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.