Everything Imperfect

Abstract

The real history of cinema is invisible history: history of friends getting together, doing the thing they love. – Jonas Mekas: Anti-100 years of cinema manifesto (1996) Everything Imperfect is a forty-five-minute film that aimed to articulate my practice as research and was submitted alongside my PhD thesis as practice as research in 2016. While making the film, I ran a d.i.y film project called Imperfect Cinema: an open-access micro-cinema collective, which navigated the intersection between film and do-it-yourself punk. This film attempts to find a form in which to share some of the aesthetic, political and collaborative concerns of the research as well as documenting some of the participatory situations and experiences. The principal aim of Imperfect Cinema was to create participatory venues for filmmakers, artists and the public, to come together to share and watch films and performances in non-traditional spaces. For producers, the idea was relatively simple: come to an Imperfect Cinema event with a film 3 minutes or less and we will screen it. This allowed anyone with a smart phone or digital camera the opportunity to make and screen a film in a social context with a live audience.