Scraps on Cinema

Ryan Worsley's Stand By for Failure , a documentary chronicling the history of the southern California experimental sound collective Negativland, saw its east coast premiere at the Philadelphia Mausoleum of Contemporary Art (PhilaMOCA) on Thursday, following its first ever screening on November 12th at the Other Cinema in the band's origin city of San Francisco. Playing to an audience of only eleven individuals (including myself and the MOCA's sole staff member and digital projectionist), sporting no copyright protection, and composed of some 56 years of audiovisual material, Worsley's film straddles a fine line between conventional band-doc and its own avant-garde remix, in keeping with both the style and ethos of its subject. Negativland formed between the years 1979 and 1980 from the unlikely friendship of two eccentric Concord high schoolers, Mark Hosler and Richard Lyons, and a semi-reclusive 34-year-old named David "The Weatherman" Willis. Building upon ...

Between the summers of 2000 and 2001, an Iran-Iraq war veteran and construction worker named Saeed Hanaei perpetrated a series of murders targeting sex workers in and around the city of Mashhad, a major economic and spiritual center of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Hanaei managed to kill 16 women before he was finally arrested, unapologetically confessing to his crimes, which he considered to be a religiously justified campaign of moral cleansing. Though he was ultimately found guilty and executed by hanging in the spring of 2002, Hanaei's trial quickly snowballed into a media spectacle, in which it became a cause célèbre  among fundamentalist hardliners. For reformist and feminist elements in the Republic, the entire ordeal became a tacit demonstration of the sheer pervasiveness and extremity of cultural and religious misogyny in the country, to an extent that a major conservative newspaper, Jomhouri-e Eslami , published a front-page story displaying the faces of Hanaei and his vi...