« Given Hoberman’s own experience making experimental movies, we asked what kinds of avant-garde work he’s interested in these days. He nominated Heinz Emigholz’s new films and Christian Marclay’s installations, as well as the “documentary use of vernacular videos in Peter Snowdon’s The Uprising and David Dufresne’s Monopoly on Violence,” both of which he’s written about. » (New York Review of Books)
In June 2021, J. Hoberman, long feared pen of the Village Voice, had already devoted a long article on « The Monopoly of Violence » in The ArtForum. He wrote :
« This metadocumentary, an annotated assemblage of mainly first-person smartphone videos made during the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) demonstrations of 2018 and 2019 by the mixed-media journalist-artist-provocateur David Dufresne sans help from French ministry of culture, is as significant in its way as the founding film of cinema verité, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s 1961 Chronicle of Summer, in which Parisians of all types were asked about their personal lives and then in some cases, having seen themselves on-screen, were interviewed again provide the film’s coda. »
