Ousmane Sembène was one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived, as well as the most renowned African director of the twentieth century—and yet his name still deserves to be better known in the rest of the world. He made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl. Sembène, who was also an acclaimed novelist in his native Senegal, transforms a deceptively simple plot—about a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white family and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a prison, both figuratively and literally—into a complexly layered critique of the lingering colonialist mind-set of a supposedly postcolonial world. Featuring a moving central performance by M’Bissine Thérèse Diop, Black Girl is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement—and one of the essential films of the 1960s.

Black Girl

Streaming two movies this week inspired by chapters one and two of Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? Check the bio for links.

Catch Arrival every night at 8. Inspired by chapter 1, The Sublime Language of My Century, Arrival begins with the sudden arrival of 12 distributed UFOs (capitalism). As pandemonium ensues intellectuals around the world (Marxist sects) work to decipher the logic of the aliens. Only by breaking with all preconceived notions of language is the main character (Wark) able to see things for how they actually are.

Catch Sorry to Bother You every night at 10. Inspired by chapter 2, Capitalism — or Worse?, Sorry to Bother You is a story about a precariat that becomes an isolated achievement subject. As an information worker, Cash subjects himself to dehumanizing affective labor only to end up learning the price of individualism & why fulfillment can’t come from selling one’s labor even in a “creative” job.

Sorry to Bother You & Arrival

While in his 20s, Karl Marx struggles to establish himself as a writer of political and sociological importance. The film begins with a scene where poor people are gathering dead wood in a forest where they have done this for centuries, but the government has made it illegal to collect the wood as it is now legally private property of the landlords. The poor are persecuted and extrajudicially killed by the government officials. Marx wrote about these events and believes that the bourgeois class has taken ownership of the state itself.

Marx meets Friedrich Engels, a young man whose wealthy father owns factories. Engels' belief that the workers there and elsewhere, including children, are mistreated and underpaid matures. The men begin to work together to create a new political movement to reform and unite the impoverished workers. Eventually, the two stage a coup during a meeting of the League of the Just and create the Communist League in its place. The film ends with Marx and Engels publishing select theories, in a simple language for anyone to understand in a relatively short writing known as The Communist Manifesto the same year of the 1848 revolutions.

The Young Karl Marx

Lizzie Borden’s feminist, queer, science fiction film takes a “documentary-style” approach in presenting its futuristic image of America reborn as a socialist democracy pushed toward anarchist activation by women’s pirate radio.

In New York City, ten years after the peaceful socialist revolution, two feminist radio stations give voice to the shortcomings of the revolution, which some argue has led to a dystopian system of governmental control and aggravated patriarchal abuse.

After a prominent feminist is detained and dies in custody, three investigative journalists are fired for their coverage of FBI agents, and both radio stations are burned down, the radio groups unite and join with the Women’s Army in direct actions against the authorities.

Born In Flames

A small, heroin seeking UFO lands on a Manhattan roof, observes a bizarre, drug addicted fashion model and sucks endorphin from her sexual encounters' brains.

Liquid Sky

Carlos, directed by Olivier Assayas, is an epic, intensely detailed account of the life of the infamous international terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez—also known as Carlos the Jackal. One of the twentieth century’s most wanted fugitives, Carlos was committed to violent left-wing activism throughout the seventies and eighties, orchestrating bombings, kidnappings, and hijackings in Europe and the Middle East. Assayas portrays him not as a criminal mastermind but as a symbol of seismic political shifts around the world, while the magnetic Édgar Ramírez brilliantly embodies him as a swaggering global gangster. Criterion presents the complete, uncut, director-approved, five-and-a-half-hour version of Carlos.

Machines Seeking Connections

Film Screenings

Black Girl

Sorry to Bother You & Arrival

The Young Karl Marx

Born In Flames

Liquid Sky

Carlos