From: Jack Sargeant (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Jun 12 2006 - 12:54:28 PDT
posting this on behalf of Brighton Cinematheque
jack
FREE FILMS / BRIGHTON / UK details below
www.criticalpositions.org
Nuisance in collaboration with Brighton Cinematheque presents CRITICAL
POSITIONS 2; a festival of films exploring the ideas of cultural and
social theorists and filmmakers who have critiqued and influenced how
we view and act in the modern world.
The themes that the films address include the work of psychoanalytical
theorist Slavoj Zizek, philosopher Martin Heidegger, social scientist
Pierre Bourdieu and political theorist Antonio Negri, the hidden
history of the internet, the birth of the 2nd wave Feminist movement,
Surrealist documentary and much more...
CRITICAL POSITIONS 2 will take place in June 2006 at the Friends
Meeting House in Brighton (see current programme for details).
Entrance to all films is FREE.
Critical Positions also welcomes your feedback, suggestions, reviews
and general disussion on our new Forum .
CRITICAL POSITIONS 2 is supported by
Friday 16th June at 8pm
Zizek!
Astra Taylor USA 05 digital 71 mins
The author of works on subjects as wide-ranging as Alfred Hitchcock,
9/11, opera, Christianity, Lenin and David Lynch, Slavoj Zizek is one
of the most important- and provocative - cultural theorists working
today. Taylor's debut documentary trails the Slovenian philosopher as
he traverses the globe, racing from packed New York City lecture halls,
through the streets of Buenos Aires, and stopping off at home in
Ljubljana. In transit, Zizek obsessively unravels the invisible
workings of ideology according to his unique blend of Lacanian
psychoanalysis, Marxism, and pop culture critique. Erudite and
immensely entertaining - a portrait of cultural theorist as spectacle
showman. This is an advanced preview ahead of its UK release. Thanks
to Astra Taylor and the New York Documentary Campaign for this
screening.
Introduced by Mark Devenney
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Saturday 17th at 6.30pm
The Universal Clock
Geoff Bowie Canada 2001 video 76 min.
The Universal Clock explores the assumption that the contemporary
documentary has become a homogenized, customised commodity - its
packaged, streamlined images and sounds concerned less with revealing
reality than concealing it. Bowie finds an opposition to this mass
media 'monoform' in the work of filmmaker Peter Watkins whose unique
cinematic approach, sometimes described as documentary reconstruction,
is determined by the opinions and actions of his films participants.
Bowie follows and interviews Watkins as he makes his most recent work
'The Commune (Paris 1871)', an epic six-hour re-imagining of the 19th
century uprising against Napoleon III by the Communards. Critical
Positions will host a special screening of The Commune in late summer.
Introduced by Jonathan Swain.
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Saturday 17th June at 8.30pm
Negri: A Revolt That Never Ends
Alexandra Weltz and Andreas Pichler Germany 2004 digital 52 min
A profile of the writer, philosopher and alleged ideologue of the
Italian Red Brigades - Antonio Negri has been at the forefront of
radical thought in Italy for decades. 'Revolt' traces Negri's life and
ideas from his early involvement in 'Autonomia' and the left-wing
workers movements of the 1960s and 1970s, through to his imprisonment,
exile, and subsequent collaboration with Deleuze and Guattari. Now
internationally renown as the co-author of 'Empire', Negri is a leading
spokesman of the anti-globalization movement. The film features recent
interviews conducted following his release from confinement, commentary
from his co-author Michael Hardt, and rare archival footage of workers
strikes, street confrontations and the political repression that
followed. 'Crackles with unexpected twists and is braced by lucid
excurses on Negri's political theories... Great!' - Cineaste
Introduced by Andy Knott.
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Sunday 18th June at 2pm
Imagining Reality
From three of cinema's greatest visual poets, a programme of rarely
screened films that challenge the codes of documentary realism and
explore the use of film as a powerful social critique.
Hotel des Invalides
Dir Georges Franju 1951 France 16mm 23 mins subtitles.
A tour of Paris’s ‘Hotel Des Invalides’, a military museum that also
housed a retirement home for war veterans. Franju’s landmark
documentary was originally commissioned by the museums custodians as a
filmic celebration, instead it develops into a lyrical. scathing attack
on the emblems of national pride and military glory.
A Propos de Nice
Jean Vigo France 1930 digital 26 mins
Vigo’s declared his film ‘the last twitchings of a society that rejects
its own responsibilities’. Shot with a concealed camera over several
months, Vigo and Boris Kaufman capture the decadent rich and urban poor
on the streets of Nice. [more]
Las Hurdes Land Without Bread
Luis Buñuel Spain 1932 digital English voice over
27 mins
Buñuel's only non-fiction film is an uncompromising portrayal of the
lives of peasants in one Spain’s most desolate regions. Shot from the
radical perspective of the Spanish surrealist tradition, Bunuel
implicates the audience and the documentary genre in the suffering it
depicts.
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Sunday 18th at 4pm
The Net
Lutz Dammbeck Germany 2004 digital 110 mins
A complex, thought provoking exploration of the hidden history of the
internet and its parallel social philosophies. Award winning filmmaker
Dammbeck combines investigative journalism and travelogue to trace the
contrasting counterculture responses to the technological revolution.
From early pioneers of media art like Marshall McLuhan and Nam Jun Paik
through to hippy idealists like Tim Leary and Ken Kesey, to an in depth
investigation of the ultimate opponent of technological control Ted
Kaczynski - the Unabomber. Dammbeck’s conceptual quest Links these
multiple nodes of cultural and political thought revealing an
unsettling matrix of revolutionary advances, coincidences, and
conspiracies. ‘An intellectual roller coaster ride through art,
technology, philosophy, politics, psychology and sociology.’ Osnabrück
Media Art Festival. [more]
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Sunday 18th June at 7pm
The Ister
David Barison+ Daniel Ross 2004 Australia digital 189 mins
The Ister is a remarkable 3000km journey to the heart of Europe, from
the mouth of the Danube river in Romania, to its source in the German
Black Forest. It forms a compelling philosophical investigation in to
the nature of being and time that takes as its starting point the 1942
lectures of Martin Heidegger and the poetry of Friedrich Holderlin.
Though Heidegger swore allegiance to the National Socialists in 1933,
his work has inspired some of the most remarkable thinkers and artists
working today. As the voyage progresses four of these - Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe , Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, and the filmmaker
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg evaluate Heidegger’s pivotal role in contemporary
thought and attempt to unravel the extraordinary past and future of
‘the west’. "An impressive philosophical exercise and a meditative work
of cinematic beauty." - Jamie Russell/BBC. "A philosophical feast—at
which it is possible to gorge oneself yet leave feeling elated,”
Variety [more]
Introduced by Mary Anne Francis.
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Wednesday 21 st June at 6pm
Argument
(Anthony McCall & Andrew Tyndall, US, 1978, video, 84 mins)
Anthony McCall and Andrew Tyndall's legendary and provocative essay
film first screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in
1978, and has been almost unseen for the last twenty years. Artist film
and video distributor LUX has now made a new high definition
restoration of the film, and its trenchant analysis of media ideology
seems more pertinent than ever.
Three male voices dissect one edition of The New York Times through a
series of locked-off shots, revealing the prejudice and latent content
of news and advertisements, reading images as texts and presenting text
as an image. Fashion photographs are used as a starting point for a
political investigation of news, advertising, and images of masculinity
- while at the same time, the filmmakers reflect on their own position
and the possibility of radical film practice. Influenced by both the
American and European avant-gardes, notably Godard and Hollis Frampton,
Argument is stylistically beautiful and relentless in its enquiry.
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Wednesday 21st at 8pm
Sociology is a Martial Art
Pierre Carles France 2002 video 146 mins subtitled
A rigorous, compelling, award winning portrait of the life and work of
the late Pierre Bourdieu, regarded by many as one of France's most
influential thinkers and prominent social activists. Bourdieu’s work
explored the complex correlations between cultural codes and the
hierarchies of class and power – he saw sociology not simply as an
academic ritual but as a tool for political action. Filmed over three
years, Carles’ camera follows Bourdieu as he lectures, attends
political rallies, travels, meets with his students, staff, and
research team in Paris, and includes Bourdieu in conversation with
Günter Grass. ‘Sociology…’ became a huge hit in France shortly before
Bourdieu’s death in 2002. "Compelling! Truly moving." - Cineaste
‘Perhaps the definitive memoriam to Bourdieu’ Leonardo Review [more
from Leonardo]
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Thursday 22 nd June at 6pm
Images of the World and the Inscription of War
Dir Harun Farocki West Germany 1988 16mm 75 mins subtitles
What can the camera capture that the eye cannot see? Filmmaker and
theorist Harun Farocki is a leading montage-based film essayist whose
work attempts to disclose the structures behind institutional power and
the ideologies embedded in visual communication. In this, his most
celebrated film, a series of aerial photographs of Auschwitz
inadvertently taken by the US airforce in 1944 and rediscovered in a
CIA archive 30 years later, serve as the basis for a dazzling
examination of 100 years of image making.
'There is not a wasted frame in 75 minutes...' NY Times
Interview with Farocki (Senses of Cinema)
Introduction to Farocki (Senses of Cinema)
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Thursday 22nd June at 8pm
Town Bloody Hall
Chris Hegedus/D A Pennebaker USA 1979 16mm 88 min
A raucous, rough-edged and riotously funny record of the now legendary
debate on feminism held in New York in 1971, organised in response to
the furore surrounding Norman Mailer's inflammatory article 'The
Prisoner of Sex'. Mailer himself chaired the discussion, sharing the
podium with four women representing different strands of feminism;
journalist and lesbian spokeswoman Jill Johnston , critic Diana
Trilling, author Germaine Greer and president of N.O.W Jacqueline
Cebellos. Roving, zooming camerawork intimately captures the volatile
atmosphere and impassioned reactions of both jury and audience. An
invaluable historical artefact, and a distillation of the political
currents then raging in the USA and far beyond.
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__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.