Anthology Film Archives

BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND!

(JIAO MA TANG HUI)

Following a highly successful week-long theatrical engagement at Anthology in May, we’re delighted to bring back Qiu Jiongjiong’s A NEW OLD PLAY – one of the most extraordinary films to emerge from China in recent years – for a weekend of encore screenings!

The first fictional feature by contemporary artist and filmmaker Qiu Jiongjiong, A NEW OLD PLAY is a magnificent achievement – profoundly personal, highly stylized, and thrillingly ambitious in its historical sweep and filmic scale. It’s an evocation of a lost world, and of a vanishing theatrical form – 20th-century Sichuan opera – whose conventions it lovingly and meticulously recreates via hand-crafted, patently artificial sets, props, and backdrops. Inspired by the story of Qiu’s own grandfather, A NEW OLD PLAY depicts the life (and afterlife) of Qiu Fu, a leading actor of Sichuan opera, over the course of many decades and numerous social and political upheavals. Calling to mind Jia Zhangke’s PLATFORM, but adopting a radically different style and sensibility, A NEW OLD PLAY is a visual feast and a film of great humor and disarming emotional power.

“Older generations of performers have passed away, and life’s shocks and disruptions have hastened the decline of our Sichuan opera. A century on, I have tried to reconstruct the traditional grammar of the form, to simulate and revive its flavor and its melodies. The film is a slice of my own history and my family’s; but also a travelogue of minstrels wandering together through this world and the next. They are my immediate forebears, and this is my ‘pre-biography.’” –Qiu Jiongjiong

“The scope – inspired by Qiu’s own theatrical family – is impressive, starting with the troupes’ creation during the chaotic period of the 1920s before passing through war with Japan, the nationalists’ struggles, war with the ascendant communists, a trip to Taiwan, and a gradual dissolution of the players before Mao’s secured reign. For such an expansive tale, Qiu shows himself both cagey and inventive: the film, which frames its history as a reflection by its aged leader on the cusp of being given a drink of forgetfulness and pulled down to hell by demons, is presented in high artifice, with charmingly theatrical sets representing non-theatrical spaces, clearly lit on sound stages, and frequently shot frontally, like dioramas. […] Qiu has made a cleverly contained existential epic, an ode to the innate persistence of workers, artists, and people in the face of futility and poor fortune. It is a wonder the film carries it off with an empathetic sparkle – there must be some purpose to art, to life, after all.” –Daniel Kasman, MUBI

“I haven’t seen a more aesthetically (and historically) daring, brilliant independent feature from China in years.” –Shelly Kraicer

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“Scandal, evil, violence, and Fascism, like Hollywood, are centers of fascination for Anger, and his films are the fields in which the dialectic of that fascination is played and fought.” –P. Adams Sitney, VISIONARY FILM

“All of [Anger’s] films have been evocations or invocations, attempting to conjure primal forces which, once visually released, are designed to have the effect of ‘casting a spell’ on the audience. […] Not a surrealist who puts blind faith in his own dream images and trusts his dreams to convey an ‘uncommon unconscious,’ Anger works predominantly in archetypal symbol. As the magus, he is the juggler of these symbols, just as in the Tarot, where the Magician is represented by the Juggler and is given the attribution of Mercury, the messenger.” –Carel Rowe, FILM QUARTERLY

FIREWORKS (1947, 15 min, 16mm-to-35mm, b&w. Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, with funding from the Film Foundation.)
PUCE MOMENT (1949-70, 6 min, 16mm)
RABBIT’S MOON (1950-70, 15 min, 35mm. Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, with funding from the Film Foundation.)
EAUX D’ARTIFICE (1953, 13 min, 16mm)
Total running time: ca. 55 min. 

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BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND!

(JIAO MA TANG HUI)

Following a highly successful week-long theatrical engagement at Anthology in May, we’re delighted to bring back Qiu Jiongjiong’s A NEW OLD PLAY – one of the most extraordinary films to emerge from China in recent years – for a weekend of encore screenings!

The first fictional feature by contemporary artist and filmmaker Qiu Jiongjiong, A NEW OLD PLAY is a magnificent achievement – profoundly personal, highly stylized, and thrillingly ambitious in its historical sweep and filmic scale. It’s an evocation of a lost world, and of a vanishing theatrical form – 20th-century Sichuan opera – whose conventions it lovingly and meticulously recreates via hand-crafted, patently artificial sets, props, and backdrops. Inspired by the story of Qiu’s own grandfather, A NEW OLD PLAY depicts the life (and afterlife) of Qiu Fu, a leading actor of Sichuan opera, over the course of many decades and numerous social and political upheavals. Calling to mind Jia Zhangke’s PLATFORM, but adopting a radically different style and sensibility, A NEW OLD PLAY is a visual feast and a film of great humor and disarming emotional power.

“Older generations of performers have passed away, and life’s shocks and disruptions have hastened the decline of our Sichuan opera. A century on, I have tried to reconstruct the traditional grammar of the form, to simulate and revive its flavor and its melodies. The film is a slice of my own history and my family’s; but also a travelogue of minstrels wandering together through this world and the next. They are my immediate forebears, and this is my ‘pre-biography.’” –Qiu Jiongjiong

“The scope – inspired by Qiu’s own theatrical family – is impressive, starting with the troupes’ creation during the chaotic period of the 1920s before passing through war with Japan, the nationalists’ struggles, war with the ascendant communists, a trip to Taiwan, and a gradual dissolution of the players before Mao’s secured reign. For such an expansive tale, Qiu shows himself both cagey and inventive: the film, which frames its history as a reflection by its aged leader on the cusp of being given a drink of forgetfulness and pulled down to hell by demons, is presented in high artifice, with charmingly theatrical sets representing non-theatrical spaces, clearly lit on sound stages, and frequently shot frontally, like dioramas. […] Qiu has made a cleverly contained existential epic, an ode to the innate persistence of workers, artists, and people in the face of futility and poor fortune. It is a wonder the film carries it off with an empathetic sparkle – there must be some purpose to art, to life, after all.” –Daniel Kasman, MUBI

“I haven’t seen a more aesthetically (and historically) daring, brilliant independent feature from China in years.” –Shelly Kraicer

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

“Scandal, evil, violence, and Fascism, like Hollywood, are centers of fascination for Anger, and his films are the fields in which the dialectic of that fascination is played and fought.” –P. Adams Sitney, VISIONARY FILM

“All of [Anger’s] films have been evocations or invocations, attempting to conjure primal forces which, once visually released, are designed to have the effect of ‘casting a spell’ on the audience. […] Not a surrealist who puts blind faith in his own dream images and trusts his dreams to convey an ‘uncommon unconscious,’ Anger works predominantly in archetypal symbol. As the magus, he is the juggler of these symbols, just as in the Tarot, where the Magician is represented by the Juggler and is given the attribution of Mercury, the messenger.” –Carel Rowe, FILM QUARTERLY

SCORPIO RISING (1963, 30 min, 16mm)
KUSTOM KAR KOMMANDOS (1965, 3 min, 16mm)
INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME (1954-66, 38 min, 16mm)
INVOCATION OF MY DEMON BROTHER (1969, 12 min, 16mm)

“Anger’s myths address mass-erotic-consciousness through a barrage of notorious symbols. These often war with one another in Reichian power-trips of rape, will-power, fascism, and revolution. ‘I find ridiculous the idea of anyone being the leader,’ Anger has said. Pentagrams war with swastikas in INVOCATION OF MY DEMON BROTHER. Brando tortures Christ in SCORPIO, Shiva asserts absolute power over his guests in PLEASURE DOME. Historical heroes are reduced to pop-idols and history is demythified by comic book codes. ‘When earths collide, gods die.’” –Carel Rowe, FILM QUARTERLY

Total running time: ca. 90 min. 

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MASS FOR THE DAKOTA SIOUX (1963-64, 20 minutes, 16mm, b&w)
QUIXOTE (1964-65, 45 minutes, 16mm)
“In MASS and QUIXOTE [Baillie] subtly blends glimpses of the heroic personae with despairing reflections on violence and ecological disaster. […] Despite his sophistication, Baillie remains an innocent; the whole of his cinema exhibits an alternation between two irreconcilable themes: the sheer beauty of the phenomenal world (few films are as graceful to the eye as his, few are as sure of their colors) and the utter despair of forgotten men. It is in QUIXOTE alone that these two themes emerge into a dialectical form, an antithesis of grace and disgrace.” –P. Adams Sitney, VISIONARY FILM

Total running time: ca. 70 min. 

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Featuring the world premiere of films made locally with the support of MONO in June 2022.

This program will include films made through the educational initiatives of MONO NO AWARE, a cinema-arts nonprofit organization and film positive community working to promote connectivity through the cinematic experience. Established in 2007 and based in downtown Brooklyn, MONO NO AWARE presents monthly artist-in-person screenings, facilitates equipment rentals, operates a film distribution initiative, maintains wet & dry lab facilities, and hosts an annual exhibition for contemporary artists and international filmmakers whose work incorporates Super-8mm, 16mm, 35mm, or altered light projections as part of a live performance or installation.

For more info visit: www.mononoawarefilm.com

BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND!

(JIAO MA TANG HUI)

Following a highly successful week-long theatrical engagement at Anthology in May, we’re delighted to bring back Qiu Jiongjiong’s A NEW OLD PLAY – one of the most extraordinary films to emerge from China in recent years – for a weekend of encore screenings!

The first fictional feature by contemporary artist and filmmaker Qiu Jiongjiong, A NEW OLD PLAY is a magnificent achievement – profoundly personal, highly stylized, and thrillingly ambitious in its historical sweep and filmic scale. It’s an evocation of a lost world, and of a vanishing theatrical form – 20th-century Sichuan opera – whose conventions it lovingly and meticulously recreates via hand-crafted, patently artificial sets, props, and backdrops. Inspired by the story of Qiu’s own grandfather, A NEW OLD PLAY depicts the life (and afterlife) of Qiu Fu, a leading actor of Sichuan opera, over the course of many decades and numerous social and political upheavals. Calling to mind Jia Zhangke’s PLATFORM, but adopting a radically different style and sensibility, A NEW OLD PLAY is a visual feast and a film of great humor and disarming emotional power.

“Older generations of performers have passed away, and life’s shocks and disruptions have hastened the decline of our Sichuan opera. A century on, I have tried to reconstruct the traditional grammar of the form, to simulate and revive its flavor and its melodies. The film is a slice of my own history and my family’s; but also a travelogue of minstrels wandering together through this world and the next. They are my immediate forebears, and this is my ‘pre-biography.’” –Qiu Jiongjiong

“The scope – inspired by Qiu’s own theatrical family – is impressive, starting with the troupes’ creation during the chaotic period of the 1920s before passing through war with Japan, the nationalists’ struggles, war with the ascendant communists, a trip to Taiwan, and a gradual dissolution of the players before Mao’s secured reign. For such an expansive tale, Qiu shows himself both cagey and inventive: the film, which frames its history as a reflection by its aged leader on the cusp of being given a drink of forgetfulness and pulled down to hell by demons, is presented in high artifice, with charmingly theatrical sets representing non-theatrical spaces, clearly lit on sound stages, and frequently shot frontally, like dioramas. […] Qiu has made a cleverly contained existential epic, an ode to the innate persistence of workers, artists, and people in the face of futility and poor fortune. It is a wonder the film carries it off with an empathetic sparkle – there must be some purpose to art, to life, after all.” –Daniel Kasman, MUBI

“I haven’t seen a more aesthetically (and historically) daring, brilliant independent feature from China in years.” –Shelly Kraicer

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

“The essential experience of transformation, between Life and Death, death and birth, or rebirth. In four reels, the first three adapted from the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The fourth reel is in the form of a black and white one-reeler Western, summarizing the material of the first three reels, which are color and abstract.” –Bruce Baillie

Followed by:
QUICK BILLY: SIX ROLLS; 14/41/43/46/47/52 (1968-69, 16 min, 16mm)
Six uncut camera rolls to be shown with QUICK BILLY. The ‘rolls’ took the form of a correspondence, or theater, between their author and Stan Brakhage, in the winter of 1968-69.

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

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Bruce Baillie
CASTRO STREET 1966, 10 min, 16mm
ALL MY LIFE 1966, 3 min, 16mm
VALENTIN DE LAS SIERRAS 1968, 10 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
“In [Baillie’s late 1960s films], the eye of the film-maker quiets his mind with images of reconciliation; the dialectics of cinematic thought become calm in the filming of the privileged moment of reconciliation.” –P. Adams Sitney, VISIONARY FILM

Jordan Belson
ALLURES 1961, 9 min, 16mm
RE-ENTRY 1964, 6 min, 16mm
SAMADHI 1967, 6 min, 16mm
COSMOS 1969, 5 min, 16mm
WORLD 1970, 6 min, 16mm
MEDITATION 1971, 7 min, 16mm
“Our greatest abstract film poet: he has found how to combine the vision of the outer and the inner eye.” –Gene Youngblood

Total running time: ca. 65 min. 

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Unless otherwise noted, all films are silent.
DESISTFILM (1954, 7 min, 16mm, b&w, sound)
REFLECTIONS ON BLACK (1955, 12 min, 16mm, b&w, sound. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
THE WONDER RING (1955, 4 min, 16mm)
FLESH OF MORNING (1956, 25 min, 16mm, b&w)
LOVING (1956, 4 min, 16mm)
DAYBREAK AND WHITEYE (1957, 8 min, 16mm)
WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING (1959, 12 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
Films made during the early, “psychodramatic” period of one of modern cinema’s greatest innovators, including two of his early experiments with sound.

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

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“DOG STAR MAN elaborates in mythic, almost systematic terms, the worldview of [Brakhage’s] lyrical films. More than any other work of the American avant-garde film, it stations itself within the rhetoric of Romanticism, describing the birth of consciousness, the cycle of the seasons, man’s struggle with nature, and sexual balance in the visual evocation of a fallen titan bearing the cosmic name of the Dog Star Man.” –P. Adams Sitney, VISIONARY FILM

“The film breathes and is an organic and surging thing…it is a colossal lyrical adventure-dance of image in every variation of color.” –Michael McClure

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Unless otherwise noted, all films are silent.
THE DEAD (1960, 11 min, 16mm)
PASHT (1965, 5 min, 16mm)
THREE FILMS: BLUEWHITE, BLOOD’S TONE, VEIN (1965, 10 min, 16mm)
FIRE OF WATERS (1965, 10 min, 16mm, b&w, sound)
THE HORSEMAN, THE WOMAN AND THE MOTH (1968, 19 min, 16mm)
Total running time: ca. 60 min.

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Unless otherwise noted, all films are silent.
ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT (1958, 40 min, 16mm)
CAT’S CRADLE (1959, 6 min, 16mm)
SIRIUS REMEMBERED (1959, 12 min, 16mm)
THIGH LINE LYRE TRIANGULAR (1961, 9 min, 16mm)
MOTHLIGHT (1963, 4 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
BLUE MOSES (1963, 11 min, 16mm, b&w, sound)
With ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT, Brakhage leaves psychodrama and enters the “closed-eye vision” period. This program also contains a unique example of a film made without a camera, MOTHLIGHT, and one of Brakhage’s few sound (and ‘acted’) films, BLUE MOSES.

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

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All films are silent.
THE WEIR-FALCON SAGA (1970, 29 min, 16mm)
THE MACHINE OF EDEN (1970, 11 min, 16mm)
SEXUAL MEDITATION #1: MOTEL (1970, 7 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
ANGELS’ (1971, 2 min, 16mm)
DOOR (1971, 4 min, 16mm)
WESTERN HISTORY (1971, 8 min, 16mm)
THE PEACEABLE KINGDOM (1971, 8 min, 16mm)
Total running time: ca. 75 min.

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“SONG 1: Portrait of a lady. SONGS 2 & 3: Fire and a mind’s movement in remembering. SONG 4: Three girls playing with a ball. Hand painted. SONG 5: A childbirth song. SONG 6: The painted veil via moth-death. SONG 7: San Francisco. SONG 8: Sea creatures. SONG 9: Wedding source and substance. SONG 10: Sitting around. SONG 11: Fires, windows, an insect, a lyre of rain scratches. SONG 12: Verticals and shadows caught in glass traps. SONG 13: A travel song of scenes and horizontals. SONG 14: Molds, paints and crystals.” –Stan Brakhage

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“A unique film produced and created by an all-woman crew, in which a group of people, in the informal surroundings of the director’s living room, tell each other of their most secret and sensational sexual experiences. Underneath the casualness of the people and the camera is a depth of feeling and communication rarely achieved in film. Although the stories and the storytellers are all different, the power of the human sexual drive bonds both the film participants and the film audience in a total unity of curiosity and sensation.” –WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, 1973

“[T]he film is shot as unobtrusively as possible – nothing is emphasized except the stark reality of peoples’ faces, movements and expressions. If not for the sound track, these people could be having a pleasant after-dinner discussion. But they are not, and the contrast between the simplicity of the camera work and the explosiveness of the stories provides a deep underlying tension. This contrast is no greater than the split in reality we experience every day between the exterior calmness and rationality of people and their secret inner life.” –David Bienstock, WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, 1973

Preceded by:
Thomas Chalmers THE SEX LIFE OF THE POLYP (1928, 11 min, 35mm-to-DCP)
Robert Benchley was one of the most influential American humorists of the 1920s, writing for magazines such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. He was also the creator of numerous short films, including this early sound film made using the Fox Movietone process, which spoofs scientific lectures by presenting Benchley as a doctor attempting to explain the mating habits of polyps and getting hilariously entangled by his examples.

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“SONG 15: FIFTEEN SONG TRAITS: A series of individual portraits of friends and family – Robert Creeley, Michael McClure, Ed Dorn, Jonas Mekas, others. SONG 16: A flowering of sex as in the mind’s eye, a joy. SONGS 17 & 18: The movie house cathedral and a singular room. SONGS 19 & 20: Women dancing and a light. SONGS 21 & 22: Two views of closed-eye vision.” –Stan Brakhage

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Sylvère Lotringer
VIOLENT FEMMES
1998, 28 min, digital. In English and French with English subtitles.
When Catherine Robbe-Grillet, the legendary Parisian dominatrix (as well as actress and writer), was invited to visit Sylvère Lotringer’s loft on Front Street, she had no idea she’d be meeting Mlle. Victoire, her American counterpart, let alone that their encounter would be videotaped. At first reluctant to face the camera, Robbe-Grillet gradually realizes that although the two don’t speak the same language, they share the same desires. A deft ballet of words, blood, and seduction.

Preceded by:
John Samson DRESSING FOR PLEASURE (1977, 25 min, 16mm-to-digital)
Banned by London Weekend Television, DRESSING FOR PLEASURE explores the fetishizing of latex, leather, and rubber clothing and centers around Atomage – the infamous fetishist magazine – and Sex, Vivienne Westwood’s and Malcolm McLaren’s King’s Road emporium, the only shop to openly sell latex fetish-wear and a well-known hangout for punks, including, of course, the Sex Pistols. A unique and fascinating documentary of a frantically creative period in British history.

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“Includes the complete DOG STAR MAN and a full extension of the singularly visible themes of it. Inspired by that period of music in which the word ‘symphonia’ was created and by the thought that the term, as then, was created to name the overlap and enmeshing of suites, this film presents the visual symphony that DOG STAR MAN can be seen as and also all the suites of which it is composed. But as it is a film, and a work of music, the above suggests only one of the possible approaches to it. For instance, as ‘cinematographer,’ at source, means ‘writer of movement,’ certain poetic analogies might serve as well. The form is conditioned by the works of art which have inspired DOG STAR MAN, its growth of form by the physiology and experiences (including experiences of art) of the man who made it. Finally, it must be seen for what it is.” –Stan Brakhage

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Filmmaker Alice Diop (TOWARDS TENDERNESS) will be here in person for a Q&A on July 9, and filmmaker Cathy Cook (THE MATCH THAT STARTED MY FIRE) will be here for the second screening on July 21!

Cathy Cook
THE MATCH THAT STARTED MY FIRE
1991, 20 min, 16mm-to-digital
This unconventional comedy explores women’s sexuality through candid stories of sexual discoveries, fantasies, and pleasures. Visually stunning, yet unnerving, the film is a visual montage of found industrial films and original footage of swirling skirts, monumental machinery, ocean life, and befuddled reaction shots.

Danielle Arbid
THIS SMELL OF SEX
2008, 20 min, digital. In Arabic with English subtitles.
“My friends in Beirut openly tell me the details of their most secret, passionate, and obsessional sexual experiences. The film unfolds against a black screen, occasionally punctuated by the images of an old Super 8 film showing a timid young woman undressing.” –Danielle Arbid

Alice Diop
TOWARDS TENDERNESS / VERS LA TENDRESSE
2016, 39 min, digital. In French with English subtitles.
“In Alice Diop’s eloquent, searching TOWARDS TENDERNESS, four young men living in the Paris suburbs speak to her of their fronts of macho and misogynistic stereotypes – and the struggles to find, express, and understand love hidden behind them. A compassionate, cliché-dismantling investigation into masculinity, sexuality, and identity from one of France’s most accomplished young documentarians…the film is structured by the men’s own words, startling for their brutality, vulnerability, and insight in turn. Diop worked hard to gain their trust, then recorded the interviews as part of a private workshop. In the final film, the conversations take on an even more striking intimacy, something like the protagonists’ interior monologues.” –LE CINÉMA CLUB

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

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“With his provocative feature debut, 26-year-old Steven Soderbergh trained his focus on the complexities of human intimacy and deception in the modern age. Housewife Ann (Andie MacDowell) feels distant from her lawyer husband, John (Peter Gallagher), who is sleeping with her sister, Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo). When John’s old friend Graham (a magnetic, Cannes-award-winning James Spader) comes to town, Ann is drawn to the soft-spoken outsider, eventually uncovering his startling private obsession: videotaping women as they confess their deepest desires. A piercingly intelligent and flawlessly performed chamber piece, in which the video camera becomes a charged metaphor for the characters’ isolation, the Palme d’Or-winning SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE changed the landscape of American film, helping pave the way for the thriving independent scene of the 1990s.” –CRITERION

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FILMMAKER MIREIA SALLARÈS WILL BE HERE IN PERSON ON SUNDAY, JULY 31!

“In 2006 the Barcelona artist and filmmaker Mireia Sallarès began interviewing, in complete intimacy, about thirty Mexican women, about just that: being women in Mexico and their sexual experiences – their experience with pleasure and also with violence. The result is LAS MUERTES CHIQUITAS, ‘the little deaths’, which, like the French ‘la petite mort’, is a slangy euphemism in Spanish for female orgasm, the post-orgasmic state of unconsciousness that some experience after sex. This wild, five-hour film is revolutionary…. […] Sallarès uses the simplest of means, filming by herself, entirely in medium close-ups, as she interviews, among many others, two anthropologists, a performance artist, an AIDS worker, a few sex-workers, a cabaret artist, two psychoanalysts, an historian, two ex-nuns, a journalist, a cross-dressing bisexual-tranny, a housekeeper, an actress, a philosopher, two guerillas, even exiled women from other countries…. She asks them to talk about, at first, their own orgasms. What emerge are extraordinary stories and images of pleasure, and often damage.

“The film’s subtitle, ‘An unfinished story of pleasure and violence’, helps connect the dots. There is abundant sexual violence against and around women in Mexico, and effective resistance. Sallarès’s correspondents are prepared to talk about their histories and so the film goes there – not just to the violence but also to the relationship between violence and sexuality, and soon enough to violence, sex, pleasure and spiritual release. These are models to learn from and admire. The critic Helena Braunštajn says this film is a place ‘where pleasure is related to armed struggle, feminicide, transsexuality, women’s liberation theology, prostitution, illness, exile, the plurality of Mexican identity, and the ethical commitment of art to socio-political reality.’ One woman says orgasm is ‘like grabbing onto the wings of an angel who lowers me down to the ground.’ Enough said.” –Jill Godmilow

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The July chapter of “Imageless Films” brings a rare presentation of artist Louise Lawler’s legendary work of conceptual cinema, A MOVIE WILL BE SHOWN WITHOUT THE PICTURE, which was first presented at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica, CA, in 1979, and has been staged only a handful of times in the intervening years. Like many of the works in “Imageless Films”, Lawler’s work diverts attention from the screen to the soundtrack, to the physical space of the cinema itself, and to the host of normally unexamined extra-filmic elements – environmental, mechanical, logistical, psychological – involved in the ritual of moviegoing. Like all the past iterations, Anthology’s presentation will be a unique one.

“As an appropriation of film that is (seemingly) without pictures, as a performative intervention in the cinematic context, as a (non) event that stresses the spectators’ agency by leaving them in the dark, A MOVIE WILL BE SHOWN WITHOUT THE PICTURE has a complex temporality. It can be related to other works by Lawler and a number of other artists from the late 1970s and early 1980s, when artists examined elements of ‘cinematic’ culture such as the film still and the film screening – in other words, elements that had usually been treated as mere context for the ‘actual’ film. However, A MOVIE… has produced after-images and after-effects well beyond the years around 1980.” –Sven Lütticken

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The July chapter of “Imageless Films” brings a rare presentation of artist Louise Lawler’s legendary work of conceptual cinema, A MOVIE WILL BE SHOWN WITHOUT THE PICTURE, which was first presented at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica, CA, in 1979, and has been staged only a handful of times in the intervening years. Like many of the works in “Imageless Films”, Lawler’s work diverts attention from the screen to the soundtrack, to the physical space of the cinema itself, and to the host of normally unexamined extra-filmic elements – environmental, mechanical, logistical, psychological – involved in the ritual of moviegoing. Like all the past iterations, Anthology’s presentation will be a unique one.

“As an appropriation of film that is (seemingly) without pictures, as a performative intervention in the cinematic context, as a (non) event that stresses the spectators’ agency by leaving them in the dark, A MOVIE WILL BE SHOWN WITHOUT THE PICTURE has a complex temporality. It can be related to other works by Lawler and a number of other artists from the late 1970s and early 1980s, when artists examined elements of ‘cinematic’ culture such as the film still and the film screening – in other words, elements that had usually been treated as mere context for the ‘actual’ film. However, A MOVIE… has produced after-images and after-effects well beyond the years around 1980.” –Sven Lütticken

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“The furthest that Brakhage came in extending the language of 8mm cinema was his editing of 23RD PSALM BRANCH... the phenomenal and painstaking craftsmanship of this film reflects the intensity of the obsession with which its theme grasped his mind. In 1966, out of confusion about the Vietnam War and the American reaction to it, Brakhage began to meditate on the nature of war... the fruit of his studies and thoughts was the longest and most important of the songs... it is an apocalypse of imagination.” –P. Adams Sitney, VISIONARY FILM.

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“Made, in director Marlon Riggs’s own words, to ‘shatter the nation’s brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference,’ this radical blend of documentary and performance defies the stigmas surrounding Black gay sexuality in the belief that, as long as shame prevails, liberation cannot be possible. Through music and dance, words and poetry by such pathbreaking writers as Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam – and by turns candid, humorous, and heartbreaking interviews with queer African American men – TONGUES UNTIED gives voice to what it means to live as an outsider in both a Black community rife with homophobia and a largely white gay subculture poisoned by racism. A lightning rod in the culture wars of the 1980s that incited a right-wing furor over public funding for the arts, the film has lost none of its life-affirming resonance.” –CRITERION

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SONGS 24-26 (1967/85, 15 min, 8mm-to-16mm)
MY MOUNTAIN: SONG 27 (1968, 25 min, 8mm-to-16mm)
MY MOUNTAIN: SONG 27: PART 2: RIVERS (1969, 33 min, 8mm-to-16mm)
SONGS 28-29 (1966/86, 21 min, 8mm-to-16mm)
“SONGS 24 & 25: A naked boy and flute song; a being about nature. SONG 26: a ‘conversation piece’ – a vis-à-visual, inspired by the (e)motional properties of talk: drone, bird-like twitterings, statement terror & bombast. SONG 28: Scenes as texture. SONG 29: A portrait of the artist’s mother.” –Stan Brakhage

Total running time: ca. 100 min.

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The erotic poems of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, a household name in Brazil, remained unpublished during his lifetime, as he feared they would be deemed pornographic. In this celebration of his poetry and sensual vision, elderly residents of Rio read his poems and comment on their graphic, voluptuous imagery with tremendous candor and enthusiasm. “We’re old. We’re not dead!” interjects one reader, as memories of stolen pleasures and bittersweet melancholy unfold.

“When O AMOR NATURAL of Carlos Drummond de Andrade appeared in the wonderful Dutch translation by August Willemsen, I started to dream about a film based on the poems in the book. At first I envisaged a film in which old people would simply read the poems. Beautiful old people and beautiful poems: that was enough to make an interesting film. But after the research period in Rio de Janeiro, the film project became richer: thanks to the poems I was able to talk to wonderful old people about Drummond, about a part of their life, about – their memories of – sex and love. The poems sometimes functioned as a kind of corkscrew, sometimes as a glass of brandy.” –Heddy Honigmann

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This program features an encore presentation of Michael Snow’s “word film” masterpiece, SO IS THIS, alongside works by two filmmakers (both of whom are acknowledged within SO IS THIS itself) who explored the possibilities of a purely text-based cinema in the years immediately preceding the creation of Snow’s film: Richard Serra, who in collaboration with Carlotta Schoolman made the seminal media-critique video TELEVISION DELIVERS PEOPLE (1973), and artist John Knight, whose rarely-screened MACGUFFIN 8-2975 (1975) uses a similar technique to very different ends.

Richard Serra & Carlotta Schoolman TELEVISION DELIVERS PEOPLE (1973, 6.5 min, video)
“First shown late one night in 1973 on a commercial television station in Amarillo, Texas, [this] video must have come as quite a shock to whoever was watching. Serra and Schoolman appropriated sections of various academic papers on television, culling citations whose imperative voices recounted the various ways in which commercial television was purportedly subjugating the public.” –William Kaizen, “Against Immediacy: Video Art and Media Populism”

John Knight MACGUFFIN 8-2975 (1975, 10 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent)
“Set in the late seventies in Halifax, Nova Scotia, MACGUFFIN 8-2975 is a text-based narrative that expresses a story of intrigue and suspicion. […] In the film industry, the MacGuffin is a term used to indicate a plot device. The protagonists come together to pursue a common goal, an object, or other stimulus that has no clear explanation. Knight’s film is an exemplary MacGuffin.” –PLUG IN INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART

Michael Snow
SO IS THIS
1982, 48 min, 16mm
“[E]xtraordinary as Michael Snow’s new film is, it’s best described briefly – the better to keep its surprises intact. […] Snow manages to defamiliarize both film and language, creating a kind of moving concrete poetry while throwing a monkey wrench into a theoretical debate (is film a language?) that has been going on for 60 years. […] Snow creates a visual dynamo that loses nothing in motion for its absence of pictures.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

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ARROWS
1984, 15 min, 16mm-to-digital
ARROWS uses a combination of live action and rostrum work to communicate the experience of anorexia and to analyze the cultural causes of the condition. “I am so aware of my body,” we are told on the soundtrack, while images of caged wild birds are intercut with images of the rib cage of the film’s subject, the filmmaker herself. Taking the camera into her own hands, and revealing this process to the spectator by using a mirror, Lahire shows herself in control of this representation of a woman’s body. The film ends with Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Thin People”, which speaks of people who starve themselves, and people who are actually deprived, locating the condition of anorexia firmly in Western patriarchal culture.

EDGE
1986, 12 min, digital
“This short, named after Sylvia Plath’s last poem, is about the woman who is a daughter; icy, perfected and petrified for the patriarchy. She is also a mother drawing her two children with her into this death-in-life. EDGE is the irony, which is the poet’s defiance. And it is the blade… How far can those controllers go with their instruments and armaments and still act as though our pieces and feelings can be stuck together again? There is no illusion of the woman’s ‘resistance’. Yet in this theme of woman as medical and war guinea-pig the silent scream becomes audible in lines of poetry and song.” –Sandra Lahire

LADY LAZARUS
1991, 24 min, 16mm-to-digital
Sylvia Plath introduced her Lady Lazarus reading by saying: “The speaker is a woman who has a great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is the phoenix… She is also just a good plain resourceful woman.” In this film, Lady Lazarus is a woman irresistibly drawn towards Plath’s voice. She becomes a medium for Sylvia, as in a séance, as the film travels between Massachusetts and Camden, UK. Bringing together the poet’s voice with a kaleidoscope of rich images, the film explores a cinematic alphabet for Plath’s own readings of her poetry and features extracts from an interview given just before her death.

EERIE
1992, 1 min, 16mm-to-digital
A magical film loop, combining a Berlin Lesbian decadence with falling in love in a cablecar, high above the slopes of Mount Pilatus. Inspired by German expressionist filmmaking, with in-camera dissolves.

NIGHT DANCES
1995, 15 min, 16mm-to-digital. Recently digitized and restored at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (San Sebastian), in the context of the research project, “Their Past is Always Present”.
“NIGHT DANCES borrows its title from the Sylvia Plath poem…. An overlaying of light and dark imagery accompanied by a piano creates a visual dance that invites the viewer to meditate on the dualities of darkness and brightness, on love, illness, life, and death. The relationship with a mother and the relationship with a lover becomes a ritual of memory and reality invoked by performance and archival recreation.” –Mariana Sánchez Bueno

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

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Joyce Chopra’s narrative feature debut – following her extraordinary short documentaries including JOYCE AT 34, GIRLS AT 12, and others – SMOOTH TALK is a beautifully achieved and deeply unsettling portrait of the loss of innocence. Based on Joyce Carol Oates’s short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, and starring Laura Dern, in her first major role, as the sexually precocious teenager Connie, the film culminates with a sustained sequence of uncanny power: an encounter between Connie and a terrifying stranger (a profoundly creepy Treat Williams) that represents one of the most disturbing depictions of verbal coercion in the cinema.

“SMOOTH TALK captures the thrill and terror of adolescent sexual exploration, and it transforms the conventions of a coming-of-age story into something altogether more troubling and profound.” –CRITERION

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PROGRAM 2:
TERMINALS
1986, 20 min, 16mm-to-digital
TERMINALS is a stream-of-consciousness collage, which asks us to look at and question the dangers of technological advances and nuclear power.
“The ‘work faster’ ethic is written on the door to the terminals. Hazards to fertility or risks of cancer are not criteria in setting ‘acceptable’ levels of exposure to radiation at work. At the Visual Display Terminal, women are staring directly at a source of radiation.” –Sandra Lahire

PLUTONIUM BLONDE
1987, 16 min, 16mm-to-digital. Recently digitized and restored at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (San Sebastian), in the context of the research project “Their Past is Always Present”.
“Part of a trilogy of films on radiation, this dystopic collage frames the fractured narrative of Thelma, a woman working with the monitors in a plutonium reactor. Plutonium blonde, a color reference usually used in beauty products, becomes the reality of the female body in the chemical factory. Through phonic collages of casual conversations and children’s lullabies that are disrupted by the fumes of factories and the threat of a nuclear war, Sandra Lahire’s film confronts the viewer with difficult questions around the damaged bodies that inhabit a chemical reality and the female identity during such a crisis.” –Mariana Sánchez Bueno

URANIUM HEX
1987, 12 min, 16mm-to-digital
Using a kaleidoscopic array of experimental techniques, this film explores uranium mining in Canada and its destructive effects on both the environment and the women working in the mines. A plethora of images ranging from the women at work to spine-chilling representations of cancerous bodies are accompanied by unnerving industrial sounds and straightforward information from some of the women.

SERPENT RIVER
1989, 32 min, 16mm-to-digital
Beautiful but often violent images are interwoven to create an experimental documentary about the hazardous existence of the Serpent River community living in the shadow of uranium mines in Ontario, Canada. SERPENT RIVER is the final part of a trilogy of anti-nuclear films in which the filmmaker makes visible the invisible menace of radioactivity. People, the landscape, and natural resources all bear the scars.

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

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“With his provocative feature debut, 26-year-old Steven Soderbergh trained his focus on the complexities of human intimacy and deception in the modern age. Housewife Ann (Andie MacDowell) feels distant from her lawyer husband, John (Peter Gallagher), who is sleeping with her sister, Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo). When John’s old friend Graham (a magnetic, Cannes-award-winning James Spader) comes to town, Ann is drawn to the soft-spoken outsider, eventually uncovering his startling private obsession: videotaping women as they confess their deepest desires. A piercingly intelligent and flawlessly performed chamber piece, in which the video camera becomes a charged metaphor for the characters’ isolation, the Palme d’Or-winning SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE changed the landscape of American film, helping pave the way for the thriving independent scene of the 1990s.” –CRITERION

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S. Pearl Sharp BACK INSIDE HERSELF (USA, 1984, 4 min, 16mm-to-digital)
Constructed as a poetic claim for the right to self-definition through everyday gestures, this experimental short questions the social expectations imposed on the protagonist.

Pratibha Parmar
A PLACE OF RAGE
USA/UK, 1991, 54 min, 16mm-to-digital
Pratibha Parmar interweaves the histories of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the LGBT rights movement of the 1980s, and the Black feminist movement. Featuring the personal narratives and perspectives of Angela Davis, June Jordan, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Alice Walker, the film presents education as a key contribution towards transformation.

L. Franklin Gilliam NOW PRETEND (USA, 1991, 10 min, 16mm-to-digital)
NOW PRETEND is an experimental investigation into the use of race as an arbitrary signifier. Drawing upon language, personal memories, and the 1959 text “Black Like Me”, it deals with Lacan’s “mirror stage” theory of self-perception and the movement from object to subject.

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

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Restored in 2015 by the Academy Film Archive. Restoration funding provided by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and The Film Foundation.

“SOFT FICTION is a personal documentary that brilliantly portrays the survival power of female sensuality. It combines the documentary approach with a sensuous lyrical expressionism. Strand focuses her camera on people talking about their own experience, capturing subtle nuances in facial expressions and gestures that are rarely seen in cinema. The title SOFT FICTION works on several levels. It evokes the soft line between truth and fiction that characterizes Strand’s own approach to documentary, and suggests the idea of softcore fiction, which is appropriate to the film’s erotic content and style. It’s rare to find an erotic film with a female perspective dominating both the narrative discourse and the visual and audio rhythms with which the film is structured.” –Marsha Kinder, FILM QUARTERLY

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Laleen Jayamanne
A SONG OF CEYLON
Australia, 1985, 51 min, 16mm-to-digital
Borrowing its title from the 1934 Basil Wright documentary, A SONG OF CEYLON, Laleen Jayamanne’s film engages with histories of colonialism and explores how these interact with questions of gender and the body.

Noski Deville LOSS OF HEAT (UK, 1994, 20 min, 16mm-to-digital)
This film is an evocative portrayal of queer love that challenges preconceived notions of the “reality” of living with the invisible disability of epilepsy. It is a poetic, immersive interpretation exploring the interplay of the emotional and the physical, across boundaries of sexuality, dependence, and desire.

Jacqui Duckworth A PRAYER BEFORE BIRTH (UK, 1991, 20 min, 16mm-to-digital)
A fictionalized account of the filmmaker’s personal experience of multiple sclerosis that attempts to convey the traumatic nature of the disease. The film uses surrealism to evoke an increased sense of unreality as the disease inexorably enters daily life.

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

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“A unique film produced and created by an all-woman crew, in which a group of people, in the informal surroundings of the director’s living room, tell each other of their most secret and sensational sexual experiences. Underneath the casualness of the people and the camera is a depth of feeling and communication rarely achieved in film. Although the stories and the storytellers are all different, the power of the human sexual drive bonds both the film participants and the film audience in a total unity of curiosity and sensation.” –WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, 1973

“[T]he film is shot as unobtrusively as possible – nothing is emphasized except the stark reality of peoples’ faces, movements and expressions. If not for the sound track, these people could be having a pleasant after-dinner discussion. But they are not, and the contrast between the simplicity of the camera work and the explosiveness of the stories provides a deep underlying tension. This contrast is no greater than the split in reality we experience every day between the exterior calmness and rationality of people and their secret inner life.” –David Bienstock, WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, 1973

Preceded by:
Thomas Chalmers THE SEX LIFE OF THE POLYP (1928, 11 min, 35mm-to-DCP)
Robert Benchley was one of the most influential American humorists of the 1920s, writing for magazines such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. He was also the creator of numerous short films, including this early sound film made using the Fox Movietone process, which spoofs scientific lectures by presenting Benchley as a doctor attempting to explain the mating habits of polyps and getting hilariously entangled by his examples.

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“Made, in director Marlon Riggs’s own words, to ‘shatter the nation’s brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference,’ this radical blend of documentary and performance defies the stigmas surrounding Black gay sexuality in the belief that, as long as shame prevails, liberation cannot be possible. Through music and dance, words and poetry by such pathbreaking writers as Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam – and by turns candid, humorous, and heartbreaking interviews with queer African American men – TONGUES UNTIED gives voice to what it means to live as an outsider in both a Black community rife with homophobia and a largely white gay subculture poisoned by racism. A lightning rod in the culture wars of the 1980s that incited a right-wing furor over public funding for the arts, the film has lost none of its life-affirming resonance.” –CRITERION

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Sheffield Film Co-op A QUESTION OF CHOICE (UK, 1982, 18 min, 16mm-to-digital)
A documentary portrait of two cleaners, a dinner lady, and a lollipop lady drawn in terms of the limited choices available to women with family commitments.

Sistren Theatre Collective
SWEET SUGAR RAGE
Jamaica, 1985, 42 min, 16mm-to-digital
The film shows the work of, and explores the methods used by, the theatre collective Sistren to highlight the harsh conditions facing female workers on a Jamaican sugar estate. Within the film, members of the collective are shown interacting with Jamaican women who work on sugar plantations and raising awareness of the women’s labor conditions and daily experiences through discussion and performance.

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

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Produced for UK television station Channel Four (which had just debuted earlier that year, as an alternative to BBC 1 & 2 and ITV), VERONICA 4 ROSE was made in collaboration with a group of young lesbian women – between the ages of 16 and 23 – from Newcastle, Liverpool, and London. Gathering these young women together, the film records their thoughts about what it means to live as a lesbian in their particular time and place, their critiques of mainstream society, and their group dynamics as they share their experiences and ideas together. The result is a frank and profoundly revealing testament.

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Adriana Monti
SCHOOL WITHOUT END / SCUOLA SENZA FINE
Italy, 1983, 40 min, 16mm-to-digital
This film was directed by Adriana Monti in collaboration with students from the adult education 150 Hour Secondary School diploma course with whom she had been working for a year. The 150 Hours Courses were an educational experiment implemented in Italy beginning in 1974, available to factory workers and farmers initially, and expanding to include women a couple of years later. The courses were non-vocational; they were not intended to improve one’s productivity at work, but rather to allow for personal and collective growth. The courses sought to help workers reflect not only upon their working conditions but also on their lives.

Esther Ronay, Mary Kelly, Mary Capps, Humphrey Trevelyan, Margaret Dickinson, Brigid Seagrave and Susan Shapiro
WOMEN OF THE RHONDDA
UK, 1973, 20 min, 16mm-to-digital
A collectively directed film, composed of interviews with women from the Rhondda Valley coal mining community in South Wales, UK, who speak about the experience of growing up and living in mining families during the first half of the 20th century. These are stories of poverty, of appalling working and living conditions, narrated with sharpness and judgement. The lack of recognition of their domestic and social duties, compared to the mining work performed by their male counterparts, leads them to an acute awareness of the need for political organization.

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

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“Following a number of short documentaries and hybrid experiments, Brazilian director Gustavo Vinagre has embarked on a series of feature-length portrait films focused on fringe figures in the queer and outsider arts communities. Told in their subjects’ own words, these extended interview-based films…casually work to disrupt notions of gender, sexuality, and storytelling. DIVINELY EVIL, centers on 74-year-old Wilma Azevedo, Brazil’s ‘queen of sadomasochistic literature.’ In two subtly contrasting conversations, Azevedo (real name Edivina Ribeiro) tells of her rise to fame in the erotic art world, her experiences as a dominatrix, and the frequently harrowing relationships that fueled her writing. Seated in the background is Wanda (Juliane Elting), a young actress set to play Azevedo in an upcoming film, who stokes Azevedo’s memories through readings of old articles and fan letters that explicitly outline their writers’ innermost fantasies. […] What emerges by the end is a double vision of an indivisible identity – one that, much like its protagonist, collapses the boundaries between pain and pleasure, fantasy and reality, the accepted and the obscene.” –Jordan Cronk, FILM COMMENT

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This program showcases a selection of films that deploy imagelessness in order to shift the viewer’s attention from the visual to the aural, demonstrating the astonishing power of sound – especially experienced in utter darkness – to conjure imagined images or landscapes. The program includes Walter Ruttmann’s pioneering radio montage work WEEKEND, a rare screening of the newly-rediscovered sound-collage-film AN ALL-ETHNIC ELECTRIC PROGRAM by poet Paul Haines, and works by Peter Rose, Keith Sanborn, and Charmaine Lee.

Walter Ruttmann WEEKEND (1928, 12 min, radiophonic montage)
“To create this work, Ruttmann wandered through Berlin with a Tri-Ergon film camera and recorded his surroundings without ever removing the camera’s lens cap. Rather than using celluloid to record imagery, Ruttmann used it to record a multifarious assemblage of ambient city sounds, including industrial machines, marching bands, bells, voices, and sirens. […] Ruttmann frequently described WEEKEND in distinctly cinematic terms: he called it ‘cinema for the ears’ and ‘a blind film.’” –Justin Remes, ABSENCE IN CINEMA: THE ART OF SHOWING NOTHING

Paul Haines AN ALL-ETHNIC ELECTRIC PROGRAM (1966, 25 min, 16mm)
“Perhaps the first ‘absolute’ sound film. A curious but very beautiful work.” –David Curtis, EXPERIMENTAL FILM

Peter Rose THE GIFT (1993, 6 min, digital)
THE GIFT was adapted from a serial bedtime story Rose told his daughter over a period of six years. It is a parable that explores the conflict between language and innocence, between sounds and ideas, and that offers a strange connection between time, language, and self.

Keith Sanborn FOR THE BIRDS (2000, 8 min, digital)
“This tape is inspired by the 11th century Sufi mystical text ‘The Conference of the Birds’. It is a text which explores transparency and opacity, multiplicity and unity, narrative and insight, the mundane and the ecstatic.” –Keith Sanborn

Charmaine Lee RACE TO THE BOTTOM (2021, 6 min, digital)
This is a film to listen to. Charmaine Lee performs “Race to the Bottom”, a vocal improvisation using microphones, radios, and modular synthesis to reveal an intimate portrait of Lee’s polyphonic sensibilities.

Total running time: ca. 60 min.

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S. Pearl Sharp BACK INSIDE HERSELF (USA, 1984, 4 min, 16mm-to-digital)
Constructed as a poetic claim for the right to self-definition through everyday gestures, this experimental short questions the social expectations imposed on the protagonist.

Pratibha Parmar
A PLACE OF RAGE
USA/UK, 1991, 54 min, 16mm-to-digital
Pratibha Parmar interweaves the histories of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the LGBT rights movement of the 1980s, and the Black feminist movement. Featuring the personal narratives and perspectives of Angela Davis, June Jordan, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Alice Walker, the film presents education as a key contribution towards transformation.

L. Franklin Gilliam NOW PRETEND (USA, 1991, 10 min, 16mm-to-digital)
NOW PRETEND is an experimental investigation into the use of race as an arbitrary signifier. Drawing upon language, personal memories, and the 1959 text “Black Like Me”, it deals with Lacan’s “mirror stage” theory of self-perception and the movement from object to subject.

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Adriana Monti
SCHOOL WITHOUT END / SCUOLA SENZA FINE
Italy, 1983, 40 min, 16mm-to-digital
This film was directed by Adriana Monti in collaboration with students from the adult education 150 Hour Secondary School diploma course with whom she had been working for a year. The 150 Hours Courses were an educational experiment implemented in Italy beginning in 1974, available to factory workers and farmers initially, and expanding to include women a couple of years later. The courses were non-vocational; they were not intended to improve one’s productivity at work, but rather to allow for personal and collective growth. The courses sought to help workers reflect not only upon their working conditions but also on their lives.

Esther Ronay, Mary Kelly, Mary Capps, Humphrey Trevelyan, Margaret Dickinson, Brigid Seagrave and Susan Shapiro
WOMEN OF THE RHONDDA
UK, 1973, 20 min, 16mm-to-digital
A collectively directed film, composed of interviews with women from the Rhondda Valley coal mining community in South Wales, UK, who speak about the experience of growing up and living in mining families during the first half of the 20th century. These are stories of poverty, of appalling working and living conditions, narrated with sharpness and judgement. The lack of recognition of their domestic and social duties, compared to the mining work performed by their male counterparts, leads them to an acute awareness of the need for political organization.

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Sheffield Film Co-op A QUESTION OF CHOICE (UK, 1982, 18 min, 16mm-to-digital)
A documentary portrait of two cleaners, a dinner lady, and a lollipop lady drawn in terms of the limited choices available to women with family commitments.

Sistren Theatre Collective
SWEET SUGAR RAGE
Jamaica, 1985, 42 min, 16mm-to-digital
The film shows the work of, and explores the methods used by, the theatre collective Sistren to highlight the harsh conditions facing female workers on a Jamaican sugar estate. Within the film, members of the collective are shown interacting with Jamaican women who work on sugar plantations and raising awareness of the women’s labor conditions and daily experiences through discussion and performance.

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Laleen Jayamanne
A SONG OF CEYLON
Australia, 1985, 51 min, 16mm-to-digital
Borrowing its title from the 1934 Basil Wright documentary, A SONG OF CEYLON, Laleen Jayamanne’s film engages with histories of colonialism and explores how these interact with questions of gender and the body.

Noski Deville LOSS OF HEAT (UK, 1994, 20 min, 16mm-to-digital)
This film is an evocative portrayal of queer love that challenges preconceived notions of the “reality” of living with the invisible disability of epilepsy. It is a poetic, immersive interpretation exploring the interplay of the emotional and the physical, across boundaries of sexuality, dependence, and desire.

Jacqui Duckworth A PRAYER BEFORE BIRTH (UK, 1991, 20 min, 16mm-to-digital)
A fictionalized account of the filmmaker’s personal experience of multiple sclerosis that attempts to convey the traumatic nature of the disease. The film uses surrealism to evoke an increased sense of unreality as the disease inexorably enters daily life.

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

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Filmmaker Alice Diop (TOWARDS TENDERNESS) will be here in person for a Q&A on July 9, and filmmaker Cathy Cook (THE MATCH THAT STARTED MY FIRE) will be here for the second screening on July 21!

Cathy Cook
THE MATCH THAT STARTED MY FIRE
1991, 20 min, 16mm-to-digital
This unconventional comedy explores women’s sexuality through candid stories of sexual discoveries, fantasies, and pleasures. Visually stunning, yet unnerving, the film is a visual montage of found industrial films and original footage of swirling skirts, monumental machinery, ocean life, and befuddled reaction shots.

Danielle Arbid
THIS SMELL OF SEX
2008, 20 min, digital. In Arabic with English subtitles.
“My friends in Beirut openly tell me the details of their most secret, passionate, and obsessional sexual experiences. The film unfolds against a black screen, occasionally punctuated by the images of an old Super 8 film showing a timid young woman undressing.” –Danielle Arbid

Alice Diop
TOWARDS TENDERNESS / VERS LA TENDRESSE
2016, 39 min, digital. In French with English subtitles.
“In Alice Diop’s eloquent, searching TOWARDS TENDERNESS, four young men living in the Paris suburbs speak to her of their fronts of macho and misogynistic stereotypes – and the struggles to find, express, and understand love hidden behind them. A compassionate, cliché-dismantling investigation into masculinity, sexuality, and identity from one of France’s most accomplished young documentarians…the film is structured by the men’s own words, startling for their brutality, vulnerability, and insight in turn. Diop worked hard to gain their trust, then recorded the interviews as part of a private workshop. In the final film, the conversations take on an even more striking intimacy, something like the protagonists’ interior monologues.” –LE CINÉMA CLUB

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

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FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
Since 2011, each annual edition of the Viennale (Vienna International Film Festival) has featured the granting of the ExtraVALUE Film Award to one or more Austrian filmmakers whose films are included within the festival. Designed to showcase the best of Austrian cinema, the Award was founded by Erste Bank, the Viennale’s main sponsor, and is awarded according to the findings of an independent jury. The Award brings a cash prize as well as a residency as a visiting filmmaker hosted and organized by Deutsches Haus at NYU.

Anthology’s longstanding tradition of presenting the ExtraVALUE films continues in July with the 2021 award winner, GREAT FREEDOM, directed by Sebastian Meise.

This program is co-presented by Erste Bank and Deutsches Haus at NYU, with additional support from the Austrian Cultural Forum New York.

Special thanks to Sebastian Meise, and to Paolo Calamita (Viennale); Juliane Camfield & Sarah Girner (Deutsches Haus at NYU); Ruth Goubran (Erste Bank); Sabine Moser & Deborah Söll (FreibeuterFilm); and Melina Tsiamos & Nina Monschein (Austrian Cultural Forum New York).

Sebastian Meise
GREAT FREEDOM / GROSSE FREIHEIT
Austria/Germany, 2021, 116 min, DCP. In German with English subtitles.
“Jail movies have always formed a fascinating sub-genre of film history: the human condition appears effectively amplified within the confinements of prison cells, corridors, and yards. Austrian director Sebastian Meise makes excellent use of spatial limitations in setting his third film, the fictional period piece GREAT FREEDOM, almost entirely within a penitentiary. The story revolves around a young man called Hans who moves between freedom and prison on a regular basis since he insists on having consensual (yet illegal) gay sex. Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, established in 1871, guarantees his prosecution. The narrative covers the years directly following World War II all the way until 1969, when ‘simple homosexuality’ was finally decriminalized. Franz Rogowski is a perfectly charismatic leading man precisely because of his quiet, introverted acting, but it is Georg Friedrich who takes on the even more interesting part as Hans’s long-time prison partner, slowly giving in to his romantic involvement. An impossible love story takes shape. Meise has a firm grasp on his character study, and he thankfully underplays all the latent pathos it contains, producing a sober, down-to-earth, yet emotionally involving romance.” –Stefan Grissemann, VIENNALE

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Restored in 2015 by the Academy Film Archive. Restoration funding provided by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and The Film Foundation.

“SOFT FICTION is a personal documentary that brilliantly portrays the survival power of female sensuality. It combines the documentary approach with a sensuous lyrical expressionism. Strand focuses her camera on people talking about their own experience, capturing subtle nuances in facial expressions and gestures that are rarely seen in cinema. The title SOFT FICTION works on several levels. It evokes the soft line between truth and fiction that characterizes Strand’s own approach to documentary, and suggests the idea of softcore fiction, which is appropriate to the film’s erotic content and style. It’s rare to find an erotic film with a female perspective dominating both the narrative discourse and the visual and audio rhythms with which the film is structured.” –Marsha Kinder, FILM QUARTERLY

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“A unique film produced and created by an all-woman crew, in which a group of people, in the informal surroundings of the director’s living room, tell each other of their most secret and sensational sexual experiences. Underneath the casualness of the people and the camera is a depth of feeling and communication rarely achieved in film. Although the stories and the storytellers are all different, the power of the human sexual drive bonds both the film participants and the film audience in a total unity of curiosity and sensation.” –WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, 1973

“[T]he film is shot as unobtrusively as possible – nothing is emphasized except the stark reality of peoples’ faces, movements and expressions. If not for the sound track, these people could be having a pleasant after-dinner discussion. But they are not, and the contrast between the simplicity of the camera work and the explosiveness of the stories provides a deep underlying tension. This contrast is no greater than the split in reality we experience every day between the exterior calmness and rationality of people and their secret inner life.” –David Bienstock, WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, 1973

Preceded by:
Thomas Chalmers THE SEX LIFE OF THE POLYP (1928, 11 min, 35mm-to-DCP)
Robert Benchley was one of the most influential American humorists of the 1920s, writing for magazines such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. He was also the creator of numerous short films, including this early sound film made using the Fox Movietone process, which spoofs scientific lectures by presenting Benchley as a doctor attempting to explain the mating habits of polyps and getting hilariously entangled by his examples.

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FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
Since 2011, each annual edition of the Viennale (Vienna International Film Festival) has featured the granting of the ExtraVALUE Film Award to one or more Austrian filmmakers whose films are included within the festival. Designed to showcase the best of Austrian cinema, the Award was founded by Erste Bank, the Viennale’s main sponsor, and is awarded according to the findings of an independent jury. The Award brings a cash prize as well as a residency as a visiting filmmaker hosted and organized by Deutsches Haus at NYU.

Anthology’s longstanding tradition of presenting the ExtraVALUE films continues in July with the 2021 award winner, GREAT FREEDOM, directed by Sebastian Meise.

This program is co-presented by Erste Bank and Deutsches Haus at NYU, with additional support from the Austrian Cultural Forum New York.

Special thanks to Sebastian Meise, and to Paolo Calamita (Viennale); Juliane Camfield & Sarah Girner (Deutsches Haus at NYU); Ruth Goubran (Erste Bank); Sabine Moser & Deborah Söll (FreibeuterFilm); and Melina Tsiamos & Nina Monschein (Austrian Cultural Forum New York).

Sebastian Meise
GREAT FREEDOM / GROSSE FREIHEIT
Austria/Germany, 2021, 116 min, DCP. In German with English subtitles.
“Jail movies have always formed a fascinating sub-genre of film history: the human condition appears effectively amplified within the confinements of prison cells, corridors, and yards. Austrian director Sebastian Meise makes excellent use of spatial limitations in setting his third film, the fictional period piece GREAT FREEDOM, almost entirely within a penitentiary. The story revolves around a young man called Hans who moves between freedom and prison on a regular basis since he insists on having consensual (yet illegal) gay sex. Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, established in 1871, guarantees his prosecution. The narrative covers the years directly following World War II all the way until 1969, when ‘simple homosexuality’ was finally decriminalized. Franz Rogowski is a perfectly charismatic leading man precisely because of his quiet, introverted acting, but it is Georg Friedrich who takes on the even more interesting part as Hans’s long-time prison partner, slowly giving in to his romantic involvement. An impossible love story takes shape. Meise has a firm grasp on his character study, and he thankfully underplays all the latent pathos it contains, producing a sober, down-to-earth, yet emotionally involving romance.” –Stefan Grissemann, VIENNALE

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Joyce Chopra’s narrative feature debut – following her extraordinary short documentaries including JOYCE AT 34, GIRLS AT 12, and others – SMOOTH TALK is a beautifully achieved and deeply unsettling portrait of the loss of innocence. Based on Joyce Carol Oates’s short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, and starring Laura Dern, in her first major role, as the sexually precocious teenager Connie, the film culminates with a sustained sequence of uncanny power: an encounter between Connie and a terrifying stranger (a profoundly creepy Treat Williams) that represents one of the most disturbing depictions of verbal coercion in the cinema.

“SMOOTH TALK captures the thrill and terror of adolescent sexual exploration, and it transforms the conventions of a coming-of-age story into something altogether more troubling and profound.” –CRITERION

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THE ANIMALS OF EDEN AND AFTER 1970, 35 min, 16mm
SEXUAL MEDITATION: ROOM WITH A VIEW 1971, 4 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
THE SHORES OF PHOS: A FABLE 1972, 10 min, 16mm
THE WOLD-SHADOW 1972, 3 min, 16mm
THE RIDDLE OF LUMEN 1972, 14 min, 16mm
SINCERITY: REEL NO. 1 1973, 27 min, 16mm

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

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John Samson
DRESSING FOR PLEASURE
1977, 25 min, 16mm-to-digital
Banned by London Weekend Television, DRESSING FOR PLEASURE explores the fetishizing of latex, leather, and rubber clothing and centers around Atomage – the infamous fetishist magazine – and Sex, Vivienne Westwood’s and Malcolm McLaren’s King’s Road emporium, the only shop to openly sell latex fetish-wear and a well-known hangout for punks, including, of course, the Sex Pistols. A unique and fascinating documentary of a frantically creative period in British history.

John Samson
THE SKIN HORSE
1983, 55 min, 16mm-to-digital
In this unique, award-winning documentary, people with disabilities talk about their sexuality and sexual needs. With powerful references to Browning’s FREAKS and Lynch’s THE ELEPHANT MAN, the film questions society’s views on disability and takes a critical look at the mechanics of institutionalization.

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Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.

“All that is, is light.” –Johannes Scotus Erigena

“[Brakhage shot] THE TEXT OF LIGHT in (through) a large crystal ashtray. This magnificent film – a slow montage of iridescent splays of light and shifting landscapes of sheer color, which acknowledges debts to Turner and American Romantic landscape painters as well as to James Davis, the pioneer film-maker of light projections – is the culmination of Brakhage’s exploration of anamorphosis.” –P. Adams Sitney, VISIONARY FILM

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The erotic poems of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, a household name in Brazil, remained unpublished during his lifetime, as he feared they would be deemed pornographic. In this celebration of his poetry and sensual vision, elderly residents of Rio read his poems and comment on their graphic, voluptuous imagery with tremendous candor and enthusiasm. “We’re old. We’re not dead!” interjects one reader, as memories of stolen pleasures and bittersweet melancholy unfold.

“When O AMOR NATURAL of Carlos Drummond de Andrade appeared in the wonderful Dutch translation by August Willemsen, I started to dream about a film based on the poems in the book. At first I envisaged a film in which old people would simply read the poems. Beautiful old people and beautiful poems: that was enough to make an interesting film. But after the research period in Rio de Janeiro, the film project became richer: thanks to the poems I was able to talk to wonderful old people about Drummond, about a part of their life, about – their memories of – sex and love. The poems sometimes functioned as a kind of corkscrew, sometimes as a glass of brandy.” –Heddy Honigmann

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Produced for UK television station Channel Four (which had just debuted earlier that year, as an alternative to BBC 1 & 2 and ITV), VERONICA 4 ROSE was made in collaboration with a group of young lesbian women – between the ages of 16 and 23 – from Newcastle, Liverpool, and London. Gathering these young women together, the film records their thoughts about what it means to live as a lesbian in their particular time and place, their critiques of mainstream society, and their group dynamics as they share their experiences and ideas together. The result is a frank and profoundly revealing testament.

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Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.

EYES
(1970, 36 min, 16mm, silent)
“After wishing for years to be given the opportunity of filming some of the more ‘mystical’ occupations of our Times – some of the more obscure Public Figures which the average imagination turns into ‘bogeymen’... viz.: Policemen, Doctors, Soldiers, Politicians, etc.: – I was at last permitted to ride in a Pittsburgh police car, camera in hand, the final several days of September 1970.” –Stan Brakhage

DEUS EX
(1971, 34 min, 16mm, silent)
“I have been many times very ill in hospitals; and I drew on all that experience while making DEUS EX in West Penn. Hospital of Pittsburgh; but I was especially inspired by the memory of one incident in an emergency room of San Francisco’s Mission District: while waiting for medical help, I had held myself together by reading an April-May 1965 issue of ‘Poetry Magazine’: and the following lines from Charles Olson’s ‘Cole’s Island’ had especially centered the experience, ‘touchstone’ of DEUS EX, for me: Charles begins the poem with the statement ‘I met Death –’ And then: ‘He didn’t bother me, or say anything. Which is / not surprising, a person might not, in the circumstances; / or at most a nod or something. Or they would. But they wouldn’t, / or you wouldn’t think to either, / it was Death. And / He certainly was, the moment I saw him.’” –Stan Brakhage

THE ACT OF SEEING WITH ONE’S OWN EYES
(1971, 32 min, 16mm, silent)
“Brakhage, entering, with his camera, one of the forbidden, terrific locations of our culture, the autopsy room. It is a place wherein, inversely, life is cherished, for it exists to affirm that no one of us may die without our knowing exactly why. All of us, in the person of the coroner, must see that, for ourselves, with our own eyes.” –Hollis Frampton

Total running time: ca. 105 min.

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“Following a number of short documentaries and hybrid experiments, Brazilian director Gustavo Vinagre has embarked on a series of feature-length portrait films focused on fringe figures in the queer and outsider arts communities. Told in their subjects’ own words, these extended interview-based films…casually work to disrupt notions of gender, sexuality, and storytelling. DIVINELY EVIL, centers on 74-year-old Wilma Azevedo, Brazil’s ‘queen of sadomasochistic literature.’ In two subtly contrasting conversations, Azevedo (real name Edivina Ribeiro) tells of her rise to fame in the erotic art world, her experiences as a dominatrix, and the frequently harrowing relationships that fueled her writing. Seated in the background is Wanda (Juliane Elting), a young actress set to play Azevedo in an upcoming film, who stokes Azevedo’s memories through readings of old articles and fan letters that explicitly outline their writers’ innermost fantasies. […] What emerges by the end is a double vision of an indivisible identity – one that, much like its protagonist, collapses the boundaries between pain and pleasure, fantasy and reality, the accepted and the obscene.” –Jordan Cronk, FILM COMMENT

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This program gathers a selection of text-based films and videos which use the technique in order to explore and/or deconstruct language and mass media representation.

Richard Serra & Carlotta Schoolman TELEVISION DELIVERS PEOPLE (1973, 6.5 min, video)
“A seminal work in the now well-established critique of popular media as an instrument of social control that asserts itself subtly on the populace through ‘entertainments,’ for the benefit of those in power – the corporations that maintain and profit from the status quo.” –VIDEO DATA BANK

Tony Cokes EVIL.27: SELMA (2011, 9 min, digital)
Tony Cokes EVIL.12.EDIT.B (FEAR, SPECTRA & FAKE EMOTION) (2009, 12 min, digital)
Both works are courtesy of Tony Cokes; Greene Naftali, New York; Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles; and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
“Investigating the way culture is created and framed in post-9/11 America, in an information landscape defined increasingly by internet usage and consumption, the [videos in Tony Cokes’s ‘Evil’ series] often feature monochromatic, text-laden slides set to music, distilling – even abstracting – the heterogeneous information that Cokes samples to expose popular rhetorics of power. The texts in the Evil series quote government testimonies, speeches, pop lyrics, stand-up comedy, and other sources; with the texts presented in motion, and bright colors and music behind them, the videos demonstrate how media flattens discourse and scrambles meaning production.” –GREENE NAFTALI GALLERY

Helga Davis & Anouk De Clercq OK (2021, 5 min, digital)
In the summer of 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S., Helga Davis wrote a text that voices her pain, her despair, and also her hopes for the future. This text became the starting point for her latest collaboration with filmmaker Anouk De Clercq.

Peter Rose SECONDARY CURRENTS (1982, 14.5 min, 16mm)
“Delivered by an improbable narrator who speaks an extended assortment of nonsense, it is an ‘imageless’ film in which the shifting relationships between voice-over commentary and subtitled narration constitute a peculiar duet for voice, thought, speech, and sound. A kind of comic opera, the film is a dark metaphor for the order and entropy of language….” –Peter Rose

Peter Rose GENESIS (1991, 4 min, digital)
GENESIS recounts a true story about embodiment “told” using voice synthesis and animation display on a Macintosh computer. This is a very unsettling work that raises questions about technology, virtual communication, ethics, and psychology.

Susan Hiller THE LAST SILENT MOVIE (2007/08, 22 min, digital. Loaned courtesy of Lisson Gallery and the artist.)
“THE LAST SILENT MOVIE is constructed from archival recordings of dead or dying languages, the speaking voices translated into subtitles that play against a black screen. The work marks an important milestone in Hiller’s career-long investigation into areas of culture that are marginalized, suppressed, or – literally in this case – rendered invisible.” –LISSON GALLERY

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

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Sylvère Lotringer
VIOLENT FEMMES
1998, 28 min, digital. In English and French with English subtitles.
When Catherine Robbe-Grillet, the legendary Parisian dominatrix (as well as actress and writer), was invited to visit Sylvère Lotringer’s loft on Front Street, she had no idea she’d be meeting Mlle. Victoire, her American counterpart, let alone that their encounter would be videotaped. At first reluctant to face the camera, Robbe-Grillet gradually realizes that although the two don’t speak the same language, they share the same desires. A deft ballet of words, blood, and seduction.

Preceded by:
John Samson DRESSING FOR PLEASURE (1977, 25 min, 16mm-to-digital)
Banned by London Weekend Television, DRESSING FOR PLEASURE explores the fetishizing of latex, leather, and rubber clothing and centers around Atomage – the infamous fetishist magazine – and Sex, Vivienne Westwood’s and Malcolm McLaren’s King’s Road emporium, the only shop to openly sell latex fetish-wear and a well-known hangout for punks, including, of course, the Sex Pistols. A unique and fascinating documentary of a frantically creative period in British history.

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This screening gathers a selection of films that foreground the materiality of 16mm or 35mm film by calling attention to the scratches, dust, or other detritus that can accrue to the film strip, either by direct intervention of the artist or by organic accumulation over time. The program features very rare presentations of two double-screen 16mm works by the great UK experimental filmmaker Malcolm Le Grice.

Nam June Paik ZEN FOR FILM (Fluxfilm No. 1) (1962-64, 8 min, 16mm, silent. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
“Clear film, accumulating in time dust and scratches.” –George Maciunas
“As an analogy to John Cage, who included silence as a non-sound in his music, Paik uses the emptiness of the image for his art. This a film which depicts only itself and its own material qualities, and which, as an ‘anti-film,’ is meant to encourage viewers to oppose the flood of images from outside with one’s own interior images.” –Heike Helfert, MEDIEN KUNST NETZ

Malcolm Le Grice BLUE FIELD DURATION (1972, 8 min, double-screen 16mm)
“This is a two-screen film where a full frame color field slowly changes from blue to green over a period of about six minutes. The film has been intentionally scratched providing another layer of content and the source of the sound track.” –Malcolm Le Grice

Malcolm Le Grice WHITE FIELD DURATION (1973, 12 min, double-screen 16mm)
“The first five minutes the screens are practically clear white. During the next five minutes, we begin to see tiny, unimposing scratches moving across the screens. The scratches obviously were placed there, but they also could be taken for dust by some. For the next five minutes or so both screens flicker lightly and softly and there are images (‘screens’) of different grey (white) intensities within the larger images (or screens). During the last five minutes or so slight traces of some representational imagery begin to be barely visible on both screens, and then the screens blank out again. It is a very pure, a very classical piece.” –Jonas Mekas, VILLAGE VOICE, 1973

Robert Huot SCRATCH (1966-1967, 11 min, 16mm, silent)
“While SCRATCH is nothing more than eleven minutes of dark leader with a continuous handmade scratch, the resulting imagery varies a good deal, depending on how deeply Huot dug into the emulsion: when the scratch is shallow, for example, it seems to bead and move up through the image; when the scratch is deep, it seems to remain within the frame, vibrating horizontally.” –Scott MacDonald, “The Films of Robert Huot: 1967-1972”, QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM STUDIES

Anouk De Clercq BLACK (2015, 5 min, 35mm, silent)
Simultaneously boundless and intimate, collective and personal, an ode to and an example of a cinematic experience that is becoming increasingly rare, the darkness of a movie theater in the course of the projection of a 35mm film print.

Total running time: ca. 50 min.

[Please note: since the BLUE FIELD DURATION print was not delivered in time for the first screening, we've added a second screening of this program on Wednesday, August 10 at 7:30; this screening will include the full lineup of films.]

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This program showcases a selection of films that deploy imagelessness in order to shift the viewer’s attention from the visual to the aural, demonstrating the astonishing power of sound – especially experienced in utter darkness – to conjure imagined images or landscapes. The program includes Walter Ruttmann’s pioneering radio montage work WEEKEND, a rare screening of the newly-rediscovered sound-collage-film AN ALL-ETHNIC ELECTRIC PROGRAM by poet Paul Haines, and works by Peter Rose, Keith Sanborn, and Charmaine Lee.

Walter Ruttmann WEEKEND (1928, 12 min, radiophonic montage)
“To create this work, Ruttmann wandered through Berlin with a Tri-Ergon film camera and recorded his surroundings without ever removing the camera’s lens cap. Rather than using celluloid to record imagery, Ruttmann used it to record a multifarious assemblage of ambient city sounds, including industrial machines, marching bands, bells, voices, and sirens. […] Ruttmann frequently described WEEKEND in distinctly cinematic terms: he called it ‘cinema for the ears’ and ‘a blind film.’” –Justin Remes, ABSENCE IN CINEMA: THE ART OF SHOWING NOTHING

Paul Haines AN ALL-ETHNIC ELECTRIC PROGRAM (1966, 25 min, 16mm)
“Perhaps the first ‘absolute’ sound film. A curious but very beautiful work.” –David Curtis, EXPERIMENTAL FILM

Peter Rose THE GIFT (1993, 6 min, digital)
THE GIFT was adapted from a serial bedtime story Rose told his daughter over a period of six years. It is a parable that explores the conflict between language and innocence, between sounds and ideas, and that offers a strange connection between time, language, and self.

Keith Sanborn FOR THE BIRDS (2000, 8 min, digital)
“This tape is inspired by the 11th century Sufi mystical text ‘The Conference of the Birds’. It is a text which explores transparency and opacity, multiplicity and unity, narrative and insight, the mundane and the ecstatic.” –Keith Sanborn

Charmaine Lee RACE TO THE BOTTOM (2021, 6 min, digital)
This is a film to listen to. Charmaine Lee performs “Race to the Bottom”, a vocal improvisation using microphones, radios, and modular synthesis to reveal an intimate portrait of Lee’s polyphonic sensibilities.

Total running time: ca. 60 min.

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This program gathers a selection of text-based films and videos which use the technique in order to explore and/or deconstruct language and mass media representation.

Richard Serra & Carlotta Schoolman TELEVISION DELIVERS PEOPLE (1973, 6.5 min, video)
“A seminal work in the now well-established critique of popular media as an instrument of social control that asserts itself subtly on the populace through ‘entertainments,’ for the benefit of those in power – the corporations that maintain and profit from the status quo.” –VIDEO DATA BANK

Tony Cokes EVIL.27: SELMA (2011, 9 min, digital)
Tony Cokes EVIL.12.EDIT.B (FEAR, SPECTRA & FAKE EMOTION) (2009, 12 min, digital)
Both works are courtesy of Tony Cokes; Greene Naftali, New York; Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles; and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
“Investigating the way culture is created and framed in post-9/11 America, in an information landscape defined increasingly by internet usage and consumption, the [videos in Tony Cokes’s ‘Evil’ series] often feature monochromatic, text-laden slides set to music, distilling – even abstracting – the heterogeneous information that Cokes samples to expose popular rhetorics of power. The texts in the Evil series quote government testimonies, speeches, pop lyrics, stand-up comedy, and other sources; with the texts presented in motion, and bright colors and music behind them, the videos demonstrate how media flattens discourse and scrambles meaning production.” –GREENE NAFTALI GALLERY

Helga Davis & Anouk De Clercq OK (2021, 5 min, digital)
In the summer of 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S., Helga Davis wrote a text that voices her pain, her despair, and also her hopes for the future. This text became the starting point for her latest collaboration with filmmaker Anouk De Clercq.

Peter Rose SECONDARY CURRENTS (1982, 14.5 min, 16mm)
“Delivered by an improbable narrator who speaks an extended assortment of nonsense, it is an ‘imageless’ film in which the shifting relationships between voice-over commentary and subtitled narration constitute a peculiar duet for voice, thought, speech, and sound. A kind of comic opera, the film is a dark metaphor for the order and entropy of language….” –Peter Rose

Peter Rose GENESIS (1991, 4 min, digital)
GENESIS recounts a true story about embodiment “told” using voice synthesis and animation display on a Macintosh computer. This is a very unsettling work that raises questions about technology, virtual communication, ethics, and psychology.

Susan Hiller THE LAST SILENT MOVIE (2007/08, 22 min, digital. Loaned courtesy of Lisson Gallery and the artist.)
“THE LAST SILENT MOVIE is constructed from archival recordings of dead or dying languages, the speaking voices translated into subtitles that play against a black screen. The work marks an important milestone in Hiller’s career-long investigation into areas of culture that are marginalized, suppressed, or – literally in this case – rendered invisible.” –LISSON GALLERY

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

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With the exception of MOTION PICTURES NO. 1, PAT’S BIRTHDAY, BREATHING, and GULLS AND BUOYS, all of the films in this program were preserved by Anthology with generous support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

FORM PHASES I (1952, 2 min, 16mm)
FORM PHASES II (1953, 2 min, 16mm)
RECREATION (1956, 1.5 min, 16mm-to-35mm)
MOTION PICTURES NO. 1 (1956, 4.5 min, 16mm, silent)
JAMESTOWN BALOOS (1957, 6 min, 16mm-to-35mm)
EYEWASH (1959, 3 min, 16mm-to-35mm)
BLAZES (1961, 3 min, 16mm-to-35mm)
PAT’S BIRTHDAY (1962, 13 min, 16mm, b&w)
BREATHING (1963, 5 min, 35mm, b&w)
FIST FIGHT (1964, 9 min, 16mm-to-35mm)
66 (1966, 5.5 min, 16mm-to-35mm)
69 (1969, 4.5 min, 16mm-to-35mm)
70 (1970, 5 min, 16mm-to-35mm)
GULLS AND BUOYS (1972, 8 min, 16mm)
FUJI (1974, 9 min, 16mm-to-35mm)
“Roughly speaking [Breer’s] works belong to that category of films generally called ‘abstract’ (though his are also highly ‘concrete’), but differ from everything else that has been done along these lines in one basic respect: Breer is undoubtedly the first filmmaker to have brought to his medium the full heritage of modern painting and the sum of sophisticated experimentation that it represents.” – Noël Burch, FILM QUARTERLY

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

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(LE JOURNAL D’UN CURÉ DE CAMPAGNE)

“Consistent with Bresson’s tendency to confront a spiritual perspective with an indifferent world, DIARY is based on the 1937 novel by Georges Bernanos and is among the few film adaptations of a work of literature to equal its source. Structured in the form of a diary kept by an earnest young priest whose labors to stir the souls of his first parish in a provincial village are met with coldness and hostility, the narrative is both a microcosm of the human condition and a via dolorosa that leads, inevitably, to the protagonist’s death. […] Neither comforting fable nor lofty celebration of pastoral devotion, DIARY is the darkest, most psychologically penetrating movie ever made about a priest and his vocation.” –Tony Pipolo, ARTFORUM

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This spring Anthology is graced by a visit from Austrian experimental filmmaker Antoinette Zwirchmayr, who will present a three-program survey of films made over the past 10 years, all of them screening on 16mm or 35mm.

Zwirchmayr’s films are distinguished by the carefully considered precision of their construction, the meditative stillness of their rhythms, and above all by their preoccupation with bodies, objects, and landscapes, which are rendered with an extraordinary degree of tactility. In Zwirchmayr’s hands, bodies and landscapes come to occupy the same plane of perception. She consistently places people and objects in various natural environments in a way that is both incongruous and evocative, resulting in a fascinating confusion of scale, abstraction, and representation. Her films demonstrate an abiding interest in juxtaposing strikingly different kinds of substances – skin and stone, fire and ice, plant and textile – and an extraordinary ability to convey the emotional, mental, and physical frisson that results. And she films both bodies and landscapes with such an attention to detail and texture that the bodies are transformed into landscapes, and vice versa. This is the case not only in the highly condensed, meditative short works that make up the larger part of her filmography, but also in the “What I Remember” trilogy of personal essay films that explore the remarkable, troubled history of her own family in a singularly elliptical style.

These programs gather together a selection of Zwirchmayr’s work over the past decade, including the “What I Remember” trilogy, as well as several brand-new films.

PROGRAM 1:
JEAN LUC NANCY (2018, 4 min, 16mm)
AT THE EDGE OF THE CURTAIN / AM RANDE DES VORHANGS (2022, 10 min, 16mm)
AM FROSTIGEN ATLAS (2020, 6 min, 16mm, silent)
DEAR DARKNESS (2022, 30 min, 35mm)

Total running time: ca. 55 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

This spring Anthology is graced by a visit from Austrian experimental filmmaker Antoinette Zwirchmayr, who will present a three-program survey of films made over the past 10 years, all of them screening on 16mm or 35mm.

Zwirchmayr’s films are distinguished by the carefully considered precision of their construction, the meditative stillness of their rhythms, and above all by their preoccupation with bodies, objects, and landscapes, which are rendered with an extraordinary degree of tactility. In Zwirchmayr’s hands, bodies and landscapes come to occupy the same plane of perception. She consistently places people and objects in various natural environments in a way that is both incongruous and evocative, resulting in a fascinating confusion of scale, abstraction, and representation. Her films demonstrate an abiding interest in juxtaposing strikingly different kinds of substances – skin and stone, fire and ice, plant and textile – and an extraordinary ability to convey the emotional, mental, and physical frisson that results. And she films both bodies and landscapes with such an attention to detail and texture that the bodies are transformed into landscapes, and vice versa. This is the case not only in the highly condensed, meditative short works that make up the larger part of her filmography, but also in the “What I Remember” trilogy of personal essay films that explore the remarkable, troubled history of her own family in a singularly elliptical style.

These programs gather together a selection of Zwirchmayr’s work over the past decade, including the “What I Remember” trilogy, as well as several brand-new films.

PROGRAM 2:
THE SEISMIC FORM / DIE SEISMISCHE FORM (2020, 15 min, 16mm)
VENUS DELTA (2016, 4 min, 16mm, silent)
OCEANO MARE (2020, 6 min, 16mm, silent)
HOUSE AND UNIVERSE (2015, 4 min, 16mm, silent)
TWO PALERMO (2022, 10 min, 16mm)
ALONG THE BODIES / ENTLANG DER KÖRPER (2022, 24 min, 35mm)

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

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(UN CONDAMNÉ À MORT S’EST ÉCHAPPÉ, OU LE VENT SOUFFLE OÙ IL VEUT)

With the simplest of concepts and sparest of techniques, Bresson made one of the most suspenseful jailbreak films of all time. Based on the account of an imprisoned French Resistance leader, this unbelievably taut and methodical marvel follows the fictional Fontaine’s single-minded pursuit of freedom, detailing the planning and execution of his escape with gripping precision. But Bresson’s film is not merely about process – it’s also a work of intense spirituality and humanity.

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This spring Anthology is graced by a visit from Austrian experimental filmmaker Antoinette Zwirchmayr, who will present a three-program survey of films made over the past 10 years, all of them screening on 16mm or 35mm.

Zwirchmayr’s films are distinguished by the carefully considered precision of their construction, the meditative stillness of their rhythms, and above all by their preoccupation with bodies, objects, and landscapes, which are rendered with an extraordinary degree of tactility. In Zwirchmayr’s hands, bodies and landscapes come to occupy the same plane of perception. She consistently places people and objects in various natural environments in a way that is both incongruous and evocative, resulting in a fascinating confusion of scale, abstraction, and representation. Her films demonstrate an abiding interest in juxtaposing strikingly different kinds of substances – skin and stone, fire and ice, plant and textile – and an extraordinary ability to convey the emotional, mental, and physical frisson that results. And she films both bodies and landscapes with such an attention to detail and texture that the bodies are transformed into landscapes, and vice versa. This is the case not only in the highly condensed, meditative short works that make up the larger part of her filmography, but also in the “What I Remember” trilogy of personal essay films that explore the remarkable, troubled history of her own family in a singularly elliptical style.

These programs gather together a selection of Zwirchmayr’s work over the past decade, including the “What I Remember” trilogy, as well as several brand-new films.

PROGRAM 3: ‘WHAT I REMEMBER’ TRILOGY
“In the ‘What I Remember’ trilogy, Zwirchmayr tackles the complexities of her baroque family history over the course of three exquisitely rendered short films. Filmed on 16mm, these films unfold with a miraculous complexity, offering up fragments of memory, confessional testimonies, artifacts and enigmatic recreations that converge around two central figures – her father, a bank robber who fled to Brazil, and her grandfather, one of the most prolific pimps in Salzburg.” –LONDON SHORT FILM FESTIVAL

THE PIMP AND HIS TROPHIES / DER ZUHÄLTER UND SEINE TROPHÄEN (2014-15, 21 min, 35mm)
JOSEF – MY FATHER’S CRIMINAL RECORD (2015-16, 19 min, 35mm)
THE SHADOW OF UTOPIA / IM SCHATTEN DER UTOPIE (2017, 24 min, 35mm)

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

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A magnificent drama about a thief, his techniques, motives, and secret existence. The plot is modeled loosely on Dostoevsky’s CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, but the rigorous intensity of the treatment is pure Bresson, as he tells the compelling story of an insignificant man who drifts into crime and finally finds grace in a prison cell. The famous scene of the pickpocket’s magical raid on a train station ranks as one of the great tours-de-force of French cinema.

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(LE JOURNAL D’UN CURÉ DE CAMPAGNE)

“Consistent with Bresson’s tendency to confront a spiritual perspective with an indifferent world, DIARY is based on the 1937 novel by Georges Bernanos and is among the few film adaptations of a work of literature to equal its source. Structured in the form of a diary kept by an earnest young priest whose labors to stir the souls of his first parish in a provincial village are met with coldness and hostility, the narrative is both a microcosm of the human condition and a via dolorosa that leads, inevitably, to the protagonist’s death. […] Neither comforting fable nor lofty celebration of pastoral devotion, DIARY is the darkest, most psychologically penetrating movie ever made about a priest and his vocation.” –Tony Pipolo, ARTFORUM

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FILMMAKER MIREIA SALLARÈS WILL BE HERE IN PERSON ON SUNDAY, JULY 31!

“In 2006 the Barcelona artist and filmmaker Mireia Sallarès began interviewing, in complete intimacy, about thirty Mexican women, about just that: being women in Mexico and their sexual experiences – their experience with pleasure and also with violence. The result is LAS MUERTES CHIQUITAS, ‘the little deaths’, which, like the French ‘la petite mort’, is a slangy euphemism in Spanish for female orgasm, the post-orgasmic state of unconsciousness that some experience after sex. This wild, five-hour film is revolutionary…. […] Sallarès uses the simplest of means, filming by herself, entirely in medium close-ups, as she interviews, among many others, two anthropologists, a performance artist, an AIDS worker, a few sex-workers, a cabaret artist, two psychoanalysts, an historian, two ex-nuns, a journalist, a cross-dressing bisexual-tranny, a housekeeper, an actress, a philosopher, two guerillas, even exiled women from other countries…. She asks them to talk about, at first, their own orgasms. What emerge are extraordinary stories and images of pleasure, and often damage.

“The film’s subtitle, ‘An unfinished story of pleasure and violence’, helps connect the dots. There is abundant sexual violence against and around women in Mexico, and effective resistance. Sallarès’s correspondents are prepared to talk about their histories and so the film goes there – not just to the violence but also to the relationship between violence and sexuality, and soon enough to violence, sex, pleasure and spiritual release. These are models to learn from and admire. The critic Helena Braunštajn says this film is a place ‘where pleasure is related to armed struggle, feminicide, transsexuality, women’s liberation theology, prostitution, illness, exile, the plurality of Mexican identity, and the ethical commitment of art to socio-political reality.’ One woman says orgasm is ‘like grabbing onto the wings of an angel who lowers me down to the ground.’ Enough said.” –Jill Godmilow

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A magnificent drama about a thief, his techniques, motives, and secret existence. The plot is modeled loosely on Dostoevsky’s CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, but the rigorous intensity of the treatment is pure Bresson, as he tells the compelling story of an insignificant man who drifts into crime and finally finds grace in a prison cell. The famous scene of the pickpocket’s magical raid on a train station ranks as one of the great tours-de-force of French cinema.

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(UN CONDAMNÉ À MORT S’EST ÉCHAPPÉ, OU LE VENT SOUFFLE OÙ IL VEUT)

With the simplest of concepts and sparest of techniques, Bresson made one of the most suspenseful jailbreak films of all time. Based on the account of an imprisoned French Resistance leader, this unbelievably taut and methodical marvel follows the fictional Fontaine’s single-minded pursuit of freedom, detailing the planning and execution of his escape with gripping precision. But Bresson’s film is not merely about process – it’s also a work of intense spirituality and humanity.

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