The Banality of Disaster: Mapping Materialism
Thursday September 10th - 7:30PM
The Brecht Forum
451 West Street, New York, NY 10014
“Where we had seen a clear city two minutes before, we could no longer see the city.”
-Robert Lewis
Perhaps the most basic RIGHT TO THE CITY is to have your city not be destroyed. Or, once it is destroyed, to be treated fairly, with compassion and understanding, and to work towards its resurrection.
As we look at visual documents of such catastrophic and apocalyptic destruction as San Francisco of 1906; Hiroshima and Nagasaki of 1945; Aushwitz and Majdanek of 1955; how can we understand the historical and political context of viewing our own "Ground Zero" today.
RIGHT TO THE CITY:
--San Francisco Earthquake and Fire - Red Channels, 1906/2009, 17 minutes
--A Tale of Two Cities - Army-Navy Screen Magazine, 1946, 12 minutes
--Night and Fog - Alain Resnais, 1955, 32 minutes
--September - Dan Meyerson & Matt Peterson, 2008, 29 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 91 minutes | Digital Projection
Co-curated by Kazembe Balagun and the Brecht Forum
Co-sponsored by Red Channels
SEPTEMBER is the debut of Dan Meyerson and Matt Peterson. It is an essay film on “Ground Zero” and America’s relationship to the atomic bomb. Filmed entirely at the former site of the World Trade Center, it explores the culture of Ground Zero – its history, its visitors, its passers-by, its sights and sounds. Documentary city portrait film. Materialist. Psychogeographic.
(The Resnais film was released on DVD (2003) by Criterion.)