About

A movie theater in Columbia City, South Seattle.

“Then it will transpire that the world has long been dreaming of something that it can acquire if only it becomes conscious of it. It will transpire that it is not a matter of drawing a great dividing line between past and future, but of carrying out the thoughts of the past. And finally, it will transpire that mankind begins no new work, but consciously accomplishes its old work.” - Karl Marx, For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing

We don’t have much time anymore. The way we experience history and the future is all fucked up. We’re stuck, disembodied in a timeless flux, an endless present. And along with this loss of time we’ve lost a part of our collective imagination—our belief that we can transform the structure of our society. “Capitalist realism” perpetually forecloses any new radical horizon. And yet our shifting ecological time has accelerated beyond our ability to properly comprehend. The effects of apocalyptic climate genocide are barreling down on us. Barring genuine revolutionary intervention, we’re in store for a future of walled luxury for a few; famine, war and despair for the rest. Beyond that, we face the very imminent possibility of no future at all. Time itself has been taken from us.

The Beacon wants to take time back. “Against the dystopian monotony of a universalized ‘now’,” says Christopher Pavsek, “we pit the utopian principle of cinema.” Cinema is an invocation: it calls the future into being through a dialectic of the present and the past. For Alexander Kluge, “the utopia of film is the idea that there could be something other than this insufficient present of the moment.” This utopian drive is an invitation to a time that isn’t, but could be—another world waiting. It’s a project of reclaiming the forgotten hopes and ambitions of the past, and building new aesthetic forms through which to realize them. And cinema utopia is an idea we must approach together. Cinema speaks to—in fact actively generates—a collective subjectivity. Through its formal structure, it opens up a view of life itself as a deeply collective experience. It gives us access to a language that we can use to rethink the social relations between objects and the material relations between people. It’s a tool we can use to dream of and prepare for a revolutionary rupture in which a new way of organizing ourselves, our society and our imaginations can take hold.

“The archive, especially the moving image archive, comes to us with a set of Janus-faced possibilities. It says, ‘I existed at one point and it’s possible that I could exist differently.’ But in order to find that you need something else, which is not in the archive, which is the philosophy of montage. Montage allows the possibility of re-engagement, of the return to the image with renewed purpose, a different ambition.” - John Akomfrah

What ambitions do we bring to our images? We desire to re-see the possibilities of cinema and think again about the relationality of art, life, struggle and pleasure. We call upon our community to gather together, in the real world, and experience cinema collectively. We aim to foster cultural forms that imagine tomorrow as something more than an endless repetition of an infinite now. Any film can tear a hole in what’s possible. It’s with cinema that we resist “the assault of the present moment on the rest of time.” The Beacon declares fidelity to a cinema utopia in which our struggle for collective liberation is bound up with all the unrealized possible futures woven through the forgotten histories of film. Together we explore our dreams so that we might some day possess them in reality.

CINEMA UTOPIA, THE BEACON