Working in Protest (2018) User Reviews

Interesting Assemblage of 15 Demonstrations over 30 Years

[lchadbou-326-26592 · 6/10 · 19 November 2018]

The couple who made this assemblage have been recording protest demonstrations by both the left (Occupy Wall Street, The Black Panthers) and right (Ku Klux Klan, neo Confederates) for 30 years starting with a Klan rally in the liberal college town of Chapel Hill in 1987.They decided to put 15 such documentary shorts together to see what their juxtaposition tells us about the way things have changed over three decades,or not, even though they did not attempt to complete a thorough coverage of such events but just shot the ones that were near places they were living in these times.They also decided to avoid a spoken commentary, which leaves an interpretation more open to each viewer (good) but limits the potential for say a poetic montage of politics that a real artist such as Chris Marker has done.from their Q&A at a screening in Carrboro, they suggest they wanted to show the possibility, as in the final sequence of conflicting sides engaging in a discussion with each other at the 2017 Trump inauguration protests, of factions opening up to dialogue more, but some might question whether that goal is even that desirable.if you have any interest, however, in some of our current history this film is a good reminder of much of what we have been through.