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ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES • OCTOBER - DECEMBER 2016
ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES FILM PROGRAM, VOLUME 46 NO. 4, OCTOBER–DECEMBER 2016
Anthology Film Archives Film Program is published quarterly by Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, NY, NY 10003
Subscription is free with Membership to Anthology Film Archives, or $15/year for non-members.
Cover: Tom Jarmusch. Untitled, ©2016. (Instagram: @tomjarmusch)
STAFF
Jonas Mekas, Artistic Director
John Mhiripiri, Director
Jed Rapfogel, Film Programmer
Ava Tews, Director of Publicity & Membership
Wendy Dorsett, Director of Publications
Hannah Greenberg, Development Associate, Theater Manager
Bibi Loizzo, Administrative Assistant
BOARD OF TRUSTEES
Robert T. Buck, Jr.
Jonas Mekas, President
Oona Mekas, Treasurer
John Mhiripiri, Secretary
Barney Oldfield, Chair
Matthew Press
Arturas Zuokas
Collections Staff
John Klacsmann, Archivist
Sean Smalley, Associate Archivist
Robert A. Haller, Director Emeritus, Special Collections
HONORARY BOARD
agnès b., Brigitte Cornand, Annette Michelson.
In memoriam: Nam June Paik (1932-2006),
Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), Robert Gardner
(1925-2014).
Theater Staff
Kolbe Resnick, Head Theater Manager & Print Traffic
Bradley Eros, Theater Manager
Rachael Guma, Theater Manager
Cait Carvalho, Assistant Manager
Phillip Gerson, Assistant Manager
Rachelle Rahme, Assistant Manager
Projectionists
Lili Chin, Evelyn Emile, Ted Fendt, Sarah Halpern,
Genevieve Havemeyer-King, Chris Jolly, Isaac
Overcast, Matt Reichard, Moira Tierney, Schuyler
Tsuda, Alex Westhelle, Tim White.
BOARD OF ADVISORS
Richard Barone, Deborah Bell, Rachel Chodorov,
Deborah M. Colton, Ben Foster, Roselee Goldberg,
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Ali Hossaini, Akiko
Iimura, Andrew Lampert, Susan McGuirk, Sebastian
Mekas, Sara L. Meyerson, Benn Northover, Benjamin
Orifici, Izhar Patkin, Ted Perry, Ikkan Sanada, Ingrid
Scheib-Rothbart, Lola Schnabel, Stella Schnabel, P.
Adams Sitney, Marvin Soloway, Hedda Szmulewicz.
COMPOSER IN RESIDENCE
John Zorn
Box Office
Josh Anderson, Bora Kim, Marcine Miller, Lily Jue Sheng,
Fiona Szende, Alan Wertz, Andreas Wilson.
New Filmmakers Coordinators
Barney Oldfield, Executive Producer
Bill Woods, Program Director
Interns & Volunteers: Jennifer Barton, Nathan Crawford, Chris Crouse, Steve Erickson, Sam Fleischner, Francisco
Fontes, Carolyn Funk, Timothy Geraghty, Jillian Hanson, Martina Kudláček, Jun Kuromiya, Jeanne Liotta, Jonas Lozoraitis,
Shannon McLachlan, Hira Nabi, Ryan Salch, Melinda Shopsin, Sara Truscott, Cassandre Marie Valfort, Auguste Varkalis,
Eva von Schweinitz, Zhaoyu Zhu.
Anthology Film Archives is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, and is supported in part by AFA’s individual members and
contributors, anonymous donors, the agnès b. Endowment Fund, Andrea Frank Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the
Visual Arts, Austrian Cultural Forum New York, b. forever, Carl Andre and Melissa Kretschmer Foundation, Cineric, Consulate
General of Spain, Criterion, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, David M. Leuschen Foundation, DEW Foundation,
Driver Family Foundation, Edison Properties, Film Chest Inc/Vinegar Syndrome, The Film Foundation, Ben Foster, George
Lucas Family Foundation, Goethe-Institut New York, Greene Naftali, James M. Guiher, Hyde & Watson Foundation, Jerome
Foundation, an anonymous donor through the Jewish Communal Fund, Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, National
Endowment for the Arts, National Film Preservation Foundation, public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural
Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo
and the New York State Legislature, public funds from NYSCA’s Electronic Media and Film (EMF) Media Arts Assistance
Fund & Presentation Funds, regrant programs administered respectively by Wave Farm & The ARTS Council of the Southern
Finger Lakes, New York Women in Film & Television, Phalarope Foundation, Robert Gore Rifkind Foundation, Ryerson
University, Showtime & Sundance Networks, Smells Like Records, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Taipei Cultural Center,
Taylor & Taylor Associates, The Weissman Family Foundation, and by all of our film-loving patrons!
ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES
OCTOBER – DECEMBER 2016
Cover artwork by Tom Jarmusch.
Untitled, ©2016. (Instagram:
@tomjarmusch)
ESSENTIAL CINEMA
2
PREMIERES
HOMELAND: IRAQ YEAR ZERO
78RPM
THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES
THE ILLINOIS PARABLES
BADEN BADEN
THE DUMB GIRL OF PORTICI
SHORT STAY
4
AFA PRESERVATIONS
RE-VISIONS: Peggy Ahwesh, Peter Hutton
7
RETROSPECTIVES
Lucio Fulci
Alexander Kluge
Dennis Hopper
Lionel Soukaz
Peter Hutton
8
ONGOING SERIES
FLAHERTY NYC: Wild Sounds
New York Women in Film & Television
ICP: Voyeurism, Surveillance + Identity in the Cinema
16
CALENDAR-AT-A-GLANCE
19-21
ONGOING SERIES, cont’d
SHOW & TELL: Kelly Sears, Fern Silva, Daïchi Saïto
Members Only: TARZAN & JANE REGAINED…SORT OF
23
24
25
SERIES
Gerald O’Grady’s FILM-MAKERS
Shoot Shoot Shoot: The London Film-Makers’ Co-op
The Medium is the Massacre
Jorge Luis Borges & Adolfo Bioy Casares on Film
26
SPECIAL SCREENINGS
THE CHELSEA GIRLS
Ron Galella
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GELITIN
THOMAS BERNHARD – THREE DAYS
MONO NO AWARE X: Carolee Schneemann
STOCKHAUSEN’S ORIGINALE: DOUBLETAKES
Vicente Vázquez & Usue Arrieta
BEAVIS & BUTT-HEAD DO AMERICA
36
NEWFILMMAKERS
40
INDEX
41
5
6
10
12
14
15
17
18
27
30
33
37
38
39
ESSENTIAL CINEMA
A very special series of films screened on a repertory basis, the Essential Cinema Repertory collection consists of
110 programs/330 titles assembled in 1970-75 by Anthology’s Film Selection Committee – James Broughton, Ken
Kelman, Peter Kubelka, P. Adams Sitney, and Jonas Mekas. It was an ambitious attempt to define the art of cinema.
The project was never completed, but even in its unfinished state the series provides an uncompromising critical
overview of cinema’s history.
And remember: ALL ESSENTIAL CINEMA SCREENINGS ARE FREE FOR AFA MEMBERS!
CHRISTOPHER MACLAINE
Jonas Mekas
“The few facts that are known about Maclaine
are, at best, sketchy. He was a published poet,
a sort of down and out San Francisco bohemian
who later became one of the psychic casualties of that scene. His last years were spent at
Sunnyacres, a state mental hospital in Fairfield,
California. These films, along with Ron Rice’s, are
clearly the most significant work to come out of
the beat period.” –J.J. Murphy
All films preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
THE MAN WHO INVENTED GOLD
1957, 14 min, 16mm
BEAT 1958, 6 min, 16mm
SCOTCH HOP 1959, 5.5 min, 16mm
THE END 1953, 35 min, 16mm
A CHUMP AT OXFORD
LAUREL AND HARDY
“Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy are the movies’
greatest comic duo, the quintessential dumb and
dumber odd-couple. Though critically overshadowed
by Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, they were enormously
popular, and proved a major influence on Abbott
& Costello, Lucille Ball & Vivian Vance, and Jackie
Gleason & Art Carney, not to mention Samuel Beckett
(they were an inspiration for WAITING FOR GODOT),
Roman Polanski (who paid homage to them in his
existentialist short films FAT AND LEAN and TWO
MEN AND A WARDROBE), and Ken Jacobs (whose
ONTIC ANTICS deconstructs one of their films).”
–David Mulkins
THEM THAR HILLS 1934, 20 min, 16mm, b&w.
Directed by Charley Rogers.
TIT FOR TAT 1935, 20 min, 16mm, b&w.
Directed by Charley Rogers.
A CHUMP AT OXFORD 1940, 42 min, 16mm, b&w
Directed by Alfred J. Goulding.
Total running time: ca. 85 min.
• Sat, Oct 15 at 3:45.
GEORGE LANDOW, AKA OWEN LAND
1971-72, 82 min, 16mm-to-35mm. Preserved by Anthology Film
Archives with support from The Film Foundation. Special thanks
to Cineric, Inc., and Trackwise.
“His remarkable faculty is as maker of images.... [T]he
images he photographs are among the most radical,
super-real and haunting images the cinema has ever
given us.” –P. Adams Sitney, VISIONARY FILM
FLEMING FALOON 1963, 6 min, 16mm
FILM IN WHICH THERE APPEAR SPROCKET HOLES,
EDGE LETTERING, DIRT PARTICLES, ETC.
1965/66, 5 min, 16mm, silent
DIPLOTERATOLOGY
1967/78, 7 min, 16mm, silent
THE FILM THAT RISES TO THE SURFACE OF
CLARIFIED BUTTER 1968, 9 min, 16mm, b&w
INSTITUTIONAL QUALITY 1969, 5 min, 16mm
REMEDIAL READING COMPREHENSION
THANK YOU JESUS FOR THE
ETERNAL PRESENT 1973, 6 min, 16mm
A FILM OF THEIR 1973 SPRING TOUR
COMMISSIONED BY CHRISTIAN
WORLD LIBERATION FRONT OF
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA
• Sat, Oct 1 at 7:30.
2
Jonas Mekas
REMINISCENCES OF A JOURNEY TO
LITHUANIA
“The film consists of four parts. The first part contains
some footage from my first years in America, 1949-52.
The second part was shot in August 1971 in Lithuania.
The third part is in Elmshorn, near Hamburg, where I
spent eight months in a forced labor camp. The fourth
part is in Vienna (1971) with Peter Kubelka, Nitsch,
Annette Michelson, Ken Jacobs, etc. The film deals
with home, memory, and culture.” –J.M.
• Sun, Oct 16 at 5:30.
1970, 5 min, 16mm
LÉGER & MURPHY / CLAIR & PICABIA
/ MAN RAY & DUCHAMP
René Clair & Francis Picabia
ENTR’ACTE 1924, 22 min, 35mm, b&w
Man Ray
LE RETOUR À LA RAISON 1923, 2 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
ÉTOILE DE MER 1927, 13 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
EMAK BAKIA 1927, 18 min, 35mm, b&w, silent
Marcel Duchamp & Man Ray
ANEMIC CINEMA 1926, 7 min, 35mm, b&w, silent
Filmed 1964-68; edited 1968-69. “Since 1950 I have
been keeping a film diary. I have been walking around
with my Bolex and reacting to the immediate reality:
situations, friends, New York, seasons of the year. On
some days I shot ten frames, on others ten seconds,
still on others ten minutes. Or I shot nothing. When
one writes diaries, it’s a retrospective process: you sit
down, you look back at your day, and you write it all
down. To keep a film (camera) diary, is to react (with
your camera) immediately, now, this instant: either
you get it now, or you don’t get it at all.” –J.M.
[THE MAN WHO INVENTED GOLD, BEAT, and
SCOTCH HOP are not part of the Essential Cinema
collection, but they are included here as a special
bonus.]
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
1969, 180 min, 16mm. New print by Cinema Arts Inc. Special
thanks to Michael Kolvek, Fran Bowen (Trackwise), and Pip
Laurenson (Tate Museum).
“I make home movies – therefore I live. I live – therefore I make home movies.” –from the soundtrack
• Sun, Oct 2 at 4:15.
• Sat, Oct 1 at 5:30.
Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy
BALLET MÉCANIQUE 1924, 19 min, 35mm, b&w, silent.
DIARIES, NOTES & SKETCHES
(WALDEN)
1972, 13 min, 16mm
1974, 11.5 min, 16mm
FILM IN WHICH…, INSTITUTIONAL QUALITY,
and FILM OF THEIR 1973 SPRING TOUR have
been preserved by Anthology Film Archives
through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program
and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by
the George Lucas Family Foundation.
• Mon, Oct 3 at 7:30.
REMINISCENCES OF A JOURNEY TO LITHUANIA
GEORGES MÉLIÈS, PROGRAM 1
MARIE MENKEN, PROGRAM 1
Magician, master of special effects, Méliès broke
with the realistic (Lumière) mode of cinema and
celebrated unlimited fantasy and artificiality (in its
best sense).
Marie Menken represents the lyrical sensibility in the
American avant-garde film. She manages to get the
maximum visual intensity from minimally photogenic
subjects. Her usage of single-frame and her poetic
attitude and purity had a strong influence on many
filmmakers of the sixties.
• Sat, Nov 5 at 3:15.
• Sat, Nov 26 at 3:15.
MARIE MENKEN, PROGRAM 2
All films in this program are b&w and silent.
THE CONJUROR / L’ILLUSIONISTE FIN DE SIÈCLE
1899, 1 min, 35mm
TRIP TO THE MOON / VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE
1902, 12 min, 35mm
THE PALACE OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS / LE PALAIS
DES MILLE ET UNE NUITS 1905, 21 min, 35mm
DELIRIUM IN A STUDIO / ALI BARBOUYOU ALI BOUF À
L’HUILE 1907, 5 min, 35mm
MERRY FROLICS OF SATAN / LES QUATRES CENT
FARCES DU DIABLE 1906, 18 min, 35mm
The films in this program are hand-tinted and silent.
THE CASCADE OF FIRE / LA CASCADE DE FEU
1904, 3 min, 35mm
A DIABOLICAL TENANT / UN LOCATAIRE DIABOLIQUE
1909, 8 min, 35mm
THE HUNCHBACK FAIRY / LA FÉE CARABOSSE
1906, 13 min, 35mm
VOYAGE ACROSS THE IMPOSSIBLE / LE VOYAGE À
TRAVERS L’IMPOSSIBLE 1904, 20 min, 35mm
• Sun, Nov 6 at 3:15.
GLIMPSE OF THE GARDEN 1957, 5 min, 16mm
NOTEBOOK 1962-63, 10 min, 16mm, silent
ARABESQUE FOR KENNETH ANGER 1961, 4 min, 16mm
EYE MUSIC IN RED MAJOR 1961, 4 min, 16mm, silent
GO! GO! GO! 1962-64, 12 min, 16mm, silent
LIGHTS 1964-66, 7 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
ANDY WARHOL 1965, 22 min, 16mm
[The films in this program are not part of the
Essential Cinema collection, but are included here
as a special bonus.]
VISUAL VARIATIONS ON NOGUCHI
1955, 4 min, 16mm, b&w
HURRY! HURRY! 1957, 3 min, 16mm
DWIGHTIANA 1959, 3 min, 16mm. Score by Teiji Ito.
MOOD MONDRIAN 1961, 7 min, 16mm, silent
BAGATELLE FOR WILLARD MAAS 1961, 5 min, 16mm
WRESTLING 1964, 8 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
MOONPLAY 1962, 5 min, 16mm, b&w
DRIPS IN STRIPS 1961, 3 min, 16mm, silent
SIDEWALKS 1966, 7 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
EXCURSION 1968, 5 min, 16mm
WATTS WITH EGGS 1967, 12 min, 16mm, silent
• Sun, Nov 27 at 3:15.
ROBERT NELSON
THE GREAT BLONDINO
1967, 42 min, 16mm. Preserved print, with thanks to the
Academy Film Archive.
TRIP TO THE MOON
All films in this program are b&w and silent.
EXTRAORDINARY ILLUSIONS / ILLUSIONS
FUNAMBULESQUES 1903, 3 min, 16mm
THE ENCHANTED WELL / LE PUITS FANTASTIQUE
1903, 3 min, 16mm
THE APPARITION / LE REVENANT 1903, 3 min, 16mm
TUNNEL UNDER THE CHANNEL / LE TUNNEL SOUS LA
MANCHE 1907, 25 min, 35mm
SIGHTSEEING THROUGH WHISKY / PAUVRE JEAN OU
LES MESAVENTURES D’UN BUVEUR 1909, 5 min, 35mm
THE DOCTOR’S SECRET / HYDROTHÉRAPIE
FANTASTIQUE 1909, 11 min, 35mm
• Sat, Nov 12 at 3:15.
“The original Blondino was a 19th-century tightrope
artist who among other feats crossed Niagara Falls
trundling a wheelbarrow. In this film, Nelson sees
Blondino as a metaphor for those who still try. Too
subtle to be allegorical, the picture is in the shape of
a quixotic search in which the goal is the journey and
the means is the end.” –MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
“It is…difficult to get at the rich visual texture that
is the film’s most striking attribute. Long stretches
are concerned with Blondino’s visions, dreams,
and dreams within dreams. The film unfolds in
brief recurring patterns of imagery. Even the more
straightforward sections are dense with interpolated
newsreel and TV commercial footage, visual gags,
and homemade special effects. The net effect is
funny, seamless, and elusive.” –J. Hoberman, “A
Filmmakers Filming Monograph”
&
BLEU SHUT
1970, 33 min, 16mm. Preserved print, with thanks to the
Academy Film Archive.
“Boat-name quizzes, dogs, cuts from Dreyer’s JOAN
OF ARC in montage with a sultry whore, a car running
up a ramp and crashing, pornography, a passionate
embrace by a thirties hero and heroine; all somehow
implicating Dreyer and Joan in the perverse synthesis
of sex and technology. What’s happening here? Basically Nelson is leaving things unsaid.” –Leo Regan
• Sat, Dec 3 at 2:45.
I WAS BORN, BUT...
SIDNEY PETERSON
THE POTTED PSALM and THE PETRIFIED DOG have been
preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the AvantGarde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and
administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation.
MR. FRENHOFFER AND THE MINOTAUR and THE LEAD SHOES
have been preserved by Anthology with support from the
National Film Preservation Foundation.
THE POTTED PSALM 1946, 19 min, 16mm
THE PETRIFIED DOG 1948, 19 min, 16mm
MR. FRENHOFFER AND THE MINOTAUR
1949, 21 min, 16mm
THE LEAD SHOES 1949, 17 min, 16mm
“These images are meant to play not on our rational
senses, but on the infinite universe of ambiguity
within us.” –Sidney Peterson
• Sun, Dec 4 at 3:45.
Vsevolod I. Pudovkin
MOTHER / MAT
1926, 104 min, 35mm, b&w, silent. Based on the novel by Maxim
Gorky. In Russian with no subtitles; English synopsis available.
With the simple theme of a working-class mother
growing in political consciousness through participation in revolutionary activity, this film established
Pudovkin as one of the major figures of the Soviet
cinema. A student of Kuleshov and an admirer of
Griffith’s films, he was writing his first book of film
theory at the same time he was making MOTHER.
His expert cutting on movement and his associated
editing of unrelated scenes to form what he called
a “plastic synthesis” are amply demonstrated here.
Although in direct opposition to Eisenstein’s shock
montage, Pudovkin used a linkage method advanced
far beyond Kuleshov’s theories.
• Sun, Dec 11 at 3:30.
Yasujiro Ozu
I WAS BORN, BUT… /
UMARETE WA MITA KEREDO…
1932, 100 min, 35mm, b&w, silent. With English intertitles.
In referring to this film Ozu stated, “I started to make
a film about grownups. While I had originally planned
to make a fairly bright little story, it changed while I
was working on it and came out very dark.” The story
concerns a very average suburban office worker,
with a wife and two very un-average sons, who is
unable to stand up to his boss.
“Joyful…as true and as moving and as timely today
as it was in 1932.” –Jonas Mekas
• Thurs, Dec 22 at 6:45 and Fri, Dec 23 at 9:00.
Yasujiro Ozu
THERE WAS A FATHER / CHICHI ARIKI
1942, 87 min, 35mm. In Japanese with English subtitles.
A schoolteacher wants his son to marry before entering military service. A key film in Ozu’s career – many
critics feel it is here that his early experimental period
ends and his later mature period begins.
• Thurs, Dec 22 at 9:00 and Fri, Dec 23 at 7:00.
3
PREMIERES
U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
Abbas Fahdel
HOMELAND: IRAQ YEAR ZERO
France, 2015, 334 min, digital. In Arabic with English subtitles. Distributed by Kino Lorber. Special
thanks to Graham Swon (Kino Lorber), and to Mathieu Fournet and Amelie Garin-Davet (Cultural
Services of the French Embassy).
In February 2002 – about a year before the U.S. invasion – Iraqi filmmaker
Abbas Fahdel traveled home from France to capture everyday life as his
country prepared for war. He concentrated on family and friends, including his
12-year-old nephew, Haider, as they went about their daily lives, which had come
to include planning for shortages of food, water, and power. No strangers to war,
the Iraqis thought they understood what was coming, and could even manage
to be grimly humorous about what they felt would likely be a major and lengthy
inconvenience. And then, the war began.
When Fahdel resumed filming in 2003, two weeks after the invasion, daily activities have come to a near standstill, the city is overrun with foreign soldiers, and
many areas of Baghdad have been closed off to ordinary citizens. Iraqis endure,
seemingly as unwitting as Americans themselves about what further tragedy
awaits. Among the most essential documents in recent cinema, Fahdel’s epic
yet intimate film paints a compelling portrait of people struggling to survive while
their civilization, dating back to ancient times, is destroyed around them. This is
a pinnacle of documentary filmmaking in the 21st century, and truly a work that
should be seen by any and every concerned American citizen.
“While journalism manipulates facts in its professional duty to craft a version of
reality and toe an editorial line, Fahdel’s film immerses the spectator into the flux
of everyday uncertainty. If stereotypes deny subtleties in order to corroborate
fears, HOMELAND attempts to mirror the complexity of Iraqi society by capturing
its nuances, be they political, cultural or religious.” –Celluloid Liberation Front,
MUBI
“The most significant work of art to come out of the Iraq war.” –Jeffrey Ruoff,
HUFFINGTON POST
HOMELAND: IRAQ YEAR ZERO will be shown in two parts,
which can be seen together or on separate days for the price
of a single admission.
Director Abbas Fahdel will be here in person on opening day,
Thursday, October 6!
PART 1: 160 min
• Thurs, Oct 6, Sat, Oct 8, Sun, Oct 9, Mon, Oct 10, and Wed, Oct 12 at
4:00; Fri, Oct 7 and Tues, Oct 11 at 7:30.
PART 2: 174 min
• Thurs, Oct 6, Sat, Oct 8, Sun, Oct 9, Mon, Oct 10, and Wed, Oct 12 at
7:30; Fri, Oct 7 and Tues, Oct 11 at 4:00.
4
NYC PREMIERE! FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
Joel Schlemowitz
78RPM
U.S., 2015, 98 min, 16mm-to-digital
Joel Schlemowitz is well known in the avant-garde film community for his handcrafted 16mm short films, experimental documentaries, live film performances,
and ingenious, projection-oriented sculptural installations. Indulging and extending his preoccupation with antique, though never obsolete, forms of technology,
his first feature film – 78RPM – is a fond documentary paean to the gramophone
and the 78 record collector. 78RPM is amply equipped with expert talking heads
– Schlemowitz interviews vintage culture mavens including Shien Lee of Dances
of Vice and the London-based Shellac Sisters; authors and experts in the field;
78 record collectors including Michael Cumella of the Antique Phonograph
Music program on WMFU; Jonathan Ward of Excavated Shellac; bandleader
Vince Giordano; and even the grandson of the inventor of the gramophone,
Oliver Berliner. But far from a dry and solemn history lesson, 78RPM is a film of
mercurial high-spirited enthusiasm, featuring an array of hand-processed 16mm
scenes of cinematic hijinks. Schlemowitz puts the music itself front and center,
pausing to play a generous selection of old shellac records in their (3-minute)
entirety – from hot jazz to Enrico Caruso to hillbilly ballads. The film’s subjects
also ponder the rapid change of technology and the specter of ever-increasing
obsolescence, as well as seeking to answer the ultimate question intrinsic to the
78 record: “Why 78 revolutions per minute?”
• Fri, Oct 14 through Sun, Oct 16 at 7:30 nightly.
PREMIERES
U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
THE PRISON
IN TWELVE
LANDSCAPES
THE ILLINOIS
PARABLES
Brett Story
Canada/U.S., 2016, 90 min, digital
More people are incarcerated in the U.S. at this
moment than in any other time or place in history, yet
the prison itself has never felt further away or more
out of sight. THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES
is a film about the penitentiary in which we never
see a prison. Instead, the film unfolds as a cinematic
journey through a series of landscapes across
the U.S. where penitentiaries affect lives, from a
California mountainside where female prisoners
fight raging wildfires, to a Bronx warehouse full of
goods destined for the state correctional system, to
an Appalachian coal town betting its future on the
promise of prison jobs.
“In this brilliant investigation of the American prison
system’s pervasive influence, the formalist structure
fosters discovery and contemplation about issues of
race, power, and poverty through a cinematic journey
across the land of the free.” –Alexander Rogalski,
HOT DOCS
“Through its vivid assortment of stories and locales,
[this film] suggests the prison-industrial complex as
an ever-growing, multi-tentacled beast that touches
endless aspects of American life. There are forms of
incarceration on both sides of the wall – a willingness to accept the limits of prison culture, even when
there are no bars. Story has made a potent political
film without having to spray viewers with a fusillade
of alarming numbers to back it up. She trusts viewers
to intuit their way through fascinating anecdotes
and detours that gain a cumulative power, one that
data alone cannot possibly express.” –Scott Tobias,
VARIETY
The screening on Thursday, November 10 at 7:30 is
co-sponsored by New York University’s Prison Education
Program, and will feature a panel discussion about incarceration and its collateral effects throughout our communities with
director Brett Story, CUNY Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and
former Prison Education Program students. The panel will be
moderated by NYU Associate Professor and Faculty Director of
the Prison Education Program, Nikhil Pal Singh.
• Fri, Nov 4 through Wed, Nov 9 at 7:00 & 9:15
nightly. Additional screenings on Sat & Sun
at 4:45, and on Thurs, Nov 10 at 7:30.
Deborah Stratman
U.S., 2016, 60 min, 16mm
The latest film by Deborah Stratman, one of contemporary avant-garde cinema’s most accomplished and
versatile artists, is an experimental documentary that
takes the form of eleven parables relaying histories
of settlement, removal, technological breakthrough,
violence, messianism, and resistance, all occurring
somewhere in the state of Illinois. The state is a
convenient structural ruse, allowing its histories to
become allegories that explore how we’re shaped
by conviction and ideology. The film suggests links
between technological and religious abstraction,
placing them in conversation with governance. In our
desire to explain the unknown, who or what do we
end up blaming or endorsing?
“In the grand tradition of the ‘political landscape film’
– as illustrated by James Benning, Lee Anne Schmitt,
William E. Jones’s first period, Jenni Olson, or
Stratman herself in her previous work – THE ILLINOIS
PARABLES juxtaposes unmarked landscapes (the
list of places come at the end), most often devoid of
human figures and present as ‘traces’ of a fraught
history, with texts, archival footage and other
artifacts yielded by a solid research. The seduction
comes from the rigorous composition of the shots
and from a strategy – not unlike that of Eastern Asian
scroll painting – that allows the spectator to project
him/herself in the ‘empty spaces’ of the shot. The
juxtaposition of image and texts is not authoritarian,
but allows for gaps, (mis)readings, (re)interpretations,
playfulness even; the spectator is invited to float
over the image like a little boat over the crest of the
wave.” –Bérénice Reynaud, SENSES OF CINEMA
NYC THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
Rachel Lang
BADEN BADEN
France/Belgium, 2016, 94 min, digital. In French with English
subtitles. Distributed by MUBI; special thanks to Daniel Kasman
& Lilly Riber.
Like many in her generation, 26 year-old, free-spirited
Ana lives a life teetering on the edge of comedy and
melodrama. After a failed experience working on a
film set, she returns to her hometown and decides
to focus her energy on renovating the bathroom of
her spunky, aging grandmother. Over the course of a
scorching summer, Ana finds herself connecting and
reconnecting with lovers and friends, as her (self-)
improvement project gradually becomes more than
she bargained for.
BADEN BADEN is a deceptively low-key feature
debut from French filmmaker Rachel Lang, anchored
by a slyly compelling, effortlessly confident lead
performance by Salomé Richard, Lang’s alter ego and
star of her two previous short films. Equally adept
at narrative minimalism, psychological portraiture,
and deadpan comedy, BADEN BADEN is a character
study of great penetration and charm.
Stratman will be here in person on
Nov 16 & 17!
“Following a long absence…the aimless 26-yearold protagonist Ana returns to her hometown of
Strasbourg and attempts to figure her life out.
Nothing extraordinary happens – she meets old
friends, reconnects with family members, has casual
flings, hooks up with her ex – but the intelligent
and unostentatious manner in which Lang charts
Ana’s emotional progression is extremely refreshing
considering the irritating artificiality that characterizes most films addressing this period of transition,
especially when it comes to female protagonists. […]
This approach allows Lang to broach such subjects
as abortion and infidelity in a level-headed way that
reflects reality, wisely eschewing both cliché and
overdramatization to achieve a mature, engaging,
and effectively feminist take on a familiar story.” –
Giovanni Marchini Camia, REVERSE SHOT
• Wed, Nov 16 through Tues, Nov 22 at 7:15 &
9:00 nightly. Additional screenings on Sat &
Sun at 5:30.
• Fri, Nov 25 through Thurs, Dec 1 at 7:00 &
9:00 nightly. Additional screenings on Sat &
Sun at 5:00.
5
PREMIERES
RESTORATION PREMIERE!
U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
THE DUMB GIRL OF PORTICI
SHORT STAY
Lois Weber & Phillips Smalley
1916, 112 min, 35mm-to-digital, b&w, silent. With Anna Pavlova. Distributed by Milestone Films.
Following on the heels of our series, “Woman with a Movie Camera,” which
included a program devoted to Lois Weber, the most successful female
filmmaker of her time, we’re thrilled to host the NYC premiere of the newlyrestored THE DUMB GIRL OF PORTICI. Just in time for its 100th anniversary,
Weber’s 1916 extravaganza is being re-released thanks to the combined
efforts of the Library of Congress and Milestone Films (who are simultaneously
distributing Weber’s SHOES).
One of Universal’s most lavish and ambitious films to date, and – as the first
blockbuster ever directed by a woman – a landmark in women’s cinema,
PORTICI is also remarkable as perhaps the most important filmic showcase for
famed ballet dancer and choreographer Anna Pavlova. A Russian émigré who
made her home in London, the dancer was “stuck” in America as WWI raged.
Pavlova was currently appearing with the Boston Opera Company in D.F.E.
Auber’s 1829 “La Muette de Portici,” portraying Fenella, a mute fisher-girl living
during the Spanish occupation of Naples in the mid-17th century. In order to
save the almost-bankrupt Boston Opera Company, Pavlova agreed to portray
Fenella in Weber’s film, and the result was the most extraordinary document of
Pavlova on celluloid.
Sadly, over the years PORTICI has fallen out of distribution and out of favor. But
that is about to change: utilizing the only prints known to have survived, the
Library of Congress archivists George Willeman and Valerie Cervantes have
brought the film to a form closer to the original than has been seen in decades,
while further restoration by An Affair With Film’s Lori Raskin has resulted in the
stabilization of the restoration and the addition of the original tinting. Thanks
to these restoration efforts, projection at the proper film speed, and a dazzling
new score by dance composer Jonathan Sweeney, THE DUMB GIRL OF
PORTICI and prima ballerina Anna Pavlova are poised to delight audiences all
over again.
“Pavlova’s artistry is something that we are often asked to take on faith,
something where you had to be there. Watching THE DUMB GIRL OF PORTICI,
you are there.” – Joan Acocella, NEW YORKER
• Fri, Dec 16 through Sun, Dec 18 at 7:30 nightly.
Ted Fendt
U.S., 2016, 61 min, Super-16mm-to-35mm. Special thanks to Graham Swon.
Cinematic renaissance man Ted Fendt – filmmaker, but also projectionist, translator, and scholar (he recently edited the Austrian Filmmuseum monograph
on Straub & Huillet) – has over the last few years quietly made a name for
himself among cognoscenti with a small body of short films. Intentionally (and
hilariously) slight, anti-dramatic, and uneventful, they seem almost by definition
to stand in opposition to a feature-film sensibility. Nevertheless, Fendt’s first
feature (albeit just barely north of one hour) has arrived, and by some miracle
it sustains its running time without sacrificing the perversely minor-key recessiveness of the short films.
The aptly titled SHORT STAY finds Fendt continuing to mine his home turf – the
unspectacular environs and ambition-challenged residents of suburban Philadelphia, where he grew up – though this time he (and his protagonist) expand
their purview to the neighboring metropolis itself. The film centers on Mike, a
resolutely undynamic, socially awkward, directionless young man, who finds
himself temporarily moving to Philadelphia to take over an acquaintance’s free
walking tour ‘business’ while he’s away. SHORT STAY reflects its protagonist’s
uninflected, seemingly imperturbable affectlessness, but with a formal precision and a preoccupation with gesture and manner rather than psychology
that, for all the film’s deadpan comedy, brings it much closer to Straub/Huillet
or Rohmer territory than mumblecore (a dimension that’s only underlined by
Fendt’s near-heroic commitment to shooting – and exhibiting – his films on
16mm or 35mm). The animating mystery of SHORT STAY is to what degree Mike
possesses self-awareness, and it’s a mystery that, to its great credit, the film
declines to resolve, allowing Mike to keep his inner life to himself and remain
an enigma rather than an object of pity or scorn.
For this week-long premiere run, we’ll be presenting SHORT STAY alongside
the three short films that preceded it, for a de facto Ted Fendt mid-career
retrospective!
“Fendt renders [his] incidents…with a deliberation, assurance, and sensitivity
to forms of everyday inconsideration that evidence his status as an unapologetic formalist, sly humorist, and unlikely moralist. SHORT STAY manages to
contain multitudes despite initially seeming unassuming and sparse….”
–Dan Sullivan, CINEMA SCOPE
Plus:
BROKEN SPECS 2012, 6 min, Super-16mm-to-35mm
TRAVEL PLANS 2013, 7 min, 16mm-to-35mm
GOING OUT 2015, 8 min, 16mm-to-35mm
• Fri, Dec 16 through Thurs, Dec 22 at 7:00 & 9:15 nightly.
Additional screenings on Sat & Sun at 5:00.
6
RE-ViSiONS:
AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL
FILM 1975-90
With the ongoing series RE-VISIONS: AMERICAN
EXPERIMENTAL FILM 1975-90, Anthology spotlights the
generation(s) of experimental film artists who emerged
after the final formation in 1975 of our Essential Cinema
repertory screening cycle. As hotly debated as it was
widely celebrated, the EC had a seismic effect (for better
or worse) on both cinema studies scholarship and international film curatorial practice. Even though the EC was
intended as a direct response to the exclusion of the avantgarde from official Film History, by so concisely outlining a
canon it effectively shifted critical and public interest away
from the still developing experimental film movement and
focused attention squarely on certain artists and works
considered to be historically important. Subsequent generations of cinema artists have never received the same level
of intellectual/institutional recognition or encouragement.
We believe that it is high time for a re-evaluation.
With the support of a significant grant from the Andy
Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Anthology has
been engaged in a multi-year project to preserve significant works by a wide range of cinema artists who largely
became active or reached their prime after 1975. Rather
than attempt to amend the EC, RE-VISIONS uses it as a
starting point from which to explore the continuities, fractures, corollaries, and connections between cinema artists
of the last 40 years and the previous avant-garde film
movements. Much like their predecessors, these artists
continued to tirelessly push at the parameters of cinematic
form.
RE-VISIONS features single-artist screenings of our new
preservations alongside other exemplary and enticing titles
spanning each artist’s career, as well as group shows bringing
together multiple artists. When possible, artists will appear in
person to discuss their work and answer questions.
Special thanks to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Audio
Mechanics, BB Optics, Cinema Arts, Cineric, Colorlab, The Film Foundation,
FotoKem, the Mike Kelly Foundation for the Arts, The National Endowment
for the Arts, the National Film Preservation Foundation, Sony Pictures
Entertainment, Trackwise, Video and Film Solutions, and all the artists who
were involved in this project.
DECEMBER:
PETER HUTTON
Avant-garde cinema lost one of its most treasured and irreplaceable
artists this year with the passing of Peter Hutton (1944-2016). A
fixture at Bard College, where he taught for more than thirty years,
Hutton began making films in the early 1970s and had continued
to create exquisite and carefully crafted works up until his death.
Hutton’s luxuriantly austere films evoke 19th century landscape
painting, still photography, and the sui generis cinema of the
Lumière brothers to offer an expansively paced, contemplative way
of viewing the world.
This RE-VISIONS screening is presented as part of an extensive
retrospective comprising all of the films that are currently in
circulation. See page 15 for the full retrospective.
RE-VISIONS PROGRAM:
All films in this program preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from
the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
BOSTON FIRE 1979, 8 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
STUDY OF A RIVER 1996-97, 16 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
NEW YORK PORTRAIT: CHAPTER 1 1978-79, 16 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
NEW YORK PORTRAIT: CHAPTER 2 1980-81, 16 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
NEW YORK PORTRAIT: CHAPTER 3 1990, 15 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
• Thurs, Dec 8 at 7:00 and Sat, Dec 10 at 4:30.
THE SCARY MOVIE
NOVEMBER:
PEGGY AHWESH• FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
Peggy Ahwesh’s staggeringly eclectic body of work channels everything from feminist critical theory and the writings of Georges Bataille to video games and camp horror, uniting the
highbrow and lowbrow with bracing intelligence and an unapologetically raw visual style. Raising
provocative questions about gender, sexuality, and the construction of identity, her films remain
tantalizingly open-ended. As she has stated, “I like it when a work involves the viewer in some
kind of dilemma about how to read its meaning… It’s a very exciting, ethical, and philosophical
place for me. My work is not supposed to be comfort food.”
Born in 1954 in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, Ahwesh became fascinated with the avant-garde at
Antioch College where she studied with filmmaker Tony Conrad and was exposed to artists like
Joyce Wieland, Carolee Schneemann, Cecil Taylor, and Jud Yalkut. Moving to Pittsburgh after
receiving her BFA, she programmed films at local venues including The Mattress Factory and
Pittsburgh Filmmakers. Throughout this time, Ahwesh immersed herself in Pittsburgh’s alternative
underground, documenting the scene and its personalities in a series of Super 8mm shorts. Her
first film, THE PITTSBURGH TRILOGY (1983), is a collection of portraits of the offbeat characters
she befriended in the city.
In 1982, Ahwesh relocated to NYC, where she established herself as a major voice of the
American independent cinema. Ceaselessly experimenting with various media and filmmaking
techniques – from film to video to virtual reality, and from found-footage and faux documentary
to image-less films and multi-screen installations – Ahwesh is a thrillingly adventurous and
unpredictable artist. Never content to spin variations on a theme, each film is a new adventure
in form and a new challenge to the social, political, and cultural status quo. For these two
RE-VISIONS programs, we will be showcasing two films newly preserved by Anthology – her
1980s masterpieces THE PITTSBURGH TRILOGY and DOPPELGANGER, both of which have been
all-but-unavailable for years now – alongside FROM ROMANCE TO RITUAL and a selection of
more recent work, amply demonstrating Ahwesh’s dizzying range of interests and approaches.
PROGRAM 1:
THE PITTSBURGH TRILOGY 1983, 37 min,
Super 8mm-to-16mm. Preserved by Anthology
Film Archives with support from the National Film
Preservation Foundation and the Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual Arts.
DOPPELGANGER 1987, 8 min, Super 8mm-to-16mm.
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support
from New York Women in Film and Television’s
(NYWIFT) Women’s Film Preservation Fund.
FROM ROMANCE TO RITUAL 1985, 20 min,
Super 8mm-to-16mm. Preserved by Bard College
with support from the National Film Preservation
Foundation. Preservation undertaken by BB Optics.
PROGRAM 2:
THE SCARY MOVIE 1993, 9 min, 16mm, b&w
SHE PUPPET 2001, 15 min, digital
73 SUSPECT WORDS & HEAVEN’S GATE
2001, 8 min, digital, b&w
NOCTURNE 1998, 30 min, 16mm, b&w
THE THIRD BODY 2007, 9 min, digital
• Sun, Nov 13 at 7:30.
• Sat, Nov 12 at 7:30.
7
THE CONSPIRACY OF
TORTURE aka BEATRICE
CENCI
THE GENRE TERRORIST:
LUCIO FULCI • OCTOBER 21-31
To commemorate the 20th anniversary of his death, Malastrana Film Series renews its collaboration with
Anthology to pay tribute to Lucio Fulci, one of Italy’s most visionary genre directors. Although known outside
Italy primarily for his horror movies, during his four-decade-long career the eclectic Fulci tackled just about
every one of the vast constellation of genres that made Italian popular cinema one of the richest and most
multi-layered in Europe.
Cutting his teeth on police procedural comedies starring Italian comic legend Toto, romantic comedy musicals with Adriano Celentano, and a popular slapstick series in collaboration with Franco and Ciccio, Fulci
moved fluidly among every genre imaginable. Never one to slavishly follow the rules, Fulci subverted genre
conventions and infused each film with his singularly dark vision, declaring himself “the genre terrorist.”
Malastrana Film Series has selected 15 films touching upon all the genres that Fulci tried his hand at.
The series encompasses comedies both romantic (A STRANGE TYPE) and erotic (MY SISTER-IN-LAW),
an historical drama with Tomas Milian (BEATRICE CENCI), a Franco Nero-starring spaghetti western
(MASSACRE TIME), and the family-friendly hit western adventure, WHITE FANG. The line-up also includes
everything from the seminal giallo, DON’T TORTURE A DUCKLING, a giallo slasher (NEW YORK RIPPER),
the cult classic, ZOMBIE, and his legendary trilogy of death, GATES OF HELL, to his sole foray into the
fantasy genre, CONQUEST. To top it all off, filmmaker William Lustig (MANIAC COP) will be here to present
a special screening of Fulci’s paranormal horror film, MANHATTAN BABY, in anticipation of its upcoming –
and long-awaited – release on Blu-ray.
1969, 89 min, 35mm-to-digital. In Italian with English
subtitles.
Beatrice Cenci is a Roman noblewoman
who conspires with her family and a male
servant to murder her tyrannical father,
who had abused and imprisoned her inside
a castle. Fulci made this historical drama
following a string of popular comedies that
characterized his output in the 1960s. It
remains one of his most formally ambitious
and coherent films, fully embodying his
tendency to treat flesh not just as an
object of sexual interest but as a vehicle of
martyrdom.
• Sat, Oct 22 at 5:00 and
Sat, Oct 29 at 3:00.
WHITE FANG / ZANNA BIANCA
1974, 102 min, 35mm. In Italian with projected
English subtitles. Print courtesy of the Cineteca
di Bologna.
WHITE FANG, inspired by Jack London’s
book of the same name, is Fulci’s version
of a family film. The story follows a
reporter (Franco Nero) as he joins forces
with a Native American tour guide, his
kid, and the wolf dog White Fang to rid the
gold-mining town of its crime lord. This
good-natured adventure film qualifies as
an unusual Fulci entry save for a dogfight sequence,
which betrays the director’s penchant for violence.
WHITE FANG also stars the enchanting Virna Lisi as
Sister Evangelina.
Programmed by Alessio Giorgetti, Alessio Grana, and Yunsun Chae (Malastrana Film Series).
Special thanks to Carmen Accaputo & Andrea Meneghelli (Cineteca Bologna), Laura Argento & Juan Del Valle (Cineteca
Nazionale), Andreas Beilharz & Konni Verleih (KommKino), Sebastian del Castillo (AGFA), Harry Guerro (Exhumed Films),
Livio Jacob & Elena Beltrami (Cineteca Friuli), William Lustig (Blue Underground) David Suzlkin (Grindhouse Releasing), and
Fabio Troisi (Italian Cultural Institute of New York).
THE NEW YORK RIPPER /
BLUE UNDERGROUND PRESENTS:
1982, 91 min, 35mm. In German with projected English subtitles.
1982, 92 min, 35mm-to-DCP
LO SQUARTATORE DI NEW YORK
Loosely based on the real-life serial killer who terrorized Times Square in the late 1970s, THE NEW YORK
RIPPER is Fulci’s most controversial film. Deemed
a video nasty and banned for 30 years in the UK,
this giallo slasher is a love-it-or-hate-it affair, where
sleaze, gore, and vicious sexual violence converge
into one great giallo plot, resulting in one of Fulci’s
best films. Malastrana Film Series is presenting an
ultra rare German distribution 35mm print of the film.
Not to be missed!
• Fri, Oct 21 at 7:00 and Sun, Oct 30 at 9:00.
MANHATTAN BABY
Special Blu-ray release screening with
introduction by William Lustig!
A young girl on vacation in Egypt is given a mysterious charm, causing her archeologist father to be
struck blind inside an unexplored pyramid tomb. But
when the family returns home to Manhattan, a plague
of supernatural evil and sudden violence follows. Can
this ancient curse be stopped before it is unleashed
on the streets of New York City?
“Fulci combines elements of THE EXORCIST, THE
AWAKENING, POLTERGEIST, and more in this bizarre
horror thriller. MANHATTAN BABY is notable as
one of Fulci’s final films to be released in America.”
–BLUE UNDERGOUND
• Fri, Oct 21 at 9:00.
• Sat, Oct 22 at 7:00 and Thurs, Oct 27 at 7:00.
DON’T TORTURE A DUCKLING /
NON SI SEVIZIA UN PAPERINO
1972, 102 min, 35mm. In Italian with projected English subtitles.
A reporter joins forces with a promiscuous young
woman to expose a string of child killings in a remote
village in Southern Italy that is rife with superstition
and distrust of outsiders. As the usual suspects are
proven innocent or end up dead he must look in
increasingly unlikely places to find the killer. This
giallo masterpiece was Fulci’s personal favorite and
remains a must-see.
• Sat, Oct 22 at 9:15 and Sun, Oct 30 at 6:45.
CONTRABAND /
LUCA IL CONTRABBANDIERE
Fulci’s only venture into the eurocrime/poliziottesco
genre, CONTRABAND is set in Naples, where brothers Luca and Michele smuggle cigarettes until they
find themselves in trouble with rival gangs. Rarely
screened, CONTRABAND is a testament to Fulci’s
ability to shape whatever material is at hand and turn
out a highly personal film within the conventions of
the genre.
• Sun, Oct 23 at 5:00 and Thurs, Oct 27 at 9:15.
THE NEW YORK RIPPER
8
RETROSPECTIVES: LUCIO FULCI
A STRANGE TYPE / UNO STRANO TIPO
1962, 90 min, 35mm, b&w. In Italian with projected English
subtitles.
Italy’s most flamboyant pop star, Adriano Celentano,
plays himself as a singer on tour in a small town on
the Amalfi Coast who finds himself enmeshed in a
string of sticky situations when a con man impersonating him (also played by Celentano) leaves behind
a trail of troubles. Fulci’s training as an assistant
director to the comedy master Steno pays off in this
early musical, as evidenced by a series of brilliant set
pieces. Fulci’s comedies remain a staple of popular
Italian cinema of the early 1960s.
• Sun, Oct 23 at 7:00 and Fri, Oct 28 at 9:15.
MASSACRE TIME aka THE BRUTE
AND THE BEAST / LE COLT CANTARONO LA
MORTE… E FU TEMPO DI MASSACRO
Print courtesy of the Cineteca di Bologna.
Scripted by Fernando Di Leo (CALIBER 9), MASSACRE TIME is Fulci’s first stab at a Spaghetti Western.
The great Franco Nero (DJANGO) stars as an unlikely
hero who returns home to reclaim the family ranch
from a landowner and his sadistic son only to realize
that he might have more in common with them than
meets the eye. While preserving some of the genre’s
classic themes, Fulci injects this western with his
trademark cynicism and nihilistic violence.
• Sun, Oct 23 at 9:00 and Fri, Oct 28 at 7:15.
CITY OF LIVING DEAD aka GATES
OF HELL / PAURA NELLA CITTA’ DEI MORTI
VIVENTI
1980, 93 min, 35mm
A clergyman in the town of Dunwich hangs himself,
causing the gates of hell to open and resuscitate the
dead. A psychic and a reporter from New York rush
to close the gates. The first installment in the GATES
OF HELL trilogy (to be followed by THE BEYOND and
THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY), CITY OF THE LIVING
DEAD raises the gore quotient to another level, firmly
establishing Fulci as the master of the genre.
• Mon, Oct 24 at 6:45 and Sat, Oct 29 at 7:15.
THE BEYOND
ZOMBIE / ZOMBI 2
CONQUEST
The daughter of a missing scientist journeys to a
Caribbean island to join a team in search of her
father, only to be met by the living dead. Although it
was produced to cash in on the success of Romero’s
DAWN OF THE DEAD (released in Italy as ZOMBI),
Fulci’s take on the undead is not a sequel, but a cult
hit of its own where even the zombies need to fend
off a shark once in a while.
In this fog-filled fantasy adventure film, a young man
with a magical bow and arrows arrives in a land
dominated by a tyrannical queen. The queen, fearing
for her life, tries to get her hands on his magical
weapon and kill him with the help of a dark magician.
• Tues, Oct 25 at 9:15 and Sat, Oct 29 at 9:30.
CERVELLO
1979, 91 min, 35mm
MY SISTER IN LAW / LA PRETORA
1976, 98 min, 35mm-to-digital. In Italian with English subtitles.
The inflexible and depised judge of a Venetian city
is targeted by her rivals, who invite her promiscuous
twin sister to town to impersonate her and ruin her
reputation. Fulci teams up with the beloved giallo
scream queen Edwige Fenech in this cult erotic
comedy. Fenech, in dual roles, shows off her comic
instincts as she shuffles with ease between frigid
judge and porn star.
1983, 88 min, 35mm
• Wed, Oct 26 at 9:15 and Sat, Oct 29 at 5:00.
CAT IN THE BRAIN / UN GATTO NEL
1990, 95 min, 35mm-to-digital
In what would turn out to be one of his final films,
Fulci plays himself as a director driven mad by his
own movies. Often called his 8 1/2, CAT IN THE
BRAIN is a splatter fest in which Fulci is stalked by
scenes from his films and thrust into an ultra-violent
fever-dream of death and depravity. When Movies
Attack!
• Mon, Oct 31 at 10:30.
• Wed, Oct 26 at 7:00 and Sun, Oct 30 at 4:30.
THE BEYOND aka SEVEN DOORS OF
DEATH / L’ALDILA’…E TU VIVRAI NEL TERRORE
1981, 87 min, 35mm
Hailed as Fulci’s masterpiece, the story of the second
installment in the GATES OF HELL trilogy begins in
1927 when a painter is accused of witchcraft and
burned to death in a Louisiana hotel built atop the
seven gates of hell. Years later, Liza inherits the same
hotel and, against the advice of a blind woman (never
a good idea), decides to restore it.
• Mon, Oct 24 at 9:15 and Mon, Oct 31 at 6:30.
THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY /
QUELLA VILLA ACCANTO AL CIMITERO
1981, 86 min, 35mm
A young historian takes his family to a remote
mansion by a cemetery to carry out his research.
Once there, he decides to investigate what drove
his colleague to kill his assistant and then commit
suicide in the same mansion. The only clue is that the
place once belonged to Dr. Freudstein, known for his
macabre experiments on the human body. This last
installment of the GATES OF HELL trilogy is also the
most terrifying.
• Tues, Oct 25 at 7:00 and Mon, Oct 31 at 8:30.
THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY
9
ALEXANDER KLUGE
ON FILM AND VIDEO
Oct 21-22 • Alexander Kluge in person on Sat, October 22!
When Anthology opened its doors at 32 Second Avenue in 1988, the first series we presented
was an Alexander Kluge retrospective. A central figure in the formation of the New German
Cinema, a student of Theodor Adorno, and author across several media, Kluge is one of the most
vital postwar European artists. He also remains one of the most active, even if his latter-day work
is largely unknown on this side of the Atlantic.
This fall, Kluge returns to NYC for a series of screenings and events, at the Goethe-Institut, the
Museum of Modern Art, and Anthology. At AFA we’ll be taking advantage of his presence by
organizing screenings of some of his famed feature films of the 1960s-80s, but also by providing
the rare opportunity to dip into the vast body of video work he’s created over the past 30 years.
In 1987 Kluge founded the Development Company for Television Program (DCTP), which has
produced hours of programming for German television, including numerous documentaries
and essay films by Kluge himself. Radically unlike conventional television programming – with
a dizzying array of visual and historical fragments combined with on-screen text and interviews
with figures both real and fictitious – this body of work represents a bold and fascinating attempt
to find new, more collaborative and widely accessible ways to communicate through movingimage media. These screenings will provide the best chance to date for NYC audiences to
engage with this dimension of Kluge’s rich and uncompromising career.
This program is co-presented with the Goethe-Institut New York. Very special thanks to Alexander Kluge, Jakob Krebs, and
Gülsen Döhr (DCTP), and to Wenzel Bilger & Sara Stevenson (Goethe-Institut).
Kluge will also make appearances at the Goethe-Institut on Sunday,
October 23, for a special soiree with literature, film, and music with guest
Ben Lerner, and at MoMA on Monday, October 24, for an evening of film
and conversation as part of the Modern Mondays series.
ARTISTS UNDER THE BIG TOP:
PERPLEXED / DIE ARTISTEN IN DER
ZIRKUSKUPPEL: RATLOS
1967, 103 min, 16mm, b&w/color. In German with English subtitles.
Kluge’s film is a parable of society and the artist’s
place in it. By reshuffling sequences and individual
pieces, the director seeks to create a film in the
viewer’s mind rather than one on the screen. Leni
Peickert is the daughter of a circus artist who died in
the ring. She dreams of starting her own circus as an
homage to her father. Leni wants to show the animals
as they are, not trained to act like humans, and she
wants the performers to explain the laws of physics,
rather than present their performances as magic
tricks. An unexpected inheritance makes the circus
possible for Leni, but her newly recruited artists
quickly make it clear that her alternative circus will
remain an abstract dream. She starts to work in TV,
driven by the same utopian principles and undeterred
by her failed plan.
• Fri, Oct 21 at 6:45.
GRAPES OF TRUST: FINANCIAL CRISIS,
ADAM SMITH, KEYNES, MARX, AND
OURSELVES. WHAT CAN WE RELY ON?
/ FRÜCHTE DES VERTRAUENS
2014, 90 min, digital. In German with English subtitles.
It isn’t traded on the stock market, but it’s a prerequisite for capitalism in any form: 21 sequences about
trust. With Hannelore Hoger as an astrologer of the
stock exchange, Joseph Vogl and Helge Schneider,
contributions from Dirk Baecker, Hans Magnus
Enzensberger, Heiner Müller, and an appearance by
Christoph Schlingensief. GRAPES OF TRUST is an
unusual meditation on capitalism today, through the
idiosyncratic eye of a man who has worked closely
with Fritz Lang as well as with philosopher Theodor
Adorno.
10
“Described by sociologist Richard Sennett as the
‘last living presence’ of the Frankfurt School, Kluge
is interested in the relationship between political
economy and artistic expression. GRAPES OF TRUST
is a film project in response to the recent global
economic crisis – the outcome is an eleven-hour long
DVD. The shorter feature film is an abridged version
which deals with various questions relating to money,
trading and its basis: trust. What role does money
play in our lives? What can money buy or not buy?
And in whom/what can we trust?” –Lin Li, GLASGOW
REVIEW OF BOOKS
• Fri, Oct 21 at 9:15.
ODDS AND ENDS /
VERMISCHTE NACHRICHTEN
1986, 103 min, 35mm, b&w/color. In German with English
subtitles.
‘Vermischte Nachrichten’ (‘Odds and Ends’) appear
on the last page of the newspapers. This film strings
together vignettes of events taken from everyday
newspaper headlines. These stories complement
one another by creating a new context, revealing the
character of German men and women through their
reactions to WWII, minorities, and the elderly. A side
plot follows a meeting between former West German
Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and East German leader
Erich Honecker. ODDS AND ENDS is one of two final
theatrical features Kluge made before he turned to the
TV work that has occupied him for the past thirty years.
• Sat, Oct 22 at 12:45.
THE EIFFEL TOWER, KING KONG, AND THE WHITE
WOMAN 1988, 24 min, digital, b&w/color. In German with
English subtitles.
ANTIQUES OF ADVERTISING 1988, 15 min, digital, b&w/
color. In German with English subtitles.
THE AFRICAN LADY, OR LOVE WITH A FATAL
OUTCOME 1988, 24 min, digital. In German w/ English subtitles.
CHANGING TIME (QUICKLY) 1988, 24 min, digital, b&w/
color. In German with English subtitles.
This program comprises several short video works
created in 1988 that demonstrate the mind-boggling
variety of imagery, historical figures, and visual
approaches that Kluge began developing in the early
days of his embrace of the television medium. In THE
EIFFEL TOWER, King Kong appears in various collages
of a white cruise ship, while a victory has been won
and photographed in France in November 1918, and
someone in a cartoon has stolen the Eiffel Tower,
which now stands over an abyss in the American
West. Will the Eiffel Tower be rescued? ANTIQUES
OF ADVERTISING interweaves ads for defunct and
foreign products with newsreel and documentary
footage, resulting in a distanced view of the link
between desire and commodities. THE AFRICAN
LADY features Margarete von Trotta as the countess/
Communist, the African Lady, Solaris, and many
other figures. And in CHANGING TIME (QUICKLY),
Kluge finds room for Beethoven, Heidegger, Hannah
Arendt, and Freder from Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS,
who attempts to hold back the hands of the enormous
clock anticipating the arrival of the 20th century.
Kluge in person for a Q & A!
• Sat, Oct 22 at 3:00.
THE EMERGENCE OF CIVILIZATION
FROM PARADISE AND TERROR, AND
THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CITY
2014, 90 min, digital. In German with English subtitles.
The peaceful coexistence of strangers in a confined
space is considered the starting point of civilization:
26 sequences sketch the principle of the city, from the
megacities of Uruk and Babylon – which the oldest
myths compared to paradise – to the terror of Aššur,
to the “city in us.”
Preceded by a special presentation by
Alexander Kluge, who will share some
of his brand-new short films, and then
introduce the feature film.
• Sat, Oct 22 at 5:30.
Introduced by Alexander Kluge!
Alexander Kluge & Edgar Reitz
IN DANGER AND DEEP DISTRESS, THE
MIDDLE WAY SPELLS CERTAIN DEATH
/ IN GEFAHR UND GRÖßTER NOT BRINGT DER
MITTELWEG DEN TOD
1974, 90 min, 16mm, b&w. In German with English subtitles.
Four separate stories are connected by Kluge’s
editing and their Frankfurt-on-Main location. Rita
Müller-Eisert is an East German spy who interprets
the fact-finding mission in her own peculiar fashion.
She engages in unorthodox research methods in
West Germany. Her superiors reject her reports
as pure fiction. A prostitute steals from her clients
while they are asleep because they would not pay
the promised fee. These two fictional storylines are
intercut with two documentary threads: one shows a
street battle of police against squatters, the other a
montage of news items and images of the Frankfurt
Mardi Gras (Fasching) parade.
• Sat, Oct 22 at 8:45.
RETROSPECTIVES: ALEXANDER KLUGE
11
DARK HOPPER
December 2-11
A Hollywood enfant terrible of the highest order, Dennis Hopper was a wildman, director, actor,
photographer, art collector, and rebel. A survivor of the studio system (albeit after several ejections
from Hollywood), Hopper created a bona fide countercultural phenomenon with his directorial
debut EASY RIDER, a film that helped usher in a new era of filmmaking in America.
The infamy of his second project as director, THE LAST MOVIE, obliterated his chances at helming
another film for nearly a decade, a task he took up again with OUT OF THE BLUE in 1980, fresh
off a jolt to his acting career with his acclaimed role as the crazed photo-journalist in Coppola’s
APOCALYPSE NOW. Out of this dark, drug- and booze-fueled period during which he shot holes
in his walls (and, famously, in his Warhol Mao screenprint) in fits of paranoia – in his own words:
“When the radio starts talking to you, then you know you’re in deep shit” – Hopper emerged alive
and went sober. Most biographical sketches of Hopper jump from the failure of THE LAST MOVIE
to his knockout performance as Frank Booth in BLUE VELVET (1986), but in this dark period of
Hopper’s life came some of the most visceral and powerful acting roles of his career, including a
handful that are all but unknown.
This series aims to shed light on the wrongly-maligned and largely forgotten roles that Hopper
tackled between his ‘official’ successes, and to celebrate the unhinged energy that Hopper was
unafraid to let loose on screen. There’s more to Hopper’s talent than his typecast roles as burnout
or tortured maniac, more to his candor than can be explained solely by his legendary drug and
alcohol use – no matter the role, Hopper brought a raw potency, intensity, and frankness, navigating an uncomfortable line that few other actors dare to tread.
THE AMERICAN DREAMER
Programmed by Jon Dieringer and Ava Tews. Special thanks to Cassie Blake (Academy Film Archive); Chris Chouinard (Park
Circus); Andrés Vicente Gómez & José Luis Garcia (Lola Films); Kyle Greenberg (BOND/360); Christopher Santacroce (The
Hopper Art Trust); Lawrence Schiller; Frieder Schlaich (Filmgalerie 451); and John Simon.
Dennis Hopper
David Lynch
Lawrence Schiller & L.M. Kit Carson
1980, 94 min, 35mm
1986, 120 min, 35mm
1971, 93 min, 16mm-to-digital. Restorated by the Walker Art
Center.
OUT OF THE BLUE
A Canadian tax-shelter movie that Hopper took the
reigns of after the original director walked off the set,
OUT OF THE BLUE was the first film Hopper directed
following the debacle of THE LAST MOVIE. Despite
coming to it late in the day, he made it decidedly his
own, its brutality punctuated by the recurring riff
of its namesake Neil Young track. Hopper stars as
an alcoholic, abusive, no-good father to the young,
Elvis-obsessed punk girl Cebe. The film’s subversive
and disturbing undertone culminates in a devoutly
depressing ending, but Hopper delivers one of his
most accomplished performances.
“In many ways it’s maybe my best film; people
who hate it have a real problem. It’s better than
Bertolucci’s LUNA, and it’s dealing with the same
subject matter: drugs, incest, and, rather than opera,
rock-and-roll. It’s about the society of North America;
the family unit is falling apart. People who say all this
doesn’t exist in this country, where have they been?”
–Dennis Hopper
BLUE VELVET
Hopper is at his most manic and astounding as the
nitrous oxide huffing Frank Booth. He famously
called up Lynch to express his interest in playing
the role and proclaimed, “I’ve got to play this part,
David, because I am Frank.” The film is unimaginable
without Hopper, who is at his career best playing one
of cinema’s most disturbing villains.
“Hopper’s Frank Booth is a violent, volatile hoodlum,
periodically dosing himself with ether to further addle
his turbulent unconsciousness, trancing out at the
sound of Roy Orbison’s haunting “In Dreams,” and
screaming “Don’t you fucking look at me” as though
we’re supposed to be able to look somewhere else.”
–J. Hoberman, DENNIS HOPPER: FROM METHOD TO
MADNESS
• Fri, Dec 2 at 9:30, Mon, Dec 5 at 6:30, and
Thurs, Dec 8 at 9:15.
In 1970, while he was in the midst of cutting his
infamous, studio-financed experimental film, THE
LAST MOVIE, Dennis Hopper invited photographer,
journalist, and filmmaker Lawrence Schiller (who had
been responsible for iconic images of Robert F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Bette Davis, Barbra Streisand,
Marilyn Monroe, and Muhammad Ali, among others)
and actor and screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson (DAVID
HOLZMAN’S DIARY and PARIS, TEXAS) to make a
quasi-documentary portrait of him. Capturing Hopper
in all his manic, monomaniacal, drug-fueled, yet
inspired glory, the resulting film combines documentary footage, philosophical monologues, and Hopperdevised scenes, resulting in a portrait-of-the-artist
that’s every bit as wild, indescribable, and thrillingly
adventurous as THE LAST MOVIE itself. Hamming
for the camera while perpetually occupied with his
beard-stroking, guns, or women, this is Hopper at his
most performative, intriguing, and wild.
• Sat, Dec 3 at 4:30, Mon, Dec 5 at 9:00, and
Sat, Dec 10 at 7:00.
With:
Brian Huberman DENNIS HOPPER’S RUSSIAN
DYNAMITE DEATH CHAIR PERFORMANCE
FOOTAGE 1983, 4 min, digital
Dennis Hopper
THE LAST MOVIE
“Russian Dynamite Death Chair performance”– what
more do we have to say? Hopper paid a visit to Rice
University in 1983, and gave this “performance,” a
death-wish side-show act wherein he sits in a seat
surrounded by dynamite and lights the fuse. Cheered
on by his friends Terry Southern and Wim Wenders,
Hopper miraculously emerges unscathed, and, in
the words of the student newspaper, “frazzled and
splayed by his own petard.”
1971, 108 min, 35mm
Fresh off the wildly successful EASY RIDER, Hopper
was given $850,000 (astoundingly low for a feature
film even in 1971) to make THE LAST MOVIE, a project
he had been developing for years (the inspiration
for the plot came to him while working on the John
Wayne western THE SONS OF KATIE ELDER in the
early 60s). If Hopper went over budget he’d lose
both final cut and his financial share of the film. The
pressure was on, the drugs were flowing, and the
project was doomed.
• Fri, Dec 2 at 7:15.
12
THE AMERICAN DREAMER
BLUE VELVET
“Whatever else it is, THE LAST MOVIE surely remains
the most elaborate autocritique ever produced by
a Hollywood studio. The success of EASY RIDER
RETROSPECTIVES: DARK HOPPER
allowed Hopper to play out his love-hate relationship
with the movie industry on a grand scale – as a follow
up he chose to confound his backers with a doggedly
nonlinear, sinuously chaotic string of apparent non
sequiturs. Incorporating Universal’s planet earth logo
as an integral part of the film (while withholding its
own title credit for half an hour), THE LAST MOVIE
parodied Hollywood westerns, Cassavetes-style
naturalism, and counterculture romanticism. Absurd,
delirious, confrontational, it was an act of visionary
aggression and an ode to failure.” –J. Hoberman,
DENNIS HOPPER: FROM METHOD TO MADNESS
• Sat, Dec 3 at 6:45, Tues, Dec 6 at 9:15, and
Sat, Dec 10 at 9:00.
Tobe Hooper
THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2
1986, 101 min, 35mm
Let’s not bury the lead: Dennis Hopper chainsaw
battle with Leatherface.
In his one-star review, Roger Ebert contrasted TCM2
with its predecessor by singling out the sequel’s
lack of “desire to be taken seriously” – which is
basically beside the point. In the intervening dozen
years, the 70s horror renaissance had given way to
many humorless, bloodless (yet increasingly gory)
imitations. Virtually a live-action cartoon, the sequel
is a hilarious, irreverent riposte to lesser genre
efforts. Caroline Williams gives a game performance
as Stretch, an alternative radio DJ who teams up with
Amarillo Lt. ‘Lefty’ Enright (Hopper) to take down the
butchering Sawyer boys, including Bill Moseley in
his iconic role as Leatherface’s plate-headed ‘Nam
vet brother Chop Top. The role is a brilliant foil to the
presence of Mr. EASY RIDER’s disgraced, obsessed
cowboy cop – who basically spends the entire film
running around the fringes of the action strapped
with three chainsaws – putting the hippie 60s and
comedown 70s homicidally adrift in the yuppie 80s.
Lest there be any doubt that Hopper’s persona is
integral to the blueprint: THE AMERICAN DREAMER
co-director L. M. Kit Carson wrote the script.
• Sat, Dec 3 at 9:30, Tues, Dec 6 at 7:00, and
Fri, Dec 9 at 7:15.
Dennis Hopper
BACKTRACK aka CATCHFIRE
1990, 98 min, 35mm
An action movie that bizarrely grafts together mobsters with the conceptual art scene, BACKTRACK is
a flawed and goofy movie, but one that boasts what
may be the ultimate ‘say what?’ cast: Dennis Hopper,
Jodie Foster, Vincent Price, Joe Pesci (though he did
get his name scrubbed from the credits), Fred Ward,
John Turturro, Julie Adams, Dean Stockwell, and
appearances by Charlie Sheen, Catherine Keener (in
her first credited performance), Toni Basil, and Bob
Dylan (playing a chainsaw-wielding artist) – not to
mention the central role of Jenny Holzer’s artwork. A
fraught production that took place during a writers’
strike (with Alex Cox stepping in during shooting to
finesse the script), Hopper purportedly submitted a
3-hour version that was cut to half that length by the
distributor and released as CATCHFIRE prompting
Hopper to redact his name and use the Alan Smithee
moniker. Re-edited and released as the director’s
cut, BACKTRACK is worthy of a cult following for
its absurdity: who other than Dennis Hopper would
insert a Jenny Holzer LED piece in the middle of a
mob boss’s discussion with a hit man? Don’t let the
THE LAST MOVIE
plot holes or the unbelievable storyline keep you from
enjoying this nutso film, with lines that Hopper doles
out like no one else: “Fuckin’ artists” and “You want
to learn a sense of reality, you don’t sit in no fuckin’
Eames chair.”
• Sun, Dec 4 at 4:30 and Thurs, Dec 8 at 6:45.
Roland Klick
WHITE STAR
1983, 92 min, 35mm
Dennis Hopper: “The emotionally most demanding film I’ve ever made, and therefore the most
dangerous one – for me.” BLUE VELVET? In the
words of Frank Booth: Fuck that shit. Dennis Hopper
gives his most terrifying, unhinged performance as
a seedy concert promoter in the virtually unknown,
dystopian synthpunk odyssey, WHITE STAR. Hopper
plays Kenneth Barlow, the sociopathic Colonel Tom
Parker to up-and-coming New Wave artist Moody
Mudinsky (aka White Star)’s Elvis. Ferociously
asserting his credibility – Barlow claims a part in
The Rolling Stones’ success – while getting beat up,
pissed on, and sold out, Barlow orchestrates a series
of increasingly dangerous schemes without Moody’s
knowledge, culminating in a wretched publicity stunt
straight out of a mid-’70s Bowie concept album.
Watching WHITE STAR, one truly fears for Hopper’s
fellow performers, as if he’ll break role, lash out,
and charge through the screen at any moment. The
experience of working with Hopper sent his director
into early retirement and rural seclusion, where he
has remained ever since. What the compromised
filmmaking lacks in Klick’s typically kinetic style, it
makes up for in Hopper’s once-in-the-history-of-themedium performance, which attains a graceful and
terrifying state of Pure Cinema.
Silvio Narizzano
BLOODBATH aka THE SKY IS FALLING
/ LAS FLORES DEL VICIO
Hopper plays a deranged hippie named “Chicken” in
this deeply unhinged, resolutely unclassifiable, and
obscure surrealist whatsit. Shot in the Andalucian village of Mojácar, BLOODBATH (originally LAS FLORES
DEL VICIO, a nod to Baudelaire) features a group of
hedonistic expatriates, including Hopper’s GIANT costar Carroll Baker as a cracked actress and Richard
Todd as a closeted retired British Air Corps captain,
cloistered among a provincial atmosphere of Mediterranean cultic rites and Catholic ritual. It’s difficult
to make heads or tails of the meaning, but Chicken’s
manifold drug abuse – and the many scenes of his
running around after eerily cloaked women whom he
calls “mommy” while sporting glassy pupils the size
of quarters – seems to have something to do with
it. The narrative confusion nevertheless enhances
the singular Almerían gothic vibe, a cross between
Hammer horror, giallo, Buñuel, and Third Cinema that
seems perhaps earnestly intended to evoke a bad
acid trip.
• Sun, Dec 4 at 9:00 and Sun, Dec 11 at 9:00.
• Sun, Dec 4 at 7:00, Fri, Dec 9 at 9:30, and
Sun, Dec 11 at 7:00.
13
UN-CENSORED: THE FILMS OF
LIONEL SOUKAZ
December 2-5 • FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
Lionel Soukaz (b. 1953) is one of the pioneers of French queer cinema. His work, especially in the
first part of his career, reflects a synthesis of the various avant-garde movements he was drawn to
in the 1970s and 80s. Affiliated with the activists and intellectuals of FHAR (the Homosexual Front
for Revolutionary Action) and the magazine Gai Pied, such as Guy Hocquenghem or Copi, he was
also active within the experimental film scene, working to promote Super-8mm filmmaking at the
Festival des Cinémas Différents (Hyères) or Cinémarge (La Rochelle), and ultimately organizing his
own event in 1978: the first Gay and Lesbian film festival in Paris, “Écrans roses et nuits bleues.”
His own films are unlike any others, then or now, displaying an uncompromising commitment to
self-narration and the expression of desire, as well as embodying his unlimited craving for freedom –
as a result of which his work has often faced censorship. Rediscovered in 2004 thanks in large part
to the advocacy of French critic Nicole Brenez, his early film work has been lavishly restored by the
CNC (French National Film Board), with the creation of beautiful new 35mm prints. These programs
represent the North American premiere of the new restorations, and, thanks to the Cultural Services
of the French Embassy, Soukaz will be here in person to present them!
Co-presented by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and by MIX NYC, producer of the NY Queer Experimental Film
Festival, which will be taking place in November (www.mixnyc.org).
Special thanks to Lionel Soukaz, Stéphane Gérard, Stephen Kent Jusick (MIX NYC), Cassie Blake (Academy Film Archive), Kristen
Fitzpatrick (Women Make Movies), Barbara Hammer, Jim Hubbard, and Greta Schiller & Andrea Weiss (Jezebel Productions).
PROGRAM 1:
The heady, exhilarating years of the 1968 movement
in France were followed by a period marked by a
profound tension between the younger generations’
newfound capacity to explore their deepest fantasies, and a very conservative establishment. It was
in this social and political climate that Soukaz made
LE SEXE DES ANGES, which reveals the inner lives of
gay teenagers, jumping from one fantasy to another
using cinematic illusionism and superimpositions,
while remaining ever aware of the revolutionary
power of these desires. Eroticizing authority into a
sexual game, these young men shatter the distorting
mirrors that the psychiatrists raise before them.
Merging politics and pornography, this dreamlike
fantasy declares homosexual desire to be a crucial
element in the coming revolution.
LE SEXE DES ANGES
1976, 45 min, 8mm-to-35mm
With:
LOLO MEGALO BLESSÉ EN SON HONNEUR
1974, 17 min, 8mm
• Fri, Dec 2 at 7:00 and Sat, Dec 3 at 9:15.
PROGRAM 2:
In 1979, Soukaz and the philosopher Guy Hocquenghem directed the four-part documentary feature
RACE D’EP, which was released alongside a book
compiling what they considered to be “a century of
homosexuality in photographs.” The movie explores
one century of oppression and empowerment of
homosexuals through their relationship to representation and images. The section on the 1900s focuses
on Wilhelm von Gloeden, the baron who took pictures
of young Italians. For the 1930s they pay tribute to
the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, whose laboratory for
research into gender was destroyed by the Nazis.
The third part expresses a critique of the capitalistinflected manner in which some western homosexuals themselves respond to gay liberation. And the last
part, set in the present, depicts a conversation, over
the course of one night, between two strangers who
meet in a gay bar. As relevant today as when it was
made, this film was initially censored by the French
Minister of Culture because of its numerous explicit
scenes of gay sex. Thanks to the support of many
intellectuals, the film was finally released, allowing
the first pages of the history of gay and trans people
to begin to be told within the cinema.
RACE D’EP
1979, 95 min, 16mm-to-35mm
• Fri, Dec 2 at 9:00 and Sun, Dec 4 at 6:00.
PROGRAM 3:
IXE
14
Following the censorship of RACE D’EP, Soukaz
rebelled more strongly than ever against any efforts
to exert control over his art, or any aspect of his
life. Cinematically, his immediate response was IXE.
A powerful manifesto proclaiming the freedom to
live, and a direct provocation to the censors, IXE
encompasses depictions of nearly every imaginable
taboo within French society at that time: sodomy,
blasphemy, drug use, bestiality, cross-dressing….
Presented in its original double-screen version, IXE
forms an audiovisual explosion of rage, beautifully
summed up by philosopher René Schérer as “hopeless vitality.”
Thirty years later, French novelist and filmmaker
Virginie Despentes faced the same censorship
regarding her radical feminist road movie BAISEMOI. In response, Soukaz directed the short, LA
LOI X, based on an article he published in the
newspaper Liberation that traced the history of
the French government’s use of the pornography
classification for censorship purposes.
IXE
1980, 46 min, 16mm-to-35mm
With:
LA LOI X, LA NUIT EN PERMANENCE
2001, 10 min, 16mm
• Sat, Dec 3 at 5:00 and Sun, Dec 4 at 8:30.
PROGRAM 4:
MAMAN QUE MAN is a fictionalization of a specific
time in Soukaz’s life, a story of leaving home for a
new life, the struggle between the craving for new
lovers and the love of our parents, intertwined with
the tragedy of life: death, betrayal, despair. Soukaz
frequently asked his friends to appear in his films,
in this case recruiting the playwright Copi. TINO too
is about friendship insofar as it’s Soukaz’s second
collaboration with Guy Hocquenghem, who wrote
the film and performs in it. TINO also features the
American journalist Doug Ireland, who plays a rich
American man visiting Europe with his wife, where
they meet a young Arab man. The story mirrors that
of the emperor Hadrian and his favorite Antinoüs, and
forms a subtle critique of contemporary imperialism.
MAMAN QUE MAN
1982, 49 min, 16mm-to-35mm
&
TINO
1986, 27 min, 16mm-to-35mm
• Sat, Dec 3 at 7:00 and Mon, Dec 5 at 9:15.
PROGRAM 5:
In October 1979, Soukaz visited New York along
with Guy Hocquenghem to present RACE D’EP.
Their visit coincided with the first National March
on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, and
he decided to document it, resulting in his film LA
MARCHE GAIE. Jim Hubbard filmed the demonstration that day as well, and more than ten years later,
he edited together his footage from the marches
in both 1979 and 1987, for the film TWO MARCHES.
And they weren’t the only filmmakers present:
Barbara Hammer was also filming scenes that would
become part of the collective film, GREETINGS FROM
WASHINGTON, D.C., co-directed by Greta Schiller.
This special event will bring together the filmmakers
(including Barbara Hammer, who contributed footage
to GREETINGS) for screenings of all three films, and a
discussion in which they will share their memories of
documenting this historic moment.
Lionel Soukaz LA MARCHE GAIE 1980, 13 min,
16mm-to-35mm
Jim Hubbard TWO MARCHES 1991, 9 min, 16mm
Rob Epstein, Frances Reid, Greta Schiller & Lucy
Winer GREETINGS FROM WASHINGTON, D.C.
1981, 28 min, 16mm-to-digital. Screened courtesy of Women
Make Movies (www.wmm.com).
Lionel Soukaz, Jim Hubbard, Greta
Schiller, and Barbara Hammer in person!
• Mon, Dec 5 at 7:00.
RETROSPECTIVES
PETER HUTTON • DECEMBER 7-12
Avant-garde cinema lost one of its most treasured and irreplaceable artists this year with the passing of
Peter Hutton (1944-2016). A fixture at Bard College, where he taught for more than thirty years, Hutton
began making films in the early 1970s and had continued to create exquisite and carefully crafted
works up until his death. With this extensive retrospective – anchored by a RE-VISIONS screening
of five works newly preserved by Anthology, but also comprising all of the films that are currently in
circulation – Anthology pays heartfelt tribute to him.
Hutton’s luxuriantly austere films evoke 19th century landscape painting, still photography, and the sui
generis cinema of the Lumière brothers to offer an expansively paced, contemplative way of viewing
the world. Hutton’s childhood fascination with the sea led him to enlist in the Merchant Marine at the
age of eighteen, a way for him to travel and see the world. His experiences working on cargo ships
would ultimately have a profound impact on the meditative nature of his films.
Beginning his creative career as a painter and sculptor, Hutton gravitated towards film while studying
at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he completed his first major work, JULY ‘71 IN SAN FRANCISCO, LIVING AT BEACH STREET, WORKING AT CANYON CINEMA, SWIMMING IN THE VALLEY
OF THE MOON (1971). Relocating to NYC, Hutton made NEW YORK NEAR SLEEP FOR SASKIA
(1972), a dreamy exploration of the play of light and shadow on the cityscape that represented his
move towards a slowed down, more reflective style.
This established a pattern in which Hutton’s films reflected the geography of wherever it was his
travels took him. However, it was New York’s Hudson River Valley that would prove the filmmaker’s
most enduring muse. Arriving at Bard in 1984, Hutton began chronicling the landscape of upstate New
York in works that recall the American Luminist paintings of the 1800s. Shot in the Catskill Mountains,
LANDSCAPE (FOR MANON) (1986-87) presents a succession of rapturously lit tableaux punctuated
by segments of black leader. Hutton continued his studies of Hudson Valley landscapes in works like
IN TITAN’S GOBLET (1991), STUDY OF A RIVER (1997), and TIME AND TIDE (1998-2000). Attaining a
beauty that is never simply cosmetic but genuinely radiant, these works, like all his films, are peerless
achievements, exuding – and inspiring – a profound sense of wonder.
“These seemingly simple films offer lessons in the art of seeing and fashioning images that make
you wonder how anyone could produce something simultaneously so humble and so astounding.”
–Tom Gunning
Very special thanks to Carolina Gonzalez Hutton, and to Antonella Bonfanti (Canyon Cinema Foundation) and Samuel La France
(Toronto International Film Festival).
NEW YORK PORTRAIT: CHAPTER 1
PROGRAM 3:
BUDAPEST PORTRAIT (MEMORIES OF A CITY)
1986, 30 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
LODZ SYMPHONY 1993, 20 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
SKAGAFJORDUR 2004, 33 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
• Fri, Dec 9 at 7:00 and Mon, Dec 12 at 7:30.
PROGRAM 4:
IN MARIN COUNTY 1970, 10 min, 16mm
JULY ‘71 IN SAN FRANCISCO, LIVING AT BEACH
STREET, WORKING AT CANYON CINEMA,
SWIMMING IN THE VALLEY OF THE MOON
NEW YORK NEAR SLEEP FOR SASKIA
IMAGES OF ASIAN MUSIC (A DIARY FROM LIFE
1973-74) 1974, 29 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
• Fri, Dec 9 at 9:00 and Sun, Dec 11 at 8:00.
PROGRAM 5:
SCREENING ROOM WITH PETER HUTTON
1977, 79 min, digital
In March of 1977, Hutton appeared on SCREENING
ROOM, the invaluable TV series hosted by filmmaker
Robert Gardner that featured interviews with many
of the key figures in the worlds of experimental film,
documentary, and animation. During this episode,
Hutton screens and discusses excerpts from JULY
‘71 IN SAN FRANCISCO…, IMAGES OF ASIAN
MUSIC, FLORENCE, and NEW YORK NEAR SLEEP
FOR SASKIA.
• Sun, Dec 11 at 6:00.
TIME AND TIDE
PROGRAM 1:
FLORENCE 1975, 7 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
LANDSCAPE (FOR MANON)
IN TITAN’S GOBLET 1991, 10 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
TIME AND TIDE 2000, 35 min, 16mm, silent
LOOKING AT THE SEA 2001, 15 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
• Wed, Dec 7 at 7:30 and Thurs, Dec 8 at 9:00.
PROGRAM 2: RE-VISIONS:
NEW AFA PRESERVATIONS
All films in this program preserved by Anthology Film Archives
with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual
Arts.
BOSTON FIRE 1979, 8 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
STUDY OF A RIVER 1996-97, 16 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
1978-79, 16 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
1980-81, 16 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
15
FLAHERTY NYC PRESENTS:
WILD SOUNDS
In film, the voices of men speak, allied with reason and language. Women’s voices,
meanwhile, tend to only sound, though they do so across a variety of registers: from
music and song, disembodied and relocated voice of technological devices, the learning
and mimicry of social linguistic norms, and the politicized voices that shape constituencies and speak truth to power. As the technical term “wild sound” connotes a sound
recorded independent of the image, the wild sounds organized in this series challenge
social and filmic convention. More than mere speech or sound, the woman’s voice
creates an alternative space where meaning is negotiated and generated anew.
Programmed by Chris Stults & Genevieve Yue.
PROGRAM 1: VOICES FROM BEYOND
Carolyn Lazard, Sara Magenheimer, and
Aura Satz in person.
Technology often “speaks” in the voices of women,
from virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa to the
affectless tones of automated phone services. The
various technological devices in this program, in turn,
reshape what a woman’s voice sounds like, from the
Ruben’s tube that visualizes sound in Aura Satz’s IN
AND OUT OF SYNC, to the hypnotically looped 16mm
optical track in Gunvor Nelson’s MY NAME IS OONA,
and the text-to-speech computer applications in Sara
Magenheimer’s SEVEN SIGNS THAT MEAN SILENCE.
In Martine Syms’s A PILOT FOR A SHOW ABOUT
NOWHERE, Courtney Stephens’s IDA WESTERN EXILE,
and Carolyn Lazard’s GET WELL SOON, the voices of
technology and mass media we encounter alternately
torment, inspire, and indelibly shape the lives of the
filmmakers.
IDA WESTERN EXILE
PROGRAM 3: SINGULAR PLURAL
Candice Breitz in person.
Unique voices multiply and individuals become
communal in this program centered around Candice
Breitz’s captivating split-screen video FACTUM
TREMBLAY. Breitz filmed extensive interviews with a
set of identical twins and dazzlingly edited the footage
together into dual monologues that accentuate and
complicate the differences and similarities between
them. Love, individuality, sibling rivalries, and queerness are among the many topics that the irresistibly
charming Tremblay siblings address. The program
concludes with the inspiring SOMOS +, which follows
a political demonstration by women who rise up with a
unified voice against Pinochet’s police squads.
Candice Breitz
FACTUM TREMBLAY
Aura Satz IN AND OUT OF SYNC 2012, 20 min, 16mm
Martine Syms A PILOT FOR A SHOW ABOUT
NOWHERE 2015, 24 min, digital
Courtney Stephens IDA WESTERN EXILE
Followed by:
Sara Magenheimer SEVEN SIGNS THAT MEAN
SILENCE 2013, 11 min, digital
Carolyn Lazard GET WELL SOON 2015, 13.5 min, digital
Gunvor Nelson MY NAME IS OONA 1969, 13 min, 16mm
PROGRAM 4: WORD PLAY
• Mon, Oct 3 at 7:00.
PROGRAM 2: PARABOLIC WOMAN
Sandra Kogut in person.
Sandra Kogut is a Brazilian filmmaker whose work
reflects the complexities of global migration and
urbanization. Her work straddles many divides, moving
across documentary and fiction forms, exhibiting in
both art and cinema contexts, traveling across rural
and urban contexts, and through intertwined historical
and contemporary conditions. In these migrations,
which are best expressed in the peripatetic HUNGARIAN PASSPORT, her voice from behind the camera
remains constant. As seen in ADIU MONDE: PIERRE
AND CLAIRE’S STORY, this occurs through an inversion of the typical documentary practice, where Kogut
allows herself to be directed by her subjects.
Sandra Kogut
ADIU MONDE: PIERRE AND CLAIRE’S STORY
Sandra Kogut
HUNGARIAN PASSPORT
• Mon, Oct 17 at 7:00.
Kollectiv (Pablo Salas/Pedro Chaskel) SOMOS +
• Mon, Oct 31 at 7:00.
Surprise Guest.
One of the greatest documentarians of his generation,
the Brazilian Eduardo Coutinho was cinema’s consummate interviewer and PLAYING is his underseen,
layered examination of women’s lives, performance,
storytelling, and the line between fiction and
documentary. Women who answered a classified ad
looking for subjects with interesting stories to tell talk
with Coutinho about their (often tragic) life stories. As
the film goes on, things become more slippery as it’s
revealed that many of the women are some of Brazil’s
finest actresses, using the original monologues as
texts to perform. The difference between the authentic
and acted becomes ever more slippery. Wu Tsang
opens the program with SHAPE OF A RIGHT STATEMENT, in which she re-performs a powerful address
by autism rights activist Amanda Baggs.
Eduardo Coutinho
PLAYING / JOGO DE CENA
2007, 105 min, 35mm
Preceded by:
Wu Tsang SHAPE OF A RIGHT STATEMENT
• Mon, Nov 14 at 7:00.
PROGRAM 5: WOMEN’S WORK
Nicolás Pereda in person.
Women’s work is often associated with the home,
in the activities of housekeeping, childrearing, and
the affective work of maintaining families. In this
program, the spaces of women’s work are extended
in a variety of ways: technologically in the use of
YouTube by young women in Elisa Giardina Papa’s
Need Ideas!PLZ!!, clandestinely in the break room
of a Swiss brothel in Louise Carrin’s VENUSIA, and
imaginatively in Nicolás Pereda’s EL PALACIO. These
are spaces of repetition and drudgery, but also of
dreaming and expressivity, and the possibility for a
better life.
Elisa Giardina Papa Need Ideas!PLZ!!
2011, 5.5 min, digital
Louise Carrin VENUSIA 2015, 34 min, digital
Nicolás Pereda EL PALACIO 2013, 36 min, digital
• Mon, Nov 28 at 7:00.
PROGRAM 6: TALK BACK
Cauleen Smith in person.
From cacophony, a clarity? Voices double back or
search for a method of address in this concluding,
contradictory program. In some of Anne Charlotte
Robertson’s overwhelming diary films she records
a second, more distanced, narration on top of (and
sometimes contradicting) the more manic narration
that she recorded at the time of filming. In Cauleen
Smith’s essential film CHRONICLES OF A LYING SPIRIT
the voice of her alter-ego, Kelly Gabron, narrates her
own story, in conflict with the ‘classical’ male narrator
who tries to overtake her voice. The other films in this
program (including the world premiere of a newly
finished “Kelly Gabron” film) play out variations on
attempts to find or read voices, culminating in Cauleen
Smith’s exquisite ENTITLED, where the artist takes up
one-sided, but pointed and playful, correspondences
with Great Dead White Male still life painters, creating
new hypothetical futures.
Anne Charlotte Robertson FIVE YEAR DIARY, REEL
23: A BREAKDOWN AND AFTER THE MENTAL
HOSPITAL 1982, 26 min, video
Anne Charlotte Robertson FIVE YEAR DIARY, REEL 26:
FIRST SEMESTER GRAD SCHOOL 1983, 22 min, video
Cauleen Smith CHRONICLES OF A LYING SPIRIT (BY
KELLY GABRON) 1992, 7 min, digital
Mounira Al-Solh RAWANE’S SONG 2006, 7 min, digital
Lucy Clout THE EXTRA’S EVER-MOVING LIPS
Cauleen Smith SINE AT THE CANYON & SINE AT
THE SEA (BY KELLY GABRON) 2010/2016, 5 min, digital
Cauleen Smith ENTITLED 2008, 7 min, video
16
• Mon, Dec 12 at 7:00.
ONGOING SERIES
NEW YORK WOMEN IN FILM
& TELEVISION PRESENTS:
NYWIFT’s Member Screening Series provides members with the opportunity to
show their work in a theatrical setting. The screenings are always followed by a
Q&A and networking at a nearby bar.
NYWIFT programs, screenings, and events are supported, in part, by grants from the New York City
Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and by the New York State Council on
the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
OCTOBER:
Robin N. Hamilton (Director, Producer, and Writer) and Stefanie
Dworkin (Editor)
THIS LITTLE LIGHT OF MINE: THE LEGACY OF FANNIE LOU
HAMER
When a poor Mississippi sharecropper fights the crushing abuse
of the Jim Crow South, the Civil Rights Movement finds an unlikely
heroine. This film follows one woman’s journey from beaten fieldhand to political powerhouse – and along the way proves every
voice matters.
Suzanne Wasserman (Director/Producer), Deborah Shaffer
(Executive Producer), and Amanda Zinoman (Editor/Co-Writer)
THUNDER IN GUYANA
2003, 50 min, video
Suzanne Wasserman grew up fascinated by her glamorous cousin
Janet. At 23, Janet Rosenberg, born and raised in Chicago, fell
in love with a handsome dental student from a country no one in
her family had even heard of. Together, the political power couple
became known as the founders of modern Guyana, and in 1997,
Janet became the first American-born woman to lead a nation.
Wasserman uses interviews, family photos, and archival footage
to tell the story of her remarkable cousin: a tale of life-long love,
political campaigns, and struggles to bring progressive policies to
an adopted country.
NOVEMBER:
THUNDER IN GUYANA
Lila Yomtoob (Director, Writer, Editor, and Producer)
AMERICA 1979
The Iran Hostage Crisis is in full effect, and even though Regina’s
parents are Iranian, she was raised to be American. When political
tensions create problems for her in school, Regina’s confusion
about her identity causes a crisis at home.
Christine Knowlton (Director/Producer) and Cheree Dillon
(Editor)
SENSE THE WIND
Highlighting ability, not disability, this documentary tells the remarkable story of four individuals who share a unique bond – each is
vision impaired and striving to race in Japan’s 2013 Blind Sailing
World Championship while navigating all the other challenges in
life. Between seasons, one of them gains something more valuable
than a trophy and must learn to live and to sail with new sensibilities.
• Tues, Nov 29 at 7:00.
• Thurs, Oct 13 at 7:00.
17
PART 1: SURVEILLANCE
Yoko Ono & John Lennon
Laura Poitras
1969, 77 min, 16mm
CITIZENFOUR
VOYEURISM,
SURVEILLANCE,
AND IDENTITY
IN THE CINEMA
This summer we inaugurated an ongoing
collaboration with the International Center of
Photography (now located in close proximity to
Anthology, at 250 Bowery) with a film series
inspired by the exhibition, PUBLIC, PRIVATE,
SECRET. The ICP’s debut show in their new
home explores the concept of privacy in
today’s society and studies how contemporary self-identity is tied to public visibility. The
film series expands on this idea by gathering a
selection of films that engage the themes of
voyeurism, surveillance, and privacy, and that
demonstrate the various ways that media is
used to fashion a sense of identity. Combining
narrative films like De Palma’s BODY DOUBLE
and Kieslowski’s A SHORT FILM ABOUT
LOVE with experimental films, documentaries, and video art, the series demonstrates
how central these ideas have been throughout
the history of the cinema.
Launched in July, the series continues with
installments in October, November, and
December, as well as with a very special
event on Thursday, October 13, with
“paparazzo superstar” Ron Galella in person
(see page 36 for more details).
The ICP exhibition, PUBLIC, PRIVATE,
SECRET, curated by Charlotte Cotton, will be
on view until January 8, 2017. For more info,
visit: publicprivatesecret.org, or www.icp.org.
Very special thanks to Pauline Vermare & Marina Chao (ICP),
as well as to Charlie Ahearn; Peggy Ahwesh; Joe Gibbons;
William E. Jones; Amie Siegel; Brian Belovarac & Emily
Woodburne (Janus Films); Daniel Bish (George Eastman
Museum); Kitty Cleary (MoMA); Athena Holbrook (MoMA);
Eric Hynes (Museum of the Moving Image); Mark McElhatten (Sikelia); Paula Naughton (Simon Preston Gallery);
MM Serra (Film-Makers’ Cooperative); Tomek Smolarski
(Polish Cultural Institute New York); Zachary Vanes (Video
Data Bank); and Gerald Weber (Sixpack).
“No amount of familiarity with whistleblower Edward
Snowden and his shocking revelations of the U.S.
government’s wholesale spying on its own citizens
can prepare one for the impact of Laura Poitras’s
extraordinary documentary. Far from reconstructing
or analyzing a fait accompli, the film tersely records
the deed in real time, as Poitras and fellow journalist
Glenn Greenwald meet Snowden over an eight-day
period in a Hong Kong hotel room to plot how and
when they will unleash the bombshell that shook the
world. Adapting the cold language of data encryption
to recount a dramatic saga of abuse of power and
justified paranoia, Poitras brilliantly demonstrates
that information is a weapon that cuts both ways.”
–VARIETY
• Fri, Oct 14 at 6:45 and Sat, Oct 15 at 8:30.
Harun Farocki
PRISON IMAGES
Composed of prison surveillance footage, as well as
clips from fiction films and documentaries, PRISON
IMAGES is a sobering meditation on incarceration, technology, and human nature. In Farocki’s
words: “The cinema has always been attracted to
prisons. Today’s prisons are full of video surveillance
cameras. These images are unedited and monotonous; as neither time nor space is compressed, they
are particularly well-suited to conveying the state
of inactivity into which prisoners are placed as a
punitive measure. The surveillance cameras show
the norm and reckon with deviations from it. Clips
from films by Genet and Bresson. Here the prison
appears as a site of sexual infraction, a site where
human beings must create themselves as people and
as workers.”
• Fri, Oct 14 at 9:15 and Sun, Oct 16 at 5:45.
William E. Jones
TEAROOM
2007, 56 min, 16mm-to-video, silent
TEAROOM consists of footage shot by the police
in the course of a crackdown on public sex in the
American Midwest. In the summer of 1962, the
Mansfield, Ohio, Police Department photographed
men in a restroom under the main square of the city,
filming from a closet through a two-way mirror. Their
footage was used in court as evidence against the
defendants, all of whom were found guilty of sodomy,
which at that time carried a mandatory minimum
sentence of one year in the state penitentiary. The
original footage came into Jones’s possession while
he was researching this case for a documentary
project. The unedited scenes of ordinary men of various races and classes meeting to have sex were so
powerful that the director decided to present it with
a minimum of intervention. TEAROOM is a radical
example of film presented ‘as found’ for the purpose
of circulating historical images that have otherwise
been suppressed.
18
RAPE
RAPE follows “the implacable, continuous, and brutal
harassment of a girl by a male camera crew” (Tate
Modern), played by Eva Majlata, a 21-year-old Hungarian actress who couldn’t speak a word of English.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono held a press conference
after the film premiered at which John commented:
“We are showing how all of us are exposed and
under pressure in our contemporary world. This isn’t
just about The Beatles. What is happening to this
girl on the screen is happening in Biafra, Vietnam,
everywhere.”
PART 2: VOYEURISM
Krzysztof Kieślowski
A SHORT FILM ABOUT LOVE
1988, 86 min, 35mm-to-digital. In Polish with English subtitles.
In this the expanded version of episode six of
Kieślowski’s DEKALOG miniseries, Tomik, a virginal
and introverted young postal worker, spies on his
older, promiscuous neighbor Magda. A witness to
her lovers, Tomik begins to insert himself into her
life, conjuring reasons for her to visit the post office
and taking a second job as a milkman so that he can
deliver bottles to her door; he even creates a bogus
service call to her apartment to interrupt one of her
rendezvous. Deeply obsessed, he eventually reveals
himself to Magda, who is at first taken aback, but
then allows herself to be flattered by the revelation
of her smitten spy, eventually offering herself to him.
As all stories of voyeurism, the film meditates on
isolation and desire, but A SHORT FILM ABOUT LOVE
distinguishes itself by its incongruous romanticism.
• Fri, Nov 25 at 7:15, Sat, Nov 26 at 9:15, and
Sun, Nov 27 at 4:00.
Brian De Palma
BODY DOUBLE
1984, 114 min, 35mm
A Hitchcockian erotic thriller replete with iconic
Los Angeles landmarks, De Palma’s BODY DOUBLE
begins as aspiring actor Jake (Craig Wasson)
loses his latest gig as a vampire in a horror film and
discovers his girlfriend is cheating on him. Downon-his-luck and with no place to stay, he takes a
house-sitting job in the Hollywood Hills that includes
a view, one of a nightly striptease by a beautiful
neighbor. Jake is victim to the scopophilic temptation
and spies on the nightly show with a telescope, but
the more he sees, the more he becomes concerned
that the woman is in great danger. With obvious
hat-tipping to REAR WINDOW, Jake is stuck between
his peeping tom voyeurism and his urge to help this
woman. But BODY DOUBLE takes a seedier turn, and
our protagonist not only becomes more involved in
his amateur investigation, but finds himself drawn
into the world of hardcore pornography.
• Fri, Nov 25 at 9:15 and Sun, Nov 27 at 6:00.
–Continues on page 23–
10
9
YEAR ZERO, PART 1, p 4
p9
9:00 Fulci MASSACRE TIME,
8:15 Peter Gidal PGM 1, p 28
p9
7:00 Fulci A STRANGE TYPE,
PGM 2, p 27
9:15 Fulci THE BEYOND, p 9
p 29
9:00 From Reel to Real PGM 1,
7:00 Peter Gidal PGM 2, p 28
DEAD, p 9
9:15 Fulci ZOMBIE, p 9
PGM 3, p 27
9:00 Shoot Shoot Shoot
CEMETERY, p 9
7:00 Fulci HOUSE BY THE
p 29
6:45 From Reel to Real PGM 2,
6:45 Fulci CITY OF LIVING
5:00 Fulci CONTRABAND, p 8
25
24
23
18
7:30 Fahdel HOMELAND: IRAQ
MAKERS, PGM 4, p 26
7:15 Gerald O’Grady FILM-
9:15 Fulci CONQUEST, p 9
p9
7:00 Fulci MY SISTER IN LAW,
6:00 NEWFILMMAKERS, p 40
26
HAPPENED TO GELITIN, p 37
8:00 Christlieb WHATEVER
19
12
5
WEDNESDAY
7
FRIDAY
p2
8
Clair & Picabia/Man Ray &
Duchamp PGM, p 2
7:30 EC: Léger & Murphy/
5:30 EC: Laurel & Hardy PGM,
1
SATURDAY
9:15 Fulci CONTRABAND, p 8
Sears, p 24
7:30 SHOW & TELL: Kelly
7:00 Fulci WHITE FANG, p 8
27
9:30 Luna ANGUISH, p 30
p9
9:15 Fulci A STRANGE TYPE,
p9
7:15 Fulci MASSACRE TIME,
ARREBATO, p 30
7:00 Zulueta RAPTURE /
28
6:45 Kluge ARTISTS UNDER
21
IMAGES, p 18
9:15 ICP: Farocki PRISON
7:30 Schlemowitz 78RPM, p 4
CITIZENFOUR, p 18
6:45 ICP: Poitras
14
p 18
TORTURE, p 8
9:30 Fulci ZOMBIE, p 9
9:15 Kurosawa PULSE, p 31
DEAD, p 9
7:15 Fulci CITY OF LIVING
7:00 Bava DEMONS 2, p 31
5:00 Fulci CONQUEST, p 9
4:30 Bava DEMONS, p 30
3:00 Fulci CONSPIRACY OF
29
DUCKLING, p 8
9:15 Fulci DON’T TORTURE A
DEEP DISTRESS…, p 10
7:00 Fulci WHITE FANG, p 8
8:45 Kluge IN DANGER AND
CIVILIZATION…, p 10
3:00 Kluge PGM, p 10
5:00 Fulci CONSPIRACY..., p 8
5:30 Kluge EMERGENCE OF
p 10
12:45 Kluge ODDS AND ENDS,
22
CITIZENFOUR, p 18
8:30 ICP: Poitras
6:45 ICP: Ono & Lennon RAPE,
p 18
5:15 ICP: Jones TEAROOM,
3:45 EC: Mekas WALDEN, p 2
15
7:30 Fahdel HOMELAND: IRAQ 7:30 Fahdel HOMELAND: IRAQ
THE BIG TOP: PERPLEXED,
p 10
7:00 Fulci NEW YORK RIPPER,
8:00 Christlieb WHATEVER
p8
HAPPENED TO GELITIN, p 37
9:00 Fulci MANHATTAN BABY,
p8
9:15 Kluge GRAPES OF TRUST,
p 10
PGM 1, p 27
20
CAMERA, p 36
7:30 ICP: Gast SMASH HIS
THUNDER IN GUYANA, p 17
13
MAKERS, PGM 1, p 26
4:00 Fahdel HOMELAND: IRAQ 4:00 Fahdel HOMELAND: IRAQ 4:00 Fahdel HOMELAND: IRAQ
6
THURSDAY
4:00 Fahdel HOMELAND: IRAQ 4:00 Fahdel HOMELAND: IRAQ 7:00 NYWIFT: Wasserman
17
MAKERS, PGM 3, p 26
MAKERS, PGM 2, p 26
11
4
TUESDAY
REMINISCENCES OF A
7:00 FLAHERTY NYC, PGM 2,
JOURNEY TO LITHUANIA, p 2
p 16
5:45 ICP: Farocki PRISON
IMAGES, p 18
7:15 ICP: Jones TEAROOM,
p 18
8:45 ICP: Ono & Lennon RAPE,
p 18
5:30 EC: Mekas
16
PGM, p 2
7:30 EC: George Landow
p 36
6:30 Warhol CHELSEA GIRLS,
p 16
4:15 EC: Christopher Maclaine
PGM, p 2
3
MONDAY
2
SUNDAY
OCTOBER 2016
OCT 31
MONDAY
p 32
MAN, p 32
p 16
28
9:15 Tractora Coop PGM, p 38
ILLINOIS PARABLES, p 5
7:15 & 9:00 Stratman
FILM ABOUT LOVE, p 18
7:00 & 9:00 Lang BADEN
5:00, 7:00 & 9:00 Lang
BADEN, p 5
BADEN BADEN, p 5
6:00 ICP: De Palma BODY
DOUBLE, p 18
8:30 ICP: Amie Siegel & Charlie
Ahearn PGM, p 23
4:00 ICP: Kieslowski SHORT
PGM 2, p 3
3:15 EC: Marie Menken
27
GO BOATING, p 34
8:00 Rivette CELINE & JULIE
Stratman ILLINOIS
PARABLES, p 5
5:30, 7:15 & 9:00
p 38
6:30 Vazquez/Arrieta PGM,
5:00 Pabst PANDORA’S BOX,
p 35
21
COMPASS, p 34
9:00 Cox DEATH AND THE
CORNER, p 34
7:15 Múgica MAN ON PINK
p 16
14
p 31
9:00 Nicolaou TERRORVISION,
IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES,
p5
7:00 & 9:15 Story PRISON
6:45 Leonard LAWNMOWER
7
p9
10:30 Fulci CAT IN THE BRAIN,
CEMETERY, p 9
8:30 Fulci HOUSE BY THE
20
MARIENBAD, p 34
7:30 RE-VISIONS: Peggy
Ahwesh PGM 2, p 7
9:00 Ruiz ON TOP OF THE
WHALE, p 35
6:45 Resnais LAST YEAR AT
p 35
3:45 Pabst PANDORA’S BOX,
13
Story PRISON IN TWELVE
LANDSCAPES, p 5
5:30 Cory Arcangel &
UNFRIENDED, p 31-32
9:00 Cronenberg
VIDEODROME, p 32
4:45, 7:00 & 9:15
PGM 2, p 3
3:15 EC: Georges Méliès
3:00 Cammell DEMON SEED,
6
UNFRIENDED, p 31-32
9:00 Fulci NY RIPPER, p 8
8:00 Cory Arcangel &
DUCKLING, p 8
6:45 Fulci DON’T TORTURE A
p 31
3:15 Hooper POLTERGEIST, p 31 6:30 Fulci THE BEYOND, p 9
4:30 Fulci MY SISTER IN
LAW, p 9
p 16
6:00 Nicolaou TERRORVISION,
OCT 30
SUNDAY
NOVEMBER 2016
p 32
VIDEODROME, p 32
6:45 Cronenberg
2
WEDNESDAY
BADEN, p 5
SENSE THE WIND, p 17
7:00 NYWIFT: Knowlton
29
MARIENBAD, p 34
UNDERWORLD, p 35
7:00 von Sternberg
22
p 24
7:30 SHOW & TELL: Fern Silva,
BADEN, p 5
30
23
HAPPY
THANKSGIVING!
24
CORNER, p 34
9:15 Múgica MAN ON PINK
STRATAGEM, p 34
17
LANDSCAPES, p 5
p5
11
9:45 Bava DEMONS 2, p 31
4
FRIDAY
DOUBLE, p 18
9:15 ICP: De Palma BODY
BADEN, p 5
25
p 35
9:15 de Broca LE CAVALEUR,
COMPASS, p 34
7:00 Cox DEATH AND THE
18
STRATAGEM, p 34
9:15 Bertolucci SPIDER’S
7:30 Story PRISON IN TWELVE 6:30 Santiago INVASION, p 33
10
p 31
9:00 Hooper POLTERGEIST,
Carolee Schneemann, p 37
7:30 MONO NO AWARE X:
3
THURSDAY
7:00 Llinás BALNEARIOS, p 35 6:45 Bertolucci SPIDER’S
16
ORIGINALE: DOUBLETAKES,
p 38
9:15 Torre Nilsson ORIBE’S
CRIME, p 34
9:00 de Broca LE CAVALEUR,
p 35
7:30 Moore STOCKHAUSEN’S
UNDERWORLD, p 35
7:00 von Sternberg
15
p 32
p5
p5
9
9:15 Flynn BRAINSCAN, p 32
BERNHARD – THREE DAYS,
p 37
6:45 Flynn BRAINSCAN, p 32
8
MAN, p 32
Malcolm Le Grice, p 28
7:30 Shoot Shoot Shoot PGM 4: 7:30 Radax THOMAS
1
TUESDAY
MAN, p 32
GO BOATING, p 34
Ahearn PGM, p 23
7:15 ICP: Amie Siegel & Charlie
BADEN BADEN, p 5
5:00, 7:00 & 9:00 Lang
p3
3:15 EC: Marie Menken PGM 1,
26
9:15 Santiago INVASION, p 33
p 33
5:45 Santiago THE OTHERS,
Stratman ILLINOIS
PARABLES, p 5
5:30, 7:15 & 9:00
MARIENBAD, p 34
19
p 33
9:00 Santiago THE OTHERS,
Ahwesh PGM 1, p 7
7:30 RE-VISIONS: Peggy
CRIME, p 34
6:45 Torre Nilsson ORIBE’S
PGM 3, p 3
3:15 EC: Georges Méliès
3:00 Rivette CELINE & JULIE
12
Story PRISON IN TWELVE
LANDSCAPES, p 5
6:45 Hooper POLTERGEIST,
p 31
9:30 Zulueta RAPTURE /
ARREBATO, p 30
4:45, 7:00 & 9:15
3:15 EC: Méliès PGM 1, p 3
5
SATURDAY
PGM, p 3
25
PORTICI, p 6
7:30 Weber DUMB GIRL OF
CONTINUING STORY OF
CAREL AND FERD, p 23
5:45 ICP: Ginsberg
Fendt SHORT STAY, p 6
5:00, 7:00 & 9:15
ALBUM, p 23
3:15 ICP: Berliner FAMILY
18
p 13
9:00 Narizzano BLOODBATH,
8:00 Peter Hutton PGM 4, p 15
7:00 Klick WHITE STAR, p 13
p3
3:30 EC: Pudovkin MOTHER,
11
p 13
9:00 Narizzano BLOODBATH,
8:30 Soukaz IXE, p 14
6:00 Soukaz RACE D’EP, p 14
p 13
4:30 Hopper BACKTRACK,
26
27
HEAD DO AMERICA, p 39
8:00 Judge BEAVIS AND BUTT-
STAY, p 6
7:00 & 9:15 Fendt SHORT
20
Warhol TARZAN AND JANE
REGAINED…SORT OF, p 25
7:30 MEMBERS ONLY:
13
9:15 Hopper LAST MOVIE, p 12
CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2,
p 13
7:00 Hooper TEXAS
6
TUESDAY
28
SHORT STAY, p 6
7:00 & 9:15 Fendt
21
14
7
WEDNESDAY
BADEN, p 5
THURSDAY
p 13
29
FATHER, p 3
9:00 EC: Ozu THERE WAS A
SHORT STAY, p 6
7:00 & 9:15 Fendt
BUT…, p 3
6:45 EC: Ozu I WAS BORN,
22
Gibbons PGM, p 23
9:00 ICP: Andy Warhol & Joe
HEAD DO AMERICA, p 39
AMERICAN DREAMER, p 12
30
BUT…, p 3
9:00 EC: Ozu I WAS BORN,
FATHER, p 3
7:00 EC: Ozu THERE WAS A
23
PORTICI, p 6
STAY, p 6
16
31
24
PORTICI, p 6
7:30 Weber DUMB GIRL OF
Fendt SHORT STAY, p 6
5:00, 7:00 & 9:15
Gibbons PGM, p 23
4:45 ICP: Andy Warhol & Joe
17
Saïto, p 25
9:00 Peter Hutton PGM 4, p 15 8:00 SHOW & TELL: Daïchi
MASSACRE 2, p 13
Hutton, p 7, 15
10
4:30 RE-VISIONS: Peter
7:15 Hooper TEXAS CHAINSAW 7:00 Schiller & Carson
9
MASSACRE 2, p 13
7:15 Hopper OUT OF THE BLUE, 5:00 Soukaz IXE, p 14
p 12
7:00 Soukaz MAMAN QUE
9:00 Soukaz RACE D’EP, p 14
MAN & TINO, p 14
9:15 Soukaz LE SEXE..., p 14
9:30 Lynch BLUE VELVET, p 12 9:30 Hooper TEXAS CHAINSAW
2:45 EC: Nelson PGM, p 3
4:30 Schiller & Carson
ANGES, p 14
7:00 Soukaz LE SEXE DES
SATURDAY
3
FRIDAY
2
8:00 Judge BEAVIS AND BUTT- 7:30 Weber DUMB GIRL OF
FROM THE BASEMENT, p 23
7:00 ICP: Frimmel NOTES
15
9:15 Lynch BLUE VELVET, p 12
Hutton, p 7, 15
7:00 RE-VISIONS: Peter
6:45 Hopper BACKTRACK,
8
1
ANTHOLOGY WILL BE CLOSED FROM DECEMBER 24-JANUARY 1 – HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
FROM THE BASEMENT, p 23
9:00 ICP: Frimmel NOTES
STAY, p 6
ALBUM, p 23
6:45 ICP: Berliner FAMILY
19
p 16
12
MAN & TINO, p 14
9:15 Soukaz MAMAN QUE
9:00 Schiller & Carson
Washington PGM, p 14
7:00 SOUKAZ: March on
5
6:30 Lynch BLUE VELVET, p 12
4
MONDAY
3:45 EC: Sidney Peterson
SUNDAY
DECEMBER 2016
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SERIES:
VOYEURISM, SURVEILLANCE, IDENTITY
interweaves footage from over 25 years of filmmaking
activity into an expertly realized, truly unforgettable
piece that is undoubtedly one of Gibbons’s most
significant achievements.
Alan Berliner
THE FAMILY ALBUM
1986, 60 min, 16mm
THE SLEEPERS
Amie Siegel
THE SLEEPERS
1999, 45 min, 16mm
Shot exclusively at night in her hometown of Chicago,
artist Amie Siegel’s THE SLEEPERS gazes at neighboring apartment buildings as apparent strangers carry
on their lives. The film welcomes the audience, its
spectators, into its voyeuristic intrigue only to complicate the complicity – is this spying, or staged fiction?
“The architecture of city windows at night, lives
glimpsed at a distance – a man talks on the phone
as his wife reads the paper, another watches TV, a
woman stares out into the dark. Are these scenes
set-up? Are the people actors? Do they know they
are being watched? These narrative fragments elicit
tensions between public and private, performance
and reality, lyrical and vernacular. The images and
soundtrack (police surveillance, cell phone conversations, dramatic ‘film-score’ music, occasional synch
dialogue) further blur the boundary between fiction
and documentary, reformulating expectations of
duration, privacy and narrative.” –A.S.
&
Charlie Ahearn
DOIN’ TIME IN TIMES SQUARE
1991, 39 min, video
DOIN’ TIME is a home movie capturing the old capital
of sleaze in all its pathetic glory. During the production
of WILD STYLE in 1980, Ahearn moved with his wife
Jane Dickson to a corner loft with views of 8th Ave
and 43rd St. Awakened nightly by howling from the
street, he was ready with his video camera to shoot
the transvestites, peep show patrons, and drug deals.
Home movies of his son Joe’s birthday parties and
the arrival of his daughter Eve clash with street fights
down below.
“I wanted to keep the home-video format and not try
to make a documentary or an art film or anything. I
wanted to let people see what I saw. In ten years,
the world that I’m showing in this tape will be gone.”
–Charlie Ahearn, 1991
• Sat, Nov 26 at 7:15 and Sun, Nov 27 at 8:30.
PART 3: EXHIBITIONISM /
SELF-FASHIONING / PRIVACY
Rainer Frimmel
NOTES FROM THE BASEMENT /
AUFZEICHNUNGEN AUS DEM TIEFPARTERRE
1993-2000, 90 min, video. In German with English subtitles.
A radical look into the mind of the ‘man on the street.’
Peter Haindl, a hospital orderly in Vienna, shot these
home movies from 1993 to 1999. They were then given
to Frimmel, who created this 90-minute compilation.
“While striking various poses around his apartment,
[Haindl] addresses an imaginary public, his speeches
ranging from defiant to contrite. Each one shows a
different side of his personality, from political grumbler
to poet in a slouch hat. His monologues deal with
the usual prejudices, such as those against women
and foreigners, and none of them can be reduced to
a single coherent point of view. Commonplaces are
qualified with contradictions and self-irony, and his
tirades occasionally swerve in the direction of serious
analysis. The state of pandemonium which characterizes the Austrian soul is depicted as a labyrinth of
rhetoric.” –Dominik Kamalzadeh
• Thurs, Dec 15 at 7:00 and
Mon, Dec 19 at 9:00.
Andy Warhol
PAUL SWAN
1965, 66 min, 16mm
PAUL SWAN is Warhol’s documentary portrait of the
early 20th century American dancer who pioneered
‘aesthetic,’ interpretive forms of modern dance. The
elderly Swan recreates past dance performances,
reciting poetry for the camera, frequently changing
costumes, and leaving the stage empty for long
periods while he hunts for a lost shoe.
&
Joe Gibbons
CONFESSIONS OF A SOCIOPATH
2001, 40 min, video
With a nod to Samuel Beckett’s KRAPP’S LAST TAPE,
Gibbons lets the cat out of the bag with a critical
self-diagnosis that is as characteristically funny as it
is worrisome. Included in the year’s best list by both
FILM COMMENT and ARTFORUM, this magnum opus
Using home movie footage from 60 different families,
this film creates a complex portrait of family life,
traditions, rituals, and the evolution from childhood to adulthood as seen through the amateur
photographer’s eye and crafted over several years by
Berliner. A distinct but related variant of voyeurism
or surveillance, this master narrative of American
life told through found footage as well as recorded
oral histories and sampled found sound, is at once
universal and deeply personal. Working on an intimate
scale to craft a common story, this is a captivating and
uncanny portrait of American life.
With:
Alan Sondheim DIRTY FILM 1990, 12 min, 16mm
“[A] film created from a number of found, undeveloped
home movies; additional material concerned directly
with sexuality and pornography was added. The
whole, fading, becomes simultaneously text and
subtext.” –A.S.
&
Ron Finne PEOPLE NEAR HERE 1969, 12 min, 16mm
In this film, Americans – across stages of life, across
decades, and in ordinary places – reveal silly, happy,
intense and sad things about themselves, mostly with
exuberance and dignity. The film is arranged without
internal editing of the found sequences.
• Sun, Dec 18 at 3:15 and Mon, Dec 19 at 6:45.
Arthur Ginsberg
THE CONTINUING STORY OF CAREL
AND FERD
1972, 59 min, video, b&w
A fascinating proto-reality-TV program made by Arthur
Ginsberg and Video Free America, CAREL AND FERD
is a story of exhibitionism told by a probing camera
that captures the (performative) daily lives of its
participants.
“This ‘underground video soap opera’ – presented in
an astonishing eight-television-screen, closed-circuit,
live-performance format – begins where commercial
TV lets off. A ‘video-vérité’ study of a sometime
homosexual junky and his girl (both former porno filmmakers), it is accurately billed as a ‘video-tape novel
about pornography, sexual identities, and the effect
of living too close to an electronic medium.’” –Amos
Vogel, FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART
With:
Miranda July THE AMATEURIST 1998, 14 min, video
A captivating video about surveillance, identity,
watching, and being watched, THE AMATEURIST
slides along the edges of horror and satire to create
an unsettling portrait of a woman on the brink of a
technologically driven madness.
• Sun, Dec 18 at 5:45.
23
SHOW&TELL
Each of our quarterly calendars contains
hundreds of films and videos all grouped into
a number of series or categories. Along with
preservation screenings, theatrical premieres,
thematic series, and retrospectives, we’re
equally dedicated to presenting work by individuals operating at the vanguard of non-commercial cinema. Each month we showcase at least
one such program, focusing on moving-image
artists who are emerging, at their peak, or longestablished but still prolific. These programs
are collected under the rubric SHOW & TELL,
to emphasize the presence of the filmmakers
at each and every program.
This calendar brings visits from experimental
animator Kelly Sears; 16mm filmmaker Fern
Silva, whose work combines documentary,
ethnographic, and structuralist approaches;
and Daïchi Saïto, filmmaker and co-founder of
Montreal’s Double Negative collective.
PATTERN FOR SURVIVAL
OCTOBER
NOVEMBER
Kelly Sears is an experimental animator who cuts
up and collages imagery from American culture and
politics to intervene with the history embedded in the
frame. A teacher of animation and film production at
the University of Colorado, Boulder, Sears works with
appropriated images ranging from thrift store castoffs to archival material, using animation to rebuild
American histories that shift between the official and
the uncanny while exploring contemporary narratives
of power, such as manifest destiny, occupation, and
surveillance.
Working primarily in 16mm, Fern Silva has created a
rich and ever-surprising body of films that incorporate elements of narrative, ethnographic, and documentary filmmaking as the starting point for structural
experimentation. But the beauty of his work is in its
consistent ability to channel what is valuable about
each of these various approaches while artfully and
slyly eluding the limitations of these or any other
codified categories. His films operate according to
a logic entirely their own, one that is never literal or
schematic but always liberatingly intuitive.
KELLY SEARS
This hour-long program contains films that address
failure or rupture – of technology, of progress, and
of history. Made from an eclectic trove of source
material – first-aid handbooks, chronicles of space
exploration, presidential and military newsreels,
35mm photography manuals, aerobic and yoga
guides, archival films, high school yearbooks, and
disaster survival guidebooks – these ten animated
shorts reveal bits of history that are recognizable but
unsteady, familiar but unhinged, feverish but poetic.
“Witty, savvy, ironic, poetic, exhilarating, even
cosmic – and lovely to look at to boot – Sears’s works
afford the viewer a sort of wormhole into a parallel
universe…made entirely of things we nonetheless
recognize. This is the uncanny principle that Sears
so unerringly parlays, rendering collage-animation
singularities out of institutional media. Something is
wrong with these pictures, things are not what they
seem, appearances are mere cover-ups for the real
power plays behind the panels.” –Craig Baldwin
A TONE HALFWAY BETWEEN LIGHTNESS AND
DARKNESS 2015, 7.5 min, digital
THE DRIFT 2007, 8.5 min, digital
COVER ME, ALPHA 2011, 2.5 min, digital
VOICE ON THE LINE 2009, 7 min, digital
TROPICAL DEPRESSION 2012, 3 min, digital
THE RANCHER 2012, 7 min, digital
IN THE VICINITY 2016, 9.5 min, digital
THE BODY BESIEGED 2009, 4.5 min, digital
ONCE IT STARTED IT COULD NOT END OTHERWISE
2011, 7.5, digital
PATTERN FOR SURVIVAL 2015, 7 min, digital
24
FERN SILVA
What truly distinguishes his work is his ability to
restore to moving images (and sounds) their unique
and inherent power to stimulate both eyes and
mind, a power that is so often subordinated to the
functional demands of story-telling, theorizing,
or documentation. Each of Silva’s films combines
seemingly disparate imagery – focusing on human or
natural phenomena, and predominantly culled from
trips to various corners of the globe (from Chicago,
the Florida Everglades, and the Southwest, to Brazil,
Egypt, Turkey, and elsewhere) – into audio-visual
compositions that are at once meditative and
disorienting, subtle and spectacular, with the nonsynchronous, carefully crafted soundtracks playing
against the imagery in fascinating ways. In his hands,
the relationship between each shot and the next
conjures impressions and ideas that conventional
filmmaking could never attain to. But each shot also
retains an irreducible power, wielding an impact that
is increasingly rare in a media-saturated world.
SCALES IN THE SPECTRUM OF SPACE
IN THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT, DARKNESS PREVAILS
2010, 13.5 min, 16mm-to-digital
PASSAGE UPON THE PLUME 2011, 7 min, 16mm
CONCRETE PARLAY 2012, 18.5 min, 16mm
TENDER FEET 2013, 10 min, 16mm
WAYWARD FRONDS 2014, 13.5 min, 16mm
• Wed, Nov 30 at 7:30.
SHOW & TELL
DECEMBER:
DAÏCHI SAÏTO
Before turning to experimental cinema, filmmaker Daïchi Saïto
was a student of literature and philosophy in the U.S. and of
Hindi and Sanskrit in India, and the influence of these interests
can be detected throughout his transfixing body of film work.
Saïto’s proclivity for constructing his films out of single frames or
clusters of fleeting images, punctuated by black leader, creates
an alternation between vision and darkness (and often between
sound and silence as well) that suggests both poetic meter and a
philosophical contemplation of diametric opposites. And his most
recent films, which have found him joining forces with the musicians Malcolm Goldstein and Jason Sharp to create extraordinary
inter-layerings of sound and image, achieve a trance-like quality
reminiscent of certain forms of Indian music. These collaborations
with Goldstein and Sharp in particular are true tours-de-force
whose uncannily pulsating rhythms affect the body as much as
the eye or ear, and variously suggest the organic mechanisms of
breathing, blinking, or the beating of the heart.
Originally from Japan, but resident in Montreal for more than a
decade, Saïto has become a force to be reckoned with since
turning to avant-garde cinema, not only as a filmmaker but also
as a curator, a teacher, an author (his first book, “Moving the
Sleeping Images of Things Towards the Light,” was published in
2013), and as the co-founder of Montreal artist collective Double
Negative, through which he has helped to trigger a renewed interest in celluloid in the city’s filmmaking community. Saïto himself
is deeply committed to working on film, and this not-to-be-missed
program will include work in Super-8mm, 16mm (both single and
dual projection), and 35mm.
“Whether in the cinema or the gallery, his every work seems to
aspire toward a singular plane of expression wherein the unstable
material reality of the celluloid image (Saïto works variously in
8mm, 16mm, and 35mm, but always on film) meets Saïto’s intricate
conceptual designs, which often advance along musical-mathematical coordinates.” –Jordan Cronk, CINEMA SCOPE
BLIND ALLEY AUGURY 2006, 3 min, Super-8mm, silent
GREEN FUSE 2008, 3 min, Super-8mm, silent
CHIASMUS 2003, 8 min, 16mm, b&w
CHASMIC DANCE 2004, 6 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
ALL THAT RISES
2007, 7 min, 16mm. Sound: Malcolm Goldstein.
TREES OF SYNTAX, LEAVES OF AXIS
AFA MEMBERS ONLY – FREE SCREENING!
TARZAN AND JANE
REGAINED…SORT OF
Once every calendar we offer a special, AFA Members Only screening, featuring sneak-previews
of upcoming features, programs of rare materials from Anthology’s collections, in-person
filmmaker presentations, and more! The benefits of an Anthology membership have always been
plentiful: free admission to over 100 Essential Cinema programs, reduced admission to all other
shows, discounted AFA publications. But with these screenings – free and open only to members
– we sweeten the pot even further.
For this quarter’s Members Only event, we follow up our Dennis Hopper series (see page 12) with
a screening of Andy Warhol’s TARZAN AND JANE REGAINED…SORT OF, which finds Hopper
sharing screen time with Taylor Mead!
Andy Warhol
TARZAN AND JANE REGAINED…SORT OF
1963, 80 min, 16mm
“Andy Warhol goes Hollywood…sort of. Warhol made his first sound film during a sojourn in Los
Angeles in 1963. Along with leading players Taylor Mead and Naomi Levine, plus Dennis Hopper
and a cavalcade of art stars including Claes and Pat Oldenburg and Wallace Berman (and his
son Tosh), Warhol spent two weeks exploring the city, shooting (in black-and-white and color)
everywhere from Berman’s studio to the Beverly Hills Hotel to an unglamorous stretch of freeway.
Jane swims naked in John Houseman’s pool, Tarzan hunts for coconuts in the local palms, and the
Watts Towers become an unlikely backdrop for an Edenic idyll.” –Juliet Clark
• Tues, Dec 13 at 7:30. Reception at 7:00!
2009, 10 min, 35mm. Sound: Malcolm Goldstein.
NEVER A FOOT TOO FAR, EVEN 2012, 14 min, 16mm dual projection.
Sound: Malcolm Goldstein.
ENGRAM OF RETURNING
2015, 19 min, 35mm. Sound: Jason Sharp.
• Sat, Dec 10 at 8:00.
SCALES IN THE SPECTRUM OF SPACE
ENGRAM OF RETURNING
25
SERIES
GERALD
O’GRADY’S
‘FILM-MAKERS’
“Developed and directed by Gerald O’Grady – scholar
and founder of the legendary Center for Media Study
at SUNY Buffalo in the early 1970s – the series,
FILM-MAKERS, was broadcast on American public
television channels from 1976-77 and geared to the
independent and experimental film world. It helped
to promote marginal artistic practices that were
generally misunderstood by the public at large.
O’Grady would talk with his guests, filmmakers and
artists such as Stan Vanderbeek, Peter Kubelka, Paul
Sharits, Robert Breer, and Jonas Mekas. [Today]
FILM-MAKERS constitutes invaluable archival material for the history of independent and experimental
cinema.” –CINÉMA DU RÉEL
“In 1975, the regional media center, Media Study/
Buffalo, which I had founded in 1973, entered into a
cooperative project with our local public broadcasting station, WNED-Channel 17, to produce thirteen
30-minute segments of a program called FILMMAKERS. At that time, no public television station
was screening the films of what had become known
as underground, experimental, art, independent, or
personal cinema. The attempt was to explain to the
widest possible audience how these new media
worked. Channel 17 provided its audio equipment and
cameras, the three cameramen, the Producer, the
Director, and a Sound Recordist. The programs were
unrehearsed and the filmmakers received $300 each
for the rights to show their work. Within the next
three years, the series was aired by more than 100
other public television stations in the U.S. Despite the
relatively low ratings, these broadcasts reached an
audience more than 100 times larger than that for all
previous screenings of these works in regional centers, classrooms, museums, etc.” –Gerald O’Grady
Special thanks to Gerald O’Grady, and to Dr. Dorcas Müller
(ZKM, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe).
Gerald O’Grady will be here in person to
present each program!
PROGRAM 1: JONAS MEKAS / STAN
BRAKHAGE / PETER KUBELKA
PROGRAM 2: ROBERT BREER / HILARY
HARRIS / PAUL SHARITS
• Mon, Oct 10 at 6:45.
PROGRAM 3: STAN VANDERBEEK /
ED EMSHWILLER / GUNVOR NELSON
• Mon, Oct 10 at 9:00.
PROGRAM 4: RICHARD LEACOCK /
D.A. PENNEBAKER / JAMES BLUE /
DAVID HANCOCK
• Tues, Oct 11 at 7:15.
26
THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY
SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT: THE LONDON FILM-MAKERS’ CO-OP
The London Film-Makers’ Co-operative was founded 50 years ago in October 1966. Inspired by the
example set by Jonas Mekas and his colleagues in New York, the LFMC grew from its beginnings as
a film-viewing group for London’s intellectual counterculture to become one of the major centers of a
worldwide network of avant-garde film culture. In contrast to similar organizations, the LFMC’s activity
was not limited to distribution – within a few years it was also running a regular program in its own
cinema and, most notably, democratized the means of production by establishing a film workshop in
which filmmakers could control every stage of the creative process.
The work made in this supportive environment was diverse, though two tendencies came to dominate: structural/materialism and expanded cinema. The materialist qualifier that distinguished British
work from American structural film refers both to Marxist philosophy and the physical presence of the
medium that was foregrounded in the LFMC’s films. European expanded cinema largely eschewed
the associations of psychedelia and expanded consciousness as formulated in Gene Youngblood’s
1970 book, EXPANDED CINEMA, and instead extended the formal exploration of film to the moment
of its presentation. The term was used to describe a range of work including multi-screen films, live
performances, and continuous installations that made innovative use of the mechanics of projection.
Filmmakers associated with the LFMC during its early years include Stephen Dwoskin, Malcolm Le
Grice, Peter Gidal, Annabel Nicolson, Sally Potter, Anthony McCall, Lis Rhodes, Guy Sherwin, and John
Smith. The organization survived in run-down premises, with little or no public funding, for more than
thirty years until its forced dissolution and merger with London Electronic Arts. Since 2002, LUX has
distributed the former LFMC collection and promoted its legacy alongside the work of contemporary
film and video artists.
Curated by Mark Webber, “Shoot Shoot Shoot: The London Film-Makers’ Co-op” is presented by Anthology Film Archives in association with LUX, London.
SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT: THE FIRST DECADE OF THE LONDON FILM-MAKERS’ CO-OPERATIVE 1966-76, edited by
Mark Webber, will be published by LUX in October 2016. The book gathers together texts, images, and archival
documents, and is illustrated throughout in full color.
SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT, PROGRAM 1
It was the film workshop that set the structure of
the LFMC apart from other film co-ops. The facility
housed a continuous processor and step printer that
enabled filmmakers to work directly with the medium,
without the need or expense of commercial laboratories, and provided a set of technical parameters
that enabled a school of filmmaking to develop. This
program spotlights works that were, more or less,
produced within that environment, from the more
playful films of Annabel Nicolson and Marilyn Halford, to one of Malcolm Le Grice’s early loop-based
found footage meditations on the military/industrial
complex. Mike Leggett’s seminal process-piece
SHEPHERD’S BUSH, a measured passage from darkness to light, was conceived as a test for the Co-op’s
step printer but is nonetheless a cathartic experience
for the viewer. Chris Garratt’s VERSAILLES I & II and
Lis Rhodes’s dynamic DRESDEN DYNAMO explore
the possibilities of using visual imagery to create optical sound on 16mm film.
This second glimpse at the first decade of the
London Film-Makers’ Co-op anticipates some of the
new directions that followed in later years. SHORT
FILM SERIES is an open-ended set of observational
pieces by Guy Sherwin, each the length of a 16mm
film roll. Mike Dunford’s STILL LIFE WITH PEAR
wittily deconstructs the act of filming, while John
Smith constructs a word game of visual puns in
ASSOCIATIONS. Finally, two double 16mm projection
serve as examples of British expanded cinema: Gill
Eatherley’s understated feminist ‘room film,’ and
Annabel Nicolson FRAMES 1973, 8 min, 16mm, silent
Marilyn Halford FOOTSTEPS 1975, 7 min, 16mm, b&w
Mike Leggett SHEPHERD’S BUSH
RIVER YAR
RIVER YAR, William Raban and Chris Welsby’s
majestic time-lapse study of a tidal river estuary.
Guy Sherwin SHORT FILM SERIES: VERMEER
FRAMES/CHIMNEY/PORTRAIT WITH PARENTS/
METRONOME 1974-78, 14 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
Mike Dunford STILL LIFE WITH PEAR 1973, 14 min,
16mm-to-digital, b&w
John Smith ASSOCIATIONS 1975, 7 min, 16mm
Gill Eatherley PAN FILM 1972, 8 min, 16mm doubleprojection, b&w, silent
Chris Welsby & William Raban RIVER YAR
1972, 35 min, 16mm double-projection
• Sun, Oct 23 at 6:00.
In the early 1970s, Malcolm Le Grice, Gil Eatherley,
William Raban, and Annabel Nicolson frequently
collaborated on expanded cinema shows under the
collective name Filmaktion. In AFTER MANET, all four
appear as filmmaker/performers, sharing in a picnic
while each operating a 16mm camera according to
a set of instructions determined by Le Grice. The
resulting images offer different viewpoints on the
same event and were shot in permutations of color,
black and white, positive, and negative. Originally
projected as a four-screen simultaneous projection,
AFTER MANET is now presented as an HD digital
composite. William Raban’s rarely seen film BREATH
is also a performance within a pastoral landscape.
Here, three cameras (operated by Raban, Eatherley,
and Le Grice) converge on a tape recorder, each shot
lasting the duration of a single breath.
William Raban BREATH 1974, 16 min, 16mm-to-digital
Malcolm Le Grice AFTER MANET, AFTER
GIORGIONE – LE DÉJEUNER SUR L’HERBE OR FÊTE
CHAMPÊTRE 1974, 53 min, 16mm-to-digital
1971, 15 min, 16mm, b&w
David Crosswaite FILM NO. 1 1971, 10 min, 16mm
Lis Rhodes DRESDEN DYNAMO 1971-72, 4 min, 16mm
Chris Garratt VERSAILLES I & II
• Tues, Oct 25 at 9:00.
1976, 11 min, 16mm, b&w
Malcolm Le Grice REIGN OF THE VAMPIRE
1970, 16 min, 16mm, b&w
–continued on page 28–
FILM NO. 1
27
SERIES: SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT
SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT, PROGRAM 4:
MALCOLM LE GRICE: NEW BFI
RESTORATIONS
Le Grice instigated the LFMC’s move towards
production, building up the workshop and sketching
the blueprint for the organization’s structure and
constitution in 1968. By that time, he had already
constructed the rudimentary printer and developer
with which he made his early work. An artist with a
passion for technological developments, he was an
early adoptee of computer animation, new media,
and multi-channel work, and is now working in digital
3D. His first 16mm film, CASTLE 1, is a Cage-ian
found-footage assemblage that requires a flashing
photoflood light-bulb to be hung in front of the screen.
LITTLE DOG FOR ROGER, a companion piece to
George Landow’s FILM IN WHICH THERE APPEAR… ASSUMPTION
and Wilhelm and Birgit Hein’s ROHFILM, embodies
PETER GIDAL: FLARE OUT
the materialist aspects of structural film. BERLIN
For five decades, Peter Gidal has sought to probHORSE (music by Brian Eno) and THRESHOLD exhibit
lematize the film-viewing process by creating works
Le Grice’s skills as a colorist, and AFTER LUMIÈRE
that resist recognition and identification. His practice
refashions early cinema to examine the construction
posits film as a durational experience and negates
of meaning. These five new restorations from the BFI
analysis on psychological grounds. These two
are being shown together for the first time on film.
programs survey his radical approach, ranging from
Le Grice will be here in person to present
the seminal early works HALL and CLOUDS (1969) to
the program, and will also be appearing
the recent CODA I, CODA II and ‘not far at all’ (2013).
on Monday, October 31 at Microscope
Gidal has lived in the UK since the late 1960s and
Gallery in Brooklyn; for more info visit
was a central figure during the formative years of
www.microscopegallery.com.
the London Film-Makers’ Co-op. He is a noted writer
and polemicist, whose “Theory and Definition of
Malcolm Le Grice CASTLE 1 1966, 22 min, 35mm, b&w
Structural/Materialist Film” is a key text of avantMalcolm Le Grice LITTLE DOG FOR ROGER
garde cinema.
1967, 12 min, 35mm, b&w
Malcolm Le Grice BERLIN HORSE 1970, 9 min, 35mm
Malcolm Le Grice THRESHOLD 1972, 13 min, 16mm
Malcolm Le Grice AFTER LUMIÈRE – L’ARROSEUR
ARROSÉ 1974, 12 min, 35mm, b&w
• Tues, Nov 1 at 7:30.
Upon the recent publication of a collection of Gidal’s
essays, Jonathan Rosenbaum commented, “The
singular way that Peter Gidal wrestles with language
is a continual lesson in philosophy, aesthetics, ideology, and politics. FLARE OUT: AESTHETICS 1966-2016
charts his ongoing struggles with wit, lucidity, and
genuine brio.”
Curated by Mark Webber, “Peter Gidal: Flare Out” is presented
by Anthology Film Archives in association with LUX, London.
FLARE OUT: AESTHETICS 1966-2016,
edited by Mark Webber and Peter Gidal,
is published by The Visible Press (www.
thevisiblepress.com). In addition to many
texts relating to film, it also includes
essays on the work of Samuel Beckett,
Thérèse Oulton, Gerhard Richter, and
Andy Warhol.
PETER GIDAL: FLARE OUT,
PROGRAM 1
28
AFTER LUMIÈRE
The early film HALL presents a fixed view across a
space of indeterminate depth that is continually disrupted by jump cuts and repeats. Despite the incessant ringing of (what may be) a doorbell, it is one of
Gidal’s more accessible works. By the mid-1970s,
the profilmic event had been entirely thrown into
question. Variations in camera movement, lighting,
exposure, focus, zooms, shot duration, repetition, and
filming from photographs (rather than ‘reality’) were
established as methods through which identification
of/with an image could be negated. In CONDITION
OF ILLUSION the image remains unstable until the
final section, a scrolling text with extended quotes
from Althusser and Beckett. Other works do not
contain similarly readable content:
FLARE OUT is “out of time in time;
not not knowing the unknown but not
knowing the known, no trace of ‘no
trace of any thing’,” while the CODAS
(commissioned by Frieze, snatches of
Burroughs on the soundtrack), are “a
complex of barely visible cuts in space
and time, the opposite of erasure, but
nothing so much as visible.”
Peter Gidal HALL 1969, 10 min, 16mm
Peter Gidal CONDITION OF ILLUSION
1975, 30 min, 16mm, silent
Peter Gidal FLARE OUT
1992, 20 min, 16mm
Peter Gidal CODA I 2013, 2 min, 16mm
Peter Gidal CODA II 2013, 2 min, 16mm
• Sun, Oct 23 at 8:15.
PETER GIDAL: FLARE OUT,
PROGRAM 2
CLOUDS was the first real manifestation of Gidal’s
anti-illusionist project, a film in which “There is
virtually nothing on screen, in the sense of in screen.
Obsessive repetition as materialist practice not
psychoanalytical indulgence.” ASSUMPTION is,
by stark contrast, exhilarating viewing. One of the
densest minutes of all cinema, the screen bristles
with recognizable images, fleeting texts, and
snatches of dialogue in tribute to filmmaker/activist
Mary Pat Leece. SILENT PARTNER and EPILOGUE
return to the more familiar territory of domestic
interiors, inhabited spaces interrogated by a restless
camera. Anti-narrative, against representation,
militant and uncompromising, yet despite themselves,
strangely compelling. After a hiatus from filmmaking,
Gidal returned in 2013 with ‘not far at all’: “tempted
to say different yet the same, but not.” The film
was awarded the L’age d’or Prize at the Brussels
Cinematek in 2015.
Peter Gidal ASSUMPTION 1997, 1 min, 16mm
Peter Gidal CLOUDS 1969, 10 min, 16mm
Peter Gidal SILENT PARTNER 1977, 35 min, 16mm
Peter Gidal EPILOGUE 1978, 7 min, 16mm, silent
Peter Gidal not far at all 2013, 15 min, 16mm
• Mon, Oct 24 at 7:00.
FROM REEL TO REAL: WOMEN,
FEMINISM, AND THE LONDON FILMMAKERS’ CO-OPERATIVE
The London Film-Makers’ Co-operative is commonly
associated with the 1970s and with a self-reflexive
mode of filmmaking characterized by hands-on
exploration of the structural and material properties
of film. The two following programs seek to expand
this vision by showcasing the little-know work and
contributions of the women filmmakers of the LFMC
from the 1970s to the mid-1990s. While these filmmakers built on the methods, processes, and ethos
associated with the LFMC, they always did so to
address the world outside of the projection room – to
express something of their subjectivity and respond
to pressing social and political issues around them.
Through an engagement with the formal, material,
and affective qualities of film, they hoped to give
voice to submerged aspects of women’s experience
and to emancipate the image, the feminine subject,
and the body from the colonizing forces of patriarchal
culture. These two programs are part of a larger
series which was presented in its entirety at Tate
Modern and Tate Britain in September this year.
Curated by Maud Jacquin, “From Reel to Real” is presented by
Anthology Film Archives in association with LUX, London.
FROM REEL TO REAL: COLLAPSING
THE FRAME
The filmmakers in this program experiment with film
structure in an attempt to collapse the frame within
which women are confined, both cinematic and
cultural. Their films evoke feelings of entrapment and
oppression at the same time as they enact a radical
attack on patriarchal authority as embedded in
social, linguistic, and filmic conventions. In particular,
they attempt to break out of women’s “misrepresentations” by expressing something in excess of
representation, both through an engagement with
the rhythms and textures of images and sounds and
through opening up gaps and interstitial spaces in the
film texts.
FROM REEL TO REAL: FILMIC BODIES
This program features works in which the exploration of the materiality of film – its physical presence
as both an object and an apparatus – relates to an
investigation of the body. Not only do the filmmakers
reinscribe the messiness and transience of the
body’s materiality as a way to relate themselves to
their medium and challenge the primacy of vision in
cinema; they also conceive of the film itself as a body,
one that is exposed in its fragility and subjected to the
same intrusive interventions as the female body in
patriarchal culture.
Gill Eatherley LENS HAND SCREEN (part of LIGHT
OCCUPATIONS series) 1973-74, 3 min, 16mm doubleprojection, b&w, silent
Gill Eatherley LENS HAND FOOT (part of LIGHT
Gill Eatherley, HAND AND SEA FILM (part of LIGHT
Jeanette Iljon FOCII 1974, 6 min, 16mm
Annabel Nicolson SLIDES 1976, 16 min, 16mm, silent
Sandra Lahire EDGE 1986, 8 min, 16mm-to-digital
Vicky Smith RASH 1997, 7 min, 16mm
Sarah Pucill MILK AND GLASS 1993, 10 min, 16mm
Sandra Lahire SERPENT RIVER 1989, 31 min,
16mm-to-digital
• Tues, Oct 25 at 6:45.
Lis Rhodes LIGHT READING 1978, 20 min, 16mm, b&w
Nina Danino FIRST MEMORY 1990, 20 min, 16mm
Tina Keane FADED WALLPAPER 1988, 20 min, digital
Jean Matthee NEON QUEEN 1986, 40 min, 16mm
DRESDEN DYNAMO (Program 1)
• Mon, Oct 24 at 9:00.
29
SCREEN SLATE PRESENTS:
THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSACRE
October 28-November 13
We’re half a century removed from the prolific decade in which Marshall McLuhan authored a
string of million-selling treatises on the changes media and electronic communication had sown
into our social and civic lives. While McLuhan’s influence and the prophetic nature of his work
have continued to crystalize, it sometimes seems as though the culture at large interprets the
observations and phenomena he describes of a more connected world as fundamentally utopian.
But McLuhan was more keenly attuned to the various and potentially troubling intersections of
consumerism, state surveillance, the nuclear family, military technology, and the profound unease
that accompanies each new “extension of man” succeeding the old. This is the McLuhan who
wrote, for instance, “All new technologies bring on the cultural blues, just as the old ones evoke
phantom pain after they have disappeared.”
In the spirit of phantoms and pain, THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSACRE is a series of filmic and
televisual terrors that surveys the way horror filmmakers and artists have exploited various media
to mine the ruptures created by technological advances in production, transmission, reception, and
communication through the media of film, television, video games, and the internet. The guiding
principle of their selection is that terror is rooted in the very media themselves, whether at the
fringes of the frames, as spectres in the signal, or embedded in the ethernet. It dials between
classics like POLTERGEIST, international cult gems ARREBATO and ANGUISH, arthouse provocations such as VIDEODROME and DEMON SEED, and recent fare like desktop horror film
UNFRIENDED. Each are paired with artists videos and experimental films mining similar conceptual areas by testing the limits of their media through strategies like optical printing, glitch, screen
capture performance, film-video hybridization, reappropriation, video synthesis, and early digital
animation to evoke the unknown, uncanny, and horrific; in many cases, these works inflict violence
on media to inversely expose or foreground the latent powers with which they envelop their
recipient.
As McLuhan said, “Whenever the dragon’s teeth of technological change are sown, we reap a
whirlwind of violence.” Horror is the arena – and cinema it’s most spectacular stage – in which
successive media contend in the popular imagination.
Program and notes by Screen Slate’s Jon Dieringer.
THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSACRE is presented by Screen Slate (www.screenslate.com), an online resource for daily listings and
editorial commentary on NYC repertory, independent, microcinema, and gallery screenings. Screen Slate members who support
with a monthly contribution of $5 or more are entitled to attend a free screening of their choice during this series.
Special thanks to Richard Ashton & David Jennings (Sony Pictures Entertainment), George Ayoub (Bogeydom Licensing), Ericka
Beckman, Ashley Blewer, Neal Block (Magnolia Pictures), Gerald Chandler (Synapse Films), Gibbs Chapman, Chris Chouinard
(Park Circus), Rebecca Cleman (EAI), Sebastian del Castillo (AGFA), Andrés Duque, Patrick Friel, Caroline Gil, Paul Ginsburg
(Universal), Leo Goldsmith, Matt Jones (University of North Carolina School of the Arts), Kristie Nakamura & Nicki Woods (WB),
Mónica Savirón, Ekrem Serdar, and Gregory Zinman.
POLTERGEIST
Bava. Few, if any, films are so conceptually premised
upon their being seen amid an audience in an actual
theater – the terrifying ability of ANGUISH to make
its audience genuinely paranoid is uncanny – making
the rare chance to catch ANGUISH on the big screen
in 35mm a can’t-miss opportunity.
Plus:
Kerry Laitala SECURE THE SHADOW… ‘ERE THE
SUBSTANCE FADE 1997, 9 min, 16mm
The title is drawn from the eerie slogan of a post-mortem photography business: “Secure the shadow, ‘ere
the substance fade, let nature imitate what nature
has made.” Laitala here re-appropriates Victorianera stereoscopic medical imagery, prodding what
André Bazin famously suggested as the fundamental
essence of the plastic arts: the embalming of the
dead.
&
Kerry Laitala RETROSPECTROSCOPE
1997, 5 min, silent, 16mm
Iván Zulueta
With:
1979, 105 min, 35mm. In Spanish with English subtitles.
A heady pop mélange of isolation, split personalities,
and media clichés set to an alternately sweet and
abrasive soundtrack of Marvin Gaye, Metal Machine
Music, and machine gun fire. Shot in Zulueta’s own
apartment – also featured in ARREBATO – it achieved
some recognition at the Berlinale, leading Zulueta to
take the plunge into his masterful feature.
RAPTURE / ARREBATO
A major cult classic in Spain, ARREBATO is an
unclassifiable, nonlinear narrative amalgamation of
drug use, allegorical vampirism, and abject, despondent cinephilia: the compulsion to film, watch films,
and be filmed. José is a preppy B-horror filmmaker
and heroin addict who has just two brief but memorable encounters with Pedro, an obsessive, aspiring
experimental filmmaker and fellow user. As the film
begins, José receives a mysterious package from
Pedro with an audio cassette, a reel of Super 8 film,
and an apartment key. José and his girlfriend pop in
the tape, thread up the film, and cozy up to a creepy
confessional in which Pedro narrates the history and
fallout of his and José’s encounters. ARREBATO is
a shockingly accomplished film for someone who
had previously worked on low-or-no-budget Super 8
experimental films. One may not readily identify it as a
genre film, and yet its relationship to horror literature
is incredibly rich, substantial, and artfully woven
through. Although it’s in a vastly different register,
ARREBATO might give viewers the same sensation
as the first time they saw Zulawski’s POSSESSION:
Where has this movie been all my life?
30
Iván Zulueta LEO ES PARDO 1976, 10 min, 16mm
• Fri, Oct 28 at 7:00 and Sat, Nov 5 at 9:30.
Bigas Luna
ANGUISH
1987, 89 min, 35mm
Fans of David Lynch will lose their minds (and
eyeballs) over this undeservedly obscure, offbeat
thriller. A Russian Doll narrative structure spirals
around a serial killing ophthalmologist (Michael
Lerner) who collects eyeballs under the hypnotic
influence of his doting mother (Zelda Rubenstein of
POLTERGEIST). Yet when the fourth wall suddenly
ruptures, we find ourselves in a movie theater with a
young patron who is convinced that a killer lurks in
the audience – and then things get really weird. Rife
with paranoia, narrative bleeds, and macabre humor,
the film suggests an unlikely mix of Buster Keaton,
Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Lamberto
A film based on the titular kinetic sculpture, invented
by Laitala in the vein of early paracinematic devices
and “philosophical toys.” Its glinting neoclassical
“cinematic muses” appear as lightning-wrought
phantasmagoria, “encircling the viewer in a procession of flickering fantasies of fragmented lyricism.”
• Fri, Oct 28 at 9:30, Thurs, Nov 3 at 6:45, and
Sat, Nov 12 at 4:45.
Lamberto Bava
DEMONS
1985, 88 min, 35mm
Lamberto Bava’s reputation is staked to this
ultraviolent, surrealistic Grand Guignol nightmare in
which audience members barricaded inside a Berlin
movie theater either turn into or are killed by horrific
demons. “I don’t know how to explain it, it’s just a
feeling,” says one character: “The movie’s to blame
for this.” That’s where plot summary ends – this is a
film that recklessly throws narrative caution to the
anarchic winds – but DEMONS endures as a major
cult classic for Bava’s telling, including a memorable
supporting cast, a start-to-finish torrent of indelibly
gruesome imagery, pitch-black humor, questionably
intentional camp, and a relentless 80s hair metal
soundtrack. It’s an unforgettable and eminently (re-)
watchable movie – if you can keep your eyes open.
SERIES:
television opens the gate into a nightmare world that
threatens to claw apart the nuclear family. In any
case, POLTERGEIST is the Zenith – pun intended – of
big budget horror.
With:
Michael Robinson CAROL ANNE IS DEAD
As the artist describes, “a family embraces the heart
of evil in this POLTERGEIST remake/drag-show circa
1992.” Fuzzy VHS textures color this DIY deconstruction and portrait of the young queer artist.
• Sun, Oct 30 at 3:15, Thurs, Nov 3 at 9:00, and
Sat, Nov 5 at 6:45.
THE WILD EYE
Ted Nicolaou
TERRORVISION
OUTER SPACE
With:
Peter Tscherkassky OUTER SPACE 1999, 10 min, 35mm
“Suggesting a convulsive hall of mirrors, Tscherkassky’s widescreen tour de force reinvents a 1981
Barbara Hershey horror vehicle [THE ENTITY],
leaving the original’s crystalline surface intact only
to violently shatter its narrative illusion. […] In an
eruption of panicked subjectivity, the actress’s face
multiplies across the screen as the frame is invaded
by sprocket holes, an optical soundtrack, and flashes
of solarized imagery.” –Kristin M. Jones
Takeshi Murata UNTITLED (SILVER)
Murata exhumes and digitally glitches a scene from
Lamberto’s pop Mario Bava’s BLACK SUNDAY to
send star Barbara Steele reeling through a soupy
digital mist.
• Sat, Oct 29 at 4:30, Fri, Nov 4 at 7:15, and
Fri, Nov 11 at 9:30.
Lamberto Bava
DEMONS 2
1986, 88 min, 35mm
The Ballardian sequel to DEMONS trades the movie
theater for a high rise in which a horror film television
broadcast viewed by residents unleashes a fiendish
horde. Relatively sprawling and therefore lacking
the concentrated maximalism of its predecessor,
DEMONS 2 is nevertheless an unfairly overshadowed
follow-up that erupts into some incredible set pieces.
In contrast to the flickering cinema, DEMONS 2
is a strobing electric buzz of flashing screens and
spasming neons. The soundtrack scores major points
for an all-star goth pop lineup of Gene Loves Jezebel,
Peter Murphy, Love and Rockets, The Cult, and, for
good measure, The Smiths. Producer/writer Dario
Argento’s daughter Asia Argento makes her screen
debut.
With:
Tommy Turner SIMONLAND 1984, 12 min, 16mm
In the unsettling, absurdist SIMONLAND, made with
Richard Kern, a grotesque, televangelist-style demagogue leads his studio audience and isolated viewers
through a psychotic game of Simon Says with twisted
results. Unequivocally one of the greatest films from
the so-called “Cinema of Transgression,” SIMONLAND has been newly preserved by Fales Library and
Electronic Arts Intermix.
• Sat, Oct 29 at 7:00 and Fri, Nov 4 at 9:45.
1986, 83 min, 35mm
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
PULSE
2001, 118 min, 35mm. In Japanese with English subtitles.
One of the few unqualified masterpieces of 21st
century horror, PULSE is a chilling investigation of
the dread and anxiety inherent in the way increased
connectivity paradoxically threatens to put us more
emotionally and spiritually adrift. The film spans two
entwined narrative threads that bleed into Lynchian
abstraction. In one, a group of friends explore the
bizarre circumstances surrounding their programmer
friend’s suicide, discovering a wave of others growing acutely disaffected before meeting death at their
own hands. In the other, a young man with a fledgling
interest in Internet technology finds his computer
unexpectedly turning on and pointing its browser
to strange websites streaming video of anguished
figures looming in shadow. Kurosawa is a master of
slowly weaving and carefully sustaining delirious
terror: he completely forgoes the jump scare in favor
of glacial buildups that he’s able to resonate at their
highest, most horrifying pitch.
With:
Jon Rafman NEON PARALLEL 1996 2015, 11 min, digital
“A flickering screen, an unknown yet familiar ’80s
game show-like tune, and the view of a nighttime
highrise landscape set the mood. Part live-action
footage, video game sequences, simulated chat,
poetic voiceover, and virtual landscape, NEON
PARALLEL 1996 is in Rafman’s own words an
attempt at creating a ‘lost vaporwave classic.’” –DIS
MAGAZINE
• Sat, Oct 29 at 9:15, Fri, Nov 11 at 6:45, and
Sun, Nov 13 at 4:15.
Tobe Hooper
POLTERGEIST
1982, 114 min, 35mm
It all starts when seven-year-old Carol Anne,
entranced by the television static, places her hand
on the buzzing glass and turns around to announce,
“They’re he-ee-ere!” The so-called “TV people” that
only she can commune with initially seem like they’re
in for chair-stacking, dish-sliding mischief, but after
she’s seemingly sucked into another dimension and
trapped inside the airwaves, the family calls upon a
team of paranormal investigators, including the great
Zelda Rubenstein in her signature role. Producer,
co-writer, and rumored director Steven Spielberg
is often at his most political when ostensibly at his
most populist. POLTERGEIST is case-in-point, as
crass real estate development sets the stage and
It’s hard to know what’s more out-of-this-world in
TERRORVISION: the slimy space alien that’s infected
the boob tube, or the swinging family’s far-out
Pleasure Palace. It seems they have everything:
a dionysian swimming pool, a tropical backyard,
and even a fully stocked bomb shelter for grandpa.
But their new, top-of-the-line satellite is a little too
advanced, and soon, in between late night horror
movie marathons and softcore adult entertainment,
a ghastly, tentacled beast has surfed the signal into
the family’s home. The slobbering extraterrestrial
stalks mom and dad and their swinger friends, the
punk princess daughter and her wasteoid boyfriend,
and of course, army vet grandpa. Can the fledgling
survivalist son save them all? You’ll want to tune in
to find out: TERRORVISION is pure camp taken to
gleefully cartoonish extremes, and one of the most
full-tilt cult horror comedies ever made. The iconic
Mary Woronov stars alongside quintessential 1980s
it-girl Diane Franklin of BETTER OFF DEAD.
With:
Max Almy LOST IN THE PICTURES
1985, 4 min, analog-to-digital
Almy’s stylized, graphic video art established her as
one of the foremost commentators of 1980s mass
culture and media clichés. Here an average computer programmer’s life is turned upside down when
a televisual rabbit hole opens inside his set, sending
him reeling through a heady, psychedelic montage
of otherworldly imagery (watch out for space aliens)
as only the best in ‘80s video compositing technology
can render.
• Sun, Oct 30 at 6:00 and Mon, Nov 7 at 9:00.
CORY ARCANGEL + UNFRIENDED
A special double feature encompassing the U.S. premiere of recent work by artist Cory Arcangel and one
of the most innovative horror films of the last decade.
(Arcangel screens first followed by UNFRIENDED,
without intermission.)
Cory Arcangel
SO SHINES A GOOD DEED IN A WEARY
WORLD (DUNKINDONUTS.COM)
Named after a line from WILLY WONKA – whose
star Peter Ostrum turns up on a video on the Dunkin’
Donuts YouTube channel handing out free coupons to
DC metro riders – this is a deadpan anthropological
exploration of the Dunkin’ Donuts digital marketing
apparatus in the form of a feature-length screen
capture desktop documentary. Moving with structural
31
SERIES:
video synthesizer at The Kitchen. According to a 1982
issue of American Cinematographer, Hays’s work on
DEMON SEED “was perhaps the first [Hollywood]
film to integrate video with other special effect film
processes.”
With:
Ericka Beckman HIATUS (SINGLE SCREEN
VERSION 1) 1999, 21 min, 16mm-to-digital
In the experimental narrative HIATUS, rendered in
Beckman’s distinctively sparse yet colorful style with
stunning live and CGI animations, a woman’s journey
through a peaceful online environment is threatened
by the internet’s most invasive species: men. Viewed
today, HIATUS can be appreciated as a prescient
work about the roles of competition and capital
in games, and even more so, networked culture’s
fraught gender dynamics and how they interface
with digital utopias, identity constructs, freedom, and
empowerment.
THE LAWNMOWER MAN
precision through Dunkin’ Donuts’s website, YouTube
channel, Vine, and Twitter, SO SHINES is a kind of
DIY archival project documenting the ephemeral
promotional literature that corporations are so quick
to expunge, and also a wry and frequently hilarious
commentary on how 21st century marketing leverages manifold new platforms, genres, consumers,
and pseudo-celebrities to make its pitch. As Arcangel
writes, “SOOOOOOOO DARK!” Terrifying indeed.
Levan Gabriadze
Soda_Jerk UNDADDY MAINFRAME 2014, 1 min, digital
“Revisits the feminist malware of pioneering Australian art collective VNS Matrix. In this recombinant
work the collective’s seminal text ‘A Cyberfeminist
Manifesto for the 21st Century’ (1991) is recoded
via instructional computer videos of the 1990s.”
–Soda_Jerk
• Tues, Nov 1 at 6:45, Sun, Nov 6 at 3:00, and
Tues, Nov 8 at 9:00.
UNFRIENDED
Brett Leonard
Created entirely from a seemingly unedited desktop
capture, UNFRIENDED is an innovative pop horror
film about a group of friends connected via Skype,
Facebook, and iChat while seemingly harassed by the
malevolent digital presence of their deceased friend,
formerly the popular but deeply disliked queen bee
of her class. UNFRIENDED gets major likes for the
authenticity of its digital environment and the keenly
observed minutiae of communication (the fits, starts,
and deletions, the glitchy buffering, and the anxious
anticipation of seeing “Laura is typing…”). Few films
so effectively, gleefully, and unpretentiously convey
the concerns of so much “post-internet” art – and if
things couldn’t get stranger, the director is none other
than Georgian Levan Gabriadze, the fiddle player in
1986 Soviet sci-fi cult classic KIN-DZA-DZA!
1992, 108 min, 35mm
2014, 83 min, DCP
• Sun, Oct 30 at 8:00 and Sun, Nov 6 at 5:30.
Donald Cammell
DEMON SEED
1977, 94 min, 35mm
Julie Christie stars in this idiosyncratic body horror
technothriller as the recently estranged wife of an
obsessive computer scientist whose AI, PROTEUS IV,
locks Christie in the couple’s smarthome and attempts
to artificially inseminate her with genetic material
possessing the computer’s accrued superintelligence.
It’s basically a one woman, one computer show,
and if it sounds absurd, it is; but Christie sells it with
a characteristically brilliant performance. Christie
aside, the most noteworthy aspect of DEMON SEED
is the astonishing animation by experimental film
legend Jordan Belson, Bo Gehring, and overlooked
computer art pioneer Ron Hays – whose early ‘70s
art bona fides include residency at WGBH alongside
Nam June Paik and performances with the Paik-Abe
32
THE LAWNMOWER MAN
A thoroughly McLuhanesque, dystopian parable,
THE LAWNMOWER MAN tells the story of Jobe,
an innocent, intellectual simpleton who becomes a
semi-unwitting human test subject for intelligence
and mind control experiments conducted through a
series of virtual reality games and test drugs. They’re
administered by a naive scientist (Pierce Brosnan,
pre-James Bond) working for a shadowy corporation.
But as the treatments advance, the simple gardener’s
intelligence ascends to extraordinary abilities of
telekinesis and the capacity to distort physical reality
– which he ultimately attempts to use to infiltrate the
fledgling internet and enslave humanity. In a certain
light, the movie is not as implausible as it seems; as
Marshall McLuhan describes, all electronic advances
are about placing the central nervous system outside
our frames – and “war and the fear of war have
always been considered the main incentives to
technological extension of our bodies.”
With:
Faith Holland RIP GEOCITIES 2011, 3 min, digital
“As though on a rollercoaster at an amusement park,
RIP GEOCITIES is a ride through what Hollywood
envisioned as cyberspace in the 1990s. This video
abstractly represents and mourns the loss of not
only the Geocities website, but also the culture it
engendered teeming with polyphonic, hand-coded
web presences.” –Faith Holland
• Tues, Nov 1 at 9:15, Sat, Nov 5 at 4:00, and
Mon, Nov 7 at 6:45.
David Cronenberg
VIDEODROME
1983, 87 min, 35mm
One of the most unabashedly McLuhan-inspired films.
James Woods plays the sleazy CEO of a small station
dedicated to tracking down and airing extreme pirate
broadcasts. He becomes fixated upon “Videodrome,”
a mysterious extreme S&M show, and resolves to find
its source – and as he draws nearer, he experiences
increasingly grotesque and violent hallucinations.
Aside from its incredible and gruesome physical
special effects, VIDEODROME is noteworthy for
its appropriation of vogue media theory, much of it
voiced by the McLuhan-esque pop philosopher “Brian
O’Blivion,” who only permits himself to appear on
television.
With:
Douglas Davis HOW TO MAKE LOVE TO YOUR
TELEVISION SET 1979, 30 min, analog-to-digital
Perhaps no one worked so fastidiously in the vein of
McLuhan as Douglas Davis, albeit directly contrary
to what he described as McLuhan’s “apocalyptic”
message. This performative broadcast features
Davis’s self-described “investigation into a kind of
denial of the physical reality of the medium…[putting]
the control over the medium…back into the hands of
the human imagination.”
• Wed, Nov 2 at 6:45 and Sun, Nov 6 at 9:00.
John Flynn
BRAINSCAN
1994, 96 min, 35mm
An unlikely cyber thriller from workhorse tough guy
auteur John Flynn, BRAINSCAN is one of the first
films to capitalize on fears of moral corruption in
violent interactive entertainment. Edward Furlong
plays Michael, a preternaturally talented and
hyper-connected computer wiz. Prompted by an ad in
the back pages of Fangoria, he orders BRAINSCAN,
an episodic suburban murder simulator in which
the player commits horrific killings and returns to
eliminate evidence – and witnesses – to cover his
tracks. The only problem is that it might not be a
simulation. Egging Michael on is the puckish wouldbe horror icon Trickster, who basically looks like a
cross between Freddy Krueger and someone you
would’ve met in the bathroom of Mars Bar; he pushes
Michael’s uncontrollable urges further as the line
between reality and fantasy blurs.
With:
Daniel Lopatin & Jon Rafman STICKY DRAMA
A Fangoria-worthy maximalist mashup of green
sludge, 90s tech, DIY drone warfare, and LARPing. It’s
the ultimate adolescent fantasy/nightmare of what a
live action video game might be.
&
Kristin Lucas WATCH OUT FOR INVISIBLE GHOSTS
Strapped inside a lo-fi virtual environment with the
screen superimposed over her intensely focused
gaze, Kristin Lucas performs an interpretation of the
heightened anxiety of video gaming.
• Wed, Nov 2 at 9:15 and Tues, Nov 8 at 6:45.
MEMORABLE FANTASIES:
JORGE LUIS BORGES &
ADOLFO BIOY CASARES
ON FILM
November 11-22
Argentine writers Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares were famously friends,
colleagues, and frequent collaborators – writing numerous stories together, including many
under the pseudonym, Honorio Bustos Domecq – but often overlooked is their shared interest
in the seventh art. Though many filmmakers have tried their hand at filming Borges and
Casares’s novels and stories, these adaptations are only one aspect of the rich intersection
between the world of cinema and their literary universe. This film series attempts to expand
the resonance of these two major figures of the 20th century, looking beyond their literary
fame to explore what made them men of cinema.
In the 1930s and 40s, Jorge Luis Borges contributed numerous pieces of film criticism to
the celebrated publication SUR. Among his most quotable lines is his prophetic celebration
of Orson Welles’s first masterpiece: “CITIZEN KANE suffers from gigantism, from pedantry,
from tediousness. It is not intelligent, it is a work of genius – in the most nocturnal and
Germanic sense of that bad word.” His tough-love interest in the domestic Argentine film
industry also bestowed upon the world this immortal observation: “This film – LOS MUCHACHOS DE ANTES NO USABAN GOMINA – is unquestionably one of the best Argentine films
I have seen, which is to say, one of the worst films in the world.”
Adolfo Bioy Casares took a different approach. He was interested in cinema throughout his
life, embracing its ability to grant access to a world parallel to ours. An impossibly romantic
cinephile, his love for the medium defied reason, whether he was falling madly in love with
a close-up of Louise Brooks or allowing events from the screen to bleed into the real world.
In the mid-1960s, Borges and Casares started corresponding with young filmmaker Hugo
Santiago. An assistant to Robert Bresson, Santiago established a relationship with the literary
duo that would soon result in Borges and Casares penning the scripts for his first two features,
the celebrated INVASION and the almost entirely neglected THE OTHERS (LES AUTRES).
As the two authors’ fame grew exponentially over the years, filmmakers around the world
drew inspiration from their writings, spurred on to create their own innovative and deeply
personal work. Rather than adaptation, these films would take unbridled liberties with the
original sources, liberating a new form that would enlarge the possibilities existing between
film and literature. And still other filmmakers would make films that, without qualifying even
as loose adaptations, would have been very different if they hadn’t encountered the work of
Borges and Casares.
A celebration of the myriad ways in which the cinema has been enriched by Borges and Casares’s writings, this film series is divided into four sections, reflecting their diverse connections
to the cinema: Scripts, Adaptations, Inspirations, and Cinephilia.
MEMORABLE FANTASIES has been guest-curated by Matías Piñeiro, whose new film
HERMIA & HELENA will be enjoying its NYC premiere at the New York Film Festival on
October 9 & 11. Piñeiro also wrote the introduction above and, except where noted, all film
descriptions.
The series is sponsored by Penguin Classics, the publisher of numerous works by Borges,
including the COLLECTED FICTIONS, and presented with invaluable support from the
Consulate General of Argentina in New York and the New York Review of Books (NYRB), the
publishers of the English-language editions of Casares’s THE INVENTION OF MOREL and
ASLEEP IN THE SUN.
Special thanks to Matías Piñeiro; Eduardo Almirantearena (Deputy Consul General); John Fagan, John Siciliano & Nora
McCarthy (Penguin Classics); Nicholas During (NYRB); and to Alex Cox; Mariano Llinás; Brian Belovarac (Janus Films);
Laurence Berbon (Tamasa); Marco Cicala (Istituto Luce Cinecittà); Eric Di Bernardo (Rialto Pictures); Jack Durwood (Paramount); Sophie Faudel (Mélisande Films); Marine Goulois & Lise Zipci (Films du losange); Matt Jones (UNCSA); Dennis Lim
& Dan Sullivan (Film Society of Lincoln Center); Laurence Millereux (Forum des images); Maria Nuñez (INCAA); Fernando
Martín Peña; Richard Suchenski (Bard College); and Barbara Varani (Compass Film).
SCRIPTS
Hugo Santiago
INVASION / INVASIÓN
1969, 123 min, 35mm, b&w. In Spanish with projected English subtitles.
Banned during the last dictatorship in Argentina, INVASION
has more recently attained the (much-deserved) status of a
classic of modern Argentine cinema. Operating in opposition
to all forms of filmic naturalism, it mixes narrative traditions
with dimensions drawn from the avant-garde, both national
and international. The films features performances by major
figures of the local star system, albeit acting in a style
reminiscent of Robert Bresson’s ‘models.’ The soundscape
of the film comprises a clash between the concrete music
experiments of the Di Tella Institute of Buenos Aires and the
tango attacks of the legendary Aníbal Troilo.
Motifs from the universes of Borges and Casares are legion:
the group of old men is an inversion of the characters in
Casares’s DIARY OF THE PIG WAR, published the same year,
while INVASION is also infused with the epic cult for courage
that Borges nurtures in short stories such as ‘The Dead,’
‘Man on Pink Corner,’ and ‘The South.’ Seen in retrospect,
INVASION also has a prophetic air, foretelling the State
violence that would befall Argentina in the 1970s.
When the film premiered at the first Quinzaine de realizateurs
at the Cannes Film Festival, Santiago urged the scriptwriters
to come up with a synopsis, which led to Borges dictating the
following: “The legend of a city, imaginary or real, besieged
by strong enemies and defended by a few men, perhaps
heroes. They will fight to the end, without suspecting that
their battle is infinite.”
• Fri, Nov 11 at 6:30 and Sat, Nov 19 at 9:15.
Hugo Santiago
THE OTHERS / LES AUTRES
1974, 127 min, 16mm. In French with projected English subtitles.
Soon after the breakthrough of INVASION, Santiago began
work on his second feature, a new adventure in the company
of Borges and Casares. THE OTHERS conjures a darker
universe, unfolding a baroque mise-en-scene as complex
as the human soul. The main character is Roger Spinoza,
a librarian determined to discover the cause of his son’s
suicide. He embarks on this quest with the help of Valerie, his
son’s last lover, but, falling in love with her, soon finds himself
dangerously following in his son’s fatal footsteps.
The formal stakes of THE OTHERS are set even higher than
those of INVASION. The film opens with a fifteen-minute
overture wherein the cast and crew of the film are seen
at work, with the writers themselves appearing in a park
accompanied by Edgardo Canton’s score. Santiago’s first
French film, THE OTHERS remains a rare gem, almost impossible to find in any form.
–continues on page 34–
33
SERIES: BORGES & CASARES
With:
Hugo Santiago LOS TAITAS 1968, 25 min, 16mm. In
Spanish with projected English subtitles.
Santiago was already living in Paris and assisting his
maestro Robert Bresson when he began hatching his
own filmmaking career. Adapted from a Borges short
story, LOS TAITAS functioned as a testing ground for
INVASION, not only in terms of its style but also in
Santiago’s approach to his literary masters.
• Sat, Nov 12 at 9:00 and Sat, Nov 19 at 5:45.
ADAPTATIONS –
INTERNATIONAL
Bernardo Bertolucci
THE SPIDER’S STRATAGEM /
STRATEGIA DEL RAGNO
1970, 100 min, 35mm. In Italian with English subtitles.
“It’s a very mysterious film that resembles a
psychoanalytic therapy. The Borges story “The
Theme of the Traitor and the Hero”…takes place
in Ireland in the 19th century and the discourse of
Borges is a very cultural discourse. The story goes
as follows: A young Irish man investigates a crime
that had been committed many years before, a crime
in which a hero of the revolution had been assassinated in unusually curious circumstances. […] The
mechanism is very similar to that used by Borges but
I’m not so focused on his very Borgesian reflection
on the cyclical nature of things. The theme of the film
is this sort of voyage into the realm of the dead. […]
The investigation that the young man is pursuing is a
kind of voyage through atavistic memory, through the
preconscious.” –Bernardo Bertolucci
• Fri, Nov 11 at 9:15 and Thurs, Nov 17 at 6:45.
story). This latter part is largely inspired by
Henry James’s ‘The Other House,’ but the
fantasy element that distinguishes the film
owes a great debt to Casares’s ‘The Perjury
of Snow,’ whose plot line closely parallels
James’s novella.
Repetition is the formal device that shapes
both tales. In Casares’s short story it is by
the perpetual repetition of every gesture
and action of one particular day that the
characters avoid the passing of time, and
hence the death of a sick girl. In the film,
it is through repetition of the same actions
that Celine and Julie perceive and foil
the macabre plot within the ‘house of fiction’ that
similarly concerns the death of a little girl.
• Sat, Nov 12 at 3:00 and Sun, Nov 20 at 8:00.
Alex Cox
DEATH AND THE COMPASS
1992, 86 min, 35mm. With Peter Boyle, Miguel Sandoval, and
Christopher Eccleston.
“Cox first discovered the writings of the great Jorge
Luis Borges when he was approached by the BBC
to direct an adaptation of one of his stories. He
selected DEATH AND THE COMPASS about a master
detective undone by his own brilliance. The choice
is an apposite one for Cox, since this story contains
Borges’s famous remark that ‘the world is a labyrinth,’
a statement that holds true for the worlds depicted
in most of Cox’s films. Where Borges is deliberately
quite dry, even deadpan, Cox here deploys his most
striking visual stylization, with dark, saturated colors,
elaborate camera movement, video imagery, and
baroque sets and costumes.” –HARVARD FILM
ARCHIVE
Jacques Rivette
• Mon, Nov 14 at 9:00 and Fri, Nov 18 at 7:00.
CÉLINE ET JULIE VONT EN BATEAU
ADAPTATIONS – ARGENTINA
Jacques Rivette’s partner in developing his ‘Les
Filles du Feu’ (‘The Girls of Fire’) cycle of films was
Eduardo de Gregorio, an Argentine filmmaker who,
like Edgardo Cozarinsky and Hugo Santiago, lived
much of his life in Paris. As scriptwriter, de Gregorio
provided the structure and plot of the films, and their
fantasy element is very much a product of his literary
background. For the first film of the series, CELINE
AND JULIE, de Gregorio drew from both Henry James
and Adolfo Bioy Casares.
Leopoldo Torre Nilsson & Leopoldo Torre Ríos
ORIBE’S CRIME / EL CRIMEN DE ORIBE
CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING /
1974, 193 min, 35mm. In French with English subtitles.
CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING can be divided into
two sections that begin to merge during the course of
the film: the world outside the house (Celine and Julie
in Paris) and the world inside the house (the crime
THE SPIDER’S STRATAGEM
34
1950, 85 min, 16mm, b&w. In Spanish with projected English
subtitles.
The first film by the great Torre Nilsson, ORIBE’S
CRIME was shot under the supervision of his
talented father, filmmaker Leopoldo Torre Ríos, who
is credited as co-director. It is not clear who exactly
was responsible for what, but most likely the father
permitted the use of his prestigious name in order
to help his son establish himself in the Argentine
film industry. ORIBE’S CRIME is an adaptation of
Casares’s short story, ‘The Perjury of Snow,’ making
it a fascinating double-bill with Rivette’s CELINE
AND JULIE, which is partly inspired by the same
source. The film is largely a typical
product of the Argentine studio era.
However, there are two scenes that
shine brightly over the rest of the film:
the card game and the veo-veo game.
Here a special energy, a sudden thrill,
bursts out of each shot, anticipating
the methods the young Torre Nilsson
would refine in classic films such
as THE KIDNAPPER, THE HAND IN
THE TRAP, AND THE HOUSE OF THE
ANGEL. The devices of repetition and
gesture, as well as the presence of a
fantasy element, provide a key texture.
• Sat, Nov 12 at 6:45 and
Wed, Nov 16 at 9:15.
DEATH AND THE COMPASS
René Múgica
MAN ON PINK CORNER / HOMBRE DE LA
ESQUINA ROSADA
1962, 70 min, 35mm, b&w. In Spanish with projected English
subtitles.
“The story by Borges, concise and precise, like all
of his work, has a narrator, who in the film became
‘el Oriental.’ He is the one who introduces the other
characters: Francisco Real, ‘el Corralero,’ who
appears one night at a low-class dance, approaches
Rosendo Juárez, ‘el Pegador,’ thinks he has humiliated him, snatches his woman, ‘la Lujanera,’ and
ends up getting stabbed by an unnamed assailant.
For her part as ‘la Lujanera,’ Susana Campos
received the Perla del Cantábrico award for best
female actress at the San Sebastián Festival in 1962.
René Múgica (1909-98) was an actor, assistant, and
assistant director in the golden days of Argentine
cinema.” –FESTIVAL INTERNACIONAL DE CINE DE
MAR DEL PLATA
• Mon, Nov 14 at 7:15 and
Thurs, Nov 17 at 9:15.
INSPIRATIONS
Alain Resnais
LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD /
L’ANNÉE DERNIÈRE À MARIENBAD
1961, 94 min, 35mm, b&w. In French with English subtitles.
“Basically, MARIENBAD – which Resnais directed
from an original screenplay by ‘new novelist’ Alain
Robbe-Grillet – is a situation. The politely avid X
(Giorgio Albertazzi) pursues the mysteriously diffident
A (Delphine Seyrig) through a huge, mirror-encrusted
chateau, complete with formal garden – ‘a universe,’
as Robbe-Grillet described it, ‘of marble and stucco,
columns, moldings, gilded ceilings, statues, motionless servants.’ Gloomy organ music underscores the
proceedings as X insists against A’s protestations
that a year ago she’d promised to leave her husband
M and go off with him. The tension is never resolved:
Is X casting a spell or breaking one? […] Certainly,
MARIENBAD popularized a particular and then dated
surrealist aesthetic. (Its two antecedents are Joseph
Cornell’s film assemblage ROSE HOBART, a portrait
of the actress that Resnais could not possibly have
seen, and Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novel THE INVENTION OF MOREL, a fantastic adventure positing a
cinematic virtual reality, which Robbe-Grillet certainly
had read.) […] The movie is what it is – a sustained
mood, an empty allegory, a choreographed moment
outside of time, and a shocking intimation of perfection.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE
• Sun, Nov 13 at 6:45, Sat, Nov 19 at 3:30, and
Tues, Nov 22 at 9:15.
CINEPHILIA
Georg Wilhelm Pabst
PANDORA’S BOX / DIE
BÜCHSE DER PANDORA
ON TOP OF THE WHALE
Raúl Ruiz
ON TOP OF THE WHALE /
HET DAK VAN DE WALVIS
1982, 93 min, 16mm. In English, Dutch, and French with English
subtitles.
In anticipation of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s
upcoming, two-part retrospective of the work of Raúl
Ruiz, arguably the most Borges-ian of filmmakers, we
offer this special screening of Ruiz’s typically dizzying
and astonishingly inventive ON TOP OF THE WHALE.
“One of Ruiz’s best features, this is also one of his
looniest – shot in Holland in about a week’s time,
although it’s supposedly set in Patagonia. The putative
science-fiction plot concerns a French anthropologist and his Dutch wife who are hired to study the
indecipherable language spoken by two members of
an Indian tribe; in fact, this is a dazzling intellectual
goof, with an average of one striking visual idea per
shot (the gorgeous color cinematography, including
many trick shots, is by the great Henri Alekan, who
filmed Cocteau’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST), a lot of
gags involving the pretensions of anthropologists
and psychoanalytical theorists, and other forms of
nonstop invention.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO
READER
The tragic story of a young and
free-spirited woman whose
passions draw her into crime,
prostitution, and death bedazzled
an innocent Casares to the point
of inspiring him to fall blindly in
love with the image of film star
Louise Brooks. Casares has
confessed in more than one
context to the fateful effect that
Pabst’s close-ups of Brooks inflicted upon him. For
many years this image represented a fetish for him.
As a young cinephile, Casares found in a mere apparition of light and shadow on a white screen the most
intense passion in his emotional life. It wouldn’t be
far fetched to relate Faustine, the female character in
Casares’s peerless novel, THE INVENTION OF MOREL,
to the magnetic figure of Louise Brooks as Lulu in
Pabst’s PANDORA’S BOX. The power that the female
characters consistently possess in Casares’s stories
and novels may reside in the romanticized tension
that the cinephile experiences in the vain attempt to
possess the film-object of desire.
• Sun, Nov 13 at 3:45 and Sun, Nov 20 at 5:00.
mere hordes of extras and broad brushstrokes of local
color. […] One may watch MOROCCO with pleasure,
but not with the intellectual satisfaction one gets
from the first viewing (and even the second) of earlier
works by von Sternberg.”
• Tues, Nov 15 at 7:00 and Tues, Nov 22 at 7:00.
Philippe de Broca
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT /
LE CAVALEUR
1979, 104 min, 35mm. In French with English subtitles.
LE CAVALEUR may not be the strongest film of French
filmmaker Philippe de Broca, but that’s no limitation
for a true cinephile like Casares. His magnetic attraction towards the film has a more intimate dimension:
the projection of his life into the silver screen. Casares
viewed himself, in a sort of fantasy trance, in the role
of Edouard, a middle-aged pianist whose prestigious
career is matched only by his volcanic desire towards
women of every variety. Casares referred to his
viewing of LE CAVALEUR as a charming yet alienating
experience. The film presented itself to him as the
duplication of his life’s adventures, a parallel version
of his actions and accounts, his biography transposed
into a lightly comical register.
Casares’s habit of blurring the limits and distinctions
between fictional worlds and his own concrete experience of the world we live in renders him the ultimate
cinephile: for him, cinema replicates life to the point of
replacing it. His comment on LE CAVALEUR can also
be taken as an ironic
self-criticism of the
depiction of the love
entanglements of his
male characters in
regard to women.
• Tues, Nov 15 at
9:00 and Fri, Nov
18 at 9:15.
• Sat, Nov 13 at 9:00.
Mariano Llinás
BALNEARIOS
2002, 80 min, digital. In Spanish with English subtitles.
The debut feature by Mariano Llinás (HISTORIAS
EXTRAORDINARIAS) is a hybrid film about summer
resorts, vacation routines, haunted hotels, and
eccentric artists. It comprises a series of short tales
united in a fashion similar to that of the short stories in
Borges’s A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INFAMY, but with
an inventive lightness and ironic humor reminiscent
of the tales Borges and Casares published under the
pseudonym, Honorio Bustos Domecq. Each story is
distinguished by a narrator who guides us through
the sounds and images of the various stories, which
use documentary elements and motifs to produce the
most extraordinary tales around the milieu of middle
class leisure during the hot lazy days of summer on
the coasts, rivers, and hills of the province of Buenos
Aires. BALNEARIOS stands as many films in one. It
makes fun of itself through its adoration of its subjects
and its passion for storytelling, mockery, and artifice.
A small film by Argentina’s most ground-breaking
filmmaker, it nevertheless had a huge impact within
the New Argentine Cinema, revolutionizing the way
independent films were exhibited in Buenos Aires and
opening a new path for filmmakers to come.
• Wed, Nov 16 at 7:00.
Josef von Sternberg
UNDERWORLD
UNDERWORLD
In his early film criticism, Borges gravitated towards
what today can be regarded as the classical canon:
Hitchcock, Ford, Mamoulian, and Vidor, among
others. Josef von Sternberg was a special member
of this group. Borges emphasized a distinction in von
Sternberg’s filmography and favored one side of it.
Disliking the more conventionally celebrated Marlene
Dietrich films, Borges was more decisively in tune
with his earlier work, such as the silent masterpiece,
UNDERWORLD: “One notices weariness, too, in von
Sternberg’s MOROCCO, even if to a less overwhelming and suicidal degree. Here, the terse photography,
exquisite organization, and oblique yet suitable
methods of UNDERWORLD have been replaced by
35
SPECIAL SCREENINGS
50TH ANNIVERSARY SCREENING –
PRESENTED BY JONAS MEKAS!
Andy Warhol
THE CHELSEA
GIRLS
1966, ca. 210 min, 16mm double-projection. With Nico, Ondine,
Marie Menken, Mary Woronov, Gerard Malanga, International
Velvet, Ingrid Superstar, Mario Montez, Eric Emerson, and
Brigid Berlin. Special thanks to Kitty Cleary (MoMA).
Warhol’s double-screen masterpiece – consisting of
12 unedited reels, shown side-by-side, with only one
soundtrack audible at a time – depicts the Chelsea
Hotel as a teeming hive of Superstars, junkies,
prostitutes, and generally out-sized personalities. An
underground sensation upon its release, it ultimately
broke out of the underground cinema circuit, invading
a ‘respectable’ uptown theater and leading uptight
NEW YORK TIMES critic Bosley Crowther to declare,
“now that [the] underground has surfaced on West
57th Street and taken over a theater with carpets…
it is time for permissive adults to stop winking at their
too-precious pranks….”
Before having the gall to blow uptown minds,
however, THE CHELSEA GIRLS premiered in 1966 at
Jonas Mekas’s Film-Makers’ Cinematheque at 125
West 41st Street (apparently far enough downtown
for Crowther), where it sold out many of its initial
screenings and enjoyed several return engagements,
before moving to the Cinema Rendezvous on 57th.
To celebrate its 50th anniversary, we present this
special screening (safely downtown), hosted by
Jonas Mekas himself, who will share stories of how
THE CHELSEA GIRLS was let loose on the world.
• Sun, Oct 2 at 6:30.
36
LEON GAST’S
‘SMASH HIS
CAMERA’
RON GALELLA IN PERSON!
Anthology Film Archives and the International Center
of Photography are delighted to present an evening
with legendary American paparazzo Ron Galella.
The evening will include a screening of SMASH
HIS CAMERA (2010), the award-winning HBO film
directed by acclaimed documentarian Leon Gast
(WHEN WE WERE KINGS). The screening will be
followed by a Q&A and book signing with Ron Galella.
Self-described “paparazzo superstar” Ron Galella,
now 85, is arguably the most famous and controversial celebrity photographer in history. In SMASH
HIS CAMERA, Gast reveals a man as fascinating as
the many celebrities he pursued, including Elizabeth
Taylor, Michael Jackson, Marlon Brando, and
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis – the object of his most
unique and obsessive attention. The phrase “Smash
his camera!” is in fact an order issued by Jackie O to
her security team in the 1970s, when Galella pursued
her with a determination so fierce it resulted in an
epic legal battle, launching the ongoing debate over
the privacy of public figures and culminating in a
restraining order. Galella’s portraits of Jackie – most
of which are now compiled in his book JACKIE: MY
OBSESSION – are some of the most iconic and beautiful ever taken, and their relationship was described
as “the most co-dependent celeb-paparazzi relationship ever.” SMASH HIS CAMERA chronicles Galella’s
singular career as a notorious guerilla photographer
while offering a thoughtful examination of the nature
of fame, the relationship between celebrities and
their pursuers, and the delicate balance between
privacy and freedom of the press over the past 30
years.
This event is part of the ongoing collaboration
between Anthology and the International Center of
Photography, which began in concert with “Public,
Private, Secret,” the ICP’s inaugural exhibition in
its new home on the Bowery (see page 18 for more
AFA screenings relating to the exhibition). The show
explores the concept of privacy in today’s society
and includes one of Galella’s most striking portraits of
Jackie O, “What Makes Jackie Run?” For more info,
visit: publicprivatesecret.org, or www.icp.org.
Leon Gast
SMASH HIS CAMERA
RON GALELLA WILL BE HERE FOR A Q&A
FOLLOWING THE SCREENING!
SPECIAL SCREENINGS
DIRECTOR AND STARS IN PERSON!
Angela Christlieb
WHATEVER
HAPPENED TO
GELITIN
Austria, 2016, 82 min, digital. Distributed by Sixpack; special
thanks to Gerald Weber.
“Artist Liam Gillick hasn’t seen them. Director John
Waters has no idea where they are. Filmmaker Tony
Conrad has his theories, but he’s not saying. But whoever you ask, the fact remains, the four members of
the Austrian artist group, Gelitin (Wolfgang Gantner,
Ali Janka, Florian Reither, and Tobias Urban) have
disappeared! So Salvatore Viviano, artist, art dealer,
and occasional collaborator in Gelitin performances,
sets off on a cinematic search for the funniest boy
group in the world. With an imposing microphone in
hand, he questions artists, gallerists, and curators about the group’s possible whereabouts. His
imaginary quest provides the narrative framework
for Angela Christlieb’s tour de force film, which both
portrays, and itself, mirrors, the energy of Gelitin’s
anarchic operations.
“The quartet rose to fame with border-crossing and
visually powerful performances, sculptures, installations, and photos. They roll gleefully in the mud,
incite audiences to acts of art destruction, attach
stuffed animals to their testicles for a ‘fashion shoot,’
[or] dance naked with spinning tassels attached to
their buns…. At one point, art dealer Christian Meyer
analyzes, ‘Our world is always trying to rationalize
things, an approach that Gelitin deliberately refuses.’
“Christlieb constructs her film out of a wealth of
archival material, rhythmically assembled, and interwoven with stories and observations from various
interviews. Art dealer Leo Koenig says that Gelitin’s
art just makes him want to strip off his clothes, while
artist Tom Sachs admits, ‘I wish my life were 10
percent more Gelitin!’ A yearning that will certainly
be shared by many after watching this film.” –Nina
Schedlmayer, SIXPACK
Both Angela Christlieb and Gelitin
themselves will be here in person
both nights!
This program is presented with support from the Austrian
Cultural Forum New York; special thanks to Christine
Moser & Arianna Fleur Kronreif.
• Wed & Thurs, Oct 19 & 20 at
8:00 each night.
THOMAS
BERNHARD –
THREE DAYS
Austrian novelist, playwright, and poet Thomas
Bernhard (1931-89) is among the towering figures
of 20th-century modernist literature, a writer whose
caustic, despairing, yet often peerlessly funny
sensibility and whose development of a genuinely
singular voice and form – the unbroken, compulsively
repetitive first-person monologue – place him on par
with the likes of Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka
as artists who truly expanded the parameters of
narrative fiction. Bernhard’s most direct intersection
with the cinema came via his two collaborations with
experimental filmmaker Ferry Radax, including the
hour-long film THOMAS BERNHARD – THREE DAYS,
in which Bernhard, seated on a park bench, delivers
a highly personal monologue that unmistakably calls
to mind those of his fictional narrators.
In November, Blast Books will publish a book that
captures Radax and Bernhard’s extraordinary film,
transliterating Bernhard’s monologue back into his
accustomed medium. Edited and translated from the
original published German text by Laura Lindgren,
and generously laden with supplemental materials,
including 166 images, further notes by Bernhard,
an afterword by scholar Georg Vogt, and illuminating information about Ferry Radax, the book is an
indispensible addition to the library of any Bernhard
devotee. To celebrate its publication, we will be
hosting Laura Lindgren and other guests for a special
discussion and screening of Radax’s film.
For more info on the book, visit: www.blastbooks.com
This program is presented with support from the Austrian
Cultural Forum New York; special thanks to Christine Moser &
Arianna Fleur Kronreif.
Ferry Radax
THOMAS BERNHARD – THREE DAYS /
THOMAS BERNHARD – DREI TAGE
1970, 58 min, video. In German with English subtitles.
“One of Radax’s trademarks are his made-for-TV
portraits of famous artists which alternate between
documentation and interpretation, distance and
embellishment. This early b&w portrait of Bernhard
shows the writer sitting on a park bench, quiet and
unapproachable, talking about childhood memories,
loneliness, and writing, and the final result is rather
austere. The point-of-view alternates between a
variety of distances, and the scene is occasionally
interrupted by black frames which resemble a
drooping eyelid.” –Harry Tomicek, SIXPACK FILMS
• Wed, Nov 2 at 7:30.
MONO NO AWARE X
at ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES
Based in Brooklyn, MONO NO AWARE is a cinemaarts non-profit organization that organizes affordable
analogue filmmaking workshops, facilitates equipment rentals, operates a film distribution initiative,
presents monthly artist-in-person screenings, plans
cinema field trips, and hosts an annual exhibition for
contemporary artists and international filmmakers
whose work incorporates Super 8mm, 16mm, 35mm,
or altered light projections as part of a live performance or installation. To celebrate the 10th annual
exhibition, MONO NO AWARE X, the organization is
hosting a cinema-arts festival with over 20 special
events throughout New York. For more info, visit
mononoawarefilm.com
For the opening night of the festival, Anthology is
pleased to partner with MONO NO AWARE to present
a special evening in celebration of the pioneering
artist Carolee Schneemann. The evening will center
around Schneemann’s rarely-screened, 16mm dualprojection film KITCH’S LAST MEAL, with special
additions to the program to be announced!
Carolee Schneemann
KITCH’S LAST MEAL
1973-78, 54 min, double-16mm projection, sound on CD.
Preserved by Anthology with support from the Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual Arts.
The third part of her autobiographical trilogy
(including FUSES and PLUMB LINE), KITCH’S LAST
MEAL documents, among other things, the demise
of Schneemann’s cat comrade, Kitch. Presented in
varying configurations and lengths over the years,
KITCH’S was shot in Super-8mm and shown simultaneously on two projectors with one image placed
above the other. This configuration is duplicated in
Anthology’s preservation, and the sound is played
from CD in an attempt to keep the ‘live’ nature of the
film intact. If you have not seen it before, KITCH’s
undoubtedly stands as one of Schneemann’s most
emotionally gripping and cathartic works.
“Domestic imagery filmed weekly for three years in
a country house where my partner and myself are
observed by our 19-year-old cat in the normal routine
of domestic intimacy and our work as artists. […]
The ordinariness of the activities of the couple in
association with the disjunctive sound builds towards
a disconcerting invisibility – beyond what is here
manifest.” –C.S.
• Thurs, Nov 3 at 7:30.
37
SPECIAL SCREENINGS
90º DOUBLE SLOPE
FILMMAKERS IN PERSON!
Peter Moore / VAGA ©Barbara Moore
BARBARA MOORE PRESENTS
‘STOCKHAUSEN’S
ORIGINALE:
DOUBLETAKES,’
EXPANDED
Anthology is overjoyed to welcome back art historian
and writer Barbara Moore for a special presentation
of STOCKHAUSEN’S ORIGINALE: DOUBLETAKES, a
unique document of the initial U.S. production of Stockhausen’s seminal musical theater work. This evening
Moore will offer an ‘expanded’ version of the film,
dipping into the riches of the Peter Moore Archive, of
which she is the director, to share a host of additional
still images that will provide glimpses into dimensions
of the production unseen in the film itself. Woven
together with her always fascinating memories and
observations of the production and the circumstances
surrounding it, her presentation promises to give us
a much fuller – not to mention more entertaining –
picture of ORIGINALE than ever before.
Peter Moore
STOCKHAUSEN’S ORIGINALE:
DOUBLETAKES
1964/94, 30 min, 16mm, b&w
This fascinating film documents the 1964 U.S.
premiere production of ORIGINALE, a Happening by
German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. It was
filmed during two performances at Judson Hall in
New York, which took place as part of the 2nd Annual
New York Avant Garde Festival, produced by Norman
Seaman and Charlotte Moorman. This stage production was directed by Allan Kaprow, with performers
including Nam June Paik, Moorman, Jackson Mac
Low, and Allen Ginsberg, among many others.
This program is presented in concert with NYU Grey
Art Gallery’s “A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte
Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s,” on
view from September 8-December 10, 2016. For more
info on the exhibition, visit greyartgallery.nyu.edu
Special thanks to Barbara Moore, and to Lucy Oakley (NYU
Grey Art Gallery).
• Tues, Nov 15 at 7:30.
38
FACTORY DETOUR:
REASSEMBLING
THE LINE
“The ellipsis is the axis of production in the audiovisual language. The ellipsis reduces experience
into a factory. The events take place in a mechanical
way, everything unessential to the plot is left out, gets
eliminated, as it is done in the process of engineering.
Each element is at the service of narrative. Meaning
is the end goal of the assembly line. A movie is
designed like a factory, it is structured like a factory,
echoes the factory. It is a work of engineering.” –
Usue Arrieta & Vicente Vázquez, SUDDEN CHANGES
OF ELEVATION
This evening represents the U.S. premiere of the
films of Vicente Vázquez and Usue Arrieta, as well as
the works generated under their influence. All five
of the films presented here display a preoccupation
with the kinetics of labor, the function of cinema and
the arts, and with description as a sensitive form of
analysis. This approach has been a constant in the
work of Vázquez/Arrieta since their very first films,
and it’s one they have transmitted to other artists,
both through their collaborations and the creation
of their artist/filmmaker cooperative, Tractora Coop.
These two programs feature a selection of films
embodying their practice and their ethos.
Vicente Vázquez and Usue Arrieta will be
here in person for both programs!
These screenings are presented on the occasion of
the opening of Vázquez/Arrieta’s exhibition, CMDG
(Cierta Mecanica Del Gesto / Some Mechanics of
Gesture), taking place at ESTE (231 Stanhope Street,
Brooklyn) from November 19-December 18, 2016 (the
opening will be on Sat, Nov 19, from 6-9pm). For more
info, visit esteste.com or email [email protected].
Special thanks to Victor Esther (ESTE).
PROGRAM 1:
SUNDAY REST: THREE FILMS BY
VÁZQUEZ/ARRIETA
Dealing with the tensions between work and
leisure, nature and culture, the industrial fabric and
community, these three films demonstrate how the
supposed opposition between these pairs gives way
to a subtle interweaving that generates an unusually
complex portrait of a social group. Open iron pit
mines in the Austrian Alps, hydropower stations in
the Atlantic-Pyrenees, and other mountainous locations in the Basque Country harbor floating concert
stages, helicopter and motorbike TV transmission
units, exhausted bike riders and shouting aficionados, enduro racers, rally cars, flying models, and
do-it-yourself soap boxes. All of these mechanized
bodies in direct contact with landscapes actively
transfigure the territory.
Vázquez/Arrieta
TOP DOWN, BOTTOM UP / GOITIK BEHERA BEHETIK
GORA 2012, 31 min, digital
THE EXHAUST NOTE 2013, 41 min, digital
90º DOUBLE SLOPE / 90º DOBLE VERTIENTE
• Mon, Nov 21 at 6:30.
PROGRAM 2:
TRACTORA COOP: WORK SAMPLES
2014-16
Tractora is the artist/filmmaker cooperative initiated
by Usue Arrieta and Vicente Vázquez in 2013. Its
name references the truck driving industry, from
which it copied its operational model. The films
presented in this program dwell upon the production
fabric of the Basque Country. Like the films in the first
program, they propose a kind of continuity, rather
than a rupture, between the industrialized labor forms
of the 20th century and the cultural forms left in their
wake. PASAIA BITARTEAN is a filmic exploration
of the urban fabric of Pasaia – the main port of the
Basque region of Gipuzkoa – which is built around a
natural fjord. LYCISCA, shot in Karrantza, an historic
mining area of Bilbao and also one of the most rural
areas of the province, departs from the myth of the
Carranza Wolf, but portrays the industrial farming
system, as well as the system by which museums
exploit animal life and geology.
Irati Gorostidi
PASAIA BITARTEAN 2015, 51 min, digital
Gerard Ortín
LYCISCA 2016, 43 min, digital
• Mon, Nov 21 at 9:15.
SPECIAL SCREENINGS
20TH ANNIVERSARY SCREENING!
Mike Judge
BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD
DO AMERICA
1996, 81 min, 35mm. With the voices of Mike Judge, Demi Moore, Bruce Willis, Robert Stack,
Cloris Leachman, and David Letterman.
Join Anthology as we celebrate the 20th anniversary of Beavis and Butt-head’s
one and only appearance on the big screen! In this prescient portrait of pre9/11 America, Beavis and Butt-head set out in search of their stolen television
only to get obliviously entangled in a cross-country domestic terrorism pursuit,
thereby becoming America’s “most wanted.” In Judge’s masterpiece, his
dynamic duo truly “do America,” their adventures comprising not only one of
the most riotously funny films of the 1990s, but also amounting to a genuinely
sharp-edged cultural critique, complete with a mind-scrambling psychedelic
sequence. Today BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD DO AMERICA plays better than
ever, especially in the immaculately beautiful print we’ll be presenting on
these two evenings (20 years to the day after its gala premiere and subsequent
theatrical release). Long live Beavis and Butt-head!
“To study B&B is to learn about a culture of narcissism, alienation, functional
illiteracy, instant gratification, and television zombiehood. Those who deplore
Beavis and Butt-Head are confusing the messengers with the message.”
–Roger Ebert
• Thurs, Dec 15 at 8:00 and Tues, Dec 20 at 8:00.
HARRY SMITH BOOKS FOR SALE!
$38 PAPER AIRPLANES
The Collections of Harry Smith
Catalogue Raisonné, Volume I
Edited by John Klacsmann and Andrew Lampert
Photographs by Jason Fulford
Published by J&L Books with Anthology Film Archives
6” x 9”, Paperback with French flaps
ISBN: 978-0-9895311-3-9
$28 STRING FIGURES
The Collections of Harry Smith
Catalogue Raisonné, Volume II
Edited by John Klacsmann and Andrew Lampert
Text by John Cohen and Terry Winters
Published by J&L Books with Anthology Film Archives
6” x 9”, Paperback with French flaps
ISBN: 978-0-9895311-6-0
PRICES INCLUDE TAX.
39
NEWFILMMAKERS
NEWFILMMAKERS NY SERIES
The NewFilmmakers Screening Series selects films and videos often overlooked by traditional film festivals. The NewFilmmakers
Series began in 1998 and over the past sixteen years has screened over 800 features and 3,000 short films. In 2002 we started
NewFilmmakers Los Angeles. Many well-known shorts and features have had their initial screenings at NewFilmmakers, including
THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and TOO MUCH SLEEP.
NewFilmmakers LA now screens monthly at the AT&T Center. Recently we began NewFilmmakers Online, which gives filmmakers
the opportunity to exhibit and distribute their films directly to the public. NewFilmmakers also programs the Soho House Screening
Series in New York & Los Angeles.
Programs are subject to change; check our schedule online at www.NewFilmmakers.com for updated information. NewFilmmakers
is sponsored by Barney Oldfield Management, Angelika Entertainment, Prophet Pictures, SXM, and H2O Distribution.
Please note that the NewFilmmakers series is not programmed or administered by Anthology Film Archives staff; for further
information, please address questions via telephone or email as listed below.
NEWFILMMAKERS NY FILM SCHOOL SERIES
NewFilmmakers regularly invites leading film schools to present films and to discuss their programs with potential students.
NEWFILMMAKERS NY SPECIAL PROGRAM SERIES
Our Special Series give new filmmakers a chance to reach their audiences. The NewLatino Series is now in its 11th year. We also
present Middle East NewFilmmakers; a Women Filmmakers Series; an Animation Screening Series; and a Gay/Lesbian Screening
Series; as well as ongoing programs curated by Third World Newsreel.
NEWFILMMAKERS NY ROUGH CUTS
Every season we give filmmakers the opportunity to see their film on the screen before a live audience. There is a special application for our Rough Cuts series on our website: www.newfilmmakers.com.
SUBMIT YOUR FILM/VIDEO
For more information and an application form write us or visit us at www.newfilmmakers.com.
Films can be submitted directly on www.newfilmmakers.com or www.withoutabox.com.
CONTACT INFORMATION:
Bill Woods, New York Director
Larry Laboe, Los Angeles Director
Bill Elberg, NewFilmmakers Online Co-Director
Jessica Canty, NewFilmmakers Online Co-Director
NEWFILMMAKERS PRESENTS A
RECEPTION AND PARTY FOR THE
BEGINNING OF THE QUARTER
• Wed, Oct 5, Party at 5:30, First Shorts Pgm
at 6:00, Second Shorts Pgm at 7:15, Third
Shorts Pgm at 8:15, Feature at 9:15.
ALTFEST PRESENTS AN LGBTQ AND
EROTIC PROGRAM
• Wed, Oct 12, Featurette Pgm at 6:00,
Shorts Pgm at 7:15, Feature at 8:15, Second
Feature at 10:00.
YOUNGFILMMAKERS PRESENTS A
NIGHT OF STUDENT SHORTS
• Tues, Oct 18, First Shorts Pgm at 6:00,
Second Shorts Pgm at 7:15, Third Shorts
Pgm at 8:45, Fourth Shorts Pgm at 9:45.
NEWFILMMAKERS &
YOUNGFILMMAKERS PRESENT A
HALLOWEEN PROGRAM
• Wed, Oct 26, Documentary Pgm at 6:00,
Shorts Pgm at 7:00, YoungFilmmakers
Shorts Pgm at 8:15, Feature at 9:30.
40
Edwin Pagan, NewLatino Programming
Lili White, Women’s Programming
Tova Beck-Friedman, Experimental Films
Brandon Ruckdashel, Marketing Director
PROGRAM ABOUT HARD CHOICES
• Wed, Nov 9, First Shorts Pgm at 6:00,
Second Shorts Pgm at 7:00, Feature at 9:00.
COMING OF AGE PROGRAM
• Wed, Nov 23, First Shorts Pgm at 6:00,
Second Shorts Pgm at 7:00, Feature at 8:45.
ALTFEST PRESENTS A
THANKSGIVING PROGRAM
• Wed, Nov 23, Shorts Pgm at 6:00, First
Feature at 7:00, Second Feature at 9:00.
WOMEN’S PROGRAM
• Tues, Dec 6, First Shorts Pgm at 6:00,
Pgm at 8:30, Feature at 9:30.
Barney Oldfield, Executive Producer
Tel: 323-302-5426
[email protected]
610 5th Ave #4956, New York, NY 10185-4956
NEWFILMMAKERS PRESENTS AN
ARTS AND EXPERIMENTATION
PROGRAM
• Wed, Dec 7, Special Pgm at 6:00, Documentary Pgm at 7:15, First Feature at 8:30,
Second Feature at 10:00.
SCI-FI PROGRAM AND A DOUBLE
FEATURE
• Tues, Dec 13, Shorts Pgm at 6:00, First
Feature at 7:15, Second Feature at 9:00.
YOUNGFILMMAKERS PRESENTS
DOCS AND A HEIST FEATURE
• Wed, Dec 14, Documentary Pgm at 6:00,
Short Films at 7:45, Feature at 8:45.
CHRISTMAS PROGRAM
• Wed, Dec 21, First Shorts Pgm at 6:00,
Pgm at 8:30.
For complete listings, visit:
newfilmmakers.com
INDEX
78RPM, Oct 14-16, p. 4
AHEARN, CHARLIE, Nov 26, 27, p. 23
AHWESH, PEGGY, Nov 12-13, p. 7
AMERICAN DREAMER, THE, Dec 3, 5, 10, p. 12
ANGUISH, Oct 28, Nov 3, 12, p. 30
ARCANGEL, CORY, Oct 30, Nov 6, p. 31-32
ARRIETA, USUE, Nov 21, p. 38
ARTISTS UNDER THE BIG TOP: PERPLEXED,
Oct 21, p. 10
BACKTRACK aka CATCHFIRE, Dec 4, 8, p. 13
BADEN BADEN, Nov 25-Dec 1, p. 5
BALNEARIOS, Nov 16, p. 35
BAVA, LAMBERTO, Oct 29, Nov 4, 11, p. 30, 31
BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD DO AMERICA,
Dec 15, 20, p. 39
BERLINER, ALAN, Dec 18, 19, p. 23
BERNHARD, THOMAS, Nov 2, p. 37
BERTOLUCCI, BERNARDO, Nov 11, 17, p. 34
BEYOND, THE, Oct 24, 31, p. 9
BLOODBATH, Dec 4, 11, p. 13
BLUE VELVET, Dec 2, 5, 8, p. 12
BODY DOUBLE, Nov 25, 27, p. 18
BORGES, JORGE LUIS, Nov 11-22, p. 33-35
BRAINSCAN, Nov 2, 8, p. 32
BRAKHAGE, STAN, Oct 6, p. 26
BREER, ROBERT, Oct 10, p. 26
BREITZ, CANDICE, Oct 31, p. 16
CAMMELL, DONALD, Nov 1, 6, 8, p. 32
CASARES, ADOLFO BIOY, Nov 11-22, p. 33-35
CAT IN THE BRAIN, Oct 31, p. 9
CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING, Nov 12, 20,
p. 34
CHELSEA GIRLS, THE, Oct 2, p. 36
CHRISTLIEB, ANGELA, Oct 19-20, p. 37
CITIZENFOUR, Oct 14, 15, p. 18
CITY OF LIVING DEAD aka GATES OF HELL,
Oct 24, 29, p. 9
CLAIR, RENÉ, Oct 1, p. 2
CONFESSIONS OF A SOCIOPATH, Dec 15, 17,
p. 23
CONQUEST, Oct 26, 29, p. 9
CONSPIRACY OF TORTURE, THE, Oct 22, 29, p. 8
CONTINUING STORY OF CAREL AND FERD,
THE, Dec 18, p. 23
CONTRABAND, Oct 23, 27, p. 8
COUNTINHO, EDUARDO, Nov 14, p. 16
COX, ALEX, Nov 14, 18, p. 34
CRONENBERG, DAVID, Nov 2, 6, p. 32
DE BROCA, PHILIPPE, Nov 15, 18, p. 35
DE PALMA, BRIAN, Nov 25, 27, p. 18
DEATH AND THE COMPASS, Nov 14, 18, p. 34
DEMON SEED, Nov 1, 6, 8, p. 32
DEMONS, Oct 29, Nov 4, 11, p. 30-31
DEMONS 2, Oct 29, Nov 4, p. 31
DOIN’ TIME IN TIMES SQUARE, Nov 26, 27, p. 23
DON’T TORTURE A DUCKLING, Oct 22, 30, p. 8
DUMB GIRL OF PORTICI, THE, Dec 16-18, p. 6
FAHDEL, ABBAS, Oct 6-12, p. 4
FAMILY ALBUM, THE, Dec 18, 19, p. 23
FAROCKI, HARUN, Oct 14, 16, p. 18
FENDT, TED, Dec 16-22, p. 6
FLYNN, JOHN, Nov 2, 8, p. 32
FRIMMEL, RAINER, Dec 15, 19, p. 23
FULCI, LUCIO, Oct 21-31, p. 8-9
GABRIADZE, LEVAN, Oct 30, Nov 6, p. 32
GALELLA, RON, Oct 13, p. 36
GAST, LEON, Oct 13, p. 36
GELITIN, Oct 19-20, p. 37
GIBBONS, JOE, Dec 15, 17, p. 23
GIDAL, PETER, Oct 23, 24, p. 28
HOMELAND: IRAQ YEAR ZERO, Oct 6-12, p. 4
HOOPER, TOBE, Oct 30, Nov 3, 5, Dec 3, 6, 9, p. 13, 31
HOPPER, DENNIS, Dec 2-11, 13, p. 12-13, 25
HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY, THE, Oct 25, 31, p. 9
HUTTON, PETER, Dec 7-12 p. 7, 15
I WAS BORN, BUT…, Dec 22, 23, p. 3
ILLINOIS PARABLES, THE, Nov 16-22, p. 5
IN DANGER AND DEEP DISTRESS, THE
MIDDLE WAY SPELLS CERTAIN DEATH,
Oct 22, p. 10
INVASION, Nov 11, 19, p. 33
IXE, Dec 3, 4, p. 14
JONES, WILLIAM E., Oct 15, 16, p. 18
JUDGE, MIKE, Dec 15, 20, p. 39
KIEŚLOWSKI, KRZYSZTOF, Nov 25, 26, 27, p. 18
KITCH’S LAST MEAL, Nov 3, p. 37
KLICK, ROLAND, Dec 4, 9, 11, p. 13
KLUGE, ALEXANDER, Oct 21-22, p. 10
KOGUT, SANDRA, Oct 17, p. 16
KUBELKA, PETER, Oct 6, p. 26
KUROSAWA, KIYOSHI, Oct 29, Nov 11, 13, p. 31
LANG, RACHEL, Nov 25-Dec 1, p. 5
LAST MOVIE, THE, Dec 3, 6, 10, p. 12
LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, Nov 13, 19, 22, p. 34
LAWNMOWER MAN, THE Nov 1, 5, 7, p. 32
LE GRICE, MALCOLM, Oct 20, 25, Nov 1, p. 27, 28
LENNON, JOHN, Oct 15, 16, p. 18
LLINÁS, MARIANO, Nov 16, p. 35
LONDON FILM-MAKERS’ CO-OP, THE, Oct 20,
23-25, Nov 1, p. 27-29
LUNA, BIGAS, Oct 28, Nov 3, 12, p. 30
LYNCH, DAVID, Dec 2, 5, 8, p. 12
MACLAINE, CHRISTOPHER, Oct 2, p. 2
MAN ON PINK CORNER, Nov 14, 17, p. 34
MANHATTAN BABY, Oct 21, p. 8
MASSACRE TIME, Oct 23, 28, p. 9
MEKAS, JONAS, Oct 2, 6, 15-16, p. 2, 26, 36
MOORE, BARBARA, Nov 15, p. 38
MOTHER, Dec 11, p. 3
MÚGICA, RENÉ, Nov 14, 17, p. 34
MY SISTER IN LAW, Oct 26, 30, p. 9
NEW YORK RIPPER, THE, Oct 21, 30, p. 8
NOTES FROM THE BASEMENT, Dec 15, 19, p. 23
O’GRADY, GERALD, Oct 6, 10, 11, p. 26
ODDS AND ENDS, Oct 22, p. 10
ON TOP OF THE WHALE, Nov 13, p. 35
ONO, YOKO, Oct 15, 16, p. 18
ORIBE’S CRIME, Nov 12, 16, p. 34
OTHERS, THE, Nov 12, 19, p. 33
OUT OF THE BLUE, Dec 2, p. 12
OZU, YASUJIRO, Dec 22-23, p. 3
PABST, GEORG WILHELM, Nov 13, 20, p. 35
PANDORA’S BOX, Nov 13, 20, p. 35
PAUL SWAN, Dec 15, 17, p. 23
PLAYING, Nov 14, p. 16
POITRAS, LAURA, Oct 14, 15, p. 18
POLTERGEIST, Oct 30, Nov 3, 5, p. 31
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT, Nov 15, 18, p. 35
PRISON IMAGES, Oct 14, 16, p. 18
PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES, THE,
Nov 4-10, p. 5
PUDOVKIN, VSEVOLOD I., Dec 11, p. 3
PULSE, Oct 29, Nov 11, 13, p. 31
RACE D’EP, Dec 2, 4, p. 14
RADAX, FERRY, Nov 2, p. 37
RAPE, Oct 15, 16, p. 18
RAPTURE, Oct 28, Nov 5, p. 30
REMINISCENCES OF A JOURNEY TO
LITHUANIA, Oct 16, p. 2
RESNAIS, ALAIN, Nov 13, 19, 22, p. 34
RIVETTE, JACQUES, Nov 12, 20, p. 34
RUIZ, RAÚL, Nov 13, p. 35
SAÏTO, DAÏCHI, Dec 10, p. 25
SANTIAGO, HUGO, Nov 11-12, 19, p. 33
SCHILLER, LAWRENCE, Dec 3, 5, 10, p. 12
SCHLEMOWITZ, JOEL, Oct 14-16, p. 4
SCHNEEMANN, CAROLEE, Nov 3, p. 37
SEARS, KELLY, Oct 27, p. 24
SEXE DES ANGES, LE, Dec 2, 3, p. 14
SHARITS, PAUL, Oct 10, p. 26
SHORT FILM ABOVE LOVE, A, Nov 25, 26, 27, p. 18
SHORT STAY, Dec 16-22, p. 6
SIEGEL, AMIE, Nov 26, 27, p. 23
SILVA, FERN, Nov 30, p. 24
SLEEPERS, THE, Nov 26, 27, p. 23
SMASH HIS CAMERA, Oct 13, p. 36
SO SHINES A GOOD DEED IN A WEARY
WORLD (DUNKINDONUTS.COM), Oct 30,
Nov 6, p. 31-32
SOUKAZ, LIONEL, Dec 2-5, p. 14
SPIDER’S STRATAGEM, THE, Nov 11, 17, p. 34
STOCKHAUSEN’S ORIGINALE: DOUBLETAKES, Nov 15, p. 38
STORY, BRETT, Nov 4-10, p. 5
STRANGE TYPE, A, Oct 23, 28, p. 9
STRATMAN, DEBORAH, Nov 16-22, p. 5
TARZAN AND JANE REGAINED… SORT OF,
Dec 13, p. 25
TEAROOM, Oct 15, 16, p. 18
TERRORVISION, Oct 30, Nov 7, p. 31
TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2, THE,
Dec 3, 6, 9, p. 13
THERE WAS A FATHER, Dec 22, 23, p. 3
TORRE NILSSON, LEOPOLDO, Nov 12, 16, p. 34
UNDERWORLD, Nov 15, 22, p. 35
UNFRIENDED, Oct 30, Nov 6, p. 32
VÁZQUEZ, VICENTE, Nov 21, p. 38
VIDEODROME, Nov 2, 6, p. 32
VON STERNBERG, JOSEF, Nov 15, 22, p. 35
WALDEN, Oct 15, p. 2
WARHOL, ANDY, Oct 2, Dec 13, 15, 17, p. 23, 25, 36
WEBER, LOIS, Dec 16-18, p. 6
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GELITIN,
Oct 19, 20, p. 37
WHITE FANG, Oct 22, 27, p. 8
WHITE STAR, Dec 4, 9, 11, p. 13
ZOMBIE, Oct 25, 29, p. 9
ZULUETA, IVÁN, Oct 28, Nov 5, p. 30
ES
A R C HI
V
A
Y
FIL
M
HOLO
G
NT
32 SECOND AVENUE
NEW YORK, NY 10003
DATED MATERIAL
ABOUT ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES
Anthology Film Archives is an international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of film and video, with a
special emphasis on alternative, avant-garde, independent productions and the classics. Anthology is a member of FIAF, the
International Federation of Film Archives, and AMIA, the Association of Moving Image Archivists.
BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ORGANIZATION
Anthology Film Archives first opened on November 30, 1970, at
the Joseph Papp Public Theater. In 1973 it relocated to 80 Wooster
Street. Pressed by the need for adequate space, in 1979 it acquired
Manhattan’s Second Avenue Courthouse building. After an extensive
renovation, the building was adapted in the mid-1980s to house two
motion-picture theaters, a film preservation department, a reference
library, administrative offices, and an art gallery. Anthology opened
at its current location on October 12, 1988.
EXHIBITION PROGRAM
Anthology’s programming is among the most diverse and eclectic
of any repertory cinema in the U.S., encompassing our foundational
Essential Cinema series, as well as premieres, revivals, retrospectives,
and survey screenings of contemporary and classic works of cinema.
Anthology features important and under-recognized filmmakers and
artists working in a wide range of styles and genres, and presents
more than 1,000 programs each year, often with the filmmakers
appearing in person. We remain deeply devoted to screening works
on their original formats, in particular 35mm, 16mm, Super-8mm,
and digital video.
ESSENTIAL CINEMA COLLECTION
A unique cycle of films screened on a repertory basis, the Essential
Cinema collection consists of 110 programs/330 individual titles
assembled in 1970-75 by Anthology’s Film Selection Committee:
James Broughton, Ken Kelman, Peter Kubelka, P. Adams Sitney, and
Jonas Mekas. It was an ambitious attempt to define the art of cinema.
The project was never completed, but even in its unfinished state the
series provides an uncompromising critical overview of cinema’s
history.
Directions
Subway: F train to 2nd Avenue, walk two blocks north on
2nd Avenue to 2nd Street.
6 train to Bleecker St., walk one block North on Lafayette, two
blocks east on Bond St. (turns into 2nd St.) to 2nd Avenue.
Bus: M15 to 3rd Street / M15 Select to Chrystie St/Houston St
Administrative Office Hours: Mon-Fri 10:30–6:30
Tel: 212.505.5181 Fax: 212.477.2714
Ticket Prices
$11 General
$9 Essential Cinema (Free for Members)
$9 Students (with ID) & Seniors (65 & over)
$7 AFA Members & Children (12 & under)
FILM & MEDIA PRESERVATION
Anthology’s preservation program was established in 1972. We have
been steadfastly committed to the preservation and restoration of
work by the most important American independent and experimental
filmmakers. Works preserved by Anthology – over 1,000 to date –
include those of Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, Joseph Cornell, Maya
Deren, George and Mike Kuchar, Jonas Mekas, Marie Menken, Paul
Sharits, and Harry Smith, among many hundreds of artists. Through
modern preservation techniques – both photochemical and digital –
Anthology works to make important titles accessible to the general
public through screenings, archival loans, on-site research, and
online access.
REFERENCE LIBRARY
Anthology’s reference library holds the world’s largest collection
of paper materials documenting the history of American and
international film and video as art. Our holdings include books,
periodicals, photographs, stills, posters, distribution and festival
catalogs, and extensive files on individual filmmakers and
organizations. The files contain original documents, manuscripts,
correspondence, program notes, scripts, notebooks, clippings, and
other ephemera. The collection is accessed regularly by students,
scholars, researchers, writers, artists, and curators, and we are
actively working to make much of these unique materials available
online.
MISSION
Fueled by the conviction that the index of a culture’s health and
vibrancy lies largely in its margins, in those works of art that are
created outside the commercial mainstream, Anthology strives to
advance the cause and protect the heritage of a kind of cinema that is
in particular danger of being lost, overlooked, or ignored.
Anthology Film Archives is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
Become a Member!
Help Anthology by becoming a member. Membership benefits include:
reserved tickets for you and a guest over the phone, free admission to all
Essential Cinema screenings, reduced admission for all public programs,
admission to special Members Only screenings of rare films from the
archives, 20% off Anthology publications, and first-class delivery of our
quarterly program calendar. Please send your check attn.: Membership,
or visit the website to become a member, or call 212-505-5181 x20.
$15 Calendar Subscription
$50 Student/Senior
$70 Individual
$125 Dual
$150 Contributor
$300 Donor
$600 Sponsor
$1,000 Preservation Donor
$3,000 Archival Donor
$10,000 Partner
$50,000 Leadership Circle
FOR SCHEDULE INFO AND MORE: anthologyfilmarchives.org

quarterly pdf - Anthology Film Archives

Transcription

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