public health and suitable living conditions, but also to their access to use the space for debate and social exchange of ideas and thoughts.
In other words, phylogenesis occurs within the spatial hierarchy of power shifting towards a more democratic setting. At the same time, the display of raw footage on the moving screens made it intellectually accessible to the wider audience, where the cinematic imagery of space was reinterpreted and redefined to provide physical space a social collective embodiment of culture and history.
" [Cinema is] a quotidian landscape of life… [being] a representation of the fantasy energy by which the collective perceives the social order" - BRIAN LARKIN
What Happened in Tahrir Square?
Tahrir Square was a landscape of artistic movement, among which was cinematic intervention in its urban spaces. The intertwined relationship between the socio-political framework of the square and the clashes taking place between protestors and security forces were captured by independent filmmakers, who later previewed the raw collected footage to the public. During the summer of Tahrir square sit-ins, these filmmakers created the Tahrir Cinema Project, a revolutionary media project that documented and exhibited the events of the January uprising to the public. For 3 weeks, till it was forcefully dispersed by the Egyptian military police on August 1st, the project laid the foundation of Mosireen (English: We are Determined), the world’s largest video archive of the Egyptian revolution. The project has redefined mass intervention within public space encompassing a major impact in its physical transformation via the exchange of value and ideas.
The artistic intervention in Tahrir Square revealed it as the metaphorical representation of the decomposition of neoliberal policies and the decrease of privatization of collective consumption and urban spaces. For the 2011-2013 period, the square maintained itself as the autonomous, city-within-city establishment and space of opposition against both the Mubarak and the Muslim Brotherhood regimes. The square became de facto the space for contestation, triggering a new visual culture via being a spot to film and be filmed, to see and be seen.
The urge to document the events in Tahrir Square made 2011 a heyday for all forms of artistic intervention in the social realm. Such an unprecedented phenomenon emphasized the importance of archiving the expressive artworks as a catalyst for media revolution. Egyptian-Lebanese artist Lara Baladi initiated ‘Vox Populi’, an archival project consisting of data related to events taking place around the world since January 2011. It is also comprised of a series of artistic projects that include installations, sculptures, and filmmaking.
Other examples of public screening initiatives included Kazeboon (English: Liars), one of the most popular campaigns that posed a counter-narrative position to Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) exposing the violence of the army’s torturing and killing. Kazeboon was carried out either with people’s equipment or equipment borrowed from other members of the campaign. The screenings were shown on the walls of the presidential palace and the state TV building as well as residential buildings.
These initiatives complemented the philosophy of phylogenetic change through the repetition of visual forms as part of a newly-born cultural habit. Novel ideas dominated the centrality of urban space during the revolution which followed a circular life-cycle rather than the well-known linear one. In other words, Tahrir Square was a direct transformation from individualism to collectivism, later to be referred to as collective memory.
What is captivating about these campaigns is how they created space that was not just a container of activism but a constitutive of it. Space was foregrounded as an active participant against the regime using film images as a weapon to rewrite and redefine its socio-political role to emphasize the citizens’ rights to freely access and use public space.
Eventually, the article gives space for further studies about reinterpreting the right to the city, or the right to access to public space, by taking a closer look at the intersection between real film images and semi-documented semi-produced images. Similar to the activists’ urge to document the square, the intellectuals’ contribution is vitally needed
Do you think it is possible for cinema to revive the right to the city in Cairo? Do you have similar initiatives in your hometown? Please share your comments, ideas, thoughts, criticism, and/or any sort of information and/or interesting facts.