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Zinoviev’s Tube: Tape 2 of the Inner Trotsky Child series

Jim Finn

2014 00:22:18 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3HD video
Tags:
Marxism, Philosophy, Television

Description

The movement’s founder Lois Severin, a former Trotskyite turned suburban housewife, was responding to the move from mass sociopolitical engagement of the 1960s and '70s to the personal fulfillment fantasies of the 80’s—the Jane Fonda­ization of the Left. While right­wing activists prepared the ground for the Reagan Revolution, the Inner Trotsky Child movement was an attempt to radicalize the personal fulfillment and self­-help scene and prepare the ground for a 21st Century revolution of the mind.

In this piece—the second in the Inner Trotsky Child video series—narrator Lois Severin is back with advice for post­-Berlin Wall leftists dealing with life in the Prime Material Plane of Corporate Capitalism. Instead of a silver cord, you will use Zinoviev's Tube to astrally project your mind to a zombie cesspool with Ronald Reagan, and hear Muammar Qaddafi’s advice on returning from space travel. There is also the familiar soothing music and affirmation exercises of the first tape, Encounters with Your Inner Trotsky Child.

— NYFF 2013

 

About Jim Finn

"Steeped in the obsolete language of revolutionary art," The New York Times said Jim Finn's films "often play like unearthed artifacts from an alternate universe." His award-winning movies have been called "Utopian comedies" and "trompe l'oeil films". The trilogy of communist features is in the permanent collection of the MoMA, and he has had retrospectives in seven countries. His movies have screened widely at festivals like Sundance, Rotterdam, Sao Paulo, AFI and Edinburgh as well as museums and cinematheques.

He has been making films, videos, revolutionary needlepoint pillows and photographs for over a decade. His first feature film Interkosmos was called "a retro gust of communist utopianism" by the Village Voice and "charming and fantastic, so full of rare atmospheres" by Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin. His second feature La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo was put on the Village Voice's Top 10 Year in Experimental Film. And Variety called The Juche Idea, his film about a North Korean art residency, "brilliant" and said all three films "upturn notions of documentary and fiction, propaganda thought, reality and restaging, and even what an 'experimental film' actually is."

He is featured in a 2010 Phaidon Press book called Take 100—The Future of Film: 100 New Directors. He was born in St. Louis and teaches at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.