One Film, Two Exhibition Forms: Separate Versions or a Flexible Work?
One Film, Two Exhibition Forms: Separate Versions or a Flexible Work?
A pitch that says "a screening and an installation, same footage" is not describing one work in two rooms. It is describing a bet: that what the footage does to a viewer does not depend on when the viewer arrives, how long they stay, or whether they can walk out mid-sentence. Sometimes that bet is safe. The trouble is that the pitch never says which case it is in.
Two arrangements get called the same thing and aren't. A work can be adaptable — one authored basis whose artistic rules survive a change of contract. Or it can be two works — sharing a library of images and performances, sequenced and addressed differently, owing different things to different viewers at different moments. Most pitches use the first word to describe the second situation. That is why the person being asked to support the project cannot tell what they are being asked to support.
Neither label is earned until one passage has been run under both conditions.
Name what the work needs the viewer to experience
Start with the relation, not the room. Not "the film is about memory," which survives a fire, but the specific thing the viewer has to undergo: a recognition that arrives late; a testimony that accumulates weight past the point where any single account would carry it; a contradiction that only becomes visible when you move; an image you see again and understand differently.
Different relations have different tolerances for how a viewer arrives. A delayed recognition needs an interval — a stretch of time during which the viewer does not know something and is aware of not knowing it. A loop is hostile to intervals. A contradiction that depends on movement is already hostile to a fixed seat, so a screening is the harder case, not the easier one. Repetition, by contrast, is nearly free in a gallery and expensive in a cinema, because a second visit to the same image is what the gallery hands you whether you asked or not.
So the first job is to write down which of these the work depends on, and then which viewing conditions sustain it. Five conditions do most of the work, and the reader job names them: when the viewer enters, how long attention can hold, whether the viewer can move, how sound reaches them, and what "finished" means. Naming the relation without naming its conditions is a mood, not a plan.
Now put it on something specific. The example below is invented, and it is invented deliberately — no documented account of a real work in both settings is being used here, so the two contracts can be compared under identical material and identical numbers. Nothing that follows describes an actual production, venue, or budget.
Call the film Nine Suppers. It is 48 minutes. It alternates nine locked-off shots of a dining table with nine recorded testimonies, spoken from a script by performers playing former residents of a shared house. The testimonies run about four minutes forty each; the table shots run forty seconds. The film opens on the table set for six.
The count drops. Five settings, four, three, two, one. By the sixth table shot the table holds a single place, and it holds at one for the shots that follow. The film never explains the count. In the third testimony, a woman called Ruth is asked whether a place stayed set after its owner stopped coming. She is quiet for about six seconds. Then she says she would rather not get into it. At 13:30, the film declines to answer its own formal question.
Then, in the ninth testimony, a man called Marco answers it — and the answer is that the place that never got cleared was his. He was the first to stop coming. The others kept setting his place anyway, and as the household thinned, everyone else's setting disappeared while his remained. The last shot shows one place set on an otherwise bare table, in a room with nobody in it.
The relation this film needs is delayed recognition, and it is load-bearing. Everything from 13:36 to 42:00 is spent not knowing whose place it is, and the last six minutes convert a silence into an answer.
Run one passage under both viewing contracts
Take one passage — Ruth's pause in the third testimony, with the table shots on either side of it — and run it under two stipulated contracts. These are comparison conditions, not descriptions of every cinema or gallery.
Contract A. Seated. Fixed start. One projection. Sound from behind the screen, the same for everyone at the same moment. The film runs to its last frame, the credits roll, the lights come up. The viewer entered before the count began.
Contract B. One room, a 48-minute loop, no fixed start. Visitors may stand, sit, leave, come back. Sound comes from a speaker at the far end of the room; the doorway is between the visitor and the speaker.
Under Contract A, the pause is a withheld thing. The viewer has already watched the table lose two settings without being told why. Ruth is asked the question the film has been asking with composition alone, and she refuses it. The film cuts to the table at three settings. The file stays open for twenty-eight minutes. When Marco names the setting, the viewer is not learning a fact so much as re-reading a silence they had already filed — the pause becomes something it could not have been at 13:30.
Under Contract B, a visitor arriving at 47:00 hears the answer at 47:30, and thirty seconds later the loop restarts, cut from the reveal straight into a table set for six. The count now reads as an unwinding rather than a withholding: the viewer knows where it lands before watching it travel. That is not nothing — it may even be good. But it is not the film's ending doing the film's work.
A second visitor arrives at 11:50, catches Ruth's testimony, hears the pause, and leaves at 15:00. Nobody ever tells them whose place it was. The film's central movement never reaches them, and nothing about the installation malfunctioned.
Sound changes too. In the room, a visitor standing in the corridor hears Marco's voice without a face, over the sound of someone else's feet. For a work whose entire method is testimony, unattributed speech arriving through a wall is a different kind of information than a voice heard from a seat in a dark room where everyone is hearing the same thing at once. And a loop has a seam where a film has an ending: the edit that finishes Nine Suppers is the edit that starts it, which means the reveal is permanently adjacent to the six-setting table.
Two things are worth separating here, because the whole decision turns on them. The countdown is a state: six settings in the first shot, one in the last, true whenever you look. Ruth's pause is an interval: it needs twenty-eight minutes of not knowing to be the pause it is. A modular structure can preserve states almost indefinitely. It destroys intervals, because an interval is made of entry control.
None of the above is a finding about visitor behaviour. It is an account of what each viewer can know under each contract. Whether real visitors stay, drift, or return is a question for a room full of them, and no such observation is available here.
Test an adaptable common structure
The tempting move is to keep one authored basis and add orientation — a short recurring passage at the head of each testimony that re-establishes the house, the household, the period, and the fact that people left.
That can work, if you accept what it costs. Orientation preserves the countdown, because a visitor entering anywhere can read the current number off the table. It preserves the rooms, the faces, the register of the testimony. It can also keep the answer withheld: a card that names the house, the span and the household, and that makes the count legible as a question rather than an answer, does not have to say whose place stayed set. Nothing about orientation forces the reveal, and the version that holds it back is a more coherent installation than the bare loop.
The obstacle is not what orientation says. It is what orientation cannot order. Ruth's pause is an interval, and an interval is made of entry control: it needs a viewer who has watched the question asked and refused, and who then waits without knowing whether it will be answered. A recurring card can sit at the head of every testimony, but the loop still admits a visitor at any point in the 48 minutes, and most of those points fall after 13:36. A visitor who arrives at 30:00 meets the count mid-descent, reaches Marco at 42:00 and takes the answer as an answer to a question they never held; staying on for the next pass, they meet Ruth's pause at 13:30 already holding it. A visitor who arrives at 47:00 meets Marco first and takes the reveal as a fact. In the first case the loop has handed over the order the film was built to withhold; in the second it has put the ending in front of the question. Orientation can preserve everything except the sequence the pause depends on.
The shared basis is genuinely valuable, and worth saying plainly in a pitch: one script, one set of performances, one image library, a consistent authorial voice, and a second presentation that can be argued about as a variation rather than commissioned from scratch. That is a real economy. But what survives is the material, and material is not the same as authorship of an exhibition experience. A cut that plays in a gallery has not necessarily adapted. It may have traded.
Here is the test worth running on your own work. Name the moment that must not be spoiled, and time it. If the answer is "none," you are probably looking at one adaptable work and can say so. If the answer is "the last six minutes," you have an interval, and you now have exactly two honest options: control entry, or give the interval up. Calling the result flexible does not create a third.
Test deliberately separate versions
If the interval is load-bearing, the gallery presentation is a different work built from the same footage, and the list of changes is specific enough to estimate.
The table stops withholding and starts performing. The installation should lead with the count — put the six-setting frame where a visitor meets it first, and let the descent be legible inside a few minutes rather than twenty-eight. The testimonies get re-ordered so that none depends on one that came before it, which means Marco's testimony has to be rewritten: it can no longer function as a reveal, so it has to work as testimony, spoken plainly, about a man who left and a setting that stayed. Text is likely needed — a wall line naming the house, the span, the number of people — and text changes the address of the work, because the film speaks to you as a voice and a panel speaks to you as an institution. Duration needs a decision: 48 minutes is a film length, and a loop that a visitor's ordinary stay cannot cover is a loop most visitors never see whole. Sound needs a decision too, and the options are not cosmetic. A directional speaker keeps the room shared. Headphones remove the room from the work entirely. The ending needs a decision, and the likely one is that the installation does not end with Marco's voice but with the bare table, so the piece's completion is the visitor's departure rather than an authored last beat.
All of that is additional authored work, and it needs its own review by a different accountable reader than the one who signed off on the film. None of it is engineering.
What is not established here, and should not be assumed by anyone writing this pitch: that one production budget covers both, that one set of clearances or exhibition agreements carries across, that a given room can support the sound design, or that visitors will read the count at all. Those are project-specific questions with project-specific answers.
Write the current proposition, not two indistinct promises
Now the pitch itself. Here is the sentence that wastes everyone's time:
Nine Suppers is a 48-minute film that can be shown as a screening or as a gallery installation.
Compare:
Nine Suppers is currently a 48-minute linear film, and we are proposing it for [venue or occasion] as a screening. A gallery installation is planned but not yet authored. It would take the film's existing material — the nine table shots and the nine recorded testimonies — as its source, with the final testimony rewritten and re-recorded. It would also need a new running order, a new sound design and a different ending, because the film's central effect is a withheld interval that a drop-in loop cannot protect. The screening is the version we are asking you to support.
The second version does five things the first cannot. It names the version being proposed now and where. It says what the other version actually is — planned, in development, or a sketch on a page. It states what is common in countable terms. It states what differs in the same terms. And it says which one the reader is being asked to back.
That last point is not a formality. Different readers may reasonably be asked to support different versions, and that is fine. What is not fine is a single pitch that leaves the reader to guess, because versatility is not something a reader can evaluate. A version is.
Where this lands, and what stays open
For Nine Suppers: separate versions, under conditions that can be stated in one breath. The withheld interval is load-bearing — the last six minutes do work that the preceding twenty-eight prepare, and the countdown only becomes an answer because it was first a question. A drop-in loop cannot guarantee the interval, and no amount of orientation can order what the viewer meets first. So the two forms are two works, and the screening is the one presently offered.
What stays genuinely open is not a technical question and should not be buried in one. Nobody knows yet whether a gallery piece built on the countdown alone — six settings to one, watched in a room you can cross, with the reveal demoted to a fact rather than a recognition — is worth making. It is a different piece, and it might be a better one, and it might be thinner. That question does not get settled from an edit suite, and it does not get settled by describing the project as flexible. It gets settled by deciding to make it, or not.
Frequently asked questions
What separates an adaptable work from two separate works?
An adaptable work is one authored basis whose artistic rules survive a change of contract. Two works share a library of images and performances but are sequenced and addressed differently, owing different things to different viewers at different moments. The common error is using the first label for the second situation, which leaves whoever is being asked to support the project unable to tell what they are supporting. Neither label is earned until one passage has been run under both conditions.
Can orientation material make a gallery loop preserve a delayed recognition?
Orientation preserves states. A recurring card can keep the countdown legible to a visitor who enters anywhere, and it can hold the answer back. What it cannot do is order what the viewer meets first. In the worked example, a visitor arriving at 30:00 meets the count mid-descent, takes Marco's testimony as an answer to a question they never held, and then meets the pause already knowing; a visitor arriving at 47:00 takes the reveal as a fact. The loop hands over the sequence the film was built to withhold.
What is the difference between a state and an interval?
A state is true whenever you look — six settings in the first shot, one in the last. An interval needs a stretch of time in which the viewer does not know something and is aware of not knowing it, and it is therefore made of entry control. A modular structure can preserve states almost indefinitely. It destroys intervals, because it admits viewers at any point, and most points fall after the question has already been asked.
Is this based on observed gallery visitor behaviour?
No. The account describes only what each viewer can know under the two stipulated contracts. Whether real visitors stay, drift or return is a question for a room full of them, and no such observation is available here. The contracts are comparison conditions, not descriptions of every cinema or gallery.
Does one production budget cover both presentations?
That is not established and should not be assumed in the pitch. Nor is it established that one set of clearances or exhibition agreements carries across, that a given room can support the sound design, or that visitors will read the count at all. These are project-specific questions with project-specific answers.