HIP BOOK REVIEW: Days of Future Utopias
Boom! The Exploding Cinema and the New London Underground
By Duncan Reekie
REVIEW BY KERRI SHARP
St Leonards-dwelling filmmaker, author, artist and performer Duncan Reekie has recently compiled and published an impressive, 324pp full-colour history of the Exploding Cinema – a low-budget/no-budget film collective that emerged out of South London in the early 1990s and is still putting on shows, some locally. Boom! is a dazzling collage of archive photos, film programmes, rants, and pithy short articles written by Reekie and other members of the group, celebrating 35 years of radical cinema.
Formed as a reaction to sterile, state-funded ‘art house’ film spaces, the Exploding Cinema – along with similar film groups such as MyEyesMyEyes, Omsk, and the Halloween Society – enabled countless filmmakers to get their short-format films before audiences in a welcoming, inclusive environment. Their evolution ran in tandem with the changing face of the UK counterculture, which was in its second-wave ascendency at the end of the ’80s and flourished in those pre-internet ‘years of hope’ of the 1990s.
THE FREE PARTY SCENE
The past 30 years have seen a clampdown on autonomous zones of radical resistance and an increase in state powers enabled by new technologies. Back in the summer of 1993, the collective put on an all-night film ‘happening’ at the then-squatted Brixton Lido in Brockwell Park, South London, which attracted 2,000 people. This was a time before legislative powers such as the Criminal Justice Act of 1996 pulled the plug on the free party scene, and before property prices went sky-high. The book features numerous photos of long-defunct, much-missed venues, celebrating a time before community arts venues were seized, sold off, defunded or demolished.
The distinctive, incendiary graphic design elements of the group’s publicity materials have been central to the Exploding Cinema’s identity. Pages taken from their montage-style film programme booklets leap out in all their provocative glory as a dynamic, defiant history that’s part pop-art puzzle, part situationist manifesto. The group has never applied for or accepted state funding, and takes special pleasure in lampooning the elitist selection processes of bodies such as the Arts Council and the BFI. But at the (very big) heart of the group, there has always been a sense of fun along with its determination to screen open-access short film events.
REFRESHINGLY ‘UN-CURATED’ AND DEMOCRATIC
Boom! is a fascinating countercultural history, with a month-by-month chronology that shows how UK underground filmmakers brought colour and carnival to political protest events over the past 35 years, including the Poll Tax Riots and the Occupy movement. It is also a history of the broader UK underground film movement, which has largely been ignored in official histories of the ‘independent sector’ of British film. Staging online shows during the Covid-19 years, and harnessing every bit of digital technology available to them, the group has remained at the cutting edge of underground media while staying true to their original vaudeville spirit. Truly and proudly independent, the Exploding Cinema shows remain refreshingly ‘un-curated’ and democratic. The book is a valuable and colourful addition to anyone interested in, or pining for, the days of future utopias.
Boom! is available from explodingcinema.org/shop priced at £23 or other outlets: ISBN 978-1-0369-2476-8
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