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Pedestrian Cinema is a a temporary underground film factory operating for one year in the city of Berlin. Cheap production and rich forms of life with a host of unknowns and knowns. It is an ulterior way of thinking film for these times, a local, un-nationalistic cinema. The making and showing of films as something immediate and part of a continuous, rapid flow. Each month there will be a budget for production and a deadline for presenting the work. A film might even be shot in the morning and screened the same evening. As Bernadette Corporation's members reside in Paris and New York as well, the Pedestrian Cinema project will travel back and forth from Berlin to intervene in these other cities.
At the close of its year-long activity, Pedestrian Cinema will become a body of digital film of several hours, documents about a hypothetical filmic world that could only happen during a complex and rich time of production. A diverse composition of casting interviews, screen tests, stories long and short, formal exercises, essays, newsreels, etc.; this corpus will then be available for screenings and exhibitions in museums and contemporary art institutions world-wide.
The possibility is to borrow cinema as narrative device / instrument of propaganda / entertaining distraction / analytic tool and lend it to: whatever unfolds in an event and encounter; a place as beacon of activity, bringing bodies together; work-hours as a metronome that marks the present moment; the materialism of improvisation and working with what is available; mobility in thought, inspiration, or whim.
Each day, Pedestrian Cinema will confront the question of fabricating itself. Is it to be based on history, dramatize the everyday, be documentary-like and specific, or metaphoric and abstract? At the same time, the film studio turns to debates internal to the medium, deciding to re-examine everything proper to cinema (shot, sequence, frame, sound, actors' bodies, time, speaking, space, light, montage, etc.). These could be exercises, investigations, and fragments that result from meeting a new actor, a series of interviews turning into monologues, and so on. The activity presented to the public will not be limited to digital film, there could also be a newsletter, live performances, music, drawings, or sculpture.
By looking at places, encountering people, making an appointment to film, keeping the borders of the film open, the idea of an outside is revived – this exterior that the film studio confronts in its work. It is a relationship of the local where the people who enter into the production process also elaborate it, sending it in different directions. Once the script is thrown away what remains are the relations of the film studio trying to make a new cinema to the world that it will be made from. These will not be films “about” something, but films that “run into” something.