https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org An international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of film and video with a particular focus on American independent and avant-garde cinema and its precursors found in classic European, Soviet and Japanese film. en-us Thu, 28 Nov 2024 09:01:59 -0500 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=11&year=2024#showing-58505 <p>This witty and original film – the filmic counterpart to Whyte’s seminal book of the same name – is about the open spaces of cities and why some of them work for people while others don’t. Beginning at New York’s Seagram Plaza, one of the most used open areas in the city, the film proceeds to analyze why this space is so popular and how other urban oases, both in New York and elsewhere, measure up. Based on direct observation of what people actually do, the film presents a remarkably engaging and informative tour of the urban landscape and looks at how it can be made more hospitable to those who live in it.<br /><br />“William Whyte is a legendary people watcher who likes to study the subtle ways public space is used. I think about this film constantly whenever I’m out shooting.” –John Wilson<br /><br />Followed by:<br />John Wilson THE ROAD TO MAGNASANTI (2017, 15 min, digital)<br />Though his sensibility and tone set his work decidedly apart from more conventional, “classical” street photography, John Wilson – who has been making utterly unique short videos for many years now, but achieved a new level of recognition thanks to the HBO series HOW TO WITH JOHN WILSON – is nothing if not a street photographer, and one of the most perceptive and witty we have. Few filmmakers have captured the vitality and absurdity of NYC street life as acutely as he has, and THE ROAD TO MAGNASANTI is his typically trenchant take on the changing physical, cultural, and economic landscape of the city.<br /><br />John Smith THE GIRL CHEWING GUM (1976, 12 min, 16mm)<br />“In THE GIRL CHEWING GUM a commanding voice over appears to direct the action in a busy London street. As the instructions become more absurd and fantasized, we realize that the supposed director (not the shot) is fictional…” –A.L. Rees<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 90 min.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank">CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Friday, November 29 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=11&year=2024#showing-58472 <p>FIELD NIGGAS<br />2015, 60 min, digital<br /><br />“With vast empathy and spontaneous imagination, Khalik Allah revitalizes the genre of the observational documentary and transforms several simple technical tricks into a vision of the world. Filming in the summer of 2014 at and near the corner of 125th Street and Lexington Avenue, videotaping and interviewing people who hang out there – most of them black, many drug addicted, some homeless, some discussing their prison time – Allah, doing his own handheld cinematography, presents his subjects in a dreamlike slow motion that turns video into a fluid transfiguration of painted portraiture. He also desynchronizes the soundtrack, matching interviews and discussions only approximately to the images. Allah engages the movie’s participants in tough and insightful discussions about the police (who are seen on-screen, too), violence, substance abuse, and the inescapable impact of racism. For all its diagnostic insight of political ruin, the film evokes inner complexities that defy harsh circumstances with a virtually literary exaltation. The result is an intimate movie with a metaphysical grandeur, a detailed local inquiry that displays the crushing power of societal forces as well as the passion and vitality of those who endure.” –Richard Brody, THE NEW YORKER<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Khalik Allah<br />URBAN RASHOMON<br />2013, 21 min, digital<br />“With raw, harrowing honesty, Khalik Allah explores the complex relationship between artist and subject as he reflects on his friendship with a homeless addict living on the streets of Harlem.” –CRITERION<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 85 min<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a></p> Friday, November 29 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=11&year=2024#showing-58445 <p>Flaherty’s pioneering ethnographic film depicts the struggle for survival of Inuit hunter Nanook and his family. Though rife with staged scenes, anachronisms, and an indulgence in the myth of the “noble savage” (Nanook was in fact an Inuit man named Allakariallak, who hunted not with harpoons and spears but with a rifle), NANOOK OF THE NORTH is a work of great lyricism, simplicity of design, and genuine affection for its protagonists, and its force is undiminished almost 100 years after it was made.</p> <p><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a></p> Saturday, November 30 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=11&year=2024#showing-58502 <p>A prolific and renowned documentary filmmaker, Nicholas Doob is known for his work as a cinematographer on numerous films by D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus (including TOWN BLOODY HALL, ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS, and THE WAR ROOM) and for directing or co-directing numerous award-winning films (such as DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAIN, A BOY’S LIFE, and AL FRANKEN: GOD SPOKE). Before launching his professional career, Doob studied at Yale (with Murray Lerner, among others), and the Yale Film Center recently preserved several of the extraordinary short films he made during that time, including two remarkable works of street photography, 42ND STREET MOVIE and STREET MUSIC.<br /><br />Nicholas Doob<br />STREET MUSIC<br />1979, 57 min, 16mm. Print courtesy of the Yale Film Archive.<br />STREET MUSIC presents performances by 19 street musicians in seven cities across the U.S. The film features singers, guitarists, drummers, dancers, and others, including street performance legends like Porkchop, Brother Blue, the Automatic Human Jukebox, and Jimmy Davis. From San Francisco to New York, and Chicago to New Orleans, the film captures a cross-section of Americans filled with raw talent, showmanship, and hustle, and presents a time capsule of the fashion, architecture, and culture of the 1970s.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Nicholas Doob<br />42ND ST MOVIE<br />1969, 18 min, 16mm. Print courtesy of the Yale Film Archive.<br />42ND ST MOVIE begins with a shot of the sun setting over the Hudson River in New York City, and goes on to examine the nighttime street life found in the block of 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. As Doob describes it, “That block was fairly notorious at that time, with pornographic bookstores and theaters, peep-shows, and prostitution. It was also a kind of magnet for exotic personalities, and a visually interesting location.”<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 85 min.<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a></p> Saturday, November 30 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=11&year=2024#showing-58451 <p>Flaherty’s third major film portrays the lives of a family of fisher folk on the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway, Ireland. Flaherty selected the location and subjects because of their isolation as the westernmost outpost of European civilization. In addition, the daily struggle between the islanders and the sea perfectly suited his interests and concerns. The scenes at sea are breathtaking.<br /><br />“His passionate devotion to the portrayal of human gesture and of a man’s fight for his family makes the film an incomparable account of human dignity. Better than anyone, Flaherty knew how to show the true face of Man.” –Georges Sadoul</p> <p><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a></p> Saturday, November 30 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=11&year=2024#showing-58483 <p>“CAIRO DRIVE expertly balances humor, frustration and a distinctive sense of fatalistic irony to offer a view of Egypt unseen in recent documentaries about the Arab Spring. Shot before, during and after the revolution, Sherief Elkatsha’s entertaining film explores Cairo from the street level through the perspectives of its drivers. Fighting congestion, navigating in the absence of any apparent traffic laws and deciphering the surprisingly eloquent language of car horns, they represent a cross-section of Egyptians trying to make their way through a country fraying at its edges.” –DOC NYC<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Mira Nair<br />JAMA MASJID STREET JOURNAL<br />1979, 18 min, 16mm-to-digital<br />Mira Nair’s personal record of street life around the Jama Masjid, or Great Mosque, in the old city of Delhi, India.<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 100 min.<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a></p> Saturday, November 30 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58493 <p>CHARLIE AHEARN IN PERSON!<br /><br />In the infancy of hip-hop, Brooklyn-born photographer Jamel Shabazz documented the pioneers of music and style who would launch an enduring worldwide phenomenon. In JAMEL SHABAZZ STREET PHOTOGRAPHER, Charlie Ahearn pays tribute to both Shabazz and those who defined hip-hop before it had definition. More than just vintage shots of kids rocking sneakers and savvy street style in Times Square and Fort Greene Park, Shabazz’s photographs have hundreds of stories behind them, and Ahearn’s film gives voice to these images with intimate interviews with Shabazz himself, graffiti pioneer and hip-hop historian Fred “Fab 5 Freddy” Brathwaite, legendary rapper KRS-One, and many others.<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a></p> Sunday, December 01 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58456 <p>Griffith’s immensely influential silent epic intercuts four parallel tales from history (spanning Babylon, Christ’s Judea, Reformation Europe, and turn-of-the-century America) to embroider a moral tapestry on personal, social, and political repression through the ages. The visual poetry is overwhelming, especially in the massed crowd scenes, and the unbridled eroticism of the Babylon harem scenes demonstrates just what Hollywood lost when it later bowed to the Hays Code. While the (partly self-financed) production ruined Griffith financially and baffled audiences with its multiple plots and labyrinthine structure, it has been enormously influential on generations of filmmakers, including Eisenstein, who studied the film closely.<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Sunday, December 01 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58480 <p><span id="docs-internal-guid-e2bd5396-7fff-ad27-37ce-4c509f44c586"><span><strong>CHARLIE AHEARN IN PERSON!</strong><br /><br />Charlie Ahearn<br />DOIN’ TIME IN TIMES SQUARE<br />1991, 39 min, video<br />During the production of WILD STYLE in 1980, Ahearn moved with his wife Jane Dickson to a corner loft with views of 8th Ave and 43rd St. Awakened nightly by howling from the street, he was ready with his video camera to shoot the transgender habitués of the infamous hangout, Sally’s Hideaway, throwing garbage cans at cops. Show World, Dobbs Hats, and Paradise Alley offered lovely backdrops to another drug deal gone bad. Home movies of his son Joe’s birthday parties and the arrival of his daughter Eve clashed with street fights down below. Times Square’s New Year’s Eve mob scenes marked the passage of time until Ahearn’s building was demolished to make way for the new Disney-fied Times Square.<br /><br />Józef Robakowski<br />FROM MY WINDOW / Z MOJEGO OKNA<br />1978-99, 19 min, 16mm-to-digital<br />“In 1978, Robakowski moved into an apartment in a newly-built high-rise in the center of Łódź. That’s when he began filming the people and events he could see from his kitchen window. Looking down onto the public square below, his witty pseudo-documentary observes the daily activities of his neighbors and mass gatherings such as the annual May Day marches. …[The] film spans 20 years with an invisible, omniscient narrator in the manner of a classic 19th-century novel.” –Walter Seidl, KONTAKT COLLECTION<br /><br />Eve Heller<br />ASTOR PLACE<br />1997, 10 min, 16mm, silent<br />“Passersby at Astor Place in New York City speak silent volumes as they move by the mirrored surface of a diner window. I wanted to capture the unscripted choreography of the street, its dance of gazes and riddle of identities.” –Eve Heller<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 75 min.<br /><br /></span></span><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a></p> Sunday, December 01 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58541 <p><strong>FREE SCREENING!</strong><br /><br />Since 1989, Visual AIDS – a New York based non-profit that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy – has mobilized art institutions for Day With(out) Art. A day of mourning and action that uses art to respond to the ongoing HIV and AIDS crisis, Day With(out) Art encourages universities, museums, art institutions, and AIDS organizations to present related programming on or around World AIDS Day, which falls on December 1.<br /><br />This year, Visual AIDS has organized “Red Reminds Me…”, a program of seven videos reflecting the emotional spectrum of living with HIV today. Through the red ribbon and other visuals, HIV and AIDS has been long associated with the color red and its connotations – blood, pain, tragedy, and anger. “Red Reminds Me…” invites viewers to consider a complex range of images and feelings surrounding HIV, spanning eroticism and intimacy, mothering and kinship, luck and chance, memory and haunting. The commissioned artists deploy parody, melodrama, theater, irony, and horror to build a new vocabulary for representing HIV today.<br /><br />The title is drawn from the words of Stacy Jennings, an activist, poet, and long-term survivor with HIV, who writes: “Red reminds me, red reminds me, red reminds me…to be free.” Linking “red” to freedom, Jennings flips the usual connotations of the color and offers a new way of thinking about the complexity of living with HIV. Just as a prism bends and refracts light, “Red Reminds Me…” expands the emotional spectrum of living with HIV. It shows us that while grief, tragedy, and anger define parts of the epidemic, the full picture contains deep, nuanced, and sometimes contradictory feelings.<br /><br />The artists in this program were selected through an open call process juried by artists/activists aAliy A. Muhammad and Jessica Whitbread, curator Alper Turan, and community organizer Josué Lopez.<br /><br />Visual AIDS is a New York-based non-profit that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over. For more info, visit: visualaids.org<br /><br />Gian Cruz DEAR KWONG CHI (2024, digital)<br />Cruz creates a video letter to the late artist Tseng Kwong Chi, drawing from the experience of living with HIV in diaspora. Across continents and decades, Kwong Chi’s legacy acts as an anchor for Cruz amongst limited representations of Asian narratives in AIDS histories.<br /><br />Milko Delgado EL CLUB DEL SIDA (2024, digital)<br />Taking its title from a sensational telenovela episode, EL CLUB DEL SIDA cycles through a lifetime of heavily stigmatizing images about HIV and AIDS. Delgado plays with multiple aesthetics – documentary, horror, comedy – to explore the various relationships he has had with AIDS over the course of his life.<br /><br />Imani Harrington AGE OF KNOWING / SCRAPED (2024, digital)<br />A professor is asked to help a young child who has been Scraped and is soon faced with a moral dilemma that either exposes the truth or upholds a lie. With a nostalgic aesthetic, AGE OF KNOWING / SCRAPED traces memories of an AIDS past that continue to haunt the present.<br /><br />David Oscar Harvey AMBIVALENCE: ON HIV & LUCK (2024, digital)<br />This film tackles the disorienting experience of existing with a manageable condition that our present culture insists on representing in terms of its bleak past. Interested in figuring HIV differently, the film presents a series of visual puns merging the iconography of HIV and AIDS with popular symbols of luck.<br /><br />Mariana Iacono and Juan De La Mar EL VIH SE ENAMORÓ DE MI (HIV FELL IN LOVE WITH ME) (2024, digital)<br />HIV FELL IN LOVE WITH ME tells the story of a woman with HIV embracing her sexuality and reconnecting with her pleasure. Filmed with an erotic aesthetic, the video reflects a pursuit towards sexual justice and autonomy for women living with HIV.<br /><br />Nixie IT’S GIVING (2024, digital)<br />Through home videos, archival footage, and fantasy landscapes, IT’S GIVING explores the connection between caregiving for a child and caregiving for a dying community. What does it mean for an HIV+ person, who carries the history and present of the AIDS-crisis in their DNA, to foster new life?<br /><br />Vasilios Papapitsios PARAPRONOIA (2024, digital)<br />Papapitsios describes PARAPRONOIA as a “meditation on how we can(not) heal in the environments that make us sick, from the perspective of an infected neurodivergent faggot.” Combining auto-fiction with magical realism, Papapitsios humorously reimagines narratives around mental health and chronic illness.<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 60 min.</p> Tuesday, December 03 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58363 <p>Meredith Monk<br />BOOK OF DAYS<br />1989, 75 min, 35mm<br />Meredith Monk’s first feature-length film, BOOK OF DAYS, is a meditation on time, drawing parallels between the Middle Ages (a time of war, plague, and fear of the Apocalypse) and the 1980s (a time of racial and religious conflict, the AIDS epidemic, and fear of nuclear annihilation). The film centers on a young girl from the Jewish community of a medieval village during the time of the Black Death who has inexplicable visions of the future. As the plague descends upon the village, scapegoating and blame are cast with tragic consequences.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Robert Withers TURTLE DREAMS 1987, 10 min, 16mm. Concept and music: Meredith Monk.<br />Meredith Monk & Bob Rosen ELLIS ISLAND 1982, 28 min, 35mm<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 120 min.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank">CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Tuesday, December 03 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58365 <p>This program features two notable cinematic adaptations of Monk’s iconic performance works. Robert Withers’s 16 MILLIMETER EARRINGS (1980), made over a decade after Monks’s 1966 breakthrough multimedia work, reconstructs a documentation of a 1977 performance for film, using most of the original film sequences and sound elements. PARIS, Meredith Monk and Ping Chong’s video adaptation of their theater work from 1973, imagines the City of Lights through a series of promenades, portraits, and cackling mime faces. These two works will be preceded by a selection of Monk’s short silent films from 1966-94, most frequently presented as standalone installations or as film elements within performance works.<br /><br />Meredith Monk CHILDREN 1967, 8 min, 16mm. Camera by Phill Niblock.<br />Meredith Monk 16 MILLIMETER EARRINGS 1966, 4 min, 16mm<br />Meredith Monk BALL BEARING 1968, 6.5 min, 16mm. Camera by Meredith Monk & George Landow.<br />Meredith Monk QUARRY 1975, 5.5 min, 16mm-to-digital<br />Meredith Monk ELLIS ISLAND 1979, 6.5 min, 16mm-to-digital<br />Meredith Monk FACES 1994, 5 min, video<br />Meredith Monk MOUNTAIN 1971, 6 min, 16mm-to-digital<br />Robert Withers 16 MILLIMETER EARRINGS 1979, 25 min, 16mm. Conceived, composed, choreographed, and performed by Meredith Monk.<br />Mark Lowry & Kathryn Escher PARIS 1982, 28 min, video. Conceived and performed by Meredith Monk & Ping Chong.<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 100 min.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank">CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Wednesday, December 04 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58367 <p>SONGS OF ASCENSION (SHRINE) reimagines a live performance of Monk’s music theater work of the same name, recorded on location in Ann Hamilton’s tower at The Oliver Ranch in Geyserville, California. Inspired by ritual motifs of ascension and circumambulation throughout time, SONGS OF ASCENSION envelops the viewer in Monk’s expansive weaving together of music, movement, and architecture, supported by the tower’s height, double helical staircase, and unique acoustic properties. Preceded by HAND MANDALA and HAND REFLECTION, two video works made in 2018 for “Cellular Songs” and reimagined as standalone installations, and ROTATION, an audio-video installation born from Monk’s latest music theater work “Indra’s Net”.<br /><br />Meredith Monk HAND MANDALA 2018, 4 min, digital<br />Meredith Monk HAND REFLECTION 2016, 4.5 min, digital<br />Meredith Monk ROTATION 2021, 10 min, digital<br />Dyanna Taylor SONGS OF ASCENSION (SHRINE) 2023, 40 min, digital. Conceived and performed by Meredith Monk.<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 65 min.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank">CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Wednesday, December 04 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58369 <p>Meredith Monk & Amram Nowak<br />QUARRY<br />1977, 82 min, 16mm-to-DCP. The 2019 restoration of this film was made possible, in part, by grants from the Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film & Television, and the National Film Preservation Fund, as well as numerous individuals.<br />Monk’s meditation on WWII and recurring cycles of intolerance, fascism, and cruelty in history, QUARRY originated in 1976 as a live stage work utilizing elements of music, images, movement, dialogue, film, sound, and light, and was filmed in the Lepercq Space at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1977. QUARRY centers on a sick American child (played by Monk herself) whose world darkens as her illness progresses, this darkening including the rise of a dictator.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Phill Niblock JUICE: A CANTATA IN THREE INSTALLMENTS 1969, 13 min, 16mm<br />A documentary filmed by composer Phill Niblock in 1969 capturing Monk’s landmark site-specific performance work.<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 100 min.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank">CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Thursday, December 05 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58543 <p>It all started with a heartbeat. Sandra Llano-Mejía’s IN PULSO (1978), the first video artwork made by a Colombian artist to be exhibited in Colombia (along with Ricardo Castaño’s AUTORRETRATO), is structured around an electrocardiogram of her heart. An embodied and scientific self-portrait of the artist ushered in the birth of a medium in the country, and it would only take a few years for it to develop into a fully-fledged scene with its own exhibitions like the Medellín Modern Art Museum (MAMM) Videoart Biennial in 1986.<br /><br />This program brings together four pioneers of Colombian video art to trace the contours of its early history. Colombian video art came to life in the late 1970s and early 80s, right at the start of one of the country’s most tumultuous historical periods and relatively late to the global scene. But this tardiness gave early Colombian video art its distinctive flavor. Combining influences from established international video artists with idiosyncratically Colombian gestures, the first attempts at video art explored the emotional and visceral textures of the country while attempting to escape the darker aspects of quotidian reality. Whether it is Llano-Mejia’s approximations to the body, Karen Lamassonne’s intimate musings, Véronique Mondéjar’s references to the televisual, or Gilles Charalambos’s erotic provocations against the artistic establishment, these figures represent the transnational, citational, and innovative qualities that characterized this exciting period of Colombian art. Together, they provide a fruitful avenue to explore the country’s history.<br /><br />Guest-curated by Juan Camilo Velásquez, who also wrote the description above.<br /><br />This screening is supported by the Latinx Project's Public Humanities Fellowship at New York University.<br /><br />Sandra Llano-Mejía IN-PULSO (1978, 30 min, video)<br />Karen Lamassonne SECRETOS DELICADOS (1982, 23 min, video)<br />Véronique Mondéjar ASA NISI MASA (1989, 15 min, video)<br />Gilles Charalambos X (1988, 7 min, video)<br />Gilles Charalambos CÁLCULOS EXTÁTICOS (1993, 4 min, video)<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 85 min.</p> Thursday, December 05 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58371 <p>Meredith Monk<br />GIRLCHILD DIARY<br />2014, 86 min, digital<br />In her 50th year of creating work that combines voice, movement, and image, Meredith Monk revisits her iconic piece “Education of a Girlchild” for this evocative documentary centering on the 1993 Joyce Theater reunion of that production’s brilliant cast. GIRLCHILD DIARY offers a unique look at Monk’s unconventional creative process, interweaving music, photographs, interviews, and performance footage to illuminate a crossover artist still radical after all these years.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank">CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Thursday, December 05 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58610 <p>In LEBANON, IN A WHIRLWIND, Saab pieces together the many facets and fault lines of a country on the brink of civil war. Though on the political surface the impending conflict may have looked like a religious clash, the director investigates, with both lucidity and empathy, the socio-economic causes that fueled it. Her journalistic rigor avoids any simplification to expose instead the complex and interconnected factors at play, including the centrality of the Palestinian Resistance which, as the REJECTION FRONT shows, was not a political monolith. Both films are traversed by a palpable sense of volatility, capturing Lebanon in a state of febrile tension as emancipatory and reactionary forces face off.<br /><br />REJECTION FRONT / LE FRONT DU REFUS<br />1975, 13 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br /></p> <p><span id="docs-internal-guid-a68e5746-7fff-06ab-816e-09c43cdf38ef"> </span></p> <p dir="ltr"><span>Total running time: ca. 90 min.<br /><br /></span><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank">CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> <p> </p> Friday, December 06 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58586 <p>ROMANCE<br />1976, 130 min, video. Courtesy of Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2014.M.6).<br /><br />“No one else really understood that ROMANCE was a great movie, the equal of early Jacques Rivette movies. I’m glad that it has been restored and will be seen in a different context and at a different moment.” –Amy Taubin<br /><br />“ROMANCE was the first feature-length fictional narrative made in video. In it, Bowes used cinema craft and technique to shadow and subvert the structure and content of conventional narrative fiction – for example, casting Karen Achenbach, as the lead male character. The film concludes with a final, highly choreographed, 20-minute single take. ROMANCE premiered with a four-night screening at The Kitchen, and was also televised on WNYC.” –Charles Ruas<br /><br />“The plot revolves around Tom (Ed Bowes) and his girlfriend Kathleen (Elizabeth Cannon) and what occurs when her mother and androgynous brother Tommy (Karen Achenbach) come to visit. Tom is receiving transcripts of his innermost thoughts in anonymous letters. Sexual ambiguity, symbiotic relationships, and self-identity are all at play here. Structured in long, uncut takes with beautiful camera work by Tom Bowes, the real-time aesthetic of the work is the result of the script, in which much of the action takes place in drifting conversations.” –Marita Sturken, “Television Fictions: An Interview with Ed Bowes,” AFTERIMAGE (May 1986)<br /><br /><strong>Introduced by Amy Taubin!</strong></p> Friday, December 06 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58613 <p>Overshadowed by other, more internationally prominent conflicts, the Sahwaris’ ongoing struggle for self-determination in the Western Sahara, from Spanish and then Moroccan occupation, is at the heart of this documentary. Saab does something that journalists rarely do, which is to listen to the people in front of her camera so that their condition is articulated in their words, not hers, and on their own political terms. The film also serves as a reminder of the Arab world’s heterogeneity, and pays testament to Saab’s genuine internationalism. Her camera and solidarity, in fact, were not reserved for her own people, but for all popular masses fighting against oppression and imperialism.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank">CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Friday, December 06 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58448 <p><span id="docs-internal-guid-cf234417-7fff-6f62-9b0b-c1f3e1fd071e"><span>NO PRESIDENT was Jack Smith’s third feature film. In this version, restored by filmmaker Jerry Tartaglia, the scenes alternate between elaborate tableaux shot at Smith’s Greene Street loft with found footage of former presidential candidate Wendell Willkie. The film features underground stars, including Tally Brown, Jerry Sims, Irving Rosenthal, Donna Kerness, Mario Montez, and Charles Henri Ford.<br /><br /></span></span>“The last of Jack Smith’s 16mm features – austerely black and white, more an exercise in sensibility than craft – evolved out of his November 1967 program, Horror and Fantasy at Midnight. Like Ken Jacobs’s STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH, Horror and Fantasy at Midnight would mix original material with found footage including newsreel footage of the 1940 Republican Convention that nominated Wendell Willkie to run for president. By late March 1968, Horror and Fantasy had coalesced into Kidnapping and Auctioning of Wendell Willkie (sic) by the Love Bandit – an all black-and-white presentation starring writer Irving Rosenthal as the infant Wendell abducted by a mustachioed pirate and sold on the block of a slave market. In early January 1969, the movie had its theatrical premiere as NO PRESIDENT. For musical accompaniment Smith played records and also used the soundtracks of the found material, albeit slowed down for being projected at silent speed. The surviving version NO PRESIDENT alternates scenes shot in the Plaster Foundation with found footage – including a Lowell Thomas travelogue of Sumatra, a clip, apparently from the late 1940s, of an unidentified couple singing ‘A Sunday Kind of Love’, and newsreel footage of candidate Willkie addressing the future Farmers of America. […] Parker Tyler would hail NO PRESIDENT as ‘an even more daring exploitation of the themes in FLAMING CREATURES, and the Selection Committee for the newly established Anthology Film Archives voted to include both in its canon of essential cinema.” –J. Hoberman</p> <p><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a><span> </span></p> Saturday, December 07 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58618 <p>“When anger is imprisoned, it bursts into flames,” observes the stupefied voiceover in BEIRUT, NEVER AGAIN. While in her previous documentary, LEBANON IN TURMOIL, the Lebanese director had pieced together the causes behind the imminent explosion, in this film she captures the dislocation that followed it. The film is a morphological treatment of a city dismembered by war, in the guise of an audiovisual poem. The focus is on the metaphysical improbability of the new landscape designed by armed confrontations, at once violently hyperreal and totally surreal. A counterpoint to the paternoster of the male Palestinian fighter is provided in PALESTINIAN WOMEN, where the director tells the ordinary stories of women living under regional imperialism. Neither displacement nor gender dissuade these women from their lives.<br /><br />PALESTINIAN WOMEN / LES FEMMES PALESTINIENNES<br />1974, 11 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br />BEIRUT, NEVER AGAIN / BEYROUTH JAMAIS PLUS<br />1976, 37 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 55 min.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank">CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Saturday, December 07 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58588 <p>BETTER, STRONGER<br />1978, 60 min, video<br />“BETTER, STRONGER stands in contrast to the lilting pace of ROMANCE. It begins with an intense monologue by its main character, Lana (Karen Achenbach), which continues at a fairly relentless pace throughout. It is not a seductive story like ROMANCE, but an aggressive one that often jabs and pokes at the audience. Lana’s character is a high-energy, talkative actress who has returned to New York from California for a brief visit. She visits her family and cousins, who are a rowdy and obnoxious bunch, and storms from one scene to another. […] Bowes made BETTER, STRONGER as an artist-in-residence at the Television Laboratory at WNET/Thirteen. The tape is distinguished by its preoccupation with and relentless poetic use of language. […] While BETTER, STRONGER, like ROMANCE, would seem to have a direct plot line, Bowes has structured the action loosely with no central crisis or resolution.” –Marita Sturken, “Television Fictions: An Interview with Ed Bowes,” AFTERIMAGE (May 1986)<br /><br />HOW TO FLY<br />1980, 30 min, video<br />“With HOW TO FLY, Bowes abandoned plot entirely, finding other forms of structure. He wanted to show that stories do not have to obsessively organize and explain data, and that television’s hundreds of simultaneous, fragmented narratives – news, fiction, commercials, sports, etc. – had prepared audiences for this new type of structure.” –Charles Ruas<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 95 min.</p> Saturday, December 07 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58622 <p>Possibly due to the time passed (three years into the war) or because of its epistolary nature, LETTER FROM BEIRUT possesses a more probing quality. There is an attempt to make sense out of senselessness, to record the many, ineluctable ways in which life keeps going on despite the devastation of war. In the second installment of her “Beirut Trilogy”, the director boards a bus to gauge the daily strategies of survival adopted by the country’s men and women. Ordinary reality is haunted by a conflict that has redrawn the coordinates of the everyday, has restricted freedom of movement and inflicted on the population a sense of permanent indeterminacy. Not without a sense of disenchantment, CHILDREN OF WAR reveals how the conflict has monopolized even the imagination of kids who now playfully enact, in their games and school-less days, the horror of war.<br /><br />CHILDREN OF WAR / LES ENFANTS DE LA GUERRE<br />1976, 11.5 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles.<br /><br />LETTER FROM BEIRUT / LETTRE DE BEYROUTH<br />1978, 50 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 65 min.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank">CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Saturday, December 07 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58590 <p>ENTANGLEMENT<br />2009, 63 min, digital. Co-written with Anne Waldman, with poetry from Robert Creeley and Eileen Myles.<br /><br />“Digital technologies are supposed to distance us from our material surroundings, but in Ed Bowes’s hands, they accentuate the physical world. His exquisite new film, ENTANGLEMENT, shot in high definition, lingers over skin pores, strands of hair, a clutch of flowers, a chair’s back. The accompanying script – written with poet Anne Waldman – is philosophical, abstract, while remaining as sensual as the camera’s vision. Together, image and word draw attention to the nuances of love, language, and touch that we frequently overlook in our bustling everyday lives.” –Alan Gilbert<br /><br />SEAHORSE POWDER ROOM<br />2018, 41 min, digital<br />SEAHORSE POWDER ROOM spends personal time with two adults and two children; variously writers, thinkers, and musicians, presenting in a weave of text, considerations of Judith Butler and queer poetics, a severed fox head and performance, as they mix in the shadow of words, light, and impermanence.<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 110 min.</p> Saturday, December 07 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58625 <p>The 1982 siege of Beirut was to leave a permanent mark on Jocelyne Saab’s memory and that of her city. BEIRUT, MY CITY begins with the director in front of the camera, surveying the destruction of her own family home at the hands of the Israeli air force. The house is, in her own words, the house of every Lebanese confronted by the memory of carbonized ruins. There is a sense of febrile immediacy that scorches every frame of this film, something that the spectator feels rather than sees. The film’s recovery of the final farewell of West Beirut to the fedayeen, forced out of Lebanon by the Zionist invasion, is vehement and glowing. The aftermath is chronicled in the melancholic but somewhat hopeful SHIP OF EXILE, which sees Saab aboard to document the evacuation of the PLO from Beirut.<br /><br />BEIRUT, MY CITY / BEYROUTH, MA VILLE<br />1982, 37 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br />SHIP OF EXILE / LE BATEAU DE L’EXIL<br />1982, 16 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles.<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 65 min.<br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><br />CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Saturday, December 07 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58628 <p>In these two documentaries, we have attempts at ethnographic filmmaking. In EGYPT, CITY OF THE DEAD, which begins in a cemetery where the living and the dead reside next to one another, Saab carries out a polyphonic survey of the Egyptian capital at a time of transition. As Arab nationalism and socialism were confronted by infitah neoliberalism, the film examines the emerging social reality through a humorous political economy. Where western accounts would have likely been alienated by such culture from below, Saab exposes the material forces that inform social relations and the changing shape of Egyptian society. In a postscript of sorts, nine years later, the director returns to Egypt with GHOSTS OF ALEXANDRIA to look at the vestigial traces of a once “cosmopolitan” city where economic and political disenfranchisement has bolstered socio-religious conservatism at society’s margins.<br /><br />EGYPT, CITY OF THE DEAD / EGYPTE: LA CITÉ DES MORTS<br />1977, 36 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles.<br /><br />GHOSTS OF ALEXANDRIA / LES FANTÔMES D’ALEXANDRIE<br />1986, 18 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Arabic and French with English subtitles.<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 60 min.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank">CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Sunday, December 08 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58592 <p>This program gathers together three important works for which Ed Bowes served as cinematographer.<br /><br />Kathryn Bigelow<br />THE SET-UP<br />1978, 17 min, 35mm. Restored by The Museum of Modern Art with support from the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation.<br />“Kathryn Bigelow still had one foot in the world of political art theory when she shot her first film. In this parody of machismo, two men beat each other to a pulp. The blows are real – Bigelow later said she had no idea of how to direct the actors to pull their punches – but the style is as camp as Kenneth Anger’s SCORPIO RISING.” –Amy Taubin<br /><br />Vito Acconci<br />THE RED TAPES, TAPE 3: TIME LAG<br />1977, 44 min, video<br />THE RED TAPES is Acconci’s masterwork, a three-part epic that is one of the major works in video. Designed originally for video projection, the work is structured to merge video space – the close-up – with filmic space – the landscape. Acconci maps a topography of the self within a cultural and social context, locating personal identity through history, cultural artifacts, language, and representation. In the third and final part, TAPE 3: TIME LAG, the space is theatrical and the action is communication, as Acconci and actors act out a “rehearsal of America.”<br /><br />Richard Foreman<br />TOTAL RAIN<br />1989, 28 min, video. With Kate Manheim, Ron Vawter, and Richard Foreman.<br />In this “video play”, which was shown on WGBH/WNET’s series, “New Television”, playwright/director Richard Foreman explores his relationship with actors, and examines the impact of William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” – and in particular the character of Quentin Compson – on his work.<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 95 min.</p> Sunday, December 08 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58631 <p>In a Beirut metaphysically disfigured by almost a decade of warfare, a young woman comes of age at a time that seems stuck, suspended. Human relations have been violently deprived of any prospect or certainty, youth of any sweetness, and her platonic entanglement with a painter is marooned by the city’s timelessness. “Newspapers no longer have a date,” says someone in an abandoned theatre. Life goes on but it is unclear in which direction it is headed. Every sentiment and thing seem destined to be frustrated in a film that poetically captures the crippling incertitude of everyday life encircled by death. Saab stages in this film the horror of wartime inertia.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank">CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Sunday, December 08 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58594 <p>THE VALUE OF SMALL SKELETONS<br />2012, 46 min, digital<br />Co-written with poet Anne Waldman, THE VALUE OF SMALL SKELETONS describes the world, relationships, and interior imagination of a character named Merit.<br /><br />GRISAILLE<br />2013, 44 min, digital. Text by Ed Bowes with poetry by Robert Duncan and Anne Waldman.<br />“In GRISAILLE (which is a painterly and stained glass term referring to the use of ‘gris’: gray) we encounter five figures – all women – or as Bowes calls them ‘presenters’ who seem to overlap and know one another. They sleep, read, write and contemplate their own consciousness and rehearse their mind grammar, and contemplate paintings, gender, a Robert Duncan poem that relates to a mother as a falconress. They exist in a mysterious landscape of texture, unfathomable shapes, and extraordinary color. The tones of painters Bonnard, de Kooning, Picasso, as well as Renaissance art, have inspired the color and shape of GRISAILLE.” –Anne Waldman<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 95 min.</p> Sunday, December 08 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58634 <p>These three films, each in their own specific way, evince Saab’s determination never to severe radical politics from the biographies of those that embrace it and whose existences are changed as a result. The biopolitical spawn of internationalist love and solidarity, Mei Shigenobu is the daughter of a PFLP guerrilla leader and the Japanese Red Army leader Fusako Shigenobu. Just like Dr. Hoa, the Vietnamese doctor and revolutionary at the center of THE LADY OF SAIGON, Mei’s mother lent her entire life to the armed fight for liberation. On the run and living in Beirut clandestinely, Fusako Shigenobu brought new life in and to the struggle. The very conception of life, and the body that first nurtures it and then delivers it to the world, is both the subject and the setting of FÉCONDATION IN VIDEO which observes emancipation from the phallic masculinity through artificial insemination.<br /><br />FERTILIZATION IN VIDEO / FÉCONDATION IN VIDEO<br />1991, 23 min, video<br /><br />THE LADY OF SAIGON / LA DAME DE SAIGON<br />1997, 61 min, video<br /><br />MY NAME IS MEI SHIGENOBU<br />2018, 7 min, digital<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 95 min.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank">CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Sunday, December 08 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58619 <p>“When anger is imprisoned, it bursts into flames,” observes the stupefied voiceover in BEIRUT, NEVER AGAIN. While in her previous documentary, LEBANON IN TURMOIL, the Lebanese director had pieced together the causes behind the imminent explosion, in this film she captures the dislocation that followed it. The film is a morphological treatment of a city dismembered by war, in the guise of an audiovisual poem. The focus is on the metaphysical improbability of the new landscape designed by armed confrontations, at once violently hyperreal and totally surreal. A counterpoint to the paternoster of the male Palestinian fighter is provided in PALESTINIAN WOMEN, where the director tells the ordinary stories of women living under regional imperialism. Neither displacement nor gender dissuade these women from their lives.<br /><br />PALESTINIAN WOMEN / LES FEMMES PALESTINIENNES<br />1974, 11 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br />BEIRUT, NEVER AGAIN / BEYROUTH JAMAIS PLUS<br />1976, 37 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 55 min.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank">CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Monday, December 09 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58596 <p>SPITTING GLASS<br />1990, 54 min, video<br />“A story about the life of a young academic starring Rosie Hall. A large part of the story takes place in the liminal areas of her consciousness. The film was produced by Amy Taubin. The film was commissioned by and played on Channel Four in England and on public TV throughout the U.S., where it was broadcast in the 1990 season of ‘New Television’ via WGBH/WNET.” –Charles Ruas<br /><br />“An adult tale of psychological disintegration presented from the point of view of a single, professional woman living in New York, SPITTING GLASS is told in a deadpan manner, with some humor and considerable irony. The program powerfully conveys an experience of mental confusion and frustration rooted in social contradictions. Soon her own thoughts are tormenting her as conflict and anger surface in some disturbing and antisocial behavior. Conversations and confrontations spill over into one another; voices become distorted and insights emerge in fragments as the protagonist moves through a series of unsatisfying encounters in her daily routine. She’d like to ‘find a new approach’ in the midst of this personal moral crisis, but can’t decide if she should go out West or kill her father.” –WGBH<br /><br />AKILAH OLIVER: THREE READINGS (2011, 14 min, digital)<br />A portrait of the African American poet through her powerful and moving work. Akilah passed away in February of 2011.<br /><br />“Bowes transcends with never-before-seen imagery, whether in cine-poem, or transcending the frame with poet Akilah Oliver reading.” –Alystyre Julian<br /><br />A PUNCH IN THE GUT OF A STAR<br />2024, 34 min, digital. Made in collaboration with Zohra Zaka, Anne Waldman, and Emma Gomis. <strong>World premiere!</strong><br />Ed Bowes’s most recent project, A PUNCH IN THE GUT OF A STAR, was filmed in 2020 during the pandemic. Set in Colorado and based on a text by Anne Waldman and the Catalan-American poet Emma Gomis, it is centered on the dreamy, poetic pod they formed together during this enigmatic time.<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 105 min.</p> Monday, December 09 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58623 <p>Possibly due to the time passed (three years into the war) or because of its epistolary nature, LETTER FROM BEIRUT possesses a more probing quality. There is an attempt to make sense out of senselessness, to record the many, ineluctable ways in which life keeps going on despite the devastation of war. In the second installment of her “Beirut Trilogy”, the director boards a bus to gauge the daily strategies of survival adopted by the country’s men and women. Ordinary reality is haunted by a conflict that has redrawn the coordinates of the everyday, has restricted freedom of movement and inflicted on the population a sense of permanent indeterminacy. Not without a sense of disenchantment, CHILDREN OF WAR reveals how the conflict has monopolized even the imagination of kids who now playfully enact, in their games and school-less days, the horror of war.<br /><br />CHILDREN OF WAR / LES ENFANTS DE LA GUERRE<br />1976, 11.5 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles.<br /><br />LETTER FROM BEIRUT / LETTRE DE BEYROUTH<br />1978, 50 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 65 min.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank">CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Monday, December 09 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58626 <p>The 1982 siege of Beirut was to leave a permanent mark on Jocelyne Saab’s memory and that of her city. BEIRUT, MY CITY begins with the director in front of the camera, surveying the destruction of her own family home at the hands of the Israeli air force. The house is, in her own words, the house of every Lebanese confronted by the memory of carbonized ruins. There is a sense of febrile immediacy that scorches every frame of this film, something that the spectator feels rather than sees. The film’s recovery of the final farewell of West Beirut to the fedayeen, forced out of Lebanon by the Zionist invasion, is vehement and glowing. The aftermath is chronicled in the melancholic but somewhat hopeful SHIP OF EXILE, which sees Saab aboard to document the evacuation of the PLO from Beirut.<br /><br />BEIRUT, MY CITY / BEYROUTH, MA VILLE<br />1982, 37 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br />SHIP OF EXILE / LE BATEAU DE L’EXIL<br />1982, 16 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles.<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 65 min.<br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><br />CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Tuesday, December 10 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58544 <p>It all started with a heartbeat. Sandra Llano-Mejía’s IN PULSO (1978), the first video artwork made by a Colombian artist to be exhibited in Colombia (along with Ricardo Castaño’s AUTORRETRATO), is structured around an electrocardiogram of her heart. An embodied and scientific self-portrait of the artist ushered in the birth of a medium in the country, and it would only take a few years for it to develop into a fully-fledged scene with its own exhibitions like the Medellín Modern Art Museum (MAMM) Videoart Biennial in 1986.<br /><br />This program brings together four pioneers of Colombian video art to trace the contours of its early history. Colombian video art came to life in the late 1970s and early 80s, right at the start of one of the country’s most tumultuous historical periods and relatively late to the global scene. But this tardiness gave early Colombian video art its distinctive flavor. Combining influences from established international video artists with idiosyncratically Colombian gestures, the first attempts at video art explored the emotional and visceral textures of the country while attempting to escape the darker aspects of quotidian reality. Whether it is Llano-Mejia’s approximations to the body, Karen Lamassonne’s intimate musings, Véronique Mondéjar’s references to the televisual, or Gilles Charalambos’s erotic provocations against the artistic establishment, these figures represent the transnational, citational, and innovative qualities that characterized this exciting period of Colombian art. Together, they provide a fruitful avenue to explore the country’s history.<br /><br />Guest-curated by Juan Camilo Velásquez, who also wrote the description above.<br /><br />This screening is supported by the Latinx Project's Public Humanities Fellowship at New York University.<br /><br />Sandra Llano-Mejía IN-PULSO (1978, 30 min, video)<br />Karen Lamassonne SECRETOS DELICADOS (1982, 23 min, video)<br />Véronique Mondéjar ASA NISI MASA (1989, 15 min, video)<br />Gilles Charalambos X (1988, 7 min, video)<br />Gilles Charalambos CÁLCULOS EXTÁTICOS (1993, 4 min, video)<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 85 min.</p> Tuesday, December 10 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58611 <p>In LEBANON, IN A WHIRLWIND, Saab pieces together the many facets and fault lines of a country on the brink of civil war. Though on the political surface the impending conflict may have looked like a religious clash, the director investigates, with both lucidity and empathy, the socio-economic causes that fueled it. Her journalistic rigor avoids any simplification to expose instead the complex and interconnected factors at play, including the centrality of the Palestinian Resistance which, as the REJECTION FRONT shows, was not a political monolith. Both films are traversed by a palpable sense of volatility, capturing Lebanon in a state of febrile tension as emancipatory and reactionary forces face off.<br /><br />REJECTION FRONT / LE FRONT DU REFUS<br />1975, 13 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br /><br /></p> <p><span id="docs-internal-guid-a68e5746-7fff-06ab-816e-09c43cdf38ef"> </span></p> <p dir="ltr"><span>Total running time: ca. 90 min.<br /><br /></span><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank">CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> <p> </p> Tuesday, December 10 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58614 <p>Overshadowed by other, more internationally prominent conflicts, the Sahwaris’ ongoing struggle for self-determination in the Western Sahara, from Spanish and then Moroccan occupation, is at the heart of this documentary. Saab does something that journalists rarely do, which is to listen to the people in front of her camera so that their condition is articulated in their words, not hers, and on their own political terms. The film also serves as a reminder of the Arab world’s heterogeneity, and pays testament to Saab’s genuine internationalism. Her camera and solidarity, in fact, were not reserved for her own people, but for all popular masses fighting against oppression and imperialism.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank">CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Wednesday, December 11 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=12&year=2024#showing-58629 <p>In these two documentaries, we have attempts at ethnographic filmmaking. In EGYPT, CITY OF THE DEAD, which begins in a cemetery where the living and the dead reside next to one another, Saab carries out a polyphonic survey of the Egyptian capital at a time of transition. As Arab nationalism and socialism were confronted by infitah neoliberalism, the film examines the emerging social reality through a humorous political economy. Where western accounts would have likely been alienated by such culture from below, Saab exposes the material forces that inform social relations and the changing shape of Egyptian society. In a postscript of sorts, nine years later, the director returns to Egypt with GHOSTS OF ALEXANDRIA to look at the vestigial traces of a once “cosmopolitan” city where economic and political disenfranchisement has bolstered socio-religious conservatism at society’s margins.<br /><br />EGYPT, CITY OF THE DEAD / EGYPTE: LA CITÉ DES MORTS<br />1977, 36 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles.<br /><br />GHOSTS OF ALEXANDRIA / LES FANTÔMES D’ALEXANDRIE<br />1986, 18 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Arabic and French with English subtitles.<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 60 min.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank">CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Wednesday, December 11