Full Unemployment Cinema

Playtime

2012-01-08T05:11:00.000-08:00

Playtime (1967)
By Jaques Tati
France
125 min

Sunday 29th January | Doors 7pm | Free admission

At COLORAMA CINEMA
52-56 Lancaster St
London SE1
[THIS TIME WITH HEATING!]

DOWNLOAD THE PLAYTIME PAMPHLET FROM HERE!

Jacques Tati's Playtime is perhaps the only epic achievement of the modernist cinema, a film that not only accomplishes the standard modernist goals of breaking away from closed classical narration and discovering a new, open form of story-telling, but also uses that form to produce an image of an entire society. After building a solid international audience through the 1950s with his comedies Jour de fête , Mr. Hulot's Holiday , and Mon oncle , Tati spent ten years on the planning and execution of what was to be his masterpiece, selling the rights to all his old films to raise the money he needed to construct the immense glass and steel set—nicknamed "Tativille"—that was his vision of modern Paris. The film—two hours and 35 minutes long, in 70mm and stereophonic sound—opened in France in 1967, and was an instant failure.

Playtime is what its title suggests—an idyll for the audience, in which Tati asks us to relax and enjoy ourselves in the open space his film creates, a space cleared of the plot-line tyranny of "what happens next?," of enforced audience identification with star performers, and of the rhetorical tricks of mise-en-scène and montage meant to keep the audience in the grip of pre-ordained emotions. Tati leaves us free to invent our own movie from the multitude of material he offers.

One of the ways in which Tati creates the free space of Playtime is by completely disregarding conventional notions of comic timing and cutting. There is no emphasis in the montage to tell us when to laugh, no separation in the mise-en-scène of the gag from the world around it. Instead of using his camera to break down a comic situation—to analyze it into individual shots and isolated movement—he uses deep-focus images to preserve the physical wholeness of the event and long takes to preserve its temporal integrity. Other gags and bits of business are placed in the foreground and background; small patterns, of gestures echoed and shapes reduplicated, ripple across the surface of the image. We can't look at Playtime as we look at an ordinary film, which is to say, passively, through the eyes of the director. We have to roam the image—search it, work it, play with it.

With its universe of Mies van der Rohe boxes, Playtime is often described as a satire on the horrors of modern architecture. But the glass and steel of Playtime is also a metaphor for all rigid structures, from the sterile environments that divide city dwellers to the inflexible patterns of thought that divide and compartmentalize experience, separating comedy from drama, work from play. The architecture of Playtime is also an image for the rhetorical structures of classical filmmaking: the hard, straight lines are the lines of plot, and the plate glass windows are the shots that divide the world into digested, inert fragments.

By Dave Kehr

Read more: http://www.filmreference.com/Films-Pi-Ra/Playtime.html#ixzz1isGUpeJ5

  So Let Me Have My Fun!
A Canzonetta by Aldo Palazzeschi

(excerpt)

Twee twee twee,
froo froo froo,
eehu eehu eehu,
uhee uhee uhee!
The poet’s having fun,
he’s insane,
he’s out of control!
Don’t insult him,
let him have his fun –
poor guy,
these little pranks
are his only pleasure.

Cocca docca,
Cocca docca,
cock-a-doodle-doo!
What are these vulgarities,
these oafish strophes?
Liberties, liberties,
poetic liberties!
They’re my passion.

Farafarafarafa,
Tarataratarata,
Paraparaparapa,
Laralaralarala!
Know what this is?
It’s very advanced stuff,
nothing silly –
it’s the chaff
of other poems.

Sick to Death Double Bill

2011-12-12T03:31:00.000-08:00

Death of Mr Lazarescu / The Kingdom
Sunday 18 December | Doors 7pm | Admission Free

Riget / The Kingdom - First Episode - Day 1: "Den hvide flok" / "The Unheavenly Host"(1994)
By Lars von Trier
Denmark (60mins)

Moartea domnului Lazarescu / The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005)
By Cristi Puiu and Razvan Radulescu
Romania (150min)

The process by which Mr Dante Remus Lazarescu becomes neglected, is also that by which the film connects him to a dying potentiality which could only be realised through him. This flickering potential, a shadow in his shape, a shadow that is the image-object to which the care of others might be attached, and which has hitherto only appeared within a set of relations defined by his insignificance, is both realised by the film and closed out unrealised by the institution which it portrays. Biopower forecloses on all discourses of redemption and seeks instead to realise, or manufacture, the tangible potentials which it identifies in individuals. Where no useful, achievable, measurable potential is identified its institutions find no purpose, nothing to work on – the shadow, the potential that is care for care’s sake, is dispersed. Mr Lazarescu’s lonely fate is also the fate of the potential that is his alone and which he might have realised in a life lived otherwise. At the end of his life he carries his shadow down into the void. And a potential for society, with him as one of its centres, an alternative circumstance structured on other relations, and other procedures, other means of caring and prioritising, dies with him.
http://theanvilreview.org/movie/dark-passage/">

A pamphlet has been produced to accompany the screening

AT

Colorama Cinema
52-56 Lancaster Street
London SE1

2011-2012 Programme

2011-11-24T03:20:00.000-08:00

FULL UNEMPLOYMENT CINEMA

2011-2012 Programme

25 SEPTEMBER – Old School of Capitalism
30 OCTOBER – Elephants' Graveyard / Pretty Dyana
27 NOVEMBER – Jeanne Dielman... / Saute Ma Ville

18 DECEMBER – Death of Mr Lazarescu / The Kingdom

29 JANUARY – Playtime
26 FEBRUARY – VW Complex / Dove On The Roof

25 MARCH – Louise Michel / Shot in the Factory

29 APRIL – Prostitute / Qualeh – Woman's Quarter

27 MAY – News From the Ideological Antiquity

Full Unemployment Cinema
http://unemployedcinema.blogspot.com/

COLORAMA CINEMA

We are just one of the groups showing films at a self-organised, independent cinema in South London.

Colorama Cinema screenings and info
http://coloramacinema.tumblr.com/

Thorough Cleaning Double Bill

2011-11-18T09:56:00.000-08:00

Sunday 27 November | Doors 7pm | Admission Free
Now with Added RAGE
presentation by Rage of Maidens: http://rageofmaidens.wordpress.com/

Saute ma ville, 1968 text
by Chantal Akerman
(Belgium, 13mins)
+
MAIN FEATURE
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080, Bruxelles, 1975 text

by Chantal Akerman
(Belgium, 201mins)

A pamphlet has been produced to accompany the screening

AT

Colorama Cinema
52-56 Lancaster Street
London SE1

Saute ma ville

2011-10-23T15:40:00.000-07:00

In Saute ma ville, Akerman’s first film, a sprightly Chantal bounds up the steps leading to a tiny studio apartment, mostly taken up by a kitchen. Her determination and precision are evident, but the tasks follow a not altogether clear pattern. As she energetically polishes her shoes, Akerman keeps going with the same obsessive gesture – until she has also brushed her legs and stained the floor around it black. The same gesture seems to produce at once disarray and tidiness. For a while, it is enthralling to try to sort out one from the other. The pleasure derived from witnessing these fully finished actions follows from the rapidity with which mess and neatness (contrasting sharply with each other) are reciprocally wiped out. The framing of these unexplained gestures can be likened, in its reduction of focus, to the single-shot frame of minimalist films trained on a single action carried to completion. But while the action in Richard Serra’s Hands Scraping (1971) comes to a close on a blank, clean screen, Akerman’s space is not neutral. The kitchen immediately defines a domestic space, and other social indices are marginally present.

With the kitchen fully in order, Chantal eats spaghetti, spills wine and food over herself. She then she leans her head on the stove and lights a match. The explosion happens over a freeze frame, in sound only. Here, she presents us with the literal image of a compression chamber, the implicit consequence of the mad chemistry she performs in every one of her boxed-in spaces. Saute ma ville announces, literally and with a bang, Akerman’s entry into artistic adulthood. It is well known that suicide is a favorite subject of adolescents’ first films. Indeed, it would be interesting to check if those who go on to live creatively declare so loudly, as Akerman does in this filmic rite of passage, their future tools, elements, genres. Brushes, spaghetti, water and soap dance animistically with Akerman. In this first film-room, droll humor and tragedy, slapstick and rigorously concerted process alternate in disturbing in-distinction. Saute ma ville presents in swift succession – as if they all pertained to the same order of events – cleaning, cooking and committing suicide. This perversion of categories, of banal and dramatic, of the literally performed action taken to the point of a suggested death, is frontally presented, enhancing these actions’ paradoxical equivalence.

With Jeanne Dielman comes the structural lesson: the stark separation between the scene and the obscene defines how an excessively dutiful domestic concern replaces the desire relegated to the elided room. In Akerman, every single space stared at for too long will bear witness to the cost of this economy. In a didactic exposure of the fragility of order, the frame remains the same whether a fork falls, dishes remain unwashed, or a shoebrush drops. This intrusion of objects moving on their own gives plastic shape to the unwelcome, recurring thoughts that obsessive-compulsive characters attempt to suppress.

Excessive doubting is the most common feature of this condition. In Monomania: the Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art, Marina Van Zuylen brilliantly explores how the panic of the mutable engenders the idée fixe and obsessive behavior. (10) Even though rituals are an important part of day-to-day life, and normal people use concentration to keep away what is irrelevant, the obsessive-compulsive finds the manifestation of ambivalence unbearable. A submission to external orders and schedules always feels better than having to decide for oneself. Manic activity is an attempt to bypass a depressed sense of autonomy through a minute, circumscribed competence. The escape from situations felt as being too contingent, too confusing to bear, is performed through invented orders, made-up series and a reasoning that is mostly lacking in logic.

see more at: http://www.rouge.com.au/10/akerman.html

Kate Millett pare de la prostitution avec des féministes

2011-10-23T15:32:00.000-07:00

In 1975 when prostitutes go on strike and after the publication of her book, Kate Millett discusses prostitution issues with French feminists (Monique Wittig, Christine Delphy...)

Disobedient Video in France in the 1970s: Video Production by Women’s Collectives

Stéphanie Jeanjean

Cathy Bernheim, Ned Burgess, Catherine Deudon, Suzanne Fenn and Annette Levy-Willard, Grève des femmes à Troyes (Womens Strike in the City of Troyes), 1971, black and white video, sound, 55min. Courtesy Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir (archive and distribution)

The ongoing reconstruction of early video’s history shows a wider usage of the medium at its start than previously thought, and particularly an expanded relationship to performance, documentary and archives. Also coming to light is the sociopolitical substance of its content, and the leading role of women in exploiting video as a new audiovisual medium. In France women developed a militant practice with video soon after the Sony Portapak camera became available in 1968. Their production and activities remain, even today, almost undocumented, and to a certain extent this stems from their anti-institutional and anti-establishment position. However, these collectives, whose members rarely identified themselves as artists, created the majority of the video produced in France in the 1970s, and arguably represent the first generation that truly and independently used video. Their example brings up several questions, such as why video became such a privileged medium for collectives, especially those composed of women.¹ Was video instrumental in the process of women’s emancipation and self-representation and, beyond, in the constitution of themselves as individuals and as a collective unit? And finally, how did early video cope with the limited conditions of distribution available at the time, and what is the current status of this production?

The adoption of video by women was certainly a gesture of disobedience and emancipation. The video historian Anne-Marie Duguet recalls that in the 1970s opportunities for women to embrace careers in technology were limited by familial and social pressures.² By contrast, video was a new and open medium not yet appropriated by men and not even taught in art schools or universities. Thus it spread through female communities after a few women, who were either self-taught or had trained at places such as The Kitchen in New York, started organising video workshops for other women. Carole Roussopoulos organised such training sessions in Paris in 1975. Originally from Switzerland, Roussopoulos moved to Paris in 1967 to study art history at the Sorbonne. In 1969, she is said to have been the first woman to buy a video camera in France (and the second person after Jean-Luc Godard).³ In 1975, in her ‘Introduction to Video’ workshop held in her apartment in the fourteenth arrondissement, she met the translator Ioana Wieder and the actress Delphine Seyrig;⁴ together they founded the collective Les Femmes s’amusent (Women Are Having Fun), later renamed Les Insoumuses, and created some of the most significant videotapes from the time. ‘Insoumuses’ was a neologism combining ‘insoumise’, which translates as ‘disobedient’, and ‘muses’, a word sharing the same signification in both French and English and customarily thought of as referring to female personifications for artistic inspiration.

The collective was the organisational mode most commonly associated with early video production in France. The cost of purchasing new technology — video was cheaper than film, but still relatively expensive — encouraged the tendency to work in couples, groups or collectives. However, beyond sharing equipment, technical skills, common interests and ideas, collectives also represented for women in France a new societal behaviour that perpetuated some of the ideals and ethics that had been envisioned and experimented with during May ’68, particularly those concerning better relations between genders and classes. Thus, collectives developed as flexible and anti -authoritarian structures that opposed sexism and exclusion — forms of oppression women had experienced in other audiovisual media, such as television and cinema, as well as more generally at the workplace. Early video in France coincided with the emergence of second-wave feminism, for which the lack of women-led organisations was a major concern. As early as 1949, in her crucial book The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir explained:

Women lack concrete means for organising themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the correlative unit. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own […] They live dispersed among males, attached through residence, housework, economic conditions and social standing to certain men — fathers or husbands — more firmly than they are to other women.⁵

Along with de Beauvoir, whom they considered an inspiration and an encouragement, the women who started meeting regularly in the spring of 1970 at the amphitheatre of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris recognised that the creation of female organisations fighting women’s seclusion and misinformation was critical for their emancipation.

That same year, they formed the MLF, or Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (Women’s Liberation Movement), which became the first and foremost feminist organisation active in France in the 1970s.

Gender and Class Struggle in the Workplace

Though early video embraced a diversity of causes — domestic violence, rape, prostitution, abortion rights, dictatorship, homosexuality and female sexuality — production in France in the 1970s significantly centred on women’s experiences at work, especially in factories, where they were predominantly employed. The prerogative of women to work gained urgency in the precarious economic conditions of the time, especially following the 1973 oil crisis, when women’s jobs were often the first to be lost. The situation resulted in numerous women-led strikes. The most significant production on this topic was a series of six videos titled LIP, created between 1973 and 1976 by Carole Roussopoulos with Vidéo Out, the collective she founded with her husband, Paul Roussopoulos. LIP was a watch factory in Besançon, in eastern France, with a workforce that was more than seventy per cent female, and which became the scene of massive demonstrations from 1973 to 1976. In LIP, Carole Roussopoulos makes women the main subject, the video alternating between footage of demonstrations and extensive testimonials by LIP workers. Immediate and personal histories unfold slowly over each interview. Roussopoulos understands that video gives voice not only to her as a director, but also, perhaps especially, to those who stand in front of her camera. In LIP her camera is attracted to charismatic female personalities; there is Monique, for example, whom Roussopoulos met among a crowd of demonstrators while shooting LIP 1: Monique, the first video of the series, in 1973.⁶ Monique reappears regularly in the series to share her experiences of the conflict and discuss the intricacies of the factory world and the place of women as workers. In particular, she explains that women organised themselves during the strike into a unit, which she describes as a major change in comparison to the arrogant, ‘petit bourgeois’ atmosphere that used to reign in the factory, especially among women. As the LIP project unfolds, Roussopoulos confronts the experiences of different women, which allows a diversity of viewpoints on the social conflict; for example, in LIP 5, realised in 1976, Christiane stands out in a video-portrait in which she articulates at length her experience with the factory unions, and her difficulties in being listened to by her male representatives as she tries to integrate herself into the union as an active member. In the 1970s, French unions were still a patriarchal bastion of the industrial sector that resisted women’s participation, even at LIP, despite its largely female workforce.

Vidéo Out (Carole and Paul Roussopoulos), LIP 1: Monique, 1973, black and white video, sound, 25min, from the series LIP. Courtesy Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir (archive) and Association Carole Roussopoulos (distribution)
Beyond the gender struggle, the LIP series also exposes disguised class issues among female workers. Monique and Christiane, for example, represent different classes of employees in the factory’s hierarchy: Monique is part of the administrative staff, while Christiane is a manual worker. Both explain that, before the social conflict broke out, they were not used to communicating with one another; however, during the strike they share the possibility of being laid off from their jobs, which leads them to an awareness, as women, of mutual difficulties and restrictions. LIP demonstrates that in the 1970s the class struggle had also infected the industrial sector: in other words, what Monique formulated as the ‘petit bourgeois’ behaviour that divided female factory workers into different castes was typical of the correlation between gender and class issues in the workplace.

The LIP video series was not the only production addressing this topic; Grève des femmes à Troyes (Women's Strike in the City of Troyes, 1971) is commonly accepted as the first feminist video produced in France. It was created by five women from the MLF, who, in an act of solidarity and with no previous experience in video, travelled to Troyes to record the first women’s strike in a hosiery factory there.⁷ Again the production is dedicated to a charismatic woman worker, Doudou, who remains at the centre of the camera’s eye for 55 minutes, relating with eloquence and passion the occupation of the factory and the camaraderie among the women, both unlike anything she has ever experienced before.

Common to this type of video production was the use of the camera to record interviews, making the video-portrait a key genre for early video. Encouraging individual expression, the productions lacked scripts and were characterised by unedited recording and anti-acting qualities, contrasting with the finished quality of narrative cinema. There were also technological possibilities and limitations specific to video in its early stages of development that explain the resulting realist quality of this production. Indeed, the endless and uninterrupted recordings of personal histories so common at the beginning of video can be explained by the relative affordability of videotape, along with the absence of editing technology.⁸ The ability to record in real time and erase any unwanted takes quickly created a climate of spontaneity and confidence between director and subject that did not exist in cinema.⁹ Because of this, video allowed more fluid exchanges and communications among participants, who were most commonly anonymous or amateur. In fact, videos by women’s collectives were rarely signed, or were done so only with the first names or nicknames of their participants. This obviously negated authorship as an individual creative gesture and, by contrast, contributed to the formulation of a collective expression allied with the formation of a climate of sisterhood.

Institutional Criticism and Counter-Information

Also at stake was video’s ability to offer a more democratic and egalitarian experience than other audiovisual media could, television in particular. Television’s status as a public service funded and overseen by the French state, the massive invasion of TV sets in French households in the 1960s and television’s total interruption of emission during the events of May ’68 had raised suspicions and singled out the medium as a target for militant video. The video Maso et Miso vont en bateau (Maso and Miso Are in the Same Boat, 1976), for instance, focuses on the climate of misogyny and sexism still dominant in French television in the 1970s.¹⁰Videos by women’s collectives were rarely signed, or only with the first names or nicknames of their participants; this obviously negated authorship as an individual creative gesture and, by contrast, contributed to the formulation of a collective expression allied with the formation of a climate of sisterhood.Maso and Miso was created by Les Insoumuses from a recording by Delphine Seyrig of a television show that aired on Antenne 2 (Channel Two) and was hosted by Bernard Pivot, a journalist and interviewer known today as one of French television’s erudite personalities but who was famous in the 1970s for his provocative and caricaturising political radio shows. The title of the prime-time television show, Encore un jour et l’année de la femme, ouf, c’est fini! (One More Day and the Year of the Woman Is Finally Over!), was clearly provocative. It had been programmed to commemorate the end of 1975 as the ‘Year of the Woman’, a celebration declared by the United Nations that was widely criticised by French feminists as a ‘mystification’. For the occasion, Pivot’s special guest was Françoise Giroud, appointed by the French government in 1974 as the first Secretary of State for Women’s Affairs, who faced commentaries throughout the broadcast by outspoken misogynists, overtly presented as such; they included television personalities (José Arthur, Pierre Bellemare and Jacques Martin), the chairman of Antenne 2 (Marcel Julian) and political figures (Alexandre Sanguetti). The video’s title, Maso and Miso, standing for ‘masochist’ and ‘misogynist’, summarised the television show as a combination of sarcasm and bad entertainment; it especially referred to the atmosphere of pleasurable perversion communicated by the attitude of the Secretary of State, who on the show either defended misogynistic behaviours or enthusiastically and happily engaged with men in sexist jokes. Here, Giroud embodied the typical ‘bourgeois woman’, according to de Beauvoir, who prefers to ally herself with men even if this betrays her ostensible engagement as Secretary of State for Women’s Affairs.¹¹ Maso et Miso’s original recording was manipulated with various techniques, such as freeze-frames and the inclusion of handwritten texts that added the voice of the collective in comments and questions.¹² Concluding the video is a handwritten text that summarises the project and identifies an opportunity for video:

Our purpose is to show that no woman can represent all the other women within any patriarchal government. She can only incarnate ‘the feminine condition’ that oscillates between the necessity to delight [féminisation-maso] and the desire to access power [masculinisation-miso]. […] No images of television want or can represent us. We explain ourselves with video.¹³

Exceptionally for militant video, Maso and Miso was shown in the independent Parisian cinema L’Entrepôt. Roussopoulos testified that Françoise Giroud exercised pressure through her private secretary to withdraw the video from distribution in exchange for a grant, which the collective refused.¹⁴ The recordings of Pivot’s television show featuring Giroud have since disappeared from the INA’s archives.¹⁵

SCUM Manifesto, a video made in 1976 by Les Insoumuses, featuring Carole Roussopoulos and Seyrig on stage facing one another at a kitchen table, with Paul Roussopoulos behind the camera, offers another revealing vision of French television as a patriarchal institution. Seyrig reads out loud from Valerie Solanas’s book of the same title, while Roussopoulos transcribes what she hears on a typewriter.¹⁶ Between them a television monitor broadcasts the French news. The video keeps the frame fixed on the two women at the table, breaking only to occasionally zoom in on the television monitor. Solanas’s uncompromising criticism of masculinity, juxtaposed with television images showing men as heads of state or as soldiers participating in wars in Korea and Lebanon, links male hegemony and violence while exposing television’s biased content.¹⁷

Distribution’s Restrictions and Alternatives

An important part of this early production were those instances when video set the stage for public debates on topics that were too controversial at the time for television or the public media; these videos are often the most graphic and potentially intimidating for viewers. Y’a qu’a pas baiser (You’d Rather Not Fuck!) is a video about abortion made by Carole Roussopoulos and Vidéo Out between 1971 and 1973. Starting with footage and interviews at a notorious pro-contraception and abortion protest in Paris in November 1971, the video develops within closed doors with unsparing footage of an abortion taking place in real time.¹⁸ It is difficult for today’s viewer to appreciate just how provocative this video was then — birth control became legal in France in 1974 and abortion in 1975. Denied public dissemination, the video circulated among small circles and succeeded in communicating a profusion of information in simple terms that demystified the medical procedure.

Other projects defied distribution restrictions related to the contentiousness of their content. Les Prostituées de Lyon parlent (The Prostitutes from Lyon Speak) was also a production by Carole Roussopoulos with Vidéo Out, this time concerning the first strike by prostitutes in 1975, during which the street workers found refuge in a local church that they occupied with the help of the minister.¹⁹ In the video, the prostitutes denounce the government’s hostility towards them: the insults and aggressions by the police, imprisonments, fines and state taxation. Roussopoulos uses the traditional video-portrait but departs from familiar techniques by giving special attention to the video’s immediate audience. The material she videotaped each morning was broadcast in the afternoon on monitors hung outside on the church’s façade — this way the women could speak to the street without being arrested by the police.²⁰ Footage of these transmissions was integrated into the final production, and shows a crowd composed of clients and pimps, along with some male and female bystanders. Unexpectedly, all appear astonished and speechless; not only have they learned that prostitutes’ concerns are, in many respects, similar to those of other women, citizens and taxpayers, but they have also realised that a debate on an issue as taboo as prostitution can overtly take place in the public space.

Les Insoumuses (Carole Roussopoulos and Delphine Seyrig), SCUM Manifesto, 1976, black and white video, sound, 27min. Courtesy Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir (archive and distribution)
Early video empowered its producers, actors and viewers in communicating alternative voices and ideas that contrasted with the more uniform, politically correct and often sexist content circulating on French television and cinema. However, already in the 1970s, militant videos such as the LIP project faced criticism among feminists for insisting on filming leaders rather than comprehensively representing the entire female community. The repeated use of the video-portrait was especially targeted for its focus on individualised expressions. Moreover, despite the democratic potential of video, and its reproducibility on videotape, the impact of the production of women’s collectives was restricted by the difficulty of securing a consistent network for distribution. Never scheduled for distribution on television and rarely shown in cinemas, early video in France was seen by a small audience. It was most commonly shown at local public debates and at feminist or union meetings, where it was typically used to engage discussion and debate among participants. Another popular distribution tactic was called ‘diffusion à la brouette’ (‘wheelbarrow diffusion’), which consisted of a portable video station using a VCR and a television monitor for outdoor broadcast; it emerged from guerrilla street strategies and was used to show early video on public plazas during market day. Together with the nearly real-time modes of diffusion experimented with in Les Prostituées, this also reveals spontaneous and performative qualities of video distribution rarely associated with public screenings but used by women collectives active in video in the 1970s.

Accordingly, Roussopoulos described her video production as ‘video-tract’ — as a means of immediate expression and communication involving current issues, with videos intended neither to be kept nor conceived as documents for the future. As a matter of fact, a large part of this production has been lost, the tapes having been recorded over just after broadcast. Today, the Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir in Paris is the exclusive location to view militant video by women collectives active in France.²¹ After cataloguing and digitalising the videotapes to protect their content, the non-profit organisation is currently complying with the government regulation of the dépôt légal, the legal notice for registration of copyright that allows authors, artists and researchers to register their production at the French National Library and thereby make it available to the library’s readership. Unsurprisingly, women’s collectives originally saw this convention as an institutional gesture that they rejected and disregarded. This compliance marks a shift in the status of this video production — from tracts to archives — and the beginning of its classificatory evaluation as documentary films. What remains largely unacknowledged is the inventiveness of feminist video collectives at using active and performative modes of distribution — which underlines video's ability to function as a means for collective action and direct communication.

Footnotes

The best known women-led collectives active in Paris in the 1970s were: Vidéo Out (formed in 1970 by Carole and Paul Roussopoulos), Vidéo 00 (1971, Anne Couteau, Yvonne Mignot-Lefèbvre and others), Les Cents Fleurs (1973, Martine Barrar, Annie Caro and Danielle Jaeggi), Vidéa (1974, Anne-Marie Faure, Isabelle Fraisse, Syn Guerin and Catherine Lahourcade; the particularity of Vidéa was to not admit men in their collective) and Les Insoumuses (1975, Carole Roussopoulos, Delphine Seyrig and Ioana Wieder). Similar collectives, most of them also women-led, started after 1975 throughout France.↑
Anne-Marie Duguet, Vidéo, la mémoire au poing, Paris: Hachette, 1981, pp.93—94. This book is the most comprehensive study on early video in France, and one of the few that discusses militant production at the beginning of video. It has never been translated, and has been out of print for years.↑
This is a statement that Carole Roussopoulos often makes in interviews; see, for example, Dario Marchiori, ‘Interview with Carole Roussopoulos’, International Documentary Film Festival (exh.cat.), Trieste: NODO, 2009, p.45. Jean-Luc Godard knew about Roussopoulos’s production; he wrote an article in the form of a letter to her. See Jean-Luc Godard, ‘Lettre à Carole Roussopoulos (Paris, 12 avril 1979)’, Les Cahiers du Cinéma, no.300, May 1979, pp.30—31.↑
Delphine Seyrig played Jeanne Dielman in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), in which Akerman records Dielman's daily routine as housewife, mother and prostitute; earlier Seyrig was the female lead in Alain Resnais’s L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad, 1961).↑
Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Introduction', The Second Sex (trans. H.M. Parshley), New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953, p.xix.↑
Her full name is Monique Piton, but in this video, as in most militant productions at the time, only first names of directors and participants are mentioned.↑
Participants in this video production are Annette Levy-Willard, Catherine Deudon, Cathy Bernheim, Ned Burgess and Suzanne Fenn; all members of the MLF.↑
See Jean-Paul Fargier, ‘Histoire de la vidéo française: Structure et forces vives’, in Nathalie Magnan (ed.), La Vidéo entre art et communication, Paris: École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, 1997, pp.51—52. Indeed, Fargier mentions that the U-matic editing system only became available in France in 1979.↑
See also A.-M. Duguet, ‘Écrire en vidéo’, Film Action, no.1, December 1981—January 1982, p.110. In this article Duguet makes references to similar stylistic approaches in cinema and television from the 1960s, such as direct cinema (Robert J. Flaherty, Richard Leacock, Albert and David Maysles and D.A. Pennebaker), ethnographic cinema (Jean Rouch), television documentary, reality television (Jacques Krier) and ‘Écriture par l’image’ (Krier and Michel Polac). Nevertheless, in interviews Carole Roussopoulos has claimed to have had no previous knowledge of independent and experimental cinema when she started in video in the early 1970s, and does not propose any stylistic influences for her video production.↑
In addition to the usual trio composed of Carole Roussopoulos, Delphine Seyrig and Ioana Wieder,
Les Insoumuses also listed Nadja Ringart in the production of Maso et Miso.↑
Speaking about women Simone de Beauvoir affirmed: ‘If they belong to the bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity with men of that class, not with proletarian women’. S. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, op. cit., pp.xix—xx.↑
For example, after Françoise Giroud chuckles at a sexist comment made by Marc Linski, Maso et Miso displays the following (handwritten) text to survey the viewer’s opinion: ‘Mrs Giroud found this funny. In your opinion is she: 1. Seductive, 2. Servile, 3. Classy, 4. Abused, 5. Maso, 6. Miso, 7. Secretary, 8. Secretary [of State] for Women's Conditions. 9. Secretary [of State] for Men's Conditions, 10. All of the above, 11. None of the above?’ Translation the author’s.↑
Translation the author’s.↑
Hélène Fleckinger, ‘Entretien avec Carole Roussopoulos’, Nouvelles questions féministes, 38, no.1, 2009, pp.105—06. This is the last interview with Roussopoulos, published before she died in Switzerland on 22 October 2009. Roussopoulos was the most prolific video director in France in the 1970s and 80s, when she signed and co-signed at least fifty independent video productions. More rarely mentioned as part of her career, she is also credited for collaborating with Gina Pane in recording her performances in 1973 and 1974 as well as for recording Michel Journiac’s famous Messe pour un corps (Mass for a Corpse, 1975) at the Stadler Gallery in Paris. Roussopoulos addresses this experience of performance in comparison to her own practice in video in Julia Hontou, ‘Gina Pane: Entretien avec Carole Roussopoulos’, Turbulences Vidéo, no.52, July 2006, pp.46—51.↑
Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA) preserves for documentary or research purposes the totality of the programmes broadcast on French public radio and television since their creation. Another instance of censorship by television involving militant video was the footage by ORTF (the governmental organisation in charge of radio and television in France from 1964 to 1974) of Jean Genet reading a pamphlet he had written in reaction to the incarceration of the activist Angela Davis for her defence of the Black Panthers. Anticipating censorship by ORTF, Genet had asked Carole Roussoupolous to record it with her own video camera. Jean Genet parle d’Angela Davis (Jean Genet Speaks about Angela Davis, 1970) was Roussopoulos’s first video. Today it remains the only document recording the outraged public address by the renowned writer and political activist. In 2001, this video entered the collections of the Espace Nouveaux Médias at the Centre Pompidou in Paris; it is currently the only militant video by women’s collectives that belongs to the French public collection.↑
See Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (1967), New York and London: Verso Editions, 2004. Solanas’s ideas were known in France in the 1970s, especially among female intellectuals and feminists, but her famous manifesto was already out of print there by 1976.↑
The Swiss artist Angela Marzullo made a partial remake of Roussopoulos and Seyrig’s SCUM Manifesto as part of her video Performing SCUM Manifesto (2003—05), in which she re-enacts video-performance works from the 1970s. In Performing SCUM Manifesto, Marzullo features two young girls sitting at a table in a children’s room, one reading and one typing on a children’s typewriter, while the television monitor between them shows violent cartoons designed for boys.↑
The year 1971 was a year of unprecedented public actions organised by women in favour of abortion rights in France, among them the ‘Manifesto of the 343', a petition signed by 343 women, intellectuals and actresses claiming to have had abortions. Simone de Beauvoir wrote the text of the manifesto, and, along with Delphine Seyrig and others, signed it. It was published in the weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur on 5 April 1971, and all signatories were risking jail time.↑
In 1975, the collective Vidéa created Millett parle de la prostitution avec des féministes (Millett Speaks
about Prostitution with Feminists), another video addressing the same prostitutes' strike in Lyon. The video shows the well-known North American activist and feminist writer Kate Millett (author of The Prostitution Papers in 1971, a diary of women and prostitutes) speaking with a group of French women about the strikers. They are informally seating on the floor, surrounded by walls covered with books. The core of their conversation concerns the position that feminists should adopt in regards to prostitutes, and Millett’s fraternal message to blame prostitution rather than prostitutes.↑
See D. Marchiori, ‘Interview with Carole Roussopoulos’, op. cit., p.48.↑
The centre was created in 1982 by Carole Roussopoulos, Delphine Seyrig and Iona Wieder with funds from the new Socialist government, after François Mitterrand was elected President of France in 1981. A common observation suggests that the support of the Socialist government in the 1980s contributed to removing the militant edge from video production by women collectives in France.↑

For more information on these videos, see the websites for the Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir
(http://www.centre-simone-de-beauvoir.com) and the Association Carole Roussopoulos (http://www.carole-roussopoulos.com; both last accessed on 11 April 2011). The author would like to thank the Centre and the Association for their assistance, as well as France Languerand and Cyril Lecomte.↑

Jeanne Dielman Death in installments

2011-10-23T15:13:00.000-07:00

by Jayne Loader

from Jump Cut, no. 16, 1977, pp. 10-12
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1977, 2005

Chantal Akerman's JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES, recently subtitled in preparation for possible American release, is an ambiguous and difficult film but one that deserves serious consideration from both feminist and formalist critics. In presenting her portrait of a bourgeois Belgian housewife whose widowhood leads her to afternoon prostitution, Akerman elicits not only an intensely sensitive performance from Delphine Seyrig but startlingly contradictory responses from her audience as well. These responses of vehemence and passion and the film's complex structure lead one to question Ackerman's politics and aesthetics. And such questions can only be answered in the context of the historiography and theory of women in the home: as workers who are essential in maintaining the capitalist system through production and reproduction, largely unrecognized and unpaid. The film raises further questions in terms of its contribution to the vital task of developing feminist art and feminist film language, providing a measure of how far we have come and of what remains undone.

My own answers to these questions are not encouraging ones: I find Akerman's film not only self-defeating in its depiction of the housewife's role and her so-called regeneration through violence at the film's end, but cavalier in its treatment of the complex role of women in the family. Akerman's solution to the fact of female oppression is unfortunately a common one, which is offered not only in several other contemporary films by women but in a significant number of women's novels as well. It is violence, directed at the first male who comes to hand. By his sex rather than his person, he is forced to stand for the oppressors of all the rest.

JEANNE DIELMAN examines three days in the life of its heroine, each day consuming approximately one hour of screen space. Much of the action of the film is shot in "real time." If it takes Jeanne fifteen minutes to peel a batch of potatoes, then the fifteen minutes are presented on the screen without a cut. Yet the moments thus shown are of necessity carefully selected; three days must be compacted into three hours, rather than 72. Much of the film and, for me, its strongest sections are about housework. Other moments capture Jeanne's interaction with her teenage son. Less time is taken up with her relations with the other people on the periphery of her life: the storekeepers who sell to her, a woman in her building whose baby she watches, the baby, neighbors on the street. She seems to have no friends. Only a small amount of time is devoted to the men who provide Jeanne's income, the clients she services as a prostitute each afternoon.

It is the housework that sticks in one's mind after the film is over and the housework that provides Jeanne's identity. The work is close to ritual, rigidly scheduled and repeated daily with slight variation and maximum efficiency. It is a process that appears impossible to sustain if one has not been at some point a housewife (or factory worker) oneself. As Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English describe it:

"Housework is maintenance and restoration: the daily restocking of the shelves and return of each cleaned and repaired object to its starting point in the family game of disorder. After a day's work, no matter how tiring, the housewife has produced no tangible object-except, perhaps, dinner; and that will disappear in less than half the time it took to prepare. She is not supposed to make anything, but to buy, and then to prepare or conserve what has been bought, dispelling dirt and depreciation as they creep up. And each housewife works alone."(1)

Since Jeanne Dielman's duties as housewife compose the bulk of the film's action, one can get a feel for the film's flow and pacing through scanning this list of them: Jeanne gets up, puts on her dressing gown, and chooses her son's clothes. She lights a fire in his room, picks up his shoes and takes them to the kitchen, where she shines them, lights the stove, grinds the coffee beans and makes coffee. She wakes her son; he eats while she dresses. She says goodbye to him, and gives him money taken from a blue and white china crock on the dining table. She washes the dishes, makes her son's bed and folds it into a couch, makes her own bed and lays a towel over her coverlet. She shops and runs errands, returns to her apartment, and begins to prepare dinner. She sits with her neighbor's child, eats her lunch, and returns the baby to its mother. The doorbell rings. She admits a man, takes his hat and coat, and leads him into the bedroom. She leads him to the front door, gives him his hat and coat, and takes money from him, which she puts in the blue china crock. She opens the window in her bedroom, puts the rumpled towel in the clothes hamper, bathes, cleans the tub, and dresses. She closes the bedroom window and takes dinner off the stove. Her son comes home. They eat dinner immediately: soup, meat and potatoes. She tells him not to read while eating. He puts his books away. She clears the table and helps him with his homework. She knits, and glances through the newspaper, until it is time for them to take their evening walk around the block. They unfold his sofa bed. He reads while she undresses. She turns off the stove, kisses him, turns out the lights, and at last goes to sleep.

There exist subtle variations within this basic range of activities that give us clues to Jeanne's character and moods, but this structure, carefully designed and rigidly adhered to, forms the core of the film and accurately, poignantly captures the reality of housework and the housewife role for many women. Ann Oakley notes the frequency of such inflexible, self-imposed schedules in her study of contemporary English housewives, who use timetables and ritualized action in order to give their lives structure, to impart meaning to what seems to many a meaningless job:

"Faced with housework as their job, they devise rules which give the work the kind of structure most employed workers automatically find in their job situation. Having defined the rules they then attempt to adhere to them, and to derive reward from carrying them out."(2)

The monotony and crippling effect of such a process are powerfully illustrated in Akerman's film. We are initially bored with the film's slow pace, which admits no music, no camera movement, and no opticals as distraction. But we are ultimately carried into the rhythm of Jeanne's life: empathy is virtually unavoidable. The frustrations — so often presented as the "mad housewife" syndrome in American film and fiction about women — are absent here for the most part. Jeanne is serene, methodical, almost madonna-like as she floats efficiently, effortlessly through the day. If she feels frustrations with her role or has fantasies of escape, she represses them even, or especially, in the privacy of her own home.

The precision of Jeanne's motions is as clean and sharp as a good Swiss watch. We watch her dip veal in egg, meal and flour without a wasted movement. She is presented as an automaton, geared for maximum efficiency and functioning perfectly, a victim of both the domestic science movement and the petit-bourgeois Belgian culture that produced her. The compulsiveness of Jeanne's housecleaning, the zeal with which she attacks crumbs and disorder, the serenity with which she accomplishes her tasks all point to a woman who has internalized the principle that "neglect of housecleaning is tantamount to child abuse."(3) And Akerman's controlled, formal style perfectly mirrors the inner feelings of her character, forcing us visually into her world.

The most striking formal technique in JEANNE DIELMAN is Akerman's use of the static camera. We see Jeanne's life as if it were a painting which we have all the time in the world to study. Thus we are not manipulated by dollies in or out of space that force us to focus on some particular point of action, or by changing camera angles which hurtle us up or down emotionally. Akerman has said that she saw no reason to move the camera in her film, and for the most part I agree with her: her character's actions speak for themselves. (4) The static camera traps us as completely as Jeanne's static life traps her, and studying that world, we become a part of it. The contrast between the average viewer's boredom with Jeanne's life or voyeuristic obsession with its stasis in contrast to Jeanne's glacial calm is striking. We are forced to experience Jeanne's life and wonder how she stands living it.

Since Jeanne is the heart of the film, this is expressed visually by her placement in the still frame. She is centered precisely within it, and unless she moves from one room to another, Akerman not only holds the camera steady but holds the shot as well. There are no cuts except when absolutely necessary, and Jeanne is almost always on screen. Akerman's cinema focuses our attention on her smallest gestures, gestures that reveal character but would be lost in a more flamboyant film: a knife that almost slips when a potato is peeled, a light turned off unnecessarily, a facial expression of disquiet or of frustration, the curious act of making coffee in a thermos in the morning for drinking at lunchtime. The effect of such details, repeated and ritualized, is cumulative. Slowly the portrait is pieced together.

Akerman's mise-en-scene is subtle in structuring the way we view the separate elements of the film and gradually put them together. When Jeanne returns to her apartment after a shopping trip, for example, Akerman presents the action with one long shot in the apartment hallway. The elevator that will take Jeanne upstairs is centered precisely in the middle of the frame, and mailboxes line the hall's left side. Jeanne walks into the foyer and stops to check her mail, then walks away from the camera toward the elevator, pushes the button, waits and enters it. A simple shot, but the use of a lens with very little depth of field which is focused sharply only on the foreground mailboxes changes the nature of the shot. We see Jeanne walk out of focus as she nears the elevator and stands waiting for it. As she nears her apartment, she becomes (visually) a different person. Suddenly the objects in the frame outweigh her. We concentrate on the texture of the walls sharply in focus rather than on the fuzzy female person. And the following shot sharpens the emotional impact of the first. Jeanne is in the elevator, slowly being carried up past the lighted floors. We don't see Jeanne but her mirror image, trapped in one half of the frame, with the lights of the passing floors playing over her face. The slow trip becomes a poignant metaphor. The woman trapped in a small, dark space while the world's lights flicker by is an image whose real self is obscured. As Jeanne leaves the elevator, the angles of the mirror's edges fragment her image further. And Akerman uses this particular sequence of shots and the elevator itself only when Jeanne returns to her apartment, never when she leaves it.

The apartment seems to have a life of its own, to have needs and demands which manipulate Jeanne and structure her day much more substantially than do the needs of either her living son or once living husband. Both of them are, she tells a neighbor, "easy to please," blind to their surroundings or to what is on the table. (5) It is the apartment that makes clear and tangible demands. It must be cleaned, its dishes washed, its furniture polished, its rooms aired of unpleasant odors, its voracious appetite for human attention, love and labor appeased. (6) The cuts in the film emphasize this fact. Akerman's camera often lingers lovingly in a room moments after Jeanne has left it, or precedes her entrances by a few long feet of film which show the quiet permanence of the apartment. Older than Jeanne, it will survive her.

Much of the cutting in the film involves the physical presence of the house and its maintenance. Because there is no camera movement, there is no invisible editing and very few cuts on Jeanne's moving figure. Although Akerman occasionally moves from one room to another by cutting on the placement of Jeanne's figure within the frame, she is much more likely to cut on objects. A table in one shot is balanced by a bowl in the shot adjacent to it. By cutting on lights, sounds and objects, Akerman emphasizes the overpowering presence of the apartment that, in its very ordinary state, has such an effect on the lives of its inhabitants.

A frequent kind of cut involves a movement from one room to the next; Jeanne turns out the light in the kitchen, and turns on the light in the living room. The cut is masked by the darkness between the two moments. Similar cuts are made with doors opening and closing, often in combination with turning on and off of lights. Such cuts make the film smoother than repeated jump cuts would have, providing natural fades without compromising Akerman's static frame or the illusions of naturalism and real time. The cuts also serve to emphasize Jeanne's compulsive nature and thrift. The lights are turned off to save electricity, the doors closed to save heat. The incessant turning on and off of lights, the rhythm of the opening and closing doors, become additional rituals, visual and aural patterns that add another level of repetition to the film and emphasize its pace.

The lighting pattern in the elevator is one more example of these repeated physical motifs. A far more important one is the neon light that flashes into Jeanne's living room each evening. With its consistent, unchanging pattern (four regular flashes and a flicker) the neon light, which never goes out and is never washed out by the light sources in the room, becomes a visual metaphor for the lives of the film's characters and perhaps a foreshadowing of Jeanne's breakdown at the film's end. Hers is a "flicker" of life that is always contained by the more powerful pulsation and control of a larger pattern.

The three days of Jeanne's life are significantly different. If the first day is a usual day when everything goes smoothly, we see that the second day throws Jeanne slightly off balance. Because a client stays longer than usual, Jeanne burns the potatoes that were cooking on the stove. With her hair slightly mussed, she wanders from room to room with the pot of burned potatoes, wondering what to do with them. It is a powerful moment in the film, the first time we have ever seen her lose her composure or perform an action that is not completely efficient. Because Jeanne has no potatoes left in the house, she must go again to market. Dinner is late. And although she is quick to reassert the family routine by forcing her son to take their nightly walk around the block, although he would prefer to read, Sylvan destroys her day further by embarrassing questions and confessions about sex. Although Jeanne heads the questions off, the day is not what it should have been.

The third day is even more disrupted. Jeanne fails to button her robe completely and gets shoe polish on her cuff while polishing Sylvan's shoes. Both precision and efficiency are eroded. She moves in and out of rooms turning their lights on and off as she goes, with no idea of what to do once in them. She arrives too early at the post office and grocery and is unable to locate a button for Sylvan's coat at the several shops she visits. She washes her dishes over and over and kneads a meatloaf interminably. When her coffee tastes strange, she throws it out and makes a new pot but finds she cannot drink even that. At the restaurant where she usually goes after shopping, her usual waitress has already gotten off, and a stranger occupies her favorite seat. It is an older, business-like woman with short hair and no makeup who smokes and is engrossed in her work. Traditional, feminine Jeanne is literally displaced by a new kind of woman. At the shops Jeanne makes an attempt to talk to the sales people about her family. Previously she had been pleasantly formal to them. She even tries for the first time to play with the baby she sits for, but it cries whenever she picks it up. She sits and stares into space. She is inactive. She responds sexually to her client and then stabs him to death with her sewing scissors.

Given the role of the housewife as Akerman presents it, one could easily define Jeanne as a "victim of society" and her act of murder an act of liberation. But there is another aspect of the film that undercuts this interpretation: the psychologically and socially repressive role of the mother in the patriarchal family. While Jeanne's relationship with her apartment marks her as a social victim, her relationship with her son shows him to be victimized as well.

Jeanne is a victim who accepts her victim's role and forces her son to join her in it. Akerman thus reveals the social role that many women have been compelled to assume. As conservative force in the family, mothers transmit patriarchal values to their children and assure through their repression and subjugation, the continuance of the dominant social order. The emergence of this role as a full-blown stereotype in male culture can be seen often in film: Leo McCarey's MY SON JOHN is certainly a prime example; the woman in THE HARDER THEY COME, a more contemporary one. Denouncing the stereotype has led many women to deny its real social base and has kept feminists from giving it the serious treatment it deserves. The pitfalls Akerman risks in her attempt to do so are obvious. She presents Jeanne's role as repressor so graphically that her character becomes a difficult one to sympathize with. By zealously defending the family and internalizing its values, Jeanne seems to renounce all opposition and to accept the principle of male-dominated bourgeois society: "bad luck is your own fault." (7)

The idea of the mother as a monster within the home is not a new one in either film or literature, and in Dielman's interactions with her son, she exhibits the kind of character traits which Phillip Wylie grouped together and labeled "Momism" in the 1940s. (A concept which peaked in popularity as women were forced back into their homes during the 50s, Momism allowed men to blame women for all the world's ills while never noticing that it was the active repression of women in post-war America that produced Mom in the first place.) Jeanne is rigidly compulsive and thrifty, completely invested in concepts of order and cleanliness, with no interests outside her home and no ideas. When her son asks her why she married his father, she explains that she did not want to marry him when he was rich; but that after he lost his money, she could not be talked out of the marriage. She finds mention of her husband's body distasteful and explains sex as something to submit to in order to produce children. The marriage to a weak, poor and unattractive man indicates Jeanne's resolve to have a husband she could tower above as a beautiful and competent woman. And her relations with her son reveal her attempts to cast him in the same mold: as a weak man, without hope or thought of rebellion. As a stereotyped castrating mother, Jeanne Dielman is distinguishable from Mrs. Portnoy and Ma Jarred only by virtue of style.

Jeanne's conscious choice of her role in the victim/victimizer chain may seem at first glance to undercut Akerman's apparent intent in the film: to portray a woman who is a product of a specific class and social milieu, a woman shaped by society and by history. I believe, rather, that it reveals Akerman's sophisticated understanding of the role of women in the home, showing to what lengths some are forced to go in order to have autonomy in the only sphere allotted them. If such women seem monstrous, they become so only to defend themselves from almost overwhelming social forces. Just as Dorothy Arzner's Harriet Craig (in CRAIG'S WIFE) was willing to sacrifice everything, including her husband, in order to preserve the only place in the world where she had power and security, so Jeanne Dielman is similarly willing to make sacrifices to preserve her home. These include not only her physical prostitution but the renunciation of all genuine human relationships.

Jeanne's son Sylvan's character is not fully revealed, but he has clearly internalized many of the values of his mother and his culture. He corrects her lapses from proper motherhood immediately, reasserting the family routine when it threatens to break down. His only rebellion in the film is to suggest that the family walk be abandoned, but when Jeanne insists, he dutifully puts on his coat. His weakness is emphasized in his total lack of social life and in his failure to pass a school test by faking an illness.

The extent to which Sylvan has accepted Jeanne's values is illustrated by this remarkable interchange, uttered after he returns home on the second day to find dinner late:

Sylvan: "Your hair's all tousled."
Jeanne: "I let the potatoes boil too long."

That the two perfectly understand each other is one level of communication: to Sylvan, it is logical that a hitch in the day's schedule is enough to muss his mother's hair. That we know her hair is messy because she hasn't had the time to comb it after an overlong sex act adds another level. At this level, Jeanne denies not only her sexual activities but the function she performs to support the family-as prostitute and as worker.

The sexually repressive nature of the family and its links with the authoritarian personality are perfectly realized in Jeanne's character. And it is in terms of sexuality that her role as agent of repression is most fully shown. During the second evening, Sylvan attempts to talk to Jeanne about sex. In a remarkable monologue he describes his introduction to sex through a friend, who has told him, "The penis is a sword; the deeper you thrust it, the better it is." The pain and power associated with that image evokes his own secret fantasies about sex between his parents and his confusion of guilt over his father's death. Hating his father's sexual use of his mother made him wish for the father's death, but to Sylvan's cry for help and explanation and comfort, Jeanne coldly answers, "You shouldn't have worried." To end the discussion, she turns out the light.

The mother's refusal to deal with her own sexuality honestly and to recognize the sexual confusion of her children is one factor, Horkheimer argues, that contributes to the continuation of a repressive social order:

"Under the pressure of such a family situation the individual does not learn to respect his mother in her concrete existence, that is, as this particular social and sexual being. Consequently, he is not only educated to repress his socially harmful impulses (a feat of immense cultural significance) but, because this education takes the problematic form of camouflaging reality, the individual also loses for good the disposition of part of his psychic energies. Reason and joy in its exercise are restricted; the suppressed inclination towards the mother reappears as a fanciful and sentimental susceptibility to all symbols of the dark, maternal and protective powers."(8)

When Jeanne hides the reality of not only her past sexual life with Sylvan's father but of her present sexual life with the clients who visit her regularly, monotonously, each weekday afternoon, not only sexuality but work is repressed. Jeanne denies that she works at all and is thus able to maintain the illusion that she is "only a housewife." Her self-definition does not include the concept of work. By engaging in prostitution in her home, while the potatoes boil, Jeanne relegates it to the level of cleaning the bathtub or bleaching out a particularly nasty stain. Sex becomes a necessary but bothersome choice.

Dielman's role as a prostitute becomes another facet of her role as both repressive agent and conservative social force. The prostitute complements the wife, and both are necessary in maintaining the status quo and preventing any real change from occurring. As a prostitute Dielman provides a socially acceptable outlet for drives which left unchecked might lead the individual to question the sexually repressive nature of society and to think of rebellion. If, as some feminists argue, the prostitute literalizes the sexual oppression of all women by calling it by its right name-an exchange of sex for money-and refuses to accept the nonnegotiable items (love, marriage, dinners) that most women bargain for, she may, in fact, avoid being a sexual victim herself. But by serving as a stabilizing force in bourgeois society, she perpetuates the sexual oppression of other women and leaves them and herself open to other forms of oppression.

The role of prostitute (a job many women have found capable of providing large amounts of money in a short time) allows Jeanne the luxury of maintaining that she is a housewife, with her dead husband's support replaced by that of the five johns she services. They replace the father as dispensers of cash while Jeanne serves as dispenser of culture.

As Jeanne misrepresents herself to Sylvan through lies and distortions, the camera similarly represses sexuality through its selection of the moments of time it chooses to show or to omit. Although Akerman shoots much of the film in real time, the sex between Jeanne and her first two clients is not shown at all. Possibly, Akerman is seeking to avoid any audience voyeurism. Because sex is in itself often interesting, omitting it altogether from the film is one way to make it seem unimportant, to prevent any sexual titillation from creeping into the film.

This seems a glib way of solving an important problem in cinema: How does one present sexuality, given the audience's conditioned responses to it as spectacle? Hard-core pornography teaches us that it is quite possible through repetition and the objectification of body parts to make the sex act seem as boring and mundane as washing dishes, as distasteful as cleaning the toilet. But by her failure to show Jeanne's physical prostitution, Akerman calls attention to it. She makes us not voyeurs but busybodies — we wonder what went on in the bedroom. By withholding knowledge of sex, she makes us preoccupied with it and forces us to identify not with Jeanne but with Sylvan, from whom knowledge is similarly withheld.

In the chain of rituals, of monotony, of the interchangeability of days and events that the film presents, the act of sex stands as an anomaly. Although sexual parts are interchangeable in filmed pornography, men and women are not; each person makes love differently. To preserve the illusion that Jeanne's clients (and all men) are identical, the filmmaker must not show their most personal, least interchangeable acts. In a film of such realism, this flaw or distortion is particularly noticeable and unfortunate.

On another level it destroys the credibility of the film. When we finally see Jeanne in bed with a client on the film's third day, we know something significant is about to happen. When we see her react sexually to the man, we are confused. Our lack of knowledge about her prior sexual behavior prevents us from understanding her: does she always respond, or is sexual response a further symptom of her disintegration? The film's point is muddied, and Jeanne's act incomprehensible. Does she kill the man because he made her respond despite herself or simply because she had a bad day?

While Akerman plays down the importance of the killing to the film as a whole, a look at the film's narrative structure reveals that the murder is demanded: the film has a conventional narrative structure despite its slow pacing and technical innovations. (9) It tells a story, sets up a conflict, and offers a solution to the conflict. It has a violent climax and period of reflective calm afterwards. The editing becomes faster as the climax approaches, and the revealing of new bits of information — the sexual act — piques our interest and lets us know that a solution to the conflict is near. Scissors left conveniently near the bed foreshadow the film's resolution. (10)

One can take the film's climax in at least two ways. My own reaction was to see Jeanne's act as a repressive one, a response to her sexual awakening. To accept this interpretation, one first has to believe that her breakdown is a positive thing: that a breakdown is preferable to a life of calm, controlled insanity, and that sexual response could be the first step toward that breakdown and thus toward change. The film becomes a critical one — critical of Jeanne's role as repressed and conservative force while cognizant of the difficulties of change — while Jeanne's act is part of a desperate struggle to preserve the status quo in the face of forces that are threatening to change and overwhelm her. The film, then, illustrates the power of bourgeois, patriarchal culture and points out the degree to which most of us have internalized its mandates. Ending the film with a bloody Jeanne, sitting in a dark room with neon flashing over her face and the blue and white china crock prominently in the foreground, seemed to capture in a frame the hegemony of oppressive forces, the futility of isolated, individualized revolt.

Chantal Akerman intends that the film be read differently. She has said of the murder, "It was either him or her, and I'm glad it was him." The murder is seen as an act of liberation, one which, Akerman says, "will change her life."

Such a concept of problem solving is neither particularly novel nor arguably feminist, which makes its use by women writers and filmmakers all the more distressing. It is understandable in such a work as Volker Schlondorff and Margarethe Von Trotta's LOST HONOR OF KATHERINA BLUM, where a young woman shoots the muckraking reporter who has tormented her throughout the film. But the reporter is an old-fashioned villain, a symbol more of a certain kind of press than of male culture, and his death is as cathartic for the audience as the climactic shooting of any Western bad guy is likely to be. Nothing feminist about it.

Nor is there anything particularly feminist in the kind of solutions many of the heroines in contemporary women's fiction reach to their objectifications and oppression: Lois Gould's beautiful victim becomes a pseudoman in A Sea Change and victimizes her female lover; Susan Reis Lukas's housewife/victim breaks out of her rut by having sex with two Puerto Rican boys who try to hustle her in Stereopticon and finishes the job by killing herself with a shiv. Judith Rossner's Theresa is murdered by a pickup in Looking for Mr. Goodbar at precisely the moment when she decides to change her life and stop being a victim. And in Liliane Dreyfus's FEMMES AU SOLEIL, the heroine's conflict over whether to leave her comfortable, if stifling and superficial bourgeois life for the love and adventure offered by a younger man is conveniently resolved when he is killed in a motorcycle accident. Death is the deus ex machina. As children end stories, badly written, with the words "and then she died," so many women authors and filmmakers resolve the conflicts set up in the bodies of their work.

The suicidal heroine of Dinah Brooke's Death Games resolves her love/hate relationship with her father by slipping into his bed after he's suffered a heart attack and performing fellatio on him until he dies. Brooke, like Akerman, portrays this act as a sign of social and sexual liberation for her heroine and, by analogy, for all women; a literal blow against patriarchal culture:

"Children scream violently, struggling, hissing with rage, daughters become avenging demons. What is required is nourishment. Love. We will fight forever. We will never give up. We will spew up your aid, your allowances, your falseness; we will struggle for what we need. We cannot be denied. Our desires are as old and powerful as the earth. They are also your desires. If you deny them you will die. … We will all be destroyed by the hidden, silent, secret desire, never expressed. You have created such a huge world, such a stack of card houses, such false structures of governments, and bombs and money and boarding schools and ministries and hotels and banks and factories and development projects and armies to hide you, to protect you from your own desires. But do not be afraid. We will pursue you. We are your daughter, your soul. We will sneak up on you in the night and in the afternoon. We are your salvation. We will have you. We will find you out in spite of all your struggles and your power. Your power is nothing. It will scream, melt, explode in the heat of our desire, and of your own."(11)

Such alternatives are not attractive ones and offer little hope or encouragement to real women. It's a choice between absolute repression or living out all one's repressed desires for incest, sex and death within the framework of a total war between men and women. Dusan Makavejev's SWEET MOVIE expresses these options perfectly through two different women: Miss World of 1984, who is objectified and mauled throughout the film until her famous chocolate bath makes her a living symbol of the union of sexual oppression and consumerism under capitalism; and the carefree "liberated woman," a revolutionary who acts on all her desires, including the castration of her only adult lover in a bed of sugar and the seduction and murder of little boys.

Many male filmmakers use the kill-for-freedom motif of JEANNE DIELIIAN, not the least of them being Sam Peckinpah. Dustin Hoffman's rampage in STRAW DOGS is as socially "justified' as Dielman's and proves him a man capable of action as hers proves her a conscious woman. Killing is used as proof of manhood in THE MARATHON MAN, where the villains which Hoffman (again) vanquishes are hardly less odious than the somewhat gentle man Jeanne Dielman kills and are meant to stand for just as many cultural evils: anti-Semitism, fascism, blacklisting, and government immorality. And the virtue of revenge and regeneration through violence is routinely offered as a solution to the moral dilemmas posed in scores of old and new films: WALKING TALL, MACON COUNTY LINE, BUSTER AND BILLIE, DEATH WISH.

Is violence any more progressive politically when women perform it? Many women applauded when the heroine of Stephanie Rothman's VELVET VAMPIRE murdered the man who tried to rape her, after pretending to submit. But Rothman later shows us that her violence was not reserved for oppressive men alone but was generalized to include more sympathetic figures, women as well as men. Most male films about female rape victims become opportunities to depict the act of rape for the titillation of the male audience, no matter how those victims ultimately respond or revenge themselves. Margaux Hemingway's murder of her rapist in LIPSTICK was overshadowed by her lengthy rape, and Yvette Mimieux's murder of the rapist/jailer in JACKSON COUNTY JAIL—the Joanne Little case in whiteface-solves nothing: not for Mimieux's character in the film and certainly not for the women who continue to be brutalized and raped inside jails and out of them.

When we study these films, we find that most of them support the social order, offering individual solutions to complex social problems: Kill criminals rather than abolish the causes of crime; kill rapists rather than rearrange the sexual power structure that necessitates the act of rape. If there are films that criticize such solutions (as I would argue in the case of WALKING TALL) then such criticism resides in the mise-en-scene, as in many films noir. The plots are spoonfed homilies to an audience that has been taught to expect what it gets: the message that violence is the acceptable way to handle all difficulties and a "natural" reaction to injustice.

The ending of Robert Altman's IMAGES crystallizes the drawbacks of such responses to oppression. Although Susannah York kills her oppressive husband, who is probably contributing to her madness, she kills him only when she sees him as a mirror image of herself. It is her own problems which haunt her and continue to haunt her after her husband's death: her husband is gone, but the greater problem, York's own, persists. Nor does Gerald Depardieu's self-castration in Ferrari's LAST WOMAN solve the problems of machismo and egoism, as the pathetic final offering of his severed penis to his lover suggests, though it is certainly an act that "changed his life."

If we are to make real changes in our lives and in our cinema, we must offer not only new cinematic structures but serious solutions to the social problems that persist. If none are forthcoming, I feel it is better to be descriptive than prescriptive. Films which illustrate the extent of female oppression and the tenacity of patriarchy seem to me more feminist than those which offer cheap answers to complex social, historical and political problems - answers that fall within the range of acceptable responses as defined by male-dominated bourgeois culture. The sections of JEANNE DIELMAN which examine in minute detail the function and practice of housework and the role of the traditional mother within the repressive structure of the nuclear family are among the finest examples of feminist cinema yet produced, pioneering and carefully wrought in both form and content. I only wish Akerman had been content with this magnificent and unique achievement rather than succumbing to the demands of the traditional narrative film form that requires a bang-up ending and the culture that requires a neatly packaged and thoroughly acceptable message. In this case: Killing is good for you.

Notes:

1. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, "The Manufacture of Housework," Socialist Revolution, 5:4 (Oct.-Dec. 1975), 6.

2. Ann Oakley, Woman's Work (N.Y.: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 95.

3. Ehrenreich and English, p. 19.

4. The static camera becomes confusing at only one point in the film: the nightly walk around the block. Four shots show them on the block's four sides, but the streets could be anywhere. Without a tracking shot, we have no sense that the four streets interlock.

5. This proves to be delusion. When Jeanne starts to perform her role as a housewife poorly, her son is quick to notice, to button an open robe or tidy disarrayed hair. Her perfect performances are taken for granted, but she is never allowed to stray from the rigid bounds that circumscribe her role.

6. The house has something of the feel that Lotte Eisner described so well in German films and literature, mirrored by a linguistic structure that gives objects a life of their own: "…they are spoken of with the same adjectives and verbs used to speak of human beings, they are endowed with the same qualities as people, they act and react in the same way… (the houses) seem to have an insidious life of their own when the autumn evening mists stagnate in the streets and veil their imperceptible grimace." See The Haunted Screen (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1969), p. 23.

7. Max Horkheimer, "Authority and the Family," in Critical Theory (N.Y.: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 121.

8. Ibid., p. 121.

9. This and all references to Akerman's comments on JEANNE DIELMAN were discussed at a screening of the film at the Museum of Modern Art's CINEPROBE series, November 8, 1976.

10. If, as feminist film critic Barbara Halpern Martineau has convincingly argued in her lectures, most narrative films reflect a structure that is remarkably close to the conventional pattern of male sexual response (tension build up, climax, exhaustion), then Akerman's film falls well within this range rather than positing an alternative narrative structure that is female or feminist.

11. Dinah Brooke, Death Games (N.Y.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), pp. 147-148.

Skiving and Salvage Double bill

2011-10-08T06:04:00.000-07:00

Sunday 30th October | Doors 7pm | Admission free

Elephants' Graveyard, 1976
By Peter McDougall & John McKenzie
(Scotland, 48mins)

Pretty Dyana, 2002
By Boris Mitic
(Serbia, 45mins)

Peter McDougall & John McKenzie - The Elephants' Graveyard (1976, 48mins)

Bunny has told his wife he is working as a postman, but in fact is wandering the hills all day, wondering why he doesn't want to work. He meets Jody, an older man who has told his wife he's working in a factory, but is in fact doing the same thing. The two men spend a day of friendship together, but what does the future offer them? And tonight is supposed to be pay night...

Brand new text about the film
Taking a Walk in The Elephant's Graveyard
by a Feral Subject

Boris Mitic - Pretty Dyana (2002, 45 mins)

An intimate look at Gypsy refugees in a Belgrade suburb who make a living by transforming Citroen´s classic 2CV and Dyana cars into Mad Max-like recycling vehicles, which they use to collect card-board, bottles and scrap metal. These modern horses are much more efficent than the cart-pushing competition, but even more important, they also mean freedom, hope and style for their crafty owners.

At
Colorama Cinema
52-56 Lancaster Street
London SE1

Download the pamphlet for this screening from Zine Library or Skiving and Salvage

More screenings and info:
http://coloramacinema.tumblr.com/

Full Unemployment Cinema
http://unemployedcinema.blogspot.com/

Taking a Walk in The Elephant's Graveyard

2011-10-08T04:35:00.000-07:00

by a Feral Subject

The first tracking shot in The Elephant's Graveyard establishes a town of tight streets, semi-detached houses that constitute a warren of domesticity built against both the sky above and the surrounding green hills. A man walks hastily away from the town into the hills- effectively commuting the wrong way- as he purposefully escapes. The camera cuts to the reasons for his flight. As well as stifling semi-detached domesticity the town is bisected by streams of traffic taking hard working citizens to either the IBM factory or the shipyards and docks down by the sea front. The town is a network of wage labour, measuring time out abstract minute by abstract minute until wages are earned at the expense of bodily, intellectual and psychological exhaustion. Then there is time for leisure, looking after the kids, maybe even a few beers with workmates. Then the next day starts in order that all of this labour can be accumulated into capital that might produce more factories, offices, semi-detached houses and workers in order to produce capital that might produce more... Bunny, the man walking with some haste into the hills is having none of this- at least for today. He turns with a grimace towards the repetitive activity of the town and strides out into the hills to hide. Once in the hills, Bunny encounters Jody, who is another refugee from the regimes of wage labour and domesticity. Both men are classic work-shy proletarians; both admit to fooling their wives; Bunny pretends he's a postman and Jody a factory worker. The latter is also older, more experienced in the art of slipping away and refusing to work. In conversation he keenly undercuts the younger mans doubts about his chosen non- vocation. There's no point in feeling guilty and no point in worrying about being caught. This is because- as Jody points out with proletarian fatalism- they will be caught for not being on the job and so might as well share the bottles of wine he has.

The Elephant's Graveyard - written by Peter McDougall-was first broadcast in 1976 as part of the BBC's long running 'Play for Today' series of specially commissioned dramas whose remit was to examine topical subjects. Dennis Potter, Lindsay Anderson, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and Alan Clarke all contributed to it and the series often attracted controversy due in part to its unflinching approach to sex, violence, class conflict, poverty, etc.1 While this would place 'Play for Today' in a British 'social realist' tradition- something that continually blights UK cinema and television- the series also experimented with both form and subject. For instance, Dennis Potter's Brimstone and Treacle is like a low budget, less emancipatory and more mean spirited version of Pasolini's Theorem; both share the disruptive figure of an angel/ demon that upsets and negates, calling into question the social relations he is cast into. The Elephant's Graveyard is just as disruptive in its negative critical impetus towards the world of work though through the simple joy of not working this is a gentler negation. And it shares a sense of everyday uncanniness with Brimstone and Treacle. However embodied the two men are in their slacking from the quantitative time of wage labour The Elephant's Graveyard- running, climbing trees, drinking, laughing, philosophising, joking- there's a spectral melancholy to it all. They are not where they are supposed to be. Rather than fulfilling the roles of subject- worker such as clocking in, posting mail, working the machinery of production, clocking out, watching telly, etc., they've stepped away from all that tightly measured wasted time. It's worth remembering- though we're rarely allowed to forget- how important quantified time is to capital. IBM- an American company that provides one of the workplaces in Bunny’s town- stands for 'International Business Machines'. An early 1889 'innovation' of IBM was the invention of a time clock to record a worker's arrival and departure time on a paper tape. Clock in, clock out, punch in and punch out as the clock punches back. Refusal of this quantitative time is central to The Elephant's Graveyard: stepping out of the time of capitalism into a potentially more qualitative, fulfilled time of doing absolutely nothing.

The Elephant's Graveyard has little to do with British social(ist) prolekult realism. Not working here is an opening out to momentary possibility rather than a litany of destitution, monetary need, depression and begging for work from welfare bureaucrats and bosses. Peter McDougall identifies and articulates a different form of proletarian 'need' in this tale of slacking and skiving. This is a 'need' not to be caught in the work/welfare/home/leisure apparatuses and to no longer be defined as working class, worker, prole. The Elephant's Graveyard is one of the few instances- at least in British culture- where this particular 'need' is not only acknowledged but valorised and articulated in language and gestures a million miles away from that of an Oscar Wilde style aesthete or the refusal of work as a preamble to a career in art. The refusal of Bunny and Jody- like most genuine instances of refusal- isn't particularly aspirational within the terms set by capitalism. They just want to think about things a bit, maybe get drunk and recognise themselves outside of the predicates of being working class sons of toil. It's not too speculative to see much of Peter Mcdougall's own experience reflected in this refusal as he spent his youth enduring the hard graft of Glasgow shipyards.2 He probably worked alongside a fair number of aspiring Bunny's and Jody's and their 'craic'- or banter- and habitual hatred of work infuses The Elephant's Graveyard with a class hatred different than that articulated by even the most radical elements of the 'old' Left. As Jody might have said though doesn’t: 'Who the fuck wants to take power as a worker when that's exactly what we wanna escape from?' Needless to say, the only presence of the official representatives of the 'workers'- the trade unions- in The Elephant's Graveyard is in a piss taking diatribe by Jody who describes the process whereby even sincere leftists become absorbed by the 'sponge' of the media and career ambition. A 'sponge'- also composed of wage labour and the religious work ethic of Scottish Protestantism- that Jody thinks is to be avoided whenever possible.

It's hard to imagine The Elephant's Graveyard being commissioned or made in a 2011 Britain. In 2011 even an involuntary period of unemployment leads to enforced exclusion from our increasingly shrinking 'Big Society' and subjection to discipline, disdain and derision by state, media, economic and welfare apparatuses. Even in 1976 it's difficult to think of many cinematic or television antecedents that express the refusal of work as a joyful and oppositional proletarian gesture. If there are cultural antecedents for The Elephant's Graveyard then they tend to be literary and rarely British. We can find them diffused throughout 19th and 20th century culture. For instance, there's Herman Melville's intransigent scrivener Bartleby, whose 'I would prefer not to' is uttered in the heart of 19th century Wall Street. Or the character of Voshchev in 20th century Soviet dissident Andrey Platonov's The Foundation Pit, dismissed from his job for thinking too much in the midst of production. When Jody and Bunny wander the hills drinking it seems like a distant echo of the poet Arthur Rimbaud's preference for 'infinite walks, rests, trips, adventures, wanderings.' (Letter, August 25th, 1870) over wage labour. Or as he put it during the Paris Commune: 'Work, now? Never, never. I'm on strike' (Letter, May 13th, 1871).3 This foot dragging proletarian recalcitrance towards the supposed joys of labouring was never really acknowledged in orthodox socialism, Marxism and anarchism. An exception to the tendency of 19th and 20th century anti-capitalism to venerate labour was the wildly popular ‘Right to be Lazy’ by Marx’s brother- in-law Paul Lafargue. He wrote in 1883 that ‘the proletariat […] has let itself be perverted by the dogma of work. Rude and terrible has been its punishment. All its individual and social woes are born of its passion for work.’4

Of course, that The Elephant's Graveyard is produced in 1976 places it at a particular historical juncture of a more recent politics predicated upon the refusal of wage labour. In 1976 there were still the determined lines of flight of Autonomia in Italy and the post-Situationist libertarian left throughout Europe and North America. This libertarian left partly arose out of practices such as wild cat strikes, sabotage, factory occupations, 'proletarian shopping' and non-payment of rent and bills and a dis-affiliation from 'being' a worker. The Elephant's Graveyard captures something of the emotional tonality of this period in a much quieter register. Rather than the great meta- narratives of resistance and defeat, crisis and revolt, it traces the history of this affective 'need' to resist by any means necessary even if that just entails going for a walk. Still, when Jody and Bunny imagine the massacre of good hard working families by Apaches in the hills where they drift its hard- for me anyway- not to think of the 1977 era 'Metropolitan Indians' in Italy. Dressed in feathers and war paint a contemporary wrote that they would:

"Habitually break into shops and appropriate useless goods.... they also frequently appear at the most elegant movie theatres in groups of about thirty people, naturally after visiting the most expensive restaurants where they obviously didn't pay".5

Even the relatively gentle refusal of work outlined in The Elephant's Graveyard always carries a little of this threat so terrifying to the capitalist or reformist 'Left' and the 'Right'. That said it'd be easy to read the fear of domesticity and the ‘wife at home’ that recurs in The Elephant's Graveyard as a reassertion of working class masculinity that borders on misogyny. Maybe, though, it’s worth reading the flight of Bunny and Jody from both wage labour and the unwaged social reproduction of domesticity as an acknowledgment that domesticity too- and the normative roles of 'man' and 'woman'- are reproduced in capitalism and central to it.

The Elephant's Graveyard is also situated exactly at the point when UK punk began to articulate its own sense of 'No Future' against and through the 'No Future' of capitalism. Without being reductive, Punk partly reflected a decomposition of the Keynesian welfare state that we're still living through in its 'new' guise of neo-liberal crisis. One of the most pernicious forms this crisis takes in the present is the 'Big Society' dream of social entrepreneurs, engaged volunteer labour and the suggestion that it's o.k not to work 9-5 so long as you're a 'creative'. Even 'slacking' might be alright for capital so long as it occurs at the local self-organised library as a form of volunteering. That this goes hand in hand with a disciplinary impetus towards the imposition of disciplinary welfare upon those counted as surplus to the requirements of capital isn't that much of a contradiction.

Part of the subversive import of The Elephant's Graveyard is the wry acknowledgment that 'need' as a simple desire for there to be more to life is expressed through a refusal to be anything in particular- especially a worker- by people whose class position deems them feral subjects unless they're labouring hard. This runs entirely counter to the normative standards of contemporary neo-liberal UK plc. that only allows self- development, workplace development or maybe cognitive behavioural therapy and pills. If the BBC commissioned such a drama now its inevitable Bunny and Jody would be 'chavs', miscreants, 'scum'- if not it'd be a bit too controversial for Milliband, Cameron and our illusory 'Big Society' to swallow down its collectively self- righteous throat. It’s worth speculating that neo-liberalism also gradually established a cultural hegemony that’s especially evident in television drama; occasional exceptions to this such as The Wire tend not to originate in the UK and such televisual subversion is not at all the rule.

As both Jody and Bunny recognise their brief refusal is destined to fail and a return to toil, the strictures of responsibility and the parameters of capitalist social relations is inevitable. That's not to say that such slacking off the job is completely pointless though. They discover less instrumentalised social relations outside of work- through arguing, reflecting and playing together they become friends. And there's always the possibility of repeating the experiment of momentarily running away even as one is always sucked back into work and welfare discipline. Or as Giorgio Agamben, the finest contemporary philosophical proponent of what we could call 'Bartlebyism' writes:

'I tend to think that every act emanating from the singular need of an individual, the proletarian, who has no identity, no substance, will also be, all the same, a political act.' 6

The Elephant's Graveyard reminds us that in work or not we're always potentially feral (non)subjects who will steal, sabotage, sleep or find that moment of grace to momentarily just walk away.

Notes

i http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_for_Today
ii http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_McDougall
tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_McDougall iii See ‘The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune’ by Kirstin Ross (Verso, 2008).
iv http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/index.htm
v http://www.uncarved.org/music/apunk/autonomia.html
vi http://www.scribd.com/doc/34537417/Agamben-Rethinking-Marxism-Interview

Peter McDougall and the BBC's Play For Today

2011-10-06T05:49:00.000-07:00

The old jobs are vanishing. Nostalgia for these outmoded forms of production – now a marketable commodity in art and theatre – is surely misplaced. It was hard, miserable toil in deplorable conditions - F. Mclay, (ed), The Reckoning. Clydeside Press, 1990, p.10.

Play for Today (1970-84)

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/454719/index.html

One of the most famous and influential of all play strands, Play for Today (BBC, 1970-84) demonstrated single drama's potential to engage mass audiences with social comment and artistic experimentation.

In effect The Wednesday Play (BBC, 1964-70) renamed after being rescheduled from Wednesday nights, Play for Today reflected in its name its defining concern with contemporary British life. The series has been associated with social realism, controversies and attacks on its perceived leftwing bias, but its sheer diversity belies such a reductive analysis. Its different styles and genres included comedy and science-fiction; its protagonists encompassed alienated youths and institutionalised pensioners, and its subject matter ranged from regional identity to multinational corporations, from racial politics to time travel.

Within Play for Today's regular industrial space, committed producers (including Tony Garnett, Graeme MacDonald, Margaret Matheson, David Rose and Irene Shubik) enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy. Writers and directors were drawn from theatre (including Richard Eyre and David Hare), established Wednesday Play contributors (including Ken Loach and Dennis Potter) and new talent.

The first piece transmitted under the Play for Today banner (though early pieces were commissioned for The Wednesday Play) was 'The Long Distance Piano Player' (tx. 15/10/1970) by Alan Sharp, directed by regular strand contributor Philip Saville, with Ray Davies as a pianist seeking a record for continuous playing. Early highlights included John Osborne's 'The Right Prospectus' (tx. 22/10/1970), about a middle-aged couple returning to school; 'Circle Line' (tx. 14/1/1971) by W. Stephen Gilbert, who won a BBC Student Play competition; and two contributions to the European initiative Largest Theatre in the World: 'The Lie' (tx. 29/10/1970) and 'The Rainbirds' (tx. 11/2/1971), written by Ingmar Bergman and Clive Exton respectively.

Early examples of overt social comment included Jeremy Sandford's highly-rated homelessness study 'Edna, the Inebriate Woman' (tx. 21/10/1971) and two intricately-researched Tony Parker pieces, 'When the Bough Breaks' (tx. 11/2/1971), on child welfare (directed by future British Board of Film Censors chief James Ferman), and 'A Life is For Ever' (tx. 16/10/1972), on the effects of long-term imprisonment, which was enhanced by Alan Clarke's adept direction of themes of institutionalisation.

However, for directors like Clarke, Play for Today also meant tackling uncharacteristic pieces with different methods, making the strand a kind of studio system. With British cinema undergoing financial uncertainty, directors (including Michael Apted and Stephen Frears) were able to hone their skills on initially rare, much-coveted slots for plays shot entirely on 16mm film - for example, Clarke's 'Penda's Fen' (tx. 21/3/1974), an extraordinary visionary piece by David Rudkin - in addition to less desirable video and multi-camera work.
'Penda's Fen' also exemplified the regional imperative and experimental vision encouraged by producer David Rose at BBC Birmingham. Other examples included 'Land of Green Ginger' (tx. 15/1/1973), Alan Plater's evocation of Hull, plus 'Gangsters' (tx. 9/1/1975), Philip Martin's tough exploration of racial tensions and organised crime in Birmingham, which spawned the self-aware series of the same title (BBC, 1976-78).

Another Play for Today that became a series, 'Rumpole of the Bailey' (tx. 16/12/1975), demonstrated that tough themes and comedy could mix superbly. Other examples included Jack Rosenthal's exquisite coming-of-age piece 'Bar Mitzvah Boy' (tx. 14/9/1976), the genre pastiche 'A Cotswold Death' (tx. 12/1/1982) and the often-cited Mike Leigh pieces 'Nuts in May' (tx. 13/1/1976) and 'Abigail's Party' (tx. 1/11/1977).

Play for Today benefited from film and theatre practitioners embracing television as a platform for social engagement. Determined to address the popular imagination, Trevor Griffiths contributed such incendiary plays as 'All Good Men' (tx. 31/1/1974) and 'Comedians' (tx. 25/10/1979), the latter epitomising the strand's relationship with radical theatre. Further provocative examples included Lindsay Anderson's production of David Storey's 'Home' (tx. 1972) and landmark pieces such as Howard Brenton and David Hare's 'Brassneck' (tx. 22/5/1975), David Edgar's 'Destiny' (tx. 31/1/1978) and the dialectical event 'The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil' (tx. 6/6/1974) from John McGrath and the 7:84 Theatre Company.

Plays on trade union politics and the betrayal of labour engaged with (and, critics feared, incited) industrial action. Key work included Jim Allen and Ken Loach's 'The Rank and File' (tx. 20/5/1971) and Colin Welland's 'Leeds - United!' (tx. 31/10/1974), ably directed by Roy Battersby. However, a political backlash - which damaged Battersby among others - makes Play for Today a barometer of the changing cultural climate.

Several pieces suffered cuts or controversy, particularly those on Northern Ireland, including 'The Legion Hall Bombing' (tx. 22/8/1978) and David Leland and Alan Clarke's 'Psy-Warriors' (tx. 12/5/1981), which presented themes that resonate strikingly with today's 'war on terror'. Two plays were banned outright: Dennis Potter's 'Brimstone and Treacle' (eventually transmitted 25/8/1987) for its conflation of disability, sex and the demonic, and Roy Minton's 'Scum' (tx. 27/7/1991) for its compressed catalogue of Borstal abuse. The BBC's capitulation to Home Office anxieties over 'Scum' exacerbated a purge of leftwing programme makers. The bans were particularly painful given that Potter and Alan Clarke (director of 'Scum') were regular, committed strand contributors - Potter interwove themes across such major pieces as 'Angels Are So Few' (tx. 5/11/1970), 'Double Dare' (tx. 6/4/1976) and 'Blue Remembered Hills' (tx. 30/1/1979).

The furore underlined the increasing vulnerability of single drama strands to political suppression and economics. The strand produced some groundbreaking film work - note the shared aesthetic, akin to Italian neo-realism or art cinema, in early plays, including Leigh's 'Hard Labour' (tx. 12/3/1973) - but the increasing dominance of film raised costs. Despite the interesting related strand Play for Tomorrow (BBC, 1982), the term 'play' seemed anachronistic: a few Play for Today commissions were broadcast without that label, and the mid-1980s saw film-based strands such as Screen One, Screen Two and Film on Four (which, while aiming for cinema release, saw David Rose pursuing themes and approaches comparable with his Play for Today work). Quality drama persists in series and serials, but the absence of a regular slot for contemporary comment and talent development is regrettable: notably, Play for Today was namechecked when the BBC recently mooted a new evening play slot.

Dave Rolinson
Further reading
Lez Cooke, British Television Drama: A History (BFI, 2003)
Irene Shubik, Play for Today: The Evolution of Television Drama (Manchester University Press, 2000).
www.playfortoday.co.uk

McDougall, Peter (1947-)
By Simon Farquhar

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/1394293/index.html

There can be no better justification for the modus operandi of the BBC drama department of the 1960s and 70s than the discovery of Peter McDougall. The most original Scottish voice of the era, McDougall might never have been given a break at any other time in broadcasting history.

Having gone straight from school to the Glasgow shipyards, McDougall fled to London in the mid-60s. It was while painting the house of Z Cars (BBC, 1962-78) star and future writer Colin Welland that he began relating his youthful exploits as a drum major in Glasgow's Orange Parades. The fascinated Welland suggested McDougall turn his experiences into a television play.

Director John Mackenzie was flabbergasted at McDougall's raw talent, and claims the finished film barely contained a single change from the original draft of the script. However the Glasgow police blocked filming on a drama they feared would cause "bloodshed on the streets in the making and in the showing."

Not disheartened, McDougall offered the BBC another play. 'Just Your Luck' (Play for Today, tx. 4/12/1972) told the story of a Protestant teenager who falls pregnant by a Catholic sailor. Its exposure of the religious bigotry of Scotland's West coast caused an enormous reaction, from outrage in the locality to reviews hailing it as "the most exciting debut since Look Back in Anger",

This success prompted the BBC to weather the inevitable controversy and finally make 'Just Another Saturday'. The resultant film (Play for Today, tx 10/3/1975) tells of one day in the life of 16 year-old John (Jon Morrison), whose excitement at leading the Orange Parade is shattered by his discovery of the violence behind the pageantry. Beyond the political issues, it is McDougall's mastery not only of the gallows humour of Glasgow's working class but of the hidden motives of parental kindness that make the drama, in Jeremy Isaacs's words, "a masterpiece" and won the play the Prix Italia.

'The Elephants Graveyard' (Play for Today, BBC, tx. 12/10/1976) was an intimate, pastoral follow-up, teaming Morrison with Billy Connolly for the charming story of two unemployed men dodging the wives who they have deceived about their job situation. The play follows them over one gloriously irresponsible day as they revert to childhood through games, stories and examination of their fears and hopes.

The astounding 'Just a Boys Game' (Play for Today, tx. 8/11/1979), was another 'play in a day', pursuing hard man Jake McQuillan, whose life of alcohol, violence and emotional impotence is threatened by the arrival of a younger, razor-wielding thug. Jake's casual 'boys' games' ultimately result in the death of his only friend. Featuring some of the strongest violence the BBC had ever dared broadcast, it was stunningly photographed by Elmer Cossey and featured McDougall's most crackling dialogue and richest characterisations, all brilliantly evoked by a cast headed by blues singer Frankie Miller in a performance that melts the camera in its intensity.

The partnership of McDougall and Mackenzie was one of the finest of the era. Their final collaboration was on HandMade Films' A Sense of Freedom (1981), dramatising the life of notorious Glasgow criminal Jimmy Boyle. Despite a devastating portrayal of Boyle by David Hayman and some nightmarish sequences of depravity and brutality, it suggested that McDougall was less confident in fact-based or big screen works, an unfortunate weakness as TV drama lost its taste for the single 'play'. Having discovered a genius, television simply didn't quite know how to make the most of him, and sadly, McDougall has never again managed to recapture the extraordinary successes of his early years.

The Old School of Capitalism

2011-09-18T08:18:00.000-07:00

Sunday 25th September | Doors 6pm | Admission Free

The Old School of Capitalism, 2009
written and directed by: Želimir Žilnik
(Serbia, 122 min, DV + HDV)

The Old School of Capitalism is rooted in the first wave of workers revolts to hit Serbia since the advent of capitalism. Desperate workers bulldoze through factory gates and are devastated to discover the site looted by the bosses. Eccentrically escalating confrontations, including a melee with workers in football shoulder-pads and helmets and boss and his security force in bulletproof vests, prove fruitless. Committed young anarchists offer solidarity, take the bosses hostage. A Russian tycoon, a Wall Street trader and US VP Biden’s visit to Belgrade unexpectedly complicate events that lead toward a final shock. Along the way, the film produces an increasingly complex and yet unfailingly lively account of present-day, in fact, up-to-the-minute struggles under the misery-inducing effects of both local and global capital.

At
Colorama Cinema
52-56 Lancaster Street
London SE1

More screenings and info:
http://coloramacinema.tumblr.com/

Full Unemployment Cinema
http://unemployedcinema.blogspot.com/

Autumn Break

2011-08-04T03:49:00.000-07:00

Schools out. We have gone to Croatan. We are running with the Wolfen on the Heygate now, squatting in Venice, not logging onto Facebook in Tunisia, commuting between Glasgow and Brazil, training in magical struggle in Omø. Enough of toil! Stuff this brittle and tiresome world we must leave. We're off!

Be seeing you soon...

Brecht's Beggar's Opera vs. Pabst's Threepenny Opera

2011-07-09T06:06:00.000-07:00

We're through with romanticism, now the seriousness of life begins.
– Polly Peachum, The Three Penny Opera.

It's appropriate that the The Three Penny Opera, G.W. Pabst's 1931 film adaptation of the wildly successful 1928 stage play The Beggar's Opera should have become immured in a court case before it was even completed. Appropriate because both the film and play are concerned with the interweaving of legality and illegality within capitalism, the way that businesses and the state shade into gangs and rackets and vice versa. The case was brought by Bertolt Brecht- co-writer with Elisabeth Hauptmann of the original stage play script – and Kurt Weil – composer of songs and music for both stage and screen versions – upon the rejection of Brecht's script for the film adaptation. Brecht lost the case, a result that may have partly been down to him substantially revising the original stage version of The Threepenny Opera in order to sharpen its anti-capitalist message. For instance, while the conflict between Peachum, the King of the Beggars, and Mackie in the completed film is as much personal as about business, Brecht's original script emphasized that it was essentially nothing more than a conflict between two businessmen and their respective capitalist enterprises. The point being that the underworld is based upon waged and unwaged labour as much as the world of capitalist legality and the two are often indistinguishable. That another racket, that of the 'law', is deeply embedded within this conflict is all to the point. Despite this watering down of Brecht's script the film surprisingly retains the Marxist theme that both criminal enterprises and the 'law' are nothing but business enterprises. As the communist critic and friend of Brecht, Walter Benjamin wrote at the time: 'Brecht is concerned with politics; he reveals the crime latent in business'.

Characteristically, Brecht used the court case as the springboard for a text - The Threepenny Litigation - in which he argued he had set it up as a 'social experiment' in the proletarianization of cultural producers i.e proving that within capitalism they own nothing. Brecht viewed the trial as a grotesque theatre and wrote that it revealed that 'justice, freedom, character have all become conditional upon the process of production...' Even failure and defeat confirmed the basic tenet of Brecht's epic theatre, that capitalism is best apprehended through physical gestures and manifest statements rather than psychological depth. The trial itself exemplified this. Cannily, Brecht later squeezed some cash out of the studio by threatening to force a re-trial and proved he was much more an irritant nurtured on pragmatism than a romantic weeping over creative control.

That he lost the case is not to suggest that Pabst's film version loses all of Brecht's surgical cutting into the real of capitalism – even if the lush expressionist darkness of the film undoubtedly runs counter to the bare sets of Epic Theatre. The Threepenny Opera is best viewed as being at the intersection of some of the most vital if contradictory cultural and political currents of Weimar Germany. Feeding into The Threepenny Opera are Pabst's own darkly expressionist romanticism; Brecht's determined theatrical practice of estrangement, its emphasis upon making unnatural through gesture, statement and voice a capitalism that theatre and cinema traditionally naturalise; communist crude thinking (the poor are always fucked...); the venality of culture as business exemplified in the studio system; the cynical eroticism of Weimar cabaret; the new collective forms of cultural production enabled by both cinema and prolekult experimentation; and the unexplored potential of new forms of cinematic technology as the 'talkie' replaced its silent predecessor. All of these are present in The Threepenny Opera even if the direct Brechtian gaze and voice of Pirate Jenny is seen through the fog of an imaginary Victorian London re-constructed on a Weimar film set.

The Threepenny Opera is a strange hybrid that can't quite let go of either big studio 'romanticism' and expressionist shadows or the 'seriousness' of Brecht's radical experimentation with form. But, given that the songs were so popular in Weimar Berlin that a Beggar's Opera bar opened dedicated to them, this distinction might be too simplistic; Brecht's experimental theatre practice came out of a collective, and popular, communist political culture. That Pabst retained much of Brecht's script- such as the horde of beggars descending upon the Queen – underlines that The Threepenny Opera can't be reduced to a simple recuperation of radical culture by an unscrupulous studio. Maybe, contra Brecht, the expressionist fog and shadows of Pabst's London express as much about the chaotic obfuscation inherent to Weimar Republic capitalism as the sharply delineated gestures and slogans of the theatre of estrangement illuminate it. The mob of beggar's could be a foretaste of a proletarian uprising or a prescient suggestion of the threat of a disenfranchised crowd roused to action by the proto-fascist rhetoric of the beggar king. Pabst's expressionist sets, with their poor lighting, retain and underline this ambiguity. The tensions between the aesthetic strategies of Pabst and Brecht are refracted through one another much as Weimar culture itself was fraught with political, economic and social crisis; the King of the Beggars is also key to the racket, the only way for gangsters to prosper is to own a bank not to rob one. It's this insight into the way the black (illegal) economy not only shades into the world of legitimate capitalist enterprise (see Mexico, Italy, the UK, pretty much anywhere today) but is essentially interdependent with it that makes The Threepenny Opera more than a bit of Weimar cabaret nostalgia. Benjamin writes of Brecht's even more acerbic Threepenny Novel, featuring a crooked underworld/ military industrial complex deal:

This detective novel depicts the objective truth about the relationship between bourgeois legality and crime, the latter being shown as a special case of exploitation sanctioned by the former. Sometimes one slides easily into the other.

There's little light or hope in The Threepenny Opera both literally in its cinematography or as an imaginative space for optimism and hope. Pabst's direction might be said to reflect an authentically Brechtian cynicism albeit in an entirely 'wrong' expressionist register. In the film even the rare dreams of utopia and escape are ultimately predicated upon violence and nihilism, in a stark recognition of how fucked up this world of rackets is. Or as Pirate Jenny sings in her (or rather Kurt Weil's) revenge fantasy of a victorious class struggle that arrives on 'The Black Freighter/ With a skull on its mast head':

Coming out from the ghostly freighter/ They're moving in the shadows where no-one can see/ And they're chaining up people/ And delivering 'em to me/Asking me: 'kill them now or later ? /Asking me: 'kill them now or later ?/ Noon by the clock and so still at the dock/You can hear a fog horn miles away/ And in that quiet of death i'll say: right now !'/ right now !/ And they pile up the bodies/ And i'll say: 'that'll learn you./ That'll learn you./ And the ship/ The black freighter/ Disappears out to sea/ And on it is me!

Links:

Lotte Lenya sings Pirate Jenny
Nina Simone sings Pirate Jenny
http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC15folder/3PennyOpera.html#n11
http://kinofist.blogspot.com/2007/03/forwards-not-forgetting.html
http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/614-the-threepenny-opera-doubles-and-duplicities
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/threepenny_opera/

Bertolt Brecht Poems

Sonnet No.1

(In memory of Josef Klein. Beheaded for robbery and murder 2 July 1927 in Augsburg gaol.)

I dedicate this poem to Josef Klein
It's all I can do for him, for they cut
His head off just this morning. Pity. But
That made it clear we don't approve of crime
That's how they handle flesh and blood, the swine.
Strapped flat upon a wooden board it rode
(It got a bit of Bible that some Holy Joe'd
Picked out, well knowing that no God loves Klein.)
But I think that its really rather much.
Approve it? No, I'd really rather not
Since their crime never stops once they've begun it.
I don't care to be seen among that lot.
(At least not until I've had time to touch
The money that they owe me for this sonnet.)

The Theatre Communist

A hyacinth in his buttonhole
On the Kurfurstendamm
This youth feels
The emptiness of the world.
In the W.C it becomes clear to him:he
Is shitting into emptiness.
Tired of work
His father's
He soils the cafes
Behind the newspapers
He smiles dangerously.
This is the man who
Is going to break up this world with his foot like
A small dry cowpat.
For 3000 marks a month
He is prepared to put on the misery of the masses
For 100 marks a day
He displays
The injustice of the world.

The Beggar's Opera Double Bill

2011-07-08T15:20:00.000-07:00

Sunday 31st July | Doors 7.30pm | Admission Free

The next Full Unemployment Cinema screening is a double bill of German and Brazilian interpretations of Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera itself in turn an early 20th century updating of John Gay's 18th century ballad opera, The Beggar's Opera. Prepare for a 200 year continuum of prostitution, work, crime, class struggle and amazing music.

Sunday 31st July | Doors 7.30pm | Admission Free

8pm

Die 3groschenoper / The Threepenny Opera by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1931 (Germany, 110mins)

10pm

A Ópera do Malandro / The Opera of the Rascal by Ruy Guerra and Chico Barque, 1986 (Brazil, 107mins)

Colorama Cinema
52-56 Lancaster Street
London SE1

http://coloramacinema.tumblr.com/

The Immediate Broth Thursday 28th July

2011-07-06T02:48:00.000-07:00

---------------------------
Thursday 28th July
The Immediate Broth
---------------------------

Glasgow / Edinburgh Film-making collective, The Immediate Broth, present their recent films

Doors 7.30pm

Film Programme starts 8pm

Palimpsest
Neil Gray,UK (2010, 11 minutes)

Palimpsest is composed of ten one-minute theses forming an interrogative essay on the constructed face of urban erasure in the West Midlands. The film focuses on The Public, a multi-purpose arts, community and business space designed by Will Alsop. While city boosters hail the ‘creative advantage’ offered by The Public, the film investigates another possibility: that West Bromwich is “neither Shoreditch nor Manhattan”, and cultural regeneration policy merely marks the weak emulation of losing formulas; a loss leader in a zero-sum game.

The Process
Sacha Kahir, UK (2010, 21 mins)

The Process is a ghost story, where dead industry and new industries of rehabilitation and the black economy loom large. Made with a group of ex-homeless people in Dunfermline, and set in a non-place somewhere between a ghost town and the clinic. The film explores themes of memory and identity on both a personal and social level. Examining the industrial warehousing of the poor in institutions and sink estates, it uses distanciation to create a constantly shifting narrative, where the various subjective experiences of those involved intertwine.

Vaguing in Oppidanus
Neil Gray / Sacha Kahir, 2010 ( UK, 20 mins)

In 18th century Edinburgh, the presbyterian Taliban would seize idlers for ‘vaguing’ on the sabbath. This film, a low rent version of the works of Patrick Keiller or Chris Petit, takes a vague and runs with it, drifting it’s way across the atomised spaces of Edinburgh. As good ‘proletarian shoppers’, the filmmakers appropriate freely from a range of historical and radical texts to create a collage-work which critically explores modern urban life.

Check the Immediate Broth website: http://theimmediatebroth.wordpress.com/

Petri trilogy Sunday 24th July

2011-06-30T04:44:00.000-07:00

Elio Petri's 'social schizophrenia' trilogy

Sunday 24th July | Doors 5.30pm | Admission Free

Colorama Cinema
52-56 Lancaster Street
London SE1

6pm Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto / Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (110mins)

8pm Talk by Alberto Toscano and discussion

9pm La classe operaia va in paradiso / The Working Class Goes to Heaven (109mins)

11pm La proprietà non è più un furto / Property is no Longer Theft (120mins)

People want to go to the cinema just to forget pressing events. Nor do they want political or ethical lessons to pour from the screen. People know enough about unhappiness and do not want to hear anything about it. They do not want pedagogism nor brain washing. They want to enjoy themselves. Movies in the cinema must be consumer goods, like everything else, with no trace of trouble, nor uneasiness. This is the moment we are going through; that indifference, not to mention mistrust, has never spurred any mind. [...]

Today, to make a film, plenty of craziness and a great love for the cinema is required. And this is probably the only positive side of the matter. - Elio Petri, from the book L'avventurosa storia del cinema italiano

Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto / Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, 1970, (110mins)

During a crackdown on political dissidents of the day, a suave, psychopathic Roman police inspector (Gian Maria Volonté) slashes the throat of his masochistic mistress (Florinda Bolkan). Perversely put in charge of the investigation, the inspector plants clues that implicate himself and then craftily diffuses them, ostensibly to prove his invincibility. A biting critic of Italian police methods and a psychological study of a budding crypto-fascist, the film outraged the Italian Right, but proved a huge box office success.

La classe operaia va in paradiso / The Working Class Goes to Heaven, 1971 (109mins)

Petri's absurd political fable shared top honours at the Cannes Film Festival with compatriot Francesco Rosi's The Mattei Affair. A giddy, gut-level, sex-and-politics criticism of industrial capitalism, the film features Petri regular Gian Maria Volonté as Lulu, a gung-ho Turin factory worker caught up in the dehumanizing wheels of mechanical production and meaningless mass production. Sexual fantasies drive his productivity for the company, but his perspective of work and life undergo a radical transformation when he is injured in a factory accident and temporarily laid off. Petri opts for an aggressive, expressionistic visual and aural approach that effectively captures the brutality of modern industrial working conditions. Golden Palm at Cannes (1972)

La proprietà non è più un furto / Property is no Longer Theft , 1973 (120mins)

Money (and private property) are definitely the root of all evil in this eccentric work, the third film remains the most rarely seen in this loose trilogy on "social schizophrenia" that also includes Petri's Investigation on a Citizen Above Suspicion and The Working Class Goes to Heaven. This barbed satire concerns a lowly bank clerk (Flavio Bucci) allergic to money and revolted by its nefarious influence on humanity. He launches a campaign of harassment against a wealthy butcher (Ugo Tognazzi), stealing small insignificant items (but never money) from the man.

Alberto Toscano

As part of this screening, Alberto Toscano will give a short talk putting Petri's trilogy in it's political context in the expanding social struggles of Italy in the early 1970s. Alberto teaches at Goldsmiths College, publishes widely in the Anglosphere, Italy and France. Amongst his listed interests are: Marx and Marxisms; theories of ‘real abstraction’ and value in capitalism; anarchism and communism; political subjectivity; revolt, revolution, and social change; the politics and sociology of religion (fanaticism, messianism, political theology); Italian workerism (operaismo) and autonomism; cognitive capitalism and immaterial labour; biopolitics; imperialism and empire; economic sociology; contemporary French and Italian thought; the politics of art and the aesthetics of the economy.

There is currently an excellent page of links relating to struggles contemporary with these films on Deterritorial Support Group

Colorama Cinema
52-56 Lancaster Street
London SE1

http://coloramacinema.tumblr.com/
and
http://unemployedcinema.blogspot.com/

Upcoming dates - July 2011

2011-06-29T02:28:00.000-07:00

We're ramping up activity this July with three screenings this month.

JULY SCREENINGS

at
Colorama Cinema
52-56 Lancaster Street
London SE1
http://coloramacinema.tumblr.com/

-----------------------------------------------
Sunday 24th July
Elio Petri's 'social schizophrenia' trilogy
-----------------------------------------------

Doors 5.30pm

6pm Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (110mins)

8pm Talk by Alberto Toscano w/ discussion

9pm The Working Class Goes to Heaven (109mins)

11pm Property is no Longer Theft (120mins)

Details: http://unemployedcinema.blogspot.com/2011/07/elio-petris-social-schizophrenia.html

---------------------------
Thursday 28th July
The Immediate Broth
---------------------------

Glasgow / Edinburgh Film-making collective, The Immediate Broth, present their recent films

Doors 7.30pm

Film Programme starts 8pm

Palimpsest
Neil Gray, 2010 (UK, 15 mins)

The Process
Sacha Kahir, 2010 (UK, 23 mins)

Vaguing in Oppidanus
Neil Gray / Sacha Kahir, 2010 (UK, 20 mins)

------------------------------------
Sunday 31st July
The Beggar's Opera Double Bill
------------------------------------

Doors 7.30pm

8pm Die 3groschenoper / The Threepenny Opera by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1931 (Germany, 110mins)

10pm A Ópera do Malandro / The Opera of the Rascal by Ruy Guerra and Chico Barque, 1986 (Brazil, 107mins)

Details: http://unemployedcinema.blogspot.com/2011/07/beggars-opera-double-bill.html

Awash with Work: working on water special

2011-06-16T07:56:00.000-07:00

Sunday 26th June | Doors 6pm

At
Colorama Cinema
52-56 Lancaster Street
London SE1

GenovaTripoli
by Marco Santarelli and Paolo Varriale, 2009.(Italy, 71 min)

Written by Marco Santarelli and Paolo Varriale. Directed and edited by Marco Santarelli, shot by Marco Santarelli and Carlo Vittucci. The documentary examines the life and work of an Italian-Russian crew, working on a container ship. The documentary begins in Genoa and ends in Tripoli, on Christmas night.

A journey at sea in the company of containers , goods and modern day sailors, a scene akin to a long silent conversation with ghosts from other times. A mobile and secret exile made of repeated and repetitive gestures, "GenovaTripoli" tells us of the lige and the work of a crew on a container ship of Russian origin, the Jolly Indaco. Un until the '80s this ship was used by the Soviet army to transport military equipment. The documentary starts in Genova and concludes offshore in Tripoli on Christmas night. This is the first of a trilogy dedicated to the circulation of goods and to the world of docks and cargos.

From an interview with Marco Santarelli.

Q: from arms to containers. These are the "boxes" which are ultimately the main characters in the film, even though they remain visually and metaphorically in the ships hold.

MS: Well, containers are only the narrative pretext for this journey. What interests me is to show the work involved in the transport of containers, the contrast between a 'liquid society', where everything happens in real time, and a 'hard society', the one that allows for things that seem normal to take place. The good that are at our disposal have arrived at us through a journey. Sometimes thay have crossed rough seas, where it's easy for everything to grind to a halt. Behind this situation the constant 'risk' we find a 'hard' work force at play,

~~~WE HAVE A FEW OTHER SHORTS AND FILMS WE COULD SHOW. LET'S DECIDE ON THE NIGHT WITH YOUR HELP~~~~

The Seafarers
by Stanley Kubrick, 1953, (US, 30mins)

Kubrick was commissioned by the Seafarers International Union to film a documentary extolling the benefits of membership of the Seafarers Union. The film marked his first exploration into colour cinematography. The film's design was to showcase the Seafarers Union service to its members and to recruit young men into a life at sea by explaining the benefits and job security of being part of a union.

There are shots of ships, machinery, a canteen, and a union meeting. The film was supervised by the staff of The Seafarers Log, the union magazine. For the cafeteria scene in the film, Kubrick chose a long, sideways-shooting dolly shot to establish the life of the seafarer's community; this shot is an early demonstration of a signature technique that Kubrick would use in his feature films.

Seafarers
by Jason Massot, 2004 (UK, 78mins)

For first-timer Jason Massot, the impulse to make this poignant feature-length examination on the solitary, transient lives of merchant seamen was a desire to examine male solitude and transience. His self-funded DV documentary follows four seamen (a Swede, a Croat, a Polynesian and a Nigerian) as they wait in Rotterdam, the world's largest port, to return to the sea. While each finds himself there for a different reason, all share a world and profession that exerts enormous emotional, relational and economic pressures on them. On the cutting edge of globalisation, with their wages forever in danger of being slashed, they exist in a limbo of often deep loss, be it of home, family, female contact, or even identity. Massot watches quietly as they wait to move on, building the film distinctively from the 'downtime' rhythms of the mariners' days and circling thoughts. It's effectively accompanied by the guitar of Will Oldham, his ambient acoustic score giving a melancholy music to the echoing halls and empty reaches of the docks and 'placeless' industrial zones.

Thames Film
by William Raban, 1986 (UK 66mins Colour 16mm transfer to DVD)

Raban's reflective, ambivalent approach to cinematic Modernism reaches its apogee in Thames Film (1986)...Narrated by john Hurt, it is the closest Raban comes to a conventional documentary, incorporating archive film from 1921-1951, panoramic photographs taken in 1937. Brueghel the Elder's painting the Triumph of Death and T.S.Eliot reading Four Quartets. Raban centres a study of the sites of modernity, and the meanings that time has inscribed into them, on the Thames, juxtaposing shots of the river in 1986 with readings from Thomas Pennant's Journey from London to Dover(1787, close to the emblematic date of 'modernity', 1789). Modernity is put on trial: Pennant's links between British imperialism, technological advances and the Thames are juxtaposed with derelict British imperialism, technological advances and pompous voiceovers from post-war newsreels anticipating the collapse not just of the Empire but also the ideals which supported it.
Gareth Buckell, review on William Raban DVD release (BFI 2005). See Lux : clip

Madame X: Eine Absolute Herrscherin | Madame X: An Absolute Ruler
By Ulrike Ottinger,1977 (Germany, 141 mins)

On the women's ship Orlando the flags of attack, leather, weapons, lesbian love and death are raised with a beauty which dispenses with a total domination of the viewer's gaze.
The aesthetic is strictly stylized, exhibiting itself without overwhelming us. Description from Ottinger’s website

In this extravagantly aestheticized, postmodern pirate film she appropriates the male genre for feminist allegory. Madame X — the cruel, uncrowned ruler of the China seas — promises "gold, love, and adventure" to all women who'll leave their humdrum lives behind. Gathered aboard her ship, Orlando, are a range of types: a frumpy housewife, a glamorous diva, a psychologist, a very German outdoorswoman, a bush pilot, an artist (played by Yvonne Rainer), and a "native" beauty. Their utopia devolves into betrayal and self-destruction—leading to eventual transformation—as the power games of the outside world are ritualized among the women. Tabea Blumenschein, who designed the film's outrageous costumes, appears in a dual role as the pirate queen and the ship's lovely, leather clad figurehead. Refusing conventional storytelling and realism for a rich, non-synchronous soundtrack, the film invites its audience along for an unprecedented journey that celebrates the marginal." — Patricia White, Swarthmore College

The contained and purposeful energy of the maritime proletariat

2011-06-10T06:28:00.000-07:00

What one sees in the harbor is the concrete movement of goods. […] If the stock market is the site in which the abstract character of money rules, the harbor is the site in which material goods appear in bulk, in the very flux of exchange. […] But the more regularized, literally containerized, the movement of goods in harbors, that is, the more rationalised and automated, the more the harbor comes to resemble the stock market.
From Allan Sekula's essay 'Red Passenger' available from aaaaarg.org

Excerpts from The Death Ship by B. Traven

It was that same sea on which thousands and thousands of decent and honest ships were sailing at this very time. And I, of all sane persons on earth and on sea. I had to ship on this can that was suffering from leprosy. A bucket that was sailing for no other reason but that the sea might have pity on her. Somehow, I felt that the sea would not take this tub, which had all the diseases know under heaven, for the simple reason that the sea did not wish to be infected with leprosy and pus. Not yet at least. She, the sea, still waited for the day when the Yorikke would have to be in some port far out of the way and when this old maid, for some reason or other, would then burst or explode or fall apart and so save the sea from being used as cemetery for this pest of the oceans. p.136

A merry life. Hundreds of Yorikkes, hundreds of death ships are sailing the seven seas. All nations have their death ships. Proud companies with fine names and beautiful flags are not ashamed to sail death ships. There have never been so many of them since the war for liberty and democracy that gave the world passports and immigration restrictions, and that manufactured men without nationalities and without papers by the ten thousand. p.176-177

Sailors, on the other hand, are slaves that are not brought and that cannot be sold. Nobody is interested in their well-being, because if one of them falls overboard, or dies in the dung, no one loses any money on him. Besides there are thousands eagerly waiting to take the place of him who is thrown into the ditch along the road to the progress and prosperity of the shipping business.

Sailors are certainly not slaves. They are free citizens, and if they have established residences, they are even entitled to vote for the election of a new sheriff; yes, sir. Sailors are free labourers, they are free, starved, jobless, tired, all of their limbs broken, their ribs smashed, their feet and arms and backs burned. Since they are not slaves, they are forced to take any job on any ship, even if they know beforehand that the bucket has been ordered down to the bottom to get the insurance money for the owners. There are still ships sailing the seven seas under the flags of civilized nations on which sailors may be whipped and lashed mercilessly if they refuse to ship double watches and half of the third watch thrown in. p.112

We, the gladiators of today, we must perish in dirt and filth. We are too tired even to wash our faces. We starve because we fall asleep at the table with a rotten meal before us. We are always hungry because the shipping company cannot compete with the freight rates of other companies if the sailors get food fit for human beings. The ship must go to the ground port, because the company would be bankrupt if the insurance money would not save her. We do not die in shining armour, we gladiators of today. We die in rags, without mattresses or blankets. We die worse than pigs in Chic. We die in silence, in the stokehold. We see the sea breaking in through the cracked hull. We can no longer go up and out. We are caught. The steam hisses upon us out of cracked pipes. Furnace doors have opened and the live coal is on us, scorching what is still left of us. We hope and pray that the boiler will explode to make it short and sure. 'Oh, down there, those men,' says the stateroom passenger who is allowed to look through a hole, 'those filthy sweating devils, oh, never mind, they do not feel it, they are accustomed to the heat and to such things as a ship going down; it's their business. Let's have another cock well iced'.

Of course, we are used to all that may happen. We are the black gang. If you are hungry and you need a job, take it. It's yours. Others are waiting to take it for less.

We go to hell without martial music and without the prayers of the Episcopalian. We die without the smiles of beautiful ladies, without holding their perfumed handkerchiefs in our hands. We die without the cheering of the excited crowd. We die in deep silence, in utter darkness, and in rags. We die in rags for you, O Caesar Augustus! Hail to you, Imperator Capitalism! We have no names, we have no souls, we have no country, we have no nationality. We are nobody, we are nothing. p.125

Next Full Unemployment Cinema event is:
Awash With Work: a working on water special

June 26th

GenovaTripoli
by Marco Santarelli, 2009
(fwith other shorts and excerpts TBA)

>>> Check the website closer to the time for details >>> http://unemployedcinema.blogspot.com/

Special Screening - THE EMPTY PLAN - 10th June 7.30pm

2011-06-08T00:24:00.000-07:00

The Empty Plan
by Anja Kirschner & David Panos (2010)

Friday 10th June | Doors 7.30pm | Film starts 8pm

At
Cine Rama
52-56 Lancaster Street
London SE1

The film-makers will be present and the screening will be followed by a Q&A / discussion. Refreshments will be available.

The Empty Plan
by Anja Kirschner & David Panos (2010)
Runtime: 78 mins, Format: HD / Custom Ratio 3:2

Shifting between documentary, historical reconstruction and melodrama, The Empty Plan interrogates the relationship between theory and practice in the theatre of Bertolt Brecht.

The film contrasts scenes from Brecht's exile in Los Angeles (1941 to 1947) with productions of his 1931 play The Mother in the late Weimar Republic, New Deal America and post-war East Germany, exploring different modes of performance and their relation to changing historical and political circumstances.

The title of the film is taken from Brecht's Messingkauf Dialogues, an unfinished theoretical work written during his exile, which considers the possibilities of 'committed art' and its practical, theoretical and formal limits at a time when revolutionary mass movements had been defeated and theatre was supplanted by Hollywood cinema as the dominant form of popular entertainment.

Through the figures of Brecht, his collaborator Ruth Berlau and his wife, the actress Helene Weigel, the film reflects on conflicting personal, artistic and political ambitions, raising questions about the nature of art and the unrealised dream of its supersession through revolutionary practice.

More about the film and film-makers
http://Kirschner-panos.info

For more details about the film and our monthly screenings see:
http://unemployedcinema.blogspot.com

Bred and Born | Scuola Senza Fine 29th May 6pm

2011-05-23T03:38:00.000-07:00

Self-Education Double Bill
Bred and Born | Scuola Senza Fine 29th May 6pm

At
Cine Rama
52-56 Lancaster Street
London SE1

This screening features two films about alternative educational initiatives carved out from the drudgery of work time

Download a pamphlet about this screening

Bred and Born

by Mary Pat Leece & Joanna Davis, 1983 (UK, 75 min)

Even if [this] film is a conversation, the editing makes it into a text. How is it possible to “give people a chance to speak for themselves” without then “using what they say to talk about what I think is interesting?” – Marina Vishmidt, BFI Screen Online

Bred And Born features four generations of women in an East London family who talk about their own experiences and close family ties, and a women’s group who discuss their roles as mothers and daughters. Moving between these two groups is a fictional storyline: an actress plays two distinct parts - a middle class researcher sent to East London to describe and define the role of the mother within the family, and a 19th Century educationalist advocating motherhood as woman’s ‘natural’ and primary purpose. Gradually, increasingly conflicting ideas disrupt ‘truths’ which seemed to be solid and unquestionable, as elements of class, race and economics become historically visible. Bred And Born acknowledges the differences between women - differences that we are born into and bred to act out - apparent differences between the language of feminism and the narratives of individual lives expressing the same oppressions but locked off from each other by language and tradition.’ (Joanna Davis, Mary Pat Leece, from the Cinenova catalogue).

Scuola Senza Fine / School Without End

by Adriana Monti et al, 1983 (Italy, 40 min)

‘I have been reading how in Italy between 1974 and 1982, there existed ‘150-hours courses’ which were available initially to factory workers and farmers, but eventually extended to housewives and pensioners.' - Emma Hedditch, ‘Now That We Are Persons’

After I had been working with a particular group of housewives for a year, we started shooting the film Scuola senza fine (literally, ‘School without end’) almost casually, in 1979. I was able to get equipment free of charge and money to pay for the film was made available. The women had taken the '150 Hours Course' and had been awarded the completion of secondary school diploma in 1976.

Watching the project develop was like uncorking a champagne bottle. The women’s writing matured and began to flow and sparkle while Lea, whose book L’infamia originaria was about to be published, did not write anything else for several years. The women students, encouraged first by Lea and the discovery of Freud, then by the other teachers and by science, philosophy, and linguistic analysis (visual, written, and body languages), filled page after page of their writing pads and exercise books, with personal reflections on culture, themselves, their families, nature, and feelings.

Introduction to the script of the film Scuola senza fine by Adriana Monti. Translated by Giovanna Ascelle: http://www.universitadelledonne.it/english/scuola%20senza%20fine.htm

http://unemployedcinema.blogspot.com/

2011-04-12T15:49:00.000-07:00

Sunday 24th April, 2011, 6pm

Crane World
by Pablo Trapero, 1999 (Argentina 90 mins)plus Trapero Short
Subtitled

At
Colorama
52-56 Lancaster Street
London SE1
Please check this site just before the 24th in case of venue change!!

This film tells a story about Rulo (Luis Margani), a moderately successful musician in the 1970s but now he's divorced and an unemployed forty-something day-laborer living in Buenos Aires. He's looking for whatever work he can find. He lives with his son who's also musically-inclined rock n roller bum and his mother (Graciana Chironi). His best friend Torres has connections in the Argentine construction industry and finds him work as a large crane operator. But shit happens, you know so Rulo lands a job as an excavating machine operator in distant Patagonia. The workers live in a remote farmhouse and the relationship between management and labor is difficult you could say especially when the food is not forthcoming.

And so the story continues...

Film critic Stephen Holden liked the look and tone of the film and wrote, "[the picture] is a stylistic throwback to 1940s Italian neo-realism. The movie's grainy, sepia-toned cinematography and low-key naturalistic performances by a cast of nonprofessionals enhance its slice-of-life authenticity" but hey we think it's a lot better than that even.

Film critic Diego Lerer, in an extensive essay about director Pablo Trapero's cinema films reviews Mundo Grúa favorably and believes Trapero's film is advancing the "New Argentina Cinema Wave", his films continuing to break away from the older Argentine storytelling. He wrote, "Trapero's film dared to break even freer from the classic narrative models. Even though the film has a story, and one that advances with utter efficiency, Crane World respects the characters' internal rhythm like none of the other films by young Argentines had done so far...In Trapero's film, the scenes are developed in all their length."

If you were a dumb film critic, you might write this about Crane World: 'The story of an aging and overweight one-time rock star who searches for work as a semi-skilled laborer. Employing the style of 1950s Italian neo-realism, Crane World is buoyed by the instinctive sense of optimism and perseverance that keeps the men and women of Argentina’s working class going". But then you probably wouldn't see or know that the film shows how that perseverance totally destroys your life the more you persevere. At a certain point Rulo is just fucked from the rat race. No wonder his son wants to just slack and play in the band. Super poignant film-a-go-go. Enjoy!

Excerpt from Crane World:

Time, Labour, Social Domination

2011-03-28T06:05:00.000-07:00

Manual labour. Time entering into the body. Through work man turns himself into matter as Christ does through the Eucharist. Work is like death.- Simone Weil

Film-time and work-time are intimately connected not only in their opposition - the history of cinema as leisure is only half the picture. Etienne-Jules Marey's photographic gun fired 12 times per second at subjects - the bearers of qualities - which passed its sights. Eadweard Muybridge's experiments further deepened the division of time and the framing of space just as it divided bodies in movement. Gesture would no longer be received as complete nor in its singularity, but in it's divisible and reproducible parts. The human and animal body became partitioned and studied as a motion/labour or work/energy machine. Time was counted into fractions and allotted equivalent space producing a frame. The actions within this frame could now be meticulously studied. It was not an accident that the camera looks like a gun, points like a gun but kills only somewhat differently: 'Cinema is death [or truth] 24 times a second'. Frank B. Gilbreth's truth was the scientific management of Frederick Winslow Taylor with a cinematic plugin. Applied to the 19th and early 20th century worker this science could yield more work from less gestures and in less time. Time was squeezed, labour was squeezed and the body calibrated and managed. Gilbreth's time-motion studies 'saved' labour in order to make workers able to do more. Off-screen are the new management structures Gilbreth's studies empowered: time-keepers and task-setters on the factory floor, bigger boardrooms upstairs, clerks on the phone lines to Wall St stock-traders. In a lifetime of 56 years Gilbreth shot over 250,000 feet of 35mm film.

An excerpt from Giorgio Agamben's essay 'Notes on Gesture' follows:

Notes on Gesture
1. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Western bourgeoisie
had definitely lost its gestures.

In 1886, Gilles de la Tourette, "ancien interne des Hopitaux de Paris et de la Salpetriere," published with Delahaye et Lecrosnicr the Etudes cliniques et physiologiques sur la marche [Clinical and physiological studies on the gait].

It was the first time that one of the most common human gestures was analyzed with strictly scientific methods.Fifty-three years earlier, when the bourgeoisie's good conscience was still intact, the plan of a general pathology of social life announced by Balzac had produced nothing more than the fifty rather disappointing pages of the Theorie de la demarche [Theory of bearing]. Nothing is more revealing of the distance (not only a temporal one) separating the two attempts than the description Gilles de la Tourette gives of a human step. Whereas Balzac saw only the expression of moral character, de la Tourette employed a gaze that is already a prophecy of what cinematography would later become:

While the left leg acts as the fulcrum, the right foot
is raised from the ground with a coiling motion that
starts at the heel and reaches the tip of the toes, which
leave the ground last; the whole leg is now brought
forward and the foot touches the ground with the
heel. At this very instant, the left foot-having ended
its revolution and leaning only on the tip of the toes leaves
the ground; the left leg is brought forward, gets
closer to and then passes the right leg, and the left foot
touches the ground with the heel, while the right foot
ends its own revolution.1

Only an eye gifted with such a vision could have perfected that footprint method of which Gilles de la Tourette was, with good reason, so proud. An approximately seven- or eight-meter-Iong and fifty-centimeter wide roll of white wallpaper was nailed to the ground and then divided in half lengthwise by a pencil-drawn line. The soles of the experiment's subject were then smeared with iron sesquioxide powder, which stained them with a nice red rust color. The footprints that the patient left while walking along the dividing line allowed a perfect measurement of the gait according to various parameters (length of the step, lateral swerve, angle of inclination, etc.).

If we observe the footprint reproductions published by Gilles de la Tourette, it is impossible not to think about the series of snapshots that Muybridge was producing in those same years at the University of Pennsylvania using a battery of twenty-four photographic lenses. "Man walking at normal speed," "running man with shotgun," "walking woman picking up a jug," "walking woman sending a kiss": these are the happy and visible twins of the unknown and suffering creatures that had left those traces.

The Etude sur une affection nerveuse caracterisee par de l'incoordination motrice accompagnee d'echolalie et de coprolalie [Study on a nervous condition characterized by lack of motor coordination accompanied by echolalia and coprolalia] was published a year before the studies on the gait came out. This book defined the clinical profile of what later would be called Gilles de la Tourctte syndrome. On this occasion, the same distancing that the footprint method had enabled in the case of a most common gesture was applied to the description of an amazing proliferation of tics, spasmodic jerks, and mannerisms - a proliferation that cannot be defined in any way other than as a generalized catastrophe of the sphere of gestures. Patients can neither start nor complete the simplest of gestures. If they are able to start a movement, this is interrupted and broken up by shocks lacking any coordination and by tremors that give the impression that the whole musculature is engaged in a dance (chorea) that is completely independent of any ambulatory end. The equivalent of this disorder in the sphere of the gait is exemplarily described by Jean-Martin Charcot in his famous Lecons du mardi:

He sets off-with his body bent forward and with his
lower limbs rigidly and entirely adhering one to the
other - by leaning on the tip of his toes. His feet then
begin to slide on the ground somehow, and he proceeds
through some sort of swift tremor.... When the
patient hurls himself forward in such a way, it seems
as if he might fall forward any minute; in any case, it
is practically impossible for him to stop all by himself
and often he needs to throw himself on an object
nearby. He looks like an automaton that is being
propelled by a spring: there is nothing in these rigid,
jerky, and convulsive movements that resembles the
nimbleness of the gait.... Finally, after several attempts,
he sets off and-in conformity to the aforementioned
mechanism-slides over the ground rather
than walking: his legs are rigid, or, at least, they bend
ever so slightly, while his steps are somehow substituted
for as many abrupt tremors. 2

What is most extraordinary is that these disorders, after having heen observed in thousands of cases since 1885, practically cease to be recorded in the first years of the twentieth century, until the day when Oliver Sacks, in the winter of 1971, thought that he noticed three cases of Tourettism in the span of a few minutes while walking along the streets of New York City. One of the hypotheses that could be put forth in order to explain this disappearance is that in the meantime ataxia, tics, and dystonia had become the norm and that at some point everybody had lost control of their gestures and was walking and gesticulating frantically. This is the impression, at any rate, that one has when watching the films that Marey and Lumiere began to shoot exactly in those years.

Evening Land by Peter Watkins

2011-03-21T06:58:00.000-07:00

Sunday 27th March 2011, 6pm
at Colorama
52-56 Lancaster Street,
London SE1

Evening Land
by Peter Watkins, 1976 (Denmark 110 mins)

Made with a cast of 192 non-professional actors, Evening Land continues to explore the form of fictional documentary which Watkins had developed since Culloden (1964), intervening polemically into a period of intense debates about the media, worker militancy, terrorism and the anti-nuclear movement.

‘Evening Land’ depicts ‘fictional’ events in Europe at that time - beginning with a strike at a shipyard in Copenhagen over the building of four submarines for the French navy: not only because the financially troubled management has proposed a wage freeze to secure the contract, but because it is discovered that the vessels can be fitted with nuclear missiles. At the same time, a summit meeting of European Common Market ministers takes place in Copenhagen, and a group of radical demonstrators kidnap the Danish EEC Minister in protest against the production of nuclear submarines in Denmark, and in support of the strikers’ demands. The Danish police not only brutally attack a demonstration by the strikers, they also locate and rescue the kidnapped minister, and capture or kill the ‘terrorists’.

Essay: http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/evening.htm

Peter Watkins on Evening Land - Aftonlandet

2011-03-01T06:04:00.000-08:00

http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/evening.htm

Background

IN OCTOBER 1975, I was invited by Stig Björkman, a Swedish filmmaker in charge of production for the Danish Film Institute, to begin research on a feature film which was to be funded chiefly by the Institute, and two private producers, Steen Herdel and Ebbe Preisler. Together with Danish director/writer Poul Martinsen and journalist Carsten Clante, we co-wrote the script of what became ‘Evening Land’. Like most of my other films, this one involved extensive research, a brief outline, and almost no written dialogue. I began filming in March 1976 - with a cast of 192 non-professional actors, and Joan Churchill (‘Punishment Park’) as cinematographer. ‘Evening Land’ depicts ‘fictional’ events in Europe at that time - beginning with a strike at a shipyard in Copenhagen over the building of four submarines for the French navy: not only because the financially troubled management has proposed a wage freeze to secure the contract, but because it is discovered that the vessels can be fitted with nuclear missiles. At the same time, a summit meeting of European Common Market ministers takes place in Copenhagen, and a group of radical demonstrators kidnap the Danish EEC Minister in protest against the production of nuclear submarines in Denmark, and in support of the strikers’ demands. The Danish police not only brutally attack a demonstration by the strikers, they also locate and rescue the kidnapped minister, and capture or kill the ‘terrorists’.

Reaction

‘Evening Land’ opened in Copenhagen and four other Danish cities, as well as in Stockholm, on February 18, 1977. The reaction by most of the Scandinavian critics was hostile, and the film was attacked primarily for “lacking a political base.” The Marxists expressed their dislike because the film supposedly sympathized more with the ‘terrorists’ than with the workers. One reviewer’s query - “When will Peter Watkins learn to stop frightening the public?” - echoed the sentiments of most of the conservative papers.

Instead of dwelling on these negative reviews, I again turn to Joseph Gomez for his evaluation of ‘Evening Land’ (‘Peter Watkins’, Twayne Publishers, 1979 : “Those familiar with Watkins’ Scandinavian films might at first perceive Evening Land as a step backward in his cinematic development. Gone, for instance, are the complex sound-track overlays, the careful manipulation of silences, and a multilayer method of psychological investigation. It might be more appropriate, however, to consider the film as a step to the side - a parallel development of his style. In fact, Watkins stresses that he deliberately attempted to break away from what he achieved in Edvard Munch in order to establish, in Evening Land, a structure of confrontation chiefly through dialogue. The emphasis is also in directness, and thus Watkins, for the first time in his professional career, avoids the use of an off-screen narrator or a television interviewer who becomes a major character in the film. Although stylistically different from much of his other work, one of the purposes of Evening Land remains the same. Watkins again attempts to force his audience to re-evaluate film and television structures by extending them beyond their conventional, present-day “response-oriented” uses. Also, in this film, especially through the use of Martin the journalist, who loses his job as industrial correspondent, Watkins tries to alert his audience to the dangers of the misuse of media in today’s world. The great achievement of Evening Land rests with the dialectic patterns that Watkins evolves through his editing. Though the film gives a "multifaceted newsreel" impression, its structure is meticulously controlled through the editing. Watkins' dialectical organization is especially complex because it is sustained throughout the entire film, and even if one employs Sergei Eisenstein's A + B = C shot structure to analyze the editing process, the constantly shifting nuances in each term of the equation alter the meanings of the terms even within the same shot. As such, generalizations become almost impossible. The strike committee, for example, does not represent a consistent position at any one time. It is made up of numerous views which are continuously changing, and thus the terms of the dialectic shift every time a new juxtaposition is posed. These permutations multiply throughout the film, and as such, its very structure comes to reflect the difficulties of coming to understand the pressures and implications of events which affect us today. Of course, the film does not propose any kind of dogmatic solution. Watkins wants his viewers to try to understand and to evaluate the situations he depicts. Perhaps then the audience will discuss not the film, but these situations, and will arrive at decisions through an increased awareness. This is Watkins' greatest hope, and his belief in the integrity of his audience stands as the cornerstone of his methods of filmmaking. Although his film is structured entirely in dialectical terms, Watkins claims "there is an underlying motif of anxiety and passion for the state of our entire system - and the total purpose of Evening Land is summed up by its plea at the conclusion for a greater awareness of the human dilemmas facing our society." The problem with this statement is that Maj Britt's dialogue at the end of the film ... is probably not strong enough to support this claim. Poul Martinsen has indicated that he and Watkins conceived a slightly different ending which exhibited a new strength among many of the workers as they discussed how to change their tactics. Perhaps in this context, the emphasis on "the human dilemmas" would have been greater. A single take of such a sequence was shot, but it did not turn out very well, and unfortunately, financial problems did not allow for this material to be refilmed ...”

In the next section Gomez criticises ‘Evening Land’ for the “unrealistic, even romanticized” portrait of the terrorist group, and concludes his review by saying:

“Although it could have been a much stronger film had Watkins made the terrorists as ruthless as members of the Red Brigade, Evening Land remains practically the only serious political film about life in Western society in the late 1970s. While this fact seems to have eluded the Scandinavian critics, it was duly acknowledged in France, where the film was recognized as a major political work which "can develop analysis and true thinking" in the viewer. Most French critics went on to praise the film's technical accomplishments and its brilliant dialectic structure. At about the same time these reviews were being published, however, [the Chairman] of the Programudvalget (Danmarks Radio's board of governors), wrote Watkins a letter. Incredible as it may sound to anyone who has endured a typical evening of Danish television, [the Chairman] refused to telecast Evening Land because it did not, “in our opinion, in its form reach a standard which DR finds necessary”. Given responses such as this one, and the overall attitudes of television and film executives in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden to his work, it should not be difficult to understand why Watkins finally deemed it necessary to leave Scandinavia and to begin what would amount to another period of self-exile in his life.”

Perfumed Nightmare

2011-02-15T03:36:00.000-08:00

Sunday 27th February, 2011, 6pm

Perfumed Nightmare
by Kidlat Tahimik, 1977 (Phillipines 91 mins)

At
Colorama
52-56 Lancaster Street
London SE1

In Perfumed Nightmare auteur and artist Kidlat Tahimik takes viewers on a magical taxi ride down the winding road of neocolonialism and work towards increasing self-consciousness, parody and anger.

Kidlat Tahimik is a young man living in a small Filipino village. As the film opens, we see him in three stages of life (symbolized by toy and then real ‘jeepneys’, the elaborately recrafted and decorated vehicles that have their origins in the Jeeps left by the Allies in World War II) crossing the bridge – ‘the bridge of life’ – to his village. Narrating in voiceover, Tahimik explains the patterns of daily life in the village. He has a fascination with the Voice of America broadcasts, and particularly with the space program. He longs to be part of the developed world, and forms the Werner von Braun fan club. When an American arrives for an aborted international conference, he gets his chance. The American asks him to come to Paris, to run his chewing-gum-ball machine business on the streets. In Paris, and on a trip to Germany, he makes friends and discovers that progress in the developed world sacrifices important values. Backgrounded by footage of a summit meeting in Paris, and unable to return to an idealized image of his past, he stubbornly refuses to capitulate to the terms of progress, resigning from his post as head of the Werner von Braun fan club and maintaining that he will find his own way.
From: http://library.american.edu/subject/media/aufderheide/perfumed.html

Map to venue: http://www.streetmap.co.uk/oldmap.srf?x=531812&y=179583&z=110&sv=531812,179583&st=4&ar=Y&mapp=oldmap.srf&searchp=oldsearch.srf&lm=0

Hostile Object Theory

2011-02-15T03:32:00.000-08:00

Reposting this excellent essay on recalcitrant labour and the hostility of a value-formed world

Originally published on Mute:
http://www.metamute.org/en/articles/hostile_object_theory

Hostile Object Theory
By Evan Calder Williams

What is this disconcerting antipathy glimpsed when everyday objects malfunction or break-down and seem, darkly, to want to hurt us? Evan Calder Williams tracks back the hatred to its origins in production

In Buster Keaton's film Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), having de-dandified (mustache and beret removed, and 'work clothes' donned), the prodigal son Bill Jr. comes aboard his father's ship for gainful employ and to acquire the designation Steamboat Bill Jr.

Image: Still from Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr., 1928

But the objects aren't having it. Moments after stepping on, Bill backs into the railing, knocking the life preserver ring into the river below, where it's expected to bob, cheerily buoyant. But at which point it sinks, like a stone, dragging itself, and the phantom body it would hold aloft, to the muddy cold of the riverbed.

There have been hints, earlier on in the film, of an object world at odds with those who, as a species, make those objects and, as individuals, try to make them work for them. We see a ceaseless series of possible 'mature' hats incapable of pleasing both father and son. But, when compromise is found/forced upon Bill, the wind snatches it away. Wasted time and judgment, spent money, a lost thing. These, however, are minor, invigorating inconveniences. Besides, how else do you develop a bit of character if not tussling with a resistant order of things?

But Steamboat Bill's encounter is something different, revealing a fundamental wrongness of objects. After the ring plummets, Bill steps back in shock, staggering, reaching out to touch the surfaces of the ship, now utterly uncertain what it is, this thing built from money and intended to generate more of it. The assumed correlation between the intended purpose of objects and their actual behaviour shattered in the fall of a single murderous example. For what is a life preserver that isn't just sub-par at preserving life but reveals itself as the promise of death? As a stone life-terminator ring? What is a steamboat if not a ghost ship of sharp edges and weight, inertia and speed and obstinacy? And beyond that vessel, a bristling world barely held together. We touch it gingerly, never knowing what will break and what will break us, thoughtlessly.

This is an instance of what I'll call hostile objects: a conviction that the objects of capitalism aren't just indifferent to us or darkly coherent beyond our intentions.^¹ They are structurally hostile, and, more often than we'd like to admit, locally hostile: uncertain, unstable, loathing or loathsome, dangerous, and weirdly incommensurable with the purpose for which they were designed. This isn't to speak of nature per se, not an Algernon Blackwood-esque thought of a savage animism.^² Nor is it a unified theory of what the world would be without us even as we still are in it; the dark and threatening woods. For my concern is not 'what is without us', but the shitty flashlight we carry through those woods, the kicking-back chainsaws we wield to take them down. This is an Unnaturphilosophie, concerned not with humanless ecologies but the self-sabotaging, crumbling inhumanity at the core of the economic.

In other words, there is the cold neutrality of that which needs us not a whit (comets, slimes, very old rocks, the usual suspects). And then there's that which would not exist without us or which would not exist as such, and which, if it did or does retain any affective traces of how it came to be, hates us for this fact and scorns its own dependence on the regime of value that ordered its production. As noted, this concern is with objects specific to the historical order of capitalism, whether they be produced as commodities, 'discovered' and valued as potential commodities, or discredited as that which cannot be exchanged. However, insofar as we consider the specificity of capital, it lies not in the older fact of producing goods to be sold, not the commodification of things, but above all the commodification of human labour under the general abstraction of value. In other words, it is the developing global condition by which human effort, broken up into units of time, becomes measurable, quantifiable and exchangeable in terms of the very abstract value it produces: the labour that produces surplus value, and hence drives the whole enterprise, is structured in accordance with the form of value.^³

Image: Still from Steamboat Bill, Jr.

This relation of equivalence opens onto the basic struggle at the heart of the labour and social relations of inequivalence that alternately supports or threatens its smooth running.^⁴ At this level, however, this form of relating, combative as it may be, is not hostility, at least insofar as we intend by hostility something distinct from enmity or antagonism, which implies having a recognisable antagonist.^⁵ Hostility indicates an impersonal, total enmity, a rejection of talking it out, an opaque threat whose motives, source and structure remain ultimately unknowable. The hostis is that which does not belong to - and cannot be understood in accordance with - the order it threatens.^⁶

As such, this hostility - as particular antagonism transformed into threat to the system of values it opposes - emerges along with the general abstraction of labour as capitalism develops, such that the commodity appears outside of the process of production, not just as a finished product of labour, not just as an 'object' to whatever labourer/subject was involved in its production, but as the object of a general order of valuation, circulation, accumulation, and exchange. Broadly speaking, a process of reification: the 'distortion' of conceiving of commodities in terms of social relations and of social relations in terms of commodities. Commonly, we assume that part of the solution is to pull the wool from our eyes, to stop treating objects as subjects and endowing them with social characteristics. Things are just things, they won't make you a better person, they have no inherent social value, destruction of property isn't really violence... But to do this is simply to pass them off as not us, without recognising that they are the material organisation of all the toil, struggle, and negative affect that went into them, that thwarted, pissed-off agency, a clenched fist that keeps pulling punches and punching clocks. Moreover, reification implies that there's a category error, 'socially necessary' but a fallacy all the same, as though something's gone wrong in cognition. But it hasn't. Something has gone wrong in the organisation, production, and maintenance of things. This is no pathetic fallacy, for it's not just that we constantly confront the world of commodified objects as a world of social relations. It's that we confront that world of commodified objects as a hostile world of social relations of hatred, coercion, competition, boredom, emiseration, and exploitation. The entire built world of capitalism is a literal record of hate, drudgery, longing, and withheld explosions, stacked millions of hours high. And it is that which surrounds us, at all moments.

To speak of hostile objects is to speak of two distinct modes.

General hostility: as described above, the structural condition of how enmity is abstracted into the relation of general equivalence that underpins the value-form and is therefore a characteristic of all commodities. It is a hostility not present 'in' an object as a supplement or a remainder, but rather in the basic relation between commodities of which human labour - and all its supplementary work of reproducing itself, buying commodities, moving around, sitting in buildings - is one.^⁷ Such hostility is not apparent in normal interactions of exchange and use, and it does not 'cause' those instances of threat. Rather, in the normally intolerable state of affairs, it takes an exceptional failure for such an encounter with the base toxicity of the value-form to come into view: not just when something breaks down in an expected manner and after a socially reasonable amount of time but when active intervention (sabotage) or a strange, inexplicable failure (auto-sabotage) turns a commodity into 'just an object' of busted value before it ‘was its time to go'.

Particular hostility: Distinct instances of objects whose relation to those using them, or in proximity, appears distinctly malevolent, counter-productive, and weird. Whether or not this is attributed to chance, some lasting trace of the particular circumstances of an object's production, or, in the often fantasmatic cultural instances I consider here, some volition, appears to direct it. There is something particular about this thing that acts in a manner that cannot be understood in terms of its intended function yet which appears to have it in for us.^⁸

Image: Jacques Carelman's 'Masochist's Coffee Pot' from his Catalogue d'objects introuvables, 1969

Capitalism is ultimately predicated on a crossing back and forth between the general and the particular, with the aggregate measure of the latter giving shape to the former, and with the injunctions of the former dictating the available modes of latter. Here, too, any rigid division misses the point. Of greater interest is where the point of crossing between the two becomes a sticking point, where such a constantly self-reinforcing real abstraction runs into blockages. One of these blocked crossings is sabotage, in which the insupportable contradictions of work are brought to bear directly on its own processes.^⁹

In 1916, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, an American Wobbly, wrote a short pamphlet entitled Sabotage: The Conscious Withdrawal of the Workers' Industrial Efficiency, a remarkable and seriously under-read document whose topics range from over-salting the soup to birth strikes.^¹⁰ Her innovation, similar to Marx's understanding of how creative destruction and crises are necessary for the health of capitalism, is to see sabotage not only as something done against capitalism. Rather:

Employers interfere with the quality of production, they interfere with the quantity of production, they interfere with the supply as well as with the kind of goods for the purpose of increasing their profit. But this form of sabotage, capitalist sabotage, is antisocial, for the reason that it is aimed at the good of the few at the expense of the many, whereas working-class sabotage is distinctly social, it is aimed at the benefit of the many, at the expense of the few.

Of course, given the sheer amount of waste and rot capital generates on its own, it's unlikely that communist disruption can come anywhere close to the potlatch of everyday circulation. Understandably, then, Flynn moves, in this sabotaged dialectics,^¹¹ toward the interference in quality with particular emphasis on adulteration ('the act of debasing a pure or genuine commodity for pecuniary profit, by adding to it an inferior or spurious article, or by taking from it one or more of its constituents').^¹² The specific instance that provoked this pamphlet was the arrest of Frederic Sumner Boyd for encouraging sabotage in a textile mill and urging workers to use certain chemicals in the dyeing of the silk that would make it unweavable. Yet, as Flynn points out, 'these chemicals are being used already in the dyeing of the silk. It is not a new thing that Boyd is advocating, it is something that is being practiced in every dye house.' In short, Boyd's sabotage consists of adding just a bit more of the chemicals already used in the factories by capitalists who willfully debase the quality of their own silk, in order to make it accord with a different principle of valuation, that of weight.^¹³

The silk is there. The loom is there. There is no property destroyed by the process. The one thing that is eliminated is the efficiency of the worker to cover up this adulteration of the silk, to carry it just to the point where it will weave and not be detected. That efficiency is withdrawn.

And what is drawn out, at the moment where the silk passes from potentially exchangeable to a ruined bolt of metal-soaked junk, is the hostility of the general structure, as the real movements of exchange are made manifest and manifest themselves as generally hostile. We might take Alfred Sohn-Rethel's point that the act of exchange is an act of practical solipsism: 'mine - hence not yours; yours - hence not mine. What is reciprocal is the exclusion of ownership.'^¹⁴ Yet against these rival claims, the commodity is posited as one, a unity imagined outside of processes of change and effects of decay or interference. At the moment of exchange, it is withdrawn from consideration of use or change: 'they are equated by virtue of being exchanged, they are not exchanged by virtue of any equality which they possess.' And so sabotage is the mirrored moment of exchange, a withdrawal of a commodity from circulation but via the utter destruction of the supposed utility, and hence exchangeability, of that thing. It declares this is no one's, with a jerking halt in the circuit. If we can't all own it, can't all profit from it, and, above all, can't all not make it in the first place, then no one will have it. It is a deictic, negatively social act waiting in the anti-social wings of accumulation.

What, though, of our stone life preserver? What of that possibility that rears its head into the plane of the normally functioning, of particular hostile objects, not broken in order to fight against a regime of work but a sabotage unmanned, unnamed and deeply strange? If one point of this project is to develop a sense of the hostility there from the start, which we might access through acts of intervention or research, the other is to consider just how difficult it is to provide figuration of such an asubjective malevolence. In this regard, I want to end with a gesture toward a cultural history, a project to come, of scattered instances across the 20th century that have grappled with this very problem and whose 'failure' to get it right has produced a volatile, unsettling trajectory of haunted houses, possessed appliances, squirming neckties itching to become nooses, slippery floors, and explosive fraying fabric. One could write a history of real commodities that have shown themselves distinctly capable of this strange enmity: after all, we exist in a world that has produced automated dolls intended to chomp away on play food and which have turned instead on the hair of little girls, eating their way relentlessly toward the scalp. Here, however, I offer a skeletal outline of some of instances that have given full reign to that darker prospect of objects genuinely out to get us. The majority of the examples here are from film. This not accidental: as a mode of production, as a temporal medium, as a site of special effects capable of, and taking pleasure in, showing objects act 'of their own accord', as that born of the moment of assembly line and the massive changes in social composition this wrought, as the most extended elaboration of the horror genre in which one would expect to find badly behaving objects, as commodity, and as that art form which perhaps most bears the traces of the entire cultural-industrial assemblage that lies behind any singular instance of 'popular cinema', film has been best suited to this task, all the more so in how it butts against these impasses of thinking hostility.

In 1928, the same year as Steamboat Bill, Jr., Hans Richter's Ghosts Before Breakfast, whose air of whimsy can't suppress its stench of menace, as revolvers turn unbidden and hats swoop free of their heads as though The Birds had been about men's fashion.

In Russia, Soviet novelist Andrei Platonov's lumpen animism perhaps leaves behind the commodity as such, but paints the obduracy, rot, and valueless heart of things so viciously that its rubbish wind can't help but blow west.

Botanical illustrations of cables in Italy show them unwinding themselves, a frayed hack at its own behest, far before fiber optics snake through the ground.

The second World War, and the RAF pilots' fantasies of gremlins. In the US, they laugh this off and make cartoons about it, turning the gremlins into supplementary, external homunculi, alternately hammering away at bombs and sawing away at Hitler's bomber. This is a safety measure, a defanged fantasy, keeping the actual fact of worker's loathing out of the rivets and converting it into a recognisable anthropic form that comes from outside to wreak playful havoc on the deathly machines.

1951's The Man in the White Suit, a whirling mess of an anti-work film, in which capital and organised labour unite against the threat of a fabric impervious to decay and dirt, a white polymer that nearly takes down the factory in a recurrent series of explosions and which ultimately takes itself down, into handfuls of useless chaff.^¹⁵

Tati's films, not because ultra-modern kitchens prove seriously harmful to one's health, but because they paint a moment caught between two poles: poisonous, spring-loaded plastic, or the bombed-out detritus of a dead world.

Guy Debord's reminder that 'wreckers write their names only in water': sabotage may have its agents provocateurs, but what remains is nothing but the restless fact of the devalued.

Jacques Carelman's Catalogue d'objets introuvables and its masochistic teapots, inverted tandem bicycles built so that lovers will strain headlong against each other, and visions of objects flawlessly redesigned to express the vicious potential they had all along.

Closer to the present, the clarification that although the generic convention of hostile objects should be horror, the horror film has proven itself most incapable of thinking enmity without a locatable subject. Instead the genre tends either to orchestrate the hostis from behind the scenes as discernible antagonist or present it to be demonically stuck in the things themselves, even as it has given us an endless series of dish-smashing spooks, furious toys, and machines with minds of their own. It comes closest, perhaps, in the physical spaces of Dario Argento's giallo horrors, in which the modern landscape is shown to consist, above all, of an excess of highly polished sharp things against which bodies prove to be little more than overfull containers of bright red liquid. But where it seems it should be the case, in tales focused on commodities, it can't shake off the specter of the anthropic. John Carpenter's Christine certainly provides a retributive car, possessed by no one, that responds murderously to men putting their hands under its hood, yet it frames this under the sign of a jealous woman competing for the affection of her owner. Tobe Hooper's The Mangler begins remarkably, something like a Heiner Müller horror-of-labour tale, with appropriately throwback factory aesthetics centered around its hulking, blood-thirsty steam press, but it's only a matter of time before it unfolds into a story of the demon that impels it. The Final Destination series, in all its Rube Goldbergian glee, betrays the latent possibility of an unending set of dangerous chain reactions without a planner behind the scenes. For even without literally anthropomorphising death, it does insofar as it sets up a situation in which the protagonists cheated death out of the predetermined selection of their time to go, and hence this inventive malevolence of the object world is an exception dictated by a retributive need to set the order right.^¹⁶ Various Japanese horror offerings turn banal commodities - cell-phones, hair extensions - into harbingers and deliverers of doom, but inevitably, there's a literal ghost in the shell, lashing out and righting past wrongs. Even the immaterial hell-raiser of Joe Dante's Gremlins 2: The New Batch, which is nothing more than electrical current, shows itself to us in a neon approximation of that familiar bat-eared gremlin shape, proving that a shift from an aesthetics of mass produced things doesn't ensure a break in the demand that there be some one to blame for all this mess.

Image: Still from Dario Argento's Tenebrae, 1982

To return to where we started, comedy, particularly of the slapstick variety, has proven itself the strongest site for wrestling with the potential violence of these everyday products of capital's structural violence. And so, in a strange reversal, while horror ends up venturing an essentially comedic question (what if my hair-drier was possessed by the angry soul of a teenage girl who killed herself?), comedy edges closer to a legitimately horrifying prospect: what if my hair-drier was possessed by no one yet might destroy me in spite of that fact? No wonder we laugh, and nervously. For inasmuch as we take cultural elaborations as a decent measure of the limits of what we can grasp or imagine, then we don't know how to think antagonism without a protagonist, hostility beyond subjects. That is, we don't know how to think one of the basic conditions of capitalism nor any sabotage incorporated by or directed against it. And this is the case no matter how many railroad tracks we undo, soups we spoil, bolts of silk we ruin, windows we shatter, or life rings that take us with them straight to hell.

Evan Calder Williams is a writer living in California and author of Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, forthcoming from Zero Books this spring. He writes the blog Socialism and/or Barbarism

This piece is indebted to suggestions from, and extended conversations with, a number of people, especially Giovanni Tiso, Jannon Stein, Marina Vishmidt, and to two events hosted, alternately, by Benjamin Noys and Pil and Galia Kollectiv

Footnotes

1 This will become clearer in the piece, but a brief note on why hostile objects, instead of hostile commodities. The reason is that the moment when such a hostility - either in its general form of the exchange abstraction or in a form particular to that commodity - becomes manifest, intrusive, or apparent is the moment of the assertion of an object against its limitation to being just commodity.

2 Or rather, an agential, often anthropomorphic (even as it tries to disavow the humanness of what it depicts), monstrous nature.

3 This is Marx's central point about the real, as opposed to formal, subsumption of labour under capital.

4 Following a line of analysis associated with Mario Tronti and other workerist thinkers, without necessarily agreeing with their general approach, we can say that worker's struggle is itself both a support and a threat. Because workers refuse the simple extension of working hours or the decrease of wages, capital is forced to innovate in order to continually grow, thereby developing new technologies of fixed capital, modes of consumption, financial instruments, and all other arcane paraphernalia of capitalist accumulation. Of course, the prospect always remains, however rare, that workers will not just try to defend their right to work and the tolerable quality of that work but begin attacking the very categories of work and worker.

5 As is initially the case in most labour formations (a discernible hierarchy of lords and bosses) and remain so in many, with the distinctly personal and enclosed situations of boss-workers, in all its local dynamics and inheritances from "pre-capitalist" modes.

6 For example, to be designated a hostis humanis generis (the enemy of all mankind), as pirates were, is to be designated as no longer belonging to the mankind you threaten: you become a barbarian to the species, that of a different order of knowledge and value. For more on hostility and opacity, see my previous article in Mute: 'Painting the Glass House Black', 25 March 2010, http://www.metamute.org/content/painting_the_glass_house_black

7 This might be understood as the flip-side of the general intellect Marx sees crystallized in the machinic assemblages of production and circulation.

8 N.B., for the sake of this piece, I am not considering another major version of what might be meant by particularly hostile objects, namely, those designed to be that way. I'm leaving out the most hostile of 20^th century objects, military technology, partly because as against that which fires flawlessly and lethally, I'm interested in misfirings. Not in just what kills or what goes wrong (not something that wears out as expected, not the fact that a sharpened knife might cut you if misused or that a badly designed chair will fuck up your back), but what goes weirdly wrong, against expectation.

9 In this space, a longer account of sabotage is far beyond me. However, this text is a glancing version of my conviction that sabotage is perhaps the key basic concept by which to understand what any form of fighting back will look like. This doesn't mean that the prime task of the day is to stick more metal wrenches between more metal gears, or to 'go slow' by stealing more work time on Facebook. Rather, in the face of an overwhelming collapse of much of what constituted the 'legit' organised prole battles, sabotage becomes both a particular injunction and a diffuse condition. It will not necessarily ‘look like' sabotage.

10 http://www.iww.org/culture/library/sabotage/

11 Sabotage as an 'internal process' that ruptures the passage from quantity (hours, goods made) to quality (the coherence of the system's persistence).

12 http://www.1902encyclopedia.com/A/ADU/adulteration.html

13 This is called 'dynamiting the silk', weighting it with solutions of tin, solutions of zinc, solutions of lead, such that, as Gurley Flynn writes in one of the more striking passages of the text:

And so when you buy a nice piece of silk today and have a dress made for festive occasions, you hang it away in the wardrobe and when you take it out it is cracked down the pleats and along the waist and arms. And you believe that you have been terribly cheated by a clerk. What is actually wrong is that you have paid for silk where you have received old tin cans and zinc and lead and things of that sort. You have a dress that is garnished with silk, seasoned with silk, but a dress that is adulterated to the point where, if it was adulterated just the slightest degree more it would fall to pieces entirely.

14 Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, Humanities Press, 1983.

15 For an extended analysis of this film, see 'It's just the suit. It looks as if it's wearing you', Socialism and/or Barbarism blog, http://socialismandorbarbarism.blogspot.com/2010/06/its-just-suit-it-looks-as-if-its.html

16 However, it does provide a strangely military, or secret agent mode of surveying the hostile territory, where each thing in an area is not read in terms of the degree to which it serves its prescribed purpose or is a store of exchange value, but rather in terms of how it might cut, burn, crush, puncture, electrocute, or otherwise maim you. And as it turns out, there is much in the built world capable of doing this. We owe the film for giving a tanning bed the chance to finally bare its glowing blue teeth.

Full Unemployment Cinema Screening at the Really Free School

2011-02-03T08:03:00.000-08:00

Wednesday 9^th February 2011, 2pm

5 Bloomsbury Square

London WC1A 2LX

This screening features two films about alternative educational initiatives carved out from the drudgery of work time

Bred and Born

by Mary Pat Leece & Joanna Davis, 1983 (UK, 75 min)

Scuola Senza Fine / School Without End

by Adriana Monti et al, 1983 (Italy, 40 min)

Introduction to the script of the film Scuola senza fine by Adriana Monti. Translated by Giovanna Ascelle: http://www.universitadelledonne.it/english/scuola%20senza%20fine.htm

http://reallyfreeschool.org

http://unemployedcinema.blogspot.com/

The Dubai in Me

2011-01-31T08:35:00.001-08:00

The Dubai in me - a film by Christian von Borries

it's all online
Part one is here. You'll be able to find parts 2-9 from there.

from the Dubai in Me website:

"At the heart of the saga - the Dubai debacle. (Nouriel Roubini)

Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neoliberal globalized world that may be crashing - at last - into the sands.

"The thing you have to understand about Dubai is - nothing is what it seems, nothing. This isn't a city, it's a con-job. They lure you in telling you it's one thing - a modern kind of place - but beneath the surface it's a medieval dictatorship." (Huffington Post)

Dubai or Palestine, Hanoi or Dubai: this film shows how wrong this antithesis is.

This film is searching for a new topography.

This film is a metaphore, a displacement, a shift where territories are marked, where things are seen, where they are given names and meaning. In this sense, the metaphoric task of cinema can be seen as subverting a previous metaphorical order, namely the official mapping of space and time. An order that defines places, that defines what has to be seen and done in those places, the way they are inhabited, their capacities and incapacities.

Tthe constructed picture of poverty and disgrace tends to take the edge of reality and should be preserved from any form of aesthetisation. Otherwise we make them acceptable and attractive.

Fiction and beauty should be the part of the rich, dull reality and the objectivity of the documentary look the part of the poor."

"Down with teachers! Up with revolution!” EDUCATION SPECIAL

2011-01-18T08:23:00.000-08:00

Sunday 30th January 2011, 6PM
at Colorama
52-56 Lancaster Street,
SE1

FULL UNEMPLOYMENT CINEMA EDUCATION SPECIAL

This month Full Unemployment Cinema returns with an Education Special, in support of the ongoing education struggles happening in the UK and all over the world. We will screen a short selection of videos from education struggles; followed by a feature film and excerpts from 3 other films and documentaries, see details below.
Approximate running time: 2 hours.

With this screening we'd like to suggest going beyond the notion of a 'right to education', instead asking questions about the role of schooling in society, through works that look at different forms of kid rebellion against the restrictions of school institutions. What would a different form of education and transmission of knowledge look like?

FEATURE FILM:

Zero de Conduite / Zero for Conduct
by Jean Vigo 1933 (France 41 mins)

“War is declared! Down with teachers! Up with revolution!”

Zero de Conduite draws extensively on Vigo’s boarding school experiences to depict a repressive and bureaucratised educational establishment in which surreal acts of rebellion occur, reflecting Vigo’s anarchist view of childhood. The title refers to a mark the boys would get which prevented them from going out on Sundays.

As well as being intransigently radical, Zéro de Conduite is also deeply poetical, and much of the rebelliousness is whimsical to the point of seeming like a dream. In part, the dreamlike moments reflect circumstances of its production. As originally shot, the film was much longer than it was meant to be. In cutting it down to the required length, Vigo removed narrative material and left behind the most evocative scenes.

From: http://annares.wordpress.com

SHORT FILM:

En Rachachânt
by Straub/Huillet/Duras, 1982 (France 7 min)

En Rachâchant is a short film made by the esoteric director duo Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. The text is adapted from a children’s story written by Marguerite Duras. It tells the story of a little boy named Ernesto who refuses to go to school because the school teaches things he doesn’t know.

Teachers on strike
by Cristina Ribas, 2010 (São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro (Brasil) 7mins)

19th March 2010: 70,000 protesters in the streets of the city of São Paulo. It's the teachers strike. For more than 3 hours, following down the big avenue Paulista, from MASP to Praça da República (where the state govern sets), teachers, students and several militants scream against the education policies that are reducing the rights to labour for the teachers over and over again. The demonstators transform the noisy city into a place for appearance and free expression but always, of course, closely observed by the state police.

EXCERPTS from:

Scuola Media
by Marco Santarelli Italy 2010
Set in the industrial outskirts of Taranto, Italy, the documentary film depicts life in the junior high school Pirandello and the work of teachers and the headmistress.

The Class
by Laurent Cantet, France 2008
Cantet’s feature film follows a year inside the classroom of one beleaguered public school teacher, played by none other than the real life Francois Begaudeau, in an urban middle school in Paris.

IF
by Lindsay Anderson, UK 1968
if.... is British drama film satirizing English public school life, depicting a savage insurrection at a public school, inspired by Zero de Conduite.

ZOMBIE SPECIAL - (No Longer) A SURPRISE!

2010-12-12T11:12:00.000-08:00

Sunday 19th December 6pm
At 56a Infoshop, 56 Crampton St SE17

Full Unemployment Cinema Zombie Special

Undead and abject, the zombie is uncontrollable ambiguity. Slouching across the earth, restlessly but with hallucinatory slowness, it is a thing with a soul, a body that is rotten but reactive, oblivious to itself yet driven by unforgiving instinct. – Lars Bang Larsen

For the final Full Unemployment Cinema screening of this year we have prepared a special themed screening around the celluloid body of the zombie. For what body better describes the unemployed negativity of the 20th century worker whose vicissitudes we continue to discuss and graves we continue to dig?

We will be screening some of our favourite zombie and horror clips as well as footage from zombie walks, flashmobs and music videos alongside a special feature: Carnival of Souls.

Mulled wine and snacks will be served.

Carnival of Souls, 1962 (US 78mins)

Carnival of Souls is a low budget 1962 horror film starring Candace Hilligoss. Produced and directed by Herk Harvey who produced industrial and educational films for the Centron Corporation based in Lawrence, Kansas. While vacationing in Salt Lake City, he developed the idea for the movie after driving past the abandoned Saltair Pavilion. Hiring an unknown actress, Lee Strasberg-trained Candace Hilligoss, and otherwise employing mostly local talent, he shot Carnival of Souls in three weeks, on location in Lawrence and Salt Lake City.

The film was made for an estimated $33,000, the movie never gained widespread public attention when it was originally released as it was intended as a B film and today, has become a cult classic. Set to an organ score by Gene Moore, Carnival of Souls relies more on atmosphere than on special effects to create its mood of horror. The film has a large cult following and occasionally has screenings at local film and Halloween festivals. Various prints of the film are in the public domain.

'In Carnival of Souls (1962), one place is allowed to be blatantly creepy: the amusement park where ghosts rest under the water and rise to dance. The rest of the world appears both normal and somehow wrong, and part of what is wrong about it—and within it, and encompassing it—is the liminal protagonist, Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss). For she has gone wrong, and the world with her. It may be her subjective world, as in the Cocteau and Bergman films that producer-director Herk Harvey and screenwriter John Clifford admired, but it is ours as long as we are in the theater, and it looks too much like the real world outside the theater for comfort ... Aside from the music, the most artistically daring element of this film—one that defies a central convention of the horror genre—is its flight from romanticism, its concentration not on a foaming monster or on the hammering bosom of a Hammer heroine, but on a cold fish. If she is a magnet for the gothic, there is nothing exciting or sexy about it. The thrills of this carnival are cold ones, bits of death.' From Carnival of Souls by Bruce Kwin, read more: http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/76-carnival-of-souls

Trailer:

and in the mean time, here's a bit of reading:

Invasion of the Aca-Zombies
by Joseph Gora and Andrew Whelan
http://zombieacademy.wordpress.com/2010/11/03/invasion-of-the-aca-zombies/

Zombies of Immaterial Labor: the Modern Monster and the Death of Death
Lars Bang Larsen

via E-Flux, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/131

Undead and abject, the zombie is uncontrollable ambiguity.1 Slouching across the earth, restlessly but with hallucinatory slowness, it is a thing with a soul, a body that is rotten but reactive, oblivious to itself yet driven by unforgiving instinct.

It follows that if the zombie is defined by ambiguity, it cannot be reduced to a negative presence. In fact, it could be a friend. So why does it lend itself so easily as a metaphor for alienation, rolling readily off our tongues? Resorting to the zombie as a sign for mindless persistence is unfair to this particular monster, to be sure, but also apathetic and facile in the perspective of the historical space we inhabit.

My proposal, perverse or braindead as it may be, is that the zombie begs a materialist analysis with a view to contemporary culture. Such an analysis is necessarily double-edged. The zombie is pure need without morality, hence it promises a measure of objectivity; we know exactly what it wants—brains, flesh—because this is what it always wants. Abject monstrosity is naturally impossible to render transparent, but abjectness itself harbors a defined function that promises instrumentality (of a blunt and limited kind, admittedly). In this way we may proceed to address contemporary relations of cultural production, at the same time as we reflect on the analytical tools we have for doing so.

continue reading at this link.

FAR FROM POLAND

2010-11-19T05:50:00.000-08:00

Far From Poland by Jill Godmilow, 1984 (106m)
Sunday November 28th at 6pm
56a Infoshop, 56 Crampton St London SE17

A filmmaker - a woman steeped in the documentary traditions of the Left - sets out to dismantle the sinister symmetry of the Cold War single-handedly and show the world the road to salvation through the miracle of the Polish Solidarity movement. When denied visas to shoot in Poland proper, she constructs a film in New York City called FAR FROM POLAND. Over the barest bones of documentary footage, she drapes dramatic re-enactments of Solidarity texts, formal vignettes and swatches of soap opera, to engage the audience in her personal, complex, contrary and contradictory understanding of the Polish struggle.

FAR FROM POLAND is probably the first American non-fiction film (Godmilow calls it a "drama-tary") to explode cinema verite's mythic claim to be the only trustworthy mode of representation for discussing the real world, and in particular, social and political issues, on film. Refused a visa to travel to Poland, "Jillski" (her Polish nickname in the film) has to literally re-invent the documentary to deal with the Polish situation and she does so with a particular eye to deconstructing not only documentary's specific claims to objectivity, but also the bourgeois audience's desire to sit comfortably in their seats, feel compassion, feel themselves part of the solution (not part of the problem) by having felt compassion for the poor oppressed Poles, who, Godmilow would argue, are far more acutely aware of their situation and what forces oppress them than the liberal American folk in the movie house.

In the course of the film, she interviews Polish exiles who try to help her "organize" some footage from Poland. She has long telephone conversations with Fidel Castro who wants her to stop making the film. (Fidel asks her, "Is it always going to be like this... is great art always going to be in conflict with the state? Jillski says, "I didn't want to break his heart so I didn't say a word.") She re-produces, with superbly performed re-enactment, four long, now famous interviews published in the Solidarity press - with Anna Walentynowicz, the fired crane operator for whom the strike started in the Gdansk shipyard; with ex-censor, K-62, who is now looking everywhere for a new job; with a Polish miner, interviewed by a reporter from the New York Times who can't quite fathom the notion of a "workers' movement in a workers' state"; and with General Jaruzelski (fictional), years after the imposition of martial law on his own people. There are Polish jokes, from both sides of the Atlantic and soap-operatic self-criticism. (Jill - explaining the Solidarity movement to her boyfriend Mark: "For 35 years, the Polish workers have been told that they own the means of production and now they're calling that bluff. They'll decide for themselves what to make, how to make it, and what it's worth." The phone rings - Mark gets it. He listens for a moment, then covers the mouthpiece, "It's Karl Marx, from Workers Utopia. He says, 'Jillski, come home.' Jill retorts, "Why do you have to turn everything into a goddamn joke?" Mark, "Because I don't have anything as important as Poland to hold my miserable little life together. I'm tired of you walking around seeing the goddamn light all the time. I'm tired of all these Poles sleeping on our sofa."

NOVEMBER FILM STILL TO BE DECIDED - Watch this space

2010-11-17T06:25:00.000-08:00

The UnCine central committee have decided to postpone the screening of THE HOUR OF THE FURNACES (Octavio Getino + Fernando Solanas) for technical and complicated reasons. But we will screen it in 2011 at some point. So we are still deciding what film we will be showing on SUNDAY NOV 28th at 6pm at 56a Infoshop. So keep checking the blog or sign up for our email list and we will send you a message about the decision.

Men In Prison

2010-10-12T09:42:00.000-07:00

Full Unemployment Cinema Prison Special
Sunday October 31st at 5.30pm - remember the clocks go back the night before!!

***IMPORTANT CHANGE OF VENUE FOR THIS SCREENING***
Was shown in a freezing ass cold squat in SE5!!

Harun Farocki, Gefängnisbilder aka Prison Images, 2000
Jacques Becker, Le Trou, 1960

With guest speaker John Barker
Author of Bending the Bars

Harun Farocki,Gefängnisbilder aka Prison Images, 2000 (60 mins)

A film composed of images from prisons. Quotes from fiction films and documentaries as well as footage from surveillance cameras. A look at the new control technologies, at personal identification devices, electronic ankle bracelets, electronic tracking devices. The cinema has always been attracted to prisons. Today's prisons are full of video surveillance cameras. These images are unedited and monotonous; as neither time nor space is compressed, they are particularly well-suited to conveying the state of inactivity into which prisoners are placed as a punitive measure. The surveillance cameras show the norm and reckon with deviations from it. Clips from films by Genet and Bresson. Here the prison appears as a site of sexual infraction, a site where human beings must create themselves as people and as a workers. In Un Chant d'amour by Jean Genet, the guard looks in on inmates in their cells and sees them masturbating. The inmates are aware that they are being watched and thus become performers in a peep show. The protagonist in Bresson's Un Condamné à mort s'est échappé turns the objects of imprisonment into the tools of his escape. These topoi appear in many prison films. In newer prisons, in contrast, contemporary video surveillance technology aims at demystification. (HF quoted on http://arttorrents.blogspot.com/2008/05/harun-farocki-gefngnisbilder-aka-prison.html)

Jacques Becker, Le Trou, 1960 (131 min)

In a Paris prison cell, five inmates use every ounce of their tenacity and ingenuity in an elaborate attempt to tunnel to freedom. Based on the novel by José Giovanni, Jacques Becker’s Le trou (The Hole) balances lyrical humanism with a tense, unshakable air of imminent danger.

Essays:
The Time It Takes: Le Trou and Jacques Becker by Chris Fujiwara
http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/138-the-time-it-takes-le-trou-i-and-jacques-becker
Le Trou by Darragh O’Donoghue
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2006/cteq/trou/

THE RAT****
298 Camberwell New Road
London
SE5

Map: http://maps.google.com/maps?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=298+Camberwell+New+Road&oe=utf-8&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=298+Camberwell+New+Rd,+Camberwell,+Greater+London+SE5+0,+United+Kingdom&ei=dq7FTJWTIsuNjAf6_Nm5BQ&ved=0CBMQ8gEwAA&z=16

September Screening: Autoworkers Special Part II

2010-08-17T04:27:00.001-07:00

Focusing on the UK car industry through one vintage and two recent films:

Jean-Luc Godard, British Sounds, 1969 (55 mins)
Reel News, Visteon Workers Fighting for us All!, 2009 (20 mins)
Duncan Campbell, Make it New John, 2009 (50 mins) (TBC)

Jean-Luc Godard, British Sounds, 1969, (UK/France 54 mins)

British Sounds was made for (and then banned from) London Weekend Television. It is a documentary in style and form, but designed as a political artifact in which Godard contrives to assault the filmgoer's sensibility with a series of images and provocations. Slogans flashed on the screen are sometimes humorous, sometimes merely decorative, though Godard would deny this bourgeois reading.

Several extended scenes, such as those where Dagenham car factory workers discuss workplace relations, are crisp, simple and also an invaluable record of industrial rhetoric. Thus, the first part is a single ten minute long tracking shot of the MG (itself a bourgeois artifact) assembly line at the British Motor Car Company in Cowley, Oxford. Then, in what seems and purports to be an early attempt at 'feminist cinema' (though one constructed from a very male point of view), a nude woman walks around her apartment, chats on the phone and finally turns to face the unwinking and rather prurient camera. There's also a feminist text read over this scene but it all remains a poorly thought out shot at a less phallocentric cinema.

In the third sequence, shots of workers are intercut with a staged news broadcast running on a TV monitor and in the fifth, students at Essex University are making up radical posters and critiquing pop music. Finally, a fist punches through a Union Jack. All very agitprop and also prefiguring the admittedly less political preoccupations of the British Punk scene – still six or so years away.

From John Dawson writing for Senses of Cinema on British Sounds
http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/05/37/british_sounds.html

Reel News, Visteon Workers Fighting for us All!, 2009

On 31st of March 2009 Ford/Visteon announced the closure of three factories in the UK and the sacking of 610 workers(1). The company was declared insolvent and put into receivership. The receivers visited all three plants; with no prior warning workers were sacked with only a few minutes notice and told only that the company had gone bust. No guarantees were given concerning redundancy or pensions payments. The management had made the workers work up to the last minute, knowing that they would not even receive any wages for their final shifts.

On the 31st workers in Belfast responded to the closure announcement by occupying their factory spontaneously. After a clash with security guards, workers secured the building and within two hours several hundred local supporters had visited the occupation. Two KPMG administrators were on the premises at the time of the occupation and refused to leave. So the workers locked them in a portakabin - where they apparently stayed for 36 hours with no food, before finally agreeing to leave! Such pointless dedication to their job... Some managers' cars also remained locked in the occupation.

Having heard the news about Belfast, the Basildon (Essex), and Enfield (north London) Visteon plants also occupied the next day. The Basildon plant contained no stock or machinery of much value to the company; so the workers trashed the site offices. A group of riot cops appeared and the workers were 'pursuaded' to end their occupation, presumably under the threat of 'leave or you'll be nicked for criminal damage'. They then began 24hr picketing of the plant.

Reel News #18 Visteon Occupation Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elBj7W0AxxY&feature=related

Duncan Campbell, Make it New John, 2009

Make it new John tells the story of the DeLorean car, its creator John DeLorean and the workers of the Belfast-based car plant who built it. The film deftly contrasts the DeLorean dream with its spectacular downfall during a critical period in Northern Ireland's history, and the canonisation of the car – the DMC12 – as a symbol of the American myth of mobility.

The son of an immigrant Romanian foundry worker, John DeLorean possessed a natural talent for engineering which took him to the top of Chevrolet, General Motors' most important division. Leaving this behind he persuaded the British Government to back his new venture – building a factory in Dunmurry in Belfast to produce a new sports car. Almost immediately beset by financial difficulties and allegations of embezzlement, DeLorean's attempts to keep the factory open became increasingly desperate and corrupt, eventually leading to his arrest by the FBI. The factory - which employed 2000 workers - closed in 1982, having produced just over 9000 cars.

Campbell fuses a documentary aesthetic with fictive moments, using existing archive news and documentary footage from the 1980s as well as new 16mm footage which imagines conversations between DeLorean factory workers.

July screening: Grunwick Dispute 1976-78 Film Special

2010-07-07T08:10:00.000-07:00

Sunday 25th July, 6pm
56A Infoshop

Selections from films on the 1976-78 Grunwick Strike:

Year of the Beaver
Dave Fox, Steve Sprung, Sylvia Stevens, 1985

Stand Together
Newsreel Collective, 1977

Look back at Grunwick
Newsreel Collective, 1978

The Great Grunwick Strike 1976-1978: a history
Chris Thomas, 2008

The screening will be introduced by former member of the Newsreel Collective, Noreen MacDowell

***Please Note time change 6pm***

The East African migrants settling in London in the early 1970s were educated in English, and held British rather than Indian citizenship, but they faced a struggle to establish their families in London’s unwelcoming society. In spite of their middle-class background, many women, determined to contribute to their families’ well-being and their children’s futures, accepted low-paid factory and manual work. Whilst these women were willing to accept low status employment, they were unwilling to accept the degrading treatment typically meted out to “unskilled” “Black” immigrants in London’s workplaces. When a group of workers, led by the now renowned Jayaben Desai, walked out of a photo processing laboratory in the hot summer of 1976 in protest against arbitrary and humiliating management, their aim was to defend their dignity and their rights.

Having joined the white collar union APEX (Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staff) their demands came to be centred on the right to union recognition and collective bargaining. The cause of the Grunwick strikers was taken up by the wider Trade Union movement of the day, with mass solidarity picketing from even the most masculine and militant of unions, including the miners.

When the Union of Postal Workers voted to boycott mailings from Grunwick – on which the firm depended to reach its client base – victory seemed within their grasp. Following failed attempts at mediation by ACAS (the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service), the government-appointed Scarman Inquiry recommended both union recognition and re-instatement of the workers. Grunwick, backed by the right- wing National Association For Freedom (NAFF), rejected these recommendations. The TUC (Trade Union Congress) and APEX retreated from mass picketing and effectively withdrew their support. Jayaben Desai and supporters mounted a hunger strike outside the TUC HQ in November 1977 but ultimately the strike committee announced the end of the dispute in June 1978, without having obtained their goals, leaving the women feeling abandoned and disillusioned with the trade union movement.

From: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/strikingwomen/grunwick

The Grunwick Strike - A. Sivanandan (Race & Class, Vol. 19, no. 1, summer 1977)
VIA: libcom.org

An essay written during the middle of the Grunwicks strike in Willesden, north-west London. A predominatly east African Asian female workforce went on strike against poor conditions and for union recognition.

There were mass pickets, sometimes violent, in support of the strikers. They eventually became disillusioned with the half-hearted and obstructive role of the unions and, towards the end of the defeated strike, conducted a hunger strike/picket outside the TUC headquarters.

From 'A Different Hunger', A. Sivanandan, Pluto Press, 1982.
========
Grunwick
(A. Sivanandan - Race & Class, Vol. 19, no. 1, summer 1977.)

Two recent events have further elucidated the strategies of the state vis-a-vis the black community and, more especially, the black section of the working class, first analysed in 'Race, class and the state' over a year ago. One is the House of Commons Select Committee Report on the West Indian Community and the other is the 10-month-old strike of Asian workers at the Grunwick Film Processing plant in Willesden in North London. Of these, the Grunwick issue is the more complex and confusing and, if only for those reasons, the more challenging of analysis - however risky the exercise of writing history even as it is being made.

Grunwick processes photographic films and relies a great deal on the mail-order business. It is estimated that around 90 per cent of those on the processing side are Asians, many of them women and most of them from East Africa. The strikers first walked out when a worker was sacked after being forced to do a job he could not possibly do in the time alloted for it. This was typical of the punitive, racist and degrading way in which the management treated the workforce. The strikers, on the advice of the local trades council, joined APEX (the Association of Professional Executive Clerical and Computer Staff). The employers, however, refused to recognise the union and the strike has now centred on the question of union recognition by management - since union recognition is a prerequisite to raising the wages from the exceptionally low figure of £25 for a 35-hour week.

The strike has received widespread union support, which is in certain respects unique in the history of British trade unionism. Not only has full strike pay from APEX been forthcoming from the very beginning, but also other national unions, e.g. Transport and General Workers Union, the Union of Post Office Workers (UPW), the Trades Union Congress (TUC), and through their encouragement hundreds of local union branches, shop stewards committees, trades councils and others, have given financial and other support. Not only did Len Murray, General Secretary of the TUC, intervene personally in the dispute, but cabinet ministers have themselves been to the picket lines to give their support. After a certain amount of pressure, the UPW took the almost unprecendented step of introducing a postal ban. Although this lasted only four days in the event, it hit management hard since it relies on the mail-order side for 60 per cent of its business.

At first it looked as though Grunwick was to be the rallying point for the labour movement to prove its commitment to black workers. But what is more apparent now is that the unions have been carefully determining the direction that the strike should take and the type of actions open to the strikers. It is worth recalling here the comments of George Bromley, a union negotiator for 30 years with London Transport, who in 1974, during the Imperial Typewriters strike of Asian workers, said, 'The workers have not followed the proper dispute procedures. They have no legitimate grievances and it's difficult to know what they want... Some people must learn how things are done'.

The 'proper procedures' have in this case certainly been taught - and followed to the bureaucratic letter. When the right-wing National Association For Freedom threatened legal action against the postal boycott[1], the UPW capitulated, arguing to the strikers that they had persuaded management to go to arbitration to the Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS). But when ACAS called for a ballot of the workforce, management sought to limit it to those still at work and not the strikers - so discrediting the ACAS procedure and the Employment Protection Act within which it operates. Similar bureaucratic procedures, such as appeals to the Industrial Tribunal and recourse to government investigation, have proved equally futile - and, worse, delayed the possibility of effective solidarity action. It was six months before ACAS's report (in favour of the strikers) finally came out. Nor has the UPW reintroduced its ban, despite its promise to do so once the report was out.

On the other hand, the unions have induced the strikers to stay out by almost doubling their strike pay. But while the unions are keen to keep the strike going at all costs, the strikers themselves have begun to question the conduct and purpose of' the unions' support. According to Mrs Desai, treasurer of the strike committee, `If the TUC wanted, this strike could be won tomorrow.' The workers are belatedly resorting to tactics they urged in the first place, such as picketing local chemists shops (from which Grunwick's trade also comes) and organising 24-hour pickets.

Asian workers have over the last two decades proved to be one of the most militant sections of the working class. In strike after strike - Woolf's, Perivale Gutermann, Mansfield Hosiery, Imperial Typewriters, Harwood Cash and others - they have not only taken on the employers and sometimes won (limited) victories, but have also battled against racist trade unions which have either dragged their feet or quite often denied them the support they would have afforded white workers. The Imperial Typewriters case was the most blatant. In May 1974 Asians at Imperial Typewriters (a subsidairy of Litton Industries) went on strike over differentials between white and Asian workers. The unions refused their support and the strikers, supported by other black workers, had to fight both union and management (bolstered by the extreme right-wing party, the National Front).

Over the Grunwick dispute, however, the unions have been unusually supportive of the Asian workforce. Some commentators on the left have traced the union change of direction to a sudden change of heart: it had come upon them (the unions) that racism was a bad thing and should be outlawed from within their ranks. But why this 'change of heart'?

In the first instance, of course, the basis of the Grunwick dispute is the unionisation of the workforce and it is therefore in the interests of the unions (and indeed their business) to recruit workers into their organisations. This is the most obvious reason for union support of the strike. But the inordinate anxiety to unionise the workers must be seen in the larger context of government-trade union collaboration in the Social Contract.

In effect what the government says to the workers in the Social Contract is: 'we are in a time of great economic crisis, with increasing inflation and galloping unemployment. The only way we are going to solve the problem is by keeping wages down. But we can do this only with your agreement to put up with hardships. So if you agree not to use your power of collective action (the only power you really have to improve your conditions) we will in turn see that you are protected from the employers taking advantage of your restraint. We will, in return for your abandoning the right to collective bargaining, give you statutory safeguards to keep the employers at bay.' Hence the Employment Protection Act 1975, the Trade Union and Labour Relations Acts of 1974 and 1976, the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Equal Pay Act 1970 (enforced in 1975). And, more recently, Michael Foot, Leader of the House of Commons, has inveighed against the judiciary for its apparent anti-union bias. 'If the freedom of the people of this country - and especially the rights of trade unionists - had been left to the good sense and fairmindedness of judges, we would have precious few freedoms in this country.'

The Grunwick dispute, if the other Asians strikes are anything to go by, threatens to blow a hole, however small, in the Social Contract, and in the circumstances (of the rank and file of' the working class clearly jibbing at a further extension of the Social Contract), one swallow could easily make a summer! To bring the dispute within the Social Contract framework it is necessary to unionise the Asian strikers. But to unionise a black workforce, it is first necessary to take a stand against racial discrimination. It is necessary to speak to the workers' first and overwhelming 'disability'. 'The strike,' said Mrs Desai, 'is not so much about pay, it is a strike about human dignity.' Hence, if the unions are to win the confidence of the strikers, and of black workers in general, they have to take an unequivocal stand against the employer's racist practices. Besides, it is the very fact of colour that has, as so many times before, lent a political dimension to the struggle of the Grunwick strikers - and the unions, as so many times before, are anxious to keep that dimension out, particularly in view of the Social Contract. Additionally, in the overall strategy of the state, the management of racism in employment has, since the strikes of 1972-74, been handed over to the trades unions (and not to the Community Relations Commission).

Now that the state has decided that the social and political cost of racism has begun - in the objective circumstances - to outweigh its economic profitability (see 'Race, Class and the State'), the unions are equally anxious to contribute to that effort.

In fact as far back as the TUC Conference in September 1976, APEX General Secretary, Roy Grantham, spoke about the Grunwick dispute in the context of the Government White Paper on Racial Discrimination, which heralded the Race Relations Act. The Act itself, passed in November 1976, is very concerned with employment and in fact extends the application of the new employment laws' complaints procedures to the area of racial discrimination. This Act, unlike previous race relations acts, has full union backing.

This support for the new legislation has been accompanied by increased interest and concern about race relations within the trade union bureaucracies since the 1972-4 period of disputes. After the Mansfield Hosiery strike there followed a whole spate of strikes throughout the East Midlands involving Asian workers in dispute not only with management, but usually with the union and fellow white workers too. Strike committees of different factories supported each other, workers were learning from the examples set in neighbouring cities, local black communities supported the strikers, there was serious debate about the need to set up black trades unions. It is since then that we find proposals for special training on shop steward courses, the establishment of race relations departments in national unions and the TUC and the production of a TUC model equal opportunity clause for contracts. And, more recently, a government race relations employment advisory group has been set up on which the TUC and ACAS, as well as the Confederation of British Industry and the Commission for Racial Equality, will be represented.

But the management of racism in employment is not the only thing that has been left to the unions' care. They have also been entrusted with the task of selling the Employment Protection Act to the workforce as a whole. The Grunwick dispute encompasses both these functions.
What we have, therefore, is not a`change of heart' but a change of tactics - to ordain, legitimise and continue the joint strategies of the state and union leaders against the working class - through the Social Contract.

Notes
[1.] Under the 1953 Post Office Act, which prohibits 'interference with the mail'.

^^^^^^^^^
FOR MORE IMAGES, CHECK THIS PAGE ON 'STRIKING WOMEN' ON THE LEEDS UNIVERSITY WEB PAGE

Slides of Grunwick on the Guardian website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/gallery/2010/jan/20/grunwick-strike-women

June Screening: Description of a Bankruptcy

2010-06-07T11:22:00.000-07:00

파산의 기술記述 | Description of a Bankrutpcy
Lee Kang Hyun, 2006

+ South Korean labour shorts

With invited speaker Haeyoung Song

Sunday 27th June, 5pm
At 56A Infoshop

'If you ask for my life, I will stab you in the heart'

Four black and white camera angles of a subway station; no sound. A train arrives, people get on and off. The lights of the next train shine from the tunnel. An agitated man descends onto the tracks. His final moments are recorded in monochrome, 15 frames per second, 13, 14, 15.

In 2006's “The Description of Bankruptcy”, director Lee Kang Hyun carries forward the haunting violence of this moment, the despair of an anonymous fate and the events which would compel it to provoke a reflection on the financial crisis of 1997. Images of Seoul are overlapped with radio channel chatter, news reports stream lifestyle advice atop cityscapes. Everyday life passes amongst industrial scenes; an industrial press rapidly stamps paper. One man relates his success story: 'got it...by betting only 100 won', another voice implores us to be mindful of the future: 'If you want to succeed...you need a wise eye to see your outcomes critically'. Traffic passes through Seoul, and more advice: 'People who don't smile a lot have wrinkles in their face', now a stone-faced man stacks papers in a printing machine, his gloves are stained red. '...smile out loud as much as you can. One who smiles a lot also has less chance for mental illnesses such as hypochondria.' Workers steam-press clothing in a factory while the radio confidently declares: 'The time has come when all power comes from the people....

In economically burgeoning South Korea, individuals are expendable. Rhythmical editing and dryly ironic narration convert the arid wind evaporating individuality from society into a visual guerilla poem.

You hear so many horrible accidents and crimes from TV and newspapers. But they don't surprise you any more. You may think they are just a part of your daily life. Since around 2000 in Korea, there have been tons of strange murders. There are no killers and no suspects, but people are murdered every day. Someone calls them, "social murders". However, these everyday terrible crimes do not shock anybody. They are just filling a small corner of a newspaper. No alarms and no surprises. No efforts to stop them. What has thrown you into such a dead apathy?

Soap dramas are still attracting many people all over the world. It means old orders are so strong and sturdy that they are moving the world even after they seem to have disappeared.

A pamphlet created on the occasion of this screening is available here: http://zinelibrary.info/files/koreaUNCINE.indd_.pdf

Recent radio interview (Sept 2010) with Loren Goldner on the making of the Korean working class: http://www.againstthegrain.org/program/346/id/361358/tues-9-07-10-making-south-korean-working-class

MAY's SCREENING: The All Round Reduced Personality

2010-04-26T06:02:00.000-07:00

The All Round Reduced Personality (Reduper), Helke Sander 1978.

Sunday May 30th at 5PM
At 56a Infoshop

Great article here from JUMP CUT: here

FULL UNEMPLOYMENT CINEMA & SHORT FUSE PRESS SPECIAL SCREENING AND BENEFIT PARTY

2010-04-13T08:54:00.000-07:00

FULL UNEMPLOYMENT CINEMA & SHORT FUSE PRESS SPECIAL SCREENING AND BENEFIT PARTY

Sunday 23 May 5 – 11pm

195 Mare Street Social Centre

Full Unemployment Cinema presents a new documentary film on workers struggles in Faridabad, Gurgaon and other areas of Delhi's industrial belt.

6 - 8pm
Developing Unrest: Workers' Struggle in Gurgaon - One of India's Miserable Boom Cities
Film screening and discussion with speaker from Gurgaon Workers News

8 – 11pm
Music from Full Unemployment Cinema DJs
Bashment, dubstep, mbalax, dancehall and more

This is a benefit for Short Fuse Press and Full Unemployment Cinema for more about these London based self-organised and autonomous projects follow the links below

Entrance free but donations welcome

http://www.gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com
http://shortfuse.alphabetthreat.co.uk/
http://unemployedcinema.blogspot.com/

Film Screening and Debate

Developing Unrest: Workers' Struggle in Gurgaon - One of India's Miserable Boom Cities

Gurgaon, a satellite town in the south of Delhi became the symbol of 'Shining India'. In the industrial areas of Gurgaon a very particular class composition emerged. Hundred of thousands migrant garment workers work next to the assembly lines of India's biggest automobile hub and next to hundred thousand young workers sweating under the head-sets of Gurgaon's call centres.

Due to the real estate boom which catapulted local farmers out of their fields into land-lordism and business a specific coalition of local political class, land-lords, labour contractors, police and company-hired local goons became a repressive front ready to quell expressions of workers' unrest. This local front of ruling class is complemented by a faceless front of multi-national investment and central government policies.

Many traditional strikes of the minoritarian permanent work-force end up in mass lock-outs. A new generation of casual workers is forced to take direct action: during recent years wildcat strikes and factory occupations shook the major auto plants and garment factories.

Since the early 1980s small group of unorthodox communists publish a monthly workers' newspaper 'Faridabad Majdoor Samachar' in nearby Faridabad, documenting workers' experiences and asking questions of how to build non-hierarchical collectivities of mutual aid and subversion against the machine. Currently they try to open meeting spaces with workers in Faridabad, Gurgaon and other areas of Delhi's industrial belt.

We want to screen a recently finished documentary on proletarian experiences in Gurgaon. A comrade involved in GurgaonWorkersNews will share his impressions after several longer stays in the region. We hope to contribute to the debate about how 'international proletarian support' could look like, what kind of role can a 'workers' newspaper' or a 'form of organisation' play today.

www.gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com

APRIL's SCREENING: Office Killer

2010-04-05T17:59:00.000-07:00

SUNDAY APRIL 25th at 5pm
At 56a Infoshop

Office Killer, Cindy Sherman 1997 (82 mins)

Setting up a group of people of the most uninteresting kind - office
workers - at first the plot seems bland and commonplace. Dorine, an
innocuous-looking young woman with owlish eyes hiding behind thick glasses
and wearing outdated dresses, gives the impression of both innocence and
ineptitude, especially of the kind that results from being trampled under.

The weekly magazine she works for is currently downsizing, meaning Dorine from now on will have to do part of her work at home, on a laptop computer she barely knows how to handle. The only denizens of her furniture-bare apartment are a grouchy invalid mother and a mouse-hunting cat, both diabolical. Dorine is seen dropping a dead mouse down a garbage disposer.

She pronounces her words as a robot first learning to speak English would,elongating the vowels and crisply spitting out the consonants. She is the joke at the office, considered no less than retarded, useful but disposable, barely a female and only borderline human.

Her co-workers, elegant women with boyfriends, tempers, and super-charged ambitions, include Norah Reed (Jeanne Trippleton), Kim Poole (Molly Ringwald), and Vriginia Wingate (Barbara Sukowa), whose asthma condition compels her to
constantly breathe into a tube. In this competitive woman's world, the last will become first, and it is Dorine, the one trampled under, who will eventually dominate.

(SPOILER ALERT!!! skip the next paragraph if you are concerned with plot and narrative!)

Dorine's metamorphosis occurs without warning, with the suddenness of an eruption. One night at the office, she is called upon to do late work, her computer breaks down and she asks the help of a co-worker, Gary Michaels (David Thornton), who is electrocuted while trying to fix the wires. Dorine dials 911, but hangs up when the call is answered. She places the corpse on a cart, rolls it down to her car, loads it in her trunk, and takes it home, placing it in her furnished basement (we don't see the body until later).

Then, seemingly without reason, she goes into a murder spree. (...)

The movie does not analyze Dorine directly but it gets a bit heavy-handed when it tries to establish cause and effect by showing flashbacks of Dorine's relationship to her parents, especially her father, a domineering tyrant and child molester. Dorine had murdered her father, pulling at his hand while he was driving and trying to fondle her knee. Her mother was paralyzed because of that incident. These scenes, which show a young vindictive, intelligent, and vicious Dorine (Rachel Aviva), connect poorly with the overall flow of the story - seeming intrusions rather than explanations of insanity.

That Dorine is mad is evident in her hallucinatory visions of corpses-of those she murdered-come to life and perform a macabre dance in her furnished basement, her necrophiliac's paradise. Her murders are not motivated by revenge-for why would she kill the girl scouts? They are rather the necessary conditions for a new state of being for Dorine, of a life with the dead, who provide a companionship unmolested by pettiness and frustration. With this film, Cindy Sherman heralds a promising career, offering a feat of imagination practically unheard of since the days of Robert Browning ("Porphyria's Lover") and Edgar Allan Poe ("Lygeia"), two nineteenth century writers who understood intuitively the inner workings of a mad mind.

by Constantine Santas
From Sense of Cinema

THE NEXT 9 MONTHS of SCREENINGS

2010-03-29T08:09:00.000-07:00

Here it is cinéastes and slackers, the amazing next nine months of scheduled films for Full Unemployment Cinema.

APRIL 25th at 5pm
Office Killer (Cindy Sherman, 1997) + Semiotics of the Kitchen (Martha Rosler, 1975)

MAY 30th at 5pm
The All-Round Reduced Personality (Helke Sander, 1978)

JUNE 27th at 5pm
Description of A Bankruptcy (Lee Kang Hyun, 2006) + South Korean labour shorts + Speaker

JULY 25th at 5pm
Grunwick Dispute 1977 Film Special (Newsreel Collective, 1977) and Speaker

AUGUST
Holiday - No Film this month!!

SEPT 26th at 5pm
UK Car Industry Special! Make It New, John (Duncan Campbell, 2009) + Visteon film + other shorts

OCT 31st at 5pm
Prison Images (Harun Farocki, 2000) + prison shorts plus Speaker

NOV 28th at 5pm
Hour Of The Furnaces (Octavio Getino + Fernando Solanas, 1968)

DEC 19th at 5pm
(one week earlier than usual)
Zombies! Undead Capital and Labour (maybe!!) Send ideas!!

MARCH's SCREENING - Coup Pour Coup (Blow For Blow)

2010-03-09T07:19:00.000-08:00

SUNDAY MARCH 28th at 5pm
At 56a Infoshop

Coup Pour Coup, Marin Karmitz 1972 (89 mins)

Plus we will knock together a short aftertalk on Coup Pour Coup, Karmitz, La Gauche Prolétarienne and other wacky 70's French (ex)Maoists.

'Marin Karmitz's 1972 Coup pour Coup (Blow for Blow), a film about a group of women mounting a successful strike at a textiles factory, the nature of work is clear: there is exploitation (long hours, sexual harassment, physical exertion and foremen and women whose job it is to prevent you from slacking off), there is a site (the factory itself, which becomes a fortress complete with ad hoc crèche, kitchen and sleeping quarters during the strike) and there is an enemy (the boss himself, who is later held hostage in his office and forbidden to use the toilet, as the women themselves had been). The final scene is a freeze-frame of the workers united in struggle accompanied by a voice-over extolling the virtues of continued resistance'.

'Karmitz's film tries directly to bypass the social and cinematic obstacles to present a realistic picture of both work and the struggle against work – the actors consist of an effective combination of real strikers and film extras in equal measures, and the alphabetical list of names at the end includes the director as merely one name amongst others. It is a genuine attempt to undercut the non-egalitarian nature of most cinematic production and present a didactic model of social resistance at the same time'.

Taken from a longer essay on Inifinite Thought blog here

Voiceover from the film:
“You thought that we were only women
But you were forced to give in.
Agnes and Colette will stay with us.
Things will be different now. We will have a say.
Your foremen aren’t so arrogant. And for good reason!
No more of your secret negotiations.
You’ll have to accept what we impose.
We know you haven’t swallowed your sequestration.
We know you’ll try to fire workers.
You and your press cried scandal.
YOU CALLED ON THE LAW. BUT YOUR LAW IS TO SEQUESTRATE WORKERS FROM THE MOMENT THEY ARE HIRED UNTIL THE END OF THE TUNNEL, WHERE THE CHRYSANTHEMUMS GROW.
OUR LAW IS JUSTICE FOR THE PEOPLE.
IT’S A KNIFE TO YOUR THROAT.
You’ll try to eliminate what you call the troublemakers.
Don’t forget that your great victory is the unity we forged with our own strength.
Unity with our husbands, who are now aware of our struggle.
Unity with other factories.
OUR FIGHT HAS SPREAD. AND MAYBE, ONE DAY, IT WILL END IN BLOODSHED.
DON’T FORGET, THE IMPORTANT THING IS NOT YOUR MEASURES.
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS WHAT HAS CHANGED IN OUR MINDS.
WE HAVE TAKEN THE RIGHT TO SPEAK, TO TAKE ACTION.
RIGHTS THAT YOU BOSSES HAVE DENIED US, TO MAKE US MORE SUBSERVIENT.
AND WE SHALL FIGHT FOR THOSE RIGHTS WITH VIOLENCE, TO CONQUER THEM, TO KEEP THEM UNTIL THE DAY YOU DON’T HAVE ANY MORE. “

FEBRUARY's SCREENING - Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave

2010-02-02T07:09:00.000-08:00

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 28th at 5pm
At 56a Infoshop

Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave
by Alexander Kluge, 1973 (91 mins)

Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin (German with English subtitles)

Roswitha (Alexandra Kluge) has been supporting her family, including her student husband, by performing illegal abortions. Police pressure makes it too dangerous for her to continue doing this, and her husband is forced to go to work in a factory. When she hears that the factory is about to be closed and moved to Portugal (an early example of a cheaper-labor move), she attempts to rally the workers of the factory....

The sixth feature film by Alexander Kluge, architect of the New German Cinema, is also one of his most remarkable. Once again, Kluge works with Godardian distanciation devices (voice-over commentary, intertitles) to playfully examine a social problem, specifically women's liberation. The director's sister, Alexandra, plays the titular domestic slave, a young housewife, mother, part-time abortionist, and would-be labor activist who is repressed by the strictures of family, society, and history.

Through the presentation of women in his films, Kluge hopes to present an alternative mode of production. This is based not on rationalised modes of industrial production that have come to govern our lives since the advent of the industrial and technological revolutions, but on a female productive force (not to be equated with pure biological reproduction). He believes this force is manifested by women in their constant struggle against patriarchal social and political structures such as archaic laws that effectively maintain control over, and attempt to contain and limit, women's bodies and desires. (18) Kluge's theorisation of a female productive force and his female protagonists, I believe, serve as a refreshing antidote to the dominant cinema's representation of active, desiring women as evil femmes fatales simultaneously desired and feared by men. Kluge's women possess agency as they playfully negotiate their own way through the public sphere on their own terms.

[From: http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/kluge.html]

Film Times: Doors open 5pm - All films begin at 5.30pm!!

56a Infoshop
56 Crampton Street
London
SE17 3AE

***********
Suggested reading:

Extract from
Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint
by Silvia Federici

Feminists in the seventies tried to understand the roots of women’s oppression, of women’s exploitation and gender hierarchies. They describe them as stemming from a unequal division of labor forcing women to work for the reproduction of the working class. This analysis was basis of a radical social critique, the implications of which still have to be understood and developed to their full potential.

When we said that housework is actually work for capital, that although it is unpaid work it contributes to the accumulation of capital, we established something extremely important about the nature of capitalism as a system of production. We established that capitalism is built on an immense amount of unpaid labor, that it not built exclusively or primarily on contractual relations; that the wage relation hides the unpaid, slave -like nature of so much of the work upon which capital accumulation is premised.

Also, when we said that housework is the work that reproduces not just “life,” but “labor-power,” we began to separate two different spheres of our lives and work that seemed inextricably connected. We became able to conceive of a fight against housework now understood as the reproduction of labor-power, the reproduction of the most important commodity capital has: the worker’s “capacity to work,” the worker’s capacity to be exploited. In other words, by recognizing that what we call “reproductive labor” is a terrain of accumulation and therefore a terrain of exploitation, we were able to also see reproduction as a terrain of struggle, and, very important, conceive of an anti-capitalist struggle against reproductive labor that would not destroy ourselves or our communities.

How do you struggle over/against reproductive work? It is not the same as struggling in the traditional factory setting, against for instance the speed of an assembly line, because at the other end of your struggle there are people not things. Once we say that reproductive work is a terrain of struggle, we have to first immediately confront the question of how we struggle on this terrain without destroying the people you care for. This is a problem mothers as well as teachers and nurses, know very well.

This is why it is crucial to be able to make a separation between the creation of human beings and our reproduction of them as labor-power, as future workers, who therefore have to be trained, not necessarily according to their needs and desires, to be disciplined and regimented in a particular fashion.

It was important for feminists to see, for example, that much housework and child rearing is work of policing our children, so that they will conform to a particular work discipline. We thus began to see that by refusing broad areas of work, we not only could liberate ourselves but could also liberate our children. We saw that our struggle was not at the expense of the people we cared for, though we may skip preparing some meals or cleaning the floor. Actually our refusal opened the way for their refusal and the process of their liberation.

Once we saw that rather than reproducing life we were expanding capitalist accumulation and began to define reproductive labor as work for capital, we also opened the possibility of a process of re-composition among women.

Of Interest: THE FILM SERIES - "ITALIAN CINEMA AT WORK"

2010-02-01T05:43:00.000-08:00

THE FILM SERIES - "ITALIAN CINEMA AT WORK"

The European Studies Research Students Seminar is glad to invite you to the screening of:

### Accattone ("The Procurer") - by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1961)
### Original Italian version with English subtitles

### Monday, 22. February 2010, 5pm
### Room FS2, Film Studies Department, Strand Campus

COMING NEXT...

### La classe operaia va in paradiso ("The working class goes to heaven") - by Elio Petri (1971) ### Original Italian version with English subtitles

### Monday, 22. March 2010, 5pm
### Room FS2, Film Studies Department, Strand Campus

All welcome!

Please forward to interested people.

----------------------------------------

THE MOVIE - "ACCATTONE"

Pasolini's first movie delves into the grey areas of the Italian "economic miracle" of the Fifties-Sixties. The pimp Vittorio Accattone has never worked a day in his life...

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Our new 2010 Film Series, "Italian Cinema at Work", aims to present a brief overview of how Italian Cinema has approached an important but too often neglected theme: work.

"Italian Cinema at Work" will thus try to show the way in which Italian film-makers have represented the thematic of work and labour from World War II to the present.

The series will be organised in three parts.

The first part will look at how Neo-realism investigated post-WWII Italian society, characterised by reconstruction, capitalistic economic development and the imposition of wage labour discipline (e.g. De Sica's "Ladri di Biciclette", 1948).

The second part will focus on Fordism and factory work, underlying how this affected the physical and mental conditions of the labour force and emphasising workers' militant response during the cycle of struggles of the sixties and seventies (e.g. Petri's "La classe operaia va in paradiso", 1971).

Finally, the third part will analyse how the working process has changed in recent decades, giving rise to the fragmentation and precarisation of labour and to new forms of protest, such as the experience of the workers of the call centre "Atesia" in the periphery of Rome (Celestini's "Parole Sante", 2007).

The transition from one period to the next will be carried out though an ‘intermezzo - movie’, where everyday difficulties are approached with irony (e.g. by the character interpreted by Paolo Villaggio in"Fantozzi", 1975), nevertheless maintaining an underlying critical attitude.

The movies will be screened every two weeks in original Italian version with English subtitles.

Due to the difficulties in finding English subtitles for all the movies, the program is likely subjected to change – we will however
do our best to maintain the original aim of the series intact.

JANUARY'S SCREENING - Bostrobalikara - Garment Girls of Bangladesh

2009-12-21T14:52:00.000-08:00

SUNDAY JANUARY 31st at 5pm
At 56a Infoshop

Bostrobalikara - Garment Girls of Bangladesh (60m) + other short clips
A documentary by Tanvir Mokammel

Plus introductory talk about the struggles in Bangladesh.

A common sight in the streets of Dhaka is the parade of young women and girls going to and from work in garment factories. These girls, who number about 2 million, work in the most successful manufacturing industry that Bangladesh has. Their labour brings in the biggest proportion of trade income. On their toil rests the livelihoods of millions of others. Their importance to the Bangladesh economy is incalculable.

This phenomenal success echoes Bengal of hundreds of years ago when its Muslin industry was ascendant. Nevertheless the garment industry is faced with uncertainties and difficulties. Most pressing are issues concerning wages and safe working conditions, future investment and the international trade environment. Symptomatic of these problems have been the long succession of factory catastrophes, and the widespread worker disturbances of May and June 2006. How will the various stakeholders, including the state, the foreign buyers and the successful entrepreneurs, respond to the challenges ahead? Will the industry lose its "sweatshop" image?

"What made you do a film on the garment workers?

I have been watching these garment girls for the last two decades. Like any conscientious person in contemporary Bangladesh, I have deep sympathy for this hardworking, silent army of working girls who walk up to their factories at dawn and return, often very late at time. They are very conspicuous as a social group on the streets of Dhaka, Narayanganj and Chittagong. We know they are very low paid, and they receive very little respect from the mainstream community. I once wrote a poem about these BOSTROBALIKARA. I wanted to make this film with the aim to sensitize concerned people about their plight, which, in turn, may help achieve better wages and more respect for these hapless girls."
From 'Interview with Tanvir Mokammel'

See here

Strike, Riot and Fire Among the Garment Workers - A Working Class Revolt in Bangladesh

Mass working class revolt has been raging in Bangladesh for several months: garment workers fighting for improved wages and conditions... Farmers fighting destruction of their livelihoods by open cast mining... Mass insurrection against power cuts...
This pamphlet attempts to cut through the dominant media chatter of ‘clash of civilizations/cultures’ and ‘religious resurgence/fundamentalism’ and to show instead the real substance of social conflict, where the exploited begin to actively control their struggles rather than just being pawns manipulated by various political or religious factions

A pamphlet published by 56a Infoshop in 2006

You can download this paginated background booklet here:

A 15 minute video; a workforce, 85% female, paid some of the lowest wages in the world; expressing some of the highest levels of class struggle in the world at present. Trade unions have very little influence or restraint on these struggles - they are self-organised by workers on the job. When strikes turn riotous, they often spread into the wider working class community.

The short compilation of clips with commentary is available here: http://libcom.org/history/video-machinists-against-machine-bangladeshi-garment-workers-struggles

DECEMBER'S SCREENING - Wages of Fear

2009-12-04T11:40:00.000-08:00

SUNDAY DECEMBER 20th at 5pm
At 56a Infoshop

WAGES OF FEAR, Henri Georges Clouzot , 1953 (131m)

“It’s like prison here. Easy to get in. ‘Make yourself at home.’ But there’s no way out.”

The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la peur) is a 1953 drama film directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, starring Yves Montand, and based on a 1950 novel by Georges Arnaud.

When a South American oil well owned by an American company catches fire, the company hires four European men, down on their luck, to drive two trucks over mountain dirt roads, while carrying the nitroglycerine needed to extinguish the fire.

The film centers on the fates of a handful of men who are stuck in a South American town. The town, Las Piedras, is isolated due to the surrounding desert but it maintains contact with the outside world through a small airport. The airfare, however, is beyond the means of the main characters (many of whom are also noncitizens without proper paperwork for work or travel). There is little opportunity for employment aside from the American corporation that dominates the town. The company, Southern Oil Company, called SOC, operates the nearby oil fields and owns a walled compound within the town. SOC is accused of unethical practices such as exploiting local workers and taking the law into its own hands.

The catalyst to the film’s action sequence is a massive fire at one of the SOC oil fields. The only means to extinguish the flames and cap the well is nitroglycerine. With short notice and lack of proper equipment, the only means of transportation are jerrycans placed in two large trucks. Due to the poor condition of the roads and the highly volatile nature of nitroglycerine, the job is considered too dangerous for the unionized SOC employees.

The company recruits drivers from the local community. Despite the dangers, many of the locals volunteer, lured by the high pay: US$2,000 per driver. This is a fortune to them, and the money is seen by some as the only way out of their dead-end lives.

NOVEMBER's SCREENING - Our Daily Bread

2009-10-25T15:25:00.000-07:00

SUNDAY NOVEMBER 29th at 5pm
At 56a Infoshop

OUR DAILY BREAD, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2005 (92m) + short

"Today, every worker is only working on one special part of the body, with always the same movement of the hand. There is no interference between the different sectors. For the workers it’s a normal work and most of them are happy to have a job".
Nikolaus Geyrhalter

Semen to pigs / Pigs to meat / Semen to cows / Cows to meat / Cows to milk / Eggs to chickens / Chickens to eggs / Chickens to meat / Fish / Crops and field harvests / Tomatoes in rock wool / Salads night harvest / Peppers / Cucumbers / Apples / Olives harvest / Salt from mines

Nikolaus Geyrhalter in an interview with Silvia Burner

OUR DAILY BREAD, like all your films, doesn’t have voice-over commentary, but in this case, there aren’t any interviews either.

I imagine my films mainly in continuous tracking shots which also contain scenes with interviews. In this case worlds of work which can stand alone are shown. The people work in spaces which are otherwise empty, and there’s not much talking while they work. At the beginning we conducted a number of interviews. During the editing, which Wolfgang Widerhofer started while shooting was still going on, it turned out that these interviews tend to disturb, and interrupt, the perception of the film. We then decided on the more radical form as it’s more appropriate for the way the footage was shot. The intention is to show actual working situations and provide enough space for thoughts and associations in long sequences. The viewers should just plunge into this world and form their own opinions.

There’s no information about specific companies or data.

It’s irrelevant for this film whether a company that produces baby chicks is located in Austria, Spain or Poland, or how many pigs are processed every year in the big slaughterhouse that’s shown. In my opinion that’s done by journalists and television, not a feature film. I also think that things are made too easy for me as a viewer when I’m spoon fed information. That moves me briefly, gets me worked up, but then it can be put into perspective quickly, and it works like all the other sensational news that bombards us day after day because that kind of thing sells newspapers - and it also dulls our perception of the world. In this film a look behind the structures is permitted, time’s provided to take in sounds and images, and it’s possible to think about the world where our basic foodstuffs are produced, which is normally ignored.

Interview with Wolfgang Widerhofer, Editor

"The film isn’t held together by people or places, it follows a different logic. It’s more of an episodic kind of thinking, an inspection, in both a spatial and temporal sense. An inspection that also comprises various cycles. The film includes themes without mentioning them explicitly: repetitive labour, automation, industrial production, and the brutality that it involves, the morality which comes into play when animals are killed, and so on. A number of discourses and approaches are set up in the film, but not so that the audience can leave the theater and say, “I learned this and that and this is what I have to do.”

OCTOBER's SCREENING - Harlan County USA

2009-09-30T05:22:00.000-07:00

SUNDAY OCTOBER 25th at 5pm
At 56a Infoshop

HARLAN COUNTY USA, Barbara Kopple, 1976 (103m) + US labour short tbc

Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award–winning Harlan County USA unflinchingly documents a gruelling coal miners’ strike in a small Kentucky town. With unprecedented access, Kopple and her crew captured the miners’ sometimes violent struggles with strikebreakers, local police, and company thugs. Featuring a haunting soundtrack – with legendary country and bluegrass artists Hazel Dickens, Merle Travis, Sarah Gunning, and Florence Reece – the film is a heartbreaking record of the thirteen-month struggle between a community fighting to survive and a corporation dedicated to the bottom line.

Essay by Paul Arthur 'Harlan County USA: No Neutrals There', http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/422

A history of strikes at Harlan County from Labor Notes
http://labornotes.org/node/1385

From Cinemension blog - Harlan County USA trailer at this link: http://cinemension.blogspot.com/2009/02/harlan-county-usa.html

"These people worked for pennies, no benefits, no indoor plumbing, no medical or dental insurance (most of their teeth are rotting and falling out) and their homes would be considered condemned in any "normal" city...Basically all these people are fighting for are their basic, human rights. Coal mining is definitely one of the most dangerous and toughest jobs imaginable. The working conditions are unsafe, atrocious, filthy and miserable".

SEPTEMBER's SCREENING - Men With Carts Double Bill!!

2009-08-30T09:41:00.000-07:00

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 27th at 6pm
At 56a Infoshop

MAN PUSH CART, Ramin Bahrani, 2005 (87mins)

Man Push Cart is a 2005 American independent film by Ramin Bahrani that tells the story of a former Pakistani rock star who now sells coffee and donuts from his push cart on the streets of Manhattan.

Every night while the city sleeps, Ahmad, a Pakistani immigrant, struggles to drag his heavy cart along the streets of New York to his corner in Midtown Manhattan. And every morning, from inside his cart he sells coffee and donuts to a city he cannot call his own. On his free time Ahmad Razvi sells pornographic DVDs. He lives a hard life, drinks Heineken and smokes Parliament cigarettes and goes to clubs. Like the workers found on every street corner in every city, he is a man who wonders if he will ever escape his fate.

BOROM SARRET, Ousmane Sembene (20mins)

Borom Sarret was the cinematic debut of Senegalese novelist and Moscow-trained filmmaker Ousmane Sembene - and also represents the earliest film directed by an indigenous filmmaker in sub-Sahara Africa.

Borom Sarret opens to the stark emptiness of a black screen, evocatively filled by the sound of a solemn, mystical tribal chant incanted amid the asynchrony of a blunt, rhythmic beat. The darkness subsequently reveals a high contrast, daylight shot of the impoverished native quarters, cutting to a shot of the supplicant (Ly Abdoulaye) praying for benediction in the foreground with his wife silently toiling in the background, as the pair assiduously perform their disparate (and intrinsically revelatory) rituals at the break of dawn.

Retrieving his family's sole possession - the horse Albourah - from a clearing, the unnamed man then leaves to fetch his wooden cart in order to earn a paltry income as a borom sarret, (a derivative of the French term bonhomme charret), a horse-cart driver for hire operating around the native quarters of Dakar, often picking up equally destitute passengers who can only offer an indebted (and indefinite) promise of payment or a wordless, ambiguous handshake in lieu of the fare. Nevertheless, the day seemingly turns auspicious as actual paying customers begin to hire his services - an overloaded delivery of construction concrete blocks and an expectant couple hurrying to the hospital for the birth of their child - begin to replace the destitute early morning commuters (and presumptuous hitchhikers) catching a free ride to the main town square.

With earned money in hand, he decides to stop at an intersection in order to enjoy the idyllic morning, eat his meager kola nut lunch, and tend to a persistently squeaking wheel on his cart before being distracted by the uplifting voice of a traditional singer performing on the street. The singer's ancient tales enhearten the borom sarret, evoking images of his ancestral family's nobility and former glory, and in an act of impulsive and negligent pride, magnanimously hands over his entire earnings to the charismatic singer. Now running out of time and anxious to recuperate his lost income, the desperate borom sarret begins to accept a series of desperate and dubious passengers, and soon finds himself driving his outmoded, derelict cart into the modernized - and forbidden - hillside colonial-era community appropriately called the Heights.

Full Unemployment Summer Break

2009-08-05T02:21:00.000-07:00

Yes, we are having a summer break this August so there won't be a film show but we will post up a three-month programme for Sept/Oct and November soon. Thanks for your support. If you have any ideas for good films about work and resistance to work then please leave a comment here with details.

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

2009-07-02T08:43:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-08T15:18:00.000-07:00

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