SINGING USHERETTE

RHYTHMIC

EVERY TRICK IN THE BOOK

STAR GAZER

BETTER KIND OF NOTHING

OBSERVATIONS AT NO.16

MORE COOKS

Made with Mat Fleming & Harriet Plewis
2012, 51 mins, 16mm transfer

Shot in the freetown of Christiania, Denmark, More Cooks is an expression of the consensual decision- making processes of groups seeking alternative ways of being together; Christiania being one example, another being the volunteer-run Star and Shadow Cinema, where all three filmmakers are active. The soundtrack layers recorded conversations, with field recordings and improvised music made in collaboration with acclaimed harpist Rhodri Davies. The film is a challenge to the dominant idea that a single artistic vision is the definitive characteristic of valuable art creation.

The media is no longer the instrument of those in power, those in power are the media. Media is the field of power-production. So if one wants to create media in opposition to this accumulation of power, which it seems that very few filmmakers do, what strategies are there? In our economic reality, capital=power. The ability to commodify your creative idea is directly aligned to your potential accumulation of both capital and power. If you want friends in high places and cash, you have to make a tasty product, just watch an episode of The Apprentice. The capital-power-nexus for cinema is Hollywood and as we are not discussing new ground, we can learn from previous attempts to combat this dynamic. Of course the proponents of avant-garde cinema since the 1920’s have considered themselves obliged to seek out alternative means of using the cinematic form. A pertinent example is Laura Mulvey's text of 1973 "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" which proposed a feminist cinema that rejected the voyeuristic and fetishistic modes of production found in dominant film. Instead of subjects being presented for the (male) viewer's consumption and sense of control, she argued for an avant-garde methodology that rejected dominant forms of plot, character and framing - in her case to rescue the representation of women, but I would say it extends further than gender to include anyone outside of the white, male, heterodoxy. Being a spectator and feeling in control replicates the capitalist cycle of creating and satisfying desire. It is so deeply embedded in our culture that we rarely question why we tend to prefer films, music, art that maintains our sense of control.

More Cooks is an exercise in the process of discovery rather than achieving proof: how to make a film that is at all stages ethically and politically bound to its subject and purpose - the lived alternative both civic (Christiania), and the cinematic (consensus-led non-hierarchical mode of production). The pretext for this film was an opportunity for a residency provided by the Christania Researcher In Residence project to stay in the freetown and make connections with the Byens Lys Cinema. Christiania is the autonomous freetown in Copenhagen, Denmark, resident to about 850 people. It is founded on principals of self-management, active responsibility to the community and consensus democracy. It is also one of Denmark's biggest tourist attractions, the arch-signifier for Denmark's national identity of tolerance and equality.
The filmmakers themselves (D. Bower, M. Fleming & H. Plewis) are deeply rooted in the organisational systems found in Christiania. They are integral participants in the Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. This cinema also operates on a consensus basis, whereby all volunteers have the same status to influence outcomes (physical/artistic/economic). They are fans of this life approach, yes, but by no means are they fixed on "the grand narrative" - it is an alternative not the alternative. They are aware that Christiania is a site onto which people project their utopian dreams of a community forever on the crest of the wave of contemporary radicalism. The film tussles with the unsurprising disjunction of expectation and reality, and refuses to aggrandise - Pusher Street, the played-out hippy murals, the tourist-commercialism reveal something far more real than a piece of puffery would focus on. It is not another hipster film celebrating a radical hangout. But critique does not negate love. And what is the basis of our expectation of this freshness of rebellion - is it our neophilia that urges us to want a community like Christiania to reinvent itself continuously?

The film is largely made up of suggestions from residents of Christiania, filtered through the prism of Bower Fleming Plewis' collective imagination. In the process of filmmaking by consensus, freedoms overlap and illuminate each other, causing ideas to lose their authorship, requiring a degree of trust, and the acceptance of a vulnerability in the yielding of individual control. Structured according to a logic of multiplicity, the guiding principal of More Cooks is to persistently evade the front on, close up representation and fixing of its subjects - Christiania and consensus democracy. Instead, More Cooks constitutes a free-form representation of a freetown that is constantly shifting through your fingers, never settling on a specific genre or methodology, always changing. Be it plotlessness, temporal inconsistency, refracted mise en scene, non-sync sound, the absence (largely) of characters to put voices to, the absence of any establishing shots; all of these techniques elude a single fixing of the subject. Other sides of Christiania are borne out in a kind of reflexive-subjective form of filmmaking. The film apparatus is frequently made visible or drawn attention to, either with arrangements of mirrors, or exaggerated camera moves that break dominant codes - swinging, spinning and even being passed between subjects, filming themselves. More Cooks creates its own lexicon of visual pleasure ranging from a sequence of defocused abstract colour shots to 360˚ pans of a community furniture warehouse. The filmmakers place themselves in front of the camera, stage performances, get naked, become vulnerable. This places an emphasis on mutuality - on the promise to rebalance power, to break any hierarchies forming between filmmaker and subject, to blur distinctions. The oblique, reflexive approach to representation, constantly circling but never fixing, makes way for one single passage that places us in the Christiania of our imagination - an oldish activist video by the residents’ media collective filmed off a computer monitor - suggesting that only the subject has the right to control its own representation.

More Cooks Essay - Christo Wallers
The Power of a Lens – Cinema by Consensus

The audience shoot film at the Byens Lys Cinema in Christiania

Emmerik discussing fellow residents anxieties in Christiania

MUSIC VIDEOS