Collectively Made Film and Video Series: April 14 schedule
Posted April 14, 2011 by molly_fair in Events
Here is the schedule for night two of our series Our Friendships are Constructed on the Basis of Conflict: collectively made films and videos presented by Red Channels and Spectacle Theater:
The namesake of our series is from Chto Delat's "Builders" which is screening tonight!
Thursday, April 14
at Spectacle Theater
124 South 3rd Street (between Bedford and Berry)
Brooklyn, NY
We decided to do this series out of our interest in the collective process, and what happens when artists intentionally share authorship of their work.
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 members of Paper Tiger Television and Marty Lucas of Paper Tiger and professor at Hunter College.
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
—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.
Chto delat? (What is to be done?) was founded with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism in early 2003 in St. Petersburg by a group of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod. It originally consisted of members Olga Egorova (Tsaplya), Artiom Magun, Nikolai Oleinikov, Natalia Pershina (Glucklya), Alexei Penzin, David Riff, and Alexander Skidan, Kirill Shuvalov, Oxana Timofeeva, and Dmitry Vilensky. Chto delat? works through collective initiatives organized by "art soviets," inspired by the councils formed in revolutionary Russia during the early 20th century. These "art soviets" wanted to trigger a prototypical social model of participatory democracy, translating an open system for the generation of new forms of solidarity into the realm of contemporary cultural work. The "art soviet" takes on the function of a counter-power that plans, localizes and executes projects collectively. For Chto Delat? this process results in artistic interventions, exhibitions, and artworks.
—Media Primer– Ira Schneider, Raindance, 1970, 23 minutes
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 Altamont rock concert.
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.
—Processed World Reads Processed World – Paper Tiger Television, 1985, 28 minutes
Processed World magazine was founded in 1981 by a small group of dissidents, mostly in their twenties, who were then working in San Francisco's financial district. The magazine's creators found themselves using their only marketable skill after years of university education: “handling information.” In spite of being employed in offices as “temps,” few really thought of themselves as “office workers.” More common was the hopeful assertion that they were photographers, writers, artists, dancers, historians or philosophers. In this video members of Processed World takes to the streets to fight “VDT” disease.
—Street Sheet – Paper Tiger Television, 1993, 28 minutes
This show provides a behind the scenes look at this San Francisco newspaper Street Sheet, produced and distributed by homeless individuals since 1989. The paper provides an ideal forum for the homeless to speak out against San Francisco’s continual “beautification” projects, stigmas against homelessness, housing, and poverty.
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.
—Northern Lights – Rob Nilsson & John Hanson, Cine Manifest, 1978, 97 minutes
A fictionalized account of a group of Norwegian 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.
Cine Manifest formed in San Francisco in 1972 with the goal of making Leftist documentary and fiction narrative features. Its members included Gene Corr, Peter Gessner, Judy Irola, John Hanson, Steve Wax, Rob Nilsson, and Stephen Lighthill. They believed in the collective style of filmmaking was the best way to reach that goal. Their members spanned a range of filmmaking experience from Hollywood to Newsreel. They aimed to create films that would appeal to a broad audience around issues of labor, and American populist history.
—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.
The Workers Film and Photo League in the United States was part of an extensive cultural movement sponsored by the Communist International and its affiliated national parties in the 1930's. Since capital was not available for studio production, emphasis inevitably came to be placed on low cost documentary and especially newsreel forms. Their footage of mass demonstrations of the unemployed during the Great Depression is some of the only film that survives from the perspective of the Left.
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