Anthology Film Archives - Calendar Events

THE WOMEN’S FILM PRESERVATION FUND PRESENTS: TWO FILMS ON ART AND SURVIVAL

Wednesday, March 22

In collaboration with the Women’s Film Preservation Fund (WFPF) of New York Women in Film & Television (NYWIFT), Anthology presents a special preservation premiere of Ariel Dougherty and Carol Clement’s film, SURVIVA (1980), alongside Lisa Crafts’s GLASS GARDENS (1982), an earlier WFPF preservation.

SURVIVA and GLASS GARDENS, both completed in the early 1980s, vary in their approaches to filmmaking and use of animation, as well as their handling of the theme of art making and survival. Yet both films focus on female protagonists and issues that were surfacing at that time: a growing appreciation of the environment and the need to protect it, as well as concerns about the impact of corporate commercial interests on our society.

The Women’s Film Preservation Fund (WFPF) of New York Women in Film & Television (NYWIFT) has preserved nearly 150 American-made films by women since its founding in 1995, covering almost every genre from the early days of filmmaking to the present and representing women makers of diverse backgrounds, points of view, and all colors. For more info please visit: womensfilmpreservationfund.org

The filmmakers will be present for a Q&A following the screening, moderated by guest-curator Ann Deborah Levy, former Co-Chair of the WFPF.

Ariel Dougherty & Carol Clement
SURVIVA
1980, 32 min, 16mm. A Women’s Film Preservation Fund premiere!
The last film produced by Women Make Movies, SURVIVA features women non-actors playing themselves in a fictionalized depiction of their lives in the Hudson Valley, where they face the issues of making and defining their art and the challenges of getting their work shown in the male-dominated art world. At the same time, they question the commercial compromises needed to support themselves through their art. A document of Second Wave feminist activity and filmmaking in the late 1970s and early 1980s, SURVIVA utilizes live-action footage to portray the women’s support groups and collaborative organizations that came out of the Women’s Movement. Animated sequences portray the women’s hopes and visions for a society where women have more power and respect. An original score with female vocals and acoustic guitar echoes the folk music of the protest movements of the era.
The production of SURVIVA reflects the activist and collaborative interests of its two makers. Ariel Dougherty has been a powerhouse of activism and support for women’s filmmaking since 1972 when she co-founded Women Make Movies. For the past 50 years she has advocated for women’s filmmaking and mentored women filmmakers through her involvement with a number of organizations and alternative screening venues, and through her teaching and writing. In addition to making ten films of her own, she has produced several others, including Sheila Paige’s WOMEN’S HAPPY TIME COMMUNE (1972), Denise Bostrom & Jane Warrenbrand’s HEALTHCARING (1976), and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s WOMEN ART REVOLUTION (2010). Carol Clement, also an early active member and Board member of Women Make Movies, began her animation career at the Hollywood cartoon company Hanna-Barbera, later creating her own sand animation film LUNA TUNE (1977). From the 1970s-80s, she documented numerous feminist events through her drawings and designed the original poster for ATOMIC CAFE.

Preceded by:

Lisa Crafts
GLASS GARDENS
1982, 6 min, 16mm. A Women’s Film Preservation Fund preservation.
This elegantly hand-drawn animated film shows the dystopian ruins of a consumer society in which the female protagonist has an unquenchable urge to create art and beauty out of whatever relics and broken utilitarian objects and waste are at hand. Her art fuels her will to survive and kindles the possibility of a more optimistic future. Lisa Crafts is an award-winning animator and moving-image artist, and a Guggenheim fellowship recipient. Her interdisciplinary work addresses issues of environmental uncertainty, sexuality, creativity, and chaos.

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EC: JAMES BROUGHTON, PGM 1

Thursday, March 23

THE PLEASURE GARDEN (1953, 38 min, 35mm, b&w)
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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EC: JAMES BROUGHTON, PGM 2

Thursday, March 23

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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ABIGAIL CHILD PROGRAM 1: IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR?

Friday, March 24

“This project is conceived as a way to bracket my ongoing film investigations in the context of the aggressions of the late 20th Century; the title is from an etching by Goya, part of the ‘Disasters of War’ series. The work is in seven detachable parts, each of which can be viewed by itself for its own qualities. Each ‘chapter’ has a different sound/image relation and each explores the social landscape through different foci. The films don’t form a single line, or even an expanding line, but rather map a series of concerns in relation to mind, to how one processes material, how it gets investigated, how it gets cut apart, how something else (inevitably) comes up.” –Abigail Child

“One of the most assured and important projects to have emerged [during the 1980s]. Constructing from and subverting a wide galaxy of source materials, these films are archeological digs into the very stuff, the conceptions, we are born into. Child decomposes the materials and gestures that would compose us. The films are charged with a startling and playful musicality and poetic and rigorous compression. Each image and sound cuts deep and works over time containing hidden and unhidden detonations working against the manufactured ambush that images have in store.” –Mark McElhatten

PREFACES (PART 1) 1981, 12 min, 16mm
BOTH (PART 3) 1988, 3 min, 16mm, silent
PERILS (PART 4) 1986, 5 min, 16mm
COVERT ACTION (PART 5) 1984, 11 min, 16mm
MAYHEM (PART 6) 1987, 20 min, 16mm
MERCY (PART 7) 1989, 10 min, 16mm

Plus:

SURFACE NOISE 2000, 19 min, 16mm. Music by Zeena Parkins, Christian Marclay, Shelley Hirsch, and Jim Black.

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

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ABIGAIL CHILD PROGRAM 2: EARLY FILMS

Saturday, March 25

The film descriptions below are by Abigail Child.

PERIPETEIA 1 1977, 9 min, 16mm, silent
Navigation spiraling sunwards. Exploring the movement of forest and body, seeking the larger pattern of my digressive attendance. Filmed in the Oregon coastal rain forest, fall.

PERIPETEIA 2 1978, 10 min, 16mm, silent
A navigation by light, contrasting the camera’s fixed sight with “in site” movement. A sculpture of glass, mirrors and film vies with the choreography of the cardinal points: dense shelter, rain, red emulsion. Filmed in the Oregon coastal forest, June.

SOME EXTERIOR PRESENCE 1977, 8 min, 16mm, silent
[This film is] structured on the four-handed nature of film: original footage (outtakes from a television documentary I was directing in the spring of 1975 in the South Bronx and Brownsville) manipulated, then optically printed, then manipulated again.

DAYLIGHT TEST SECTION 1978, 4 min, 16mm, silent
Recurring emergence of narrative. The “loaded” image becomes the determinant feature for reading otherwise unemotional footage; a first experiment in what is an ongoing investigation.

PACIFIC FAR EAST LINE 1979, 12 min, 16mm, silent
An urban landscape film constructed from materials gathered over two years looking out at downtown San Francisco. The elements “folded” and mixed, Time redefines Space: the erector and helicopter appear as toys within a schizy motor-oil-ized ballet mechanique.

ORNAMENTALS 1979, 10 min, 16mm, silent
This film was crucial to my understanding of composition, to my desire for an encyclopedic construction (the world “out” there), and reaffirmed my allegiance to rhythm, the rhythm of body-nerve-mind.

Total running time: ca. 60 min.

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EC: BUÑUEL / DALÍ

Saturday, March 25

Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1928, 22 min, 35mm, b&w)
Twenty-two minutes of pure, scandalous dream-imagery, a stream of images from which anything that could be given a rational meaning was rigorously excluded. It remains the unsurpassed masterpiece of the surrealist cinema.

Luis Buñuel LAND WITHOUT BREAD / LAS HURDES: TIERRA SIN PAN (1932, 28 min, 35mm, b&w. With English narration.)
“A documentary describing, matter-of-factly, a region of Spain so ravaged by epidemic poverty that there our worst fantasies find their objective correlative.” –Raymond Durgnat

Total running time: ca. 55 min.

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ABIGAIL CHILD PROGRAM 3: FACING REALITY

Saturday, March 25

GAME
1972, 40 min, 16mm
One of the early documentaries that Child made before turning towards the experimental cinema, and whose footage she repurposed for her later work, MUTINY (1982-83), GAME is a portrait of a prostitute and pimp in downtown Manhattan.

MUTINY (PART 2)
1982-83, 11 min, 16mm. With Polly Bradfield (violinist), Sally Silvers (dancer), Erica Hunt (poet), and Shelley Hirsch (singer).
“A new kind of classic, it has invented once and for all the machine-gun sound of explosives and composed sentences with speeded-up speech and wild singing, laughter, hardly all understandable, with violins screeching like falling bombs and a Hispanic grind dance.” –Anne Robertson, X-DREAM

B/SIDE
1996, 38 min, 16mm
A provocative exploration of the urban homeless, combining sensitive footage of their exterior situation and entering imaginatively into interior fantasies. Framed by footage of the encampment locally known as Dinkinsville on the Lower East Side, where some of the homeless of Tompkins Square Park settled after the riots of June l991, the movie begins with the encampment’s first night and ends with the subsequent destruction of the lot in October of the same year. Applying rhythmic construction, poetic license, and a generous eye to bodies in poverty, B/SIDE documents a gritty vision of late 20th century urban life.

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

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THE DEVIL QUEEN / A RAINHA DIABA

Saturday, March 25

“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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EC: L’ÂGE D’OR

Sunday, March 26

“The story is a sequence of moral and surrealist aesthetics. The sexual instinct and the sense of death form the substance of the film. It is a romantic film performed in full surrealistic frenzy.” – Luis Buñuel

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ABIGAIL CHILD PROGRAM 4: FOREIGN FILM SERIES

Sunday, March 26

“We perceive that a set of concerns builds up, with artful indirectness: women’s power; the gestures of gender; manipulation of a spectator’s sensibility through the medium of film; large-scale political implications of small moments.” –Karen Schiff, BIG RED & SHINY

TO AND NO FRO 2005, 4.5 min, 16mm-to-digital
In collaboration with Monica de la Torre and Bunuel’s WOMEN WITHOUT LOVE. Status and culture crack the mirror of family secrets, dreams, hauntings, and wish-fulfillment in shifting and multiplying frames.

MIRROR WORLD 2006, 12 min, 16mm-to-digital
In collaboration with Gary Sullivan and Mehboob Khan’s AAN. A reshaping of Khan’s classic Bollywood feature, locating its narrative tropes against mistranslated subtitles…and becoming “multi-lingual” in the maneuver. Formal play and poetic montage wrench causality to create a subversion of class conflict and desire.

(IF I CAN SING A SONG ABOUT) LIGATURES 2009, 5.5 min, digital
In collaboration with Nada Gordon and E. J. Bellocq’s classic photos. Subversive sexuality and the poignancy of desire and vulnerability. The women are visions, desirous, vulnerable, illusory; the illusionary nature manifests in traversing boundaries, expectations, and ultimately physical bodies.

SALOMÉ 2014, 20 min, 35mm-to-digital. Music by Frank London.
In collaboration with Adeena Karasick and Charles Bryant’s SALOME (1923). Child has layered and processed the images, recomposed the multiple strains of music and selected words and phrases to create a “succulent nexus”: fluid and strange.

Plus:

VIS À VIS 2013, 25 min, 16mm-to-digital
Inspired by Vertov’s LULLABY (1937), as well as by Warhol’s SCREEN TEST portraits and Frampton’s MANUAL OF ARMS (1966), VIS À VIS constructs black and white portraits into a set of Romances, a notebook of sexualities: s/m, lesbian, gay, straight, solo. The piece celebrates friends and divergent (d)alliances. Out of the past comes a vision of the future as a set of erotic possibilities.

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

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EC: LOS OLVIDADOS

Sunday, March 26

(THE FORGOTTEN ONES)

“Buñuel shows the sad condition of the poor without embellishing them, because if there is one thing Buñuel hates it is that artificial sweetness imparted to all the poor which we so frequently see in the traditional film. If, as usually happens in motion pictures, the moral principals approved by conventional society are carefully observed by members of the poorest classes…then these principals have some universal validity. However, Buñuel is concerned with exposing the opposite.” –Emilio Garcia Riera, FILM CULTURE

“[LOS OLVIDADOS] lashes the mind like a red-hot iron and leaves one’s conscience no opportunity to rest.” –André Bazin

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ABIGAIL CHILD PROGRAM 5: THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY

Sunday, March 26

A feature-length project about girlhood and the immigrant dream, focusing on post-WWII North American suburbs as well as Europe between the wars, the “Suburban Trilogy” views these worlds critically through the lens of gender, property, and myths of nation. The project is prismatic, insofar as each part explores a different perspective in terms of both cinematics and historical era.

CAKE AND STEAK 2004, 18.5 min, 16mm-to-digital
Excavating the phenomenon of “girl training” in the home movies and culture of post-war suburban America, CAKE AND STEAK is constructed as a series of achronological “chapters” in which Edenic images of adolescent twirlers, basement parties, and “dress-up” are challenged by a sound montage composed of horror movie music, old TV shows, laugh tracks, and the machine noise of our modern Arcadias.

THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU 2004-05, 18.5 min, 16mm-to-digital. Music by John Zorn, arranged and performed by Sylvie Courvoisier and Mark Feldman.
A fictional story composed from the archive of an anonymous family in 1930s Europe, this film focuses on two sisters who play, fight, kiss, and grow up together under the shadow of oncoming history. At once biography and fiction, history and psychology, THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU excavates gestures to locate the heart of narrative, and seeks a bridge between private and public histories.

SURF AND TURF 2008-11, 33.5 min, digital
Contemporary ambiguities on the Jersey shore: the look is secular, the lifestyle capitalist, the religion orthodox. 40,000 Syrian Jews have moved into a landscape previously occupied by Irish and Italian immigrants, and by the distinctly different sect of Askenazi Jews. The “unmelted pot” of America’s small towns is set within memory and contemporary oppositions. What does it mean to have class in America? What does it mean to be Jewish?

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

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ABIGAIL CHILD PROGRAM 6: UNBOUND

Monday, March 27

UNBOUND: SCENES FROM THE LIFE OF MARY SHELLEY
2013, 70 min, digital. Music by Zeena Parkins.

UNBOUND transforms and explodes the idea of documentary and biography. The result is an inversion of narrative, re-siting Romanticism through an infinitely caressing yet ruptured and painterly lens. For this film – produced during a one-year residency in Rome – Child created imaginary home movies of scenes from the life of the writers Mary and Percy Shelley. Incorporating non-actors, the seasons, and the extraordinary architecture and landscapes of Italy, where the Shelleys spent six of the eight years they were together, UNBOUND is digressive, looped, unpredictable, and symphonic. A poignant exploration of women and creativity, Child’s deconstruction embodies the poetic primacy of memory as well as the wit of techne: layered, diverted, delayed, reframed, and remade.

“At once a mischievous scuttling of BBC costume drama and the creative anachronism of home movies before the invention of film, UNBOUND achieves a playful mastery of form.” –Jim Supanick

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ABIGAIL CHILD PROGRAM 7: ACTS & INTERMISSIONS

Monday, March 27

ACTS & INTERMISSIONS: EMMA GOLDMAN IN AMERICA
2017, 60 min, 16mm-to-digital

“As an artist and writer, Child has worked seriously across a range of media. In all of them, her principal form has been montage, developing, as Tom Gunning writes, ‘a system founded not on coherence, but on breakdown, not on continuity, but interruption.’ Here she subjects Goldman to the latest iteration of this always evolving system. She mixes Goldman’s own words, in titles and on the soundtrack, with reenacted tableaux and documentary footage both archival and new. This method uncovers the historical figure as a patchwork of complex personal and historical determinations that cannot be contained within a sealed past, but which seep into a present moment animated by the same injustices Goldman sought to abolish.” –Colin Beckett

“An hour-long collage essay, charging the discussion with Child’s enlightened aesthetic of poetry, the archive, and experimental montage. As the Most Dangerous Woman Alive, Emma Goldman’s life is seen as an ongoing negotiation of revolutionary purity and personal freedom, a complexity that Child mirrors in her own formal strategies. She layers multiple fragments of Emma’s liberatory legacy – from archive, from reenactment and from observational cinema – her speculative play with the revolutionary ideas extending to the present moment of feminist revolt!” –Craig Baldwin

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EC: LOS OLVIDADOS

Tuesday, March 28

ABIGAIL CHILD PROGRAM 8: ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES

Tuesday, March 28

ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES
2020, 73 min, digital
An experimental feature documentary that explores android development with a focus on human/machine relations, gender, and the ethical implications of this research, ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES reveals the work taking place at cutting edge laboratories in Japan and the U.S., where scientists attempt to make robots that resemble, move, and speak like humans. Our guide through these explorations is BINA48 (Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural Architecture), who has variously been called a sentient robot, an android, a gynoid, and a cybernetic companion. She is modeled after a black lesbian, and designed to test hypotheses concerning the ability to download a person’s consciousness into a non-biological or nanotech body. The last in Child’s trilogy of female desire, ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES reveals the contemporary dance between metal and flesh, as humans become more mechanical and robots approach consciousness. The film brings a necessary female perspective (and humor) to this research, asking how subjectivities and nationalities shape our imaginings of an “appropriate” mechanical companion?

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COLOR OF POMEGRANATES / SAYAT NOVA

Wednesday, March 29

The powerful words of 17th-century poet Arutuin Sayadian, also known as “Sayat Nova” (“King of Siam”) are magnificently captured in this visual pastiche which is both a stylized biography and a tribute to his work. Conceived as a complex series of painterly tableaux that recall Byzantine mosaics, the film is divided into eight sections, which evoke the poet’s childhood and youth, his days as a troubadour at the court of King Heraclius II of Georgia, his retreat to a monastery, and his old age and death. Comprising a series of symbolically rich, almost hallucinatory scenes, this baroque masterpiece was banned in the Soviet Union for its religious sentiment and nonconformity to “Socialist realism”. Paradjanov, a tirelessly outspoken campaigner for human rights, was convicted on a number of trumped-up charges and sentenced to five years of hard labor in the gulag. A wave of protest from the international film community led to his release in 1978.

“Paradjanov’s greatest film. […] The striking use of tableau-like frames recalls the shallow space of movies made roughly a century ago, while the gorgeous uses of color and the wild poetic conceits seem to derive from some utopian cinema of the future, at once ‘difficult’ and immediate, cryptic and ravishing.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

Preceded by:
Ramin Bahrani PLASTIC BAG (2009, 19 min, digital)
A plastic bag, thrown out in the trash, attempts to find his way back to his owner and along the way discovers the world in this poignant ecological love story narrated by Werner Herzog.

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GABBEH

Thursday, March 30

GABBEH is a brilliantly colorful, profoundly romantic ode to beauty, nature, love, and art. Makhmalbaf originally traveled to the remote steppes of southeastern Iran to document the lives of an almost extinct tribe of nomads. For centuries, these wandering families created special carpets – Gabbeh – that served both as artistic expression and autobiographical record of the lives of the weavers. Spellbound by the exotic countryside, and by the tales behind the Gabbehs, Makhmalbaf’s intended documentary evolved into a fictional love story which uses a gabbeh as a magic storytelling device weaving past and present, fantasy and reality. Delicately interlaced with a simple and touching story are the people whose lives are shaped by the rhythms of nature, and who instinctively express the joys and sorrows of life through song, poetry, and the tales they tell in their brilliantly-hued weavings.

Preceded by:
Abbas Kiarostami THE CHORUS / HAMSARAYAN (1982, 17 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Persian with English subtitles.)
An old man strolls through the noisy streets of Rasht, and when his hearing aid is knocked out, the film’s sound goes off, mimicking the silence that envelops him. At home, the same thing happens when he takes the device out, and Kiarostami intercuts his silent actions with the clamor of schoolgirls who try to get his attention from outside. THE CHORUS is, like many Kiarostami films, a meditation on the contrasts of silence and sound, age and youth, solitude and solidarity.

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EC: LOS OLVIDADOS

Friday, March 31

EC: L’ÂGE D’OR

Friday, March 31

HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD

Saturday, April 01

Print courtesy of the Joe Dante and Jon Davison Collection at the Academy Film Archive.
The directorial debut of both Joe Dante (THE HOWLING, GREMLINS) and Allan Arkush (ROCK ‘N’ ROLL HIGH SCHOOL), this deliriously entertaining pastiche of exploitation film tropes was the result of a bet between producer Jon Davison and Roger Corman that Davison could make the cheapest film yet created for Corman’s New World Pictures. Dante and Arkush pulled off this impressive feat by shooting on leftover short ends of raw stock and by freely incorporating footage from previous New World films, including NIGHT CALL NURSES, BIG BAD MAMA, and DEATH RACE 2000. Amongst its many references and homages to drive-in cinema classics, it includes a cameo by Dick Miller reprising his role as BUCKET OF BLOOD’s Walter Paisley!

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THE MOVIE ORGY

Saturday, April 01

FREE SCREENINGS!
THE MOVIE ORGY is the legendary, epic-length, found-footage work created by a young Joe Dante, who would soon become one of genre cinema’s modern masters. In 1968, the future director of GREMLINS and INNERSPACE took an apartment’s worth of 16mm prints and, with the help of producer Jon Davison (ROBOCOP), meticulously fashioned them into what is quite possibly the world’s first found footage megamix. Comprised of commercials, news reels, clips from feature films, TV bloopers, and much more, THE MOVIE ORGY is both a fascinating cultural artifact and a wild vortex of mashed-up magnificence. Unavailable to screen for decades and never available on home video, the film has been preserved from the original 16mm reels by AGFA in partnership with Joe Dante and Jon Davison.

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MONO NO AWARE COMMUNITY SCREENING PROGRAM

Sunday, April 02

Featuring the world premiere of films made locally with the support of MONO in March and April 2023.

These programs will include films made through the educational initiatives of MONO NO AWARE, a cinema-arts nonprofit organization and film positive community working to promote connectivity through the cinematic experience. Established in 2007 and based in downtown Brooklyn, MONO NO AWARE presents monthly artist-in-person screenings, facilitates equipment rentals, operates a film distribution initiative, maintains wet & dry lab facilities, and hosts an annual exhibition for contemporary artists and international filmmakers whose work incorporates Super-8mm, 16mm, 35mm, or altered light projections.

For more info visit: www.mononoawarefilm.com

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AMAZON WOMEN ON THE MOON

Sunday, April 02

With Arsenio Hall, Michelle Pfeiffer, Joe Pantoliano, David Alan Grier, B.B. King, Rosanna Arquette, Ed Begley, Jr., Carrie Fisher, Paul Bartel, and many others.

“John Landis’s unofficial sequel to KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE and the bastard child of Joe Dante and Jon Davison’s THE MOVIE ORGY. Like those back-handed tributes to the disreputable entertainments of our youth, AMAZON WOMEN is a smorgasbord of comedy skits…. Overall the result [includes] three or four laugh-out-loud vaudeville sequences and a couple of bona-fide short-form classics.” –Charlie Largent, TRAILERS FROM HELL

“The strongest aftertaste is left by Dante’s bad-taste rendition of movie critics reviewing a failed life, a sequence that eventually turns into a celebrity roast for the dead person, attended by Slappy White, Jackie Vernon, Henny Youngman, Charlie Callas, and Steve Allen – too sinister for comfortable laughs, but queasy in the best Dante manner.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

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EC: THE GOLD RUSH

Sunday, April 02

One of the most celebrated and beloved of all silent films, THE GOLD RUSH features Chaplin’s most distinctive alter-ego, the little tramp, as he wins fortune and love in the Yukon. Filled with impressive sight gags and heartrending pathos, the film deserves its reputation as one of the touchstones of modern comedy. This version features Chaplin’s own music and poetic narration, added for his 1942 reissue.

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MATINEE

Sunday, April 02

With John Goodman, Cathy Moriarty, John Sayles, and Dick Miller.

“John Goodman stars as shlockmeister Lawrence Woolsey (affectionately based on William Castle), who turns up in Key West in 1962 to present a preview of his latest horror B-film. This highly enjoyable and provocative teenage comedy, set during the Cuban missile crisis, was directed by Joe Dante and written by Dante regular Charlie Haas and Jerico, who all have a lot of fun with all the period absurdities, especially those provoked by war fever. They’re also adroit in implicitly suggesting some related absurdities of the early 1990s.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

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EC: SHORT FILMS BY CHARLIE CHAPLIN, PGM 1

Sunday, April 02

“It is stupid to treat Charlie as a clown of genius. If there had never been a cinema he would undoubtedly have been a clown of genius, but the cinema has allowed him to raise the comedy of circus and music hall to the highest aesthetic level. Chaplin needed the medium of the cinema to free comedy completely from the limits of space and time imposed by the stage or the circus arena. […] [The] best Chaplin films can be seen over and over again with no loss of pleasure – indeed the very opposite is the case. It is doubtless a fact that the satisfaction derived from certain gags is inexhaustible, so deep does it lie, but it is furthermore supremely true that comic form and aesthetic value owe nothing to surprise. The latter is exhausted the first time around and is replaced by a much more subtle pleasure, namely the delight of anticipating and recognizing perfection.” –André Bazin, WHAT IS CINEMA

A WOMAN (1915, 20 min, 16mm, silent)
THE CURE (1917, 26 min, 16mm, silent)
EASY STREET (1917, 19 min, 16mm, silent)

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

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HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD

Sunday, April 02

GREMLINS

Monday, April 03

With Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, Corey Feldman, and Dick Miller.

Joe Dante’s GREMLINS was produced by Spielberg and became a huge hit, but it’s no E.T. True, its ‘hero,’ Gizmo the mogwai, is an adorable, wide-eyed, furry little creature of unknown origins (by way of Chinatown). But, given as a gift to our human protagonist Billy (Zach Galligan), Gizmo comes along with three rules: never expose it to bright light, never get it wet, and never, EVER feed it after midnight. Needless to say, rules (especially in horror movies) are made to be broken, and soon the placid town of Kingston Falls is overrun with murderous, anarchic, and not at all furry Gremlins, who lay a path of destruction which Dante delights in portraying. GREMLINS is a bona fide 1980s popcorn-movie classic whose mischievous spirit and Looney Tunes-inspired havoc remain fresh forty years later.

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EC: SHORT FILMS BY CHARLIE CHAPLIN, PGM 2

Monday, April 03

“It is stupid to treat Charlie as a clown of genius. If there had never been a cinema he would undoubtedly have been a clown of genius, but the cinema has allowed him to raise the comedy of circus and music hall to the highest aesthetic level. Chaplin needed the medium of the cinema to free comedy completely from the limits of space and time imposed by the stage or the circus arena. […] [The] best Chaplin films can be seen over and over again with no loss of pleasure – indeed the very opposite is the case. It is doubtless a fact that the satisfaction derived from certain gags is inexhaustible, so deep does it lie, but it is furthermore supremely true that comic form and aesthetic value owe nothing to surprise. The latter is exhausted the first time around and is replaced by a much more subtle pleasure, namely the delight of anticipating and recognizing perfection.” –André Bazin, WHAT IS CINEMA

A DAY’S PLEASURE (1919, 19 min, 35mm, silent)
THE IDLE CLASS (1921, 32 min, 35mm, silent)
PAY DAY (1922, 22 min, 35mm, silent)

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

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EC: THE GREAT DICTATOR

Monday, April 03

In his controversial masterpiece, Chaplin offers both a cutting caricature of Adolf Hitler and a slytweaking ofhis own comic persona. Chaplin, in his first pure talkie, brings his sublimephysicality to two roles: the cruel yet clownish “Tomainian” dictator and the kindly Jewishbarber who is mistaken for him. Featuring Jack Oakie and Paulette Goddard in stellar supportingturns, THE GREAT DICTATOR, boldly going after the fascist leader before the U.S.’s officialentry into World War II, is an audacious amalgam of politics and slapstick that culminates inChaplin’s famously impassioned speech.

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GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH

Monday, April 03

With Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, Corey Feldman, and Dick Miller.
Rare is a sequel that bests the original, but GREMLINS 2 manages to outsmart and undermine its blockbuster predecessor a hundred times over. A parable for our times (circa 1990), this improbable tale takes place in the towering Manhattan super-building of Clamp Enterprises, where poor furry Gizmo is being used as a guinea pig by gonzo billionaire Daniel Clamp (played with a Donald Trump-like zeal by the rubbery John Glover). Next thing you know Gizmo gets wet and, well, hell breaks loose. Luckily his pals Billy (Zach Galligan), Katie (Phoebe Cates) and Murray (Dick Miller, natch) are there to help save him and New York from the whacked-out antics of the deplorable, deadly Gremlins. Simultaneously a tribute to the great sight gags of Frank Tashlin and a riotous parody of disaster movies in the Irwin Allen mold, this great meta-film is 100% Joe Dante.

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AMAZON WOMEN ON THE MOON

Tuesday, April 04

MATINEE

Tuesday, April 04