Wednesday, January 27, 2021,
12:00 AM
– Wednesday, April 14, 2021,
11:59 PM
Virtual, Synchronous Online Screening for Spring 2021
In conjunction with CTITH 600, MSCH C 792, and CULS C 701, Theory for Troubled Times, the Center for Theoretical Inquiry in the Humanities has arranged a virtual (synchronous online) film series, offered through the IU Libraries Moving Image Archive Screening Room.
The series is free and open to the public, but you do need to register.
Here is a link that will send you to all three public screenings. Please click on each one and register.
There is also a Zoom link to access the film introductions. For more information, contact Joan Hawkins, jchawkin@indiana.edu.
Film Series Schedule
Craig Baldwin, Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies under America (1992, USA, 49 min)
This is a science fiction collage film, directed by Craig Baldwin. It presents a chronicle and critique of U.S. involvement in Latin America through a pseudo-documentary about an alien invasion. The footage itself comes from a large collection of government and other archival films that had been discarded by institutions switching to VHS. Instead of working from a prepared script, Baldwin edited works from the archive to imply connections and a story. Playing with American paranoia and conspiracy theories, it is a remarkable and unsettling film. When we contacted Mr. Baldwin to arrange the screening, he told us, “Tell your students I was right.”
Harun Farocki, Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988, Germany, 75 min)
This is a classic essay film that asks us to consider the relationship between knowledge and sight, knowledge and images, and knowledge and expectation. In 1944, American military evaluators were given aerial footage showing an IG Farben Industrial plant, which they intended to bomb. Also visible in the photograph is a concentration camp and crematorium. It would have been easy, on this mission, to take a little turn and bomb the ovens. But the U.S military did not do that, and did not in fact realize what the photos showed until 1977, when a pair of CIA investigators starting going through World War II files. Taking this event and these images as its point of departure, the film also considers colonial identification pictures taken of Arab Women, and the role of photography in art. In many ways it parallels Paul Virilio’s book War and Cinema, and is considered by many to be a masterpiece of the essay-film form and of political filmmaking.
Bernadette Corporation, Get Rid of Yourself (2003, USA 61 min)
The Bernadette Corporation is a New York and Paris-based art and fashion collective founded in 1994. It has always been tied to anti-corporate aesthetics. Get Rid of Yourself is a complex, multi-layered work, that is called an “anti-documentary” by its authors. It combines footage of rioting at the 2001 G-8 summit in Genoa with performances by Chloe Sevigny, Werther von Delmont, and members of the Black Bloc anarchist group. While its initial sounds and images were filmed during the riots in Genoa, these materials are pulled apart and recomposed in order to locate the intensity of a shared experience, rather than producing one more documentary version of the programmed and hyper-mediatized confrontation of the G8 counter-summit. A complex look at protest and political resistance, it is as poignant now as it was at the turn of the century.
Center for Documentary Research and Practice resources and social media channels
