June 2–23, at 6:30 p.m.
School of the Arts Cineclub
#6 — I’M MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!
Ilídio Pinho Auditorium

In 1967, Guy Debord wrote that the entire life of societies where modern conditions of production reign presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. He was not speaking of cinema, nor of television in the strict sense, but of mediation as a mode of existence. From relationships between people filtered through capitalist images to the point where lived experience itself becomes secondary to its representation (“Tout ce qui était directement vécu s'est éloigné dans une représentation.”) Fifty years later, the idea has been sufficiently validated by reality to have become almost a cliché, which is, in itself, a perfect form of spectacle. Absorb the critique, transform it into content, and neutralize it.

The four films in this series confront this thesis, each in its own way, with different materials and different urgencies, but all with the intuition that power over people increasingly lies in controlling what they see, and therefore what they desire, fear, and believe to be real.