“A crystalline expression of Duras’s central themes – memory, desire, lost or forbidden love – AGATHA stars Duras’s companion Yann Andréa and Bulle Ogier as brother and sister. They arrange to rendezvous in the Hôtel des Roches Noires in the seaside village of Trouville because the hotel reminds them of the house they grew up in. There, engulfed by an expanse of sea and sky which turns into a confluence of memory, they wander through the château of endless windows and mirrors and empty rooms, finally confronting their incestuous desires. Among Duras’s most radical experiments, AGATHA not only separates image and text, but also concludes with a bravura, sustained use of black frame over which the denouement of the tale is narrated.” –James Quandt

As funny as they are unsettling, as affectionate as they are trenchant, and made with a refreshing concision that belies the depth of their cultural and social observations, the short documentaries of Rhody Streeter and Tony Ganz are ripe for rediscovery. Featured in their day on the public television series “The Great American Dream Machine” and “The 51st State,” and screened in the 1970s at MoMA, Film Forum and the Whitney Museum, as well as in a program curated by Amos Vogel at the Annenberg School for Communication, Ganz and Streeter’s work (which was produced under the banner of Tunbridge Films) has since fallen into obscurity, kept alive only through the devoted efforts of various film collectors and programmers. But now, thanks to Jacob Perlin and The Film Desk, a number of the films have been newly restored and are poised to regain their rightful place as some of the most eccentric and hilarious examples of 1970s documentary filmmaking in the U.S. Turning their mordant, deadpan eye on a wide variety of uniquely American phenomena – from retirees in Sun Valley and honeymooners in the Poconos to sign painters in Brooklyn, phone help-line operators, female comportment instructors, Muzak executives, and the denizens of a Bowery men’s shelter – Streeter and Ganz’s films deserve to be set alongside such masterpieces of satirical Americana as Errol Morris’s early films, Garry Winogrand’s photographs, and John Wilson’s short films and television work. We’re thrilled to host the week-long premiere run of The Film Desk’s new compilation of Ganz and Streeter’s short films, with the filmmakers in person! “Kitsch hotels for newly-weds, well-fed Jesus freaks, plastic retirement villages, Muzak executives who confirm one’s worst suspicions: these slashing self-indictments – entirely documentary – are among the most controversial political films in America today.” –Amos Vogel THE BEST OF YOUR LIFE (aka SUN CITY) (1971, 8.5 min, 16mm-to-digital) HONEYMOON HOTEL (1971, 3.5 min, 16mm-to-digital) RISEN INDEED (aka CAMPUS CRUSADE FOR CHRIST) (1972, 5.5 min, 16mm-to-digital) HOI – VILLAGE LIFE IN TONGA (1967-69, 8.5-min excerpt, 16mm-to-digital) A BETTER DAY IN EVERY WAY (aka MUZAK) (1972, 5.5 min, 16mm-to-digital) HELP-LINE (1972, 5.5 min, 16mm-to-digital) WOMAN UNLIMITED (1972, 4 min, 16mm-to-digital) SIGN PAINTERS (aka SIGNS) (1972, 6 min, 16mm-to-digital) BOWERY MEN’S SHELTER (1973, 10 min, 16mm-to-digital) A TRIP THROUGH THE BROOKS HOME (1971-73, 7.5 min, 16mm-to-digital) Total running time: ca. 65 min.

In Kaurismäki’s drolly existential crime drama, a coal miner named Taisto attempts to leave behind a provincial life of inertia and economic despair, only to get into ever deeper trouble. Yet a minor-key romance with a hilariously dispassionate meter maid might provide a light at the end of a very dark tunnel. ARIEL, which boasts a terrific soundtrack of Finnish tango and Baltic pop music and lovely cinematography by Kaurismäki’s longtime cameraman Timo Salmimen, put its director on the international map.

THE NEON ROSE (1961-65, 41 min, 16mm) The narrative form expanded, utilizing non-linear sequences within a linear structure. Past, Present, and Future are interwoven and therefore perceived as existing on the same plane. AUTOMATIC FREE FORM FILM (1968, 16 min, 16mm, silent) “A series of exquisite camera creations using a few scraps of phenomena culled from both city and forest for its basic color/light materials, the film has the perfect tension, quietude, impossible existence of a beautifully colored floating soapbubble (and you can even sense it pop at the end).” –Ken Jacobs Total running time: ca. 60 min.

GROUP I: GRASS (1969, 1 min, 16mm, silent) Grass to reeds to sky – the gradual melting of grass image to become the blue of the sky. ICE (1969, 2 min, 16mm, silent) Sensual icicle images in process of melting – drops of water eventually fall. SNOW (1969, 1 min, 16mm, silent) The mystery of snow illusion – a snow-covered walkway is followed to a short flight of steps to a bicycle wheel transposed by snow. VIBRATIONS (1969, 8 min, 16mm, silent) “VIBRATIONS is a truly photographic poetry, a transformation of sunlight into art light.” –Michael Snow GROUP II: WATER (1969, 4 min, 16mm, silent) Two images of a lapping water level, used at the beginning and end of the film, counterpointing the middle section consisting of flying through clouds and mist. CONTEMPLATING (1969, 12 min, 16mm, silent) The body fluids reacting in unison with the ocean waters. GENERATIONS (1969, 8 min, 16mm, silent) [D]ynamic shapes emitting energy from the living forms created by subtle camera movements combined with compositional awareness. GROUP III: SUNLIGHT (1970, 4 min, 16mm, silent) Sunlight patterns on a window in constant change through subtle camera swings – the motions repeated giving the light a fluid quality. FLOATING (1970, 15 min, 16mm, silent) Moving images from a windowsill looking out on a cityscape transformed in time and space. AFTERNOON (1970, 8 min, 16mm, silent) A darkened room in Time with yellow sunlight streaming onto the floor through parted red curtains gently swaying in the breeze. Total running time: ca. 70 min.

GROUP IV: BEADED LIGHT (1970, 4 min, 16mm, silent) “In BEADED LIGHT, Gerson applies an ambiguous procedure to our perception of color and light.” –Bill Simon, ARTFORUM DISSOLVING (1970, 4 min, 16mm, silent) An ambiguous shiny grey substance at the bottom part of the frame counterpoints horizontals of clouds and fog as the camera moves up and down – shifting the perspective and therefore the space. A lone bird flies across on a perfect horizontal path. BEYOND (1970, 4 min, 16mm, silent) “The foreground discloses the red hair and the shoulders of a girl lying on a beach. [...] At the very end of the film, he raises the camera to a higher angle and the portions of the beach previously obscured by the girl’s form becomes visible and the two spaces – the girl and beach, foreground and background – are joined.” –Bill Simon, ARTFORUM GROUP VII: PORTRAIT OF DIANA (1970, 4 min, 16mm, silent) PORTRAIT OF ANDREW NOREN (1972, 4 min, 16mm, silent) These films are personal light portraits. I consider them unique and beautiful. LUMINOUS ZONE (1973, 28 min, 16mm, silent) The film is composed of six sections, each having a basic image which is recognizable only in part. The images are framed by various sized black rectangular mattes. [...] Specific rhythms are developed through the use of single frame in conjunction with changing rectangular matte sizes which in turn makes the screen appear to change size. TRANSLUCENT APPEARANCES (1975, 22 min, 16mm-to-digital) “In [this film], thirty-five different shots of Niagara Falls are blocked by horizontal, monochromatic mattes. The object is shaped – water flowing seeking a form that will suffice.” –Mónica Savirón, LUMIÈRE Total running time: ca. 75 min.

THE SECRET ABYSS (1979, 12 min, 16mm) Evocations of a space in the mind – limitless, soundless. Blackness punctuated by bursting water bubbles ascending and descending into the unknown. The color red evokes feelings of the inner self – a microcosmic viewpoint for an expansion of time and space. SHADOW SPACE (1973, 6 min, 16mm) A confined space alive and teeming with energy – shapes merge forming new shapes. CELLULOID ILLUMINATIONS (1975, 32 min, 16mm) The film is in three sections each dealing with a different manifestation of the relationships between colors and shapes and their effect on our perception of movement through light. EPISODES FROM THE SECRET LIFE (1982, 30 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent) Poetic structure created through masking out of two separate images juxtaposing opposite motions, resulting in two visions of the world being viewed simultaneously. Our ideas about space and time, and about what and how we perceive are challenged. Total running time: ca. 85 min.

“Since 2001, my use of the observed world has, to some extent, given way to an imagined space created in the studio through the use of minimal sets composed of objects, which I paint, interacting with controlled light and shadow. At a certain point in time, I began to mix the use of studio objects with elements of the real world. This has enabled me to meld my mind images with material from the natural world. An emphasis is placed on light, color, and texture, elucidated by the use of slow, deliberate, camera movements. This creates a sense, as if one is feeling, touching, the images, i.e., forms responded to by one’s whole body. It becomes an ‘imagistic sculpture’, about volumes in motion and space.” –Barry Gerson LATE SUMMER (2013, 11 min, digital, silent) STRETCH AND PULL (2014, 3 min, digital, silent) THE UNIVERSE (2009, 7 min, digital) CRYSTAL CANYONS (2016, 3 min, digital, silent) LEAVES OF LIGHT (2022, 4 min, digital) FOGGED WINDOWS (2013, 17 min, digital, silent) SNOWS OF REDUCTION (2010-12, 5.5 min, digital, silent) BLUE FOLLIES (2012, 13 min, digital, silent) MEXICO (2023, 3.5 min, digital Total running time: ca. 70 min.

Rahmaneh Rabani was raised in a conservative religious household in Iran. In her early twenties, she deviated from her strict upbringing and began to live an increasingly secular lifestyle. After the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iranian authorities in 2022 and the wave of protests that followed, Rabani’s conflict with her family reignited. In IMPASSE, she documents her direct and emotional conversations with three generations of family members, most of them steadfastly supportive of the government and its mandatory hijab laws. Produced in collaboration with Bahman Kiarostami, IMPASSE offers an intimate portrait of Iranian society at a critical juncture.

PROGRAM 1: DISCO 2000 1990, 30 sec, video One of a trio of works Atlas made to celebrate downtown New York nightlife at the beginning of the 1990s, DISCO 2000 mixes footage of a crowded dance floor, homemade optical effects, and a dancing chicken. IT’S A JACKIE THING 1999, 29 min, video “‘Jackie 60’ was a weekly party at the nightclub Mother, in New York’s Meatpacking District. I went faithfully, every Tuesday night, all through the 90s. I didn’t always bring a camera – I usually went just to have fun – but sometimes I shot the performances. […] When ‘Jackie 60’ ended in 1999, the promoters Chi Chi Valenti and Johnny Dynell asked me to contribute a video to show at the closing event. So, I edited together my footage, choosing the best moments. The result captures an era of brilliant drag performance.” –Charles Atlas THE LEGEND OF LEIGH BOWERY 2002, 84 min, video. Music: Richard Torry, Minty. In this documentary feature, Atlas examines the legend and the life of his friend and collaborator – artist, performer, fashion designer, model, and club promoter and icon Leigh Bowery. In a remarkable and brief period before his early death from AIDS-related illness in 1994, Bowery made an indelible mark on nightlife, fashion, and artmaking in London, New York, and beyond. Through a wealth of archival footage and frank and uncensored interviews with friends, family, and fellow artists, Atlas traces the extraordinary impact Bowery had on culture, recalling his infamous nightclub Taboo, his collaborations with dancer and choreographer Michael Clark, his time as a muse to Lucien Freud, and his notorious, innovative, and influential fashions and performances. The result is a complex, candid portrait of a singular talent – and a legend. Total running time: ca. 120 min.

PROGRAM 10: THE “MARTHA” TAPES, PART 4 1996-2000, 23 min, video [See the description for THE “MARTHA” TAPES in Program 2.] MORE MEN 1982, 90 min, video A double-screen video portrait of Atlas’s father and a host of fictional sons, featuring performers John Erdman, Michael Bloom, and Joseph Lennon. Total running time: ca. 120 min.

PROGRAM 2: THE “MARTHA” TAPES, PART 10 1996-2000, 16 min, video “Starting in 1997 I began to make found-footage montages for a once-a-month downtown NY performance club called ‘Martha @ Mother’. It was hosted by the performance artist Richard Move in his satirical impersonation of Martha Graham, the iconic 20th century modern dance choreographer. My videos presented a hyperactive mix of all kinds of dance styles ranging from the serious and minimal to the entertaining and irreverent – all sprinkled with comments about dance and call-outs to ‘Martha’ characters from Hollywood films.” –Charles Atlas SSS 1989, 5.5 min, video. Made in collaboration with Marina Abramovic. In this video portrait of Marina Abramovic, Abramovic delivers a monologue that traces a concise personal chronology. This brief narrative history, which references her past in former Yugoslavia, her performance work, and her collaboration with and separation from Ulay, is intercut with images of Abramovic engaged in symbolic gestures and ritual acts – scrubbing her feet, staring like Medusa as snakes writhe on her head. Closing her litany with the phrase “time past, time present,” Abramovic invokes the personal and the mythological in a poignant affirmation of self. CALVIN KLEIN CAMPAIGN 2015, 8.5 min, digital Two films made for the Calvin Klein 2015 Fall Campaign. SON OF SAM AND DELILAH 1991, 27 min, video “New York City 1988. Raging homophobia. A killer on the loose. Disco dancing till dawn. Performers struggle to survive. Delilah seduces Samson in song. Gender illusionists go shopping. Samson and Delilah, 1991. This tape is an entertaining amalgam of cross-cut scenes featuring New York performance luminaries including John Kelly, Hapi Phace, and DANCENOISE. It is a dark vision of an America where life is cheap and even the moments of tenderness have a life-threatening edge.” –Charles Atlas BECAUSE WE MUST 1989, 52.5 min, video. Choreography: Michael Clark. In BECAUSE WE MUST, Atlas continued his collaboration with British choreographer Michael Clark, the enfant terrible of the dance world in the 1980s. Based on an original stage production at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London, this is an ironic, irreverent work that is as entertaining as it is provocative. The extravagant stylization and burlesque humor that pervade the choreography, costuming and staging are mirrored by Atlas’s focus on the theatricality of the performance and the artifice of the behind-the-scenes narrative. Clark thumbs his nose at the conventions of “serious” dance, composing outrageously unexpected and inventive scenarios that include a nude dancer wielding a chain-saw and a psychedelic interlude, all exquisitely, if ironically, performed. Total running time: ca. 115 min. Thurs, May 16 at 7:30.

PROGRAM 3: THE “MARTHA” TAPES, PART 6 1996-2000, 14.5 min, video [See the description for THE “MARTHA” TAPES in Program 2.] FROM AN ISLAND SUMMER 1984, 13 min, 16mm-to-video. Choreography: Karole Armitage. Atlas’s exuberantly hip homage to a specific time and place – New York, August 1983 – is a dance “home movie,” a quasi-documentary that follows choreographer Karole Armitage and her dancers along the boardwalk of Coney Island and through the streets of Times Square. HAIL THE NEW PURITAN 1986, 85 min, 16mm-to-video. Choreography: Michael Clark; music: The Fall and Bruce Gilbert. Exuberant and witty, HAIL THE NEW PURITAN is a simulated day-in-the-life “docufantasy” starring the British dance celebrity Michael Clark. Atlas’s fictive portrait of the charismatic choreographer serves as a vivid invocation of the studied decadence of the 1980s post-punk London subculture. Contriving a faux cinéma-vérité format in which to stage his stylized fiction, Atlas seamlessly integrates Clark’s extraordinary dance performances into the docu-narrative flow. Focusing on Clark’s flamboyantly postured eroticism and the artifice of his provocative balletic performances, Atlas posits the dance as a physical manifestation of Clark’s psychology. From the surreal opening dream sequence to the final solo dance, Clark’s milieu of fashion, clubs, and music signifies for Atlas “a time capsule of a certain period and context in London that’s now gone.” Total running time: ca. 115 min.

PROGRAM 4: AS SEEN ON TV 1987, 25 min, video. Made in collaboration with Bill Irwin. Choreography: William Whitener and Diane Martel. In AS SEEN ON TV, “new vaudevillian” performance artist Bill Irwin is the subject of a wryly comic performance narrative. Framed by the storyline of a parodic theatrical audition, Irwin plays a hapless Everyman who inadvertently becomes trapped inside a television set. Displaying an antic physical comedy that has been likened to a contemporary rendering of Chaplin’s Little Tramp, Irwin wanders, baffled, through the television space, caught in the flow of televised soap operas, commercials, sitcoms, and ballets. EX-ROMANCE 1986, 48.5 min, 16mm-to-video. Choreography: Karole Armitage; music: Jeffrey Lohn. Atlas’s fascination with “narrative, psychology, dance, and flights of fantasy,” is manifested in this dynamic videodance musical. Here the postmodern choreography of Karole Armitage is performed by Armitage, Michael Clark, and others, to American pop and Latin music. Framed and interrupted by the ironic observations of two parodic “public television” commentators, the dancers play fictionalized versions of themselves in a wry tale of contemporary romance, in which the dance literally and metaphorically advances the narrative. Atlas deftly stages elaborate dance sequences in unlikely settings – an airport lounge, a gas station, a baggage conveyor belt – that are presented alternately as fact and fantasy. PARAFANGO 1984, 37.5 min, video. Choreography: Karole Armitage; music: David Linton. Magnetic performances by Karole Armitage, Michael Clark, and Philippe Découflé are the focus of this French production, an intricate and quintessential Atlas pastiche of provocative dance, new music, pop design and costuming, narrative, documentary, and media references. The kinetically shot and edited dance segments are intercut with an ambiguous narrative involving the performers, TV news footage and other appropriated images, color bars and other formal video devices. Total running time: ca. 115 min.

PROGRAM 5: JUMP (HYSTERIQUE BOURREÉ) 1984, 15 min (excerpt), video. Choreography: Philippe Découflé; music: Joseph Biscuit and The Residents. Flaunting the burlesque theatricality of a surreal, post-punk cabaret, JUMP is a wildly stylized collaboration between Atlas and French choreographer Philippe Découflé. Within the campy, self-conscious decadence of a French music hall milieu, Découflé’s idiosyncratic, postmodern choreography is performed with elegant bravado. BUTCHERS’ VOGUE 1990, 5 min, video. Choreography: Richard Move; music: Madonna. Set in a New York Meat Market restaurant after hours, BUTCHERS’ VOGUE features a voguing waiter and waitress, two prostitutes on the run, and a cop. DANCENOISE SCRAPS 2010, 10 min, video A collage of clips made from footage shot in New York in collaboration with DANCENOISE in the 80s and 90s. DANCENOISE IN A MUSEUM? 2018, 5 min, video Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton invade the recently opened new home of the Whitney Museum in 2018. LIFE’S A BEACH 2019, 3 min, video “A short film vignette featuring Anne Iobst from the American feminist performance art duo DANCENOISE. Shaped by a 30-year collaborative relationship, the work was created spontaneously while Atlas and Iobst were at The Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island, Florida, goofing around in the studio.” –STUK PUT BLOOD IN THE MUSIC 1989, 72 min, video PUT BLOOD IN THE MUSIC is a unique documentary on the downtown New York music scene. In a collage of music, performance, and commentary, Atlas captures the energy and pluralism that characterize this urban milieu. Reflecting the eclecticism of his subject, Atlas re-structures the conventional “talking head” format to allow a fragmented, fast-paced compendium of voices and sounds, ranging from music critic John Rockwell of The New York Times to street musicians. Focusing on such influential downtown figures as John Zorn, and featuring performances by Zorn, Sonic Youth, Hugo Largo, and others, this is less a documentary than a cultural document, a vivid time capsule of the contemporary New York music scene, circa 1989. Total running time: ca. 115 min.

PROGRAM 6: THE “ MARTHA” TAPES, PART 8 1996-2000, 17.5 min, video [See the description for THE “MARTHA” TAPES in Program 2.] MAYONNAISE, #1 1972, 11 min, 16mm-to-digital A portrait of dancer/choreographer Douglas Dunn inspired by Edouard Manet’s painting “Boy with Cherries”. NEVADA 1974, 3 min, Super-8mm-to-digital “Dance, drawing and abstraction are incorporated into the film NEVADA, in which Douglas Dunn performs a series of movements with a board found randomly in the street and whose shape is reminiscent of the state of Nevada.” –Claire Staebler SECRET OF THE WATERFALL 1983, 29 min, video. Choreography: Douglas Dunn. The confluence of words and movement propels this multi-layered collaboration by Atlas, choreographer Douglas Dunn, and poets Anne Waldman and Reed Bye. Dunn’s athletic choreography is performed to the rhythms, cadences, and associative meanings of the poets’ “cascade of words,” which function as music. Atlas introduces narrative references, ironically staging the dance in unexpected locations, including domestic interiors and vehicles. OH, MISHA 1999, 12 min, video “A video collage of filmed Baryshnikov ballet performances edited with feature film clips in which all the characters refer to someone named ‘Misha’.” –NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY GRAND DANCE OF JOLLY 3 2010, 2.5 min, digital “A remix of footage I shot in the early 70’s in preparation for my theater piece ‘Wonder, Try’ combined with the original D.W. Griffith footage of Lillian Gish that inspired it.” –Charles Atlas RAINER VARIATIONS 2002, 40 min, video Employing archival film clips and new video, Atlas’s self-described “video montage” is a documentary sous-rature. In his portrayal of filmmaker/choreographer Yvonne Rainer, Atlas undermines genre conventions to pose some of the same questions that have long concerned her. While an extended interview with Rainer runs throughout the piece, Atlas’s editing takes up the four “performers” (Rainer herself among them) who enact and re-enact the interview, shuffling and superimposing image and voice tracks to yield a video palimpsest of theatricality and ambiguity. Total running time: ca. 120 min.

PROGRAM 7: THE “MARTHA” TAPES, PART 2 1996-2000, 20.5 min, video [See the description for THE “MARTHA” TAPES in Program 2.] MRS. PEANUT VISITS NY 1999, 6 min, video In this video portrait of the legendary performance artist, fashion designer, and nightlife icon Leigh Bowery, Atlas’s camera follows Bowery as he flamboyantly strolls through Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, outrageously costumed in a self-made reinterpretation of “Mr. Peanut,” the Planter’s Peanut mascot. YOU ARE MY SISTER 2005, 4 min, video Atlas’s video visualization of the song of the same name by the acclaimed Anohni and the Johnsons (previously known as Antony and the Johnsons). Anohni’s haunting anthem is paired with Atlas’s processed images of thirteen “NYC Beauties,” whose close-up portraits turn in hypnotic motion. These images were originally processed and projected live by Atlas for the performance piece TURNING, a collaboration with Anohni and the Johnsons that merged the artists’ distinctive and dramatic styles. TURNING 2012, 78 min, video “Originally staged at New York’s Whitney Biennial exhibition, TURNING is a stunning collaboration between Antony & The Johnsons and Charles Atlas. The evening’s premise is a simple one. As Antony Hegarty and his band perform, a parade of striking New York women [successively] mount a small revolving platform to the side of the stage. Atlas films them and beams the results – blurred and interwoven with external images – on to a giant screen behind the musicians. The concept sounds risibly pretentious but is breathtakingly effective. Hegarty’s gentle music invariably obsesses on themes of alienation, gender and sexual identity, and his melodramatic contralto, quavering and seemingly insatiable, chimes magnificently with Atlas’s stark visual reinventions of his handpicked ‘13 New York beauties’.” –VIENNALE. This film is a mix of performance footage from the live show filmed on tour in London in 2006 mixed with interviews of the performers. Total running time: ca. 115 min.

PROGRAM 8: INSTANT FAME NY & LONDON 2003-06, 70 min, digital A selection of live video portraits made during the installation exhibitions in New York at Participant, Inc gallery in 2003 and in London at Vilma Gold Gallery in 2006. TESSERACT 3D 2017, 43 min, digital. Made in collaboration with choreographers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener; music: Christian Fennesz. This film will be projected in 3D with stereoscopic glasses provided. “A six-chapter work of science fiction, TESSERACT 3D is Atlas’s first ‘dance video’ in over a decade. Filmed with a mobile camera rig that moves with the choreography, TESSERACT 3D traverses a series of hybrid and imagined worlds staged and filmed over a series of Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) production residencies. Each chapter combines a specific set, choreography, and camera motion to encompass pas de deux and ensemble pieces, choreographed and performed by former Merce Cunningham dancers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener. Manipulating the 3D footage to combine live dance with animation, Atlas’s distinctive video effects reach into otherworldly dimensions beyond the stage.” –EMPAC Total running time: ca. 120 min.

PROGRAM 9: THE “MARTHA” TAPES, PART 7 1996-2000, 21 min, video [See the description for THE “MARTHA” TAPES in Program 2.] DRAGLINQUENTS 1990, 7 min, video The performances of two 1990s NYC junior drag queens are superimposed over cliched images and intercut with 1950s muscle-boy movies. The video was shot in the “Make Your Own Video” studio at Macy’s department store. THE MYTH OF MODERN DANCE 1990, 26 min, video. Choreographer/Performer: Douglas Dunn. Collaborating with choreographer Douglas Dunn, Atlas uses anthropological text, satirical movement, and vividly colored chroma-keyed backgrounds in an episodic, often humorous look at the evolution of modern dance. SUPERHONEY 1994, 51 min, video. Choreography: Thomas Hejlesen; music: Sort Sol and David Linton. In this futuristic danse macabre, Atlas creates a fully realized cyber-gothic world, rife with both erotic and physical danger. We follow our heroine on her travels through a world inhabited by libidinal robots, human profligates, statuesque hairdressers, and a bevy of other intriguing individuals. Her stylized and blank-faced nonchalance mirror the performative passion and violence which surrounds her. In SUPERHONEY Atlas unhinges his own well-developed aesthetic in order to more fully explore the interplay between ambivalence and pleasure. Total running time: ca. 110 min.

Ukraine, 1986, 54 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Ukrainian with English subtitles. This documentary was shot by a team of Ukrainian filmmakers in the weeks immediately following the Chernobyl disaster. Part documentation of the clean-up effort and part essay film, it uses the unique tools of cinema as a medium to reflect on this catastrophe of unprecedented scale. The team was aware that spending so much time in the “zone” and filming directly above the exploded fourth reactor could prove fatal, yet felt a duty to do so anyway. The director, Volodymyr Shevchenko, fought a ten-month battle against the Soviet censors and succumbed to radiation sickness shortly before the film was finally released.

RECORD RELEASE EVENT! This summer, Mississippi Records will release CHESS OF THE WIND, the soundtrack to Mohammad Reza Aslani’s 1976 film of the same time. A masterpiece of world cinema, Aslani’s CHESS OF THE WIND was banned in Iran and thought lost until a complete print of the film re-emerged in 2014. Restored by Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation and released to rapturous reviews in 2020, CHESS OF THE WIND is a genre-breaking queer-class-horror in miniature, and one of the most visionary and daring films of pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema. The film’s soundtrack, by one of Iran’s most revered avant-garde composers, Sheida Gharachedaghi, blends Persian classical instrumentation and atonal dissonance drawn from the composer’s Western-conservatory background. For the new Mississippi Records album, both Aslani and Gharachedaghi worked with film scholar Gita Aslani Shahrestani to revisit their score from fifty years ago and recombine its recorded elements into a new sonic work. The result is a cohesive sound collage tracing the history of the Women’s Rights Movement in Iran from 1905 to the present – a wholly new work that Aslani long dreamt of creating. To celebrate the record’s release, Mississippi Records label head Cyrus Moussavi will be here in person to present the project and the process of working with the Aslani family, along with a screening of Aslani’s film, CHESS OF THE WIND. The screening will be preceded by a short performance by Mani Nilchiani, who is a New York-based musician by way of Tehran. In his music, he uses elements of Iranian classical music (Radif) to retrace, explore, and retell a story of displacement while researching future-facing sonic spaces. The co-founder of the cultural platform Disco Tehran, which he co-led until 2023, Mani has performed in venues such as MoMA PS1, Public Records, Barbes, Symphony Space & DROM. Mohammad Reza Aslani CHESS OF THE WIND / SHATRANJ-E BAAD 1976, 98 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Farsi with English subtitles. Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Image Retrouvée laboratory (Paris) in collaboration with Mohammad Reza Aslani and Gita Aslani Shahrestani. Restoration funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. “This rediscovered jewel of Iranian cinema has reemerged as one of the most astonishing works of the country’s prerevolutionary New Wave. A hypnotically stylized murder mystery awash in period atmosphere, CHESS OF THE WIND unfolds inside a candlelit mansion, where a web of greed, violence, and betrayal ensnares potential heirs as they vie for control of their matriarch’s estate. Melding the influences of European modernism, gothic horror, and classical Persian art, Mohammad Reza Aslani crafts an exquisitely restrained mood piece that erupts into a subversive final act in which class conventions, gender roles, and time itself are upended with shocking ferocity.”–CRITERION COLLECTION

NEW YORK PREMIERE ENGAGEMENT! FILMMAKER IN PERSON! In a small village in Finland, which has relied solely on metallurgical activities for the past two centuries, Aki Kaurismäki and his friend, the poet and writer Mika Lätti, are constructing their own cinema within an old foundry. Employing recycled wood, metal, and pre-owned furniture, Kaurismäki and the residents of Karkkila collaboratively craft Kino Laika. The venue is surrounded by Cadillacs, motorcycles, rock bars, and the awe-inspiring beauty of nature, encapsulating the very essence of cinema’s enchantment – a place where the magic resides in its profound capacity to instigate change. In chronicling the creation of Kino Laika, Croatian-French filmmaker Veljko Vidak has created a modest yet finely-crafted film that is simultaneously a documentary about a particular cultural project, a more wide-ranging filmic meditation on the nature of cinema, and a portrait of a small-town community. Transcending the usual documentary trappings, CINEMA LAIKA radiates a deadpan charm and bemused curiosity about humanity that calls to mind nothing so much as the work of Kaurismäki himself. “When I learned that Aki Kaurismäki was building the first movie theater in the town of Karkkila, Finland, I set out to follow this ambitious initiative at a time when the trend was leaning towards the closure of theaters. On my way to Karkkila, I reflected upon André Bazin’s question, ‘What is Cinema?’, transforming it into ‘What is a movie theater, and what can it offer people?’ […] Imbued by Aki Kaurismäki’s films, the characters we encountered in Finland bore the imprint of his movies. We felt as if they were emerging from fiction as we entered it. And so, by living for almost a year in this small town, we also became characters in this fiction, and the film CINEMA LAIKA has become a fiction of reality.” –Veljko Vidak [Alongside the screenings of CINEMA LAIKA, we'll also be presenting five films by Aki Kaurismäki; for more details click here.]

Anthology partners with 8-Ball Community and Printed Matter / St Marks for a special evening presented in conjunction with the East Village Zine Fair. This program focuses on films about zines: films by zine-makers, about zine-making, or that carry the spirit of a zine – anything handmade with care for its subject matter and a general focus. The three short films showcased here – DIRTY GIRLS, ZINED!, and SWAMPY’S DIARY VOL. 1 – represent the zine community in various ways through different decades. These films remain precious to those of us who value the shareable and radically accessible nature of zines, something that persists today and forever. Guest-programmed by 8-Ball Community members and East Village Zine Fair co-organizers Mia Greenberg, Nicolas Umpierrez, and Tina Lee. For more info about the East Village Zine Fair, click here: https://www.instagram.com/8ballcommunity/ Michael Lucid DIRTY GIRLS 2000, 18 min, 8mm video-to-digital Shot in 1996 but edited in 2000, DIRTY GIRLS was created by Michael Lucid when he was a high school senior. It follows an infamous eighth-grade friend group, with a focus on Amber and Harper Willat, known for mimicking the spirit and appearance of Riot Girls. Interviews with other high school students reveal the misunderstood nature of alternative communities and zine culture, many stating their fear of the girls’ boorish behavior and supposed lack of hygiene. Through his interviews, Lucid reveals that the Dirty Girls’ negative reputation is unjustified, while their anger about their treatment as women in modern society is, on the contrary, fully justified. DIRTY GIRLS captures a specific time and attitude that otherwise would’ve been forgotten, and has been an essential film in the zine-making community since it was shown at Anthology in 2001. Marc Moscato ZINED! 1997, 28 min, VHS This documentary features local zine enthusiasts, makers, and collectives in Buffalo, New York. Shown from the original VHS tape, ZINED! contains snippets with artists from various communities such as Ape Fanzine, Riverside Art Scene, Highest Population of Rock Stars, The Salivation Army, Free Fixin’s, and many more. Through various interviews, this work explains what a zine is, its potential subject matter, and the various subcultures often associated with zine-making, while also considering different techniques for hand-making zines, the perspectives towards digitally-made zines, and the question of monetary profit from zines. Swampy SWAMPY’S DIARY VOL. 1 2013, 10 min, VHS-to-digital Swampy is a multidisciplinary artist best known for his graffiti – which can be found throughout North and South America – as well as his zines, photographs, cassettes, paintings, videotapes, and more. Swampy effectively uses the world as his canvas, whether that be artistically or otherwise, and inspires others to do the same. Although he’s had a cult following for well over a decade, Swampy’s identity is mostly unknown, and he prefers to keep it that way. SWAMPY’S DIARY VOL. 1 is the first in a series of VHS video diaries made while freight train hopping around the U.S. In these works, Swampy showcases his skills as a “bootleg artist”, shares rural views from his train rides, and lets viewers in on memories with friends. Although his videos are not explicitly about zines, they carry the ethos of the medium, overlaying text and photographs atop camcorder footage, all while relaying a general thesis – one that is anti-capitalist in nature and based in personal freedom. Total running time: ca. 60 min.

“An elderly woman (Madeleine Renaud) returns to Paris to see her son one last time. She hasn’t seen him in ten years. But this favorite son (Jean-Pierre Aumont), the one who spent ‘whole days in the trees’ as a child, has become old, selfish, immoral and squanders all his money gambling. Crazy with love for him, his mother nevertheless tries to save him from this precarious existence. DES JOURNÉES ENTIÈRES DANS LES ARBRES is Duras’s screen adaptation of her own eponymous short story from 1954, which she had previously adapted for the stage in 1966.” –LaCinetek

“In the spring of 2016, after editing AUTUMN and THE DREAMER, I began to project my camera original Kodachrome outtakes of footage I had shot while making my Kodachrome films from 1992 through 2009. It was inspiring to come upon this footage from another period of time and to see material that did not fit into my needs of the moment, but in retrospect is very beautiful and well worth working with. There were many different types of material from different projects. Being low on funds, I edited the camera original without a work print and with cement splices. I have decided not to print them. I feel that their charm is in their ephemeral nature as camera original and any attempt to reproduce them only lessens their modest nature. I am hoping there will be situations when I can personally present some of these works publicly. There is of course the danger of them being damaged in projection. Two of the films are personal travel films, LUX PERPETUA I and II, shot in Oaxaca and then in France and Italy. Another is a short portrait of a dear friend and collaborator on Devotional Cinema, Nick Hoff, titled OTHER ARCHER.” –Nathaniel Dorsky Nathaniel Dorsky LUX PERPETUA I (2000-2002/2016, 23 min, 16mm, silent) Nathaniel Dorsky LUX PERPETUA II (1999-2002/2016, 31 min, 16mm, silent) Nathaniel Dorsky OTHER ARCHER (2003/2016, 9 min, 16mm, silent) Total running time: ca. 70 min.

Nathaniel Dorsky DEATH OF A POET 2003/2016, 21 min, 16mm, silent “DEATH OF A POET is a document from the weeks that Stan Brakhage was dying of bladder cancer. Dominic Angerame, then head of Canyon Cinema, and I went up to Victoria, Canada to visit Stan. Five weeks later, while I was in Boulder, Colorado, to screen my recent films, Stan passed away. There was a gathering at Stan’s daughter’s house with Jane (Brakhage) Wodening and her brother, poet, Jack Collom in Boulder. That night it began to snow and like a purification it did not stop for five days.” –Nathaniel Dorsky Nathaniel Dorsky OSSUARY 1995-2005/2016, 43 min, 16mm, silent “OSSUARY is made up of footage from all my films from this period of shooting Kodachrome, 1995 to 2005. An ossuary is a decorative or ceremonial use of human bones dug up after a body decomposes.” –Nathaniel Dorsky Total running time: ca. 70 min.

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

by Orson Welles 1941, 119 min, 35mm, b&w “Welles’s first feature is probably the most respected, analyzed, and parodied of all films. Although its archival and historical value are unchallenged, CITIZEN KANE, nevertheless, seems fresh on each new viewing. The film touches on so many aspects of American life – politics and sex, friendship and betrayal, youth and old age – that it has become a film for all moods and generations. In its expansive way, it creates a kaleidoscopic panorama of a man’s life. Loosely based on the life of the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, CITIZEN KANE is the saga of the rise to power of a ‘poor little rich boy’ starved for affection, as Welles himself was after his parents’ early deaths. It is also a meditation on emotional greed, the ease of amassing wealth, and the difficulty of sustaining love.” –MoMA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1934, 83 min, 35mm. In French with English subtitles. Vigo’s feature is outwardly a simple story: couple weds, couple has problems, couple reunites, but it’s transformed by the director’s poetic, idiosyncratic touch into a masterpiece. Cinematographer Boris Kaufman (the younger brother of Dziga Vertov) recalled, “He used everything around him: the sun, the moon, snow, night. Instead of fighting unfavorable conditions, he made them play a part.” Already in delicate health (at times he had to direct from a stretcher), the winter location shooting may have pushed Vigo over the edge – he died of lung disease at age 29, three weeks after the Paris premiere.

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.

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

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

Karl Valentin CONFIRMATION DAY / DER FIRMLING 1934, 23 min, 35mm, b&w. In German with no subtitles; English synopsis available. “Valentin plays a drunken father treating his giggly young son to lunch, and the inspired muddle he creates out of a table, two chairs, an umbrella, and a watch chain rivals some of Laurel and Hardy’s best moments.” –J.R. Jones, CHICAGO READER Jean Vigo TARIS 1931, 9 min, 16mm & ZERO FOR CONDUCT / ZÉRO DE CONDUITE 1935, 44 min, 35mm, b&w. In French with English subtitles. An eloquent parable of freedom versus authority, Vigo’s film is set at a boys’ boarding school and undoubtedly echoes Vigo’s own unhappy experiences as a child. Under the pressure of various civic groups the film was removed from screens several months after its release in 1933. It was branded “anti-French” by censors and was not shown again in Paris until 1945. Total running time: ca. 80 min.

Andy Warhol EAT 1963, 35 min, 16mm, b&w, silent “A portrait of artist Robert Indiana, EAT is one of the classics of Warhol’s minimalist cinema. As Indiana slowly eats one mushroom, the action is rendered mysterious by Warhol’s decision to assemble the rolls out of order, so the mushroom appears to magically renew itself from time to time.” –Callie Angell James Sibley Watson & Melville Webber FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER 1928, 13 min, 16mm, b&w, silent “Filmed in a Rochester, New York, carriage house, this expressionist film is the earliest live-action dramatic film made by a collaboration of poets and artists in the United States. Watson devised the optical effects that distinguish the film, while Webber provided its visual design, based upon medieval frescoes.” –Robert A. Haller John & James Whitney FILM EXERCISES 1-5 1943-45, 18 min, 16mm “The visual images in these films were created by shining light through flexible masks, so that the camera was filming direct light rather than light reflected from drawings. The results seem like dazzling neon apparitions, that were as novel and shocking as the accompanying soundtrack.” –William Moritz James Whitney LAPIS 1963-66, 10 min, 16mm “The most elaborate example of a mandala in cinema. It utilizes a field of tiny dots, symmetrically organized in hundreds of very fine concentric rings, to generate slowly changing intricate patterns…. Both structurally and visually LAPIS conforms to the circular form of the mandala; its elaborate movements belie a fundamental stasis.” –P. Adams Sitney Total running time: ca. 80 min.

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

EGYPT Yousry Nasrallah THE GATE OF THE SUN / BAB EL SHAMS 2004, 278 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles. U.S. premiere of brand-new restoration! “A four-hour epic, THE GATE OF THE SUN is Yousry Nasrallah’s powerful adaptation of Lebanese writer Elias Khoury’s novel of fifty years of Palestinian dispossession, exile, and resistance. The film follows the flight of Younes, his wife Nahila, and those around them, from their village in northern Palestine to a refugee camp in Lebanon. Some vow to continue the struggle, most simply struggle to survive. Unsparingly detailing the impact of the nakba on Palestinian life and society, and the refugees’ relationship with the Lebanese people, THE GATE OF THE SUN spans generations, mixing personal stories with historical events.” –NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

Founded in 2009, the Festival of (In)appropriation is a preeminent international showcase for experimental, found-media film and video. Every year, the Festival attracts artists working across an astonishing array of moving-image formats while probing the limits of collage, machinima, re-mix, détournement, mash-up, and more. The raw material for their work derives from the abundant new sources of audiovisual media to have surfaced in recent decades, from official state and commercial archives to vernacular collections, home movie repositories, and digital databases of every stripe. By exploiting and refashioning these pre-existing materials, such creations generate novel juxtapositions and recombinations, often producing ideas and meanings that were unintended or unimagined by the original makers. These remarkable works, in other words, are “inappropriate” in the profoundest sense of the term. Sponsored by Los Angeles Filmforum, the Festival of (In)appropriation strives to evince the remarkable range, sophistication, and critical impact of this vital aesthetic practice. The 2023 edition – Festival #13 – is curated by Jaimie Baron, Jennifer Proctor, and Adam Sekuler. Cheryl Gelover & Tom Murray TULIPOMANIA: YOU HAD TO BE THERE (U.S., 2022, 4 min, digital) Magnification doesn’t always yield detail. Maybe you had to be there… When the observer and the observed exchange places – at what point do we hold ourselves accountable? YOU HAD TO BE THERE is the first music video for Tulipomania’s soon to be released new album “Dreaming of Sleep”. The animation was created frame by frame including animated lip sync as well as vintage found footage in an exploration of varied states of disintegration and recombination created on thousands of individual sheets of black or white paper. Sophia Haboush HEADSPACE (U.S., 2023, 5 min, digital) HEADSPACE is an experimental film that expresses the feelings of anxiety and peace through composites of archival video and images. Taking inspiration from the principles and techniques of Dada and Surrealism, the film uses unorthodox techniques and focuses on the internal space. With collaboration between visuals, music, and sound design, it creates a world that depicts what the headspaces of anxiety and peace could be like. Luis Carlos Rodriguez COLLAGE 42 (Spain, 2022, 2.5 min, digital) An audiovisual “divertimento” based on a work in the public domain – THE GREAT ST. LOUIS BANK ROBBERY (1959) by Charles Guggenheim – COLLAGE 42 is part of a broad experimental audiovisual research project that seeks to explore, through the construction and deconstruction of classic film scenes in the public domain and, from the point of view of artistic-expressive activities, questions that encompass formal, structural, narrative and aesthetic aspects of the Audiovisual Arts. Bill Morrison HER VIOLET KISS (U.S., 2021, 5 min, digital) A woman attends a party where she encounters a mysterious stranger. Krista Leigh Steinke TIMESCRAPS: FILM THREADS AND SPROCKET HOLES (U.S., 2023, 8 min, digital) An homage to the women who worked in the motion picture industry in the early part of the 20th century. Scraps from old footage – sprocket holes, light leaks, film leaders, scratches (parts of the film material not intended for viewing) – are hand painted, collaged, and stitched together as a way to reclaim and honor their skill and labor as film editors and colorists. Here, color bleeds outside of the lines, while other moments break from convention and become chaotic and unruly. Visuals are contrasted against male narrators who dictate directions and explain how to correctly handle cinema technology. Jean-Pierre Marchant DATE NIGHT (Canada, 2023, 1.5 min, digital) Michael Lyons QUEEN OF DOTS (Japan, 2020, 2 min, digital) The Queen of dots is also a queen of Instagram and Tumblr. Grzegorz Kielawski & Alexander Bayer MOTOR (Austria, 2023, 18 min, digital) Farmers, truckers, and gamers stream live on a daily basis. MOTOR offers a glimpse of their content. The flow of images and words is condensed into a chamber play on working conditions, time structures, and professional identities. Simulation and documentation merge, work and play interlace. Christopher Harris DREAMS UNDER CONFINEMENT (U.S., 2020, 2.5 min, digital) “Frenzied voices on the Chicago Police Department’s scanner call for squad cars and reprisals during the 2020 uprising in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, as Google Earth tracks the action through simulated aerial views of urban spaces and the vast Cook County Department of Corrections, the country’s third-largest jail system. In DREAMS UNDER CONFINEMENT, the prison and the street merge into a shared carceral landscape.” –NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL Jean-Pierre Marchant ANOTHER SET OF JAWS (Canada, 2023, 1 min, digital) Anna Malina Zemlianski OilMoonNight (Germany, 2022, 5.5 min, digital) “A revenge fantasy. A corrupted & glitched daydream. A futile endeavor to cope with visions of terror… Sunflower Fields Forever! I cut scenes from various films by necrorealist filmmaker Yevgeni Yufit into a new narrative influenced by the pain unleashed by Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine. This new cut was datamoshed and printed with an inkjet printer. As I allowed the ink cartridges to run empty, the prints and colors became faulty, adding another layer of glitching. For some scenes the prints were manipulated even further by collaging, applying water to the ink or using sticky tape to tear off parts of the images. The sound too is made entirely with sounds found in the same films which I collaged and manipulated as well.” –Anna Malina Zemlianski Yasaman Baghban HOME (Iran, 2020, 3 min, digital) The war in Afghanistan has resulted in immense suffering and displacement for many of its citizens. Two Afghan painters were among those affected and were forced to flee their home country. They found refuge in Iran, a country that has generously taken in thousands of Afghan refugees since the conflict began. However, despite the warm welcome, the painters have faced challenges in adapting to life in a new place, and the effects of the trauma they have experienced cannot be overlooked. The experience of living in the diaspora has had a profound impact on their memories and has shaped their lives in ways that are not easily forgotten. The trauma of war has taken a toll on these individuals, and it is important to recognize the difficulties they face as they try to rebuild their lives. Jean-Pierre Marchant A HEATED EXCHANGE (Canada, 2023, 1 min, digital) Federica Foglia SKYSCRAPER FILM (Italy, 2023, 8 min, digital) Can I use the film strip structure as an architectural element? Is it possible to use the celluloid from the film as a cement? Can these skyscrapers be turned into something else? Can solid lines blend into sensual, natural curves? Can I melt skyscrapers? SKYSCRAPER FILM was created to try to give a visual answer to these questions, arising from the artist’s relation to urban maps of various locations and their respective skylines, populated by imposing skyscrapers and reinforced concrete panoramas: Quebec, Kingston (Canada), Maryland, Pittsburgh, Baltimore (USA), etc. Cities are presented to us as an abstract handmade camera-less collage, created from scraps of orphan 16mm films from the 1980s. MilleFeuille CUPID’S FEVER (Canada, 2021, 16 min, digital) Child hunters look through scope-cam rifles to aim for the heart. A found-footage portrait of love told through YouTube vlogs of relationship breakups and psycho exes. CUPID’S FEVER is part of the feature I WENT TO A PARTY ALONE in which YouTube vlogs of random, daily life are recast as dramatic events imbued with cinematic qualities and mythic allusions. When the hard cuts and juxtapositions reveal a landscape of oppressive social control, the vloggers’ mundane normal soon gives way to the surreal. Seemingly innocuous recordings are fraught with foreboding as the vloggers who yearn for freedom, love, and self-expression find themselves unable to escape society’s haunting bondage. Eugenia Bakurin LONG TIME NO TECHNO (Germany, 2022, 4 min, digital) The footage comes from the archive of the Odesa Film Studio, which was the first film studio established in the Russian Empire. During the Soviet era, many films were shot there, which shaped the childhood of millions of people. However, today the film studio, like many other cultural monuments in Ukraine, is threatened with destruction by the Russian army. The video features dancing moments from children’s films of the 70s and 80s, which provide a glimpse into a carefree time of adventure, fantasy trips, and freedom. These scenes serve as illusions of a time that has since passed. Total running time: ca. 90 min.

GAZA Mustafa Abu Ali SCENES OF THE OCCUPATION FROM GAZA / MASHAHID MIN AL-IHTILAL FI GHAZA 1973, 13 min, 16mm-to-digital. In Arabic with English subtitles. “A rare film by the legendary filmmaker Mustafa Abu Ali, one of the founders of the Palestine Film Unit, the first filmic arm of the Palestinian revolution. Shot by a French news team, the footage was edited by Mustafa in Lebanon to produce one of the earliest films on the occupied territory in Gaza. [It] employs experimental editing techniques to produce a cinematically and politically subversive film. It was the only such project produced by the Palestine Cinema Group, which in 1974 became the Palestine Cinema Institute.” –PALESTINE FILM INSTITUTE Khaled Hamada THE KNIFE / AL-SIKKIN 1972, 87 min, 35mm-to-digital. In Arabic with English subtitles. “Ghassan Kanafani’s novella ‘All That’s Left to You’ (1966) is perhaps one of the most significant Palestinian texts, navigating an abstract symbology of collaboration, violation, and resistance in Gaza. Its adaptation, THE KNIFE, is a largely-unseen and necessarily contingent film. Produced under the auspices of the Syrian General Cinema Organization (GCO), just as Tewfiq Saleh’s THE DUPES (1973), it too changes the end of its originating Kanafani text, in this case flattening it. What results then is a morass of Arab reaction, at once ghostly beach pastoral and nightmarish bedroom narrative, unfinished and elliptical.” –Kaleem Hawa

USSR (Kyrgyzstan), 1963, 85 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Russian with English subtitles. Seventeen-year-old Kemal goes to work on a state farm during the Virgin Lands campaign – and clashes with its authoritarian leader – in this debut feature by the legendary Soviet Ukrainian director Larisa Shepitko. “While Shepitko’s tilted shots and rapid cutting reveal a debt to Eisenstein, her gently lyrical compositions express an elemental relationship among machines, humans, land, and sky.” –Fred Camper, CHICAGO USSR (Kyrgyzstan), 1963, 85 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Russian with English subtitles. Seventeen-year-old Kemal goes to work on a state farm during the Virgin Lands campaign – and clashes with its authoritarian leader – in this debut feature by the legendary Soviet Ukrainian director Larisa Shepitko. “While Shepitko’s tilted shots and rapid cutting reveal a debt to Eisenstein, her gently lyrical compositions express an elemental relationship among machines, humans, land, and sky.” –Fred Camper, CHICAGO READER

[SON NOM DE VENISE DANS CALCUTTA DÉSERT] “[This film] is the culmination of the Indian Cycle’s undoing of cinema and, for her, the ultimate riddance of the Stretter character [Delphine Seyrig’s character in INDIA SONG]. The film consists of the soundtrack of INDIA SONG played in its entirety over images of the crumbling interiors and exteriors of the Château Rothschild, the location on the outskirts of Paris where much of INDIA SONG was shot, the sound reverberating in the deserted location. During the making of HER VENETIAN NAME IN DESERTED CALCUTTA, Duras walked alongside Bruno Nuytten, her cinematographer (here as on INDIA SONG), matching the sound playing from a tape recorder to his tracking shots. The director had fixated on this palace in the Bois de Boulogne, used as Nazi quarters in World War II and never again occupied by the Rothschild family, as the setting for INDIA SONG. Frozen in its layered history, this husk of a husk of a location is her choice for a final mourning – a ‘deserted’ place, she said, ‘to speak of the end of the world.’” –Ivone Margulies, CRITERION

In her best-known film, Duras effectively evokes the colonial India of the thirties, contrasting the indolent life of the colonialists with the squalor and suffering that lie just outside their gates and consciousness – though her camera never ventures from the abodes of the wealthy, and the film was in fact shot in Paris. The story concerns a beautiful woman, the wife of a diplomat, who suffers from what Duras has called “colonial sickness.” Despite numerous suitors and affairs, she lives in a private desolation which none can enter. With its offscreen voices, a kind of distant dialogue counterpointed by image and music, INDIA SONG portrays what Richard Roud called an “India of the soul.”

In conjunction with the third solo exhibition of the pioneering experimental filmmaker and artist Jordan Belson, at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, Erik Davis will present and discuss Belson’s films. Noted author of “Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information”, Erik Davis is one of our foremost scholars of esoteric mysticism. He lives in San Francisco and writes extensively about West Coast Post-War culture. He will be presenting a program of rare 16mm prints from public and private collections, and will discuss the filmmaker and his work. For more info about the exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery, visit: https://matthewmarks.com/ Titles will include: WORLD (1970, 7 min, 16mm) MEDITATION (1971, 6 min, 16mm) CHAKRA (1972, 8 min, 16mm) LIGHT (1973, 8 min, 16mm) CYCLES (1974, 10 min, 16mm. Made in collaboration with Stephen Beck.) MUSIC OF THE SPHERES (1977, 10 min, 16mm) Total running time: ca. 60 min.

“A poetic evocation of measured anguish by a woman who has just been left by her lover, L’HOMME ATLANTIQUE is the culmination of Duras’s belief in the primacy of the text and the power of the voice to conjure the ineffable. Using outtakes from AGATHA ET LES LECTURES ILLIMITÉES, in which Yann Andréa gazes out toward the sea, and other shots in which he looks right into the camera, Duras overlays a soundtrack composed of her hypnotic voice and the sound of crashing waves. Punctuated by darkness, eventually the film gives way entirely to a black, imageless screen (with only specks of light that have ruptured the celluloid over time) and a trance-like quality delivers us into a meditation on death and sublimation. Driven by melancholia as a creative force, L’HOMME ATLANTIQUE, not unlike Derek Jarman’s masterpiece BLUE, transforms the cinema itself into a space to consider grief, memory, absence, doomed love, the absolute of our mortality – and the liberatory refusal of representation. ‘The black is a space of listening’ (Marguerite Duras).” –Andréa Picard, TIFF Preceded by: Absis CYGNE I (1976, 11 min, 35mm-to-DCP. Narration by Marguerite Duras.) Absis CYGNE II (1976, 8.5 min, 35mm-to-DCP. Narration by Michael Lonsdale.) Inspired in part by Duras, whom filmmaker Absis befriended in the 1970s, CYGNE I & II were made in collaboration with both Duras and actor Michael Lonsdale (INDIA SONG). After their initial screenings in 1976, they fell into obscurity before their rediscovery in 2021. Total running time: ca. 70 min.

This deadpan tragicomedy about a group of impoverished, outcast artists living the bohemian life in Paris is among the most beguiling of Kaurismäki’s films. Based on stories from Henri Murger’s influential mid-nineteenth-century book Scènes de la vie de bohème (the basis for the opera La bohème), the film features a marvelous trio of Kaurismäki regulars – André Wilms, Matti Pellonpää, and Karl Väänänen – as a writer, painter, and composer who scrape by together, sharing in life’s daily absurdities. Gorgeously shot in black and white, LA VIE DE BOHÈME is a vibrantly scrappy rendition of a beloved tale.

The lingering effects of a nuclear war have wiped out most of humanity. A small group of survivors – all women – roam the Earth in search of a male to continue the human race. LATE AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE is a brilliant, underappreciated gem of the Czechoslovak New Wave.

In this warmhearted comic yarn, fate throws the young African refugee Idrissa into the path of Marcel Marx, a kindly old bohemian who shines shoes for a living in the French harbor city Le Havre. With inborn optimism and the support of his tight-knit community, Marcel stands up to the officials doggedly pursuing the boy for deportation. A political fairy tale that exists somewhere between the reality of contemporary France and the classic French cinema of the past, LE HAVRE is a charming, deadpan delight and one of the Finnish director’s finest films.

Christian Ghazi A HUNDRED FACES FOR A SINGLE DAY / MI’AT WAJEH LI YAWM WAHED 1972, 64 min, 35mm-to-digital. In Arabic with English subtitles. “Made in 1969 and released in 1972, Christian Ghazi’s incendiary, avant-garde masterpiece is one of the filmmaker’s only two surviving early works. Through this fiction-documentary hybrid film, Ghazi forged a stinging critique of bourgeois society in Beirut during Lebanon’s pre-civil war period. An essay on labor, class, social relations, and resistance, Ghazi considered the film his ‘manifesto on cinema,’ a powerful and polemical work that reaches back to the early decades of film experimentation while pioneering radical techniques in multivalent sound, disjunctive montage, and an embedded perspective on direct action.” –ARTEEAST

SPECIAL SCREENING AND LIVE PERFORMANCE! Since the mid-1960s, poet, musician, and Sanskrit scholar Louise Landes Levi has been traveling the world and performing with musicians such as Terry Riley, Josephine Foster, Kawabata Makoto, and Christer Hennix. She is a frequent artist-in-residence at Blank Forms in Brooklyn. For this special program, we will be presenting the NY premiere of Brooklyn artist and filmmaker William Carrà’s RASA, a drone meditation filmed in Woodstock in 2023 (with Will Epstein and Ben Vida). Following RASA, Landes Levi will perform a live soundtrack to Ron Rice’s hallucinatory film CHUMLUM, starring Jack Smith, Beverly Grant, Gerard Malanga, Mario Montez, and Barbara Rubin. William Carrà RASA 2023, 40 min, digital Ron Rice CHUMLUM 1964, 23 min, 16mm-to-35mm. Restored by Anthology Film Archives and The Film Foundation with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Total running time: ca. 70 min.

“It was in summer 1993 when I first saw films by Margaret Tait. Not in a cinema, but at a 16mm editing table in the Filmmakers Co-op office in London. The room was not dark enough, the image small, but I was inspired and deeply touched by something that is difficult to put into words. Till today I ask myself, what is it that I admire so much in Margaret Tait’s films? They are timeless and speak directly to our inner self, plain and clear and complex at the same time. Her images are simple, nothing special, her camera movements motivated by an inner impulse, often surprising, like her editing. If we see her films, something remains secret, inexplicable but not hidden. Tait said: ‘The cinema I care about is at the level of poetry.’ Perhaps this best explains what defies explanation. I have selected seven short films for the program to show a range, starting with one of her earliest films, A PORTRAIT OF GA, from 1952 and ending with her last film, GARDEN PIECES, from 1998. The program concludes with one of my own short films, which I filmed during my visit to Orkney in 1995.” –Ute Aurand PROGRAM 1: A PORTRAIT OF GA 1952, 5 min, 16mm AERIAL 1974, 4 min, 16mm THE LEADEN ECHO AND THE GOLDEN ECHO 1955, 7 min, 16mm COLOUR POEMS 1974, 12 min, 16mm CALYPSO 1955, 4 min, DCP HAPPY BEES 1954, 17 min, 16mm GARDEN PIECES 1998, 12 min, 16mm Ute Aurand GLIMPSES FROM A VISIT TO ORKNEY IN SUMMER 1995 2020, 5 min, 16mm, color, silent Total running time: ca. 70 min.

WHERE I AM IS HERE 1963, 35 min, 16mm “Starting with a six-line script which just noted down a kind of event to occur, and recur, my aim was to construct a film with its own logic, its own correspondences within itself, and its own echoes and rhymes and comparisons, all through close exploration of the everyday, the commonplace, in the city of Edinburgh.” –Margaret Tait A PLACE OF WORK 1976, 31 min, 16mm “A close study of one garden and house and what could be seen there and heard there within the space of time from June 1975 to November 1975. An evocation of a place (in Orkney) with lifelong associations and latterly used as a work place. A family home, from which at the time of filming, the family had long gone. My own home in childhood and off and on through the years, eventually returned to and worked in (and on). Filmed in the months before leaving it.” –Margaret Tait Total running time: ca. 70 min.

Featuring the world premiere of films made locally with the support of MONO in September & October 2022. This program will include films made through the educational initiatives of MONO NO AWARE, a cinema-arts nonprofit organization and film positive community working to promote connectivity through the cinematic experience. Established in 2007 and based in downtown Brooklyn, MONO NO AWARE presents monthly artist-in-person screenings, facilitates equipment rentals, operates a film distribution initiative, maintains wet & dry lab facilities, and hosts an annual exhibition for contemporary artists and international filmmakers whose work incorporates Super-8mm, 16mm, 35mm, or altered light projections as part of a live performance or installation taking place November 30-December 4.

When twisted teen Alice convinces her boyfriend Luc to murder a male classmate, the couple go on the run and wind up deep in the forest, hungry and lost. Coming across a secluded cabin, the devious duo creep inside to find food, until the cabin owner returns home, imprisons Alice, and makes Luc his personal plaything. But is it a punishment worse than prison – or does Luc actually like his new role? Gay director François Ozon’s early-career feature fuses the killers-on-the-run genre with the classic Hansel & Gretel story to make connections between the themes, darkness, perversity, and underlying fears that both true crime stories and fairy tales utilize to evoke fascination in their audiences. The SM-tinged sex scenes between hairy hermit Predrag ‘Miki’ Manojlovic and smooth twunk Jérémie Renier titillated gay audiences who found the film at festivals or on home video, and contributed to Ozon’s well-deserved reputation as a provocative maker of lush and dark queer films. This new HD restoration courtesy of Altered Innocence and Studiocanal shows off every bloody detail of Pierre Stoeber’s masterful cinematography and Ozon’s playful mise-en-scene. See it with someone you love.

When elderly children’s book author Yamazaki hires young sex worker Leo for a BDSM session, the paddling he receives impacts him in a much deeper way than he expects. Bitter and regretful over his lost looks, failed love life, and declining health, Yamazaki becomes instantly smitten with Leo, who reminds him of his younger self and offers a last chance to get things right. Forging an unlikely friendship – though Yamazaki hopes for more – the two men embark on a journey of self-reflection and mirroring that forces each to face their uncertain futures. Writer/director Tsuyoshi Shôji’s emotionally rich comedic drama is perhaps the most sexually frank and kink-positive entry so far in the burgeoning subgenre of films about gay elders (SWAN SONG, TURTLES). Anchored by actor Taijiro Tamura’s melancholic lead performance, and featuring stunningly surreal erotic moments that would surely be cut out of an American remake, OLD NARCISSUS is a rare gem that deserves to be seen by as wide a queer audience as possible. We’re thrilled to present the film’s New York Premiere as part of “Narrow Rooms”.

In the early 1980s, during Brazil’s military dictatorship, a group of gay and lesbian filmmakers in the northeastern state of Paraíba were taking courses in “Direct Cinema” (formerly called Cinéma Vérité) at NUDOC (The Federal University of Paraíba’s Cinematographic Documentation Center), a documentary film workshop created by the great French filmmaker Jean Rouch in various countries. Inspired by what they learned, these artists and friends formed a gay activist group and began collaborating on Super-8mm films that used experimental documentary techniques to address queer issues in Paraíba. This remarkable program by Cinelimite, the Brazilian Audiovisual Preservation Association, and NUDOC (which houses almost all of this Super-8 collection), presents five of these fascinating and long-overlooked works from what is likely the only 20th-century queer film movement in Brazil. CLOSES, by Pedro Nunes, features interviews with Brazilians discussing gay rights, interspersed with a romantic story of gay love that culminates in sex on a beach. BALTAZAR DA LOMBA, by queer activist collective Nós Também, self-reflexively re-enacts the story of the first man convicted of sodomy in colonial Brazil, while ERA VERMELHO SEU BATOM, by Henrique Magalhães, examines stereotypes and discrimination within the gay community and the tensions between closeted and out men. MISERERE NOBIS, by Lauro Nascimento, presents a homoerotic queer staging of The Last Supper, while PEREQUETÉ, by Bertrand Lira, is a more direct portrait of actor and dancer Francisco Marto and his drag queen alter ego. Made in a very repressive context (at the beginning of the military dictatorship’s final act), these films were shown in public environments subject to the repression of the authoritarian regime. They remain controversial to this day. We are excited to have the cooperation of Cinelimite, NUDOC, and ABPA to present this exciting program for the first time in North America. We’re even more excited that filmmaker Bertrand Lira and Francisco Marto will be present at the screening and will participate in a filmed Q&A session after the screening. Pedro Nunes CLOSES (1982, 30 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP) Grupo Nós Também BALTAZAR DA LOMBA (1982, 20 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP) Bertrand Lira PEREQUETÉ (1981, 20 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP) Lauro Nascimento MISERERE NOBIS (1982, 20 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP) Henrique Magalhães YOUR LIPSTICK WAS RED / ERA VERMELHO SEU BATOM (1983, 10 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP) Total running time: ca. 105 min.

PROGRAM 1: Nathaniel Dorsky AUGUST AND AFTER 2012, 19 min, 16mm, silent “After a lifetime, two mutual friends, George Kuchar and Carla Liss, passed away during the same period of time.” –Nathaniel Dorsky Jerome Hiler GLADLY GIVEN 1995, 10 min, 16mm, silent “Illuminated leaves from the sub rosa oeuvre of Jerome Hiler. Although the title is tinged with irony, this film is in fact a gift and a work of gifted seeing made perceptible. Fragile and challenging in its seeming simplicity, GLADLY GIVEN unfolds and bristles with the delicacy of a Japanese Floating World painting while being gravitationally drawn into the containments and accidents of the everyday.” –Mark McElhatten Nathaniel Dorsky VARIATIONS 1992-98, 24 min, 16mm, silent “VARIATIONS blossomed forth while shooting additional material for TRISTE. What tender chaos, what current of luminous rhymes might cinema reveal unbridled from the daytime word? During the Bronze Age a variety of sanctuaries were built for curative purposes. One of the principal activities was transformative sleep. This montage speaks to that tradition.” –Nathaniel Dorsky Nathaniel Dorsky KODACHROME DAILIES FROM THE TIME OF SONG AND SOLITUDE (REEL 1) 2005-2006, 40 min, 16mm, silent “[KODACHROME DAILIES FROM THE TIME OF SONG AND SOLITUDE, reels 1 & 2] are genuinely one of a kind. There are no prints in distribution. The Kodachrome they were sourced from is still intact but Kodak has terminated the internegative stock that was used at that time to make this work print, and the internegative used for printing them has since been cut up to serve as the printing source for the edited film, SONG AND SOLITUDE (2005-06). What is interesting about these two reels is that it is an unusual opportunity to have the informal pleasure of seeing my footage, not only unedited, but with images that were not selected for the final film and therefore never seen. There is a sense of observing the filmmaker as the observer and therefore participating in the exploration with the camera, somewhat like a painter’s sketchbook or a writer’s notebook.” –Nathaniel Dorsky Total running time: ca. 100 min.

An integral part of the Bay Area avant-garde film scene since the 1970s, Dominic Angerame has directed more than 35 films (and counting) over the course of his career, and has also taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, University of California, Berkeley, New College of San Francisco, Osher Life Long Learning Center, and the University of Nevada at Reno, as well as the Academy of Art University. From 1980-2012, he was the Executive Director of Canyon Cinema, where he played an invaluable role in helping to distribute, promote, and preserve experimental cinema. Thanks to his role at Canyon, Anthology has had a longstanding relationship with Angerame, and in 2019, as part of our Infrastructure on Film series, we hosted screenings of his own work, in particular his multi-part film CITY SYMPHONY (1987-95). We’re pleased to welcome Dominic back now, with a program devoted entirely to works made in the five years since he last visited. The program includes a continuation of his CITY SYMPHONY series (REVELATIONS), as well as a number of his FILM DIARIES, and other filmic portraits and visual meditations. REVELATIONS (2019, 22 min, digital) PROMETHEUS (2023, 3 min, digital) WAR ZONE (2024, 7 min, digital) SAN FRANCISCO ART INSTITUTE (A GHOST STORY) (2024, 9 min, digital) LUMINAE (2023, 3 min, digital) AEON (2024, 12 min, digital) FLASHBACKS (2022, 5 min, digital) KHOROSHO (2023, 4 min, digital) FILM DIARY #1—ROBERT FULTON III (2024, 2 min, digital) FILM DIARY #2—NO NOTHING CINEMA (2024, 4 min, digital) FILM DIARY #7—PSALM SUNDAY (2024, 5 min, digital) Total running time: ca. 80 min.

OCCUPIED PALESTINE, PROGRAM 1 Vladimir Tamari AL QUDS 1968, 18 min, 16mm-to-digital. In English. “A short film made by Vladimir Tamari following the first anniversary of the occupation of Arab Jerusalem by the Zionist army at the start of the 1967 war. Using footage from UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) cinema archives where he worked as a technician, Tamari edited this film and organized its narration and addition of music by his friends, all volunteers and amateurs as he was, in order to express the feelings of the Palestinians at the loss of their capital city and center of their spiritual, commercial, and intellectual life.” –PALESTINE FILMS Kamal Aljafari RECOLLECTION 2015, 70 min, DCP. In English. “RECOLLECTION was inspired by a late-night TV encounter in a London hotel room. While flipping channels, Kamal Aljafari stumbled upon Menahem Golan’s THE DELTA FORCE (1986), about an elite counter-terrorism team rescuing hostages from kaffiyeh-clad terrorists in a Beirut played onscreen by Jaffa. As Chuck Norris sped through the streets, Aljafari noticed, in the background, someone he recognized from his youth. In his film, Aljafari collates images shot in Jaffa from the 1960s to the ’90s, such as the bourekas films that often reinforced Zionist origin narratives and hero mythologies in their scenes of slapstick action, car chases, shootouts, and Arab-coded Mizrahi ‘thugs’ threatening Ashkenazi maidens. He then enacts what he describes as ‘cinematic justice,’ using digital software to erase the leading actors, and leaving only those figures who appear in the background.” –Kaleem Hawa, CINEMA SCOPE

OCCUPIED PALESTINE, PROGRAM 2 Kassem Hawal RETURN TO HAIFA / A’ID ILA HAYFA 1982, 75 min, 35mm-to-digital. In Arabic with English subtitles. “The first feature-length Palestinian fictional film, RETURN TO HAIFA adapts Ghassan Kanafani’s 1969 novella by the same name. Filmed in Lebanon during its crushing civil war, the film team relied on the communities of Palestinian life-in-exile and the infrastructures of the Palestinian resistance for its production; per Hawal’s screen notes, resistance fighters went door to door in Badawi and Nahr al-Barid refugee camps to furnish the actors for the scenes of mass exodus filmed in Tripoli. What results is a national initiative, at once polemical and cautious, of exodus and its attendant psychologies.” –Kaleem Hawa

OCCUPIED PALESTINE, PROGRAM 3 Borhane Alaouié KAFR QASIM 1975, 108 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles. “The Lebanese master Borhane Alaouié’s first feature film, KAFR QASIM recreates a day in the life of the eponymous village, made site of a 1956 Zionist massacre. Based on a novelization by ʿAsim al-Jundi, the film’s narrative threads remain unresolved, a tale of forty-nine lives cut short by a tightening project of settlement. Filmed in the Syrian village of al-Shaykh Saad, the film suggests entangled Arab fates, producing a coldly realist depiction of the nature of Zionist occupation and the functioning of power, labor, and capital in historic Palestine.” –Kaleem Hawa

This spring, Anthology hosts a memorial tribute to filmmaker, curator, and teacher Ross McLaren (1953-2023). McLaren was, in a sense, hiding in plain sight in recent years, his films relatively rarely screened here in New York, despite living and working in the city for decades as a beloved teacher, colleague, and mentor. Born in Canada, McLaren began making extraordinary films there in the mid-1970s, including his seminal punk chronicle, CRASH ‘N’ BURN (1977), shot at (and named after) Canada’s first punk club, which features performances by the Dead Boys, Teenage Head, The Boyfriends, and the Diodes. But his importance within the Canadian film scene extended far beyond his own films – soon after graduating from the Ontario College of Art, he co-founded the Toronto Super 8 Film Festival, and later founded and directed the experimental film collective and venue, The Funnel, which became the epicenter of underground cinema in Toronto. Later in his career, after relocating to New York, he continued to make genuinely underground, uncompromising, and vital films, while also inspiring generations of young filmmakers through his teaching at Fordham University (since 1986), Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, Millennium Film Workshop, and other institutions. For this initial tribute to McLaren’s work, we’ll be screening the six Super-8mm and 16mm films that are currently in distribution (with the aim of organizing a more comprehensive series at a later date, when his undistributed, lesser-known films become available). “Ross McLaren’s films fall roughly into three areas of concern. One direction is typified by WEATHER BUILDING and his segment of LAUNCH FIVE. These are characterized by a dark ground (shot at night) from which emerge the images and form of the work. They are constructed intuitively and demand an intuitive reading by others. The second group includes 9X12 and WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 17, 1979, and show a concern for the nature of the film material, typical of ‘structural’ or conceptual films. Finally CRASH ‘N’ BURN, SUMMER CAMP and SEX WITHOUT GLASSES share a fascination with human performance before a camera.” –John Porter Special thanks to McLaren’s collaborators and colleagues, filmmaker James Kienitz Wilkins and professor Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock (Fordham University), both of whom will be here in person to speak about McLaren’s work. Thanks as well to Mike Hoolboom and the CFMDC. I.E. (1976, 15 min, 16mm) WEATHER BUILDING (1976, 10 min, Super-8mm-to-16mm) CRASH ‘N’ BURN (1977, 28 min, 16mm) WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 17, 1979 (1979, 4 min, 16mm) SEX WITHOUT GLASSES (1983, 12 min, 16mm) Total running time: ca. 75 min.

FILMMAKER IN PERSON! “In his brief, notorious life, artist David Wojnarowicz burned hot and bright. Born in poverty and raised in neglect, sexual at a young age and hustling as a teenager, he was the right artist to shake up the 1980s East Village scene with explicit sexuality and dissections of toxic American culture. His work was always in-your-face: photographs of men having sex among the dilapidated Hudson River piers; a post-punk band called 3 Teens Kill 4; and a series of angry, sexy videos, which were attacked by fundamentalist right-wingers. Director Marion Scemama and editor François Pain, both friends and collaborators of Wojnarowicz, artfully bring together interviews shot in his cluttered apartment in 1989, along with rare glimpses of his beautiful, provocative art. This simmering documentary builds toward the intense, outraged live performances he delivered at the height of the AIDS crisis, before his death in 1992. It’s an intimate portrait of the serious, goofy, anguished, brainy, and horny sides of an essential artist and activist who gave voice to unapologetic queerness at the end of the 20th century.” –K.M. Soehnlein, FRAMELINE “In an interview conducted in 1989 by cultural theorist Sylvère Lotringer, Wojnarowicz speaks candidly about intimate moments in his life, the creative process, sexuality, AIDS, and coming to terms with one’s own death – at a time when society categorically refused to face up to the AIDS epidemic. Marion Scemama, who was a close friend of Wojnarowicz and who filmed the interview, has created an incomparable essay out of [this conversation] and previously unseen work drawn from the artist’s and her own private archives. Interweaving Wojnarowicz’s charismatic observations with excerpts from his work, she has succeeded in creating a deeply moving film that looks into the soul of a man who exposed his vulnerability in a variety of aesthetic forms.” –BERLINALE This program is presented as part of Lower East Side History Month; for more info visit: https://peoplesles.org/les-history-month/

This program shines a spotlight on artist Shinkichi Tajiri, who is best known for his sculptural work, but who also made a number of fascinating films. Born in Los Angeles to first-generation Japanese immigrants, Tajiri enlisted in the army to escape imprisonment in the Japanese concentration camps that the U.S. government created during the war. Moving to Paris in 1948, he was based there for most of the next decade, a period in which he studied with sculptor Ossip Zadkine and painter (and filmmaker) Fernand Léger, collaborated with the CoBrA group of artists, and co-founded Galerie Huit. Tajiri’s first film, VIPERS (1955), which he intended to evoke the experience of taking psychoactive drugs, was awarded the Golden Lion for ‘Best Use of Film Language’ at the Cannes Film Festival. For this program, we’ll be presenting four of Tajiri’s short films, as well as Johan van der Keuken’s 1962 film portrait of Tajiri and Carmen D’Avino’s 1950 documentary VERNISSAGE OF AMERICAN ARTISTS, which provides glimpses of Tajiri and several other American artists in Paris at the time. All the films in this program, with the exception of VERNISSAGE OF AMERICAN ARTISTS, are screened courtesy of the Eye Filmmuseum. Shinkichi Tajiri THE VIPERS 1955, 9.5 min, 16mm. Co-cinematography by Baird Bryant. MAD NEST 1955, 4.5 min, 16mm FERDI 1955, 12 min, 16mm-to-digital BICYCLES 1960, 5 min, 16mm-to-digital Johan van der Keuken TAJIRI 1962, 12 min, 16mm-to-digital Carmen D’Avino VERNISSAGE OF AMERICAN ARTISTS 1950, 18 min, 16mm-to-digital Total running time: ca. 65 min.

SYRIA: Qais al-Zubaidi THE VISIT / AL-ZIYARAH 1972, 9 min, 16mm-to-digital. In Arabic with English subtitles. “THE VISIT sublimates narrative and visual conventions into a diaphanous haze of lyrical evocation. Linearity is here dissolved not through anti-narrative deconstruction but through a refutation of its alleged logical primacy.” –Celluloid Liberation Front, THE BROOKLYN RAIL Mohammad Malas THE NIGHT / AL-LEIL 1992, 116 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles. “In THE NIGHT, Malas returns to the Syria of the late 1930s and ’40s to reclaim not only his own childhood as the son of a deeply troubled father, but also his country’s struggles with colonial rule and with Zionist settlements in neighboring Palestine. Malas’s alter ego is a young boy who lives with his parents in Quneitra, a rural village in the Golan Heights, not far from the Palestinian border, which was later annexed [and occupied] by the [Zionists]. Dense with historical references and haunting images, THE NIGHT offers an all-too-rare glimpse into daily life in the [Arab] world – and into one man’s efforts to understand both father and fatherland.” –SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

At the end of the 20th century, an ecological disaster has left the air contaminated and exhausted the Earth’s natural resources. Experts estimate that there is enough water and food to ensure humanity’s survival only for another ten years. Against this backdrop, Jan, a TV repairman, tries to win over the glamorous and elusive Ewa.

[TULITIKKUTEHTAAN TYTTÖ] Kaurismäki took his penchant for despairing character studies to unspeakably grim depths in the shockingly entertaining THE MATCH FACTORY GIRL. Kati Outinen is memorably impenetrable as Iris, whose grinding days as a cog in a factory wheel, and nights as a neglected daughter living with her parents, ultimately send her over the edge. Despite her transgressions, Kaurismäki makes Iris a compelling, even sympathetic figure. Bleak yet suffused with comic irony, THE MATCH FACTORY GIRL closes out the “Proletariat Trilogy” with a bang – and a whimper.

[TOIVON TUOLLA PUOLEN] This wry, melancholic comedy from Kaurismäki, a clear-eyed response to the refugee crisis, follows two people searching for a place to call home. Displaced Syrian Khaled lands in Helsinki as a stowaway; meanwhile, middle-aged salesman Wikström leaves behind his wife and job and buys a conspicuously unprofitable seafood restaurant. After Khaled is denied asylum, he decides not to return to Aleppo – and the paths of the two men cross fortuitously. As deadpan as the best of the director’s work, and with a deep well of empathy for its down-but-not-out characters (many of them played by members of Kaurismäki’s ever-reliable stock company), THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE is a bittersweet tale of human kindness in the face of official indifference.

A family voluntarily isolates themselves in their home, which slowly transforms from a sanctuary into a prison. The drama unfolds from the perspective of a mother and her sons, culminating in a tense climax that reveals the mystery of their seclusion.A family voluntarily isolates themselves in their home, which slowly transforms from a sanctuary into a prison. The drama unfolds from the perspective of a mother and her sons, culminating in a tense climax that reveals the mystery of their seclusion.

Katy Martin UNDERBRUSH (2019, 16 min, digital. With music by Matthew Shipp and The Matthew Shipp Acoustic Ensemble, recorded live at The Vision Festival.) In this film, the moving image supports the sound, and the music in turn opens up the image. That is in keeping with modes of improvisational jazz, where at times members of the ensemble take the lead and, at other times, stand back to listen and support. UNDERBRUSH was created at the invitation of the Vision Festival, and a silent version was projected onstage during the music’s premiere performance. Katy Martin & Miriam Parker BY NIGHT – NO STILLNESS (2009, 10 min, digital. With music by Hamid Drake, dance by Miriam Parker, painting by Katy Martin, and sculpture by Jo Wood-Brown.) BY NIGHT – NO STILLNESS is a study in black, where black becomes a radiant space within which one finds inner light. Dancer Miriam Parker and percussionist Hamid Drake perform within a video projection of a black and yellow painting on Parker’s body. The sculpture is by Jo Wood-Brown. Miriam Parker ENERGY NEVER DIES IT ONLY TRANSFORMS (2023, 6 min, digital. Poetry by No Land Voice and sound by Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez.) “This film is a tribute to Jaime Branch, an artist who continues to be a source of inspiration to me, and a reminder of the power of our life force to expand beyond the boundaries of this flesh bag called our body.” –Miriam Parker Miriam Parker IN THE CENTER (2024, 11 min, digital) A visual dance between weight, force, and sound. An experiment on the intersection of rhythm and emotion as a part of the fuel needed to pursue revolutionary change. Jo Wood-Brown THE ORIGIN MYTH OF THE DREAMING WOMAN (2022, 26 min, digital) This film tells the story of the titular character, a contemporary archetype of femininity and the ephemeral, who travels through the unseen channels of the universe. In her journey through ancient landscapes and the modern world, Dreaming Woman operates as a connective tissue not only between the past and the present but between different cultures and civilizations; she is the personification of the ties that bind us to our histories and to our futures. Total running time: ca. 75 min.

William Parker LIGHT SLICES MY HEART (2002, 45 min, 16mm) A document of Parker’s early days of sound and music, dance and family. Michael Lucio Sternbach THE MYSTERY OF THE GARDNERS GROOVE: ILLUMINATION (2017, 25 min, digital) A documentary film by Michael Lucio Sternbach about the musical brotherhood of bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake. Known worldwide as one of the premier rhythm sections of jazz, the two discuss their musical kinship and the shamanistic sound ceremonies they deploy worldwide. The film is a comprehensive look into their music, which becomes a conversation about the substantial lessons we learn in life. Anonymous Film Collective FIRE OF COMPASSION (2024, 20 min, digital) This biopic chronicles the early days of William Parker – following his arrival in Manhattan from the Bronx in the early 1970s – through on-location interviews and highlights of performances. Total running time: ca. 95 min. Filmmakers in person!

Luke Fowler COP26FILM (2023, 7 min, digital) Carlos Araya Diaz HE WHO DANCES PASSES (2023, 70 min, digital)

Tomonoari Nishikawa SIX SEVENTY-TWO VARIATIONS, VARIATION 3 (FOR CHARLES) (2023, 23 min, 16mm performance) Cherrie Yu BOLERO STUDY (2024, 3 min, digital) Audrey Lam US AND THE NIGHT (2024, 67 min, digital) Followed by a Q&A.

Raúl Ruiz & Valeria Sarmiento EL REALISMO SOCIALISTA 1973/2023, 78 min, 16mm-to-digital

Philip Hoffman DEEP 1 (2023, 15 min, 35mm) Rhayne Vermette BLACK RECTANGLE (2013, 2 min, 16mm) Rhayne Vermette DOMUS (2017, 15 min, 16mm) Isaac Sherman A SHIFTING PATTERN (2024, 6 min, 16mm) Abigail He MEASURING 500 FEET (2023, 14 min, 16mm) Tomonari Nishikawa LIGHT, NOISE, SMOKE, AND LIGHT, NOISE, SMOKE (2023, 6 min, 16mm) Rhayne Vermette TRICKS ARE FOR KIDDO (2012, 3 min, 16mm) Federica Fogli GLITTER FOR GIRLS (2024, 4 min, digital) Followed by a Q&A. Premiere of 16mm Rhayne Vermette prints courtesy of the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection at the Waller Art Center.

Calum Walter ENTRANCE WOUNDS (2023, 18 min, digital) Isiah Medina HE THOUGHT HE DIED (2023, 70 min, digital)

Kamal AlJafari UNDR (2024, 15 min, digital) Larissa Sansour & Søren Lind FAMILIAR PHANTOMS (2024, 42 min, digital)

Luke Fowler A VISIT WITH ROBERT (2024, 3 min, 16mm) Rachel Daisy Ellis EROS (2024, 107 min, digital) Followed by a Q&A.

Antoinetta Angelidi THE HOURS – A SQUARE FILM 1995, 80 min, 35mm-to-digital Followed by a Q&A.

Charlie Shackleton CAMERA TEST (KING CADBURY) (2024, 7 min, digital) Melissa Friedling MIDWOOD MOVIE (2024, 75 min, digital) Followed by a Q&A.

Derek B. Jenkins AS CLOSE AS YOUR VOICE CAN CALL (2023, 4 min, 16mm) Alexis Kyle Mitchell THE TREASURY OF HUMAN INHERITANCE (2024, 59 min, digital) Followed by a Q&A.

San Francisco Newsreel REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY A.K.A. WE ARE THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE (NEWRSEEL #65) (1973, 45 min, 16mm-to-digital) Jayce Salloum & Elia Suleiman INTRODUCTION TO THE END OF AN ARGUMENT (1990, 40 min, digital)

Ralitsa Doncheva LET THE RED MOON BURN (2023, 7 min, digital) Xiaolu Wang AT THE BAMBOO GREEN (2024, 11 min, digital) Aminata Ndow IN THE WAKE OF LOSS (2024, 22 min, digital) Samy Benammar BEFORE SERIANA (2024, 9 min, digital) Followed by a Q&A.

Antoinetta Angelidi 121280 RITUAL (1980/2008, 16 min, 16mm-to-digital) Antoinetta Angelidi IDEES FIXES / DIES IRAE (1988, 60 min, 16mm-to-digital) Followed by a Q&A.

Linnea Nugent IN THE FISHTANK (2024, 3 min, digital) Terrie Samundra EXTINCTION STORY ORIGIN STORY (2024, 17 min, digital) Svetlana Romanova HINKELTEN (2024, 18 min, digital) Kara Hansen UNSPEAKABLE HEAP (2024, 14 min, digital) Naghmeh Abbasi LANDSCAPE SUSPENDED (2022, 26 min, digital)

Antoinetta Angelidi THIEF OR REALITY 2001, 80 min, 35mm Followed by a Q&A.

Eri Saito SOCIAL CIRCLES (2024, 16 min, digital) Tsai Ming-Liang ABIDING NOWHERE (2023, 79 min, digital)

Gurvinder Singh TROLLEY TIMES 2023, 143 min, digital

Antoinetta Angelidi TOPOS 1985, 80 min, 35mm Followed by a Q&A.

Amir George ABEFELE (2023, 3 min, digital) Little Egypt Collective ON THE BATTLEFIELD (2024, 16 min, digital) Demetrius Antonio Lewis MAP TO THE SIRENS (2024, 14 min, digital) Daphne Xu ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong ping pong (2024, 9 min, digital) Nafis Fathollahzadeh KHABUR (2024, 30 min, digital) Followed by a Q&A.

Aldo Tambellini & M. Woods BLACK INFINITUDE 110 min, 16mm + digital + livescore

Carol Mansour AIDA RETURNS 2024, 77 min, digital

Antoinetta Angelidi OBSESSIVE HOURS AT THE TOPOS OF REALITY 2023, 88 min, digital Followed by a Q&A.

Pablo Alvarez Mesa THE SOLDIER’S LAGOON 2024, 75 min, digital Followed by a Q&A.

Akbar Padamsee SYZYGY (1969/2024, 12 min, 35mm) Joost Rekveld MECHANISMS COMMON TO DISPARATE PHENOMENON: #59 (2023, 79 min, digital)

Lynne Sachs CONTRACTIONS (2024, 12 min, digital) Tana Gilbert MALQUERIDAS (2023, 75 min, digital)

Digitally restored by the Harvard Film Archive and Ciné-Archives using the original 35mm picture negative and magnetic track. Financial support provided by the McMillan Stewart Foundation. Film services by Blackhawk Films and Lumières Numériques. This past March Anthology presented a comprehensive retrospective devoted to Mauritanian-French filmmaker Med Hondo, which coincided with a premiere engagement at Film Forum of the new 4K digital restoration of Hondo’s masterpiece, WEST INDIES: THE FUGITIVE SLAVES OF LIBERTY. As a follow-up to those presentations, Anthology presents a week of encore screenings of WEST INDIES, an anti-colonial Brechtian musical of immense political power and formal daring. WEST INDIES proved a watershed event for African cinema – the continent’s first musical as well as a sui generis amalgam of historical epic, Broadway revue, Brechtian theater, and joyous agitprop. Using an enormous mock slave ship as the film’s only soundstage, Hondo mounts intricately choreographed reenactments and dance numbers across his multipurpose set to investigate more than three centuries of imperialist oppression. The story traverses the West Indies, Europe, and the Middle Passage; jumps across time to depict the effects of official French policy upon the colonized, the enslaved, and their descendants; and surveys the actions and motivations of the resigned, the revolutionary, and the powers that be (along with their lackeys). No mere extravaganza, WEST INDIES is a call to arms for a spectacular yet critical cinematic reimagining of an entire people’s history of resistance and struggle. “Born from the desire ‘to free the very concept of musical comedy from its American trade mark,’ WEST INDIES is an immaculately staged musical entirely set on a slave ship. The director appropriates and overturns the tropes of the genre to craft a musical epic on the cultural and economic logics of the slave trade. Lucidly, Med Hondo in WEST INDIES dissects the business of slavery in all its components, from genocidal greed to collaborationism, all the while choreographing an immaculate spectacle worthy of Busby Berkeley.” –Celluloid Liberation Front, MUBI

Almantas Grikevičius TIME PASSES THROUGH THE CITY / LAIKAS EINA PER MIESTĄ Lithuania, 1966, 20 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Lithuanian with English subtitles. The main protagonist of this film is time itself as it passes through Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Drawing on both the Soviet avant-garde and French cinéma vérité, it peels back intersecting layers of the city’s history. The white horse wandering the streets becomes a poignant symbol of the way streets and buildings retain the memory of ages past. Kornél Mundruczó WHITE GOD / FEHÉR ISTEN Hungary, 2014, 120 min, DCP. In Hungarian with English subtitles. An allegorical tale in which an abandoned dog searches desperately for his beloved owner. When his search fails, he joins a canine revolt against the dogs’ human abusers. The film, which skillfully blends melodrama, adventure, and a touch of horror to pose questions about contemporary Hungary, was awarded the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes.

The moving-image works of Lily Jue Sheng are distinguished by the richly multi-layered quality (visually, thematically, and conceptually), and by their achievement in creating a sensory-driven cinema that’s as piercing as it is poetic, imaginative, and strange. Whether working with experimental animation, collage, documentary, text, or some combination thereof, Sheng’s films devise polyphonic compositions that link the totality of their ideas to the unassuming, common spaces they frequent day-to-day. Their earlier films coincided with a temporary job cataloging the works of Japanese filmmaker Stom Sogo, which not only informs their cinematic and occupational habits of rephotographing images to the punctuated beat of a hair-raising soundtrack, but also renders categorically illegible, thereby neglected, the kind of work performed by filmmakers doubling as cinema’s conditionally documented and perpetually alien technical workers. In their later films, Sheng starts to more explicitly circumvent, recontextualize, and unravel the symbolic tensions permeating language, specifically focusing on deteriorated or vernacular inflections of Chinese. In these works, written characters function simultaneously as the primary image, text caption, oral tradition, and somatic drawing of their personal lineage toward a more critical consciousness, bearing the spirit of Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s rigorously reframed subtitles and anthropological studies. Sheng’s most recent work – HERITAGE ARCHITECTURE (2024), a study of landscapes, architecture, and the local-to-global capital underpinnings of East Asian port cities – is a departure insofar as it takes up a more representational style of street photography. Heavily inspired by their introduction to and thinking around anti-displacement, landscape theory, and the consciousness raising largely taking place outside of the theater, the work maps the socially abstract to the socially real as one and the same. Sweeping scenes of condemned housing, high-rise housing, and so-called preserved housing gutted into luxury shops and cinema’s backdrops make plain the sight of predatory real estate speculation running the political economy. Sheng will be in attendance and will discuss these issues further with labor researcher, writer, and guest moderator Steff Hui Ci Ling in a post-screening Q&A. HERITAGE ARCHITECTURE / 建筑遗产 (2024, 9 min, 16mm. Scored by Masami Tomihisa and Lily Jue Sheng.) Pedestrian scenes recorded in the background of larger ongoing projects while passing through Shanghai, Keelung, Taipei, and Taoyuan. Culture is not just measured in time and travel to the historic place(s) marked by heritage or mediated cinema. The paradox of culture, one affectively caught up in the familiar and alien, and architecture itself lays bare the very infrastructure we call culture. The film fell together walking Hongkou, where my family is from – looking up old spots, finding eminent domain streets instead. In Taiwan, we encounter deities’ birthdays, street vendors, and A Maiden’s Prayer littering streets all year round. Congregations encompassing the passionately devoted, as well as those bored and impatiently melting under the sun, come to perform this act called spiritual life to captive audiences – which cannot be distilled to geography or god-fearing seen on the surface, but ebbs and flows as money changes hands and interests over generations. FIVE MOVEMENTS / 五種流⾏之氣 (2018/24, 19 min, digital. Scored by Nyle Kim Kaliski; paintings by Anjuli Rathod.) FIVE MOVEMENTS is titled after the system wǔxíng, which is very hard to describe, but in this film manifests as dreams and waking life enmeshing in the space of personal melancholia, theater, and myths surrounding the home. This new (2024) cut features recent images and videos recorded in Edison, New Jersey, and Shanghai. CHANGE / 变 (2016-2017, 6 min, 16mm double projection. Scored by Kevin P Keenan and Lily Jue Sheng.) CHANGE is an incantation that begins and ends with the character 变 biàn. It draws attention to simultaneous logics unfolding in time, chance, estrangement, and labor, deploying alienation as a sensory strategy – one filmmakers will recognize in a structural film, while native speakers of Mandarin are first attuned to its unnatural grammar. Those familiar with TCM will pick up on body clocks and hexagrams, while others studying a different set of classics pick up on the distancing effect. It packs a partial history of I Ching inspired divination and characters into a few minutes. FORCE MAJEURE (2015-2017, 5 min, 16mm. Scored by Kevin P Keenan.) This almost went in the trash because it’s a poor image. It’s self-conscious and struggling to not be so poor, kind of angry about it. It’s also a shadow companion to MERCURIAL MATTER made at a time I held a job upstairs ingesting filmmaker (and former AFA projectionist) Stom Sogo’s mind-bending Super-8mm films. MERCURIAL MATTER (2014-2017, 6 min, 16mm. Scored by Asha Sheshadri.) Early animistic animations using travel mattes and optical printing to layer single-frame captured images into botanical and graphic collages. IKEBANA / 花道 (2021, 13 min, Super-16mm-to-digital. Made in collaboration with Rita Ferrando.) An experimental documentary that reimagines the art of flower arranging. Connecting different practices and perspectives through cinematic assemblage, the film witnesses plants as living, permeable vehicles that hold everyday memories and poetics. Total running time: ca. 65 min.