Within Our Gates

This episode I am once again solo style! Answering (great) questions from my Patreon listeners, and it all kind of ended up being under the hood of Materialist Dialectics and how it can help us look at the arts. Some of it explicit, some of it implicit. Thanks to all who submitted questions! Please send some more responses so we can keep the conversation going! To get a jump on the shows a few day...

Peace Comrades! For this episode I have with me Alice Lovejoy to discuss her book Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War . The book is "the untold story of film as a chemical cousin to poison gas and nuclear weapons, shaped by centuries of violent extraction. Following scientists, soldiers, prisoners, and spies through Kodak's and Agfa's global empires, Alice Lovejoy lin...

For this episode happy to have with me Steven Osuna to talk about the legendary film Memories of Underdevelopment by late Cuban Filmmaker and theorist Tomas Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. Alea was a major figure in cinema, and in the development of Cuban cinema and culture in the early days of the revolution until his death in 1996. A prolific filmmaker, cinematic theorist and cultural leader who was one o...

For this episode I am joined by Lara Sheehi, someone if you have been paying attention to these anti-imperialist airwaves you have def seen, and if you aren't yet familiar with Lara's work you are def in for something truly substantial, and can't miss this episode. Lara, who is one the true counter hegemonic forces in the world of psychoanalysis helps me untangle questions around the ideas of narr...

For this episode I am solo! I dive into a Patreon members extended question on Third Cinema and how can we envision it for today. It was a rather capacious set of questions so I felt it would be good to set aside some time to jump into the topic more thoroughly as it connects to a lot my current theoretical work that I am developing. In general I plan on doing these solo episodes once a quarter (a...

For this episode I am joined by Jemma DeCristo to discuss her excellent new text The Aesthetic Character of Blackness: Sounds like Us . Its a powerful intervention into conversations around Blackness, Black art, and aesthetics which "critiques the exaltation of black culture and art's saving power by analyzing the violence underneath aesthetic production". Its a truly necessary work and our conver...

Returning to the show we have Sudip Bhattacharya to have an in depth discussion about intellectuals, artists and their role in the current movement. We do a historical analysis, focusing on the work by Marx as well as Amilcar Cabral. We also talk about the bourgeois art cultures relationship to stifling movements and how the left must orient itself in relationship to the forces at hand. Its a fun...

For this episode I have Alex Aviña joining me. We discuss the convergence of Latin American politics, leftist anti-colonial revolution and cinema. Taking a cue from Third Cinema creators Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, we look at 3 films that represent each of the "Three" different worlds of cinema and use it as a bridge point to connect the actual material history that informed the films cre...

Stephen Sheehi joins me to talk about his text  Camera Palaestina , a critical exploration of Jerusalemite chronicler Wasif Jawhariyyeh (1904–1972) and his seven photography albums entitled The Illustrated History of Palestine . We have an expansive conversation, talking not only about the collection but the historical context in which they were collected, and how these images and the history arou...

For this episode I am joined by Gabriel Rockhill to further my discussions on arts, culture and aesthetics from a dialectical materialist framework. Rockhill is the author of the newly released "Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?" on Monthly Review Press , a text which offers a crash course in the history of imperialist propaganda, as well as in the Marxist method for analyzing culture and id...

This week I have with me Andre Easton, a Bronx born native running for Congress in New York's District 15 in The Bronx. We dig in on Andre's platform which looks to spark radical reconstruction under a socialist vision. We talk about what this vision mean in terms education, arts and culture and how his campaign in The Bronx reflects the broader the struggle happenining not only here in the heart...

This episode I have a returning guest Macedonia to discuss one of the most unsung gems of the 1970's; Christopher St. John's Top of the Heap. A radical take down of the pangs of social mobility for the Black individual, Top of the Heap is an entry into Black Cinema that takes a hard look at Black existence in the imperial core through the experience of the Black Police Officer. Macedonia and I dis...

Popular educator and organizer Layan Fuleihan joins me to discuss the current battle of ideas here in the Imperial Core of the U.S. and in the long struggle towards dismantling capitalism to build a socialist future what is the educators job and approach? I talk to Layan both philosophically and practically about the work she does at The People Forum in the belly of beast of New York City and the...

For this episode of Within Our Gates I am joined by my comrade Jared Ball to do a long awaited talk on Hip Hop and its politics. We dig into some significant, yet under known projects that looked to deepen Hip hop's connection to the broader movement of Black revolutionary history such as the Black August Hip Hop project, and what this period history uncovered about the issues of the artist/celebr...

Peace Comrades! This episode is actually one I recorded October of last year, but was only exclusive on my Patreon, but it was too good of an episode and too important in terms of topic to NOT release to you all. So here it goes. I am joined once again by my friend Adam Thomas to talk about the then recent rerelease of The Spook Who Sat by Door, and how this film has a shaky reputation with the Bl...

Peace Everyone. Im back with another solo episode talking about the world premiere of my feature length film The Hand that Feeds, and my thoughts around the current state of independent cinema. I wrestle with the contradictions of Second Cinema and how under its heavy hand a truly radical cinema can never materialize. I also speak on what I believe is the need for a Revolutionary Arts Internationa...

Peace Folks. For this episode I am doing something a bit different. I decided to solicit questions from my listeners and answer them! And boy did I get some fantastic questions and hopefully the answers I give are up to snuff. I tackle things from the Hollywood response to the genocide in Gaza, my opinion of Fourth Cinema, how art fits into the Marxist concept of the superstructure, the work of Da...

Joining me on Within Our Gates is Animator and Scholar to Samantha Youssef to talk about the entertainment industry and how it uses often initially well meaning artists to uphold Hollywood's imperial messaging system. Samantha and I take a deep and personal dive into our experiences in the training grounds of arts/entertainment, we compare and contrast our similarities and differences but ultimate...

Joining me for this episode is writer and political theorist Sudip Bhattacharya as we dig into Mira Nair's cult favorite film Mississippi Masala. We dig into its attempt to have commentary on the conundrums of cross cultural exchange and how the film fits into the trajectory of liberal diversity projects in American Cinema during the early 90's. We also fit this into work Sudip has done on the top...

How are the arts in the vaunted "age of tech" affected? And how do we study these effects with a materialist approach? To answer these questions I have with me Dwayne Monroe who is a technologist with decades of experience in the US and Europe. He intimately knows how technologies the media describes as ethereal really work, where they come from, and how they are used in the multinational corporat...

Is it Black Cinema or Black Hollywood? To me this is an essential question and for this reason I had to bring on Filmmaker Chad Murdock to talk about with me. We dig into a piece that Chad written called The False Notions of a Blackened Image where he does a material analysis on images that are routinely dispersed currently throughout popular Black movies. We also speak about his recently released...

This week I'm joined by Julia Alekseyeva to talk their book Antifascism and the Avant- Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960's published by University of California Press. Julia is an Assistant Professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania as well an artist and activist. We have a fantastic conversation about the book which covers the leftist filmmakers of Japa...

Peace Comrades! For this episode I am joined by two great guests who I plan to have here regularly to discuss Paul Schrader's 1978 film, Blue Collar starring Richard Pryor, Yaphet Kotto and Harvey Keitel. Jared Ball is a professor of communication studies and Africana / Black Studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Ball is also host of the podcast "iMiXWHATiLiKE!"...

This week I have my dear friend Marcus Pinn from the longstanding film blog Pinnland Empire with me. Marcus and I have a more freewheeling talk focused around written pieces that come from the both of us, one is Marcus's review of the film Sinners and the other is my critique from a few years ago of the film Get Out . Where they connect is Marcus's (on-point) analysis that Black Hollywood has ente...

This week I'm happy to have Yasmin Nair back with me to talk about Francis Ford Coppola's classic film The Conversation. The idea came to us after the recent passing of Gene Hackman and both of us speaking about the respect we have for much of the work Hackman did as an actor over the years. It led us to one of his finer films, The Conversation, which is also one of Coppola's very best works. In o...