December 13, 2017, 7pm
311 East Broadway
New York, NY 10002
USA
As a special send off for 2017, we are pleased to invite you to a screening and live broadcast of Comunismo Futuro, a vertiginous film journey through the twentieth century directed by Andrea Gropplero and narrated by Franco “Bifo” Berardi. The screening will mark the film’s New York as well as online premiere—the first in a series of art films and video works to be presented on the new e-flux Video & Film platform.
In the year 2017, we dwell in a spiral of decomposition.
Visual stimulations proliferate. Recording devices are hidden in every niche of planet Earth. We can see everything, therefore we see nothing. We can know everything, therefore we know nothing. Is ignorance strength?
A hundred years after the Soviet Revolution, our present appears as a panicked acceleration wherein critical reflection, political decision, and rational government are incapacitated. If there is a global mind, it is located in the visual and psychic dimension of chaos.
The film Comunismo Futuro is a vertiginous journey through the twentieth century, whose trajectory is retraced twice: first from the point of view of the Russian Revolution of 1917; then again through the twenty-first century spiral of folly.
The narrator of these journeys is Franco Berardi, aka “Bifo,” who in his youth experienced the happy vertigo of 1968 before plunging into punk and cyberpunk dystopian nightmares.
Drawing from Russian and Italian archives (i.e. those of the Workers’ movement and the Istituto Luce-Cinecittà), and from multiple sources of contemporary media activism, director Andrea Gropplero—in collaboration with Paolo Marzoni—has composed a chaos-film: a dynamic recombinant visual object.
Previously recognized images of the twentieth century, pulverized through the media-art kaleidoscope, are recomposed here in a fluid cut of charged visual fragments and memes.
The film—a “bifography” of its visionary storyteller, a plunder-film rich with marks of the Russian avant-garde of the 20s, Futurist animation, and proto-punk visual poetry of the 70s—anticipates the future cinema: a permanent recombination of fragments proceeding from the datascape of cyberspace.
Gropplero, who recently took part in the occupation of the Teatro Valle in Rome, opens a surprising window of possibility: after the failure of the previous century, communism is coming back. It is the only possible re-composition of social solidarity after this trumping age of chaos.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.