Men In Prison

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