The IMA/MFA Program, The IMA Development Fund and The Department of Film & Media Studies
present
Seeing Power Seeing: Two Films by Martin Lucas
Monday, May 7th @ 7PM
HN 502 Screening Room
North Building, Hunter College
695 Park Avenue, NYC
(Entrance on East 69th St. between Park and Lexington)
About:
These two very different films (Cold Shutdown: Fukushima One Year After and Beyond Recognition), both look at the current state of the encounter between people and technology and ask how our lives are dictated (even dominated) by complex technologies, technologies that prioritize our lives while masking the games of profit and desire that they involve us while hiding the way that they force us to employ our own humanity in the service of dubious and ultimately sterile goals.
Cold Shutdown: Fukushima One Year After (36 min. 2012)
The Fukushima disaster, the biggest nuclear catastrophe since Chernobyl, has contaminated thousands of square miles of Japan, and blown open the cozy relationship between politicians, the press and the nuclear power industry in Japan, forcing ordinary citizens to take the matter into their own hands. This short visit with the citizens of Fukushima Prefecture, trying to protect the lives of their children and themselves in the face of the widespread nuclear contamination of their region, in the face of a government determined to return to ‘business as usual’ is a portrait of suffering and endurance. Filmed on location in December, 2011.
Beyond Recognition (24 min., 2012)
This short fiction film focuses on a regular work day in the life of two soldiers operating an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, a missile-laden drone, from a trailer from a military base somewhere near Las Vegas. On this, their first “journey” together, they explore the strange nature of a job that allows one to take out targets on the other side of the globe while sitting at a console sipping your takeout coffee and making plans to pick up your kids from soccer practice. The mission is a targeted assassination over Pakistan, a job that raises important existential questions for this pair of quintessentially modern warriors, who can kill while a half a world away from the battlefield. With Aaron Lloyd as Specialist Pauly and Sandra Rodriguez as Sgt. Lee.
Martin Lucas is an artist and media activist whose work explores the links of the technological with languages of control and forms of resistance. His career includes many works looking at urban crisis and the militarization of American culture seen at venues including The New York Film Festival, the Whitney Biennial, and PBS. As a member of the Paper Tiger Television Collective, Martin was one of the producers of The Gulf Crisis Television Project in 1991. Other works include Cold War in 24 Frames (Durable Reinforcement Art, Utrecht, 2001) and Subway Outside with Jeanne van Heeswijk. (Artist’s Space, NYC, 2000). More recently Martin has worked with Story Workshop in Malawi, Southern Africa, developing productions around gender violence, food security, and AIDS awareness, including the full-length feature Okoma Atani: Who Cares? (2011). His experimental short Treatment Plan, a meditation on depression and beauty, aired at the 2011 Videoart.net Festival in New York. Martin has a BFA in Film Production from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and an MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
This event is free and open to the public. For further information, please contact David Pavlosky at: pav10023@gmail.com
Photo From the Event