Coop Cinema: Notes Towards a History of Films and Videos by Art Collectives

Cinema, media and cultural industries have consolidated an idea of the film as a product of vertical dynamics with the director as the pinnacle and the performers as stars, no matter how much relevance is given to the choral dimension emerging from the credits. There exists, however, a counter-history of moving images, that of films and videos made by groups. A result of artistic, social, or political instances, these experimental works are less relevant for the style, the genre, or their position within or off mainstream culture, than as symptoms of a hybrid and cooperative approach to cultural production that has slowly become a proper modus operandi. Halfway between the visual arts, cinema, and activism, this unclassifiable and overlooked approach to filmmaking has unfolded throughout the 20th century, becoming since the 1990s a distinctive practice, in line with the increase of collectivism in the arts. In preparation for an overdue process of analysis and historicization of coop cinema, the present essay aims to trace cartography of this phenomenon and its development from a single, interdisciplinary, global perspective.