Says who?

For the final film in this series, we’ve got Emma Cooney’s hilarious yet melancholy AUTOMATIC DOOM. Inspired by a Sunday night family ritual, the film is a masterful supercut, drawing us in to the weird and world-weary mind of the legendary radio and television writer Andy Rooney. Compiling clips from “A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney,” the long-running (1978-2011) concluding segment of the weekly news magazine “60 Minutes,” AUTOMATIC DOOM subverts dominant paradigms of traditional televisual authority figures, celebrating Rooney as an intensely self-aware and humble authoritative voice. Deeply cynical yet deeply sincere, Rooney (and the film) offer the viewer a long curmudgeonly sigh, a humorous rumination on mortality, environmental catastrophe and the virtues and vices of sleep. AUTOMATIC DOOM is a profoundly humane work, showing us not that misery love company, but that company can provide much-needed relief from misery. Through Rooney’s open-hearted reflections on the terrifying miasma of precarity that shapes contemporary life, we feel a little bit less alone in the daily struggle just to muddle through, and to get a good night’s sleep.

Enjoy AUTOMATIC DOOM!

#marvelousmoviemondays

https://vimeo.com/332580083

Says who?

This week we’ve got the Khalil Brothers’ and Jackson Polys’ bold yet ruminative 2017 short, THE VIOLENCE OF A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT SECRETS. The film recounts the struggle of five Columbia Basin tribes to rebury the remains of one of their ancestors, known as “The Kennewick Man,” whose skeleton was discovered in 1996 along the banks of the Columbia River in the south eastern part of Washington state. Their demand was thwarted by a group of forensic anthropologists, who filed a lawsuit claiming that the cranial features of “The Kennewick Man” indicated that he was of European descent, and therefore not a tribal ancestor. (This lawsuit was gleefully endorsed by white supremacist groups, who claimed that the discovery proved their status as indigenous peoples.) The forensic anthropologists’ claim on “The Kennewick Man” for the purpose of “scientific study” was upheld by the courts, who asserted that the tribe’s oral histories constituted unreliable evidence. This decision was finally overturned in 2014, when advancements in DNA testing proved that “The Kennewick Man” was in fact an ancestor of the tribes, at which point he was reburied in a secret location.

In recounting this horrifying (and horrifyingly typical) incident, THE VIOLENCE OF A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT SECRETS offers a bracing meditation on the central role of enlightenment institutions and ideals–such as the museum, the archive, the courts and the scientific method–in enacting and maintaining hegemonic violence by the settler colonial state against indigenous peoples. The authority of these institutions to determine what constitutes valid forms of “evidence” and “knowledge,” is revealed to be a fundamental tool in maintaining control over every aspect of the lives, deaths, histories, and memories of subaltern peoples.

Enjoy THE VIOLENCE OF A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT SECRETS: https://vimeo.com/217342747

Says who?

This week we’ve got Kelly Sears “dreadfully” brilliant short film, PATTERN FOR SURVIVAL (2015), a spare yet dense interrogation of ideologies of “preparedness” in the face of perceived existential threats. How-to models (cut out from exercise manuals, emergency preparedness texts, hunting guidebooks, etc.) find themselves caught in desperate and compulsive loops of aggression, physical conditioning and disaster mitigation, as ominous slogans such as “Don’t pretend you have no fears,” “You can use bone as an effective weapon,” and “Security takes priority” appear below them on screen. These grotesque and revealing fragments of text, culled from a US Army Survival Manual, combine with the images to produce a kind of bizarro world survivalist handbook. In this way, Sears’ film compels us to question who and what it is we should actually be fearing.

Enjoy PATTERN FOR SURVIVAL!

https://vimeo.com/124163256

How does authority inhere in media? How is it maintained and how is it expressed? Who has the authority to define the past? Who has the authority to determine the future? Who has the authority to speak for whom? Who has the authority to lead? Who has the authority to bury the dead?

Says who?

The films I have chosen for this month all grapple in some way with these questions of authority, either within the film text itself, or in society, culture, and history-at large. First up in the series is a wonderful little essay film from 1971, Nick Macdonald’s meditation on anarchism in practice, “No More Leadershit.”

Macdonald is a New York-based writer, filmmaker, and avowed anarchist, who in the 1970s made a cycle of radical, essayistic experimental documentaries.

“No More Leadershit” is a diminutive and playful work, combining stop motion animation and live action in a simple structural conceit. Accompanied by the sounds of his children playing, Macdonald (in voiceover) grapples with the inherent inequality of political leadership, and advocates for a world in which there are no more leaders . . . on the Right or the Left. (Particularly amusing is his reluctant renunciation of iconic liberatory figures such as Malcolm X and Abbie Hoffman.) In our contemporary historical moment, when populist demagoguery is seemingly in vogue around the world, the film’s core message is troublingly resonant.

Enjoy “No More Leadershit”!

https://vimeo.com/230525809