" BERLIN, name - polabian: "swamp", vulgar: "built on sand"; a "political
abstraction" (Maurice Blanchot), a "position from which there is no escape"
(Joseph Goebbels), a "conglomerate of calamities" (Frank Wedekind), a "curse"
(Alfred Döblin); an "attitude of defiance mingled with self-conceit" (Walter
Benjamin), the political condition of being "poor but sexy" (Klaus Wowereit)
NEGATIVITY, noun - organized negation, collective expression of antagonism,
denial or refutation, application of destructive forces within a political
struggle that is not aimed at a positive goal and usually directed against the
state and its organs; critical negativity - to employ the power of negation in a
critical situation: "I have been hit by a taxi", "my wife has left me", etc.;
dialectical negativity - the negatively dialectical reversal of the concept of
negative dialectics, negativity applied to itself, affirming - but refusing to
accept as total or self-identical - the object of negation: "no future", "punk's
not dead" etc.; historical-political negativity - any sustained political effort
that aims to make the sum of a specific historical process less than zero.
Commonly cited causes of negativity: bad weather, bad food, bad housing, the
Great Depression, the Cold War, the German Reunification (see: Berlin)
TO CAPTURE THE SPIRIT OF A CITY, expression - 1. to drink oneself to death: to
capture the spirits of a city (to never return from a city); 2. to find the
monster one's wife is having an affair with: to chase the ghosts of a city (to
be possessed by a city); 3. to build a wall around a city (see: negativity)"
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for directions:
http://camputer.org/campstudio.html
Pirate Cinema from Berlin, who we are working with on the video archive http://pad.ma, present a series of weekly (Sunday) events in the Pirate Cinema tradition, on films and footage.
Opening soon, CAMP solo in NYC.
Sunday, 7:00 pm
100 mins
Pandemic shorts by Panahi, Poitras, Apichatpong, Weiwei, and others.
by Iram Ghufran
50 mins, 2023
7:00 pm
Introduction and post-screening discussion with Iram Ghufran.
A science-fiction fable set in the "miracle city" of Yiwu, in one of the world's largest wholesale markets for small commodities.
Shaina A gave a talk at the film studies conference at EFLU, Hyderabad titled Film After Video, Notes from CAMP.
by Johan Grimonprez
150 mins| 2024|
7:00 pm
A story about the encounter of American Jazz and African decolonisation, via the UN and the CIA, with a lot of world around it.
Join us for a season of new films at CAMP which explore configurations and revelations of "world", amidst a world in pieces.
We begin the year with
GRAND TOUR
by Miguel Gomes
2024, 120 mins.
7:00 pm.
in memorium, Tejas Pande.
Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar
Streaming on Union Docs.
Five narratives developed in the class "Footage Films", that re-assemble archives of campus protest, Penn Museum collections, university weapons development projects, the Schuylkill river, a utopia called Shangri-La, and their intersections across time and place.
*Recalling Far From Vietnam, collectively-made essay film from 1967.
Asia Pacific Triennial