In the Winter 1991 issue of The Independent Eye, the magazine published by the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, Martin Rumsby offered his “Thoughts on an Invisible Cinema.” Rumsby, a New Zealand-born filmmaker and curator, at the time based in Regina, had spent much of the previous decade hauling experimental films between New Zealand, Canada and the United States. He built programmes, bought prints, arranged screenings and treated distribution as an active form of cultural exchange through these activities, which he called 'the invisible cinema'.
Rumsby describes challenges that are familiar to those who have worked in the distribution and exhibition networks of experimental cinema. Public money can support the production of a film, but rarely did it build a corresponding mechanism through which that film might find an audience. Canada had developed a remarkably extensive system of production co-operatives, granting agencies, and distribution organizations, but it was still lacking a substantive and sustaining public. The films would typically receive only a handful of screenings before entering a collection where their availability was, in a sense, more hypothetical than genuine. Rumsby calls this a system of “benevolent censorship.” Nothing's been forbidden, the work is permitted to exist in obscurity, it's even been funded, but the conditions necessary for its public life, and for a greater flourishing of creativity and invitation, remain absent.
Thirty-five years have passed since Rumsby wrote this article. The landscape has changed enough that some of his essay now reads as a document of another, distant distribution culture. The 16mm film print has become a rarified treat rather than a necessity for festival and cinema culture, and in itself, the idea of seeing anything 'on film' attracts audiences of medium fetishists. Thanks to digital, in principle, almost anything can circulate instantly (availability and artist's wishes permitting). A film can now be everywhere and still be invisible, can even be more invisible than it once was as the critical engagement around experimental film declines. Nothing is guaranteed: just because something is available doesn't mean it's presented in a framework where a film can be recognized and appreciated for what it is. Access has expanded enormously, but it is often a case of access without discriminating curation, engaged interpreters, and an inviting discourse.
I've come to think of distribution as a form of publishing. When we publish, we make decisions about what accompanies the work, how we attach to it relevant histories, where it fits alongside the massive climbing archive of other works by other makers, and what reasons an experiencer might be given to spend time with something that is essentially obscure. "Why watch a movie nobody else has seen?" What motivates so many to consume movies for which someone else–a critic, a curator, god forbid an influencer–has already made up their mind for them? Experimental films were once the focus of such gaining attention through distributor newsletters, film societies programme notes, and other forms of discourse that leant themselves to engaged exhibition-building.
I have built Black Zero around the conviction that these activities still support the work at hand. In practice, restoration, publishing, exhibition and distribution continually fold into one another. Historical neglect can still bury a film regardless of its physical survival; a torrent tracker can circulate a dazzling scan while obscuring the information that may help a viewer understand how and why the film was made. Making something available is the beginning of the publisher’s obligation.
Rumsby reaches a related conclusion from the vantage point of 1991. He doesn't expect that distribution will becoming larger or more efficient. Instead, he describes small entrepreneurial organizations purchasing prints, assembling programmes and actively exhibiting them in a variety of screening environments. He compares this work to that of an art dealer and asks why filmmakers who routinely buy books, records and paintings are so disinclined to buy one another’s films. A film culture is an ecosystem: it requires not only filmmakers but collectors, exhibitors, projectionists, writers, distributors and audiences.
That proposition runs throughout the issue of The Independent Eye from which this essay comes. The magazine turns its attention away from individual works in order to study the structures that surround them: the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, the Funnel, provincial co-operatives, cinematheques, repertory theatres, touring programmes, censorship boards and projection booths. In 1991, an independent cinema was being continually assembled through institutions that are themselves provisional, underfunded and frequently contentious. The films survive because of the impassioned human labour that builds systems, like Rumsby's, through which they can continue to encounter one another.
Rumsby understands that visibility is not simply a matter of numbers. His concern is with the existence of the routes by which a work might reach the viewers capable of responding to it. Those routes are fragile. They are cut into our landscape not only to be maintained and followed, but to be reinvented.
Stephen Broomer, October 4, 2026
THOUGHTS ON AN INVISIBLE CINEMA
by Martin Rumsby
Originally something of a utopian project whose goal was to transform first individual viewers then society as a whole, avant-garde cinema has shifted course over the past decade to function more as a critique of the forms and meanings of industrial cinema. The combative, defiant nature of avant-garde films challenges the alienating viewing experience offered by mass media entertainment. Avant-garde films offer an adventure in perception, requiring the heightened sensitivity of a totally engaged self, directly perceiving the “thing in itself”. Techniques of avant-garde film include intense modes of perception offered by rapid, often hand-held camera movement; fast cutting, sound-image juxtapositions; the realization of interior psychological landscapes; open non-linear narrative structures; and direct working on the film’s surface. These strategies are intended to challenge viewers to resee and rethink their preconceptions rather than passively absorbing the formulaic stream of processed images offered by mainstream film and television.
Over the past two decades both industrial cinema and television have increasingly served the production of manipulated information. Political power has infiltrated the apparatus of popular ideology, and mass media events have become the activity of a conservative political process. Today the control of the production and distribution of moving images defines both the expressive and interpretive parameters such images serve. The media, then, delivers a pre-determined message, only addressing subjects which reinforce those corporate and state agendas which profit from dominant industrial cinema. Think of the abundance of popular cinemas devoted to law and order, militarism and the moneyed status quo, refusing to acknowledge uncomfortable social and personal realities. Such a situation adds particular urgency to the project of critiquing mass media image making.
A recent study of American media, titled "The Media Monopoly", reveals that the opportunity for accurate and equitable representation of divergent viewpoints in the cinema will undoubtedly continue to decline over the next few years.
“In 1981, 46 corporations controlled most of the business in daily newspapers, magazines, television, books and motion pictures in the United States. By 1986 that number had shrunk to 29. It is estimated that by the year 2000 ownership of the United States media industry may be in the hands of only 6 conglomerates, and global communication will be dominated by only twelve major corporations.”¹
This is very depressing news for anyone interested in independent cinema, more so for those of us committed to presenting independently made moving images. Personal cinemas will become more marginalized and will seem excessively eccentric and aberrant within the increasingly homogeneous media culture of the future.
The strength and dominance of the Hollywood feature film, television and even the art world results from the realization that both art and industry must be based upon an efficient distribution and exhibition system—be it the local cineplex, cable television, artist-run centre or municipal art gallery. Numerous aesthetic, political and personal decisions made in relation to avant-garde film have, however, created an inadequate patronage and presentation system for this cinema. These decisions include the separation of the explicitly political and aesthetic in the North American vanguard; a conservative Euro-Americancentricity; the anti-commodity stance of many film artists; and the petty factionalism in what should ideally be an independent filmmaking scene united by certain common causes. These factors have alienated critics, curators and potential patrons. Where once there was a support system for avant-garde cinema, many critics, programmers and patrons now prefer to apply their critical theory, appreciation and programming skills to the productions of, say, David Lynch, Peter Greenaway and Wim Wenders rather than focus on the critical challenges offered by artists such as Trinh T Minh-ha, Brent Haywood or Leslie Thornton.
This situation is further aggravated in countries like Canada by federal, provincial and municipal funding policies which have markedly prioritized production over the presentation of independent cinema. (When it is not uncommon for the distribution budget of recent Hollywood films to match or even exceed their production costs, present arts council policies appear misguided.) The tragedy of the Canadian system is that there is an already existing nationwide system of film co-operatives which could easily form the basis of an independent film exhibition network. Virtually all of these co-operatives, however, are primarily concerned with producing new films which, when completed, will have few exhibition opportunities. They may be shown in a couple of independent festivals, included in a provincial co-op-organized travelling film program, or end up gathering dust in an artist-run distribution centre. The present funding strategy amounts to a benevolent form of censorship which ensures the production of critical cinema while simultaneously preventing the widespread dissemination of the work, thereby creating an invisible cinema.
This is not to lay the blame entirely at the feet of the funding bodies. Although they make policy decisions on funding priorities, granting agencies are subject to the influence of specific interest groups and power-brokers within cinema. The prevailing philosophy at this time encourages filmmakers to get just enough screenings in a few validated venues to ensure their next, usually larger grant.
Virtually all the cinema screens are controlled by monolithic, colonial affiliates of American film studios. These affiliates have implemented protectionist policies aimed at feeding consumers a steady stream of American entertainment films and keeping independent and “foreign” (i.e. non-American) films off their screens.
There is a saying in Canada that “local films are not released, but one occasionally escapes.” In such a situation, the creation of subsidized cinema industries to make films that look like Hollywood spin-offs for a market that does not want them is absurd. An arts council policy of funding films that cannot be exhibited is equally absurd.²
What the industry does or does not do is their concern. Even if the local industry were to create a viable exhibition system, it would no doubt exclude the work of independent and vanguard film artists from its screens. Let us hope that independent filmmakers will soon realize the future of their cinema depends upon the creation of an independent exhibition network tied into similar networks overseas. Let us hope, further, that these filmmakers will look beyond the funding of their next project and spend some time lobbying funding agencies to prioritize the establishment of screening networks for independent films. These networks would allow taxpayers nationwide, as the actual funders of the work, an opportunity to choose whether or not they want to see national and international independent cinemas.³
Today in North America, most experimental films are distributed by centralized, federally funded, non-profit centres who require that filmmakers donate copies of their films and pay a membership fee to the centre. The filmmaker is then left to hope s/he will get enough rentals to cover the replacement costs of worn-out, scratched and often bootlegged prints after they have made their way backwards and forwards across North America.
As filmmaker Mike Hoolboom has pointed out, "Over 90% of all the rentals of [the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, New York Filmmakers’ Co-op and Canyon Cinema] are derived from income issued by universities, art colleges and the like.... A distribution system based on ‘educational values’ necessarily favours a small canon of films and filmmakers, choosing to replay a select handful of anointed films over and over again.... North America’s distribution co-ops have put into place a powerful conservative agenda that has established terms of reference, lines of heritage, career opportunities and schools of thought which mitigate against the present-day achievements of new filmmakers.”⁴
While such centres and their educational market fulfil an important historic and symbolic function, both are based on “passive” distribution models of the 1960s and early 1970s. These models were appropriate for their time but are inadequate in fully serving the needs of filmmakers, buyers and audiences in the 1990s.⁵
During the 1980s several new entrepreneurial distribution projects including the Parabola Arts Foundation (in New York), Film Trek (Ontario) and Invisible Cinema (Canada/New Zealand/USA) were initiated. These projects seek to alter the present conditions of patronage, presentation and reception of independent cinemas. All three are based, in varying degrees, on the idea of buying and selling avant-garde films and creating independent film collections. As such they take on a role akin to that of an art dealer. By purchasing film prints, packaging them into programs, then touring them through a wide variety of screening situations, entrepreneurial distributors hope to encourage private patronage of independent cinema. The critical question these initiatives pose is this: if artists buy painting, writers buy books and musicians buy recordings, why is it that avant-garde filmmakers generally don’t support their art form by buying prints of avant-garde films?
Notes
1. Marvin Heiferman, “Everywhere, All the Time, For Everybody,” in Image World: Art and Media Culture (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989).
2. Of the $166.5 million of public money Telefilm Canada invested in the Canadian film, television and video industry during the 1989-90 fiscal year, Telefilm generated a total of $16.4 million in revenue. Reported in the Leader Post (Regina, September 1, 1990).
3. As an example of what can be done we could look to French West Africa. in 1963 the French Ministry of Co-operation instigated a program to aid black West African filmmakers. The first feature film shot by an African south of the Sahara was Ouseman Sembene’s Black Girl made in 1966. At that time West African screens were monopolized by two French exhibition companies which excluded African films from African screens. Despite the difficulties of inter-state co-operation, within twenty years of the production of Black Girl an African consortium had replaced the French distribution duopolies, allowing the screening of African films on African screens. From a lecture by Dr. Sheila Petty at the University of Regina (November, 1988).
4. Mike Hoolboom, “How German Is It?” in the Independent Eye (Toronto: Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, Spring 1990), p. 1.
5. New York Filmmakers’ Co-op, for example, does not even have film projection facilities for interested programmers or buyers to see work listed in the co-op catalogue, and although Canyon Cinema can show films to a potential booker, its procedure for previewing films is far from straightforward.
---
Martin Rumsby was a New Zealand experimental filmmaker, writer, curator, distributor and exhibitor. He became involved with Alternative Cinema, the Auckland Filmmakers’ Co-operative, in 1980, where he organized screenings and developed an independent distribution service for New Zealand experimental film. In 1985, supported by an Air New Zealand/Arts Council Travel Award, he travelled to North America with a collection of New Zealand films, subsequently touring programs through media arts centres, universities and galleries for much of the following decade. Under the name Invisible Cinema, Rumsby also brought North American experimental films back to New Zealand, creating an informal circuit of exchange between otherwise geographically distant filmmaking communities. His own films and videos include Vistas (1985), American Sketchbook (2000), Driveway (2006), For Dots (2008), Eye I Aye (2014) and Sojourns (2018). He wrote extensively on experimental film for publications including The Independent Eye, Illusions, Senses of Cinema and Millennium Film Journal. Rumsby passed away in 2022, leaving a substantial body of films, criticism and curatorial work.