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ОглавлениеIt’s 22 December 2011. I open my emails to find the last of three cryptic correspondences from Secret Cinema, which I have booked tickets to attend the following month. The email contains an image of a ‘wireless communication’ that looks like it dates from the 1920s. Embedded within the typewriter-style font are hyperlinks leading to instructions on where to go on the day of the screening and pictures showing what to wear. I have been assigned the category of ‘Rogue’, but from the multiple dress codes can see that others have been designated ‘Guardians’ from the ‘International Police Headquarters’ and ‘Esteemed Visitors’ from the ‘British Cultural Office’.
Following one hyperlink takes me to a map on which the ‘international zone’ has been located to the north of Barbican tube station. Some roads have been given German names, and others French, but the map is recognizable as Central East London.
A month later, in January 2012, I arrive at Barbican station with two friends, feeling self-conscious in my slightly half-hearted costume. As we approach the meeting point, we start to see other people dressed up and notice a woman holding balloons, who we were told to look out for. Everyone begins to funnel down the same alleyway and I feel a surge of excitement. Lots of people have gone to town with their costumes, and I can’t tell the difference between the audience and the actors. Policemen scream at us in German to line up against the wall, and then march us through the streets. We pass some trade vans unloading meat carcasses, which it takes me a while to realize aren’t part of the set; they seem subsumed within the fictional world we’re being led into.
In fact, everything incongruent seems to go out of focus as more characters emerge from behind each corner. An old man glares at us from one of the dimly lit backstreets, a woman with a briefcase hurries away, appearing terrified, and some of the officers leading us splinter off to chase a young man who has bolted through the crowd. Eventually, we arrive at a grand building and are asked to change our money into the ‘currency’ of the site. The entranceway is decorated like a 1920s bar or hotel, and up the wide stairs we can hear a band playing. There are sweet stalls, cafes, a cart selling candyfloss and, for some reason, piles of rubble on the floor and in the corners. There are seemingly infinite doors, staircases and corridors. We don’t know where to start. It feels like something, although I don’t know what, is about to happen.
To be immersed in something is to be totally involved with it, even lost or submerged within its confines. It implies some degree of surrender, entering inside a situation or process that you don’t have a full vantage point on. In recent years, immersion has become a key feature of performance cultures, especially within site-specific theatre productions and pop-up film screenings. Spectators are invited to interact with dramatized worlds, and in many instances their choices and decisions guide how dramas unfold. Within pop-up culture, immersion is also a feature of many other sites of consumption. For example, guests are offered ‘immersive drinking experiences’ in bars themed around Sherlock Holmes stories or a chance to dine in an immersive restaurant based on the British TV series Fawlty Towers.
Immersion might seem like a strange place to start an exploration of pop-up logics. While lots of pop-up places market themselves as immersive, it’s arguably a fairly niche element of pop-up leisure economies, and other logics may seem more central. I start with immersion, though, because out of all the logics I want to examine, immersion is most clearly a way of seeing – a form of orientation in the world. This is important because across the book, I want to show how reorientation is precisely what pop-up logics do. As the introduction touched on, this book is concerned with how pop-up logics realign our perception in order to acclimatize us to (and dampen our alarm at) the post-2008 city. We’ll explore how pop-up logics provide ways of encountering the city that make sense of, and normalize, precarity and turbulence.
For the cultural theorist Fredric Jameson, significant changes in urban environments require new ‘perceptual equipment’ to be developed so that cities become intelligible again. This ‘perceptual equipment’ could refer to technologies specifically designed to understand cities, such as maps or data visualizations, or to more creative media, such as film, photography or other art forms. This chapter explores immersive events as key to the ‘perceptual equipment’ that pop-up produces, focusing on how immersion is mobilized in pop-up cinemas. Pop-up cinemas don’t just screen films, but also offer spectators an immersive experience of urban space, either by using city spaces to (re)create fantastical, normally fictional, film worlds or by applying immersive viewing practices to real urban issues. Pop-up cinemas are big across the world, but London has an especially well-developed pop-up cinema scene, led by commercial front runners Secret Cinema but also including many smaller-scale, often experimental or art-house, pop-up cinema projects. In this chapter, I explore the generation of immersive modes of encounter through two pop-up cinemas, the Floating Cinema and Secret Cinema, while paying attention to the political stakes of immersive ways of seeing in this context.
Pop-up cinema has a conflicted politics. Pop-up screenings have the potential to engage with important social issues, but this is often overshadowed by how events play into the hands of stakeholders looking to redevelop urban spaces. Certainly, pop-up cinemas can and do alert audiences to crucial concerns. For example, the pop-up cinema Films on Fridges, which made a cinema out of discarded fridges in Hackney, used its pop-up format to engage visitors with environmental issues around recycling and urban waste (Pratt & San Juan, 2014). However, immersive pop-ups are also undoubtedly instrumental in gentrifying urban areas. In 2014, a series of immersive events was held in the Balfron Tower, formerly a social housing block in East London, after it was decanted and prepared for private sale. These included an immersive performance of Macbeth and an artistic recreation of an ‘authentic’ 1968 Balfron flat. The events were described by commentators as ‘artwashing’, a way of using artistic programming to distract from the removal of the building’s council tenants and its preparation for private sale while simultaneously drawing middle-class interest to the block to drive up purchase prices (Wainwright, 2014).
Indeed, immersion is often associated with a dubious class politics. In 2017, Zebedee Productions ran an immersive ‘Cockney Nativity’ supper club in a disused ‘authentic’ Hackney pub, complete with actors playing stereotyped working-class characters. The event, which cost £55 to attend, was widely criticized for fetishizing working-class culture, parodying and exoticizing ‘authentic’ Hackney life for more middle-class newcomers to the area. This kind of use of immersion recalls a history of exoticizing and othering people from different cultures through immersive spectatorship. For example, in the 1800s, travelling showmen used to bring panoramas and other optical devices such as peep show boxes from village to village to demonstrate the distant colonized lands of the British Empire (Della Dora, 2007). The images presented people from other countries as exotic peculiarities to be marvelled at via these performative devices. Presenting people from other cultures in this way, as a form of entertainment, undermined their status as equals. Likewise, immersive pop-ups can other working-class (and racialized) groups while also infiltrating their spaces. That is to say, immersion attracts middle-class people into formerly commercially undesirable urban areas but does so in a way that exoticizes, alienates and often literally displaces the area’s existing occupants. Examining the political stakes of immersion as a way of seeing the city is therefore crucial. While pop-up cinemas might seem like an innocuous form of entertainment, I explore how the modes of encounter they generate play into the ongoing gentrification of the city. If pop-up culture grows out of vacancy and dereliction, then it also turns those conditions into an opportunity for profit.
Since its invention, film has fascinated people because of the kinds of perception it generates. In the early days of film’s development, filmic footage was often shown at travelling exhibitions. The primary attraction was not the images depicted in the film, but the medium itself. Film was recognized as a technology of vision that brought the world into focus in new ways – slowing it down, speeding it up and showing the mechanics of movement. In fact, film was often demonstrated alongside other perception-enhancing technologies such as early X-ray machines (Gunning, 1997).
In particular, it was film’s sensitivity to motion that drove the fascination around it. Film’s ‘pans and tilts’ and ‘tracking shots’ (Bruno, 2002) echoed the sense of motion within the newly mechanized infrastructures of rapidly urbanizing cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and mimicked forms of viewing on the move that typified modern urban life, such as train travel, window shopping and urban wandering (Bruno, 1997). In doing so, films not only reflected changes in the urban environment, but also reconfigured ways of seeing, making spectators more alert to, but also less disorientated by, the motion of the modern city.
The idea that ways of seeing are not fixed, but historically developed, including through changes in technology, is what the cultural critic Walter Benjamin identified in his concept of the ‘optical unconscious’. Benjamin (2008) argued that perception is altered by media such as photography and film. For example, montage as a cinematic technique makes us more aware of the reality of simultaneity while photography changes the nature of memory. This evolution of perception is a continuous historical process, impacted by more modern technologies today too. Geographer James Ash, for instance, has examined how the speed of response needed in contemporary video games make players aware of minute intervals of time (Ash, 2012), and there has, of course, been much public debate about how the Internet and its associated technologies have changed capacities for attention, especially in young people and children.
In thinking about how pop-up cinema reconfigures vision, it is important to consider what is distinctive about pop-up cinemas – namely that they make the site of spectatorship part of the filmic event. If cinema is routinely understood to foreground motion, highlighting the continuous flux of urban environments, then pop-up cinemas emphasize the changing nature of urban space even more emphatically, by literally changing the urban environment as part of their events.
Immersive events can highlight capacities for urban change in two key ways. First, immersive cinemas overlay ‘real’ urban spaces with fantastical recreations of places from films. In doing this, they show how current organizations of the city are contingent (could be differently arranged), including to reproduce these fictional worlds. This is seen, for example, in the maps that Secret Cinema send to participants to help them find the venues – maps that merge ‘real’ space with the filmic space created.
For Secret Cinema’s 2012 screening of The Third Man (discussed in the opening vignette), a map was sent out that was recognizable as Central East London, including Barbican tube station, but also with the ‘international zone’ marked out just above the tube stop and some roads renamed in other languages, including German and French. The Third Man is set in occupied post-war Vienna, a city split into four quarters, controlled by the Americans, the Soviets, the English and the French. It is already, therefore, a film about how spaces can be taken over and transformed in various and competing ways. In this context, Secret Cinema’s own territorialization of urban space for its immersive performance transferred the film’s engagement with the various potential futures of Vienna to an understanding of the potential changes of London itself.
Second, immersive events can expose potentials for urban change by encouraging spectators to explore ‘real’ urban environments in an investigative and playful way. The Floating Cinema, which we’ll turn to next, hosts events that involve participants in exploring local areas of London. It does this in order to uncover information about what places used to be like, how they are currently changing, and what they could become in the future. This is, again, a way of seeing that enhances sensitivity to the metastability of the city – to the fact that even seemingly stable organizations of urban space can be, and have been, reconfigured.
The Floating Cinema: getting on board
The Floating Cinema is a mobile cinema that operates from a purpose-built canal boat, travelling to various locations on London’s waterways. It is run by the arts organization UP Projects. UP Projects aims to ‘empower communities and enrich the public sphere’ (UP Projects, 2016). The Floating Cinema was developed by UP Projects as part of the legacy opportunities that followed the 2012 Olympic Games held in London. As Ali, who works at the Floating Cinema, explained to me in an interview, the project responded to a call for activities that would ‘connect people living around the Olympic Park with what was happening inside of it, and make it feel like it was sort of a space for them’. Because the Olympic Park is criss-crossed by canals, they decided to produce a floating cinema that could reach those who don’t normally attend cultural events by literally going to them, mooring the boat at points along East London’s waterways. From its conception, then, the Floating Cinema aimed to acclimatize people to changes in urban space and to enable them to develop a sense of belonging and agency in the midst of those transformations.
From this starting point, the Floating Cinema soon expanded into a London-wide project. Each season, the Floating Cinema develops a programme of events that use film and activities to respond to urban, environmental and heritage issues along the waterways. For example, their event ‘Gone Fishing’ used a film about fly fishing and a trip to a fishery to engage with issues of water pollution, and their screening ‘Vertical Living’, which took place at a mooring near the Balfron Tower, featured short films that explored ‘the impact of urban renewal’ (UP Projects, 2016). At all these screenings, their aim remains to help to orientate people within changes occurring in the city.
The immersive viewing practices engaged by the Floating Cinema encourage people to creatively investigate urban areas, but those explorations can play into the hands of redevelopment and gentrification agendas. This tension is well illuminated by a series of events that the Floating Cinema held in the London suburb of Brentford in the summer of 2015. The Brentford events formed part of a rare tour the boat undertook beyond London, of the waterways from Brentford to Bristol and back. Brentford was picked as the starting point because it’s the last stop in London on the way out to Bristol. For the duration of the tour, a sound artist, Jacob, accompanied the boat. Jacob worked with interested people at points along the waterway to explore and record the sounds of their area. He spent a week in Bristol in the middle of the tour producing his final piece, which he then exhibited on board the boat on the way back, including at Brentford, when the boat returned there again.
While the Floating Cinema regard their events as ‘immersive’, Ali explained to me that theirs is a different kind of immersion to that which you would find at a Secret Cinema event. Rather than creating a fictional world for participants, the Floating Cinema makes real space immersive by encouraging visitors to take on an exploratory way of looking. Ali argued that this is achieved by ‘the charm of the boat’ by ‘getting on board and being excited by that’.
The boat was purpose-designed by the architectural firm Duggan Morris. In a promotional video about the boat’s making, Duggan Morris describe the impetus for the boat’s design (UP Projects, 2013). Having researched the Lea Valley (the area of the Olympic Park that the boat was first designed to tour), they discovered that it was, historically, a hub of invention where technologies such as aviation and petrol were pioneered. Responding to this, they wanted a boat that would evoke that history, and the tag line for the design project became ‘a cargo of extraordinary objects’. The original plan was to use a refurbished industrial hopper boat so that the vessel would grow, quite literally, out of the area’s history of invention. However, the repairs and adjustments that would be needed proved too expensive, so a boat was designed and built from scratch. To keep the idea of invention alive regardless, Duggan Morris wanted a design for the boat that would look ‘magical’, suggesting the enticement and fascination of invention. The way they achieved this also drew on the magic of the cinema. They designed a boat with a shell made from translucent materials so that it would light up at night like a classic cinema light box. This ‘cargo of extraordinary objects’ therefore came to conflate two kinds of technological invention; on the one hand, it evoked East London’s history of industrial invention, and on the other it referenced cinema as another magical technology.
Just as early film technologies were aligned with X-ray, as technological inventions that enhance human perception, the Floating Cinema is presented as an apparatus for discovery. Ali described the boat almost like a set of tools for investigations. She explained to me how lots of different equipment is hidden away inside the boat so that it ‘unpacks into many different versions of itself’ for different kinds of events, providing, for example, audiovisual equipment or chairs and tables for workshops. In this way, it offers a variety of tools with which spectators can explore urban life at the Floating Cinema’s screenings.
The framing of the boat as a magical travelling vessel is also reminiscent of the historical itinerant spectacles, such as peep show boxes and panoramas, brought by showmen from village to village to display images of distant lands. Yet while these ‘moving geography lessons’ (Griffiths, 2013, p. 73) brought images of exotic faraway places, the Floating Cinema travels around London to give spectators an enhanced experience of areas close to home. If immersion carries a sense of ‘being elsewhere’ (Griffiths, 2013, p. 81), then the Floating Cinema, while literally a mode of transport, also enables a kind of ‘virtual transport’ (Griffiths, 2013, p. 40) by which spectators are given an uncanny experience of seeing local urban places anew, as if travelling to them from afar. As suggested previously, this exoticization of local areas of London can be problematic. It can potentially fetishize deprived areas of London to make them interesting to the middle classes, just as travelling peep shows fetishized faraway cultures in ways that reinforced the power imbalances of empire, giving spectators a sense of mastery as well as fascination, as if viewing people from other places like animals in a zoo. The Floating Cinema does try to engage ‘harder to reach communities’, ensuring as far as they can that the events are for rather than just about the places where they moor their boat (UP Projects, 2013). Ali explained that they work with local housing development companies to make sure communities are invited to their events. However, as will be explored, the Floating Cinema still encounters problems in trying to navigate working in gentrifying communities.
Sounds of Brentford
At the start of the Floating Cinema’s tour from Brentford to Bristol, the sound artist Jacob held a workshop at the lock, next to the moored boat. Visitors to the Floating Cinema, as well as un-expecting passers-by, were invited to take part in recording the noises of Brentford. Jacob had brought an array of equipment, and as he tested out his contraptions, dipping them in the water and waving them around to test the sounds coming through his headphones, he did seem much like an inventor who had arrived, via the boat, to share his discoveries with the people of Brentford. Jacob let participants take recorders away into Brentford town, and they came back with sounds including water fountains, factories, dogs and the buzzing of the M4 motorway.
Jacob also compiled a list, with the help of suggestions via Twitter, of sounds that he and his participants should aim to record. This list focused attention on fading, enduring and emerging elements of Brentford as a place. Participants were interested in recording historical features of Brentford, such as its boating culture and wildlife, but also more recent elements of its soundscapes, such as the variety of accents, the trains and planes that run regularly over the canal, and the industries now located there – including the huge GlaxoSmithKline factory. Many people had also suggested Jacob try to record sounds that related specifically to the current economic climate. These included sounds of ‘austerity’, ‘capitalism’ and ‘apathy’, as well as ‘gentrification’.
Alongside the sound recording activities, the archive footage that the Floating Cinema were showing on the boat drew attention to the remaking of Brentford over the years. They had about two hours of footage that they repeated on a loop throughout the day so that visitors could drop in and out. The archive footage demonstrated many things that Brentford once was (and to some extent still is) – a destination for fishing and holiday making as well as a boating community. It also pointed towards past visions of the future of Brentford. It showed how Brentford, as an area that became part of Greater London in 1963, was a site where new visions of the urban were played out. The footage explored how rows of terraced housing were knocked down to make way for high-rise blocks that were at the time seen as groundbreaking – despite their reputation today. It also showed the building of the M4 motorway, a development that radically changed the feel and function of the area. The weekend of events, including the workshops and the screenings, thereby set out resources for spectators to imagine what Brentford is, has been, and could become. Via the boat, visitors were encouraged to immerse themselves in Brentford’s character, and that immersive way of seeing included attention to Brentford’s capacities for transformation.
Spectators were also encouraged to see Brentford’s potential transformations as something they had agency over. The evening programme of films for the tour kicked off with a screening of Life in a Day. The Floating Cinema have a projector they bring out of the boat in order to host large outdoor screenings, and the movie was screened by the lock, with spectators sitting on chairs and cushions. Life in a Day is a crowdsourced documentary made out of 80,000 clips uploaded to YouTube, recorded by ‘ordinary’ people on one particular day – 24 July 2010. The film was introduced by two artists who had been working with UP Projects for several years. Before screening the main film, they showed a montage of archive footage of Brentford that they had put together. Discussing both this and Life in a Day, they argued that we’re all making archive footage all the time as we record and share things on our phones. Comparing Life in a Day with the old archive footage of Brentford, they demonstrated to spectators that they themselves are the ones who, by taking everyday footage on their mobile phones, are making the images of their area – images that will define how it is imagined in future years.
However, some of the sounds recorded by Jacob’s participants exposed the unequal forces driving and deciding how Brentford will transform. For the event, the Floating Cinema had worked with Brentford Lock West, developers currently building new flats around the lock. Brentford Lock West had given them access to the mooring site and partly funded the event. The flats they were building were luxury apartments, costing upwards of £400,000 for a one-bed. While the Floating Cinema was trying hard to engage with existing communities of Brentford, the event obviously appealed to the developers as they tried to garner interest in their properties from potential buyers. Ali explained:
Brentford wouldn’t really be considered a cultural destination, but we like that kind of challenge, we’re inviting an audience from all over London, like, ‘Come to Brentford’, ’cause nobody else is going to ask you to do that, but we can make it look amazing.
They had even sought out the archive material about the M4 to make this very ordinary, arguably even unsightly, piece of Brentford’s geography into something ‘exciting’, in Ali’s words. For Brentford Lock West, then, funding the event played directly into their desire to rebrand and gentrify the area. Indeed, the salesman for the development had booked in several viewings during the Floating Cinema’s event, perhaps taking advantage of the screenings and Jacob’s workshops to show how arty the area was becoming.
While I was at Jacob’s event, one participant went to record the sounds of the builders working on the new flats by Brentford Lock West. When he returned to Jacob’s station, he ticked off ‘gentrification’ from the list. The irony was clear: a local resident invited to use Jacob’s sound equipment to investigate sounds of gentrification did so by recording the building works of the very developer that was sponsoring the event. Jacob was clearly a little uncomfortable at this incongruity, as well as at the critical turn the tweeted sound recording suggestions were taking. Staring at the space between ‘capitalism’ and ‘austerity’ on the increasingly depressing list of sounds to be recorded, he suggested, ‘I should probably put something else in between, as like, a fresh chaser’.
The potential of the Floating Cinema’s critical, artistic events to play into the hands of developers was not just a Brentford-based issue, but a wider concern for the company. All their programming, Ali said, takes the canals as a starting point to think about ‘London as a transient city’. The canals are a good way into thinking about industrial decline and reuse and ‘to try and capture some of that and think about what it means for the people who live there now’. Yet, as Ali noted, the canals are also rapidly changing and the waterways are getting busier, especially as London’s housing crisis pushes more people to think about the canals as a way of life. The canals are at the centre of a tension between London’s industrial history and its imagined futures. Talking about Kings Cross, where the Floating Cinema hold lots of their screenings, Ali said that ‘the perception of the canals has changed so much recently … there’s so much development work that’s gone on’. For Ali, this has made Kings Cross ‘a lovely place to go’ but also raises a question of who is able to access places along the waterways once they transform in this way.
Ali described how hard it is to navigate these tensions, given that developers have their own agendas in providing meanwhile space for pop-ups such as the Floating Cinema. While the company tries hard not to use ‘art as a tool for regeneration, but as a place to talk about regeneration’, she acknowledged that this isn’t straightforward, and that although the events might enlist communities in talking about changes, their agency to do anything about those changes is very limited. The Floating Cinema generates an immersive way of seeing that foregrounds capacities of a place to change, but the power geometries of how this can be mobilized are clearly uneven. Immersion can enable event participants to engage more deeply with areas of their city and consider how they might want it to be otherwise. However, the immersive way of seeing is perhaps more powerfully instrumentalized by stakeholders such as developers, who use this exposure of the potential of places to change to drive a normative progression towards their desired version of the city.
Pop-up cinemas, then, assert the plasticity of urban space by showing the contingency of its organizations and its potential avenues for transformation. This function of pop-up cinema can be elucidated through arguments made by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze about how post-Second World War cinema changed perceptions of the city. In particular, it evokes Deleuze’s concept of the ‘any-space-whatever’, a phrase coined to describe scenes such as ‘disused warehouses’ or ‘cities in the course of demolition’ that appeared in post-war films, reflecting the prevalent ruin and abandonment of urban centres at the time (Deleuze, 2013, p. x). Deleuze argued that in these sites – where normal functions had been disrupted – urban spaces lost their established relations and became open to potentially infinite new uses and conceptions. For example, whereas once a warehouse had just been a warehouse, earmarked for that specific use, its dereliction left it open to be used in all kinds of ways – for all kinds of filmic scenes and events – making it at once no space and any space at all.
Deleuze’s any-space-whatever has clear resonances with pop-up culture as a whole. Pop-ups usually take place in indeterminate spaces, gaps left by dereliction in the aftermath of recession and ‘interim’ sites awaiting redevelopment. Just as Deleuze suggests that any-space-whatevers open up ‘new circuits of thinking’ (Pratt & San Juan, 2014, p. 36), it’s argued that pop-ups demonstrate the capacity of sites to be reimagined (Iveson, 2013; Nemeth & Langhorst, 2014; Tardiveau & Mallo, 2014). In fact, the very premise of pop-up is that urban space can be used in multiple and ever-changing ways. Pop-up space-finding companies such as Appear Here list numerous urban sites ‘ready to be filled with your idea’ (Appear Here, 2015), asserting the contingency of a site’s former designations and its ability to be recreated by each new user.
In this section, we’ll further examine how pop-up cinemas see the city as somewhere that can be continuously reimagined and transformed by exploring Secret Cinema’s screening of Back to the Future (1985) in the summer of 2014. Secret Cinema are London’s most prominent and successful pop-up cinema. They occupy vacant spaces, temporarily transforming them into theatrical versions of the films they show. Visitors explore these sites before the screening and can buy food and drink, enjoy entertainment, and interact with props and characters.
In its early days, Secret Cinema didn’t tell audiences what film would be screened in advance of the event. Guests had to try and work it out from the in-fiction correspondence sent beforehand and/or from the clues on the set when they arrived. Then, as the evening of exploration drew to a close, spectators would be ushered into a room and the movie would begin. Back to the Future, however, was announced in advance, drawing on the huge popularity of the film to market the event. It took place at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, East London. Stratford is an area that has become synonymous with the gentrification that followed the 2012 Olympic Games (Watt, 2012), and Secret Cinema’s occupation of the site can be seen as instrumental in the ongoing rebranding of the area. Hostility was evident on social media in the run-up to the event, with many local residents complaining about the ‘hipsters’ it would bring with it (Atkinson & Kennedy, n.d.).
Back to the Future is a cult classic about a boy called Marty who, thanks to his friend, the crackpot scientist Dr Emmet Brown (known as Doc), travels from 1985 to 1955 in a car that Doc has turned into a time machine. On arriving in 1955, Marty must enlist the help of Doc’s past self to get ‘back to the future’. However, in the process, he accidentally disrupts the getting together of his teenage parents, thereby threatening the event of his own birth. Marty then has to work to make sure his parents do fall in love, lest he accidentally erase himself from time. Secret Cinema had recreated the world(s) of Back to the Future for the event. They constructed places from both the 1985 and 1955 settings, including a 1955 fairground, a 1985 record shop, disco and aerobics class, and a recreation of the 1955 school dance Marty attends in the film, as well as several houses and shops. The set was complete with actors playing characters from the film and live performances of certain scenes were staged.
The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, where this screening was hosted, is a strange place, but also peculiarly fitting for an immersive recreation of Back to the Future. One of the ‘legacy’ areas surrounding the Olympic Games, it has been newly developed. Roads have been built, landscaping has been undertaken and yet the area, at least in 2014, was still sparsely occupied, awaiting the bustle of the businesses and inhabitants it sought to attract. The embryonic site was reminiscent of a scene in Back to the Future when Marty, having arrived in the past, ends up at the site of the estate he lives on, which in 1955 is just being built. The gates exist but the houses haven’t been constructed yet. Marty’s arrival there destabilizes his sense of the place and time he comes from. What, for him, is the unquestioned world he grew up in is exposed as a historical contingency; something that is, but wasn’t always, and might not have been.
Throughout Back to the Future, we are reminded not just of the instability of place, but of the instability of personal identity too. As somebody who belongs in the future, Marty’s existence is predicated on a particular trajectory of events that, as he learns, could well have happened differently. The anxiety of the film stems from Marty’s attempts to recreate the sequence of events that led to his birth and to the creation of the place he knows as home. At the Secret Cinema event, Marty’s anxiety about how places and people come into existence shed a new light on the setting of the freshly built Olympic Park, foregrounding the site as a place and a community in the making that, like Marty’s estate, will one day be naturalized in London’s landscape.
Back to the Future is a film that all takes place in one geographical space. However, the place that space is made into changes non-linearly during the film as past and present constantly remake each other through Marty’s misadventures. The unmaking of future place is visible in the photographs Marty has of himself with his family, which begin to fade and reappear depending on how successfully he is orchestrating the event of his own conception. The main driver of action and comedy of the film comes from the interruptions that Marty makes into the past and their impacts in the future, such as accidentally seducing his mother or introducing rock ’n’ roll to the 1950s. These interruptions highlight the precarious metastability of the life he takes for granted in 1985, emphasizing how these conditions, which seemed stable to him before his time-travelling adventures, are actually dependent on processes or events that could have been very different.
The way of seeing that Secret Cinema’s immersive screening of Back to the Future cultivates was, then, one where the city is shown to be malleable – a place whose future can be created in manifold ways. As a site-specific rendition of Back to the Future, the event transferred the film’s concern with the making and unmaking of place onto the Olympic Park area of Stratford, making 2014 London a sort of third layer in the film’s already time-shifting geographies. The actors at the site all belonged either to the 1955 or 1985 version of the world, yet moved between the scenes belonging to each decade, as, for example, when Marty’s car from 1985 burst into the 1955 fairground space that formed part of the set. Against this background, the unmissable presence of Anish Kapoor’s Orbital sculpture, built for the Olympic Games, introduced a third temporality to the event. It loomed over the set as if signalling post-Olympic London as a third potential version of the site, an alternative, or subsequent, future to that of the film’s settings.
However, crucially, the plot of the film means that a very particular vision of future Stratford is evoked. When Marty finally gets back to the future, he is reassured to find that his family and his town are still there, yet things are subtly different. More exactly, everything is better. His sister and mother are more attractive, his brother and father are more successful, and the whole family are richer, cooler and happier. Marty’s travels to the past, though they were destabilizing, have resulted in a better present: he has succeeded in recreating place to put his own family higher up the social ladder.
In staging such a film in the Olympic Park, what kind of message is given about the prognosis for Stratford as a rapidly developing and gentrifying area? Following the logics of the film, the event could suggest that the unmaking and remakings of place are going to generate a better future for the area – one where poor, unhappy and unattractive people are replaced with cooler, richer and happier ones. However, unlike in Back to the Future, these are unlikely to be new and improved versions of the place’s original inhabitants, but instead middle-class arrivals. Perhaps they will even include some of Secret Cinema’s attendees, inspired to house-hunt in the area. The event, then, creates another kind of time travel, catapulting Stratford into the post-Olympic future that stakeholders imagined for it. The event positions Stratford as an any-space-whatever that can be remade just as past, present and future are remade in the film. But it also suggests that such recreations are unproblematically positive. Just as with the Floating Cinema, however, there are clearly agendas to Secret Cinema’s immersive event. While any-space-whatevers are theoretically indeterminate, open to be transformed in any way, the primary aim here is with a particular, profitable transformation – making the site into a successful space of consumption while helping to rebrand the area and raise the financial value of property.
Any-space-whatever/any-city-whatever
Secret Cinema is by no means unique in staging film events that play into the rebranding of London. The use of pop-up cinema to rebrand place is a clear tactic for developers and governments across the city. For example, a series of pop-up film screenings and other pop-up events called ‘The Power of Summer’ took place annually at Battersea Power Station during its redevelopment. Battersea Power Station is an iconic Grade II listed London building that lay derelict for many years until it its sale to Malaysian investors was agreed in 2012. After that, its transformation into luxury flats, offices and retail units began. Events were held on site during the works to raise its profile, including the pop-up film screenings. Similarly, a series of pop-up screenings in disused underground stations were planned to accompany the (delayed) coming of the night tube in 2016. In these instances, pop-up cinemas helped to reimagine sites undergoing transformations. As we saw in the case of the Floating Cinema in Brentford, the immersive viewing practices pop-up cinema events engage make places seem exciting, as well as garnering interest in them. What’s more, as we’ve seen in relation to Secret Cinema, the events insist that places can be unproblematically remade for the better, generating a way of seeing that conveniently focuses on the plasticity of place and the positive outcomes of change rather than what might be erased.
Just as in Back to the Future Marty’s meddling with space–time produces a future that is unquestioned as better for his family, a vision of Stratford is created in Secret Cinema’s screening of the film that overlooks any adverse outcomes of the transformation taking place – for example, the displacements that gentrification in the area is causing. Of course, in Back to the Future, there are ‘negative’ outcomes of Marty’s actions. For example, Biff and his son – who used to bully Marty and his dad – swap places with them in the new version of the present, becoming poor and ugly and effectively servants to Marty’s newly rich family. But within the film’s narrative, these outcomes are figured as poetic justice – after all, Biff is a bad person – and so rather than serving as a warning about the impacts of change, they strengthen the idea that recreations of place are justified and beneficial.
It is no surprise, then, that pop-up cinemas are enlisted in places where a transition is desired. The ways that pop-up cinemas imagine the city as metastable and celebrate its potential for transformations are clearly valuable to stakeholders in redevelopment projects. We can see that immersion, while figured as a leisure activity, has important consequences in the current socio-economic climate. It generates a sense of the city as an any-space-whatever, declaring space to be open for any kind of transformation, but then drives those transformations towards particular agendas.
Earlier in this chapter, we saw how different technologies of spectatorship have, across history, constructed particular ways of seeing. Recalling Fredric Jameson’s conjecture that these technologies serve to reorientate people within cities at times of change, we can see how the immersive spectatorship of pop-up cinema orientates people within the changing landscape of post-2008 London. In particular, immersion facilitates, normalizes and naturalizes gentrification.
In post-recession London, inequalities are being exacerbated. Austerity measures, job cuts and pay freezes mean growing groups of Londoners are being pushed out of areas such as Brentford and Stratford, where the events discussed in this chapter took place, traditionally working-class places. Meanwhile, pop-up has made those places more attractive for those who are relatively privileged and are yet themselves being pushed out of the city’s more upmarket locales, as even the ‘squeezed middle’ feel the pinch. Pop-ups come into these areas and add excitement and intrigue. In doing so, they turn precarity into an opportunity for profit, putting Brentford or Stratford on the map for cultural events as well as for estate agents. The immersive way of seeing pop-up cinema generates, becomes something akin to a way of identifying what the geographer Neil Smith called the ‘rent gap’, the disparity between the current value of a place and its potential value (Smith, 1987).
Pop-up cinema is an important starting place for thinking about pop-up’s logics because cinema is so clearly about perception – about a way of seeing and understanding space and time. However, the rest of this book will show how, further than just immersion, all pop-up logics can be understood as ways of seeing the city. Over the chapters that follow, we’ll see how each of pop-up’s logics reorientates approaches to aspects of urban life, growing out of, and serving particular functions within, the post-recession austerity climate.
In examining each logic, I’ll shed light on the nature of the compensations they offer for precarity and the mechanisms by which they operate. I’ll also map key cultural and socio-economic contexts of each logic in order to better understand their political implications. In relation to immersion, we’ve seen how it compensates for precarity by normalizing change. Immersion fosters sensitivity to and enjoyment in the metastability of urban space – its potentials for transformation. We saw how this kind of orientation to the city can engage people with an area’s history and give them a greater sense of their agency in changes taking place, capacities that were clearer in relation to the Floating Cinema. However, in examining the wider processes surrounding the Floating Cinema’s event, and putting these in proximity to Secret Cinema’s operations, it became clear that immersion can also frame the city as a playground for the middle classes, disregarding the needs of existing communities and accelerating gentrification. As such, the key mechanism of immersion is one of naturalization. Immersion encourages people to expect and enjoy unpredictable changes in the city, and most often this is operationalized by developers and local governments looking to raise the value of an area.
