Negotiating Terrorism: An Oppositional Public Sphere
Thursday June 10th - 8PM
92Y-Tribeca
200 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10013
$10
As a follow-up to our last screening at the 92Y-Tribeca, a preview of the forthcoming DVD release of Peter Watkins' Evening Land (1977), we will present a 35mm projection of the omnibus film Germany in Autumn (1978). Watkins' film featured 192 non-professional Danish actors using public performance to anticipate a dystopic present. Though seen and talked about in auteurist terms, the film was a collective effort, a method Watkins would later return to in The Journey (1985) and La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000). Germany in Autumn, made the year following Evening Land, is more explicitly a collaborative and collective response to the German Autumn of 1977 - the time between the Red Army Faction's kidnapping of Hanns-Martin Schleyer on September 5th, and the deaths in prison of RAF members Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe on October 18th.
Watkins' films are striking for their dramatic interventions into both daily life and political consciousness. With his epic cinema, utilizing an enormous cast and crew, the productions themselves becomes forms of organizing and mobilization. In Germany in Autumn the major representatives of the New German Cinema, Germany's own Nouvelle Vague, come together to immediately and publicly respond to its country's political present (as well as the legacy of fascism) with a gorgeous feature-length essay film. We might consider, at present, how our own auteurs can not just explicitly interact with contemporary politics, but do so in a way which organizes an opposition, and in the most public of spheres.
--Germany in Autumn - Heinrich Boll, Alf Brustellin, Hans Peter Cloos, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Maximiliane Mainka, Edgar Reitz, Katja Rupe, Volker Schlöndorff, Peter Schubert, Bernhard Sinkel, 1978, 119 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 119 minutes | 35mm Projection
Discussion with:
--Kazembe Balagun - educator, theorist; outreach coordinator of the Brecht Forum
--Charity Scribner - professor; author of the book Requiem for Communism (2003), and the article "Buildings on Fire: The Situationist International and the Red Army Faction" (2007)
Co-presented by the Goethe Institut and
Not Coming to a Theater Near You
Co-sponsored by Deutches Haus
Special thanks to Bruce Pavlow & Beata Wiggen