INTRO

'Vertical Cinema is like the ultimate anti pop-up event. It has become fashionable to show films in any venue, but this event turns that on its head because you have to find a very specific kind of venue that has the height and also the depth of room as well. There's no point in showing these films unless you show them really, really big. They're all screened from 35mm, so it's a special projector which has to be put on its side and then placed on a massive platform. The sonic element of the films is crucial too; it's very much an audio-visual experience. It's such an insanely singular, unwieldy, truculent behemoth of an event - it sort of proposes a future for cinema but uses obsolete film equipment and can only ever happen in very particular spaces.'


- Matt Lloyd, Director of Glasgow Short Film Festival in Herald Scotland

Vertical Cinema is a series of fourteen commissioned large-scale, site-specific works by internationally renowned experimental filmmakers and audiovisual artists, which are presented on 35 mm celluloid and projected vertically with a custom-built projector in vertical cinemascope. The programme premiered in 2013 and has since been screened at museums and festivals around the globe.

The fourteen experimental films made by Tina Frank (AT), Björn Kämmerer (DE/AT), Manuel Knapp (AT), Johann Lurf (AT), Joost Rekveld (NL), Rosa Menkman (NL), Billy Roisz (AT) & Dieter Kovačič (AT), Makino Takashi (JP) & Telcosystems (NL), Esther Urlus (NL), Martijn van Boven (NL) & Gert-Jan Prins (NL), Susan Schuppli (UK), Lukas Marxt (AT), HC Gilje (NO), BJ Nilsen (SE) & Karl Lemieux (CA) are screened live on a vertical monument. They are a unique blend of abstract cinema, structural experiments, found footage remixes, chemical film explorations and live laser action. The artists offer their view of ‘vertical axis art’, and the results of this challenging commission are fascinating.