Anthology Film Archives - Calendar Events

SAINT OMER

Saturday, July 27

“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

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EC: AU HASARD BALTHAZAR

Saturday, July 27

“Bresson interweaves two histories: the story of Balthazar, the donkey, from birth to death, and the human beings to whom the animal belongs. The film joins the two stories organically, in a series of cinematic brush-strokes and short elliptical scenes. Balthazar is the witness/judge: man’s life is seen through his eyes – he sees all and alone carries the burden of universal guilt. His various owners each represent a vice (greed, lust, drunkenness) from which he suffers and finally dies.” –NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

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EC: PICKPOCKET

Saturday, July 27

A magnificent drama about a thief, his techniques, motives, and secret existence. The plot is modeled loosely on Dostoevsky’s CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, but the rigorous intensity of the treatment is pure Bresson, as he tells the compelling story of an insignificant man who drifts into crime and finally finds grace in a prison cell. The famous scene of the pickpocket’s magical raid on a train station ranks as one of the great tours-de-force of French cinema.

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THE GREAT CHICAGO CONSPIRACY CIRCUS

Saturday, July 27

“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

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EC: A MAN ESCAPED, OR THE WIND BLOWS WHERE IT LISTETH

Saturday, July 27

(UN CONDAMNÉ À MORT S’EST ÉCHAPPÉ, OU LE VENT SOUFFLE OÙ IL VEUT)

With the simplest of concepts and sparest of techniques, Bresson made one of the most suspenseful jailbreak films of all time. Based on the account of an imprisoned French Resistance leader, this unbelievably taut and methodical marvel follows the fictional Fontaine’s single-minded pursuit of freedom, detailing the planning and execution of his escape with gripping precision. But Bresson’s film is not merely about process – it’s also a work of intense spirituality and humanity.

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CONSPIRACY: THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 8

Saturday, July 27

FILMMAKER IN PERSON ON AUG 10!

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.

Jeremy Kagan will be here in person on Aug 10!

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THE FUTURE'S GETTING OLD LIKE THE REST OF US

Sunday, July 28

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.

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EC: A MAN ESCAPED, OR THE WIND BLOWS WHERE IT LISTETH

Sunday, July 28

PUBLIC HEARING

Sunday, July 28

FILMMAKER IN PERSON ON JULY 28!

“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

James N. Kientiz Wilkins will be here in person on July 28!

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EC: AU HASARD BALTHAZAR

Sunday, July 28

MEDIUMS + GROWTH OPPORTUNITIES

Sunday, 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.

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THE TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC

Monday, July 29

[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.

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A DIRTY STORY

Monday, July 29

[UNE SALE HISTOIRE]

“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

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EC: AU HASARD BALTHAZAR

Tuesday, July 30

VERBATIM: ELISABETH SUBRIN PGM

Tuesday, July 30

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.

Elisabeth Subrin will be here in person on July 30!

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EC: PICKPOCKET

Tuesday, July 30

LETTERS HOME

Tuesday, July 30

“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

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CHARLIE VICTOR ROMEO

Wednesday, July 31

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

Filmmaker Robert Berger will be here in person for both screenings!

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FEW CAN SEE

Wednesday, July 31

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.

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THE LEGION HALL BOMBING (free screening)

Thursday, August 01

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.

BEST OF NARROW ROOMS: PENDA'S FEN

Thursday, August 01

Stephen is a little prick whose fiery conservative rants earn the ridicule of his schoolmates and the eyerolls of his parents. They can tell exactly what’s behind his uptight behavior. When his obsession with famed British composer Edward Elgar inspires vivid erotic dreams about a hunky milkman, it forces Stephen into an epic internal awakening. He soon begins questioning his strident beliefs and mania for Jesus in favor of a neo-pagan, socialist worldview that stands in direct opposition to the very nature of modern English identity. Could it all have something to do with a secret experimental military base nearby? Or the legend of the long-dead King Penda? “This aired on TELEVISION?!” you’re likely to think at multiple points throughout Alan Clarke’s astonishing, criminally-uncanonized queer coming-of-age tale, which is laden with potent symbology and scary surrealistic flourishes more akin to early Todd Haynes than the director of hard-hitting British social-realist fare like ELEPHANT, SCUM, and RITA, SUE AND BOB TOO.

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THE ARBOR

Thursday, August 01

“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

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LANDSCAPE SUICIDE

Friday, August 02

“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.

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THE EXPERIMENTAL FILMS OF DICK HIGGINS, PROG. 1

Friday, August 02

Dick Higgins
THE FLAMING CITY
1961-62, 121 min, 16mm-to-digital

Higgins’s only feature-length film, THE FLAMING CITY, explores the dichotomy between the lifestyle of Higgins and his artist friends in SoHo, which was viewed as a threat to middle class American values, and Higgins’s well-heeled upbringing. The film incorporates acted footage of friends and family, including Lette Eisenhauer, Alison Knowles, and Florence Tarlow, as well as the artist’s grandparents. Settings range from Downtown New York and Central Park Zoo to Coney Island Beach, Upstate New York, and Worcester, Massachusetts. Baroque music accompanies the otherwise silent film. THE FLAMING CITY employs several photographic techniques Higgins learned at the Manhattan School of Printing, including filters, hand-drawn patterns, and alteration of color.

The screening on Fri, Aug 2 will be introduced by Lauren Fulton.

THE TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC

Friday, August 02

SAINT OMER

Saturday, August 03

EC: JAMES BROUGHTON, PGM 1

Saturday, August 03

THE PLEASURE GARDEN 1953, 38 min, 35mm
THE BED 1968, 19 min, 16mm
NUPTIAE 1969, 14 min, 16mm

“Broughton was and is a poet, sometimes a dramatist. Yet whatever the mode, his style is remarkably consistent: urbane and witty with the persona of the naïve, or the simpleton, or the child. Like the poems, the films record the basic rites of passage, the search for love, the primal relationships, with ironic insight: there are parents who are children, a rube who’s really the artist, a loony wise man.” –P. Adams Sitney

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

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THE LEGION HALL BOMBING (free screening)

Saturday, August 03

THE EXPERIMENTAL FILMS OF DICK HIGGINS, PROG. 2

Saturday, August 03

This program brings together a selection of Higgins’s films in which he experimented with several photo-derived techniques – including color filters and hand-drawn patterns – the superimposition of reels, manipulation of found footage, and the use of Möbius strips.

The screening will be followed by a conversation between Lauren Fulton, Alice Centamore, and Andrew Uroskie (Stony Brook University).

SCENARIO (1968, 11 min, 16mm-to-digital)
A home movie of Higgins’s twin toddlers filmed by the artist in Vermont. The film incorporates Higgins’s fanciful poem of the same name written one year earlier alongside imagery that has nothing to do with it.

MEN & WOMEN & BELLS (1970, 41 min, 16mm-to-digital)
Featuring home movie footage shot by Higgins and other material derived from his father, MEN & WOMEN & BELLS includes the recurring sound of the bells of Rostov-on-Don in Russia, lending it a mournful quality.

HANK AND MARY WITHOUT APOLOGIES (1969, 16.5 min, 16mm-to-digital)
“Good evening ladies and gentlemen. We are gathered together to witness a very strange occasion: the death of the traditional American theater.” Following Higgins’s opening words, the viewer is met with flashing images, unspectacular visuals but for their color. Higgins establishes a complex relationship between these and his 1967 computational poem “Hank and Mary, a Love Story, a Chorale (for Diter Rot).” Overlaid throughout is audio recorded during the weekend-long “Ray Gun Spex,” a series of Happenings organized by Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine at the Judson Gallery in 1960.

THE END (1962, 12 min, 16mm-to-digital)
Higgins altered a found 1940s employee communication film from a telephone company by running it backwards so that, in his hands, the instructional film instead becomes nonsensical gibberish.

INVOCATION OF CANYONS AND BOULDERS (FOR STAN BRAKHAGE) (1962, 7 sec, 16mm-to-digital, silent. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
Intended to be projected as a Möbius strip for eternity, INVOCATION features a repeated blip of close-up footage of Higgins’s chewing mouth. Later produced as a Fluxfilm by George Maciunas, the piece is dedicated to Higgins’s favorite filmmaker at the time.

Total running time: ca. 85 min (plus panel).

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A DIRTY STORY

Saturday, August 03

LIFE AND TIMES – EPISODE 8

Sunday, August 04

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.

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EC: JAMES BROUGHTON, PGM 2

Sunday, August 04

THE GOLDEN POSITIONS 1970, 32 min, 16mm
“A lovely, poetic, humorous, and crystal investigation of mankind standing, sitting, and lying down.” –John Wasserman, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

DREAMWOOD 1972, 45 min, 16mm
“A modern day spiritual odyssey in which a man is mysteriously compelled to leave his home and embark on a voyage to a strange, magical island. On the island he faces the most improbable and intense experiences of his life, ranging from total humiliation to a deep sense of oneness with the force of life. Heroic in concept, subtle in execution, DREAMWOOD is a beautiful film by a true master of the medium.” –David Bienstock

HIGH KUKUS 1974, 3 min, 16mm
“A High Kuku is, of course, a cuckoo haiku. In inventing this form Broughton has concocted zany verses which are ‘high’ in the sense that they are often metaphysical and are keenly aware of the metacomedy of things.” –Alan Watts

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

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VERBATIM: MADE FOR TV

Sunday, August 04

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.

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THE EXPERIMENTAL FILMS OF DICK HIGGINS, PROG. 1

Sunday, August 04

VERBATIM: ELISABETH SUBRIN PGM

Sunday, August 04

LETTERS HOME

Monday, August 05

BEST OF NARROW ROOMS: THE WOUNDED MAN

Monday, August 05

[L’HOMME BLESSÉ]

Written by Patrice Chéreau and Hervé Guibert. New restoration courtesy of Altered Innocence & Anus Films!

Henri is a frustrated teenager living with his parents in a provincial French coastal town. When they drag him to the train station to bid adieu to his sister, Henri sneaks off to a secluded bathroom and interrupts a hustler named Jean satisfying the masochistic desires of an older male client. Henri falls desperately in love with the straight hoodlum, but Jean evades Henri’s affections. Undeterred, Henri shadows Jean as he traverses the dark and dangerous underbelly of their sleepy village. But as he descends deeper and deeper into Jean’s world, there may not be an easy way out. Patrice Chéreau’s 1983 drama is one of the most bleak and beautiful portraits of gay erotic obsession ever assembled, boasting a breakout lead performance by young Jean-Hugues Anglade and a script that took co-writers Chéreau and legendary gay French author and activist Hervé Guibert six years to perfect. The result is a rich, strange and sumptuous film that reveals new truths on each viewing.

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THE LEGION HALL BOMBING (free screening)

Monday, August 05

FIRES IN THE MIRROR

Tuesday, August 06

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.

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TWILIGHT: LOS ANGELES

Tuesday, August 06

FILMMAKER IN PERSON ON AUG 13!

“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

Marc Levin will be here in person for a Q&A on Aug 13!

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THE TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC

Wednesday, August 07

EC: ROBERT BREER PGM

Wednesday, August 07

With the exception of MOTION PICTURES NO. 1, PAT’S BIRTHDAY, BREATHING, and GULLS AND BUOYS, all of the films in this program were preserved by Anthology with generous support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

FORM PHASES I (1952, 2 min, 16mm)
FORM PHASES II (1953, 2 min, 16mm)
RECREATION (1956, 1.5 min, 16mm-to-35mm)
MOTION PICTURES NO. 1 (1956, 4.5 min, 16mm, silent)
JAMESTOWN BALOOS (1957, 6 min, 16mm-to-35mm)
EYEWASH (1959, 3 min, 16mm-to-35mm)
BLAZES (1961, 3 min, 16mm-to-35mm)
PAT’S BIRTHDAY (1962, 13 min, 16mm, b&w)
BREATHING (1963, 5 min, 35mm, b&w)
FIST FIGHT (1964, 9 min, 16mm-to-35mm)
66 (1966, 5.5 min, 16mm-to-35mm)
69 (1969, 4.5 min, 16mm-to-35mm)
70 (1970, 5 min, 16mm-to-35mm)
GULLS AND BUOYS (1972, 8 min, 16mm)
FUJI (1974, 9 min, 16mm-to-35mm)
“Roughly speaking [Breer’s] works belong to that category of films generally called ‘abstract’ (though his are also highly ‘concrete’), but differ from everything else that has been done along these lines in one basic respect: Breer is undoubtedly the first filmmaker to have brought to his medium the full heritage of modern painting and the sum of sophisticated experimentation that it represents.” – Noël Burch, FILM QUARTERLY

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

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THE FUTURE'S GETTING OLD LIKE THE REST OF US

Wednesday, August 07

A DIRTY STORY

Thursday, August 08

BEST OF NARROW ROOMS: THE DEVIL QUEEN

Thursday, August 08

[A RAINHA DIABA]

“The Devil” is the fearsome nickname given to the Black femme queen who rules Rio’s criminal underworld with an iron fist and painted nails. Any pimps, pushers, or thieves who want to work in town have to pay her tribute, or else! But when greedy underlings conspire to oust her and take power, the Devil must turn to her sisters – the reviled queens, sissies, and swishes who worship her – to fight back before it’s too late. As brutally violent as it is vividly shot, THE DEVIL QUEEN is a candy-colored GODFATHER-style take off on the legend of Madame Satã, a drag performer with fierce fighting skills who was beloved by Rio’s criminal and queer underworld during the 20th century. Featuring a star-making performance from the late great Milton Gonçalves, a former member of Augusto Boal’s company who went on to become the most famous Black actor in Brazil, THE DEVIL QUEEN is an underseen queer Brazilian classic ripe for reappraisal.

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CHARLIE VICTOR ROMEO

Thursday, August 08

PUBLIC HEARING

Friday, August 09

WHEN PUPPETS GO BAD

Friday, August 09

Anthology welcomes back Skip Elsheimer, the mastermind behind the invaluable A/V Geeks Film Archive, who will be here to present a program drawn from his strange and wonderful 16mm print collection.

“Join the A/V Geeks as we step into a world of whimsical wonder and downright unsettling puppetry at our live 16mm film night! Prepare to be mesmerized by a lineup of puppets so outrageously “bad” they’re unforgettable. Our special selection includes: PARENTS: WHO NEEDS THEM?: Watch in awe as a magical puppet embarks on a fantastical journey, turning a little boy invisible to teach him a heartwarming lesson in gratitude; LUNCHROOM MANNERS: Experience the chaos and hilarity as a mischievous puppet turns a simple lunch into an uproarious spectacle, reminding us all of the importance of good manners; WHAT TADOO?: Dive into a riveting cautionary tale, where children learn the crucial lesson of stranger danger through the captivating antics of our puppet characters. And more! Don’t miss this extraordinary night where bad puppets come to life, weaving stories that entertain, educate, and creep the bejeezus out of us.” –A/V GEEKS

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MEDIUMS + GROWTH OPPORTUNITIES

Friday, August 09