“Reflections on Disruptive Film” collects texts that articulate, meditate on, or respond to the short films of Disruptive Film: Everyday Resistance to Power, curated by Ernest Larsen and Sherry Millner. This is the first of three two-disc sets that aim to recover the history of short-form radical experimental non-fiction film and video. Edited by Michael Mandiberg, this dossier brings together Eng-Beng Lim, Julie Livingston, Neferti X. M. Tadiar, and Helga Tawil-Souri (members of the Social Text editorial collective) to consider these films and, in particular, they way they merge the radical potentials of content and form. While Larsen and Millner have been working on this curatorial project for eight years, and this edition of Periscope was conceived during the summer of 2016, its publication seems particularly pressing in the weeks and months since the election and inauguration of the current US President and the subsequent cycles of protest that greeted this moment.
“Reflections on Disruptive Film” collects texts that articulate, meditate on, or respond to the short films included in Disruptive Film: Everyday Resistance to Power, curated by Ernest Larsen and Sherry Millner. This is the first of three two-disc sets that … Continue reading “Introduction”
What do the worlds of Jack Smith and striking Taiwanese dockworkers have to do with each other? Birgit Hein’s Jack Smith (Germany, 1974, 10 min.) and Chen Chieh-Jen’s The Route (Taiwan, 2006, 17 min.) are produced more than three decades … Continue reading “Drag Mermaids and the Imaginary Global Picket Line”
The Death Knell (René Vautier, France/Rhodesia/Algeria, 1964, 5 min.) is a stunning film. The poem read by the brilliant Djibril Mambety. The music, at once both dirge and waltz. The artwork offered in lieu of René Vautier’s original footage, which … Continue reading “The Uncanny of Martyrdom: Watching The Death Knell (Le Glas)”
On the morning of the 23rd of November in 2009, in the southern Philippine province of Maguindanao, fifty-eight people were gunned down by over a hundred armed men, their bodies and all their effects, including their vehicles, dumped and hastily … Continue reading “…In Reverse”
“No prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis.” A senior official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government purportedly once confided to a UN official that this was Israel’s goal for Gaza. Supressing without starving the population has been a prevalent … Continue reading “Putting Palestinians on a Diet”
