The Water Cycle and The Mandala Cycle

A pioneering video artist, Peter Donebauer has made artworks that combine an improvisational spirit with calculated scientific know-how. In 1974, he became the first artist whose video-work was commissioned and broadcast nationally by the BBC in the United Kingdom. That piece was “Entering” and it was part of The Creation Cycle, which Donebauer and his musical collaborator Simon Desorgher tinkered with over five years. The structure of the cycle is one Donebauer would return to twice more in his career, and it is our honor to host these rare cycles this November.

Donebauer was commissioned to make The Water Cycle under the aegis of Thorn-EMI, who intended to distribute the video as the first concept album on the then new JVC laser disc format. He teamed up with musicians Mike Ratledge and Karl Jenkins (formerly of Soft Machine) on the soundtrack, and the result is a spellbinding, seven-part video-meditation on the eponymous natural cycle. Unfortunately, the videodisc system didn’t sell in Japan and never even made it to the British market, leaving The Water Cycle in limbo. Nevertheless, the spirit of the project lived on in future “pop promos” (music videos) and the video can now be seen in full in our theater for one-night only.

Another 10 years went by before Donebauer made The Mandala Cycle, another seven-part video that toyed with order and chaos to create a spiritual experience in moving image form. The video, as its title suggests, revolved around mandalas — circular images that are used in meditation and symbolize the unity of creation in traditional eastern philosophies. In video-form, Donebauer moves across several mandalas, designing a riveting, metamorphosing experience meant to stimulate a “centering” of consciousness. Unlike his previous cycles, Donebauer opted to first record all of the imagery in the film and then digitally manipulate it, creating variations through feedback that maintain the seamless magic of his previous experiments.

THE WATER CYCLE
dir. Peter Donebauer, 1981
United Kingdom. 47 min.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 13 – 7:30 PM

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Peter Donebauer’s The Water Cycle was commissioned by Thorn-EMI as a concept album for their brand new JVC laser disc player. With music from Mike Ratledge and Karl Jenkins (of Soft Machine fame), the video moves through the several states of the eponymous cycle — Sea, Evaporation, Condensation, Precipitation, Seepage, Run-Off, Sea. As in much of Donebauer’s videos, shifting streams of color and amoeba-like figures coalesce into a meditative, spiritual experience.

THE MANDALA CYCLE
dir. Peter Donebauer, 1991
United Kingdom. 40 min.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14 – 7:30 PM

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Peter Donebauer’s most recent cycle to date revolves around the symbol of the mandala, and is designed to stimulate a “centering” of consciousness. Working with predetermined imagery, Donebauer subjected each part of his cycle to a myriad of technological interventions, resulting in a video that fluidly transforms before the viewer’s eyes. The video proved so relaxing that it became popular among ravers in London, who’d often watch it during the come-down of a long night out.

Special thanks to Peter Donebauer.

Her father dies… her fiance dumps her… and she can’t find a job… so she covers the waterfront. And then one night…

French writer Guy de Maupassant’s short story “The Port” first landed on the Mexican silver-screen in 1934, courtesy of Russian exile Arkady Boytler and his directing buddy Raphael J. Sevilla. This classic tale of twisted faith has since been adapted thrice over — although, we’ll leave Luis Quintanilla’s TV-adaptation for another summer — and become a cornerstone of Mexican cinema, its tale of mixed identities reflecting the status of a nation confused about its own.

Now heralded as a classic of Latin American cinema, Boytler and Sevilla’s grim and pointed THE WOMAN OF THE PORT (1934) sets the standard high for all future filmmakers looking to adapt this powerful short story. Set in the docks of Veracruz, THE WOMAN OF THE PORT follows a woman frowned upon by fate, forced into squalor, and made to make a name for herself in infamy. In 1949, Emilio Gómez Muriel tried his hand at the story with an adaptation starring rumbera Maria Antonieta Pons. This version of THE WOMAN OF THE PORT (1949) flips the chronology of the first on its head, setting up a narrative parabola that moves from grime to good to ghastly. It’d take about 40 years for another filmmaker to throw his name in the hat and in 1991, former Luis Buñuel assistant director Arturo Ripstein put forth his own spin on the story: a Rashomon–style vision of despair anchored in a quartet of wonderful performances.

Content warning: These films contain depictions of physical violence, sexual assault, and self-harm.

MONDAY, AUGUST 4 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 29 – 5 PM

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Best known for co-directing the landmark REDES (1936) — about a fishermens’ revolt — with Fred Zinnemann, Emilio Gómez Muriel was a prolific studio director whose career started in the late ’30s and ran up until the ’70s. He directed everything from social realist dramas to swashbucklers and Blue Demon wrestling flicks, working with starlets like María Felix, Miroslava, and Maria Antonieta Pons. It’s the latter that takes on the role of the titular Woman, a night dancer and crooner who has developed a propensity for alcohol in light of the darts destiny has thrown her.

La mujer del puerto

(The Woman of the Port)

dir. Arturo Ripstein 1991

In Spanish with english subtitles

MONDAY, AUGUST 18 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 30 – 7:30 PM

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Leave it to Arturo Ripstein, enfant terrible of Mexican cinema for fifty years and counting, to make one of its most tawdry tales even more depraved. Split into four chapters, each chronicling the film’s doomed romance from a different perspective, Ripstein’s THE WOMAN OF THE PORT extends his source material’s central wickedness to its extreme, as though taunting viewers with an embodied vision of the Mexico they fear from morbid and shocking news reports worldwide. An incendiary film, as only Ripstein can make them, this most recent adaptation of Mexican cinema’s most intriguing and unpleasant myth foreshadows the squalor Ripstein would continue to burrow himself as a filmmaker while making an opus of what was once a simple expat’s attempt at adapting de Maupassant.

Special thanks to ACERVO-FILMOTECA UNAM, Alebrije Cine y Video, Jesse Trussell, Mónica Lozano, Chloe Roddick, and IMCINE.

VALI: THE WITCH OF POSITANO
Dir. Sheldon Rochlin and Flame Schon, 1967
United States / United Kingdom / Italy, 62 mins
In English

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 30 – 7:30 PM

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It is in the bohemian’s nature to be a multihyphenate—or in the multihyphenate’s nature to be bohemian. Take Vali Myers, an Australian artist, dancer, and occultist, and self-proclaimed “creatrix.” She’s the captivating subject of Sheldon Rochlin and Flame Schon’s 1965 documentary Vali: The Witch of Positano. Instantly recognizable by her shock of red hair, facial tattoos, gold teeth, and kohl-lined eyes, Myers procured art related to her many talents: surreal, fluid paintings and drawings which revolved around primogenial magic and femininity, often depicting arcane supernatural figures. Myers was born in Sydney in 1930 to a merchant navy officer and a violinist, and by age 14 she had moved to St. Kilda, where she worked in factories and as an art model to pursue dance, her main passion beyond drawing.

By 17, Myers was lead dancer of the Melbourne Modern Ballet Company, and two years later she boarded a ship to Paris. The city was ravaged by war, and Myers, unable to find work, fell into a subculture of refugees, writers, and artists. (During this time, Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken photographed her for his seminal roman à clef Love on the Left Bank and made her the lead of his 1972 film Death in Port Jackson Hotel.) Myers was imprisoned multiple times for vagrancy and eventually expelled from Paris, only to return years later, at which point her artwork was discovered by The Paris Review‘s George Plimpton (a portfolio of her drawings ran in the magazine’s spring 1958 edition).

Flitting between Europe, Melbourne, and New York, Myers developed an artistic network, associating with figures like Abbie Hoffman and Patti Smith, and was encouraged to exhibit her talents by Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalí. After leaving Paris to quell her opium addiction, Myers settled in Positano in Southern Italy, where her cottage by the sea became a wildlife sanctuary, as if plucked from a fairy tale. Several films were made about Myers and her artistry, including Death in Port Jackson Hotel, Vali’s World (1984), Vali’s Diary (1984), The Tightrope Dancer (1989), and Painted Lady (2002), but none were as local to the most earnest slice of her life as Vali.

Spectacle is pleased to host Toronto-based critic and curator Saffron Maeve for a special event. Her series Contours is dedicated to films that thematize arts like painting, sculpture, sketching, and performance. In Rochlin and Schon’s hourlong experimental documentary, we visit Myers at her Positano dwelling, where she is seen dancing, chatting with friends and visitors, rolling in bed with her lover, tending to animals, engaging in occult rituals, and briefly painting. The film hop-skips between reality and phantasm, acting as an affective archive for this nonconformist artist to play within. Dreams are indulged, fantasies are taken as fact, and oblique rituals make for hyperreality. It’s clear Myers’ flavor of celebrity is unusual, but the filmmakers tend to both her worldview and public perception, keeping in mind that art is rarely made consciously.

Special thanks to Saffron Maeve and filmmaker Flame Schon.

CONTENT WARNING: These films contain flashing lights which may not be suitable for those with photosensitive epilepsy.

Saul Levine does not stop. He is an uncompromising and relentless filmmaker whose work reflects his experimental verve. As far back as the 1960s, he has shown that film is a material object, that it can be twisted, warped, chopped, and stretched to produce immersive and challenging experiences. On April 4, we are pleased to host Levine—alongside a troupe of filmmakers and thinkers close to him—for a night honoring his legacy.

In addition to the impressive body of work Levine has assembled over the decades, he has imparted a love and understanding of experimental filmmaking to younger generations as a professor at the Massachusetts College of Arts and Design, among them Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco. Her work championing his films, alongside Byron Davies and Lumia Lightsmith, led to the presentation of a Saul Levine Retrospective that toured Mexico last year. Tonight we present an abridged version of that retrospective, with Levine in person to discuss his work.

The program notes for the Saul Levine retrospective in Mexico are available here.

All 16mm prints are from Levine’s personal collection.

FRIDAY, APRIL 4 – 7 PM

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STAR FILM
1969, 15 mins, 16mm

“I began this film in 1968. I had painted, scratched, scraped and bleached film since I began making films in 64/65 mainly in regular 8 and usually with photo-chemical representations. In this film I decided to paint and bleach 16mm clear and black leader thinking from the beginning that I was making an emulsion that light would shine through. I was making both positive and negative images that could be contact printed. The film is made from a painted and bleached original a little over 100 ft that has been contact printed onto b&w and color positive and negative film. I used stars, circles and crescents to ground the viewer and make clearer the meditation on positive and negative space. I also wanted to make a completely camera-less film.” — Saul Levine

BIG STICK / AN OLD REEL
1973, 10 mins, 16mm

“Beginning in 1967, with roughly a dozen short films under his belt, Levine spent six years reediting 8-mm prints of the Chaplin shorts Easy Street (1917) and In the Park (1915), incorporating television images of an antiwar protest in which the Boston filmmaker participated. The result was The Big Stick/An Old Reel (1967-73), his self-tutorial in montage, the ascesis of narrative, and the beauties of caustic rhythms. In the early stages of that work’s construction, Levine was teaching filmmaking at Tufts University, in Medford, Massachusetts, but he would soon be fired, if not specifically for his role in occupying a campus building during a protest over the dismissal of an African-American secretary, then for his political activism generally.” — P. Adams Sitney

NEW LEFT NOTE
1982, 27 mins

“‘New Left Note is a study of radical politics in radical film form.” — Marjorie Keller

IS AS IS
1991, 3 mins, 16mm

“A portrait of a mother with her arms full in the backyard bathing her twin babies. As if the early spring light sings and dances. Later the father cooks a fish. Marjorie Keller is the mother.” — Saul Levine

FIVE-MINUTE INTERMISSION

AS IS WAS
1995, 4 mins, 16mm

“This film was shot the same weekend as Z (Zee Not Zed), when Stan Brakhage was visiting University of Rhode Island, where Marjorie Keller was teaching at the time. They get some coffee, then go for a walk on a beach in an old whaling harbor.” — Saul Levine

FALLING NOTES UNLEAVING
2013, 13 mins, 16mm

“Falling Notes Unleaving is made from footage gathered in the fall of 2012 and edited in early 2013. Anne Charlotte Robertson, friend and fellow Super8 filmmaker, died. I attended her funeral and filmed the burial of her ashes. She was famous for her diary films and I thought it important to honor her work by filming an event that she could not. The burial took place in a wonderful old cemetery in Framingham, Massachusetts, which lightened a sad event. The film also includes footage shot in the mountains outside of Portland and the streets of Cambridge and Somerville in Massachusetts. It is not a diary. The title and the film reflect Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem ‘Spring and Fall.’ Luther Price, Bob Brodsky, Tara Nelson, Gordon Nelson, Liz Coffey, Heather Green, her daughter Rosealee, her dog Blue, and many other people and animals appear in this film.” — Saul Levine

NOTE TO PATI
1969, 7 mins, 16mm

“Note on snowstorms in February-March ’69. The restoration of the landscape begun to show friends on west coast violent beauty of this period. Childhood memories, snowball fights, sledding, etc., and how I felt about Medford where I live kept entering into the film. The principal birds in the film are the blue jay and the crow, both beautiful, smart and ruthless.” — Saul Levine

LIGHT LICKS: PARDES: COUNTING FLOWERS ON THE WALL
2018, 13 mins, 16mm

“Light Licks are a series of films I began in 1999. The films are made frame by frame, often by flooding the camera with enough light to spill beyond the gate into the frame left unexposed. Light Licks are ecstatic flicker films inspired by jazz and mystic visionary practice, and extend my interest in the ways film can be a medium of visual improvisation. ‘Pardes’ is the ancient Persian word for walled garden. In Hebrew and Aramaic it means paradise, heaven, the garden of Eden, the peak or terminus of ecstatic visionary, trance, flight, wild flowers, morning glories, an urban jungle an eden for a petite Tyger.” — Saul Levine

LIGHT LICKS: AMEN
2017, 6 mins, 16mm

“A stark portrait of my father at daily morning prayers, to which I respond, AMEN.” — Saul Levine

NOTE TO TETSUA
2018, 1 min, 16mm

Moon flight
loud silence
soft dark
hard light
a Ray o gram
made with a camera
out of sight
— Saul Levine

Special thanks to Saul Levine, Byron Davies, Lumia Lightsmith, Stephen Cappel, and Kathy Del Beccaro. Davies and Lightsmith co-programmed this screening, in addition to adapting and writing the program notes. Davies’ research project, “Materialism and Geographic Specificity in the Philosophy of Film,” forms the basis for these screenings, which are supported by Salón de Cines Múltiples. Additional support was provided by Laboratorio Experimental de Cine.

FRIDAY, APRIL 4 – 10 PM

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WARNING: These films contain flashing lights which may not be suitable for those with photosensitive epilepsy.

Destiny supplants space and time as La Cueva, Spectacle, and the MassArt Film Society become perfectly superimposed. The show begins with a vintage Super 8 print of Warm Broth (1988), one of Luther Price’s most iconic films from his period of films made under the moniker “Tom Rhodes,” while also highlighting the participation in that film of Laurie McKenna, a former student of Levine and friend + collaborator of Price whose video Why the Long Face (1997) we will also screen. By rendering tribute to Levine, we will also attend to his own talents at rendering tribute to others: to Marjorie Keller, Anne Charlotte Robertson, to Stan Brakhage, to his Father, and—especially in this program—to Luther Price (aided in this tribute by short films by Laurie McKenna, Annalisa D Quagliata Blanco, and Linnea Nugent). Not for the only time in this retrospective, these artists will go searching for each other in that most interstitial space of transit: dreams.

The program notes of the Saul Levine retrospective in Mexico are available here.

WARM BROTH
Dir. Luther Price/Tom Rhodes, 1988
35 mins, Super 8mm
Print provided by Canyon Cinema.

“Everything will be ok, just close
your eyes little thing
go to sleep little fuck
feel my hand on your warm
forehead
It’s cold isn’t it? Ice cold.

“Dream of something real sweet
for mommy
Mommy likes sweet things
Dream of a merry-go-round and
cotton candy

“Mommy’s hand got all warm
resting on your tiny head
See, look at mommy’s hand
It got all warm now

“You’re running a slight fever
Mommy will get you some
water
And you’re running a slight
fever

“Little fuck don’t have to go to
school tomorrow
but no playing in the yard
Someone could see you
And I’ll be an unfit mommy
You’ll have to stay in all day

“but now, dream of the prettiest
flower for mommy
I’ll make you oatmeal first thing
And you could tell me the color
of the –
prettiest flower.”

-Luther Price/Tom Rhodes

WHY THE LONG FACE
Dir. Laurie McKenna, 1997
26 mins

A former student of Levine and collaborator and friend of Price, McKenna made this short about Nancy Luce, a desperate, creative, Martha’s Vineyard oddball of the mid 1800s. Using old photographs, puppets, toy models, and off-the-cuff footage, McKenna creates a lonely work as daring and personal as that of her teachers and peers.

GOODTIME CHARLIE BIRTHDAY
Dir. Laurie McKenna, 1997
2 mins

A film of stuffed animals, haunted by a lullaby. Much like Price, McKenna makes visible the horror hiding beneath the surface of familiar American scene audio: rehearsal cassette recording, vocals: Laurie and Tom Rhodes (Luther), the Fabulous Turquoise Rain and Shines, 1987.

AGGREGATE
Dir. Laurie McKenna, 2020
6 mins

McKenna’s pandemidiario conjures desert punk powering the aggregate of memory and charcoal and grounds national rupture in a sonic package.

“A whole formed by combining several (typically disparate) elements” – Laurie McKenna

OUTCRY (FOR LUTHER)
Dir. Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco, 2015
1 min

“Luther Price’s handmade film work demonstrated the vagaries of trauma internal to the medium itself: the simultaneously world-destroying and world-repairing possibilities of unmaking and remaking of the body of the film strip. Annalisa Quagliata has taken up the lessons of Price’s handmade film course at MassArt, maintaining their queer resonances while reshaping them with the perhaps unanticipated application to the unmaking and remaking of myths of the Mexican body politic. This 2016 tribute to Luther Price, made in that same MassArt course before Quagliata’s return to Mexico, reminds us of the facilitating possibilities of the body in disintegration. A 16mm optical sound bar is the skeleton on which it all hangs.” – Byron Davies

WAS ONCE ONE
Dir. Linnea Nugent, 2023
3 mins

“Was Once one is the auditory artifact of since lost Luther Price speaking on what was once one film that belonged as two.” – Linnea Nugent

CRESCENT
Dir. Saul Levine and Pelle Lowe, 1993
5 mins, Super 8mm
Print provided by Saul Levine.

“A conversation with Pelle Lowe.” – Saul Levine

SCHMATEH IV & SCRAPE
Dir. Saul Levine, 1986
8 mins, Super 8mm
Print provided by Saul Levine.

Two portrayals on one reel. A Portrait of Pelle Lowe and A Portrait of Laurie McKenna aka Bud Scrape.

READY-MADE
Dir. Saul Levine and Pelle Lowe, 1993
4 mins, Super 8mm
Print provided by Saul Levine.

“A film made by Pelle Lowe and myself, READY-MADE is a single work in itself, and also exists as part of a series of works that Pelle and I made reflecting on Manet’s painting OLYMPIA, including it’s reception, it’s relationship to painting, sex work, imperialism, the Paris Commune, sex, drugs and rock roll, ect.” – Saul Levine

Special thanks to Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco, Saul Levine, Byron Davies, Lumia Lightsmith, Stephen Cappel, Nicolas Cadena, Mono No Aware, and Kathy Del Beccaro.

Davies and Lightsmith co-curated this screening, in addition to providing the program notes. The banner and poster image for this program come courtesy of David Michael Curry, who participated in the filming of Warm Broth. Davies’ research project “Materialism and Geographic Specificity in the Philosophy of Film” forms the basis for these screenings, which are supported by Salón de Cines Múltiples.