Get Rid of Yourself is a video-film-tract addressed to those who anonymously embody the return of political activism within Empire. While its initial sounds and images were filmed during the riots in Genoa, 2001, these materials are pulled apart and recomposed in order to locate the intensity of a shared experience, rather than producing one more documentary version of the programmed and hyper-mediatized confrontation of the G8 counter-summit. Elaborating a complex and rhythmic form of address via sound/image disjunctions, cheap video effects and performance, the film declares its own exile from a biopolitical space-time where nothing ever happens. The crisis it announces is the sudden return of history, but this time without characters or a story, and of a politics without subjects.
Provisionally aligning itself with the so-called Black Bloc' movement with the arrogance of its discourse as well as the force and style of their resistance Get Rid of Yourself is an encounter with emerging, non-instituted or identity-less forms of protest that refuse the representational politics of the official Left. Edited in the aftermath of 9/11 - a period of doubt, reflection and heightened security measures worldwide the film also attempts to measure the strange distance these events have crossed, and the increasing repression under which the feeling of civil war' has been buried in the meantime. A filmed essay that works by betraying its own form, Get Rid of Yourself tries to approach what is most open in an event, rather than capturing and completing it as something recognizable.
Bernadette Corporation
(2003, DV, 61 min, featuring Chloe Sevigny and Werner von Delmont)
Director: Shinkichi Tajiri |
Production Country: The Netherlands |
Year: 1955 |
Production Company: Unknown |
Film from the collection of EYE (Amsterdam) - www.eyefilm.nl
"The ritual of people who come together, make a joint, smoke it, become high and have fantasies. Tajiri and his wife Ferdi figure in the film together with Hy Hirsch (an American abstract artist) and his wife. The film also contains "found footage" from movie journals. The film got a lot of attention at the time."
"I wanted to make a short documentary-style film about marijuana and hashish, psychoactive drugs that in 1955 were still relatively unknown to the general public. They were mainly used by a small group of artists, jazz musicians, intellectuals, and North Africans."
"I wanted to visualize the ritual of rolling and lighting up a joint, and then put a series of seemingly unrelated images next to each other to represent the feeling of being high. When the movie was finished, we took it to the festival for 16mm films at Cannes, and won the Golden Lion for ‘Best Use of Film Language." (Shinkichi Tajiri, Tajiri, 1993)
A searing documentary looking at the pragmatics of what is called Austerity - "difficult economic conditions created by government measures to reduce public expenditure" - in the UK today.
The present UK Conservative Party government came to power in 2010 but even before that national financial policy favoured the rich over the poor for decades. In 2008 the Labor Government of Gordon Brown responded to the global credit crisis by giving billions of Pounds to the banks. Neoliberalism has been an entrenched defining element in government social, educational and cultural policies in the West since the 1980s. We are now just seeing the endgame of it play out amid economies that have little room to maneuver outside the neoliberal model. When wealth is so concentrated in the hands of those that control the majority of assets, then the majority of the population will be brought to a point of suffering that will only be comparable to feudal societies.
Documentary looking at the black market website known as the Silk Road, which emerged on the darknet in 2011. This 'Amazon of illegal drugs' was the brainchild of a mysterious, libertarian intellectual operating under the avatar The Dread Pirate Roberts. Promising its users complete anonymity and total freedom from government regulation or scrutiny, Silk Road became a million-dollar digital drugs cartel.
Homeland Security, the DEA, the FBI and even the Secret Service mounted multiple investigations in the largest online manhunt the world had ever seen. But it would be a young tax inspector from the IRS, who had grown up in the projects of Brooklyn, who would finally crack the case and unmask 'DPR'.
With unparalleled access, Silk Road is a thrilling cat-and-mouse crime story for the digital age, bristling with intrigue, mayhem... and murder.
In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto invented bitcoin and the blockchain. For the first time in history, his invention made it possible to send money around the globe without banks, governments or any other intermediaries. The concept of the blockchain isn’t very intuitive. But still, many people believe it is a game changer.
Economist and filmmaker Manuel Stagars portrays this exciting technology in interviews with software developers, cryptologists, researchers, entrepreneurs, consultants, VCs, authors, politicians, and futurists from the United States, Canada, Switzerland, the UK, and Australia.
The Blockchain and Us is no explainer video of the technology. It gives a view on the topic, makes it accessible and starts a conversation about its potential wider implications in a non-technical way. The film deliberately poses more questions than it answers.
Lars Thomsen
Chief Futurist & Founder, Future Matters
Zurich, Switzerland
Eric Van der Kleij
Founder Adeptra, London Tech City, Level39. Adviser UK Govt, Kickstart Accelerator
London, UK
Roger Wattenhofer
Professor, Distributed Computing Group, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH)
Zurich, Switzerland
Rik Willard
Founder & Managing Director, Agentic Group
New York, USA
Steve Wilson
Digital Identity Innovator & Analyst
Sydney, Australia
Additional conversations and special thanks (in alphabetical order): Iris Belle, Ben Bledsoe, Thomas Bromehead, Richard Cheng, Dario Duran, Marie Farrar Knowles, Olga Feldmeier, Sony Fricker, Daniel Gasteiger, Daniel Grassinger, Johs. Hoehener, Richard Kastelein, Leanne Kemp, Thomas Kern, Francine Klopfenstein, Veronica Lange, Claire LaRocca, Adriano B. Lucatelli, Christian Mäder, Ruedi Maeder, Luzius Meisser, Michael Monceaux, Martin Müller, Mia Mutic, Ian Petchenik, Nathaniel Popper, Ramon Quesada, Kamesh Raghavendra, Brian Rogers, Jouko Salonen, Vadim Shamigulov, Raffaela Stelzer, Don Tapscott, Elizabeth Wesson
Many thanks to all conversation partners and all others who made this film possible
Additional thanks (in alphabetical order): Agentic Group, Blockchain News, Blockstream, Bloq, Chamber of Digital Commerce, Constellation Research, Consult Hyperion, Cryptocash, Deloitte Switzerland, Ethereum Foundation, Everledger, Flightradar24, Future Matters, ISO-20022.ch, Lightning, Lockstep Consulting, Municipality of Zug, nexussquared, Northwest Passage Ventures, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Swiss Re, Symbiont, World Economic Forum (WEF), Zurich Airport
Recording of live air traffic courtesy of Flightradar24
Chinese subtitles: Richard Cheng
Dutch subtitles: Rein Jonkman
French translation: Thomas Bromehead
Portuguese subtitles: Caio Rearte
Russian subtitles: Vadim Shamigulov, Sergey Sevantsyan
Spanish subtitles: Jose Felip Daras and Avalbit.org team
Many thanks to all individuals and teams who contributed additional subtitles and translations.
Cinematography, Editing, Music, Narration & Sound Design by Manuel Stagars
The goal of this film is to encourage the conversation about the economic and social impacts of blockchain technology. Participate in the comments and subscribe to the channel to stay in the loop.
Witness the last days of the Beat poet whose works would capture the very essence of the 1960 counter-cultural movement in an informative documentary featuring Allen Ginsberg's final television interview as well as remarkable deathbed footage shot by underground cinema icon Jonas Mekas. In addition to candid discussions about everything from Ginsberg's personal life to his literary career, home movie footage of the Howl author as a child and archive footage allow contemporary fans to witness such landmark moments as his 1965 reading at Royal Albert Hall and chanting at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Previously unreleased footage of Ginsberg performing with Paul McCartney is also included, as are interviews with Dick Cavett and William Buckley, and the heartfelt memorial service in which Patti Smith bid her old friend a particularly poignant farewell. In the final sequence, Ginsberg invites filmmaker Mekas to his New York loft as he lies on his deathbed and prepares to embark on the ultimate adventure.
Cast (in alphabetical order)
Don Cox ... Himself
Allen Ginsberg ... Himself
Fred Hampton Jr. ... Himself
Fred Hampton ... Himself (archive footage)
Abbie Hoffman ... Himself
Deborah Johnston ... Herself
William Kunstler ... Himself
Timothy Leary ... Himself
Jerry Rubin ... Himself
Deborah Russell ... Herself
John Sinclair ... Himself
Episode 1: The Shock of the Other.
Millennium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World is a series of video programs by Harvard anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis. The 1992 documentary series was presented as 10 video programs, each 60 minutes long, and was released on VHS after being aired on public television. The series was designed to stimulate reflection and inspire a new look at what the modern world can learn from tribal societies as the millennium approached.
I watched Millennium when it was first shown on Australian television in 1992. It changed my life. I was 23.
"I'm here to tell you that apathy isn't it. And we can all do something if we try." ~ John Lennon
"I just considered it part of my job. If you were gonna be a revolutionary, you were gonna have to go to prison." ~ John Sinclair
John Sinclair is best known as the Sixties marijuana activist who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for giving two joints to an undercover policewoman. He was eventually freed when John Lennon and Yoko Ono spoke out on his behalf
Less understood is his role as the founder and chairman of the radical anti-war group, The White Panther Party, an offshoot of the Black Panthers. The Black Panther Party was a militant political organization formed after the brutal murders of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Robert Kennedy.
During the Cold War the US Government launched a secret program called COINTELPRO to disrupt and ultimately destroy the Black Panthers and the Anti-War movement. As part of this program, John Sinclair was set up and imprisoned on marijuana charges. When the government could no longer justify denying him a bond over two joints, they falsely charged him with a Federal conspiracy to blow up a CIA station, in order to make him disappear.
In this case we find the secret origins of so much that troubles us today, like: classifying dissidents as terrorists, or the use of warrantless wiretaps and indefinite detention. The things that were revealed during his case are what the US government would prefer history forget.
WHITE PANTHER: The Legacy of John Sinclair
a short film by CHARLES SHAW
featuring JOHN SINCLAIR
music by Thelonius Monk, Roy Harper & Jimmy Page, Jello Biafra & Mojo Nixon, Phil Ochs, Frijid Pink, Commander Cody, The Up
