Frames of Resistance explores Wolf Vostell and other Fluxus filmmakers’ use of film as political interventions into the built environment and the media landscape. Vostell proposed this list of films to be shown during his visit to the MCA in January 1970 when he supervised the production of Concrete Traffic. Screening are Vostell’s films Sun in Your Head (1963), Starfighter (1967), and others.

Presented by UChicago Arts, the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, and the Film Studies Center.

In the times of public intrusion into the private sphere, right wing populists and religious fundamentalists threatening the freedom of expression and diversity, and conservative politicians pressing for control and surveillance, the expressions of private life become a political affair again. Related to the slogan of 1968 "The personal is political", the here presented films talk about personal or private affairs in relation to the public sphere and the urban space.

The five-program series "Troubling the Image: New + Restored Experimental Cinema" features an eclectic and wide-ranging group of works that celebrate the vibrancy of experimental and almost-experimental cinema from near and far, now and then.

Directly and obliquely, narratives are enacted, told, sung, and implied. Keewatin Dewdney’s Wildwood Flower (1971) is a simple, lovely imagining of the Carter Family’s eponymous song. Lois Patiño’s ghost-like smugglers haunt a phantasmagorical Portuguese mountain region in the cryptic Night without Distance (2015). Robert Flaherty’s long-lost film A Night of Storytelling (1935) captures the essence of Irish oral folklore. French-based Iranian filmmaker Arash Nassiri visualizes a conspiracy-driven monologue with a hallucinatory trip through the Paris catacombs in Darwin Darwah (2016). In Edward R. Feil’s The Inner World of Aphasia (1968) medical instructional film becomes a psychological horror film when a nurse becomes the patient.