TERROR
TACTICS
Films Screening
Tuesday
June 26, Wednesday June 27 and Thursday June 28
ADDITIONAL SCREENING ON THURSDAY JUNE 28 4-7 PM
PART
I: Targeting, tracking, analyzing.
12 PM & 4 PM
Drive. Track 3 (compulsion/
registration). Directed by Jordan Crandall. 1998/2000, 22 min.
30 sec.
Homefront. Directed
by Jordan Crandall. 2006, 6 min. 50 sec.
It
Is Not My Memory of It. Produced
by Speculative Archive: Julia Meltzer and David Thorne. 2003,
25 min.
Transcript. Directed by
Jenny Perlin. 2006,
11 min. 25
sec.
PART
II: Reanimating.
1:15
PM & 5:15 PM
USSA: Secret Manual of the Soviet Politburger. Directed
by Mark Boswel. 2001, 6:30 min.
Agent
Orange.
Directed by Mark Boswel. 2002, 5 min.
The
End of Copenhagen. Directed
by Mark Boswel.2004, 8 min. 30 sec.
Possible
Models. Directed
by Jenny Perlin. 2004,
10 min, 45 sec.
PART
III: Resisting 1.
1:45
PM
A
Simple Case for Torture, or How To Sleep at Night. Directed
by Martha Rosler. 1983,
63 min.
PART
IV: Resisting 2.
3 PM & 6 PM
La Trinchera Luminiosa del Presidente Gonzalo
(The Shining Trench of Chairman Gonzalo). Directed by Jim
Finn. 2007. 60 min.
PART
I: Targeting, tracking, analyzing.
Drive. Track 3 (compulsion/ registration). Directed by Jordan
Crandall.
22 min. 30 sec. 1998/2000.
Drive. Track 3 is a seven-part video piece
that combines traditional film technology with military recognition
and target
processing
techniques,
in other words, that subordinates the history of the film to the
history of war, as prescribed by the modern media-theory of writers
such as Paul Virilio. Drive. Track 3 reflects on paranoia provoked
by surveillance techonology. Made with the use of different types
video cameras, including surveillance and night vision camera,
it features the atmosphere of suspicion and erotic tension.
Homefront. Directed by Jordan Crandall.
6 min. 50 sec. 2006.
The film explores the effects of media-security culture on subjectivity
and self-identification. The relationship between a man and a woman
is depicted in three visual regimes. The first is that of reality
television, particularly of the live-action crime TV variety, which
combines both policing and voyeuristic entertainment. The second
is that of panoptic surveillance, which transforms urban space
into a site of potential crime. The third is a military gaze, evoked
through tactical observation methods, night vision technology,
and image processing software. (http://jordancrandall.com)
It
Is Not My Memory of It. Produced by Speculative Archive:
Julia Meltzer and David Thorne. Color, 25 min. 2003.
The film explores the mechanism of secrecy, memory and documents.
The former CIA source recounts his disappearance through
shredded classified documents that were painstakingly reassembled
by radical fundamentalist students in Iran in 1979. A CIA film--recorded
in 1974 but unacknowledged until 1992--documents the burial
at sea of six Soviet sailors, in a ceremony which collapses
Cold
War antagonisms
in a moment of death and honor. The film also includes the
analysis of the archival images of a
publicly acknowledged but top secret U.S. missile strike
in Yemen in
2002.(http://www.speculativearchive.org)
Transcript.
Directed by Jenny Perlin.
16 mm, color, sound, 11
min. 25 sec. 2006.
Part 1 of the Perlin Paper series. The text comes from an
October 1953 transcript of a dinner party that took
place four months after
the Rosenbergs’ execution. On October 30, informant
NY-964-S eavesdropped on two couples attending a dinner
party at an apartment
in the West Village, New York. Both of these couples had
been friends of the Rosenbergs and were being called to
testify in front of
the House Un-American Activities Committee about their roles
in the ‘Commie spy ring.’ NY-964-S could not
hear many details of the conversation and filled in words
he could not
understand. Most
of the text is inaudible, but one gathers that the guests
at the dinner party know they are being spied on. The fragmented
text
reveals clues to the culture in which it was captured, and
by extension, to current conditions. (http://www.nilrep.net)
PART
II: Reanimating.
USSA: Secret Manual of the Soviet Politburger. Directed
by Mark Boswell.
16mm/Digital, 6:30 min. 2001.
The History of the mythical hamburger is investigated in this
political crypto-documentary. Starting from the origins of
the hamburger to the rise of McDonalds led by Ray Kroc (an
unscrupulous milkshake salesman) who acquires a bootleg copy
of the seminal Soviet food manual – “The Acme of
ground Bovinity” and transforms a humble L.A. burger
outlet into one of the world’s most sinister meta-corporations.
Agent Orange. Directed by Mark Boswell.
Super-8/Digital, 5 min. 2002.
"The effects are only superficial". The film uses
the political backdrop of the '60s as well as the cinematic
avant-garde
of the same period that have effectively "sprayed" us
with what Paul
Sharits referred to in his seminal structuralist film as a "Ray
Gun
Virus." The corollary results of this cinematic spraying
(Conner,
Brahkage, Kubelka, et. al.) is the mass appropriation of experimental
style by the agents of celluloidic sellout a.k.a. "The
M.T.V. Generation," Agent Orange is thus
the toxic consequence of the digital conversion of
avant-garde cinema that not only addresses the problems of
the canon, but
the current political crisis brought to head by 9/11.
The End of Copenhagen. Directed By Mark Boswell.
Super-8/Digital, 8.30 min. 2004.
“The End of Copenhagen” finds the inspiration for
its title from two different sources. The first is from the
scientist
Werner Heisenberg’s trip to Copenhagen where he met his
mentor Niels Bohr in order to discuss the possibility that
Nazi Germany had nuclear capabilities. The second source is
from the Situtationist art book by Asger Jorn and Guy DeBord
entitled “Fin de Copenhague.” The film, structured
as a “crypto-documentary” incorporates found footage
from three classics of sixties cinema: “The Manchurian
Candidate,” “Dr. Strangelove,” and “Last
Year at Marienbad,” as well as other odd bits of archival
film material in a dense 8 and 1/2 minute experimental montage.
Film received the International Media Art Award from the ZKM
Museum of Karlsruhe, Germany.
Possible Models. Directed by Jenny Perlin.
16 mm, b/w, silent, 10 min. 45 sec. 2004.
Perlin's film "Possible Models" explores the strange
realities of the post-9/11world. It uses stop-animation to
follow a handwritten narrative about a man arrested in a
plot to blow up a shopping mall. "Possible Models looks
at capitalism’s attempt to purchase paradise through
three 'case
studies': the Mall of America’s failure to live
up to its potential as a utopian complex; the Mall of Dubai
as the new global super-mall; and the 'freedom ship',
a floating self sustained mall-based community/commune that
encircles continents.” (Jeffrey Uslip quote, The Project,
New York, NY, July, 2004; in: http://www.nilrep.net/possible-models/)
PART
III: Resisting 1.
A Simple Case for Torture, or How To Sleep at Night.
Directed by Martha Rosler.
NTSC, color, 63 min. 1983.
Rosler identifies the totalitarian implications of an argument
for torture, under certain circumstances, as it appears in the
editorial pages of Newsweek magazine. Her critique is presented
as voiceover and an assemblage of print media—articles on
subjects ranging from human rights to unemployment and global economics.
Implicating the U.S. government and American businesses for supporting
regimes that systematically use torture, she indicts the American
press for its role as an agent of disinformation through selective
coverage, its use of language, and for implicitly legitimizing
points of view that support torture.
PART
IV: Resisting 2.
La Trinchera Luminiosa del Presidente Gonzalo (The
Shining Trench of Chairman Gonzalo). Directed by Jim Finn. 60 min. 2007.
La Trinchera has the look of a Maoist home movie from
the '80s.
Shot in Hi-8 video in New Mexico, the film follows women prisoners
from the Peruvian Maoist revolutionary group the Shining Path.
As terrorists they were kept apart from other prisoners in cellblocks
they called “shining trenches of combat”. Their inspiration
was their cult-like leader Chairman Gonzalo, the nom-de-guerre of
former philosophy professor Abimael Guzman. Though his leadership
was absolute, the Shining Path had the highest proportion of women
commanders in Latin American guerrilla history. This film captures
one day at Canto Grande prison in Peru, following the women from
their
morning marches to their bedtime chants.
PANEL
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