Site-specific, expanded film and performance

Taking its name from Ben M. Hall‘s seminal book, Filmklasse Mainz has produced and will perform a new work, The Best Remaining Seats, for the European Media Art Festival 2023. A collaborative work using Filmtheater Hasetor, one of the festival venues, as both a departure point and the subject of the collaboration. For the screening, the class expands the screen by literally doubling it while moving out into the auditorium, excavating the histories of this specific cinema and the everchanging rituals of cinema-going itself.

Filmtheater Hasetor‘s history from neighbourhood cinema, to porno cinema, to programme cinema as well as festival and event venue is not a completely uncommon one – it reflects the transformations that movie auditoriums underwent in their use and social function across the globe throughout the past decades. By addressing both, the specific and general history, the work engages with the major changes that communal watching of moving images has gone through, not only recently but also since the birth of the medium. We tend to think that cinemas have only become endangered with the upheaval of digitalisation and that our viewing habits are only now being severely altered – but looking at histories like Hasetor’s, one quickly recognises that these changes in fact run parallel to the history of film itself.

Still, after the past few years of on and off “isolation” for most parts of the world, the class is very curious to fathom what it means to watch films together as an audience, in the same room, at a festival, in Germany, at this very moment, spring 2023.