Remediating War: Vietnam In/On Film

We commemorate the fiftieth anniversaries of key works from the Film-Makers’ Coop that protested the Vietnam War during the 1960s. As hundreds of thousands across the country flocked to the streets to articulate their dissent, artists and filmmakers took up the mantle of the political avant-garde to seek out aesthetic forms adequate to the political demands of the age.

Highlighting the technique of re-mediation whereby found picture and sound are repurposed to unveil the ironies at the heart of official political discourse, this program likewise serves as an object lesson in impoverished, artisanal aesthetics that countermand the war machine’s technological super-production. We offer these as primers in radical aesthetics for an age that, as urgently as ever, demands avant-garde art’s alliance with movement politics.

Programmed by David Fresko

 

PROGRAM

Carolee Schneemann, Viet Flakes (1966/1967) 8 min.
Peter Gessner, Time of the Locust (1966) 13 min.
Stan Brakhage, Song XXIII: 23rd Psalm Branch, Part 1 (1966/1967) 33 min.
Fred Safran, Kill for Peace (1968) 3 min.