Anthology Film Archives

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HIS HEAD WAS A SLEDGEHAMMER: RICHARD FOREMAN IN RETROSPECT

May 21 – May 28

May 21-28, 2025

The term “iconoclast” gets thrown around all too much, but in the case of Richard Foreman (1937-2025) there is hardly a more appropriate synonym to describe him. An unparalleled writer and director who ranks among the premier theater artists of the twentieth century, Foreman was also a local legend whose electrifying work greatly shaped the artistic landscape of downtown New York. The founder and director of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater company, Foreman staged eighty-plus astounding plays in a career that spanned over forty-five years, and most of them were presented here in the neighborhood. Foreman’s brazen avant-garde aesthetic was deeply rooted in his early involvement with Jonas Mekas and the 1960s underground film movement. His very first play, Angelface, was performed in 1968 at Mekas’s Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, one of the organizations that preceded Anthology.

This retrospective both memorializes Foreman, who passed away in January, and celebrates the publication of No Title, his posthumous new book just published by The Further Reading Library. Organized in roughly chronological order, the series includes Foreman’s own films and videos alongside an array of performance documentation, documentaries, and portraits. Foreman retired from the theater in 2013 to focus on filmmaking, and the series includes his final digital videos, many of which have never been publicly screened. In addition to this sweeping survey, we are presenting a sidebar program featuring a handful of Foreman’s most cherished films. Some are the movies that inspired him early on, and others are works that he talked about on a regular basis.

[Unfortunately, we are unable to include Foreman’s 35mm feature film STRONG MEDICINE (1981) in the series as all the known prints are unavailable at the moment due to a future preservation project.]

Guest-programmed by Andrew Lampert. The retrospective is co-presented by New York University Special Collections, home to the Richard Foreman and Kate Manheim Papers, and The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance.

For more info about the new book No Title visit: https://furtherreadinglibrary.com/. For more info about the The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance visit: https://www.thesegalcenter.org/film-festival

Special thanks to Christine Bergin; Charles Bernstein; Elliot Caplan; Rebecca Cleman & Karl McCool (Electronic Arts Intermix); Ernie Gehr; Clay Hapaz; David Herskovits; Henry Hills; Shaun Irons; Marie Losier; Kate Manheim; Nicholas Martin (Fales Library & Special Collections, NYU); Lauren Petty; P. Adams Sitney; and Amy Taubin.

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