Event date: September 29 – October 8
Durham University curatorial team is pleased to announce the special program of films, art-projects and discussions, titled What’s Left? A Century in Revolution, which is taking place at Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne, between Friday 29 September and Sunday 8 October 2017.
The program is produced as part of the Cross-Language Dynamics (Open World Research Initiative Project) and is curated by a team of Durham scholars (Dušan Radunović as lead curator) and Tyneside Cinema Newcastle (Una Henry as curator).
Marking the centenary of the October Revolution, this series of daily screenings and discussions examines the paradoxes of revolutionary cycles across the 20th and 21st centuries: their progressions and regresses, advances and returns to origins. Moving from Latin America to the Middle East, from China to the former Soviet Union, from North Africa to Europe, the programme foregrounds the global reach and transnational interrelatedness of these events.
While rooted in history, the programme’s emphasis is on the significance of revolution today. It goes beyond commemoration, pursuing a non-nostalgic, critical approach to the meanings and enactments of revolution. In recognition that revolutionary transformations acquire meaning in and through the lives of ordinary people, the films shown and discussed exemplify, each in their own way, the intimate interlocking of personal and historical time.
Emphasis is also placed on the link between moving image and political action. New visual media and technologies are examined as vehicles of revolutionary change, as means for creating a novel aesthetic of political radicalism, and as a fundamentally new lens for both experiencing and making history.