Amateur Filmmaking vs the Normativity of Institutions: The Case of the Invisible Film Festival

This article explores the “Invisible Film Festival,” focusing on its curatorial, production, and spectator practices. The project was born in 2019 and is still taking place in the “Poryadok slov” bookstore in St. Petersburg. Comparing the curatorial project created by Darina Polikarpova, Ksenia Ilyina and Anastasia Volokhova with the retrospective created by Bruce Posner’s “Unseen cinema” and the thematicization of “the cinema of attractions” after the Brighton conference, the author posits that invisibility is a lasting characteristic of films that require specific production and viewing conditions while possessing distinct cinematic attributes. In terms of production, such films are crafted by amateur filmmakers, which challenges the traditional separation of film production time and space from everyday life that leads to destruction of the existing professional separation of the community of filmmakers.
The use of amateur technology allows the definition of invisible cinema through perceptual qualities, such as “amateur excess” (Rascaroli), “sterile movements” (Lyotard), “poverty” (Brashinsky). The amateur aspect of production and technology also results in the observation that, unlike visible cinema, invisible cinema necessitates a focus on the fragmented and transient elements, thus aligning it more closely with the concept of “pure cinema” as a domain of unrestricted evolution. Ultimately, if we regard invisible cinema as a dispositif, we can anticipate a shift in the dynamics among filmmakers, curators, and spectators within the context of a restructured festival format.

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