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 (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 (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

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.

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 (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.

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

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

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.