Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping (film)

Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping is the title of the first featurelength documentary film about the actor and performance artist Reverend Billy. The film was produced and directed by the filmmakers Dietmar Post and Lucia Palacios. The film debuted on the festival circuit in August 2002 at the Chicago Underground Film Festival.

Reverend Billy, a.k.a. Bill Talen, is an actorperformance artist and a leading figure in the antiglobalization movement. His work combines the forces of social and political change with the means of theater arts to counteract our media culture. His artistic and political work is influenced by various concepts of street theater. His disruptions or shopping interventions in public spaces are in the tradition of the Living Theater, Jos Bov, Lenny Bruce, The Yippies. New York Times theater critic Jonathan Kalb calls his work the most hilarious and pointed political theater in New York, something that has to be done in the risky environment of the street. The actionsperformances inside and outside of Starbucks coffee shops and Disney stores often end with the Reverend being arrested. He calls it stepping into somebodys imagined box. The police call it illegal trespassing. The Reverend claims that social change always begins with civil disobedience and includes as his heroes the civil rights, peace and labor movements.Americans, according to Reverend Billy, lead fake lives we gobble up the monoculture peddled by transnational conglomerates we buy whatever stores sell us and, consequently, we live consumerist fictions. We become, in his words, tourists in our own lives. Dietmar Post and Lucia Palacioss REVEREND BILLY AND THE CHURCH OF STOP SHOPPING focuses on Reverend Billy NYC performance artist Bill Talen and his devout group of disciples as they crusade against the synthetic and corruptive aspects of todays hyperconsumerist culture. Talen tirelessly labors to organize actionsranging from choirsinging protests to rooftop speechesthat urge people to stop shopping and to realize the threat lurking beneath the veneer of commodification. Working to create real change through his activism, Talen leads his followers to the streets to recite The Raven in protest of NYUs planned demolition of the Edgar Allan Poe House. Concerned with how transnational corporations colonize our

Source: Wikipedia