NOW!

Do You Want to Go for a Drive? is an experimental essay film by Kelly Gallagher, illustrating the importance of consent. The film also explores sexual agency, love, pleasure, mutual desire, violence, vengeance, the moon and the sky. The title, a call and response with the final line of the film ("It's you I really want to drive"), more importantly serves to commence the entire viewing experience with the asking of a question- which is how all sexual encounters should begin, with the asking for consent.

More from Kelly Gallagher: www.purpleriot.com

Baton Rouge to Jackson ’63 is an exceptional, bold, and deeply affecting illustration of a growing sub-genre of urgent political cinema: the radical re-enactment of historical violence, echoing one another with a jarringly precise confluence. The films also tend to be deeply cinematic, with exponential rather than additive formal approaches, projecting their vitality that much further. What does this say? More than anything, that our broadly held illusions of progress–especially on the Left–are nothing but so much stifling air. In material reality, nearly nothing has changed. Which leads one down another path: stop fetishizing heroic movements of the past, especially when their tactics, their methods, their ethos—while highly inspiring—are nothing but points of entry. Objectively so. I find myself thinking of the line in Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn”, “Do things gradually, but bring more tragedy.” How much more gradually are we going to change the things we all know are obviously wrong and are causing horrific, daily harm? And how are we going to speed along that change? Which brings us abruptly to the present moment: a place where there still isn’t meaningful help for poor people, again flooded catastrophically and forced to live under intolerable circumstance, but somehow there’s all that money to clothe those abusive cops, head to toe, in high tech armor using military weapons and vehicles, to beat back anger over another “death by police” of the same people who are now totally abandoned. The next phase of cinematic innovation surely must be the radical enactment.

More from Dan Albright: https://vimeo.com/danalbright

While silence pervades Lydia Moyer's masterful new film, it has a great deal to say indeed. A supercut of 7 years of moments of silence in the U.S. House of Representatives for victims of mass shootings, it is a scathing indictment of a government unconcerned with protecting the lives of its own citizens, in the face of escalating yet preventable mass shootings. With Orlando still an open wound, and fears of the next shooting forever lurking at the edges of our consciousness, Moyer's film speaks truth to power, truth to hypocrisy, and calls bullshit on the substitution of "symbolic gestures" for social change. It is a simple, vital, necessary work, silent yet deafening. More from the Now! Journal: now-journal.com //

More from Lydia Moyer: https://vimeo.com/goodfornow

Begun in the wake of recent (and ongoing) unrest in Ferguson, MO, The Forcing (no. 2) is a meditation on power and the longing for deliverance in contemporary America. It combines original sound and video with appropriated content, observing no hierarchy of image quality or authorship.

A Costly Lesson, is a strange, mournful bird: an artifact of a forgotten past that arrives on the schedule of this week’s newsreel. More of less, it constitutes the scant findings of Johnston’s investigations into the 1913 suffocation of 8 black convicts in a Texas prison. Yet rather than reading as a document of a past time, it reads like a transcript of our nightmare present: black teenagers in prison, abusive work conditions, racist cops, a murderous response to resistance, 8 dead teenagers . . . and nobody does anything about it. Johnston does what he can. He honors them with dignity, beauty, restraint. He answers the questions he can answer: who, where, when, how. The only missing interrogative is why. But he answers that too, almost automatically, by answering the preceding questions themselves. One of the true horrors of racism in the United States is that it obliterates questions of why as part of its existential firestorm. Simply say that a victim of violence in the United States is young, black, and poor, and we already know how the story will end. It’s a lesson we learn over and over. It’s a lesson we never seem to learn.

Margaret Rorison’s One Document for Hope, pits the sterile and procedural narratives of a Baltimore City Police Scanner against images from the precious moments of gathering, celebration, mourning and protest in response to the 2015 death by police of 25 year-old Freddie Gray. The juxtaposition of these elements, institutional dispassion versus community action, makes legible the power of the latter to confront and resist the former. As its title implies, Rorison’s film is ultimately a hopeful one, a celebration of the radical possibility of collective action, and of the necessity of speaking truth to power Now!

Marseille Après La Guerre, an exquisite short film by legendary L.A. Rebellion filmmaker Billy Woodberry, is both the first salvo of Now! and an embodiment of its values and sensibilities. The piece is materially modest but formally stunning. Told almost entirely through a series of stunning still black and white images, it offers an astonishing portrait of dock workers in Marseille just after the war, and a reflection on the political awakening of the "father of African film," Ousmane Sembene. A lyrical description of a disappeared world, Marseille Après La Guerre is redolent of a radical past, while inspiring us to consider the shape and texture of a present and future politics of emancipatory solidarity. 

An excerpt from Kelly Gallagher's 2014 film, Pen Up the Pigs.

NOW! AGAIN! is a reenactment of a classic radical film, "Now" by Santiago Alvarez, staged this summer in Ferguson, Missouri by the cops themselves. Playing themselves, the cops reenact their own vicious history as if they were checking their performance in a mirror shattered by gunfire. NOW! AGAIN! blows up at the intersection of an avant-garde film act and an urgent manifesto for militant action, demanding an end to police violence NOW!"

Out of respect for his parents' request, four and one half minutes of silence for Michael Brown Jr. One minute for each hour his body lay in the streets of Ferguson, MO after he was shot to death by Officer Darren Wilson. Please watch in darkness. Please watch in silence.