Past events
A selection of previous events linked to the Media, Arts and Humanities Research Institute.
We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher (Screening and Q+A)
Wednesday 3 December 16:00 until 18:00
University of Sussex Campus : Fulton B
Speaker: Simon Poulter (Close & Remote)
Part of the series: Organised by the Department of Art History with the Centre for Modernist Studies
Close and Remote - We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher (Screening and Q+A)
16.00-18.00 Wednesday 3 December, Fulton B
Organised by the Department of Art History with the Centre for Modernist Studies
A meta-fictional filmic exploration the late theorist's ideas on hauntology, capitalist realism and acid communism.
This event will include an introduction and Q&A with film maker Simon Poulter.
A trailer for the film is here.
If you would like to join us, please do sign up here so we have a sense of numbers:
Further details about the film are below:
We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher
A Film by Simon Poulter & Sophie Mellor (Close and Remote), working with a team of artists using a process of manifesting...and an instagram account. Starring, Justin Hopper as ‘Parkins’.
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.
What the artists say:
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 his 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 2025.
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.
@markfisherfilm
For more on the film makers see: closeandremote.net
By: Hope Wolf
Last updated: Thursday, 20 November 2025