Voluminous press archive coming soon.
For now, here's an article we wrote for Vertigo magazine in January 2007...
The seeds for 7 Inch Cinema were sown nearly ten years ago. I was
working at a ‘proper’ film festival when a vanload of lottery-funded
a-v equipment arrived which nobody knew how to run. This strange new
world of ansi lumins, female XLRs and magic folding screens opened up
the possibility of non-cinema screenings, and the freedom to put on a
mixture of shorts and music compiled from submissions and diligent
web-surfing. On leaving the festival this was the avenue I wanted to
pursue, and a group of us started up a regular night at the Rainbow pub
under railway arches in Digbeth which quickly picked up a good
following. The Birmingham Post called us “scruffy avant-garde”. All
manner of DVDs started landing on the mat. 7inch events offered a
gathering point and a test-bed for sketches and experiments that might
not otherwise get seen or heard, an alternative to polished shorts made
with one eye on a TV career. As we went along, we realised that all this was nothing new.
Cinema had been here a hundred years before, in empty shop-units and on
patches of wasteland. Come and see yourself on screen. A film, a
conjuring trick, a musical turn. Of course, a pub can be a terrible
place to show films. There’s a filmmaker sat at the front chewing her
fist over the lack of image contrast, while at the back of the room
people are merrily blethering away. Don’t even think about screening
Stan Brakhage. On other nights, though, something seemingly quiet and
difficult will stop the whole place in its tracks. The real joy is
being sat in the middle of your audience, getting instant responses and
frequent requests. (Setting up a filmtent in a field one summer, an
eight year-old boy poked his head through the door – obviously a repeat
attender from the previous year. ‘Are you going to show the one with
stick-men having sex?’) It often feels like the films are a pretext, a
conversational gambit. Look at youtube - where films and clips offer a
social lubricant, a million campfires to gather round. Soothsayers
conclude that the programmer’s days are numbered now that everyone can
devise their own entertainment schedule, but the job of sifting for
good stuff and putting it in context has not gone away. There’s just a
lot more people doing it now. In the interests of taking 7inch onto a bigger platform and
developing this strange hobby into a job, we ended up running our own
four-day festival. Flatpack launched in early 2006, and included such
delights as the Vladmaster Experience (a roomful of 3-D viewmasters
clicking in unison), a tribute to sound artist and goofing-off guru
Henry Jacobs, Mitchell and Kenyon films with live klezmer scores,
events in various basement bars and warehouses and even a few cinema
screenings. In our cheesier marketing moments we would call it ‘Film,
and then some’, or ‘A hundred niches for the price of one’; the idea
being that everyone has their own obscure defining passion, and that
there’s no reason why a film festival can’t gather together knitters,
skateboarders, rail enthusiasts and computer boffins. And get them all
doing heavy metal karaoke. In some ways we’ve come full circle, once
again chasing after disinterested distributors and wading through
funding applications. Weird things continue to plop onto the mat,
though, and the magic screen is still going strong. Missing a few of
its poppers and layered with the debris of a hundred sticky floors, but
fully capable of putting on a good show.








