JULY's SCREENING: À nous la liberté, Rene Clair (1931)

Sunday 19th July
5pm at 56a Infoshop

À Nous la Liberté
Rene Clair, 1931, 97 mins


À nous la liberté is a landmark in the history of film comedy and sound film. Back in 1931 when almost all film directors in every country were cautiously using the new technology as a recording medium, Clair, with the help of Georges Auric's musical score, was exploring it as a creative medium. Throughout the film we see and hear many unusual sound effects and uses of recorded sound: the "sound" of assembly line mechanization done through music (using xylophones, among other instruments), aural flashbacks, singing flowers and more.



The film opens with an image of a wooden toy horse. Gradually we observe that this is an assembly line in a prison, staffed by prisoners. They sing (La liberté, c'est pour les heureux = "Freedom is for the happy") as they work.


The film follows the paths of Louis and Émile. At the outset, they are convicts in prison, forced to work on an assembly line. They are separated when Louis manages to escape and eventually becomes the owner of a vast phonograph factory. Through a series of mishaps, Émile finds himself working at the factory (initially not realizing who owns it). The friends reunite; while Émile tries to pursue a love interest (never realized), Louis is threatened by former convicts from the prison, now gangsters. The film climaxes at the dedication of Louis's new phonograph factory, where everyone chases after money which one of the gangsters had stolen from Louis. The film ends with Louis and Émile as tramps, extolling the virtues of freedom.



À nous la liberté clearly identifies the factory, school, and family as focal points of ideological domination. A seamless juxtaposition of the ideology of work and conformist pedagogy is achieved with one of the most celebrated shock cuts in early sound cinema. As Émile languishes in a grassy field within sight of factory chimneys, a disapproving policeman reproves him with the words 'Not working. Don't you know that...' - a sentence fragment that is finished by a schoolmaster dictating the words 'work is compulsory' to his captive class. After the camera tracks back to reveal a row of bored pre-pubescent children, the teacher continues his dead-pan dictation with the words 'because work is freedom'.



From Richard Porton's 'Film and The Anarchist Imagination' called 'Anarcho-Syndicalism and Revolt Against Work' that has a big chunk on Rene Clair and this film:
http://books.google.com/books?id=7_GPRz4Gis8C&pg=PA131&lpg=PA131&dq=a+nous+la+liberte+communism&source=bl&ots=yx8MFux8be&sig=mxnRwSj-mj3MfGTCnzt0K4MDxzk&hl=en&ei=yqceSviBFN7MjAfLnZWXDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#PPA131,M1

NEW TIMES for our upcoming FILM SCREENINGS

NOTE!! Both JUNE's film PITFALL and July's film A NOUS LA LIBERTE have been rescheduled from 3pm to 5pm!!

JUNE's SCREENING: 'PITFALL', Hiroshi Teshigahara (1962)

Sunday JUNE 21st 5pm

Pitfall
Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1962, 92 mins.



Based on the experimental fiction of postwar novelist Kobo Abe, Pitfall is a haunting, spare, and elemental, yet surreal and atmospheric portrait of alienation. Teshigahara weaves actual footage of coal miners and their hungry and desperate families into Pitfall to establish his sympathy for the workers, but do not expect a neo-realist call to arms.



The Plot of the film
Pitfall is set against the background of labour relations in the Japanese mining industry, but the film owes as much to surrealism as it does to "socially aware" drama. The mine in the film is divided into two pits, the old one and the new one, each represented by a different trade union faction. A mysterious man in white, whose identity we never learn, murders an unemployed miner who bears an uncanny resemblance to the union leader at the old pit and bribes the only witness to frame the union leader of the new pit. The two union leaders go to the murder scene to investigate only to come across the body of the witness, who has subsequently been killed by the man in white. They blame one another and begin a fight which ends in both their deaths. The film ends with the man in white observing them before riding off on his motorcycle, satisfied his mission is complete. Beyond this realistic plot, Pitfall shows us the realm of the dead as well as the living, as the ghosts of the victims look on, powerless to intervene in events and bring the truth to light.



It has been argued that the social and political concerns are almost secondary to the real ambition of Abe and Teshigahara, which is to create a narrative that operates on the level of a dream—or a nightmare. Nonetheless the film has a powerful resonance with the decades of struggles in Japan that followed World War II. One of most central of these being the Mitsui Corporation's Miike Coal Mine, where workers gradually built a powerful union during the early 1950s. Another being the wave of student and worker mass protests against ANPO - the Japan-US security treaty. These real world events pervade and haunt Teshigahara's film steeped as it is in an atmosphere of frustration, death and machinations over collective organisation.


19th May 1960: Japanese coal miners, wearing protective clothing, form a human barricade to prevent strikebreakers from entering the Mitsui Miike mine at Kumamoto.


Anti-ANPO protest, 1960?, Location unknown.





In 1951 Abe was organizing literary circles among factory workers, Abe was a member of the Communist Party while Teshigahara belonged to an artist’s circle called “Night Association” that Abe founded. Like Communists everywhere in the world during this period of Stalinism in crisis, both Teshigahara and Abe were beginning to become disenchanted at the time of Pitfall's making. Along with many other Japanese Communist artists and intellectuals, Abe ran afoul of the party leadership. Abe being among the 28 writers expelled in 1962.

Further reading
Otoshiana, 1962 [The Pitfall]
http://www.filmref.com/directors/dirpages/teshigahara.html
Pitfall (On Abe and Teshigahara's political affiliations)
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/06/23/pitfall/
About the Japan-US Security Treaty
http://www.united-red-army.com/?p=13&language=en
Short History of Japanese Left
http://iwaokitamura.hp.infoseek.co.jp/DOC/s002t001.html

MAY's SCREENING - Chop Shop

Sunday 17th MAY
3pm at 56a Infoshop


Chop Shop
Directed by Ramin Bahrani, 2007. 84 min.

Chop Shop is an intimate story about a brother and sister who live and work in apart of Queens, New York. The duo, Ale and Isamar, barely survive on the margins of a neighborhood that is far removed from middleclass America . Our characters almost never leave this labyrinthine network of garages, mud and highway. Both characters are played by non-professional actors — both of them get to keep their first names for their characters.



The film begins with Ale doing random jobs, but he eventually secures a job at the eponymous chop shop (a car workshop) — his surly yet sympathetic owner allows him to live upstairs, in a room that just about fits a bed, a fridge and a microwave. Ale is so resourceful that he even gets his sister a job at a food stall. They have a shared dream: running a small business out of van; both are saving for this automobile that has become the crux of their redemption. To say money is a recurring motif would be stating the obvious, inbetween the scenes of Ale counting his money there is nothing but work. When there is not work, there is looking to get work. Deferring sentimental reflection neither Ale nor the director, Bahrani, have any time for distraction, there is only survival – live/work – a relentless vision of labouring, hustling bodies.

APRIL's SCREENING: Don’t Touch The White Woman!

Sunday 12th APRIL
3pm at 56a Infoshop

Paris no longer exists. The destruction of Paris is only one striking example of the fatal illness that is currently wiping out all the major cities, and that illness is in turn only one of the numerous symptoms of the material decay of this society. But Paris had more to lose than any other. Bliss it was to be young in this city when for the last time it glowed with so intense a flame.
- Guy Debord, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni



******THIS FILM IS ALSO BEING SHOWN 21st MARCH 2PM AT THE RIO CINEMA WITH GUEST SPEAKER (WRITER/FILM-MAKER) NEIL GRAY******


Marco Ferreri, Touche Pas a La Femme Blanche / Don’t Touch The White Woman! (FR, 1973) 109 mins.

Following in the wake of his first considerable success, La Grande Bouffe (1973), Italian filmmaker Marco Ferreri decided to reunite

his ensemble cast and commence filming his next feature, Don’t Touch The White Woman!, right in middle of “le trou des Halles”, a crater formed by the demolition of the ancient market quarter in the centre of Paris. The crater, with its jagged precipices, sculpted by excavation machinery and dynamite, oddly resembled the panoramic canyons depicted in classical westerns.

The plot revolves around a droll and war-crazed General Custer (Marcello Mastroianni), arriving in France with the mission of “pacifying” and removing the natives, in order to clear the area for the construction of railroads (which happens to be the same reason for the actual dismantling of old Les Halles). The location’s particularity provided the locus for Ferreri to apply his particular vision of combined histories by overlapping alternate times and spaces in recent U.S and French history. Thus the natives stand in for the poor inhabitants of Paris, but also refer to the insurgent Vietnamese and Algerians fighting colonial power. War and capitalism, financial speculation and state intervention are connected in a farcical costume drama enacted in midst of the very present creative destruction of urban Paris.

">An essay on the film by Miljenko Skoknic:
http://marcoferreri.weebly.com/ferreri-femme-blanche.html

Script of Debord's In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni:
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/ingirum.htm

An invisible world of work?

I made this pamphlet to accompany Sunday's screening, but unfortunately ran out of time to print it in sufficient copies to distribute on the day. It will be available to download here and may be distributed at future screenings.

Michael Glawogger's film, Workingman's Death, makes the argument that in the 21st Century gruelling physical work has not disappeared completely but rather, by a post-fordist sleight of hand capital has shifted East and South away from a de-industrialising West to seek out cheaper labour in unregulated, non-unionised markets.

This online pamphlet seeks to raise the question of the representation of work. Bringing together two texts, one by Richard Pithouse and one by Sergio Bologna, each with completely opposing views of work, representation and social reproduction, this pamphlet is intended to critically question assumptions about an invisible but 'hegemonic' cognitariat labouring in the service economies of the Global North and an impoverished and aestheticised sub-proletariat labouring in the Global South.

Download the pamphlet
http://www.divshare.com/i/6813821-aab

MARCH's SCREENING: WORKING MAN'S DEATH

SUNDAY 15th MARCH
3pm at 56A Infoshop










Is heavy manual labor disappearing or is it just becoming invisible?
Where can we still find it in the 21st century?
Workingman's Death follows the trail of the HEROES in the illegal mines of the Ukraine, sniffs out GHOST among the sulfur workers in Indonesia, finds itself face to face with LIONS at a slaughterhouse in Nigeria, mingles with BROTHERS as they cut a huge oil tanker into pieces in Pakistan, and joins Chinese steel workers in hoping for a glorious FUTURE.

Meanwhile, the future is now in Germany, where a major smelting plant
of bygone days has been converted into a bright and shiny leisure park.




Work can be many things. Often it is barely visible; sometimes,
difficult to explain;and in many cases, impossible to portray.
Hard manual labor is visible, explainable, portrayable.
This is why I often think of it as the only real work.
Michael Glawogger






Concept and Realization: Michael Glawogger (FILMOGRAPHY)
Austria/Germany 2005 / 122 Min. / 35mm / 1:1,85 / color / DOLBY SRD-EX
Produced by: Lotus Film GmbH/Vienna and Quinte Film/Freiburg
with arte G.E.I.E.


http://www.workingmansdeath.com