Add to Queue: Emily Apter and Inney Prakash’s favourite documentaries, pt 2
A selection of curated media lists from our global community
words – emily apter and inney prakash
location – new york city, usa
Following part one of their favourite documentaries, Co-Directors of Programming at Maysles Documentary Centre Emily Apter and Inney Prakash share another selection of films touching on themes of class struggle, racial injustice and gender equality. Located in the heart of Harlem, MDC has been delighting and surprising New York cinephiles for almost two decades. The centre has had an undeniable impact upon both the local community and visitors from further afield; the below films are a reflection of genre-defying and eye-opening subjects that consider the role of creativity in analysing and understanding our world.
01_Water and Power [Pat O’Neil 1989]
We screened this on the sidewalk during the pandemic, its soundtrack mixing with the sounds of Harlem and drawing in practically every passerby at least for a few seconds. An essential portrait of place, featuring O’Neil’s unparalleled use of the optical printer.
02_Occupation Mill Worker [Anand Patwardhan 1996]
A great documentary about working class struggle, this is a short about a group of workers organising to occupy an empty textile mill in 1990s Bombay. At the time, real estate booms made selling mills more profitable than running them. The workers attempt to occupy and collectively run the mill to keep their jobs and share in profits. We featured this film in a series we did called “Cinemas, In Memoriam,” about the life, death [and material forces] that affect cinema spaces, as Occupation Mill Worker briefly features a workers’ cinema!
03_Le Joli Mai [Chris Marker 1963]
A profoundly humanist film with one of the greatest narrated endings in all cinema: “Perhaps… without hearing it you shelter within yourself this voice that says ‘as long as poverty exists, you’re not rich. As long as despair exists, you are not happy. As long as prisons exists, you are not free.’”
04_Personal Problems [Bill Gunn 1980]
Another film near-impossible to describe! A three hour meta-melodrama [written by Ishmael Reed and directed by Bill Gunn] we screened several times on the sidewalk in Harlem through a rainstorm – it’s that joyful, despairing and overall intoxicating!
05_IWOW [Khalik Allah 2020]
What to call this..? A diary film? A portrait of a Harlem street corner? An expression of urban existence? A confession of compulsive image-making’s destructive potential? The perils of inter-racial love? One long, bad trip on mushrooms? A breakup movie? We can’t say for sure!
06_A Night of Knowing Nothing [Payal Kapadia 2021]
A powerful film about student resistance to the rise of Hindu Nationalism, and a stirringly poetic account of what it means to come of age in a compromised world.
07_The Fake Fruit Factory [Chick Strand 1986]
This film’s got the reddest reds and the glossiest greens, subversive intimacy between working women, candid talk of power and sex, and close attention to hands, lips, commodity-production, artifice and the exploitation of feminised labour.
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