June Screening: Description of a Bankruptcy

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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.