The Yellow House of Cinema

Russian Film Symposium 2005
May 2-7, 2005

University of Pittsburgh

What feast is in the Yellow House afoot,
And wherefore are the multitudes there thronging??
— Boris Pil'niak, Mahogany

"Yellow house," a Russian colloquialism, means "insane asylum." Russia's film union and its principal screening venue is Moscow's famous House of Cinema. This year Pittsburgh's annual Russian Film Symposium invites you to visit the Yellow House of Cinema, a selection of Russia's newest and most interesting films.

"The Yellow House of Cinema" examines the themes, visual practices, and cultural politics in recent Russian cinema around issues of social psychosis, dementia, mania, folly, lunacy, aberration, and the absurd.

Descriptions of the italian social centres are incredibly lacking in english. This is easily the best text that I've found, and unsurprisingly it was written by Steve Wright, elsewhere author of the essential "Storming Heaven, Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism".

‘A Love Born of Hate’


Autonomist Rap in Italy

Steve Wright
In less than a decade, home-grown rap has carved out its own space
within Italy’s music scene. Emerging at the end of the 1980s from the
local squatting movement and riding the crest of nation-wide university
occupations shortly thereafter, Italian rap has since gone on to win a wide
audience throughout the country. Today its influence is also apparent within
the mainstream of Italy’s pop industry, with prominent performers such as
Jovanotti doffing their caps not only to those first rap posses, but also to the
political movement of ‘self managed, occupied social centres’ (CSOAs)
which produced them (European Counter Network, 1998).

Kim Paice writes:

"Art, State, Sabotage"

Kim Paice

In recent years, government has tended to see an ever-narrowing line between art and threats to the state.

When, on February 8th, Austrian artist Robert Jelinek — founder of the artists collective Sabotage — flew from Vienna to Cincinnati via Amsterdam and Detroit, he was carrying art and literature for the exhibition "Incorporated: a recent (incomplete) history of infiltrations, actions and propositions utilizing contemporary art" at the Contemporary Arts Center.

Between Detroit and Cincinnati, Homeland Security confiscated 33 passport-works by artist Heimo Zobernig, educational leaflets, and personal items from Jelinek’s belongings. Officials left an incomplete receipt for items in one suitcase.

They later explained seizing the art because it was “produced by an anarchy group called Sabotage which does not believe in international borders.” After a period of what one participant called “civil” negotiation, authorities returned the passports and literature to the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati on March 2. They are on view in Incorporated until May 8th.

CNN and other media outlets quickly compared the seizure to controversy over Robert Mapplethorpe’s exhibition in Cincinnati. Yet, the recent incident has new markings. Seizure of a foreign national’s property amounts to an international incident and fosters cultural isolationism.

While hardly comparable to criminal actions in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, this event also occurs on the world stage. It tells us that 15 years since the Mapplethorpe scandal, federal authorities have yet to learn that crusades against pornological and political art generate an audience and demand for such art.

"Desperately Seeking Susan"

Terry Castle, London Review of Books

A few weeks ago I found myself scanning photographs of Susan Sontag into my screensaver file: a tiny head shot clipped from Newsweek; two that had appeared in the New York Times; another printed alongside Allan Gurganus’s obituary in the Advocate, a glossy American gay and lesbian mag usually devoted to pulchritudinous gym bunnies, gay sitcom stars and treatments for flesh-eating strep. It seemed the least I could do for the bedazzling, now-dead she-eminence.

Stevphen Shukaitis writes:

"Walking We Ask Questions”

An Interview with John Holloway

From the Fall issue of "Perspectives on Anarchist Theory"

John Holloway and Marina Sitrin exchanged questions, answers, and more questions during the month of August 2004. John Holloway is the author of Change the World Without Taking Power (Pluto Press, 2002) and co-author of Zapatista! Rethinking Revolution in Mexico (Pluto Press, 1998). Marina Sitrin is the editor of Horizontalidad: Voces de Poder Popular en Argentina (Chilavert, 2005).

Marina Sitrin: Could you explain what events or activities in your life brought you to the point where you are now doing considerable theoretical, as well as practical work on the question of power and, specifically, to challenge the concept of taking power?

John Holloway: I think the most obvious starting point is a theoretical one. Trying to think about the state from the perspective of Marxist theory, I got into the so-called ‘state derivation debate’, a mainly German theoretical debate that took place in the early 1970’s. The main emphasis in the debate was on trying to understand the state as a specifically capitalist form of social relations. Although the actual participants in the debate developed this notion in different directions politically, to me it always seemed clear that the implication of the debate was that we could not think of revolution as taking place through the state, or in other words, that we had to try and develop an anti-state Marxism. Of course, this idea was very much bound up with the experience of 1968, of the struggles in the 1970’s and of the anti-Poll Tax movement in Britain in the later 1980’s.

"In Central Park"

Hal Foster



"The Gates", the orange portals and banners that punctuated many of the paths in Central Park from 12 to 27 February, were greeted with great delight. People were first softened up by the numbers – 7532 portals, 5290 tons of steel, 60 miles of vinyl tubing, 116,389 miles of pleated nylon, 23 miles of trails, $21 million in costs – and then worked over by all the wacky presentations by the Bulgarian-born Christo and his French-born partner Jeanne-Claude (she of the punk-red hair). Contemporary art is big, bright, expensive and eager to please, right? So maximise these qualities, involve as many people as possible (640 paid workers to assemble the gates and 340 volunteer ‘ambassadors’ to open them), and you have a winning formula. Scale of work and size of audience will trump everything else (the hero of the piece might be the head engineer), and the piece will triumph as spectacle. If the actual location of The Gates was the park, its effective site was the global media (including the souvenir market online): that is to say, its site was everywhere.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

Paul McCartney, Super Bowl Anarchist?

Anonymous Comrade

Fox and the Super Bowl thought they had it all figured out. They figured they'd avoid controversy all together by featuring unarguably one of, if not the most respected pop musicians of all time. Simple and sweet, one act, a maturing white man playing four of what most would agree are some of the greatest pop songs ever recorded. Classics, (as in Coca Cola Classic) sung by a classic, who laid the groundwork for popular music period. No dancers, no big current names, no young blood, instead a seasoned professional reciting what amounts at this point to elevator music.

Despite this idiot proof plan, despite the projections of patriotic images, Fox/NFL would not get there way so easily. Despite the giant card display that taunted "Na Na Na" in red white and blue at the colonized world, watching from their couches, a statement as controversial if not more than last years was made. The broadcast delay and the censors could do nothing.

E. Heroux writes:

"The Fascist Church"

E. Heroux

"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter." — Adolf Hitler, in a speech on April 12th, 1922.

It goes without saying that only some Christians are fascists; that not all Christians are fascists; that a few Christians went so far as to oppose fascism, for example under the Nazis in Germany. A few openly opposed Hitler's plans even when threatened with punishment of death, as in the tragic case of the Christian intellectual, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But it doesn't go without saying that most Christians in Germany willingly followed Hitler and supported the rise of the Nazis. And it doesn't go without saying that a substantial number of American Christians are now crypto-fascists as I began to suggest in a previous blog.

It bears repeating this history lesson here as nobody was taught it, (and I do apologize for the seeming cliche of having to drag in tired old Hitler yet again!). Be we live in ahistorical times where the entire past is like some dark basement we've never wondered about, but rather papered over with childish myths and Hollywood fantasies; where "reality-based" is somehow wrongheaded; where people shake their heads in denial when confronted with facts; where ahistoric anachronism rules in vapid ignorance not only of the past but equally of our own present, about which few know anything at all worth knowing. So, off my pulpit and onto just the facts:

Alan Moore writes:

From ZNet, the Parecon section
http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm

A Call to Artists: Support Parecon

by Jerry Fresia; December 15, 2004

A history of art over the last 100 years, not as the history of the product, the piece, but as the history of decision making within our industry, is the history of investors acquiring greater control over the distribution, the definition, and the making of art products – and thus over who we are. It is the history of power slipping further from the people who make the piece to the people who profit from the piece. Yes, there are individual art stars aplenty. But as workers in an industry, we are being ground into dust.

"Glowlab" New York City Psychogeographers Update

Christina Ray,

Dear friends of Glowlab,

As some of you may know, we've been working behind the scenes for the past several months to build ourselves a brand new website. We're excited to announce that beginning in mid-March, Glowlab will be published in the form of a bi-monthly web-based magazine for psychogeographic projects. Our regular members and guest contributors are getting set to bring you fresh psychogeographic adventures in the form of performances, walks, interventions, multimedia/tech-based work and more. Project documentation and related articles will be published in every issue, and we'll offer a running calendar of offline events for public participation.