Anthology Film Archives

One of the most important documents of the AIDS epidemic, THE AIDS SHOW was filmed in 1986 during the very early stages of the crisis. The AIDS (Artists Involved with Death and Survival) SHOW deals with the impact of the epidemic on the community most affected by the disease: gay men. This unique work, one of the first films to deal with the subject of AIDS, was based on San Francisco’s long-running Theatre Rhinoceros stage production of the same name. It speaks to anyone who has ever thought about AIDS or any terminal disease. Excerpts from the play have been combined with interviews with the show’s creators and performers, along with a personal narration by the filmmakers – Peter Adair & Rob Epstein (WORD IS OUT, THE TIMES OF HARVEY MILK, COMMON THREADS, THE CELLULOID CLOSET) – to produce a powerful hybrid of documentary and drama.

“A complex production, often deeply moving, sometimes very funny, that gets away from the sanitizing ‘objectivity’ of a news report or panel discussion.” –NEW YORK TIMES

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FREE SCREENING!
Visual AIDS presents “Being & Belonging”, a program of seven short videos from artists living with HIV across the world. From navigating sex and intimacy to confronting stigma and isolation, “Being & Belonging” centers the emotional realities of living with HIV today. How does living with HIV shift the ways that a person experiences, asks for, or provides love, support, and belonging? The seven videos are a call for belonging from those that have been stigmatized within their communities or left out of mainstream HIV/AIDS narratives.

For more info about Visual AIDS, visit: visualaids.org

Santiago Lemus & Camilo Acosta Huntertexas
LOS AMARILLOS
Colombia, 2022, 10 min, digital
In Colombia, many people living with HIV experience jaundice – the yellowing of the eyes and skin – as a side effect of the low-cost antiretroviral drugs supplied by the government. LOS AMARILLOS addresses the alienation and hypervisibility faced as a result of this side effect.

Camila Arce
VERTICAL MEMORY ARCHIVE / MEMORIA VERTICAL
Argentina, 2022, 5 min, digital
Camila Arce presents a poem about the experience of being born with HIV and growing up as part of the first generation with access to antiretroviral medication in South America.

Davina “Dee” Conner & Karin Hayes
HERE WE ARE: VOICES OF BLACK WOMEN WHO LIVE WITH HIV
U.S., 2022, 7 min, digital
Davina “Dee” Conner was diagnosed with HIV in 1997. For 18 years she knew no one else who lived with HIV. As she emerged from isolation and internalized stigma, Davina sought to understand the journeys of other Black women living with HIV. Here they are. Listen to their voices.

Jaewon Kim
NUANCE
South Korea, 2022, 6 min, digital
Through an unfolding collection of images, NUANCE reflects the thoughts and feelings exchanged between the artist, who is living with HIV, and his HIV-negative partner.

Mikiki
RED FLAGS, A LOVE LETTER
Canada, 2022, 10 min, digital
Through a cacophony of limbs, members, and sounds drawn from the party and play scene, Mikiki speaks with other drug users about the possibilities of representing the pleasure of substance use beyond the framework of harm.

Jhoel Zempoalteca & La Jerry
LXS DXS BICHUDAS
Mexico, 2022, 11 min, digital
LXS DXS BICHUDAS offers a poetic dance dialogue in Zapotec and Spanish that explores the ways in which race, gender, and geography shapes the lives and bodies of people living with HIV in Mexico, a country marked by the ideological project of mestizaje.

Clifford Prince King
KISS OF LIFE
U.S., 2022, 7 min, digital
In KISS OF LIFE, several Black people describe their experiences living with HIV. Raw conversations surrounding disclosure, rejection, and self love are expressed through visual poetry and dreamscapes.

Total running time: ca. 60 min.

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES DIGITAL RESTORATION!

REPORT was digitized through a partnership between Anthology Film Archives and Lightbox Film Center at University of the Arts, with funding from Ron and Suzanne Naples. Special thanks to Jean-Bernard Bucky, Robert Peyton, Max Bienstock, and Jesse Pires.

“Shot during the 1968/69 school year at University of California Berkeley, REPORT was created as part of Norman Jacobson’s experimental political science course ‘Toward an Expression of the Idea of Freedom’. The film, which features cinematography by avant-garde filmmaker Ed Emshwiller, merges fiction and documentary as it portrays the widening generation gap within the university, and in society at large. At the center of the film is an uncertain teacher and the students who challenge him. The filmmakers sought to not only capture this scenario but the real-life experiences and opinions of the students in the class. Combining scripted elements, on-the-street interviews, behind-the-scenes conversations, and cinema verité footage of the demonstrations and police crackdown connected to the Third World Liberation Front campus protests, REPORT is a complex portrait of American higher education at a particularly tumultuous time in history. As issues surrounding free speech on college campuses continue to dominate our public discourse, REPORT is a fascinating time capsule from the epicenter of student activism.” –LIGHTBOX FILM CENTER

Preceded by:

Ed Emshwiller WOE OH HO NO 1972, 13 min, 16mm-to-DCP
Collaboratively produced at Wantagh High School in Nassau County, New York, Ed Emshwiller’s WOE OH HO NO ventures into the unconscious mind of the average student.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW!

An analysis of the social upheaval of May 1968, made in the immediate wake of the workers’ and students’ protests, the film consists of two parts, each with identical image tracks and differing narration.

“The first film in Godard’s ‘radical’ period finds the director rejecting established notions of narrative and authorship to present a dialectic response to the events of May ’68. […] While Godard would refine his radical approach significantly in his later films under the Dziga Vertov Group banner, A FILM LIKE ANY OTHER is a fascinating milestone in the illustrious filmmaker’s career, representing the revolutionary juncture from which Godard would not turn back.” –BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

“The unique contribution of Land’s work lies in the fusion of intellectual reason and, significantly, the humor that distances it from the supposedly ‘boring’ world of avant-garde film. Having explored the basic properties of the celluloid strip itself in early works such as FILM IN WHICH THERE APPEAR…, his attention turned to the spectator in a series of ‘literal’ films that question the illusionary nature of cinema through the use of word play and visual ambiguity. His work often parodies experimental film itself by mimicking his contemporaries and mocking the solemn approach of film theorists and scholars.” –Mark Webber, TWO FILMS BY OWEN LAND

FLEMING FALOON (1963, 6 min, 16mm)
FILM IN WHICH THERE APPEAR EDGE LETTERING, SPROCKET HOLES, DIRT PARTICLES, ETC. (1965-66, 5 min, 16mm, silent)
DIPLOTERATOLOGY (1967/78, 7 min, 16mm, silent)
THE FILM THAT RISES TO THE SURFACE OF CLARIFIED BUTTER (1968, 9 min, 16mm)
INSTITUTIONAL QUALITY (1969, 5 min, 16mm)
REMEDIAL READING COMPREHENSION (1970, 5 min, 16mm)
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? (1972, 13 min, 16mm)
THANK YOU JESUS FOR THE ETERNAL PRESENT (1973, 6 min, 16mm)
A FILM OF THEIR 1973 SPRING TOUR COMMISSIONED BY CHRISTIAN WORLD LIBERATION FRONT OF BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA (1974, 11.5 min, 16mm)

FILM IN WHICH…, INSTITUTIONAL QUALITY, and FILM OF THEIR 1973 SPRING TOUR… have been preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW!

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES DIGITAL RESTORATION!

REPORT was digitized through a partnership between Anthology Film Archives and Lightbox Film Center at University of the Arts, with funding from Ron and Suzanne Naples. Special thanks to Jean-Bernard Bucky, Robert Peyton, Max Bienstock, and Jesse Pires.

“Shot during the 1968/69 school year at University of California Berkeley, REPORT was created as part of Norman Jacobson’s experimental political science course ‘Toward an Expression of the Idea of Freedom’. The film, which features cinematography by avant-garde filmmaker Ed Emshwiller, merges fiction and documentary as it portrays the widening generation gap within the university, and in society at large. At the center of the film is an uncertain teacher and the students who challenge him. The filmmakers sought to not only capture this scenario but the real-life experiences and opinions of the students in the class. Combining scripted elements, on-the-street interviews, behind-the-scenes conversations, and cinema verité footage of the demonstrations and police crackdown connected to the Third World Liberation Front campus protests, REPORT is a complex portrait of American higher education at a particularly tumultuous time in history. As issues surrounding free speech on college campuses continue to dominate our public discourse, REPORT is a fascinating time capsule from the epicenter of student activism.” –LIGHTBOX FILM CENTER

Preceded by:

Ed Emshwiller WOE OH HO NO 1972, 13 min, 16mm-to-DCP
Collaboratively produced at Wantagh High School in Nassau County, New York, Ed Emshwiller’s WOE OH HO NO ventures into the unconscious mind of the average student.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW!

“Godard’s startling, uncompromising attempt at a revolutionary cinema marked a new stage in the aesthetic evolution of modern cinema’s most radical experimenter. Believing that the narrative film – even when modified as in his own BREATHLESS or MASCULINE-FEMININE – was outdated and bourgeois, Godard loosened a propagandistic audio-visual barrage on the senses that combines Maoism, the Beatles, multiple sound tracks, minimal cinema à la Warhol, nudity (accompanied by a women’s liberation statement), and excerpts from Nixon, Pompidou, and the Communist Manifesto, all ending with a blood-spattered hand painfully reaching for a red flag.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

A loosely conceived “leftist western” that moves through a series of practical and analytical passages (“an organization of shots,” Godard called it) into a finale based around the process of manufacturing homemade weapons.

“The consensus favorite among the Dziga Vertov films has historically been WIND FROM THE EAST. It is certainly the most well-constructed of the bunch, and what’s more it possesses the outward trappings of a Western. Granted, it satisfies that genre about as well as, say, Andy Warhol’s VINYL serves as a legitimate adaptation of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, which is to say, barely. Visually, WIND FROM THE EAST is charming, not unlike an amateur rendition of WEEKEND as imagined by Ken Jacobs during his LITTLE STABS AT HAPPINESS phase. […] The catalog of revolutionary and anti-revolutionary moments in cinematic history, once matched with Godard’s later, more elliptical style, can certainly be read as a rough draft for HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA.” –Michael Sicinski, MUBI NOTEBOOK

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

“Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy are the movies’ greatest comic duo, the quintessential dumb and dumber odd couple. Though critically overshadowed by Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, they were enormously popular, and proved a major influence on Abbott & Costello, Lucille Ball & Vivian Vance, and Jackie Gleason & Art Carney, not to mention Samuel Beckett (they were an inspiration for WAITING FOR GODOT), Roman Polanski (who paid homage to them in his existentialist short films FAT AND LEAN and TWO MEN AND A WARDROBE), and Ken Jacobs (whose ONTIC ANTICS deconstructs one of their films).” –David Mulkins

Special thanks to David Mulkins.

Lewis R. Foster MEN O’WAR 1929, 20 min, 16mm. Written by Leo McCarey & H.M. Walker.
James Parrott A PERFECT DAY 1929, 19 min, 16mm. Written by Leo McCarey, Hal Roach, and H.M. Walker.
James Parrott HELPMATES 1931, 20 min, 16mm. Written by H.M. Walker.

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW!

Not necessarily a film about the struggles in Italy, this work was in fact largely shot in Godard and Anne Wiazemsky’s home at the time. It is a discursive reflection on a young Italian woman’s shift from political “theory” to political “practice” and, at the same time, a self-questioning of its own practice and theories.

“The Dziga Vertov Group films are not purely rhetorical. They are also formal, with rhythms and patterns unlike anything else in the Godardian oeuvre. Take STRUGGLE IN ITALY, for example. The film is devised as its own double, the narration spoken in Italian and overdubbed in French. […] But more significantly, STRUGGLE is a film of visual repetitions. A bowl of soup, a woman trying on a sweater, a math lesson, and other inserts alternate with the lessons in dialectics, as if the film is trying to teach you how to watch it as well as provide a lecture of historical materialism. STRUGGLE IN ITALY may be Godard’s most [Hollis] Framptonian film.” –Michael Sicinski, MUBI NOTEBOOK

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES DIGITAL RESTORATION!

REPORT was digitized through a partnership between Anthology Film Archives and Lightbox Film Center at University of the Arts, with funding from Ron and Suzanne Naples. Special thanks to Jean-Bernard Bucky, Robert Peyton, Max Bienstock, and Jesse Pires.

“Shot during the 1968/69 school year at University of California Berkeley, REPORT was created as part of Norman Jacobson’s experimental political science course ‘Toward an Expression of the Idea of Freedom’. The film, which features cinematography by avant-garde filmmaker Ed Emshwiller, merges fiction and documentary as it portrays the widening generation gap within the university, and in society at large. At the center of the film is an uncertain teacher and the students who challenge him. The filmmakers sought to not only capture this scenario but the real-life experiences and opinions of the students in the class. Combining scripted elements, on-the-street interviews, behind-the-scenes conversations, and cinema verité footage of the demonstrations and police crackdown connected to the Third World Liberation Front campus protests, REPORT is a complex portrait of American higher education at a particularly tumultuous time in history. As issues surrounding free speech on college campuses continue to dominate our public discourse, REPORT is a fascinating time capsule from the epicenter of student activism.” –LIGHTBOX FILM CENTER

Preceded by:

Ed Emshwiller WOE OH HO NO 1972, 13 min, 16mm-to-DCP
Collaboratively produced at Wantagh High School in Nassau County, New York, Ed Emshwiller’s WOE OH HO NO ventures into the unconscious mind of the average student.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW!

“In 1970, Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin continued their run of politically-inspired work – nominally Maoist but locked in conflict between doctrine and image – with a Brechtian farce of the trial of the Chicago Seven. What emerges is a probing psychological analysis of the modern radical as well as an incipient effort to speak in a new voice in another court: Godard and Gorin themselves, raising a racket on a tennis court with the help – or, rather, the decisive hindrance – of a low-tech feedback loop. It resounds with the tangled discourse of a troubled time and suggests an incipient desire to play the game again, if by a new set of rules.” –Richard Brody, NEW YORKER

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

An analysis of the social upheaval of May 1968, made in the immediate wake of the workers’ and students’ protests, the film consists of two parts, each with identical image tracks and differing narration.

“The first film in Godard’s ‘radical’ period finds the director rejecting established notions of narrative and authorship to present a dialectic response to the events of May ’68. […] While Godard would refine his radical approach significantly in his later films under the Dziga Vertov Group banner, A FILM LIKE ANY OTHER is a fascinating milestone in the illustrious filmmaker’s career, representing the revolutionary juncture from which Godard would not turn back.” –BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES DIGITAL RESTORATION!

REPORT was digitized through a partnership between Anthology Film Archives and Lightbox Film Center at University of the Arts, with funding from Ron and Suzanne Naples. Special thanks to Jean-Bernard Bucky, Robert Peyton, Max Bienstock, and Jesse Pires.

“Shot during the 1968/69 school year at University of California Berkeley, REPORT was created as part of Norman Jacobson’s experimental political science course ‘Toward an Expression of the Idea of Freedom’. The film, which features cinematography by avant-garde filmmaker Ed Emshwiller, merges fiction and documentary as it portrays the widening generation gap within the university, and in society at large. At the center of the film is an uncertain teacher and the students who challenge him. The filmmakers sought to not only capture this scenario but the real-life experiences and opinions of the students in the class. Combining scripted elements, on-the-street interviews, behind-the-scenes conversations, and cinema verité footage of the demonstrations and police crackdown connected to the Third World Liberation Front campus protests, REPORT is a complex portrait of American higher education at a particularly tumultuous time in history. As issues surrounding free speech on college campuses continue to dominate our public discourse, REPORT is a fascinating time capsule from the epicenter of student activism.” –LIGHTBOX FILM CENTER

Preceded by:

Ed Emshwiller WOE OH HO NO 1972, 13 min, 16mm-to-DCP
Collaboratively produced at Wantagh High School in Nassau County, New York, Ed Emshwiller’s WOE OH HO NO ventures into the unconscious mind of the average student.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW!

“Godard’s startling, uncompromising attempt at a revolutionary cinema marked a new stage in the aesthetic evolution of modern cinema’s most radical experimenter. Believing that the narrative film – even when modified as in his own BREATHLESS or MASCULINE-FEMININE – was outdated and bourgeois, Godard loosened a propagandistic audio-visual barrage on the senses that combines Maoism, the Beatles, multiple sound tracks, minimal cinema à la Warhol, nudity (accompanied by a women’s liberation statement), and excerpts from Nixon, Pompidou, and the Communist Manifesto, all ending with a blood-spattered hand painfully reaching for a red flag.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

“The few facts that are known about Maclaine are, at best, sketchy. He was a published poet, a sort of down and out San Francisco bohemian who later became one of the psychic casualties of that scene. His last years were spent at Sunnyacres, a state mental hospital in Fairfield, California. These films, along with Ron Rice’s, are clearly the most significant work to come out of the beat period.” –J.J. Murphy

All films preserved by Anthology Film Archives.

THE MAN WHO INVENTED GOLD (1957, 14 min, 16mm)
BEAT (1958, 6 min, 16mm)
SCOTCH HOP (1959, 5.5 min, 16mm)
THE END (1953, 35 min, 16mm)
Total running time: ca. 65 min.

[THE MAN WHO INVENTED GOLD, BEAT, and SCOTCH HOP are not part of the Essential Cinema collection, but they are included here as a special bonus.]

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

A loosely conceived “leftist western” that moves through a series of practical and analytical passages (“an organization of shots,” Godard called it) into a finale based around the process of manufacturing homemade weapons.

“The consensus favorite among the Dziga Vertov films has historically been WIND FROM THE EAST. It is certainly the most well-constructed of the bunch, and what’s more it possesses the outward trappings of a Western. Granted, it satisfies that genre about as well as, say, Andy Warhol’s VINYL serves as a legitimate adaptation of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, which is to say, barely. Visually, WIND FROM THE EAST is charming, not unlike an amateur rendition of WEEKEND as imagined by Ken Jacobs during his LITTLE STABS AT HAPPINESS phase. […] The catalog of revolutionary and anti-revolutionary moments in cinematic history, once matched with Godard’s later, more elliptical style, can certainly be read as a rough draft for HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA.” –Michael Sicinski, MUBI NOTEBOOK

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy
BALLET MÉCANIQUE (1924, 19 min, 35mm, silent. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
“The two fundamental works of the graphic cinema from the 1920s made without animation were Fernand Léger’s BALLET MÉCANIQUE and Marcel Duchamp’s ANEMIC CINEMA. By extending a metaphor from several of his paintings into film, Léger compared a universe of human actions and everyday objects to the functions of a machine.” –P. Adams Sitney, VISIONARY FILM

René Clair & Francis Picabia
ENTR’ACTE (1924, 22 min, 35mm)
One of the indisputable masterpieces of Dada cinema, ENTR’ACTE was created, as its title suggests, to function as a diversion in between the two acts of Francis Picabia and Erik Satie’s avant-garde ballet RELÂCHE.

Man Ray
LE RETOUR À LA RAISON (1923, 2 min, 16mm, silent)
ÉTOILE DE MER (1927, 13 min, 16mm, silent)
EMAK BAKIA (1927, 18 min, 35mm, silent)
“All the films I have made have been improvisations. I did not write scenarios. It was automatic cinema. I worked alone. My intention was to set in motion the compositions I made in photography. As for the camera, I use it to capture something I do not want to paint. But I am not interested in producing ‘beautiful photography’ for the cinema.” –Man Ray, “All the Films I Have Made” (1965)

Marcel Duchamp & Man Ray
ANEMIC CINEMA (1926, 7 min, 35mm, silent)
“Duchamp alternates head-on views of his illusion-producing roto-reliefs with similarly turned discs of words, elaborate French puns printed spirally, creating a fluctuation of illusory depth within a very narrow spectrum (from the slightly convex or slightly concave illusions) to the flat readings. In this, his only film, Duchamp typically crystallized the significance of the graphic film.” –P. Adams Sitney, VISIONARY FILM

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

Not necessarily a film about the struggles in Italy, this work was in fact largely shot in Godard and Anne Wiazemsky’s home at the time. It is a discursive reflection on a young Italian woman’s shift from political “theory” to political “practice” and, at the same time, a self-questioning of its own practice and theories.

“The Dziga Vertov Group films are not purely rhetorical. They are also formal, with rhythms and patterns unlike anything else in the Godardian oeuvre. Take STRUGGLE IN ITALY, for example. The film is devised as its own double, the narration spoken in Italian and overdubbed in French. […] But more significantly, STRUGGLE is a film of visual repetitions. A bowl of soup, a woman trying on a sweater, a math lesson, and other inserts alternate with the lessons in dialectics, as if the film is trying to teach you how to watch it as well as provide a lecture of historical materialism. STRUGGLE IN ITALY may be Godard’s most [Hollis] Framptonian film.” –Michael Sicinski, MUBI NOTEBOOK

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

“Since 1950 I have been keeping a film diary. I have been walking around with my Bolex and reacting to the immediate reality: situations, friends, New York, seasons of the year. On some days I shot ten frames, on others ten seconds, still on others ten minutes. Or I shot nothing. When one writes diaries, it’s a retrospective process: you sit down, you look back at your day, and you write it all down. To keep a film (camera) diary, is to react (with your camera) immediately, now, this instant: either you get it now, or you don’t get it at all.” –Jonas Mekas

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

“In 1970, Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin continued their run of politically-inspired work – nominally Maoist but locked in conflict between doctrine and image – with a Brechtian farce of the trial of the Chicago Seven. What emerges is a probing psychological analysis of the modern radical as well as an incipient effort to speak in a new voice in another court: Godard and Gorin themselves, raising a racket on a tennis court with the help – or, rather, the decisive hindrance – of a low-tech feedback loop. It resounds with the tangled discourse of a troubled time and suggests an incipient desire to play the game again, if by a new set of rules.” –Richard Brody, NEW YORKER

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from The Film Foundation. Special thanks to Cineric, Inc., and Trackwise.

“The film consists of four parts. The first part contains some footage from my first years in America, 1949-52. The second part was shot in August 1971 in Lithuania. The third part is in Elmshorn, near Hamburg, where I spent eight months in a forced labor camp. The fourth part is in Vienna (1971) with Peter Kubelka, [Hermann] Nitsch, Annette Michelson, Ken Jacobs, etc. The film deals with home, memory, and culture.” –Jonas Mekas

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

An analysis of the social upheaval of May 1968, made in the immediate wake of the workers’ and students’ protests, the film consists of two parts, each with identical image tracks and differing narration.

“The first film in Godard’s ‘radical’ period finds the director rejecting established notions of narrative and authorship to present a dialectic response to the events of May ’68. […] While Godard would refine his radical approach significantly in his later films under the Dziga Vertov Group banner, A FILM LIKE ANY OTHER is a fascinating milestone in the illustrious filmmaker’s career, representing the revolutionary juncture from which Godard would not turn back.” –BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

Working with and against the documentary tradition, and incorporating innovative stylistic techniques to emphasize issues of truth, misunderstanding, and personal history, Jenny Perlin’s work looks closely at the ways in which social machinations are reflected in the smallest fragments of daily life. Her new feature film, BUNKER, investigates the lonely lives of American men who have decided to live in decommissioned military bunkers and nuclear missile silos.

More and more American men are deciding to live alone in decommissioned military bunkers and nuclear missile silos, even as an upscale industry begins to cater to “preppers,” people who fear the imminent breakdown of society and the destruction of the United States. In BUNKER, Perlin journeys by herself into the middle of America to meet such men, and the builders and salesmen who cater to them. The film follows a uniquely American path, moving from undisclosed location to undisclosed location, from the headquarters of a bunker construction firm to the homes of men who have cut themselves off from society, and ultimately to a newly constructed isolated retreat and an upscale nuclear missile silo where developers claim they can recreate New York City life hundreds of feet underground. Investigating toxic American myths, including self-reliance, masculinity, home safety and security, and family life in a time of climate crisis, economic upheaval, and political strife, BUNKER reveals the pathological inner workings of an American phenomenon on the rise.

“Rigorous and refreshingly unvarnished…BUNKER patiently observes several American men as they take up residence in decommissioned missile silos and elaborate underground condos in anticipation of impending nuclear fallout. With a sense of melancholy permeating its spectacle, the documentary exposes the revival of Cold War anxieties and doomsday fetishism among ostensibly ordinary grandfathers and uncles. […] By interviewing subjects with a wartime journalist’s emotional distance and crafting still-life portraiture of their windowless lives, Perlin reveals the loneliness and dark humor of what some of her subjects consider the end times.” –Tomasin Fonseca, FILM COMMENT

Jenny Perlin will be here in person for Q&As on Fri, Dec 9 at 6:45 and Tues, Dec 13 at 6:45.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

“Let’s Just Do It Ourselves” comes from the turn of phrase made popular by the ingenuity of Linda Goode Bryant and Just Above Midtown, a former NYC gallery that empowered Black artists, and is currently being revitalized in a MOMA retrospective.

These words have long been a reaction for Black (women) artists when their work became embattled by the dominant narrative. Although timing is everything, Black women artists from years gone by aren’t done yet. Their art has come full circle and finally reached an audience feverish for its catalyzing insights. Actor and director Sandye Wilson began her career in the late 1980s at the center of New York’s Black Bohemian Renaissance, which gave rise to Spike Lee and others. Wilson’s short films, SO MANY THINGS TO CONSIDER (1996) and NOT SO PRIVATE (2004) poetically lay bare pleasure and desire in Black women’s lives. With little to no distribution, Wilson transitioned out of the arts and into a lesser creative field. We will screen Wilson’s works alongside Fronza Woods’s recently restored KILLING TIME (1979), to contextualize the creative lockout both women experienced in pursuit of longevity in filmmaking.

Sandye Wilson will be here in person for a Q&A following the screening!

This program is guest-programmed by Melissa Lyde (Alfreda’s Cinema) and co-presented by Alfreda’s Cinema and The African Film Festival; for more info about both organizations visit: www.instagram.com/alfredascinema/ and https://africanfilmny.org/

Sandye Wilson
SO MANY THINGS TO CONSIDER
1996, 10 min, 16mm
Sandye Wilson draws on the urban innocence of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, expressed in poetic cinema vérité, while an inner monologue constructs the makings of a “good man.” Romantic recollections and arousal conjure a compelling lover from the filmmaker’s childhood fantasy.

Sandye Wilson
NOT SO PRIVATE
2004, 31 min, digital
Candid testimonies from varying New York City women, including artist Carrie Mae Weems and Wilson, recount their earliest engagements with arousal, erotic pleasure, and feelings of objectivity in a society where Black girls are sexualized at an early age.

Fronza Woods
KILLING TIME
1979, 15 min, 16mm-to-DCP
An offbeat, wryly humorous look at the dilemma of a would-be suicide unable to find the right outfit to die in, KILLING TIME examines the personal habits, socialization, and complexities of life that keep us going.

Total running time: ca. 60 min.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW!

Working with and against the documentary tradition, and incorporating innovative stylistic techniques to emphasize issues of truth, misunderstanding, and personal history, Jenny Perlin’s work looks closely at the ways in which social machinations are reflected in the smallest fragments of daily life. Her new feature film, BUNKER, investigates the lonely lives of American men who have decided to live in decommissioned military bunkers and nuclear missile silos.

More and more American men are deciding to live alone in decommissioned military bunkers and nuclear missile silos, even as an upscale industry begins to cater to “preppers,” people who fear the imminent breakdown of society and the destruction of the United States. In BUNKER, Perlin journeys by herself into the middle of America to meet such men, and the builders and salesmen who cater to them. The film follows a uniquely American path, moving from undisclosed location to undisclosed location, from the headquarters of a bunker construction firm to the homes of men who have cut themselves off from society, and ultimately to a newly constructed isolated retreat and an upscale nuclear missile silo where developers claim they can recreate New York City life hundreds of feet underground. Investigating toxic American myths, including self-reliance, masculinity, home safety and security, and family life in a time of climate crisis, economic upheaval, and political strife, BUNKER reveals the pathological inner workings of an American phenomenon on the rise.

“Rigorous and refreshingly unvarnished…BUNKER patiently observes several American men as they take up residence in decommissioned missile silos and elaborate underground condos in anticipation of impending nuclear fallout. With a sense of melancholy permeating its spectacle, the documentary exposes the revival of Cold War anxieties and doomsday fetishism among ostensibly ordinary grandfathers and uncles. […] By interviewing subjects with a wartime journalist’s emotional distance and crafting still-life portraiture of their windowless lives, Perlin reveals the loneliness and dark humor of what some of her subjects consider the end times.” –Tomasin Fonseca, FILM COMMENT

Jenny Perlin will be here in person for Q&As on Fri, Dec 9 at 6:45 and Tues, Dec 13 at 6:45.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

“One of the major works of Jean-Luc Godard, the eight-part essay film HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA has revealed itself slowly over a period of more than 30 years, as a sort of intellectual striptease. The project had its origins in a series of lectures that Godard delivered in Montreal in 1978, and which were published in 1980 as ‘Introduction to a True History of the Cinema.’ The book gave birth to a project for French television, originally to consist of 10 episodes; in 1987, Mr. Godard presented the first two installments, ‘Toutes les Histories’ (‘All the Stories’) and ‘Une Histoire Seule’ (‘A Single History’), at Cannes, and several more years passed before more episodes appeared…. 

Because of its long gestation, HISTOIRE(S) has already produced a considerable library of academic exegesis, and it is bound to produce even more. Composed of unidentified film clips, snatches of dialogue, glimpses of painting, passages of classical music, quotations of works of literature and art criticism, all orchestrated into thematic clusters and provocative contradictions, HISTOIRE(S) is by nature an open-ended, unstable work that even its author would be unable (and certainly unwilling) to explain. […] There are those who will always find Godard frustrating – or flatly denounce him as a fraud – because his work resists strict and systematic analysis. But as he has grown older, he has claimed the privilege, as David Byrne put it in a memorable lyric, to ‘stop making sense.’ What he has made instead is a sort of associational machine, as dense and obscure as any of the Symbolist poetry that also serves as one of Mr. Godard’s reference points, but one that also solicits the viewer’s participation in connecting the dots and filling in the blanks.” –Dave Kehr, NEW YORK TIMES

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

Working with and against the documentary tradition, and incorporating innovative stylistic techniques to emphasize issues of truth, misunderstanding, and personal history, Jenny Perlin’s work looks closely at the ways in which social machinations are reflected in the smallest fragments of daily life. Her new feature film, BUNKER, investigates the lonely lives of American men who have decided to live in decommissioned military bunkers and nuclear missile silos.

More and more American men are deciding to live alone in decommissioned military bunkers and nuclear missile silos, even as an upscale industry begins to cater to “preppers,” people who fear the imminent breakdown of society and the destruction of the United States. In BUNKER, Perlin journeys by herself into the middle of America to meet such men, and the builders and salesmen who cater to them. The film follows a uniquely American path, moving from undisclosed location to undisclosed location, from the headquarters of a bunker construction firm to the homes of men who have cut themselves off from society, and ultimately to a newly constructed isolated retreat and an upscale nuclear missile silo where developers claim they can recreate New York City life hundreds of feet underground. Investigating toxic American myths, including self-reliance, masculinity, home safety and security, and family life in a time of climate crisis, economic upheaval, and political strife, BUNKER reveals the pathological inner workings of an American phenomenon on the rise.

“Rigorous and refreshingly unvarnished…BUNKER patiently observes several American men as they take up residence in decommissioned missile silos and elaborate underground condos in anticipation of impending nuclear fallout. With a sense of melancholy permeating its spectacle, the documentary exposes the revival of Cold War anxieties and doomsday fetishism among ostensibly ordinary grandfathers and uncles. […] By interviewing subjects with a wartime journalist’s emotional distance and crafting still-life portraiture of their windowless lives, Perlin reveals the loneliness and dark humor of what some of her subjects consider the end times.” –Tomasin Fonseca, FILM COMMENT

Jenny Perlin will be here in person for Q&As on Fri, Dec 9 at 6:45 and Tues, Dec 13 at 6:45.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

“One of the major works of Jean-Luc Godard, the eight-part essay film HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA has revealed itself slowly over a period of more than 30 years, as a sort of intellectual striptease. The project had its origins in a series of lectures that Godard delivered in Montreal in 1978, and which were published in 1980 as ‘Introduction to a True History of the Cinema.’ The book gave birth to a project for French television, originally to consist of 10 episodes; in 1987, Mr. Godard presented the first two installments, ‘Toutes les Histories’ (‘All the Stories’) and ‘Une Histoire Seule’ (‘A Single History’), at Cannes, and several more years passed before more episodes appeared…. 

Because of its long gestation, HISTOIRE(S) has already produced a considerable library of academic exegesis, and it is bound to produce even more. Composed of unidentified film clips, snatches of dialogue, glimpses of painting, passages of classical music, quotations of works of literature and art criticism, all orchestrated into thematic clusters and provocative contradictions, HISTOIRE(S) is by nature an open-ended, unstable work that even its author would be unable (and certainly unwilling) to explain. […] There are those who will always find Godard frustrating – or flatly denounce him as a fraud – because his work resists strict and systematic analysis. But as he has grown older, he has claimed the privilege, as David Byrne put it in a memorable lyric, to ‘stop making sense.’ What he has made instead is a sort of associational machine, as dense and obscure as any of the Symbolist poetry that also serves as one of Mr. Godard’s reference points, but one that also solicits the viewer’s participation in connecting the dots and filling in the blanks.” –Dave Kehr, NEW YORK TIMES

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

A loosely conceived “leftist western” that moves through a series of practical and analytical passages (“an organization of shots,” Godard called it) into a finale based around the process of manufacturing homemade weapons.

“The consensus favorite among the Dziga Vertov films has historically been WIND FROM THE EAST. It is certainly the most well-constructed of the bunch, and what’s more it possesses the outward trappings of a Western. Granted, it satisfies that genre about as well as, say, Andy Warhol’s VINYL serves as a legitimate adaptation of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, which is to say, barely. Visually, WIND FROM THE EAST is charming, not unlike an amateur rendition of WEEKEND as imagined by Ken Jacobs during his LITTLE STABS AT HAPPINESS phase. […] The catalog of revolutionary and anti-revolutionary moments in cinematic history, once matched with Godard’s later, more elliptical style, can certainly be read as a rough draft for HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA.” –Michael Sicinski, MUBI NOTEBOOK

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

Working with and against the documentary tradition, and incorporating innovative stylistic techniques to emphasize issues of truth, misunderstanding, and personal history, Jenny Perlin’s work looks closely at the ways in which social machinations are reflected in the smallest fragments of daily life. Her new feature film, BUNKER, investigates the lonely lives of American men who have decided to live in decommissioned military bunkers and nuclear missile silos.

More and more American men are deciding to live alone in decommissioned military bunkers and nuclear missile silos, even as an upscale industry begins to cater to “preppers,” people who fear the imminent breakdown of society and the destruction of the United States. In BUNKER, Perlin journeys by herself into the middle of America to meet such men, and the builders and salesmen who cater to them. The film follows a uniquely American path, moving from undisclosed location to undisclosed location, from the headquarters of a bunker construction firm to the homes of men who have cut themselves off from society, and ultimately to a newly constructed isolated retreat and an upscale nuclear missile silo where developers claim they can recreate New York City life hundreds of feet underground. Investigating toxic American myths, including self-reliance, masculinity, home safety and security, and family life in a time of climate crisis, economic upheaval, and political strife, BUNKER reveals the pathological inner workings of an American phenomenon on the rise.

“Rigorous and refreshingly unvarnished…BUNKER patiently observes several American men as they take up residence in decommissioned missile silos and elaborate underground condos in anticipation of impending nuclear fallout. With a sense of melancholy permeating its spectacle, the documentary exposes the revival of Cold War anxieties and doomsday fetishism among ostensibly ordinary grandfathers and uncles. […] By interviewing subjects with a wartime journalist’s emotional distance and crafting still-life portraiture of their windowless lives, Perlin reveals the loneliness and dark humor of what some of her subjects consider the end times.” –Tomasin Fonseca, FILM COMMENT

Jenny Perlin will be here in person for Q&As on Fri, Dec 9 at 6:45 and Tues, Dec 13 at 6:45.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

“Godard’s startling, uncompromising attempt at a revolutionary cinema marked a new stage in the aesthetic evolution of modern cinema’s most radical experimenter. Believing that the narrative film – even when modified as in his own BREATHLESS or MASCULINE-FEMININE – was outdated and bourgeois, Godard loosened a propagandistic audio-visual barrage on the senses that combines Maoism, the Beatles, multiple sound tracks, minimal cinema à la Warhol, nudity (accompanied by a women’s liberation statement), and excerpts from Nixon, Pompidou, and the Communist Manifesto, all ending with a blood-spattered hand painfully reaching for a red flag.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

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“In 1970, Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin continued their run of politically-inspired work – nominally Maoist but locked in conflict between doctrine and image – with a Brechtian farce of the trial of the Chicago Seven. What emerges is a probing psychological analysis of the modern radical as well as an incipient effort to speak in a new voice in another court: Godard and Gorin themselves, raising a racket on a tennis court with the help – or, rather, the decisive hindrance – of a low-tech feedback loop. It resounds with the tangled discourse of a troubled time and suggests an incipient desire to play the game again, if by a new set of rules.” –Richard Brody, NEW YORKER

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

Working with and against the documentary tradition, and incorporating innovative stylistic techniques to emphasize issues of truth, misunderstanding, and personal history, Jenny Perlin’s work looks closely at the ways in which social machinations are reflected in the smallest fragments of daily life. Her new feature film, BUNKER, investigates the lonely lives of American men who have decided to live in decommissioned military bunkers and nuclear missile silos.

More and more American men are deciding to live alone in decommissioned military bunkers and nuclear missile silos, even as an upscale industry begins to cater to “preppers,” people who fear the imminent breakdown of society and the destruction of the United States. In BUNKER, Perlin journeys by herself into the middle of America to meet such men, and the builders and salesmen who cater to them. The film follows a uniquely American path, moving from undisclosed location to undisclosed location, from the headquarters of a bunker construction firm to the homes of men who have cut themselves off from society, and ultimately to a newly constructed isolated retreat and an upscale nuclear missile silo where developers claim they can recreate New York City life hundreds of feet underground. Investigating toxic American myths, including self-reliance, masculinity, home safety and security, and family life in a time of climate crisis, economic upheaval, and political strife, BUNKER reveals the pathological inner workings of an American phenomenon on the rise.

“Rigorous and refreshingly unvarnished…BUNKER patiently observes several American men as they take up residence in decommissioned missile silos and elaborate underground condos in anticipation of impending nuclear fallout. With a sense of melancholy permeating its spectacle, the documentary exposes the revival of Cold War anxieties and doomsday fetishism among ostensibly ordinary grandfathers and uncles. […] By interviewing subjects with a wartime journalist’s emotional distance and crafting still-life portraiture of their windowless lives, Perlin reveals the loneliness and dark humor of what some of her subjects consider the end times.” –Tomasin Fonseca, FILM COMMENT

Jenny Perlin will be here in person for Q&As on Fri, Dec 9 at 6:45 and Tues, Dec 13 at 6:45.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

Not necessarily a film about the struggles in Italy, this work was in fact largely shot in Godard and Anne Wiazemsky’s home at the time. It is a discursive reflection on a young Italian woman’s shift from political “theory” to political “practice” and, at the same time, a self-questioning of its own practice and theories.

“The Dziga Vertov Group films are not purely rhetorical. They are also formal, with rhythms and patterns unlike anything else in the Godardian oeuvre. Take STRUGGLE IN ITALY, for example. The film is devised as its own double, the narration spoken in Italian and overdubbed in French. […] But more significantly, STRUGGLE is a film of visual repetitions. A bowl of soup, a woman trying on a sweater, a math lesson, and other inserts alternate with the lessons in dialectics, as if the film is trying to teach you how to watch it as well as provide a lecture of historical materialism. STRUGGLE IN ITALY may be Godard’s most [Hollis] Framptonian film.” –Michael Sicinski, MUBI NOTEBOOK

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(UMARETE WA MITA KEREDO…)

In referring to this film Ozu stated, “I started to make a film about grownups. While I had originally planned to make a fairly bright little story, it changed while I was working on it and came out very dark.” The story concerns a very average suburban office worker, with a wife and two very un-average sons, who is unable to stand up to his boss.

“Joyful…as true and as moving and as timely today as it was in 1932.” –Jonas Mekas

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

Working with and against the documentary tradition, and incorporating innovative stylistic techniques to emphasize issues of truth, misunderstanding, and personal history, Jenny Perlin’s work looks closely at the ways in which social machinations are reflected in the smallest fragments of daily life. Her new feature film, BUNKER, investigates the lonely lives of American men who have decided to live in decommissioned military bunkers and nuclear missile silos.

More and more American men are deciding to live alone in decommissioned military bunkers and nuclear missile silos, even as an upscale industry begins to cater to “preppers,” people who fear the imminent breakdown of society and the destruction of the United States. In BUNKER, Perlin journeys by herself into the middle of America to meet such men, and the builders and salesmen who cater to them. The film follows a uniquely American path, moving from undisclosed location to undisclosed location, from the headquarters of a bunker construction firm to the homes of men who have cut themselves off from society, and ultimately to a newly constructed isolated retreat and an upscale nuclear missile silo where developers claim they can recreate New York City life hundreds of feet underground. Investigating toxic American myths, including self-reliance, masculinity, home safety and security, and family life in a time of climate crisis, economic upheaval, and political strife, BUNKER reveals the pathological inner workings of an American phenomenon on the rise.

“Rigorous and refreshingly unvarnished…BUNKER patiently observes several American men as they take up residence in decommissioned missile silos and elaborate underground condos in anticipation of impending nuclear fallout. With a sense of melancholy permeating its spectacle, the documentary exposes the revival of Cold War anxieties and doomsday fetishism among ostensibly ordinary grandfathers and uncles. […] By interviewing subjects with a wartime journalist’s emotional distance and crafting still-life portraiture of their windowless lives, Perlin reveals the loneliness and dark humor of what some of her subjects consider the end times.” –Tomasin Fonseca, FILM COMMENT

Jenny Perlin will be here in person for Q&As on Fri, Dec 9 at 6:45 and Tues, Dec 13 at 6:45.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

Ozu’s hilarious Technicolor reworking of his silent I WAS BORN, BUT…, GOOD MORNING is the story of two young boys in suburban Tokyo who take a vow of silence after their parents refuse to buy them a television set. Shot from the perspective of the petulant brothers, GOOD MORNING is an enchantingly satirical portrait of family life that gives rise to gags about romance, gossip, and the consumerism of modern Japan.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

Working with and against the documentary tradition, and incorporating innovative stylistic techniques to emphasize issues of truth, misunderstanding, and personal history, Jenny Perlin’s work looks closely at the ways in which social machinations are reflected in the smallest fragments of daily life. Her new feature film, BUNKER, investigates the lonely lives of American men who have decided to live in decommissioned military bunkers and nuclear missile silos.

More and more American men are deciding to live alone in decommissioned military bunkers and nuclear missile silos, even as an upscale industry begins to cater to “preppers,” people who fear the imminent breakdown of society and the destruction of the United States. In BUNKER, Perlin journeys by herself into the middle of America to meet such men, and the builders and salesmen who cater to them. The film follows a uniquely American path, moving from undisclosed location to undisclosed location, from the headquarters of a bunker construction firm to the homes of men who have cut themselves off from society, and ultimately to a newly constructed isolated retreat and an upscale nuclear missile silo where developers claim they can recreate New York City life hundreds of feet underground. Investigating toxic American myths, including self-reliance, masculinity, home safety and security, and family life in a time of climate crisis, economic upheaval, and political strife, BUNKER reveals the pathological inner workings of an American phenomenon on the rise.

“Rigorous and refreshingly unvarnished…BUNKER patiently observes several American men as they take up residence in decommissioned missile silos and elaborate underground condos in anticipation of impending nuclear fallout. With a sense of melancholy permeating its spectacle, the documentary exposes the revival of Cold War anxieties and doomsday fetishism among ostensibly ordinary grandfathers and uncles. […] By interviewing subjects with a wartime journalist’s emotional distance and crafting still-life portraiture of their windowless lives, Perlin reveals the loneliness and dark humor of what some of her subjects consider the end times.” –Tomasin Fonseca, FILM COMMENT

Jenny Perlin will be here in person for Q&As on Fri, Dec 9 at 6:45 and Tues, Dec 13 at 6:45.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

In the 1950s and 60s, an underground network of transgender women and cross-dressing men found refuge at a modest house in the Catskills region of New York. Known as Casa Susanna, the house provided a safe place for them to express their true selves and live for a few days as they had always dreamed – dressed as women without fear of being incarcerated or institutionalized for their self-expression. Using a rich trove of color photos of Casa Susanna’s guests, archival footage, and personal remembrances, the film reconstructs the forgotten life of Susanna Valenti, the courageous woman who ran the house. From her enlistment in the army as a man to her marriage to Marie, an eccentric older Italian woman, Susanna led a life that, even today, many would find hard to imagine. Like Susanna, many who came to the Catskills house were married and fathers, working as airplane pilots, tugboat captains, film directors, and authors. They found each other and Casa Susanna through word-of-mouth and Transvestia, a magazine for and by the trans and cross-dressing community. In the film, two people whose lives were forever changed at Casa Susanna, Diane and Kate, travel back to the now-abandoned site and share their memories of a time when people like them, from all over the country, came to a place where they were free to dress and live as women from morning to night.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

The Hallmark Channel, the Lifetime network, and the star of TV’s “The Big Bang Theory” have all spent the past few years bringing anodyne gay Christmas stories to our screens. But Derek Jarman already made the greatest, gayest, queerest Christmas movie way back in 1990, and it’s time we made it into the holiday cinematic classic it deserves to be. Overflowing with rage at the British governmental homophobia that abandoned queer people with AIDS during the 1980s, Jarman’s Super-8 fever dream reimagines Biblical stories in astonishing ways. Jesus is a gay couple attacked by jackbooted fascists, the Devil is a leatherman, Mary Magdalene is a drag queen, and Tilda Swinton plays the Madonna. It all plays out in the actual garden of Jarman’s Prospect Cottage, which the filmmaker tended until his death from AIDS-related illness in 1994 and where he was canonized as a Saint by the drag queen-activist troupe the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. When most of the world is busy worshiping Saint Nick, let us instead pay tribute to Saint Derek of the Celluloid Knights of Dungeness and his brilliant masterpiece, which seems more relevant than ever in these very scary times.

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CARLOS MOTTA IN PERSON!

EXUBERANCE AS PROCESS, is a program of short films by visual artists. Primarily intended for gallery presentation, these works have been removed from their installation contexts and collated into a linear cinematic program. Disrupting the films from their formal intentions, this series creates conversations between the works in new ways. Augusto Cascales’s adaptation of CA Conrad’s text as a frantic and despairing performance to camera is juxtaposed with Carlos Motta’s breathtaking WHEN I LEAVE THIS WORLD, which, extracted from its narrative channel, becomes a meditation on transformation and sacrifice. This film features a hook suspension by Motta’s collaborator and trans species being, Tiamat Legion Medusa, and may be challenging for some viewers. TJ Cuthand’s 2-channel exploration of Witch-burning and folk magic within his family history invites a longer treatise from Vika Kirchenbauer as she excavates a form of self-reflexive art criticism through a series of personal photographic ephemera.

TJ Cuthand MEDICINE AND MAGIC 2021, 5 min, digital
Vika Kirchenbauer THE CAPACITY FOR ADEQUATE ANGER 2021, 15 min, digital
Carlos Motta & Tiamat Legion Medusa WHEN I LEAVE THIS WORLD 2022, 11 min, digital
Augusto Cascales THE OBITUARY SHOW 2022, 22 min, digital

Total running time: ca. 60 min.

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(CHICHI ARIKI)

“One of Ozu’s most perfect films. There is a naturalness and a consequent feeling of inevitability that is rare in cinema […] Critics have called the performance of Chishu Ryu in this film one of the best in the history of Japanese cinema, and they are right […] THERE WAS A FATHER has become one of the country’s most esteemed classics” –Donald Richie

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“The leader of a down-at-the-heels band of traveling players returns to a small mountain town and meets his grown son, who was unaware of his father’s existence. The son himself becomes involved with one of the actresses in the troupe. Ozu took the idea from a 1929 American film, THE BARKER, about a circus barker whose educated son falls for a performer in his father’s troupe, and completely transformed it with added vital characters, including the former mistress.” –PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

“Ozu turned this slightly melodramatic story into a picture of great atmosphere and intensity of character, one in which story, actors, and setting all combine to create a whole world, the first of those eight-reel universes in which everything takes on a consistency somewhat greater than life: in short, a work of art.” –Donald Richie

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In 1959, Ozu remade his 1934 silent classic A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS in color with the celebrated cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa (RASHOMON, UGETSU). Setting his later version in a seaside location, Ozu otherwise preserves the details of his elegantly simple plot wherein an aging actor returns to a small town with his troupe and reunites with his former lover and illegitimate son, a scenario that enrages his current mistress and results in heartbreak for all. A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS sees Ozu in the midst of developing his mode of expression; FLOATING WEEDS reveals his distinct style at its pinnacle. In each, the director captures the joy and sadness in everyday life.

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All films in this program are b&w and silent.

THE CONJUROR / L’ILLUSIONISTE FIN DE SIÈCLE (1899, 1 min, 35mm)
TRIP TO THE MOON / VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE (1902, 12 min, 35mm)
THE PALACE OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS / LE PALAIS DES MILLE ET UNE NUITS (1905, 21 min, 35mm)
MERRY FROLICS OF SATAN / LES QUATRES CENT FARCES DU DIABLE (1906, 18 min, 35mm)
DELIRIUM IN A STUDIO / ALI BARBOUYOU ALI BOUF À L’HUILE (1907, 5 min, 35mm)

Magician, master of special effects, Méliès broke with the realistic (Lumière) mode of cinema and celebrated unlimited fantasy and artificiality (in its best sense).

“All early filmmakers were fascinated at first with the camera’s possibilities for tricks and illusionism. In fact, many were magicians before becoming filmmakers. But it was Georges Méliès, the French magician, producer of spectacles, actor, artist, and poet, who had the imagination and enthusiasm to fully exploit its marvels. His films are spectacles that amaze and delight. He created fantastic visions – all of them curious, some of them comic.” –MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Total running time: ca. 60 min.

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FILMMAKER IN PERSON!

As a young trans New Yorker, the filmmaker arrives in Southern California in pursuit of a coalition near the U.S.-Mexico border. In the filmmaker’s first mid-length film, he harnesses diary and performance material to probe the nature of solidarity, including his own relationship to time and fantasy, storytelling and change. What does it mean to wish for a different world, and what role does the search itself play?

Following the screening, Mendelsohn will appear for a conversation with filmmaker and curator Angelo Madsen Minax and filmmaker Sindhu Thirumalaisamy.

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A filmic reimagining of a live work by devynn emory that was scheduled to premiere at Danspace Project in NYC in Spring 2020. It is a grief space for their body as a hospice and COVID nurse and spirit medium, and is a balm to reimagine care. In all its various forms, “deadbird” serves as a container to process the intensity of nursing and honor the lives who have passed in their care. Conceived prior to the pandemic, the project took on even more significance and urgency in 2020, as a way of holding the grief and loneliness of being a healthcare worker during COVID-19.

“[The work] draws on every aspect of emory’s identity: nurse, ceremonial guide, dancer, bodyworker. Their transness, their indigenous ancestry, their relationship with their late grandmother – all of these elements are present throughout. emory does not have a neat brand. They insist, subtly, on being seen for all their parts. Maybe after a year of isolation, deprived of the luxury to compartmentalize ourselves, we are ready to hold emory’s complexities.” –Noa Weiss, THE BROOKLYN RAIL

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“Ozu’s 1949 film inaugurated his majestic late period: it’s here that he decisively renounces melodrama (and, indeed, most surface action of any kind) and lets his camera settle into the still, long-take contemplation of his gently drawn characters. Setsuko Hara, in the first of many performances for Ozu, plays a young woman who has renounced marriage to stay with her elderly father (Chishu Ryu). When the father belatedly realizes what she’s done, he must encourage her to leave without wounding her feelings. The sense of loss and regret is beautifully balanced with the optimism of a new life beginning: for Ozu the family unit is not only a network of personal relationships but also the crisis point in the tragedy of time.” –Dave Kehr, CHICAGO READER

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“Another of Ozu’s late-career color remakes, LATE AUTUMN revisits the situation of his 1949 masterpiece LATE SPRING with Setsuko Hara, the filial child of the earlier film, here playing the mother of a daughter who declines to leave the nest. The movie is broader in tone than the original, but the camera placement never falters.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

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The films on this program are hand-tinted and silent.

A DIABOLICAL TENANT / UN LOCATAIRE DIABOLIQUE (1909, 8 min, 35mm)
THE CASCADE OF FIRE / LA CASCADE DE FEU (1904, 3 min, 35mm)
VOYAGE ACROSS THE IMPOSSIBLE / LE VOYAGE À TRAVERS L’IMPOSSIBLE (1904, 20 min, 35mm)
THE HUNCHBACK FAIRY / LA FÉE CARABOSSE (1906, 13 min, 35mm)

Total running time: ca. 50 min.

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All films in this program are b&w and silent.

EXTRAORDINARY ILLUSIONS / ILLUSIONS FUNAMBULESQUES (1903, 3 min, 16mm)
THE ENCHANTED WELL / LE PUITS FANTASTIQUE (1903, 3 min, 16mm)
TUNNEL UNDER THE CHANNEL / LE TUNNEL SOUS LA MANCHE (1907, 25 min, 35mm)
THE APPARITION / LE REVENANT (1903, 3 min, 16mm)
THE DOCTOR’S SECRET / HYDROTHÉRAPIE FANTASTIQUE (1909, 11 min, 35mm)
SIGHTSEEING THROUGH WHISKY / PAUVRE JEAN OU LES MESAVENTURES D’UN BUVEUR (1909, 5 min, 35mm)

Total running time: ca. 55 min.

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In the 1950s and 60s, an underground network of transgender women and cross-dressing men found refuge at a modest house in the Catskills region of New York. Known as Casa Susanna, the house provided a safe place for them to express their true selves and live for a few days as they had always dreamed – dressed as women without fear of being incarcerated or institutionalized for their self-expression. Using a rich trove of color photos of Casa Susanna’s guests, archival footage, and personal remembrances, the film reconstructs the forgotten life of Susanna Valenti, the courageous woman who ran the house. From her enlistment in the army as a man to her marriage to Marie, an eccentric older Italian woman, Susanna led a life that, even today, many would find hard to imagine. Like Susanna, many who came to the Catskills house were married and fathers, working as airplane pilots, tugboat captains, film directors, and authors. They found each other and Casa Susanna through word-of-mouth and Transvestia, a magazine for and by the trans and cross-dressing community. In the film, two people whose lives were forever changed at Casa Susanna, Diane and Kate, travel back to the now-abandoned site and share their memories of a time when people like them, from all over the country, came to a place where they were free to dress and live as women from morning to night.

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(UMARETE WA MITA KEREDO…)

In referring to this film Ozu stated, “I started to make a film about grownups. While I had originally planned to make a fairly bright little story, it changed while I was working on it and came out very dark.” The story concerns a very average suburban office worker, with a wife and two very un-average sons, who is unable to stand up to his boss.

“Joyful…as true and as moving and as timely today as it was in 1932.” –Jonas Mekas

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All films preserved by Anthology Film Archives.

GLIMPSE OF THE GARDEN (1957, 5 min, 16mm)
ARABESQUE FOR KENNETH ANGER (1961, 4 min, 16mm)
EYE MUSIC IN RED MAJOR (1961, 4 min, 16mm, silent)
NOTEBOOK (1962-63, 10 min, 16mm, silent)
GO! GO! GO! (1962-64, 12 min, 16mm, silent)
ANDY WARHOL (1965, 17 min, 16mm)
LIGHTS (1964-66, 7 min, 16mm, silent)

“Marie Menken pioneered the radical transformation of the handheld, somatic camera into a formal matrix that would underpin an entire work in the films she made between 1945 and 1965. […] The extraordinary cinematic style that I have been calling Menken’s somatic camera has been her most influential gift to the American avant-garde cinema. It is an embodiment of the Emersonian invention of a pictorial air, the spiritual emancipation automatically brought about by ‘certain mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position.’ It is also analogous to the equally Emersonian somatic theory of poesis Charles Olson was developing at nearly the same time: his emphasis on breath and proprioception corresponds to Menken’s identification of the camera with her body in motion and her cultivation of the respiratory and nervous agitation of the handheld camera even in its quietest moments.” –P. Adams Sitney, EYES UPSIDE DOWN

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

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Script by Carl Meyer based on the story “A Trip to Tilsit” by Herman Sudermann. Photographed by Charles Rosher and Karl Strauss. With George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor.

Murnau’s first American film is an allegory set in no particular time or place, about a man who is temporarily overruled by his passions, inflamed by the power of evil as personified by the city woman, and who finally returns to his senses and the orderly family life of the country. It is a virtuoso exercise representing the expressiveness of the silent film as it neared its end.

“SUNRISE becomes the lyrical culmination of a strain of German Expressionism that, married to American technology, could almost serve as a definition of the cinema. For the studio apparatus, enabling the creation of a spiritually and spatially unified microcosm, corresponds to the way the mind, in Expressionism, experiences reality – organizing it, imbuing it with personal associations, patterns, significances, until finally the only reality is a mental reality.” –Molly Haskell

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“The leader of a down-at-the-heels band of traveling players returns to a small mountain town and meets his grown son, who was unaware of his father’s existence. The son himself becomes involved with one of the actresses in the troupe. Ozu took the idea from a 1929 American film, THE BARKER, about a circus barker whose educated son falls for a performer in his father’s troupe, and completely transformed it with added vital characters, including the former mistress.” –PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

“Ozu turned this slightly melodramatic story into a picture of great atmosphere and intensity of character, one in which story, actors, and setting all combine to create a whole world, the first of those eight-reel universes in which everything takes on a consistency somewhat greater than life: in short, a work of art.” –Donald Richie

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Ozu’s hilarious Technicolor reworking of his silent I WAS BORN, BUT…, GOOD MORNING is the story of two young boys in suburban Tokyo who take a vow of silence after their parents refuse to buy them a television set. Shot from the perspective of the petulant brothers, GOOD MORNING is an enchantingly satirical portrait of family life that gives rise to gags about romance, gossip, and the consumerism of modern Japan.

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Newly preserved print; thanks to the Academy Film Archive!

“The original Blondino was a 19th-century tightrope artist who among other feats crossed Niagara Falls trundling a wheelbarrow. In this film, Nelson sees Blondino as a metaphor for those who still try. Too subtle to be allegorical, the picture is in the shape of a quixotic search in which the goal is the journey and the means is the end.” –MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

“It is…difficult to get at the rich visual texture that is the film’s most striking attribute. Long stretches are concerned with Blondino’s visions, dreams, and dreams within dreams. The film unfolds in brief recurring patterns of imagery. Even the more straightforward sections are dense with interpolated newsreel and TV commercial footage, visual gags, and homemade special effects. The net effect is funny, seamless, and elusive.” –J. Hoberman, “A Filmmakers Filming Monograph”

&

BLEU SHUT
(1970, 33 min, 16mm. Newly preserved print; thanks to the Academy Film Archive!)
“Boat-name quizzes, dogs, cuts from Dreyer’s JOAN OF ARC in montage with a sultry whore, a car running up a ramp and crashing, pornography, a passionate embrace by a thirties hero and heroine; all somehow implicating Dreyer and Joan in the perverse synthesis of sex and technology. What’s happening here? Basically Nelson is leaving things unsaid.” –Leo Regan

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

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In 1959, Ozu remade his 1934 silent classic A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS in color with the celebrated cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa (RASHOMON, UGETSU). Setting his later version in a seaside location, Ozu otherwise preserves the details of his elegantly simple plot wherein an aging actor returns to a small town with his troupe and reunites with his former lover and illegitimate son, a scenario that enrages his current mistress and results in heartbreak for all. A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS sees Ozu in the midst of developing his mode of expression; FLOATING WEEDS reveals his distinct style at its pinnacle. In each, the director captures the joy and sadness in everyday life.

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Script by Carl Meyer based on the story “A Trip to Tilsit” by Herman Sudermann. Photographed by Charles Rosher and Karl Strauss. With George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor.

Murnau’s first American film is an allegory set in no particular time or place, about a man who is temporarily overruled by his passions, inflamed by the power of evil as personified by the city woman, and who finally returns to his senses and the orderly family life of the country. It is a virtuoso exercise representing the expressiveness of the silent film as it neared its end.

“SUNRISE becomes the lyrical culmination of a strain of German Expressionism that, married to American technology, could almost serve as a definition of the cinema. For the studio apparatus, enabling the creation of a spiritually and spatially unified microcosm, corresponds to the way the mind, in Expressionism, experiences reality – organizing it, imbuing it with personal associations, patterns, significances, until finally the only reality is a mental reality.” –Molly Haskell

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(CHICHI ARIKI)

“One of Ozu’s most perfect films. There is a naturalness and a consequent feeling of inevitability that is rare in cinema […] Critics have called the performance of Chishu Ryu in this film one of the best in the history of Japanese cinema, and they are right […] THERE WAS A FATHER has become one of the country’s most esteemed classics” –Donald Richie

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THE POTTED PSALM and THE PETRIFIED DOG have been preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. MR. FRENHOFFER AND THE MINOTAUR and THE LEAD SHOES have been preserved by Anthology with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.

THE POTTED PSALM (1946, 19 min, 16mm)
THE PETRIFIED DOG (1948, 19 min, 16mm)
MR. FRENHOFFER AND THE MINOTAUR (1949, 21 min, 16mm)
THE LEAD SHOES (1949, 17 min, 16mm)

“These images are meant to play not on our rational senses, but on the infinite universe of ambiguity within us.” –Sidney Peterson

“Sidney Peterson’s work and sensibility are those of a native American surrealist. Many of his films chronicle the picaresque adventures of a wacky protagonist and use disjunctive editing strategies to construct new time and space relations…. But perhaps their best-known feature is the use of distorted, funhouse mirror-images, which he created by shooting with an anamorphic lens. […] In his films, he investigates extreme states of consciousness, and the primary tool of his epistemology of irrationalism is the photographic image distorted and transformed to register the impact of those states.” –R. Bruce Elder, IMAGE AND IDENTITY

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

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“Ozu’s 1949 film inaugurated his majestic late period: it’s here that he decisively renounces melodrama (and, indeed, most surface action of any kind) and lets his camera settle into the still, long-take contemplation of his gently drawn characters. Setsuko Hara, in the first of many performances for Ozu, plays a young woman who has renounced marriage to stay with her elderly father (Chishu Ryu). When the father belatedly realizes what she’s done, he must encourage her to leave without wounding her feelings. The sense of loss and regret is beautifully balanced with the optimism of a new life beginning: for Ozu the family unit is not only a network of personal relationships but also the crisis point in the tragedy of time.” –Dave Kehr, CHICAGO READER

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“Another of Ozu’s late-career color remakes, LATE AUTUMN revisits the situation of his 1949 masterpiece LATE SPRING with Setsuko Hara, the filial child of the earlier film, here playing the mother of a daughter who declines to leave the nest. The movie is broader in tone than the original, but the camera placement never falters.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

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(MAT)

Based on the novel by Maxim Gorky.

With the simple theme of a working-class mother growing in political consciousness through participation in revolutionary activity, this film established Pudovkin as one of the major figures of the Soviet cinema. A student of Kuleshov and an admirer of Griffith’s films, he was writing his first book of film theory at the same time he was making MOTHER. His expert cutting on movement and his associated editing of unrelated scenes to form what he called a “plastic synthesis” are amply demonstrated here. Although in direct opposition to Eisenstein’s shock montage, Pudovkin used a linkage method advanced far beyond Kuleshov’s theories.

“In the final episode Pudovkin resorts to the now famous simile of the ice-floe breaking up against the bastions of the great bridge with a movement parallel to that of the procession of men and women marching with the Red Flag held high before them, until they are scattered and broken by the cavalry. The ice-floe intensifies the action by its strong forward movement far more than by its obvious symbolism. The purpose of Pudovkin’s technique is to sublimate the action of every part of his film, so that the commonplace is raised to the level of a kind of epic poem.” –Roger Manvell, THE FILM AND THE PUBLIC

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