Sylvain George: Screening and Conversation

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Saturday, May 18 at 3pm for a screening of three films by Sylvain George, guest-curated by George MacBeth.

For the last eighteen years, Sylvain George has been engaged in a critical cinematic project of confronting the sedimentation of violence enacted by Fortress Europe to “securitise” its terrestrial and imaginary borders, and suppress dissent—whilst also portraying the forms of disidentification practiced by those subjects who strive to surmount such official borders, whether it is the young Moroccan men amongst and with whom the filmmaker has recently lived and filmed in Melilla (the so-called Harragas), the migrants in the Calais refugee camps, or the insurrectionary surging of social movement activists in the metropole. Drawing upon the formal legacy of the historic avant-garde, George’s work provides both a self-scrutinizing record of the so-called Mass-Protest Decade—the 2010s—and its militancy, and a searing and immediate insight into the ongoing European refugee crisis.

These are films that, in the words of Jacques Rancière show the “quiet violence of the global order—the round of police cars, the blinding of streetlamps and flashing lights, the careful execution of official orders—rather than the blows of the truncheon. In the face of this, [George’s] politics show us not the classic opposition of one violence against the other, but the way in which individuals, outside any ‘militant education,” bring their behavior and thoughts into line with this instituted violence.”

Following the screening George will be in conversation with MacBeth.

Films

No Border (Aspettavo Che Scendesse La Sera) (2008, 23 minutes)
(I was waiting for evening to fall). Paris, Open City. Dizziness, commemorations. Ruins. Winds. Tides. Young migrant Iraqis, Afghans, Iranians roam the streets between soup kitchens and camps. Consequently, they put in crisis the order of things and of bourgeois society. An emancipation occurs, deeply melancholy, elegiac, redefining the concept of revolution through a new concept of history.

Joli Mai (2017, 8 minutes)
Lovely May (Let those who have killed less than a hundred times cast the first stone at me).
At the end of the demonstrations of May 1, 2016, the police use force against the protestors.

L’impossible – Pages arrachées (2009, 90 minutes)
(The Impossible – Pieces of Fury)
Placed under the rubric of Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Dostoyevsky, and Benjamin, of free jazz, and of punk, this five-part ciné-tract seeks to testify to the iniquitous policies which shape our time, and to the “infernal” character of certain political lives or bodies (migrants/immigrants, workers, unemployed, students, etc.). It pursues a critical stasis of mythical and majoritarian realities; working on the body to open up questions of revolt and insurrection; overflow, disidentification, undecidable reconfigurations… that which is impossible.
The film is divided into the following sections:
1. THE WOOD OF THE SHIPS (I burn properly!)
2. BALLAD FOR A CHILD (We won’t kill you any more than if you were a corpse)
3. ARMED AGAINST JUSTICE (Burn! Burn! Burn!)
4. THE TIME OF THE ASSASSINS (Fire Music)
5. YOU WILL REMAIN HYENA ETC. (The book of the damned)

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.