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, 03 Apr 2025 11:13:24 -0400 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59197 <p><strong>WORLD PREMIERE! ALYSTYRE JULIAN & ANNE WALDMAN IN PERSON!</strong></p> <p><strong></strong>[We have added a second screening on April 1 at 7:15 pm in the Maya Deren on the ground floor level for accessibility. All other screenings in the upstairs Courthouse Theater.]<br /><br />Poet/filmmaker Alystyre Julian’s OUTRIDER is an experimental portrait of “fast speaking” poet/performer, Grammy-nominated librettist, artistic director, and cultural activist Anne Waldman. OUTRIDER is a portal to her path of imagination, her vow to poetry and activism, and her vortex of artists/collaborators: Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Thurston Moore, Meredith Monk, Allen Ginsberg, Laurie Anderson, Douglas Dunn, Eileen Myles, Amiri Baraka, James Brandon Lewis, Cecilia Vicuña, Pat Steir, Ha-Yang Kim, Daniel Carter, Eleni Sikelianos, Bob Holman, Janice Lowe, No Land, Akilah Oliver, Lee Ann Brown, Brenda Coultas, and many others.<br /><br />OUTRIDER immerses in the poetry communities constellating around Waldman’s life and legacy in New York – “city of my poems” – from her “hearthome” in Greenwich Village and The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and outwards to Big Sur, Morocco, and Mexico.<br /><br />OUTRIDER is a story of transmutation through making art. Waldman asks, “What is it to be a contemporary poet in one’s time? A seer, conjurer? How to keep the world safe for poetry?” Waldman’s exploratory, restless consciousness informs her startling, panoramic work; she is a person woven of poetry, study, and visionary commitment to planetary and social challenges. As the film demonstrates, she has addressed war and patriarchy in The Iovis Trilogy, a cri de coeur for endangered species in Manatee Humanity, the urgency of Archives in Gossamurmur, entheogens in Jaguar Harmonics, Blake’s Thel in Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet Unborn, and her radical life in Bard, Kinetic. OUTRIDER tracks her investigative mind, always “on,” her improvisations with original music by Waldman’s son Ambrose Bye and nephew Devin “Brahja” Waldman, and her wake-up calls, from demonstrating at Rocky Flats (1978) to contemporary social, cultural, and environmental justice movements. <br /><br />OUTRIDER celebrates Waldman’s role as a visionary word-worker, her transcendent presence as poet/performer, and her vocal fortitude as she sings out, in the ancient, bardic tradition, the thunderous power of poetry.<br /><br />“OUTRIDER is a flash of lightning in the dark night, aglow with the life force of Anne Waldman. If you want to sneak up on the secret trajectory of U.S. culture, if you want to know the true, deep possibilities for art in our times – this is your poet.” –Eleni Sikelianos, poet<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Thursday, April 03 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59117 <p>U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON!<br />Distributed by The Film Desk.<br /><br />The feature film debut by Austrian film scholar, historian, and curator Alexander Horwath – the former Director of the Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum – HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT represents, as its title suggests, a filmic portrait of the actor Henry Fonda, but it is anything but a conventional Hollywood portrait. While it is structured chronologically according to the progression of Fonda’s life and career, the film transcends individual portraiture by using Fonda as a prism through which it explores and meditates upon the changing (and intimately intertwined) politics, society, and culture of the United States in Fonda’s time. Equally adept at cultural criticism, historical accounting, and political analysis, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT also incorporates elements of found-footage filmmaking and landscape cinema, as it combines a wide array of revelatory archival material (including film and television clips, Fonda’s final 1981 interview, news reports, and more) with Horwath’s own footage of sites throughout the U.S. Extending the tradition of seminal reflections on America by commentators from abroad, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT achieves the near-impossible, articulating a genuinely new and profoundly insightful take on 1900s-80s American culture, and on the legacy of this era both on the wider world and on the present day.<br /><br />“An actor and a country, Henry Fonda and the United States, as seen through the prism of cinema by a passionate observer from another place and time. In this personal and expansive essay film, Alexander Horwath shows that a politique des acteurs can yield much more than mere star worship. HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT may be his directorial debut but he is no novice when it comes to cinema. With the sensitivity and intelligence for which his work as a curator and writer is renowned, Horwath roams across an imagined realm he calls ‘The United States of Fonda,’ finding within it dreams and devastations that begin with the era of European settlement and continue to echo into the present. […] Through it all, he also makes an argument about the power of classical Hollywood cinema – as a mass art of personality, a distorted window through which one encounters the world and an ideological tangle considerably more complex than some today would allow.” –Erika Balsom, VIENNALE<br /><br />“A movie star who emerged in the mid-1930s, Fonda starred as Abe Lincoln, Tom Joad, Wyatt Earp, and the honest naval officer Mister Roberts. He played a ‘forgotten man’ in the original ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ film, YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (1937). He was the protagonist of THE WRONG MAN (1956) and THE BEST MAN (1964), and of 12 ANGRY MEN (1957), which he also produced. He fought for democracy in the Spanish Civil War on-screen and in World War II in actuality. He personified New Deal democracy, Cold War liberalism, and – thanks to his rebellious children – the 1960s generation gap. Was he also, as more than one person puts it in Alexander Horwath’s erudite, entertaining three-hour meta-biopic, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT, the ‘quintessential American’? Embraced by cinephiles at festivals from Berlin to Buenos Aires and beyond, HFFP more than makes the case for Fonda’s centrality in the American imaginary – what Norman Mailer called the nation’s dream life. […] A masterpiece of applied cinephilia, HFFP is a melancholy reminder that the mass Hollywood-driven illusions that produced Fonda and Reagan et al. are no more. The spell has been broken. Not that we’re awake: We live the Total Cinema Bardo created by talk radio, cable news, reality TV, iPhones, and social media.” –J. Hoberman, ARTFORUM<br /><br /><em><strong>Alexander Horwath will be here in person for Q&As following the 7:15 screening on Friday, April 4 (moderated by Kent Jones) and the 3:30 screening on Saturday, April 5!</strong></em><br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Thursday, April 03 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59118 <p>U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON!<br />Distributed by The Film Desk.<br /><br />The feature film debut by Austrian film scholar, historian, and curator Alexander Horwath – the former Director of the Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum – HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT represents, as its title suggests, a filmic portrait of the actor Henry Fonda, but it is anything but a conventional Hollywood portrait. While it is structured chronologically according to the progression of Fonda’s life and career, the film transcends individual portraiture by using Fonda as a prism through which it explores and meditates upon the changing (and intimately intertwined) politics, society, and culture of the United States in Fonda’s time. Equally adept at cultural criticism, historical accounting, and political analysis, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT also incorporates elements of found-footage filmmaking and landscape cinema, as it combines a wide array of revelatory archival material (including film and television clips, Fonda’s final 1981 interview, news reports, and more) with Horwath’s own footage of sites throughout the U.S. Extending the tradition of seminal reflections on America by commentators from abroad, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT achieves the near-impossible, articulating a genuinely new and profoundly insightful take on 1900s-80s American culture, and on the legacy of this era both on the wider world and on the present day.<br /><br />“An actor and a country, Henry Fonda and the United States, as seen through the prism of cinema by a passionate observer from another place and time. In this personal and expansive essay film, Alexander Horwath shows that a politique des acteurs can yield much more than mere star worship. HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT may be his directorial debut but he is no novice when it comes to cinema. With the sensitivity and intelligence for which his work as a curator and writer is renowned, Horwath roams across an imagined realm he calls ‘The United States of Fonda,’ finding within it dreams and devastations that begin with the era of European settlement and continue to echo into the present. […] Through it all, he also makes an argument about the power of classical Hollywood cinema – as a mass art of personality, a distorted window through which one encounters the world and an ideological tangle considerably more complex than some today would allow.” –Erika Balsom, VIENNALE<br /><br />“A movie star who emerged in the mid-1930s, Fonda starred as Abe Lincoln, Tom Joad, Wyatt Earp, and the honest naval officer Mister Roberts. He played a ‘forgotten man’ in the original ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ film, YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (1937). He was the protagonist of THE WRONG MAN (1956) and THE BEST MAN (1964), and of 12 ANGRY MEN (1957), which he also produced. He fought for democracy in the Spanish Civil War on-screen and in World War II in actuality. He personified New Deal democracy, Cold War liberalism, and – thanks to his rebellious children – the 1960s generation gap. Was he also, as more than one person puts it in Alexander Horwath’s erudite, entertaining three-hour meta-biopic, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT, the ‘quintessential American’? Embraced by cinephiles at festivals from Berlin to Buenos Aires and beyond, HFFP more than makes the case for Fonda’s centrality in the American imaginary – what Norman Mailer called the nation’s dream life. […] A masterpiece of applied cinephilia, HFFP is a melancholy reminder that the mass Hollywood-driven illusions that produced Fonda and Reagan et al. are no more. The spell has been broken. Not that we’re awake: We live the Total Cinema Bardo created by talk radio, cable news, reality TV, iPhones, and social media.” –J. Hoberman, ARTFORUM<br /><br /><em><strong>Alexander Horwath will be here in person for Q&As following the 7:15 screening on Friday, April 4 (moderated by Kent Jones) and the 3:30 screening on Saturday, April 5!</strong></em><br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Friday, April 04 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59158 <p>An aspiring New York-based actress struggling with the misogynoir in the industry turns to phone sex in hopes of financing her move to Hollywood to make it big. Though Judy enters with the intention of raising the money and leaving, the fantasy roles that she creates for her clients become portals for her to unearth her desires and exercise her storytelling abilities. Through phone sex, Judy becomes her own director. With an incredibly ridiculous appearance by Madonna and a soundtrack composed of Prince’s B-sides, GIRL 6 is Spike Lee’s most elusive film. This is partly because it was the first of Lee’s films that he did not pen himself. The scriptwriter, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, drew inspiration for the film from her own brief experience as a phone sex operator. Though the film toes the line with the presumed morality of sex work, the agency and ambition of its lead character (Lee described it as an intentional “star role” for Theresa Randle) allows it to rise above its shortcomings. One of Lee’s most formally and narratively ambitious films, GIRL 6 demands a reappraisal from critics who lambasted it at the time for its ambiguous take on sex work.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Ayanna Dozier NIGHTWALKER 2022, 7 min, 16mm<br />NIGHTWALKER, an experimental short, examines how the surveillance eye overlaps with the gaze of a potential predator. The film is ambivalent as to whether the character is a sex worker, and is more interested in the act of surveillance “sight-based” discourse that names individuals through visual signifiers presented on the body of a woman of color.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Friday, April 04 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59119 <p>U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON!<br />Distributed by The Film Desk.<br /><br />The feature film debut by Austrian film scholar, historian, and curator Alexander Horwath – the former Director of the Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum – HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT represents, as its title suggests, a filmic portrait of the actor Henry Fonda, but it is anything but a conventional Hollywood portrait. While it is structured chronologically according to the progression of Fonda’s life and career, the film transcends individual portraiture by using Fonda as a prism through which it explores and meditates upon the changing (and intimately intertwined) politics, society, and culture of the United States in Fonda’s time. Equally adept at cultural criticism, historical accounting, and political analysis, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT also incorporates elements of found-footage filmmaking and landscape cinema, as it combines a wide array of revelatory archival material (including film and television clips, Fonda’s final 1981 interview, news reports, and more) with Horwath’s own footage of sites throughout the U.S. Extending the tradition of seminal reflections on America by commentators from abroad, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT achieves the near-impossible, articulating a genuinely new and profoundly insightful take on 1900s-80s American culture, and on the legacy of this era both on the wider world and on the present day.<br /><br />“An actor and a country, Henry Fonda and the United States, as seen through the prism of cinema by a passionate observer from another place and time. In this personal and expansive essay film, Alexander Horwath shows that a politique des acteurs can yield much more than mere star worship. HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT may be his directorial debut but he is no novice when it comes to cinema. With the sensitivity and intelligence for which his work as a curator and writer is renowned, Horwath roams across an imagined realm he calls ‘The United States of Fonda,’ finding within it dreams and devastations that begin with the era of European settlement and continue to echo into the present. […] Through it all, he also makes an argument about the power of classical Hollywood cinema – as a mass art of personality, a distorted window through which one encounters the world and an ideological tangle considerably more complex than some today would allow.” –Erika Balsom, VIENNALE<br /><br />“A movie star who emerged in the mid-1930s, Fonda starred as Abe Lincoln, Tom Joad, Wyatt Earp, and the honest naval officer Mister Roberts. He played a ‘forgotten man’ in the original ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ film, YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (1937). He was the protagonist of THE WRONG MAN (1956) and THE BEST MAN (1964), and of 12 ANGRY MEN (1957), which he also produced. He fought for democracy in the Spanish Civil War on-screen and in World War II in actuality. He personified New Deal democracy, Cold War liberalism, and – thanks to his rebellious children – the 1960s generation gap. Was he also, as more than one person puts it in Alexander Horwath’s erudite, entertaining three-hour meta-biopic, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT, the ‘quintessential American’? Embraced by cinephiles at festivals from Berlin to Buenos Aires and beyond, HFFP more than makes the case for Fonda’s centrality in the American imaginary – what Norman Mailer called the nation’s dream life. […] A masterpiece of applied cinephilia, HFFP is a melancholy reminder that the mass Hollywood-driven illusions that produced Fonda and Reagan et al. are no more. The spell has been broken. Not that we’re awake: We live the Total Cinema Bardo created by talk radio, cable news, reality TV, iPhones, and social media.” –J. Hoberman, ARTFORUM<br /><br /><em><strong>Alexander Horwath will be here in person for Q&As following the 7:15 screening on Friday, April 4 (moderated by Kent Jones) and the 3:30 screening on Saturday, April 5!</strong></em><br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Saturday, April 05 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59162 <p>In what may be the best depiction of harming, berating, and “fucking with” men ever to be depicted onscreen, A NEW LOVE IN TOKYO subverts the audience’s expectations by centering the protagonist’s commitment to her local theater troupe amidst her chaotic night job as a dominatrix. Featuring photography and photo direction by acclaimed kink and taboo visual artist Nobuyoshi Araki (who also receives a story credit), A NEW LOVE IN TOKYO, like WORKING GIRLS, outlines the day-to-day procedural dynamics of the industry, an approach that amplifies both the drama and the humor of these scenarios. Though laced with plenty of sex, the film is anchored by the blossoming friendship between two working girls (an escort and dominatrix), which unfolds over karaoke, theater, drinks, and joyrides.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Lena Chen CHINESE TOUCH (2023, 3 min, digital)<br />CHINESE TOUCH renders the classic “money shot” image disturbing by taking images of Asian porn actresses’ faces before a “facial” and intersplicing them with footage of the cooking entrepreneur Joyce Chen – seen here as a model of Asian feminine respectability – all set to an audio loop of “Me So Horny”.<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 125 min.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Saturday, April 05 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59166 <p>This short film program is organized around the excess narratives, forms, and genres around sex work in film. The program opens with Beth and Scott B’s bold hybrid narrative essay film, G-MAN, which depicts the power dynamics between political activists, the police, and the head of the NYC bomb squad and his dominatrix. Lucas Kane and David Gonzalez’s documentary CACHERO//TAXIBOY examines male sex workers in Quito, Ecuador, and their fight for decriminalization. The experimental essay film NIGHTWALKER uses the ambiguity of the body of a woman of color alone at night to play with the visual signifiers of “clocking” a whore that is informed by police law. Tourmaline’s SALACIA collapses time, aesthetics, and space to merge the histories of trans sex workers in NYC, including Mary Jones and Sylvia Rivera. Ariane Labed’s debut narrative short, OLLA, chronicles an Eastern European “mail-order” bride’s experience against the backdrop of a Greek chorus. Closing out the program is WHORE WRITERS by Tall Milk, who uses her luscious, pink-themed home studio as a stage for writers to narrate to the camera their relationship with their body and sex.<br /><br />Beth & Scott B G-MAN 1978, 28 min, Super-8mm-to-DCP<br />Lucas Kane CACHERO//TAXIBOY 2018, 11 min, DCP<br />Ayanna Dozier NIGHTWALKER 2022, 7 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br />Tourmaline SALACIA 2019, 6 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br />Ariane Labed OLLA 2019, 28 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br />Tall Milk WHORE WRITERS 2024, 5 min, DCP<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 90 min.<br /><br /><em><strong>The screening will be followed by a discussion between series programmer Ayanna Dozier and visual artist Natasha Gornik.</strong></em><br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Saturday, April 05 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59120 <p>U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON!<br />Distributed by The Film Desk.<br /><br />The feature film debut by Austrian film scholar, historian, and curator Alexander Horwath – the former Director of the Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum – HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT represents, as its title suggests, a filmic portrait of the actor Henry Fonda, but it is anything but a conventional Hollywood portrait. While it is structured chronologically according to the progression of Fonda’s life and career, the film transcends individual portraiture by using Fonda as a prism through which it explores and meditates upon the changing (and intimately intertwined) politics, society, and culture of the United States in Fonda’s time. Equally adept at cultural criticism, historical accounting, and political analysis, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT also incorporates elements of found-footage filmmaking and landscape cinema, as it combines a wide array of revelatory archival material (including film and television clips, Fonda’s final 1981 interview, news reports, and more) with Horwath’s own footage of sites throughout the U.S. Extending the tradition of seminal reflections on America by commentators from abroad, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT achieves the near-impossible, articulating a genuinely new and profoundly insightful take on 1900s-80s American culture, and on the legacy of this era both on the wider world and on the present day.<br /><br />“An actor and a country, Henry Fonda and the United States, as seen through the prism of cinema by a passionate observer from another place and time. In this personal and expansive essay film, Alexander Horwath shows that a politique des acteurs can yield much more than mere star worship. HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT may be his directorial debut but he is no novice when it comes to cinema. With the sensitivity and intelligence for which his work as a curator and writer is renowned, Horwath roams across an imagined realm he calls ‘The United States of Fonda,’ finding within it dreams and devastations that begin with the era of European settlement and continue to echo into the present. […] Through it all, he also makes an argument about the power of classical Hollywood cinema – as a mass art of personality, a distorted window through which one encounters the world and an ideological tangle considerably more complex than some today would allow.” –Erika Balsom, VIENNALE<br /><br />“A movie star who emerged in the mid-1930s, Fonda starred as Abe Lincoln, Tom Joad, Wyatt Earp, and the honest naval officer Mister Roberts. He played a ‘forgotten man’ in the original ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ film, YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (1937). He was the protagonist of THE WRONG MAN (1956) and THE BEST MAN (1964), and of 12 ANGRY MEN (1957), which he also produced. He fought for democracy in the Spanish Civil War on-screen and in World War II in actuality. He personified New Deal democracy, Cold War liberalism, and – thanks to his rebellious children – the 1960s generation gap. Was he also, as more than one person puts it in Alexander Horwath’s erudite, entertaining three-hour meta-biopic, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT, the ‘quintessential American’? Embraced by cinephiles at festivals from Berlin to Buenos Aires and beyond, HFFP more than makes the case for Fonda’s centrality in the American imaginary – what Norman Mailer called the nation’s dream life. […] A masterpiece of applied cinephilia, HFFP is a melancholy reminder that the mass Hollywood-driven illusions that produced Fonda and Reagan et al. are no more. The spell has been broken. Not that we’re awake: We live the Total Cinema Bardo created by talk radio, cable news, reality TV, iPhones, and social media.” –J. Hoberman, ARTFORUM<br /><br /><em><strong>Alexander Horwath will be here in person for Q&As following the 7:15 screening on Friday, April 4 (moderated by Kent Jones) and the 3:30 screening on Saturday, April 5!</strong></em><br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Saturday, April 05 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59191 <p>Often wrongly described as a documentary on the lives of working girls in an escort house, WORKING GIRLS is a narrative film that has set the standard for fictional movies on sex work. One of the first films to center the workers’ experience with clients, each other, themselves, their partners, and their head madams, WORKING GIRLS is superlative for how much it gets right about the labor politics of sex work. This is largely because the characters in the film are a dramatization of director Lizzie Borden and her film crew’s experiences in the industry. The film outlines the procedural elements of sexual labor in a parlor, including day-to-day tasks like answering the front door, making bodega runs, washing up in between clients, overtime, training new hires, dressing up, breakups, gossip, unfair managing madams who swear they are better than pimps but act no different, threatening to quit, and the cyclical nature of doing it all over again. If there were room for only one narrative film about the industry, WORKING GIRLS would have to be it.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Saturday, April 05 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59121 <p>U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON!<br />Distributed by The Film Desk.<br /><br />The feature film debut by Austrian film scholar, historian, and curator Alexander Horwath – the former Director of the Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum – HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT represents, as its title suggests, a filmic portrait of the actor Henry Fonda, but it is anything but a conventional Hollywood portrait. While it is structured chronologically according to the progression of Fonda’s life and career, the film transcends individual portraiture by using Fonda as a prism through which it explores and meditates upon the changing (and intimately intertwined) politics, society, and culture of the United States in Fonda’s time. Equally adept at cultural criticism, historical accounting, and political analysis, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT also incorporates elements of found-footage filmmaking and landscape cinema, as it combines a wide array of revelatory archival material (including film and television clips, Fonda’s final 1981 interview, news reports, and more) with Horwath’s own footage of sites throughout the U.S. Extending the tradition of seminal reflections on America by commentators from abroad, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT achieves the near-impossible, articulating a genuinely new and profoundly insightful take on 1900s-80s American culture, and on the legacy of this era both on the wider world and on the present day.<br /><br />“An actor and a country, Henry Fonda and the United States, as seen through the prism of cinema by a passionate observer from another place and time. In this personal and expansive essay film, Alexander Horwath shows that a politique des acteurs can yield much more than mere star worship. HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT may be his directorial debut but he is no novice when it comes to cinema. With the sensitivity and intelligence for which his work as a curator and writer is renowned, Horwath roams across an imagined realm he calls ‘The United States of Fonda,’ finding within it dreams and devastations that begin with the era of European settlement and continue to echo into the present. […] Through it all, he also makes an argument about the power of classical Hollywood cinema – as a mass art of personality, a distorted window through which one encounters the world and an ideological tangle considerably more complex than some today would allow.” –Erika Balsom, VIENNALE<br /><br />“A movie star who emerged in the mid-1930s, Fonda starred as Abe Lincoln, Tom Joad, Wyatt Earp, and the honest naval officer Mister Roberts. He played a ‘forgotten man’ in the original ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ film, YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (1937). He was the protagonist of THE WRONG MAN (1956) and THE BEST MAN (1964), and of 12 ANGRY MEN (1957), which he also produced. He fought for democracy in the Spanish Civil War on-screen and in World War II in actuality. He personified New Deal democracy, Cold War liberalism, and – thanks to his rebellious children – the 1960s generation gap. Was he also, as more than one person puts it in Alexander Horwath’s erudite, entertaining three-hour meta-biopic, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT, the ‘quintessential American’? Embraced by cinephiles at festivals from Berlin to Buenos Aires and beyond, HFFP more than makes the case for Fonda’s centrality in the American imaginary – what Norman Mailer called the nation’s dream life. […] A masterpiece of applied cinephilia, HFFP is a melancholy reminder that the mass Hollywood-driven illusions that produced Fonda and Reagan et al. are no more. The spell has been broken. Not that we’re awake: We live the Total Cinema Bardo created by talk radio, cable news, reality TV, iPhones, and social media.” –J. Hoberman, ARTFORUM<br /><br /><em><strong>Alexander Horwath will be here in person for Q&As following the 7:15 screening on Friday, April 4 (moderated by Kent Jones) and the 3:30 screening on Saturday, April 5!</strong></em><br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Sunday, April 06 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59168 <p>Cleo Uebelmann<br />MANO DESTRA<br />1986, 56 min, 16mm-to-DCP<br />In one of her short stories, Clarice Lispector contends that the only thing more painful than death is waiting. MANO DESTRA filmically takes that sentiment to task, through an experimental sadomasochism film that blurs the line between still photography and the moving image. The director Cleo Übelmann stars as a dominatrix who arranges and ties up a variety of femme subs to her liking, often leaving them in contorted positions or cabinets for extended periods of time. MANO DESTRA was briefly resurrected in 2014 by director Peter Strickland who cited it as one of the inspirations behind his film THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY, but it has since largely disappeared back into the archives. It’s a daring film for its same-gender dynamic that also centers women – too often films on BDSM examine queer men’s relationship to the field or use it to unpack the power imbalances between heterosexual couples. In this film’s reality, BDSM can be felt for its effect on the body in time, rather than its perceived socio-cultural baggage.<br /><br />Alison Murray<br />KISSY SUZUKI SUCK<br />1992, 18.5 min, video<br />KISSY SUZUKI SUCK is a madhouse of an experimental short that follows two street-based sex workers as they wait in their car for a trick. Allison Murray’s short was decried by critics upon its release as terroristic and pornographic. In a 1992 interview with Sight & Sound magazine, Murray declared of the uproar, “If men are saying I’m a fag, get used to it…women are asserting I’m a macho, slut, so what?” KISSY SUZUKI SUCK crosses and dismisses the psychoanalytic model of reading cinema through gender division by troubling not just the straights and women but everyone in the damn theater. An ambitious post-punk film KISSY SUZUKI SUCK features heavy dancing, an incredible house song (Coco Steel & Lovebomb’s “Feel It”), spit, women making out with each other, and voiceovers from other working girls on class politics. All these elements ultimately collide with each other, leaving the film to dissolve upon itself via its own excess. It’s perfect.<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 80 min.<br /><br /><em><strong>The screening will be followed by a discussion between series programmer Ayanna Dozier and cultural anthropologist, artist, and community educator Kassandra Sparks.</strong></em><br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Sunday, April 06 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59122 <p>U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON!<br />Distributed by The Film Desk.<br /><br />The feature film debut by Austrian film scholar, historian, and curator Alexander Horwath – the former Director of the Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum – HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT represents, as its title suggests, a filmic portrait of the actor Henry Fonda, but it is anything but a conventional Hollywood portrait. While it is structured chronologically according to the progression of Fonda’s life and career, the film transcends individual portraiture by using Fonda as a prism through which it explores and meditates upon the changing (and intimately intertwined) politics, society, and culture of the United States in Fonda’s time. Equally adept at cultural criticism, historical accounting, and political analysis, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT also incorporates elements of found-footage filmmaking and landscape cinema, as it combines a wide array of revelatory archival material (including film and television clips, Fonda’s final 1981 interview, news reports, and more) with Horwath’s own footage of sites throughout the U.S. Extending the tradition of seminal reflections on America by commentators from abroad, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT achieves the near-impossible, articulating a genuinely new and profoundly insightful take on 1900s-80s American culture, and on the legacy of this era both on the wider world and on the present day.<br /><br />“An actor and a country, Henry Fonda and the United States, as seen through the prism of cinema by a passionate observer from another place and time. In this personal and expansive essay film, Alexander Horwath shows that a politique des acteurs can yield much more than mere star worship. HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT may be his directorial debut but he is no novice when it comes to cinema. With the sensitivity and intelligence for which his work as a curator and writer is renowned, Horwath roams across an imagined realm he calls ‘The United States of Fonda,’ finding within it dreams and devastations that begin with the era of European settlement and continue to echo into the present. […] Through it all, he also makes an argument about the power of classical Hollywood cinema – as a mass art of personality, a distorted window through which one encounters the world and an ideological tangle considerably more complex than some today would allow.” –Erika Balsom, VIENNALE<br /><br />“A movie star who emerged in the mid-1930s, Fonda starred as Abe Lincoln, Tom Joad, Wyatt Earp, and the honest naval officer Mister Roberts. He played a ‘forgotten man’ in the original ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ film, YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (1937). He was the protagonist of THE WRONG MAN (1956) and THE BEST MAN (1964), and of 12 ANGRY MEN (1957), which he also produced. He fought for democracy in the Spanish Civil War on-screen and in World War II in actuality. He personified New Deal democracy, Cold War liberalism, and – thanks to his rebellious children – the 1960s generation gap. Was he also, as more than one person puts it in Alexander Horwath’s erudite, entertaining three-hour meta-biopic, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT, the ‘quintessential American’? Embraced by cinephiles at festivals from Berlin to Buenos Aires and beyond, HFFP more than makes the case for Fonda’s centrality in the American imaginary – what Norman Mailer called the nation’s dream life. […] A masterpiece of applied cinephilia, HFFP is a melancholy reminder that the mass Hollywood-driven illusions that produced Fonda and Reagan et al. are no more. The spell has been broken. Not that we’re awake: We live the Total Cinema Bardo created by talk radio, cable news, reality TV, iPhones, and social media.” –J. Hoberman, ARTFORUM<br /><br /><em><strong>Alexander Horwath will be here in person for Q&As following the 7:15 screening on Friday, April 4 (moderated by Kent Jones) and the 3:30 screening on Saturday, April 5!</strong></em><br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Sunday, April 06 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59170 <p>HOUSE OF TOLERANCE is a terrifyingly beautiful ode to the red-light district of Paris during the Belle Époque era. Rather than navigating the 21st-century socio-cultural and economic realities of sex workers, Bonello turns his gaze back in time to find the ambition, struggles, and desires of women who are both the center of society and yet distinctively cut off from it. Though the production and costume design are impeccably lush, Bonello does not glamorize nor chastise the industry. Instead, he examines the communal kinship and struggles of these working women amidst a socio-cultural landscape that limits their artistic input and renders it almost impossible to evade marriage or manual wage labor to make a living. HOUSE OF TOLERANCE is unique in the film archive of sex work thanks to Bonello’s disinterest in the clients themselves. In this suspended reality he positions the workers above the clients – it’s their lives, dreams, fears, and pleasures we experience.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Sunday, April 06 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59159 <p>An aspiring New York-based actress struggling with the misogynoir in the industry turns to phone sex in hopes of financing her move to Hollywood to make it big. Though Judy enters with the intention of raising the money and leaving, the fantasy roles that she creates for her clients become portals for her to unearth her desires and exercise her storytelling abilities. Through phone sex, Judy becomes her own director. With an incredibly ridiculous appearance by Madonna and a soundtrack composed of Prince’s B-sides, GIRL 6 is Spike Lee’s most elusive film. This is partly because it was the first of Lee’s films that he did not pen himself. The scriptwriter, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, drew inspiration for the film from her own brief experience as a phone sex operator. Though the film toes the line with the presumed morality of sex work, the agency and ambition of its lead character (Lee described it as an intentional “star role” for Theresa Randle) allows it to rise above its shortcomings. One of Lee’s most formally and narratively ambitious films, GIRL 6 demands a reappraisal from critics who lambasted it at the time for its ambiguous take on sex work.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Ayanna Dozier NIGHTWALKER 2022, 7 min, 16mm<br />NIGHTWALKER, an experimental short, examines how the surveillance eye overlaps with the gaze of a potential predator. The film is ambivalent as to whether the character is a sex worker, and is more interested in the act of surveillance “sight-based” discourse that names individuals through visual signifiers presented on the body of a woman of color.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Monday, April 07 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59123 <p>U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON!<br />Distributed by The Film Desk.<br /><br />The feature film debut by Austrian film scholar, historian, and curator Alexander Horwath – the former Director of the Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum – HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT represents, as its title suggests, a filmic portrait of the actor Henry Fonda, but it is anything but a conventional Hollywood portrait. While it is structured chronologically according to the progression of Fonda’s life and career, the film transcends individual portraiture by using Fonda as a prism through which it explores and meditates upon the changing (and intimately intertwined) politics, society, and culture of the United States in Fonda’s time. Equally adept at cultural criticism, historical accounting, and political analysis, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT also incorporates elements of found-footage filmmaking and landscape cinema, as it combines a wide array of revelatory archival material (including film and television clips, Fonda’s final 1981 interview, news reports, and more) with Horwath’s own footage of sites throughout the U.S. Extending the tradition of seminal reflections on America by commentators from abroad, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT achieves the near-impossible, articulating a genuinely new and profoundly insightful take on 1900s-80s American culture, and on the legacy of this era both on the wider world and on the present day.<br /><br />“An actor and a country, Henry Fonda and the United States, as seen through the prism of cinema by a passionate observer from another place and time. In this personal and expansive essay film, Alexander Horwath shows that a politique des acteurs can yield much more than mere star worship. HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT may be his directorial debut but he is no novice when it comes to cinema. With the sensitivity and intelligence for which his work as a curator and writer is renowned, Horwath roams across an imagined realm he calls ‘The United States of Fonda,’ finding within it dreams and devastations that begin with the era of European settlement and continue to echo into the present. […] Through it all, he also makes an argument about the power of classical Hollywood cinema – as a mass art of personality, a distorted window through which one encounters the world and an ideological tangle considerably more complex than some today would allow.” –Erika Balsom, VIENNALE<br /><br />“A movie star who emerged in the mid-1930s, Fonda starred as Abe Lincoln, Tom Joad, Wyatt Earp, and the honest naval officer Mister Roberts. He played a ‘forgotten man’ in the original ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ film, YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (1937). He was the protagonist of THE WRONG MAN (1956) and THE BEST MAN (1964), and of 12 ANGRY MEN (1957), which he also produced. He fought for democracy in the Spanish Civil War on-screen and in World War II in actuality. He personified New Deal democracy, Cold War liberalism, and – thanks to his rebellious children – the 1960s generation gap. Was he also, as more than one person puts it in Alexander Horwath’s erudite, entertaining three-hour meta-biopic, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT, the ‘quintessential American’? Embraced by cinephiles at festivals from Berlin to Buenos Aires and beyond, HFFP more than makes the case for Fonda’s centrality in the American imaginary – what Norman Mailer called the nation’s dream life. […] A masterpiece of applied cinephilia, HFFP is a melancholy reminder that the mass Hollywood-driven illusions that produced Fonda and Reagan et al. are no more. The spell has been broken. Not that we’re awake: We live the Total Cinema Bardo created by talk radio, cable news, reality TV, iPhones, and social media.” –J. Hoberman, ARTFORUM<br /><br /><em><strong>Alexander Horwath will be here in person for Q&As following the 7:15 screening on Friday, April 4 (moderated by Kent Jones) and the 3:30 screening on Saturday, April 5!</strong></em><br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Monday, April 07 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59163 <p>In what may be the best depiction of harming, berating, and “fucking with” men ever to be depicted onscreen, A NEW LOVE IN TOKYO subverts the audience’s expectations by centering the protagonist’s commitment to her local theater troupe amidst her chaotic night job as a dominatrix. Featuring photography and photo direction by acclaimed kink and taboo visual artist Nobuyoshi Araki (who also receives a story credit), A NEW LOVE IN TOKYO, like WORKING GIRLS, outlines the day-to-day procedural dynamics of the industry, an approach that amplifies both the drama and the humor of these scenarios. Though laced with plenty of sex, the film is anchored by the blossoming friendship between two working girls (an escort and dominatrix), which unfolds over karaoke, theater, drinks, and joyrides.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Lena Chen CHINESE TOUCH (2023, 3 min, digital)<br />CHINESE TOUCH renders the classic “money shot” image disturbing by taking images of Asian porn actresses’ faces before a “facial” and intersplicing them with footage of the cooking entrepreneur Joyce Chen – seen here as a model of Asian feminine respectability – all set to an audio loop of “Me So Horny”.<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 125 min.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Monday, April 07 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59124 <p>U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON!<br />Distributed by The Film Desk.<br /><br />The feature film debut by Austrian film scholar, historian, and curator Alexander Horwath – the former Director of the Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum – HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT represents, as its title suggests, a filmic portrait of the actor Henry Fonda, but it is anything but a conventional Hollywood portrait. While it is structured chronologically according to the progression of Fonda’s life and career, the film transcends individual portraiture by using Fonda as a prism through which it explores and meditates upon the changing (and intimately intertwined) politics, society, and culture of the United States in Fonda’s time. Equally adept at cultural criticism, historical accounting, and political analysis, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT also incorporates elements of found-footage filmmaking and landscape cinema, as it combines a wide array of revelatory archival material (including film and television clips, Fonda’s final 1981 interview, news reports, and more) with Horwath’s own footage of sites throughout the U.S. Extending the tradition of seminal reflections on America by commentators from abroad, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT achieves the near-impossible, articulating a genuinely new and profoundly insightful take on 1900s-80s American culture, and on the legacy of this era both on the wider world and on the present day.<br /><br />“An actor and a country, Henry Fonda and the United States, as seen through the prism of cinema by a passionate observer from another place and time. In this personal and expansive essay film, Alexander Horwath shows that a politique des acteurs can yield much more than mere star worship. HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT may be his directorial debut but he is no novice when it comes to cinema. With the sensitivity and intelligence for which his work as a curator and writer is renowned, Horwath roams across an imagined realm he calls ‘The United States of Fonda,’ finding within it dreams and devastations that begin with the era of European settlement and continue to echo into the present. […] Through it all, he also makes an argument about the power of classical Hollywood cinema – as a mass art of personality, a distorted window through which one encounters the world and an ideological tangle considerably more complex than some today would allow.” –Erika Balsom, VIENNALE<br /><br />“A movie star who emerged in the mid-1930s, Fonda starred as Abe Lincoln, Tom Joad, Wyatt Earp, and the honest naval officer Mister Roberts. He played a ‘forgotten man’ in the original ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ film, YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (1937). He was the protagonist of THE WRONG MAN (1956) and THE BEST MAN (1964), and of 12 ANGRY MEN (1957), which he also produced. He fought for democracy in the Spanish Civil War on-screen and in World War II in actuality. He personified New Deal democracy, Cold War liberalism, and – thanks to his rebellious children – the 1960s generation gap. Was he also, as more than one person puts it in Alexander Horwath’s erudite, entertaining three-hour meta-biopic, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT, the ‘quintessential American’? Embraced by cinephiles at festivals from Berlin to Buenos Aires and beyond, HFFP more than makes the case for Fonda’s centrality in the American imaginary – what Norman Mailer called the nation’s dream life. […] A masterpiece of applied cinephilia, HFFP is a melancholy reminder that the mass Hollywood-driven illusions that produced Fonda and Reagan et al. are no more. The spell has been broken. Not that we’re awake: We live the Total Cinema Bardo created by talk radio, cable news, reality TV, iPhones, and social media.” –J. Hoberman, ARTFORUM<br /><br /><em><strong>Alexander Horwath will be here in person for Q&As following the 7:15 screening on Friday, April 4 (moderated by Kent Jones) and the 3:30 screening on Saturday, April 5!</strong></em><br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Tuesday, April 08 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59171 <p>HOUSE OF TOLERANCE is a terrifyingly beautiful ode to the red-light district of Paris during the Belle Époque era. Rather than navigating the 21st-century socio-cultural and economic realities of sex workers, Bonello turns his gaze back in time to find the ambition, struggles, and desires of women who are both the center of society and yet distinctively cut off from it. Though the production and costume design are impeccably lush, Bonello does not glamorize nor chastise the industry. Instead, he examines the communal kinship and struggles of these working women amidst a socio-cultural landscape that limits their artistic input and renders it almost impossible to evade marriage or manual wage labor to make a living. HOUSE OF TOLERANCE is unique in the film archive of sex work thanks to Bonello’s disinterest in the clients themselves. In this suspended reality he positions the workers above the clients – it’s their lives, dreams, fears, and pleasures we experience.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Tuesday, April 08 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59164 <p>In what may be the best depiction of harming, berating, and “fucking with” men ever to be depicted onscreen, A NEW LOVE IN TOKYO subverts the audience’s expectations by centering the protagonist’s commitment to her local theater troupe amidst her chaotic night job as a dominatrix. Featuring photography and photo direction by acclaimed kink and taboo visual artist Nobuyoshi Araki (who also receives a story credit), A NEW LOVE IN TOKYO, like WORKING GIRLS, outlines the day-to-day procedural dynamics of the industry, an approach that amplifies both the drama and the humor of these scenarios. Though laced with plenty of sex, the film is anchored by the blossoming friendship between two working girls (an escort and dominatrix), which unfolds over karaoke, theater, drinks, and joyrides.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Lena Chen CHINESE TOUCH (2023, 3 min, digital)<br />CHINESE TOUCH renders the classic “money shot” image disturbing by taking images of Asian porn actresses’ faces before a “facial” and intersplicing them with footage of the cooking entrepreneur Joyce Chen – seen here as a model of Asian feminine respectability – all set to an audio loop of “Me So Horny”.<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 125 min.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Wednesday, April 09 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59125 <p>U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON!<br />Distributed by The Film Desk.<br /><br />The feature film debut by Austrian film scholar, historian, and curator Alexander Horwath – the former Director of the Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum – HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT represents, as its title suggests, a filmic portrait of the actor Henry Fonda, but it is anything but a conventional Hollywood portrait. While it is structured chronologically according to the progression of Fonda’s life and career, the film transcends individual portraiture by using Fonda as a prism through which it explores and meditates upon the changing (and intimately intertwined) politics, society, and culture of the United States in Fonda’s time. Equally adept at cultural criticism, historical accounting, and political analysis, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT also incorporates elements of found-footage filmmaking and landscape cinema, as it combines a wide array of revelatory archival material (including film and television clips, Fonda’s final 1981 interview, news reports, and more) with Horwath’s own footage of sites throughout the U.S. Extending the tradition of seminal reflections on America by commentators from abroad, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT achieves the near-impossible, articulating a genuinely new and profoundly insightful take on 1900s-80s American culture, and on the legacy of this era both on the wider world and on the present day.<br /><br />“An actor and a country, Henry Fonda and the United States, as seen through the prism of cinema by a passionate observer from another place and time. In this personal and expansive essay film, Alexander Horwath shows that a politique des acteurs can yield much more than mere star worship. HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT may be his directorial debut but he is no novice when it comes to cinema. With the sensitivity and intelligence for which his work as a curator and writer is renowned, Horwath roams across an imagined realm he calls ‘The United States of Fonda,’ finding within it dreams and devastations that begin with the era of European settlement and continue to echo into the present. […] Through it all, he also makes an argument about the power of classical Hollywood cinema – as a mass art of personality, a distorted window through which one encounters the world and an ideological tangle considerably more complex than some today would allow.” –Erika Balsom, VIENNALE<br /><br />“A movie star who emerged in the mid-1930s, Fonda starred as Abe Lincoln, Tom Joad, Wyatt Earp, and the honest naval officer Mister Roberts. He played a ‘forgotten man’ in the original ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ film, YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (1937). He was the protagonist of THE WRONG MAN (1956) and THE BEST MAN (1964), and of 12 ANGRY MEN (1957), which he also produced. He fought for democracy in the Spanish Civil War on-screen and in World War II in actuality. He personified New Deal democracy, Cold War liberalism, and – thanks to his rebellious children – the 1960s generation gap. Was he also, as more than one person puts it in Alexander Horwath’s erudite, entertaining three-hour meta-biopic, HENRY FONDA FOR PRESIDENT, the ‘quintessential American’? Embraced by cinephiles at festivals from Berlin to Buenos Aires and beyond, HFFP more than makes the case for Fonda’s centrality in the American imaginary – what Norman Mailer called the nation’s dream life. […] A masterpiece of applied cinephilia, HFFP is a melancholy reminder that the mass Hollywood-driven illusions that produced Fonda and Reagan et al. are no more. The spell has been broken. Not that we’re awake: We live the Total Cinema Bardo created by talk radio, cable news, reality TV, iPhones, and social media.” –J. Hoberman, ARTFORUM<br /><br /><em><strong>Alexander Horwath will be here in person for Q&As following the 7:15 screening on Friday, April 4 (moderated by Kent Jones) and the 3:30 screening on Saturday, April 5!</strong></em><br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Wednesday, April 09 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59193 <p class="p1">Often wrongly described as a documentary on the lives of working girls in an escort house, WORKING GIRLS is a narrative film that has set the standard for fictional movies on sex work. One of the first films to center the workers’ experience with clients, each other, themselves, their partners, and their head madams, WORKING GIRLS is superlative for how much it gets right about the labor politics of sex work. This is largely because the characters in the film are a dramatization of director Lizzie Borden and her film crew’s experiences in the industry. The film outlines the procedural elements of sexual labor in a parlor, including day-to-day tasks like answering the front door, making bodega runs, washing up in between clients, overtime, training new hires, dressing up, breakups, gossip, unfair managing madams who swear they are better than pimps but act no different, threatening to quit, and the cyclical nature of doing it all over again. If there were room for only one narrative film about the industry, WORKING GIRLS would have to be it.</p> <p><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il"><br />CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Wednesday, April 09 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59160 <p>An aspiring New York-based actress struggling with the misogynoir in the industry turns to phone sex in hopes of financing her move to Hollywood to make it big. Though Judy enters with the intention of raising the money and leaving, the fantasy roles that she creates for her clients become portals for her to unearth her desires and exercise her storytelling abilities. Through phone sex, Judy becomes her own director. With an incredibly ridiculous appearance by Madonna and a soundtrack composed of Prince’s B-sides, GIRL 6 is Spike Lee’s most elusive film. This is partly because it was the first of Lee’s films that he did not pen himself. The scriptwriter, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, drew inspiration for the film from her own brief experience as a phone sex operator. Though the film toes the line with the presumed morality of sex work, the agency and ambition of its lead character (Lee described it as an intentional “star role” for Theresa Randle) allows it to rise above its shortcomings. One of Lee’s most formally and narratively ambitious films, GIRL 6 demands a reappraisal from critics who lambasted it at the time for its ambiguous take on sex work.<br /><br />Preceded by:<br />Ayanna Dozier NIGHTWALKER 2022, 7 min, 16mm<br />NIGHTWALKER, an experimental short, examines how the surveillance eye overlaps with the gaze of a potential predator. The film is ambivalent as to whether the character is a sex worker, and is more interested in the act of surveillance “sight-based” discourse that names individuals through visual signifiers presented on the body of a woman of color.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Thursday, April 10 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59127 <p>U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! BEN RUSSELL IN PERSON!<br /><br />In January 2018, the construction of an airport in rural Notre-Dame-des-Landes was officially canceled, putting an end to years of resistance led by one of the most important activist communities in France. From 2022-23, filmmakers Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell immersed themselves in the ZAD (zone-to-defend) to create a portrait of collective life in the years after this unprecedented success. The resulting work documents the transformation of a local struggle into a new ecological protest movement – culminating with the Battle of Sainte-Soline in March 2023, where an act of collective direct action against water privatization was again met by the brutality of State violence.<br /><br />Following the principles of immersive filmmaking and in the footsteps of Frederick Wiseman, Chantal Akerman, and others, DIRECT ACTION is a unique and hypnotic portrayal of a community which is not circumscribed to its violent interactions with the State: thanks to their meticulous observation, the directors document a highly singular political movement where it is still possible to conceive a better tomorrow.<br /><br />“With a strong inheritance from the avant-gardist structural film movement of the 1960s and ’70s and a focus on radical opposition, DIRECT ACTION… insistently compels its viewer to consider the relationship between form and content, to reflect on directness and direction while delving into one of the most significant political struggles of contemporary Europe with disarming concreteness.” –Erika Balsom, FILM COMMENT<br /><br />“Shot on Super 16mm with structuralist and durational rigor, scenes of fields plowed by horses, bread making, and a children’s birthday party are shown alongside violent clashes with police. With curiosity and solidarity, the directors bring viewers into the ZAD, giving insight into the daily labor of France’s most successful protest movement and the inherent challenges of taking a stance against corporations and the state.” –Vivian Belik, TIFF<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Thursday, April 10 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59172 <p>HOUSE OF TOLERANCE is a terrifyingly beautiful ode to the red-light district of Paris during the Belle Époque era. Rather than navigating the 21st-century socio-cultural and economic realities of sex workers, Bonello turns his gaze back in time to find the ambition, struggles, and desires of women who are both the center of society and yet distinctively cut off from it. Though the production and costume design are impeccably lush, Bonello does not glamorize nor chastise the industry. Instead, he examines the communal kinship and struggles of these working women amidst a socio-cultural landscape that limits their artistic input and renders it almost impossible to evade marriage or manual wage labor to make a living. HOUSE OF TOLERANCE is unique in the film archive of sex work thanks to Bonello’s disinterest in the clients themselves. In this suspended reality he positions the workers above the clients – it’s their lives, dreams, fears, and pleasures we experience.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Thursday, April 10 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59128 <p>U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! BEN RUSSELL IN PERSON!<br /><br />In January 2018, the construction of an airport in rural Notre-Dame-des-Landes was officially canceled, putting an end to years of resistance led by one of the most important activist communities in France. From 2022-23, filmmakers Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell immersed themselves in the ZAD (zone-to-defend) to create a portrait of collective life in the years after this unprecedented success. The resulting work documents the transformation of a local struggle into a new ecological protest movement – culminating with the Battle of Sainte-Soline in March 2023, where an act of collective direct action against water privatization was again met by the brutality of State violence.<br /><br />Following the principles of immersive filmmaking and in the footsteps of Frederick Wiseman, Chantal Akerman, and others, DIRECT ACTION is a unique and hypnotic portrayal of a community which is not circumscribed to its violent interactions with the State: thanks to their meticulous observation, the directors document a highly singular political movement where it is still possible to conceive a better tomorrow.<br /><br />“With a strong inheritance from the avant-gardist structural film movement of the 1960s and ’70s and a focus on radical opposition, DIRECT ACTION… insistently compels its viewer to consider the relationship between form and content, to reflect on directness and direction while delving into one of the most significant political struggles of contemporary Europe with disarming concreteness.” –Erika Balsom, FILM COMMENT<br /><br />“Shot on Super 16mm with structuralist and durational rigor, scenes of fields plowed by horses, bread making, and a children’s birthday party are shown alongside violent clashes with police. With curiosity and solidarity, the directors bring viewers into the ZAD, giving insight into the daily labor of France’s most successful protest movement and the inherent challenges of taking a stance against corporations and the state.” –Vivian Belik, TIFF<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Friday, April 11 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59138 <p>“(Un)invited Collaborators” is a screening program that highlights the intricate relations between living and nonliving entities, emphasizing the fluid and transformative nature of these interactions. The selected videos demonstrate how these relationships are shaped by mutual influence and constant reconfiguration, challenging static notions of separation and autonomy.<br /><br />The artists offer new perspectives on the ways humans intervene, often uninvited, in the lives of other beings and objects, addressing our hybrid reality and blurring the boundaries between the natural and the unnatural. Each piece reflects on a different aspect of our shared reality, weaving together distinct communities – human and non-human animals, plants, lands, plastics, and commodities – that continually influence and transform one another. By questioning traditional notions of objectivity, the program suggests that agency is not an intrinsic property of an entity but arises from the dynamic interplay of forces between beings and things.<br /><br />The program is curated by New York-based artist Zorica Čolić and brings together nine contemporary artists from diverse cultural and geographical backgrounds.<br /><br />Rob Crosse OLD GROWTH 2021, 10 min, digital<br />OLD GROWTH observes the automated climate-controlled systems required to maintain a Camellia tree at Pillnitz Castle in Dresden. The tree was planted in its current location in 1801, and has been protected ever since, initially by intricate wooden and glass structures that were erected each winter, and dismantled each spring. In 1992 however, these structures were replaced with a permanent glass house, mounted on tracks that enable it to be moved towards and away from the tree whenever needed. According to legend, the tree is the last surviving specimen brought from Japan to Europe by Swedish botanist Karl Peter Thunberg following a trip to Japan in 1779. Rob Crosse approaches his film through and with the motion of the glass house that keeps this Camellia tree alive, addressing questions of belonging, care, strangeness, and perpetuity.<br /><br />Andrea Palašti FITNESS FOR UNLIKELY SPECIES, PENGUIN POOL EDITION 2023, 10.5 min, digital<br />This film is a fitness training and an illustrative lesson all rolled into one, centered on animals whose shapes, movements, and existence are shaped by life in a zoo enclosure. Captivity alters natural animal behavior, causing repetitive, unnatural actions known as zoochosis. Similarly, humans detached from nature can experience chronic stress, anxiety, and depression – a type of “zoochosis” of our own. As human physical fitness became an essential desire in the Anthropocene, not just to prevent diseases but also to resist climatic failure, it is crucial to find new ways of learning, understanding, connecting with, and moving within our “world in trouble.” For, as Desmond Morris in THE HUMAN ZOO (1969) says, the unnatural behavior of animals in zoos can help us understand, accept, and overcome the mechanisms that life in consumerist societies brings.<br /><br />Zorica Čolić THE THING THAT ENJOYS ITSELF 2023, 6.5 min, digital<br />In THE THING THAT ENJOYS ITSELF commodities come alive to speak about their implications on human enjoyment and sexual pleasure. The video is composed of short animated clips/ads of sex toys that resemble human, animal, or abstract forms, and are treated as animate, independent beings: vibrating, licking, tickling, rotating, penetrating, and squeezing other inanimate objects. These fevered, looped motions evoke modes of desiring and resisting, excitation and frustration. Invested with an agency that belongs to humans, these “living things” discuss the alienating aspects of our enjoyment, value production, and sexuality that became calculable.<br /><br />Monica Duncan & Senem Pirler TEARS FOR LOST FREQUENCIES 2024, 17 min, digital<br />This video explores our complex relationship with plastic: the artists propose a question of whether we carry microplastics in our most intimate moments of relating to the world. In this piece, the microplastics that were found in tears become companions to the experience of one’s hearing loss and a speculative space for plastic healing and sensory expansion. The video situates itself in queer ecologies and focuses on the entanglement between human and more-than-human entities, highlighting plastic as a matter that cannot be separated from the “natural”: a material that once was invented and is now a human artifact.<br /><br />Noor Abed PENELOPE 2014, 6.5 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent<br />Inspired by Homer’s Odyssey, the film looks at the role and relevance of mythology to the present and to the collective imaginary. Filmed in Palestine, the piece reimagines Penelope as a solitary female figure, weaving a quilt made of dead fish. The hero is absent, and the fish, typically trapped in a net underwater, now form the very fabric of the web, spread across a desolate, arid desert, evoking a poignant meditation on displacement and dispossession.<br /><br />titre provisoire (Cathleen Schuster and Marcel Dickhage) PROLOGUE TO A STORY TOLD FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE WATER BETWEEN US 2018, 13.5 min, digital<br />This work centers around an imagination of a social relation between animate and inanimate subjects and objects, their gestures and histories in different present times. The reason for their get-together is to work on a peace agreement, which in the course of the video manifests itself only temporarily in the form of a spatio-physical composition. Driven by the question of whether an agreement can include a conflict, the work is reflecting on both, the historical attempt of an identity formation as well as a demand for an emancipation from an (unspecified) power system.<br /><br />Oscar Cueto THE DAY WILL COME WHEN WE WILL CONTROL THE PACE OF PRODUCTION 2024, 1 min, digital<br />The implications of man’s dominance over nature and his confrontation with nature’s power is highlighted in Oscar Cueto’s short animation: in a Versailles-like garden, a pig (that stands for a man), reveling in his dominance over nature, gets overwhelmed by flood. Before drowning he utters: “The day will come when we will control the pace of production,” while a deer lands to contradict him.<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 70 min.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Friday, April 11 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59129 <p>U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! BEN RUSSELL IN PERSON!<br /><br />In January 2018, the construction of an airport in rural Notre-Dame-des-Landes was officially canceled, putting an end to years of resistance led by one of the most important activist communities in France. From 2022-23, filmmakers Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell immersed themselves in the ZAD (zone-to-defend) to create a portrait of collective life in the years after this unprecedented success. The resulting work documents the transformation of a local struggle into a new ecological protest movement – culminating with the Battle of Sainte-Soline in March 2023, where an act of collective direct action against water privatization was again met by the brutality of State violence.<br /><br />Following the principles of immersive filmmaking and in the footsteps of Frederick Wiseman, Chantal Akerman, and others, DIRECT ACTION is a unique and hypnotic portrayal of a community which is not circumscribed to its violent interactions with the State: thanks to their meticulous observation, the directors document a highly singular political movement where it is still possible to conceive a better tomorrow.<br /><br />“With a strong inheritance from the avant-gardist structural film movement of the 1960s and ’70s and a focus on radical opposition, DIRECT ACTION… insistently compels its viewer to consider the relationship between form and content, to reflect on directness and direction while delving into one of the most significant political struggles of contemporary Europe with disarming concreteness.” –Erika Balsom, FILM COMMENT<br /><br />“Shot on Super 16mm with structuralist and durational rigor, scenes of fields plowed by horses, bread making, and a children’s birthday party are shown alongside violent clashes with police. With curiosity and solidarity, the directors bring viewers into the ZAD, giving insight into the daily labor of France’s most successful protest movement and the inherent challenges of taking a stance against corporations and the state.” –Vivian Belik, TIFF<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Saturday, April 12 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59187 <p>Jack Smith<br />SCOTCH TAPE (1962, 3 min, 16mm)<br />A junkyard musical.<br /><br />Jack Smith<br />FLAMING CREATURES <br />1963, 45 min, 16mm, b&w<br />“[Smith] graced the anarchic liberation of new American cinema with graphic and rhythmic power worthy of the best of formal cinema. He has attained for the first time in motion pictures a high level of art which is absolutely lacking in decorum; and a treatment of sex which makes us aware of the restraint of all previous filmmakers.” –FILM CULTURE<br /><br />Ron Rice<br />CHUMLUM (1964, 23 min, 16mm-to-35mm. With Jack Smith, Beverly Grant, Mario Montez, Joel Markman, Frances Francine, Guy Henson, Barry Titus, Zelda Nelson, Gerard Malanga, Barbara Rubin, and Frances Stillman. Music by Angus MacLise. Restored by Anthology Film Archives and The Film Foundation with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.)<br />“A hallucinatory micro-epic filmed during lulls in the production of Smith’s NORMAL LOVE and one of the great ‘heroic doses’ of ’60s underground cinema, a movie so sumptuously and serenely psychedelic it appears to have been printed entirely on gauze.” –Chuck Stephens, CINEMA SCOPE<br /><br />Total running time: ca. 75 min.<a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong><br /><br />CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a></p> Saturday, April 12 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59130 <p>U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! BEN RUSSELL IN PERSON!<br /><br />In January 2018, the construction of an airport in rural Notre-Dame-des-Landes was officially canceled, putting an end to years of resistance led by one of the most important activist communities in France. From 2022-23, filmmakers Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell immersed themselves in the ZAD (zone-to-defend) to create a portrait of collective life in the years after this unprecedented success. The resulting work documents the transformation of a local struggle into a new ecological protest movement – culminating with the Battle of Sainte-Soline in March 2023, where an act of collective direct action against water privatization was again met by the brutality of State violence.<br /><br />Following the principles of immersive filmmaking and in the footsteps of Frederick Wiseman, Chantal Akerman, and others, DIRECT ACTION is a unique and hypnotic portrayal of a community which is not circumscribed to its violent interactions with the State: thanks to their meticulous observation, the directors document a highly singular political movement where it is still possible to conceive a better tomorrow.<br /><br />“With a strong inheritance from the avant-gardist structural film movement of the 1960s and ’70s and a focus on radical opposition, DIRECT ACTION… insistently compels its viewer to consider the relationship between form and content, to reflect on directness and direction while delving into one of the most significant political struggles of contemporary Europe with disarming concreteness.” –Erika Balsom, FILM COMMENT<br /><br />“Shot on Super 16mm with structuralist and durational rigor, scenes of fields plowed by horses, bread making, and a children’s birthday party are shown alongside violent clashes with police. With curiosity and solidarity, the directors bring viewers into the ZAD, giving insight into the daily labor of France’s most successful protest movement and the inherent challenges of taking a stance against corporations and the state.” –Vivian Belik, TIFF<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Saturday, April 12 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59186 <p>“With CARRIAGE TRADE, Sonbert began to challenge the theories espoused by the great Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s; he particularly disliked the ‘knee-jerk’ reaction produced by Eisensteinian montage. In both lectures and writings about his own style of editing, Sonbert described CARRIAGE TRADE as ‘a jig-saw puzzle of postcards to produce varied displaced effects.’ This approach, according to Sonbert, ultimately affords the viewer multi-faceted readings of the connections between shots through the spectator’s assimilation of ‘the changing relations of the movement of objects, the gestures of figures, familiar worldwide icons, rituals and reactions, rhythm, spacing, and density of images.” –Jon Gartenberg<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a></p> Saturday, April 12 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59131 <p>U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! BEN RUSSELL IN PERSON!<br /><br />In January 2018, the construction of an airport in rural Notre-Dame-des-Landes was officially canceled, putting an end to years of resistance led by one of the most important activist communities in France. From 2022-23, filmmakers Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell immersed themselves in the ZAD (zone-to-defend) to create a portrait of collective life in the years after this unprecedented success. The resulting work documents the transformation of a local struggle into a new ecological protest movement – culminating with the Battle of Sainte-Soline in March 2023, where an act of collective direct action against water privatization was again met by the brutality of State violence.<br /><br />Following the principles of immersive filmmaking and in the footsteps of Frederick Wiseman, Chantal Akerman, and others, DIRECT ACTION is a unique and hypnotic portrayal of a community which is not circumscribed to its violent interactions with the State: thanks to their meticulous observation, the directors document a highly singular political movement where it is still possible to conceive a better tomorrow.<br /><br />“With a strong inheritance from the avant-gardist structural film movement of the 1960s and ’70s and a focus on radical opposition, DIRECT ACTION… insistently compels its viewer to consider the relationship between form and content, to reflect on directness and direction while delving into one of the most significant political struggles of contemporary Europe with disarming concreteness.” –Erika Balsom, FILM COMMENT<br /><br />“Shot on Super 16mm with structuralist and durational rigor, scenes of fields plowed by horses, bread making, and a children’s birthday party are shown alongside violent clashes with police. With curiosity and solidarity, the directors bring viewers into the ZAD, giving insight into the daily labor of France’s most successful protest movement and the inherent challenges of taking a stance against corporations and the state.” –Vivian Belik, TIFF<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Sunday, April 13 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59185 <p>“<span id="docs-internal-guid-a5a28094-7fff-5c69-5a46-7b02213bf896"><span>WAVELENGTH</span></span> is without precedent in the purity of its confrontation with the essence of cinema: the relationships between illusion and fact, space and time, subject and object. It is the first post-Warhol, post-Minimal movie; one of the few films to engage those higher conceptual orders which occupy modern painting and sculpture. It has rightly been described as a ‘triumph of contemplative cinema’.” –Gene Youngblood, L.A. FREE PRESS<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Sunday, April 13 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59132 <p>U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! BEN RUSSELL IN PERSON!<br /><br />In January 2018, the construction of an airport in rural Notre-Dame-des-Landes was officially canceled, putting an end to years of resistance led by one of the most important activist communities in France. From 2022-23, filmmakers Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell immersed themselves in the ZAD (zone-to-defend) to create a portrait of collective life in the years after this unprecedented success. The resulting work documents the transformation of a local struggle into a new ecological protest movement – culminating with the Battle of Sainte-Soline in March 2023, where an act of collective direct action against water privatization was again met by the brutality of State violence.<br /><br />Following the principles of immersive filmmaking and in the footsteps of Frederick Wiseman, Chantal Akerman, and others, DIRECT ACTION is a unique and hypnotic portrayal of a community which is not circumscribed to its violent interactions with the State: thanks to their meticulous observation, the directors document a highly singular political movement where it is still possible to conceive a better tomorrow.<br /><br />“With a strong inheritance from the avant-gardist structural film movement of the 1960s and ’70s and a focus on radical opposition, DIRECT ACTION… insistently compels its viewer to consider the relationship between form and content, to reflect on directness and direction while delving into one of the most significant political struggles of contemporary Europe with disarming concreteness.” –Erika Balsom, FILM COMMENT<br /><br />“Shot on Super 16mm with structuralist and durational rigor, scenes of fields plowed by horses, bread making, and a children’s birthday party are shown alongside violent clashes with police. With curiosity and solidarity, the directors bring viewers into the ZAD, giving insight into the daily labor of France’s most successful protest movement and the inherent challenges of taking a stance against corporations and the state.” –Vivian Belik, TIFF<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Sunday, April 13 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59184 <p>Restored by Anthology Film Archives with funding provided by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and The Film Foundation. Special thanks to Dan DeVincent, Simon Lund, and Adam Wangerin (Cineric, Inc.).<br /><br />“This neat, finely tuned, hypersensitive film examines the outside and inside of a banal prefab classroom, stares at an asymmetrical space so undistinguished that it’s hard to believe the whole movie is confined to it, and has this neckjerking camera gimmick which hits a wooden stop arm at each end of its swing. Basically it’s a perpetual motion film which ingeniously builds a sculptural effect by insisting on time-motion to the point where the camera’s swinging arcs and white wall field assume the hardness, the dimensions of a concrete beam.<br />“In such a hard, drilling work, the wooden clap sounds are a terrific invention, and, as much as any single element, create the sculpture. Seeming to thrust the image outward off the screen, these clap effects are timed like a metronome, sometimes occurring with torrential frequency.” –Manny Farber, ARTFORUM, 1970<br /><br /><a href="https://ticketing.us.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr"><strong>CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!</strong></a> </p> Sunday, April 13 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59133 <p>U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! BEN RUSSELL IN PERSON!<br /><br />In January 2018, the construction of an airport in rural Notre-Dame-des-Landes was officially canceled, putting an end to years of resistance led by one of the most important activist communities in France. From 2022-23, filmmakers Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell immersed themselves in the ZAD (zone-to-defend) to create a portrait of collective life in the years after this unprecedented success. The resulting work documents the transformation of a local struggle into a new ecological protest movement – culminating with the Battle of Sainte-Soline in March 2023, where an act of collective direct action against water privatization was again met by the brutality of State violence.<br /><br />Following the principles of immersive filmmaking and in the footsteps of Frederick Wiseman, Chantal Akerman, and others, DIRECT ACTION is a unique and hypnotic portrayal of a community which is not circumscribed to its violent interactions with the State: thanks to their meticulous observation, the directors document a highly singular political movement where it is still possible to conceive a better tomorrow.<br /><br />“With a strong inheritance from the avant-gardist structural film movement of the 1960s and ’70s and a focus on radical opposition, DIRECT ACTION… insistently compels its viewer to consider the relationship between form and content, to reflect on directness and direction while delving into one of the most significant political struggles of contemporary Europe with disarming concreteness.” –Erika Balsom, FILM COMMENT<br /><br />“Shot on Super 16mm with structuralist and durational rigor, scenes of fields plowed by horses, bread making, and a children’s birthday party are shown alongside violent clashes with police. With curiosity and solidarity, the directors bring viewers into the ZAD, giving insight into the daily labor of France’s most successful protest movement and the inherent challenges of taking a stance against corporations and the state.” –Vivian Belik, TIFF<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Monday, April 14 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59134 <p>U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! BEN RUSSELL IN PERSON!<br /><br />In January 2018, the construction of an airport in rural Notre-Dame-des-Landes was officially canceled, putting an end to years of resistance led by one of the most important activist communities in France. From 2022-23, filmmakers Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell immersed themselves in the ZAD (zone-to-defend) to create a portrait of collective life in the years after this unprecedented success. The resulting work documents the transformation of a local struggle into a new ecological protest movement – culminating with the Battle of Sainte-Soline in March 2023, where an act of collective direct action against water privatization was again met by the brutality of State violence.<br /><br />Following the principles of immersive filmmaking and in the footsteps of Frederick Wiseman, Chantal Akerman, and others, DIRECT ACTION is a unique and hypnotic portrayal of a community which is not circumscribed to its violent interactions with the State: thanks to their meticulous observation, the directors document a highly singular political movement where it is still possible to conceive a better tomorrow.<br /><br />“With a strong inheritance from the avant-gardist structural film movement of the 1960s and ’70s and a focus on radical opposition, DIRECT ACTION… insistently compels its viewer to consider the relationship between form and content, to reflect on directness and direction while delving into one of the most significant political struggles of contemporary Europe with disarming concreteness.” –Erika Balsom, FILM COMMENT<br /><br />“Shot on Super 16mm with structuralist and durational rigor, scenes of fields plowed by horses, bread making, and a children’s birthday party are shown alongside violent clashes with police. With curiosity and solidarity, the directors bring viewers into the ZAD, giving insight into the daily labor of France’s most successful protest movement and the inherent challenges of taking a stance against corporations and the state.” –Vivian Belik, TIFF<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Tuesday, April 15 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59135 <p>U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! BEN RUSSELL IN PERSON!<br /><br />In January 2018, the construction of an airport in rural Notre-Dame-des-Landes was officially canceled, putting an end to years of resistance led by one of the most important activist communities in France. From 2022-23, filmmakers Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell immersed themselves in the ZAD (zone-to-defend) to create a portrait of collective life in the years after this unprecedented success. The resulting work documents the transformation of a local struggle into a new ecological protest movement – culminating with the Battle of Sainte-Soline in March 2023, where an act of collective direct action against water privatization was again met by the brutality of State violence.<br /><br />Following the principles of immersive filmmaking and in the footsteps of Frederick Wiseman, Chantal Akerman, and others, DIRECT ACTION is a unique and hypnotic portrayal of a community which is not circumscribed to its violent interactions with the State: thanks to their meticulous observation, the directors document a highly singular political movement where it is still possible to conceive a better tomorrow.<br /><br />“With a strong inheritance from the avant-gardist structural film movement of the 1960s and ’70s and a focus on radical opposition, DIRECT ACTION… insistently compels its viewer to consider the relationship between form and content, to reflect on directness and direction while delving into one of the most significant political struggles of contemporary Europe with disarming concreteness.” –Erika Balsom, FILM COMMENT<br /><br />“Shot on Super 16mm with structuralist and durational rigor, scenes of fields plowed by horses, bread making, and a children’s birthday party are shown alongside violent clashes with police. With curiosity and solidarity, the directors bring viewers into the ZAD, giving insight into the daily labor of France’s most successful protest movement and the inherent challenges of taking a stance against corporations and the state.” –Vivian Belik, TIFF<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Wednesday, April 16 https://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=04&year=2025#showing-59153 <p>How does incarceration affect an artist’s psyche? In a fascinating and novel approach, Lynn Hershman Leeson allows us to eavesdrop on a session between Tania Bruguera – one of the world’s most celebrated and daring Cuban artists (and herself the recipient of an AWAW award in 2016) – and Dr. Frank Ochberg, a New York-based psychiatrist and pioneer in post-traumatic stress disorder and the Stockholm syndrome. Bruguera visited Dr. Ochberg after spending eight months in prison, accused of treason after announcing her intention to provide an uncensored platform for citizens in Havana to freely express their views in public for one minute. During the session, Bruguera eloquently reflects on the emotional ramifications of her constant struggles with authorities, the psychological and physical effects of her interrogations, and a family dynamic that mirrors the subversive surveillance culture that many Cubans encounter in their daily life.<br /><br /><strong><a href="https://ticketing.uswest.veezi.com/sessions/?siteToken=bsrxtagjxmgh2qy0b6p646xdcr" target="_blank"><span class="il">CLICK</span> <span class="il">HERE</span> TO <span class="il">BUY</span> TICKETS NOW!</a></strong></p> Wednesday, April 16