Jem Cohen / Vic Chestnutt - Evening's Civil Twilight in Empires of Tin

*  Unique film/live DVD hybrid featuring film vignettes from acclaimed filmmaker Jem Cohen with a live soundtrack from Vic Chesnutt, Guy Picciotto (Fugazi) and ilver Mt. Zion.
*  This film performance was recorded (audio and video) by the Viennale. Video footage of the live event was then combined with Cohen’s original film footage and edited in Vienna by Jem. It received it’s premiere screening at the 2008 Viennale.
*  New York filmmaker Jem Cohen was commissioned to close the festival, which he did with his program entitled /Evening’s Civil Twilight In Empires Of Tin/. This piece, inspired by Joseph Roth’s novel /The Radetsky March/, is a
meditation on the decline of empires, juxtaposing images from the twilight stages of the Hapsburg empire and WWI with footage from present-day Vienna and Cohen’s hometown of Brooklyn, NY, where he traces his own visual
meditations on the twilight of American empire.
*  An impressionistic narrative is constructed through live readings from the texts of Joseph Roth, and a live musical score performed by Vic Chesnutt, The Silver Mt Zion, Guy Piciotto (Fugazi), and The Quavers.
*  The music includes improvisations, wonderfully blown-out interpretations of Strauss’ "The Radetsky March", and
bracing renditions of a number of Vic Chesnutt songs.  The result is a sort of agit-prop hallucination, a string of film vignettes bound by the poetry of Roth’s writing and by the sounds and songs of the live musicians.

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