Radical media, politics and culture.

From Wildcat to Insurrection Screening July 15 NYC

From Wildcat to Insurrection, from insurrection to wildcat: Screening Day
15 July 2012 – 3:30PM - The Brecht Forum - 451 West Street, New York, NY 10014

A full-day screening program organized with the Our Lives Are Not Negotiable reading group, and the new Group Affect collective project. Please join us for discussion, food, and drink (please bring things to share!).

OLANN, organized through the Public School New York, has met 25 times since last December, an attempt to give ourselves space to "collectively study anarchism, autonomism, biopolitics, communism, insurrectionism, nihilism, structuralism, our relationship to capital and the state, and other forms of exchange and authority." We've looked at such authors as Giorgio Agamben, Louis Althusser, Antonin Artaud, Aufheben, Jean Baudrillard, Alfredo M. Bonanno, Judith Butler, Cornelius Castoriadis, Colectivo Situaciones, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, the Motherfuckers, Precarias a la Deriva, Tiqqun, Alexander Trocchi, and Raoul Vaneigem, among others.

In the months leading up to the May Day General Strike, we read a wide number of texts which theorized on strikes: general, mass, wildcat, human, women's, proletarian, infinite, care, et al. Since then we've turned our attention to looking at some of recent urban riots and national insurrections: Argentina 2001, Los Angeles 1992, London 2011, Tunisia 2011, Greece 2008, Paris 2005, et al. To some extent, these histories have represented an alternative to the traditional approaches of leftist social movements, as a more immediate and direct response to economic collapse, police brutality, and racism. It is these two trends we'd like to combine within this screening event, as an attempt to reconsider our strategy and tactics moving forward.

4PM
--Collective Behavior Civil Disturbances - U.S. Army Missile Command, 1975, 17 minutes
--Anarchy USA - G. Edwuard Griffin, 1966, 76 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 93 minutes | Digital Projection

6PM
--Civil Disturbances: Principles of Control - Army Pictorial Center, 1968, 13 minutes
--Perfect Storm - Wideshut, 2011, 29 minutes
--Wildcat at Mead - October League, 1972, 51 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 93 minutes | Digital Projection

8PM
--A Film Like Any Other (Un Film Comme Les Autres) - Dziga-Vertov Group, 1968, 103 minutes

http://brechtforum.org/
http://groupaffect.wordpress.org/
http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/
http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/class/3880
https://www.facebook.com/events/175148035951692/

As we mention in the reading group description, "It is not expected that we like or agree with the [films] selected. They serve only as a means to facilitate discussion towards the sharpening of our analyses and understanding."

BONUS
In the lead-up to the May Day General Strike, we organized two screening programs, along with Death to Capitalism Cinema and Strike Everywhere, including Richard Leacock & Noel E. Parmentel, Jr. Chief's (1968) and Videofreex's Mayday Realtime (1971) at Anthology Film Archives: http://maydaynyc.org/mayday-realtime and a program of short films and videos on general strikes at Eyebeam: http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/note/4029

Our Lives Are Not Negotiable came out of the Anti-State Communism reading group (http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/note/3053), which met for 10 months in 2011. Last September, it organized a similar screening day at No Space, in collaboration with Red Channels: http://www.facebook.com/events/260734043949598/ This screening featured Thomas Harlan's Torre Bela (1975); Guido Chiesa's Working Slowly (2004); and Isabelle Fremeaux, John Jordan and Kypros Kyprianou's Paths Through Utopias (2011).

Group Affect is a new collective project which spans a number of platforms, politics, and practices, and serves as a space for coordination and production.