Flaherty NYC Global Revolt: Cinematic Ammunition
Tuesday, November 12, 7pm @ Anthology Film Archives
Filmmaker and author Ariella Azoulay will be present for a post-screening discussion.
Israel, Palestine, Syria: the unending crisis in the Middle East, unstable states caught up in a state of exception…. These films militate against the militarized state and its ideology.
*FILMS*
A PLATE OF SARDINES
Omar Amiralay (Syria, 1997, 17 min)
“The first time I heard of Israel, I was in Beirut, the conversation was about a plate of sardines. I was six years old, Israel was two.” A militant elegy, a beautifully shot meditation on history, memory, and ruin, largely framed by a conversation with fellow filmmaker Mohammed Malas, as they walk through a destroyed village.
A FLOOD IN BAATH COUNTRY
Omar Amiralay (Syria, 2003, 46 min)
The deep pre-conditions that one cannot help but feel, ultimately led to the current revolt against the Assad dictatorship in Syria are explored with maximum rigor, elegance, and impact. Amiralay returns to site of his first film, the Assad dam on the Euphrates river. What he finds is little short of blood-curdling.
THE FOOD CHAIN
Ariella Azoulay (Israel/USA, 2002, 17 min)
An inventive investigation of the question: Is there hunger in Palestine? leads to a disquieting conclusion: the Israeli military and government are positively nourished by the spread of humanitarian speech and ideas, which directly supports their continued aggression against Palestine. In the end the film’s title takes on a steely irony.
HEZREALLAH
Yann Beauvais (France, 2006, 1 min)
A silent blast of flashing text, words in both English and French, at the point of self-destruction, hovering above what resembles the shimmery digital map visible in a war plane’s targeting screen. This intense 48 second film, bearing angry traces of Lettrist/ Situationist intransigence, was made during the 2006 Lebanon War.
*ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS*
The contentious career of the great Syrian documentarian Omar Amiralay was set in motion when, while still in film school, he joined the protests in the streets of Paris in May 1968. Always a political dissident, Amiralay made many critical films that have been enormously influential throughout the Arab world—when not banned.
Ariella Azoulay’s work, she says, uses “images to revise political concepts — that of citizenship and sovereignty first and foremost — in order to understand Palestine in the larger global context of revolution, colonial legacy, imperialism, and of what is left over after imperialism.” Perhaps the most influential contemporary theorist of photography, as well as a filmmaker, she teaches at Brown University. She is the author of Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography, among other books.
Perhaps the major French exponent of experimental cinema, Yann Beauvais has made at least thirty films. A curator and generous critic, with a deep knowledge of the history of the experimental traditions both in Europe and the U.S., he co-founded Light Cone, the largest avant-garde cinematic archive in Europe. His most recent critical essay–on films influenced by the cinematographic propositions of Guy Debord–is available in In Situs (Gruppen). He lives and works in Recife, Brazil.
The programmers would like to dedicate this series to Allan Sekula.
*FALL FLAHERTY NYC PROGRAMMERS*
Sherry Millner and Ernie Larsen are anarchist artists who produce STATE OF EMERGENCY, an interventionist video project, in collaboration with more than 15 artists. They began working together in the mid-seventies with a performance about the Weather Underground and then made the two-screen situationist Super-8 Disaster (1976), recently restored on DVD. They produced two 16 mm anti-documentaries on the politics of crime, and then a series of satiric semi-autobiographical videos focusing on the authoritarian structures indispensable to capital. Millner’s multimedia installations have explored domestic space as a battleground, first with the theory and practice of camouflage as the controlling aesthetic and then re-creating the designs and plans in U.S. army manuals on how to boobytrap the home. Larsen is also a novelist (Not a Through Street) and a media critic. Their conceptual video, 41 Shots, based on the police murder of immigrant street peddler, Amadou Diallo, examines the implicitly racist ‘broken windows’ theory of criminology. Their new video essay Rock the Cradleexplores the fierce challenge posed by the Greek uprising of December ’08-January ’09 to the rule of global capital and the state, while relocating resonant aspects of the anarchist pasts of Barcelona and the Paris Commune within present-day struggles. Millner is also a professor at College of Staten Island, CUNY.
FOR THE FULL FLAHERTY NYC SCHEDULE VISIT:
http://flahertyseminar.org/flaherty-nyc/
Flaherty NYC at Anthology Film Archives: 32 Second Ave. (@2nd St.)www.anthologyfilmarchives.org (Tickets on sale at the box office day of screening)
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue (@2nd Street), New York 10003