A festival protest could stage a film on an official’s face as performance

Evidence

With the irrepressible Rubin as his confederate, Mekas chose New Year’s Eve to commandeer the projection booth of the festival theater. Pretending to tie up the projectionist, experimental filmmaker Jean-Marie Buchet, and screening a print of Flaming Creatures that had been planted between the reels of Warhol’s six-hour Sleep, Mekas provoked a disturbance that was widely reported in Europe. A small riot broke out, and as the Belgian Minister of Justice (and honorary head of the festival) arrived to quell it, Mekas projected the film on the minister’s face until all power was cut off. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 493

Categorization

• CANDY: Projecting a banned movie onto a government minister’s face until the power cut out is a perfect cocktail-party anecdote.
• XREF: connects to: Well-planned protest spectacles can dictate front-page coverage — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 369