Anthology Film Archives

One of the opening shots of WANDA features a small silhouette in a white outfit – blonde hair, a white purse – walking across a vast black coal field. The feelings of inadequacy and self-denigration are perhaps what cause Wanda (Barbara Loden) to wander in rural Pennsylvania. She deserts her family and roams local bars with curlers in her hair and a small handbag, and clings to a man who, finding her useful for a brief period, drags her into his criminal schemes. Filmed in a vérité style, and inspired by a real-life news item that deeply affected Loden, WANDA is a compassionate meditation on marginalization, as its protagonist navigates a world that has no place carved out for her.

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Robert Wise’s classic boxing film THE SET-UP is graced with a cameo from Weegee, who appears as a ringside timekeeper in one of the film’s peerless boxing match sequences.

“A classic noir, THE SET-UP features Robert Ryan (who in his youth had reigned as heavyweight champion all four years he studied at Dartmouth) as creaky heavyweight Bill “Stoker” Thompson. His manager arranges a deal with the mob to have Thompson “take a dive.” When he eventually learns of his manager’s dirty dealing, he must quickly make a choice with no good outcomes: kowtow to the capos and live with the fact that he is another palooka, or fight on in the hopes of snatching that last bit of dignity from a sport that never gave much in return. Tense, efficient, and pitch-perfect, THE SET-UP is one of Wise’s most meticulously crafted films – a vision of boxing, and of life, that offers only the bleakest alternatives.” –Sean Nam

Preceded by:
PITTSBURGH
1959, 28 min, 16mm-to-DCP. Produced by On Film Co. New scan by Anthology Film Archives!
Commissioned by the Pittsburgh Bicentennial Association to celebrate the city’s 200th anniversary, PITTSBURGH was created by a team of filmmakers that included Weegee, as well as avant-garde filmmakers Stan Brakhage (working under the pseudonym James Stanley), Len Lye, and Stan Vanderbeek, and photographers W. Eugene Smith and Willard Van Dyke.

“In PITTSBURGH, an extensive body of talent collaborates to execute an idiosyncratic vision, expressed through a dazzling cache of technique, all completed rather improbably – or so it might seem – on ‘the client’s dime.’ […] [Weegee was] hired because of his cinematography in WEEGEE’S NEW YORK, a short documentary film that rendered the normal urban milieu fantastic through the deployment of optical effects. In PITTSBURGH, Weegee utilized both prismatic and kaleidoscopic lenses to generate a sort of cinematic shortcut to the future. The prisms cast the camera’s subject in bands of refracted light, creating a rainbow-saturated otherworld, while the kaleidoscopic lenses multiplied the image into identical slivers of vision, providing a quick metaphor for the heady prime time of nuclear fission that was just around the corner.” –Sean P. Kilcoyne, “PITTSBURGH (1959): ‘Equilibriums of Paradox’ and the Bicentennial City of Tomorrow”

“It’s weirdly interesting, but a monstrosity.” –Stan Brakhage
Total running time: ca. 105 min.

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Restored by Cineteca Nazionale and Cineteca di Bologna with Associazione Alberto Grifi.

“ANNA is an astonishing, nearly four-hour documentary about a 16-year-old homeless junkie, eight months pregnant, whom the filmmakers discovered in Rome’s Piazza Navona. Mainly shot on then-newfangled video (which at times gives the black-and-white images a ghostly translucence), it documents the interactions between the beautiful, clearly damaged, often dazed teenager and the directors, who take her in partly out of compassion and partly because she’s a fascinating subject for a film. Far from straightforward vérité, this self-implicating chronicle includes reenactments of the first meeting, explicit attempts to direct its subject, and frequent intrusions from behind the camera…. ANNA cuts between long, often discomfiting domestic scenes (including an interminable delousing in the shower) and equally protracted café discussions back in the square, where the unruly cross talk among hippies, bums, bourgeoisie, and angry young men touches on the movie’s key themes of obligation and intervention: between filmmakers and their subjects, the state and its citizens, fellow members of society.” –Dennis Lim, ARTFORUM

“With Anna, as with certain of Warhol’s subjects we never heard from again…the electrifying presence of filmed beauty and the obsessive gaze itself form a vivid and mysterious historical record: of ‘stars’ who exist purely as stars, leaving no trace of lives continued offscreen, outside their moment of celluloid fame. Their only record is their record on film. Almost unknown for the past thirty-six years outside the country where it was made, ANNA contains within it, as if under lock and key, seemingly every seed and secret component of that mythical and explosive era, the 1970s in Italy.” –Rachel Kushner, ARTFORUM

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With the exception of WEEGEE’S NEW YORK, all films in this program have been preserved by Anthology Film Archives, in collaboration with the International Center of Photography, through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

COCKTAIL PARTY ca. 1946, 5.5 min, 16mm
A home movie short capturing the raucous party celebrating the release of Weegee’s second photobook, “Weegee’s People”. The film features appearances by Mrs. George Washington Kavanaugh, who is among the subjects of one of Weegee’s most celebrated photos, “The Critic”, as well as some of the only known footage of eccentric author Joe Gould.

BOAC ca. 1955-59, 5.5 min, 16mm
The neon lights of Time Square’s BOAC sign…in Kodachrome kaleidoscope.

ASSORTED SCENES/KALEIDOSCOPE ca. 1952-65, 16.5 min, 16mm
More urban kaleidoscopic experiments in color and B&W.

WEEGEE’S NEW YORK 1946-48/51, 21.5 min, 16mm. Edited by Amos Vogel.
“The famed press photographer creates a vividly impressionistic feature-length study of the metropolis, combining documentary and experimental techniques. (‘I am very excited about this film. Weegee has the eye of a Balzac.’ Robert Flaherty)” –Amos Vogel, CINEMA 16 notes, June 2, 1948

“One of the most under-recognized films of the 1950s.” –Scott Macdonald

ANIMATION MONA LISA, ETC. ca. 1955-65, 5 min, 16mm
Weegee’s experiments in distorted portraiture.

IDIOT BOX 1967, 5.5 min, 16mm
Weegee’s last film, a tribute to trash television and commercial culture.

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

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“The success of Cinerama spawned several imitations, notably the Cinemiracle process (which used a different mounting system for its three cameras). The veteran documentary producer Louis de Rochemont (famous for his ‘March of Time’ series in the ’30s and ’40s) used Cinemiracle to film WINDJAMMER: THE VOYAGE OF THE CHRISTIAN RADICH, the record of a trans-Atlantic training exercise taken by a Norwegian high-masted sailing ship and its student crew. […] The film is mostly a straightforward travelogue, until the ship finally reaches New York Harbor and touches off a flurry of kaleidoscopic camerawork executed by the tabloid photographer Weegee.” –Dave Kehr, NEW YORK TIMES

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Anna, a filmmaker in her thirties, returns to her native Belgium to present a film. During her stay, she meets family members, acquaintances, and strangers with whom she spends a night. She moves through urban spaces, trains, hotels, train station halls, and restaurants with the strangeness and curiosity characteristic of those who return home. LES RENDEZ-VOUS D’ANNA is a film about such a return, the passage of time, the notion of movement, and the space that interweaves with those who stay behind.

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“[Kubrick had] worked as a press photographer from the age of 17, principally for Look magazine, making extraordinarily good photographs that owed some of their look to Weegee’s. He even shot a few with infrared film. The two men had crossed paths regularly…and Kubrick had been attentive to Weegee’s work and career. As DR. STRANGELOVE began filming at Shepperton Studios, Kubrick found himself able to, after a fashion, repay the artistic debt, and he hired Weegee to work on the set, taking still pictures. […] [Peter Sellers] found him fascinating, as anyone obsessed with accents and eccentricities would, and he not only observed Weegee but absorbed him. A few months later, on Steve Allen’s TV show, Allen asked Sellers about Strangelove’s peculiar high-pitched German-accented English, and Sellers told him where the accent came from: ‘I was stuck, you see, because I didn’t want to do sort of a normal English broken-German-accent thing. So on the set was a little photographer from New York, a very cute little fellow called Weegee – you must’ve heard of him. And he had a little voice, like this, used to walk around the set talking like this most of the time. He’d say, “I’m looking for a girl with a beautiful body and a sick mind!” And I got an idea, I was really stuck for this…I put a German accent on top of that, and I suddenly got [in Strangelove’s voice] dis thing, you know, where – going up here and…so I got him into Dr. Strangelove. So really it’s Weegee. I don’t know if he knows it.’” –Christopher Bonanos, SLATE

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DON’T CRY, PRETTY GIRLS! depicts the odyssey of a young woman (Jaroslava Schallerová, star of the Czech New Wave classic VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS) through the streets of Budapest on the eve of her marriage to a factory worker (Mark Zala). The film captures a precise moment of social change when young people were caught in the historical, cultural, and economic contradictions between the rigidity of the Eastern bloc – work, factory life, and family expectations – and a beat-influenced generation inspired by love, music, and freedom. The almost pamphlet-like song lyrics rhyme with the editing, and the camera captures – reflected on a young girl’s face – this moment of hesitation between two models of existence.

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As if Weegee’s path from crime photographer to celebrated artist and public figure to avant-garde filmmaker to Hollywood studio photographer and technician wasn’t bizarre enough, the later stage of his career found him appearing in several “nudie cutie” exploitation films, including SHANGRI-LA (1961) and MY BARE LADY (1963). The culmination of this strange chapter was THE ‘IMP’PROBABLE MR. WEE GEE (1966), which, trading on his name recognition, cast him in the starring role. In this absurd, scattershot, and Russ Meyer-esque film, Weegee falls in love with a shop-window mannequin. When the mannequin is shipped off to Paris, he follows in hot pursuit, searching for his beloved while casting an admiring eye on many of the other female residents of the City of Light. Painfully dated, THE ‘IMP’PROBABLE MR. WEE GEE nevertheless demonstrates the unique, stranger-than-fiction quality of Arthur Fellig’s life and career.

Preceded by:
WEEGEE’S CAMERA MAGIC 1960, 8 min, 16mm-to-DCP
Distributed by Castle Films for the home market, this short film illustrates some of the camera tricks that Weegee became known for throughout the latter part of his career.

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

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“My name is Joy. I’m about 5’3, measurements 36-24-36, and English. My little baby’s name is Jonny… Things I like most: plenty of clothes and money.” POOR COW centers on Joy, a single 18-year-old mother who moves from place to place with her son under her arm, from an abusive boyfriend to her prostitute aunt to another bad-news boyfriend, engaging in promiscuous relationships with older men who spoil her. The story could be an inverted gender version of the Kitchen sink realist film – a genre that has typically focused on angry young men disillusioned with modern society. Joy, however, has no big dreams and consequently no big disappointments. POOR COW hinges on the contradiction between the wish to drift away from middle-class stability, infused with a new spirit of female freedom, and the desire for small material comforts and a measure of domestic happiness.

“[A scene featuring a] deflated hair-piece which Joy despairingly ‘can’t go out without!’ and cost her ‘five and eleven’ demarks Joy’s status in the narrative; a single, working-class mother with no way to get by but her looks. It is a scene literal yet beguiling. This ornamental hair-piece, abstract and banal, is the coveted commodity yet also embodies the source of Joy’s income. In its abject state the promises of this object – the ability to pay rent and buy food, the dreamworld of another life, the valuation of her gender, the possibility of beauty – are untenable, unstable, and lacking.” –Carolyn Funk, MUBI NOTEBOOK

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“Yasuko, Yoko, Koichi, and Bill are high school freshmen who engage in group sex to find out the reasons for their dissatisfaction and desensitization. They want to discover how they can ‘beat’ sex and therefore win against adult society. When 15-year-old Yasuko, who has become pregnant, tells her classmates that she has slept with their teacher, she is accused of betrayal and of breaking their vow not to have sex just for pleasure. Yasuko declares that she has felt something only because she prostituted herself. In order to confirm whether this is true, and encouraged by her peers, Yasuko becomes a prostitute and sets out on a journey of self-exploration. […] Interspersed with actual suicide notes and employing several alienation effects, GUSHING PRAYER is a penetrative allegory of the political dissatisfaction and spiritual void that came in the wake of the failed 1960s student movement.” –INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM

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Robert Wise’s classic boxing film THE SET-UP is graced with a cameo from Weegee, who appears as a ringside timekeeper in one of the film’s peerless boxing match sequences.

“A classic noir, THE SET-UP features Robert Ryan (who in his youth had reigned as heavyweight champion all four years he studied at Dartmouth) as creaky heavyweight Bill “Stoker” Thompson. His manager arranges a deal with the mob to have Thompson “take a dive.” When he eventually learns of his manager’s dirty dealing, he must quickly make a choice with no good outcomes: kowtow to the capos and live with the fact that he is another palooka, or fight on in the hopes of snatching that last bit of dignity from a sport that never gave much in return. Tense, efficient, and pitch-perfect, THE SET-UP is one of Wise’s most meticulously crafted films – a vision of boxing, and of life, that offers only the bleakest alternatives.” –Sean Nam

Preceded by:
PITTSBURGH
1959, 28 min, 16mm-to-DCP. Produced by On Film Co. New scan by Anthology Film Archives!
Commissioned by the Pittsburgh Bicentennial Association to celebrate the city’s 200th anniversary, PITTSBURGH was created by a team of filmmakers that included Weegee, as well as avant-garde filmmakers Stan Brakhage (working under the pseudonym James Stanley), Len Lye, and Stan Vanderbeek, and photographers W. Eugene Smith and Willard Van Dyke.

“In PITTSBURGH, an extensive body of talent collaborates to execute an idiosyncratic vision, expressed through a dazzling cache of technique, all completed rather improbably – or so it might seem – on ‘the client’s dime.’ […] [Weegee was] hired because of his cinematography in WEEGEE’S NEW YORK, a short documentary film that rendered the normal urban milieu fantastic through the deployment of optical effects. In PITTSBURGH, Weegee utilized both prismatic and kaleidoscopic lenses to generate a sort of cinematic shortcut to the future. The prisms cast the camera’s subject in bands of refracted light, creating a rainbow-saturated otherworld, while the kaleidoscopic lenses multiplied the image into identical slivers of vision, providing a quick metaphor for the heady prime time of nuclear fission that was just around the corner.” –Sean P. Kilcoyne, “PITTSBURGH (1959): ‘Equilibriums of Paradox’ and the Bicentennial City of Tomorrow”

“It’s weirdly interesting, but a monstrosity.” –Stan Brakhage
Total running time: ca. 105 min.

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VAGABOND is a work of “documenteur” (mock-documentary), to use Varda’s term, operating at the crossroads of documentary and fiction. Following the wanderings of a young woman who undergoes a radical experience of freedom, from summer swims in the Mediterranean to becoming a mere news item, the film offers a sociological analysis of rural France while building an inexorable tension of impending doom. It explores the strength and vitality of an uncompromising freedom while showing the fragility and vulnerability of marginal lives.

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The first part of Ulrike Ottinger’s “Berlin Trilogy” – it would be followed by FREAK ORLANDO (1981) and DORIAN GRAY IN THE MIRROR OF THE YELLOW PRESS (1984) – TICKET OF NO RETURN tells the story of a rich young woman who buys a one-way ticket to Berlin in order to define her destiny on her own terms, specifically through her passion for alcohol: “her passion to drink, live to drink, a drunken life. Life of a drunkard.” Alcohol becomes both a site of social commentary on the condition of women (where female drunkenness is seen as degrading and repulsive) and the vehicle for wandering through spaces, social classes, and chance encounters – always in high heels, often on steep stairs.

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“[Kubrick had] worked as a press photographer from the age of 17, principally for Look magazine, making extraordinarily good photographs that owed some of their look to Weegee’s. He even shot a few with infrared film. The two men had crossed paths regularly…and Kubrick had been attentive to Weegee’s work and career. As DR. STRANGELOVE began filming at Shepperton Studios, Kubrick found himself able to, after a fashion, repay the artistic debt, and he hired Weegee to work on the set, taking still pictures. […] [Peter Sellers] found him fascinating, as anyone obsessed with accents and eccentricities would, and he not only observed Weegee but absorbed him. A few months later, on Steve Allen’s TV show, Allen asked Sellers about Strangelove’s peculiar high-pitched German-accented English, and Sellers told him where the accent came from: ‘I was stuck, you see, because I didn’t want to do sort of a normal English broken-German-accent thing. So on the set was a little photographer from New York, a very cute little fellow called Weegee – you must’ve heard of him. And he had a little voice, like this, used to walk around the set talking like this most of the time. He’d say, “I’m looking for a girl with a beautiful body and a sick mind!” And I got an idea, I was really stuck for this…I put a German accent on top of that, and I suddenly got [in Strangelove’s voice] dis thing, you know, where – going up here and…so I got him into Dr. Strangelove. So really it’s Weegee. I don’t know if he knows it.’” –Christopher Bonanos, SLATE

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“For me France is the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom and my bedroom.” The first feature by the great Ousmane Sembène, BLACK GIRL depicts the broken dream of Diouana, from the streets of Dakar in search of a job to her isolation within the suffocating domesticity of her employers, “Monsieur” and “Madame”, on the French Riviera. Through repetitive gestures, imposed orders, and humiliations, it is in this confined space that colonial violence resonates most strongly. The French title, LA NOIRE DE… (THE BLACK GIRL OF…), suggests Diouana’s fading identity, as part of the colonial enterprise of dehumanization of which we become, as film spectators, eternal witnesses.

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“THE NAKED CITY was directed by Jules Dassin…but its lead creative force is journalist-turned-movie producer Mark Hellinger. His affinity for Weegee’s extraordinary 1945 photo book Naked City animates what could have been a fairly tepid noir. The book Naked City was a freewheeling and feverish glimpse under the veneer of mid-century city life. THE NAKED CITY adds a definite article, for a somewhat less definitive translation of the book’s themes. […] The movie is never more haunting than in the bleak and beautiful views of [its] opening sequence, which makes an essay of establishing shots and weaves in parts of a story we don’t realize has already started. It also offers a few visions of shocking death that seem indifferent to the Production Code, and most closely channel Weegee’s work (he was involved in creating some of the film’s static shots.)” –Geoffrey Stueven, PERISPHERE

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Anna, a filmmaker in her thirties, returns to her native Belgium to present a film. During her stay, she meets family members, acquaintances, and strangers with whom she spends a night. She moves through urban spaces, trains, hotels, train station halls, and restaurants with the strangeness and curiosity characteristic of those who return home. LES RENDEZ-VOUS D’ANNA is a film about such a return, the passage of time, the notion of movement, and the space that interweaves with those who stay behind.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

As if Weegee’s path from crime photographer to celebrated artist and public figure to avant-garde filmmaker to Hollywood studio photographer and technician wasn’t bizarre enough, the later stage of his career found him appearing in several “nudie cutie” exploitation films, including SHANGRI-LA (1961) and MY BARE LADY (1963). The culmination of this strange chapter was THE ‘IMP’PROBABLE MR. WEE GEE (1966), which, trading on his name recognition, cast him in the starring role. In this absurd, scattershot, and Russ Meyer-esque film, Weegee falls in love with a shop-window mannequin. When the mannequin is shipped off to Paris, he follows in hot pursuit, searching for his beloved while casting an admiring eye on many of the other female residents of the City of Light. Painfully dated, THE ‘IMP’PROBABLE MR. WEE GEE nevertheless demonstrates the unique, stranger-than-fiction quality of Arthur Fellig’s life and career.

Preceded by:
WEEGEE’S CAMERA MAGIC 1960, 8 min, 16mm-to-DCP
Distributed by Castle Films for the home market, this short film illustrates some of the camera tricks that Weegee became known for throughout the latter part of his career.

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

“[Kubrick had] worked as a press photographer from the age of 17, principally for Look magazine, making extraordinarily good photographs that owed some of their look to Weegee’s. He even shot a few with infrared film. The two men had crossed paths regularly…and Kubrick had been attentive to Weegee’s work and career. As DR. STRANGELOVE began filming at Shepperton Studios, Kubrick found himself able to, after a fashion, repay the artistic debt, and he hired Weegee to work on the set, taking still pictures. […] [Peter Sellers] found him fascinating, as anyone obsessed with accents and eccentricities would, and he not only observed Weegee but absorbed him. A few months later, on Steve Allen’s TV show, Allen asked Sellers about Strangelove’s peculiar high-pitched German-accented English, and Sellers told him where the accent came from: ‘I was stuck, you see, because I didn’t want to do sort of a normal English broken-German-accent thing. So on the set was a little photographer from New York, a very cute little fellow called Weegee – you must’ve heard of him. And he had a little voice, like this, used to walk around the set talking like this most of the time. He’d say, “I’m looking for a girl with a beautiful body and a sick mind!” And I got an idea, I was really stuck for this…I put a German accent on top of that, and I suddenly got [in Strangelove’s voice] dis thing, you know, where – going up here and…so I got him into Dr. Strangelove. So really it’s Weegee. I don’t know if he knows it.’” –Christopher Bonanos, SLATE

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

DON’T CRY, PRETTY GIRLS! depicts the odyssey of a young woman (Jaroslava Schallerová, star of the Czech New Wave classic VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS) through the streets of Budapest on the eve of her marriage to a factory worker (Mark Zala). The film captures a precise moment of social change when young people were caught in the historical, cultural, and economic contradictions between the rigidity of the Eastern bloc – work, factory life, and family expectations – and a beat-influenced generation inspired by love, music, and freedom. The almost pamphlet-like song lyrics rhyme with the editing, and the camera captures – reflected on a young girl’s face – this moment of hesitation between two models of existence.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

VAGABOND is a work of “documenteur” (mock-documentary), to use Varda’s term, operating at the crossroads of documentary and fiction. Following the wanderings of a young woman who undergoes a radical experience of freedom, from summer swims in the Mediterranean to becoming a mere news item, the film offers a sociological analysis of rural France while building an inexorable tension of impending doom. It explores the strength and vitality of an uncompromising freedom while showing the fragility and vulnerability of marginal lives.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

With the exception of WEEGEE’S NEW YORK, all films in this program have been preserved by Anthology Film Archives, in collaboration with the International Center of Photography, through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

COCKTAIL PARTY ca. 1946, 5.5 min, 16mm
A home movie short capturing the raucous party celebrating the release of Weegee’s second photobook, “Weegee’s People”. The film features appearances by Mrs. George Washington Kavanaugh, who is among the subjects of one of Weegee’s most celebrated photos, “The Critic”, as well as some of the only known footage of eccentric author Joe Gould.

BOAC ca. 1955-59, 5.5 min, 16mm
The neon lights of Time Square’s BOAC sign…in Kodachrome kaleidoscope.

ASSORTED SCENES/KALEIDOSCOPE ca. 1952-65, 16.5 min, 16mm
More urban kaleidoscopic experiments in color and B&W.

WEEGEE’S NEW YORK 1946-48/51, 21.5 min, 16mm. Edited by Amos Vogel.
“The famed press photographer creates a vividly impressionistic feature-length study of the metropolis, combining documentary and experimental techniques. (‘I am very excited about this film. Weegee has the eye of a Balzac.’ Robert Flaherty)” –Amos Vogel, CINEMA 16 notes, June 2, 1948

“One of the most under-recognized films of the 1950s.” –Scott Macdonald

ANIMATION MONA LISA, ETC. ca. 1955-65, 5 min, 16mm
Weegee’s experiments in distorted portraiture.

IDIOT BOX 1967, 5.5 min, 16mm
Weegee’s last film, a tribute to trash television and commercial culture.

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Robert Wise’s classic boxing film THE SET-UP is graced with a cameo from Weegee, who appears as a ringside timekeeper in one of the film’s peerless boxing match sequences.

“A classic noir, THE SET-UP features Robert Ryan (who in his youth had reigned as heavyweight champion all four years he studied at Dartmouth) as creaky heavyweight Bill “Stoker” Thompson. His manager arranges a deal with the mob to have Thompson “take a dive.” When he eventually learns of his manager’s dirty dealing, he must quickly make a choice with no good outcomes: kowtow to the capos and live with the fact that he is another palooka, or fight on in the hopes of snatching that last bit of dignity from a sport that never gave much in return. Tense, efficient, and pitch-perfect, THE SET-UP is one of Wise’s most meticulously crafted films – a vision of boxing, and of life, that offers only the bleakest alternatives.” –Sean Nam

Preceded by:
PITTSBURGH
1959, 28 min, 16mm-to-DCP. Produced by On Film Co. New scan by Anthology Film Archives!
Commissioned by the Pittsburgh Bicentennial Association to celebrate the city’s 200th anniversary, PITTSBURGH was created by a team of filmmakers that included Weegee, as well as avant-garde filmmakers Stan Brakhage (working under the pseudonym James Stanley), Len Lye, and Stan Vanderbeek, and photographers W. Eugene Smith and Willard Van Dyke.

“In PITTSBURGH, an extensive body of talent collaborates to execute an idiosyncratic vision, expressed through a dazzling cache of technique, all completed rather improbably – or so it might seem – on ‘the client’s dime.’ […] [Weegee was] hired because of his cinematography in WEEGEE’S NEW YORK, a short documentary film that rendered the normal urban milieu fantastic through the deployment of optical effects. In PITTSBURGH, Weegee utilized both prismatic and kaleidoscopic lenses to generate a sort of cinematic shortcut to the future. The prisms cast the camera’s subject in bands of refracted light, creating a rainbow-saturated otherworld, while the kaleidoscopic lenses multiplied the image into identical slivers of vision, providing a quick metaphor for the heady prime time of nuclear fission that was just around the corner.” –Sean P. Kilcoyne, “PITTSBURGH (1959): ‘Equilibriums of Paradox’ and the Bicentennial City of Tomorrow”

“It’s weirdly interesting, but a monstrosity.” –Stan Brakhage
Total running time: ca. 105 min.

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Kathleen Conklin (Lili Taylor), an NYU philosophy graduate student, is assaulted by a woman on the streets of New York. Deeply shaken by this unmotivated aggression, she soon finds herself grappling with a new identity. In many ways, the vampire’s addiction to human blood mirrors the New York cosmopolitan experience. Ferrara, filming in bloody black and white, plays with genre ambiguity: set in 1990s New York, in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis, the film follows anemic students pondering concepts of free will and determinism – ultimately becoming a reflection on existence stripped bare by a more urgent force: addiction. The question emerges: how to face existence when chained to a self that is itself an absence?

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“Following the gorgeous, seemingly liberated Adriana (Stefania Sandrelli) as she chases her dreams in the Rome of LA DOLCE VITA, I KNEW HER WELL is at once a delightful immersion in the popular music and style of Italy in the 1960s and a biting critique of its sexual politics and culture of celebrity. Over a series of intimate episodes, just about every one featuring a different man, a new hairstyle, and an outfit to match, the unsung Italian master Antonio Pietrangeli, working from a script he cowrote with Ettore Scola, composes a deft, seriocomic character study that never strays from its complicated central figure.” –JANUS FILMS

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With Willem Dafoe, Matthew Modine, Bob Hoskins, Asia Argento, Shanyn Leigh, Roy Dotrice, Riccardo Scamarcio, Stefania Rocca, Bianca Balti, Lou Doillon, Sylvia Miles, Burt Young, Joe Cortese, and Anita Pallenberg.

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

“Ferrara’s first flat-out comedy. The press book name-checks Wilder, Sturges, and Capra, and he has described it…as ‘CHEERS meets THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE.’ But…GO GO TALES is also an allegory: a portrait of the artist as a hustler, a gambler, a performer, a dreamer, an addict, a throwback, a holdout, and, of course, a purveyor of good old-fashioned T&A, navigating the screw-or-be-screwed questions common to all exploitative professions, indeed to modern capitalist systems. You could say this one comes from the heart.” –Dennis Lim, CINEMA SCOPE

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Restored in 4K by Niki Charitable Art Foundation, under the supervision of Arielle de Saint Phalle, with funding provided by Dior at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory.

A recently rediscovered gem of 1970s French avant-garde cinema by renowned artist Niki de Saint Phalle. UN RÊVE is a dark, Alice in Wonderland-like coming-of-age tale, in which young Camelia’s wish to grow up results in a journey through the adult world. In search of treasure, she instead encounters a chaos of metallic structures, wars, sexual obsessions, and giant prop phalluses in the form of cannons and feather dusters – all realized through Saint Phalle’s inimitable craft and humor.

Preceded by:
Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON 1943, 14 min, 16mm. Music by Teiji Ito from 1959.

Total running time: ca. 100 min.

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“Intimate and extremely self-reflexive, TOMMASO [finds Ferrara] enlisting his muse Willem Dafoe, his wife Cristina Chiriac, and their three-year-old daughter, Anna, to draft out a scrappy, startling, and often moving mosaic of Ferrara’s emotional and psychological state. Whether its various elements are representations of actual events or purely fictitious creative whims is never clear (a story that Dafoe recounts in a scene at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting feels so personal to him – eliciting tears I took to be too genuine to not have been personally experienced – is a particularly ambiguous confusion of performance that ends up being quite generative), but it’s the impressions that feel essential. This is filmmaking as survival, an earnest confession and auto-critique (with crucifixions and all) that ought to be remembered as more than a mere footnote in his late period.” –Blake Williams, FILMMAKER MAGAZINE

Willem Dafoe will be here in person for a Q&A following the screening on Sat, Feb 8!

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All films preserved by Anthology Film Archives.

GLIMPSE OF THE GARDEN (1957, 5 min, 16mm)
ARABESQUE FOR KENNETH ANGER (1961, 4 min, 16mm)
EYE MUSIC IN RED MAJOR (1961, 4 min, 16mm, silent)
NOTEBOOK (1962-63, 10 min, 16mm, silent)
GO! GO! GO! (1962-64, 12 min, 16mm, silent)
ANDY WARHOL (1965, 17 min, 16mm)
LIGHTS (1964-66, 7 min, 16mm, silent)

“Marie Menken pioneered the radical transformation of the handheld, somatic camera into a formal matrix that would underpin an entire work in the films she made between 1945 and 1965. […] The extraordinary cinematic style that I have been calling Menken’s somatic camera has been her most influential gift to the American avant-garde cinema. It is an embodiment of the Emersonian invention of a pictorial air, the spiritual emancipation automatically brought about by ‘certain mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position.’ It is also analogous to the equally Emersonian somatic theory of poesis Charles Olson was developing at nearly the same time: his emphasis on breath and proprioception corresponds to Menken’s identification of the camera with her body in motion and her cultivation of the respiratory and nervous agitation of the handheld camera even in its quietest moments.” –P. Adams Sitney, EYES UPSIDE DOWN

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

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Kathleen Conklin (Lili Taylor), an NYU philosophy graduate student, is assaulted by a woman on the streets of New York. Deeply shaken by this unmotivated aggression, she soon finds herself grappling with a new identity. In many ways, the vampire’s addiction to human blood mirrors the New York cosmopolitan experience. Ferrara, filming in bloody black and white, plays with genre ambiguity: set in 1990s New York, in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis, the film follows anemic students pondering concepts of free will and determinism – ultimately becoming a reflection on existence stripped bare by a more urgent force: addiction. The question emerges: how to face existence when chained to a self that is itself an absence?

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“While Dafoe is certainly an actor who can and will follow Ferrara out to the very limits of logic and restraint, he is also the ideal collaborator for this new phase of Ferrara’s career. As opposed to earlier performers like Harvey Keitel, Christopher Walken, or Matthew Modine, Dafoe provides a discipline that helps Ferrara ground some of his more expressionist tendencies. […] Dafoe evinces a kind of tired wisdom in his portrayal of an individual who has been granted vision beyond the scope of ordinary humanity. While his Pasolini was a Marxist philosopher who understood society as a system and whose insights could not save him, SIBERIA’s ‘Clint’ is, depending on your interpretation, the next phase of that total being or a complete inversion of it. A kind of Nietzschean ‘last man’ who may not even be human, exactly, this figure (he’s not really a character) blurs any and all lines between the personal and the allegorical. Even as he traverses the frozen tundra on his dogsled, we cannot know if he is negotiating physical space or plunging deeper into his own mindscape.” –Michael Sicinski, CINEMA SCOPE

Willem Dafoe will be here in person for a Q&A following the screening on Sat, Feb 8!

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“Yasuko, Yoko, Koichi, and Bill are high school freshmen who engage in group sex to find out the reasons for their dissatisfaction and desensitization. They want to discover how they can ‘beat’ sex and therefore win against adult society. When 15-year-old Yasuko, who has become pregnant, tells her classmates that she has slept with their teacher, she is accused of betrayal and of breaking their vow not to have sex just for pleasure. Yasuko declares that she has felt something only because she prostituted herself. In order to confirm whether this is true, and encouraged by her peers, Yasuko becomes a prostitute and sets out on a journey of self-exploration. […] Interspersed with actual suicide notes and employing several alienation effects, GUSHING PRAYER is a penetrative allegory of the political dissatisfaction and spiritual void that came in the wake of the failed 1960s student movement.” –INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM

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The feature debut of both Willem Dafoe and Kathryn Bigelow, THE LOVELESS takes place in the late 1950s, a time of generational conflict, of immense social change, of bold fashions and toe-tapping music. A motorcycle gang roars into a small southern town en route to the Daytona races, unnerving and angering the locals with their standoffish attitude and disrespect for social niceties. When one of their number, the charismatic Vance (Dafoe), hooks up with sportscar-driving Telena (Marin Kanter), he incurs the wrath of the girl’s father, setting the gang on a collision course with the rest of the town as simmering tensions boil over into violent retribution. Raw, angry and honest, THE LOVELESS evokes, with unflinching clarity, both an attitude and a bygone era, exploring the tensions between two very different Americas.

“Bigelow’s first feature immediately reveals her canny talent for simultaneously fulfilling and deconstructing popular film genres. Set in the 1950s and starring a young, pomaded Willem Dafoe in his screen debut as the charismatic leader of a leather-clad and immoral bike gang, THE LOVELESS deliberately uproots the genre’s traditional embrace of youthful rebellion by introducing a notably noir shading and sharp feminist perspective into its story of generational and gender conflict. Bigelow’s training in painting and experimental cinema informs the film’s (relatively) slow pace, meticulous framing, and sparse, deliberately iconic dialogue – not to mention the evocation of Kenneth Anger’s SCORPIO RISING in the camera’s close attention to the bikers’ gleaming chrome and leather.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

Preceded by:
Burt Barr & James Benning
O PANAMA
1985, 27 min, video
Written and directed by video artist Burt Barr in collaboration with filmmaker James Benning, O PANAMA features Willem Dafoe as a man confined to his apartment on a winter day as he suffers through an illness. Built on the polarity between hot and cold, the tedious reality of the man’s sickness, and the vivid hallucinatory visions of his delirium, O PANAMA conveys the workings of the subconscious.

Total running time: ca. 115 min.

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“Scorsese’s long-gestating adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ revisionist life of Christ depicts Jesus as a profoundly troubled Messiah, wrestling with doubts about his divine mission and attracted by the prospect of earthly love – a reading that became a flashpoint for controversy upon the film’s release. Defying the conventions of Biblical spectaculars, Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader opt for a demotic tone in both dialogue and casting, with Willem Dafoe as Jesus leading a fine cast that also includes Harvey Keitel as Judas, Barbara Hershey as Mary Magdalene, Harry Dean Stanton as Saul/Paul, and David Bowie as Pontius Pilate. Similarly, composer Peter Gabriel eschews heavenly choirs for a soundtrack that draws upon influences from the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and South Asia.” –TIFF LIGHTBOX

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According to its director, Paula Delsol – who was, alongside Agnès Varda, one of the few female French New Wave filmmakers, and who remains virtually unknown today – LA DÉRIVE could have been entitled “Castles in Spain”. It’s a portrait of Jacquie, a young woman living hand-to-mouth as she hitchhikes to Camargue. Estranged from her family, thanks to her rejection of the domestic life her mother wants for her, and disillusioned after a romance with a guitarist (Pierre Barouh), Jacquie sleeps around, becoming something of a kept woman. Depicting a free young woman of the 1960s, LA DÉRIVE paints a vivid portrait of a character who encompasses aspects drawn from both Delsol and her remarkable lead actress, Jacqueline Vandal.

“In a certain way, Jacquie is a forerunner of film characters like…Mona in Varda’s VAGABOND: self-determined, non-conformist, free of illusions. François Truffaut compared the film’s boldness to Ingmar Bergman’s first works.” –Sabine Schöbel & Florian Widegger, AUSTRIAN FILM ARCHIVE

The screening on Sun, Feb 9 will be followed by a discussion between series curator Nina Verneret and Jamie Berthe, from The Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU.

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

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“Following the gorgeous, seemingly liberated Adriana (Stefania Sandrelli) as she chases her dreams in the Rome of LA DOLCE VITA, I KNEW HER WELL is at once a delightful immersion in the popular music and style of Italy in the 1960s and a biting critique of its sexual politics and culture of celebrity. Over a series of intimate episodes, just about every one featuring a different man, a new hairstyle, and an outfit to match, the unsung Italian master Antonio Pietrangeli, working from a script he cowrote with Ettore Scola, composes a deft, seriocomic character study that never strays from its complicated central figure.” –JANUS FILMS

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It’s not easy to upstage Nicolas Cage, or to stand out among the crowd of nightmarish ghouls and grotesques that haunt David Lynch’s films, but Willem Dafoe’s performance as the psychotic Bobby Peru in WILD AT HEART exudes a disturbing and destabilizing power that is truly unforgettable. Sporting perhaps the most viscerally off-putting, character-defining set of fake teeth in all of cinema, Dafoe bursts into the film – and into the lives of its protagonists, the on-the-run lovers Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lulu (Laura Dern) – shattering both their lives and the audience’s complacency. Lynch’s typically unsettling film – released soon after TWIN PEAKS revolutionized American television – combines an idiosyncratic mixture of genre tropes (encompassing BONNIE AND CLYDE, Elvis Presley, and THE WIZARD OF OZ) with a degree of graphic sex and violence that nearly saddled the film with an X rating. But it’s Dafoe’s daringly unbridled, volcanically unrestrained performance that gives it its staying power.

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**SOLD OUT**

The Wooster Group & Ken Kobland
FLAUBERT DREAMS OF TRAVEL BUT THE ILLNESS OF HIS MOTHER PREVENTS IT
1986, 20 min, video. Director: Elizabeth LeCompte; photography/editor/score: Ken Kobland.This piece focuses on images of death and transcendence as suggested by the writings of Gustave Flaubert. The film was made in conjunction with the Wooster Group’s theater production “Frank Dell’s The Temptation of St. Antony”, a re-invention of Flaubert’s epic “closet drama” about the visions and ecstasies of the fourth-century hermit St. Antony.

The Wooster Group
WHITE HOMELAND COMMANDO
1992, 62.5 min, video. Director: Elizabeth LeCompte; teleplay: Michael Kirby; Director of Photography: Ken Kobland.
WHITE HOMELAND COMMANDO is TWG’s 1992 full-length video and was originally shown at the New York Film Festival and included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial. Michael Kirby’s teleplay is a cops-versus-white-supremacists tale imagined as a structuralist police procedural, as well as a prescient examination of domestic terrorism and the national security apparatus.

“Nothing if not medium specific WHC makes video noise and glitches read like psychotic brainstorms. Solarized and colorized, the punchy mise-en-scene is made to the measure of Avenue B after dark…. Needless to say, the ensemble acting is impeccable.” –VILLAGE VOICE

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

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The Wooster Group
RHYME ’EM TO DEATH
1994, 10.5 min, video. Performed by the Wooster Group; director: Elizabeth LeCompte; cinematography: Leslie Thornton; editor: Christopher Kondek; screenplay: Kate Valk & Marianne Weems.
RHYME ’EM TO DEATH reconstructs the trial from Victor Hugo’s “Hunchback of Notre Dame” from a new perspective, that of a minor character – the goat. The trial of the goat, a postscript in the Hugo novel, has been extended and enlivened with actual transcripts of 15th-century trials in which animals were persecuted as witches.

The Wooster Group
WRONG GUYS
1997, 41 min, 35mm-to-digital. Adapted from the short novel “Wrong Guys” by James Strahs; directed by Elizabeth LeCompte; cinematographer/editor: Ken Kobland; videographer/video effects editor: Christopher Kondek; music: John Lurie.
Adapted from a novella by James Strahs (the author of “Queer and Alone”, as well as the Wooster Group’s play, “North Atlantic”), this unfinished 1997 film from the Wooster Group was first shown as part of the 1997 Whitney Biennial. Aside from a screening as part of Anthology’s tribute to the Group in 2012, it has rarely been seen since. A tale of smuggling and survivalists that adopts the tone and visual style of film noir, but with a narrative logic all its own, it stars Willem Dafoe as Jack Straw, a small-time operator who ran a “pharmaceutical outfit” before an accident changed everything. A rare instance of an extended moving-image work by the Wooster Group that was created independently of their theatrical productions, WRONG GUYS is a fascinating and little-seen work.

Total running time: ca. 55 min.

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“While Dafoe is certainly an actor who can and will follow Ferrara out to the very limits of logic and restraint, he is also the ideal collaborator for this new phase of Ferrara’s career. As opposed to earlier performers like Harvey Keitel, Christopher Walken, or Matthew Modine, Dafoe provides a discipline that helps Ferrara ground some of his more expressionist tendencies. […] Dafoe evinces a kind of tired wisdom in his portrayal of an individual who has been granted vision beyond the scope of ordinary humanity. While his Pasolini was a Marxist philosopher who understood society as a system and whose insights could not save him, SIBERIA’s ‘Clint’ is, depending on your interpretation, the next phase of that total being or a complete inversion of it. A kind of Nietzschean ‘last man’ who may not even be human, exactly, this figure (he’s not really a character) blurs any and all lines between the personal and the allegorical. Even as he traverses the frozen tundra on his dogsled, we cannot know if he is negotiating physical space or plunging deeper into his own mindscape.” –Michael Sicinski, CINEMA SCOPE

Willem Dafoe will be here in person for a Q&A following the screening on Sat, Feb 8!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Dafoe’s screentime in STREETS OF FIRE – his first major Hollywood role – is limited, but he makes the most of it: his dramatic entrance in the movie’s bravura opening sequence is worth the price of admission in and of itself. A “rock and roll fable”, as per the opening credits, STREETS OF FIRE is a gleefully anachronistic mashup of 1950s biker melodrama and 1980s multiplex stylistics, which hinges on the abduction of rock and roll singer Ellen Aim (a young Diane Lane) at the hands of the biker gang the Bombers. As Raven Shaddock, the leader of the gang, a cartoonishly coiffed and made-up Dafoe turns in a daringly stylized performance that elevates its genre pastiche from commercial pandering into the realm of kabuki-like sublimity.

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BOB WILSON’S LIFE & DEATH OF MARINA ABRAMOVIC documents the coming together of Willem Dafoe, director Robert Wilson, performance artist Marina Abramovic, and singer and composer Antony Hegarty, to create an experimental opera based on Marina Abramovic’s biography. Through rehearsal footage and interviews with the artists as they are making the piece, director Giada Colagrande provides insight into this unique collaboration, resulting in an intimate portrait that reveals the dynamics, excitement, and insecurities of making such a poetic and visually stunning theatre work.

Preceded by:
Savanah Leaf run (2023, 9 min, 35mm-to-digital)
Savanah Leaf run 002 (2024, 9.5 min, 35mm-to-digital)
These short films by artist and filmmaker Savanah Leaf (EARTH MAMA) are investigations of bodies subjected to various forms of measuring, categorization, and control.

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

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“SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE is a wickedly fabricated behind-the-scenes yarn about the production of the movie NOSFERATU (1922). […] Even though it earned [Willem Dafoe] an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, it remains an unduly obscure entry in his filmography. It’s the second feature directed by E. Elias Merhige, a work of straight-faced and ingenious giddiness – a riotous yet loving laugh up the ample sleeve of cinematic history that’s also a substantial and troubled contemplation of the art.” –Richard Brody, NEW YORKER

Preceded by:John Lurie FISHING WITH JOHN: EPISODE 4 1991, 24 min, digitalIn arguably the most surreal episode of John Lurie’s cult cable TV series “Fishing With John”, Lurie and Dafoe embark on an ice-fishing adventure in northern Maine, but, ill-prepared and inexperienced, the trip soon devolves into a desperate – albeit soporific – struggle for survival.

Total running time: ca. 120 min.

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“Intimate and extremely self-reflexive, TOMMASO [finds Ferrara] enlisting his muse Willem Dafoe, his wife Cristina Chiriac, and their three-year-old daughter, Anna, to draft out a scrappy, startling, and often moving mosaic of Ferrara’s emotional and psychological state. Whether its various elements are representations of actual events or purely fictitious creative whims is never clear (a story that Dafoe recounts in a scene at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting feels so personal to him – eliciting tears I took to be too genuine to not have been personally experienced – is a particularly ambiguous confusion of performance that ends up being quite generative), but it’s the impressions that feel essential. This is filmmaking as survival, an earnest confession and auto-critique (with crucifixions and all) that ought to be remembered as more than a mere footnote in his late period.” –Blake Williams, FILMMAKER MAGAZINE

Willem Dafoe will be here in person for a Q&A following the screening on Sat, Feb 8!

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Script by Carl Meyer based on the story “A Trip to Tilsit” by Herman Sudermann. Photographed by Charles Rosher and Karl Strauss. With George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor.

Murnau’s first American film is an allegory set in no particular time or place, about a man who is temporarily overruled by his passions, inflamed by the power of evil as personified by the city woman, and who finally returns to his senses and the orderly family life of the country. It is a virtuoso exercise representing the expressiveness of the silent film as it neared its end.

“SUNRISE becomes the lyrical culmination of a strain of German Expressionism that, married to American technology, could almost serve as a definition of the cinema. For the studio apparatus, enabling the creation of a spiritually and spatially unified microcosm, corresponds to the way the mind, in Expressionism, experiences reality – organizing it, imbuing it with personal associations, patterns, significances, until finally the only reality is a mental reality.” –Molly Haskell

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“While Dafoe is certainly an actor who can and will follow Ferrara out to the very limits of logic and restraint, he is also the ideal collaborator for this new phase of Ferrara’s career. As opposed to earlier performers like Harvey Keitel, Christopher Walken, or Matthew Modine, Dafoe provides a discipline that helps Ferrara ground some of his more expressionist tendencies. […] Dafoe evinces a kind of tired wisdom in his portrayal of an individual who has been granted vision beyond the scope of ordinary humanity. While his Pasolini was a Marxist philosopher who understood society as a system and whose insights could not save him, SIBERIA’s ‘Clint’ is, depending on your interpretation, the next phase of that total being or a complete inversion of it. A kind of Nietzschean ‘last man’ who may not even be human, exactly, this figure (he’s not really a character) blurs any and all lines between the personal and the allegorical. Even as he traverses the frozen tundra on his dogsled, we cannot know if he is negotiating physical space or plunging deeper into his own mindscape.” –Michael Sicinski, CINEMA SCOPE

Willem Dafoe will be here in person for a Q&A following the screening on Sat, Feb 8!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

“Schrader has spoken of LIGHT SLEEPER as the final panel in a triptych of films about male loners which also includes TAXI DRIVER and AMERICAN GIGOLO. Featuring one of Schrader’s tautest and most effective screenplays, LIGHT SLEEPER tells the story of a NYC drug runner grappling with a midlife crisis and framed for a drug-related murder. Schrader’s return to the mean streets of Manhattan is notably melancholic, suffused with an aura of regret and longing that adds nuance to all of its characters. Willem Dafoe offers a poignant and powerful rendering of the dealer’s moving struggle to reassemble his life and reconnect with a lost love.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

Willem Dafoe will be here in person for a Q&A following the screening on Sun, Feb 16!

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The news is full of images of overcrowded boats and vast tent camps. But how much do we really know about what refugees are going through? NOTES ON DISPLACEMENT takes a deep dive by following a single family on a grueling journey, destination Germany. Their fear, disorientation, and solidarity are palpable.

Nadira, an elderly Palestinian, has been a refugee since the age of 12. And now she has to leave Damascus, too. She and her daughter Mona feared for their lives there, but the idea of a safe existence elsewhere is a distant dream. Filmmaker Khaled Jarrar receives unsettling videos and voice messages as they cross to the Greek island of Lesbos. He joins them there, on the long road to a better life.

Jarrar has his personal reasons for going through this experience in order to eliminate, in his own images, the distance so dominant in Western media coverage. He worms his way through the thronging crowds, gets lost in the night with his group, discovers how dangerous language barriers can be, and wanders around in the dehumanizing camps. And in a sense he – along with the viewer – becomes a true member of this family.

“My grandmother Shafiqa was forced to leave her home in Haifa, her jasmine tree, her cup of tea on her balcony and her view of the sea. I inherited this ‘pain print’ of hers through haunted memories both beautiful and painful at the same time. They chased me in my dreams like ghosts that never intended to leave. […] As the director, from behind the camera, I was driven to offer images of our own making, outside the never-ending Western paparazzi image onslaught of displaced refugees. This film is for us, our values, our knowledge, our experiences.” –Khaled Jarrar

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“AUTO FOCUS offers a glimpse into the colorful life – and mysterious death – of the handsome and charming star of the hugely successful ’60s-era POW-camp comedy ‘Hogan’s Heroes’. After the show’s cancellation, Crane (Greg Kinnear) desperately fell into the seamy world of sex, strip clubs, and decadence. Eventually, he teamed up with video technician John Henry Carpenter (Willem Dafoe) to document his exploits – an association that very well may have led to his violent murder in an Arizona motel room in 1978 where he was bludgeoned with a camera tripod. Almost two decades since its release, Schrader’s adaptation of this true-crime tale – something fit for the pages of Kenneth Anger’s ‘Hollywood Babylon’ – still stands as one of the most entertaining and provocative ‘Dark Side of Hollywood’ films ever made.” –JACOB BURNS FILM CENTER

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“Scorsese’s long-gestating adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ revisionist life of Christ depicts Jesus as a profoundly troubled Messiah, wrestling with doubts about his divine mission and attracted by the prospect of earthly love – a reading that became a flashpoint for controversy upon the film’s release. Defying the conventions of Biblical spectaculars, Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader opt for a demotic tone in both dialogue and casting, with Willem Dafoe as Jesus leading a fine cast that also includes Harvey Keitel as Judas, Barbara Hershey as Mary Magdalene, Harry Dean Stanton as Saul/Paul, and David Bowie as Pontius Pilate. Similarly, composer Peter Gabriel eschews heavenly choirs for a soundtrack that draws upon influences from the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and South Asia.” –TIFF LIGHTBOX

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Artist Khaled Jarrar shadows West Bank residents as they search for ways to bypass the highly militarized Israeli apartheid wall that separates them from Jerusalem. Over, under, or through, with great difficulty and risk, the infiltrators are by turn people who wish to visit relatives in hospitals, religious women trying to reach Al Aqsa, teenage boys tasked with “smuggling” bread, or, most often, construction workers: Palestinian men whose labor will be used to build up the city they are not permitted to enter. Alternating between cigarette breaks, detours, waiting, climbing, escaping, and confrontation, INFILTRATORS depicts the constant struggle both to survive and to resist captivity and occupation.

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Dafoe’s screentime in STREETS OF FIRE – his first major Hollywood role – is limited, but he makes the most of it: his dramatic entrance in the movie’s bravura opening sequence is worth the price of admission in and of itself. A “rock and roll fable”, as per the opening credits, STREETS OF FIRE is a gleefully anachronistic mashup of 1950s biker melodrama and 1980s multiplex stylistics, which hinges on the abduction of rock and roll singer Ellen Aim (a young Diane Lane) at the hands of the biker gang the Bombers. As Raven Shaddock, the leader of the gang, a cartoonishly coiffed and made-up Dafoe turns in a daringly stylized performance that elevates its genre pastiche from commercial pandering into the realm of kabuki-like sublimity.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

The news is full of images of overcrowded boats and vast tent camps. But how much do we really know about what refugees are going through? NOTES ON DISPLACEMENT takes a deep dive by following a single family on a grueling journey, destination Germany. Their fear, disorientation, and solidarity are palpable.

Nadira, an elderly Palestinian, has been a refugee since the age of 12. And now she has to leave Damascus, too. She and her daughter Mona feared for their lives there, but the idea of a safe existence elsewhere is a distant dream. Filmmaker Khaled Jarrar receives unsettling videos and voice messages as they cross to the Greek island of Lesbos. He joins them there, on the long road to a better life.

Jarrar has his personal reasons for going through this experience in order to eliminate, in his own images, the distance so dominant in Western media coverage. He worms his way through the thronging crowds, gets lost in the night with his group, discovers how dangerous language barriers can be, and wanders around in the dehumanizing camps. And in a sense he – along with the viewer – becomes a true member of this family.

“My grandmother Shafiqa was forced to leave her home in Haifa, her jasmine tree, her cup of tea on her balcony and her view of the sea. I inherited this ‘pain print’ of hers through haunted memories both beautiful and painful at the same time. They chased me in my dreams like ghosts that never intended to leave. […] As the director, from behind the camera, I was driven to offer images of our own making, outside the never-ending Western paparazzi image onslaught of displaced refugees. This film is for us, our values, our knowledge, our experiences.” –Khaled Jarrar

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The feature debut of both Willem Dafoe and Kathryn Bigelow, THE LOVELESS takes place in the late 1950s, a time of generational conflict, of immense social change, of bold fashions and toe-tapping music. A motorcycle gang roars into a small southern town en route to the Daytona races, unnerving and angering the locals with their standoffish attitude and disrespect for social niceties. When one of their number, the charismatic Vance (Dafoe), hooks up with sportscar-driving Telena (Marin Kanter), he incurs the wrath of the girl’s father, setting the gang on a collision course with the rest of the town as simmering tensions boil over into violent retribution. Raw, angry and honest, THE LOVELESS evokes, with unflinching clarity, both an attitude and a bygone era, exploring the tensions between two very different Americas.

“Bigelow’s first feature immediately reveals her canny talent for simultaneously fulfilling and deconstructing popular film genres. Set in the 1950s and starring a young, pomaded Willem Dafoe in his screen debut as the charismatic leader of a leather-clad and immoral bike gang, THE LOVELESS deliberately uproots the genre’s traditional embrace of youthful rebellion by introducing a notably noir shading and sharp feminist perspective into its story of generational and gender conflict. Bigelow’s training in painting and experimental cinema informs the film’s (relatively) slow pace, meticulous framing, and sparse, deliberately iconic dialogue – not to mention the evocation of Kenneth Anger’s SCORPIO RISING in the camera’s close attention to the bikers’ gleaming chrome and leather.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

Preceded by:
Burt Barr & James Benning
O PANAMA
1985, 27 min, video
Written and directed by video artist Burt Barr in collaboration with filmmaker James Benning, O PANAMA features Willem Dafoe as a man confined to his apartment on a winter day as he suffers through an illness. Built on the polarity between hot and cold, the tedious reality of the man’s sickness, and the vivid hallucinatory visions of his delirium, O PANAMA conveys the workings of the subconscious.

Total running time: ca. 115 min.

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“Schrader has spoken of LIGHT SLEEPER as the final panel in a triptych of films about male loners which also includes TAXI DRIVER and AMERICAN GIGOLO. Featuring one of Schrader’s tautest and most effective screenplays, LIGHT SLEEPER tells the story of a NYC drug runner grappling with a midlife crisis and framed for a drug-related murder. Schrader’s return to the mean streets of Manhattan is notably melancholic, suffused with an aura of regret and longing that adds nuance to all of its characters. Willem Dafoe offers a poignant and powerful rendering of the dealer’s moving struggle to reassemble his life and reconnect with a lost love.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

Willem Dafoe will be here in person for a Q&A following the screening on Sun, Feb 16!

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Artist Khaled Jarrar shadows West Bank residents as they search for ways to bypass the highly militarized Israeli apartheid wall that separates them from Jerusalem. Over, under, or through, with great difficulty and risk, the infiltrators are by turn people who wish to visit relatives in hospitals, religious women trying to reach Al Aqsa, teenage boys tasked with “smuggling” bread, or, most often, construction workers: Palestinian men whose labor will be used to build up the city they are not permitted to enter. Alternating between cigarette breaks, detours, waiting, climbing, escaping, and confrontation, INFILTRATORS depicts the constant struggle both to survive and to resist captivity and occupation.

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“AT ETERNITY’S GATE is a portrait of Vincent van Gogh during the last and most prolific years of his life. It is directed by Julian Schnabel, himself a painter, and stars Willem Dafoe. The film is so much a collaboration that I hesitate to designate it Schnabel’s alone. Together, Schnabel and Dafoe, who is in virtually every frame, have made the first convincing and illuminating non-documentary film about what great painters do and how they see, and for his efforts, Dafoe won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival.” –Amy Taubin, FILM COMMENT

“More intimate than the films about Vincent van Gogh directed by Vincente Minnelli, Robert Altman and the married duo Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, the artist-filmmaker Julian Schnabel’s AT ETERNITY’S GATE attempts, more successfully than most movies that probe the creative process, to get inside the artist’s head, to understand how his thoughts and feelings spontaneously transmitted themselves to the canvas.” –Graham Fuller, SIGHT & SOUND

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The news is full of images of overcrowded boats and vast tent camps. But how much do we really know about what refugees are going through? NOTES ON DISPLACEMENT takes a deep dive by following a single family on a grueling journey, destination Germany. Their fear, disorientation, and solidarity are palpable.

Nadira, an elderly Palestinian, has been a refugee since the age of 12. And now she has to leave Damascus, too. She and her daughter Mona feared for their lives there, but the idea of a safe existence elsewhere is a distant dream. Filmmaker Khaled Jarrar receives unsettling videos and voice messages as they cross to the Greek island of Lesbos. He joins them there, on the long road to a better life.

Jarrar has his personal reasons for going through this experience in order to eliminate, in his own images, the distance so dominant in Western media coverage. He worms his way through the thronging crowds, gets lost in the night with his group, discovers how dangerous language barriers can be, and wanders around in the dehumanizing camps. And in a sense he – along with the viewer – becomes a true member of this family.

“My grandmother Shafiqa was forced to leave her home in Haifa, her jasmine tree, her cup of tea on her balcony and her view of the sea. I inherited this ‘pain print’ of hers through haunted memories both beautiful and painful at the same time. They chased me in my dreams like ghosts that never intended to leave. […] As the director, from behind the camera, I was driven to offer images of our own making, outside the never-ending Western paparazzi image onslaught of displaced refugees. This film is for us, our values, our knowledge, our experiences.” –Khaled Jarrar

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It’s not easy to upstage Nicolas Cage, or to stand out among the crowd of nightmarish ghouls and grotesques that haunt David Lynch’s films, but Willem Dafoe’s performance as the psychotic Bobby Peru in WILD AT HEART exudes a disturbing and destabilizing power that is truly unforgettable. Sporting perhaps the most viscerally off-putting, character-defining set of fake teeth in all of cinema, Dafoe bursts into the film – and into the lives of its protagonists, the on-the-run lovers Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lulu (Laura Dern) – shattering both their lives and the audience’s complacency. Lynch’s typically unsettling film – released soon after TWIN PEAKS revolutionized American television – combines an idiosyncratic mixture of genre tropes (encompassing BONNIE AND CLYDE, Elvis Presley, and THE WIZARD OF OZ) with a degree of graphic sex and violence that nearly saddled the film with an X rating. But it’s Dafoe’s daringly unbridled, volcanically unrestrained performance that gives it its staying power.

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**SOLD OUT**

“In this graphic psychodrama, a grief-stricken man and woman – a searing Willem Dafoe and Cannes best actress winner Charlotte Gainsbourg – retreat to their cabin deep in the woods after the accidental death of their infant son, only to find terror and violence at the hands of nature and, ultimately, each other. But this most confrontational work yet from one of contemporary cinema’s most controversial artists is no mere provocation. It is a visually sublime, emotionally ravaging journey to the darkest corners of the possessed human mind; a disturbing battle of the sexes that pits rational psychology against age-old superstition; and a profoundly effective horror film.” –CRITERION

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The news is full of images of overcrowded boats and vast tent camps. But how much do we really know about what refugees are going through? NOTES ON DISPLACEMENT takes a deep dive by following a single family on a grueling journey, destination Germany. Their fear, disorientation, and solidarity are palpable.

Nadira, an elderly Palestinian, has been a refugee since the age of 12. And now she has to leave Damascus, too. She and her daughter Mona feared for their lives there, but the idea of a safe existence elsewhere is a distant dream. Filmmaker Khaled Jarrar receives unsettling videos and voice messages as they cross to the Greek island of Lesbos. He joins them there, on the long road to a better life.

Jarrar has his personal reasons for going through this experience in order to eliminate, in his own images, the distance so dominant in Western media coverage. He worms his way through the thronging crowds, gets lost in the night with his group, discovers how dangerous language barriers can be, and wanders around in the dehumanizing camps. And in a sense he – along with the viewer – becomes a true member of this family.

“My grandmother Shafiqa was forced to leave her home in Haifa, her jasmine tree, her cup of tea on her balcony and her view of the sea. I inherited this ‘pain print’ of hers through haunted memories both beautiful and painful at the same time. They chased me in my dreams like ghosts that never intended to leave. […] As the director, from behind the camera, I was driven to offer images of our own making, outside the never-ending Western paparazzi image onslaught of displaced refugees. This film is for us, our values, our knowledge, our experiences.” –Khaled Jarrar

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“AUTO FOCUS offers a glimpse into the colorful life – and mysterious death – of the handsome and charming star of the hugely successful ’60s-era POW-camp comedy ‘Hogan’s Heroes’. After the show’s cancellation, Crane (Greg Kinnear) desperately fell into the seamy world of sex, strip clubs, and decadence. Eventually, he teamed up with video technician John Henry Carpenter (Willem Dafoe) to document his exploits – an association that very well may have led to his violent murder in an Arizona motel room in 1978 where he was bludgeoned with a camera tripod. Almost two decades since its release, Schrader’s adaptation of this true-crime tale – something fit for the pages of Kenneth Anger’s ‘Hollywood Babylon’ – still stands as one of the most entertaining and provocative ‘Dark Side of Hollywood’ films ever made.” –JACOB BURNS FILM CENTER

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The news is full of images of overcrowded boats and vast tent camps. But how much do we really know about what refugees are going through? NOTES ON DISPLACEMENT takes a deep dive by following a single family on a grueling journey, destination Germany. Their fear, disorientation, and solidarity are palpable.

Nadira, an elderly Palestinian, has been a refugee since the age of 12. And now she has to leave Damascus, too. She and her daughter Mona feared for their lives there, but the idea of a safe existence elsewhere is a distant dream. Filmmaker Khaled Jarrar receives unsettling videos and voice messages as they cross to the Greek island of Lesbos. He joins them there, on the long road to a better life.

Jarrar has his personal reasons for going through this experience in order to eliminate, in his own images, the distance so dominant in Western media coverage. He worms his way through the thronging crowds, gets lost in the night with his group, discovers how dangerous language barriers can be, and wanders around in the dehumanizing camps. And in a sense he – along with the viewer – becomes a true member of this family.

“My grandmother Shafiqa was forced to leave her home in Haifa, her jasmine tree, her cup of tea on her balcony and her view of the sea. I inherited this ‘pain print’ of hers through haunted memories both beautiful and painful at the same time. They chased me in my dreams like ghosts that never intended to leave. […] As the director, from behind the camera, I was driven to offer images of our own making, outside the never-ending Western paparazzi image onslaught of displaced refugees. This film is for us, our values, our knowledge, our experiences.” –Khaled Jarrar

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“Scorsese’s long-gestating adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ revisionist life of Christ depicts Jesus as a profoundly troubled Messiah, wrestling with doubts about his divine mission and attracted by the prospect of earthly love – a reading that became a flashpoint for controversy upon the film’s release. Defying the conventions of Biblical spectaculars, Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader opt for a demotic tone in both dialogue and casting, with Willem Dafoe as Jesus leading a fine cast that also includes Harvey Keitel as Judas, Barbara Hershey as Mary Magdalene, Harry Dean Stanton as Saul/Paul, and David Bowie as Pontius Pilate. Similarly, composer Peter Gabriel eschews heavenly choirs for a soundtrack that draws upon influences from the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and South Asia.” –TIFF LIGHTBOX

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Dafoe’s screentime in STREETS OF FIRE – his first major Hollywood role – is limited, but he makes the most of it: his dramatic entrance in the movie’s bravura opening sequence is worth the price of admission in and of itself. A “rock and roll fable”, as per the opening credits, STREETS OF FIRE is a gleefully anachronistic mashup of 1950s biker melodrama and 1980s multiplex stylistics, which hinges on the abduction of rock and roll singer Ellen Aim (a young Diane Lane) at the hands of the biker gang the Bombers. As Raven Shaddock, the leader of the gang, a cartoonishly coiffed and made-up Dafoe turns in a daringly stylized performance that elevates its genre pastiche from commercial pandering into the realm of kabuki-like sublimity.

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The news is full of images of overcrowded boats and vast tent camps. But how much do we really know about what refugees are going through? NOTES ON DISPLACEMENT takes a deep dive by following a single family on a grueling journey, destination Germany. Their fear, disorientation, and solidarity are palpable.

Nadira, an elderly Palestinian, has been a refugee since the age of 12. And now she has to leave Damascus, too. She and her daughter Mona feared for their lives there, but the idea of a safe existence elsewhere is a distant dream. Filmmaker Khaled Jarrar receives unsettling videos and voice messages as they cross to the Greek island of Lesbos. He joins them there, on the long road to a better life.

Jarrar has his personal reasons for going through this experience in order to eliminate, in his own images, the distance so dominant in Western media coverage. He worms his way through the thronging crowds, gets lost in the night with his group, discovers how dangerous language barriers can be, and wanders around in the dehumanizing camps. And in a sense he – along with the viewer – becomes a true member of this family.

“My grandmother Shafiqa was forced to leave her home in Haifa, her jasmine tree, her cup of tea on her balcony and her view of the sea. I inherited this ‘pain print’ of hers through haunted memories both beautiful and painful at the same time. They chased me in my dreams like ghosts that never intended to leave. […] As the director, from behind the camera, I was driven to offer images of our own making, outside the never-ending Western paparazzi image onslaught of displaced refugees. This film is for us, our values, our knowledge, our experiences.” –Khaled Jarrar

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“Intimate and extremely self-reflexive, TOMMASO [finds Ferrara] enlisting his muse Willem Dafoe, his wife Cristina Chiriac, and their three-year-old daughter, Anna, to draft out a scrappy, startling, and often moving mosaic of Ferrara’s emotional and psychological state. Whether its various elements are representations of actual events or purely fictitious creative whims is never clear (a story that Dafoe recounts in a scene at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting feels so personal to him – eliciting tears I took to be too genuine to not have been personally experienced – is a particularly ambiguous confusion of performance that ends up being quite generative), but it’s the impressions that feel essential. This is filmmaking as survival, an earnest confession and auto-critique (with crucifixions and all) that ought to be remembered as more than a mere footnote in his late period.” –Blake Williams, FILMMAKER MAGAZINE

Willem Dafoe will be here in person for a Q&A following the screening on Sat, Feb 8!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

“AUTO FOCUS offers a glimpse into the colorful life – and mysterious death – of the handsome and charming star of the hugely successful ’60s-era POW-camp comedy ‘Hogan’s Heroes’. After the show’s cancellation, Crane (Greg Kinnear) desperately fell into the seamy world of sex, strip clubs, and decadence. Eventually, he teamed up with video technician John Henry Carpenter (Willem Dafoe) to document his exploits – an association that very well may have led to his violent murder in an Arizona motel room in 1978 where he was bludgeoned with a camera tripod. Almost two decades since its release, Schrader’s adaptation of this true-crime tale – something fit for the pages of Kenneth Anger’s ‘Hollywood Babylon’ – still stands as one of the most entertaining and provocative ‘Dark Side of Hollywood’ films ever made.” –JACOB BURNS FILM CENTER

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

The news is full of images of overcrowded boats and vast tent camps. But how much do we really know about what refugees are going through? NOTES ON DISPLACEMENT takes a deep dive by following a single family on a grueling journey, destination Germany. Their fear, disorientation, and solidarity are palpable.

Nadira, an elderly Palestinian, has been a refugee since the age of 12. And now she has to leave Damascus, too. She and her daughter Mona feared for their lives there, but the idea of a safe existence elsewhere is a distant dream. Filmmaker Khaled Jarrar receives unsettling videos and voice messages as they cross to the Greek island of Lesbos. He joins them there, on the long road to a better life.

Jarrar has his personal reasons for going through this experience in order to eliminate, in his own images, the distance so dominant in Western media coverage. He worms his way through the thronging crowds, gets lost in the night with his group, discovers how dangerous language barriers can be, and wanders around in the dehumanizing camps. And in a sense he – along with the viewer – becomes a true member of this family.

“My grandmother Shafiqa was forced to leave her home in Haifa, her jasmine tree, her cup of tea on her balcony and her view of the sea. I inherited this ‘pain print’ of hers through haunted memories both beautiful and painful at the same time. They chased me in my dreams like ghosts that never intended to leave. […] As the director, from behind the camera, I was driven to offer images of our own making, outside the never-ending Western paparazzi image onslaught of displaced refugees. This film is for us, our values, our knowledge, our experiences.” –Khaled Jarrar

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“Schrader has spoken of LIGHT SLEEPER as the final panel in a triptych of films about male loners which also includes TAXI DRIVER and AMERICAN GIGOLO. Featuring one of Schrader’s tautest and most effective screenplays, LIGHT SLEEPER tells the story of a NYC drug runner grappling with a midlife crisis and framed for a drug-related murder. Schrader’s return to the mean streets of Manhattan is notably melancholic, suffused with an aura of regret and longing that adds nuance to all of its characters. Willem Dafoe offers a poignant and powerful rendering of the dealer’s moving struggle to reassemble his life and reconnect with a lost love.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

Willem Dafoe will be here in person for a Q&A following the screening on Sun, Feb 16!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

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

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Sanborn’s 1980-88 film cycle, KAPITAL!, which encompasses seven individual works, includes performative and expanded cinema elements, and finds Sanborn working with found footage sourced from what he has called the ‘consensual hallucinations’ of the mass media.

“There were many sources of inspiration for the Project: a reading of ‘Kapital,’ the knowledge of Eisenstein’s project (his printed notes), a reading of Guy Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle,’ and experience of media culture in the U.S. All of the films in the KAPITAL film cycle are based on pre-existing films, which I have altered in my reproduction of them. While the alterations contain a formal element – usually some form of optical printing and the combination with a variant soundtrack – my primary interest is in the recontextualization of the material to yield a psychological and political unfolding of its latent meaning.” –Keith Sanborn

FASCINATION 1980-88, 18 min, 16mm, silent, with separate digital soundtrack accompaniment. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
“SOMETHING IS SEEN BUT ONE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT…” 1986, 2.5 min, 16mm
A PUBLIC APPEARANCE AND A STATEMENT 1987-88, 18.5 min, 16mm
KAPITAL 1982, 3.5 min, 16mm, anaglyph 3D
MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (BLONDE; HE APPEARS TO BE YOUNG) 1982, 4.5 min, 16mm
IMITATION OF LIFE 1982, 25 min, 16mm
1970 OR THE COLLAPSE OF HISTORY IN THE HYSTERICAL SUBLIME 1983-88, 40 min, 8mm-to-digital and 16mm projector performance. This work includes the film NAVIGATION, which has been preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
 
Total running time: ca. 115 min.

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“SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE is a wickedly fabricated behind-the-scenes yarn about the production of the movie NOSFERATU (1922). […] Even though it earned [Willem Dafoe] an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, it remains an unduly obscure entry in his filmography. It’s the second feature directed by E. Elias Merhige, a work of straight-faced and ingenious giddiness – a riotous yet loving laugh up the ample sleeve of cinematic history that’s also a substantial and troubled contemplation of the art.” –Richard Brody, NEW YORKER

Preceded by:John Lurie FISHING WITH JOHN: EPISODE 4 1991, 24 min, digitalIn arguably the most surreal episode of John Lurie’s cult cable TV series “Fishing With John”, Lurie and Dafoe embark on an ice-fishing adventure in northern Maine, but, ill-prepared and inexperienced, the trip soon devolves into a desperate – albeit soporific – struggle for survival.

Total running time: ca. 120 min.

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This program displays the wide range of Sanborn’s practice. Showcasing films made from found footage, as well as text-based pieces and imageless films, it includes ingenious works such as THE ARTWORK IN THE AGE OF ITS MECHANICAL REPRODUCIBILITY BY WALTER BENJAMIN AS TOLD TO KEITH SANBORN and SEMI-PRIVATE SUB-HEGELIAN PANTY FANTASY (whose titles alone hint at the wit and conceptual depth of his work), as well as several installments in his ongoing series, ENERGY OF DELUSION, in which Sanborn compresses some of “the most notoriously engaging, difficult, and lengthy works of film history” into one-minute-long versions.

THE ARTWORK IN THE AGE OF ITS MECHANICAL REPRODUCIBILITY BY WALTER BENJAMIN AS TOLD TO KEITH SANBORN 1936/1996, 3.5 min, digital
THE GIFT 1991, 7 min, digital
ENERGY OF DELUSION: [C. C+R][C. F+T] /0.24930556 2015, 1.5 min, digital
SEMI-PRIVATE SUB-HEGELIAN PANTY FANTASY (WITH SOUND) 2001, 3.5 min, digital
MIRROR 1999, 6 min, digital
ENERGY OF DELUSION: RN(D)^b[T(DY)^t]9WS0^b/323.05694444 2015, 1.5 min, digital
THE ZAPRUDER FOOTAGE: AN INVESTIGATION OF CONSENSUAL HALLUCINATION 1999, 19.5 min, digital
ENERGY OF DELUSION: JDQdC²³B¹⁰⁸⁰/201.224313202091 2010, 1.5 min, digital
OPERATION DOUBLE TROUBLE 2003, 10.5 min, digital
THE FORCE OF BEAUTY, THE BEAUTY OF FORCE, AN AD 2008, 3.5 min, digital
ENERGY OF DELUSION: M[MC^a]^w Ч[К-А]^c/72.92569444 2015, 1.5 min, digital
ONE MINUTE FOR JONAS ON THE DAY OF HIS OCCULTATION 2019, 1 min, digital
FOR THE BIRDS 2000, 7 min, digital
 
Total running time: ca. 70 min.

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With Willem Dafoe, Matthew Modine, Bob Hoskins, Asia Argento, Shanyn Leigh, Roy Dotrice, Riccardo Scamarcio, Stefania Rocca, Bianca Balti, Lou Doillon, Sylvia Miles, Burt Young, Joe Cortese, and Anita Pallenberg.

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

“Ferrara’s first flat-out comedy. The press book name-checks Wilder, Sturges, and Capra, and he has described it…as ‘CHEERS meets THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE.’ But…GO GO TALES is also an allegory: a portrait of the artist as a hustler, a gambler, a performer, a dreamer, an addict, a throwback, a holdout, and, of course, a purveyor of good old-fashioned T&A, navigating the screw-or-be-screwed questions common to all exploitative professions, indeed to modern capitalist systems. You could say this one comes from the heart.” –Dennis Lim, CINEMA SCOPE

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SLOW DEATH
2023, 35 min, digital
A slow four-part film on death and the persistence of the dead.
 
TERRAIN
2023, 23.5 min, digital
A short essay on the triangular Square du Vert-Galant, one of the favorite repairs of the vanishing Paris of Guy Debord.
 
NEGATIVE CAPABILITY
2024, 6.5 min, digital
An exploration of Keats’s proposition, that “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”
 
JOAN’S STUDIO
2024, 4.5 min, digital
An exploration of Joan Jonas’s studio in Nova Scotia in August 2019, by night with torch, but no spear. Special thanks to Peggy Ahwesh for pelican lighting effects.
 
Total running time: ca. 70 min.

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“AT ETERNITY’S GATE is a portrait of Vincent van Gogh during the last and most prolific years of his life. It is directed by Julian Schnabel, himself a painter, and stars Willem Dafoe. The film is so much a collaboration that I hesitate to designate it Schnabel’s alone. Together, Schnabel and Dafoe, who is in virtually every frame, have made the first convincing and illuminating non-documentary film about what great painters do and how they see, and for his efforts, Dafoe won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival.” –Amy Taubin, FILM COMMENT

“More intimate than the films about Vincent van Gogh directed by Vincente Minnelli, Robert Altman and the married duo Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, the artist-filmmaker Julian Schnabel’s AT ETERNITY’S GATE attempts, more successfully than most movies that probe the creative process, to get inside the artist’s head, to understand how his thoughts and feelings spontaneously transmitted themselves to the canvas.” –Graham Fuller, SIGHT & SOUND

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BOB WILSON’S LIFE & DEATH OF MARINA ABRAMOVIC documents the coming together of Willem Dafoe, director Robert Wilson, performance artist Marina Abramovic, and singer and composer Antony Hegarty, to create an experimental opera based on Marina Abramovic’s biography. Through rehearsal footage and interviews with the artists as they are making the piece, director Giada Colagrande provides insight into this unique collaboration, resulting in an intimate portrait that reveals the dynamics, excitement, and insecurities of making such a poetic and visually stunning theatre work.

Preceded by:
Savanah Leaf run (2023, 9 min, 35mm-to-digital)
Savanah Leaf run 002 (2024, 9.5 min, 35mm-to-digital)
These short films by artist and filmmaker Savanah Leaf (EARTH MAMA) are investigations of bodies subjected to various forms of measuring, categorization, and control.

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

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THE GREAT BLONDINO
(1967, 42 min, 16mm. Preservation print, with thanks to the Academy Film Archive.)

“The original Blondino was a 19th-century tightrope artist who among other feats crossed Niagara Falls trundling a wheelbarrow. In this film, Nelson sees Blondino as a metaphor for those who still try. Too subtle to be allegorical, the picture is in the shape of a quixotic search in which the goal is the journey and the means is the end.” –MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

“It is…difficult to get at the rich visual texture that is the film’s most striking attribute. Long stretches are concerned with Blondino’s visions, dreams, and dreams within dreams. The film unfolds in brief recurring patterns of imagery. Even the more straightforward sections are dense with interpolated newsreel and TV commercial footage, visual gags, and homemade special effects. The net effect is funny, seamless, and elusive.” –J. Hoberman, “A Filmmakers Filming Monograph”

&

BLEU SHUT
(1970, 33 min, 16mm. Preservation print, with thanks to the Academy Film Archive.)

“Boat-name quizzes, dogs, cuts from Dreyer’s JOAN OF ARC in montage with a sultry whore, a car running up a ramp and crashing, pornography, a passionate embrace by a thirties hero and heroine; all somehow implicating Dreyer and Joan in the perverse synthesis of sex and technology. What’s happening here? Basically Nelson is leaving things unsaid.” –Leo Regan

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

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The Wooster Group
RHYME ’EM TO DEATH
1994, 10.5 min, video. Performed by the Wooster Group; director: Elizabeth LeCompte; cinematography: Leslie Thornton; editor: Christopher Kondek; screenplay: Kate Valk & Marianne Weems.
RHYME ’EM TO DEATH reconstructs the trial from Victor Hugo’s “Hunchback of Notre Dame” from a new perspective, that of a minor character – the goat. The trial of the goat, a postscript in the Hugo novel, has been extended and enlivened with actual transcripts of 15th-century trials in which animals were persecuted as witches.

The Wooster Group
WRONG GUYS
1997, 41 min, 35mm-to-digital. Adapted from the short novel “Wrong Guys” by James Strahs; directed by Elizabeth LeCompte; cinematographer/editor: Ken Kobland; videographer/video effects editor: Christopher Kondek; music: John Lurie.
Adapted from a novella by James Strahs (the author of “Queer and Alone”, as well as the Wooster Group’s play, “North Atlantic”), this unfinished 1997 film from the Wooster Group was first shown as part of the 1997 Whitney Biennial. Aside from a screening as part of Anthology’s tribute to the Group in 2012, it has rarely been seen since. A tale of smuggling and survivalists that adopts the tone and visual style of film noir, but with a narrative logic all its own, it stars Willem Dafoe as Jack Straw, a small-time operator who ran a “pharmaceutical outfit” before an accident changed everything. A rare instance of an extended moving-image work by the Wooster Group that was created independently of their theatrical productions, WRONG GUYS is a fascinating and little-seen work.

Total running time: ca. 55 min.

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

Followed by a Q&A with Keith Sanborn, moderated by Natasha Chuk, PhD. Chuk is a media theorist, writer, educator, and independent curator focused on the intersection of art, philosophy, and creative technologies. Her writing has appeared in Millennium Film Journal, FLAT Journal, Chronogram, and other journals and edited volumes. She is the author of Vanishing Points: Articulations of Death, Fragmentation, and the Unexperienced Experience of Created Objects (Intellect, 2015) and the forthcoming Photo Obscura: The Photographic in Post-Photography (Intellect, 2025). She teaches courses in the areas of film, photography, video game studies, new media art, and media theory at the School of Visual Arts and Parsons in New York City.

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The Wooster Group & Ken Kobland
FLAUBERT DREAMS OF TRAVEL BUT THE ILLNESS OF HIS MOTHER PREVENTS IT
1986, 20 min, video. Director: Elizabeth LeCompte; photography/editor/score: Ken Kobland.This piece focuses on images of death and transcendence as suggested by the writings of Gustave Flaubert. The film was made in conjunction with the Wooster Group’s theater production “Frank Dell’s The Temptation of St. Antony”, a re-invention of Flaubert’s epic “closet drama” about the visions and ecstasies of the fourth-century hermit St. Antony.

The Wooster Group
WHITE HOMELAND COMMANDO
1992, 62.5 min, video. Director: Elizabeth LeCompte; teleplay: Michael Kirby; Director of Photography: Ken Kobland.
WHITE HOMELAND COMMANDO is TWG’s 1992 full-length video and was originally shown at the New York Film Festival and included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial. Michael Kirby’s teleplay is a cops-versus-white-supremacists tale imagined as a structuralist police procedural, as well as a prescient examination of domestic terrorism and the national security apparatus.

“Nothing if not medium specific WHC makes video noise and glitches read like psychotic brainstorms. Solarized and colorized, the punchy mise-en-scene is made to the measure of Avenue B after dark…. Needless to say, the ensemble acting is impeccable.” –VILLAGE VOICE

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

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“SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE is a wickedly fabricated behind-the-scenes yarn about the production of the movie NOSFERATU (1922). […] Even though it earned [Willem Dafoe] an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, it remains an unduly obscure entry in his filmography. It’s the second feature directed by E. Elias Merhige, a work of straight-faced and ingenious giddiness – a riotous yet loving laugh up the ample sleeve of cinematic history that’s also a substantial and troubled contemplation of the art.” –Richard Brody, NEW YORKER

Preceded by:John Lurie FISHING WITH JOHN: EPISODE 4 1991, 24 min, digitalIn arguably the most surreal episode of John Lurie’s cult cable TV series “Fishing With John”, Lurie and Dafoe embark on an ice-fishing adventure in northern Maine, but, ill-prepared and inexperienced, the trip soon devolves into a desperate – albeit soporific – struggle for survival.

Total running time: ca. 120 min.

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The feature debut of both Willem Dafoe and Kathryn Bigelow, THE LOVELESS takes place in the late 1950s, a time of generational conflict, of immense social change, of bold fashions and toe-tapping music. A motorcycle gang roars into a small southern town en route to the Daytona races, unnerving and angering the locals with their standoffish attitude and disrespect for social niceties. When one of their number, the charismatic Vance (Dafoe), hooks up with sportscar-driving Telena (Marin Kanter), he incurs the wrath of the girl’s father, setting the gang on a collision course with the rest of the town as simmering tensions boil over into violent retribution. Raw, angry and honest, THE LOVELESS evokes, with unflinching clarity, both an attitude and a bygone era, exploring the tensions between two very different Americas.

“Bigelow’s first feature immediately reveals her canny talent for simultaneously fulfilling and deconstructing popular film genres. Set in the 1950s and starring a young, pomaded Willem Dafoe in his screen debut as the charismatic leader of a leather-clad and immoral bike gang, THE LOVELESS deliberately uproots the genre’s traditional embrace of youthful rebellion by introducing a notably noir shading and sharp feminist perspective into its story of generational and gender conflict. Bigelow’s training in painting and experimental cinema informs the film’s (relatively) slow pace, meticulous framing, and sparse, deliberately iconic dialogue – not to mention the evocation of Kenneth Anger’s SCORPIO RISING in the camera’s close attention to the bikers’ gleaming chrome and leather.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

Preceded by:
Burt Barr & James Benning
O PANAMA
1985, 27 min, video
Written and directed by video artist Burt Barr in collaboration with filmmaker James Benning, O PANAMA features Willem Dafoe as a man confined to his apartment on a winter day as he suffers through an illness. Built on the polarity between hot and cold, the tedious reality of the man’s sickness, and the vivid hallucinatory visions of his delirium, O PANAMA conveys the workings of the subconscious.

Total running time: ca. 115 min.

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“AT ETERNITY’S GATE is a portrait of Vincent van Gogh during the last and most prolific years of his life. It is directed by Julian Schnabel, himself a painter, and stars Willem Dafoe. The film is so much a collaboration that I hesitate to designate it Schnabel’s alone. Together, Schnabel and Dafoe, who is in virtually every frame, have made the first convincing and illuminating non-documentary film about what great painters do and how they see, and for his efforts, Dafoe won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival.” –Amy Taubin, FILM COMMENT

“More intimate than the films about Vincent van Gogh directed by Vincente Minnelli, Robert Altman and the married duo Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, the artist-filmmaker Julian Schnabel’s AT ETERNITY’S GATE attempts, more successfully than most movies that probe the creative process, to get inside the artist’s head, to understand how his thoughts and feelings spontaneously transmitted themselves to the canvas.” –Graham Fuller, SIGHT & SOUND

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With Willem Dafoe, Matthew Modine, Bob Hoskins, Asia Argento, Shanyn Leigh, Roy Dotrice, Riccardo Scamarcio, Stefania Rocca, Bianca Balti, Lou Doillon, Sylvia Miles, Burt Young, Joe Cortese, and Anita Pallenberg.

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

“Ferrara’s first flat-out comedy. The press book name-checks Wilder, Sturges, and Capra, and he has described it…as ‘CHEERS meets THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE.’ But…GO GO TALES is also an allegory: a portrait of the artist as a hustler, a gambler, a performer, a dreamer, an addict, a throwback, a holdout, and, of course, a purveyor of good old-fashioned T&A, navigating the screw-or-be-screwed questions common to all exploitative professions, indeed to modern capitalist systems. You could say this one comes from the heart.” –Dennis Lim, CINEMA SCOPE

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(UMARETE WA MITA KEREDO…)

In referring to this film Ozu stated, “I started to make a film about grownups. While I had originally planned to make a fairly bright little story, it changed while I was working on it and came out very dark.” The story concerns a very average suburban office worker, with a wife and two very un-average sons, who is unable to stand up to his boss.

“Joyful…as true and as moving and as timely today as it was in 1932.” –Jonas Mekas

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

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(CHICHI ARIKI)

“One of Ozu’s most perfect films. There is a naturalness and a consequent feeling of inevitability that is rare in cinema […] Critics have called the performance of Chishu Ryu in this film one of the best in the history of Japanese cinema, and they are right […] THERE WAS A FATHER has become one of the country’s most esteemed classics” –Donald Richie

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BOB WILSON’S LIFE & DEATH OF MARINA ABRAMOVIC documents the coming together of Willem Dafoe, director Robert Wilson, performance artist Marina Abramovic, and singer and composer Antony Hegarty, to create an experimental opera based on Marina Abramovic’s biography. Through rehearsal footage and interviews with the artists as they are making the piece, director Giada Colagrande provides insight into this unique collaboration, resulting in an intimate portrait that reveals the dynamics, excitement, and insecurities of making such a poetic and visually stunning theatre work.

Preceded by:
Savanah Leaf run (2023, 9 min, 35mm-to-digital)
Savanah Leaf run 002 (2024, 9.5 min, 35mm-to-digital)
These short films by artist and filmmaker Savanah Leaf (EARTH MAMA) are investigations of bodies subjected to various forms of measuring, categorization, and control.

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

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This rare screening, hosted by Bidoun, is presented as a prelude to a two-day symposium on the renowned Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist, Etel Adnan. Organized by Omar Berrada and Simone Fattal on the centenary of Adnan’s birth, the symposium will take place on February 28 and March 1, at The Poetry Project and Giorno Poetry Systems.

The day before, on Thursday, February 27, we will present Etel Adnan’s feature film, MOTION. In the 1980s, Adnan regularly traveled with a Super-8mm camera in hand. She visited New York frequently, staying at a friend’s apartment in a high-rise overlooking the East River. While there, she would repeatedly attempt to capture the sun touching skyscrapers’ windows, the geometry of bridges, the marriage of light and water, the movement of barges on the river, the shapes of factory smoke – the oddly meditative poetry of inexorable motion at the immediate edge of city life. The footage was retrieved and digitized three decades later, and edited into a feature-length film, MOTION, which premiered at Documenta 13 in 2012.

For more info about the symposium at The Poetry Project and Giorno Poetry Systems, please visit https://www.poetryproject.org/ + https://giornopoetrysystems.org/ 

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(CHICHI ARIKI)

“One of Ozu’s most perfect films. There is a naturalness and a consequent feeling of inevitability that is rare in cinema […] Critics have called the performance of Chishu Ryu in this film one of the best in the history of Japanese cinema, and they are right […] THERE WAS A FATHER has become one of the country’s most esteemed classics” –Donald Richie

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

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(UMARETE WA MITA KEREDO…)

In referring to this film Ozu stated, “I started to make a film about grownups. While I had originally planned to make a fairly bright little story, it changed while I was working on it and came out very dark.” The story concerns a very average suburban office worker, with a wife and two very un-average sons, who is unable to stand up to his boss.

“Joyful…as true and as moving and as timely today as it was in 1932.” –Jonas Mekas

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