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This shorts programme focuses on Sarah Wood’s concerns with the way counter-cinema can survive as an open space for thought and imagination.
This event is presented in partnership by Bertha DocHouse and Birkbeck University, bringing you some of the best events from this year’s disrupted Essay Film Festival 2020.
At the end of the nineteenth century when the Lumière brothers perfected their cinématographe they dispatched envoys across the world to demonstrate the new technology. Their invention was about movement – the moving image was a form that travelled. Fast forward to the twenty-first century and here we are in the age of border control, of security walls, of global surveillance, and now quarantine lockdown – a time that suggests the very opposite of movement.
What function does the moving image play in this new landscape? Does it simply become a servant to the new closed-in world – an image of information, of surveillance? Or can it sustain its promise to enable the migration of ideas around the world?
In the spirit of the Lumière cinématographe demonstrations, ‘To Bring the World into the World‘ will look back at Sarah Wood’s recent work, and how her work is re-imagining the travelling film show, and the possibility in the twenty-first century for a renewed and renewing cinema of ideas.