Disruptive Film: Everyday Resistance to Power

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Sherry Millner and Ernest Larsen – artists, filmmakers, writers, educators, troublemakers – have curated and exhibited multiple programs of short films that critically and/or actively represent resistance to power all over the world. The duo’s groundbreaking, decades-long research demonstrates not only the variety of everyday resistance strategies, but also a surprising diversity of experimental approaches to short-form nonfiction media.

The films presented here – drawn from three Facets DVD collections (one newly released and two upcoming) make propositions – or “escape routes” – from exhausted classical documentary forms. They each employ critical interventions intended to contest, resist, or imaginatively overturn repressive conditions, stale culture, the violence of the state, patriarchy, racism, the rule of global capital. The overall aim is a gradual construction of an alternative history – a history that has at times been blocked, repressed, censored or hijacked – of short-form radical experimental non-fiction media, from 1914 up to the present. The films selected ask and often answer the complex question of how political resistance can be articulated in forms that are not only appositely representative of resistance but also embody that shape-shifting force in their own diverse historical moments and contradictions.

According to the French critic and filmmaker Jean-Louis Comolli, “Defeating or overcoming the existing order of things requires the invention of forms that are different to those serving to repress our consciousness and our movements.” The requirement to which Comolli refers should encompass the invention of forms of life, of politics, and aesthetic forms, as an intentional project that produces the conditions through which such revolutionary change could begin to be achieved. And the invention of such forms is always experimental.

Curated by Sherry Millner and Ernest Larsen. For more info regarding the first DISRUPTIVE FILM boxset, visit: www.facetsdvd.com/Disruptive-Film-Vol-1-p/dv102386.htm

“A visual demonstration of the powers of film. Such a collection of rare and precious items from many times, places and conflict situations, not only provides a strong perspective about film history, but also transmits to us the practical energy to struggle with our present injustices.” –Nicole Brenez