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Capitalism has been the engine of unprecedented economic growth and social transformation. With the fall of the communist states and the triumph of “neo- liberalism,” capitalism is by far the world’s dominant ideology. But how much do we understand about how it originated, and what makes it work?

CAPITALISM is an ambitious and accessible six-part documentary series that looks at both the history of ideas and the social forces that have shaped the capitalist world.

Blending interviews with some of the world’s great historians, economists, anthropologists, and social critics (view the complete list of participants), with on-the-ground footage shot in twenty-two countries, CAPITALISM questions the myth of the unfettered free market, explores the nature of debt and commodities, and retraces some of the great economic debates of the last 200 years.

Each fifty-two minute episode is designed to stand alone, making these ideal for classroom use or as an additional resource for students:

Episode 1: Adam Smith, The Birth of the Free Market
Capitalism is much more complex than the vision Adam Smith laid out in The Wealth of Nations. Indeed, it predates Smith by centuries and took root in the practices of colonialism and the slave trade.

Episode 2: The Wealth of Nations: A New Gospel?
Adam Smith was both economist and moral philosopher. But his work on morality is largely forgotten, leading to tragic distortions that have shaped our global economic system.

The program is 67 minutes and will be followed by a discussion with the artists. Program includes:

Ground, Path, Fruition (2017, 18 minutes, Robert Fox) A compilation of digital video abstractions collected from a number of “notebooks” developed over the past couple of years. It is an artistic practice that helps fine tune the digital material, while adhering to a defined set of parameters. The goal of adhering to this discipline is to develop works that will offer glimpses into what lies ahead while also standing on their own as finished works of art.

Recording Device (2017, 24 minutes, David Finkelstein) A poetic exploration of the ways we store our memories. A collage of words, images and music, showing how we scratch and etch our impressions onto paper, film, vinyl and other media, shaping our view of the world. A journey through an interior landscape filled with snakes, saxophones, pyramids, the film’s two narrators explore the effects of stored memories, both corrosive and illuminating.

Miraculous Aqueduct (2017, 16 minutes, David Finkelstein, world premiere) A poetic exploration of the sources of creativity. Do we take a scattershot approach to inspiration, throwing ideas out at random, to see which ones take root? Or can we plug directly into a never-ending source of new ideas, an effortless flow? Miraculous Aqueduct is a journey through an interior landscape filled with tarot cards, towers, and centurions; a collage of words, images and music, in which the film’s two narrators discover that acknowledging inner blocks is the key to overcoming them.

Every so often a film would startle us for its originality and personal vision, it would electrify our senses and leave us hungry for more. David Finkelstein’s Epistolary Fusillades was one such film.-Film Panic Journal
An oneiric, surprising odyssey through seductive, hyperreal and overwhelming spaces that float somewhere between the screen and your body. Piloted by expansive and elastic improvisation, the work unfolds into continually unpredictable and astonishing new territories. –Jesse Malmed (Nightingale Cinema) on David Finkelstein’s “Suggestive Gestures”

David Finkelstein‘s video work has been featured in numerous film festivals around the world and has won awards at 16 of them. In 2013, he was an invited artist at the Traverse Vidéo Festival in Toulouse, France. His first feature film premiered at New Filmmakers in New York. He has had solo screenings of his films in Bilbao, London, Porto, New York, Chicago, Portland, Austin, North Carolina, Minnesota, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. His work has been funded by The Fund for Creative Communities, The Field, Movement Research, Meet the Composer, The Brooklyn Arts Exchange, BACA, and other sources. lakeivan.org

Robert Fox is an award winning Bay Area filmmaker, sound composer and visual artist. His work is a reflection that mirrors 40 years of practice as an explorer and experimenter in film, photography, music and multimedia. His work has appeared in various venues, both extant and non-extant, in the Bay area and U.S.A.

view trailers for David Finkelstein’s films:
https://vimeo.com/161977077
https://vimeo.com/208836785

view a trailer for Robert Fox’s film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0-dbV6N-ek
Featuring: Ian W. Hill

PENNY LANE’s THE VOYAGERS + K. CATO + UFO CULTS
Back by demand, our way-out celebration of speculative—yet human-scale—technology features astronautical essays, planetary performances, and curious inquiries into extraterrestrial obsessions. Penny (Our Nixon, Nuts!) Lane’s The Voyagers gives voice to the rich inscription of cultural meanings in Carl Sagan’s utopian project. Aided by her live violin, Kristin Cato parlays hours of assiduous archival-film research into a multi-media paean to Saturn. Fellow psychonauts Travis Wilkerson, Keith Sanborn, Yin-Ju Chen, Soda Jerk, and Semiconductor all beam their respective outer-space fantasies onto our telepathic screen. Framed by a hysterical p/review of so-called “futures”, Walter Cronkite and Wink Martindale finally grok Philco’s prescient Year 1999. We ultimately reach escape velocity with three Astounding Tales of ET Encounters, from Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs, John Shepard Hill, and Unarius’ Archangel Uriel.