"Reclaiming the Future" Screening + Discussion
Sherry Milner & Ernie Larsen
Who: Anyone interested is invited
When: 7.00 pm, Sunday 3.08.09
Where: 16 Beaver Street 4th floor, New York City
What: Talk / discussion
About "Reclaiming the Future": a screening and discussion of key films
from "Border-Crossers and Trouble-Makers" a series of programs of
experimental political films/videos originally screened at the 2008
Oberhausen Film Festival, co-curated by Sherry Mllner and Ernie Larsen.
The full title of this event, written above, obviously gives much of the
"about" for this event, in which Sherry and Ernie will share what they
feel are the most important highlights
The slate of films Sherry and Ernie will show is less certain, but will
include films by Jorge Furtado ("Isle of Flowers"), one or two films by
Zelimir Zilnik (perhaps "Black Film" or "Tito Among the Serbs for the
Second Time") and several others depending on time, probably, Chen-Chieh
Jen's "The Route."
___________________________________________________
About Sherry Milner and Ernie Larsen
Sherry Millner and Ernie Larsen are anarchist artists who produce STATE OF
EMERGENCY, an interventionist series of video projections in the windows
of a New York loft. They began collaborating in the mid-seventies with a
performance about the Weather Underground and then made the two-screen
situationist Super-8 Disaster (1976), recently restored on DVD. They
produced two 16 mm anti-documentaries on crime, and then a series of
satiric semi-autobiographical videos focusing on the nuclear family as the
originary site for the the reproduction of the authoritarian structures
that support the public sphere. Millner’s multimedia installlations have
explored domestic space as a battleground, first with the theory and
practice of camouflage as the controlling aesthetic and then re-creating
the designs and plans in U.S. army manuals on how to boobytrap the home.
Larsen is also a novelist (Not a Through Street) and a media critic.
Their conceptual video, 41 Shots, based on the police murder of immigrant
street peddler, Amadou Diallo, examines the implicitly racist ‘broken
windows’ theory of criminology. They are currently editing the
installation and single-channel versions of Sight Gags which depicts
patriotism as a collective outbreak of hysterical blindness. Millner is a
professor at College of Staten Island, CUNY.
___________________________________________________
"Reclaim the Future" Catalogue Essay from 2008 Oberhausen Film Festival
by Millner/Larsen
The essay and program descriptions can also be downloaded from our website
at:
http://www.16beavergroup.org/pdf/reclaimthefuture.pdf
RECLAIM THE FUTURE
Sherry Millner/Ernie Larsen
“You could be in DANGER.” (Copyright 2004) Barneys New York
“All systems of domination, we assume, are ‘leaky’; the point is to turn
such leaks into a flood.” --Ella Shohat and Robert Stam
“Still, the garbage pile is where we wanted to land…” --Avital Ronell
“We are given a social examination of garbage; the truth of a society is
in its detritus.”
--Ella Shohat and Robert Stam
“In Colombia, March 1 is designated the Day of the Waste Picker to
commemorate the murder of waste pickers 15 years ago in a body-snatching
scandal.”
– Henry Mance, OneWorld US
“Since the Ice Age…streams of images, of so-called associations, have
moved through the human mind, prompted to some extent by an anti-realistic
attitude, by the protest against an unbearable reality. They have an
order organized by spontaneity. Laughter, memory, and intuition—hardly
the product of mere education—are based on this raw material of
associations. This is the more-than-ten-thousand-year-old cinema to which
the invention of the film strip, projector and screen only provided a
technological response.”
--Alexander Kluge
In the long, thus far, unending wake of 9/11 we began a video projection
series titled “State of Emergency” in the windows of our loft on 23rd
Street in Manhattan. This deliberately localized project, involving more
than fifteen artists, was an anti-realistic protest against the the US
invasion and thus far unending occupation of Iraq (and Afghanistan) along
with a hyper-speed evisceration of democracy, in which rights and agency
were and are glibly traded for the false promise of security. Let’s
suppose that Kluge is correct that our collective mentality is not only
inherently anti-realistic but inherently cinematic. In that case, maybe
we were not so far off the mark to hope to re-organize that more or less
spontaneous flow of nomadic associations known as street life and to
condense its dilute power from the ten-thousand year (i.e. thus far
unending) mental protest against an unbearable reality to an encounter
with some visibly unmistakable moments of collective resistance.
Producing several successive states of “State of Emergency” slowly but
effectively sharpened our far from challenged sensitivity to how cultural
resistance can be shaped.
So well before the programs grouped under the title “Border-Crossers and
Trouble-Makers” came anywhere near the horizon we had our eyes out for
films that reckoned critically with the distinctive character of this
strange era. Consciously or not, we had a standard, a steep standard:
films which, with something of the unreconciled intransigence of Bunuel’s
Las Hurdes, took little or nothing for granted and grappled with the
consequences, at whatever level, of the global monopoly of capital and its
relation to terror—post 9/11 essays in human geography, as it were. All
right, an impossible standard—but a useful one, nevertheless.
Soon enough, it became clear that an approach that set out toward the new
was not limited to films produced in the past few (in our view, watershed)
years. There were in fact films made in 1913, 1945, 1978, or whenever
that still forced or facilitated distinctive reckonings with the
historical moment in which we live. Often these were films that saw their
own historical moment with a spirit of raw urgency and thus when screened
have the feeling of unkept promises, of of a barely tapped—mostly
banked--potential. (“The task to be accomplished is not the conservation
of the past, but the redemption of the hopes of the past.”
Horkheimer/Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment)
From this point in assembling our programs grew an interest in mixing the
older and the newer, what still felt new or alive in the old, as well as
what felt new in the new. Rather than consciously set out to slot films
into pre-established programs, we expected to locate strong concepts for
individual programs in the films that turned up in our research. This was
risky, perhaps. It’s always a bit risky to place oneself in a position of
not knowing, of exploring a terrain that might have turned out to be
desert—and left us high and dry. In the end, roughly half the screened
films are recent. And nearly half are produced or co-produced by women.
We searched for films that critically and/or actively represented
resistance to power, the status quo, especially in the tone, shape and
manner of what is represented. As artists slash curators our object was
to find out what precise shapes and what forms of motion such otherwise
deliberately undefined resistance was presently taking in experimental
political cinema. In looking now at the programs, with a critical eye,
from their individual titles alone, it becomes clear that we see political
film-making (of the kind represented in the programs) as both contingent
and necessary experiments in risk-taking, experiments in reclaming the
future, to paraphrase a picket-sign from a real protest that never
occurred except in Chen Chieh-Jen’s film The Route. Today, when power so
successfully exploits the apparent contradiction between terror and
security to scare off concerted resistance, the concentration of
political experimental film on the subject of history and the
transformation of everyday life may be crucial. These programs aim to
take up this question of the resisting subject at once from the point of
view of the history of oppositional film and from current oppositional
practices in film and video.
In the English language, the term resistance is commonly used to describe
the concerted acts of people who take a stand, often against great odds,
against the powers that be. In fact, the root of resist is stand. Such
acts of opposing power, as the root word confirms, do not initially imply
active violence. To the contrary, it is clear that this (resistant)
motion of standing up together does no more than block the continuation of
force (such as the legitimated violence of the state, at whatever level).
There is always an alternative to resistance: not standing up—staying
supine, a suppliant, a doormat. However, the gestural root of resistance
appears to suggest the latent potential of a people or differentiated
fraction thereof to take the risk of standing up. The films in these
programs are the cultural equivalent of such gestures of intervention to
block a forward flow at least temporarily, and perhaps to create an
imaginative rupture.
The criteria of protest against an unbearable reality that Kluge connects
to cinema are not about (“hardly the product of mere”) education, not
about learned responses per se, which would seem to disqualify (for
example) our usual experience of most (conventional) documentary work, of
convention altogether. Instead Kluge specifies the work produced by a
natural resource: spontaneity which effortlessly imposes its own order
(in relation to “laughter, memory, intuition”). Is it possible to
substantiate more precisely this apparent connection between cultural
resistance and spontaneity? Spontaneity has not had a good press, so to
speak—in fact, it’s acquired considerable notoriety, no doubt
justifiably—it too readily causes surprise and hence trouble, since it is
unpredictable. However, it is possible to conceptualize spontaneity
(provisionally, simply) as a space between, a space where the unexpected
(i.e. the lifelike) occurs, without securing any permission in advance,
that is. Because if such permission was put into place (by whatever
order of power, even biopower) it would no longer be perceptible as
spontaneous. The spontaneous feels new, and of course there’s no
insurance policy issued as such for its outbreak: it’s not a forseeable
regime to which actuaries or computer wizards might successfully apply
themselves, in advance. Adorno, Kluge’s one-time mentor, in his essay
written in support of the Oberhauseners, “Transparencies on Film”,
unexpectedly or not, valorizes the category of spontaneity and in the
process further defines its operation:
“Film, therefore, must search for other means of conveying immediacy:
improvisation which systematically surrenders itself to unguided chance
should rank high among possible alternatives.” Following this lead, we
would imagine that if cultural resistance has any hope of attaining its
end it can not hew to any party line, can not be programmatic. It would
seem then that this emphasis on immediacy and improvisation is therefore
more tactical rather than strategic—which recalls Michel de Certeau’s
emphasis on opportunity: “a tactic is a calculated action determined by
the absence of a proper locus. No delimitation of an exteriority, then,
provides it with the condition necessary for autonomy. The space of a
tactic is the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain
imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power.”
De Certeau readily acknowledged that resistant tactics in everyday life
are the art of the weak: all victories are provisional, territory can be
held only temporarily. (In de Derteau’s sense of the tactical we could
say that art would be a tactic of the art of the weak—except that art is
not only a practice, it is a production, i..e has shelf-life.) In a
different sense Adorno (in “Transparencies”), picks up on and valorizes
this perhaps contradictory power of the weak in film, in considering film
which adheres to an artisanal rather than industrial mode of production:
“works which have not completely mastered their technique, conveying as a
result something consolingly uncontrolled and accidental, have a
liberating quality.” Adorno’s embrace of the uncontrolled and the
accidental enhances our grasp of Kluge’s compressed account of
spontaneity. Further confirming this overlap, Adorno agrees with Kluge
about the associational : “The aesthetics of film will do better to base
itself on a subjective mode of experience which film resembles and which
constitutes its artistic character.”
The ready avowal of the aesthetic strengths of the spontaneous, the weak,
the uncontrolled, and the imperfect is also essential to Julio Garcia
Espinosa’s impassioned argument for the the revolutionary movement
‘toward an imperfect cinema’, which in its way echoes Adorno’s unexpected
warning against the temptation of technical and artistic mastery:
“Imperfect cinema finds a new audience in those who struggle, and it finds
its themes in their problems. For imperfect cinema, ‘lucid’ people are
the ones who think and feel and exist in a world which they can change.”
(Adorno: “The liberated film would have to wrest its a priori collectivity
from the mechanisms of unconscious and irrational influence and enlist
this collectivity in the service of emancipatory intentions.”) In
returning to the question of reception, Espinosa reframes in a directly
activist vein Adorno’s comment that “It would not be incorrect to
describe the constitutive subject of film as a ‘we’ in which the aesthetic
and sociological aspects of the medium converge.”
The constitution of the ‘we’ is no less critical on the other side of the
camera. Collectively and cooperatively made film has always amounted to
another sort of political experiment (with less easily discernible
results). In the “Border-Crosssers and Trouble-Makers” programs there’s
even something of a libidinal chord to the cooperatively-made film—since a
considerable number of the films were evidently produced by couples. In
any case, the premise of collective cinema is that common experience of
cultural production is indispensable to the development of popular change.
For instance, in researching these programs we found that as far back as
1913 a group of anarchist militants (including Sebastiane Faure) founded
(obviously, on a shoestring) a cooperative called Le Cinema du Peuple,
which may well be the first media collective. (Co-founder Armand Guerra,
a Spanish anarchist, directed and acted in their first production, La
Commune, in which the last living Communards briefly appeared, grouped
around a banner reading Vive La Commune! Following a second film, the
production plans of Le Cinema du Peuple were cut short by the outbreak of
the Great War.) Suppose we thought of each of the programs in
“Border-Crossers and Trouble-Makers” as amounting to collective
representations of specific thematic questions. Then each of them might
be said to test how artisanal ( that is to say, individual artist’s) works
may or may not offer substantially different experiences from
cooperatively and collectively produced works.
Convincing spontaneity requires the gestural seizure of the spirit of a
moment. Fine, but how then to reconcile the tactical moment with that
ten-thousand year history of mental protest, which would, by definition,
be strategic? In “Esthetics of Resistance,” the penultimate chapter of
Unthinking Eurocentrism, Robert Stam and Ella Shohat point out that
“Oppositional cinemas in both the First and Third Worlds have explored a
wide spectrum of alternative esthetics….such modes and strategies as the
carnivalesque, the anthropophagic, the magical realist, the reflexive
modernist, and the resistant posmodernists. These alternative esthetics
are often rooted in non-realist, often non-Western or para-Western
cultural traditions featuring other historical rhythms, other narrative
structures, other views of the body, sexuality, spirituality, and the
collective life.” A bit later, in the “Media Jujitsu” section of the
chapter they go on to say that “many alternative esthetics have in
common the twin anthopophagic notions of revalorizing what had been seen
as negative and of turning tactical weakness into strategic strength.”
The works in “Border-Crossers and Trouble-Makers”test this assertion.
Some years ago we concluded an essay (“Toward an Impure
Cinevideo”exploring the complications suggested by politicized hybrids of
film and video) influenced by Espinosa’s “cinema imperfecto” and Mary
Douglas’s concept of dirt as matter out of place, as follows: “The impure
cinevideo thrives at the edge of disorder, indefinitely sketching a series
of patterns that shift as the materials at hand themselves shift,
privileging no single pattern, throwing the patterns themselves onto the
waste pil as they threaten to fall apart, and yet trying never to escape,
trying always to follow or to challenge the movement of contradiction.
It’s an interventionist approach, not only more adequately attuned to the
heterogeneity of daily life, to the multiple and shifting textures of
reality, but also more pleasurable and not without the throb of danger as
it tries to capture what it is that is changing or about to change or
trying to change.”
___________________________________________________
"Border-Crossers and Trouble-Makers": Program Descriptions
‘Dirty’ Movies
“Here we have a man who has to gather the day’s refuse in the capital
city. Everything that the big city threw away, everything it lost,
everything it despised, everything it crushed underfoot, he catalogs and
collects.” --Baudelaire
“With the idea of defilement we enter the realm of terror. This sentence
by Paul Ricoeur, sums up the entire role of dirt in society. Here
something truly remarkable happens. That is, all dirt relationships are
reinterpreted as power relationships. Anyone carrying dirt is powerful,
and anyone in power utilizes dirt for purposes of control. The one who
can defile others, whether clean himself or not, is the boss.” –Christian
Enzensberger in Smut (New York: Seabury, 1972), p.47
“FILM—WEAPON OR SHIT?” Zelimir Zilnik, manifesto (1971)
Oppositional politics has sometimes been referred to as ‘The Great
Refusal’ while an epithet often applied to the working-class was ‘The
Great Unwashed.’ The common association of dirt with manual labor has
become, in the presumably well-washed hands of the filmmakers
of this program, a radical and effective means of questioning the
contradictory values that underlie urban existence. These films retrieve
the political/ aesthetic reality and the metaphor of refuse, rather than
refusal: trash, what’s thrown away and those who clean up, the discarded
populations, the guest worker, the refugee, the unemployed.
Anthropologist Mary Douglas defined dirt as matter out of place. These
films question unexamined social definitions of the marginal and the
dirty, that which is perceived by the powers that be to be out of place.
Put into contention:
--the troublesome question of the social definition and status of
marginality in relation to
power
--the question of the inversion of high and low in artistic practice --how
does the liminality of garbage put into question the organization of urban
existence
--the association among the poor, the counterculture, and
artistic/bohemian subcultures
DARK SUN SQUEEZE Pawel Wojtasik 2003 10 min. video US/Poland
A wordless, unblinkingly precise, immaculate look at the machinic disposal
of endless rivers of human excrement, with no humans in sight. A
chillingly ironic portrayal of the absolute efficiency of the removal of
human waste from the visual field and from urban existence altogether.
AUBERVILLIERS Elie Lotar 1945 25 min 35mm France
The only film directed by Elie Lotar, who was Luis Bunuel’s
cinematographer on Las Hurdes. With a poetically allusive script by
Jacques Prevert, Aubervilliers, in a sense extends Bunuel’s intention of
calling the bluff of civilization, with Lotar’s corruscating portrait of
suburban Aubervilliers, the poverty-stricken toxic dump site of postwar
Paris.
THINKING GARBAGE Nancy Atakan & Ipek Duben 2005 2 min. 18 sec. video
Turkey
Inspired by Zygmunt Bauman’s study Wasted Lives, this collaborative video,
shot in the Galata neighborhood of Istanbul, bluntly shifts the
responsibility for urban waste from those who clean it up to those who
produce it. Humans made useless and functionless by the modern global
system are also added to the pile.
GARBAGE U.S. Newsreel 1968 10 min. 16mm US
A radical film collective documents a collective action in defiant support
of a New York City sanitation workers strike. The Lower East Side
anarchist group Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers carry their
uncollected garbage on the subway up to the then new and pristine-white
citadel of high culture Lincoln Center and dump it right there on the
marble steps. The disjunctive soundtrack, a passionate post-dumping group
critique of the action, permits us to experience theory and practice as
inseparable parts of a single process.
ISLE OF FLOWERS Jorge Furtado 1989 12 min video Brazil
Described by Furtado as a “letter to a Martian who knows nothing of the
earth and its social systems,” the film uses inventive animation and a
parodic mock-lecture style of narration to link the urban bourgeois family
to the rural poor who scavenge the garbage dump, the ‘isle of flowers,’
where pigs eat better than people. The truth of a society is in its
detritus.
AUSFEGEN Joseph Beuys 1972 26 min. 16mm Germany
Following a May Day demonstration along Karl Marx Strasse in Berlin,
Joseph Beuys and two students sweep up, wielding red-bristled brooms, in
solidarity with guest workers. A rigorously performative argument for the
radical democratization of art production and a reconsideration of its
relation to work. The trash they clean from the streets is dumped on the
floor of Beuys’s gallery: is the resulting installation truly matter out
of place—or a messy re-situation of the demonstration--or…?
85 min.
LEARNING PROCESSES WITH A POSSIBLY DEADLY OUTCOME
“…certain concepts and descriptions put forward forty years ago by Guy
Debord and the Situationist International…still possess explanatory
power—more so than ever…in the poisonous epoch we are living through. In
particular, the twinned notions of the ‘colonization of everyday life’ and
the society of the spectacle…strike us as having purchase on key aspects
of what has happened since September 11, 2001. “ –Retort, Afflicted Powers
(New York: Verso, 2006, p. 17)
“No abyss separates us from yesterday, only the changed situation.” –
Alexander Kluge
This program title, stolen from Kluge, raises some difficult questions of
political process, particularly the multiple and sometimes conflicted
approaches to political awareness, from a little French boy resistant to
his schooling to a 75-year old African American activist whose grandfather
was born into slavery. And then there are the pitfalls of limited or
partial awareness, as noted in Zilnik’s production statement from Black
Film, which spells out some of the consequences of the artist’s strategic
naivete:
“This film depicts the misery of abstract humanism. It is a reckoning
with anarcho-liberalism, with false avant-gardism, with social demagogy,
with left-wing fraction. The author sees this film as an example of
filmmaker’s exploitation of others’ misfortune, believing as they do that
they belong to a higher social class than the victims.”
In Critique of Separation, Guy Debord says, “This dominant equilibrium is
brought back
into question each time unknown people try to live differently.” This
question remains alive: What routes lead from an individual’s
understanding of a concrete historical position to an awareness of the
potential for agency—and even on to the grasping of that agency in common
with others? How does a subject who may well be resistant within everyday
life to conscious knowledge of oppression grasp the potential of
transformation? Some alternatives: a slow process, an awakening, sheer
repetition, a shock, violence, empathy. These films capture something of
this dynamic range--and how these alternatives can create new conditions,
new situations, new outcomes, sometimes deadly ones. Queen Mother Moore
sweeps up the attentions of her audience—imprisoned young black men—when
she addresses how violence has been defined by the white power structure.
And performance artist Rev. Billy and his choir hold the roots of
Baptist rhetoric of redemption to the fire here and now by taking to the
streets to defend a neighborhood shoemaker from being evicted by his
greedy landlord.
EN RACHACHANT Straub/Huillet 1982 7.5 min 16mm France
Based on a Marguerite Duras story (“Ah! Ernesto”), about a young boy who
refuses to go to school because they teach him things he doesn’t know.
His perplexed teacher and his parents attempt to intervene. A funny and
all but unique anti-lesson on the young’s all-but-genetic resistance to
institutional educational process.
PARTIAL CRITIQUE OF SEPARATION Sherry Millner & Ernest Larsen 2008 19
min. double-screen video US
This re-make of Guy Debord’s Critique of Separation juxtaposes Paris 1961
with New York 2008: “The only adventure, we said, is to contest the
totality, whose center is this way of living, where we can test our
strength but never use it.” The film proposes that the material conditions
that separate each from all and self from self and that every moment
militate against the imperative to resist persist.
BLACK FILM Zelimir Zilnik 1971 14 min 16mm Yugoslavia
In an attempt to ‘solve the homeless problem,’ the filmmaker invites ten
homeless men (ignored by the government) into his own apartment in Novi
Sad, and suffers the consequences and lives to tell the tale.
DESERT TRUCK TERMINAL Ursula Biemann 2007 13 min. video Swiss
From a series titled “Sahara Chronicle” this video sets out from Agadez,
Niger, at a recently opened gateway for West African migrants desperately
embarking toward Europe, a document “on mobility and the politics of
containment” in the Sahara.
QUEEN MOTHER MOORE SPEECH AT GREENHAVEN PRISON The People’s Communication
Network 17 min. video U.S.
A videotape of a live cable broadcast on community visiting day inside a
federal prison that documents an extraordinary speech by 75 year old
African-American civil rights activist Queen Mother Moore, who says such
things to the increasingly stunned young black male prisoners as “you
can’t steal from the white man, because everything he has is stolen from
you.”
CHURCH OF STOP SHOPPING CONFRONTS GENTRIFICATION DeeDee Halleck/Deep Dish
2008 8 min. video U.S.
On the Lower East Side of New York, an Italian immigrant shoemaker is
being driven from his store by a rapacious landlord. Political
performance artist Reverend Billy and his choir come to the rescue.
Promises are made and an aria is sung amid the shoes.
SIGHT GAGS Millner/Larsen 12 min. 2008 video U.S.
The post-9/11 premise is that patriotism and nationalism almost
inevitably lead to severe distortions in vision, if not outright
collective blindness, especially among the almost comically fearful
citizens of the U.S. As Rudolph Valentino said, “an eye for an eye and a
horse for a donkey,” or, as Helen Keller said, “the outer daylit world is
stumbling and groping in social blindness.”
90.5 min.
Capital Crimes
“’All men are here, and all crimes.’
‘First the thieves,’ said Madre. ‘Those who steal in the street, from shop
windows; purse snatchers, pickpockets, hotel rats. Burlars: professionals
and amateurs. Con men, swindlers, crooked stockbrokers, bigshots who go
bankrupt in style. Forgers and fortune hunters….We have thieves, all
right.’
‘You can see,’ said someone, ‘that prisons are necessary!’
‘It’s too bad,’ said Laurent, ‘that you forgot all the thieves who will
never be here, all the ones who don’t look like thieves and are the
biggest thieves of all.’”
--Victor Serge, Men in Prison (Writers and Readers, 1972, p. 239)
“we need more complex ways of understanding the multivalence and tactics
of power to understand forms of resistance, agency, and
countermobilization that elude or stall state power.”
--Judith Butler, Who Sings the Nation-State (Seagull Books, 2007)
It has been suggested that the media’s obsession with criminality is an
inevitable displacement
of the spectacular swindle of bourgeois capitalist society. Taken
together these films
destabilize the still widespread notion that the state is based on some
form of a social contract. Instead they concentrate on the state’s
monopoly on legitimate violence in advancing the interests of capital.
The relevant forms of such legitimate violence (of policing) decisively
includes such ethical/cultural/aesthetic dimensions as: the self-policing
psyche of the atomized individual known as the citizen, the aesthetic
economy of the popular forms of cultural representation, the
ever-increasing hi-tech surveillance of urban areas, the renaming of wars
as police actions, the functioning of police as armies, the proliferation
of private armies. This array is commonly greeted by the typical
middle-class citizen with sincere appreciation for the visible increase in
security. This program reflects on this deeply structural or perhaps
viral dynamic —more from the vantage point of the policed than from the
vantage point of the policing institutions.
CROWDED Alonzo Crawford 1978 10 min. U.S.
Shot, remarkably enough, with official permission in a Baltimore prison,
CROWDED depicts without commentary the casual cruelties and routine
humiliations visited upon the mostly young almost exclusively black
prisoners. Statistic: 1/100 U.S. citizens are presently crowded behind
bars.
ACCORDING TO Kevin Everson 2007 8.30min video US
Newsworthy stories of inter-racial murder in southern rural America are
told in two distinct contradictory versions. Without commentary, the
consumption of falsified news is concretely protrayed as a very old story
against which one must always be on guard.
WHAT FAROCKI TAUGHT Jill Godmilow 1997 30 min. 16mm US
A remake of Haroun Farocki’s film, Inextinguishable Fire (1969), about the
development of Napalm B by Dow Chemical during the Vietnam War, this time
in color and in English, rather than in black and white and in German.
Godmilow’s passionately critical introduction and epilogue, while
concentrating on conventional documentary’s “pornography of the real”
raises and renews the question of corporate war crimes within the U.S.
context.
PROTOTYPE Martha Rosler 2006 1 min. video US
A deadpan single shot of a toy US soldier, playing ‘God Bless America’ on
a toy trumpet,
who turns out to be an amputee. The all too scrutable wages of patriotism.
SUPREMATIST KAPITAL James T. Hong & Yin-Ju Chen 2007 5 min US/Tiawan “A
symbolic history of Kapital—a symbolic history of the West.” A speedy
graphic montage: animated logo-mania, of a kind.
FIVE DOTS Tomas Ochoa & Andriana Meyer 2005 11 min. video Argentina At a
jail for juveniles in Mendoza Argentina, the young inmates perform songs
of their own composing, which are filled with longing, desire, and the
thirst for escape, alternated with their recitation of quotes about
disciplinary technology drawn from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. The
inmates attempt to resist power tactically through their capacity to
produce their own symbology.
FERAL Louis Hock 2003 5 min. video U.S.
In Southern California, not so far from the Mexican border, the imposing
figure of a U.S. immigration officer in full regalia, that reads as
unimpeachably sado-masochistic drag, stands
in the middle of Interstate 5, checking each approaching vehicle for
illegal immigrants.
SHOPLIFTING: IT’S A CRIME? Sherry Millner 1979 15 min. 16mm US
An ‘educational’ documentary on the evils of shoplifting is itself
shoplifted, mocked, and then remade or extrapolated on the Proudhonian
principle that ‘property is theft,’ with the figure of the shoplifter
freed from the zone of morality and re-situated as a vital part of an
alternative economy. The dual aim is to shake up the disciplinary role
of the educational doc as well as conventional definitions of criminality.
85.5 min.
COLLECTIVE RESISTANCE: 1871-2084
“Even to summon a handful of emblematic instances of the new movement is
dangerous, we feel: it risks folding the hiddenness and impermanence of
the anti-vanguard into a few bright names…This opposition—and
specifically, this opposition’s distance from the vanguard ideal—is as
much a product of the present dynamic of capital as any other development
of the past quarter-century. Its objects and tactics are a response to
the logic of the neo-liberalism it is called on to resist.” --Retort,
Afflicted Powers (New York: Verso, 2006 p. 192)
Films made by politically committed individuals about collective struggles
for political and/or economic freedom and films made by collectives about
collective struggles. This juxtaposition puts forward the complex
question of collective vision, on both sides of the camera. In the early
seventies, Julio Garcia Espinosa made an impassioned argument for ‘an
imperfect cinema,” arguing against the temptation of technical and
artistic mastery. Certainly, collective production has always compensated
for its relative poverty of technical means with its directness and
immediacy of commitment—and well before Godard coined the phrase making
political films politically understood the political and aesthetic
advantages of that intention.
This program includes a film made by Chris Marker who has a remarkable and
complex history both as a director of his own idiosyncratic personal and
political projects and as a producer and instigator of French collective
production: SLON, the collectively produced Far From Vietnam, the
Cine-Tracts series, his underwriting of Groupe Medvedkine, the non-profit
distribution arm, ISKRA, etc. Is his exemplary career proof, if any is
needed or desired, that many—perhaps all of us--possess some form of
collective vision? This program considers the dynamics of representation
(in art) in relation to the dynamics of self-representation (in politics)
and vice-versa.
LA COMMUNE Armand Guerra 1914 13 min 35mm France
Staging of episodes from the Paris Commune (1971) featuring the appearance
of the last living Communards, posed clustered around a banner reading
Vive La Commune. Directed by a legendary Spanish anarchist, who later
fought Fascism with a camera, Guerra helped found the anarchist film
cooperative, The Cinema of the People.
EL SOPAR Pere Portabella 1974 47 min. 16mm Spain
A group of seasoned militants, all of whom have been imprisoned and even
subject to torture under the fascist Franco regime, meet for a clandestine
dinner on the eve of the execution of a militant anarchist. Their often
heated discussion across the table dramatizes the psychic costs of their
unabated political commitments. Portabella uses simple cinematic means to
explore his subject: “You can’t understand liberation if you don’t begin
with yourself.”
SOLIDARITY Joyce Wieland 1973 11 min 16mm Canada SEE NOTE BELOW
A kind of structuralist-political film. The title word Solidarity is
visible throughout the length of this film made in support of a strike in
Canada, while the underlying images are closeups of marching, marching,
marching feet.
2084 Chris Marker 1984 10 min. 16mm France
Robots a hundred years after 1984 discuss the significance of collective
labor struggle. Produced in response to the 100th year anniversary of
labor union laws in France, this film melds sci-fi to the documentary.
NOUVELLE SOCIETE #6 9 min 1969 Groupe Medvedkine 16mm France
Everyday life issues are explored through the eyes of a child: she sees
her family falling apart under the deadening effects of her mother’s work
in a biscuit factory and her father’s work as a truck-driver.
THE LAND BELONGS TO THOSE WHO WORK IT Chiapas Media Project 2005 15 min.
video Mexico
Collectively made, this film details an elaborately polite but equally
tense confrontation between masked Zapatistas farming unused land in the
north of Chiapas and federal officials who have sold the same land to a
private company for ecotourist development. The future of the natural
resources of Chiapas is at stake.
PLEASE NOTE: Take out “Solidarity” as long as we can get “La Commune”
which would make the program 94 min.
MNEMONIC DEVICES
“Personal objects, including mass-produced objects, will necessarily go on
being one main instrumentation of meaning and desiring in any human
society we care to imagine. But they cannot and do not work the magic
they are presently called on to perform.” --Retort,
Afflicted Powers, 2006, p. 179
“In some ways, Solanas shows up as a victim of the failed performative, as
one who felt her verbal velocities could reach no one in a way that would
truly mark or unhinge the brutal protocols of lived reality.” –Avital
Ronell, Introduction to Scum Manifesto, Verso, 2004, p.4
Signs, icons, and media artifacts (museum exhibits, illustrations, a book,
an audiotape, archival TV news, cassette tapes, old photos) can be keys to
exploring the gaps between what we think we know and what we ought to know
about the personal/political influences of the past on the present. But
what exact doors or locks do such ‘keys’ really open? These filmmakers
are by no means attempting to redeem or stabilize the past through the
exploration of these artifacts, still less to shut off disturbing echoes.
The objects and icons promote a filmic revisionism that resists any smooth
or easily digestible version of the past while suggesting that in order to
go forward it’s best to go backward. A mess is very likely waiting for us
back there. But in each film the focus of investigation differs
—autobiography, racial or national identity, exigent details—pitched at a
different breaking point, and demanding somewhat differing tactics
(formal, emotional, conceptual, etc.) of re-examining the mess that many
might prefer to forget. Yielded in each case is a somewhat different
slice in the assessment of what has been left out of the account by
design, force, or accident. Afterwards, the gaps remain intact and still
very visible—there is no ultimate resolution.
FACE A FACE B Rabih Mroue 2003 9 min video Lebanon
Using simple delicate means (cassette tapes and old photos), exploring
gaps between memory and knowledge, physical evidence and identity,
recollection and survival, the autobiographical video moves through a
childhood marked by the Lebanese civil war to the present.
POW 57187 Vahid Zara Zade 2007 29 min. video Iran
An Iraqi prisoner captured during the Iran-Iraq War has lived his entire
adult life on the grounds of an Iranian prison. Though officially
released, he continues to decorate the prison’s buildings with murals,
continually changing them to fit shifting politics. With minimal supplies
and great imagination, he has pieced together a museum of life-size
sculptures and dioramas that reflect his experiences and those of his
fellow prisoners.
SCHWARZ AUF WEISS – DIE RÜCKSEITE DER BILDER / BLACK AND WHITE – THE BACK
OF THE IMAGES Klub Zwei (Simone Bader & Jo Schmeiser) 2003 5 Min. Austria
How has the media made use of the photo-archives of the Holocaust? If,
for instance, we haven’t ever investigated what’s on the back of these
photos? In this purely textual (black and white and voiceover) video,
Rosemarie Nief, librarian of the fotoarchives of the Wiener Library in
London, critically examines the issue.
LET ME COUNT THE WAYS: Minus 6 Leslie Thornton 2008 1.5 min. video US
Imagery the Nazis ordered destroyed: Hitler practicing his repertoire of
demagogic gestures for his speeches, a veritable template of the trained
spontaneity of the Great Leader in action, to the present-day.
EMERGENCY NEEDS Kevin Everson 2007 7 min. video US
Was it a civil disorder, a riot, or a rebellion in the ghetto of Cleveland
in 1964? Archival footage of black mayor Carl Stokes is strikingly
updated and reframed with a young black woman (in split-screen)
re-enacting Stokes’s extremely tense post-disorder news conference. The
past, we must realize, is not over. It’s not even past.
SLA SCREED Sharon Hayes 2002 10 min video US
Hayes attempts a word for word performance of a message kidnapped heiress
Patty Hearst sent to her parents during her captivity by self-styled
revolutionary group Symbionese Liberation Army. Off-screen voices
continually prompt the performer, correcting every mistake—a strangely
compelling yet matter-of-fact resurrection of mid-seventies U.S.
radicalism gone crazy, a past that cannot be squared with the present no
matter how hard the performer works to correct every error.
SCUM MANIFESTO Carole Roussopoulos/ Delphine Seyrig 1976 28 min. 16 mm
France
When Roussopoulos and Seyrig produced SCUM Manifesto, no publisher had
risked making Valerie Solanas’s notorious screed available in France—it
was truly matter out of place ( as per anthropologist Mary Douglas’s
definition of dirt). Their film enacts a performance of ‘publishing’
Solanas while essentially allegorizing the dynamics of female labor in its
depiction of dictation at a typewriter, a process increasingly interrupted
by a ceaseless montage of state (i.e. patriarchal) repression (throughout
the world) seen on a centrally placed television monitor.
89.5 min.
CONTESTED GROUND
“Any honest man in America is separate, or separates himself, from the
gloss of its image. But by being separate from that image a man is also
setting himself up to be murdered, one way or another.”—Leroi Jones in
Home: Social Essays, p. 185 (NY: William Morrow, 1966)
“Most seastories are allegories of authority. In this sense alone
politics is never far away. The ship is one of the last unequivocal
bastions of absolutism, regardless of the political system behind the
flag that flies from the stern…” --Allan Sekula (Fish Story, Rotterdam:
Richter Verlag, p.183)
Films that depict a distinctive range of resonant modes of cultural
resistance to the extraordinary powers of colonization and its brood,
including neo-colonialism and neo-liberalism and the colonization of
everyday life. These modes may even include or sample ghosts, the spirit
world, and the scars of war that mark the earth and the body. These films,
though standing uneasily, as it were, on the shifting sands of history
attempt nevertheless to contest the ground on which they stand. Chen
Chieh-Jen has said of his strategy in The Route: “Taiwan has become a
‘fast-forgetting’ consumer society that has abandoned its right to
‘self-narration’ and this has spurred me to resist the tendency to forget.
One of my methods of resistance is to view each film I make as an act of
connection, linking together the history of people who have been excluded
from the dominant discourse, the real-life situations of areas that are
being ignored, and ‘others’ who are being isolated. In this way, I resist
the state of amnesia in consumer society.”
TALKING TO THE DEAD Soon Mi-Yoo 2006 35 min. video US/ South Korea An
impassioned personal essay on the little-known role of the 320,000 South
Korean soldiers who fought for the United States during the Vietnam War,
with fascinating archival footage of Korea and original material. Mi-Yoo
visits a Vietnamese village once ravaged in a My-Lai style massacre by
South Korean soldiers and encounters raw anger and the wounded
recognition of the other. Ghosts still circulate wherever she looks.
LE GLAS Rene Vautier 1964 5 min. France
Made with Zapu (Zimbabwe African Party for Unity) about 3 African
revolutionaries who are hanged in Salisbury. Banned in France when it was
released, the film features voice-over by Djibril Diop Mambety. Visual
poem on the victims of history. Vautier: “Write history in
pictures—right now!”
TARRAFAL Pedro Costa 2007 16 min. Portugal
Shot on the haunted island of Fogo, site of the Tarrafal prison in which
political dissidents were tortured and killed for nearly forty years.
Maintaining an ironic yet terrifying tone, while evoking interchangeable
anonymity among the already displaced residents, who are subject to
arbitrary deportation by the state, Costa obliquely considers the desolate
dreams and the ravages wrought upon the poverty-stricken population.
THE ROUTE Chen Chieh-Jen 2006 14 min. video (silent) Taiwan
In stifling heat, Taiwanese dock workers break into a dock and formally,
with precisely choreographed gestures, enact their part in a world-wide
dockers protest that was forbidden by the Taiwanese government, in order
as one of their picket signs says to “Reclaim the Future.”
THE LOTTERY OF THE SEA Allan Sekula 2005 23 min video (overture) U.S. A
witty, deeply historical analysis of the dire impact of the powers of
globalization on maritime existence, rapidly setting in collision elements
of myth, Marxism, Hollywood, and the lore and lure of the sea. The film
reflects on the globalizing effects of classical economist’s Adam Smith’s
notion of the seafaring life as a form of gambling. Shot at locations
from Barcelona to Japan.
93 min.
Excessive Behavior: Performance as Political Intervention
“No one can control the single circuit-breaking moment that charges games
with critical reality. If the glass is cut, if the cushioned distance of
media is removed, the patients may
never respond as normals again. They will become life-actors.”—Digger
Manifesto 1966-67
“We were an advertisement for revolution.” –Abbie Hoffman, Revolution for
the Hell of It (New York, p. 184)
The overlap between the performative and the activist (both so dependent
on receptive public attention) is the crux of this program. This overlap
has always been perceptible in the exemplary theatrics of resistance that
enliven the parade, the protest, the demonstration, and the strike. This
dynamic has extended to the event, the created situation (pseudo-event),
the stunt/hoax as simultaneous aesthetic/political expression, which
sometimes become a kind of shock therapy to confront power and the
seductive/sedative sway of imagery.
Highlighting a tactical repertoire of inversion, masking, worlds turned
upside down, excessive behavior, song, erotic transgression, collage,
political pleasures, the carnivalesque, these films dramatize the at least
momentary disruptive capacity of activists and ordinary
people to assume agency at unpredictable moments of crisis or accession to
desire.
THE FLAG Koken Ergun 2006 9 min. video Turkey
Split-screen document of Children’s Day in Istanbul. How a child absorbs
and performs the patriotic in a public celebration in a packed stadium.
One little girl offers to “dig the grave of anyone who doesn’t look at the
flag the way (she does).”
ON THE ART OF LOVING Karpo Godina 1971 11 min 35mm Yugoslavia
Using non-actors as foils to musical performance, Godina assembles a
considerable part of the Yugoslavian army to forge an anti-war chorale in
the mountains. Meanwhile in the next village dozens of women are alone
and bereft while the soldiers are on maneuvers. Banned for the fun it
makes of the Yugoslavian army.
YIPPIE! U.S. Newsreel 1968 10 min. 16mm US
Produced by the collective U.S. Newsreel, shortly after the notorious 1968
Democratic Convention in Chicago, this film rapidly montages the absurdist
activities of the Youth International Party (Yippie!), prominently
including the nomination of a pig to run for U.S. president.
TERRITORIES Isaac Julien 1984 25 min 16mm Great Britain
The Notting Hill Carnival (in London), the scene of police clashes in 1976
and 1984, becomes a privileged territory, as an event about resistance,
that enables carnival participants to explore contradictions of race,
class, and sexuality. In referring to the ‘his-stories’ and ‘her-stories’
contained in history, the film emphasizes the territory of the
dialogical.
JACK SMITH Birgit Hein 1974 10 min 16mm Germany
At a zoo in Cologne the legendary performer/filmmaker writes checks to
gorillas and then, while garbed in an elaborate feathered head-dress,
expounds on the evils of museums and the exploitation of art by the rich.
Richly satirizes and metaphorizes the artist-patron relation as a pampered
pet.
SCHMEERGUNTZ Gunvor Nelson & Dorothy Wiley 1966 15 min. 16mm US
Vomit, trash, and excrement all play roles in this juxtaposition of TV
images and the everyday life of the American housewife, a visceral
critique of patriarchal society. Has been called “one long raucous belch
in the face of the American Home.”
SEMIOTICS OF THE KITCHEN Martha Rosler 1975 6 min. U.S.
A classic feminist performative excoriation of domestic entrapment from A
to Z. Rosler says, “An anti- Julia Child replaces the domesticated
‘meaning’ of tools with a lexicon of rage and frustration.”
NOW Santiago Alvarez 1964 6 min. 35mm Cuba
A rapidly edited montage of black struggles in the early sixties cut to
the rhythms of Lena Horne singing (to the tune of Hava Negila!) a militant
civil-rights song.
92 min
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