Offscreen Film Festival Presents:
Interactive Cinema - symposium & film program
Cinema was one of the earliest media to experiment with forms of audience participation and interactivity. Strangely enough these experiments have mostly remained odd footnotes in the history of cinema. Today, interactivity is mostly talked about in relation to media or art installations, games or web-based media. The last few years we have also seen more and more interactive films that are exclusively designed for the private environment of dvd, pc or internet, completely different from a theatre situation where an audience participates in a collective experience in real time. An exceptional historical example of 'live' interaction with an audience is Kinoautomat, shown at the world exhibition of Montreal in 1967. For Offscreen 2009 we have the unique opportunity to show the Kinoautomat film One Man and His House at Brussels Bozar.
The screening takes place as part of a larger thematic module on interactive cinema, including a retrospective program on William Castle's gimmick movies that give a different historical perspective on filmic experiments with audience participation. We will also show the cinematic performance, Cause and Effect and the Canadian interactive feature film Late Fragment, produced in 2008.
Symposium
Kinoautomat is a well known and much cited example in academic studies on cinematic interactivity and yet almost no one has had the chance to actually see the film. The last screening was in 1974 but recently the film has been restored for screening purposes thanks to a research project led by Chris Hales and with the help of Alena Cincerova, daughter of the director of Kinoautomat Radúz Činčera.
In the symposium we'd like to take a step back from the actual debate on interactivity and new media to a more purely cinematic and film historical perspective by linking it to pre-cinema techniques and gimmick films up to Kinoautomat as well as contemporary experiments with audience participation. But also looking at the wider cultural historical perspective, such as the Laterna Magika movement in Prague and the world exhibition of Montreal in 1967.
Speakers
Alena Cincerova –Introduction to Kinoautomat
Christopher Hales - Interactive cinema, from Kinoautomat to the present day
Thomas Weynants – Interactivity in early visual media
Jack Stevenson - Scared to death: the movie gimmick in theory and practice
Teijo Pellinen (Finland) - Audience participation within television
Saturday March, 7
13h – 17h30 at Cinema Nova
Free entrance
Please register before march 5 via symposium@offscreen.be
In collaboration with :
Cinema Nova, VDFC/Vlaamse Dienst voor Filmcultuur, MEDIA Desk België - Vlaamse Gemeenschap en het Tsjechisch Centrum van Brussel.
Info: www.offscreen.be