Popcorn screening at Zumzeig cinema

​​On January 8, the feature film Popcorn [Crispeta] (2012) by Adrià Julià will be screened at the Zumzeig cinema (c. Béjar, 53). This screening is part of the exhibition Things That Say Things, curated by Latitudes a Fabra i Coats: Center d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona.

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Free and unique session, without prior registration. Limited capacity.

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Popcorn is a feature-length movie adapted from footage shot by the Californian photo optics company Photron to demonstrate the capabilities of a model of ultra-high-speed camera. The slow-motion pop of a single popcorn kernel has been further prolonged by extending the 12-second film to a duration of 90 minutes. A soundtrack has been added, and the movie is accompanied by a poster.

When heated, the moisture bound within the starchy core of a seed kernel of the everta variety of the plant species Zea mays turns to steam. The pressure increases until the hard hull bursts and the gelatinised interior forcefully expands and cools to create what we know as popcorn, a form of maize. The kernels of the earliest maizes were too tough to chew or grind into flour, and ancient indigenous peoples throughout Central and South America, especially in Peru, Guatemala, and Mexico would have popped them. The Aztecs ate popcorn but also used it for ornamentation.

In the 16th century, Spanish colonists described ceremonies with popcorn, momochitl in the Nahuatl language. Centuries later, with the invention of the steel plough in 1837, European settler colonialists in the United States were able to break the thick grasses of the prairies. The fertile soils of the Midwest were transformed, and the upper Mississippi Valley soon became known as the Corn Belt. Despite the Great Depression of the 1930s, popcorn remained an affordable treat in the Midwestern United States, and the snack industry thrived as popping machines became commonplace in movie theatres. Popcorn began its inexorable association with Western cinema, mass appeal, and profit-making.

The truism that selling popcorn is much more lucrative than screening films, the packaging more expensive than the contents, shadows the complex and intractable historical explosion of capitalism’s ecologies and colonialism’s extortion. In this sense, Popcorn the movie is a documentary drama about the silencing of indigenous cultures and the magnitude of ground floor their influence, a sort of technical and mythic counterpoint to accelerationism, short attention spans, and short-horizon perspectives.

Popcorn is also an American horror movie in which industrial violence and cultural supremacy lie behind a gesture as apparently mundane and mindless as the consumption of a low-stress, low-calorie snack.