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Cinema Vortex Presents Consumption Junction
(released
1/18/2006)
By greenroomwire
Cinema Vortex chief programmer Barron Sherer delights in another trip to Public Domain Playhouse, an innovative exploration of the strange and silly world of public domain films. "Consumption Junction is our first compilation film examining the American obsession of consumerism through eyes alien to our culture, literally. Martians from the public domain cult classic Santa Claus vs. the Martians try their best to understand our culture while bombarded with a manic montage of TV dinners, mass production, credit cards all with vintage film clips tripping through American consumer culture from its tentative beginnings in the '30s to its explosive development after World War II."
Public Domain Playhouse's newest screening is related to the Wolfsonian collection and the role seductive imagery plays in shaping consumer's desires -- and their purchases. A "Free Fridays at the Wolf" event presented by Cinema Vortex and the Wolfsonian-FIU.
A staggering range of films and videos - including classroom instructional films, advertising films, movie trailers, pop music shorts, and feature films -- have drifted out of copyright and into the hazy never-land known to entertainment lawyers everywhere as the public domain. These obscure films, a unique record of the values, attitudes, images and mores of our American past, are a vast mine of images for iconoclastic independent filmmakers in the US and all over the world.
In a time when corporate consolidation threatens to restrict public access to information; when wildly proliferating technologies make it possible to sell and re-sell the same piece of intellectual property again and again and again; when reforms in copyright laws make possible a future when copyrights can be renewed almost endlessly; the films of the public domain, and the new works derived from them, represent a vital new creative frontier.
Public Domain Playhouse: "Consumption Junction" (U.S. 2006; curated by Barron Sherer & Kevin Wynn; running time 45 min.)
Friday, January 27, 2006, 7pm
Wolfsonian-FIU
1001 Washington Avenue
Miami Beach
Admission is FREE
Contact Cinema Vortex at www.cinemavortex.org or 305-614-5700; contact the Wolfsonian-FIU at www.wolfsonian.org or 305-531-1001.
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