Gravity Hill Newsreels: "Occupy Wall Street"
Jem Cohen, Artist and Filmmaker
The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture presents filmmaker Jem Cohen who will discuss 12 short observations about Occupy Wall Street (2011/2012), New York City.
“In regards to Occupy Wall Street, when friends asked me where the newsreels were, I decided to plunge in and make some myself. We knew there’d eventually be many documentaries made about the phenomenon and that there were already short advocacy pieces in support of the movement (as well as YouTube slams against it). My own interest lay elsewhere: in a kind of reporting based on direct observation that expresses solidarity without propaganda, while leaving room for experimentation and lyricism.” – Jem Cohen
Jem Alan Cohen (born 1962) is an award-winning New York City-based filmmaker known for his observational portraits of urban landscapes, blending of media formats (16mm, Super 8, video) and collaborations with music artists. Cohen was born in Kabul, Afghanistan. He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1984, with a concentration on painting and photography.
Gravity Hill Newsreels: Occupy Wall Street is the fifth installment of the six-part lecture series Jump Over Time: Uses of Documentation Video. Organized by Joanna Raczynska, Visiting Curator at the CADVC and Assistant Head of Film Programs at the National Gallery of Art, the series explores a wide range of creative uses of video documentation as an idiom and form used by media artists. When does the video documentation of an event shift from witness to evidence? If a performance is designed for the camera is the urgency, the live-ness, of the performance obliterated? When the video maker’s intent is to re-present a specific historic period, action, or happening, can reenactments be considered documentation? Selected works as well as visiting artists and archivists will speak to the many ways archives—brimming with mediated experiences—are critical to cultural determination, memory, and practice.
Admission is free.