i'm running a free film series at the see spot community art space in the ithaca commons throughout the month of may. here's the list of films i intend to show...
Sunday, May 2
Can Dialectics Break Bricks (René Viénet, 1973) -- Imagine a kung fu flick in which the martial artists spout Situationist aphorisms about conquering alienation while decadent bureaucrats ply the ironies of a stalled revolution. This is what you'll encounter in René Viénet's outrageous refashioning of a Chinese fisticuff film. An influential Situationist, Viénet stripped the soundtrack from a run-of-the-mill Hong Kong export and lathered on his own devastating dialogue. A brilliant, acerbic and riotous critique of the failure of socialism in which the martial artists counter ideological blows with theoretical thrusts from Debord, Reich and others. Viénet's target is also the mechanism of cinema and how it serves ideology.
Tribulation 99 (Craig Baldwin, 1991) -- A pseudo pseudo-documentary, obsessively organized into 99 paranoid rants, parlaying every imaginable scrap of "found" footage, re-filmed TV, and industrial sound into a revisionist history of alien intervention in Latin America. A melange of satire, political fantasy, and black comedy, the film takes on crack-pot paranoid theories, environmental deconstruction, and CIA intervention -- and more -- all in one shot.
Sunday, May 9
"Not My President!" Voices from the Counter-Coup (Independent Media Center, 2001) -- "Not My President!" is the work of more than two dozen independent videographers and several organizations who've joined forces to present the untold story of the 2001 Presidential inaugration counter-demonstration.
Breaking The Spell: Anarchists, Eugene, and The WTO (Tim Ream & Tim Lewis, 2001) -- Breaking the Spell is an hour-long look at the WTO and anarchists, especially those from Eugene, who went up, created a stir, and faced national media presence in the wake of the action that took place there. Featuring outstanding local musicians from folk to punk to hip-hop. Including the footage that aired nationally on 60 Minutes and the CBS Sunday Morning News.
Sunday, May 16
Spin (Brian Springer, 1995) -- Brian Springer spent a year recording footage from live satellite feeds, in the process catching a fair number of politicians in compromising positions. See what our "leaders" are really like when they think the camera's off, and gain insight into the "behind-the-scenes maneuverings of politicians and newscasters in the early 1990s."
Frontline: The Merchants of Cool (Douglas Rushkoff, 2001) -- They spend their days sifting through reams of market research data. They conduct endless surveys and focus groups. They comb the streets, the schools, and the malls, hot on the trail of the "next big thing" that will snare the attention of their prey--a market segment worth an estimated $150 billion a year. They are the merchants of cool: creators and sellers of popular culture who have made teenagers the hottest consumer demographic in America. But are they simply reflecting teen desires or have they begun to manufacture those desires in a bid to secure this lucrative market? And have they gone too far in their attempts to reach the hearts--and wallets--of America's youth? Douglas Rushkoff examines the tactics, techniques, and cultural ramifications of these marketing moguls, talks with top marketers, media executives and cultural/media critics, and explores the symbiotic relationship between the media and today's teens, as each looks to the other for their identity.
Sunday, May 23
The Experiment at Petaluma (Rose X, 1991) -- Variously termed a radical sociophilosopher, an ethnobotanist, a technoshaman and a guru to Generation X, Terence McKenna was a prolific author and noted wit. His first cooperative video endeavor with Rose X, The Experiment At Petaluma, was hailed by Magical Blend as, "...an amazing visual and audio rendition of McKenna's latest thinking on psychedelics, virtual reality and visible language." Like nothing else you've ever seen before.
Timewave Zero (Sound Photosynthesis, 1990) -- The theory of Timewave Zero was allgedly revealed to Terence McKenna by an alien intelligence following a bizarre, quasi-psychedelic experiment conducted in the Amazon jungle in Colombia in 1971. Inspired by this influence McKenna was instructed in certain transformation of numbers derived from the King Wen sequence of I Ching hexagrams. This led eventually to a rigorous mathematical description of what he called the timewave, an entity which correlates time and history with the ebb and flow of novelty, which is intrinsic to the structure of time and hence of the temporal universe. In this film, McKenna explains his theory of Timewave Zero at length.
Alien Dreamtime (Rose X, 1993) -- Alien Dreamtime was produced as a live multimedia event in San Francisco, on the evenings of February 26 and 27, 1993. The performance is divided into three movements, each reflective of Terence McKenna's ethnobotanical theories: Archaic Revival, Alien Love, and Timewave Zero. McKenna's presence is combined with the entrancing visuals of Rose X and ambient techno improvosations by Space Time Continuum and didgeridoo player Stephen Kent. Described by Mondo 2000 as, "spiraling vortexes, flowing from nowhere into your reptillian stem...mesmerizing, eroticizing." You'll soon find yourself swept into the lush, viridian reality of Alien Dreamtime.
Sunday, May 30
Sonic Outlaws (Craig Baldwin, 1995) -- Sonic Outlaws is a rowdy crash course in 80's and 90's American counterculture. In starring roles, plagiarism and the copywrong movement linked with copyrights owned by large corporations; supported by anti-branding actions, billboard sabotage and the illicit sampling of entertainers and politicians etc., all in the name of fun and anti-authoritarian gain. Sonic Outlaws is an audiovisual fireworks display of underground Americana, breathtaking and colorful. A large part of its material has been pilfered from B-movies and cable TV shows, which underlines the concept of the folklore of the electronic age, reiterated by many of the "sonic outlaws" interrogated in the film. According to them, tradition-based folk art cannot emerge in the present world because all significant images and sounds are strictly protected by copyright laws, and thus can't be used as parts of new works. The wealth of material in Sonic Outlaws is held together - in true American style - by a court case. In 1991, the San Francisco band Negativland got their hands on a pirated tape of Casey Kasem cursing like a sailor after a failed attempt to record an introduction to a U2 song. Negativland couldn't resist the art-prank possibilities. The band mixed Kasem's cussing with mangled bits of U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." SST released the recording, only to discover that Island Records, U2's label, was not amused. Island charged Negativland with copyright and trademark infringement, and sued the band and SST Records.
Beyond Life with Timothy Leary (Danny Shechter, 1997) -- A fond remembrance of the counterculture leader, Harvard-educated psychologist, and psychedelia advocate, as recalled by associates Allen Ginsberg and Yoko Ono and by legions of younger fans affected by the enduring legacy of the 1960s icon.
