Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations Collective Theorization

I am happy to say, after reading the first few essays in AK Press' Constituent Imagination, that I am excited about many of the ideas presented about http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifdoing militant theory and research in a practical context. Kudos to Stevphen Shukaitis, David Graeber, and Erika Biddle for putting together such an inspiring and provocative compilation! AK Strikes Again!

La Commune

This past week I had the opportunity to watch Peter Watkins' revolutionary critique of media and rehashing of the Paris Commune, La Commune. This was one of the most emotionally inspiring, politically challenging, and intellectually stimulating films I've seen in my life. The running time of the film is 5 hours and 54 minutes. It uses the convention of "tv crews" on site at the Paris Commune, an event that took place in 1871 in response to the Franco-Prussian Wars. Using 2oo Parisian working class people, Watkins restages the commune and uses his film as a tool to engage these people in questions of revolution, historical reflection, and strategic thinking on contemporary globalization and class war. Issues ranging from immigration, the function of the mass media, the validity of violence in struggle, class and state repression, the trouble with nationalism, and women's rights are all foregrounded though the film. In many ways, this film is a perfect cinematic companion to Pierre Bourdieu's On Television, two lectures Bourdieu gave about the flaws of broadcast models based on ratings systems that fail to move forward smaller, more specialized intellectual, social, and cultural projects.

Antonioni and Bergman Dead

After a
long day of negotiating our country's inadequate social systems for homeless people, I want to take a brief moment to mourn the death of two of the great filmmakers -- Michaelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman! I sure hope Godard is taking care of himself...ah, the death of the CINEMA.

Coco Fusco -- Couple in the Cage

After writing my last post, I realized some folks might not know Coco Fusco's other work. Perhaps her most famous piece is Couple in a Cage, a performance piece with video documentation that she did with Guillermo Gomez-Pena in 1993. Together, the two artists exhibited themselves as caged Amerindians outside of a variety of natural science museums, art museums, etc...It's a great piece about colonialism and objectification. You should check out her website and her other work as well!

Operation Atropos

At Free Speech TV, we started having monthly Doc Fridays. I get to pick a couple programs from our collection and show them to the staff. This past Friday, I showed Howard Scott Warshaw's Vice and Consent, which I've blogged about before, and Coco Fusco's Operation Atropos. The latter video is available through the Video Databank and will be playing on Free Speech TV. The first of the two films is an educational documentary about San Francisco's BDSM community. The second, Operation Atropos, is Fusco's exploration of women's roles in military interrogation after the photos from Abu Ghraib were released. Fusco takes a group of young women to an interrogation training course put on by ex-military interrogators. The bulk of the film shows her and the group of women experiencing interrogation and learning about it from the position of victims. The film addresses all sorts of issues about representation, the real, the performative, victimization, power, race, gender, etc...The conversation afterwards was quite interesting. One staff member was highly effected by the simulation of interrogation and found the documentary to be quite painful. Another, who had seen films from the School of the Americas in the late 80s, felt the film diminished the reality of torture. I really hope you get a chance to check it out when it plays on Free Speech TV. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Submedia

Submedia has started a regular video-blog taking anarchist-news to a new level! Hosted by a quirky animation called The Stimulator, the newscast covers a variety of activist and environmental issues. Check-it out!

If you haven't seen Submedia's short videos, they are available on the website too!

Kalup Linzy

While I was at the Flaherty Film Seminar in June, I had the chance to meet and watch the work of performance artist/video-maker Kalup Linzy. His work deals with pop-culture, gender-performance, sexuality, and race with humor, pathos, and lo-fi aesthetics. Hi short music video LOLLIPOP opened the seminar and proved to be one of my favorite shorts in quite along time. Sadly for us, his videos are available primarily through gallery distribution and are not currently accessible to the home DVD audience. Nonetheless,
clips of his work can be found at his website.