Film Screening, Deutsches Filmmuseum

Return of the Living Dead (directed by Dan O’Bannon, 1985) popularized the brain-eating zombie, its only cure from the eternal pain of undeath. The film is a New Wave Horror classic, which will be screened in a 35mm, uncut U.S version.

With an introduction to the significance of the film by Kyle Bishop.

Thursday, September 21, 2023, 6.00 p.m.
Admission: € 6.00 / 8.00
Deutsches Filmmuseum
Schaumainkai 41
60596 Frankfurt

Art Project / Discussion, Synnika: The Last of Us in the Bahnhofsviertel

One way in which the zombie as signifier features in contemporary public debates is as a propagandistic metaphor directed at marginalized populations and/or at ones rendered obsolete by their falling out of the matrix of surplus value extraction. We discuss these tropes against the backdrop of playing The Last of Us, a video game that features a post-zombie-apocalypse civilization that survives by erecting massive walls, guarded by countless security cameras and a heavily militarized police force. In this gameworld, players face an antagonistic horde of braindead prowlers against whom no means of material redistribution, social transformation, or housing program could ever present an adequate response. There is no revolution to be won at the side of the zombie: the only mode of interacting with it is to kill it—an activity the game problematically succeeds in rendering as fun. Here, finally, the neoliberal modes of combating poverty are symbolically rendered as inevitable. This is the zombie icon that conservative and right-wing liberal voices mobilize in their attempts to justify diverse forms of violent exclusion, repression, or displacement, stigmatizing the Other as parasitical, unproductive, and thoroughly inhuman.

With an introduction by Sarah Juliet Lauro.

Friday, September 22, 2023, 8.00 p.m.
Synnika at NIKA.House
Niddastraße 57
60329 Frankfurt