Archive Fever 3.0: Jesse Lerner Saturday

Friday, August 5, 2011 – Unfortunately, Jesse Pires won’t be with us tomorrow night, keeping the Jesse-count to a low two, but I hope you’ll still join us for Jesse Lerner, in person and presenting his film The Atomic Sublime. An essay based on found footage, the movie examines the Cold War propaganda use of abstract expressionist art. While the Soviet Union tolerated figurative painting, the US started to promote abstraction as an emblem of capitalist democracy. “Threatening” abstract expressionism was assimilated by the government and used for propaganda, as the personification of the Western ideal of freedom.

Lerner will be appearing in person and answering questions after the screening. He is a documentary film and video maker and writer based in Los Angeles. His work has screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the Sydney Biennale, and the Sundance Film Festival, Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, the Los Angeles International Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and other festivals and museums internationally. His films Natives (1991), Frontierland/Fronterilandia (1995), Ruins (1999), and The American Egypt (2001) have won numerous prizes at film festivals in the US, Latin America and Japan.

Here is an excerpt of “Frontierland/Fronterilandia”

Tickets are here.