Anthology Film Archives

REEL ROCKERS: COME GET CRAZY IN THE EAST VILLAGE

A FILM SCREENING AND DISCUSSION TO BENEFIT THE GREENWICH VILLAGE SOCIETY FOR HISTORIC PRESERVATION

Archival print courtesy of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.
In 1982 director Allan Arkush (ROCK ‘N’ ROLL HIGH SCHOOL) collaborated with writer Danny Opatoshu to create a rock & roll fantasy set backstage at a legendary concert hall very much like the late, lamented Fillmore East, where they had both worked (and which was located at 2nd Avenue & 4th Street, just two blocks away from Anthology). The resulting satirical musical film, GET CRAZY, is a phantasmagorical pastiche of a very special time and place. Starring Malcolm McDowell, Daniel Stern, Allen Garfield, Miles Chapin, Stacey Nelkin, and Ed Begley Jr., it also features cameo appearances from the legendary musician Lou Reed, Howard Kaylin (THE TURTLES, THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION), Lee Ving (FEAR), Paul Bartel & Mary Woronov (from the film EATING RAOUL), John Densmore (THE DOORS), and teen idols Fabian & Bobby Sherman. This screening, which will be followed by an informal discussion with the film’s director and others who lived the Fillmore East experience (panelists to be announced), will benefit the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.

SPECIAL TICKET PRICES: $45 for GVSHP and Anthology Film Archives members; $55 general.

To purchase tickets, or for more info, visit: gvshp.org/crazy

With Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, Keenan Wynn, Carroll O’Connor, and John Vernon.
Double-crossed and left for dead by his partner, a career criminal named Walker (Lee Marvin) seeks revenge and repayment in John Boorman’s iconic, relentlessly stylized crime drama. Jacobs’s script – an adaptation of the first novel in Donald Westlake/Richard Stark’s peerless Parker series – contains just enough gruff repartee and deadpan stoicism to sustain a never-better Marvin and Angie Dickinson (particularly strong as Walker’s in-too-deep sister-in-law). The first film ever to be shot (in part) at Alcatraz, POINT BLANK has remained a stylistic wonder fully deserving of its status as a major point of reference for contemporary action filmmakers.

With Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune.
Boorman, Jacobs, and Marvin reunited for this sparse WWII tale concerning an American and a Japanese soldier (Toshiro Mifune) stranded on an otherwise unpopulated Pacific island who forge an uneasy alliance in the interest of survival. Forgoing subtitles to ratchet up the tension and atmosphere of miscommunication, HELL IN THE PACIFIC continues Boorman and Jacobs’s exploration of desperate masculinity, rendered all the more resonant by Marvin and Mifune’s actually having served in their respective countries’ militaries during the war.

Archival print courtesy of 20th Century-Fox. With Roy Scheider and Tony Lo Bianco.
An elite task force of unapologetically dirty cops finds itself implicated in a string of kidnappings in Philip D’Antoni’s breathless NYC-set thriller. D’Antoni, who produced the Steve McQueen vehicle BULLITT (1968), turns the wheel over to a game Roy Scheider, who is compelling as Buddy Manucci, the Seven-Ups’ besieged leader. It is only appropriate, given D’Antoni’s involvement, that the centerpiece of THE SEVEN-UPS is a car chase along the Hudson River that rivals BULLITT in its exhilarating over-the-top-ness.

The screening on Sat, Dec 1 will be presented by Randy Jurgensen, actor, producer, and ex-police detective (his experiences helped inspire THE FRENCH CONNECTION and CRUISING!). Jurgensen worked on THE SEVEN-UPS and will share his stories about that production and more!

Archival print courtesy of 20th Century-Fox.With Gene Hackman and Fernando Rey.
“In these further adventures of Popeye Doyle…Marseilles, its inhabitants and its ways of life provide the exotic backgrounds and raw materials for the movie’s various specialty numbers, principally chases in which Popeye and his French counterparts attempt to nab drugdom’s Mr. Big, the character played by Fernando Rey, who disappeared at the end of THE FRENCH CONNECTION. […] Popeye is a colorful and interesting – though hardly noble – character, and when the Marseilles drug people kidnap him, forcibly create a heroin habit in him, and then release him, you have a very special kind of jeopardy that the film and Mr. Hackman exploit most effectively.” –Vincent Canby, NEW YORK TIMES

With Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, and Sylvia Miles.
The only X-rated film to win the Oscar for Best Picture, this collaboration between John Schlesinger and Waldo Salt made Jon Voight a star and further elevated Dustin Hoffman’s reputation. A young, naïve Texan (Voight) arrives in Manhattan hoping to make a living as a hustler, though he quickly runs into various obstructions in his efforts to sell himself; he soon hooks up with a vaguely grotesque lumpenprole (Hoffman) who helps him to get ahead in NYC’s underground. This film is unquestionably one of the major zeitgeist pictures of the late 1960s.

With Al Pacino.
Working from Peter Maas’s nonfiction book of the same title and in collaboration with Norman Wexler (who was spotlighted in a previous installment of FROM THE PEN OF…), Salt’s portrait of a plainclothes cop (Pacino) who seeks to expose police corruption within the NYPD and finds his life threatened as a result is at once an evocative document of its time (Pacino’s wardrobe! His Minetta St. apartment!) and an absorbing, paranoiac thriller. Amongst Lumet’s very best, and a quintessential NYC film to boot.

All films preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
VISUAL VARIATIONS ON NOGUCHI (1955, 4 minutes, 16mm, b&w)
HURRY! HURRY! (1957, 3 minutes, 16mm)
GLIMPSE OF THE GARDEN (1957, 5 minutes, 16mm)
DWIGHTIANA (1959, 3 minutes, 16mm, score by Teiji Ito)
BAGATELLE FOR WILLARD MAAS (1961, 5 minutes, 16mm)
NOTEBOOK (1962-63, 10 minutes, 16mm, silent)
MOOD MONDRIAN (1961, 7 minutes, 16mm, silent)
EYE MUSIC IN RED MAJOR (1961, 4 minutes, 16mm, silent)
ANDY WARHOL (1965, 22 minutes, 16mm)
Marie Menken represents the lyrical sensibility in the American avant-garde film. She manages to get the maximum visual intensity from minimally photogenic subjects. Her usage of single-frame and her poetic attitude and purity had a strong influence on many filmmakers of the sixties.
Total running time: ca. 70 minutes.

With Jon Voight, Jane Fonda, and Bruce Dern.
A marine’s wife (Fonda) falls for a paraplegic, antiwar veteran (Voight) while her husband (Dern) is serving abroad in Ashby’s seminal Vietnam drama, notable for its fearless portrayal of a sexual relationship between an able-bodied woman and a disabled man. Winning Oscars for Best Actor (Voight), Best Actress (Fonda), and Best Original Screenplay (Salt, Robert C. Jones, and Nancy Dowd), COMING HOME remains a swirling cauldron of timely emotions and sentiments, sensitively rendered by Ashby and cinematographer Haskell Wexler.

All films preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
WRESTLING (1964, 8 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent)
MOONPLAY (1962, 5 minutes, 16mm, b&w)
DRIPS IN STRIPS (1961, 3 minutes, 16mm, silent)
GO! GO! GO! (1962-64, 12 minutes, 16mm, silent)
LIGHTS (1964-66, 7 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent)
SIDEWALKS (1966, 7 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent)
EXCURSION (1968, 5 minutes, 16mm)
WATTS WITH EGGS? (1967, 12 minutes, 16mm, silent)
ARABESQUE FOR KENNETH ANGER (1961, 4 minutes, 16mm)
Total running time: ca. 70 minutes.

With Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, Keenan Wynn, Carroll O’Connor, and John Vernon.
Double-crossed and left for dead by his partner, a career criminal named Walker (Lee Marvin) seeks revenge and repayment in John Boorman’s iconic, relentlessly stylized crime drama. Jacobs’s script – an adaptation of the first novel in Donald Westlake/Richard Stark’s peerless Parker series – contains just enough gruff repartee and deadpan stoicism to sustain a never-better Marvin and Angie Dickinson (particularly strong as Walker’s in-too-deep sister-in-law). The first film ever to be shot (in part) at Alcatraz, POINT BLANK has remained a stylistic wonder fully deserving of its status as a major point of reference for contemporary action filmmakers.

With Lee Marvin and Jane Fonda.
Silverstein’s comedic western, from a screenplay by Pierson and Walter Newman, stars Lee Marvin in a dual role, as reputed (though hapless) gunslinger Kid Shelleen and hired killer Tim Strawn. Catherine Ballou (Fonda), a schoolteacher, hires Shelleen to protect her rancher father (John Marley) from Strawn; when an apparently washed-up Shelleen fails to prevent the murder of Ballou’s father, he sharpens up in order to help her seek revenge against Strawn. Marvin won an Oscar for his mercurial performance here.

JIM DAVIS: DANCING WITH LIGHT
This past spring, Anthology’s Robert Haller, Director of Library Collections, curated a program devoted to the films of Jim Davis. The screening was conceived as a tribute to Davis’s niece, Elizabeth Guiher, who passed away in 2011, and in anticipation of the appearance of a book Haller was preparing on Davis’s work. That book, JIM DAVIS: DANCING WITH LIGHT, has now been completed, and on the occasion of its publication Haller will present this new program, highlighting several Davis films that have not recently screened.
From 1946 to 1972, working alone in his Princeton apartment, painter-sculptor Davis made over fifty films, most of which are abstract, and all of which are in color, treat light in continuous motion, and proceed with the logic of dreams. They leave an impression of cosmic forces, of streaming light, even while a human hand or arm occasionally emerges from this flux of energy. In the new book, Haller traces the place of Davis in film history, and discusses 44 individual films, as well as presenting several Davis essays that have never been printed before. Copies of the book will be available for sale at the box office, alongside DVDs containing several of the films discussed therein.

PRISMATIC VARIATIONS (1965, 11 min, 16mm, silent)
IN THE BEGINNING (1955, 9 min, 16mm, silent)
COLOR DANCES, NO. 2 (1952, 7.5 min, 16mm, silent)
THE SEA (1950, 8.5 min, 16mm, silent)
IMPULSES (1959, 9.5 min, 16mm)
SEA RHYTHMS (1971, 9.5 min, 16mm, silent)
Total running time: ca. 60 min.

With Al Pacino, John Cazale, Chris Sarandon, Charles Durning, and Carol Kane.
A milestone work in the careers of both Al Pacino and Sidney Lumet, this crime drama is powered by Pierson’s brisk, taut script (for which he was awarded the 1975 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay). The heist plot of bank robbers Sonny (Pacino) and Sal (John Cazale) goes awry when their third accomplice loses his nerve and they discover that they have arrived at the bank after its daily cash pickup. Surrounded by the police, Sonny and Sal’s backstory unfolds at the same time that their precarious situation unravels.

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

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

Robert Downey Sr.
STICKS AND BONES
1973, 105 min, video.
A young soldier blinded in Vietnam is sent home to his unwitting parents. Tensions immediately come to a hilt. They are all victims of the futile war. Produced for CBS by Public Theater founder Joseph Papp and directed by the singular Robert Downey Sr. (PUTNEY SWOPE, GREASER’S PALACE, CHAFED ELBOWS), STICKS AND BONES was adapted from playwright David Rabe’s Tony-award winning play. As claustrophobic as Hitchcock’s LIFEBOAT and as absurd as Buñuel’s THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL, this fantastically acted, genuinely radical interpretation was too much for the network to handle. At first they refused to show it, but eventually relented after criticism from returning veterans. Even though half of CBS’s affiliates would not air it, STICKS AND BONES was eventually broadcast without any commercials one time only, late on a Sunday night – and it has been missing in action ever since. Seen today, it is incredible if not insane to imagine that this aggressively offbeat anti-war parable would have ever been shown on – much less made for – television, especially at a time when there were only a handful of networks. It’s a remarkable piece of television history and a seminal missing link in Downey’s audacious filmography. You won’t find this film on DVD, Blu-ray, YouTube, or online, and it won’t be playing anywhere else in the foreseeable future.

We are thrilled to have Anthology favorite Downey in person for a post-show conversation and Q&A.

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.

NEWFILMMAKERS WELCOMES UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA SCHOOL OF THE ARTS AS PART OF ITS FILM SCHOOL SERIES

FILM SCHOOL SERIES
with University Of North Carolina School of the Arts.

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Gail Thomas and Jim Sapione MY BFF (2012, 12 min, video)
Ruchi Mital RAGA FOR THE LIGHT (2012, 13 min, 8mm)
Nicholas Vafio A COMMON RELATIONSHIP (2012, 30 min, video)

FIRST FEATURE PRESENTATION
Mike Bason
LIFE IS PARALLEL
2012, 62 min, video.
A student filmmaker goes through the trials and tribulations of his senior thesis, while learning that his life on-screen is not so different from the one he leads off-screen.

SECOND FEATURE PRESENTATION
Douglas Brekan
LIGHTHOUSE LANE
2010, 74 min, video.
A 25-year-old college student drops out of Yale after becoming mentally ill. Moving back home with her overbearing mother, she spirals downward in a haze of psychotic delusions and nightmarish hallucinations.

–Wednesday, December 5, Documentary Series at 6:00, Short Film Program at 8:00, First Feature at 9:00, Second Feature at 10:15.

Archival print courtesy of 20th Century-Fox.With Gene Hackman and Fernando Rey.
“In these further adventures of Popeye Doyle…Marseilles, its inhabitants and its ways of life provide the exotic backgrounds and raw materials for the movie’s various specialty numbers, principally chases in which Popeye and his French counterparts attempt to nab drugdom’s Mr. Big, the character played by Fernando Rey, who disappeared at the end of THE FRENCH CONNECTION. […] Popeye is a colorful and interesting – though hardly noble – character, and when the Marseilles drug people kidnap him, forcibly create a heroin habit in him, and then release him, you have a very special kind of jeopardy that the film and Mr. Hackman exploit most effectively.” –Vincent Canby, NEW YORK TIMES

Archival print courtesy of 20th Century-Fox. With Roy Scheider and Tony Lo Bianco.
An elite task force of unapologetically dirty cops finds itself implicated in a string of kidnappings in Philip D’Antoni’s breathless NYC-set thriller. D’Antoni, who produced the Steve McQueen vehicle BULLITT (1968), turns the wheel over to a game Roy Scheider, who is compelling as Buddy Manucci, the Seven-Ups’ besieged leader. It is only appropriate, given D’Antoni’s involvement, that the centerpiece of THE SEVEN-UPS is a car chase along the Hudson River that rivals BULLITT in its exhilarating over-the-top-ness.

The screening on Sat, Dec 1 will be presented by Randy Jurgensen, actor, producer, and ex-police detective (his experiences helped inspire THE FRENCH CONNECTION and CRUISING!). Jurgensen worked on THE SEVEN-UPS and will share his stories about that production and more!

With Al Pacino, John Cazale, Chris Sarandon, Charles Durning, and Carol Kane.
A milestone work in the careers of both Al Pacino and Sidney Lumet, this crime drama is powered by Pierson’s brisk, taut script (for which he was awarded the 1975 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay). The heist plot of bank robbers Sonny (Pacino) and Sal (John Cazale) goes awry when their third accomplice loses his nerve and they discover that they have arrived at the bank after its daily cash pickup. Surrounded by the police, Sonny and Sal’s backstory unfolds at the same time that their precarious situation unravels.

10^TH ANNIVERSARY SCREENING! PRESENTED BY ANDREW BUJALSKI AND LENA DUNHAM!

Anthology celebrates the 10th anniversary of Andrew Bujalski’s seminal film with this special screening of a brand-new 35mm print, presented by Bujalski and his friend Lena Dunham, whose own acclaimed work (TINY FURNITURE, HBO’s GIRLS) demonstrates how influential FUNNY HA HA has been.

“A decade ago, a young director named Andrew Bujalski made one of cinema’s politest call-to-arms with FUNNY HA HA, his generation-defining D.I.Y. debut about post-college indirection. Like Linklater’s SLACKER did for the ’90s, FUNNY HA HA definitively captures aimlessness in the Aughts with humor, compassion, and incisiveness as it follows recent grad Marnie (the luminous Kate Dollenmayer) as she meanders through temp jobs, crushes, and to-do lists. A graduate of Harvard’s hands-on and documentary-heavy film program, with a faculty advisor none other than Chantal Akerman(!), Bujalski’s indisputable film buff cred shines through every warmly rough-hewn frame and naturalistic line of dialogue.” –CINEFAMILY

With Lee Marvin and Jane Fonda.
Silverstein’s comedic western, from a screenplay by Pierson and Walter Newman, stars Lee Marvin in a dual role, as reputed (though hapless) gunslinger Kid Shelleen and hired killer Tim Strawn. Catherine Ballou (Fonda), a schoolteacher, hires Shelleen to protect her rancher father (John Marley) from Strawn; when an apparently washed-up Shelleen fails to prevent the murder of Ballou’s father, he sharpens up in order to help her seek revenge against Strawn. Marvin won an Oscar for his mercurial performance here.

With Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, Keenan Wynn, Carroll O’Connor, and John Vernon.
Double-crossed and left for dead by his partner, a career criminal named Walker (Lee Marvin) seeks revenge and repayment in John Boorman’s iconic, relentlessly stylized crime drama. Jacobs’s script – an adaptation of the first novel in Donald Westlake/Richard Stark’s peerless Parker series – contains just enough gruff repartee and deadpan stoicism to sustain a never-better Marvin and Angie Dickinson (particularly strong as Walker’s in-too-deep sister-in-law). The first film ever to be shot (in part) at Alcatraz, POINT BLANK has remained a stylistic wonder fully deserving of its status as a major point of reference for contemporary action filmmakers.

With Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune.
Boorman, Jacobs, and Marvin reunited for this sparse WWII tale concerning an American and a Japanese soldier (Toshiro Mifune) stranded on an otherwise unpopulated Pacific island who forge an uneasy alliance in the interest of survival. Forgoing subtitles to ratchet up the tension and atmosphere of miscommunication, HELL IN THE PACIFIC continues Boorman and Jacobs’s exploration of desperate masculinity, rendered all the more resonant by Marvin and Mifune’s actually having served in their respective countries’ militaries during the war.

With Al Pacino, John Cazale, Chris Sarandon, Charles Durning, and Carol Kane.
A milestone work in the careers of both Al Pacino and Sidney Lumet, this crime drama is powered by Pierson’s brisk, taut script (for which he was awarded the 1975 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay). The heist plot of bank robbers Sonny (Pacino) and Sal (John Cazale) goes awry when their third accomplice loses his nerve and they discover that they have arrived at the bank after its daily cash pickup. Surrounded by the police, Sonny and Sal’s backstory unfolds at the same time that their precarious situation unravels.

With Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, and Sylvia Miles.
The only X-rated film to win the Oscar for Best Picture, this collaboration between John Schlesinger and Waldo Salt made Jon Voight a star and further elevated Dustin Hoffman’s reputation. A young, naïve Texan (Voight) arrives in Manhattan hoping to make a living as a hustler, though he quickly runs into various obstructions in his efforts to sell himself; he soon hooks up with a vaguely grotesque lumpenprole (Hoffman) who helps him to get ahead in NYC’s underground. This film is unquestionably one of the major zeitgeist pictures of the late 1960s.

With Al Pacino.
Working from Peter Maas’s nonfiction book of the same title and in collaboration with Norman Wexler (who was spotlighted in a previous installment of FROM THE PEN OF…), Salt’s portrait of a plainclothes cop (Pacino) who seeks to expose police corruption within the NYPD and finds his life threatened as a result is at once an evocative document of its time (Pacino’s wardrobe! His Minetta St. apartment!) and an absorbing, paranoiac thriller. Amongst Lumet’s very best, and a quintessential NYC film to boot.

Script by Carl Meyer based on the story “A Trip to Tilsit” by Herman Sudermann. Photographed by Charles Rosher and Karl Strauss. With George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor.
Murnau’s first American film is an allegory set in no particular time or place, about a man who is temporarily overruled by his passions, inflamed by the power of evil as personified by the city woman, and who finally returns to his senses and the orderly family life of the country. It is a virtuoso exercise representing the expressiveness of the silent film as it neared its end.

With Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, and Sylvia Miles.
The only X-rated film to win the Oscar for Best Picture, this collaboration between John Schlesinger and Waldo Salt made Jon Voight a star and further elevated Dustin Hoffman’s reputation. A young, naïve Texan (Voight) arrives in Manhattan hoping to make a living as a hustler, though he quickly runs into various obstructions in his efforts to sell himself; he soon hooks up with a vaguely grotesque lumpenprole (Hoffman) who helps him to get ahead in NYC’s underground. This film is unquestionably one of the major zeitgeist pictures of the late 1960s.

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.

SPECIAL PREVIEW SCREENING! FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
NOBUHIKO OBAYASHI: EARLY EXPERIMENTAL FILMS
Anthology Film Archives presents a special event featuring a selection of shorts by Nobuhiko Obayashi, one of the leading figures of Japan’s alternative cinema. Recently receiving attention for the re-release of his studio debut HOUSE (1977), Obayashi’s early experimental films range in tone from melodrama to comedy and vary in style from the emotionally hyperbolic to the formally audacious. A pioneer of ‘home movies’ in Japan, Obayashi formed film collectives with Takahiko Iimura and Yoichi Takabayashi, namely the Association of Three (Sannin no Kai) and the Film Independents, and went on to direct youth dramas co-produced by the Art Theatre Guild, some titles of which will be screened as part of the ATG AND JAPANESE UNDERGROUND CINEMA series at MoMA (December 7-February 10, 2013). Shot in 8mm and 16mm, the films in this program display a playful hand-made sensitivity and light-hearted exuberance that has been retained in his more recent feature-length productions.

The screening is a preview event in anticipation of a comprehensive survey of Japanese experimental cinema from the 1960s and 1970s, coming to Anthology in February 2013: RITUALS IN THE AVANT-GARDE: FILM EXPERIMENTS IN 1960s-70s JAPAN.

Obayashi will be here in person to present and discuss the program!

Curated by Go Hirasawa and Julian Ross; and co-organized by the Japan Foundation.

Very special thanks to Joshua Siegel (MoMA), Roland Domenig (University of Vienna), Kyoko Obayashi & Takehito Moriizumi (PSC), and MM Serra (Film-Makers’ Coop).

DANDANKO (1960, 11 min, 8mm-to-digital, b&w. Co-directed by Akira Hirata.)
THURSDAY / MOKUYOBI (1961, 19 min, 8mm-to-digital, b&w)
AN EATER / TABETA HITO (1963, 23 min, 16mm, b&w. Co-directed by Kazutomo Fujino)
COMPLEXE (1964, 15 min, 16mm, b&w)
Total running time: ca. 75 min.

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

With Al Pacino.
Working from Peter Maas’s nonfiction book of the same title and in collaboration with Norman Wexler (who was spotlighted in a previous installment of FROM THE PEN OF…), Salt’s portrait of a plainclothes cop (Pacino) who seeks to expose police corruption within the NYPD and finds his life threatened as a result is at once an evocative document of its time (Pacino’s wardrobe! His Minetta St. apartment!) and an absorbing, paranoiac thriller. Amongst Lumet’s very best, and a quintessential NYC film to boot.

With Jon Voight, Jane Fonda, and Bruce Dern.
A marine’s wife (Fonda) falls for a paraplegic, antiwar veteran (Voight) while her husband (Dern) is serving abroad in Ashby’s seminal Vietnam drama, notable for its fearless portrayal of a sexual relationship between an able-bodied woman and a disabled man. Winning Oscars for Best Actor (Voight), Best Actress (Fonda), and Best Original Screenplay (Salt, Robert C. Jones, and Nancy Dowd), COMING HOME remains a swirling cauldron of timely emotions and sentiments, sensitively rendered by Ashby and cinematographer Haskell Wexler.

NEWFILMMAKERS PRESENTS A DOUBLE FEATURE

DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Saman Maydani HACK (2011, 20 min, video)
Nathaniel Flynn-Ryan FACTORY OF ONE (2012, 58 min, video)

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Kyra Nicole Rogers THE HIPSTER PARADOX (2012, 13 min, video)
Bryce Prevatte HIPSTER TREATMENT (2010, 14 min, video)

FIRST FEATURE PRESENTATION
Chris Ernst
IN CARCOSA
2012, 90 min, video.
A no-budget, quasi sci-fi, surrealist-psychonautic, character-study, urban ‘space’ operetta feature film.

SECOND FEATURE PRESENTATION
David F. Morgan
CITY BABY
2012, 86 min, video.
Two Portland party girls live fast as they blunder through extreme love affairs and meandering career aspirations, always on the lookout for the next greener pasture.

–Tuesday, December 11, Documentary Series at 6:00, Short Film Program at 7:45, First Feature at 8:30, Second Feature at 10:15.

The film features the three actors Alexandra Dahlström, Elizabeth Whitney and Lea Robinson, who meet at a theater in Croton Falls, New York to participate in a 10-day workshop, a feminist experiment, based on August Strindberg’s famous play Miss Julie. Their mission is to save Strindberg’s main character from the scripted suicide. 
 
The screening will be followed by a short talk with director Fia-Stina Sandlund and actors Lea Robinson and Elizabeth Whitney, moderated by writer/director Sarah Gyllenstierna.
  
The event is supported by the Consulate General of Sweden. 

For more information about the screening, please visit:http://www.swedenabroad.com/en-GB/Embassies/New-York/Current-affairs/News/Screening-of-Shes-Staging-It-sys/

Pick up your free ticket at the box office before the screening
Box office opens at 6 pm

NEWFILMMAKERS PRESENTS OUR ANNUAL CHRISTMAS SHOW

SPECIAL PROGRAM
Short Experimental Documentaries; curated by Tova Beck-Friedman.
Ken Paul Rosenthal CROOKED BEAUTY (20 min)
Neil Ira Needleman VISION OF WASTED TIME (5 min)
Neil Ira Needleman TWO JOURNEYS (5 min)
Dorit Weisman GOOD MORNING (3 min)
Iva Radivojevic GAWKING REG (4 min)
Lindsay McIntyre WHERE SHE STOOD IN THE FIRST PLACE (10 min)
Jayne Wilson ALL THAT MIGHTY HEART (10 min)

FIRST SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Deirdre Vertucci THE TALE OF PARIS ECHO GOLD (2012, 7 min, video)
Mekki Leeper CHRISTMAS IN SUMMER (2012, 10 min, video)
Jack McCabe CHRISTMAS EVE AT MCTAVISH’S (2011, 17 min, video)

SECOND SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Kantarama Gahigiri THE ELEVATOR (2011, 7 min, video)
Anthony Tocchio CANDYMAN (2011, 7 min, video)
Douglas Horn COFFEE & PIE (2011, 16 min, video)
Michael Rose PARTY ON THE 49TH FLOOR (2012, 24 min, video)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Jesse Wolfe
EYE OF THE HURRICANE
2011, 104 min, video.
Tells the story of a small Everglades community struggling to put their lives back together in the wake of a devastating hurricane.

–Wednesday, December 12, Documentary Series at 6:00, First Short Film Program at 7:15, Second Short Film Program at 8:15, Feature Presentation at 9:30.

SINGLE FRAME: JUDSON DANCE THEATER IN CONTEXT 1963-1965
A SLIDE LECTURE BY BARBARA MOORE
Judson Dance Theater is renowned as the seedbed of post-modern dance. The performances and activity that transpired, however, encompassed a wide variety of creative personalities and styles. Non-dancers such as visual artists and musicians were an influential, integrated contingent, and active collaborators with trained dancers and each other. Audiences in the close-knit art scene, much smaller and more geographically cohesive than it is today, also represented a diverse cross-section of New York’s creative communities.
This slide lecture, composed of historic photographs by Peter Moore, mines his remarkable archive for evidence of this inter-connectedness both within Judson Dance Theater itself and in relation to various artistic practices outside of the group proper.
Barbara Moore is an art historian, writer, and manager/curator of the Peter Moore Archive. From the beginning she collaborated on organizing the performance component of the archive – now celebrating its 50th anniversary parallel to that of JDT – and created its extensive accompanying research files. She is currently writing a book titled OBSERVING THE AVANT-GARDE: PETER MOORE AND THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF PERFORMANCE.

With Denholm Elliott.

“[A] dark tale of an American expatriate pimp, based on a novel by Paul Theroux and shot entirely on location in Singapore. Gazzara is simply mesmerizing as Jack Flowers, the perennial operator determined to set up a business of his own gradually realizing that his territory and way of life are being challenged. An unexpectedly touching and revealing character study, SAINT JACK contrasts its tale of redemption and morality against the lurid backdrop of the Singapore underworld.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

UNESSENTIAL CINEMA PRESENTS: WILL WONDERS NEVER CEASE?
Anthology’s archive crew breaks out of the vault tonight for a jam-packed exposé of recently recovered celluloid gems and newly digitized videos from ancient formats. The works in this program haven’t been seen in decades, if ever, and are guaranteed to pique curiosity. All of the selections come straight to you from our deepest, darkest shelves and overflowing hard drives. So that our overworked staff does not have to make all the decisions, the audience will have a hand in selecting what works we will screen. We could list some potential titles, but that would be cheating. Come prepared to discover something completely unexpected.

This screening will be free for AFA members!

With Pat Hingle.

Gazzara as Cadet Staff Sergeant Jocko DeParis, the sadistic big man on campus at a fictitious military academy in the South. When DeParis is instrumental in the frame-up and expulsion of a classmate, two freshmen aim to end his Caligula-like reign. A tense parable about power and tyranny, this film is particularly notable for its treatment of hazing and homosexuality despite the Hayes Code’s strict regulation of the content of Hollywood productions.

With Audrey Hepburn and John Ritter. Courtesy of Home Box Office.

This mash-up of the romantic comedy and private eye genres, in which a pair of private detectives fall in love with the women they’re hired to follow, is a tribute to the classical Hollywood cinema Bogdanovich knew and loved so well, a beautifully photographed valentine to Manhattan (shot by the legendary DP Robby Müller), and a bittersweet meditation on love and its disappointments. For Gazzara it had a special significance, since it paired him with Audrey Hepburn, with whom he had recently been involved in a short-lived but heartfelt affair.

MOVIES FROM THE MULTIVERSE: FILMS BY TARA AND GORDON NELSON
Filmmaking spouses Tara and Gordon Nelson present an extensive selection of their Super-8mm and 16mm films, in a program that encompasses quadruple projections, sound performances, live editing, audience interaction, found-footage dance parties, and other extraterrestrial surprises. Hailing from the celluloid paradise of Pittsburgh, and currently residing in Boston, they have created a body of work, both separately and together, that explores the many ways in which Super-8mm and 16mm film can document, manipulate, and transfigure reality. Given their embrace of performance and happenstance, no two shows are ever alike – prepare to be dazzled!

Tara and Gordon Nelson NOISOLPMI (2009, 5 min, 16mm, b&w, live sound)
Drama in the streets of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Tara Nelson IN CHINA (2012, 10 min, Super-8mm)
A travel diary on 2 projectors, with live sound from a Buddhist ‘chant box’ that is passed through the audience. The overlapping images are edited ‘live’ using Chinese fans as external shutters.

Tara Nelson SNOW (2010, 7 min, Super-8mm, b&w)
I was unexpectedly hospitalized after a surgery disaster in December 2009. This footage was shot under the influence of painkillers. It is hand-processed and hand-scratched.

Tara Nelson FLYING FISH (2012, 7 min, Super-8mm, silent)
“When the new is given birth, the light is brought to Earth. The energy of the cosmos becomes visible through human life and deeds, and that energy impregnates all with its divine quality. The creation which takes place in darkness and stillness will emerge and spread the divine, the light, sharing it once again with the mother who gave it birth.” –The Tarot, Princess of Disks

Gordon Nelson UNTIED FORCES (2010, 3 min, 16mm, double-system sound)
A surreal film about cosmic alignments and tenuous relationships among cattle, a cat, soldiers, and a bit of witchcraft. 16mm hand-processed footage combined with animation. Music composed and performed by GN.

Gordon Nelson FEATHER (2008, 4 min, Super-8mm)
Pittsburgh in wintertime, carousels, and scraps from the cutting-room floor.

Tara Nelson HULL (2011, 8 min, 16mm)
A journey between layers of corporal consciousness, HULL explores the physical memory of trauma, and the psychological repercussions of a surgical disaster.

Gordon Nelson SIXTIES TEEN DANCE PARTY (2001, 12 min, 16mm, b&w, live sound)
Found footage by an anonymous filmmaker of a wild dance party circa 1965 suspended in time.

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

With Ornella Muti and Susan Tyrrell.

This adaptation of Charles Bukowski’s best-known collection of short stories stars Gazzara as the author’s onscreen surrogate, Charles Serking, a hard-drinking poet with libido to spare. Of all the actors who portrayed Bukowski’s protagonists – that is to say, himself in various guises – it was Gazzara who best captured his singular cocktail of compassion and combustibility.

New York Film/Video Council presents:

This holiday season (being 1969) Henry Fonda would like to remind you to contribute to help the neediest. James Coburn would like to, as well. RCA has some holiday greetings for you, as does the management of this theater, and your church. Plus previews of coming attractions from Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Woody Allen, and an advance look of a major studios new slate of releases for 1985. All projected on 35mm, with some sacrilege thrown in for good measure. Program approx. 60 minutes.

map here

Free for members! Just email NYFVCrsvp@gmail.com
Invite your friends!

$10 for non-members, buy your ticket here

Filmed 1964-68; edited 1968-69. “Since 1950 I have been keeping a film diary. I have been walking around with my Bolex and reacting to the immediate reality: situations, friends, New York, seasons of the year. On some days I shot ten frames, on others ten seconds, still on others ten minutes. Or I shot nothing. When one writes diaries, it’s a retrospective process: you sit down, you look back at your day, and you write it all down. To keep a film (camera) diary, is to react (with your camera) immediately, now, this instant: either you get it now, or you don’t get it at all.” –J.M.
“I make home movies – therefore I live. I live – therefore I make home movies.” –from the soundtrack.

With John Cassavetes and Peter Falk.

Arguably Gazzara and Cassavetes’s greatest collaboration, this film follows three friends (Gazzara, Cassavetes, and Falk) who, following the death of their fourth wheel, go on a two-day bender that sends each of their respective lives into psychodramatic tailspins. A hangout film teeming with self-critical machismo and happy accidents, HUSBANDS is the ultimate distillation of Gazzara and Cassavetes’s tandem style.

The Literati Film Festival presents a collection of thought-provoking works from around the world. It is an international showcase of films rarely seen, bizarre, and sublime. Our focus is finding artists working with the moving image who make work both emotional and challenging, taking the viewer to a place unknown. Artists include Phil Solomon, Ben Russell, Alex McLeod, Robert Todd, and many more. The LFF is a night of films that quicken the heart and mystify the senses.

For more info, visit: http://literatifilmfestival.com/

With Seymour Cassel and Timothy Carey.

“[F]ollows Cosmo Vitelli (Gazzara at his very best), the charismatic owner of an LA strip joint – simultaneously an asshole and a saint – who recklessly gambles his way into debt and has to bump off a Chinese bookie to settle his accounts. In many respects the film serves as a personal testament; what makes the tragicomic character of Cosmo so moving is its alter-ego relation to the filmmaker – the proud impresario and father figure of a tattered showbiz collective (read Cassavetes’s actors and filmmaking crew) who must compromise his ethics to keep his little family afloat (read Cassavetes’s career as a Hollywood actor).” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from The Film Foundation. Special thanks to Cineric, Inc., and Trackwise.
“The film consists of four parts. The first part contains some footage from my first years in America, 1949-52. The second part was shot in August 1971 in Lithuania. The third part is in Elmshorn, near Hamburg, where I spent eight months in a forced labor camp. The fourth part is in Vienna (1971) with Peter Kubelka, Nitsch, Annette Michelson, Ken Jacobs, etc. The film deals with home, memory, and culture.” –J.M.

With James Stewart, Lee Remick, Joseph Welch, and George C. Scott.

“[A] prime contender for Preminger’s greatest film. … James Stewart plays a small-town Michigan lawyer asked to defend an army lieutenant (Gazzara) on a charge of murdering a local businessman who allegedly raped his flirtatious wife (Lee Remick); Boston lawyer Joseph Welch (of the Army-McCarthy hearings), in his only screen performance, plays the judge; and George C. Scott is a lawyer working for the prosecution.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

Archival print courtesy of 20th Century-Fox. With Harry Guardino, Susan Blakely, Sylvester Stallone, and John Cassavetes.

Produced by Roger Corman, this take on the Al Capone story is rarely screened, despite a commanding lead performance by Gazzara, and a supporting cast that includes Sylvester Stallone and John Cassavetes (together at last!). Charting Capone’s ascension to the top of the Chicago underworld, and his subsequent fall from power, it’s a brutal, efficient, unpretentious piece of work, and a fine showcase for Gazzara.

With Frederic March.

Veteran pathologist Dr. Joseph Pearson (March) clashes with up-and-comer Dr. David Coleman (Gazzara) when the nurse for whom Coleman has fallen develops a tumor in her knee that Pearson diagnoses as malignant and recommends to be amputated. They then butt heads over an expectant mother whose baby might have hemolytic disease, pushing their antagonism to its breaking point.

NEW YORK PREMIERE!

“When Danièle Hibon, curator of the Musée du Jeu de Paume, asked Jonas Mekas to contribute to a celebration of 20 years of cinema in her museum, [he] assembled footage of Paris he’d shot over the years into a tribute to the City of Light. Tangled in this maze of inspiring images is a journey through the artist’s inspired imaginary world. Both diary and love letter, in the spirit of Gertrude Stein and Hemingway, MY PARIS MOVIE is a funny and moving stroll through the memories of a man whose entire life seems guided by generosity, friendship, and freedom.” –Helen Faradji, MONTRÉAL FESTIVAL DU NOUVEAU CINEMA

With Audrey Hepburn and John Ritter. Courtesy of Home Box Office.

This mash-up of the romantic comedy and private eye genres, in which a pair of private detectives fall in love with the women they’re hired to follow, is a tribute to the classical Hollywood cinema Bogdanovich knew and loved so well, a beautifully photographed valentine to Manhattan (shot by the legendary DP Robby Müller), and a bittersweet meditation on love and its disappointments. For Gazzara it had a special significance, since it paired him with Audrey Hepburn, with whom he had recently been involved in a short-lived but heartfelt affair.

With Ornella Muti and Susan Tyrrell.

This adaptation of Charles Bukowski’s best-known collection of short stories stars Gazzara as the author’s onscreen surrogate, Charles Serking, a hard-drinking poet with libido to spare. Of all the actors who portrayed Bukowski’s protagonists – that is to say, himself in various guises – it was Gazzara who best captured his singular cocktail of compassion and combustibility.

“Both a simply happy and a profoundly ecstatic film. There is an undercurrent of domestic tranquility, of people who are at home with each other. […] The film begins with the title “He stands in a desert counting the seconds of his life”; it ends with the title repeated in the past tense: “He stood in the desert…” This is in effect a double past tense, achievable only at the film’s end: the filmmaker remembering himself remembering the past. For a film of memories, [it] is amazingly devoid of easy sentimentality, perhaps because Mekas has chosen to remember his past not in the long years recalled by an aching, ill-defined nostalgia but in the intense seconds of ecstasy.” –Fred Camper, SENSES OF CINEMA

Introduced by Tony Conrad!

With Denholm Elliott.

“[A] dark tale of an American expatriate pimp, based on a novel by Paul Theroux and shot entirely on location in Singapore. Gazzara is simply mesmerizing as Jack Flowers, the perennial operator determined to set up a business of his own gradually realizing that his territory and way of life are being challenged. An unexpectedly touching and revealing character study, SAINT JACK contrasts its tale of redemption and morality against the lurid backdrop of the Singapore underworld.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

With Pat Hingle.

Gazzara as Cadet Staff Sergeant Jocko DeParis, the sadistic big man on campus at a fictitious military academy in the South. When DeParis is instrumental in the frame-up and expulsion of a classmate, two freshmen aim to end his Caligula-like reign. A tense parable about power and tyranny, this film is particularly notable for its treatment of hazing and homosexuality despite the Hayes Code’s strict regulation of the content of Hollywood productions.

Preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation.

“No figure appears more firmly rooted in both the American avant-garde and downtown New York than Jonas Mekas…. Yet LOST LOST LOST, his…three-hour diary collage, tells a very different story, one of exile, displacement, and longing. It was completed in 1976 out of footage shot during an almost 15-year span, from his arrival in New York in 1949 (as a postwar Lithuanian refugee) to his engagement with the budding independent film scene of the early ‘60s. […] These are gnomic records of self-discovery, sealed in celluloid amber by their very act of creation. But this potently intimate epic transcends mere personal record to tap a universal sentiment. A photographic Homer of his own odyssey, Mekas journeys – like us all – in irrevocable exile from his own past, attempting to reconstruct that invisible nation of youth to which he can never return.” –Ed Halter, VILLAGE VOICE

Introduced by Amy Taubin!

With John Cassavetes and Peter Falk.

Arguably Gazzara and Cassavetes’s greatest collaboration, this film follows three friends (Gazzara, Cassavetes, and Falk) who, following the death of their fourth wheel, go on a two-day bender that sends each of their respective lives into psychodramatic tailspins. A hangout film teeming with self-critical machismo and happy accidents, HUSBANDS is the ultimate distillation of Gazzara and Cassavetes’s tandem style.

Archival print courtesy of 20th Century-Fox. With Harry Guardino, Susan Blakely, Sylvester Stallone, and John Cassavetes.

Produced by Roger Corman, this take on the Al Capone story is rarely screened, despite a commanding lead performance by Gazzara, and a supporting cast that includes Sylvester Stallone and John Cassavetes (together at last!). Charting Capone’s ascension to the top of the Chicago underworld, and his subsequent fall from power, it’s a brutal, efficient, unpretentious piece of work, and a fine showcase for Gazzara.

A selection of short pieces from Mekas’s website – brief, poetic glimpses of his daily life, friendships, and captured moments – these works reflect his perpetual, compulsive image-making, and his unhesitating embrace of new media and new modes of exhibition, and new technologies.

Introduced by Ken Jacobs!

This program features selections of the short digital films Mekas posted daily throughout 2007. Combining brand-new footage with older material unearthed and made public for the first time, the 365 Day project was both a bold leap into the digital world for Mekas and a natural extension of the approach to cinema – small-scale, intimate, and direct – that he had been practicing in his diary films for decades.
Total running time: 137 min.

Introduced by Ken Jacobs!

With Seymour Cassel and Timothy Carey.

“[F]ollows Cosmo Vitelli (Gazzara at his very best), the charismatic owner of an LA strip joint – simultaneously an asshole and a saint – who recklessly gambles his way into debt and has to bump off a Chinese bookie to settle his accounts. In many respects the film serves as a personal testament; what makes the tragicomic character of Cosmo so moving is its alter-ego relation to the filmmaker – the proud impresario and father figure of a tattered showbiz collective (read Cassavetes’s actors and filmmaking crew) who must compromise his ethics to keep his little family afloat (read Cassavetes’s career as a Hollywood actor).” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

(aka OONA’S THIRD YEAR)

“The film is…constructed as a letter to [Jonas’s daughter] Oona, “to serve her, some day, as a distant reminder of how the world around her looked during the third year of her life.” […] The title, PARADISE NOT YET LOST, suggests that through Oona and the growth of his family, Mekas finds some hope of redemption. To that end, Mekas passes on some of the lessons he’s learned to his daughter: “I’m talking to you, Oona. Be idealistic, don’t be practical. Seek the insignificant small but essential qualities, essential to life.” […]
As we live after the Fall (and for Mekas, the devastating Fall occurred when he was forced to leave Lithuania), we can only catch glimpses of Paradise, in fragments. Mekas’ great accomplishment, then, is to persist in filming Paradise wherever he can, despite the darkness and struggle that surrounds him.” –Genevieve Yue, SENSES OF CINEMA

CATALYSTS (or, EXPOUNDED CINEMA) PRESENTS:
Bradley Eros & Jeanne Liotta’s DERVISH MACHINE – 20TH ANNIVERSARY EVENT!
CATALYSTS is a new series wherein avant-garde filmmakers reveal the secret sources and inspirations for a specific film from their body of work by a show-and-tell presentation through readings, films, music, images, dreams, documents, private tales, or exhibits demonstrating the roots and branches of experimental personal cinema: Exegesis by demo. Experience the cultural and personal artifacts that influenced the works and unravel the process from initiation to completion of the creative dynamics that form a work of film art.

Each invited artist will be asked to develop and deliver a presentation that gives the audience insight into their original research on the personal, cultural, or historical source materials of the particular film being discussed. Each work chosen shall be rich in hybrid sources for a complex mixture of influences & inspirations.

Curated by Bradley Eros.

Bradley Eros & Jeanne Liotta
DERVISH MACHINE
1992, 10 min, Super 8-to-16mm.
Hand-developed meditations on being and movement, as inspired by Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine, Sufi mysticism, and early cinema. A knowledge of the fragility of existence mirrors the tenuousness of the material. The film itself becomes the site to experience impermanence, and to revel in the unfixed image.
To celebrate the anniversary of their 1992 collaborative collage film, Eros and Liotta will perform an extended exegesis of DERVISH MACHINE’s creative process by exploring the secret sources and influences that contributed to this work: films, clips, texts, sounds, and actions will be revealed in concert & context with the film itself.

IN BETWEEN: 1964-68
1978, 52 min, 16mm.
“Filmed in 1964-68. Edited in 1978. The material for this film is footage that didn’t find a place in the WALDEN reels. Some of it begins in between LOST, LOST, LOST and WALDEN. It’s mostly New York, and some travel footage. The City friends: Richard Foreman, Amy Taubin, Mel Lyman, Peter Beard, David Wise, Andrew Meyer, Salvador Dali, Jerome Hill, David Stone and Barbara Stone, my brother Adolfas filming DOUBLE BARRELLED DETECTIVE STORY, Diane di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Ed Sanders, Gordon Ball, Henry Romney, Jack Smith, Shirley Clarke, Louis Brigante, Jane Holzer, etc. etc.” –J.M.
&
MYSTERIES
1966/2002, 34 min, 16mm.
A document of a Living Theater performance in Cassis, France, this piece was filmed in 1966 but only edited and released in 2002, with a newly commissioned score by Philip Glass.

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

With James Stewart, Lee Remick, Joseph Welch, and George C. Scott.

“[A] prime contender for Preminger’s greatest film. … James Stewart plays a small-town Michigan lawyer asked to defend an army lieutenant (Gazzara) on a charge of murdering a local businessman who allegedly raped his flirtatious wife (Lee Remick); Boston lawyer Joseph Welch (of the Army-McCarthy hearings), in his only screen performance, plays the judge; and George C. Scott is a lawyer working for the prosecution.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

SCENES FROM ALLEN’S LAST THREE DAYS ON EARTH AS A SPIRIT
1997, 67 min, video.
“This is a video record of the Buddhist Wake ceremony at Allen Ginsberg’s apartment. You see Allen, now asleep forever, in his bed; some of his close friends; and the wrapping up and removal of Allen’s body from the apartment. You hear Jonas’s description of his last conversation with Allen, three days earlier. You see the final farewell at the Buddhist temple, 118 West 22nd Street, New York City, and some of his close friends: Patti Smith, Gregory Corso, LeRoi Jones-Baraka, Hiro Yamagata, Anne Waldman, and many others.” –J.M.
&
ON MY WAY TO FUJIYAMA (1995, 25 min, 16mm)
“A Bolex record of my journey through Japan in 1995, from all the way South to all the way North, with some of my good Japanese friends. After I finished it, I looked at it, and I didn’t like it and decided to keep it on the shelf. This is the first screening of this film since its completion in 1995. I will have another look at it myself.” –J.M.

NEW YORK PREMIERE!

“When Danièle Hibon, curator of the Musée du Jeu de Paume, asked Jonas Mekas to contribute to a celebration of 20 years of cinema in her museum, [he] assembled footage of Paris he’d shot over the years into a tribute to the City of Light. Tangled in this maze of inspiring images is a journey through the artist’s inspired imaginary world. Both diary and love letter, in the spirit of Gertrude Stein and Hemingway, MY PARIS MOVIE is a funny and moving stroll through the memories of a man whose entire life seems guided by generosity, friendship, and freedom.” –Helen Faradji, MONTRÉAL FESTIVAL DU NOUVEAU CINEMA

With Pat Hingle.

Gazzara as Cadet Staff Sergeant Jocko DeParis, the sadistic big man on campus at a fictitious military academy in the South. When DeParis is instrumental in the frame-up and expulsion of a classmate, two freshmen aim to end his Caligula-like reign. A tense parable about power and tyranny, this film is particularly notable for its treatment of hazing and homosexuality despite the Hayes Code’s strict regulation of the content of Hollywood productions.

With Ornella Muti and Susan Tyrrell.

This adaptation of Charles Bukowski’s best-known collection of short stories stars Gazzara as the author’s onscreen surrogate, Charles Serking, a hard-drinking poet with libido to spare. Of all the actors who portrayed Bukowski’s protagonists – that is to say, himself in various guises – it was Gazzara who best captured his singular cocktail of compassion and combustibility.

“I originally met Martin Scorsese when he was still a film student at the New York University. He used to come to my film screenings. But our real friendship began when he made his first feature film, WHO’S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR. I was asked to make a film about Marty to introduce a retrospective of his films. As it happened, Marty was shooting THE DEPARTED at that time. I asked him if I could follow him for a week or two, and he said yes. So that’s how this film happened. It’s a chamber kind of movie, a personal tribute to a friend.” –J.M.

With John Cassavetes and Peter Falk.

Arguably Gazzara and Cassavetes’s greatest collaboration, this film follows three friends (Gazzara, Cassavetes, and Falk) who, following the death of their fourth wheel, go on a two-day bender that sends each of their respective lives into psychodramatic tailspins. A hangout film teeming with self-critical machismo and happy accidents, HUSBANDS is the ultimate distillation of Gazzara and Cassavetes’s tandem style.

“1963 saw the controversial off-Broadway theater production THE BRIG by THE LIVING THEATRE. Filmed on stage with the original cast, rarely has there been a more intense cinematic adaptation of a play. Executed with brutish authenticity, THE BRIG won the Venice Festival Grand Prize for best documentary. A polemic drama with sonic shock waves, it is a nightmare that suggests ‘Kafka with a Kodak.’ The audience is placed in a violently claustrophobic environment, a Marine Corps stockade. Mekas puts aside his poetic sensibilities and ties us to a chair in the blistering sun with no water, no hope, and no mercy. This film is hard as nails.” –MELBOURNE UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL

Followed by:
Storm De Hirsch
NEWSREEL: JONAS IN THE BRIG
1964, 5 min, 16mm. Preserved with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Poet/Filmmaker Storm De Hirsch was on-hand to document Mekas as he threw himself into the filming of THE BRIG. This gorgeous print was recently preserved by Anthology.

Piano: Auguste Varkalis.

“My film diaries 1970-1999. It covers my marriage, children are born, you see them growing up. Footage of daily life, fragments of happiness and beauty, trips to France, Italy, Spain, Austria. Seasons of the year as they pass through New York. Friends, home life, nature. Nothing extraordinary, nothing special, things that we all experience as we go through our lives. There are many inter-titles that reflect my thoughts of the period. … The film is also my love poem to New York, its summers, its winters, streets, parks. It’s the ultimate Dogma ‘95 movie, before the birth of Dogma.”  –J.M.

Introduced by P. Adams Sitney!

With Seymour Cassel and Timothy Carey.

“[F]ollows Cosmo Vitelli (Gazzara at his very best), the charismatic owner of an LA strip joint – simultaneously an asshole and a saint – who recklessly gambles his way into debt and has to bump off a Chinese bookie to settle his accounts. In many respects the film serves as a personal testament; what makes the tragicomic character of Cosmo so moving is its alter-ego relation to the filmmaker – the proud impresario and father figure of a tattered showbiz collective (read Cassavetes’s actors and filmmaking crew) who must compromise his ethics to keep his little family afloat (read Cassavetes’s career as a Hollywood actor).” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

With Frederic March.

Veteran pathologist Dr. Joseph Pearson (March) clashes with up-and-comer Dr. David Coleman (Gazzara) when the nurse for whom Coleman has fallen develops a tumor in her knee that Pearson diagnoses as malignant and recommends to be amputated. They then butt heads over an expectant mother whose baby might have hemolytic disease, pushing their antagonism to its breaking point.