1. The important thing is not to make political films, nor to make films politically, but rather to engage seriously in the political, collectively. This does not mean to become politicians, but rather to overthrow what politics has come to mean in 2013.

2. Film and video are only tools, tools that offer a mediated relationship between the present and the political. The point is not to use these tools critically, but rather strategically. This goes for the camera as much as the weapon.

3. We can no longer simply respond to urgent circumstances, as our entire lives have been placed under a permanent state of emergency, crisis, and war. The question of aesthetics is not simply to represent our current condition, but rather to begin to live the life we want – to begin to live communism.

4. The tragic histories of revolutionaries, and the cultural artifacts they leave behind, are not something to be observed or consumed individually. Rather they should be studied collectively, and put into practice presently. “Every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor.” (Frantz Fanon, 1961)

5. Resistance is not a matter of knowledge, ideas, critique, or consciousness, but rather one of force, both material and spiritual. Resistance is the movement towards communism.

6. To confront the trappings of the present is to analyze materially the difference between idealism and struggle. Those uprisings which occur in another time and space, which we access via screens, are not simply to be catalogued or curated as movements in history. They are something to be lived.

7. The problem of media today resides in the binary of documentation and projection. During the Occupy movement, this was a question we chose to leave unanswered, or rather ignore. For us, the movement was a rejection of the mediation and representation that had come to dominate our lives. As such, our concerns were elsewhere.

8. Luckily in 2013, institutional critique has been relegated to graduate students and bloggers. Whatever we may want to say today, Newsreel already said it in 1968.

New York Year Zero
29 August 2013