Anthology Film Archives

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
With Tallie Medel, Sky Hirschkron, Aundrea Fares, Kati Schwartz, and Caroline Luft.
Dan Sallitt’s remarkable, boldly conceived fourth feature is a vivid character study of Jackie, a charismatic, fiercely intelligent, soulful young woman struggling to navigate the choppy waters of adolescence, and nurturing an intense emotional attachment to her older brother that crosses over unmistakably into incestuousness. Frankly acknowledging her forbidden feelings in the company of both her unfazed but elusive brother and her loving but ineffectual mother, Jackie is deeply confused and adrift, even while her sharp wit and keen intellect render her an astute analyst of her own situation.

While its central conceit is admirably provocative, the film’s courting of controversy is belied by Sallitt’s resolutely unspectacular approach – quietly observational, psychologically penetrating, and deeply sensitive, THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT treats its attention-grabbing premise as a prism through which it explores the universally familiar process of negotiating between attachment and emotional independence as one progresses towards adulthood.

A critic and blogger as well as a filmmaker, Sallitt has established a unique and confident voice, both in his writing and in his long-gestating but always impressive feature films (all of which will be screening at Anthology on this calendar). A great admirer of (and profoundly astute commentator on) the work of such masters of behavioral cinema as Eric Rohmer, Maurice Pialat, and Mikio Naruse, Sallitt is perhaps contemporary American cinema’s foremost keeper of their flame, and THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT a deeply moving example of his craft.

“The film is much more than an homage [to Eric Rohmer]; it’s an idiosyncratic take on desire and change that goes into uncharted sexual territories Rohmer never dared to thread, and does so with a measure of elegant, fearless lucidity few directors are capable of mustering.” –Michał Oleszczyk, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

“The mystery and surprise of THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT is how such a cerebral film can be so emotionally affecting. […] This impressive feature provides strong evidence that Dan Sallitt is one of the most underappreciated major American indie writer/directors out there.” –J.J. Murphy

“TOP TEN OF 2012: As close as an American director has ever come to making a Rohmer movie – and not only because the wonderful actor playing the teenage heroine resembles the young Béatrice Romand.” –Amy Taubin, ARTFORUM

With Strawn Bovee, Edith Meeks, Dylan McCormick, and Lois Raebeck.
Evelyn Bell, a Catholic professor of theology, and her younger sister Virginia are reunited after many years when Virginia returns home mired in a depression after being ejected from a religious cult. At a lakeside retreat in Northeastern Pennsylvania, the sisters try to reestablish their relationship, talking about their very different systems of belief, and about the oppressive childhood that still hangs over them….

“With religious films tending toward either propaganda or satire, ALL THE SHIPS AT SEA arrives like a gust of crisp sea air. With its searching discussion of faith lost and found, this highly impressive second feature by Sallitt follows the tradition of Dreyer, Bergman and Bresson, and is distinguished by two exceptional lead performances and an unusually rigorous aesthetic. … To encounter characters this authentically self-aware and introspective in an American film is rare.” –Scott Foundas, VARIETY

“Watching and listening to Strawn Bovee and Edith Meeks is like listening to two great jazz soloists jamming, in perfect tune with each other. … Woody Allen would cut off his right arm to be able to make a film like this, but he doesn’t have the intelligence, the taste or the actresses.” –Bill Krohn

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
With Tallie Medel, Sky Hirschkron, Aundrea Fares, Kati Schwartz, and Caroline Luft.
Dan Sallitt’s remarkable, boldly conceived fourth feature is a vivid character study of Jackie, a charismatic, fiercely intelligent, soulful young woman struggling to navigate the choppy waters of adolescence, and nurturing an intense emotional attachment to her older brother that crosses over unmistakably into incestuousness. Frankly acknowledging her forbidden feelings in the company of both her unfazed but elusive brother and her loving but ineffectual mother, Jackie is deeply confused and adrift, even while her sharp wit and keen intellect render her an astute analyst of her own situation.

While its central conceit is admirably provocative, the film’s courting of controversy is belied by Sallitt’s resolutely unspectacular approach – quietly observational, psychologically penetrating, and deeply sensitive, THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT treats its attention-grabbing premise as a prism through which it explores the universally familiar process of negotiating between attachment and emotional independence as one progresses towards adulthood.

A critic and blogger as well as a filmmaker, Sallitt has established a unique and confident voice, both in his writing and in his long-gestating but always impressive feature films (all of which will be screening at Anthology on this calendar). A great admirer of (and profoundly astute commentator on) the work of such masters of behavioral cinema as Eric Rohmer, Maurice Pialat, and Mikio Naruse, Sallitt is perhaps contemporary American cinema’s foremost keeper of their flame, and THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT a deeply moving example of his craft.

“The film is much more than an homage [to Eric Rohmer]; it’s an idiosyncratic take on desire and change that goes into uncharted sexual territories Rohmer never dared to thread, and does so with a measure of elegant, fearless lucidity few directors are capable of mustering.” –Michał Oleszczyk, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

“The mystery and surprise of THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT is how such a cerebral film can be so emotionally affecting. […] This impressive feature provides strong evidence that Dan Sallitt is one of the most underappreciated major American indie writer/directors out there.” –J.J. Murphy

“TOP TEN OF 2012: As close as an American director has ever come to making a Rohmer movie – and not only because the wonderful actor playing the teenage heroine resembles the young Béatrice Romand.” –Amy Taubin, ARTFORUM

With Dawn Wildsmith, S.A. Griffin, and Strawn Bovee.
Out of Nick Huxley’s past comes Theresa, a lowlife who sleeps with anything that moves and who has decided that she wants Nick back. Nick, a successful photographer with a stable relationship, is determined to banish Theresa and youthful folly from his life. But neither Nick’s girlfriend Arliss, who believes in driving buried emotions out into the open, nor Theresa, who seems to have an unseen power on her side, is willing to let it go at that…

Shot in Los Angeles in 1985 on ¾” video and never shown since its 1986 run at West Hollywood’s EZTV, POLLY PERVERSE was described by Sallitt as a cross between BRINGING UP BABY and THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE. The heterogeneous cast includes Sallitt regular Strawn Bovee, L.A. poet S. A. Griffin, Fred Olen Ray axiom Dawn Wildsmith, and film critics Michael Wilmington and Blake Lucas.

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
With Tallie Medel, Sky Hirschkron, Aundrea Fares, Kati Schwartz, and Caroline Luft.
Dan Sallitt’s remarkable, boldly conceived fourth feature is a vivid character study of Jackie, a charismatic, fiercely intelligent, soulful young woman struggling to navigate the choppy waters of adolescence, and nurturing an intense emotional attachment to her older brother that crosses over unmistakably into incestuousness. Frankly acknowledging her forbidden feelings in the company of both her unfazed but elusive brother and her loving but ineffectual mother, Jackie is deeply confused and adrift, even while her sharp wit and keen intellect render her an astute analyst of her own situation.

While its central conceit is admirably provocative, the film’s courting of controversy is belied by Sallitt’s resolutely unspectacular approach – quietly observational, psychologically penetrating, and deeply sensitive, THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT treats its attention-grabbing premise as a prism through which it explores the universally familiar process of negotiating between attachment and emotional independence as one progresses towards adulthood.

A critic and blogger as well as a filmmaker, Sallitt has established a unique and confident voice, both in his writing and in his long-gestating but always impressive feature films (all of which will be screening at Anthology on this calendar). A great admirer of (and profoundly astute commentator on) the work of such masters of behavioral cinema as Eric Rohmer, Maurice Pialat, and Mikio Naruse, Sallitt is perhaps contemporary American cinema’s foremost keeper of their flame, and THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT a deeply moving example of his craft.

“The film is much more than an homage [to Eric Rohmer]; it’s an idiosyncratic take on desire and change that goes into uncharted sexual territories Rohmer never dared to thread, and does so with a measure of elegant, fearless lucidity few directors are capable of mustering.” –Michał Oleszczyk, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

“The mystery and surprise of THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT is how such a cerebral film can be so emotionally affecting. […] This impressive feature provides strong evidence that Dan Sallitt is one of the most underappreciated major American indie writer/directors out there.” –J.J. Murphy

“TOP TEN OF 2012: As close as an American director has ever come to making a Rohmer movie – and not only because the wonderful actor playing the teenage heroine resembles the young Béatrice Romand.” –Amy Taubin, ARTFORUM

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
With Tallie Medel, Sky Hirschkron, Aundrea Fares, Kati Schwartz, and Caroline Luft.
Dan Sallitt’s remarkable, boldly conceived fourth feature is a vivid character study of Jackie, a charismatic, fiercely intelligent, soulful young woman struggling to navigate the choppy waters of adolescence, and nurturing an intense emotional attachment to her older brother that crosses over unmistakably into incestuousness. Frankly acknowledging her forbidden feelings in the company of both her unfazed but elusive brother and her loving but ineffectual mother, Jackie is deeply confused and adrift, even while her sharp wit and keen intellect render her an astute analyst of her own situation.

While its central conceit is admirably provocative, the film’s courting of controversy is belied by Sallitt’s resolutely unspectacular approach – quietly observational, psychologically penetrating, and deeply sensitive, THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT treats its attention-grabbing premise as a prism through which it explores the universally familiar process of negotiating between attachment and emotional independence as one progresses towards adulthood.

A critic and blogger as well as a filmmaker, Sallitt has established a unique and confident voice, both in his writing and in his long-gestating but always impressive feature films (all of which will be screening at Anthology on this calendar). A great admirer of (and profoundly astute commentator on) the work of such masters of behavioral cinema as Eric Rohmer, Maurice Pialat, and Mikio Naruse, Sallitt is perhaps contemporary American cinema’s foremost keeper of their flame, and THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT a deeply moving example of his craft.

“The film is much more than an homage [to Eric Rohmer]; it’s an idiosyncratic take on desire and change that goes into uncharted sexual territories Rohmer never dared to thread, and does so with a measure of elegant, fearless lucidity few directors are capable of mustering.” –Michał Oleszczyk, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

“The mystery and surprise of THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT is how such a cerebral film can be so emotionally affecting. […] This impressive feature provides strong evidence that Dan Sallitt is one of the most underappreciated major American indie writer/directors out there.” –J.J. Murphy

“TOP TEN OF 2012: As close as an American director has ever come to making a Rohmer movie – and not only because the wonderful actor playing the teenage heroine resembles the young Béatrice Romand.” –Amy Taubin, ARTFORUM

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
With Tallie Medel, Sky Hirschkron, Aundrea Fares, Kati Schwartz, and Caroline Luft.
Dan Sallitt’s remarkable, boldly conceived fourth feature is a vivid character study of Jackie, a charismatic, fiercely intelligent, soulful young woman struggling to navigate the choppy waters of adolescence, and nurturing an intense emotional attachment to her older brother that crosses over unmistakably into incestuousness. Frankly acknowledging her forbidden feelings in the company of both her unfazed but elusive brother and her loving but ineffectual mother, Jackie is deeply confused and adrift, even while her sharp wit and keen intellect render her an astute analyst of her own situation.

While its central conceit is admirably provocative, the film’s courting of controversy is belied by Sallitt’s resolutely unspectacular approach – quietly observational, psychologically penetrating, and deeply sensitive, THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT treats its attention-grabbing premise as a prism through which it explores the universally familiar process of negotiating between attachment and emotional independence as one progresses towards adulthood.

A critic and blogger as well as a filmmaker, Sallitt has established a unique and confident voice, both in his writing and in his long-gestating but always impressive feature films (all of which will be screening at Anthology on this calendar). A great admirer of (and profoundly astute commentator on) the work of such masters of behavioral cinema as Eric Rohmer, Maurice Pialat, and Mikio Naruse, Sallitt is perhaps contemporary American cinema’s foremost keeper of their flame, and THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT a deeply moving example of his craft.

“The film is much more than an homage [to Eric Rohmer]; it’s an idiosyncratic take on desire and change that goes into uncharted sexual territories Rohmer never dared to thread, and does so with a measure of elegant, fearless lucidity few directors are capable of mustering.” –Michał Oleszczyk, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

“The mystery and surprise of THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT is how such a cerebral film can be so emotionally affecting. […] This impressive feature provides strong evidence that Dan Sallitt is one of the most underappreciated major American indie writer/directors out there.” –J.J. Murphy

“TOP TEN OF 2012: As close as an American director has ever come to making a Rohmer movie – and not only because the wonderful actor playing the teenage heroine resembles the young Béatrice Romand.” –Amy Taubin, ARTFORUM

Once every calendar we offer a special, AFA Members-Only screening, featuring sneak-previews of upcoming features, programs of rare materials from Anthology’s collections, in-person filmmaker presentations, and more! The benefits of an Anthology membership have always been plentiful: free admission to over 100 Essential Cinema programs, reduced admission to all other shows, discounted AFA publications. But with these screenings – free and open only to members – we sweeten the pot even further.

David Cronenberg
STEREO
1969, 65 min, 16mm
Recognized today as one of our most preeminent auteurs, David Cronenberg has achieved international critical and popular success in the many years that followed his little-seen first featurette, STEREO. As disquieting and multi-layered as many of his better-known works (which include THE BROOD, VIDEODROME, DEAD RINGERS, and CRASH, among many others), STEREO is an early foray into the unique brand of corporeal and intellectual horror that gave us the term “Cronenbergian”. Set within the walls of the Canadian Academy of Erotic Enquiry, Dr. Luther Stringfellow embarks on a series of experiments to find a suitable replacement for the “obsolescent family unit”. His subjects exhibit pronounced telepathic abilities, as well as ambiguous sexual desires. STEREO establishes themes that Cronenberg would return to many times over the years, and is clearly related to the early short films he made in the mid-to-late 1960s under the influence of the New York experimental film scene. Not quite a student film, and at 65 minutes only barely a feature, STEREO is a wonderfully insightful and rarely seen curiosity.
We are happy to screen STEREO with a secret short from Anthology’s collection. Expect the unexpected!

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
With Tallie Medel, Sky Hirschkron, Aundrea Fares, Kati Schwartz, and Caroline Luft.
Dan Sallitt’s remarkable, boldly conceived fourth feature is a vivid character study of Jackie, a charismatic, fiercely intelligent, soulful young woman struggling to navigate the choppy waters of adolescence, and nurturing an intense emotional attachment to her older brother that crosses over unmistakably into incestuousness. Frankly acknowledging her forbidden feelings in the company of both her unfazed but elusive brother and her loving but ineffectual mother, Jackie is deeply confused and adrift, even while her sharp wit and keen intellect render her an astute analyst of her own situation.

While its central conceit is admirably provocative, the film’s courting of controversy is belied by Sallitt’s resolutely unspectacular approach – quietly observational, psychologically penetrating, and deeply sensitive, THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT treats its attention-grabbing premise as a prism through which it explores the universally familiar process of negotiating between attachment and emotional independence as one progresses towards adulthood.

A critic and blogger as well as a filmmaker, Sallitt has established a unique and confident voice, both in his writing and in his long-gestating but always impressive feature films (all of which will be screening at Anthology on this calendar). A great admirer of (and profoundly astute commentator on) the work of such masters of behavioral cinema as Eric Rohmer, Maurice Pialat, and Mikio Naruse, Sallitt is perhaps contemporary American cinema’s foremost keeper of their flame, and THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT a deeply moving example of his craft.

“The film is much more than an homage [to Eric Rohmer]; it’s an idiosyncratic take on desire and change that goes into uncharted sexual territories Rohmer never dared to thread, and does so with a measure of elegant, fearless lucidity few directors are capable of mustering.” –Michał Oleszczyk, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

“The mystery and surprise of THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT is how such a cerebral film can be so emotionally affecting. […] This impressive feature provides strong evidence that Dan Sallitt is one of the most underappreciated major American indie writer/directors out there.” –J.J. Murphy

“TOP TEN OF 2012: As close as an American director has ever come to making a Rohmer movie – and not only because the wonderful actor playing the teenage heroine resembles the young Béatrice Romand.” –Amy Taubin, ARTFORUM

(RANI RADOVI)
Filmed during the political ferment of 1968, this work explores the radical impulses behind the unrest of the young in a country where the revolutionaries of an earlier generation now form the Establishment. Three young men and a beautiful girl leave home and move across the country in search of a just society and true socialism, only to discover tragically that an unfinished revolution, while changing the face of power, has failed to change the nature of man. Filled with black humor, frank sex, and bizarre tableaux, the film becomes a revolutionary allegory of the European New Left. Though it brought its director into conflict with his country’s authorities, the Yugoslav courts subsequently ruled in his favor in a landmark decision.

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
With Tallie Medel, Sky Hirschkron, Aundrea Fares, Kati Schwartz, and Caroline Luft.
Dan Sallitt’s remarkable, boldly conceived fourth feature is a vivid character study of Jackie, a charismatic, fiercely intelligent, soulful young woman struggling to navigate the choppy waters of adolescence, and nurturing an intense emotional attachment to her older brother that crosses over unmistakably into incestuousness. Frankly acknowledging her forbidden feelings in the company of both her unfazed but elusive brother and her loving but ineffectual mother, Jackie is deeply confused and adrift, even while her sharp wit and keen intellect render her an astute analyst of her own situation.

While its central conceit is admirably provocative, the film’s courting of controversy is belied by Sallitt’s resolutely unspectacular approach – quietly observational, psychologically penetrating, and deeply sensitive, THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT treats its attention-grabbing premise as a prism through which it explores the universally familiar process of negotiating between attachment and emotional independence as one progresses towards adulthood.

A critic and blogger as well as a filmmaker, Sallitt has established a unique and confident voice, both in his writing and in his long-gestating but always impressive feature films (all of which will be screening at Anthology on this calendar). A great admirer of (and profoundly astute commentator on) the work of such masters of behavioral cinema as Eric Rohmer, Maurice Pialat, and Mikio Naruse, Sallitt is perhaps contemporary American cinema’s foremost keeper of their flame, and THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT a deeply moving example of his craft.

“The film is much more than an homage [to Eric Rohmer]; it’s an idiosyncratic take on desire and change that goes into uncharted sexual territories Rohmer never dared to thread, and does so with a measure of elegant, fearless lucidity few directors are capable of mustering.” –Michał Oleszczyk, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

“The mystery and surprise of THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT is how such a cerebral film can be so emotionally affecting. […] This impressive feature provides strong evidence that Dan Sallitt is one of the most underappreciated major American indie writer/directors out there.” –J.J. Murphy

“TOP TEN OF 2012: As close as an American director has ever come to making a Rohmer movie – and not only because the wonderful actor playing the teenage heroine resembles the young Béatrice Romand.” –Amy Taubin, ARTFORUM

Paul Cronin
FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART: AMOS VOGEL AND THE CINEMA 16
2003, 56 min, video
“An historic documentary about Amos Vogel and the creation of Cinema 16, the first large-scale film society in the United States. Director Paul Cronin records the free-form reminiscences of Cinema 16’s organizers, together with commentary by Vogel scholar Scott MacDonald. Interspersed with clips from movies which were once projected at Cinema 16, Cronin’s film provides a first-hand visual representation of the cutting edge films that Amos Vogel so effectively championed.” –Jon Gartenberg
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Andre St. Laurent
CAMERA THREE: NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL 1963
1963, 28 min, video, b&w
In 1963, Amos Vogel and Richard Roud founded the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. In its first five editions (1963-68) Vogel served as Festival Director introducing American audiences to the work of Bernardo Bertolucci, Chris Marker, Werner Herzog, Eric Rohmer, R.W. Fassbinder, and Martin Scorsese. In this episode of CAMERA THREE hosted by James MacAndrew, Vogel is joined by Richard Roud and directors Adolfas Mekas and Joseph Losey in discussing the inaugural season of the New York Film Festival.

Archival print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.
This deceptively humorous cinéma vérité study of a traveling evangelist emerges as a ruthless exposé of an aspect of America’s national psyche, with implications far beyond its immediate subject matter. Marjoe began by performing marriage ceremonies at the age of four (seen in the marvelous newsreels of the time) and graduated to fame on the ‘Holy Roller’ Pentecostal circuit, throwing women into convulsions, performing miracles, providing sex substitutes and mass therapy to the countless victimized poor and ignorant who flock to his meetings with their offerings. While the sequences of a prancing Mick Jagger imitation (complete with rock rhythms and brimstone) and of his huge and suffering audience in themselves constitute an impressive achievement of non-fiction cinema, simultaneous private interviews reveal the fiery evangelist to be a cynical atheist and hedonist, with contempt for his ‘work’ and at best an ambiguous solicitude for his flock.
The revelation of mass manipulation by a charismatic, smiling con-man, the fervor and conservatism of the duped, the intrusion of questions of money and power over others – these American preoccupations are brilliantly reflected in this outrageous, disturbing black comedy.

With Edith Meeks, Dylan McCormick, Peter Joseph, and Renee Bucciarelli.
Mimi and Michael have been close friends since briefly dating years before. The spark between them is re-kindled during a weekend picnic outing, and Mimi, suddenly enthusiastic, proposes to Michael abruptly. The two marry and head off on a honeymoon to Pennsylvania without ever having slept with each other. But the honeymoon goes terribly wrong: in no time the wedding night becomes a nightmare of recriminations and sexual incompatibility. Over the next few days, the couple tries to get past their problems, but Michael’s sexual anxiety and Mimi’s defensive reactions prove a deadly combination, and before long the marriage is hanging by a thread….

“Not many movies are willing or able to hack their way through the tangled, complicated emotional territory of HONEYMOON. This funny, harrowing, lucid movie is so mature about sex and human relations that it puts to shame the bulk of what passes for ‘adult’ entertainment in American cinema. In its deceptively simple way, HONEYMOON pulls off something quite difficult – namely, the illumination of the divide between expectations and reality in the lives of ordinary people.” –Kent Jones

The playful anarchism and exuberant vitality of this work – a thumbing of noses at the ‘straight’ adult world – caught the essence of the Beatle mystique and even reinforced their electrifying presence with machine-gun editing, jump cuts, accelerated speed, quick movements in close-up, and a camera that never stood still. The best sequence is of their largely improvised, anarchic outdoor ‘dance’ shot from a helicopter and closely cut to their famous ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. The constant dissolution and reformation of their group patterns, seen in fluid motion against the geometric lines of a playing field is delightfully choreographic and lyrical. The Beatles’ ideological refusal to take the world or themselves seriously, their almost surreal approach to their environment proved a perfect foil for Lester, previously responsible for the surrealist RUNNING, JUMPING AND STANDING STLL film (with Peter Sellers).
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Jud Yalkut KUSAMA’S SELF-OBLITERATION (1968, 24 min, 16mm)
A strangely compelling study of Yayoi Kusama, painter, sculptor and environmentalist, who paints polka dots on flowers, bodies, water, and grass in a thought-provoking attempt at pantheism and ego transcendence, culminating in relaxed nude body painting and group sex.

With Strawn Bovee, Edith Meeks, Dylan McCormick, and Lois Raebeck.
Evelyn Bell, a Catholic professor of theology, and her younger sister Virginia are reunited after many years when Virginia returns home mired in a depression after being ejected from a religious cult. At a lakeside retreat in Northeastern Pennsylvania, the sisters try to reestablish their relationship, talking about their very different systems of belief, and about the oppressive childhood that still hangs over them….

“With religious films tending toward either propaganda or satire, ALL THE SHIPS AT SEA arrives like a gust of crisp sea air. With its searching discussion of faith lost and found, this highly impressive second feature by Sallitt follows the tradition of Dreyer, Bergman and Bresson, and is distinguished by two exceptional lead performances and an unusually rigorous aesthetic. … To encounter characters this authentically self-aware and introspective in an American film is rare.” –Scott Foundas, VARIETY

“Watching and listening to Strawn Bovee and Edith Meeks is like listening to two great jazz soloists jamming, in perfect tune with each other. … Woody Allen would cut off his right arm to be able to make a film like this, but he doesn’t have the intelligence, the taste or the actresses.” –Bill Krohn

The Austrian avant-gardist Otto Muehl may well be the most scandalous filmmaker working in cinema today. Whether he is also the most subversive is the subject of a continuing international debate, with even some liberal critics denouncing him as fascist, or at least, anti-humanist. But it is a grave mistake to misinterpret Muehl’s work as pornographic, thereby underestimating its seditious, anarchist intent. Muehl’s films…are based on his notorious ‘Materialaktionen’; love happenings, involving nude protagonists in real and extravagant acts of sexual violence and defilement. Clearly derived from dada-surrealist anti-aestheticism, these public performances predictably caused police prosecution, scandals, and near-riots in various countries. They invade the spectator’s defence mechanism and value systems in a manner comparable perhaps only to the slitting of the woman’s eyeball in Buñuel’s UN CHIEN ANDALOU or Franju’s deceptive documentary of the slaughter-houses, THE BLOOD OF THE BEASTS.

Kurt Kren 6/64: MAMA & PAPA (1964, 4 min, 16mm)

Otto Muehl
MATERIALAKTIONSFILME
1970 47 min, 16mm

With NIGHT AND FOG, this is unquestionably the most sophisticated film yet made on the philosophical and moral problems posed by the concentration camp universe. Twenty years after the liberation, a group of Canadian survivors return on a pilgrimage to the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. A complex filmic structure, combining cinéma vérité and a constant mingling of past and present, records the result: a morass of paradox, irony, unanswerable questions; and a strong implication that it may be impossible to go back or to ‘understand’. The camp has become a NATO base and a garden for Germans; the returning Jews are unable to live up to the presumably heroic role imposed on them and fumble; an old German introduces himself as one of the sixty million cowards who did nothing against Hitler; and we learn of Jewish collaborators, anti-Nazi Germans, NATO soldiers who have no idea of where or who they are. But the question hovering over the entire film – unspoken, yet implicit in every scene – is simply how, or whether, one can learn from the past.

Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
“A conceptual lap dissolve from ‘water currents’ to ‘film strip currents’/Dedicated to my son Christopher.” –P.S.
“Yes, S:S:S:S:S:S is beautiful. The successive scratchings of the stream-image film is very powerful vandalism. The film is a very complete organism with all the possible levels really recognized.” –Michael Snow

An apocalyptic vision of man after a cosmic catastrophe, this film is a terrifying metaphor of a dehumanized future. The Brazilian Cinema Novo, German expressionism of the twenties, and the ideologically motivated ‘cruelty’ of a Buñuel come together in this ferocious work of a French theatre collective – an ambitious, almost completely successful example of visual cinema at its best.

In conjunction with the NYU Grey Art Gallery’s exhibition ‘Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg’, Anthology presents two programs of films featuring Ginsberg as well as many other luminaries of the Beat movement.

On view at the Grey Art Gallery, NYU (100 Washington Square East) from January 15-April 6, ‘Beat Memories’ presents an in-depth look at the Beat Generation through the lens of Allen Ginsberg, featuring some 110 black-and-white photographs by him including portraits of William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and many others, along with self-portraits. For more info, visit www.nyu.edu/greyart

Two other seminal Beat films will be screening at Film Forum in January: Robert Frank’s PULL MY DAISY (January 12) and ME AND MY BROTHER (January 14). For more info, visit www.filmforum.org

Special thanks to Lucy Oakley (Grey Art Gallery, NYU), Eric Liknaitzky (Contemporary Films), Marian Luntz & Tracy Stephenson (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), and Paul Marchant (First Run Features).

Robert Frank
THIS SONG FOR JACK
1983, 30 min, 16mm, b&w. With Allen Ginsberg, David Amram, Gary Snyder, William Burroughs, Carolyn Cassady, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. © Robert Frank, 1983, distributed by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Based on footage Robert Frank shot at “On the Road: The Jack Kerouac Conference”, held at the Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado, from July 23 to August 1, 1982. The film is dedicated to Kerouac, Frank’s late friend and collaborator on PULL MY DAISY and THE AMERICANS.
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Peter Whitehead
WHOLLY COMMUNION
1965, 33 min, 35mm, b&w
Captures the historic event at the Royal Albert Hall on June 11, 1965, where an audience of 7,000 witnessed the first meeting of American and English Beat poets. Among the performers featured are Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Alexander Trocchi, Gregory Corso, and Adrian Mitchell.

This definitive documentary explores the world of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, San Francisco’s legendary poet, artist, publisher, and civil libertarian. Felver’s one-on-one interviews with Ferlinghetti, made over the course of a decade, touch upon a rich mélange of characters and events that began to unfold in postwar America, including the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s HOWL, William S. Burroughs’s NAKED LUNCH, and Jack Kerouac’s ON THE ROAD, as well as the divisive events of the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, and this country’s perilous march towards intellectual and political bankruptcy.

Shûji Terayama
EMPEROR TOMATO KETCHUP / TOMATO KECCHAPPU KÔTEI
1970, 27 min, 16mm. In Japanese with English subtitles.
The use of children in (however simulated) sex acts with adults is always shocking; in this ‘scandalous’ avant-garde film, magical women act as their initiatory, yet protectively maternal partners. The children, in revolt, have condemned their parents to death for depriving them of self-expression and sexual freedom; they create a society in which fairies and sex education are equally important and…literally combinable.
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Kôji Wakamatsu
VIOLATED ANGELS / OKASARETA HAKUI
1967, 56 min, 35mm-to-digital video. In Japanese with English subtitles.
This film is more symptomatic than significant. Its director claims that his twenty sadomasochist and erotic features project an anti-authoritarian message. The ‘angels’ in this film are young nurses, methodically violated, shot, and/or cut into ribbons to the accompaniment of moans, and croaking noises, by a young man with a gun and a razor. In a lake of blood and beautiful young nude bodies, he is unable to kill the last one, curling up, foetus-like, in her lap instead. ‘Why did you spill so much blood?’ asks the girl-mother. ‘To ornament you’, he replies. While there is no doubt of Wakamatsu’s ability as an artist, his anti-feminist sadism, unadorned by ideological context, ultimately gives his work an anti-humanist flavor.

(RANI RADOVI)
Filmed during the political ferment of 1968, this work explores the radical impulses behind the unrest of the young in a country where the revolutionaries of an earlier generation now form the Establishment. Three young men and a beautiful girl leave home and move across the country in search of a just society and true socialism, only to discover tragically that an unfinished revolution, while changing the face of power, has failed to change the nature of man. Filled with black humor, frank sex, and bizarre tableaux, the film becomes a revolutionary allegory of the European New Left. Though it brought its director into conflict with his country’s authorities, the Yugoslav courts subsequently ruled in his favor in a landmark decision.

This ‘underground video soap opera’ – presented in an astonishing eight-television-screen, closed-circuit, live-performance format – begins where commercial TV lets off. A ‘video-vérité’ study of a sometime homosexual junky and his girl (both former porno filmmakers), it is accurately billed as a ‘video-tape novel about pornography, sexual identities, and the effect of living too close to an electronic medium’. The work is performed ‘live’ before an audience by the director manipulating the eight monitors, mixing different or identical action on one, several or all of them; the ‘film’ thus changes daily. Though attention is usually spread among all monitors, the sudden appearance of sex on even one set immediately ‘distorts’ the balance; a tribute to its power.”
&
Karen Johnson ORANGE (1969, 3 min, 16mm)
“[T]his close-up of the peeling, sectioning, licking, and eating of a naval orange becomes a sensuous, sexual experience that disturbs and attracts by the ambivalence of its images; erotic associations constantly impinge.”

SCOTCH TAPE
1962, 3 min, 16mm
Junkyard musical.
&
FLAMING CREATURES 
1963, 45 min, 16mm, b&w
“FLAMING CREATURES graced the anarchic liberation of new American cinema with graphic and rhythmic power worthy of the best of formal cinema. He has attained for the first time in motion pictures a high level of art which is absolutely lacking in decorum; and a treatment of sex which makes us aware of the restraint of all previous filmmakers.” - FILM CULTURE

This definitive documentary explores the world of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, San Francisco’s legendary poet, artist, publisher, and civil libertarian. Felver’s one-on-one interviews with Ferlinghetti, made over the course of a decade, touch upon a rich mélange of characters and events that began to unfold in postwar America, including the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s HOWL, William S. Burroughs’s NAKED LUNCH, and Jack Kerouac’s ON THE ROAD, as well as the divisive events of the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, and this country’s perilous march towards intellectual and political bankruptcy.

(DIE UNTERDRÜCKUNG DER FRAU IST VOR ALLEM AN DEM VERHALTEN DER FRAUEN SELBER ZU ERKENNEN)
One of the ideologically most aggressive filmmakers of the German avant-garde…has us spy on the humdrum activities of a housewife during a typical day of her life, much of it recorded in real time to reveal its boredom and stultifying idiocy. She washes dishes, talks on the telephone, masturbates in front of a mirror, cooks. With characteristic perversity, however, she is played by a male in male dress: a brilliant and disturbing visual metaphor. Here the Warhol style of ‘real time’ and minimal cinema is utilized for a radical political statement.

In conjunction with the NYU Grey Art Gallery’s exhibition ‘Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg’, Anthology presents two programs of films featuring Ginsberg as well as many other luminaries of the Beat movement.

On view at the Grey Art Gallery, NYU (100 Washington Square East) from January 15-April 6, ‘Beat Memories’ presents an in-depth look at the Beat Generation through the lens of Allen Ginsberg, featuring some 110 black-and-white photographs by him including portraits of William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and many others, along with self-portraits. For more info, visit www.nyu.edu/greyart

Two other seminal Beat films will be screening at Film Forum in January: Robert Frank’s PULL MY DAISY (January 12) and ME AND MY BROTHER (January 14). For more info, visit www.filmforum.org

Special thanks to Lucy Oakley (Grey Art Gallery, NYU), Eric Liknaitzky (Contemporary Films), Marian Luntz & Tracy Stephenson (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), and Paul Marchant (First Run Features).

Robert Frank
THIS SONG FOR JACK
1983, 30 min, 16mm, b&w. With Allen Ginsberg, David Amram, Gary Snyder, William Burroughs, Carolyn Cassady, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. © Robert Frank, 1983, distributed by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Based on footage Robert Frank shot at “On the Road: The Jack Kerouac Conference”, held at the Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado, from July 23 to August 1, 1982. The film is dedicated to Kerouac, Frank’s late friend and collaborator on PULL MY DAISY and THE AMERICANS.
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Peter Whitehead
WHOLLY COMMUNION
1965, 33 min, 35mm, b&w
Captures the historic event at the Royal Albert Hall on June 11, 1965, where an audience of 7,000 witnessed the first meeting of American and English Beat poets. Among the performers featured are Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Alexander Trocchi, Gregory Corso, and Adrian Mitchell.

From 1973 until his retirement in 1991, Vogel taught and lectured on film at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1980 he hosted a television program broadcast on Philadelphia PBS affiliate WHYY where he presented and discussed the best independent and experimental films being made in the Delaware Valley. The series ran for five episodes; episode 5, the final installment, features work by Peter Rose and Laurence Salzmann, as well as the film PUNKING OUT, directed by Ric Shore with Maggi Carson and Juliusz Kossakowski, which inspires a particularly brilliant introduction from Vogel.
PUNKING OUT has been preserved by the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, with funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Shûji Terayama
EMPEROR TOMATO KETCHUP / TOMATO KECCHAPPU KÔTEI
1970, 27 min, 16mm. In Japanese with English subtitles.
The use of children in (however simulated) sex acts with adults is always shocking; in this ‘scandalous’ avant-garde film, magical women act as their initiatory, yet protectively maternal partners. The children, in revolt, have condemned their parents to death for depriving them of self-expression and sexual freedom; they create a society in which fairies and sex education are equally important and…literally combinable.
&
Kôji Wakamatsu
VIOLATED ANGELS / OKASARETA HAKUI
1967, 56 min, 35mm-to-digital video. In Japanese with English subtitles.
This film is more symptomatic than significant. Its director claims that his twenty sadomasochist and erotic features project an anti-authoritarian message. The ‘angels’ in this film are young nurses, methodically violated, shot, and/or cut into ribbons to the accompaniment of moans, and croaking noises, by a young man with a gun and a razor. In a lake of blood and beautiful young nude bodies, he is unable to kill the last one, curling up, foetus-like, in her lap instead. ‘Why did you spill so much blood?’ asks the girl-mother. ‘To ornament you’, he replies. While there is no doubt of Wakamatsu’s ability as an artist, his anti-feminist sadism, unadorned by ideological context, ultimately gives his work an anti-humanist flavor.

With NIGHT AND FOG, this is unquestionably the most sophisticated film yet made on the philosophical and moral problems posed by the concentration camp universe. Twenty years after the liberation, a group of Canadian survivors return on a pilgrimage to the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. A complex filmic structure, combining cinéma vérité and a constant mingling of past and present, records the result: a morass of paradox, irony, unanswerable questions; and a strong implication that it may be impossible to go back or to ‘understand’. The camp has become a NATO base and a garden for Germans; the returning Jews are unable to live up to the presumably heroic role imposed on them and fumble; an old German introduces himself as one of the sixty million cowards who did nothing against Hitler; and we learn of Jewish collaborators, anti-Nazi Germans, NATO soldiers who have no idea of where or who they are. But the question hovering over the entire film – unspoken, yet implicit in every scene – is simply how, or whether, one can learn from the past.

The playful anarchism and exuberant vitality of this work – a thumbing of noses at the ‘straight’ adult world – caught the essence of the Beatle mystique and even reinforced their electrifying presence with machine-gun editing, jump cuts, accelerated speed, quick movements in close-up, and a camera that never stood still. The best sequence is of their largely improvised, anarchic outdoor ‘dance’ shot from a helicopter and closely cut to their famous ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. The constant dissolution and reformation of their group patterns, seen in fluid motion against the geometric lines of a playing field is delightfully choreographic and lyrical. The Beatles’ ideological refusal to take the world or themselves seriously, their almost surreal approach to their environment proved a perfect foil for Lester, previously responsible for the surrealist RUNNING, JUMPING AND STANDING STLL film (with Peter Sellers).
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Jud Yalkut KUSAMA’S SELF-OBLITERATION (1968, 24 min, 16mm)
A strangely compelling study of Yayoi Kusama, painter, sculptor and environmentalist, who paints polka dots on flowers, bodies, water, and grass in a thought-provoking attempt at pantheism and ego transcendence, culminating in relaxed nude body painting and group sex.

Archival print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.
This deceptively humorous cinéma vérité study of a traveling evangelist emerges as a ruthless exposé of an aspect of America’s national psyche, with implications far beyond its immediate subject matter. Marjoe began by performing marriage ceremonies at the age of four (seen in the marvelous newsreels of the time) and graduated to fame on the ‘Holy Roller’ Pentecostal circuit, throwing women into convulsions, performing miracles, providing sex substitutes and mass therapy to the countless victimized poor and ignorant who flock to his meetings with their offerings. While the sequences of a prancing Mick Jagger imitation (complete with rock rhythms and brimstone) and of his huge and suffering audience in themselves constitute an impressive achievement of non-fiction cinema, simultaneous private interviews reveal the fiery evangelist to be a cynical atheist and hedonist, with contempt for his ‘work’ and at best an ambiguous solicitude for his flock.
The revelation of mass manipulation by a charismatic, smiling con-man, the fervor and conservatism of the duped, the intrusion of questions of money and power over others – these American preoccupations are brilliantly reflected in this outrageous, disturbing black comedy.

An apocalyptic vision of man after a cosmic catastrophe, this film is a terrifying metaphor of a dehumanized future. The Brazilian Cinema Novo, German expressionism of the twenties, and the ideologically motivated ‘cruelty’ of a Buñuel come together in this ferocious work of a French theatre collective – an ambitious, almost completely successful example of visual cinema at its best.

(RANI RADOVI)
Filmed during the political ferment of 1968, this work explores the radical impulses behind the unrest of the young in a country where the revolutionaries of an earlier generation now form the Establishment. Three young men and a beautiful girl leave home and move across the country in search of a just society and true socialism, only to discover tragically that an unfinished revolution, while changing the face of power, has failed to change the nature of man. Filled with black humor, frank sex, and bizarre tableaux, the film becomes a revolutionary allegory of the European New Left. Though it brought its director into conflict with his country’s authorities, the Yugoslav courts subsequently ruled in his favor in a landmark decision.

(DIE UNTERDRÜCKUNG DER FRAU IST VOR ALLEM AN DEM VERHALTEN DER FRAUEN SELBER ZU ERKENNEN)
One of the ideologically most aggressive filmmakers of the German avant-garde…has us spy on the humdrum activities of a housewife during a typical day of her life, much of it recorded in real time to reveal its boredom and stultifying idiocy. She washes dishes, talks on the telephone, masturbates in front of a mirror, cooks. With characteristic perversity, however, she is played by a male in male dress: a brilliant and disturbing visual metaphor. Here the Warhol style of ‘real time’ and minimal cinema is utilized for a radical political statement.

“WAVELENGTH is without precedent in the purity of its confrontation with the essence of cinema: the relationships between illusion and fact, space and time, subject and object. It is the first post-Warhol, post-Minimal movie; one of the few films to engage those higher conceptual orders which occupy modern painting and sculpture. It has rightly been described as a ‘triumph of contemplative cinema.’” – Gene Youngblood, L.A. FREE PRESS, 1968

“...This neat, finely tuned, hypersensitive film examines the outside and inside of a banal
prefab classroom, stares at an asymmetrical space so undistinguished that it’s hard to believe the whole movie is confined to it, and has this neckjerking camera gimmick which hits a wooden stop arm at each end of its swing. Basically it’s a perpetual motion film which ingeniously builds a sculptural effect by insisting on time-motion to the point where the camera’s swinging arcs and white wall field assume the hardness, the dimensions of a concrete beam.
“In such a hard, drilling work, the wooden clap sounds are a terrific invention, and, as much as any single element, create the sculpture. Seeming to thrust the image outward off the screen, these clap effects are timed like a metronome, sometimes occuring with torrential frequency.” –Manny Farber, ARTFORUM

Shûji Terayama
EMPEROR TOMATO KETCHUP / TOMATO KECCHAPPU KÔTEI
1970, 27 min, 16mm. In Japanese with English subtitles.
The use of children in (however simulated) sex acts with adults is always shocking; in this ‘scandalous’ avant-garde film, magical women act as their initiatory, yet protectively maternal partners. The children, in revolt, have condemned their parents to death for depriving them of self-expression and sexual freedom; they create a society in which fairies and sex education are equally important and…literally combinable.
&
Kôji Wakamatsu
VIOLATED ANGELS / OKASARETA HAKUI
1967, 56 min, 35mm-to-digital video. In Japanese with English subtitles.
This film is more symptomatic than significant. Its director claims that his twenty sadomasochist and erotic features project an anti-authoritarian message. The ‘angels’ in this film are young nurses, methodically violated, shot, and/or cut into ribbons to the accompaniment of moans, and croaking noises, by a young man with a gun and a razor. In a lake of blood and beautiful young nude bodies, he is unable to kill the last one, curling up, foetus-like, in her lap instead. ‘Why did you spill so much blood?’ asks the girl-mother. ‘To ornament you’, he replies. While there is no doubt of Wakamatsu’s ability as an artist, his anti-feminist sadism, unadorned by ideological context, ultimately gives his work an anti-humanist flavor.

ALONE (1963, 13 min, 16mm, b&w)
“A major departure into projecting feelings and senses of loneliness, timelessness and the sensual self. The film presents moments that are passing tones in any life, yet far from registering a passive despair, protests against a traditional culture which is unable to confront such moments and passes them by as both trivial and obscene.” –S.D.

ASLEEP (1961, 4 min, 16mm, b&w)
Made in NYC, Dwoskin’s first film documents a woman’s feet during a whole night of sleep condensed into four minutes.

CHINESE CHECKERS (1964, 13 min, 16mm, b&w)
“Two girls, one square-jawed and American, the other invoking a wise Oriental passivity, begin by playing the board game, drift from a concentration on the pieces to a concentration on each other’s hands and eyes, with disquieting tentatives of invitation or dominance.” –Raymond Durgnat

NAISSANT (1967, 14 min, 16mm, b&w)
“For fourteen minutes, the camera shows the troubled face of a young girl. The purpose: not to tell a story but to involve the viewer ‘in the moments of a person’. Through subtle, non-verbal communication, certain of her feelings and fears are intimated; the film’s real time allows – indeed, compels – us to consider them more closely and to ‘think with her’. –Amos Vogel, FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART

SOLILOQUY (1964, 8 min, 16mm)
“A girl broods uncertainly over a failed love affair, while the camera roves over her fingers, her cigarette, her knuckles, her lips and the handmirror in which she peers. […] [T]he split between her body and her spoken thoughts becomes a strange bilocation of consciousness.” –Raymond Durgnat

ME MYSELF AND I (1967, 18 min, 16mm, b&w)
“The beginning of the prevalent theme – or question – ‘what keeps us apart, even when together?’” –S.D.

DIRTY (1967, 10 min, 16mm, b&w)
“Remarkable for its sensuousness, created partly by the use of re-photography which enables the filmmaker a second stage of response to the two girls he was filming, partly by the caressing style of camera movement and partly by the gradual increase of dirt on the film itself, increasing the tactile connotations generated by re-photography.” –John Du Cane

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

Since its first edition in 2009, the Screen Loud Film Festival has been committed to programming a broad range of short fiction and documentaries that explore the theme of being a ‘foreigner’ searching for a way to express oneself in a new world. Traversing the barriers of cross-cultural communication, the foreigner is one who explores ways beyond words to express him- or herself and SCREEN LOUD. Emphasizing the universality of the image over the singularity of each culture and language, we are screening a selection of shorts that use film as a ‘visual Esperanto’ that defies linguistic, cultural, and geographical barriers and speaks to all through the language of cinematography.

“An unfulfilled man renders himself to the unrealized sensuality of four women. In his drifting search he fails and fades in the same loneliness as the women. The film is the reality and a metaphor for the intensities of sexual experience.” –S.D.
“His camera is a never-static instrument of his intrusion into the fantasy/reality of the relationships he is dealing with and forming. … TIMES FOR is one of the few erotic masterpieces.” –NATIONAL FILM THEATRE, LONDON
&
TRIXI
1969, 30 min, 16mm
“Dwoskin’s most convulsive version of his recurrent theme: the confrontation of a solitary girl with the camera. Shot in one continuous 8-hour session, TRIXI records Beatrice Cordua’s responses to the situation, from initial shyness, fear, and withdrawal through teasing and posturing to naked surrender and final exhaustion.” –Tony Rayns

Photographed by an all-female crew and directed by the author of SEXUAL POLITICS, these are autobiographical interviews with three very different women who talk frankly about their lives, conflicts, and contrasting life styles. A proud and uncompromising film.

“DYN AMO is a ‘drama’ exploring the distinction between a person’s self and his projection of that self to others; and it’s a ‘horror movie’ tragically suggesting how a projection can become more substantial than the self behind it. Its subjects are role-playing (especially sexual role-playing), and the masochism of playing a role that conforms to others’ exploitative interests.” –Tony Rayns

(PRIMA DELLA RIVOLUZIONE)

Rarely has a talent burst upon the film scene with such brilliance as Bertolucci did with this film, perhaps the most germinal work of the new cinema. A flood of poetic visuals, montage, and sound, it is a shamelessly passionate, intensely personal statement of political and sexual coming of age. […] The motto that prefaces this film also points to Bertolucci’s dilemma: ‘Only those who lived before the revolution, knew how sweet life could be’ (Talleyrand). Thus Bertolucci is at his best describing, with anguished ambivalence, bitter-sweet episodes of middle-class life – an evening at the opera, the raptures of young (bourgeois) love, the despair of an Italian aristocrat whose world is being destroyed by capitalist materialism. The red flag and the poisonous beauty of privileged bourgeois existence are the two constants of Bertolucci’s work.
What is most original in it, however, is his outrageous and exuberant pictorial sense, his (aesthetically) revolutionary attempt to create a poetic-political cinema by means of audacious, violent editing and visual effects, far in advance of anything the commercial cinema has to offer and surpassing many of the most potent achievements of the international avant-garde. Bertolucci’s camera work and montage are entirely unorthodox, yet infused with a lyrical fluidity and depth of feeling untypical for a contemporary of Godard, Robbe-Grillet, and Resnais.

“An astonishingly intimate recreation of Dwoskin’s time with actor Carola Regnier (who gives a hypnotically intricate performance of her own desires and vulnerabilities). This is Dwoskin’s masterpiece. Indeed, I have come to regard it as the one of the greatest works in cinema history. […] Like many of Dwoskin’s pieces, it is a reflection upon his physical condition – the title could be translated as ‘hindered’ or even ‘handicapped’, hence ‘disabled’ – and the strains it poses on his exchanges with an able-bodied lover. But this is as far from a ‘social problem’ or ‘disease of the week’ telemovie as can possibly be imagined – as the perfectly judged long takes, coupled with the relentless drone-score by Gavin Bryars, attest.
“BEHINDERT remains Dwoskin’s most daring and artistically successful attempt to splice his ‘first person’ mode of cinema with a staged fiction – creating a kind of cubistic complexity from the constantly shuffled perspectives. The ‘fourth look’ which Willemen intuited – not exactly the look of the characters, the spectator, or even the camera-eye, but some other, more forbidding look, like the gaze of society itself – hovers over the interstices between these images, these tableaux, these scenes from a relationship. From a film-history standpoint, Dwoskin’s breakthrough here is prophetic. Anticipating the ongoing novelistic autobiography of Philippe Garrel’s work since the 1980s, BEHINDERT plays a thrilling, almost vampiric game with the proximity of real-life experience to its fictive recreation – especially as its principals are the actual former lovers!” –Adrian Martin, FILM QUARTERLY

Dwoskin’s final film is a meditation on the subjective experience and cultural concepts of aging. The film is an ode to the texture, the beauty, the singularity of aging faces and silhouettes. Throughout his films intimacy has always played a leading role and this is also true for AGE IS…, all the faces belonging to close friends, relatives, or sometimes even Dwoskin himself.
“Age is a question, a fear, something that may calm you too, but first of all it’s a way of looking. Other people looking at you and you looking at other people. It’s words that qualify you, official letters that classify you. Age gets measured by an ellipse, in the photos of a bygone era, the rediscovery of old films, the existence of an archive. Those are the places that I wish to explore, like the memory of a path. Unfortunately, age also means loss. The loss of things, people, friends. You become very lonely. That’s maybe one of the reasons why I want to ask my friends to shoot some images.” –S.D.

New print courtesy of the BFI!
“[CENTRAL BAZAAR] was reduced to [156 minutes] from fifteen hours of footage Dwoskin shot with a group of volunteers adventurous to act out their erotic fantasies. […] Theatre of life, costumes, sexes, colors, lips, reality, and fantasy mix and reveal themselves, intensified by Dwoskin’s obsessive camera eye, as he picks out, watches, stops on faces, details, sustains, doesn’t go away; the face is trapped, recorded. But there is no forcing, no rape of the camera in Dwoskin. It’s gentleness itself, it’s an intelligence that is gentle and unimposing.” –Jonas Mekas

(DAS INNERE BLOS)
“[OUTSIDE IN] is nominally about the filmmaker’s experience of his disability, stricken with polio in early childhood. But is it a personal reminiscence, a documentary, an essay film, a fictional recreation, a lyrical abstraction, or a dance/performance piece? It works through…a series of self-contained tableaux, each one starkly set against those surrounding it, and each drawing upon a very different style of cinematic representation. Poetic associations flit from segment to segment, but it is left to the viewer to draw the lines and make the connections: the prosthetic apparatus into which Dwoskin laboriously straps his legs each morning is compared to both the everyday high heels with which women torture themselves, and the bondage-and-discipline gear that forms part of a sophisticated sexual ‘underworld’ we see much of in his work.” –Adrian Martin, FILM QUARTERLY

“This autobiographical film evolves from the perspective of events and images over a period of over 50 years. These events are liberated and interwoven like an inner landscape framing one life, directly and indirectly, all life-connected and film-connected by personal associations and rediscovered fragments.” –S.D.

Depicts an elderly paralytic man’s literally unspeakable monologue of pain and fury as he finds himself caught in the isolation of dependency and sexual loss. His mind attempts to regain a certain equilibrium of desire as the women whom he once loved surround his shrinking and shrieking mind. They are both real and imaginary and appear, disappear, and suddenly come back to torment his memory.

In Dwoskin’s take on BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, an elderly woman and a girl in an isolated country house are forced to confront the ‘other’, a deformed and fearsome man. Increasingly locked within their personal solitude and terrorized by the menace that seems to be looming over them, the two women must decide whether they should take part in the annihilation of the man or if they should carry out a final gesture of pity and compassion.
&
NIGHTSHOTS (1, 2, 3)
2007, 33 min, digital video, b&w, silent
The first three of a series of intriguingly personal and erotic engagements seen in the privacy of darkness and transformed by the iridescence of the night light.

“An unfulfilled man renders himself to the unrealized sensuality of four women. In his drifting search he fails and fades in the same loneliness as the women. The film is the reality and a metaphor for the intensities of sexual experience.” –S.D.
“His camera is a never-static instrument of his intrusion into the fantasy/reality of the relationships he is dealing with and forming. … TIMES FOR is one of the few erotic masterpieces.” –NATIONAL FILM THEATRE, LONDON
&
TRIXI
1969, 30 min, 16mm
“Dwoskin’s most convulsive version of his recurrent theme: the confrontation of a solitary girl with the camera. Shot in one continuous 8-hour session, TRIXI records Beatrice Cordua’s responses to the situation, from initial shyness, fear, and withdrawal through teasing and posturing to naked surrender and final exhaustion.” –Tony Rayns

“An astonishingly intimate recreation of Dwoskin’s time with actor Carola Regnier (who gives a hypnotically intricate performance of her own desires and vulnerabilities). This is Dwoskin’s masterpiece. Indeed, I have come to regard it as the one of the greatest works in cinema history. […] Like many of Dwoskin’s pieces, it is a reflection upon his physical condition – the title could be translated as ‘hindered’ or even ‘handicapped’, hence ‘disabled’ – and the strains it poses on his exchanges with an able-bodied lover. But this is as far from a ‘social problem’ or ‘disease of the week’ telemovie as can possibly be imagined – as the perfectly judged long takes, coupled with the relentless drone-score by Gavin Bryars, attest.
“BEHINDERT remains Dwoskin’s most daring and artistically successful attempt to splice his ‘first person’ mode of cinema with a staged fiction – creating a kind of cubistic complexity from the constantly shuffled perspectives. The ‘fourth look’ which Willemen intuited – not exactly the look of the characters, the spectator, or even the camera-eye, but some other, more forbidding look, like the gaze of society itself – hovers over the interstices between these images, these tableaux, these scenes from a relationship. From a film-history standpoint, Dwoskin’s breakthrough here is prophetic. Anticipating the ongoing novelistic autobiography of Philippe Garrel’s work since the 1980s, BEHINDERT plays a thrilling, almost vampiric game with the proximity of real-life experience to its fictive recreation – especially as its principals are the actual former lovers!” –Adrian Martin, FILM QUARTERLY

“DYN AMO is a ‘drama’ exploring the distinction between a person’s self and his projection of that self to others; and it’s a ‘horror movie’ tragically suggesting how a projection can become more substantial than the self behind it. Its subjects are role-playing (especially sexual role-playing), and the masochism of playing a role that conforms to others’ exploitative interests.” –Tony Rayns

ALONE (1963, 13 min, 16mm, b&w)
“A major departure into projecting feelings and senses of loneliness, timelessness and the sensual self. The film presents moments that are passing tones in any life, yet far from registering a passive despair, protests against a traditional culture which is unable to confront such moments and passes them by as both trivial and obscene.” –S.D.

ASLEEP (1961, 4 min, 16mm, b&w)
Made in NYC, Dwoskin’s first film documents a woman’s feet during a whole night of sleep condensed into four minutes.

CHINESE CHECKERS (1964, 13 min, 16mm, b&w)
“Two girls, one square-jawed and American, the other invoking a wise Oriental passivity, begin by playing the board game, drift from a concentration on the pieces to a concentration on each other’s hands and eyes, with disquieting tentatives of invitation or dominance.” –Raymond Durgnat

NAISSANT (1967, 14 min, 16mm, b&w)
“For fourteen minutes, the camera shows the troubled face of a young girl. The purpose: not to tell a story but to involve the viewer ‘in the moments of a person’. Through subtle, non-verbal communication, certain of her feelings and fears are intimated; the film’s real time allows – indeed, compels – us to consider them more closely and to ‘think with her’. –Amos Vogel, FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART

SOLILOQUY (1964, 8 min, 16mm)
“A girl broods uncertainly over a failed love affair, while the camera roves over her fingers, her cigarette, her knuckles, her lips and the handmirror in which she peers. […] [T]he split between her body and her spoken thoughts becomes a strange bilocation of consciousness.” –Raymond Durgnat

ME MYSELF AND I (1967, 18 min, 16mm, b&w)
“The beginning of the prevalent theme – or question – ‘what keeps us apart, even when together?’” –S.D.

DIRTY (1967, 10 min, 16mm, b&w)
“Remarkable for its sensuousness, created partly by the use of re-photography which enables the filmmaker a second stage of response to the two girls he was filming, partly by the caressing style of camera movement and partly by the gradual increase of dirt on the film itself, increasing the tactile connotations generated by re-photography.” –John Du Cane

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

Dwoskin’s final film is a meditation on the subjective experience and cultural concepts of aging. The film is an ode to the texture, the beauty, the singularity of aging faces and silhouettes. Throughout his films intimacy has always played a leading role and this is also true for AGE IS…, all the faces belonging to close friends, relatives, or sometimes even Dwoskin himself.
“Age is a question, a fear, something that may calm you too, but first of all it’s a way of looking. Other people looking at you and you looking at other people. It’s words that qualify you, official letters that classify you. Age gets measured by an ellipse, in the photos of a bygone era, the rediscovery of old films, the existence of an archive. Those are the places that I wish to explore, like the memory of a path. Unfortunately, age also means loss. The loss of things, people, friends. You become very lonely. That’s maybe one of the reasons why I want to ask my friends to shoot some images.” –S.D.

The endless hype about the death of film is frankly very boring. People really need to get a life, and we are here to help. Rather than fetishize celluloid or pretend that it is the most superior format ever known to mankind, this edition of UNESSENTIAL CINEMA focuses on hidden video gems from our deep and ever-growing collections. Freshly digitized from antiquated formats or presented from the original tapes (VHS!), this program brings together a crazy array of art, non-art, known, unknown, really good, and pretty bad works that have never, ever been shown on film. And never will be.

(DAS INNERE BLOS)
“[OUTSIDE IN] is nominally about the filmmaker’s experience of his disability, stricken with polio in early childhood. But is it a personal reminiscence, a documentary, an essay film, a fictional recreation, a lyrical abstraction, or a dance/performance piece? It works through…a series of self-contained tableaux, each one starkly set against those surrounding it, and each drawing upon a very different style of cinematic representation. Poetic associations flit from segment to segment, but it is left to the viewer to draw the lines and make the connections: the prosthetic apparatus into which Dwoskin laboriously straps his legs each morning is compared to both the everyday high heels with which women torture themselves, and the bondage-and-discipline gear that forms part of a sophisticated sexual ‘underworld’ we see much of in his work.” –Adrian Martin, FILM QUARTERLY

Adapted from a Georges Simenon story, this no-nonsense noir classic from crime movie master Karlson (THE PHENIX CITY STORY) stars Richard Conte as Eddie, the oldest Rico brother and a former mob accountant pulled back into a world of crime by his younger siblings. “Karlson’s best film. […] [He] was most personal and most efficient when he dealt with the phenomenon of violence in a world controlled by organized evil. […] Unfortunately, an American director gets nowhere making films like THE BROTHERS RICO. The cosmopolitan genre prejudices are too strong” (Sarris).

“This autobiographical film evolves from the perspective of events and images over a period of over 50 years. These events are liberated and interwoven like an inner landscape framing one life, directly and indirectly, all life-connected and film-connected by personal associations and rediscovered fragments.” –S.D.

Short on money while receiving medical attention in London, American Julia Ross takes a job as secretary for the eccentric Hughes family. She falls into a deep sleep at the Hughes estate, only to awaken in a different house with another woman’s name and a psychotic fiancé. After years spent toiling on small B-pictures, Lewis (GUN CRAZY) was finally given a chance at a bigger production by Columbia’s Harry Cohn, and this resulting gothic thriller proved to be his breakthrough: “In 1945, MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS became the sleeper of the year. From that point on, the director’s somber personality has been revealed consistently through a complex visual style” (Sarris).

Depicts an elderly paralytic man’s literally unspeakable monologue of pain and fury as he finds himself caught in the isolation of dependency and sexual loss. His mind attempts to regain a certain equilibrium of desire as the women whom he once loved surround his shrinking and shrieking mind. They are both real and imaginary and appear, disappear, and suddenly come back to torment his memory.

In Dwoskin’s take on BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, an elderly woman and a girl in an isolated country house are forced to confront the ‘other’, a deformed and fearsome man. Increasingly locked within their personal solitude and terrorized by the menace that seems to be looming over them, the two women must decide whether they should take part in the annihilation of the man or if they should carry out a final gesture of pity and compassion.
&
NIGHTSHOTS (1, 2, 3)
2007, 33 min, digital video, b&w, silent
The first three of a series of intriguingly personal and erotic engagements seen in the privacy of darkness and transformed by the iridescence of the night light.

Following his success on TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, Mulligan re-teamed with producer Alan J. Pakula, writer Horton Foote, and composer Elmer Bernstein for another Southern-set drama, an adaptation of Foote’s play. Steve McQueen is “particularly memorable” (Sarris) as an ex-con, country singer, and emotional trainwreck struggling to do right by wife Lee Remick and his young daughter and stay on the law’s good side. A literate, patient, and sincere character study, filled with what Sarris called the director’s “behavioral beauties.”

New print courtesy of the BFI!
“[CENTRAL BAZAAR] was reduced to [156 minutes] from fifteen hours of footage Dwoskin shot with a group of volunteers adventurous to act out their erotic fantasies. […] Theatre of life, costumes, sexes, colors, lips, reality, and fantasy mix and reveal themselves, intensified by Dwoskin’s obsessive camera eye, as he picks out, watches, stops on faces, details, sustains, doesn’t go away; the face is trapped, recorded. But there is no forcing, no rape of the camera in Dwoskin. It’s gentleness itself, it’s an intelligence that is gentle and unimposing.” –Jonas Mekas

Shot in just a week by the great Wilder and Preminger cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, Oswald’s taut and tense Western stars John Derek as a gunslinger looking to settle down to a quiet life of cattle ranching. But when an old foe has his brother killed, he’s forced to strap on his guns once again. “Oswald has shown an admirable consistency, both stylistically and thematically, for a director in his obscure position. A fluency of camera movement is controlled by sliding turns and harsh stops befitting a cinema of bitter ambiguity. …Oswald has been making distinguished American films that are never reviewed in the fashionable weeklies and monthlies that feed off the fashionable and well-publicized projection room circuit” (Sarris).

Katherine Hepburn stars – in only her third film appearance – as a small-town actress who comes to New York with dreams of Broadway stardom, but must first navigate the affections of theater manager Adolphe Menjou and playwright Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Sherman, coming off his own successful acting career, rehearsed the script extensively and shot the film in sequence, guiding Hepburn to her first Oscar win. “Sherman deserves an esoteric niche all his own for the behavioral glories of Katherine Hepburn in MORNING GLORY…. His civilized sensibility was ahead of its time, and the sophistication of his sexual humor singularly lacking in malice” (Sarris).

“An astonishingly intimate recreation of Dwoskin’s time with actor Carola Regnier (who gives a hypnotically intricate performance of her own desires and vulnerabilities). This is Dwoskin’s masterpiece. Indeed, I have come to regard it as the one of the greatest works in cinema history. […] Like many of Dwoskin’s pieces, it is a reflection upon his physical condition – the title could be translated as ‘hindered’ or even ‘handicapped’, hence ‘disabled’ – and the strains it poses on his exchanges with an able-bodied lover. But this is as far from a ‘social problem’ or ‘disease of the week’ telemovie as can possibly be imagined – as the perfectly judged long takes, coupled with the relentless drone-score by Gavin Bryars, attest.
“BEHINDERT remains Dwoskin’s most daring and artistically successful attempt to splice his ‘first person’ mode of cinema with a staged fiction – creating a kind of cubistic complexity from the constantly shuffled perspectives. The ‘fourth look’ which Willemen intuited – not exactly the look of the characters, the spectator, or even the camera-eye, but some other, more forbidding look, like the gaze of society itself – hovers over the interstices between these images, these tableaux, these scenes from a relationship. From a film-history standpoint, Dwoskin’s breakthrough here is prophetic. Anticipating the ongoing novelistic autobiography of Philippe Garrel’s work since the 1980s, BEHINDERT plays a thrilling, almost vampiric game with the proximity of real-life experience to its fictive recreation – especially as its principals are the actual former lovers!” –Adrian Martin, FILM QUARTERLY

Eager to escape the limelight, a celebrated but reclusive painter (Monty Woolley) fakes his own death and assumes the identity of his recently deceased valet, only to discover the valet was engaged to be married via a matrimonial agency…and already had a wife. Stahl – perhaps best known for his melodramas that would be remade by Douglas Sirk – had, according to Sarris, “a startling quality of consistency from 1932 on. …[His] strong point was sincerity and a vivid visual style.” Featuring an Oscar-nominated script by Nunnally Johnson (THE GRAPES OF WRATH, THE DIRTY DOZEN), this rarely-screened comedy was described by Sarris as “a success by any standards.”

“My magnum opus. Travels over four continents in six years.” –W.S.
“With CARRIAGE TRADE, Sonbert began to challenge the theories espoused by the great Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s; he particularly disliked the ‘knee-jerk’ reaction produced by Eisensteinian montage. In both lectures and writings about his own style of editing, Sonbert described CARRIAGE TRADE as ‘a jig-saw puzzle of postcards to produce varied displaced effects.’ This approach, according to Sonbert, ultimately affords the viewer multi-faceted readings of the connections between shots through the spectator’s assimilation of ‘the changing relations of the movement of objects, the gestures of figures, familiar worldwide icons, rituals and reactions, rhythm, spacing, and density of images.” –Jon Gartenberg

Dwoskin’s final film is a meditation on the subjective experience and cultural concepts of aging. The film is an ode to the texture, the beauty, the singularity of aging faces and silhouettes. Throughout his films intimacy has always played a leading role and this is also true for AGE IS…, all the faces belonging to close friends, relatives, or sometimes even Dwoskin himself.
“Age is a question, a fear, something that may calm you too, but first of all it’s a way of looking. Other people looking at you and you looking at other people. It’s words that qualify you, official letters that classify you. Age gets measured by an ellipse, in the photos of a bygone era, the rediscovery of old films, the existence of an archive. Those are the places that I wish to explore, like the memory of a path. Unfortunately, age also means loss. The loss of things, people, friends. You become very lonely. That’s maybe one of the reasons why I want to ask my friends to shoot some images.” –S.D.

In “Tashlin’s best film” (Sarris), bone-obsessed British archaeologist Terry-Thomas takes a house for the summer in Malibu while his fiancée Helen travels to Paris, only to find a gaggle of adoring young co-eds at his doorstep and a troublesome Dachshund next door. Then Helen’s daughter Tuesday Weld appears… “Tashlin is impressively inventive, particularly with gadgets and animals,” Sarris wrote, but he especially admired in BACHELOR FLAT a sweetness and sympathy he found lacking in the director’s other ribald satires.

(DAS INNERE BLOS)
“[OUTSIDE IN] is nominally about the filmmaker’s experience of his disability, stricken with polio in early childhood. But is it a personal reminiscence, a documentary, an essay film, a fictional recreation, a lyrical abstraction, or a dance/performance piece? It works through…a series of self-contained tableaux, each one starkly set against those surrounding it, and each drawing upon a very different style of cinematic representation. Poetic associations flit from segment to segment, but it is left to the viewer to draw the lines and make the connections: the prosthetic apparatus into which Dwoskin laboriously straps his legs each morning is compared to both the everyday high heels with which women torture themselves, and the bondage-and-discipline gear that forms part of a sophisticated sexual ‘underworld’ we see much of in his work.” –Adrian Martin, FILM QUARTERLY

“Everything Goes in Wichita” – that is, until Joel McCrea’s former buffalo hunter Wyatt Earp foils a bank robbery and is recruited to be the town marshal. Earp reluctantly takes the job looking to bring order into the lawless cattle town, but when he starts confiscating firearms from the rowdy cowpunchers, the local leaders decide he’s gone one step too far. Sarris wrote that Tourneur fils brought “a certain French gentility to the American cinema,” and this dynamic Western – with its stunning CinemaScope compositions – offers plenty of the director’s refined sensibility. With Vera Miles and Lloyd Bridges.

After he’s released from prison, charismatic thug Chester Morris returns to life with his old gang and his fiancée, the police chief’s daughter. But when a warehouse robbery goes awry, the law’s eyes fall on Morris, and he must quickly establish a solid alibi. West’s atmospheric first talkie – filmed exclusively at night – brings the shadowy German expressionist style to the gangster melodrama, replete with Art Deco sets from the legendary designer William Cameron Menzies. “West is one of the forgotten figures of the early thirties. […] ALIBI remains to be seen and saved from the limbo of legend” (Sarris).

(KINOGLAZ)

Adapted from a Georges Simenon story, this no-nonsense noir classic from crime movie master Karlson (THE PHENIX CITY STORY) stars Richard Conte as Eddie, the oldest Rico brother and a former mob accountant pulled back into a world of crime by his younger siblings. “Karlson’s best film. […] [He] was most personal and most efficient when he dealt with the phenomenon of violence in a world controlled by organized evil. […] Unfortunately, an American director gets nowhere making films like THE BROTHERS RICO. The cosmopolitan genre prejudices are too strong” (Sarris).

(SHAGHAI, SOVIET!)

“Everything Goes in Wichita” – that is, until Joel McCrea’s former buffalo hunter Wyatt Earp foils a bank robbery and is recruited to be the town marshal. Earp reluctantly takes the job looking to bring order into the lawless cattle town, but when he starts confiscating firearms from the rowdy cowpunchers, the local leaders decide he’s gone one step too far. Sarris wrote that Tourneur fils brought “a certain French gentility to the American cinema,” and this dynamic Western – with its stunning CinemaScope compositions – offers plenty of the director’s refined sensibility. With Vera Miles and Lloyd Bridges.

Following his success on TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, Mulligan re-teamed with producer Alan J. Pakula, writer Horton Foote, and composer Elmer Bernstein for another Southern-set drama, an adaptation of Foote’s play. Steve McQueen is “particularly memorable” (Sarris) as an ex-con, country singer, and emotional trainwreck struggling to do right by wife Lee Remick and his young daughter and stay on the law’s good side. A literate, patient, and sincere character study, filled with what Sarris called the director’s “behavioral beauties.”

Short on money while receiving medical attention in London, American Julia Ross takes a job as secretary for the eccentric Hughes family. She falls into a deep sleep at the Hughes estate, only to awaken in a different house with another woman’s name and a psychotic fiancé. After years spent toiling on small B-pictures, Lewis (GUN CRAZY) was finally given a chance at a bigger production by Columbia’s Harry Cohn, and this resulting gothic thriller proved to be his breakthrough: “In 1945, MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS became the sleeper of the year. From that point on, the director’s somber personality has been revealed consistently through a complex visual style” (Sarris).

Shot in just a week by the great Wilder and Preminger cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, Oswald’s taut and tense Western stars John Derek as a gunslinger looking to settle down to a quiet life of cattle ranching. But when an old foe has his brother killed, he’s forced to strap on his guns once again. “Oswald has shown an admirable consistency, both stylistically and thematically, for a director in his obscure position. A fluency of camera movement is controlled by sliding turns and harsh stops befitting a cinema of bitter ambiguity. …Oswald has been making distinguished American films that are never reviewed in the fashionable weeklies and monthlies that feed off the fashionable and well-publicized projection room circuit” (Sarris).

(CHELOVEK S KINO-APPARATOM)
“Little introduction is needed for one of the great masterpieces of world cinema, Vertov’s extraordinary meditation on then-contemporary Soviet Russian society and the place of filmmakers within it. A kind of ‘city symphony,’ cataloguing the sights and sounds of urban life, the film is structured across a day, beginning with citizens waking up while machines are revved up. As Vertov shows us, among the first heading off to work is the ‘man with the movie camera,’ played in the film by his brother and cameraman Mikhail Kaufman. For Vertov, the camera was a kind of infinitely more perfect eye: it could offer details and aspects of the world that might be missed otherwise.” –FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER

Katherine Hepburn stars – in only her third film appearance – as a small-town actress who comes to New York with dreams of Broadway stardom, but must first navigate the affections of theater manager Adolphe Menjou and playwright Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Sherman, coming off his own successful acting career, rehearsed the script extensively and shot the film in sequence, guiding Hepburn to her first Oscar win. “Sherman deserves an esoteric niche all his own for the behavioral glories of Katherine Hepburn in MORNING GLORY…. His civilized sensibility was ahead of its time, and the sophistication of his sexual humor singularly lacking in malice” (Sarris).

“Everything Goes in Wichita” – that is, until Joel McCrea’s former buffalo hunter Wyatt Earp foils a bank robbery and is recruited to be the town marshal. Earp reluctantly takes the job looking to bring order into the lawless cattle town, but when he starts confiscating firearms from the rowdy cowpunchers, the local leaders decide he’s gone one step too far. Sarris wrote that Tourneur fils brought “a certain French gentility to the American cinema,” and this dynamic Western – with its stunning CinemaScope compositions – offers plenty of the director’s refined sensibility. With Vera Miles and Lloyd Bridges.

(ENTUZIASM: SIMFONIYA DONBASSA)

Eager to escape the limelight, a celebrated but reclusive painter (Monty Woolley) fakes his own death and assumes the identity of his recently deceased valet, only to discover the valet was engaged to be married via a matrimonial agency…and already had a wife. Stahl – perhaps best known for his melodramas that would be remade by Douglas Sirk – had, according to Sarris, “a startling quality of consistency from 1932 on. …[His] strong point was sincerity and a vivid visual style.” Featuring an Oscar-nominated script by Nunnally Johnson (THE GRAPES OF WRATH, THE DIRTY DOZEN), this rarely-screened comedy was described by Sarris as “a success by any standards.”

JEANNE LIOTTA: THE REAL WORLD AT LAST BECOMES A MYTH
Whether focusing on stars in the sky, documenting her Lower East Side neighborhood, lyrically investigating language, or examining the inherent properties of light and celluloid, Jeanne Liotta is undoubtedly one of the most inquisitive moving image artists working today. Born and raised in NYC, but currently teaching at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as on Faculty in the Bard MFA program, Liotta makes films, videos, and other ephemera – including photographs, works on paper, and live projection performances. Her latest body of work takes place in a constellation of mediums investigating the cosmic landscape, at a curious intersection of art, science, and natural philosophy.

These three programs divide more than two decades of work into groupings that revolve around science, the urban landscape (and its inhabitants), and cinematic poetry. Throughout these shows you will encounter 35mm, 16mm, Super 8mm, and video, each of which are employed in highly distinctive ways. Liotta is an intrepid explorer who uses all the tools in her reach both to investigate the nature of the medium and to engage with the world (and the cosmos) around her.

Unless noted, all descriptions written by the filmmaker.

PROGRAM 1: SCIENCE MIX. the poetry of facts.
BLUE MOON
1988, 3 min, Super 8-to-16mm. Preserved by BB Optics and NYU’s MIAP in 2012 with support from the Orphans Film Symposium.
My very first film, made for Owen O’Toole’s FILMERS ALMANAC, an international collaborative Super 8 project inspired in equal parts by Hollis Frampton’s ‘Magellan’ cycle of films and the cassette music underground. Erratic, erotic, arrhythmic lunar trauma.

LORETTA
2003, 4 min, 16mm. Sound by Carlo Altomare.
An abstract moving rayogram in the form of a woman or an aria. Living in time experienced as high drama, dissolving into the infinite. A dialectical manifestation of phenomena in flux, like any other movie.
“I love that which dazzles me and then accentuates the darkness within me.” –Rene Char

ECLIPSE
2005, 3 min, 16mm
The lunar eclipse event of November 2003 is observed, documented, and translated via the light-sensitive medium of Kodachrome film. In the 4th century BCE Aristotle founded The Lyceum, a school for the study of all natural phenomena pursued without the aid of mathematics, which was considered too perfect for application on this imperfect terrestrial sphere. By eye and hand, in the spirit of.

OBSERVANDO EL CIELO
2007, 19 min, 16mm
Seven years of celestial field recordings gathered from the chaos of the cosmos and inscribed onto 16mm film from various locations upon this turning tripod Earth. This work is neither a metaphor nor a symbol, but is feeling towards a fact in the midst of perception, which time flows through. Natural VLF radio recordings of the magnetosphere in action allow the universe to speak for itself.
“The Sublime is Now.” –Barnett Newman
“Amor Fati!” –Friedrich Nietzsche

ONE DAY THIS MAY NO LONGER EXIST
2005, 8 min. Live double projection performance, for 16mm loop and archival travelogue, with colored filters, set to sound by Sun City Girls.
Lucretius has identified the substratum of everything that exists with homogeneous atoms too small to be perceived. These atoms aggregate by chance to produce the visible world, and by chance they will eventually disperse, demolishing the cosmos as we know it. There are no permanent beings beneath, within, or above the heavens. There are no gods, and the universe manifests no final cause.

WHAT MAKES DAY AND NIGHT
1998, 10 min, 16mm
This 1940s artifact is coupled with music by Nino Rota to expose the existential skeleton in the closet: our perilous journey on the planet Earth. A readymade film with the barest of interventions. Thanks to Hollis, Federico, and Materials for the Arts.
“Jeanne Liotta dares to leave the perceived perfect.” –Matthias Mueller

HYMN TO THE VOID
2006, 3 min, for 16mm film and hymnboard
Work, for The Night is Coming.

SCIENCE’S TEN MOST BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS
2005, 2 min each, digital video
Inspired by a 2005 Physics World magazine poll.
#2: GALILEO’S
One of the first experimentalists was Galileo, who supposedly dropped a feather and a hammer simultaneously from the Leaning Tower of Pisa in order to demonstrate that the two would hit the ground at the same time. Approximately 400 years later that trick still works, courtesy NASA (1971).

#10: FOUCAULT’S
The California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco houses this particular Foucault’s Pendulum, where one can go to watch the Earth rotating, by deduction.

SWEET DREAMS
2009, 4 min, video
Ostensibly a karaoke music video shot on location in Second Life, featuring Sunshine Hernandoz as herself. A virtual derive, flying through 360 degrees of a built environment, inclusive of random encounters, poetic objects, and impossible architecture. A science fiction dream of fluid identities and fantasy as a practice of everyday life.
“It is the possible we place before us.” –Gilles Deleuze, on the virtual

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

After he’s released from prison, charismatic thug Chester Morris returns to life with his old gang and his fiancée, the police chief’s daughter. But when a warehouse robbery goes awry, the law’s eyes fall on Morris, and he must quickly establish a solid alibi. West’s atmospheric first talkie – filmed exclusively at night – brings the shadowy German expressionist style to the gangster melodrama, replete with Art Deco sets from the legendary designer William Cameron Menzies. “West is one of the forgotten figures of the early thirties. […] ALIBI remains to be seen and saved from the limbo of legend” (Sarris).

(SHESTAIA CHAST MIRA)

“Everything Goes in Wichita” – that is, until Joel McCrea’s former buffalo hunter Wyatt Earp foils a bank robbery and is recruited to be the town marshal. Earp reluctantly takes the job looking to bring order into the lawless cattle town, but when he starts confiscating firearms from the rowdy cowpunchers, the local leaders decide he’s gone one step too far. Sarris wrote that Tourneur fils brought “a certain French gentility to the American cinema,” and this dynamic Western – with its stunning CinemaScope compositions – offers plenty of the director’s refined sensibility. With Vera Miles and Lloyd Bridges.

JEANNE LIOTTA: THE REAL WORLD AT LAST BECOMES A MYTH
Whether focusing on stars in the sky, documenting her Lower East Side neighborhood, lyrically investigating language, or examining the inherent properties of light and celluloid, Jeanne Liotta is undoubtedly one of the most inquisitive moving image artists working today. Born and raised in NYC, but currently teaching at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as on Faculty in the Bard MFA program, Liotta makes films, videos, and other ephemera – including photographs, works on paper, and live projection performances. Her latest body of work takes place in a constellation of mediums investigating the cosmic landscape, at a curious intersection of art, science, and natural philosophy.

These three programs divide more than two decades of work into groupings that revolve around science, the urban landscape (and its inhabitants), and cinematic poetry. Throughout these shows you will encounter 35mm, 16mm, Super 8mm, and video, each of which are employed in highly distinctive ways. Liotta is an intrepid explorer who uses all the tools in her reach both to investigate the nature of the medium and to engage with the world (and the cosmos) around her.

Unless noted, all descriptions written by the filmmaker.

PROGRAM 2: IRL MIX. stylistic contaminations from the urban field.

“o little jeannie”
anon, unknown date, 3 min, 8mm
My fake autobiography.

HEPHAESTUS OF THE AIRSHAFT
2005, 3 min, digital video
The god of metallurgy manifests in Manhattan, with the radio on.

A YEAR OF YOUTUBE
A random mix of my point ‘n’ shoot urban field recordings; here comes everybody.

CROSSWALK
2010, 18 min, 35mm
“‘Nuyo-realism’ from the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, CROSSWALK is a locative portrait in sound and image, shot at the intersection of home movie and cinema vérité. Participation and observation take place on consecutive Good Fridays, highlighting the hybrid urban collage of peoples, cultures, and performances in daily life. A set of physical facts and a groove.” –Michael Sicinski, GREEN CINE DAILY
“The cinema is an explosion of my love for reality.” –Pier Paolo Pasolini

MANIFESTO! (STRUCK BY THE HAND)
2001, 11 min, digital video. With Andrew Castrucci.
A guerilla action performed on the steps of The Met, by Italo Zamboni, the last painter of the 20th century.

OCCUPY DENVER
2011, 4 min, Super-8mm
A matter of record.

SUTRO
2009, 3 min, digital video. Sounds by Scanner.
Animated glitch portrait of the eponymous television tower on the hill, guardian of fog and electronic signals in that earthshaking city by the Bay…
“Like the two main strands of the accompanying music (sustained minor chords / fractured, hyperkinetic drum machine pitter-pat), SUTRO is never not a clash of opposing forces. Get down with your bad-ass Hegelian self.” –Michael Sicinski, GREEN CINE DAILY

Short on money while receiving medical attention in London, American Julia Ross takes a job as secretary for the eccentric Hughes family. She falls into a deep sleep at the Hughes estate, only to awaken in a different house with another woman’s name and a psychotic fiancé. After years spent toiling on small B-pictures, Lewis (GUN CRAZY) was finally given a chance at a bigger production by Columbia’s Harry Cohn, and this resulting gothic thriller proved to be his breakthrough: “In 1945, MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS became the sleeper of the year. From that point on, the director’s somber personality has been revealed consistently through a complex visual style” (Sarris).

JEANNE LIOTTA: THE REAL WORLD AT LAST BECOMES A MYTH
Whether focusing on stars in the sky, documenting her Lower East Side neighborhood, lyrically investigating language, or examining the inherent properties of light and celluloid, Jeanne Liotta is undoubtedly one of the most inquisitive moving image artists working today. Born and raised in NYC, but currently teaching at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as on Faculty in the Bard MFA program, Liotta makes films, videos, and other ephemera – including photographs, works on paper, and live projection performances. Her latest body of work takes place in a constellation of mediums investigating the cosmic landscape, at a curious intersection of art, science, and natural philosophy.

These three programs divide more than two decades of work into groupings that revolve around science, the urban landscape (and its inhabitants), and cinematic poetry. Throughout these shows you will encounter 35mm, 16mm, Super 8mm, and video, each of which are employed in highly distinctive ways. Liotta is an intrepid explorer who uses all the tools in her reach both to investigate the nature of the medium and to engage with the world (and the cosmos) around her.

Unless noted, all descriptions written by the filmmaker.

PROGRAM 3: WORDY MIX. words are working hard for you.
Following this program, Liotta will be take part in a conversation with poet Anselm Berrigan!

@movies (iPhoto slide installation)

SWEET DREAMS
2009, 4 min, video
See above for description.

WHAT WE AS HUMANS TRYING FALLIBLY FOREVER
2006, DV loop
A singular dissolve extracted from the media haystack of the mid-20th century.

HYMN TO THE VOID
2006, 3 min, for 16mm film and hymnboard
Work, for The Night is Coming.

HAIKU FOR ONIZUKA
2007, 1 min, 16mm
On January 28, 1986 the Challenger Mission 51-L set out to observe Halley’s Comet from space but exploded about one minute into the launch killing everyone on board. A monument to the Challenger astronaut Ellison J. Onizuka stands in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, where I made graphite rubbings from the plaque onto plain paper, resulting in nearly a perfect haiku. Then refilmed to emphasize poetic structure, and disaster duration.

DARK ENOUGH
2011, 7 min, video. Text by Lisa Gil.
Text-as-text and text-as-image, avoiding poetic illustration by way of poetic illustration. Lines from Lisa Gill’s DARK ENOUGH. Sound composed for 60 cycle speaker hum and Tibetan bell.

SPONTANEOUS GEOMETRY (for Jen Hofer)
2012, 1 min, video
An occasional; made to celebrate Hofer’s recent award-winning translation of Myriam Moscona’s NEGRO MARFIL, Les Figues Press.

SOME WORLDS
2012, 8 min, video. With Matvei Yankelevich.
A collaborative game for video, objects, voice and text, based on Yankelevich’s long poem ‘Some Worlds for Dr Vogt.’
“E a c h  F o r m  i s  a  W o r l d” –M a l e v i c h

LEXICON OF SPATIAL CONCEPTS FOR GIORDANO BRUNO
2012 (work-in-progress), 2 min
Pattern poetry and public speech. Towards a working project in diverse media with a door at anyplace, a film to be composed of interlocking passages inspired by Bruno’s L’infinito: cruciform wordplay, scientific visualization, lyrical social media, interviews, and jargon.

Raul Ruiz LE FILM A VENIR
1997, 9 min, video
Plot keywords: secret society, absurdism, non-professional cast, meta film, cult director, film within a film. –IMDb

In “Tashlin’s best film” (Sarris), bone-obsessed British archaeologist Terry-Thomas takes a house for the summer in Malibu while his fiancée Helen travels to Paris, only to find a gaggle of adoring young co-eds at his doorstep and a troublesome Dachshund next door. Then Helen’s daughter Tuesday Weld appears… “Tashlin is impressively inventive, particularly with gadgets and animals,” Sarris wrote, but he especially admired in BACHELOR FLAT a sweetness and sympathy he found lacking in the director’s other ribald satires.

Adapted from a Georges Simenon story, this no-nonsense noir classic from crime movie master Karlson (THE PHENIX CITY STORY) stars Richard Conte as Eddie, the oldest Rico brother and a former mob accountant pulled back into a world of crime by his younger siblings. “Karlson’s best film. […] [He] was most personal and most efficient when he dealt with the phenomenon of violence in a world controlled by organized evil. […] Unfortunately, an American director gets nowhere making films like THE BROTHERS RICO. The cosmopolitan genre prejudices are too strong” (Sarris).

(ODINNADTSAYI)

(TRI PESNI O LENINYE)

Following his success on TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, Mulligan re-teamed with producer Alan J. Pakula, writer Horton Foote, and composer Elmer Bernstein for another Southern-set drama, an adaptation of Foote’s play. Steve McQueen is “particularly memorable” (Sarris) as an ex-con, country singer, and emotional trainwreck struggling to do right by wife Lee Remick and his young daughter and stay on the law’s good side. A literate, patient, and sincere character study, filled with what Sarris called the director’s “behavioral beauties.”

A once-a-calendar opportunity to take a peek at the teeming hive of creativity hiding behind the scenes at Anthology, thanks to the film- and video-making efforts of AFA’s staff, friends, fellow-travelers, and devotees.

Shot in just a week by the great Wilder and Preminger cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, Oswald’s taut and tense Western stars John Derek as a gunslinger looking to settle down to a quiet life of cattle ranching. But when an old foe has his brother killed, he’s forced to strap on his guns once again. “Oswald has shown an admirable consistency, both stylistically and thematically, for a director in his obscure position. A fluency of camera movement is controlled by sliding turns and harsh stops befitting a cinema of bitter ambiguity. …Oswald has been making distinguished American films that are never reviewed in the fashionable weeklies and monthlies that feed off the fashionable and well-publicized projection room circuit” (Sarris).