https://cinemasofglobalsolidarity.com/mainpage daily 1.0 2022-02-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61c10a9a7b5dc400106ddaaa/1f0ae381-831a-4688-b055-0c89ee5d5f57/CGS-POSTER-31-05.jpg Main Page - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://cinemasofglobalsolidarity.com/speakers-and-schedule daily 0.75 2022-02-17 https://cinemasofglobalsolidarity.com/about daily 0.75 2022-02-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61c10a9a7b5dc400106ddaaa/ba065818-f1f1-49d8-bd4f-a66e06d93d98/mozambique.jpeg About https://cinemasofglobalsolidarity.com/rizvana-bradley daily 0.75 2022-02-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61c10a9a7b5dc400106ddaaa/a51e8741-9e1a-4849-8c26-1cdcd209ac95/Killer+of+sheep.jpg Rizvana Bradley - A still from Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1972) In a famous passage from Toni Morrison's seminal novel, Beloved, one of the novel's central characters, Sethe, is indicted by her lover for exhibiting a perilously devoted maternity which could only culminate in disaster. “Your love is too thick,” he declares. While such “too thick” love is qualified as the unthinkable justification for the infanticide that is speculatively recounted in Beloved, and has been taken up and interpreted as an act that points toward the moral, ethical, and political antinomies within a violent world order set against blackness, this essay thinks with Morrison’s novelistic rendering of a “too thick” love as irreducible to those forms of politicality ascribed to the humanist subject. “Too Thick Love: On Cinematic Unbearability” theorizes too thick feeling as a racially gendered problem for affect theory, one which not only exposes the latter’s residual humanisms, but which opens onto the possibility of thinking with the minor affective registers of black existence. Highlighting the conjunction between black critiques of humanism (principally those of Saidiya Hartman, Frank B. Wilderson III, and Calvin Warren) and the repertoires of what I call wayward feeling that subtend black existence, my reading of too thick feeling moves us through the undertheorized racially gendered declensions and transfigurations within registers of feeling such as slowness, exhaustion, bitterness, and perseverance in film. Turning from Morrison to Charles Burnett’s 1978 film, Killer of Sheep, a landmark feature which is often taken as emblematic of the black cinematic innovations of the L.A. Rebellion (for an overview see: Field, Horak and Stewart, 2015), I conduct a close reading of a scene which has been called “one of the most intimately melancholic moments in modern cinema” (Brody, 2017). The roughly four-minute, single shot take featuring the film’s protagonist, Stan, slow-dancing with his wife to Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth,” displays how too thick feeling structures repertoires of intramural love and bitterness as irreducibly entwined. I demonstrate how the aesthetic unfolding of this scene vitiates not only conventional humanist recuperations of its affective force within universalist grammars of suffering and perseverance, but also critical theories that would subsume its affects under the rubric of racial melancholia. In this scene, we witness not so much what Elizabeth Povinelli reads as Stan “capacitating the will to endure” (Povinelli, 2011); but rather a complicated set of racially gendered bearings and displacements, tracked by the synchronizations of and disjunctures between the visualities on-screen and the sonic lyricism of Washington’s song. Within these affective relays, “bitterness” is displaced onto (degraded) earth, within which the black feminine is sublimated — in Washington’s words, as the ‘dust hiding the glow of the rose.’ Without reducing the affective singularities that obtain across Burnett’s black film aesthetics and Morrison’s literary imagination, or ignoring the affective modulations effectuated to Washington’s song as it becomes sonically integrated into Killer of Sheep’s diegesis, I suggest that they are all nonetheless threaded together by the too thick feeling that permeates black life. Although this internally differentiated genre of wayward feeling is enmeshed in various histories, I argue that it cannot, in the first instance, be understood through the historicization of affect. Parting ways with accounts that historicize Killer of Sheep’s affective repertoires as emblematic of postwar cinema, or as indexical of the transition from Fordist to neoliberal urban regimes, I emphasize (in contradistinction to Povinelli, for instance) how the film’s aesthetic practice reflexively engages with black interdiction from normative spatiotemporality, narrative subjectivity, and linear history. I conclude by analyzing how Killer of Sheep’s dilated event time (apropos Lauren Berlant) discloses the incommensurability of a universal grammar of fatigue, and speculate about what this insurmountable difference might mean for the durative temporality that is assigned to “a life.” https://cinemasofglobalsolidarity.com/rosalind-galt daily 0.75 2022-02-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61c10a9a7b5dc400106ddaaa/a26a361b-55bc-4ec7-9749-ca5fe31de8f8/statue+atlantics.png Rosalind Galt - A still from Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019) This paper will focus on French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop, reading her feature film Atlantics and its short predecessor in relation to the inheritances of African cinemas of liberation. Diop has a well-known familial connection to history of post-liberation cinema, as her uncle was Djibril Diop Mambety, and her film Mille Soleils directly engages the contemporary resonances of his film Touki Bouki. However, this generational inheritance is not a question of a young female filmmaker being defined in relation to an older male relative. Rather, Diop’s work takes on the question of postcolonial inheritance more broadly: for engaged cinemas, for the diasporic transits of Africa and Europe, and for Black women—both onscreen and behind the camera. In Atlantics, inheritance is imagined most strikingly through the figure of the revenant: spirits of men who have drowned in attempting perilous ocean journeys to Spain, and whose return to haunt the women they left behind asserts a powerful political aesthetic. Atlantics’ ghosts participate in a history of indigenous haunting across the Black Atlantic, from the Senegalese faru rab to the Arab jinn to the Haitian zombie. This paper argues that Diop’s film understands these spirits as a form of anticolonial realism, capable of rendering visible the affective depths of the Atlantic ocean: they bespeak the ocean’s unimaginable archive of Black death, as well as envisioning beauty and grace in contemporary Black life. This is also a cinematic history, traced in the films of postcolonial liberation and those of migration and diaspora. In reimagining the inheritance of these journeys, Diop’s films pose questions for thinking about global solidarity and contemporary world cinema. https://cinemasofglobalsolidarity.com/malini-guha daily 0.75 2022-02-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61c10a9a7b5dc400106ddaaa/ef55c4cd-f355-4fe7-bb6d-595e40536209/SPELL_REEL.jpg Malini Guha - A still from Spell Reel (Filipa César, 2017) In this paper, I will position the model of ‘the ciné-kinship’ practiced by the group luta ca caba inda (‘the struggle is not yet over’) as a method of solidarity work that revives the memories of a decolonial cinematic praxis while offering a continuation of this praxis for the present and the future. Luta ca caba inda is a collaborative project involving filmmakers including Filipa César and Flora Gomes, artists and critics from around the globe who have undertaken the urgent task of digitizing and disseminating moving image fragments that constitute the remaining traces of a nearly lost history of a militant cinema practice in Guinea-Bissau that flourished between 1963 and 1974. This practice was forged during the height of the revolutionary struggle against Portuguese rule led by the Amilcar Cabral and his party, Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné Cabo Verde. Some of these unrestored fragments have been screened across Guinea-Bissau while some of these images have also found a home in films directed and assembled by César, including Conakry (2013) and Spell Reel (2017). The kinship model, according to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, does not name a precise structure, but rather “a practice, a praxis, a method and even a strategy” (Anti-Oepidus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia). Seemingly informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of kinship as well as assemblage, the ciné-kinshipdenotes a method of working as well as an aesthetic that foregrounds performance and assembly, as demonstrated in Conakry and Spell Reel, among other works. As such, I will argue that luta ca caba inda is demonstrative of the potential that a solidarity- based practice holds for the revival of lost histories that add to our contemporary understandings of militant cinema as a category while also offering ways to consider elements of film style and assembly as themselves gestures of kinship. https://cinemasofglobalsolidarity.com/ling-zhang daily 0.75 2022-02-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61c10a9a7b5dc400106ddaaa/edb83814-a8ad-4cd1-bc87-20f6bfa5f579/Dr.+Bethune.jpg Ling Zhang - A still from Dr. Bethune (Zhang Junxiang, 1965) The global COVID pandemic again draws our attention to severe medical inequalities among different social classes and nations. The pandemic has also lent new urgency to Marxist internationalism and the critique of capitalism across the globe, popularizing ideas like socialized medicine. How might the possibility of medical internationalism defy unjust social structures and transcend narrow visions of nationalism? How might film portrayals of recent efforts at medical internationalism serve as a reference point for viewers? This paper focuses on the Chinese film Dr. Bethune (1965), which was based on the life of the Canadian Communist surgeon Norman Bethune (1890–1939), who became a symbol of medical internationalism. It explores how the film attempts to convey this internationalism by “reliving” his life, constructing a sense of embodied revolutionary realism. Bethune, an accomplished surgeon and advocate of socialized medicine, supported Republicans’ efforts in the Spanish Civil War. His strong commitment to medical internationalism and anti-fascist struggles led him to China in 1938, where he aided Chinese soldiers and villagers in their war of resistance against Japanese invasion. In late 1939, Bethune died of sepsis due to a lack of proper medicine. Mao Zedong’s eulogy for him, “In Memory of Norman Bethune” (1939), praised his spirit of “internationalism and communism.” Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens first suggested making a film about Bethune in 1958, yet Dr. Bethune (dir. Zhang Junxiang) only materialized in 1965, with American actor Gerald Tannebaum (1917–2001) portraying Bethune. The film crew, like devoted ethnographers, traced Bethune’s footsteps and interviewed people who had worked with him. The film’s actors moreover learned to perform basic medical tasks and attempted to re-experience the late 1930s wartime environment. This “embodied realism” was closely related to the socialist film practice of going “deep into life and deep into the people” in order to communicate with the masses. Seemingly mainstream, it functioned as a radical move away from seeing film as sheer entertainment and for profit in the capitalist system. https://cinemasofglobalsolidarity.com/luca-caminati daily 0.75 2022-02-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61c10a9a7b5dc400106ddaaa/a1d3cc3d-11bd-48a7-bdad-b27d05c06665/FireShot+Capture+007+-+Il+popolo+calabrese+ha+rialzato+la+testa+%28Paola%29+-1a+parte-+-+YouTube_+-+www.youtube.com.png Luca Caminati - A still from Il popolo calabrese ha rialzato la testa (Marco Bellocchio, 1969) In this presentation I will engage with Italian Maoist film productions by the group Unione dei Comunisti Italiani (marxisti-leninisti) best known for their journal Servire il popolo. I focus on two films produced by Marco Bellocchio, at the time an active member of the group: the revolutionary black-and-white film shot in March 1969, titled Il popolo calabrese ha rialzato la testa (The People of Calabria Have Raised Their Heads, 60 min), which describes the squatting of public housing by subproletariats under the leadership of the Unione; and Viva il primo maggio rosso proletario (Long Live the Red and Proletarian May First, 28 min) on the celebration by the Unione in Rome and Milan on May 1st, 1969, in which images of Maoist demonstration through the streets of Milan and Rome are accompanied by a political lecture. These two films, while quite at odds with each other, can be thought as a potential way to produce Western Maoist films, certainly more in line with films produced in China in that period than the Brechtian Modernism in which Godard and his Dziga Vertov group were involved, or the infamous situationist approach of Chinois, encore un effort pour etre revolutionnaire (Peking Duck Soup, 1977) by Rene Viénet and Ji Qingming. https://cinemasofglobalsolidarity.com/mariano-mestman daily 0.75 2022-01-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61c10a9a7b5dc400106ddaaa/4140ad1e-6942-4344-81e6-19fc80956ac2/603515180b2cae27705d26e3_CCH_6_4+-+JLR+with+Andrew+Salkey+and+CLR+James+Havana+Congress+-+Copy_Page2.jpg Mariano Mestman - “Ralph Featherstone (left), John La Rose (centre) and C.L.R. James (right) attending the Congress” (The George Padmore Institute) The Cultural Congress of Havana, held in Cuba in January 1968, was one of the greatest attempts to articulate a global cultural solidarity coalition-building with Third World struggles of the time. More than 600 artists and intellectuals from over 60 countries arrived at the Cultural Congress to discuss the situations of colonialism and neo-colonialism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It followed the impulse of the Tricontinental Conference (of January 1966) and other radical political and cultural meetings also held in Havana during 1967. Although the Cultural Congress was not a cinema meeting, some political filmmakers from different countries arrived there, among other intellectuals and artists. In this talk, against recent readings that saw in that Congress a moment of "Sovietization" of Cuban cultural policy, I will analyze the creative convergence at the meeting of a Third Worldist internationalism with the experimental, avant-garde visual culture trends of the times (including the overlooked Cuban newsreel about the meeting, as an example). I will also mention the role of the Cuban cinema institute (ICAIC) during the meeting in order to show the links between the Cultural Congress and the so-called New Latin American Cinema movement (1967-1974), as well as the dialogue and debates between European and Third World filmmakers. https://cinemasofglobalsolidarity.com/matthew-croombs daily 0.75 2022-01-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61c10a9a7b5dc400106ddaaa/fe879b4a-22cb-4660-a112-e3def7b3ed2f/vautier.jpg Matthew Croombs - Make it stand out A cover of Maghreb des Films, 11/15 April 2012 https://cinemasofglobalsolidarity.com/alexandra-juhasz-and-pato-hebert daily 0.75 2022-01-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61c10a9a7b5dc400106ddaaa/c5e9a00a-c5ca-49de-b62e-ae393e157106/2_HEBERT_Untitled-from-the-Lingering-Series-1280x960.jpg Alexandra Juhasz and Pato Hebert - A photo from Long Hauling by Pato Hebert and Alexandra Juhasz What is a politics of the longhaul? Organizers, writers, and artists Pato Hebert and Alexandra Juhasz will discuss two years of collaborating on COVID. They will present ideas raised in their Long Hauling series with a keen interest in how activists and artists think from within a pandemic, including Hebert’s two-year photo project on his own longhauling with COVID. The pandemic is an occasion to reconsider broader notions of long hauling and learn from the challenges of long COVID, while cultivating reciprocity, holding uncertainty, and nuancing our efforts with lessons from other viruses and their related movements about mutual practices of aid and cohabitation to thrive over the long haul of sustained illness, neoliberal precarity, and other threats to human dignity and existence. https://cinemasofglobalsolidarity.com/sarah-hamblin daily 0.75 2022-02-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61c10a9a7b5dc400106ddaaa/9b26a993-4e4b-4839-8a46-4dcc83555f79/air_conditioner-_rotterdam_-_publicity_still_-_h_2020_.jpg Sarah Hamblin - A still from Air Conditioner (Fradique, 2020) This presentation explores how we can understand radical political cinema in the age of the Capitalocene. Dominant twentieth century narratives have imagined revolution as a future-oriented endeavor. Yet these projected futures, whose realization is predicated on the power of human agency to transform the world, have historically grounded themselves in the promises of petromodernity and anthropocentric fantasies of humanity’s sovereignty over nature. Indeed, it is precisely such devotion to industry and technology that has made the world inhospitable to human flourishing, and the apocalyptic reality of catastrophic climate change has rendered the future profoundly volatile. As such, the Capitalocene forces us to fundamentally reconsider the basic tenants of the revolutionary imagination. This paper therefore asks what revolutionary transformation looks like when: one, we must abandon modes of resistance and visions of the future that remain wedded to what Dominic Boyer refers to as the “epistemic infrastructures of high carbon life”; two, we can no longer project ourselves into a safe and stable future but must reckon with the hostile reality of catastrophism; and three, we cannot sustain the fantasies of human vitality or mastery of nature and must instead decenter ourselves as the sole agents of our history. To begin exploring some of these concerns, this paper takes up the Angolan lo-fi Africanfuturist film, Air Conditioner (Fradique, 2020). Set in Luanda, where AC units across the city suddenly begin collectively failing and falling from windows, the film dramatizes the problems of technological collapse combined with a rapidly warming climate and offers new ways of thinking revolution from within the conditions of catastrophe. In following the daily experience of two domestic workers employed by the owner of a crumbling colonial-era apartment building, Air Conditioner focuses on peripheries – on a nation decimated by decades of colonial rule and civil war, a city on the frontlines of climate disaster, and an underclass disproportionally impacted by both. However, while impending catastrophe is tied to colonialism and the protracted conflict between communist and capitalist forces, these twentieth century Grand Narratives are resigned to the decaying infrastructural backdrop of the film. Rather than focusing on the legacy of these systems, the film is concerned with the new modes of solidarity and localized ideas of futurity that emerge from the specific geographic, economic, and cultural conditions of contemporary Angola. The film’s incidental references to socialism, combined with its meandering narrative and languid pace, render it quite different in form and tone from the revolutionary anti-colonial cinemas of independence. Against these earlier images of revolution as a sudden rupture that harnesses the power of human agency, Air Conditioner roots itself in slowness, imagining revolution as a process of deceleration and withdrawal based on the wearing out of life. https://cinemasofglobalsolidarity.com/philip-rosen daily 0.75 2022-02-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61c10a9a7b5dc400106ddaaa/0b5a8ef8-31f8-443f-9b10-81672119c5ec/rosen1.jpg Philip Rosen - A still from Society of the Spectacle (Guy Debord, 1974) For some time now, prominent social, cultural and political theorists and critics have developed highly elaborated arguments that the contemporary world is undergoing fundamental transitions, even a historical rupture. They have done so with varied emphases on geopolitics, social formations, cultural practices, technologies, and economics, including mutations of global capitalism. Significant film scholarship has been aligned with this tendency. Just a few major examples would include mobilizing theories of postmodern media, concepts of post-cinema, and positioning cinema within new forms of public spheres. One overarching idea is that films are now are produced, distributed and received as components of a vast, qualitatively expanded multi-media universe, resulting in comprehensive changes in practices, experiences, and the status of cinema. Yet, over and against the idea of a break, one may find predecessors in film/media history. This suggests that, even if one accepted a premise that a qualitatively new kind of multi-media universe, there remain historical inheritances and continuities. On the theoretical level, examples include Horkheimer and Adorno's concept of the culture industry, or Debord's concept of spectacle. There are also ongoing debates about film practices that resonate with earlier ones. For example, it can be argued that some of these recent approaches are overly monolithic, obscuring nuances and specificities of film history and current film/media practices; and that they do not take account of strategies emerging from local, national, and/or regional cultures and politics, as well as other kinds of aesthetic, formal, and technical insurgencies in media cultures. Good demonstrations are provided by scholarly research into the history of third cinema, including both its prehistory and its afterhistory and contemporary legacies. This paper considers how changes in cinema have been conceived in relation to hypotheses of mutations of capitalism. It emphasizes such terms as geopolitics, spectacle, and world systems. It is framed through two canonical proposals: Jameson's "geopolitical aesthetic" and Comolli's revision of Debord's spectacle in order to envision a contemporary "cinema against spectacle." Jameson's formulation appeared in a late 20th century book, written on the heels of the Cold War with reference to world systems theory. Comolli's text was written during the seeming zenith of neoliberalism, which was also the crystallization of what T. J. Demos calls "crisis globalization" or what might be called crisis capitalism. https://cinemasofglobalsolidarity.com/masha-salazkina daily 0.75 2022-02-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61c10a9a7b5dc400106ddaaa/a1729657-9ef5-4022-a5a3-7d65640922df/salazkina.jpg Masha Salazkina - The opening ceremony of the First International Film Festival of Asian and African and Latin American Countries in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, 1968 (SPUTNIK) This presentation argues for exploring the war topoi in socialist cinemas across the Soviet bloc and the Global South in relation to each other, and in their shared international contexts of production and circulation. Socialist cinema of armed struggle extended to a great number of sites and institutional contexts of production, circulation and exhibition, both national and international – including, on the one end of the spectrum the film production of the military itself, and on the other, informal clandestine filmmaking that have come to be associated with militant Third Cinema, and numerous cinematic forms in-between. Here, I will take the Tashkent festival of cinemas of Asia, Africa and Latin America from 1968 to the early 80s as a privileged site for the international exhibition of such cinema. Constituting perhaps the largest portion of the festival selections, these were both fiction and non-fiction films, dealing with the war, insurgent violence, military aggression (including state violence) and armed resistance in a variety of historical and contemporary contexts. While many of these films represented different positions within their contemporary polemical struggles over the aesthetics and politics of leftist cinema (reflective of the combative, high-stakes environments in which they were rooted), together they are part of a larger, more complex story of war as the organizational principle of global socialism as manifested through cinema. Considered together, I argue, this body of work and its exhibition history reveals more than its strategic geopolitical employment by the Soviet bloc. Cinematic representation of armed struggle became a true arena for the complex performances of affinities, alliances, and solidarities across the Socialist and Third Worlds – while also revealing their internal contradictions and divergences. https://cinemasofglobalsolidarity.com/lakshmi-padmanabhan daily 0.75 2022-02-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61c10a9a7b5dc400106ddaaa/cc4e4903-2f41-4f57-92a0-6373eb78f2de/Earth-7.png Lakshmi Padmanabhan - A still from Earth (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2019) Recent debates within postcolonial literature and criticism (Chakrabarty, Ghosh, Nixon) have raised the problem of representing the anthropocene, or the epoch of human-made climate change, through the medium of the moving image, pointing to impossible scale of representing disaster that is too slow moving for the speed of contemporary culture. Within film studies, the "world" is often a qualifier in the category "world cinema," itself seen as a watered down attempt at unthinking Eurocentrism (Salazkina, 2020) or a phase in film history (Andrew, 2010) perhaps superseded by the growing emphasis on the category of "global media." This talk begins by putting pressure on the concept of the "world" in the category of "world cinema" to argue for an understanding of the world as a cinematic object. In the first half of the paper, I begin by synthesizing several contemporary approaches to the problem of the "world" that are indebted to the Arendtian definition of a world as that which is produced through shared meaning and the efforts of human action. In contrast to this liberal promise of a world created through human action and its dystopian end in the era of the anthropocene, I argue that the "world" is an object of desire (a structuring absence) and anxiety, where anxiety is understood as the affect attuned to the overpresence of an object that has not yet risen to the level of signification, or to put it more colloquially, that we know something is wrong but its exact contours are not yet articulated. In the second part of the paper, I propose this mode of anxiety as an affect that is palpable in the rise of slow cinema aesthetics in world cinema. Here, I argue for the rise of slow cinema aesthetics not only as a kind of respite from the speed of popular media or contemporary life (Lim, Koepnick, de Luca, etc.), but rather as a mode of attunement to the exhaustion of surviving in the dystopian present, attentive to the anxiety of living in a world that is already inhospitable. Here, I discuss recent examples of films where the reality of environmental disaster or "slow violence" is the very world in which one must survive. https://cinemasofglobalsolidarity.com/john-mackay daily 0.75 2022-02-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61c10a9a7b5dc400106ddaaa/9f0ecda6-7421-47f9-a38c-bf7ea049bc9a/Kino-pravda+no.+22+-+Krestianskaia+Kino-pravda_000054.jpg John MacKay - A still from Kinopravda 22 (Dziga Vertov, 1925)