Not Showing at This Cinema: Festivals of the Unmade

Film Festivals are uniquely placed to disseminate research on unmade cinema and television in a variety of ways to a public audience. The chapter will be structured around a series of case studies drawn from the work of CINECITY (based at the University of Brighton) over the last decade, exploring unmade and lost films. The range of featured projects - live events, installations and text - include Not Showing at this Cinema (2015), a printed programme of unmade post-war British Cinema distributed to cinemas across the UK, film set installations for imagined screen versions of novels Hangover Square (2012) and Berg (2014) and an ‘on-location’ camera obscura event around Kay Dick’s 1977 SF novel They. Live events featuring lost and alternative film endings will also be explored. The chapter will highlight how, in the context of a film festival, the curation of such projects can creatively combine research on the unmade with cinephilia and the cinematic imagination, to engage a wide range of audiences in new ways. It will reflect on the potential for film festivals and other curated initiatives to actively incorporate research into this absorbing area of film and television history, as part of their audience development strategies.