Public Screening #02: Ann and Eduardo Guedes et al. Rocinante, March 17, 2017, Arsenal

Friday, March 17, 2017
7.30PM
Arsenal at “Kino 2”

Great Britain, mid-1980s: In the very moment neoliberalism’s triumph in the realm of Margaret Thatcher seems irreversible, Ann and Eduardo Guedes, two veteran members of the socialist documentary film collective Cinema Action (founded in 1968), shoot their first feature film: ROCINANTE (UK, 1986) is a mythological road movie, a squatter and hacker story, starring John Hurt, Maureen Douglass, Ian Dury, Carol Gillies and others. Raymond Williams’ cultural analysis of Britishness and socially produced landscape is being tied up with the dramatic bucolics of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and Derek Jarman’s transgressive dreamy England. We haven’t seen the movie, but we are curious how the conjunction of documentary and fictional practice, a problem Harun Farocki became very familiar with in the 1970s and 1980s, is being played out here.

Ann and Eduardo Guedes, Rocinante, GB 1986, with John Hurt, Maureen Douglass, Ian Dury, Carol Gillies and others, 35mm, 93 min