f i l m fo r u m
los angeles

Winter 2006 Screenings
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The Egyptian Theater
6712 Hollywood Blvd.

Sunday January 28, 2007, 7:00 pm
World Premiere of DECLINE AND FALL, by Erika Suderberg
Filmmaker in person!
At the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd at Las Palmas.

In 1999/2000, Filmforum held a three-part retrospective of the work of renowned video artist.  Filmforum is now delighted to host the premiere of her newest work, Decline and Fall. 

Erika Suderburg is an artist and writer who works in film, video, installation and photography. Her work has been exhibited Internationally including: the Pacific Film Archives-Berkeley, Capp Street Projects-San Francisco, MOMA-New York, The American Film Institute-Los Angeles, MOCA-Los Angeles, Kunstlerhaus-Stuttgart, the Collective for Living Cinema-New York, New Langton Arts-San Francisco, International Video Festival-Bonn, and Simon Watson Gallery-New York. She is the co-editor of Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and the editor of Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art (Feb 2000) from the University of Minnesota Press.  She currently is a professor in the Art Dept. and Film and Visual Culture at the University of California at Riverside.
http://erikasuderburg.com/

DECLINE AND FALL (2007, video, 77 min.)
By Erika Suderburg

Decline and Fall examines how the individual, the institutionalized collective (military, party affiliated or affinity group) and the body politic operate within Empire's boot print or trace. And how these collections of bodies archive empire's leavings, protest its destructive capacities, manufacture alternatives and agitate for its dissolution.
Decline and Fall is an experimental feature-length documentary about aerial bombing, reconstruction, mass protest, and monumentality. Spanning historical and present day images from Rome, Yucatán, Berlin and Los Angeles this work seeks to examine empire; its artifacts, structures and collapse. Through archival footage of the bombing, aerial reconnaissance and rebuilding of WWII Berlin, contemporary footage of a 2.8 million person peace march in Rome at the start of the present war, a neighborhood candlelight vigil in Los Angeles, and stock footage of astronomical events in and around Chichén Itzá in Yucatán, Mexico this work decomposes the macro and micro movements of destruction, memorialization and everyday life.  Through public and private recall, commemoration and witnessing Decline and Fall is structured as a historical “epic” in search of a conclusion, a conclusion that is elusive, mutable, and perpetually contested.

Originally subtitled: A Historical Epic the work is structured around 12 (re) views or chapters and event/image sites of Empire's struggle to maintain wholeness, reinvent itself and disintegrate; actions which sometimes occur simultaneously. The sites traversed in these 12 sections include: The Roman Forum, contemporary international peace marches, Berlin's Trümmerfrauen clearing bombing debris, the reconstruction of Berlin under the Marshall plan, The 1999 re-opening of the Reichstag, Iraqi troops observed via night vision before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the first night of the bombing of Baghdad.

Place is constructed here as vibrant social reactivation of monumental debris and the requisition of streets for pubic protest. The monumental artifactual fragments of the German "1000 year Reich", the Roman, American and Mayan Empires and the people left to clean it up, inherit it, re inhabit it and/or restore it serve as the tropes within Decline and Fall, a visual meditation on the experience of architecture, bodies in motion, protest, destruction, and the cyclical disintegration, destruction, collapse and reconstruction this engenders.