Guerrilla Television: FOUR MORE YEARS

Friday, April 5, 2024 at 7:00 PM

Location: The Block Museum of Art, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, IL 60208

RSVP here before 4/5

FOUR MORE YEARS (TVTV, 1972, 60 min, Digital)

WITH VIDEOMAKER TOM WEINBERG AND PROFESSOR HEATHER HENDERSHOT OF NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY’S SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION AND MEDILL SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM

In 1972, a loose collective of more than twenty videomakers from all over the country came together to form Top Value Television, aka TVTV, and create a brand-new kind of documentary. Shooting on video – lightweight, cheap, easy to use – the team recorded that year’s presidential conventions, resulting in THE WORLD’S LARGEST TV STUDIO (about the Democrats) and FOUR MORE YEARS (about the Republicans). At a time when TV’s political coverage was uniformly buttoned up and formal, the “long-haired and braless” youngsters pointed their cameras at everything the networks overlooked or ignored about the conventions, drilling down on the hypocrisy of the politicians and deflating the empty pageantry of the entire spectacle, and of the media apparatus that disseminated their messages. They interviewed righteously passionate protesters and network news anchors, random attendees and Henry Kissinger. TVTV provided a view of the American political process that had never been seen before and, remarkably, it was broadcast all over the country. In the process, these quirky, irreverent, and deeply funny documentaries launched a movement – guerrilla television – of fiercely independent, politically-motivated videomakers who aspired to nothing less than the overthrow of the American media hierarchy. Presented with Media Burn Archive.

This program is in conjunction with the symposium Guerrilla Television: The Revolutions of Early Independent Video, taking place April 19-21 at the University of Chicago and presented by Media Burn Archive, the University of Chicago Department of Cinema and Media Studies, and the Video Data Bank. This symposium – and a series of related screenings and discussions – brings together artists, scholars, and archivists to discuss the legacies of this crucial but underappreciated era of independent media. For more information, visit mediaburn.org.