America the Beautiful

A miners’ strike is brew­ing in Butte, Mon­tana, in the rev­o­lu­tion­ary year of 1917. Tens of thou­sands of men have already lost their lives in the copper mines of the Ana­con­da Mining Com­pa­ny. The rad­i­cal union Indus­tri­al Work­ers of the World (IWW) takes up the fight for better work­ing con­di­tions and improved safety in the mines. When their activist Frank Little gives blaz­ing speech­es and calls for a strike, he is bru­tal­ly lynched. The per­pe­tra­tors are never found, many union­ists are impris­oned for years, and laws are tight­ened, although work­ers did not use any violence.

AN INJURY TO ONE is a requiem for sol­i­dar­i­ty in which lan­guage, music, and imagery work togeth­er in a subtle chore­og­ra­phy. All evi­dence of the events has since been lost, the offi­cial his­to­ry writ­ten by the mining com­pa­ny. Travis Wilk­er­son arranges the few remain­ing pic­tures – a hand­ful of pho­tographs and film shots of the town and mining land­scape, news­pa­per arti­cles, and mug shots of union­ists – in a mon­tage, nar­rat­ing the story that begins with the dawn of indus­tri­al­iza­tion in a voice com­plete­ly void of preach­i­ness. Tra­di­tion­al miners’ songs break up the film into chap­ters, the lyrics appear­ing on screen (but not sung) in time with the music. Many dif­fer­ent com­plex strands of thought are art­ful­ly con­veyed using the sim­plest filmic means. Wilkerson’s thesis film project at CalArts (his advi­sors were Thom Ander­son, Hart­mut Bit­o­m­s­ki, and Billy Wood­ber­ry) was regard­ed as one of the best avant-garde films of the decade by the mag­a­zine Film Comment.

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Travis Wilk­er­son geb. 1969 in Denver, USA, wuchs auf in Col­orado und Mon­tana. Er studierte Sprachen und Lit­er­atur, dann Film am Cal­i­for­nia Insti­tute of the Arts (M.F.A. in 2001). Eine Begeg­nung mit dem leg­endären kuban­is­chen Filmemach­er San­ti­a­go Alvarez bee­in­flusste ihn maßge­blich. Seit­dem macht er Filme in der Tra­di­tion des „Drit­ten Kinos“, in welchem poli­tis­ch­er Inhalt und Form eine untrennbare Ein­heit bilden. Seine Filme wurden auf inter­na­tionalen Fes­ti­vals und im Kun­stkon­text gezeigt. Wilk­er­son veröf­fentlicht auch Texte über Film und lehrt zurzeit am Vassar Col­lege, Pough­keep­sie, NY. Filme: ACCELERATED UNDER-DEVELOPMENT (1999), WHO KILLED COCK ROBIN? (2005), DISTINGUISHED FLYING CROSS (2011), FRAGMENTS OF DISSOLUTION (part of FAR FROM AFGHANISTAN, 2012, see John Gian­vi­to), MACHINE GUN OR TYPEWRITER? (2015).

Detroit’s story has encap­su­lat­ed the iconic nar­ra­tive of Amer­i­ca over the last cen­tu­ry— the Great Migra­tion of African Amer­i­cans escap­ing Jim Crow; the rise of man­u­fac­tur­ing and the middle class; … read more

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In some parts of St. Louis, Mis­souri, preg­nant moth­ers hope they will have girls. Half of the boys who grow up here don’t live to cel­e­brate their eigh­teenth birth­day. This … read more

What is this land that promis­es a better future for so many people, luring them to come and settle, to cul­ti­vate it, to live? What is this land whose real­i­ty … read more

In 1979, short­ly before he died, James Bald­win wrote an unfin­ished work in which he reflect­ed on his life as a homo­sex­u­al writer in the con­text of the black Civil … read more

What char­ac­ter­izes public life? What­ev­er it is, it could hardly be more lively than in Jack­son Heights, where 167 dif­fer­ent lan­guages are spoken. There are shops, restau­rants, and places of … read more

In LONG STORY SHORT, over 100 people at home­less shel­ters, food banks, adult lit­er­a­cy pro­grams, and job train­ing cen­ters in Los Ange­les and the Bay Area in Cal­i­for­nia dis­cuss their … read more

In the early 1980s, Diego Echev­er­ria took a 16mm camera into the streets of the South­side of Williams­burg, then a pri­mar­i­ly Puerto Rican neigh­bor­hood and one of the city’s poor­est, … read more