Karl Hess in the World of Ideas
Tuesday, November 6 at 8 PM (doors 7:30), $7-10
Directed by Daniel Tucker
Edited by Valerie Keller
Music by Theo Katsaounis, Tim Kinsella and Todd Mattei
60 minutes, video, 2018
Local Control is an experimental documentary about the political spectrum.
It has been said repeatedly that “All Politics Are Local” but what does the impulse towards controlling your own life at the local level mean to people as diverse as Jeffersonian Yeoman, Climate Change activists, Fair food advocates, anarcho-capitalists and Republican speechwriters? Is local on the scale of the body, the neighborhood, or the nation?
Local Control uses the story of writer Karl Hess to propose a field of interaction between Ayn Rand, Emma Goldman, Rush Limbaugh, Abby Hoffman, Studs Terkel, Benito Mussolini, Ken Kesey, Robert Heinlein, Bob Dylan and The Black Panther Party. A former corporate consultant and speechwriter for Barry Goldwater, Karl Hess later joined the ranks of Students for a Democratic Society. He wrote speeches for New Left groups of the 1960s before beginning to advocate for urban agriculture and community technology, and later becoming a founding figure amongst Libertarians and survivalists. Throughout it all he promoted ideas of self-sufficiency and localism.
Traveling from Washington DC to Los Angeles and across over 50 years, this video essay introduces Hess’ family and interviews with political authors Cindy Milstein, Charles Murray, Raj Patel and Rick Perlstein, and is also interspersed with clips from mainstream news outlets, online personalities and Hess devotees.
In a time where our map of ideas has been turned on its head, this mediation on individualism and collectivism considers conventional categories of Right and Left while introducing surprising new ones to help us to consider where we are now.
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Daniel Tucker works as an artist, writer and curator developing documentaries, publications, exhibitions and events inspired by his interest in social movements and the people and places from which they emerge. In 2015 Tucker completed his first feature-length video essay Future Perfect: Time Capsules in Reagan Country and has recently completed a followup video Local Control: Karl Hess in the World of Ideas (2018). His short video Retooling Dissent (2002) was screened widely and his writings and projects have been distributed, published and exhibited widely. He earned his MFA from University of Illinois at Chicago and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently an Assistant Professor and founding Graduate Program Director in Socially-Engaged Art at Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia. miscprojects.com
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programmed by Jesse Malmed
Filed under:
anarchy,
artist in attendance,
documentary,
experimental,
social justice,
video
Multi-media Documentary Project
by Matt Peterson & Malek Rasamny
Artists in attendance!
Tuesday, October 16 at 7pm, $7-10
The Native and the Refugee is a multimedia documentary project by Matt Peterson and Malek Rasamny that profiles the Palestinian and Native American experience by examining the infrastructure, politics, and geography of American Indian reservations alongside Palestinian refugee camps. In connecting these two spaces, the goals of the project are to understand the centrality of the question of land and territory for any conception of autonomy; to look at the camp as an “extra-national” space with all the contradictions entailed; and to meet with those getting organized politically in these places to understand their communal concerns.
Program Details:
The History of the Camp (2015, 10 minutes)
Indian Winter (2017, 26 minutes)
Aida (2018)
Black Mesa (2018, 10 minutes)
The Native and the Refugee has been presented in Canada, Ecuador, England, France, Guatemala, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Portugal, Quebec, and Syria, including within refugee camps and reservations, and at other venues including cinemas, community centers, galleries, and universities.
Matt Peterson co-directed the documentary features Scenes from a Revolt Sustained (2014), on the Tunisian insurrection, and Spaces of Exception (2018). He was a member of the collectives Red Channels and the 16 Beaver Group, and is currently part of a commune in New York called Woodbine. His films and videos have screened at Anthology Film Archives, e-flux, Eyebeam, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Indiana University, International House Philadelphia, Millennium Film Workshop, and MoMA PS1. He has spoken and organized events at Artists Television Access, BAMcinematek, Centre Pompidou, DCTV, dOCUMENTA 13, Goethe-Institut, Interference Archive, Light Industry, Maysles Cinema, the New School, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, SculptureCenter, and UnionDocs.
Malek Rasamny is a researcher and filmmaker based in both New York and Beirut whose writings have been published in The Daily Star and Fuse. He’s worked at the Maysles Documentary Center, and was a founding member of the LERFE space in Harlem, the Ground Floor Collective, and Red Channels. He is a regular speaker at the Afikra international monthly series on Arab history and culture, and has presented on his travels to Kurdish Iraq and Syria at Interference Archive, Ta Marbouta in Beirut, and La Passe in Montreal. He has organized a series of meetings and fora in support of the Syrian revolution at Columbia University. He is currently working on a research project surrounding Druze sovereignty in Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, and has presented at the conferences of the American Druze Society.
Programmed by Christy LeMaster & Matt Peterson
Filed under:
artist in attendance,
collaboration,
documentary,
ethnography,
experimental,
international,
social justice,
travel,
video
A Skate Media Inspired Shorts Program
Sunday, October 14 at 8:00 PM, $7-10
Bail or No? takes its name from a moment of indecision, the intuitive, instinctual moment where one decides to either bail from a skate trick or to ride it out. The shorts assembled as part of this program, while disparate in their approaches and proximity skateboarding, ruminate on the spirit of skating, namely the ways in which it has embraced individual and idiosyncratic contributions to the form and how the very practice of skateboarding insists on risk in the face of both futility and injury.
Bail or No? is an experimental shorts program in the guise of a collage film, with concrete and asphalt video-poetry riffing on the aesthetics of skate media, DIY culture, bailing as a form, and the metaphor of micro-rebellion. Aware that such rebellions are easily commodified and co-opted, the program is nonetheless knit together by a mutual spirit—that having to bail is okay, but to move without risk or chance, is to throw in the towel regardless.
Featuring contributions by Brandon Alvendia, Liz Cambron, Chris Johanson, Joe Castrucci with Future Islands, Molly Colleen O’Connell, Rick Silva and Jordan Tate, Jennifer Chan, John Auer, Dina Kelberman, Caitlin Ryan, Jacob Riddle, Rick Charnoski, Philippe Blanchard, Thad Kellstadt, KC Milliken with Eric Fleischauer, and surprise cameos by many more. Programmed by Chris Reeves and Aaron Walker.
Total screening time: 60 minutes
Filed under:
anarchy,
animation,
artist in attendance,
experimental,
new media,
Uncategorized,
video
