Torchlight Cinema
As well as the collective show NATURE’S NICKELODEONS, Cutler’s TORCHLIGHT CINEMA is a solo performance of off-grid “living cinema” - specimen projection and contraptions which “bring nature to life” using head torches, hand torches, and other versions of geographic illusion. Playing on the historical crossovers between the conventionally male figures of the geographer, the conjuror, the entomologist, and the projectionist (before the habits of more passively consumed or linear cinema), TORCHLIGHT CINEMA is an adaptable show which can take place on foot, or in site specific installation. Between fieldwork, lab-work, and film screening, the use of the torchbeam to both navigate - and then to later project - an environment places it as both a stand-in protagonist (the point of view tool of the walk-through in video games), and as the “live” element: to bring geography to life on film, just “apply light”. Like a “BYOB” bring your own beamer show, the use of different torches - single to triple beam and variant focus - creates a unique installation with every rendition, performance, narration, or even group walk, in which the audience project specimens with their own head-torches. (Specimen, after all, literally means “way of looking”, which is what a torch beam is). The original footage used in these multi-media projects has also been developed on Cutler’s recent winter residency on an uninhabited Finnish island, in which she explored during the 19-hour nights the range of experiments offered to a filmmaker by a simple torch. This connects up to some of Cutler’s site-based film practice and film-optic installations to date exploring individual and collective experiences of sky-gazing, sea-gazing, and the forest - and the film space as a “dark sky observatory” which is both public and private.
As the project evolves, Cutler is looking at modifying several kinds of torches and apparatus, including her collected archive of nature slides (mostly magic lantern and Autochrome or Kodachrome 35mm from botanical and amateur archives). These will be modified for torch and various headband / spectacle based magnifiers, nature domes, field prisms, and other accessible tools for nature viewing, reflecting and magnification-projection: watchmaker’s lenses, currency/jewel inspectors, and other clip-ons. Inspired by micro-cinematography’s links to diorama and mechanical theatre, Cutler is pursuing approaches which are social and interactive (Nature Documentary “on foot” with torches), and/or automated, including new collaborations on the theme of hand-cranked nature documentary; in this, tiny specimen dioramas will work on a light dependent resistor, with a small amplifier circuit integrating an LDR, so the nature documentaries installed en route around a site will come to life only when torchlight shines on them). For site specific work or festival gigs, please contact amycutler1985@gmail.com.
