Starting out as a pirate DVD/USB company, issuing irregular mail-order catalogues of films otherwise unobtainable (an activity which it maintains), the club ran as a regular event series at the Close-Up Film Centre, London, curated by Schtinter. This anthology is a complete and unabridged collation of these introductions.

Notes on Contributors


Stanley Schtinter has been described as an ‘artist’ by the Daily Mail and as an ‘exorcist’ by the Daily Star.

Shezad Dawood works across film, painting and sculpture to juxtapose discrete systems of image, language, site and narrative, using the editing process as a method to explore meanings and forms between film and painting. His practice often involves collaboration, working with groups and individuals across different territories to physically and conceptually map far-reaching lines of enquiry. These networks chart different geographic locations and communities and are particularly concerned with acts of translation and re-staging.

Chris Petit is an internationally renowned author and filmmaker once described by Le Monde as “the Robespierre of English cinema.” His films include the definitive Radio On (1979) and have been the subject of several foreign retrospectives.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman is an artist, filmmaker and cultural activist whose engaged practice calls for a profound re-imagining of the relationship between people, place and ecology. Focusing on marginalised individuals, communities and experience, the practice employs imaginative hybridity and narrative re-framing, alongside reverie and a creative waywardness. Informed by suppressed histories, and alert to sources of radical hope, the work prioritises an enduring and equitable co-existence.

William Fowler is a film historian, writer and musician, and an archive curator at the BFI. His co-authored book, The Bodies Beneath: The Flipside of British Film and Television was published by Strange Attractor Press in 2019. blue thirty-three, by his band The Begotten, is out on Blue Tapes; Wire magazine called it ‘a great noisy slug.’

John Rogers is a writer and film-maker based in London. He is the author of This Other London—Adventures in the Overlooked City (Harper Collins, 2013). He directed the feature documentaries The London Perambulator (2009), featuring Will Self, Iain Sinclair, Russell Brand, and Nick Papadimitriou; Make Your Own Damn Art—the world of Bob and Roberta Smith (2012), London Overground (2016) with Iain Sinclair, and In the Shadow of the Shard (2018). Rogers was psychogeographer-in-residence for Waltham Forest London Borough of Culture 2019. He produces a regular series of videos on his YouTube channel.

Ben Rivers is a filmmaker, born in Somerset, lives in London. He has made over 40 films, with his first feature Two Years at Sea winning the International Critics Prize at 68th Venice Film Festival. Other awards include twice winning the Tiger Award at Rotterdam Film Festival, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists and the EYE Art Film Prize. He was commissioned by Artangel to make The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, shown at the former BBC Television Centre and The Whitworth Museum, Manchester. Most recently he collaborated with Anocha Suwichakornpong on the feature film Krabi, 2562. He co-ran and programmed Brighton Cinematheque, 1996-2006.

Gideon Koppel, “Born in London in 1960, and still looking for a place [he’d] like to die...”

Gareth Evans is a London-based writer, curator, producer and presenter.

Adam Roberts—born in Bogota, Colombia—has made films and videos since the mid-90s. His film Mickey Finn won the Grand Prix du Jury at Angers international Film Festival. His collaborators have included film-maker Jack Hazan, choreographer Jonathan Burrows, composers Kevin Volans & Matteo Fargion, and the dancer Sylvie Guillem. His work has shown at Whitechapel Gallery, Hayward Gallery, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Maxi Gallery, Rome, and BFI Southbank. He produced and filmed an unprecedented series of interviews with long-term survivors of HIV (the AIDS Since the 80s Project, now The HIV Story Trust), housed in the London Metropolitan Archives, indexed and catalogued with support from the Wellcome Foundation. With Joanna Hogg he founded A Nos Amours, which has programmed screenings, curated exhibitions, and staged conferences. A Nos Amours has also published a book, the Chantal Akerman Retrospective Handbook, arising from a celebrated complete retrospective of Akerman's work at London's ICA. An exhibition at Ambika P3 of Akerman's installation work followed. His published writing includes chapters and journal papers, and the book Lamentation—In the Stuart Croft Archive, published by Ma Bibliothèque in 2020.

John Akomfrah is an artist and filmmaker, whose works are characterised by their investigations into memory, post-colonialism, temporality and aesthetics and often explores the experiences of migrant diasporas globally. Akomfrah was a founding member of the influential Black Audio Film Collective, which started in London in 1982 alongside the artists David Lawson and Lina Gopaul, who he still collaborates with today. Their first film, Handsworth Songs (1986) explored the events surrounding the 1985 riots in Birmingham and London through a charged combination of archive footage, still photos and newsreel. The film won several international prizes and established a multi-layered visual style that has become a recognisable motif of Akomfrah’s practice. Other works include The Unfinished Conversation (2012); Peripeteia (2012); Mnemosyne (2010); Vertigo Sea (2015); Purple (2017); Precarity (2017) and Four Nocturnes (2019).

Shama Khanna is an independent curator, writer and educator from London. They are the founder of Flatness (flatness.eu), a long-running platform for artists’ moving image and network culture invested in curating through a decolonial feminist lens. The project has been described as a ‘digital site of resistance’ (Dr Sylvia Theuri), decentring narratives of the arts and normalcy from the margins of the online. As well as with the artists featured on the site, Khanna has collaborated with numerous publications and organisations including: documenta 14, Athens; NANG, Seoul; Western Front, Vancouver; Microscope, NYC; Art Monthly; Afterall; LUX Scotland; Jerwood Arts; Herbert Gallery; Camden Arts Centre; The Women's Art Library, Goldsmiths; Feminist Review Journal; Chisenhale Gallery; Syllabus; and CCA, Glasgow (all UK). They are currently producing a Flatness book commissioned by Axisweb & Manchester Metropolitan University in partnership with the artist workers' co-operative not/nowhere. Khanna is a lecturer in Curating at the Royal College of Art, a Cultural Tenant at Studio Voltaire Studios, and a proud Trustee of not/nowhere.

Tony Grisoni worked in many different areas of film making before turning to screenwriting. Queen of Hearts (1989) was his award winning first feature directed by Jon Amiel. He has worked closely with a number of directors including Michael Winterbottom, John Boorman, Sean Durkin and Marc Munden, and has co-written with Terry Gilliam, including Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas (1998); Tideland (2005) and that ship of fools, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018). Other works include In this World (2001); Brothers of the Head (2005); Red Riding (2009); The Unloved (2009); Southcliffe (2013); The Young Pope (2016); Crazy Diamond (2017); and The City and the City (2018).

Damien Sanville is the founder of Close-Up Film Centre.

Mania Akbari is an internationally acclaimed artist and filmmaker. Her provocative, revolutionary and radical films were recently the subject of retrospectives at the BFI, London (2013), the DFI, Denmark (2014), Oldenburg International Film Festival, Germany (2014), Cyprus Film Festival (2014) and Nottingham Contemporary UK (2018). Her films have screened at festivals around the world and have received numerous awards including German Independence Honorary Award, Oldenberg (2014), Best Film, Digital Section, Venice Film Festival (2004), Nantes Special Public Award Best Film (2007) and Best Director and Best film at Kerala Film Festival (2007), Best Film and Best Actress, Barcelona Film Festival (2007). Akbari was exiled from Iran and currently lives and works in London, a theme addressed in Life May Be (2014), co-directed with Mark Cousins. This film was released at Karlovy Vary Film Festival and was nominated for Best Documentary at Edinburgh International Film Festival (2014) and Asia Pacific Film Festival (2014). Akbari’s latest film A Moon For My Father, made in collaboration with British artist Douglas White, premiered at CPH:DOX where it won the NEW:VISION Award 2019. The film also received a FIPRESCI International Critics Award at the Flying Broom Festival, Ankara.

Xiaolu Guo is a Chinese/British filmmaker and novelist. She has directed 11 films, including features How Is Your Fish Today (2007) and UFO In Her Eyes (2011). Her fiction She A Chinese received “the Golden Leopard" award at the Locarno Film Festival 2009. She self-produced all her documentaries. Once Upon A Time Proletarian (2011) premiered at the Venice Film Festival. We Went To Wonderland (2008) premiered at the MOMA in New York. Five Men & A Caravaggio (2018) premiered at the BFI London Film Festival. She has had film retrospectives at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (2019); Swiss Cinematheque (2010); and Greek Film Archives (2018). Her memoir, Once Upon A Time In The East, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, 2017 and A Lover’s Discourse is her most recent novel.

Sean Price Williams is a New York-based cinematographer, known for producing some of the most colourful and thrilling images in independent cinema today. He shoots both film and digital across categories of narrative, documentary, and experimental cinema. Some of Williams’ notable recent credits include Her Smell (2018); Marjorie Prime (2017); and Good Time (2017).

Chloe Aridjis is the author of three novels, Book of Clouds (2009), which won the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger in France, Asunder (2013), set in London's National Gallery, and Sea Monsters (2019), recently awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Aridjis has written for various art journals and was a guest curator at Tate Liverpool. She stars in Josh Appignanesi’s psychodrama Female Human Animal (2018) and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. She is a member of XR Writers Rebel, a group of writers who focus on addressing the climate emergency, and dreams of a world in which animals cease to be exploited.

Athina Tsangari is a Greek director and producer. Her first work in cinema was in a small acting role in Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991). She went on to produce work by Linklater, as well as that of Yorgos Lanthimos. She is best known for directing the feature films Attenberg (2010); Chevalier (2016); and Benaki Museum (2013).

Juliet Jacques is a writer and filmmaker based in London, UK. Trans: A Memoir (2015), was published by Verso, and her most recent book, Variations (2021), was published by Influx Press. Her short fiction, essays and journalism have appeared in numerous publications, and her short films have screened in galleries and festivals worldwide. She hosts the podcast Suite (212), which looks at the arts in their social, cultural, political and historical contexts.

Anna Thew is a painter turned filmmaker, writer and performer. Her work has been screened and celebrated literally everywhere.

Adam Christensen is a London-based artist who makes performance, video, fabric and text works, and performs with the music project Ectopia, which was Wysing Arts Centre’s band-in-residence in 2016. He has previously performed and presented work at Overgaden Institute for Contemporary Art; Copenhagen Baltic Triennial; as well as Almanac; David Roberts Art Foundation; Southard Reid; Institute of Contemporary Arts (London); Hollybush Gardens; Goldsmiths CCA (London).

Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of Visual and Other Pleasures (Macmillan, 1989/2009); Fetishism and Curiosity (British Film Institute, 1996/2013); Citizen Kane (bfi Classics series, 1992/2012); Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion Books, 2006) and Afterimages: on Cinema, Women and Changing Times (Reaktion Books, 2019) as well as three co-edited collections of essays. She made six films in collaboration with Peter Wollen, including Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1980). With artist/filmmaker Mark Lewis, she made Disgraced Monuments (1994) and 23 August 2008 (2013).

Astra Taylor is a writer, documentary filmmaker, and activist. Her films include Zizek! (2005); Examined Life (2008), and What Is Democracy? (2018). Her books include The People’s Platform (2014) and Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss it When It’s Gone (2019) and, as co-editor, Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America (2011). She is a Fellow of the Shuttleworth Foundation for her work against predatory debt.

Dennis Cooper is the author of nine novels as well as numerous books of poetry and non-fiction. He has made two feature films in collaboration with artist Zac Farley, Permanent Green Light (2018) and Like Cattle Towards Glow (2015). His most recent publications are a novel, The Marbled Swarm (2011) and four works of fiction composed of animated gifs, most recently the gif novel Zac’s Freight Elevator (2016) and a short gif fiction collection, Zac’s Coral Reef (2018). Cooper has written the works of French theatre director and choreographer Gisele Vienne since 2004, and has recently completed his tenth novel, I Wished. He is currently working on Room Temperature, his third film with Farley. He lives in Paris and Los Angeles. See also, denniscooperblog.com.

Stewart Home, author, is the only person on earth who is visible to the naked eye from outer space. He really does burn that brightly. The London Review of Books has praised Home by saying: “I really don't think anyone who is at all interested in literature has any business not knowing the work of Stewart Home.” However, this notorious egg bagel eater prefers to liken himself to “a proletarian comedian with Tourette's spewing obscenities.” Home much prefers standing on his head and reciting sexually explicit passages from his work at public events to courting the literary establishment, but nonetheless Home has recently published Re-Enter The Dragon: Genre Theory, Brucesploitation & the Sleazy Joys of Lowbrow Cinema (2018); and, previously, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (2010); Sixty-Nine Things To Do With A Dead Princess (2002); Slow Death (1996); and The Easy Way to Falsify Your Credit Rating (2005), to name but a few.

Dan Fox is a writer, filmmaker and musician living in New York, USA. He is the author of the books Limbo (2018) and Pretentiousness: Why It Matters (2016).

Miranda Pennell originally trained in contemporary dance and later studied visual anthropology. Pennell has produced a body of award-winning film and video work that explores forms of collective performance, whether dancers, soldiers or fight directors. Her most recent moving-image work uses colonial archives as the starting point for investigations into the colonial imaginary. Pennell’s films include You Made Me Love You (2005); Tattoo (2001); Fisticuffs (2004); Why Colonel Bunny Was Killed (2010); and The Host (2015).

Elena Gorfinkel is a senior lecturer in film studies at King’s College London and the author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s (2017). Her criticism appears in Sight & Sound, Art Monthly, and Cinema Scope, among other publications.

Tai Shani is a Tutor in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art. Shani's multidisciplinary practice, comprising performance, film, photography, and installation, revolves around experimental narrative texts. Shani recently published Our Fatal Magic (2019)—a work of feminist science fiction that anticipates a post-patriarchal future.