- Description:
- DVD - Region 1. viewing copy. 2 videodiscs of 2.
- Notes:
- A collection of films curated by Ernerst Larsen and Sherry Millner. Since 2008, the two have been researching, curating, and teaching aesthetically and politically radical nonfiction media. A follow-up to Disruptive Film Vol. 1, their new collection presents under-explored or forgotten approaches to political and experimental filmmaking. Vol. 2 contains two distinct programs including 16 works from 11 countries, spanning 50 years of film history.
Supplemental materials include an information booklet, available at checkout.
Titles
+ Isle of Flowers
- Alternate Title:
- Ilha das Flores
- Director:
- Furtado, Jorge
- Production Co:
- Casa de Cinema de Porto Alegre
- Running Time:
- Short. 12 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - PCM
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- Brazil
- Year:
- 1989
- Language:
- English language
- Genre:
- Experimental / Avant Garde, Documentary, Animation
- Notes:
- Isle of Flowers uses creative animation, actors, and a monotonous style of narration to link the urban middle classs family to the rural poor who scavenge the garbage dump, the “isle of flowers”, where pigs eat better than people. Winner of a Silver Bear for Best Short Feature at the 1990 Berlin Film Festival as well as nine awards at the 1989 Granado Film Festival, including for Best Short Film.
- Link to:
- FII catalog |
+ In Between
- Director:
- Hewitt, Nicole
- Production Co:
- Zagreb Film
- Running Time:
- Short. 11 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - PCM audio
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- Croatia
- Year:
- 2002
- Language:
- English language
- Genre:
- Documentary, Experimental / Avant Garde
- Notes:
- Shot on the streets of Zagreb, Croatia, this film records the accumulation and disappearance of trash, using stop-motion to allow the heavy piles of refuse to seemingly come to life. The city’s ‘garbage pickers’ are featured through their off-camera testimonies, and invariably insist that they not be filmed. Director Nicole Hewitt says of the piece, “Anthropologist Mary Douglas calls rubbish ‘matter out of place’ – discarded objects that still retain traces of their previous identities... they are still recognizable objects, but in the wrong place and with traces of ownership still lingering. In the Zagreb case, the matter is even more fascinating as other factors come into play—private vs. public space, bourgeois taboos of cleanliness, and confrontation with scavengers.”
+ Garbage
- Director:
- uncredited
- Running Time:
- Short. 11 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - PCM audio
- Color:
- b/w
- Country:
- USA
- Year:
- 1968
- Language:
- English language
- Genre:
- Newsreel
- Notes:
- Garbage follows the Lower East Side anarchist group named “Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers.” In one big defiant move in support of a New York City sanitation workers strike, the group carries their uncollected garbage on the subway to Lincoln Center, the then new and pristine-white citadel of high culture, and dump it right there on the marble steps.
+ Ausfegen
- Alternate Title:
- Sweeping Up
- Director:
- Beuys, Joseph; Boch, Jurgen
- Running Time:
- Short. 26 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - PCM
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- Germany
- Year:
- 1972
- Language:
- German language with English subtitles
- Genre:
- Documentary
- Notes:
- Following a May Day demonstration along the Karl Marx Platz in Berlin, Joseph Beuys and two students wielding red-bristled brooms sweep up the mess left behind by demonstrators. The trash they clean from the streets is dumped on the floor of Beuys’s gallery. Through this performance, Beuys shows solidarity with these demonstrators, but also serves to show that their ideological tendencies need to be kept in check as well.
+ Black Film
- Alternate Title:
- Crni Film
- Director:
- Žilnik, Želimir
- Production Co:
- Neoplanta Film
- Running Time:
- Short. 15 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - PCM audio
- Color:
- b/w
- Country:
- Yugoslavia
- Year:
- 1971
- Language:
- Serbian language with English subtitles
- Genre:
- Documentary
- Notes:
- In an attempt to “solve the homeless problem,” the director invites 10 homeless men ignored by the socialist government into his own apartment in Novi Sad, Serbia.
+ Tehran is the Capital of Iran
- Director:
- Shirdel, Kamran
- Production Co:
- The Organization of The Iranian Women
- Running Time:
- Short. 15 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - PCM audio
- Color:
- b/w
- Country:
- Yugoslavia
- Year:
- 1971
- Language:
- Arabic language with English subtitles
- Genre:
- Documentary
- Notes:
- This film includes the brilliant use of the relation between image and sound, the counterpoint of chillingly indifferent official reports, the testimony of inhabitants, and quotations from schoolbooks. These elements come together to evoke the continued hardship of everyday life in the poorest section of Tehran, Iran. Kamran Shirdel, influenced by neo-realism, attempts to expose the conditions in an unfiltered way. Many of his early documentaries, including this one, were censored for many years.
+ Five Dots
- Director:
- Ochoa, Tomas; Meyer, Andriana
- Production Co:
- Centro de Orientación Socio-Educativo
- Running Time:
- Short. 11 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - PCM audio
- Color:
- b/w
- Country:
- Argentina
- Year:
- 2005
- Language:
- Spanish language with English subtitles
- Genre:
- Documentary
- Notes:
- At a jail for juveniles in Mendoza, Argentina, teenage inmates perform improvised songs of their own composing, filled with desire, longing, and the thirst for escape, alternating with verbatim recitations of quotes from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Through their compositions, the inmates attempt to resist the stranglehold placed over themselves while locked up.
+ Don’t Go Gentle into the Night
- Alternate Title:
- N’Entre Pas Sans Violence Dans La Nuit
- Director:
- George, Sylvain
- Production Co:
- Noir Production
- Running Time:
- Short. 20 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - PCM audio
- Color:
- b/w
- Country:
- France
- Year:
- 2005
- Language:
- French language with English subtitles
- Genre:
- Documentary
- Notes:
- In October 2005, fed up with mass arrests and deportations of undocumented persons, dozens of people in a district of Paris revolt spontaneously and temporarily route the forces of order. This is the first French film to confront the police roundups and raids on undocumented migrants. Shot in high-contrast black and white, with George’s mobile camera moving among the bedlam and clamor, this is also one of the rare films that documents a direct street action from beginning to end.
+ Suprematist Kapital
- Director:
- Hong, James T.; Chen, Yin-Ju
- Running Time:
- Short. 5 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - PCM audio
- Color:
- color and b/w
- Country:
- USA, Taiwan
- Year:
- 2007
- Genre:
- Documentary, Animation
- Notes:
- Featuring iconic brand images and logos, this short film/montage quickly outlines the almost 500-year rise to power capitalism has seen.
+ Day You Will Love Me, The
- Alternate Title:
- El día que me quieras
- Director:
- Katz, Leandro
- Production Co:
- Mirror on the Moon Productions
- Running Time:
- Short. 30 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - PCM audio
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- Argentina
- Year:
- 1997
- Language:
- English intertitles
- Genre:
- Documentary, Experimental / Avant Garde, Drama - Historical
- Notes:
- A non-narrative film investigating death and the power of photography, it is a meditation on the last pictures taken of Ernesto Che Guevara, as he lay dead on a table surrounded by his captors in Bolivia in 1967. Not a political documentary in the traditional sense, the film alternates between recreation and actual reports, centering on an interview with the Bolivian photographer Freddy Alborta. Suffused with a sense of mystery, The Day You Will Love Me is about our assimilation of history.
+ Minus 6
- Director:
- Thornton, Leslie
- Production Co:
- Leslie Thornton
- Running Time:
- Short. 2 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - PCM audio
- Color:
- b/w
- Country:
- USA
- Year:
- 2008
- Language:
- German language with English subtitles
- Genre:
- Documentary, Performance
- Notes:
- The year is 1925 and Hitler works with a drama coach while listening to a recording of one of his own speeches. As he practices some of his many gestures employed during his invigorating speeches, we are reminded that everything he performs was used to manipulate a whole country and that these techniques are still in use today.
+ What Farocki Taught
- Director:
- Godmilow, Jill
- Production Co:
- The Laboratory for Icon & Idiom, Inc.
- Running Time:
- Short. 30 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - PCM
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- USA
- Year:
- 1997
- Language:
- English language
- Genre:
- Documentary
- Notes:
- A replica of Harun Farocki’s film, Inextinguishable Fire (1969), WHAT FAROCKI TAUGHT is a Brechtian investigation of the development of Napalm by Dow Chemical during the Vietnam War, this time in color and in English, rather than in black-and- white and in German. Godmilow’s critical introduction and on-camera epilogue, while concentrating on conventional documentary’s “pornography of the real” raises and aptly renews the pertinent question of corporate war crimes within the U.S. context.
- Link to:
- FII catalog |
+ Xochimilco 1914
- Director:
- Viumasters, Los
- Production Co:
- Axolote Cine
- Running Time:
- Short. 5 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - PCM
- Color:
- b/w
- Country:
- Mexico
- Year:
- 2010
- Language:
- Spanish language with English and Spanish subtitles
- Genre:
- Documentary, Animation
- Notes:
- On the morning of December 4th, 1914, the legendary Mexican revolutionaries Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata met for the first time. This punk animation makes use of an original stenographic record of their conversations, just hours before they took control of Mexico City. The film playfully explores the words of these revolutionary heroes while intimating the historic repercussions of their deeds.
+ Threnody for the Victims of Marikana
- Director:
- Kaganof, Aryan
- Production Co:
- Premeditated Murder Productions
- Running Time:
- Short. 28 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - PCM
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- South Africa
- Year:
- 2014
- Language:
- Afrikaans language with English subtitles
- Genre:
- Documentary, War
- Notes:
- On August 16, 2012, the South African Police opened fire on a crowd of striking platinum workers, killing 34 and injuring 78. This three-part film uses instrumentals coupled with other music, found footage, theoretical analysis, and doses of irony to arrive at a new understanding of how this massacre could have happened under a government ruled by the African National Congress.
+ Satyagraha
- Director:
- Perconte, Jacques
- Production Co:
- Lalit Vachani
- Running Time:
- Short. 5 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - PCM
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- France
- Year:
- 2009
- Language:
- French with English subtitles
- Genre:
- Documentary
- Notes:
- In a world without Gandhi, this film asks what has become of non-violent civil disobedience. As video images of the struggling Indian masses morph into a mass of shifting unidentifiable pixels, and with a couple of thought provoking monologues, we feel a collective loss of historical agency after Gandhi’s disappearance from the world stage. Since 1995 Jacques Perconte has made at least 20 films. He is one of the pioneers of French internet art. As critic Nicole Brenez puts it, “nothing in the machine is alien to Jacques Perconte, he knows how to push it beyond its limits, how to think and create with its flaws.”
+ 41 Shots
- Director:
- Millner, Sherry; Larsen, Ernest
- Running Time:
- Short. 15 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - PCM audio
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- USA
- Year:
- 2000
- Language:
- English language
- Genre:
- Documentary
- Notes:
- The notorious NYPD murder of immigrant street peddler Amadou Diallo, as he stood in the vestibule of the Bronx apartment building where he lived, is framed as the direct result of then-Mayor Guiliani’s no-holds-barred zero tolerance enactment of the implicitly racist ‘broken windows’ theory of policing. The video essay ‘moves’ the crime to 41 vestibules in safe (i.e. white) lower Manhattan that will never be attacked by the New York Street Crimes Unit.