Category: Film as a Subversive Art

FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART: The End of Sexual Taboos

Posted on by spectacletheater

FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART: THE END OF SEXUAL TABOOS
(Amos Vogel, 1974)

FRIDAY, JULY 6TH – MIDNIGHT

Can film make revolution? What use is it if it can’t? Film critic Amos Vogel’s seminal work, Film As A Subversive Art, published in 1974, is both an argument for and a catalogue of cinema that refuses, rebels and repulses. Film “designed to eradicate the reactionary values of an establishment that had proven its bankruptcy.”

Vogel died in April 2012. In his honor, Spectacle Theater and The New Inquiry will be hosting a series of talks and screenings, taking selections of many of the near-impossible to see films from his book. July’s screening will feature early animated erotica, some abominable Viennese Actionism, a fairy from the Society For Cutting Up Men, and other arousing anachronisms.

FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART: JUNE 2013

Posted on by spectacletheater

TWO PROGRAMS from ‘THE ATTACK ON GOD’.
MONDAY, JUNE 24TH – 7:30PM & 10PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Can film make revolution? What use is it if it can’t? Film critic Amos Vogel’s seminal work, Film As A Subversive Art, published in 1974, is both an argument for and a catalogue of cinema that refuses, rebels and repulses. Film “designed to eradicate the reactionary values of an establishment that had proven its bankruptcy.”

Vogel died in April 2012. In his honor, Spectacle Theater and The New Inquiry will be hosting a series of talks and screenings, taking selections of many of the near-impossible to see films from his book. June’s screening will feature banned blasphemies, comic crucifixions, and other atheistic anarchy.

FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART: MAY 2013

Posted on by spectacletheater

FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART: MAY 2013
SELECTIONS FROM THE CHAPTER ‘EASTERN EUROPEAN LEFT & REVOLUTIONARY CINEMA’
WEDNESDAY MAY 15TH — PROGRAM 1 at 7:30PM & PROGRAM 2 at 10PM

The subversive and revolutionary cinema that emerged from Eastern Europe in the sixties and seventies is an incredibly original, bizarre, opaque, bodily and nihilistic cinema. Free of the Maoist and Internationalist errors that haunt much of the Western left in the period, and somewhat removed from the aesthetic battles typified by the Western “new waves”, many of the films of revolt against actually existing socialism, often created under conditions of censorship (direct and indirect), are surreal to the point of unintelligibility.

Among the most haunting and destabilizing works to emerge from the long sixties, these films are not dogmatic nor “political” so much as non- or anti-polemical. Meandering, frightening, and deeply experimental, these films sometimes feel as though they emerge directly out of desire itself, an explosion of mysterious flows and forces which attempt to smash the bureaucratic maintenance of survival that called itself life in a worker’s nation.

If capitalism pointed to the individual’s accumulation of things as proof of its success, state-socialism preferred to accumulate reports of collective achievement and productivity. Thus this Eastern European cinema opposes itself both to accumulation and political proclamation, preferring disoriented and ecstatic explorations of subjectivities that refuse official conceptions of the collective and bourgeois notions of the individual.

They also have the distinction of rebelling against a dead regime—while the spectacle transforms itself in order to consume its critics, from which you could argue that every regime which is fought against is “dead” if the subversion does not end in its overthrow, the end of state-socialism has been more thorough and total—throwing the question of their continuing power as revolutionary works into stark relief.

In our monthly series, Film as a Subversive Art, we’ve been looking at films from Amos Vogel’s book of the same name. This month we’ll look at films from the chapter “Eastern European Left and Revolutionary Cinema”. Join us for a night of upended totalities, destroyed symbols, naked desires and total tactical opacity.

FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART: APRIL 2013

Posted on by spectacletheater
FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART: APRIL 2013
SELECTIONS FROM THE CHAPTER ‘WESTERN LEFT & REVOLUTIONARY CINEMA’
TUESDAY APRIL 30TH — 7:30 & 10PM

The revolutionary moment of the sixties is as dead as anything, and good riddance. Though we may yearn for that level of revolutionary fervor, we’re glad to see the backs of all those patriarchal Maoist puritans, misogynist homophobic “free love” partisans and statist non-violence ideologues (ok, maybe those fuckers are still around). But what of the films they left behind? What of the documents of their struggles? Do those have any power remaining to subvert, or are they merely that, documents?

In our monthly series, Film as a Subversive Art, we’ve been looking at films from Amos Vogel’s book of the same name. In February we looked at Third World revolutionary cinema, this month it’s revolutionary cinema from “The West”.

Increasingly, we’ve been confronted with the question of these films’ relevance, their subversive power, their meaning and their value 40-50 years after the fact. This month we’ll see dystopian statist political prisons, listen to manifestos from the lips of long-dead revolutionaries, witness insurrectionary violence, staged and actual, and a plethora of rebellious aesthetic upendings.

What good are old political statements? What is the difference between ‘subversive’ and ‘revolutionary’, and what are either worth? What, if anything, can these films do politically? And do they point toward a potential revolutionary use for cinema today?

We will definitely answer all of these questions entirely to your satisfaction. (And stoke the fires for that loveliest of days, the First of May.) With introductions by New Inquiry editor Willie Osterweil and members of the Anti-Banality Union, makers of Police Mortality.