Stages and Screens: the art of the 1960s

Stages & Screens. Photo: © Miriam Bokser

Stages and Screens is a multiscreen film and archive presentation exploring culture and counter-culture in the UK and America through the 60s.

For over five decades British-born filmmaker and producer Peter Davis has been at the forefront of directing, producing and distributing works of socio-political documentary film. In two separate film cycles – each accompanied by documentation, archive materials, commissioned texts and slide show rotations – Davis draws from his own film collection, Villon Films, highlighting period works made by himself and others in order to present a personal journey through the 60s.

In total, sixteen films make up the programme.

Offerings by Davis himself such as Anatomy of Violence (1967), which details the Congress of The Dialectics of Liberation, an international gathering featuring Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Marcuse and R.D. Laing, will be presented alongside works by other directors such as The Russell Tribunal (dir. Staffan Lamm, 2004), a powerful short concerning Bertrand Russell’s 1967 war crimes tribunal featuring Tariq Ali, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beavoir and America Against Itself (dir. William C. Jersey, 1968), a documentary about the events surrounding the infamous 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago.

Stages and Screens: Peter Davis, Villon Films and Friends

Cycle I 3- 25 September
Cycle II 27 September – 16 October

Space Studios
129-131 Mare Street E8 3RH
Tel: 020 8525 4330