SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE ONE :: William Greaves :: February 7, 19:00

[illegal_cinema] PRESENTS

SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE ONE (1968, USA)
Director: William Greaves
Duration: 75 min
Film proposed by Fia Backstrom

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One is a documentary written and directed by William Greaves. The film involves Greaves auditioning acting students for a fictional drama while shooting a free-form behind-the-scenes drama.
In his one-of-a-kind fiction/documentary hybrid Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, director William Greaves presides over a beleaguered film crew in New York’s Central Park, leaving them to try to figure out what kind of movie they’re making. A couple enacts a break-up scenario over and over, a documentary crew films a crew filming the crew, locals wander casually into the frame: the project defies easy description. Yet this wildly innovative sixties counterculture landmark remains one of the most tightly focused and insightful movies ever made about making movies. Criterion presents this long-unreleased gem in a special two-disc edition, along with its sequel, Take 2 1/2, made thirty-five years later with executive producers Steven Soderbergh and Steve Buscemi.

National Society of Film Critics honored Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One and Take 2 1/2 with its 2005 Experimental Award, calling the films a “remarkable investigation into the nature of the acting process and power relationships on a movie set.”

See online:
http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/460

Saturday, February 7, 19:00
TÜTÜN DEPOSU
Lüleci Hendek caddesi 12 / Tophane

THE SEVENTH CONTINENT :: Michael Haneke :: January 31, 20:00

[illegal_cinema] PRESENTS

THE SEVENTH CONTINENT (1989, Austria)
Director: Michael Haneke
Duration: 104 min
Film proposed by Marta Popivoda

Saturday, January 31, 20:00
TÜTÜN DEPOSU
Lüleci Hendek caddesi 12 / Tophane

[illegal_cinema] is conceived as an open (self-) educational project of exchange and contextualization of the auteur, documentary, political, activist, queer, anarchist, censored and other marginalized and in the local context hardly accessible films. The project is open to everyone interested to propose films, with obligation to speak about them, to open up discussion, or to invite guests – wherewith we try to erase the boundaries between the editor (curator) and audience and to perform a long-term process of (collective) self-education. During its realization the project is constantly developing and expanding its original framework, generating different program-lines and trying to explore new modes of facilitating art and culture as a space for diverse knowledge production. In collaboration with ‘No More Reality: Crowd and Performance’ the project [illegal_cinema] appears as new edition of thematic cinema which gathers a number of films related to the topics of crowd, demonstration, micro and macro revolutions.

STALKER AND ME :: Igor Grubić

Tarkovsky’s film Stalker aligns with the works rendering spiritual quests on screen in a most complex manner, conceiving meanings outside the real and ordinary experience in the domain of human unrests and subconscience, and addressing fundamental bonds with the nature and anxieties over the future of humanity.

The film obliquely dwells upon resistance to the domineering patterns of collectivism and respective idolatry, and convictions opposed to the prevailing social systems and conventions, suggesting that the only revolution is the individual spiritual evolution propelled by courage of each person who dares pursuing a loftier sense, a self-cognition.
A group of people enters an imaginary zone where only a few of them can survive. Apt and brave individuals live surrounded by dark totalitarian and detached systems, and passive and indifferent mediocrity.
The zone is a spiritual home they pursue, the only home befitting them – a road they must take to achieve a higher purpose.
Their urge to find and enter the zone can be viewed as a desire for an inner peace, self-cognition and spiritual purge.

Back in the 80s I’ve seen almost every film Tarkovsky had ever made. However, I managed to get a copy of the Stalker much later, at the outset of the war in Croatia. Somehow, what was going on around and inside me deeply corresponded to the contents of this film. And, perhaps, this is why it had such a deep impact on me, being for a while a true relief in whatever I was doing.

Beginning of the war in 1991, proximity of death, and cruelty of people found me in a state of shock and severe identity crisis.
In this outer destruction I have seen and recognized an inner self-destruction. I realized I did not want to belong to a group of people sharing a passive existence, and allowing for alien circumstance to govern their lives.
I’ve decided to take full responsibility over my own. In order to accomplish this, I had to face my inner demons: laziness, conformism, egoism, self-obsession, fear of authority, greed, and various mechanisms of self-deception.
Thus, like in the Stalker, began my quest, a personal spiritual revolution, an ongoing struggle demanding ever alert self-observation.
Through this work on myself changes occurred – release from fear, and opening to others.
The sense of rapid passing of life brings me to a conclusion that the only life worth living is conscientious and responsible one.

Translation: Irena Šentevska

YOUR SHIT—YOUR RESPONSIBILITY :: Škart :: 2000-present

Škart group was founded in 1990 in abandoned graphic atelier in Belgrade’s Faculty of Architecture, as a 2-person-quarrel&dialogue sort of collective. Škart (means ’scrap’ in Serbian) was formed by Dragan Protić and Djordje Balmazović, who call themselves ‘collective-in-progress’ and base their activities on ’selfproduction-and-selfdistribution of critical communication’. Škart often collaborates with the groups of amaterus, enthusiasts or fans, whose motives, driving forces and modes of incorporation are contrary to the logic of interests, effective production or team management. Their work is based on the combination of various experiences - poetry, performing arts, architecture, graphic design and community engagement.

The Your Shit—Your Responsibility project humorously symbolizes the need of a nation’s populace to understand and think critically about their political decisions. It is one of the famous Škart slogans which is commenting on personal responsibility in/of not only the hard times, but also in everyday life and day-to-day situations. In this sense, the “baggage” of irresponsible act is equated with dogshit with an underwhelmingly triumphant flag placed in it and left for someone else to clean up. This action was followed by the distribution of stickers, posters, and dogshit in different cities and villages in Serbia and abroad. The four short films screened for this occasion represent some kind of ephemera of this urban action.

Jelena Vesić

ARTICULATION OF PROTEST :: Hito Steyerl :: video-lecture

Every articulation is a montage of various elements - voices, images, colors, passions or dogmas - within a certain period of time and with a certain expanse in space. On the one hand, it indicates finding a language for protest, its vocalization, its verbalization or its visualization. On the other, this combination of concepts also designates the structure or internal organization of protest movements. In other words, there are two different kinds of concatenations of different elements: one is at the level of symbols, the other at the level of political forces. The dynamic of desiring and refusal, attraction and repulsion, the contradiction and the convergence of different elements unfolds at both levels.

Naturally, protest movements are articulated at many levels: at the level of their programs, demands, self-obligations, manifestos and actions. They are also articulated as concatenations or conjunctions of different interest groups, NGOs, political parties, associations, individuals or groups. Alliances, coalitions, fractions, feuds or even indifference are articulated in this structure. At the political level as well, there is also a form of montage, combinations of interests, organized in a grammar of the political that reinvents itself again and again. According to which rules, though, is this montage organized? Who does it organize with whom, through whom, and in which way? What is the image of a protest movement? Is it the sum of the heads of speakers from the individual groups added together? Is it pictures of confrontations and marches? Is it new forms of depiction? Is it the reflection of forms of a protest movement? Or the invention of new relations between individual elements of political linkages? With these thoughts about articulation, I refer to a very specific field of theory, namely the theory of montage or film cuts.

Hito Steyerl

* The video-lecture by Hito Steyerl was recorded and presented as a part of discussion program of No More Reality-Step 2, held in Belgrade in 2006.

CALL FOR DEMONSTRATION :: Annika Ström :: 2006

If my son demonstrates for a Museum of Contemporary Fine Art now it could take 20 years for it to happen. Then he’ll be 25 and he’ll have been fighting for a Museum for 20 years.
Annika Ström’s videos, songs and paintings are centered around the banality and the preoccupations of her own everyday life as an artist. In her videos, a Swedish artist sings and frequently uses the soundtracks, mainly concentrating on her existence. Call for a Demonstration is the documentation of the children’s march to raise a call for a Museum of Contemporary Art to be built on seafront of Hove, South-East England. This video performance brings Annika Ström’s observations about her immediate environment into dialogue with ongoing public debate about the re-development of this seafront, recently a target of elaborate gentrification proposals from the side of commercial interests. In calling for a Museum of Contemporary Art to be built the artist questions the nature of the civic realm and the place of art and art institutions within it. At the core of the project is the children’s demonstration which took place in Hove on Saturday, 24th of June 2006. Call for a Demonstration archives Ström’s act of preparation for an unexpected museum of the future, and further creates the possibility for it to arrive. Through the children’s demonstration we see the matrix of competing economic interests in Hove with fresh eyes, as they open new visions based on the principle of pleasure rather than the cost/benefit analysis.
Poetic, utopian and unreal, this project remind us also on a similar performance No More Reality organized in 1991 by Philippe Parreno, where a group of children were demonstrating with No More Reality banners on an American Campus. Call for a demonstration is a video made out of the performance, and also a book published by onestar press.

Claire Staebler

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