Main Event

How Not to Be Seen preceded by La Jetée

Name of Venue

Metrograph

Address

7 Ludlow, New York, NY 10002

Dates, Times, and Duration

Friday, May 29th, at 6:20 PM.

The films have a combined runtime of 44 minutes:

• La Jetée (28 minutes)
• How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (16 minutes)

Host, Artists, Performers, or Collaborators

• Chris Marker: Director of La Jetée.
• Hito Steyerl: Artist and director of How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File. She will be present for a Q&A session.
• Thalia Stefaniuk: Series co-curator and New Museum Curatorial Assistant.

This event is part of the "New Museum Presents New Humans" series.

Activity Description

This screening features two films: Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) and Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013).

• La Jetée: A massively influential 1963 Prix Jean Vigo winner, this short film is comprised almost entirely of still images. It tells the story of survivors in a post-World War III Paris, forced underground, who attempt to send one of their own into the past to find a way to a less toxic future.
• How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File: An acidic lampoon of instructional films, its title references a classic Monty Python skit. It was largely shot at a desert site containing military photo calibration targets.

The two films explore how surveillance images and technologies can be double-edged. In La Jetée, recollected images essential for humanity's survival also foreshadow the protagonist’s death. In How Not to Be Seen, technology designed for mass surveillance simultaneously renders certain bodies invisible.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with artist Hito Steyerl.

Editorial Recommendations

"Chris Marker’s La Jetée is introduced by artist Hito Steyerl and paired with her short film How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File. La Jetée, a photo-roman composed almost entirely of still images, portrays a man in a dystopian future who is forced to time-travel through his memories to unlock the key to humanity’s survival. How Not to Be Seen, a satirical instructional video shot against the backdrop of US Air Force aerial-photography calibration targets, teaches its viewers techniques for becoming invisible within a culture of hypervisibility. The two films reveal how the images and technologies of surveillance cut both ways: in La Jetée, the recollected images that hold the key to humanity’s survival also conceal the protagonist’s death; in How Not to Be Seen, technology designed to surveil entire populations simultaneously renders certain bodies invisible." —Thalia Stefaniuk, series co-curator and New Museum Curatorial Assistant.