Comunismo a Times Square

2010. Every day, from 11:57 pm to midnight, the advertisements disappear from the more than ninety-two screens in Times Square to make way for a work of video art. When New York-based filmmaker John Sams, who is an advertising executive ‘for a real job’, sees an excerpt from his documentary about Albert Einstein’s brain projected on these screens, he is finally able, in those three minutes that seem endless to him, to think that he can love a woman again after the trauma of his recent divorce. One day, almost spring, on a plane, John falls in love with Agata, an Emirates stewardess and former actress who was forced to leave the theatre because she could no longer afford to be an aspiring artist. Agata, however, is still partly in love with Walther, a narcissistic playwright and the only one of the three who can afford to live from his art, as he is supported by his family. Agata, Walther and John is a lyrical and tragicomic portrait of a generation in crisis in the face of the collapse of capitalism, increasingly caught between financial storms, climate emergency and the subversion of gender relations. Set mainly in New York (but also flying between continents, or in that pond-enclosure at the Berlin Zoo celebrating the life and death of Knut the bear) at the end of the 1910s, between forays into pop culture and the crucial political scene of those years – Yoko Ono’s orgasm at the MoMa and Alexander McQueen’s suicide, the chart-topping indie music and Barack Obama’s presidential victory, the snow-covered tents of Occupy Wall Street and the birth of blogging – biting dialogue and crisp social satire; At once visionary and realistic, with the glamour of a TV series and the serenity of a philosophical novel, this is an unprecedented and subversive account of the last few years in which the West was able to imagine and stage the future before it was swallowed up by social media. Or perhaps only by itself. There can be no synonym for the revolution as it is happening. This is what makes it irresistible to us: the extreme violence of its loneliness.