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ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES • JULY – SEPTEMBER 2015
Anthology Film Archives Film Program, Volume 45 No. 3, July–September 2015
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: Sabrina Gschwandtner, Quilts, Dresses, Arts and Crafts (for Rollins), 2014. 16mm polyester film, polyester thread, lithography
ink. 53” high x 77 3/16” wide x 6 1/8” deep. Photo by Tom Powel Imaging. Collection of the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art
at Rollins College.
STAFF
Jonas Mekas, Artistic Director
John Mhiripiri, Director
Jed Rapfogel, Film Programmer, Theater Manager
Ava Tews, Director of Publicity & Membership
Wendy Dorsett, Director of Publications
COLLECTIONS STAFF
Andrew Lampert, Curator of Collections
John Klacsmann, Archivist
Robert A. Haller, Director Emeritus, Special Collections
Lily Jue Sheng, Project Technician
Andy Lauer, Project Specialist
THEATER STAFF
Sarah Halpern, Head Theater Manager & Print Traffic
Cait Carvalho, Theater Manager
Bradley Eros, Theater Manager
Christopher Nazzaro, Theater Manager
Phillip Gerson, Assistant Manager
Rachelle Rahme, Assistant Manager
PROJECTIONISTS
Lili Chin, Chris Crouse, Ted Fendt, Carolyn Funk, Sarah Halpern,
Constantin Hartenstein, Genevieve Havemeyer-King, Chris Jolly,
Isaac Overcast, Matt Reichard, Moira Tierney, Schuyler Tsuda,
Alex Westhelle, Tim White.
BOARD OF TRUSTEES
Robert T. Buck, Jr.
Jonas Mekas, President
Oona Mekas, Treasurer
John Mhiripiri, Secretary
Barney Oldfield, Chair
Matthew Press
Arturas Zuokas
HONORARY BOARD
agnès b., Brigitte Cornand, Annette Michelson.
In memoriam: Nam June Paik (1932-2006),
Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), Robert Gardner
(1925-2014).
BOARD OF ADVISORS
Richard Barone, Deborah Bell, Rachel Chodorov,
Deborah M. Colton, Ben Foster, Roselee Goldberg,
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Ali Hossaini, Akiko Iimura,
Susan McGuirk, Sebastian Mekas, Sara L. Meyerson,
Benn Northover, 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, Yara Gharib, Micah Gottlieb, Rachael Guma,
Bora Kim, Marcine Miller, Sean Nam, Fiona Szende, Alan Wertz.
New Filmmakers Coordinators
Barney Oldfield, Executive Producer
Bill Woods, Program Director
Interns & Volunteers: Kayla Becich, Samantha Corsini, Steve Erickson, Sam Fleischner, Timothy Geraghty, Hannah Greenberg,
Martina Kudláček, Philippe Leonard, Zach Lewis, Jeanne Liotta, Bibi Loizzo, Jonas Lozoraitis, Shannon McLachlan, Melinda Shopsin,
Hilary Steadman, Auguste Varkalis, Eva von Schweinitz.
Anthology Film Archives is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, and is supported in part by 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, Driver Family Foundation, Edison Properties, Film Chest Inc/Vinegar Syndrome, The Film Foundation, George Lucas Family
Foundation, Goethe-Institut New York, Greene Naftali, James M. Guiher, 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, Peter Norton Family Foundation, Phalarope Foundation, Robert Gore
Rifkind Foundation, Showtime & Sundance Networks, Smells Like Records, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Taipei Cultural Center, Taylor &
Taylor Associates, The Weissman Family Foundation, anonymous donors, and AFA’s individual members and contributors.
ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES
JULY – SEPTEMBER 2015
The cover of this issue of Anthology Film
Archives Film Program is by Sabrina
Gschwandtner, Quilts, Dresses, Arts and
Crafts (for Rollins), 2014. 16mm polyester
film, polyester thread, lithography ink.
53” high x 77 3/16” wide x 6 1/8” deep.
Photo by Tom Powel Imaging. Collection
of the Alfond Collection of Contemporary
Art at Rollins College.
ESSENTIAL CINEMA
2
PREMIERES
STATIONS OF THE CROSS
HOME FROM HOME
SONGS FROM THE NORTH
5
AFA PRESERVATIONS
RE-VISIONS: Tessa Hughes-Freeland,
Marjorie Keller, Luther Price
7
RETROSPECTIVES
Tom Baker
Edgar Reitz
Robert Ryan
10
ONGOING SERIES
Beyond Cassavetes: LILITH
SHOW & TELL: Rachel Mason,
Xander Marro, Soon-Mi Yoo
Unessential Cinema: Hippie Paranoia?
White Cube/Black Box: East Coast/West Coast
12
CALENDAR-AT-A-GLANCE
15-17
ONGOING SERIES, cont’d
AFA Members Only: JEANNE DIELMAN
18
SERIES
One-Film Wonders
This Is Celluloid: 35mm
American International Pictures
Beijing Independent Film Festival
Experimental Animation
18
SPECIAL SCREENINGS
Vision Festival
Larry Janiak
Dirty Looks: THE DOOM GENERATION
MoreVALUE Film Award
Secret Life of AFA
New York Women in Film & Television
29
NEWFILMMAKERS
INDEX
32
33
6
11
13
14
21
23
27
28
30
31
ESSENTIAL CINEMA
UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE
BLONDE COBRA
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!
Robert Flaherty
NANOOK OF THE NORTH
1922, 83 min, 35mm, b&w, silent
The most enduring of all Flaherty’s
films for its simplicity of purpose,
structure, and design. It ennobles its
subjects rather than exploiting them.
Sharp and uncluttered, the film relies
on a few well-developed sequences
that remain in the memory of the
viewer.
“NANOOK is one of the most vital,
dramatic and human films that has
ever flashed across the screen.” –Rex
Ingram
–Sat, July 18 at 5:30.
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Robert Flaherty
MAN OF ARAN
1934, 76 min, 35mm, b&w
Flaherty’s third major film portrays the
lives of a family of fisher folk on the
Aran Islands off the coast of Galway,
Ireland. Flaherty selected the location
and subjects because of their isolation
as the westernmost outpost of European civilization. In addition, the daily
struggle between the islanders and
the sea perfectly suited his interests
and concerns. The scenes at sea are
breathtaking.
“His passionate devotion to the portrayal of human gesture and of a man’s
fight for his family makes the film an
incomparable account of human dignity. Better than anyone, Flaherty knew
how to show the true face of Man.”
–Georges Sadoul
–Sun, July 19 at 5:30.
HOLLIS FRAMPTON
ZORNS LEMMA
1970, 60 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
“A major poetic work. Created and put together by a
very clear eye-head, this original and complex abstract
work moves beyond the letters of the alphabet, beyond
words and beyond Freud. If you don’t understand it the
first time you see it, don’t despair, see it again! When
you finally ‘get it,’ a small light, possibly a candle, will
light itself inside your forehead.” –Ernie Gehr
&
HAPAX LEGOMENA I: (nostalgia)
1971, 36 min, 16mm, b&w. Preserved by Anthology Film
Archives.
“In (nostalgia) the time it takes for a photograph to burn
(and thus confirm its two-dimensionality) becomes
the clock within the film, while Frampton plays the
critic, asynchronously glossing, explicating, narrating,
mythologizing his earlier art, and his earlier life, as he
commits them both to the fire of a labyrinthine structure; for Borges too was one of his earlier masters, and
he grins behind the facades of logic, mathematics, and
physical demonstrations which are the formal metaphors for most of Frampton’s films.” –P. Adams Sitney
Total running time: ca. 100 min.
–Sun, July 26 at 5:00.
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Marcel Hanoun
UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE
1958, 68 min, 16mm, b&w. In French with projected English
subtitles.
“Based on a true incident, the film chronicles the wanderings of a woman and child looking for work and
lodging in Paris. This is the only plot, and Hanoun has
little interest in embellishing it with background and
motivation: he never even makes it clear, for example,
whether the woman is the child’s mother, guardian
or companion. UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE is, more than a
narrative, a formal stylistic exercise so rigorously disciplined and understated that it makes the visual asceticism of Robert Bresson seem almost Fellini-esque by
comparison.” –TIME
–Fri, July 31 at 7:30.
2
CROCKWELL / GRANT / JACOBS & FLEISCHNER
Douglass Crockwell
THE LONG BODIES 1949, 6 min, 16mm
GLEN FALLS SEQUENCE 1964, 8 min, 16mm
“The basic idea was to paint continuing pictures on various layers with
plastic paint, adding at times and removing at times, and to a certain
extent these early attempts were successful.” –D.C.
Dwinell Grant
COMPOSITION #2 CONTRATHEMIS 1941, 5 min, 16mm, silent
“An attempt to develop visual abstract themes and to counterpoint
them in a planned, formal composition.” –D.G.
STOP MOTION TESTS 1942, 3 min, 16mm, silent
A self-portrait.
COLOR SEQUENCE 1943, 3 min, 16mm, silent
“Pure solid-color frames which fade, mutate and flicker. A research
into color rhythms and perceptual phenomena.” –William Moritz
Ken Jacobs
LITTLE STABS AT HAPPINESS 1959-63, 18 min, 16mm. With Jack Smith.
“Material was cut in as it came out of the camera, embarrassing
moments intact. 100’ rolls timed well with music on old 78s. I was
interested in immediacy, a sense of ease, and an art where suffering
was acknowledged but not trivialized with dramatics. Whimsy was our
achievement, as well as breaking out of step.” –K.J.
Ken Jacobs & Bob Fleischner
BLONDE COBRA
1959-63, 35 min, 16-to-35mm blow-up, b&w/color. With Jack Smith.
Preserved by Anthology, with the generous support of The Film Foundation.
“BLONDE COBRA is an erratic narrative – no, not really a narrative, it’s
only stretched out in time for convenience of delivery. It’s a look in on
an exploding life, on a man of imagination suffering pre-fashionable
Lower East Side deprivation and consumed with American 1950s, 40s,
30s disgust. Silly, self-pitying, guilt-strictured and yet triumphing – on
one level – over the situation with style… enticing us into an absurd
moral posture the better to dismiss us with a regal ‘screw off.’” –K.J.
Total running time: ca. 85 min.
–Sat, Aug 1 at 5:30.
ESSENTIAL CINEMA
ENTR’ACTE
PULL MY DAISY
JEROME HILL
Ken Jacobs
These 35mm prints are the result of a preservation
project undertaken by the Museum of Modern Art.
TOM, TOM, THE PIPER’S SON
DEATH IN THE FORENOON
An absolute masterpiece from one of the
most inspiring innovators of modern cinema.
“Original 1905 film shot and probably
directed by G.W. ‘Billy’ Bitzer, rescued via a
paper print filed for copyright purposes with
the Library of Congress. It is most reverently
examined here, absolutely loved, with a new
movie, almost as a side effect, coming into
being.” –K.J.
1934/66, 2 min, 35mm
CANARIES 1969, 4 min, 35mm
&
FILM PORTRAIT
1971, 81 min, 35mm
A pioneering work in autobiographical cinema, FILM PORTRAIT masterfully combines
actual and staged footage and painting over
images. Filmmaker, painter, and composer
Jerome Hill was born into the famous James
J. Hill railroad-building family and lived on the
same street as F. Scott Fitzgerald. Here he recreates wonderfully – with old family footage
– the period and milieu of the American upper
class at the beginning of the 20th century.
Total running time: ca. 90 min.
–Sun, Aug 2 at 5:30.
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GENET / FRANK & LESLIE
Jean Genet
UN CHANT D’AMOUR
1950, 26 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
Jean Genet’s poetic expression of male
eroticism pitted against the confines of prison
cells and a homophobic state…a powerfully
resonant work that explores individual freedom and the laws of desire.
[This Essential Cinema screening of UN
CHANT D’AMOUR is presented in conjunction
with the series ONE-FILM WONDERS; see
page 18 for more details.]
Robert Frank & Alfred Leslie
PULL MY DAISY
1959, 28 min, 35mm, b&w
A largely spontaneous experiment, arranged
in 1959 by Robert Frank along with Alfred
Leslie. They enlisted the participation of Jack
Kerouac, who offered in place of an original
screenplay a stage play he’d never finished
writing, “The Beat Generation.” The plot is
based on an incident in the life of Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn. They’re raising a
family and trying to fit in with their suburban
neighbors, and one night they invite a respectable neighborhood bishop over for dinner. But
Neal’s Beat friends crash the party, and that
Marx Brothers-like scenario is the closest
thing the film has to a storyline.
Total running time: ca. 60 min.
–Sat, Aug 8 at 5:00.
1969, 115 min, 16mm, b&w/color, silent
–Sat, Aug 15 at 4:45.
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JENNINGS / KIRSANOFF /
LÉGER & MURPHY / CLAIR &
PICABIA
Humphrey Jennings
LISTEN TO BRITAIN 1941, 19 min, 35mm, b&w
Jennings’s film is a masterpiece of sound
mixing; it creates an audio landscape of
Britain during the war, with images both
accompanying and conflicting with the multitude of sounds. From the film’s introduction:
“I have been listening to Britain. I have heard
the sound of her life by day and by night….
In the great sound picture that is here presented, you too will hear that heart beating.
For blended together in one great symphony
is the music of Britain at war.”
Dimitri Kirsanoff
MÉNILMONTANT 1924-25, 38 min, 35mm,
b&w, silent
A melodramatic story of an orphan girl whose
seduction is avenged. Early use of hand-held
camera, montage, and superimpositions.
Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy
BALLET MÉCANIQUE 1924, 19 min, 35mm,
b&w, silent. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
A brief exploration of cubist form, black-andwhite tonalities, and various vectors through
its constant, rapidly cut movements and
compositions. Many of the film’s forms and
compositions are reflected in – or themselves
reflect – forms and compositions in Léger’s
famous cubist paintings from the period.
René Clair & Francis Picabia
ENTR’ACTE 1924, 22 min, 35mm, b&w
A masterpiece of Dada, a feat of cinema
magic. Made as an intermission entertainment for the Ballet Suédois from an
impromptu scenario by Francis Picabia.
Music by Erik Satie.
Total running time: ca. 105 min.
–Sun, Aug 16 at 5:00.
THE GENERAL
JORDAN / LEVITT / MAAS
Larry Jordan
DUO CONCERTANTES 1962-64, 6 min, 16mm, b&w
HAMFAT ASAR 1965, 13 min, 16mm, b&w
GYMNOPEDIES 1968, 6 min, 16mm
THE OLD HOUSE, PASSING 1966, 45 min, 16mm, b&w. Preserved by Anthology Film
Archives.
OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE 1968, 9 min, 35mm
“With a taste for nostalgic romanticism…Jordan creates a magical universe of
work using old steel engravings and collectable memorabilia. His 50-year pursuit
into the subconscious mind gives him a place in the annals of cinema as a prolific
animator on a voyage into the surreal psychology of the inner self.” –Jackie Leger
Helen Levitt
IN THE STREET 1952, 12 min, 16mm, b&w. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
Levitt’s short, lyrical documentary portrait of life in Spanish Harlem. Stealthily shot
by Levitt, Janice Loeb, and James Agee.
Willard Maas
GEOGRAPHY OF THE BODY 1943, 7 min, 16mm, b&w. Preserved by Anthology with
support from The National Film Preservation Foundation.
“The terrors and splendors of the human body as the undiscovered, mysterious
continent.” –W.M.
Total running time: ca. 105 min.
–Mon, Aug 17 at 7:30.
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Buster Keaton
THE GENERAL
1927, 105 min, 35mm, b&w, silent. With Buster Keaton, Marion Mack, Glen Cavendar, Jim Farley,
and Joseph Keaton.
One of Keaton’s best silent features, setting comedy against a true Civil War story
of a stolen train and Union spies.
–Fri, Aug 21 at 7:30.
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BUSTER KEATON SHORTS
Buster Keaton & Eddie Cline
NEIGHBORS 1921, 23 min, 35mm, b&w, silent
THE HIGH SIGN 1921, 18 min, 35mm, b&w, silent
THE GOAT 1921, 20 min, 35mm, b&w, silent
THE BOAT 1921, 20 min, 35mm, b&w, silent
Total running time: ca. 85 min.
–Sat, Aug 22 at 6:00.
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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
COUNTY HOSPITAL 1932, 20 min, 16mm, b&w. Directed by James Parrott.
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.
Total running time: ca. 65 min.
–Sat, Aug 22 at 8:00.
3
ESSENTIAL CINEMA
TUSALAVA
Dimitri Kirsanoff
RAPT
1934, 84 min, 35mm, b&w. In French with no subtitles; English
synopsis available.
“RAPT is, paradoxically, both a film which looks back
anachronistically toward the silent era and a work
which belongs to the vanguard of sound cinema. Part
of that paradox can be resolved by an understanding of the film’s complex utilization of music. RAPT
employs very little dialogue, and in this respect it is
reminiscent of the part-talkie genre…. It is linked to
such abstract and hybrid avant-garde works as VAMPYR and L’ÂGE D’OR. The radical nature of RAPT, however, resides in its vision of a cinematic musical score.
In making the film, Kirsanoff worked closely with the
composers Honegger and Hoerce.” –Lucy Fisher
–Sun, Aug 23 at 6:00.
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KUBELKA / LYE
Peter Kubelka
MOSAIK IM VERTRAUEN / MOSAIC IN CONFIDENCE
1955, 16 min, 35mm, b&w/color
ADEBAR 1957, 1 min, 35mm, b&w
SCHWECHATER 1958, 1 min, 35mm
ARNULF RAINER 1960, 7 min, 35mm, b&w
UNSERE AFRIKAREISE / OUR TRIP TO AFRICA
1966, 12 min, 16mm
PAUSE 1977, 12 min, 16mm
“Peter Kubelka is the perfectionist of the film medium;
and, as I honor that quality above all others at this time
finding such a lack of it now elsewhere, I would simply
like to say: Peter Kubelka is the world’s greatest filmmaker – which is to say, simply: see his films!…by
all means/above all else…etcetera.” –Stan Brakhage
Len Lye
TUSALAVA 1929, 10 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
TRADE TATTOO 1937, 5 min, 16mm
RHYTHM 1957, 1 min, 16mm, b&w
FREE RADICALS 1958/79, 4 min, 16mm, b&w
A giant of experimental animation, Len Lye was born
in New Zealand in 1901. He moved to England in the
1920s and subsequently to New York in 1944, where
he spent the last 40 years of his life. A pioneer of
‘scratch’ or ‘direct’ filmmaking, Lye used various tools
to mark patterns, shapes, and images directly onto
the film’s surface, and often explored the dynamic
energy of abstract images propelled into life by lively
jazz scores or Pacific-inspired rhythms.
Total running time: ca. 55 min.
–Sun, Aug 23 at 8:00.
4
FLEMING FALOON
GEORGE & MIKE KUCHAR
All films preserved by Anthology with support from the National Film Preservation
Foundation.
THE NAKED AND THE NUDE 1957, 36 min, 8mm-to-16mm
The oldest surviving Kuchar mini-epic, this patriotic WWII period piece
(made by high schoolers) chronicles the desires and destinies of carnal appetites on the front line.
“Big…Rousing…Memorable! The incredible war saga of our own
boys in a Jap-infested jungle in the Botanical Gardens. Hear Lloyd
Thorner sing the title song. You’ll come out whistling from both ends.”
–G.K.
PUSSY ON A HOT TIN ROOF 1961, 14 min, 8mm-to-16mm
“It glows with the embers of desire! It smokes with the revelation of
men and women longing for robust temptations that will make them
sizzle into maturity with a furnace-blast of unrestrained animalism. A
film for young and old to enjoy.” –G.K.
BORN OF THE WIND 1962, 24 min, 8mm-to-16mm
Preserved by Anthology through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by the
Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Special thanks to Cineric, Inc.
“A tender and realistic story of a scientist who falls in love with a
mummy he has restored to life… 2,000 years as a mummy couldn’t
quench her thirst for love!” –G.K.
TOOTSIES IN AUTUMN 1963, 15 min, 8mm-to-16mm
Mike’s cautionary tale about past-their-prime thespians caught up in
a typically Kucharian vortex of madness.
Total running time: ca. 95 min.
–Thurs, Aug 27 at 7:30.
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GEORGE LANDOW, AKA OWEN LAND
“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
EARLY FILMS BY GEORGE LANDOW ca. 1961-62, ca. 15 min,
8mm-to-16mm blow-up. Preserved by Anthology with support from Cineric,
Inc.
CLASSICS OF THE TWENTIES
Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy
BALLET MÉCANIQUE 1924, 19 min, 35mm,
b&w, silent. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
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
Total running time: ca. 85 min.
–Fri, Sept 4 at 7:30.
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CHRISTOPHER MACLAINE
“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
Total running time: ca. 65 min.
–Fri, Sept 11 at 7:30.
These films are not part of the Essential Cinema. According to Jonas
Mekas, Landow used to show these films along with FLEMING
FALOON at early screenings before he pulled them from his repertoire.
Jonas Mekas
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: BARDO FOLLIES 1967, 7 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
THE FILM THAT RISES TO THE SURFACE OF CLARIFIED BUTTER
1969, 180 min, 16mm. New print by Cinema Arts Inc.
Special thanks to Michael Kolvek, Fran Bowen (Trackwise), and Pip Laurenson (Tate Museum).
1968, 9 min, 16mm, b&w
REMEDIAL READING COMPREHENSION 1970, 5 min, 16mm
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? 1972, 13 min, 16mm
THANK YOU JESUS FOR THE ETERNAL PRESENT
1973, 6 min, 16mm
Total running time: ca. 80 min.
–Sat, Aug 29 at 5:15.
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DIARIES, NOTES & SKETCHES
(WALDEN)
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
ESSENTIAL CINEMA / PREMIERES
THE END
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.
“I make home movies – therefore I live. I live – therefore I make
home movies.” –from the soundtrack
–Sat, Sept 12 at 7:30.
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Jonas Mekas
REMINISCENCES OF A JOURNEY TO
LITHUANIA
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.
“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, Sept 13 at 7:30.
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GEORGES MÉLIÈS, PROGRAM #1
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
Magician, master of special effects, Méliès broke with the
realistic (Lumière) mode of cinema and celebrated unlimited
fantasy and artificiality (in its best sense).
Total running time: ca. 60 min.
–Fri, Sept 25 at 8:00.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GEORGES MÉLIÈS, PROGRAM #2
The films on 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
Total running time: ca. 50 min.
–Sat, Sept 26 at 6:00.
STATIONS OF THE CROSS
GEORGES MÉLIÈS, PROGRAM #3
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
Total running time: ca. 55 min.
–Sat, Sept 26 at 7:30.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MARIE MENKEN, PROGRAM 1
All films preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
VISUAL VARIATIONS ON NOGUCHI
1955, 4 min, 16mm, b&w
HURRY! HURRY! 1957, 3 min, 16mm
GLIMPSE OF THE GARDEN 1957, 5 min, 16mm
DWIGHTIANA 1959, 3 min, 16mm. Score by Teiji Ito.
BAGATELLE FOR WILLARD MAAS
1961, 5 min, 16mm
NOTEBOOK 1962-63, 10 min, 16mm, silent
MOOD MONDRIAN 1961, 7 min, 16mm, silent
EYE MUSIC IN RED MAJOR 1961, 4 min, 16mm, silent
ANDY WARHOL 1965, 22 min, 16mm
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.
Total running time: ca. 70 min.
–Sun, Sept 27 at 5:45.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MARIE MENKEN, PROGRAM 2
All films preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
WRESTLING 1964, 8 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
MOONPLAY 1962, 5 min, 16mm, b&w
DRIPS IN STRIPS 1961, 3 min, 16mm, silent
GO! GO! GO! 1962-64, 12 min, 16mm, silent
LIGHTS 1964-66, 7 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
SIDEWALKS 1966, 7 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
EXCURSION 1968, 5 min, 16mm
WATTS WITH EGGS 1967, 12 min, 16mm, silent
ARABESQUE FOR KENNETH ANGER
1961, 4 min, 16mm
Total running time: ca. 70 min.
–Sun, Sept 27 at 7:30.
U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
Dietrich Brüggemann
STATIONS OF THE
CROSS / KREUZWEG
Germany, 2014, 107 min, digital. In German with English subtitles. Distributed by Film Movement; special thanks to Michael
Rosenberg, Clemence Taillandier, Genevieve Villaflor, and Jimmy
Weaver.
Told in fourteen fixed-angle, single shot, individual
tableaus that parallel Christ’s journey to his own
crucifixion, STATIONS OF THE CROSS utilizes a highly
formalist style to explore a fraught and mysterious
phenomenon that continues to represent a dominant
force in contemporary society: religious fundamentalism. The film hinges on an extraordinary performance
by the young, eerily poised actress Lea van Acken,
as Maria, a young woman who struggles against the
uncompromising religious tenets of her family even
as she has fully internalized them. As she struggles
to balance her own desires with the dictates of her
family’s radically Catholic faith, she makes ever more
perilous sacrifices, attempting to please a God she
worships unquestioningly in the pious hopes of curing
the autistic younger brother she adores. Co-written
by director Dietrich Brüggemann and his sister Anna,
STATIONS OF THE CROSS is both an indictment of
fundamentalist faith and the articulation of an impressionable teen’s struggle to find her own path in life. It
is at once a cautionary nightmare and, thanks to van
Acken’s fully committed performance, an unforgettable character study.
“Brüggemann offers up a darkly comic, contemporary reworking of Catholic doctrine that never shirks
away from illuminating both the ridiculous and the
sublime.” –Daniel Green, CINE-VUE
“This formally inventive film unfolds as a series of
austere and extraordinarily vivid fixed shots, weighing matters of faith, adolescent yearnings, and the
potential danger of early religious indoctrination. The
aesthetic pleasures of such restraint – only rarely
interrupted by camera movement – underscore the
perils of a belief system that venerates suffering,
sacrifice and martyrdom through repression and control.” –Paul Meyers, SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL
FILM FESTIVAL
–Fri, July 10 through Thurs, July 16
at 6:45 & 9:00 nightly. Additional
screenings on Sat & Sun at 4:30.
5
PREMIERES
HOME FROM HOME: CHRONICLE OF A VISION
U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
Edgar Reitz
HOME FROM HOME: CHRONICLE OF A
VISION / DIE ANDERE HEIMAT: CHRONIK EINER SEHNSUCHT
Germany, 2013, 230 min, DCP, b&w/color. In German with English subtitles. Distributed by Corinth Films, and
presented with invaluable support from the Goethe-Institut New York; special thanks to John Poole Jr. (Corinth), and
Wenzel Bilger & Sara Stevenson (Goethe-Institut New York).
Edgar Reitz’s monumental HEIMAT films hold a privileged place in postwar German cinema. A precursor to some of the episodic yet cohesively crafted serial dramas that are all the rage in the U.S.
and Europe today, Reitz’s enormously ambitious, ever-expanding project began in 1984 with the
15-hour HEIMAT: A CHRONICLE OF GERMANY. Since then, Reitz has added to his career-defining
edifice roughly every ten years, with 1993’s HEIMAT II (more than 25 hours long), 2004’s HEIMAT
III (11 hours), and now, like clockwork, with HOME FROM HOME, which comes in at a breezy
230 minutes. (This account elides the smaller-scale, in-between work, HEIMAT FRAGMENTS: THE
WOMEN, from 2006…)
A prequel to the previous HEIMAT films, HOME FROM HOME turns back the clock to the mid-19th
century, to focus on the ancestors of the Simon family, as they struggle to subsist in the (fictional)
village of Schabbach (familiar from the earlier films). Depicting both the struggles and the deeply
ingrained rituals and sense of community that define their lives, Reitz shows his usual panoramic
flair, bringing to life a host of characters and capturing the rhythms and textures of a whole village.
Nevertheless, the film’s attention settles on two figures in particular: the sensitive, imaginative, and
restless Jakob, who immerses himself in literature and dreams of emigrating to Brazil, and Henriette, the beautiful daughter of a gem cutter fallen on hard times, who is at once drawn to Jakob
and fated to take a different path. Reitz, as always, is attuned both to his characters’ daily lives
and to the larger social and historical forces that shape their existence. Here he explores a world
marked by famine and poverty, the stirrings of revolution, and above all the specter of emigration, a
phenomenon that holds the promise of freedom even as it represents a threat to the stability of the
communities that are left behind. Playing out against the backdrop of the mass exodus that saw
hundreds of thousands of German farmers, laborers, and craftsman departing for the New World,
HOME FROM HOME is both a heart-wrenching drama and a penetrating portrait of an historical era.
“[E]vocative, surprising and very entertaining. It…marks the completion of a remarkable achievement.” –Jonathan Romney, THE GUARDIAN
“If you’ve seen HEIMAT you’ll spot masses of connections. Yet this stand-alone four-hour mini
epic – shot in black-and-white widescreen – also makes a great starting-point. […] To see the
wagons rolling out of the Rhineland is a potent image for today – a counterblast to the contentious
subject of migration in today’s Europe. That immediate relevance deepens the film’s rich fresco of
historical insight and immersive drama. This is a magnificent, career-capping achievement from
one of the great storytellers of our era.” –Trevor Johnston, TIME OUT LONDON
Immediately preceding the run of HOME FROM HOME, we’ll be
screening a brief selection of Reitz’s earlier work; see pages 10-11 for
details.
–Fri, Sept 11 through Thurs, Sept 17 at 7:00 nightly.
Additional screenings on Sat & Sun at 2:30.
6
SONGS FROM THE NORTH
U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
Soon-Mi Yoo
SONGS FROM THE NORTH
2014, 72 min, digital
SONGS FROM THE NORTH is an essay film that looks differently at
the enigma of North Korea, a country typically seen only through the
distorted lens of jingoistic propaganda and derisive satire. Interweaving footage from Yoo’s three visits to North Korea, together with songs,
spectacle, popular cinema and archival footage, SONGS FROM THE
NORTH tries to understand, on their own terms, the psychology and
popular imaginary of the North Korean people and the political ideology
of absolute love which continues to drive the nation towards its uncertain future. To look closely and objectively at North Korea, a country
that challenges our most fundamental assumptions about the human
condition, is, Yoo argues, ultimately to question the meaning of freedom,
love, and patriotism.
“Although the kernel of Yoo’s inquiry into North Korea is the wartime
experience of her own father (a leftist law student who, unlike many of
his comrades, did not head north after the war), Yoo provides a broadranging examination of the culture and ideology of a nation too often
regarded as either ludicrous or incomprehensible. While in no way softening the all-encompassing propaganda state of three generations of
Great Leader Kims, Songs from the North also displays a rare audacity
by showing certain aspects of North Korean life as perfectly normal.
[…] The genuine desires of ordinary people (above all for reunification)
are placed in a broader historical context, but explored with the utmost
respect. There is no trace of Western capitalist triumphalism in Yoo’s
film.” – Michael Sicinski, CINEMA SCOPE
Soon-Mi Yoo and producer Haden Guest will be
here in person on Sat & Sun, Sept 18 & 19, for both
shows each evening.
Soon-Mi Yoo’s earlier work will be featured in our
SHOW & TELL series on Sat, Sept 19 at 5:00; see
page 14 for more details.
–Fri, Sept 18 through Thurs, Sept 24 at 7:00 & 9:00
nightly.
AFA PRESERVATIONS
BABY DOLL
GIFT
DIRTY
RE-VISIONS:
AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL FILM 1975-90
With the new monthly 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 avant-garde 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. While recognized for their accomplishments within the relatively small independent filmmaking community,
their work is still too new, too unruly, or else too marginalized to be sold in galleries, collected by museums, or preserved by most film archives.
RE-VISIONS features single-artist screenings of our new preservations alongside other exemplary and enticing titles spanning each artist’s career. We are as interested in seeing what
they made way back then as we are in what they are doing today. 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.
JULY:
TESSA HUGHES-FREELAND
FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
One of the defining figures of the No Wave and Cinema of Transgression movements of the 1980s, Tessa Hughes-Freeland’s powerfully provocative films harness the shock value of
sex and violence and then undercut it with a cool sense of irony. Steeped in the gritty atmosphere of downtown New York, her work radically recontextualizes familiar imagery – from
pornography, classic Hollywood films, and mythology – to subvert the traditional pleasures of cinematic voyeurism.
Born in England, Hughes-Freeland earned a B.A. in Art History from the University of London and moved to NYC to pursue a master’s degree in Cinema Studies at NYU. Unimpressed
with what she saw as the university’s staid approach to film history, she was drawn to the East Village’s vibrant cinematic underground. Frequenting screenings at local small clubs
and bars like Club 57, Limbo Lounge, and Chandelier, she got to know the filmmakers associated with the burgeoning No Wave/Cinema of Transgression scene – including Nick Zedd,
Richard Kern, Tommy Turner, and Scott B & Beth B – many of whom she interviewed for the EAST VILLAGE EYE and Zedd’s zine, THE UNDERGROUND FILM BULLETIN.
Frustrated that the critical establishment was ignoring challenging, different, and confrontational independent films, Hughes-Freeland, along with fellow underground avant-garde
filmmaker Ela Troyano, co-founded the New York Film Festival Downtown in 1984. The festival’s stated goal was “to break the stranglehold of ignorance and intolerance that has
confined most of these films to the clubs and performance spaces of downtown New York.” The multi-day festival, which ran until 1990, featured an impressive array of artists and
works including Todd Haynes (SUPERSTAR: THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY), Nan Goldin (THE BALLAD OF SEXUAL DEPENDENCY), Peggy Ahwesh (I RIDE A PONY NAMED FLAME), and
Manuel De Landa (JUDGMENT DAY, ISM ISM), among many others.
Hughes-Freeland’s first major work as a filmmaker is BABY DOLL (1982), a 16mm portrait of two female go-go dancers who speak exasperatedly about the misogynistic expectations
of their male clients. DIRTY (1992), made in collaboration with Annabel Lee, is an adaptation of Georges Bataille’s BLUE OF NOON, in which a drunken society woman soils herself
and wallows in degradation. GIFT (2010) deconstructs and reassembles ALICE IN WONDERLAND & SLEEPING BEAUTY into something slyly sinister, while WATCH OUT! and INSTINCT:
BITCHES SIDE (2007) both employ a wide range of found footage and multiple layers of images. Rounding out our show are new digital transfers of rarely screened Super 8 documents
from the 1980s, including a seminal performance by the Butthole Surfers and old school graffiti captured on super saturated Kodachrome.
BABY DOLL 1982, 3 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
GIFT 2010, 6 min, Super 8mm & mixed media-to-digital
WATCH OUT! 2007, 3.5 min, Super 8mm & 16mm-to-digital
DIRTY 1993, 17 min, Super 8mm
INSTINCT: BITCHES SIDE 2007, 13 min, Super 8mm-to-digital
THE BUTTHOLE SURFERS 1986, 17 min, Super 8mm-to-digital. Digitized by Anthology Film Archives with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
GRAFFITI HALL OF FAME 1984, 7 min, Super 8mm-to-digital. Digitized by Anthology Film Archives with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
VIRGINIA TRIPPING FILM 1985, 17 min, Super 8mm-to-digital. Digitized by Anthology Film Archives with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Total running time: ca. 90 min.
–Thurs, July 30 at 7:30.
7
AFA PRESERVATIONS
OBJECTION
THE FALLEN WORLD
RE-VISIONS, CONT’D.
AUGUST:
MARJORIE KELLER
Born in 1950 in Yorktown, NY, Marjorie Keller was a leading scholar of experimental cinema and an accomplished filmmaker whose wondrously impressionistic film diaries record fragments of everyday life that she superlatively transformed through elliptical editing and contrapuntal sound design. Her work, as described by film theorist Robin Blaetz, “drew from her
rich domestic world to fashion gemlike renderings of the conflicts and challenges facing a feminist in the second half of the twentieth century.” In 1981, critic Amy Taubin praised her as
“perhaps the only major filmmaker that the American independent film has produced since the end of the Sixties.”
As an undergraduate at Tufts University in the late 1960s, Keller studied with filmmaker Saul Levine and participated in political demonstrations that would ultimately get her expelled
from college. Relocating to Chicago, Keller enrolled at the School of the Art Institute where she studied with Stan Brakhage who, along with fellow film artists like Marie Menken and
Gregory Markopoulos, would have a profound influence on her work. She later moved to NYC and received a PhD in film studies from NYU in 1983. Marrying fellow film scholar P. Adams
Sitney in 1986, Keller associated herself with groups like the Collective for Living Cinema and Film-Makers’ Cooperative while working as a professor at the University of Rhode Island
from 1975 until her unexpected death in 1994. Her body of work includes 27 films and the 1985 book THE UNTUTORED EYE: CHILDHOOD IN THE FILMS OF COCTEAU, CORNELL, AND
BRAKHAGE. She also authored an animated pop-up book called THE MOON ON THE PORCH (1986) and was in the midst of an unfinished work that was to trace the history of women
avant-garde filmmakers from pioneers like Germaine Dulac and Maya Deren to then-emerging artists such as Peggy Ahwesh and Su Friedrich.
In their day Keller’s films were exhibited across North America and Europe. Among Keller’s major films, SIX WINDOWS (1979) is a wistful meditation on her childhood and the world outside
her window, punctuated by dreamy dissolves and fades to black. In this and all of her best films, Keller’s “language is controlled, sophisticated, carefully worked out. Her imagery is a
mosaic of memories and present, both intermingling. The sensibility, primarily, is lyrical, with a good feeling for color and rhythm” (Jonas Mekas, SOHO NEWS).
THE OUTER CIRCLE 1973, 6.5 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the
National Film Preservation Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
A conversation in a hair salon….
OBJECTION 1974, 18 min, 16mm
Begun as a document for insurance purposes, OBJECTION catalogues the contents of a house with
ever-increasing horror. The soundtrack carries the voices and sounds of the family unseen.
SIX WINDOWS 1979, 7 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film
Preservation Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
“A pan and a dissolve make a window of a wall on film. A portrait of the filmmaker in a luminous
space, synthetically rendered via positive and negative overlays. […] I lived in some rooms by the sea
and watched the inside and the view as well as the window panes that divided and joined them. I was
often lost in thought. The birds would come and make a racket, reminding me I shared that space and
sky with them. The film is a moody record of that place and my peace of mind.” –M.K.
THE FALLEN WORLD 1983, 9 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
An elegy for a Newfoundland dog named Melville and a portrait of his owner.
HEREIN 1991, 30 min, 16mm
“If you put it on tape, you can’t erase it.” HEREIN charts the movement from political activism to
filmmaking through the metaphor of a dwelling. An FBI film obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Emma Goldman’s autobiography, the making of films on the Lower East Side in NYC, street
prostitution and drug addiction – all inflect the sense of place, space, and history.
Total running time: ca. 75 min.
–Thurs, Aug 20 at 7:30.
8
AFA PRESERVATIONS
CLOWN
A
POTATO PIECE
SEPTEMBER:
LUTHER PRICE – FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
A stand out figure amongst his peers, Luther Price’s images of beautiful decay live and die in an instant onscreen, evoking the fragile, ephemeral nature of both life and cinema itself.
Alternately iconoclastic and nostalgic, his films confront the specters of death, sex, and childhood trauma – psychic turmoil that is reflected in the spliced and scarred film stock he
employs. Born in 1962 in Marlboro, Massachusetts, the artist known as Luther Price earned a BFA in Sculpture and Media/Performing Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and
Design. After a near-death experience that involved accidentally being shot in Nicaragua, he made art under a variety of short-lived pseudonyms (including Fag, Brick, and Laija Brie)
before adopting the artistic persona of Tom Rhoads. Between 1987-89, Rhoads created at least eighteen Super 8mm films before being ceremoniously killed off in 1989 via a publicly
staged candy overdose. Luther Price soon emerged and achieved almost immediate notoriety with SODOM (1989), in which footage from hardcore gay porn is edited (with the help of a
hole-puncher) into a pulsating morass of writhing bodies, violent penetration, and faces contorted in agony and ecstasy. Critic and curator Ed Halter has called the result “a blasphemous
tour de force, a nightmare of unrepentant darkness that should rank with the best work of Kenneth Anger and Dario Argento.”
Price’s early Super 8mm films offer a window into his singularly captivating psyche. In these small gauge works he inhabits alter egos like the nightmarish harlequin of CLOWN (1992)
or the unhinged, Joan Crawford-esque drunk in the suicide melodrama A (1995). When multiple family members became ill with cancer in the late 1990s, Price channeled his grief
into domestic horror-shows like the ghostly HOME (1999), a haunted house of eerily flickering family photographs in which images from a child’s birthday party take on a diseased,
bloodless look. These painfully personal works took a psychic toll and led to him working with 16mm found footage in the early 2000s as “a way,” Price has written, “for me to still talk
about issues…but not destroy me.” Along with his continued cinematic pursuits over the last few years Price has been actively exhibiting his exquisite super-saturated 35mm slide
collages created from dirt, detritus, and decaying film stock.
These four programs focus on recent film and digital restorations undertaken by Anthology Film Archives and the Bard College Film and Electronic Arts Department. Our screenings
coincide with a Luther Price solo exhibition running from September 17-November 1 at Calicoon Fine Arts located at 49 Delancey St. Please visit callicoonfinearts.com for more info.
Special thanks to Photios Giovanis, Peggy Ahwesh, Tommy Aschenbach, and Ivy Swope of Film and Video Solutions.
PROGRAM 1:
PROGRAM 3:
restored by Anthology Film Archives with support from the Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual Arts.
1988, 30 min, Super 8mm-to-16mm. Preserved by the Bard College Film & Electronic Arts Department with support from the National
Film Preservation Foundation.
JELLYFISH SANDWICH 1994, 17 min, Super 8mm-to-digital. Digitally
CLOWN 1991/2002, 30 min, Super 8mm-to-digital. Digitally restored by
Anthology Film Archives with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for
the Visual Arts.
CLOWN exists in two different versions; we will screen the longer
revised edit made by Price in 2002.
HOME 1999, 13 min, Super 8mm-to-16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film
Archives with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
SODOM 1989, 21 min, Super 8mm-to-16mm. Brand new print made with
support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Total running time: ca. 85 min.
–Fri, Sept 18 at 8:00.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PROGRAM 2:
A
1995, 60 min, Super 8mm-to-digital. Digitally restored by Anthology Film
Archives with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
As ravenously beautiful as anything that he has ever made, this
unforgettable Super 8 mini-epic stars the filmmaker in a totally
committed performance that resulted in Price almost accidentally
asphyxiating himself during filming.
“A is a relentlessly rancid alcoholic and drug-induced journey
through which Edie, a washed-up and broken movie starlet finds
herself alone and ugly with only glittering memories of her silver
past.” –L.P.
–Sat, Sept 19 at 8:00.
GREEN
The filmmaker inhabits a variety of personas both male and female as necrotic images of death and deterioration are set to a chirpy, 70s AM radio soundtrack.
WARM BROTH
1988, 36 min, Super 8mm-to-16mm. Preserved by the Bard College Film & Electronic Arts Department with support from the National
Film Preservation Foundation.
A pull-string voice and dead-eyed dolls, home movies and the occasional shot of sexual penetration. Like much
of Price’s work, the WARM BROTH is at once unsettling and heart-tuggingly poignant.
Total running time: ca. 70 min.
–Sun, Sept 20 at 6:30.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PROGRAM 4: VIDEOS AND DOCUMENTS
While Price may be best known these days for his complexly edited films and 35mm slide works, he has always
been equally invested in performance, whether staged for a camera or in front of an unsuspecting audience.
This program gathers together early video productions like TOTALLY HOT (1986-87) and HOPELESSLY DEVOTED
(1986), along with selected documentation of memorable, if not scandalous performances such as MEAT (1992)
and GLITTER FAT FASHION MAGGOT (2000). Tonight’s show will be an eclectic mix specially prepared by Price
for the occasion.
Titles to be included:
POTATO PIECE (1986)
SHIT RAGS (1986)
HOPELESSLY DEVOTED (1986)
BETTER HOMES AND GARDENS (1986)
TOTALLY HOT (1986-87)
RAIN N SHINE ROCK OPERA (1989)
MEAT (1992)
GLITTER FAT FASHION MAGGOT (2000)
–Sun, Sept 20 at 8:30.
9
RETROSPECTIVES
BEYOND THE LAW
I, A MAN
WHEN IRISH EYES ARE WASTED:
A TRIBUTE TO TOM BAKER
August 1-2
The narrative of “The Sixties” is a complicated affair populated by myriad heroic, doomed, and mythic characters. Among the
most mercurial was actor, director, and writer Tom Baker (1940-82). A member of Lee Strasberg’s Theatre and Film Institute,
Baker’s place in the underground history of the world was assured after being cast as the lead actor in Andy Warhol’s I, A MAN
(1967) where, alongside would-be Warhol assassin Valerie Solanas, he cast the Platonic screen image of the sharp-featured,
fast-talking, Irish hustler. Contracted to Universal Studios, Baker initially tried his luck in Hollywood, where he soon embarked
on an affair with Pamela Courson, then-girlfriend (and future wife) of Doors lead singer Jim Morrison. Not one to hold a grudge,
Morrison saw a kindred spirit in Baker and the two became fast friends (and notorious drinking buddies), their relationship
immortalized years later by Oliver Stone in his bio-pic THE DOORS (1991), with Michael Madsen portraying Baker.
Returning to New York in early 1967, Baker appeared alongside George Plimpton in Norman Mailer’s second feature BEYOND
THE LAW (1968), and, for the next ten years, juggled multiple addictions while making semi-regular appearances on television
and in exploitation films like HALLUCINATION GENERATION (1967) and ANGELS DIE HARD (1970). His most curious endeavor,
however, was BONGO WOLF’S REVENGE (1970), a ‘lost’ featurette he produced and directed set against the demimonde of
the Sunset Strip. Baker would go on to write scripts, including an unproduced screenplay with Chet Baker, and became, for a
period in the 1970s and early 1980s, one of the East Village’s most charismatic residents.
Baker was a friend and mentor to many, and Anthology Film Archives is pleased to pay tribute to him with a trio of screenings,
which will include the recently re-discovered BONGO WOLF’S REVENGE and a unique, 35mm print of Mailer’s BEYOND THE
LAW. –Michael Chaiken
Presented in collaboration with the Post-Literate Press. Special thanks to Michael Chaiken, Jeffrey Jampol, Eric Liknaitzky, Frank Lisciandro, Michael
Mailer, James Marshall, Legs McNeil, Frazer Pennebaker, and the British Film Institute.
Andy Warhol
Norman Mailer
1967, 97 min, 16mm
1968, 100 min, 35mm, b&w. Unique archival 35mm print courtesy of The Norman Mailer Estate.
I, A MAN
BEYOND THE LAW
After the success of Warhol’s MY
HUSTLER (1965), New York’s Hudson
Theater asked Andy Warhol to make
another feature film to capitalize on
the emerging ‘sexploitation’ market.
Inspired by the popular Swedish
import I, A WOMAN, released in the
U.S. the previous year, I, A MAN follows Baker in a series of amorous
encounters that, comically, never
manage to reach consummation.
The film stars Nico, Ultra Violet,
and Valerie Solanas, who agreed
to appear in the film after offering
Warhol the script for her film UP
YOUR ASS, which Warhol, fatefully,
claimed he had lost when she asked
for it back. I, A MAN was to star Jim
Morrison, who agreed to play the
lead, but after The Doors’ management discouraged it, The Lizard King
suggested Baker.
Norman Mailer’s belief that we’re all capable of being either cop or crook was the
impetus for his second feature, which takes place over the course of one feverish
night in a Manhattan police precinct and neighboring bar. The texture of the blackand-white stock coupled with D.A. Pennebaker’s cinematography offers a sweaty,
intense depiction of the police lineup, lending the film a rugged, documentary feel
years before realist ‘cop shows’ became a television fixture. In addition to Mailer, who
cast himself as tough-guy Irish cop Francis Xavier Pope, BEYOND THE LAW features
Rip Torn, poet Michael McClure, George Plimpton, and Baker in the role of one of the
precinct’s nightly catches.
–Sat, Aug 1 at 7:30.
10
Preceded by:
Tom Baker
BONGO WOLF’S REVENGE
1970, 50 min, 35mm-to-digital, b&w
Bongo Wolf, born William Donald Grollman, was a mythic, eccentric creature living on
the fringes of 1960s Hollywood. Walking with a severe limp after having fallen down
a sidewalk elevator shaft, Bongo trolled The Strip sporting fake porcelain vampire
fangs, a pageboy haircut, and trademark bongo drums. His greatest ambition was
to become a werewolf, fulfilled in part with the help of Baker in this ‘day in the life’
portrait. Featuring rock singer P.J. Proby, guitarist Michael Bloomfield, singer-songwriter Jim Ford, and a variety of groupies, hangers-on, and other bloodless vampire
creatures descended from the Hollywood Hills, the film has the distinction of being
shot by The Doors filmmaking team of Paul Ferrara, Babe Hill, and Frank Lisciandro
(FEAST OF FRIENDS, HWY: AN AMERICAN PASTORAL). Unseen for decades, this new
digital transfer was made from a recently discovered work-print in the archives of the
British Film Institute.
–Sun, Aug 2 at 7:30.
TABLE OF LOVE
EDGAR REITZ
September 8-10
On the occasion of our week-long premiere run of
his new film, HOME FROM HOME (the continuation of
his monumental HEIMAT saga), we present a weekend of earlier works by Edgar Reitz, a key figure in
postwar German cinema. As one of the signatories
of the Oberhausen Manifesto – the group statement
delivered in 1962 that was intended to shake up a
contemporary German commercial cinema that the
signers perceived as tired and aesthetically bankrupt
– Reitz was part of the generation of filmmakers who
helped create the New German Cinema movement,
fostering the rise of auteurs like Fassbinder, Werner
Herzog, and Volker Schlöndorff. After directing a number of remarkable short films throughout the 1950s
and 60s, he joined forces with Alexander Kluge and
others to found the first German film school, the Institut für Filmgestaltung in Ulm, where he taught until
it was closed in 1968. He collaborated with Kluge
on several films as well, shooting YESTERDAY GIRL
(1965-66) and later co-directing THE MIDDLE OF THE
ROAD IS A VERY DEAD END (1974).
Though not as well known in the U.S. as some of his
New German Cinema peers, Reitz is legendary in
Germany and among cognoscenti, above all for his
series of HEIMAT films. Beginning in 1984 with the
15-plus hour HEIMAT: A CHRONICLE OF GERMANY,
this series has grown to comprise three multi-episode
series and two shorter (but still epic) feature films,
all of which add up to a total running time of more
than 50 hours. Tracing the history of Germany from
the early 19th century to the present day, HEIMAT is a
towering achievement.
While the HEIMAT films have seen distribution in the
U.S., as well as home-video releases, Reitz’s other
films are virtually unknown here. In an attempt to
begin to remedy that, we will be highlighting two of
his feature films from the 1960s and 70s, as well
as presenting a selection of his short films, whose
mastery of documentary and avant-garde techniques
demonstrate Reitz’s astonishing versatility.
The Edgar Reitz program is co-presented with the GoetheInstitut New York, and organized with the assistance of Corinth
Films; special thanks to Wenzel Bilger & Sara Stevenson
(Goethe-Institut New York) and John Poole Jr. (Corinth Films),
and to Sylvia Edelmann (ARRI Media).
RETROSPECTIVES
ZERO HOUR
TABLE OF LOVE / MAHLZEITEN
1967, 94 min, 35mm, b&w. In German with English subtitles.
“Photography student Elisabeth meets idealistic medical student Rolf. She’s interested in everything he does; they go on outings together and feel like they’re at
the beginning of a great, romantic love story. Children soon follow, one after the
other; Rolf gives up his studies and tries his hand at various menial professions.
It is a marriage that ‘consumes’ the husband, so to speak – ‘Rolf gives his whole
life to Elizabeth and receives children and poetic thoughts of love in return,’ as the
production notes put it. ‘TABLE OF LOVE presents in exemplary manner the extent
to which the male directors of the New German Cinema were fascinated by strong,
vital female characters full of life, while the male characters were usually held back
by navel-gazing or lachrymosity.’ (Thomas Kramer)” –ARSENAL
–Tues, Sept 8 at 6:45 and Wed, Sept 9 at 9:15.
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ZERO HOUR / STUNDE NULL
1977, 108 min, 35mm, b&w. In German with English subtitles.
ZERO HOUR takes place in a village outside Leipzig in 1945, in a Germany decimated
by the war and just beginning the long process of reconstruction. With the U.S. Army
having left and the Red Army preparing to take over, the village’s inhabitants are
forced to adapt to their new circumstances. Young Joschi, a former member of the
Hitler Youth, decides to go over to the Americans, but first he’s determined to find
the money and jewelry that he knows was hidden in the local graveyard by a Nazi
officer. Together with the beautiful Isa, with whom he’s fallen in love, the two plot to
escape, only to find themselves falling prey to the chaos of postwar Germany and
the abuses of both the Soviet and American forces. ZERO HOUR is a powerful and
penetrating portrait of a society convulsed by the consequences of war.
–Tues, Sept 8 at 9:15 and Thurs, Sept 10 at 6:30.
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SHORT FILM PROGRAM:
Though Reitz is best known for creating HEIMAT, the longest film in the history
of the cinema, his short films rank among the greatest of his works. They range
from deeply perceptive, finely crafted documentaries about the production of cotton
(COTTON) and about the vanished culture of the Maya (YUCATAN), to an impressionistic paean to the unprecedented speed of movement in the modern world
(SPEED – CINEMA ONE), to the truly extraordinary achievement that is COMMUNICATION: commissioned by the German post office, this masterpiece of avant-garde
filmmaking is a rapidly edited, associative, purely visual essay on mechanical and
electronic forms of communication that depicts the world of modern technology as
a profoundly dystopic one.
COTTON / BAUMWOLLE 1959-60, 40 min, 35mm
YUCATAN 1959-60, 11 min, 35mm, b&w
COMMUNICATION / KOMMUNIKATION – TECHNIK DER VERSTÄNDIGUNG
1961, 11 min, 35mm
SPEED – CINEMA ONE / GESCHWINDIGKEIT – KINO EINS 1962-63, 13 min, 35mm, b&w
THE CHILDREN / DIE KINDER 1966, 11 min, 35mm, b&w
SUSANNE DANCES / SUSANNE TANZT 1979, 17 min, 35mm, b&w
Total running time: ca. 105 min.
–Wed, Sept 9 at 6:45 and Thurs, Sept 10 at 9:15.
ACT OF VIOLENCE
ROBERT RYAN:
AN ACTOR’S ACTOR
Sept 4-10
Robert Ryan (1909-73) started out in movies as a handsome Irish-American good
guy, but that all changed with his Oscar-nominated performance as a fearsome
anti-Semitic murderer in the film noir CROSSFIRE (1947). Over the next 25 years
Ryan created a series of malevolent characters in noirs, westerns, and war movies,
his services prized by such directors as Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, Jacques Tourneur,
Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, and Anthony Mann. Ryan may be best remembered now
as the vain army colonel in THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967) or the guilt-ridden bounty hunter
in THE WILD BUNCH (1969), yet he was an artist of great range and sensitivity; shortly
before his death he gave a moving performance as the disillusioned anarchist in John
Frankenheimer’s screen adaptation of THE ICEMAN COMETH. No less than Martin
Scorsese has called Ryan “one of the greatest actors in the history of American film.”
On the occasion of the publication of THE LIVES OF ROBERT RYAN, a remarkable
new biography of the actor by J.R. Jones, film critic for the Chicago Reader, we’ll be
presenting this mini-retrospective showcasing some of the Chicago-born performer’s
most arresting performances. Ryan left an indelible mark on noir playing a lonely,
violent cop in Nicholas Ray’s ON DANGEROUS GROUND and a traumatized former
POW in Fred Zinnemann’s ACT OF VIOLENCE. He lit up two classic 50s westerns,
as the chuckling, philosophical killer in Anthony Mann’s THE NAKED SPUR and the
sinister rancher in John Sturges’s BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK. But Ryan had a tender
side too: he shines as the wealthy gentleman in Daniel Mann’s poignant romance
ABOUT MRS. LESLIE and as the crazed country patriarch in Anthony Mann’s comedy
GOD’S LITTLE ACRE.
Select screenings will feature live discussions with the actor’s son Cheyney
Ryan, professor of law and philosophy at University of Oregon and Oxford
University, and J.R. Jones, the author of THE LIVES OF ROBERT RYAN.
Special thanks to Cheyney Ryan and J.R. Jones, as well as to Cassie Blake (Academy Film Archive);
Jack Durwood (Paramount); Kristie Nakamura & Nicki Woods (WB); and Todd Wiener & Steven Hill
(UCLA Film & Television Archive).
Fred Zinnemann
ACT OF VIOLENCE
1948, 82 min, 35mm, b&w. With Ryan, Van Helfin, Janet Leigh, and Mary Astor.
Frank Enley (Van Heflin) is a pillar of the community in his small Southern California
town, but then a bus from NYC brings an unwelcome visitor: Joe Parkson (Ryan), who
knows Enley’s dirty little secret from their days together in a German POW camp.
Originally intended for Gregory Peck and Humphrey Bogart, this sun-washed noir
from MGM was shot immediately after Ryan’s great success in CROSSFIRE, and he
contributes one of his most iconic performances, limping around in a trenchcoat and
fedora as he thirsts for vengeance.
–Fri, Sept 4 at 7:00, Sun, Sept 6 at 4:15, and Tues, Sept 8 at
9:00.
–continues on page 12–
11
RETROSPECTIVES / ONGOING SERIES
ON DANGEROUS GROUND
BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK
ROBERT RYAN, CONT’D.
Nicholas Ray
John Sturges
1951, 82 min, 35mm, b&w. With Ryan, Ida Lupino, Ward Bond, and Ed Begley.
1955, 81 min, 35mm. With Ryan, Spencer Tracy,
Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin, Anne Francis, Dean
Jagger, and Walter Brennan.
ON DANGEROUS GROUND
Ryan gives one of his most unsettling performances in this eerily
romantic thriller. Jim Wilson (Ryan) is a seething police detective in a
hellish city of drunks, thieves, B-girls, and hustlers. After beating one
suspect too many, he is banished to the mountains to investigate
a child murder and, accompanied by the victim’s vengeful father,
winds up at the door of a beautiful blind woman (Ida Lupino) whose
brother may be the culprit. Critics were quick to note the dichotomy
between the noirish city sequences of the first half hour and the
achingly white imagery of the snow-covered Rockies in the second
part; the same duality applies to Ryan’s performance, which begins
in anger but ends in longing and repentance.
–Fri, Sept 4 at 9:00, Mon, Sept 7 at 7:00, and
Thurs, Sept 10 at 7:00.
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Anthony Mann
THE NAKED SPUR
1953, 91 min, 35mm. With Ryan, James Stewart, Janet Leigh, Ralph Meeker,
and Millard Mitchell.
Ryan was exceedingly proud of his performance in this noirish western, which gave him a chance to work opposite James Stewart. A
determined bounty hunter (Stewart) succeeds in capturing a murderer at large (Ryan) and his young compatriot (Janet Leigh), but as
he and his partners transport them across the mountains to justice,
the wily killer begins sowing seeds of discontent. Shooting in the
San Juan Mountains in Colorado, director Anthony Mann constructs
a harrowing physical journey for his characters, though his ultimate
focus is the moral and psychological battle between the hunter
and his prey. Ryan’s outlaw is one of his craftiest, most eccentric
characters, a crackerbarrel comedian who can turn vicious as a
rattlesnake.
–Sat, Sept 5 at 4:30, Mon, Sept 7 at 9:00, and
Wed, Sept 9 at 7:00.
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Daniel Mann
ABOUT MRS. LESLIE
1954, 104 min, 16mm, b&w. Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive. With
Ryan and Shirley Booth.
Ever mindful of being typecast, Ryan gave a marvelously understated performance as a shy business executive in this affecting
women’s picture. Shirley Booth had just won an Oscar as the dumpy
wife in Daniel Mann’s COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA; for this follow-up
Mann cast Booth as the good-hearted owner of a New York rooming house who enjoys a warm but painful affair with a prominent
executive, played by Ryan. Adapted from a novel by Vina Delmar, the
story was bowdlerized by Paramount Pictures to satisfy the Production Code Administration, but even in its diminished form it tells an
affecting tale of two lovers who are forced to wait, until time finally
runs out.
–Sat, Sept 5 at 6:45 and Thurs, Sept 10 at 9:00.
12
BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK
Nothing much happens in the tiny western
town of Black Rock, until one day the Silverliner train unexpectedly slows to a halt
and delivers a one-armed stranger (Tracy)
who’s come looking for a local Japanese
farmer. No one in town wants to help him,
and the resident boss man (Ryan) orders
his crew of thugs (including Borgnine and
Lee Marvin) to lean on the visitor. A western mystery with contemporary political
overtones, this was the sort of socially conscious entertainment Ryan couldn’t resist,
and he invests a relatively simple heavy
with an intelligence that brings the man to
frightening life.
–Sat, Sept 5 at 9:15,
Sun, Sept 6 at 9:00, and
Tues, Sept 8 at 7:00.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anthony Mann
GOD’S LITTLE ACRE
1958, 118 min, 35mm, b&w. Restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. With
Ryan, Aldo Ray, Buddy Hackett, Tina Louise, Jack
Lord, Vic Morrow, and Michael Landon.
Erskine Caldwell’s 1933 best-seller GOD’S
LITTLE ACRE had long been considered too
sexy for the screen, but a quarter century
after its publication the book was finally
adapted by independent producers Philip
Yordan and Sidney Harmon as part of a
three-picture profit-participation deal with
Ryan. The actor’s agent begged him not
to play Ty Ty Walden, the elderly Georgia
farmer who’s spent years digging up his
land in search of buried gold, but Ryan
ignored him. Buddy Hackett is the whining
political candidate Pluto Swint, and both
he and Ryan give rollicking comic performances.
–Sun, Sept 6 at 6:15 and
Wed, Sept 9 at 9:00.
LILITH
BEYOND
CASSAVETES:
LOST LEGENDS OF THE NEW YORK FILM
WORLD (1945-70)
In-between Hollywood and the emerging cinematic underground, New York in the 1950s and 60s was home to a littleknown but vibrant feature film industry. Beyond bigger names
like John Cassavetes and Morris Engel, scores of hopeful, independent filmmakers cobbled together low-budget productions
with few prospects for critical or commercial success. From
waterfront wise guys to Village beatniks, from film noir to existential comedies, ‘Made in New York’ signified a quirky, vibrant,
indie aesthetic that in many ways laid the foundation for later
New York-based auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Abel Ferrara, Jim
Jarmusch, and Spike Lee, among others. This ongoing series
will expose and explore New York’s pioneering contributions to
the low-budget independent feature.
Introduced by series curator Michael Bowen, Adjunct
Lecturer at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Robert Rossen
LILITH
1964, 114 min, 35mm, b&w. With Warren Beatty, Jean Seberg, Peter Fonda,
Kim Hunter, Anne Meacham, Jessica Walter, and Gene Hackman.
Dogged by rumors of on-set friction, then summarily withdrawn from the Venice Film Festival after nasty comments
by the festival’s director, LILITH is one of those marvelously
fractured and unrepeatable little films so typical of New York
production in the Sixties. Directed by Hollywood blacklistee
Robert Rossen (whose previous feature, THE HUSTLER, had
also been lensed entirely in New York), the majority of the film
was shot at the newly opened Meyerberg Studio on Long Island
(the first feature shot there), as well as on the vacant ‘Killingworth’ estate in Lattingtown. Warren Beatty gets top billing, but
it’s Peter Fonda and an astonishingly demonic Jean Seberg, as
denizens of an elite psychiatric hospital, who steal the show. A
bewitching meditation on madness and sexuality, and certainly
Rossen’s most personal effort, LILITH typifies the kind of edgy,
off-center spirit that seemed to infect even studio-backed New
York features.
Plus: As a special bonus, a rarely-seen, 8-minute,
behind-the-scenes documentary on the production of
LILITH will be screened following the feature.
–Fri, July 17 and Sat, July 18 at 7:30 each
night.
ONGOING SERIES
THE LIVES OF HAMILTON FISH
L’EYE
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 long-established 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 artist and songwriter Rachel Mason, who will present her singular “cinematic rock opera performance” THE LIVES OF HAMILTON FISH; Xander
Marro, multi-media artist and co-founder of the feminist art collective, Dirt Palace, in Providence, RI; and South Korean-raised, Cambridge, MA-based filmmaker, Soon-Mi Yoo, who
will present a program of short films in conjunction with our week-long run of her new feature-length essay film, SONGS FROM THE NORTH.
JULY:
AUGUST:
THE LIVES OF HAMILTON FISH
“Xander Marro (American b. 1975) has been living the good life in the feminist sub-underground for too
many years to count on her long bony fingers. She draws pictures (usually narrative), makes movies (usually
not narrative), produces plays with elaborate sets and costumes (usually narrative, but confusing), and then
makes stuff like quilts and dioramas (probably narrative?). Her work is often about spiritual relationships to the
material stuff of this world. Co-founder of the Dirt Palace in 2000 AD (feminist cupcake-encrusted netherworld
located along the dioxin filled banks of the Woonasquatucket River, which is to say in Providence, RI, USA). Her
studio (and heart) is there still.” –X.M.
RACHEL MASON
2014, 70 min, digital video and live performance
A unique and inspired combination of moving image and
live performance, visual artist, songwriter, and singer
Rachel Mason’s THE LIVES OF HAMILTON FISH is a cinematic meditation on American history whose story is
told entirely through song. The departure point for the film
was Mason’s discovery, while teaching art at Sing Sing
prison in upstate NY, of a very strange coincidence: on
January 16, 1936, the Peekskill Evening Star News published notices on its front page of the unrelated deaths of
two men, both named Hamilton Fish. Though united by
their shared name, these two were otherwise from vastly
different worlds: Hamilton Fish II was a descendant of one
of the most prominent families on the East Coast, while
Hamilton “Albert” Fish was a serial killer.
For THE LIVES OF HAMILTON FISH, Mason, in drag, plays
the Peekskill Evening Star’s editor, as well as voicing all
the characters in the film, via songs that suggest American murder ballads with a Brechtian twist. Intercutting
scenes filmed at Sing Sing and at the Morris-Jumel
Mansion in upper Manhattan, with others playing out on
fabricated sets imagined as abstract paintings, Mason
conjures up a new kind of multimedia storytelling to
weave a tale in which supernatural events and historic
facts merge in a wild, musical journey.
“A work of artistic and intellectual genius.” –Phil Hall,
FILM THREAT
“An unsettling meditation on the nature of fate and the
sanctity of individual identity.” –Jon Gartenberg, TRIBECA
FILM FESTIVAL
Mason will be appearing at Joe’s Pub at the Public
Theater on Sunday, July 26, for a special concert version
(songs only) of THE LIVES OF HAMILTON FISH; for more
info, visit: www.publictheater.org
–Tues, July 21 at 7:30.
XANDER MARRO
“Marro is an artist, community activist, performer and filmmaker ‘steeped in the underground’ of Providence,
RI. As co-founder of the Dirt Palace, a feminist art collective, Marro is equally diverse in her artistic practices.
Her work ranges from printmaking to puppetry to performance to film animation and installation and is loosely
gathered under a distinctive sensibility that has been described as ‘a blend of girly Victorian dreaming, Monty
Python cartoons, Russian onion domes, beehive hairdos, Pee Wee’s Playhouse, Barbarella, and Dr. Seuss’
(Greg Cook, Boston Pheonix).
Marro’s work is generally low-tech and handmade and embedded with a community of collective art-making.
Typically using arcane pieces of visual culture to create strange and fantastic worlds, this almost Luddite
approach presents an alternative to today’s fast-paced media-driven environments.” –Dina Deitsch, DECORDOVA SCULPTURE PARK AND MUSEUM
THE JOURNEY 2002, 8 min, 16mm-to-video. Soundtrack: Xander Marro
SPELL CASTING MISHAPS VOLUME 1 2011, 1 min, video. Soundtrack: Amil Byleckie
FLYING CATS OF THE STARS 2012, 5 min, video. Soundtrack: Suckdog
QUILT MOVIE 2014, 4 min, 16mm-to-video. Soundtrack: Jeremy Harris
THE PATTERN OF RITUAL 2005, 8 min, 16mm, with live soundtrack. Soundtrack: Xander Marro.
L’EYE 2001, 2 min, 16mm. Soundtrack: Carley Ptak.
BORN TO NEVER THROW ANYTHING AWAY 2009, 4 min, 16mm. Soundtrack: Xander Marro (drum track) Natalja
Kent (Guitar track at end), Amil Byleckie (Synth track at beginning).
THE CHEMICAL BATH (L’EYE V.2) 2001, 6 min, hand-processed 16mm. Soundtrack: Xander Marro & Mat Brinkman
(warping The Shirelles & Suicidal Tendencies).
ISEMOND 2006, 17.5 min, 16mm. Made in collaboration with Mat Brinkman. Soundtrack: Xander Marro & Mat Brinkman.
THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF LADY LONG ARMS IN THE LAND OF LOVE 2004, 11 min, 16mm.
Soundtrack: Xander Marro & Mat Brinkman.
0106 2006, 12 min, 16mm. Made in collaboration with Mat Brinkman. Soundtrack: Xander Marro.
Total runing time: ca. 80 min.
–Thurs, Aug 6 at 7:30.
–continues on page 14–
13
ONGOING SERIES
ssitkim: talking to the dead
UNESSENTIAL CINEMA
ISM ISM
SHOW & TELL, CONT’D.
SEPTEMBER:
SOON-MI YOO
“The lyrical short films of Soon-Mi Yoo give haunting life to the fleeting shadows and ghosts of Korean
history, using avant-garde forms to open unwritten
chapters from her country’s traumatic past. Yoo’s
early training as a still photographer and time studying under experimental filmmakers Saul Levine and
Mark LaPore clearly inform her poetic and essayistic
approaches. Yoo’s films seek a different kind of
moving image, one able to render vivid the deep
emotional resonance of the past. Yoo’s spellbinding
DANGEROUS SUPPLEMENT makes remarkable use of
footage from American fighter planes bombing North
Korea to capture the dark sublimity of war through
fragmentary landscapes that tip away as soon as they
appear, haunting us with afterimages of beauty and
destruction. The ghosts and ghostly memories of war
are also the subject of ssitkim: talking to the dead,
which courageously takes on the taboo and long suppressed subject of South Korea’s collaboration with
the American war against Vietnam. Fiercely contesting any notion of cinema as a tool for the smooth narrativization of official histories, ssitkim interweaves
the incontestable facts of the Vietnam War with the
dreams and supernatural visions of its victims.” –
Haden Guest, HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE
ssitkim: talking to the dead
2004, 35 min, video, b&w/color. In English, Korean, and Vietnamese with English subtitles.
This film explores the dark legacy of the mass Vietnamese civilian killings committed by South Korean
soldiers from sizable Korean forces who fought for
hire for the U.S. from 1965-73. Calmly reexamining
aural and visual evidence of the little-known war
crime, Yoo’s poetic essay film bravely uncovers layers of personal and historical memory, tracing the
physical and psychological scars of the trauma and
discovering a means of history able to speak to the
still-living spirits of the dead.
DANGEROUS SUPPLEMENT
2006, 14.5 min, video, b&w/color
Most of the archival material in this film comes from
U.S. military footage shot during the Korean War. The
film originated from the questions: Is it possible to
see the landscape of the past even though it was
first seen by the other’s murderous gaze? Did the
mountains and the waters manage to escape it?
DANGEROUS SUPPLEMENT is an incomplete index for
memory, a substitute for a vision that is yet to exist.
–Sat, Sept 19 at 5:15.
14
UNESSENTIAL CINEMA: HIPPIE PARANOIA?
Edward Snowden isn’t the first whistleblower to warn us that big brother is watching. To prove this point, tonight’s edition
of UNESSENTIAL CINEMA presents a hairy array of conspiracy and agitprop films made by camera-wielding outsiders.
Trippy and dippy, paranoid and prophetic, the hippies and weirdoes who made these far out flicks were more or less onto
something…or at least smoking something.
Chris Bedford COMMITTEE TO END GOVERNMENT SPYING 1981, 30 min, 16mm-to-digital
Patricia Amlin THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE IS GREATER THAN THE MAN’S TECHNOLOGY 1969, 3 min, 16mm
Richard Merciez AMERICA SINGS 1976, 9 min, 16mm
Harry Weisburd PENTAGON PROTEST 1967, 13 min, 16mm
Kevin Rafferty PRESIDENT NIXON’S INAUGURATION DAY ADDRESS 1969, 8 min, 16mm
Michael Klein SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY 1967, 11 min, 16mm
Total running time: ca. 80 min.
FREE FOR AFA MEMBERS!
–Wed, Aug 12 at 7:30.
WHITE CUBE / BLACK BOX
Bridging the gap between the white walls of the gallery and the immersive darkness of a movie theater, Anthology’s ongoing
series WHITE CUBE / BLACK BOX seeks to create a dialogue between films made by visual artists – with a focus on historical
works that continue to go largely unseen in cinema spaces – and works by experimental filmmakers.
Curated by Ava Tews.
EAST COAST / WEST COAST
This program takes as its point of departure the first video collaboration between artists Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt,
EAST COAST, WEST COAST, a satirical dialogue that pits artist stereotypes against each other. Holt plays the New York
conceptual artist who relies on systems and theoretical outlines, in contrast to her West Coast counterpart, the laid-back,
organic-obsessed Californian artist played by Smithson. While Holt argues for systems-based thinking Smithson rambles on
about the value of intuitive, experience-based knowledge over philosophies; as Holt urges him to participate in a dialogue
and struggles to define him – she settles on “mystical pragmatist” – Smithson retorts that the exchange is a “bad trip”
and asks, “Why don’t you just feel things?” While the repartee reflects the stereotypes of the late 60s, the work remains
funny – and perhaps familiar – today.
In true East Coast form, this program follows the proposed conceptual framework of the bi-coastal divide. SWAMP, a masterful study of perception that also manages to entertain, shows how these two East Coast artists deal with putting themselves
(literally) right up against nature. Marie Menken’s GO! GO! GO! presents the dizzying speed of NYC in gorgeous time-lapse,
while Henry Hills’s rhythmic spectacle RADIO ADIOS ups the speed and adds sound to catapult the viewer into the theoryheavy New York intellectual scene. Manuel DeLanda’s ISM ISM makes Manhattan its canvas by taking its own advice to use
“illegal surfaces for your art.” Delanda creates collages, reminiscent of Hannah Hoch’s work, directly on cigarette ads, and
intercuts shots of his spray-painted adages.
Representing the West Coast, and echoing Smithson’s performed California cliché that as an artist he “just goes out and looks
at the clouds,” Gary Beydler’s HAND HELD MIRROR shows us both the east and the west simultaneously, with a handheld
mirror creating a striking frame within a frame.
Robert Smithson & Nancy Holt EAST COAST, WEST COAST 1969, 22 min, video, b&w
Robert Smithson & Nancy Holt SWAMP 1971, 6 min, 16mm
Marie Menken GO! GO! GO! 1964, 12 min, 16mm, silent
Henry Hills RADIO ADIOS 1982, 11 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation
for the Visual Arts and the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Manuel DeLanda ISM ISM 1979, 8 min, Super 8mm-to-16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the Andy
Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Gary Beydler HAND HELD DAY 1975, 6 min, 16mm, silent
Total running time: ca. 70 min.
–Thurs, Sept 17 at 7:30.
8:30 Ford 3 GODFATHERS,
p 21
7:30 Mortezai MACONDO,
p 31
5:00 EC: Frampton PGM, p 2
4:45 Kubrick BARRY
LYNDON, p 21
26
14
7
TUESDAY
15
6:00 NEWFILMMAKERS,
p 32
8
6:00 NEWFILMMAKERS,
p 32
1
WEDNESDAY
16
9
2
THURSDAY
11
4
SATURDAY
17
18
6:45 & 9:00 Brüggemann 4:30, 6:45 & 9:00
STATIONS OF THE CROSS,
Brüggemann STATIONS
p5
OF THE CROSS, p 5
10
3
FRIDAY
20
7:30 Sirk SIGN OF THE
PAGAN, p 21
27
6:00 NEWFILMMAKERS,
p 32
22
28
9:00 La Cava FEEL MY
PULSE, p 21
7:30 RE-VISIONS: Tessa
Hughes-Freeland PGM,
p7
7:15 La Cava FEEL MY
PULSE, p 21
30
7:15 Whale KISS BEFORE
THE MIRROR, p 21
8:45 Whale KISS BEFORE
THE MIRROR, p 21
7:30 Mortezai MACONDO,
p 31
7:00 Ford 3 GODFATHERS,
p 21
24
9:15 Coppola DEMENTIA 13,
p 24
7:30 EC: Hanoun UNE
SIMPLE HISTOIRE, p 2
7:00 Gilbert BLOOD AND
LACE, p 23
31
9:00 Chamberlain BRAND X, 9:15 Sirk SIGN OF THE
p 18
PAGAN, p 21
8:00 Araki THE DOOM
GENERATION, p 30
7:00 Carey WORLD’S
GREATEST SINNER, p 19
23
6:00 NEWFILMMAKERS,
p 32
29
7:30 SHOW & TELL: Mason
6:45 Isou VENOM AND
LIVES OF HAMILTON FISH,
ETERNITY, p 19
p 13
9:15 Murch RETURN TO OZ,
9:15 Schiller NOTHING
p 19
LASTS FOREVER, p 18
7:00 Guercio ELECTRA
GLIDE IN BLUE, p 19
21
5:00 Ulmer THE AMAZING
TRANSPARENT MAN, p 24
5:30 EC: Crockwell/Grant/
Jacobs & Fleischner
PGM, p 2
6:45 Bava BLACK SABBATH,
p 24
7:30 Warhol I, A MAN, p 10
9:00 Scorsese BOXCAR
BERTHA, p 24
AUGUST 1
7:30 Mortezai MACONDO,
p 31
7:15 Kubrick BARRY
LYNDON, p 21
25
5:00 Macpherson
6:45 & 9:00 Brüggemann 6:45 & 9:00 Brüggemann 6:00 NEWFILMMAKERS,
6:45 & 9:00 Brüggemann 7:00 Chamberlain BRAND X,
BORDERLINE, p 19
STATIONS OF THE CROSS,
STATIONS OF THE CROSS,
p 32
STATIONS OF THE CROSS,
p 18
5:30 EC: Flaherty NANOOK
p5
p5
p5
OF THE NORTH, p 2
6:45 & 9:00 Brüggemann
7:30 BEYOND CASSAVETES: 6:30 Murch RETURN TO OZ,
STATIONS OF THE CROSS, 7:15 Schiller NOTHING
Rossen LILITH, p 12
p 19
p5
LASTS FOREVER, p 18
7:30 BEYOND CASSAVETES:
9:15 Isou VENOM AND
Rossen LILITH, p 12
9:15 Lambert ANOTHER SKY,
ETERNITY, p 19
p 18
9:00 Carey WORLD’S
GREATEST SINNER, p 19
13
6
MONDAY
7:15 Macpherson
BORDERLINE, p 19
5:30 EC: Flaherty MAN OF
ARAN, p 2
9:00 Murch RETURN TO OZ,
7:00 Schiller NOTHING
p 19
LASTS FOREVER, p 18
7:30 Larry Janiak PGM, p 30
9:00 Guercio ELECTRA
GLIDE IN BLUE, p 19
5:00 Lambert ANOTHER
SKY, p 18
19
4:30, 6:45 & 9:00
Brüggemann STATIONS
OF THE CROSS, p 5
12
9:15 Vision Fest PGM, p 29
7:00 Hansen & Boulet BILLY
BANG LUCKY MAN, p 29
5
SUNDAY
JULY 2015
2
3
MONDAY
10
16
24
9:15 Lear COLD TURKEY, p 19
7:30 EC: Jordan/Levitt/Maas
PGM, p 3
7:00 Loden WANDA, p 20
31
5:00 Corman TOMB OF LIGEIA,
p 25
7:00 Ragona & Salkow LAST
MAN ON EARTH, p 26
5:30 Experimental Animation
PGM 3, p 29
9:00 Hayers BURN, WITCH,
7:00 Hayers BURN, WITCH,
BURN, p 26
BURN, p 26
7:30 Experimental Animation
PGM 4, p 29
9:00 Corman X: MAN WITH THE
X-RAY EYES, p 25
30
3:15 Gordon AMAZING
COLOSSAL MAN, p 25
7:00 Melchior TIME
TRAVELERS, p 26
5:00 AIP Trailers PGM, p 26
6:00 EC: Kirsanoff RAPT, p 4
9:00 Ragona & Salkow LAST
MAN ON EARTH, p 26
7:15 Fowler Jr. I WAS A
TEENAGE WEREWOLF, p 26
8:00 EC: Kubelka/Lye PGM, p 4
9:00 Strock I WAS A TEENAGE
FRANKENSTEIN, p 26
23
5:00 EC: Jennings/Kirsanoff/
Léger & Murphy/Clair &
Picabia PGM, p 3
7:00 Anderson SPRING NIGHT,
SUMMER NIGHT, p 20
7:30 Treml & Calice EDEN’S
EDGE, p 31
9:00 Laughton NIGHT OF THE
HUNTER, p 19
17
9:00 Li EMPEROR VISITS THE
HELL, p 27
8:00 Ai Weiwei PING’AN
YUEQING, p 27
9:00 Gilbert BLOOD AND LACE,
p 23
7:00 BIFF Shorts PGM, p 27
7:00 De Palma SISTERS, p 25
5:30 Yang FEMALE DIRECTORS
6:00 NEWFILMMAKERS, p 32
+ Wen LISTENING…, p 27
9
4:45 Minnelli A MATTER OF
7:00 Coppola DEMENTIA 13,
TIME, p 24
p 24
5:30 EC: Jerome Hill PGM, p 3
7:00 Harrington QUEEN OF
9:00 De Palma SISTERS, p 25
BLOOD, p 24
7:30 Mailer BEYOND THE LAW,
p 10
9:00 Gilbert BLOOD AND LACE,
p 23
SUNDAY
AUGUST 2015
9:00 Hayers BURN, WITCH,
BURN, p 26
7:00 Corman TOMB OF LIGEIA,
p 25
25
9:00 Bass PHASE IV, p 20
7:00 Laughton NIGHT OF THE
HUNTER, p 19
18
7:30 UNESSENTIAL: Hippie
Paranoia?, p 14
9:00 Huang, Xu & Sniadecki
YUMEN, p 27
9:00 Loden WANDA, p 20
7:00 Laughton NIGHT OF THE
HUNTER, p 19
7:00 Milland PANIC IN YEAR
ZERO!, p 25
27
7:30 RE-VISIONS: Marjorie
Keller PGM, p 8
20
8:45 Cahn SHE-CREATURE, p 26 9:00 Melchior TIME
TRAVELERS, p 26
7:00 Corman X: MAN WITH THE
X-RAY EYES, p 25
7:30 EC: Kuchar PGM, p 4
6:00 NEWFILMMAKERS, p 32
26
9:00 Anderson SPRING NIGHT,
SUMMER NIGHT, p 20
7:00 Harvey CARNIVAL OF
SOULS, p 20
6:00 NEWFILMMAKERS, p 32
19
15
22
9:15 Harvey CARNIVAL OF
SOULS, p 20
7:30 Treml & Calice EDEN’S
EDGE, p 31
7:15 Bass PHASE IV, p 20
5:00 Lear COLD TURKEY, p 19
4:45 EC: Jacobs TOM, TOM,
THE PIPER’S SON, p 3
9:00 Ragona & Salkow LAST
MAN ON EARTH, p 26
7:30 Experimental Animation
PGM 1, p 28
7:15 Gordon AMAZING
COLOSSAL MAN, p 25
28
3:45 Cahn SHE-CREATURE, p 26
5:15 EC: Owen Land PGM, p 4
5:30 Fowler Jr. I WAS A
TEENAGE WEREWOLF, p 26
7:15 Strock I WAS A TEENAGE
FRANKENSTEIN, p 26
7:30 Experimental Animation
PGM 2, p 28
9:00 Corman BUCKET OF
BLOOD, p 25
29
4:30 Milland PANIC IN YEAR
7:30 EC: Keaton THE GENERAL,
ZERO!, p 25
p3
6:00 EC: Buster Keaton PGM,
p3
8:00 Corman X: MAN WITH THE 7:00 Corman BUCKET OF
X-RAY EYES, with
BLOOD, p 25
ROGER CORMAN IN PERSON!,
8:00
EC: Laurel & Hardy PGM,
p 25
p3
9:00 Corman TOMB OF LIGEIA,
p 25
21
7:00 Anderson SPRING NIGHT,
SUMMER NIGHT, p 20
14
9:00 De Palma SISTERS, p 25
8:45 Wang AROUND THAT
WINTER, p 27
7:00 Scorsese BOXCAR
BERTHA, p 24
8
5:00 EC: Genet/Frank & Leslie
PGM, p 3
6:45 Huang, Xu & Sniadecki
YUMEN, p 27
7:00 Harrington QUEEN OF
BLOOD, p 24
8:45 Chai FOUR WAYS TO DIE IN
MY HOMETOWN, p 27
9:00 Bava BLACK SABBATH, p 24
7
SATURDAY
6:45 Li EMPEROR VISITS THE
HELL, p 27
FRIDAY
6:30 Ai Weiwei PING’AN
YUEQING, p 27
13
9:15 Harrington QUEEN OF
BLOOD, p 24
7:30 SHOW & TELL: Xander
Marro PGM, p 13
7:00 Minnelli A MATTER OF
TIME, p 24
6
THURSDAY
9:00 Yang FEMALE DIRECTORS 9:00 Lear COLD TURKEY, p 19
+ Wen LISTENING…, p 27
9:15 BIFF Shorts PGM, p 27
7:00 Chai FOUR WAYS TO DIE
IN MY HOMETOWN, p 27
12
9:00 Scorsese BOXCAR
BERTHA, p 24
7:00 Coppola DEMENTIA 13,
p 24
6:00 NEWFILMMAKERS, p 32
5
WEDNESDAY
7:00 Wang AROUND THAT
WINTER, p 27
11
9:15 Ulmer THE AMAZING
TRANSPARENT MAN, p 24
7:00 Bava BLACK SABBATH,
p 24
4
TUESDAY
7:00 Ray ON DANGEROUS
GROUND, p 12
9:00 Mann THE NAKED SPUR,
p 12
4:15 Zinnemann ACT OF
VIOLENCE, p 11
6:15 Mann GOD’S LITTLE
ACRE, p 12
27
29
9:00 Secret Life of AFA, p 31
9:00 Dwan THE RIVER’S EDGE,
p 22
7:30 EC: Menken PGM 2, p 5
5:45 EC: Menken PGM 1, p 5
7:30 AFA MEMBERS ONLY:
7:00 NYWIFT: Shorts PGM,
Akerman JEANNE DIELMAN,
p 31
p 18
6:45 Hunter RIVER’S EDGE, p 22
28
7:00 & 9:00 Yoo SONGS
FROM THE NORTH, p 6
6:00 NEWFILMMAKERS,
p 32
7:00 & 9:00 Yoo SONGS
FROM THE NORTH, p 6
6:30 RE-VISIONS: Luther Price
PGM 3, p 9
6:00 NEWFILMMAKERS,
p 32
6:00 NEWFILMMAKERS,
p 32
30
9:15 Hunter RIVER’S EDGE,
p 22
7:15 Dwan THE RIVER’S EDGE,
p 22
7:00 & 9:00 Yoo SONGS
FROM THE NORTH, p 6
23
7:00 Reitz HOME FROM HOME,
p6
6:00 NEWFILMMAKERS,
p 32
16
9:15 Reitz TABLE OF LOVE, p 11 9:15 Reitz PGM, p 11
9:15 Reitz ZERO HOUR, p 11
15
9:00 Mann GOD’S LITTLE
ACRE, p 12
9:00 Zinnemann ACT OF
VIOLENCE, p 11
FRIDAY
31
9:15 Hathaway BOTTOM OF
THE BOTTLE, p 22
7:00 & 9:00 Yoo SONGS
FROM THE NORTH, p 6
6:45 Sarafian VANISHING
POINT, p 22
24
SATURDAY
7:00 & 9:00 Yoo SONGS
FROM THE NORTH, p 6
18
7:30 EC: Maclaine PGM, p 4
7:00 Reitz HOME FROM HOME,
p6
9:00 Oshima CEREMONY, p 22
7:30 EC: Méliès PGM 3, p 5
7:00 Hathaway BOTTOM OF
THE BOTTLE, p 22
8:00 EC: Méliès PGM 1, p 5
9:15 Sarafian VANISHING
POINT, p 22
6:00 EC: Méliès PGM 2, p 5
26
6:45 Oshima CEREMONY, p 22
25
8:00 RE-VISIONS: Luther Price
PGM 2, p 9
7:00 & 9:00 Yoo SONGS
FROM THE NORTH, p 6
5:15 SHOW & TELL: Soon-Mi
Yoo PGM, p 14
19
7:30 EC: Mekas WALDEN, p 4-5
2:30 & 7:00 Reitz HOME
FROM HOME, p 6
12
9:15 Sturges BAD DAY AT
BLACK ROCK, p 12
9:00 Ray ON DANGEROUS
GROUND, p 12
11
6:45 Mann ABOUT MRS. LESLIE,
p 12
4:30 Mann THE NAKED SPUR,
p 12
5
7:30 EC: Classics of the
Twenties PGM, p 4
7:00 Zinnemann ACT OF
VIOLENCE, p 11
4
7:30 WHITE CUBE/BLACK BOX: 8:00 RE-VISIONS: Luther Price
East Coast/West Coast PGM,
PGM 1, p 9
p 14
7:00 Reitz HOME FROM HOME,
p6
17
9:00 Mann ABOUT MRS.
LESLIE, p 12
7:00 Ray ON DANGEROUS
GROUND, p 12
10
7:00 Mann THE NAKED SPUR,
p 12
9
7:00 Sturges BAD DAY AT
BLACK ROCK, p 12
22
4:00 Oshima CEREMONY, p 22
THURSDAY
7:00 Kastle HONEYMOON
KILLERS, p 20
3
6:30 Reitz ZERO HOUR, p 11
21
8:30 RE-VISIONS: Luther Price
PGM 4, p 9
WEDNESDAY
6:45 Reitz TABLE OF LOVE, p 11 6:45 Reitz PGM, p 11
8
20
7:00 & 9:00 Yoo SONGS
FROM THE NORTH, p 6
2
7:15 Corman BUCKET OF BLOOD, 6:45 Peixoto LIMITE, p 20
7:15 Fowler Jr. I WAS A
p 25
TEENAGE WEREWOLF, p 26
9:15 Bidgood PINK NARCISSUS, 9:00 Melchior TIME
8:45 Peixoto LIMITE, p 20
p 20
TRAVELERS, p 26
9:00 Gordon AMAZING
COLOSSAL MAN, p 25
9:15 Peixoto LIMITE, p 20
7:00 Reitz HOME FROM HOME,
p6
7:00 Reitz HOME FROM HOME,
p6
2:30 & 7:00 Reitz HOME
FROM HOME, p 6
TUESDAY
7:00 Bidgood PINK NARCISSUS, 6:00 NEWFILMMAKERS,
p 20
p 32
1
7:30 EC: Mekas
REMINISCENCES OF A
JOURNEY TO LITHUANIA, p 5
14
13
9:00 Sturges BAD DAY AT
BLACK ROCK, p 12
7
MONDAY
6
SUNDAY
SEPTEMBER 2015
ONGOING SERIES / SERIES
JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES
AFA MEMBERS
ONLY –
FREE SCREENING!
CHANTAL AKERMAN’S ‘JEANNE
DIELMAN’
NOTHING LASTS FOREVER
BRAND X
ONE-FILM WONDERS
July 16-23, August 13-19, and Sept 1-3
Most great filmmakers spend an entire career developing a signature style and coherent themes, experimenting and exploring
and refining their craft over the course of several movies. But there is another brand of auteur, far more elusive and remarkable:
the director who establishes a fully formed cinematic vision with their first full-length credit, only to never make another feature.
The “One-Offs,” as Andrew Sarris labels them in a chapter of THE AMERICAN CINEMA. The One-Film Wonders.
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.
Almost exclusively misunderstood or underappreciated in their time – by critics, the public, or both – these singular artists never
assembled a full-blown oeuvre. Some gave up, disinterested in the process of directing or disillusioned by the hardships of the
industry. Some moved on, finding success in another field. Some kept trying, struggling and failing to get a follow-up project off
the ground. Some simply met a premature demise. No matter the story, a combination of circumstance and chance has unfairly
relegated these directors’ achievements to the footnotes of film history.
Chantal Akerman
Co-curated by C. Mason Wells, who also wrote the series introduction and all film descriptions. Special thanks to Carmen Accaputo (Cineteca di Bologna);
Brian Belovarac (Janus Films); Daniel Bish (George Eastman House); Cassie Blake (Academy Film Archive); Margaret Bodde (The Film Foundation);
Romeo Carey; Sam Chamberlain; Pip Chodorov (Re:Voir); Chris Chouinard (Park Circus); Jack Durwood (Paramount); Tiffany Greenwood (Swank Motion
Pictures, Inc.), Kristie Nakamura & Nicki Woods (WB); Todd Wiener & Steven Hill (UCLA Film & Television Archive); and Mike Williams (Strand Releasing).
JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU
COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES
1975, 201 min, 35mm. In French with English subtitles. With
Delphine Seyrig and Jan Decorte.
Arguably Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece, JEANNE
DIELMAN is a landmark of both feminist and minimalist cinema. Charting the course of three days in
the life of a middle-aged widow, this (seemingly)
radically uneventful film depicts her highly regimented daily routine in microscopic yet inexplicably compelling detail, observing in near real time
as she attends to her shopping, cooking, and other
domestic chores (both typical and not-so-typical).
Brilliantly photographed by Babette Mangolte (a
great filmmaker in her own right), and anchored
by a simply astounding performance by Delphine
Seyrig, JEANNE DIELMAN is truly a towering work
of modern cinema and an essential experience for
any cinephile.
“JEANNE DIELMAN is as monumental a formal
film as Michael Snow’s LA RÉGION CENTRALE;
Akerman’s landscape, however, is radically other.
Seyrig’s slow-motion breakdown, her leap into an
abyss beyond the kitchen sink, packs an emotional
wallop entirely different from the products of earlier (mostly male) avant-gardes.” –J. Hoberman,
VILLAGE VOICE
“One way to describe JEANNE DIELMAN is as an
ethnography of the kitchen crossed with classical
tragedy.” –Amy Taubin, ARTFORUM
–Mon, Sept 28 at 7:30.
Reception at 7:00!
18
Anthology is thrilled to finally give these 17 visionaries their due – with 17 complete retrospectives. The One-Film Wonders
appear in all forms – industry insiders, regional upstarts, avant-garde iconoclasts – and hail from different countries and time
periods, but they remain united by a go-for-broke ambition, an ability to pack a lifetime’s worth of images and ideas into a single
feature. They may not have enjoyed long careers, but as THE HONEYMOON KILLERS’ Leonard Kastle remarked, “One thing I can
always say – and not every director can say this – I never made a bad film.”
Tom Schiller
Wynn Chamberlain
1984, 82 min, 35mm. With Zach Galligan, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Mort Sahl.
1970, 87 min, 35mm-to-DCP. Courtesy of the
Cineteca di Bologna. With Taylor Mead, Sally
Kirkland, Sam Shepard, Abbie Hoffman, Candy
Darling, Tally Brown, and Ultra Violet.
NOTHING LASTS FOREVER
A member of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE’s original writing staff in 1975, Tom Schiller,
like Albert Brooks, cut his filmmaking teeth directing shorts for the Not Ready for
Primetime Players. He transitioned to features in the early 80s with this retrofuturist fable about a wide-eyed aspiring artist (a pre-GREMLINS Zach Galligan)
who comes to New York to make it big, but finds himself on an oddball journey
from the Holland Tunnel to an underground artists’ colony to a bus to the moon
(driven by Bill Murray). This strangely funny, highly stylized pastiche of outdated
tropes (shot by THE KING OF COMEDY d.p. Fred Schuler and intercut with clips
from old films) tested so poorly at preview screenings that its producer, MGM,
declined to release it. Schiller continued to work in the shorter form for SNL, and
has since directed hundreds of commercials, but never another feature.
–Thurs, July 16 at 7:15, Sun, July 19 at 7:00, and
Tues, July 21 at 9:15.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gavin Lambert
ANOTHER SKY
1955, 86 min, 16mm, b&w. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National
Film Preservation Foundation.
In the middle of his stint as editor for SIGHT & SOUND, Gavin Lambert (onetime
Oxford chum of future filmmakers Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson) tried his
own hand at directing. Inspired by the writing of Paul Bowles (who’d later become
a close friend of Lambert’s in Tangier) and beautifully filmed by Walter Lassally
(THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE RUNNER), ANOTHER SKY trails a white
governess brought to Morocco for work who gradually falls under the spell of the
music, culture, and men of Marrakesh. But this mesmerizing slow-burn romance
would prove Lambert’s only effort as director; he opted instead for a successful
career as screenwriter (Nicholas Ray’s BITTER VICTORY), novelist (INSIDE DAISY
CLOVER), and biographer (of George Cukor and Natalie Wood).
–Thurs, July 16 at 9:15 and Sun, July 19 at 5:00.
BRAND X
Downtown fixture Elwyn “Wynn” Chamberlain painted Frank O’Hara and Allen
Ginsberg, produced an early Charles
Ludlam play, and turned to film in 1970
with this crude, merciless consumerist
satire. Inspired by a snowed-in weekend
stuck watching television, BRAND X gleefully parodies boob-tube banality with
copious nudity, a wicked sense of humor,
and a who’s-who cast featuring Taylor
Mead, Sally Kirkland, Sam Shepard,
Abbie Hoffman, and Candy Darling. “The
first truly entertaining Entertainment film
of the new consciousness,” heralded
Jonas Mekas, but Chamberlain moved
on, burning his paintings and relocating
his family to India in the mid-70s. His
latter-day artistic output consisted solely
of a series of novels.
These screenings will be presented
by Wynn Chamberlain’s son, Sam!
–Fri, July 17 at 7:00 and
Thurs, July 23 at 9:00.
SERIES
VENOM AND ETERNITY
RETURN TO OZ
ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE
Isidore Isou
Walter Murch
James William Guercio
BAVE ET D’ÉTERNITÉ
1985, 113 min, 35mm. With Fairuza Balk, Nicol
Williamson, Jean Marsh, and Piper Laurie.
1973, 114 min, 35mm. With Robert Blake.
VENOM AND ETERNITY / TRAITÉ DE
1951, 123 min, 35mm, b&w. With Isidore Isou.
In 1942 at only 16, Isidore Isou founded Lettrism,
an avant-garde movement devoted to purely
formalist poetry stripped of all semantic meaning.
After a prolific decade of writing and theorizing,
Isou brought his radical ideas to cinema in VENOM
AND ETERNITY, a filmic manifesto for “discrepancy
cinema,” where the visuals and soundtrack are
treated as two separate channels, bearing little
relation to one another. Over shots of Isou himself
walking through the Left Blank, he intones, “I
announce the destruction of the cinema” – and
his images begin to turn upside down and become
violently scratched. It proved a succès de scandale
at Cannes, winning a made-up prize from Jean
Cocteau. By 1953, Isou had begun his deconstruction of the tenets of photography, painting, dance,
and theater and never returned to film, but his
solitary work behind the camera became a crucial
touchstone for Guy Debord, Stan Brakhage, and
Olivier Assayas.
–Fri, July 17 at 9:15 and
Wed, July 22 at 6:45.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kenneth Macpherson
BORDERLINE
RETURN TO OZ
Groundbreaking sound designer and editor
Walter Murch helped to shape the visual and
aural rhythms of Francis Ford Coppola’s classic 70s pictures. For his only effort to date as
director, Murch assumed a seemingly impossible assignment: a sequel to the beloved
THE WIZARD OF OZ. Instead of delivering a
family friendly update, Murch’s adaptation of
L. Frank Baum’s second and third Oz books
offers a despairing expressionist vision that
feels plucked directly from a child’s nightmare.
Fairuza Balk’s Dorothy arrives in Emerald City
(fresh off a round of shock therapy) to find
the city in tatters and a diabolical princess
with her eye on Dorothy’s head. A true film
maudit, beset by production problems (Murch
was briefly fired for running behind schedule,
only to be reinstated at the behest of Coppola
and George Lucas) and an indifferent viewing
public, RETURN TO OZ looks miraculous today,
a rare fairy tale for adults.
–Sat, July 18 at 6:30, Mon, July
20 at 9:00, and Wed, July 22 at
9:15.
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1930, 63 min, 35mm, b&w. From the collection of George
Eastman House. With Paul & Eslanda Robeson and Hilda
Doolittle.
Timothy Carey
Heavily inspired by Eisenstein, Kenneth Macpherson founded British cinema journal CLOSE UP in
1927 and began his own filmmaking practice
soon after, directing three poetic experimental
shorts in as many years. As its title suggests,
Macpherson’s feature debut is a movie at a crossroads, a defiantly silent experiment made at the
cusp of cinema’s transition to sound. BORDERLINE
takes a fairly conventional love triangle plot and
complicates it through radical editing patterns, a
“clatter montage” where adjacent images butt up
so close against one another they nearly overlap.
The content of Macpherson’s film is equally startling, unafraid to explore simmering racial tensions
(two of its characters are played by Paul Robeson
and his wife Eslanda) and fluid notions of sexuality.
After BORDERLINE met a harsh critical reception,
Macpherson retired from directing and withdrew
his film from circulation – it wouldn’t be rediscovered for another 50 years.
Wild man character actor Timothy Carey
cobbled together a career with bit parts as
heavies and hucksters for Kubrick, Cassavetes,
and more, his indelible, unstable screen presence suggesting there was always a madness
to his Method. He brought that same volatile
energy to his first film as director (and writer,
producer, and eventual self-distributor), this
berserk parable about a bored insurance salesman who quits his job, forms a rockabilly band/
religious movement, rechristens himself “God,”
and winds up frontrunner for President, using
his newfound power to sleep with women
aged 14 to 92. A vanity project-cum-labor of
love with little regard for good taste or common
filmmaking rules, THE WORLD’S GREATEST
SINNER would later find fans in Martin Scorsese and Will Oldham but didn’t break through
to the grindhouse circuit upon release. Carey’s
TV pilot follow-up, TWEET’S LADIES OF PASADENA, was never finished.
–Sat, July 18 at 5:00 and
Mon, July 20 at 7:15.
WORLD’S GREATEST SINNER
1962, 77 min, 35mm, b&w/color. With Timothy Carey.
–Sat, July 18 at 9:00 and
Thurs, July 23 at 7:00.
ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE
James William Guercio first came to prominence in the music biz: he wrote a
Chad and Jeremy hit, collaborated with Frank Zappa, produced Chicago and
Moondog, and even played bass for the Beach Boys. His only directing credit,
ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE, suggests he could’ve enjoyed an equally fruitful film
career. Robert Blake stars as a pint-sized Arizona motorcycle cop who dreams
of making detective, only to find a department festering beneath layers of corruption. Gorgeously shot by Conrad Hall (who Guercio afforded by taking a $1
directing salary) to recall John Ford epics, this bleakly funny hybrid of police
procedural and Western combines a distinctly 70s cynicism with a handsome
cinematic classicism. Guercio would produce another Robert Blake vehicle a
few years later – Hal Ashby’s SECOND-HAND HEARTS – but then moved toward
a career in cattle ranching and oil drilling.
–Sun, July 19 at 9:00 and Tues, July 21 at 7:00.
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Charles Laughton
THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER
1955, 92 min, 35mm, b&w. Restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive;
restoration funding provided by The Film Foundation. With Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters,
and Lillian Gish.
Over the course of a 30-plus year career, the British-born Charles Laughton
established himself as one of Hollywood’s most versatile performers, a
scene-stealer of unmatched grace, intelligence, and range. But nothing about
Laughton’s beloved acting could’ve prepared audiences for the sheer ferocity
of his directing in this expressionist Southern Gothic nightmare. It’s good vs.
evil: Lillian Gish struggles to protect two innocent orphans from the clutches of
crooked preacher and murderer Robert Mitchum, chasing after the loot stolen
by the children’s imprisoned father. Elegantly written by famed critic and novelist James Agee and shot in high-contrast black-and-white by Stanley Cortez
(THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS), Laughton’s sole effort behind the camera
has a baroque, brooding style unlike anything before or since. It was understandably greeted with confusion in 1955 but is universally celebrated today,
with CAHIERS DU CINÉMA naming it the second most beautiful film of all time.
–Thurs, Aug 13 at 7:00, Sun, Aug 16 at 9:00, and
Tues, Aug 18 at 7:00.
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Norman Lear
COLD TURKEY
1971, 99 min, 35mm. With Dick Van Dyke.
Before his run as one of television’s most acclaimed showrunners, Norman
Lear (ALL IN THE FAMILY) directed a theatrical film, this pungent satire of
American addiction and greed. A tobacco company devises a surefire stunt:
award $25 million to the Rockwellian hamlet of Eagle Rock, Iowa if it can give
up cigarettes for 30 days. As the media circus descends (played by comedy duo
Bob & Ray in multiple roles) the townsfolk (led by Dick Van Dyke as a conniving
minister and Jean Stapleton as the ever-fattening mayor’s wife) get ready for
their newfound fortune and fame. Roger Ebert grouped the bitterly hilarious
COLD TURKEY with another 1971 release (A NEW LEAF) as part of a welcome
new mean-streak in American film comedy. Lear briefly stepped away from TV
success in 1978 to work on a follow-up film about right-wing evangelists, a
project that never came to fruition.
–Thurs, Aug 13 at 9:00, Sat, Aug 15 at 5:00, and
Mon, Aug 17 at 9:15.
19
SERIES
PHASE IV
WANDA
PINK NARCISSUS
ONE-FILM WONDERS, CONT’D.
J.L. Anderson
Saul Bass
James Bidgood
1967, 82 min, 35mm, b&w. Restored print courtesy of the
UCLA Film & Television Archive.
1974, 84 min, 35mm. Print courtesy of the Academy Film
Archive. With Nigel Davenport, Michael Murphy, and Lynne
Frederick.
1971, 71 min, 35mm
SPRING NIGHT, SUMMER NIGHT
Before he co-authored the seminal THE JAPANESE
FILM: ART AND INDUSTRY, scholar Joseph L.
Anderson (then going by “J.L.”) was brought to the
University of Ohio, Athens to found the school’s film
production department. It was there he directed –
with a cast of non-actors and local community
theater performers, and a crew comprised largely
of his students – this lyrical, wrenching snapshot
of two star-crossed small-town lovers (and possible siblings). A sensitive drama about a salacious
subject, SPRING NIGHT, SUMMER NIGHT was
snapped up for distribution by exploitation maestro
Joseph Brenner, who added nude scenes and the
controversy-stirring title MISS JESSICA IS PREGNANT. (Brenner hired a young Martin Scorsese to
consult on re-edits, but he maintained the film was
perfect as is.) This gorgeous new print restores
Anderson’s original vision, revealing one of the
great lost works of American regional cinema.
–Fri, Aug 14 at 7:00, Sun, Aug 16
at 7:00, and Wed, Aug 19 at 9:00.
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Barbara Loden
WANDA
1970, 102 min, 35mm. Restored print courtesy of the UCLA
Film & Television Archive; restoration funding provided by
The Film Foundation and GUCCI. With Barbara Loden.
She appeared on television (as an Ernie Kovacs
sidekick) and on stage (winning a Tony for Arthur
Miller’s AFTER THE FALL) but Barbara Loden is
still reductively known as “Elia Kazan’s wife,” a
part she assumed after her role in SPLENDOR IN
THE GRASS. Loden deserves to be best known as
director of this independent stunner, shot for a low
six figures on 16mm with Cassavetes associate
Nicholas T. Proferes. Loden herself stars as the
eponymous anti-heroine, a woman who abandons
her dead-end blue collar life to drift aimlessly, only
to fall in with a petty hood eager to use her as an
accomplice for his two-bit robberies. A piercing
character study that morphs into a tense crime
drama, WANDA won the Critics Prize at the Venice
Film Festival – and the jealousy of Kazan, who
worked to stifle his wife’s success. She died at 48
from breast cancer.
–Fri, Aug 14 at 9:00, and
Mon, Aug 17 at 7:00.
PHASE IV
Beyond his hugely influential credit sequences and
posters for Hitchcock, Preminger, and more, legendary designer Saul Bass also dabbled in filmmaking.
He worked as a visual consultant on SPARTACUS and
WEST SIDE STORY (assisting with the storyboards),
oversaw racing sequences for Frankenheimer’s
GRAND PRIX, and even directed several documentary
shorts with his wife Elaine. PHASE IV was his sole
feature, following a pair of research scientists (Nigel
Davenport and Michael Murphy) investigating the
strange behavior of ant colonies in the Arizona desert.
Less an animal attack thriller than a quiet and disquieting work of environmental terror, PHASE IV was
unsurprisingly a box office failure. But Bass displays
a full command of composition and color, a feeling
for geography and geometry (including the first-ever
onscreen crop circle) closer to the avant-garde than
to a Hollywood blockbuster.
+
Alternate ending!
–Sat, Aug 15 at 7:15 and
Tues, Aug 18 at 9:00.
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Herk Harvey
CARNIVAL OF SOULS
1962, 78 min, 16mm-to-35mm, b&w. Preserved by the
Academy Film Archive; presented with permission from
Matthew Irvine.
Herk Harvey had amassed several years of filmmaking experience by the time he made CARNIVAL OF
SOULS in 1962. A prolific writer, director, and producer of industrial films for Kansas’s Centron Films,
Harvey was renowned for his ingenuity and efficiency,
qualities he’d bring to his feature-length debut. The
story of a young blonde (onetime Lee Strasberg
student Candace Hilligoss) who emerges from a car
accident to find herself haunted by demons, CARNIVAL OF SOULS uses its limitations – a low budget,
tight shooting schedule, non-professional supporting players, unpolished tech credits – as strengths,
showing an almost Val Lewton-esque ability to
wring atmospheric dread from few resources. The
film would eventually find a cult fan base thanks to
late-night TV, but its failure to catch on discouraged
Harvey. Production was aborted on his attempted scifi follow-up THE RELUCTANT WITCH in the late-60s,
and he continued his work for Centron.
–Sat, Aug 15 at 9:15 and
Wed, Aug 19 at 7:00.
20
PINK NARCISSUS
Parsons grad James Bidgood made a name for himself with his fantastical gay erotic photographs; in 1963, he embarked on a cinematic
project in a similarly gauzy style. A wordless (and often clothes-less)
study of a dark-haired young man cruising through seedy nightclubs,
city streets, and forests, PINK NARCISSUS was shot on 8mm entirely
on bejeweled plastic sets constructed in Bidgood’s tiny apartment,
the director operating as one-man-band. Filmed over seven years,
this handmade epic wasn’t finished so much as confiscated by its
financier and cut against Bidgood’s wishes. It was initially shown
without a director’s credit, leading some to speculate it was a secret
Warhol project, but reemerged decades later as Bidgood’s creation
and a pioneering work of the queer avant-garde. After a long hiatus,
Bidgood returned to photography in 2005, but not, as of yet, filmmaking.
–Tues, Sept 1 at 7:00 and Wed, Sept 2 at 9:15.
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Mario Peixoto
LIMITE
1931, 114 min, 35mm-to-DCP, b&w. Print courtesy of the Cineteca di Bologna.
During a stint in Europe in the 1920s, a young Mário Peixoto discovered the cinema of Lang, Murnau, and Pudovkin. Upon returning to
his native Brazil, he decided to make a film of his own. A silent flood
of poetic imagery sans intertitles, LIMITE uses flashbacks to recount
the oblique narrative of a man and a woman ending up lost at sea.
Produced in close collaboration with the Rio de Janeiro art scene,
this radical experiment went undistributed for fear it’d provoke riots,
and was unseen for so long some thought its very existence was
apocryphal. It reemerged as a favorite of cine-clubs, collecting fans
from Orson Welles to Sergei Eisenstein to David Bowie, and now
enjoys a reputation as one of the greatest works of Brazilian cinema.
After struggling for decades to make a second film, Peixoto focused
on literary work, writing poetry, plays, and novels.
–Tues, Sept 1 at 8:45, Wed, Sept 2 at 6:45, and
Thurs, Sept 3 at 9:15.
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Leonard Kastle
THE HONEYMOON KILLERS
1969, 108 min, 35mm. With Shirley Stoler and Tony Lo Bianco.
In the 1960s opera composer and librettist Leonard Kastle was
tasked by a producer colleague to write a script around the real-life
Lonely Hearts Killers. After doing painstaking research and studying
works by cinema greats, Kastle turned in his tense, spare treatment,
only to find himself at the helm of the low-budget project after initial
director Martin Scorsese proved too methodical. A rebuke to the
romanticism of BONNIE & CLYDE, THE HONEYMOON KILLERS offers
an uncommonly raw and unsentimental portrait of lovers on the run;
it was critically acclaimed upon release (“my favorite American film,”
declared François Truffaut) but fell victim to tepid domestic box office
returns. Kastle left several unproduced screenplays behind when he
died in 2011.
–Thurs, Sept 3 at 7:00.
SERIES
3 GODFATHERS
BARRY LYNDON
THIS IS CELLULOID: 35MM
July 24-30 & September 23-27
As the medium of celluloid (or more accurately but far less evocatively, polyester) is rapidly pushed towards obsolescence, and the new digital standard, DCP, continues to invade not
only the world’s multiplexes but also those repertory theaters and museums devoted to screening movies from the art form’s first century, Anthology stands fast in its commitment to
keeping 35mm and 16mm and 8mm alive! Though our devotion to screening films in their original formats holds true throughout our programming, this past spring we inaugurated the
series “This Is Celluloid” in order specifically to highlight the unique beauty (which DCP can approximate, but never equal) of celluloid, and to celebrate the exquisite textures, glorious
colors, and unique qualities of light that are becoming a tragically rare sight on our cinema’s screens in the 21st century.
Highlighting some of the most stunningly beautiful prints that have graced our screens or that we’ve encountered in other repertory cinemas in recent memory, “This Is Celluloid” also
serves as an opportunity for us to invite various archives to select beauties from their libraries. Encompassing both pristine preservations as well as vintage prints whose visual delights
are undimmed despite the inevitable wear and tear they’ve accumulated through decades of projections (and now wear almost as a badge of honor), the series is guaranteed to raise
your appreciation of the medium to new heights.
Special thanks to Brian Belovarac (Janus Films); Daniel Bish (George Eastman House); Paul Ginsburg (Universal); Mike Mashon & Lynanne Schweighofer (Library of Congress); Mark McElhatten (Sikelia); Kristie Nakamura
& Nicki Woods (WB); Mike Pogorzelski, May Haduong & Cassie Blake (Academy Film Archive); Caitlin Robertson & Joe Reid (20th Century Fox); Martin Scorsese; and David Spencer, Matt Jones & Eric Self (University of
North Carolina School of the Arts).
John Ford
Stanley Kubrick
1948, 106 min, 35mm. With John Wayne, Pedro Armendáriz, Harry Carey
Jr., and Ward Bond.
1975, 183 min, 35mm. Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive. With Ryan O’Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Kruger,
and Leonard Rossiter.
3 GODFATHERS
A remake of his now-lost 1919 silent film, MARKED MEN,
John Ford’s Technicolor classic 3 GODFATHERS transposes the
Christmas story of the Three Wise Men to the Old West. John
Wayne, Pedro Armendáriz, and Harry Carey Jr. star as outlaws
who take flight after robbing a bank, only to find themselves
saddled with a newborn infant when they come across a dying
mother in the desert. With lawman Ward Bond in hot pursuit,
they become determined to keep their promise to protect their
newfound charge, leading to a quasi-biblical redemption.
“Despite its comic touches, 3 GODFATHERS is tinged with a
mournful tone that anticipates a major theme of 1960s and
1970s revisionist Westerns – the inexorable death of the
frontier. Filmed largely in Death Valley, it renders the torturous
heat-warped landscape of the unforgiving desert into scorching Technicolor.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE
–Fri, July 24 at 7:00 and Sun, July 26 at 8:30.
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Douglas Sirk
SIGN OF THE PAGAN
1954, 92 min, 35mm. Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive. With Jeff
Chandler and Jack Palance.
Douglas Sirk’s very first CinemaScope film was also his only
foray into the swords-and-sandals genre. Though it would be a
stretch to call it a perfect fit, SIGN OF THE PAGAN displays his
usual intelligence and precision, boasts a genuine fascination
with its historical era that sets it apart from most of the rest of
the genre, and features an unforgettable, larger-than-life performance by Jack Palance as Attila the Hun. Strutting around
with shoulder-length hair, a Fu Manchu mustache, and brownish skin, Palance makes Attila not only truly ferocious, but also
vulnerable and psychologically complex.
–Fri, July 24 at 9:15 and Mon, July 27 at 7:30.
BARRY LYNDON
“All of Kubrick’s features look better now than when they were first released, but BARRY LYNDON…remains his
most underrated. It may also be his greatest. This personal, idiosyncratic, melancholy, and long (three hours)
adaptation of the Thackeray novel is exquisitely shot in natural light (or, in night scenes, candlelight) by John Alcott,
with frequent use of slow backward zooms that distance us, both historically and emotionally, from its rambling
picaresque narrative about an 18th-century Irish upstart (Ryan O’Neal). Despite its ponderous, funereal moods and
pacing, the film is a highly accomplished piece of storytelling, building to one of the most suspenseful duels ever
staged. It also repays close attention as a complex and fascinating historical meditation, as enigmatic in its way as
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER
–Sat, July 25 at 7:15 and Sun, July 26 at 4:45.
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PREMIERE OF BRAND NEW PRINT!
Gregory La Cava
FEEL MY PULSE
1928, 63 min, 35mm, b&w, silent. Preserved by the Library of Congress. With Bebe Daniels, Richard Arlen, and William Powell.
This silent comedy gem by the great and still-underappreciated Gregory La Cava (MY MAN GODFREY, STAGE
DOOR, UNFINISHED BUSINESS) features the incomparable Bebe Daniels as a hypochondriac heiress who retreats
to a sanitarium that, unbeknownst to her, has become a hideout for bootleggers. William Powell is the gang’s heavy
who plays along until the truth comes out, culminating in an unforgettable slapstick crescendo.
–Wed, July 29 at 7:15 and Thurs, July 30 at 9:00.
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PREMIERE OF BRAND NEW PRINT!
James Whale
THE KISS BEFORE THE MIRROR
1933, 67 min, 35mm, b&w. Preserved by the Library of Congress. With Nancy Carroll, Frank Morgan, and Paul Lukas.
“A dark and highly stylized psychodrama, THE KISS BEFORE THE MIRROR traces the breakdown of a lawyer who
begins to suspect his wife of infidelity, even as he is defending a friend on trial for having murdered his wife. For
this operatic material, Whale sought out famed German cinematographer Karl Freund to produce another visually
striking and rhapsodically cinematic masterpiece, complete with complicated tracking shots and 360-degree pans,
one that (in the words of a critic of the day) ‘might well have come from the UFA studios a dozen years earlier.’
Whale remained rightfully proud of this still largely unknown gem.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE
–Wed, July 29 at 8:45 and Thurs, July 30 at 7:15.
21
SERIES
THE RIVER’S EDGE
RIVER’S EDGE
CELLULOID, CONT’D.
Allan Dwan
Henry Hathaway
1957, 87 min, 35mm. Archival print courtesy of 20th Century Fox. With Ray Milland, Anthony Quinn,
Debra Paget, and Harry Carey Jr.
1956, 88 min, 35mm. Archival print courtesy of 20th Century Fox. With Van Johnson, Joseph Cotten,
Jack Carson & Margaret Lindsay.
THE RIVER’S EDGE
“Ray Milland stars as an anxious thief on the lam, fleeing to Mexico after lifting
a million dollars from a U.S. bank. He solicits the help of border guide Anthony
Quinn to lead him through the California wilderness and to freedom – there’s only
the small matter of Quinn’s exasperated wife Debra Paget, who just so happens
to be Milland’s ex-girlfriend. Shooting on location and in CinemaScope, the madly
prolific Dwan transforms this crime-melodrama quickie into another of his terrific
B-movies. Sarris grouped the film alongside the director’s SILVER LODE and THE
RESTLESS BREED, and said they ‘represent a virtual bonanza of hitherto unexplored
classics. …[I]t may very well be that Dwan will turn out to be the last of the old
masters.’” –C. Mason Wells
–Wed, Sept 23 at 7:15 and Sun, Sept 27 at 9:00.
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Tim Hunter
RIVER’S EDGE
1986, 99 min, 35mm. Archival print courtesy of the North Carolina School of the Arts. With Daniel
Roebuck, Keanu Reeves, Ione Skye, Crispin Glover, and Dennis Hopper.
Based on a true story, this disturbing teen film is one of the darkest commercial
films of the 1980s, a chilling alternative to the likes of THE BREAKFAST CLUB or
PRETTY IN PINK. When sullen high-schooler John kills his classmate Jamie, far from
keeping it a secret he brags about the crime to his friends (played by Keanu Reeves,
Ione Skye, and Crispin Glover, among others) and takes them to see the body. Rather
than report the crime or struggle with guilt at their association with the killer, they
react with morbid curiosity or misplaced loyalty. Without denying its characters a
measure of sympathy or understanding, RIVER’S EDGE is a deeply unsettling depiction of teenage alienation and moral paralysis.
–Wed, Sept 23 at 9:15 and Sun, Sept 27 at 6:45.
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Richard Sarafian
VANISHING POINT
1971, 99 min, 35mm. Archival print courtesy of 20th Century Fox. With Barry Newman, Cleavon
Little, Dean Jagger, and Severn Darden.
Persistently overshadowed by Monte Hellman’s TWO LANE BLACKTOP, Sarafian’s
VANISHING POINT is 1971’s ‘other’ existential road picture, a symphony of roaring pistons and wafting dust clouds. Blasting through the Nevada desert in a V-8
muscle car, Vietnam vet and ex-policeman Kowalski (Barry Newman) plunges ever
deeper – and ever more meaninglessly – into a showdown with the law. Athletic
and philosophical in turn, the film was also an early coup for cinematographer John
Alonzo, who went on a few years later to lens Roman Polanski’s CHINATOWN.
–Thurs, Sept 24 at 6:45 and Fri, Sept 25 at 9:15.
22
THE BOTTOM OF THE BOTTLE
Wealthy attorney/rancher P.M. (Cotten) discovers his brother Donald (Johnson), a
recovering drunk who was convicted of murder (which he claims was self-defense),
hiding out in his garage after escaping from prison. Donald asks P.M. to help him
cross the Arizona-Mexico border at the Santa Cruz River to reunite with his wife and
children; P.M. scrambles to aid his brother (and keep him sober) while also keeping
Donald’s identity a secret from his wife Nora (Roman) and their ranch-hands.
–Thurs, Sept 24 at 9:15 and Sat, Sept 26 at 7:00.
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Nagisa Oshima
CEREMONY / GISHIKI
1971, 123 min, 35mm. In Japanese with English subtitles.
Widely acclaimed as Nagisa Oshima’s most ambitious film, THE CEREMONY takes
as its subject the entire history of postwar Japan, as embodied by the fortunes of the
powerful Sakurada family from 1946 to the present. Through the eyes of the family’s
Manchurian-born heir apparent, we move through a dense, flashback-punctuated
procession of weddings and funerals that escalates into a vertiginous indictment of
the madness of contemporary Japan.
–Fri, Sept 25 at 6:45, Sat, Sept 26 at 9:00, and
Sun, Sept 27 at 4:00.
SERIES
AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL PICTURES
ROGER CORMAN IN PERSON!
July 31 – September 3
The 1950s brought the crystallization in the U.S. of a creature that had only recently emerged as a full-blown social and demographic phenomenon: the Teenager. No longer ushered
straight from childhood into work and marriage, teenagers comprised an enormous segment of the nation’s population...and an audience ripe for exploitation.
Into this breach stepped American International Pictures, a company that looms large in the memories of anyone who grew up watching movies in the U.S. in the 1950s-70s. AIP
was founded in 1954 (initially as American Releasing Corporation) by James H. Nicholson, who was well-known among his fellow theater owners as an innovative showman with
revolutionary ideas who kept his movie houses packed even when the business was in a nationwide slump. With financial assistance from Joseph Moritz, and with attorney Sam
Arkoff as his vice-president, Nicholson put together a team of writers, actors, and directors that challenged the established Hollywood studio system, and displayed an uncanny
knack for anticipating and exploiting current trends.
Nicholson and AIP seized on the teenage market – and its newfound natural habitat, the drive-in theater – with a vengeance. It was said that AIP was devoted more to quantity over
quality, speed over careful craft, and promotional ingenuity over production values (in many cases, Nicholson conceived of titles and designed posters first, and only later assigned
the projects to a writer). But thanks to Nicholson’s vision, AIP was responsible for dozens of films of astonishing energy and creativity, and became a breeding ground for some of
the most extraordinary cinematic talents of its time: filmmakers from Roger Corman, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola to Monte Hellman and Peter Bogdanovich cut their
teeth working on AIP productions, as did a who’s-who of actors including Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Bruce Dern, and many others.
Ever-adaptable, AIP produced (and/or distributed) numerous sci-fi, horror, racecar, beach party, and specifically teenage-themed films throughout the 1950s, then in the 1960s
moved gradually towards harder-edged horror or biker films, before turning its attention in the 1970s to yet another new (or newly recognized) market by embracing the blaxploitation genre.
This summer, Anthology begins a multi-part tribute to AIP that demonstrates the company’s crucial role in reflecting and even creating the popular culture of the time. The survey
opens with a selection of AIP films made by auteurs, from long-established greats such as Edgar G. Ulmer and Vincente Minnelli to future New Hollywood luminaries such as Coppola
and Scorsese. And the survey continues with a focus on the ultra-low-budget sci-fi and horror films that marked AIP’s first decade. As if that’s not enough, we welcome filmmaker
and AIP-enthusiast William Lustig for a special presentation of BLOOD AND LACE, and horror cinema scholar Tom Weaver, a contributor to STARLOG, MONSTERS FROM THE VAULT,
and many other magazines, and the author of more than 25 books including UNIVERSAL HORRORS, THE CREATURE CHRONICLES, and SCIENCE FICTION CONFIDENTIAL, who will
introduce several shows on Sunday, August 23.
ROGER CORMAN WILL BE HERE IN PERSON ON FRIDAY, AUGUST 21, TO PRESENT HIS FILM, ‘X: THE MAN WITH THE
X-RAY EYES’, AND FOR A SPECIAL CONVERSATION FOLLOWING THE FILM. HE WILL ALSO BE HERE ON SATURDAY,
AUGUST 22, FOR THE SCREENINGS OF ‘BUCKET OF BLOOD’ AND ‘TOMB OF LIGEIA.’
Stay tuned for much more AIP madness – bikers, blaxploitation, and more – this Fall!
The AIP series is sponsored by Ninkasi Brewing; for more info, visit: http://www.ninkasibrewing.com.
Special thanks to Roger Corman, Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante, Susan Nicholson-Hofheinz, William Lustig, Martin Scorsese, and Jacques Boyreau & Scott Moffett (Cosmic Hex), as
well as to Brian Belovarac (Janus Films); Daniel Bish (George Eastman House); Cassie Blake (Academy Film Archive); Cynthia Brown (New Horizons Picture Corp.); Robert Cashill;
Chris Chouinard (Park Circus); Harry Guerro; and André Schäublin (Cinémathèque suisse).
WILLIAM LUSTIG PRESENTS:
Philip Gilbert
BLOOD AND LACE
1971, 87 min, 35mm. With Gloria Grahame.
“SHOCK AFTER SHOCK AFTER SHOCK as Desire drives a bargain with DEATH!”
This brutal chiller, which AIP picked up for distribution, marked the first significant big-screen role in more than a decade for Hollywood legend Gloria Grahame, after years spent
almost entirely on theater and TV work. Grahame is unforgettable as Mrs. Deere, the sadistic director of a nightmarish orphanage where the film’s protagonist, teenage Ellie Masters,
finds herself banished after her prostitute mother is killed by a hammer-wielding maniac.
“I first saw BLOOD AND LACE in 1971 when it played bottom-billed with VAMPIRE LOVERS at the Academy of Music on E. 14th St. The opening hammer murder scene had me riveted
to the film! I’m totally convinced the scene inspired a more famous horror film’s opening scene a few years later! I saw this film a few times later on 42nd St. and then it disappeared,
popping up occasionally on bootleg VHS and DVD. This is a great opportunity to see this lost film projected.” –William Lustig
–Fri, July 31 at 7:00, Sun, Aug 2 at 9:00, and Sun, Aug 9 at 9:00.
23
SERIES
DEMENTIA 13
AIP, CONT’D.
BLACK SABBATH
QUEEN OF BLOOD
AUTEURS AT AIP:
Mario Bava
Vincente Minnelli
Francis Ford Coppola
1963/64, 96 min, 35mm. With Boris Karloff.
1976, 97 min, 35mm. Archival print courtesy of the Swiss Film
Archive. With Liza Minnelli, Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, Tina
Aumont, Fernando Rey, and Isabella Rossellini.
DEMENTIA 13
1963, 75 min, 35mm, b&w. Produced by Roger Corman.
“ARE YOU AFRAID OF DEATH BY DROWNING?...
HAVE YOU EVER ATTEMPTED SUICIDE?...HAVE
YOU EVER THOUGHT OF COMMITTING MURDER?...
THESE ARE SOME OF THE QUESTIONS YOU WILL BE
ASKED IN THE UNPRECEDENTED ‘D-13 TEST’ TO
PREPARE YOU FOR THE HORRIFYING EXPERIENCE
OF…DEMENTIA 13!”
Coppola’s first bona fide feature (his previous directorial credits were for films that were comprised in part
of footage from other movies, including AIP’s BATTLE
BEYOND THE SUN), was this low-budget slasher film,
produced by Corman and shot in Ireland, with a cast
that included AIP regulars alongside members of Dublin’s renowned Abbey Theater. Coppola chafed at Corman’s demands for more sex and violence, eventually
watching as Corman bypassed his objections by hiring
Jack Hill for some substantial ‘second unit’ work (said
Coppola years later, “Roger wanted some more violence,
which he got – but not from me.”). Nevertheless, it’s a
highly inventive, resourceful, and genuinely creepy film,
and Coppola’s immense talent is readily apparent.
–Fri, July 31 at 9:15, Mon, Aug 3 at
7:00, and Wed, Aug 5 at 7:00.
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Edgar G. Ulmer
THE AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN
1960, 58 min, 16mm, b&w. Print courtesy of the Academy Film
Archive.
“Warning: Joey Faust, escaped convict, THE
AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN, has vowed to
‘appear’ invisibly IN PERSON at every performance
of this picture in this theatre. Police officers
are expected to be present in force, but the
management will not be responsible for any
unusual or mysterious happenings while Faust is
in the theatre.”
“The French call movies like this films maudits, ‘damned
films,’ born under a black cloud with no more chance
to be seen and appreciated than a Thalidomide baby.
The irrepressible Edgar G. Ulmer made this 1960 feature
back-to-back with BEYOND THE TIME BARRIER in the
space of three weeks, using standing ‘sets’ provided
by the Texas State Fairground. …[B]oth are moving
testimonies to the indomitability of the creative spirit,
even when faced with the most absurd limitations of
budget and time. Ulmer, surely, was some sort of saint
– no director ever humbled himself more thoroughly in
pursuit of his art.” –Dave Kehr, CHICAGO READER
24
–Sat, Aug 1 at 5:00 and
Tues, Aug 4 at 9:15.
BLACK SABBATH
“This is the NIGHT of the NIGHTMARE!…
when a headless corpse rides the cold night
wind…when a woman’s soul inhabits the
body of a buzzing Fly!”
Having previously acquired the Mario Bava films
BLACK SUNDAY and ERIK THE CONQUEROR for
American release, AIP co-produced his nowclassic BLACK SABBATH with Italian production
company Galatea Film. Comprising three separate
tales (allegedly adapted from tales by Chekhov,
Tolstoy, and Maupassant, but good luck finding
the originals), BLACK SABBATH is ‘hosted’ by
Boris Karloff, who was under contract to AIP at the
time. The film was released in Italy as I TRE VOLTI
DELLA PAURA; for its American release (which is
the version we’ll be screening here), AIP made
drastic modifications, changing the order of the
stories, commissioning a new score, and radically
altering the content of the “Telephone” chapter
to add supernatural overtones and eliminate
any hints of lesbianism. Lesbians or no lesbians,
though, it’s one of Bava’s greatest films, and a
superior example of the horror anthology genre.
–Sat, Aug 1 at 6:45, Tues, Aug 4 at
7:00, and Sat, Aug 8 at 9:00.
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Martin Scorsese
BOXCAR BERTHA
1972, 88 min, 35mm. With Barbara Hershey, David Carradine, and John Carradine. Produced by Roger Corman.
“AMERICA IN THE 30’S WAS A FREE COUNTRY.
Bertha was jes’ a little bit free’er than most.”
“A weirdly interesting movie and not really the
sleazy exploitation film the ads promise. It finds
its inspiration in the exploits of Boxcar Bertha
Thompson, an outlaw folk hero who operated in
Arkansas during the Depression. […] I have the
notion that Roger Corman, American-International’s most successful producer of exploitation films,
sent his actors and crew South with the hope of
getting a nice, simple, sexy, violent movie for the
summer trade. What he got is something else,
and something better. Director Martin Scorsese
has gone for mood and atmosphere more than
for action, and his violence is always blunt and
unpleasant – never liberating and exhilarating, as
the New Violence is supposed to be. We get the
feeling we’re inhabiting the dark night of a soul.”
–Roger Ebert
–Sat, Aug 1 at 9:00, Wed, Aug 5 at
9:00, and Fri, Aug 7 at 7:00.
A MATTER OF TIME
“We are pleased to announce that we have
been chosen to present this year’s Important
Entertainment Event Starring Academy Award
Winners LIZA MINNELLI and INGRID BERGMAN.”
One of the stranger film historical phenomena is the fact
that the great Vincente Minnelli, renowned for his exacting visual style and consummate control, was fated to
make his last film for AIP. Truly a match made in hell, this
partnership was a bona fide disaster on all sides – the
shoot was bedeviled by Minnelli’s health problems and
his difficulty in communicating with his Italian crew;
and once complete, Samuel Arkoff commandeered
the editing process, brutally cutting, restructuring, and
to a large extent butchering the film. Conceived of by
AIP as a prestige project, it ended up failing miserably,
both commercially and critically. Today, it’s something of
an auteurist litmus test, a film of many flaws, but one
in which Minnelli’s vision, sensibility, and sensitivity
transcend even the meddling of such a deeply unsympathetic partner as Arkoff.
–Sun, Aug 2 at 4:45 and
Thurs, Aug 6 at 7:00.
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Curtis Harrington
QUEEN OF BLOOD
1966, 81 min, 16mm. With John Saxon, Basil Rathbone, and Dennis
Hopper.
“HIDEOUS BEYOND BELIEF…with an INHUMAN
CRAVING!”
Always looking to save money and exploit every possible
opportunity, AIP in the mid-60s acquired several Eastern
bloc sci-fi films, mining them for their often extraordinary imagery and sets. Repurposing passages from
these films, they hired filmmakers to re-edit the existing
footage and to shoot additional material, integrating the
two to create new AIP films ripe for the drive-in. The
filmmakers who took on this unusual task included such
future luminaries as Francis Ford Coppola and Peter
Bogdanovich, as well as Curtis Harrington, who in 1966
was poised between the two distinct halves of his career:
his seminal experimental films of the 40s and 50s and
the string of remarkable feature-length thrillers he
would create throughout the 70s. QUEEN is unquestionably the most accomplished of these Eastern bloc/AIP
hybrids – constructed from not one but two Soviet sci-fi
films (MECHTE NAVSTRECHU and NEBO ZOVYOT), it’s a
vampire-in-space tale with an otherworldly and terrifying
femme fatale.
–Sun, Aug 2 at 7:00, Thurs, Aug 6 at
9:15, and Sat, Aug 8 at 7:00.
SERIES
X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES
Brian De Palma
SISTERS
1973, 93 min, 35mm. Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive. With Margot Kidder, Jennifer
Salt, and Charles Durning.
“WHAT THE DEVIL HATH JOINED TOGETHER LET NO MAN CUT
ASUNDER!”
An Edward Pressman and Paul Williams independent production that AIP picked
up for distribution, SISTERS was the first film to display De Palma’s affinity for
the suspense thriller and his fascination with Hitchcock – a connection made
all the more unmistakable thanks to a brilliant score by Bernard Herrmann. As
such, SISTERS points forward to the New Hollywood films that would soon be
created by De Palma and others, and that signaled the dawn of a new era in
popular cinema. But AIP’s promotional materials for the film hearken back to its
earlier days, promising, “To allow audiences to regain their composure from the
emotional impact of SISTERS after each showing, no one will be seated during
a SPECIAL SHOCK RECOVERY PERIOD!”
–Mon, Aug 3 at 9:00, Fri, Aug 7 at 9:00, and
Sun, Aug 9 at 7:00.
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EARLY SCI-FI/HORROR:
Roger Corman
X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES
1963, 79 min, 35mm. With Ray Milland and Don Rickles.
“HE STRIPPED SOULS AS BARE AS BODIES!”
Conceived of by James H. Nicholson and directed by Corman, X features a
remarkable performance from Ray Milland as a scientist who manages to give
himself X-ray vision. Initially intoxicated by his incredible powers, he ultimately
finds his new-found ‘gift’ to be a mixed-blessing to say the least, one that gives
him the ability to penetrate more deeply into the material world than he can
cope with.
–Fri, Aug 21 at 8:00, Wed, Aug 26 at 7:00, and
Sun, Aug 30 at 9:00.
ROGER CORMAN WILL BE HERE IN PERSON FOR A SPECIAL
CONVERSATION FOLLOWING THE SCREENING ON FRIDAY, AUGUST 21!
TICKETS WILL BE $15 GENERAL / $12 FOR AFA MEMBERS.
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Ray Milland
PANIC IN YEAR ZERO!
1962, 92 min, 35mm, b&w. With Ray Milland, Jean Hagen, and Frankie Avalon.
“DESTINED TO BE THE MOST TALKED ABOUT FILM OF OUR TIME! An
orgy of looting and lust…‘A’-DAY…when civilization came to an end!”
Tapping into the fear of thermonuclear war that ran rampant in the early 60s,
PANIC features Ray Milland as Harry Baldwin, who, thanks to a well-timed
camping trip with his family, is spared destruction in the nuclear cataclysm
that befalls LA. They soon find, though, that surviving the blast itself is only the
beginning of their ordeal, in a world where law and order has suddenly given
way to chaos and violence. One of five films that Milland would direct later in his
career, PANIC is by far the best known, a minimalist, bracingly unsentimental
piece of work that focuses not on the physical devastation promised by nuclear
war but the even more disturbing social and moral collapse that could ensue.
–Sat, Aug 22 at 4:30 and Thurs, Aug 27 at 7:00.
THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN (©2015 Susan Nicholson-Hofheinz)
Roger Corman
A BUCKET OF BLOOD
1959, 66 min, 35mm, b&w. With Dick Miller.
“You’ll be sick, sick, sick – from LAUGHING!”
Though typical of early AIP horror films in many ways – with AIP staple Dick Miller in the lead
role, a bare-bones budget, and a whiplash-fast shooting schedule (five days!) – the nowclassic A BUCKET OF BLOOD was the first flat-out comedy for both AIP and Roger Corman.
Miller shines as Walter Paisley, an aspiring beatnik who stumbles on art-world success when
he accidentally kills his landlady’s cat and, on a whim, covers it in clay. After passing the
result off as a genuine sculpture he’s proclaimed an artistic genius. But soon he finds himself
pursuing increasingly desperate and horrific means to produce new sculptures and maintain
his artistic glory.
–Sat, Aug 22 at 7:00, Sat, Aug 29 at 9:00, and Tues, Sept 1 at 7:15.
ROGER CORMAN WILL BE HERE IN PERSON FOR THE SCREENING ON SATURDAY,
AUGUST 22!
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Roger Corman
THE TOMB OF LIGEIA
1964, 81 min, 35mm. With Vincent Price.
“CAT or WOMAN or a thing too evil to mention? Listen for the SCREAM in the night,
look into the eyes of the creature who rules the land of the living dead!”
Written by future CHINATOWN screenwriter Robert Towne, LIGEIA is perhaps the most faithful
of the Poe adaptations. In this final film in the cycle, Price stars as the widower Verdon Fell,
who is convinced that his wife’s spirit has not found peace; when he reluctantly decides to
remarry, sinister events suggest that his suspicions may be well-founded…
“Here at last Mr. Corman has done what it always seemed he might be able some time to
do: make a film which could without absurdity be spoken of in the same breath as Cocteau’s
ORPHEUS.” –THE LONDON TIMES
–Sat, Aug 22 at 9:00, Tues, Aug 25 at 7:00, and Sun, Aug 30 at 5:00.
ROGER CORMAN WILL BE HERE IN PERSON FOR THE SCREENING ON SATURDAY,
AUGUST 22!
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Bert I. Gordon
THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN
1957, 74 min, 35mm, b&w
“GROWING…! GROWING…! GROWING…! TO A GIANT…! TO A MONSTER…!
TO A BEHEMOTH…! WHEN WILL IT STOP…??”
In 1956 James H. Nicholson acquired the screen rights to THE NTH MAN, a whimsical sci-fi
story about a sky-high human giant. In its transition from page to screen it morphed into a
more serious tale of an anguished army colonel, exposed to nuclear radiation, who finds himself growing at an astounding rate. THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN was the first film directed
for AIP by giant monster specialist Bert I. Gordon (his nickname “Mister B.I.G.” referred both
to his initials and his preferred genre). Gordon had already proved his colossal credentials
with KING DINOSAUR (1955) and THE CYCLOPS (1957), and would go on to create numerous
other super-sized films (for AIP and others), from WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST (1958) and
VILLAGE OF THE GIANTS (1965), all the way up to EMPIRE OF THE ANTS (1977). He was the
undisputed master of the form.
The screening on Sunday, August 23 will be introduced by horror cinema scholar
Tom Weaver!
–Sun, Aug 23 at 3:15, Fri, Aug 28 at 7:15, and Tues, Sept 1 at 9:00.
25
SERIES
I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF (©2015 Susan Nicholson-Hofheinz)
I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN (©2015 Susan Nicholson-Hofheinz)
THE SHE-CREATURE
AIP, CONT’D.
AIP TRAILERS PROGRAM
No AIP tribute would be complete without
a program focusing on the company’s promotional and marketing genius. At AIP, the
promotional campaign often took precedence,
sometimes literally: many were the AIP projects
for which the titles were chosen (usually by the
company’s founder James Nicholson) and the
poster art designed before the films themselves
were written, much less shot. The trailers, for
better or for worse, had to wait until there was
a film to mine them from – but once it had its
hands on a finished product, AIP lavished the
same attention on their trailers as they did on
their posters, press releases, and ad materials,
pulling out the stops to make damned well sure
their target audiences hauled their asses to
the movie theater. Tonight, thanks to collector
and Exhumed Films co-founder Harry Guerro,
we’ll be seeing a generous selection of these
mini-masterpieces. Covering the 1960s-80s,
the program will include trailers for some of the
films screening this summer, and serve as a
bona fide sneak-preview of Part 2, coming soon
to a repertory cinema/film archive near you.
–Sun, Aug 23 at 5:00.
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Gene Fowler Jr.
I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF
1957, 76 min, 16mm, b&w
“THE MOST AMAZING MOTION PICTURE OF
OUR TIME!”
In the dawning days of AIP, James H. Nicholson
wanted producer Herman Cohen as his partner.
Cohen was unavailable, but Nicholson later
brought him into the AIP fold as a producer,
and they became the daddies of the teenage
monster genre, beginning with this film.
“REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE sprouts fangs and
claws, as a hard-to-handle Michael Landon
comes under the dubious care of an obsessed
hypnotherapist who plumbs his primitive
instincts and turns him into a lycanthrope. By
appealing directly to their drive-in audience,
AIP’s creature features got a shot in the paw
with this one-week wonder.” –Robert Cashill
The screening on Sunday, August 23 will
be introduced by horror cinema scholar
Tom Weaver!
–Sun, Aug 23 at 7:15, Sat, Aug
29 at 5:30, and Thurs, Sept 3 at
7:15.
26
Herbert L. Strock
Ubaldo Ragona & Sidney Salkow
1957, 74 min, 16mm, b&w/color
1964, 86 min, 35mm, b&w. With Vincent Price.
I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN
“BODY OF A BOY! MIND OF A MONSTER!
SOUL OF AN UNEARTHLY THING!”
“Four months after teen audiences went gaga for
I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF came the natural
follow-up, with another famous monster adapted
for the postwar generation. Fresh from WEREWOLF, Whit Bissell plays Professor Frankenstein,
who harvests body parts from student athletes
killed in a crash near his laboratory to make his
creature (Gary Conway). ‘Speak,’ the professor
commands. ‘I know you have a civil tongue in
your head because I sewed it back myself.’ As
his secretary (Phyllis Coates, TV’s first Lois Lane
on ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN) frets, this battle
between a troubled youth and a twisted, authoritarian adult gets increasingly uncivil – luckily,
Frankenstein has an alligator pit in his lab, to
dispose of the collateral damage. Conway would
return for AIP’s very meta HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER.” –Robert Cashill
The screening on Sunday, August 23 will be
introduced by horror cinema scholar Tom
Weaver!
–Sun, Aug 23 at 9:00 and
Sat, Aug 29 at 7:15.
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Ib Melchior
THE TIME TRAVELERS
1964, 82 min, 35mm
“Step through “The Time Portal” beyond the
crack in Space and Time where the fantastic
world of the Future will freeze your blood
with its weird horrors!”
“From the prolific pen of the late writer and director Ib Melchior came one of the most tantalizing
time travel scenarios, an early cinematography
credit for future Oscar winner Vilmos Zsigmond.
Scientists tinkering with a time portal step into
the blighted future world of 2071, where surviving
humans are working on a spaceship that will take
them to safety elsewhere in the galaxy. Mutants
scarred by nuclear war complicate those plans,
however, as time trips up the travelers (including
veteran actors Preston Foster and Philip Carey,
with John Hoyt as their future counterpart). Sci-fi
super fan Forrest J. Ackerman, of FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND fame, cameos.” –Robert
Cashill
–Mon, Aug 24 at 7:00,
Thurs, Aug 27 at 9:00, and
Thurs, Sept 3 at 9:00.
THE LAST MAN ON EARTH
“Do you dare imagine what it would be like to be…the last man
on earth…or the last woman? Alive among the lifeless…alone
among the crawling creatures of evil that make the night hideous
with their inhuman craving!”
This was the first adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I AM LEGEND, the
novel which would spawn 1971’s THE OMEGA MAN and 2007’s I AM LEGEND. Intended for Hammer Films, the project was ultimately handed over
to independent producer Robert Lippert, with AIP picking it up for distribution in the U.S. Vincent Price stars as seemingly the sole survivor of a
post-apocalyptic plague that has killed most of humanity and transformed
the remainder into zombies. Despite its low budget, and the fact that it was
filmed in Italy, with Rome standing in for L.A.(!), it’s a genuinely haunting
film that’s graced with a superb, subdued performance from Price.
–Mon, Aug 24 at 9:00, Fri, Aug 28 at 9:00, and
Mon, Aug 31 at 7:00.
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Sidney Hayers
BURN, WITCH, BURN
1962, 90 min, 35mm, b&w
“DO THE UNDEAD DEMONS OF HELL STILL ARISE TO TERRORIZE
THE WORLD?”
“Other than giving NIGHT OF THE EAGLE a more exploitable title here,
AIP didn’t make wholesale changes to a film it subcontracted to AngloAmalgamated, its UK co-producers. It didn’t need to, as co-writers Richard
Matheson and Charles Beaumont, with numerous TWILIGHT ZONE scripts
under their belts, had brewed a classic tale of witchcraft from Fritz Leiber’s
novel CONJURE WIFE. Rationalist psychology professor Peter Wyngarde is
dismayed to learn that his spouse is dabbling in the black arts to advance
his career. But forcing her to abandon the practice opens the door to more
supernatural havoc, as the film makes deft use of the bubbling cauldron
of personalities, agendas, and insecurities in academia.” –Robert Cashill
–Tues, Aug 25 at 9:00, Sun, Aug 30 at 7:00, and
Mon, Aug 31 at 9:00.
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Edward L. Cahn
THE SHE-CREATURE
1956, 77 min, 16mm, b&w
“HYPNOTIZED! Reincarnated as a Monster from Hell! IT CAN AND
DID HAPPEN! Based on authentic FACTS you’ve been reading
about! The STARTLING disclosures about REINCARNATION and AGE
REGRESSION!”
THE SHE-CREATURE represents a bizarre mash-up of then-current trends,
combining the fad for hypnotic regression triggered by the best-selling,
allegedly non-fiction book THE SEARCH FOR BRIDEY MURPHY with the
one for prehistoric humanoid reptilian creatures that was inspired by THE
CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954). If this hybrid genre sounds
like it makes no sense whatsoever, well…it doesn’t. But therein lies the
charm of THE SHE-CREATURE, whose low-budget ingenuity, flashes of
genuinely moody atmospherics, and opportunistic chutzpah render it an
exemplary AIP film.
–Wed, Aug 26 at 8:45 and Sat, Aug 29 at 3:45.
SERIES
YUMEN
FEMALE DIRECTORS
THE POET AND THE SINGER
CINEMA ON THE EDGE:
THE BEST OF THE BEIJING INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL 2012-14
August 7-13
Independent cinema in China is definitely “on the edge,” and these days it’s frequently forbidden. Independent films, i.e., those without government permission to be screened, can only
exist on the margins in China. Commercial theaters are inaccessible without government approval, and screenings in cafes and art galleries can’t fill the gap. Independent film festivals
like Beijing’s BIFF provided a vital platform, by screening films made by the most enterprising and aesthetically (and sometimes politically) risk-taking filmmakers to hungry and engaged
audiences. But in 2012, the Chinese government began clamping down on “unauthorized” film festivals. Last year, BIFF was met with police force and prevented from screening anything.
But the festival and its organizers, indomitable, refuse to be intimidated. We have curated a selection of the best of BIFF from the last three years: brilliant, sometimes challenging,
always eye-opening cinema that tells new Chinese stories with brave, innovative, and inspired cinematic language. This selection from BIFF’s programs highlights an exuberant kind of
experimentalism, a search for new language in the face of China’s bewildering variety of new realities, expressed in documentary, fictional, and short film modes. Experience the delight
of encountering a cinema on the vanguard, one that speaks with an urgency and confidence impossible to ignore.
Curated by Shelly Kraicer and produced by Karin Chien.
Luo Li
Huang Xiang, Xu Ruotao, and JP Sniadecki
Yang Mingming
TANG HUANG YOU DIFU
2013, 65 min, 16mm-to-digital. In Gansu dialect with
English subtitles.
2012, 43 min, digital. In Mandarin with English subtitles.
EMPEROR VISITS THE HELL /
2012, 67 min, digital. In Mandarin with English subtitles.
This is a quietly astonishing tour de force
that hinges on a lovely conceit: relocating to
the present day the famous story of the Tang
dynasty Emperor Taizong’s visit to the underworld. Shot in elegant, black-and-white long
takes, the film spins a tale of a local river god,
the Dragon King, who, feuding with a fortune
teller, alters the weather without authorization
and is condemned to death. When the Emperor
fails to commute the god’s sentence, otherworldly retribution is swift: he is summoned
to Hell. Li’s audacious use of multiple levels
of storytelling and filmmaking craftily and joyously subverts every authority around.
–Fri, Aug 7 at 6:45 and
Mon, Aug 10 at 9:00.
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Wang Xiaozhen
YUMEN
Two Chinese avant-garde artists and an American experimental filmmaker have collaborated
on a stunningly beautiful Chinese experimentalfiction-documentary that dazzlingly combines
ghost stories and “ruin porn” to form a celluloid
psycho-collage. Shot on 16mm film, it’s set
in the largely abandoned oil drilling town of
Yumen – a place with an ancient, poetic history
in China’s western Gansu province – and takes
us through trashed, desolate urban spaces abandoned by Chinese socialism. But the filmmakers
bring these places alive with their cast of ghosts,
artists, vagabond dancers, and singers.
–Sat, Aug 8 at 6:45 and
Tues, Aug 11 at 9:00.
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Chai Chunya
AROUND THAT WINTER /
FOUR WAYS TO DIE IN MY
HOMETOWN / WO GUXIANGDE SI
2013, 96 min, digital. In Shandong dialect with English
subtitles.
2012, 90 min, digital. In Gansu dialect with English
subtitles.
TIANYUAN JIANG WU
This curiously beautiful Daoist comedy was the
opening film of BIFF2013. Wang, painting with
scrupulously composed, eloquent black-andwhite images, tells of a young urbanite who
brings his girlfriend to meet his farmer parents
in the countryside of Shandong province.
Although nothing precisely happens, the farm
and surrounding woods are a stage for almost
non-stop cursing, kissing, pissing, and fucking.
It’s both earthy and somehow unworldly at the
same time, featuring perfectly ribald kids, a
voyeuristic brother with a urination fetish, and
a deadpan comic couple. Wang has a terrific
eye, and an utterly unique, low-key comic
voice.
–Fri, Aug 7 at 8:45 and
Tues, Aug 11 at 7:00.
ZHONG SIWANG FANGSHI
As much poetry as it is narrative, Chai’s gorgeous
work evokes four characters – a poet, a searcher,
a puppet master, and a shaman – each with
intense, mystical, deeply-rooted spiritual links
to the land mediated by the four elemental symbols: earth, water, fire, and wind. The film’s logic
is associative, dreamlike; Chai builds up a series
of striking tableaux, hypnotically suggestive and
pictorially spectacular. Two young women lose a
camel, then a father. A retired shadow puppeteer
meets a gun-toting tree thief. Storytellers and
shamans evoke a lost spiritual world that Chai
films back to life in spectacular visual motifs
whose meanings are intuited, like deeply felt
communal memories.
–Sat, Aug 8 at 8:45 and
Wed, Aug 12 at 7:00.
FEMALE DIRECTORS / NÜ DAOYAN
Two brilliant young women, art school graduates with deliciously profane vocabularies and supreme confidence, talk sex, cinema, and power, as they wield their shared
video camera like a scalpel. Yang’s superb debut is hilarious, moving, and subversive.
&
Wen Hui
LISTENING TO THIRD GRANDMOTHER’S STORIES / TING SAN
NAINAI JIANG GUOQUDE SHIQING
2012, 75 min, digital, b&w/color. In Mandarin with English subtitles.
A language written by women confronts official ideology in Wen’s film. She starts
from stories her 83-year-old great-aunt tells her of being tortured as a “class enemy”
during Mao’s China: the result is poetry, an experimental documentary that combines
testimony and dance-like gesture, in black-and-white and color.
–Sun, Aug 9 at 5:30 and Wed, Aug 12 at 9:00.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ai Weiwei
PING’AN YUEQING
2011, 142 min, digital. In Mandarin with English subtitles.
The documentaries produced by Ai Weiwei’s studio are closer to investigative journalism than to conceptual art. This film concerns the mysterious death by “road accident” of a village leader, Qian Yunhui, an activist who stood up for his fellow villagers
when their land was confiscated without compensation by the local government.
Qian’s death in 2010 quickly became a cause célèbre online in China. Ai and his team
take up the challenge of determining what really happened, and dig deep into the
land dispute lying behind what looks like the convenient murder of a rights advocate.
–Sun, Aug 9 at 8:00 and Thurs, Aug 13 at 6:30.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EXPERIMENTAL SHORT FILM PROGRAM:
Bi Gan THE POET AND THE SINGER / JINGANGJING 2012, 26 min, digital
A visually splendid poem that provocatively but elegantly juxtaposes a poet, a singer,
a river, a pair of murderers, and the Diamond Sutra.
Zhi Jun DISMANTLING CLEMATIS #16 / CHAI TIESI #16 2014, 30 min, digital
After a fire, scarred bonsai trees are meticulously freed of their supporting wires by
medical professionals.
Chen Zhou I’M NOT NOT NOT CHEN ZHOU 2013, 34 min, digital
The color yellow, as well as artist Chen Zhou and his alter ego(s), star in this droll,
playfully conceptual tour de force.
Total running time: ca. 95 min.
–Mon, Aug 10 at 7:00 and Thurs, Aug 13 at 9:15.
27
SERIES
DEAR JANICE
RHYTHMUS 21
EXPERIMENTAL ANIMATION
August 28-30
Published in 1976, EXPERIMENTAL ANIMATION was among the first texts to trace the trajectory of the kinetic art form by directly linking the abstract work of early pioneers
(e.g., Eggeling, Richter, Fischinger) to the technological breakthroughs of the 1960s and 70s (e.g., Whitney, Vanderbeek, Emshwiller). The book was a collaborative effort
between Robert Russett (1935-2015), an animator and scholar, and Cecile Starr (1921-2014), a critic, teacher, and filmmaker, who combined their expertise of contemporary
practices and early animation respectively to compile this definitive, yet highly accessible, volume.
Russett and Starr ingeniously mapped this history by featuring a multi-generational selection of 38 “innovative artist-filmmakers.” Each artist was highlighted in a chapter of
their own with a short introduction and a collection of primary source materials including illuminating stills, interviews, and statements. All 38 artists are represented in this
series alongside program titles and descriptions from the book.
This series represents a tribute to Russett and Starr, both of whom we sadly lost within the last year, as well as a celebration of their influential volume.
Special thanks to Cassie Blake, May Haduong & Mark Toscano (Academy Film Archive); Aram Boyajian; Kitty Cleary (MoMA); Kathy Elder (York University); Clint Enns; Robert Haller; Mark Johnson (Harvard
Film Archive); Denah Johnston & Antonella Bonfanti (Canyon Cinema); Jodie Mack; Cheryl Petrie (University of Waterloo); James Roberts (National Film Board of Canada); and MM Serra & Josh Guilford
(Film-Makers’ Coop).
PROGRAM 1: A RISING GENERATION OF INDEPENDENT ANIMATORS
“The young artists whose work is represented in this section form only a small sampling of the current generation of animators who began working within the last decade.
[…] Unlike the generation of independent animators before them, they have often found audiences and some financial support, although usually only within modest terms.
[…] With such a growing interest in the field, future creations are impossible to imagine. And that, by definition, is the nature of experimental animation.”
Adam Beckett DEAR JANICE 1972, 13 min, 16mm
Laurent Coderre METAMORPHOSES 1968, 2.5 min, 16mm
Caroline Leaf SAND, OR PETER AND THE WOLF 1968, 10 min, 16mm, b&w. Print courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive.
Frank and Caroline Mouris FRANK FILM 1973, 9 min, 16mm
Eliot Noyes Jr. CLAY OR THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 1965, 9 min, 35mm, b&w
Dennis Pies SURFACE WORK 1979, 4.5 min, 16mm
Robert Russett PRIMARY STIMULUS 1977, 8 min, 16mm
John Stehura CIBERNETIK 5.3 1960-65, 7 min, 16mm
Total running time: ca. 70 min.
–Fri, Aug 28 at 7:30.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PROGRAM 2: PIONEERS OF ABSTRACT AND PICTORIAL ANIMATION IN EUROPE
“While the work of pioneer abstract animators in Europe is of inestimable historical importance as a movement, it is the quality of their artistry that deserves our greatest
attention. Many of the films are individually striking, even dazzling achievements. They remain unrivalled by the subsequent works of later innovators, growing rather than
diminishing in value with the passing of time, like all works of art.”
Walter Ruttmann OPUS II-IV 1923-25, 11 min, 16mm, b&w, silent
Viking Eggeling SYMPHONIE DIAGONALE 1924, 7 min, 35mm, b&w, silent
Hans Richter RHYTHMUS 21 1921, 3.5 min, 35mm, b&w, silent
Oskar Fischinger CIRCLES 1933-34, 3 min, 16mm
Len Lye TUSALAVA 1928, 9 min, 16mm, b&w
“The three European artist-animators included in this section were among the first to develop new and distinctive styles of pictorial animation outside the bounds of the
commercial animated cartoon. Each created a characteristic imagery: Reiniger in her sharply contrasting black-and-white fairy tales and adventure stories; Bartosch in his
hazy, glistening caricature of modern society; and Alexeieff in his pointillistic half-tone that evoked real and fantasy life in turn-of-the-century Russia.”
Lotte Reiniger THE STOLEN HEART / DAS GESTOHLENE HERZ 1934, 11 min, 16mm, b&w
Berthold Bartosch THE IDEA / L’IDEE 1932, 25 min, 16mm, b&w
Alexandre Alexeieff & Claire Parker EN PASSANT 1943, 2 min, 16mm, b&w
Total running time: ca. 75 min.
–Sat, Aug 29 at 7:30.
28
SERIES / SPECIAL SCREENINGS
STRAIGHT AND NARROW
LAPIS
PROGRAM 3:
PIONEERS OF ABSTRACT ANIMATION IN AMERICA + CONTEMPORARY IMAGISTS
“New York and California were the two centers around which abstract animation developed in the United
States. Mary Ellen Bute seems to have taken the lead on the East Coast, and she was followed by other
painters who like herself worked in virtual isolation – Douglass Crockwell, Dwinell Grant, and Francis Lee.”
Mary Ellen Bute SYNCHROMY NO. 4: ESCAPE 1937-38, 4 min, 35mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
Douglass Crockwell THE LONG BODIES 1947, 4 min, 16mm, silent
Dwinell Grant ABSTRACT EXPERIMENTS 1941-42, 8 min, 16mm, silent
Francis Lee LE BIJOU 1946, 8 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
“Building on the historic and artist tradition of the early pioneers, experimental animators working in the
post-1950s began to create new kinds of content and meaning by investigating the interior logic of nonnarrative and perceptual concepts of cinema. […] Working outside the mainstream of commercial cinema,
these contemporary imagists, like the experimental pioneers before them, have contributed to a rigorous
tradition of independence, originality and esthetic inquiry that has always been the concern of experimental
animation.”
Robert Breer 70 1970, 5 min, 16mm-to-35mm, silent. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the
Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Harry Smith FILM NO. 16: OZ: THE TIN WOODSMAN’S DREAM ca. 1967, 14 min, 35mm, silent. Preserved by
Anthology Film Archives.
Carmen D’Avino PIANISSIMO 1963, 6 min, 35mm. Archival print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.
Jerome Hill CANARIES 1968, 4 min, 35mm. The 35mm print is the result of a recent preservation project undertaken
by the Museum of Modern Art.
Tony Conrad STRAIGHT AND NARROW 1970, 10 min, 16mm, b&w. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with
funding provided by The National Film Preservation Foundation.
Larry Jordan ORB 1973, 5 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
Paul Sharits PIECE MANDALA/END WAR 1966, 5 min, 16mm, silent. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
Total running time: ca. 80 min.
–Sun, Aug 30 at 5:30.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PROGRAM 4:
EXPERIMENTERS IN ANIMATED SOUND + ANIMATION AND THE NEW TECHNOLOGY
“A form of filmic sound has been explored and developed within the realm of experimental animation, which
is unlike any other auditory experience in motion pictures. Basically, the technique consists of creating
sound, not from conventional musical instruments or other sonic sources, but by inscribing graphic patterns
directly onto the soundtrack of film. This unique form of sound production is a totally synthetic process
which closely resembles the technique of animation itself and is sometimes called synthetic sound or
animated sound.”
Norman McLaren DOTS and LOOPS 1940, 5 min, 16mm
John & James Whitney FIVE FILM EXERCISES 1943, 5 min, 16mm
Barry Spinello SOUNDTRACK 1969, 10 min, 16mm, b&w
“As modern technology develops, its image-making potential is being examined and explored by a new
breed of animator who is a technician as well as an artist. The visual vocabulary of animation is being
enriched by such fundamental new provisions as computers, video tape, synthesizers, and intermedia
projection systems.”
James Whitney LAPIS 1966, 9 min, 16mm
Stan Vanderbeek (with Ken Knowlton) POEM FIELD NO. 1 1965, 5 min, 16mm, b&w
Peter Foldes HUNGER 1974, 11.5 min, 16mm
Ed Emshwiller SCAPE-MATES 1972, 28 min, 16mm
VISIONS
VISION FESTIVAL
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Vision Festival. To
celebrate this milestone Arts for Art (AFA) plans 6 days that set the
standard for creative Free Jazz music, dance, visual art and ideas,
which embrace values that challenge and inform. This year Arts for
Art celebrates all VISION artists, in particular those iconic NY artists
whose creative voices have helped build Vision Festival’s reputation
as the world’s premier FreeJazz Festival.
Markus Hansen & Jean-Marie Boulet
BILLY BANG LUCKY MAN
2008, 90 min, DCP
In 1967, Billy Bang served a year-long tour of duty in Vietnam, an
experience that left him emotionally scarred and confused about his
American identity. Deciding that the only way he can repair his emotions and find some closure is to return to Vietnam, this time with
his violin. LUCKY MAN documents his return to the battlefields of his
past, fraught with memories and flashbacks, in contrast to the ebullient youthful Vietnam of today. His journey takes him through the rich
musical traditions of Vietnam, from Saigon and the Mekong Delta,
north across the 17th parallel and climaxing with his collaboration
with the Hanoi symphony orchestra. LUCKY MAN documents Billy’s
desire to overcome and transcend the trauma of war through music
and art.
–Sun, July 5 at 7:00.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Lucio Sternbach
WILLIAM PARKER AND HAMID DRAKE: A PLUG-IN TO NATURE
2015, 25 min, digital
A rare glimpse into the musical brotherhood of bassist William Parker
and drummer Hamid Drake. Known worldwide as one of the premier
rhythm sections of the idiom, the two discuss their musical kinship
and the shamanistic sound ceremonies they deploy worldwide.
Featuring exclusive live performances from Parker’s 2013 Stone
residency and the 2014 Vision Festival.
&
Susan Littenberg
VISIONS
1998, 60 min, video
Recorded during the 2nd Annual Vision Festival held in the Lower East
Side from May 27-June 1, 1997, VISIONS contains powerful and rare
performances by underground artists who have mastered their disciplines over the past 25-30 years, but have largely been ignored by
the mainstream. Featuring performances and interviews with William
Parker, David S. Ware, Matthew Shipp, Roy Campbell, Daniel Carter,
Cooper-Moore, Amiri Baraka, Patricia Nicholson, Assif Tsahar, John
Tchicai, and more.
–Sun, July 5 at 9:15.
Total running time: ca. 80 min.
–Sun, Aug 30 at 7:30.
29
SPECIAL SCREENINGS
DISINTEGRATION LINE #1 (DL1)
LIFE & FILM: LARRY JANIAK
“Drawing directly on film, when approached calmly, reveals the universe.”
–Larry Janiak
Between 1960-70 Chicago filmmaker Larry Janiak crafted a stunning body of work
filled with personal images, dynamic shapes, and overarching spiritual quests. The
images are often intimate, yet the overall moods and themes echo well beyond
the self. Janiak has been making experimental films as a means of personal and
aesthetic expression since the age of 15. He studied and then taught at the Illinois
Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design, an environment steeped in Bauhaus
traditions and one of the first schools in the U.S. to develop an art-film program. His
filmmaking techniques include live action film and visual experiments in abstract
image via direct chemical manipulation of the film emulsion and scratching or
drawing images directly on the film surface itself.
It’s hard to believe that Janiak’s films are so little known outside small circles in his
hometown of Chicago. This long overdue retrospective, presented in collaboration
with Chicago Film Archives (CFA), aims to introduce Janiak’s singular work to a
new audience. CFA’s Collections Manager, Anne Wells, will be here in-person to
present the program.
“Janiak displays an instinctive command of his techniques, an assuredness of
process rivaled only by Pat O’Neill.” –Doug McLaren, CINE-FILE
ALLEGRO 1960, 3 min, 16mm
DISINTEGRATION LINE #1 (DL1) 1960, 9 min, 16mm, b&w, silent. Preserved by
Chicago Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
ADAM’S FILM 1963, 9 min, 16mm. Preserved by Chicago Film Archives with support from
the National Film Preservation Foundation.
GLASSHOUSE 1964, 7 min, 16mm, b&w
AGAMEMNON IN NEW YORK 1964, 4.5 min, 16mm, b&w. Made in collaboration with
Wayne Boyer.
LIFE & FILM 1965, 4.5 min, 16mm, b&w. Made in collaboration with Robert Stiegler and
Jeffrey Pasco.
HALE HOUSE 1965, 11 min, 16mm, b&w
HOMAGE #5 1970, 6 min, 16mm
DISINTEGRATION LINE #2 (DL2) 1970, 12 min, 16mm. Preserved by Chicago Film
Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Total running time: ca. 70 min.
–Sun, July 19 at 7:30.
30
THE DOOM GENERATION
DIRTY LOOKS: ON LOCATION
(AT AFA)
DIRTY LOOKS: ON LOCATION is a series of queer interventions in New York City
spaces. Over the course of July, artist film and video will appear in queer social
spaces and former sites of queer sociality (like shuttered bars, bathhouses, and
former meeting zones). A new piece, a different setting on each night of July.
Special thanks to Bradford Nordeen (Dirty Looks).
Gregg Araki
THE DOOM GENERATION
1995, 83 min, 35mm. With Rose McGowan, James Duval, Jonathan Schaech, and Parker Posey.
Hit the road with Jordan White, Amy Blue, and Xavier Red, when a couple of
angst-fueled teenagers rescue a wayfaring stranger from a gang of homophobic
goons (played by Skinny Puppy). After a pit stop at a Quickie Mart turns homicidal,
these lovers-on-the-lam are forced to coast through the candy colored hell of
New Queer Cinema auteur Gregg Araki’s first “heterosexual film.” Former lovers
emerge – challenging Amy’s claims of virginity – and go in hot pursuit of these
lusty ones. Blending his early Godardian formal approaches with an MTV flair for
blood, guts, and stunt casting (look out for appearances by Margaret Cho, Porno
For Pyros’ Perry Farrell, Heidi Fleiss, and former cast members of THE LOVE BOAT,
THE BRADY BUNCH, and HERBIE, THE LOVE BUG), Araki’s THE DOOM GENERATION
is the ultimate midnight movie of the 90s, a total cult sensation, and the central
installment in Araki’s “Teen Apocalypse Trilogy.” There just is no place for us in
this world…
–Thurs, July 23 at 8:00.
SPECIAL SCREENINGS
MACONDO
EDEN’S EDGE
VIENNALE MoreVALUE FILM AWARD
WINNERS
Since 2011, each annual edition of the Viennale (Vienna International Film Festival) has featured the granting of the
MoreVALUE Film Award to one or more Austrian filmmakers whose films are included within the festival. Designed to
showcase the best of Austrian cinema, the Award was founded by Erste Bank, the Viennale’s main sponsor, and is
awarded according to the findings of an independent jury. The Award brings a cash prize as well as a one-month residency as a visiting film scholar hosted and organized by the Deutsches Haus at NYU. The screenings are co-organized
by the Deutsches Haus at NYU and the Austrian Cultural Forum New York. Anthology has presented the award-winning
films in the past, and we continue the tradition this year with special screenings of both of the 2014 winners: Sudabeh
Mortezai’s docudrama MACONDO and Gerhard Treml & Leo Calice’s experimental landscape film EDEN’S EDGE. All three
filmmakers will be here in person to present their work!
This program is co-presented by Erste Bank, Deutsches Haus at NYU, and the Austrian Cultural Forum New York.
Special thanks to Sudabeh Mortezai; Gerhard Treml & Leo Calice; Juliane Camfield & Sarah Girner (Deutsches Haus at NYU); Ruth Goubran (Erste
Bank); and Christine Moser, Judith Brand & Chris Zimmerman (Austrian Cultural Forum NY).
JULY:
AUGUST:
MACONDO
EDEN’S EDGE
Sudabeh Mortezai
2014, 98 min, digital. In Chechen and German with English
subtitles.
The first fiction feature from documentary filmmaker
Sudabeh Mortezai, MACONDO focuses on 11-year-old
Chechen refugee Ramasan, who lives in the titular
suburban neighborhood of Vienna with his widowed
mother and two younger sisters. Though only a child,
Ramasan finds himself pushed precipitously towards
adulthood: even as he struggles with the loss of his
father (who was killed in the Chechen wars) and his
cultural identity in a strange new land, he is, within
traditional Chechen society, now considered the man
of the house. The arrival in Macondo of Isa, an old
war buddy of his father’s, throws Ramasan’s uneasy
position between childhood and maturity into relief: he
must reconcile his desire for a father-figure with his
loyalty towards the patriarch whom he hardly knew.
Graced with an exquisite performance – heartbreaking
yet tough – from Ramasan Minkailov, as well as equally
assured work from Kheda Gazieva as his mother Aminat
and Aslan Elbiev as Isa, MACONDO is a finely observed
and deeply humanistic film that movingly depicts one
young man’s emotional struggles as well as providing
a glimpse into the experience of immigrants in 21st
century Europe.
“As an Iranian who split her childhood between Tehran
and Vienna, Mortezai can clearly identify with the confused emotional state of her young protagonist, treating his unique situation as one example of Austria’s
complex immigrant experience – a deeply humanist
perspective.” –Peter Debruge, VARIETY
–Fri, July 24 through Sun, July 26 at
7:30 nightly.
Gerhard Treml & Leo Calice
2014, 61 min, digital
This nine-part film is the creation of the Office for Narrative
Landscape Design, a group of artists, filmmakers, architects,
and landscape designers. O.N.L.S.D., according to its mission
statement, “investigates the narrative nature of landscapes.
In the process, new questions arise about how we see and
use landscapes within stories of everyday life, work, science,
politics, fiction, movies, dreams, or the news.” Consisting of
nine short chapters, each depicting American desert landscapes shot from a seemingly impossible, birds-eye vantage,
EDEN’S EDGE focuses on various men and women who exist
on the margins of society.
“We see bird’s-eye views of minimalistic scenes, meticulously arranged in gray desert sands, usually furnished with
but a few props. Within this context, seemingly lost and barely
insect-size inhabitants move about, recluses, mavericks and
freaks in the best sense of the word. They all have retreated to
the desert, to reinvent their lives on the margins of an increasingly unbearable society: the schizo-shaman who has constructed a totem circle out of stones; a female artist who fled
the city and created a repository for the traumas of combat
veterans; the paranoid druggie who inscribes a giant spiral
along classical lines of land art. As they ploddingly drag
themselves through the sunstruck backdrop, we hear their
voices persistently tell of their fates – in sum, a densely
woven patchwork of unconventional modes of existence.
[…] Rarely have the borders of the idyllic been so concisely fathomed, rarely have the places of retreat remaining for non-conformists been pinpointed so precisely.”
–Christian Höller
ECHOES
THE SECRET LIFE
OF…ANTHOLOGY
FILM ARCHIVES
A once-a-calendar opportunity to take a peek at the
teeming hive of creativity hiding behind the scenes at
Anthology, thanks to the film- and video-making efforts
of AFA’s staff, friends, fellow-travelers, and devotees.
–Sun, Sept 27 at 9:00.
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.
NARRATIVE SHORTS
Marissa Kelton KISSED BY INSPIRATION
2013, 10 min, digital
Amy Leland ECHOES 2014, 10 min, digital
Hannah Leshaw WRITE WITH ME…
2015, 9.5 min, digital
Fouzia Najar SEMIOTICS OF ISLAM 2015, 7 min, digital
Maria Riboli LOCKED IN YOU 2015, 17 min, digital
Lola Jimoh LOVE IN ZODIAC 2013, 21 min, digital
Total running time: ca. 80 min
–Tues, Sept 29 at 7:00.
–Sat & Sun, Aug 15 & 16 at 7:30 each
night.
31
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 BEGINS ITS
SUMMER SERIES AND CELEBRATES
THE UPCOMING FOURTH OF JULY
HOLIDAY WITH THE BLACK PANTHER
PARTY OF HARLEM
–Wed, July 1, Special Program at 6:00,
Short Film Program at 7:45, Feature at
9:00.
NEWFILMMAKERS PRESENTS A
NIGHT OF WOMEN FILMMAKERS
–Wed, July 8, Special Program at 6:00,
Short Film Program at 7:15, Feature at
8:30.
NEWFILMMAKERS NIGHT OF
CHRISTIAN SEX
–Wed, July 15, First Short Film Program
at 6:00, Second Short Film Program at
7:15, Feature at 8:30.
NEWFILMMAKERS NIGHT OF
BROOKLYN FILMS
–Wed, July 22, Short Film Program
at 6:00, First Feature at 7:15, Second
Feature at 9:00.
Edwin Pagan, NewLatino Programming
Lili White, Women’s Programming
Tova Beck-Friedman, Experimental Films
Brandon Ruckdashel, Marketing Director
Barney Oldfield, Executive Producer
Tel: 323-302-5426
[email protected]
610 Fifth Avenue #4956, New York, NY 10185-4956
NEWFILMMAKERS PRESENTS A
ROUGH CUT SCREENING OF ‘GRINDER’
–Wed, July 29, Short Film Program at
6:00, Special Program at 7:00, Feature
at 8:45.
NEWFILMMAKERS MIDDLE EAST
NIGHT
–Wed, Aug 5, First Short Film Program
at 6:00, Second Short Film Program at
7:15, Feature at 8:30.
NEWFILMMAKERS NIGHT OF ARTS
AND CRAFTS
–Mon, Aug 10, First Short Film Program
at 6:00, Second Short Film Program at
7:00, Third Short Film Program at 8:15.
NEWFILMMAKERS PRESENTS A
NIGHT OF SCIENCE FICTION
–Wed, Aug 19, Special Program at 6:00,
Short Film Program at 7:00, Feature at
8:15.
NEWFILMMAKERS PRESENTS A
NIGHT OF WOMEN FILMMAKERS
–Wed, Aug 26, Special Program at 6:00,
Short Film Program at 7:00, Feature at
8:45.
32
NEWFILMMAKERS NIGHT OF MEN’S
ISSUES
–Wed, Sept 2, Short Film Program at
6:00, First Feature at 7:15, Second
Feature at 9:00.
NEWFILMMAKERS GOES BACK TO
SCHOOL WITH YOUNGFILMMAKERS
–Tues, Sept 15, First Short Film Program
at 6:00, Second Short Film Program
at 7:15, First Feature at 8:30, Second
Feature at 9:45.
NEWFILMMAKERS PRESENTS A
NIGHT OF OFFBEAT FILMS
–Wed, Sept 16, Short Film Program
at 6:00, First Feature at 7:15, Second
Feature at 9:00.
NEWFILMMAKERS NIGHT OF FAMILY
FILMS
–Tues, Sept 22, First Short Film Program
at 6:00, Second Short Film Program at
7:15, Feature at 8:30.
NEWFILMMAKERS PRESENTS A
NIGHT OF WOMEN FILMMAKERS
–Wed, Sept 30, Special Program at
6:00, Short Film Program at 7:15,
Special Program at 8:30, Feature at
9:45.
INDEX
3 GODFATHERS, July 24, 26, p. 21
HANOUN, MARCEL, July 31, p. 2
NANOOK OF THE NORTH, July 18, p. 2
ABOUT MRS. LESLIE, Sept 5, 10, p. 12
HARRINGTON, CURTIS, Aug 2, 6, 8, p. 24
NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, THE, Aug 13, 16, 18, p. 19
ACT OF VIOLENCE, Sept 4, 6, 8, p. 11
HARVEY, HERK, Aug 15, 19, p. 20
NOSTALGIA, July 26, p. 2
AI, WEIWEI, Aug 9, 13, p. 27
HATHAWAY, HENRY, Sept 24, 26, p. 22
NOTHING LASTS FOREVER, July 16, 19, 21, p. 18
AKERMAN, CHANTAL, Sept 28, p. 18
HILL, JEROME, Aug 2, 30, p. 3, 29
ON DANGEROUS GROUND, Sept 4, 7, 10, p. 12
AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN, THE, Aug 23, 28, Sept 1,
p. 25
HOLT, NANCY, Sept 17, p. 14
OSHIMA, NAGISA, Sept 25, 26, 27, p. 22
PANIC IN YEAR ZERO!, Aug 22, 27, p. 25
AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN, THE, Aug 1, 4, p. 24
HOME FROM HOME: CHRONICLE OF A VISION,
Sept 11-17, p. 6
ANDERSON, J.L., Aug 14, 16, 19, p. 20
HONEYMOON KILLERS, THE, Sept 3, p. 20
PHASE IV, Aug 15, 18, p. 20
ANOTHER SKY, July 16, 19, p. 18
HUGHES-FREELAND, TESSA, July 30, p. 7
PICABIA, FRANCIS, Sept 10, p. 3
ARAKI, GREGG, July 23, p. 30
I, A MAN, Aug 1, p. 10
PING’AN YUEQING, Aug 9, 13, p. 27
AROUND THAT WINTER, Aug 7, 11, p. 27
I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN, Aug 23, 29, p. 26
PINK NARCISSUS, Sept 1, 2, p. 20
BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK, Sept 5, 6, 8, p. 12
I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF, Aug 23, 29, Sept 3, p. 26
PRICE, LUTHER, Sept 18, 19, 20, p. 9
BAKER, TOM, Aug 2, p. 10
ISOU, ISIDORE, July 17, 22, p. 19
PULL MY DAISY, Aug 8, p. 3
BARRY LYNDON, July 25, 26, p. 21
JACOBS, KEN, Aug 1, 15, p. 2, 3
QUEEN OF BLOOD, Aug 2, 6, 8, p. 24
BASS, SAUL, Aug 15, 18, p. 20
JANIAK, LARRY, July 19, p. 30
RAPT, Aug 23, p. 4
BAVA, MARIO, Aug 1, 4, 8, p. 24
JEANNE DIELMAN, Sept 28, p.18
RAY, NICHOLAS, Sept 4, 7, 10, p. 12
BEYOND THE LAW, Aug 2, p. 10
JENNINGS, HUMPHREY, Aug 16, p. 3
REITZ, EDGAR, Sept 8-17, p. 6, 10-11
BIDGOOD, JAMES, Sept 1, 2, p. 20
JORDAN, LARRY, Aug 17, 30, p. 3, 29
BILLY BANG LUCKY MAN, July 5, p. 29
KASTLE, LEONARD, Sept 3, p. 20
REMINISCENCES OF A JOURNEY TO LITHUANIA,
Sept 13, p. 5
BLACK SABBATH, Aug 1, 4, 8, p. 24
KEATON, BUSTER, Aug 21, 22, p. 3
RETURN TO OZ, July 18, 20, 22, p. 19
BLOOD AND LACE, July 31, Aug 2, 9, p. 23
KELLER, MARJORIE, Aug 20, p. 8
RIVER’S EDGE, Sept 23, 27, p. 22
BONGO WOLF’S REVENGE, Aug 2, p. 10
KIRSANOFF, DIMITRI, Aug 16, 23, p. 3, 4
ROSSEN, ROBERT, July 17, 18, p. 12
BORDERLINE, July 18, 20, p. 19
KISS BEFORE THE MIRROR, THE, July 29, 30, p. 21
RUSSETT, ROBERT, Aug 28-30, p. 28
BOTTOM OF THE BOTTLE, THE, Sept 24, 26, p. 22
KUBELKA, PETER, Aug 23, p. 4
RYAN, ROBERT, Sept 4-10, p. 11-12
BOXCAR BERTHA, Aug 1, 5, 7, p. 24
KUBRICK, STANLEY, July 25, 26, 28, p. 21
SARAFIAN, RICHARD, Sept 24, 25, p. 22
BRAND X, July 17, 23, p. 18
KUCHAR, GEORGE & MIKE, Aug 27, p. 4
SCHILLER, TOM, July 16, 19, 21, p. 18
BRÜGGEMANN, DIETRICH, July 10-16, p. 5
LA CAVA, GREGORY, July 29, 30, p. 21
SCORSESE, MARTIN, Aug 1, 5, 7, p. 24
BUCKET OF BLOOD, A, Aug 22, 29, Sept 1, p. 25
LAMBERT, GAVIN, July 16, 19, p. 18
SHE-CREATURE, THE, Aug 26, 29, p. 26
BURN, WITCH, BURN, Aug 25, 30, 31, p. 26
LANDOW, GEORGE (OWEN LAND), Aug 29, p. 4
SIGN OF THE PAGAN, July 24, 27, p. 21
CALICE, LEO, Aug 15, 16, p. 31
LAST MAN ON EARTH, THE, Aug 24, 28, 31, p. 26
SIMPLE HISTOIRE, UNE, July 31, p. 2
CAREY, TIMOTHY, July 18, 23, p. 19
LAUGHTON, CHARLES, Aug 13, 16, 18, p. 19
SIRK, DOUGLAS, July 24, 27, p. 21
CARNIVAL OF SOULS, Aug 15, 19, p. 20
LAUREL & HARDY, Aug 22, p. 3
SISTERS, Aug 3, 7, 9, p. 25
CEREMONY, Sept 25, 26, 27, p. 22
LEAR, NORMAN, Aug 13, 15, 17, p. 19
SMITHSON, ROBERT, Sept 17, p. 14
CHAMBERLAIN, WYNN, July 17, 23, p. 18
LESLIE, ALFRED, Aug 8, p. 3
SNIADECKI, JP, Aug 8, 11, p. 27
CLAIR RENÉ, Sept 10, p. 3
LILITH, July 17, 18, p. 12
SONGS FROM THE NORTH, Sept 18-24, p. 6
COLD TURKEY, Aug 13, 15, 17, p. 19
LIMITE, Sept 1, 2, 3, p. 20
SPRING NIGHT, SUMMER NIGHT, Aug 14, 16, 19, p. 20
COPPOLA, FRANCIS FORD, July 31, Aug 3, 5, p. 24
STARR, CECILE, Aug 28-30, p. 28
CORMAN, ROGER, Aug 21, 22, 25, 26, 29, 30, Sept 1 p. 23-25
LISTENING TO THIRD GRANDMOTHER’S
STORIES, Aug 9, 12, p. 27
DE PALMA, BRIAN, Aug 3, 7, 9, p. 25
LIVES OF HAMILTON FISH, THE, July 21, p. 13
STURGES, JOHN, Sept 5, 6, 8, p. 12
DEMENTIA 13, July 31, Aug 3, 5, p. 24
LODEN, BARBARA, Aug 14, 17, p. 20
TABLE OF LOVE, Sept 8, 9, p. 11
DOOM GENERATION, THE, July 23, p. 30
LYE, LEN, Aug 23, 29, p. 4, 28
TIME TRAVELERS, THE, Aug 24, 27, Sept 3, p. 26
DUCHAMP, MARCEL, Sept 10, p. 4
MAAS, WILLARD, Aug 17, p. 3
TOM, TOM, THE PIPER’S SON, Aug 15, p. 3
DWAN, ALLAN, Sept 23, 27, p. 22
MACLAINE, CHRISTOPHER, Sept 11, p. 4
TOMB OF LIGEIA, THE, Aug 22, 25, 30, p. 25
EDEN’S EDGE, Aug 15, 16, p. 31
MACONDO, July 24-26, p. 31
TREML, GERHARD, Aug 15, 16, p. 31
ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE, July 19, 21, p. 19
MACPHERSON, KENNETH, July 18, 20, p. 19
ULMER, EDGAR G., Aug 1, 4, p. 24
EMPEROR VISITS THE HELL, Aug 7, 10, p. 27
MAILER, NORMAN, Aug 2, p. 10
VANISHING POINT, Sept 24, 25, p. 22
FEEL MY PULSE, July 29, 30, p. 21
MAN OF ARAN, July 19, p. 2
VENOM AND ETERNITY, July 17, 22, p. 19
FEMALE DIRECTORS, Aug 9, 12, p. 27
MANN, ANTHONY, Sept 5, 7, 9, p. 12
VISIONS, July 5, p. 29
FILM PORTRAIT, Aug 2, p. 3
MARRO, XANDER, Aug 6, p. 13
WALDEN, Sept 12, p. 4
FLAHERTY, ROBERT, July 18, 19, p. 2
MASON, RACHEL, July 21, p. 13
WANDA, Aug 14, 17, p. 20
FORD, JOHN, July 24, 26, p. 21
MATTER OF TIME, A, Aug 2, 6, p. 24
WARHOL, ANDY, Aug 1, p. 10
FOUR WAYS TO DIE IN MY HOMETOWN,
Aug 8, 12, p. 27
MEKAS, JONAS, Sept 12, 13, p. 4, 5
WHALE, JAMES, July 29, 30, p. 21
MÉLIÈS, GEORGES, Sept 25, 26, p. 5
WORLD’S GREATEST SINNER, July 18, 23, p. 19
FRAMPTON, HOLLIS, July 26, p. 2
MENKEN, MARIE, Sept 17, 27, p. 5, 14
FRANK, ROBERT, Aug 8, p. 3
MILLAND, RAY, Aug 22, 27, p. 25
X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES, Aug 21, 26, 30,
p. 25
GENERAL, THE, Aug 21, p. 3
MINNELLI, VINCENTE, Aug 2, 6, p. 24
YOO, SOON-MI, Sept 18-24, p. 6, 14
GENET, JEAN, Aug 8, p. 3
MORTEZAI, SUDABEH, July 24-26, p. 31
YUMEN, Aug 8, 11, p. 27
GOD’S LITTLE ACRE, Sept 6, 9, p. 12
MURCH, WALTER, July 18, 20, 22, p. 19
ZERO HOUR, Sept 8, 10, p. 11
GORDON, BERT I., Aug 23, 28, Sept 1, p. 25
NAKED SPUR, THE, Sept 5, 7, 9, p. 12
ZINNEMANN, FRED, Sept 4, 6, 8, p. 11
PEIXOTO, MARIO, Sept 1, 2, 3, p. 20
STATIONS OF THE CROSS, July 10-16, p. 5
ZORNS LEMMA, July 26, p. 2
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 opened on November 30, 1970, at Joseph Papp’s 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 reference library, a film preservation department, administrative
offices, and an art gallery. Anthology opened at its current location on October 12, 1988.
EXHIBITION PROGRAM
Our theaters are equipped with 35mm, 16mm, 8mm, Super-8mm, and video projection. Besides the daily screenings of new and classic works
programmed by the staff, Anthology is a home to many guest curators and film festivals. Anthology’s programming is unusually rich and varied.
Individual retrospectives, special national and minority surveys, and thematic festivals are exhibited regularly.
ESSENTIAL CINEMA REPERTORY COLLECTION
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 the 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.
REFERENCE LIBRARY
Anthology’s reference library contains the world’s largest collection of materials documenting the history of American and international avantgarde/independent film and video. The holdings include books, periodicals, photographs, posters, recordings of lectures and interviews,
distribution and festival catalogs, as well as files on individual filmmakers and organizations. The files contain original documents, manuscripts,
letters, scripts, notebooks, clippings, and other ephemera. We are now working to make much of these unique materials available online.
FILM PRESERVATION
Anthology has also saved tens of thousands of films from disposal and disintegration, principally by housing materials in our historic East Village
Courthouse building. We have been steadfastly committed to the preservation and exhibition of work by the most important American independent
and experimental filmmakers of the last half-century. Films preserved by Anthology—over 1000 to date—include those of Stan Brakhage, Shirley
Clarke, Joseph Cornell, Maya Deren, George & Mike Kuchar, Marie Menken, Paul Sharits, and Harry Smith, among many others.
COVER: Sabrina Gschwandtner, Quilts, Dresses, Arts and Crafts (for Rollins), 2014. 16mm polyester film, polyester thread, lithography
ink. 53” high x 77 3/16” wide x 6 1/8” deep. Photo by Tom Powel Imaging. Collection of the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art
at Rollins College.
Directions
Subway: F train to 2nd Avenue, walk two blocks north on
2nd Avenue to 2nd Street.
#6 to Bleecker St., walk one block North on Lafayette, two
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Bus: M15 to 3rd Street.
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Help Anthology by becoming a member. Membership benefits include:
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