November 29, 2021
Join us on e-flux Video & Film on Monday, November 29 for the repeat screenings and wrap of Unreformable, a six-part program of films and essays put together by artist Adelita Husni Bey as the eighth edition of the online series Artist Cinemas.
Unreformable has featured films by Silvano Agosti, Andreas Hernandez, Khaled Jarrar, Sarah Minter, Adriana Monti, and Narciso Ibáñez Serrador; in conversation with Adelita Husni Bey, Dora Budor, Christina Chalmers and Lea Melandri, Olivia Crough, and Ciarán Finlayson.
The films will stream through Tuesday, November 30, noon EST. Watch them here.
Artist Cinemas presents Unreformable
Convened by Adelita Husni Bey
Silvano Agosti, D’amore si vive (We Live of Love), 1983
93 minutes
With an interview with Silvano Agosti conducted by Adelita Husni Bey
Adriana Monti, Scuola senza fine (School Without End), 1983
40 minutes
With an interview with Lea Melandri conducted by Christina Chalmers
Sarah Minter, Nadie es inocente (No One is Innocent), 1987
57 minutes
With a text response by Olivia Crough
Andreas Hernandez, Soil, Struggle and Justice, 2014
73 minutes
With an interview with Andreas Hernandez conducted by Adelita Husni Bey
Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, ¿Quién puede matar a un niño (Who Can Kill a Child?), 1976
111 minutes
With a text response by Dora Budor
Khaled Jarrar, Infiltrators, 2012
70 minutes
With a text response by Ciarán Finlayson
About the program
“The films in this program are held together by a refusal of innocence: a refusal of containment, of neutralization, and of a morality grounded in the exemplary goodness and docility of its subjects. The subjects of these films have been expropriated and some expropriate in return. In Quién puede matar a un niño?, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s island is populated by children who kill adults and cops after being subjected to war. Through Lea Melandri’s “150 hours” course in Adriana Monti’s Scuola senza fine, a mother comes to understand herself as both warden of her child and prisoner of her own motherhood. Frank, the eight-year-old boy interviewed by Silvano Agosti in D’amore si vive, decries the world he was born into and declares “making love” as a clear-eyed act of defiance against the prison of salaried work he is yet to experience. In Sarah Minter’s Nadie es inocente, a group of teenage punks rebuke orders and the conscriptions of “normality.” Palestinian youth refuse an imposed and militarized border in Khaled Jarrar’s Infiltrators, just as members of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Andreas Hernandez’s Soil, Struggle and Justice refuse the expropriation of waged labor, dispossession, and poverty through occupying latifundios.
If innocence is the precondition for care in liberal societies—whereby an imagined purity and passivity are necessary attributes of social cohesion and order, and unruly expressions of rage are immediately othered and violently repressed—then one has to be unthreatening in order to appeal to a liberal politics of recognition. Yet the subjects of these films commit criminal acts, oneirically and practically, against history, against their assigned roles, against super-exploitation and arbitrary confinement. For them, following Genet, the position of the unreformed is the only position.” (Read the full text here.)
Unreformable is a program convened by Adelita Husni Bey as part of the series Artist Cinemas. It ran for six weeks from October 18–to November 28, 2021, screening a new film each week accompanied by a commissioned interview or response published in text form.
Unreformable wraps on Monday, November 29 with a repeat screening of all six films presented in the program, streaming thorugh Tuesday, November 30, noon EST. Watch the films here.
About Artist Cinemas
Artist Cinemas is a new e-flux platform focusing on exploring the moving image as understood by people who make film. It is informed by the vulnerability and enchantment of the artistic process—producing non-linear forms of knowledge and expertise that exist outside of academic or institutional frameworks. It will also acknowledge the circles of friendship and mutual inspiration that bind the artistic community. Over time this platform will trace new contours and produce different understandings of the moving image.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
