An Incomplete List / 2022-Present

Machines in Flames
(2022, 50 min)

              A cinematic search for the elusive group CLODO, who bombed computer companies in 1980s Toulouse, France. Journeying through the cybernetic nodes of military, industrial, and socialist development, the film exposes how recording devices fail to collect the ashes of history. The film combines archival traces, a viral desktop choreography, and paranoid footage of nocturnal stakeouts into a philosophical investigation of self-combustion.
            The film is the debut work of the Destructionist International, and the first in a series of films on the appetite for abolition in ultra-leftism. It was first distributed through a network of self-erasing USB data sticks dropped outside corporate campuses.

A Manifesto for Destructionist Film (2022, text)

              To guide its assault on the present, the Cinema Committee of the Destructionist International joins with others over a series of nos.

• No to easy, common sense, or entertaining film catering to reassurance.
  
  
• No to catharsis, for there is no worse crime than giving an audience a sense of resolution for having simply watched a film.
  
  
• No to revelation, whose only trick is the cheap exposure of the horrors of the present.
  
  
• No to informative films and their concern for factuality.
  
  
• No to persuasion, as our purpose is not to convince the reluctant.
  
  
• No to calls to action, because the fully-mobilized public has already been activated too much.
  
  
• No to endorsements that would vault anyone into power under the mistaken idea that some other faction would be better at pulling the strings.
  
  
• No to the already-present, because we have lost faith in all existing peoples and causes

• No to this world, as the only place left for film is to help bring about its end.

Click here for the full text.

Breached: A Chronicle of Cargo Theft 
(2024, 15 min)

    Freight train robberies grabbed headlines in late 2021. Amidst a supply chain crisis, stark images of train tracks strewn with Amazon packages went viral. Consumers, awaiting delayed orders, spotted their items among the sea of cardboard. To reassure anxious shoppers, California’s governor joined the cleanup, while rail companies spent millions on added security.

    Breached asks: What makes container freight so sacred yet so vulnerable?

    The story is told from the POV of a local worker, drawn from his diary. His alienated existence unravels when he witnesses the robbers in action. A hidden landscape of logistics, infrastructure, and surveillance snaps into focus, both violent and fragile. The turning point comes when he trains himself to read the landscape like a looter, discovering a way to channel his disaffection into a strike against capitalist ideology.

︎ Please contact us at aculp@calarts.edu and T.D.C.Dekeyser@soton.ac.uk to arrange screenings, for a press pack, or for any other information.

︎ Updates via @Destruct_Intl on Twitter.