The Gods of Times Square / I Am Somebody

Programme

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  I Am Somebody (Madeline Anderson, 1970, 28')

  In 1969, black female hospital staff in Charleston, South Carolina went on strike for a raise, but ultimately ended up in conflict with the state and the National Guard. I Am Somebody, produced by the New York hospital union Local 1199, is a crucial document of the struggle for labour rights.

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  The Gods of Times Square (Richard Sandler, 1999, 93')

  For six years, Sandler filmed the radical transformation of Times Square, 'the world’s crossroads'. The privately owned businesses making way for chain stores, forced out by project developers with dollar signs in their eyes. The colourful preachers who turned Times Square into Speaker's Corner also disappeared. The Gods of Times Square records a moment in New York’s history: the place most associated with freedom of speech and free spirits turned from a democratic, interracial, communal area into a soulless corporate-led amusement park. The legendary square now hosts new gods: Mickey, Minnie and Goofy on one corner and Bugs, Daffy and Porky on the other. Neon advertisements announcing our religious devotion to consumerism.

• About Garrett Bradley

  These films were selected by American artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley, whom Eye has dedicated an exhibition to: “This constellation of films helped shape me over the years, in some terrible and wonderful symmetry – a series of visions that not only reflect the void of human ignorance and the violent powers-that-be, but also the silent, stubborn resistance. These messages from the edge of human consciousness constitute a bastion against the erasure of memory. When art is silenced, the past is sterilised, the present ground down to conformism and the future becomes a repetition of oxidised myths. This creates a narrative that dares not view its own ugliness, nor has the courage to imagine something else.
  
  These works are far from merely entertainment (although some were made for that purpose), they are fever dreams of our shared human condition, how we stumble under the weight of history and yet still stand tall to dream. I keep coming back to these films because they remind me that although this world is often cruel, our collective capacity for endurance, for struggle and coming up with something better is a form of resistance so deep it borders on the sublime”.