Guy Debord’s On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Fairly Short Unity of Time, 20 minutes, 1959

“…a few people put into practice a systematic questioning of all the works and diversions of a society, a total critique of its notion of happiness…”.

“The point is to understand what has been done and all that remains to be done, not to add more ruins to the old world of spectacles and memories.”

Partial Critique of Separation, 19 minutes, 2008-2012

The first re-make of a Situationist film, the two-screen 19-minute PARTIAL Critique of Separation. Rigorously but playfully applying detournement, the indispensable situationist principle of political/aesthetic intervention, to Debord’s film Critique of Separation (1961), Millner and Larsen claim to re-situate the undimmed energies of its intransigent and impassioned argument. Juxtaposing the here and now with the there and then (New York 2008 with Paris 1961) PARTIAL Critique of Separation proposes that the material conditions that separate each from all and self from self and that every moment militate against the imperative to resist persist.

DISASTER, 30 minutes, 1976

In 1975/76 Millner produced the two-screen super-8 Disaster, the first avowedly situationist film made in the U.S. Screen left features the spectacle of imagery from Seventies Hollywood blockbuster disaster films shot clandestinely in first-run movie theaters. Screen right depicts the actual site of disaster: everyday life. This cheapskate decidedly feminist cinemascope animates the gulf between the two sites of catastrophe. Is it this massive disjunction between the spectacle and the quotidian—a unrelenting deployment of humiliations, routines, disciplines, distractions, and fantasies—that reconciles all of us to a regimen of passive and delayed gratification?

Graven Images, 5 minutes, 2010

The sacred icon of the U.S. red, white, and blue literally becomes a burning issue. As flames engulf flag after flag, the audio-montage connects patriotism to hysterical blindness. Is there a fundamental(ist) relation between the religious injunction against graven images and the iconic status of the U.S. American flag? Who is burning all those flags?

In January we published a podcast interview with the artists, “Anarchist Cinema and the Counterculture w/ Sherry Millner & Ernie Larsen”: https://www.patreon.com/posts/61776128

Sherry Millner makes films, videos, photo-texts, book, curatorial and other research projects, exhibited in festivals, museums, cultural centers, squats, windows, storefronts and on walls. She co-created the collaborative video project State of Emergency (2003-2008). The video essay How Do Animals and Plants Live? was screened this year at the Social Justice Film Festival in Chennai, India, at the Small Axe Festival in Great Britain, and ChangeFest in Atlanta, Georgia. She co-curated Disruptive Film, a two volume DVD set of experimental short-form radical films and videos. She loves postcards.

As an exponent of oppositional culture, Ernie Larsen is a novelist, filmmaker, and media critic. He has collaborated with Sherry Millner on photo-text projects and many films including Rock the Cradle on the December ’09 uprising in Greece and How Do Animals and Plants Live?, on the demolition of a self-organized migrant squat in Thessaloniki, and 41 Shots, the first film to skewer the racist ‘broken windows’ theory of policing that underpinned the notorious murder of Amadou Diallo in New York City. He co-curated Disruptive Film: Everyday Resistance to Power, two DVD sets of short-form experimental political films from 26 countries. His most recent book is The Trial Before the Trial (Autonomedia, 2018).