Film Screenings / Programs / Series
PRISON IMAGES: INCARCERATION AND THE CINEMA (online edition)
July 27 – August 31
In the summer and fall of 2019, Anthology presented a two-part series entitled “Prison Images: Incarceration and the Cinema. Bringing together a wide range of films – from provocative, activist documentaries and commercial exploitation cinema to classic escape dramas, and more – “Prison Images” sought to counteract mainstream cinema’s tendency to naturalize the phenomenon of the prison system, and instead challenge received notions about the usefulness and effectiveness of punishment. For Part 2, we extended the series to delve more deeply into the realm of inmate-produced films and videos, including works created in collaboration with video-makers Gary Glassman and Wendy Clarke during their successive experiences as artist-in-residence at the California Institution for Men in Chino, California, as well as a selection of documentaries that explore similar programs intended to foster the creation of theater, music, art, and literature by inmates.
Since the program is more relevant than ever, we’re revisiting the series during our closure, with several of the films available online either directly through Anthology or from other sources. See below for more details.
“Prison Images” was curated in collaboration with Evelyn Emile (Part 1) and Lauren Lee White (Part 2). It was originally presented in association with FRAMEWORK: The Journal of Cinema and Media, which hosts an ongoing special section entitled “Prison USA” (www.frameworknow.com/prison-usa).
The inaugural issue of Fabric – a new, independent journal that examines incarceration through a variety of critical writing and art practices – includes an in-depth article about Anthology’s series. In particular, the article takes the form of an interview with Lauren Lee White, the co-curator of Part 2 of the series, which focused on “Art by Inmates.” Click here to read the article.
PRESENTED BY OR IN COLLABORATION WITH ANTHOLOGY:
Christine Choy & Cynthia Maurizio
INSIDE WOMEN INSIDE
1978, 21 min, 16mm-to-digital. Preserved with funds from the Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film & Television.
Christine Choy and Cynthia Maurizio offer a rare look at the degradation faced by women in prison, interviewing women who suffer daily within a system that disregards their humanity and neglects their basic needs.
Gary Glassman & Jonathan Borofsky
PRISONERS
1985, 56 min, digital
PRISONERS explores the lives of 32 people imprisoned at San Quentin State Prison for Men and the California Institution for Women. The documentary was co-directed and produced by Jonathan Borofsky and Gary Glassman in 1985. Based on 48 hours of interviews, the work focuses directly on the personal lives of each individual before they were incarcerated, while incorporating Borofsky’s dream imagery and music alongside relevant facts and statistics.
Gary Glassman
WALKING SMOOTH: SELECTIONS FROM PRISON VIDEO WORKSHOP – CALIFORNIA INSTITUTION FOR MEN IN CHINO
1989, 53 min, digital
“From 1986-89, Gary Glassman was the artist in residence at a California men’s prison where he taught video skills to inmates. Over those four years, Glassman worked with more than 600 men and women throughout the state prison system; the fruits of his labors [resulted in] WALKING SMOOTH, a 53-minute compilation of 13 videos Glassman completed in collaboration with prison inmates. These modest tapes are as emotionally rich as they are technically spare. Employing video in a variety of ways – as a form of therapy, a source of humor, a vehicle for poetry – Glassman attempts to focus on the humanity of the inmates and to restore some of the dignity they’ve lost in the course of their ill-fated lives.” –Kristine McKenna, LOS ANGELES TIMES
AVAILABLE FOR STREAMING RENTAL FROM OTHER ONLINE SOURCES:
Ronald Weyman
PENITENTIARY
1951, 10 min, 35mm-to-digital
This short documentary reports on the conditions in a Canadian penitentiary, focusing on the treatments developed to reduce the amount of recidivism.
Robert Bresson
A MAN ESCAPED / UN CONDAMNÉ À MORT S’EST ÉCHAPPÉ OU LE VENT SOUFFLE OÙ IL VEUT
1956, 101 min, 35mm-to-digital. In French with English subtitles.
Based on the memoirs of André Devigny, a member of the anti-Nazi resistance in France who was imprisoned during the German occupation, the film follows the figure of Fontaine in his material struggle to escape from Montluc prison. In this film, technical precision is key to both the escape and to the editing structure, which together imbue each moment with an understated suspense and a powerful form of grace. Building tools from the common objects found in his cell, Fontaine’s concentrated and resolute efforts to escape keep him from succumbing to the same fate as the 7,000 who died in Montluc prison at the hands of the Nazis during the occupation.
Jacques Becker
LE TROU
1960, 131 min, 35mm-to-digital. In French with English subtitles.
Jean Keraudy, former prisoner of La Santé Prison in France, introduces and stars in LE TROU, the film based on his and his cellmate’s actual attempted escape from the prison in 1947. In the midst of planning their imminent escape, four cellmates are joined by a fifth, who they entrust to join in their plans even though there are subtle signs that his interests would conflict with their goal. Under Jacques Becker’s direction, the cast of non-actors lent such urgency and truth to their parts that critic Serge Daney said Becker had filmed “the very idea of freedom.”
Pere Portabella
EL SOPAR
1974, 50 min, 16mm-to-digital. In Spanish and Catalan with English subtitles.
On the day of the execution of the militant Catalan anarchist Salvador Puig Antich, and in an act of bold defiance against the repression of the Franco era, Pere Portabella filmed the meeting of five former political prisoners as they discuss the effects of long-term prison sentences on their political commitments and of the state’s intention to strip the political prisoner of any vestige of humanity and will to resist. They describe the contained, authoritarian universe of the prison, with its intensifying repressive measures, as a state structure meant to nip revolutionary movements in the bud.
Eric Thiermann
ART & THE PRISON CRISIS
1982, 28 min, digital
Photographed in penal installations throughout California, ART & THE PRISON CRISIS depicts the activities, interviews, and artwork of inmates whose lives have been changed by art projects in prison. State officials, program directors, and prison administrations verify the statements made by inmates and prove that the experience of the punishment can also be an experience of the restoration of humanness.
Danny Lyon
WILLIE
1985, 82 min, 16mm-to-digital
One of the finest and most enterprising of American photographers, Danny Lyon has long devoted himself to chronicling some of the most marginalized and little-understood of American subcultures, from bikers in the Midwest and prison inmates in Texas, to Native-American communities throughout the U.S. In WILLIE, he revisits one of the subjects of his earlier film, LLANITO (1971). Shifting between black-and-white images from Willie Jaramillo’s childhood and color footage of him as a young man, Danny and Nancy Lyon create a realistic and unsentimental film about the circumstances of Willie’s life both in and out of New Mexico prisons. The filmmakers use this form less to focus attention on what might be construed too simplistically as the childhood roots of his later criminal behavior, and more to lend ambiguity to his story, for Willie is not a criminal in the common sense of the word.
John Reilly
GODOT IN SAN QUENTIN
1988, 25 min, digital
“GODOT IN SAN QUENTIN documents the production of WAITING FOR GODOT by a cast of inmates from San Quentin Prison. Producer and director John Reilly [founder of the Global Village Video Resource Center] and a crew spent four weeks at the maximum-security facility; rehearsal and performance sequences are intercut with footage of daily prison life and discussions with the principal characters. Reilly has said that the inmates ‘do not “act” because they are not trained actors, but they feel the parts because they have lived the lives of Beckett’s characters.’” –Clifford Terry, CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Wendy Clarke
AMEN
1992, 60 min, digital
AMEN is a videotape made by eight prisoners in the HIV/AIDS unit at the California Institution for Men in Chino, CA. The men talk to the camera and tell their life stories. The viewer is gradually drawn into their lives as the men talk about their experiences from childhood through drug addiction and HIV diagnosis, to their current state of mind, and their hope and despair about the future. The stories are interwoven, one with another, making a tapestry of their lives.
Jim Finn
super-max
2003, 13 min, digital
“A tour of maximum security prisons shot from a moving car, their hulking forms framed by telephone poles and power lines that divide landscape and sky. The concluding voice-over, making reference to Lewis and Clark, implicitly equates the European occupation of this continent with imprisonment.” –Fred Camper, CHICAGO READER
Danny Lyon
MURDERERS
2006, 30 min, digital
This film tells the story of five murderers in three different states: Jessie Ruiz, who served eight and a half years for beating a man to death with a baseball bat; Pinkie and Mojo, whom Lyon interviews in an Arkansas prison; Harold Davey Cassel, the subject of Lyon’s extraordinary book, “Like a Thief’s Dream”; and Michael Guzman, who first appeared in Lyon’s WILLIE.
Ava DuVernay
13TH
2013, 100 min, digital
One of the most informative and accessible documentaries about the American prison system to be released in recent years, 13TH traces the roots of today’s disproportionately high incarceration rate of African Americans back to the creation of the 13th Amendment, which officially abolished slavery after the Civil War – “except as punishment for a crime.” As numerous scholars, lawyers, politicians, and activists in the film argue, the 13th Amendment was a veiled means of continuing the legal enslavement of Black people living in the capitalist American democracy.
Brett Story
THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES
2016, 90 min, digital
“I can’t help but feel the limitations of a cinema whose highest aspiration is simply that of evoking sympathy. I want the imagery to do more, and wonder if seeing prisons differently might be key to thinking about prisons differently.” –Brett Story
In THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES, Brett Story films chance encounters with individuals whose lives have been shaped by the prison system. While the location of the prison is far away, the ideological and economic effects are nearby, pervading the social and psychic space of the whole American landscape and touching the lives of everyday people in disquieting ways.
Kristi Zea
NOTES FROM THE FIELD
2018, 91 min, digital
Showcasing the great playwright and performer Anna Deavere Smith, this film documents her recent one-woman show, in she dramatizes the accounts of a wide variety of individuals who have suffered at the hands of police brutality, mass incarceration, and our failing educational system.
