Los Angeles Filmforum presents
The Los Angeles premiere of Machine Gun or Typewriter, by Travis Wilkerson
LOS ANGELES, July 5, 2016 - Filmforum is delighted to host Travis Wilkerson again with the city's premiere of his latest featurefilm. Machine Gun or Typewriter? In the tradition of An Injury to One, Wilkerson mixes genres in his unique agitprop exploration of places, economic systems, and injustice. "Machine Gun or Writer?" which Wilkerson calls fiction, premiered at Locarno 2015 and was awarded Best International Feature at DokuFest (Kosovo). It has since screened worldwide and was recognized as one the finest films of the year on numerous lists including La Furia Umana andDesistFilm.
"A love story, told as if retracing footsteps, the city mapped on psychogeographic lines. Travis Wilkerson's Machine Gun or Typewriter? is at once a landscape essay film, a fractious collage piece and an abstract confessional, restlessly serving the film noir narrative trope of a missing woman. Wilkerson plays the radio man, seen only behind a pop screen and a Sennheiser mic, who tells stories about falling in and out of love with his partner, another would-bepolitical reactionary. Each anecdote is tethered to a place, both physically - mapped out with pins and string on the man's wall - and figuratively: the man's fury at the injustices perpetrated at these landmarks wrests attentionaway from the woman who has gone missing. There's a perverse solace he finds in re-visiting narratives of systemic racism, class divide and policebrutality." Conor Bateman, 4:3
"Confidently straddling forms as diverse as the essay film, agitprop, and noir, and themes as broadly different as Los Angeles, anarchism, and unrequited love, Wilkerson's film is a wry, controlled, and witty engagement with how the historical and social both inform one man's political maturation." Michael Pattison, Slant Magazine
What: Machine Gun or Typewriter, by Travis Wilkerson
Travis Wilkerson inperson! Los Angeles premiere!
When: Sunday July 17, 2016, 7:30 pm.
Where: At the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90028
Tickets: $10 general; $6 students/seniors; free for Filmforum members.
Available in advance from Brown Paper Tickets at http://bpt.me/2571374 or at the door.
For more information: www.lafilmforum.org or 323-377-7238
Screening:
Machine Gun or Typewriter (2015, digital, 71 minutes)
Film by Travis Wilkerson
World Premiere Locarno 2015.
Music by Gangs. newlos.com.
Trailer https://vimeo.com/131818459
On Travis Wilkerson: A chance meeting in Havana with legendary Cuban film propagandist Santiago Alvarez changed the course of Travis Wilkerson'slife. He now makes films in the tradition of the "third cinema," wedding politics to form in an indivisible manner. In 2015, Sight & Sound called Wilkerson "the political conscience of American cinema." His films have screened at scores of venues and festivals worldwide, including Sundance, Toronto, Locarno, Rotterdam, Vienna, Yamagata, the FID Marseille and the Musée du Louvre. His best-known work is an agit-prop essay on the lynching of Wobbly Frank Little called "An Injury to One," named one of the best avant-garde films of the decade by Film Comment. His writings on film have appeared in Cineaste, Kino!, and Senses of Cinema. He has taught filmmaking at the University of Colorado and Film Directing at CalArts, and was the inaugural Visiting Fellow of Media Praxis in the Pomona College Media Guild. Presently, he is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Film at Vassar College. He is also the founding Editor of Now: A Journal of Urgent Praxis.
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This program is supported by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles; and Bloomberg Philanthropies. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.
Los Angeles Filmforum is the city's longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, documentaries, video art, and experimental animation. 2016 is our 41st year.
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