'A new work in an old cinema'

James Lingwood, May 2002

Photograph by Stephen White

Melanie had decided that she wanted to make a new work in an old cinema. The scale of the cinema was important - it needed to be somewhere with a sense of grandeur. The Coronet gave a very strong sense of a cinematic experience before the age of television, when cinema going was a kind of communal, collective activity.

It felt as if the work was moving the viewer through the space (rather than the artist directing the viewer). The movement was always upwards, up the stairs fron the foyer into the auditorium. On entering the auditorium, the immediate view of the image was disrupted by a ribbed glass screen, which was too high to see over. So you were compelled to move upwards again, to see over the glass screen. Only when you had ascended right to the top of the upper circle could you see the full projected image.

Not for the last time, the work came together at the last moment, when the time-lapse 16mm reel arrived. It wasn't until Melanie showed me the rushes of this very slow evaporation that I understood how the whole project would work. Sometimes it's important not to ask too many questions whilst an artist is working through their ideas.

Perhaps it's worth repeating the Andrei Tarkovsky quote that Melanie had put in the leaflet. "Why do people go to the cinema? What takes them to a darkened room where for hours, they watch the play of shadows On a sheet? I think what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had."