Rupture Cinema is a guerilla, radical cinema collective championing liberation in all its iterations. Having recently emerged onto the Dublin streetscape, the collective’s screenings tackle national and international issues, with their recent curation ranging from archival footage of anti-war uprisings on American college campuses to short films charting Palestinian resistance. Sharing impactful, subversive cinema has always been Rupture’s imperative. Trinity News spoke with Rupture’s founder, Evan Kelly, to discuss the group’s conception, the history of revolutionary cinema and burgeoning student social consciousness.
A significant driving force behind the creation of Rupture Cinema was Evan’s personal relationship with film. Explaining that he “grew up in a situation with no cinematic culture”, watching movies was typically a solitary activity for Evan. Like most young film aficionados, torrenting films online and watching them on a laptop was Evan’s unorthodox baptism into cinema. After moving to Dublin and again being underwhelmed by the lack of communal, cinematic culture, Evan resolved “to build a vehicle to connect the social element to cinema, and to add another string to the city’s arts bow also”.
Similarly, Evan found “rupture” to resonate with his vision for Dublin’s urban landscape which would see an end to the privatisation of public housing.
When asked about the story behind Rupture’s name, Evan explained its layered significance. Citing Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator and Moufawad-Paul’s Continuity and Rupture as inspiration, Evan said that he first encountered the term “rupture” in these academic texts. Rancière, for instance, meditates on cinema’s capacity to rupture our ways of seeing. Then he “started to see how rupture fitted into a cinematic history. Rupturing with the bourgeois reality of what cinema now is”. Similarly, Evan found “rupture” to resonate with his vision for Dublin’s urban landscape which would see an end to the privatisation of public housing. “Now we have a multifold appropriation of the term for cinematic and revolutionary purposes.”
Although Rupture Cinema itself is a somewhat recent project, the concept of revolutionary cinema collectives is nothing new. Rupture’s manifesto pays homage to these trailblazers, applauding that “such ventures are real, historical examples of cinema interacting with the public and social dimensions in a wholly positive way”. Evan names the Expanded Cinema organisation as one such muse. Operating from the 1970s onwards, the network endeavoured to cultivate cinematic curiosity among the general populations of Europe’s urban centres.
Rupture’s manifesto also discusses early cinema experiments like nickelodeons, which were the earliest motion picture theatres. When asked how Rupture Cinema could be considered an experiment, Evan quickly replied that the definition of an experiment is to “have an idea” and “test it”, and he believes that “Rupture does that every time.” Certainly the collective’s unfixed address invites an element of trial and error, which Evan finds gives the project “more manifold intricacies because of everything that can go wrong or right”. It seems that within Rupture’s overall experimental framework, each screening is another experiment in its own right. “I never know what will happen. I’ve long since thought that Rupture is to cinema what raves are to clubs,” he says.
On an analytical level, I asked Evan how he envisages the relationship between cinema and space and what factors he considers when choosing locations. He recalls the tangible synergy between image and space at Rupture’s first screening, which was a projection of Mubridge’s The Horse in Motion onto the vacant public toilets at Smithfield Square. “It was harkening back to the Smithfield Horse Fair with moving images. It was referencing the locality of the area and was a hauntological reanimation of that.” Ultimately the location of screenings is determined by contingent factors like weather and private security presence, but the interplay between cinema and space is something Rupture continues to build upon.
Accessibility is a key tenet of Rupture Cinema’s work and therefore “events are completely free and always will be”.
Given that intellectualism is often at the expense of sensitivity and subjectivity, I asked how Rupture manages to balance the academic and the everyday. Evan insisted that “Rupture is absolutely against the trappings of intellectualism” and added that “academia can be an ivory tower where knowledge is kept behind hierarchies”. He continued that “after a screening, the content of the film is reflected upon and sometimes we have a speaker. The subjectivities just bounce off each other like atoms and people create from that. It’s this interplay that differs from academia”. Although academia and actuality often appear mutually exclusive, Evan recognises that Rupture Cinema’s roots are in his study of history and theory. Ultimately he reasons that “intellectualism, without sounding semantic, is the practice of protecting or withholding truth from people. I think any liberated art practice should break down those barriers’”.
I think you can find the importance of viewing cinema collectively in the clichéd construct of two people, who don’t know each other, going on a date to the movies.
Although he admits that streaming services and expensive cinema ticket prices are making film increasingly unsociable, Evan maintains the importance of viewing and discussing cinema communally. “I think you can find the importance of viewing cinema collectively in the clichéd construct of two people, who don’t know each other, going on a date to the movies. For the duration of the film you can say nothing, but you leave feeling so much more connected to that person,” Evan substantiates. Rupture Cinema excites that effect across a whole audience. “People love that collectivity in the darkness and it’s so important not to let that die.”
Regarding the recent proliferation of student activism across Irish campuses, I asked Evan what contributions he envisions Rupture making to anti-imperialist consciousness among students. The Pro-Palestine encampments in particular align with Rupture ideologically as both are concerned with “taking space, making it a pedagogical space and having joint learning”. Unfortunately logistical issues prevented the collective from staging screenings at the encampments but Evan anticipates Rupture having a more palpable presence at future demonstrations.
I couldn’t finish our chat without asking Evan a variant of Letterboxd’s “four favourite films” question: “Which one piece of revolutionary cinema would you recommend?” Although frustrating to choose just one, Evan settled on Godard’s documentary Here and Elsewhere, which spotlights the Palestinian struggle for independence. “He’s a filmmaker working at such a high level to understand what his role in liberation is,” Evan praises.
Despite its relatively short lifetime, Rupture Cinema has made a name for itself as Dublin’s definitive liberated cinema collective. Its programming thus far has spotlighted, subverted and stimulated conversation. Anyone who identifies with Rupture’s mission is warmly invited to their screenings, which are announced on instagram by @rupturecinema.
