Cinema

Daniel Day Lewis, Tilda Swinton, Kate Winslet and Alan Rickman star in Cinema, a novel that explores the hitherto unrecognized relationships between acting, writing, performance, being, office politics, restructures, and corporate thinking about new ways of working.

Nick Clement, former small-time circus impresario, is resigned to his existence in a valueless bureaucracy where he learns the new languages of activity-based working, collaborative spaces and cross-functional engagement. Clement and his new colleague, Claire, are tasked by the company with undertaking a whole-of-business analysis of where operational improvements can be made. In the face of this opportunity to demonstrate his executive potential, Clement's life takes a turn when he meets Claire's film director boyfriend, James McNeil. McNeil has written a screenplay of such overwhelming complexity and beauty it seems it could never be realized.

The screenplay is picked up and financed by a well-established and ambitious English film producer, who is able, because of the ground-breaking nature of the work, to engage four of the finest actors of their generation to commit to the project. There is one role in the cast that is unable to be filled, that of Friedrich Engels, the great comrade of Daniel Day Lewis' Karl Marx. Nick Clement is, against his better judgment, thrown into a film production that will change the course of cinema forever.

Cinema will take you to Sydney, London, the Sachsenwald Forest outside Hamburg, and Los Angeles as it explores the birth of Communism, Germanic-Gypsy history, and an invisible writing that foretold a great literature of the future. It will take you across the Atlantic in a medieval replica sailing boat hand-made by the the most admired actor of the last 40 years. In essence, Cinema outlines a never-ending performative process of being.