Development, Displacement, Leisure: Capital and Community Interests
Monday October 26th - 7:30PM
Brecht Forum
451 West Street, New York, NY 10014
During this summer's "Visual Liberation" series at the Brecht Forum, we organized a number of screenings and discussions around the theme of "The Right to the City." Using historical films shot in New York from 1903 to the present, we looked at issues that have become all too banal: bureaucracies that corrupt our basic infrastructure and institutions; the struggles to maintain open and public space; the struggle for affordable and decent housing (and the grassroots attempts to organize); and, finally, the main theme of tonight's screening, community displacement for larger development (and the grassroots attempts to organize).
As Cassim Shepard put it in Urban Omnibus, one of the series' main focuses was "how the analysis and representation of New York’s built environment has changed in the past century." What I think we need to directly confront is whether or not, in fact, anything has changed. There is the great potential for contemporary misunderstanding that the issues we now face are the fault of certain individuals (developers, and the politicians that placate them), and not, as I would suggest, the fault (and inevitability) of a larger system we can see at work for as long as cinema has existed.
This program has a special focus on collectively produced media on this very subject. We open with Newsreel's 1968 film not just to show some of our radical filmmaking roots, but also the painful similarity in its content and scope to the contemporary work that will follow.
This is the first in a series of screenings we are doing to highlight some of the programming done uptown at the Maysles Cinema. The first two films in this program come from a series they did, "Rent Control: NYC Documented and Imagined."
This is the second of a series of screenings we hope to do with Paper Tiger Television; going through their archives to present a rich history of media analysis, counter-hegemony, collective filmmaking, and video experimentation. The short we present here is a special sneak preview of a "fine cut" for an as-yet unfinished work.
--The Case Against Lincoln Center - Newsreel, 1968, 12 mins
--Rezoning Harlem - Natasha Florentino & Tamara Gubernat, 2008, 40 minutes
--Brooklyn Boondoggle – Meerkat Media Collective, 2009, 11 minutes
--The Right to the City – Paper Tiger Television/IndyVideo, 2009, 28 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 91 minutes | Digital Projection
Discussion with:
--Astride Charles, organizer with the NYC Grassroots Media Coalition
--Natasha Florentino, co-director of Rezoning Harlem
--Tamara Gubernat, co-director/producer of Rezoning Harlem
--Craig Shley, organizer of Vote People
--Julius Tajiddin, candidate for city council in West Harlem
--members of the Meerkat Media Collective
--members of the Paper Tiger collective
Co-sponsored by the Maysles Cinema, the NYC Grassroots Media Coalition, and Paper Tiger Television
Brecht Forum
Maysles Cinema
The NYC Grassroots Media Coalition
Paper Tiger Television
Third World Newsreel
(All of the Newsreel films are available from Third World Newsreel. All of the Paper Tiger tapes remain available through them directly.)