Anthology Film Archives

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Distributed by KimStim.

The latest film by Austrian documentary filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter (PRIPYAT, OUR DAILY BREAD, ABENDLAND) is a typically masterful, disturbing work, scary in its compositional perfection and unblinking depiction of mankind’s effect on the planet. Where Geyrhalter’s eye for the dystopic has brought certain of his earlier works to the precipice of a kind of documentary science fiction (in OUR DAILY BREAD for instance, which paints a highly unsettling portrait of the modern food industry), HOMO SAPIENS goes even further. Focusing his gaze on modern ruins, and with nary a human being in sight, Geyrhalter has made a film that is ostensibly an essay on abandoned structures and spaces, of factories and hospitals and homes left empty and crumbling. But marked by the profound absence of life, and recording manmade structures that are gradually being reclaimed by nature, it registers as something like a documentary portrait of a post-human world, an ode to humanity as seen from the distant future. A film about the finiteness and fragility of human existence, HOMO SAPIENS questions the meaning of human existence in relation to the world we live in.

“Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s fantastical HOMO SAPIENS depicts a disquieting scenario whereby the world made by people is slowly won back by nature: it is science fiction and documentary in equal measure, equal parts contemporary and post-apocalyptic.” –BERLINALE

“From a frightening distance and with supreme indifference, we examine the remnants of this world as if we were archaeologists from the future or from a different world, trying to decipher an alien civilization. Everything turns into a cipher, a sign, a code that promises understanding: they must have been megalomaniacs, those humans – extravagant, imposing, and full of themselves. In HOMO SAPIENS, we confront the absurdity of such self-images once they are subject to decay. We would like to believe that this film tells of a distant future, but we know that its images were generated in the here and now.” –Alejandro Bachmann

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Distributed by KimStim.

The latest film by Austrian documentary filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter (PRIPYAT, OUR DAILY BREAD, ABENDLAND) is a typically masterful, disturbing work, scary in its compositional perfection and unblinking depiction of mankind’s effect on the planet. Where Geyrhalter’s eye for the dystopic has brought certain of his earlier works to the precipice of a kind of documentary science fiction (in OUR DAILY BREAD for instance, which paints a highly unsettling portrait of the modern food industry), HOMO SAPIENS goes even further. Focusing his gaze on modern ruins, and with nary a human being in sight, Geyrhalter has made a film that is ostensibly an essay on abandoned structures and spaces, of factories and hospitals and homes left empty and crumbling. But marked by the profound absence of life, and recording manmade structures that are gradually being reclaimed by nature, it registers as something like a documentary portrait of a post-human world, an ode to humanity as seen from the distant future. A film about the finiteness and fragility of human existence, HOMO SAPIENS questions the meaning of human existence in relation to the world we live in.

“Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s fantastical HOMO SAPIENS depicts a disquieting scenario whereby the world made by people is slowly won back by nature: it is science fiction and documentary in equal measure, equal parts contemporary and post-apocalyptic.” –BERLINALE

“From a frightening distance and with supreme indifference, we examine the remnants of this world as if we were archaeologists from the future or from a different world, trying to decipher an alien civilization. Everything turns into a cipher, a sign, a code that promises understanding: they must have been megalomaniacs, those humans – extravagant, imposing, and full of themselves. In HOMO SAPIENS, we confront the absurdity of such self-images once they are subject to decay. We would like to believe that this film tells of a distant future, but we know that its images were generated in the here and now.” –Alejandro Bachmann

For full program listings, visit www.newfilmmakers.com.

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Distributed by KimStim.

The latest film by Austrian documentary filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter (PRIPYAT, OUR DAILY BREAD, ABENDLAND) is a typically masterful, disturbing work, scary in its compositional perfection and unblinking depiction of mankind’s effect on the planet. Where Geyrhalter’s eye for the dystopic has brought certain of his earlier works to the precipice of a kind of documentary science fiction (in OUR DAILY BREAD for instance, which paints a highly unsettling portrait of the modern food industry), HOMO SAPIENS goes even further. Focusing his gaze on modern ruins, and with nary a human being in sight, Geyrhalter has made a film that is ostensibly an essay on abandoned structures and spaces, of factories and hospitals and homes left empty and crumbling. But marked by the profound absence of life, and recording manmade structures that are gradually being reclaimed by nature, it registers as something like a documentary portrait of a post-human world, an ode to humanity as seen from the distant future. A film about the finiteness and fragility of human existence, HOMO SAPIENS questions the meaning of human existence in relation to the world we live in.

“Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s fantastical HOMO SAPIENS depicts a disquieting scenario whereby the world made by people is slowly won back by nature: it is science fiction and documentary in equal measure, equal parts contemporary and post-apocalyptic.” –BERLINALE

“From a frightening distance and with supreme indifference, we examine the remnants of this world as if we were archaeologists from the future or from a different world, trying to decipher an alien civilization. Everything turns into a cipher, a sign, a code that promises understanding: they must have been megalomaniacs, those humans – extravagant, imposing, and full of themselves. In HOMO SAPIENS, we confront the absurdity of such self-images once they are subject to decay. We would like to believe that this film tells of a distant future, but we know that its images were generated in the here and now.” –Alejandro Bachmann

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Distributed by KimStim.

The latest film by Austrian documentary filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter (PRIPYAT, OUR DAILY BREAD, ABENDLAND) is a typically masterful, disturbing work, scary in its compositional perfection and unblinking depiction of mankind’s effect on the planet. Where Geyrhalter’s eye for the dystopic has brought certain of his earlier works to the precipice of a kind of documentary science fiction (in OUR DAILY BREAD for instance, which paints a highly unsettling portrait of the modern food industry), HOMO SAPIENS goes even further. Focusing his gaze on modern ruins, and with nary a human being in sight, Geyrhalter has made a film that is ostensibly an essay on abandoned structures and spaces, of factories and hospitals and homes left empty and crumbling. But marked by the profound absence of life, and recording manmade structures that are gradually being reclaimed by nature, it registers as something like a documentary portrait of a post-human world, an ode to humanity as seen from the distant future. A film about the finiteness and fragility of human existence, HOMO SAPIENS questions the meaning of human existence in relation to the world we live in.

“Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s fantastical HOMO SAPIENS depicts a disquieting scenario whereby the world made by people is slowly won back by nature: it is science fiction and documentary in equal measure, equal parts contemporary and post-apocalyptic.” –BERLINALE

“From a frightening distance and with supreme indifference, we examine the remnants of this world as if we were archaeologists from the future or from a different world, trying to decipher an alien civilization. Everything turns into a cipher, a sign, a code that promises understanding: they must have been megalomaniacs, those humans – extravagant, imposing, and full of themselves. In HOMO SAPIENS, we confront the absurdity of such self-images once they are subject to decay. We would like to believe that this film tells of a distant future, but we know that its images were generated in the here and now.” –Alejandro Bachmann

An artist and composer living in Los Angeles, John Wiese began experimenting with recording as a teenager and has since gone on to become a highly respected figure, both in the academic world of contemporary sound art as well as within the international experimental music underground. His music ranges from the serene and sublime to the frenetic and irregular, a sign of his ability to adapt and utilize a plethora of sounds to build captivating aural works. As a performer and recording artist, his expertise in composition, texture, and experimentation with sound is not restricted to work under his own name. Wiese is also known for his influential grind/noisecore band Sissy Spacek, extreme electronics unit LHD, and for his numerous collaborations with some of the finest experimental artists from around the world. He is also an accomplished visual and graphic artist with a long list of exhibitions and printed materials published across the globe. For his program at Anthology, Wiese will present eight film pieces that incorporate elements of documentation, narrative, and abstraction, using image, sound, and often silence, to create a visual score for both real and imagined sound.

SISSY SPACEK (2011, 16.5 min, digital, silent)
THE TENSES WITH JOHN WIESE (2014, 12.5 min, digital)
UNTITLED (2014, 6.5 min, digital, silent)
LEATHER BATH (2013, 6.5 min, digital)
SISSY SPACEK—MATA GALLERY (2014, 1.5 min, digital)
I BET YOU CAN’T FINISH THAT GLASS OF WATER (2014, 10 min, digital, silent)
THREE GLASS BOTTLES (2014, 30 sec, Super 8mm-to-digital, b&w)
A SPECIFIC POINT IN A CONTINUOUS WHOLE (2014, 19.5 min, digital, silent)

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

(IVAN GROZNY)

“The first time in history a man has committed suicide by cinema,” quipped Dovzhenko. A state-sanctioned production, Ivan’s opulent furs and jewels color the black-and-white machinations by a demonic Czar bent on making his subjects’ lives a living hell – a statement pointed with outrage directly at Stalin.

(BRONENOSETS POTEMKIN)

“POTEMKIN used [Eisenstein’s] new set of rules to create what has been called the most perfect and concise example of film structure. Like STRIKE, [POTEMKIN] has no hero, only the masses, and no plot, only an incident plucked from the pre-history of the Revolution.” –Standish Lawder, EISENSTEIN AND CONSTRUCTIVISM

“POTEMKIN was the first work to embody, in their most tangible form, various principles of construction peculiar to the medium: montage (or editing) and parallel action (the expansion of time through spatial manipulation); or, in sum, the purely formal deployment of objective action to create psychological dimensions. Eisenstein was not the first ‘film artist,’ but he was the first to be so pure, the first to use photography like painting in movement, photography like verbal imagery. As set down in his writings, his own theories inform us of this. Yet POTEMKIN must be seen to be believed.” –Parker Tyler

(STACHKA)

Eisenstein’s interest in the Freudian father complex drives this psychological scenario in which non-actors step forward to acknowledge the viewer, illustrating Eisenstein’s desire to penetrate to the heart of cinema, sidestepping realism by ‘being real.’ Governmental restrictions made STRIKE the only completed film of a series intended to portray the road to revolution.

(OKTYABR)

“An imaginary document projected on actual locations, OCTOBER is the Soviet equivalent of the Sistine Chapel – an artist commissioned by the state has represented the sacred origins of the universe. Woodrow Wilson had famously hailed D.W. Griffith’s THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915) as ‘history written with lightning,’ but Eisenstein’s cosmic newsreel cum theoretical film poem goes beyond THE BIRTH OF A NATION, as well as his own BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, in drafting the past to serve the requirements of the present. No less than the revolutionaries who made October, Eisenstein understood himself as history’s tool. Thus consecrated to the Bolshevik faith, his OCTOBER is a perfect tautology – it clarifies and improves on history in the service of objective historical necessity.” –J. Hoberman, THE RED ATLANTIS: COMMUNIST CULTURE IN THE ABSENCE OF COMMUNISM

(STAROYE I NOVOYE)

With OLD AND NEW, also known as THE GENERAL LINE, Eisenstein developed and perfected his theories of “mise-en-cadre,” using the montage of characters in the foreground and background to conjure meanings, and “overtonal montage,” bringing silent film to its zenith.

For full program listings, visit www.newfilmmakers.com.

PROGRAM 1:
These eight films, made over a four year period, include BEAVER FEVER, starring George Kuchar and Curt’s sister, Melinda McDowell-Milks; the nakedly personal CONFESSIONS; the never-before-seen THE MEAN BROTHERS “GET STOOD UP”; the darkly absurdist WIENERS & BUNS MUSICAL; and the self-explanatory STINKY-BUTT, starring George Kuchar.

All films restored by the Academy Film Archive, with the exception of A VISIT TO INDIANA.

AINSLIE TRAILER (for Underground Cinema 12) (1972, 2 min, 16mm)
CONFESSIONS (1971, 11 min, 16mm, b&w)
A VISIT TO INDIANA (16mm version) (1970, 10 min, 16mm. Preserved by Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive with a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation.)
WIENERS AND BUNS MUSICAL (1972, 13.5 min, 16mm, b&w)
A NIGHT WITH GILDA PECK (1973, 9.5 min, 16mm)
THE MEAN BROTHERS “GET STOOD UP” (1973, 3.5 min, 16mm, b&w)
STINKY-BUTT (1974, 3 min, 16mm, b&w)
BEAVER FEVER (1974, 19.5 min, 16mm, b&w)

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

Flaherty’s pioneering ethnographic film depicts the struggle for survival of Inuit hunter Nanook and his family. Though rife with staged scenes, anachronisms, and an indulgence in the myth of the “noble savage” (Nanook was in fact an Inuit man named Allakariallak, who hunted not with harpoons and spears but with a rifle), NANOOK OF THE NORTH is a work of great lyricism, simplicity of design, and genuine affection for its protagonists, and its force is undiminished almost 100 years after it was made.

“There was no practical application for any of it. And that’s what made that time so magical.” –Ann Magnuson

Pioneering video artist Tom Rubnitz worked in the bustling East Village performance scene – he was a fixture at The Pyramid Club and Club 57, where he documented many of the period’s most noteworthy artists, including Ann Magnuson, RuPaul, the “Lady” Bunny, David Wojnarowicz, John Sex, John Kelly, and Frieda. His short-form tapes extended beyond the music video format, offering prescient glimpses of YouTube culture, a format that has wholly embraced the artist’s work, with his famous PICKLE SURPRISE having accumulated over 2 million views and counting.

PROGRAM 1:
A program of longer-form video works, beginning with Rubnitz’s collaboration with David Wojnarowicz, a searing indictment of broadcast journalism. Some of the artist’s earliest works are also included here, including FRIEDA! (THE MOVIE), which depicts Pyramid Club sensation, Frieda, the dancing disco doll – a plastic 1960s children’s hair toy, perched atop the shoulders of a prancing performer – and MIDNIGHT LULLABY, a very early short starring Rubnitz as a late night babysitter.

LISTEN TO THIS (1992, 15.5 min, digital. With David Wojnarowicz.)
REVEREND HOWARD FINSTER: MAN OF VISION (1980, 27 min, video)
FRIEDA! (THE MOVIE) (1980, 20 min, video)
MIDNIGHT LULLABY (1980, 11 min, video)

Total running time: ca. 80 min. 

“There was no practical application for any of it. And that’s what made that time so magical.” –Ann Magnuson

Pioneering video artist Tom Rubnitz worked in the bustling East Village performance scene – he was a fixture at The Pyramid Club and Club 57, where he documented many of the period’s most noteworthy artists, including Ann Magnuson, RuPaul, the “Lady” Bunny, David Wojnarowicz, John Sex, John Kelly, and Frieda. His short-form tapes extended beyond the music video format, offering prescient glimpses of YouTube culture, a format that has wholly embraced the artist’s work, with his famous PICKLE SURPRISE having accumulated over 2 million views and counting.

PROGRAM 2:
Featuring RuPaul, the “Lady” Bunny, John Kelly, John Sex, Quentin Crisp, and the B-52s, Tom Rubnitz’s bizarro recreations of 1950s kitsch and commercialism brim with colorful vitality. Beginning with short-form documentaries highlighting the Pyramid Club and John Sex, the program traces Rubnitz’s evolution into his famed recipe tutorials such as CHICKEN ELAINE, STRAWBERRY SHORTCUT and the YouTube sensation, PICKLE SURPRISE.

FROM THE FILES OF THE PYRAMID COCKTAIL LOUNGE (1983, 6.5 min, digital)
CHICKEN ELAINE (1983, 1 min, digital)
JOHN SEX: THE TRUE STORY (1983, 4 min, digital)
MADE FOR TV (1984, 15 min, digital. With Ann Magnuson.)
DRAG QUEEN MARATHON (1986, 6 min, digital)
HUSTLE WITH MY MUSCLE (1986, 4 min, digital)
BUMP AND GRIND IT (1986, 4 min, digital)
PLASTIC RAP (1986, 3 min, digital. With Frieda.)
UNDERCOVER… ME! (1989, 2 min, digital)
STRAWBERRY SHORTCUT (1989, 2 min, digital)
PICKLE SURPRISE (1989, 1.5 min, digital)
THE FAIRIES (1989, 5 min, digital)
LOVE IS THE MESSAGE (1990, 4 min, digital)
SUMMER OF LOVE PSA (1990, 5 min, digital)
THE MOTHER SHOW (1981-91, 4 min, digital. With Tom Koken & Barbara Lipp.)

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

Flaherty’s third major film portrays the lives of a family of fisher folk on the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway, Ireland. Flaherty selected the location and subjects because of their isolation as the westernmost outpost of European civilization. In addition, the daily struggle between the islanders and the sea perfectly suited his interests and concerns. The scenes at sea are breathtaking.

“His passionate devotion to the portrayal of human gesture and of a man’s fight for his family makes the film an incomparable account of human dignity. Better than anyone, Flaherty knew how to show the true face of Man.” –Georges Sadoul

PROGRAM 2:
This program features TABOO (THE SINGLE AND THE LP), a mixture of documentary and psychodrama featuring a series of sexually charged vignettes inspired by a piece of graffiti found inside a toilet stall at the Maritime Museum, as well as LOADS, which David Ehrenstein asserted, “goes far beyond his earlier all-out efforts and puts such big-time dabblers in eroticism as Bernardo Bertolucci and Nagisa Oshima decidedly in the shade.”

All films restored by the Academy Film Archive, with the exception of LOADS.

CURT MCDOWELL’S L.A. SHOW (TRAILER) (ca. 1979, 2 min, 16mm, b&w)
TRUTH FOR RUTH (1972, 4 min, 16mm, b&w)
BOGGY DEPOT (1973, 17 min, 16mm, b&w)
LOADS (1980, 22 min, 16mm, b&w)
&
TABOO (THE SINGLE AND THE LP)
1981, 53 min, 16mm, b&w

Total running time: ca. 100 min.

Psychosexual confessionals carry on the startlingly frank eroticism of Curt McDowell, from Aimee Goguen’s Hi8 gay play to Mariah Garnett’s experimental documentary approaches towards the embodiment of Peter Berlin. Explicit sexuality erupts in handmade 16mm, daydreamed celesbian encounters, and hardcore art porn, produced by production company Naked Sword.

Aimee Goguen SPORTS TAPE 3 (2016, 3 min, digital)
Mariah Garnett ENCOUNTERS I MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE HAD WITH PETER BERLIN (2012, 13 min, 16mm)
Aimee Goguen PTERODAKTULOS SOUND (2014, 3.5 min, digital)
Nazli Dinçel SOLITARY ACTS #6 (2015, 11 min, 16mm)
Aimee Goguen MATTERHORN (2013, 3 min, digital)
Vanessa Roveto EXCITABILITY (2013, 30 min, digital)
Aimee Goguen BIG BAD STRAW (2012, 1.5 min, digital)
Brontez Purnell 100 BOYFRIENDS MIXTAPE (2016, 17 min, digital)
Aimee Goguen TUB CAKE (2012, 3 min, digital)

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

PROGRAM 3:
“PEED INTO THE WIND smears across the screen like one of those dirty underground comic books. It’s loaded with a lot of big scenes and unusual looking people that make this epic resemble a clogged toilet. Unfortunately, since several of the performers were not as loyal as Ainslie Pryor and John Thomas, the plot is difficult to follow but in no way hinders the sewer-like sequences. It’s quite enjoyable and possesses the releasing power of an enema.” –George Kuchar

“A real gut-punch. It’ll have you puking in the aisles.” –Mike Kuchar

All films restored by the Academy Film Archive.

KATHLEEN TRAILER (for Underground Cinema 12) (1972, 1.5 min, 16mm)
RONNIE (1972, 4 min, 16mm, b&w)
TRUE BLUE AND DREAMY (1973, 12.5 min, 16mm, b&w)
&
PEED INTO THE WIND
1972, 54 min, 16mm, b&w

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

Written by and featuring George Kuchar.

“Witness if you dare, the world’s only underground kinky art porno horror film, complete with four men, three women, and a gorilla. Ecstasy so great that all heaven and hell becomes just one big old Shangri-La! […] With the initial setup of an atmospheric gothic horror tale – dark stormy night breakdown featuring a creepy old house on the hill – it quickly turns into a bawdy, graphic, and darkly comic orgy. Dead drunk, horny, and delirious Marion Eaton commands the screen as one of cinema’s weirdest female characters, while George Kuchar falls madly in love with a gorilla. […] The most dialogue you will ever see in porn and the most porn you will ever see in a melodrama, THUNDERCRACK! is a volatile marriage of genres, fluid sexuality, and depraved perversion.” –D.A. Johnston, FRAMELINE

Tracing the legacy of Tom Rubnitz’s short form videos, this program assembles material produced by performance artists working in video to document outré compositions from experimental dance on the rooftops of San Francisco to trans communities in France. Also included are Barry Morse’s direct homage to PICKLE SURPRISE, starring drag superstars Jacky Beat and Willam Belli, and music videos from Dynasty Handbag, Seth Bogart, and Macy Rodman.

Young Joon Kwak & Velli Mata Hoika AM I PRETTY? (2015, 4 min, digital)
Steve Hall & Cathee Wilkins THE NAGEL INCIDENT (2002, 16 min, digital)
Josef Kraska PEPPRÉ ANN & FROENDS, EPISODE 4: GONE FISHING (2015, 9.5 min, digital)
Dynasty Handbag VAGUE (2016, 5 min, digital)
Barry Morse OOKIE COOKIE (2009, 3 min, digital)
Jennifer Stratford & Seth Bogart EATING MAKEUP (2015, 3.5 min, digital. Featuring Kathleen Hanna.)
Josef Kraska LAZY GIRL (promo video for Macy Rodman) (2015, 4 min, digital)
Brice Dellsperger BODY DOUBLE 34 (2015, 5 min, digital)
Brontez Purnell Dance Company FREE JAZZ (2013, 23 min, 16mm)

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

“There was no practical application for any of it. And that’s what made that time so magical.” –Ann Magnuson

Pioneering video artist Tom Rubnitz worked in the bustling East Village performance scene – he was a fixture at The Pyramid Club and Club 57, where he documented many of the period’s most noteworthy artists, including Ann Magnuson, RuPaul, the “Lady” Bunny, David Wojnarowicz, John Sex, John Kelly, and Frieda. His short-form tapes extended beyond the music video format, offering prescient glimpses of YouTube culture, a format that has wholly embraced the artist’s work, with his famous PICKLE SURPRISE having accumulated over 2 million views and counting.

PROGRAM 3:
Highlighting Rubnitz’s videography skills in the colorful performance culture that peopled many of his most infamous short works, this program assembles Rubnitz’s longer-form documents of mad-cap plays mounted at The Pyramid Club, featuring artists Lypsinka, Tabboo, Hapi Phace, and Lady Bunny’s annual Wigstock festival in Tompkins Square Park, directly across the street.

PSYKHO III: THE MUSICAL by Mark Oates (1985, 23 min, digital)
WIGSTOCK: THE MOVIE (1987, 20 min, digital)
DIAL ‘M’ FOR MODEL (1987, 27 min, digital)

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

With Melinda McDowell, Marion Eaton, and George Kuchar. Preserved by Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive with a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation.

Welcome to Sparkle’s Tavern – a sing-and-suck bordello where a brother-sister entrepreneurial duo are just trying to earn an honest buck. Their little brothel is a secret, hard kept from their conservative mother. But when she receives a visit from the magical Mr. Pupik (Kuchar) he shares with her the joys of sexual enlightenment and SPARKLE’S becomes a raucous, sex-positive family film. Shot in 1976 but not edited until 1984, the film was the last McDowell would complete.

“A lusty, bizarre, sexually-dripping marvel of the emotional dangers in a dysfunctional family crippled with secrets and lost passions. Marion Eaton as Mrs. Blake is the marvelously pinched backbone of this body of decadence and Dionysian mania.” –Frederic E. Kahler

“Stephen Winter’s audacious feature debut is a colorful but messy satire about a bunch of HIV-positive Asian and black drag queens who decide to take matters in hand and fight the government’s apathy toward AIDS.” –Emanuel Levy, VARIETY

PROGRAM 1:
These eight films, made over a four year period, include BEAVER FEVER, starring George Kuchar and Curt’s sister, Melinda McDowell-Milks; the nakedly personal CONFESSIONS; the never-before-seen THE MEAN BROTHERS “GET STOOD UP”; the darkly absurdist WIENERS & BUNS MUSICAL; and the self-explanatory STINKY-BUTT, starring George Kuchar.

All films restored by the Academy Film Archive, with the exception of A VISIT TO INDIANA.

AINSLIE TRAILER (for Underground Cinema 12) (1972, 2 min, 16mm)
CONFESSIONS (1971, 11 min, 16mm, b&w)
A VISIT TO INDIANA (16mm version) (1970, 10 min, 16mm. Preserved by Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive with a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation.)
WIENERS AND BUNS MUSICAL (1972, 13.5 min, 16mm, b&w)
A NIGHT WITH GILDA PECK (1973, 9.5 min, 16mm)
THE MEAN BROTHERS “GET STOOD UP” (1973, 3.5 min, 16mm, b&w)
STINKY-BUTT (1974, 3 min, 16mm, b&w)
BEAVER FEVER (1974, 19.5 min, 16mm, b&w)

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

PROGRAM 2:
This program features TABOO (THE SINGLE AND THE LP), a mixture of documentary and psychodrama featuring a series of sexually charged vignettes inspired by a piece of graffiti found inside a toilet stall at the Maritime Museum, as well as LOADS, which David Ehrenstein asserted, “goes far beyond his earlier all-out efforts and puts such big-time dabblers in eroticism as Bernardo Bertolucci and Nagisa Oshima decidedly in the shade.”

All films restored by the Academy Film Archive, with the exception of LOADS.

CURT MCDOWELL’S L.A. SHOW (TRAILER) (ca. 1979, 2 min, 16mm, b&w)
TRUTH FOR RUTH (1972, 4 min, 16mm, b&w)
BOGGY DEPOT (1973, 17 min, 16mm, b&w)
LOADS (1980, 22 min, 16mm, b&w)
&
TABOO (THE SINGLE AND THE LP)
1981, 53 min, 16mm, b&w

Total running time: ca. 100 min.

PROGRAM 3:
“PEED INTO THE WIND smears across the screen like one of those dirty underground comic books. It’s loaded with a lot of big scenes and unusual looking people that make this epic resemble a clogged toilet. Unfortunately, since several of the performers were not as loyal as Ainslie Pryor and John Thomas, the plot is difficult to follow but in no way hinders the sewer-like sequences. It’s quite enjoyable and possesses the releasing power of an enema.” –George Kuchar

“A real gut-punch. It’ll have you puking in the aisles.” –Mike Kuchar

All films restored by the Academy Film Archive.

KATHLEEN TRAILER (for Underground Cinema 12) (1972, 1.5 min, 16mm)
RONNIE (1972, 4 min, 16mm, b&w)
TRUE BLUE AND DREAMY (1973, 12.5 min, 16mm, b&w)
&
PEED INTO THE WIND
1972, 54 min, 16mm, b&w

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

For full program listings, visit www.newfilmmakers.com.

Written by and featuring George Kuchar.

“Witness if you dare, the world’s only underground kinky art porno horror film, complete with four men, three women, and a gorilla. Ecstasy so great that all heaven and hell becomes just one big old Shangri-La! […] With the initial setup of an atmospheric gothic horror tale – dark stormy night breakdown featuring a creepy old house on the hill – it quickly turns into a bawdy, graphic, and darkly comic orgy. Dead drunk, horny, and delirious Marion Eaton commands the screen as one of cinema’s weirdest female characters, while George Kuchar falls madly in love with a gorilla. […] The most dialogue you will ever see in porn and the most porn you will ever see in a melodrama, THUNDERCRACK! is a volatile marriage of genres, fluid sexuality, and depraved perversion.” –D.A. Johnston, FRAMELINE

“Stephen Winter’s audacious feature debut is a colorful but messy satire about a bunch of HIV-positive Asian and black drag queens who decide to take matters in hand and fight the government’s apathy toward AIDS.” –Emanuel Levy, VARIETY

With David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, and Jane Birkin.

“Taking place in mid-1960s London, and featuring a young, dapper fashion photographer as its lead character, Antonioni’s BLOW-UP should by all rights appear utterly dated by now. Instead, with its unblinking view of a society obsessed with pretty pictures but little else, the film has turned out to be profoundly relevant. Far from being a time capsule, as some critics assert, unlike other films that share its ‘Swinging London’ setting (such as A HARD DAY’S NIGHT or DARLING), Mr. Antonioni’s movie, which won the top prize at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival, has much to say to an age in which nearly everyone carries a mobile device outfitted with a camera. Little of it is encouraging.” –Peter Tonguette, WALL STREET JOURNAL

FILMMAKER IN PERSON!

A radio distress call from a refugee boat: the passengers haven’t eaten for three days and are exhausted. It’s winter on Lampedusa. The tourists have all gone home and it’s cold on the windy Italian island, which, lying some 68 miles from the coast of North Africa, is the first port of call for African migrants striving to reach Europe.

Brossmann’s documentary feature reveals the numerous crises besetting the residents – both temporary and permanent – of Lampedusa. While the migrants protest the poor treatment they receive, the local fishing community is also restless. The cargo capacity of the new ferry – the only way onto and off of the island for its 5,000 inhabitants – isn’t sufficient to transport their catches to the mainland. Angry, the fishermen block the arrival of the boat. Stocks on the island are slowly running low, and store shelves are frighteningly bare. There’s division among the inhabitants of the island, and the garbage is piling up – as are the leaky, abandoned immigrant boats in the harbor. In the meantime, a lawyer from Palermo is trying to arrange a place of burial for those who have died, and the mayor is trying to keep everyone calm.

Vitally important and skillfully constructed, LAMPEDUSA IN WINTER is an elegant documentary portrait of a tiny community at the edge of Europe that’s engaged in a desperate fight for dignity, and for solidarity with those who many consider the cause of the ongoing crisis: the African boat people.

LAMPEDUSA IN WINTER was the co-recipient of this year’s MoreVALUE Film Award, which is granted each year during the Viennale (Vienna International Film Festival). Designed to showcase the best of Austrian cinema, the Award was founded by Erste Bank, the Viennale’s main sponsor, and is awarded according to the findings of an independent jury. The Award brings a cash prize as well as a one-month residency hosted and organized by the Deutsches Haus at NYU. The screenings are co-organized by the Deutsches Haus at NYU and the Austrian Cultural Forum New York.

With John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow, and Dennis Franz.

“De Palma evokes both Hitchcock and Antonioni’s BLOW-UP in this riveting, brilliantly constructed thriller. Travolta stars as Jack Terry, a former police audio technician who now makes a living doing sound effects for low-budget slasher flicks. Recording outdoor sounds one night, Jack witnesses (and records) a car driving off a bridge and hurtling into a river; diving in, he is able to rescue the passenger, a young woman named Sally (Nancy Allen). It is soon revealed that the car’s deceased driver was a state governor who was a likely front-runner in the upcoming presidential race, and that Sally was hired by parties unknown to accompany him on his fatal drive. Reviewing his tapes from the night of the accident, Jack becomes convinced that he hears a gunshot just before the car’s tire blows out, and, obsessed with discovering the truth, soon finds himself enmeshed in a deadly web of political intrigue.” –TIFF Cinematheque

A program of shorts that take surveillance tapes as found footage to ends that both illuminate and unnerve. Deborah Stratman’s IN ORDER NOT TO BE HERE is a brilliant exploration of privacy and surveillance, and the manipulation of fear in the fabric of suburban communities. Stratman describes the film as “a new genre of horror movie, attempting suburban locations as states of mind.” Sophie Calle’s UNFINISHED takes ATM surveillance footage as its source and inspiration for a fifteen-year-long investigation into security, money, and the allure of the anonymous faces on these tapes. Harun Farocki’s I THOUGHT I WAS SEEING CONVICTS is a single-channel edit of a two-channel video installation. We see two frames of surveillance footage from a maximum-security prison in California, slightly overlayed to create a dual screen within the frame. The silent footage is a sobering look at the isolation and violence within this prison, and ultimately about the much larger issue of mass incarceration in America.

Deborah Stratman IN ORDER NOT TO BE HERE (2002, 33 min, 16mm)
Sophie Calle UNFINISHED (2005, 30 min, digital. In English and French with English subtitles. Made in collaboration with Fabio Balducci.)
Harun Farocki I THOUGHT I WAS SEEING CONVICTS (2000, 25 min, digital)

Total running time: ca. 90 min.

ZORNS LEMMA
(1970, 60 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
“A major poetic work. Created and put together by a very clear eye-head, this original and complex abstract work moves beyond the letters of the alphabet, beyond words and beyond Freud. If you don’t understand it the first time you see it, don’t despair, see it again! When you finally ‘get it,’ a small light, possibly a candle, will light itself inside your forehead.” –Ernie Gehr
&
HAPAX LEGOMENA I: (nostalgia)
(1971, 36 min, 16mm, b&w. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
“In (nostalgia) the time it takes for a photograph to burn (and thus confirm its two-dimensionality) becomes the clock within the film, while Frampton plays the critic, asynchronously glossing, explicating, narrating, mythologizing his earlier art, and his earlier life, as he commits them both to the fire of a labyrinthine structure; for Borges too was one of his earlier masters, and he grins behind the facades of logic, mathematics, and physical demonstrations which are the formal metaphors for most of Frampton’s films.” –P. Adams Sitney

Total running time: ca. 100 min.

With André Dussollier, Anémone, and Eddie Constantine. Print courtesy of the Walker Art Center.

“In this prescient sci-fi farce, the fictional Ministry of Future offers an average French couple the opportunity to function as test subjects in the development of an ideal City of the Future. Confined to a modular prototype apartment, they live under constant televised surveillance and public scrutiny as a team of scientists subjects them to a range of psychometric and behavioral tests, often vexing and absurd. The experience proves revealing both for the couple and for the scientists (themselves mere workers exploited by the Ministry), until a group of pubescent ‘terrorists’ occupies the model apartment to free the couple from their standardized, aseptic prison through the unleashing of sheer juvenile chaos. A critique of the distortions of modernist utopias into postwar architecture and design, which looks shockingly prophetic from the present perspective of a society bombarded with reality TV shows and ruled by the logic of market research.” –TATE

FILMMAKER IN PERSON!

A radio distress call from a refugee boat: the passengers haven’t eaten for three days and are exhausted. It’s winter on Lampedusa. The tourists have all gone home and it’s cold on the windy Italian island, which, lying some 68 miles from the coast of North Africa, is the first port of call for African migrants striving to reach Europe.

Brossmann’s documentary feature reveals the numerous crises besetting the residents – both temporary and permanent – of Lampedusa. While the migrants protest the poor treatment they receive, the local fishing community is also restless. The cargo capacity of the new ferry – the only way onto and off of the island for its 5,000 inhabitants – isn’t sufficient to transport their catches to the mainland. Angry, the fishermen block the arrival of the boat. Stocks on the island are slowly running low, and store shelves are frighteningly bare. There’s division among the inhabitants of the island, and the garbage is piling up – as are the leaky, abandoned immigrant boats in the harbor. In the meantime, a lawyer from Palermo is trying to arrange a place of burial for those who have died, and the mayor is trying to keep everyone calm.

Vitally important and skillfully constructed, LAMPEDUSA IN WINTER is an elegant documentary portrait of a tiny community at the edge of Europe that’s engaged in a desperate fight for dignity, and for solidarity with those who many consider the cause of the ongoing crisis: the African boat people.

LAMPEDUSA IN WINTER was the co-recipient of this year’s MoreVALUE Film Award, which is granted each year during the Viennale (Vienna International Film Festival). Designed to showcase the best of Austrian cinema, the Award was founded by Erste Bank, the Viennale’s main sponsor, and is awarded according to the findings of an independent jury. The Award brings a cash prize as well as a one-month residency hosted and organized by the Deutsches Haus at NYU. The screenings are co-organized by the Deutsches Haus at NYU and the Austrian Cultural Forum New York.

With Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Harrison Ford, Teri Garr, and Robert Duvall.

Made in-between the first two GODFATHER films, Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION is a character study of its protagonist Harry Caul (Hackman), woven into an eerie psychological thriller. Caul, a surveillance expert, records a conversation between a couple in a crowded Union Square in San Francisco, but his cool objectivity as surveillor slowly begins to unravel as he becomes convinced that the subjects that he spied on are in danger. A prescient examination of privacy and surveillance in the Watergate era, it is every bit as relevant and timely today, in the wake of revelations of the NSA’s international surveillance.

With David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, and Jane Birkin.

“Taking place in mid-1960s London, and featuring a young, dapper fashion photographer as its lead character, Antonioni’s BLOW-UP should by all rights appear utterly dated by now. Instead, with its unblinking view of a society obsessed with pretty pictures but little else, the film has turned out to be profoundly relevant. Far from being a time capsule, as some critics assert, unlike other films that share its ‘Swinging London’ setting (such as A HARD DAY’S NIGHT or DARLING), Mr. Antonioni’s movie, which won the top prize at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival, has much to say to an age in which nearly everyone carries a mobile device outfitted with a camera. Little of it is encouraging.” –Peter Tonguette, WALL STREET JOURNAL

Jean Genet
UN CHANT D’AMOUR
(1950, 26 minutes, 35mm, b&w, silent.)
Jean Genet’s poetic expression of male eroticism pitted against the confines of prison cells and a homophobic state… a powerfully resonant work that explores individual freedom and the laws of desire.

Robert Frank & Alfred Leslie
PULL MY DAISY
(1959, 28 minutes, 35mm, b&w.)
A largely spontaneous experiment, arranged in 1959 by Robert Frank along with Alfred Leslie. They enlisted the participation of Jack Kerouac, who offered in place of an original screenplay a stage play he’d never finished writing, “The Beat Generation.” The plot is based on an incident in the life of Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn. They’re raising a family and trying to fit in with their suburban neighbors, and one night they invite a respectable neighborhood bishop over for dinner. But Neal’s Beat friends crash the party, and that Marx Brothers-like scenario is the closest thing the film has to a storyline.
Total running time: ca. 60 minutes.

With John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow, and Dennis Franz.

“De Palma evokes both Hitchcock and Antonioni’s BLOW-UP in this riveting, brilliantly constructed thriller. Travolta stars as Jack Terry, a former police audio technician who now makes a living doing sound effects for low-budget slasher flicks. Recording outdoor sounds one night, Jack witnesses (and records) a car driving off a bridge and hurtling into a river; diving in, he is able to rescue the passenger, a young woman named Sally (Nancy Allen). It is soon revealed that the car’s deceased driver was a state governor who was a likely front-runner in the upcoming presidential race, and that Sally was hired by parties unknown to accompany him on his fatal drive. Reviewing his tapes from the night of the accident, Jack becomes convinced that he hears a gunshot just before the car’s tire blows out, and, obsessed with discovering the truth, soon finds himself enmeshed in a deadly web of political intrigue.” –TIFF Cinematheque

FILMMAKER IN PERSON!

A radio distress call from a refugee boat: the passengers haven’t eaten for three days and are exhausted. It’s winter on Lampedusa. The tourists have all gone home and it’s cold on the windy Italian island, which, lying some 68 miles from the coast of North Africa, is the first port of call for African migrants striving to reach Europe.

Brossmann’s documentary feature reveals the numerous crises besetting the residents – both temporary and permanent – of Lampedusa. While the migrants protest the poor treatment they receive, the local fishing community is also restless. The cargo capacity of the new ferry – the only way onto and off of the island for its 5,000 inhabitants – isn’t sufficient to transport their catches to the mainland. Angry, the fishermen block the arrival of the boat. Stocks on the island are slowly running low, and store shelves are frighteningly bare. There’s division among the inhabitants of the island, and the garbage is piling up – as are the leaky, abandoned immigrant boats in the harbor. In the meantime, a lawyer from Palermo is trying to arrange a place of burial for those who have died, and the mayor is trying to keep everyone calm.

Vitally important and skillfully constructed, LAMPEDUSA IN WINTER is an elegant documentary portrait of a tiny community at the edge of Europe that’s engaged in a desperate fight for dignity, and for solidarity with those who many consider the cause of the ongoing crisis: the African boat people.

LAMPEDUSA IN WINTER was the co-recipient of this year’s MoreVALUE Film Award, which is granted each year during the Viennale (Vienna International Film Festival). Designed to showcase the best of Austrian cinema, the Award was founded by Erste Bank, the Viennale’s main sponsor, and is awarded according to the findings of an independent jury. The Award brings a cash prize as well as a one-month residency hosted and organized by the Deutsches Haus at NYU. The screenings are co-organized by the Deutsches Haus at NYU and the Austrian Cultural Forum New York.

With André Dussollier, Anémone, and Eddie Constantine. Print courtesy of the Walker Art Center.

“In this prescient sci-fi farce, the fictional Ministry of Future offers an average French couple the opportunity to function as test subjects in the development of an ideal City of the Future. Confined to a modular prototype apartment, they live under constant televised surveillance and public scrutiny as a team of scientists subjects them to a range of psychometric and behavioral tests, often vexing and absurd. The experience proves revealing both for the couple and for the scientists (themselves mere workers exploited by the Ministry), until a group of pubescent ‘terrorists’ occupies the model apartment to free the couple from their standardized, aseptic prison through the unleashing of sheer juvenile chaos. A critique of the distortions of modernist utopias into postwar architecture and design, which looks shockingly prophetic from the present perspective of a society bombarded with reality TV shows and ruled by the logic of market research.” –TATE

A program of shorts that take surveillance tapes as found footage to ends that both illuminate and unnerve. Deborah Stratman’s IN ORDER NOT TO BE HERE is a brilliant exploration of privacy and surveillance, and the manipulation of fear in the fabric of suburban communities. Stratman describes the film as “a new genre of horror movie, attempting suburban locations as states of mind.” Sophie Calle’s UNFINISHED takes ATM surveillance footage as its source and inspiration for a fifteen-year-long investigation into security, money, and the allure of the anonymous faces on these tapes. Harun Farocki’s I THOUGHT I WAS SEEING CONVICTS is a single-channel edit of a two-channel video installation. We see two frames of surveillance footage from a maximum-security prison in California, slightly overlayed to create a dual screen within the frame. The silent footage is a sobering look at the isolation and violence within this prison, and ultimately about the much larger issue of mass incarceration in America.

Deborah Stratman IN ORDER NOT TO BE HERE (2002, 33 min, 16mm)
Sophie Calle UNFINISHED (2005, 30 min, digital. In English and French with English subtitles. Made in collaboration with Fabio Balducci.)
Harun Farocki I THOUGHT I WAS SEEING CONVICTS (2000, 25 min, digital)

Total running time: ca. 90 min.

With David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, and Jane Birkin.

“Taking place in mid-1960s London, and featuring a young, dapper fashion photographer as its lead character, Antonioni’s BLOW-UP should by all rights appear utterly dated by now. Instead, with its unblinking view of a society obsessed with pretty pictures but little else, the film has turned out to be profoundly relevant. Far from being a time capsule, as some critics assert, unlike other films that share its ‘Swinging London’ setting (such as A HARD DAY’S NIGHT or DARLING), Mr. Antonioni’s movie, which won the top prize at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival, has much to say to an age in which nearly everyone carries a mobile device outfitted with a camera. Little of it is encouraging.” –Peter Tonguette, WALL STREET JOURNAL

With Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Harrison Ford, Teri Garr, and Robert Duvall.

Made in-between the first two GODFATHER films, Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION is a character study of its protagonist Harry Caul (Hackman), woven into an eerie psychological thriller. Caul, a surveillance expert, records a conversation between a couple in a crowded Union Square in San Francisco, but his cool objectivity as surveillor slowly begins to unravel as he becomes convinced that the subjects that he spied on are in danger. A prescient examination of privacy and surveillance in the Watergate era, it is every bit as relevant and timely today, in the wake of revelations of the NSA’s international surveillance.

With John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow, and Dennis Franz.

“De Palma evokes both Hitchcock and Antonioni’s BLOW-UP in this riveting, brilliantly constructed thriller. Travolta stars as Jack Terry, a former police audio technician who now makes a living doing sound effects for low-budget slasher flicks. Recording outdoor sounds one night, Jack witnesses (and records) a car driving off a bridge and hurtling into a river; diving in, he is able to rescue the passenger, a young woman named Sally (Nancy Allen). It is soon revealed that the car’s deceased driver was a state governor who was a likely front-runner in the upcoming presidential race, and that Sally was hired by parties unknown to accompany him on his fatal drive. Reviewing his tapes from the night of the accident, Jack becomes convinced that he hears a gunshot just before the car’s tire blows out, and, obsessed with discovering the truth, soon finds himself enmeshed in a deadly web of political intrigue.” –TIFF Cinematheque

For full program listings, visit www.newfilmmakers.com.

With Bartley O’Feeney, Padraig O’Feeney, and Anne Slattery.

Guerín’s second feature film is this unusual portrait of the Irish town of Innisfree, where John Ford shot his 1952 classic, THE QUIET MAN. Establishing Guerín’s fascination with the interplay between fiction and reality, as well as his ability to balance cinephilia with a passionate engagement with the world around him, INNISFREE reveals the still-lingering effects of Ford’s visit, a case of the cinema impacting reality in both subtle and unmistakable ways.

“INNISFREE explores the difference between then and now in order to chart the interstices between memory and history, between imagination, fantasy, and reality, and between classical narrative cinema and contemporary, observational documentary.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

(TREN DE SOMBRAS)

With Juliette Gaultier, Ivon Orvain, and Anne Celine Auche.

“TRAIN OF SHADOWS, is, like so much of [Guerín’s] work, a challenging and mesmerizing hybrid – part genre piece, part structuralist experiment, part city symphony. The film is built on a provocative premise: 70 years after the unexplained death of Gérard Fleury, a Parisian attorney, family man, and amateur filmmaker, several reels of his home movies have been unearthed, and someone, the unnamed author of the film we are watching, sets out to restore and recreate them, thereby embarking on an investigation into this long-forgotten mystery. That synopsis, however, paints a misleading portrait of TRAIN OF SHADOWS, which is more concerned with the texture of images and the fickle nature of memory than with gumshoe detecting or intrigue. To borrow from late-20th century critical parlance, this is art about art, a film about film. …[Guerín] is among the handful of directors today who possess the wit, poetry, intellectual rigor, and technical command of the medium necessary to transcend cliché and reinvigorate discussions about the relationship between image-making and meaning-making in our post-MATRIX, pop philosophy discourse.” –Darren Hughes, SENSES OF CINEMA

Preceded by:
SOUVENIR (1986, 5 min, digital)
“Little white clouds drifted behind Notre-Dame in an old film by Jean Renoir. And I say to myself, thus those little clouds drifted by, more than fifty years ago.”

(EN CONSTRUCCIÓN)

With Juana Rodríguez Molina, Iván Guzmán Jiménez, and Juan López López.

WORK IN PROGRESS documents the transformation of El Chine, a once multi-ethnic, working-class Barcelona neighborhood, where new condominium buildings are being erected on the site of an older apartment building, in the name of ‘improvement.’ Guerín spent 18 months on the streets of El Chine, shooting more than 100 hours of material recording the progress of the construction, and observing and interviewing the longtime residents of the neighborhood, many of whom are being displaced by the new housing. Integrating documentary footage with dramatized segments focusing on individual characters, WORK IN PROGRESS is reminiscent in theme and approach, if not style, of Pedro Costa’s later COLOSSAL YOUTH (2006), both of which depict with unusual commitment a community forced to stand by while their neighborhood is both socially and physically reconfigured. The result is a layered, philosophical, often associative discourse on past, present, and future.

Douglass Crockwell
GLENS FALLS SEQUENCE (1946, 8 min, 16mm)
THE LONG BODIES (1947, 6 min, 16mm)
“The basic idea was to paint continuing pictures on various layers with plastic paint, adding at times and removing at times, and to a certain extent these early attempts were successful.” –D.C.

Dwinell Grant
COMPOSITION #2 CONTRATHEMIS (1941, 5 min, 16mm, silent)
“An attempt to develop visual abstract themes and to counterpoint them in a planned, formal composition.” –D.G.
STOP MOTION TESTS (1942, 3 min, 16mm, silent)
A self-portrait.
COLOR SEQUENCE (1943, 3 min, 16mm, silent)
“Pure solid-color frames which fade, mutate and flicker. A research into color rhythms and perceptual phenomena.” –William Moritz

Ken Jacobs
LITTLE STABS AT HAPPINESS (1959-63, 18 min, 16mm. With Jack Smith.)
“Material was cut in as it came out of the camera, embarrassing moments intact. 100’ rolls timed well with music on old 78s. I was interested in immediacy, a sense of ease, and an art where suffering was acknowledged but not trivialized with dramatics. Whimsy was our achievement, as well as breaking out of step.” –K.J.

Ken Jacobs & Bob Fleischner
BLONDE COBRA
1959-63, 35 min, 16-to-35mm blow-up, b&w/color. With Jack Smith.
Preserved by Anthology, with the generous support of The Film Foundation.“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. 85 min.

MEMORIES OF A MORNING / RECUERDOS DE UNA MAÑANA
(2011, 47 min, digital. In Spanish with English subtitles.)
“[A] magnificent contemplation of death and community. Sometime after Guerín moved to a flat in Barcelona’s Eixample neighborhood, a violinist named Manel jumped to his death from a window in a nearby building. Considering it a galvanizing event that brought together neighbors who seldom spoke to each other, Guerín visits several of them to glean their eyewitness accounts and reflections. Strongly recalling his masterpiece WORK IN PROGRESS, MEMORIES OF A MORNING manages to unify into an elegant whole the power of music, life’s transitory nature, and big-city existence, among other elements.” –Robert Koehler, VARIETY

&

THE SAPPHIRE OF SAINT-LOUIS / LE SAPHIR DE SAINT-LOUIS
(2015, 35 min, digital. In Spanish with English subtitles.)
In 1741, a ship called the Saphir sets sail from a port in La Rochelle, France, on its way to the New World. On board are 30 crewmembers and 271 slaves. Somewhere off the coast of Santo Domingo, a slave revolt erupts. This little-known moment in history was memorialized in an obscure 18th century painting that hangs in the Saint-Louis Cathedral in La Rochelle. Guerín peers into this painting to vividly re-tell the story, capturing, in the process, a snapshot of the political, historical, economic, and social realities of the time.

(UNAS FOTOS EN LA CIUDAD DE SYLVIA)

“[A] silent, autobiographical, essay film constructed mostly of still, black-and-white, documentary photographs that harkens back not so much to Chris Marker, who famously used a similar technique in LA JETÉE (1962), but to Eadweard Muybridge and other 19th century innovators of the ‘moving image.’ In UNAS FOTOS, Guerín wanders the streets of Strasbourg, chasing the ghost of a woman he met there more than twenty years earlier. Each photograph reconstructs and, in a sense, supplants a particular memory, transforming it, like one of Muybridge’s horses, into a single, extended frame in Guerín’s slow-moving picture.” –Darren Hughes, SENSES OF CINEMA

Preceded by:
TWO LETTERS TO ANA / DOS CARTAS A ANA
(2011, 28 min, digital)
Inspired by the lost paintings of antiquity evoked by classical texts, in particular by Pliny the Elder’s 1^st century encyclopedia, NATURAL HISTORY, Guerín constructs an epistolary essay film in which images, words, light, and shadows draw a connection between cinema and painting.

“Based on a true incident, the film chronicles the wanderings of a woman and child looking for work and lodging in Paris. This is the only plot, and Hanoun has little interest in embellishing it with background and motivation: he never even makes it clear, for example, whether the woman is the child’s mother, guardian or companion. UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE is, more than a narrative, a formal stylistic exercise so rigorously disciplined and understated that it makes the visual asceticism of Robert Bresson seem almost Fellini-esque by comparison.”  –TIME

(EN LA CIUDAD DE SYLVIA)

With Pilar López de Ayala, Xavier Lafitte, and Laurence Cordier.

In Guerín’s best-known film, which finds him reconfiguring SOME PHOTOS IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA in a narrative mode, a young foreigner in Strasbourg spends his days sitting at an outdoor café, sketching the gestures and expressions of the women around him. Haunted by the memory of Sylvia, a woman he encountered there years before, he waits patiently for her to reappear. Whether passively observing the urban landscape and its inhabitants, or pursuing a woman who just might be the object of his meditations, he is the focal point of Guerín’s impossibly delicate, alert, and sensitive film, a movie that foregrounds the act of looking like few others.

“Guerín reiterates his past preoccupation with urban atmosphere and his instinctive grasp of cinematic language in this fictional film that is almost entirely free of dialogue. The climax of the film…is a mesmerizing orchestration of repeating visual and aural motifs – footsteps, street signs and graffiti, street hawkers, passers-by, and a reappearing cast of women. As our artist sketches, so too does Guerín.” –SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL

In this installment of an ongoing project initiated by Barcelona’s Centre of Contemporary Culture, wherein some of the world’s most revered filmmakers exchange filmic ‘letters,’ Jonas Mekas and Guerín engage in a pointed, lyrical visual discourse on the nature of filmmaking and humanity’s ever-evolving relationship to the moving image. The result is a wide-ranging and poignant cinematic dialogue that draws together the lives, careers, and hopes of two filmmakers, so different in age, who share a need to find in cinema a language for expressing the ineffable.

(TREN DE SOMBRAS)

With Juliette Gaultier, Ivon Orvain, and Anne Celine Auche.

“TRAIN OF SHADOWS, is, like so much of [Guerín’s] work, a challenging and mesmerizing hybrid – part genre piece, part structuralist experiment, part city symphony. The film is built on a provocative premise: 70 years after the unexplained death of Gérard Fleury, a Parisian attorney, family man, and amateur filmmaker, several reels of his home movies have been unearthed, and someone, the unnamed author of the film we are watching, sets out to restore and recreate them, thereby embarking on an investigation into this long-forgotten mystery. That synopsis, however, paints a misleading portrait of TRAIN OF SHADOWS, which is more concerned with the texture of images and the fickle nature of memory than with gumshoe detecting or intrigue. To borrow from late-20th century critical parlance, this is art about art, a film about film. …[Guerín] is among the handful of directors today who possess the wit, poetry, intellectual rigor, and technical command of the medium necessary to transcend cliché and reinvigorate discussions about the relationship between image-making and meaning-making in our post-MATRIX, pop philosophy discourse.” –Darren Hughes, SENSES OF CINEMA

Preceded by:
SOUVENIR (1986, 5 min, digital)
“Little white clouds drifted behind Notre-Dame in an old film by Jean Renoir. And I say to myself, thus those little clouds drifted by, more than fifty years ago.”

(EN CONSTRUCCIÓN)

With Juana Rodríguez Molina, Iván Guzmán Jiménez, and Juan López López.

WORK IN PROGRESS documents the transformation of El Chine, a once multi-ethnic, working-class Barcelona neighborhood, where new condominium buildings are being erected on the site of an older apartment building, in the name of ‘improvement.’ Guerín spent 18 months on the streets of El Chine, shooting more than 100 hours of material recording the progress of the construction, and observing and interviewing the longtime residents of the neighborhood, many of whom are being displaced by the new housing. Integrating documentary footage with dramatized segments focusing on individual characters, WORK IN PROGRESS is reminiscent in theme and approach, if not style, of Pedro Costa’s later COLOSSAL YOUTH (2006), both of which depict with unusual commitment a community forced to stand by while their neighborhood is both socially and physically reconfigured. The result is a layered, philosophical, often associative discourse on past, present, and future.

With Bartley O’Feeney, Padraig O’Feeney, and Anne Slattery.

Guerín’s second feature film is this unusual portrait of the Irish town of Innisfree, where John Ford shot his 1952 classic, THE QUIET MAN. Establishing Guerín’s fascination with the interplay between fiction and reality, as well as his ability to balance cinephilia with a passionate engagement with the world around him, INNISFREE reveals the still-lingering effects of Ford’s visit, a case of the cinema impacting reality in both subtle and unmistakable ways.

“INNISFREE explores the difference between then and now in order to chart the interstices between memory and history, between imagination, fantasy, and reality, and between classical narrative cinema and contemporary, observational documentary.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

These 35mm prints are the result of a preservation project undertaken by the Museum of Modern Art.

DEATH IN THE FORENOON (1934/66, 2 min, 35mm)
CANARIES (1969, 4 min, 35mm)
&
FILM PORTRAIT
(1971, 81 min, 35mm)
A pioneering work in autobiographical cinema, FILM PORTRAIT masterfully combines actual and staged footage and painting over images. Filmmaker, painter, and composer Jerome Hill was born into the famous James J. Hill railroad-building family and lived on the same street as F. Scott Fitzgerald. Here he re-creates wonderfully – with old family footage – the period and milieu of the American upper class at the beginning of the 20th century.

Total running time: ca. 90 min.

MEMORIES OF A MORNING / RECUERDOS DE UNA MAÑANA
(2011, 47 min, digital. In Spanish with English subtitles.)
“[A] magnificent contemplation of death and community. Sometime after Guerín moved to a flat in Barcelona’s Eixample neighborhood, a violinist named Manel jumped to his death from a window in a nearby building. Considering it a galvanizing event that brought together neighbors who seldom spoke to each other, Guerín visits several of them to glean their eyewitness accounts and reflections. Strongly recalling his masterpiece WORK IN PROGRESS, MEMORIES OF A MORNING manages to unify into an elegant whole the power of music, life’s transitory nature, and big-city existence, among other elements.” –Robert Koehler, VARIETY

&

THE SAPPHIRE OF SAINT-LOUIS / LE SAPHIR DE SAINT-LOUIS
(2015, 35 min, digital. In Spanish with English subtitles.)
In 1741, a ship called the Saphir sets sail from a port in La Rochelle, France, on its way to the New World. On board are 30 crewmembers and 271 slaves. Somewhere off the coast of Santo Domingo, a slave revolt erupts. This little-known moment in history was memorialized in an obscure 18th century painting that hangs in the Saint-Louis Cathedral in La Rochelle. Guerín peers into this painting to vividly re-tell the story, capturing, in the process, a snapshot of the political, historical, economic, and social realities of the time.

Ian Hugo
BELLS OF ATLANTIS
(1952, 10 min, 16mm. Preserved by the Library of Congress through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation.)
Film poem, based on Anaïs Nin’s HOUSE OF INCEST, spoken by Nin, who also appears.

Larry Jordan
DUO CONCERTANTES (1962-64, 6 min, 16mm, b&w)
HAMFAT ASAR (1965, 13 min, 16mm, b&w)
GYMNOPEDIES (1968, 6 min, 16mm)
THE OLD HOUSE, PASSING (1966, 45 min, 16mm, b&w. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE (1968, 9 min, 35mm)
“With a taste for nostalgic romanticism…Jordan creates a magical universe of work using old steel engravings and collectable memorabilia. His 50-year pursuit into the subconscious mind gives him a place in the annals of cinema as a prolific animator on a voyage into the surreal psychology of the inner self.” –Jackie Leger

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

Willard Maas
GEOGRAPHY OF THE BODY (1943, 7 min, 16mm, b&w. Preserved by Anthology with support from The National Film Preservation Foundation.)
“The terrors and splendors of the human body as the undiscovered, mysterious continent.” –W.M.

Total running time: ca. 105 min.

Camera in hand, Guerín wanders the streets of a number of international cities whose festivals he is attending during the promotional tour of his film, in search of a character or plot for his next work. Recounted in the form of a travelogue, GUEST is a wonderfully humane and sincere portrayal of the people that he meets when he goes off the beaten track in some of the world’s major cities.

(TREN DE SOMBRAS)

With Juliette Gaultier, Ivon Orvain, and Anne Celine Auche.

“TRAIN OF SHADOWS, is, like so much of [Guerín’s] work, a challenging and mesmerizing hybrid – part genre piece, part structuralist experiment, part city symphony. The film is built on a provocative premise: 70 years after the unexplained death of Gérard Fleury, a Parisian attorney, family man, and amateur filmmaker, several reels of his home movies have been unearthed, and someone, the unnamed author of the film we are watching, sets out to restore and recreate them, thereby embarking on an investigation into this long-forgotten mystery. That synopsis, however, paints a misleading portrait of TRAIN OF SHADOWS, which is more concerned with the texture of images and the fickle nature of memory than with gumshoe detecting or intrigue. To borrow from late-20th century critical parlance, this is art about art, a film about film. …[Guerín] is among the handful of directors today who possess the wit, poetry, intellectual rigor, and technical command of the medium necessary to transcend cliché and reinvigorate discussions about the relationship between image-making and meaning-making in our post-MATRIX, pop philosophy discourse.” –Darren Hughes, SENSES OF CINEMA

Preceded by:
SOUVENIR (1986, 5 min, digital)
“Little white clouds drifted behind Notre-Dame in an old film by Jean Renoir. And I say to myself, thus those little clouds drifted by, more than fifty years ago.”

In this installment of an ongoing project initiated by Barcelona’s Centre of Contemporary Culture, wherein some of the world’s most revered filmmakers exchange filmic ‘letters,’ Jonas Mekas and Guerín engage in a pointed, lyrical visual discourse on the nature of filmmaking and humanity’s ever-evolving relationship to the moving image. The result is a wide-ranging and poignant cinematic dialogue that draws together the lives, careers, and hopes of two filmmakers, so different in age, who share a need to find in cinema a language for expressing the ineffable.

For full program listings, visit www.newfilmmakers.com.

(EN LA CIUDAD DE SYLVIA)

With Pilar López de Ayala, Xavier Lafitte, and Laurence Cordier.

In Guerín’s best-known film, which finds him reconfiguring SOME PHOTOS IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA in a narrative mode, a young foreigner in Strasbourg spends his days sitting at an outdoor café, sketching the gestures and expressions of the women around him. Haunted by the memory of Sylvia, a woman he encountered there years before, he waits patiently for her to reappear. Whether passively observing the urban landscape and its inhabitants, or pursuing a woman who just might be the object of his meditations, he is the focal point of Guerín’s impossibly delicate, alert, and sensitive film, a movie that foregrounds the act of looking like few others.

“Guerín reiterates his past preoccupation with urban atmosphere and his instinctive grasp of cinematic language in this fictional film that is almost entirely free of dialogue. The climax of the film…is a mesmerizing orchestration of repeating visual and aural motifs – footsteps, street signs and graffiti, street hawkers, passers-by, and a reappearing cast of women. As our artist sketches, so too does Guerín.” –SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL

(UNAS FOTOS EN LA CIUDAD DE SYLVIA)

“[A] silent, autobiographical, essay film constructed mostly of still, black-and-white, documentary photographs that harkens back not so much to Chris Marker, who famously used a similar technique in LA JETÉE (1962), but to Eadweard Muybridge and other 19th century innovators of the ‘moving image.’ In UNAS FOTOS, Guerín wanders the streets of Strasbourg, chasing the ghost of a woman he met there more than twenty years earlier. Each photograph reconstructs and, in a sense, supplants a particular memory, transforming it, like one of Muybridge’s horses, into a single, extended frame in Guerín’s slow-moving picture.” –Darren Hughes, SENSES OF CINEMA

Preceded by:
TWO LETTERS TO ANA / DOS CARTAS A ANA
(2011, 28 min, digital)
Inspired by the lost paintings of antiquity evoked by classical texts, in particular by Pliny the Elder’s 1^st century encyclopedia, NATURAL HISTORY, Guerín constructs an epistolary essay film in which images, words, light, and shadows draw a connection between cinema and painting.

(EN CONSTRUCCIÓN)

With Juana Rodríguez Molina, Iván Guzmán Jiménez, and Juan López López.

WORK IN PROGRESS documents the transformation of El Chine, a once multi-ethnic, working-class Barcelona neighborhood, where new condominium buildings are being erected on the site of an older apartment building, in the name of ‘improvement.’ Guerín spent 18 months on the streets of El Chine, shooting more than 100 hours of material recording the progress of the construction, and observing and interviewing the longtime residents of the neighborhood, many of whom are being displaced by the new housing. Integrating documentary footage with dramatized segments focusing on individual characters, WORK IN PROGRESS is reminiscent in theme and approach, if not style, of Pedro Costa’s later COLOSSAL YOUTH (2006), both of which depict with unusual commitment a community forced to stand by while their neighborhood is both socially and physically reconfigured. The result is a layered, philosophical, often associative discourse on past, present, and future.

Born in 1950 in El Paso, Texas, on the Mexican-American border, Willie Varela grew up surrounded by the disparate influences of his Chicano heritage, Catholicism, and television, all of which he synthesizes in his hauntingly searching works. Weaving together diaristic impressions from his everyday life with imagery from the mass media – TV news, classic movies, Mexican telenovelas, wrestling – Varela’s films are a beguiling fusion of the personal and political.

Varela began making Super 8mm films in 1971. Showing the influence of Stan Brakhage, Varela’s early works are gestural investigations of perception and the act of seeing – in his own words, he was in this period, “concerned with the rhythm and the movements, the color and the light of daily life… In other words, my films were more domestic in nature.”

That changed when Varela moved to San Francisco in 1980, where the emergence of the AIDS crisis, and the deaths of many of his friends and fellow filmmakers, impacted him profoundly. This coming to terms with grim sociopolitical realities is reflected in the increasingly dark and politically-charged tone of films like IN PROGRESS (1985), a nightmarish vision of the Reagan era in which Varela combines re-photographed television imagery with his own footage to create doom-laden social commentaries on American culture.

Returning to El Paso in 1986, Varela has continued working in video, exploring the potent themes that drove his Super 8mm films. He has produced nearly 100 films and videos to date and in 1994 he was honored with a mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In addition to his work as a filmmaker, Varela is also a photographer, film programmer, writer, and teacher. For these RE-VISIONS screenings, we will be presenting one program of Anthology’s recent 16mm preservations and one program devoted to Varela’s more recent video work.

“If Varela is a personal filmmaker, it is because the personal, like his native El Paso, functions as a crossroads for domestic, local, and national discourses.” –Chon Noriega

PROGRAM 1:
All films preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Film Preservation Foundation.
GHOST TOWN (1975, 3 min, Super-8mm-to-16mm, silent)
BECKY’S EYE (1977, 3.5 min, Super-8mm-to-16mm, silent)
MARCH 1979 (1979, 3.5 min, Super-8mm-to-16mm, silent)
LIGHT JOURNALS (1981, 35 min, 16mm, silent. Print courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.)
RECUERDOS DE FLORES MUERTAS (1982, 7.5 min, Super-8mm-to-16mm)
IN PROGRESS (1985, 13 min, Super-8mm-to-16mm)
Total running time: ca. 70 min.

Born in 1950 in El Paso, Texas, on the Mexican-American border, Willie Varela grew up surrounded by the disparate influences of his Chicano heritage, Catholicism, and television, all of which he synthesizes in his hauntingly searching works. Weaving together diaristic impressions from his everyday life with imagery from the mass media – TV news, classic movies, Mexican telenovelas, wrestling – Varela’s films are a beguiling fusion of the personal and political.

Varela began making Super 8mm films in 1971. Showing the influence of Stan Brakhage, Varela’s early works are gestural investigations of perception and the act of seeing – in his own words, he was in this period, “concerned with the rhythm and the movements, the color and the light of daily life… In other words, my films were more domestic in nature.”

That changed when Varela moved to San Francisco in 1980, where the emergence of the AIDS crisis, and the deaths of many of his friends and fellow filmmakers, impacted him profoundly. This coming to terms with grim sociopolitical realities is reflected in the increasingly dark and politically-charged tone of films like IN PROGRESS (1985), a nightmarish vision of the Reagan era in which Varela combines re-photographed television imagery with his own footage to create doom-laden social commentaries on American culture.

Returning to El Paso in 1986, Varela has continued working in video, exploring the potent themes that drove his Super 8mm films. He has produced nearly 100 films and videos to date and in 1994 he was honored with a mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In addition to his work as a filmmaker, Varela is also a photographer, film programmer, writer, and teacher. For these RE-VISIONS screenings, we will be presenting one program of Anthology’s recent 16mm preservations and one program devoted to Varela’s more recent video work.

“If Varela is a personal filmmaker, it is because the personal, like his native El Paso, functions as a crossroads for domestic, local, and national discourses.” –Chon Noriega

PROGRAM 2:
THIS BURNING WORLD (2002, 32 min, digital)
I RAISE MY ARM, I AM RESPONSIBLE (2004, 16.5 min, digital)
AMBIENS SERIES VII, DUO (2002, 9.5 min, digital)
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY (2004, 10.5 min, digital)
THE EXTRAORDINARY DAY (2003, 16.5 min, digital)

Total running time: ca. 90 min.

With Bartley O’Feeney, Padraig O’Feeney, and Anne Slattery.

Guerín’s second feature film is this unusual portrait of the Irish town of Innisfree, where John Ford shot his 1952 classic, THE QUIET MAN. Establishing Guerín’s fascination with the interplay between fiction and reality, as well as his ability to balance cinephilia with a passionate engagement with the world around him, INNISFREE reveals the still-lingering effects of Ford’s visit, a case of the cinema impacting reality in both subtle and unmistakable ways.

“INNISFREE explores the difference between then and now in order to chart the interstices between memory and history, between imagination, fantasy, and reality, and between classical narrative cinema and contemporary, observational documentary.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE