Anthology Film Archives

DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Kryssa Schemmerling
OUR HAWAII
2010, 58 minutes, video.

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Paige Campbell REFLECT (2010, 6 minutes, video)
Rob Malone PUPPY WHITE (2010, 26 minutes, video)
Andrew Greer MR WHO? (2010, 27 minutes, video)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Ryan Balas
EVERYONE SAYS I LOOK JUST LIKE HER
2009, 85 minutes, video.

–Friday, April 1, Documentary Series at 6:00, Short Film Program at 7:15, and Feature Presentation at 8:30.

NEWLY PRESERVED!

WE IMITATE; WE BREAK-UP (1978, 30 minutes, Super-8-to-16mm blow-up)
Preserved by the Moving Image Archiving Program at NYU with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
“If Beckman’s narratives are often cryptic, her work is preoccupied by a recurring core of themes – competition, role-playing, and what she calls ‘the coordination of the self in the physical world’. In virtually every one of her movies some young (usually female) individual learns, through trial and error, how to act in (or upon) the world. In WE IMITATE a set of life-sized marionette legs teach the filmmaker/protagonist how to dance and play a version of soccer, and then chase her all over the lot when she runs away with the ‘loot’.” –J. Hoberman

THE BROKEN RULE (1979, 25 minutes, Super-8-to-16mm blow-up)
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Starring artists Mike Kelley, Matt Mullican, James Welling, and others.
“Utilizing television-commercial stereotypes of women as either laundresses or cheerleaders and of men as engaged either in sports or commerce (or both) Beckman creates an ideological satire on sexism and American capitalism. Riveting in its choreography of space and rhythm, THE BROKEN RULE is a sort of Marxist musical. Oddly suggestive of Tashlin, the film is constructed with the precision of an animated work, and with the formal humor of a George Landow.” –Bruce Jenkins, MEDIA STUDY MAGAZINE

OUT OF HAND (1981, 30 minutes, Super-8-to-16mm blow-up)
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
“Singsong voice tracks, jerky robot motions, repetitive gestures, and the iconic use of sports equipment and cheerleaders characterize Beckman’s mise-en-scene. Beckman frequently links her work to Piaget but, with its obsessive images of property and loss, OUT OF HAND is an Allstate Insurance commercial as it might appear to an autistic child.” –J. Hoberman

Total running time: ca. 90 minutes.

Ron Rice
CHUMLUM (1964, 23 min, 16mm)
With Jack Smith, Mario Montez, Gerard Malanga.
“One of the underground’s best and most influential films.” –Peter Gidal

Hans Richter
RHYTHMUS 21 (1921, 3 min, 16mm, b&w, silent)
“Its content is essentially rhythm, the formal vocabulary is elemental geometry, and the structural principle is counterpoint of contrasting opposites.” –Standish Lawder
EVERYTHING REVOLVES, EVERYTHING TURNS / ALLES DREHT SICH, ALLES BEWEGT SICH (1929, 9 min, 16mm, b&w)

Paul Sharits
N:O:T:H:I:N:G (1968, 36 min, 16mm)
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
“Based in part on the Tibetan Mandala of the Five Dhyani Buddhas/a journey toward the center of pure consciousness (Dharma-Dhatu Wisdom)/space and motion generated rather than illustrated/time-color energy create virtual shape/in negative time, growth is inverse decay.” –P.S.
“In essence there are only three flicker films of importance, ARNULF RAINER, THE FLICKER, and N:O:T:H:I:N:G… In terms of the subject we have discussed here, it is Sharits’ N:O:T:H:I:N:G that opens the field for the structural film with a flicker base.” –P. Adams Sitney
T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1969, 12 min, 16mm)
Newly preserved print!
Starring poet David Franks whose voice appears on the soundtrack/an uncutting and unscratching mandala.
“Merges violence with purity.”  –P. Adams Sitney
“Surrealist tour de force.” –Parker Tyler

Total running time: ca. 90 min.

NEWLY PRESERVED!

WE IMITATE; WE BREAK-UP (1978, 30 minutes, Super-8-to-16mm blow-up)
Preserved by the Moving Image Archiving Program at NYU with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
“If Beckman’s narratives are often cryptic, her work is preoccupied by a recurring core of themes – competition, role-playing, and what she calls ‘the coordination of the self in the physical world’. In virtually every one of her movies some young (usually female) individual learns, through trial and error, how to act in (or upon) the world. In WE IMITATE a set of life-sized marionette legs teach the filmmaker/protagonist how to dance and play a version of soccer, and then chase her all over the lot when she runs away with the ‘loot’.” –J. Hoberman

THE BROKEN RULE (1979, 25 minutes, Super-8-to-16mm blow-up)
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Starring artists Mike Kelley, Matt Mullican, James Welling, and others.
“Utilizing television-commercial stereotypes of women as either laundresses or cheerleaders and of men as engaged either in sports or commerce (or both) Beckman creates an ideological satire on sexism and American capitalism. Riveting in its choreography of space and rhythm, THE BROKEN RULE is a sort of Marxist musical. Oddly suggestive of Tashlin, the film is constructed with the precision of an animated work, and with the formal humor of a George Landow.” –Bruce Jenkins, MEDIA STUDY MAGAZINE

OUT OF HAND (1981, 30 minutes, Super-8-to-16mm blow-up)
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
“Singsong voice tracks, jerky robot motions, repetitive gestures, and the iconic use of sports equipment and cheerleaders characterize Beckman’s mise-en-scene. Beckman frequently links her work to Piaget but, with its obsessive images of property and loss, OUT OF HAND is an Allstate Insurance commercial as it might appear to an autistic child.” –J. Hoberman

Total running time: ca. 90 minutes.

DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Jenai Cutcher
THINKING ON THEIR FEET: WOMEN OF THE TAP RENAISSANCE
2010, 55 minutes, video.
&
Melodie Bryant A HOME IN THE THEATRE (2010, 37 minutes, video)

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Jenna Dini Bliss WALKING IN THE STUDIO (2009, 4 minutes, video)
Jenna Dini Bliss INBOX (2010, 8 minutes, video)
Jakob Abrams PLAY MATES (2010, 19 minutes, video)
Nicholas Carmen PIANO FINGERS (2010, 25 minutes, video)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Billy Sharff
THE SPARROW AND THE TIGRESS
2009, 65 minutes, video.
–Saturday, April 2, Documentary Series at 6:00, Short Film Program at 7:45, Feature Presentation at 9:00.

YOU THE BETTER (1983, 35 minutes, 16mm)
"[A] film based on games of chance, and as games such as roulette, or craps go, this one is closed – meaning that the player cannot really affect the outcome. A team of uniformed players, led by the artist Ashley Bickerton, performs the mechanics of a game servicing an off-camera betting entity, the ‘House’. Although the game keeps changing and players are swapped out, one thing remains the same, the ‘House’ is hidden and controls the bets, the ‘chance’ of winning is nil. The game, in fact, is not between the players, but rather between the ‘House’, and the ‘Bettor’.” –E.B.

CINDERELLA (1986, 30 minutes, 16mm)
“[O]wes as much to pinball as to Perrault. Although no less fraught with psychosexual tension than Walt Disney’s version, Beckman drops the fairytale’s sibling rivalry and Oedipal underpinnings, reworking the heroine’s situation as an allegory of female socialization. Vintage Beckman, CINDERELLA exhibits the filmmaker’s characteristic use of ambiguous interior space, stutter-stop development, incantatory songs, and dreamlike condensation.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

HIATUS (1999, 20 minutes, 16mm-to-video)
“An experimental narrative film about a young woman who plays HIATUS, an on-line interactive ‘identity’ game. Propelled through action by her Go-Go cowgirl construct Wanda, and powered by a computer corset that stores her programs in a garden interface, Maid meets Wang, a powerful take-over artist. She must learn how to use the power of her ‘organic memory’ to block his expansion and preserve her freedom.” –E.B.

SWITCH CENTER (2003, 12 minutes, 16mm)
“I chose an abandoned water purification plant on the outskirts of Budapest as the setting for Switch Center. In conceiving of this film, I was inspired by Léger’s early avant-garde picture BALLET MÉCANIQUE. In my film, the structure itself comes to life through the manipulations of the employees who work inside it. I wanted to make a tribute to the kind of futuristic pragmatism expressed by these buildings that are now being razed to allow space for shopping malls and corporate offices.” –E.B.

Total running time: ca. 100 minutes.

Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
“A conceptual lap dissolve from ‘water currents’ to ‘film strip currents’/Dedicated to my son Christopher.” –P.S.
“Yes, S:S:S:S:S:S is beautiful. The successive scratchings of the stream-image film is very powerful vandalism. The film is a very complete organism with all the possible levels really recognized.” –Michael Snow

SENSELESS
1962, 28 minutes, 16mm.
“Consisting of a poetic stream of razor-sharp images, the overt content of SENSELESS portrays ecstatic travelers going to pot over the fantasies and pleasures of a trip to Mexico.... Highly effective cutting subtly interweaves the contrapuntal development of themes of love and hate, peace and violence, beauty and destruction.” –David Brooks

THE FLOWER THIEF
1960, 59 minutes, 16mm, b&w. Starring Taylor Mead. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
“In the old Hollywood movie days movie studios would keep a man on the set who, when all other sources of ideas failed (writers, directors), was called upon to ‘cook up’ something for filming. He was called The Wild Man. THE FLOWER THIEF has been put together in memory of all dead wild men who died unnoticed in the field of stunt.” –R.R.

Total running time: ca. 90 minutes.

DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Michael Dafferner
WHY YOU DO THIS
2010, 62 minutes, video.

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Peter Valente BURNING THE SLATES (2010, 3 minutes, 16mm)
David Gugliemo THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY (2011, 12 minutes, video)
Jack Gattanella JEALOUS JERZY (2010, 14 minutes, video)
Michael Conroy WRITER’S BLOCK (2010, 14 minutes, video)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Julius Kelly FORGIVENESS (2009, 36 minutes, video)
&
Mike Lordi
RETRIBUTION
2010, 59 minutes, video.

–Sunday, April 3, Documentary Series at 6:00, Short Film Program at 7:15, Feature Presentation at 8:15.

“The film describes, poetically, a way of living. The film is a protest which is violent, childish, and sincere – a protest against an industrial world based on the cycle of production and consumption.” –Alberto Moravia, L’ESPRESSO

DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Rosa Elena Ortiz
FLESH-N-BONE IS HOME
2010, 70 minutes, video.

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Tiara Colon DUDE CAN I BORROW YOUR CAR? (2010, 8 minutes, video)
Eric Jones BAD APPLES (2009, 15 minutes, video)
Nima Nabavinejad SWORN (2010, 20 minutes, video)
Joseph Meli ROTTEN LUCK (2010, 32 minutes, video)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Sean Roman
TICKET COPS
2010, 65 minutes, video.

–Monday, April 4, Documentary Series at 6:00, Short Film Program at 7:30, Feature Presentation at 9:00.

DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Kaoru Ayabe
STEPPING INTO THE FIRE
2011, 84 minutes, video.

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Natasha Baptiste A RUMBLE IN THE LOT (2010, 6 minutes, video)
Maria Torres NOCHES DE TUNGSTENO (2010, 9 minutes, 16mm)
Saul Herckis OYSTERS & PEARLS (2010, 14 minutes, video)
Laura Lindle & Nik Perleros MARIA IN THE KITCHEN (2010, 15 minutes, video)
Ari Candido Fernandes HEAVEN GARDEN (2009, 15 minutes, 16mm)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Fabian Baez
BUENA GENTE
2009, 94 minutes, video.

–Monday, April 4, Documentary Series at 6:00, Short Film Program at 7:45, Feature Presentation at 9:00.

EARLY DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Barbara Celis
SURVIVING AMINA
2010, 65 minutes, video.

SHORT DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Hima B HOW DO YOU TELL SOMEBODY THAT YOU’RE HIV+ (2011, 13 minutes, video)
Stephane Goldsand LEAP BEFORE YOU LOOK (2010, 22 minutes, video)
Gabriel Bellman THE BELLMAN EQUATION (2010, 28 minutes, video)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Tim Skousen
ZERO PERCENT
2010, 108 minutes, video.

–Tuesday, April 5, Early Documentary Series at 6:00, Short Documentary Series at 7:15, Feature Presentation at 8:45.

DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Trent Tooley & Jackie Garry
NO TIME FOR COLD FEET
2010, 110 minutes, video.

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Pedro Baron MEMORIA (2010, 7 minutes, video)
Frank Terranova LUNCH MONEY (2009, 8 minutes, 16mm)
Eri Yokoyama JULY SIXTEENTH (2010, 9 minutes, video)
Rc Asli JINGLETOWN USA (2010, 13 minutes, video)
Yong Pil Choi THE REPLY LETTER (2010, 17 minutes, video)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Kathy Undboe
NONAMES
2009, 108 minutes, video.

–Tuesday, April 5, Documentary Series at 5:30, Short Film Program at 7:45, Feature Presentation at 9:00.

ANIMATION SERIES
Roger Hom THE WALLED CITY (2010, 2 minutes, video)
Nick DiLiberto MEDUSA (2010, 2 minutes, video)
Rodrigo Jorge ANIMAMINDED (2010, 5 minutes, video)
Daisy Yu Chuan Lin OUT ON A LIMB (2010, 5 minutes, 16mm)

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Hotaka Demura ONE DAY IN THE MORNING (2010, 6 minutes, video)
Francesco Saviano TWO BIRDS (2010, 14 minutes, video)
Amir Michalovich RAILWAY SIGNAL (2010, 17 minutes, video)
Thomas Justino WITH ANCHOVIES…WITHOUT MAMMA (2009, 25 minutes, video)
Gina Duncan THE ROOSTER (2010, 25 minutes, video)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
John Zhao
DAYS GONE BY
2010, 93 minutes, video.

–Wednesday, April 6, Animation Series at 6:00, Short Film Program at 6:30, Feature Presentation at 8:15.

Two working-class white boys, one of them played by Paul Slabolepszy, who also wrote the play on which the film is based, arrive at an isolated roadhouse and proceed to take out their racial frustrations on a black waiter. Davies, although operating primarily in a claustrophobic diner location, opens the play out into a cinematically complex work which operates both as a gripping thriller and an analysis of white working class fears and prejudices. The two white actors, reprising their stage roles with the addition of the great John Kani, effortlessly provide a disturbing insight into South Africa’s racial divisions.

SPECIAL SCREENING!

Made in collaboration with Anthony Flackett.
As a professor of film history and theory at Harvard University for more than 25 years (1972-1997) and the founding curator of the Harvard Film Archive, Vlada Petric is a crucially important figure in American film culture. During his years at Harvard, he amassed a veritable museum’s worth of photographs, reproductions, frame enlargements, photograms, clippings, and miniature souvenirs, all of which he ‘exhibited’ on the wall above his desk. Prior to his retirement, Prof. Petric’s assistants shot the entire wall with a digital camera. And so began the creation of his expansive, years-in-the-making, perpetual work-in-progress THE WALL OF MEMORIES.
Conceived on the collage principle, the piece utilizes this digital footage as a kind of ‘archival material’. From over 800 items Petric selected about 50, concocting sequences dedicated to his favorite film directors, as well as to his favorite painters, photographers, and designers, and to his own past (a visit to his birth place in Bosnia, his return to Harvard’s Carpenter Center, and his recollection of his studies in Moscow). THE WALL OF MEMORIES is at once a reflection on Petric’s theory of film aesthetics and a nostalgic examination of a life devoted to film.

Panic in the streets, the shantytowns, and the shopping malls of Johannesburg. Panic is a small-time gangster (a mapantsula), who keeps his nose out of politics. Politics however touches everybody on the streets of Johannesburg in 1988, as Panic discovers when he’s picked up by the police for questioning. Dumped in a cell with township militants, the sort of people he most despises and fears, he is gradually politicized. Rough and ready, this immensely influential film, which was initially banned in South Africa, gets far closer to the sights, sounds, smells, and rhythms of Soweto than such high-budget, international, white-liberal conscience movies as CRY FREEDOM and A WORLD APART.

With Danny Glover and Angela Bassett.

“[Athol Fugard’s play] brings the sensibility of Beckett’s WAITING FOR GODOT to the horrors of life as a non-person in a racially exclusive state. Two ragged wanderers…meet on a riverbank, where they try to scavenge food and firewood in order to survive the night. As they talk, their bitterness about the ways their lives have gone begins to emerge, as well as the tragedies they’ve suffered at the hands of a racist government. Gradually, you realize that they’ve been husband and wife in a relationship that has been plundered by the poisonous influence of apartheid, reducing them to a level in which they have to remind themselves of their own humanity and their ability to make human connections.” –Marshall Fine

SPECIAL SCREENING, IN COLLABORATION WITH THE NEW MUSEUM
Shot in a Chinatown storefront converted for the occasion into an improvised kitchen/restaurant, this film documents three days of public conversations between artists, critics, curators, and a free floating public. The event was organized by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Nico Dockx, and Anton Vidokle in response to an invitation by Brussels-based art journal A PRIOR to be the subject of their new issue. Instead of commissioning essays or producing artwork for the journal, the artists decided to rethink the structure by which an art publication is produced and to attempt to do this discursively in a public setting.

The film is a subjective record of these conversations, which explored various topics ranging from questions concerning precarious and immaterial labor in the field of art, to more immediate questions concerning whether what was actually taking place throughout the course of the event was in fact an artwork. In the tradition of underground cinema, essay films, and experimental language-based films from the conceptual era, NEW YORK CONVERSATIONS insists upon a certain degree of participation from the audience – by way of critical reading.

With: Francisca Benitez, Nico Dockx, Daniel Faust, Media Farzin, Liam Gillick, Egon Hanfstingl, Jörg Heiser, Shama Khana, Anders Kreuger, Miwon Kwon, Valerie Mannaerts, Sis Matthé, Hadley Nunes, Saul Ostrow, Marti Peran, Simon Rees, Els Roelandt, Dieter Roelstraete, Martha Rosler, Joe Scanlan, Maxwel Stephen, Monika Szewczyk, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Jan Verwoert, Anton Vidokle, Lawrence Weiner, Andrea Wiarda, Louwrien Wijers, and others.

Presented in collaboration with the New Museum. Special thanks to Anton Vidokle, and to Eungie Joo & Ethan Swan (New Museum).

A mixed-race couple takes to the road when their shanty is demolished. Laden with a bizarre collection of thrown-out objects they come, at last, to the desolate mudflats of the Swartkops River and set up a makeshift home. Boesman, savage and bitter, has grown up thinking of himself as white man’s rubbish. Lena, the target of his brutality, refuses to believe that she is worthless. This gritty film, the earlier of two adaptations of Athol Fugard’s famous play (this one starring Fugard himself), depicts a world in which every movement is monitored, controlled, and regulated, and every small privilege hard-won and precious – a world in which any kind of freedom is a valuable commodity.

VUKANI/AWAKE
1962, 17 minutes, video.
Ngakane’s first film was this short anti-apartheid documentary, which was, in his own words, “the first film about the political situation in South Africa made from an African’s point of view.”
“His first film, a documentary titled VUKANI/AWAKE (1962), deals with man’s inhumanity to man, depicting the evils of apartheid and the predicament of black people in South Africa.” – Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, QUESTIONING AFRICAN CINEMA
&
JEMIMA & JOHNNY
1966, 30 minutes, 35mm.
In 1958, Notting Hill in West London erupted in vicious race riots. In South Africa in 1963, Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress leader, was imprisoned for life. Ngakane, a fellow ANC member, was exiled from South Africa and came to Britain to be a film director. JEMIMA & JOHNNY, his first fiction film, portrays the developing friendship between a white English boy and the young daughter of recent immigrants from the Caribbean, against the backdrop of a Notting Hill simmering with racial conflict.
&
NELSON MANDELA: THE STRUGGLE IS MY LIFE
1985, 45 minutes, video. Distributed by Third World Newsreel.
“Your freedom and mine cannot be separated” are the words written by Nelson Mandela from his prison cell to the people of South Africa in 1985. Through interviews with leaders of the African National Congress, archival film and photographs, and the words of Nelson Mandela himself, this video provides an introduction to the man who became an international symbol of resistance to South African apartheid.

Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

With Karen Black, John Thaw, and John Kani.

Rhodesian-born maverick filmmaker Michael Raeburn is deeply intimate with the South African landscape, and his first feature is a truly iconoclastic film – an Afrikaans-language orgy of incest and bloodletting. Based on Doris Lessing’s novel, it is a haunting, obsessive story of a secretary from the city who marries a well-meaning farmer. Out in the middle of nowhere her racial- and class-consciousness comes into bizarre flowering as she alternately lusts after and abuses the black farm foreman. When she attempts to return to the city, only to come back to the farm in desperation, the stage is set for a particularly arid South African tragedy.

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

Debbie May
YOU HAVE STRUCK A ROCK
1981, 28 minutes, 16mm.
“You have touched a woman but have struck a rock” was a slogan from a 1956 march by 20,000 women on the Union Buildings in Pretoria. Using a collage of rare footage and interviews with some of the women who were actively involved, the film is a document of a brave demonstration against injustice.
&
Antonia Caccia, Simon Louvish & Nana Mahomo
END OF THE DIALOGUE
1974, 47 minutes, video.
Two London-based activist film students, Antonia Caccia and Simon Louvish, took the remarkable step of ingratiating themselves with a touring British drama group that traveled to South Africa to perform, amongst other things, MARAT/SADE in the townships. Ostensibly there simply to film the tour, Caccia and Louvish (along with their associate Nana Mahomo, an exiled Pan Africanist in London) in fact had another agenda: to bear witness for the outside world to the horrors of apartheid. When the film was eventually scheduled to air on British television, the South African government went to great lengths to ban the screening, but succeeded only in drawing more attention to the film and its revelations.
&
TO ACT A LIE
1980, 22 minutes, video.
A propaganda film made by South Africa’s Ministry of Information, refuting the claims made about injustices perpetrated by the Apartheid regime.

Total running time: ca. 100 minutes.

In conjunction with the forthcoming release of Céline Danhier’s BLANK CITY, a feature-length documentary on the No Wave movement that defined underground culture in NYC in the 70s & 80s, sweeping through the worlds of filmmaking, music, art, and writing, we devote a weekend to two of the seminal works of No Wave cinema: Eric Mitchell’s UNDERGROUND U.S.A. and its even more uncompromising and provocative predecessor, KIDNAPPED.
Special thanks to Eric Mitchell.

“A satire of contemporary New York ‘scenemaking’ in the form of an update of SUNSET BLVD., UNDERGROUND U.S.A. is both a personal triumph for its creator, actor-director Eric Mitchell, and a further indication of the importance of New York’s New Wave film movement. …
“As played by Patti Astor, Vicky is clearly meant to represent Edie Sedgwick, the superstar of Warhol’s legendary cinematic psychodramas. Like Norma Desmond, she lives with her butler (Rene Ricard as an effete Erich von Stroheim) in high style, half-mad and lost in drug-induced dreams of a comeback. But instead of William Holden’s disillusioned writer-turned-gigolo, a completely spent and soulless Joe Dallesandro-styled hustler, played by Mitchell himself, is offered. …
“There’s a rich, multi-layered texture at work here. Characters exist less for themselves than as iconographical anchoring devices – points of reference in a hall of mirrors crossing space and time. The time is now, but it is also the then of the ‘60s and the ‘50s and (remembered) ‘20s of the Billy Wilder melodrama. As these spent sophisticates move through Mitchell’s carefully designed decor trapped in their narcissistic fantasies, going through the motions of rituals that have lost all meaning for them, we may giggle but at the same time be touched by their lives of noisy desperation.” –David Ehrenstein, BOMB

PLEASE NOTE: Due to circumstances beyond our control, Eric Mitchell will not be present for this weekend's screenings as previously expected.

A controversial examination of love across the color line, as a woman classified as mixed-race poses as white to continue her love affair with a white priest. The results of her deception bring tragedy to herself and her son. Rautenbach, as near to an auteur as was possible under the circumstances, has been criticized for an ending which seemed to support the existence of predestined racial groupings. But the film is far more complex than that, and the heartbreaking reality of the pain inflicted by apartheid is palpably presented. Filmed on location amongst the mixed-race fishing community on South Africa’s West Coast, the filmmaker took a brave step in the accepted practice of the time by mixing cast members classified as white with cast members classified as 'colored', although all the major black roles were still played by white actors.

In conjunction with the forthcoming release of Céline Danhier’s BLANK CITY, a feature-length documentary on the No Wave movement that defined underground culture in NYC in the 70s & 80s, sweeping through the worlds of filmmaking, music, art, and writing, we devote a weekend to two of the seminal works of No Wave cinema: Eric Mitchell’s UNDERGROUND U.S.A. and its even more uncompromising and provocative predecessor, KIDNAPPED.
Special thanks to Eric Mitchell.

“KIDNAPPED – 15 raw rolls of Super-8 spliced together for video projection – showcases the ‘no wave’ upper-crust. … [A] number of KIDNAPPED’s principles seem wrested from the [Amos Poe film THE FOREIGNER], including Patti Astor, a buxom blonde in crewcut and cocktail dress, and Anya Phillips, a wise-cracking Eurasian with a starlet’s radar for keeping in frame. Her intuition is truly impressive in KIDNAPPED: for most of its 60 minutes the camera pans around a barren Avenue B tub-in-kit[chen] remorselessly chopping off torsos at the neck. …
“KIDNAPPED seems almost an homage to VINYL – one of the few vintage Warhols that’s screened these days – but Mitchell’s random compositions, on-screen direction, and impoverished location shake the mothballs off the Factory aesthetic. It’s actually witty when he stages a violently autistic dance number to Devo’s ‘Satisfaction’….” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

Preceded by:
MASS HOMICIDE (1977, 7 minutes, video)

PLEASE NOTE: Due to circumstances beyond our control, Eric Mitchell will not be present for this weekend's screenings as previously expected.

Panic in the streets, the shantytowns, and the shopping malls of Johannesburg. Panic is a small-time gangster (a mapantsula), who keeps his nose out of politics. Politics however touches everybody on the streets of Johannesburg in 1988, as Panic discovers when he’s picked up by the police for questioning. Dumped in a cell with township militants, the sort of people he most despises and fears, he is gradually politicized. Rough and ready, this immensely influential film, which was initially banned in South Africa, gets far closer to the sights, sounds, smells, and rhythms of Soweto than such high-budget, international, white-liberal conscience movies as CRY FREEDOM and A WORLD APART.

Ken Kaplan
THE HIDDEN FARMS
1986, 15 minutes, video.
Based on a story by Mtutuzeli Matshoba, the film was banned under the State of Emergency Act. A deeply disturbing meditation on prison labor, the film is both disturbing and poetic.
&
David Bensusan
MY COUNTRY MY HAT
1982, 85 minutes, video.
Subtitled TO LOSE YOUR PASS IS TO LOSE YOUR LIFE, the film follows the fortunes of a young black man looking for illegal work in Johannesburg. Although born in Soweto, he is unable to apply for a pass to be resident in South Africa, since his mother did not herself have a pass. Rendered non-existent by bureaucracy, his only recourse is to remain in the twilight. Finding a job with Piet, a garbage-truck driver who doesn’t ask questions, he soon finds that the price he has to pay is involvement in the internecine strife within Piet’s family. When Piet’s beloved cowboy hat disappears, the hapless worker is naturally suspected.

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

Stephen Frears
THE BURNING
1967, 30 minutes, 35mm.
With South Africa’s increasingly negative profile growing in the West, British filmmaker Stephen Frears chose to make his debut film a fantasy projection about the first day of revolution in South Africa. A very rare film by one of Britain’s most acclaimed directors.
&
Sven Persson
LAND APART
1974, 90 minutes, video.
Swedish filmmaker Persson had long been settled in South Africa, making wildlife films and coordinating local shoots by visiting directors such as Cornel Wilde and Ivan Tors, when he put together a documentary on South Africa’s increasing isolation from the rest of the world. The South African censors went ballistic and ordered extensive cuts, and the local distributor, MGM, pulled out of their distribution agreement on the film. Released in a pale shadow of its original cut as THE SOUTH AFRICANS, the film caused little fuss. The original cut, however, had been languishing in the South African National Film Archives and, released from banishment, can finally be seen.

In conjunction with the forthcoming release of Céline Danhier’s BLANK CITY, a feature-length documentary on the No Wave movement that defined underground culture in NYC in the 70s & 80s, sweeping through the worlds of filmmaking, music, art, and writing, we devote a weekend to two of the seminal works of No Wave cinema: Eric Mitchell’s UNDERGROUND U.S.A. and its even more uncompromising and provocative predecessor, KIDNAPPED.
Special thanks to Eric Mitchell.

“KIDNAPPED – 15 raw rolls of Super-8 spliced together for video projection – showcases the ‘no wave’ upper-crust. … [A] number of KIDNAPPED’s principles seem wrested from the [Amos Poe film THE FOREIGNER], including Patti Astor, a buxom blonde in crewcut and cocktail dress, and Anya Phillips, a wise-cracking Eurasian with a starlet’s radar for keeping in frame. Her intuition is truly impressive in KIDNAPPED: for most of its 60 minutes the camera pans around a barren Avenue B tub-in-kit[chen] remorselessly chopping off torsos at the neck. …
“KIDNAPPED seems almost an homage to VINYL – one of the few vintage Warhols that’s screened these days – but Mitchell’s random compositions, on-screen direction, and impoverished location shake the mothballs off the Factory aesthetic. It’s actually witty when he stages a violently autistic dance number to Devo’s ‘Satisfaction’….” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

Preceded by:
MASS HOMICIDE (1977, 7 minutes, video)

PLEASE NOTE: Due to circumstances beyond our control, Eric Mitchell will not be present for this weekend's screenings as previously expected.

In conjunction with the forthcoming release of Céline Danhier’s BLANK CITY, a feature-length documentary on the No Wave movement that defined underground culture in NYC in the 70s & 80s, sweeping through the worlds of filmmaking, music, art, and writing, we devote a weekend to two of the seminal works of No Wave cinema: Eric Mitchell’s UNDERGROUND U.S.A. and its even more uncompromising and provocative predecessor, KIDNAPPED.
Special thanks to Eric Mitchell.

“A satire of contemporary New York ‘scenemaking’ in the form of an update of SUNSET BLVD., UNDERGROUND U.S.A. is both a personal triumph for its creator, actor-director Eric Mitchell, and a further indication of the importance of New York’s New Wave film movement. …
“As played by Patti Astor, Vicky is clearly meant to represent Edie Sedgwick, the superstar of Warhol’s legendary cinematic psychodramas. Like Norma Desmond, she lives with her butler (Rene Ricard as an effete Erich von Stroheim) in high style, half-mad and lost in drug-induced dreams of a comeback. But instead of William Holden’s disillusioned writer-turned-gigolo, a completely spent and soulless Joe Dallesandro-styled hustler, played by Mitchell himself, is offered. …
“There’s a rich, multi-layered texture at work here. Characters exist less for themselves than as iconographical anchoring devices – points of reference in a hall of mirrors crossing space and time. The time is now, but it is also the then of the ‘60s and the ‘50s and (remembered) ‘20s of the Billy Wilder melodrama. As these spent sophisticates move through Mitchell’s carefully designed decor trapped in their narcissistic fantasies, going through the motions of rituals that have lost all meaning for them, we may giggle but at the same time be touched by their lives of noisy desperation.” –David Ehrenstein, BOMB

PLEASE NOTE: Due to circumstances beyond our control, Eric Mitchell will not be present for this weekend's screenings as previously expected.

Two working-class white boys, one of them played by Paul Slabolepszy, who also wrote the play on which the film is based, arrive at an isolated roadhouse and proceed to take out their racial frustrations on a black waiter. Davies, although operating primarily in a claustrophobic diner location, opens the play out into a cinematically complex work which operates both as a gripping thriller and an analysis of white working class fears and prejudices. The two white actors, reprising their stage roles with the addition of the great John Kani, effortlessly provide a disturbing insight into South Africa’s racial divisions.

VUKANI/AWAKE
1962, 17 minutes, video.
Ngakane’s first film was this short anti-apartheid documentary, which was, in his own words, “the first film about the political situation in South Africa made from an African’s point of view.”
“His first film, a documentary titled VUKANI/AWAKE (1962), deals with man’s inhumanity to man, depicting the evils of apartheid and the predicament of black people in South Africa.” – Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, QUESTIONING AFRICAN CINEMA
&
JEMIMA & JOHNNY
1966, 30 minutes, 35mm.
In 1958, Notting Hill in West London erupted in vicious race riots. In South Africa in 1963, Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress leader, was imprisoned for life. Ngakane, a fellow ANC member, was exiled from South Africa and came to Britain to be a film director. JEMIMA & JOHNNY, his first fiction film, portrays the developing friendship between a white English boy and the young daughter of recent immigrants from the Caribbean, against the backdrop of a Notting Hill simmering with racial conflict.
&
NELSON MANDELA: THE STRUGGLE IS MY LIFE
1985, 45 minutes, video. Distributed by Third World Newsreel.
“Your freedom and mine cannot be separated” are the words written by Nelson Mandela from his prison cell to the people of South Africa in 1985. Through interviews with leaders of the African National Congress, archival film and photographs, and the words of Nelson Mandela himself, this video provides an introduction to the man who became an international symbol of resistance to South African apartheid.

Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

Filmmaker in person!
Iconoclastic Oregon filmmaker Vanessa Renwick comes to Anthology to present an adrenaline-pumping and sometimes brutal program of new works on video, including several NYC premieres. These films, which represent both a meditation and a holler, using stunning cinematography and rare archival fragments to offer up both the grandeur and the violence of nature, will amply demonstrate why Renwick has been a star in the underground film scene for the past couple of decades.
RED STALLIONS REVENGE (2007, 7 minutes, 16mm-to-video)
FOOD IS A WEAPON (1998, 4 minutes, Super-8 & 16mm-to-video)
WOODSWOMAN (2010, 10 minutes, video)
FULL ON LOG JAM (2010, 16 minutes, video)
HOPE & PREY (2010, 23 minutes, video)
Total running time: ca. 65 minutes.

With Danny Glover and Angela Bassett.

“[Athol Fugard’s play] brings the sensibility of Beckett’s WAITING FOR GODOT to the horrors of life as a non-person in a racially exclusive state. Two ragged wanderers…meet on a riverbank, where they try to scavenge food and firewood in order to survive the night. As they talk, their bitterness about the ways their lives have gone begins to emerge, as well as the tragedies they’ve suffered at the hands of a racist government. Gradually, you realize that they’ve been husband and wife in a relationship that has been plundered by the poisonous influence of apartheid, reducing them to a level in which they have to remind themselves of their own humanity and their ability to make human connections.” –Marshall Fine

A mixed-race couple takes to the road when their shanty is demolished. Laden with a bizarre collection of thrown-out objects they come, at last, to the desolate mudflats of the Swartkops River and set up a makeshift home. Boesman, savage and bitter, has grown up thinking of himself as white man’s rubbish. Lena, the target of his brutality, refuses to believe that she is worthless. This gritty film, the earlier of two adaptations of Athol Fugard’s famous play (this one starring Fugard himself), depicts a world in which every movement is monitored, controlled, and regulated, and every small privilege hard-won and precious – a world in which any kind of freedom is a valuable commodity.

With Karen Black, John Thaw, and John Kani.

Rhodesian-born maverick filmmaker Michael Raeburn is deeply intimate with the South African landscape, and his first feature is a truly iconoclastic film – an Afrikaans-language orgy of incest and bloodletting. Based on Doris Lessing’s novel, it is a haunting, obsessive story of a secretary from the city who marries a well-meaning farmer. Out in the middle of nowhere her racial- and class-consciousness comes into bizarre flowering as she alternately lusts after and abuses the black farm foreman. When she attempts to return to the city, only to come back to the farm in desperation, the stage is set for a particularly arid South African tragedy.

SPECIAL PROGRAM
Ari Selinger OPENING DAY (2011, 10 minutes, video)
Steve Zissis KLESHNOV (2010, 10 minutes, video)

ANIMATION GROUP SCREENING
See www.newfilmmakers.com for updated information.

–Wednesday, April 13, Special Program at 6:00, Animation Group Screening at 6:30.

A controversial examination of love across the color line, as a woman classified as mixed-race poses as white to continue her love affair with a white priest. The results of her deception bring tragedy to herself and her son. Rautenbach, as near to an auteur as was possible under the circumstances, has been criticized for an ending which seemed to support the existence of predestined racial groupings. But the film is far more complex than that, and the heartbreaking reality of the pain inflicted by apartheid is palpably presented. Filmed on location amongst the mixed-race fishing community on South Africa’s West Coast, the filmmaker took a brave step in the accepted practice of the time by mixing cast members classified as white with cast members classified as 'colored', although all the major black roles were still played by white actors.

Debbie May
YOU HAVE STRUCK A ROCK
1981, 28 minutes, 16mm.
“You have touched a woman but have struck a rock” was a slogan from a 1956 march by 20,000 women on the Union Buildings in Pretoria. Using a collage of rare footage and interviews with some of the women who were actively involved, the film is a document of a brave demonstration against injustice.
&
Antonia Caccia, Simon Louvish & Nana Mahomo
END OF THE DIALOGUE
1974, 47 minutes, video.
Two London-based activist film students, Antonia Caccia and Simon Louvish, took the remarkable step of ingratiating themselves with a touring British drama group that traveled to South Africa to perform, amongst other things, MARAT/SADE in the townships. Ostensibly there simply to film the tour, Caccia and Louvish (along with their associate Nana Mahomo, an exiled Pan Africanist in London) in fact had another agenda: to bear witness for the outside world to the horrors of apartheid. When the film was eventually scheduled to air on British television, the South African government went to great lengths to ban the screening, but succeeded only in drawing more attention to the film and its revelations.
&
TO ACT A LIE
1980, 22 minutes, video.
A propaganda film made by South Africa’s Ministry of Information, refuting the claims made about injustices perpetrated by the Apartheid regime.

Total running time: ca. 100 minutes.

Ken Kaplan
THE HIDDEN FARMS
1986, 15 minutes, video.
Based on a story by Mtutuzeli Matshoba, the film was banned under the State of Emergency Act. A deeply disturbing meditation on prison labor, the film is both disturbing and poetic.
&
David Bensusan
MY COUNTRY MY HAT
1982, 85 minutes, video.
Subtitled TO LOSE YOUR PASS IS TO LOSE YOUR LIFE, the film follows the fortunes of a young black man looking for illegal work in Johannesburg. Although born in Soweto, he is unable to apply for a pass to be resident in South Africa, since his mother did not herself have a pass. Rendered non-existent by bureaucracy, his only recourse is to remain in the twilight. Finding a job with Piet, a garbage-truck driver who doesn’t ask questions, he soon finds that the price he has to pay is involvement in the internecine strife within Piet’s family. When Piet’s beloved cowboy hat disappears, the hapless worker is naturally suspected.

Bette Gordon & James Benning MICHIGAN AVENUE (1973, 7 minutes, 16mm)
Preserved with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Women’s Film Preservation Fund.
A narrative film concerning an investigation of two women in time and space, to the point where the investigation becomes the narrative.

Bette Gordon & James Benning i-94 (1974, 3 minutes, 16mm)
Preserved with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Women’s Film Preservation Fund.
Intercourse between two people who never appear on the screen at the same time. An exploration of sex and male/female identities.

Bette Gordon & James Benning THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (1975, 27 minutes, 16mm)
Preserved with support from The National Film Preservation Foundation.
A true masterpiece of 70s cinema, more remarkable today then ever before. A conceptual bicentennial film dealing with spatial and temporal relationships between two travelers, their car, and the geographic, political, and social changes from New York to Los Angeles. The space within each frame is at the same time continuous and elliptical.

Bette Gordon STILL LIFE (1972, 3 minutes, 16mm)
Preserved with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Women’s Film Preservation Fund.
A meditation on the American rustic where various objects within the composition are re-presented in unnatural colors and unusual spatial arrangements, emphasizing the illusion of movement while exploring film grain and its graphic nature.

Bette Gordon AN EROTIC FILM (1975, 3 minutes, 16mm)
Preserved with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Women’s Film Preservation Fund.
The moment before and the moment after…

Bette Gordon AN ALGORITHM (1977, 10 minutes, 16mm)
Preserved with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Women’s Film Preservation Fund.
A visually stunning kinetic rhythm produced by looped footage (mathematical curves) in and out of phase with each other.

Total running time: ca. 55 minutes.

Bette Gordon
EMPTY SUITCASES
1981, 55 minutes, 16mm-to-video.
A narrative derived from film’s own material and an exploration of issues relating to representation and identification in cinema. The film presents fragments of a woman’s life – her work (as a photographer), her friendships and relationships – in short, her economic, sexual, and artistic struggles. By deconstructing the fragments of text, speech, music, and picture, the film problematizes the way in which cinematic language structures point of view.

Preceded by:
NOYES (1976, 3 minutes, 16mm)
“A single action seen from alternative left and right perspectives, accentuating reversals, repetitions, and persistence of vision.” –Karyn Kay, CAMERA OBSCURA
&
EXCHANGES (1979, 18 minutes, 16mm-to-video)
“The elliptical printing-editing style confronts the problem of the imaging of the body, by posing a kind of striptease of cinema. … The film’s construction attempts to re-position the erotic elements: the technology employed becomes more seductive than the actual image of the stripping, displacing the striptease rather than serving it invisibly, thus establishing a tension between the image of the woman and the sensuality of the filmic process.” –Karyn Kay, CAMERA OBSCURA
Total running time: ca. 80 minutes.

Stephen Frears
THE BURNING
1967, 30 minutes, 35mm.
With South Africa’s increasingly negative profile growing in the West, British filmmaker Stephen Frears chose to make his debut film a fantasy projection about the first day of revolution in South Africa. A very rare film by one of Britain’s most acclaimed directors.
&
Sven Persson
LAND APART
1974, 90 minutes, video.
Swedish filmmaker Persson had long been settled in South Africa, making wildlife films and coordinating local shoots by visiting directors such as Cornel Wilde and Ivan Tors, when he put together a documentary on South Africa’s increasing isolation from the rest of the world. The South African censors went ballistic and ordered extensive cuts, and the local distributor, MGM, pulled out of their distribution agreement on the film. Released in a pale shadow of its original cut as THE SOUTH AFRICANS, the film caused little fuss. The original cut, however, had been languishing in the South African National Film Archives and, released from banishment, can finally be seen.

VARIETY
1984, 100 minutes, 35mm. Written by Kathy Acker; with Sandy McLeod, Will Patton, Nan Goldin, and Cookie Mueller.
A desperately unemployed Manhattan woman lands a job as a cashier in an X-rated cinema where she finds herself drawn towards events on-screen and compelled by the mysterious activities of a shady businessman. Gordon’s striking and gritty pseudo-thriller was filmed on NYC locations years before the Times Square clean-up, and remains a haunting study of sexual identity and the silent, invisible walls existing between men and women.

Preceded by:
ANYBODY’S WOMAN (1981, 25 minutes, Super-8mm-to-video)
“I asked my friend Nancy Reilly to talk about her porn fantasies in front of the [Variety Theater]. And I asked my friend Spalding Gray to do the same. … I wanted to hear women talk dirty and to see what kind of power that might yield. I wanted women to look back instead of being looked at. I turned this Super-8 film into the treatment for my film VARIETY.” –B.G.
Total running time: ca. 130 minutes.

SPECIAL ENCORE SCREENING

As a follow-up to the film series UNITED WE STAND: SOUTH AFRICAN CINEMA UNDER APARTHEID, and following its successful run at Film Forum last spring, we present this encore screening of Connie Field’s thrillingly ambitious, expansive, and magisterial 7-episode documentary chronicling the history of the global anti-apartheid movement that took on South Africa’s entrenched apartheid regime and its international supporters who considered South Africa an ally in the Cold War. The combined stories have a scope that is epic in both space and time, spanning most of the globe over half a century.

“More than a decade in the making, eight-and-a-half-hours long, featuring more than 100 talking heads, and spanning 42 years and four continents, [HAVE YOU HEARD] is a triumph of maximalist filmmaking. And you won’t look at your watch once. … Field’s nonfiction epic is a monumental chronicle not just of one nation and its hideous regime, but of the second half of the 20th century.” –Melissa Anderson, VILLAGE VOICE

Please note: the three parts can be seen separately with no loss of comprehension.

PART 1:
THE ROAD TO RESISTANCE (58 minutes)
In 1948, South Africa institutes apartheid, a system of segregation that infiltrates every aspect of life. The Sharpeville Massacre shocks the world, and Nelson Mandela and other leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) are jailed. Hundreds escape into exile.

HELL OF A JOB (58 minutes)
Oliver Tambo heads the resistance from exile (opposition within South Africa has been effectively crushed). A worldwide movement begins with support from the Soviet Union and Sweden.

THE NEW GENERATION (58 minutes)
The Soweto Uprising, led by a younger generation, inspires an international response; apartheid opponent Steve Biko is murdered; the United Nations issues a mandatory arms embargo against South Africa.

Total running time: ca. 180 minutes.

Bette Gordon & James Benning MICHIGAN AVENUE (1973, 7 minutes, 16mm)
Preserved with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Women’s Film Preservation Fund.
A narrative film concerning an investigation of two women in time and space, to the point where the investigation becomes the narrative.

Bette Gordon & James Benning i-94 (1974, 3 minutes, 16mm)
Preserved with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Women’s Film Preservation Fund.
Intercourse between two people who never appear on the screen at the same time. An exploration of sex and male/female identities.

Bette Gordon & James Benning THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (1975, 27 minutes, 16mm)
Preserved with support from The National Film Preservation Foundation.
A true masterpiece of 70s cinema, more remarkable today then ever before. A conceptual bicentennial film dealing with spatial and temporal relationships between two travelers, their car, and the geographic, political, and social changes from New York to Los Angeles. The space within each frame is at the same time continuous and elliptical.

Bette Gordon STILL LIFE (1972, 3 minutes, 16mm)
Preserved with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Women’s Film Preservation Fund.
A meditation on the American rustic where various objects within the composition are re-presented in unnatural colors and unusual spatial arrangements, emphasizing the illusion of movement while exploring film grain and its graphic nature.

Bette Gordon AN EROTIC FILM (1975, 3 minutes, 16mm)
Preserved with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Women’s Film Preservation Fund.
The moment before and the moment after…

Bette Gordon AN ALGORITHM (1977, 10 minutes, 16mm)
Preserved with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Women’s Film Preservation Fund.
A visually stunning kinetic rhythm produced by looped footage (mathematical curves) in and out of phase with each other.

Total running time: ca. 55 minutes.

(KINOGLAZ)

“The film drama is the Opium of the people…down with Bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios…long live life as it is!” – Dziga Vertov

Print courtesy of the Tim Hunter Collection at the Academy Film Archive.
Produced by Benedict Bogeaus, this kooky, color RKO western features John Payne as ‘Tennessee’ and Ronald Reagan as his partner ‘Cowpoke’, in what Peter Bogdanovich has declared Reagan’s most likable performance. The partners swap partners, as Tennessee becomes interested in Cowpoke’s betrothed, a gold-digger named Goldie. Marking one of the high points in Dwan’s astoundingly productive career, TENNESSEE’S PARTNER is a film that Raul Ruiz too claims as a favorite.

Bette Gordon
EMPTY SUITCASES
1981, 55 minutes, 16mm-to-video.
A narrative derived from film’s own material and an exploration of issues relating to representation and identification in cinema. The film presents fragments of a woman’s life – her work (as a photographer), her friendships and relationships – in short, her economic, sexual, and artistic struggles. By deconstructing the fragments of text, speech, music, and picture, the film problematizes the way in which cinematic language structures point of view.

Preceded by:
NOYES (1976, 3 minutes, 16mm)
“A single action seen from alternative left and right perspectives, accentuating reversals, repetitions, and persistence of vision.” –Karyn Kay, CAMERA OBSCURA
&
EXCHANGES (1979, 18 minutes, 16mm-to-video)
“The elliptical printing-editing style confronts the problem of the imaging of the body, by posing a kind of striptease of cinema. … The film’s construction attempts to re-position the erotic elements: the technology employed becomes more seductive than the actual image of the stripping, displacing the striptease rather than serving it invisibly, thus establishing a tension between the image of the woman and the sensuality of the filmic process.” –Karyn Kay, CAMERA OBSCURA
Total running time: ca. 80 minutes.

Haunting and sometimes shocking, Tourneur’s first color western is a lyrical and unusual film starring Dana Andrews as a man torn. His loyalty to his troubled, compulsive-gambler best friend is further tested when he falls for the friend’s fiancée, the sexy and world-weary Susan Hayward. Tourneur’s storytelling is so fluid that it’s dizzy, in this film set under the dappled light of Oregon forests, and anchored by terrific songs from Hoagy Carmichael.

FOLLOWED BY A Q&A WITH SERGE BOZON AND MIRIAM BALE.

LUMINOUS MOTION
1998, 94 minutes, 35mm. With Eric Lloyd, Deborah Kara Unger, Terry Kinney, and Jamey Sheridan.
Based on the genre-bending novel THE HISTORY OF LUMINOUS MOTION, Gordon’s hypnotic and disturbing road movie centers around the darkly comic adventures of Phillip Davis, a ten-year-old boy living on the California highways with his carefree and highly seductive mother (Unger). Phillip’s love for his mother, however, is strained by her frequent forays into larceny, promiscuity, and drunkenness.

Starring Sylvie Testud and Pascale Greggory.
One of the most genuinely peculiar movies to emerge in many a moon, LA FRANCE is a bizarre but beautiful brew, equal parts gender-bending drama, war film, romantic odyssey, and anachronistic folk-musical. Determined to find her husband, who has vanished into the storm of WWI, Camille (Testud) disguises herself as a man and sets off into the countryside, where she soon falls in with a band of wandering soldiers (equipped with more than the usual instruments of war) who are burdened with a secret of their own. Eschewing realism for an allegorical, fable-like tone, LA FRANCE is note-perfect, a soulful, mysterious, and poetic voyage through a landscape that is both war-torn and enchanted. Like the songs that punctuate the narrative, LA FRANCE is melancholy, strange, and lovely.

(SHAGHAI, SOVIET!)

“The film drama is the Opium of the people…down with Bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios…long live life as it is!” – Dziga Vertov

With Jamey Sheridan, Steve Buscemi, Aidan Quinn, and John Savage.

“Harry, a well-liked, long-divorced middle-ager…takes off suddenly for Philadelphia to visit Tom (Buscemi), a dying Navy buddy. ‘We became men together’, Tom reminisces in his hospital bed – rites of passage that torment Harry, who continues to seek out friends from the service to assuage his guilt over a heinous act of betrayal and cruelty. Each visit serves as a set piece for the pathologies of white midlife manhood: entitlement, repression, rage, self-pity. Gordon films every encounter…with a hesitant empathy, maintaining just the right tone before Harry’s lushly romantic final reunion.” –Melissa Anderson, VILLAGE VOICE

SPECIAL ENCORE SCREENING!

As a follow-up to the film series UNITED WE STAND: SOUTH AFRICAN CINEMA UNDER APARTHEID, and following its successful run at Film Forum last spring, we present this encore screening of Connie Field’s thrillingly ambitious, expansive, and magisterial 7-episode documentary chronicling the history of the global anti-apartheid movement that took on South Africa’s entrenched apartheid regime and its international supporters who considered South Africa an ally in the Cold War. The combined stories have a scope that is epic in both space and time, spanning most of the globe over half a century.

“More than a decade in the making, eight-and-a-half-hours long, featuring more than 100 talking heads, and spanning 42 years and four continents, [HAVE YOU HEARD] is a triumph of maximalist filmmaking. And you won’t look at your watch once. … Field’s nonfiction epic is a monumental chronicle not just of one nation and its hideous regime, but of the second half of the 20th century.” –Melissa Anderson, VILLAGE VOICE

Please note: the three parts can be seen separately with no loss of comprehension.

PART 2:
FAIR PLAY (95 minutes)
An international sports boycott takes shape when African teams refuse to compete in the Olympics with South Africa’s all-white teams. Only SA’s world champion Springboks rugby team remains on the field.

FROM SELMA TO SOWETO (90 minutes)
With the success of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, African-Americans push for economic sanctions against South Africa. Despite President Reagan’s opposition, Congress finally imposes sanctions.

Total running time: ca. 190 minutes.

Bette Gordon & James Benning MICHIGAN AVENUE (1973, 7 minutes, 16mm)
Preserved with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Women’s Film Preservation Fund.
A narrative film concerning an investigation of two women in time and space, to the point where the investigation becomes the narrative.

Bette Gordon & James Benning i-94 (1974, 3 minutes, 16mm)
Preserved with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Women’s Film Preservation Fund.
Intercourse between two people who never appear on the screen at the same time. An exploration of sex and male/female identities.

Bette Gordon & James Benning THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (1975, 27 minutes, 16mm)
Preserved with support from The National Film Preservation Foundation.
A true masterpiece of 70s cinema, more remarkable today then ever before. A conceptual bicentennial film dealing with spatial and temporal relationships between two travelers, their car, and the geographic, political, and social changes from New York to Los Angeles. The space within each frame is at the same time continuous and elliptical.

Bette Gordon STILL LIFE (1972, 3 minutes, 16mm)
Preserved with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Women’s Film Preservation Fund.
A meditation on the American rustic where various objects within the composition are re-presented in unnatural colors and unusual spatial arrangements, emphasizing the illusion of movement while exploring film grain and its graphic nature.

Bette Gordon AN EROTIC FILM (1975, 3 minutes, 16mm)
Preserved with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Women’s Film Preservation Fund.
The moment before and the moment after…

Bette Gordon AN ALGORITHM (1977, 10 minutes, 16mm)
Preserved with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Women’s Film Preservation Fund.
A visually stunning kinetic rhythm produced by looped footage (mathematical curves) in and out of phase with each other.

Total running time: ca. 55 minutes.

SPECIAL ENCORE SCREENING!

As a follow-up to the film series UNITED WE STAND: SOUTH AFRICAN CINEMA UNDER APARTHEID, and following its successful run at Film Forum last spring, we present this encore screening of Connie Field’s thrillingly ambitious, expansive, and magisterial 7-episode documentary chronicling the history of the global anti-apartheid movement that took on South Africa’s entrenched apartheid regime and its international supporters who considered South Africa an ally in the Cold War. The combined stories have a scope that is epic in both space and time, spanning most of the globe over half a century.

“More than a decade in the making, eight-and-a-half-hours long, featuring more than 100 talking heads, and spanning 42 years and four continents, [HAVE YOU HEARD] is a triumph of maximalist filmmaking. And you won’t look at your watch once. … Field’s nonfiction epic is a monumental chronicle not just of one nation and its hideous regime, but of the second half of the 20th century.” –Melissa Anderson, VILLAGE VOICE

Please note: the three parts can be seen separately with no loss of comprehension.

PART 3:
THE BOTTOM LINE (83 minutes)
Employees and consumers worldwide pressure Polaroid, General Motors, Barclay’s Bank, and other corporate giants to divest from South Africa. A financial crisis ensues when a mass exodus of corporations isolates the white regime.

FREE AT LAST (75 minutes)
The campaign to free Nelson Mandela (imprisoned 27 years) gains momentum. His release, coupled with ongoing international pressure and an unstoppable internal mass movement, lead to the toppling of apartheid and the holding of democratic elections.

Total running time: ca. 160 minutes.

DOCUMENTARY SERIES
About Religion.
Jody Kemmerer SKY DANCER (2010, 30 minutes, video)
Herb Kossover FLOWERS OF THE SON (2011, 28 minutes, video)

FIRST SHORT FILM PROGRAM
About Environment.
Skyler Carkhuff DIRTY WATER (2010, 3 minutes, video)
Christine Kellogg DANCING THE TIDE (2010, 10 minutes, video)
Daniel Laabs SLEET/SNOW (2008, 15 minutes, video)
Yuri Alves BROKEN CLOUDS (2010, 22 minutes, video)
Alexander Adler RAINFALL COLLAPSE (2010, 30 minutes, video)

SECOND SHORT FILM PROGRAM
About Religion.
Matthew Johnston MOTHER SUPERIOR: LET THERE BE LEAD (2009, 25 minutes, video)
Cecile Cinco ANGEL FACE (2009, 25 minutes, video)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Another Film in our Christian Sex Series.
Aron Campisano
THE MASTER PLAN
2009, 108 minutes, video.

–Wednesday, April 20, Documentaries at 6:00, First Short Film Program at 7:15, Second Short Film Program at 8:45, Feature Presentation at 9:45.

Anthology’s exhibition program encompasses many different categories of screenings each calendar – along with our theatrical premieres, thematic series, and auteur and actor retrospectives, we’re equally dedicated to presenting new or recent work by individual artists working at the vanguard of avant-garde/experimental/non-commercial cinema, encompassing filmmakers who are emerging, at their peak, or long-established but still prolific.

Each month we showcase at least one such program under the rubric NEW/IMPROVED/INSTITUTIONAL/QUALITY, an Owen Land-inspired title for a series that, after all, features new moving-image work, exhibited at a hallowed institution, and whose high quality we’re more than prepared to guarantee.

This calendar’s programs feature the work of Boston-based 16mm filmmaker Rebecca Meyers, Chinese found-footage documentarian Huang Weikai, and experimental animator and musician Martha Colburn.

APRIL:
REBECCA MEYERS
Rebecca Meyers has been making short, exquisite 16mm films for a decade now, patiently and quietly producing a body of work that displays a finely-attuned sensitivity to her environment – whether her own apartment, the streets of her city, or places further afield – and a remarkable grasp of composition and rhythm.

While her perceptiveness and lyricism have been amply evident from the start, each film has demonstrated a steady growth in confidence, ambition, and structural complexity, culminating in the magnificent achievement of her latest (and longest) film, BLUE MANTLE, which combines her typically beautiful cinematography with found footage, photographs, and literary texts, to form a haunting visual essay on the sea and its many psychological, emotional, and literary resonances.

“The films of Rebecca Meyers are acts of peripheral attention. … Meyers’s works are not so much films of place as they are films as environment. Like her subject matter, each film has a subtle richness that creates larger resonances through an act of detailed immersion. On the surface, the films do not ask for much, but they manage to absorb us experientially into the spaces they map, whether as contained as a small apartment or as sprawling as migratory paths of urban wildlife.” –Chris Kennedy

GLOW IN THE DARK (JANUARY-JUNE) (2002, 6.5 minutes, 16mm)
“The film is a small compendium of points of light that ends in a beautiful fireworks display celebrating the coming of summer.” –Chris Kennedy

THINGS WE WANT TO SEE (2004, 7 minutes, 16mm)
“An inventory of tenuously connected wonders – whales blowing, glaciers calving – that focuses on small movements within the frame.” –Fred Camper, CHICAGO READER

LIONS AND TIGERS AND BEARS (2006, 12 minutes, 16mm)
A bustling metropolis’s towering skyscrapers and urban architecture reveal traces of the wild.

NIGHT SIDE (2009, 4.5 minutes, 16mm)
“Delicate and beautiful – gem-like one might say – but it does have an edge to it. Meyers’s images are certainly familiar ones: trees, the eaves of houses, snow-covered ground, a solitary squirrel; but her editing keeps everything unbalanced and the dusk and night-time photography shrouds her images in a faintly otherworldly haze.” –Patrick Friel, SENSES OF CINEMA

BLUE MANTLE (2010, 34 minutes, 16mm)
“An elegant, sorrowful meditation on the sea, crosscutting haunting images of its variable moods, seductive hallucinations, and numerous shipwrecks with excerpts from poems, novels, paintings, and music – of Melville, Turner, Wagner, and Tennyson – that have bowed to the supremacy of all seas over human history and invention.” –Tony Pipolo, ARTFORUM

Total running time: ca. 70 minutes.

(CHELOVEK S KINO-APPARATOM)

ESSENTIAL CINEMA SCREENING – FREE FOR MEMBERS!

“If Vertov had never made anything other than MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA he would still be among the cinema’s greatest masters. A kaleidoscopic city symphony – conjoining Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa in one dizzying metropolis – this is Vertov’s most complex film, matching the rhythms of a day to the cycle of life (birth, death, marriage, divorce) and the mechanisms of movie-making to the logic of production. Made without titles, the movie is at once a documentary portrait of the Soviet people, a reflexive essay on cinematic representation (as dazzling as it is didactic), and an ode to work itself as a process of transformation.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

(SHESTAIA CHAST MIRA)

“What do Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Rouch, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, Allen Funt, and Santiago Alvarez have in common? All of them were anticipated, if not directly influenced, by the genius of Dziga Vertov, one of the half-dozen most important personalities in the history of cinema, and a key figure in 20th century culture as a whole.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

“[A SIXTH OF THE WORLD] was commissioned by the government trade agency, Gostorg. Vertov called [it] a ‘lyrical cine-poem,’ and he used declamatory titles to address the audience in the manner of Mayakovsky or Whitman. Dramatizing the full expanse of the Soviet Union (as well as demonstrating Vertov’s fast cutting), A SIXTH OF THE WORLD proved his first popular success and attracted considerable attention abroad.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE 

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

With Gabriele Ferzetti, Monica Vitti, and Lea Massari.

“Introspective, meditative movies have little action. Their actions are small, if any. It may sound strange to some, but when I think about L’AVVENTURA, Angelopoulos’s ULYSSES’ GAZE comes to my mind. Keitel walking walking walking, remembering remembering, thinking thinking thinking. Very very boring… And at the same time a very very important existential reality is taking place in him and around him. Two extremely different films in every way, but both, in my memory, are walking, searching, remembering films. I would add a third one, Gavin Lambert’s ANOTHER SKY. Yes, another boring masterpiece of meditation, retrospective, searching, remembering. There is poetry in all three. Yes, maybe that’s why they are boring, the poetry! Like rituals, old churches, or Shakespeare…” –Jonas Mekas

(ODINNADTSAYI)

“What do Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Rouch, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, Allen Funt, and Santiago Alvarez have in common? All of them were anticipated, if not directly influenced, by the genius of Dziga Vertov, one of the half-dozen most important personalities in the history of cinema, and a key figure in 20th century culture as a whole.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

“Vertov’s ecstatic paean to industrial development was, like Eisenstein’s OCTOBER, commissioned to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution and was accused of the dread ‘formalism.’” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(ENTUZIASM: SIMFONIYA DONBASSA)

“What do Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Rouch, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, Allen Funt, and Santiago Alvarez have in common? All of them were anticipated, if not directly influenced, by the genius of Dziga Vertov, one of the half-dozen most important personalities in the history of cinema, and a key figure in 20th century culture as a whole.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

ENTHUSIASM is Vertov’s vision of the transformation of social energies in a progressive society. The film is remarkable for its experimental use of sound and montage. Vertov himself invented special lightweight recording equipment to register the sounds of workers in the mines and factories of the Don Basin in this film. It is the best example of his theory of cinema which brings together “the film-eye and the radio-ear.” At one point he described the film as a “symphony of noises.”

“I would never have believed it possible to assemble mechanical noises to create such beauty. One of the most superb symphonies I have known. Dziga Vertov is a musician.” –Charles Chaplin 

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With Gabriele Ferzetti, Monica Vitti, and Lea Massari.

“Introspective, meditative movies have little action. Their actions are small, if any. It may sound strange to some, but when I think about L’AVVENTURA, Angelopoulos’s ULYSSES’ GAZE comes to my mind. Keitel walking walking walking, remembering remembering, thinking thinking thinking. Very very boring… And at the same time a very very important existential reality is taking place in him and around him. Two extremely different films in every way, but both, in my memory, are walking, searching, remembering films. I would add a third one, Gavin Lambert’s ANOTHER SKY. Yes, another boring masterpiece of meditation, retrospective, searching, remembering. There is poetry in all three. Yes, maybe that’s why they are boring, the poetry! Like rituals, old churches, or Shakespeare…” –Jonas Mekas

(TRI PESNI O LENINYE)

“What do Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Rouch, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, Allen Funt, and Santiago Alvarez have in common? All of them were anticipated, if not directly influenced, by the genius of Dziga Vertov, one of the half-dozen most important personalities in the history of cinema, and a key figure in 20th century culture as a whole.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

“Vertov’s ‘official’ Soviet masterpiece – a hagiographic compilation of lyrically edited stock footage and cinema’s first direct interviews – was the most successful (and compromised) movie he ever made.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE 

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SPECIAL SCREENING! ARTIST IN PERSON!

“Okiishi has been living between NY and Berlin since 2001, and (GOODBYE TO) MANHATTAN combines materials from that experience (filmed between 2006 and 2009) into a 72-minute, semiautobiographical transposition of Woody Allen’s classic. Okiishi’s cast of characters is pared down to MANHATTAN’s three female protagonists, interpreted by key players in the artist’s actual New York/Berlin life; its script is the Google translation, into English, of the German version of Allen’s original. The resultant semantic layering is mirrored in the video’s sometimes vertiginous, pixelated editing; still, if there is anything neurotic here, it is only in both films’ intuitive, historicized preoccupation with Germanness. Okiishi’s work indulges the hysterical potential of that transatlantic transaction; its Technicolor destabilizes a black-and-white cliché. One sees a zany shopping and dining experience in West Berlin’s KaDeWe department store; Manhattan meanwhile languishes under a sound track of slightly decelerated Gershwin tunes that have the metallic quality of a recording made, perhaps, in the hull of a Berlin-bound Boeing 757.” –Victoria Camblin, ARTFORUM

Premiered to great acclaim at the galleries Alex Zachary (NY) and MD 72 (Berlin) last year, this will be the work’s theatrical debut.

Ken Okiishi will take part in a Q&A after the screening with artist Jordan Wolfson.

This screening series celebrates the work of NYWIFT members. Whenever possible, the filmmakers are present for discussion and socializing after their works are shown. Screenings take place at Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Avenue @ 2nd Street.
There will be a Q&A following the screening, and an after-party to follow, with Cash Bar and complimentary food @ Dempsey's Pub, 61 2nd Avenue, between 3rd and 4th Streets.

This month, the NYWIFT screening series is proud to present Windfall, by NYWIFT members Stacey Foster and Autumn Tarleton.
What do we really know about wind power? We are told it’s green energy that reduces our dependency on foreign oil. That’s exactly what the people of Meredith in upstate New York thought when a wind developer offered to supplement the town’s failing economy with a farm of 40 industrial wind turbines. Attracted at first to the financial incentives, townspeople grew alarmed when they found out about side effects they had never anticipated.
Windfall exposes the dark side of wind energy development and the potential for its exploitation in highly profitable financial scams. With wind development in the US growing annually by 39%, the film is an eye-opener for anyone concerned about the future of renewable energy.  It premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2010, screened at the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam and won the Grand Jury Prize at DOCNYC.

SPECIAL SCREENING
The University of North Carolina School of the Arts.
This is the second presentation at NewFilmmakers of ‘The Image and Internal Time-Space Continuum’ experimental film class, taught by John LeBlanc and Julian Semilian. The twenty-one short films, ranging from thirty seconds to five minutes, span the surreal, experimental, comic, and dramatic, and are all original works created in the context of the classroom.

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Torrey Meeks GUARANTEED SEX (2010, 4 minutes, video)
Lili Baldwin SLEEPING WITH FRANK (2010, 5 minutes, video)
Dennis Williams CLYDE WATKINS, MADMAN (2010, 8 minutes, 16mm)
Nathan Jacobs LAST WISH (2010, 15 minutes, video)
Thomas Siblo FIVE APTS (2010, 21 minutes, video)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Gavin James
FOOTSTEPS
2009, 85 minutes, 16mm.

–Wednesday, April 27, Special Screening at 6:00, Short Film Program at 8:00, Feature Presentation at 9:15.

PUBLIC ACCESS POETRY

If you were watching the awesome recent innovation called cable TV in 1977 and ’78 you may have seen a long-since-forgotten show titled PUBLIC ACCESS POETRY, and it might have blown your mind. Produced by a group who met at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, PAP programs featured half-hour readings by a wide range of poets and performers who could roughly be categorized as ‘downtown’, or linked in one way or another with the still vital Poetry Project, now celebrating its 45th anniversary. The television series lasted two seasons (one live, the other recorded for later airing) and was produced with little-to-no broadcasting skills by the PAP personnel: Greg Masters, Gary Lenhart, David Herz, Didi Susan Dubelyew, Daniel Krakauer, Bob Rosenthal, and Rochelle Kraut.

Thankfully, more than 50 fragile open-reel videotapes of these shows still exist and were donated to the Poetry Project by Greg Masters. In 2010 a grant and subsequent anonymous support funded the preservation and digitization of 30 tapes. This two-program series features highlights and a few full broadcast episodes now made available once again. The Poetry Project is proud to partner with Anthology to rediscover these old shows that illustrate one aspect of its community and history.

Funding to preserve PUBLIC ACCESS POETRY was made possible through a Consulting Fund re-grant from the New York State Literary Presenters Technical Assistance Program (LitTAP). LitTAP is made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), a State agency, and administered through Just Buffalo Literary Center. Additional funding was made possible through the generosity of two anonymous donors. All videos transferred by The Standby Program at MercerMedia with consulting support from Anthology Film Archives.

PROGRAM 1: BEST OF PUBLIC ACCESS POETRY
ca. 75 minutes, video. Edited by Ethan Mitchell and Stacy Szymaszek.
This enticing sampler features moments, glimpses, and words from the wild and woolly PUBLIC ACCESS POETRY series. Guaranteed to surprise and certain to bring a smile of wonderment, it includes appearances and readings from the likes of Ted Berrigan, Jim Brodey, Tim Dlugos, Ted Greenwald, Bob Holman, Joanne Kyger, Jackson Mac Low, Bernadette Mayer, Eileen Myles, Alice Notley, Joel Oppenheimer, Peter Orlovsky, Maureen Owen, Ron Padgett, Rene Ricard, Tom Savage, Susie Timmons, Tony Towle, Lewis Warsh, and others.

If you were watching the awesome recent innovation called cable TV in 1977 and ’78 you may have seen a long-since-forgotten show titled PUBLIC ACCESS POETRY, and it might have blown your mind. Produced by a group who met at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, PAP programs featured half-hour readings by a wide range of poets and performers who could roughly be categorized as ‘downtown’, or linked in one way or another with the still vital Poetry Project, now celebrating its 45th anniversary. The television series lasted two seasons (one live, the other recorded for later airing) and was produced with little-to-no broadcasting skills by the PAP personnel: Greg Masters, Gary Lenhart, David Herz, Didi Susan Dubelyew, Daniel Krakauer, Bob Rosenthal, and Rochelle Kraut.

Thankfully, more than 50 fragile open-reel videotapes of these shows still exist and were donated to the Poetry Project by Greg Masters. In 2010 a grant and subsequent anonymous support funded the preservation and digitization of 30 tapes. This two-program series features highlights and a few full broadcast episodes now made available once again. The Poetry Project is proud to partner with Anthology to rediscover these old shows that illustrate one aspect of its community and history.

Funding to preserve PUBLIC ACCESS POETRY was made possible through a Consulting Fund re-grant from the New York State Literary Presenters Technical Assistance Program (LitTAP). LitTAP is made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), a State agency, and administered through Just Buffalo Literary Center. Additional funding was made possible through the generosity of two anonymous donors. All videos transferred by The Standby Program at MercerMedia with consulting support from Anthology Film Archives.

PROGRAM 2: PUBLIC ACCESS POETRY: THREE EPISODES
ca. 90 minutes, video.
Get your groove on and get a feel for the savvy DIY special effects techniques of PUBLIC ACCESS POETRY by watching three consecutive episodes from 1978. In the first, hosted by Bob Rosenthal, Ron Padgett gives a delightful reading from TOUJOURS L’AMORE (Sun, 1976). The following episode, again hosted by Rosenthal, features Bernadette Mayer shortly before she wrote her classic MIDWINTER DAY, and Lewis Warsh reading from BLUE HEAVEN (Kulchur, 1978). The final episode finds Peter Orlovsky reading from CLEAN ASSHOLE POEMS & SMILING VEGETABLE SONGS, shortly before it was to be published as Pocket Poets Series #37, by City Lights Books. He works in a talk about the benefit of urban fruit and nut trees, and then is joined for a set of music by Steven Hall (who also opens the show with a few poems) on guitar – and Arthur Russell fans take note, Russell appears on cello.

With James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, and Bob Dylan.
“May be the most beautiful and ambitious film that Peckinpah ever made. The time is 1881. Powerful interests want New Mexico tamed for their brand of progress, and Sheriff Pat Garrett (Coburn) is commissioned to rid the territory of his old gunfighting comrades. He serves fair notice to William Bonney – Billy the Kid (Kristofferson) – and his Fort Sumter cronies, but it’s not in their nature, or his, to go quietly. Peckinpah’s theme, more than ever, is the closing of the frontier and the nature of the loss that that entails. But this time his vision takes him beyond genre convention, beyond history and legend, to the bleeding heart of myth – and surely of himself. This is one strange and original movie.” –Richard T. Jameson

–On Friday, April 29, Wurlitzer will appear along with Will Oldham for a reading and conversation to mark the release of Oldham’s recent audio book version of SLOW FADE (Drag City). With musical accompaniment by Ben Chasny (SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE) and photographs by Lynn Davis. The reading will begin at 7:30 with the PAT GARRETT screening to follow.

With James Taylor, Dennis Wilson, and Warren Oates.
“[An] exciting existentialist road movie by Monte Hellman, with a swell script by Wurlitzer and Will Corry and my favorite Warren Oates performance…. Taylor and Wilson are the drivers of a supercharged ’55 Chevy, and Oates is the owner of a new GTO (these nameless characters are in fact identified only by the cars they drive); they meet and agree to race from New Mexico to the east coast, though an assortment of side interests periodically distracts them, including various hitchhikers (among them Laurie Bird). (GTO hilariously assumes a new persona every time he picks up a new passenger, rather like the amorphous narrator in Wurlitzer’s novel NOG.) The movie starts off as a narrative but gradually grows into something much more abstract – it’s unsettling but also beautiful.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

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

With the recent interest in the post-war Madison Ave advertising world (a la MAD MEN), the A/V Geeks are proud to present some of their favorite advertising and sales films. Some of the films, like Kodak’s MOVIES MOVE PEOPLE and Hamilton Beach’s COMPREHENDING BLENDING, realize the potential of motion pictures as a tireless yet effective sales tool and arestunning examples to behold. Others, such as the newsreel-like press releases from Monsanto, look informational and news-worthy on the surface but have asales pitch buried within. And finally, some films, like Sears’s FREEZE-IN, are curiosities leaving us to wonder how such a train wreck of a film could have been made. Besides highlighting some of the films that are available on a newly released A/V Geeks DVD from Kino, master showman Skip Elsheimer will be screening some never-before-seen gems, including the baffling HALF-HUMANOIDPRESENTATION and more! Where does Skip keep finding these weird, wonderful, whacked-out movies??????

Co-written by Rudy Wurlitzer.
Jim McBride’s first commercial film portrays the odyssey undertaken by the last bewildered survivors of an atomic holocaust, as they stumble through the wreckage of a vanished civilization. Neither moralizing sci-fi nor melodrama, despite its fanciful premise, the film is rather like a cinéma vérité doomsday documentary – a parable in newsreel form. Of all the films Wurlitzer was involved with, GLEN AND RANDA most closely resembles the tone and spirit of his own novels.
“Unaccountably disregarded by critics, this is a poisoned idyll of two young people in an America destroyed by atomic war…. A paraphrase of the counterculture’s sensibilities, the film’s subversive potential lies in its straightforward acceptance and naturalistic portrayal of the destructability of eternal American symbols: a destroyed Howard Johnson restaurant is more difficult to take than newspaper articles warning about the dangers of atomic war.” –Amos Vogel, FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART

–On Saturday, April 30, Rudy Wurlitzer will be here for a dialogue with friend and colleague Robert Downey Sr. after the 8:00 screening of GLEN AND RANDA.