Jason Livingston
JASON LIVINGSTON is a filmmaker currently teaching in the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa.
As Occupy Wall Street hit full stride in Zuccotti Park in fall 2011, all flavors of curious people arrived, including large numbers of artists. Zoe Beloff decided to check it out, too, not with any predetermined notion of a theater project, but rather to sketch portraits she terms “Drawings of Modern Life.”
Borrowing its title from the Industrial Workers of the World’s motto, “An Injury To One Is An Injury To All,” Travis Wilkerson’s An Injury To One made quite a splash in film festival circles when it was released in 2002. Wearing its celluloid love on its very video sleeves, it’s a media hybrid of sorts, indulging in frequent 16mm roll-outs and orange washes, yet committed to split screens and textual interventions that announce newer media.
Melanie Gilligan’s Popular Unrest (2010) opened this year’s Migrating Forms with a pointed set of questions: Is it relevant to render human stories in a traditional moving-image format? (Arguably not.) Can a movie portray the abstractions of capital amidst an increasingly global, savage monetarization of physical life?


