Essay Film Festival 2017: Thinking Cinema on Television

After all the buzz and clamor caused by the 2019 re-opening of the extended MoMA and the much celebrated rehang of its permanent collection, N+1 publishes a sobering curatorial fantasy (by Claire Bishop and Nikki Columbus) on what should have been done instead to come to terms with the “outrageous disconnect between saying and doing at this museum—the brazen hypocrisy and superficial multiculturalism.”

Heute um 18 Uhr hält Volker Pantenburg den Vortrag “‘Zusammensetzen und auseinandernehmen’. Arbeit mit dem Para-Archiv des Harun Farocki Instituts” an der Universität der Künste in Berlin.

You have probably watched Ricky Gervais yesterday’s Golden Globe speech already, or read about it, so this is not exactly news to you. Still, it deserves mentioning and posting, particularly if you haven’t seen it yet, notwithstanding all its shortcomings. If simply for the fact that Gervais here shows a welcome (and rare) structural, dialectic, and pretty pitiless understanding of

a) his own debatable role at the ceremony and in the industry as such;
b) the game-shifting changes in the media industry caused by monopoly digital streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon, Apple;
c) the necessity to (once again) question the public performance of the political amid the liberal Hollywood establishment;
d) the systemic contradiction between “progressive” media content (“quality TV”) and the outrageously destructive economies and technologies on which this content and its providers gleefully rely;
e) the blatant inconsistency in the actions of the media industry people when it comes to not only complaining about racism but actually fight it;