WAR! PROTEST IN AMERICA Film Series at Whitney Museum, NYC

WHITNEY FILM SERIES: WAR! PROTEST IN AMERICA 1965 - 2004
August 25 - October 24

In the 1960s a new generation, disillusioned with authority and motivated by the political and social turbulence of the times, became engaged with civil rights, black power, personal liberation and political action. 'War! Protest in America 1965 - 2004' brings together a group of films addressing one of the key issues around which this unrest revolved: the Vietnam War. Some of the filmmakers included in "War!" demonstrated solidarity with a new, collectivized political filmmaking centered around the New York and San Francisco Newsreels (later known as Third World Newsreel). In many cases their anonymously produced films challenged the hierarchy of television news reportage and 'professional' documentary filmmaking, capturing testimony and interview material with controversial and sometimes shocking content. Filmmakers such as Emile de Antonio, Beryl Fox, Jean-Luc Godard and D.A. Pennebaker captured similarly raw, controversial footage, creating iconic independent documentaries whose anti-war statements of protest and civic unrest came to define the period. A section of the program is devoted to experimental films protesting the Vietnam war, by filmmakers including Paul Sharits, Stan Brakhage, and Carolee Schneemann. The series also includes Not in Our Name, in which artists including Richard Serra, Lawrence Weiner, Martha Rosler and Leon Golub are filmed by Brigitte Cornand on the eve of the Iraq War, and Julie Talen's 'Sixty Cameras Against the War', in which sixty independently filmed documents of the New York march against the Iraq War in March 2003 are edited together to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of a demonstration split apart by barricades.

MEMORIALS OF WAR
Concurrent with the film series 'War! Protest in America 1965 - 2004', 'Memorials of War', an exhibition of prints, sculpture and photographs from the Whitney Museum's permanent collection, brings together works made by artists from the 1960s to the present addressing the issue of war and memory. Chris Burden's 'America's Darker Moments' (1994) and Robert Morris's lithograph series 'War Memorials' (1970) are shown alongside Jon Haddock's 'Children Fleeing Napalm Strike, Modified (1972), Sigmund Abeles' Vietnam Series: Helicopters' (1967) and Edward Kienholz's assemblage 'The Non War Memorial' comprising an American mud-filled soldier's uniform from Vietnam. Vik Muniz's blurred image in 'Memory Rendering of Kent State Shootings' (1988-90) evokes the elusive state of memory itself. Curated by David Kiehl, curator of Prints and Special Collections


CONTINUOUS SCREENINGS: One long program of films repeated each day:
Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Sundays
SPECIAL WEEKEND SCREENINGS on Saturdays (listed below)

DAILY CONTINUOUS SCREENINGS
WEDNESDAY AUGUST 26 - SUNDAY OCTOBER 24

11.30am
PROTEST
Third World Newsreel, America, 1969, 30 min.
Teenagers, Vietnam veterans and Black militants express frustration with the escalating war in Vietnam, interwoven with footage of police brutality and war to a background of 1960s rock classics, including the lyrics "America, where are you now?"

Brigitte Cornand, Not in Our Name, 2003, 62 min.
Cornand interviews Lawrence Weiner, Richard Serra, Martha Rosler, Leon Golub, Rob Storr, Edouard Glissant and Jonas Mekas on the eve of America's war in Iraq.

Third World Newsreel, Resist - with Chomsky, 1968, 12 min.
A rare look at Noam Chomsky in the late 1960s as he speaks candidly about the war in Vietnam.

Third World Newsreel, No Game, 1968, 17 min.
In October 1967, 100,000 people marched on Washington demanding an end to the Vietnam war. A number of filmmakers pooled their footage to produce this documentation of a peaceful march that ended in the occupation of the grounds of the Pentagon.


2pm
WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?
Third World Newsreel, Only the Beginning, 1971, 20 min.
In April 1971, thousands of GIs came to Washington D.C. to protest the Vietnam war. They stood in front of the U.S. Capitol and threw away their medals. Told from the veterans' point of view, the film examines the conditions that led many decorated but disillusioned veterans to their dramatic action.

STATE OF THE NATION
Richard Myers, Pat Myers, Jake Leed, Mary Leed, Robert Olrich, Carla Olrich, Mel Someroski and Mike Tarr, Confrontation at Kent State , 1971, 43 min.
On May 4 1970 four students on Kent State University campus were shot to death and others wounded. This film, made by members of the faculty and student body, documents this confrontation, including interviews with the National Guard, people in the town of Kent, and students.

Richard Myers, Allison, 1970, 7 min.
A portrait of Allison Krause, one of the four students murdered at Kent State by the Ohio National Guard, from footage Myers and others had unknowingly filmed of Krause during student demonstrations.

4pm
Julie Talen, Sixty Cameras Against the War, 2004, 110 min.
Sixty cameras independently filming the New York march against the war in Iraq in February 2003 are gathered by Talen into a kaleidoscopic portrait of a demonstration split apart by barricades.


PLEASE NOTE: The DAILY SCREENING PROGRAM (see above) will also be shown on Saturday, August 28 and Saturday, September 4 (Labor Day). The following special Saturday screenings veer from the regular daily screening schedule.


SATURDAY SCREENINGS

Saturday September 11

Noon
SUMMER '68
Norman Fruchter and John Douglas, Summer '68, 1969, 60 min.
An alternative documentary reporting the protest activities surrounding the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, including the growth of G.I. coffee houses and the resistance to the draft.

2pm
YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION
Albert Alotta, Peacemeal, 1967, color, sound, 7 1/2 min.
A poetic study of an anti-war rally.

Third World Newsreel, Yippie, 1968, 10 min.
An irreverent official statement by the Youth International Party on the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, featuring the pig the Yippies ran for president. A satirical addressing of police brutality reveals an undercurrent of deep anger.

Third World Newsreel, Boston Draft Resistance Group, 1968, 18 min.
A profile of a grass-roots anti-war group in Boston that documents the tactics of draft resistance groups across the country during the Vietnam war.

Lenny Lipton, We Shall March Again, 1965, 8 min.
David Ringo, March on the Pentagon, 1968, b/w, sound, 20 1/2 min.
Leonard Henny, Black Power - We're Goin' Survive America!, 1969, 15 min.
Three experimental films documenting the anti-war marches of the 1960s and the Black Power movement's protest against discrimination, war and racism.


Saturday September 18
Noon
EXPERIMENTAL FILMMAKERS AGAINST WAR
Paul Sharits, Piece Mandala/End War, 1966, b/w and color, silent, 5 min.
Stan Vanderbeek, Poem Field no. 7, 1966/1969, 4 min.
Storm de Hirsch, Trap Dance, 1968, b/w, sound, 1 1/2 min.
"End War" flashes out of Paul Sharits' violently pulsating mandala; Stan Vanderbeek's computer-patterns animate the poem "There is no way to peace - peace is the way", with soundtrack by John Cage; Storm de Hirsch creates a protest film of black and white gestural marks.

Carolee Schneemann, Viet Flakes, 1965, b/w, sound, 11 min. Sound collage by James Tenney.
Composed of Vietnam atrocity photographs from newspapers and magazines, Schneemann's disturbing collage film was a central element of her kinetic theatre piece 'Snows' of 1966, expressing moral outrage at the endless destruction.

Andy Warhol Chelsea Girls, 1966, reels 5 ("Hanoi Hannah"), and 6 ("Hannoi Hannah and Guests"), 38 min.
The increasing American military involvement in Vietnam seeped into the thinking of artists and filmmakers everywhere. In this section of Chelsea Girls, Mary Woronov plays the Vietnam anti-war radio announcer Hannoi Hannah in Ronald Tavel's play.

2pm
NEWS FROM THE FRONT
Howard Lester, One Week in Vietnam, ? min.
The published photographs of all the American soldiers lost during one week in Vietnam flash past in a numbered countdown reaching 150.

Hollis Frampton, Apparatus Sum (Studies for Magellan #1), 1972, 2 1/2 min.
A poetic study of the body in death.

Stan Brakhage, Song 23: 23rd Psalm Branch, Parts 1 & 2 , 1966/1978, 85 min.
Brakhage's most political film, Song 23 is a meditation on war, a response to Vietnam, "an apolcalypse of the imagination". (P.Adams Sitney).


Saturday September 25
Noon
NO VIETNAMESE EVER CALLED ME NIGGER
David Loeb Weiss, 1968, b/w, sound, 68 min.
Filmed at the Harlem Fall Mobilization March against the war in 1967, three African American Vietnam veterans discuss the relationship between the racism they encountered in the army, the poverty and discrimination of the ghetto, and war.

2pm
THE MILLS OF THE GODS
Beryl Fox, 1965, 55 min.
Fox's seminal film, one of the earliest documentaries on Vietnam, commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, includes candid interviews with young GIs and pilots, intercut with the devastation they caused, in one of the most penetrating documents of the Vietnam war.

ONE PM
Jean-Luc Godard, Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker, 1972, color, sound, 95 min.
On the eve of what he predicted would be a revolution in the United States, Jean-Luc Godard embarked on a collaborative project with American documentarists Leacock and Pennebaker in 1968 in Chicago. The project was abandoned and the footage edited by Leacock and Pennebaker into "One PM" ("One Perfect Movie"), in which the Jefferson Airplane, Rip Torn, Eldridge Cleaver and others articulate the attitude of a young generation towards the political system in America at the end of the 1960s.

Saturday 2 October
Noon
SUMMER '68

2pm
IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG
Emile de Antonio, 1969, 101 min.
Widely considered a masterpiece, this raw documentary, including archive footage, interviews by de Antonio and a soundtrack by a student of John Cage, traces the origins of the Vietnam war, making an impassioned argument for its futility and moral tragedy.

Saturday 9 October
Noon
EXPERIMENTAL FILMMAKERS AGAINST WAR

2pm
NEWS FROM THE FRONT


Saturday 16 October
Noon
IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG

2pm
ONE PM

4PM
NO VIETNAMESE EVER CALLED ME NIGGER


Saturday 23 October
Noon
YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION

2pm
THE MILLS OF THE GODS
Beryl Fox

4pm
SIXTY CAMERAS AGAINST THE WAR