Tuesday, December 10, 2024 at 7:30pm
Newsreel's Break and Enter aka Squatters
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Introduced by Tracy Rosenthal
Break and Enter aka Squatters, Newsreel, 1971, digital projection, 42 mins
Break and Enter opens with a scene of destruction. Bulldozers clear rubble along a blighted streetscape, emblems of urban renewal projects that would displace thousands of poor New Yorkers in the decades following the Second World War. Newsreel, a collective which gave us so many extraordinary documents of the New Left, here begins an intimate portrait of a group of tenants organizing themselves in response to mass evictions, and to a public housing bureaucracy that offered little more than years-long wait lists: Operation Move-In.
In the spring of 1970, 15-year-old Jimmy Santos was killed by carbon monoxide poisoning after his family’s landlord refused to repair their building’s boiler, and his funeral march concluded defiantly, with those gathered occupying a vacant building owned by the city. What followed, as recorded by Newsreel, is a stirring demonstration of cooperative living, of a rather different kind of urban renewal. The abandoned structure is transformed by its residents, with hammers and nails, yes, but also through a new social infrastructure, like its daycare and its community kitchen. Cops hover menacingly about the stoop, and in one instance storm in to trash the complex, but the people stand ready to defend it. Soon their movement would grow to include nearly 200 families across dozens of reclaimed buildings.
The terrain of housing struggles has changed significantly in the half century since Newsreel chronicled Operation Move-In, but what emerged in that moment—a multi-racial, trans-generational coalition of tenants, asserting community control over their homes as a means of survival—is precisely what’s needed in ours.
Copies of Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis's new book Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis will be available at the event.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.