Prophets and Gain: New Russian Cinema

May 3-8, 2004, Pittsburgh Russian Film Symposium 2004

Much has been written in the past decade about the crises besetting the film industry in Russia since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. These crises, however, were simply the inevitable consequence of capital's struggle to differentiate itself from money — that is, a painful transition from funding individual film projects (by the state, by Klondike capitalists, by the underworld) to the investment of funds with an expectation of generating surplus value; a transition that transformed the film industry by shifting the focus from products to profits. Even the film studios inherited from the recent Soviet past — Mosfilm, Lenfilm, Gor'kii Film Studio — were forced to allocate their now limited resources in a new way: film projects had to be packaged both in terms of their "social (or artistic) merits" and their projected ability to return capital investments to the studios.

a_khenatoun writes:

VideoKaravaan 2004

Media Arts Workshop

April 12–24, 2004, Agadir, Morocco

The next station of our project this year will be Inchallah in Agadir, in the southern side of Morocco. Besides
programme screening, video installations and interactive,Videokaravaan will
set up a series of workshops
and initiatives to allow local Artists to create their own works and enable
them to represent themselves
directly. Many International Artists will give their assistance and
experience, among them: Toni Serra,
Mounir Fatmi, Joachim Montessuis, Nabil Ayouch, Abdelaziz Taleb, Zhor
Rehihi, Bouchra Khalili, Abdellatif
Benfaidoul, Alexander Peterhaensel....

NY News and Letters invites you to join a series of classes on:

"Alternatives to Capitalism" Classes

Sundays in Spring, 2004, New York City

39 West 14th Street, Rm. 205 (Ring bell #3, Identity House), Manhattan

Free admission; free and open discussion. Most readings can be purchased from us. Call (212) 663-3631 for more information, or e-mail nandl@ igc.org and ask about
New York classes. You can visit our website at www.newsandletters.org. Classes continue every other Sunday.

Class 2: Value, Exchange Value, and Freely Associated Labor? — April 4
Speaker: Andrew Kliman, 7:00-9:15 p.m. (Daylight Savings Time)

"Socialism" is often posed in terms of whether "capital should be individual or common." Marx's rejection to this way of posing the issue is discussed in The Poverty of Philosophy and "Critique of the Gotha Program." Marx's view that, "It is totally impossible to reconstitute a society on the basis of what is merely an embellished shadow of it," permeates his 1875 "Critique," which is taken up in Dunayevskaya's "A New Revision of Marxian Economics."

RunMe DorkBot CityCamp 2004

Aarhus, Denmark, Aug. 25–27

You are cordially invited to leave your tents and sleeping bags safely at home and join us in
Aarhus, Denmark for the Runme Dorkbot citycamp 2004. From the 25th-27th August, Aarhus will be
filled with 'people doing strange things with software', as well as more traditional campfire
activities such as eating, drinking, talking, socialising, showing off and relaxing together.