Dead the ends

                           

2017, 106 mins     

             


gif-blockbuster 

 

Can capitalism be looted and broken by those it loots and breaks? Dead the Ends is the first feature length film by Benedict Seymour. Re-working Chris Marker's much re-made 1962 film La jetée, it adopts the fractal, emergent logic of the UK uprising of 2011 to explore the revolutionary potential of an era of riots.



‘Benedict Seymour’s experimental feature is an urgent, engaging journey into the London riots and our current political situation via imagery from dystopian science fiction.’

– William Fowler, BFI London Film Festival, 2017


Official Selection BFI London Lux Experimenta.
 

World premier at ICA Cinema, London; Rich Mix, London*










Review by Paul Clinton in Frieze 26 October, 2017


‘First as tragedy, then as farce’ – so goes Karl Marx’s often quoted prediction that the worst of history is doomed to repeat itself. But what if repetitions of the past could actually be made to serve political progress? Such is the argument of Benedict Seymour’s new film Dead the Ends (2017) which premiered this month in the Experimenta section of the London Film Festival.”

“The key traumatic event in Dead the Ends is the real-life shooting of Mark Duggan, by London’s Metropolitan Police Force on 4 August 2011. The police initially stated that Duggan was armed – though no gun could be found and claims he behaved aggressively were disputed by eyewitnesses – triggering protests that he had been unfairly targeted for being black and working class, which escalated into five days of rioting and looting in cities across the UK. From this Seymour spins his own speculative time travel fiction but with a distinctly Marxist argument, in which this brief period of civil unrest becomes the pivotal moment in the emergence of a new revolutionary proletariat. In reading Marker through the UK riots, he suggests that we should raid the past to find material for a better political future.

William Fowler, curator of artists’ moving image BFI:


“Dead the Ends begins with the 2011 London riots and the death of Mark Duggan, but then begins retelling the story of Chris Marker’s influential experimental narrative short La Jetée (1962), about a man who is sent back in time to avert the fascist future.” 

https://www2.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/5a7a377e7d8f9


Press kit (download)








Other screenings:
The Colloquium for Unpopular Culture. NYU, New York, US Premiere. 3 October 2018.

Screening and Symposium at With Sukhdev Sandhu, Hari Kunzru, and members of the NYU Cinema Studies and Literature Depts. 29 September 2018: ‘Dead the Ends’ (2017) 
16 May 2018: ‘Dead the Ends’, University of Kent, Department of Law. Screening and discussion with Elizabeth Cowie and Thanos Zartouladis.

22 February 2018: ‘Dead the Ends’, Screening and Q&A at Hospital Prison University Archive, Copenhagen. With Jakob Jakobsen. In connection with the exhibition on art, money and value with the 'Art for Goods' association and Joen Vedel.
http://hospitalprisonuniversity.net/




17 October 2018: ‘Dead the Ends’, Centre for Entangled Media Research (CEMR), College of Arts and the School of Film and Media at the University of Lincoln



Screening and talk at ‘The Future of the Digital Image, a seminar on Dead the Ends’ convened by Dean Lockwood and Dave Boothroyd, with contributions and papers by Rob Coley, Marie Thompson & Thomas Sutherland, Martin Thayne and Dean Lockwood.

 9 Feb 2018 ‘Dead the Ends’, screened at QAGOMA Australian Cinémathèque Brisbane Australia.



30 January 2018: ‘Dead the Ends’, Anagram Books, Berlin, Germany – screening and discussion with Sean Bonney and Sacha Kahir





Artist’s trailer