Series of Collectively Produced Film/Video Starts Tonight
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Red Channels
Apr 13, 2011, 1:27:37 PM4/13/11
to Red Channels
Our Friendships are Constructed on the Basis of Conflict: Collectively
Produced Film & Video
13-17 April 2011
Spectacle Theater
124 South 3rd Street, Brooklyn, NY 11211
Who made these movies? We did it together! This series features films
and videos by media makers around the globe who operate as
collectives, using group identities rather than assuming individual
authorship. Whether a political statement or an artistic choice,
working collectively means combining many individual visions into a
cohesive whole--egos will be crushed. You will see television sets
thrown at riot cops and artistic musings on the collaborative process
among other things.
Featuring work by Chto Delat, CineManifest, Cinetracts, Groupe
Medvedkine, Grupo Ukamau, Newsreel, Pacific Street Films, Paper Tiger
Television, Raindance, TVTV, the Workers Film and Photo League, and
more.
WEDNESDAY 13 APRIL
7PM
—San Francisco Earthquake and Fire 1906 – Red Channels, 2009, 17
minutes
—La Commune – Armand Guerra, La Coopérative du Cinéma du Peuple, 1914,
19 minutes
—Yamamoto Senji’s Farewell Ceremony - Prokino, 1929, 2 minutes
—Yamamoto Senji Watanabe Masanosuke Worker-Farmer Funeral - Prokino,
1929, 11 minutes
—Twelfth Annual Tokyo May Day - Prokino, 1931, 7 minutes
—Workers Film and Photo League
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: ~75 minutes | Digital Projection
9PM
—Cinetracts – 1968, 75 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 75 minutes | Digital Projection
Both shows will feature live improvised musical accompaniment. 7PM:
Chuck Bettis (laptop electronics), Yuriko Huguchi (tenor saxophone),
Coralie Lonfat (laptop electronics), Joe Merolla (violoncello). 9PM:
Ras Moshe (saxaphone), Ken Silverman (guitar), Blaise Siwula (reeds)
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THURSDAY 14 APRIL
7PM
—Builders – Chto Delat, 2005, 8 minutes
—Media Primer (Schneider) – Raindance, 1970, 23 minutes
—Processed World Reads Processed World – Paper Tiger Television, 1985,
28 minutes
—Street Sheet – Paper Tiger Television, 1993, 28 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 87 minutes | Digital Projection
Discussion with Marty Lucas
9PM
-Detroit Workers News Special 1932: Ford Massacre – Workers Film and
Photo League, 1932, 7 minutes
-Northern Lights – Rob Nilsson & John Hanson, Cine Manifest, 1978, 97
minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 104 minutes | Digital Projection
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FRIDAY 15 APRIL
7PM
-Sandwiched – Chto Delat, 2004, 11 minutes
—Nightcleaners – Berwick Street Collective, 1976, 90 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 101 minutes | Digital Projection
9PM
-Lincoln Hospital – Newsreel, 1970. 12 minutes
-Blood of the Condor – Jorge Sanjines, Groupo Ukamau, 1969, 74 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 86 minutes | Digital Projection
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SATURDAY 16 APRIL
3PM
A collective brunch
5PM
—Inciting to Riot – Pacific Street Films, 1970, 35 minutes
—Taiwan: The Generation After Martial Law – Green Team, 1986, 58
minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 103 minutes | Digital Projection
7PM
—Mill-in – Newsreel, 1968, 12 minutes
—Ipimpi – Pacific Street Films, 1971, 10 minutes
—Help the Child, Help Your Country! – Voina, 2010, 2 minutes
—Por los circuitos de la Precariedad Feminina – Precarias a la Deriva,
2003, 50 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 74 minutes | Digital Projection
9PM
—Rhodia 4×8 – Groupe Medvedkine, 1969, 3 minutes
—Shut the Fuck Up – General Idea, 1984, 14 minutes
—Handsworth Songs – John Akomfrah, Black Audio Film Collective, 1986,
58 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 75 minutes | Digital Projection
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SUNDAY 17 APRIL
3PM
—My Journey with Hibakusha – Takashi Kunimoto NDS, 2010 64 minutes
5PM
—Garbage – Newsreel, 1968, 10 minutes
—GIs Take Manhattan: Operation First Casualty – Meerket Media
Collective, 2007, 5 minutes
—Cop Humiliation in His Own Domain – Voina, 2008, 12 minutes
—Anarchists Liberate the Deflating World – Glassbead, 2009, 9 minutes
—People’s Firehouse #1 – Newsreel, 1979, 25 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 61 minutes | Digital Projection
7PM
-Everything has been done – Azorro, 2003, 6 minutes
—Proto Media Primer – Raindance, 1970, 16 minutes
—Four More Years – TVTV, 1972, 61 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 83 minutes | Digital Projection
9PM
—Dick Captured by KGB! – Voina, 2010, 3 minutes
—And the War Has Only Just Begun – Imaginary Party, 2001, 18 minutes
—Get Rid of Yourself – Bernadette Corporation, 2003, 61 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 82 minutes | Digital Projection
Bernadette Corporation
Since 1994, the anonymous, international group of artists known as
Bernadette Corporation has explored strategies of cultural resistance
and détournement, appropriating contemporary entertainment modes for
their own experimental purposes. From the New York-based BC fashion
label, which garnered a cult following in the 1990s, and the magazine
Made In USA, launched in 1999, to the collectively-authored novel
Reena Spaulings (Semiotexte, 2005) and videos starring the likes of
Sylvère Lotringer and Chloe Sevigny, Bernadette Corporation’s
interventionist projects amount to a precisely-calibrated critique of
a global culture that constructs identity through consumption and
branding.
Berwick Street Film Collective
Formed in Britain in 1970, with members Richard Mordaunt, Marc Karlin,
James Scott and Humphrey Trevelyan. They were joined for Nightcleaners
by Mary Kelly. The aim of the collective was to produce films with a
social and community-based imperative.
Black Audio Film Collective
The Black Audio Film Collective was formed at Portsmouth Polytechnic
in 1982 by sociology, fine art and psychology John Akomfrah, Reece
Auguiste, Edward George, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, David Lawson and
Trevor Mathison. It was one among many such collectives founded in
Britain during the early- to mid- 1980s which produced works for
Channel 4. Although dealing with contemporary events such as
oppressive policing, riots, and unrest, inner city ghettoization and
the clearing and destruction of working class enclaves, they were also
responding to a more fundamental condition of the victims of
colonization and slavery. Instead of making propagandistic films in
response to these issues, they instead produced meditative works,
experimenting with form and presentation their slide films, and
exploring issues of memory, history, and identity through the use of
archival footage and examination of radical icons such as Malcolm X.
The group disbanded in 1998.
General Idea
The artist collective General Idea — AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge
Zontal — forged a unique conceptual practice that deployed parody and
irony to critique the artworld and popular media culture. In
performances, installations, video, photography, prints, and editions,
they explored social phenomena ranging from the production,
distribution and consumption of mass media images to gay identity and
the AIDS crisis. General Idea worked together from 1969 until the
deaths of Partz and Zontal in 1994.
Green Team
The video movement in Taiwan made successful use of home cassette
distribution, via both mail and street vendors. The Green Team
collective pioneered in this effort with over 100 titles in
distribution, documenting the struggles of farmers, students, workers
and environmentalists. In a show of force against the repressive state
television system, they took to the airwaves with a low power pirate
TV transmission which included scenes of a massive demonstration where
dozens of TV sets were thrown at the gates of the Taiwan TV station.
Meerkat Media Collective is a self-organized community of makers
committed to creating innovative and thought-provoking film and new
media. Inspired by the communal nature of meerkats, they value shared
authorship and consensus process in their day-to-day operations as
well as in their artistic endeavors. Under a cooperative model,
members give creative and administrative time to the collective in
exchange for material and non-material support. They share skills,
equipment and ideas with a firm belief that a healthy, inclusive
process is as important as crafting quality work.
NDS (Nakazaki-cho Documentary Space)
NDS, a group of documentarians, based in Kamagasaki Osaka, have been
braving police harassment and repression to chart new territory at the
intersection of filmmaking and community organizing. They have been
documenting and participating urban struggles around labor, urban
development, and housing issues.
Newsreel
Established in December 1967 as Newsreel, an activist filmmaker
collective, this NY group grew to become a network with chapters
across the US. Its different chapters produced and distributed short
16mm films covering the anti-war and women’s movements, Civil and
human rights movements, getting unique access to such groups as the
Black Panther Party and the Young Lords Party. The New York Newsreel
became Third World Newsreel (TWN) in the mid-70s and strengthened its
commitment to developing filmmakers and audiences of color. Today, TWN
carries on the progressive vision of its founders, and remains the
oldest media arts organization in the U.S. devoted to cultural workers
of color and their global constituencies.
Paper Tiger
Paper Tiger Television, through the collaborative efforts of artists,
activists and scholars, has pioneered experimental, innovative and
truly alternative community media since 1981. An early innovator in
video art and public access television of the early 80’s, PTTV
developed a unique, handmade, irreverent aesthetic that experimented
with the television medium by combining art, academics, politics,
performance and live television.
The Proletarian Film League of Japan (日本プロレタリア映画同盟, Nihon Puroretaria
Eiga Dōmei?) was a left-wing film organization, known as Prokino for
short, active in the late 1920s and early 1930s in Japan. Associated
with the proletarian arts movement in Japan, it primarily used small
gauge films such as 16mm film and 9.5mm film to record demonstrations
and workers’ lives and show them in organized events or, using mobile
projection teams, at factories and mines. It also published its own
journals. Most of its films were documentaries or newsreels, but
Prokino also made fiction films and animated films. Prominent members
included Akira Iwasaki and Genjū Sasa, although in its list of
supporters one finds such famous figures as Daisuke Itō, Kenji
Mizoguchi, Shigeharu Nakano, Tomoyoshi Murayama, Kiyohiko Ushihara,
Kogo Noda, Takiji Kobayashi, Sōichi Ōya, Fuyuhiko Kitagawa, Tokihiko
Okada, Matsuo Kishi, Kiyoshi Miki, Denmei Suzuki, Teppei Kataoka, and
Shigeyoshi Suzuki.1 The movement was eventually suppressed by the
police under the Peace Preservation Law, but many former members
became prominent figures in the Japanese documentary and fiction film
industries.
Raindance
Founded in 1969 by Frank Gillette, Paul Ryan, Michael Shamberg and Ira
Schneider, Raindance was an influential media collective that proposed
radical theories and philosophies of video as an alternative form of
cultural communication. The name “Raindance” alluded to what members
termed “cultural R & D” (research and development). Influenced by the
communications theories of Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller,
the collective produced tapes and writings, including the journal
Radical Software, that explored the relation of cybernetics, media and
ecology.
TVTV
Originally organized to provide alternative news coverage of the 1972
Republican and Democratic Presidential Conventions in Miami, Top Value
Television, known as TVTV was an ad hoc collective of videomakers that
defined the radical video documentary movement of the 1970s, known as
“guerrilla television.” TVTV subverted conventions of television news
and documentary reportage with its alternative journalistic
techniques, countercultural principles and pioneering use of portable,
low-tech video equipment.
Workers Film and Photo League
The Workers Film and Photo League in the United States (known as the
Film and Photo League after 1933) was part of an extensive cultural
movement sponsored by the Communist International and its affiliated
national parties in the interwar period. Specifically, it was a
section of the Comintern-control led Internationale Arbeiterhilfe or
Workers International Relief (WIR), founded at Lenin’s Instigation in
Berlin in 1921. But the WIR’s activities extended also into the mass
media and many cultural fields. The WIR’s next move was clearly to
stimulate indigenous production in the other countries in which it
operated. Since capital was not available for studio production,
emphasis inevitably came to be placed on low cost documentary and
especially newsreel forms.
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—La Commune – Armand Guerra (Le Cinéma du Peuple), 1914, 19 minutes
The first film depicting the story of the 1871 Paris Commune produced
by Le Cinéma du Peuple, a libertarian film cooperative. This
historical reenactment depicts the rise and fall of the Commune, which
grew from growing unrest among workers and the lower classes, and fear
of a royalist majority in the government, and anger over the defeat in
Franco-Prussian War.
—Yamamoto Senji’s Farewell Ceremony- Proletarian Film League of Japan
(Prokino), 1929, 2 minutes
On March 3, 1929 activist Yamamoto Senji was killed by a right wing
assassin. Yamamoto Senji was the son of a famous ryotei in Kyoto. He
was a doctor and scientist, and known for promoting birth control.
After an autopsy at Tokyo University, a procession took his body to a
public hall for a funeral. This is a documentary recording that
procession.
—Yamamoto Senji Watanabe Masanosuke Worker-Farmer Funeral- Proletarian
Film League of Japan (Prokino), 1929, 11 minutes
After cremation, Yamamoto’s ashes were taken back to his home at
Kyoto. Around the same time as Yamamoto’s death, another left-wing
leader named Watanabe Masanosuke committed suicide. Watanabe was the
chair of the Communist Party’s central committee and had been in
Shanghai holding a meeting. He stopped in Taiwan on his way home when
the people around him were all arrested. Tipped off by a spy, the
police surrounded Watanabe as he was waiting at a port for a ferry
home. He turned a pistol on himself and committed suicide. A combined
funeral procession for both leaders was held in Kyoto. Along the route
Prokino members from both Tokyo and Kyoto shot the footage for this
film. It is said that all the taxis in Kyoto formed a line that
started at Kyoto Station and ran slowly to Yamamoto’s home, a scene
captured toward the end of the film. One can also see many leaders of
the left in Kyoto, such as economist Kawakami Hajime.
—Twelfth Annual Tokyo May Day- Proletarian Film League of Japan
(Prokino), 1931, 7 minutes
Iwasaki Akira coordinated the entire Tokyo Prokino organization as it
photographed the 1931 May Day celebrations. They shot in both 16mm and
35mm (other 35mm productions were planned, but this is the only one
that achieved completion). A 16mm print was circulated around the
countryside by mobile projection units, and a 35mm print was shown at
Soviet film nights in Tokyo and Osaka. Unfortunately, only the first
half of the film is extant. The rest shows the end of the parade route
and a rally in Ueno Park. Although Prokino shot May Day parades
between 1927 and 1932, this is the only remaining film. A print was
given to the Soviet cultural attaché in Tokyo, but this print is also
missing.
— Cinétracts – 1968, 75 minutes
Chris Marker, Jean Luc Godard and Alain Resnais collaborated in making
and distributing “Cinétracts” one reel silent 16mm promotional pieces
with inter-titles intended as “news bulletins” for and about students
and workers during and around the May 1968 revolt. They were intended
as an alternative to the media that was censored and controlled by the
state. Due to the anonymous and collective approach of the directors
involved, no credits are given to identify who made each one.
—Builders – Chto Delat?, 2005, 8 minutes
In this video, members of Chto Delat? debate the potency and purpose
of collectivism. The Soviet Socialist Realist painting by Viktor
Popkov, from which the work takes its title, is the starting point for
this conversation, which questions merits and inspirational qualities
of the workers depicted in The Builders of Bratsk (1961). The potency
of this image is compared to the revolutionary potential of artistic
communities propelled by conversation and conflict.
—Media Primer (Schneider) – Raindance, 1970, 23 minutes
Raindance’s Media Primers reflect the group’s iconoclastic theories of
television and video, and their engagement with alternative and mass
media, pop culture and the counter-culture. The themes addressed –
media manipulation, the camera’s role in modifying individual behavior
– illustrate their experiments with the technological and conceptual
underpinnings of 1/2-inch portable video.
Merging alternative video and mass media, Ira Schneider’s Media Primer
juxtaposes cultural indicators, including television commercials, news
footage, and Portapak documentation of countercultural events such as
the Altamount rock concert.
-Detroit Workers News Special 1932: Ford Massacre – Workers Film and
Photo League, 1932, 7 minutes
The only newsreel coverage of the historic mass march in downtown
Detroit on February 4, 1932, against the starvation program of Hoover/
Murphy, and the armed, unprovoked attack by Dearborn police and Ford
“guards” on unemployed auto workers at the gates of the River Rouge
plant.
-Workers Newsreel Unemployment Special– Workers Film and Photo League,
1930-1931, 10 minutes
A record of the historic mass demonstration of the unemployed on March
6, 1930, in Union Square for government action on immediate relief and
jobs.
-The National Hunger March – Workers Film and Photo League, 1931, 10
minutes
The surviving film record of the first massive protest against the
federal government’s and big business’ failure to adopt programs to
alleviate the starvation and deprivation of 12,000,000 unemployed men,
women and youth.
-America Today– Workers Film and Photo League, 1932-1934, 10 minutes
A news review of mass actions in the streets in the critical
Depression years of 1932-34, filmed and edited from the working class
point of view.
-Northern Lights – Rob Nilsson & John Hanson, Cine Manifest, 1978, 97
minutes
A fictionalized account of a group of Norweigan immigrant farmers in
North Dakota who organized the Nonpartisan League in 1915 to resist
the control of farm prices and interest rates by East Coast
corporations. Winner of the Camera d’Or Award at the 1979 Cannes Film
Festival.
-Sandwiched – Chto Delat?, 2004, 11 minutes
Coinciding with the anniversary of the first Russian Revolution of
1905, artist cooperative Chto Delat? (What is to Be Done?) staged a
theatrical happening in which activists wearing sandwich boards
bearing text from Bertolt Brecht’s poem, “In Praise of Dialectics”
descend upon the square at Narva Gate, where the workers began their
revolt 100 years earlier. This piece is a reflection on a failed
revolution and the political potential that could grow from its ruins.
-Lincoln Hospital – Newsreel, 1970. 12 minutes
When a city-run health clinic in the South Bronx fails to meet the
needs of the city, local residents and health workers force a strike
and then run the clinic themselves.
-Blood of the Condor – Jorge Sanjines, Groupo Ukamau, 1969, 74 minutes
A dramatization of an Indigenous uprising against a Peace Corps medial
clinic which had been sterilizing Quechua women who visited the clinic
without their knowledge or consent. It is based on actual events,
which occurred in Bolivia in 1968 when the government imposed a
population control program aided by the U.S. Subsequently the film was
banned in both countries.
—Taiwan: The Generation After Martial Law – Green Team, 1986, 58
minutes
In 1949 the ruling Nationalist Party (KMT) imposed a strict martial
law on Taiwan, which lasted 38 years. Since this law was lifted in
1987, alternative media makers have joined farmers, workers and
students to press for social and political change. In a show of force
against the repressive state television system, the Green Team Video
Collective took to the airwaves with a low power pirate TV
transmission, which included scenes of a massive demonstration where
dozens of TV sets were thrown at the gates of the Taiwan TV station.
—Mill-in – Newsreel, 1968, 12 minutes
In order to raise the consciousness of New Yorkers, anti-war
demonstrators took to the streets on fashionable Fifth Avenue on
Christmas eve. To the dismay of the shoppers, their action snarled
traffic and stunted holiday consumption.
—Rhodia 4×8 – Groupe Medvedkine, 1969, 3 minutes
Groupe Medvedkine, started by Chris Marker, united workers with
filmmakers in the spirit of the Mai ’68 in an attempt to document the
condition of workers at factories like Rhodia in Besançon, the Peugeot
facility in Sochaux, and Kelton-Timex watch factory. In Rhodia 4/8
images of workers in the factories are accompanied by a haunting
melody sung by Colette Magny, legendary French avant-garde protest
singer.
—Shut the Fuck Up – General Idea, 1984, 14 minutes
“I don’t want to be a media whore!” Using ironic and iconic excerpts
from television and film from the 1960s, such as The Joker character
from Batman and part of the historic footage of artist Yves Klein’s
painting and performance from Mondo Cane, General Idea examine the
relationship between the mass media and the artist.
—Handsworth Songs – Black Audio Film Collective, 1986, 58 minutes
“There are no stories in the riots, only the ghosts of other stories”.
An experimental film essay on race and disorder in Britain, filmed in
Handsworth and London during the riots of 1985 that erupted in
reaction to repressive policing of black communities. It explores the
history and circumstances leading to the riots through newsreel and
archival material accompanied by an ethereal score.
—Garbage – Newsreel, 1968, 10 minutes
During a prolonged garbage collector’s strike in New York City, a
group of youths from the Lower East Side of Manhattan decide to use
the situation to make a political statement. They collect garbage from
the streets of their community and deposit piles of it on the grounds
of Lincoln Center, “The Establishment’s” cultural showcase.
—GIs Take Manhattan: Operation First Casualty – Meerket Media
Collective, 2007, 5 minutes.
The adage “in war, truth is the first casualty” is generally
attributed to the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, and the words
still ring true a few millenia later. Over Memorial Day weekend 2007,
members of Iraq Veterans Against the War revived Aeschylus’ saying
with Operation First Casualty. Simulating sniper fire and mass
detentions on the streets of Manhattan, these antiwar veterans brought
home a small piece of the Iraq War.
—Anarchists Liberate the Deflating World – Glassbead, 2009, 9 minutes
A film created for a three screen immersive installation. The No
Borders protest in Copenhagen during COP15 United Nations Climate
conference results in demonstrators liberating a huge advertising
globe set up in front of the house of parliament by the Danish energy
company.
—People’s Firehouse #1 – Newsreel, 1979, 25 minutes
“We’re making our point to the whole United States: you can fight the
system; and win!” The Polish Americans of Northside, Brooklyn realized
their community was under attack by the city bureaucracy: schools,
hospitals, and other services has been closed or cut back and the
neighborhood had began to decay. The closing of the local firehouse
was the last straw. They occupied the firehouse and began a campaign
to win back fire protection and revitalize their neighborhood.
-Everything has been done – Azorro, 2003, 6 minutes
Members of the Azorro super-group meet to come up with an idea for a
new art project. As the conversation progresses, however, it turns out
that – just as it happens in art – all ideas have already been
realized.
—Proto Media Primer – Raindance, 1970, 16 minutes
Raindance’s Media Primers reflect the group’s iconoclastic theories of
television and video, and their engagement with alternative and mass
media, pop culture and the counter-culture. The themes addressed —
media manipulation, the camera’s role in modifying individual behavior
— illustrate their experimentation with the technological and
conceptual underpinnings of 1/2-inch portable video. Paul Ryan’s Proto
Media Primer includes scenes of Abbie Hoffman awaiting the verdict
from the Chicago 7 trial and ironic man-on-the-street interviews.
—Four More Years – TVTV, 1972, 61 minutes
The landmark documentary Four More Years is an iconoclastic view of
the American electoral process, captured through TVTV’s irreverent,
candid coverage of Richard Nixon’s 1972 presidential campaign and the
Republican Convention in Miami. Using lightweight 1/2-inch portable
video equipment, the TVTV crew was able to plunge onto the Convention
floor for a close-up, subjective view of the proceedings. Whether
soliciting off-the-cuff analyses from Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite,
or making behind-the-scenes forays into the Nixon camp (with glimpses
of the Young Republicans’ maneuverings, the Nixonettes, and a
fundraiser with Tricia and Julie Nixon), the spontaneity and wit of
TVTV’s coverage results in fascinating, unorthodox broadcast
journalism.
—And the War Has Only Just Begun – Imaginary Party, 2001, 18 minutes
Love it or hate it, this Debord-esque tract from the Imaginary Party
(or the Invisible Committee, or Tiqqun. or the alleged Tarnac 9)
circulated on the internet in 2001 features images of the burning Twin
Towers and the black bloc-ers with a voice over addressing all the
lost children, " We need fiction to believe in the reality we’re
living. The Party is the central fiction, the one that tells the war
of our time."
—Get Rid of Yourself – Bernadette Corporation, 2003, 61 minutes
Called an “anti-documentary” by its authors, combines footage of
rioting at the 2001 G-8 summit in Genoa with performances by Chloe
Sevigny, Werner von Delmont and members of the Black Bloc anarchist
group. These elements yield a disorienting and critical video that
ultimately questions its own status and role as much as that of its
subjects.
- The Nightcleaners, part I – Berwick Street Collective, 1972-1975, 90
minutes
A documentary made by members of the Berwick Street Collective (Marc
Karlin, Mary Kelly, James Scott and Humphry Trevelyan) about the
campaign to unionize the women who cleaned office blocks at night and
who were being victimized and underpaid. Intending at the outset to
make a campaign film, the Collective was forced to turn to new forms
in order to represent the forces at work between the cleaners, the
Cleaner’s Action Group, the unions, and the complex nature of the
campaign itself. The result was an intensely self-reflexive film,
which implicated both the filmmakers and the audience in the processes
of precarious, invisible labor. It is increasingly recognized as a key
work of the 1970s and as an important precursor, in both subject
matter and form, to current political art practice.
- My Journey with Hibakusha – Takashi Kunimoto, NDS, 2010, 64 minutes
This documentary feature a group of more than 100 survivors of the
atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (hibukusha), who
cruised around the world in 2008 in a project organized by
nongovernmental organization Peace Boat to share their stories and
make a plea to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=175238402526064
www.spectacletheater.com
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Reading Capital, Repeated / Enigma, Repeated: Kluge and Trust
Saturday May 14th 2011 - 2PM
Brecht Forum
451 West Street, New York, NY 10014
2:30PM
--Grapes of Trust - Alexander Kluge, 2009, 120 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 120 minutes | Digital Projection
5PM
--News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx-Eisenstein-Capital - Alexander
Kluge (with Tom Tykwer), 2008, 84 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 84 minutes | Digital Projection
www.brechtforum.org
www.redchannels.org
www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=101837505379
www.groups.google.com/group/red-channels
Produced Film & Video
13-17 April 2011
Spectacle Theater
124 South 3rd Street, Brooklyn, NY 11211
Who made these movies? We did it together! This series features films
and videos by media makers around the globe who operate as
collectives, using group identities rather than assuming individual
authorship. Whether a political statement or an artistic choice,
working collectively means combining many individual visions into a
cohesive whole--egos will be crushed. You will see television sets
thrown at riot cops and artistic musings on the collaborative process
among other things.
Featuring work by Chto Delat, CineManifest, Cinetracts, Groupe
Medvedkine, Grupo Ukamau, Newsreel, Pacific Street Films, Paper Tiger
Television, Raindance, TVTV, the Workers Film and Photo League, and
more.
WEDNESDAY 13 APRIL
7PM
—San Francisco Earthquake and Fire 1906 – Red Channels, 2009, 17
minutes
—La Commune – Armand Guerra, La Coopérative du Cinéma du Peuple, 1914,
19 minutes
—Yamamoto Senji’s Farewell Ceremony - Prokino, 1929, 2 minutes
—Yamamoto Senji Watanabe Masanosuke Worker-Farmer Funeral - Prokino,
1929, 11 minutes
—Twelfth Annual Tokyo May Day - Prokino, 1931, 7 minutes
—Workers Film and Photo League
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: ~75 minutes | Digital Projection
9PM
—Cinetracts – 1968, 75 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 75 minutes | Digital Projection
Both shows will feature live improvised musical accompaniment. 7PM:
Chuck Bettis (laptop electronics), Yuriko Huguchi (tenor saxophone),
Coralie Lonfat (laptop electronics), Joe Merolla (violoncello). 9PM:
Ras Moshe (saxaphone), Ken Silverman (guitar), Blaise Siwula (reeds)
---
THURSDAY 14 APRIL
7PM
—Builders – Chto Delat, 2005, 8 minutes
—Media Primer (Schneider) – Raindance, 1970, 23 minutes
—Processed World Reads Processed World – Paper Tiger Television, 1985,
28 minutes
—Street Sheet – Paper Tiger Television, 1993, 28 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 87 minutes | Digital Projection
Discussion with Marty Lucas
9PM
-Detroit Workers News Special 1932: Ford Massacre – Workers Film and
Photo League, 1932, 7 minutes
-Northern Lights – Rob Nilsson & John Hanson, Cine Manifest, 1978, 97
minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 104 minutes | Digital Projection
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FRIDAY 15 APRIL
7PM
-Sandwiched – Chto Delat, 2004, 11 minutes
—Nightcleaners – Berwick Street Collective, 1976, 90 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 101 minutes | Digital Projection
9PM
-Lincoln Hospital – Newsreel, 1970. 12 minutes
-Blood of the Condor – Jorge Sanjines, Groupo Ukamau, 1969, 74 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 86 minutes | Digital Projection
---
SATURDAY 16 APRIL
3PM
A collective brunch
5PM
—Inciting to Riot – Pacific Street Films, 1970, 35 minutes
—Taiwan: The Generation After Martial Law – Green Team, 1986, 58
minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 103 minutes | Digital Projection
7PM
—Mill-in – Newsreel, 1968, 12 minutes
—Ipimpi – Pacific Street Films, 1971, 10 minutes
—Help the Child, Help Your Country! – Voina, 2010, 2 minutes
—Por los circuitos de la Precariedad Feminina – Precarias a la Deriva,
2003, 50 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 74 minutes | Digital Projection
9PM
—Rhodia 4×8 – Groupe Medvedkine, 1969, 3 minutes
—Shut the Fuck Up – General Idea, 1984, 14 minutes
—Handsworth Songs – John Akomfrah, Black Audio Film Collective, 1986,
58 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 75 minutes | Digital Projection
---
SUNDAY 17 APRIL
3PM
—My Journey with Hibakusha – Takashi Kunimoto NDS, 2010 64 minutes
5PM
—Garbage – Newsreel, 1968, 10 minutes
—GIs Take Manhattan: Operation First Casualty – Meerket Media
Collective, 2007, 5 minutes
—Cop Humiliation in His Own Domain – Voina, 2008, 12 minutes
—Anarchists Liberate the Deflating World – Glassbead, 2009, 9 minutes
—People’s Firehouse #1 – Newsreel, 1979, 25 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 61 minutes | Digital Projection
7PM
-Everything has been done – Azorro, 2003, 6 minutes
—Proto Media Primer – Raindance, 1970, 16 minutes
—Four More Years – TVTV, 1972, 61 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 83 minutes | Digital Projection
9PM
—Dick Captured by KGB! – Voina, 2010, 3 minutes
—And the War Has Only Just Begun – Imaginary Party, 2001, 18 minutes
—Get Rid of Yourself – Bernadette Corporation, 2003, 61 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 82 minutes | Digital Projection
Bernadette Corporation
Since 1994, the anonymous, international group of artists known as
Bernadette Corporation has explored strategies of cultural resistance
and détournement, appropriating contemporary entertainment modes for
their own experimental purposes. From the New York-based BC fashion
label, which garnered a cult following in the 1990s, and the magazine
Made In USA, launched in 1999, to the collectively-authored novel
Reena Spaulings (Semiotexte, 2005) and videos starring the likes of
Sylvère Lotringer and Chloe Sevigny, Bernadette Corporation’s
interventionist projects amount to a precisely-calibrated critique of
a global culture that constructs identity through consumption and
branding.
Berwick Street Film Collective
Formed in Britain in 1970, with members Richard Mordaunt, Marc Karlin,
James Scott and Humphrey Trevelyan. They were joined for Nightcleaners
by Mary Kelly. The aim of the collective was to produce films with a
social and community-based imperative.
Black Audio Film Collective
The Black Audio Film Collective was formed at Portsmouth Polytechnic
in 1982 by sociology, fine art and psychology John Akomfrah, Reece
Auguiste, Edward George, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, David Lawson and
Trevor Mathison. It was one among many such collectives founded in
Britain during the early- to mid- 1980s which produced works for
Channel 4. Although dealing with contemporary events such as
oppressive policing, riots, and unrest, inner city ghettoization and
the clearing and destruction of working class enclaves, they were also
responding to a more fundamental condition of the victims of
colonization and slavery. Instead of making propagandistic films in
response to these issues, they instead produced meditative works,
experimenting with form and presentation their slide films, and
exploring issues of memory, history, and identity through the use of
archival footage and examination of radical icons such as Malcolm X.
The group disbanded in 1998.
General Idea
The artist collective General Idea — AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge
Zontal — forged a unique conceptual practice that deployed parody and
irony to critique the artworld and popular media culture. In
performances, installations, video, photography, prints, and editions,
they explored social phenomena ranging from the production,
distribution and consumption of mass media images to gay identity and
the AIDS crisis. General Idea worked together from 1969 until the
deaths of Partz and Zontal in 1994.
Green Team
The video movement in Taiwan made successful use of home cassette
distribution, via both mail and street vendors. The Green Team
collective pioneered in this effort with over 100 titles in
distribution, documenting the struggles of farmers, students, workers
and environmentalists. In a show of force against the repressive state
television system, they took to the airwaves with a low power pirate
TV transmission which included scenes of a massive demonstration where
dozens of TV sets were thrown at the gates of the Taiwan TV station.
Meerkat Media Collective is a self-organized community of makers
committed to creating innovative and thought-provoking film and new
media. Inspired by the communal nature of meerkats, they value shared
authorship and consensus process in their day-to-day operations as
well as in their artistic endeavors. Under a cooperative model,
members give creative and administrative time to the collective in
exchange for material and non-material support. They share skills,
equipment and ideas with a firm belief that a healthy, inclusive
process is as important as crafting quality work.
NDS (Nakazaki-cho Documentary Space)
NDS, a group of documentarians, based in Kamagasaki Osaka, have been
braving police harassment and repression to chart new territory at the
intersection of filmmaking and community organizing. They have been
documenting and participating urban struggles around labor, urban
development, and housing issues.
Newsreel
Established in December 1967 as Newsreel, an activist filmmaker
collective, this NY group grew to become a network with chapters
across the US. Its different chapters produced and distributed short
16mm films covering the anti-war and women’s movements, Civil and
human rights movements, getting unique access to such groups as the
Black Panther Party and the Young Lords Party. The New York Newsreel
became Third World Newsreel (TWN) in the mid-70s and strengthened its
commitment to developing filmmakers and audiences of color. Today, TWN
carries on the progressive vision of its founders, and remains the
oldest media arts organization in the U.S. devoted to cultural workers
of color and their global constituencies.
Paper Tiger
Paper Tiger Television, through the collaborative efforts of artists,
activists and scholars, has pioneered experimental, innovative and
truly alternative community media since 1981. An early innovator in
video art and public access television of the early 80’s, PTTV
developed a unique, handmade, irreverent aesthetic that experimented
with the television medium by combining art, academics, politics,
performance and live television.
The Proletarian Film League of Japan (日本プロレタリア映画同盟, Nihon Puroretaria
Eiga Dōmei?) was a left-wing film organization, known as Prokino for
short, active in the late 1920s and early 1930s in Japan. Associated
with the proletarian arts movement in Japan, it primarily used small
gauge films such as 16mm film and 9.5mm film to record demonstrations
and workers’ lives and show them in organized events or, using mobile
projection teams, at factories and mines. It also published its own
journals. Most of its films were documentaries or newsreels, but
Prokino also made fiction films and animated films. Prominent members
included Akira Iwasaki and Genjū Sasa, although in its list of
supporters one finds such famous figures as Daisuke Itō, Kenji
Mizoguchi, Shigeharu Nakano, Tomoyoshi Murayama, Kiyohiko Ushihara,
Kogo Noda, Takiji Kobayashi, Sōichi Ōya, Fuyuhiko Kitagawa, Tokihiko
Okada, Matsuo Kishi, Kiyoshi Miki, Denmei Suzuki, Teppei Kataoka, and
Shigeyoshi Suzuki.1 The movement was eventually suppressed by the
police under the Peace Preservation Law, but many former members
became prominent figures in the Japanese documentary and fiction film
industries.
Raindance
Founded in 1969 by Frank Gillette, Paul Ryan, Michael Shamberg and Ira
Schneider, Raindance was an influential media collective that proposed
radical theories and philosophies of video as an alternative form of
cultural communication. The name “Raindance” alluded to what members
termed “cultural R & D” (research and development). Influenced by the
communications theories of Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller,
the collective produced tapes and writings, including the journal
Radical Software, that explored the relation of cybernetics, media and
ecology.
TVTV
Originally organized to provide alternative news coverage of the 1972
Republican and Democratic Presidential Conventions in Miami, Top Value
Television, known as TVTV was an ad hoc collective of videomakers that
defined the radical video documentary movement of the 1970s, known as
“guerrilla television.” TVTV subverted conventions of television news
and documentary reportage with its alternative journalistic
techniques, countercultural principles and pioneering use of portable,
low-tech video equipment.
Workers Film and Photo League
The Workers Film and Photo League in the United States (known as the
Film and Photo League after 1933) was part of an extensive cultural
movement sponsored by the Communist International and its affiliated
national parties in the interwar period. Specifically, it was a
section of the Comintern-control led Internationale Arbeiterhilfe or
Workers International Relief (WIR), founded at Lenin’s Instigation in
Berlin in 1921. But the WIR’s activities extended also into the mass
media and many cultural fields. The WIR’s next move was clearly to
stimulate indigenous production in the other countries in which it
operated. Since capital was not available for studio production,
emphasis inevitably came to be placed on low cost documentary and
especially newsreel forms.
---
—La Commune – Armand Guerra (Le Cinéma du Peuple), 1914, 19 minutes
The first film depicting the story of the 1871 Paris Commune produced
by Le Cinéma du Peuple, a libertarian film cooperative. This
historical reenactment depicts the rise and fall of the Commune, which
grew from growing unrest among workers and the lower classes, and fear
of a royalist majority in the government, and anger over the defeat in
Franco-Prussian War.
—Yamamoto Senji’s Farewell Ceremony- Proletarian Film League of Japan
(Prokino), 1929, 2 minutes
On March 3, 1929 activist Yamamoto Senji was killed by a right wing
assassin. Yamamoto Senji was the son of a famous ryotei in Kyoto. He
was a doctor and scientist, and known for promoting birth control.
After an autopsy at Tokyo University, a procession took his body to a
public hall for a funeral. This is a documentary recording that
procession.
—Yamamoto Senji Watanabe Masanosuke Worker-Farmer Funeral- Proletarian
Film League of Japan (Prokino), 1929, 11 minutes
After cremation, Yamamoto’s ashes were taken back to his home at
Kyoto. Around the same time as Yamamoto’s death, another left-wing
leader named Watanabe Masanosuke committed suicide. Watanabe was the
chair of the Communist Party’s central committee and had been in
Shanghai holding a meeting. He stopped in Taiwan on his way home when
the people around him were all arrested. Tipped off by a spy, the
police surrounded Watanabe as he was waiting at a port for a ferry
home. He turned a pistol on himself and committed suicide. A combined
funeral procession for both leaders was held in Kyoto. Along the route
Prokino members from both Tokyo and Kyoto shot the footage for this
film. It is said that all the taxis in Kyoto formed a line that
started at Kyoto Station and ran slowly to Yamamoto’s home, a scene
captured toward the end of the film. One can also see many leaders of
the left in Kyoto, such as economist Kawakami Hajime.
—Twelfth Annual Tokyo May Day- Proletarian Film League of Japan
(Prokino), 1931, 7 minutes
Iwasaki Akira coordinated the entire Tokyo Prokino organization as it
photographed the 1931 May Day celebrations. They shot in both 16mm and
35mm (other 35mm productions were planned, but this is the only one
that achieved completion). A 16mm print was circulated around the
countryside by mobile projection units, and a 35mm print was shown at
Soviet film nights in Tokyo and Osaka. Unfortunately, only the first
half of the film is extant. The rest shows the end of the parade route
and a rally in Ueno Park. Although Prokino shot May Day parades
between 1927 and 1932, this is the only remaining film. A print was
given to the Soviet cultural attaché in Tokyo, but this print is also
missing.
— Cinétracts – 1968, 75 minutes
Chris Marker, Jean Luc Godard and Alain Resnais collaborated in making
and distributing “Cinétracts” one reel silent 16mm promotional pieces
with inter-titles intended as “news bulletins” for and about students
and workers during and around the May 1968 revolt. They were intended
as an alternative to the media that was censored and controlled by the
state. Due to the anonymous and collective approach of the directors
involved, no credits are given to identify who made each one.
—Builders – Chto Delat?, 2005, 8 minutes
In this video, members of Chto Delat? debate the potency and purpose
of collectivism. The Soviet Socialist Realist painting by Viktor
Popkov, from which the work takes its title, is the starting point for
this conversation, which questions merits and inspirational qualities
of the workers depicted in The Builders of Bratsk (1961). The potency
of this image is compared to the revolutionary potential of artistic
communities propelled by conversation and conflict.
—Media Primer (Schneider) – Raindance, 1970, 23 minutes
Raindance’s Media Primers reflect the group’s iconoclastic theories of
television and video, and their engagement with alternative and mass
media, pop culture and the counter-culture. The themes addressed –
media manipulation, the camera’s role in modifying individual behavior
– illustrate their experiments with the technological and conceptual
underpinnings of 1/2-inch portable video.
Merging alternative video and mass media, Ira Schneider’s Media Primer
juxtaposes cultural indicators, including television commercials, news
footage, and Portapak documentation of countercultural events such as
the Altamount rock concert.
-Detroit Workers News Special 1932: Ford Massacre – Workers Film and
Photo League, 1932, 7 minutes
The only newsreel coverage of the historic mass march in downtown
Detroit on February 4, 1932, against the starvation program of Hoover/
Murphy, and the armed, unprovoked attack by Dearborn police and Ford
“guards” on unemployed auto workers at the gates of the River Rouge
plant.
-Workers Newsreel Unemployment Special– Workers Film and Photo League,
1930-1931, 10 minutes
A record of the historic mass demonstration of the unemployed on March
6, 1930, in Union Square for government action on immediate relief and
jobs.
-The National Hunger March – Workers Film and Photo League, 1931, 10
minutes
The surviving film record of the first massive protest against the
federal government’s and big business’ failure to adopt programs to
alleviate the starvation and deprivation of 12,000,000 unemployed men,
women and youth.
-America Today– Workers Film and Photo League, 1932-1934, 10 minutes
A news review of mass actions in the streets in the critical
Depression years of 1932-34, filmed and edited from the working class
point of view.
-Northern Lights – Rob Nilsson & John Hanson, Cine Manifest, 1978, 97
minutes
A fictionalized account of a group of Norweigan immigrant farmers in
North Dakota who organized the Nonpartisan League in 1915 to resist
the control of farm prices and interest rates by East Coast
corporations. Winner of the Camera d’Or Award at the 1979 Cannes Film
Festival.
-Sandwiched – Chto Delat?, 2004, 11 minutes
Coinciding with the anniversary of the first Russian Revolution of
1905, artist cooperative Chto Delat? (What is to Be Done?) staged a
theatrical happening in which activists wearing sandwich boards
bearing text from Bertolt Brecht’s poem, “In Praise of Dialectics”
descend upon the square at Narva Gate, where the workers began their
revolt 100 years earlier. This piece is a reflection on a failed
revolution and the political potential that could grow from its ruins.
-Lincoln Hospital – Newsreel, 1970. 12 minutes
When a city-run health clinic in the South Bronx fails to meet the
needs of the city, local residents and health workers force a strike
and then run the clinic themselves.
-Blood of the Condor – Jorge Sanjines, Groupo Ukamau, 1969, 74 minutes
A dramatization of an Indigenous uprising against a Peace Corps medial
clinic which had been sterilizing Quechua women who visited the clinic
without their knowledge or consent. It is based on actual events,
which occurred in Bolivia in 1968 when the government imposed a
population control program aided by the U.S. Subsequently the film was
banned in both countries.
—Taiwan: The Generation After Martial Law – Green Team, 1986, 58
minutes
In 1949 the ruling Nationalist Party (KMT) imposed a strict martial
law on Taiwan, which lasted 38 years. Since this law was lifted in
1987, alternative media makers have joined farmers, workers and
students to press for social and political change. In a show of force
against the repressive state television system, the Green Team Video
Collective took to the airwaves with a low power pirate TV
transmission, which included scenes of a massive demonstration where
dozens of TV sets were thrown at the gates of the Taiwan TV station.
—Mill-in – Newsreel, 1968, 12 minutes
In order to raise the consciousness of New Yorkers, anti-war
demonstrators took to the streets on fashionable Fifth Avenue on
Christmas eve. To the dismay of the shoppers, their action snarled
traffic and stunted holiday consumption.
—Rhodia 4×8 – Groupe Medvedkine, 1969, 3 minutes
Groupe Medvedkine, started by Chris Marker, united workers with
filmmakers in the spirit of the Mai ’68 in an attempt to document the
condition of workers at factories like Rhodia in Besançon, the Peugeot
facility in Sochaux, and Kelton-Timex watch factory. In Rhodia 4/8
images of workers in the factories are accompanied by a haunting
melody sung by Colette Magny, legendary French avant-garde protest
singer.
—Shut the Fuck Up – General Idea, 1984, 14 minutes
“I don’t want to be a media whore!” Using ironic and iconic excerpts
from television and film from the 1960s, such as The Joker character
from Batman and part of the historic footage of artist Yves Klein’s
painting and performance from Mondo Cane, General Idea examine the
relationship between the mass media and the artist.
—Handsworth Songs – Black Audio Film Collective, 1986, 58 minutes
“There are no stories in the riots, only the ghosts of other stories”.
An experimental film essay on race and disorder in Britain, filmed in
Handsworth and London during the riots of 1985 that erupted in
reaction to repressive policing of black communities. It explores the
history and circumstances leading to the riots through newsreel and
archival material accompanied by an ethereal score.
—Garbage – Newsreel, 1968, 10 minutes
During a prolonged garbage collector’s strike in New York City, a
group of youths from the Lower East Side of Manhattan decide to use
the situation to make a political statement. They collect garbage from
the streets of their community and deposit piles of it on the grounds
of Lincoln Center, “The Establishment’s” cultural showcase.
—GIs Take Manhattan: Operation First Casualty – Meerket Media
Collective, 2007, 5 minutes.
The adage “in war, truth is the first casualty” is generally
attributed to the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, and the words
still ring true a few millenia later. Over Memorial Day weekend 2007,
members of Iraq Veterans Against the War revived Aeschylus’ saying
with Operation First Casualty. Simulating sniper fire and mass
detentions on the streets of Manhattan, these antiwar veterans brought
home a small piece of the Iraq War.
—Anarchists Liberate the Deflating World – Glassbead, 2009, 9 minutes
A film created for a three screen immersive installation. The No
Borders protest in Copenhagen during COP15 United Nations Climate
conference results in demonstrators liberating a huge advertising
globe set up in front of the house of parliament by the Danish energy
company.
—People’s Firehouse #1 – Newsreel, 1979, 25 minutes
“We’re making our point to the whole United States: you can fight the
system; and win!” The Polish Americans of Northside, Brooklyn realized
their community was under attack by the city bureaucracy: schools,
hospitals, and other services has been closed or cut back and the
neighborhood had began to decay. The closing of the local firehouse
was the last straw. They occupied the firehouse and began a campaign
to win back fire protection and revitalize their neighborhood.
-Everything has been done – Azorro, 2003, 6 minutes
Members of the Azorro super-group meet to come up with an idea for a
new art project. As the conversation progresses, however, it turns out
that – just as it happens in art – all ideas have already been
realized.
—Proto Media Primer – Raindance, 1970, 16 minutes
Raindance’s Media Primers reflect the group’s iconoclastic theories of
television and video, and their engagement with alternative and mass
media, pop culture and the counter-culture. The themes addressed —
media manipulation, the camera’s role in modifying individual behavior
— illustrate their experimentation with the technological and
conceptual underpinnings of 1/2-inch portable video. Paul Ryan’s Proto
Media Primer includes scenes of Abbie Hoffman awaiting the verdict
from the Chicago 7 trial and ironic man-on-the-street interviews.
—Four More Years – TVTV, 1972, 61 minutes
The landmark documentary Four More Years is an iconoclastic view of
the American electoral process, captured through TVTV’s irreverent,
candid coverage of Richard Nixon’s 1972 presidential campaign and the
Republican Convention in Miami. Using lightweight 1/2-inch portable
video equipment, the TVTV crew was able to plunge onto the Convention
floor for a close-up, subjective view of the proceedings. Whether
soliciting off-the-cuff analyses from Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite,
or making behind-the-scenes forays into the Nixon camp (with glimpses
of the Young Republicans’ maneuverings, the Nixonettes, and a
fundraiser with Tricia and Julie Nixon), the spontaneity and wit of
TVTV’s coverage results in fascinating, unorthodox broadcast
journalism.
—And the War Has Only Just Begun – Imaginary Party, 2001, 18 minutes
Love it or hate it, this Debord-esque tract from the Imaginary Party
(or the Invisible Committee, or Tiqqun. or the alleged Tarnac 9)
circulated on the internet in 2001 features images of the burning Twin
Towers and the black bloc-ers with a voice over addressing all the
lost children, " We need fiction to believe in the reality we’re
living. The Party is the central fiction, the one that tells the war
of our time."
—Get Rid of Yourself – Bernadette Corporation, 2003, 61 minutes
Called an “anti-documentary” by its authors, combines footage of
rioting at the 2001 G-8 summit in Genoa with performances by Chloe
Sevigny, Werner von Delmont and members of the Black Bloc anarchist
group. These elements yield a disorienting and critical video that
ultimately questions its own status and role as much as that of its
subjects.
- The Nightcleaners, part I – Berwick Street Collective, 1972-1975, 90
minutes
A documentary made by members of the Berwick Street Collective (Marc
Karlin, Mary Kelly, James Scott and Humphry Trevelyan) about the
campaign to unionize the women who cleaned office blocks at night and
who were being victimized and underpaid. Intending at the outset to
make a campaign film, the Collective was forced to turn to new forms
in order to represent the forces at work between the cleaners, the
Cleaner’s Action Group, the unions, and the complex nature of the
campaign itself. The result was an intensely self-reflexive film,
which implicated both the filmmakers and the audience in the processes
of precarious, invisible labor. It is increasingly recognized as a key
work of the 1970s and as an important precursor, in both subject
matter and form, to current political art practice.
- My Journey with Hibakusha – Takashi Kunimoto, NDS, 2010, 64 minutes
This documentary feature a group of more than 100 survivors of the
atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (hibukusha), who
cruised around the world in 2008 in a project organized by
nongovernmental organization Peace Boat to share their stories and
make a plea to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=175238402526064
www.spectacletheater.com
---
Reading Capital, Repeated / Enigma, Repeated: Kluge and Trust
Saturday May 14th 2011 - 2PM
Brecht Forum
451 West Street, New York, NY 10014
2:30PM
--Grapes of Trust - Alexander Kluge, 2009, 120 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 120 minutes | Digital Projection
5PM
--News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx-Eisenstein-Capital - Alexander
Kluge (with Tom Tykwer), 2008, 84 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 84 minutes | Digital Projection
www.brechtforum.org
www.redchannels.org
www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=101837505379
www.groups.google.com/group/red-channels
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