On August 18th, TNI teamed up with Spectacle Theater to present a night of cop movies in celebration of our new magazine issue. We were able to get our hands on an extremely rare Keystone short with a Charlie Chaplin cameo as one of the Kops. The film had been rumored to exist, but no surviving copies were seen until two years ago, when film historian Paul Gierucki discovered a reel in a Michigan garage sale.
Protect and Serve by Ben Shapiro and Greg Eggebeen, however, brought down the house. Billed as a compilation of "golden-age police procedural tutorials, self-defense training vids, and the most nightmarish amateur footage of macings, beatdowns, and brutal assaults ever captured by the public," Protect and Serve helped demonstrate the symmetry between fictional narratives of policing from the dawn of cinema and the narratives that police themselves produce in training their officers to become cops.
Not everyone who we wished would have seen the movie could make it to Brooklyn, so Greg and Ben have graciously allowed us to share Protect and Serve here at TNI A/V.