"What does it mean to speak of cinema outside of the screen?"
Ho Rui An says that he became interested in using lecture as performance because they exploded cinema:
"The first medium that I was deeply engaged with as an artist was film, and I still make videos and work in a moving image context. The move into the lecture as a performance medium came about because I was interested in exploding the form of film toward a kind of paracinema.
One form that fascinated me when I was researching cinema history is the cinematic lecture. This is the form in which most films were presented in the early days of cinema, where cinema meant a semitheatrical experience involving a live body. There was almost always a live body either introducing the film or even directly participating in the narrative itself. In Japan, there was the benshi narrator. In Thailand, there were the versionists who would travel in troupes in the provinces, where they would present films accompanied by a live aural performance that served to supplement the projected image in various ways, from narration to dubbing, commentary or even critique. I thank the Thai film historian May Adadol Ingawanij for introducing this history to me. She shared that sometimes the versionist would even replace the names of the characters with the names of villagers. Given that many of these films were made in Hollywood or India, you can read this practice as an extreme localization of the foreign or generic.
In engaging with this history, I was fascinated by the positionality of the live body beside the screen, sometimes speaking about the film being projected, sometimes speaking inside of it by voicing the characters, sometimes speaking around it, or sometimes speaking back to it.
It was very refreshing for me to see how the apparatus of cinema changes in these different contexts, because if you were to go to the cinema today, you would have the impression that the apparatus hasn’t really changed since the 1930s. Even with 3D today, it’s still pretty much a single-screen experience. The unicity of the experience continues to be valorized despite all the other innovations that have happened within the parameters of the screen itself. Compare this to contemporary art, where the material form of the artwork has completely exploded. I think one reason is that some of these more vernacular understandings of cinema that took the medium beyond the single screen were so deformalized that even the people who were effectively bringing the film to life were not seen as artists or innovators in their time. They thus remain paracinematic in relation to what is held up to be “cinema proper.”"
