7:00pm
Ed Halter presents Un film de Diane Chambers

Critic and curator Ed Halter presents an illustrated lecture on fake experimental films as seen in mainstream movies and television, where they have often been used to ridicule the very notion of artistic practice or counterculture. Taken together as their own motley tradition, these parodies can provide a shadow history of the avant-garde, showing how popular narrative has policed itself against any other possible forms that cinema might take.

9:15pm
Electronic Arts Intermix presents Raymond Pettibon’s Sir Drone
EAI is pleased to present Raymond Pettibon’s Sir Drone (1989), featuring Mike Kelley. Pettibon’s highly idiosyncratic pen and ink drawings have taken him from L.A. cult status to the international artworld. With Kelley, Pettibon was close to the West Coast punk bands of the late 1970s and early 1980s. His deliberately crude, low-tech video narratives are irreverent tales of 1960s and ’70s West Coast radical subcultures. These wildly ironic, deadpan dramas feature an ensemble of luminaries from L.A.’s post-punk underground. In Sir Drone, Kelley and Mike Watt play two teens struggling to create the right image for themselves, debating aesthetic and ethical issue of starting a punk band, and strategies to avoid being “rinky dink.”

Screening with Cory Arcangel’s Insectiside (1992-03) and Message my Brother Justin Left Me on my Cell from the Slayer Concert Last Week (2004).

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is a leading international resource for video and media art whose core program is the distribution and preservation of a major collection of over 3,500 new and historical video works by artists.

Described by J. Hoberman as “the Godard of the ’80s, Mister nearly-Borges-plus-middle- period Welles, a Barthesian Bunuel, the Edgar G. Ulmer of the European art film, a Third World H. Rider Haggard, the Garcia Marquez of French TV,” Migrating Forms will host an evening dedicated to the life and legacy of Raul Ruiz (1941-2011), one of the most innovative and inspirational filmmakers and film thinkers of the last 40 years.

A screening of Ruiz’ 1982 feature On Top of the Whale will be followed by a program of rare Ruiz shorts and readings from Poetics of Cinema presented by artists and curators including Michael Almereyda, Tom Jarmusch, Jeanne Liotta, Keith Sanborn, Elisabeth Subrin, Jordi Torrent and more. Jonathan Rosenbaum writes of On Top of the Whale, “One of Raul Ruiz’s best features, this is also one of his looniest…The putative SF plot concerns a French anthropologist and his Dutch wife who are hired to study the indecipherable language spoken by two members of an Indian tribe; in fact, this is a dazzling intellectual goof, with an average of one striking visual idea per shot, a lot of gags involving the pretensions of anthropologists and psychoanalytical theorists, and other forms of nonstop invention.” (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

Read Jonathan Rosenbaum’s essay on On Top of the Whale in Rouge’s Ruiz dossier 

“The Roof of the Whale – the film of Ruiz’s with the most pronounced ideological/political/polemical thrust – deals brilliantly with the plight of an anthropologist trying to learn the language of an obscure Patagonian Indian tribe whose last surviving members he has discovered. Beautifully and inventively shot in colour by Henri Alekan, the film proceeds less as narrative or as drama than as a prodigious stream of visual, verbal and conceptual ideas centring around this theme.

The performances are either minimal to the point of indifference or deliberately curtailed (so that, for instance, Willeke van Ammelrooy, who plays the anthropologist’s wife, appears to have learned her speeches in English phonetically) and, despite periodic bursts of portentous music, suspense exists only on a purely formal level…(read more)

As a point of departure for his ongoing research and writing on the subject of prison abolition, n+1 associate editor Christopher Glazek will present a screening of Harun Farocki’s 2001 film Prison Images (aka I Thought I was Seeing Convicts) and speak about anti-prison propaganda, the role that images play in this, and the difference between art images and political images. Farocki’s film explores the similarities between the surveillance states of prison, the factory and the supermarket, focusing on surveillance footage of the murders of unarmed inmates at California’s Corcoran prison.

Read Christopher Glazek’s Raise the Prison Rate in n+1

Is it true that living in America has become riskier? In 2006, the political scientist Jacob Hacker published The Great Risk Shift, a progressive tract that appropriated the vocabulary of wealth management to show how thirty years of privatization and deregulation had abraded the security of the American family. Risks once borne by corporations and the government, Hacker noted, like unplanned health costs, are now the responsibility of Mom and Pop. Transferring risk from the collective to the individual, though, ends badly for everyone. Family affliction, like banker “contagion,” is tricky to sequester: if Larry and Terry get bankrupted by bad luck, their misfortune cascades, dragging down creditors, neighbors, and especially their children. The reason liberals like insurance is that it helps diffuse risk throughout society. Pooling risk, one might say, is the essence of the progressive social contract…(read more)

A Japanese Director’s Path to Revolution
By Dennis Lim

Mr. Baudelaire’s project originated while he was on an artist’s residency in Japan several years ago. “I was interested in these extreme left movements that went underground following the failure of the broad-based student movements,” he said, “and typically experienced even greater failures.” While researching the Japanese Red Army, he discovered Mr. Adachi’s films and heard about the daughter of the group’s founder, Fusako Shigenobu. Born in Lebanon, May Shigenobu lived there in secrecy until her mother’s arrest in 2000, at which point her clandestine existence turned into a very public one.

A visual artist whose work often concerns the representation of politically charged events — some of his videos and installations have invoked Sept. 11 and war photography — Mr. Baudelaire was compelled by the intertwined stories of the Shigenobus and Mr. Adachi but reluctant to make a conventional biographical portrait. Keeping its protagonists off-screen and maintaining a subtle tension between sound and image, “The Anabasis” combines the voice-overs of May Shigenobu and Mr. Adachi with Super-8 footage filmed in present-day Tokyo and Beirut — an application of Mr. Adachi’s theory of landscape on none other than the theorist himself…(read more)

These Walls of Theirs
By Daniel Kasman

Cutting off his ties to Hollywood with the blade-bare sinistry of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), Fritz Lang returned to Germany in the late 1950s to make the final two features of his career, both resumptions, updates and evolutions on subjects and styles that forged Lang’s name in Germany.  His last film envisioned what German society’s arch (fictional) supervillain, Dr. Mabuse, would be up to in 1960, producing the terrifying The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse.  Less internationally known but more extravagant than that film, whose taut black and white sparseness resembles Lang’s late work in Hollywood, is the master’s “Indian Epic,” a two part, three plus hour revision of a Weimar-era superfilm directed by Joe May from a scenario by future Lang wife Thea von Harbou…(read more)

Spotlight: It’s the Earth Not the Moon
By Robert Koehler

The lure of islands, their fundamental thereness, their separation from, and fragile connections to, the rest of civilization, their existence as an ideal metonym for individual identity but also for the world as a whole—all these, and more, make islands powerful places for filmmakers to land upon. When they do, they’re hopefully aware that they follow the wake left by Homer, Shakespeare, Defoe, Golding, and others drawn to the island—the “island mind,” as the English novelist John Fowles precisely termed it—as a place to unpack immense ideas about creation and being. Whatever Gonçalo Tocha’s reading may be, his physical connection to the sea, as first seen in his astonishing, out-of-nowhere diary documentary Balaou (2007), is intense, and the ocean odyssey of his debut logically leads to an oceanic landing on the remote Azores island of Corvo, Europe’s furthest western tip, in It’s the Earth Not the Moon. Already in the title is the inherent consciousness of island-as-world, but also the need of a reminder that, on this island (and maybe any island one lands upon), the voyager is still on this planet, even while the nature of the island is to promulgate the idea and feeling of being on a distinct satellite…(read more)

Unreconstructed: Phil Collins’ Marxism Today
by Daniel Trilling

There are two pitfalls awaiting any filmmaker today who tackles the subject of life in the former East Germany. On one hand there’s the pull of Ostalgie, the reduction of life under Communism to kitsch memorabilia; on the other there’s a compulsion to preface the subject with a denunciation – however sincere – of the crimes of Stalinism.

The two films which make up Phil Collins’ Marxism Today (currently the final show at the soon-to-be-scuppered BFI Gallery) cleverly sidestep both. In the first film, a half-hour series of interviews with former teachers of Marxism-Leninism – a compulsory subject for schoolchildren in the GDR – Collins’s camera cuts away from the speakers and lingers on various ephemera: old banknotes, a teen magazine for girls, dusty copies of Das Kapital. When the film ends, a second room in the gallery lights up and visitors enter to sit at a series of old-fashioned wooden school benches; from here we watch a lecture on some basic Marxist concepts, delivered to modern-day students by one of the ex-teachers we see in the first film… (read more)

Yael Bartana

In 2006, While researching for the film Mary Kosmary (Nightmares) I met Sławomir Sierakowski, a young leftist activist from Warsaw who later became the leader of the semifictitious Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMIP). Together, we came to the understanding that we share the same interests, namely to question the status quo in our respective countries and to build a new future for ourselves. You see, Poland had become such a homogeneous society after World War II. He and I wanted to break up the uniformity of Polish society. After we met, my desire to alter the status quo took the form of asking him to join the project: His political activities in Poland and his charisma convinced me that he should be the protagonist of the film… (read more)

Ghost World: History as Occult Knowledge in Abrantes and Schmidt’s Palaces of  Pity 
By Collin Beckett

Palaces of Pity (2011) is a film of hard, unforgiving surfaces. In Portugal ancient and modern, directors Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt discover a wealth of heavy, obdurate materials: towering cliffs, gleaming metal swords and chainmail, big stone palaces, and thick sliding glass doors, to name just a few… (read more)

Program Notes