It all started with a heartbeat. Sandra Llano-Mejía’s IN PULSO (1978), the first video artwork made by a Colombian artist to be exhibited in Colombia (along with Ricardo Castaño’s AUTORRETRATO), is structured around an electrocardiogram of her heart. An embodied and scientific self-portrait of the artist ushered in the birth of a medium in the country, and it would only take a few years for it to develop into a fully-fledged scene with its own exhibitions like the Medellín Modern Art Museum (MAMM) Videoart Biennial in 1986. This program brings together four pioneers of Colombian video art to trace the contours of its early history. Colombian video art came to life in the late 1970s and early 80s, right at the start of one of the country’s most tumultuous historical periods and relatively late to the global scene. But this tardiness gave early Colombian video art its distinctive flavor. Combining influences from established international video artists with idiosyncratically Colombian gestures, the first attempts at video art explored the emotional and visceral textures of the country while attempting to escape the darker aspects of quotidian reality. Whether it is Llano-Mejia’s approximations to the body, Karen Lamassonne’s intimate musings, Véronique Mondéjar’s references to the televisual, or Gilles Charalambos’s erotic provocations against the artistic establishment, these figures represent the transnational, citational, and innovative qualities that characterized this exciting period of Colombian art. Together, they provide a fruitful avenue to explore the country’s history. Guest-curated by Juan Camilo Velásquez, who also wrote the description above. This screening is supported by the Latinx Project at New York University. Sandra Llano-Mejía IN-PULSO 1978, 30 min, video Karen Lamassonne SECRETOS DELICADOS 1982, 23 min, video Véronique Mondéjar ASA NISI MASA 1989, 15 min, video Gilles Charalambos X 1988, 7 min, video Gilles Charalambos CÁLCULOS EXTÁTICOS 1993, 4 min, video Total running time: ca. 85 min.
A prolific and renowned documentary filmmaker, Nicholas Doob is known for his work as a cinematographer on numerous films by D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus and for directing or co-directing numerous award-winning films. Before launching his professional career, Doob studied at Yale (with Murray Lerner, among others), and the Yale Film Center recently preserved several of the extraordinary short films he made during that time, including two remarkable works of street photography, 42ND STREET MOVIE and STREET MUSIC. Nicholas Doob STREET MUSIC 1979, 57 min, 16mm. Print courtesy of the Yale Film Archive. Presents performances by 19 street musicians in seven cities across the U.S. The film features singers, guitarists, drummers, dancers, and others, including street performance legends like Porkchop, Brother Blue, the Automatic Human Jukebox, and Jimmy Davis. From San Francisco to New York, and Chicago to New Orleans, the film captures a cross-section of Americans filled with raw talent, showmanship, and hustle, and presents a time capsule of the fashion, architecture, and culture of the 1970s. Preceded by: Nicholas Doob 42ND ST MOVIE 1969, 18 min, 16mm. Print courtesy of the Yale Film Archive. 42ND ST MOVIE begins with a shot of the sun setting over the Hudson River in New York City, and goes on to examine the nighttime street life found in the block of 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Total running time: ca. 85 min.
NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! Kamal Aljafari A FIDAI FILM / الفلم عمل فدائي 2024, 78 min, DCP. In Arabic, English, and Hebrew with English subtitles. Distributed by Prismatic Ground. Prismatic Ground presents a theatrical premiere run of prolific Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari’s multiple-award-winning A FIDAI FILM, a new feature that powerfully reimagines/repurposes stolen archival material to battle the violent colonial forces of theft, destruction, and erasure. The film’s Arabic title, which translates to something like “To Make a Film is a Fidai Act”, posits revolutionary filmmaking as a tool in the struggle towards liberation, and continues to uphold Aljafari’s practice as a relentless form of cultural resistance. In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut. During this time, it raided the Palestinian Research Center and looted its entire archive. The archive contained historical documents of Palestine, including a collection of still and moving images. Taking this as its departure point, A FIDAI FILM aims to create a counter-narrative to this loss, presenting a form of cinematic sabotage that seeks to reclaim and restore the looted memories of Palestinian history. It’s a poignant exploration of identity, memory, and resistance, told through a unique blend of documentary and experimental filmmaking techniques. “It is not only a project about the present past that needs to be recognized, but also about the future that is still possible to define. Repurposed moving images, names, and texts are digitally defaced. Red scribbles blot out parts of the footage. Figures are cut out, or replaced with random material re-appropriated from backgrounds. Kamal Aljafari calls his counter-archive ‘the camera of the dispossessed.’” –KAMAL ALJAFARI PRODUCTIONS Preceded by: PARADISO, XXXI, 108 2022, 22 min, DCP “How to express what is absent, marginalized and made to disappear through the use of violence? Kamal Aljafari’s work has been revolving around this basic constellation of memory politics for years. In the shots of an elaborately staged Israeli army propaganda film from the 1970s, condensed into frenzied cascades of images, Palestine, imagined solely as a battlefield, once again becomes ‘a shadow that runs faster than the body that belongs to it’”. –Stephan Settele, VIENNALE Total running time: ca. 105 min.
In Ana Lily Amirpour’s stunning first feature film, A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT, a nameless, chador-wearing, skateboarding female vampire roams the fictional Bad City as an avenging angel, killing men who have harmed women. Amirpour references spaghetti Westerns, American noirs, vampire films, and graphic novels, to subvert the tropes of primarily male horror films. Scored to Iranian rock, techno, and Morricone-inspired riffs, the film explores Iranian conservatism, female desire, rage, and agency.
In a Beirut metaphysically disfigured by almost a decade of warfare, a young woman comes of age at a time that seems stuck, suspended. Human relations have been violently deprived of any prospect or certainty, youth of any sweetness, and her platonic entanglement with a painter is marooned by the city’s timelessness. “Newspapers no longer have a date,” says someone in an abandoned theatre. Life goes on but it is unclear in which direction it is headed. Every sentiment and thing seem destined to be frustrated in a film that poetically captures the crippling incertitude of everyday life encircled by death. Saab stages in this film the horror of wartime inertia.
A polemical pastiche and ludic film essay, Cameroonian director Jean-Marie Teno’s film summons the history of colonization to explain the present. Set in Cameroon – which holds the unfortunate, singular status of having been colonized by France, Germany and Britain – the documentary presents an effective account of the harsh realities of neocolonialism on the African continent. Opening with a fable and taking its title from a children’s song, the film succeeds in identifying what might still be embers of possibility in the inheritance of once autonomous societies and indigenous cultures that are not yet entirely lost.
Alfreda’s Cinema returns to Anthology to host the first in-person NYC event with British-born, Jamaican filmmaker Cecile Emeke, who has enjoyed a meteoric rise in recent years. A decade ago, Emeke broke the internet with ACKEE & SALTFISH and STROLLING, which led to her directing the second episode of HBO’s INSECURE. Emeke’s rise came amidst millennials’ initiation into the workforce and as streaming began to dominate the entertainment industry. YouTube was uncharted territory and the ACKEE & SALTFISH webseries inspired the next wave of Black British and Black Women’s cinema. Self-taught, Emeke’s ingenuity ignited a fresh and stylized approach to telling Black stories. 10 years later, Emeke is standing tall after career pivots and upheavals. This celebration of Cecile Emeke is an expression of gratitude for holding space in an industry that continues to overlook and marginalize Black women’s impact and authenticity. Launched in 2015 by Melissa Lyde, Alfreda’s Cinema is working towards becoming the only microcinema in Brooklyn to operate under the leadership of a Black woman with a mission to screen films that celebrate Black and non-Black people of color. For more info visit: www.instagram.com/alfredascinema/ ACKEE & SALTFISH: BACKBREAD EPISODE 2014, 5 min, digital STROLLING 2014-16, 9 min, digital THE ANCESTORS CAME 2017, 6 min, digital HEY BABE LONGTIME LET ME KNOW WHEN YOU’RE FREE TO CATCH UP SOON 2020, 24.5 min, digital HERENOWTHENWHAT 2020, 17.5 min, digital ATONEMENT 2021, 7.5 min, digital SAMEGAAD 2023, 6 min, digital Total running time: ca. 80 min.
“Following an act of vandalism, the filmmaker’s father decides to install a surveillance camera to record the scenes unfolding in front of the house. Everyday family life, the neighbors going to work, and the children at school – AN UNUSUAL SUMMER captures fleeting moments of poetry whereas, in the background, the daily choreography of the Arab district – that some name the ‘ghetto’ – of Ramla, in current Israeli territory, comes to the surface. Composing with this visual material of low-definition aesthetics, finely punctuated with sound effects, Aljafari creates a mechanical diary of a life that scrolls past the window and succeeds with patience and infinite grace in transfiguring a ‘film à dispositif’ based on a security device into a personal and eminently political fresco.” –Emilie Bujès, VISIONS DU RÉEL Preceded by: IT’S A LONG WAY FROM AMPHIOXUS 2019, 16 min, digital “An old woman leans to the young man with the yellow book sitting next to her and asks, ‘What are they distributing here?’ ‘Numbers’, he replies. In Berlin’s waiting rooms, where metal and wooden seats are nailed to the ground, people arrive after emerging from the seas. Here they wait. Aljafari’s new short film once again collapses time, questioning the meaning of life in a system in which humanity is reduced to a number and the value of one’s future is measured by applications within grey hallways.” –BERLINALE
Sarah Maldoror AND THE DOGS WERE QUIET / ET LES CHIENS SE TAISAIENT 1978, 13 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles. Briefly returning to her acting origins, the French and Guadeloupean filmmaker Sarah Maldoror adapted the Martinican poet, playwright, and politician Aimé Césaire’s play of the same name to the screen. Maldoror applied her lyrical and militant lens to a work centered on the Haitian Revolution and the death of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Her version adds a pedagogic dimension, specifically targeting the anthropological Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Playing the role of “mother”, Maldoror’s staging presents the play in pieces, set amongst a visiting group of students and the museum’s storage area of caged African objects. Manthia Diawara DIASPORA CONVERSATIONS: FROM GORÉE TO DOGON 2000, 47 min, digital This documentary begins with a group of children gathered around the Maison des Esclaves – the House of Slaves – on Gorée Island in Senegal, whose Door of No Return has become a site of commemoration and pilgrimage, marking a final point of departure in the transatlantic slave trade. Malian scholar Manthia Diawara and American actor Danny Glover take this charged location as their own starting point for a journey across West Africa, travelling by train, van, and boat to explore the complicated and shared histories of the continent and diaspora. Camille Billops TAKE YOUR BAGS 1998, 11 min, 16mm-to-DCP “My take on slavery,” begins the voiceover by storyteller and archivist Camille Billops, in one of the many experimental documentaries she made with her partner James Hatch. This short film navigates cultural memory within the context of slavery, exposing the artistic and spiritual theft which accompanied the enslavement of Africans. Billops’s take on the looting of “dreams and memories” targets the further plundering by artists such as Matisse, Braque, and Picasso, and the structures of Euro-American art museums. Nii Kwate Owoo YOU HIDE ME 1970/2024, 16 min, 16mm-to-DCP. This version of YOU HIDE ME – created by the director in 2024 – is based on a digitally restored 16mm duplicate negative and was made possible by a collaboration between Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, the British Film Institute, and Nii Kwate Owoo. Ghanaian filmmaker Nii Kwate Owoo’s deliciously clandestine subversion of his access to the British Museum’s hidden holdings coincided with some of the earlier calls for restitution. Shooting in one day and under urgent conditions, Owoo and his team revealed the overflowing storage vaults of stolen African objects, artefacts, and artworks. The film powerfully holds up over 50 years later, situating a militant demand for repatriation in clear historical terms. Total running time: ca. 95 min.
“Parajanov’s lost 1952 diploma film…was based on the same material: Andriesh, the 1946 narrative poem by the Moldovan author Emilian Bucov. […] This more conventional feature-film remake produced at the Dovzhenko Film Studio adheres to the popular Soviet fairytale film genre as exemplified by directors such as Alexander Ptushko and Alexander Rou. […] The film was not a box-office success and was criticized in the Soviet press for its underdeveloped script, but the aspects that critics did admire then still retain their charm: the performance of the child actor Konstantin (Kostya) Rusu, the musical score, and Suren Shakhbazian’s cinematography.” –James Steffen, IL CINEMA RITROVATO Sergei Parajanov DUMKA 1957, 25 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Ukrainian and Russian with English subtitles. Scanned in 4K using the original negatives preserved at Dovzhenko Centre. The project was made possible thanks to the special partnership with Fixafilm (Warsaw). “The first of the documentaries directed by Parajanov at the Dovzhenko Film Studio in Kyiv at the very beginning of his career. The film’s subject is the state academic choir Dumka, which became famous for its a cappella singing. […] The folkloric motifs that recur in the story…become a declaration of love for the Ukrainian land. This eclecticism is underlined by the poetic force of images, in which Parajanov often echoes Dovzhenko.” –Stanislav Bytiutskyi, IL CINEMA RITROVATO Total running time: ca. 90 min.
“Co-directed with Dodo Abashidze…Parajanov’s hypnotic and wondrous ASHIK KERIB is his last completed film. Based on a short story by the poet Mikhail Lermontov…it is a lushly choreographed and illusory portrayal of an Azeri-Turkish folk tale in which a meandering minstrel named Ashik Kerib falls madly in love with a rich merchant’s daughter. After he is spurned by her wealthy and erratic father, he traverses the Caucasus for one thousand and one nights to earn riches and win her hand. On his fragmented quest, Kerib is tricked by a rival, assailed by marauding horsemen, menaced by a pasha, and subjugated by a sultan (likely allusions to Brezhnev and Stalin).” –Dorota Lech, TIFF
“BETTER, STRONGER begins with an intense monologue by its main character, Lana (Karen Achenbach), which continues at a fairly relentless pace throughout. It is not a seductive story like ROMANCE, but an aggressive one that often jabs and pokes at the audience. Lana’s character is a high-energy, talkative actress who has returned to New York from California for a brief visit. She visits her family and cousins, who are a rowdy and obnoxious bunch, and storms from one scene to another. […] Bowes made BETTER, STRONGER as an artist-in-residence at the Television Laboratory at WNET/Thirteen. The tape is distinguished by its preoccupation with and relentless poetic use of language.” –Marita Sturken, “Television Fictions: An Interview with Ed Bowes,” AFTERIMAGE (May 1986) HOW TO FLY 1980, 30 min, video “With HOW TO FLY, Bowes abandoned plot entirely, finding other forms of structure. He wanted to show that stories do not have to obsessively organize and explain data, and that television’s hundreds of simultaneous, fragmented narratives – news, fiction, commercials, sports, etc. – had prepared audiences for this new type of structure.” –Charles Ruas Total running time: ca. 95 min.
BEYOND MESHES: THE FILM MUSIC OF TEIJI ITO PRESENTED BY MICHIKO OGAWA Teiji Ito (1935-82) played an important role in the New York experimental film and theater music scene from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s. Ito is famous for a free and expressive compositional style, using multiple instruments and overdubbing techniques in close relationship with on-screen imagery. For this special evening, Michiko Ogawa will present three films by Maya Deren and Marie Menken that Ito scored, alongside three recent films inspired by Ito’s works and working process, devised in collaboration with Lyndsay Bloom, Angela Jennings, Manuel Pessôa de Lima, and Carolyn Chen. Michiko Ogawa is a Japanese performer/composer based out of Berlin. She was awarded a Doctoral degree from the University of California San Diego in 2019 with a thesis focusing on the film music of Teiji Ito, and is currently writing his biography. Marie Menken BAGATELLE FOR WILLARD MAAS 1961, 5 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives. Lyndsay Bloom HAND CATCHING FLOUR 2019, 5 min, 16mm-to-digital Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON 1943, 14 min, 16mm. Music by Teiji Ito from 1959. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives. Angie Jennings THE STIGMA FOG SAINT WARDS OFF EXTINCTION 2019, 6 min, digital Marie Menken DWIGHTIANA 1959, 3 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives. Michiko Ogawa & Manuel Pessôa de Lima THE COSMIC MUSIC OF TEIJI ITO 2021, 20 min, digital Total running time: ca. 75 min (with presentation).
“Robin Bolger: Yesterday, you said the last good movie you’d recently seen was BLUE VELVET. I agree with you on that, I think that was close to perfect. Did you see David Lynch’s view of America? Can you talk about that a little bit, why you liked that movie so much? Robert Frank: Yeah, I saw the brutality, a certain craziness, an hypocrisy, I saw very strong criticism. I also felt that he really understood, to put it in that form of a movie. It’s horrifying. It had a very big effect on me afterwards, thinking about it. When I saw it, I was really horrified, I thought ‘Jesus, this is really going a bit too far on the other side.’ But the next day when I thought about it I accepted it totally. Wonderful, if you don’t have to pussy-foot around. And at the same time, it was entertaining. It kept you in suspense, it was well done. I also like the first movie by him, ERASERHEAD.” –THE PICTURES ARE A NECESSITY: ROBERT FRANK IN ROCHESTER, NY, November 1988 (edited by William S. Johnson)
Meredith Monk’s first feature-length film, BOOK OF DAYS, is a meditation on time, drawing parallels between the Middle Ages (a time of war, plague, and fear of the Apocalypse) and the 1980s (a time of racial and religious conflict, the AIDS epidemic, and fear of nuclear annihilation). The film centers on a young girl from the Jewish community of a medieval village during the time of the Black Death who has inexplicable visions of the future. As the plague descends upon the village, scapegoating and blame are cast with tragic consequences. Preceded by: Robert Withers TURTLE DREAMS 1987, 10 min, 16mm. Concept and music: Meredith Monk. Meredith Monk & Bob Rosen ELLIS ISLAND 1982, 28 min, 35mm Total running time: ca. 120 min.
“CAIRO DRIVE expertly balances humor, frustration and a distinctive sense of fatalistic irony to offer a view of Egypt unseen in recent documentaries about the Arab Spring. Shot before, during and after the revolution, Sherief Elkatsha’s entertaining film explores Cairo from the street level through the perspectives of its drivers. Fighting congestion, navigating in the absence of any apparent traffic laws and deciphering the surprisingly eloquent language of car horns, they represent a cross-section of Egyptians trying to make their way through a country fraying at its edges.” –DOC NYC Preceded by: Mira Nair JAMA MASJID STREET JOURNAL 1979, 18 min, 16mm-to-digital Mira Nair’s personal record of street life around the Jama Masjid, or Great Mosque, in the old city of Delhi, India. Total running time: ca. 100 min.
“Autumnal, verging on wintry, CANDY MOUNTAIN is a film of off-putting attitude and unobtrusive splendor. This Robert Frank/Rudy Wurlitzer collaboration resurrects the ghost of beatnik aspiration – it’s as mocking and elegiac as befits the testament of two reclusive counter-culture heroes. […] As beautiful as it is mannered, as sad as it is funny, [this] is a film about the end of the road, the end of America, the end of Endsville. Incandescently nondescript, this may be the first movie to make Canada seem uncanny.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE
COMMITTED, directed and written by Lynne Tillman and co-directed by Sheila McLaughlin, is about actress and leftist iconoclast Frances Farmer, played by McLaughlin. In the mid-1930s, Farmer became a Hollywood star; within a decade, she was in a state mental hospital. Highly stylized, moodily provocative, and shot in b&w, COMMITTED presents a complex look at this defiant woman with leftist political views, casting new light on Farmer’s powerful persona.
“A coming-of-age narrative made with documentary filmmaker Peter Whitehead, DADDY depicts an incestuous relationship between father and daughter, which Saint Phalle modeled on her own real life Oedipal trauma. When DADDY was released in 1973, the Village Voice called it ‘a wildly uneven succession of images, of black-and-white and color photography, cartoons, collage, sculpture, action desecration, deconstructivist art, charades and masquerades, with a look that falls between avant-garde decadence and softcore pornography.’ While critics may not have welcomed Saint Phalle’s transgression of structural orthodoxies, her unique contribution to cinema can be celebrated today for its entwinement of female sexual and artistic empowerment. DADDY transcends autobiographical confessional to become an anti-Oedipal, anarchafeminist manifesto that places sexual agency as the fulcrum of Niki de Saint Phalle’s artistic practice.” –Alison Gingeras & Nicoletta Beyer
Franco-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop returns to the terrain of restless spirits and haunting pasts to situate still unfolding efforts for the restitution of the African cultural patrimony looted by colonial powers. In 2021, 26 (of at least 7,000) artworks taken from the Kingdom of Dahomey in an 1892 invasion were returned to Cotonou, in their remapped home territory of the present-day Republic of Benin. Maintaining her cinematic signature of hybridity, DAHOMEY is a collage of forensic observation and spiritual reanimation – the latter delivered through the voiceover interventions of the recovered statue of King Ghezo. Diop’s tightly-coiled documentary centralizes the importance of sustaining and recuperating a plural and collective store of indigenous knowledge and memory. Preceded by: Chris Marker & Alain Resnais STATUES ALSO DIE / LES STATUES MEURENT AUSSI 1953, 30 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles. Commissioned by Présence Africaine, the magazine and publishing house started by Alioune Diop as a home for Pan-African thought, Resnais and Marker’s essay film pays close visual attention to African statues and masks in order to formally protest their transformation into commodities by the European art world’s mechanisms of capture and commercialization. STATUES ALSO DIE served as a rare French recognition that the materials recoded as “African art objects” were materializations of entire cosmologies, and spiritual and social systems. Total running time: ca. 100 min.
Since 1989, Visual AIDS – a New York based non-profit that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy – has mobilized art institutions for Day With(out) Art. A day of mourning and action that uses art to respond to the ongoing HIV and AIDS crisis, Day With(out) Art encourages universities, museums, art institutions, and AIDS organizations to present related programming on or around World AIDS Day, which falls on December 1. This year, Visual AIDS has organized “Red Reminds Me…”, a program of seven videos reflecting the emotional spectrum of living with HIV today. Through the red ribbon and other visuals, HIV and AIDS has been long associated with the color red and its connotations – blood, pain, tragedy, and anger. “Red Reminds Me…” invites viewers to consider a complex range of images and feelings surrounding HIV, spanning eroticism and intimacy, mothering and kinship, luck and chance, memory and haunting. The commissioned artists deploy parody, melodrama, theater, irony, and horror to build a new vocabulary for representing HIV today. The title is drawn from the words of Stacy Jennings, an activist, poet, and long-term survivor with HIV, who writes: “Red reminds me, red reminds me, red reminds me…to be free.” Linking “red” to freedom, Jennings flips the usual connotations of the color and offers a new way of thinking about the complexity of living with HIV. Just as a prism bends and refracts light, “Red Reminds Me…” expands the emotional spectrum of living with HIV. It shows us that while grief, tragedy, and anger define parts of the epidemic, the full picture contains deep, nuanced, and sometimes contradictory feelings. The artists in this program were selected through an open call process juried by artists/activists aAliy A. Muhammad and Jessica Whitbread, curator Alper Turan, and community organizer Josué Lopez. Visual AIDS is a New York-based non-profit that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over. For more info, visit: visualaids.org Gian Cruz DEAR KWONG CHI 2024, digital Milko Delgado EL CLUB DEL SIDA 2024, digital Imani Harrington AGE OF KNOWING / SCRAPED 2024, digital David Oscar Harvey AMBIVALENCE: ON HIV & LUCK 2024, digital Mariana Iacono & Juan De La Mar EL VIH SE ENAMORÓ DE MI (HIV FELL IN LOVE WITH ME) 2024, digital Nixie IT’S GIVING 2024, digital Vasilios Papapitsios PARAPRONOIA 2024, digital Total running time: ca. 60 min.
During the production of WILD STYLE in 1980, Ahearn moved with his wife Jane Dickson to a corner loft with views of 8th Ave and 43rd St. Awakened nightly by howling from the street, he was ready with his video camera to shoot the transgender habitués of the infamous hangout, Sally’s Hideaway, throwing garbage cans at cops. Show World, Dobbs Hats, and Paradise Alley offered lovely backdrops to another drug deal gone bad. Home movies of his son Joe’s birthday parties and the arrival of his daughter Eve clashed with street fights down below. Times Square’s New Year’s Eve mob scenes marked the passage of time until Ahearn’s building was demolished to make way for the new Disney-fied Times Square. Józef Robakowski FROM MY WINDOW / Z MOJEGO OKNA 1978-99, 19 min, 16mm-to-digital “In 1978, Robakowski moved into an apartment in a newly-built high-rise in the center of Łódź. That’s when he began filming the people and events he could see from his kitchen window. Looking down onto the public square below, his witty pseudo-documentary observes the daily activities of his neighbors and mass gatherings such as the annual May Day marches. …[The] film spans 20 years with an invisible, omniscient narrator in the manner of a classic 19th-century novel.” –Walter Seidl, KONTAKT COLLECTION Eve Heller ASTOR PLACE 1997, 10 min, 16mm, silent “Passersby at Astor Place in New York City speak silent volumes as they move by the mirrored surface of a diner window. I wanted to capture the unscripted choreography of the street, its dance of gazes and riddle of identities.” –Eve Heller Total running time: ca. 75 min.
“A wonderfully spare and evocative portrait of a fishing town perched on the frigid northern edge of the U.S. […] With its WPA-meets-alt.rock sensibility, DUTCH HARBOR provides that lingering frontier with an elegy that’s hard-bitten and haunting.” –NEW YORK PRESS “It’s hard to take Robert’s influence on frontally. There is no me without him (who on earth would I be, I wonder?), just as there is no DUTCH HARBOR without him. There is a way in which making this film felt like stepping inside of his work – simply moving through space on Unalaska Island felt like living inside of a scratched print from Nova Scotia. Before I ever knew him, Robert taught me how to look – and to some extent, how to live. The fact that the film eventually led to our meeting and an intermittent friendship… I don’t know how it all works. No words. He told me that DUTCH HARBOR was ‘A good film. An honest film,’ but we never talked about it at length. It brought us together. And that means the very world.” –Braden King
Viking Eggeling SYMPHONIE DIAGONALE (1924, 8 min, 35mm) “This early experimental short is one of only two films completed by Swedish-born artist Viking Eggeling, who worked in Paris, Milan, and ultimately Germany. It utilizes paper cutouts, tin foil, and frame-by-frame photography to create a playful show in which cubist, even art deco, circles and lines dance – diagonally – across the black screen.” –FACETS 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.” –Dwinell Grant STOP MOTION TESTS (1942, 3 min, 16mm, silent) A pixillated self-portrait of the filmmaker in his studio. 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 & Bob Fleischner BLONDE COBRA (1959-63, 35 min, 16mm-to-35mm. With Jack Smith.) Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from 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.’” –Ken Jacobs Total running time: ca. 60 min.
“Ernie Gehr [makes] cinematic magic, often from the least likely materials. Indeed, Gehr’s most famous film, SERENE VELOCITY (1970), in which the filmmaker transforms an institutional hallway in the basement of a classroom building at the State University of New York at Binghamton into a nexus of visual and conceptual energy, merely by adjusting his stationary camera’s zoom lens every four frames for twenty-three minutes, can be read as Gehr’s manifesto. For Gehr the most everyday spaces and the most mundane actions offer the imaginative filmmaker the most interesting potential. No other filmmaker, with the exception of Michael Snow, has so relentlessly and so productively explored the capacity of filmmaking to develop the visual (and auditory) opportunities afforded by the cinematic apparatus itself.” –Scott MacDonald, A CRITICAL CINEMA 5
Georges Franju BLOOD OF THE BEASTS / LE SANG DES BÊTES (1949, 20 min, 16mm. In French with English subtitles. Archival print courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive.) “This documentary on the slaughterhouses of Paris is one of the great masterpieces of the subversive cinema; here, for once, we are face to face with death, and are neither protected nor cheated. […] A dream-like quality permeates the intense realism of the images; a surrealist intent – akin to Buñuel’s slitting of the eyeball in UN CHIEN ANDALOU – is discernible in this anti-bourgeois film. But the eyeball, however shocking, was fictional; BLOOD OF THE BEASTS is real.” –Amos Vogel, FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART Jean Genet UN CHANT D’AMOUR (1950, 26 min, 16mm, silent) “Genet’s only film – hounded by the censors, unavailable, secret – is an early and remarkably moving attempt to portray homosexual passions. Already a classic, it succeeds as perhaps no other film to intimate the explosive power of frustrated sex…. Like all Genet’s early work, the entire film is, in effect, a single onanistic fantasy, filled with desperate frustration and sensuous nostalgia.” –Amos Vogel, FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART “There’s no smoke without fire; UN CHANT D’AMOUR is a communion in which Genet takes us into the prison in order to liberate us from it.” –Derek Jarman Total running time: ca. 50 min.
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. 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.
by D.W. Griffith (1916, 170 min, 35mm, silent) Griffith’s immensely influential silent epic intercuts four parallel tales from history (spanning Babylon, Christ’s Judea, Reformation Europe, and turn-of-the-century America) to embroider a moral tapestry on personal, social, and political repression through the ages. The visual poetry is overwhelming, especially in the massed crowd scenes, and the unbridled eroticism of the Babylon harem scenes demonstrates just what Hollywood lost when it later bowed to the Hays Code. While the (partly self-financed) production ruined Griffith financially and baffled audiences with its multiple plots and labyrinthine structure, it has been enormously influential on generations of filmmakers, including Eisenstein, who studied the film closely.
(IVAN GROZNY) by Sergei Eisenstein (1942-46, 194 min, 35mm. In Russian with no subtitles; English synopsis available.) “The first time in history a man has committed suicide by cinema,” quipped Dovzhenko. A state-sanctioned production, Ivan’s opulent furs and jewels color the black-and-white machinations by a demonic Czar bent on making his subjects’ lives a living hell – a statement pointed with outrage directly at Stalin.
by Robert Flaherty (1934, 76 min, 35mm) 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
by Robert Flaherty (1922, 83 min, 35mm, silent) Flaherty’s pioneering ethnographic film depicts the struggle for survival of Inuit hunter Nanook and his family. Though rife with staged scenes, anachronisms, and an indulgence in the myth of the “noble savage” (Nanook was in fact an Inuit man named Allakariallak, who hunted not with harpoons and spears but with a rifle), NANOOK OF THE NORTH is a work of great lyricism, simplicity of design, and genuine affection for its protagonists, and its force is undiminished almost 100 years after it was made.
by Jack Smith (1967-70, 45 min, 16mm. Restored print courtesy of the Gladstone Gallery.) “The last of Jack Smith’s 16mm features – austerely black and white, more an exercise in sensibility than craft – evolved out of his November 1967 program, Horror and Fantasy at Midnight. Like Ken Jacobs’s STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH, Horror and Fantasy at Midnight would mix original material with found footage including newsreel footage of the 1940 Republican Convention that nominated Wendell Willkie to run for president. By late March 1968, Horror and Fantasy had coalesced into Kidnapping and Auctioning of Wendell Willkie (sic) by the Love Bandit – an all black-and-white presentation starring writer Irving Rosenthal as the infant Wendell abducted by a mustachioed pirate and sold on the block of a slave market. In early January 1969, the movie had its theatrical premiere as NO PRESIDENT. For musical accompaniment Smith played records and also used the soundtracks of the found material, albeit slowed down for being projected at silent speed. The surviving version NO PRESIDENT alternates scenes shot in the Plaster Foundation with found footage – including a Lowell Thomas travelogue of Sumatra, a clip, apparently from the late 1940s, of an unidentified couple singing ‘A Sunday Kind of Love’, and newsreel footage of candidate Willkie addressing the future Farmers of America. […] Parker Tyler would hail NO PRESIDENT as ‘an even more daring exploitation of the themes in Flaming Creatures, and the Selection Committee for the newly established Anthology Film Archives voted to include both in its canon of essential cinema.” –J. Hoberman
(STAROYE I NOVOYE) by Sergei Eisenstein (1929, 120 min, 35mm, silent. With Russian intertitles; English synopsis available.) With OLD AND NEW, also known as THE GENERAL LINE, Eisenstein developed and perfected his theories of “mise-en-cadre,” using the montage of characters in the foreground and background to conjure meanings, and “overtonal montage,” bringing silent film to its zenith.
THE VALUE OF SMALL SKELETONS 2012, 46 min, digital Co-written with poet Anne Waldman, this piece describes the world, relationships, and interior imagination of a character named Merit. GRISAILLE 2013, 44 min, digital. Text by Ed Bowes with poetry by Robert Duncan and Anne Waldman. “In GRISAILLE (which is a painterly and stained glass term referring to the use of ‘gris’: gray) we encounter five figures – all women – or as Bowes calls them ‘presenters’ who seem to overlap and know one another. They sleep, read, write and contemplate their own consciousness and rehearse their mind grammar, and contemplate paintings, gender, a Robert Duncan poem that relates to a mother as a falconress. They exist in a mysterious landscape of texture, unfathomable shapes, and extraordinary color. The tones of painters Bonnard, de Kooning, Picasso, as well as Renaissance art, have inspired the color and shape of GRISAILLE.” –Anne Waldman Total running time: ca. 95 min.
SPITTING GLASS 1990, 54 min, video “A story about the life of a young academic starring Rosie Hall. A large part of the story takes place in the liminal areas of her consciousness. The film was produced by Amy Taubin. The film was commissioned by and played on Channel Four in England and on public TV throughout the U.S., where it was broadcast in the 1990 season of ‘New Television’ via WGBH/WNET.” –Charles Ruas AKILAH OLIVER: THREE READINGS 2011, 14 min, digital A portrait of the African American poet through her powerful and moving work. Akilah passed away in February of 2011. “Bowes transcends with never-before-seen imagery, whether in cine-poem, or transcending the frame with poet Akilah Oliver reading.” –Alystyre Julian A PUNCH IN THE GUT OF A STAR 2024, 34 min, digital. World premiere! Ed Bowes’s most recent project was filmed in 2020 during the pandemic. Set in Colorado and based on a text by Anne Waldman and the Catalan-American poet Emma Gomis, it is centered on the dreamy, poetic pod they formed together during this enigmatic time. Total running time: ca. 105 min.
“Digital technologies are supposed to distance us from our material surroundings, but in Ed Bowes’s hands, they accentuate the physical world. His exquisite new film, ENTANGLEMENT, shot in high definition, lingers over skin pores, strands of hair, a clutch of flowers, a chair’s back. The accompanying script – written with poet Anne Waldman – is philosophical, abstract, while remaining as sensual as the camera’s vision. Together, image and word draw attention to the nuances of love, language, and touch that we frequently overlook in our bustling everyday lives.” –Alan Gilbert SEAHORSE POWDER ROOM 2018, 41 min, digital SEAHORSE POWDER ROOM spends personal time with two adults and two children; variously writers, thinkers, and musicians, presenting in a weave of text, considerations of Judith Butler and queer poetics, a severed fox head and performance, as they mix in the shadow of words, light, and impermanence. Total running time: ca. 110 min.
South African photographer Ernest Cole was the first to expose the horrors of apartheid to a worldwide audience. His book “House of Bondage”, published in 1967 when he was only 27 years old, led him into exile in NYC and Europe for the rest of his life, never to find his bearings. Raoul Peck recounts his wanderings, his turmoil as an artist, and his anger, on a daily basis, at the silence or complicity of the Western world in the face of the horrors of the Apartheid regime. He also recounts how, in 2017, 60,000 negatives of his work were discovered in the safe of a Swedish bank.
EVERYBODY STREET illuminates the lives and work of New York’s iconic street photographers – including Bruce Davidson, Mary Ellen Mark, Elliott Erwitt, Ricky Powell, and Jamel Shabazz – and the incomparable city that has inspired them for decades. Shot by renowned photographer Cheryl Dunn on both black-and-white 16mm and color HD video, the documentary pays tribute to the spirit of street photography through a cinematic exploration of New York City, and captures the visceral rush, singular perseverance, and at times immediate danger customary to these artists. Preceded by: William Klein CONTACTS: WILLIAM KLEIN 1983, 15 min, 35mm-to-digital “Klein dissects the contact sheet from one recent roll of film, deconstructing his editing technique and injecting a brutally honest assessment of his art. As the New York Times put it, ‘Half a century of work can add up to two blinks of an eye.’” –WALKER ART CENTER Total running time: ca. 105 min.
“With vast empathy and spontaneous imagination, Khalik Allah revitalizes the genre of the observational documentary and transforms several simple technical tricks into a vision of the world. Filming in the summer of 2014 at and near the corner of 125th Street and Lexington Avenue, videotaping and interviewing people who hang out there – most of them black, many drug addicted, some homeless, some discussing their prison time – Allah, doing his own handheld cinematography, presents his subjects in a dreamlike slow motion that turns video into a fluid transfiguration of painted portraiture. […] For all its diagnostic insight of political ruin, the film evokes inner complexities that defy harsh circumstances with a virtually literary exaltation. The result is an intimate movie with a metaphysical grandeur, a detailed local inquiry that displays the crushing power of societal forces as well as the passion and vitality of those who endure.” –Richard Brody, THE NEW YORKER Preceded by: Khalik Allah URBAN RASHOMON 2013, 21 min, digital “With raw, harrowing honesty, Khalik Allah explores the complex relationship between artist and subject as he reflects on his friendship with a homeless addict living on the streets of Harlem.” –CRITERION Total running time: ca. 85 min.
This program gathers together three important works for which Ed Bowes served as cinematographer. Kathryn Bigelow THE SET-UP 1978, 17 min, 35mm. Restored by The Museum of Modern Art with support from the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation. “Kathryn Bigelow still had one foot in the world of political art theory when she shot her first film. In this parody of machismo, two men beat each other to a pulp. The blows are real – Bigelow later said she had no idea of how to direct the actors to pull their punches – but the style is as camp as Kenneth Anger’s SCORPIO RISING.” –Amy Taubin Vito Acconci THE RED TAPES, TAPE 3: TIME LAG 1977, 44 min, video THE RED TAPES is Acconci’s masterwork, a three-part epic that is one of the major works in video. Designed originally for video projection, the work is structured to merge video space – the close-up – with filmic space – the landscape. Acconci maps a topography of the self within a cultural and social context, locating personal identity through history, cultural artifacts, language, and representation. In the third and final part, TAPE 3: TIME LAG, the space is theatrical and the action is communication, as Acconci and actors act out a “rehearsal of America.” Richard Foreman TOTAL RAIN 1989, 28 min, video. With Kate Manheim, Ron Vawter, and Richard Foreman. In this “video play”, which was shown on WGBH/WNET’s series, “New Television”, playwright/director Richard Foreman explores his relationship with actors, and examines the impact of William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” – and in particular the character of Quentin Compson – on his work. Total running time: ca. 95 min.
In her 50th year of creating work that combines voice, movement, and image, Meredith Monk revisits her iconic piece “Education of a Girlchild” for this evocative documentary centering on the 1993 Joyce Theater reunion of that production’s brilliant cast. GIRLCHILD DIARY offers a unique look at Monk’s unconventional creative process, interweaving music, photographs, interviews, and performance footage to illuminate a crossover artist still radical after all these years.
“Along with DUMKA, this Parajanov short forms a diptych on Ukrainian culture. It is about the Ukrainian craftsmen who work in ceramics, painting, glass and ornaments.” –Stanislav Bytiutskyi, IL CINEMA RITROVATO Sergei Parajanov FLOWERS ON THE STONE / KVITKA NA KAMENI / CVETOK NA KAMNE 1960-62, 73 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Russian with English subtitles. Scanned in 4K using the original negatives preserved at Dovzhenko Centre. The project was made possible thanks to the special partnership with Fixafilm (Warsaw). “[This film owes its present form to] the tragic death of lead actress Inna Burduchenko, the rising star of Ukrainian cinema, during the shooting of the film, originally directed by Anatoly Slisarenko. Slisarenko, an ambitious but mediocre director, ordered the actress to run into a burning barn several times until she was fatally burned. He was eventually sentenced to five years in prison, and Parajanov turned out to be the only director at the Dovzhenko studio who agreed to take over the disastrous film. Parajanov showed little interest in composing any semblance of continuity from the existing footage. Instead, he added a series of eccentric, self-contained scenes that only emphasized the film’s artificiality. […] For those who know the production history of the film…[it becomes] a latently surrealist film with a queer sensibility that deconstructs the dull socialist-realist narrative in the process of its completion.” –Olga Briukhovetska, IL CINEMA RITROVATO Total running time: ca. 115 min.
Known for experimental work that delved into themes of gender and sexuality, Ricardo Nicolayevsky was an influential and multifaceted queer Mexican artist who pushed past cultural and formal structures at every turn to create his own style of transgressive lyricism. His creative endeavors spanned various disciplines, including music, cinema, video, literature, and cabaret. Born in Mexico City in 1961, Nicolayevsky moved to NYC in 1982. There, he studied musical composition and musicology while earning a BFA in Cinema Studies from New York University. During this formative period, Nicolayevsky’s most significant work began to emerge through film. He used Super 8 and 16mm cameras to document the vibrant creative community around him – comprising young New York artists, friends from Mexico, and notorious New York luminaries of the era (hello Michael Musto!). His films featured experimental in-camera techniques, innovative editing, and original musical scores, creating multilayered portraits that explored diverse personas, desires, and cinematic influences. His work drew from sources such as Lumière (if WORKERS LEAVING THE LUMIÈRE FACTORY were made while on mushrooms), the Surrealists, Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and beyond. The full impact of his work, later termed “Lost Portraits”, became evident only years later, receiving significant acclaim in the 1990s and 2000s. This program, curated with Nicolayevsky’s close friend and creative partner-in-crime, media artist Ximena Cuevas, and organized by Kathy Brew, Carlos A. Gutiérrez, and Maria-Christina Villaseñor, honors Nicolayevsky’s enduring legacy by screening a selection of “Lost Portraits” alongside later works. NYC 1983 1983, 2.5 min, Super-8mm-to-digital A LETTER FROM KATIA 1984, 2.5 min, Super-8mm-to-digital From the “LOST PORTRAITS” series (1982-85, Super-8mm-and-16mm-to-digital): RICARDO 1 – SELF PORTRAIT APT. 2B 6.5 min MARIANA 1 min TED (TV EROS) 1 min ULA 1 1.5 min XIMENA 2 1 min ROSA 1 1 min PAJARITA 3.5 min MICHAEL 1 min MARILYN 1 min MARK 1 1 min MARIBEL 1 min XIMENA & RICARDO 2.5 min LILY 1 1.5 min A PORTRAIT OF BILLY BOY 1.5 min AMIE 1 1.5 min EDDIE & LYNDELL 1 min EDDIE & LYNDELL 2 1 min KATIA & LULA ON MUSHROOMS 1 min KATIA & RICARDO ON HEROIN 1.5 min SCRATCHES ON MY BRAIN 1982, 1.5 min, 16mm-to-digital From the series “AUTORRETRATOS ERÓTICOS”: HISTOIRE DE L'OEIL 2009, 1 min, digital AUTOPORTRAIT DANS UN HÔTEL DE PUTES 2005, 1 min, digital From the series “POLIPTICOS”: THE PARALLEL LIVES OF R.N. 2009, 1 min, digital From the series “LA VIE PARISIENNE”: LA MORT D’ADONIS 2005, 1 min, digital MIME GATÉ 2005, 1 min, digital LE BAIN DU COMTE 2005, 1 min, digital JULIE! 2002, 13.5 min, 16mm-to-digital THE BIG WHACK 2002, 2.5 min, 16mm-to-digital From the “LOST PORTRAITS” series: JUAN PABLO & ENRIQUE 1982-85, 1 min, digital Total running time: ca. 65 min.
This screening celebrates the release of “Killed (of Kids)” a book by the five members of Huggy Bear, a UK riot grrrl band that existed from 1991-94. Outcast and outraged, Huggy Bear made a howling, squalling mess of punk, with all the menace and freedom of flocking birds. The handful of records, zines, and memories that document this brief, bonfire lifespan sketch a blueprint for how to be in the world, for how to understand the forces of capitalism and patriarchy and capitulation and still resist. Huggy Bear was a group that let things be complicated, that considered themselves complicit, but never took that as a reason to surrender. “Killed (of Kids)” is a book by the five members of Huggy Bear. It reproduces all seven zines made by the band during their lifespan alongside photos, correspondence, flyers, and ephemera from their three-year existence. This archive is joined by new text drawn from two years of interviews with the band members, carefully assembled into an extensive dialogue about intention, surprise, distress, and encouragement. To celebrate the book’s release, we will screen Lucy Thane’s IT CHANGED MY LIFE (1993), about the 1993 Bikini Kill/Huggy Bear tour. Live footage and interviews with both bands is joined by footage of The Raincoats and Skinned Teen as well as interviews with teenagers, revealing the harsh 90s context that gave birth to Huggy Bear. Following the original film, we’ll present a selection of previously unseen performance and interview footage of the Bikini Kill/Huggy Bear tour selected from Lucy Thane’s archive. Organized by Ethan Swan, editor of “Killed (of Kids)”, the screening will be followed by a discussion, with participants to be announced. Lucy Thane IT CHANGED MY LIFE 1993, 25 min, Hi-8-to-DCP
I SHOT ANDY WARHOL, gorgeously shot and long out of circulation, is Mary Harron’s feature film debut, the partially fictionalized story of writer Valerie Solanas’s failed assassination attempt on Andy Warhol. Solanas, the fierce, brilliant author of the S.C.U.M Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men) thought Warhol stole her ideas as she grew increasingly unhinged. Solanas is played by the charismatic Lili Taylor, who won the best acting prize at Sundance in 1996. Jared Harris channels Warhol, Stephen Dorff becomes Candy Darling, and Michael Imperioli is the essence of Ondine.
In the infancy of hip-hop, Brooklyn-born photographer Jamel Shabazz documented the pioneers of music and style who would launch an enduring worldwide phenomenon. In JAMEL SHABAZZ STREET PHOTOGRAPHER, Charlie Ahearn pays tribute to both Shabazz and those who defined hip-hop before it had definition. More than just vintage shots of kids rocking sneakers and savvy street style in Times Square and Fort Greene Park, Shabazz’s photographs have hundreds of stories behind them, and Ahearn’s film gives voice to these images with intimate interviews with Shabazz himself, graffiti pioneer and hip-hop historian Fred “Fab 5 Freddy” Brathwaite, legendary rapper KRS-One, and many others.
This program shifts the focus to Niki de Saint Phalle’s longtime partner and collaborator, Swiss artist and sculptor Jean Tinguely. Tinguely and Saint Phalle’s careers were closely intertwined, and Tinguely played an important part in the creation of UN RÊVE PLUS LONG QUE LA NUIT, both as an actor (his performance in a small but crucial role is memorably outrageous) and as the creator of the monumental sculpture/structure Le Cyclop, which itself plays a major role in the film. Tinguely never made a film of his own, but his work has been unforgettably celebrated on-screen, including by the great Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara and by American experimental filmmaker and animator Robert Breer, whose HOMAGE TO JEAN TINGUELY’S HOMAGE TO NEW YORK documents one of Tinguely’s most sublime and inspired works of mechanical self-destruction. Robert Breer LE MOUVEMENT 1957, 14 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology with generous support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Ed van der Elsken DYLABY 1962, 10 min, 16mm-to-digital Robert Breer HOMAGE TO JEAN TINGUELY’S HOMAGE TO NEW YORK 1968, 10 min, 16mm François de Menil & Monique Alexandre TINGUELY: A KINETIC COSMOS 1980, 32 min, 16mm-to-digital. Courtesy of Menil Archives, The Menil Collection, Houston. © François de Menil. Hiroshi Teshigahara SCULPTURE MOUVANTE – JEAN TINGUELY 1981, 14 min, 35mm-to-digital Total running time: ca. 85 min.
Jem Cohen’s body of work is exceptionally multi-faceted, but one strand that he’s pursued throughout his career, and that threads through almost all of his work, is a devotion to street photography. A compulsive wanderer and filmer, Cohen is one of the great contemporary moving-image street photographers, a successor to diary filmmakers like Robert Frank and Jonas Mekas, and one who is deeply attuned to the hidden details, unique rhythms, and too-often-voiceless inhabitants of NYC and the various other cities and towns he has visited. This program comprises a selection of some of his finest works of “street cinema”, and shows how varied his work is even within that form. LOST BOOK FOUND 1996, 37 min, Super-8mm & 16mm-to-video “My first films were ‘street’ essays and that’s been a through line ever since. Looking back, I’ve come to some realizations. (With time, fog rolls in, but some drifts away too.) In 1990 I had the chance to meet Harry Smith and blew it. LOST BOOK FOUND, which I was already circling by then (I’d started gathering footage by ’89) was, among other things, a way of making that meeting. The film is about seeing the city through a kind of outsider taxonomy; finding a million connections, and missing a million more. That’s what street photography is. Whether trying to make sense of a city or just celebrating the impossibility of doing so, one must embrace chance. The theater of the street, its ‘sets’ and ‘actors,’ can’t and shouldn’t be controlled or effaced (not by gentrification, academicians, cops, cell phones, surveillance…).” –Jem Cohen Plus: NYC WEIGHTS & MEASURES 2006, 6 min, 16mm-to-digital HELIANTHUS CORNER BLUES 2013, 3 min, digital BURY ME NOT 2016, 9 min, digital Total running time: ca. 60 min.
In JENNIFER’S BODY, hot girl Jennifer (Megan Fox) is ritually sacrificed by a group of wannabe rock stars. She becomes a succubus, feeding on high school boys but sexually drawn to her BFF, nerdy Needy (Amanda Seyfried), who is both terrified of and attracted to Jennifer. Bitten by Jennifer while trying to save her boyfriend and end the carnage, Needy develops some of Jennifer’s abilities and escapes from a mental institution, bent on killing those who sacrificed Jennifer. This tongue-in-cheek cult classic (even referencing Jennifer Lynch’s BOXING HELENA) was written by Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama.
In LEBANON, IN A WHIRLWIND, Saab pieces together the many facets and fault lines of a country on the brink of civil war. Though on the political surface the impending conflict may have looked like a religious clash, the director investigates, with both lucidity and empathy, the socio-economic causes that fueled it. Her journalistic rigor avoids any simplification to expose instead the complex and interconnected factors at play, including the centrality of the Palestinian Resistance which, as the REJECTION FRONT shows, was not a political monolith. Both films are traversed by a palpable sense of volatility, capturing Lebanon in a state of febrile tension as emancipatory and reactionary forces face off. REJECTION FRONT / LE FRONT DU REFUS 1975, 13 min, 16mm-to-DCP LEBANON, IN A WHIRLWIND / LE LIBAN DANS LA TOURMENTE 1975, 75 min, 16mm-to-DCP Total running time: ca. 90 min.
“When anger is imprisoned, it bursts into flames,” observes the stupefied voiceover in BEIRUT, NEVER AGAIN. While in her previous documentary, LEBANON IN TURMOIL, the Lebanese director had pieced together the causes behind the imminent explosion, in this film she captures the dislocation that followed it. The film is a morphological treatment of a city dismembered by war, in the guise of an audiovisual poem. The focus is on the metaphysical improbability of the new landscape designed by armed confrontations, at once violently hyperreal and totally surreal. A counterpoint to the paternoster of the male Palestinian fighter is provided in PALESTINIAN WOMEN, where the director tells the ordinary stories of women living under regional imperialism. Neither displacement nor gender dissuade these women from their lives. PALESTINIAN WOMEN / LES FEMMES PALESTINIENNES 1974, 11 min, 16mm-to-DCP BEIRUT, NEVER AGAIN / BEYROUTH JAMAIS PLUS 1976, 37 min, 16mm-to-DCP Total running time: ca. 55 min.
Possibly due to the time passed (three years into the war) or because of its epistolary nature, LETTER FROM BEIRUT possesses a more probing quality. There is an attempt to make sense out of senselessness, to record the many, ineluctable ways in which life keeps going on despite the devastation of war. In the second installment of her “Beirut Trilogy”, the director boards a bus to gauge the daily strategies of survival adopted by the country’s men and women. Ordinary reality is haunted by a conflict that has redrawn the coordinates of the everyday, has restricted freedom of movement and inflicted on the population a sense of permanent indeterminacy. Not without a sense of disenchantment, CHILDREN OF WAR reveals how the conflict has monopolized even the imagination of kids who now playfully enact, in their games and school-less days, the horror of war. CHILDREN OF WAR / LES ENFANTS DE LA GUERRE 1976, 11.5 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles. LETTER FROM BEIRUT / LETTRE DE BEYROUTH 1978, 50 min, 16mm-to-DCP Total running time: ca. 65 min.
The 1982 siege of Beirut was to leave a permanent mark on Jocelyne Saab’s memory and that of her city. BEIRUT, MY CITY begins with the director in front of the camera, surveying the destruction of her own family home at the hands of the Israeli air force. The house is, in her own words, the house of every Lebanese confronted by the memory of carbonized ruins. There is a sense of febrile immediacy that scorches every frame of this film, something that the spectator feels rather than sees. The film’s recovery of the final farewell of West Beirut to the fedayeen, forced out of Lebanon by the Zionist invasion, is vehement and glowing. The aftermath is chronicled in the melancholic but somewhat hopeful SHIP OF EXILE, which sees Saab aboard to document the evacuation of the PLO from Beirut. BEIRUT, MY CITY / BEYROUTH, MA VILLE 1982, 37 min, 16mm-to-DCP SHIP OF EXILE / LE BATEAU DE L’EXIL 1982, 16 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles. Total running time: ca. 65 min.
In these two documentaries, we have attempts at ethnographic filmmaking. In EGYPT, CITY OF THE DEAD, which begins in a cemetery where the living and the dead reside next to one another, Saab carries out a polyphonic survey of the Egyptian capital at a time of transition. As Arab nationalism and socialism were confronted by infitah neoliberalism, the film examines the emerging social reality through a humorous political economy. Where western accounts would have likely been alienated by such culture from below, Saab exposes the material forces that inform social relations and the changing shape of Egyptian society. In a postscript of sorts, nine years later, the director returns to Egypt with GHOSTS OF ALEXANDRIA to look at the vestigial traces of a once “cosmopolitan” city where economic and political disenfranchisement has bolstered socio-religious conservatism at society’s margins. EGYPT, CITY OF THE DEAD / EGYPTE: LA CITÉ DES MORTS 1977, 36 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles. GHOSTS OF ALEXANDRIA / LES FANTÔMES D’ALEXANDRIE 1986, 18 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Arabic and French with English subtitles. Total running time: ca. 60 min.
PROGRAM 8 These three films, each in their own specific way, evince Saab’s determination never to severe radical politics from the biographies of those that embrace it and whose existences are changed as a result. The biopolitical spawn of internationalist love and solidarity, Mei Shigenobu is the daughter of a PFLP guerrilla leader and the Japanese Red Army leader Fusako Shigenobu. Just like Dr. Hoa, the Vietnamese doctor and revolutionary at the center of THE LADY OF SAIGON, Mei’s mother lent her entire life to the armed fight for liberation. On the run and living in Beirut clandestinely, Fusako Shigenobu brought new life in and to the struggle. The very conception of life, and the body that first nurtures it and then delivers it to the world, is both the subject and the setting of FÉCONDATION IN VIDEO which observes emancipation from the phallic masculinity through artificial insemination. FERTILIZATION IN VIDEO / FÉCONDATION IN VIDEO 1991, 23 min, video THE LADY OF SAIGON / LA DAME DE SAIGON 1997, 61 min, video MY NAME IS MEI SHIGENOBU 2018, 7 min, digital Total running time: ca. 95 min.
For this bold, epic-length experiment in “automatic” street photography, filmmaker Djamil Beloucif installed a digital camera in the center of Algiers, alongside a note instructing passersby how to start recording. The result finds a cross-section of Algiers residents interacting with the camera in various ways, performing for the camera, philosophizing, and expressing their thoughts on life, culture, politics, sports, city life, and much, much more. Lasting four-and-a-half hours, LE COIN DES VAURIENS comprises a wide-ranging catalogue of individual portraits, and becomes a kind of city symphony made by the city’s residents themselves. The structure and nature of the work means that it can be seen as a whole, or in parts – we encourage audiences to come and go during the course of the screening.
This program features two notable cinematic adaptations of Monk’s iconic performance works. Robert Withers’s 16 MILLIMETER EARRINGS (1980), made over a decade after Monks’s 1966 breakthrough multimedia work, reconstructs a documentation of a 1977 performance for film, using most of the original film sequences and sound elements. PARIS, Meredith Monk and Ping Chong’s video adaptation of their theater work from 1973, imagines the City of Lights through a series of promenades, portraits, and cackling mime faces. These two works will be preceded by a selection of Monk’s short silent films from 1966-94, most frequently presented as standalone installations or as film elements within performance works. Meredith Monk CHILDREN 1967, 8 min, 16mm. Camera by Phill Niblock. Meredith Monk 16 MILLIMETER EARRINGS 1966, 4 min, 16mm Meredith Monk BALL BEARING 1968, 6.5 min, 16mm. Camera by Meredith Monk & George Landow. Meredith Monk QUARRY 1975, 5.5 min, 16mm-to-digital Meredith Monk ELLIS ISLAND 1979, 6.5 min, 16mm-to-digital Meredith Monk FACES 1994, 5 min, video Meredith Monk MOUNTAIN 1971, 6 min, 16mm-to-digital Robert Withers 16 MILLIMETER EARRINGS 1979, 25 min, 16mm. Conceived, composed, choreographed, and performed by Meredith Monk. Mark Lowry & Kathryn Escher PARIS 1982, 28 min, video. Conceived and performed by Meredith Monk & Ping Chong. Total running time: ca. 100 min.
SONGS OF ASCENSION (SHRINE) reimagines a live performance of Monk’s music theater work of the same name, recorded on location in Ann Hamilton’s tower at The Oliver Ranch in Geyserville, California. Inspired by ritual motifs of ascension and circumambulation throughout time, SONGS OF ASCENSION envelops the viewer in Monk’s expansive weaving together of music, movement, and architecture, supported by the tower’s height, double helical staircase, and unique acoustic properties. Preceded by HAND MANDALA and HAND REFLECTION, two video works made in 2018 for “Cellular Songs” and reimagined as standalone installations, and ROTATION, an audio-video installation born from Monk’s latest music theater work “Indra’s Net”. Meredith Monk HAND MANDALA 2018, 4 min, digital Meredith Monk HAND REFLECTION 2016, 4.5 min, digital Meredith Monk ROTATION 2021, 10 min, digital Dyanna Taylor SONGS OF ASCENSION (SHRINE) 2023, 40 min, digital. Conceived and performed by Meredith Monk. Total running time: ca. 65 min.
In this offbeat “road movie,” Honigmann travels with, and records the stories of, taxi drivers in Lima. In the early 1990s, in response to Peru’s inflationary economy and a government destabilized by corruption and Shining Path terrorism, many middle-class professionals used their own cars to moonlight as taxi drivers in order to weather the financial crisis. Through the filmmaker’s distinctive approach METAL AND MELANCHOLY explores how these part-time cabbies, including a teacher, a Ministry of Justice employee, a film actor, and a policeman, among others, manage to navigate through Lima’s congested, pothole-filled streets in dilapidated cars whose survival techniques are as fascinating as those of their owners.
This program, which celebrates the launch of MILLENNIUM FILM JOURNAL NO. 80: STRATA, consists of works discussed in the issue. Representing a cross-section of moving-image works both old and new, it compounds layers of history and culture, personal and political, revealing new insights through their juxtaposition. Programmed by Grahame Weinbren, Vince Warne, and Jonathan Ellis. The Millennium Film Workshop gratefully acknowledges support for the Millennium Film Journal by the following individuals and organizations: Deborah and Dan Duane; Walter and Karla Goldschmidt Foundation; C. Noll Brinckmann; anonymous donors; and New York State Council on the Arts. If you’d like to support the publication of the Millennium Film Journal with a tax-deductible gift, please visit: https://millenniumfilmjournal.com/donations/donation-form/ Bill Viola MIGRATION 1986, 7 min, digital Diane Severin Nguyen TYRANT STAR 2019, 16 min, digital George Kuchar WEATHER DIARIES 5 1986, ca. 24-min excerpt, digital Bojan Stojčić HOPE HOTEL PHANTOM 2023, 22 min, digital Julie Perini 1000 WATERS: HOT SPRINGS 2024, 4.5 min, digital Julie Perini 1000 WATERS: RIVER MOSS HERON 2024, 3 min, digital STITCHING KEFFIYEHS (Selections TBD) Total running time: ca. 90 min.
In 1969, Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle began an amazing artistic adventure. “With help from a group of their artist friends, the pair started construction on the Cyclop in a park on the outskirts of Paris. The Cyclop (which plays a major role in Saint Phalle’s film UN RÊVE PLUS LONG QUE LA NUIT) is a monumental sculpture made of twisted metal, mirrors, stairways, footbridges, fountains, and a gigantic eye in the middle of the “forehead.” Inside, an installation of noisy gears, unique gadgets, and riotous machines delights visitors. Nearly forgotten until filmmakers Louise Faure and Anne Julien rediscovered it for this sterling documentary, Cyclop remains a shining example of Nouveau Realisme.” –FACETS Plus: Louise Faure & Anne Julien NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE AND JEAN TINGUELY: THE BONNIE AND CLYDE OF ART 2010, 55 min, digital “Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely met in Paris in 1955, in the artistic effervescence of the post-war period. 25 and 30 respectively, and both married, and they became close friends. It took them five years to fall in love and decide to create and live together. For forty years, this nomadic couple did not make children, but rather sculptures, preferably monumental, all over the world. From Europe to Japan, their works have dazzled audiences, enchanting young and old with sacred machines and multicolored creatures. In THE BONNIE AND CLYDE OF ART, testimonials and archival images help to trace their life and artistic epic.” –LES RENCONTRES DU FILM D’ART
Director Jules Rosskam’s arousing new hybrid documentary DESIRE LINES explores the phenomenon of trans-masculine people who, after transitioning, find themselves developing an attraction to men, both cis and trans. For many, the advent of new desires requires time and adjustment to synthesize with their own self-concept of identity. Rosskam’s fantastic film seeks to reframe transmasculine sexuality via interviews with trans men of various experiences and rare archival footage of pioneering trans gay man Lou Sullivan. Most thrillingly, Rosskam also interweaves a semi-fictionalized narrative about an Iranian-American trans man (Aden Hakimi) searching for images of transmasculine history in an LGBTQ archive that has the magical ability to transport him into cruising spaces of the past, leading to some very hot scenes sure to stoke your own desires. A must-see for cis and trans gay men, Narrow Rooms is proud to co-present this landmark film with the organizers of TRANSFERNO, NYC’s only trans-masc-centered sex party. Stick around after the screening for a special Q&A with director Jules Rosskam and the TRANSFERNO team.
Jim is a horse-hung photographer who specializes in titillating spreads for a hot New York gay porn magazine called Juice. But at the start of his weekend, his ungrateful bosses task him with finding a fresh face for the new issue by Monday, or he’s out on his juicy ass! Jim has in mind a gorgeous young blonde he passes on his morning jogs, but it’ll take some work to convince him. In the meantime, Jim seeks out several frisky friends to entice them to pose, leading to an extended middle sequence that intercuts between several gorgeously shot scenes of muscled man-on-man action, temporarily pausing the film’s narrative to absolutely no one’s unhappiness. In the final act, JUICE reveals itself as a sweet gay romantic comedy as well as a humpy gay porno flick par excellence. Pioneering gay independent director Arthur J. Bressan’s acclaimed films, like PASSING STRANGERS and FORBIDDEN LETTERS, often included explicit sexual scenes, alongside unusually emotional narratives and clever writing. JUICE displays all of these characteristics, offering a commentary on the challenges of using one’s own sexuality to create “content” that’s likely to resonate with both porn consumers and makers in this era of OnlyFans and JustForFans. Throw in some wry comedic skewering of the gay social scene in early 1980s New York, rare footage of the exteriors of long-defunct horny gay nightspots, and a hilarious theme song, and you’ve got yourself a can’t-miss flick. We are thrilled to screen this new 2K restoration of Bressan’s penultimate film, in tandem with the screening at the IFC Center of the restoration of his Dean Johnson-starring DADDY DEAREST, as part of Elizabeth Purchell and KJ Shepherd’s “Cruising the Movies” series; for more info on the IFC screening, taking place on Monday, December 9, visit: https://www.ifccenter.com/series/cruising-the-movies/
Saint Phalle talks about her life, her work, and her collaboration with Jean Tinguely, famous for his kinetic art. The film begins with Niki’s ‘shooting paintings’ of the early sixties (‘instead of becoming a terrorist, I became a terrorist in art’). It shows her work on the voluptuous, colorful Nana figures; on The Devouring Mothers; on giant architectural sculptures including the Cathedral Woman Hon (Stockholm), Golem (Jerusalem), and the Stravinsky Fountain (Paris); and the construction and opening ceremony of the enormous sculpture garden in Tuscany, where the artist optically depicts the twenty-two main tarot cards. Highlights are clippings from Niki’s own experimental films DADDY and UN RÊVE PLUS LONG QUE LA NUIT. Preceded by: Niki de Saint Phalle MY LIFE 1991, 25 min, video In this video self-portrait, Saint Phalle reflects on her life and work, with glimpses of various projects, including her Tirs (the “shooting paintings”), her Assemblages, and UN RÊVE PLUS LONG QUE LA NUIT.
This program showcases a selection of short films made with or about Niki de Saint Phalle, including her Warhol SCREEN TEST, and two filmic portraits by François de Menil. The program culminates with a long-buried treasure: a made-for-German-television version of ICH, a theatrical production created by Rainer von Hessen (aka Rainer von Diez) and Saint Phalle, who co-wrote the play and designed the characteristically inspired costumes and sets. Andy Warhol NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE [SCREEN TEST 292] 1964, 4.5 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent. Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. Courtesy The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. François de Menil HON 1966, 8 min, 16mm-to-digital. Courtesy of Menil Archives, The Menil Collection, Houston. © François de Menil. François de Menil & Monique Alexandre NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE 1982, 15 min, 16mm-to-digital. Courtesy of Menil Archives, The Menil Collection, Houston. © François de Menil. Roland Petit ELOGE DE LA FOLIE 1966, 14.5-min excerpt, 16mm-to-digital Rainer von Diez ICH 1968, 45 min, video Michel Auder MY LOVE 1978, 6 min, video Total running time: ca. 100 min.
Robert Frank ONE HOUR / C’EST VRAI 1990, 60 min, video. © June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, distributed by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Jonas Mekas A WALK 1990, 60 min, video These two hour-long, single-take videos both have their roots in Philippe Grandrieux’s French television project, “Live” (which also encompassed hour-long pieces by Robert Kramer, Stephen Dwoskin, Ken Kobland, and Grandrieux himself). Robert Frank’s contribution is an eye-opening and inspired ramble through downtown NYC, which combines verité footage of a (now largely vanished) East Village (including a glimpse of Anthology), improvisation, and scripted elements (during the seemingly spontaneous walk, the camera just happens to come across figures such as Taylor Mead, Bill Rice, Tom Jarmusch, and Peter Orlovsky). Jonas Mekas created an hour-long work for Grandrieux’s project as well – MOB OF ANGELS: A BAPTISM – but was unhappy with the result and never submitted it (he later reevaluated the film and released it separately). But later that year he made another unedited hour-long video work, A WALK, which he described thusly: “On a rainy day, I have a walk through the early Soho. I begin my walk on 80 Wooster Street and continue towards the Williamsburg bridge, where, 58 minutes later, still raining, my walk ends. As I walk, occasionally I talk about what I see or I tell some totally unrelated little stories that come to my mind as I walk. This video was my early exercise in the one-shot video form.”
Made in collaboration with Congolese journalist Mona Mpembele, Belgian scholar Matthias De Groof’s documentary addresses the 2013 renovation of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels. Grouped under the efficient, if opaque, title of “Les 6,” a group of relevant experts and museum staff are filmed in the midst of conversations by turns impassioned, placid, exasperated, and lucid about how the reopened museum might negotiate its role in the brutal history of Belgian colonization of the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo. Manthia Diawara MAISON TROPICALE 2008, 58 min, DCP. In French with English subtitles. The fate of “Les Maisons Tropicales” exemplifies the slippage between practical objects and artworks within a colonial context. Designed in the late 1940s by French architect and designer Jean Prouvé, these prefabricated, transportable houses were intended to fill housing shortages in Niamey and Brazzaville, the capitals of the Republic of Niger and Republic of the Congo, then French colonies. Under unquestionably predatory circumstances, once a growing appreciation for Prouvé resulted in the houses accruing cultural cachet in 2000, several were bought and returned to Europe as coveted objects of modernist design and eventually auctioned for millions. Total running time: ca. 130 min.
“Walled-up houses, notice of expulsion, immobile consumers in a café, an eccentric individual driving round on his scooter shouting, a sick old woman and her daughter glued to a television set, stray cats, the anxiety of a couple tetanized by the somber certainties of the future, and to finish, a cemetery overlooking the sea and night drawing in on the terraces. The picture that Aljafari paints for us of Jaffa is that of a shrinking skin slowly closing in on its resigned inhabitants, who are crushed by fate, whatever they say about it, as if the slow-motion repetition of everyday gestures were their only way of suspending the course of time, of delaying the inevitable.” –Javier Packer y Comyn, CINÉMA DU RÉEL Preceded by: VISIT IRAQ 2003, 26 min, digital A short film about the abandoned Iraqi Airways office in Geneva, VISIT IRAQ was made during Aljafari’s studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.
Monk’s meditation on WWII and recurring cycles of intolerance, fascism, and cruelty in history, QUARRY originated in 1976 as a live stage work utilizing elements of music, images, movement, dialogue, film, sound, and light, and was filmed in the Lepercq Space at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1977. QUARRY centers on a sick American child (played by Monk herself) whose world darkens as her illness progresses, this darkening including the rise of a dictator. Preceded by: Phill Niblock JUICE: A CANTATA IN THREE INSTALLMENTS 1969, 13 min, 16mm A documentary filmed by composer Phill Niblock in 1969 capturing Monk’s landmark site-specific performance work. Total running time: ca. 100 min.
“RECOLLECTION was inspired by a late-night TV encounter in a London hotel room. While flipping channels, Aljafari stumbled upon Menahem Golan’s THE DELTA FORCE (1986), about an elite counter-terrorism team rescuing hostages from kaffiyeh-clad terrorists in a Beirut played onscreen by Jaffa. As Chuck Norris sped through the streets, Aljafari noticed, in the background, someone he recognized from his youth. In his film, Aljafari collates images shot in Jaffa from the 1960s to the ’90s, such as the bourekas films that often reinforced Zionist origin narratives and hero mythologies in their scenes of slapstick action, car chases, shootouts, and Arab-coded Mizrahi ‘thugs’ threatening Ashkenazi maidens. He then enacts what he describes as ‘cinematic justice,’ using digital software to erase the leading actors, and leaving only those figures who appear in the background.” –Kaleem Hawa, CINEMA SCOPE Preceded by: UNDR 2024, 15 min, digital The camera’s eye returns obsessively to the same places, a vertical perspective that imposes control, the possession of archaeological sites, stones lying for thousands of years in the desert. The places it observes, however, are not deserted: we see, as if glimpsed from afar, the peasants working the land, themselves transformed into landscape. Something disturbs the stillness of the place: explosions on land and in the sea prepare the ground for new cities with new names, new forests. This landscape is transformed into a scenography of appropriation.
“I heard about Alan Clarke’s ROAD from Robert and June Leaf and eventually saw the film at Anthology (where else? For years it was nearly impossible to see any Clarke, especially the TV work). Clarke, a renegade who pushed the BBC as far as it could go and then some, was (like Robert) a kind of lyrical realist. And like June he was an unflinching master observer of human gesture. ROAD is pissed and funny. It made sense that they liked it.” –Jem Cohen ROAD is an adaptation of Jim Cartwright’s stage play, which comprised a series of interconnected glimpses into the lives of the residents of a single street in an unnamed Lancashire town over the course of a single evening. Though the original play – consisting largely of soliloquies and very little action – might not have seemed a natural for cinematic adaptation, Clarke (PENDA’S FEN; SCUM; ELEPHANT) transformed it into another of his Steadicam-saturated masterpieces. Freely mixing effects both patently cinematic and patently theatrical – the constantly roving camera on the one hand, and occasional direct-to-camera soliloquies on the other – ROAD is a typically shattering depiction of the tragic consequences of social and economic stagnation.
This program highlights the artistic (and spiritual) affinities between Robert Frank and the legendary Harry Smith. In the early 1960s, Frank was among the first to recognize that the mysterious experimental animator Harry Smith and the compiler of the ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC were one and the same. He later befriended Smith, whose art, life, and profoundly counter-cultural sensibility exerted a major fascination on him. The program will feature Frank’s film, HARRY SMITH AT THE BRESLIN HOTEL, which chronicles Smith’s 1984 eviction from one of the many hotels he called home throughout his life, as well as Smith’s own biographical FILM NO. 14 (LATE SUPERIMPOSITIONS), and several rare moving-image documents of Smith. “Harry, I think he was a genius. He was to me the only person I met in my life that transcended everything. He seemed to always be able to give you an answer that was really at the end of the line.” –Robert Frank “I guess Robert and Harry were both insiders and outsiders (inside-out-siders?). They cared so deeply about so many things but were also quite capable of just not giving a fuck, especially when it came to things like wearing clean shirts or pleasing the establishment. In their work, they didn’t like to repeat themselves. They both had a lot of pain, left a lot behind.” –Jem Cohen Robert Frank HARRY SMITH AT THE BRESLIN HOTEL 2018, 11 min, DCP Harry Smith FILM NO. 14 (LATE SUPERIMPOSITIONS) 1964, 28 min, 16mm-to-35mm. Restored by Anthology Film Archives and The Film Foundation with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Robert Frank MOVING PICTURES 1994, 16 min, video Plus, additional films to be announced! Total running time: ca. 60 min.
“No one else really understood that ROMANCE was a great movie, the equal of early Jacques Rivette movies. I’m glad that it has been restored and will be seen in a different context and at a different moment.” –Amy Taubin “The plot revolves around Tom (Ed Bowes) and his girlfriend Kathleen (Elizabeth Cannon) and what occurs when her mother and androgynous brother Tommy (Karen Achenbach) come to visit. Tom is receiving transcripts of his innermost thoughts in anonymous letters. Sexual ambiguity, symbiotic relationships, and self-identity are all at play here. Structured in long, uncut takes with beautiful camera work by Tom Bowes, the real-time aesthetic of the work is the result of the script, in which much of the action takes place in drifting conversations.” –Marita Sturken, “Television Fictions: An Interview with Ed Bowes,” AFTERIMAGE (May 1986)
The powerful words of 17th-century poet Arutuin Sayadian, also known as “Sayat Nova” (“King of Siam”) are magnificently captured in this visual pastiche which is both a stylized biography and a tribute to his work. Conceived as a complex series of painterly tableaux that recall Byzantine mosaics, the film is divided into eight sections, which evoke the poet’s childhood and youth, his days as a troubadour at the court of King Heraclius II of Georgia, his retreat to a monastery, and his old age and death. Comprising a series of symbolically rich, almost hallucinatory scenes, this baroque masterpiece was banned in the Soviet Union for its religious sentiment and nonconformity to “Socialist realism”. Preceded by: Sergei Parajanov HAKOB HOVNATANYAN 1967, 10 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Armenian and French with English subtitles. “With a playful associative montage, Parajanov offers an overview of portrait paintings by Hakob Hovnatanyan, the ‘Raphael of Tiflis.’” –ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Total running time: ca. 90 min.
Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s PULL MY DAISY and John Cassavetes’s SHADOWS (in the revised version that has come down to us) both appeared in 1959, and from the beginning they were closely linked. By some accounts, the screenings at New York’s Paris Theater in 1958 of the first version of SHADOWS helped inspire Frank and Leslie to make PULL MY DAISY. Appropriate, then, that when Cassavetes premiered his revised version of SHADOWS, at Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16 in November 1959, in a program entitled “The Cinema of Improvisation”, it was presented as a double bill with Frank and Leslie’s film. Exhibition history aside, the two films were heralded, above all by Jonas Mekas (albeit speaking of the first version of SHADOWS), as representing the advent of a new, countercultural American cinema that was in tune with the artistic and political ferment and the vital creative energies brewing in American culture at the time. “When I began writing my Movie Journal, it was the beginning of the New American Cinema. Cassavetes had just completed SHADOWS. Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie were shooting PULL MY DAISY. The film bug had already bitten us, and the air was becoming more and more charged with energy and expectations. We felt that cinema was only beginning – with us!” –Jonas Mekas
Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in collaboration with the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre and in association with the Dovzhenko Film Studio. Special thanks to Daniel Bird and Łukasz Ceranka. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. “Ostensibly a tale of doomed love between members of two warring families, the plot is both fragmented and interspersed with fantasy. Harking back to the Formalist-influenced works of early Dovzhenko, Parajanov forged the blueprint for a cinema derived from folklore, poetry, song, and dance. Shot with the participation of the Hutsul Rusyn hill people in the Carpathian Mountains in West Ukraine, Parajanov straddled the line demarcating ethnography and surrealist flights of fancy. […] The result changed Ukrainian filmmaking, effectively birthing the ‘Kyiv School’ of poetic cinema.” –Daniel Bird, IL CINEMA RITROVATO
A remarkably gritty, rough-hewn, and deeply personal video portrait of Cleveland, SOMETIMES CITY features Clevelanders speaking about their hometown, its problems, and the things they like. Conceived as a mixture of documentary, home movie, personal memoir, and fiction, it obliquely suggests Cleveland’s history, its neighborhoods and landscape, and the huge heart of the people who inhabit it. Its accumulation of unspectacular filmed encounters gradually forms an incredibly revealing mosaic of a deeply troubled urban community, making SOMETIMES CITY something of a lo-fi, minimalist version of THE WIRE.
In November, Elevator Repair Service’s renowned 8-hour theater production, GATZ, returns for one final engagement, at the Public Theater. Described by the New York Times as “the most remarkable achievement in theater not only of this year but also of this decade” upon its initial run in 2005, GATZ takes place in a non-descript office in which one of the employees begins reading Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”, only to find the reality of the novel seeping into the reality of the office. Encompassing every word of “The Great Gatsby”, and featuring an extraordinary cast including Scott Shepherd as Nick and Jim Fletcher as Gatsby himself, GATZ is a monumental, endlessly inventive work, and undoubtedly ranks among the highlights of 21st-century American theater. On the occasion of its encore engagement, Anthology hosts a revival of its own, bringing back a film we’ve shown several times in the past: Shaun Irons and Lauren Petty’s documentary STANDING BY: GATZ BACKSTAGE. Following the company through a composite day, STANDING BY explores the behavior of the actors when they’re in between scenes, and the atmosphere that prevails offstage. Far from a familiar theatrical document, STANDING BY is a poetic evocation of a mood unique to live theater, and a fascinating glimpse into the singular experience of stage performers. Shaun Irons, Scott Shepherd, Jim Fletcher, and Elevator Repair Service founder John Collins will present the screening in person! For more info about the Public Theater’s revival engagement of GATZ, running November 1-December 1, 2024, visit: https://publictheater.org/productions/season/2425/gatz/
With “Swamplands”, Storefront for Art and Architecture revives Storefront Films, a program – presented in partnership with Anthology – that embraces cinema and highlights its significant role in representing the built environment. “Swamplands” is a yearlong research cycle focused on the ethical and technical entanglements of water. It takes the murky soil and unstable grounds of swamps as a conceptual framework to highlight the ecological and socioeconomic intricacies that lie at the threshold between bodies of water and land. The films presented in this program deal with the increasing complexity of wetlands, challenging perceptions of swamps as unstable environments, and instead portraying them as sites of inherent duality and hybridity, of emergence and transformation, of care and kinship, as well as of violence and neglect. They aim to uncover the emergence of diverse life forms amidst the dynamic interplay of weather, water, land, and the coexistence of human and non-human elements. Alongside Storefront Films, “Swamplands” has unfolded through newly commissioned works and exhibitions, public programs, radio broadcasts, an open call, and a thematic reader. Storefront for Art and Architecture amplifies the understanding of the built environment through artistic practice. Founded in 1982 by artists and architects in downtown New York, Storefront has chronicled the changing landscape of the city for over forty years and remains committed to producing and presenting work about diverse notions of place and public life. For more info, visit: https://storefront.nyc/ Filipa César & Sónia Vaz Borges MANGROVE SCHOOL 2022, 35 min, digital. In Guinea-Bissau Creole with English subtitles. Thao Nguyen Phan BECOMING ALLUVIUM 2019-ongoing, 16.5 min, digital. In French with English subtitles. Barbara Hammer DIVING WOMEN OF JEJU-DO 2007, 24 min, digital. In Korean with English subtitles. Hanna Rullmann & Faiza Ahmad Khan HABITAT 2190 2019, 16 min, digital. In French with English subtitles. Tania Ximena LA MARCHA DEL LIQUEN 2024, 30 min, digital. In Spanish with English subtitles. Total running time: ca. 125 min.
Rootless Hungarian émigré Willie (John Lurie), his pal Eddie (Richard Edson), and visiting sixteen-year-old cousin Eva (Eszter Balint) always manage to make the least of any situation, whether aimlessly traversing the drab interiors and environs of New York City, Cleveland, or an anonymous Florida suburb. With its delicate humor and dramatic nonchalance, Jim Jarmusch’s one-of-a-kind minimalist masterpiece, STRANGER THAN PARADISE, forever transformed the landscape of American independent cinema. “In 1982, Robert Frank and June Leaf were our friends. A year or so earlier Jim met Robert. They were both jury members at the Big Muddy Film Festival at the Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Jim and Robert discovered we only lived a few blocks away from each other in NYC. Jim edited the first half hour of STRANGER THAN PARADISE (we made the first half hour in 1982 and completed the film in 1984) in our fourth-floor tenement apartment on Prince St. Jim was working on a rented, antiquated upright Moviola. We couldn’t afford to rent an editing room. Jim had his outtakes taped to the wall. He drilled holes in the dining room table we found on the street for the 35mm rewinds. While Jim was finishing the first half hour, Robert came up to the apartment to see the film on the small screen of the Moviola. He liked that the film was so minimal, handmade, and do-it-yourself. His approval and encouragement meant a lot to Jim.” –Sara Driver Preceded by: Lewie Kloster & Noah Kloster STRANGER THAN ROTTERDAM WITH SARA DRIVER 2021, 9 min, digital STRANGER THAN ROTTERDAM WITH SARA DRIVER uses inspired cut-out puppet animation to tell the (incredible but true!!) story of an ingenious, resourceful, and risky scheme STRANGER THAN PARADISE producer Sara Driver and Rotterdam Festival director Huub Bals concocted to help complete the film, a stratagem that encompassed Robert Frank’s notorious Rolling Stones doc, COCKSUCKER BLUES. Total running time: ca. 105 min.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of Chinese migrants are drawn to the allure of Shanghai, one of the world’s most vibrant cities, with hopes of earning a decent living. Some end up in the dark alleys of Nanjing Road, Shanghai’s largest shopping street, where they learn to hustle and scrape together any kind of living they can. Dayong Zhao arrived in Shanghai in 2004 and began documenting their lives using digital video. He saw their stories as overlooked portraits of the deep social impact caused by China’s rapid economic growth. Zhao uses bold, exaggerated compositions in order to emphasize the relationship between his vagrant subjects and the city streets they inhabit. The result is a raw, vivid portrait of physical and psychological rootlessness.
“The Summer of Love was not all daisies. Each week hundreds of distraught parents from across the country filed missing persons reports. Teens were dropping out of society and running away in record numbers to San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury and New York’s East Village. Enter Miloš Forman, fresh from Czechoslovakia. TAKING OFF, his first film in America, is a strange and wonderful comedy about a 15-year-old girl who doesn’t come home one day. Her father, played by the great Buck Henry, goes to the East Village to search for her and – one thing leading to another – finds himself confronting such 1960s countercultural spectacles as a room full of uptight parents learning to smoke marijuana, a suburban game of strip poker, a cameo by a young folk-singing Kathy Bates (credited as Bobo Bates), appearances by Carly Simon and Ike & Tina Turner, and many more surprises. Forman wrote the film with Jean-Claude Carrière (who also penned screenplays for Luis Buñuel and Pierre Étaix) and the noted playwright John Guare (THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES, SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION), while his friend Mary Ellen Mark helped him cast the dropout youngsters from Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain.” –Jason Fulford
“An adventurous prankster and fabulator in real life, Parajanov did not fully display this creative facet in his cinema. THE FIRST LAD remained his only direct involvement with comedy, although one can find certain humorous touches in all of his subsequent films. […] The wayward mechanic Yushka is secretly in love with the Komsomol secretary Odarka, who shows few direct signs of reciprocity, not out of lack of interest, but out of a dutifulness that turns out to be not so robust in the end. Parajanov peppered the film with witty quotes and inventive gags, creating a layered texture that subverts the formulaic story.” –Olga Briukhovetska, IL CINEMA RITROVATO Sergei Parajanov NATALIA UZHVY 1959, 35 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Ukrainian with English subtitles. Parajanov’s short documentary is a filmic portrait of the prominent Ukrainian stage and screen actress, Natalia Uzhvy, who appears in Parajanov’s UKRAINIAN RHAPSODY. Total running time: ca. 125 min.
“Inspired by an ancient tale and based on Daniel Chonkadze’s Georgian novella, this film, co-directed with Georgian filmmaker Dodo Abashidze, is brought to life through Parajanov’s honed, idiosyncratic style of opulent costuming, striking tableaus, and unforgettable mise en scène. In this archaic folktale, told through two mirroring storylines (one unfolding in the present tense and another one as a set of flashbacks), the inhabitants of a remote mountain village resolve to build a fortress to defend themselves from enemy attacks. However, the structure begins crumbling from the onset, and according to a prophecy, will only stand if a young, blue-eyed countryman sacrifices himself by being sealed into the walls. Mixing regional history, political protest, and romantic drama, the film marked Parajanov’s return to cinema after enduring 15 years of Soviet censorship due to political and aesthetic disagreements with the state.” –Dorota Lech, TIFF Preceded by: Sergei Parajanov ARABESQUES ON THE PIROSMANI THEME / ARABESKEBI PIROSMANIS TEMAZE 1985, 25 min, 35mm-to-DCP “A documentary film about the great Georgian outsider artist Niko Pirosmani. By filming the detail and themes of his colorful paintings, Parajanov creates an engaging and mysterious portrait of Georgia itself.” –ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL Total running time: ca. 110 min.
Throughout 2022, Anthology presented a five-part series devoted to the peculiar, counter-intuitive, but surprisingly abundant “genre” of the “imageless film” – which is to say, films that have subverted or entirely dispensed with imagery, by focusing entirely on spoken dialogue, sound collages, written text, flicker effects, and so on. That series was immensely popular, broke box office records, and included James N. Kienitz Wilkins and Robin Schavoir’s THE REPUBLIC. While the preceding sentence is entirely untrue, this November at least the last bit will become retroactively accurate. As a special addendum to the “Imageless Films” series, we’re delighted to present a belated screening of Wilkins’s ambitious and epic-length THE REPUBLIC, which, like all of his work, combines conceptual daring, philosophical richness, and deadpan comedy. “THE REPUBLIC is a feature that is both an audio performance and an experimental movie without a representational image. The story is about a confederation of aging ‘citizens’ who can no longer rely upon the youthful principles of self-sufficiency that once defined their lives. Rejecting the concept of the United States, the characters trade goods, develop life-improving inventions, hold hearings to resolve disputes, and deal through bartering determined by personal contracts. However, an unusually harsh winter upsets their fragile ecosystem, and they find themselves negotiating with the wealthy young widow of a banned traitor in order to survive. With a running time of 3.5 hours, THE REPUBLIC has a performative style crossed between a narrated reading of a screenplay, and a radio-drama acted by an ensemble cast, led by visual/performance artist, Nour Mobarak. […] A playbill accompanies the movie, and the full screenplay is available as a PDF on the Automatic Moving Co. website, illustrated with studies and test images from the film that never was.” –James N. Kienitz Wilkins
“This deceptively quiet film presents a portrait of Aljafari’s family in Ramleh and Jaffa that hovers between documentary and cinematic memoir, guided by a nimble camera moving calmly but ceaselessly around the rooms of homes inhabited, damaged and ruined. The title refers to the roof missing from the house where Aljafari’s family resettled in 1948, a home unfinished, an incomplete construction project. The use of stillness and off-screen space creates a sense of suspension, of time spent waiting, of aftermath, of lives lived elsewhere. Aljafari’s striking use of his ‘cast,’ his family, reveals the influence of Bresson’s use of nonprofessional actors as models whose performances emanate from their presence, not from acting.” –David Pendleton, HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE Preceded by: BALCONIES 2007, 7 min, digital “An experimental short film that looks at all the balconies left unfinished in director Kamal Aljafari’s hometown of Ramla, in the central district of Israel. What are we to think when, to paraphrase García Lorca, our home is no longer our home?” –INDIELISBOA
Overshadowed by other, more internationally prominent conflicts, the Sahwaris’ ongoing struggle for self-determination in the Western Sahara, from Spanish and then Moroccan occupation, is at the heart of this documentary. Saab does something that journalists rarely do, which is to listen to the people in front of her camera so that their condition is articulated in their words, not hers, and on their own political terms. The film also serves as a reminder that the Arab world is a heterogeneous space inhabited by different people and political stances, and pays testament to Saab’s genuine internationalism. Her camera and solidarity, in fact, are not reserved to her own people or causes only, but are eager to side with the popular masses fighting against oppression wherever it might occur.
This witty and original film – the filmic counterpart to Whyte’s seminal book of the same name – is about the open spaces of cities and why some of them work for people while others don’t. Beginning at New York’s Seagram Plaza, one of the most used open areas in the city, the film proceeds to analyze why this space is so popular and how other urban oases, both in New York and elsewhere, measure up. Based on direct observation of what people actually do, the film presents a remarkably engaging and informative tour of the urban landscape and looks at how it can be made more hospitable to those who live in it. “William Whyte is a legendary people watcher who likes to study the subtle ways public space is used. I think about this film constantly whenever I’m out shooting.” –John Wilson Followed by: John Wilson THE ROAD TO MAGNASANTI 2017, 15 min, digital Though his sensibility and tone set his work decidedly apart from more conventional, “classical” street photography, John Wilson is nothing if not a street photographer, and one of the most perceptive and witty we have. Few filmmakers have captured the vitality and absurdity of NYC street life as acutely as he has, and THE ROAD TO MAGNASANTI is his typically trenchant take on the changing physical, cultural, and economic landscape of the city. John Smith THE GIRL CHEWING GUM 1976, 12 min, 16mm “A commanding voice over appears to direct the action in a busy London street. As the instructions become more absurd and fantasized, we realize that the supposed director (not the shot) is fictional…” –A.L. Rees Total running time: ca. 90 min.
In Chantal Akerman’s inimitable TOUTE UNE NUIT, the modern city and its inhabitants are captured in fragmentary, elliptical visions of desire, frustration, and loneliness, with more than two dozen characters appearing in fleeting vignettes that tease the possibility of larger narratives. Applying a formalist framework to tableau-like sequences drenched in moody atmosphere, Akerman fashions a new cinematic grammar that combines structuralist rigor with the dreamy solitude of Edward Hopper. “I went to the movies a number of times with Robert. I remember we walked out of KOYAANISQATSI after about twenty minutes. Robert said, ‘It looks like a fucking airlines commercial.’ We also once saw a James Bond film together – I forget which one, but from the Pierce Brosnan period. It was very enjoyable on a big screen. Robert’s comment: ‘Not much sex for a Bond film, though.’ But the film we both loved the most was TOUTE UNE NUIT by Chantal Akerman, from 1982. Robert loved the structure, the photography, the rhythm… We both agreed it’s truly a beautiful and evocative film, and highly recommended.” –Jim Jarmusch
Having shown two of their three previous films, THE WORK OF MACHINES (2010) and THE BETRAYED SQUARE (2017), Anthology is delighted to follow up with the U.S. premiere of the latest category-busting, inspired work from MML Collective, a trio of artists comprising Gilles Lepore and Maciej & Michał Mądracki. A collaboration with poet and sound artist Stéphane Montavon, TRACKING SATYRS transforms Sophocles’s satyr play “Ikhneutai” into an enigmatic, formally challenging, and stylistically striking mixture of experimental cinema, theater, performance art, documentary, and political commentary. “Apollo has lost his herd of cows. Furious, he begs the forest spirits to help him. Sylenus and a gang of satyrs agree to find his cows, trusting his promises of money and freedom, but the traces are lost and the satyrs drift, before encountering the disrespectful monster who has stolen the cows from their master. This monster is none other than a toddler named Hermes – frustrated at not being recognized as a god, he insists on inventiveness and cruelty to prove his divine belonging, alongside his guardian nymph Cyllene. Will the Satyrs discovery be worth the price of their freedom? An update of Sophocles’s ‘Ikhneutai’, TRACKING SATYRS reconceives the play in the form of a docu-fiction, filmed in modern-day Poland. Mixing antiquity and modernity, blurring representations, and inviting us to observe those on the margins, it becomes a counter-model which reflects our time through a narrative that’s at once funny and disturbing.” –MML Collective
U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE ENGAGEMENT! 3D FEATURE! Deimantas Narkevičius TWITTERING SOUL / ČIULBANTI SIELA 2023, 70 min, 3D DCP. In Lithuanian and Polish with English subtitles. Anthology presents the premiere theatrical engagement of TWITTERING SOUL, the new feature film from acclaimed Lithuanian artist and filmmaker Deimantas Narkevičius. A deeply unsettling, hypnotic, and uncanny work of historical imagination, TWITTERING SOUL was conceived for – and only for – 3D projection, a medium of which it makes truly singular and innovative use. “Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevičius’s alluring period piece TWITTERING SOUL is set in the late 1800s, yet it is haunted by the specter of the 20th century. It’s the dawn of automobiles, human aviation, psychoanalysis and of course, cinema. Indifferent to, but not ignorant of, these historical upheavals, a small wooded village in southern Lithuania prepares for doomsday. Two women discuss afterlife, an itinerant musician witnesses strange happenings on his journey, tales are told of stones that grow in size and float in the air, a band of faeries weave busily away in a cottage, a feudal lord pores over an optical contraption as his daughter is warned about the witches that haunt a nearby tree. The nature of these events remains mysterious, the connection between them tenuous. Like Breughel’s Netherlandish Proverbs, the film weaves them into a sumptuous, mystical rural tapestry embodying a distinct, pre-modern conception of life and beyond. Narkevičius draws his material liberally from Lithuanian folk song, superstitions, sayings, prayers and games, concocting a work that hovers between reality, fantasy, dreams and visions. Presented in stereoscopic 3D and shot with a painterly attention to light, TWITTERING SOUL gazes at once into the past and the future.” –Srikanth Srinivasan, INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM “Narkevičius cheerfully inverts [perspective], playing with the improbable scales of the characters moving through the landscape, thwarting the effects usually sought from 3D. The crossover of enchantment techniques is used to create a poetics and politics of the image. TWITTERING SOUL’s imagery-fueled retelling of folk tales blends pre-modern thought and practice with technologies past and present in a way that goes against the mainstream. Free of nostalgia, in a marvelous tone, this fable about belief challenges modernity using modernity itself and its own tools, whilst continuing to make use of what it thinks it’s shrugged off.” –Nicolas Feodoroff, FIDMARSEILLE
“Parajanov’s second solo feature was his most ambitious project yet: a wartime melodrama that employed location shooting in Lviv to stand in for the unnamed ‘Western European city’, and Kaliningrad (Königsberg) for the bombed-out ruins of Germany. Oleksand Levada’s script, about a gifted Ukrainian singer named Oksana who is separated from her lover Anton during the war, undoubtedly resonated with Parajanov [who] studied singing and enrolled in a conservatory before enrolling in the VGIK.” –James Steffen, IL CINEMA RITROVATO Sergei Parajanov KYIV FRESCOES / KYIVS’KI FRESKY / KIEVSKIE FRESKI 1966, 15 min, 35mm-to-DCP. Restored by Fixafilm and NCCA (National Cinema Centre of Armenia), produced within the Hamo Bek-Nazarov Project. Restoration supervised by Lukasz Ceranka and produced by Daniel Bird. Funding provided by Kino Klassika Foundation. “Parajanov worked on KYIV FRESCOES throughout 1965. While it never made it into production, he did write the scenario and shooting script, and filmed a handful of camera tests in October of that year. Ostensibly a celebration of the Great Patriotic War, KYIV FRESCOES is set on 9 May 1965 – the anniversary of Kyiv’s liberation. Parajanov’s script described the film as made up of ten ‘cine-frescoes.’” –Daniel Bird, IL CINEMA RITROVATO Total running time: ca. 95 min.
NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! Niki de Saint Phalle UN RÊVE PLUS LONG QUE LA NUIT / A DREAM LONGER THAN THE NIGHT 1976, 82 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In French and Swiss German with English subtitles. Restored in 4K by Niki Charitable Art Foundation, under the supervision of Arielle de Saint Phalle, with funding provided by Dior at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory. Distributed by The Film Desk. Barely seen or discussed for decades following its completion, Niki de Saint Phalle’s lone solo feature film is a bona fide revelation: a dark but profoundly inventive work that explores female coming-of-age, sexual awakening, and trauma through the prism of a twisted fairy tale. Charting the progress of its protagonist (played as a young adult by Saint Phalle’s daughter, Laura Duke Condominas) through a psychosexually-charged landscape peopled by disturbingly monstrous, cartoonishly sexualized men, surprisingly gentle monsters, and menacing machines large and small (many of them designed by Jean Tinguely), UN RÊVE PLUS LONG QUE LA NUIT is, like Saint Phalle’s previous feature DADDY (made in collaboration with Peter Whitehead), an allegorical exploration of female identity and trauma in a male-dominated, violent world. But where DADDY felt like a work in which Saint Phalle was processing her trauma and struggling to find a proper mode of expression, here she achieves a perfect fusion of feeling, theme, and form. Saint Phalle conjures the dark heart of human sexuality through a fractured, dreamlike narrative full of inspired imagery, outrageous humor, and mind-boggling set- and costume-design. More a concatenation of ideas, moods, allegorical figures, and symbolic objects than a work of conventional storytelling, UN RÊVE is a film that blurs the line between narrative cinema, fine art, performance, and installation. But whatever categories it encompasses or explodes, it harnesses the profound power of dream or myth as it charts the strange, wondrous, and unsettling realms of sexual awakening. “The film wishes, it appears, to revive the marvelous, the fantastic, in the tradition of Meliès and Cocteau… There is no denying the originality of its poetic universe, of its delirious and surrealistic imagination. Landscapes, sets, costumes, music, sounds and Tinguely’s machines plunge the viewer into a strange, magical, fairy tale land from which the obsessions of a creator who is both a woman and a mother emerge. It is a feminine version of a cinema that is quite close to that of Jodorowsky or Arrabal.” –André Cornand, IMAGE ET SON (1977) Preceded by: Niki de Saint Phalle THE TRAVELLING COMPANION 1977, 7 min, video See page ? for description. Total running time: ca. 90 min.
These last few years have been a time of considerable loss, when many friends and great artists of cinema have disappeared. Vincent Grenier was one of those greats. Born in Quebec City, Canada in 1948, Grenier died in Ithaca, New York in 2023. An unassuming but vital presence across many decades and locations as an educator and maker, Grenier’s work was quietly groundbreaking. Known as a steadfast and generous friend to many, he was notably one of the few artists who, after decades of subtly exploring the medium of 16mm film, transitioned confidently to digital video, an entirely new medium which he embraced and mastered. Grenier made work full of perceptual acuity, sensual wonder, paradox, and true invention. He was an honest illusionist who delighted in creating natural magic. Grenier had the powers of observation of a scientist, the patience of a watchmaker, and the heart of a poet. His works made use of simplicity, ambiguity, and discretion to frame his open-ended mysteries. He coaxed the barely visible into crossing the threshold into full appearance. Transformed, reality was confident in his safekeeping. We keenly feel the absence of Vincent and the necessity of sharing the experience of his works in a communal setting where once again he will light up the screen for us. This tribute program will be drawn from the over fifty film and video works Vincent Grenier completed in his lifetime. A wide range of filmmakers, curators, and close friends were invited to choose individual works to determine the program. The selected titles will be announced soon. Organized by Mary Zebell, who wrote the program description above.
Charlie Ahearn’s seminal WILD STYLE is a loosely-scripted narrative film that also functions as an invaluable glimpse into the graffiti and hip-hop cultures, showcasing the art and music of legends such as Fab 5 Freddy and graffiti artist Lee Quiñones. Its story follows the exploits of maverick tagger Zoro (Quiñones), whose work attracts the attention of an East Village art fancier (Patti Astor) who commissions him to paint the stage for a giant Rapper’s Convention, and features additional appearances from Grandmaster Flash, Busy Bee, The Cold Crush Brothers, and more.
Created by Josh Ethan Johnson, WRONG SIDE OF THE LENS is a documentary series that explores the lives of street photographers. Turning the camera on masters of the form who are accustomed to being on the other side of the lens, the series investigates why artists from a wide variety of backgrounds are drawn to the same calling, provides glimpses into what went into the creation of some of the photographers’ most indelible images, and gives them the chance to reflect on what is usually a solitary activity. JILL FREEDMAN: YOU SOUND LIKE MY FUCKING MOTHER 2023, 24 min, digital ESTEVAN ORIOL: JUST ANOTHER DAY IN EAST LA 2023, 17 min, digital RICHARD SANDLER: A LIE THAT TELLS THE TRUTH 2023, 18 min, digital Total running time: ca. 65 min.