Ryan Harper Gray’s Quiet Time intervenes in the reactionary rhetoric from the Presidential debates.  Employing the strategy of erasure, the militarist, imperialist, and misogynist discourse is rejected, removed, and thrown out. The silence that remains still carries the trace of the eliminated objectionable and regressive declarations.  The absence of speech is a false respite as the focus is shifted toward the formation of the next distorted refusal and rebuttal.

For more from Ryan Harper Gray: https://vimeo.com/ryanharpergray

Irene Lusztig on FORTY YEARS:

For the past two years I have been filming people (mostly women and mostly strangers) reading letters sent to the editor of Ms. Magazine in the 1970s, in the cities where the letters were originally written. I am usually a very slow filmmaker, and I expect this work to take a few years to find its finished form.

But this week I realized I was feeling a lot of rage about the misogyny that has taken over American public life. I was stunned by the scale of the 9.7 million stories of sexual assault that women shared on Twitter over 14 hours this week, but also–and maybe, ultimately, this is what feels stunning–I realized that none of these stories surprise me. They don't surprise me because I could tell similar stories from my own life, because I hear my female students tell these stories year after year, and because I've been filming women all over the country talking about their every day lives for the past two years.

Violence towards women–structural and physical–is ordinary and ongoing. It is ordinary and ongoing now, it was ordinary and ongoing in the 1990s when I went to college, it was ordinary and ongoing in the 1970s when hundreds of letters from all over the country poured into the Ms. Magazine office each month, and it was ordinary and ongoing long before that. I made this film in an afternoon. I finished editing–in a state of productive rage–during Sunday's presidential debate. In this film, four women read letters about sexual violence that were sent to Ms. Magazine in the 1970s. This is happening now, but it has also been happening forever.

For more from Irene Lusztig: http://komsomolfilms.com/ 

Travis Wilkerson on Two Party System:

Trigger warning: this is a ready-made work, the embodiment of a dominant aesthetic of our times—an aesthetic of barbarism. Barbarism nauseates me too.

But an aesthetic is not just a chosen value. It does not come when you call it.

Should the aesthetic of a terrible thing really never be terrible itself? Does that make any sense at all?

A simple pairing: Qaddafi, first sodomized then murdered by a lynch-mob during the NATO bombing campaign against Libya; Trump provides the commentary.

Each piece is presented unedited, save final duration. Yet they speak almost directly to one another. It is rather uncanny.

But if form meets subject at a crossroads, then this shouldn’t come as the shadow of a surprise.

Grotesque sexual violence is an articulated feature of US Imperialism, as if the record is stuck on the worst possible spot. US agents are obsessed with sexual humiliation - Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Black Sites - It has become a fixture of US power.

Think this is an exaggeration? Google these together: tunisia, cia, anus. That’s this week.

Socially, Imperialism alienates US actions from global and agreed upon legal norms. It provides the alibi. The US is “exceptional.” The US “transcends” mere norms.

The reality is this: rape culture exists. But rape culture isn’t autonomous. It doesn’t appear like so many clouds over the valley.

Rape culture is an automatic feature of a militaristic culture, a culture of conquest and subjugation. And US culture is a deeply militaristic culture. From its inception.

It is centuries past time to halt that loop.

Disarm US Militarism!

For more from Travis Wilkerson: https://www.traviswilkersonfilms.com/