As part of the re-structuring of our activities over the next five years, we’ll be discussing the question: what could a socialist cinema potentially be, and do, and mean? We’re looking for definitions and visions and plans for action, we’re aiming to better ourselves, and we’re asking you all for help to do this.

We were featured in issue #309 of Swedish art magazine Paletten. In the article we laid out our central question for the next five years: what could a socialist cinema be, potentially? How would a socialist cinema be organised and how would decisions be made, how would it be financed and where would it be placed? Who are the audience in a socialist cinema and what role does the audience play, why would they be there, and how would they watch the films, how would they discuss the films, and what would they take away with them when they leave? What films would be shown in a socialist cinema, how would they be produced, what would they look like, how would they be shown, how would they be selected, and what would watching and discussing these films do with us? What would happen to us in a socialist cinema? We gratefully accept thoughts and replies to these questions from everyone in what we call our audience.

We’ve asked writers, artists and thinkers to supply us with food for thought, to get the ball rolling. Meaning there will be some commissioned texts, which attempt to answer or go beyond the questions we’re posing. We’re very excited to launch this feature, The What And The How, which will reoccur periodically over the coming years. Our first three contributions come from John Jordan, Frida Sandström, and Lisa Rosendahl.

Today we begin with the text There will be no Cinema in Utopia, which was written by John Jordan on the occasion of the 40 year jubilee of the revolts in May 1968.

John Jordan is an art activist.  He founded the direct action groups Reclaim the Streets and the Clown Army, worked as a cinematographer for Naomi Klein’s film The Take (about worker-occupied factories in Argentina), co-edited the book We Are Everywhere: the irresistible rise of global anti-capitalism (Verso 2004) and lecturers in theatre and fine art. Together with Isabel Fremeaux he founded the art activist collective The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, which is currently based in the ZAD, “a liberated territory against an airport and its world”.

Coming up next!