What might cinema look like without programmers, funding bodies, cultural gatekeepers or even conventional cinemas?
In this episode, we discuss BOOM! The Exploding Cinema and the New London Underground with filmmaker, writer and longtime Exploding Cinema participant Duncan Reekie. Emerging from London’s squatted cultural spaces in the early 1990s, Exploding Cinema developed a radically open approach to exhibition: films were shown without curatorial selection, anyone could become involved in organising, and screenings could take place wherever the necessary space, equipment and collective energy could be assembled. Reekie reflects on the institutional gatekeeping that shaped experimental film culture in the period, and on how projects such as the London Filmmakers’ Co-op, CoolTan and other underground screening spaces helped make a different model possible. Exploding Cinema was not simply another outlet for films excluded elsewhere. Its screenings attempted to create a different relationship between filmmakers, organisers and audiences, with exhibition itself becoming a form of collective cultural practice.
The conversation also explores the collective’s refusal of professionalisation and careerism, including its suspicion of individual recognition and the continuing power of institutions of taste and selection. What does it mean to build autonomous cultural forms without simply reproducing the structures they set out to escape? Finally, the episode considers what has changed over more than thirty years. Digital technologies have made filmmaking far more accessible, while gentrification, rising costs and the disappearance of cheap or squatted spaces have made the social conditions for underground culture harder to sustain. Online distribution may make films easier to circulate, but it cannot fully replace the conviviality of gathering together to watch, argue and continue the conversation. Exploding Cinema remains a striking example of autonomous media not simply as radical content, but as the collective creation of other ways to make, show and encounter culture.
Intro / Outro: Breach the Peace – Spiral Tribe