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OCCUPY THE CINEMA Ben Russell & Guillaume Cailleau, Austerity Measures, Greece, 2012, 9 min Ken Jacobs, Seeking the Monkey King, USA, 2011, 40 min Brad Butler & Karen Mirza, Deep State, UK, 2012, 44 min OCCUPY THE CINEMA AUSTERITY MEASURES SEEKING THE MONKEY KING DEEP STATE
\nThursday 11 October 2012, at 8pm
\nLondon ICA Cinema 1<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Athens at crisis point: a colour-separation portrait of the Exarchia neighbourhood during the anti-austerity protests.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Amid the hypnotic, flickering motion of a metallic terrain, vitriolic onscreen texts rail against American culpability, from the Revolution to Iraq to the present administration. Each statement casts an arrow, and J.G. Thirlwell\u2019s monstrously cinematic score drives them home.<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>\u2018An audacious, semi-fantastical secret history of the counterforces of popular protest and clandestine control, this struggle is told through archive material, contemporary footage and future speculation.\u2019
\nA direct development of the filmmakers\u2019 visit to Cairo prior to the Tahrir Square uprising, Deep State<\/em> was commissioned by Film & Video Umbrella, and made in collaboration with author China Mi\u00e9ville.<\/p>\nPROGRAMME NOTES<\/a>
\n<\/strong>Thursday 11 October 2012, at 8pm
\nLondon ICA Cinema 1<\/p>\n
\nBen Russell & Guillaume Cailleau, Greece, 2012, 16mm, colour, silent, 9 min
\n<\/strong>A colour-separation portrait of the Exarchia neighbourhood of Athens, Greece, made during the Anti-Austerity protests in late 2011. In a place thick with stray cats and scooters, cops and Molotovs, ancient myths and new ruins; where fists are raised like so many columns in the Parthenon, this is a film of surfaces \u2013 of grafitti\u2019d marble streets and wheat-pasted city walls \u2013 hand-processed in red, green, and blue. Made as part of a hand-processing workshop at LabA in Athens. (Ben Russell)
\nwww.dimeshow.com<\/a><\/p>\n
\nKen Jacobs, USA, 2011, HD video, colour, sound, 40 min
\n<\/strong>The film could have well been called \u2018Kicking and Screaming\u2019 but that only describes me in the process of making it, questioning its taste. Once the message kicked in it overrode all objection. The piece demanded J.G. Thirlwell\u2019s music, normally way too overtly expressive for me as most of my stuff comes out of painting and is also to be absorbed in silence. Who will even notice visual innovation now, or what\u2019s happening with time? Determining a place between two and three dimensions, pushing time to take on substance, is what I do. Seeking the Monkey King<\/em> is a reversion to my mid-twenties and that sense of horror that drove the making of Star Spangled to Death<\/em>. (Ken Jacobs)<\/p>\n
\nBrad Butler & Karen Mirza, UK, 2012, HD video, colour, sound, 44 min
\n<\/strong>The film takes its title from the Turkish term \u2018Derin Devlet\u2019, meaning \u2018state within the state\u2019. Although its existence is impossible to verify, this shadowy nexus of special interests and covert relationships is the place where real power is said to reside, and where fundamental decisions are made \u2013 decisions that often run counter to the outward impression of democracy. Amorphous and unseen, the influence of this deep state is glimpsed at regular points throughout the film \u2013 most clearly surfacing in its reflexive responses to popular protest, and in legislated acts of violence and containment, but also rumbling and reverberating, deeper down, in an eternally recurring call-and-response between rhetorical positions and counter-languages, in which a raised fist, a thrown rock, a crowd surge, an occupation, provoke a corresponding reaction in the form of a police charge, a baton attack, a pepper spray, assassinations. A powerful undertow in the ongoing tide of history, this push and pull of competing forces is deftly illuminated in a vivid montage of newly filmed and archive footage. Collided together, past, present and future trace a continuum in which the same repetitive patterns are played out. Against a backdrop of momentous, historically resonant demonstrations, an eternal rioter, or \u2018riotonaut\u2019, is picked out, as if by a searchlight, ever-present at each and every flashpoint. On a moonscape, confronted with a picket that becomes a riot, an ur-dictator, the personification of the \u2018Deep State\u2019, blurts stupefying, hot-air abstractions of neo-liberalism. Deep State<\/em> is a film by Karen Mirza and Brad Butler that has been scripted in collaboration with author China Mi\u00e9ville. Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella. Funded by Arts Council England and London Councils. (Karen Mirza & Brad Butler)
\nwww.mirza-butler.net<\/a><\/p>\n