Screening and discussion: Marion von Osten and Matt Peterson

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, March 2 at 7pm for a screening of Marion von Osten’s video Camera Running! A Small Post-Fordist Drama (2003), and of selected films by Matt Peterson followed by a discussion between Peterson and Joscelyn Jurich. 

The films in this screening offer a critique of contemporary capitalism and its impact on the lives and careers of ordinary people. Works shown explore the themes of alienation, precarity, the search for meaning, and strategies of resistance in an urbanized world that is increasingly defined by economic imperatives.

This screening constitutes the third event of“Communities, Labor, and Class Relations,” the third chapter of the four-part series Aesthetics of Resistance: Straub-Huillet and Contemporary Moving-Image Art taking place at e-flux Screening Room in monthly chapters between December 2022 and March 2023. Read more on the series here.

Aesthetics of Resistance: Straub-Huillet and Contemporary Moving-Image Art is produced and organized by e-flux; with the support of the German Film Office, an initiative of the Goethe-Institut and German Films.

Films

Marion von Osten, Brigitta Kuster, Isabell Lorey, and Katja Reichard, Camera Running! A Small Post-Fordist Drama (2003, 32 minutes)
Camera Running! A Small Post-Fordist Drama examines the transformation of cultural activities and the careers associated with them. Simultaneity and alternation of non-paid, low-paid, and “normally” paid activities that are never socially secured is approached as precarization as well as social positioning. The project is based on the numerous interviews about changing working conditions that were conducted with cultural producers in Berlin, which led to a video where actors reenacted the stories of the interviewees. The interviews staged for the camera revolve around questions such as daily life, forms of desire, and the perspectives of working days that are supposed to be as flexible and autonomous as possible. As a result, precarious living and working conditions in creative contexts can be understood as models of neoliberal self-entrepreneurship. 

Selected films by Matt Peterson and collaborators
The selection includes a trilogy of Red Channels videos made during the spring and summer of 2011, in anticipation of what would become Occupy Wall Street—experimental agitprop documents of guerrilla street theater actions. Then, from ten years later, a piece on Woodbine’s mutual aid organizing and move into their new space, as well as a portrait by William Jourdan and Matt Peterson of Ben Morea, where he discusses Black Mask and the Motherfuckers, and their collective actions at Lincoln Center, MoMA, and Woodstock.
Films:
Red Channels and Glass Bead, From Wall Street to Wall Street to Wall Street (2011, 4 minutes)
Red Channels, Ø (2011, 4 minutes)
Red Channels, La Commune (2011, 8 minutes)
Woodbine, Mutual Aid in Ridgewood, Queens (2021, 5 minutes)
Matt Peterson and Brandon Jourdan, We Seek a Total Revolution (2021, 9 minutes)

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility            
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue. 
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.          
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.