My favorite movie experience of 2024 so far has been June 24th at Normal’s Books and Records, where Brooklyn-based and “Mrs.・A screening of the movie performance “Vexions” by Matthew Thurber, a filmmaker and cartoonist who has produced films such as “Studio” was held. Thurbers toured cities around the country with Vexations, but this isn’t just about filmmakers making personal appearances at screenings of their films. The full experience of Vexations depends on the presence of servers and direct involvement in screenings. The audience isn’t watching Vexations, they’re participating.
It’s misleading to call Vexations an interactive film. It’s not The Rocky Horror Picture Show or any other cult movie where the viewer interacts with a movie that exists as a fixed experience on the screen. Vexations take shape as they unfold, as if they were made exactly as shown. Future film screenings may become less constrictive and more improvisational, resembling live performances.
The title “Vexations” is taken from Erik Satie’s work of the same name, a musical motif designed to be played 840 times. Thurber’s “Vexations” begins by asking the audience to imagine that in 1959, the CIA began weaponizing easy listening music as a tool for anti-communist propaganda. This included performances of Satie’s works by John Cage using a miniature orchestra, reduced to microscopic size by secret technology and released into the air as a means of infiltrating and defeating communist operatives. .
Thurber’s mixed media performances are built around his 16mm silent feature films and soundtracks of 1950s and 1960s easy-listening records salvaged from a dumpster behind a Greenpoint record store, and still are. It’s a movie. Thurber also uses live narration, dual projectors, dye-colored intertitles surrounded by liquid lights, and at one point allows for direct audience participation. Servers act as filmmakers, projectionists, narrators, and DJs.
Vexations’ immersive experience got us thinking about how we could improve our movie screening events. This is something that can come close to the level of spontaneity and surprise you get from experimental musical performances on a regular basis. We can foster a level of energy that can only be gained by watching a movie with an audience and experiencing it together. We have the advantage of establishing direct engagement with our audience. Although the director of the opening of a Hollywood blockbuster released on 3,000 screens cannot personally attend each screening, the filmmaker is not only present at each screening, but is an important part of the screening. Thurber’s Vexations model offers one path to the future.
How do you get there? Look at the past. In the early days of cinema, before established industrial and commercial rules were established, movies were still free to develop in different directions. Vexations’ mixed media approach reminded me of attending Rick Altman’s Living Nickelodeon presentation in 2010. There, Altman, a film historian and scholar specializing in silent film exhibitions, recreated the experience of attending an early Nickelodeon theatrical show. Years of the 20th century. His performance on The Living Nickelodeon emphasizes how movies were only part of the entire moviegoing experience at the time. Altman plays the role of a theater musician, charming the audience with jokes, jokes, and commentary about the film itself. He sings along with illustrated glass slides projected on a screen (the combination of photographic tableaux and music itself creates a kind of film prototype), and plays music between reel changes and program breaks. .
There’s a direct connection from the Nickelodeon moviegoing experience of the early 1900s to today’s film screenings like Vexations, where music and visuals, audience and filmmakers come together to create an immersive event. . Independent films that play by their own rules require an experience that is free from the constraints of established commercial norms. Similar to small brick-and-mortar Nickelodeon theaters, independent films no longer need to be shown in large commercial movie theaters, but instead in community spaces, clubs, book and record stores, coffee shops, and DIY performance venues. You can. And rather than simply watching a movie unfold on screen, audiences can once again become active and passive participants, like early Nickelodeon audiences.
