Film Screenings / Programs / Series
VERBATIM
July 24 – August 13
July 24-August 13, 2024
This film series focuses on a very particular technique that filmmakers and screenwriters have adopted on rare but almost inevitably indelible occasions: drawing the dialogue or onscreen text verbatim from various written documentary materials – transcripts of interviews, cockpit voice recorders, public hearings, or (most often) trials. By incorporating these preexisting, documentary transcripts into fictionalized or re-staged contexts, films such as Bresson’s THE TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC, Alice Diop’s SAINT OMER, Clio Barnard’s THE ARBOR, and Jeremy Kagan’s CONSPIRACY: THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 8 blur the lines between documentary and dramatization, and call into question the nature of performance and representation.
Though this approach surfaced in the cinema early on – perhaps most famously in Carl Dreyer’s THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC – it has played a much greater role on the stage, where the genre of “documentary theater” has a long and fascinating history (especially in the UK, though theater artists such as Anna Deavere Smith have developed an important version of the form in North America). Nevertheless, various filmmakers – including auteurs like Robert Bresson, James Benning, Jean Eustache, and Chantal Akerman, and more recent luminaries such as Alice Diop, Elisabeth Subrin, and James N. Kienitz Wilkins – have mobilized the form to remarkably cinematic ends.
One of the primary goals of the verbatim technique is to preserve or privilege forms of language that are normally obscured, corrupted, or transformed by more conventional theatrical or cinematic conceptions of dramatic composition. The filmmakers who have experimented with this approach have often been motivated by a conviction that whatever might be lost in retaining the repetitiveness or inarticulacy of spoken language or the dryness of the language of official proceedings like trials or public hearings, something more important is gained: the authenticity and unique texture of vernacular speech, or the direct trace that comes from incorporating genuine, “found” language.
Paradoxically, many of the films here both reach towards a special “authenticity” by incorporating verbatim speech, while simultaneously re-distancing this language via various methods: having actors lip-synch audio recordings, setting interviews to music, reenacting documentary material, or utilizing highly stylized visual approaches. One way or another, the verbatim technique partakes of the tradition of reenactment or restaging, but with a special focus on written or spoken language, and a special insistence on the power of the word.
Special thanks to all the filmmakers, and to Brian Belovarac (Janus Films); Rebecca Cleman & Karl McCool (EAI); Kelly Copper & Pavol Liska (Nature Theater of Oklahoma); John Flahive (Wavelength Pictures); William Gruenberg (Strand Releasing); Joan Ma (BBC); Emily Martin (Video Data Bank); Seth Mitter (Canyon Cinema); Bill O’Donnell (Thirteen); Inney Prakash; Peggy Préau (Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir); George Schmalz (Dekanalog); Michael Silberman (Neon); and Anna Deavere Smith.
Clio Barnard
THE ARBOR
2010, 94 min, DCP
“Precocious playwright Andrea Dunbar [‘The Arbor’, ‘Rita, Sue and Bob Too’, ‘Shirley’] spoke for the lumpen abused of her native Bradford, England; THE ARBOR, video artist Clio Barnard’s pitch-perfect Dunbar biopic, reprises her pungent, profane voice, but from a discreet distance. Barnard revisits the foredoomed career and tragic afterlife of this slum-born self-educated writer to electrifying effect, shooting mainly on location in Bradford, with actors lip-synched to actual recordings of the people they portray. […] Dunbar had never been out of Yorkshire or inside a theater until ‘The Arbor’ was staged at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1980. Success brought disaster; she returned to Bradford, had two more children out of wedlock, and drank up her screenplay money to die at 29 of a brain hemorrhage on a barroom floor. It’s a compelling story, delivered here after the fashion of British ‘verbatim theater,’ which takes trial transcripts, diaries, and other documents as the basis for factual dramas.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE
Wed, July 24 at 6:45, Thurs, Aug 1 at 9:00, and Sat, Aug 10 at 3:45.
James Benning
LANDSCAPE SUICIDE
1986, 92 min, 16mm
“Delving into two murder cases – Bernadette Protti’s seemingly unmotivated stabbing murder of another teenage girl in a California suburb in 1984, and Ed Gein’s even more gratuitous mass slayings and mutilations in rural Wisconsin in the late 50s – Benning uses actors to re-create part of the killers’ court testimonies and juxtaposes them with the commonplace settings where these crimes took place. Boldly eschewing the specious psychological rhetoric that usually accompanies accounts of such crimes, he creates an open forum for the spectator to contemplate the mysterious vacancy of these people and these places, and their relationships to each other.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER
“The film script is taken verbatim from trial transcripts and recorded police interviews. The performances by Rhonda Bell, who plays Bernadette Protti, and Elion Sacker, who is Ed Gein, feel somehow more devastating and ‘genuine’ than watching the ‘real’ trials might have been. As I revisited LANDSCAPE SUICIDE last year, it began to seem as if the official testimonies of these two real people were somehow the copy and Benning’s re-creation, his actors, the original.” –Rachel Kushner, ARTFORUM
Preceded by:
Beth B & Scott B LETTERS TO DAD 1979, 12 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
A meditation on authority that superimposes the specter of Jonestown over the relatively fresh faces of the parapunk art world; the film takes on a musical form – like a 20th-century ballad composed of subliminal behavior cues, advertising testimonials, and the text of the National Enquirer.
Total running time: ca. 110 min.
Wed, July 24 at 9:00 and Fri, Aug 2 at 6:30.
George C. Wolfe
FIRES IN THE MIRROR
1993, 79 min, video. Written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith.
This television adaptation immortalizes Anna Deavere Smith’s acclaimed one-woman show, ‘Fires in the Mirror’, an early and masterful instance of her singular theatrical practice whereby she interviews a wide variety of individuals, and then embodies their verbatim testimonies by playing each of them in turn, creating a moving and inspired form of theatrically embodied oral history. In FIRES IN THE MIRROR, she delves into a particularly fraught and tragic event: the violence that erupted in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in 1991, after an Hasidic man driving in the neighborhood accidentally struck and killed a 7-year-old Black child, igniting the racial tensions that had long existed in the community. Channeling the testimony, observations, thoughts, and feelings of 26 different people connected to the incident, Smith explores both this particular tragedy as well as the subject of race in America in general.
Preceded by:
Ayanna Dozier
VINCENT GALLO’S SPERM
2022, 3 min, 16mm-to-DCP
The short appropriates the personal advert page for Vincent Gallo where he sells sex and his sperm to white patrons only. The piece is an exercise in the speech-act of white cismale power and how easily it is overlooked when spoken by a man but how quickly sinister said speech-act becomes when enacted and performed by a racialized woman’s body.
Total running time: ca. 85 min.
Fri, July 26 at 6:30, Tues, Aug 6 at 6:45, and Tues, Aug 13 at 9:00.
FILMMAKER IN PERSON ON AUG 13!
Marc Levin
TWILIGHT: LOS ANGELES
2000, 76 min, digital. Written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith.
“When Anna Deavere Smith’s drama ‘Twilight: Los Angeles’ premiered in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum, it made national news for its unique and unflinching look at the fallout from the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Not only did Smith capture the tumultuous aftermath of the Rodney King trial verdict, she created a searing, innovative and truly American piece of theater. In her acclaimed one-woman show, later directed by George C. Wolfe on Broadway, Smith gives voice to 40 real-life ‘characters,’ from a Korean grocer to a Hollywood agent and a juror. Not ‘mimicry’ in the traditional sense, her performance is an account of what and how these people spoke to her in hundreds of interviews. In a film adaptation that interweaves Smith’s virtuoso performance with documentary interviews and footage of then contemporary Los Angeles, award-winning director Marc Levin deftly transforms Smith’s work from stage to screen.” –PBS
Fri, July 26 at 8:45, Tues, Aug 6 at 9:00, and Tues, Aug 13 at 6:45. Marc Levin will be here in person for a Q&A on Aug 13!
Alice Diop
SAINT OMER
2022, 122 min, DCP. In French with English subtitles.
“Bringing a documentarian’s sense of open-ended inquiry to her first narrative feature, writer-director Alice Diop constructs a morally and emotionally layered courtroom drama unlike any other. When she travels to Saint-Omer, France, to attend the trial of a young Senegalese woman (Guslagie Malanda) accused of murdering her infant daughter, novelist Rama (Kayije Kagame) finds herself shaken to the core by a case that proves to have profound resonances with her own life. Interweaving complex themes of mother-daughter bonds, immigrant alienation, and postcolonial trauma into a piercing portrait of two mysteriously connected women, Diop forgoes mere questions of guilt and innocence in order to plumb the unsettling unknowability of the human soul.” –CRITERION
“Much of the dialogue from SAINT OMER is taken word for word from the transcript of the [2016] trial [of Fabienne Kabou]. The film was shot not only in the same region and town, but also in the very same courtroom. Yet Diop decided not to make a documentary about Kabou. She has said in interviews that this story could ‘only’ be told as fiction. To take a line from her protagonist, Rama, Diop uses ‘the power of narrative to sublimate reality,’ to transform violence and shame into ‘an almost lyrical song.’ Even as its details are directly lifted from the world, for Diop, this reality could never be straightforwardly represented, but needed to be rerouted and mediated through the alchemical powers of narrative film.” –Francey Russell, LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
Sat, July 27 at 4:00, Sat, Aug 3 at 4:00, and Sun, Aug 11 at 5:45.
Kerry Feltham
THE GREAT CHICAGO CONSPIRACY CIRCUS
1970, 92 min, 16mm-to-digital
“In 1969, a Chicago court spent six months hearing the case of the men who became known as the Chicago Seven, who had been protesting at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and were arrested and charged with conspiracy to riot. Directed by Kerry Feltham, this 1971 film started out as a play conceived by a Toronto theatre group based on the trial transcripts. The result is surreal, absurd and over-the-top, emphasizing not so much the course of the trial as the despotic actions of an authoritarian state power in its dealings with dissident citizens. The stage is both courtroom and circus; and the trial is both tragic reality and a grotesque scenario with elements of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’.” –BERLINALE
Sat, July 27 at 7:00 and Sat, Aug 10 at 9:15.
FILMMAKER IN PERSON ON AUG 10!
Jeremy Kagan
CONSPIRACY: THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 8
1987, 118 min, video
This TV movie was produced by and aired on HBO in 1987, almost a decade after CBS passed on the project, shying away from its depiction of radical politics. CONSPIRACY combines reenactments of the trial of the Chicago 8 (taken directly from the court transcripts), documentary footage, and contemporary interviews with all eight of the original defendants, who were also present on set for part of the shoot. Featuring a star-studded cast (including Brian Benben as Tom Hayden, Peter Boyle as David Dellinger, Robert Carradine as Rennie Davis, Carl Lumbly as Bobby Seale, Elliott Gould as Leonard Weinglass, Robert Loggia as William Kunstler, and Martin Sheen as James Marion Hunt), it’s a fascinating mixture of 1980s TV movie, cinema verité, oral history, and verbatim reenactment.
Sat, July 27 at 9:15 and Sat, Aug 10 at 6:15. Jeremy Kagan will be here in person on Aug 10!
Beatrice Gibson
THE FUTURE’S GETTING OLD LIKE THE REST OF US
2010, 48 min, 16mm-to-digital
A 16mm film conceived in the format of a TV Play and set in an older peoples care home. Part documentary, part fiction, the script for the film was a collaboration with writer and critic George Clark and was constructed from verbatim transcripts of a discussion group held over a period of five months with the residents of four of Camden’s Care Homes. Taking B.S. Johnson’s 1971 experimental novel “House Mother Normal” as its formal departure point and employing the structural logic of a score, the script is edited into a vertical structure, in which eight voices or eight monologues occur simultaneously.
Sun, July 28 at 4:15 and Wed, Aug 7 at 9:15.
FILMMAKER IN PERSON ON JULY 28!
James N. Kienitz Wilkins
PUBLIC HEARING
2012, 110 min, 16mm-to-DCP
“The scenario for one of the most distinctive American films of the past decade: in 2006, a forum is held by a small-town planning committee, soliciting comment on a local Wal-Mart’s proposal to expand into a Super Wal-Mart. At the end of a particularly deep internet rabbit hole, the artist and filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins discovered a ‘ready-made screenplay;’ his first feature, PUBLIC HEARING, takes as its parent material a PDF from a municipal website, a transcription of the debate that unfolded. As Wilkins has explained, the film is not only a reenactment of a previously existing narrative, but also a kind of satire of reenactment itself as an aesthetic maneuver, offering a comparatively pedestrian counterpoint to the often weighty subjects deemed by artists as fit for duplication. And while Wilkins’s comic intelligence is perhaps the main throughline in a remarkably heterogeneous body of work, PUBLIC HEARING is not simply a joke. Rather, it now appears as a potent, even emblematic document of a community in decline, a document reanimated, like flowers in water, by Wilkins’s visual style—a series of stark, black-and-white, 16mm close-ups.” –LIGHT INDUSTRY
Sun, July 28 at 6:00 and Fri, Aug 9 at 6:30. James N. Kienitz Wilkins will be here in person on July 28!
James N. Kienitz Wilkins
MEDIUMS
2017, 38 min, Super-16mm-to-DCP
“MEDIUMS tracks a series of conversations between a group of prospective jurors passing time outside a courthouse on the first day of jury duty. The dialogue is culled almost entirely from found sources, as listed in the film’s credits: the New York State Unified Court System’s Trial Jurors Handbook; a Volkswagen manual; the SAG-AFTRA constitution; Cameron Crowe’s JERRY MAGUIRE (1996); a franchise disclosure document from Dunkin’ Donuts; copy from the New York State health plan marketplace; text from the US Copyright Office’s website; and a few blog posts. The earnest tone of the dialogue strikes a fascinating counterpoint to Wilkins’ laissez-faire borrowing of text, and its self-conscious mise-en-scène – the bodies of everyday people posed against a backdrop of a simulated courthouse, sometimes with a view of the Dunkin’ Donuts across the street – embodies Wilkins’ interest in the relationship between cinema and theatre.” –Dan Sullivan, CINEMA SCOPE
Followed by:
Andrew Lampert
GROWTH OPPORTUNITIES
2006, 21 min, digital
Originally presented in 2000 in Mexico City, re-staged soon after at Anthology, and recorded during a presentation at the Getty Center in 2005, this performance piece features a script drawn from Del Taco corporate materials (with creative modifications by Lampert), as well as actual Del Taco corporate videos, to highlight the blithe, breathtakingly oblivious cultural appropriation perpetrated by a “Mexican” fast-food chain.
Total running time: ca. 65 min.
Sun, July 28 at 9:00 and Fri, Aug 9 at 9:15.
Robert Bresson
THE TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC / PROCÈS DE JEANNE D’ARC
1962, 65 min, 16mm. In French with English subtitles.
“Bresson’s film follows Joan of Arc’s prolonged interrogation through to her death. The dialogue consists entirely of the trial transcript, reduced to its essentials; the visuals are austere, consisting mainly of medium shots of Joan and her judges, intercut with extreme close-ups of objects, hands, feet. Out of this icy surface Bresson creates an experience full of the mystery and the drama of this woman’s existence.” –PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE
Followed by:
Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor
THE TRIAL / PROCESUL
2005, 37 min, digital. In Romanian with English subtitles.
A film constructed on a text that seems to be a theatrical performance rather than the transcript of a trial. The camera traces facades of communist housing blocks, depressingly unchanged over the years, as the transcript from the trial of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, is read without pause or emotion. The intensity of the film is created by the tension between the dizzying and unceasing movement of the camera and the continuous and expressionless reading of the trial script, recording a very dark episode of modern history.
Total running time: ca. 105 min.
Mon, July 29 at 6:45, Fri, Aug 2 at 9:00, and Wed, Aug 7 at 6:45.
Jean Eustache
A DIRTY STORY / UNE SALE HISTOIRE
1977, 50 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles.
“In A DIRTY STORY Jean Eustache presents the same story of storytelling twice: once in documentary fashion, filmed in 16mm black-and-white, and a second time in 35mm color with actors. Eustache invited his friend Jean-Noël Picq to sit down with a group of people to recount in detail how once, in the men’s room of a Parisian restaurant, he found a hole in the wall and peered through to a perfect view of the ladies’ room. In order to test his contention that the actor (Michel Lonsdale) would prove more convincing than the real-life storyteller, Eustache placed the fictional version first. While the film never shows anything more shocking than a man talking, French censors gave the film an X rating, proving Eustache’s claim that ‘sex has nothing to do with morals, not even with aesthetics; sex is a metaphysical affair.’” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE
Mon, July 29 at 9:15, Sat, Aug 3 at 9:15, and Thurs, Aug 8 at 7:00.
FILMMAKER IN PERSON ON JULY 30!
Elisabeth Subrin
MARIA SCHNEIDER, 1983
2022, 24 min, digital. In English and French with English subtitles.
Critically acclaimed actresses (and directors) Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga, and Isabel Sandoval recreate a 1983 French TV interview with the legendary French actress Maria Schneider, which takes a turn when she’s asked about the traumatic filming of LAST TANGO IN PARIS with Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando a decade before. Taken together, they not only perform Schneider’s words and gestures, but inhabit them through their own identities – along with all those silenced, before and after.
“Each channels Schneider in her own way, in her own race, in her own time, bringing this maligned actress into the present, conjuring her into power, throwing their bodies on the line to salvage hers.” –B. Ruby Rich, FILM QUARTERLY
Elisabeth Subrin
SHULIE
1997, 37 min, Super-8 & 16mm-to-digital
“A cinematic doppelganger without precedent, SHULIE uncannily and systemically bends time and cinematic code alike, projecting the viewer 30 years into the past to rediscover a woman out of time and a time out of joint – and in Subrin’s words, ‘to investigate the mythos and residue of the late 60s.’ Staging an extended act of homage, as well as a playful, provocative confounding of filmic propriety, Subrin and her creative collaborator Kim Soss resurrect a little-known 1967 documentary portrait of a young Chicago art student [Shulamith Firestone], who a few years later would become a notable figure in Second Wave feminism, and author of the radical 1970 manifesto, ‘The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution’. Reflecting on her life and times, SHULIE functions as a prism for refracting questions of gender, race and class that resonate in our era as in hers, while through painstaking mediation, Subrin makes manifest the eternal return of film.” –Mark McElhatten & Gavin Smith, NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
“It’s a fascinating tape. Not a clone in the end, but a brilliant rethinking of history. […] Subrin has created a document within a document that makes us remember what we didn’t know, then makes us realize all over again how much we’ve lost.” –B. Ruby Rich, SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN
Total running time: ca. 65 min.
Tues, July 30 at 6:45 and Sun, Aug 4 at 9:00. Elisabeth Subrin will be here in person on July 30!
Chantal Akerman
LETTERS HOME
1986, 103 min, digital. In French with English subtitles.
“Seldom screened in North America, LETTERS HOME is an unconventional filmed adaptation of Rose Leiman Goldemberg’s play based on Sylvia Plath’s intense correspondence with her mother Aurelia, from the time the poet was in university until her suicide. Maintaining the original Parisian production’s theatrical stylization and minimal sets and props, Akerman’s film features Delphine Seyrig and her niece Coralie Seyrig reciting Sylvia and Aurelia’s letters to the audience directly, as though we were the recipients of these intimate missives, the musicality of the actors’ voices heightened by the use of sonatas by Schumann, Debussy, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich. Offering poignant resonance with Akerman’s earlier epistolary film NEWS FROM HOME, and with the theme of the mother–daughter bond that runs through so much of the filmmaker’s work, LETTERS HOME is strangely transcendent in its seeming simplicity.” –TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Tues, July 30 at 9:00 and Mon, Aug 5 at 6:30.
Robert Berger, Patrick Daniels, and Karlyn Michelson
CHARLIE VICTOR ROMEO
2013, 80 min, DCP
A 3D film adaptation of the underground play of the same name – which was first created and presented by the downtown NYC performing arts organization Collective:Unconscious in 1999 – CHARLIE VICTOR ROMEO is derived entirely from the Cockpit Voice Recorder transcripts of six major airline incidents and accidents. CHARLIE VICTOR ROMEO puts the audience inside the tension-filled cockpits of actual flights in distress, offering a fascinating portrait of the psychology of crisis and a person’s will to live to the last second.
“A nail-biting, fear-of-flying 3-D experimental movie where you are locked in six separate cockpits with the flight crew as they reenact black-box dialogue from actual aviation mishaps and crashes. The scariest airplane movie ever.” –John Waters, ARTFORUM
Wed, July 31 at 6:45 and Thurs, Aug 8 at 8:45. Filmmaker Robert Berger in person for both screenings!
Frank Sweeney
FEW CAN SEE
2023, 42 min, digital
FEW CAN SEE examines the legacy of broadcast censorship of the conflict in the north of Ireland and political movements during this era. The project attempts to recreate material absent from state archives due to censorship, based on contemporary oral history interviews with people censored during this time period. Within a late-80s current affairs television format, actors verbatim re-enact edited transcripts from 18 oral history interviews, later dubbing their own performances. This technique is inspired by the use of actors to dub the voices of censored people during the conflict. The story is inspired by several blackout strikes which took place at broadcasters across Ireland and Britain in response to censorship. Most of the film is shot on old live broadcast tube cameras, resurrected for the production.
With:
Arthur MacCaig IRISH VOICES 1995, 13 min, 16mm-to-digital
After the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972, the British government curtailed radio and television access for the IRA and its supporters in an attempt to “deny terrorists the oxygen of publicity.” However, there were odd loopholes in this endeavor. News reports, for instance, were allowed to show the face of Gerry Adams, Sinn Fein’s president, but could not broadcast his voice. To get around this, actors were hired to lip sync Adams’s words. Featuring interviews with Adams, journalists, and one of Adams’s myriad “voices,” IRISH VOICES is a unique introduction into the media war that was part of the Irish struggle.
Excerpt from SPEAK NO EVIL – THE STORY OF THE BROADCAST BAN (Francis Welch, 2005)
Total running time: ca. 70 min.
Wed, July 31 at 9:00 and Sun, Aug 11 at 3:45.
Roland Joffé
THE LEGION HALL BOMBING
1978, 85 min, video. Scripted by Caryl Churchill.
Made for “Play for Today”, the BBC television series that produced extraordinary work throughout the 1970s and early 1980s by filmmakers and writers such as Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Dennis Potter, Alan Clarke, and many others, THE LEGION HALL BOMBING was scripted by renowned playwright Caryl Churchill (“Cloud Nine”, “Top Girls”, “A Number”). Churchill’s script, which was taken verbatim from the court transcripts of a trial of two men accused of terrorism in Northern Ireland, is presented in a radically unadorned, straightforward manner. This treatment renders the political, judicial, and historical dimensions of the trial – which, like so many terrorism trials of the period, was conducted without a jury and with the admission of confessions extracted under brutal interrogation – all the more starkly powerful. Despite the formal purity of the film’s method, both Churchill and director Roland Joffé removed their names in protest, thanks to the BBC’s insistence on removing parts of the introductory and concluding voiceovers (which explicitly referenced the legally and morally dubious aspects of the trial). Nevertheless, even in its censored form, THE LEGION HALL BOMBING is an extraordinary work of impassioned political critique, and a demonstration of the verbatim technique at its most trenchant.
Thurs, Aug 1 at 7:00, Sat, Aug 3 at 7:00, and Mon, Aug 5 at 9:00.
Nature Theater of Oklahoma
LIFE AND TIMES – EPISODE 8
2015, 118 min, digital
The magnum opus of NYC-based theater company Nature Theater of Oklahoma, LIFE AND TIMES is a 9-part episodic performance piece that spans multiple mediums, styles, and genres: it encompasses full-fledged stage productions (Episodes 1-4, which debuted at the Public Theater in 2013), a short animation (Ep. 4.5), an illustrated book (Episode 5), a radio-show/live-performance (Episode 6), a silent-cinema-inspired feature film (Episode 7), a full-color feature-length moving-image musical (Episode 8), and a gangsta rap video (Episode 9). All these iterations of LIFE AND TIMES are based on the transcript of a recorded telephone call in which company member Kristin Worrall recounts the story of her life, a narrative that’s as epic as it is sublimely unextraordinary. Faithfully retaining every pause, repetition, “um”, and “you know” of her account – even when setting it to music – LIFE AND TIMES is as infectiously irreverent and outrageously entertaining as it is astonishingly ambitious. In EPISODE 8 – which takes the form of an early color Cinemascope movie and is inspired by the vast American landscapes of the Hudson River School painters – the narrative finally shifts to adult life: work, career, and finding a place in the larger world. Sung throughout – with original music and shot entirely on location with available light in single long takes – this episode is one of the company’s most ambitious and visually stunning works to date.
Sun, Aug 4 at 4:00 and Sun, Aug 11 at 8:45.
VERBATIM: MADE FOR TV
This program will gather together a miscellaneous grab bag of televised shorts and clips that utilize the verbatim technique in sometimes sublime, sometimes disturbing ways. Less high-minded than most of the programs in the series proper, it will include sometimes shockingly memorable trial reenactments – both live action and animated – as well as appearances from a variety of drunken celebrities, among other memorable oddities.
Sun, Aug 4 at 6:45.
