GORE CAPITALISM - A TOUCH OF SIN
- April 18 @ 4:22 PM
- The Gene Siskel Film Center
- 164 N. State Street
- 164 N. State Street
April 18 at 6pm | Winner of Best Screenplay at Cannes Film Festival, A TOUCH OF SIN is composed of four vignettes involving violence and vengeance in contemporary China. The film confronts taboos of crime, corruption, adultery and prostitution by grounding its stories in actual news stories from the 2000s—as if tracing effects of modernization on the most vulnerable of Chinese citizens. An ocean away from Mexico, A TOUCH OF SIN considers the emergence of what Valencia calls the “endriago subject”—the new entrepreneur who is willing to commit violence as a sort of independent contractor—in a nation branded as the ultimate resistance to capitalist logic. The Film Center is delighted to welcome the return of our long-running lecture series, presented in collaboration with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Art History, Theory and Criticism, and Film, Video, New Media, and Animation departments. GORE CAPITALISM will run January 31 through May 9. Inspired by Sayak Valencia’s book of the same name, GORE CAPITALISM is not about “horror movies,” although some of its titles draw on conventions of that genre. Rather, this screening series starts from the premise that “horror” is what we live through right now, whether in our everyday lives or via the information bombarding us from screens. This horror has something to do with the economic order in which we live: sometimes called “neoliberalism,” it is a situation of acceleration in which it is increasingly harder to make ends meet; the gap between haves and have-nots keeps growing; and tactics of repression are ever more violent. GORE CAPITALISM is particularly concerned with how the individual gets caught in uneven wars between classes, races, genders, sexual orientations, healthy and sick, states and citizens. “Gore” is one way to name - and to witness - what it is that happens to vulnerable human bodies, in an increasingly polarized and ruthless world. Valencia focuses on how Mexican cartels turn the pornographic violence of slasher films into a reality. My aim, in this screening series, is to restore back to cinema urgent ethical questions from our shared global crisis: What can we add to these conversations? What futures can we envision? Why should cinema persist? Lecturer: Professor Daniel R. Quiles, SAIC, Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism.