Civil War Surveillance Poems (Part 1)
ABOUT
CIVIL WAR SURVEILLANCE POEMS (Part 1) is the first installment in a five-part project of experimental and hybrid-form short films contemplating a second American civil war via lyrical nonfiction, mixing call-in radio, twenty years of verité footage from the filmmaker's archive, and robots. Conceptually speculating from sixteen years in the future in a protracted civil war, the project is partly nostalgic political travelogue, partly a quest to mine the archive for what went wrong, and part prewar surveillance records, the project deconstructs and builds to a clashing ideology, culminating in an installation of sound sculpture, four-walled video and artifacts.
Mitch McCabe is a queer artist, filmmaker and educator whose work spans narrative, nonfiction and experimental film, mining themes of class, politics and identity grounded in their native Midwest. Their short and feature films have screened at Sundance, True/False, New Directors/New Films, Sheffield, Ann Arbor, Camden, Clermont-Ferrand, Winterhür, Edinburgh, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts and New York Film Festivals. Their feature HBO documentary “Youth Knows No Pain” screened at IDFA, Lincoln Center and AFI Silverdocs. A 2019 Sarah Jacobson awardee and past fellow of MacDowell and the Flaherty Seminar, McCabe’s work has been supported by MASS MoCA, NYSCA, Yaddo, LEF, Jerome and Djerassi Foundations. They received their BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College and their MFA from New York University. They live and work between Michigan and New York. McCabe’s currently working on the full multi-part feature film project of CIVIL WAR SURVEILLANCE POEMS.