Unbuilding the World: A conversation with Half-Earth Socialism authors Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese

As pop music blares and cars rush past, the camera lurches into a wood at the road’s edge and, through rustling foliage, reveals a strange scene: giant spanners, a discarded bike and a piano outside a primitive tin-roofed cottage. The bucolic chirp of sparrows is shattered by a gunshot. De Natura and The Moon and the Sledgehammer will be available with descriptive subtitles. The live conversation on Tuesday 13 September will be live-captioned. The films look at different visions and versions of sustainability: some feature those who have had to find inventive, sustainable ways of solving problems through necessity, while others show those who have found contentment and joy in life without succumbing to consumer traps. We will also be featuring works that highlight the dangers of wonderful traditional skills being lost in our modern world which comes at a price we cannot afford.

Summer Sale

Picturehouses Central is the flagship cinema of the Picturehouses group, located in the heart of London in Piccadilly Circus. It is the former Trocadero Centre and has now been transformed into a luxury 7 Screen cinema, all boasting huge screens and probably the most comfortable and spacious seats in the country. The Revelator will host a selection of old and new films from around the world during COP26 on 6-7 th November. Alongside these two wonderful films we will be joined on Tuesday 13 September by Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese, authors of the recently-published Half-Earth Socialism, to discuss the book and their plan for a future free from extinction, climate change and pandemics. Following the screening a conversation will be held with director Philip Trevelyan, Alastair McIntosh and David Archibald, hosted by Sam Ainsley Scotsman article on The Revelator: https://tinyurl.com/39t65yt4 This special event has been created by film distributor Katy MacMillan and artist Stephen Skrynka .

On the third evening, The Moon & the Sledgehammer will screen Gorge Coeur Ventre (Still Life, 2016), by Maud Alpi, fresh from the Locarno film festival. More here Hello. I hope this finds you safe and well during these strange times of both adversity and positive changes, where our values are being challenged like never before. Over an hour, a remarkable vision of genuine freedom is explored, far from the constraints of conventional ways of being.” A very lively Q&A followed, with original and insightful contributions – John Russell Taylor brought his encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema to the fore, making comparisons with Cocteau, Vigo and Jennings and calling Trevelyan ‘one of the few real poets of cinema’. And following on Maxine’s point that the word ‘eccentric’ can be used in a derogatory way, he made the insightful comment that ‘Sometimes it’s the world that is eccentric, peculiar, and not totally in touch with reality and it’s the family that are not eccentric, that are real.’ It offers a glimpse into their self-constructed albeit unusual universe where they have formed their own philosophies about the world around them. There, in their woodland paradise and being part of the Nature they inhabit, they believe the world has followed the wrong path.

Giveaway

Skrynka’s work invites a dialogue through joyful and playful experimentation in his use of materials, painting and performance. His work is about the constant cycle of risk and failure, repair and renewal, always exploring ways of revealing the beauty and truth of human failure and the true path of following your dreams always involves an element of risk and a human cost. Challenging conventional notions of success and exploring the ways failure can be far more revealing and life-affirming. He works with recycled material which is or becomes damaged, and also through performance by taking on ridiculous challenges. Skrynka’s work follows a methodical sequence of production but the results leave everything to chance, the whole process inviting disaster. The film was my compass for Gallivant and my accomplice for This Filthy Earth. It has nurtured me and fed me. Jon Bang Carlsen must have drunk from the same trough, as his companion films It's Now or Never(1996) and How to Invent Reality (1996) contain smidgeons of the same spellbinding. Ben Rivers’ This Is My Land (2006) is a magnificent pretender and then of course there’s Stalker…