Writer and researcher Gawan Fagard reflects on the second edition of The Social Life of Film, a  gathering of film collectives which took place in Ostend, Belgium from 13 – 16 September 2024.

The second edition of The Social Life of Film brought together 25 nomadic film collectives in the coastal town of Ostend for four days in early September 2024. The meeting was organized by Monokino and inspired by the first SLOF meeting, initiated the previous year in Copenhagen by the collectives PRISMS (Oslo) and Terrassen (Copenhagen). This gathering offered me the chance to be present as a guest within the finely woven social fabric of collectives — a privileged position from which I could observe, reflect and form some thoughts on the questions at stake in the field of autonomous film collectives active around the globe today.

The gathering coincided with Monokino’s yearly Shhh festival, dedicated to silent film and the sea. The combination of informal collective gatherings, film projections in unique locations, meals prepared with love by the hosts, and late-night swimming in the North Sea made these four days a memorable, out-of-time experience for me, and, I believe, for many others too.

It quickly became apparent how precarious it often is to hold space for film collectives, and to dedicate valuable time to a project with uncertain outcomes. Exchanging practices and ideas proved to be a much-needed and energizing experience. As each collective presented their practice, it became clear that there are various forms of people coming together in informal, sometimes temporal structures. These ranged from autonomous production platforms for independent artists such as LaborBerlin (Berlin), to nomadic screening spaces such as Cinéma Parenthèse (Brussels), Nomadica (Bologna) HÆRK (Oslo), Sharna Pax (London/Copenhagen) and Kinautomat (Ghent), archiving initiatives such as Non-Aligned Film Archives (Rennes-Paris), publication collectives such as Walden (Stockholm) and Lumière (Barcelona), programming groups such as Liberated Film Club (London) and WET (Rotterdam), or community-based screening spaces such as Mascara Film Club (London), Birdie NumNum (Barcelona), and blue screen (Brussels). Despite the diversity of purposes and commitments, a common ground emerged: these collectives are invested in positioning cinema screenings as moments of social connection. 

As online video-on-demand platforms rapidly reshape our audiovisual appetites and cinema complexes reinforce film as an immersive spectacle driven by industrialized apparatus, an increasing number of independent, nomadic platforms exhibiting film are emerging. Such initiatives create a cinema screen large enough to be viewed by many, but small enough to see the structure that sustains it and the people who run it. These spaces enable working on a human scale, where the film experience is a point of entry for face-to-face encounter, exchange, solidarity, community work and potentially also activism and resistance. It was on these grounds that we met each other during that long weekend in Ostend.

The Transparency of Film Labor

There was one major question that kept re-emerging, in different instances, throughout these four magic days: what is the purpose of cinema beyond its projection onto the screen? Isn’t it already an event that a film travels miles and miles, passing through the hands of several people, making its way through mailboxes and dropbox links, carried and cared for until that rare moment when its projection lights up in front of the eyes of an audience? This sense of a secret community that extracts meaning from the mere fact of light projected into darkness, of distant sounds being reproduced, of absent bodies dancing on the screen or the scanning of surfaces from faraway lands and oceans? The mere magic of a sunrise above an unknown sea, filmed on celluloid in Tacita Dean’s The Green Ray (2001), transported to a chilly September evening in Ostend onto a makeshift 16mm projection screen on the beach. Sea and its cinematic representation in a magical tautology. Beyond this sublime moment of cinematic beauty, what else is there to be expected?

Emotion here came not just from the film but also from the collective effort to set up the projector and the screen on the beach against all odds, against the forces of nature; sand, wind and rain. This effort gave body to the idea of how a community can bring a warm and caring context to film, and how, in its most magical function, film can energize this community in return. This sense of collectivity extended far beyond the auratic presence of the rolling 16mm projector. It extended beyond the projectionist Bob Mees, who was hiding underneath a white cloth as in a remarkable wedding ritual with his instrument. It extended beyond the screen gently swaying in the wind, extending all the way to the soup after the screening prepared by volunteers. It sparked a generosity and a collective dishwashing session that made me realize the strength of these small, nomadic, autonomous film collectives lies in activating and openly displaying all the labor that makes a film screening possible. Resonating with my own long-term commitment to the inclusive film collective Cinemaximiliaan, the work of carrying chairs, cutting onions, washing dishes, or covering windows is as essential as preparing the print or holding the mic for a Q&A session.

Collective effort in the streets of Ostend (credit Gawan Fagard).

The Social Life of Film could easily have been some kind of fancy, fully funded EU project gathering “cultural representatives” from various European “stakeholder” organizations, where everyone’s flights and overnight stays are fully covered, where networking dinners are prepared by the best traiteur in town and badges are printed on glossy plexiglass pins. Instead, participants contributed a free donation from their pocket money for home-cooked soup and deliciously buttered bread. The festival was organized by volunteers and venues were offered for free by social and cultural organizations (KAAP, KleinVerhaal, projectvierennegentig and Elysée) who believe in the mission, thus reducing the budget—and dependencies—to a minimum.¹ The notion of “bricolage”, which applied both to the building of makeshift cinema spaces and the organization of the gathering itself, reveals the intention to resist institutional or ideological recuperation of this initiative, hopefully guaranteeing its autonomy as an informal network.

What Constitutes a Collective?

What holds a film collective together? Collectives are inherently utopian, energized by an ideal of what cinema ought to be within its social dimension. But there is also a pragmatic side: why would an individual artist give up his or her valuable time for the sake of a (mostly volunteer-based) commitment, setting up a collective structure to screen films with and for others?

Between, on the one hand, the romantic image of the artist working in a void solely fueled by “divine” inspiration and, on the other, the neoliberal idea of the artist as an entrepreneur, collective work enables a relatively open and autonomous way to organize and perform artistic labor. By sharing knowledge, resources, equipment, screening platforms and audiences, artists demonstrate that their interest extends beyond personal creative pursuits to encompass what surrounds it: the community, the means of production and distribution, and the historical, political and ideological contexts of their work. Through the conversations I had over the course of the weekend, I learned that the collective allows the individual to voice care and concern for the larger picture of things, without having to shoulder it alone.

What interests me here is the complex dynamic between the individual artist or artworker and the collective. The collective can be seen as the imaginary body, holding together an idea that drives individuals beyond their own goals. Early leftist-inspired collectives from revolutionary or militant periods and places initially conceived of the collective as a means to dismantle the capitalist idea of the auteur.² They sought political impact through collective creation not signed by anyone but the group — although this would eventually engender notorious juridical struggles concerning authorship of these works later on. In contrast, most of today’s collectives serve as vehicles for individual artistic development and growth within a neo-capitalist global culture scene. Collectives might offer artists a way to position themselves in relation to the artworld and its institutions. As such, the Venice-based collective Cinema Galleggiante, for example, forges connections between artists and institutions, while bringing films and live performances to an adventurous location: a floating raft in the middle of the lagoon. Shifting the screening space to unexpected locations means to break down institutionalized or standardized ways of film viewing and interacting around cinema and challenge the institutions to think out of the box.

Other collectives, however, actively resist what was sometimes referred to during our conversations as “the inherent violence of institutions.” These power structures—curators, juries, applications as well as the tendency for institutions to incorporate and appropriate narratives from the periphery into their self-legitimation rhetoric—gives rise to a need for spaces outside institutional frameworks. Institutions, bound by policy, procedure and public accountability, often prioritize interests beyond those of artists and their work, increasing the risk of censorship as political tensions rise.³ While, in the best-case scenario, artists might occasionally be offered the chance to be exhibited or even paid for their work by institutions (although payment remains until today often not self-evident), they remain largely outside the decision-making sphere, and are dependent on the programming whims of curators. The same goes for film festivals and their selections, sections and awards, which create a film world shaped by the highly capitalist principle of competition at the expense of the principle of solidarity. As a result, festivals often divide filmmakers and film professionals as competitors, instead of uniting them as allies.⁴ In response, collective organization is a way for artists to claim ownership over the context of their work, shaping a small part of the world as a caring social fabric around the fragility and precariousness of artistic practice. In our conversation on Fair Lands and Following Seas with Polar Film Lab (Tromsø) and SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA (Berlin), we investigated where this competitive mode can be replaced by other ways of functioning within or outside of cultural institutions by introducing the idea of “cinema as a connector.”

A Collective of Collectives as a Resilient Network

This principle resonates in my view not only within the artworld and its institutions, but also in relation to society at large. A sword of Damocles is hanging over Europe’s cultural sphere, especially in the current socio-political context, as hostility rapidly increases and the social-democratic welfare state is slowly abolished, artists are—consciously or unconsciously—preparing for dire times. Historically, solidary-based support structures and networks have been creating fertile spaces for artistic dissidence and, as George Didi-Huberman famously argued with Pier Paolo Pasolini, have the potential to hold space for “the survival of fireflies” away from the blinding spotlights of populism.⁵ It is often observed that in situations of life-threatening emergency (that is, when the very primary foundations of existence are threatened by economic or ecological collapses), a unique energy of solidarity is released.⁶ What I find admirable and inspiring about The Social Life of Film gathering, is that these collectives are not waiting for such an emergency to come in order to solidify their bonds of solidarity; they’re already investing time in establishing a federation of forces. This network, potentially linking up with others like the Radical Film Network or the Cinema of Commoning, could activate and strengthen connections during times of unrest. The Social Life of Film is not merely an idea but an actual conference of people meeting, exchanging, bonding, dishwashing, sharing, and, yes, commoning. 

The Collective Dreams of a Community to Come

The relationship between collectives and communities became a much-debated question across these four days, and has everything to do with the notion of inclusiveness versus exclusiveness. A workshop proposed by Anorak (Berlin), Before Forgetting (Copenhagen) and Other Cinemas (London), revolved around the notion of creating “safer spaces.” While a collective seems an important tool for bringing like-minded people together around a common idea, and supporting individual practice within that lightweight structure, the notion of community introduces the “distant other.” It is this other which the collective hopes to reach.

During our conversations, this hope was expressed in many ways but without a single clear image. Simply put, the community might include those who are not engaged with cinema professionally but are drawn by broader interests to join in. The notion of community becomes more complex when looking beyond the narrow walls of majority or hegemonic identities—typically white, middle-class—and turning our attention towards minorities, underrepresented groups and subaltern voices, making space for peripheral narratives that represent these voices. Here, the collective, as a shelter and a safe space for artistic creation and exhibition, challenges itself as a space of heterogeneity, diversity, precariousness. Often, this leads to the collective being stretched beyond its initial capacities, which might be limited to setting up a screening space, programming a film, delivering a Q&A and serving some beers afterwards.

In every step, from the initial invitation to the farewell, one has to be aware of sensitivities of those who might have other values or habits or desires. There is a space of unease and inconvenience that needs to be bridged, there is trust to be built over time, again and again, and this kind of relationship building and maintenance requires specific skills. The reward is a community that embraces one another beyond religious, sexual, political or myriad other boundaries which segment society, cutting through the social bubbles in which we operate both online and offline every day, reaching unexpected people beyond the usual crowd. For me, as a scholar, film programmer and co-initiator of the inclusive film platform Cinemaximiliaan, it was a pleasure to exchange ideas around this notion of collectivity.⁷ Similarly, Other Cinemas has developed a much-needed community space in North West London where welcoming smiles and shared food precede films and enable connections among those from African or Middle Eastern backgrounds. Meanwhile, Cinema Fulgor in Odemira brings experimental cinema to a rural town in southern Portugal, embodying a very different vision of a community away from urban contexts.

A dream of a “coming community of others” involves not only new audiences but also centering filmmakers who are marginalized, overlooked or forgotten. Such is the work of Non-Aligned Film Archives, a collective formed by film archivists Annabelle Aventurin and Léa Morin, which aims to dig into an alternative film history overlooked within the cinematic canon. Films that either existed in thought and intention, or lived in fragments or in lost bits and pieces, are put together with both scientific rigor and moral rage and form a counternarrative to dominant film history. Their performance Le cinema manquant de Madeleine Beauséjour, for example, meticulously reconstructed the bumpy career of a filmmaker and film editor from Réunion Island. When engaged in such an reparative archaeology, the audience automatically follows, as this sort of archival work doesn’t just attract an audience; it holds space for new narratives.

The Spectre of Art and Life 

While several collectives work explicitly with non-Western programs and audiences within Western society, there weren’t many collectives at The Social Life of Film based in the Global South. This was most probably due to funding restrictions and visa issues, as well as concerns over the ecological impact of flying in participants from further afield.

The only collective present during the weekend based outside of Europe was The Camelia Committee from Beirut. Talking about emergencies, The Camelia Committee is scattered by the economic and security issues at stake in Lebanon today, which since Israel’s invasion have become even more challenging than they were before. Their work as a collective is both a conceptual and a practical necessity, to survive as artists in a society at the brink of collapse. Their collective reading session created a continuous text composed of fragments chosen by every collective. 

In many countries, cities and communities away from western welfare states, artistic practice is obliged to find refuge in the collective as a practical tool for survival — ranging from taking care of each other’s children, maintaining a communal creative space, cooking together, sharing resources, celebrating life events together, and, at times, fighting oppression, as with Palestinian cinema. This stands in stark contrast with the often quite limited notion of working collectively in the West, which, as one of the organizers Godart Bakkers from Monokino put it ironically, “is rather a simulacrum of a collective restricted to writing funding applications together.” The idea of the collective sharing of resources, housing, struggles, food, love and life together, has largely vanished in Europe since the dissolution of the 1960s and 1970s radical and anarchist-inspired communal experiments. But from the perspective of art worlds operating in Global South contexts, within which the societal position of the artist is often subject to even greater precarity, this notion of expanded collectivity and “commoning” in art practices through which art and life are intertwined, is slowly but steadily coming back.⁸

An interesting note to be placed here, I believe, is the notion of the institutionalization of a collective. Questions of growth, sustainability, long-term organizational structures, and also about the survival of an idea or a struggle beyond the commitment of the individual person, lies at the heart of this. A wide range of forms of commitment to a collective effort were presented during the gathering. For some, a shared question remains how to navigate perpetual precarity without succumbing to institutionalization.

Open End 

As everyone left Ostend after this long weekend of discussions, a key idea stayed with me–a notion initially introduced by Mike Sperlinger from PRISMS: the idea of a “collective of collectives.” This concept gestures towards a federation of nomadic, ever-shifting and quasi-organically evolving platforms that could form a shelter together for the fragile existence of independent artists working with moving images. Such a federation could hold space for cultural inclusion, peripheral narratives and subaltern voices, than the so-called democratic (and in fact bureaucratic) spaces proposed by cultural institutions, funding organizations, subsidized institutions, private cultural enterprises, production houses and film festivals. This idea remains to be debated and discussed, and could perhaps form a pillar in the next iteration of the Social Life of Film, whose work will and should remain forever a space under construction, a bricolage, a peripheral space emerging from inside of the center to maintain a sense of autonomy, a potential for resistance and a response to the urgencies of our times. Wherever and whenever it might be needed.

The Social Life of Film 2024 was hosted in Ostend by Monokino, as part of Shhh, a festival of silent film and the sea.

Gawan Fagard is a film scholar, writer and programmer based in Belgium. He holds a PhD in Film Theory from LMU Munich and is currently a postdoc researcher affiliated to the University of Zürich where he’s working on the notion of Empathy in Film as well as a lecturer at ULB and RITCS School of Arts (both Brussels). He is also co-founder of Cinemaximiliaan.

Endnotes:

1. The Shhh festival is subsidized with modest project funding from the Ministry of Culture of the Flemish Government; connecting the SLOF meeting to a publicly organized festival was thus a smart way to combine both events into one momentum on one budget. ↩︎
2. For further reading on the notion of collective filmmaking, see Bertold Brecht’s “Collective Presentation” (1932), published in Screen 15(2), 1974, p. 43-44; Fernando Solana’s and Octavio Getino’s “Towards a Third Cinema” (1969) in in Nichols, Bill (ed.). Movies and Methods. An Anthology, University of California Press, 1976, p. 44–64; Federico Rossin’s“Collectif de film” in Vacarme, no. 62(1), 2013, p. 85-94; Barbara Hammer and Alex Crooc’s “Working with Ogawa Pro collective,” published online by ICA London in 2016, available at https://archive.ica.art/bulletin/working-ogawa-pro/index.html (accessed 23/10/2024). ↩︎
3. In Germany for example, where many of the present collectives are working such as Anorak, LaborBerlin and SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA, many artists have experienced cancellations and censorship due to their solidarity with the Palestinian cause. The online project Archive of Silence charts these cases. ↩︎
4. Examples of non-competitive film festivals such as Telluride Film Festival or Courtisane Ghent show indeed how film culture can be organized differently with a focus on community rather than competition. ↩︎
5. Georges Didi-Huberman, Survival of the Fireflies, University of Minnesota Press, 2018, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Disappearance of the Fireflies,” originally published as “Il vuoto del potere in Italia” (The Power Void in Italy) in Corriere della sera, 1 February 1975. English translation available at Diagonal Thoughts (online), https://www.diagonalthoughts.com/?p=2107 (accessed 23/10/2024). ↩︎
6. See, for example, Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Haymarket Books, 2016. ↩︎
7. Cinemaximiliaan, which I co-founded with my partner, artist Gwendolyn Lootens, began in Brussels during the migration crisis in 2015. To this day, a diverse community of people with or without refugee backgrounds, fuels the film exhibition and creation process in a warm, welcoming house in Molenbeek. ↩︎
8. The role of Ruangrupa’s Documenta Fifteen is not to be underestimated here, as they have explicitly built the concept of the exhibition on the practice of Lumbung – i.e. collective, process based work instead of highlighting the individual artwork and the individual artist. See also: Ruangrupa, Documenta Fifteen Handbook. Hatje Cantz; 2022 and Ruangrupa. Documenta Fifteen – Majalah Lumbung. A Magazine on Harvesting and Sharing. Hatje Cantz; 2022.sx ↩︎