As part of this year’s Light After Dark Film Festival, Bonington Gallery is pleased to present Peep Show, an innovatively staged exhibition of archival film curated by feminist collective Invisible Women.
Only visible through spyholes in the outer perimeter walls of Bonington Gallery; Peep Show brings together a series of archival film fragments that explore the interaction between spectator and subject, eye and body —across the history of film.
Weaving together extracts from early films by women working at the cutting edge of the emerging artform—including Alice Guy Blache, Germaine Dulac and Lois Weber—this innovatively staged exhibition reflects how the medium’s conventions have been shaped by the eyes behind the camera.
Over the course of its transformation from novelty to artform, cinema has continually drawn on its peep show roots to captivate, titillate, and absorb. By drawing inspiration from quietly subversive, once-forgotten work made by early women filmmakers, Peep Show also invites us to question who has shaped this cinematic language, offering a playful potential subversion to dominant aesthetic conventions.
Beware—sometimes this peep show looks back.
Curated by Invisible Women Archive. In collaboration with Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University.
Cinematic codes create a gaze, a world and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire…
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema, 1975
A woman performs in a box, alone. Behind glass, in darkness, we watch. She cannot see out, but we can see in. As her body moves we look on; silent, staring, unseen.
Over the past 120 years, cinema has presented us with countless scenes such as these; a dreamworld composed of unconscious impulses, images edited to tease and tantalise, illusions cut to the measure of desire. Before the invention of cinema, early motion picture devices were viewed through box mechanisms, private shows for one. The development of projection allowed moving images to be enlarged and viewed collectively, but the darkness of the auditorium served to reproduce the experience of the peep show. Even as this new artform moved towards respectability, this carnival legacy lived on. Early peep boxes were not exclusively for erotic images, but an explosion of pornographic peep shows in the 1970s reinforced a historic association between the peep show, cinema and sleaze which remains potent.
As the feminist critic Laura Mulvey outlines in her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), the language of mainstream filmmaking was designed to capitalise on our subconscious desire for scopophilia (pleasure in looking) which, in a society dominated by heterosexual patriarchal structures, created a coded language built on images of women’s bodies, diced and dissected for our enjoyment. In the dark auditorium we pretend we are alone, that the bodies on screen perform only for us. This is the dream that cinema sells, and the same voyeuristic fantasy lies at the heart of the peep show: what differentiates the eye pushed against a keyhole, from the eye focused down a camera’s viewfinder, from the eye that rests on the cinema screen?
In Peep Show, feminist collective Invisible Women bring together a series of archive fragments which explore the interaction between spectator and subject, eye and body, across the history of film. Weaving together extracts from early films by women working at the cutting edge of the emerging artform – including Alice Guy Blache, Alla Nazimova, Germaine Dulac and Lois Weber – this immersive exhibition reflects how the medium’s conventions have been shaped by the eyes behind the camera. Over the course of its transformation from novelty to artform, cinema has continually drawn on its peep show roots to captivate, titillate and absorb. By drawing inspiration from quietly subversive, once forgotten work made by early women filmmakers, Peep Show also invites us to question who has shaped this cinematic language, offering a playful potential subversion to dominant aesthetic conventions. Beware – sometimes this peep show looks back.
Invisible Women seek out and champion the work of women and filmmakers with marginalised identities who have been overlooked, un-credited or left out of the history of cinema. By drawing attention to these forgotten stories, Invisible Women aim to reinsert female voices into the story of film.
X: @IW_Archives
In its second year, Light After Dark Film Festival: Immersive encounters in cinema is a film festival dedicated to immersive experiences in cinema. Pairing films with performance, music, technology, and art, Life After Dark will give audiences a deep, intimate, and collective encounter with film.
A collaboration between Nottingham Contemporary, Broadway Cinema, Nottingham Playhouse, University of Nottingham and Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University.
Light After Dark Film Festival has been made possible with support from Film Hub Midlands through funds from the National Lottery. Film Hub Midlands support people to watch, show, and make films in the Midlands. Festival Design: @waste_studio
Image credit: Suspense (1913) directed by Lois Webster.
5 Curators. 5 Exhibitions of moving image.
Curator: Professor Duncan Higgins, Nottingham Trent University
Northern Russia has been described as being shrouded in a rare serene stillness and beauty undermined by the decaying presence of evil. Unloud looked at this idea: a place of limits, a frontier or an extreme situation incorporating the extremes of climate, geography and nature, faith, brutality, beauty and fantasy.
Curator: Dr Anna Ball, Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Nottingham Trent University
A lost homeland, a dispossessed population, a missing film archive: images of absence haunt Palestinian national consciousness. Bringing together works by leading film-makers and video artists, this exhibition explored the dynamic relationship between presence and absence in moving images from or about Palestine.
Curators: Geoff Litherland and Jim Boxall, School of Art & Design, Nottingham Trent University
Chromista are water organisms that photosynthesise, taking advantage of any light that breaks through the surface. Likewise the films that were selected for Chromista exploit the physical surface of the projected image; light and imagery is abstracted to create works whose process of creation dictates the final image.
A showcase of work from the narrative to the abstract, each day focussed on a different artist. A group of Nottingham Trent University School of Art and Design alumni film-makers were invited to screen one of their own works and two further short films which have either influenced or compliments their chosen piece.
Curator: Jenny Chamarette, Department of Film Studies, Queen Mary, University of London
Water has the capacity to distort and magnify light and sound: it bends and reshapes these elemental parts of the moving image to create something altogether different from what we might usually experience. In this programme drawn from moving image artists, filmmakers and public information broadcasts, water is both an inspiration and a distraction, for viewers and filmmakers alike.
Moving on from the success of Magic Light 2014, Lighting the Future: No Boundaries was an eclectic mix of lighting designs and installations by product and furniture design final year students and alumni from Nottingham Trent University.
All pieces within the show were representations of new and recently created designs, many of which push the boundaries of lighting, materials and design.
Alongside Lighting the Future: No Boundaries, and situated at the entrance of Nottingham Trent University’s Newton building, 170 was a ghostly montage of light inspired by images of the University at night.
Lighting the Future: No Boundaries was part of Nottingham Light Night 2015.
Download your copy of the official Light Night 2015 What’s On Guide
