Autonomia Film Series

email translatingpuissance at riseup dot net for directions

“Autonomy has no frontiers. It is a way of eluding the imperatives of production, the verticality of institutions, the traps of political representation, the virus of power…Autonomy is a way of acting collectively. It is made up of a number of organs and fluid organizations characterized by the refusal to separate economics from politics, and politics from existence.”

– Sylvere Lotringer, “The Return of Politics”

We know that we have inherited concepts of life and of struggle – of revolution, really – that cohere in no way to our real experiences.  Revolution as a seizure of power, as the overthrow of one government for another, as a discreet event with a start and end date – so many ways to describe what so often amounts to little more than a type of law-creating violence. Since 2008, and more frequently since 2011,  a new intelligence has been building itself in the plazas, at the barricades, in the masked demonstrations and strange occupations. We place ourselves in this history as students of the era but also as partisans inside of it.

We would like to look at a previous cycle of struggles which took place in Italy from roughly 1969 to roughly 1977. Autonomia spread from the factories to the universities and then everywhere else. Tens of thousands of workers and young people refused the discipline of the factories and universities and fought with their union representatives to shut down production, to occupy buildings, to strike and riot, to publish text and operate pirate radios, and to spread this tension throughout the society as an everyday reality.

We’d like to visit a few films from and about this era and we would love for you to join us. The first film we will be watching is “The Working Class Goes to Heaven,” by Elio Petri.