Anthology Film Archives - Calendar Events

NEWFILMMAKERS

Wednesday, February 22

NEWFILMMAKERS CELEBRATES THE PERFORMING ARTS

DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Bruce Bernstein TWO GROWN MEN (2011, 11 minutes, video)
&
Ana Barredo
THE TABLE
2011, 71 minutes, video.

SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Colemar Nichols SC&AH AKA FUNNY MAN (2010, 8 minutes, video)
Matt Davies UNTITLED #17 (2011, 9 minutes, video)
Antonia Roman HOLLYWOOD TALE (2011, 19 minutes, video)
Chip Hackler TWO HOURS IN THE DARK (2009, 35 minutes, 16mm)

FEATURE PRESENTATION
Thomas Bentey
LOVE CHAOS
2011, 90 minutes, video.
Journalist Joe Lombardi has a shot at a big-time NYC newspaper if he can only write one last home-run article – on the ‘hot-n-sexy’ Jersey Shore dating scene.

Wednesday, February 22, Documentaries at 6:00, Short Film Program at 7:30, Feature Presentation at 9:00.

WOOSTER GROUP PGM 11

Wednesday, February 22

PROGRAM 11: WHITE HOMELAND COMMANDO & RHYME ‘EM TO DEATH
WHITE HOMELAND COMMANDO is TWG’s 1992 full-length video and was originally shown at the NYFF and included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial. Michael Kirby’s teleplay is a cops-versus-white-supremacists tale imagined as a structuralist police procedural, as well as a prescient examination of domestic terrorism and the national security apparatus. RHYME ‘EM TO DEATH, a short black-and-white film shot by Leslie Thornton and inspired by Victor Hugo’s THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME and the Salem Witch Trials, was first shown in the 1995 Whitney Biennial.

WOOSTER GROUP PGM 12

Wednesday, February 22

PROGRAM 12: FILMS FROM
Embedded in much of TWG’s theater pieces are several films that are discreet works of art in their own right. This evening will include screenings of “The Cocktail Party” from NAYATT SCHOOL; “By the Sea” from POINT JUDITH (an epilog); and “Flaubert Dreams of Travel But the Illness of His Mother Prevents It” from FRANK DELL’S THE TEMPTATION OF SAINT ANTONY (all three made in collaboration with filmmaker Ken Kobland).

THE HOWLING

Thursday, February 23

Screenplay by John Sayles and Terence H. Winkless, based on a novel by Gary Brandner. With Dee Wallace, Patrick Macnee, Dennis Dugan, Kevin McCarthy, John Carradine, and Slim Pickens.
“A popular Los Angeles TV reporter is given doctor’s orders to visit a remote consciousness-raising retreat called ‘The Colony’ after a traumatic incident with a serial killer. The bizarre behavior of the residents begins to make sense once the reporter discovers that she is staying amidst a community of werewolves! THE HOWLING is not only a great werewolf movie, but also a witty and knowing commentary on the genre itself. The film is as full of impressive werewolf transformation scenes as of social satire, which is no surprise given that the special effects were done by Rob Bottin (THE THING) and the screenplay was written by John Sayles.” –THE WEXNER CENTER

WOOSTER GROUP PGM 1

Thursday, February 23

PROGRAM 1: THREE PLACES IN RHODE ISLAND & FUTURE REAL MOMENTS 1
An evening of clips from the seminal 1970s trilogy, comprised of SAKONNET POINT, RUMSTICK ROAD, and NAYATT SCHOOL, as well as POINT JUDITH (an epilog). These pieces draw partly from the autobiographical impulses of Spalding Gray, and also incorporate material from sources as diverse as Mary Baker Eddy, T.S. Eliot, James Strahs, Arch Oboler, and Eugene O’Neill.

“When the trilogy was performed together for a two-month run in the winter of 1978-79…its imaginative use of film, dance, music, child actors, and non-linear texts confirmed its stature as one of the most impressive and innovative theater events of the ‘70s.” –VILLAGE VOICE

THREE PLACES IN RHODE ISLAND will be followed by FUTURE REAL MOMENTS 1 - a work-in-progress by theatre-video artist and filmmaker Zbigniew Bzymek. This new piece is based on the Group’s online Dailies that grapple with presenting the work and behind-the-scenes life of The Wooster Group. Posted every workday since Oct 2010, the Dailies include footage from the Group in and out of performance, on tour and at home. For FUTURE REAL MOMENTS 1 Bzymek has edited an installment of these short films about art for the big screen, in which the Group encounters and consumes the filmmaker as a wannabe auteur.
"New York's the Wooster Group is a company that has online flair in bucketloads…these abstract shorts convey a palpable flavour of the company, fostering an online relationship with their audience that bridges the Atlantic." – THE GUARDIAN

WOOSTER GROUP PGM 2

Thursday, February 23

PROGRAM 2: THE ROAD TO IMMORTALITY
A program of clips from ROUTE 1 & 9, L.S.D. (…JUST THE HIGH POINTS…), and FRANK DELL’S THE TEMPTATION OF SAINT ANTONY. The 1980s trilogy features fierce juxtapositions and syntheses of theater, video, music, dance, raucous vaudeville, stilted TV soap opera, naked talk shows, and meditations on lust and death, religious ecstasy, and social repression. This fusion of high and low art incorporates materials from Thornton Wilder, “Pigmeat” Markham, Arthur Miller, Michael Kirby, Timothy Leary, Gustave Flaubert, Ingmar Bergman, and Lenny Bruce. In 1990 the VILLAGE VOICE called the trilogy, “The most significant body of theater work created in this country in the past decade.”
“TWG’s theatrical collages present the violent inexplicable collision of cultures and artistic materials without prettification or overt moralizing, although the work resonates with a post-countercultural despair. […] TWG represents the darker vision of New York’s theatrical avant-garde.” –NEW YORK TIMES

THE CANDIDATE

Thursday, February 23

Screenplay by Jeremy Larner. With Robert Redford, Peter Boyle, and Melvyn Douglas.
Left-wing lawyer Bill McKay (Redford), enlisted by a politico (Boyle) to run for the Senate, agrees on the condition that he can say exactly what he thinks. His honesty captivates the electorate, but as he inches up in the polls the corrupting forces of the American political process come into play. Released the fateful year of Richard Nixon’s reelection, the film garnered numerous accolades including the Oscar for Best Screenplay (screenwriter Larner thanked the “politicians of our time” for inspiration).
“THE CANDIDATE managed to garner real followers, if not votes, for its imaginary candidates. Indeed, it was thanks to THE CANDIDATE’s satire of image politics that a good-looking if dimwitted law student named Dan Quayle decided to follow his electoral destiny.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

KEN KOBLAND PGM 1

Friday, February 24

PROGRAM 1:

VESTIBULE (in 3 episodes) (1978, 24 minutes, 16mm)
16mm original in various (3) modes of optical re-photography. I think of this as my first ‘real’ film. ‘Real’ for me in the sense that it combines ruminations (philosophical and otherwise), fantasies, memories and the landscape of the city; a field of play I’ve never left.

FRAME (1975, 10 minutes, 16mm)
A first experiment using optical re-photography. I was trying to re-produce the experience of the drive, the movement forwards and back, simultaneously…and at the same time to portray the haunted, desolate beauty of those empty summer cabins at the edge of the sea.

ARISE! WALK DOG EAT DONUT (1999, 20 minutes, video)
A reflection on the daily grind, accompanied by an old Russian melody loosely translated and interpreted 4 or 5 different ways…and a return visit to the landscape of FRAME, 25 years later.

BUILDINGS AND GROUNDS (2003, 45 minutes, video)
5 texts/5 landscapes/5 monologues: Whitman/Ozu, the Dharma/Fellini, Bergman/Tarkovsky, DeLillo/Mann and Chekhov…the city as theater, a desert ruin, meat and pulp…a mish-mash and mis-read…the unreliable translator…and the landscapes we dream in…

FLUSHED-AT-ONCE (2002, 45 seconds, video)
A short remembrance…a project created for an exhibition in commemoration of the events of Sept. 11.

Total running time: ca. 105 minutes.

BREAKING IN

Friday, February 24

Screenplay by John Sayles. With Burt Reynolds and Casey Siemaszko.
The second American film by Scottish director Bill Forsyth (GREGORY’S GIRL, LOCAL HERO) portrays the relationship that ensues when professional thief Burt Reynolds and the younger, inexperienced Casey Siemaszko break into the same house. Reynolds decides to take the amateur crook under his wing, and the result is a charming, unexpectedly affecting comedy.
“A subtle, masterly film, a series of life lessons which never ducks the moral ironies, no less precious for their simplicity.” –TIME OUT

John Sayles in person following the screening on Friday, February 24!

THE GOLDEN BOAT

Friday, February 24

The first American film by the great Raul Ruiz (who passed away in August 2011) features appearances by a host of NY underground luminaries, including Jim Jarmusch, Kathy Acker, Annie Sprinkle, and several of the Wooster Group’s actors: Kate Valk, Michael Kirby, Michael Stumm, and Anna Köhler.
“Stars Michael Kirby as a creepy, logorrheic derelict and compulsive slasher – modeled according to Ruiz on Kojak – who leaves a trail of unquiet corpses around Lower Manhattan as he leads a young VILLAGE VOICE rock critic on a quest for God, or maybe a Mexican soap opera star. … In addition to [its] impossible camera angles and loop-de-loop dialogue, the movie is characterized by its bloody tableaux, circular structure, and pervasive hacienda music.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

HOMBRE

Saturday, February 25

Screenplay by Irving Ravetch & Harriet Frank Jr., based on a novel by Elmore Leonard. With Paul Newman, Fredric March, and Richard Boone. Archival print courtesy of 20th Century Fox.
“Don’t try to wolf it down crudely, the way you do with slapdash Western barbecues. Savor it for its fine ingredients. Let it slowly subdue your appetite. Dwell on its peppery pungence, its blood-red juiciness, its spicy surprises and the warm taste it leaves in your mouth – or, if you insist on being literal, in the pit of your emotions and your mind. For this is a first-rate cooking of a western recipe – not a great Western film nor a creation, but an excellent putting of heat to a fine selected blend.” –Bosley Crowther, NEW YORK TIMES

SERRA & BELL / JONAS PGM

Saturday, February 25

Richard Serra & Robert Bell
PRISONER’S DILEMMA
1974, 40 minutes, video.
This rare Richard Serra video uses the concept of ‘The Prisoner’s Dilemma’ from game theory as a video experiment to, in Serra’s words, “expose the format of commercial TV.” The video features Spalding Gray, Richard Schechner, Kathryn Bigelow, Leo Castelli, and Bruce Boice, among others.
&
Joan Jonas DOUBLE LUNAR DOGS (1984, 24 minutes, video)
With Spalding Gray and Joan Jonas.
Inspired by the science fiction story “Universe” by Robert Heinlein, this is an Orwellian vision of post-apocalyptic survival aboard a drifting spaceship whose timeless travelers have forgotten the purpose of their mission. To recapture memory and create a continuum between their unknown origin and uncertain destination, the characters in this disjointed, philosophical narrative play metaphorical games with words and archetypal objects.

NORMA RAE

Saturday, February 25

Screenplay by Irving Ravetch & Harriet Frank Jr. With Sally Field, Beau Bridges, Ron Leibman, and Pat Hingle.
The screenwriting team of Irving Ravetch & Harriet Frank Jr. collaborated repeatedly with director Martin Ritt, working together on, among other films, HOMBRE (also included here), THE LONG HOT SUMMER, THE SOUND AND THE FURY, and HUD. Perhaps their most beloved film, though, was NORMA RAE, with Sally Field as a North Carolina cotton mill worker who fights to unionize her factory. Based on the true story of Crystal Lee Sutton, it’s genuinely stirring without lapsing into easy sentimentality.

THE LOVELESS

Saturday, February 25

With Willem Dafoe. Print courtesy of George Eastman House.
“Bigelow’s first feature immediately reveals her canny talent for simultaneously fulfilling and deconstructing popular film genres. Set in the 1950s and starring a young, pomaded Willem Dafoe in his screen debut as the charismatic leader of a leather-clad and immoral bike gang, THE LOVELESS deliberately uproots the genre’s traditional embrace of youthful rebellion by introducing a notably noir shading and sharp feminist perspective into its story of generational and gender conflict. Bigelow’s training in painting and experimental cinema informs the film’s (relatively) slow pace, meticulous framing, and sparse, deliberately iconic dialogue – not to mention the evocation of Kenneth Anger’s SCORPIO RISING in the camera’s close attention to the bikers’ gleaming chrome and leather.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

PIRANHA

Saturday, February 25

Screenplay by John Sayles. With Kevin McCarthy, Keenan Wynn, Dick Miller, and Barbara Steele. Print courtesy of the Joe Dante and Jon Davison Collection at the Academy Film Archive.
“A massive horde of genetically modified piranhas with a taste for human blood is unintentionally released into the waters of a summer resort named Lost River Lake. Do-gooder Maggie teams with Paul, the town drunk, to rid the lake of the razor-toothed menaces before it’s too late! This 1978 cult classic offers more than its fair share of blood, guts, and body parts. But don’t let the dismembered limbs fool you – this campy gorefest is also a smart, thinly-veiled critique of America’s military-industrial complex.” –BLOCK CINEMA

KEN KOBLAND PGM 2

Saturday, February 25

PROGRAM 2:

THE SHANGHAIED TEXT (1996, 30 minutes, video)
Archival footage and the Montana landscape entangled…Excerpts from films by Dovzhenko and Vertov with a musical score from Turandot. A mixed-brew of ecstatic tropes and heroic vistas…16mm film footage processed in an early D-1 Video post-production studio in Montbeliard, France.

THE TOY SUN (2011, 32 minutes, video)
More ruins, time, and memory…buildings come and go, like everything else. A text based on Eliot’s “Four Quartets”…an old man’s ramble…a moving picture book, illustrated with landscapes (from earlier films).

IDEAS OF ORDER IN CINQUE TERRE (2005, 32 minutes, video)
Cinque Terre is a string of towns along Italy’s North coast. An overwhelmingly beautiful place, extraordinary color, light and geometry. Of particular note is the train line which links the towns. It moves like a needle and thread through the mountains…its patterns and lines connect back to earlier Wooster Group rehearsals, which now form an outline of landscape.

Total running time: ca. 100 minutes.

ALLIGATOR

Saturday, February 25

Screenplay by John Sayles. With Robert Forster.
“A very funny meditation on the old ‘what happens when you flush the goldfish down the john?’ nightmare. It is also a formula film that simultaneously demonstrates the specific requirements of the formula while sending them up with good humor. Lewis Teague, the director, and John Sayles, who wrote the screenplay, know exactly what they’re doing. … Though ALLIGATOR is done straight, not as parody, it never for a minute loses its sense of humor.” –Vincent Canby, NEW YORK TIMES

THE CANDIDATE

Sunday, February 26

SMILE

Sunday, February 26

Screenplay by Jerry Belson. With Bruce Dern.
“This 1975 satire about a ‘Young American Miss’ beauty pageant and the middle-class mentality of small-town southern California is Michael Ritchie’s best feature, though it hasn’t won anything like the reputation it deserves. … Screenwriter Jerry Belson supplies an unexpected amount of pain and even horror as well as comic nuance.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

MINUS ZERO

Sunday, February 26

With Rosemary Hochschild, Ron Vawter, Will Patton, and Eric Mitchell.
A psycho noir shot in high-contrast black-and-white where stalkers, terrorists and government agents collide.
“It promised pleasure and delivered death… nothing ever happened to her class… there was no reason to feel nervous even in the heart of New York… you push the fourth button and arrive at the fourth floor… she was one more person in personville was one more person too many…”

KING BLANK

Sunday, February 26

With Ron Vawter, Rosemary Hochschild, Will Patton, and Gary Indiana.
A sour-spirited foul-mouthed epic of ennui, BLANK is a prescient classic by No-Wave filmmaker Oblowitz. Set in a motel room at NYC’s Kennedy Airport, the film treats two days in the life of a deadbeat couple, an obsessive husband lost in a web of psychotic delusion and his immigrant wife. Great character bits include Ron Vawter forcing Gary Indiana to give him a blowjob in the bathroom.
“A cinephiliac achievement in which the pathology of male sexuality insists to the point of nausea.” –Claire Johnston

BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS

Sunday, February 26

Screenplay by John Sayles. With Richard Thomas, Robert Vaughn, John Saxon, and George Peppard.
This Roger Corman-produced mash-up of STAR WARS and THE SEVEN SAMURAI finds seven intergalactic mercenaries teaming up to defend a peaceful planet from the evil tyrant Sador (Saxon). The film’s charming modesty belies the heavy duty talent behind the scenes, including James Cameron (who was responsible for the art direction), composer James Horner (TITANIC), production assistant Gale Ann Hurd (producer of ALIENS), and of course, John Sayles, who contributed the witty, memorable screenplay.

KEN KOBLAND PGM 3

Sunday, February 26

PROGRAM 3:

FOTO-ROMAN (1992, 26 minutes, video)
The text is composed of excerpts of a novel, QUEER AND ALONE, by Jim Strahs (who also plays the John Doe here.) The voice-over is by Vito Acconci. It’s a travelogue of sorts…or a daydream, by a very odd, somewhat unreliable narrator.

LANDSCAPE AND DESIRE (1980, 40 minutes, 16mm)
A (mostly) bus ‘tour’ of the American landscape. But this is the old un-franchised one. Small-town hotels, bus depot waiting rooms, and the endless plains and sky. A scrapbook of the banal and un-dramatic. Now it feels like a souvenir from a more modest world. Photographed in Super-8 and re-printed onto 16mm.

END CREDITS (1994, 7 minutes, video)
Made as the end-credit sequence for a film of Ron Vawter’s performance piece, ROY COHN/JACK SMITH, directed by Jill Godmilow. Ron was an extraordinary performer and actor. The two men he portrays were gay men, at infinitely opposite ends of the spectrum, social, artistic, and human.

PIECE FOR SPALD (2004, 7 minutes, video)
An audio-mix, no image…scraps of Spalding Gray’s comments, from here and there… Assembled as part of a memorial for the storyteller and old friend, who lost himself in New York harbor in January of 2004.

Total running time: ca. 85 minutes.

BREAKING IN

Sunday, February 26

NORMA RAE

Monday, February 27

SPALDING GRAY PGM

Monday, February 27

Bette Gordon ANYBODY’S WOMAN (1981, 25 minutes, Super-8mm-to-video)
“I asked my friend Nancy Reilly to talk about her porn fantasies in front of the [Variety Theater]. And I asked my friend Spalding Gray to do the same. … I wanted to hear women talk dirty and to see what kind of power that might yield. I wanted women to look back instead of being looked at.” –B.G.
&
Bruce & Norman Yonemoto SPALDING GRAY’S MAP OF L.A. (1984, 27.5 minutes, video)
The Yonemotos collaborated with Gray and actors Mary Woronov and Marshall Efron on this satire of the mythology of Los Angeles, juxtaposing a parodic fictional narrative with Gray’s autobiographical monologues.
&
Skip Blumberg SPALDING GRAY’S “A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN THEATER” (1985, 27 minutes, video)
Taking his cues from a stack of cards with the names of plays in which he performed throughout the 1960s and 70s, Gray turns each tidbit of information into an inspired anecdote and becomes animated with recollection, presenting a microcosm of the relentless and self-conscious experimentation of this period of American theater.

Total running time: ca. 90 minutes.

YONEMOTO / RAPPAPORT PGM

Monday, February 27

Bruce & Norman Yonemoto
MADE IN HOLLYWOOD
1990, 56 minutes, video. With Patricia Arquette, Michael Lerner, Ron Vawter, Mary Woronov, Michael Smith, and Mike Kelley.
Steeped in irony, this video depicts the personal and cultural mediation of reality and fantasy, desire and identity, by the myths of television and cinema. Quoting from a catalogue of popular styles and sources, from TV commercials to THE WIZARD OF OZ, the Yonemotos construct a parable of the Hollywood image-making industry from a pastiche of narrative clichés. With deadpan humor and hyperbolic visual stylization, the Yonemotos layer artifice upon artifice, constructing an image-world where reality and representation, truth and simulation, are meaningless distinctions.
&
Mark Rappaport POSTCARDS (1990, 27 minutes, video)
This short piece by Mark Rappaport, his first work in video (he would go on to create the seminal video essays ROCK HUDSON’S HOME MOVIES and FROM THE JOURNALS OF JEAN SEBERG) features Ron Vawter as a traveling salesman whose romance with Janet is depicted entirely through the postcards he sends her from the road.

HOMBRE

Monday, February 27

THE GOLDEN BOAT

Tuesday, February 28

ALLIGATOR

Tuesday, February 28

THE CABINET OF DR. RAMIREZ

Tuesday, February 28

With Ron Vawter, Kate Valk, Jim Clayburgh, Peyton Smith, Jeff Webster, and Anna Köhler.
The only theatrical feature film by renowned avant-garde stage director Peter Sellars is this dialogue-free quasi-remake of THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, set on and around Wall Street and featuring performances from Mikhail Baryshnikov, Joan Cusack, Peter Gallagher, Sellars himself, and a significant portion of the Wooster Group’s company of actors: Ron Vawter, Kate Valk, Jim Clayburgh, and Peyton Smith.
“The film is a series of layered and parallel episodes that will be experienced and interpreted somewhat differently by each viewer. They are linked in a world of pure color, sound, light, emotion and human presence.” –P.S.

PIRANHA

Tuesday, February 28

THE CANDIDATE

Wednesday, February 29

MINUS ZERO

Wednesday, February 29

KING BLANK

Wednesday, February 29

THE HOWLING

Wednesday, February 29

SMILE

Thursday, March 01

KOBLAND / BARR & BENNING PGM

Thursday, March 01

Ken Kobland
THE COMMUNISTS ARE COMFORTABLE
1984-88, 55 minutes, video.
Part Bronx reminiscence, part landscape fantasy; part morality play, part melodrama. A film in many parts with monologue segments written by James Strahs for Willem Dafoe, Spalding Gray, Ron Vawter, Peyton Smith, and Luche Sacker.
“Filmed and acted with insinuating skill, it invites analysis but operates most powerfully on a visionary level, transforming ideas and emotions into a haunting reverie on childhood and its reverberating memories.” –David Sterritt
&
Burt Barr and James Benning O PANAMA (1985, 27.5 minutes, video)
This collaboration between video artist Burt Barr and filmmaker James Benning features Willem Dafoe as a man confined to his apartment on a winter day as he suffers through an illness. Built on the polarity between hot and cold, the tedious reality of the man’s sickness and the vivid hallucinatory visions of his delirium, O PANAMA conveys the workings of the subconscious. The contrast between the bleak urban winterscape and the vibrancy of Dafoe’s imagination fuels the dramatic progression.

THE LOVELESS

Thursday, March 01

BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS

Thursday, March 01

GLEYZER/DE LA BASE PGM

Friday, March 02

RAYMUNDO GLEYZER AND CINE DE LA BASE
Argentine filmmaker Raymundo Gleyzer was the founder of the Cine de la Base, a group dedicated to bringing revolutionary films to the people. In 1976, like 30,000 of his fellow countrymen, he was abducted and murdered by the country’s military dictatorship. But before his death he created a number of films which reveal his commitment to social reform in Latin America, a commitment he gave his life for. MEXICO, THE FROZEN REVOLUTION uses rare newreel footage of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata to connect the betrayal of the 1910 Mexico Revolution with the failed revolution of Gleyzer’s own time, while THE LAND BURNS boldly exposes the inequities of land ownership in Brazil, where 2% of the population owns 80% of the usable land. These rare screenings are not to be missed!
Presented by Juana Sapire, Gleyzer’s wife and producer.

THE LAND BURNS / LA TIERRA QUEMA (1964, 12 minutes, 35mm, b&w)
SWIFT, COMUNICADO CINEMATOGRÁFICO DEL ERP N°5 Y 7 (1971, 12 minutes, 16mm, b&w)
&
MEXICO, THE FROZEN REVOLUTION / MÉXICO, LA REVOLUCIÓN CONGELADA
1970, 66 minutes, 16mm.

WHERE ARE YOU TAKING ME?

Friday, March 02

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

A high society wedding, a movie set, a beauty salon, a women’s weightlifting competition: these are a few of the many places in Uganda visited in Kimi Takesue’s feature documentary, Where Are You Taking Me? Employing an observational style, Takesue travels through the vibrant streets of Kampala to the rural quiet of Hope North, a refuge and school for survivors of civil war. Where Are You Taking Me? offers multi-faceted portraits of Ugandans and their country, exploring the complex interplay between the observer and the observed. This stunningly beautiful cinematic journey challenges notions of the familiar and the exotic. Where are we going... and what will we find?

“Stellar…. Takesue’s documentary takes the explosive subject of former Ugandan child soldiers in an unexpected direction; instead of choosing the usual routes of investigative journalism or bombastic commentary, the film keeps its distance from the traumatized youngsters and observes them with detached empathy as they readjust to ‘normalcy’.” –Richard Porton, CINEASTE

“Beautifully meditative…an enriching experience.” –Jay Weissberg, VARIETY

Check out the trailer for the film!

Takesue will be present at the following screenings for Q&As:
Friday, March 2nd: 7:00pm
Friday, March 2nd: 8:45pm
Saturday, March 3rd: 7:00pm
Saturday, March 3rd: 8:45pm

WHERE ARE YOU TAKING ME?

Friday, March 02

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Internationalist Visual Analysis PGM

Friday, March 02

INTERNATIONALIST VISUAL ANALYSIS OF THE 60s:

Carolee Schneemann VIET FLAKES (USA, 1965, 7 minutes, 16mm, b&w)
Masahori Ôe THE GREAT SOCIETY (USA/Japan, 1967, 17 minutes, 16mm)
Edouard de Laurot BLACK LIBERATION aka SILENT REVOLUTION (1967, 40 minutes, 16mm, b&w)
Lee Savage MICKEY MOUSE IN VIETNAM (USA, 1968, 1 minute, 16mm, b&w)
L.A. Newsreel REPRESSION (USA, 1970, 13 minutes, 16mm-to-video, b&w)

René Vautier PGM

Saturday, March 03

“Born in 1928 and still at work, René Vautier is the dean of French committed cinema. Author of a hundred films, all his life he has fought on the side of the oppressed against capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. In the course of his lifelong investigation into the necessity and relativity of images, Vautier has explored a vast array of different possible articulations between visual document and visual argument. Taken as a whole, then, Vautier’s work of the last fifty years constitutes the backbone of cinema understood in terms of its ethical and political responsibility. In the process, it has expanded more than any other single work the range of cinematic forms of critical investigation, from poetry to raw document, from pedagogical essay to experimental fiction.” –Nicole Brenez

AFRIQUE 50 (1950, 17 minutes, video. In French with English subtitles.)
The first French anti-colonial film.
LE GLAS (1964, 5 minutes, video. In French with English subtitles.)
A visual poem against Apartheid, narrated by filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambety, with music by the Black Panthers.
&
René Vautier, Brigitte Criton, Buana Kabue and Olivier Tambo
FRONTLINE
1976, 75 minutes, video. In French with English subtitles.
An analysis of the causes and effects of the Apartheid regime in South Africa.

All the films in this program were subtitled by students/interns of Virginia Commonwealth University, The University of Richmond, and the VCU & RU French Film Festival. Thanks to the students/interns, and to Peter S. Kirkpatrick.

WHERE ARE YOU TAKING ME?

Saturday, March 03

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

WHERE ARE YOU TAKING ME?

Saturday, March 03

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

ANGELA: PORTRAIT OF A REVOLUTIONARY

Saturday, March 03

A documentary film about the academic and political tribulations of Angela Davis, the UCLA instructor and radical activist. Du Luart, a former student of Davis’s, initiated the project at the Department of Film at UCLA, where Davis was embroiled in a conflict with the University’s regents thanks to her Communist party membership, and eventually had to complete it independently, with the help of her fellow filmmakers and film students, including Charles Burnett and Hailé Gerima. It was completed only three weeks before the hijacking of a courtroom in San Rafael, California, which Davis was accused of helping to plan, leading to her eventual flight, capture, trial, and acquittal.

WHERE ARE YOU TAKING ME?

Saturday, March 03

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

BEHIND THE LINES

Saturday, March 03

“A classic documentary on the struggle against Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique, focusing on the organization of civil life in the liberated areas. Filmed in 1970, in Niassa province, it was made with the support and co-operation of the Mozambican liberation movement, FRELIMO.” –DOCLISBOA

GLEYZER/DE LA BASE PGM

Sunday, March 04

SAMBIZANGA

Sunday, March 04

One of the most important films on black resistance in Africa. Set just before the 1961 uprising against the Portuguese colonialists, SAMBIZANGA centers on a young woman’s search for her jailed husband. Through first-time director Maldoror’s skill, this tale of separation and brutality becomes overwhelmingly affirmative. Co-scripted by Maldoror’s resistance leader husband.

WHERE ARE YOU TAKING ME?

Sunday, March 04

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

THE HOUR OF THE GENERALS

Sunday, March 04

Frank Pineda and Florence Jaugey
(LA HORA DE LOS GENERALES)
UK, 1992, 20 minutes, video. In English and Spanish.

This documentary reflects the career and personality of what was the Sandinista Popular Army, which was born of a guerilla movement and was once the youngest and largest army in Central America. It follows its evolution from its origins to its dramatic reduction since 1990.

PLUS: SANDINISTA FILMS
Presented by Jonathan Buchsbaum, author of CINEMA AND THE SANDINISTAS: FILM IN REVOLUTIONARY NICARAGUA, 1979-1990.

Frank Pineda, Ramiro LacayoCaméra Raúl Perez Ureta NOTICIERO 1. NACIONALIZACIÓN DE LAS MINAS (1979, 10 minutes)
Maria Jose Alvarez / Caméra Frank Pineda NOTICIERO 5. INICIA CRUZADA NACIONAL DE ALFABETIZACIÓN (1980, 10 minutes, b&w)
Bertha Navarro, Jorge Denti, Carlos Vicente Ibarra VICTORIA DE UN PUEBLO EN ARMAS (1980, 30 minutes)
Emilio Rodriguez HISTORIA DE UN CINE COMPROMETIDO (1983, 15 minutes, b&w)
Ivan Argüello & Ronal Porras ROMPIENDO EL SILENCIO (1983, 14 minutes, b&w)

WHERE ARE YOU TAKING ME?

Sunday, March 04

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

WHERE ARE YOU TAKING ME?

Sunday, March 04

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

WADDINGTON PGM

Sunday, March 04

LAURA WADDINGTON

CARGO (Netherlands, 2001, 29 minutes, video)
“A powerful adventure on the Mediterranean with undocumented sailors, by one of the most brilliant and courageous filmmakers of her generation, worthy heir to Henri Storck, Paul Strand, Marcel Hanoun.” –Nicole Brenez
BORDER (France, 2004, 27 minutes, video)
BORDER is a personal account of the plight of the Afghan and Iraqi refugees of the Sangatte Red Cross camp in France, and of the police violence that followed the camp’s closure.
STILL (2010, 7 minutes, video)
Made for a collective French film created to protest the police violence that ensued when a policeman shot a young man with a Flash-ball cartridge in July 2009, causing him to lose his eye.
Total running time: ca. 70 minutes.

SEARCHING FOR HASSAN

Monday, March 05

“November 2007: I have been asked to go and film a Kurdish battalion of the Iraqi army. This battalion is located in Mossoul. I have 48 hours to make a decision. I decide to go. There, a friend gives me his old Hi8 camera with ten tapes. I am a photographer. I have never filmed anything. I have never seen War. For a whole month, I remain close to these soldiers and I film their everyday life, in spite of everything. Long waits, times out, endless wanderings through the city, looking for untraceable terrorists.” –E.B.

WHERE ARE YOU TAKING ME?

Monday, March 05

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Marcie/Dury PGM

Monday, March 05

Florent Marcie
SAÏA
Afghanistan/France, 2000, 30 minutes, video.
“Florent Marcie on the front lines in Afghanistan, like Fabrice at Waterloo but like Stendhal at the same time.” –Nicole Brenez
&
Olivier Dury
MIRAGES
France, 2009, 46 minutes, video.
Every day, dozens of people are driven by an incredible sense of hope to set out on a journey from Niger, with the intention of arriving in Europe. During the first few days of their crossing into Algeria, these emigrants are forced to confront the time of the desert with its stases, its brutal accelerations, and its mineral inertia. The ordeal they undergo turns them into undocumented immigrants. But during their journey, this film considers them as individuals and for a brief moment steals them from the invisibility that awaits them.

WHERE ARE YOU TAKING ME?

Monday, March 05

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

ITCHKÉRI KENTI

Tuesday, March 06

“Florent Marcie undertook his first voyage to Chechnya in 1996. ITCHKÉRI KENTI resulted from ten years of reflections and voyages to the heart of the Chechen resistance, for a fresco on a people struggling against the central power since the end of the 18th century. Images of Russians in Chechnya, images of Chechens according to the Russians, ethnographic films from the past, videotapes of a present simultaneously experienced and meditated, as if Stendhal’s Fabrice del Dongo was looking to the battlefield in extreme close-up and in wide angle…. [A] subjective history of a collective situation, [it] takes the time to expose and to decry the different forms of conflicts, material, cultural, temporal, sometimes simple but sometimes very unexpected, which structure a popular struggle.” –Nicole Brenez

WHERE ARE YOU TAKING ME?

Tuesday, March 06

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

WHERE ARE YOU TAKING ME?

Tuesday, March 06

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

IRAQI SHORT FILMS

Tuesday, March 06

“U.S. soldiers [in Iraq] are not allowed to film the war. They do it anyway, spreading and broadcasting images without permission, violating the orders and restrictions imposed by their superiors. Videos that show the real war, with casualties on both sides, scary situations and the horror of the day-by-day in occupied Iraq. IRAQI SHORT FILMS is the result of a long-term investigation of the propaganda generated by all the forces implicated in the conflict: the private security contractors, the U.S.-led occupation army, and the militias resisting the invasion.”