The Masters of Italian Exploitation series returns to Spectacle this March to showcase Luigi Bazzoni, one of Italy’s unsung masters of genre cinema. Bazzoni began his career as the assistant director to Mauro Bolognini before stepping into the director’s chair in 1963 with the short films DI DOMENICA and UN DELITTO. Two years later, Bazzoni would direct his first feature film, THE POSSESSED, and follow it up with four more. Even though he only directed five feature films in his career, they are regarded as some of the best Spaghetti Western and Giallo movies ever made.

LE ORME, Bazzoni’s final feature, played throughout 2023 at Spectacle, returning for the best of Spectacle in January 2024. This series will focus on his earlier Giallo films, THE POSSESSED and THE FIFTH CORD.

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THE POSSESSED
(AKA LA DONNA DEL LAGO)
(AKA THE LADY OF THE LAKE)
dir. Luigi Bazzoni, Franco Rossellini. 1965.
Italy. 94 mins.
In Italian with English Subs.

FRIDAY, MARCH 8TH – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13TH – 10 PM
SATURDAY, MARCH 23RD – 5 PM
THURSDAY, MARCH 28TH – 7:30 PM

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Upon returning to a sleepy lakeside town, a writer learns that the woman he had been infatuated with has died by suicide. Devastated by the news, he investigates her death and soon discovers a dark secret.

Bazzoni’s first feature-length film, THE POSSESSED, is a mastery of slow-burn mystery and suspense. The film delivers classic Noir tropes – a sad investigator, a mysterious woman, and a dead body – with flashes of excessive violence and a hint of the supernatural, foreshadowing the future of Giallo.

Thematically and tonally similar to Bazoni’s later film LE ORME, THE POSSESSED plunges the audience into a familiar tale of deception and self-doubt. Whereas LE ORME relied on color to create the film’s dream-like aesthetic, Bazzoni shot THE POSSESSED in black and white. The cinematography gives THE POSSESSED a haunted quality that accentuates the ominous atmosphere, resulting in a tone closer to a nightmare than a dream.

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THE FIFTH CORD
(AKA  GIORNATA NERA PER I’ARIETE)
(AKA BLACK DAY OF THE RAM)
dir. Luigi Bazzoni, 1971.
Italy. 93 mins.
In Italian with English Subs.

FRIDAY, MARCH 8TH – 10 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 12TH – 10 PM
MONDAY, MARCH 18TH – 10 PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 24TH – 5 PM

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Andrea, an alcoholic journalist, is thrust into chaos after a killer targets his acquaintances. As the prime suspect, he must race against the clock to discover the killer’s identity and clear his name. 

Where Bazzoni’s other thrillers inspired or drew inspiration from Giallo films, THE FIFTH CORD falls squarely within the genre. Even though the Giallo genre is often synonymous with eccentricity and violence, which this film has incredible flourishes of, Bazzoni doesn’t stray too far from his signature slow burn, reserved style. This combination makes THE FIFTH CORD an anxiety-inducing fever dream that will keep you guessing until the last moment.

With cinematography by Vittorio Storara (APOCALYPSE NOW, LE ORME), a score by Ennio Morricone, and a killer performance by Franco Nero, THE FIFTH CORD is widely considered one of the most visually and audibly stunning Giallos ever made.

This February, Spectacle continues with our Palestine fundraising series, spotlighting films from across the Arab world with two programs of documentaries made within the context of Palestine-solidarity filmmaking in the tumultuous decades of the 1970s and ‘80s. Each of these films were directed by Arab women, and with the exception of Jocelyne Saab’s BEIRUT, MY CITY, were all made in collaboration with, or with support from, the Palestine Cinema Institute (PCI) in Lebanon and the General Union of Palestinian Women.

Films from Khadijeh Habashneh, founder of the General Union of Palestinian Women, and Jocelyne Saab describe the situation for the women and orphans of Palestine, while films from Lebanon by Jocelyne Saab and Randa Chahal Sabbag document that nation’s sprawling and drawn-out civil war and its intersections with contemporaneous events in Palestine.

All proceeds raised will benefit relief efforts. Special thanks is given to Samirah Alkassim for her assistance in assembling this program.

Content warning: These programs contains explicit images of war and death.

PROGRAM 1: TWO FILMS BY JOCELYNE SAAB

Jocelyne Saab began her career as a documentarian at the outset of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. She would spend the next decade and a half documenting the many splintering conflicts of the war and its effects across her homeland. Following her experience working as second unit director on Volker Schlöndorff’s Circle of Deceit (1981), Saab began to work in fiction and would only rarely return to documentary, stating in a 1982 interview that, “This documentary phase wasn’t only linked to my personal history; it was determined by my country’s political situation and Lebanon’s cinema history. My trajectory is a bit like that of other Lebanese filmmakers. If I decided to move to fiction it’s because, after speaking in a ‘militant’ manner, I now want the image to speak as much as possible.”

Spectacle is proud to present two of Saab’s early documentaries: the French television-commissioned Palestinian Women (1973) and the second installment of her masterful Beirut Trilogy, Beirut, My City (1983).

PALESTINIAN WOMEN
(LES FEMMES PALESTINIENNES)
Dir. Jocelyne Saab, 1974.
France, State of Palestine. 15 mins.
In Arabic and French with English subtitles.

This early work by Saab finds her interviewing Palestinian women (students and soldiers, mothers and children), giving these often unheard voices a chance to speak to their conditions and experiences of the occupation. This early work by Saab was commissioned by French television, but was never aired and long thought lost. In it, one can see the stirrings of her investigations into the twin themes of liberty and memory that she would follow for the rest of her career.

screening with
BEIRUT, MY CITY
(بيروت مدينتي)
Dir. Jocelyne Saab, 1983.
Lebanon, France. 38 min.
In Arabic and French with English subtitles.

Near the start of the film, Saab and her co-writer, Lebanese playwright Roger Assaf, consider their ambivalence towards their native Beirut before the war; “A supermarket of fishy business and betrayal, that’s what Beirut was.” But the affection for the city evident in Saab’s images – of its architecture and its coastline, to say nothing of its people – betray these feelings. Later, Assaf’s gentle voiceover describes Beirut as a utopia, and because of what Saab has shown us, it is easy to believe him. 

These conflicting feelings over a place and its history are what Saab and Assaf pry at in this short but profoundly moving masterwork. Assaf considers the corruptibility of memory, lamenting that, “Man always believes what he sees, and what he sees ends up cheating him.” Saab’s footage is intercut with news coverage of the war – occupying soldiers, bombings, entire families of corpses. Yet Saab’s own scenes of life in Beirut assert the power of the image to correct memory. If memory is produced by bearing witness, Saab entreats us to look with her, and to consider which images we choose to remember.

TICKETS HERE
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 5 – 7:30PM
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10 – 5PM
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 21 – 7:30PM
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 25 – 5PM

PROGRAM 2: CHILDREN, NEVERTHELESS & STEP BY STEP…

Paired together, Khadijeh Habashneh’s Children, Nevertheless and Randa Chahal Sabbag’s Step by Step provide a micro and macro view on neighboring Lebanon and Palestine’s history of solidarity and discord, both motivated by the Arab Nationalist movement.

CHILDREN, NEVERTHELESS
(أطفال …ولكن)
Dir. Khadijeh Habashneh, 1979.
State of Palestine. 22 mins.
In Arabic with English subtitles.

In 1976, the Tel al-Zatar refugee camp came under siege from right-wing militias looking to expel Palestinians from Lebanon. The violence peaked with a massacre in which hundreds of children died and 15,000 residents were forced to flee — half of them children, some of them too small to be able to say their own names. Produced by the PCI and the GUPW, Children Nevertheless (also known as Children Without Childhood) shows the lives of the orphans of those killed in the massacre now living in Bait El-Somoud, a housing facility which was established for them by the GUPW. Habashneh’s film discusses the contradictions between the International Declaration of Child Rights and the reality of the living conditions of Palestinian children suffering in diaspora camps and under the Israeli occupation.

screening with
STEP BY STEP…
(Pas á pas…)
Dir. Randa Chahal Sabbag, 1979.
Lebanon, France. 80 mins.
In Arabic and French with English subtitles.

Shot between February 1976 and March 1978, Step by Step compacts the chaos of the Lebanese civil war into its short run time using archival images, news broadcasts, interviews, and raw documentary footage. Sabbag’s work is sprawling, brutal, and poetic in its approach and clarity even as the span of history it attempts to communicate is long and winding. In the lead up to the civil war, Palestinian refugees spilled in increasing numbers through the Lebanese border and the PLO’s operations within Lebanon alarmed the conservative Phalangist Party. Formed in 1936 by Pierre Gemayel after visiting Germany, the Phalangists were a right-wing Maronite Christian political group that dominated the Lebanese civil war, collaborated with Israel, and fought against pro-Palestinian forces. Sabbag’s film places the Palestinian struggle for liberation in the context of this broader conflict, tracing the dismemberment of Lebanon and the shifting balance of powers in the Middle East as the United States (via Henry Kissinger) manipulated the region during this time.

TICKETS HERE
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7 – 7:30PM
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 11 – 5PM
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 24 – 5PM
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 26 – 7:30PM

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CLASSIC PARTS – R. G. STUDIOS
Dir. R. G. Miller
United States. 40 mins.
In English

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 4 – 7 PM
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 16– MIDNIGHT
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 18 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 29 – 10 PM

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In this collection of sci-fi shorts, Kansas-based filmmaker R.G. Miller taps into a dimension beyond the Twilight Zone. Working with familiar sci-fi tropes—inter-dimensional travel, scientific mishaps, monsters—on a low-budget, Miller’s films are a product of creative ambition and aesthetic limitations. Much like the subjects they entertain, short films like THE WAVE MATTER MACHINE and THE SHADOW PEOPLE assume an experimental and incendiary quality that is alternately baffling and sublime. As a whole, CLASSIC PARTS compiles the best of Miller’s action sci-fi thrillers, which star himself, friends and action figures.

R.G. Miller has been making zero-budget “Internet Art Films” of unmatched zeal out of his home in Wichita, KS for decades. 

This presentation is part of an ongoing collaboration between Spectacle and the Queens-based art publisher Random Man Editions, which specializes in broadcasting various genres of the indescribable and documenting fringe practices across analogue and digital media. More information available at randomman.net.

Special thanks to Random Man Editions, Steve Macfarlane and Steven Niedbala.

Born Ian Kerkhof in Aparteid South Africa in 1964, the Dutch writer/artist/filmmaker Aryan Kaganof has found himself associated with the most extreme names in challenging industrial and experimental art – including the likes of Merzbow, Matthew Barney, J.G. Ballard, Blixa Bargeld, Henry Rollins, Hisayasu Sato, and Peter Whitehead.

It is a wonder then that mentioning the name Aryan Kaganof in film circles often yields the same result: a concerning “Who?” Indeed, this seems to be the question all over the internet. Without a single home video release in the U.S. or film retrospective to mention, this has sent Kaganof’s work deeper into the underground than it deserves to be. We here at Spectacle aim to change that, in hope of answering the question: “Who The Hell Is Aryan Kaganof?”

WASTED!
Dir. Aryan Kaganof, 1996
Netherlands. 104 min.
In Dutch with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 3 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 9 – 5 PM
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 22 – 10 PM

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Two young lovers Jacqueline and Martijn escape to Amsterdam where their relationship is brought to the limit by the dangerous sex and drug fueled underworld. Filmed and conceived when hardcore gabber and ecstasy use in The Netherlands was at its zenith.

TOKYO ELEGY
Dir. Aryan Kaganof, 1999
Japan/Netherlands. 85 min.
In Japanese and Dutch with English subtitles.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 1 — 10 PM
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10 — MIDNIGHT
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 15 — 7:30 PM
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 19 — 10 PM

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This film – also known as SHABONDAMA ELEGY – details the sordid and deadly love affair between paranoid man-on-the-run Jack and his cunning porn star ex-sister-in-law Keiko. With a soundtrack by infamous noise artist MERZBOW, directed by a South African, starring Dutch actor Thom Hoffman and featuring a Japanese cast and crew, TOKYO ELEGY is truly an international affair.

BEYOND ULTRA VIOLENCE: UNEASY LISTENING BY MERZBOW
Dir. Aryan Kaganof, 1998
Japan/Netherlands. 72 min.
In Japanese and English with English subtitles.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 5 — 10 PM
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 9 — 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 17 — 10 PM
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 27 — 7:30 PM

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An experimental and exhilarating documentary about Masami Akita, the man many harsh noise enthusiasts know simply as MERZBOW.

Screening with:

THE SEQUENCE OF PARALLEL BARS
Dir. Aryan Kaganof, 1992
USA, 8 min.

A sexy black and white silent short from Kaganof and scored by MERZBOW.

In November, we screened seven films that dug into the long history of Palestine’s struggle for liberation. This December, we will continue this program with a selection of Palestinian fiction and nonfiction films which restage this struggle and the lives and culture of the people who persist alongside it. We hope that these films expand audience engagement with this tragic and pivotal conflict. For those already acquainted with the details of the subject, we hope this series offers an opportunity to have your beliefs reaffirmed or perhaps challenged.

At Spectacle, we pride ourselves on presenting the lost and forgotten, the marginalized, and the obscured. Little has been more (intentionally) obscured than the facts of the blood-soaked history of 20th century Palestine– a history materialized by the politics and apparatus of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and various other violent structures of Western hegemony which have turned this sliver of land in the Southern Levant into an unparalleled expression of humanity’s ideological turmoil. The ongoing Israeli bombardment of the region, triggered by Hamas’ attacks on October 7th, must be understood as a continuation of this history. It must also be seen as a reminder that the work of a people’s liberation is the obligation of all humanity, not something that can be compartmentalized or described in isolation.

The history staged in these films is that of a people engaged in a perpetual struggle for liberation from a colonialist project embodied by a regime which offers no quarter to appeals for a peaceful coexistence. As such, Zionism necessitates resistance, the means of which are subject to excessive scrutiny and furious condemnation. Spectacle does not necessarily endorse every sentiment contained within these films. We simply wish to present, in the midst of immense suffering, a selection of the often overlooked Palestinian contribution to cinema as an artform.

“My actions were my contribution to my people, to the struggle… We declared to the whole world that we are a people living through an injustice, and that the world has to help us to reach our goal.” – Leila Khaled

“To us, to liberate our country, to have dignity, to have respect, to have our mere human rights – is something as essential as life itself.” – Ghassan Kanafani

I don’t walk, I fly, I become another,
transfigured. No place and no time. So who am I?
I am no I in ascension’s presence. But I
think to myself: Alone, the prophet Muhammad
spoke classical Arabic. “And then what?”
Then what? A woman soldier shouted:
Is that you again? Didn’t I kill you?
I said: You killed me … and I forgot, like you, to die.
–In Jerusalem, Mahmoud Darwish

-all proceeds to benefit relief efforts-
From The River To The Sea // Solidarity Forever // Spectacle 2023

THE NIGHT
(الليل)
dir. Mohammad Malas, 1992
Syria.  116 min.
In Arabic with English Subtitles

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 6 – 7:30pm
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 23 – 7:30pm
TICKETS HERE

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15 – 7:00pm w Q+A (this event is $10)
TICKETS HERE

In November, Spectacle screened Mohommad Malas’ short lyrical documentary The Dream (1987). Now, we present one of his subsequent feature films, The Night (1992). Set in the village of Quneitra in the years between the Great Revolt of 1936 and the Arab–Israeli War of 1948, Malas cites Tarkovsky’s Mirror, Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, and Kurosawa’s Babarossa as references for this abstract narrative about a son who visits the resting place of his father, an old Syrian resistance fighter.

Malas explains that the film “revolves around the idea of a lost place, and covers the decade of the 1930s, when the first (of many to come) coup d’état took place and the military junta behind it consolidated power. This ended a nascent civilian rule and set a precedent that would be repeated many times thereafter, with one military coup after another conditioning the country into becoming prey for the Israeli forces that arrived in 1967, occupied the Golan Heights, and destroyed my ancestral home, the lost place, of Quneitra.”

Film scholar Samirah Alkassim, who will be joining us for a remote Q&A after the December 15 screening, describes The Night as “a puzzle with a composite protagonist fused between the characters of the mother, son, and father. The real protagonist, however, is the process of memory configured through the overlapping recollections between a son and mother of the father who died mysteriously in the expropriation of their city, Quneitra. It is as if the characters are in a loop, sifting through fragments of the past to reassemble the picture and find themselves again.”

THE TIME THAT REMAINS
( فيلم الزمن الباقي كامل )
dir. Elia Suleiman, 2009
France/Belgium/Italy/UK/UAE/Palestine/Israel. 109 min.
In Arabic and Hebrew, with English subtitles.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 4 – 7:30pm
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 13 – 7:30pm
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 22 – 5pm

TICKETS HERE

Elia Suleiman’s semi-autobiographical film is, per the director’s own words, “a family portrait and a social portrait” of Palestinian life in the decades following the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. The film casually mounts its drama as a succession of anecdotes which gather into gently traced narrative strands that detail the history of a family and their neighbors living through the second half of a century of tumult. Suleiman, who appears, wordlessly, in the latter half of the film, has often seen his films compared to those of Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton. The comparisons are apt, as his mild-mannered presence, ordered mise-en-scene, and laconic realism pull forth the blackly-comic absurdity of life under occupation.

Suleiman has referred to his presence in the film as a sort of “wingless angel” offering a neutralized gaze, but this is not to say the film is without deep currents of melancholy or anger. These feelings are profoundly present, evinced through the exhausting accumulation of injustice and violence, staged upon a landscape of such striking beauty that it can be difficult to imagine it could sustain such suffering. 

Early in the film, a Palestinian man standing before a brigade of Israeli soldiers, concedes his life to his dignity. Before putting the gun to his head, he proclaims:
 “I want no life if we’re not respected in our land. If our words are not heard echoing around the world, I shall carry my soul in my palm, tossing it into the cavern of death. Either a life to gladden the hearts of friends, or a death to torture the hearts of foes.”

RETURN TO HAIFA
( عائد الى حيفا )
Dir. by Kassem Hawal, 1982
Lebanon. 75 min.
In Arabic, English, German w/ English subtitles.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 5 – 10pm
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 19 – 7:30pm
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 23 – 5pm

TICKETS HERE

Based on Ghassan Kanafani’s eponymous 1969 novella, Return to Haifa takes place in 1967 during the Six-Day War when Palestinian refugees had an opportunity to visit the places from which they had been expelled during the 1948 Nakba. Sa’id and Safiyya, a Palestinian couple living in Ramallah, return to their home for the first time. Living there now is Miriam, a Holocaust survivor and Jewish Israeli citizen. Not realizing they would be unable to return, Sa’id and Safiyya left behind their infant son who they find has been raised by Miriam. The film depicts the Nakba as not only the tragedy of the Palestinian people but also of the Israeli settlers who cannot escape confronting this past and becoming accountable for it. Who is the father? Who is the mother? What is a homeland?

Iraqi director Kassem Hawal was born in 1940 and studied theater acting and directing at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad. After leaving Iraq in 1970 he traveled to Lebanon and Syria, worked on films for the PLO, and has directed 28 documentaries and five features over his career.

R21 AKA RESTORING SOLIDARITY
dir. Mohanad Yaqubi, 2022
Qatar/Palestine/Belgium. 71 min.
English, Japanese, and Arabic with English Subtitles.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 2 – 8pm ft Q&A Fadi Abu Nemeh – a scholar based in Montreal who was part of the archival research and film production
Q&A TICKETS HERE
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 12 – 7:30pm
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 22 – 10pm
TICKETS HERE

The growing struggle for Palestinian self-determination between 1960 and 1980 was supported by radical left-wing movements worldwide, including Japan. This is illustrated by a collection of 16mm films by militant filmmakers from various countries, which were dubbed and screened in Japan. Following the events of WWII, Japanese audiences felt oppressed by the US, and not only sympathized but also identified with the Palestinians.

Stylistically, the films vary widely. They include interviews with PLO leaders, documentary impressions of life in refugee camps, experimental films, and instructional films for tourism purposes. Mohanad Yaqubi has drawn on this material to create a film that might be seen as a conclusion or epilogue. He shows how two very different peoples can feel connected through images, and also raises questions. Where is the line between support and propaganda? And to what extent can a local struggle be translated internationally?
-Collective Eye Films