From the Vaults x Central Committee: We are Making a Film about Mark Fisher + Q&A with Simon Poulter

We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher + Q&A with Simon Poulter

Doors 5:30pm – Film start 6pm

We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher is a film made between October 2024 and now using an instagram account. Over a year of research, social media conversations and creative collaboration, artists Simon Poulter and Sophie Mellor set out to explore what it means to “manifest” a work using social media.

The Instagram account was both studio and meeting place and the project grew accordingly – through research, reading, posts and the gradual response to this. Out of this came an evolving community of artists, thinkers and fans of Fisher’s writing. In the year-long period, all of the parts of the film were made and several shoots took place, notably in Felixstowe and Thamesmead.

The story is built around ‘Professor Parkins’, a character played by Justin Hopper, who jumps out of an early 1900s ghost story into the present day and narrates what has happened, encountering Mark Fisher’s ideas and life.

The film moves through the key ideas that defined Mark Fisher’s thinking – hauntology, capitalist realism, the CCRU, K-punk, and the unfinished concept of ‘acid communism’. In the film we also meet people who knew or worked with Mark Fisher, including Jodi Dean and Andy Beckett.

For students and people coming fresh to Mark Fisher, we recommend his books ‘Capitalist Realism’ and ‘ Ghosts of My Life’. Fisher’s writing is intensely personal but reaches out to successive generations, because he is so good at describing the conditions of late stage capitalism.

At its core, the film project is “de-capitalised” – just a network of people making something together over a period of time. In this way it is a refusal of the market logic that Fisher critiqued, and an experiment in what collective creativity might look like in the 2020s.
The film ends in the room that it is screened in. We ask people to continue the discussion and take forward some of the ideas. The most important ones, that Mark Fisher talked about and enacted, are solidarity and kindness.