“(Un)invited Collaborators” is a screening program that highlights the intricate relations between living and nonliving entities, emphasizing the fluid and transformative nature of these interactions. The selected videos demonstrate how these relationships are shaped by mutual influence and constant reconfiguration, challenging static notions of separation and autonomy. The artists offer new perspectives on the ways humans intervene, often uninvited, in the lives of other beings and objects, addressing our hybrid reality and blurring the boundaries between the natural and the unnatural. Each piece reflects on a different aspect of our shared reality, weaving together distinct communities – human and non-human animals, plants, lands, plastics, and commodities – that continually influence and transform one another. By questioning traditional notions of objectivity, the program suggests that agency is not an intrinsic property of an entity but arises from the dynamic interplay of forces between beings and things. The program is curated by New York-based artist Zorica Čolić and brings together nine contemporary artists from diverse cultural and geographical backgrounds. Rob Crosse OLD GROWTH 2021, 10 min, digital Andrea Palašti FITNESS FOR UNLIKELY SPECIES, PENGUIN POOL EDITION 2023, 10.5 min, digital Zorica Čolić THE THING THAT ENJOYS ITSELF 2023, 6.5 min, digital Monica Duncan & Senem Pirler TEARS FOR LOST FREQUENCIES 2024, 17 min, digital Noor Abed PENELOPE 2014, 6.5 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent titre provisoire (Cathleen Schuster and Marcel Dickhage) PROLOGUE TO A STORY TOLD FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE WATER BETWEEN US 2018, 13.5 min, digital Oscar Cueto THE DAY WILL COME WHEN WE WILL CONTROL THE PACE OF PRODUCTION 2024, 1 min, digital Total running time: ca. 70 min.

In what may be the best depiction of harming, berating, and “fucking with” men ever to be depicted onscreen, A NEW LOVE IN TOKYO subverts the audience’s expectations by centering the protagonist’s commitment to her local theater troupe amidst her chaotic night job as a dominatrix. Featuring photography and photo direction by acclaimed kink and taboo visual artist Nobuyoshi Araki (who also receives a story credit), A NEW LOVE IN TOKYO, like WORKING GIRLS, outlines the day-to-day procedural dynamics of the industry, an approach that amplifies both the drama and the humor of these scenarios. Though laced with plenty of sex, the film is anchored by the blossoming friendship between two working girls (an escort and dominatrix), which unfolds over karaoke, theater, drinks, and joyrides.

With the support of the Carolee Schneemann Foundation and Electronic Arts Intermix, Anthology presents newly restored 16mm prints of Carolee Schneemann’s PLUMB LINE and VIET-FLAKES, alongside the rarely screened RED NEWS. The program pairs Schneemann’s films with Joseph Cornell’s ROSE HOBART and Peggy Ahwesh’s THE FALLING SKY. Carolee Schneemann’s PLUMB LINE (1968-71) offers a fragmented portrait of a collapsing relationship, merging intimate imagery with experimental techniques. VIET-FLAKES (1962-67), a searing anti-war collage, recontextualizes found photographs of Vietnam War atrocities, while RED NEWS (1962-67) considers the interplay between media, entertainment, and violence. Cornell’s ROSE HOBART (1936) transforms a forgotten Hollywood film into a surreal, dreamlike meditation on longing and nostalgia. Ahwesh’s THE FALLING SKY (2017) extends this tradition by repurposing animated news to interrogate our collective interests, fears, and obsessions. Together these works trace a lineage of experimental filmmaking that activates archival material to reveal new layers of meaning. A conversation with Peggy Ahwesh, Rachel Churner, John Klacsmann, Karl McCool, and Kenneth White follows the screening. Guest-programmed by Kenneth White, Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and Visual Studies, The New School, and Rachel Churner, director of the Carolee Schneemann Foundation. Schneemann’s films have been preserved through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Carolee Schneemann PLUMB LINE 1968-71, 14.5 min, 16mm Carolee Schneemann VIET-FLAKES 1962-67, 8.5 min, 16mm Carolee Schneemann RED NEWS 1962-67, 2.5 min, 16mm Joseph Cornell ROSE HOBART ca. 1936/68, 20 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives. Peggy Ahwesh THE FALLING SKY 2017, 9.5 min, digital Total running time: ca. 60 min.

In January 2018, the construction of an airport in rural Notre-Dame-des-Landes was officially canceled, putting an end to years of resistance led by one of the most important activist communities in France. From 2022-23, filmmakers Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell immersed themselves in the ZAD (zone-to-defend) to create a portrait of collective life in the years after this unprecedented success. The resulting work documents the transformation of a local struggle into a new ecological protest movement – culminating with the Battle of Sainte-Soline in March 2023, where an act of collective direct action against water privatization was again met by the brutality of State violence. Following the principles of immersive filmmaking and in the footsteps of Frederick Wiseman, Chantal Akerman, and others, DIRECT ACTION is a unique and hypnotic portrayal of a community which is not circumscribed to its violent interactions with the State: thanks to their meticulous observation, the directors document a highly singular political movement where it is still possible to conceive a better tomorrow. “With a strong inheritance from the avant-gardist structural film movement of the 1960s and ’70s and a focus on radical opposition, DIRECT ACTION… insistently compels its viewer to consider the relationship between form and content, to reflect on directness and direction while delving into one of the most significant political struggles of contemporary Europe with disarming concreteness.” –Erika Balsom, FILM COMMENT “Shot on Super 16mm with structuralist and durational rigor, scenes of fields plowed by horses, bread making, and a children’s birthday party are shown alongside violent clashes with police. With curiosity and solidarity, the directors bring viewers into the ZAD, giving insight into the daily labor of France’s most successful protest movement and the inherent challenges of taking a stance against corporations and the state.” –Vivian Belik, TIFF

by Michael Snow 1969, 50 min, 16mm-to-35mm. Restored by Anthology Film Archives with funding provided by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and The Film Foundation. Special thanks to Dan DeVincent, Simon Lund, and Adam Wangerin (Cineric, Inc.). “This neat, finely tuned, hypersensitive film examines the outside and inside of a banal prefab classroom, stares at an asymmetrical space so undistinguished that it’s hard to believe the whole movie is confined to it, and has this neckjerking camera gimmick which hits a wooden stop arm at each end of its swing. Basically it’s a perpetual motion film which ingeniously builds a sculptural effect by insisting on time-motion to the point where the camera’s swinging arcs and white wall field assume the hardness, the dimensions of a concrete beam. “In such a hard, drilling work, the wooden clap sounds are a terrific invention, and, as much as any single element, create the sculpture. Seeming to thrust the image outward off the screen, these clap effects are timed like a metronome, sometimes occurring with torrential frequency.” –Manny Farber, ARTFORUM, 1970

1926, 74 min, 35mm, b&w, silent. With Russian intertitles; English synopsis available. “[A SIXTH OF THE WORLD] was commissioned by the government trade agency, Gostorg. Vertov called [it] a ‘lyrical cine-poem,’ and he used declamatory titles to address the audience in the manner of Mayakovsky or Whitman. Dramatizing the full expanse of the Soviet Union (as well as demonstrating Vertov’s fast cutting), A SIXTH OF THE WORLD proved his first popular success and attracted considerable attention abroad.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

by Warren Sonbert 1973 version, 61 min, 16mm “With CARRIAGE TRADE, Sonbert began to challenge the theories espoused by the great Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s; he particularly disliked the ‘knee-jerk’ reaction produced by Eisensteinian montage. In both lectures and writings about his own style of editing, Sonbert described CARRIAGE TRADE as ‘a jig-saw puzzle of postcards to produce varied displaced effects.’ This approach, according to Sonbert, ultimately affords the viewer multi-faceted readings of the connections between shots through the spectator’s assimilation of ‘the changing relations of the movement of objects, the gestures of figures, familiar worldwide icons, rituals and reactions, rhythm, spacing, and density of images.” –Jon Gartenberg

1931, 67 min, 35mm, b&w. In Russian with no subtitles; English synopsis available. ENTHUSIASM is Vertov’s vision of the transformation of social energies in a progressive society. The film is remarkable for its experimental use of sound and montage. Vertov himself invented special lightweight recording equipment to register the sounds of workers in the mines and factories of the Don Basin in this film. It is the best example of his theory of cinema which brings together “the film-eye and the radio-ear.” At one point he described the film as a “symphony of noises.”

1925-26, 73 min, 35mm, b&w, silent. With Russian intertitles; English synopsis available. “FORWARD, SOVIET! was commissioned by the Moscow soviet for the 1926 elections. Structurally, the film compares prerevolutionary famine and disease with the dynamism of revolutionary life. Then after a sequence on newborn babies, Vertov’s irrepressible futurism bursts forth. Buses and cars hold a political rally without the benefit of their drivers; an extended montage celebrates industrial forms with such gusto as to make Léger’s contemporaneous BALLET MÉCANIQUE seem virtually Luddite.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

by Erich von Stroheim 140 min, 1924, 35mm, b&w, silent With Gibson Gowland, ZaSu Pitts, and Jean Hersholt. “Reduced from an eight-and-a-half-hour running time to slightly over two hours, [GREED] is perhaps more famous for the butcher job performed on it than for Stroheim’s great and genuine accomplishment. Though usually discussed as a masterpiece of realism (it was based on a novel by the naturalist writer Frank Norris), it is equally sublime in its high stylization, which ranges from the highly Brechtian spectacle of ZaSu Pitts making love to her gold coins to deep-focus compositions every bit as advanced as those in CITIZEN KANE. It is probably the most modern in feel of all silent films, establishing ideas that would not be developed until decades later.” –Dave Kehr, CHICAGO READER

FILM NOS. 1-5, 7, 10 (EARLY ABSTRACTIONS) (ca. 1946-57, 23 min, 16mm-to-35mm. Restored by Anthology Film Archives and The Film Foundation with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.) FILM NO. 11 (MIRROR ANIMATIONS) (ca. 1957, 4 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.) FILM NO. 14 (LATE SUPERIMPOSITIONS) (1964, 28 min, 16mm-to-35mm. Restored by Anthology Film Archives and The Film Foundation with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.) “My cinematic excreta is of four varieties: – batiked animations made directly on film between 1939 and 1946; optically printed non-objective studies composed around 1950; semi-realistic animated collages made as part of my alchemical labors of 1957 to 1962; and chronologically super-imposed photographs of actualities formed since the latter year. All these works have been organized in specific patterns derived from the interlocking beats of the respiration, the heart and the EEG Alpha component and should be observed together in order, or not at all, for they are valuable works, works that will forever abide – they made me gray.” –Harry Smith Total running time: ca. 60 min.

Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and Cineric, Inc. “NO. 12 can be seen as one moment – certainly the most elaborately crafted moment – of the single alchemical film which is Harry Smith’s life work. In its seriousness, its austerity, it is one of the strangest and most fascinating landmarks in the history of cinema. Its elaborately constructed soundtrack in which the sounds of various figures are systematically displaced onto other images reflects Smith’s abiding concern with auditory effects.” –P. Adams Sitney

1925, 78 min, 16mm, b&w, silent. With Russian intertitles; English synopsis available. “KINOGLAZ is a didactic work, centered on episodes which articulate major preoccupations of the young Soviet regime: it deals with the manufacture and distribution of bread,…the processing and distribution of meat, celebrates the constructions of youth camps and discusses the problem of alcoholism. It introduces Vertov’s formal adoption of the articulation of filmmaking technique as his subject. It begins, as well, to suggest what we may understand by ‘the negative of time’ as a key ‘to the Communist decoding of reality.’ Looking for ‘the negative of time,’ we find it in the use of reverse motion as analytic strategy.” –Annette Michelson, “From Magician to Epistemologist”

by Dziga Vertov 1922, 55 min, 35mm-to-digital. Courtesy of the Austrian Film Museum. “Between 1922 and 1925, a total of 23 issues of Dziga Vertov’s newsreel series KINO-PRAVDA (KINO-TRUTH) appeared (albeit irregularly and in very few copies). Vertov’s goal was to create a kind of ‘screen newspaper’; the title is a tribute to the newspaper Pravda founded by Lenin. Just like the KINONEDELJA (KINO-WEEK) newsreel series (1918-19), the KINO-PRAVDA issues offer a fascinating insight into the early Soviet Union and demonstrate the rapid development of Vertov’s film language. The 22 surviving issues (No. 12 is lost) have been digitized and subtitled in German and English by the Austrian Film Museum.” –AUSTRIAN FILM MUSEUM

1929, 104 min, 35mm, b&w, silent. No intertitles. “If Vertov had never made anything other than MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA he would still be among the cinema’s greatest masters. A kaleidoscopic city symphony – conjoining Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa in one dizzying metropolis – this is Vertov’s most complex film, matching the rhythms of a day to the cycle of life (birth, death, marriage, divorce) and the mechanisms of movie-making to the logic of production. Made without titles, the movie is at once a documentary portrait of the Soviet people, a reflexive essay on cinematic representation (as dazzling as it is didactic), and an ode to work itself as a process of transformation.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

Jack Smith SCOTCH TAPE (1962, 3 min, 16mm) A junkyard musical. FLAMING CREATURES (1963, 45 min, 16mm, b&w) “[Smith] graced the anarchic liberation of new American cinema with graphic and rhythmic power worthy of the best of formal cinema. He has attained for the first time in motion pictures a high level of art which is absolutely lacking in decorum; and a treatment of sex which makes us aware of the restraint of all previous filmmakers.” –FILM CULTURE Ron Rice CHUMLUM (1964, 23 min, 16mm-to-35mm. With Jack Smith, Beverly Grant, Mario Montez, Joel Markman, Frances Francine, Guy Henson, Barry Titus, Zelda Nelson, Gerard Malanga, Barbara Rubin, and Frances Stillman. Music by Angus MacLise. Restored by Anthology Film Archives and The Film Foundation with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.) “A hallucinatory micro-epic filmed during lulls in the production of Smith’s NORMAL LOVE and one of the great ‘heroic doses’ of ’60s underground cinema, a movie so sumptuously and serenely psychedelic it appears to have been printed entirely on gauze.” –Chuck Stephens, CINEMA SCOPE Total running time: ca. 75 min.

1928, 60 min, 35mm, b&w, silent. With Russian intertitles; English synopsis available. “Vertov’s ecstatic paean to industrial development was, like Eisenstein’s OCTOBER, commissioned to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution and was accused of the dread ‘formalism.’” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE Preceded by: Excerpts from KINO-PRAVDA 1922, 16 min, 16mm, silent Produced from 1922-25, Vertov’s KINO-PRAVDA was an ongoing series of newsreels that ultimately comprised 23 separate “issues” (of which 22 exist today, albeit some only in fragmentary form). Taken together, they created a record of Soviet life through a mix of documentary, animation, and direct address. The reel screening here showcases excerpts from the series, with footage documenting the reconstruction of the Moscow trolley system, tanks on the labor front, and starving children, and culminating with a fascinating call for “inquiries regarding traveling film shows.”

(FRANCESCO, GIULIARE DI DIO) by Roberto Rossellini (1949, 85 min, 35mm, b&w. In Italian with English subtitles.) “Roberto Rossellini’s buoyant 1950 masterpiece is a glorious hallucination of perfect harmony between man and nature. The Franciscans arrive at Assisi in the first reel and leave in the last. In between, as they say, nothing happens and everything happens. Rossellini is able to suggest the scope and rhythm of an entire lost way of life through a gradual accumulation of well-observed detail. The Franciscans are at once inspired and slightly foolish, but Rossellini maintains a profound respect for the grandeur of their delusions. A great film, all the more impressive for being apparently effortless.” –Dave Kehr

(LA RÈGLE DU JEU) by Jean Renoir (1939, 97 min, 35mm, b&w. In French with English subtitles.) “Detested when it first appeared (for satirizing the French ruling class on the brink of the Second World War), almost destroyed by brutal cutting, restored in 1959 to virtually its original form, THE RULES OF THE GAME is now universally acknowledged as a masterpiece and perhaps Renoir’s supreme achievement. Its extreme complexity (it seems, after more than 20 viewings, one of the cinema’s few truly inexhaustible films) makes it peculiarly difficult to write about briefly.” –Robin Wood

1934, 60 min, 35mm, b&w. In Russian with no subtitles; English synopsis available. “Vertov’s ‘official’ Soviet masterpiece – a hagiographic compilation of lyrically edited stock footage and cinema’s first direct interviews – was the most successful (and compromised) movie he ever made.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

by Michael Snow 1967, 45 min, 16mm “WAVELENGTH is without precedent in the purity of its confrontation with the essence of cinema: the relationships between illusion and fact, space and time, subject and object. It is the first post-Warhol, post-Minimal movie; one of the few films to engage those higher conceptual orders which occupy modern painting and sculpture. It has rightly been described as a ‘triumph of contemplative cinema.’” –Gene Youngblood, L.A. FREE PRESS

An aspiring New York-based actress struggling with the misogynoir in the industry turns to phone sex in hopes of financing her move to Hollywood to make it big. Though Judy enters with the intention of raising the money and leaving, the fantasy roles that she creates for her clients become portals for her to unearth her desires and exercise her storytelling abilities. Through phone sex, Judy becomes her own director. With an incredibly ridiculous appearance by Madonna and a soundtrack composed of Prince’s B-sides, GIRL 6 is Spike Lee’s most elusive film. This is partly because it was the first of Lee’s films that he did not pen himself. The scriptwriter, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, drew inspiration for the film from her own brief experience as a phone sex operator. Though the film toes the line with the presumed morality of sex work, the agency and ambition of its lead character (Lee described it as an intentional “star role” for Theresa Randle) allows it to rise above its shortcomings. One of Lee’s most formally and narratively ambitious films, GIRL 6 demands a reappraisal from critics who lambasted it at the time for its ambiguous take on sex work. Preceded by: Ayanna Dozier NIGHTWALKER 2022, 7 min, 16mm NIGHTWALKER, an experimental short, examines how the surveillance eye overlaps with the gaze of a potential predator. The film is ambivalent as to whether the character is a sex worker, and is more interested in the act of surveillance “sight-based” discourse that names individuals through visual signifiers presented on the body of a woman of color.

German filmmaker Helga Fanderl returns to Anthology to present a specially-selected program drawn from her vast body of silent Super-8mm films (she has made around 1,000 short films since 1986). A one-time student of both Peter Kubelka and Robert Breer, Fanderl makes her work impressionistically and intuitively, in response to the rhythms, forms, textures, and colors she encounters, and always limits herself to in-camera editing, so that each film becomes a reflection of the process of its own creation. Her practice is distinguished as well by her commitment to a particular way of presenting her work in public: generally projecting the films herself from within the screening space, Fanderl conceives of each screening program as a unique “montage” of individual works that together comprise a kind of ephemeral, never-to-be-repeated “film” in their own right (an approach made possible by the sheer multitude of pieces she’s created over the years). Fanderl was last here at Anthology in 2018. On the occasion of a visit to the U.S., we welcome her back for an entirely different selection of films, screening entirely on Super-8mm! CONSTELLATIONS SUPER 8 2000-2024, ca. 51 min, Super-8mm, silent Includes: JARDIN D’ACCLIMATATION I MIRRORED / GESPIEGELT PICTURES OF SPRING / FRÜHLINGSBILDER PICTURES OF PARIS FOR DR. G. / PARISER BILDER FÜR DR. G. SWINGS (2002) / SCHAUKELN (2022) PLAYING DOGS / SPIELENDE HUNDE CONVERSATION AT THE BEACH / KONVERSATION AM STRAND AUTUMN IN ST. PIAT / HERBST IN ST. PIAT PERSIMMON TREE IN WINTER / KAKIBAUM IM WINTER ZOO ANIMALS AND ARCHITECTURES / ZOOTIERE UND ARCHITEKTUREN MONA LISA TUNNEL FIREWORKS / FEUERWERK IRISES AND PEACOCKS / IRISBLÜTEN UND PFAUE PILES IN A RIVER / PFOSTEN IM FLUSS SCULPTURES IN THE MIST / SKULPTUREN IM NEBEL AFTER THE FIRE I / NACH DEM FEUER I TULIPS / TULPEN FOR K. (CANAL IN THE SUMMER LIGHT) / FÜR K. (KANAL IM SOMMERLICHT)

The feature film debut by Austrian film scholar, historian, and curator Alexander Horwath – the former Director of the Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum – HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT represents, as its title suggests, a filmic portrait of the actor Henry Fonda, but it is anything but a conventional Hollywood portrait. While it is structured chronologically according to the progression of Fonda’s life and career, the film transcends individual portraiture by using Fonda as a prism through which it explores and meditates upon the changing (and intimately intertwined) politics, society, and culture of the United States in Fonda’s time. Equally adept at cultural criticism, historical accounting, and political analysis – and as such, something like a filmic equivalent of J. Hoberman’s indispensable trilogy of books about the politics and movies of the 1950s-80s (“The Dream Life”, “An Army of Phantoms”, and “Make My Day”) – HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT also incorporates elements of found-footage filmmaking and landscape cinema, as it combines a wide array of revelatory archival material (including film and television clips, Fonda’s final 1981 interview, news reports, and more) with Horwath’s own footage of sites throughout the U.S. Extending the tradition of seminal reflections on America by commentators from abroad, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT achieves the near-impossible, articulating a genuinely new and profoundly insightful take on 1900s-80s American culture, and on the legacy of this era both on the wider world and on the present day. “A movie star who emerged in the mid-1930s, Fonda starred as Abe Lincoln, Tom Joad, Wyatt Earp, and the honest naval officer Mister Roberts. He played a ‘forgotten man’ in the original ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ film, YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (1937). He was the protagonist of THE WRONG MAN (1956) and THE BEST MAN (1964), and of 12 ANGRY MEN (1957), which he also produced. He fought for democracy in the Spanish Civil War on-screen and in World War II in actuality. He personified New Deal democracy, Cold War liberalism, and – thanks to his rebellious children – the 1960s generation gap. Was he also, as more than one person puts it in Alexander Horwath’s erudite, entertaining three-hour meta-biopic, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT, the ‘quintessential American’? Embraced by cinephiles at festivals from Berlin to Buenos Aires and beyond, HFFP more than makes the case for Fonda’s centrality in the American imaginary – what Norman Mailer called the nation’s dream life. […] A masterpiece of applied cinephilia, HFFP is a melancholy reminder that the mass Hollywood-driven illusions that produced Fonda and Reagan et al. are no more. The spell has been broken. Not that we’re awake: We live the Total Cinema Bardo created by talk radio, cable news, reality TV, iPhones, and social media.” –J. Hoberman, ARTFORUM

HOUSE OF TOLERANCE is a terrifyingly beautiful ode to the red-light district of Paris during the Belle Époque era. Rather than navigating the 21st-century socio-cultural and economic realities of sex workers, Bonello turns his gaze back in time to find the ambition, struggles, and desires of women who are both the center of society and yet distinctively cut off from it. Though the production and costume design are impeccably lush, Bonello does not glamorize nor chastise the industry. Instead, he examines the communal kinship and struggles of these working women amidst a socio-cultural landscape that limits their artistic input and renders it almost impossible to evade marriage or manual wage labor to make a living. HOUSE OF TOLERANCE is unique in the film archive of sex work thanks to Bonello’s disinterest in the clients themselves. In this suspended reality he positions the workers above the clients – it’s their lives, dreams, fears, and pleasures we experience.

Cleo Uebelmann MANO DESTRA 1986, 56 min, 16mm-to-DCP In one of her short stories, Clarice Lispector contends that the only thing more painful than death is waiting. MANO DESTRA filmically takes that sentiment to task, through an experimental sadomasochism film that blurs the line between still photography and the moving image. The director Cleo Übelmann stars as a dominatrix who arranges and ties up a variety of femme subs to her liking, often leaving them in contorted positions or cabinets for extended periods of time. MANO DESTRA was briefly resurrected in 2014 by director Peter Strickland who cited it as one of the inspirations behind his film THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY, but it has since largely disappeared back into the archives. It’s a daring film for its same-gender dynamic that also centers women – too often films on BDSM examine queer men’s relationship to the field or use it to unpack the power imbalances between heterosexual couples. In this film’s reality, BDSM can be felt for its effect on the body in time, rather than its perceived socio-cultural baggage. Alison Murray KISSY SUZUKI SUCK 1992, 18.5 min, video KISSY SUZUKI SUCK is a madhouse of an experimental short that follows two street-based sex workers as they wait in their car for a trick. Allison Murray’s short was decried by critics upon its release as terroristic and pornographic. In a 1992 interview with Sight & Sound magazine, Murray declared of the uproar, “If men are saying I’m a fag, get used to it…women are asserting I’m a macho, slut, so what?” KISSY SUZUKI SUCK crosses and dismisses the psychoanalytic model of reading cinema through gender division by troubling not just the straights and women but everyone in the damn theater. An ambitious post-punk film KISSY SUZUKI SUCK features heavy dancing, an incredible house song (Coco Steel & Lovebomb’s “Feel It”), spit, women making out with each other, and voiceovers from other working girls on class politics. All these elements ultimately collide with each other, leaving the film to dissolve upon itself via its own excess. It’s perfect. Total running time: ca. 80 min.

This program features two new works by Austrian filmmaker Marieli Fröhlich. The daughter of two luminaries of Austrian culture – experimental filmmaker Peter Kubelka and artist Gertie Fröhlich – Marieli’s immersion in film began as an actress, appearing in features by John Cook, Peter Patzak, and Claude Chabrol, before she embarked on a career as a director. The two award-winning films presented here find Fröhlich embracing the realm of documentary and experimental cinema, connected by a poetic style. WHAT’S HAPPENING?: ART IN THE LIFE OF GERTIE FRÖHLICH is a filmic portrait of her mother Gertie Fröhlich, a painter, graphic designer, and curator (among her many achievements are her iconic posters created for the Austrian Film Museum) whose influence on postwar Austrian art has yet to be fully acknowledged, while S T O P is a genuinely innovative, ongoing project that represents a very different kind of portraiture. Within a Warholian “screen test” format, the camera frames each subject casually for a fixed duration with their eyes closed, conjuring up an image that ingeniously fuses interior and exterior. Edited from hundreds of filmed encounters over 15 years, and in contrast to Warhol’s glamourous focus, Fröhlich’s subjects seem to glimmer from an enduring inner beauty regardless of the location or circumstances. Marieli Fröhlich will be here in person! Presented with support from Deutsches Haus at NYU. WHAT’S HAPPENING?: ART IN THE LIFE OF GERTIE FRÖHLICH 2018-2023, 30 min, DCP. In English and German with English subtitles. Marieli Fröhlich flips the script in her documentary exploration of her mother’s artistic legacy, exposing the unseen patriarchal force that attempts to erase her rightful place in postwar Austrian Art History. Interwoven with historical interviews, Surreal montages, and dreamlike footage, WHAT’S HAPPENING? is an empowering matrilineal film, in which a female director pays homage to her mother’s creative struggles and triumphs. S T O P 2010-2025, 30 min, DCP The average person’s symbiosis with their cell phones subjects them to constant invasiveness that allows no time to reflect, recharge, or maintain equilibrium. S T O P proposes other states of mind by asking people to close their eyes and record a moment without event, progression, or logic. Observing people’s processes (the opposite of acting) gives the audience a similar self-awareness and calm. Could this simple act breach the enforcement of society’s symbolic order and incite a radical awareness of the unconscious effect it has on our individuality and humanity? Total running time: ca. 65 min.

Roberto Faenza COPKILLER aka CORRUPT aka ORDER OF DEATH / L’ASSASSINO DEI POLIZIOTTI 1983, 101 min, 35mm-to-DCP. With Harvey Keitel, John Lydon, and Sylvia Sidney. Music by Ennio Morricone. Lt. Fred O’Connor (Harvey Keitel) is a corrupt narcotics detective on the trail of a serial killer who’s been ambushing dirty cops and slitting their throats. But his search gets cut short when Leo Smith, a gay British punk (John Lydon) shows up at O’Connor’s secret second apartment claiming to be the titular psychopath. Fearing Smith will drop the dime on him, O’Connor ties his visitor up and subjects him to torture and beatings, rather than turning him in. But that might be exactly what Smith wants. Is he really a cop killer? Or just a kinky rich kid with a screw loose? So begins a twisted cat and mouse game between two effed up men that plays out like a cross between a grimy 80s cop movie and Joseph Losey’s queer 1963 classic THE SERVANT. Based on a long out-of-print novel by cult author and painter Hugh Fleetwood, COPKILLER is a nasty, freaky little thriller that takes a dim view of policing, but provides the sneering punk legend Lydon (of Sex Pistols and PiL fame) with a meaty role, which he takes full advantage of.

Poet/filmmaker Alystyre Julian’s OUTRIDER is an experimental portrait of “fast speaking” poet/performer, Grammy-nominated librettist, artistic director, and cultural activist Anne Waldman. OUTRIDER is a portal to her path of imagination, her vow to poetry and activism, and her vortex of artists/collaborators: Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Thurston Moore, Meredith Monk, Allen Ginsberg, Laurie Anderson, Douglas Dunn, Eileen Myles, Amiri Baraka, James Brandon Lewis, Cecilia Vicuña, Pat Steir, Ha-Yang Kim, Daniel Carter, Eleni Sikelianos, and many others. OUTRIDER immerses in the poetry communities constellating around Waldman’s life and legacy in New York – “city of my poems” – from her “hearthome” in Greenwich Village and The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and outwards to Big Sur, Morocco, and Mexico. OUTRIDER is a story of transmutation through making art. Waldman asks, “What is it to be a contemporary poet in one’s time? A seer, conjurer? How to keep the world safe for poetry?” Waldman’s exploratory, restless consciousness informs her startling, panoramic work; she is a person woven of poetry, study, and visionary commitment to planetary and social challenges. As the film demonstrates, she has addressed war and patriarchy in The Iovis Trilogy, a cri de coeur for endangered species in Manatee Humanity, the urgency of Archives in Gossamurmur, entheogens in Jaguar Harmonics, Blake’s Thel in Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet Unborn, and her radical life in Bard, Kinetic. OUTRIDER tracks her investigative mind, always “on,” her improvisations with original music by Waldman’s son Ambrose Bye and nephew Devin “Brahja” Waldman, and her wake-up calls, from demonstrating at Rocky Flats (1978) to contemporary social, cultural, and environmental justice movements. OUTRIDER celebrates Waldman’s role as a visionary word-worker, her transcendent presence as poet/performer, and her vocal fortitude as she sings out, in the ancient, bardic tradition, the thunderous power of poetry. “OUTRIDER is a flash of lightning in the dark night, aglow with the life force of Anne Waldman. If you want to sneak up on the secret trajectory of U.S. culture, if you want to know the true, deep possibilities for art in our times – this is your poet.” –Eleni Sikelianos, poet

How does incarceration affect an artist’s psyche? In a fascinating and novel approach, Lynn Hershman Leeson allows us to eavesdrop on a session between Tania Bruguera – one of the world’s most celebrated and daring Cuban artists (and herself the recipient of an AWAW award in 2016) – and Dr. Frank Ochberg, a New York-based psychiatrist and pioneer in post-traumatic stress disorder and the Stockholm syndrome. Bruguera visited Dr. Ochberg after spending eight months in prison, accused of treason after announcing her intention to provide an uncensored platform for citizens in Havana to freely express their views in public for one minute. During the session, Bruguera eloquently reflects on the emotional ramifications of her constant struggles with authorities, the psychological and physical effects of her interrogations, and a family dynamic that mirrors the subversive surveillance culture that many Cubans encounter in their daily life.

THE LAZIEST GIRL IN TOWN 1981, 24 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP HELLO FROM BERTHA 1983, 17 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP Total running time: ca. 45 min.

NYMPH-O-MANIAC 1984, 45 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP

“Richard Beymer began one of the most surprising careers in the history of cinema as a child actor in De Sica’s TERMINAL STATION in 1953, appearing alongside Montgomery Clift and Jennifer Jones. He is of course best known for his unforgettable roles in WEST SIDE STORY and TWIN PEAKS. But what did he do between these two milestones? He largely dropped out of Hollywood and became an independent filmmaker. What’s even more unexpected is that the films are revelations. He began with an acclaimed 16mm civil rights documentary called A REGULAR BOUQUET (1964) and then dropped entirely off the grid. His greatest achievement remains THE INNERVIEW, a feature-length experimental film that he ostensibly completed in 1973 and has been revising ever since. A kaleidoscopic tour de force through the process of filmmaking, it’s also a journey through an inner landscape that resonates with the best of 1960s psychedelia. Featuring a stunning performance by lead actress Joanna Bochco, as well as the ever-charismatic Beymer himself, THE INNERVIEW offers a parallel vision to the classic American underground of the era. In one of its few public screenings, it caught the attention of the Los Angeles Times’ Kevin Thomas, who wrote, ‘Moving beyond the mystery of love to the mystery of life itself, THE INNERVIEW’s flood of sometimes frightening, sometimes reassuring and always sensual images evokes a gamut of emotions – overpowering feelings of terror, despair and death mingling with a wondrous sense of oneness with nature and the universe.’ The original 1973 version is lost beyond recovery, as Richard re-cut not just his original negative but all existing prints, in his ongoing quest for perfection. He’s currently nearing completion of a new cut that integrates substantially different sound and picture. This new project by Lightbox Film Center in collaboration with Northeast Historic Film and the National Film Preservation Foundation restores the 1975 version of the film – the last he completed on film, and in many ways the culmination of his early vision of the work. As Beymer said, ‘I never left the movies. I just made other kinds of movies.’” –Ross Lipman

To celebrate the publication of his new book, “The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde”, the renowned film scholar Tom Gunning will be visiting NYC to take part in special events at multiple venues (organized by curator David Schwartz). Here at Anthology, we will present a screening devoted to work by Ernie Gehr, who is the subject of two separate essays in “The Attractions of the Moving Image”. Both Gunning and Gehr will be here in person for a post-screening conversation. “The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde” has been edited by Daniel Morgan, and is published by the University of Chicago Press; click here for more info. Special thanks to Ernie Gehr; Tom Gunning; David Schwartz; Light Industry; and the Museum of the Moving Image. UNTITLED 1977 1977, 4 min, 16mm, silent “UNTITLED 1977 also explores the contradictions of the apparent penetration of space that perspective seems to offer through the dynamic of the film lens. But here, rather than the aggressive and rather contradictory effects of the zoom lens [as in SERENE VELOCITY], Gehr deals with a gradually changing plane of focus.” –Tom Gunning, “Perspective and Retrospective: The Films of Ernie Gehr” REAR WINDOW 1986, 10 min, 16mm, silent “Few of Gehr’s films are as beautiful as this, or as delicate. […] [U]nlike the views of street traffic or sidewalks given in other films, this rear-window vantage point turns toward the other side of city life, where folks hang their laundry out to dry. Gehr focuses his camera on the most quotidian of sights and reveals a drama of light and space as breathtaking as the cityscapes in SIDE/WALK/SHUTTLE.” –Tom Gunning, “Perspective and Retrospective: The Films of Ernie Gehr” SIDE/WALK/SHUTTLE 1991, 41 min, 16mm “[P]resents one of America’s most photographed cities, San Francisco, in images that confound us with their unfamiliar viewpoint and trajectory. […] Shot from a glass-enclosed elevator that climbs to a restaurant at the top of the Fairmont Hotel, Gehr’s film ascends only as high as that tall building and the city’s hills. The sense of aerial feats comes entirely from the variety of camera angles Gehr manages to achieve.” –Tom Gunning, “Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000” THIS SIDE OF PARADISE 1991, 15 min, 16mm, silent “[This film] deals with another circulation of people and their goods across the borders and directional circuits of a big city. Gehr was in West Berlin in 1989 to record some sound for a film, and stumbled upon an improvised flea market where Poles, weekend visitors from the Eastern Bloc, were trying to sell random objects they had brought with them for Western currency, which they could exchange on the black market at home for substantial profit. […] The history of Gehr’s family as refugees and immigrants during the period of World War II has undoubtedly sharpened his awareness of the precariousness of finding a place in a world given to violent upheavals and reworkings of borders.” –Tom Gunning, “Perspective and Retrospective: The Films of Ernie Gehr” Total running time: ca. 75 min.

“A single mother (Suzy Amis) comes home one day to find her suburban house in disarray and her two young children missing; a police lieutenant (Fred Ward) turns up and, convinced she murdered the children, proceeds to question her at length. These are the only two characters in this playlike, rather ritualized chamber piece with sadomasochistic overtones, which never strays from the house and its immediate environs. Written and precisely directed by Beth B and shot in Germany, this independent effort is sustained by the talented actors, though how much one warms to the ambiguous goings-on will depend a great deal on one’s own psychosexual predilections.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

This short film program is organized around the excess narratives, forms, and genres around sex work in film. The program opens with Beth and Scott B’s bold hybrid narrative essay film, G-MAN, which depicts the power dynamics between political activists, the police, and the head of the NYC bomb squad and his dominatrix. Lucas Kane and David Gonzalez’s documentary CACHERO//TAXIBOY examines male sex workers in Quito, Ecuador, and their fight for decriminalization. The experimental essay film NIGHTWALKER uses the ambiguity of the body of a woman of color alone at night to play with the visual signifiers of “clocking” a whore that is informed by police law. Tourmaline’s SALACIA collapses time, aesthetics, and space to merge the histories of trans sex workers in NYC, including Mary Jones and Sylvia Rivera. Ariane Labed’s debut narrative short, OLLA, chronicles an Eastern European “mail-order” bride’s experience against the backdrop of a Greek chorus. Closing out the program is WHORE WRITERS by Tall Milk, who uses her luscious, pink-themed home studio as a stage for writers to narrate to the camera their relationship with their body and sex. Beth & Scott B G-MAN 1978, 28 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP Lucas Kane CACHERO//TAXIBOY 2018, 11 min, DCP Ayanna Dozier NIGHTWALKER 2022, 7 min, 16mm-to-DCP Tourmaline SALACIA 2019, 6 min, 16mm-to-DCP Ariane Labed OLLA 2019, 28 min, 16mm-to-DCP Tall Milk WHORE WRITERS 2024, 5 min, DCP Total running time: ca. 90 min.

Often wrongly described as a documentary on the lives of working girls in an escort house, WORKING GIRLS is a narrative film that has set the standard for fictional movies on sex work. One of the first films to center the workers’ experience with clients, each other, themselves, their partners, and their head madams, WORKING GIRLS is superlative for how much it gets right about the labor politics of sex work. This is largely because the characters in the film are a dramatization of director Lizzie Borden and her film crew’s experiences in the industry. The film outlines the procedural elements of sexual labor in a parlor, including day-to-day tasks like answering the front door, making bodega runs, washing up in between clients, overtime, training new hires, dressing up, breakups, gossip, unfair managing madams who swear they are better than pimps but act no different, threatening to quit, and the cyclical nature of doing it all over again. If there were room for only one narrative film about the industry, WORKING GIRLS would have to be it.