Film as A Subversive Art @ Spectacle Theater 2/20

Film As a Subversive Art is a monthly screening series being put on by The New Inquiry and Spectacle Theater in honor of Amos Vogel’s book of the same title. Published in 1974, Film As a Subversive Art came out just as the art of subversion was slipping from daily American practice. But as we find ourselves in another period of global ferment, and in tribute to Vogel's death in April of last year, we've been looking at films from Vogel's revolutionary history of cinema with a particular question in mind: what, if anything, can film do?

This month, we'll be looking at films from his "Third World Revolutionary Cinema" section. So far in the series we've mostly witnessed aesthetic subversions, from dadaist attacks on art to structuralist attacks on subjectivity. This month's program will feature way more attacks on capitalists.

Join us for a night of Marxist manifestos, machete fights, tutorials in jungle guerrilla tactics, exposes of bourgeois decadence, dialectical editing processes, riots, AK-47s, peasant uprisings, and weaponized cinema. We'll be watching films from Brazil, Cuba, and Argentina, including one of the only films in history to start a riot directly from a screening.

There will be two screenings, one at 7:30 and one at 10:00PM, each featuring different films and introductions by New Inquiry editor Willie Osterweil and members of the Anti-Banality Union, the filmmakers behind Unclear Holocaust and the upcoming Police Mortality.

Wednesday, February 20
Spectacle Theater
124 S. 3rd st
Brooklyn, NY
7:30, 10pm
$5