Nitrate Fires and Community Radical Movie Screenings
Before the 1950s, films were printed and distributed on strips of nitrate cellulose, a transparent material used industrially as a substitute for gunpowder. Nitrate film was extremely flammable. Because nitrate cellulose contains oxygen, the fires it causes are impossible to extinguish.
Nitrate Fires is our next offering. It will be CAW's film review column and your home for anarchist TV, Film and video criticism. Most weeks I will review a new theatrical release movie: the films covered will be a combination of Hollywood, with a strong focus on horror movie coverage, and new arthouse stuff, although if a particularly exciting re-release, retrospective or even home viewing catches my fancy, that will appear here too.
The column will also feature updates and previews of my upcoming book The Extended Universe: How Disney Destroyed the Movies and Took Over the World, coming out next spring from Haymarket.
But most exciting of all, I think, is a monthly radical film screening in our Discord. For now, I am planning to host these on the last Thursday of every month, at 7PM EST. Come hang out and chat with me and the CAW community as we watch rare, radical, obscure or frankly just some of my favorite movies, with every month having a themed double feature (WOW!)
The first two scheduled screenings are:
First, in honor of May Day, we'll be doing two classics on American labor. First, the 1970 documentary Finally Got The News... about the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit, and then the classic Matewan (1987), about one of the most pivotal and violent episodes of the West Virginia Coal Wars. This will be in the Discord on May 29th.
June I'll be hosting Pride Was A Riot, which will start with the incredibly rare Maggots and Men (2009), an all-trans cast reenactment of the 1921 Krondstadt uprising, and then featuring a surprise second film of gay anti-colonial mayhem...That will be in the discord on June 26th.
One dream for Nitrate Fires is that we grow large enough to get me to a film festival or two. I've never attended any major ones and I'd love to do special trananarchist coverage for y'all.
Coming soon to a screen near you...
