Stand By for Failure: A Documentary About Negativland
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Stand By for Failure: A Documentary About Negativland
LA Premiere with Negativland in person!
Saturday September 19, 2026, 1:00 pm
At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd. Los Angeles CA 90057
NOTE THE EARLIER SHOW TIME
Tickets: $15 general, $10 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members
https://link.dice.fm/d168e55a1385
“Every bit as mind-altering as its subjects.”- Oscar Goff, Boston Hassle
“Much of the film layers eviscerated visuals into a vaudevillian media kaleidoscope.” - Marc Weidenbaum, The Wire
In 1978 David "The Weatherman" Wills, Richard Lyons and Mark Hosler formed Negativland, which quickly became an absurd and noisy multimedia world without boundaries, ownership or privacy.
Negativland's complex chaos of plunderphonics poses both serious and silly questions about the nature of sound, media, technology, control, propaganda, power and perception in the global village. Negativland continue to be pioneers of art in the electric age, and the medium reveals that any message is all in our heads.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y3vwrWxrCw
About Negativland:
Negativland is an American experimental music band that originated in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970s. The core of the band consists of Mark Hosler, David Wills, Peter Conheim and Jon Leidecker. Negativland has released a number of albums ranging from pure sound collage to more musical expositions.
“Negativland, longtime advocates of fair use allowances for pop media collage, are perhaps America’s most skilled plunderers from the detritus of 20th century commercial culture...the band’s latest project is razor sharp, microscopically focused, terribly fun and a bit psychotic.” —WIRED MAGAZINE
“Negativland isn’t just some group of merry pranksters; its art is about tearing apart and reassembling found images, objects, and sounds to create new ones, in an attempt to make social, political and artistic statements. Hilarious and chilling.” —THE ONION
“Musical collage pioneers... genre-defying, densely layered, strangely accessible...” —WASHINGTON POST
“Negativland is arguably the preeminent audio collage collective of our time.” —HI FRUCTOSE
Ryan Worsley is a DIY documentary filmmaker that often reconstructs and recontextualizes fragmented found footage to celebrate glorious mundanity (SHIT HAPPENS, 2016) and the heroism in failure (RAZING THE BAR, 2014). Her collaboration with Negativland has resulted in five music videos, a concert film and two feature length documentaries.
Stand By For Failure: A Documentary about Negativland
Stand By For Failure: A Documentary about Negativland
Directed by Ryan Worsley
2022, digital color, sound, 96 minutes
Official Website:
“Worsley guides us toward emotional throughlines on a nearly subliminal level.” - Oscar Goff, Boston Hassle
“If you want to be inspired by individuals who dare to bust down the doors of art’s gatekeepers, then STAND BY FOR FAILURE is the way to go.” - Alan Ng, Film Threat
“Worsley directs her documentary by embracing Negativland’s own “helter stupid” collage techniques. Much of the film layers eviscerated visuals into a vaudevillian media kaleidoscope. Some of this material is drawn from the band’s own work, while other portions simulate the Negativland plunder-drunk ethos, drawing from the group’s favourite resources, such as televangelism, advertising and TV news.
“No zone is safe, not even the home that David Wills shared with his mother. We first meet him as a precocious boy when he starts broadcasting his recitation of the weather report in 1959. As he matures, so does home technology. Soon he’s filming and, later, using video recorders to capture daily life. Worsley frequently reproduces segments of Wills’s home movies in split-screen. The message is clear: even the most mundane aspects of human existence are technologically mediated and surveilled – and thus raw material for the madcap minds of Negativland.” – Marc Weidenbaum, Disquiet.com, April 16, 2023