Can There Be a Working Class Culture & Experience?
Presented by the Dalhousie/King's Platypus Affiliated Society
Co-sponsored by Carbon Arc Independent Cinema, NSCAD University, the King's Student Union and the Dalhousie Student Union Sustainability Office
Co-sponsored by Carbon Arc Independent Cinema, NSCAD University, the King's Student Union and the Dalhousie Student Union Sustainability Office
Please join us for two events that explore the concept of working-class culture, its history and what it might mean today.
//OCT 17 (fri) @ 7pm - Leviathan (2012, 87 min, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel), Film Screening and Discussion
Carbon Arc Independent Cinema, 1747 Summer Street, Halifax
An experimental documentary on the North American commercial fishing industry. Leviathan captures the collaborative clash of people, nature and machine. Shot on a dozen cameras - tossed and tethered, passed from fisherman to filmmaker - it is an stunning and unusual portrait of contemporary work.
“visually ravishing. leviathan is in every way sensational.” – j. hoberman, artinfotrailer link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2wNiJt-I6U
//OCT 20 (mon) @ 6:30pm - Can there be a working class culture and experience? Panel discussion
panelists:
Room D500, NSCAD University Fountain Campus, 5163 Duke Street, Halifax
Bruce Barber (Media Arts Faculty at NSCAD University),
Sebastien Labelle (SEIU, Mayworks Festival Organizer), and
Chris Mansour (Platypus Member and independent writer).
Description: Throughout the 20th century, there was a powerful idea that there could be a homogeneous experience which would culminate into a revolutionary 'working class culture.' Whether represented through the USSR's Prolekult during the 1920s, the Mexican muralists and American Artist Union in the 1930s, or by the artists associated with the Art Workers Coalition in the 1960s-70s, each movement sought to create artworks which would transcend the decadent forms characteristic of bourgeois culture. However, since the variety of revolutionary aspirations of all these groups ultimately failed to transform society in an emancipatory direction, the merits and potentiality of a coherent working-class culture have been thrown into question. This panel seeks to explore the concept of working-class culture, its history, and what it might mean today.
