^{For ‘The Machine Stops,’ a short
                                                                  story by E.M Forster, see here.}




Because you’re sick of knowing exactly what
you’re going to get, and you’re sick when you get it.

(Old proverb)

            &

Cinema is the liberating application in the margins
in search of a proper world.

(Stavros Tornes)

            &

Feed your head, the dormouse said.

(Grace Slick)



or THE LIBERATION OF THE LIBERATED FILM CLUB 


Such were the founding principles of the Liberated Film Club, and you know the score. I would invite a guest to introduce a film, but only after their introduction—with the parting curtains and the throwing light—would they discover what that film was. The attending audience wouldn’t know either; no details were announced in advance, except the occasional ‘promotional’ freeze frame of a character turning their back to the crowd. Great collisions were made. And what happened after the screenings—I understand at least the journey to and from the Cinema as inalienable constituent parts of the moviegoing experience—mattered as much as what happened in the auditorium. Installed at its spiritual home of Close-Up (✩) in London, the club leapt into the void with the hallowed month of June 2016, dragging you all down with it, and returned with necessary news from nowhere in 2019-20.

And then I called Time on the club. Why? There were queues back to the bagel shops (✩✩). There was a waiting list, a PhD proposal, and elegantly forged ‘blindfolded’ screenings in New York City. There was an unusually substantial venture at the BFI imitating the approach, and in Scotland, spongers were (are) deriving charity sterling by aping the banner. I also recognised the clear direction of travel in a general withdrawal from the sensual world. This was soon confirmed by the virus and the subsequent stay-at-home order. There is no such thing as an online screening. And there are few spaces as contagious as a Cinema auditorium. That, for me, is the big draw. Be it gauze or immaterial: off with your mask. Risk is the beating heart of adventure. Success is knowing when to stop.



Sheela-na-Gig,
dated to the Dark Ages
or earlier.

(℅ Radnorshire Muesum, Llandrindod Wells)

 

During the time outside of Time that followed, I wrote (on the end of the club ‘The Machine Stops’, Hotel, 2021) with naive optimism about the world that might emerge: a little fairer, a little freer. Even radically transformed.

(See here for the look of liberty in the way-back-when.)  

Instead, we reckon in Present Time with the hard truth of Michel Houellebecq’s prophecy: ‘It will be the same as before, just a bit worse.’ But we also reckon with something that St Giorgio Agamben (✩✩✩) recently overheard in Rome, surely true of any Time:

… that Earth is the hell of some unknown planet, and our life is the punishment meted out for their faults on the damned from that other realm. But then what about the sky and the stars and the crickets’ singing? Unless we’re supposed to think that, in order to make the punishment that much subtler and more atrocious, hell was placed inside paradise.

‘Liberated Film’ means whatever you want it to mean. In my mind—and action—it is movies lost or banned or made in impossible circumstances (politically, environmentally; that rarest of rare movies, that rarest & ever rarer art: fearless), seen together in a public space, without the ability to project your preconceptions or the analyses of those who have watched already, in advance of the event of your own seeing. These are also the parameters offered to 2025-26’s guest programmers, advocates for the chronically underseen. And yet, paradoxical as it may sound, there are no parameters. They might not show a film. They might not show up. They might pass the baton of their invitation to someone else—their mother, their minder, or a passerby in the street. They might… set the place on fire. They might flood it. They might make mayonnaise (again). Ladies and Gentlemen, the Liberated Film Club.

The ‘liberation’ of the Liberated Film Club is the removal of my captainship, the scalpelling out of ‘I’; the total abandonment of my duty and direction to the guestlist. If this feels like a filing down of the conceptual intelligence of the original project, that’s because it is, but that doesn’t mean that the outcomes will be less compelling. On the contrary, the careful selection of these luminaries is likely to produce significantly more rewarding audience experiences. It wasn’t unusual for me to woozily unspool movies even I hadn’t seen in advance, to a sometimes mixed response.

Ah, but on response, and on responsibility... The Liberated Film Club exists to help remind the viewer that it doesn’t matter whether or not we ‘like’ a film. Value judgements are the idle hands in the brothel waiting room that the internet has become; a place designed and run by a few small guys with a big bad plan, to derive profit from the free labour of the vanity and desperation of powerless people's opinions. Followers are anathema to friends. Software is anathema to everyone’s entitlement to narrative, to romance. The propaganda of the tech-dominant consensual hallucination insists otherwise, but these are contingencies evidently only available to those signing out, switching off, and recovering fantasies. So! Run with wolves, rawdog. Go to the movies. Go drink a brandy. Go feed the goats. (There is still only to go.) Fuck the wrong person. Celebrate the error. May every error and each violation be as precious to you as mine are to me (✩✩✩✩). Fin sin fin.






‘You do not have the right to show the film, you have the responsibility to show the film,’ said Jean-Luc Godard. And films are made to be seen in the Cinema. (We may not need to travel to the temple to pray, but it certainly helps.)

Hyperbolic though it may seem, the Liberated Film Club returns because it has never (in my life) felt so necessary to present a space determined antidote and refuge; loaded against ideology and predictability, where risk-taking is mandatory and Time is away. This event series is a tribute to life via the medium that imitates it, and an insistence on the vast and visionary potential of the tiny Time allotted every songbird that bothers to show up. A twice-monthly opportunity to leap together into a shimmering void on a darkening island in a pitch-black Present Time. Ultimately, the liberation of the Liberated Film Club was conceived to mark Close-Up’s first twenty years of existence, and it is held to honour the immortality of the venue’s example.







Close-Up’s founder, Damien Sanville, wisely refuses interview (á la Guy Debord), but explains his motivations with a single line: ‘My job is to give my 18-year-old self the opportunity to watch the films that once transformed him.’ I consider myself at eighteen, at that Janus-like threshold: an ever receding memory of childhood’s visionary state of knowing, knowing that the world around us is nothing but a collage of older people’s imaginations manifest, present and palpable enough to know that everything in the future is (still) possible.

Plant the apple tree. Build the cinema.




Stanley Schtinter





✩                     Close-Up makes film culture and history accessible through its cinema programmes and library. Established in 2005, it is the most comprehensive independent film resource in London, located at 97 Sclater St, E1 6HR.

(closeupfilmcentre.com).

✩✩                 Bagel Shops: there’s a yellow one, and there’s a white one. The propaganda of the white one is powerful stuff, often known as ‘the’ bagel shop on Brick Lane. But this is a crown of dough stolen, and its claret hue is no May Day dye. The white one opened in 1974, an outrageous two doors down from the yellow one, established in 1855. A few years ago, the young heir to the white fortune was cut from the will, and he retaliated by murdering his sister and his mother. Once again, the white propaganda was so powerful that many believed this was an event tied to the yellow. Worse still, the white one today pre-fills and cling-films the bagels, meaning that what you receive is a stale simulacrum of the once defining freshness. The yellow still stuffs to order. Go there! Or better still: to Damascu.

✩✩✩             On St Giorgio: media scrambled to destroy him for his careful and crucial reflections on how easily it seemed, during the pandemic, that people relinquished their most basic liberties. And the people didn’t bother to read what he actually wrote, so they scrambled to destroy him, too. Never forget that here is a human who, opposed to the establishment of Guantanamo Bay, and the demand for the traveller’s biometric data in exchange for entrance to the United States, gave up his lucrative position at New York University, and hasn’t been back since. If more people behaved with this simple but unwavering dedication to their principles—and the understanding that my freedom exists only if you, too, are free—we may be more than ‘bare’ living (as Agamben has it) in the sepia of Houellebecq’s terrible scrying.

✩✩✩✩         This isn’t the self-loathing of the sucking of the fourth in the ice cream four-pack before you’re even home from the shop, or the suicide-facility thrill of betraying your lover. It means that in Present Time a whole new system of value is afforded to the slippage and seepage of human being. I am signposting here Aleister Crowley’s frequently misrepresented mantra of ‘do what thou wilt.’ It is an eventful and fault-laden principle, recognising that there is no authority but yourself. The only measure is the integrity of your vision of the world, and so the glory is yours, the poetry and the fuckery too. This isn’t a passport to reckless abandon: it means all responsibility is our own. Do what you want, but if your actions are negatively impacting another? Fix your engine, young traveller. One mouth, two ears. Love is the law, love under will. The struggle continues.

✩✩✩✩✩     None of the views expressed herein necessarily reflect the beliefs of the guest programmers or the host institution. Any similarities to persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental. Liberty is without limits BUT— 

(a.) admission is for those unfortunate enough to look over the age of eighteen;
(b.) please consider every possible trigger warning applicable at the Liberated Film Club;
(c.) under no circumstances do we accept complaints or issue refunds
(d.) Attendees are encouraged to refrain from removing their clothes in the auditorium;
(e.) Anyone known to be in possession of an e-cigarette will be denied entry to events; 
and (f.) Anyone caught consuming food during presentations will be immediately ejected.

---

 





Stanley Schtinter has been described as 'the witchfinder general of cultural complacency' by Sight & Sound magazine. Recent projects include Schneewittchen (IFFR, 2025), Last Movies (ICA, 2023-24); The Lock-In (Barbican Centre, 2022); and Important Books (or, Manifestos Read by Children) (Whitechapel Gallery, 2021-2022). He is the artistic director of 'anti-label' purge.xxx and founder of the Liberated Film Club. His moving image works are distributed by Light Cone, Paris.