Mugged In a Movie Theater: Crime or Craft?

Jack Stevenson: ‘Inspired by the recent documentary Sick by Kirby Dick, about masochistic Bob Flanagan, ‘Mugged in a Movie Theatre: Crime or Craft?’ is a 16mm short-film free-association improvisation on the currently debated issues of personal privacy – violated and (unbearably) extreme images unleashed on the movie screen – all films connected by a common consideration of the fragility and impermanence of the human body.The selected short films are culled from a diverse range of non-commercial/non-exploitation genres, offering a peek into a collective sort of secret cinema. The programme includes an underground ‘art’ film, a child’s hygiene short, a documentary on physical abnormality, a U.S.Army-produced orientation film aimed at Vietnam-bound medics and a road safety horror movie.
Part of the essence and purpose of the show is the untested dynamic of the combination: five monumentally unrelated films screened in essentially random succession completely out of their originally intended contexts. A contextual experiment – and an experiment in a visceral sense as well, for while the show is not without its humorous and absurd moments, other stretches are almost unbearably horrifying (although not within the concept of commercial exploitation).
I’ve used the term ‘exploitation’ thus far in an absolutist sense: ‘this is not exploitation’ – but isn’t it? How does the context of a film’s exhibition bear on what it ultimately ‘is’? When does art or documentation end and exploitation begin? Or should such judgements simply be left to the individual viewer, with an inevitable range of verdicts? Must we redefine what ‘exploitation’ means, since today so many of the ‘exploited’ – like Bob Flannagan – are their own best press agents? And who, finally, is being exploited?
Always to be carefully weighed in any such debate is the audience factor. In a cinema situation, collective audience response is a key in determining what a film actually is on any given day. A commercial Hollywood feature film is fashioned to be perceived by everyone in the same way – and then played before audiences for the most part happily preconditioned to know what to expect. Conversely, the short films in this programme were aimed at diverse social subsets. It is safe to assume that none of these films will be playing before the audiences for which they were intended, or that any audience has sat through such a cacophonous raw mixture of films. It is safe to say I can not prepare you for this.

Programme:

All Women Have Periods (early 70s, 8 min.)
A Day in the Life of Bonnie Consolo (late 70s, Colour, 15 min.)
Eclipse of the Sun Virgin (George Kuchar, 1967, Colour, 15 min.)
Army Medicine in Vietnam (1967, Colour, 30 min.)
Signal 30 (1960 vintage, Colour, 20 min.)