Making The Film That Buys the Cinema

When the Cube microplex was launched back in 1998, the idealistic avant-garde funsters behind it had a dream. A daft dream, perhaps, but a dream nonetheless. They expected it to make so much cash that this could then be re-invested in filmmaking. Things didn’t quite work out that way, but the idea of the Cube as a place that makes films rather than simply exhibiting them persisted.

Fast forward to 2012. The Chinese Overseas Association, from which the Cube leased its premises, decided to shut up shop. That’s when the Cube co-operative came up with its second crazy dream of raising £185,000 to buy the property. “I don’t think anyone there owned a car let alone a house,” laughs long-term volunteer Chiz (yep, just ‘Chiz’), “so the notion of securing a mortgage was way beyond us. But one of the earliest ideas was of some kind of filmmaking that would dovetail as a fundraising exercise.”

So began the process that eventually resulted in The Film That Buys the Cinema, which was premiered at the London Film Festival last November and gets its first hometown screenings in April. As you might expect, this is no ordinary film. In fact, it’s 70 one-minute films, each from a different director, spliced together.

“We decided on 70 people because 70mm is the maximum film format and 70 minutes is roughly a feature film,” explains Chiz. “Then we spent a couple of long evenings poring over old Cube programmes to pick different people who either have some connection to the Cube or had their films screened at the cinema. Obviously, Martin Scorsese and George Lucas didn’t get back to us…”

Plenty of people did, however. And of the 140 approached by a team of ten volunteers, half agreed to contribute. These included big names like Performance and Walkabout director Nic Roeg and Peter Strickland, who’s currently receiving plaudits for The Duke of Burgundy.

Chiz reckons they both understood the nature of the project and recognised the importance of cinemas like the Cube. “They just had an affinity with the space. I don’t think Nic Roeg’s ever visited it, but I imagine Performance lived in cinemas like the Cube back in the day. Peter Strickland was in a band I tried to book to play the Cube years ago.”

The commission was a simple one: one minute of footage with no edits and no titles. This proved a challenge for some (“One artist filmmaker who shall remain nameless took that as a slight – ‘You can’t lay down conditions on me!'”) but just about everyone else delivered. Two days of intensive editing followed, with a great deal of thought being put into sequencing the shorts to draw out contrasts and thematic links.

How to make loot from such an enterprise? Well, there are a variety of packages available on the Cube website, ranging from a limited edition of 70 DVDs at £50 a pop to scripts and unique signed stills (£750). So far, these have raised around £3,500 for further development of the microplex.

But The Film That Buys the Cinema also has another function. It’ll soon be seen as far afield as Portland (Oregon), Montreal, the Ukraine Short Film Festival, an arts festival in Frankfurt and at a DIY venue in Glasgow, with plenty more to follow. “A lot of its value has been in publicising what the Cube is trying to do and joining forces with other people around the world,” says Chiz. “We estimate it’ll have two years of life at festivals”.

You can see The Film That Buys the Cinema at the Cube on Thursday, April 16 (with live music from Auto Bitch) and Friday, April 17 (with live music from the Dagger Brothers).

Read more about the history of the Cube and meet some of the volunteers who keep it going.