WHAT FAROCKI TAUGHT + SCUM MANIFESTO

Jill Godmilow WHAT FAROCKI TAUGHT 1997, 30 min, 16mm. Made in collaboration with Gloria Jean Masciarotte & Ted Mandell. WHAT FAROCKI TAUGHT is literally and stubbornly a remake – that is, a perfect replica in color and in English, of Harun Farocki’s black-and-white, 1969 German language film, INEXTINGUISHABLE FIRE. Taking as its subject the political and formal strategies of Farocki’s film about the development of Napalm B by Dow Chemical during the Vietnam War, Godmilow’s unabashedly perfect copy reopens Walter Benjamin’s discussion of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. WHAT FAROCKI TAUGHT thus becomes an agit-prop challenge to the cinéma vérité documentary’s representation of information, history, politics, and “real” human experience. Because Farocki’s film was not in distribution in the U.S. at the time, WHAT FAROCKI TAUGHT was conceived as a gesture of film distribution – taking this small, film footnote to a war, a barnacle stuck on the side of the moth-balled vessel of Vietnam, flicking it forward past the recent, more sophisticated, and successful technologies of Panama and the Persian Gulf, to see if the “ping” of recognition and the radical potential of the documentary film project could be revived.

Jill Godmilow SCUM MANIFESTO 2016, 27 min, digital. Made in collaboration with Joanna Krakowska & Magda Mosiewicz. When Sherry Millner and Ernest Larsen, the producers of the Facets DVD compilation “Disruptive Film”, couldn’t clear the rights to Delphine Seyrig and Carole Roussopoulos’s 1976 French film, SCUM MANIFESTO, they contacted Jill Godmilow, Queen of Replicas (see WHAT FAROCKI TAUGHT), who decided to produce a perfect Polish copy of this landmark film about the 1967 feminist manifesto – this time with Polish performers and current Polish newsreel of goings-on in the newly super-nationalist Polish state. Exactly as in the 1976 French film, the Poles translate then type up, phrase-by-phrase, Valerie Solanas’s still outrageous and profoundly useful 1967 text, which begins, “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.”

Total running time: ca. 60 min.

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