In 1969, Pola Chapelle founded INTERCAT: The First International Cat Film Festival, which began as a five-hour program of films about cats that played at New York City’s Elgin Theatre. Through 1976, INTERCAT reappeared intermittently and toured Boston, Philadelphia, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Sydney, and Winnipeg. Among the numerous feline flicks that screened at INTERCAT in those years were the kitten sequence from François Truffaut’s DAY FOR NIGHT (1973) and Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s collaboration made three years after MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON, titled THE PRIVATE LIFE OF A CAT (1946). In 2016, the festival was briefly revived at Bard College. 56 years after its original incarnation, Spectacle is cat-atonic with excitement to host the Film-Makers’ Cooperative to bring INTERCAT back to New York City.

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INTERCAT’s appeal is immediate: a festival devoted entirely to films about cats is catnip for any cat lover. Moreover, with INTERCAT, Chapelle forecasted the ubiquity of cat images and videos in the digital age. Dubbed by Thought Catalog as the “unofficial mascot of the Internet,” cats are easily the most-viewed and shared domesticated animal on the net. From the widespread proliferation of cat memes and TikTok videos, to viral feline celebs like Grumpy Cat and Lil Bub, there’s no denying cats’ domination of visual media on the World Wide Web in the 21st century. This phenomenon has even been the subject of the book How to Make your Cat an Internet Celebrity: A Guide to Financial Freedom, the Museum of the Moving Image’s 2015 exhibition How Cats Took Over the Internet, and the annual Internet Cat Video Festival (of which INTERCAT is an obvious progenitor).

The 2025 revival of INTERCAT includes a number of films from the Coop’s collection that appeared in Chapelle’s original iterations of the festival, as well as cat-themed Coop titles making their INTERCAT debuts on both 16mm and digital formats. Among the returning films are Chapelle’s own FISHES IN SCREAMING WATER (1969) and HOW TO DRAW A CAT (1973) — the latter described by Jonas Mekas as “the most perfect film about how to draw a cat” — as well as Joyce Wieland’s CATFOOD (1968). New additions include Stan Brakhage’s NIGHTCATS (1956) and MAX (2002), Tom Chomont’s OPHELIA / THE CAT LADY (1969), Sarah Jane Lapp’s THE NEIGHBORHOOD CAT (1999), Peggy Ahwesh’s MY CAT GETS AN AURA READING (2011), and recent Oscar-nominee Bill Morrison’s feat of GoPro filmmaking, CURLY’S THANKSGIVING (2020), which can be viewed as a precursor to the recent promulgation of cat POV videos on social media. Concluding this program is a new 16mm restoration print of Roberta Cantow’s IF THIS AIN’T HEAVEN (1984), another popular cat-themed title from the Coop’s collection. This restoration print, struck by BB Optics, comes from the New York Public Library’s Reserve Film and Video Collection.

Chapelle (known, according to a 1976 Boston Globe article, as “The Cat Woman”) was one of the founding members of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative. Her husband was filmmaker Adolfas Mekas, director of acclaimed experimental feature HALLELUJAH FOR THE HILLS (1963) and the brother of Jonas Mekas, once the Coop’s de facto leader. Chapelle’s life and work is often overshadowed by the well-documented lives and oeuvres of her husband and brother-in-law. (Even the countercultural avant-garde has tended to foreground the contributions of its men while overlooking those of its women).

Yet, Chapelle was a prolific and multi-talented artist who made a significant impact on the underground film movement of the 1960s and ‘70s. An accomplished filmmaker in her own right, her films THOSE MEMORY YEARS (1972) and A MATTER OF BAOBAB (1970) — the latter of which features the Brothers Mekas, Storm de Hirsch, and Louis Brigante among its colorful cast of characters — are among the cornerstone works of the Coop’s 16mm collection. As an actor, Chapelle appeared in a number of her husband’s and brother-in-law’s films. As a singer, she released the album Pola Chapelle Sings Italian Folk Songs in 1961 and sang the theme song for Storm de Hirsch’s only feature-length film, the Rome-set dramatic narrative GOODBYE IN THE MIRROR (1964), which was once described by Shirley Clarke as “the first real woman’s film.” INTERCAT remains one of Chapelle’s most endearing — and enduring — contributions.

At each screening, printed program notes will include scans of articles — from the Boston Globe, Variety, Winnipeg Tribune, Chelsea Clinton News, and Harvard University’s Film Study Center newsletter — about INTERCAT. Also featured are the original programs for INTERCAT ‘69 and ‘73, as printed in the Film-Makers’ Cooperative’s official catalogue, as well as handwritten booking cards from the original ‘69 festival.

Co-programming and text co-written by Matt McKinzie and Robert Schneider (the Film-makers’ Cooperative). Special thanks to Roberta Cantow, Mackenzie Lukenbill, Will Hair, Stephanie Monohan, and Nate Dorr.

HOW TO DRAW A CAT
Dir. Pola Chapelle, 1973.
United States. 3 min. 16mm.

FISHES IN SCREAMING WATER
1969. United States.
6 min. 16mm.

NIGHTCATS
Dir. Stan Brakhage, 1956.
United States. 8 min. 16mm.

MAX
2002. United States.
4 min. 16mm.

OPHELIA / THE CAT LADY
Dir. Tom Chomont, 1969.
United States. 3 min. Digital.

MY CAT GETS AN AURA READING
Dir. Peggy Ahwesh, 2011.
United States. 1 min. Digital.

CATFOOD
Dir. Joyce Wieland, 1968.
United States. 13 min. 16mm.

THE WHITE CAT
Dir. Mary Ann Spencer, 1969.
United States. 2 min. 16mm.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD CAT
Dir. Sarah Jane Lapp, 1999.
United States. 2 min. 16mm.

MEOW, MEOW
Dir. Yvonne Andersen, 1970.
United States. 7 min. 16mm.

INTERCATMISSION

CURLY’S THANKSGIVING
Dir. Bill Morrison, 2020.
United States. 12 min. Digital.

IF THIS AIN’T HEAVEN
Dir. Roberta Cantow, 1984.
United States. 27 min. 16mm.

Total Run Time: 87 min. + 5 min. intermission