Published: September 26, 2024; Aithor: Julia Sonrisa
Address: 172 Classon Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11205, United States
Join us at e-flux on Thursday, October 3 for Consuming Revolutions, a lecture by cultural critic, filmmaker, and writer Charles Mudede.
Fredric Jameson is famous for writing, in Archaeologies of the Future (2005), that “someone has observed [it’s] easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” This might be the case with science-fiction literature but certainly not with Hollywood movies. From Star Wars (1977—present) to the recent space opera Rebel Moon (2023-2024), social forms that approximate or directly picture capitalism are repeatedly destroyed by revolutionaries. And so it is: Hollywood rarely sides with the Empire but with the rebels. Capital doesn’t sell, for a pretty penny, the rope of its undoing but the fantasy of it. What it can’t produce and promote, however, is what happens after the revolution, as the late Mark Fisher explained in Capitalist Realism (2009). What is to account for this limitation? And why are revolutions more popular than disasters? No movie has made more money than Avatar (2009), a film whose heroes are aligned with the passions of the radical left and Third World freedom fighters rather than the key repressive institution, the military, of over-developed economies. Indeed, it’s easier to imagine the end of capitalism than what follows its demise.
Charles Tonderai Mudede is a Zimbabwean-born cultural critic, urbanist, filmmaker, college lecturer, and writer. He is a senior staff writer of The Stranger, a lecturer at Cornish College of the Arts, and director of the feature film Thin Skin (2023). He has collaborated with director Robinson Devor on three films, two of which, Police Beat(2005, now part of MoMA’s permanent collection) and Zoo (2007, also screened at Cannes) premiered at Sundance; and the most recent of which, Suburban Fury, premiers at New York Film Festival 2024 and concerns a failed revolution.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
Time: 7:00 pm EST
Free!
Detailed information and discussion of the event.