“Cinema of Resistance,” the dense, varied and timely series organized by Dennis Lim and co-programmed with filmmaker John Gianvito for the Film Society of Lincoln Center (as the opposite of light, summer fare) concludes August 29 with a program, titled “Occupy Wall Street and Beyond” that puts the events at Zuccotti Park two years ago and even the symbolic role of the West Side culture complex in a wider historical context.
The evening begins with Jack Smith’s three-minute “Scotch Tape”—antic doings amid the late ‘50s rubble on the site of the future Lincoln Center—as a sort of invocation of the muse, then jumps ahead a decade with three 1968 Newsreel bulletins, two of which concern the grounds on which they are being shown. “The Case Against Lincoln Center,” amplifies the Smith film by invoking the 20,000 mainly Latino families displaced by the massive clearance and construction; “Garbage” documents the most notorious demonstration of the 1968 sanitation strike with the anarchic Lower East Side SDS chapter Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers bringing boxes of uncollected refuse from their neighborhood uptown to what one manifesto called “the Pentagon of cultural oppression” on West 65th Street.
The program’s remaining films were shot in and around Zuccotti Park by Jem Cohen, Zoe Beloff, the Red Channels/Glass Bead collective and the Occupy Cinema collective; the filmmakers will participate in a panel discussion moderated by Rachael Rakes, Brooklyn Rail film editor, following the screening.
Image: Jem Cohen
