KINOAUTOMAT

Kinoautomat (1967) was the world's first interactive movie, conceived by Radúz Činčera for the Czechoslovak Pavilion at Expo '67 in Montreal. At nine points during the film the action stops, and a moderator appears on stage to ask the audience to choose between two scenes; following an audience vote, the chosen scene is played.

The film is a black comedy, opening with a flash-forward to a scene in which Petr Novák (Miroslav Horníček)'s apartment is in flames. No matter what choices are made, the end result is the burning building, making the film—as Činčera intended—an effective satire of democracy.

What better place to start than on our beautiful island home, the Tyneside Cinema. Harking back to the beginning of collaborative and interactive cinema Kinoautomat was and remains a benchmark with which to draw distant and proximate reference, in relation to our contemporary artistic sphere.
Kinoautomat is a perfect point of departure for this week long voyage into Fine Art Film and Cinema. It encompasses many of the ideas i hope to research, such as collaboration, context, and medium. Defining where the focus of my research will lie is at once problematic and key to the issues and questions with which I will engage. By defining these subjects as separate a conceptual and physical divide is created, but it is this divide or lack of divide that I hope to explore. The hardest part of this will be naming areas and ideas as Art, Film, or Cinema, as elements of each exists inherently and reciprocally within each term. I will start by creating specific chapter headings that will prompt focused investigation of certain key questions that will lie at the core of my chosen topic. Lets just imagine its all going to be more Johnathon Livingstone Seagull, than a lead brick...