Description

$7 / $5 / free for members
Get tickets here.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to present a special screening of David Cort’s Mayday Realtime, a groundbreaking work of video verité documenting the 1971 May Day demonstrations against the Vietnam War.

The 1971 May Day protests in Washington D.C., organized by Rennie Davis and Jerry Coffin of the War Resistors League, were among the largest-scale demonstrations against the Vietnam War, and prompted unprecedented mass arrests (an estimated 12,000) over the course of six days. David Cort came to D.C. with a group of guerrilla documentarians—including fellow members of the Videofreex collective—called Mayday Video, who shot the proceedings with then-novel Sony Portapaks. Mayday Realtime begins as a real-time document of Washington D.C. taken from the interior of a moving car, soundtracked by radio news of the protests. The second half becomes a participatory time capsule, as Cort interviews participants and onlookers about their feelings on the demonstration. In-camera editing and minimal post-production, completed at the newly-formed Electronic Arts Intermix, make for an unmediated and highly personal account of the event. Writes Daryl Chin: “the parameters of chance and of documentation have never been as acutely realized.”