Anthology Film Archives

NEWFILMMAKERS GETS DOWN AND DIRTY

EARLY PROGRAM
Jimmy Genacarelli
A NEIGHBORHOOD STORY
2008, 92 minutes, video.
A story about the codes and traditions of a mafia neighborhood on the Lower East Side, from 1990 to today.

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Marty Moon MOON CAKE (2007, 7 minutes, video)
Sascha Just* THREE (2008, 12 minutes, video)
Thomas Nagy RESCUE (2008, 12 minutes, video)

FIRST FEATURE PRESENTATION
Nick Oddo*
NEW YORK BLOOD
2008, 60 minutes, video.
Drug dealing mobster Vinny, who owns a neighborhood whorehouse, wants to take care of his father Lorenzo, a convicted murderer just released from prison. But things just don’t work out. Watch as the sins of the father and violence of the son overwhelm good intentions and lead to a blood-soaked finale.

SECOND FEATURE PRESENTATION
Jennifer Hobody
FIX
2007, 95 minutes, video.
FIX takes you from Beverly Hills to Watts, and places in between, in one day, as documentary filmmakers Bella and Milo race to get Milo’s brother Leo from jail to rehab before 8pm, or else Leo goes to prison for three years.
–Wednesday, March 4, Early Program at 6:00, Short Film Program at 7:45, First Feature at 8:20, Second Feature at 9:30.

Long out of circulation and recently restored by Anthology, LUPE and JEROVI by Jose Rodriguez-Soltero are two of the most colorful and compelling underground films of the sixties. Born in Puerto Rico in 1943, Rodriguez-Soltero made his first film, EL PECADO ORIGINAL (1964) while a student at the University of Puerto Rico. Soon thereafter he moved to NY where, from the mid-1960s through the 1970s, he produced work in 8mm, 16mm, and videotape, including the films JEROVI, LUPE, and the double-screen projection DIALOGUE WITH CHE (1968). He was also the Editor-in-Chief of the short-lived film quarterly, MEDIUM, and taught film and video seminars.

JEROVI
1965, 11.5 minutes, 16mm. Preserved with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
JEROVI departs from earlier experimental work by Cocteau, Curtis Harrington, Willard Maas and others, which drew upon the Narcissus myth to explore the filmmakers’ Freudian unconscious and homosexual desire. Rodriguez-Soltero’s film celebrates narcissistic desire and the physical act of self-love. A product of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, Jerovi loves himself without shame, in a lush, colorful, natural setting.

LUPE
1966, 50 minutes, 16mm. Preserved with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Unlike Warhol’s LUPE, which emphasizes the decline of Mexican Hollywood star Lupe Velez (and Edie Sedgwick), Rodriguez-Soltero’s is a sumptuous film that celebrates both Velez and Puerto Rican underground actor Mario Montez, who plays Velez. Drawing on the collaboration of Theater of the Ridiculous stars Lola Pashalinski and Charles Ludlum, LUPE is one of the finest films from the New York underground, offering an ecstatic explosion of color, costume, music, camp performance, and complex superimpositions.
Total running time: ca. 65 minutes.

Shot by D.A. Pennebaker and Ricky Leacock, Mailer’s third and most ambitious film of the 1960s, concerns the exploits of highly popular, yet esoteric, film director Norman T. Kingsley. That MAIDSTONE was largely improvised was made unforgettably clear when Torn, near the end of shooting, unexpectedly attacked Mailer with a hammer, triggering an obviously un-staged tussle that yanked the film out of its already ambiguous semblance of fictional narrative. Torn has consistently maintained that his action arose from conversations with his director, while Mailer claimed otherwise. But in any case, the result was a truly extraordinary sequence that even Mailer himself ultimately admitted had benefited the film (though not before very nearly taking a bite out of Torn’s ear…).

PEOPLE ON SUNDAY / MENSCHEN AM SONNTAG

Shot entirely on location in late-20s Berlin, this tale of five young people spending a typical summer Sunday afternoon in the metropolis and surrounding countryside is a true landmark in film history – co-directed by Siodmak and Ulmer, scripted by Billy Wilder and photographed by the great Eugen Schufftan, with the help of Fred Zinnemann! Produced with little financial assistance, and with each of the performers effectively playing themselves, it became famous as an avant-garde precursor of poetic realism.

“Fueled by weed, whiskey, fistfuls of pills, and naked greed, Rip Torn spends the film wreaking havoc and testing his luck, confident that there will always be somebody around to clean up after him, whether it’s his big dumb animal of a driver/flunky, or an ashen-faced manager whose job entails a lot more than negotiating contracts and dealing with promoters. Daryl Duke’s minor cult classic documents, with unblinking candor, a brief tumultuous period in a singer’s messy existence….” –Nathan Rabin, THE ONION
–Thursday, March 5 at 9:30, Sunday, March 8 at 6:15, and Friday, March 13 at 7:15.

FILMMAKER MILTON MOSES GINSBERG IN PERSON ON FRIDAY, MARCH 6!

Torn gives one of his greatest performances as a psychiatrist secretly filming his own mental breakdown in Ginsberg’s classic exploration of dark eroticism and self-referential cinematic form. Psychoanalyst Joe Glazer, aka Glassman, rents a studio apartment where he has a variety of sexual encounters with a series of women – all of which he films with a hidden camera. But Joe becomes a voyeur of his own life, until, finally encased in his own reflection, Joe ends up filming his own disintegration. Truly ahead of its time, COMING APART remains a visionary and transformative piece of American cinema.
–Friday, March 6 at 7:00, Monday, March 9 at 9:00, and Sunday, March 15 at 2:00.

A vehicle for Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson, who play two star country-music performers on the road, SONGWRITER, a personal favorite of Torn’s, is a rambling, satiric comedy about two mischievous artists and their struggle to negotiate the treacherous music industry. Incorporating songs specially written by Nelson and Kristofferson, SONGWRITER also features Torn in an unforgettable supporting role as an unscrupulous promoter.

Originally titled ONE A.M. (ONE AMERICAN MOVIE), this collaboration among Pennebaker, Leacock and Godard hoped to capture Vietnam War protests and what Godard believed to be imminent revolution in the U.S. With the filmmakers dispersed and a deadline looming, Pennebaker began composing the final cut. Departing from Godard’s original plans, Pennebaker admitted “I was soon making a film of my own.” The result, ONE P.M. (ONE PARALLEL MOVIE), combines cinema-verite, political theater, and footage of Jefferson Airplane, Eldridge Cleaver, and Torn articulating the attitude of a young generation toward the American political system of the late-60s.

Ian Hugo
BELLS OF ATLANTIS (1952, 10 minutes, 16mm)
Film poem, based on Ana?s Nin’s HOUSE OF INCEST, spoken by Nin, who also appears.

Larry Jordan
DUO CONCERTANTES (1962-64, 6 minutes, 16mm)
HAMFAT ASAR (1965, 13 minutes, 16mm)
GYMNOPEDIES (1968, 6 minutes, 16mm)
THE OLD HOUSE, PASSING (1966, 45 minutes, 16mm)
Brand new print preserved by Anthology Film Archives!
OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE (1968, 9 minutes, 35mm)
Brand new 35mm print!
“[Jordan’s] 50-year pursuit into the subconscious mind gives him a place in the annals of cinema as a prolific animator on a voyage into the surreal psychology of the inner self.” –Jackie Leger

Helen Levitt
IN THE STREET (1952, 12 minutes, 16mm)
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives!
Levitt’s short, lyrical documentary portrait of life in Spanish Harlem. Stealthily shot by Levitt, Janice Loeb, and James Agee.

Willard Maas
GEOGRAPHY OF THE BODY (1943, 7 minutes, 16mm)
Preserved with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
“The terrors and splendors of the human body as the undiscovered, mysterious continent.” –W.M.
Total running time: ca. 115 minutes.

Torn made his Broadway debut in Elia Kazan’s 1959 production of Tennessee Williams’s SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH, a role that earned him a Tony Award nomination and introduced him to his future wife, Geraldine Page. Three years later, Torn, Page, and Paul Newman reprised their roles in this film adaptation. Newman is Chance, a drifter and failed movie-actor, whose return to his hometown, with an over-the-hill Hollywood star (Page) in tow, rekindles past tensions with the local boss. Despite significantly toning down the original play, the film version provides an invaluable glimpse of Torn, as well as Page and Newman, near the beginnings of their careers.

FILMMAKER IRA SACHS IN PERSON ON SATURDAY, MARCH 7!
Torn, giving a tour-de-force performance as Alan James, an over-the-hill Memphis music producer with an ego larger than his 60s sofa, heads up a cast that includes Dina Korzun as his beautiful trophy wife, and Darren Burrows as the estranged adult son who drops in for his old man’s birthday bash. Sachs’s Memphis background imbues the story with uncanny naturalism, capturing the subtle and not-so-subtle changes people undergo when events in their lives come to a boil.

Cornel Wilde produced, directed, co-wrote, and stars in this gritty and honest World War II tale that intercuts poignant flashbacks with intense battle scenes to illustrate the horrors of war experienced by a squad of Marines, and their Japanese counterparts, as they face one another on a small island in the Pacific. With its wealth of interior monologues and its naked sensitivity to the cruelty at the heart of war, BEACH RED is like a low-budget, B-movie version of Terence Malick’s THE THIN RED LINE.

Humphrey Jennings
LISTEN TO BRITAIN (1941, 19 minutes, 35mm)
Jennings’s film creates an audio landscape of Britain during the war, with images both accompanying and conflicting with the multitude of sounds.

Dimitri Kirsanoff
MÉNILMONTANT (1924-25, 38 minutes, 35mm)
A melodramatic story of an orphan girl whose seduction is avenged. Early use of hand-held camera, montage, and superimpositions.

Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy
BALLET MÉCANIQUE (1924, 19 minutes, 35mm)
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives!
A brief exploration of cubist form, black and white tonalities, and various vectors through its constant, rapidly cut movements and compositions.

René Clair & Francis Picabia
ENTR’ACTE (1924, 22 minutes, 35mm)
A masterpiece of dada, a feat of cinema magic. Made as an intermission entertainment for the Ballet Su?dois from an impromptu scenario by Francis Picabia. Music by Erik Satie.

Total running time: ca. 105 minutes.

“Fueled by weed, whiskey, fistfuls of pills, and naked greed, Rip Torn spends the film wreaking havoc and testing his luck, confident that there will always be somebody around to clean up after him, whether it’s his big dumb animal of a driver/flunky, or an ashen-faced manager whose job entails a lot more than negotiating contracts and dealing with promoters. Daryl Duke’s minor cult classic documents, with unblinking candor, a brief tumultuous period in a singer’s messy existence….” –Nathan Rabin, THE ONION
–Thursday, March 5 at 9:30, Sunday, March 8 at 6:15, and Friday, March 13 at 7:15.

“RAPT is, paradoxically, both a film which looks back anachronistically toward the silent era and a work which belongs to the vanguard of sound cinema…. It is linked to such abstract and hybrid avant-garde works as VAMPYR and L’AGE D’OR. The radical nature of RAPT, however, resides in its vision of a cinematic musical score.” –Lucy Fisher

Upon the release of renowned character-actor Karl Malden’s little-known directorial debut, TIME LIMIT, one reviewer praised the film for its “taut direction and vigorous performances drawn not only from principals, but a supporting cast of promising new-comers.” One of these newcomers was Rip Torn, enjoying his first significant film-role. A Korean War-era courtroom drama about an officer suspected of collaborating with the North Koreans, but whose case proves to be more complicated than it seems, TIME LIMIT was filmed largely on Governor’s Island.
–Sunday, March 8 at 8:30 and Wednesday, March 11 at 7:15.

“Mailer’s second directorial effort takes place over an evening in a downtown New York precinct as cops and crooks engage in the old ritual of dominance and submission. Mailer plays sadistic Irish police chief Charles Xavier Pope, Grand Inquisitor to that night’s catch of petty crooks, axe murderers, pedophiles and bikers on acid (as played by Rip Torn and poet Michael McClure). A brilliantly conceived playing out of Mailer’s complex moral cosmology where the criminals come off as something close to saintly while the law couldn’t be more sadistic, cruel and unforgiving.” –Michael Chaiken

Jacqueline Goss
STRANGER COMES TO TOWN
2007, 28 minutes, video.
Six people are interviewed anonymously about the questions and examinations used to establish identity at the border, and about how these processes in turn affect one’s own sense of self and view of the world.
&
Joshua Weinstein
FLYING ON ONE ENGINE
2008, 51 minutes, video.
Wheelchair-bound and diagnosed with a life-threatening aortic aneurysm, India-born, Brooklyn-based Dr. Sharadkumar Dicksheet lives only so he can travel back to his homeland to perform free surgeries on children with cleft lips and other deformities. Although Dicksheet survives off social security in the U.S., his life is drastically different in India where the eight-time Nobel Prize nominee is treated like a living god. This film shows how this quirky, funny, and sometimes difficult character lives two different realities in two different countries.
–Monday, March 9 at 7:30.

FILMMAKER MILTON MOSES GINSBERG IN PERSON ON FRIDAY, MARCH 6!

Torn gives one of his greatest performances as a psychiatrist secretly filming his own mental breakdown in Ginsberg’s classic exploration of dark eroticism and self-referential cinematic form. Psychoanalyst Joe Glazer, aka Glassman, rents a studio apartment where he has a variety of sexual encounters with a series of women – all of which he films with a hidden camera. But Joe becomes a voyeur of his own life, until, finally encased in his own reflection, Joe ends up filming his own disintegration. Truly ahead of its time, COMING APART remains a visionary and transformative piece of American cinema.
–Friday, March 6 at 7:00, Monday, March 9 at 9:00, and Sunday, March 15 at 2:00.

NEWFILMMAKERS CELEBRATES CREATIVE LIVING

EARLY SHORT PROGRAM
Yelena Demikovsky HAPPY TO BE SO (2007, 48 minutes, video)
Floanne Ankah ONE WAY (2008, 10 minutes, video)

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Kelly Knudson A KOLOR TO KILL FOR (2008, 6 minutes, video)
Amitabh Kiemm THE ART OF STALKING (2007, 14 minutes, 35mm)
Drew McCreadie THE VALLET (2008, 39 minutes, video)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Dileepan Ganesan THE GIRL ON THE BICYCLE (2008, 7 minutes, video)
&
Lovisa Inserra
BUSTER
2008, 72 minutes, 8mm.
BUSTER’s the story of a guy that anyone in his right mind would run away from. Or should run away from, since Buster spends all his spare time provoking strangers into fights, then refusing to defend himself as they pummel him ‘til they grow bored. You've probably already guessed, but this is a low budget film.
–Tuesday, March 10, Early Short Program at 6:00, Short Film Program at 7:15, Feature Presentation at 8:30.

A vehicle for Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson, who play two star country-music performers on the road, SONGWRITER, a personal favorite of Torn’s, is a rambling, satiric comedy about two mischievous artists and their struggle to negotiate the treacherous music industry. Incorporating songs specially written by Nelson and Kristofferson, SONGWRITER also features Torn in an unforgettable supporting role as an unscrupulous promoter.

Three years after cinematizing James Joyce’s long-censored ULYSSES, Joseph Strick mounted an adaptation of another racy literary work. Rip Torn plays Henry Miller, an American expatriate author living – and loving – in Paris (1920s in the novel, but updated to the 70s for the film). The much-vaunted sex scenes were explicit enough in 1970 to earn the film an X-rating. Henry Miller himself appears here, billed as a “spectator.”

A LUST FOR ECSTASY:
BRAND NEW & RECENT PRESERVATIONS OF THE KUCHAR BROTHERS!
MARCH 11-17
George and Mike Kuchar are the twin darlings of the experimental film world, makers of hundreds of films and videos, and legends in their own time. But back in the 50s and 60s they were just a couple of brothers from the Bronx who shared an 8mm camera. As delirious as they are dramatic, as colorful as they are campy, these rarely seen short films are laugh-out-loud funny and overwhelming proof that the Kuchars are the eighth and ninth wonders of the world.

In 2004, with support from the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology preserved ten of their 8mm films by blowing them up to 16mm. Today, we are proud to say we’ve finished the job with a second round of preservations that include the remaining seven titles from their early oeuvre. To celebrate the completion of this project we will be showcasing the new preservations, reviving the older ones, and, as a special bonus, hosting the premiere of Harvard Film Archives’ restorations of films produced by George and his students at the San Francisco Art Institute – a veritable Kuchar-athon!

Anthology wishes to thank Leah Churner, Jacob Burckhardt, Cineric, Inc, Haden Guest & Liz Coffey (Harvard Film Archive), the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation for all their efforts on behalf of the Kuchar brothers.

PROGRAM 1:
PRESERVATION PREMIERE!
All films preserved with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
TOOTSIES IN AUTUMN (1963, 15 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, sound on CD)
Mike’s cautionary tale about past-their-prime thespians caught up in a typically Kucharian vortex of madness.

MOUNTAIN VACATIONS (1962, 15 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, silent)
Also known as CATSKILL COOL CATS, this mysterious reel has never appeared in any Kuchar filmography, including the list in their joint memoir, REFLECTIONS ON A CINEMATIC CESSPOOL. George recalls that this vacation destination was the easiest place to reach by bus from the Bronx.

THE NAKED AND THE NUDE (1957, 36 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, sound on CD)
The oldest surviving Kuchar mini-epic, this patriotic WWII period piece (made by high schoolers) chronicles the desires and destinies of carnal appetites on the front line.
“Big…Rousing…Memorable! The incredible war saga of our own boys in a Jap-infested jungle in the Botanical Gardens. Hear Lloyd Thorner sing the title song. You’ll come out whistling from both ends.” –G.K.

A REEL OF HOME MOVIES (1959-1961, 25 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, silent)
This eclectic compilation of home movies and early cinematic experiments includes vignettes from the streets of the Bronx, Central Park and the Cloisters; a love scene starring Mike; documentation of a child’s ruined birthday party; footage of an animated bee chasing George across a field; and also comic-book-style animation of a rocket ship, which Mike would later incorporate into SINS OF THE FLESHAPOIDS (1965).
“From the age of 12 onward until 17 (the restless years) the Kuchar brothers lived life to the fullest and tasted the spices of the lower class, the sugar of the bourgeoisie and the kasha of the jet set. At this time their films were seldom longer than four minutes.” –G.K.
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

Upon the release of renowned character-actor Karl Malden’s little-known directorial debut, TIME LIMIT, one reviewer praised the film for its “taut direction and vigorous performances drawn not only from principals, but a supporting cast of promising new-comers.” One of these newcomers was Rip Torn, enjoying his first significant film-role. A Korean War-era courtroom drama about an officer suspected of collaborating with the North Koreans, but whose case proves to be more complicated than it seems, TIME LIMIT was filmed largely on Governor’s Island.
–Sunday, March 8 at 8:30 and Wednesday, March 11 at 7:15.

A LUST FOR ECSTASY:
BRAND NEW & RECENT PRESERVATIONS OF THE KUCHAR BROTHERS!
MARCH 11-17
George and Mike Kuchar are the twin darlings of the experimental film world, makers of hundreds of films and videos, and legends in their own time. But back in the 50s and 60s they were just a couple of brothers from the Bronx who shared an 8mm camera. As delirious as they are dramatic, as colorful as they are campy, these rarely seen short films are laugh-out-loud funny and overwhelming proof that the Kuchars are the eighth and ninth wonders of the world.

In 2004, with support from the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology preserved ten of their 8mm films by blowing them up to 16mm. Today, we are proud to say we’ve finished the job with a second round of preservations that include the remaining seven titles from their early oeuvre. To celebrate the completion of this project we will be showcasing the new preservations, reviving the older ones, and, as a special bonus, hosting the premiere of Harvard Film Archives’ restorations of films produced by George and his students at the San Francisco Art Institute – a veritable Kuchar-athon!

Anthology wishes to thank Leah Churner, Jacob Burckhardt, Cineric, Inc, Haden Guest & Liz Coffey (Harvard Film Archive), the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation for all their efforts on behalf of the Kuchar brothers.

PROGRAM 2:
PRESERVATION PREMIERE!
All films preserved with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
PUSSY ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1961, 14 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, sound on CD)
Featuring Donna Kerness, Bob Cowan, Terry Brunetti, Sarah Kelly, Bill Piles.
The salacious short that caused the Kuchars’ banishment from meetings of the New York Eight Millimeter Motion Picture Club.
“It glows with the embers of desire! It smokes with the revelation of men and women longing for robust temptations that will make them sizzle into maturity with a furnace-blast of unrestrained animalism. A film for young and old to enjoy.” –G.K.

LUST FOR ECSTASY: A DRAMA OF OBSESSIONS IN THE LANGUAGE OF SENSATIONALISM (1963, 52 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, sound on CD)
Featuring Donna Kerness, Bob Cowan, Mike Kuchar, Cynthia Mailman, George Kuchar and Larry Leibowitz.
“LUST FOR ECSTASY is my most ambitious attempt since my last film…. I wrote many of the pungent scenes on the D train, and when I arrived on the set I ripped them up and let my emotional whims make chopped meat out of the performances and the story…. Yes, LUST FOR ECSTASY is my subconscious, my own naked lusts that sweep across the screen in 8mm and color with full fidelity sound.” –G.K.

LOVERS OF ETERNITY (1964, 36 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, sound on CD)
Featuring Mary Flanagan, Dov Lederberg and Jack Smith.
The last 8mm Kuchar production is an all-too-tragic tale in which we find underground icon Jack Smith, experimental filmmaker Dov Lederberg and one giant cockroach intermingling in the squalor of the Lower East Side.
Total running time: ca. 105 minutes.

Shot by D.A. Pennebaker and Ricky Leacock, Mailer’s third and most ambitious film of the 1960s, concerns the exploits of highly popular, yet esoteric, film director Norman T. Kingsley. That MAIDSTONE was largely improvised was made unforgettably clear when Torn, near the end of shooting, unexpectedly attacked Mailer with a hammer, triggering an obviously un-staged tussle that yanked the film out of its already ambiguous semblance of fictional narrative. Torn has consistently maintained that his action arose from conversations with his director, while Mailer claimed otherwise. But in any case, the result was a truly extraordinary sequence that even Mailer himself ultimately admitted had benefited the film (though not before very nearly taking a bite out of Torn’s ear…).

A LUST FOR ECSTASY:
BRAND NEW & RECENT PRESERVATIONS OF THE KUCHAR BROTHERS!
MARCH 11-17
George and Mike Kuchar are the twin darlings of the experimental film world, makers of hundreds of films and videos, and legends in their own time. But back in the 50s and 60s they were just a couple of brothers from the Bronx who shared an 8mm camera. As delirious as they are dramatic, as colorful as they are campy, these rarely seen short films are laugh-out-loud funny and overwhelming proof that the Kuchars are the eighth and ninth wonders of the world.

In 2004, with support from the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology preserved ten of their 8mm films by blowing them up to 16mm. Today, we are proud to say we’ve finished the job with a second round of preservations that include the remaining seven titles from their early oeuvre. To celebrate the completion of this project we will be showcasing the new preservations, reviving the older ones, and, as a special bonus, hosting the premiere of Harvard Film Archives’ restorations of films produced by George and his students at the San Francisco Art Institute – a veritable Kuchar-athon!

Anthology wishes to thank Leah Churner, Jacob Burckhardt, Cineric, Inc, Haden Guest & Liz Coffey (Harvard Film Archive), the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation for all their efforts on behalf of the Kuchar brothers.

PROGRAM 3:
All films preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by the Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Special thanks to Cineric, Inc.
THE THIEF & THE STRIPPER (1959, 25 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
Dares to lay bare the naked carcass of a generation gone mad with moral decay.
BORN OF THE WIND (1962, 24 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
“A tender and realistic story of a scientist who falls in love with a mummy he has restored to life… 2,000 years as a mummy couldn’t quench her thirst for love!” –G.K.
A TOWN CALLED TEMPEST (1963, 33 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
Rarely has the cinema equaled such a spectacle! Seldom have movies probed so deeply into the rotten core of hypocrisy and weakness!
SYLVIA’S PROMISE (ca. 1962, 9 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
Love comes in all sizes, but in this case love needs to diet! Sylvia makes a promise, but can she keep it?
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

Originally titled ONE A.M. (ONE AMERICAN MOVIE), this collaboration among Pennebaker, Leacock and Godard hoped to capture Vietnam War protests and what Godard believed to be imminent revolution in the U.S. With the filmmakers dispersed and a deadline looming, Pennebaker began composing the final cut. Departing from Godard’s original plans, Pennebaker admitted “I was soon making a film of my own.” The result, ONE P.M. (ONE PARALLEL MOVIE), combines cinema-verite, political theater, and footage of Jefferson Airplane, Eldridge Cleaver, and Torn articulating the attitude of a young generation toward the American political system of the late-60s.

A LUST FOR ECSTASY:
BRAND NEW & RECENT PRESERVATIONS OF THE KUCHAR BROTHERS!
MARCH 11-17
George and Mike Kuchar are the twin darlings of the experimental film world, makers of hundreds of films and videos, and legends in their own time. But back in the 50s and 60s they were just a couple of brothers from the Bronx who shared an 8mm camera. As delirious as they are dramatic, as colorful as they are campy, these rarely seen short films are laugh-out-loud funny and overwhelming proof that the Kuchars are the eighth and ninth wonders of the world.

In 2004, with support from the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology preserved ten of their 8mm films by blowing them up to 16mm. Today, we are proud to say we’ve finished the job with a second round of preservations that include the remaining seven titles from their early oeuvre. To celebrate the completion of this project we will be showcasing the new preservations, reviving the older ones, and, as a special bonus, hosting the premiere of Harvard Film Archives’ restorations of films produced by George and his students at the San Francisco Art Institute – a veritable Kuchar-athon!

Anthology wishes to thank Leah Churner, Jacob Burckhardt, Cineric, Inc, Haden Guest & Liz Coffey (Harvard Film Archive), the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation for all their efforts on behalf of the Kuchar brothers.

PROGRAM 4:
All films preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by the Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Special thanks to Cineric, Inc.
A WOMAN DISTRESSED (1962, 12 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
Pre-dating SHOCK CORRIDOR, the Kuchars bring us this tantalizing tale of the inner workings of a very, very insane asylum.
NIGHT OF THE BOMB (1962, 18 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
Teenage lust and deranged delinquence combine to create a cautionary tale for the ages. The Chernobyl of Comedy!
THE CONFESSIONS OF BABETTE (1963, 15 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
An early masterpiece by Mike Kuchar in which Babette tells all, leaving no turgid stone unturned.
ANITA NEEDS ME (1963, 16 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
“All the horrors and guilt of the human mind exposed! It reaches deep into the workings of a woman’s cravings. Your emotions will be squeezed.” –G.K.
I WAS A TEENAGE RUMPOT (1960, 10 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
George and Mike here stumbled upon something big: their names were Arline, Edie, and Harry. A documentary about people like you and me, people with a zest for life.
THE SLASHER (1958, 21 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
An insane, deformed killer stalks the grounds of a resort house, bringing sudden violence to those of easy virtue and godlessness.
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

Cornel Wilde produced, directed, co-wrote, and stars in this gritty and honest World War II tale that intercuts poignant flashbacks with intense battle scenes to illustrate the horrors of war experienced by a squad of Marines, and their Japanese counterparts, as they face one another on a small island in the Pacific. With its wealth of interior monologues and its naked sensitivity to the cruelty at the heart of war, BEACH RED is like a low-budget, B-movie version of Terence Malick’s THE THIN RED LINE.

A LUST FOR ECSTASY:
BRAND NEW & RECENT PRESERVATIONS OF THE KUCHAR BROTHERS!
MARCH 11-17
George and Mike Kuchar are the twin darlings of the experimental film world, makers of hundreds of films and videos, and legends in their own time. But back in the 50s and 60s they were just a couple of brothers from the Bronx who shared an 8mm camera. As delirious as they are dramatic, as colorful as they are campy, these rarely seen short films are laugh-out-loud funny and overwhelming proof that the Kuchars are the eighth and ninth wonders of the world.

In 2004, with support from the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology preserved ten of their 8mm films by blowing them up to 16mm. Today, we are proud to say we’ve finished the job with a second round of preservations that include the remaining seven titles from their early oeuvre. To celebrate the completion of this project we will be showcasing the new preservations, reviving the older ones, and, as a special bonus, hosting the premiere of Harvard Film Archives’ restorations of films produced by George and his students at the San Francisco Art Institute – a veritable Kuchar-athon!

Anthology wishes to thank Leah Churner, Jacob Burckhardt, Cineric, Inc, Haden Guest & Liz Coffey (Harvard Film Archive), the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation for all their efforts on behalf of the Kuchar brothers.

PROGRAM 1:
PRESERVATION PREMIERE!
All films preserved with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
TOOTSIES IN AUTUMN (1963, 15 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, sound on CD)
Mike’s cautionary tale about past-their-prime thespians caught up in a typically Kucharian vortex of madness.

MOUNTAIN VACATIONS (1962, 15 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, silent)
Also known as CATSKILL COOL CATS, this mysterious reel has never appeared in any Kuchar filmography, including the list in their joint memoir, REFLECTIONS ON A CINEMATIC CESSPOOL. George recalls that this vacation destination was the easiest place to reach by bus from the Bronx.

THE NAKED AND THE NUDE (1957, 36 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, sound on CD)
The oldest surviving Kuchar mini-epic, this patriotic WWII period piece (made by high schoolers) chronicles the desires and destinies of carnal appetites on the front line.
“Big…Rousing…Memorable! The incredible war saga of our own boys in a Jap-infested jungle in the Botanical Gardens. Hear Lloyd Thorner sing the title song. You’ll come out whistling from both ends.” –G.K.

A REEL OF HOME MOVIES (1959-1961, 25 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, silent)
This eclectic compilation of home movies and early cinematic experiments includes vignettes from the streets of the Bronx, Central Park and the Cloisters; a love scene starring Mike; documentation of a child’s ruined birthday party; footage of an animated bee chasing George across a field; and also comic-book-style animation of a rocket ship, which Mike would later incorporate into SINS OF THE FLESHAPOIDS (1965).
“From the age of 12 onward until 17 (the restless years) the Kuchar brothers lived life to the fullest and tasted the spices of the lower class, the sugar of the bourgeoisie and the kasha of the jet set. At this time their films were seldom longer than four minutes.” –G.K.
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

“Fueled by weed, whiskey, fistfuls of pills, and naked greed, Rip Torn spends the film wreaking havoc and testing his luck, confident that there will always be somebody around to clean up after him, whether it’s his big dumb animal of a driver/flunky, or an ashen-faced manager whose job entails a lot more than negotiating contracts and dealing with promoters. Daryl Duke’s minor cult classic documents, with unblinking candor, a brief tumultuous period in a singer’s messy existence….” –Nathan Rabin, THE ONION
–Thursday, March 5 at 9:30, Sunday, March 8 at 6:15, and Friday, March 13 at 7:15.

A LUST FOR ECSTASY:
BRAND NEW & RECENT PRESERVATIONS OF THE KUCHAR BROTHERS!
MARCH 11-17
George and Mike Kuchar are the twin darlings of the experimental film world, makers of hundreds of films and videos, and legends in their own time. But back in the 50s and 60s they were just a couple of brothers from the Bronx who shared an 8mm camera. As delirious as they are dramatic, as colorful as they are campy, these rarely seen short films are laugh-out-loud funny and overwhelming proof that the Kuchars are the eighth and ninth wonders of the world.

In 2004, with support from the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology preserved ten of their 8mm films by blowing them up to 16mm. Today, we are proud to say we’ve finished the job with a second round of preservations that include the remaining seven titles from their early oeuvre. To celebrate the completion of this project we will be showcasing the new preservations, reviving the older ones, and, as a special bonus, hosting the premiere of Harvard Film Archives’ restorations of films produced by George and his students at the San Francisco Art Institute – a veritable Kuchar-athon!

Anthology wishes to thank Leah Churner, Jacob Burckhardt, Cineric, Inc, Haden Guest & Liz Coffey (Harvard Film Archive), the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation for all their efforts on behalf of the Kuchar brothers.

PROGRAM 2:
PRESERVATION PREMIERE!
All films preserved with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
PUSSY ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1961, 14 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, sound on CD)
Featuring Donna Kerness, Bob Cowan, Terry Brunetti, Sarah Kelly, Bill Piles.
The salacious short that caused the Kuchars’ banishment from meetings of the New York Eight Millimeter Motion Picture Club.
“It glows with the embers of desire! It smokes with the revelation of men and women longing for robust temptations that will make them sizzle into maturity with a furnace-blast of unrestrained animalism. A film for young and old to enjoy.” –G.K.

LUST FOR ECSTASY: A DRAMA OF OBSESSIONS IN THE LANGUAGE OF SENSATIONALISM (1963, 52 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, sound on CD)
Featuring Donna Kerness, Bob Cowan, Mike Kuchar, Cynthia Mailman, George Kuchar and Larry Leibowitz.
“LUST FOR ECSTASY is my most ambitious attempt since my last film…. I wrote many of the pungent scenes on the D train, and when I arrived on the set I ripped them up and let my emotional whims make chopped meat out of the performances and the story…. Yes, LUST FOR ECSTASY is my subconscious, my own naked lusts that sweep across the screen in 8mm and color with full fidelity sound.” –G.K.

LOVERS OF ETERNITY (1964, 36 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, sound on CD)
Featuring Mary Flanagan, Dov Lederberg and Jack Smith.
The last 8mm Kuchar production is an all-too-tragic tale in which we find underground icon Jack Smith, experimental filmmaker Dov Lederberg and one giant cockroach intermingling in the squalor of the Lower East Side.
Total running time: ca. 105 minutes.

Three years after cinematizing James Joyce’s long-censored ULYSSES, Joseph Strick mounted an adaptation of another racy literary work. Rip Torn plays Henry Miller, an American expatriate author living – and loving – in Paris (1920s in the novel, but updated to the 70s for the film). The much-vaunted sex scenes were explicit enough in 1970 to earn the film an X-rating. Henry Miller himself appears here, billed as a “spectator.”

FILMMAKER IRA SACHS IN PERSON ON SATURDAY, MARCH 7!
Torn, giving a tour-de-force performance as Alan James, an over-the-hill Memphis music producer with an ego larger than his 60s sofa, heads up a cast that includes Dina Korzun as his beautiful trophy wife, and Darren Burrows as the estranged adult son who drops in for his old man’s birthday bash. Sachs’s Memphis background imbues the story with uncanny naturalism, capturing the subtle and not-so-subtle changes people undergo when events in their lives come to a boil.

A career as multi-faceted and wide-ranging as Rip Torn’s can’t be accurately represented through feature film roles alone. This program will feature rare footage of Torn, including documentation of some of his renowned stage performances, forgotten talk-show appearances, excerpts from some of his lesser-known film and TV work, and much more! Here’s a chance to witness his extraordinary range across many different media.
Includes:
Robert Markowitz SONG OF MYSELF (1976, 31 minutes, video)
Courtesy of the Phoenix Learning Group.
“Torn, a gutsy actor who has long deserved better of his trade than he usually receives, plays [Walt Whitman] instead of embalming him. There is something fine and wild in his spirit, in his very eyes, that is a perfect match for Whitman. It is hard to think of a historical drama that has dared to be as lively with a great historical name as this one.” –Richard Schickel, TIME MAGAZINE

A LUST FOR ECSTASY:
BRAND NEW & RECENT PRESERVATIONS OF THE KUCHAR BROTHERS!
MARCH 11-17
George and Mike Kuchar are the twin darlings of the experimental film world, makers of hundreds of films and videos, and legends in their own time. But back in the 50s and 60s they were just a couple of brothers from the Bronx who shared an 8mm camera. As delirious as they are dramatic, as colorful as they are campy, these rarely seen short films are laugh-out-loud funny and overwhelming proof that the Kuchars are the eighth and ninth wonders of the world.

In 2004, with support from the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology preserved ten of their 8mm films by blowing them up to 16mm. Today, we are proud to say we’ve finished the job with a second round of preservations that include the remaining seven titles from their early oeuvre. To celebrate the completion of this project we will be showcasing the new preservations, reviving the older ones, and, as a special bonus, hosting the premiere of Harvard Film Archives’ restorations of films produced by George and his students at the San Francisco Art Institute – a veritable Kuchar-athon!

Anthology wishes to thank Leah Churner, Jacob Burckhardt, Cineric, Inc, Haden Guest & Liz Coffey (Harvard Film Archive), the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation for all their efforts on behalf of the Kuchar brothers.

PROGRAM 5:
GEORGE KUCHAR’S CLASSROOM CAVALCADES
PRESERVATION PREMIERE!
George Kuchar has been teaching at the venerable San Francisco Art Institute since 1971, and virtually every semester he jumps into yet another production with his always excitable students. Produced piecemeal over a number of weeks, these delightfully loopy movies always feature plenty of drama and great improvised special effects. This program features brand-new prints of rarely seen titles from the massive Kuchar back catalog.
The Saturday screening will be introduced by Liz Coffey, Conservationist at the Harvard Film Archive.
ASPHALT RIBBON (1977, 20 minutes, 16mm)
“A cinematic rendering of an essay on the nobility of truck drivers.” –G.K.
ONE NIGHT A WEEK (1978, 27 minutes, 16mm)
“A cinematic rendering of a 1940s radio play intended for classroom broadcast during that era. A very erotic rendering.” –G.K.
POWER OF THE PRESS (1977, 28 minutes, 16mm)
“Another radio workshop play meant to train students of the time in broadcasting techniques. The plot concerns teacher/student crushes.” –G.K.
MOTEL CAPRI (1986, 18 minutes, 16mm)
“A Mother Superior commits murder to spare a soul damnation.” –G.K.
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.
–Saturday and Sunday, March 14 & 15 at 5:00.

A LUST FOR ECSTASY:
BRAND NEW & RECENT PRESERVATIONS OF THE KUCHAR BROTHERS!
MARCH 11-17
George and Mike Kuchar are the twin darlings of the experimental film world, makers of hundreds of films and videos, and legends in their own time. But back in the 50s and 60s they were just a couple of brothers from the Bronx who shared an 8mm camera. As delirious as they are dramatic, as colorful as they are campy, these rarely seen short films are laugh-out-loud funny and overwhelming proof that the Kuchars are the eighth and ninth wonders of the world.

In 2004, with support from the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology preserved ten of their 8mm films by blowing them up to 16mm. Today, we are proud to say we’ve finished the job with a second round of preservations that include the remaining seven titles from their early oeuvre. To celebrate the completion of this project we will be showcasing the new preservations, reviving the older ones, and, as a special bonus, hosting the premiere of Harvard Film Archives’ restorations of films produced by George and his students at the San Francisco Art Institute – a veritable Kuchar-athon!

Anthology wishes to thank Leah Churner, Jacob Burckhardt, Cineric, Inc, Haden Guest & Liz Coffey (Harvard Film Archive), the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation for all their efforts on behalf of the Kuchar brothers.

PROGRAM 3:
All films preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by the Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Special thanks to Cineric, Inc.
THE THIEF & THE STRIPPER (1959, 25 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
Dares to lay bare the naked carcass of a generation gone mad with moral decay.
BORN OF THE WIND (1962, 24 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
“A tender and realistic story of a scientist who falls in love with a mummy he has restored to life… 2,000 years as a mummy couldn’t quench her thirst for love!” –G.K.
A TOWN CALLED TEMPEST (1963, 33 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
Rarely has the cinema equaled such a spectacle! Seldom have movies probed so deeply into the rotten core of hypocrisy and weakness!
SYLVIA’S PROMISE (ca. 1962, 9 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
Love comes in all sizes, but in this case love needs to diet! Sylvia makes a promise, but can she keep it?
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

SPECIAL SNEAK-PREVIEW! FILMMAKERS IN PERSON!

Anthology is thrilled to present a special sneak-preview of the new film by Angelica and Tony Torn, a Coney Island-set drama featuring a special appearance by the filmmakers’ father, Rip.
A chance encounter with her childhood sweetheart leads Virginia (Angelica Torn) to discover hidden truths about her boyfriend and her neighborhood that she has chosen to ignore. Over the last explosive weekend of the summer she must decide whether to abandon everything she’s ever known to the wolf-pack of developers buying up and tearing down the Coney Island boardwalk, or to sacrifice herself to the world that’s been created for her. Angelica Torn’s luminescent performance beautifully carries the film, which casts a beguiling spell in the manner of Alan Rudolph’s early work.

A LUST FOR ECSTASY:
BRAND NEW & RECENT PRESERVATIONS OF THE KUCHAR BROTHERS!
MARCH 11-17
George and Mike Kuchar are the twin darlings of the experimental film world, makers of hundreds of films and videos, and legends in their own time. But back in the 50s and 60s they were just a couple of brothers from the Bronx who shared an 8mm camera. As delirious as they are dramatic, as colorful as they are campy, these rarely seen short films are laugh-out-loud funny and overwhelming proof that the Kuchars are the eighth and ninth wonders of the world.

In 2004, with support from the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology preserved ten of their 8mm films by blowing them up to 16mm. Today, we are proud to say we’ve finished the job with a second round of preservations that include the remaining seven titles from their early oeuvre. To celebrate the completion of this project we will be showcasing the new preservations, reviving the older ones, and, as a special bonus, hosting the premiere of Harvard Film Archives’ restorations of films produced by George and his students at the San Francisco Art Institute – a veritable Kuchar-athon!

Anthology wishes to thank Leah Churner, Jacob Burckhardt, Cineric, Inc, Haden Guest & Liz Coffey (Harvard Film Archive), the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation for all their efforts on behalf of the Kuchar brothers.

PROGRAM 4:
All films preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by the Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Special thanks to Cineric, Inc.
A WOMAN DISTRESSED (1962, 12 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
Pre-dating SHOCK CORRIDOR, the Kuchars bring us this tantalizing tale of the inner workings of a very, very insane asylum.
NIGHT OF THE BOMB (1962, 18 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
Teenage lust and deranged delinquence combine to create a cautionary tale for the ages. The Chernobyl of Comedy!
THE CONFESSIONS OF BABETTE (1963, 15 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
An early masterpiece by Mike Kuchar in which Babette tells all, leaving no turgid stone unturned.
ANITA NEEDS ME (1963, 16 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
“All the horrors and guilt of the human mind exposed! It reaches deep into the workings of a woman’s cravings. Your emotions will be squeezed.” –G.K.
I WAS A TEENAGE RUMPOT (1960, 10 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
George and Mike here stumbled upon something big: their names were Arline, Edie, and Harry. A documentary about people like you and me, people with a zest for life.
THE SLASHER (1958, 21 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
An insane, deformed killer stalks the grounds of a resort house, bringing sudden violence to those of easy virtue and godlessness.
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

Torn made his Broadway debut in Elia Kazan’s 1959 production of Tennessee Williams’s SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH, a role that earned him a Tony Award nomination and introduced him to his future wife, Geraldine Page. Three years later, Torn, Page, and Paul Newman reprised their roles in this film adaptation. Newman is Chance, a drifter and failed movie-actor, whose return to his hometown, with an over-the-hill Hollywood star (Page) in tow, rekindles past tensions with the local boss. Despite significantly toning down the original play, the film version provides an invaluable glimpse of Torn, as well as Page and Newman, near the beginnings of their careers.

FILMMAKER MILTON MOSES GINSBERG IN PERSON ON FRIDAY, MARCH 6!

Torn gives one of his greatest performances as a psychiatrist secretly filming his own mental breakdown in Ginsberg’s classic exploration of dark eroticism and self-referential cinematic form. Psychoanalyst Joe Glazer, aka Glassman, rents a studio apartment where he has a variety of sexual encounters with a series of women – all of which he films with a hidden camera. But Joe becomes a voyeur of his own life, until, finally encased in his own reflection, Joe ends up filming his own disintegration. Truly ahead of its time, COMING APART remains a visionary and transformative piece of American cinema.
–Friday, March 6 at 7:00, Monday, March 9 at 9:00, and Sunday, March 15 at 2:00.

“Mailer’s second directorial effort takes place over an evening in a downtown New York precinct as cops and crooks engage in the old ritual of dominance and submission. Mailer plays sadistic Irish police chief Charles Xavier Pope, Grand Inquisitor to that night’s catch of petty crooks, axe murderers, pedophiles and bikers on acid (as played by Rip Torn and poet Michael McClure). A brilliantly conceived playing out of Mailer’s complex moral cosmology where the criminals come off as something close to saintly while the law couldn’t be more sadistic, cruel and unforgiving.” –Michael Chaiken

A LUST FOR ECSTASY:
BRAND NEW & RECENT PRESERVATIONS OF THE KUCHAR BROTHERS!
MARCH 11-17
George and Mike Kuchar are the twin darlings of the experimental film world, makers of hundreds of films and videos, and legends in their own time. But back in the 50s and 60s they were just a couple of brothers from the Bronx who shared an 8mm camera. As delirious as they are dramatic, as colorful as they are campy, these rarely seen short films are laugh-out-loud funny and overwhelming proof that the Kuchars are the eighth and ninth wonders of the world.

In 2004, with support from the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology preserved ten of their 8mm films by blowing them up to 16mm. Today, we are proud to say we’ve finished the job with a second round of preservations that include the remaining seven titles from their early oeuvre. To celebrate the completion of this project we will be showcasing the new preservations, reviving the older ones, and, as a special bonus, hosting the premiere of Harvard Film Archives’ restorations of films produced by George and his students at the San Francisco Art Institute – a veritable Kuchar-athon!

Anthology wishes to thank Leah Churner, Jacob Burckhardt, Cineric, Inc, Haden Guest & Liz Coffey (Harvard Film Archive), the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation for all their efforts on behalf of the Kuchar brothers.

PROGRAM 5:
GEORGE KUCHAR’S CLASSROOM CAVALCADES
PRESERVATION PREMIERE!
George Kuchar has been teaching at the venerable San Francisco Art Institute since 1971, and virtually every semester he jumps into yet another production with his always excitable students. Produced piecemeal over a number of weeks, these delightfully loopy movies always feature plenty of drama and great improvised special effects. This program features brand-new prints of rarely seen titles from the massive Kuchar back catalog.
The Saturday screening will be introduced by Liz Coffey, Conservationist at the Harvard Film Archive.
ASPHALT RIBBON (1977, 20 minutes, 16mm)
“A cinematic rendering of an essay on the nobility of truck drivers.” –G.K.
ONE NIGHT A WEEK (1978, 27 minutes, 16mm)
“A cinematic rendering of a 1940s radio play intended for classroom broadcast during that era. A very erotic rendering.” –G.K.
POWER OF THE PRESS (1977, 28 minutes, 16mm)
“Another radio workshop play meant to train students of the time in broadcasting techniques. The plot concerns teacher/student crushes.” –G.K.
MOTEL CAPRI (1986, 18 minutes, 16mm)
“A Mother Superior commits murder to spare a soul damnation.” –G.K.
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.
–Saturday and Sunday, March 14 & 15 at 5:00.

Shot by D.A. Pennebaker and Ricky Leacock, Mailer’s third and most ambitious film of the 1960s, concerns the exploits of highly popular, yet esoteric, film director Norman T. Kingsley. That MAIDSTONE was largely improvised was made unforgettably clear when Torn, near the end of shooting, unexpectedly attacked Mailer with a hammer, triggering an obviously un-staged tussle that yanked the film out of its already ambiguous semblance of fictional narrative. Torn has consistently maintained that his action arose from conversations with his director, while Mailer claimed otherwise. But in any case, the result was a truly extraordinary sequence that even Mailer himself ultimately admitted had benefited the film (though not before very nearly taking a bite out of Torn’s ear…).

A LUST FOR ECSTASY:
BRAND NEW & RECENT PRESERVATIONS OF THE KUCHAR BROTHERS!
MARCH 11-17
George and Mike Kuchar are the twin darlings of the experimental film world, makers of hundreds of films and videos, and legends in their own time. But back in the 50s and 60s they were just a couple of brothers from the Bronx who shared an 8mm camera. As delirious as they are dramatic, as colorful as they are campy, these rarely seen short films are laugh-out-loud funny and overwhelming proof that the Kuchars are the eighth and ninth wonders of the world.

In 2004, with support from the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology preserved ten of their 8mm films by blowing them up to 16mm. Today, we are proud to say we’ve finished the job with a second round of preservations that include the remaining seven titles from their early oeuvre. To celebrate the completion of this project we will be showcasing the new preservations, reviving the older ones, and, as a special bonus, hosting the premiere of Harvard Film Archives’ restorations of films produced by George and his students at the San Francisco Art Institute – a veritable Kuchar-athon!

Anthology wishes to thank Leah Churner, Jacob Burckhardt, Cineric, Inc, Haden Guest & Liz Coffey (Harvard Film Archive), the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation for all their efforts on behalf of the Kuchar brothers.

PROGRAM 1:
PRESERVATION PREMIERE!
All films preserved with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
TOOTSIES IN AUTUMN (1963, 15 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, sound on CD)
Mike’s cautionary tale about past-their-prime thespians caught up in a typically Kucharian vortex of madness.

MOUNTAIN VACATIONS (1962, 15 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, silent)
Also known as CATSKILL COOL CATS, this mysterious reel has never appeared in any Kuchar filmography, including the list in their joint memoir, REFLECTIONS ON A CINEMATIC CESSPOOL. George recalls that this vacation destination was the easiest place to reach by bus from the Bronx.

THE NAKED AND THE NUDE (1957, 36 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, sound on CD)
The oldest surviving Kuchar mini-epic, this patriotic WWII period piece (made by high schoolers) chronicles the desires and destinies of carnal appetites on the front line.
“Big…Rousing…Memorable! The incredible war saga of our own boys in a Jap-infested jungle in the Botanical Gardens. Hear Lloyd Thorner sing the title song. You’ll come out whistling from both ends.” –G.K.

A REEL OF HOME MOVIES (1959-1961, 25 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, silent)
This eclectic compilation of home movies and early cinematic experiments includes vignettes from the streets of the Bronx, Central Park and the Cloisters; a love scene starring Mike; documentation of a child’s ruined birthday party; footage of an animated bee chasing George across a field; and also comic-book-style animation of a rocket ship, which Mike would later incorporate into SINS OF THE FLESHAPOIDS (1965).
“From the age of 12 onward until 17 (the restless years) the Kuchar brothers lived life to the fullest and tasted the spices of the lower class, the sugar of the bourgeoisie and the kasha of the jet set. At this time their films were seldom longer than four minutes.” –G.K.
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

Originally titled ONE A.M. (ONE AMERICAN MOVIE), this collaboration among Pennebaker, Leacock and Godard hoped to capture Vietnam War protests and what Godard believed to be imminent revolution in the U.S. With the filmmakers dispersed and a deadline looming, Pennebaker began composing the final cut. Departing from Godard’s original plans, Pennebaker admitted “I was soon making a film of my own.” The result, ONE P.M. (ONE PARALLEL MOVIE), combines cinema-verite, political theater, and footage of Jefferson Airplane, Eldridge Cleaver, and Torn articulating the attitude of a young generation toward the American political system of the late-60s.

A LUST FOR ECSTASY:
BRAND NEW & RECENT PRESERVATIONS OF THE KUCHAR BROTHERS!
MARCH 11-17
George and Mike Kuchar are the twin darlings of the experimental film world, makers of hundreds of films and videos, and legends in their own time. But back in the 50s and 60s they were just a couple of brothers from the Bronx who shared an 8mm camera. As delirious as they are dramatic, as colorful as they are campy, these rarely seen short films are laugh-out-loud funny and overwhelming proof that the Kuchars are the eighth and ninth wonders of the world.

In 2004, with support from the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology preserved ten of their 8mm films by blowing them up to 16mm. Today, we are proud to say we’ve finished the job with a second round of preservations that include the remaining seven titles from their early oeuvre. To celebrate the completion of this project we will be showcasing the new preservations, reviving the older ones, and, as a special bonus, hosting the premiere of Harvard Film Archives’ restorations of films produced by George and his students at the San Francisco Art Institute – a veritable Kuchar-athon!

Anthology wishes to thank Leah Churner, Jacob Burckhardt, Cineric, Inc, Haden Guest & Liz Coffey (Harvard Film Archive), the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation for all their efforts on behalf of the Kuchar brothers.

PROGRAM 2:
PRESERVATION PREMIERE!
All films preserved with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
PUSSY ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1961, 14 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, sound on CD)
Featuring Donna Kerness, Bob Cowan, Terry Brunetti, Sarah Kelly, Bill Piles.
The salacious short that caused the Kuchars’ banishment from meetings of the New York Eight Millimeter Motion Picture Club.
“It glows with the embers of desire! It smokes with the revelation of men and women longing for robust temptations that will make them sizzle into maturity with a furnace-blast of unrestrained animalism. A film for young and old to enjoy.” –G.K.

LUST FOR ECSTASY: A DRAMA OF OBSESSIONS IN THE LANGUAGE OF SENSATIONALISM (1963, 52 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, sound on CD)
Featuring Donna Kerness, Bob Cowan, Mike Kuchar, Cynthia Mailman, George Kuchar and Larry Leibowitz.
“LUST FOR ECSTASY is my most ambitious attempt since my last film…. I wrote many of the pungent scenes on the D train, and when I arrived on the set I ripped them up and let my emotional whims make chopped meat out of the performances and the story…. Yes, LUST FOR ECSTASY is my subconscious, my own naked lusts that sweep across the screen in 8mm and color with full fidelity sound.” –G.K.

LOVERS OF ETERNITY (1964, 36 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, sound on CD)
Featuring Mary Flanagan, Dov Lederberg and Jack Smith.
The last 8mm Kuchar production is an all-too-tragic tale in which we find underground icon Jack Smith, experimental filmmaker Dov Lederberg and one giant cockroach intermingling in the squalor of the Lower East Side.
Total running time: ca. 105 minutes.

A LUST FOR ECSTASY:
BRAND NEW & RECENT PRESERVATIONS OF THE KUCHAR BROTHERS!
MARCH 11-17
George and Mike Kuchar are the twin darlings of the experimental film world, makers of hundreds of films and videos, and legends in their own time. But back in the 50s and 60s they were just a couple of brothers from the Bronx who shared an 8mm camera. As delirious as they are dramatic, as colorful as they are campy, these rarely seen short films are laugh-out-loud funny and overwhelming proof that the Kuchars are the eighth and ninth wonders of the world.

In 2004, with support from the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology preserved ten of their 8mm films by blowing them up to 16mm. Today, we are proud to say we’ve finished the job with a second round of preservations that include the remaining seven titles from their early oeuvre. To celebrate the completion of this project we will be showcasing the new preservations, reviving the older ones, and, as a special bonus, hosting the premiere of Harvard Film Archives’ restorations of films produced by George and his students at the San Francisco Art Institute – a veritable Kuchar-athon!

Anthology wishes to thank Leah Churner, Jacob Burckhardt, Cineric, Inc, Haden Guest & Liz Coffey (Harvard Film Archive), the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation for all their efforts on behalf of the Kuchar brothers.

PROGRAM 3:
All films preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by the Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Special thanks to Cineric, Inc.
THE THIEF & THE STRIPPER (1959, 25 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
Dares to lay bare the naked carcass of a generation gone mad with moral decay.
BORN OF THE WIND (1962, 24 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
“A tender and realistic story of a scientist who falls in love with a mummy he has restored to life… 2,000 years as a mummy couldn’t quench her thirst for love!” –G.K.
A TOWN CALLED TEMPEST (1963, 33 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
Rarely has the cinema equaled such a spectacle! Seldom have movies probed so deeply into the rotten core of hypocrisy and weakness!
SYLVIA’S PROMISE (ca. 1962, 9 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
Love comes in all sizes, but in this case love needs to diet! Sylvia makes a promise, but can she keep it?
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

A LUST FOR ECSTASY:
BRAND NEW & RECENT PRESERVATIONS OF THE KUCHAR BROTHERS!
MARCH 11-17
George and Mike Kuchar are the twin darlings of the experimental film world, makers of hundreds of films and videos, and legends in their own time. But back in the 50s and 60s they were just a couple of brothers from the Bronx who shared an 8mm camera. As delirious as they are dramatic, as colorful as they are campy, these rarely seen short films are laugh-out-loud funny and overwhelming proof that the Kuchars are the eighth and ninth wonders of the world.

In 2004, with support from the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology preserved ten of their 8mm films by blowing them up to 16mm. Today, we are proud to say we’ve finished the job with a second round of preservations that include the remaining seven titles from their early oeuvre. To celebrate the completion of this project we will be showcasing the new preservations, reviving the older ones, and, as a special bonus, hosting the premiere of Harvard Film Archives’ restorations of films produced by George and his students at the San Francisco Art Institute – a veritable Kuchar-athon!

Anthology wishes to thank Leah Churner, Jacob Burckhardt, Cineric, Inc, Haden Guest & Liz Coffey (Harvard Film Archive), the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation for all their efforts on behalf of the Kuchar brothers.

PROGRAM 4:
All films preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by the Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Special thanks to Cineric, Inc.
A WOMAN DISTRESSED (1962, 12 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
Pre-dating SHOCK CORRIDOR, the Kuchars bring us this tantalizing tale of the inner workings of a very, very insane asylum.
NIGHT OF THE BOMB (1962, 18 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
Teenage lust and deranged delinquence combine to create a cautionary tale for the ages. The Chernobyl of Comedy!
THE CONFESSIONS OF BABETTE (1963, 15 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
An early masterpiece by Mike Kuchar in which Babette tells all, leaving no turgid stone unturned.
ANITA NEEDS ME (1963, 16 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
“All the horrors and guilt of the human mind exposed! It reaches deep into the workings of a woman’s cravings. Your emotions will be squeezed.” –G.K.
I WAS A TEENAGE RUMPOT (1960, 10 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
George and Mike here stumbled upon something big: their names were Arline, Edie, and Harry. A documentary about people like you and me, people with a zest for life.
THE SLASHER (1958, 21 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm, sound)
An insane, deformed killer stalks the grounds of a resort house, bringing sudden violence to those of easy virtue and godlessness.
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

NEWFILMMAKERS GOES TO WAR

SPECIAL PROGRAM
Luke Heppner
NEW ORLEANS ANIMAL RESCUE
2008, 80 minutes, video.
250,000 companion animals of New Orleans are left behind in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the Levee system. With the city flooded and time running out for thousands of animals, animal rescuers from around the country converge on the city.

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Bob Jones THE WAR COMES HOME (2008, 3 minutes, video)
Josef Wladyka HUEY (2007, 4 minutes, 16mm)
Sami Khan HABIBI (2008, 8 minutes, video)
Christopher Capelluto LAST STOP (2008, 16 minutes, 16mm)
Jonathan J. Johnson ADIRONDACK (2008, 20 minutes, video)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Kirk Gostkowski
LEAVE ME BEHIND
2007, 124 minutes, video.
Christian Keller, a 21-year-old husband and father, is about to leave for Iraq. In the next three days he is forced to question everything he has come to believe while trying to say goodbye to his friends and family.
–Tuesday, March 17, Special Program at 6:00, Short Film Program at 7:30, Feature Presentation at 8:30.

A LUST FOR ECSTASY:
BRAND NEW & RECENT PRESERVATIONS OF THE KUCHAR BROTHERS!
MARCH 11-17
George and Mike Kuchar are the twin darlings of the experimental film world, makers of hundreds of films and videos, and legends in their own time. But back in the 50s and 60s they were just a couple of brothers from the Bronx who shared an 8mm camera. As delirious as they are dramatic, as colorful as they are campy, these rarely seen short films are laugh-out-loud funny and overwhelming proof that the Kuchars are the eighth and ninth wonders of the world.

In 2004, with support from the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology preserved ten of their 8mm films by blowing them up to 16mm. Today, we are proud to say we’ve finished the job with a second round of preservations that include the remaining seven titles from their early oeuvre. To celebrate the completion of this project we will be showcasing the new preservations, reviving the older ones, and, as a special bonus, hosting the premiere of Harvard Film Archives’ restorations of films produced by George and his students at the San Francisco Art Institute – a veritable Kuchar-athon!

Anthology wishes to thank Leah Churner, Jacob Burckhardt, Cineric, Inc, Haden Guest & Liz Coffey (Harvard Film Archive), the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation for all their efforts on behalf of the Kuchar brothers.

PROGRAM 1:
PRESERVATION PREMIERE!
All films preserved with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
TOOTSIES IN AUTUMN (1963, 15 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, sound on CD)
Mike’s cautionary tale about past-their-prime thespians caught up in a typically Kucharian vortex of madness.

MOUNTAIN VACATIONS (1962, 15 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, silent)
Also known as CATSKILL COOL CATS, this mysterious reel has never appeared in any Kuchar filmography, including the list in their joint memoir, REFLECTIONS ON A CINEMATIC CESSPOOL. George recalls that this vacation destination was the easiest place to reach by bus from the Bronx.

THE NAKED AND THE NUDE (1957, 36 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, sound on CD)
The oldest surviving Kuchar mini-epic, this patriotic WWII period piece (made by high schoolers) chronicles the desires and destinies of carnal appetites on the front line.
“Big…Rousing…Memorable! The incredible war saga of our own boys in a Jap-infested jungle in the Botanical Gardens. Hear Lloyd Thorner sing the title song. You’ll come out whistling from both ends.” –G.K.

A REEL OF HOME MOVIES (1959-1961, 25 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, silent)
This eclectic compilation of home movies and early cinematic experiments includes vignettes from the streets of the Bronx, Central Park and the Cloisters; a love scene starring Mike; documentation of a child’s ruined birthday party; footage of an animated bee chasing George across a field; and also comic-book-style animation of a rocket ship, which Mike would later incorporate into SINS OF THE FLESHAPOIDS (1965).
“From the age of 12 onward until 17 (the restless years) the Kuchar brothers lived life to the fullest and tasted the spices of the lower class, the sugar of the bourgeoisie and the kasha of the jet set. At this time their films were seldom longer than four minutes.” –G.K.
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

A LUST FOR ECSTASY:
BRAND NEW & RECENT PRESERVATIONS OF THE KUCHAR BROTHERS!
MARCH 11-17
George and Mike Kuchar are the twin darlings of the experimental film world, makers of hundreds of films and videos, and legends in their own time. But back in the 50s and 60s they were just a couple of brothers from the Bronx who shared an 8mm camera. As delirious as they are dramatic, as colorful as they are campy, these rarely seen short films are laugh-out-loud funny and overwhelming proof that the Kuchars are the eighth and ninth wonders of the world.

In 2004, with support from the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology preserved ten of their 8mm films by blowing them up to 16mm. Today, we are proud to say we’ve finished the job with a second round of preservations that include the remaining seven titles from their early oeuvre. To celebrate the completion of this project we will be showcasing the new preservations, reviving the older ones, and, as a special bonus, hosting the premiere of Harvard Film Archives’ restorations of films produced by George and his students at the San Francisco Art Institute – a veritable Kuchar-athon!

Anthology wishes to thank Leah Churner, Jacob Burckhardt, Cineric, Inc, Haden Guest & Liz Coffey (Harvard Film Archive), the Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation for all their efforts on behalf of the Kuchar brothers.

PROGRAM 2:
PRESERVATION PREMIERE!
All films preserved with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
PUSSY ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1961, 14 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, sound on CD)
Featuring Donna Kerness, Bob Cowan, Terry Brunetti, Sarah Kelly, Bill Piles.
The salacious short that caused the Kuchars’ banishment from meetings of the New York Eight Millimeter Motion Picture Club.
“It glows with the embers of desire! It smokes with the revelation of men and women longing for robust temptations that will make them sizzle into maturity with a furnace-blast of unrestrained animalism. A film for young and old to enjoy.” –G.K.

LUST FOR ECSTASY: A DRAMA OF OBSESSIONS IN THE LANGUAGE OF SENSATIONALISM (1963, 52 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, sound on CD)
Featuring Donna Kerness, Bob Cowan, Mike Kuchar, Cynthia Mailman, George Kuchar and Larry Leibowitz.
“LUST FOR ECSTASY is my most ambitious attempt since my last film…. I wrote many of the pungent scenes on the D train, and when I arrived on the set I ripped them up and let my emotional whims make chopped meat out of the performances and the story…. Yes, LUST FOR ECSTASY is my subconscious, my own naked lusts that sweep across the screen in 8mm and color with full fidelity sound.” –G.K.

LOVERS OF ETERNITY (1964, 36 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up, sound on CD)
Featuring Mary Flanagan, Dov Lederberg and Jack Smith.
The last 8mm Kuchar production is an all-too-tragic tale in which we find underground icon Jack Smith, experimental filmmaker Dov Lederberg and one giant cockroach intermingling in the squalor of the Lower East Side.
Total running time: ca. 105 minutes.

HOLLIS FRAMPTON’S HAPAX LEGOMENA
MARCH 25-31
“Hapax legomena are, literally, ‘things said once’. The scholarly jargon refers to those words that occur only a single time in the entire oeuvre of an author, or in a whole literature.” –H.F.

Hollis Frampton – photographer, theoretician, philosopher and, above all, filmmaker – is one of the towering figures of American avant-garde cinema. Possessed of a frighteningly prodigious and wide-ranging intellect – he was a voracious reader from childhood, and his films abound with evidence of his fascination with linguistics, science, mathematics and philosophy – combined with a witty and mischievous attraction to puzzles and game-playing, Frampton was active as a filmmaker for only a decade-and-a-half (his career cut tragically short by his death from cancer in 1984). But in that brief time he created a breathtakingly ambitious body of work, whose range and inventiveness are unsurpassed.

Frampton’s seven-part HAPAX LEGOMENA is arguably his greatest completed achievement. While its various parts can each stand alone, together they form a complex and quasi-symphonic whole – an enigmatic structuralist ‘autobiography’, a series of investigations into the possibilities of filmmaking, and a playful and dazzling encyclopedia of the cinema that is perhaps the closest thing avant-garde film has to Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”. Puzzling, conceptually daring, and at times disarmingly comic, HAPAX LEGOMENA is one of the pinnacles of experimental film.

This full week of screenings of the complete work celebrates the preservation of HAPAX LEGOMENA, as well as the April 2009 publication, by MIT Press, of ON THE CAMERA ARTS AND CONSECUTIVE MATTERS: THE WRITINGS OF HOLLIS FRAMPTON, edited by Bruce Jenkins, a collection encompassing Frampton’s critical essays, lectures, correspondence, interviews, and scripts.

In addition to a very special recreation of Frampton’s A LECTURE, and presentations by Michael Zryd (York University) and Ken Eisenstein (University of Chicago) on Saturday, March 28, each evening will feature an introduction by a different Frampton scholar or enthusiast. The scheduled speakers include:
Keith Sanborn, filmmaker and critic (Wednesday); Annette Michelson, scholar and co-founder of the journal, OCTOBER (Thursday); P. Adams Sitney, scholar and author of VISIONARY FILM (Friday); Bruce Jenkins, Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Professor of Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Saturday); Bill Brand, filmmaker, scholar, and preservationist, along with students from NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (Sunday); and Gerry O’Grady, scholar and writer (Monday).

HAPAX LEGOMENA has been preserved through a major cooperative effort funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation, and undertaken by MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the New York University Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, and Bill Brand, professor in the NYU program and project conservator.

PROGRAM 1:
(nostalgia) (HAPAX LEGOMENA I)
1971, 36 minutes, 16mm, sound.
“[T]he time it takes for a photograph to burn (and thus confirm its two-dimensionality) becomes the clock within the film, while Frampton plays the critic, asynchronously glossing, explicating, narrating, mythologizing his earlier art, and his earlier life, as he commits them both to the fire of a labyrinthine structure; for Borges too was one of his earlier masters, and he grins behind the facades of logic, mathematics, and physical demonstration which are the formal metaphors for most of Frampton’s films.” –P. Adams Sitney

POETIC JUSTICE (HAPAX LEGOMENA II)
1972, 31 minutes, 16mm, silent.
“Frampton presents us with a ‘scenario’ of extreme complexity in which the themes of sexuality, infidelity, voyeurism are ‘projected’ in narrative sequence entirely through the voice telling the tale – again it is the first person singular speaking, however, in the present tense and addressing the characters as ‘you,’ ‘your lover,’ and referring to an ‘I’. We see, on screen, only the physical aspect of a script, papers resting on a table…and the projection is that of a film as consonant with the projection of the mind.” –Annette Michelson

CRITICAL MASS (HAPAX LEGOMENA III)
1971, 26 minutes, 16mm, sound.
“As a work of art I think [it] is quite universal and deals with all quarrels (those between men and women, or men and men, or women and women, or children, or war. It is war!... It is very funny, and rather obviously so. It is a magic film in that you can enjoy it, with greater appreciation, each time you look at it. Most aesthetic experiences are not enjoyable on the surface. You have to look at them a number of times before you are able to fully enjoy them, but this one stands up at once, and again and again, and is amazingly clear.” –Stan Brakhage
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

HOLLIS FRAMPTON’S HAPAX LEGOMENA
MARCH 25-31
“Hapax legomena are, literally, ‘things said once’. The scholarly jargon refers to those words that occur only a single time in the entire oeuvre of an author, or in a whole literature.” –H.F.

Hollis Frampton – photographer, theoretician, philosopher and, above all, filmmaker – is one of the towering figures of American avant-garde cinema. Possessed of a frighteningly prodigious and wide-ranging intellect – he was a voracious reader from childhood, and his films abound with evidence of his fascination with linguistics, science, mathematics and philosophy – combined with a witty and mischievous attraction to puzzles and game-playing, Frampton was active as a filmmaker for only a decade-and-a-half (his career cut tragically short by his death from cancer in 1984). But in that brief time he created a breathtakingly ambitious body of work, whose range and inventiveness are unsurpassed.

Frampton’s seven-part HAPAX LEGOMENA is arguably his greatest completed achievement. While its various parts can each stand alone, together they form a complex and quasi-symphonic whole – an enigmatic structuralist ‘autobiography’, a series of investigations into the possibilities of filmmaking, and a playful and dazzling encyclopedia of the cinema that is perhaps the closest thing avant-garde film has to Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”. Puzzling, conceptually daring, and at times disarmingly comic, HAPAX LEGOMENA is one of the pinnacles of experimental film.

This full week of screenings of the complete work celebrates the preservation of HAPAX LEGOMENA, as well as the April 2009 publication, by MIT Press, of ON THE CAMERA ARTS AND CONSECUTIVE MATTERS: THE WRITINGS OF HOLLIS FRAMPTON, edited by Bruce Jenkins, a collection encompassing Frampton’s critical essays, lectures, correspondence, interviews, and scripts.

In addition to a very special recreation of Frampton’s A LECTURE, and presentations by Michael Zryd (York University) and Ken Eisenstein (University of Chicago) on Saturday, March 28, each evening will feature an introduction by a different Frampton scholar or enthusiast. The scheduled speakers include:
Keith Sanborn, filmmaker and critic (Wednesday); Annette Michelson, scholar and co-founder of the journal, OCTOBER (Thursday); P. Adams Sitney, scholar and author of VISIONARY FILM (Friday); Bruce Jenkins, Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Professor of Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Saturday); Bill Brand, filmmaker, scholar, and preservationist, along with students from NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (Sunday); and Gerry O’Grady, scholar and writer (Monday).

HAPAX LEGOMENA has been preserved through a major cooperative effort funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation, and undertaken by MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the New York University Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, and Bill Brand, professor in the NYU program and project conservator.

PROGRAM 2:
TRAVELING MATTE (HAPAX LEGOMENA IV)
1971, 34 minutes, 16mm, silent.
“TRAVELING MATTE is the pivot upon which the whole of HAPAX LEGOMENA turns.” –H.F.
“This film metaphors an entire human life: birth, sex, death – the framing device is the fingers and palm of the maker’s hand, wherein others only attempt to read the future.” –Stan Brakhage

ORDINARY MATTER  (HAPAX LEGOMENA V)
1972, 36 minutes, 16mm, sound on CD.
“A vision of a journey, during which the eye of the mind drives headlong through Salisbury Cloister (a monument to enclosure), Brooklyn Bridge (a monument to connection), Stonehenge (a monument to the intercourse between consciousness and LIGHT)… visiting along the way diverse meadows, barns, waters where I now live; and ending in the remembered cornfields of my childhood.” –H.F.
“I suppose I think of it as a kind of acceleration from TRAVELING MATTE. [There] the eye is groping and feeling its way and staggering and so forth. And [here] the need somehow to worry about those words, and still photographs, and so forth, is behind. ORDINARY MATTER is for me a kind of ecstatic, headlong dive.” –H.F.

REMOTE CONTROL (HAPAX LEGOMENA VI)
1972, 29 minutes, 16mm, silent.
“[In REMOTE CONTROL], the images speed up to the point where every successive frame is different from every previous frame, so that if there is an image in it, it’s a kind of inner voice within the images, as sometimes music will have many voices that can be written out on the paper, and then in the listening the real shape of the music is to be found in the voice that is generated among them. … It was shot in a single evening, off the tube, right off the ordinary TV set, in the course of an evening.” –H.F.

SPECIAL EFFECTS (HAPAX LEGOMENA VII)
1972, 11 minutes, 16mm, sound.
“I wanted to affirm and honor the film frame itself. Because so much of what we know now, so much of our experience is something that comes to us through that frame. It seems to be a kind of synonym for what we are conscious of. I have only seen the pyramids of Egypt within that frame. I have only seen – endless things – most of what I believe I have experienced I have in fact seen at the movies. I’ve seen it inside that frame.” –H.F.
Total running time: ca. 115 minutes.

HOLLIS FRAMPTON’S HAPAX LEGOMENA
MARCH 25-31
“Hapax legomena are, literally, ‘things said once’. The scholarly jargon refers to those words that occur only a single time in the entire oeuvre of an author, or in a whole literature.” –H.F.

Hollis Frampton – photographer, theoretician, philosopher and, above all, filmmaker – is one of the towering figures of American avant-garde cinema. Possessed of a frighteningly prodigious and wide-ranging intellect – he was a voracious reader from childhood, and his films abound with evidence of his fascination with linguistics, science, mathematics and philosophy – combined with a witty and mischievous attraction to puzzles and game-playing, Frampton was active as a filmmaker for only a decade-and-a-half (his career cut tragically short by his death from cancer in 1984). But in that brief time he created a breathtakingly ambitious body of work, whose range and inventiveness are unsurpassed.

Frampton’s seven-part HAPAX LEGOMENA is arguably his greatest completed achievement. While its various parts can each stand alone, together they form a complex and quasi-symphonic whole – an enigmatic structuralist ‘autobiography’, a series of investigations into the possibilities of filmmaking, and a playful and dazzling encyclopedia of the cinema that is perhaps the closest thing avant-garde film has to Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”. Puzzling, conceptually daring, and at times disarmingly comic, HAPAX LEGOMENA is one of the pinnacles of experimental film.

This full week of screenings of the complete work celebrates the preservation of HAPAX LEGOMENA, as well as the April 2009 publication, by MIT Press, of ON THE CAMERA ARTS AND CONSECUTIVE MATTERS: THE WRITINGS OF HOLLIS FRAMPTON, edited by Bruce Jenkins, a collection encompassing Frampton’s critical essays, lectures, correspondence, interviews, and scripts.

In addition to a very special recreation of Frampton’s A LECTURE, and presentations by Michael Zryd (York University) and Ken Eisenstein (University of Chicago) on Saturday, March 28, each evening will feature an introduction by a different Frampton scholar or enthusiast. The scheduled speakers include:
Keith Sanborn, filmmaker and critic (Wednesday); Annette Michelson, scholar and co-founder of the journal, OCTOBER (Thursday); P. Adams Sitney, scholar and author of VISIONARY FILM (Friday); Bruce Jenkins, Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Professor of Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Saturday); Bill Brand, filmmaker, scholar, and preservationist, along with students from NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (Sunday); and Gerry O’Grady, scholar and writer (Monday).

HAPAX LEGOMENA has been preserved through a major cooperative effort funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation, and undertaken by MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the New York University Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, and Bill Brand, professor in the NYU program and project conservator.

PROGRAM 1:
(nostalgia) (HAPAX LEGOMENA I)
1971, 36 minutes, 16mm, sound.
“[T]he time it takes for a photograph to burn (and thus confirm its two-dimensionality) becomes the clock within the film, while Frampton plays the critic, asynchronously glossing, explicating, narrating, mythologizing his earlier art, and his earlier life, as he commits them both to the fire of a labyrinthine structure; for Borges too was one of his earlier masters, and he grins behind the facades of logic, mathematics, and physical demonstration which are the formal metaphors for most of Frampton’s films.” –P. Adams Sitney

POETIC JUSTICE (HAPAX LEGOMENA II)
1972, 31 minutes, 16mm, silent.
“Frampton presents us with a ‘scenario’ of extreme complexity in which the themes of sexuality, infidelity, voyeurism are ‘projected’ in narrative sequence entirely through the voice telling the tale – again it is the first person singular speaking, however, in the present tense and addressing the characters as ‘you,’ ‘your lover,’ and referring to an ‘I’. We see, on screen, only the physical aspect of a script, papers resting on a table…and the projection is that of a film as consonant with the projection of the mind.” –Annette Michelson

CRITICAL MASS (HAPAX LEGOMENA III)
1971, 26 minutes, 16mm, sound.
“As a work of art I think [it] is quite universal and deals with all quarrels (those between men and women, or men and men, or women and women, or children, or war. It is war!... It is very funny, and rather obviously so. It is a magic film in that you can enjoy it, with greater appreciation, each time you look at it. Most aesthetic experiences are not enjoyable on the surface. You have to look at them a number of times before you are able to fully enjoy them, but this one stands up at once, and again and again, and is amazingly clear.” –Stan Brakhage
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

HOLLIS FRAMPTON’S HAPAX LEGOMENA
MARCH 25-31
“Hapax legomena are, literally, ‘things said once’. The scholarly jargon refers to those words that occur only a single time in the entire oeuvre of an author, or in a whole literature.” –H.F.

Hollis Frampton – photographer, theoretician, philosopher and, above all, filmmaker – is one of the towering figures of American avant-garde cinema. Possessed of a frighteningly prodigious and wide-ranging intellect – he was a voracious reader from childhood, and his films abound with evidence of his fascination with linguistics, science, mathematics and philosophy – combined with a witty and mischievous attraction to puzzles and game-playing, Frampton was active as a filmmaker for only a decade-and-a-half (his career cut tragically short by his death from cancer in 1984). But in that brief time he created a breathtakingly ambitious body of work, whose range and inventiveness are unsurpassed.

Frampton’s seven-part HAPAX LEGOMENA is arguably his greatest completed achievement. While its various parts can each stand alone, together they form a complex and quasi-symphonic whole – an enigmatic structuralist ‘autobiography’, a series of investigations into the possibilities of filmmaking, and a playful and dazzling encyclopedia of the cinema that is perhaps the closest thing avant-garde film has to Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”. Puzzling, conceptually daring, and at times disarmingly comic, HAPAX LEGOMENA is one of the pinnacles of experimental film.

This full week of screenings of the complete work celebrates the preservation of HAPAX LEGOMENA, as well as the April 2009 publication, by MIT Press, of ON THE CAMERA ARTS AND CONSECUTIVE MATTERS: THE WRITINGS OF HOLLIS FRAMPTON, edited by Bruce Jenkins, a collection encompassing Frampton’s critical essays, lectures, correspondence, interviews, and scripts.

In addition to a very special recreation of Frampton’s A LECTURE, and presentations by Michael Zryd (York University) and Ken Eisenstein (University of Chicago) on Saturday, March 28, each evening will feature an introduction by a different Frampton scholar or enthusiast. The scheduled speakers include:
Keith Sanborn, filmmaker and critic (Wednesday); Annette Michelson, scholar and co-founder of the journal, OCTOBER (Thursday); P. Adams Sitney, scholar and author of VISIONARY FILM (Friday); Bruce Jenkins, Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Professor of Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Saturday); Bill Brand, filmmaker, scholar, and preservationist, along with students from NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (Sunday); and Gerry O’Grady, scholar and writer (Monday).

HAPAX LEGOMENA has been preserved through a major cooperative effort funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation, and undertaken by MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the New York University Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, and Bill Brand, professor in the NYU program and project conservator.

PROGRAM 2:
TRAVELING MATTE (HAPAX LEGOMENA IV)
1971, 34 minutes, 16mm, silent.
“TRAVELING MATTE is the pivot upon which the whole of HAPAX LEGOMENA turns.” –H.F.
“This film metaphors an entire human life: birth, sex, death – the framing device is the fingers and palm of the maker’s hand, wherein others only attempt to read the future.” –Stan Brakhage

ORDINARY MATTER  (HAPAX LEGOMENA V)
1972, 36 minutes, 16mm, sound on CD.
“A vision of a journey, during which the eye of the mind drives headlong through Salisbury Cloister (a monument to enclosure), Brooklyn Bridge (a monument to connection), Stonehenge (a monument to the intercourse between consciousness and LIGHT)… visiting along the way diverse meadows, barns, waters where I now live; and ending in the remembered cornfields of my childhood.” –H.F.
“I suppose I think of it as a kind of acceleration from TRAVELING MATTE. [There] the eye is groping and feeling its way and staggering and so forth. And [here] the need somehow to worry about those words, and still photographs, and so forth, is behind. ORDINARY MATTER is for me a kind of ecstatic, headlong dive.” –H.F.

REMOTE CONTROL (HAPAX LEGOMENA VI)
1972, 29 minutes, 16mm, silent.
“[In REMOTE CONTROL], the images speed up to the point where every successive frame is different from every previous frame, so that if there is an image in it, it’s a kind of inner voice within the images, as sometimes music will have many voices that can be written out on the paper, and then in the listening the real shape of the music is to be found in the voice that is generated among them. … It was shot in a single evening, off the tube, right off the ordinary TV set, in the course of an evening.” –H.F.

SPECIAL EFFECTS (HAPAX LEGOMENA VII)
1972, 11 minutes, 16mm, sound.
“I wanted to affirm and honor the film frame itself. Because so much of what we know now, so much of our experience is something that comes to us through that frame. It seems to be a kind of synonym for what we are conscious of. I have only seen the pyramids of Egypt within that frame. I have only seen – endless things – most of what I believe I have experienced I have in fact seen at the movies. I’ve seen it inside that frame.” –H.F.
Total running time: ca. 115 minutes.

HOLLIS FRAMPTON’S HAPAX LEGOMENA
MARCH 25-31
“Hapax legomena are, literally, ‘things said once’. The scholarly jargon refers to those words that occur only a single time in the entire oeuvre of an author, or in a whole literature.” –H.F.

Hollis Frampton – photographer, theoretician, philosopher and, above all, filmmaker – is one of the towering figures of American avant-garde cinema. Possessed of a frighteningly prodigious and wide-ranging intellect – he was a voracious reader from childhood, and his films abound with evidence of his fascination with linguistics, science, mathematics and philosophy – combined with a witty and mischievous attraction to puzzles and game-playing, Frampton was active as a filmmaker for only a decade-and-a-half (his career cut tragically short by his death from cancer in 1984). But in that brief time he created a breathtakingly ambitious body of work, whose range and inventiveness are unsurpassed.

Frampton’s seven-part HAPAX LEGOMENA is arguably his greatest completed achievement. While its various parts can each stand alone, together they form a complex and quasi-symphonic whole – an enigmatic structuralist ‘autobiography’, a series of investigations into the possibilities of filmmaking, and a playful and dazzling encyclopedia of the cinema that is perhaps the closest thing avant-garde film has to Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”. Puzzling, conceptually daring, and at times disarmingly comic, HAPAX LEGOMENA is one of the pinnacles of experimental film.

This full week of screenings of the complete work celebrates the preservation of HAPAX LEGOMENA, as well as the April 2009 publication, by MIT Press, of ON THE CAMERA ARTS AND CONSECUTIVE MATTERS: THE WRITINGS OF HOLLIS FRAMPTON, edited by Bruce Jenkins, a collection encompassing Frampton’s critical essays, lectures, correspondence, interviews, and scripts.

In addition to a very special recreation of Frampton’s A LECTURE, and presentations by Michael Zryd (York University) and Ken Eisenstein (University of Chicago) on Saturday, March 28, each evening will feature an introduction by a different Frampton scholar or enthusiast. The scheduled speakers include:
Keith Sanborn, filmmaker and critic (Wednesday); Annette Michelson, scholar and co-founder of the journal, OCTOBER (Thursday); P. Adams Sitney, scholar and author of VISIONARY FILM (Friday); Bruce Jenkins, Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Professor of Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Saturday); Bill Brand, filmmaker, scholar, and preservationist, along with students from NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (Sunday); and Gerry O’Grady, scholar and writer (Monday).

HAPAX LEGOMENA has been preserved through a major cooperative effort funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation, and undertaken by MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the New York University Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, and Bill Brand, professor in the NYU program and project conservator.

PROGRAM 1:
(nostalgia) (HAPAX LEGOMENA I)
1971, 36 minutes, 16mm, sound.
“[T]he time it takes for a photograph to burn (and thus confirm its two-dimensionality) becomes the clock within the film, while Frampton plays the critic, asynchronously glossing, explicating, narrating, mythologizing his earlier art, and his earlier life, as he commits them both to the fire of a labyrinthine structure; for Borges too was one of his earlier masters, and he grins behind the facades of logic, mathematics, and physical demonstration which are the formal metaphors for most of Frampton’s films.” –P. Adams Sitney

POETIC JUSTICE (HAPAX LEGOMENA II)
1972, 31 minutes, 16mm, silent.
“Frampton presents us with a ‘scenario’ of extreme complexity in which the themes of sexuality, infidelity, voyeurism are ‘projected’ in narrative sequence entirely through the voice telling the tale – again it is the first person singular speaking, however, in the present tense and addressing the characters as ‘you,’ ‘your lover,’ and referring to an ‘I’. We see, on screen, only the physical aspect of a script, papers resting on a table…and the projection is that of a film as consonant with the projection of the mind.” –Annette Michelson

CRITICAL MASS (HAPAX LEGOMENA III)
1971, 26 minutes, 16mm, sound.
“As a work of art I think [it] is quite universal and deals with all quarrels (those between men and women, or men and men, or women and women, or children, or war. It is war!... It is very funny, and rather obviously so. It is a magic film in that you can enjoy it, with greater appreciation, each time you look at it. Most aesthetic experiences are not enjoyable on the surface. You have to look at them a number of times before you are able to fully enjoy them, but this one stands up at once, and again and again, and is amazingly clear.” –Stan Brakhage
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

HOLLIS FRAMPTON’S HAPAX LEGOMENA
MARCH 25-31
“Hapax legomena are, literally, ‘things said once’. The scholarly jargon refers to those words that occur only a single time in the entire oeuvre of an author, or in a whole literature.” –H.F.

Hollis Frampton – photographer, theoretician, philosopher and, above all, filmmaker – is one of the towering figures of American avant-garde cinema. Possessed of a frighteningly prodigious and wide-ranging intellect – he was a voracious reader from childhood, and his films abound with evidence of his fascination with linguistics, science, mathematics and philosophy – combined with a witty and mischievous attraction to puzzles and game-playing, Frampton was active as a filmmaker for only a decade-and-a-half (his career cut tragically short by his death from cancer in 1984). But in that brief time he created a breathtakingly ambitious body of work, whose range and inventiveness are unsurpassed.

Frampton’s seven-part HAPAX LEGOMENA is arguably his greatest completed achievement. While its various parts can each stand alone, together they form a complex and quasi-symphonic whole – an enigmatic structuralist ‘autobiography’, a series of investigations into the possibilities of filmmaking, and a playful and dazzling encyclopedia of the cinema that is perhaps the closest thing avant-garde film has to Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”. Puzzling, conceptually daring, and at times disarmingly comic, HAPAX LEGOMENA is one of the pinnacles of experimental film.

This full week of screenings of the complete work celebrates the preservation of HAPAX LEGOMENA, as well as the April 2009 publication, by MIT Press, of ON THE CAMERA ARTS AND CONSECUTIVE MATTERS: THE WRITINGS OF HOLLIS FRAMPTON, edited by Bruce Jenkins, a collection encompassing Frampton’s critical essays, lectures, correspondence, interviews, and scripts.

In addition to a very special recreation of Frampton’s A LECTURE, and presentations by Michael Zryd (York University) and Ken Eisenstein (University of Chicago) on Saturday, March 28, each evening will feature an introduction by a different Frampton scholar or enthusiast. The scheduled speakers include:
Keith Sanborn, filmmaker and critic (Wednesday); Annette Michelson, scholar and co-founder of the journal, OCTOBER (Thursday); P. Adams Sitney, scholar and author of VISIONARY FILM (Friday); Bruce Jenkins, Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Professor of Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Saturday); Bill Brand, filmmaker, scholar, and preservationist, along with students from NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (Sunday); and Gerry O’Grady, scholar and writer (Monday).

HAPAX LEGOMENA has been preserved through a major cooperative effort funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation, and undertaken by MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the New York University Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, and Bill Brand, professor in the NYU program and project conservator.

PROGRAM 2:
TRAVELING MATTE (HAPAX LEGOMENA IV)
1971, 34 minutes, 16mm, silent.
“TRAVELING MATTE is the pivot upon which the whole of HAPAX LEGOMENA turns.” –H.F.
“This film metaphors an entire human life: birth, sex, death – the framing device is the fingers and palm of the maker’s hand, wherein others only attempt to read the future.” –Stan Brakhage

ORDINARY MATTER  (HAPAX LEGOMENA V)
1972, 36 minutes, 16mm, sound on CD.
“A vision of a journey, during which the eye of the mind drives headlong through Salisbury Cloister (a monument to enclosure), Brooklyn Bridge (a monument to connection), Stonehenge (a monument to the intercourse between consciousness and LIGHT)… visiting along the way diverse meadows, barns, waters where I now live; and ending in the remembered cornfields of my childhood.” –H.F.
“I suppose I think of it as a kind of acceleration from TRAVELING MATTE. [There] the eye is groping and feeling its way and staggering and so forth. And [here] the need somehow to worry about those words, and still photographs, and so forth, is behind. ORDINARY MATTER is for me a kind of ecstatic, headlong dive.” –H.F.

REMOTE CONTROL (HAPAX LEGOMENA VI)
1972, 29 minutes, 16mm, silent.
“[In REMOTE CONTROL], the images speed up to the point where every successive frame is different from every previous frame, so that if there is an image in it, it’s a kind of inner voice within the images, as sometimes music will have many voices that can be written out on the paper, and then in the listening the real shape of the music is to be found in the voice that is generated among them. … It was shot in a single evening, off the tube, right off the ordinary TV set, in the course of an evening.” –H.F.

SPECIAL EFFECTS (HAPAX LEGOMENA VII)
1972, 11 minutes, 16mm, sound.
“I wanted to affirm and honor the film frame itself. Because so much of what we know now, so much of our experience is something that comes to us through that frame. It seems to be a kind of synonym for what we are conscious of. I have only seen the pyramids of Egypt within that frame. I have only seen – endless things – most of what I believe I have experienced I have in fact seen at the movies. I’ve seen it inside that frame.” –H.F.
Total running time: ca. 115 minutes.

One of Hollis Frampton’s earliest analyses of the film medium (and perhaps his most entertaining) came in the form of a lecture/performance that he presented in 1968 at Hunter College. Prefiguring his film (nostalgia), Frampton pre-recorded the text of A LECTURE on audiotape, using the voice of filmmaker Michael Snow. The rest of the work was done by that unheralded cinematic performer, the 16mm film projector, with periodic assistance by the artist. A LECTURE utilizes an archivally remastered version of the original 1968 audiotape courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive. Michael Zryd (York University) and Ken Eisenstein (University of Chicago) will each be on hand to discuss the relationship of A LECTURE to the HAPAX LEGOMENA series, as well as some of the conceptual frameworks that bind the seven films together into a cohesive cycle.

HOLLIS FRAMPTON’S HAPAX LEGOMENA
MARCH 25-31
“Hapax legomena are, literally, ‘things said once’. The scholarly jargon refers to those words that occur only a single time in the entire oeuvre of an author, or in a whole literature.” –H.F.

Hollis Frampton – photographer, theoretician, philosopher and, above all, filmmaker – is one of the towering figures of American avant-garde cinema. Possessed of a frighteningly prodigious and wide-ranging intellect – he was a voracious reader from childhood, and his films abound with evidence of his fascination with linguistics, science, mathematics and philosophy – combined with a witty and mischievous attraction to puzzles and game-playing, Frampton was active as a filmmaker for only a decade-and-a-half (his career cut tragically short by his death from cancer in 1984). But in that brief time he created a breathtakingly ambitious body of work, whose range and inventiveness are unsurpassed.

Frampton’s seven-part HAPAX LEGOMENA is arguably his greatest completed achievement. While its various parts can each stand alone, together they form a complex and quasi-symphonic whole – an enigmatic structuralist ‘autobiography’, a series of investigations into the possibilities of filmmaking, and a playful and dazzling encyclopedia of the cinema that is perhaps the closest thing avant-garde film has to Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”. Puzzling, conceptually daring, and at times disarmingly comic, HAPAX LEGOMENA is one of the pinnacles of experimental film.

This full week of screenings of the complete work celebrates the preservation of HAPAX LEGOMENA, as well as the April 2009 publication, by MIT Press, of ON THE CAMERA ARTS AND CONSECUTIVE MATTERS: THE WRITINGS OF HOLLIS FRAMPTON, edited by Bruce Jenkins, a collection encompassing Frampton’s critical essays, lectures, correspondence, interviews, and scripts.

In addition to a very special recreation of Frampton’s A LECTURE, and presentations by Michael Zryd (York University) and Ken Eisenstein (University of Chicago) on Saturday, March 28, each evening will feature an introduction by a different Frampton scholar or enthusiast. The scheduled speakers include:
Keith Sanborn, filmmaker and critic (Wednesday); Annette Michelson, scholar and co-founder of the journal, OCTOBER (Thursday); P. Adams Sitney, scholar and author of VISIONARY FILM (Friday); Bruce Jenkins, Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Professor of Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Saturday); Bill Brand, filmmaker, scholar, and preservationist, along with students from NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (Sunday); and Gerry O’Grady, scholar and writer (Monday).

HAPAX LEGOMENA has been preserved through a major cooperative effort funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation, and undertaken by MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the New York University Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, and Bill Brand, professor in the NYU program and project conservator.

PROGRAM 1:
(nostalgia) (HAPAX LEGOMENA I)
1971, 36 minutes, 16mm, sound.
“[T]he time it takes for a photograph to burn (and thus confirm its two-dimensionality) becomes the clock within the film, while Frampton plays the critic, asynchronously glossing, explicating, narrating, mythologizing his earlier art, and his earlier life, as he commits them both to the fire of a labyrinthine structure; for Borges too was one of his earlier masters, and he grins behind the facades of logic, mathematics, and physical demonstration which are the formal metaphors for most of Frampton’s films.” –P. Adams Sitney

POETIC JUSTICE (HAPAX LEGOMENA II)
1972, 31 minutes, 16mm, silent.
“Frampton presents us with a ‘scenario’ of extreme complexity in which the themes of sexuality, infidelity, voyeurism are ‘projected’ in narrative sequence entirely through the voice telling the tale – again it is the first person singular speaking, however, in the present tense and addressing the characters as ‘you,’ ‘your lover,’ and referring to an ‘I’. We see, on screen, only the physical aspect of a script, papers resting on a table…and the projection is that of a film as consonant with the projection of the mind.” –Annette Michelson

CRITICAL MASS (HAPAX LEGOMENA III)
1971, 26 minutes, 16mm, sound.
“As a work of art I think [it] is quite universal and deals with all quarrels (those between men and women, or men and men, or women and women, or children, or war. It is war!... It is very funny, and rather obviously so. It is a magic film in that you can enjoy it, with greater appreciation, each time you look at it. Most aesthetic experiences are not enjoyable on the surface. You have to look at them a number of times before you are able to fully enjoy them, but this one stands up at once, and again and again, and is amazingly clear.” –Stan Brakhage
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

HOLLIS FRAMPTON’S HAPAX LEGOMENA
MARCH 25-31
“Hapax legomena are, literally, ‘things said once’. The scholarly jargon refers to those words that occur only a single time in the entire oeuvre of an author, or in a whole literature.” –H.F.

Hollis Frampton – photographer, theoretician, philosopher and, above all, filmmaker – is one of the towering figures of American avant-garde cinema. Possessed of a frighteningly prodigious and wide-ranging intellect – he was a voracious reader from childhood, and his films abound with evidence of his fascination with linguistics, science, mathematics and philosophy – combined with a witty and mischievous attraction to puzzles and game-playing, Frampton was active as a filmmaker for only a decade-and-a-half (his career cut tragically short by his death from cancer in 1984). But in that brief time he created a breathtakingly ambitious body of work, whose range and inventiveness are unsurpassed.

Frampton’s seven-part HAPAX LEGOMENA is arguably his greatest completed achievement. While its various parts can each stand alone, together they form a complex and quasi-symphonic whole – an enigmatic structuralist ‘autobiography’, a series of investigations into the possibilities of filmmaking, and a playful and dazzling encyclopedia of the cinema that is perhaps the closest thing avant-garde film has to Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”. Puzzling, conceptually daring, and at times disarmingly comic, HAPAX LEGOMENA is one of the pinnacles of experimental film.

This full week of screenings of the complete work celebrates the preservation of HAPAX LEGOMENA, as well as the April 2009 publication, by MIT Press, of ON THE CAMERA ARTS AND CONSECUTIVE MATTERS: THE WRITINGS OF HOLLIS FRAMPTON, edited by Bruce Jenkins, a collection encompassing Frampton’s critical essays, lectures, correspondence, interviews, and scripts.

In addition to a very special recreation of Frampton’s A LECTURE, and presentations by Michael Zryd (York University) and Ken Eisenstein (University of Chicago) on Saturday, March 28, each evening will feature an introduction by a different Frampton scholar or enthusiast. The scheduled speakers include:
Keith Sanborn, filmmaker and critic (Wednesday); Annette Michelson, scholar and co-founder of the journal, OCTOBER (Thursday); P. Adams Sitney, scholar and author of VISIONARY FILM (Friday); Bruce Jenkins, Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Professor of Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Saturday); Bill Brand, filmmaker, scholar, and preservationist, along with students from NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (Sunday); and Gerry O’Grady, scholar and writer (Monday).

HAPAX LEGOMENA has been preserved through a major cooperative effort funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation, and undertaken by MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the New York University Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, and Bill Brand, professor in the NYU program and project conservator.

PROGRAM 2:
TRAVELING MATTE (HAPAX LEGOMENA IV)
1971, 34 minutes, 16mm, silent.
“TRAVELING MATTE is the pivot upon which the whole of HAPAX LEGOMENA turns.” –H.F.
“This film metaphors an entire human life: birth, sex, death – the framing device is the fingers and palm of the maker’s hand, wherein others only attempt to read the future.” –Stan Brakhage

ORDINARY MATTER  (HAPAX LEGOMENA V)
1972, 36 minutes, 16mm, sound on CD.
“A vision of a journey, during which the eye of the mind drives headlong through Salisbury Cloister (a monument to enclosure), Brooklyn Bridge (a monument to connection), Stonehenge (a monument to the intercourse between consciousness and LIGHT)… visiting along the way diverse meadows, barns, waters where I now live; and ending in the remembered cornfields of my childhood.” –H.F.
“I suppose I think of it as a kind of acceleration from TRAVELING MATTE. [There] the eye is groping and feeling its way and staggering and so forth. And [here] the need somehow to worry about those words, and still photographs, and so forth, is behind. ORDINARY MATTER is for me a kind of ecstatic, headlong dive.” –H.F.

REMOTE CONTROL (HAPAX LEGOMENA VI)
1972, 29 minutes, 16mm, silent.
“[In REMOTE CONTROL], the images speed up to the point where every successive frame is different from every previous frame, so that if there is an image in it, it’s a kind of inner voice within the images, as sometimes music will have many voices that can be written out on the paper, and then in the listening the real shape of the music is to be found in the voice that is generated among them. … It was shot in a single evening, off the tube, right off the ordinary TV set, in the course of an evening.” –H.F.

SPECIAL EFFECTS (HAPAX LEGOMENA VII)
1972, 11 minutes, 16mm, sound.
“I wanted to affirm and honor the film frame itself. Because so much of what we know now, so much of our experience is something that comes to us through that frame. It seems to be a kind of synonym for what we are conscious of. I have only seen the pyramids of Egypt within that frame. I have only seen – endless things – most of what I believe I have experienced I have in fact seen at the movies. I’ve seen it inside that frame.” –H.F.
Total running time: ca. 115 minutes.

“A major poetic work. Created and put together by a very clear eye-head, this original and complex abstract work moves beyond the letters of the alphabet, beyond words and beyond Freud. If you don’t understand it the first time you see it, don’t despair, see it again! When you finally ‘get it,’ a small light, possibly a candle, will light itself inside your forehead.” –Ernie Gehr

HOLLIS FRAMPTON’S HAPAX LEGOMENA
MARCH 25-31
“Hapax legomena are, literally, ‘things said once’. The scholarly jargon refers to those words that occur only a single time in the entire oeuvre of an author, or in a whole literature.” –H.F.

Hollis Frampton – photographer, theoretician, philosopher and, above all, filmmaker – is one of the towering figures of American avant-garde cinema. Possessed of a frighteningly prodigious and wide-ranging intellect – he was a voracious reader from childhood, and his films abound with evidence of his fascination with linguistics, science, mathematics and philosophy – combined with a witty and mischievous attraction to puzzles and game-playing, Frampton was active as a filmmaker for only a decade-and-a-half (his career cut tragically short by his death from cancer in 1984). But in that brief time he created a breathtakingly ambitious body of work, whose range and inventiveness are unsurpassed.

Frampton’s seven-part HAPAX LEGOMENA is arguably his greatest completed achievement. While its various parts can each stand alone, together they form a complex and quasi-symphonic whole – an enigmatic structuralist ‘autobiography’, a series of investigations into the possibilities of filmmaking, and a playful and dazzling encyclopedia of the cinema that is perhaps the closest thing avant-garde film has to Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”. Puzzling, conceptually daring, and at times disarmingly comic, HAPAX LEGOMENA is one of the pinnacles of experimental film.

This full week of screenings of the complete work celebrates the preservation of HAPAX LEGOMENA, as well as the April 2009 publication, by MIT Press, of ON THE CAMERA ARTS AND CONSECUTIVE MATTERS: THE WRITINGS OF HOLLIS FRAMPTON, edited by Bruce Jenkins, a collection encompassing Frampton’s critical essays, lectures, correspondence, interviews, and scripts.

In addition to a very special recreation of Frampton’s A LECTURE, and presentations by Michael Zryd (York University) and Ken Eisenstein (University of Chicago) on Saturday, March 28, each evening will feature an introduction by a different Frampton scholar or enthusiast. The scheduled speakers include:
Keith Sanborn, filmmaker and critic (Wednesday); Annette Michelson, scholar and co-founder of the journal, OCTOBER (Thursday); P. Adams Sitney, scholar and author of VISIONARY FILM (Friday); Bruce Jenkins, Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Professor of Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Saturday); Bill Brand, filmmaker, scholar, and preservationist, along with students from NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (Sunday); and Gerry O’Grady, scholar and writer (Monday).

HAPAX LEGOMENA has been preserved through a major cooperative effort funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation, and undertaken by MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the New York University Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, and Bill Brand, professor in the NYU program and project conservator.

PROGRAM 1:
(nostalgia) (HAPAX LEGOMENA I)
1971, 36 minutes, 16mm, sound.
“[T]he time it takes for a photograph to burn (and thus confirm its two-dimensionality) becomes the clock within the film, while Frampton plays the critic, asynchronously glossing, explicating, narrating, mythologizing his earlier art, and his earlier life, as he commits them both to the fire of a labyrinthine structure; for Borges too was one of his earlier masters, and he grins behind the facades of logic, mathematics, and physical demonstration which are the formal metaphors for most of Frampton’s films.” –P. Adams Sitney

POETIC JUSTICE (HAPAX LEGOMENA II)
1972, 31 minutes, 16mm, silent.
“Frampton presents us with a ‘scenario’ of extreme complexity in which the themes of sexuality, infidelity, voyeurism are ‘projected’ in narrative sequence entirely through the voice telling the tale – again it is the first person singular speaking, however, in the present tense and addressing the characters as ‘you,’ ‘your lover,’ and referring to an ‘I’. We see, on screen, only the physical aspect of a script, papers resting on a table…and the projection is that of a film as consonant with the projection of the mind.” –Annette Michelson

CRITICAL MASS (HAPAX LEGOMENA III)
1971, 26 minutes, 16mm, sound.
“As a work of art I think [it] is quite universal and deals with all quarrels (those between men and women, or men and men, or women and women, or children, or war. It is war!... It is very funny, and rather obviously so. It is a magic film in that you can enjoy it, with greater appreciation, each time you look at it. Most aesthetic experiences are not enjoyable on the surface. You have to look at them a number of times before you are able to fully enjoy them, but this one stands up at once, and again and again, and is amazingly clear.” –Stan Brakhage
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

HOLLIS FRAMPTON’S HAPAX LEGOMENA
MARCH 25-31
“Hapax legomena are, literally, ‘things said once’. The scholarly jargon refers to those words that occur only a single time in the entire oeuvre of an author, or in a whole literature.” –H.F.

Hollis Frampton – photographer, theoretician, philosopher and, above all, filmmaker – is one of the towering figures of American avant-garde cinema. Possessed of a frighteningly prodigious and wide-ranging intellect – he was a voracious reader from childhood, and his films abound with evidence of his fascination with linguistics, science, mathematics and philosophy – combined with a witty and mischievous attraction to puzzles and game-playing, Frampton was active as a filmmaker for only a decade-and-a-half (his career cut tragically short by his death from cancer in 1984). But in that brief time he created a breathtakingly ambitious body of work, whose range and inventiveness are unsurpassed.

Frampton’s seven-part HAPAX LEGOMENA is arguably his greatest completed achievement. While its various parts can each stand alone, together they form a complex and quasi-symphonic whole – an enigmatic structuralist ‘autobiography’, a series of investigations into the possibilities of filmmaking, and a playful and dazzling encyclopedia of the cinema that is perhaps the closest thing avant-garde film has to Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”. Puzzling, conceptually daring, and at times disarmingly comic, HAPAX LEGOMENA is one of the pinnacles of experimental film.

This full week of screenings of the complete work celebrates the preservation of HAPAX LEGOMENA, as well as the April 2009 publication, by MIT Press, of ON THE CAMERA ARTS AND CONSECUTIVE MATTERS: THE WRITINGS OF HOLLIS FRAMPTON, edited by Bruce Jenkins, a collection encompassing Frampton’s critical essays, lectures, correspondence, interviews, and scripts.

In addition to a very special recreation of Frampton’s A LECTURE, and presentations by Michael Zryd (York University) and Ken Eisenstein (University of Chicago) on Saturday, March 28, each evening will feature an introduction by a different Frampton scholar or enthusiast. The scheduled speakers include:
Keith Sanborn, filmmaker and critic (Wednesday); Annette Michelson, scholar and co-founder of the journal, OCTOBER (Thursday); P. Adams Sitney, scholar and author of VISIONARY FILM (Friday); Bruce Jenkins, Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Professor of Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Saturday); Bill Brand, filmmaker, scholar, and preservationist, along with students from NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (Sunday); and Gerry O’Grady, scholar and writer (Monday).

HAPAX LEGOMENA has been preserved through a major cooperative effort funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation, and undertaken by MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the New York University Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, and Bill Brand, professor in the NYU program and project conservator.

PROGRAM 2:
TRAVELING MATTE (HAPAX LEGOMENA IV)
1971, 34 minutes, 16mm, silent.
“TRAVELING MATTE is the pivot upon which the whole of HAPAX LEGOMENA turns.” –H.F.
“This film metaphors an entire human life: birth, sex, death – the framing device is the fingers and palm of the maker’s hand, wherein others only attempt to read the future.” –Stan Brakhage

ORDINARY MATTER  (HAPAX LEGOMENA V)
1972, 36 minutes, 16mm, sound on CD.
“A vision of a journey, during which the eye of the mind drives headlong through Salisbury Cloister (a monument to enclosure), Brooklyn Bridge (a monument to connection), Stonehenge (a monument to the intercourse between consciousness and LIGHT)… visiting along the way diverse meadows, barns, waters where I now live; and ending in the remembered cornfields of my childhood.” –H.F.
“I suppose I think of it as a kind of acceleration from TRAVELING MATTE. [There] the eye is groping and feeling its way and staggering and so forth. And [here] the need somehow to worry about those words, and still photographs, and so forth, is behind. ORDINARY MATTER is for me a kind of ecstatic, headlong dive.” –H.F.

REMOTE CONTROL (HAPAX LEGOMENA VI)
1972, 29 minutes, 16mm, silent.
“[In REMOTE CONTROL], the images speed up to the point where every successive frame is different from every previous frame, so that if there is an image in it, it’s a kind of inner voice within the images, as sometimes music will have many voices that can be written out on the paper, and then in the listening the real shape of the music is to be found in the voice that is generated among them. … It was shot in a single evening, off the tube, right off the ordinary TV set, in the course of an evening.” –H.F.

SPECIAL EFFECTS (HAPAX LEGOMENA VII)
1972, 11 minutes, 16mm, sound.
“I wanted to affirm and honor the film frame itself. Because so much of what we know now, so much of our experience is something that comes to us through that frame. It seems to be a kind of synonym for what we are conscious of. I have only seen the pyramids of Egypt within that frame. I have only seen – endless things – most of what I believe I have experienced I have in fact seen at the movies. I’ve seen it inside that frame.” –H.F.
Total running time: ca. 115 minutes.

HOLLIS FRAMPTON’S HAPAX LEGOMENA
MARCH 25-31
“Hapax legomena are, literally, ‘things said once’. The scholarly jargon refers to those words that occur only a single time in the entire oeuvre of an author, or in a whole literature.” –H.F.

Hollis Frampton – photographer, theoretician, philosopher and, above all, filmmaker – is one of the towering figures of American avant-garde cinema. Possessed of a frighteningly prodigious and wide-ranging intellect – he was a voracious reader from childhood, and his films abound with evidence of his fascination with linguistics, science, mathematics and philosophy – combined with a witty and mischievous attraction to puzzles and game-playing, Frampton was active as a filmmaker for only a decade-and-a-half (his career cut tragically short by his death from cancer in 1984). But in that brief time he created a breathtakingly ambitious body of work, whose range and inventiveness are unsurpassed.

Frampton’s seven-part HAPAX LEGOMENA is arguably his greatest completed achievement. While its various parts can each stand alone, together they form a complex and quasi-symphonic whole – an enigmatic structuralist ‘autobiography’, a series of investigations into the possibilities of filmmaking, and a playful and dazzling encyclopedia of the cinema that is perhaps the closest thing avant-garde film has to Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”. Puzzling, conceptually daring, and at times disarmingly comic, HAPAX LEGOMENA is one of the pinnacles of experimental film.

This full week of screenings of the complete work celebrates the preservation of HAPAX LEGOMENA, as well as the April 2009 publication, by MIT Press, of ON THE CAMERA ARTS AND CONSECUTIVE MATTERS: THE WRITINGS OF HOLLIS FRAMPTON, edited by Bruce Jenkins, a collection encompassing Frampton’s critical essays, lectures, correspondence, interviews, and scripts.

In addition to a very special recreation of Frampton’s A LECTURE, and presentations by Michael Zryd (York University) and Ken Eisenstein (University of Chicago) on Saturday, March 28, each evening will feature an introduction by a different Frampton scholar or enthusiast. The scheduled speakers include:
Keith Sanborn, filmmaker and critic (Wednesday); Annette Michelson, scholar and co-founder of the journal, OCTOBER (Thursday); P. Adams Sitney, scholar and author of VISIONARY FILM (Friday); Bruce Jenkins, Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Professor of Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Saturday); Bill Brand, filmmaker, scholar, and preservationist, along with students from NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (Sunday); and Gerry O’Grady, scholar and writer (Monday).

HAPAX LEGOMENA has been preserved through a major cooperative effort funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation, and undertaken by MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the New York University Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, and Bill Brand, professor in the NYU program and project conservator.

PROGRAM 1:
(nostalgia) (HAPAX LEGOMENA I)
1971, 36 minutes, 16mm, sound.
“[T]he time it takes for a photograph to burn (and thus confirm its two-dimensionality) becomes the clock within the film, while Frampton plays the critic, asynchronously glossing, explicating, narrating, mythologizing his earlier art, and his earlier life, as he commits them both to the fire of a labyrinthine structure; for Borges too was one of his earlier masters, and he grins behind the facades of logic, mathematics, and physical demonstration which are the formal metaphors for most of Frampton’s films.” –P. Adams Sitney

POETIC JUSTICE (HAPAX LEGOMENA II)
1972, 31 minutes, 16mm, silent.
“Frampton presents us with a ‘scenario’ of extreme complexity in which the themes of sexuality, infidelity, voyeurism are ‘projected’ in narrative sequence entirely through the voice telling the tale – again it is the first person singular speaking, however, in the present tense and addressing the characters as ‘you,’ ‘your lover,’ and referring to an ‘I’. We see, on screen, only the physical aspect of a script, papers resting on a table…and the projection is that of a film as consonant with the projection of the mind.” –Annette Michelson

CRITICAL MASS (HAPAX LEGOMENA III)
1971, 26 minutes, 16mm, sound.
“As a work of art I think [it] is quite universal and deals with all quarrels (those between men and women, or men and men, or women and women, or children, or war. It is war!... It is very funny, and rather obviously so. It is a magic film in that you can enjoy it, with greater appreciation, each time you look at it. Most aesthetic experiences are not enjoyable on the surface. You have to look at them a number of times before you are able to fully enjoy them, but this one stands up at once, and again and again, and is amazingly clear.” –Stan Brakhage
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

HOLLIS FRAMPTON’S HAPAX LEGOMENA
MARCH 25-31
“Hapax legomena are, literally, ‘things said once’. The scholarly jargon refers to those words that occur only a single time in the entire oeuvre of an author, or in a whole literature.” –H.F.

Hollis Frampton – photographer, theoretician, philosopher and, above all, filmmaker – is one of the towering figures of American avant-garde cinema. Possessed of a frighteningly prodigious and wide-ranging intellect – he was a voracious reader from childhood, and his films abound with evidence of his fascination with linguistics, science, mathematics and philosophy – combined with a witty and mischievous attraction to puzzles and game-playing, Frampton was active as a filmmaker for only a decade-and-a-half (his career cut tragically short by his death from cancer in 1984). But in that brief time he created a breathtakingly ambitious body of work, whose range and inventiveness are unsurpassed.

Frampton’s seven-part HAPAX LEGOMENA is arguably his greatest completed achievement. While its various parts can each stand alone, together they form a complex and quasi-symphonic whole – an enigmatic structuralist ‘autobiography’, a series of investigations into the possibilities of filmmaking, and a playful and dazzling encyclopedia of the cinema that is perhaps the closest thing avant-garde film has to Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”. Puzzling, conceptually daring, and at times disarmingly comic, HAPAX LEGOMENA is one of the pinnacles of experimental film.

This full week of screenings of the complete work celebrates the preservation of HAPAX LEGOMENA, as well as the April 2009 publication, by MIT Press, of ON THE CAMERA ARTS AND CONSECUTIVE MATTERS: THE WRITINGS OF HOLLIS FRAMPTON, edited by Bruce Jenkins, a collection encompassing Frampton’s critical essays, lectures, correspondence, interviews, and scripts.

In addition to a very special recreation of Frampton’s A LECTURE, and presentations by Michael Zryd (York University) and Ken Eisenstein (University of Chicago) on Saturday, March 28, each evening will feature an introduction by a different Frampton scholar or enthusiast. The scheduled speakers include:
Keith Sanborn, filmmaker and critic (Wednesday); Annette Michelson, scholar and co-founder of the journal, OCTOBER (Thursday); P. Adams Sitney, scholar and author of VISIONARY FILM (Friday); Bruce Jenkins, Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Professor of Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Saturday); Bill Brand, filmmaker, scholar, and preservationist, along with students from NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (Sunday); and Gerry O’Grady, scholar and writer (Monday).

HAPAX LEGOMENA has been preserved through a major cooperative effort funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation, and undertaken by MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the New York University Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, and Bill Brand, professor in the NYU program and project conservator.

PROGRAM 2:
TRAVELING MATTE (HAPAX LEGOMENA IV)
1971, 34 minutes, 16mm, silent.
“TRAVELING MATTE is the pivot upon which the whole of HAPAX LEGOMENA turns.” –H.F.
“This film metaphors an entire human life: birth, sex, death – the framing device is the fingers and palm of the maker’s hand, wherein others only attempt to read the future.” –Stan Brakhage

ORDINARY MATTER  (HAPAX LEGOMENA V)
1972, 36 minutes, 16mm, sound on CD.
“A vision of a journey, during which the eye of the mind drives headlong through Salisbury Cloister (a monument to enclosure), Brooklyn Bridge (a monument to connection), Stonehenge (a monument to the intercourse between consciousness and LIGHT)… visiting along the way diverse meadows, barns, waters where I now live; and ending in the remembered cornfields of my childhood.” –H.F.
“I suppose I think of it as a kind of acceleration from TRAVELING MATTE. [There] the eye is groping and feeling its way and staggering and so forth. And [here] the need somehow to worry about those words, and still photographs, and so forth, is behind. ORDINARY MATTER is for me a kind of ecstatic, headlong dive.” –H.F.

REMOTE CONTROL (HAPAX LEGOMENA VI)
1972, 29 minutes, 16mm, silent.
“[In REMOTE CONTROL], the images speed up to the point where every successive frame is different from every previous frame, so that if there is an image in it, it’s a kind of inner voice within the images, as sometimes music will have many voices that can be written out on the paper, and then in the listening the real shape of the music is to be found in the voice that is generated among them. … It was shot in a single evening, off the tube, right off the ordinary TV set, in the course of an evening.” –H.F.

SPECIAL EFFECTS (HAPAX LEGOMENA VII)
1972, 11 minutes, 16mm, sound.
“I wanted to affirm and honor the film frame itself. Because so much of what we know now, so much of our experience is something that comes to us through that frame. It seems to be a kind of synonym for what we are conscious of. I have only seen the pyramids of Egypt within that frame. I have only seen – endless things – most of what I believe I have experienced I have in fact seen at the movies. I’ve seen it inside that frame.” –H.F.
Total running time: ca. 115 minutes.

NEWFILMMAKERS PRESENTS FILMS ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND AMERICA

DOCUMENTARY PROGRAM
Masoud Farand LOSING AFGHANISTAN (2007, 47 minutes, video)
Masoud Farand USA: DESIRED & DESPISED (2008, 27 minutes, video)
Selcuk Oksuzoglu THE RESTORER (2005, 44 minutes, video)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Moniere* OH AKBAR (2005, 8 minutes, video)
Moniere* KHANJAR (2008, 7 minutes, video)
&
Affandy Yacoob & Ajmal Yourish
AL QAREM
2006, 84 minutes, video.
An Afghan family’s friend becomes the victim of an FBI agent who lost a brother in the 9/11 attacks.
–Tuesday, March 31, Documentary Program at 6:00, Feature Presentation at 8:15.

HOLLIS FRAMPTON’S HAPAX LEGOMENA
MARCH 25-31
“Hapax legomena are, literally, ‘things said once’. The scholarly jargon refers to those words that occur only a single time in the entire oeuvre of an author, or in a whole literature.” –H.F.

Hollis Frampton – photographer, theoretician, philosopher and, above all, filmmaker – is one of the towering figures of American avant-garde cinema. Possessed of a frighteningly prodigious and wide-ranging intellect – he was a voracious reader from childhood, and his films abound with evidence of his fascination with linguistics, science, mathematics and philosophy – combined with a witty and mischievous attraction to puzzles and game-playing, Frampton was active as a filmmaker for only a decade-and-a-half (his career cut tragically short by his death from cancer in 1984). But in that brief time he created a breathtakingly ambitious body of work, whose range and inventiveness are unsurpassed.

Frampton’s seven-part HAPAX LEGOMENA is arguably his greatest completed achievement. While its various parts can each stand alone, together they form a complex and quasi-symphonic whole – an enigmatic structuralist ‘autobiography’, a series of investigations into the possibilities of filmmaking, and a playful and dazzling encyclopedia of the cinema that is perhaps the closest thing avant-garde film has to Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”. Puzzling, conceptually daring, and at times disarmingly comic, HAPAX LEGOMENA is one of the pinnacles of experimental film.

This full week of screenings of the complete work celebrates the preservation of HAPAX LEGOMENA, as well as the April 2009 publication, by MIT Press, of ON THE CAMERA ARTS AND CONSECUTIVE MATTERS: THE WRITINGS OF HOLLIS FRAMPTON, edited by Bruce Jenkins, a collection encompassing Frampton’s critical essays, lectures, correspondence, interviews, and scripts.

In addition to a very special recreation of Frampton’s A LECTURE, and presentations by Michael Zryd (York University) and Ken Eisenstein (University of Chicago) on Saturday, March 28, each evening will feature an introduction by a different Frampton scholar or enthusiast. The scheduled speakers include:
Keith Sanborn, filmmaker and critic (Wednesday); Annette Michelson, scholar and co-founder of the journal, OCTOBER (Thursday); P. Adams Sitney, scholar and author of VISIONARY FILM (Friday); Bruce Jenkins, Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Professor of Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Saturday); Bill Brand, filmmaker, scholar, and preservationist, along with students from NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (Sunday); and Gerry O’Grady, scholar and writer (Monday).

HAPAX LEGOMENA has been preserved through a major cooperative effort funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation, and undertaken by MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the New York University Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, and Bill Brand, professor in the NYU program and project conservator.

PROGRAM 1:
(nostalgia) (HAPAX LEGOMENA I)
1971, 36 minutes, 16mm, sound.
“[T]he time it takes for a photograph to burn (and thus confirm its two-dimensionality) becomes the clock within the film, while Frampton plays the critic, asynchronously glossing, explicating, narrating, mythologizing his earlier art, and his earlier life, as he commits them both to the fire of a labyrinthine structure; for Borges too was one of his earlier masters, and he grins behind the facades of logic, mathematics, and physical demonstration which are the formal metaphors for most of Frampton’s films.” –P. Adams Sitney

POETIC JUSTICE (HAPAX LEGOMENA II)
1972, 31 minutes, 16mm, silent.
“Frampton presents us with a ‘scenario’ of extreme complexity in which the themes of sexuality, infidelity, voyeurism are ‘projected’ in narrative sequence entirely through the voice telling the tale – again it is the first person singular speaking, however, in the present tense and addressing the characters as ‘you,’ ‘your lover,’ and referring to an ‘I’. We see, on screen, only the physical aspect of a script, papers resting on a table…and the projection is that of a film as consonant with the projection of the mind.” –Annette Michelson

CRITICAL MASS (HAPAX LEGOMENA III)
1971, 26 minutes, 16mm, sound.
“As a work of art I think [it] is quite universal and deals with all quarrels (those between men and women, or men and men, or women and women, or children, or war. It is war!... It is very funny, and rather obviously so. It is a magic film in that you can enjoy it, with greater appreciation, each time you look at it. Most aesthetic experiences are not enjoyable on the surface. You have to look at them a number of times before you are able to fully enjoy them, but this one stands up at once, and again and again, and is amazingly clear.” –Stan Brakhage
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

HOLLIS FRAMPTON’S HAPAX LEGOMENA
MARCH 25-31
“Hapax legomena are, literally, ‘things said once’. The scholarly jargon refers to those words that occur only a single time in the entire oeuvre of an author, or in a whole literature.” –H.F.

Hollis Frampton – photographer, theoretician, philosopher and, above all, filmmaker – is one of the towering figures of American avant-garde cinema. Possessed of a frighteningly prodigious and wide-ranging intellect – he was a voracious reader from childhood, and his films abound with evidence of his fascination with linguistics, science, mathematics and philosophy – combined with a witty and mischievous attraction to puzzles and game-playing, Frampton was active as a filmmaker for only a decade-and-a-half (his career cut tragically short by his death from cancer in 1984). But in that brief time he created a breathtakingly ambitious body of work, whose range and inventiveness are unsurpassed.

Frampton’s seven-part HAPAX LEGOMENA is arguably his greatest completed achievement. While its various parts can each stand alone, together they form a complex and quasi-symphonic whole – an enigmatic structuralist ‘autobiography’, a series of investigations into the possibilities of filmmaking, and a playful and dazzling encyclopedia of the cinema that is perhaps the closest thing avant-garde film has to Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”. Puzzling, conceptually daring, and at times disarmingly comic, HAPAX LEGOMENA is one of the pinnacles of experimental film.

This full week of screenings of the complete work celebrates the preservation of HAPAX LEGOMENA, as well as the April 2009 publication, by MIT Press, of ON THE CAMERA ARTS AND CONSECUTIVE MATTERS: THE WRITINGS OF HOLLIS FRAMPTON, edited by Bruce Jenkins, a collection encompassing Frampton’s critical essays, lectures, correspondence, interviews, and scripts.

In addition to a very special recreation of Frampton’s A LECTURE, and presentations by Michael Zryd (York University) and Ken Eisenstein (University of Chicago) on Saturday, March 28, each evening will feature an introduction by a different Frampton scholar or enthusiast. The scheduled speakers include:
Keith Sanborn, filmmaker and critic (Wednesday); Annette Michelson, scholar and co-founder of the journal, OCTOBER (Thursday); P. Adams Sitney, scholar and author of VISIONARY FILM (Friday); Bruce Jenkins, Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Professor of Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Saturday); Bill Brand, filmmaker, scholar, and preservationist, along with students from NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (Sunday); and Gerry O’Grady, scholar and writer (Monday).

HAPAX LEGOMENA has been preserved through a major cooperative effort funded by the National Film Preservation Foundation, and undertaken by MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the New York University Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, and Bill Brand, professor in the NYU program and project conservator.

PROGRAM 2:
TRAVELING MATTE (HAPAX LEGOMENA IV)
1971, 34 minutes, 16mm, silent.
“TRAVELING MATTE is the pivot upon which the whole of HAPAX LEGOMENA turns.” –H.F.
“This film metaphors an entire human life: birth, sex, death – the framing device is the fingers and palm of the maker’s hand, wherein others only attempt to read the future.” –Stan Brakhage

ORDINARY MATTER  (HAPAX LEGOMENA V)
1972, 36 minutes, 16mm, sound on CD.
“A vision of a journey, during which the eye of the mind drives headlong through Salisbury Cloister (a monument to enclosure), Brooklyn Bridge (a monument to connection), Stonehenge (a monument to the intercourse between consciousness and LIGHT)… visiting along the way diverse meadows, barns, waters where I now live; and ending in the remembered cornfields of my childhood.” –H.F.
“I suppose I think of it as a kind of acceleration from TRAVELING MATTE. [There] the eye is groping and feeling its way and staggering and so forth. And [here] the need somehow to worry about those words, and still photographs, and so forth, is behind. ORDINARY MATTER is for me a kind of ecstatic, headlong dive.” –H.F.

REMOTE CONTROL (HAPAX LEGOMENA VI)
1972, 29 minutes, 16mm, silent.
“[In REMOTE CONTROL], the images speed up to the point where every successive frame is different from every previous frame, so that if there is an image in it, it’s a kind of inner voice within the images, as sometimes music will have many voices that can be written out on the paper, and then in the listening the real shape of the music is to be found in the voice that is generated among them. … It was shot in a single evening, off the tube, right off the ordinary TV set, in the course of an evening.” –H.F.

SPECIAL EFFECTS (HAPAX LEGOMENA VII)
1972, 11 minutes, 16mm, sound.
“I wanted to affirm and honor the film frame itself. Because so much of what we know now, so much of our experience is something that comes to us through that frame. It seems to be a kind of synonym for what we are conscious of. I have only seen the pyramids of Egypt within that frame. I have only seen – endless things – most of what I believe I have experienced I have in fact seen at the movies. I’ve seen it inside that frame.” –H.F.
Total running time: ca. 115 minutes.