NEW #DirectedbyWomen Insights feature by Jennifer Fischer, filmmaker and co-founder of Think Ten Media Group. Fischer explains why, as an arts educator and film curator, she is so passionate about films directed by women and shares a selection of the most popular short films directed by women that she has highlighted over the past year at events or through online courses. These films cover different styles, genres, and subject matter, and we think they would make excellent viewing options for the #DirectedbyWomen Worldwide Film Viewing Party!

This Halloween season is going to be pretty special to me because it’ll mark ten years since I started doing genre programming at the cinema I now run. As a volunteer, I was tasked with selecting some horror flicks for late October, and those were Bride of Frankenstein, Carrie, and Prince of Darkness — all on 35mm, as it was pre-digital. Wild to think how much time has passed.

Missing from the above: Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, a 35th anniversary screening of Ghostbusters, The Crow (25th ann!), and Halloween III: Season of the Witch on October 31 (with a bonus Super 8 surprise!)

What does a Film Programmer do? I talk to James McEvoy to find out what programming the Warwick Arts Centre cinema, a three-screen cinema, based on a university campus but also serving a local and regional audience, involves. Who is the audience and how to build new ones is part of the conversation.   We touch on Flatpack, the MAC, the Mockingbird, Square-Eye TV, Lock Studios, Steven Knight, the…

Welcome to the first in a programmatic series I’m calling 

HOSTILE SPACES. This is MALL MADNESS:

Liminal environments at the intersection of consumer culture and the uncanny, just down the escalator from the food court.

So, what is a mall? For me, my local mall was an adolescent playground. 

Growing up in Miami, Florida, my mall of choice was Aventura, Spanish for adventure. Aventura is where I bought my first book, first CD, stole my first book and CD. It’s where I had my first kiss, tried my first orange chicken on a stick. I was chased by bullies, and mall cops. I would play tag, the teen version of hide and seek, with my friends between the clothing racks of JC Penny. My mall had a pet store, a dentist’s office, a hot topic, a movie theater, a Johnny Rocket’s, a Rainforest Cafe. Aventura had everything: awe, wonder, spectacle, temptation, drama, humor, and lust. And sometimes, when we were least expecting it, our mall had offered other things: anxiety, disillusion, abandonment, and fear. 

Joan Didion said:

“They float on the landscape like pyramids to the boom years, all of those Plazas and Malls and Esplanades. All those Squares and Fairs. All those Towns and Dales, all those Villages, all those Forests and Parks and Lands. Stonestown. Hillsdale. Valley Fair, Mayfair, Northgate, Southgate, Eastgate, Westgate. Gulfgate. They are toy garden cities in which no one lives but everyone consumes, profound equalizers, the perfect fusion of the profit motive and the egalitarian ideal, and to hear their names is to recall words and phrases no longer quite current.”

The shopping mall was created as an environment of idealized hyperreality, a sense of safety communicated through an over-planned feeling of disorienting familiarity. One steps into a mall and becomes delighted, overwhelmed, forgetting why we came inside. It is not the place for the casual purchaser, the one-item grocery store run. Rather, it is the promenade of the beguiled, impressionable consumer. Don’t worry where the exits are, you’ll be just fine as long as you keep shopping. 

Imagine yourself standing at the dim edge of a beautiful, expansive atrium, with wings extending like arteries from a central Consumerist core. It’s difficult to tell the time. There’s no one else around. The shop windows aren’t boarded up, but they’re not beckoning open either. There’s a strange, recycled stillness in the air, upon which a slowed-down version of mall singer Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now” floats over to you in an infinite wave as the overhead fluorescents buzz and pop out of existence, suddenly plunging the mall into an unreal darkness. 

The filmmakers tonight give us a glimpse into the afterlife of these shopping centers, when they cease to function as originally intended and become “dead malls”, vacant of their once glittering dream-projections, but lugubriously repopulated and reanimated with the nostalgic reflecting pools of our formerly limitless belief in the power of products and capital to push civilization forward. 

These new zombie malls are the crypts and the cemeteries of ideological innocence, the centers of fiscal forensics. They are the buy-rial grounds, and mall-soleums of our sense of personal freedom and independence. It is we that have become artificial, and the mall itself that is intelligent, sentient. The mall is now a place where people come to mourn, to pay their respects by revisiting, remembering, or to take (as in a souvenir — looting, grave robbing) what they once gave so willingly, throwing loose change into the fountain, a supreme example of our confidence, our trust, in these urban-designed safe spaces that honed and channeled our aspirations while forming a bulwark against our xenophobic fears. 

We return, almost unaware that the shops have all closed, or moved out of town. Ruefully surprised to find that the shelves are now empty, the gates are now closed, not realizing that the avenues and hallways around the fountain remain stocked with resources: US. 

“They come out of some sort of instinct. A memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.” - Dawn of the Dead 1978

Prepare yourselves to Mallhard with multimedia artist Cecelia Condit’s 1983 murder musical, queer love, based-on-a-true, story POSSIBLY IN MICHIGAN (shot on 3/4-inch U-matic and Super 8mm film)

AND

Backrooms filmmaker / wunderkind Kane “Pixels” Parsons’ 2023 chat room sensation The Rolling Giant (The Oldest View Part 3), which was made entirely on the computer graphics software Blender, based on photographs and layouts of an actual abandoned mall in Texas, for which he has been offered a development deal with A24.  

Thank you to Whammy!, Erik, Jessica, our wonderful volunteers, Cecelia Condit, Austin Wolf-Sothern for the supercut “Shopping is A Feeling”, D.J. McHale creator of AYAOTD, my camera brother Jonny for showing me Kane’s film, Micah Gottlieb of Mezzanine for his advice, my witch sister Claire Kill for designing some posters, the Abandoned America photo project, Addie Rae for the inspiring chats, the TAPE programming workgroup for their support, all of you for coming out, and my parents for allowing me to lose myself, as often as I found myself in our local malls. 

This one is for: Aventura, Dolphin Mall, Dadeland, Sawgrass Mills, CocoWalk, The Falls, and Sunset Place. 

Enjoy the show.

In Conversation with Josh Bullen on UNTAMED: THE RESILIENCE OF QUEER CINEMA

I was very excited to discover Josh Bullen’s new programme of queer films scheduled to be presented at the Rio Cinema in London from November 24th to the 5th of December: Untamed: The Resilience of Queer Cinema, A season of films which explores contemporary queer cinema from nations where regimes remain openly oppressive towards LGBTQIA+ identities. These hidden gems are a celebration of the…

This is such an incredible programme. Jealous it is far away.