Edgar Arceneaux’s MLK, Sci-Fi Mash-up Film Screens with Live Score

A still from Edgar Arceneaux’s ‘A Time To Break Silence’

Last fall, CalArts alum Edgar Arceneaux’s (Art MFA 01) debuted his latest exhibit, A Book and A Medal: Disentanglement Equals Homogenous Abstractions, in Los Angeles. A mixed media show that explored Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ideas and legacy, the centerpiece was the feature film A Time to Break Silence, which screens once again in L.A. on Feb. 28 at 7 pm at the Riverside Studios. The encore presentation includes a live score by Ray 7 of Detroit’s techno innovators, Underground Resistance.

Presented by the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), the film links two events of the 1960s: the assassination of King and Stanley Kubrick’s dystopian film 2001: A Space Odyssey. More from LAND:

A Time To Break Silence is titled after Dr. King’s last major speech, ‘Beyond Vietnam,’ in which he decries U.S. involvement in the war as an ‘enemy of the poor.’ King was killed exactly one year later in 1968, two days before Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered in Washington, D.C. In Arceneaux’s film, Dr. King reprises his speech in Detroit’s Saint Anne’s Church, which figures as a timeless ruin, while a prehistoric man named Stargazer aimlessly explores his alien environment. Both 2001: A Space Odessey and Dr. King’s speech address technology in dual terms, as tool and weapon, a link amplified by Arceneaux’s collaboration with Underground Resistance. With these two intertextual references, Arceneaux’s film stages how the technologies we use are produced by the same evolutionary forces that produced us. In this film, Arceneaux uses a directing strategy he coined, ‘Probality Mapping,’ which allows for improvisation to be mapped then overlayed with scripted performances.  

A Time To Break Silence will screen alongside two related video works simultaneously projected on the side walls of Riverside Studios, a former manufacturing space that’s been converted into artist studios and a performance venue. 

Seating is limited. To attend for free, RSVP online by Feb. 25.

Watch a documentary produced by The Current on the Underground Resistance on YouTube.