mumok kino | Long Cold Shadow

Wednesday, March 18, March 25, and April 15, 2026, 7 pm

mumok cinema
Long Cold Shadow
“You don’t have anything, you’re nothing. You’re not even a citizen of the United States.”

Bringing together Medium Cool, Punishment Park, Black Panthers, and The Murder of Fred Hampton, Long Cold Shadow explores a moment when cinema became inseparable from political struggle. Made at the end of the 1960s and the start of the 1970s, these films reflect a shared urgency: a need to document, question, and intervene. They challenge the boundaries between observer and participant, asking what responsibility media, filmmakers, and audiences carry in times of upheaval. Across different styles and approaches, the camera emerges not as a neutral tool, but as something embedded within systems of power, resistance, and memory. These films remain striking not only for what they show, but for how they show it, inviting viewers to reconsider the relationship between images and history, and the role of cinema in shaping how we see and act within the world.

In Medium Cool, director Haskell Wexler embeds fiction within the police-induced chaos in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention, exposing the camera’s uneasy role in moments of crisis. Punishment Park, by Peter Watkins, stages a speculative but frighteningly plausible all-too-current vision of state repression. With Black Panthers, Agnès Varda offers a vivid, intimate portrait of resistance and solidarity within the Black Power movement. Finally, The Murder of Fred Hampton by Howard Alk stands as both document and indictment of state power’s unchecked violence.

Curated by Martin Beck.

Martin Beck is an artist living in New York and Vienna. Recent exhibitions include for hours, days, and weeks at a time…, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2025), Last Night, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2024), and echo* (with Sung Tieu), Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (2024).

The film program corresponds with the exhibition Mapping the 60s. Art Histories from the mumok Collections.