Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
ADOLPHO ARRIETTA
September 15 – September 18
FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
This fall Anthology will be graced by a rare visit from Spanish experimental filmmaker Adolpho Arrietta, one of the most singular figures to emerge from the wave of avant-garde and underground cinema that swept film culture in the 1960s and 70s. After his early short films were hailed by critics in France, Arrietta joined the film scene there, producing a series of experimental narrative features, screenings of which have been extremely scarce in the U.S.
Reminiscent in many ways of the work of underground luminaries such as Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger – sharing above all their freedom of expression, their resourcefulness, their embrace of financial and technical limitations, and their precociousness (like Anger, Arrietta made his first film as a teenager!) – Arrietta’s films, with their poetic narratives and their lyrical beauty, are equally suggestive of the spirit of Jean Cocteau, an affinity explicitly confirmed by the casting of Jean Marais in Arrieta’s first French film, LE JOUET CRIMINEL. We are very pleased to be presenting this survey of Arrietta’s work, with the filmmaker in person!
“A young Spaniard outside of every system, of every small group, of every influence, records on 16mm (since for him, cinema cannot be an occupation) the quiet heartbreaking delusions that express, better than if he had prepared indictments, the state of mind of a generation for whom poetry today is the only refuge and the only practicable fight…” –Jean-André Fieschi, CAHIERS DU CINÉMA
Presented with the generous support of the Cultural Department of the Spanish Consulate in New York, and co-presented by MIX NYC, producer of the NY Queer Experimental Film Festival (www.mixnyc.org).
Arrietta will also appear at Brooklyn’s Microscope Gallery on Monday, September 19 at 7:00pm, for the following event:
Microscope is thrilled to welcome Spanish film-maker Adolfo Arrieta for a carte blanche night where he will present videos by French artist Marguerite Lantz as well as a new 8-minute short work composed specially for this show. The theme of the evening is 'angel wings' - also very much present in Arrieta’s work. For more info, please visit: www.microscopegallery.com.
Special thanks to Adolpho Arrietta, Íñigo Ramírez de Haro (Cultural Department of the Spanish Consulate NY), Elle Burchill & Andrea Monti (Microscope Gallery), Pip Chodorov (RE:VOIR), Stephen Kent Jusick (MIX NYC), and M.M. Serra (Film-Makers’ Cooperative).
