DEVO: Restorations & Revelations (Collected Film & Video Works 1976 - 1984)

Formed in the wreckage of the Kent State shootings in 1973, where co-founders Gerald V. Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh were students during the massacre, and still blowing the horn five decades later, Akron’s DEVO would take their subversive pop-art to staggering mainstream success. And all the while, they considered themselves filmmakers as much as they were a “band.”

From their first film onward (1976’s The Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution), they fused their love of dadaist image making with their constantly shapeshifting music, confounding their record label by plowing their meager promo budgets into companion films for songs. This program unveils painstaking new restorations and reconstructions of much of this pivotal work (including Satisfaction, Freedom of Choice, Whip It and much more) alongside a host of rarely (and never)-seen live footage, encounters with hapless interviewers and other spud ephemera, curated specially for Lightbox by film archivist and…