Economies of Love
Admission:
General $10
Student $7
June 26, 2025, 7pm
Brooklyn 11205
USA
Join us on Thursday, June 26 at 7pm at e-flux Screening Room for “Before the Storm,” the fourth installment of Economies of Love, presenting Shinji Sōmai’s Typhoon Club (1985) and Jordan Strafer’s No Spank (2024).
How do young people endure the structures designed to contain them? Within spaces where time is regimented, desire is policed, and emotion is disciplined, adolescent defiance takes shape under pressure, morphing into a spontaneous refusal.
Set against the backdrop of Japan’s economic boom in the 1980s, Typhoon Club captures a young generation’s quiet unrest through moments of disorientation, fragile emotion, and suspension of time. In parallel, No Spank unfolds as a choreography of discipline and withholding, turning a girls’ boarding school into a space of constraint where meaning circulates through postures and gestures of disobedience. Together, the films examine how bodily proximity under regimes of control does not create relation, but sets the stage for its possible eruption.
Economies of Love is a series that examines how love is shaped by labor, technology, and power—structured by economies of care and exchange, mediated through digital and urban infrastructures, and regulated by shifting social and political contexts—while also being a force for subversion and transformation within these very structures. You can find more information and view the archive of the previous screenings here.
Films
Shinji Sōmai, Typhoon Club (1985, 115 minutes)
Winner of the Grand Prix at the first Tokyo International Film Festival in 1985, Typhoon Club is widely regarded as the seminal film of director Shinji Sōmai’s career. A work of raw, elemental power, it follows an ensemble of junior high students in a provincial town, beset by summery malaise as a typhoon looms. When the storm makes landfall, the teens find themselves holed up in their school unsupervised, while another classmate disappears alone on a harrowing trek to the big city. Set adrift in a world suddenly unmoored, the students let loose their pent-up angst and burgeoning passions in a series of propulsive, phantasmic scenes—part apocalypse, part utopia—as the deluge rages on into the night. Observed in daring long takes, director Sōmai gives material form to the students’ turbulent inner lives. When day breaks and the rains let up, the youngsters open their eyes to a world in ruins—or a world renewed.
Jordan Strafer, No Spank (2024, 10 minutes)
A dark coming-of-age tale on a remote Greek island that doubles as a strictly regimented girls’ school, capturing the frustrations, rebellions, and body horror of adolescence through the artist’s trademark mise-en-scène and taciturn performances.
For more information, contact program [at] 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[at]e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave (garage door) leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.
