Vexations and the Future of DIY Film Screenings

My favorite film experience of 2024 so far took place on June 24 at Normal’s Books and Records, with a screening of Vexations, a film performance by Brooklyn-based filmmaker and cartoonist Matthew Thurber, who makes films like Mrs. William Horsley Film Studio. Thurber’s toured with Vexations in cities across the country, though this isn’t a case of a filmmaker simply making personal appearances at screenings of their film; the full experience of Vexations depends on Thurber’s presence and direct involvement in the screening. The audience doesn’t watch Vexations—they participate in it.

Calling Vexations an interactive film is misleading; it’s not The Rocky Horror Picture Show or other cult movies where viewers interact with a film that exists as a fixed experience on the screen. Vexations takes shape as it unfolds, as if it were being made as it’s shown. The future of film screenings may be transformed into something closer to live performance, with less constrictions and more improvisation.

Vexations takes its title from Erik Satie’s piece of the same name, a musical motif designed to be played 840 times. Thurber’s Vexations starts by asking the audience to imagine that in 1959, the CIA began weaponizing easy-listening music as a tool for anti-Communist propaganda; this included a performance of Satie’s piece by John Cage using a miniature orchestra, shrunk down to microscopic size by top-secret technology, and released into the ether as a means of infiltrating and bringing down Communist agents.

Thurber’s mixed-media performance, built around his 16mm silent feature film, and a soundtrack of 1950s and 1960s easy-listening records, salvaged from a dumpster behind a record store in the Greenpoint, is still a movie. Thurber also uses live narration, dual projectors, dye-colored inter-titles surrounded by a liquid light—and at one point, direct audience participation. Thurber takes on the roles of filmmaker, projectionist, narrator and DJ.

The immersive experience of Vexations inspired me to think about ways of improving film screening events—something that can approach the level of spontaneity and surprise that regularly comes out of experimental music performance. We can facilitate that level of energy that only comes from seeing a movie with an audience, experiencing it together; we have an advantage in establishing direct engagement with the audience. The director of a Hollywood blockbuster opening on 3000 screens can’t personally attend each showing, but Thurber’s model with Vexations, with the filmmaker not just being present at each screening, but an essential part of it, points one way into the future.

How do we get there? Look at the past: the early years of film, before there were any established industrial or commercial rules, when cinema was still free to develop in many different possible directions. The mixed-media approach of Vexations reminded me of attending a presentation of Rick Altman’s Living Nickelodeon in 2010, in which Altman (a film historian and scholar specializing in silent film exhibition) re-created the experience of attending a nickelodeon theater show in the early years of the 20th century. His Living Nickelodeon performance emphasizes how films were just one part of the overall experience that moviegoing audiences would’ve had at the time. Altman takes the role of the theater’s musician, engages the audience with banter, jokes, and commentary on the films themselves; he leads sing-alongs to illustrated glass slides projected on the screen (whose combination of photographic tableaux and music creates a kind of proto-cinema in itself), and plays music in between reel changes and other breaks in the program.

There’s a direct line from the nickelodeon moviegoing experience of the early-1900s to the presentation of a film like Vexations today, where music and image, audience and filmmaker, come together to create an immersive event. Independent films playing by their own rules deserve an experience that breaks free from the limitations of established commercial norms. As with small, storefront nickelodeon theaters, independent films no longer need be shown in massive commercial cinemas, but can instead be screened in community spaces, clubs, book and record stores, coffee shops, DIY performance venues. And rather than simply watching a movie unfold on the screen, the audience can once again become—like those of the earliest nickelodeons—active and passive participants.