9 december
18.00 uur
Collegezaal
Piet Zwart Institute
Overblaak
Het programma bestaat uit twee of drie (Amerikaanse) films/documantaires, die de overeenkomst hebben dat ze allemaal een onderwerp hebben gerelateerd aan een anti-globalistische houding. ‘Bowling for Columbine’, Oscar voor de beste documentaire, is een analyse van de Verenigde Staten rond het ‘Second Amendment’; het recht op het bezit van een vuurwapen ter zelfverdediging. ‘Radical Teen Cheer’ (optioneel) is een film over een cheerleader-groep die hun eigen positie bepalen en een oplossing proberen te formuleren. ‘We interrupt this empire’ is een film gemaakt door het ‘San Francisco Bay Area Video Activist Network’ over de protestacties die op 20 maart 2003 San Fransisco platlegden. En probeert inzicht te geven in datgene wat door de media niet wordt verteld.
Bowling For Columbine
"Bowling for Columbine" is an alternately humourous and horrifying film about the United States. It is a film about the state of the Union, about the violent soul of America. Why do 11,000 people die in America each year at the hands of gun violence? The talking heads yelling from every TV camera blame everything from Satan to video games. But are we that much different from many other countries? What sets us apart? How have we become both the master and victim of such enormous amounts of violence? This is not a film about gun control. It is a film about the fearful heart and soul of the United States, and the 280 million Americans lucky enough to have the right to a constitutionally protected Uzi.
"Bowling for Columbine" was the first documentary film accepted into competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 46 years. The Cannes jury unanimously awarded it the 55th Anniversary Prize. From a look at the Columbine High School security camera tapes to the home of Oscar-winning NRA President Charlton Heston, from a young man who makes homemade napalm with The Anarchist's Cookbook to the murder of a six-year-old girl by another six-year-old, "Bowling for Columbine" is a journey through America, and through our past, hoping to discover why our pursuit of happiness is so riddled with violence.
(www.michaelmoore.com)
Radical Teen Cheer
Eli Elliott’s inspired portrait of Los Angeles high school students who boldly express their political views as cheerleaders. From cheers against third world country sweatshops to the hypocrisy of the United States government, Radical Teen Cheer shows a rare group of youths speaking out on issues in an interesting new form of political expression.
(www.next5minutes.org)
We’re Here! We Cheer! Get Used To It!
Sept. 29 issue — At first, the cheerleaders getting ready for practice in a Los Angeles park seem like average teens as they sip Coke and pepper their sentences with “like.” But then 17-year-old Larry Wood peels off his sweat pants to reveal a short black and red pleated skirt.
A STARTLED ONLOOKER yells out, “Faggot!” Wood, who has a girlfriend, shrugs and tries an arabesque. “I just don’t pay attention to it,” he says. “It shows how much they know. It doesn’t matter if you’re gay or bi. We should all be treated equally.” Moments later, Wood and the 11 other members of Radical Teen Cheer, who come from two inner-city high schools and several colleges, launch into their first routine: “We’re teens, we’re cute, we’re radical to boot! We’re angry, we’re tough and we have had enough!”
Radical cheerleaders might seem like an oxymoron, but in the last few years, teenage and twentysomething activists around the world have turned an American tradition into potent political theater. There are Radical Cheerleading squads from Burlington, Vt., and San Diego, as well as France, Poland and even Japan. Some squads carefully choreograph routines and wear matching outfits, complete with pompoms and megaphones. Others go for a more eccentric look.
‘AMERICAN INGENUITY AT ITS BEST’
It’s a grass-roots movement, usually spread when someone sees a squad in action—at WTO protests, for example, or antiwar demonstrations. (Meredith Ryley, a history teacher, started Radical Teen Cheer after reading about a Minneapolis group.) What unites them are causes, from protesting the Iraq war to fighting racism, sexism, homophobia and capitalist exploitation. Cheerleading is the ironic medium for their message. University of Alabama professor Natalie Adams, coauthor of “Cheerleader: An American Icon,” includes Radicals in a class she teaches called “The Cheerleader in American Culture.” She compares them to Twinkies, which, she says, were created when someone took conventional ingredients, sponge cake and icing, and made something new, just as activists have created something new out of traditional cheerleading. “I think it’s brilliant,” she says. “It’s American ingenuity at its best.”
Most squads credit two activist sisters from Florida—Aimee and Cara Jennings—with coming up with the idea in the mid-1990s. They taught cheers to other women at workshops, and the concept spread quickly. By 2001, there were enough radical squads for a convention in Ottawa. Since then, Aimee Jennings, now 33, says in an e-mail, “this combustible merger of traditional cheerleading and social justice has focused on everyone from the streetside sexual harasser to G.W. Bush.”
The first Radical Cheerleaders fashioned pompoms out of plastic garbage bags, but there have been dozens of variations on the theme, with coed, gay and transgender squads. “Every group does their own thing,” says Robin Jacks, 23, who helped start the Dirty Southern Belles in Memphis. The Belles wear pink and black when they cheer for gay pride or protest what they see as patriarchy at a Promise Keepers gathering. Milwaukee’s Pirate Cheerleaders don black skirts with white pleats and black shirts with white pirate logos to perform at basement punk shows, Ladyfest Midwest (a feminist celebration) and malls. They cheer about motherhood as unpaid work and body image, among other things. At the State University of New York in New Paltz, Wazina Zondon, 20, helped found the New Paltz Rads, whose colors are black and red. “Crowds love it when we’re out there cart-wheeling and screaming in fishnets and combat boots,” Zondon says. They’ve cheered at antiwar rallies, Take Back the Night protests and a friend’s opening at the campus museum, “trying very, very hard not to cartwheel into the sculptures.”
Since attracting attention is the goal, outrageousness helps. “We sort of consider ourselves queer-leaders instead of cheerleaders,” says Abigail Katz, 23, who founded Chicago’s Lickity Split and whose nom de cheer is Queefer Southernland. The performances are often R-rated but, says Katz, “We feel comfortable and shameless enough to go out in public and shock.” She hopes to inspire others. “I personally hope there can be a younger Lickity Split,” she says. “On college campuses, there’s such a great energy. We’re getting old.”
One might think that traditional cheerleaders would take a dim view of all this. And indeed, some do. “It is a warping of what cheerleading is all about,” says Sheila Noone, editorial director of American Cheerleader magazine. “Cheerleaders have an uphill battle getting respect, and that’s the last thing we need.” But others are more open. Robin Jacks’s sister, Lauren, 21, is a proud member of Harvard’s cheerleading squad. Cheerleading, she says, is “all about trying to get everyone else excited about your causes, so it’s perfect for political activism.” And if the Dirty Southern Belles need a hand, they can count on her. “I definitely would love to get out there and help them with their stunts,” she says. Now that’s sisterhood in action.
Karen Springen in Chicago and Jenny Hontz in Los Angeles © 2003 Newsweek, Inc.
(www.msnbc.com/news/)
WE INTERRUPT THIS EMPIRE
San Francisco Bay Area Video Activist Network, USA, 2003, 54’39 mini dv
What happens when a trigger-happy cowboy with a pocket full of loot aims his guns on an oil-rich, people-poor nation? The San Francisco Bay Area Video Activist Network presents the story you won’t see on Fox News:an eye-popping, jaw-dropping look at the Bay Area’s radical resistance to an illegal war.
WE INTERRUPT THIS EMPIRE... SCREENS JUNE 10TH AND JUNE 11TH AT THE RED VIC MOVIE HOUSE
What happens when a trigger-happy cowboy with a pocket full of loot aims his guns on an oil-rich, people-poor nation?
The San Francisco Video Activist Network presents the story you won't see on Fox News: an eye-popping, jaw-dropping look at the Bay Area's radical resistance to an illegal war. Composed of various segments, the first half of WE INTERRUPT THIS EMPIRE... is a collaborative work from some of San Francisco's independent videographers. Jino Choi and Jessica Lawrence document the direct actions that shut down both the financial district of San Francisco on the morning of March 20th and the corporate profiteers of the Bay Area over the following weeks. The Whispered Media video collective takes on how the pro-war protests received 'balanced' coverage and how such coverage devolves into a flag-waving, pro-war culture blinded to the truths and realities of war. 'The Logic of Empire,' by David Martinez and Iain Boar, considers the war not as an out-of-control business venture fronted by the petroleum industry, but as the first steps in a new, lethally dangerous, imperialist project with Iraq as its first subject. 'War American Style' by Natalija Vekic, Monica Nolan and Christian Bruno is a sly critique of the corporate media's role as Pentagon stenographer, where mainstream news media clips are re-assembled and examined for gross inaccuracies, glaring omissions and corporate biases. In 'The War Profiteers,' by Miles Montalbano, interviews and film clips shine a light on the Military Industrial Complex as the film looks at corporations with close ties to the Bush administration, and their ability to influence policy and profit from war. The second half of the program will be selects from Shutdown Downtown Fogtown, a daring collection of on-the-scene videos from the historic anti-war protests that shutdown San Francisco.
Proceeds from WE INTERRUPT THIS EMPIRE... go to the Video Activist Network (VAN) and Whispered Media. The VAN is an informal association of activists and politically conscious artists using video to support social, economic and environmental justice campaigns. Whispered Media is a collective that offers video witnessing, support and training, collects archival political footage, and produces video works about specific grassroots campaigns and organizations.
(www.indybay.org/news/)
(www.videoactivism.org)