Archival: Student Manifesto from the Fourth International Experimental Film Exposition At Knokke-Le Zoute (1968)
in Film Culture No. 46
I’ve been scanning some archival materials* related to experimental film and the history of experimental exhibition in NYC. Expect a couple more of these transcriptions over the next few months, along with a new cluster of essays on internet culture and cultural politics of art dependent on social networks.
What follows is just a pamphlet that came before the transcription of a report P. Adams Sitney wrote about the Experimental Film Exposition at Knokke-Le-Zoute in 1977, originally published in the pages of Film Culture in 1968. This fourth iteration of the Experimental Film Exposition was the one where Michael Snows’ film WAVELENGTH won first prize. It was preceded directly by a statement by Snow himself on the film, and an interview of Snow conducted by Sitney and Jonas Mekas.
*For my purpose here, defined as: Periodicals/books/essays which I can access via my institution and which are not easily available on the internet.
A leaflet distributed at the festival (language left intact):
FIGHT AGAINST THE OPEN AND THE UNDERGROUND AMERICAN IMPERIALIST AND CINE-IMPERIALIST AGGRESSION ALL OVER THE WORLD!
The international capital recruits its boys: Gaevert-Agfa lends them a roll of filmmaterial and pays the one who is most obedient with 4000 US dollars: every meter film showing a naked ass out of the metropoles keeps silence about a burned body in Vietnam making more profit than 4000 US dollars.
film as trash of napalm.
American imperialism and cine-imperialism as well as their national variants commit crimes in Vietnam and other places every day, crimes and torture against mankind. Experimental underground cinema dreams to stand in rebellion against cine-imperialism, but they are following “operation eagle” aggression choosing to carry its guns and flowers: the cinema is darkened like the sky above North-Vietnam, this glittering blending film-products deform the consciousness of the intelligence in the metropoles flat like bombs flatten the heroic Vietnamese. Vietnam is [an] experimental field for newer and more sophisticated weapons for strikes against human consciousness. The latest success is repeated by the critic to the agencies. There in laboratories and academies, special-forces for more effective and more sophisticated terror is educated and produced.
We have to depart from this voluntaristic and petit-bourgeois praxis to pick up a marxist one, the one human: We must organize ourselves politically to fight against international cine-imperialism and its asslickers. We have to make real revolutionary films and to hamper production and performance of counter-revolutionary films.
We have to learn to be flexible choosing our weapons. We have to learn to get militant.
We have to shoot with our camera like others with their fucking gun.
LET’S DESTROY TWO THREE MANY FILM STUDIOS ACADEMIES FESTIVALS! LET’S CREATE TWO THREE MANY VIETNAM! LETS START WITH KNOKKE! DONT LET FREE BELGIUM BECOME THE BASE FOR IMPERIALISM LIKE CASTEAU AND KNOKKE!
-Students of the filmacademies from Ulm, West-Berlin, Brussel and of the Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Architecture et des Arts Visuell, Brussel, the Comité Vientam Radio Television Belge; Brussel.