A much needed reunion of minds and hearts took place at Barrios Unidos and 418 Project, hosted by Irene Gustafson, Hannah Jayanti and Irene Lusztig for the Poetics + Politics symposium May 14-17th, supported by UC Santa Cruz.
The theme for the fifth edition of Poetics + Poetics: This intentionally broad theme aims to engender a space of open dialogue about the interplay of aesthetics, politics, and history as they emerge in our various and discrete practices, commitments, regions and contexts. What are ‘poetics’ in the politics of now? Or, what are the ‘politics’ of the poetics of now? What is ‘now’? How are the pervasive topics that tend to cluster around documentary (realism, fidelity, responsibility, ethics, representation) animated or challenged or changed by this contemporary moment? What work does documentary do, and what can it do, in a media space increasingly dominated by altered images and facts? In a world increasingly shaped by the forces of financialization and nationalism? What could investing in form and poetics do in a moment like this?
Miko Revereza gave a memorable keynote address, with a live virtual presentation. We watched him attempt a time travel experiment to be in the cinema space with us through a loophole he would create using analog and digital electronic, communication, travel, and monetary devices, along with boundless humor and wit.
I moderated the last session, Common Threads, with Ernest Larsen, Sherry Millner, Alex Johnston, Jeanne C. Finley.
Through practices of engaged collaboration, this panel imagines how filmmaking can enact care and relationship building processes. In a presentation on their in-progress experimental essay film, Uprooted, Larsen and Millner reflect upon the “complex, anti-authoritarian poetics, rooted in and uprooted from the multiply determining contexts” in which the film and the filmmakers themselves are embedded. Johnston explores the intimate nature of his in progress film, Cozy Cuddly, Armed and Dangerous: A Film with the George Jackson Brigade. His presentation considers the film’s acts of relational and political entanglement and ponders the ways we learn and listen and teach and love one another amidst historical periods of dislocation, isolation, and precarity. An extended meditation on the necessary and complex nature of hope– as an orientation of the heart– Finley will discuss her latest documentary A Radical Thread. (P+P program notes)
Jeanne Finley presents on her latest documentary A Radical Thread.
Alex Johnston presents his work-in-progress Cozy Cuddly, Armed and Dangerous: A Film with the George Jackson Brigade.
Sherry Millner and Ernest Larsen present How Do Animals and Plants Live? about a microhistory of a migrant/anarchist/communist self-organized squat Orfanotrofeio, the site of an abandoned orphanage, attacked by police (upon the orders of Syriza–and the Orthodox Church, owner of the building) with dozens of migrants evicted, many activists arrested, and the building immediately bulldozed to the ground. So then: migrants not as helpless victims, but as activists, attempting to create new alternatives for living together.
My questions for the filmmakers:
How do filmmakers’, perhaps “poetic and political”, relationship to their subjects inform the form or documentary techniques employed?
For your featured works, how does the language of connection–whether cinematic, linguistic, translated–contribute to documentary poetics and politics?
Discuss the temporal aesthetics of your works (what moving images do best) that link critical documentary poetics and politics for our times.
(Photos by Anita Chang, Tosh Tanaka, Rebecca Ora)