CHAPTER TWO

Spatial effects: film cultures and sites of exhibition

A century on from its inception, the public, institutionally organized collectivespaces to view film within Europe are the multiplex cinema, the independentarthouse cinema and the art gallery.1 These diverse institutional locations offerdifferent experiences of film, locating it within diverse histories and socio-culturalnetworks. If, in the early part of the twentieth century, film appeared to offer a multiplicity of possibilities (of political transformation, of bodily pleasure, of animbrication of art and life), a century later the institutional locations on offerrepresent a radical paring down of those possibilities.

It might be argued in response to the framing of these three various sites of filmcultures that the institutional identity presents a coherence that belies the crossingof films across such boundaries. Further, that to identify institutional sites ofexhibition as representative of different film cultures is a further polarization of aesthetic traditions. In response I would argue that my concern is not to classify,and thus delimit, aesthetic filmic practices. Film as a media is multiple, infinite,always in excess of strict categorical definitions. Nor am I arguing that filmcultures present a coherent body of work existing in discrete domains (themultiplex, the arthouse, the gallery). Mutual influence and cross-referencing,co-existence and appropriation subvert any definitive sense of boundary. What I am proposing is that the context of exhibition contributes to the social valueof film cultures. In the exploration of these sites, certain formal aesthetic traditionsadhere to film texts more strongly than others, but none are definitive featuresof arthouse or multiplex. In the first part of this chapter I address the problemof the homogeneous meanings that have come to accrue to film as mass cultureand avant-garde production; returning briefly to the critical debates framing thehistory of different film practices, this section troubles the notion of a singularavant-garde and a monolithic tradition of film as mass culture. The followingsections then turn to an understanding of film cultures as institutionally andspatially located.