There Is No Center: Screening the Obama Era, 2009–17
Programmed by: Avivit Ashman and Karsten Rynearson
This is not a biography. There Is No Center does not focus on Barack Obama, the person, or on President Obama, elected leader of the USA from 2009-2017. If you want that story, fear not: our theater is 0.6 miles away from the brand-new commemorative complex. Rather, this series takes shape as an inquiry: what shared ideas, assumptions, and emotions defined the Obama presidential era? If the election of a Black president in 2008 appeared to transcend the racial inequalities endemic to American society from the nation’s birth, what did the rebirth of the American nation look like in an age of apparently-universal rights? How did enduring reminders of inequality complicate liberal triumphalism, whether in financial disaster in 2008, racial violence in 2014, or continuing war crimes in the Middle East?
This series focuses on the conflicts at the heart of Obama-era optimism: toggling between jubilant images of national identity and the troubling material realities of American life in a moment of proliferating austerity. Our objective is not to assert the supremacy of one over the other, but to evaluate their coexistence as it played out on screen. In line with that goal, each screening (with one exception) pairs a blockbuster movie with an experimental short film. Taking inspiration from an Obama-era programming event — J. Hoberman’s experimental 2014 double projection of White House Down and The Butler at Light Industry — the series’ pairings speak to the cultural contradictions of the time, to often incongruous visions of history, the global financial crisis, sexual politics, global warfare, and the post-Obama future. By revisiting the films of the Obama era in the light of the present, we hope to encounter this historical period of American culture in a new light. This is not a eulogy, only an autopsy: there led us here. Why?
There Is No Center is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Longer Than the Sky: Art of the Obama Years curated by Jenny Harris, which proposes a provisional art history of the era. The exhibition will run at the Logan Center for the Arts (915 E 60th St) until October 11. Another exhibition in conversation, doing our literal speed, curated by Cole Gruber and Hannah Michelle Ivanov, will run at the Cochrane-Woods Art Center from September 18 to October 9. Special thank you to Jenny Harris and Giampaolo Bianconi, as well as to Video Data Bank and Electronic Arts Intermix.
Crow Requiem / 12 Years a Slave (2015 / 2013)
Cauleen Smith / Steve McQueen · 11m / 134m · DCP
Crow Requiem considers the migration of crows between Syracuse and Auburn, formerly key cities on the Underground Railroad, in relation to the ongoing circulation of anti-Black state violence. 12 Years a Slave is a terrifying portrayal of the abduction, enslavement, and emancipation of Solomon Northrup. Director Steve McQueen asserted the film “wouldn’t have been made without Obama being president.” As many rejoiced about the dawn of a “post-racial” society in 2008, McQueen’s film is a commemoration for all those left unfree.
Courtesy of Cauleen Smith Studio.
Saturday, October 3 3:00 PM
Evil.27: Selma / Selma (2011 / 2014)
Tony Cokes / Ava DuVernay · 9m / 128m · DCP
Evil.27 meditates on Bloody Sunday in 1965, when state troopers and police attacked peaceful protestors in Selma. Cokes considers the circulation of horrific images of that day in relation to 21st-century image economies. DuVernay’s own historicization, which wrapped filming a month before Michael Brown’s murder by a police officer in Ferguson, has faith in the potential of visibility; it is, in her words, a “film about the power of voice.”
Courtesy of Tony Cokes; Greene Naftali, New York; Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles; and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
Sunday, October 4 7:00 PM
Gravity Hill Newsreels: Occupy Wall Street / The Bling Ring (2011 / 2012)
Jem Cohen / Sofia Coppola · 64m / 90m · Digital / DCP
Reacting to the 1%. Jem Cohen’s Gravity Hill Newsreels moves to correct the lack of coverage of the Occupy movement, stitching together 12 live-time sequences over the course of 54 days. Where Cohen offers us a meditative look at a movement of “the 99%,” The Bling Ring shows a consumerist extravaganza reserved for the rich and famous. Following a set of amoral LA teenagers, Coppola updates the American Dream for a generation all too eager to replace “Hope” with fame.
Courtesy of Video Data Bank. There will be an intermission between screenings.
Saturday, October 10 3:00 PM
In Free Fall / The Big Short (2010 / 2015)
Hito Steyerl / Adam McKay · 32m / 131m · DCP
Crash and the rubble left behind. In Free Fall uses the figure of the airplane — its circulation, historical associations, and literal instances of crashing — to map movements of images and commodities against the death drive of Recession-era capitalism. The Big Short plunges us into the biggest crash of our century. The abstract and impersonal sphere of finance may not lend itself to dramedy, but the film fleshes out the 2008 crisis, showing who profited from collective loss and heroizing those who predicted the crash.
Sunday, October 11 7:00 PM
It Gets Better: Dan and Terry / President Obama: It Gets Better / The Kids Are All Right (2010 / 2010 / 2010)
It Gets Better Project / It Gets Better Project / Lisa Cholodenko · 8m / 3m / 106m · DCP
It gets better: at once a prophecy for queer youth in crisis and a sales pitch to remodel American domesticity, the slogan embodies the manic optimism of the 2010s. Created in reaction to a spate of youth suicides, the videos from the It Gets Better Project show celebrities reassuring gay teens that harassment is finite, and progress inevitable. The Kids Are All Right offers an endpoint for that progress, starring Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as an affluent lesbian couple raising their two teenagers.
Saturday, October 17 4:00 PM
Quality Control / Magic Mike (2011 / 2012)
Kevin Jerome Everson / Steven Soderbergh · 71m / 110m · DCP
Two radically different explorations of labor in post-Recession America. Quality Control captures two days in the life of Black dry-cleaning plant workers in Pritchard, Alabama. The tedium of the body’s repeated movements coexists alongside music and workplace chatter. Magic Mike presents a vision of a much different mode of labor — masculine, white, spectacular — in its observations of male performers at a Tampa strip club. Here the precarity of the mid-2010s gig economy underlies the beauty of the body.
Courtesy of Picture Palace Pictures.
Sunday, October 18 7:00 PM
Junior War / Zero Dark Thirty (2013 / 2012)
Ryan Trecartin / Kathryn Bigelow · 24m / 157m · DCP
In Junior War, Ryan Trecartin films a group of high schoolers partying in the woods. The militarized mindsets of a youth coming of age during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan come to the surface in this sort of play-war. Zero Dark Thirty, a thriller about the CIA’s hunt for Osama Bin Laden, documents this context. Controversial for what critics described as its endorsement of CIA torture, the movie’s October release date was rescheduled after allegations that the film was Sony Pictures’ effort to win Obama the 2012 election.
Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
Saturday, October 24 3:00 PM
Serious Games I-IV / American Sniper (2011 / 2014)
Harun Farocki / Clint Eastwood · 44m / 133m · DCP
Serious Games explores military use of video game technology in training for the war in Afghanistan. Trainees play simulations resembling mass-market combat games and use laptop programs aimed at remedying PTSD. The lethal technologies of asymmetric warfare are on full display in American Sniper. Eastwood’s film debuted two years after he staged an imaginary interrogation of Obama at the Republican National Convention. It stars Bradley Cooper as Navy SEAL Chris, returning from his campaign in Iraq wishing he had “only killed more.”
Courtesy of Harun Farocki Estate and Greene Naftali. There will be a short intermission between screenings.
Sunday, October 25 7:00 PM
Circle in the Sand / Get Out (2012 / 2017)
Michael Robinson / Jordan Peele · 47m / 104m · DCP
Sifting through the ruins of progress. Circle in the Sand follows vagabonds navigating a post-apocalyptic coastal landscape, rummaging through the debris of American culture. Another combination of the horrifying and the comedic, Get Out delves into the unconscious of America’s white liberal upper-class. Chris’ (Daniel Kaluuya) weekend trip to meet his white girlfriend’s parents reveals the mortal costs of fetishizing Blackness. Don’t worry, though: they “would have voted for Obama a third time!”
Courtesy of Video Data Bank. There will be a short intermission between screenings.
