NO NAME IN NEW YORK

Dirs. Justin Clifford Rhody & Abigail Smith, 2021-2026.
US. 66 min.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10 – 7:30 PM (Special event with filmmakers)

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This film contains flashing lights and strobe effects that may affect viewers with photosensitive epilepsy.

From 2021-2026, Justin Clifford Rhody and Abigail Smith operated the now-defunct No Name Cinema in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Now, the duo of self-taught filmmakers is on tour across the East Coast, sharing a couple of the frantic, beautiful, frightful, and inventive films they made while running the aforementioned anti-capitalist warehouse microcinema.

The 65-minute program assembled this evening comprises a wide-range of artist films, from re-re-visionist westerns to strobe-fueled tone poems made with film stock and copy machines. Similar thematic, aesthetic, and formal interests abound across all of the works presented this evening. Key among these are the filmmakers’ attentive approach to the role sound plays in a film, the recurrence of collaborative filmmaking, and a continued investigation into the material qualities of film (its deterioration, mechanics, and texture). In much the same manner Rhody and Smith championed radical artist films via No Name Cinema, their own work also reflects a devotion to stressing the formal and material limits of their medium-of-choice. Each film in this program was made on its own terms, and together they represent a repudiation of what film is often limited to and a proposition of what it could be.

Justin Clifford Rhody and Abigail Smith will be in attendance to introduce this special screening.

THE INTERIOR FRONTIER

dir. Justin Clifford Rhody & Abigail Smith, 2023

USA. 20 min.

Shot on 16mm and Super-8mm film using a total of 9 different expired film stocks, Justin Clifford Rhody and Abigail Smith’s short explores the lost legacies of the American frontier as seen on film. Taking its name from a 16mm educational short titled The Frontier Experience (1975) and filmed in the same small town in Kansas where Barbara Loden shot her last directorial effort, The Interior Frontier presents a confused version of history, blending fact and fiction into a cinematic odyssey all of its own.

POTEMKIN PIECE

dir. Justin Clifford Rhody (and friends), 2022

USA. 1 min.

This 1-minute short was made between nearly 80 collaborators over lockdown. In order to create it, each collaborator was mailed a half-second long film strip from a 35mm trailer for Battleship Potemkin and instructed to do whatever they wanted with it. The final result regroups the discombobulated trailer and emblematizes the creative/chaotic spirit of its maker.

thread

dir. Abigail Smith, 2022

USA. 2 min.

In this 2-minute short, Abigail Smith explores the mechanics of film and draws similarities between the act of threading film and wielding a sewing machine. With its rough soundtrack and bouncing visuals, thread evinces the mechanical magic that defines film as a medium.

THE MONEY CURSE

dir. Abigail Smith, 2024

USA. 8 min.

This silent, Super-8 film from Abigail Smith concerns an avaricious man who is cursed by a gaggle of witches. Spooky, surprising, and anti-capitalist, it stands out as a wonderfully succinct expression of its maker’s talents and interests.

in dreams only

dir. Justin Clifford Rhody & Abigail Smith, 2023

USA. 11 min.

Justin Rhody and Abigail Smith employ a similar method to the one used to create Potemkin Piece in this short made from natural elements, food products, paint and toner. Blending all of these mixed elements with an audacious score from K/S/R and Wind Tide, in dreams only represents a unique collaborative effort for the duo. It is a film that stresses the preciousness of film as a medium, highlighting its fragility while underlining its tactility.

(another) Perfect film

Justin Clifford Rhody, 2026

USA. 5 min.

Dedicated to the late Ken Jacobs, Justin Clifford Rhody’s (another) Perfect film collects found footage to produce a new film (of sorts). With its rushes of a man holding a gun, it offers a haunting (re)discovery, disclosing secret scenes from the life of a cipher whose life survives on the big screen.

BRUISED FRUIT & UNDERFED FLORA

dir. Justin Clifford Rhody, 2022

USA. 6 min.

Bruised Fruit & Underfed Flora exemplifies Justin Clifford Rhody’s unique approach to the relationship between a film’s sound- and image-track. Working with his longtime collaborator Jeremy Kennedy, Rhody assembles a film that alternates in how its stresses one of the aforementioned tracks over the other, producing a kind of sonic-visual ping-pong for the viewer to delight in.

BLACK PALMS

dir. Justin Clifford Rhody, 2022

USA. 1 min.

The minute-long Black Palms was made with transparent 35mm film and a copy machine. Its stark, black-and-white images recall the patterns of Peter Kubelka.

drip

dir. Justin Clifford Rhody, 2023

USA. 4 min.

Per its eponymous motif, this short assembles scenes involving water as it falls and scatters on different surfaces. It is a poetic montage that coalesces all sorts of landscapes, stressing the once pervasive, now fading presence of water in the world.

EL RITO

dir. Justin Clifford Rhody, 2021

USA. 8 min.

An abstract film like Black Palms, this 8-minute short reflects on the loss of Lot 55, El Rito Estates (a now-defunct parking lot in Santa Fe). It is a film in which black and white orbs dissipate. It is a film of and about loss.

Special thanks to Justin Clifford Rhody, Abigail Smith and Kathy Del Beccaro.

YOUTH RESURGENCE ‘68: FROM TAKASAKI TO NEW YORK

Spectacle is proud to present this special one-night-only program in celebration of Interference Archive’s exhibition, Resurgence Youth Movement, 1964-67: Teenrevolt, Surrealism, Anarchism. Founded in New York’s Lower East Side in 1964, the Resurgence Youth Movement became a sprawling and boundless web of anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anarchist activity in cities around the country. The exhibition, closing on May 17th, follows the 2023 publication of Resurgence!, the first book devoted to the RYM and its founder Jonathan Leake, which includes selections of all twelve issues of Resurgence, the original mimeographed zine published by Leake and RYM between 1964 and 1967.

From Interference Archive:

The RYM called for the disintegration of the State, the complete destruction of bourgeois society, and a total surrealist-psychedelic revolution of the mind and body. “The Resurgence Youth Movement…advances the new anarchism of body, mind and soul, the psychedelic alchemies of revolution,” RYM wrote in their “Guerilla Manifesto” (Resurgence 6, 1967). Their activities continued until August of 1967, when Walter Caughey was stabbed to death in New York in an unsolved murder that many believe was politically motivated.

Copies of Resurgence! will be available for sale at the theater. We will be joined throughout the evening by special guests including Resurgence! Editor Abigail Susik, underground press scholar Sean Lovitt, and theorist and activist Sabu Kohso.

COLUMBIA REVOLT (Newsreel #14)
Pr. Newsreel, 1968.
United States. 59 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, MAY 16TH 5pm with q+a

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Working between 1967 and 1972, Newsreel was an activist film collective made up of numerous filmmakers who produced dozens of films documenting the political and social unrest of the late 60s and early 70s. Preserved by Third World Newsreel, this is the first opportunity to see the newly digitalized COLUMBIA REVOLT. One of the collective’s longest films, it documents the student occupation of five Columbia University buildings in April 1968.

An early large-scale protest of the Vietnam War, the action exposed links between Columbia’s institutional funding, support of the Vietnam War, and a new gymnasium to be constructed in the nearby neighborhood of Morningside Heights. Led by the Students for a Democratic Society and the Society of Afro-American Students, hundreds of young activists experimented with new forms of organizing, despite violent clashes with the NYPD. The revolt successfully forced the university to abandon its gymnasium project and disaffiliate from the Institute for Defense Analyses, a military research corporation supporting the US invasion of Vietnam. 

preceded by 

GARBAGE DEMONSTRATION (Newsreel #5)
Pr. Newsreel, 1968.
United States. 10 min.
In English.

This short Newsreel film follows a group of young people as they travel from Manhattan’s rapidly politicizing Lower East Side to its Upper West Side, bringing with them heaps of uncollected garbage from their own neighborhood to relocate on the grounds of Lincoln Center.

Abigail Susik and Sean Lovitt will join us for a Q+A discussion following this screening.

THE OPPRESSED STUDENTS
(aka FOREST OF OPPRESSION – A RECORD OF THE STRUGGLE AT TAKASAKI CITY)
(圧殺の森－高崎経済大学闘争の記録)
Dir. Shinsuke Ogawa, 1967.
Japan. 105 min.
In Japanese with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, MAY 16TH 7:30pm with introduction and q+a

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Rarely screened in the United States since their original releases, Shinsuke Ogawa’s films offer invaluable insight into Japanese radical politics and the collective action of workers, students, and villagers. Ogawa dared to imagine a new ethics and approach to documentary production in Japan as he situated himself closely alongside political dissidents and communities and brought the filmmaking process closer to political struggle than had previously been done in Japan.

THE OPPRESSED STUDENTS is an undecorated and patient documentation of a multi-year protest at Takasaki University, which reached its peak in 1967 and 1968 with the students’ unprecedented occupation of university buildings. The film follows a relatively small group of young activists as they struggle to maintain their movement against violent Japanese institutions and the powerful cultural pressures surrounding themselves and their peers. An intimate view of long-term resistance, THE OPPRESSED STUDENTS sits with the messiness and uncertainty of grassroots organizing and reflects the changing feeling of time for those on the frontlines, as persistent and slow struggle erupts into sudden and dangerous moments of conflict.

Abigail Susik, Sean Lovitt, and Sabu Kohso will join us to discuss this piece of history, including how a group of teenagers involved with RYM in the Lower East Side caught wind of THE OPPRESSED STUDENTS and were inspired to adapt some of the Japanese students’ tactics.

Sabu Kohso is a theorist, translator, and long-time activist in global and anti-capitalist struggle. A native of Okayama, Japan, Sabu has lived in New York City since 1980. He has published several books on urban space and struggle in Japan and his translations include works by Kojin Karatani and David Graeber. His most recent book is Radiation and Revolution (Duke University Press, September 2020). 

 

Co-programmed with Abigail Susik and Sean Lovitt.

Special thanks to Abigail Susik, Sean Lovitt, Sabu Kohso, Kelly Mill, Amelia Langas, Brooke Darrah Shuman, Jed Rapfogel, Third World Newsreel, and the Athénée Français Cultural Center.