SUNDAY 17 APRIL

3PM
—My Journey with Hibakusha – Takashi Kunimoto NDS, 2010 64 minutes

5PM
—Garbage – Newsreel, 1968, 10 minutes
—GIs Take Manhattan: Operation First Casualty – Meerket Media Collective, 2007, 5 minutes
—Cop Humiliation in His Own Domain – Voina, 2008, 12 minutes
—Anarchists Liberate the Deflating World – Glassbead, 2009, 9 minutes
—People’s Firehouse #1 – Newsreel, 1979, 25 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 61 minutes | Digital Projection

7PM
-Everything has been done – Azorro, 2003, 6 minutes
—Proto Media Primer – Raindance, 1970, 16 minutes
—Four More Years – TVTV, 1972, 61 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 83 minutes | Digital Projection

9PM
—Dick Captured by KGB! – Voina, 2010, 3 minutes
—And the War Has Only Just Begun – Imaginary Party, 2001, 18 minutes
—Get Rid of Yourself – Bernadette Corporation, 2003, 61 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 82 minutes | Digital Projection

www.redchannels.org
www.spectacletheater.com

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Bernadette Corporation
Since 1994, the anonymous, international group of artists known as Bernadette Corporation has explored strategies of cultural resistance and détournement, appropriating contemporary entertainment modes for their own experimental purposes. From the New York-based BC fashion label, which garnered a cult following in the 1990s, and the magazine Made In USA, launched in 1999, to the collectively-authored novel Reena Spaulings (Semiotexte, 2005) and videos starring the likes of Sylvère Lotringer and Chloe Sevigny, Bernadette Corporation’s interventionist projects amount to a precisely-calibrated critique of a global culture that constructs identity through consumption and branding.

Berwick Street Film Collective
Formed in Britain in 1970, with members Richard Mordaunt, Marc Karlin, James Scott and Humphrey Trevelyan. They were joined for Nightcleaners by Mary Kelly. The aim of the collective was to produce films with a social and community-based imperative.

Black Audio Film Collective
The Black Audio Film Collective was formed at Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1982 by sociology, fine art and psychology John Akomfrah, Reece Auguiste, Edward George, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, David Lawson and Trevor Mathison. It was one among many such collectives founded in Britain during the early- to mid- 1980s which produced works for Channel 4. Although dealing with contemporary events such as oppressive policing, riots, and unrest, inner city ghettoization and the clearing and destruction of working class enclaves, they were also responding to a more fundamental condition of the victims of colonization and slavery. Instead of making propagandistic films in response to these issues, they instead produced meditative works, experimenting with form and presentation their slide films, and exploring issues of memory, history, and identity through the use of archival footage and examination of radical icons such as Malcolm X. The group disbanded in 1998.

General Idea
The artist collective General Idea — AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal — forged a unique conceptual practice that deployed parody and irony to critique the artworld and popular media culture. In performances, installations, video, photography, prints, and editions, they explored social phenomena ranging from the production, distribution and consumption of mass media images to gay identity and the AIDS crisis. General Idea worked together from 1969 until the deaths of Partz and Zontal in 1994.

Green Team
The video movement in Taiwan made successful use of home cassette distribution, via both mail and street vendors. The Green Team collective pioneered in this effort with over 100 titles in distribution, documenting the struggles of farmers, students, workers and environmentalists. In a show of force against the repressive state television system, they took to the airwaves with a low power pirate TV transmission which included scenes of a massive demonstration where dozens of TV sets were thrown at the gates of the Taiwan TV station.

Meerkat Media Collective is a self-organized community of makers committed to creating innovative and thought-provoking film and new media. Inspired by the communal nature of meerkats, they value shared authorship and consensus process in their day-to-day operations as well as in their artistic endeavors. Under a cooperative model, members give creative and administrative time to the collective in exchange for material and non-material support. They share skills, equipment and ideas with a firm belief that a healthy, inclusive process is as important as crafting quality work.

NDS (Nakazaki-cho Documentary Space)
NDS, a group of documentarians, based in Kamagasaki Osaka, have been braving police harassment and repression to chart new territory at the intersection of filmmaking and community organizing. They have been documenting and participating urban struggles around labor, urban development, and housing issues.

Newsreel
Established in December 1967 as Newsreel, an activist filmmaker collective, this NY group grew to become a network with chapters across the US. Its different chapters produced and distributed short 16mm films covering the anti-war and women’s movements, Civil and human rights movements, getting unique access to such groups as the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords Party. The New York Newsreel became Third World Newsreel (TWN) in the mid-70s and strengthened its commitment to developing filmmakers and audiences of color. Today, TWN carries on the progressive vision of its founders, and remains the oldest media arts organization in the U.S. devoted to cultural workers of color and their global constituencies.

Paper Tiger
Paper Tiger Television, through the collaborative efforts of artists, activists and scholars, has pioneered experimental, innovative and truly alternative community media since 1981. An early innovator in video art and public access television of the early 80’s, PTTV developed a unique, handmade, irreverent aesthetic that experimented with the television medium by combining art, academics, politics, performance and live television.

The Proletarian Film League of Japan (日本プロレタリア映画同盟, Nihon Puroretaria Eiga Dōmei?) was a left-wing film organization, known as Prokino for short, active in the late 1920s and early 1930s in Japan. Associated with the proletarian arts movement in Japan, it primarily used small gauge films such as 16mm film and 9.5mm film to record demonstrations and workers’ lives and show them in organized events or, using mobile projection teams, at factories and mines. It also published its own journals. Most of its films were documentaries or newsreels, but Prokino also made fiction films and animated films. Prominent members included Akira Iwasaki and Genjū Sasa, although in its list of supporters one finds such famous figures as Daisuke Itō, Kenji Mizoguchi, Shigeharu Nakano, Tomoyoshi Murayama, Kiyohiko Ushihara, Kogo Noda, Takiji Kobayashi, Sōichi Ōya, Fuyuhiko Kitagawa, Tokihiko Okada, Matsuo Kishi, Kiyoshi Miki, Denmei Suzuki, Teppei Kataoka, and Shigeyoshi Suzuki.1 The movement was eventually suppressed by the police under the Peace Preservation Law, but many former members became prominent figures in the Japanese documentary and fiction film industries.

Raindance
Founded in 1969 by Frank Gillette, Paul Ryan, Michael Shamberg and Ira Schneider, Raindance was an influential media collective that proposed radical theories and philosophies of video as an alternative form of cultural communication. The name “Raindance” alluded to what members termed “cultural R & D” (research and development). Influenced by the communications theories of Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, the collective produced tapes and writings, including the journal Radical Software, that explored the relation of cybernetics, media and ecology.

TVTV
Originally organized to provide alternative news coverage of the 1972 Republican and Democratic Presidential Conventions in Miami, Top Value Television, known as TVTV was an ad hoc collective of videomakers that defined the radical video documentary movement of the 1970s, known as “guerrilla television.” TVTV subverted conventions of television news and documentary reportage with its alternative journalistic techniques, countercultural principles and pioneering use of portable, low-tech video equipment.

Workers Film and Photo League
The Workers Film and Photo League in the United States (known as the Film and Photo League after 1933) was part of an extensive cultural movement sponsored by the Communist International and its affiliated national parties in the interwar period. Specifically, it was a section of the Comintern-control led Internationale Arbeiterhilfe or Workers International Relief (WIR), founded at Lenin’s Instigation in Berlin in 1921. But the WIR’s activities extended also into the mass media and many cultural fields. The WIR’s next move was clearly to stimulate indigenous production in the other countries in which it operated. Since capital was not available for studio production, emphasis inevitably came to be placed on low cost documentary and especially newsreel forms.

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—La Commune – Armand Guerra (Le Cinéma du Peuple), 1914, 19 minutes
The first film depicting the story of the 1871 Paris Commune produced by Le Cinéma du Peuple, a libertarian film cooperative. This historical reenactment depicts the rise and fall of the Commune, which grew from growing unrest among workers and the lower classes, and fear of a royalist majority in the government, and anger over the defeat in Franco-Prussian War.

—Yamamoto Senji’s Farewell Ceremony- Proletarian Film League of Japan (Prokino), 1929, 2 minutes
On March 3, 1929 activist Yamamoto Senji was killed by a right wing assassin. Yamamoto Senji was the son of a famous ryotei in Kyoto. He was a doctor and scientist, and known for promoting birth control. After an autopsy at Tokyo University, a procession took his body to a public hall for a funeral. This is a documentary recording that procession.

—Yamamoto Senji Watanabe Masanosuke Worker-Farmer Funeral- Proletarian Film League of Japan (Prokino), 1929, 11 minutes
After cremation, Yamamoto’s ashes were taken back to his home at Kyoto. Around the same time as Yamamoto’s death, another left-wing leader named Watanabe Masanosuke committed suicide. Watanabe was the chair of the Communist Party’s central committee and had been in Shanghai holding a meeting. He stopped in Taiwan on his way home when the people around him were all arrested. Tipped off by a spy, the police surrounded Watanabe as he was waiting at a port for a ferry home. He turned a pistol on himself and committed suicide. A combined funeral procession for both leaders was held in Kyoto. Along the route Prokino members from both Tokyo and Kyoto shot the footage for this film. It is said that all the taxis in Kyoto formed a line that started at Kyoto Station and ran slowly to Yamamoto’s home, a scene captured toward the end of the film. One can also see many leaders of the left in Kyoto, such as economist Kawakami Hajime.

—Twelfth Annual Tokyo May Day- Proletarian Film League of Japan (Prokino), 1931, 7 minutes
Iwasaki Akira coordinated the entire Tokyo Prokino organization as it photographed the 1931 May Day celebrations. They shot in both 16mm and 35mm (other 35mm productions were planned, but this is the only one that achieved completion). A 16mm print was circulated around the countryside by mobile projection units, and a 35mm print was shown at Soviet film nights in Tokyo and Osaka. Unfortunately, only the first half of the film is extant. The rest shows the end of the parade route and a rally in Ueno Park. Although Prokino shot May Day parades between 1927 and 1932, this is the only remaining film. A print was given to the Soviet cultural attaché in Tokyo, but this print is also missing.

— Cinétracts – 1968, 75 minutes
Chris Marker, Jean Luc Godard and Alain Resnais collaborated in making and distributing “Cinétracts” one reel silent 16mm promotional pieces with inter-titles intended as “news bulletins” for and about students and workers during and around the May 1968 revolt. They were intended as an alternative to the media that was censored and controlled by the state. Due to the anonymous and collective approach of the directors involved, no credits are given to identify who made each one.

—Builders – Chto Delat?, 2005, 8 minutes
In this video, members of Chto Delat? debate the potency and purpose of collectivism. The Soviet Socialist Realist painting by Viktor Popkov, from which the work takes its title, is the starting point for this conversation, which questions merits and inspirational qualities of the workers depicted in The Builders of Bratsk (1961). The potency of this image is compared to the revolutionary potential of artistic communities propelled by conversation and conflict.

—Media Primer (Schneider) – Raindance, 1970, 23 minutes
Raindance’s Media Primers reflect the group’s iconoclastic theories of television and video, and their engagement with alternative and mass media, pop culture and the counter-culture. The themes addressed – media manipulation, the camera’s role in modifying individual behavior – illustrate their experiments with the technological and conceptual underpinnings of 1/2-inch portable video.
Merging alternative video and mass media, Ira Schneider’s Media Primer juxtaposes cultural indicators, including television commercials, news footage, and Portapak documentation of countercultural events such as the Altamount rock concert.

-Detroit Workers News Special 1932: Ford Massacre – Workers Film and Photo League, 1932, 7 minutes
The only newsreel coverage of the historic mass march in downtown Detroit on February 4, 1932, against the starvation program of Hoover/Murphy, and the armed, unprovoked attack by Dearborn police and Ford “guards” on unemployed auto workers at the gates of the River Rouge plant.

-Workers Newsreel Unemployment Special– Workers Film and Photo League, 1930-1931, 10 minutes
A record of the historic mass demonstration of the unemployed on March 6, 1930, in Union Square for government action on immediate relief and jobs.

-The National Hunger March – Workers Film and Photo League, 1931, 10 minutes
The surviving film record of the first massive protest against the federal government’s and big business’ failure to adopt programs to alleviate the starvation and deprivation of 12,000,000 unemployed men, women and youth.

-America Today– Workers Film and Photo League, 1932-1934, 10 minutes
A news review of mass actions in the streets in the critical Depression years of 1932-34, filmed and edited from the working class point of view.

-Northern Lights – Rob Nilsson & John Hanson, Cine Manifest, 1978, 97 minutes
A fictionalized account of a group of Norweigan immigrant farmers in North Dakota who organized the Nonpartisan League in 1915 to resist the control of farm prices and interest rates by East Coast corporations. Winner of the Camera d’Or Award at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival.

-Sandwiched – Chto Delat?, 2004, 11 minutes
Coinciding with the anniversary of the first Russian Revolution of 1905, artist cooperative Chto Delat? (What is to Be Done?) staged a theatrical happening in which activists wearing sandwich boards bearing text from Bertolt Brecht’s poem, “In Praise of Dialectics” descend upon the square at Narva Gate, where the workers began their revolt 100 years earlier. This piece is a reflection on a failed revolution and the political potential that could grow from its ruins.

-Lincoln Hospital – Newsreel, 1970. 12 minutes
When a city-run health clinic in the South Bronx fails to meet the needs of the city, local residents and health workers force a strike and then run the clinic themselves.

-Blood of the Condor – Jorge Sanjines, Groupo Ukamau, 1969, 74 minutes
A dramatization of an Indigenous uprising against a Peace Corps medial clinic which had been sterilizing Quechua women who visited the clinic without their knowledge or consent. It is based on actual events, which occurred in Bolivia in 1968 when the government imposed a population control program aided by the U.S. Subsequently the film was banned in both countries.

—Taiwan: The Generation After Martial Law – Green Team, 1986, 58 minutes
In 1949 the ruling Nationalist Party (KMT) imposed a strict martial law on Taiwan, which lasted 38 years. Since this law was lifted in 1987, alternative media makers have joined farmers, workers and students to press for social and political change. In a show of force against the repressive state television system, the Green Team Video Collective took to the airwaves with a low power pirate TV transmission, which included scenes of a massive demonstration where dozens of TV sets were thrown at the gates of the Taiwan TV station.

—Mill-in – Newsreel, 1968, 12 minutes
In order to raise the consciousness of New Yorkers, anti-war demonstrators took to the streets on fashionable Fifth Avenue on Christmas eve. To the dismay of the shoppers, their action snarled traffic and stunted holiday consumption.

—Rhodia 4×8 – Groupe Medvedkine, 1969, 3 minutes
Groupe Medvedkine, started by Chris Marker, united workers with filmmakers in the spirit of the Mai ’68 in an attempt to document the condition of workers at factories like Rhodia in Besançon, the Peugeot facility in Sochaux, and Kelton-Timex watch factory. In Rhodia 4/8 images of workers in the factories are accompanied by a haunting melody sung by Colette Magny, legendary French avant-garde protest singer.

—Shut the Fuck Up – General Idea, 1984, 14 minutes
“I don’t want to be a media whore!” Using ironic and iconic excerpts from television and film from the 1960s, such as The Joker character from Batman and part of the historic footage of artist Yves Klein’s painting and performance from Mondo Cane, General Idea examine the relationship between the mass media and the artist.

—Handsworth Songs – Black Audio Film Collective, 1986, 58 minutes
“There are no stories in the riots, only the ghosts of other stories”. An experimental film essay on race and disorder in Britain, filmed in Handsworth and London during the riots of 1985 that erupted in reaction to repressive policing of black communities. It explores the history and circumstances leading to the riots through newsreel and archival material accompanied by an ethereal score.

—Garbage – Newsreel, 1968, 10 minutes
During a prolonged garbage collector’s strike in New York City, a group of youths from the Lower East Side of Manhattan decide to use the situation to make a political statement. They collect garbage from the streets of their community and deposit piles of it on the grounds of Lincoln Center, “The Establishment’s” cultural showcase.

—GIs Take Manhattan: Operation First Casualty – Meerket Media Collective, 2007, 5 minutes.
The adage “in war, truth is the first casualty” is generally attributed to the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, and the words still ring true a few millenia later. Over Memorial Day weekend 2007, members of Iraq Veterans Against the War revived Aeschylus’ saying with Operation First Casualty. Simulating sniper fire and mass detentions on the streets of Manhattan, these antiwar veterans brought home a small piece of the Iraq War.

—Anarchists Liberate the Deflating World – Glassbead, 2009, 9 minutes
A film created for a three screen immersive installation. The No Borders protest in Copenhagen during COP15 United Nations Climate conference results in demonstrators liberating a huge advertising globe set up in front of the house of parliament by the Danish energy company.

—People’s Firehouse #1 – Newsreel, 1979, 25 minutes
“We’re making our point to the whole United States: you can fight the system; and win!” The Polish Americans of Northside, Brooklyn realized their community was under attack by the city bureaucracy: schools, hospitals, and other services has been closed or cut back and the neighborhood had began to decay. The closing of the local firehouse was the last straw. They occupied the firehouse and began a campaign to win back fire protection and revitalize their neighborhood.

-Everything has been done – Azorro, 2003, 6 minutes
Members of the Azorro super-group meet to come up with an idea for a new art project. As the conversation progresses, however, it turns out that – just as it happens in art – all ideas have already been realized.

—Proto Media Primer – Raindance, 1970, 16 minutes
Raindance’s Media Primers reflect the group’s iconoclastic theories of television and video, and their engagement with alternative and mass media, pop culture and the counter-culture. The themes addressed — media manipulation, the camera’s role in modifying individual behavior — illustrate their experimentation with the technological and conceptual underpinnings of 1/2-inch portable video. Paul Ryan’s Proto Media Primer includes scenes of Abbie Hoffman awaiting the verdict from the Chicago 7 trial and ironic man-on-the-street interviews.

—Four More Years – TVTV, 1972, 61 minutes
The landmark documentary Four More Years is an iconoclastic view of the American electoral process, captured through TVTV’s irreverent, candid coverage of Richard Nixon’s 1972 presidential campaign and the Republican Convention in Miami. Using lightweight 1/2-inch portable video equipment, the TVTV crew was able to plunge onto the Convention floor for a close-up, subjective view of the proceedings. Whether soliciting off-the-cuff analyses from Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite, or making behind-the-scenes forays into the Nixon camp (with glimpses of the Young Republicans’ maneuverings, the Nixonettes, and a fundraiser with Tricia and Julie Nixon), the spontaneity and wit of TVTV’s coverage results in fascinating, unorthodox broadcast journalism.

—And the War Has Only Just Begun – Imaginary Party, 2001, 18 minutes
Love it or hate it, this Debord-esque tract from the Imaginary Party (or the Invisible Committee, or Tiqqun. or the alleged Tarnac 9) circulated on the internet in 2001 features images of the burning Twin Towers and the black bloc-ers with a voice over addressing all the lost children, " We need fiction to believe in the reality we’re living. The Party is the central fiction, the one that tells the war of our time."

—Get Rid of Yourself – Bernadette Corporation, 2003, 61 minutes
Called an “anti-documentary” by its authors, combines footage of rioting at the 2001 G-8 summit in Genoa with performances by Chloe Sevigny, Werner von Delmont and members of the Black Bloc anarchist group. These elements yield a disorienting and critical video that ultimately questions its own status and role as much as that of its subjects.

- The Nightcleaners, part I – Berwick Street Collective, 1972-1975, 90 minutes
A documentary made by members of the Berwick Street Collective (Marc Karlin, Mary Kelly, James Scott and Humphry Trevelyan) about the campaign to unionize the women who cleaned office blocks at night and who were being victimized and underpaid. Intending at the outset to make a campaign film, the Collective was forced to turn to new forms in order to represent the forces at work between the cleaners, the Cleaner’s Action Group, the unions, and the complex nature of the campaign itself. The result was an intensely self-reflexive film, which implicated both the filmmakers and the audience in the processes of precarious, invisible labor. It is increasingly recognized as a key work of the 1970s and as an important precursor, in both subject matter and form, to current political art practice.

- My Journey with Hibakusha – Takashi Kunimoto, NDS, 2010, 64 minutes
This documentary feature a group of more than 100 survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (hibukusha), who cruised around the world in 2008 in a project organized by nongovernmental organization Peace Boat to share their stories and make a plea to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons.