SLIP OF THE TONGUE > ADRIEL LUIS
Spoken Word Poem written by and performed by Adriel Luis
Directed and Edited by Karen Lum
Starring Karen Lum and William Tsang
Filmed by Karen Lum, Andrew Baxter, German E. Rodriguez
Shot entirely in my hometown of Oakland, CA in the Summer of 2005
Check out the poet, Adriel Luis, at http://drzzl.com.
ThE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED > BLACK ICE
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
Performed by BLACK ICE.
Inspired by the Motion Picture Free Angela and All Political Prisoners
FREE ANGELA is a feature-length documentary about Angela Davis.
The high stakes crime, political movement, and trial that catapults the 26 year-old newly appointed philosophy professor at the University of California at Los Angeles into a seventies revolutionary political icon. Nearly forty years later, and for the first time, Angela Davis speaks frankly about the actions that branded her as a terrorist and simultaneously spurred a worldwide political movement for her freedom.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Produced by Desmond ‘DSP Powell for DSP Operations in association with ArtistLive LLC.
Written and co-produced by Black Ice
SCIENTOLOGY > Jamie DeWolf
NPR’s Snap Judgment Performance of the YEAR! Snap Judgment veteran Jamie DeWolf smashes against a towering family legacy with a breathtaking performance.
Original score by composed by Alex Mandel. Performed by Alex Mandel and the Snap Judgment Playaz (David Brandt and Tim Frick).
Film Editing by Will Urbina.
Snap Judgment Productions. All Rights Reserved. http://www.SnapJudgment.org
TO BE A POET > Warrior Poet
“To Be A Poet” by the Warrior Poet
“To be a poet is to wake up every morning and file the callouses from your senses. You scrub them until they are so raw that your familiar lover smells of lust and danger, a cup of coffee is like a warm hug from an old friend, and morning sunshine still tickles with the light of unmanifested dreams.
Stephen Dunn says, “All good poems are victories over something.” The poet trades 1000 days of idle leisure for any adventure. A chance at victory. A chance that their entire life can be an epic poem that echoes in the halls of eternity.
If on this path a poet suffers a tragedy, she does not claw in panic from the depths of despair. She breathes… and digs deeper. For she knows that her only salvation is on the other side of that hole, where there are no demons left unmasked, and no poisonous tears unspilled.
To be a poet is to have one true enemy with many names. Emptiness, numbness, apathy. When a poet feels these things he throws himself into a passion, a challenge, a fight, a dance, anything to make him feel. He despises those ameliorates that dull his senses, and heralds that which fuels his fire. And if that which fuels his fire is fire itself, he cares not. For as Soren Kierkegaard says, “A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.”
A poet can express unimaginable joy, but he never brags. A poet can express unimaginable heartbreak, but he never complains. A poet is a tuning fork that resounds the human experience, and Fortune herself, the striker.
The difference between a poet and a soldier, is that the soldier’s heart is full of scars armored in Spartan red. Whatever pain he might feel, whatever innocence he may carry is guarded by his impenetrable ethos. A poet goes to life without armor because he knows only when you are vulnerable to injury are you susceptible to bliss.
Walt Whitman wrote the prayer for the soul of a poet. “Sail Forth- Steer for the deep waters only. Reckless O soul, exploring. I with thee and thou with me. For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared go. And we will risk the ship, ourselves, and all.”
What is life then, but one grand adventure, one epic poem? To be a poet is to embrace the story of your life as it unfolds. To play the hero, to fall in love, to have your heart broken, to fall in love again, again, again, to fail, to despair, to inspire… To be a poet is to live.”
SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE > GUY DEBORD
Not exactly a poem, more a tour de force of revolutionary conceptual explorations through words and image by French Situationist philosopher Guy Debord. This film pioneered a technique of video montage we might now call a ‘mashup’, in a complex and challenging prose that explores the relationship between society, culture, politics, art, media, and the abstraction of values that becomes almost a riddle of it’s own self. It is a manifesto in the form of experimental video. Philosophy presented so originall it almost becomes one extended theoretical poem. Almost.
“On the Society of the Spectacle (Original Announcement for the Film)”
Until now it has generally been assumed that film is a completely unsuitable medium for presenting revolutionary theory. This view was mistaken. The lack of any serious attempts in this direction stemmed simply from the historical lack of a modern revolutionary theory during virtually the entire period of the cinema’s development; as well as from the fact that the potentials of cinematic composition, despite so many declarations of intent on the part of filmmakers and so much feigned satisfaction on the part of a miserable public, have as yet scarcely been liberated.
Published in 1967, The Society of the Spectacle is a book whose theoretical insights have profoundly influenced the new current of social critique that is now more and more openly undermining the established world order. Its present cinematic adaptation, like the book itself, does not offer a few partial political critiques, but a total critique of the existing world; that is, a critique of all aspects of modern capitalism and of its general system of illusions.
The cinema is itself an integral part of this world, serving as one of the instruments of the separate representation that opposes and dominates the actual proletarianized society. As revolutionary critique engages in battle on the very terrain of the cinematic spectacle, it must thus turn the language of that medium against itself and give itself a form that is itself revolutionary.
The text and images of this film form a coherent whole; but the images are never mere direct illustrations of the text, much less demonstrations of it (cinematic “demonstrations” are in any case never reliable due to the unlimited possibilities of manipulation offered by the unilateral editing of the material). Instead, the film’s use of images (whether photographs, newsclips, or sequences from preexisting films) is governed by the principle of détournement, which the situationists have defined as “communication that includes a critique of itself.” The images through which spectacular society presents itself to itself are taken and turned against it: the spectacle’s means should be treated with insolence. As a result, in a certain sense this film, coming at the end of the cinema’s pseudo-autonomous history, incorporates all the memories of that history. It can thus be seen simultaneously as a historical film, a Western, a love story, a war movie, etc. Like the society it examines, it also presents a number of comical aspects. In talking about the spectacular order, and about the commodity domination that it serves, one is also talking about what this order hides: class struggles and strivings toward real historical life, revolution and its past failures, and the responsibilities for those failures. Nothing in this film is made to please the fashionable blockheads of leftist cinema: it has equal contempt for what they respect and for the style in which they express that respect. One who is capable of understanding and denouncing an entire socio-economic formation will denounce it even in a film. Objections to our “extremism” are meaningless, because current history is already on the verge of going beyond the most extreme possibilities imagined.
Theses that have never before been presented in the cinema will now appear there in a never before seen form, simply because for the first time a filmmaker has undertaken an uncompromising critique.
In the socio-economic context, the total freedom required to create such a film obviously means that the producer must renounce any claim to exert any preliminary control over the director, whether by insisting that he present a synopsis or by seeking to obtain from him any other sort of meaningless commitment. This has been recognized in the contract between the filmmaker and the producer, Simar Films: “It is understood that the filmmaker will carry out his work in complete freedom, without any control or supervision whatsoever, and without even being obliged to pay the slightest attention to any comment that the producer might make regarding any aspect of the content or of the cinematic form that the filmmaker feels appropriate for his film.”
Considering that this film itself expresses its meaning in a sufficiently comprehensible manner, the producer and the filmmaker believe that it is unnecessary to provide any further explanations.
1974
bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/spectacle-announcement.htm
SLAM TV 