Watermelon for cinemagoers
Audience waiting for sunset
Add potted palm tree for ‘gala’ effect
Introducing the theme
Break for hot tea between Farocki and Persson
All of the above photos taken by Peter Nilsson!
Monthly Archives: July 2012
Curtains!
Kristina working on curtains for the cinema
Cover to newsletter
The cover to our first A5 newsletter, which will be distributed at screenings. Latin American signpainter goes William Blake, sort of.
Update on screening Wednesday July 25 at 20.30
Short update:
Weather forecast for Wednesday looks promising, so the show is still on. Doors open at 20.30, screening starts at approx. 21.00. There’ll be hotdogs and hot drinks, but might still get chilly so bring a sweater and a blanket.
Travel directions are found on the blog, under ‘About us’.
Trial run last night
From a trial run last night (on screen is the first film ever shown in a cinema, 46 seconds of ‘Workers leaving the Lumière factory’ by the brothers Lumière). Light conditions acceptable from around 21.00.
Screening!
On Wednesday July 25 2012 at 20.30:
Workers Leaving the Factory by Harun Farocki
Politicamente Correcto! by Claudia Del Fierro
Space Debris by Lina Persson
“Workers leaving the Factory” c Harun Farocki, 1995
Sunshine Socialist Cinema is an outdoor cinema powered by solarpanels, run by artists Kalle Brolin and Kristina Müntzing. We’re re-distributing surplus light from day to night by solarpanel and projector, and screen films that generate discussion on socialist topics. Some themes for the films and videos to be screened include redistribution of surplus and contemporary commons, post-industrial survival strategies, and artists committing to a collective.
The cinema is installed in a garden in the southern Swedish countryside, with screenings occurring regularly during the summer months. A 230 W solarpanel provides power for a 270 W projector, meaning two hours of sunlight gives us one and a half hour of projected film at night. Screen and bleachers purposebuilt, free entrance, artworks on display, and connections developed gradually with local organizations. Programming is discussed and technical issues worked out in a study group run within the local workers educational association, ABF, where we’re also figuring out a typology of political film and filmmaking. The Sunshine Socialist Cinema is inspired by public screenings attended in Parque Rivadavia in Buenos Aires in the noughties.
On opening night, Wednesday July 25 2012:
Workers Leaving the Factory by Harun Farocki starts from the first film ever shown in a cinema, and traces the recurring image of workers exiting a factory throughout filmhistory, setting the stage for the post-industrial condition. What is the image of the worker, when the worker has left the factory, and labor is performed in every aspect of life? Is the dissolution of the workforce outside the factory gates where films pick up on individual characters and follow them away from collective life?
In Politicamente Correcto!, Claudia Del Fierro dresses up like the workers at a textile factory in Santiago, Chile, and joins them whenever they exit the building for a cigarettebreak. An artist blending in visually with the workers, entering and exiting the gate unnoticed, she creates an ambiguous picture of both alienation and of the artists’ desire to place herself on the side of the workers.
We end with Space Debris by Lina Persson, a film showing the perspective of a camera detached by accident from an astronaut, who is in the process of trying to free a stuck solar array on the international space station. The camera drifts into space and continues transmitting film as it moves further and further out of range.
Sun going down; upcoming screening!
On Wednesday, July 25:th 2012, the sun sets at 21.31 in our part of the world. The weather forecast says it’ll be clear skies. Preliminary program: we’ll be screening from around 20.30!
Construction work
Bleachers being built! This is one out of five segments holding up a five-floor bleacher, with seating for about 25 persons.
Check out how other people go about setting up their backyard cinemas at backyardtheater.com/
Projector tech stuff
We got our brand spanking new projector set up. It’s got full HD resolution (1920×1080), and the lumens value (telling us how strong the light is) is 2000 ANSI. We absolutely adore it, but there’s a ‘but’.
Bit of free advice for those planning on starting up their own outdoor screenings here: if you’re on a tight budget, it’s better to sacrifice resolution for lumens – having for example 4500 ANSI lumens from your 1024×768 projector means you can start a little earlier in the evening, and the difference in resolution is only noticeable to the picky few.
On to building a shading stage for the screen now!
Solar Panel installed
A 230 W solar panel providing power for a 270 W projector, meaning that from two hours of sunlight in the daytime we get one and a half hour of film projected at night. We plan on adding panels to the cinema from year to year, so the capacity will grow continually.
For those curious about the efficiency of solarpanels, a 230 W solarpanel at 1,5 squaremeters will produce about 900 times its’ wattage in a year, so:
230×900=207000 or 207 kWh. per year
(and that gives us 767 hours of projected film per year)
Sunshine Socialist Cinema 