Screening Memories

 

A Small Cinema is back once more as next weekend we will put an event on in Kirkby town centre. The shop is transformed and ready, the (fantastic) leaflets and posters are out, and the film programme is nearly done.

But in someways, last week was already the highlight of the project.

 

On Thursday, me, John and Hannah ran a screenprint workshop with the Pingwood Arts Group in Kirkby. Together, we created cinema-style posters of the group’s memories of movies. It was a great day -the memories shared were really varied, personal and interesting, the group worked really hard and enjoyed the process, and the actual printed posters looked great.

It’s a very slow and steady process, from the discussion of memories of cinema, distilling these down to a single sentence, through to the more hands on weeding of the cut vinyl letters, and careful creation of the screen. The actual printing is very swift, and in someways becomes an adrenaline rush and a relief.

I think though, the poster activity is important and enjoyable for a few reasons:

1) It works as RESEARCH into the personal and collective experience of cinema

2) It VALUES and celebrates peoples own memories and experience

3) It crystalises the IDEA of cinema(s) into a very simple and distinct form of typographic design

.4) Screenprinting as a process encourages MULTIPLES! People can take away lots of (unique) copies of their poster, and so the ideas are shared further.

You can read more about the workshop here.