Film Screenings / Programs / Series
INFRASTRUCTURE ON FILM
March 14 – March 28
This appropriately multi-faceted series gathers together a diverse array of films that explore the infrastructure of the built environment, the various systems and networks that are conceived, designed, and engineered to encourage the functioning of our societies (while perpetually proving just as capable of turning destructive). Encompassing films about trains, mass transit systems, and highways; bridges, canals, and dams; and telephone networks and electrical grids, “Infrastructure on Film” demonstrates the myriad ways that filmmakers have probed the histories, changing technologies, and profound significances of systems that are often hidden or taken for granted but crucially important to the daily lives of each and every human being. It demonstrates too the fascination that these topics have exerted on documentary, experimental, and narrative filmmakers alike – everyone from Jean-Luc Godard and Bernardo Bertolucci, Sergio Leone and Bong Joon-ho, Joris Ivens and Frederick Wiseman, to Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, and Barbara Hammer.
The series will continue in the spring with programs devoted to infrastructure-gone-bad, the infrastructure of the internet and other uniquely contemporary systems, and a sidebar series showcasing truckers on film!
Curated in collaboration with Rebecca Cleman (Electronic Arts Intermix).
Special thanks to Francesca Ansuini (RAI), Antonella Bonfanti (Canyon Cinema), Emilie Cauquy (Cinémathèque Française), Jack Durwood (Paramount), Kevin Jerome Everson, Devleta Filipovic (Kinoteka Bosne i Hercegovine), Chad Friedrichs, Amélie Garin-Davet (Cultural Services of the French Embassy), Emily Glaser (Zipporah Films), Paul Gordon & Tina Harvey (Library & Archives Canada), Jane Gutteridge (National Film Board of Canada), May Haduong (Academy Film Archives), Anke Hahn (Deutsche Kinemathek), Lawrence R. Hott, Alice Lea (LUX), Annamaria Licciardello & Elena Testa (Cineteca Nazionale), Inoue Mao (Kansai EPCO), Arianne Olthaar, Peter Bo Rappmund, Elena Rossi-Snook (NYPL), Paola Ruggiero (Cinecittà), Hirofumi Sakamoto (Postwar Japan Moving Image Archive), Frieder Schlaich (Filmgalerie 451), Hunter Snyder, Carsten Spicher (International Short Film Festival Oberhausen), and Carsten Zimmer (Arsenal).
Chad Freidrichs
THE EXPERIMENTAL CITY
2017, 95 min, digital
In the 1960s, frustrated by the growing problem of urban pollution, Athelstan Spilhaus, a visionary scientist and futurist comic strip writer, assembled a team of experts to develop a bold experiment: the Minnesota Experimental City (MXC). MXC would be the city of the future, a domed metropolis for 250,000 pioneering residents, built from scratch and using cutting-edge technology to prevent urban sprawl and pollution. It was a compelling vision, with powerful backers, hundreds of experts, and its own state agency. But things didn’t quite go as planned, as explored in this fascinating look back at the would-be city of tomorrow.
Thurs, Mar 14 at 7:30 and Thurs, Mar 21 at 6:45.
Hartmut Bitomsky
REICHSAUTOBAHN
1986, 90 min, 35mm. In German with English subtitles. Archival print courtesy of the Deutsche Kinemathek.
“‘Where Germany ends,’ Hitler once said, ‘the potholes begin.’ And so he set about engineering the massive public works project known as the Autobahn. Hailed as a hedge against unemployment, a stimulant for a sluggish economy, a boon for car owners, and an efficient network for military transport, REICHSAUTOBAHN forwards the notion that from its conception the Autobahn ‘wasn’t to be just a road, it had to be a cultural institution.’ Accordingly, Bitomsky states that the Nazis didn’t develop the idea of the uberhighway, they simply formulated the aesthetics of the monumental road. REICHSAUTOBAHN drives headlong into the cultural politics of a ‘road without obstacles,’ the perfect symbol for a nation seeking extreme unification.” –PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE
Fri, Mar 15 at 7:00 and Fri, Mar 22 at 9:15.
Lawrence R. Hott & Tom Lewis
DIVIDED HIGHWAYS: THE INTERSTATES AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN LIFE
1997, 87 min, digital
“A delightful essay on the history of the interstate highway system, DIVIDED HIGHWAYS describes how freeways have transformed the continent in physical, sociological, and psychological ways. The creation of new cities, the division and destruction of neighborhoods, and the evolution of fast food, are living proof of the everlasting power of pavement. Directed by Lawrence R. Hott, and written by Tom Lewis (upon whose book the film is based), DIVIDED HIGHWAYS shows President Dwight D. Eisenhower cutting the ceremonial ribbon along the first interstate, and continues the joyride through the next four decades.” –PEABODY
Fri, Mar 15 at 9:15.
James Benning
RR
2007, 115 min, 16mm
“For two years, Benning assembled footage of trains throughout the U.S., depicting their movement through the frame of a static camera in a variety of surroundings. From start to finish, we see the steel monsters in their entirety, passing from idyllic and pristine landscapes to more populated and disfigured spaces, and finally through to the ends of the continent. The diversity of these locations corresponds in turn to a catalog of different forms of trains, speeds and shot lengths: ranging from very short to extremely long, the freight trains make their way by turns slowly or at great speeds, at times in the foreground or vanishing into the backdrop, through the changing scenery.” –Christian Höller, EDITION FILMMUSEUM
Sat, Mar 16 at 6:15.
Bong Joon-ho
SNOWPIERCER
2013, 126 min, DCP
“South Korean director Bong Joon-ho uses genre, with fantastical distortions, to comment upon social ills. SNOWPIERCER combines the outlandish disaster/thriller movie setup, akin to those seen in such 1970s films as THE CASSANDRA CROSSING or THE TOWERING INFERNO, with the recent vogue for apocalypse plotlines. Here the survivors of climate change circumnavigate a frozen planet in the cars of a ceaseless train. A perversion of the railway’s original function to bring civilization to remote areas, the Snowpiercer is a self-contained society hurtling through desolation. As the train speeds along its course, the negative effects of an imposed infrastructure corrode from within, leading everyone towards inevitable catastrophe. Tilda Swinton stars in one of her most unforgettable roles.” –Rebecca Cleman
Sat, Mar 16 at 9:00 and Thurs, Mar 21 at 9:00.
Willy Otto Zielke
THE STEEL BEAST / DAS STAHLTIER
1935, 75 min, 35mm-to-digital
This daring collage of rhythms, abstractions, superimpositions, and wild shots of the railroad and other machines, made by the great German photographer Zielke, was originally commissioned to celebrate the centennial of the Nuremburg-Furth railroad line, and later banned by the Third Reich for “decadent aesthetics.”
Preceded by:
Jean Mitry PACIFIC 231 1949, 12 min, 16mm. Print courtesy of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
Film critic Jean Mitry made this film poem to honor the largest French steam locomotive, the Pacific. The montage of speeding wheels, pistons and gears; the parallel lines of rails and wires; a stoker furiously shoveling coal in concert with the score – together these elements visually and musically describe the exhilaration of the train’s motion.
&
Jürgen Böttcher SHUNTERS / RANGIERER 1984, 21 min, 35mm. Archival print courtesy of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.
A bona fide masterpiece, SHUNTERS is a portrait of the workers who are responsible for detaching train cars and diverting them from one track to another. With a musique concrète soundtrack constructed from field recordings of the clanging, screeching, and whistling that suffuse the trainyards, the film portrays an uncanny world of workers whose gestures are deeply inscribed with their long experience, and of the hulking, unmanned train cars themselves, which seem to have a life of their own as they careen into each other in controlled but cacophonous collisions.
Total running time: ca. 115 min.
Sun, Mar 17 at 5:15 and Sun, Mar 24 at 3:00.
Sergio Leone
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST / C’ERA UNA VOLTA IL WEST
1968, 164 min, 35mm. Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive. Restoration made possible with support by The Film Foundation and Cinema per Roma Foundation in association with Sergio Leone Productions and Paramount Pictures.
“The iconic opening sets an indelible scene: in a barren desert landscape in the American Old West, lone figures lurk around a remote railway station, waiting. The composer Ennio Morricone fills this scene with the sounds of weathered infrastructure, creaking under footfalls and whistling in the wind. When at last the train pulls in, its rhythmic huffing is monumental, signaling that the railway has an outsized impact on this land and its inhabitants. Along with the modern conveniences it brings, the train is a harbinger of violent upheaval; it is both a sustaining and destructive force. The original story was co-written by Leone, Dario Argento, and Bernardo Bertolucci, and features blue-eyed Henry Fonda cast convincingly against type as a cold-blooded villain.” –Rebecca Cleman
Sun, Mar 17 at 8:00 and Sat, Mar 23 at 8:00.
Dominic Angerame
CITY SYMPHONY
1987-95, 73 min, 16mm
A collection of five distinct films centering around the city environment in a constant state of change, focusing on images of construction and destruction of modern structures in the urban environment. CONTINUUM CONTINUUM (1987) centers on the people who perform hard manual labor, such as tarring roofs, digging up streets, etc. DECONSTRUCTION SIGHT (1995) shows how modern methods of construction have rendered men and women insignificant behind mammoth tools of destruction. IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS (1997) documents the demolition of the Embarcadero Freeway. THE LINE OF FIRE (1997) finds Angerame returning to his apartment building the day after it burned down. And PREMONITION (1995) shows the vacant Embarcadero Freeway after it has outlived its usefulness, but before its destruction.
Plus, the NYC Premiere of the most recent chapter of Angerame’s CITY SYMPHONY series!:
REVELATIONS
2018, 24 min, digital
“This works includes footage that was filmed from the late 1990s to the present. Some of the footage includes shots from waterfront docks near the Todd Shipyards of San Francisco and scenes of the baseball stadium while it was being constructed. REVELATIONS also shows the cityscape from the Dogpatch area before renovations and many scenes from the San Francisco Embarcadero.
There were many scenes in the 16mm that were over exposed and I was tempted to throw the material away. But in the post-production, my black-and-white grader, Yannis Davidas from Light Cone in Paris, was able to adjust the gain and out of the whiteness of the overexposed film materialized imagery that I had never seen before. Since new imagery was revealed to me, I decided to call the film REVELATIONS.” –Dominic Angerame
Mon, Mar 18 at 7:30.
WATER & DAMS FILM PROGRAM
Dams and water systems may seem like unlikely subjects for acclaimed filmmakers, but strangely enough filmmakers from Ermanno Olmi and Jean-Luc Godard to prolific American independent filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson have made fascinating films about those very things. Both Olmi and Godard began their careers with lyrical short works documenting the construction of dams, while Everson’s SOUND THAT depicts the employees of the Cleveland Water Department on the hunt for leaks in Cuyahoga County’s water system. The program also includes two Canadian non-fiction films, Gordon Sparling’s PICKING LOCKS and Roger Blais’s THE DIKES.
Gordon Sparling PICKING LOCKS 1937, 10 min, 35mm. Print courtesy of Library & Archives Canada.
Ermanno Olmi THE GLACIER DAM / LA DIGA DEL GHIACCIAIO 1954, 11 min, 16mm. Print courtesy of the Cineteca Nazionale.
Roger Blais THE DIKES 1955, 20 min, 16mm
Jean-Luc Godard OPERATION CONCRETE / OPÉRATION BÉTON 1958, 20 min, 35mm, b&w. In French with English subtitles.
Kevin Jerome Everson SOUND THAT 2014, 12 min, digital
Total running time: ca. 80 min.
Tues, Mar 19 at 7:00.
Peter Bo Rappmund
PSYCHOHYDROGRAPHY
2010, 63 min, digital
This mesmerizing work follows the Los Angeles water supply from its Eastern Sierra Nevada source through the alien channels of the Los Angeles River all the way to its eventual Pacific deposit. Constructed entirely from single-frame photographic images, combined with sound recordings of the sun by Thomas Ashcraft, PSYCHOHYDROGRAPHY is a strikingly conceived and fully accomplished work. It is reminiscent of the work of James Benning and Thom Andersen in its formal qualities as well as its concern with the social and political dimensions of landscape.
With:
Emily Richardson PETROLIA 2005, 21 min, digital
PETROLIA looks at the architecture of the oil industry along the Scottish coastline where oil and gas supplies are predicted to run dry in the next forty years. Shooting on 16mm, and using time lapse and long exposure techniques, the film presents a record of industrial phenomena: the toxic beauty of the refinery at Grangemouth, huge drilling platforms gliding across the water as they come in for maintenance and repair at Nigg, and the last dance of the shipbuilding cranes in Glasgow harbor.
Tues, Mar 19 at 9:00.
Bernardo Bertolucci
THE PATH OF OIL / LA VIA DEL PETROLIO
1967, 140 min, 35mm. In Italian with English subtitles. Provided by the Istituto Luce Cinecittà, and screened courtesy of the Archivio Nazionale Cinema Impresa – CSC and Eni.
“In the interval between BEFORE THE REVOLUTION and PARTNER, Bertolucci directed his only substantial documentary, a fascinating exploration of the ‘path of oil,’ following its extraction in Iran to its dispersal throughout Europe. Commissioned by Eni, the nationalized petroleum company of Italy, Bertolucci’s meditation on the complex process of gas production seems nonetheless slyly preoccupied by the colonial enterprise underlying it; Middle Eastern nations supply the raw materials of modernity but don’t benefit from its advancements. Divided into three parts, Bertolucci’s grandly shot black-and-white film experiments with the nonfiction form as he discovers aesthetic riches buried in its substrate.” –Steve Seid, PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE
Wed, Mar 20 at 7:15 and Sat, Mar 23 at 4:45.
Rithy Panh
THE LAND OF WANDERING SOULS / LA TERRE DES ÂMES ERRANTES
1999, 111 min, video
This film follows a poor, unnamed Cambodian family as they travel through the country engaging in the back-breaking work of laying fiber optic cables. The man, woman, and their six children are but a few of the hundreds of individuals employed by the French company Alcatel to construct this enormous infrastructural project, one that looks to a national future, but is intimately bound to post-colonial and civil traumas of the past. As the family marches across the nation, digging holes in the ground, it is the unresolved traumas of the nation’s recent past that are exhumed and encountered, and Panh’s open-eyed gaze that records it.
Fri, Mar 22 at 6:45 and Thurs, Mar 28 at 9:00.
BRIDGES FILM PROGRAM
This program explores the various ways that filmmakers have celebrated and explored the phenomenon of the bridge, with classics by Joris Ivens, Rudy Burckhardt, and Shirley Clarke, alongside the rarely-screened BRIDGE HIGH by Manfred Kirchheimer (director of STATIONS OF THE ELEVATED), one of Heinz Emigholz’s exquisite architectural studies (MAILLART’S BRIDGES), and more.
Joris Ivens THE BRIDGE / DE BRUG 1927-28, 15 min, 16mm
Rudy Burckhardt UNDER THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE 1953, 15 min, 16mm
Shirley Clarke BRIDGES-GO-ROUND 1958, 7 min, 16mm
Robert Crawford BRIDGES AND LIGHTS 1969, 7 min, 16mm
Manfred Kirchheimer BRIDGE HIGH 1976, 10 min, 16mm. Print courtesy of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
Heinz Emigholz MAILLART’S BRIDGES 1995-2000, 24 min, 35mm
Tomonari Nishikawa TEN MORNINGS TEN EVENINGS AND ONE HORIZON 2016, 10 min, 16mm
Hunter Snyder BRIDGE TENDER 2013, 8 min, digital
Total running time: ca. 100 min.
Sun, Mar 24 at 5:30.
Frederick Wiseman
CANAL ZONE
1977, 174 min, 16mm
CANAL ZONE is about the people who live and work in the Panama Canal Zone and shows both the operation of the Canal and the various governmental agencies – business, military, and civilian – related to the functioning of the Canal and the lives of the Americans in the zone. The film includes sequences of ships in transit, the work of special canal pilots, aspects of the civil government, the work of the military, and the social, religious, and recreational life of the Zonians.
Sun, Mar 24 at 8:00.
MASS TRANSIT FILM PROGRAM
This program gathers together films and videos about the New York City subway – including Stan Brakhage’s gorgeous THE WONDER RING, poet Frank Kuenstler’s haunting EL ATLANTIS, and lesser-known works by Robert Crawford and Barbara Hammer – with films about other mass transit systems worldwide, from Winnipeg streetcars and the Tokyo Metro to Wuppertal, Germany’s surreal and captivating suspended train, the Schwebebahn.
Roman Kroitor PAUL TOMKOWICZ: STREET-RAILWAY SWITCHMAN 1954, 9 min, 35mm, b&w
Stan Brakhage THE WONDER RING 1955, 4 min, 16mm
Robert Crawford SCENES FROM NEW YORK CITY TRANSIT 1972, 17 min, 16mm
Frank Kuenstler EL ATLANTIS 1973, 21 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives; special thanks to Tom Gunning, University of Chicago.
Barbara Hammer WOULD YOU LIKE TO MEET YOUR NEIGHBOR? A NEW YORK SUBWAY TAPE 1985, 12.5 min, video
Arianne Olthaar SCHWEBEBAHN 2016, 3.5 min, 16mm-to-digital
Tomonari Nishikawa TOKYO – EBISU 2010, 5 min, 16mm
Total running time: ca. 80 min.
Mon, Mar 25 at 6:45.
Ursula Biemann
BLACK SEA FILES
2005, 43 min, video
BLACK SEA FILES investigates the construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, a British Petroleum-owned 1,760-km conduit built to bring oil from resource-rich Azerbaijan to international markets. Circumventing the main players in the region, the video sheds light on a multitude of secondary sceneries. Oil workers, farmers, refugees, and prostitutes who live along the pipeline come into profile and contribute to a wider human geography that displaces the singular and powerful signifying practices of oil corporations and oil politicians.
Marc Wolfensberger
OIL ROCKS: CITY ABOVE THE SEA / LA CITÉ DU PÉTROLE
2009, 52 min, digital
Commissioned by Stalin in 1949, the Oil Rocks is a vast, sprawling web of oil platforms in the middle of the Caspian Sea, comprising 2,000 oil rigs, 300 kilometers of bridges, rusty old Soviet trucks rolling back and forth, nine-story building blocks, thousands of oil workers, a cultural palace, a lemonade factory, and a green park. Sixty years later, the Oil Rocks still stand. But two-thirds of the infrastructure has been regained by the sea, making it a kind of Oil Atlantis. Combining black-and-white archival material from the Soviet era and contemporary footage, the film tells the story of this timeless place and of some of its amazing inhabitants.
Mon, Mar 25 at 9:00.
ELECTRICITY/COMMUNICATIONS FILM PROGRAM
This program showcases a handful of extraordinary sponsored films by the likes of Ermanno Olmi, Toshio Matsumoto, and Edgar Reitz, all on the subject of electrical or other communications networks. These films are paired with an experimental film by Lithuanian filmmaker Deimantas Narkevicius, as well as a masterpiece of 1970s Yugoslavian nonfiction cinema – HIGH VOLTAGE ELECTRICIANS, which unforgettably documents the installation of electrical lines high above a country valley – and Nell Cox’s OPERATOR, a short film shot by the great vérité pioneer Richard Leacock.
Ermanno Olmi THREE LINES TO MILAN / TRE FILI FINO A MILANO 1958, 25 min, 35mm. Archival print courtesy of the Cineteca Nazionale.
Toshio Matsumoto THE RECORD OF A LONG WHITE LINE / SHIROI NAGAI SEN NO KIROKU 1960, 13 min, 35mm-to-digital
Edgar Reitz COMMUNICATION / KOMMUNIKATION – TECHNIK DER VERSTÄNDIGUNG 1961, 11 min, 35mm
Ranko Stanišić HIGH VOLTAGE ELECTRICIANS / PENJAČI 1978, 13 min, 16mm-to-digital
Deimantas Narkevicius ENERGY LITHUANIA 2000, 17 min, Super-8mm-to-digital
Nell Cox OPERATOR 1969, 15 min, 16mm. Photographed by Richard Leacock.
Total running time: ca. 100 min.
Thurs, Mar 28 at 6:45.
