Anthology Film Archives

With Nancy Coleman, Margaret Lindsay, and Phillip Reed.
Anticipating the mid-1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk, Ulmer’s weepie tells the familiar story of an illegitimate birth and the tortured decision to have the baby raised by a childless older sister. With Nancy Coleman and Margaret Lindsay as the sisters DuBois, well-heeled New Orleanians with the haute-couture wardrobe to prove it, the film features witty bit performances by émigré actors Felix Bressart and Fritz Feld. Cinematographer Franz Planer, a landsman of Ulmer’s, gives the picture a similar kind of atmospheric richness to Max Ophüls’s LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN, which Planer would photograph a couple years later.

Humphrey Jennings
LISTEN TO BRITAIN (1941, 19 minutes, 35mm, b&w)
Jennings’s film is a masterpiece of sound mixing; it creates an audio landscape of Britain during the war, with images both accompanying and conflicting with the multitude of sounds. From the film’s introduction: “I have been listening to Britain. I have heard the sound of her life by day and by night…. In the great sound picture that is here presented, you too will hear that heart beating. For blended together in one great symphony is the music of Britain at war.”
Dimitri Kirsanoff
MÉNILMONTANT (1924-25, 38 minutes, 35mm, b&w, silent)
A melodramatic story of an orphan girl whose seduction is avenged. Early use of hand-held camera, montage, and superimpositions.
Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy
BALLET MÉCANIQUE (1924, 19 minutes, 35mm, b&w, silent)
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives!
A brief exploration of cubist form, black-and-white tonalities, and various vectors through its constant, rapidly cut movements and compositions. Many of the film’s forms and compositions are reflected in – or themselves reflect – forms and compositions in Léger’s famous cubist paintings from the period.
René Clair & Francis Picabia
ENTR’ACTE (1924, 22 minutes, 35mm, b&w)
A masterpiece of dada, a feat of cinema magic. Made as an intermission entertainment for the Ballet Suédois from an impromptu scenario by Francis Picabia. Music by Erik Satie.
Total program time: ca. 105 minutes.

Restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive; preservation funded by The Film Foundation and the Franco American Cultural Fund, a unique partnership between the Directors Guild of America (DGA); the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA); the Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique (SACEM); and the Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW). With Zachary Scott, Louis Hayward, and Diana Lynn.

Often thought of as Ulmer’s CITIZEN KANE on the cheap, his study of American capitalism and runaway greed – scripted, without formal credit, by blacklisted writer Alvah Bessie – boasts the A-list acting talent of Zachary Scott and Sidney Greenstreet, both on loan-out from Warner Bros. Chronicling the rise and fall of Horace Vendig (Scott), a tale lifted from the pages of Dayton Stoddart’s PRELUDE TO NIGHT, the film presents an archetypal man who craves and ultimately captures all that others have. Its core message, riddled with delicious cynicism, hasn’t lost any of its timeliness.

Due to circumstances brought upon by hurricane Sandy, this event has been relocated from Deutsches Haus at NYU to the Austrian Cultural Forum. Unfortunately, Austrian film critic Stefan Grissemann was unable to fly in to New York because of the storm, and J. Hoberman will also not be able to join us for this event.

In order to adapt to these rather extenuating circumstances, the event will now feature a screening of director Michael Palm's 2004 documentary Edgar G. Ulmer: The Man Off-Screen,followed by a Q&A with Michael Palm and Noah Isenberg.

Please visit the Austrian Cultural Forum's website for further details:

http://www.acfny.org/event/tribute-to-edgar-g-ulmer-talent-obliges/

One of Keaton’s best silent features, setting comedy against a true Civil War story of a stolen train and Union spies.

With Arthur Kennedy.
Hailed as a “small gift from Hollywood” by François Truffaut, who drew much of his inspiration for JULES AND JIM from the love triangle Ulmer portrays, this lyrical Western shot in Technicolor belongs to the director’s most cherished productions. Co-starring Arthur Kennedy, Betta St. John, and Eugene Iglesias, the story – scripted by yet another blacklisted author, Julian Halevy – pits a rugged and romantic wanderer (Kennedy) against a compromising modern man (Iglesias) tempted by the venal impulses of financial gain, with his magnificent wife (St. John) standing between them.

“RAPT is, paradoxically, both a film which looks back anachronistically toward the silent era and a work which belongs to the vanguard of sound cinema. Part of that paradox can be resolved by an understanding of the film’s complex utilization of music. RAPT employs very little dialogue, and in this respect it is reminiscent of the part-talkie genre…. It is linked to such abstract and hybrid avant-garde works as VAMPYR and L’?GE D’OR. The radical nature of RAPT, however, resides in its vision of a cinematic musical score. In making the film, Kirsanoff worked closely with the composers Honegger and Hoerce.” –Lucy Fisher

Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive. With Robert Clarke, Darlene Tompkins, and Vladimir Sokoloff.

Many of Ulmer’s films were family affairs, with his wife Shirley handling the scripts and his daughter Arianne (credited as Arianne Arden) in front of the camera – here as Captain Markova. This Z-budget sci-fi, shot on a hangar at the abandoned Texas state fairgrounds, reflects a Cold War pessimism found in other of his films from the era. Air Force major William Allison (Clarke) sets out to explore the limits of time travel and finds himself catapulted to the year 2024, a futuristic wasteland even darker than what Fritz Lang had imagined.

MOSAIC IN CONFIDENCE / MOSAIK IM VERTRAUEN (1955, 16 min, 35mm, b&w/color)
ADEBAR (1957, 1 min, 35mm, b&w)
SCHWECHATER (1958, 1 min, 35mm, b&w/color)
ARNULF RAINER (1960, 7 min, 35mm, b&w)
OUR TRIP TO AFRICA / UNSERE AFRIKAREISE (1966, 12 min, 16mm)
PAUSE (1977, 12 min, 16mm)
POETRY AND TRUTH / DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT (2003, 13 min, 35mm)
“Peter Kubelka is the perfectionist of the film medium; and, as I honor that quality above all others at this time finding such a lack of it now elsewhere, I would simply like to say: Peter Kubelka is the world’s greatest filmmaker – which is to say, simply: see his films!…by all means/above all else…etcetera.” –Stan Brakhage
Total running time: ca. 65 min.

Archival print courtesy of 20th Century-Fox. With John Saxon, Larry Hagman, and Rosanna Schiaffino.

Ulmer’s final film, a wartime drama shot in the mountains of Yugoslavia, oscillates between a Renoir-like humanism and a dark undercurrent of apocalyptic doom (though never officially recognized as its screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo claims the words, including the final proclamation “Let there be light”, were his). Trapped together in an alpine crater, six soldiers and a woman do everything in their power to survive. The international ensemble cast includes John Saxon, Larry Hagman, Roseanna Schiaffino, and Hans von Borsody, all showing some guts in what proved to be an unusually trying production.

Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive. With Robert Clarke, Darlene Tompkins, and Vladimir Sokoloff.

Many of Ulmer’s films were family affairs, with his wife Shirley handling the scripts and his daughter Arianne (credited as Arianne Arden) in front of the camera – here as Captain Markova. This Z-budget sci-fi, shot on a hangar at the abandoned Texas state fairgrounds, reflects a Cold War pessimism found in other of his films from the era. Air Force major William Allison (Clarke) sets out to explore the limits of time travel and finds himself catapulted to the year 2024, a futuristic wasteland even darker than what Fritz Lang had imagined.

Archival print courtesy of 20th Century-Fox. With John Saxon, Larry Hagman, and Rosanna Schiaffino.

Ulmer’s final film, a wartime drama shot in the mountains of Yugoslavia, oscillates between a Renoir-like humanism and a dark undercurrent of apocalyptic doom (though never officially recognized as its screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo claims the words, including the final proclamation “Let there be light”, were his). Trapped together in an alpine crater, six soldiers and a woman do everything in their power to survive. The international ensemble cast includes John Saxon, Larry Hagman, Roseanna Schiaffino, and Hans von Borsody, all showing some guts in what proved to be an unusually trying production.

The Underground’s greatest film comedian, Taylor Mead has been an uproarious onscreen presence since the late 1950s. A beloved Warhol superstar who happens to be a neighborhood fixture, Mead’s comedic quips and improvisatory skills are unparalleled. Besides acting, Mead is a published poet who for the last few years presented a weekly spoken word extravaganza called, naturally, The Taylor Mead Show at the Bowery Poetry Club. That showcase is sadly defunct (for now), but we are absolutely thrilled to have Taylor with us for one more wild evening of recitations and reminiscences. And to up the ante we will also screen, quite possibly simultaneously, a Warhol film solely devoted to…you know what. You’ve never seen Taylor Mead like this before!

THE TAYLOR MEAD SHOW
One never quite knows what will escape Taylor’s smirking lips. If you have never seen him perform live before, you seriously don’t have any clue what you are missing. Poems, gossip, jokes, and oh so much more…
&
Andy Warhol
TAYLOR MEAD’S ASS
1964, 76 min, 16mm, b&w, silent.
Andy gives Yoko Ono a run for her money with this epic portrait of Taylor Mead’s posterior. The original version supposedly ran for over two hours!

With Tom Neal and Ann Savage.
Made at the apex of his extended stint at Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), the bargain basement studio for which he churned out eleven Bs in four short years, the gritty, nasty, and unrelentingly bleak DETOUR stands as Ulmer’s crowning achievement. With Tom Neal as sad sack Al Roberts, a down-and-out jazzman on his way to the coast, and Ann Savage as his acid-tongued nemesis Vera, perhaps the most lethal femme fatale of all time, Ulmer offers a psychologically taut road trip that sours faster than milk left out in the blazing sun.

With Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and David Manners.
Ulmer’s short-lived career at Universal began and ended with his spectacularly defiant entry to the studio’s horror cycle. With Papa Laemmle away on vacation, and Junior’s trusting hand on the till, the mischievous filmmaker packed his picture with retro-expressionist visuals (“From Caligari to Hitler in one lurid package”, as J. Hoberman quipped) and a haunting classical score; he also ran off with the wife of Laemmle’s beloved nephew, script supervisor Shirley Kassler. Co-starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, in the first of eight such tempestuous face-offs, the film’s wry campiness continues to delight.

With Arthur Kennedy.
Hailed as a “small gift from Hollywood” by François Truffaut, who drew much of his inspiration for JULES AND JIM from the love triangle Ulmer portrays, this lyrical Western shot in Technicolor belongs to the director’s most cherished productions. Co-starring Arthur Kennedy, Betta St. John, and Eugene Iglesias, the story – scripted by yet another blacklisted author, Julian Halevy – pits a rugged and romantic wanderer (Kennedy) against a compromising modern man (Iglesias) tempted by the venal impulses of financial gain, with his magnificent wife (St. John) standing between them.

JDT was not exclusively a dance movement. Artists of various disciplines participated in the movement that came to be known as JDT, including filmmakers. This screening highlights some of the many collaborations between Judson artists and film artists who were pushing at the boundaries of both forms.

Films will include:
Jonas Mekas CUP/SAUCER/TWO DANCERS/RADIO (1965/83, 23 min, 16mm)
With Kenneth King & Phoebe Neville.
Simone Forti CLOTHS (fragment) (1967, 5 min, 16mm-to-video)
Camera: Hollis Frampton.
Simone Forti & Anne Tardos STATUES (1977/99, 14 min, video)
Babette Mangolte WATER MOTOR (1978, 7 min, 16mm, b&w)
Steve Paxton MAGNESIUM (1972, 9.5 min, video, b&w)
Steve Paxton CHUTE (1979, 9.5 min, video, b&w)

Restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive; preservation funded by The Film Foundation and the Franco American Cultural Fund, a unique partnership between the Directors Guild of America (DGA); the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA); the Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique (SACEM); and the Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW). With Zachary Scott, Louis Hayward, and Diana Lynn.

Often thought of as Ulmer’s CITIZEN KANE on the cheap, his study of American capitalism and runaway greed – scripted, without formal credit, by blacklisted writer Alvah Bessie – boasts the A-list acting talent of Zachary Scott and Sidney Greenstreet, both on loan-out from Warner Bros. Chronicling the rise and fall of Horace Vendig (Scott), a tale lifted from the pages of Dayton Stoddart’s PRELUDE TO NIGHT, the film presents an archetypal man who craves and ultimately captures all that others have. Its core message, riddled with delicious cynicism, hasn’t lost any of its timeliness.

With Noah Isenberg, author of the forthcoming biography EDGAR G. ULMER: A FILMMAKER IN TRANSIT, in-person to introduce the film!

In George Manupelli’s wonderfully cracked feature CRY DR. CHICAGO, which had fallen almost entirely into oblivion when Anthology was able to revive and then preserve it in 2008, Dr. Chicago (played by venerable composer Alvin Lucier) is a sex-change surgeon on the run from the law, forever on his way to Sweden and always out to make a buck. Along for the ride are his faithful companions Sheila Marie (the delightfully zonked-out Mary Ashley) and Steve (brilliantly, and silently, portrayed by the great dancer Steve Paxton, a founding member of Judson Dance Theater). Together they must face the fiendish plots of their French nemesis Clo Clo (played by the riotously funny Claude Kipnis) who will stop at nothing to exact bloody revenge. Shot in glorious color and set amid the sprawling gardens and lush landscapes of Bucyrus, Ohio, CRY DR. CHICAGO is by far one of the most enjoyable feature films to come out of the 1960s underground era.

With Nancy Coleman, Margaret Lindsay, and Phillip Reed.
Anticipating the mid-1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk, Ulmer’s weepie tells the familiar story of an illegitimate birth and the tortured decision to have the baby raised by a childless older sister. With Nancy Coleman and Margaret Lindsay as the sisters DuBois, well-heeled New Orleanians with the haute-couture wardrobe to prove it, the film features witty bit performances by émigré actors Felix Bressart and Fritz Feld. Cinematographer Franz Planer, a landsman of Ulmer’s, gives the picture a similar kind of atmospheric richness to Max Ophüls’s LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN, which Planer would photograph a couple years later.

Jacob Ciocci has been rattling nerves and gathering acclaim since his days as a founding member of the influential Paper Rad art collective and the performance group Extreme Animals. Jacob’s ultra-dynamic videos, installations, and performances are concerned with the relationship between popular culture, popular technology, and collective experience. He consistently appropriates the most unexpected cultural symbols of our times and refashions them into something strangely alien and uncomfortably familiar. He has performed and exhibited at a variety of venues including the New Museum and MoMA in New York, Tate Britain, and more recently the TBA Festival in Portland, Oregon, and the Penrith National Gallery in Australia. Always in-demand, we are lucky to have Jacob in person for an evening that will conclude with a new performance made in collaboration with David Wightman!

THE PEACE TAPE (2008, 4 min, video. Music by Extreme Animals.)
“Culling his sources from thrift stores (countless straight-to-VHS childrens’ programs), the Internet (a single YouTube clip featuring “dog in a dog costume”), and his own designs (flash animation of eyes and mouths, subliminal flickers of text), Ciocci concentrates hours of light entertainment into a dense, four-minute block.” –ELECTRONIC ARTS INTERMIX

DON’T WORRY BE HAPPY, STRESSFUL MIX (2006, 3 min, video)
The classic inspirational pop song by Bobby McFerrin gets a stressful remix. A depressed robot, the specter of “World Music”, Grateful Dead bears, and the always-lurking hand of death drift on anxious clouds through the bottom floor of a dying shopping mall.

HOW TO ESCAPE FROM THE STRESS BOXES (2006, 7 min, video)
“E-meditation is revealed as false mediation and Troll-ing becomes a binarized self-help guide towards salvation-through-total-destruction.” –Ben Russell

YOUR LIFE, YOUR LANGUAGE (2010, 7 min, video. Music by Extreme Animals.)
This video was made from a combination of found footage and footage shot by the artist at the Youth Explosion community day in Braddock, Pennsylvania, August 25, 2010.

THE URGENCY (2010, 7 min, video. Music by Extreme Animals.)
Ciocci takes an ambivalent look at contemporary technological life, via a loose narrative that questions the power of the individual and the purpose (or purposelessness) of agency within a world of incomprehensible complexity.

AM I EVIL? (2011, 4 min, video. Music by Extreme Animals.)
Uses the Harry Potter theme-song as a basis for discussing recent popular culture ‘witches’ in America. Is social control so pervasive that an individual is only capable of combating it with a power on the scale of wizardry?

FINALE:
The premiere of a new, untitled 15-minute performance piece for guitar and video made in collaboration with David Wightman. The piece is the result of Wightman’s residency at Harvestworks, and uses a custom Max/MSP patch built by Matthew Ostrowski to trigger video clips via Wightman’s guitar playing.

Total running time: ca. 60 min.

PROGRAM 1: EVOLVING VISIONS
IN THE LAND OF THE BLACK MAGI / AU PAYS DES MAGES NOIRS (1949, 13 min, 35mm, b&w)
INITIATION INTO POSSESSION DANCE / INITIATION À LA DANSE DES POSSÉDÉS (1949, 22 min, 16mm)
THE CIRCUMCISION / LA CIRCONCISION (1949, 14 min, 16mm)
THE MAD MASTERS / LES MAÎTRES FOUS (1955, 24 min, 16mm-to-video)
BABY GHANA (1957, 27 min, 35mm)
Total running time: ca. 105 min.

When Rouch began making ethnographic films in the late forties, there was no precedent for the kind of work he wanted to do. The lack of paradigm allowed him tremendous freedom, but it also meant that he was constantly borrowing from other genres and fine-tuning his own experiments. This collection of early ethnographic shorts includes some of his first films on sacred rites and possession ceremonies, his most famous and controversial work, LES MAÎTRES FOUS, and a rarely screened film about the celebrations of Ghanaian Independence (BABY GHANA). Taken together, they allow us to trace the evolution of a filmmaker as his eye is becoming more discerning, and his practice is becoming more distinctly his own.

With Michael Caine and Britt Ekland.
“There’s nobody to root for but the smartly dressed sexual athlete and professional killer (Caine) in this English gangland picture, which is so calculatedly cool and soulless and nastily erotic that it seems to belong to a new genre of virtuoso viciousness. What makes the movie unusual is the metallic elegance and the single-minded proficiency with which it adheres to its sadism-for-the-connoisseur formula.” –Pauline Kael

PROGRAM 2: DISCOVERING DAMOURÉ ZIKA
BATAILLE SUR LE GRAND FLEUVE
1952, 33 min, 16mm.
&
JAGUAR
1957-67, 92 min, 16mm.
While assisting the Department of Public Works in Niger during WWII, Rouch met Damouré Zika – a young Sorko whose people were considered masters of the water. The encounter transformed both men profoundly and left their lives inextricably intertwined. As actor, writer, and crewmember, Zika became essential to Rouch’s work. In this tribute, watch Zika discover his own talent for being on screen, while Rouch’s camera falls under his spell. Whether sneaking in a magical swim with a baby hippo or narrating the adventures of an incredible road trip, Zika’s charm and humor are the perfect match for Rouch’s playful approach to filmmaking.

With Bernie Casey and Pam Grier.
Adapted from the same novel as GET CARTER (Ted Lewis’s JACK’S RETURN HOME), Armitage’s second directorial effort stars Bernie Casey as Tyrone Tackett, a man who travels to Southern California to attend his brother’s funeral and winds up getting roped into the local underworld of which his brother was a key player. It isn’t long before Tyrone, using his brother’s old contacts and renewing rivalries with old enemies, is stepping on toes and stirring up trouble – inevitably leading to an extraordinary revenge mission.

Restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive; preservation funded by The Film Foundation and the Franco American Cultural Fund, a unique partnership between the Directors Guild of America (DGA); the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA); the Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique (SACEM); and the Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW). With Zachary Scott, Louis Hayward, and Diana Lynn.

Often thought of as Ulmer’s CITIZEN KANE on the cheap, his study of American capitalism and runaway greed – scripted, without formal credit, by blacklisted writer Alvah Bessie – boasts the A-list acting talent of Zachary Scott and Sidney Greenstreet, both on loan-out from Warner Bros. Chronicling the rise and fall of Horace Vendig (Scott), a tale lifted from the pages of Dayton Stoddart’s PRELUDE TO NIGHT, the film presents an archetypal man who craves and ultimately captures all that others have. Its core message, riddled with delicious cynicism, hasn’t lost any of its timeliness.

With Noah Isenberg, author of the forthcoming biography EDGAR G. ULMER: A FILMMAKER IN TRANSIT, in-person to introduce the film!

With Nigel Davenport, Jean Wallace, and John Hamill.
In Wilde’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi road movie a virus breaks out and destroys East Asia’s grass, soon mutating and causing a chaotic famine across Europe. A British architect (Davenport) and his family trek from their London home to his brother’s potato farm in northern England where food and shelter await; along the way they encounter a variety of desperate, hungry, hostile characters, and it’s not long before the family is forced to compromise their morals in the interest of survival.

PROGRAM 3: EXTENDED PARAMETERS, DISTENDED FORMS
GARE DU NORD (1965, 18 min, 35mm)
&
PETIT À PETIT
1971, 96 min, 16mm-to-video.
With flea market cameras and film stock from pharmacies, Rouch became one of French cinema’s great technical innovators. His best films find their subjects coupled with reflections on formal issues: narration, shot length, sync and non-sync sound, when and how to edit. This program pairs two of his most fearless experiments. The well-known short GARE DU NORD tells the story of a young woman dreaming of escape through a long-take sequence made from two ten-minute reels. PETIT À PETIT’s aggressive exploration of improvisation is a sequel to JAGUAR, an update of Montesquieu’s 1721 novel PERSIAN LETTERS, and a rumpled uncle to Rivette’s OUT 1. This film’s reverse ethnography of post-68 Europe originally ran 230 minutes before it was cut down for theatrical release.

With Stacy Keach, Bud Cort, Marianna Hill, and M. Emmet Walsh.
In 1918, a former carny turned executioner (Keach) travels around the American South with his assistant (Cort) and a portable electric chair, clearing out death rows on commission. Things grow complicated when he is hired to kill a brother-sister pairing, only to fall in love with the sister and then scramble to devise a plot to fake her execution. Featuring a score by Jerry Goldsmith, this film is a crucial piece of Smight’s underappreciated oeuvre.

PROGRAM 4: MUSIC, DANCE, CEREMONY
Q&A WITH SUBLIME FREQUENCIES!
HORENDI
1972, 68 min, 16mm. Co-directed by Gilbert Rouget.
&
LE DAMA D’AMBARA
1974, 62 min, 16mm. Co-directed by Germaine Dieterlen.

These films treat the relationship between music, ceremony, and dance in two different cultural settings. HORENDI focuses on what ethnographer Luc de Heusch has called an “endorcism”, a ceremony in which Songhai women learn not how to cast off spirits, but how to host them through ritualized dance. LE DAMA D’AMBARA documents a Dogon rite which marks the end of a period of mourning and uses masked dancers to help the spirits of the dead out of the village. This special screening will be followed by a Q&A with Sublime Frequencies founder and filmmaker Hisham Mayet, along with colleagues Olivia Wyatt and Brian Nowak. Immediately following this program, at 9:30, Anthology will host a special screening of a new Sublime Frequencies film.

With Jim Brown, Diahann Carroll, Ernest Borgnine, Julie Harris, Gene Hackman, Jack Klugman, Warren Oates, and Donald Sutherland.
The L.A. Coliseum gets robbed of $500,000 during a football game in this crime drama, adapted from a novel by Donald E. Westlake and featuring a truly remarkable ensemble cast, which largely focuses on the disastrous aftermath of the otherwise meticulously plotted heist. Brown, the former Cleveland Browns running back who had retired from football in 1965, is an especially commanding presence as Parker, the main character in a series of novels that Westlake wrote under his best-known pseudonym, Richard Stark.

With Jim Brown.
Brown stars here as Curtis Hook, a crook who, feeling that he hasn’t gotten a fair slice of the proverbial pie, takes matters into his own hands and murders a gang of drug dealers, taking their loot (but not their product) and stashing it away. Soon Hook is doing a bid for this homicide/robbery, and everyone in the joint wants to know where the money is hidden…. But after learning that the money’s location has been improbably compromised, Hook schemes to break out and reclaim what’s his.

SPECIAL SUBLIME FREQUENCIES SCREENING! WORLD PREMIERE!
Mayet’s exploration of West African possession ceremonies continues in Benin. Formerly known as the Slave Coast, since most of the slave industry was exported from its shores, Benin is the cradle and birthplace of Voodoo – and Voodoo worship is integral to the everyday lives of its people. This film, shot in 2010, is an impressionistic lens on the myriad ceremonies that this rich and diverse culture has to offer. This will be the premiere screening of this visual feast.

Opening the program will be an extremely rare glimpse of possession footage shot between 2004-10 in Niger by Hisham Mayet.

There will be a Q&A with the filmmaker and his colleague Brian Nowak.

Earlier this evening, Mayet will also be introducing and discussing one of the programs in our Jean Rouch retrospective.

With Tony Russel, Lisa Gastoni, and Franco Nero.
Margheriti’s signature film, this hallucinatory, low-budget cult classic follows Commander Mike Halstead (Tony Russel), hot on the trail of mad scientist Dr. Nurmi (Massimo Serato), who is not-so-secretly conducting deranged eugenics experiments in his hidden laboratory. When Halstead’s girlfriend Connie (Lisa Gastoni) is abducted by Dr. Nurmi, the interstellar cop has no choice but to intensify his investigation. The first installment in Margheriti’s “Gamma-One” series.

PROGRAM 5: PAST AND PRESENT
BABATOU AND THE THREE WISE COUNSELS / BABATOU: LES TROIS CONSEILS
1975, 90 min, 35mm. Co-directed by Boubou Hama.
Although much of Rouch’s work is grounded in the moment, he did make one epic historical film, the 19th-century costume drama BABATOU, in which Damouré Zika and Lam Ibrahima Dia play Songhai adventurers who set off to join legendary Zarma prince Babatou on his adventures through the lands of the Gurunsi people in what is now Northern Ghana. Written and co-directed by Nigerian writer, historian, and politician Boubou Hama, this film is one of the most unusual entries in Rouch’s filmography and it has become one of the hardest to see: don’t miss it!

With Tony Russel, Lisa Gastoni, and Franco Nero.
Commander Mike Halstead returns when a race of hostile extraterrestrials, the Diaphanoids, land on Mars and transform it into a base for launching a full-blown invasion against Earth. Russel, Gastoni, and Franco Nero reprise their roles from THE WILD, WILD PLANET in this delirious, zonked-out space opera, which boasts what is surely one of film history’s first astronaut ballet scenes, set to an accordion rendition of “Auld Lang Syne”. The soundtrack, by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino (who scored Orson Welles’s CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT and OTHELLO), is an especially noteworthy ingredient.

PROGRAM 6: PORTRAITS, HOMAGES, MEMORIALS
CINÉ-PORTRAIT DE MARGARET MEAD (1977, 20 min, video)
HOMMAGE À MARCEL MAUSS: GERMAINE DIETERLEN (1977, 26 min, 35mm)
CINÉ-MAFIA (1980, 35 min, video)
CINÉ-PORTRAIT DE RAYMOND DEPARDON (1983, 10 min, 16mm)
Total running time: ca. 95 min.

In a conversation with Robert Gardner, Rouch once said, “When I’m with anthropologists, they consider me a filmmaker, but when I’m with filmmakers, they consider me an anthropologist. You see, I’m a Gemini by birth, which means I’m always in two places at the same time.” Offering a glimpse of his unique ability to cross between these two worlds – whether discussing the future of anthropology with Margaret Mead (spoiler alert – it includes space colonies!), or hanging out with partners-in-crime like Joris Ivens and Henri Storck – this touching collection of portraits illustrates the unique rapport Rouch forged with the diverse array of individuals who surrounded and inspired him.

With Jack Stuart, Amber Collins, and Renato Baldini.
“[O]ffers an unusual fusion of the ‘believe it or not’ fascination with the Abominable Snowmen and the waning outer-space craze being exploited in Europe. An entertaining piece of hokum, the story is more earthbound in its alien antics than its companion films. […]THE SNOW DEVILS became one of the last widely screened entries from the first wave of Italian space adventures, a craze that would not be revived until a decade later with the genre’s resurgence in the wake of STAR WARS.” –Nathaniel Thompson, TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES

PROGRAM 7: FILMS ABOUT JEAN ROUCH
Jackie Raynal UNE BRÈVE HISTOIRE DE CINÉMA (2004, 16 min)
&
Manthia Diawara
ROUCH IN REVERSE
1995, 52 min, video.
&
Jean-André Fieschi
NIGER, NEW IMPRESSIONS OF AFRICA / NIGER, NOUVELLES IMPRESSIONS D’AFRIQUE
1999, 43 min, video.
Total running time: ca. 115 min.

Rouch made excellent portraits (see Program 6), and his friends were quick to return the favor. These are three of our favorites: in Jackie Raynal’s film, she and Noël Simsolo join the filmmaker at his neighborhood café as neighbors, firemen, and a surprise guest drop by. Manthia Diawara’s ROUCH IN REVERSE uses Rouch’s films to explore the idea of reverse anthropology. Jean-André Fieschi’s NIGER offers invaluable glimpses of Rouch’s partners Tallou Mouzourane and Damouré Zika in the wake of the disastrous floods of 1998.

New 35mm Print courtesy of the Film Noir Foundation Collection at the UCLA Film & Television Archive. With Bobby Driscoll, Arthur Kennedy, Barbara Hale, Paul Stewart, and Ruth Roman.
Ably helmed by former Hitchcock DP Ted Tetzlaff, this L.E.S.-set noir is an exceptionally tense slab of terror within the tenements. On a sweltering summer night, 12-year-old Tommy decides to sleep on the fire escape of his parents’ apartment…and witnesses a murder. When the two killers discover that he watched them do the deed, they plot to take him out of the picture, and Tommy – whose tendency to cry wolf leads his parents to disbelieve his story – is left to fend for himself…

PROGRAM 8: Rethinking Revolution
LIBERTÉ, ÉGALITÉ, FRATERNITÉ…ET PUIS APRÈS
1990, 95 min, 16mm.
Taking the bicentenary celebration of the French Revolution as his point of departure, Rouch reflects on how France’s republican ideals measure up to historical reality. Utterly unique in both form and content, the film features an unforgettable sequence involving a voodoo ritual held on the Esplanade des Invalides that is performed to reconcile the spirits of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Haitian revolutionary who died by his command, Toussaint L’Ouverture.
&
MAKWAYELA (1977, 20 min, 16mm)
A form of protest and political expression, the Makwayela dance is performed by a group of factory workers in Post-Independence Mozambique. Rouch pays tribute to the creative ways people cope with adversity and articulate their desire for a better future.

Archival print courtesy of the Library of Congress. With Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook Jr., and Margaret Tallichet.
Regarded by many as the first true film noir, this RKO B-movie – written by Nathanael West – stars John McGuire as Michael Ward, a reporter whose testimony in a murder trial leads to the conviction of an ex-con, Joe Briggs (Elisha Cook Jr.). But when one of Ward’s neighbors is murdered, he begins to wonder whether his testimony was accurate, and circumstances force his fiancée (Tallichet) to hunt down the mystery man (Lorre) who was suspiciously present for both crimes.

With Michael Caine and Britt Ekland.
“There’s nobody to root for but the smartly dressed sexual athlete and professional killer (Caine) in this English gangland picture, which is so calculatedly cool and soulless and nastily erotic that it seems to belong to a new genre of virtuoso viciousness. What makes the movie unusual is the metallic elegance and the single-minded proficiency with which it adheres to its sadism-for-the-connoisseur formula.” –Pauline Kael

With Bernie Casey and Pam Grier.
Adapted from the same novel as GET CARTER (Ted Lewis’s JACK’S RETURN HOME), Armitage’s second directorial effort stars Bernie Casey as Tyrone Tackett, a man who travels to Southern California to attend his brother’s funeral and winds up getting roped into the local underworld of which his brother was a key player. It isn’t long before Tyrone, using his brother’s old contacts and renewing rivalries with old enemies, is stepping on toes and stirring up trouble – inevitably leading to an extraordinary revenge mission.

PROGRAM 9: WHY NOT / AS IF
MADAME L’EAU
1992, 120 min, video.
Their land drought-stricken, three West African farmers (and their donkey, of course!) travel to Holland to investigate the possibility of importing windmill technology for use on the plains of Niger. A surreal journey full of whimsy that manages, nonetheless, to address the serious issues of technology, development, and the nature of cross-cultural collaboration.

FERNANDO ARRABAL IN PERSON!
Anthology is honored to host Fernando Arrabal – renowned playwright, novelist, poet, filmmaker, Surrealist, and Pataphysician – for a special screening of his notorious feature film, VIVA LA MUERTE. One of the most controversial and taboo-busting artists of his time, Arrabal is an incredibly prolific writer (with literally hundreds of books and plays to his name), as well as the director of seven feature films, and the co-founder, along with Roland Topor and Alejandro Jodorowsky, of the Panic Movement, a collective inspired by and named after the god Pan, and influenced by Luis Buñuel and Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. In October we’ll be screening his 1975 film, THE GUERNICA TREE, as part of our THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR IN THE BASQUE COUNTRY series, as well as welcoming Arrabal in person for this special event in November.

Co-presented by Spain Culture New York; very special thanks to Iñigo Ramirez de Haro and Águeda Sanfiz, as well as Nico Bruinsma (Cult Epics).

VIVA LA MUERTE
Arrabal’s debut feature, based on his own novel, is a shocking and unforgettable protest against totalitarian patriarchy that tells the story of a boy whose mother betrays his father to the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War. Using haunting, hallucinatory imagery to reveal the boy’s subconscious, VIVA LA MUERTE is a surreal tour de force.
“A paroxysm of anguish, a scream for liberty and probably one of the most ferocious, violent films ever made.” –Amos Vogel, VILLAGE VOICE

PROGRAM 5: PAST AND PRESENT
BABATOU AND THE THREE WISE COUNSELS / BABATOU: LES TROIS CONSEILS
1975, 90 min, 35mm. Co-directed by Boubou Hama.
Although much of Rouch’s work is grounded in the moment, he did make one epic historical film, the 19th-century costume drama BABATOU, in which Damouré Zika and Lam Ibrahima Dia play Songhai adventurers who set off to join legendary Zarma prince Babatou on his adventures through the lands of the Gurunsi people in what is now Northern Ghana. Written and co-directed by Nigerian writer, historian, and politician Boubou Hama, this film is one of the most unusual entries in Rouch’s filmography and it has become one of the hardest to see: don’t miss it!

(NINGEN JOHATSU)
Print courtesy of the Japan Foundation.
One of his greatest and most challenging films, and perhaps his most definitive statement on the nature of ‘documentary’, A MAN VANISHES began as an investigation into one of the thousands of missing persons cases that occur in Japan each year. Imamura focuses on one particular case, following the man’s fiancée as she desperately searches for him. But as the film progresses, its status as non-fiction becomes complicated. Imamura hires an actor to pose as an investigator, while the woman ultimately grows more interested in Imamura himself than in her missing fiancé. The film culminates in a scene that explodes any stable sense of fiction and reality, making A MAN VANISHES an early example of what film historian Donald Ritchie called, “One of Imamura’s major themes…[the] confrontation of illusion with reality (and the resultant problem of telling which is which).”

“In a coup de cinéma that has been equaled only by Abbas Kiarostami’s CLOSE-UP, Imamura transforms fact into artifice, being into acting, personal identity into a tenuous fabrication.” –James Quandt, CINEMATHEQUE ONTARIO

Now screening in 35mm!

PROGRAM 10: DESTINATION: FARTHER THAN FAR
THE LION HUNTERS / LA CHASSE AU LION À L’ARC
1965, 68 min, 16mm.
Between 1958 and 1965 Rouch accompanied Gow hunters in West Africa on several traditional lion hunts, using poisoned arrows instead of rifles. These expeditions into “the land farther than far” were his initiation into Gow culture, and he tried to use the film’s form and structure to “give the audience a feeling of what I myself felt as I was learning the way of the lion hunt.” Arguably one of his richest and most complexly-woven ethnographic narratives, THE LION HUNTERS also addresses one of cinema’s central questions: how do you film violence?
&
BATEAU-GIVRE
1987, 35 min, 35mm-to-video.
Far removed from his habitual landscapes, BATEAU GIVRE was Rouch’s section of a collaborative work (other contributors included Luc Ferrari and Raoul Ruiz) that explored the Swedish icebreaker Frej. The resulting short is one of his most beautiful and contemplative films.

IN SEARCH OF THE UNRETURNED SOLDIERS IN MALAYSIA / MIKAHEI O OTTE
1971, 50 mins, digital video.
&
IN SEARCH OF THE UNRETURNED SOLDIERS IN THAILAND / MIKAHEI O OTTE N°2
1971, 50 mins, digital video.
In these two remarkable films, Imamura travels first to Malaysia and then to Thailand, to investigate the lives and experiences of those Japanese soldiers who, during World War II, chose to desert from the Japanese Army and remain in Southeast Asia.

PROGRAM 8: Rethinking Revolution
LIBERTÉ, ÉGALITÉ, FRATERNITÉ…ET PUIS APRÈS
1990, 95 min, 16mm.
Taking the bicentenary celebration of the French Revolution as his point of departure, Rouch reflects on how France’s republican ideals measure up to historical reality. Utterly unique in both form and content, the film features an unforgettable sequence involving a voodoo ritual held on the Esplanade des Invalides that is performed to reconcile the spirits of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Haitian revolutionary who died by his command, Toussaint L’Ouverture.
&
MAKWAYELA (1977, 20 min, 16mm)
A form of protest and political expression, the Makwayela dance is performed by a group of factory workers in Post-Independence Mozambique. Rouch pays tribute to the creative ways people cope with adversity and articulate their desire for a better future.

(NINGEN JOHATSU)
Print courtesy of the Japan Foundation.
One of his greatest and most challenging films, and perhaps his most definitive statement on the nature of ‘documentary’, A MAN VANISHES began as an investigation into one of the thousands of missing persons cases that occur in Japan each year. Imamura focuses on one particular case, following the man’s fiancée as she desperately searches for him. But as the film progresses, its status as non-fiction becomes complicated. Imamura hires an actor to pose as an investigator, while the woman ultimately grows more interested in Imamura himself than in her missing fiancé. The film culminates in a scene that explodes any stable sense of fiction and reality, making A MAN VANISHES an early example of what film historian Donald Ritchie called, “One of Imamura’s major themes…[the] confrontation of illusion with reality (and the resultant problem of telling which is which).”

“In a coup de cinéma that has been equaled only by Abbas Kiarostami’s CLOSE-UP, Imamura transforms fact into artifice, being into acting, personal identity into a tenuous fabrication.” –James Quandt, CINEMATHEQUE ONTARIO

Now screening in 35mm!

With Jim Brown.
Brown stars here as Curtis Hook, a crook who, feeling that he hasn’t gotten a fair slice of the proverbial pie, takes matters into his own hands and murders a gang of drug dealers, taking their loot (but not their product) and stashing it away. Soon Hook is doing a bid for this homicide/robbery, and everyone in the joint wants to know where the money is hidden…. But after learning that the money’s location has been improbably compromised, Hook schemes to break out and reclaim what’s his.

(KARAYUKI SAN)
Print courtesy of the Japan Foundation.
A film about another kind of “unreturned soldier”, KARAYUKI-SAN finds Imamura traveling to Malaysia to interview Kikuyo Zendo, one of the countless Japanese women who were kidnapped or otherwise sold into sexual slavery in order to service the Japanese military in Southeast Asia. 74 years old at the time of filming, she offers a frank and harrowing testimony into her horrific wartime experiences, and the factors that have led her to choose exile over repatriation.

“Perhaps the most brilliant and feeling of Imamura’s fine documentaries.” –Joan Mellen, THE WAVES AT GENJI’S DOOR

With Jim Brown, Diahann Carroll, Ernest Borgnine, Julie Harris, Gene Hackman, Jack Klugman, Warren Oates, and Donald Sutherland.
The L.A. Coliseum gets robbed of $500,000 during a football game in this crime drama, adapted from a novel by Donald E. Westlake and featuring a truly remarkable ensemble cast, which largely focuses on the disastrous aftermath of the otherwise meticulously plotted heist. Brown, the former Cleveland Browns running back who had retired from football in 1965, is an especially commanding presence as Parker, the main character in a series of novels that Westlake wrote under his best-known pseudonym, Richard Stark.

With Tony Russel, Lisa Gastoni, and Franco Nero.
Margheriti’s signature film, this hallucinatory, low-budget cult classic follows Commander Mike Halstead (Tony Russel), hot on the trail of mad scientist Dr. Nurmi (Massimo Serato), who is not-so-secretly conducting deranged eugenics experiments in his hidden laboratory. When Halstead’s girlfriend Connie (Lisa Gastoni) is abducted by Dr. Nurmi, the interstellar cop has no choice but to intensify his investigation. The first installment in Margheriti’s “Gamma-One” series.

THE PIRATES OF BUBUAN / BUBUAN NO KAIZOKU
1972, 46 mins, digital video.
Remote and impoverished islands in the Philippines are revealed to be the home of rival factions of pirates in this absorbing investigation into a little-known way of life.
&
OUTLAW-MATSU RETURNS HOME / MUHOMATSU KOKYO E KAERU
1973, 47 mins, digital video.
“IN SEARCH OF THE UNRETURNED SOLDIERS was about former soldiers of the Japanese army who chose not to return to Japan after the war. … Two years later, I invited one of them to make his first return visit to Japan and documented it in OUTLAW-MATSU RETURNS HOME. During the filming, my subject Fujita asked me to buy him a cleaver so that he could kill his ‘vicious brother.’ I was shocked, and asked him to wait a day so that I could plan how to film the scene. By the next morning, to my relief, Fujita had calmed down and changed his mind about killing his brother. But I couldn’t have had a sharper insight into the ethical questions provoked by this kind of documentary filmmaking.” –Shôhei Imamura

With Tony Russel, Lisa Gastoni, and Franco Nero.
Commander Mike Halstead returns when a race of hostile extraterrestrials, the Diaphanoids, land on Mars and transform it into a base for launching a full-blown invasion against Earth. Russel, Gastoni, and Franco Nero reprise their roles from THE WILD, WILD PLANET in this delirious, zonked-out space opera, which boasts what is surely one of film history’s first astronaut ballet scenes, set to an accordion rendition of “Auld Lang Syne”. The soundtrack, by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino (who scored Orson Welles’s CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT and OTHELLO), is an especially noteworthy ingredient.

(NINGEN JOHATSU)
Print courtesy of the Japan Foundation.
One of his greatest and most challenging films, and perhaps his most definitive statement on the nature of ‘documentary’, A MAN VANISHES began as an investigation into one of the thousands of missing persons cases that occur in Japan each year. Imamura focuses on one particular case, following the man’s fiancée as she desperately searches for him. But as the film progresses, its status as non-fiction becomes complicated. Imamura hires an actor to pose as an investigator, while the woman ultimately grows more interested in Imamura himself than in her missing fiancé. The film culminates in a scene that explodes any stable sense of fiction and reality, making A MAN VANISHES an early example of what film historian Donald Ritchie called, “One of Imamura’s major themes…[the] confrontation of illusion with reality (and the resultant problem of telling which is which).”

“In a coup de cinéma that has been equaled only by Abbas Kiarostami’s CLOSE-UP, Imamura transforms fact into artifice, being into acting, personal identity into a tenuous fabrication.” –James Quandt, CINEMATHEQUE ONTARIO

Now screening in 35mm!

With Jack Stuart, Amber Collins, and Renato Baldini.
“[O]ffers an unusual fusion of the ‘believe it or not’ fascination with the Abominable Snowmen and the waning outer-space craze being exploited in Europe. An entertaining piece of hokum, the story is more earthbound in its alien antics than its companion films. […]THE SNOW DEVILS became one of the last widely screened entries from the first wave of Italian space adventures, a craze that would not be revived until a decade later with the genre’s resurgence in the wake of STAR WARS.” –Nathaniel Thompson, TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES

IN SEARCH OF THE UNRETURNED SOLDIERS IN MALAYSIA / MIKAHEI O OTTE
1971, 50 mins, digital video.
&
IN SEARCH OF THE UNRETURNED SOLDIERS IN THAILAND / MIKAHEI O OTTE N°2
1971, 50 mins, digital video.
In these two remarkable films, Imamura travels first to Malaysia and then to Thailand, to investigate the lives and experiences of those Japanese soldiers who, during World War II, chose to desert from the Japanese Army and remain in Southeast Asia.

With Boris Karloff, Catherine Lacey, and Ian Ogilvy.
Professor Marcus Moserrat (Karloff) and his wife Estelle (Lacey) hypnotize a listless young man, Mike (Ogilvy), and program him to commit a series of increasingly grotesque crimes for sport. When Estelle veers toward outright madness and Mike’s actions grow even more extreme, the comparatively moral Marcus makes it his mission to put a stop to this reign of terror. This is a wondrously delirious precursor to Reeves’s next and signature film, WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968).

With Nigel Davenport, Jean Wallace, and John Hamill.
In Wilde’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi road movie a virus breaks out and destroys East Asia’s grass, soon mutating and causing a chaotic famine across Europe. A British architect (Davenport) and his family trek from their London home to his brother’s potato farm in northern England where food and shelter await; along the way they encounter a variety of desperate, hungry, hostile characters, and it’s not long before the family is forced to compromise their morals in the interest of survival.

(KARAYUKI SAN)
Print courtesy of the Japan Foundation.
A film about another kind of “unreturned soldier”, KARAYUKI-SAN finds Imamura traveling to Malaysia to interview Kikuyo Zendo, one of the countless Japanese women who were kidnapped or otherwise sold into sexual slavery in order to service the Japanese military in Southeast Asia. 74 years old at the time of filming, she offers a frank and harrowing testimony into her horrific wartime experiences, and the factors that have led her to choose exile over repatriation.

“Perhaps the most brilliant and feeling of Imamura’s fine documentaries.” –Joan Mellen, THE WAVES AT GENJI’S DOOR

With Stacy Keach, Bud Cort, Marianna Hill, and M. Emmet Walsh.
In 1918, a former carny turned executioner (Keach) travels around the American South with his assistant (Cort) and a portable electric chair, clearing out death rows on commission. Things grow complicated when he is hired to kill a brother-sister pairing, only to fall in love with the sister and then scramble to devise a plot to fake her execution. Featuring a score by Jerry Goldsmith, this film is a crucial piece of Smight’s underappreciated oeuvre.

(NINGEN JOHATSU)
Print courtesy of the Japan Foundation.
One of his greatest and most challenging films, and perhaps his most definitive statement on the nature of ‘documentary’, A MAN VANISHES began as an investigation into one of the thousands of missing persons cases that occur in Japan each year. Imamura focuses on one particular case, following the man’s fiancée as she desperately searches for him. But as the film progresses, its status as non-fiction becomes complicated. Imamura hires an actor to pose as an investigator, while the woman ultimately grows more interested in Imamura himself than in her missing fiancé. The film culminates in a scene that explodes any stable sense of fiction and reality, making A MAN VANISHES an early example of what film historian Donald Ritchie called, “One of Imamura’s major themes…[the] confrontation of illusion with reality (and the resultant problem of telling which is which).”

“In a coup de cinéma that has been equaled only by Abbas Kiarostami’s CLOSE-UP, Imamura transforms fact into artifice, being into acting, personal identity into a tenuous fabrication.” –James Quandt, CINEMATHEQUE ONTARIO

Now screening in 35mm!

Archival print courtesy of the Library of Congress. With Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook Jr., and Margaret Tallichet.
Regarded by many as the first true film noir, this RKO B-movie – written by Nathanael West – stars John McGuire as Michael Ward, a reporter whose testimony in a murder trial leads to the conviction of an ex-con, Joe Briggs (Elisha Cook Jr.). But when one of Ward’s neighbors is murdered, he begins to wonder whether his testimony was accurate, and circumstances force his fiancée (Tallichet) to hunt down the mystery man (Lorre) who was suspiciously present for both crimes.

New 35mm Print courtesy of the Film Noir Foundation Collection at the UCLA Film & Television Archive. With Bobby Driscoll, Arthur Kennedy, Barbara Hale, Paul Stewart, and Ruth Roman.
Ably helmed by former Hitchcock DP Ted Tetzlaff, this L.E.S.-set noir is an exceptionally tense slab of terror within the tenements. On a sweltering summer night, 12-year-old Tommy decides to sleep on the fire escape of his parents’ apartment…and witnesses a murder. When the two killers discover that he watched them do the deed, they plot to take him out of the picture, and Tommy – whose tendency to cry wolf leads his parents to disbelieve his story – is left to fend for himself…

THE PIRATES OF BUBUAN / BUBUAN NO KAIZOKU
1972, 46 mins, digital video.
Remote and impoverished islands in the Philippines are revealed to be the home of rival factions of pirates in this absorbing investigation into a little-known way of life.
&
OUTLAW-MATSU RETURNS HOME / MUHOMATSU KOKYO E KAERU
1973, 47 mins, digital video.
“IN SEARCH OF THE UNRETURNED SOLDIERS was about former soldiers of the Japanese army who chose not to return to Japan after the war. … Two years later, I invited one of them to make his first return visit to Japan and documented it in OUTLAW-MATSU RETURNS HOME. During the filming, my subject Fujita asked me to buy him a cleaver so that he could kill his ‘vicious brother.’ I was shocked, and asked him to wait a day so that I could plan how to film the scene. By the next morning, to my relief, Fujita had calmed down and changed his mind about killing his brother. But I couldn’t have had a sharper insight into the ethical questions provoked by this kind of documentary filmmaking.” –Shôhei Imamura

IN SEARCH OF THE UNRETURNED SOLDIERS IN MALAYSIA / MIKAHEI O OTTE
1971, 50 mins, digital video.
&
IN SEARCH OF THE UNRETURNED SOLDIERS IN THAILAND / MIKAHEI O OTTE N°2
1971, 50 mins, digital video.
In these two remarkable films, Imamura travels first to Malaysia and then to Thailand, to investigate the lives and experiences of those Japanese soldiers who, during World War II, chose to desert from the Japanese Army and remain in Southeast Asia.

With Rod Taylor, Trevor Howard, Jill St. John, and Akim Tamiroff.
Cardiff’s spy thriller, adapted from the first of John Gardner’s Boysie Oakes novels, stars Taylor as a former tank corps officer who lands a job as a ‘liquidator’ (assassin) for British intelligence, despite not having much of a taste for blood. Oakes then invites his boss’s secretary to spend the weekend with him in the Côte d’Azur, which leads to his capture by a team of enemy agents headed by Sheriek (Tamiroff). A series of spectacular double-crosses and guileful maneuvers follows.

(NINGEN JOHATSU)
Print courtesy of the Japan Foundation.
One of his greatest and most challenging films, and perhaps his most definitive statement on the nature of ‘documentary’, A MAN VANISHES began as an investigation into one of the thousands of missing persons cases that occur in Japan each year. Imamura focuses on one particular case, following the man’s fiancée as she desperately searches for him. But as the film progresses, its status as non-fiction becomes complicated. Imamura hires an actor to pose as an investigator, while the woman ultimately grows more interested in Imamura himself than in her missing fiancé. The film culminates in a scene that explodes any stable sense of fiction and reality, making A MAN VANISHES an early example of what film historian Donald Ritchie called, “One of Imamura’s major themes…[the] confrontation of illusion with reality (and the resultant problem of telling which is which).”

“In a coup de cinéma that has been equaled only by Abbas Kiarostami’s CLOSE-UP, Imamura transforms fact into artifice, being into acting, personal identity into a tenuous fabrication.” –James Quandt, CINEMATHEQUE ONTARIO

Now screening in 35mm!

(aka DARK OF THE SUN)
With Rod Taylor and Jim Brown.
“Filmed in Jamaica, although set during the savage Congo civil wars of the early 60s, [this] is an unashamed and bloody action-adventure, with Rod Taylor as a mercenary commander and the ex-football star Jim Brown supporting, as a Congolese supposedly raised in the U.S. For all his studio finesse, Cardiff palpably enjoyed the challenge of shooting and directing violent action, and THE MERCENARIES has acquired a considerable cult following.” –BFI

THE PIRATES OF BUBUAN / BUBUAN NO KAIZOKU
1972, 46 mins, digital video.
Remote and impoverished islands in the Philippines are revealed to be the home of rival factions of pirates in this absorbing investigation into a little-known way of life.
&
OUTLAW-MATSU RETURNS HOME / MUHOMATSU KOKYO E KAERU
1973, 47 mins, digital video.
“IN SEARCH OF THE UNRETURNED SOLDIERS was about former soldiers of the Japanese army who chose not to return to Japan after the war. … Two years later, I invited one of them to make his first return visit to Japan and documented it in OUTLAW-MATSU RETURNS HOME. During the filming, my subject Fujita asked me to buy him a cleaver so that he could kill his ‘vicious brother.’ I was shocked, and asked him to wait a day so that I could plan how to film the scene. By the next morning, to my relief, Fujita had calmed down and changed his mind about killing his brother. But I couldn’t have had a sharper insight into the ethical questions provoked by this kind of documentary filmmaking.” –Shôhei Imamura

With Jacqueline Bisset, Jim Brown, and Joseph Cotten.
19-year-old Canadian Christine (Bisset) moves to L.A. to be with her long-distance banker fiancé – but when their relationship flounders, she’s off to Las Vegas to work as a showgirl at a casino where she meets and falls for former pro-football-player-turned-casino-exec Tommy (Jim Brown). Tommy puts a serious hurtin’ on a rich casino patron who rapes Christine, leading to him getting fired, and the two take to the road in search of peace, quiet, and safety from a potential revenge plot. They quickly come to discover a clean getaway is all but impossible…

(NINGEN JOHATSU)
Print courtesy of the Japan Foundation.
One of his greatest and most challenging films, and perhaps his most definitive statement on the nature of ‘documentary’, A MAN VANISHES began as an investigation into one of the thousands of missing persons cases that occur in Japan each year. Imamura focuses on one particular case, following the man’s fiancée as she desperately searches for him. But as the film progresses, its status as non-fiction becomes complicated. Imamura hires an actor to pose as an investigator, while the woman ultimately grows more interested in Imamura himself than in her missing fiancé. The film culminates in a scene that explodes any stable sense of fiction and reality, making A MAN VANISHES an early example of what film historian Donald Ritchie called, “One of Imamura’s major themes…[the] confrontation of illusion with reality (and the resultant problem of telling which is which).”

“In a coup de cinéma that has been equaled only by Abbas Kiarostami’s CLOSE-UP, Imamura transforms fact into artifice, being into acting, personal identity into a tenuous fabrication.” –James Quandt, CINEMATHEQUE ONTARIO

Now screening in 35mm!

From the collection of George Eastman House. With Barbara Hershey, Scott Glenn, and Jeannie Berlin.
Barbara Hershey turns in an excellent performance as Tish Gray, a flower child who gives her infant daughter up for adoption and is subsequently hired to be a surrogate mother for haute-bourgeois SoCal couple Suzanne (Collin Wilcox Patton) and Jay (Sam Groom). This arrangement quickly becomes emotionally and psychologically wrought when Tish unexpectedly develops a close bond with Suzanne and Jay and when her boyfriend, Tad (Glenn), grows jealous of the motley family-like unit.

(KARAYUKI SAN)
Print courtesy of the Japan Foundation.
A film about another kind of “unreturned soldier”, KARAYUKI-SAN finds Imamura traveling to Malaysia to interview Kikuyo Zendo, one of the countless Japanese women who were kidnapped or otherwise sold into sexual slavery in order to service the Japanese military in Southeast Asia. 74 years old at the time of filming, she offers a frank and harrowing testimony into her horrific wartime experiences, and the factors that have led her to choose exile over repatriation.

“Perhaps the most brilliant and feeling of Imamura’s fine documentaries.” –Joan Mellen, THE WAVES AT GENJI’S DOOR

(NINGEN JOHATSU)
Print courtesy of the Japan Foundation.
One of his greatest and most challenging films, and perhaps his most definitive statement on the nature of ‘documentary’, A MAN VANISHES began as an investigation into one of the thousands of missing persons cases that occur in Japan each year. Imamura focuses on one particular case, following the man’s fiancée as she desperately searches for him. But as the film progresses, its status as non-fiction becomes complicated. Imamura hires an actor to pose as an investigator, while the woman ultimately grows more interested in Imamura himself than in her missing fiancé. The film culminates in a scene that explodes any stable sense of fiction and reality, making A MAN VANISHES an early example of what film historian Donald Ritchie called, “One of Imamura’s major themes…[the] confrontation of illusion with reality (and the resultant problem of telling which is which).”

“In a coup de cinéma that has been equaled only by Abbas Kiarostami’s CLOSE-UP, Imamura transforms fact into artifice, being into acting, personal identity into a tenuous fabrication.” –James Quandt, CINEMATHEQUE ONTARIO

Now screening in 35mm!

With Boris Karloff, Catherine Lacey, and Ian Ogilvy.
Professor Marcus Moserrat (Karloff) and his wife Estelle (Lacey) hypnotize a listless young man, Mike (Ogilvy), and program him to commit a series of increasingly grotesque crimes for sport. When Estelle veers toward outright madness and Mike’s actions grow even more extreme, the comparatively moral Marcus makes it his mission to put a stop to this reign of terror. This is a wondrously delirious precursor to Reeves’s next and signature film, WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968).

With Stacy Keach, Bud Cort, Marianna Hill, and M. Emmet Walsh.
In 1918, a former carny turned executioner (Keach) travels around the American South with his assistant (Cort) and a portable electric chair, clearing out death rows on commission. Things grow complicated when he is hired to kill a brother-sister pairing, only to fall in love with the sister and then scramble to devise a plot to fake her execution. Featuring a score by Jerry Goldsmith, this film is a crucial piece of Smight’s underappreciated oeuvre.

With Nigel Davenport, Jean Wallace, and John Hamill.
In Wilde’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi road movie a virus breaks out and destroys East Asia’s grass, soon mutating and causing a chaotic famine across Europe. A British architect (Davenport) and his family trek from their London home to his brother’s potato farm in northern England where food and shelter await; along the way they encounter a variety of desperate, hungry, hostile characters, and it’s not long before the family is forced to compromise their morals in the interest of survival.

All films in this program are b&w and silent.
THE CONJUROR / L’ILLUSIONISTE FIN DE SIÈCLE (1899, 1 min, 35mm)
TRIP TO THE MOON / VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE (1902, 12 min, 35mm)
THE PALACE OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS / LE PALAIS DES MILLE ET UNE NUITS (1905, 21 min, 35mm)
DELIRIUM IN A STUDIO / ALI BARBOUYOU ALI BOUF À L’HUILE (1907, 5 min, 35mm)
MERRY FROLICS OF SATAN / LES QUATRES CENT FARCES DU DIABLE (1906, 18 min, 35mm)
Magician, master of special effects, Méliès broke with the realistic (Lumière) mode of cinema and celebrated unlimited fantasy and artificiality (in its best sense).
Total running time: ca. 60 min.

The films on this program are hand-tinted and silent.
THE CASCADE OF FIRE / LA CASCADE DE FEU (1904, 3 min, 35mm)
A DIABOLICAL TENANT / UN LOCATAIRE DIABOLIQUE (1909, 8 min, 35mm)
THE HUNCHBACK FAIRY / LA FÉE CARABOSSE (1906, 13 min, 35mm)
VOYAGE ACROSS THE IMPOSSIBLE / LE VOYAGE À TRAVERS L’IMPOSSIBLE (1904, 20 min, 35mm)
Total running time: ca. 50 min.

(aka DARK OF THE SUN)
With Rod Taylor and Jim Brown.
“Filmed in Jamaica, although set during the savage Congo civil wars of the early 60s, [this] is an unashamed and bloody action-adventure, with Rod Taylor as a mercenary commander and the ex-football star Jim Brown supporting, as a Congolese supposedly raised in the U.S. For all his studio finesse, Cardiff palpably enjoyed the challenge of shooting and directing violent action, and THE MERCENARIES has acquired a considerable cult following.” –BFI

All films in this program are b&w and silent.
EXTRAORDINARY ILLUSIONS / ILLUSIONS FUNAMBULESQUES (1903, 3 min, 16mm)
THE ENCHANTED WELL / LE PUITS FANTASTIQUE (1903, 3 min, 16mm)
THE APPARITION / LE REVENANT (1903, 3 min, 16mm)
TUNNEL UNDER THE CHANNEL / LE TUNNEL SOUS LA MANCHE (1907, 25 min, 35mm)
SIGHTSEEING THROUGH WHISKY / PAUVRE JEAN OU LES MESAVENTURES D’UN BUVEUR (1909, 5 min, 35mm)
THE DOCTOR’S SECRET / HYDROTHÉRAPIE FANTASTIQUE (1909, 11 min, 35mm)
Total running time: ca. 55 min.

With Rod Taylor, Trevor Howard, Jill St. John, and Akim Tamiroff.
Cardiff’s spy thriller, adapted from the first of John Gardner’s Boysie Oakes novels, stars Taylor as a former tank corps officer who lands a job as a ‘liquidator’ (assassin) for British intelligence, despite not having much of a taste for blood. Oakes then invites his boss’s secretary to spend the weekend with him in the Côte d’Azur, which leads to his capture by a team of enemy agents headed by Sheriek (Tamiroff). A series of spectacular double-crosses and guileful maneuvers follows.

“Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy are the movies’ greatest comic duo, the quintessential dumb and dumber odd-couple. Though critically overshadowed by Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, they were enormously popular, and proved a major influence on Abbott & Costello, Lucille Ball & Vivian Vance, and Jackie Gleason & Art Carney, not to mention Samuel Beckett (they were an inspiration for WAITING FOR GODOT), Roman Polanski (who paid homage to them in his existentialist short films FAT AND LEAN and TWO MEN AND A WARDROBE), and Ken Jacobs (whose ONTIC ANTICS deconstructs one of their films).” –David Mulkins
COUNTY HOSPITAL (1932, 20 minutes, 16mm, b&w)
Directed by James Parrott.
THE MUSIC BOX (1932, 30 minutes, 16mm, b&w)
Directed by James Parrott.
THEM THAR HILLS (1934, 20 minutes, 16mm, b&w)
Directed by Charley Rogers.
TIT FOR TAT (1935, 20 minutes, 16mm, b&w)
Directed by Charley Rogers.
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

With Tony Russel, Lisa Gastoni, and Franco Nero.
Margheriti’s signature film, this hallucinatory, low-budget cult classic follows Commander Mike Halstead (Tony Russel), hot on the trail of mad scientist Dr. Nurmi (Massimo Serato), who is not-so-secretly conducting deranged eugenics experiments in his hidden laboratory. When Halstead’s girlfriend Connie (Lisa Gastoni) is abducted by Dr. Nurmi, the interstellar cop has no choice but to intensify his investigation. The first installment in Margheriti’s “Gamma-One” series.

Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy
BALLET MÉCANIQUE  (1924, 19 minutes, 35mm, b&w, silent. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
René Clair & Francis Picabia
ENTR’ACTE (1924, 22 minutes, 35mm, b&w)
Man Ray
LE RETOUR À LA RAISON (1923, 2 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent)
ÉTOILE DE MER (1927, 13 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent)
EMAK BAKIA (1927, 18 minutes, 35mm, b&w, silent)
Marcel Duchamp & Man Ray
ANEMIC CINEMA (1926, 7 minutes, 35mm, b&w, silent)
Total running time: ca. 85 minutes.

With Tony Russel, Lisa Gastoni, and Franco Nero.
Commander Mike Halstead returns when a race of hostile extraterrestrials, the Diaphanoids, land on Mars and transform it into a base for launching a full-blown invasion against Earth. Russel, Gastoni, and Franco Nero reprise their roles from THE WILD, WILD PLANET in this delirious, zonked-out space opera, which boasts what is surely one of film history’s first astronaut ballet scenes, set to an accordion rendition of “Auld Lang Syne”. The soundtrack, by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino (who scored Orson Welles’s CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT and OTHELLO), is an especially noteworthy ingredient.

“The few facts that are known about Maclaine are, at best, sketchy. He was a published poet, a sort of down and out San Francisco bohemian who later became one of the psychic casualties of that scene. His last years were spent at Sunnyacres, a state mental hospital in Fairfield, California. These films, along with Ron Rice’s, are clearly the most significant work to come out of the beat period.” –J.J. Murphy
All films preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
THE MAN WHO INVENTED GOLD (1957, 14 minutes, 16mm)
BEAT (1958, 6 minutes, 16mm)
SCOTCH HOP (1959, 5.5 minutes, 16mm)
THE END (1953, 35 minutes, 16mm)
“Six stories of people on the last day of their lives. Most are about to commit suicide, or some metaphorical equivalent, but the mushroom cloud with which the film begins and ends reminds us that, as Maclaine's voice intones on the sound track, we await ‘the grand suicide of the human race’ – his conceit is that his characters have reached the end of their personal ropes the day before a nuclear holocaust. Throughout the film he compares the dehumanizing effects of mass culture to the dehumanizing effects of personal despair, weaving these two threads together until the mannequins he films in store windows, the anonymous people he films on the street, and his characters all seem variations on the same half-living, half-dead persona.” –Fred Camper
Total running time: ca. 65 minutes.

With Jack Stuart, Amber Collins, and Renato Baldini.
“[O]ffers an unusual fusion of the ‘believe it or not’ fascination with the Abominable Snowmen and the waning outer-space craze being exploited in Europe. An entertaining piece of hokum, the story is more earthbound in its alien antics than its companion films. […]THE SNOW DEVILS became one of the last widely screened entries from the first wave of Italian space adventures, a craze that would not be revived until a decade later with the genre’s resurgence in the wake of STAR WARS.” –Nathaniel Thompson, TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES

From the collection of George Eastman House. With Barbara Hershey, Scott Glenn, and Jeannie Berlin.
Barbara Hershey turns in an excellent performance as Tish Gray, a flower child who gives her infant daughter up for adoption and is subsequently hired to be a surrogate mother for haute-bourgeois SoCal couple Suzanne (Collin Wilcox Patton) and Jay (Sam Groom). This arrangement quickly becomes emotionally and psychologically wrought when Tish unexpectedly develops a close bond with Suzanne and Jay and when her boyfriend, Tad (Glenn), grows jealous of the motley family-like unit.

With Jacqueline Bisset, Jim Brown, and Joseph Cotten.
19-year-old Canadian Christine (Bisset) moves to L.A. to be with her long-distance banker fiancé – but when their relationship flounders, she’s off to Las Vegas to work as a showgirl at a casino where she meets and falls for former pro-football-player-turned-casino-exec Tommy (Jim Brown). Tommy puts a serious hurtin’ on a rich casino patron who rapes Christine, leading to him getting fired, and the two take to the road in search of peace, quiet, and safety from a potential revenge plot. They quickly come to discover a clean getaway is all but impossible…

From Broadway to American Ballet, this exposé reveals the courage and hope needed to remain resilient in an incredibly competitive environment. Six dancers, each at different stages of thier lives and careers, share their very personal stories. Their journeys encompass their introduction to dance, the realization of their passion, and the obstacles they’ve overcome in the pursuit of success.

With Jim Brown, Diahann Carroll, Ernest Borgnine, Julie Harris, Gene Hackman, Jack Klugman, Warren Oates, and Donald Sutherland.
The L.A. Coliseum gets robbed of $500,000 during a football game in this crime drama, adapted from a novel by Donald E. Westlake and featuring a truly remarkable ensemble cast, which largely focuses on the disastrous aftermath of the otherwise meticulously plotted heist. Brown, the former Cleveland Browns running back who had retired from football in 1965, is an especially commanding presence as Parker, the main character in a series of novels that Westlake wrote under his best-known pseudonym, Richard Stark.

With Jim Brown.
Brown stars here as Curtis Hook, a crook who, feeling that he hasn’t gotten a fair slice of the proverbial pie, takes matters into his own hands and murders a gang of drug dealers, taking their loot (but not their product) and stashing it away. Soon Hook is doing a bid for this homicide/robbery, and everyone in the joint wants to know where the money is hidden…. But after learning that the money’s location has been improbably compromised, Hook schemes to break out and reclaim what’s his.

The various faces of the “China girl”, sometimes called a “China doll” or “girl head”, have appeared in more films than any actress, though she is almost never seen, save for the fleeting glimpses an audience might catch at the end of a film reel. These images of a woman, demurely positioned next to color swatches, have appeared on the leader of every commercial manufactured film since the late 1920s and continue in limited use today. The China girl image is instrumental in determining exposure, image density, and color balance, forming a kind of cinematic unconscious. Her essential but often overlooked role in film history has also made her a compelling subject for experimental filmmakers variously examining issues of celluloid materiality, the behind-the-scenes workings of the film industry, and the often marginal role of women. In some cases, the China girl is no less than the enigmatic icon of a vanishing medium.

Over the course of two programs, we will be highlighting a number of experimental films which feature the China girl, as well as a talk by programmer Genevieve Yue and a projection performance by Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder.

Programmed by Genevieve Yue, and co-sponsored by NYU Cinema Studies and the Orphan Film Project.

PROGRAM 1
Owen Land INSTITUTIONAL QUALITY (1969, 5 min, 16mm)
Owen Land FILM IN WHICH THERE APPEAR SPROCKET HOLES, EDGE LETTERING, DIRT PARTICLES, ETC. (1965/66, 5 min, 16mm, silent)
Morgan Fisher STANDARD GAUGE (1984, 35 min, 16mm)
Michelle Silva CHINA GIRLS (2006, 3 min, 16mm)
Thomas Draschan and Stella Friedrichs TO THE HAPPY FEW (2003, 5 min, 16mm)
Brian Frye NADJA (2000, 3 min, 16mm)
Timoleon Wilkins MM (1996, 8 min, 16mm)
Mark Toscano RELEASING HUMAN ENERGIES (2012, 5.5 min, 16mm)
Total running time: ca. 75 min.

The various faces of the “China girl”, sometimes called a “China doll” or “girl head”, have appeared in more films than any actress, though she is almost never seen, save for the fleeting glimpses an audience might catch at the end of a film reel. These images of a woman, demurely positioned next to color swatches, have appeared on the leader of every commercial manufactured film since the late 1920s and continue in limited use today. The China girl image is instrumental in determining exposure, image density, and color balance, forming a kind of cinematic unconscious. Her essential but often overlooked role in film history has also made her a compelling subject for experimental filmmakers variously examining issues of celluloid materiality, the behind-the-scenes workings of the film industry, and the often marginal role of women. In some cases, the China girl is no less than the enigmatic icon of a vanishing medium.

Over the course of two programs, we will be highlighting a number of experimental films which feature the China girl, as well as a talk by programmer Genevieve Yue and a projection performance by Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder.

Programmed by Genevieve Yue, and co-sponsored by NYU Cinema Studies and the Orphan Film Project.

PROGRAM 2
BLINK AND BURN: CHINA GIRLS IN EXPERIMENTAL FILM
A talk by Genevieve Yue.
&
A SOURCEFUL OF SECRETS (2002/2012)
Projection performance by Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder.

With Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright, Leonard Nimoy, and Kevin McCarthy.
This sly, funny, but still surprisingly terrifying reimagining of the Don Siegel classic transplants the story to the Bay Area, allowing Kaufman and screenwriter W.D. Richter to bolster the original’s paranoid political allegory with a parody of the narcissistic, self-help mentality of 70s San Francisco. One of the most successful and purposeful of Hollywood remakes, it confidently mixes humor and horror without sacrificing either, a tricky feat that Kaufman, Richter, and their cast pull off with aplomb.

“His remarkable faculty is as maker of images.... [T]he images he photographs are among the most radical, super-real and haunting images the cinema has ever given us.” –P. Adams Sitney, VISIONARY FILM
“Film is a complex medium, combining elements of many other media. The ideal film artist would be a great poet, great painter, great playwright, great composer, great inventor – and maybe even a great business man or woman (most probably a woman – all the artists of the future may be women, men having long given up that profession to become soldiers or mystics). Such a composite genius has yet to appear.” –interview with George Landow, IMAGE FORUM
EARLY FILMS BY GEORGE LANDOW
ca. 1961-62, ca. 15 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up. Preserved with support from Cineric, Inc.
These films are not part of the Essential Cinema. According to Jonas Mekas, Landow used to show these films along with FLEMING FALOON at early screenings before he pulled them from his repertoire. They seem to be studies for FLEMING FALOON, more raw, less concise, messy split-screens and footage re-filmed off the screen. Talking heads (including Mike Wallace and film historian Richard Kraft) blur, stretch, fade; what Jonas says is a festering arm wound that Landow had at the time is shot at various blurry exposures.
FLEMING FALOON (1963, 6 minutes, 16mm)
FILM IN WHICH THERE APPEAR SPROCKET HOLES, EDGE LETTERING, DIRT PARTICLES, ETC. (1965/66, 5 minutes,
16mm, silent)
DIPLOTERATOLOGY: BARDO FOLLIES (1967, 7 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent)
THE FILM THAT RISES TO THE SURFACE OF CLARIFIED BUTTER (1968, 9 minutes, 16mm, b&w)
INSTITUTIONAL QUALITY (1969, 5 minutes, 16mm)
REMEDIAL READING COMPREHENSION (1970, 5 minutes, 16mm)
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? (1972, 13 minutes, 16mm)
THANK YOU JESUS FOR THE ETERNAL PRESENT (1973, 6 minutes, 16mm)
Total running time: ca. 80 minutes.

With Kurt Russell and Kim Cattrall.
“A film to embody the Eighties, and justify them. John Carpenter in Spielberg-Lucas turf, he surveys the perils and wholeheartedly forges ahead. […] W.D. Richter worked on the screenplay, and Russell lovingly evokes the spirit of THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION by firing his gun into the air before a showdown and getting knocked unconscious by falling debris; for the rest, Richter’s loopy jokes receive Carpenter’s unerring formalist elegance…. Naturally, it took the rise of post-modernism in the next decade for people to notice the greatness in it, but Carpenter at once understood the complex layering of pop imagery, and was off to make THEY LIVE.” –Fernando F. Croce