Boston-based filmmaker and former Harvard Film Archive curator John Gianvito had made a few films before the 20th century became the 21st, but he would wind up emerging as one of the definitive filmmakers of the current century during its first decade. His six years of work on Gulf War I cri de cœur The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein wound up serving as one of the definitive commentaries on the upcoming century when it premiered in 2001. Mad Songs served as a work of inadvertent commentary on the bloodlust spurred by the Twin Tower attacks, and the Gulf War II that was going to come about as a result. It was also a work of intensely personal cinephilia-inspired curation: Griffith- and Wyler-adjacent structuring of multiple war-at-home storylines was melded with archival footage and performance documentary, resulting in a bold and sprawling hybrid work. Despite fierce advocacy from notable champions in Chantal Akerman, Peter Watkins, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Dennis Lim, it was not an easy film to see in 2001 and it has not gotten much easier since. He’d take another six years to make his next film, this time decidedly aimed at the domestic. Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2007) was a film whose more minimalist scale and running time didn’t reduce its power. Its simultaneously rousing and despairing analysis, courtesy of Howard Zinn, marked a turn towards a more domestic issue: how America eats its rabble rousers but leaves a tribute to them later. The groundwork laid by the champions of Mad Songs resulted in Profit Motive finding more of an audience, and it subsequently being named the Best Experimental Film of 2007 by the National Society of Film Critics.

Spectacle is pleased to present Gianvito’s two features of the 2000s in collaboration with Gianvito himself, who suggested a third title to accompany the present moment where America’s leaders are once again burning down the Middle East for money while punishing its own citizens for speaking up. The omnibus film Far From Afghanistan (2012), conceptualized and edited by Gianvito as a follow-up to the Chris Marker-led Far From Vietnam (1967), finds him and four other directors turning their attentions to the Afghanistan War during its peak years. The more things change, the more they stay the same.