From cockroaches to Potemkin

"The Battleship Potemkin," Sergei Eisenstein's classic 1925 silent film, has had a soundtrack by the Pet Shop Boys attached to it by Yehuda Nuriel - "by hand," as he says. He has screened Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" with a soundtrack of Giorgio Moroder and Freddie Mercury. These are just some of the works Nuriel, a journalist at the mass circulation daily Yedioth Ahronoth, has screened at Cinematalk, the film club he founded.

Cinematalk is just one of a number of groups formed in Tel Aviv in the past two years where avant-garde films are screened non-commercially. The clubs serve as a mode of self-differentiation in a global society where everyone sees the same thing. The accessibility of everything possible on the Internet is making them superfluous and they are becoming a social event, a way of breaking the loneliness.

Nuriel started the group on Facebook. It now has about 500 members signed up and about 90 film evenings to its credit. Between 10 and 50 people usually show up. There isn't room for more than that, he says.

The meetings are held at the club of a group of artists and media people called Hayarkon 70, located at that address in Tel Aviv. Initially, they crowded in front of a television screen. Then the group donated them a projector and screen.

"I wouldn't want the club to be interpreted as an attempt to attack or offer a free alternative to the movie theater - there is no commercial intention here," clarifies Nuriel. "I love fun combined with transmission of knowledge, and if it's not for profit it's a lot more pleasurable."

Sometimes he also hosts filmmakers at the club. Last year, for example, filmmaker Ram Devineni of Indian origins and Brazilian director Beatriz Seigner presented a film they made together. "We show many things that others don't and we make an effort to get them," says Nuriel.

How?

"I have many virtual friends. There is a community of film nuts from all over the world who exchange films among themselves."

He chooses the films to screen in part "according to the events of the times. For example, when the Iranian All-Stars soccer team demonstrated in protest I remembered the Iranian film 'Offside' about a female fan of the Iranian All-Stars and my grandmother helped me translate it."

Another club is organized by Chen Sheinberg, a filmmaker and lecturer on film. The Visionary Film Club meets once a month at the Zimmer club in Tel Aviv. "In my opinion we started this trend in 2007, in places that aren't cinemas," says Sheinberg. "At that time I organized eight evenings of screenings at Levontin 13 [a Tel Aviv night spot]. I decided in advance not to show films from a cinema or television. The principle of the evenings is that this is experimental cinema - rare and hard-to-watch films, even though our audience stays throughout the whole screening."

It's with reason that Sheinberg mentions walking out on screenings. At a film evening held at a club located in the southern part of the city where rows of hard wooden chairs and mattresses were set up for viewers, a documentary film was screened, during the last third of which was a scene of burning animals. Most of the viewers could not stomach this. Only five brave or indifferent people remained seated in front of the screen.

Sheinberg, however, whose audience numbers 30 to 40 people at a screening, tells of another evening, about cockroaches, at which the audience remained in its seats: "I brought a film from 1891 by Etienne-Jules Mary, who filmed insects in motion, an animation of insects by Wladislaw Starewicz and films by Stan Brakhage and Percy Smith. In the wake of this I also made a one-man exhibition curated by Haim Lusky at the Minshar Gallery.

He adds: "I found that the more one challenges and raises the bar for viewing, people are grateful."

Sheinberg and Nuriel both talk about a didactic urge that led them to establish the clubs. Sheinberg says, "I love to share knowledge with people and expose them, and show them that cinema is not just Scorsese and David Lynch. There are fascinating things being made they won't hear about, because it's an obscure part of cinema, not written in the history of film because the filmmakers weren't famous enough or some of these things got lost due to the distribution mechanisms."

Among the films he has screened is "The Angel" by French director Patrick Bokanowski (1982), "which was a great success. The film is abstract and built on light and episodes that happen in a stairwell. There is something poetic about it - the films I show aren't films of prose but rather of poetry. The audience responded to this fantastically. People came and asked me how to find the film and the filmmaker. They sat open-mouthed. During the screening I looked at the light streaming from the projector and it was an almost mystical experience."

Eitan, an enthusiastic film buff who prefers to remain anonymous, started a film club in his apartment about two and a half years ago. Among the films he has screened there are John Ford's "The Searchers," Elia Kazan's "Splendor in the Grass" and Buster Keaton's "Sherlock Jr." He says private viewing wrongs the cinema: "At home, on DV or on television isn't cinema as far as I am concerned. The cinema experience is made up of expectancy, of knowing that on a certain day at a certain time you will be seeing a movie and you get ready in advance like for a ceremony. You shower and change clothes, buy a ticket and go into the movie theater, a place where there's an usher who maintains order like a policeman and there are strangers, and you have to be quiet and polite, and in front of you is a big screen.

"This whole set of constraints you put yourself into enables you to enter a different world, to go into a different psycho-psysiological state: neither awake not asleep. Maybe something that sometimes resembles dreaming. At home there are temptations - to go to the refrigerator, make coffee, stretch out on the sofa and fall asleep. Therefore the club is the closest I can create to the cinema experience."

About 15 to 40 people attend the weekly screenings he holds in an artists' studio. "There are those who are interested in the social interaction and aren't put off by the films," he says, "and there are those who are interested in the films and aren't put off by the social interaction, and there are those who are both."

The meetings are held in the studio Anna shares with her life partner. She says, "This is a way to see contemporary art - and not a supermarket. For me this works differently from a DVD - I don't watch Antonioni or Fellini at home after work, because watching them is also work. At the club you are supposedly watching the films with other people's eyes as well, and a collective consciousness is developed."

Not for attribution, the founders of the clubs say that they are also springing up because of the dysfunctionality of the cinematheque - as part of the mandate it was given by the fact of its definition as a cinema archive to show more experimental programs and films. "They don't bring films of the sort screened at the clubs because they have become popularized," says one club founder. "Many of their films have completed a round at the movie theaters before getting there. In general they aren't fulfilling their role - there are economic and populist considerations coming in there that shouldn't be coming in."

Nuriel lists other reasons his club attracts an audience: "We are very flexible, we can respond immediately to what is interesting. We can naturally integrate a documentary on disco and a Chilean film with John Travolta's double. Everything is immediate and above all - can't be found anywhere else. Directors of programming and film at the most respected institutions also come to us often."

And he adds: "With us, no one needs to pay a single shekel, and sometimes we have free arak and popcorn. And the cinema is open to everyone - both smokers and non-smokers."