Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
3 BY TOM DICILLO
November 10 – November 11
FILMMAKER IN PERSON FOR ALL SHOWS! STEVE BUSCEMI IN PERSON ON WED, NOV 11!
Tom DiCillo is a key figure in the wave of bold and vividly inventive independent narrative filmmaking that reinvigorated film culture in the U.S. in the 1980s and 90s. After training as a director at NYU’s Graduate Film School, he made his mark with the 1991 feature film, JOHNNY SUEDE, and went on to direct five more feature films (as well as the Doors documentary WHEN YOU’RE STRANGE), all of which have established him as a keen and deadpan funny chronicler of American culture (whether that of music, filmmaking, celebrity, or of society at large), as well as a peerless director of actors. His films mix genres and tones in elegant and innovative ways and are studded with performances by a who’s-who of gifted performers such as Steve Buscemi, Catherine Keener, Kevin Corrigan, Sam Rockwell, Peter Dinklage, and Denis Leary.
Despite all this, DiCillo hasn’t found it any easier to get his projects funded over the past decade. Taking matters into his own hands, he has returned to a more self-reliant, handmade mode of filmmaking for his latest work. Made over the course of seven years, DOWN IN SHADOWLAND is an impressionistic, haunting portrait of the NYC subway system. Filmed secretly, in the tradition of Walker Evans’s renowned Subway Portraits, SHADOWLAND is at once a vérité portrait of the world beneath New Yorkers’ feet, and an evocative, carefully structured, almost musical filmic composition. Taking the subway as a microcosm of the world at large, it combines the private and the public, the personal and the political.
Anthology is thrilled to host Tom DiCillo for screenings of DOWN IN SHADOWLAND as well as two of his finest fiction features, LIVING IN OBLIVION and DELIRIOUS.
Special thanks to Tom DiCillo; Richard Abramowitz (Abramorama); David Spencer & Matt Jones (University of North Carolina School of the Arts); and Alexandre Mallet-Guy & Rémi Dupéroux (Memento Films).
