Kollettivo Cinematografico Nichilista “Morte ai Porci”

Kollettivo Cinematografico Nichilista “Morte ai Porci” was a Berkeley-based film collective that tried to make the camera-as-weapon metaphor literal in political practice. The effort left a material and ideological legacy: after the collective had dwindled, Frenesi Gates and the Pisk sisters took over what remained, and some of its most persistent members carried parts of its manifesto into the new 24fps collective.

Origins and Inherited Equipment

The collective’s project is presented as doomed from the start: it sought to turn the idea of the camera as a weapon into action. By the time Frenesi Gates and the Pisk sisters succeeded it, the group had been reduced to its surviving property and a handful of determined adherents. That inheritance included cameras, spotlights, an editing machine, a hydraulic camera mount, and a refrigerator full of film stock. The remains were both practical resources for filmmaking and the physical residue of the earlier collective’s political ambition.

Manifesto and Political Aims

Some of the original members inserted points from the old manifesto into 24fps’s new one. Its rhetoric fused filmmaking with violent judgment: images were treated as acts of death, sequences of images as the foundation of a final reckoning, and the collective imagined itself constructing a just hell for fascists. The manifesto’s language makes the camera more than a recording device; it casts image-making as a means of political attack and punishment.

Internal Disagreement and Legacy

That militant language met resistance within the group. Mirage objected to using pigs as a term of abuse, arguing that pigs were appealing animals and more deserving of affection than many humans labeled with the word. Sledge Poteet proposed substituting cockroaches, but Howie objected while smoking a joint, and Krishna, the sound technician, insisted that every form of life—including cockroaches—was sacred. An original member then argued that such objections undermined the collective’s conceptual basis, which, in his view, was about shooting people. The exchange exposes a fault line between the manifesto’s rhetoric of violent opposition and the members’ competing ethical limits. The collective’s legacy in 24fps was therefore not simply a transfer of equipment or doctrine: its inherited language arrived already contested.