After being exhibited in museums around the world, Mark Amerika’s feature-length “foreign film,” Immobilité, is having its UK premiere in London on May 11. 2016. The film will be screened at the Regent Street Cinema. The Regent Street Cinema has a great heritage:
On 20 February 1896, the Polytechnic’s theatre became the birthplace of cinema in the UK, when the Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe machine was demonstrated to the press and these earliest of moving images given their first presentation to a paying audience the following day. The Lumière brothers’ show had first been seen by the public in Paris on 28 December 1895 and after London continued its tour to New York, Bombay and Buenos Aires.
Here’s a sample from the press release from my sponsors at the University of Westminster:
Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster is delighted to announce a UK premiere of Mark Amerika’s work of early mobile phone video art, Immobilité.
Released in 2009, Mark Amerika’s Immobilité appropriates the stylistic tendencies of the “feature-length foreign film.” The artwork introduces the creative use of subtitles that double as a literary text depicting a future world where the dream of living in utopia can only be sustained by a nomadic tribe of artists and intellectuals living on the edge of apocalypse.
According to Amerika, “Immobilité mashes up the language of auteur-driven ‘foreign films’ with a more amateur video vernacular we now associate with social media platforms like YouTube and Vine.” By experimenting with a low-tech glitch aesthetic associated with pre-HD mobile phone video recording technology as well as more sophisticated forms of motion picture narrative found in European art-house movies, Amerika makes an attempt at interrogating the question: “What is the future of cinema?”
Shot entirely on a Nokia N95 mobile phone in 2007 (before the release of the iPhone), Immobilité was filmed on location in the Cornwall region of England and received support from the University of Falmouth iRES research group, Tate Media, and the University of Colorado Innovative Seed Grant. Solo exhibitions of Immobilité have taken place at the Denver Art Museum, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, and the Chelsea Art Museum.
You can register for tickets at Eventbrite.
For those who are unable to attend, you can always (re)read my e-book, The Postproduction of Presence: A Director’s Notebook.
