I’m a fan of Bernadette Corporation, so even though it’s not about results but about process, I’m interested to see what came out of their film gig in Berlin. That’s where they ran Pedestrian Cinema, a temporary production center for DV and any other creative medium they saw fit to trot out. As they put it,
Each day, Pedestrian Cinema will confront the question of fabricating itself. Is it to be based on history, dramatize the everyday, be documentary-like and specific, or metaphoric and abstract? At the same time, the film studio turns to debates internal to the medium, deciding to re-examine everything proper to cinema (shot, sequence, frame, sound, actors’ bodies, time, speaking, space, light, montage, etc.). These could be exercises, investigations, and fragments that result from meeting a new actor, a series of interviews turning into monologues, and so on. The activity presented to the public will not be limited to digital film, there could also be a newsletter, live performances, music, drawings, or sculpture.
While production cost barriers are falling enough to make a year of “shoot whatever, we’ll see” feasible, the distribution bottleneck remains. BC’s chosen the arts institutional channel to screen and exhibit their work. So far, pieces have been shown at Frieze in October, and as part of a BC retrospective [which just closed] at Witte de With artspace in Rotterdam [smart people, nice place]. And Chrissie Iles put PC on two lists she made: a ten best for 2005 list for Artforum–and the Whitney Biennial.
Pedestrian Cinema proposal [bernadettecorporation.com]