“(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.

RECORD RELEASE EVENT! ARVO PÄRT: SILENTIUM Mississippi Records celebrates the release of SILENTIUM, a new compilation of work by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, with a rare screening of Dorian Supin’s singular portrait of the artist, AND THEN CAME THE EVENING AND THE MORNING (1989). Dorian Supin AND THEN CAME THE EVENING AND THE MORNING / SIIS SAI ÕHTU JA SAI HOMMIK 1989, 60 min, DCP. In German, Russian, and Estonian with English subtitles. A sensitive, humorous, and deeply personal look at the pioneer of “holy minimalism,” Arvo Pärt, this film was shot by Estonian documentarian (and Pärt’s brother-in-law) Dorian Supin. Filming while Pärt and his family were in semi-exile in West Berlin in the early 1980s, Supin was given extraordinary access to both daily life in the family home and the artist’s burgeoning public career. Pärt as an artist and person shines through here – traveling the world, peeling potatoes, navigating fame and politics, laying his head on the piano, and just playing when words fail. Supin’s film is a rare music documentary that reflects the rhythm, language, and philosophy of the artist it portrays. Preceded by a short film on Pärt by Dorian Supin. With an introduction by Mississippi Records.

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.

“AT ETERNITY’S GATE is a portrait of Vincent van Gogh during the last and most prolific years of his life. It is directed by Julian Schnabel, himself a painter, and stars Willem Dafoe. The film is so much a collaboration that I hesitate to designate it Schnabel’s alone. Together, Schnabel and Dafoe, who is in virtually every frame, have made the first convincing and illuminating non-documentary film about what great painters do and how they see, and for his efforts, Dafoe won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival.” –Amy Taubin, FILM COMMENT “More intimate than the films about Vincent van Gogh directed by Vincente Minnelli, Robert Altman and the married duo Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, the artist-filmmaker Julian Schnabel’s AT ETERNITY’S GATE attempts, more successfully than most movies that probe the creative process, to get inside the artist’s head, to understand how his thoughts and feelings spontaneously transmitted themselves to the canvas.” –Graham Fuller, SIGHT & SOUND

This rare screening, hosted by Bidoun, is presented as a prelude to a two-day symposium on the renowned Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist, Etel Adnan. Organized by Omar Berrada and Simone Fattal on the centenary of Adnan’s birth, the symposium will take place on February 28 and March 1, at The Poetry Project and Giorno Poetry Systems. The day before, on Thursday, February 27, we will present Etel Adnan’s feature film, MOTION. In the 1980s, Adnan regularly traveled with a Super-8mm camera in hand. She visited New York frequently, staying at a friend’s apartment in a high-rise overlooking the East River. While there, she would repeatedly attempt to capture the sun touching skyscrapers’ windows, the geometry of bridges, the marriage of light and water, the movement of barges on the river, the shapes of factory smoke – the oddly meditative poetry of inexorable motion at the immediate edge of city life. The footage was retrieved and digitized three decades later, and edited into a feature-length film, MOTION, which premiered at Documenta 13 in 2012. For more info about the symposium at The Poetry Project and Giorno Poetry Systems, please visit https://www.poetryproject.org/ + https://giornopoetrysystems.org/ This screening will be free of charge!

BOB WILSON’S LIFE & DEATH OF MARINA ABRAMOVIC documents the coming together of Willem Dafoe, director Robert Wilson, performance artist Marina Abramovic, and singer and composer Antony Hegarty, to create an experimental opera based on Marina Abramovic’s biography. Through rehearsal footage and interviews with the artists as they are making the piece, director Giada Colagrande provides insight into this unique collaboration, resulting in an intimate portrait that reveals the dynamics, excitement, and insecurities of making such a poetic and visually stunning theatre work. Preceded by: Savanah Leaf run 002 2024, 9.5 min, 35mm-to-digital This short film by artist and filmmaker Savanah Leaf (EARTH MAMA) – the follow-up to her earlier “run” (2023) – continues her investigation of bodies subjected to various forms of measuring, categorization, and control. Total running time: ca. 70 min.

“‘This is not a film about my father’, says Mariano Llinás again and again in CLORINDO TESTA. But each repetition only proves the contrary: this film is indeed about his father, the artist, art critic, advertising editor, flâneur and renowned Buenos Aires intellectual Julio Llinás. The complex structure of this mockumentary has the mind behind LA FLOR pretend to make a film about Clorindo Testa using a book written about him by the filmmaker’s father, although his research into the work of the famous architect and painter ends up being nothing more than a diversion, a sleight of hand to disguise the project’s personal nature. Since Julio and Clorindo were not only well-known intellectuals but also good friends, Llinas’s film tries to understand their particular, often tense relationship, the political context in which they worked and the history of artistic movements in Argentina in the 20th century, tracing out a lineage that can also be applied to its national cinema. Through self-referential jokes, conversations with family members and quotes from the book, CLORINDO TESTA becomes a bittersweet comedy about the passing of time, the relationship between art and life, and a film about friendship, family and the fictions we invent to face our history.” –Diego Lerer, VIENNALE

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

Long overlooked, especially in the U.S., the cinema of Guy Gilles has recently begun to be rediscovered, revealing one of the most sensitive visions of its time. In 1970’s EARTHLIGHT, Pierre, a young man who lives in Paris with his father, travels to his native Tunisia in search of his early childhood and distant memories, including that of his long-since-deceased mother. All the poetry of Guy Gilles’ editing and writing, as well as his exploration of the themes of loss, melancholy, and longing, are to be found in this seminal third feature. Gilles worked repeatedly with the actor Patrick Jouané, whose presence illuminates EARTHLIGHT. This special event is co-hosted by La Clef Revival, a collective of activists and artists whose mission is to keep Paris’s historical theatre La Clef running sustainably, and in a manner true to their values: community-run, participatory programming, and a pay-what-you-can ticketing ethos. The screening will be followed by a conversation with members of the collective.

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

(UMARETE WA MITA KEREDO…) by Yasujiro Ozu (1932, 100 min, 35mm, b&w, silent. With English intertitles.) In referring to this film Ozu stated, “I started to make a film about grownups. While I had originally planned to make a fairly bright little story, it changed while I was working on it and came out very dark.” The story concerns a very average suburban office worker, with a wife and two very un-average sons, who is unable to stand up to his boss. “Joyful…as true and as moving and as timely today as it was in 1932.” –Jonas Mekas

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

(MAT) by Vsevolod I. Pudovkin (1926, 104 min, 35mm, b&w, silent. Based on the novel by Maxim Gorky. In Russian with no subtitles; English synopsis available.) With the simple theme of a working-class mother growing in political consciousness through participation in revolutionary activity, this film established Pudovkin as one of the major figures of the Soviet cinema. His expert cutting on movement and his associated editing of unrelated scenes to form what he called a “plastic synthesis” are amply demonstrated here. Although in direct opposition to Eisenstein’s shock montage, Pudovkin used a linkage method advanced far beyond Kuleshov’s theories. “In the final episode Pudovkin resorts to the now famous simile of the ice-floe breaking up against the bastions of the great bridge with a movement parallel to that of the procession of men and women marching with the Red Flag held high before them, until they are scattered and broken by the cavalry. The ice-floe intensifies the action by its strong forward movement far more than by its obvious symbolism. The purpose of Pudovkin’s technique is to sublimate the action of every part of his film, so that the commonplace is raised to the level of a kind of epic poem.” –Roger Manvell, THE FILM AND THE PUBLIC

Pat O’Neill SAUGUS SERIES (1974, 19 min, 16mm) SAUGUS SERIES is actually seven short films, united by a common soundtrack. Each is an evolving “still life” made up of meticulously assembled but spatially contradictory elements. “SAUGUS SERIES exhibits the possibilities of the optical printer with considerable self-confidence and élan. The colors are deeply saturated; radically incompatible spaces are meticulously pieced together; moving images are layered in front of each other or masked within ‘negative’ spaces outlined by the absence of an object; a multiplicity of textures and densities and the dynamics of particles in turmoil enliven the imagery. […] The displaced objects and the uncanny juxtapositions of Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, and Curtis Harrington take on meaning from their relationship to the human figures that encounter them. As such, they become symbolic functions. O’Neill, a native of southern California, seems to be telling us that such a symbolic and psychologically personalized landscape loses its significance in a space like Los Angeles which is so overwhelmed by fragmented representations and gerrybuilt perspectives.” –P. Adams Sitney, MILLENNIUM FILM JOURNAL Hans Richter RHYTHMUS 21 (1921, 3 min, 35mm, b&w, silent) “Its content is essentially rhythm, the formal vocabulary is elemental geometry, and the structural principle is counterpoint of contrasting opposites.” –Standish Lawder TWO PENNY MAGIC / ZWEIGROSCHENZAUBER (1929, 2 min, 16mm, b&w) Produced as a commercial for a German illustrated magazine, this film is an experiment with visual rhymes. EVERYTHING REVOLVES, EVERYTHING TURNS / ALLES DREHT SICH, ALLES BEWEGT SICH (1929, 9 min, 16mm, b&w) “Richter’s unique and fascinating view of magic and cruelty in a carnival side-show.” –Cecile Starr Paul Sharits N:O:T:H:I:N:G (1968, 36 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.) “Based in part on the Tibetan Mandala of the Five Dhyani Buddhas/a journey toward the center of pure consciousness (Dharma-Dhatu Wisdom)/space and motion generated rather than illustrated/time-color energy create virtual shape/in negative time, growth is inverse decay.” –Paul Sharits T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1969, 12 min, 16mm.) Preserved by Anthology Film Archives. “Starring poet David Franks whose voice appears on the soundtrack/an uncutting and unscratching mandala.” –Paul Sharits Total running time: ca. 85 min.

S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED (1968-70, 41 min, 16mm. NEWLY RESTORED BY ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES!) “Yes, S:S:S:S:S:S is beautiful. The successive scratchings of the stream-image film is very powerful vandalism. The film is a very complete organism with all the possible levels really recognized.” –Michael Snow COLOR SOUND FRAMES (1974, 26 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.) “A film in which Sharits sums up his researches in the area of film strip (in opposition to the individual frames). The film strips move horizontally and vertically; two strips move simultaneously in opposite directions; variations in color; action of sprocket-holes. Very methodically and scientifically he covers the area. […] COLOR SOUND FRAMES advances one area of cinema or one area of researches in cinema (call it art if you wish) to a new climax, to a new peak: his exploration is so total, so perfect.” –Jonas Mekas, VILLAGE VOICE Total running time: ca. 70 min.

Both films in this program have been preserved by the Academy Film Archive. THE GREAT BLONDINO (1967, 42 min, 16mm) “The original Blondino was a 19th-century tightrope artist who among other feats crossed Niagara Falls trundling a wheelbarrow. In this film, Nelson sees Blondino as a metaphor for those who still try. Too subtle to be allegorical, the picture is in the shape of a quixotic search in which the goal is the journey and the means is the end.” –MUSEUM OF MODERN ART “It is…difficult to get at the rich visual texture that is the film’s most striking attribute. Long stretches are concerned with Blondino’s visions, dreams, and dreams within dreams. The film unfolds in brief recurring patterns of imagery. Even the more straightforward sections are dense with interpolated newsreel and TV commercial footage, visual gags, and homemade special effects. The net effect is funny, seamless, and elusive.” –J. Hoberman, “A Filmmakers Filming Monograph” & BLEU SHUT (1970, 33 min, 16mm) “Boat-name quizzes, dogs, cuts from Dreyer’s JOAN OF ARC in montage with a sultry whore, a car running up a ramp and crashing, pornography, a passionate embrace by a thirties hero and heroine; all somehow implicating Dreyer and Joan in the perverse synthesis of sex and technology. What’s happening here? Basically Nelson is leaving things unsaid.” –Leo Regan Total running time: ca. 80 min.

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.

Karl Freund, Carl Mayer & Walter Ruttmann BERLIN, SYMPHONY OF A CITY / BERLIN, DIE SYMPHONIE DER GROSSTADT (1927, 65 min, 16mm, silent. Archival print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.) Ruttmann and company’s seminal, groundbreaking film is a valentine to the ‘new’ Berlin of the late 1920s. Beginning at dawn and ending after midnight, it shows Berliners hard at work by day and possessed by the city’s thriving nightlife. Essentially a feature-length montage, the film was heavily influenced by Soviet documentary experiments like Dziga Vertov’s KINO-PRAVDA and was itself very influential in fostering the ‘city symphony’ genre and other documentary hybrid styles to come. Frank Stauffacher SAUSALITO (1948, 10 min, 16mm) “This film is part ‘city symphony’ and part ‘outtakes for an experimental film.’ Sausalito is the picturesque waterfront town across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Stauffacher experiments with slow motion, split screens, and superimposition, all of which are lightened by a constant thread of whimsicality and wit.” –MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Total running time: ca. 80 min.

THE POTTED PSALM and THE PETRIFIED DOG have been preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. MR. FRENHOFFER AND THE MINOTAUR and THE LEAD SHOES have been preserved by Anthology with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation. THE POTTED PSALM (1946, 19 min, 16mm) THE PETRIFIED DOG (1948, 19 min, 16mm) MR. FRENHOFFER AND THE MINOTAUR (1949, 21 min, 16mm) THE LEAD SHOES (1949, 17 min, 16mm) “These images are meant to play not on our rational senses, but on the infinite universe of ambiguity within us.” –Sidney Peterson “Sidney Peterson’s work and sensibility are those of a native American surrealist. Many of his films chronicle the picaresque adventures of a wacky protagonist and use disjunctive editing strategies to construct new time and space relations…. But perhaps their best-known feature is the use of distorted, funhouse mirror-images, which he created by shooting with an anamorphic lens. […] In his films, he investigates extreme states of consciousness, and the primary tool of his epistemology of irrationalism is the photographic image distorted and transformed to register the impact of those states.” –R. Bruce Elder, IMAGE AND IDENTITY Total running time: ca. 80 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

(CHICHI ARIKI) by Yasujiro Ozu (1942, 87 min, 35mm. In Japanese with English subtitles.) “One of Ozu’s most perfect films. There is a naturalness and a consequent feeling of inevitability that is rare in cinema […] Critics have called the performance of Chishu Ryu in this film one of the best in the history of Japanese cinema, and they are right […] THERE WAS A FATHER has become one of the country’s most esteemed classics” –Donald Richie

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

EMPTY SUITCASES presents fragments of a woman’s life – her work (as a photographer), her friendships and relationships – in short, her economic, sexual, and artistic struggles. By deconstructing the fragments of text, speech, music, and picture, the film problematizes the way in which cinematic language structures point of view. Bette Gordon GREED: PAY TO PLAY 1987, 20 min, 16mm In Bette Gordon’s GREED, three women have a strange, claustrophobic encounter in the ladies lounge of a luxurious Manhattan hotel. Total running time: ca. 80 min.

Straub-Huillet’s FROM THE CLOUD TO THE RESISTANCE bridges history and myth, and modernity and antiquity. Based on six mythological encounters in Cesar Pavese’s “Dialogues with Leucò”, and on Pavese’s last novel, “The Moon and the Bonfires”, about the savage murders of Italian anti-Fascist resistance fighters during World War II, the film has affinities with HISTORY LESSONS, TOO EARLY/TOO LATE, and a series of films of the 2000s in which they returned to Pavese’s “Dialogues”.

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.

This enormously entertaining, heartfelt, and rousing strip-club-set ensemble comedy, filmed at Rome’s legendary studio, Cinecittà, is presided over by Willem Dafoe, in a tour-de-force performance as Ray Ruby, an impresario/dreamer desperate to save the financially-strapped venue – Ray Ruby’s Paradise Lounge – which in his hands functions as a combination strip-club, vaudeville theater, and rag-tag family. GO GO TALES is studded with vivid performances from a host of gifted actors (including Bob Hoskins, the great Sylvia Miles, and Asia Argento, whose brief but memorable appearance finds her locking lips with a rottweiler). But at its center is Dafoe’s Ray, who is in many ways a self-portrait on Ferrara’s part. Indeed, the functioning of the club is reflected in Ferrara’s orchestration of the various characters, plot lines, and tones, a (barely) controlled chaos that somehow hangs together brilliantly.

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

“It’s quite a gathering at the corner tables at Diener Tattersall in Berlin. Iconic queer performers like Vaginal Davis and Susanne Sachsse, scholars like Marc Siegel, cultural overlords like Rene Pollesch, and great actors of every living generation are drinking heavily and filling up the ashtrays at their late friend Volker Spengler’s favorite bar. But this is not a funeral party. It’s not even funereal. It’s a smoky, raucous wake for an actor of shocking force and dedication; a crude, intense, and untamable lover and joker, and the strangest, funniest person they ever knew. […] Shot over the course of a few gatherings, Hans Broich’s film is put together in the eternal present tense of the corner booth, registering waves of jollity and exhaustion. With glimpses of European theatre culture, Fassbinder’s core ensemble, and the radical camp that originated in 1960s New York, HIGHFALUTIN circles around a character who hated conventionality and probed anarchic, Dionysian ways of life and of acting. Is it possible to offend without being ‘offensive’? Can resistance be a matter of the body and not of the intellect? Is it a good idea to pour gin in an IV? Volker Spengler was a white, European man. But as HIGHFALUTIN shows us, the way he lived gives us a taste of universal liberation.” –Martin Schwartz

“[In HONOR AMONG LOVERS], Dorothy Arzner’s instinct for story, casting, and visuals are employed at the service of some of the era’s finest actors. Her third collaboration with Fredric March proved her star-making skills worked for men too. Businessman Jerry is in love with his secretary Julia and what begins as an office romance evolves into a love triangle with dangerous consequences. Arzner cynically plays on sex and social class distinctions to satisfying effect.” –BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE

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.

“IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS resembles Fassbinder’s VERONIKA VOSS in that both films demonstrate how the masquerade of gender cannot be sustained. […] Fassbinder mercilessly lays bare how gender transgression is reviled by society and how the individual suffers from this rejection. And yet, as we shall see, 13 MOONS does lead to QUERELLE in the way it articulates a longing for a space in which contradictory desires can be expressed. […] [Elvira attempts] to move beyond projecting the image others demand of her to experience freely the contradictions of being interchangeably male, female, bisexual, and transgender. Her exercise remains, though, ‘still some kind of hope,’ for 13 MOONS ultimately portrays social and sexual conformity as an inescapable prison. Fassbinder does not romanticize transgender but presents it as a transgression lived every day.” –Alice A. Kuzniar, THE QUEER GERMAN CINEMA

“A JFK airport motel serves as the fitting setting for an unmoored couple joined together only by their extreme alienation. The titular King Blank (Ron Vawter), rejected from the military on the basis of his psychosis, dons military garb as he cruises empty streets and plays with a blow-up doll. His wife Queenie (Hochschild, the film’s co-writer) works as a go-go dancer and endures the fantasies of patrons. This claustrophobic, moody feature continues Oblowitz’s foray into transgressive and psychosexual terrain, as the postmodern couple’s relationship devolves into the existential turmoil of displaced desire and projected frustration – or is it the other way around?” –MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

This early film by Michelangelo Antonioni bears the first signs of the cinema-changing style for which he would soon be world-famous. LE AMICHE (THE GIRLFRIENDS) is a brilliantly observed, fragmentary depiction of modern bourgeois life, conveyed from the perspective of five Turinese women. As four of the friends try to make sense of the suicide attempt of the fifth, they find themselves examining their own troubled romantic lives. With suggestions of the theme of modern alienation and the fastidious visual abstraction that would define his later masterpieces, Antonioni’s film is a devastating take on doomed love and fraught friendship.

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.

“[Here] Pollet made a work that is the very definition of what French critics like to call an ovni or ufo (as in ‘unidentified filmic object’). [It] has been described as being ‘like a comet in the sky of French cinema,’ an ‘unknown masterpiece,’ and an ‘unprecedented’ work that refuses interpretation even as it has provoked reams of critical writing. Its rhythmic collage of images – a girl on a gurney, a fisherman, Greek ruins, a Sicilian garden, a Spanish corrida – is accompanied by an abstract commentary written by Sollers, and only the somber lyricism of Antoine Duhamel’s score holds the film’s elements together. At first viewing, you fear that [it] might fly apart into incoherent fragments. Instead, over the course of its 45 minutes it invents its own rules, and you realize you’re watching something like the filmic channeling of an ancient ritual.” –Chris Darke, FILM COMMENT Jean-Daniel Pollet BASSAE 1964, 9 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles. Text by Alexandre Astruc. Pollet’s hypnotic visual study of the Greek archaeological site whose Doric temple, constructed by Ictinos and dedicated to Apollo, is one of the best preserved from Greek Antiquity. Total running time: ca. 60 min.

“Continuing her recent collection of film portraits, Tacita Dean’s MICHAEL HAMBURGER is a moving portrayal of the poet and translator, a resident of Middleton in Suffolk and great friend of W.G. Sebald. […] For its 28 minutes, the film quietly observes the poet in his study and among the apple trees in his garden. Sunlight dissolves the frames of the windows, the most insubstantial of thresholds between this home, only one-room-deep, and what lies outdoors; a rainbow marks its watery geometry in the sky; and the apples age upon the ground, shrunken, and yet somehow becoming more intensely themselves. […] Unwilling, perhaps unable, to talk of his past and his migrations, most especially fleeing Nazism in 1933, he talks poignantly, instead, of his apple trees, of where they have come from, and of their careful cross-breeding. Purity is dismissed, and one senses with an awkward pathos that the poet is translating himself.” –FILM AND VIDEO UMBRELLA “Dean’s film recasts [W.G. Sebald’s friend, the poet and translator Michael] Hamburger, a Jewish exile, as an intrepid protagonist whose psychic weariness is manifest in his obsession with cultivated apple varieties, particularly those commercially obsolete, a subtle reference to the ethnic categorization and genocide that motivated Hamburger’s exile. Shot on 16mm film, the film’s low, interior light and muted colors are punctuated by glimpses of intense yellows, apple-skin reds, and bright exterior shots, perhaps an allusion to Hamburger’s resilience.” –Courtney J. Martin, ARTFORUM Hollis Frampton ZORNS LEMMA 1970, 60 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives. “A major poetic work. Created and put together by a very clear eye-head, this original and complex abstract work moves beyond the letters of the alphabet, beyond words and beyond Freud. If you don’t understand it the first time you see it, don’t despair, see it again! When you finally ‘get it,’ a small light, possibly a candle, will light itself inside your forehead.” –Ernie Gehr Total running time: ca. 90 min.

“MINUS ZERO follows characters named after case studies by Sigmund Freud in an elliptical murder story. Saturated black-and-white 16mm cinematography transforms Manhattan into a science-fiction-like terrain as prostitute-informer Dora (Hochschild) and a pair of detectives (the Wooster Group’s Ron Vawter and Will Patton) traverse abandoned streets and the World Trade Center’s geometric esplanade. […] As Gary Indiana described it in a 1980 issue of East Village Eye, ‘MINUS ZERO is partly Raymond Chandler and Freud, ALPHAVILLE and Lacan, Wittgenstein and THE THIN MAN, but also manages to be MINUS ZERO, the end of language, life at the brink of the inexpressible, a virtuoso piece of filmmaking disguised as parody and homage.’” –MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Preceded by: Michael Oblowitz X-TERMINATOR 1977, 18 min, 16mm-to-DCP Michael Oblowitz TABLE CONVERSATION 1978, 10 min, 16mm-to-DCP. With Rosemary Hochschild, Eric Mitchell, and Anthony Piazza. Total running time: ca. 85 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.

NARROW ROOMS PRESENTS: DARK GAY SHORTS Spring may be just around the corner, but don’t expect sunshine and flowers this month. For our March selection, we’re screening three classic short films that exemplify our favorite gay subgenre: dark, dirty, and depressing! P. David Ebersole DEATH IN VENICE, CA 1994, 30 min, 16mm-to-DCP Ebersole’s adaptation of Thomas Mann’s classic novel, “Death in Venice”, begins when stressed-out writer Mason Carver comes to stay with his wife’s relative (Academy Award-nominee Shirley Knight) near the Venice Canals in west LA. As in Mann’s novel, Carver finds himself tempted, here by a seductive young gay relative. DEATH screened on opening night of San Francisco’s Frameline festival in 1994, together with last year’s Narrow Rooms rediscovery, Hisayasu Sato’s MUSCLE. François Ozon LITTLE DEATH / LA PETITE MORT 1995, 26 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles. Young gay photographer Paul is contacted by his sister after his father suffers a debilitating stroke. But Paul’s bitterness and resentment over their estrangement mean a tearful hospital reconciliation is highly unlikely. More grounded in reality than Ozon’s other early works, it still contains the mix of gay eroticism and audience provocation that would become staples of the French director’s most attention-grabbing films. Carter Smith BUGCRUSH 2006, 36 min, 35mm-to-DCP Adapted from a short story featured in the pioneering queer horror story collection “Queer Fear”, BUGCRUSH tells the unnerving tale of a closeted teenage outcast named Ben who becomes obsessed with a new kid after they meet in detention. Offering to drive his crush home after school, Ben finds himself tempted into a disturbing situation hinted at by the film’s title. Since his film became the most talked-about title at queer film festivals in 2006, director Carter Smith has continued to make horror films with a queer edge, including SWALLOWED, MIDNIGHT KISS, and JAMIE MARKS IS DEAD. Total running time: ca. 95 min.

One of the most influential gay films of the 1970s, Fassbinder’s 1975 drama tells the story of Fox, a down-on-his-luck carnival worker whose fortunes change when he wins the lottery. But his naivete and desire for love leave him vulnerable to Eugen, the effete leader of a predatory cadre of upper-class homosexual “friends,” who set about separating the foolish Fox from his newfound wealth. Starring Fassbinder himself in the title role, with supporting turns by RWF regulars Harry Baer, Brigitte Mira, Kurt Raab, and Karlheinz Böhm, FOX AND HIS FRIENDS is a searing, heartbreaking melodrama that illustrates Fassbinder’s view of love as a commodity that creates a capitalistic power imbalance in all human relationships. Hated by many gay men, who saw it as trashing our community during an era when we needed to be portrayed more positively, it also found fans who appreciated the film for its warts and all critique of gay bourgeois viciousness. One such fan was director John Waters, who named FOX one of his favorite films of the 1970s, and claimed that watching Fassbinder’s films was “better than drugs, liquor and sex put together.”

Over the course of a single nightshift, a West London hotel clerk (U.K. counterculture icon Jordan, and previously the star of Derek Jarman’s JUBILEE) plays mute witness to a nocturnal constellation of guests ranging from punk rockers and scenester magicians to seemingly staid businessmen and old-world gentry. As the hours march deeper into night and the varied clientele depart the waking world, the hotel transforms into an otherworldly, liminal space swaying between the everyday and the enchanting. Gorgeously photographed by filmmaker Jon Jost, with a soundtrack by Simon Jeffes of the legendary Penguin Cafe Orchestra, NIGHTSHIFT is both a potent snapshot of London’s early-1980s art scene (actor/poet Heathcote Williams and filmmaker Anne Rees-Mogg also star) and a bold, instantly engrossing artistic statement from director Robina Rose. Newly restored by Lightbox Film Center, and back in circulation thanks to Arbelos Films, NIGHTSHIFT is a beguiling masterwork of surreal, somnambulant cinema that casts a resonant and bewitching spell. “Some films [emerge from the archives] as though you had yourself wished them into being. One such gleaming jewel of ‘archive fever’ from the past year is NIGHTSHIFT, an extraordinary work of oneiric imagination, punkish sensibility, and a requiem to women’s labor in the hazy terrain of night work. […] Jon Jost provides his runic cinematographic eye (and appears briefly in the film) and the film’s stunning 16mm images suspend in their gelatinous amber the dusty charms of the hotel’s Vermeer-ish ambiance, conveying the peculiar liminality of being awake while others sleep, tending to the rhythms of night’s minutiae.” –Elena Gorfinkel, MUBI

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

“This exquisitely tuned portrait looks at the pioneering gay Marxist filmmaker-poet-theorist through his last days on Earth in November 1975, all interspersed with fanciful/macabre scenes from his unmade film PORNO-TEO-KOLOSSAL. Willem Dafoe embodies the 53-year-old Pasolini with a sensual cool and watchful intelligence, and the script by Maurizio Braucci luxuriates in the loving environment of his family and friends and in the outspoken intellectual’s choice quotations (starting with a gauntlet-throwing television interview). Pasolini’s insights at this point in his career have an apocalyptic ring, and that suits Ferrara well, in elegiac mode here, aided by supple, melancholically beautiful cinematography by Stefano Falivene, especially in the portrayal of the artist’s final, violent night. The act of Pasolini’s murder is rendered in full, twinned indelibly with acts of desire, and as for Ferrara’s opinion of who the guilty parties might be, the prominent placement of EUR, Rome’s Fascist architectural showcase, in montages is hard to ignore.” –Nicolas Rapold, FILM COMMENT

Anthology Film Archives is pleased to invite members at the Contributor, Donor, and Preservation donor tiers to an exclusive free screening of preservation works-in-progress. This program inaugurates a new effort by Anthology to provide greater insight into the archive’s process, and to showcase new preservations in advance of their public premieres. Works will be selected and introduced by John Klacsmann, Anthology’s Archivist. To sign up, renew, or upgrade your membership in person, visit Anthology’s box office during opening hours, or you can do so online at www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/support

“[This work] dares to violate every remaining shred of ‘good taste’ using the vehicle of Brecht and Weill’s much-abused ‘Moritat von Mackie Messer,’ aka ‘Mack the Knife.’ Over 200 versions collide, taking you from its origins in Weimar Berlin to the multiple travesties of Rat Pack Vegas and the many imitators of each on East Block TV and in cheesy Jersey nightclubs. Further stops along the way include Midwestern High School chorus practice and performances of ivy college a capella groups, not to mention jazz improvisation sessions, talent shows, and rockers doing high Kultur! A splendid time is guaranteed for all.” –Keith Sanborn

The poet Walter Kranz (Kurt Raab) faces a total creative crisis: Once called the “poet of the revolution,” he has not produced a word in two years. What remains are debts, a haranguing wife (Helen Vita), and a dim-witted brother (Volker Spengler) who collects dead flies. But after Kranz kills his rich lover, the blood in his poetic vein is revitalized. Yet, the work turns out to be a plagiarism of a poem by Stefan George. This is when Kranz develops the mania to be George himself. The savings of his glowing admirer (Margit Carstensen) permit him to engage young actors to play, for good pay, an admiring circle of disciples. Among Kranz’s creative exercises is also the attempt to succeed as a homosexual. But then the money is gone, including the funds Kranz stole from his parents and extracted from a prostitute. The “disciples” disappear. Now Kranz turns totally megalomaniac. Fascist ideas overcome him. There is no way to stop the chaos in the madhouse. And this is only a fragment of madness that ensues when Fassbinder, for the first and last time, decides to make a comedy.

“SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE is a wickedly fabricated behind-the-scenes yarn about the production of the movie NOSFERATU (1922). […] Even though it earned [Willem Dafoe] an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, it remains an unduly obscure entry in his filmography. It’s the second feature directed by E. Elias Merhige, a work of straight-faced and ingenious giddiness – a riotous yet loving laugh up the ample sleeve of cinematic history that’s also a substantial and troubled contemplation of the art.” –Richard Brody, NEW YORKER Preceded by: John Lurie FISHING WITH JOHN: EPISODE 4 1991, 24 min, digital In arguably the most surreal episode of John Lurie’s cult cable TV series “Fishing With John”, Lurie and Dafoe embark on an ice-fishing adventure in northern Maine, but, ill-prepared and inexperienced, the trip soon devolves into a desperate – albeit soporific – struggle for survival. Total running time: ca. 120 min.

One of the rarest items in Schlingensief’s filmography, SHEEP IN WALES was his first film based on another writer’s script. Made for German television, it “has an unmistakable style, fascinating for its dense atmosphere, grotesque caricaturing of the protagonists, and the layered dramatic elements that are fragmented into each other” (STUTTGARTER NACHRICHTEN). “Perpetrators and victims in the generational conflict, wolves in Berlin and sheep in Wales. Contrary to popular expectations, but in keeping with Schlingensief’s cosmos, the perpetrators whose criminal desire guarantees survival (as well as the work of art) are the children: the chubby and nimble twins Felix and Jacob. Wolves scurry in the Tegel Forest, a brightly lit subway rumbles through the cold night and unites the protagonists. An adult (Volker Spengler) seeks the children’s friendship in order to exchange desperation and aggression for childlike security and impartiality. […] The fascination of the world of fathers and the sinful thrill of getting rid of them are expressed in what Schlingensief deliberately exaggerates and drives into a macabre grotesque. The emotional layering of the dramaturgical elements, noises, sound and music, largely freed from their narrative connection, releases intensities that lead to direct communication.” –LICHTBLICK-KINO

“‘Instead of looking, I prefer to listen,’ says one character to another in cult Swiss author Robert Walser’s ‘Snow White,’ which provides the fitting source for this ground-breaking adaptation. Beginning with photographs of Walser (who spent most of his years in a mental asylum, and is best known for [his novel ‘Jakob von Gunten’]) lying dead in the alpine snow, SNOW WHITE quickly abandons image entirely, or at least the traditional version of it, and instead uses words alone to create vision. A fade to black that lasts the entire film, interspersed with sudden shots of clouds floating across a blue sky, accompany a series of actors voicing the entire story. Similar to Jarman’s BLUE in radical concept, SNOW WHITE embraces the question…‘Do pictures negate the intensity of vision?’ Does one see more clearly, when one has only words to see? Challenging, radical, and essential.” –PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

As counter-programming to Disney’s new version of SNOW WHITE, coming soon to multiplexes near you, we offer the first U.S. screenings of Stanley Schtinter’s SNOW WHITE / SCHNEEWITTCHEN. Schtinter’s film encompasses multiple levels of adaptation: taking as its source the great Swiss writer Robert Walser’s radical reinterpretation of the German fairy tale, Schtinter’s film is simultaneously a remake of Portuguese filmmaker João César Monteiro’s BRANCA DE NEVE (2000). A filmmaker, artist, writer, and curator (who extends curation into the realm of conceptual art), Schtinter was responsible for London’s experiment in film presentation, the Liberated Film Club, and was last seen in New York presenting a program in connection with his curatorial project and book “Last Movies” (which elaborated a highly original curatorial framework by focusing on the last movies seen by various famous figures before their deaths). Like BRANCA DE NEVE, SCHNEEWITTCHEN is a predominantly sound-based work, its image track consisting of a black screen, intermittently punctuated by fleeting images of clouds (photographed by cinematographer Sean Price Williams). Featuring an incongruously star-studded cast of voice actors, including Stacy Martin as Snow White, Julie Christie as the Evil Queen, Toby Jones as the Prince, Stephen Dillane as the King, and Hanns Zischler as the Hunter, SCHNEEWITTCHEN features evocative sound design by artist and filmmaker Joshua Bonnetta. “In Walser’s radical reworking of the Grimm fable, a resurrected Snow White reconciles with the Evil Queen, denying any foul play and even seeking forgiveness for provoking her jealousy. A parable for our post-truth times, Schtinter’s film provokes reflection on the ontology of a tale as it travels across languages, mediums, geographies and eras.” –Srikanth Srinivasan, INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM

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.

This typically anarchic comedy by Christoph Schlingensief finds some of the surviving members of the Fassbinder ensemble attempting to make the Last New German Film, a remake of Pasolini’s THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM. Producer Volker Spengler sends an agent (Schlingensief) to Hollywood where he meets Udo Kier, Kitten Natividad, and Roland Emmerich on a mission to raise money and get ex-Visconti superstar Helmut Berger to appear in the film. Depicting a German cultural scene at the turn of the century that still has not come to terms with the legacy of New German Cinema, Schlingensief tackles the topic once and for all: with endless references both open and obscure, Schlingensief takes the process of de- and reconstruction just far enough to both completely demystify and pay tribute to an era and its heritage. Part parody, part heartfelt homage, THE 120 DAYS OF BOTTROP gives New German Cinema its final coup de grâce. Followed by: Claude-Oliver Rudolph THE FAT REBEL / DER DICKE REBELL 1987, 45-min excerpt, 16mm-to-DCP. In German with English subtitles. Though a relatively conventional documentary portrait, compared to HIGHFALUTIN, this film by Claude-Oliver Rudolph (better known as an actor, thanks to his roles in films like Werner Schroeter’s PALERMO OR WOLFSBURG, Wolfgang Petersen’s DAS BOOT and the James Bond movie, THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH) sheds a great deal of light on Volker Spengler’s life, career, and outsized personality. [We will be screening the first 45 minutes of the film, omitting only a final 20-minute sequence that documents one of Spengler’s stage performances.] Total running time: ca. 110 min.

PROGRAM 1 Gordon Matta-Clark FIRE CHILD 1971, 10 min, 16mm FRESH KILL 1972, 13 min, 16mm BINGO/NINTHS 1974, 10 min, 16mm SPLITTING 1974, 11 min, 16mm CITY SLIVERS 1976, 15 min, 16mm-to-digital Total running time: ca. 65 min.

Gordon Matta-Clark CONICAL INTERSECT 1975, 19 min, 16mm Eric Convents & Roger Steylaerts OFFICE BAROQUE 1977-2005, 44 min, 16mm-to-digital Total running time: ca. 65 min.

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

The feature debut of both Willem Dafoe and Kathryn Bigelow, THE LOVELESS takes place in the late 1950s, a time of generational conflict, of immense social change, of bold fashions and toe-tapping music. A motorcycle gang roars into a small southern town en route to the Daytona races, unnerving and angering the locals with their standoffish attitude and disrespect for social niceties. When one of their number, the charismatic Vance (Dafoe), hooks up with sportscar-driving Telena (Marin Kanter), he incurs the wrath of the girl’s father, setting the gang on a collision course with the rest of the town as simmering tensions boil over into violent retribution. Raw, angry and honest, THE LOVELESS evokes, with unflinching clarity, both an attitude and a bygone era, exploring the tensions between two very different Americas. Preceded by: Burt Barr & James Benning O PANAMA 1985, 27 min, video Written and directed by video artist Burt Barr in collaboration with filmmaker James Benning, O PANAMA features Willem Dafoe as a man confined to his apartment on a winter day as he suffers through an illness. Built on the polarity between hot and cold, the tedious reality of the man’s sickness, and the vivid hallucinatory visions of his delirium, O PANAMA conveys the workings of the subconscious. Total running time: ca. 115 min.

“An audacious female-centric revenge flick swathed in faded neon, religious iconography, and leopard prints. […] Strip club matriarch Queen Mary (Oblowitz’s real-life mother Rosemary Hochschild) has spent three decades leaning in. But on her 60th birthday, a gangster from her past informs her the business she built was never actually hers. They’ve also taken her son, Otto (Oblowitz). If she wants to see him again and repay an old ‘debt,’ all she has to do is knock off a snitch and hand over her keys to the club. The Queen embarks on a survival strategy to save her son and her legacy.” –Melinda Green, BOSTON UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL Preceded by: Adele Bertei VENUS FLYTRAP! 2017, 11 min, digital In this short film by renowned singer, songwriter, and author Adele Bertei – conceived of as a proof-of-concept for a web series – pangender Tazmanian devil Tink holds auditions for her punk feminist band. Playing Tink’s punk-rock grandmother, Rosemary Hochschild turns in a scene-stealing performance. Total running time: ca. 110 min.

“Piñeiro’s sparkling debut film breathlessly follows a clever, capricious young woman as she carefully interweaves friends and lovers into an intricate web of secretive yet often unexpectedly compassionate games. Together with her best friend and fellow tour guide at a rival Buenos Aires historical museum, Piñeiro’s headstrong heroine attempts to tame the unpredictable course of her heart, eccentrically drawing inspiration from Sarmiento’s magnum opus, ‘Facundo’. With its grainy 16mm black-and-white cinematography, its political sub- and super-texts and its compelling portrait of impetuous youth, THE STOLEN MAN recalls the alternately sober and sprightly nouvelle vague of Jean Eustache and Jacques Rivette.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

Fassbinder’s follow-up to his international breakthrough THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN is a wildly anarchic satire of guerrilla terrorism in which a band of leftist radicals inadvertently become puppets of the West German government, which uses them to justify its authoritarian policies. Taking aim at the entire spectrum of political ideologies, THE THIRD GENERATION stands as one of Fassbinder’s most provocative and explosively controversial explorations of power and control. “The Baader-Meinhof Gang’s attacks provide the backdrop for Fassbinder’s hectic, funny, prismatically intricate political thriller, from 1979. It begins with a high-rolling businessman (Eddie Constantine), in a chilling modern office high above Berlin, at work with his assistant (Hanna Schygulla), who turns out to be a mole from a revolutionary cell that is plotting spectacular crimes. The teeming cast of characters includes a cynical police detective (Hark Bohm) whose son (Udo Kier) is one of the plotters, and a drug addict (Y Sa Lo) who brings a former Army explosives specialist (Günther Kaufmann) into the group. Slapstick comedy (including a game of keep-away with a volume of Bakunin) and oddball habits (the terrorists dress like prewar gangsters and play Monopoly) contrast with wild visions (as when the detective dreams that ‘capitalism invented terrorism to force the state to protect it better’).” –Richard Brody, NEW YORKER

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 program of shorts organized by Kathy Brew – including works by several artists affiliated with the29.art, with support from Women Make Movies – examines issues of conformity among women, challenges gender stereotypes, and advocates for female agency. The works, presented chronologically, span from 1989 to 2024, and underscore the fact that a woman’s right to control her own body remains critical in these dangerous times. Kathy High I NEED YOUR FULL COOPERATION 1989, 5-min excerpt, digital Kathy Brew MIXED MESSAGES 1990, 20 min, digital Aline Mare S’ALINE’S SOLUTION 1991, 9 min, digital Jacqueline Frank CHOICE THOUGHTS: REFLECTIONS ON THE BIRTH CONTROL WAR 1996, 10 min, digital Queen Elizabeth (aka Liz Canner) & Murphy Brown (aka Lara Pellegrinelli) WHY WE MARCH: SIGNS OF PROTEST AND HOPE, VOICES FROM THE WOMEN’S MARCH AFTER TRUMP WAS ELECTED IN 2016 2017, 9 min, digital Barbara Attie, Janet Goldwater, and Mike Attie ABORTION HELPLINE, THIS IS LISA 2019, 13 min, digital Lynne Sachs CONTRACTIONS 2024, 12 min, digital Total running time: ca. 85 min.

Audrey Chen [UNTITLED] (2021, 17 min, digital) Sydney Spann ATTACHED OR DETACHED (PARTIAL DISAPPEARANCE) (2021, 24 min, digital) Annabelle Playe AD ASTRA (2021, 38 min, digital) crys cole VALID FOREVERRRRRRRRRR… (PT.1) (2021, 19 min, digital) Total running time: ca. 100 min.

Maayan Tsadka SONIC BOTANY: RA’ASH ADAMA (EARTHNOISE) 2021, 55 min, digital Annea Lockwood PIANO BURNING 2021, 59 min, digital. Performed by Vanessa Tomlinson. Curated by Lawrence English (Room40) and presented as part of Brisbane Festival 2021. Film by Greg Harm (Tangible Media). Total running time: ca. 120 min

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.

The Wooster Group & Ken Kobland FLAUBERT DREAMS OF TRAVEL BUT THE ILLNESS OF HIS MOTHER PREVENTS IT 1986, 20 min, video. Director: Elizabeth LeCompte; photography/editor/score: Ken Kobland. This piece focuses on images of death and transcendence as suggested by the writings of Gustave Flaubert. The film was made in conjunction with the Wooster Group’s theater production “Frank Dell’s The Temptation of St. Antony”, a re-invention of Flaubert’s epic “closet drama” about the visions and ecstasies of the fourth-century hermit St. Antony. The Wooster Group WHITE HOMELAND COMMANDO 1992, 62.5 min, video. Director: Elizabeth LeCompte; teleplay: Michael Kirby; Director of Photography: Ken Kobland. WHITE HOMELAND COMMANDO is TWG’s 1992 full-length video originally shown at the New York Film Festival and included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial. Michael Kirby’s teleplay profiles four white supremacists and four anti-terrorist police officers in an interweaving Structuralist plot. “Nothing if not medium specific WHC makes video noise and glitches read like psychotic brainstorms. Solarized and colorized, the punchy mise-en-scene is made to the measure of Avenue B after dark…. Needless to say, the ensemble acting is impeccable.” –VILLAGE VOICE Total running time: ca. 85 min.

The Wooster Group RHYME ’EM TO DEATH 1994, 10.5 min, video. Director: Elizabeth LeCompte; cinematography: Leslie Thornton; editor: Christopher Kondek; screenplay: Kate Valk & Marianne Weems. Included in the 1995 Whitney Biennial, RHYME ’EM TO DEATH reconstructs the trial from Victor Hugo’s “Hunchback of Notre Dame” from a new perspective, that of a minor character – the goat. The trial of the goat, a postscript in the Hugo novel, has been extended and enlivened with actual transcripts of 15th-century trials in which animals were persecuted as witches. The Wooster Group WRONG GUYS 1997, 41 min, 35mm-to-digital. Adapted from the short novel “Wrong Guys” by James Strahs; directed by Elizabeth LeCompte; cinematographer/editor: Ken Kobland; videographer/video effects editor: Christopher Kondek; music: John Lurie. Adapted from a novella by James Strahs (the author of “Queer and Alone”, as well as the Wooster Group’s play, “North Atlantic”), this unfinished 1997 film from the Wooster Group was first shown as part of the 1997 Whitney Biennial. Aside from a screening as part of Anthology’s tribute to the Group in 2012, it has rarely been seen since. Adopting the tone and visual style of film noir, WRONG GUYS features Willem Dafoe as Jack Straw. A small-time operator who used to run a “pharmaceutical outfit,” his life is upended when an accident changes everything and he ends up in a survivalist camp. Created independently of the Wooster Group’s theatrical productions, WRONG GUYS is a fascinating and little-seen work. Total running time: ca. 55 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.

An adaptation of “Sea Foam”, a chapter in Cesare Pavese’s “Dialogues with Leucò”, Matías Piñeiro’s latest film is an intimate and expansive meditation on death and desire and a thrilling exploration of the possibilities of adapting text to film. In “Sea Foam”, Pavese stages a fictional dialogue between the ancient Greek poet Sappho and the nymph Britomartis (played by frequent Piñeiro collaborators Gabi Saidón and María Villar). Sappho has thrown herself into the ocean from heartbreak. Britomartis has fallen off a cliff into the water while fleeing a man. Reuniting at the shore, they discuss life, death, and the bittersweet nature of desire. But Piñeiro, known for his series of metatextual films dealing with the translation and performance of Shakespeare, is not content to simply restage a dialogue and instead infuses the film with footnotes and lacunae: the fragmentary poetry of Sappho, by whom only one complete poem still exists; the circumstances of Pavese’s death, heartbroken in a Turin hotel room; and the science of sea foam with its connections to disease and fertility. In this ebb and flow of death and desire, YOU BURN ME introduces a game of translation and memorization, a game intrinsic to the moving image that may just save Sappho, Pavese, Piñeiro, and the audience from oblivion. “An ingenious and open-ended translation of Pavese’s dialogues, Sappho’s poems (which mostly survive today as fragments of phrases), and various other footnotes from the lives of both writers, YOU BURN ME looks to these source texts not as material to adapt faithfully or ‘visualize,’ but instead as their own potent cinematic form. […] But what’s most fascinating is how Piñeiro goes about his translation, carving out his own richly personal associations from the living remnants of an always unfinished past. And while YOU BURN ME is, in some ways, of a thematic piece with the rest of Piñeiro’s work, it’s also a major leap into new territory. It’s a resolutely intimate and handmade film that burrows even deeper into its filmmaker’s obsessions: the lure of marginalia; the act of reading, translating, drawing, and making music; and the drive to imprint oneself on things for the sake of it.” –Michael Blair, FILM COMMENT Preceded by: PREFACE TO THE LITTLE DIALOGUE / PREFACIO PARA EL DIALOGUITO 2025, 6 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Spanish with English subtitles. “Gerard Borràs, the editor of YOU BURN ME, said at the end of our work together, ‘This film could continue being edited forever: let’s finish it.’ He was right and so we found its balance. Still, there was one idea I was not able to include in the feature. Around its premiere at the 2024 Berlinale, I said, ‘I could make a preface to the film around this missing point – after all, Pavese wrote a preface to the book ‘Dialogues with Leucò’ and also one preface to each of its 20 chapters, including ‘Sea Foam’, the chapter we adapted. So, one year after finishing YOU BURN ME, and with all new footage specially shot and edited for the occasion, here is our little preface…” –Matías Piñeiro