Provisions Film: Politics and Prose
For this film, activist and artists Paul Chan invited several other video artists to generate four short films that intimately portray political activist who have been sentenced to jail by the US government post September 11, 2001.
The film in itself stands at the intersection of art and politics. It is a brilliant survey of our current laws and constitutional rights, the Patriot Act and its implications, and the abuse of power within the US legal system.
The subjects include activist lawyer Lynne Stewart, founder of the Critical Art Ensemble Steve Kurtz, naturalized American citizen, husband, father and academic Mohammed Yousry, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Kathy Kelly, and Frida Berrigan, the first activist to protest against Guantanamo Bay at Guantanamo Bay.
Paul Chan’s video portrait of Lynne Stewart called “Untitled” , focuses on the relationship between the language of law and the language of poetry.
The film [simply] shows Ms. Stewart talking; in a sense it is a self-portrait. She talks about her trial, about her career as an activist lawyer and about a personal politics that sounds instinctual rather than ideological. She also reads poetry.
One of the poems she reads is William Blake’s “On Another’s Sorrow” from “Songs of Innocence”. It isn’t “political” in any overt way. It is filled with both questions and answers. While she reads, Mr. Chan turns the screen into a field of changing colors, so that we concentrate on the music of the words, the activism of the soul that poetry is, the power outlet that art can be. It’s a simple device, and like any effective political action, right or wrong, brilliant because it works.
Holland Cotter, New York Times January 17, 2006
The film is now available at Video Data Bank (www.vdb.org)
