THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND :: Sam Green, Bill Siegel :: February 28, 19:00

[illegal_cinema] PRESENTS

THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND (2002, USA)
Directors: Sam Green, Bill Siegel
Duration: 92 min
Film from the illegal_cinema Belgrade archive

In October 1969, hundreds of young people wielding lead pipes and clad in football helmets marched through an upscale Chicago shopping district, pummeling parked cars and smashing shop windows. Thus began the “Days of Rage,” the first demonstration of the Weathermen, later known as the Weather Underground. Outraged by the Vietnam War and racism in America, this group of former student radicals waged a low-level war against the United States government through much of the 1970s, bombing the Capitol building, breaking Timothy Leary out of prison and finally evading the FBI by going into hiding. In THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND, former Weathermen including Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd and David Gilbert speak frankly about the idealist passions and trajectories that transformed them from college activists into the FBI’s Most Wanted.
The Weather Underground emerged when Dohrn and a group of fellow University of Chicago students split with the campus-run Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, because they disagreed with the SDS’s peaceful protest tactics against the Vietnam War. Dubbing itself the Weathermen, this new organization took its name from a line in Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”—“you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”—and within months had set off bombs at the National Guard headquarters and set in motion plans to bomb targets across the country that it considered emblematic of the worldwide violence sanctioned by the U.S. government.
As an exploration of the Weathermen in the context of other social movements of the time, the film also features rare footage and interviews with former SDS members and the Black Panthers, further examining the U.S. government’s suppression of dissent during the 1960s and 1970s. Looking back at their years underground, former Weather Underground members paint a compelling portrait of troubled times, revolutionary times and the forces that drove their resistance home.

Awards:
•    Documentary award, Seattle International Film Festival, 2003
•    Golden Gate Award, San Francisco International Film Festival, 2003
•    Marlon Riggs Award, San Francisco Film Critics Circle, 2003
•    Critics Week Award, Locarno International Film Festival, 2003
•    Nomination IDA Award, International Documentary Association, 2003
•    Nomination for Grand Jury Prize, Sundance Film Festival, 2003
•    Nomination DGA Award,Directors Guild of America, 2004
•    Nomination Academy Awards, USA, 2004

See online:
http://www.filmcritic.com/misc/emporium.nsf/reviews/The-Weather-Underground
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/weatherunderground/film.html
http://www.samgreen.to/store/#weathe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Weather_Underground

Saturday, February 28, 19:00
TÜTÜN DEPOSU
Lüleci Hendek caddesi 12 / Tophane

CZECH DREAM - a post socialist hypermarket :: Jana and Jiří Ševčíkovi

Barbara Kruger, an American artist, is the author of the famous statement I go shopping, therefore I am. The slogan from her poster - an ironic perversion of a famous philosophical statement - brings us into a situation, in which all the media perform different forms of seduction in order to fulfil our needs, in which even culture has long ago become a product and we have all become entangled in the market system. It was this circulation into which Marcel Duchamp has placed art one hundred years ago. He exhibited a mass production object as an object of art and thus turned the artistic creation into an equivalent of a capitalist production. The products are consumed in a feverish tempo and the accelerated consumption requires an increased production, which again encourages consumption, as we all know in theory from Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. Today the artists use the fact that consumption and production become more and more entangled and that production becomes post-production, that is making use of, sampling, creating collage, cutting out of the ready made products. This was very well described by a French sociologist Nicolas Bourriaud in his book Postproduction. Culture As Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World.
The artists move happily in this global culture and hedonically consume in order to produce and vice versa. According to Bourriaud, a DJ and a programmer become the heraldic figures of the new age. The question remains how to avoid being drowned in the consumer culture, how to keep a critical view in the never ending process of satisfying one’s delight of consuming. In order to fulfil their old critical duty towards the society, the artists have to look for new strategies. They have to get around in the same way as hackers do: they have to acquire the system, identify with it and occupy it as thoroughly as their own house. If they treated the system ironically or passed moral judgements over it, no one would believe them. Only when the artists control the system and seemingly totally identify themselves with it, they can uncover its obscene basis. At the same time they put the viewers in a situation that requires his or her critical attitude. They do not answer their questions, but ask them.
We believe that this is the context of the CZECH DREAM project, that has started as a shooting of a film about those, to whom the statement of Barbara Kruger /I go shopping therefore I am/ applies. But the project has grown and a stage for a spectacular show was created as its “postproduction” or its parallel product. It illustrates what our “realistic” socialist life has turned into. For some of the participants, the staging of this show might change an entertaining game into an unpleasant awakening. But this is the role of contemporary art: to show how manipulated our everyday “reality” is by the means of this very “reality”.

CZECH DREAM :: Vit Klusak, Filip Remunda :: February 21, 19:00

[illegal_cinema] PRESENTS

CZECH DREAM (2004, Czech Republic)
Directors: Vit Klusak, Filip Remunda
Duration: 90 min
Film from the illegal_cinema Belgrade archive

Czech Dream is a documentary film directed by two young Czech directors: Vit Klusak and Filip Remunda. The film was released in February 2004. It recorded a large-scale hoax perpetuated by Klusák and Remunda on the Czech public, culminating in the “opening event” of a fake hypermarket. The film was their final project for film school.
Remunda and Klusák invented the “Český sen” hypermarket and created a massive advertising campaign around it. Posing as businessmen, the two film students managed to persuade an ad agency and a public relations agency to create a campaign for them. Billboards appeared on Czech highways, and 200,000 pamphlets were distributed in Prague. A jingle was recorded, and there was a series of television commercials. The advertising campaign slogans were “don’t come” and “don’t spend”, etc. Still, the filmmakers succeeded in attracting more than 3000 shoppers.
The idea for the hoax came from a 2002 study by Incoma Research reporting that 30% of Czechs shop mainly at hypermarkets. There has been growing concern in the country about the growth of consumerism.
How easily we can fool ourselves is perhaps summed up by a quote in the film. Somewhere in the middle of the advertising campaign, the employees of the advertising agency (BBDO) have some moral doubts about advertising untrue things. One of them says: “Maybe you filmmakers lie to people, but we advertisers don’t!”

Awards:
•    Traverse City Film Festival (dir. Michael Moore), USA 2005: Best Nonfiction Film Award
•    FFFB.be Filmfestival Brussel 2005, Belgium: Prize Be TV for best Film
•    2005 Zolotoy Vityaz (Golden Knight) Chelyabinsk, Russia: Award for the Best Directing Award
•    45th Cracow Film Festival 2005, Poland: People’s Choice Award
•    48th San Francisco International Film Festival, USA 2005: Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Feature
•    2005 Jeonju International Film Festival, South Korea: JJ-Star Award
•    Lubuskie Film Summer, Lagow 2005: Silver Grape Award
•    2005 Febiofest, Czech Republic: Best Documentary Kristian Award (Czech Film Critics)
•    Aarhuus Film Festival, Denmark 2004: Best Documentary Award
•    International Documentary Festival Jihlava, Czech Republic 2004:
Best Czech Documentary Award 2004 and Audience Award
•    International Film Festival Ljubljana, Slovenia 2004: FIPRESCI Award
•    Has been nominated by the Film Academy in Prague for the student Oscars

See online:
http://www.ceskatelevize.cz/specialy/ceskysen/en/
http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/000666.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Dream

Saturday, February 21, 19:00
TÜTÜN DEPOSU
Lüleci Hendek caddesi 12 / Tophane

THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED :: Kim Bartley, Donnacha O’Briain :: February 14, 19:00

[illegal_cinema] PRESENTS

THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED (2003, Ireland)
Directors: Kim Bartley, Donnacha O’Briain
Duration: 74 min
Film from the illegal_cinema Belgrade archive

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (a.k.a. Chavez: Inside the Coup) is a 2003 documentary about the April 2002 Venezuelan coup attempt which briefly deposed Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. A television crew from Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTE happened to be recording a documentary about Chávez during the events of April 11, 2002. Shifting focus, they followed the events as they occurred. During their filming, the crew recorded images of the events that they say contradict explanations given by Chávez’s opposition, the private media, the US State Department, and then White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer.
Filmmakers Kim Bartley and Donacha O’Briain were inside the presidential palace on 11 April 2002 when Chávez was deposed and two days later when he returned to power, recording “what was probably history’s shortest-lived coup d’état.”
The pivotal role of the media before and during the coup is highlighted throughout its 75 minutes, with emphasis in the importance that both Chávez government and the opposition who executed the coup gave to gaining control over channel 8, the only TV Channel owned by the state, shut down the day of the coup and recovered afterwards to communicate the news that the rest of the channels were not communicating, such as the fact that Chávez had not resigned but was actually being held as a prisoner and the fact that what was happening was not a democratical transition but actually a coup d’état.

Awards:
•    Banff Rockie Award, Banff World Television Festival, Best Information & Current Affairs Program.
•    Grand Prize, Banf World Television Festival.
•    Chicago International Film Festival, Silver Hugo, Best Documentary.
•    EBU Golden Link Award.
•    Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Seeds of War Award.
•    International Documentary Association, IDA Award, Feature Documentaries.
•    Leeds International Film Festival, Audience Award.
•    Prix Italia, TV Documentary - Current Affairs.
•    Seattle International Film Festival, Documentary Award.
•    Seattle International Film Festival.

See online:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolution_Will_Not_Be_Televised_(documentary)#Reception_of_the_film
http://www.chavezthefilm.com
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=28456

Saturday, February 14, 19:00
TÜTÜN DEPOSU
Lüleci Hendek caddesi 12 / Tophane

SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: STILL NO ANSWERS :: AMY TAUBIN

The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, the sixties counterculture at large, and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

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