Initially I was hired as a curator of public programmes. So that was largely intended to be more talks, discussions and symposia than it was films. But at that point Andrew Brighton, who was running the public programme department, had made the initial contact with the BFI because we didn’t have a film archive. It’s quite a conservative situation in Britain; you have the Tate that is supposed to collect ‘art’ and the BFI that is supposed to collect ‘film’. So I was part of those initial meetings, and we decided it was a good idea to try and cross-pollinate the two archives as it were and be able to use the visual arts context at Tate Modern to allow work in the BFI’s collection to be shown. This would give the archive a different resonance and in some cases, given the audience that we have here, we would be able show what they never show and what never gets seen.

It started properly with the Max Beckmann exhibition and we did a Weimar programme. Needless to say the Tate had done screenings before, including ‘Shoot Shoot Shoot’ most obviously, but also during the Warhol exhibition and other things. I think when the building first opened they had a programme of Surrealist film as well, because the Surrealist collection is such a strength here. Basically it escalated from there very quickly. I think the audiences and attendances were pretty low initially. Not for Shoot Shoot Shoot, though, which was quite well attended. But gradually things picked up very, very quickly and I decided I wanted to start focusing on artist filmmakers as well and not just cinema.

This was right around the time the Lux Centre was closing as well so it became clear that there was a need for a venue in London to show this kind of work. I think one of the first screenings I did was as a screening of TJ Wilcox and I found out ironically he’d been the last artist to be shown at the old Lux Centre before they closed so there’s a sort of nice unexpected link. I wanted to balance it between people like him who function more within the conventional art world and then film-makers from the London Film-makers Co-op who have conventionally not been part of the museum circuit as much, although clearly they have always been showing at places like the Whitney in New York.

I guess most importantly, one should make the point that I think the whole history of experimental cinema has largely resided in the education programme at most museums – it’s never been part of the exhibition programme. It’s always relegated slightly as a second-class citizen in a way. I think that what has changed most fundamentally with my position, just in the last year, is that they’ve moved it into exhibitions and displays. This is a kind of acknowledgement that essentially these are artworks and they deserve the resources that any other artwork does. Now it’s not a clean-cut move because this institution in particular is designed really to serve painting, sculpture and photography still. But the set of requirements for presenting any kind of time-based media, whether it is film or performance, is radically different. These past several months have really been a time to figure out how it can fit within an exhibitions programme, especially given that the speed and the timing and the pace of things is so different to working on a major exhibition. Also about a year after I started focusing more on programming film here Gregor Muir was appointed as the Kramlich curator. Which meant the institution also committed at that point to collecting, or raising the profile of its collection of film and video.

Basically Pam and Dick Kramlich are video collectors based in San Francisco. They have a fantastic, very rich collection that is also historically very strong. They have a lot of early video work and very recent installation work as well. They are currently in the process of designing a home north of San Francisco by Herzog & de Meuron, who are the same architects that did the Tate. They really were thinking ‘how can one present a video collection in a sort of domestic situation’, and also just the conservation issues raised by that. So they funded positions, I think it was at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Tate Modern, for each of those institutions to raise the visibility of their activities concerning moving images basically and digital media in general. Gregor came in and right off the bat was quite proactive in buying a lot of young artists like Nick Relph and Oliver Payne, and Mark Leckey, and he bought a major video installation by Christian Marclay so very quickly he moved right into the collections. That also provided a platform for him and Jessica Morgan to curate Time Zones(1), which again was the first major exhibition here at Tate Modern devoted exclusively to film and video.

Then Gregor eventually left and about a year later I was appointed as that position as well. But it’s now morphed into a combination of overseeing the film programmes and dealing with the collection, which includes the collection displays in the Tate Galleries. It’s a lot of work but it’s quite interesting in terms of how people are now allowing me to treat the cinema more as a gallery space and the gallery more as a cinema. I mean these are obviously issues that have been much discussed. We are trying to re-brand the Star Auditorium so that it will function more so that people will drop in and experience work in the way it should be seen.

So hence we premiered Daria Martin’s new film Lonliness of the Modern Penthalethe (16mm, 17 mins, UK, 2004-2005) and Francesco Vezzoli’s video MARLENE REDUX A True Hollywood Story! (Part One) (15 min, 2006). And rather than constructing fake cinemas in a gallery setting, we are going to be redirecting people on to level two into the Star Auditorium cinema space.

No, although I’m very determined to keep that discursive aspect of the screenings intact. I think that’s another aspect of doing screenings in a cinema space. Because it does acknowledge that it is a performance space, a luxurious space, a cinema space, but also those spaces are designed for a certain degree of interaction. I firmly believe that the audience should not be passive if possible, and the best way to do that is to organise discussions when possible.

Obviously money is always an issue, but for the László Moholy-Nagy films for instance we have the primary expert on his films, Jan Sahli, coming to introduce those. I’m in the middle of confirming an Oskar Fischinger for the Kandinsy exhibition, because there’s a strong link between them. We’re also got Esther Leslie to write this fantastic article for Tate ETC magazine where she’s looking them not just from the point of view of links between colour and music, but taking in Fischinger’s relationship to Hollywood and mass culture. It won’t just be a passive situation of enjoying Fischinger’s visual music; it will really push a socio-political and cultural point as well. Which I do think is quite important. When the budget allows it, I definitely will try to keep that aspect.

Okay, in the case of someone like Fischinger there’s a lot of information about him, even online, that is fairly easy to access, presumably therefore the audience will be fairly well educated about the work. So it’s probably good to provoke a discussion to somehow reflect that understanding and hopefully expand it a bit. But then there are a number of artists we show here whose work is not that well known, it’s not well written about or documented heavily on-line or elsewhere. So it is a convenient way just to get people thinking about the work in a more substantial way because many of them won’t go to the library afterwards and look up an old P. Adams Sitney article, you know.

It is an art form that still doesn’t have massive visibility, and so inevitably some people that come to those screenings haven’t been exposed to experimental cinema before. I do think an institution like the Tate serves a different function than the kinds of cinemas that are showing Jack Smith and Warhol. We are preaching to the converted in a sense. Ultimately, this is an archival institution, which means ultimately it’s an educational institution. I do feel strongly that if we present something here, especially because it is going to be advertised to a broader public we have to take that into account somehow. Tate is massively visible as everybody knows, and so I think I need to be responsible to that somehow. Although I’m quite keen on presenting work that is challenging, it makes it that much more imperative that we contextualise it somehow. So I do programme notes for every screening and they tend to have as much information as possible.

I do try to collaborate a lot because I am basically a department of one. I have to rely on the expertise of a lot of other people because even as an academic field, it’s constantly in formation. Even with the disputes and debates that are going on right now about distribution and other issues like that, no one has the definite answer for any of those questions. So again it’s quite imperative that we stage those debates. I think that because there’s a visible public events programme here it makes it the perfect venue. We are well oiled for those kinds of events so we try to keep it discursive here.

I like there to be some kind of ambient connection either to the exhibitions or to the collection, or in general to the mission of Tate Modern. As things develop gradually from visual art into visual culture, we take that into account as well. But initially most of the programming was very much rooted in the exhibition programme. As part of the education department it functioned more as an illustration or an amplification of the ideas in the exhibitions. But sometimes we would really push that a bit.

For instance with Sigmar Polke(2), there’s not an obvious filmmaker that would necessarily come to mind but his work does deal with issues that I found were quite relevant to Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet’s work. I was also aware that their work had not been seen in London for a very long time despite the fact that the BFI has their films. It was the perfect situation where I could say ‘this is how we reactivate these incredible films kept in this dusty corner of their archive’. We couldn’t do a complete retrospective because there wasn’t money and there are several films that are not in the BFI’s collection. Nonetheless it was a really nice cross-section of their work. It was a perfect situation where it related to the programme here but also dipped into a history of cinema that isn’t often exhibited in London.

I think they were quite keen because the Tate offered a possible opportunity to highlight work in their collection that wasn’t screened regularly. The NFT audience would be a different audience. There are certain things in their archive that would appeal to a visual arts audience more. Needless to say the Tate has been quite visible too so it brings a different kind of publicity to it as well. But also it was trying to dissolve those boundaries a little bit. As I said they were so artificial and fundamentally conservative in a sense that these are separate archives that should be kept separately, and in fact it’s much more beneficial to all involved if those connections are made.

From the beginning Tate has often included films in its collection displays even if we didn’t technically own the film but just as a means to contextualise things. For the upcoming new hang, we’ll be using the Relph and Payne film Driftwood (25min, UK, 1999) that we bought. We’ll contextualise that in a loop with Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (65min, Germany, 1927) and Rudy Burkhardt’s Square Times (7min, USA, 1967). You’ll have city symphonies from the beginnings of modernism, the middle of the century after the war, then in contemporary London. In a sense we build it out from something that is now actually in the collection. The good thing is for once one of the films is ours, but we are having to rely on other distributors obviously as well in that case. Film has obviously led to digital media and a lot of copyright debates. The whole idea of ownership and exhibiting a collection should be thrown into question a little bit and I don’t think one should be too precious about that in a sense.

Very abstract.

Exactly.

I’m still not quite sure how exactly to define the range of work. I don’t want to say there’s a cinema strand, an experimental film strand, a video strand because they are clearly different ways of approaching moving images. Sometimes I’ll show all of those in a given programme for one exhibition, or I might be showing any one of those in something totally independent of the exhibition programme here.

I mean if you look at someone like Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, who as a young artist from Thailand, functions both in gallery contexts and in cinema contexts, he’s done extremely well at Cannes, but he’s also shown at the ICA. He’s a perfect example of an artist who crosses all those different boundaries. But his films I thought related brilliantly with Rousseau in terms of their interest in Surrealism and the boundaries between the natural and the urban worlds. In that case we were engaging with cinema through an experimental filmmaker who has also worked in video and other media.

Again it comes down to that ambient connection that I was talking about. I don’t want to just show things that are totally out of leftfield, although sometimes we do. But I would say that at least 80% of the programme here has some relevance to something in the collection or the exhibitions programme. Then the other things are not totally random because they do relate to something. Occasionally we work with the Freud Museum or other institutions because there’s a conference going on or there is just something in the cultural zeitgeist. I mean as this whole field is being reappraised, gradually I’m trying to position the Tate as a hub for that reappraisal, which brings in the idea of conferences and talks too.