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

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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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