Philosophy, Politics and Film: A season of film screenings
- Written byInternal Communications
- Published date 29 April 2022
Open to all UAL staff and students, Philosophy, Politics and Film comprises free screenings of six independent films. There's no need to book in advance, just drop-in!
The programme includes films made in China, north and western Africa, and Black American cinema, which are notable both for their formal innovations as well as for raising political issues and debates relevant to the post-colonial era. The aim of the season is to open up thinking and discussion about some recent landmark films from around the world, sharing ideas across the community of courses at UAL. Each film will be introduced by a member of staff on the Masters Art Theory & Philosophy course at CSM, and the screenings are linked to recommended texts which you may like to read in connection with each film.
Programme
Platform (2000), dir. Jia Zhangke (贾樟柯)
Wednesday 27 April, 6.30pm
E003, Central Saint Martins
Introduced by Dr Maria Chehonadskih
Jia Zhangke is a Chinese film director and screenwriter. Platform narrates the history of transition from the Maoist 1970s to the new reality of the market economy of the 1980s through the eyes of a provincial performing arts troupe or a ‘cultural brigade’. The film has been called the masterpiece of the so-called sixth generation movement – the underground film movement in China. Featuring mostly non-professional actors and actresses, Platform produces documentary-like esthetics, with long takes, handheld cameras and ambient sound.
Optional texts
Jason McGrath, ‘The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke: From Postsocialist Realism to a Transnational Aesthetic’, in The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Zhen Zhang (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 81-114
Kaili Blues (2015), dir. Bi Gan (毕赣)
Wednesday 4 May 6pm,
E003, Central Saint Martins
Introduced by Dr Maria Chehonadskih
Bi Gan is a Chinese film director, screenwriter, poet and photographer. He was born in Kaili City (凯里), Guizhou (贵州) in 1989. His first feature film Kaili Blues won multiple awards and prizes, including the Best First Feature Film Award at the 68th Locarno Film Festival. Kaili Blues is a philosophical and poetical tale on memory, time and space. It creates the synthesis of past and present, perception and memory by narrating the story of a main protagonist through the mountainous space of Kaili City and an imaginary village Dangmai, where industrialisation clashes with the rural, peripheral and marginalised life. The episode in Dangmai, the village of the Miao people, unfolds in a forty-one-minute take, a meditation on memory and historical trauma.
Optional text
Undine (2020), dir. Christian Petzold
Wednesday 11 May, 6.30pm
E003, Central Saint Martins
Introduced by Dr Inès Aït Mokhtar
With Undine, Christian Petzold revisits a myth we all know: a creature of water who desires to enter the world of men. From the German Renaissance to Andersen’s Little Mermaid, this myth has known variations. In this contemporary cinematic rendition, Petzold offers us an Undine who lives among us, falls in love and is destined to kill the man she loves if he leaves her. But Petzold’s Undine stands against fate: she refuses this path and rejects the violence of killing. This refusal is the first step of her liberation. More than a love story, Undine is the tale of a woman’s emancipation from destiny. Set in contemporary Berlin, Petzold’s film is also a strong act of reappropriation: by diving into German mythology, Petzold reconnects with German history and Undine can be seen as the director’s love declaration to the city of Berlin. But Undine is most and foremost a dreamlike tale inhabited by water – domesticated, wild, dangerous, peaceful, quiet or ravaging, water occupies this story from the beginning to the end. A metaphor for love and a metaphor for the troubled history of Germany, water is the main character of this story.
Optional text
Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams
The Man from Oran (2014), dir. Lyès Salem
Wednesday 18 May, 6pm
E003, Central Saint Martins
Introduced by DrInès Aït Mokhtar
The Man from Oran retraces the fate of fictional heroes of the Algerian Revolution (1954 – 1962) after they won the war. The fight turned simple men into war heroes who are left with the responsibility to build a newly independent country. Lyes Salem, director and main actor of this film, gives us a bittersweet access to the emotional conflicts that independence has left Algerian leaders with. From the end of the war to the 1990s, Salem follows the itinerary of Djaffar, a man whose personal history was shattered by the course of history. This film also poses the question of the growing corruption a newly independent country gradually falls into when led by men whose personal lives were turned upside down by the original aggression of colonisation. With a classical narrative thread, Salem brings the question of the legacy of pain in the post-independence Algerian political system. This legacy is also the ghostly presence of France that Djaffar cannot escape.
Optional texts
Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism
Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other
Sankofa (1993), dir. Haile Gerima
Wednesday 25 May, 6.30pm
E003, Central Saint Martins
Introduced by Matt Phull
Haile Gerima’s 1993 film Sankofa represents one of most significant and radical attempts to address the horror of the transatlantic slave trade within cinema. Despite international acclaim upon release, the Ethiopian-produced film was - until very recently - unable to secure widespread distribution, leaving the LA-based and Ethiopian-born filmmaker to self-distribute and promote the film within the United States. Through the overlapping characters of Mona and Shola (both played by Oyafunmike Oguniano) the film transports the audience in space and time from the 1990’s Ghana of the film’s present day to a plantation within the Antebellum-era Southern United States and back again. Through this process of time travel – reminiscent of Octavia Butler’s classic novel on the same topic Kindred – the film charts the transformation of its protagonist Mona through her immersion within the history of slavery and her participation within a slave revolt as Shola.
The film resonates with Saidiya Hartman’s account of her own personal journey to Ghana in Lose Your Mother (2007) in which she seeks to connect to the lived historical experience of enslavement by visiting the slave dungeon of Elmina Castle - the site of Mona’s transformation into Shola within the film. For Hartman, the experience of slavery is simultaneously profoundly connected to the present day and epistemologically inaccessible to present-day subjects. This impasse can only be overcome via a form of historically restrained aesthetic speculation which Hartman calls ‘critical fabulation’. The speculative cinematic slave narrative of Sankofa might be considered to belong to such a tradition alongside Butler’s Kindred and Hartman’s own works. Less favorably, the film might also be reconsidered from the standpoint of an intersectional feminist critique. For example, Kara Keeling (2007) has criticised the way in the which the film circumscribes the limits of black radical female identity.
Optional texts
Hartman, S. (2007) ‘So Many Dungeons’ in Lose Your Mother. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Keeling, K. (2007). ‘In Order to Move Forward’ in The Witches Flight. Durham: Duke University Press
Bush Mama (1979), dir. Haile Gerima
Wednesday 1 June, 6pm
E003, Central Saint Martins
Introduced by Matt Phull
A landmark film in African American cinema, Bush Mama (1976) recounts the story of Dorothy (played by Barbara O. Jones), the wife of a victimised Vietnam veteran, T.C., and how her experience of state repression leads to her political radicalisation. Bush Mama was the thesis film of Haile Gerima while he was a U.C.L.A student and helped to establish him as a leading light of the L.A Rebellion Film Movement. These filmmakers sought to create a new black cinema in the late 1960’s against the backdrop of the Vietnam war, the Watts riots, and the emergence of the black radical politics. The film takes place within Watts and documents both the suffocating experience of a life besieged by routine state violence and the liberating potential of Black radicalism.
In his influential work Red, White and Black (2010) Frank B. Wilderson III argues that film reflects his ‘afropessimist’ view that Black experience is constituted through gratuitous violence. For Wilderson, the audio and cinematographic editing strategies of Gerima’s film are used to create a sense of Dorothy and T.C’s “absolute dereliction” that reflects the simultaneous exclusion of black life from US civil society and its imprisonment within White violence. Wilderson emphasises the aesthetic and political radicalism of the film as response to these conditions and its roots within the radical politics of the Black Liberation Army.
Optional texts
Moten, F . (2008) ‘The Case of Blackness’. Criticism, Volume 50, Number 2, Spring 2008, pp. 177-218