Anthology Film Archives

NEWLATINO FILMMAKERS PRESENTS OUR ANNUAL CINCO DE MAYO SCREENING
Curated by Edward Pagan
–Wed, May 1, Documentary Series at 6:00, Short Film Program at 7:00, Feature at 8:00.

JONAS MEKAS WILL BE HERE IN PERSON FOR OPENING NIGHT, THURS, APRIL 25!

“A motion picture composed of brief diaristic scenes not used in completed films from the years 1960-2000; and self-referential video footage taped during the editing. Brief glimpses of family, friends, girl-friends, the City, seasons of the year, travels. Occasionally I talk, reminisce, or play music I taped during those earlier years, plus more recent piano improvisations by Auguste Varkalis. It’s a kind of autobiographical, diaristic poem, celebration of happiness and life. I consider myself a happy man.” –J.M.

“In a film of amazing delicacy and poetic insight, Mekas celebrates the beauty of imperfect images…” –Amy Taubin

“OUT-TAKES starts with Mekas alone at night while the city sleeps, editing his old films. As he looks back over his life he starts to talk, insisting that his life’s work amounts to ‘just images, some fragments of this world’ that he will bring together for himself and a few friends. But as images of the people who brought joy into his life pass by, we realize that most of them are no longer alive. Mekas sees them again, but he is seeing them alone. As much as it is about his happy life, the film is also about emptiness, loss, and a longing for some sort of spiritual consolation. At one moment the cover of St John of the Cross’s MEDITATIONS appears on screen. This is Mekas’s long dark night of the soul.” – Richard Dorment, THE TELEGRAPH

For screening details, please visit: http://alwanfilmfestival2013.com/calendar/

JONAS MEKAS WILL BE HERE IN PERSON FOR OPENING NIGHT, THURS, APRIL 25!

“A motion picture composed of brief diaristic scenes not used in completed films from the years 1960-2000; and self-referential video footage taped during the editing. Brief glimpses of family, friends, girl-friends, the City, seasons of the year, travels. Occasionally I talk, reminisce, or play music I taped during those earlier years, plus more recent piano improvisations by Auguste Varkalis. It’s a kind of autobiographical, diaristic poem, celebration of happiness and life. I consider myself a happy man.” –J.M.

“In a film of amazing delicacy and poetic insight, Mekas celebrates the beauty of imperfect images…” –Amy Taubin

“OUT-TAKES starts with Mekas alone at night while the city sleeps, editing his old films. As he looks back over his life he starts to talk, insisting that his life’s work amounts to ‘just images, some fragments of this world’ that he will bring together for himself and a few friends. But as images of the people who brought joy into his life pass by, we realize that most of them are no longer alive. Mekas sees them again, but he is seeing them alone. As much as it is about his happy life, the film is also about emptiness, loss, and a longing for some sort of spiritual consolation. At one moment the cover of St John of the Cross’s MEDITATIONS appears on screen. This is Mekas’s long dark night of the soul.” – Richard Dorment, THE TELEGRAPH

For screening details, please visit: http://alwanfilmfestival2013.com/calendar/

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER AND KUBELKA IN PERSON!
Presented with the support of the Austrian Cultural Forum New York; special thanks to Andreas Stadler & Hannah Liko.
Having previously created fascinating documentary portraits of seminal avant-garde figures Maya Deren and Marie Menken, Martina Kudláček has turned her sights on Peter Kubelka, the legendary Austrian filmmaker, theorist, lecturer, and cook, not to mention AFA co-founder. And the result is her most ambitious film yet, an expansive yet focused 4-hour immersion in Kubelka’s work, theories, personality, and sensibility.
While Kubelka’s radical and pioneering body of films is a highly condensed work of little more than an hour, his lectures are legendary for their extended length. In Kudláček’s film these drawn-out presentations on ‘what is cinema’ and ‘cooking as an art form’ are frequently illuminated by archaeological objects from Kubelka’s eclectic collection. He considers his ongoing collecting to be an expanded film practice that explores the evolution of humanity.
Delving deeply into the numerous, incredibly varied, and yet gracefully integrated facets of Kubelka’s life, FRAGMENTS OF KUBELKA is both a vibrant portrait of a unique and legendary figure and a penetrating inquiry into his views on cinema, art, and experience.

“Martina’s film on Kubelka is the best film on any artist that I’ve ever seen. The trick she used was so simple and so difficult: she kept herself out of it. What she gave us is pure Kubelka.” –Jonas Mekas

“Kudláček invites us to an intimate meeting with Johann Sebastian Bach, or equivalent, and speaking our language. Stan Brakhage of the conspicuous ego considered him the greatest filmmaker. I’m content when anyone hits their stride – Oscar Micheaux! – and he’s surely the greatest Peter Kubelka we could have, he who taught us how damn interesting perfection could be.” –Ken Jacobs

“How do you portray a Renaissance man? With the perseverance of a skilled Nature filmmaker, Kudláček observed Peter Kubelka for many years with her hand-held camera and gave him all the time in the world to expose us to his unfolding vision. As a result she presents a four-hour masterpiece about one of the most influential artists in film history and one of the most original thinkers and critics of our times.” –Peter Tscherkassky

Director Martina Kudláček will be here in person!

IDEAS CITY 2013: THE URBAN LANDSCAPE IN CINEMATIC TRANSFORMATION
This program is presented as part of IDEAS CITY, a biennial festival which was created to explore the future city and to effect change, and which will take place in downtown New York from May 1-4, 2013. Formerly known as the ‘Festival of Ideas for the New City’, IDEAS CITY was founded by the New Museum as a major collaboration between dozens of downtown arts, education, and community organizations to harness the power of the creative community and imagine our collective future. This ambitious initiative is built upon the core belief that arts and culture constitute a driving force behind the vitality of urban centers worldwide.

The theme for IDEAS CITY 2013 is Untapped Capital. As the world’s resources continue to be endangered, depleted, and destroyed, we all need to imagine new solutions and develop innovative approaches and practices. Rather than focusing on deficits, IDEAS CITY 2013 will encourage intensive examination of surplus resources that may be under- recognized or underutilized: Untapped Capital.

Audi Urban Future Initiative is the Lead Sponsor of IDEAS CITY.

These programs have been organized in collaboration with MM Serra (Film-Makers’ Coop) and Jen Senko.

PROGRAM 1: SHORT FILMS
NYC’s urban landscape is constantly in flux. There are multitudinous stories of the city’s workers and dwellers, lives that are made and destroyed by this city. This program of short films tells some of these stories over the last five decades, and interweaves three threads pertinent to the East Village, Soho, and the Lower East Side: the urban landscape, subcultures that inhabit them, and changes over time.

Rudy Burckhardt SQUARE TIMES (1967, 6.5 min, 16mm)
A Saturday night on 42nd Street, from dusk to dawn. The glamour, the garbage, the hot dogs, the movies, the sex and the violence in the air – with music by The Supremes.

Marie Menken GO! GO! GO! (1964, 11.5 min, 16mm, silent)
“Taken from a moving vehicle, for much of the footage, while the rest uses stationary frame, stop-motion. In the harbor sequence, I had to wait for the right amount of activity, to show effectively the boats darting about; some sequences took over an hour to shoot, and last perhaps a minute on the screen. The ‘strength and health’ sequence was shot at a body beautiful convention. Various parts of the city of New York, the busy man’s engrossment in his busy-ness, make up the major part of the film. … a tour-de-force on man’s activities.” –M.M.

Coleen Fitzgibbon L.E.S. (LOWER EAST SIDE) (1975, 10 min, Super-8mm transferred to digital video)
“The story of the collapse of the problematic island of Manhattma, whose inhabitants worshiped the god of mamon, John Doe. Shot in the lower eastside of Manhattan, NYC circa 1976. Filmed on Super-8mm with sound, summer 1976, shown on open reel videotape 1978 on Manhattan Cable Channel D, Collaborative Projects, Inc.’s Red Curtain show.” –C.F.

Henry Hills MONEY (1985, 15 min, 16mm-to-35mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.)
Filmed primarily on the streets of Manhattan for the ambient sounds and movements and occasional pedestrian interaction to create a rich tapestry of swirling colors and juxtaposed architectural spaces in deep focus and present the intense urban over-flowing energy that is experience living here. MONEY is thematically centered around a discussion of economic problems facing avant-garde artists in the Reagan era. Discussion, however, is fragmented into words and phrases and reassembled into writing. Musical and movement phrases are woven through this conversation to create an almost operatic composition. Give me money!
“If time is money, this 15-minute film is a bargain.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

Joel Schlemowitz MOVING IMAGES – THE FILM-MAKERS’ COOPERATIVE RELOCATES (2001, 14 min, 16mm)
The day the Film-Makers’ Cooperative was forced by loss of lease to move from their offices at Lexington Ave and 31st Street in NYC, filmmaker and Coop member Joel Schlemowitz showed up with a camera to document the historic moment. Rather than record the event per se, a freewheeling use of roving handheld, time lapse, and double exposure were employed to create a visually evocative, impressionistic documentary about the Film-Makers’ Cooperative. On the soundtrack Jonas Mekas, one of the Coop’s founders, and MM Serra, the current executive director, describe the Coop’s beginnings, the organization’s recent struggles, and the difficulties of finding space for the arts.

Ken Jacobs JACK ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE (1957, 15 min, 16mm, b&w, silent)
Excerpts from TWO WRENCHING DEPARTURES.
A tribute to the life-force of Jacobs’s fellow artists, Bob Fleischner and Jack Smith. This is a digital version of the live Nervous System film-performance presented at the Museum of the Moving Image a few weeks after Fleischner and Smith died in 1989.

MM Serra BITCH-BEAUTY (2011, 6 min, video)
An experimental documentary profiling the life of Anne Hanavan, whose experiences as part of the underground scene in the East Village of the 1980s was contemporary with now-deceased Zoe Tamerlis Lund, the legendary actor and screenwriter (BAD LIEUTENANT) who died of heart failure due to extended cocaine use in 1999. Using the cathartic self-expression of Hanavan’s films, performance, and music as well as footage from Lund’s work, BITCH-BEAUTY is an intense 7-minute time capsule of addiction and the perils of street prostitution.

Followed by a Q&A with MM Serra and Coleen Fitzgibbon!

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

For screening details, please visit: http://alwanfilmfestival2013.com/calendar/

IDEAS CITY 2013: THE URBAN LANDSCAPE IN CINEMATIC TRANSFORMATION
This program is presented as part of IDEAS CITY, a biennial festival which was created to explore the future city and to effect change, and which will take place in downtown New York from May 1-4, 2013. Formerly known as the ‘Festival of Ideas for the New City’, IDEAS CITY was founded by the New Museum as a major collaboration between dozens of downtown arts, education, and community organizations to harness the power of the creative community and imagine our collective future. This ambitious initiative is built upon the core belief that arts and culture constitute a driving force behind the vitality of urban centers worldwide.

The theme for IDEAS CITY 2013 is Untapped Capital. As the world’s resources continue to be endangered, depleted, and destroyed, we all need to imagine new solutions and develop innovative approaches and practices. Rather than focusing on deficits, IDEAS CITY 2013 will encourage intensive examination of surplus resources that may be under- recognized or underutilized: Untapped Capital.

Audi Urban Future Initiative is the Lead Sponsor of IDEAS CITY.

These programs have been organized in collaboration with MM Serra (Film-Makers’ Coop) and Jen Senko.

PROGRAM 2:
Fiore DeRosa & Jen Senko
THE VANISHING CITY
2009, 54 min, video
NYC has changed drastically in the last few years. Luxury high rises litter the city skyline and middle and lower income people and the artists who once made this city are now priced out. This award-winning documentary pulls back the curtain to reveal the forces behind the ‘luxurification’ of one of the world’s most iconic cities. Told through the eyes of tenants, small landlords, city planners, business owners, scholars, and politicians, it exposes and explains the real politic behind the alarming disappearance of NY’s beloved neighborhoods, the truth about its finance-dominated economy, and the myth of ‘inevitable change’.

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion featuring:
M.M. Serra (filmmaker; Director, Film-Makers’ Coop)
Jen Senko (director, producer of THE VANISHING CITY)Fiore DeRosa (director, producer of THE VANISHING CITY)
Jaren Benjamin (Executive Director, Met Council)
Ida Susser (Professor of Anthropology at Hunter, author “Norman Street, Poverty and Politics in an Urban Neighborhood”)
Bill Samuels (Chairman, Effective New York Foundation, Inc.)

MOSAIC IN CONFIDENCE / MOSAIK IM VERTRAUEN (1955, 16 min, 35mm, b&w/color)
ADEBAR (1957, 1 min, 35mm, b&w)
SCHWECHATER (1958, 1 min, 35mm, b&w/color)
ARNULF RAINER (1960, 7 min, 35mm, b&w)
OUR TRIP TO AFRICA / UNSERE AFRIKAREISE (1966, 12 min, 16mm)
PAUSE (1977, 12 min, 16mm)
POETRY AND TRUTH / DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT (2003, 13 min, 35mm)
“Peter Kubelka is the perfectionist of the film medium; and, as I honor that quality above all others at this time finding such a lack of it now elsewhere, I would simply like to say: Peter Kubelka is the world’s greatest filmmaker – which is to say, simply: see his films!…by all means/above all else…etcetera.” –Stan Brakhage
Total running time: ca. 65 min.

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER AND KUBELKA IN PERSON!
Presented with the support of the Austrian Cultural Forum New York; special thanks to Andreas Stadler & Hannah Liko.
Having previously created fascinating documentary portraits of seminal avant-garde figures Maya Deren and Marie Menken, Martina Kudláček has turned her sights on Peter Kubelka, the legendary Austrian filmmaker, theorist, lecturer, and cook, not to mention AFA co-founder. And the result is her most ambitious film yet, an expansive yet focused 4-hour immersion in Kubelka’s work, theories, personality, and sensibility.
While Kubelka’s radical and pioneering body of films is a highly condensed work of little more than an hour, his lectures are legendary for their extended length. In Kudláček’s film these drawn-out presentations on ‘what is cinema’ and ‘cooking as an art form’ are frequently illuminated by archaeological objects from Kubelka’s eclectic collection. He considers his ongoing collecting to be an expanded film practice that explores the evolution of humanity.
Delving deeply into the numerous, incredibly varied, and yet gracefully integrated facets of Kubelka’s life, FRAGMENTS OF KUBELKA is both a vibrant portrait of a unique and legendary figure and a penetrating inquiry into his views on cinema, art, and experience.

“Martina’s film on Kubelka is the best film on any artist that I’ve ever seen. The trick she used was so simple and so difficult: she kept herself out of it. What she gave us is pure Kubelka.” –Jonas Mekas

“Kudláček invites us to an intimate meeting with Johann Sebastian Bach, or equivalent, and speaking our language. Stan Brakhage of the conspicuous ego considered him the greatest filmmaker. I’m content when anyone hits their stride – Oscar Micheaux! – and he’s surely the greatest Peter Kubelka we could have, he who taught us how damn interesting perfection could be.” –Ken Jacobs

“How do you portray a Renaissance man? With the perseverance of a skilled Nature filmmaker, Kudláček observed Peter Kubelka for many years with her hand-held camera and gave him all the time in the world to expose us to his unfolding vision. As a result she presents a four-hour masterpiece about one of the most influential artists in film history and one of the most original thinkers and critics of our times.” –Peter Tscherkassky

Director Martina Kudláček will be here in person!

For screening details, please visit: http://alwanfilmfestival2013.com/calendar/

MOSAIC IN CONFIDENCE / MOSAIK IM VERTRAUEN (1955, 16 min, 35mm, b&w/color)
ADEBAR (1957, 1 min, 35mm, b&w)
SCHWECHATER (1958, 1 min, 35mm, b&w/color)
ARNULF RAINER (1960, 7 min, 35mm, b&w)
OUR TRIP TO AFRICA / UNSERE AFRIKAREISE (1966, 12 min, 16mm)
PAUSE (1977, 12 min, 16mm)
POETRY AND TRUTH / DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT (2003, 13 min, 35mm)
“Peter Kubelka is the perfectionist of the film medium; and, as I honor that quality above all others at this time finding such a lack of it now elsewhere, I would simply like to say: Peter Kubelka is the world’s greatest filmmaker – which is to say, simply: see his films!…by all means/above all else…etcetera.” –Stan Brakhage
Total running time: ca. 65 min.

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER AND KUBELKA IN PERSON!
Presented with the support of the Austrian Cultural Forum New York; special thanks to Andreas Stadler & Hannah Liko.
Having previously created fascinating documentary portraits of seminal avant-garde figures Maya Deren and Marie Menken, Martina Kudláček has turned her sights on Peter Kubelka, the legendary Austrian filmmaker, theorist, lecturer, and cook, not to mention AFA co-founder. And the result is her most ambitious film yet, an expansive yet focused 4-hour immersion in Kubelka’s work, theories, personality, and sensibility.
While Kubelka’s radical and pioneering body of films is a highly condensed work of little more than an hour, his lectures are legendary for their extended length. In Kudláček’s film these drawn-out presentations on ‘what is cinema’ and ‘cooking as an art form’ are frequently illuminated by archaeological objects from Kubelka’s eclectic collection. He considers his ongoing collecting to be an expanded film practice that explores the evolution of humanity.
Delving deeply into the numerous, incredibly varied, and yet gracefully integrated facets of Kubelka’s life, FRAGMENTS OF KUBELKA is both a vibrant portrait of a unique and legendary figure and a penetrating inquiry into his views on cinema, art, and experience.

“Martina’s film on Kubelka is the best film on any artist that I’ve ever seen. The trick she used was so simple and so difficult: she kept herself out of it. What she gave us is pure Kubelka.” –Jonas Mekas

“Kudláček invites us to an intimate meeting with Johann Sebastian Bach, or equivalent, and speaking our language. Stan Brakhage of the conspicuous ego considered him the greatest filmmaker. I’m content when anyone hits their stride – Oscar Micheaux! – and he’s surely the greatest Peter Kubelka we could have, he who taught us how damn interesting perfection could be.” –Ken Jacobs

“How do you portray a Renaissance man? With the perseverance of a skilled Nature filmmaker, Kudláček observed Peter Kubelka for many years with her hand-held camera and gave him all the time in the world to expose us to his unfolding vision. As a result she presents a four-hour masterpiece about one of the most influential artists in film history and one of the most original thinkers and critics of our times.” –Peter Tscherkassky

Director Martina Kudláček will be here in person!

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER AND KUBELKA IN PERSON!
Presented with the support of the Austrian Cultural Forum New York; special thanks to Andreas Stadler & Hannah Liko.
Having previously created fascinating documentary portraits of seminal avant-garde figures Maya Deren and Marie Menken, Martina Kudláček has turned her sights on Peter Kubelka, the legendary Austrian filmmaker, theorist, lecturer, and cook, not to mention AFA co-founder. And the result is her most ambitious film yet, an expansive yet focused 4-hour immersion in Kubelka’s work, theories, personality, and sensibility.
While Kubelka’s radical and pioneering body of films is a highly condensed work of little more than an hour, his lectures are legendary for their extended length. In Kudláček’s film these drawn-out presentations on ‘what is cinema’ and ‘cooking as an art form’ are frequently illuminated by archaeological objects from Kubelka’s eclectic collection. He considers his ongoing collecting to be an expanded film practice that explores the evolution of humanity.
Delving deeply into the numerous, incredibly varied, and yet gracefully integrated facets of Kubelka’s life, FRAGMENTS OF KUBELKA is both a vibrant portrait of a unique and legendary figure and a penetrating inquiry into his views on cinema, art, and experience.

“Martina’s film on Kubelka is the best film on any artist that I’ve ever seen. The trick she used was so simple and so difficult: she kept herself out of it. What she gave us is pure Kubelka.” –Jonas Mekas

“Kudláček invites us to an intimate meeting with Johann Sebastian Bach, or equivalent, and speaking our language. Stan Brakhage of the conspicuous ego considered him the greatest filmmaker. I’m content when anyone hits their stride – Oscar Micheaux! – and he’s surely the greatest Peter Kubelka we could have, he who taught us how damn interesting perfection could be.” –Ken Jacobs

“How do you portray a Renaissance man? With the perseverance of a skilled Nature filmmaker, Kudláček observed Peter Kubelka for many years with her hand-held camera and gave him all the time in the world to expose us to his unfolding vision. As a result she presents a four-hour masterpiece about one of the most influential artists in film history and one of the most original thinkers and critics of our times.” –Peter Tscherkassky

Director Martina Kudláček will be here in person!

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER AND KUBELKA IN PERSON!
Presented with the support of the Austrian Cultural Forum New York; special thanks to Andreas Stadler & Hannah Liko.
Having previously created fascinating documentary portraits of seminal avant-garde figures Maya Deren and Marie Menken, Martina Kudláček has turned her sights on Peter Kubelka, the legendary Austrian filmmaker, theorist, lecturer, and cook, not to mention AFA co-founder. And the result is her most ambitious film yet, an expansive yet focused 4-hour immersion in Kubelka’s work, theories, personality, and sensibility.
While Kubelka’s radical and pioneering body of films is a highly condensed work of little more than an hour, his lectures are legendary for their extended length. In Kudláček’s film these drawn-out presentations on ‘what is cinema’ and ‘cooking as an art form’ are frequently illuminated by archaeological objects from Kubelka’s eclectic collection. He considers his ongoing collecting to be an expanded film practice that explores the evolution of humanity.
Delving deeply into the numerous, incredibly varied, and yet gracefully integrated facets of Kubelka’s life, FRAGMENTS OF KUBELKA is both a vibrant portrait of a unique and legendary figure and a penetrating inquiry into his views on cinema, art, and experience.

“Martina’s film on Kubelka is the best film on any artist that I’ve ever seen. The trick she used was so simple and so difficult: she kept herself out of it. What she gave us is pure Kubelka.” –Jonas Mekas

“Kudláček invites us to an intimate meeting with Johann Sebastian Bach, or equivalent, and speaking our language. Stan Brakhage of the conspicuous ego considered him the greatest filmmaker. I’m content when anyone hits their stride – Oscar Micheaux! – and he’s surely the greatest Peter Kubelka we could have, he who taught us how damn interesting perfection could be.” –Ken Jacobs

“How do you portray a Renaissance man? With the perseverance of a skilled Nature filmmaker, Kudláček observed Peter Kubelka for many years with her hand-held camera and gave him all the time in the world to expose us to his unfolding vision. As a result she presents a four-hour masterpiece about one of the most influential artists in film history and one of the most original thinkers and critics of our times.” –Peter Tscherkassky

Director Martina Kudláček will be here in person!

NEWFILMMAKERS PRESENTED BY DAILYMOTION
As one of the leading sites for sharing videos, Dailymotion attracts over 106 million unique monthly visitors and 2 billion video views worldwide.
–Wed, May 8, Daily Motion Program at 6:00.

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER AND KUBELKA IN PERSON!
Presented with the support of the Austrian Cultural Forum New York; special thanks to Andreas Stadler & Hannah Liko.
Having previously created fascinating documentary portraits of seminal avant-garde figures Maya Deren and Marie Menken, Martina Kudláček has turned her sights on Peter Kubelka, the legendary Austrian filmmaker, theorist, lecturer, and cook, not to mention AFA co-founder. And the result is her most ambitious film yet, an expansive yet focused 4-hour immersion in Kubelka’s work, theories, personality, and sensibility.
While Kubelka’s radical and pioneering body of films is a highly condensed work of little more than an hour, his lectures are legendary for their extended length. In Kudláček’s film these drawn-out presentations on ‘what is cinema’ and ‘cooking as an art form’ are frequently illuminated by archaeological objects from Kubelka’s eclectic collection. He considers his ongoing collecting to be an expanded film practice that explores the evolution of humanity.
Delving deeply into the numerous, incredibly varied, and yet gracefully integrated facets of Kubelka’s life, FRAGMENTS OF KUBELKA is both a vibrant portrait of a unique and legendary figure and a penetrating inquiry into his views on cinema, art, and experience.

“Martina’s film on Kubelka is the best film on any artist that I’ve ever seen. The trick she used was so simple and so difficult: she kept herself out of it. What she gave us is pure Kubelka.” –Jonas Mekas

“Kudláček invites us to an intimate meeting with Johann Sebastian Bach, or equivalent, and speaking our language. Stan Brakhage of the conspicuous ego considered him the greatest filmmaker. I’m content when anyone hits their stride – Oscar Micheaux! – and he’s surely the greatest Peter Kubelka we could have, he who taught us how damn interesting perfection could be.” –Ken Jacobs

“How do you portray a Renaissance man? With the perseverance of a skilled Nature filmmaker, Kudláček observed Peter Kubelka for many years with her hand-held camera and gave him all the time in the world to expose us to his unfolding vision. As a result she presents a four-hour masterpiece about one of the most influential artists in film history and one of the most original thinkers and critics of our times.” –Peter Tscherkassky

Director Martina Kudláček will be here in person!

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER AND KUBELKA IN PERSON!
Presented with the support of the Austrian Cultural Forum New York; special thanks to Andreas Stadler & Hannah Liko.
Having previously created fascinating documentary portraits of seminal avant-garde figures Maya Deren and Marie Menken, Martina Kudláček has turned her sights on Peter Kubelka, the legendary Austrian filmmaker, theorist, lecturer, and cook, not to mention AFA co-founder. And the result is her most ambitious film yet, an expansive yet focused 4-hour immersion in Kubelka’s work, theories, personality, and sensibility.
While Kubelka’s radical and pioneering body of films is a highly condensed work of little more than an hour, his lectures are legendary for their extended length. In Kudláček’s film these drawn-out presentations on ‘what is cinema’ and ‘cooking as an art form’ are frequently illuminated by archaeological objects from Kubelka’s eclectic collection. He considers his ongoing collecting to be an expanded film practice that explores the evolution of humanity.
Delving deeply into the numerous, incredibly varied, and yet gracefully integrated facets of Kubelka’s life, FRAGMENTS OF KUBELKA is both a vibrant portrait of a unique and legendary figure and a penetrating inquiry into his views on cinema, art, and experience.

“Martina’s film on Kubelka is the best film on any artist that I’ve ever seen. The trick she used was so simple and so difficult: she kept herself out of it. What she gave us is pure Kubelka.” –Jonas Mekas

“Kudláček invites us to an intimate meeting with Johann Sebastian Bach, or equivalent, and speaking our language. Stan Brakhage of the conspicuous ego considered him the greatest filmmaker. I’m content when anyone hits their stride – Oscar Micheaux! – and he’s surely the greatest Peter Kubelka we could have, he who taught us how damn interesting perfection could be.” –Ken Jacobs

“How do you portray a Renaissance man? With the perseverance of a skilled Nature filmmaker, Kudláček observed Peter Kubelka for many years with her hand-held camera and gave him all the time in the world to expose us to his unfolding vision. As a result she presents a four-hour masterpiece about one of the most influential artists in film history and one of the most original thinkers and critics of our times.” –Peter Tscherkassky

Director Martina Kudláček will be here in person!

With John Garfield.
Belying its generic war-effort title, Daves’s superior 1945 feature stars Garfield as a brash Philly welder who enlists with the Marines only to get blinded in the Pacific. With semi-documentary detail and a feel for day-to-day dramas and crushing challenges alike, PRIDE follows Al Schmid as he’s fixed up with a woman (Eleanor Parker), then ships out to the jungle gun nests of Guadalcanal, surviving yet reluctant to leave the hospital. Daves and Garfield sensitively portray Schmid’s bonds with his tough-willed girl, wisecracking buddies, and, touchingly, a Red Cross letter-writer. Featuring typically eloquent visuals – from the claustrophobic night battle to the pinpricks of Garfield’s eyes in darkness at the hospital – and an Academy Award-nominated screenplay by Albert Maltz, later a blacklistee like Garfield.

(SAN ZI MEI)
NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
Special thanks to Isabelle Glachant (Chinese Shadows).
One of the most important documentary filmmakers of his generation, and perhaps the preeminent chronicler of contemporary China, Wang Bing returns to the non-fiction realm – following his first fiction feature, THE DITCH (2010) – with THREE SISTERS, a patient, penetrating, and heartbreaking portrait of three young girls living and laboring with their family in a small mountain village in southwest China. As he so clearly demonstrated in his towering, 9-hour WEST OF THE TRACKS (2003), Wang is a master of long-form documentary filmmaking, and here he portrays the lives of his three protagonists, as well as the community and the landscapes around them, with an extraordinary sensitivity, openness, and clarity of vision.

“Wang’s concern with those who do not fit in with the image of neo-capitalist super-modernity imposed by the country’s elites is at the heart of his remarkable new documentary, THREE SISTERS. Filmed in a remote mountain village in Yunnan, China – where roughly eighty families raise livestock and cultivate potatoes at an altitude of 3,200 meters – Wang’s beautifully realized film follows the lives of one such family, capturing their day-to-day existence with startling intimacy. […] With modest confidence and masterly control, Wang constructs his filmic chronicle on the rhythms of daily life and imbues his images with an almost painterly aesthetic, from the muted colors of the stunning mountain landscapes to the striking backlit compositions within the family’s humble homestead. A triumph of observational filmmaking, THREE SISTERS opens a window onto an unfamiliar world, and renders the quotidian strangely magical.”–Giovanna Fulvi, TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Preserved by the Library of Congress. With Edward G. Robinson.
Anticipating Daves’s Freudian Westerns of the 50s, THE RED HOUSE displays the filmmaker’s ability to express a variety of (mostly troubling) interior states through landscape. Patriarch farmer Pete Morgan (Robinson) maintains the status quo with his daughter and spinster sister, until a hired hand starts challenging the various taboos that Pete has set into place. A sort-of rural noir, the film combines noir’s smothering foreboding – and Robinson’s anguished gargoyle mask – with fresh outdoor photography and a keen sense of life as lived in remote places, where everything is measured in terms of daylight and distance. Once seen, its air of sexual unease, fell wind blowing through trees, and secrets hiding in bright, open spaces is not easily forgotten.

(SAN ZI MEI)
NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
Special thanks to Isabelle Glachant (Chinese Shadows).
One of the most important documentary filmmakers of his generation, and perhaps the preeminent chronicler of contemporary China, Wang Bing returns to the non-fiction realm – following his first fiction feature, THE DITCH (2010) – with THREE SISTERS, a patient, penetrating, and heartbreaking portrait of three young girls living and laboring with their family in a small mountain village in southwest China. As he so clearly demonstrated in his towering, 9-hour WEST OF THE TRACKS (2003), Wang is a master of long-form documentary filmmaking, and here he portrays the lives of his three protagonists, as well as the community and the landscapes around them, with an extraordinary sensitivity, openness, and clarity of vision.

“Wang’s concern with those who do not fit in with the image of neo-capitalist super-modernity imposed by the country’s elites is at the heart of his remarkable new documentary, THREE SISTERS. Filmed in a remote mountain village in Yunnan, China – where roughly eighty families raise livestock and cultivate potatoes at an altitude of 3,200 meters – Wang’s beautifully realized film follows the lives of one such family, capturing their day-to-day existence with startling intimacy. […] With modest confidence and masterly control, Wang constructs his filmic chronicle on the rhythms of daily life and imbues his images with an almost painterly aesthetic, from the muted colors of the stunning mountain landscapes to the striking backlit compositions within the family’s humble homestead. A triumph of observational filmmaking, THREE SISTERS opens a window onto an unfamiliar world, and renders the quotidian strangely magical.”–Giovanna Fulvi, TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Archival print courtesy of 20th Century Fox. With James Stewart & Jeff Chandler.
“I learned things that day… Apache mothers cried about their sons, Apache men had a sense of fair play….” A landmark Western due to its sympathetic portrayal of the Native American, BROKEN ARROW is even more remarkable for never overcompensating by ennobling the Other into an inhuman abstraction. Thanks to Daves’s mastery, this is one of the rare ‘issue’ movies that backs up its vaunted, important content with exquisite, evocative form, a film composed of quiet sylvan interludes and massed, surging movement. Against vistas of a Technicolor Arizona, James Stewart’s ex-prospector Tom Jeffords tries to parlay peace with Jeff Chandler’s Apache chief Cochise, working together against both a renegade Geronimo and white Indian-haters, the “terrible cruelty from both sides” never sugar-coated.

With Glenn Ford & Jack Lemmon.
Following JUBAL and 3:10 TO YUMA, Daves and Glenn Ford re-teamed for this shrewd story of cattleman and clerk that’s both slice-of-life tale from the trail and psychological dialectic. Betting losses lead old hand Tom Reece (Ford) to take on Chicago hotel tenderfoot Frank Harris (Lemmon), who’s sweet on a Mexican girl, for his latest drive down south. Instead of simplistic culture clash, Daves’s treatment only deepens as the journey proceeds, with a clear-eyed feel for rough, even deadly play on the trail and an often stunning pictorial sense. The screenplay by Edmund H. North and blacklistee Dalton Trumbo takes flight from the memoir of Frank Harris. Titles by Saul Bass.

Archival print courtesy of 20th Century Fox. With Richard Widmark.
Another study in race-hate the Old Western way, this worthy follow-up to BROKEN ARROW has Daves returning to Arizona’s Martian valleys and mesas, this time filming in overwhelming, hallucinatory CinemaScope. George Mathews’s swinish Sheriff Bull Harper is bringing Richard Widmark’s ‘Comanche’ Todd to justice for the murder of the other three Harper brothers. But when the wagon train of settlers that they’re traveling with is attacked by Apaches, the despised Todd, who has lived most of his life with the Indians, becomes the last line of defense for the few surviving youths of the party, leading them through the “Canyon of Death” in a wagon made from the remaining wreckage.

(SAN ZI MEI)
NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
Special thanks to Isabelle Glachant (Chinese Shadows).
One of the most important documentary filmmakers of his generation, and perhaps the preeminent chronicler of contemporary China, Wang Bing returns to the non-fiction realm – following his first fiction feature, THE DITCH (2010) – with THREE SISTERS, a patient, penetrating, and heartbreaking portrait of three young girls living and laboring with their family in a small mountain village in southwest China. As he so clearly demonstrated in his towering, 9-hour WEST OF THE TRACKS (2003), Wang is a master of long-form documentary filmmaking, and here he portrays the lives of his three protagonists, as well as the community and the landscapes around them, with an extraordinary sensitivity, openness, and clarity of vision.

“Wang’s concern with those who do not fit in with the image of neo-capitalist super-modernity imposed by the country’s elites is at the heart of his remarkable new documentary, THREE SISTERS. Filmed in a remote mountain village in Yunnan, China – where roughly eighty families raise livestock and cultivate potatoes at an altitude of 3,200 meters – Wang’s beautifully realized film follows the lives of one such family, capturing their day-to-day existence with startling intimacy. […] With modest confidence and masterly control, Wang constructs his filmic chronicle on the rhythms of daily life and imbues his images with an almost painterly aesthetic, from the muted colors of the stunning mountain landscapes to the striking backlit compositions within the family’s humble homestead. A triumph of observational filmmaking, THREE SISTERS opens a window onto an unfamiliar world, and renders the quotidian strangely magical.”–Giovanna Fulvi, TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

With John Garfield.
Belying its generic war-effort title, Daves’s superior 1945 feature stars Garfield as a brash Philly welder who enlists with the Marines only to get blinded in the Pacific. With semi-documentary detail and a feel for day-to-day dramas and crushing challenges alike, PRIDE follows Al Schmid as he’s fixed up with a woman (Eleanor Parker), then ships out to the jungle gun nests of Guadalcanal, surviving yet reluctant to leave the hospital. Daves and Garfield sensitively portray Schmid’s bonds with his tough-willed girl, wisecracking buddies, and, touchingly, a Red Cross letter-writer. Featuring typically eloquent visuals – from the claustrophobic night battle to the pinpricks of Garfield’s eyes in darkness at the hospital – and an Academy Award-nominated screenplay by Albert Maltz, later a blacklistee like Garfield.

SPECIAL EVENT!
‘BERLIN, SYMPHONY OF A CITY’ WITH LIVE SCORE
Karl Freund, Carl Mayer & Walter Ruttmann
BERLIN, SYMPHONY OF A CITY / BERLIN, DIE SYMPHONIE DER GROSSTADT
1927, 65 min, 16mm. Special thanks to Kitty Cleary (MoMA).
Tonight Anthology gives Edmund Meisel (the original composer of BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN as well as BERLIN) the night off. Instead the visionary ‘city symphony’ Meisel co-created with Carl Mayer, Karl Freund, and Walter Ruttmann unspools alongside a live score commissioned by the Springville, NY Center for the Arts, and composed and performed by bass player, vocalist, and percussionist Sue Garner, drummer and percussionist Rick Brown, and guitar player and percussionist Bruce Bennett. Collectively the trio boasts recordings and performances with The Shams, Run On, The A-Bones, V-Effect, Angel Dean, Timber, Rattle, Fish And Roses, John Zorn, Guigou Chenevier, Andre Williams, and Hasil Adkins, for labels including Matador, Norton, Thrill Jockey, and Egon. The group hopes that the Manhattan debut performance of their score will musically tease out the similarities between the film’s bygone Weimar Berlin and the lost Lower East Side of the performers’ vanished youth.

Ruttmann and company’s seminal, groundbreaking film is a valentine to the ‘new’ Berlin of the late 1920s. Beginning at dawn and ending after midnight, it shows Berliners hard at work by day and possessed by the city’s thriving nightlife. Essentially a feature-length montage, the film was heavily influenced by Soviet documentary experiments like Dziga Vertov's KINO-PRAVDA and was itself very influential in fostering the ‘city symphony’ genre and other documentary hybrid styles to come. This rare screening is not to be missed!

Preserved by the Library of Congress. With Edward G. Robinson.
Anticipating Daves’s Freudian Westerns of the 50s, THE RED HOUSE displays the filmmaker’s ability to express a variety of (mostly troubling) interior states through landscape. Patriarch farmer Pete Morgan (Robinson) maintains the status quo with his daughter and spinster sister, until a hired hand starts challenging the various taboos that Pete has set into place. A sort-of rural noir, the film combines noir’s smothering foreboding – and Robinson’s anguished gargoyle mask – with fresh outdoor photography and a keen sense of life as lived in remote places, where everything is measured in terms of daylight and distance. Once seen, its air of sexual unease, fell wind blowing through trees, and secrets hiding in bright, open spaces is not easily forgotten.

(SAN ZI MEI)
NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
Special thanks to Isabelle Glachant (Chinese Shadows).
One of the most important documentary filmmakers of his generation, and perhaps the preeminent chronicler of contemporary China, Wang Bing returns to the non-fiction realm – following his first fiction feature, THE DITCH (2010) – with THREE SISTERS, a patient, penetrating, and heartbreaking portrait of three young girls living and laboring with their family in a small mountain village in southwest China. As he so clearly demonstrated in his towering, 9-hour WEST OF THE TRACKS (2003), Wang is a master of long-form documentary filmmaking, and here he portrays the lives of his three protagonists, as well as the community and the landscapes around them, with an extraordinary sensitivity, openness, and clarity of vision.

“Wang’s concern with those who do not fit in with the image of neo-capitalist super-modernity imposed by the country’s elites is at the heart of his remarkable new documentary, THREE SISTERS. Filmed in a remote mountain village in Yunnan, China – where roughly eighty families raise livestock and cultivate potatoes at an altitude of 3,200 meters – Wang’s beautifully realized film follows the lives of one such family, capturing their day-to-day existence with startling intimacy. […] With modest confidence and masterly control, Wang constructs his filmic chronicle on the rhythms of daily life and imbues his images with an almost painterly aesthetic, from the muted colors of the stunning mountain landscapes to the striking backlit compositions within the family’s humble homestead. A triumph of observational filmmaking, THREE SISTERS opens a window onto an unfamiliar world, and renders the quotidian strangely magical.”–Giovanna Fulvi, TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

With Glenn Ford & Jack Lemmon.
Following JUBAL and 3:10 TO YUMA, Daves and Glenn Ford re-teamed for this shrewd story of cattleman and clerk that’s both slice-of-life tale from the trail and psychological dialectic. Betting losses lead old hand Tom Reece (Ford) to take on Chicago hotel tenderfoot Frank Harris (Lemmon), who’s sweet on a Mexican girl, for his latest drive down south. Instead of simplistic culture clash, Daves’s treatment only deepens as the journey proceeds, with a clear-eyed feel for rough, even deadly play on the trail and an often stunning pictorial sense. The screenplay by Edmund H. North and blacklistee Dalton Trumbo takes flight from the memoir of Frank Harris. Titles by Saul Bass.

Archival print courtesy of 20th Century Fox. With James Stewart & Jeff Chandler.
“I learned things that day… Apache mothers cried about their sons, Apache men had a sense of fair play….” A landmark Western due to its sympathetic portrayal of the Native American, BROKEN ARROW is even more remarkable for never overcompensating by ennobling the Other into an inhuman abstraction. Thanks to Daves’s mastery, this is one of the rare ‘issue’ movies that backs up its vaunted, important content with exquisite, evocative form, a film composed of quiet sylvan interludes and massed, surging movement. Against vistas of a Technicolor Arizona, James Stewart’s ex-prospector Tom Jeffords tries to parlay peace with Jeff Chandler’s Apache chief Cochise, working together against both a renegade Geronimo and white Indian-haters, the “terrible cruelty from both sides” never sugar-coated.

(SAN ZI MEI)
NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
Special thanks to Isabelle Glachant (Chinese Shadows).
One of the most important documentary filmmakers of his generation, and perhaps the preeminent chronicler of contemporary China, Wang Bing returns to the non-fiction realm – following his first fiction feature, THE DITCH (2010) – with THREE SISTERS, a patient, penetrating, and heartbreaking portrait of three young girls living and laboring with their family in a small mountain village in southwest China. As he so clearly demonstrated in his towering, 9-hour WEST OF THE TRACKS (2003), Wang is a master of long-form documentary filmmaking, and here he portrays the lives of his three protagonists, as well as the community and the landscapes around them, with an extraordinary sensitivity, openness, and clarity of vision.

“Wang’s concern with those who do not fit in with the image of neo-capitalist super-modernity imposed by the country’s elites is at the heart of his remarkable new documentary, THREE SISTERS. Filmed in a remote mountain village in Yunnan, China – where roughly eighty families raise livestock and cultivate potatoes at an altitude of 3,200 meters – Wang’s beautifully realized film follows the lives of one such family, capturing their day-to-day existence with startling intimacy. […] With modest confidence and masterly control, Wang constructs his filmic chronicle on the rhythms of daily life and imbues his images with an almost painterly aesthetic, from the muted colors of the stunning mountain landscapes to the striking backlit compositions within the family’s humble homestead. A triumph of observational filmmaking, THREE SISTERS opens a window onto an unfamiliar world, and renders the quotidian strangely magical.”–Giovanna Fulvi, TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

With John Garfield.
Belying its generic war-effort title, Daves’s superior 1945 feature stars Garfield as a brash Philly welder who enlists with the Marines only to get blinded in the Pacific. With semi-documentary detail and a feel for day-to-day dramas and crushing challenges alike, PRIDE follows Al Schmid as he’s fixed up with a woman (Eleanor Parker), then ships out to the jungle gun nests of Guadalcanal, surviving yet reluctant to leave the hospital. Daves and Garfield sensitively portray Schmid’s bonds with his tough-willed girl, wisecracking buddies, and, touchingly, a Red Cross letter-writer. Featuring typically eloquent visuals – from the claustrophobic night battle to the pinpricks of Garfield’s eyes in darkness at the hospital – and an Academy Award-nominated screenplay by Albert Maltz, later a blacklistee like Garfield.

NEWFILMMAKERS WELCOMES BACK DIGITAL FILM ACADEMY AS PART OF OUR COLLEGE SCREENING SERIES

SHORT DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Wayne Thomas PASSION AND ACCEPTANCE: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC PHOTOGRAPHER WILLIAM ALBERT ALLARD (2012, 15 min, video)
Pegah Arzi K.O.B.R.A. (2012, 27 min, video)
Bob Jones FALLEN SOLDIER (2013, 14 min, video)

COLLEGE FILM PROGRAM
With Digital Film Academy

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Brendan Nagle
THE ESSENTIALS
2012, 90 min, video
Jim is a burnt-out ex-spy. After he goes rogue and screws up yet again, his former agency must bail him out, vowing that this favor will be his last. But in a refusal to accept a forced retirement, Jim takes on a hot young protégé to help him crack one last case.

–Wed, May 15, Documentary Series at 6:00, College Film Program at 7:15, Feature at 9:15.

(SAN ZI MEI)
NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
Special thanks to Isabelle Glachant (Chinese Shadows).
One of the most important documentary filmmakers of his generation, and perhaps the preeminent chronicler of contemporary China, Wang Bing returns to the non-fiction realm – following his first fiction feature, THE DITCH (2010) – with THREE SISTERS, a patient, penetrating, and heartbreaking portrait of three young girls living and laboring with their family in a small mountain village in southwest China. As he so clearly demonstrated in his towering, 9-hour WEST OF THE TRACKS (2003), Wang is a master of long-form documentary filmmaking, and here he portrays the lives of his three protagonists, as well as the community and the landscapes around them, with an extraordinary sensitivity, openness, and clarity of vision.

“Wang’s concern with those who do not fit in with the image of neo-capitalist super-modernity imposed by the country’s elites is at the heart of his remarkable new documentary, THREE SISTERS. Filmed in a remote mountain village in Yunnan, China – where roughly eighty families raise livestock and cultivate potatoes at an altitude of 3,200 meters – Wang’s beautifully realized film follows the lives of one such family, capturing their day-to-day existence with startling intimacy. […] With modest confidence and masterly control, Wang constructs his filmic chronicle on the rhythms of daily life and imbues his images with an almost painterly aesthetic, from the muted colors of the stunning mountain landscapes to the striking backlit compositions within the family’s humble homestead. A triumph of observational filmmaking, THREE SISTERS opens a window onto an unfamiliar world, and renders the quotidian strangely magical.”–Giovanna Fulvi, TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Archival print courtesy of 20th Century Fox. With Richard Widmark.
Another study in race-hate the Old Western way, this worthy follow-up to BROKEN ARROW has Daves returning to Arizona’s Martian valleys and mesas, this time filming in overwhelming, hallucinatory CinemaScope. George Mathews’s swinish Sheriff Bull Harper is bringing Richard Widmark’s ‘Comanche’ Todd to justice for the murder of the other three Harper brothers. But when the wagon train of settlers that they’re traveling with is attacked by Apaches, the despised Todd, who has lived most of his life with the Indians, becomes the last line of defense for the few surviving youths of the party, leading them through the “Canyon of Death” in a wagon made from the remaining wreckage.

(SAN ZI MEI)
NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
Special thanks to Isabelle Glachant (Chinese Shadows).
One of the most important documentary filmmakers of his generation, and perhaps the preeminent chronicler of contemporary China, Wang Bing returns to the non-fiction realm – following his first fiction feature, THE DITCH (2010) – with THREE SISTERS, a patient, penetrating, and heartbreaking portrait of three young girls living and laboring with their family in a small mountain village in southwest China. As he so clearly demonstrated in his towering, 9-hour WEST OF THE TRACKS (2003), Wang is a master of long-form documentary filmmaking, and here he portrays the lives of his three protagonists, as well as the community and the landscapes around them, with an extraordinary sensitivity, openness, and clarity of vision.

“Wang’s concern with those who do not fit in with the image of neo-capitalist super-modernity imposed by the country’s elites is at the heart of his remarkable new documentary, THREE SISTERS. Filmed in a remote mountain village in Yunnan, China – where roughly eighty families raise livestock and cultivate potatoes at an altitude of 3,200 meters – Wang’s beautifully realized film follows the lives of one such family, capturing their day-to-day existence with startling intimacy. […] With modest confidence and masterly control, Wang constructs his filmic chronicle on the rhythms of daily life and imbues his images with an almost painterly aesthetic, from the muted colors of the stunning mountain landscapes to the striking backlit compositions within the family’s humble homestead. A triumph of observational filmmaking, THREE SISTERS opens a window onto an unfamiliar world, and renders the quotidian strangely magical.”–Giovanna Fulvi, TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

With Glenn Ford & Jack Lemmon.
Following JUBAL and 3:10 TO YUMA, Daves and Glenn Ford re-teamed for this shrewd story of cattleman and clerk that’s both slice-of-life tale from the trail and psychological dialectic. Betting losses lead old hand Tom Reece (Ford) to take on Chicago hotel tenderfoot Frank Harris (Lemmon), who’s sweet on a Mexican girl, for his latest drive down south. Instead of simplistic culture clash, Daves’s treatment only deepens as the journey proceeds, with a clear-eyed feel for rough, even deadly play on the trail and an often stunning pictorial sense. The screenplay by Edmund H. North and blacklistee Dalton Trumbo takes flight from the memoir of Frank Harris. Titles by Saul Bass.

SHELLY SILVER: small lies, Big Truths

Overachieving trickster Shelly Silver hacks genres and invades safety zones with equal parts pleasure, desire, aggression, and precision. We will be presenting a selection of her work spanning 1987-2013.

“To watch the moving-image art of Shelly Silver is to understand that, among other messy civic values on which democracies rely – free access to public space, for instance, and a willingness to transgress comfort zones – democracy relies on empathy. And empathy relies on fantasy, and fantasy is always partial, entwined with misperception, unpredictable, perverse. ‘Being-for-others’, in Silver’s feminist sense, amounts less to the alienating instrumentalization of the individual by a masterful observer, and more to the feeling that civic space is a matrix of hallways, doorways, rooms and streets, glimpses and confrontations, in which to see is to acknowledge and co-create, because everyone is looking all the time.
“Silver has been making films since 1980. She works with actors and non-actors alike, and has interviewed extensively on the streets of Berlin, Tokyo, New York; she has a writer’s ear for the idiosyncrasies of unrehearsed speech, and a painterly eye for real-world color. For Silver, living in the existential apartment-house with fellow citizens means looking out the window, scoping on the street, eavesdropping, quoting, meeting strangers and having awkward, excited, unexpectedly candid talks. To look, and to let oneself be seen, is a pleasure and like all pleasures tinged with ambiguity, with risk.” –Frances Richard

“Shelly Silver is a peripatetic videomaker, roving from subject to subject, genre to genre and place to place. She is a good match for these itinerant and unsettling times.” –Sally Berger

PROGRAM 1
getting in.
1989, 3 min, digital video
Starting with the deceptively soothing pastel hues of a sunny afternoon in San Francisco, ‘getting in.’ stages a collision between two rarely questioned phenomena, heterosexual sex and real estate.

We
1990, 4 min, digital video
“Even as the text instructs us otherwise, it is impossible not to read ‘We’’s two images – that is, to respond to their symbolic quality, their suggestiveness. In a stream of associations, the rhythmic flow of people on the left becomes an ejaculation while the rhythmic hand on the right marks detachment, self-centeredness. Simultaneously, we may say to ourselves, ‘Yes, it is only a crowd of anonymous people. It is only a penis.’
“But even as we attempt to discipline our interpretative urges, the hermeneutic created by this simple juxtaposition is driving us crazy with questions: Who is he? Why is he alone? Does he have a lover…? Does everyone in this crowd masturbate? Do they seek isolation from the mass? Are they aware of one another? Are they relational in less-populated situations? Why was this private image made public? Why is this image private…?” –Chris Straayer, DEVIANT EYES, DEVIANT BODIES, SEXUAL ORIENTATION IN FILM AND VIDEO

small lies, Big Truth
1999, 18 min, digital video. With Bill Raymond, Joan Jonas, Kathy High, Ken Kobland, and others.
“Based on the 1998 Grand Jury testimony of President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, ‘small Lies, Big Truth’ unravels the web of meaning created by this media event. Multiple voices read lines from the court proceedings. The varied voices and configurations of gendered pronouns render the familiar words ambiguous and strangely intimate.” –ELECTRONIC ARTS INTERMIX

Things I Forget to Tell Myself
1989, 2 min, digital video
“A fragmented textual statement is interspersed with imagery culled from NYC, much of it cropped by the camera operator’s outstretched hand. Buildings, windows, signs, pedestrians, cops and doors constitute a continuum of access and obstruction. The sometimes alternating, sometimes simultaneous patterns of disclosure and withholding, recognition and inobservance, are scrutinized to reveal the imprints of psychological processes and cultural codes, while testing boundaries between seeing and reading.” –Michael Nash, Curator, THE LONG BEACH MUSEUM OF ART

5 lessons & 9 questions about Chinatown
2009, 10 min, digital video
10 square blocks, past, present, future, time, light, movement, immigration, exclusion, gentrification, racism, history, China, America, 3 languages, 13 voices, 152 years, 17,820 frames, 9 minutes, 54 seconds, 9 questions, 5 lessons, Chinatown.

1
2001, 3 min, digital video
A short tape about longing, threat, power, and seduction, with the camera functioning in turn, as aggressor, mediator, and confessor.

What I’m Looking For
2004, 15 min, digital video
On an Internet dating site a woman writes: “I’m looking for people who would like to be photographed in public revealing something of themselves…”. Documenting the results, this video is a rumination on the nature of photography and the persistence of vision and desire.

The Houses that are Left (trailer)
1989, 8 min, digital video
“In this compelling ‘trailer’, Silver constructs an evocative and elusive montage of disjunctive narrative threads – glimpsed images, dramatic snippets of sound and provocative fragments of text – in a pastiche of stylized black-and-white film and color video verite. Documentary? Fiction? Silver builds a mesmerizing, staccato rhythm of light and dark, sound and silence, text and image: brief bursts of cinematic orchestration and sound effects; gestures and dialogue of ‘characters’ from a fictional melodrama, abbreviated answers to ‘people-in-the-street’ interview questions. Questions of race, age and marital status converge with self-descriptions in an enigmatic inquiry into contemporary identity, constructed from the roles and narrative conventions of cinema and television.” –Electronic Arts Intermix

And a few surprises…

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

DESISTFILM (1954, 7 min, 16mm, sound)
REFLECTIONS ON BLACK (1955, 12 min, 16mm, sound)
THE WONDER RING (1955, 4 min, 16mm)
FLESH OF MORNING (1956, 25 min, 16mm)
DAYBREAK AND WHITEYE (1957, 8 min, 16mm)
WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING (1959, 12 min, 16mm)
Films made during the early, “psychodramatic” period of one of modern cinema’s greatest innovators, including two of his early experiments with sound.
Total running time: ca. 75 minutes.

SHELLY SILVER: small lies, Big Truths
Overachieving trickster Shelly Silver hacks genres and invades safety zones with equal parts pleasure, desire, aggression, and precision. We will be presenting a selection of her work spanning 1987-2013.

“To watch the moving-image art of Shelly Silver is to understand that, among other messy civic values on which democracies rely – free access to public space, for instance, and a willingness to transgress comfort zones – democracy relies on empathy. And empathy relies on fantasy, and fantasy is always partial, entwined with misperception, unpredictable, perverse. ‘Being-for-others’, in Silver’s feminist sense, amounts less to the alienating instrumentalization of the individual by a masterful observer, and more to the feeling that civic space is a matrix of hallways, doorways, rooms and streets, glimpses and confrontations, in which to see is to acknowledge and co-create, because everyone is looking all the time.
“Silver has been making films since 1980. She works with actors and non-actors alike, and has interviewed extensively on the streets of Berlin, Tokyo, New York; she has a writer’s ear for the idiosyncrasies of unrehearsed speech, and a painterly eye for real-world color. For Silver, living in the existential apartment-house with fellow citizens means looking out the window, scoping on the street, eavesdropping, quoting, meeting strangers and having awkward, excited, unexpectedly candid talks. To look, and to let oneself be seen, is a pleasure and like all pleasures tinged with ambiguity, with risk.” –Frances Richard

“Shelly Silver is a peripatetic videomaker, roving from subject to subject, genre to genre and place to place. She is a good match for these itinerant and unsettling times.” –Sally Berger

PROGRAM 2
The Houses that are Left
1991, 52 min, digital video
A story of mortality, friendship, revenge, murder, and the supernatural, as two friends come together to try to figure out how to live, while being besieged by malignant messages from the dead. Truth and fiction are blurred as the dead communicate with the living and real people are interviewed by fictional characters.

“Structured as a sort of post-modern mystery story (that encompasses everything from murder to market research, from sexuality to the supernatural), ‘The Houses that are Left’ constructs a shifting narrative framework in which not only its characters but also the viewer is constantly having to sift out what is fiction from what is truth…to finally arrive at its powerful and perceptive dissection of modern America: anxious, narcissistic, consumed by media images.” –Steven Bode, LONDON FILM FESTIVAL

Meet the People
1986, 15 min, digital video
“The fictions of the self overtly concern Silver in her tour-de-force ‘Meet The People’. In video verite style, she swiftly intercuts what appear to be her interviews of 14 individuals representing contemporary New York types: a cabby, a waitress, a housewife, a stripper, an Italian construction worker, a black army officer. At the end the credits reveal that all 14 are actors and all were apparently reading Silver’s script…. Silver wittily questions the very idea of the authentic – ultimately she implies, ‘personal truth’ is a momentary and collaborative invention, a triborough bridge between actor, author-director, and audience – on TV and on the street.” –Anne Hoy, Curator, INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY

SHELLY SILVER: small lies, Big Truths
Overachieving trickster Shelly Silver hacks genres and invades safety zones with equal parts pleasure, desire, aggression, and precision. We will be presenting a selection of her work spanning 1987-2013.

“To watch the moving-image art of Shelly Silver is to understand that, among other messy civic values on which democracies rely – free access to public space, for instance, and a willingness to transgress comfort zones – democracy relies on empathy. And empathy relies on fantasy, and fantasy is always partial, entwined with misperception, unpredictable, perverse. ‘Being-for-others’, in Silver’s feminist sense, amounts less to the alienating instrumentalization of the individual by a masterful observer, and more to the feeling that civic space is a matrix of hallways, doorways, rooms and streets, glimpses and confrontations, in which to see is to acknowledge and co-create, because everyone is looking all the time.
“Silver has been making films since 1980. She works with actors and non-actors alike, and has interviewed extensively on the streets of Berlin, Tokyo, New York; she has a writer’s ear for the idiosyncrasies of unrehearsed speech, and a painterly eye for real-world color. For Silver, living in the existential apartment-house with fellow citizens means looking out the window, scoping on the street, eavesdropping, quoting, meeting strangers and having awkward, excited, unexpectedly candid talks. To look, and to let oneself be seen, is a pleasure and like all pleasures tinged with ambiguity, with risk.” –Frances Richard

“Shelly Silver is a peripatetic videomaker, roving from subject to subject, genre to genre and place to place. She is a good match for these itinerant and unsettling times.” –Sally Berger

PROGRAM 3
FORMER EAST/FORMER WEST
1994, 62 min, digital video
Made up of hundreds of street interviews done in Berlin two years after the Reunification, this is a vital, surprisingly open, and at times disturbing documentary about what it meant to be German at that particular moment in history. For forty-five years, residents of this divided city lived radically different lives, both in terms of ideology and everyday experience. Silver questions the very notion of a shared language, focusing on changing definitions of words for political and economic systems – democracy, freedom, capitalism, socialism – as well as words used to describe nations and identity – nationality, Germany, history, foreigners, home.

Unless otherwise noted, all films are silent.
ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT (1958, 40 min, 16mm)
CAT’S CRADLE (1959, 6 min, 16mm)
SIRIUS REMEMBERED (1959, 12 min, 16mm)
THE DEAD (1960, 11 min, 16mm)
MOTHLIGHT (1963, 4 min, 16mm)
BLUE MOSES (1963, 11 min, 16mm, b&w, sound)
With ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT, Brakhage leaves psychodrama and enters the “closed-eye vision” period. This program also contains a unique example of a film made without a camera, MOTHLIGHT, and one of Brakhage’s few sound (and ‘acted’) films, BLUE MOSES.
Total running time: ca. 90 min.

A masterwork in which all of Brakhage’s techniques achieve a complex synthesis to produce one of cinema’s supreme epic poems.
“The film breathes and is an organic and surging thing… it is a colossal lyrical adventure-dance of image in every variation of color.” –Michael McClure, ARTFORUM

“SONG 1: Portrait of a lady. SONGS 2 & 3: Fire and a mind’s movement in remembering. SONG 4: Three girls playing with a ball. Hand painted. SONG 5: A childbirth song. SONG 6: The painted veil via moth-death. SONG 7: San Francisco. SONG 8: Sea creatures. SONG 9: Wedding source and substance. SONG 10: Sitting around. SONG 11: Fires, windows, an insect, a lyre of rain scratches. SONG 12: Verticals and shadows caught in glass traps. SONG 13: A travel song of scenes and horizontals. SONG 14: Molds, paints and crystals.” –S.B.

NEWFILMMAKERS EXPLORES RELATIONSHIPS BUT DON’T TRY THEM AT HOME

EXPERIMENTAL DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Cody Clarke
REHEARSALS
2012, 73 min, video
An experimental documentary in which fly-on-the-wall footage of the lives of 16 women is collaged to form a day in the life of one woman: an aspiring actress living alone in NYC.

SECOND SHORT FILM PROGRAM
About relationships
Bea Song TU-NA HOUSE (2012, 9 min, video)
Dan Shapiro THE PUSSY (2012, 10 min, video)
Bryce Richardson CLOSING SHOP (2012, 15 min, video)
Tara Eve Davies COLOUR ME BRIGHT (2012, 6 min, video)
Chris Dolman BOX (2012, 15 min, video)
Livia Aranha CHRISTIE (2012, 7 min, video)
Irina Varina A MEMORY (2012, 6 min, video)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Daniel Berg
THE WAY OF GLASS
2012, 67 min, video
This adaptation of Salinger’s FRANNY AND ZOOEY looks at a college girl in the midst of a spiritual breakdown.

–Wed, May 22, Documentary Series at 6:00, Short Film Program at 7:15, Feature at 8:30.

The best version of Boccaccio’s classic collection of medieval stories ever made, this film retains the sexiness, impudence, and hilarity of the original. Pasolini himself turns up as the painter’s assistant in the fifth story told on day six, a debate between the historical jurist and politician Forese da Rabatta and Giotto, the most important Italian painter of the fourteenth century.
“Taking 10 tales out of the 100 in Boccaccio’s DECAMERON, Pasolini has created one of the most beautiful, turbulent, and uproarious panoramas of early Renaissance life ever put on film.” –Vincent Canby, NEW YORK TIMES

“After films set in the 19th and 18th centuries, this one goes all the way back to the Middle Ages, and medieval art, theater, and literature form much of the basis of the style here. While the frontal shooting style of THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES is partially echoed, a deeper use of space and a much more expansive use of landscape makes the visual style closer to tapestries than to icons.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

Set in thirteenth-century Sweden, this film concerns the rape and death of a young girl, her father’s vengeance, and finally his redemption. The script is based on the Swedish ballad “Töre of Vänge’s Daughters” (or “Per Tyrsson’s daughters in Vänge”). Along with Bergman’s SEVENTH SEAL, this film has elements of “medieval noir”, in which film noir is linked “to the apocalyptic and millennial discourses associated with the Middle Ages” (John M. Ganim, “Medieval Noir: Anatomy of a Metaphor,” in Anke Bernau & Bettina Bildhauer’s MEDIEVAL FILM). Both are widely considered to be among the best of films with medieval themes.

SINGLE FRAME
This calendar offers a double dose of SINGLE FRAME, our regular series devoted to live slide projections. Last December art historian Barbara Moore brought us an incredible overview of the 1960s dance and performance scenes with a slide lecture using images by her late husband, the noted photographer Peter Moore. It was so excellent that we have invited her back for another lecture event focused entirely on the fun-loving Fluxus group. Our second presentation comes from Yuji Agematsu, an insightful artist who specializes in a form of collage that involves archiving bits and pieces of garbage. His evening will feature the premiere of a new multi-projector work that uses rediscovered slides from a trip to France.

NEW YORK FLUXUS 1964-78
A slide lecture by Barbara Moore.
After its introduction in Europe (1962-63), Fluxus came to New York, its first major performances taking place in Spring 1964 at George Maciunas’s loft on Canal Street. From that time until Maciunas’s death in 1978, Peter Moore was the fly on the Fluxus wall, recording its ephemeral events and non-events as part of his much larger documentation of 30 years in the development of performance art. Once more mining the remarkable Peter Moore photographic archive, art historian and writer Barbara Moore covers this thrillingly formative period with plentiful detail, personal reminiscences, and a host of famous and never-before-publicly-shown photographs in vintage slideshow format.

“Mizoguchi’s packed compositions express the harrowing pull of the narrative line – and the residual humanity that tugs against it. Every positive action in this movie has an opposite reaction, leaving an increment of glory in defeat. […] The movie explores the strengths and the tenuousness of family ties in scenes that are freshets of feeling. In Mizoguchi, as in Faulkner, the past isn’t dead – as Faulkner said, ‘It’s not even past.’ When Sansho sees the freed and elevated Zushio, he exclaims, ‘It’s like a fairy tale! A slave becoming a governor!’ But in this fairy tale no one lives happily ever after. Terrifying and cathartic, SANSHO THE BAILIFF is a morality play without easy moralism.” –Michael Sragow, CRITERION COLLECTION

ORCHARD STREET (1955, 12 min, 16mm-to-35mm blow-up. Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art with support from the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation.)
ARTIE AND MARTY ROSENBLATT’S BABY PICTURES (1963, 4 min, 8mm, sound on tape)
AIRSHAFT (1967, 4 min, 16mm)
JERRY TAKES A BACK SEAT, THEN PASSES OUT OF THE PICTURE (1975, 15 min, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up)
THE WINTER FOOTAGE (1964, 50 min, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up)
Total running time: ca. 90 min.

Lester’s film tells the later history of the legendary outlaw Robin Hood. Rather than portraying him as an energetic (and perpetual) youth, this film presents a man who has faced disappointment and is scarred from his years of warfare with Richard the Lionheart in the Holy Land. After twenty years of fighting, Robin Hood returns to Sherwood to reunite with Maid Marion who is now an abbess. ROBIN AND MARION fearlessly shows the death of the hero, a common representation in medieval and later texts of the Robin Hood story though not a feature in other films.

THE WHIRLED (1956-63 [compiled in early 1990s], 19 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
BAUD’LARIAN CAPERS (A MUSICAL WITH NAZIS AND JEWS) (1963, 25 min, 16mm)
BOB FLEISCHNER DYING (2009, 3 min, digital video)
HOT DOGS AT THE MET (2009, 10 min, digital video)
LISA AND JOEY IN CONNECTICUT, JANUARY ’65: “YOU’VE COME BACK!” “YOU’RE STILL HERE!” (1965, 18 min, 8mm-to-16mm)
Total running time: ca. 80 min.

“This masterful adaptation of Cervantes' novel features Nikolai Cherkasov (IVAN THE TERRIBLE) as Quixote, who is so impressed with tales of chivalry that he becomes a knight errant and takes up arms to defend the poor and oppressed. Kozintsev brings a great sense of color, spectacle, and comedy to the table, but preserves Don Quixote’s dignity.” –FACETS

All films are silent.
LOVING (1956, 4 min, 16mm)
PASHT (1965, 5 min, 16mm)
FIRE OF WATERS (1965, 10 min, 16mm, b&w, sound)
THE HORSEMAN, THE WOMAN AND THE MOTH (1968, 19 min, 16mm)
THE WEIR-FALCON SAGA (1970, 29 min, 16mm)
SEXUAL MEDITATION #1: MOTEL (1970, 7 min, 16mm)
SEXUAL MEDITATION: ROOM WITH A VIEW (1971, 4 min, 16mm, b&w)
THE SHORES OF PHOS: A FABLE (1972, 10 min, 16mm)
A selection from some of Brakhage’s most densely mysterious works.
Total running time: ca. 95 min.

“Rohmer returned to THE MARQUISE OF O author Heinrich von Kleist for this gorgeous staging (from Rohmer’s own translation) of the author’s popular medieval play, performed at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre in 1979 and filmed for French television. Pascale Ogier stars as the beautiful armourer’s daughter who becomes infatuated with a gallant knight and leaves home to follow him, whereupon she finds herself in the crosshairs of a jealous rival, Kunigunde de Thurneck (played by frequent Rohmer muse Arielle Dombasle).” –Film Society of Lincoln Center

Brakhage’s tour-de-force exploration of refracted light in an ashtray. “All that is, is light.” –Dun Scotus Erigena

THE DOCTOR’S DREAM (1978, 23 min, 16mm)
PERFECT FILM (1985, 22 min, 16mm)
WHAT HAPPENED ON 23RD STREET IN 1901 (2009, 14 min, digital video)
THE SURGING SEA OF HUMANITY (2006, 11 min, digital video)
Total running time: ca. 75 min.

“A creepy, interesting, and visually striking [film], set in the 16th century in the midst of a civil war, about two poor women who live in the marshes and support themselves by luring wounded samurai to their deaths and then selling their possessions. Things get more complicated when the partnership is threatened by the younger of the two women becoming romantically involved with a neighbor, and the film builds to a macabre and eerie climax.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

Join all of us at Anthology in celebrating the 80th birthday of legendary filmmaker Ken Jacobs!

Special reception in the Courthouse Lobby.

GLOBE (1969, 22 min, 16mm, Pulfrich 3D)
INSISTENT CLAMOR (2005, 22 min, digital video)
BRAIN OPERATIONS (2009, 22 min, digital video)
MAKE LIGHT ON FILM (1995, 15 min, 16mm, Pulfrich 3D)
Total running time: ca. 85 min.

“As it slides between realism and extreme artifice, using cinematic and theatrical devices, KURONEKO becomes increasingly, pleasurably difficult to predict. It’s alternately abstract and down to earth, recognizable and strange, and consistently surprising. […] Using spare dialogue…Mr. Shindo creates a supernatural story that combines folkloric elements with social commentary and a touchingly sad love story.” –Manohla Dargis, NEW YORK TIMES

Lagrange’s TRISTAN AND ISOLDE cannot precisely be described as narrative. Episodes from the story of the doomed lovers are evoked though “images of violence and explicit eroticism.” Only Isolde speaks; the rest of the story is told through visual sequences that sometimes draw on medieval iconography, representing “the naked myth set beyond anecdotal tradition” (Jean Marcel, “Le Dernière métamorphose de Tristan: Yvan Lagrange”).

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

“In 1960s Czechoslovakia, historical themes provided a way in which controversial ideas could be smuggled onto the screen, but they had their own artistic raison d’être as well. Filmed under treacherous conditions in the mountains of southern Bohemia, MARKÉTA LAZAROVÁ plays out a parallel between barbarism and ‘civilized’ brutality in the 13th century with a dazzling visual sensibility and uncanny realism, both physical and psychological. Its achievement in dynamic, widescreen cinematography at the time was paralleled only by the Japanese and Soviet epic film styles. […] Vlácil creates a narrative that is more poetic than linear, like a dream of an ancient age.” –PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

AMERICA AT WAR (2011, 30 min, digital video, anaglyph 3D)
ANOTHER OCCUPATION (2011, 15 min, digital video)
SEEKING THE MONKEY KING (2011, 40 min, digital video)
Total running time: ca. 90 min.

KEATON’S COPS (1991, 23 min, 16mm)
HIS FAVORITE WIFE IMPROVED (OR THE VIRTUE OF BAD RECEPTION) (2008, 2 min, digital video)
WE ARE CHARMING (2007, 1 min, digital video)
HANKY PANKY JANUARY 1902 (2007, 1 min, digital video)
NYMPH (2007, 2 min, digital video)
ALONE AT LAST (2008, 2 min, digital video)
THE DISCOVERY (2008, 5 min, digital video)
LOVE STORY (2008, 3 min, digital video)
DISORIENT EXPRESS (1996, 30 min, 35mm)
Total running time: 75 min.

The best version of Boccaccio’s classic collection of medieval stories ever made, this film retains the sexiness, impudence, and hilarity of the original. Pasolini himself turns up as the painter’s assistant in the fifth story told on day six, a debate between the historical jurist and politician Forese da Rabatta and Giotto, the most important Italian painter of the fourteenth century.
“Taking 10 tales out of the 100 in Boccaccio’s DECAMERON, Pasolini has created one of the most beautiful, turbulent, and uproarious panoramas of early Renaissance life ever put on film.” –Vincent Canby, NEW YORK TIMES

“After films set in the 19th and 18th centuries, this one goes all the way back to the Middle Ages, and medieval art, theater, and literature form much of the basis of the style here. While the frontal shooting style of THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES is partially echoed, a deeper use of space and a much more expansive use of landscape makes the visual style closer to tapestries than to icons.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

Set in thirteenth-century Sweden, this film concerns the rape and death of a young girl, her father’s vengeance, and finally his redemption. The script is based on the Swedish ballad “Töre of Vänge’s Daughters” (or “Per Tyrsson’s daughters in Vänge”). Along with Bergman’s SEVENTH SEAL, this film has elements of “medieval noir”, in which film noir is linked “to the apocalyptic and millennial discourses associated with the Middle Ages” (John M. Ganim, “Medieval Noir: Anatomy of a Metaphor,” in Anke Bernau & Bettina Bildhauer’s MEDIEVAL FILM). Both are widely considered to be among the best of films with medieval themes.

“Mizoguchi’s packed compositions express the harrowing pull of the narrative line – and the residual humanity that tugs against it. Every positive action in this movie has an opposite reaction, leaving an increment of glory in defeat. […] The movie explores the strengths and the tenuousness of family ties in scenes that are freshets of feeling. In Mizoguchi, as in Faulkner, the past isn’t dead – as Faulkner said, ‘It’s not even past.’ When Sansho sees the freed and elevated Zushio, he exclaims, ‘It’s like a fairy tale! A slave becoming a governor!’ But in this fairy tale no one lives happily ever after. Terrifying and cathartic, SANSHO THE BAILIFF is a morality play without easy moralism.” –Michael Sragow, CRITERION COLLECTION

On the brink of Iceland’s financial meltdown, a CEO in Reykjavik visits a tarot card reader in a desperate attempt to avert his fate. Suddenly the two are transported to another time and place. In a parallel world Odin, the father of the Viking gods, has sought out a Wise Woman to hear her knowledge of the past, present, and future. He wants to know if there is anything he can do to avoid the predicted destruction of the world.
&
Amy Guggenheim THE SNAKE AND THE PARROT (2012, 19 min, video)

Lester’s film tells the later history of the legendary outlaw Robin Hood. Rather than portraying him as an energetic (and perpetual) youth, this film presents a man who has faced disappointment and is scarred from his years of warfare with Richard the Lionheart in the Holy Land. After twenty years of fighting, Robin Hood returns to Sherwood to reunite with Maid Marion who is now an abbess. ROBIN AND MARION fearlessly shows the death of the hero, a common representation in medieval and later texts of the Robin Hood story though not a feature in other films.

NEWFILMMAKERS INTRODUCES ITS FIRSTLOOK PROGRAM FOR ROUGH CUT FILMS

DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Chyung Sun
THE PRICE OF PLEASURE
2007, 90 min, video
Once relegated to the margins of society, pornography has emerged as one of the most visible and profitable sectors of the cultural industries at the same time that its content has become more overtly sexist and racist. This eye-opening and disturbing film tackles this seeming paradox.

EXPERIMENTAL SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Peter Valente THE DESERTS OF LOVE (2012, 15 min, video)
Jenny Plante THE SECOND NURSE (2013, 15 min, video)
Michael Reynolds RAIMONO’S RUXPIN (2012, 10 min, video)
Joseph Dwyer THE DIDDLER (2012, 16 min, video)

FIRSTLOOK FEATURE PRESENTATION
FirstLook gives you the opportunity to see a rough cut of a new film.
Doug Bollinger
GRAVEDIGGER
A scary new feature recently shot in New Jersey, which is already a scary place.

–Wed, May 29, Documentary Series at 6:00, Short Film Program at 7:00, Feature at 8:00.

“As it slides between realism and extreme artifice, using cinematic and theatrical devices, KURONEKO becomes increasingly, pleasurably difficult to predict. It’s alternately abstract and down to earth, recognizable and strange, and consistently surprising. […] Using spare dialogue…Mr. Shindo creates a supernatural story that combines folkloric elements with social commentary and a touchingly sad love story.” –Manohla Dargis, NEW YORK TIMES

“This masterful adaptation of Cervantes' novel features Nikolai Cherkasov (IVAN THE TERRIBLE) as Quixote, who is so impressed with tales of chivalry that he becomes a knight errant and takes up arms to defend the poor and oppressed. Kozintsev brings a great sense of color, spectacle, and comedy to the table, but preserves Don Quixote’s dignity.” –FACETS

The best version of Boccaccio’s classic collection of medieval stories ever made, this film retains the sexiness, impudence, and hilarity of the original. Pasolini himself turns up as the painter’s assistant in the fifth story told on day six, a debate between the historical jurist and politician Forese da Rabatta and Giotto, the most important Italian painter of the fourteenth century.
“Taking 10 tales out of the 100 in Boccaccio’s DECAMERON, Pasolini has created one of the most beautiful, turbulent, and uproarious panoramas of early Renaissance life ever put on film.” –Vincent Canby, NEW YORK TIMES

CATALYSTS (or, EXPOUNDED CINEMA) PRESENTS:
Peggy Ahwesh & Keith Sanborn’s THE DEADMAN
CATALYSTS is a new series wherein avant-garde filmmakers reveal the secret sources and inspirations for a specific film from their body of work by a show-and-tell presentation through readings, films, music, images, dreams, documents, private tales, or exhibits demonstrating the roots and branches of experimental personal cinema: Exegesis by demo. Each invited artist will be asked to develop and deliver a presentation that gives the audience insight into their original research on the personal, cultural, or historical source materials of the particular film being discussed. Each work chosen shall be rich in hybrid sources for a complex mixture of influences and inspirations.
Curated by Bradley Eros.

For this edition, Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn will explore the secret beatle messages and spiritual ambience which gave rise to their two-headed monster: THE DEADMAN. Bataille, Hegel, Lacan, Goya, de Sade, Danish specialty porn, Bimbonic initiatic rites, and the Dionysian festival of the goat will be included in this ill-guided tour of the Pathosformeln invoked in the making of the film.

THE DEADMAN
1990, 37 min, 16mm
A loose adaptation of Georges Bataille’s text of the same name. The protagonist, Marie, leaves the deathbed of her lover to explore to the limit her shattered identity. Neither ‘erotic’ nor ‘pornographic’ quite captures the sense of the agonistic limits she shatters in recollecting herself in confrontation with death. Nor is it a matter, for the filmmakers, of style, but the embrace of something less amenable to direct description.

“Mizoguchi’s packed compositions express the harrowing pull of the narrative line – and the residual humanity that tugs against it. Every positive action in this movie has an opposite reaction, leaving an increment of glory in defeat. […] The movie explores the strengths and the tenuousness of family ties in scenes that are freshets of feeling. In Mizoguchi, as in Faulkner, the past isn’t dead – as Faulkner said, ‘It’s not even past.’ When Sansho sees the freed and elevated Zushio, he exclaims, ‘It’s like a fairy tale! A slave becoming a governor!’ But in this fairy tale no one lives happily ever after. Terrifying and cathartic, SANSHO THE BAILIFF is a morality play without easy moralism.” –Michael Sragow, CRITERION COLLECTION

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
STUDENT is co-presented by the Global Film Initiative and is part of the Global Lens 2013 film series. For more information, visit www.globalfilm.org.
Darezhan Omirbayev, one of the greatest of the remarkable wave of filmmakers who emerged from Central Asia in the 1980s and 90s, made his mark with a series of masterful, minimalist, highly trenchant films including KAIRAT (1992), KILLER (1998), and THE ROAD (2001), all deeply perceptive portraits of Kazakh society. More recently he has gravitated towards (free) adaptations of Russian literary classics – his last feature, SHUGA, was based on Tolstoy’s ANNA KARENINA, and his newest, STUDENT, represents his version of Dostoyevsky’s CRIME AND PUNISHMENT.
Transposing the story to Kazakhstan’s capital, Almaty, a world of brutal, unrestrained economic competition and corruption, STUDENT demonstrates Omirbayev’s sensitivity to the moral, ethical, and emotional toll taken by 21st-century capitalism, a phenomenon he’s well-placed to comment on, given the profound transformations that the free-market economy has wreaked on the societies of Kazakhstan and the other formerly Soviet countries of Central Asia. Ali, the protagonist of STUDENT, inhabits a world in which social Darwinism seems to be the law of the land, and his actions follow from the idea that, “If competition is the principle of life, then logically we come to the conclusion that it’s alright to kill your competitor.” Filmed in Omirbayev’s customarily deadpan, uninflected style, STUDENT is a powerful piece of work, artfully fitting Dostoyevsky’s time-honored narrative to the grim realities of present-day Kazakhstan.

“You cannot look away from Darezhan Omirbaev's STUDENT, as you can't look away from any of the Kazakh director's films, for each and every shot is quietly but powerfully charged. It always seems a minute charge until a simple shot’s condensation of narrative expression and emotional nuance sneaks up on you.” – Daniel Kasman, MUBI

“With its deadpan performances, retro visual style, and crime-story plot, [STUDENT] almost feels like an Aki Kaurismaki movie but without the jokes or rockabilly music, just the despair. […] Omirbayev once again offers a quietly scathing portrait of his homeland, which, on the evidence here, is on the verge of losing its soul in the pursuit of Range Rovers, banal soap operas, and other ephemeral pleasures.” –Leslie Felperin, VARIETY

“Omirbayev puts to rest any notion…that adaptations of Dostoyevsky’s great CRIME AND PUNISHMENT have been exhausted. Not only is his aesthetic singular – lean, pared down to nicely textured basics, excision of extraneous images and sounds – but the overall social, political, and geographical context is so unique that it affords him the opportunity to spin the entire narrative in an uncharted direction.” – Howard Feinstein, SCREEN

ABIGAIL CHILD’S ‘UNBOUND’ & ‘A SHAPE OF ERROR’
Anthology is pleased to present the NYC premieres of both Abigail Child’s new feature film A SHAPE OF ERROR, and an expanded, ‘exploded’ version of the same material, entitled UNBOUND.

“In Rome for a year at the American Academy, I created imaginary home movies of scenes from the life of Mary and Percy Shelley. I was attracted to these authors – their life of poetry, politics, and sexual invention – and inspired by my previous fictionalizing of home movies in COVERT ACTION and THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU. I worked with non-actors, the seasons, and the extraordinary architecture and landscapes of Italy where the Shelleys were in exile for six of their eight years together. The result was a feature film, A SHAPE OF ERROR, gorgeous, emotional, and harnessed to the narrative. I wanted to go further and abetted by digital technology, I have ‘exploded’ the film. The result is UNBOUND, digressive, looped, unpredictable, symphonic, spontaneous, messy – like life and memory.” –A.C.

“So exuberant, so visually gorgeous…ahead of the curve…mixing narrative, avant-garde and expanded cinema.” –Tina Wasserman

“[A]t once a mischievous scuttling of BBC costume drama and the creative anachronism of home movies before the invention of film. The results are of a kind that only Child could achieve: a playful mastery of form, and never-wavering attention to the past’s connection with the present.” –Jim Supanick

UNBOUND
2012, 75 min, digital video. Music by Zeena Parkins.
The ‘exploded’ version of A SHAPE OF ERROR.