Cinema 16 Returns For A Sequel

Breathing new life into overlooked cinematic masterpieces and giving cinema back to populace.

The most significant communal culture of the last one hundred years has been multi-plexed. The millenniums old tradition of gathering in the dark to share stories, songs and dance that evolved into cinema has been commodified and become an isolated experience. The modern cinematic tradition has been broken down from a wondrous, almost alchemical mix of visually and audially excitement shared by a town, a neighborhood, or even just a group of friends into a paranoia inducing, wallet-breaking exercise in commercial-culture engagement via monstrous, modular cinema or personal viewing devices (both of which have done more harm to the art of film than good).

Things are changing though, and one of the leaders in the return of the small, community movie-house can be found in a forgotten Brooklyn neighborhood. A local artist has taken up the mantle of New York City’s art-house pioneers by holding small screenings of off-kilter short films and challenging bands from the city’s underground music scene to create new scores as part of a brand new Cinema 16 film society. By doing so, she is not only breathing new life into overlooked cinematic masterpieces but giving cinema back to populace.

Today, Cinema 16 projects classic experimental films against a large screen while cutting edge bands perform an original live score. The film selections skew towards the unusual, lining up hand-made, surreal shorts from top international creators one after another to the strange and often unworldly music of local underground bands. Since the event began in April, the experimental resurrection of the movie-house has become a wildly popular monthly event that packs people into small, makeshift theaters in various cities across the nation for a one-of-a-kind, cinematic experience.

“Today, people are craving a communal film experience,” said Molly Surno, a Brooklyn-based photographer, who has taken it upon herself to give her neighborhood exactly that. Looking back into the history of New York City, she revived an extinct but influential film society for a new generation of film buffs. She bemoans the state of cinema today, recognizing that there are so many great films being made or re-released with no way to watch them as they were meant to be seen. “People are so used to watching things alone, and returning to a more communal setting can be overwhelming and emotional. I see a lot of audience response. People ‘oohing’ and ‘ahhing’ in response to the films.”

The new Cinema 16 is a revival of an influential film society that operated out of New York City in 40’s and 50’s. In the spirit of the original Cinema 16, Surno has put classic, esoteric handmade short films back on the big screen, and added new, esoteric experimental music. The result as Surno has discovered, has been a sensation that has launched the community based film series into the national spotlight.

The now monthly Cinema 16 is being held at its new permanent home, Starr Space in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. A small, sign-less loft, Starr Space is on an unassuming residential block in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood that is becoming haven for the city’s creative class. The building’s large, open brick interior effortlessly transforms into a elegant theater by arranging rows of pleather seats and wooden benches in front of a white sheet that serves as a make-shift screen. After the film screens, the lights come up and the chairs are pushed aside to create a dance floor for the free-alcohol fueled dance parties that wind down the nights.

At the most recent Cinema 16, Surno invited members of experimental electronic band Darkbloom to create and perform a score for a selection of three films by the Brothers Quay. Identical twin animators, the Brothers Quay work in a stop-motion puppet style similar to animators Wladysaz Starewicz and Jan Svankmajer, who have been featured in previous Cinema 16 events. “We live in an age that is very digital, and I’m fascinated by alternative processes,” said Surno. Her selections for past Cinema 16’s are linked by these processes, and create insular, surreal and often nightmarish worlds through the use doll heads, food, and countless other found objects. A majority of the films that she has selected are animated, but she has shown several live-action films as well. “I like kind of quirky, handmade visionaries at the forefront of film.”

The music that accompanies her selections is similarly peculiar. For the Brothers Quay, Surno contacted members of Night Watch, a Brooklyn-based psychedelic/electronic band to compose a score. Though the group was disbanded, its members joined up with other local musicians to form Darkbloom, a new band that came together specifically to work with Cinema 16. Given a month to create a score for the films, Darkbloom created a dark electronic piece that linked the three films through one musical narrative.

“It’s a great challenge to write a score like this,” said Warren Holt, the keyboardist for Darkbloom. “We wanted to something as ambitious as the films themselves.” Darkbloom’s score, as explained by Warren Holt, was inspired by a recurring motif of string and thread that runs throughout the three Brothers Quay films. Based around a theme incorporating twelve-tone musical theory and Bach’s compositional rules, Darkbloom used guitar, bass, synthesizer and audiotapes to create their score, which was a dark and brooding complement to the junk-store despair projected onto the screen. “We know the cues to start the central pieces of the score, but for a lot of it, we don’t know where it’s going to go,” said Holt prior to the screening. “Hopefully we’ll achieve something on a higher level.”

Surno has encouraged the bands she works with to leave room in their improvisation, so that they can play to the crowd and react to the films once they are projected at large scale on the Starr Space wall. But she asks that the bands create something structured and tailored specifically to the film that is showing. “I don’t want Cinema 16 to be a band playing with some cool images in the background,” she said. Hundred Eyes, a local band that scored Svankmajer films at a previous Cinema 16, provided a more free-form, squeaks, rocking score that incorporated several wind instruments. Since coming to Starr Space, bands set up on the sides of the screen in front of the audience, and Hundred Eyes further took the focus off of themselves by playing underneath a white sheet, making sure that Cinema 16 goers kept their eyes on the film. “These performances aren’t recorded. They are a one-time thing, an un-recreatable experience. It all comes together, and only one time.”

A Los Angeles native, Surno was both inspired and disappointed by the theater offerings in the world’s film capital. Though there were smaller theaters and festivals operating throughout LA and Orange Counties, very few of them appealed to her sense of community. “My lust for films just wasn’t embraced in Los Angeles,” she said. “I wanted a more pop-up, kitschy kind of quality seeing them.”  Of the few that she enjoyed, she counted offbeat institutions like the silent movie theater in West Hollywood and the films shown at the Hollywood Cemetery as some of the better ones.

But it was her participation in the Los Angeles Film Festival that ultimately convinced her to create her own film series. One of her programs with the festival brought Wu-Tang Clan mastermind RZA to the Silent Film Theater, where he scratched both the audio and visual elements of classic Fleischer Brothers films. Surno was already an enormous fan of the Fleischer Brothers, but the results of an artistic master of the second half of the 20th century reinvigorating the masters of the first half is something that she would carry with her as she left Los Angeles for New York City.

Settling into Brooklyn, Surno was again disappointed by the small-scale cinematic offerings of another cultural capital. There are a handful of art theaters in New York City, but even fewer were conducting the community oriented, innovative film screenings that she was looking for. “There’s so many creative people living in New York City, but they are limited by space,” she said of the notoriously dense and crowded city. It is specifically because of rising rents that the creative class and Cinema 16 have left Manhattan and moved into the outer boroughs like Brooklyn and Queens. Surno sees Cinema 16 as a response to the changing city, and is pleased that she has provided a reason and a space for artistically-minded people to commune and engage film and music.

The original Cinema 16 was something of a New York institution in its heyday. Created in 1947 by Amos and Marie Vogel, the society lasted until 1963 and is still considered to be the nation’s largest film club. The society was known for showing eclectic films that included new experimental films as well as newsreels and educational shorts, and was instrumental in redefining film as a legitimate means of artistic expression.

Surno herself has no connection to the original Cinema 16 other than admiration, but felt that it was important to resurrect the society rather than create something new. Her primary focus in creating the film series was to create something community oriented, and by reviving Cinema 16, she gave the project roots in New York City’s artistic culture and a sense of history.

Despite the revivalist nature of the project, Surno’s Cinema 16 diverges from the original in several significant ways. While the original society was specifically about appreciating films and creating a counterculture, its modern incarnation is about experiencing new art and communal setting. But Surno says that her revival/repurposing of the original Cinema 16 is an extension of what she is trying to do with the films themselves. By recruiting bands to create new elements for classic short films, Surno is herself creating a new element of the original Cinema 16.

“It’s all part of the post-modern idea of taking something old and revitalizing it. I know that adding new music is changing the filmmaker’s intent, but I don’t want the intent of the old piece. I want something new. And by having a new musical group playing behind these films, it shows that the timelessness of the art. Watching these classic films in this way, people’s perceptions are going to be completely altered.”

Since April, Surno has held four Cinema 16 events in New York City, one in Portland, and one in Chicago. The first two New York events were so successful that she caught the attention of alcohol companies and Myopenbar.com, who have sponsored the later events. Myopenbar.com, looking for something unique to do in Portland and Chicago, asked Surno to take her show on the road, which she did to mixed results. The road shows were both programmed by Surno and featured local bands, but Surno herself was unable to attend the Portland event. While she considers both out-of-state events successful, they made her realize that Cinema 16 is very much a part of New York City, and insisted that it would remain in Brooklyn for the foreseeable future. “We’re becoming something of a neighborhood institution.”

As the Cinema 16 events grow in popularity and sponsors more readily supply the events with free food and drinks, Surno is looking forward to expanding the series. Abandoning the so-far sporadic schedule, she’s working hard to make the events monthly and free, ideally through grants rather than corporate sponsorship. She also hopes to grow the range of what Cinema 16 can be.

Her experience with the members of Darkbloom and Hundred Eyes- which are two project based bands pulling together various established musicians for special gigs (Darkbloom formed specifically to play at Cinema 16, and anticipate staying together for future projects)- has inspired her to exclusively seek out project bands for the scores. Surnos says that word is spreading about Cinema 16, and bands are beginning to contact her about writing and performing scores.

Cinema 16’s popularity also means that the project can grow in artistic scope as well. Surno said that, since it has become a known and well-attended event in Brooklyn, she can be less concerned with filling the seats with crowd-pleasing material and begin to show stranger more challenging films against a wider variety of music.

Surno and the bands she has worked with have already made enormous headway in the return of community theater, as they champion small, pop-up theaters, handcrafted films and once-in-a-lifetime musical performances from the small space in Bushwick. Cinema 16 will not be coming to a theater near you, because if it did, it would betray its origins as a local, communal event that has a specific and individual place in the current cultural scene. But the sense of community that it is creating in New York City will undoubtedly catch on and spread to countercultures across the nation, inspiring others to establish their own theaters, write their own scores, and ultimately, get to know their neighbors. At the very least, it’s better for your eyes than staring at an iPod.

Photography by Clayton Hauck and Agaton Strom