FTHo

Film still from 'The Remembered Film' (2013) by Vicki Thornton

Flat Time House present the final part of The Best Scene is Off-Screen, a monthly programme of film, performance and discussion, off-site at the nearby Peckham Plex. Drawing on a wide range of moving image work, the programme ends by considering the home as the final, and most private, site for a potential theatre of the everyday.

Made in the same year as Warhol’s famous dictum that in the future everybody would be famous “for 15 minutes”, Paul Bartel’s “The Secret Cinema” imagines a terrifying world of surveillance as entertainment. A selection from Erica Scourti’s year-long “Life in Ad Words” project updates Bartel’s science fiction, to a present in which obsessive technologically-enabled narcissism entails a form of self-surveillance, the results of which are ruthlessly mined for commercial interest.

Films from Lucy Clout and Alice Theobald explore the limits of domestic space as a site for drama, from Clout’s deadpan analysis of a cookie-cutter suburban American house’s ‘success’ in multi-million dollar American sitcoms, to Theobald’s glitched soap opera that loops into a mid-century theatre of the absurd (via a musical number).

Finally, Vicki Thornton’s “The Remembered Film” is a double portrait of the striking Château-de-Sacy and its owner, Hermine Demoriane—a singer, writer, performance artist and tightrope walker. Demoriane is also known from the milieu of experimental artists, filmmakers and performed attached to the London Filmmakers Co-op, described by artist Anna Thew in her introduction to the first week’s screenings.

Responding to research conducted forThe Movie Movie Show (The Pneuwritten)by John Latham and by the Eventstructure Research Group led by Jeff Shaw, the four-month programme looks at the potential for a theatre of the everyday in four spaces: the cinema, the street, the square and the home.

In each space, as audience, pedestrians and public are re-cast as performers and engage consciously or unconsciously with their new role, theatre is further mediated or reproduced by cinema. This programme asks how the moving image can work formally to capture, distort or take us beyond a theatre of the everyday.