La cinepresa è una pistola

La cinepresa è una pistola is the organizing expression of a radical theory of filmmaking: the camera is treated not as a neutral recording device but as a weapon, and images as instruments of political judgment. Taken up by 24fps in Berkeley, the slogan turns filming and editing into acts with imagined consequences beyond the frame.

Formulation and Inheritance

Frenesi Gates and the Pisk sisters took over what remained of Kollettivo Cinematografico Nichilista “Morte ai Porci,” whose attempt to enact the camera-as-weapon metaphor was described as doomed from the outset. The collective’s equipment passed into the new group’s hands: cameras, spotlights, an editing table, a hydraulic camera mount, and a refrigerator full of film. A handful of its most persistent members also stayed on, carrying parts of the old manifesto into 24fps’s new one.

Images as Force and Judgment

The manifesto’s logic extends the weapon metaphor from filming to editing. A captured image is figured as a death dealt; images assembled together become the foundation of a Last Judgment and an afterlife. The filmmakers cast themselves as architects of a just inferno for their political enemies. This is not merely a claim that films can persuade: its rhetoric imagines image-making as a direct exercise of power, with the camera’s recording and the editor’s cuts assigned the gravity of punishment.

Dispute over the Slogan

The collective’s language did not command universal agreement, and Mirage objected to calling political opponents pigs: actual pigs, she argued, were appealing creatures, more so than many humans given that name. Sledge Poteet proposed cockroaches instead. The exchange leaves the slogan’s militancy intact while revealing that even within this filmmaking circle, its targets and terms were contested. Its force lies partly in that unresolved tension: 24fps inherits a manifesto that makes art answer to political struggle, but the group does not speak with one voice about what that struggle should call its enemies.