Anthology Film Archives

With Michael Paré, Diane Lane, Rick Moranis, Amy Madigan, and Willem Dafoe.

“A futuristic rock fantasy which is, at heart, a Western. An itinerant soldier (Paré) returns to his home to discover that his former girlfriend, the local girl who’s made it big in the rockbiz (Lane) has been kidnapped by a villainous street gang. Cue for fisticuffs and fireworks as Paré, aided by a tough-talking female sidekick (Madigan) hikes over to the bad part of town and unlocks Ms. Lane from the bed to which she’s been handcuffed. Result? Showdown. STREETS OF FIRE is fast and loud, with music from Ry Cooder…it is also violent, though its violence lies not in the depiction of blood and entrails, but in the sheer energy and speed with which the dark and brooding images rush after one another. The message is that there is no message; if this isn’t action cinema in its purest form, then it’s pretty close.” –Richard Rayner, TIME OUT FILM GUIDE

With John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, James Brown, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin.

Belushi and Aykroyd star in this early big-screen manifestation of an SNL sketch as Jake and Elwood Blues, two brothers on a “mission from God” to save their old Catholic orphanage the only way they know how: by reuniting their R&B band for a benefit concert and tour. Along the way, they dodge lawmen of every kind, neo-Nazis, and crazy ex-girlfriends. Featuring performances by James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and Ray Charles at their funky, late-70s best, Landis’s deadpan musical farce is graceful even when a dozen police cars are smashing into each other.

NEWFILMMAKERS WELCOMES THE NEWLATINO FILMMAKERS GROUP

SPECIAL PROGRAM
NewLatino Filmmakers is the best and only independent Latino “cinematheque” showcase in New York City, now in its 9th year! Check www.newfilmmakers.com for full program details.

FILM OF THE MONTH PRESENTATION
This is the best selling film on NewFilmmakers Online in January.
John Preston
SÉANCE
2010, 95 minutes, video.
Late one night, Jon throws a party for his college buddies and sexy sweetheart Sylvia. Looking to liven things up, Jon tells the tale of a child ghost, Michael Miller, who died a long time ago while desecrating a church. Intrigued, Jon’s friends convince him to hold a séance to raise the dead.

With Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Rip Torn, and Lesley Ann Warren.

A breezy comedy about the dirty business of concert promoting and a meta-backstager about the art of moguling (as in THE PRODUCERS, sometimes a really toxic show can be more profitable than a good one). Willie stars in a semi-autobiographical role as a creatively/financially frustrated musician/composer who takes a break from songwriting to visit some old ex-wives and manage a semi-autobiographical Kris Kristofferson. Ever-shifting allegiances eventually ally them with competitor Rip Torn (“Hold it! I wish the vision of how beautiful y’all are could be painted on the Great Wall of China!'”) to defeat a more nefarious music publisher, played by VANISHING POINT director Richard C. Sarafian.

With Prince, Apollonia Kotero, Morris Day, and Clarence Williams III.

Prince finds rock stardom while racing around Minneapolis on a purple motorcycle – pedestrians beware!

“Strutting across a spectrum of feminine coquettishness and masculine dynamism, Prince is as incendiary an icon as has ever existed on film. He has Dietrich’s campy glamour and self-allure, genuine musicianship and a singing and performance style to match all the musical legends. … With Prince dancing upon layers of musical history and style and Albert Magnoli consciously evoking the show-within-a-show staging of CABARET and the kinetics of MEAN STREETS and TAXI DRIVER, PURPLE RAIN is like a whirling cultural vortex.” –Armond White, THE RESISTANCE

With Robin Williams, Shelley Duvall; screenplay by Jules Feiffer; songs by Harry Nilsson, arranged by Van Dyke Parks.

Altman’s musical treatment of the revered character channels both E.C. Segar’s original comic strip and the short animations produced by the great Fleischer brothers throughout the 1930s (which rank among the most sublime examples of early 20^th century American pop culture). A highly quixotic project which quickly ran into substantial production problems, POPEYE remains one of the most undervalued of Altman’s works, an unjust fate for a film brimming with invention, graced by great performances from Robin Williams, Shelley Duvall, and a host of great character actors from Altman’s stable, and featuring songs written by Harry Nilsson and arranged by Van Dyke Parks.

NEW/IMPROVED/INSTITUTIONAL/QUALITY

Each quarterly calendar at Anthology is filled with hundreds of films and videos all grouped into a number of series or categories. Along with preservation screenings, theatrical premieres, thematic series, and auteur and actor retrospectives, we’re equally dedicated to presenting new and recent work by individuals operating at the vanguard of non-commercial cinema. Each month, under the rubric NEW/IMPROVED/INSTITUTIONAL/QUALITY, we showcase at least one such program, focusing on moving-image artists who are emerging, at their peak, or long-established but still prolific.

This calendar’s programs feature the work of Peter Bo Rappmund, film preservationist and filmmaker Ross Lipman, and, from the UK, Beatrice Gibson.

Anthology gratefully acknowledges support for this program from the Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Funds Program, which is supported by public funds from the Electronic Media and Film Program of the New York State Council on the Arts.

AUGUST:

ROSS LIPMAN
URBAN RUINS, FOUND MOMENTS
Filmmaker in person!

Known as one of the world’s leading restorationists of experimental and independent cinema, Ross Lipman is also an accomplished filmmaker, writer, and performer whose oeuvre has taken on urban decay as a marker of modern consciousness. He visits Anthology with a program of his own lyrical and speculative works, including the live cinema performance essay THE CROPPING OF THE SPECTACLE, selections from the video cycle THE PERFECT HEART OF FLUX, and a sneak preview excerpt of his feature-length memoir, KEEP WARM, BURN BRITAIN!, with an original score by NY street-performing legend Thoth.

“Everything that’s built crumbles in time: buildings, cultures, fortunes, and lives,” says Lipman. “The detritus of civilization tells us no less about our current epoch than an archeological dig speaks to history. The urban ruin is particularly compelling because it speaks of the recent past, and reminds us that our own lives and creations will also soon pass into dust. These film, video, and performance works explore decay in a myriad of forms – architectural, cultural, and personal.”

“Lipman’s films are wonderful…strong and delicate at the same time…unique. The rhythm and colors are so subtle, deep, and soft.” –Nicole Brenez, Cinémathèque Française

10-17-88
1989, 11 minutes, 16mm. Audio collage by John Shaw.
Optically printed collage of found and archival footage.

THE CROPPING OF THE SPECTACLE
Video/PowerPoint performance, 25 minutes. Premiered at Orphan Film Symposium (NY), 2008.
A 25-minute PowerPoint performance investigating the birth of the Television Spectacle in 1954 McCarthy’s America. Based on Lipman’s work restoring the classic anarchist documentary POINT OF ORDER (Emile de Antonio/Dan Talbot, 1964).

From THE PERFECT HEART OF FLUX compilation:
SELF-PORTRAIT IN MAUSOLEUM (2009, 1 minute, DV)
OCEAN BEACH / PT. LOBOS I, II, III (2007, 10 minutes, DV)
CASA LOMA (DIGNITY AND IMPUDENCE) (2010, 10 minutes, DV)

KEEP WARM, BURN BRITAIN!
Work-in-progress, ca. 17-minute excerpt, 35mm. With music by Thoth.
Lipman’s current project is a feature-length experimental memoir of the mid-80s squatting movement in East London. Comprised entirely of still photographs, it chronicles the lives of the anarchists, outcasts, and punks who inhabited a network of soon-to-be demolished buildings south of the Thames, an area known in the anarchist community as Squatter’s Paradise.

Total running time: ca. 80 minutes.

With Johnny Depp, Amy Locane, Susan Tyrrell, and Iggy Pop.

CRY-BABY is about juvenile delinquents and bad reputations. As usual with Waters, there’s an extra-textual dimension at work: Depp joined the cast to sully his image; Traci Lords to clean hers up. Then the director found himself defending his own name against charges of selling out, as fans complained his first studio-backed film wasn’t “filthy” enough. Worse, the version most people saw – the one that ran on basic cable throughout the 90s – was horrendously recut. The intact CRY-BABY is worth revisiting, not only for its noteworthy ensemble (Patti Hearst, Joe Dallesandro, Susan Tyrrell, Iggy Pop, Ricki Lake, Willem Dafoe) but for Depp’s performance. Never has he milked his appeal so perversely as the titular Baltimore “drape”, the weepy, tattooed orphan spawn of the Alphabet Bomber.

(WINIFRED WAGNER UND DIE GESCHICHTE DES HAUSES WAHNFRIED VON 1914-1975)

“‘He had that perfect Austrian warmth and understanding’: Winifred Wagner (78-year-old widow of Richard Wagner’s son Siegfried) on the human face and personal charm of Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s passion for Wagner inevitably led him to Winifred, organizer of the Bayreuth Festival. During their 22-year friendship, to whose memory she is stubbornly faithful, Hitler doted on her family and mentioned nothing of politics: ‘I would say he was too easily influenced and gave in to radical demands’, is her only criticism, made apparently without irony. This film features Winifred Wagner’s first interview (shot almost entirely in medium close-up) about Hitler as a patron of the arts. It’s an extraordinary document – about the role of art in a society, about its relation to politics, and about degrees of unawareness.” –Chris Petit, TIME OUT FILM GUIDE

With David Byrne, John Goodman, and Spalding Gray.

Credited as “Narrator/Lip-syncher/Talking Heads Singer”, David Byrne also co-wrote and directed this episodic story about two days in the life of a fictional North Texas exurb, Virgil, where the inhabitants are planning a sesquicentennial parade and talent show called “A Celebration of Specialness.” All the tunes are Heads compositions performed by townspeople; among them is John Goodman, as an aspirant singer looking for a wife. For all its technophilic optimism, TRUE STORIES evokes the gravity of its more melancholy precedents, Thorton Wilder’s OUR TOWN and Robert Altman’s NASHVILLE.

Martin Scorsese
ITALIANAMERICAN
1974, 49 minutes, 35mm.
&
AMERICAN BOY
1978, 55 minutes, 16mm.
Early in his career Martin Scorsese made not one but two TALKING HEAD films. The first, ITALIANAMERICAN, finds him interviewing his parents (the focus is equally on the two of them, but after 40 years of marriage they have arguably become enough of a unit to qualify as a single “talking head”) in their Elizabeth Street walk-up apartment. The second, AMERICAN BOY, documents a raucous autobiographical performance by Steven Prince (TAXI DRIVER’s unforgettable gun/drugs/Cadillac salesman “Easy Andy”) whose recollected life stories encompass army brat-hood, draft-dodging, heroin abuse, a turbulent stint as a road manager for Neil Diamond, even murder.

With David Bowie, Ray Davies, and Sade.

Rarely revived, based on Colin MacInnes’s 1958 novel of the same name.

“[A] movie about style – the 50s roots of 80s clothes and music, echoed through 40s musicals. Set in a neon-bright London in 1958, it has some of the 40s artifice of boys and girls bursting into song, yet is full of 80s rock stars and 70s survivors like David Bowie and Ray Davies. Looking through these layers of time, this flashy, extravagant rock musical elevates style to a symptom and cause of social change.” –Caryn James, NEW YORK TIMES

Preceded by…a 35mm Bowie surprise!

The first feature film by the legendary filmmaker Jean Eustache (THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE) is one of the seminal TALKING HEAD films, consisting of a straightforward, unadorned interview with his grandmother, who gives a passionate account of her lurid past – the wars she survived, the babies she lost, and the husband accused of pedophilia. Eustache considered the film a jumping-off point for his later work (hence the title). But while a truncated version of the film (entitled ODETTE ROBERT) was exhibited on French TV in the 70s, the longer original version was not screened publicly until 2003, nearly twenty years after Eustache’s death. These ultra-rare Stateside screenings are not to be missed!

With Prince, Apollonia Kotero, Morris Day, and Clarence Williams III.

Prince finds rock stardom while racing around Minneapolis on a purple motorcycle – pedestrians beware!

“Strutting across a spectrum of feminine coquettishness and masculine dynamism, Prince is as incendiary an icon as has ever existed on film. He has Dietrich’s campy glamour and self-allure, genuine musicianship and a singing and performance style to match all the musical legends. … With Prince dancing upon layers of musical history and style and Albert Magnoli consciously evoking the show-within-a-show staging of CABARET and the kinetics of MEAN STREETS and TAXI DRIVER, PURPLE RAIN is like a whirling cultural vortex.” –Armond White, THE RESISTANCE

(WANDERSPLITTER)
Thomas Harlan, author and filmmaker, was born in 1929 as the only son of the German director Veit Harlan, maker of the notorious anti-semitic propaganda film, JEW SÜSS, and as a child sat at Hitler’s dinner table. After WWII Harlan moved to Berlin and then to France. He wrote plays, poetry, and prose, engaged in left-wing discourses, and in 1959 he began archival research into the National Socialist regime. This research led to the prosecution of more than 2,000 German war criminals. Harlan, who passed away last year, lived in his final years in a respiratory clinic in South Germany. It is in this clinic that he, together with filmmaker Christoph Hübner, examined fragments of his past for this film. The pieces of Harlan’s life revealed to us in this fascinating documentary are, he says, like shrapnel: they enter the body violently and can cause long-term pain and aggravation.

With Teri Garr, Frederic Forrest, Raul Julia, Nastassja Kinski, and Harry Dean Stanton.

Teri Garr and Frederic Forrest star as domestic partners who break up and take foreign lovers (Raul Julia and Nastassja Kinski, respectively) during a wild 4th of July weekend in Vegas. This rectangular love story is a musical in structure, even though the leads don’t sing; instead, their emotions are articulated on the soundtrack through overlaid lyric commentary by Crystal Gayle and Tom Waits. Taglined “a new kind of old-fashioned romance”, ONE FROM THE HEART was Coppola’s experiment in producing a movie in the style of the Old Hollywood studio system. With its vast sets of the Vegas Strip and McCarran Airport, hundreds of dancing extras, and Gene Kelly consulting on the choreography, it was the first and last megaproduction for the short-lived Zoetrope Hollywood.

(WINIFRED WAGNER UND DIE GESCHICHTE DES HAUSES WAHNFRIED VON 1914-1975.)

“‘He had that perfect Austrian warmth and understanding’: Winifred Wagner (78-year-old widow of Richard Wagner’s son Siegfried) on the human face and personal charm of Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s passion for Wagner inevitably led him to Winifred, organizer of the Bayreuth Festival. During their 22-year friendship, to whose memory she is stubbornly faithful, Hitler doted on her family and mentioned nothing of politics: ‘I would say he was too easily influenced and gave in to radical demands’, is her only criticism, made apparently without irony. This film features Winifred Wagner’s first interview (shot almost entirely in medium close-up) about Hitler as a patron of the arts. It’s an extraordinary document – about the role of art in a society, about its relation to politics, and about degrees of unawareness.” –Chris Petit, TIME OUT FILM GUIDE

With David Bowie, Ray Davies, and Sade.

Rarely revived, based on Colin MacInnes’s 1958 novel of the same name.

“[A] movie about style – the 50s roots of 80s clothes and music, echoed through 40s musicals. Set in a neon-bright London in 1958, it has some of the 40s artifice of boys and girls bursting into song, yet is full of 80s rock stars and 70s survivors like David Bowie and Ray Davies. Looking through these layers of time, this flashy, extravagant rock musical elevates style to a symptom and cause of social change.” –Caryn James, NEW YORK TIMES

Preceded by…a 35mm Bowie surprise!

With Guy Davis, Rae Dawn Chong, and Saundra Santiago.

Shot on location in the South Bronx, BEAT STREET is about a teenage DJ/MC, his b-boy kid brother, their graffiti-artist friend, and the tagalong who wants to be everybody’s agent. Coolly received in the States, it was one of the first films to introduce hip-hop culture to an international audience.

“WILD STYLE and STYLE WARS clued Hollywood producers into a potential market for hip-hop-themed movies. … Prowling the Roxy, the producers – Harry Belafonte and David Picker – gathered a DJ, rap, and dance A-list: DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force, Jazzy Jay, Zulu Queens Lisa Lee and Sha Rock, Mellie Mel, The Treacherous Three, Doug E. Fresh, Rock Steady Crew, the New York Breakers, the Magnificent Force. On paper, this was the historical equivalent of landing Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, the Nicholas Brothers, Honi Coles and Cholly Atkins, and Whitey’s International Hoppers for a feature film about jazz.” –Jeff Chang, CAN’T STOP WON’T STOP

With Malcolm McDowell, Allen Garfield, Daniel Stern, Ed Begley Jr., and Lou Reed. Archival print courtesy of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

Allan Arkush’s ROCK ‘N’ ROLL HIGH SCHOOL was about tearing down an institution. GET CRAZY is about saving one: the Saturn Theater, modeled after the Fillmore East in NYC, where Arkush worked as a bouncer and learned to shoot concert footage. Rapid-fire sight-gags and a dozen plots revolve around a New Year’s Eve rock show at the Saturn. Ed Begley Jr. and Fabian launch a conspiracy against the management, McDowell does his own vocals as a codpiece-wearing Jagger-type, Maui Wowie somehow gets into the water supply, and Lou Reed spends the entire movie riding in a cab. Title track by Sparks.

(DER LACHENDE MANN)

Posing as West German journalists, East German documentary filmmakers Heynowski and Scheumann pay a visit to the notorious Nazi-turned-mercenary Siegfried “Kongo” Müller, pump him with booze, and get him to talk. Müller fought in Congo’s civil war in the 1960s, and the more Pernod he imbibes, the more fascinating this interview becomes. He asserts that blacks are no better than animals and shares his dream of enlisting in the U.S. Army to fight communism in Vietnam and beyond. He flaunts his military paraphernalia, including the Iron Cross he was awarded in Germany in 1945, and proceeds to deny his earlier statements about civil killings, the ethics of war, and the defense of Western libertarian values. This documentary tour-de-force is interspersed with pictures of Müller and his comrades proudly posing with severed skulls, and it touches on other Nazis who are active in Africa as well as American world dominance.

An essential supplement to Lanzmann’s renowned SHOAH, this film centers on an extended interview with Yehuda Lerner, a young Jew involved in the only successful uprising by Jewish death-camp prisoners. Lanzmann presents Lerner’s tale with a Hitchcockian mastery of suspense, while raising existential and ethical questions about justified violence.
“Lerner’s account…is as gripping as the greatest thrillers and as gratifying as any story of brave and cunning virtue confronting mighty evil. His detailed narration…is as precise and evocative as a novelist’s, his reflections are as profound as a philosopher’s, and his gestures are the apotheosis of the Old World habit of talking with the hands….” –Richard Brody, NEW YORKER

With David Byrne, John Goodman, and Spalding Gray.

Credited as “Narrator/Lip-syncher/Talking Heads Singer”, David Byrne also co-wrote and directed this episodic story about two days in the life of a fictional North Texas exurb, Virgil, where the inhabitants are planning a sesquicentennial parade and talent show called “A Celebration of Specialness.” All the tunes are Heads compositions performed by townspeople; among them is John Goodman, as an aspirant singer looking for a wife. For all its technophilic optimism, TRUE STORIES evokes the gravity of its more melancholy precedents, Thorton Wilder’s OUR TOWN and Robert Altman’s NASHVILLE.

With Michael Paré, Diane Lane, Rick Moranis, Amy Madigan, and Willem Dafoe.

“A futuristic rock fantasy which is, at heart, a Western. An itinerant soldier (Paré) returns to his home to discover that his former girlfriend, the local girl who’s made it big in the rockbiz (Lane) has been kidnapped by a villainous street gang. Cue for fisticuffs and fireworks as Paré, aided by a tough-talking female sidekick (Madigan) hikes over to the bad part of town and unlocks Ms. Lane from the bed to which she’s been handcuffed. Result? Showdown. STREETS OF FIRE is fast and loud, with music from Ry Cooder…it is also violent, though its violence lies not in the depiction of blood and entrails, but in the sheer energy and speed with which the dark and brooding images rush after one another. The message is that there is no message; if this isn’t action cinema in its purest form, then it’s pretty close.” –Richard Rayner, TIME OUT FILM GUIDE

Special thanks to Wang Bing and Lihong Kong.
Winter in China. A town in the snow. Wrapped in her coat, an old woman walks slowly through a housing complex to her simple apartment. Inside, He Fengming settles into her armchair and remembers. Her memories take us back to 1949, to the beginning of a journey that will take us through 30 years of her life and of the New China. In FENGMING, Wang Bing presents her unforgettable story, from her repeated persecution under the two reformatory campaigns in China during the 1950s through her rehabilitation in 1974.
“Unprompted and unrelenting, an elderly Chinese woman recounts her harrowing experiences during the 1950s anti-Rightist campaign and 1960s Cultural Revolution in a torrent of words that is not only a devastating critique of Chinese Communism but, in a way, the [Cannes Film Festival’s] most remarkable performance.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

With John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, James Brown, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin.

Belushi and Aykroyd star in this early big-screen manifestation of an SNL sketch as Jake and Elwood Blues, two brothers on a “mission from God” to save their old Catholic orphanage the only way they know how: by reuniting their R&B band for a benefit concert and tour. Along the way, they dodge lawmen of every kind, neo-Nazis, and crazy ex-girlfriends. Featuring performances by James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and Ray Charles at their funky, late-70s best, Landis’s deadpan musical farce is graceful even when a dozen police cars are smashing into each other.

(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

With Susan Tyrrell and The Mystic Knights of Oingo Boingo.

“A freak musical that manages to synthesize ingredients of virtually every other midnight movie hit into the cheerful consistency of bad-taste vaudeville. Inspired by TV reruns like Betty Boop and Flash Gordon, and abetted by such counterculture standbys as the dwarf Hervé Villechaize (FANTASY ISLAND), Susan Tyrrell (FAT CITY), and Viva, this bargain-basement HELLZAPOPPIN’ – one-third animated and the rest shot in a studio that combines the expressionism of DR. CALIGARI and the flakiness of R. Crumb – revels in hyperbolic racial, cultural, and musical stereotypes, converging in the giddy Cab Calloway-style numbers performed by the band Oingo Boingo.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, MIDNIGHT MOVIE

Oingo Boingo frontman Danny Elfman (who later scored most of Tim Burton’s films) plays Satan. Richard Elfman had the film colorized in 2008, to reflect his original vision.

Andy Warhol
PAUL SWAN
1965, 66 minutes, 16mm.
PAUL SWAN is Warhol’s documentary portrait of the early 20th century American dancer who pioneered ‘aesthetic’, interpretive forms of modern dance. The elderly Swan recreates past dance performances, reciting poetry for the camera, frequently changing costumes, and leaving the stage empty for long periods while he hunts for a lost shoe.
&
Andy Warhol
OUTER AND INNER SPACE
1965, 33 minutes, double-screen 16mm.
Shot in August 1965 using videotape equipment loaned to Warhol by the Norelco Company, OUTER AND INNER SPACE features Edie Sedgwick seated in front of a large television screen, on which we see her pre-recorded video image. As the videotape plays, she responds to her own image and talks with someone off-screen. The result is a fascinating exercise in double-screen filmmaking which highlights Sedgwick’s beauty as well as her mercurial, fragmented personality.

With Dolly Parton, Burt Reynolds, Dom DeLuise, and Charles Durning.

The most commercially successful musical of the 80s, this Broadway adaptation depicts a fantasy of brothel life as a rootin’ tootin’ bachelorette party that never ends. The story is based on an actual mid-70s media circus, when a ‘watchdog’ reporter led a televised crusade to compel the state of Texas to shut down a long-running cathouse. Those willing to suspend disbelief will find a wholesome message in this pre-code-flavored fable about a libertarian (Dolly, that is) battling sexual hypocrisy in public policy. Songs include “Hard Candy Christmas”, the original “I Will Always Love You”, “The Sidestep”, an ode to gubernatorial doublespeak that earned Charles Durning an Oscar nomination, and “The Aggie Song”, the best jocksploitation number since GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES.

With Johnny Depp, Amy Locane, Susan Tyrrell, and Iggy Pop.

CRY-BABY is about juvenile delinquents and bad reputations. As usual with Waters, there’s an extra-textual dimension at work: Depp joined the cast to sully his image; Traci Lords to clean hers up. Then the director found himself defending his own name against charges of selling out, as fans complained his first studio-backed film wasn’t “filthy” enough. Worse, the version most people saw – the one that ran on basic cable throughout the 90s – was horrendously recut. The intact CRY-BABY is worth revisiting, not only for its noteworthy ensemble (Patti Hearst, Joe Dallesandro, Susan Tyrrell, Iggy Pop, Ricki Lake, Willem Dafoe) but for Depp’s performance. Never has he milked his appeal so perversely as the titular Baltimore “drape”, the weepy, tattooed orphan spawn of the Alphabet Bomber.

Written by Ronald Tavel.
Andy Warhol was in many ways the TALKING HEAD filmmaker par excellence, as evidenced by several of his features, as well as the plethora of “talking head” passages embedded within other films. The first of many Warhol films scripted by playwright Ronald Tavel, SCREEN TEST #1 stars Philip Fagan as the subject of Tavel’s off-screen examination. In the face of his tester’s increasingly suggestive and campy instructions, Fagan becomes stubbornly unresponsive, refusing to follow Tavel’s lead and falling back instead on the appeal of his own silent good looks. Although Fagan’s wooden performance prompted Warhol and Tavel to remake the film with Mario Montez (SCREEN TEST #2), this first version is a fascinating look into the complexities of queer identity in the 1960s.

Written by Ronald Tavel; with Mario Montez.
As Mario Montez auditions for the role of Esmerelda in THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, Ronald Tavel, again off-screen, subjects the actor to a series of increasingly humiliating improvisations. But Mario’s faith in his self-created persona sustains the illusion of his character and becomes, in the end, a triumph of performance art.

With Robin Williams, Shelley Duvall; screenplay by Jules Feiffer; songs by Harry Nilsson, arranged by Van Dyke Parks.

Altman’s musical treatment of the revered character channels both E.C. Segar’s original comic strip and the short animations produced by the great Fleischer brothers throughout the 1930s (which rank among the most sublime examples of early 20^th century American pop culture). A highly quixotic project which quickly ran into substantial production problems, POPEYE remains one of the most undervalued of Altman’s works, an unjust fate for a film brimming with invention, graced by great performances from Robin Williams, Shelley Duvall, and a host of great character actors from Altman’s stable, and featuring songs written by Harry Nilsson and arranged by Van Dyke Parks.

With Michael Paré, Diane Lane, Rick Moranis, Amy Madigan, and Willem Dafoe.

“A futuristic rock fantasy which is, at heart, a Western. An itinerant soldier (Paré) returns to his home to discover that his former girlfriend, the local girl who’s made it big in the rockbiz (Lane) has been kidnapped by a villainous street gang. Cue for fisticuffs and fireworks as Paré, aided by a tough-talking female sidekick (Madigan) hikes over to the bad part of town and unlocks Ms. Lane from the bed to which she’s been handcuffed. Result? Showdown. STREETS OF FIRE is fast and loud, with music from Ry Cooder…it is also violent, though its violence lies not in the depiction of blood and entrails, but in the sheer energy and speed with which the dark and brooding images rush after one another. The message is that there is no message; if this isn’t action cinema in its purest form, then it’s pretty close.” –Richard Rayner, TIME OUT FILM GUIDE

In BLIND SPOT, Traudl Junge describes on camera her experience working as one of Adolf Hitler’s private secretaries from 1942 until his suicide in 1945. After keeping quiet for nearly 60 years, Frau Junge tells the riveting story of working alongside Hitler until the final collapse of the Nazi regime. Frau Junge is one of only a handful of witnesses to Hitler’s last days in his fortified bunker as the Third Reich was collapsing above them. Together with documentary filmmaker Othmar Schmiderer, Heller has condensed ten hours of material into a 90-minute film that renounces all form of stylistic embellishment and instead relies entirely on the compelling force of this woman and her stunning tale.

With Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Rip Torn, and Lesley Ann Warren.

A breezy comedy about the dirty business of concert promoting and a meta-backstager about the art of moguling (as in THE PRODUCERS, sometimes a really toxic show can be more profitable than a good one). Willie stars in a semi-autobiographical role as a creatively/financially frustrated musician/composer who takes a break from songwriting to visit some old ex-wives and manage a semi-autobiographical Kris Kristofferson. Ever-shifting allegiances eventually ally them with competitor Rip Torn (“Hold it! I wish the vision of how beautiful y’all are could be painted on the Great Wall of China!'”) to defeat a more nefarious music publisher, played by VANISHING POINT director Richard C. Sarafian.

Martin Scorsese
ITALIANAMERICAN
1974, 49 minutes, 35mm.
&
AMERICAN BOY
1978, 55 minutes, 16mm.
Early in his career Martin Scorsese made not one but two TALKING HEAD films. The first, ITALIANAMERICAN, finds him interviewing his parents (the focus is equally on the two of them, but after 40 years of marriage they have arguably become enough of a unit to qualify as a single “talking head”) in their Elizabeth Street walk-up apartment. The second, AMERICAN BOY, documents a raucous autobiographical performance by Steven Prince (TAXI DRIVER’s unforgettable gun/drugs/Cadillac salesman “Easy Andy”) whose recollected life stories encompass army brat-hood, draft-dodging, heroin abuse, a turbulent stint as a road manager for Neil Diamond, even murder.

NEWFILMMAKERS WELCOMES NOMAD FILMS, WHICH WAS CREATED IN AN EFFORT TO EXPOSE INNOVATIVE AND EXPERIMENTAL FORMS OF FILMMAKING

FIRST SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Bethynia Cardenas Iniquez NOCHE SIN LUNA (2010, 13 minutes, video)
Mauricio Arango THE NIGHT OF THE MOON HAS MANY HOURS (2010, 16 minutes, video)
Cheri Robartes GYPSY MOON (2011, 20 minutes, video)

SECOND SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Wes Eastin AIRSOFT COMMERCIAL (2009, 1 minute, video)
Terry Ziegelman BOOM BOOM (2010, 8 minutes, video)
Eric Laplante MARCH HARE (2009, 14 minutes, video)
Travis Greene GUILLERMO (2010, 30 minutes, video)

SPECIAL PROGRAM
With NOMAD Films.
Vienne Chan SALVAGE (2011, 7 minutes. video)
Liran Hutmacher THE MECHANISM OF LOVE (2011, 10 minutes, video)
Nicola Piovesan THE BEARDLESS GARIBALDI (2010, 15 minutes, video)
Silvia Defrance CANDY DARLING (2008, 26 minutes, video)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Marina Shron LULLABY FOR RAY (2011, 18 minutes, video)
&
Kyle Mumford
HIS NAKED MIND
2010, 70 minutes, video.
Admired by the street kids of Asbury Park, Christopher refuses to be controlled by drug dealer William and overzealous Officer Edwards. When William discovers that Christopher is dividing himself among his clingy girlfriend (William’s sister), an amorous middle-aged woman (William’s mother), and the girl who is becoming Christopher’s love (William’s girlfriend), all hell breaks loose.

ELEGY (1991, 11 minutes, video)
SABOTAGING SPRING (1991, 10 minutes, video)
BARBIE’S AUDITION (1995, 13 minutes, video)
FINAL EXIT (2001, 5 minutes, video)
CONFESSIONS OF A SOCIOPATH (2002, 37 minutes, video)
Joe Gibbons conveys his dry humor through obsessive monologues that scrape the bottom of a monomaniacal mind – spilling forth with fantasies of power, destruction, and death. In his tapes, the hand-held camera allows Gibbons’s alter-ego to surface as he gives vent to tyrannical rants that comically invert social values.
Total running time: ca. 80 minutes.

“In his ongoing series DRIVEN, begun in 2002, Levine rides in the front seat of an automobile while one of his friends talks about his or her life for eighty-two minutes (the maximum length of a single take using his digital camera). … By having his subjects drive him around the city at night, he disengages much of the self-consciousness inherent in the interview genre. … Levine’s low-key mode of inquiry and his genuine passion for listening have an infectious power. Sometimes his driver makes it easy for him: the filmmaker Joe Gibbons is an ironic raconteur who does not require Levine’s skillful intervention to fascinate us for almost an hour and a half at a stretch.” –P. Adams Sitney, ARTFORUM

Filmmaker Leandro Katz visits lower Manhattan, his former home, from his current base in Buenos Aires for a screening and artist’s talk. Over the past fifty years Katz has created a diverse, rigorous, complex, and thrilling body of work that includes installations, photographs, artist books, poetry, and experimental films and videos. Tonight Katz presents his invented alphabets, which use malacology and lunar phases to spell out witty phrases about language and art.

(DER LACHENDE MANN)

Posing as West German journalists, East German documentary filmmakers Heynowski and Scheumann pay a visit to the notorious Nazi-turned-mercenary Siegfried “Kongo” Müller, pump him with booze, and get him to talk. Müller fought in Congo’s civil war in the 1960s, and the more Pernod he imbibes, the more fascinating this interview becomes. He asserts that blacks are no better than animals and shares his dream of enlisting in the U.S. Army to fight communism in Vietnam and beyond. He flaunts his military paraphernalia, including the Iron Cross he was awarded in Germany in 1945, and proceeds to deny his earlier statements about civil killings, the ethics of war, and the defense of Western libertarian values. This documentary tour-de-force is interspersed with pictures of Müller and his comrades proudly posing with severed skulls, and it touches on other Nazis who are active in Africa as well as American world dominance.

(WINIFRED WAGNER UND DIE GESCHICHTE DES HAUSES WAHNFRIED VON 1914-1975)

“‘He had that perfect Austrian warmth and understanding’: Winifred Wagner (78-year-old widow of Richard Wagner’s son Siegfried) on the human face and personal charm of Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s passion for Wagner inevitably led him to Winifred, organizer of the Bayreuth Festival. During their 22-year friendship, to whose memory she is stubbornly faithful, Hitler doted on her family and mentioned nothing of politics: ‘I would say he was too easily influenced and gave in to radical demands’, is her only criticism, made apparently without irony. This film features Winifred Wagner’s first interview (shot almost entirely in medium close-up) about Hitler as a patron of the arts. It’s an extraordinary document – about the role of art in a society, about its relation to politics, and about degrees of unawareness.” –Chris Petit, TIME OUT FILM GUIDE

[Milestone Films will be re-releasing PORTRAIT OF JASON, along with other films by Shirley Clarke, in early 2012.]
“Experimental filmmaker Clarke culled her PORTRAIT OF JASON from a grueling, 12-hour interview with her subject, Jason Holliday. A complicated examination of cinéma vérité conventions, the spectacle of the interviewed subject, and the seeming exoticism (for a mostly white, avant-garde audience) of a gay, African American performer and sometime hustler, the film is Holliday’s. His difficult performance of self against the filmmaker’s goading and unflinching gaze remains, in the end, his own.” –SFMOMA
“The most fascinating film I’ve ever seen.” –Ingmar Bergman

On the occasion of Leandro Katz’s participation in the Visible Evidence conference, Anthology welcomes him for two additional programs of his film and video work. Tonight’s program includes Katz’s short video documentary PARADOX, a deadpan study of a Honduran banana plantation and a monumental ancient Maya sculpture nearby, and a silent single-shot film that may be thought of as a companion piece, LOS ANGELES STATION. In EL DÍA QUE ME QUIERAS, Katz revisits the much-reproduced 1967 photograph of Bolivian soldiers displaying the corpse of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Katz interweaves an interview with the photographer, Bolivian photojournalist Freddy Alborta, with a text by Borges, music of Carlos Gardel, and footage of the town of Ilabaya, near where Guevara died.
LOS ANGELES STATION (1976, 10 minutes, 16mm-to-video, silent)
PARADOX (2001, 30 minutes, video)
THE DAY YOU’LL LOVE ME / EL DÍA QUE ME QUIERAS (1997, 30 minutes, 16mm-to-video)
Total running time: ca. 75 minutes.

The first feature film by the legendary filmmaker Jean Eustache (THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE) is one of the seminal TALKING HEAD films, consisting of a straightforward, unadorned interview with his grandmother, who gives a passionate account of her lurid past – the wars she survived, the babies she lost, and the husband accused of pedophilia. Eustache considered the film a jumping-off point for his later work (hence the title). But while a truncated version of the film (entitled ODETTE ROBERT) was exhibited on French TV in the 70s, the longer original version was not screened publicly until 2003, nearly twenty years after Eustache’s death. These ultra-rare Stateside screenings are not to be missed!

(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

Viking Eggeling
SYMPHONIE DIAGONALE
1924, 8 minutes, 35mm, silent.
Alberto Cavalcanti
RIEN QUE LES HEURES
1928, 52 minutes, 35mm, silent.
A “city symphony” interweaving documentary, experimental and narrative elements that provide vivid images of Paris in the mid-1920s.
Total running time: ca. 65 minutes.

Special thanks to Wang Bing and Lihong Kong.
Winter in China. A town in the snow. Wrapped in her coat, an old woman walks slowly through a housing complex to her simple apartment. Inside, He Fengming settles into her armchair and remembers. Her memories take us back to 1949, to the beginning of a journey that will take us through 30 years of her life and of the New China. In FENGMING, Wang Bing presents her unforgettable story, from her repeated persecution under the two reformatory campaigns in China during the 1950s through her rehabilitation in 1974.
“Unprompted and unrelenting, an elderly Chinese woman recounts her harrowing experiences during the 1950s anti-Rightist campaign and 1960s Cultural Revolution in a torrent of words that is not only a devastating critique of Chinese Communism but, in a way, the [Cannes Film Festival’s] most remarkable performance.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

MAYA DEREN
MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON
1943, 14 minutes, 16mm, b&w. Co-directed by Alexander Hammid. Music by Teiji Ito from 1959.
AT LAND
1944, 15 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent. Photographed by Hella Heyman and Alexander Hammid.
A STUDY IN CHOREOGRAPHY FOR CAMERA
1945, 3 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent. By Maya Deren and Talley Beatty.
RITUAL IN TRANSFIGURED TIME
1946, 15 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent. Choreographic collaboration with Frank Westbrook. Photographed by Hella Heyman. With Rita Christiani and Frank Westbrook.
Total running time: ca. 55 minutes.

Katz returns with a program of short films and videos. SPLITS is an adaptation of Borges’s short story “Emma Zunz” set in New York. The (unsubtitled) Spanish language documentary EXHUMACIÓN, on the forensic team charged with the exhumation of Guevara’s remains, is paired with a repeat screening of EL DÍA QUE ME QUIERAS.
SPLITS (1978, 25 minutes, 16mm-to-video)
THE DAY YOU’LL LOVE ME / EL DÍA QUE ME QUIERAS (1997, 30 minutes, 16mm-to-video)
EXHUMACIÓN (2007, 38 minutes, video. In Spanish without subtitles; an English transcript will be available.)
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

James Nares
NO JAPS AT MY FUNERAL
1980, 60 minutes, video.
“[A] deconstructive propaganda piece that demolishes the British version of events in Northern Ireland. It is an eloquent statement about brutality and victims, told mainly by Jackie, an IRA man whose personal account is intercut with images from British television. NO JAPS has the same formal properties as a typical TV documentary, but is aimed to show the bias of what is known on TV as ‘truth’.” –Gary Indiana, EAST VILLAGE EYE
&
Jacob Burckhardt
A GUIDED TOUR OF EDITH’S APARTMENT
2010, 47 minutes, video.
In his affecting new film, Jacob Burckhardt documents his mother, the artist Edith Schloss, as, one after the other, and in a non-stop torrent of commentary, she describes the many objects in her apartment, including her own paintings and assemblages. Thanks to her long and fascinating life, and her friendship with some of the 20th century’s most important artists, many of the pieces in her home are of great cultural interest. But more importantly, they all embody some sort of emotional or psychological significance for her, making Burckhardt’s deceptively straightforward, home-movie-like film something like his mother’s indirect autobiography, a portrait of a woman through her own work and the belongings she’s gathered over the decades.

(WANDERSPLITTER)
Thomas Harlan, author and filmmaker, was born in 1929 as the only son of the German director Veit Harlan, maker of the notorious anti-semitic propaganda film, JEW SÜSS, and as a child sat at Hitler’s dinner table. After WWII Harlan moved to Berlin and then to France. He wrote plays, poetry, and prose, engaged in left-wing discourses, and in 1959 he began archival research into the National Socialist regime. This research led to the prosecution of more than 2,000 German war criminals. Harlan, who passed away last year, lived in his final years in a respiratory clinic in South Germany. It is in this clinic that he, together with filmmaker Christoph Hübner, examined fragments of his past for this film. The pieces of Harlan’s life revealed to us in this fascinating documentary are, he says, like shrapnel: they enter the body violently and can cause long-term pain and aggravation.

A selection of several short non-fiction masterpieces from Anthology’s collection, including the classic TOBY AND THE TALL CORN, by documentary legend Ricky Leacock (who passed away this spring); the exceedingly rare film EYES ON RUSSIA, by the photographer Margaret Bourke-White; RITUALS AND DEMONSTRATIONS, a fascinating record of Jewish religious rituals in 1970s Brooklyn by the gifted Jerry Jofen; and FILM MAGAZINE OF THE ARTS, a sponsored film by Anthology’s own co-founder Jonas Mekas.

Margaret Bourke-White
EYES ON RUSSIA: FROM THE CAUCASUS TO MOSCOW
1934, 9 minutes, 16mm, b&w.

Ricky Leacock
TOBY AND THE TALL CORN
1953, 30 minutes, 35mm-to-video.
“Made for OMNIBUS, TOBY is a heartwarming and entertaining portrait of one of the last traveling variety shows in the U.S. Leacock captures the heat of the summer night on the faces of the appreciative audiences, the thrill of the live performances, and the challenge of the set-up. … Its candid style caught the eye of filmmaker Robert Drew [with whom Leacock would make] PRIMARY, a film that launched the American vérité movement.” –Shannon Abel, HOTDOCS

Jonas Mekas
FILM MAGAZINE OF THE ARTS
1963, 20 minutes, 16mm.
“In Spring, 1963 SHOW MAGAZINE called me and asked that I make a film on arts in New York. I told them, why did they want me to make it – didn’t they know I was a bit unusual? … ‘We want something unusual’, they said. So I went out and made a newsreel on arts. SHOW people looked at the rough cut of the film and became very angry. ‘But there is nothing about SHOW MAGAZINE and DuPont fabrics in the movie’, they said. ‘What has that to do with the arts in New York!’ I said. The battle was short. The film was destroyed. Really, I have no idea what they did with it. This workprint of the first FILM MAGAZINE OF THE ARTS is the only print in existence, as far as I know.” –J.M.

Jerry Jofen
RITUALS AND DEMONSTRATIONS
1977, 42 minutes, 16mm.
A record of authentic religious rituals – circumcision, upsherung (the cutting of the boy’s hair at age three), Bar mitzvah, betrothal, children learning Aleph-Beth and Chumash, young men studying Talmud, celebrations of festivals, and a farbrengen, a gathering of the Lubavitcher Rebbe addressing thousands of his disciples on Chassidic and Kabbalistic interpretations of the particular occasion.
“[The film’s] most effective scenes celebrate the collective energy of Chassidic life. There are some wonderfully observed street scenes of Purim in Williamsburg…and a particularly lovely wedding ceremony; a sequence of an elderly Torah scribe carries so great a sense of tradition and awe as to render explanation superfluous…. Jofen’s film testifies to the inexhaustible richness of his subject matter.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE
Total running time: ca. 105 minutes.

Andy Warhol
PAUL SWAN
1965, 66 minutes, 16mm.
PAUL SWAN is Warhol’s documentary portrait of the early 20th century American dancer who pioneered ‘aesthetic’, interpretive forms of modern dance. The elderly Swan recreates past dance performances, reciting poetry for the camera, frequently changing costumes, and leaving the stage empty for long periods while he hunts for a lost shoe.
&
Andy Warhol
OUTER AND INNER SPACE
1965, 33 minutes, double-screen 16mm.
Shot in August 1965 using videotape equipment loaned to Warhol by the Norelco Company, OUTER AND INNER SPACE features Edie Sedgwick seated in front of a large television screen, on which we see her pre-recorded video image. As the videotape plays, she responds to her own image and talks with someone off-screen. The result is a fascinating exercise in double-screen filmmaking which highlights Sedgwick’s beauty as well as her mercurial, fragmented personality.

Tony Conrad
THE FLICKER
1966, 30 minutes, 16mm, sound.
Mathematical and rhythmical orchestration of white and black frames.
&
Ken Jacobs & Bob Fleischner
BLONDE COBRA
1959-63, 35 minutes, 16-to-35mm blow-up. Featuring Jack Smith.
Preserved by Anthology, with the generous support of the Film Foundation, the National Film Preservation Foundation, Simon Lund and Cineric, Inc.
“BLONDE COBRA is an erratic narrative – no, not really a narrative, it’s only stretched out in time for convenience of delivery. It’s a look in on an exploding life, on a man of imagination suffering pre-fashionable Lower East Side deprivation and consumed with American 1950s, 40s, 30s disgust. Silly, self-pitying, guilt-strictured and yet triumphing – on one level – over the situation with style… enticing us into an absurd moral posture the better to dismiss us with a regal ‘screw off.’” –K.J.
Total running time: ca. 70 minutes.

An essential supplement to Lanzmann’s renowned SHOAH, this film centers on an extended interview with Yehuda Lerner, a young Jew involved in the only successful uprising by Jewish death-camp prisoners. Lanzmann presents Lerner’s tale with a Hitchcockian mastery of suspense, while raising existential and ethical questions about justified violence.
“Lerner’s account…is as gripping as the greatest thrillers and as gratifying as any story of brave and cunning virtue confronting mighty evil. His detailed narration…is as precise and evocative as a novelist’s, his reflections are as profound as a philosopher’s, and his gestures are the apotheosis of the Old World habit of talking with the hands….” –Richard Brody, NEW YORKER

James Nares
NO JAPS AT MY FUNERAL
1980, 60 minutes, video.
“[A] deconstructive propaganda piece that demolishes the British version of events in Northern Ireland. It is an eloquent statement about brutality and victims, told mainly by Jackie, an IRA man whose personal account is intercut with images from British television. NO JAPS has the same formal properties as a typical TV documentary, but is aimed to show the bias of what is known on TV as ‘truth’.” –Gary Indiana, EAST VILLAGE EYE
&
Jacob Burckhardt
A GUIDED TOUR OF EDITH’S APARTMENT
2010, 47 minutes, video.
In his affecting new film, Jacob Burckhardt documents his mother, the artist Edith Schloss, as, one after the other, and in a non-stop torrent of commentary, she describes the many objects in her apartment, including her own paintings and assemblages. Thanks to her long and fascinating life, and her friendship with some of the 20th century’s most important artists, many of the pieces in her home are of great cultural interest. But more importantly, they all embody some sort of emotional or psychological significance for her, making Burckhardt’s deceptively straightforward, home-movie-like film something like his mother’s indirect autobiography, a portrait of a woman through her own work and the belongings she’s gathered over the decades.

In BLIND SPOT, Traudl Junge describes on camera her experience working as one of Adolf Hitler’s private secretaries from 1942 until his suicide in 1945. After keeping quiet for nearly 60 years, Frau Junge tells the riveting story of working alongside Hitler until the final collapse of the Nazi regime. Frau Junge is one of only a handful of witnesses to Hitler’s last days in his fortified bunker as the Third Reich was collapsing above them. Together with documentary filmmaker Othmar Schmiderer, Heller has condensed ten hours of material into a 90-minute film that renounces all form of stylistic embellishment and instead relies entirely on the compelling force of this woman and her stunning tale.

An essential supplement to Lanzmann’s renowned SHOAH, this film centers on an extended interview with Yehuda Lerner, a young Jew involved in the only successful uprising by Jewish death-camp prisoners. Lanzmann presents Lerner’s tale with a Hitchcockian mastery of suspense, while raising existential and ethical questions about justified violence.
“Lerner’s account…is as gripping as the greatest thrillers and as gratifying as any story of brave and cunning virtue confronting mighty evil. His detailed narration…is as precise and evocative as a novelist’s, his reflections are as profound as a philosopher’s, and his gestures are the apotheosis of the Old World habit of talking with the hands….” –Richard Brody, NEW YORKER

(WANDERSPLITTER)
Thomas Harlan, author and filmmaker, was born in 1929 as the only son of the German director Veit Harlan, maker of the notorious anti-semitic propaganda film, JEW SÜSS, and as a child sat at Hitler’s dinner table. After WWII Harlan moved to Berlin and then to France. He wrote plays, poetry, and prose, engaged in left-wing discourses, and in 1959 he began archival research into the National Socialist regime. This research led to the prosecution of more than 2,000 German war criminals. Harlan, who passed away last year, lived in his final years in a respiratory clinic in South Germany. It is in this clinic that he, together with filmmaker Christoph Hübner, examined fragments of his past for this film. The pieces of Harlan’s life revealed to us in this fascinating documentary are, he says, like shrapnel: they enter the body violently and can cause long-term pain and aggravation.

NEWFILMMAKERS PRESENTS GAY AND LESBIAN FILMS

DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Ryan Kipp THE COLLECTOR (2009, 5 minutes, video)
Stephanie Donnelly I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU HUSBAND AND HUSBAND (2010, 20 minutes, video)

LESBIAN FILM PROGRAM
Amie Morelli BUYER BEWARE (2010, 4 minutes, 35mm)
Gabrielle Lindaw THESE SHOWERS CAN TALK (2010, 25 minutes, video)
&
Cheyanne Kane
JILL AND JAC
2010, 90 minutes, video.
After being brutally raped, Jill is forced to find a way to survive emotionally. She searches for herself through reckless and cloudy relationships with others, as well as drugs. With the failure of each relationship, Jill traumatically disintegrates.

GAY FILM PROGRAM
Antonio Santini KILLER TRANNY (2011, 5 minutes, video)
David Arinello DATE BLIND (2009, 15 minutes, video)
&
Wendy Jo Cohen
THE BATTLE OF PUSSY WILLOW CREEK
2010, 96 minutes, video.
Ken Burns meets SPINAL TAP in a subversive tour de force relaying the outrageous life stories of four forgotten Civil War heroes: an opium-addicted gay Colonel, an aging Chinese launderer, a nerdy escaped slave, and a one-armed teenage prostitute.

(AUFZEICHNUNGEN AUS DEM TIEFPARTERRE)

A radical look into the mind of the ‘man on the street’. Peter Haindl, a hospital orderly in Vienna, shot these home movies from 1993 to 1999. They were then given to Frimmel, who created this 90-minute compilation.
“While striking various poses around his apartment, Haindl addresses an imaginary public, his speeches ranging from defiant to contrite. … His monologues deal with the usual prejudices, such as those against women and foreigners, and none of them can be reduced to a single coherent point of view. Commonplaces are qualified with contradictions and self-irony, and his tirades occasionally swerve in the direction of serious analysis. The state of pandemonium which characterizes the Austrian soul is depicted as a labyrinth of rhetoric.” –Dominik Kamalzadeh

FILMMAKERS IN PERSON FOR THE SCREENING ON THURS, SEPT 8!

(DER LACHENDE MANN)

Posing as West German journalists, East German documentary filmmakers Heynowski and Scheumann pay a visit to the notorious Nazi-turned-mercenary Siegfried “Kongo” Müller, pump him with booze, and get him to talk. Müller fought in Congo’s civil war in the 1960s, and the more Pernod he imbibes, the more fascinating this interview becomes. He asserts that blacks are no better than animals and shares his dream of enlisting in the U.S. Army to fight communism in Vietnam and beyond. He flaunts his military paraphernalia, including the Iron Cross he was awarded in Germany in 1945, and proceeds to deny his earlier statements about civil killings, the ethics of war, and the defense of Western libertarian values. This documentary tour-de-force is interspersed with pictures of Müller and his comrades proudly posing with severed skulls, and it touches on other Nazis who are active in Africa as well as American world dominance.

(PRASTANKAN)
A lyrical, early Dreyer comedy. A young parson wins a plum parish in 17th century Norway, but is obliged to marry the widow of his deceased predecessor and pretend his attractive young fiancée is his sister. The master’s touch is evident in the close-ups of the pastor’s would-be rivals and parishioners and a slow pan presaging the 360-degree views of VAMPYR.

“Imagine that we are sitting in a very ordinary room. Suddenly we are told that there is a corpse behind the door. Instantly, the room we are sitting in has taken on another look. The light, the atmosphere have changed, though they are physically the same. This is because we have changed and the objects are as we conceive them. This is the effect I wanted to produce in VAMPYR.” –Carl Dreyer

(LA PASSION DE JEANNE D’ARC)
A work that exemplifies Dreyer’s philosophy: simplicity is the most complex idea of all. Although renowned for its spare acts, lack of embellishment, and use of simple shots, Dreyer’s masterpiece reveals the natural complexity of an un-retouched face (often existing alone, filling up the frame) and a landscape of history as individual as the lines on that face. Made in 1927-28, it continues to haunt the cinema, looking more and more avant-garde as the years go by.

(VREDENS DAG)
“Carl Dreyer’s art begins to unfold at the point where most other directors give up. Witchcraft and martyrdom are his themes – but his witches don’t ride broomsticks, they ride the erotic fears of their persecutors. It is a world that suggests a dreadful fusion of Hawthorne and Kafka.” –Pauline Kael

SPECIAL SCREENINGS!
Four hours in length and six years in the making, ICONOCLAST is an epic view of the controversial life of American underground artist/musician Boyd Rice. First coming to prominence in the 1970s as one of the founders of the genre known as Industrial Music, Rice has enjoyed a career spanning four decades, and encompassing the worlds of pop culture, music, art, and film. He has been dubbed ‘The Godfather of Noise Music’, authored several books, exhibited his art in a number of one-man gallery shows, and even lectured at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, despite having been a high-school dropout.
Told through the words of the provocative raconteur himself, ICONOCLAST is a roller coaster ride through the fevered mindscape of one of the most controversial artists of the modern age. From Charles Manson to Marilyn Manson, tiki bars to industrial noise, this kaleidoscopic magnum opus features dozens and dozens of interview subjects, including filmmaker Allison Anders, televangelist Bob Larson, satanist Blanche Barton, and disc jockey Rodney Bingenheimer.

An existential morality essay by the master of the long take, in which a man who believes he is Jesus Christ soon begins to convince those around him. Based on the play by Kaj Munk, ORDET is a meditation on faith and fanaticism.

SPECIAL SCREENINGS!
Four hours in length and six years in the making, ICONOCLAST is an epic view of the controversial life of American underground artist/musician Boyd Rice. First coming to prominence in the 1970s as one of the founders of the genre known as Industrial Music, Rice has enjoyed a career spanning four decades, and encompassing the worlds of pop culture, music, art, and film. He has been dubbed ‘The Godfather of Noise Music’, authored several books, exhibited his art in a number of one-man gallery shows, and even lectured at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, despite having been a high-school dropout.
Told through the words of the provocative raconteur himself, ICONOCLAST is a roller coaster ride through the fevered mindscape of one of the most controversial artists of the modern age. From Charles Manson to Marilyn Manson, tiki bars to industrial noise, this kaleidoscopic magnum opus features dozens and dozens of interview subjects, including filmmaker Allison Anders, televangelist Bob Larson, satanist Blanche Barton, and disc jockey Rodney Bingenheimer.

(LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE)
With Jean Marais and Josette Day; score by Georges Auric.
“[P]erhaps the most sensuously elegant of all filmed fairy tales. As a child escapes from everyday family life to the magic of a storybook, so, in the film, Beauty’s farm, with its Vermeer simplicity, fades in intensity as we are caught up in the Gustave Dore extravagance of the Beast’s enchanted landscape. …Jean Marais is a magnificent beast.” –Pauline Kael

(LE SANG D’UN POÈTE)
“Adolescent angels wandering about, black boxers with perfect bodies taking flight, school-children in capes killing each other with snowballs, a mirror becomes a swimming pool, and the hallways of a furnished hotel turn into a labyrinth.” –Georges Sadoul

NEWFILMMAKERS PRESENTS SOME NEW YORK STORIES

DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Gregorio Smith SKIN DEEP (2008, 52 minutes, video)
Lorna Ventura THE DANCER CHRONICLES (2010, 60 minutes, video)

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Sebastian Sommer MAMA SAID SARDINE BABY (2010, 3 minutes, video)
Anne Hestia Lann AUTUMN DIARY (2010, 9 minutes, video)
Yoav Netanyahu CITY LOVE (2010, 10 minutes, video)
Violette D’Agata Hartmann AFTER DARK (2010, 19 minutes, video)
Christopher Ide BENEFITS (2010, 19 minutes, video)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Sabrina Osso SABRINA OSSO (2010, 35 minutes, video)
&
Michael Kuell
THE BITS IN BETWEEN
2009, 76 minutes, video.
Follows the personal and professional challenges of a group of NYC performers. Their successes and failures play out onstage and off in a series of comedic bits, culminating in one humiliating, awkward, and ultimately liberating audition.

(NEWFILMMAKERS PRESENTS JEWISH & ISRAELI FILMS)

DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Max Joseph SAAB STORY (2010, 19 minutes, video)
Lori Petchers SURVIVING (2010, 43 minutes, video)

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Tova Beck-Friedman LOT’S WIFE (2011, 4 minutes, video)
Tova Beck-Friedman MEDUSA’S HEAD (2011, 6 minutes, video)
Dalia Schlesinger BUBBLES (2010, 10 minutes, video)
Sivan Cohen TASNIM (2010, 11 minutes, video)
Jon Kauffman STORM UP THE SKY (2010, 11 minutes, video)
Ted Hayash LUCKY NUMBERS (2011, 22 minutes, video)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Amar Chebib MISH MUSH (2010, 19 minutes, video)
&
Orna Mokady & Yael Shavitt
iF YOU PULL NORTH
2010, 67 minutes, video.
During the 1967 Israeli-Syrian battle on the Golan Heights, Major Rafi Mokady attempts to lead the Israeli troops and to prevent casualties. When the battle is over, and Rafi is left wounded in the field, he is confident help is on the way.