reverend billy in berlin



New York Festival: New York Performance Artists Explore Berlin's Urban Space
House of World Cultures, Berlin, August 2007

No multinational corporation, and certainly no shopping mall, is safe from Reverend Billy. From 22 August Reverend Billy appeared at Berlin's temples of consumption, where he and his Church of Stop Shopping hold open services, including sermon and gospel choir.

At once smoothly charming and cuttingly critical, Reverend Billy preaches against the phoney life promised by experience-marketing and brand-name products. His credo is consumer refusal, his arch enemy the companies that fill public space with chain stores and advertising. Nobody can predict when and where the artistic performance will cross over into the uncontrollable realm of spontaneous political action. Reverend Billy practices a kind of political theatre that in the USA is possible in few places outside New York.

by André Lepecki, New York University

REVEREND BILLY & THE CHURCH OF STOP SHOPPING
documentary film | USA, Germany, Spain | 2002 | 60 min + 30 min interview | color | DVCam, digibeta
You can purchase the DVD at http://www.playloud.org/shop.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Christian Cloos (commissioning editor for ZDF) about the film 'Donna Summer: Hot Stuff'

Image
  Christian Cloos (commissioning editor for ZDF) writes: I really liked the film. Donna as a phone ghost, out of necessity, worked well, almost like it was an intentional way of raising questions of identity. Her death must have been a horror for you. The film offers great archive material and good interviewees (the sister was fantastic, as were all the others). It is very carefully researched, tightly narrated, intelligent and neatly edited – it’s a joy. It’s a continually surprising journey, both in its content and form, through the seventies and eighties. The use of the photos is brilliant. They become like exhibits about pop history, and when you introduce other material, we accept the poor technical quality as texture. It’s great how respectful you were, for example in how you introduced all the musicians involved in the single cover. It would be great if this were the start of an ongoing collaboration between you and Arte on more films about music and culture and you could ma...
Read more

In a Village Named After Franco, Spain Is Struggling to Overcome the Fascist Past

Image
  An interview with Lucía Palacios and Dietmar Post (by Alex Alvarez Taylor for Jacobin ) One of the three hundred settlements founded by Franco's regime, the village of Llanos del Caudillo is still today named in homage to the dictator. Villagers' nostalgia for his regime reflects Spain's failure to reckon with its past — and the ongoing struggle to gain recognition for fascism's victims. The village of Llanos del Caudillo, in Spain’s Castilla La Mancha region, is one of three hundred “colonies,” or settlements, christened by the Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in the decades after the Civil War. Its historic link to his regime is still today visible in its name: Llanos — “plains” — del Caudillo — “of the leader.” Established in the 1950s by the agriculture ministry’s National Colonization Institute, the settlements reflected the Franco regime’s disastrous policy of economic “self-sufficiency,” beginning with the drive to repopulate or “recolonize” devastated rural ...
Read more

La fama es voraz. Un documental sobre Donna Summer.

Image
  “Tagespiegel” (diario alemán): La fama es voraz. Engulle a sus víctimas en cuerpo y alma. El documental "Donna Summer - Hot Stuff" comienza con escenas de un programa de entrevistas de los años 80. El presentador quiere saber qué piensa la cantante de los estereotipos que circulan sobre ella. ¿Diva de la música disco? ¿Reina del sexo? Ella se limita a sonreír con un ligero sarcasmo. Donna Summer saltó a la fama a mediados de los años setenta con sus éxitos "Love To Love You Baby" y "I Feel Love", en los que, acompañada del sonido futurista de los sintetizadores Moog del productor Giorgio Moroder, cantaba versos jadeantes y gemidos lujuriosos. La etiqueta “reina sexy del disco” le acompañó hasta su muerte. Un crítico de la revista Time contó 22 orgasmos en "Love To Love You". En la portada del álbum Donna aparecía vistiendo un minúsculo camisón. "Me sentía como un producto", confiesa Summer a los autores de la película. "Como una ...
Read more