Loden’s WANDA had a latent feminist sensibility, if not an overtly expressed feminist politics. While some feminist audiences of the film saw little of an affirmative model within it, WANDA also was exhibited in early women’s film festivals of the 1970-80s, where it was often programmed alongside the films here assembled. In a contemporaneous, parallel track of women’s filmmaking, women on the cusp of the feminist movement’s second wave began to analyze the problems they faced in their daily lives. Across non-fiction and avant-garde modes, these films embodied an emergent collective feminist voice using distinct strategies: collage, disruption, self-narration. Gunvor Nelson & Dorothy Wiley SCHMEERGUNTZ 1965, 25 min, 16mm Newsreel (Louise Alaimo, Judy Smith, and Ellen Sorren) THE WOMAN’S FILM 1970, 40 min, 16mm Newsreel (Geri Ashur, Peter Barton, Marilyn Mulford, and Stephanie Palewski) JANIE’S JANIE 1971, 25 min, 16mm-to-DCP. With Janie Geise.

Co-directed by Matevž Jerman (filmmaker, film programmer, and restorationist at the Slovenian Cinematheque) and Jurij Meden (writer, scholar, head curator at the Austrian Film Museum, and formerly the head of the program department at the Slovenian Cinematheque), ALPE-ADRIA UNDERGROUND! is an exhilarating and inspiring deep dive into the rich realm of experimental films that were produced in Slovenia during the period of socialism (1945-91), albeit mostly outside the prevailing state production. Orchestrating a dizzying sampling of mind-boggling imagery, dynamic editing and scoring, and highly perceptive interviews from the artists themselves, as well as various scholars, curators, and other participants, ALPE-ADRIA UNDERGROUND! persuasively and elegantly demonstrates that postwar Slovenia was a true hotbed of filmic innovation.

AMONG THE PALMS THE BOMB, or: or: Looking for reflections in the toxic field of plenty 2024, 85 min, DCP. In English, Spanish, and Cahuilla with English subtitles. A cinematic exploration that is the culmination of Marxt’s seven-year-long research into the Salton Sea – the largest lake in California, which is on the verge of ecological collapse – and the resilient community struggling to survive within this dystopian reality.

“‘Gidget meets Badlands’ is how writer-director James Dillinger describes his visceral, action-packed, black comedy feature. Tammy, a teenage timebomb, arrives in Orange County with her ignorant redneck parents, and eighteen years of bottled-up frustration give way to a summer of lethal excess. Get out the body bags; call in the SWAT team!” –EZTV GUIDE Preceded by: Jim Baker MOUSE KLUB KONFIDENTIAL 1976, 15 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP Jim Baker THE BRADY BUNCH 1981, 10 min, SD-video-to-DCP

This bipartite program brings three (ex-)Yugoslav avant-garde works from 1982 into dialogue with three from the last decade (2015-24), all invested – in different and contradictory ways – in interrogating the effects of ultra-processed mass culture on mind and body. From Iveković’s enfleshment of the televisual cut to Bezovšek’s recent and bombastic subversion of infinite Insta scrolls, these six works bring image and sound ecologies (’80s and contemporary, analog and digital) to bear on real, physical beings. All made or co-directed by women, the films and videos sharply exclaim that inventive critical engagement with the media environments that envelop us never went away – it only descended underground. Sanja Iveković PERSONAL CUTS / OSOBNI REZOVI 1982, 4 min, video-to-digital Olga Pajek TOO MUCH 1982, 9 min, 8mm-to-digital Juliana Terek & Miroslav Bata Petrović PERSONAL DISCIPLINE / LIČNA DISCIPLINA 1982, 28 min, 16mm-to-digital Doplgenger FRAGMENTS UNTITLED #3 2015, 6 min, digital Kumjana Novakova IT COULD BE A FILM / MOŽEŠE DA BIDE FILM 2016, 8 min, digital Sara Bezovšek THE FUTURE… IS JUST LIKE YOU IMAGINED / PRIHODNOST… JE TOČNO TAKŠNA, KOT STE SI JO ZAMISLILI 2024, 13 min, digital

“This deeply personal portrait of acclaimed artist Ida Applebroog was shot with mischievous reverence by her filmmaker daughter, Beth B. Applebroog, then in her 80s, looks back at how she expressed herself through decades of drawings and paintings, as well as her private journals. With her daughter’s encouragement, she investigates the stranger that is her former self, a woman who found psychological and sexual liberation through art. As Beth B finds a deeper understanding of her mother as a human being, Applebroog shares a newfound appreciation for her own provocative work.” –MoMA DOC FORTNIGHT

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! Jessica Sarah Rinland COLLECTIVE MONOLOGUE / MONÓLOGO COLECTIVO 2024, 104 min, DCP. In Spanish with English subtitles. Distributed by Grasshopper Film. The subject of an Anthology mini-retrospective in 2021 – which showcased her short films, her medium-length BLACK POND (2018), and her debut feature, THOSE THAT, AT A DISTANCE, RESEMBLE ANOTHER (2019) – Jessica Sarah Rinland returns to present her latest work, COLLECTIVE MONOLOGUE. The new film extends her preoccupation with the intersection between the natural world, the natural sciences, and social and economic history, and continues her investigations into the ways that institutions function. Where BLACK POND focused on a Natural History Society and THOSE THAT explored – in its enigmatic, idiosyncratic way – a variety of museums and labs, COLLECTIVE MONOLOGUE shifts attention to the zoo and the animal shelter. In keeping with her earlier work, though, it’s distinguished by a profoundly empathetic sensitivity to matters both human and animal, a lyrical and textured visual sensibility, and a highly unconventional, counter-intuitive approach to the documentary form. Rinland will also present a program of short films by Argentinian filmmaker Narcisa Hirsch on Saturday, July 19 at 4:30; see page ? for details. “While most visitors to a zoo are assumed to leave with a greater understanding of the animals housed within, such spaces can reveal just as much about the humans who design and manage them. With COLLECTIVE MONOLOGUE, Jessica Sarah Rinland pursues her ongoing concerns with the relationship between humans and the natural world – particularly as mediated by institutions. At the film’s core are the animals and staff in various Argentinian zoos and shelters – including the Buenos Aires Ecopark, established as a zoo in the late 19th century – capturing not just tender moments of interspecies interaction but also administrative and infrastructural details. […] Beyond its fascinating portrayal of interspecies care, COLLECTIVE MONOLOGUE features remarkable 16mm footage of the resident creatures – and some amazing surveillance camera glimpses of nocturnal anteaters – as well as archival detours, which reveal a parallel inquiry into questions of labor, gender, and colonial conquest over the natural world. With a form that is intricate and precise, while pleasingly fragmented and open in construction, Rinland’s hypnotic approach invites questions about how we not only look at animals, but also share the world with them.” –Andréa Picard, TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

CORTILE CASCINO begins with a title card stating that the film has “Spoken commentary based on actual recorded conversations,” a curious preface. For the next three quarters of an hour, we meet the residents of Cortile Cascino, per the voiceover, an “ancient slum.” Roemer abhorred the narration, and he would remove large segments of it for the version that now exists, but it does deflect somewhat from the extremity of the images by giving people names and identities. Animal slaughter, child labor, crippling poverty and prostitution are all presented as facts of life in Cortile Cascino, as they are facts of life across the earth, should someone look, which American television might not have thought its postwar audiences were yet ready to, even if it was the reality in their own cities. NBC cancelled the broadcast days before the scheduled airdate, yet remarkably, the person tasked with junking the negative admired the film and made a dupe, which is the source that allowed the film to be saved. FACES OF ISRAEL 1967, 27 min, 16mm-to-DCP FACES OF ISRAEL was the product of a commission from NET to make a film about Martin Buber. Shot in 1966, for which Roemer spent six weeks of research in Israel before cameras rolled, the resulting film DIALOGUE was eventually aired on PBS. It was a decade later, while teaching at Yale, that Roemer revisited the footage and recut it as FACES OF ISRAEL, the film never shown, or even intended to be shown, save for a few screenings, and often mistaken as airing in 1966. The film opens with a single still image of an emaciated dead body, presumably a Nazi victim, in a camp or a ghetto, held for just a few seconds: no sound, no text, no narration. Nothing is needed. And then the contemporary images begin. It is as simple and striking an opening as the documentary form has produced.

“What makes this film distinctive is the way Rousseau explicitly returns to the source of his creative inspiration. So here he is at home reciting [Jean Racine’s play] Bérénice to himself, whilst going about his household chores. It verges on the comical: There are repeated shots of him obstinately trying to turn off a dripping tap, or the jubilant close up of bare feet carried away in performing a dance step or two. Combining art with life in such a way, that nothing is compartmentalised, nothing lost – that is the goal.” –Jean-Pierre Rehm, VIENNALE Jean-Claude Rousseau WELCOME 2022, 18 min, digital. No dialogue. Rousseau’s second film made in New York, thirty-five years after KEEP IN TOUCH. In the solitude of an apartment, a piece of cardboard beats against the window, at the whim of the wind, like a beating heart.

While continuing to teach at Yale and write scripts, Roemer was asked by WGBH if he would be interested in making a film about the rites and customs of death. Roemer was interested in exploring the topic, but only from the point of view of those in the process of dying. Three and a half months of interviews with forty people led to a two-year project and would eventually leave Roemer physically and emotionally depleted. But as a result, DYING is unlike any other film in its attempt to address what is still the most taboo of subjects, with Roemer’s profoundly empathetic approach inspiring his protagonists to express on camera what few would under any other circumstances.

(UN CONDAMNÉ À MORT S’EST ÉCHAPPÉ, OU LE VENT SOUFFLE OÙ IL VEUT) With the simplest of concepts and sparest of techniques, Bresson made one of the most suspenseful jailbreak films of all time. Based on the account of an imprisoned French Resistance leader, this unbelievably taut and methodical marvel follows the fictional Fontaine’s single-minded pursuit of freedom, detailing the planning and execution of his escape with gripping precision. But Bresson’s film is not merely about process – it’s also a work of intense spirituality and humanity.

(LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE) by Jean Cocteau In French with English subtitles. “Jean Cocteau’s first full-length movie is perhaps the most sensuously elegant of all filmed fairy tales. As a child escapes from everyday daily life to the magic of a storybook, so, in the film, Beauty’s farm, with its Vermeer simplicity, fades in intensity as we are caught up in the Gustave Doré extravagance of the Beast’s enchanted landscape. In Christian Bérard’s makeup, Jean Marais is a magnificent Beast.” –Pauline Kael

Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1928, 22 min, 35mm, b&w) Twenty-two minutes of pure, scandalous dream-imagery, a stream of images from which anything that could be given a rational meaning was rigorously excluded. It remains the unsurpassed masterpiece of the surrealist cinema. Luis Buñuel LAND WITHOUT BREAD / LAS HURDES: TIERRA SIN PAN (1932, 28 min, 35mm, b&w. With English narration.) “A documentary describing, matter-of-factly, a region of Spain so ravaged by epidemic poverty that there our worst fantasies find their objective correlative.” –Raymond Durgnat Total running time: ca. 55 min.

Alberto Cavalcanti RIEN QUE LES HEURES / NOTHING BUT THE HOURS 1926, 52 min, 35mm One of the very first “city symphonies,” this film interweaves documentary, experimental, and narrative elements that together provide vivid images of Paris in the mid-1920s. The Brazilian-born Cavalcanti was at the time a central figure of the French avant-garde, but his fascinating career would later find him making pioneering documentaries for John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit in the UK in the 1930s, dramas, noirs, and musicals for Ealing Studios throughout the 1940s, and finally a wide array of films in Brazil, East Germany, France, and Israel in the years before his death in 1982. Douglass Crockwell GLENS FALLS SEQUENCE (1946, 8 min, 16mm) THE LONG BODIES (1947, 6 min, 16mm) Both films preserved by Anthology Film Archives. “The basic idea was to paint continuing pictures on various layers with plastic paint, adding at times and removing at times, and to a certain extent these early attempts were successful.” –Douglass Crockwell Total running time: ca. 70 min.

A WOMAN 1915, 20 min, 16mm EASY STREET 1917, 19 min, 16mm THE CURE 1917, 26 min, 16mm Total running time: ca. 70 min. “It is stupid to treat Charlie as a clown of genius. If there had never been a cinema he would undoubtedly have been a clown of genius, but the cinema has allowed him to raise the comedy of circus and music hall to the highest aesthetic level. Chaplin needed the medium of the cinema to free comedy completely from the limits of space and time imposed by the stage or the circus arena. […] [The] best Chaplin films can be seen over and over again with no loss of pleasure – indeed the very opposite is the case. It is doubtless a fact that the satisfaction derived from certain gags is inexhaustible, so deep does it lie, but it is furthermore supremely true that comic form and aesthetic value owe nothing to surprise. The latter is exhausted the first time around and is replaced by a much more subtle pleasure, namely the delight of anticipating and recognizing perfection.” –André Bazin, WHAT IS CINEMA

by Bruce Conner A MOVIE (1958, 12 min, 16mm) COSMIC RAY (1961, 4 min, 16mm) REPORT (1965, 13 min, 16mm) “Conner stands as a kind of twentieth century Pieter Bruegel. For like the great Flemish master he distorts the visible world in order to penetrate a reality of being rather than appearances; his vision is cosmic in breadth; he deals with some of the most provocative issues, both artistic and otherwise, of his time; and finally, with an evocative ambiguity and painful irony he touches something which we sometimes call the human experience.” –Carl I. Belz, FILM CULTURE COSMIC RAY and REPORT have been preserved by Anthology through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program, funded by The Film Foundation. by Tony Conrad THE FLICKER (1966, 30 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology with funding provided by the National Film Preservation Foundation.) “THE FLICKER is a tremendous harnessing of the raw power, the elemental material of the cinematic medium – light itself – to transport the spectator slowly at first, hardly perceptibly, then accelerating, through a non-objective non-abstract world of sheer energy. Time becomes the compelling pulse of white into black and back, space becomes the unbounded expansion and contraction of force; the screen becomes a new sun, the audience its creatures.” –Ken Kelman Total running time: ca. 65 min.

MOTHER’S DAY 1948, 22 min, 16mm FOUR IN THE AFTERNOON 1951, 15 min, 16mm LOONY TOM, THE HAPPY LOVER 1951, 10 min, 16mm

THE PLEASURE GARDEN 1953, 38 min, 35mm THE BED 1968, 19 min, 16mm NUPTIAE 1969, 14 min, 16mm

THE GOLDEN POSITIONS 1970, 32 min, 16mm THIS IS IT 1971, 10 min, 16mm TESTAMENT 1974, 20 min, 16mm

DREAMWOOD 1972, 45 min, 16mm HIGH KUKUS 1974, 3 min, 16mm

Unless otherwise noted, all the films in this program are silent. With the exception of GNIR REDNOW, all films have been preserved by Anthology Film Archives. ROSE HOBART ca. 1936/68, 20 min, 16mm CENTURIES OF JUNE 1955, 10 min, 16mm. Photographed by Stan Brakhage. THE AVIARY 1954, 11 min, 16mm. Photographed by Rudy Burckhardt. GNIR REDNOW 1955, 5 min, 16mm. Photographed by Stan Brakhage. NYMPHLIGHT 1957, 8 min, 16mm. Photographed by Rudy Burckhardt. A LEGEND FOR FOUNTAINS 1957/65, 17 min, 16mm. Photographed by Rudy Burckhardt; completed by Lawrence Jordan. ANGEL 1957, 3 min, 16mm. Photographed by Rudy Burckhardt.

by Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí In French with English subtitles. “The story is a sequence of moral and surrealist aesthetics. The sexual instinct and the sense of death form the substance of the film. It is a romantic film performed in full surrealistic frenzy.” – Luis Buñuel

(THE FORGOTTEN ONES) by Luis Buñuel In Spanish with English subtitles. “Buñuel shows the sad condition of the poor without embellishing them, because if there is one thing Buñuel hates it is that artificial sweetness imparted to all the poor which we so frequently see in the traditional film. If, as usually happens in motion pictures, the moral principles approved by conventional society are carefully observed by members of the poorest classes…then these principles have some universal validity. However, Buñuel is concerned with exposing the opposite.” –Emilio Garcia Riera, FILM CULTURE “[LOS OLVIDADOS] lashes the mind like a red-hot iron and leaves one’s conscience no opportunity to rest.” –André Bazin

(ORPHÉE) by Jean Cocteau In French with English subtitles. “Orpheus could only exist on the screen. A drama of the visible and the invisible, ORPHEUS’s Death is like a spy who falls in love with the person being spied upon. The myth of immortality.” –Jean Cocteau

by Robert Bresson In French with English subtitles. A magnificent drama about a thief, his techniques, motives, and secret existence. The plot is modeled loosely on Dostoevsky’s CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, but the rigorous intensity of the treatment is pure Bresson, as he tells the compelling story of an insignificant man who drifts into crime and finally finds grace in a prison cell. The famous scene of the pickpocket’s magical raid on a train station ranks as one of the great tours-de-force of French cinema.

With the exception of MOTION PICTURES NO. 1, PAT’S BIRTHDAY, BREATHING, and GULLS AND BUOYS, all of the films in this program were preserved by Anthology with generous support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. FORM PHASES I (1952, 2 min, 16mm) FORM PHASES II (1953, 2 min, 16mm) RECREATION (1956, 1.5 min, 16mm-to-35mm) MOTION PICTURES NO. 1 (1956, 4.5 min, 16mm, silent) JAMESTOWN BALOOS (1957, 6 min, 16mm-to-35mm) EYEWASH (1959, 3 min, 16mm-to-35mm) BLAZES (1961, 3 min, 16mm-to-35mm) PAT’S BIRTHDAY (1962, 13 min, 16mm, b&w) BREATHING (1963, 5 min, 35mm, b&w) FIST FIGHT (1964, 9 min, 16mm-to-35mm) 66 (1966, 5.5 min, 16mm-to-35mm) 69 (1969, 4.5 min, 16mm-to-35mm) 70 (1970, 5 min, 16mm-to-35mm) GULLS AND BUOYS (1972, 8 min, 16mm) FUJI (1974, 9 min, 16mm-to-35mm) “Roughly speaking [Breer’s] works belong to that category of films generally called ‘abstract’ (though his are also highly ‘concrete’), but differ from everything else that has been done along these lines in one basic respect: Breer is undoubtedly the first filmmaker to have brought to his medium the full heritage of modern painting and the sum of sophisticated experimentation that it represents.” – Noël Burch, FILM QUARTERLY Total running time: ca. 85 min.

(LE SANG D’UN POÈTE) by Jean Cocteau In French with English subtitles. “Adolescent angels wandering about, black boxers with perfect bodies taking flight, school-children in capes killing each other with snowballs, a mirror becomes a swimming pool, and the hallways of a furnished hotel turn into a labyrinth.” –Georges Sadoul

In his controversial masterpiece, Chaplin offers both a cutting caricature of Adolf Hitler and a slytweaking ofhis own comic persona. Chaplin, in his first pure talkie, brings his sublimephysicality to two roles: the cruel yet clownish “Tomainian” dictator and the kindly Jewishbarber who is mistaken for him. Featuring Jack Oakie and Paulette Goddard in stellar supportingturns, THE GREAT DICTATOR, boldly going after the fascist leader before the U.S.’s officialentry into World War II, is an audacious amalgam of politics and slapstick that culminates inChaplin’s famously impassioned speech.

Preserved by Anthology Film Archives. EYES (1970, 36 min, 16mm, silent) “After wishing for years to be given the opportunity of filming some of the more ‘mystical’ occupations of our Times – some of the more obscure Public Figures which the average imagination turns into ‘bogeymen’... viz.: Policemen, Doctors, Soldiers, Politicians, etc.: – I was at last permitted to ride in a Pittsburgh police car, camera in hand, the final several days of September 1970.” –Stan Brakhage DEUS EX (1971, 34 min, 16mm, silent) “I have been many times very ill in hospitals; and I drew on all that experience while making DEUS EX in West Penn. Hospital of Pittsburgh; but I was especially inspired by the memory of one incident in an emergency room of San Francisco’s Mission District: while waiting for medical help, I had held myself together by reading an April-May 1965 issue of ‘Poetry Magazine’: and the following lines from Charles Olson’s ‘Cole’s Island’ had especially centered the experience, ‘touchstone’ of DEUS EX, for me: Charles begins the poem with the statement ‘I met Death –’ And then: ‘He didn’t bother me, or say anything. Which is / not surprising, a person might not, in the circumstances; / or at most a nod or something. Or they would. But they wouldn’t, / or you wouldn’t think to either, / it was Death. And / He certainly was, the moment I saw him.’” –Stan Brakhage THE ACT OF SEEING WITH ONE’S OWN EYES (1971, 32 min, 16mm, silent) “Brakhage, entering, with his camera, one of the forbidden, terrific locations of our culture, the autopsy room. It is a place wherein, inversely, life is cherished, for it exists to affirm that no one of us may die without our knowing exactly why. All of us, in the person of the coroner, must see that, for ourselves, with our own eyes.” –Hollis Frampton Total running time: ca. 105 min.

Originally released in 1970, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s EL TOPO quickly caught the imagination of movie audiences, becoming a landmark in independent filmmaking. The early screenings at New York’s Elgin Theater sparked the Midnight Movie phenomenon, catalyzed by an endorsement from John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Classic Americana and avant-garde European sensibilities collide with Zen Buddhism and the Bible as master gunfighter and mystic El Topo (played by Jodorowsky himself) tries to defeat four sharp-shooting rivals on a bizarre path to allegorical self-awareness and resurrection. As it seeks an alternative to the Hollywood mainstream, EL TOPO is also the most controversial quasi-Western head trip ever made! “The episodes of El Topo’s progress are parabolic tales performed in concrete poetry. Many of these tales are metaphysical gags in the manner of the Marx Brothers, who often used a Sufi parable to launch their excursions into madness. Their style is often considered frivolous but is one of deliberate anarchy, which Artaud called their ‘disintegration of the real by poetry.’ The same sense of humor, rooted at the cruel basis of laughter, is present in EL TOPO. Its humor attacks reality, creating a comedy that provokes laughter in order to overcome horror – a comedy that becomes a cult of salvation. Its tone portrays the growth of horror among us. Despite the nostalgic trend in style, this is not the 1930s, and the price of exorcism and the price of initiation have gone up. As was declared in Jean-Luc Godard’s WEEKEND, ‘It will take more horror to overcome the horror of the bourgeoisie.’ EL TOPO is dedicated to the metaphysical mechanics of that proposition.” –Glenn O’Brien, VILLAGE VOICE

“After a series of experimental shorts such as MASQUERADE BALL (1971), FEAST (1972), and BALUUN CANAAN (1974), Franci Slak transitioned from alternative/amateur to semi-professional filmmaking with DAILY NEWS (1979), a film widely considered to be the first Slovenian experimental feature-length film. It was shot on Super-8mm and later blown up to 16mm. Experimental cinema is usually non-narrative driven, relying heavily on the expressive qualities and interactions between images/sounds. Franci Slak has embraced this conceptual approach with a certain almost insane intensity. He has diligently collected images over the course of a year, images ranging from pure abstractions to concrete representations of the world, thus creating a whirlpool of personal mythology driven by an absolute freedom of expression of a kind ordinarily unseen within professional film production.” –Silvan Furlan

“A vibrant and idiosyncratic avant-garde scene once quietly simmered beneath the surface of Slovenian film production – a scene we are only now beginning to truly rediscover and, albeit belatedly, recognize as an exciting blind spot in the canon of Slovenian film history. Unlike the clearly defined manifestos and theory-driven concepts such as antifilm in Zagreb or alternative film in Belgrade, Slovenia never formed a unified movement. Instead, it was shaped by a constellation of unique individuals, each exploring the language of film in their own way. Some worked at the intersection of documentary and poetry (Vinko Rozman), others combined aesthetic precision with political subversion (Karpo Godina). Some approached animation from a highly conceptualistic angle (Tone Rački), while others pushed the boundaries of film’s materiality (Davorin Marc) or explored the limits of kinetic energy of the camera as the “dislocated third eye” (OM Production). This program offers a brief, vertiginous glimpse into the breadth of Slovenian experimental film – from the dizzying cycles of history and freedom, to the euphoria of love, the endless spinning of celluloid, and a four-movement meditation on rotation itself.” –Matevž Jerman Vinko Rozman PRAGUE SPRING / PRAŠKA POMLAD 1969, 11 min, 8mm-to-DCP Karpo Godina FRIED BRAINS OF PUPILIJA FERKEVERK / GRATINIRANI MOŽGANI PUPILIJE FERKEVERK 1970, 12 min, 35mm-to-DCP Tone Rački LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT / LJUBEZEN NA PRVI POGLED 1972, 3 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP Davorin Marc EVERYTHING IS SPINNING / VSE SE VRTI 1978, 2 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP Sulejman Ferenčak / OM Production DISLOCATED THIRD EYE SERIES: BISMILLAH /IN FOUR MOVEMENTS/ / SERIJA DISLOCIRANO TRETJE OKO: BISMILLAH /V ŠTIRIH STAVKIH/ 1984, 31 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP

Cancel those Fire Island plans and book yourself a stay at Anthology in August, because the EZTV retrospective organized by our dear friend Elizabeth Purchell is one of the most mind-blowing queer repertory programs New York has seen in years (see page ? for more details). “Narrow Rooms” is thrilled and honored to partner with Purchell and her new distribution label – MUSCLE Distribution – to co-present the opening night screening of this monumental retrospective, which comprises three incredible, rarely-seen works by Ken Camp, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker who was making “Narrow Rooms”-style movies (dark, dirty, disturbing, gay) a decade before the directors of the comparatively tame “New Queer Cinema” era. These films go hard and will leave you unsettled, unnerved, and afraid. The program begins with SHOCK VIDEO, an experimental shot-on-film trailer for Camp’s as-of-yet unfinished Super 8 horror feature AFTER THE COMET. The second – much lighter – entry in the program is the first episode of Camp’s campy gay soap opera spoof AS THE WORLD BURNS, which takes place in a seemingly picture perfect Reaganite California suburb where all the female character’s husbands’ are mysteriously turning gay. The program concludes with Camp’s masterpiece HIGHWAY HYPNOSIS, a structuralist gay horror film that follows a serial killer as he travels from LA to Las Vegas. Though there are very few frames of actual “horror” in the film, the cumulative effect is far more disturbing than the graphic gore flicks of the 1980s. Ken Camp HIGHWAY HYPNOSIS 1984, 63 min, SD-video-to-DCP Preceded by: Ken Camp SHOCK VIDEO 1985, 12 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP Ken Camp AS THE WORLD BURNS: EPISODE 1 1982, 19 min, SD-video-to-DCP

In 1984, EZTV created its own in-house video magazine called EZTV Eye that featured a mix of video art pieces, music videos, and newsreel-style documentaries. Though short-lived (in fact, there may have only ever been a single episode), the series was a testament to the vibrancy and diversity of the various scenes that had begun to build around the Video Gallery by its second year of operation. For this program, we’ll construct a hypothetical episode of the series with an eclectic selection of shorts from videomakers John Dorr, Sebastian, Mark Addy, Mark Shepard, and more. Ken Camp AS THE WORLD BURNS: EPISODE 3 1982, 21 min, SD-video-to-DCP Graham Dent CONAN THE WAITRESS 1984, 6 min, SD-video-to-DCP John Dorr DO IT YOURSELF VIDEO FOR POETS 1987, 8 min, SD-video-to-DCP Sebastian THEY SAVED GIDGET’S BRAIN 1983, 30 min, SD-video-to-DCP Plus additional titles to be announced!

When the EZTV Video Gallery first opened in the summer of 1983, Dorr envisioned the space as presenting “an alternative vision of contemporary culture and reality, a vision in no way controlled by the mass media, lowest-common-denominator ethic.” This was accomplished through EZTV’s wildly varied programming, which featured everything from more traditional narrative video to live performance and cutting-edge video and computer art – and often works that incorporated multiple elements from all of the above. For this program, we’ll present a wide swath of video and digital art spanning much of EZTV’s 45-year history.

Founded by On Our Backs magazine founders Nan Kinney and Deborah Sundahl at the height of the lesbian sex wars of the 1980s, Fatale Video was one of, if not the very first, companies dedicated to making erotic videos by and for lesbians. When a program featuring Fatale’s first two shorts nearly caused a riot (!) at the 1985 San Francisco Lesbian & Gay Video Festival, festival programmer and EZTV associate John Canaly decided to bring them to the Video Gallery at the end of September 1985. This kind of programming would eventually lead to some of the more high-minded critics and video artists of the era giving the space the dismissive (and perhaps a bit homophobic) nickname, SleazyTV. For this special screening, we’ll be playing a preserved copy of the original tape assembled for this program’s run at EZTV, with all of the original shorts, trailers, and snipes intact. Ingrid Wilhite FUN WITH A SAUSAGE 1984, 16 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP O. Wow PRIVATE PLEASURES 1985, 30 min, SD-video-to-DCP Ingrid Wilhite L’INGENUE 1985, 12 min, SD-video-to-DCP Debi Sundahl SHADOWS 1985, 30 min, SD-video-to-DCP

EZTV founding member (and director since 1994) Michael J. Masucci began a decade-long collaboration with dancer and choreographer ia Kamandalu (formerly Kim McKillip) in 1986 as part of his three-part video/performance piece BALLET LEMURIA. Under the name Vertical Blanking, the duo created early examples of what became known as “desktop video,” combining analog video with hot-rodded desktop computer equipment, experimental soundtracks, and live performance elements. The short videos in this program explore a wide range of themes, including feminism, Pan-Pacific mythology, UFO/UAP conspiracies, consumerism, and televangelism. Vertical Blanking NIGHTLIGHT 1992, 4 min, SD-video-to-DCP Vertical Blanking DEPOSITION 1991, 7 min, SD-video-to-DCP Vertical Blanking CLONE SHOPPING CLUB 1992, 5 min, SD-video-to-DCP Michael J. Masucci & ia Kamandalu LEMURIA 1986, 20 min, SD-video-to-DCP Michael J. Masucci & Nina Barlow BAD TV 1986, 12 min, SD-video-to-DCP Vertical Blanking THEATER OF DREAMS (I THOUGHT THIS IS WHAT YOU WANTED) 1989, 7 min, SD-video-to-DCP Vertical Blanking DEEP THOUGHT 1992-2025, 20 min, SD-video-to-DCP

In its early years, EZTV’s position as an exhibition space allowed it to build networks with videomakers in other cities – most notably San Francisco’s John Canaly and Washington, DC’s Video Free Earth. Founded by federal workers Jamie Walters and Leonard Bravermen in 1982, Video Free Earth frequently collaborated with poets, performers, and activists like Chasen Gaver, Jack Guidone, and Isabel-Lee Malone on a series of wickedly satirical and thought-provoking videos like A KENNEDY TRILOGY and LOUISE NEVELSON TAKES A BATH. This program represents the first retrospective of the group’s work since the passing of all of its principal members. Jamie Walters THE KENNEDY TRILOGY 1980-82, 25 min, SD-video-to-DCP Jamie Walters UNDER SUSPICION 1984, 2 min, SD-video-to-DCP Hunter Wolkoff VICKI PICKS A TIE 1984, 12 min, SD-video-to-DCP Jamie Walters LOUISE NEVELSON TAKES A BATH 1983, 4 min, SD-video-to-DCP Gregory J. Ford DESK IN HELL 1982, 11 min, SD-video-to-DCP Jamie Walters FRESH OUT OF IDEAS 1984, 2 min, SD-video-to-DCP Jamie Walters GLORIA’S POINT OF VIEW 1984, 4 min, SD-video-to-DCP Jamie Walters THRU THE CRT 1984, 24 min, SD-video-to-DCP

Set in the red-rock landscape of Moab, FADE IN concerns a budding and improbable city-country romance between a Los Angeles film editor (which would have represented Loden’s first stint as leading lady) and a brawny Utah rancher (a young Burt Reynolds). After editorial meddling by producers at Paramount, the film became the first pseudonymous “Allen Smithee” vehicle, and was shelved until its relegation to TV broadcast in 1973. This is a rare screening of a film which, thanks to its unusual production history, is rarely shown theatrically.

FAREWELL AMOR follows Walter, an Angolan immigrant in New York, as he reunites with his wife and daughter after 17 years apart. Though now virtual strangers, the three must navigate the tensions of living together in a small apartment. As they struggle to reconnect, a shared love of dance emerges as a powerful tool for healing, helping bridge the emotional distance shaped by years of separation, personal change, and cultural dislocation.

In 1975, Yugoslav filmmaker Karpo Godina traveled to Vojvodina (northern Serbia) and captured several dozen residents of local villages and farms on 16mm color film. These were individuals who had artistic, musical, or technological crafts and skills to perform for the camera: from choral singers and amateur potters to carvers of sophisticated wooden instruments. FRAME FOR A FEW POSES is a six-episode documentary financed by the entertainment division of Belgrade TV, in which Godina records a vibrant constellation of folk ingenuity and imagination within a particular geographic region. (“Yugoslavia’s Got Talent” could be a fitting alternative title.) Yet the film is also a synecdoche of socialist Yugoslavia itself: a miniature of the country’s ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity. This respectful and endlessly hilarious tribute to the inexhaustible energy of human (and not merely national or ethnoparticular) creativity has recently been preserved by the Slovenian Cinematheque in collaboration with Serbian and Slovene TV. It will be shown here in two parts, each approximately 90 minutes in length.

In 1975, Yugoslav filmmaker Karpo Godina traveled to Vojvodina (northern Serbia) and captured several dozen residents of local villages and farms on 16mm color film. These were individuals who had artistic, musical, or technological crafts and skills to perform for the camera: from choral singers and amateur potters to carvers of sophisticated wooden instruments. FRAME FOR A FEW POSES is a six-episode documentary financed by the entertainment division of Belgrade TV, in which Godina records a vibrant constellation of folk ingenuity and imagination within a particular geographic region. (“Yugoslavia’s Got Talent” could be a fitting alternative title.) Yet the film is also a synecdoche of socialist Yugoslavia itself: a miniature of the country’s ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity. This respectful and endlessly hilarious tribute to the inexhaustible energy of human (and not merely national or ethnoparticular) creativity has recently been preserved by the Slovenian Cinematheque in collaboration with Serbian and Slovene TV. It will be shown here in two parts, each approximately 90 minutes in length.

This screening assembles six of Vlatko Gilić’s haunting short films. Gilić, born in 1935 in Montenegro, is socialist Yugoslavia’s eeriest cineaste; he directed 13 ultra-macabre films between 1966 and 1980, after which he entered academia and teaching, retreating from the limelight. Fusing Christian metaphysics/symbolism with politicized allegory, ritual, and myth, Gilić’s films scrutinize humankind – its ever-elusive “nature” – with the use of observational, languid, transcendental technique. The films, as Ben Harrison noted elatedly in 1976, “make use of documentary material, yet their selectivity and structure are as rigorous as lyric poetry…. Like all works of genius, they are untranslatable. One must see them to appreciate them, and having seen them, one can never forget them.” These rarely projected 16mm prints are on loan from the Harvard Film Archive. Vlatko Gilić HOMO HOMINI 1968, 4 min, 16mm PULL, PULL / ZATEGNI DELE 1969, 10 min, 16mm IN CONTINUO 1970, 11 min, 16mm ONE DAY MORE / DAN VIŠE 1971, 11 min, 16mm JUDAS / JUDA 1971, 11 min, 16mm POWER / MOČ 1972, 34 min, 16mm

The Cinema of Gender Transgression is proud to present the first cohesive program of work by Hazel Katz, whose filter of socio-political and cultural critique cuts deep. Whether it be an exegesis on canonical cinematic history assembled through loose association and braided narrative form (WHO GETS TO DIE), a critical examination of borders and empire, or a fiction narrative about one slice of a bestie road-trip-cum-post-surgery debacle (SYDNEY & KIM), these films are pointed, and often staunchly different in approach. BABY SIS 2022, 8 min, digital WHO GETS TO DIE 2021, 22 min, digital SYDNEY & KIM 2023, 17 min, digital WHO GETS TO FLY 2025, 14 min, digital (work-in-progress)

This is the debut film by Iranian director Panah Panahi, who follows a family’s road trip across the Iranian countryside. The reason for their journey gradually unfolds as the film progresses, set between the confined space of the car and expansive wide shots of the landscape, where a family of four faces an imminent departure. Each family member’s point of view is carefully developed, highlighting their emotional clashes and quiet connections. The cruelty of forced displacement is conveyed through intimate fragments of family life, elevated by an exquisite blend of classical music including a recurring Schubert piano sonata and catchy Iranian pop. Preceded by: Saj Issa PLEIN AIR PERFORMANCE 2024, 5 min, digital

Raganelli’s moving tribute to and portrait of Barbara Loden, made one decade after the success of WANDA, is a riveting and poignant documentary of the filmmaker at work and reflecting on the lessons of her career. I AM WANDA presents an intimate account of the visionary actor-writer-director in the flow of her life as an acting teacher, artist, and mother.

SPECIAL SCREENINGS – FILMMAKER IN PERSON! Klára Tasovská I’M NOT EVERYTHING I WANT TO BE / JEŠTĚ NEJSEM, KÝM CHCI BÝT 2024, 90 min, DCP. In Czech with English subtitles. “Some people are so attuned to the world that they seem to be on hand when history strikes. Czech photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková [who’s been dubbed the ‘Nan Goldin of Czechoslovakia’] is one such figure: born to a family of painters in Prague, she was sixteen and had just begun to take photographs when Soviet tanks entered the city in 1968. As the daughter of ‘politically unreliable people’, she had to learn her craft outside of the university system. She thus chose to work, travel, and explore the night in equal measure, whether as a factory worker in Prague in the late ‘60s, as a fashion photographer in ‘80s Tokyo, as a frequent visitor to Prague’s only queer club in the ‘80s or as a chambermaid in West Berlin from the late ‘80s to early ‘90s. Along the way, she continually took photographs of the places and people surrounding her. She also took numerous self-portraits, and her oeuvre thus gazes in two directions at once: outwards to history and inwards to the photographer chronicling it. This portrait of a portraitist is pieced together from the most appropriate of materials: her archive and her voice. In passing, it also tells a tale of three cities (Prague-Tokyo-West Berlin) across five whirlwind decades.” –Lucía Salas, VIENNALE “1968 Prague, 1979 Tokyo, 1990 Berlin. Part of the Czech counterculture, celebrated fashion photographer, chambermaid at the Intercontinental Hotel. These are some of the stages in Libuše Jarcovjáková’s life. As the child of a Prague artist couple, she was drawn to photography at an early age and it became her great passion. ‘Yes, it’s a compulsion. I am extremely attracted to mirrors and their reflections. I take pictures everywhere, on the train, in the toilet.’ Klára Tasovská has created this film from more than 70,000 photographs as a rapid succession of snapshots of an eventful and dazzling life, which is literally seen through the eyes of the protagonist. The rhythmic montage combines wonderful black-and-white photographs, diary entries, and an outstanding soundtrack to create a sensual overall experience. The audience soon forgets that these are still images. They are drawn into a maelstrom that they cannot escape. This film is a portrait of a different kind: direct, unpretentious, and moving.” –Jury Statement of the Viennale Erste Bank Film Award Since 2011, each annual edition of the Viennale (Vienna International Film Festival) has featured the granting of the Viennale Erste Bank Film Award to one or more filmmakers whose films are included within the festival. Designed to showcase the best of Austrian cinema, the Award was founded by Erste Bank, the Viennale’s main sponsor, and is awarded according to the findings of an independent jury. The Award brings a cash prize as well as a residency as a visiting filmmaker organized by Deutsches Haus at NYU. The 2024 Award was granted to Klara Tasovska’s I'M NOT EVERYTHING I WANT TO BE. The screenings are co-presented by the Deutsches Haus at NYU, Erste Bank, and the Czech Center New York.

“Shooting in the rural Tuscan woods, Cottafavi crafts a portrait of lumberjack Guglielmo who works at the edge of poverty while reeling from the loss of his wife. There is no sign of hope for Guglielmo, but he teaches fresh blood the life and trade he’s led while looking forward to some brief respite at home where he can gather his thoughts. A peasant’s portrait, and a reflection of rural life in Italy after reconstruction, IL TAGLIO DEL BOSCO is a bleak film that offers a very gentle reprieve for the real heroes of society, the every-day man.” –Liam Kenny

Living in 1960s Yugoslavia meant being crisscrossed and inundated by images originating from East, West, and everywhere in between. This screening of experimental, documentary, and animated shorts constellates radical – and radically different – aesthetico-political approaches that avant-garde and amateur filmmakers in the SFRY adopted to confront, process, and deconstruct the exigencies of market socialism, environmental disaster, and the afterlife of WWII. From rephotography and archival appropriation to English pop soundtracks, these seven underseen treasures show what it looked, sounded, and felt like to exist in a non-aligned society of foreign images and spectacle. Erna Banovac ERNA 1963, 3 min, 8mm-to-digital Ljubiša Grlić REINDEER, DEAR REINDEER / SOBOVI, DRAGI SOBOVI 1963, 3 min, 8mm-to-digital Stjepan Zaninović A TEAR ON YOUR FACE / SUZA NA LICU 1965, 11 min, 16mm-to-digital Vladimir Petek ONE HAND 30 SWORDS / JEDNA RUKA 30 MAČEVA 1967, 12 min, 16mm-to-digital Tatjana Dunja Ivanišević WOMAN / ŽEMSKO 1968, 6 min, 8mm-to-digital Tatjana Ivančić CITY IN A SHOP WINDOW / GRAD U IZLOGU 1969, 5 min, Super-8mm-to-digital Želimir Žilnik JUNE TURMOIL / LIPANJSKA GIBANJA 1969, 11 min, 35mm

Socialist Slovenia’s first feature-length experimental film, DAILY NEWS was shot on Super-8mm by then-26-year-old Franci Slak, who would go on to become an acclaimed industry director. As its title suggests, the film is a diary in which the author records his observations of the outside world. Film theorist Jože Dolmark appraised it best: “the film contains a desire to record (not strictly chronologically) the experience of a lived day: what happened to you, what you experienced, or which is more interesting, what you would like the day to look like, according to how you’ve imagined it. I think the entire power of DAILY NEWS lies in this desire of Franci’s for what remained unspoken, what slipped, what remained outside the edges, and what we’ll never know.” The film has been nearly impossible to see for decades; this is the world premiere of its digital restoration, completed in 2025 by the Slovenian Cinematheque.

INVENTION is a collaboration between director Courtney Stephens and actress / filmmaker Callie Hernandez. The film fictionalizes the aftermath of Hernandez’s father’s death, using a real archive of varied TV appearances he made as an alternative health doctor in the late ’90s thru 2020. The fictional storyline revolves around the patent of an experimental healing device, which is the daughter’s sole inheritance. Featuring other independent filmmakers in acting roles, INVENTION also serves as a portrait of America in its late period, a country in which widespread disappointment infuses the culture with hopeful fictions and toxic nostalgia. “Despite the narrative framework, this Super 16mm-shot feature furthers Stephens’s longstanding interest in cultural memory, female mythology and the slippery notion of authorship. As the film shifts between archival material and loosely scripted scenes of Carrie’s encounters with a variety of her father’s friends and former associates…a slipstream of fictions and fantasies emerge from the fabric of multiple intersecting realities, a meta-cinematic conceit Stephens reinforces through use of on-set audio of the cast and crew recorded during production. With INVENTION, Stephens and Hernandez have fashioned a uniquely reflexive portrait of the grieving process, utilizing personal experience to articulate something universal about death and the ways we mourn the complicated figures in our lives.” –Jordan Cronk, FILMMAKER MAGAZINE

Peter Emmanuel Goldman PESTILENT CITY 1965, 16 min, 16mm-to-DCP Shirley Clarke THE COOL WORLD 1964, 104 min, 35mm. Print courtesy of Zipporah Films and preserved by the Library of Congress Packard Campus for National Audio-Visual Conservation from the original camera negatives in the Zipporah Films Collection. Total running time: ca. 125 min.

EMPATHY follows a heroin-addicted professional escort as she moves between NYC, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles. Combining frank images of the actual labor of sex work with intimate portraits of her interpersonal life, the film is an alternately humorous and harrowing look at a seldom depicted side of American life as well as a meditation on the performativity at the core of documentary filmmaking and the sex industry alike.

UNTITLED 2009, 3 min, digital WE’VE LOVED YOU SO MUCH 2010, 10 min, 16mm 3PM (PUMA AUTOMATIC) 2014, 3 min, digital FUCK WORK 2015, 12 min, digital MARRIAGE STORY 2020, 9.5 min, digital-to-35mm LIFE STORY 2024, 10 min, digital-to-35mm. With McKenzie Wark.

Rousseau’s first film, shot in Super-8mm, is an experiential meditation on vision via an encounter with Johannes Vermeer. For this rare screening, we present a new 2K digitization of the film’s sole copy, preserved on a single roll of Kodachrome color-reversal film. The DCP was supervised by Rousseau himself in collaboration with a group of students and teachers at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, led by Manuel Asín and Carlos Saldaña. Jean-Claude Rousseau KEEP IN TOUCH 1987, 25 min, Super-8mm-to-16mm. In English and French with English subtitles. “KEEP IN TOUCH explores waiting periods. The filmmaker sits at a table in a room in New York, blank stationary paper in front of him. He turns on a lamp, leafs through an erotic magazine. Meanwhile, we hear various messages left on an answering machine: whispers punctuated by “love, love, love”; switching French to English, the voice tells of a move back into an old apartment. Another, in English, surprised by the answering machine, half-heartedly solicits a second date. The film explores this pause; the time between the initial encounter and the waiting period. The persistent hum of the city is perceptible, pierced by an ambulance siren.” –Érik Bullot Total running time: ca. 75 min.

NIC Kay arranges an archive of Black gestural virality across their research project, #blackpeopledancingontheinternet, taking a close look at the textures and tonalities of spectacality. Works like WAIT, WAIT, WAIT (RENEGADE), US FOR IS THIS, and THRU IT ALL, incorporate hypnotic repetition and glitchy documentation – distinctive framing devices for how Blackness is codified and sensationalized on screen. González also interrogates the mediated gaze, blending a range of performance tactics and filmic histories to manipulate spectatorship. In BLUES TIME, the artist uses animation to chronicle the relationship between the body and geography, arranging renderings of their form between cityscapes and syncopated soundscapes. Within their Super-8 black-and-white short, BODY PREFERENCES, Jonathan González captures a subject performing a therapeutic practice entitled Authentic Movement, wherein the clinician watches their patient move with closed eyes. Here, the artist documents the performer as they feel their way through two landmarks of resistance: New York City’s Hudson River Piers – a geography critical to the city’s queer history – and an open-air stage in Barbados, located in one of the few areas on the island not transformed into a plantation. NIC Kay RENEGADE 2022, 2 min, digital US FOR IS THIS 2021, 2 min, digital THRU IT ALL 2022, 3 min, digital. Posted to Facebook: May 4, 2017. Video: Tjader Photography. Edit: NIC Kay. Jonathan González (BODY PREFERENCES) DE LA PREFERENCE DU CORPS 2024, 8 min, video BLUES TIME 2022, 11 min, digital

Call-and-response, the infectious tradition of crying out and beckoning a reply from an audience, is rooted in histories of Afro-diasporic embodiment. We spot it across the Black music lineages that Kearra Amaya Gopee presents in PAPPYSHOW IN THE DARK TIME, MY LOVE – a work whose protagonists, asked what they would do if they could take revenge, slice through scenes of subjects writhing in ecstatic rebellion to soca, techno, and noise. Amidst practices of Black worship, call-and-response remains central as preachers, much like DJs with their dancers, summon the spirit while commanding control over their disciples. Omolola Ajao considers the haunting power of this phenomenon in works like PSALMS XIX, in which they juxtapose television pastor oration with dissenting scripture to observe the intimacy of natural transgression. In I BELIEVE I SAW ALIENS, Ajao reckons with the consequences of Black performativity in the public sphere, taking a close look at the vernacular performances of Black stars as they encounter normative white gazes. Omolola Ajao PSALMS XIX 2024, 5 min, digital I BELIEVE I SAW ALIENS 2023, 12 min, digital Kearra Amaya Gopee PAPPYSHOW IN THE DARK TIME, MY LOVE 2022, 26 min, digital

Mamá Icha left her hometown of Mompox, Colombia, more than ten years ago to emigrate to the U.S. and help raise her grandchildren. Though she has spent years abroad, she has never stopped longing for home. She has sent money back consistently, investing in the construction of her dream house, determined one day to return. Finally finding a way, she returns to Colombia, embodying a powerful act of reverse immigration, going back to the place she never stopped calling home. But returning is not what she envisioned. Instead, she encounters unexpected tensions with the very people she hoped to reunite with. LA CASA DE MAMÁ ICHA explores the emotional complexities of aging, belonging, and the cost of migration, as well as the desire to end one’s life where it began.

In the mid-1980s, Rousseau visited the Fontaine de Vaucluse in Southern France, a grotto along the Sourgue river where, at springtime, a violent torrent of water suddenly gushes forth. Rousseau would continually return to this site over the next ten years, drawn by the primordial pull of this strange phenomenon, the inspiration for many folktales and legends. He brought along a Super-8mm camera given to him by his parents, and the accumulation of this material resulted in his seminal second feature, LA VALLÉE CLOSE. “Every shot (frame, image, light) of LA VALLÉE CLOSE issues a roll of the dice, and casts into nothingness three-quarters of contemporary film – along with its directors of photography.” –Jean-Marie Straub

WANDA was not Loden’s only film: she made two 16mm shorts for the Learning Corporation of America, both shot by WANDA’s cinematographer Nicholas Proferes. THE FRONTIER EXPERIENCE – which was written by Joan Micklin Silver – draws on the 1860s diaries of Kansan frontierswoman Delilah Fowler. THE BOY WHO LIKED DEER, a film concerning pre-teen emotions and boys’ anti-social impulses, was scripted by novelist Dinitia Smith (McCarthy). These films screen alongside the educational shorts made for LCA by Loden’s contemporary and collaborator Joan Micklin Silver. Barbara Loden THE FRONTIER EXPERIENCE 1975, 25 min, 16mm-to-DCP Barbara Loden THE BOY WHO LIKED DEER 1975, 18 min, 16mm-to-DCP Joan Micklin Silver THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE 1972, 28 min, 16mm Joan Micklin Silver THE CASE OF THE ELEVATOR DUCK 1973, 17 min, 16mm Joan Micklin Silver THE FUR COAT CLUB 1974, 18 min, 16mm

Rousseau’s first feature-length film, a work of ellipses and absences, is made up of seven parts plus one. “Each of the first seven moments consists of a view, or rather a vision, of a Roman monument or one of its aspects, captured from a hotel window or from the street, in several shots, with vehicles or human beings passing by, or not. The seventh ends with one of the characters closing the shutters of the two bedroom windows, eyelids lowering and hiding the world from us, or what we believe it to be.” –Bertrand Ogilvie Preceded by: Jean-Claude Rousseau VENISE N’EXISTE PAS 1984, 11 min, Super-8mm-to-16mm “VENISE N’EXISTE PAS deciphers the Italian city in a very paradoxical way. We find the same harshness of appearance, the sharp cut of ambient sounds, the end to end of the Super 8 reels, the window and the variations of light, the comings and goings of the filmmaker from the bed to the window…. By concluding with a postcard that remains blurred for a very long time, VENISE N’EXISTE PAS exposes the difficult crystallization of the image. From the bed to the window, from the bedroom to the journey, the filmmaker attempts to approach an image hidden from view, deferred or even dispatched from one place to another.” –Érik Bullot Total running time: ca. 120 min.

While mainstream sources might describe this film as a 1980s period piece about a coming-of-age romance between a high-school outcast and a corpse, we’re going to say it’s a Hollywood B goth comedy castration panic film that argues for the use of dildos. Directed by Robin Williams’s daughter, whose name is Zelda (very trans, don’t you think?), this film enters the canon of trans-adjacent romance, mixed with genital panic.

Norman Felton STUDIO ONE: THE HOLLYWOOD COMPLEX 1957, 60 min, 16mm-to-digital. With Tony Randall, David Opatoshu, William Redfield, Michael Tolan, Barbara Loden, and Lawrence Fletcher. In this drama of generational estrangement, class shame, and the oppositions of west and east coast worlds, television, and moviemaking, Sam Garson travels to visit his producer son in Hollywood. Al is embarrassed by his father and socially shuns him, while Al’s roommate befriends the older man. Loden appeared on several anthology tele-dramas of the late 1950s and early 1960s, often in supporting, secondary roles. Such is the case for this appearance on “Studio One”, wherein Loden plays the character Darlene, a showgirl girlfriend of one of the Hollywood producer son’s friends. Plus: Excerpts from THE ERNIE KOVACS SHOW (1956) Barbara Loden on THE DICK CAVETT SHOW (1971)

Michael Elliott CBS PLAYHOUSE: THE GLASS MENAGERIE 1966, 103 min, 16mm-to-DCP. With Shirley Booth, Hal Holbrook, Barbara Loden, and Pat Hingle. In this “CBS Playhouse” adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s 1948 play, Loden stars in the role of Laura, opposite Hal Holbrook (then mainly known for his one-man show, “Mark Twain Tonight”) and Pat Hingle. THE GLASS MENAGERIE was recently recovered and reconstructed through the work of the Paley Center and archivist Jane Klain. Plus: Barbara Loden interviewed with John Lennon and Yoko Ono on THE MIKE DOUGLAS SHOW (1971)

PROGRAM 5: TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPES BLACK RAIN WHITE SCARS 2014, 8 min, DCP VALLEY PRIDE 2023, 13 min, DCP IMPERIAL VALLEY (CULTIVATED RUN-OFF) 2018, 14 min, DCP IMPERIAL IRRIGATION 2020, 20 min, DCP CIRCULAR INSCRIPTION 2016, 7 min, DCP IN A BEAUTIFUL AND QUIET LOCATION / WUNDERSCHÖN UND RUHIG GELEGEN 2015, 13 min, DCP. Co-directed by Jakub Vrba. In German with English subtitles.

Marcel Broodthaers (1924-76) is widely recognized as one of the icons of postwar art history. Yet his unique cinematic legacy remains one of the most overlooked aspects of his oeuvre. Far from being a mere extension or document of his visual work, Broodthaers’s films – ranging from slapstick comedies and pseudo-documentaries to home movies – form a singular body of work. Through their deliberate amateurism and anachronism, Broodthaers’s films convey a true love for cinema that challenges both conventional and avant-garde film. Following the publication of “Marcel Broodthaers and Film: A Second of Eternity” (2024) – the first scholarly volume devoted entirely to his cinema – this program offers a rare opportunity to (re)discover Broodthaers’s filmic legacy. At its center is RENDEZ-VOUS MIT JACQUES OFFENBACH (1972), a little-seen compilation movie assembled by the artist himself. Splicing together earlier films and found footage, it exemplifies Broodthaers’s principle of endless reshuffling. Guest-programmed by Raf Wollaert. The screenings will be presented by Steven Jacobs and Raf Wollaert, editors of “Marcel Broodthaers and Film: A Second of Eternity”, and Bruce Jenkins, a longtime expert on the artist’s films. For more info about “Marcel Broodthaers and Film: A Second of Eternity”, visit: https://lup.be/book/marcel-broodthaers-and-film/ LA CLEF DE L’HORLOGE (POÈME CINÉMATOGRAPHIQUE EN L’HONNEUR DE KURT SCHWITTERS) 1957, 8 min, 16mm RENDEZ-VOUS MIT JACQUES OFFENBACH 1972, 31 min, 16mm PROJET POUR UN POISSON 1970, 7 min, 16mm FIGURES OF WAX 1974, 16 min, 16mm

“MARIA ZEF is one of Cottafavi’s finest films and one of the greatest of all 20th-century TV movies. Shot in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of northern Italy and recorded almost entirely in Friulian (one of Italy’s most unique dialects), it also stands as a proud achievement within the small body of Friulian cinema. Cottafavi was interested in the region as far back as 1936, when the Maria Zef story inspired him to one day make the film. Finally realized decades later, MARIA ZEF is about Mariute and Rosute, 15- and 9-year-old girls respectively, whose mother falls prey to a fatal illness. They are retrieved by their uncle, Barbe Zef, a raging alcoholic living in desolate conditions. Mariute helps rebuild the farm while raising Rosute single-handedly. When Rosute has to stay at the local hospital, Barbe Zef’s alcoholism threatens to ruin Mariute’s life.” –Liam Kenny

An incandescent film observing the life of a French underclass girl, MILLA carves out images of profound beauty and great tenderness. Like Loden’s Wanda Goronski, the film’s working-class subjects, played by nonprofessionals, have been “given no chance” by a society that thrives on class inequality. Massadian bestows these young vagabonds with a gaze of deep care and reverence.

Set in London, during the Thatcher-era, this film offers an unconventional portrait of race, class, and sexuality. It centers on Omar, a young British-Pakistani man navigating family expectations and economic ambition, who partners with his former lover Johnny, a white working-class punk, to transform a run-down laundrette into a thriving business. Their relationship unfolds against a backdrop of social unrest, racism, and generational conflict. Boldly blending romance, politics, and dark humor, the film challenges stereotypes and explores the complexities of identity in a multicultural society. Preceded by: Maria Thereza Alves ABOUT A VILLAGE 2012, 17 min, digital

Alongside the NYC premiere run of her own new film (COLLECTIVE MONOLOGUE – see page ? for details), Jessica Sarah Rinland will present a program devoted to the work of Argentine filmmaker and artist Narcisa Hirsch (1928-2024). “The program showcases a series of recently restored films that Hirsch made between 1973-77. Narcisa talks over images she recorded of people she loves, their gestures, portraits, their bodies within landscapes, photographs, details of their rooms, their family archives. The projector is sometimes heard in the background as she watches the images and talks to them as if the person were sitting in front of her: ‘I wanted to write you a letter, but not a letter. A declaration of love.’ We’ll also be screening Hirsch’s 1978 film, SURELY BACH CLOSED THE DOOR WHEN HE WANTED TO WORK, in which she films her friends’ faces, including her own. Later, she records their voices as they reflect on their own image, as well as her voice reacting to her own face. Narcisa repeats this exercise often as she ages, each time reflecting on how she, as a woman, is learning to ‘look at herself from the outside.’” –Jessica Sarah Rinland Curated by Jessica Sarah Rinland. Restored films supplied by Filmoteca Narcisa Hirsch. RAFAEL EN RIO 1977, 4 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP ANDREA 1973, 10 min, 16mm-to-DCP RAFAEL 1975, 11 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP SURELY BACH CLOSED THE DOOR WHEN HE WANTED TO WORK / SEGURO QUE BACH CERRABA LA PUERTA CUANDO QUERIA TRABAJABAR 1978, 30 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP

Sergio is a kinky trash collector who loves dogs and cruising public toilets in Lisbon. One night at work he meets a straight motorcyclist named João, who becomes the object of Sergio’s increasingly dangerous obsession. Sergio goes through João’s trash, steals his stuff, and starts diving deeper into the world of fetish and BDSM, a process that director João Pedro Rodrigues depicts as a devolution from man to latex-bodysuit-clad beast. Rodrigues’s transgressive 2000 debut is a sexually explicit middle finger to assimilationist, sanitized depictions of gay life onscreen. Entrancing and unsettling all at the same time, it takes both subject and audience on an intense journey into a strangely beautiful oblivion. A must-see for any fan of “Narrow Rooms”.

“NELLA FANTASIA was filmed at an offshore oil rig situated in the middle of the North Sea off the coast of Norway. Marxt traveled to the platform and spent ten days collecting visual and acoustic impressions amid the loneliness of windstorms and waves. The result is a divine melancholic monologue on solitude and nothingness.” –25 FPS FESTIVAL Preceded by: LOW TIDE 2013, 3 min, DCP TWO SKIES 2013, 4 min, DCP HIGH TIDE 2014, 8 min, DCP REIGN OF SILENCE 2013, 7 min, DCP

Akerman pairs long, contemplative shots of 1970s New York with readings of letters from her mother in Belgium, intimate messages filled with love, worry, and routine updates. As the mother’s voice becomes a distant echo over the noise of the city, the film evokes a sense of emotional exile and fragmented belonging, forming a reflection on distance, dislocation, and the tension between personal memory and public space. Akerman’s minimalist style emphasizes stillness and observation, inviting the viewer into a meditative experience of time, place, and absence. NEWS FROM HOME is a profound exploration of migration, and the multiple ways we remain tethered to the places and people we leave behind. Preceded by: Mona Hatoum MEASURES OF DISTANCE 1988, 15.5 min, video

This film, a sordid psychological thriller about men, women, and the lies they tell each other, is a great entry point into the anxieties at the heart of the witch films that would eventually come to dominate the 1960s horror cycle. When a psychology professor with a focus on superstition learns his wife practices witchcraft, his worldview is tested and his life is brought to the brink. Bridging the gap between classic ’40s horror films like CAT PEOPLE and titans like ROSEMARY’S BABY with crafty plotting and stark cinematography, NIGHT OF THE EAGLE is a haunting look at some of the simmering fears around gender, religion and the social contract that eventually defined the politics of the decade.

This film centers on a former Argentine telenovela star who relocates to New York in search of a new beginning. When his initial plan falls through, he chooses to stay, confident that his talent will open doors. Instead, too light-skinned to fit Latino stereotypes, yet with an accent that marks him as foreign, he faces a string of rejections. As his savings dwindle, he drifts into precarious work and growing invisibility. Unwilling to return home in defeat, he navigates survival through performance, pretending both emotionally and professionally.

Roemer’s first feature film as writer and director (co-produced and shot by Robert Young), NOTHING BUT A MAN was warmly received on release and has continued to grow in stature with each passing generation. It is routinely described as “a landmark,” which, while accurate, perhaps somewhat reduces its significance and greatness as a work of art, as well as the extraordinary performances by the great Abbey Lincoln, Ivan Dixon, Gloria Foster, Yaphet Kotto, and Julius Harris. As a depiction of Black American life, it was unprecedented, rightfully lauded for decades, and remains Roemer’s most widely known work. Perceiving connections between Black and Jewish life, Roemer incorporated into the script for NOTHING BUT A MAN his own childhood experience of the dissolution of family through his father’s abandonment of him as a child, and his displacement due to Nazism.

This selection of structural and diaristic films provides an intimate encounter with cinematic light and time. Stillness, rhythm, and movement emerge to reveal captivatingly simple yet complex paths. Migrating through the United States, Patagonia, the UK, and circling back again, we witness animals, plants, and humans navigating cycles of life and death. Culminating with the magnificent frigate bird, existence appears as wondrous and fleeting as the passing of a day. Part of an ongoing series inspired by place, this program pays homage to the city of Galveston, Texas, a small barrier town along the Gulf of Mexico that withstood the deadliest natural disaster of the 20th century. Guest-programmed by Lili Chin. Christopher Harris 28.IV.81 BEDOUIN SPARK 2009, 3 min, 16mm Bette Gordon & James Benning THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 1975, 27 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from The National Film Preservation Foundation. Narcisa Hirsch DIARIOS PATAGONICOS I 1970, 11 min, Super-8mm-to-digital Emily Chao AS LONG AS THERE IS BREATH 2020, 2 min, 16mm-to-digital Jayne Parker TRIFORIUM 2021, 7.5 min, 16mm-to-digital Gary Beydler HAND HELD DAY 1975, 6 min, 16mm Nancy Graves AVES: THE MAGNIFICENT FRIGATE BIRD, GREAT FLAMINGO 1973, 23 min, 16mm

The debut feature by Filipino filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik is a playful and subversive reflection on post-colonial identity, modernization, and cultural disillusionment. The film follows Kidlat, a jeepney driver and space-obsessed dreamer from a small Philippine village, who idolizes American progress and Western technology. When he finally travels to Europe, his idealism is confronted by the contradictions of colonial influence, capitalism, and alienation. Tahimik crafts a deeply personal and inventive cinematic journey that critiques neocolonial aspirations with humor and sincerity. Preceded by: Chantal Peñalosa Fong FONG 2023, 12 min, digital

Thanks to the wide acclaim that Roemer’s documentary DYING received, he was able to find funding (from German television) to make his final two films, PILGRIM, FAREWELL and VENGEANCE IS MINE. PILGRIM, FAREWELL revisits the themes of DYING, but inverts the drama. There is no outward anger displayed by those in DYING who are, in fact, dying. While in the documentary it is the dying man’s wife who is convulsed with anger, for the fictional narrative about a woman with a fatal illness, it is she herself who is furious at her family and at the world. Co-produced by American Playhouse, the film would play festivals and receive very positive reviews when broadcast on PBS. Staged minimally, in a single setting with a small cast, PILGRIM, FAREWELL could be called a four-hander or chamber piece, but more elegantly described as a small symphony.

“What does it mean to hold the legacy of beloved ones on changing formats? How do mourning and memory change across time and tech? Whatever could it mean that twice in my life (in my late 20s and then in my late 50s), two friends (so different from each other) asked me to tape them – as AIDS activists and collaborators – as they were nearing death? PLEASE HOLD is an experimental documentary engaging with decades of activist media, two death-bed/legacy videos, and the wisdom of many living ‘AIDS workers,’ as we all sit together in one (changing) format, video – VHS, hi-8, digital, Zoom – to address these and other questions: How do neighborhoods, queer bars, videos, sweaters, and scarves hold ghosts? How do we let them go?” –Alexandra Juhasz

Alejandro is an aspiring toy designer from El Salvador trying to bring his original ideas to life in New York City. As his work visa is close to expiring, his only chance to avoid deportation is an unusual job assisting an eccentric and demanding art critic. Caught between the surreal challenges of the U.S. immigration system and the unpredictable world of New York’s art scene, Alejandro barely navigates a labyrinth of bureaucracy while fighting to pursue his dream. The debut feature film from writer/director Julio Torres, PROBLEMISTA is a bizarre and visually rich comedy that tackles ambition, identity, and survival. Preceded by: Allora & Calzadilla UNDER DISCUSSION 2005, 6 min, digital Shekhar Bassi FAUX DEPART 2012, 9 min, digital

“RALF’S COLORS is an experimental portrait of a schizophrenic person living in Lanzarote (Canary Islands), whom I accompanied for over 5 years. The film shows the struggle of his inner life in contrast to the deserted volcanic surroundings.” –Lukas Marxt Preceded by: FISHING IS NOT DONE ON TUESDAYS 2017, 15 min, DCP. Co-directed by Marcel Odenbach.

Re-envisioning the outlaw couple genre, Reichardt’s charming indie debut upends the conventions of “a girl and a gun.” Describing her first feature as a “road movie without the road, a love story without the love, and a crime film without the crime”, Reichardt’s couple-on-the-run caper is set in the Florida Everglades of her adolescence.

Leo McCarey, a director deeply admired by Rousseau (and by Ozu and Renoir), directs this rowdy and deeply felt romp wherein Charles Laughton plays a British butler brought unwillingly to the American West. Speaking of another McCarey film, AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER, and evoking Robert Bresson in the process, Rousseau once wrote, “The film carries us there [to a happy ending], in a tension produced by what is not said, by what is not shown, in a formal restraint without artifice because it finds its necessity in the very story that is told to us. And this story, since it is that of the unsaid and the unshown, is none other than that of the cinématographe.”

Steeped firmly in the genre of silent film, Sequinette Jaynesfield’s 16mm and Super-8 films reflect neither the slapstick of Buster Keaton, the underdog pathos of Chaplin, nor the in-camera tricks of either, yet harken back to the 1920s through sheer, unbridled, queen glamour. Marked by a cast of recurrent characters, they’re rife with speakeasies, painted ladies, and Ragtime – but queer AF. Set design and costumes take center stage in these filmic renderings of queens, queens, queens, from gestural one-liners like RACK FOCUS to absurdist pseudo-John-Waters-inspired camp narratives like FANCY PHONE NUMBERS. These by-any-means-necessary productions stem from the heart of queer, nightlife community, to deliver a “by us, for us” vibe that is incomparable. Jaynesfield will be here in person following the screening, for a conversation with Dusty Childers! BROKEN: BATTLE OF THE GODDESSES 2019, 7.5 min, 16mm-to-digital STEVEN’S AUNT’S HAT 2018, 1 min, 16mm-to-digital RACK FOCUS 2018, 3.5 min, 16mm-to-digital FANCY PHONE NUMBERS 2021, 23 min, 16mm-to-digital QUEEN DOWN 2016, 3 min, digital CELLO SCREEN TEST 2017, 4.5 min, Super-8mm-to-digital GOOD QUEEN: A FOWL REVOLT 2018, 9 min, 16mm-to-digital

“Marxt and Smiljanic organized material they and others recorded during a solar eclipse in March 2015, to create a small catalogue of cosmic visual data. Eclipse chasers and collectors are seen readying themselves and positioning their optical instruments; an outer-space weather fairy analyses recent solar storms; an early warning radar station waits for signals from on high, while a thick fog makes it impossible to see ahead.” –Joachim Schätz Preceded by: BEAUTIFULLY MAINTAINED AND WELL LOCATED / SEHR GEPFLEGT UND GUT GELEGEN 2021, 9 min, DCP. Co-directed by Jakub Vrba. In German with English subtitles. MARINE TARGET 2022, 9 min, DCP LOADING PIT 2019, 10 min, DCP

An investigation of leftist politics and femme identity in the context of an increasingly right-wing world, SO PRETTY moves freely between fictional depictions and semi-documentary, adaptation and translation, looking towards the artistic and personal worlds its characters generate across time and culture as a space for new tensions and potentials.

True to its name, SOMETHING WEIRD, must be seen to be believed. This wild, incoherent, quasi-collage of acid, ESP, karate, witches, and serial killers takes being a product of its time to a new level; its screenwriter was a professor with an impassioned interest in the potential military uses of telepathy and extrasensory perception who hoped the film would be a way to share his warning to the world. While Lewis’s decision to put his friend’s passions on screen may not have been particularly consciousness-raising (or particularly lucrative, either), this oddball flick serves beautifully today as a vivid portrait of the gonzo intersections between the movies, the New Age, and the stranger political concerns of the period.

A tale of unfulfilled teenage desire set in Kansas circa 1928, Kazan’s hothouse parable examines the toll of Puritanical social propriety and sexual repression on high-school sweethearts Bud Stamper (Beatty in his Hollywood debut), the child of oil wealth, and the fragile Deanie (Wood). Loden’s role as Bud’s tempestuous flapper sister Ginny provides a prominent foil to the film’s critique of Puritanical small-town mores.

“Cordelia Coventry (Irene Roseen) is an actress whose appearance in a series of laundry detergent commercials brings her fame and fortune as ‘America’s favorite housewife.’ Can her cynical but idealist director (George LaFleur) truly transcend the banalities of American popular culture? And what part does the Hillside Homo Hacker (Leonard Lumpkin) play in making Cordelia aware of the strange contusions that mediate between art and reality?” –Original press synopsis Preceded by: Ken Camp AS THE WORLD BURNS: EPISODE 2 1982, 14 min, SD-video-to-DCP

What is it with trans guys and werewolves?! Allow the revisiting of this coming-of-age classic to illuminate the relationships between transmasculine identity and werewolf identity, as the notions of transition, puberty, monstrosity, self-realization, and tokenization become centrally shared topics. When high school nerd Scott Howard (Michael J. Fox) learns from his father that being a werewolf runs in the family, he decides to take advantage of his “freakish” trait.

In Yugoslavia, cameraless cinema thrived. This screening gathers six under-watched gems of avant-garde animation, collage, and recycled film. Non-live-action image-making in the SFRY took different routes: stop-motion and direct-to-film etching appear alongside other types of lens-based tinkering. Some operationalize optics to hallucinatory ends – rotoscoping in the case of Divna Jovanović and pseudo-kaleidoscopic grids in Almažan’s MEDUZA SAJANA – while others rely on electro audioscapes, as in the frenetic anti-agit-props of Zoran Jovanović. Concluding with a bang, Vlada Petrić’s scandalously forgotten LIGHT-PLAY is both a tribute to László Moholy-Nagy and a trance-inducing jewel of cine-pyrotechnics in its own right. From fantasy and dreams to analytic cinephagia, these films unravel the cinematic unconscious either by inverting the apparatus’s terms and conditions – or by omitting the camera entirely. Boštjan Hladnik FANTASTIC BALLAD / FANTASTIČNA BALADA 1957, 11 min, 35mm Divna Jovanović TRANSFORMATION / PREOBRAŽAJ 1973, 3 min, 35mm-to-digital Slavko Almažan MEDUZA SAJANA 1976, 15 min, 35mm Zoran Jovanović ANTIDOGMIN 1976, 7 min, 35mm Zoran Jovanović MARXIANS / MARKSIJANCI 1984, 9 min, 35mm Vlada Petrić LIGHT-PLAY: A TRIBUTE TO MOHOLY-NAGY 1988, 28 min, 16mm

In this eclectic spin on the concert film, Ross Lipman transforms footage of one of his celebrated live documentary performances into a new video essay that’s at once an archeological dig and a riveting history. In the summer of 1971 Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos announced the discovery of a tribe of primitive cave dwellers who had lived in complete isolation for thousands of years in the rainforest of Mindanao. The Tasaday indigenous group represented a chance to witness firsthand the roots of our culture, and to explore the very essence of humanity. They also – as we learn – offered Marcos and his cronies a unique political opportunity. Lipman presents this stunning story entirely through its portrayal in differing accounts by western media, integrating rare ethnographic footage, vintage television broadcasts, recordings, and still photographs.

THE DEVONSVILLE TERROR is another brashly feminist film whose idiosyncrasies elevate familiar material, offering a jolt of freshness in a soon-to-be-oversaturated straight-to-video landscape of witch horror in the 1980s. It blends the feminist conventions of the previous decade’s witch horror cycle with the slasher conventions of the day, all filtered through the dreamy arthouse stylings of its director, New German Cinema and Video Nasty pioneer Ulli Lommel, whose collaborators included Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Andy Warhol. Its naturalistic treatment of masculine entitlement to feminine bodies is uncomfortably familiar and viscerally direct. Like SOMETHING WEIRD, the film also incorporates the psychedelic and New Age elements of its moment, serving as a time capsule for a country on the cusp of radical transformation as the counterculture drew its very last gasps.

“THE FOUNTAINHEAD takes up Frank Capra’s principle: the modest, perfect man who acts alone against everyone, found in films like MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON, IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, MR DEEDS GOES TO TOWN, as well as in Hawks’s SERGEANT YORK and Leo McCarey’s GOOD SAM. The last three films star Gary Cooper, and most of these films end in a trial. This myth of the ideal man was a good fit for the Roosevelt era, and became somewhat obsolete after the end of the war. […] The plot of the film is extraordinary: an architect destroys the skyscraper he designed, because his successors have not respected his design. And it’s a building intended as low-income housing. The right of the author versus improving the welfare of ordinary people; it’s a parable of the cinematic problem of the final cut. The film’s bias reflects a very right-wing attitude, since the screenwriter Ayn Rand was very anti-communist. Nevertheless, Vidor’s film is a masterpiece.” –Luc Moullet

THE MAN WITHOUT A WORLD is credited to legendary Soviet director Yevgeny Antinov…but that is far from the whole truth. Antinov is one of several personae created by contemporary filmmaker, artist, author, and performer Eleanor Antin (in her other guises she has embodied Eleanor Nightingale, a nurse in the Crimean War, and Eleanora Antinova, the famous black ballerina in Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe who dreamt of starring in Swan Lake but was only allowed “ethnic” roles such as Pocahontas). Her debut feature is a love letter both to the heyday of silent cinema and to Antin’s mother, a former actress in the Yiddish theater of Poland, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease while Antin was at work on the film. Preceded by: Josef Berne DAWN TO DAWN (aka BLACK DAWN) 1933, 34 min, 35mm. Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive in association with Anthology Film Archives as part of the Unseen Cinema Project, with funding from Cineric, the Eastman Kodak Company, the National Film Preservation Foundation, and NT Audio. Laboratory services provided by Cineric and NT Audio. Restoration supervised by Ross Lipman. “DAWN TO DAWN was directed by Josef Berne, a Russian immigrant who worked in the Yiddish cinema and later directed some ‘Soundies’ – the precursor to the music video. Here he tells the tale of a lonely young woman who tends a farm with her domineering and possessive father. What stands out today, as it would have then, is the lyrical eroticism of the film – something truly unusual in American cinema at the time.” –Ross Lipman

While it was largely dismissed at the time as a cheapie softcore rehash of ROSEMARY’S BABY for the jet-set, there’s more to THE MEPHISTO WALTZ than initially meets the eye. This kinky tête-à-tête pairs Jacqueline Bisset and Alan Alda as an artistic young couple tempted by wealth, influence, sex, and black magic. Replete with body swapping, crash zooms, and swinger parties, the film takes the broader strokes of Ira Levin’s classic tale and bends them in a less Catholic, more overtly erotic direction to twisted, surprisingly feminist ends.

Kaneto Shindo’s largely dialogue-free film of rural endurance on an island on the Seto Sea details the life of a family of farmers who must travel to a nearby island to gather water to irrigate their crops. Loden noted that in depicting the arduousness of Wanda Goronski’s drift, especially through the coal-mining landscape, she “wanted to show the time it takes to get from here to there”, elsewhere referencing how such regions required a lot of walking, “like in THE NAKED ISLAND.”

“A mobster’s widow is expected to testify in front of a grand jury in Los Angeles, but must make it there from Chicago without being intercepted by those who would kill her before she talks. Enter Detective Sergeant Brown, tasked with protecting the woman he blames for the death of his partner, Forbes. Nobody knows her identity but him. Or does he? Richard Fleischer’s high-strung, claustrophobic 71-minute noir thriller takes place almost entirely within the confines of the small interiors of a train, which reveals a world of double identities.” –Joshua Peinado

[TOIVON TUOLLA PUOLEN] Kaurismäki’s THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE begins with the parallel stories of Khaled, a Syrian asylum seeker who arrives in Helsinki hidden aboard a coal freighter, and Wikström, a middle-aged Finnish salesman who abruptly quits his job and his marriage to open a small restaurant. Their paths intersect when Khaled, rejected for asylum and on the run from the authorities, turns up at Wikström’s restaurant in need of shelter and work. Navigating between satire, drama, and comedy, the film blends a sharp sense of humor with a quiet tenderness, expressed through subtle gestures that deeply impact the characters’ fates. The absurdities of the immigration system are set in contrast with small, humane acts that have the power to twist the story’s direction and subvert expectations. Preceded by: Forensic Architecture THE LEFT-TO-DIE BOAT 2011, 18 min, digital

The story of a small-time Jewish bookie freshly out of jail and trying to regain his lost turf, THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY is one of the great New York films and, to a contingent of true believers, a total masterpiece, beautifully shot in black and white, again by Robert Young. In keeping with Roemer’s new path as a writer, Harry is an increasingly desperate and unheroic character, a perpetual loser who is propelled by unbelievable coincidences as he attempts to work his way out from under obstacles completely beyond his control. It is also deadpan in the extreme, specifically ethnic – warts and all – and refuses to telegraph its intentions. Thus, early screenings were met with bafflement, most significantly from potential distributors, and Roemer decided to shelve it. The film went unreleased and unseen until, nearly twenty years later, when transferring it to video in the lab, a technician laughed, and Roemer reconsidered the film. On a whim, he submitted it to festivals, and THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY finally found a (rapturous) audience. “Gives rampant ethnic nuttiness a distinctively wistful vulgarity…At once gritty and ethereal…Although THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY has been compared to John Cassavetes’s work, the director’s sensibility is far closer to Elaine May’s. Roemer’s satire of the Jewish urban middle class has its corollary in May’s THE HEARTBREAK KID, his comic rhythms parallel the droll understatement of the much-maligned ISHTAR, and HARRY’s characters and milieu suggest a ‘lite’ version of May’s MIKEY AND NICKY.” –J.Hoberman, PREMIERE

“Long known as a legend in the amateur filmmaking community, ex-Vaudevillian Sid Laverents burst into national attention in 2000 at age 92, when he was ‘re-discovered’ by filmmaker/historian Melinda Stone. THE SID SAGA is his magnum opus, a feature-length autobiographical work that is not only extremely entertaining, but establishes the importance of amateur cinema as a vital part of our cultural heritage. […] In typical Sid fashion, he handles all aspects of the filmmaking himself, including cinematography, writing, narration, editing, and post-production. In the telling, we learn not just about Sid, but about the supposedly ordinary, yet fantastic worlds in which he traveled. The film is the story of one life and an American century.” –Ross Lipman

Blending French New Wave aesthetics with Senegalese storytelling, TOUKI BOUKI follows Mory, a cowherd, and Anta, a university student, as they dream of escaping Dakar for a glamorous life in Paris. Determined to leave behind their reality, they fantasize about freedom. With its bold editing, surreal imagery, and jazz-infused score, TOUKI BOUKI is both a road movie and a political allegory. The film embodies a rebellious vision of youth longing for escape, one that critiques the allure of the West while capturing the disillusionment of modern African identity. Both playful and radical, the film remains a powerful statement on desire, exile, and belonging. Preceded by: Karimah Ashadu LAGOS ISLAND 2012, 4 min, digital SUPERFLEX KWASSA KWASSA 2015, 18 min, digital

The third feature by Argentine filmmaker María Aparicio, winner of the Cinema Tropical Award for Best Latin American Film, UNDEFINED THINGS is a delicate meditation on cinema, memory, and mourning. Eva, a 50-year-old film editor – portrayed with quiet grace by Eva Bianco – is working with her young assistant, Rami, on a documentary about people living with blindness, while grappling with the recent death of Juan, a filmmaker friend whose films she once edited. As loneliness and doubt begin to settle into her daily life, Eva starts to question her relationship to cinema and the meaning of her craft. With a subtle and introspective narrative, the film explores the boundaries between fiction and documentary and the persistence of images as traces of the past.

“Long thought lost, the experimental films of Vasko Pregelj (1948-85) – digitized and partially restored by the Slovenian Cinematheque – reveal a prodigious teenage auteur whose surreal, grotesque, and baroquely poetic visions defy time. Created in the late 1960s while he was still a high school student, Pregelj’s films weave the formal innovation of early avant-garde cinema with the lyrical introspection of later experimental movements. Echoing the intellectual weight of his artistic lineage – his father was the famous Slovenian painter Marij Pregelj, his grandfather writer Ivan Pregelj – his works brim with painterly compositions, sculptural symbolism, and philosophical meditations on impermanence. Through recurring motifs of clocks, fire, decay, and repetition, his 8mm films transform ephemeral emotions into visual poetry. NOCTURNE (1965), a monochrome 8mm masterpiece of melancholic still lifes and multi-exposure imagery, stands as a haunting elegy of form. Complemented by new soundscapes from avant-garde musician Tine Vrabič – Nitz, Pregelj’s oeuvre re-emerges as a tragic yet visionary cornerstone of Slovenian experimental cinema.” –Matevž Jerman DREAMS / SANJE 1966, 5 min, 8mm-to-DCP FANTASY / FANTAZIJA 1965, 8 min, 8mm-to-DCP OLD COURTYARD / STARO DVORIŠČE 1967, 10 min, 8mm-to-DCP REQUIEM / REKVIJEM 1966, 14 min, 8mm-to-DCP NOCTURNE / NOKTURNO 1965, 12 min, 8mm-to-DCP

Like THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY, VENGEANCE IS MINE is a masterpiece that was virtually unknown for decades (in contrast to the 20 years that elapsed before the rediscovery of HARRY, the later film languished in obscurity for almost twice as long). VENGEANCE IS MINE opens with Jo (Brooke Adams), in an unbroken take of over a minute, smiling, thinking, closing her eyes, as she flies into her New England hometown. We do not yet know she is fleeing a physically abusive relationship, nor that she is returning to attempt reconciliation and to say goodbye to her adoptive mother, before starting a new life in Seattle. Through a series of unexpected occurrences – declining to return to her sister’s house after being attacked by her estranged husband and instead taking refuge at the home of the neighbors she has just met – Jo finds herself witness to a family coming apart under the stress of mental illness. Instead of backing away, she finds herself compelled to become more involved in their lives. In his final film, Roemer’s ideas of character come to their fullest fruition. Roemer has said that his characters believe themselves to be proactive, while they are, in fact, reactive. They may think they know what they are doing, but, in the end, they are at the mercy of chance. What all of Roemer’s work shares is an assuredness of its own pace, in step only with itself – all of his films are utterly original works that confront major themes in a minor key. “Roemer is known for only two films, both masterpieces: NOTHING BUT A MAN (1964) and THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY (1971). […] The rediscovery of a third Roemer feature as good as the others is a cause for celebration, and something of a miracle.” –A.S. Hamrah, SCREEN SLATE

Barbara Loden’s tough, austere portrait of an alienated woman unmoored in Appalachia was a landmark work of American independent cinema. Loden based her film on a 1960 Sunday News story about a female accomplice to a bank robbery who expressed gratitude to her judge for her twenty-year jail sentence. What kind of woman could be “that passive and numb,” Loden asked? Shot on location amid the ruins of Scranton’s anthracite mining and the rest stops, motels, pubs, and parking lots of Pennsylvania and Connecticut, WANDA tarries with the enigma of a woman “without any redeeming qualities at all” (Loden). A poetic, unsentimental film of unvarnished beauty, the film traces the itinerancy of its unforgettable anti-hero (played by Loden herself), who abandons her life as coalminer’s wife and mother to drift “in the sea of her own insignificance” (as per Berenice Reynaud), across deindustrialized landscapes of precarity.

In WANDERLUST Italian retiree Giuseppe returns to his ancestral home in Istria, a region now divided between Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia. This tripartite geography, once Yugoslavia, now EU fringe, is no incidental detail in Želimir Žilnik’s hands. Donning his father’s Austro-Hungarian Navy coat, Giuseppe, following his mother’s advice, sets off in search of a wife – though what he may truly be seeking is continuity. Žilnik’s film, shaped by decades of probing migration and the absurdity of borders, drifts through faded monuments and provisional identities. What unfolds is a quiet, wry meditation on aging, inheritance, and the soft ruins of socialism. Giuseppe’s journey is both sentimental and strategic: a melancholic proposal across nations that no longer exist, where desire and memory remain perpetually in transit.

María travels to Puerto Williams, at the southern tip of Chile, to star in a film. But when a powerful storm prevents the crew from arriving, she finds herself stranded and alone. As she seeks relief for a sudden bout of severe back pain, María begins to discover the rhythms of life in the world’s southernmost city – and with it, an unresolved chapter from her own past. The latest film by acclaimed director José Luis Torres Leiva features María Alché – the Argentine director of A FAMILY SUBMERGED and star of Lucrecia Martel’s THE HOLY GIRL – in a quietly luminous performance. Meditative and atmospheric, the film unfolds like a diary of solitude and revelation, capturing the fragile beauty of place, memory, and the passage of time.

Clift stars as a New Deal-era bureaucrat tasked with evicting tenants from their land for a hydroelectric dam project in the Tennessee River Valley. An octogenarian matriarch (Van Fleet) refuses to relinquish her island property in the name of “progress,” as romance develops between the government agent and her granddaughter (Remick). Shot on location, Kazan’s Chekhovian Cinemascope staging of tradition contra modernity also features Barbara Loden in her first small film role.