I SEE A DARKNESS

I SEE A DARKNESS
dirs. Katherine Waugh and Fergus Daly, 2023
Ireland. 133 mins.
In English.

FRIDAY, MARCH 15 – 7 PM followed by a discussion with Katherine Waugh and Fergus Daly
SUNDAY, MARCH 17 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, MARCH 25 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 31 – 5 PM

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This March, Spectacle is honored to host the U.S. premiere of I SEE A DARKNESS, a new essay-documentary about both the origins and the future of photographic imaging directed by Katherine Waugh and Fergus Daly.

Following Trevor Paglen’s edict that “It’s imperative for other artists to pick up where [Harun] Farocki left off, lest we plunge even further into the darkness of a world whose images remain invisible yet control us in evermore profound ways”, the makers of I SEE A DARKNESS describe the film as a political and philosophical manifesto for seeing differently. While pushing back against standardized myths of individual genius, Waugh and Daly thread their exploration of this technology’s origins with the story of Lucien Bull (1876-1972), an Irish-born inventor and key figure in the development of chronophotography and onetime assistant to Étienne-Jules Marey. I SEE A DARKNESS also considers the work of Harold E. Edgerton, who developed high-speed film cameras on behalf of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, thus meditating on the relationship of innovation to the natural world and resulting in a kind of threnody for the untold number of animals sacrificed in the name of so-called scientific progress.

Born of a multimedia installation project spanning several years and dedicated to the memory of the filmmakers’ close friend and collaborator Sylvère Lotringer, I SEE A DARKNESS combines historical footage from dozens of archives with original material shot at locations such as the Conservatoire des Techniques de la Cinémathèque Française, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Death Valley, the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, White Sands National Park and others. The result is an unforgettable rumination on the way supposedly objective practices (whether time-based cinematography in the 19th century, or AI-enabled digital imaging in the 21st) are perhaps inevitably deployed to political ends.

I SEE A DARKNESS ultimately questions what was disappeared in the ‘progressive’ narrative of image-capture technologies, especially considerations of the non-human and animal, and gestures towards what Jean-Christophe Bailly reminds us of when he writes: “the world in which we live is gazed upon by other beings, that the visible is shared among creatures, and that a politics should be invented on this basis, if it is not too late.”

“I’ve always liked that quote from Nietzsche, ‘We hear only those questions for which we are capable of finding an answer’, which suggests that to really think critically we must create new modes of questioning rather than seek easy answers, that fostering new problematics is what thinking in film (as in any art) should promote… In this sense, the way different subjects come together in I SEE A DARKNESS became a kind of organic process whereby certain ideas, concepts, histories, and political  and philosophical concerns, formed their own Venn diagram and impetus, finding expression in the final film in the form of creating new questions.” Katherine Waugh

“After a recent viewing of their film I SEE A DARKNESS, it is safe to say that Katherine Waugh and Fergus Daly’s new work together is not only one of the most significant Irish films of this century but one of the most significant films of this century more generally. This is a work that not only engages with critical and pertinent philosophical ideas but it places itself among a rarer breed of film essay that will actively do the work of philosophy, while also engaging and creating clarity around complex philosophical thought and ideas. It is in my opinion a stunning achievement and a work that should be widely seen.”Daniel Fitzpatrick, Co-Director of aemi

“Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh may not be the most recognizable names on the Irish filmmaking landscape but over the last 20 years they have proved themselves to be pre-eminent crafters of the film essay. They have used both the world and mechanics of cinema as springboards to a range of deeply considered ideas and observations. I SEE A DARKNESS is a typically cerebral and meticulously constructed meditation on a variety of topics ranging from image capture to the atomic bomb. Engrossing!”Don O’Mahony & Si Edwards, Programmers, Cork Film Festival

This event is presented in association with the Irish Film Institute’s IFI International programme supported by Culture Ireland. Special thanks to Ruairí McCann.

DIGGING IN THE CRATES: THE LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY

Occasional Brief Glimpses of Beauty (OBGB) presents DIGGING IN THE CRATES, a video essay and philosophy lecture about the dynamics of cultural memory in 1990s hip hop, the way in which Golden Era hip hop sampling is defined by a “dual embrace and rejection of what came before” (in the words of musicologist Tom Perchard).

THE LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY
dir. John Akomfrah, 1996
45 mins. United Kingdom.
In English.

SATURDAY, MARCH 2 – 7:30 PM followed by discussion with Zed Adams
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
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Whereas some archive-based documentaries are backwards-looking in that they aim to make sense of the present through reflecting on our relation to past media (such as Bill Morrison’s DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME), and others are forwards-looking in that they aim to document the present in order to create an archive for the future (such as John Wilson’s HOW TO WITH JOHN WILSON), John Akomfrah’s THE LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY is simultaneously backwards- and forwards-looking in proposing that sifting through the detritus of past media holds the clues for coping with the future. Akomfrah’s video essay combines sci-fi speculation with interviews with Juan Atkins, Octavia E. Butler, George Clinton, Samuel R. Delany, and others.

“A tantalizing blend of sci-fi parable and essay film [as well as] a fine primer on the aesthetics and dynamics of contemporary Afrofuturism—it was the first film to include the then-recently minted term.” – New York Magazine

THESES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF SAMPLING

In this 30 min. lecture, philosophy professor Zed Adams will discuss the relevance of Walter Benjamin’s work for appreciating the aesthetics of 1990s hip hop. His lecture will be accompanied by a supercut of interviews with hip hop producers taken from BEAT DIGGIN’ (Jesper Jensen, 1997), SCRATCH (Doug Pray, 2001), DEEP CRATES I & II (Jeremy Weisfeld, 2004 & 2007), and BEAT KINGS (Ray Stewart, 2006).

This is the second installment of the OCCASIONAL BRIEF GLIMPSES OF BEAUTY (OBGB) documentary series. Special thanks to Icarus Films.

TWO FILMS BY NEVILLE D’ALMEIDA

In collaboration with the Cosmic Shelter: Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s Private Cosmococas exhibition—on view until March 30th at the Hunter College Art Galleries—please join us at 124 s. 3rd street for a beyond-rare chance to see the first two films directed by Brazilian filmmaker, artist and holy madman Neville D’almeida. Each screening will be followed by a remote discussion with D’Almeida, moderated by Cosmic Shelter curator Daniela Mayer.


JARDIM DE GUERRA
(WAR GARDEN)
dir. Neville D’almeida, 1967
Brazil. 92 mins.
In Brazilian Portuguese with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, MARCH 16 – 1 PM followed by a discussion with Neville D’almeida
ONE SCREENING ONLY!

Set in Rio de Janeiro under the military dictatorship in the 1960s, JARDIM DE GUERRA follows a young leftist Edson and his love interest, aspiring filmmaker Maria, played by Joel Barcellos and Maria do Rosário, respectively. The plot takes a dark turn when Edson, in an attempt to raise fast money for Maria’s film, is baselessly arrested and tortured for his suspected involvement in a plot to overthrow the regime. Ironically, JARDIM’s seditious content led to its interception by the real Brazilian military government, which used the infamous 1968 Ato Institucional Número Cinco [Institutional Act Number Five] to censor the press, music, film, theater, and television for inflammatory political and moral content. JARDIM was barred from public screenings and some scenes were destroyed or lost forever.

The film showcases D’Almeida’s signature style as an auteur: he breaks the fourth wall of his fictional narratives with shots of political propaganda and photographs to communicate subversive (and ironic) ideological concepts to the audience. These elements reportedly impressed Oiticica, who met D’Almeida at a private screening of JARDIM DE GUERRA in Brazil, initiating the duo’s artistic relationship. The scenes on view here showcase D’Almeida’s radical political commentary, with his ideas and imagery of Latin America, war, race, and drugs foreshadowing his later collaboration with Oiticica on the Cosmococas.


MANGUE BANGUE
dir. Neville D’almeida, 1971
Brazil. 62 mins.
No dialogue.

SATURDAY, MARCH 16 – 3 PM followed by discussion with Neville D’almeida
ONE SCREENING ONLY!

D’Almeida originally imagined MANGUE BANGUE as a collaboration with Oiticica, but the latter’s transcontinental move led D’Almeida to complete the film himself, editing the project in London to avoid censorship. The silent film’s story loosely follows a stockbroker as he devolves into a primitive creature that raves between Rio de Janeiro’s financial center and Mangue, the neighboring red-light district, before disappearing into the jungle. Blurring the line between documentary and fiction, D’Almeida integrated long sequences of actors and real people performing common tasks, from laundry to drug use, to capture the ordinary lives of criminal and marginalized figures in Brazil. The film was shown for the first time on March 9, 1973, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to a handpicked group of Brazilian and North American artists and critics. Oiticica was taken immediately with the film’s adept visual representation of the minutiae of everyday life, writing that “MANGUE BANGUE is not a naturalist document of life-as-it-is or a search on the part of a poet-artist for what’s fucked up in life: it is rather the perfect measure of the film-sound gaps-fragments of concrete elements.”

The raw authenticity of the film and its extended visual sequences were key forerunners to the Cosmococas, the first of which was created only four days after the screening of MANGUE BANGUE.

NEVILLE D’ALMEIDA was born in 1941 in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil. He became devoted to cinema at age sixteen, when he joined the film club at the Estudos Cinematográficos de Belo Horizonte [Center of Cinematographic Studies of Belo Horizonte] and was exposed to various global cinema movements. The artist moved to New York during the 1960s to continue his cinema studies before returning to Brazil, where he created experimental films that gained a reputation for their frequent censorship. His early feature films JARDIM DE GUERRA (1967), PIRANHAS DO ASFALTO (1971), NIGHT CATS (1972) and SURUCUCU CATIRIPAPO (1973) were intercepted by the Brazilian military government, who destroyed scenes and prevented the movies’ public display.

D’Almeida found commercial and critical success with his erotic drama A DAMA DO LOTACAO (LADY ON THE BUS, 1978) starring actress Sônia Braga, which remains the sixth highest-grossing movie in Brazilian cinema history. His subsequent movies in the same genre, OS SETE GATINHOS (THE SEVEN KITTENS, 1980) and RIO BABILONIA (RIO BABYLON, 1983) were also national box-office hits. In 1991, he was awarded best director both at Festival Brasília do Cinema Brasileiro (Brasília Festival of Brazilian Cinema) and Festival de Cinema de Gramado (Gramado Film Festival) for MATOU A FAMILIA E FOI AO CINEMA (KILLED THE FAMILY AND WENT TO THE MOVIES, 1991). D’Almeida currently lives in Rio de Janeiro, where he continues to make films.

DANIELA MAYER is a New York based Brazilian-American researcher, educator, and curator focused on transnational artist networks across the Americas. More on her projects here.

THE ALL GOLDEN

THE ALL GOLDEN
dir. Nate Wilson, 2023
65 mins. Canada.
In English.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 12 – 7:30 PM followed by an in-person Q+A with filmmaker Nate Wilson moderated by film critic Nick Newman
(This event is $10.)

ONE NIGHT ONLY!

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Nate Wilson’s THE ALL GOLDEN is a thriller about an injured bicycle courier who discovers a scandalous secret in her boyfriend’s apartment, BUT WAIT… it’s also non-linear experiment about identity and sexuality, BUT WAIT… it’s also a treatise on the trials and tribulations of no-budget filmmaking, a movie that splinters and becomes the subject of itself, BUT WAIT… it’s also VERY funny!

“Absolutely nuts. Never seen anything like it. Extremely low budget, deconstructive, intense, honestly annoyingly experimental at times, and 100% nonlinear YET engaging, hilarious, sexy, disgusting, and somehow follow-able (like the movie feels like you’re having a literal dream – you have no idea what’s “actually” happening linearly or logically but you FEEL understand  and know everything that is happening…it’s wild). My favorite kind of movie. Need to see more Lea in movies. Need to watch more movies directed by Nate.” – Vera Drew, director of THE PEOPLE’S JOKER

“Formal fuckery of the highest order. Hard not to admire the film’s economy and conviction in forging its own way, constantly reinventing the lens in which it should be viewed. Must be something in the water out there in Canada.” – Tuck The Suck Man, letterboxd

NATE WILSON is a filmmaker based in Toronto. His past credits include FUCK BUDDIES, BONEFIRE and the 2022 Fantastic Fest selection THE STRAIGHT BALL.

screening with

THE TAKING OF JORDAN (ALL AMERICAN BEAUTY)
Dir. Kalil Haddad, 2022
7 mins. Canada.
In English.

Jordan, an amateur adult performer, recalls the horror of his many former lives.

SCOTT BARTLETT: THE MEANING OF THE UNIVERSE

This September, Spectacle is proud to present a retrospective of the luminary American experimental filmmaker SCOTT BARTLETT in collaboration with The Film-Makers’ Cooperative. Thank you to the generosity of the Co-Op and joint programmer Robert Schneider, the films in this program will be projected on 16mm.

Scott Barlett (1943 – 1990) was a traveling man with a fancy for strobing lights and fast motion. His films are pure psychedelia. Patching together philosophical ramblings on mystic traditions, hit songs from the ‘60s and ‘70s, and wobbly light patterns, Bartlett creates pithy works of genius. To this day, he remains best known for 1968’s OFFON, a gleaming vision of the cosmos that tested the limits of early video technology and set Bartlett down a path of stalwart experimentation within the cinematic tradition.

After OFFON’s success, Bartlett relocated to San Francisco where he became a light-show pioneer, creating flicker films for concerts and art shows all over the city. His films caught the attention of Stanley Kubrick (who took inspiration from OFFON for 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY), Ken Russell, and Movie Brats George Lucas and Francis Coppola who tried but failed to get his science fiction epic INTERFACE off the ground. Nonetheless, his keen graphic sensibilities are sprinkled throughout many Hollywood films, including ALTERED STATES and MORE AMERICAN GRAFFITI. But his true talent is best displayed throughout his unbridled directorial ventures which combine his fascinations with psychedelics, mysticism, and outer space into visual portals that open gateways into unseen dimensions of cinematic splendor.

PROGRAM ONE: To the Moon and Beyond

MAKING OFFON. 1981. 10 mins.
METANOMEN. 1966. 8 mins.
SERPENT. 1971. 14 mins.
MOON 1969. 1969. 10 mins.
OFFON. 1968. 9 mins.

Total runtime approx 50 mins.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 – 3:00 PM, this event is $10
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Scott Bartlett was haunted by outer space throughout his life. In a lecture at the Carnegie Museum of Art, he said he wanted to express “the meaning of the universe” by depicting visions of the cosmos that surpassed the limits of human consciousness. His crowning achievement, OFFON, might represent the zenith of these ambitions, but Bartlett’s intense curiosity in space is shared across many of his short films.

Made in 1981, while Bartlett was teaching in Los Angeles, MAKING OFFON dives back into his origins as a filmmaker and sets the scene for his artistic mission. His first film, METANOMEN, still sees him stuck on Earth. Collaging images of skyscrapers into a rollicking city tour, the film foretells Bartlett’s consuming interest with worlds beyond our own. SERPENT — a magic mushroom-inspired retelling of the Eden myth — finds Bartlett playing with recycled imagery in an attempt to link various historical narratives into a short parable about humanity’s destructive tendencies. MOON 1969 and OFFON take Bartlett elsewhere and are best described by film critic Gene Youngblood as “the cosmos in continual transformation” and explorations of the “fundamental realities below the surface of normal perception” respectively.

PROGRAM TWO: It was the ‘70s

1970. 1972. 30 min.
A TRIP TO THE MOON. 1968. 32 min.

Total runtime approx. 62 mins.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 – 3:00 PM, this event is $10
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Bartlett’s longest works are also the most emblematic of his era. The tragicomic 1970 is a city symphony unlike any other. Moving between personal documentary and city portrait, 1970 displays Bartlett’s incredible ability to shift between the world’s micro and macro elements in his artistic practice. In A TRIP TO THE MOON, he films a conversation between seven artists discussing astrology and I Ching. Bartlett’s effortless control of the edit complements the artists’ metaphysical conversation, as he superimposes talking heads and cuts away to abstract images that illustrate their heady ideas.

PROGRAM THREE: Cultural Studies

LOVEMAKING. 1970. 13 min. (Not on 16mm; New Restoration from BAMPFA)
GREENFIELD. 1977. 13 min.
HEAVY METAL. 1979. 13 min.
MEDINA. 1976. 15 min.
SOUND OF ONE. 1976. 11 min.

Total runtime approx 65 mins.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 – 3:00 PM, this event is $10
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Always absorbed by his surroundings, Bartlett made exceptional ethnographic works and personal portraits throughout his life. In LOVEMAKING, he tackled his eponymous subject matter head on, creating an anti-sexploitation film that luxuriates in its romantic imaging of sex. GREENFIELD sees him venture to a commune in Northern California where he becomes absorbed in the free rhythms of its residents’ work and leisure. For HEAVY METAL, Bartlett used elaborate optical techniques to explore early gangster films. MEDINA and SOUND OF ONE both center Bartlett’s interests in non-Western traditions. Here, Bartlett surrenders himself to his environs, letting their patterns and actions guide his camera’s movement.

>Special thanks to Robert Schneider at The Film-Makers’ Co-Op.

FLUID DYNAMICS: FILMS BY MAXIMILIEN LUC PROCTOR

This September, Spectacle is thrilled to welcome avant-garde filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Maximilien Luc Proctor for two consecutive nights of films and discussion, including the first-ever NYC screening of Proctor’s 16mm works. This program was organized in collaboration with Phil Coldiron, who prefaces Proctor’s work as follows:

Lately, it can feel like a bleak joke to apply the adjective “independent” to anything related to the movies. Criticism mostly exists as content marketing for VC-backed corporations. The world of the indie narrative film is a dispiriting swamp of calling cards, and the spaces that once housed the historical avant-garde are clotted with interlopers from the blue-chip art world making work that often feels like sitting through a grant proposal. Still, there are scattered reasons for hope, chief among them the new small-scale lyricism that’s recently blossomed across Europe: films shot on 8- and 16mm with Bolexes passed between friends, processed on the cheap in cooperative labs, and shown in venues that make no promise of anything besides an audience that actually cares.

This is the context from which the Oklahoma-born, Berlin-based Maximilien Luc Proctor has emerged. Over the last few years, beyond running Ultra Dogme, a gratifyingly scrappy platform for criticism and streaming, and playing in the decidedly algorithm-unfriendly band Two Nice Catholic Boys (alongside UD editor Ruairí McCann), Proctor has produced a few dozen films, most of them single rolls of celluloid edited in camera. Ranging from the Arcadian village of Raftis to the American Southwest, he records oblique impressions with a sharp eye for composition and an intuitive sense of rhythm, gently arguing in favor of the minor and the fleeting. This early-career survey brings together a selection of his shorts along with the digital feature, SREĆAN PUT, and offers a rare opportunity to chart the ongoing refinement of a young artist’s craft in real time.

PROGRAM ONE: NESTED FOCUS
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 – 7:30 PM with Maximilien Luc Proctor in person for Q+A!
(This event is $10.)

ONE NIGHT ONLY! ADVANCE TICKETS

ALL THE BEST
2022. 3 min. 16mm.

CRUCES
2023. 6 min. 16mm.

WASHINGTON (UNTITLED)
2022. 4 min. 16mm.

FLUID DYNAMICS: STEADY FLOW
2022. 4 min. 16mm.

FLUID DYNAMICS: UNSTEADY FLOW
2022. 2 min. 16mm.

RAFTI(S)
2022. 2 min. 16mm.

(against interpretation)
2023. 4 min. 16mm.

FLUID FRAGMENTS
2023. 4 min. 16mm.

PROGRAM TWO: HAPPY TRAILS
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 – 7:30 PM with Maximilien Luc Proctor in person for Q+A!
(This event is $10.)

ONE NIGHT ONLY! ADVANCE TICKETS

the sound of the sky reflected in water
2021. 3 min. Super 8mm-to-digital.

summercycle iii
2022. 3 min. Super 8mm-to-digital.

summercycle iv
2023. 3 min. Super 8mm-to-digital.

SREĆAN PUT
(HAPPY TRAILS)
2021. 93 min. Digital.

MAXIMILIEN LUC PROCTOR is a French-American filmmaker, critic and curator. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma with honors in Film and Media Studies in 2014 before moving to Heidelberg, where he shot his first feature film, FRAGMENTS OF A MEMORY OF A FILM, while working as a barista and karaoke host. In 2017 he moved to Berlin and completed his second feature film, SREĆAN PUT, in 2021. He records music in the band Two Nice Catholic Boys and co-hosts a monthly analog screening salon with Christian Flemm. He is the founder and co-editor of Ultra Dogme, and the avant-garde instructor for Berlin’s Art-on-the-Run film school.

The filmmaker would like to give special thanks to the people who helped make these films possible: phili c, Christian Flemm, Ruairí McCann, Martin Bremer, Malkah Manouel, Florian Weigl, Nicholas Christenson, Tijana Perović, Oath, Valentin Duceac, Bali Govindarajan, Big Waves of Pretty, Bobi, and my families

SREĆAN PUT poster by Đorđe Vidojević

LE ORME + FILMS BY JEANNE LIOTTA

LE ORME
(aka FOOTPRINTS)
(aka FOOTPRINTS ON THE MOON)
(aka PRIMAL IMPULSE)
dir. Luigi Bazzoni, 1975
96 mins. Italy.
In dubbed English with a few minutes of Italian.

SUNDAY, JULY 23 – DUSK at ARVERNE CINEMA
ONE NIGHT ONLY! (LE ORME will return to Spectacle in August 2023.)

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Spectacle is thrilled to partner with Rockaway Film Festival for a special outdoor presentation of Luigi Bazzoni’s surreal psychological thriller LE ORME (1975). Newly scanned in 4K from the original camera negatives by Severin Films, LE ORME will be preceded by cosmic short films by avant-garde filmmaker Jeanne Liotta who will join us in attendance.

In Luigi Bazzoni’s uniquely hallucinatory LE ORME, memories of a science fiction film seen in childhood return to haunt Alice (Florinda Bolkan, of LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN). The fragments of the film lodged in her memory concern an astronaut left behind on the moon; as Alice becomes more and more preoccupied with this vision, her life begins to spin out of control.

Shown at Spectacle in its first “Spectober” programme, LE ORME (originally reedited and rereleased in the States and Europe as PRIMAL IMPULSE) is an unsung masterpiece of 70s genre cinema, marrying the sustained ambient dread of gialli with god-tier cinematography by Vittorio Storaro (just after lensing Elizabeth Taylor in the similarly mental IDENTITK and before Bertolucci’s epic folly NOVOCENTO.) Klaus Kinski features in an extended cameo as the head of Mission Control.

“This hallucinatory Italian film resists easy classification, attempting to subjectively portray the fractured, paranoid psyche of a woman suddenly haunted by memories of a bizarre science fiction film seen in childhood. Florinda Balkan drifts through cinematographer Vittorio Storaro‘s strange, beautiful tableaux much like Monica Vitti in RED DESERT. Often mischaracterized as a giallo—I suppose simply because it’s Italian and stars Balkan—this is more of a haunting puzzle film grinding inexorably toward abject hysterics.”Screen Slate

“Psychedelically haunting… An existentialist adventure that combines the narrative mystery of SOLARIS with the vivid visions of Argento.”Electric Sheep Magazine

“Seek it out and unravel its mystery…One of the most unique and overlooked Italian films of the ‘70s.”Moon In The Gutter

JEANNE LIOTTA makes films, video, moving image installations, projector performances and other media operating at a lively intersection of art, science,& natural philosophy. Her signature 16mm film of the night skies, OBSERVANDO EL CIELO (2007), has won many prizes including the prestigious Tiger Award at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, and was voted among the top ten films of the decade by The Film Society of Lincoln Center. Her films and videos have been screened around the world, including The Whitney Biennial, The New York Film Festival, SFMOMA, The Cinematheque Francais, Museo Nitsch in Naples Italy, The Wexner Center for the Arts, The Menil Collection Houston, The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver . Her works are included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Vienna Film Museum, The European Media Arts Collection, Harvard and Duke Universities. Liotta is a Professor of Moving Image Arts at CU Boulder and is also on the faculty at The Bard MFA program in the Hudson Valley. She is represented by Microscope Gallery, NYC where she has had two solo exhibitions, “Break the Sky”(2018) and “The World is a Picture of The World” (2021). Her films and video works are distributed by Lightcone in Paris, France.

COLLECTIVE CINEMA AND SURVIVING 1968

TUESDAY, JUNE 13 – 7PM with Newsreel members in attendance
(This event is $10.)
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

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Join us on June 13 for a screening of collectively made films from 1968-1980, presented by Giulia Gabrielli and Matt Peterson, based on their research and interviews with the Newsreel collective (1967-1972), a survey of politically engaged and collaboratively produced international cinema.

Featuring rarely screened works by Newsreel, Collectif Mohamed, IDHEC Student Collective, Elio Petri and Italian Filmmakers Committee Against Repression, the screening is part of a larger series which will also take place at Maysles Cinema in Harlem with Newsreel Shorts on June 22.

MAKE OUT
dir. Newsreel, 1970
5 mins. United States.

As a young couple make out in a car, we hear the woman’s stream of consciousness thoughts. She worries about her reputation and whether he’ll try to “go all the way.” This film is best used with discussions and/or materials about date rape.

THREE HYPOTHESES ON GUISEPPE PINELLI’S DEATH
dir. Elio Petri, 1970
11 mins. Italy.
In Italian with English subtitles.

Some actors, led by Gian Maria Volonté, enact the three different versions that the police provided on the voluntary or accidental fall of the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli.

PIG POWER
dir. Newsreel, 1968
4 mins. United States.

As students take to the streets in New York and Berkeley, the state violence that follows illustrates Chicago Mayor Daley’s thesis that the police are there “to preserve disorder”.

THEY KILLED KADER
(ILS ONT TUE KADER)
dir. Collectif Mohamed, 1980
21 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

After the death of a young man from Vitry, killed by a building guard, the media come to the housing estate to do a report and get images from the Collective. A film that raises many questions about the role of the media in the suburbs, and the need to produce images oneself.

LINCOLN HOSPITAL
dir. Newsreel, 1970
11 mins. United States.

When a city-run health clinic in the South Bronx fails to meet the needs of the city, local residents and health workers force a strike and then run the clinic themselves.

RETURN TO WORK AT THE WONDER FACTORY
dirs. Jacques Willemont, Pierre Bonneau, Liane Estiez, Roland Chicheportiche, 1968
10 min. France.
In French with English subtitles.

In June 1968, after the Grenelle Agreements, work resumed at the Wonder factories in Saint-Ouen, in the northern suburbs of Paris. In the midst of an essentially male group, a young female worker refused to go back to work.

THE CASE AGAINST LINCOLN CENTER
dir. Newsreel, 1968
12 min. United States.

More than 20,000 Latino families were displaced to make way for Lincoln Center, home to the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Symphony. This film examines the patrons of the art-industrial complex (corporations and wealthy families) and the culture displayed there. Juxtaposing the atmosphere of Lincoln Center with the vibrant street culture of a displaced neighborhood, the film correctly predicts the process by which the West Side was to be turned into a high-rent area for the upper middle class.

GIULIA GABRIELLI is an artist, researcher, assistant and director from the Mediterranean. She tries to interrupt work. With what they called a life. Giulia is involved in experiments in and on (dis)organizing communal forms of sociality and encounter. She considers scripts and artistic conventions as sometimes helpful devices.

MATT PETERSON is an organizer at Woodbine, an experimental space in New York City. He directed the documentary features SCENES FROM A REVOLT SUSTAINED (2014) and SPACES OF EXCEPTION (2018), and co-edited the books In the Name of the People (2018), The Mohawk Warrior Society (2022) and The Reservoir (2022). Since 2014 he has collaborated with Malek Rasamny on “The Native and the Refugee”, a multimedia documentary project on American Indian reservations and Palestinian refugee camps.

POSTHUMOUS PROPERTY

SATURDAY, JUNE 17 – 5:30 PM with filmmaker Adam Samuel Goldman in person for Q+A moderated by Zed Adams!
(This event is $10.)
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
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OBGB presents POSTHUMOUS PROPERTY, two video essays about inordinate attempts to maintain control over artists’ intellectual property after their deaths:

THE MARK TWAIN COMPANY
dir. Adam Samuel Goldman, 1999
30 mins. United States.
In English.

Adam Samuel Goldman’s THE MARK TWAIN COMPANY recounts how the titular company was founded in 1908 as a way of establishing unprecedented legal control over an artist’s public persona.It has never been released onVHS/DVD. Goldman will attend the screening, and participate in a post-screening discussion with Zed Adams from the New School for Social Research.

“Adam Goldman‘s deadpan inventory of the evolution of Twain’s familial and cultural bequests constitutes a canny critical treatise on relations between artists, estates, heirs, intellectual property, and public memory. Masterfully controlled, the half-hour work offers crucial insights into how artistic intentions are unexpectedly transformed by historical forces.” – Craig Baldwin

THE FANCY
dir. Elisabeth Subrin, 2000
35 mins. United States.
In English.

Elisabeth Subrin’s THE FANCY uses recreations of Francesca Woodman‘s photographs to expose the ways that Woodman’s posthumous lionization involved both her family and the art world pigeonholing Woodward’s work into preconceived categories.

“[THE FANCY is] one of the most moving evocations of the irreplaceable quiddity of a person. … Somehow Ms. Subrin confers immortality on her subject while at the same time making vivid her irrevocable absence.” – A. O. Scott, The New York Times

This is the first installment of the OCCASIONAL BRIEF GLIMPSES OF BEAUTY (OBGB) documentary series.

OUR BODIES ARE STILL ALIVE: SIX FILMS BY ROSA VON PRAUNHEIM

Following the success of last year’s program of activist documentaries by legendary gay German filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim, queer film historian and programmer Elizabeth Purchell (of AGFA and Ask Any Buddy) returns to Spectacle with a survey of Praunheim’s work from the 80s and early 90s. From the bleakly acidic AIDS satire A VIRUS KNOWS NO MORALS to the surprisingly heartwarming trans biopic/doc hybrid I AM MY OWN WOMAN, these six features show the filmmaker at his peak, using both the trappings of genre and his own unique handmade visual aesthetic to interrogate queerness, gender, and German society throughout history in a way that clearly presaged the much more well-known New Queer Cinema of the 90s. All worldwide festival favorites, these films also feature collaborations with a number of beloved cult figures, including trans icons Jayne County and Angie Stardust, and Praunheim’s greatest muse, the septuagenarian dancer and concentration camp survivor Lotti Huber.

RED LOVE
(ROTE LIEBE)
dir. Rosa von Praunheim, 1982
80 minutes. Germany.
In German with English subtitles.

TICKETS HERE
FRIDAY, JUNE 2 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 23 – MIDNIGHT

In this self-proclaimed attack on good taste, Rosa von Praunheim smashes a lavishly produced adaptation of Soviet diplomat Alexandra Kollontai’s A Great Love together with a crudely shot-on-video interview with radical sex activist Helga Goetz, the ex-housewife mother of seven who’d claimed to have had sex with over 200 partners after discovering the free love movement in the 60s. Borne out of Praunheim’s disappointment with the original, more traditional cut of his adaptation of Kollontai’s novella, RED LOVE becomes something more than the sum of its two parts: a singular, punk tribute to two revolutionary women.

CITY OF LOST SOULS
(STADT DER VERLORENEN SEELEN)
dir. Rosa von Praunheim, 1982
91 minutes. Germany.
In German and English with English subtitles.

TICKETS HERE
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 7 – 10 PM

MONDAY, JUNE 12 – 7:30 PM

Onetime 82 Club performer and trans pioneer Angie Stardust becomes den mother to a group of weirdo queer American émigrés at her Berlin burger restaurant slash boarding house in this absurdist glam musical. Largely drawn from the real-life backgrounds of its stars—including punk icon Jayne County, performance artist Juaquin la Habana, and porn star Tron von Hollywood—and with a number of new wave earworms taken from County and Hollywood’s live U-Bahn to Memory Lane revue, CITY OF LOST SOULS is inclusive, incisive, and one of the greatest trans films ever made.

HORROR VACUI: THE FEAR OF EMPTINESS
(HORROR VACUI: DIE ANGST VOR DER LEERE)
dir. Rosa von Praunheim, 1984
85 minutes. Germany.
In German with English subtitles.

TICKETS HERE
FRIDAY, JUNE 9 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 28 – 10 PM

A young gay couple is torn apart when one of the lovers is drawn into the mysterious Madame C’s cult of ‘Optimal Optimism’ in this takedown of religion and the self-help industry. With a gorgeously handmade aesthetic that could easily be described as ‘Red Grooms meets THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI,’ appearances from Praunheim regulars Joaquin la Habana and Günter Thews, and an especially committed performance by the great Lotti Huber, HORROR VACUI: THE FEAR OF EMPTINESS is a biting satire that’s as unsettling as it is funny.

A VIRUS KNOWS NO MORALS
(EIN VIRUS KENNT KEINE MORAL)
dir. Rosa von Praunheim, 1986
84 minutes. Germany.
In German with English subtitles.

TICKETS HERE
FRIDAY, JUNE 16 – 10 PM


TICKETS HERE
SATURDAY, JUNE 24 – 7:30 PM on 16mm!
(This event is $10.)

Meet some of the faces of AIDS in Germany: a capitalist bathhouse owner (played by Rosa von Praunheim himself) who refuses to shut down his business even as he succumbs to disease, a virologist whose research is centered around extracting as much money from the dying as possible, and a straight woman who wants to make it with a gay man ‘before they go extinct.’ Both a precursor to Praunheim’s AIDS Trilogy (screened last year) and the first German film to directly address the epidemic, A VIRUS KNOWS NO MORALS is a caustic, take-no-prisoners satire on the AIDS Industrial Complex and those who sought to both profit from the virus and downplay its threat, and one of the most radical AIDS films of the 80s.

ANITA: DANCES OF VICE
(ANITA: TÄNZE DES LASTERS)
dir. Rosa von Praunheim, 1987
89 minutes. Germany.
In German with English subtitles.

TICKETS HERE
SATURDAY, JUNE 10 – MIDNIGHT

MONDAY, JUNE 26 – 7:30 PM

The true story of Anita Berber, the notorious bisexual who scandalized Weimar Germany with her own particular brand of nude cabaret before dying of tuberculosis at 29, is brought to life in the visions of an eccentric old woman living in present-day Berlin in this shimmering tribute to silent-era German cinema. Written specifically as a starring vehicle for Praunheim’s muse Lotti Huber, ANITA: DANCES OF VICE is the ultimate expression of the filmmaker’s 80s aesthetic and a clear precursor to New Queer Cinema classics like SWOON and POISON.

I AM MY OWN WOMAN + CHARLOTTE IN SWEDEN
(ICH BIN MEINE EIGENE FRAU + CHARLOTTE IN SCHWEDEN)
dir. Rosa von Praunheim, 1992 + 2003
105 minutes (combined). Germany.
In German with English subtitles.

TICKETS HERE
SATURDAY, JUNE 17 – 3 PM


TICKETS HERE
SATURDAY, JUNE 24 – 5 PM ON 16mm!
(This event is $10.)

East German trans icon Charlotte von Mahlsdorf guides Rosa von Praunheim through the retelling of her incredible life story in this biopic that blurs the lines between traditional narrative and documentary. As much about the joys of collecting antique furniture as it is Mahlsdorf’s role in fostering and protecting queer community in East Berlin, I AM MY OWN WOMAN is one of the few trans biopics to truly feel as radical and as original as its subject. Paired with von Praunheim’s short 2003 follow-up, CHARLOTTE IN SWEDEN.