This Film Will (Not) Be Televised
The final session on Saturday brings together talks by two artists and filmmakers: Tony Cokes and Ephraim Asili. Cokes’ presentation connects three threads: his scepticism with regard to historical constructions, the media’s attempted conversion of ‘revolution’ into a marketing trope, and how these representations resonate in our current climate of fear and proto-fascism. Ephraim Asili will talk about his cinematic practice – Mindfulness Cinema – which includes jazz methodologies, meditation, African-American literary traditions, Sigmund Freud, Sun Ra and concepts of landscape/locational cinema. The conference session will be co-hosted by Ash Sarkar and Juha van 't Zelfde.
In his talk, Tony Cokes will revisit some of his ideas he deployed in a talk presented in July 2001. He will begin with Black Celebration (1988), his first work to examine the legacy of the late 60s and early 70s. That video appropriated newsreel images of urban uprisings in Watts, Boston, Detroit and Newark. Cokes juxtaposed the footage with an ‘industrial’ music soundtrack by Skinny Puppy and visual text quotations, prominently from Situationist International’s The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy. The video re-presents these historical events from a distant, but desiring perspective that would counter Reagan-era amnesia or dismissal. Cokes’ presentation will discuss this period in relation to a trajectory within his artistic practice that questions the mythic idea of progress. He will connect three threads: his scepticism with regard to historical constructions, the media’s attempted conversion of ‘revolution’ into a debased marketing trope, and the question of how these representations resonate in our current climate of fear and proto-fascist nationalisms.
Artist and filmmaker Ephraim Asili presents a talk about his cinematic practice to date as well as some ideas that he hopes to resolve in future projects. Themes of his presentation include: jazz methodologies, meditation, African-American literary traditions, Sigmund Freud, Sun Ra and concepts of landscape/locational cinema.
