2012.03.11-2012.03.12
Capital: Film Action workshop was initiated by ICAST, co-hosted by Gao Shiming and Lu Jie, with participation from Wu Shanzhuan, Wang Jianwei, Qin Siyuan, Peter Anders, Rainer Stollmann, Ralph Obermauer, Hu Jieming, MadeIn (Xu Zhen), Guan Yi, Lu Xinghua, Zhao Qianfan, and Huang Chien-Hung, among others. The main team members also included ICAST students Weng Zhenqi, Tang Xiaolin, Gong Linlin, and Min Han.
The workshop began with a screening of Alexander Kluge’s film Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike. Marx–Eisenstein–Das Kapital, building temporary sets and conducting interviews and discussions. In the first session Temporary Set—The Recurrence of History, the discussion revolved around Kluge’s film activities, exploring the artistic—historical—political implications of the ‘serial case’ involving Eisenstein, Joyce, and Marx, and revisiting significant revolutionary moments, such as the 1848 Revolution, the Paris Commune, the October Revolution, and the protests of May 1968. The second session Our ‘Capital’ World celebrated 150 years after the writing of Das Kapital, and aimed to build on Marx’s work by exploring the realities of symbolic capital in life, the culture and creative industries, brand hegemony, and symbolic capitalism. This session also re-examined Kluge’s cinematic methods. The third session The Symptom of Capitalism addressed the relationship between art and capital, critiquing contemporary values of exchange, display, author-brand systems, and the dominance of spectacle. It aimed to analyze and overcome the capitalist crises inherent in our times through not only institutional and ideological critique but also psychological analysis and psychotherapy, thus reopening and expanding our historical perspectives and social imagination.