Abstract
This chapter draws upon a film-in-production concerning Stourbridge Fair held near Cambridge between 1211 and 1932: an imaginary of a temporary polis and zone of the carnivalesque. An epicentre for cultural and biological transaction, this was the most significant event of its kind in northern Europe, but now comprises an instance of space without archive or ruin. It explores how cinema might enact an absent cultural memory via a performative methodology of spatio-temporal encounters within hybrid over-layered spaces that yield defamiliarising forms of knowledge. The result disavows claims to historical authenticity, suggesting instead ways of screening unbidden cultural forms, thresholds and geographies that reorganise the visual field; where the polis is revealed as a palimpsest of dormant tracks, hallucinations and information-flows set against the land’s physical contours.
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Notes
- 1.
A film of the last Barsham Faire of 1986 is hosted on the East Anglian Film Archive website at http://www.eafa.org.uk/catalogue/703.
- 2.
The edit-in-progress can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qDj8dYPLQ4&t=908s
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Hrebeniak, M. (2017). ‘Where Is the Dust That Has Not Been Alive?’: Screening the Vanished Polis in Stirbitch: An Imaginary . In: Penz, F., Koeck, R. (eds) Cinematic Urban Geographies. Screening Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46084-4_9
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