Anthology Film Archives

DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Zack Godshall
GOD’S ARCHITECTS
2009, 82 minutes, video.
Tells the stories of five divinely inspired artist-architects and their enigmatic creations.

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Kent Hayward SUNSET TO SUNSET (2010, 2 minutes, 8mm)
Ana Cuadra WRITER’S BLOCK (2009, 13 minutes, 16mm)
Jeff Robinson SLINGS AND ARROWS (2010, 14 minutes, 16mm)
Terrence Donnellan HOLLYWOOD LOVE STORY (2010, 18 minutes, video)
Michael Swingler MIDLIFE (2010, 22 minutes, video)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Gary King
WHAT’S UP LOVELY
2010, 69 minutes, video.
In the dead of night, a recently unemployed insomniac wanders the streets of New York discovering a city beyond her wildest imagination. During one unforgettable night, she comes face-to-face with her innermost fears and desires as she tries to find her way back home.

–Saturday, July 3, Documentary Series at 6:00, Short Film Program at 7:30, Feature Presentation at 9:00.

Anthology celebrates this 4th of July weekend with two very special screenings of WILLIE NELSON’S 4TH OF JULY CELEBRATION, a document of one of Willie’s legendary picnics/concerts/free-for-alls. Rarely, if ever, shown in New York City, WILLIE NELSON’S 4TH is guaranteed to transport you far from the rat-race cacophony of the metropolis, to a world of smooth country crooning and nimble-fingered guitar picking, of high times and open spaces.
“Willie is [here] the smooth 1970s country crooner: hunk-ily handsome and heartbreakingly good; not yet his gentle stoner-Gramps-self of today. Those unfamiliar with Willie’s live performances will marvel at the fireworks display his chops ignite on that beat-up Spanish guitar. The film’s music is infectious, especially when Doug ‘the Ragin’ Cajun’ Kershaw shows up in full Austin Powers velour and pirate-dickie, and – full of all the swirling energy of a ‘Looze-ana’ hurricane – steals the show with his brand of wild bayou fiddling. Willie’s dear compadre Waylon Jennings shows up, too, performing several hits including his Willie-homage, ‘Willie the Wandering Gypsy’. As the show climaxes with the requisite ‘everyone-on-stage’ finale, even Jennings has become pretty recreationally zonked, with his half-open eyelids giving him a devilish aura.” –Walter Forsberg

Anthology celebrates this 4th of July weekend with two very special screenings of WILLIE NELSON’S 4TH OF JULY CELEBRATION, a document of one of Willie’s legendary picnics/concerts/free-for-alls. Rarely, if ever, shown in New York City, WILLIE NELSON’S 4TH is guaranteed to transport you far from the rat-race cacophony of the metropolis, to a world of smooth country crooning and nimble-fingered guitar picking, of high times and open spaces.
“Willie is [here] the smooth 1970s country crooner: hunk-ily handsome and heartbreakingly good; not yet his gentle stoner-Gramps-self of today. Those unfamiliar with Willie’s live performances will marvel at the fireworks display his chops ignite on that beat-up Spanish guitar. The film’s music is infectious, especially when Doug ‘the Ragin’ Cajun’ Kershaw shows up in full Austin Powers velour and pirate-dickie, and – full of all the swirling energy of a ‘Looze-ana’ hurricane – steals the show with his brand of wild bayou fiddling. Willie’s dear compadre Waylon Jennings shows up, too, performing several hits including his Willie-homage, ‘Willie the Wandering Gypsy’. As the show climaxes with the requisite ‘everyone-on-stage’ finale, even Jennings has become pretty recreationally zonked, with his half-open eyelids giving him a devilish aura.” –Walter Forsberg

DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Emily Pyle
BURNED: LIFE IN AND OUT OF TEXAS YOUTH PRISONS
2009, 69 minutes, video.
Follows a year in the life of two boys committed to maximum-security youth facilities in Texas.

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Sally Grizzell Larson AXIOM (2010, 1 minute, video)
Gabrielle Lansner DAD (2010, 7 minutes, video)
James Arrabito WHAT’S IN ALASKA (2009, 13 minutes, video)
Roy Clovis THE CYCLE (2010, 18 minutes, video)
J. J. Adler NEW MEDIA (2009, 20 minutes, video)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Hightower
LAST CHANCE
2010, 82 minutes, video.
After spending the last six months getting his life together, Nate decides he’s ready to try again with his ex-girlfriend Kim, who unbeknownst to him has moved on to another relationship. After a confrontation between the two goes awry, Nate resorts to more extreme measures to convince her that they belong together.

–Monday, July 5, Documentary Series at 6:00, Short Film Program at 7:20, Feature Presentation at 8:30.

NEWFILMMAKERS PRESENTS FILMS ABOUT THE DIRTY BUSINESS OF OIL, ALONG WITH OUR SUMMER SHORTS SERIES

NEWFILMMAKERS DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Rossana Jeran 6 GEMINI (2007, 5 minutes, video)
&
Jeremy Earp
BLOOD AND OIL
2008, 52 minutes, video.
Based on the work of NATION magazine defense correspondent Michael T. Klare, this film shows how concerns about oil have been at the core of American foreign policy for more than 60 years.

FIRST SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Joyce P. Fields A KINDNESS (2009, 10 minutes, video)
Mike Smith Rivera COLD APRIL (2010, 16 minutes, video)
Matthew J. Clark DRY RAIN (2008, 23 minutes, 16mm)

SECOND SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Sascha Just TRIP (2010, 5 minutes, video)
Christian Vogeler IT IS (2009, 8 minutes, video)
Petter Ringbom MAY FLY (2009, 14 minutes, video)
Ben Hur Sepehr THE DESPERATE (2009, 33 minutes, video)

–Monday, July 5, Documentary Series at 6:00, First Short Film Program at 7:15, Second Short Film Program at 8:15.

NEWFILMMAKERS WELCOMES THE RETURN OF THE ASIAN FILMMAKERS SERIES

DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Jeff Giordano
LONG-DISTANCE RUNNERS: A CROSS-CULTURAL LOVE STORY
2010, 69 minutes, video.
A documentary about a long-distance, romantic relationship between a man from New Jersey and a woman from Kobe, Japan.

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Minji Kang REQUIEM FOR HERSTORY (2010, 25 minutes, video)
Arckii Mun Jong Kim FANTASTIC GLASS PORTRAIT (2009, 25 minutes, video)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Yuko Torihara AMATERASU (2010, 15 minutes, video)
&
Tatsuo Kobayashi
COUNTRY GIRL
2010, 70 minutes, video.
Hayashi is a high-school boy in Kyoto who has no regard for traditional values. His routine is to con foreign tourists. Unexpectedly he falls in love with a young geisha who belongs to the traditional side of the city.

–Tuesday, July 6, Documentary Series at 6:00, Short Film Program at 7:30, Feature Presentation at 8:45.

COMEDY SHORT PROGRAM
Debra Zarne MENDEL’S BLACK HATS (2007, 1 minute, video)
Mattson Tomlin SOLOMON GRUNDY (2009, 10 minutes, video)
Matt Golub SUPER SUNDAY (2009, 14 minutes, video)
Matt McGregor BIKE CLUB (2009, 15 minutes, video)
Jennifer Reeder SEVEN SONGS ABOUT THUNDER (2010, 20 minutes, video)

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Derek Braasch MURDER FOR PLEASURE MUSIC VIDEO 1 (2010, 4 minutes, video)
Kantarama Gahigiri LEILA (2009, 2 minutes, video)
Debra Zarne GOING WITH GRANDMA FOR HER PRUNES (2006, 6 minutes, video)
Hans Christian Berger NO (2009, 6 minutes, video)
Zev Frank CYCLE (2008, 13 minutes, video)
Wei Zhang NORA’S FISH (2008, 13 minutes, 16mm)
Brendan Bellomo BOHEMIBOT (2008, 26 minutes, video)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Michael Paul
ROMAN’S BRIDE
2009, 84 minutes, video.
Lily Heller, a lonely woman, operates a dried-weed bouquet business nestled among the cornfields of rural Iowa. When news reaches her that her neighbor and childhood crush, Roman, has recently become single and unemployed, Lily’s mental stability falters as long-buried feelings rise to the surface.

–Tuesday, July 6, Comedy Short Program at 6:00, Short Film Program at 7:15, Feature Presentation at 8:45.

NEWFILMMAKERS ENDS SUMMER FEST 2010. TONIGHT’S PROGRAM IS NOT FOR EVERYONE. FILMS CONTAIN ADULT MATERIAL.

DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Greg Paxton BABY (1998, 3 minutes, video)
&
Deborah Staab DESPERATE FOR A LAUGH (2009, 50 minutes, video)
Follows MEAT, an all-female sketch comedy group, as they travel from New York to Los Angeles for a last shot at achieving industry recognition.

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Lori Bowen ESSENGER (2010, 5 minutes, video)
William Crooks ROBOTIC PANIC (2010, 10 minutes, video)
Peter Pizzi SUCKER (2008, 18 minutes, video)
Matthew Silver LOVE COMES OUT OF THE BUTT (2009, 24 minutes, video)
Arthuro Cubacub B-17: A MINI-EPIC (2007, 36 minutes, video)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Zach Clark
MODERN LOVE IS AUTOMATIC
2009, 93 minutes, video.
After her new roommate Adrian moves in, Lorraine is drawn into a secret, seedy world of lonely men, cheap motel rooms, and whips and chains. Meanwhile, Adrian’s dreams of becoming a glamorous fashion model are cut short when the only employment she can find is showcasing mattresses in a strip mall. In pursuing their hidden desires and misguided dreams, both girls find their paths crossing in ways they never expected.

–Wednesday, July 7, Documentary Series at 6:00, Short Film Program at 7:15, Feature Presentation at 9:00.

NEWFILMMAKERS ENDS SUMMER FEST 2010. TONIGHT’S PROGRAM IS FOR EVERYONE.

FILM SCHOOL PROGRAM
FIVE TOWNS COLLEGE
NewFilmmakers regularly invites leading film schools to present films and to discuss their programs with potential students. Check our website, www.NewFilmmakers.com, for additional information about the Five Towns Program.

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Steve Hosford
VACANCY
2005, 52 minutes, video.
Ten-year-old Reid is spending the summer of 1983 far from home, stuck at a remote roadside motel with his parents. Fending off boredom is second nature to loners like him; but when a captivating girl checks in with her family, Reid suddenly finds he has more than enough on his mind.

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Nathan Rose Freeman
AUTHORING ACTION
2010, 120 minutes, video.
When three children survive a bus crash that kills their parents, their childhood dies as well, until they find an unlikely partner-in-grief at the shallow grave of a long-lost child.

–Wednesday, July 7, Film School Program at 6:00, Short Film Program at 7:30, Feature Presentation at 8:45.

THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS / FRANCESCO, GIULIARE DI DIO
Francesco (St. Francis of Assisi) comes back to Santa Maria degli Angeli from Rome, journeying with his friars through the rain. When they are driven out of a hut, he begs the brothers’ forgiveness for abusing their obedience. While the monks are finishing the chapel, Brother Ginepro arrives naked again and confesses that the previous night he was tempted by the Devil. Later, he cuts the foot off a pig to feed a sick brother. That evening, Francesco meets a leper and kisses him. Brother Ginepro receives Francesco’s permission to preach and arrives at the camp of Nicolaio, the tyrant of Viterbo, whose cruelty he overcomes with his perfect humility. Francesco teaches Brother Leone that bearing injuries and blows is an example of perfect joy. Francesco sends his brothers out to preach far and wide.

Herbert Danska UPTOWN: PORTRAIT OF THE SOUTH BRONX
(1965, 29 minutes, 16mm. Print courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; preserved with funding from the New York State Library, Division of Library Development.)

A study of a disadvantaged community within the city of New York, situated in a triangle at the southern tip of the borough of the Bronx, the film includes scenes of tenements, streets, parks, churches, markets, dance halls, and playgrounds, revealing the way of life of its people, their desperation and their hope.

Newsreel LINCOLN HOSPITAL
(1970, 12 minutes, video)

When a city-run health clinic in the South Bronx fails to meet the needs of the city, local residents and health workers force a strike and then run the clinic themselves.

William Sarokin SIMPSON STREET
(1979, 22 minutes, 16mm)

A brief but compelling history of New York’s devastated South Bronx, showing reasons for its decline, and introducing the people who live there and some of their efforts to rebuild their economy.

Patrick Tarrant SLOW BOAT TO QUEENS
(2009, 8 minutes, video)

Tracing the vectored movement of the city’s mobile machines and people carriers, this film seeks to give perspective to what it means to be human in their midst.

Alexandra Cuesta RECORDANDO EL AYER (2004, 9 minutes, 16mm)

Memory and identity are observed through textures of everyday life in a portrait of Jackson Heights, home to a large Latin American immigrant population.

Barry Braverman MURITA CYCLES
(1978, 28 minutes, 16mm. Print courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.)

Braverman’s portrait of his father, who runs a shop selling used bicycles and innumerable other objects in Staten Island, is a remarkable, unexpectedly moving, and disarmingly candid character study.

Paul Schneider PEOPLE’S FIREHOUSE #1
(1979, 25 minutes, 16mm. Print courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.)

This film portrays the campaign by residents, mostly Polish, of Brooklyn’s Northside community as they battle to re-open their local firehouse, Engine Company 212, closed by the city’s budget cuts.

Renee Fraser & Ann-Carol Grossman KEEP ‘EM FLYING
(1981, 29 minutes, 16mm. Print courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; preserved with funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.)

Focusing on the sport of flying domesticated pigeons from Brooklyn rooftops, this film documents pigeon flyers caring for their flocks and trading stories and strays in the neighborhood pet shop.

Caroline Ahlfors Mouris & Frank Mouris CONEY
(1975, 5 minutes, 16mm)

A personal and impressionistic response to a year in Coney Island.

Nick Manning HOT BAGELS
(1979, 16 minutes, video)

A film capturing the process of making bagels by hand, along with commentary on the changing nature of the bagel business, and the bagel shop’s place in the neighborhood.

Sol Rubin TRINIDAD IN BROOKLYN
(1985, 10 minutes, video)

A film about “a Mardi Gras of Black Islanders through an Orthodox Jewish area. The festive and pious seem to coexist.”

Total running time: ca. 120 minutes.

EARLY ABSTRACTIONS (1941-57, 23 min, 16mm) Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
MIRROR ANIMATIONS (extended 1979 version, 11 min, 35mm) NEW PRINT!
LATE SUPERIMPOSITIONS (1964, 28 min, 16mm)
OZ, THE TIN WOODMAN’S DREAM (1967, 15 min, 35mm)
“My cinematic excreta is of four varieties: – batiked animations made directly on film between 1939 and 1946; optically printed non-objective studies composed around 1950; semi-realistic animated collages made as part of my alchemical labors of 1957 to 1962; and chronologically super-imposed photographs of actualities formed since the latter year. All these works have been organized in specific patterns derived from the interlocking beats of the respiration, the heart and the EEG Alpha component and should be observed together in order, or not at all, for they are valuable works, works that will forever abide – they made me gray.” –Harry Smith
Total running time: ca. 80 min.

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

Diego Echeverria
LOS SURES 
(1983, 70 minutes, 16mm. Print courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.)
A portrait of one of NYC’s poorest neighborhoods, the primarily Hispanic section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, known as Los Sures, the film examines the lives of five Puerto Rican residents of the area.
With:
Bonnie Friedman THE FLASHETTES
(1977, 20 minutes, 16mm. Print courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.)
A documentary about the growing self-confidence of the members of a black, all-girl track team from Bedford-Stuyvesant.
BLACK JOURNAL: DIGGING FOR BLACK PRIDE
(1971, 19 minutes, video)
This film documents a classroom program in which black children in Bedford-Stuyvesant learn about their 19th-century ancestors from the then newly-discovered village of Weeksville, and their African heritage.
Total running time: ca. 115 minutes.

Tony Batten
AIN’T GONNA EAT MY MIND
1972, 34 minutes, 16mm. Print courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

The story of the murder of a young gang member in the South Bronx and its aftermath, culminating in a summit meeting of gang leaders.

&

Gary Weis
80 BLOCKS FROM TIFFANY’S
1979, 67 minutes, video.

A documentary depicting the daily life of gangs within the context of the South Bronx. It deals primarily with two African American and Puerto Rican gangs known as the “Savage Skulls” and the “Savage Nomads”.

Total running time: ca. 105 minutes.

FIREWORKS (1947, 20 min, 35mm, b&w)
RABBIT’S MOON (1950-70, 15 min, 35mm)
EAUX D’ARTIFICE (1953, 13 min, 16mm)
KUSTOM KAR KOMMANDOS (1965, 3 min, 16mm)
SCORPIO RISING (1963, 30 min, 35mm)
Poetry, psychodrama, and the occult meet in these timeless works by one of the pioneers of the American avant-garde film.
Total running time: ca. 85 min.

Alan & Susan Raymond
THE POLICE TAPES
1976, 90 minutes, video.
This groundbreaking, profoundly influential film reveals the life of a police precinct in the South Bronx in a period when the neighborhood was perhaps at its most blighted. Alan and Susan Raymond were allowed unprecedented access to the police force, interviewing the officers and following them on a typical day, and the result is an unforgettable document.

NEWFILMMAKERS CELEBRATES BASTILLE DAY. FLYING IN WILL BE THE DIRECTOR AND CAST MEMBERS OF ‘THE VISIT’ ABOUT A FRENCH TEENAGER OBSESSED WITH PORN.

FRENCH SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Charlotte Beaudoin Pelletier LE SEPTIÈME ÉCART (2009, 8 minutes, 16mm)
Guillaume Mazloum PEINE PERDUE (2010, 12 minutes, 8mm)
Matthieu Rumani DERNIÈRE DÉMARQUE (2009, 14 minutes, 35mm)
Pierre Terrade CRESCENDO (2009, 14 minutes, video)
Farouk Thoyer THE ART OF SUICIDE (2009, 27 minutes, 16mm)

FIRST FEATURE PRESENTATION
Arnaud Collery
LITTLE KLAUS BIG WORLD
2010, 60 minutes, video.
An international documentary comedy about action star dreams, love, and worldwide adventure. Klaus Pierre is a half-German, half-French, wannabe action star who travels to Hollywood to be the next Keanu Reeves. An unfortunate event takes him back to Europe. But fate then puts Klaus on another journey through Japan, China, and India.

SECOND FEATURE PRESENTATION
Richard Dailey
THE VISIT
2010, 90 minutes, video.
Melinda is a 16-year-old born-again Christian who visits her cousin Elliot and his mother in Paris for the Christmas holiday and finds herself in a web of Parisian intrigue that forms around her.

–Wednesday, July 14, Short Film Program at 6:00, First Feature at 7:30, Second Feature at 8:45.

With Roger Daltrey, Paul Nicholas, and Ringo Starr. Russell reinvents the biopic as a gleefully anachronistic, grossly obscene, unapologetically tasteless, and genuinely unhinged phantasmagoria, with piano virtuoso and composer Franz Liszt presented as a proto-rock-star (no great stretch for The Who’s Roger Daltrey) locked in a Manichean struggle with the satanic Richard Wagner. While most of the films in this series challenge biopic conventions by eschewing psychology, practicing formal experimentation, or developing a filmic style reflective of their subjects’ art, LISZTOMANIA does so via power-pop musical numbers, Frankenstein monster Nazis, and giant penises. This is Ken Russell at his most excessive (which is to say, prepare to take cover!). –Wednesday, July 14 at 7:00 and Saturday, July 17 at 9:00.

The powerful words of 17th-century poet Arutuin Sayadian, also known as “Sayat Nova” (“King of Siam”) are magnificently captured in this visual pastiche which is both a stylized biography and a tribute to his work. Charted into eight sections of his life from childhood to death, the film is a series of symbolically rich, almost hallucinatory scenes. This baroque masterpiece was banned in the Soviet Union for its religious sentiment and nonconformity to "Socialist realism." Paradjanov, a tirelessly outspoken campaigner for human rights, was convicted on a number of trumped-up charges and sentenced to five years of hard labor in the gulag. A wave of protest from the international film community led to his release in 1978.

With Karl Johnson, Tilda Swinton, and Michael Gough.
Seven years after the release of his highly personal, studio-bound, freely anachronistic portrait of the painter Caravaggio, Jarman made this even more stylized biographical study of one of the 20^th century’s most influential philosophers. Shot on a soundstage with radically minimalist sets consisting of little more than a handful of suggestive props, Jarman stages significant moments from Wittgenstein’s life, played out in a vacuum of darkness suggestive of a philosophically-charged void. Utilizing a series of ploys to undercut biopic clichés – including direct-address to the camera, unapologetically anachronistic touches, and the appearance of an alien who engages in dialogue with the young Wittgenstein – Jarman conjures a highly meditative and experimental exploration of the philosopher’s life and thought.

CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH / CHRONIK DER ANNA MAGDALENA BACH
With Gustav Leonhardt and Christiane Lang.
This beautiful, lucid account of the last 27 years of the life of J.S. Bach (as played by Dutch harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt), seen through the eyes of his second wife, is mediated partly through documents but mostly through Bach’s own music, performed in original locations and “used neither as accompaniment nor as commentary but as aesthetic material in its own right” (Straub). This is among the most de-dramatized and materialist of biographical films.

“Thérèse Martin died of neglect and consumption in a Carmelite convent at the age of 25, leaving behind little more than a slim volume of memoirs and a reputation for piety and self-mortification. Like an obsessed artist or athlete, she had honed her life for one end – the sainthood she was granted in 1925, less than three decades after her death. In brief and limpid episodes Cavalier bares the masochism, eroticism, and purity at the heart of Thérèse’s self-enclosed crusade. … [The film] evokes equally the atavistic appeal and repulsiveness of fanatic faith and unrelenting vision. Unfolding with the cumulative rhythms of prayer, it achieves by the end the intensity and ambivalence of a religious experience.” –Peter Keough, CHICAGO READER

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

With Ed Harris and Peter Boyle. Written by Rudy Wurlitzer.
[T]his delirious fantasy about William Walker, the American who ruled Nicaragua from 1855 to 1857, is all over the place and excessive, but as a radical statement about the U.S.’s involvement in that country it packs a very welcome wallop. … Deliberate and surreal anachronisms plant the action in a historical version of the present, and David Bridges’s cinematography combined with a liberal use of slow motion creates a lyrical depiction of carnage and devastation. … One can certainly quarrel with some aspects of the film’s treatment of history, but with political cowardice in commercial filmmaking so prevalent, one can only admire this movie’s gusto in calling a spade a spade, and the exhilaration of its anger and wit.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

FELLINI’S CASANOVA / IL CASANOVA DI FEDERICO FELLINI
With Donald Sutherland and Tina Aumont.
Fellini’s late-career film is a phantasmagoric portrait of the notorious womanizer, and, despite its typically Fellini-esque spectacle, one of the director’s bleakest and most pessimistic films. Portraying Casanova (Sutherland, in a remarkable performance) in his waning days, engaging in various amorous and political adventures with an air of bored detachment as he travels through a disease-ridden Europe, the film debunks the myth of Casanova as a great lover and instead presents him as an ordinary man swept along by extraordinary circumstances.
“Imbued with an air of funereal solemnity and elegance, CASANOVA forsakes realism in favor of a stylized romantic pessimism which confronts impotence, failure, sexuality, and exploitation as fully as Pasolini’s SALÒ. Although teetering at times dangerously close to Ken Russell, the visual daring and pure imagination of every image leave it as an elegiac farewell to an era of Italian cinema; and Sutherland’s performance is the most astonishing piece of screen acting since Brando’s in LAST TANGO IN PARIS.” –TIME OUT LONDON

“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

The powerful words of 17th-century poet Arutuin Sayadian, also known as “Sayat Nova” (“King of Siam”) are magnificently captured in this visual pastiche which is both a stylized biography and a tribute to his work. Charted into eight sections of his life from childhood to death, the film is a series of symbolically rich, almost hallucinatory scenes. This baroque masterpiece was banned in the Soviet Union for its religious sentiment and nonconformity to "Socialist realism." Paradjanov, a tirelessly outspoken campaigner for human rights, was convicted on a number of trumped-up charges and sentenced to five years of hard labor in the gulag. A wave of protest from the international film community led to his release in 1978.

“...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

With Roger Daltrey, Paul Nicholas, and Ringo Starr. Russell reinvents the biopic as a gleefully anachronistic, grossly obscene, unapologetically tasteless, and genuinely unhinged phantasmagoria, with piano virtuoso and composer Franz Liszt presented as a proto-rock-star (no great stretch for The Who’s Roger Daltrey) locked in a Manichean struggle with the satanic Richard Wagner. While most of the films in this series challenge biopic conventions by eschewing psychology, practicing formal experimentation, or developing a filmic style reflective of their subjects’ art, LISZTOMANIA does so via power-pop musical numbers, Frankenstein monster Nazis, and giant penises. This is Ken Russell at his most excessive (which is to say, prepare to take cover!). –Wednesday, July 14 at 7:00 and Saturday, July 17 at 9:00.

“Rossellini’s portrait of René Descartes was his third film set in seventeenth-century France, and is even more elliptical than the others. Rossellini leaves out many…aspects of Descartes’ life (his military service, his devout religious practices, his application of algebra to geometry), focusing instead on his deficiencies, his fear, existential terror, his indolence and self-absorption. Rossellini described Descartes as ‘a son of a bitch, a coward, a lazy person. He was quite repulsive of course, not simpatico…. But I don’t care about that. He was intelligent.’ … With his characteristic attention to quotidian detail, ever curious camera, and emphasis on the social and economic contexts for Descartes’ scientific inquiry, Rossellini produces a demanding, tough, intellectually gripping portrait of the man whose cogito ergo sum could stand as another of the director’s credos.” –James Quandt, CINEMATHEQUE ONTARIO

(TRIUMPH DES WILLENS)
“The official Nazi record of the 1934 Nuremberg Party rally, commissioned by Hitler and directed by Leni Riefenstahl, [it] is one of the most controversial contributions to film history because of its subject matter – her insistence that the film is solely a work of art and not propaganda; and the presentation of the subject matter – the manipulation of reality in this ‘documentary’ record. The contributions to the art of film this work has to offer are closely tied to the controversies. [It] is a masterpiece of style and editing, which in turn are the very techniques used to manipulate reality and create emotionally effective propaganda.” –Marie Saeli

CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH / CHRONIK DER ANNA MAGDALENA BACH
With Gustav Leonhardt and Christiane Lang.
This beautiful, lucid account of the last 27 years of the life of J.S. Bach (as played by Dutch harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt), seen through the eyes of his second wife, is mediated partly through documents but mostly through Bach’s own music, performed in original locations and “used neither as accompaniment nor as commentary but as aesthetic material in its own right” (Straub). This is among the most de-dramatized and materialist of biographical films.

Rossellini was arguably the supreme maker of biographical films, creating portraits of historical figures throughout his career but devoting himself almost entirely to the genre towards the end of his life. These late “history films” are frankly pedagogical works, using an ostensibly dry, anti-dramatic style to convey the stories of their subjects’ lives without resorting to the narrative and psychological clichés of conventional biopics. And yet the result is a series of films of enormous emotional and intellectual power. BLAISE PASCAL is one of the greatest and most hypnotic of these late works.
“[T]he epitome of [his] mature art…. PASCAL is the closest Rossellini came to the spiritualized minimalism of Dreyer and Bresson; it explicitly acknowledges DAY OF WRATH and AU HASARD BALTHAZAR, and it’s nearly as great as both.” –J. Hoberman

FELLINI’S CASANOVA / IL CASANOVA DI FEDERICO FELLINI
With Donald Sutherland and Tina Aumont.
Fellini’s late-career film is a phantasmagoric portrait of the notorious womanizer, and, despite its typically Fellini-esque spectacle, one of the director’s bleakest and most pessimistic films. Portraying Casanova (Sutherland, in a remarkable performance) in his waning days, engaging in various amorous and political adventures with an air of bored detachment as he travels through a disease-ridden Europe, the film debunks the myth of Casanova as a great lover and instead presents him as an ordinary man swept along by extraordinary circumstances.
“Imbued with an air of funereal solemnity and elegance, CASANOVA forsakes realism in favor of a stylized romantic pessimism which confronts impotence, failure, sexuality, and exploitation as fully as Pasolini’s SALÒ. Although teetering at times dangerously close to Ken Russell, the visual daring and pure imagination of every image leave it as an elegiac farewell to an era of Italian cinema; and Sutherland’s performance is the most astonishing piece of screen acting since Brando’s in LAST TANGO IN PARIS.” –TIME OUT LONDON

With Karl Johnson, Tilda Swinton, and Michael Gough.
Seven years after the release of his highly personal, studio-bound, freely anachronistic portrait of the painter Caravaggio, Jarman made this even more stylized biographical study of one of the 20^th century’s most influential philosophers. Shot on a soundstage with radically minimalist sets consisting of little more than a handful of suggestive props, Jarman stages significant moments from Wittgenstein’s life, played out in a vacuum of darkness suggestive of a philosophically-charged void. Utilizing a series of ploys to undercut biopic clichés – including direct-address to the camera, unapologetically anachronistic touches, and the appearance of an alien who engages in dialogue with the young Wittgenstein – Jarman conjures a highly meditative and experimental exploration of the philosopher’s life and thought.

With Ed Harris and Peter Boyle. Written by Rudy Wurlitzer.
[T]his delirious fantasy about William Walker, the American who ruled Nicaragua from 1855 to 1857, is all over the place and excessive, but as a radical statement about the U.S.’s involvement in that country it packs a very welcome wallop. … Deliberate and surreal anachronisms plant the action in a historical version of the present, and David Bridges’s cinematography combined with a liberal use of slow motion creates a lyrical depiction of carnage and devastation. … One can certainly quarrel with some aspects of the film’s treatment of history, but with political cowardice in commercial filmmaking so prevalent, one can only admire this movie’s gusto in calling a spade a spade, and the exhilaration of its anger and wit.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

“Thérèse Martin died of neglect and consumption in a Carmelite convent at the age of 25, leaving behind little more than a slim volume of memoirs and a reputation for piety and self-mortification. Like an obsessed artist or athlete, she had honed her life for one end – the sainthood she was granted in 1925, less than three decades after her death. In brief and limpid episodes Cavalier bares the masochism, eroticism, and purity at the heart of Thérèse’s self-enclosed crusade. … [The film] evokes equally the atavistic appeal and repulsiveness of fanatic faith and unrelenting vision. Unfolding with the cumulative rhythms of prayer, it achieves by the end the intensity and ambivalence of a religious experience.” –Peter Keough, CHICAGO READER

NEWFILMMAKERS INTRODUCES ITS NEW ANIMATION SERIES CURATED BY ERIC LEISER. FILMMAKERS ARE INVITED TO SUBMIT THEIR WORK FOR FUTURE SCREENINGS.

Our full night of animation will include:
Janeann Dill MAH MOVING AROUND HEIDEGGER (2008, 2 minutes, video)
Maureen Selwood UNTITLED (2010, 4 minutes, video)
Diana Reichenbach HARMONICS (2009, 2 minutes, video)
Ria Ama SNOW (2009, 2 minutes, video)
Betsy Kopmar NIGHT FISHING WITH CORMORANTS (2009, 4 minutes, video)
Michal Levy ONE (2007, 6 minutes, video)
Eric Leiser REGENERATION (2010, 3 minutes, video)
Eric Leiser MAELSTROM (2010, 2 minutes, video)
Eric Leiser NELUMBO NUCIFERA (2010, 2 minutes, video)
Burton Bush MEMORIES DEEP IN TIME (2008, 4 minutes, video)
Soyeon Kim TRANSPARENT MOVEMENT (2010, 2 minutes, video)
Jessica Chen TODAY’S WEATHER (2010, 3 minutes, video)
Sandy Ding THE RADIO WAVE OF BLOOD BENEATH THE DIRT ICE AND FLOWERS (2009, 9 minutes, video)
Eric Leiser FOREST (2008, 3 minutes, video)

–Wednesday, July 21, Animation Series Reception at 6:00, Film Program at 7:00.

Rossellini was arguably the supreme maker of biographical films, creating portraits of historical figures throughout his career but devoting himself almost entirely to the genre towards the end of his life. These late “history films” are frankly pedagogical works, using an ostensibly dry, anti-dramatic style to convey the stories of their subjects’ lives without resorting to the narrative and psychological clichés of conventional biopics. And yet the result is a series of films of enormous emotional and intellectual power. BLAISE PASCAL is one of the greatest and most hypnotic of these late works.
“[T]he epitome of [his] mature art…. PASCAL is the closest Rossellini came to the spiritualized minimalism of Dreyer and Bresson; it explicitly acknowledges DAY OF WRATH and AU HASARD BALTHAZAR, and it’s nearly as great as both.” –J. Hoberman

“Rossellini’s portrait of René Descartes was his third film set in seventeenth-century France, and is even more elliptical than the others. Rossellini leaves out many…aspects of Descartes’ life (his military service, his devout religious practices, his application of algebra to geometry), focusing instead on his deficiencies, his fear, existential terror, his indolence and self-absorption. Rossellini described Descartes as ‘a son of a bitch, a coward, a lazy person. He was quite repulsive of course, not simpatico…. But I don’t care about that. He was intelligent.’ … With his characteristic attention to quotidian detail, ever curious camera, and emphasis on the social and economic contexts for Descartes’ scientific inquiry, Rossellini produces a demanding, tough, intellectually gripping portrait of the man whose cogito ergo sum could stand as another of the director’s credos.” –James Quandt, CINEMATHEQUE ONTARIO

“Thérèse Martin died of neglect and consumption in a Carmelite convent at the age of 25, leaving behind little more than a slim volume of memoirs and a reputation for piety and self-mortification. Like an obsessed artist or athlete, she had honed her life for one end – the sainthood she was granted in 1925, less than three decades after her death. In brief and limpid episodes Cavalier bares the masochism, eroticism, and purity at the heart of Thérèse’s self-enclosed crusade. … [The film] evokes equally the atavistic appeal and repulsiveness of fanatic faith and unrelenting vision. Unfolding with the cumulative rhythms of prayer, it achieves by the end the intensity and ambivalence of a religious experience.” –Peter Keough, CHICAGO READER

The powerful words of 17th-century poet Arutuin Sayadian, also known as “Sayat Nova” (“King of Siam”) are magnificently captured in this visual pastiche which is both a stylized biography and a tribute to his work. Charted into eight sections of his life from childhood to death, the film is a series of symbolically rich, almost hallucinatory scenes. This baroque masterpiece was banned in the Soviet Union for its religious sentiment and nonconformity to "Socialist realism." Paradjanov, a tirelessly outspoken campaigner for human rights, was convicted on a number of trumped-up charges and sentenced to five years of hard labor in the gulag. A wave of protest from the international film community led to his release in 1978.

Like EDVARD MUNCH, but even more so, Rosi’s portrait of the notorious Sicilian bandit upends biopic conventions by focusing less on its ostensible subject than on the environment, the society, and the historical conditions out of which he emerged and into which he was subsumed. One of the greatest of all post-neorealist films, SALVATORE GIULIANO is a remarkably urgent and incisive portrait of Sicilian society, with Giuliano not so much the film’s central figure as much as he is its structuring absence.

Karl Valentin
CONFIRMATION DAY / DER FIRMLING
1934, 23 min, 35mm, b&w. In German with no subtitles; English synopsis available.
A father and son, celebrating the son’s confirmation, go to a fancy restaurant and drink all day. They want to order Emmentaler cheese, but can only find Affentaler wine on the menu. How did the Affentaler, which they think is cheese, get into the bottle? They keep on drinking away, attracting attention and causing more and more confusion.
“Valentin plays a drunken father treating his giggly young son to lunch, and the inspired muddle he creates out of a table, two chairs, an umbrella, and a watch chain rivals some of Laurel and Hardy’s best moments.” –J.R. Jones, CHICAGO READER
&
Jean Vigo
ZERO FOR CONDUCT / ZÉRO DE CONDUITE
1935, 44 min, 35mm, b&w. In French with no subtitles; English synopsis available.
An eloquent parable of freedom versus authority, Vigo’s film is set at a boys’ boarding school and undoubtedly echoes Vigo’s own unhappy experiences as a child. Under the pressure of various civic groups the film was removed from screens several months after its release in 1933. It was branded “anti-French” by censors and was not shown again in Paris until 1945.
Total running time: ca. 70 min.

With Philip Baker Hall.
Sequestered in his home, a disgraced President Richard Milhous Nixon arms himself with a bottle of scotch and a gun to record memoirs that no one will hear, a passionate attempt to defend himself and his political legacy. Based on the original play by Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone, made with a student crew at the University of Michigan, and starring Philip Baker Hall in a tour-de-force solo performance, SECRET HONOR – one of the most interesting of Altman’s post-70s films – is a searing interrogation of the Nixon mystique and an audacious depiction of unchecked paranoia.
“Altman’s one-man theatrical adaptation, for all its dense verbosity, is resolutely cinematic, employing a prowling camera to illuminate the dark areas of its melancholy, megalomaniac hero’s soul.” –Geoff Andrew, TIME OUT LONDON

What better way to inaugurate the series than with the boringest masterpiece of them all: Andy Warhol’s monumental, conceptually ground-breaking (not to mention butt-breaking) EMPIRE. (Full disclosure: EMPIRE was photographed by Jonas – but who could argue that it doesn’t belong here?) The culmination of Warhol’s minimalist style, it consists of an 8-hour shot of the Empire State Building, filmed from evening into the early morning on July 25-26, 1964, from the 41st floor of the Time-Life building. A nighttime study of a skyscraper in slow motion, EMPIRE is a cinematic meditation on the nature of duration. Warhol himself wouldn’t have been caught dead watching the whole thing, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give it your best shot!

THOSE WHO HEROICALLY ENDURE THE ENTIRE FILM WILL BE REWARDED WITH A SPECIAL PRIZE!
Update:
As promised, those hearty souls who make it through the entirety of Warhol’s EMPIRE (bathroom breaks allowed) will be rewarded with a very special prize: a free ticket to Warhol expert Thomas Kiedrowski’s weekly tour of Andy Warhol sites throughout Manhattan.  You can learn more about the tour here: www.warholtour.com  

“What you'll experience on the Andy Warhol Sites tour:
The first section of the tour will focus on Warhol's early commercial days in NY - you'll feast your eyes on his former home and beautiful historic neighborhood, locate his first studio, and find out what it was like to spend a day in his shoes from first-hand accounts from his former roommates, friends and co-workers.
The second leg on the tour takes a look at a more intimate side of Warhol with a visit to his former church, and his grand townhouse which became homebase for Warhol's well-known collection of cookie jars, art-deco jewelry, and his expensive art collection.
Famous Factory locations will be revealed along with insight into the beginnings of the Velvet Underground, Interview magazine, and a look into Warhol's near-death shooting by Valerie Solanas.
The tour will also visit addresses related to Edie Sedgwick, Truman Capote, and others.”
 

With Mary Beth Hurt.
“Rappaport’s film essay is an imaginary monologue in which the late actress (superbly played by Hurt) meditates on her troubled life. The real Seberg was discovered, as an Iowa teenager, by Otto Preminger…; she later starred in Godard’s BREATHLESS, became involved in radical politics, was persecuted by the FBI, and died – an apparent suicide – in 1979, at the age of forty. Rappaport’s Seberg delivers a detached, ironic running commentary on a series of clips and stills illustrating her erratic career; what’s moving about the film is that this woman is a ghost, bitterly aware that the smart ideas she’s reeling off never occurred to her during her time on earth. Seeing herself clearly for the first time, she seems to know that the image she’s looking at is still a kind of illusion: a trick of time and distance, like the cold, useless light of a dead star.” –Terence Rafferty, NEW YORKER

THE SUN / SOLNTSE
The third in Sokurov’s series of films on world leaders (after 1999’s Hitler portrait MOLOCH, and 2001’s woefully under-seen TAURUS, a meditation on Lenin’s last days), THE SUN depicts, in Sokurov’s typically hypnotic, heightened manner, the experiences of Japanese Emperor Hirohito in the final days of WWII, as he faces the inevitable surrender of his country and the momentous decision to renounce his heretofore asserted divinity. Sokurov’s world-leader films are fraught with a fascinating tension between Sokurov’s hermetic, hallucinatory sensibility and the concrete historical meanings embodied by their protagonists, a tension that places them among the great director’s finest films.

Watkins’s portrait of the great painter is a bona fide masterpiece, and a supreme example of a particular approach to re-thinking the biographical film. Watkins’s social and political commitment, which has manifested itself in other films (such as THE WAR GAME and PUNISHMENT PARK) in an angry and passionate stance, here takes the form of a rigorous, deeply intelligent inquiry into Munch’s era (achieved through Watkins’s accustomed faux-documentary approach). A critique-by-example of most biopics, Watkins reverses the usual relationship between figure and context, focusing on the social and political conditions in which Munch lived his life and created his work, a dimension relegated by most biographical films to the status of a more-or-less relevant “background”. Munch himself remains an elusive, somewhat remote figure. And yet despite, or perhaps because of, this elusiveness, the film’s portrait of the artist is a poetic and deeply moving one.

With Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Ka Fai.
“Stanley Kwan’s masterpiece is still the greatest Hong Kong film I’ve seen…. The story of silent film actress Ruan Ling-yu, known as the Garbo of Chinese cinema, it combines documentary with period re-creation, biopic glamour with profound curiosity, and ravishing historical clips with color simulations of the same sequences being shot – all to explore a past that seems more complex, sexy, and mysterious than the present. … Any historical movie worth its salt historicizes the present along with the past, and this movie implicitly juxtaposes our own inadequacy with those potent clips of Ling-yu herself.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

Andy Warhol
LUPE
1966, 72 minutes, 16mm. With Edie Sedgwick and Billy Name.
&
José Rodriguez-Soltero
LUPE
1966, 50 minutes, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. With Mario Montez, Charles Ludlam, and Lola Pashalinski.
The ultimate underground biopic double-feature: a pair of essential films investigating (and transfiguring) the life and persona of Mexican Hollywood star Lupe Velez, and featuring performances by two of the legends of the 60s underground. Warhol’s two-reel version, designed to be shown as either a single- or double-screen work, is a showcase for Edie Sedgwick, who interacts with Billy Name and then dines alone in an elegant apartment, drinking herself into a toilet-bowl grave. Rather than focusing on Velez’s decline, Rodriguez-Soltero’s version is a sumptuous film that celebrates both Velez and actor Mario Montez. Drawing on the collaboration of Theater of the Ridiculous stars Lola Pashalinski and Charles Ludlam, LUPE is one of the finest films from the New York underground, offering an ecstatic explosion of color, costume, music, camp performance, and complex superimpositions.

Andy Warhol
EAT (1963, 35 min, 35mm, b&w, silent)
John and James Whitney
FILM EXERCISES 1-5 (1943-45, 18 min, 16mm)
James Whitney
LAPIS (1963-66, 10 min, 16mm, silent)
Total running time: ca. 65 min.

MY HUSTLER is one of the classics of gay cinema. It is the story of a sexual triangle in which Ed Hood competes with his Fire Island neighbors, Joe Campbell and Genevieve Charbin, for the attentions of Paul America, whom he has rented for the weekend from “Dial-a-Hustler”. The realism of the scenario is due largely to the absence of a script and performances by actors essentially playing themselves.

CO-PRESENTED BY CINEMA TROPICAL
FRIDA / FRIDA, NATURALEZA VIVA
“Ofelia Medina – bearing an uncanny resemblance to her subject – gives a powerful performance as the flamboyant Mexican painter, wife of the renowned muralist Diego Rivera, close friend of Leon Trotsky, and committed revolutionary. As she drifts in and out of consciousness on her deathbed, fragments of memories and dreams pass through her mind. These images – some haunting, some moving, some painful, some enchanting – gradually form a mosaic of her interior and exterior life. Every frame of this remarkable film exhibits a painterly sense of color, light, and texture.” –VANCOUVER LATIN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL

A unique film on the life of the primitive Georgian artist Niko Pirosmanashvili, who was born in 1862 and died of starvation and alcoholism in 1918. Pirosmani spent much of his life wandering from tavern to tavern, exchanging his paintings for food, drink, and shelter. Lush with static compositions and muted colors, the film is striking not only for its beautifully controlled visual style – which reflects the rich simplicity of Pirosmani’s primitive paintings – but also as a carefully subdued study of the relationship between an artist and society.

With Ken Ogata.
“Schrader’s mesmerizing vision of famed Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima is a dramatic extension of the titular American Gigolo’s transformation into an elusive object of desire, with Mishima similarly re-fashioning himself, embellishing his image with militaristic, reactionary politics and a group of devoted followers. Set to a driving Philip Glass score, Schrader’s unconventional biopic interweaves Mishima’s life and work, centering on the events leading to the author’s attempted coup and 1970 suicide and structured by lush adaptations of three Mishima novels, poetic interludes that mark a furthest extreme in Schrader’s use of stylized mise-en-scène.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

Like EDVARD MUNCH, but even more so, Rosi’s portrait of the notorious Sicilian bandit upends biopic conventions by focusing less on its ostensible subject than on the environment, the society, and the historical conditions out of which he emerged and into which he was subsumed. One of the greatest of all post-neorealist films, SALVATORE GIULIANO is a remarkably urgent and incisive portrait of Sicilian society, with Giuliano not so much the film’s central figure as much as he is its structuring absence.

THE SUN / SOLNTSE
The third in Sokurov’s series of films on world leaders (after 1999’s Hitler portrait MOLOCH, and 2001’s woefully under-seen TAURUS, a meditation on Lenin’s last days), THE SUN depicts, in Sokurov’s typically hypnotic, heightened manner, the experiences of Japanese Emperor Hirohito in the final days of WWII, as he faces the inevitable surrender of his country and the momentous decision to renounce his heretofore asserted divinity. Sokurov’s world-leader films are fraught with a fascinating tension between Sokurov’s hermetic, hallucinatory sensibility and the concrete historical meanings embodied by their protagonists, a tension that places them among the great director’s finest films.

NEWFILMMAKERS WELCOMES BACK THE DIGITAL FILM ACADEMY AS PART OF OUR CONTINUING FILM SCHOOL SCREENING SERIES

DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Lucy Martens
VOICES FROM INSIDE – ISRAELIS SPEAK
2008, 65 minutes, video.
A documentary based upon interviews with 16 Jewish-Israeli voices of conscience, each representing a different facet within the peace movement.

FILM SCHOOL SCREENING SERIES
with The Digital Film Academy.
Digital Film Academy, the premier digital film and media academy in New York, presents an evening of short films from students in the Digital Filmmaking programs and workshops. Students wrote, produced, directed, and edited their individual short films as part of their course work. See www.NewFilmmakers.com for a list of tonight’s films.

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Erin David NUMBER 9 (2009, 10 minutes, video)
Nathan Waire YARD RATS (2010, 15 minutes, video)
&
Brian MacArthur
A CHOICE OF WEAPONS
2009, 59 minutes, video.
Follows the story of San Francisco youth as they discover the threats of eviction, toxic waste, and redevelopment facing their Bayview-Hunter’s Point community.

–Wednesday, July 28, Documentary Series at 6:00, Film School Screening Series at 7:15, Feature Presentation at 9:15.

Watkins’s portrait of the great painter is a bona fide masterpiece, and a supreme example of a particular approach to re-thinking the biographical film. Watkins’s social and political commitment, which has manifested itself in other films (such as THE WAR GAME and PUNISHMENT PARK) in an angry and passionate stance, here takes the form of a rigorous, deeply intelligent inquiry into Munch’s era (achieved through Watkins’s accustomed faux-documentary approach). A critique-by-example of most biopics, Watkins reverses the usual relationship between figure and context, focusing on the social and political conditions in which Munch lived his life and created his work, a dimension relegated by most biographical films to the status of a more-or-less relevant “background”. Munch himself remains an elusive, somewhat remote figure. And yet despite, or perhaps because of, this elusiveness, the film’s portrait of the artist is a poetic and deeply moving one.

With Philip Baker Hall.
Sequestered in his home, a disgraced President Richard Milhous Nixon arms himself with a bottle of scotch and a gun to record memoirs that no one will hear, a passionate attempt to defend himself and his political legacy. Based on the original play by Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone, made with a student crew at the University of Michigan, and starring Philip Baker Hall in a tour-de-force solo performance, SECRET HONOR – one of the most interesting of Altman’s post-70s films – is a searing interrogation of the Nixon mystique and an audacious depiction of unchecked paranoia.
“Altman’s one-man theatrical adaptation, for all its dense verbosity, is resolutely cinematic, employing a prowling camera to illuminate the dark areas of its melancholy, megalomaniac hero’s soul.” –Geoff Andrew, TIME OUT LONDON

(THOMAS BERNHARD – DREI TAGE)

“One of Radax’s trademarks are his made-for-TV portraits of famous artists which alternate between documentation and interpretation, distance and embellishment. This early black-and-white portrait of Thomas Bernhard shows the writer sitting on a park bench, quiet and unapproachable, talking about childhood memories, loneliness, and writing, and the final result is rather austere. The point-of-view alternates between a variety of distances, and the scene is occasionally interrupted by black frames which resemble a drooping eyelid.” –Harry Tomicek, AUSTRIAN FILM MUSEUM

THE ITALIAN / DER ITALIENER
“The lord of the castle was found, shot dead. The question of whether it was murder or suicide confused and frightened both family and servants. Only the dead man’s sister, with cold composure, has him laid out in splendor in the greenhouse. The Italian, a wealthy and apparently pampered young man, listens to Béla Bártok records in his suite for hours at a time. The castle is full of hungry mourners awaiting their breakfast. A frail Spanish guest experiments with firearms. Was he the one who fired the deadly shot? Everyone thinks better of informing the police. The affair remains a private matter.” –Ferry Radax

With Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Ka Fai.
“Stanley Kwan’s masterpiece is still the greatest Hong Kong film I’ve seen…. The story of silent film actress Ruan Ling-yu, known as the Garbo of Chinese cinema, it combines documentary with period re-creation, biopic glamour with profound curiosity, and ravishing historical clips with color simulations of the same sequences being shot – all to explore a past that seems more complex, sexy, and mysterious than the present. … Any historical movie worth its salt historicizes the present along with the past, and this movie implicitly juxtaposes our own inadequacy with those potent clips of Ling-yu herself.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

With Ken Ogata.
“Schrader’s mesmerizing vision of famed Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima is a dramatic extension of the titular American Gigolo’s transformation into an elusive object of desire, with Mishima similarly re-fashioning himself, embellishing his image with militaristic, reactionary politics and a group of devoted followers. Set to a driving Philip Glass score, Schrader’s unconventional biopic interweaves Mishima’s life and work, centering on the events leading to the author’s attempted coup and 1970 suicide and structured by lush adaptations of three Mishima novels, poetic interludes that mark a furthest extreme in Schrader’s use of stylized mise-en-scène.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

THE ITALIAN / DER ITALIENER
“The lord of the castle was found, shot dead. The question of whether it was murder or suicide confused and frightened both family and servants. Only the dead man’s sister, with cold composure, has him laid out in splendor in the greenhouse. The Italian, a wealthy and apparently pampered young man, listens to Béla Bártok records in his suite for hours at a time. The castle is full of hungry mourners awaiting their breakfast. A frail Spanish guest experiments with firearms. Was he the one who fired the deadly shot? Everyone thinks better of informing the police. The affair remains a private matter.” –Ferry Radax

(THOMAS BERNHARD – DREI TAGE)

“One of Radax’s trademarks are his made-for-TV portraits of famous artists which alternate between documentation and interpretation, distance and embellishment. This early black-and-white portrait of Thomas Bernhard shows the writer sitting on a park bench, quiet and unapproachable, talking about childhood memories, loneliness, and writing, and the final result is rather austere. The point-of-view alternates between a variety of distances, and the scene is occasionally interrupted by black frames which resemble a drooping eyelid.” –Harry Tomicek, AUSTRIAN FILM MUSEUM

Andy Warhol
LUPE
1966, 72 minutes, 16mm. With Edie Sedgwick and Billy Name.
&
José Rodriguez-Soltero
LUPE
1966, 50 minutes, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. With Mario Montez, Charles Ludlam, and Lola Pashalinski.
The ultimate underground biopic double-feature: a pair of essential films investigating (and transfiguring) the life and persona of Mexican Hollywood star Lupe Velez, and featuring performances by two of the legends of the 60s underground. Warhol’s two-reel version, designed to be shown as either a single- or double-screen work, is a showcase for Edie Sedgwick, who interacts with Billy Name and then dines alone in an elegant apartment, drinking herself into a toilet-bowl grave. Rather than focusing on Velez’s decline, Rodriguez-Soltero’s version is a sumptuous film that celebrates both Velez and actor Mario Montez. Drawing on the collaboration of Theater of the Ridiculous stars Lola Pashalinski and Charles Ludlam, LUPE is one of the finest films from the New York underground, offering an ecstatic explosion of color, costume, music, camp performance, and complex superimpositions.

THE SUN / SOLNTSE
The third in Sokurov’s series of films on world leaders (after 1999’s Hitler portrait MOLOCH, and 2001’s woefully under-seen TAURUS, a meditation on Lenin’s last days), THE SUN depicts, in Sokurov’s typically hypnotic, heightened manner, the experiences of Japanese Emperor Hirohito in the final days of WWII, as he faces the inevitable surrender of his country and the momentous decision to renounce his heretofore asserted divinity. Sokurov’s world-leader films are fraught with a fascinating tension between Sokurov’s hermetic, hallucinatory sensibility and the concrete historical meanings embodied by their protagonists, a tension that places them among the great director’s finest films.

STEPHANIE BARBER

Anthology welcomes Baltimore-based multi-media artist Stephanie Barber, who has been quietly amassing a remarkable body of work over the last 15 years, producing a steady stream of films and videos that are meticulously crafted and disarmingly modest. Barber uses cinema to explore the borders between text and image, photography and poetry, memory and loss. Each film creates its own whimsical world, teetering on the edge of sadness yet never maudlin. Barber’s intellectually playful works engage both brains and funny bones.
“Stephanie Barber…has one of the most original visions to emerge recently from the diverse experimental film scene. Deceptively simple at first, her work is unique in the way it alters and even suspends time.” –CHICAGO READER

“[Barber’s films] can feel like highly formal exercises in film language made by a profoundly restless mind, playing image and sound off each other and forcing you to locate implied meanings on your own. Others are both silly and oddly engaging, involving puppets mundanely discussing pressing metaphysical concerns. And others calmly and almost imperceptibly sweep you up in the genuine breadth of their emotional wake.” –Bret McCabe, THE BALTIMORE CITY PAPER

A SIDES
flower, the boy, the librarian (1996, 6 minutes, 16mm)

they invented machines (1997, 8 minutes, 16mm)
shipfilm (1998, 3 minutes, 16mm)
letters, notes (2000, 4.5 minutes, 16mm)
catalog (2005, 11 minutes, 16mm)
total power dead, dead, dead (2005, 3 minutes, 16mm)

dwarfs the sea (2007, 7 minutes, video)
the visit and the play (2008, 8 minutes, video)
to the horse dream of arms (2010, 5 minutes, video)
the inversion, transcription, evening track and attractor (2008, 13 minutes, video)

Total running time: ca. 75 minutes.

CO-PRESENTED BY CINEMA TROPICAL
FRIDA / FRIDA, NATURALEZA VIVA
“Ofelia Medina – bearing an uncanny resemblance to her subject – gives a powerful performance as the flamboyant Mexican painter, wife of the renowned muralist Diego Rivera, close friend of Leon Trotsky, and committed revolutionary. As she drifts in and out of consciousness on her deathbed, fragments of memories and dreams pass through her mind. These images – some haunting, some moving, some painful, some enchanting – gradually form a mosaic of her interior and exterior life. Every frame of this remarkable film exhibits a painterly sense of color, light, and texture.” –VANCOUVER LATIN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL

STEPHANIE BARBER

Anthology welcomes Baltimore-based multi-media artist Stephanie Barber, who has been quietly amassing a remarkable body of work over the last 15 years, producing a steady stream of films and videos that are meticulously crafted and disarmingly modest. Barber uses cinema to explore the borders between text and image, photography and poetry, memory and loss. Each film creates its own whimsical world, teetering on the edge of sadness yet never maudlin. Barber’s intellectually playful works engage both brains and funny bones.

“Stephanie Barber…has one of the most original visions to emerge recently from the diverse experimental film scene. Deceptively simple at first, her work is unique in the way it alters and even suspends time.” –CHICAGO READER

“[Barber’s films] can feel like highly formal exercises in film language made by a profoundly restless mind, playing image and sound off each other and forcing you to locate implied meanings on your own. Others are both silly and oddly engaging, involving puppets mundanely discussing pressing metaphysical concerns. And others calmly and almost imperceptibly sweep you up in the genuine breadth of their emotional wake.” –Bret McCabe, THE BALTIMORE CITY PAPER

B SIDES
woman stabbed to death (1996, 7 minutes, 16mm)
these horizon (1997, 12 minutes, 16mm)
city at heart (2003, 4 minutes, 16mm)
dogs (2000, 15 minutes, 16mm)
the end of the world (2001, 32 minutes, video)
the tell tale heart (2009, 3.5 minutes, video)
i began by walking into rooms slowly (1999/2010, 7 minutes, 16mm-to-video)
Total running time: ca. 85 minutes.

With Mary Beth Hurt.
“Rappaport’s film essay is an imaginary monologue in which the late actress (superbly played by Hurt) meditates on her troubled life. The real Seberg was discovered, as an Iowa teenager, by Otto Preminger…; she later starred in Godard’s BREATHLESS, became involved in radical politics, was persecuted by the FBI, and died – an apparent suicide – in 1979, at the age of forty. Rappaport’s Seberg delivers a detached, ironic running commentary on a series of clips and stills illustrating her erratic career; what’s moving about the film is that this woman is a ghost, bitterly aware that the smart ideas she’s reeling off never occurred to her during her time on earth. Seeing herself clearly for the first time, she seems to know that the image she’s looking at is still a kind of illusion: a trick of time and distance, like the cold, useless light of a dead star.” –Terence Rafferty, NEW YORKER