Jem Cohen: Evening's Civil Twlight in Empires of Tin

This avant garde release documents an unusual performance staged and mounted at the 2007 Vienna International Film Festival. As part of that event, organizers invited the iconoclastic filmmaker Jem Cohen to create an evening of film with live musical accompaniment. To fulfill this request, Cohen compiled a series of archival sequences pulled from the annals of history (much of it in black and white), and used the footage in question to meditate on the eerie parallels between the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the years just prior to World War I, and the early 21st century United States as its global hegemony began to come to a sudden and alarming end given the failing economy, outsourcing of industry and the blunders of the Bush administration. In devising this theme, Cohen culled inspiration from the novels of Joseph Roth, particularly his 1933 The Radetzky March.