Concrete Cinema / cinema concrète

Through the projection of an image, a surface becomes a screen. Perhaps it was always a screen — a structure designed and installed for that purpose. Or perhaps the projection itself reveals a surface that unexpectedly bears an aptitude for becoming a screen; a surface that was never intended nor understood to be a screen until it was projected upon. In becoming a screen it risks instantly disappearing beneath the weight of the image, unless the image itself draws us back into awareness of the specificity of the screen surface somehow.  This article will describe an ongoing practice research project that attempts to use the projected moving image to reveal the underlying screenic potential of many buildings (especially modernist and brutalist buildings), and to use that re-shaped understanding to incite discursive imaginings of how the building is and how it might be otherwise. In reconfiguring the building, or part of the building, as a screen, this project draws attention to the material surface itself, and potentially interrogates how a particular building fits within webs of image relations across the city, and how this ‘image’ may serve local and national political and ideological optics in one way or another. When the screen is also a building, it must necessarily be understood as a thing in which people live, work, eat, sleep, and dwell, a thing that has a social, industrial or commercial function, and which is more or less part of a regional and national political history. What does that do to the image? What does the image do to it?

cinema concrète

Though concrete has been in use at least since the Greeks put it in their floors three-and-a-half thousand years ago, and the Romans, Mayans, Assyrians and others used it to build complex structures, it was in the early twentieth century that its international usage expanded decisively and accelerated rapidly. As Adrian Forty writes, “To talk about concrete means talking about modernity.”¹Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture: A Material History (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), 14. As such, it coincided with the emergence of cinema (which, in its own way, had existed for more than two thousand years in the form of various pre-cinematic devices such as the camera obscura). Cinema and concrete were both drivers and symptoms of twentieth century modernity, capturing the emerging energies of urbanity and the technologically augmented everyday. They both drew their power from the speed of their creation, the flexibility of their application, and the ease of their replication and distribution. But while one presented a radical ‘new’ building material, the other presented a complex form of immateriality. While one effected a transformation from viscous liquid into durable, tangible solid, the other seemed to turn the solidity of the everyday into an intangible phantom, made of light and characterised by change and ephemerality. While one presented the petrification of that which flows, the other represented the ultimate evanescence of all that is solid.

The growing international awareness of concrete as a modern building material, with the aforementioned property of petrification, led to its regular invocation as a term to describe the freezing, solidifying, or reinforcing of things that were conventionally transient, ephemeral or volatile, such as poetry or music, into fixed forms. The freezing of letters and words into radically new and visually interesting configurations on the page would be dubbed concrete poetry in the 1950s, while the cutting up and collaging of tape recordings of the sounds of the world would be dubbed musique concrète at around the same time. Cinema, however, was arguably concrete from its inception, in a manner analogous to the found sounds of musique concrète. As such, it was never really subject to the revolutionary concretization that these other forms underwent.²I am wrong, of course. Anthony McCall’s 1973 installation piece Line Describing a Cone, for instance, could convincingly be said to ‘concretize’ the projected moving image, as well as Gill Eatherley’s Chair Installation (1972) or Liz Rhodes’ Light Music (1975), amongst many other limit cases in the history of expanded cinema and installation art.

This article will stop short of offering a theory or proposal for what cinema concrète might be. Rather, it will offer an account of an ongoing project, titled Concrete Cinema, which attempts to explore the affordances and potentials of outdoor moving image projection for the analysis and critique of architecture. The central concept and conceit of the project is that it involves the projection of images that know and respond to the surface that they are being ‘screened’ upon. Concrete Cinema is a project that generates moving images that were made to be projected onto concrete. Associated with this undertaking is an interest in guerrilla projection as a tool for activist interventions into urban space.

Iteration 1: Everyday Brutalism

The first iteration of this project was conducted in collaboration with Dr. Miriam de Rosa in the Hillfields neighbourhood of Coventry. This was also a collaboration between the institutions of the University of Warwick (my workplace) and Coventry University (Miriam’s). Titled Concrete Cinema: Everyday Brutalism, this involved working with a community of Hillfields residents to workshop a set of images for projection onto a well-known building with landmark significance within the area. The building was Pioneer House, a seventeen-storey housing block built in 1966, and a good example of the many high-rise tower blocks that were erected across Britain in the 1960s and 1970s to provide social housing. These were built rapidly using concrete slabs on a concrete frame, and modular replication of fittings across multiple sites to save money. Initially, the widespread building of tower blocks was welcomed as a modern solution to the housing problems of post-war Britain. British architects looked to the innovations of continental Europe for inspiration: Le Corbusier’s vision of the high-rise apartment building as a “vertical garden city”, modelled by his “Unité d’habitation” design, combined with an embrace of béton brut, or rough-cast concrete, as a defining building material (which would serve as the etymological origin of the designation “Brutalist”). Local councils were attracted to the relative speed with which these buildings could be put up, the high number of residents that could be accommodated on a small tract of land, and the progressive, future-oriented vision that this signalled to the voting public. Prospective residents were promised modern facilities, stunning views, and bright airy apartments with balconies, and the feeling toward them was generally positive at first. However, a combination of rushed planning and cost-saving measures resulted in many flawed buildings, frequently exacerbated by council neglect over the following decades. Issues with leaks, mould, and spalling concrete led to tower blocks gaining an increasingly bad reputation. Alongside this, widespread perceptions that tower blocks suffered from myriad social issues and harboured criminality meant that they quickly became one of the least desirable forms of dwelling. By the 1970s tower blocks were already broadly understood to be places that one should want to move out of, not move into. By the 1990s local authorities across the country began to systematically demolish and replace these buildings.

It was in this context that we began working with residents of Pioneer House and the surrounding neighbourhood; those that lived in it and lived with it. We sought to use outdoor projection to allow residents to express their thoughts and feelings about the building onto its surface, to broadcast their dreams and fantasies and impressions of the building outwards, into the community. While tower blocks may have gained a reputation as “undesirable” social housing in low-income areas on the fringes of urban space, their vertical height at least affords the advantage of visual presence within the city. From their elevated vantage point, residents can often see the city in ways that are not easily available to people in conventional low-rise housing, and the building can be seen from a large radius. In this way, it can act as a beacon.

Beacons, Bat-signals and Tatlin’s Tower

During the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests that occurred in Manhattan, a guerrilla projection that came be known as the “Bat-signal” functioned as a unifying call to arms.  It consisted of a simple projection of white text on the expansive concrete facade of the Verizon building. While the projection presented a number of short text exhortations, the most memorable and iconic is a simple “99%” in a white circle, as if to mimic the circular spot of a searchlight, specifically the “Bat-signal” searchlight used across many comic, TV and film adaptations of the Batman mythos. It is also a reference to the unifying slogan of the Occupy movement: “We are the 99%”, which was a call for the majority of the population to rise up in unity against the one percent who control more than forty percent of US wealth. 

On the night of November 17, 2011, tens of thousands of protestors marched across the Brooklyn Bridge, with the “Bat-signal” in view above their head. The artist who organised and executed this activist projection intervention was Mark Read, who set up a 12,000 lumen projector in an apartment on the sixteenth floor of the building directly across from the Verizon. Read characterises this building as contrasting strongly with the corporate magnificence of the Verizon: “Subsidized, rent-controlled. There’s a lack of services, lights are out in the hallways, the housing feels like jails, like prisons.”³Xeni Jardin, “Interview with creator of Occupy Wall Street ‘bat-signal’ projections during Brooklyn Bridge #N17 march”, Boing Boing, November 17, 2011, https://boingboing.net/2011/11/17/interview-with-the-occupy-wall.html He set up his projector in the living room of single mother-of-three Denise Vega, who bravely volunteered her home for the guerrilla project. Read had settled on his target because of its proximity to the Brooklyn Bridge, where the march was taking place, but also because of its iconic presence on the New York skyline: “I knew I wanted to throw it on the Verizon Building. Everyone who lives in New York has looked at that big monolithic structure. For some of us, every time we look at it we think of how cool it would be as a projection surface.”⁴Xeni Jardin, “Interview with creator of Occupy Wall Street ‘bat-signal’ projections during Brooklyn Bridge #N17 march”, Boing Boing, November 17, 2011, https://boingboing.net/2011/11/17/interview-with-the-occupy-wall.html The Occupy “Bat-signal” used projection to temporarily appropriate an iconic building with a strong visual presence in the city, turning it into a novel screen with both formal and symbolic significance. 

Every outdoor projection event has two operational sites – the screen surface and the projection origin (and of course a third, dispersed site, which is the location of the audience). In this case the projection origin had the benefit of vertical elevation, located on the sixteenth floor of another Manhattan building. Though it may have been “undesirable” low-income housing, this building afforded visual access to the vertical space of the city, endowing this ostensibly powerless position with a novel form of soft power. In the context of outdoor projection, especially guerilla projection, the conventions of space are sometimes turned on their heads: hard space becomes soft, and “soft” light becomes hard. The soft power of guerilla projection involves the temporary appropriation of space for the transmission of meaning. It brings about the temporary modification of the architecture of a building, the defacement of a facade; graffiti that is simultaneously more spectacular (by night at least) and less permanent.

The residents of Pioneer House in Coventry inhabit a similar position of subaltern power, often involuntarily housed in this “undesirable” building, which is, nevertheless, a sort of vertical fortress and an imposing edifice on the skyline. This latter characteristic is likely one of the reasons that local authorities around the UK are choosing to demolish these tall, hyper-visible forms of social housing. The building, and its surrounding space, is militarized in other ways. Attributions of criminality that are attached not to individuals but to the architecture itself, and implicitly, the kind of residents that dwell in it, have led to spatial policing measures that have modified the topology of the outdoor ground level. The entrances to the building are accessible only through a labyrinth of fencing that prevents rapid evasion or concealment. The square in front of the building is extensively covered by CCTV and subject to regular police patrols. In many ways the space of Pioneer House and its immediate surrounds has been transformed into adversarial space: urban space that has been tangibly and intangibly shaped by strategies of control based on pervasive suspicion. These strategies implicitly assume that the kind of people who live in such a building cannot be trusted.

At the same time, the site and structure of the building, with its vertical reach, has some affordances that may be exploited by the residents as a means of contesting this framing and pursuing alternative means of organising the residents as a community. On the roof of Pioneer House, a folded dipole transmitter broadcasts the community radio station HillzFM, which was founded in 2004 to “give the local community a voice”.⁵“About,” HillzFM, accessed January 23, 2025, https://www.hillzfm.co.uk/about/history. And, as I have already suggested, a tower like this has both visible presence and reach. One of the purposes of the Concrete Cinema project is to explore the activist and grassroots community-building potential of leveraging these characteristics through combination with moving image projection.

Vladimir Tatlin’s design for the Monument to the Third International, otherwise known as “Tatlin’s Tower”, was never built, but its vision has had a significant influence on twentieth and twenty-first century architecture and art. Designed in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution, its twisting helical form would have been 400 metres tall and was intended to serve as the headquarters of the Third International. It would have been a symbol of Soviet architectural modernity and technological futurism. Rotating chambers across three massive levels would have housed meetings, conferences, and offices where executive and administrative activities would be carried out. At the top would be a cylindrical chamber that could accommodate a range of information and propaganda activities, including telegraphy and radio. Massive loudspeakers would be mounted on this cylinder, and a “giant screen, on which it would be possible … with the help of a film reel … to send the latest news from cultural and political life throughout the world.”⁶Nikolai Punin, “On Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, 1919”, in Form and Function: A Source Book for the History of Architecture and Design 1890-1939, ed. Tim Benton, Charlotte Benton and Dennis Sharp (London: Granada, 1975), 86. In addition to this it was also planned to host a powerful projector pointed at the clouds, to “write letters in light in the sky … with such letters it would be possible to compose different slogans in connection with current events.”⁷Nikolai Punin, “On Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, 1919”, in Form and Function: A Source Book for the History of Architecture and Design 1890-1939, ed. Tim Benton, Charlotte Benton and Dennis Sharp (London: Granada, 1975), 86.

The plans for Tatlin’s Tower demonstrate an early acknowledgment of the potential of image projection when integrated into the infrastructure of very tall buildings. Alongside the futuristic, though quite feasible,⁸Cloud projection was achieved by British inventor Harry Grindell Matthews in the late 1920s. See Abigail Susik, “Sky Projectors, Portapaks, and Projection Bombing: The Rise of a Portable Projection Medium,” in Journal of Film and Video 64, Nos. 1–2 (Spring/Summer 2012): 80. plans for projecting political messages onto the night-time cloudy sky, Tatlin’s design featured a cylindrical facade that would serve as a projection surface, turning the upper part of the building itself into a cinema screen that would be “visible from a great distance.”⁹Cloud projection was achieved by British inventor Harry Grindell Matthews in the late 1920s. See Abigail Susik, “Sky Projectors, Portapaks, and Projection Bombing.” Though propagandist and overtly political in intent, it nevertheless presages the development of urban screen advertising such as the iconic Jumbotron in Times Square. Equally, it also anticipates the emergence of outdoor projections that appropriate building facades, often for political purposes. These newfound urban ‘screens’ were never designed as such, but find themselves temporarily transformed through the adaptive power of portable digital projectors. In this context, any surface in the night-time city has the potential to become a screen, and to support any kind of image or message. Some surfaces lend themselves more readily to this transformation, and some projection interventions do more to acknowledge the form and meaning of the building being projected upon than others. 

Using small high-brightness digital projectors, high-capacity “power station” batteries, and nimble transport solutions such as cargo bicycles, the projection apparatus is unhooked from many of the infrastructural and technological encumbrances that would have impeded or slowed it in the past. “Guerrilla” projection tactics allow activists (or indeed actors of any stripe) to rapidly appropriate a building, leveraging both its iconicity and presence in order to convey a message, the significance of which may be amplified by the physical stature of the building (allowing it to be “visible from a great distance”), and meaningful interaction with the identity or function of the building itself. As Abigail Susik writes, “At the point where projection in the most literal sense of the word is endowed with the potential for domination of any surface—the identity and physiognomy of that surface, the “skin” of the objective world, in turn becomes a keenly contested zone of ideological debate.”¹⁰Abigail Susik, “The Screen Politics of Architectural Light Projection,” Public: Art, Culture, Ideas 45 (Spring 2012), 109.

Doodling on concrete

As institutionally associated researchers, we were in a position of privilege and power, which is often prone to extractive logics and methods in the pursuit of knowledge or data. Luckily, this project was small scale and speculative, so its limited funding was not subject to clear requirements in terms of quantifiable outcomes or publications. We attempted to make initial contact with residents through the official routes of city housing authorities and community-focused charity organisations, both of which proved ineffective and more or less confounding. In the face of this we adopted a direct approach, visiting the building and posting an invitation to the project through each letterbox in the building. We received several interested responses from residents, including that of H, who became our main contact in the building, and key collaborator. H welcomed me into his flat for many subsequent social visits, generously explained the history of the building from an insider’s perspective, and brought me on walks around the area, all the while providing sociopolitical commentary on the relationship between the building, its residents, and the city authorities. An amateur photographer and videographer, H has been documenting the lives of building residents and the local Afro-Caribbean community for several decades. He has witnessed the dominant ethnicity of building residents shift over the decades. Pioneer House has routinely served as an initial landing place for immigrants new to the UK, before they move on to ostensibly better accommodation once they have found a job and established themselves. Waves of Irish, West Indian, Polish, Bangladeshi and Iraqi immigrants have passed through the building at different points. Tensions and negotiations occur between the different communities of the tower, but there is also a strong sense of solidarity amongst the tenants, especially those who are long term.

H offered to contribute some of his photo and video archive of the local community history to the project, and we held a workshop for interested residents to explore how projection could be used to illuminate the facade of the building with their chosen imagery. Artists Blanca Regina and Pierre Bouvier Patron, both experienced projection mappers who run professional courses teaching the skill, were commissioned to facilitate this workshop. They demonstrated the process of projection mapping to the residents, partly to explain exactly what we were proposing and partly to share the skill, potentially providing residents with the know-how to undertake outdoor projection interventions in the future, without us. As I have asserted elsewhere, the emergence of cheap digital projectors, and the high rate of turnover of technical resources by institutional users (such as schools, universities and businesses) has flooded second-hand markets with good quality projectors, making this activity increasingly accessible.¹¹Michael Pigott and Richard Wallace, “A New ‘Wild West’ of Projection”, in Practices of Projection: Histories and Technologies, ed. Virginia Crisp and Gabriel Menotti (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2020), 19–35.

There was a good turnout of predominantly women and children for this workshop, who used craft materials to draw and design projections for the surface of the building. They were then able to test-project some of these images within the workshop space. In an attempt to broaden the reach of the project we collaborated with the Sidney Stringer School, which is within a one-minute walk from Pioneer House. We made a “colouring-in” sheet, based on the façade of the building, by reducing its architectural shape to a black and white line-drawing, the panels of flat concrete offering blank white spaces for the students to fill in however they wanted. We briefed the art teacher on the nature of the project, and the students were given the following prompt: “Doodle / draw / scribble / colour me in. Your doodles will be projected onto the building itself!” 

The culmination of this first iteration of Concrete Cinema was an evening of projections in August 2019. Using our institutional funding we hired a van, projector and portable generator, and provided a DJ setup and free food and drink for those gathered in the square in front of Pioneer House. On the night, the generator failed, and so we were forced to quickly seek another power source. The charity organisation, though extremely close to our projection site, had declined to allow us to plug in, as their staff were apparently afraid to stay in the area after dark. H and a group of residents came to the rescue, cobbling together a long extension lead and running it up the side of the building to H’s flat, where we plugged in. While this caused an undesired delay to the event, it increased the sense of a community coming together to make it happen, and loosely echoed the collaborative engagement between projector and domestic apartment space in the earlier example of the Occupy “Bat-signal”. 

The music was provided by Williams Bros Sound, a pair of local DJs who host a show on HillzFM. Food was provided through three local restaurants that were either on the square itself, or very close by. Both of these choices were important to us; we wanted the event to build upon already existent cultural actors and businesses in the local area, rather than bringing in food and entertainment from outside (too often this is kind of institutionally led project reads as a cynical external intervention that serves the purposes of the university/local authority/NGO more than those of the community that is being “helped”). Our interest was to stimulate communal-cultural activity in an area where communal activity in public spaces has waned over the last twenty years. Our intention was to engage the community, not by bringing an externally designed structure and expecting them to gratefully comply, so much as funding a street party with local food and music. To this familiar construct we added the projections, which themselves were generated by residents and locals. As such, we did not control the images that were projected onto the building. On this occasion, there was nothing very critical or contentious about the messages projected onto the tower. However, the event demonstrated the potential use of the building itself as a canvas for image and text-based expression and discourse. It succeeded in establishing a temporary festival atmosphere, in which the normally adversarial space of the square and the building itself were turned toward enjoyment of food, drink, music, sociability, and the sharing of ideas about the building itself. The event did attract the attention of the police (first a two-person patrol, soon followed by a rapid response van). Recourse to my institutional affiliation, evidenced by my identity card, assuaged their concern (one wonders what might have happened if the legitimising framework of the institution was not available).

Iteration 2: Concrete Cinema

The second iteration of Concrete Cinema in spring 2022 moved the projections into the centre of Coventry, spread across a number of sites. This version was intended to experiment with the combination of a guerrilla projection format and a program of artistic commissions thematically focused on concrete. Working with funding and support from the University of Warwick, Coventry Biennial and Flatpack Film Festival, we were able to offer three commissions to selected artists, who were each invited to make a new video projection work “for concrete”. The brief for each artist made it clear that the commissioned video works should be designed to respond to the surface onto which they would be projected, to recognise and critically reflect upon concrete as a substance and an ideologically inflected building material. In doing so the project would hopefully instigate critical conversations about the materials out of which the city is built, and attendant issues of style, functionality, sustainability, and dwelling. It would raise questions about the purpose of these concrete-driven architectures, and the shape of lives lived within them. By turning the built environment itself into a screen, the project would turn the subject of discourse into the canvas on which that discourse is conducted.

The conventional projection screen is almost always tacitly understood to be a neutral object: a flat, blank, white surface onto which moving images are projected. The conventional screen is rectangular and conforms to one of a number of standardised aspect ratios. It is a structure and a format that supports the projection of the kinds of moving images that are widely distributed by studios, broadcasters, and streaming platforms, all of which adhere to a set of standard rectangular aspect ratios, and otherwise ignore the specificity, shape, and context of the screen. In the vast majority of cases, the screen will ideally reflect light uniformly, without deforming or interrupting the projected image. Which is to say that it ideally disappears, allowing the audience to forget that there is a physical screen support at all, seeing instead into the illusory motion and illusory depth of the image. In contrast with this structure, Concrete Cinema flips the script, upending the hierarchy of image and screen, insisting that the specificity of the physical support is revealed and recognised. In this sense the screen material is reflected upon twice, once by the projected image, and secondly by the critical interaction between image and surface. 

The chosen “screens” for the Concrete Cinema projections would be prominent buildings in the centre of Coventry city (within the ring road), all of which featured concrete facades. The three artists commissioned to produce work for the project were Laura Dicken, Benedict Drew, and Antonio Roberts. Laura Dicken’s piece incorporated stark black and white video portraits of members of the migrant communities of Coventry. This piece broke with the conventional rectangular screen shape, and allowed the portraits to emerge and recede as circular bubbles on the walls of Coventry, making these hidden figure visible, and integrating them into the fabric of the urban space, as if to bluntly assert how they “fit in” to the city. Benedict Drew’s piece applied his characteristic mode of “digital materialism”, layering hard-edged text over cut-out shapes of rock and other heavy textures. Bold swathes of coarse colour allowed the underlying textures of the screen surface to emerge and interact with the image. One particularly striking image and text combination within this piece, which exhorted that “All this will crumble”, became the iconic representation of the event. 

Antonio Roberts created a rippling, undulating animated glitch machine that seemed to unfurl itself from the very surface of the buildings onto which we projected. Colourful and rhythmic, it suggested a mechanical abstraction, transforming the building into something that seemed to have a beating heart. Like Drew’s, this piece aligned an exploratory interest in the ontology of digital video with that of the materiality of concrete. To this set of three I added one of my own video pieces, which was made as part of an earlier research project that investigated the urban space of Coventry through novel methods informed by the humanities.¹²A Catalogue of the Great Buildings of Coventry (at great speed) (Michael Lightborne, 2020). Available at: https://www.michaellightborne.com/urbansensographies This piece featured a rapid compendium of surface textures, in various states of decay and erosion, collected across the built environment of Coventry, including concrete, but also including examples of brick, clay, wood, OSB, tiles, sandstone, moss and more. In projecting a high contrast black and white version of this piece upon concrete, hybrid textures were rapidly formed and deformed, no sooner generated that they were dissipating away, replaced by another hybrid structure.

This second iteration of Concrete Cinema took place over the course of five nights in spring 2022. While we publicised the dates of the projections, we did not reveal the locations, instead inciting interested audiences to follow our social media presence for details of exactly where and when we would be showing up. This was because we had not sought permission from city authorities or individual landowners for the projections. 

With this project we sought to use surprise to enliven the built environment of Coventry for its residents. Everyday life in a city quickly erodes the novelty of the built environment itself. Familiarity combines with a sense of permanence and immovability to allow the built environment to simultaneously recede into the background whilst also profoundly structuring our routes and routines, our potentialities and our constrictions. The human-scaled rhythms of a working day, a season or lifetime are comparably much more tenuous and transient than the apparently fixed and reliable structures of the built environments through which we move. Though it is true that a wave of demolitions has undermined the sense of endurance attached to many modernist and brutalist structures, their temporal scale still contrasts with the dynamic flux of everyday life. Outdoor projection interventions, such as those discussed above, afford the capacity to perform illusory manipulations of the built environment, to soften the hard shell of the city, and play out fantasies of being otherwise.

Michael Pigott

Michael Pigott is Reader in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Joseph Cornell Versus Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2013), the forthcoming Wild Sound: Cinema and the Sonic Environment (Bloomsbury, 2025), and articles on the image of the sleeping body, the sonic environment of the projection box, experimental documentary practices, and uses of projection outside of the cinema. He was co-investigator on the UK AHRC-funded projects The Projection Project (2014–2018) and Sensing the City (2017–2020). His practical research outputs sometimes take the form of installations, films and albums, such as Sounds of the Projection Box (Gruenrekorder, 2018), RING ROAD RING (Gruenrekorder, 2020), and Slí na Fírinne (The Department of Energy, 2022), and his sound work has been featured on BBC Radio 3’s ‘Late Junction‘, NTS Radio, Resonance FM and others.