After our Mobile Cinema event last month we were alerted to a lovely project in the south-west. A few years ago a rusty Bedford cinema van was retrieved from a field in Devon and has been carefully restored to tour the region showing archive films.

A fleet of seven of these were commissioned by Tony Benn when he was at the Ministry of Technology in the 60s. That perspex cockpit would originally have housed the 16mm projector, beaming the image onto a screen on the van’s back door for up to 28 punters at a time. Now it seats 22, and uses HD digital projection and 7.1 Dolby sound. We want one!

Cinemas on wheels have a long pedigree in the UK, from fairground bioscopes in the 1900s right up to Highlands juggernaut The Screen Machine. Taking their lead from the kino trains they’ve often had a political purpose, whether it be the workers agit prop of Cinema Action or ‘Touring Talkies’ bringing Labour propaganda to the masses, pictured below. (Sample slogan: ‘WOMEN VOTE LABOUR – FOR THE CHILDRENS SAKE’)

A few more up-to-date examples:
- Video activists Undercurrents have got into the mobile cinema game with a refitted caravan:
- A group in Market Harborough decided against a fixed building and are trying to raise the money to renovate a portable unit;
- Flicks in the Sticks recently celebrated ten years of bringing movies to village halls across Shropshire and Herefordshire.
- and Volvo are bank-rolling a touring drive-in.

Yesterday I drove to London to pick up two hefty black boxes which contain The Mobile Cinema, starring at the Hare and Hounds this Tuesday. The word ‘Mobile’ is used quite loosely here. Although Romana Schmalisch, the artist who created it, has carted this contraption around Europe I imagine she risked life and hernia to do so.

The inspiration for The Mobile Cinema came from The New Moscow, a 1938 urban planning comedy made by Aleksandr Medvedkin. It tells the tale of an idealistic young designer who treks into the capital from Siberia to present his utopian model for a new city, a table-top diorama with intricate moving parts which have a tendency to malfunction at the wrong moment. Earlier Medvedkin had been involved in the kino-train movement, when revolutionary ideals were transported across the USSR using trains converted into cinemas and film production units, and all of this history and plenty more besides has been stirred into the mix of Schmalisch’s performance.

The Mobile Cinema can also be seen throughout June in Nottingham, Norwich and all over Scotland.