Program III: EMPIRE

Or, Power Is the World's Most Potent Aphrodisiac.
(73.30' total running time)

N.ew Y.ork C.asino

Kyle Henry,
4', Super 8/ DV, 2002, USA

Las Vegas comes to Manhattan. The voices of the gods of Times Square demand unconditional worship and Platinum VISAs.

Kyle Henry (www.mccollege.org) is a filmmaker, political activist, writer and editor from Texas. N.ew Y.ork C.asino won Best Experimental short at the South By South West Film Festival, in Austin.

Little Flags

Jem Cohen,
6:30', Super 8/BETA, 2000, USA

Everyone loves a parade, except for the dead... A chronicle of a crowd in a 1991 Gulf War victory parade. The human face of exultant empire: full of pride and cheer, but also lonesome, surrounded by an enormous mess that someone will have to sweep up. Soundtrack by Fugazi.

Jem Cohen' s work blurs the distinctions between documentary, narrative and experimental, creating what Time Out London called "a hypnotic, fugitive poetry of the everyday." Instrument, his ten- year collaboration with the band Fugazi was selected for the 2000 Whitney Biennial.

Human Remains

Jay Rosenblatt,
25', 16mm, 1999, USA.

On the surface, an archival footage essay on the private lives of public men. In essence, a scathing examination of power. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin, Mao. Eating habits, pets, hygiene, bowel movements. The great dictators tell us more than we ever wanted to know...
San Francisco-based Jay Rosenblatt has been working as an independent filmmaker since 1980 and has been one of the most celebrated, award winning short format filmmakers in the U.S.

LBJ

Santiago Alvarez,
18', 16mm/BETA, 1968, Cuba
(Print courtesy of Travis Wilkerson)

A stunning piece of visual and musical montage reaching a high pitch of political satire. The film's three sections correspond to President Johnson's initials: Luther, as in Martin Luther King; Bob, as in Robert Kennedy; and Jack or John, his brother. A bold play on the strange coincidence that the corpses of these three men littered Johnson's ascent into presidency.
In a film career which spanned from 1959 until his death in 1998, at the age of 79, Santiago Alvarez directed nearly 700 films. As the director of the Cuban Film Institute's (ICAIC) newsreel division, he supervised, for thirty years, the production of nearly 1500 weekly newsreels, transforming a banal, utilitarian genre to a laboratory of radical innovation.

The Zapruder Footage: An Investigation of Consensual Hallucination

Keith Sanborn,
20', Super 8/DV, 1999, USA

Various permutations of the Zapruder footage, the notorious amateur movie taken of the assassination of JFK. Intended as an investigation of the footage as visual, experiential, and cultural document, it implodes the spectacle of the world's most famous assassination as a fetish object.
Keith Sanborn has been working in film, photography, and digital media since the late 1970s. His work has appeared at festivals, museums and media arts centers worldwide. He has translated several of the films of Guy Debord, Rene Vienet, and Gil Wollman into English.