We are pleased to announce that we will be working with Jim Speers, an Auckland-based artist with a long and distinguished record of projects and exhibitions staged in New Zealand and internationally. Rather than running with what he has done so far, we thought we'd open with an outline of one of his great unrealised ideas - a proposal for an underground cinema dedicated to the constant screening of Sam Peckinpah's classic western Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia. Starring Warren Oates, Kris Kristofferson and others, the film represents a weird 70s moment when American cinema went to Mexico - a foreign movie staged in a foreign landscape.
Speers wants to build his cinema in the great outdoors - the kind of landscape we often refer to as cinematic - creating a series of adventures: first to the location (one that is foreign to the idea of cinema) and then, having been drawn to a minimal, modernist folly (sitting somewhere between art and architecture), below and into the ground for the cinema experience. Here visitors would encounter Peckinpah's Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia in a home theatre-scaled cinema connected to the surface by a transparent roof allowing a view of the cinema's internal space and the activities of the cinema-goers.
Images: concept drawings for Jim Speers' Underground Cinema
