This May, Spectacle welcomes back longtime friend and filmmaker Gina Telaroli for two nights to present her latest feature, IN SEARCH OF GLADYS GLOVER, a singular emotional enmeshment (and nightmare) of both personal and genre filmmaking. The film also blends many of our micro-cinema’s predilections together into a powerful dose: B-horror, travelogues, surveillance paranoia, harsh noise, slow cinema, fast cinema, and New York baseball! Telaroli will bring in her insights, friends, a generous offering of unseen footage, and a peak at her latest project.
IN SEARCH OF GLADYS GLOVER
Dir. Gina Telaroli, 2024.
United States, Thailand. 89 min.
SUNDAY, MAY 4 – 7:30PM w/Q&A between Gina Telaroli and filmmaker Matías Piñeiro
MONDAY, MAY 12 – 7:00PM w/introduction and work in progress screening preceding!
Feature presentation begins approx. 8:15PM
In the late winter of 2022, filmmaker and soon-to-be-star Gina Telaroli went to Film Forum to see a 35mm screening of George Cukor’s NYC classic IT SHOULD HAPPEN TO YOU (1954). When the film ended she burst out of the theater loudly proclaiming her desire to make a sequel: a horror film entitled DON’T LET IT HAPPEN TO YOU. She grabbed the iPhone 13 mini she was forced to buy when BlackBerries died, enlisted her friends, and spent the next few months running around the streets of New York City shooting a Larry Cohen-esque pandemic thriller about a woman in a gold hoodie whose life is overtaken by a blonde doppelganger. After the shooting concluded, the footage (and the filmmaker) took a much needed rest and two years later a new movie—IN SEARCH OF GLADYS GLOVER—twisted itself into existence. Manically oscillating between the epic and the intimate, the shapeshifting finished film is lovingly indebted to Cohen, Anne Charlotte Robertson, Iris Murdoch, William Dieterle’s PORTRAIT OF JENNIE, and the unrelenting oppressive energy of the New York Yankees.
***
Quotes from friends:
“Nothing feels like your (Telaroli’s) movies, creativity pushing out with a refusal to let anything else stop it. Even when messy, it’s still bracing and exciting.”
“…like if Rivette made a diary film.”
“It ends up becoming a film about a woman trapped by forces she doesn’t understand, with a terrifying scene on a bridge under the rain where the protagonist is confronted by her stalker, now holding the camera. In a much different context, IN SEARCH OF GLADYS GLOVER brings the void to life just as giallo and J-horror have.”
The May 12 screening is preceded by a special work in progress screening of …
MY LAKE ERIE MOVIE (working title)
Dir. Gina Telaroli, TBD
United States. Approx. 60 min.
The footage in this movie was captured, without any intended purpose, between the years of 2008 and 2023 when the filmmaker visited her childhood home in Mentor, Ohio, a town that sits along the shores of the Great Lake Erie. Shot instinctively, haphazardly, gloriously with whatever devices were on hand, most notably multiple BlackBerry phones and a FUJIFILM X-T200, this kaleidoscopic film (perhaps) seeks to find out what Iris Murdoch meant when she wrote: “Time, like the sea, unties all knots.”
And later that evening …
GOD TOLD ME TO
(aka DEMON)
Dir. Larry Cohen, 1976.
United States. 90 min. 16mm.
To celebrate Gina Telaroli’s Larry Cohen-inspired IN SEARCH OF GLADYS GLOVER we’ll be screening a 16mm print of Cohen’s GOD TOLD ME TO (1976) following the screening of GLADYS GLOVER on May 12th. Both films are rife with paranoia, making use of the inherent insanity of New York City while encompassing a disorienting amount of different genres. It should be a weird and wonderful night of movies!