Michèle Rosier (1930-2017) was a pioneering fashion designer (she created the vinyl-intensive V de V sportswear label), a journalist who worked as editor of the women’s lifestyle magazine Le Noveau Femina, and an avowed leftist. She also had a 40+ year career behind the camera, directing several documentaries for French television as well as a handful of theatrical features, most famously the George Sand biopic GEORGE QUI?, starring Anne Wiazemsky. Rosier’s cumulative body of work is staggering, and the movies bely an utterly idiosyncratic filmmaking sensibility: wryly funny, curious about people, jazz-suffused (with scores by Mal Waldron, Keith Jarrett and Aldo Romano) and forever interrogating the limits of liberation in post-1968 France. While she’s a known quantity in France, Rosier has never before been given a proper retrospective in the United States; we’re honored to show these works in a two-part series spread over November and December, with her signature work MON CŒUR EST ROUGE (MY HEART IS RED) screening in a brand new digitization with fresh subtitles translated and timed by Spectacle volunteers.

Hervé Boulliane, rightsholder to a number of Michèle’s films, has made them available for free online (without English subtitles.) You can learn more about the filmmaker here, and access the official Vimeo page here.

This series is part of Brooklyn Falls for France, a cultural season organized by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and FACE Foundation in partnership with Brooklyn venues. Special thanks to Go Films, Hervé Boulliane, Bernard Payen (Cinematheque Francaise), Nathanaël Arnould (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel) and Amélie Garin-Davet.

GEORGE QUI?
(GEORGE WHO?)
dir. Michèle Rosier, 1973
106 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1 – 10 PM
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13 – 7:30 PM with introduction from Hervé Boulliane, longtime friend of Michèle Rosier
MONDAY, DECEMBER 23 – 10 PM

Rosier’s extraordinary feature debut is a buried gem of post-New Wave French filmmaking, starring the inimitable Anne Wiazemsky as the scandalizing writer George Sand (1804-1874). Born into nobility as Aurore Dupin, Sand was the most prolific female author of the 19th century, notorious for smoking cigars and flouting laws banning women from dressing as men. While her life is storied (she was close friends with Balzac, Delacroix and Flaubert, as well as one of Frederic Chopin’s lovers; he described her gaze as “like a fiery flood” in his journal), Rosier’s approach mischievously and anachronistically engages the limitations of the staid and stale drawing-room biopic. GEORGE QUI? juxtaposes current-day discussions about Sand’s proto-feminism (as well as her militant opposition to the Paris Communards) with the very real movement for gender equality raging outside the cinemas. Beyond Wiazemsky’s coy leading turn, the film features delectable discussions about sex, love and literature, with a supporting turn from Bulle Ogier as stage actress Marie Dorval, and Gilles Deleuze in a bizarre cameo as pioneering Catholic philosopher Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais – Rosier’s idea.

( poster by Stephanie Monohan )

MON CŒUR EST ROUGE
(MY HEART IS RED)
dir. Michèle Rosier, 1976
110 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – 5PM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24 – 5PM
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 26 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5 – 7:30 PM with introduction from Hervé Boulliane, longtime friend of Michèle Rosier
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 18 – 10 PM

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MON CŒUR EST ROUGE stars Françoise Lebrun as Clara, a market research analyst hired by a big cosmetics company to interview women from different walks of life about their makeup-purchasing habits. (Rosier’s original treatment for the film put it like this: “What began as research for better ways to lie to women becomes a quest for truths only women can reveal.”) The process sees her probing questions of femininity in a Paris that’s modernizing at a rapid rate; while Clara strikes up a spur-of-the-moment romance along the way, much of the film concerns people’s embrace of (and resistance to) the new freedoms of the Sixties and Seventies. MON CŒUR EST ROUGE is a bruisingly funny cross-examination of second wave feminism and its discontents – ending in an extraordinary finale at a “Women’s Fair”, with a murderer’s row of Rosier’s collaborators playing luminaries such as Freud, Sartre, Aristotle, Marx and Shakespeare in drag – provoking dreams of an alternative history away from masculine supremacy. Screening with brand-new English subtitles translated by Claudia Eve Beauchesne.

UN CAFE, UN!
(ONE COFFEE, ONE)
dirs. Michele Rosier & Jacques Kebadian, 1982
40 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

screening with

LA FEMME, L’HOMME
(THE WOMAN, THE MAN)
dir, Michele Rosier, 1975.
54 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 19 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21 – 5 PM

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These two short documentaries (both made for French television) demonstrate Rosier’s abiding interest in the lives and careers of ordinary people, her keen eye for human foibles and her undergirding focus on gender inequality. Part of the series grands jours et jours ordinaires (big days and ordinary days), UN CAFE UN details a small coffee shop and bistro in Paris over the course of one long working day, carefully registering small moments (like one businessman’s very long gulp of his first beer, or a bored child soliciting the attention of the various old ladies who flock to the espresso counter on the regular.) With a sly nose-thumbing attitude for the tired rigors of documentary sociology, LA FEMME, L’HOMME sees the filmmaker asking women from a variety of personal backgrounds for their opinions on the future of femininity – anticipating the interviews with working-class women that formed the backbone of her second theatrical feature MON CŒUR EST ROUGE. Screening with brand new English subtitles translated by Natalia Espinoza. 

SMILE, YOU’RE HAPPY TODAY
(SOURIS, T’ES HEUREUX CE JOUR-LA)
dir. Michele Rosier, 1978
76 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14 – 5 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21 – 3PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 22 – 5 PM

screening with

SORAYA OF AUBERVILLIERS
(SORAYA A AUBERVILLIERS)
dir. Michele Rosier, 2004
50 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

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In 1978, Michèle Rosier filmed the marriage of Soraya and Pascal Alvarez in the working-class suburb of Aubervilliers – resulting in a humanist, warmly funny documentary surveying the the entire community and pageantry of the wedding. Thirty-six years later in SORAYA OF AUBERVILLIERS, she wanted to see how their marriage – and the city – had evolved. Screening with brand-new English subtitles translated by Djata Doumbouya.

AH! LA LIBIDO
dir. Michele Rosier, 2009
83 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14 – 3 PM

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Whether by intent or coincidence, Rosier’s final feature seems a French riff on Sex and the City, about a quartet of women, working for the newspaper Liberation, as they endure the ecstasies and tribulations of singledom (or not). The film culminates in a bizarre twist ending – after each of the group has hired a sex worker to spice up their dull dating life – and whereby one of them realizes she may be happier in a bad relationship with a middle-aged slimeball. Screening with brand-new English subtitles translated by Claudia Eve Beauchesne.

EMBRASSE-MOI
(HUG ME)
dir. Michèle Rosier, 1987
93 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 3 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 14 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – 10 PM

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The first film shot by legendary cinematographer Darius Khondji (CITY OF LOST CHILDREN, SE7EN) and anchored by a heartbreaking performance by Sophie Rochut, EMBRASSE-MOI is a slice-of-life drama about Louise, an 12-year-old girl left to her own devices over the summer following her parents’ divorce. Her mother (Dominique Valadie) is a renowned concert pianist, anxious to begin a second life free of entanglements. Her father (Patrick Chesnais) is a workaholic industrialist, distracted to the point of denial about the collapse of his marriage. Rosier’s command of her cast is impossible to deny, as is the brave unsentimentality of EMBRASSE-MOI’s approach: Louise clocks her mother’s newer, younger lover in one brazen panning shot across his naked body. While Rosier denied any autobiographical interpretations of EMBRASSE-MOI, it’s hard not to read at least a kinship between Louie’s solitude and the filmmaker’s own relationship with her famous mother Hélène Gordon-Lazareff (founder of Elle) and stepfather Pierre Lazareff, who adopted Michèle as his own.

PULLMAN PARADIS
dir. Michèle Rosier, 1995
99 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11 – 10PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – 7:30 PM

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A cross-section of tourists, Parisians and daytrippers board a Pullman bus on a 48-hour journey to Normandy; along the way they all become friends (or enemies) and fall prey to a mass burglary. A multi-character dramedy in the vein of Robert Altman, PULLMAN PARADIS again affords Rosier an opportunity to expose the contradictions (and the comedy) of postwar French society, without casting her participants into facile molds of good and evil. The result is a warmly compassionate, drolly hilarious depiction of multiple anxieties (class, race, etc) crisscrossing at once – and a revealing ensemble portrait.

“Traveling is not just going places, but meeting people, remarks a character in Michèle Rosier’s refreshing human comedy. The actors (who hail from the stage) make up a troupe that revels in repartee — it may not be Musset, but Rosier, who made a movie on George Sand, has a sense for sharp dialogue and the subtle pacts that spring up between strangers. So a kind of spell is cast on these mere mortals, shaken from their moorings, who quit their banality and take off from the big bus into another space, outward bound.” – Janet Dupont, The New York Times

BLOODY MOON
dir. Jesus Franco, 1981
85 mins. West Germany.
In (dubbed) English.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25 – MIDNITE

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BLOODY MOON (Dir. Jesus Franco, 1981) from Spectacle Theater on Vimeo.

Miguel, a severely disfigured man, has just been released after 5 years in a mental institution for murdering a girl who he failed to have sex with. He is released into the care of his incestuous sister and their rich Countess aunt, who run a language-learning school together in Spain. Shortly after his arrival, new student Angeline notices strange events, and her friends start to disappear…

Jess Franco is operating at the peak of his sleaze-powers in this American-slasher knock-off for the German market, which manages to feel both insanely familiar and like nothing you’ve seen before. Like a disco riff on HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13TH, this accidental giallo with a badass leading lady (Olivia Pascal), psychedelic synth score and off-the-charts fashion (think Grace Jones sweaters and full body leopard print) is a sicko gem that is sure to blow your mind.

CONTENT WARNING: This film contains is an actual snake-death on screen (not cool) / attempted sexual violence in the opening (also not cool), but otherwise above-board-sleaze.

EVIL LAUGH
dir. Dominick Brascia, 1986
87 mins. United States.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11 – MIDNITE
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26 – MIDNITE

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EVIL LAUGH (Dominick Brascia, 1986) from Spectacle Theater on Vimeo.

“Ten years ago something terrible happened in this house… This weekend, it’s about to happen again.”

A group of medical students take a weekend to fix up an old house where a mass murder occurred 10 years earlier.”

An early example of the self-aware slasher that Scream would later epitomize, EVIL LAUGH falls heavily on the campy side of the equation. This meta fright-fest features a Fangoria-reading nerd who calls out the horror-tropes as they happen, a preppy couple in matching fedoras, unsafe pranks, and a house-cleaning dance break montage that will haunt you for weeks to come.

Directed by the chocolate-eating ‘disabled’ guy from FRIDAY THE 13TH: A NEW BEGINNING and co-written, produced by, and starring Scott Baio’s brother Steve, this is low-budget horror comedy at its best (worst).

DON’T PANIC
(aka DIMENSIONES OCULTAS)
dir. Rubén Galindo Jr., 1989
89 mins. Mexico.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 5 – MIDNITE
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24 – 10 PM

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“You’re already dead, but don’t panic…it could be worse!”

On his seventeenth birthday, Michael is given a present of a Ouija board by his best friend, Tony. At a session, using a medium known only to him as ‘Virgil’, Tony unwittingly unlocks the evil forces of the board. Soon there is a wave of violent killings and the chief suspect appears to be Michael, who has been witness to all the killings via premonitions and/or out of body experiences. Is Michael the killer? Can he prove his innocence, or is someone else being possessed by the evil spirit…?

From the director of GRAVE ROBBERS comes this bizarro Saved by the Bell/NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET-possession mashup, a blur of horror tropes and cheap Americana (Coke cans and Marlboro packs are all over this thing). Not to mention the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, mullet-sporting Americanized lead actor. For fans of: adults playing high-school teens, full body dinosaur pajamas, soapy-teenage melodrama, and good ‘ol-fashioned goopy gore.

THE BASEMENT
dir. Timothy O’Rawe, 1989
79 mins. United States.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12 – MIDNITE
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18 – MIDNITE

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“Four strangers are summoned to the basement of an abandoned house by a mysterious entity known only as The Sentinel. One after another, they are forced to witness heinous deeds they have yet to commit – and which will damn them for all eternity.”

A shot-on-video camp-fest anthology structured as a series of ‘flash-forwards’, each segment follows one of our confused basement dwellers as they do something ‘unforgivable’ and are then swiftly punished for it.

Scenarios include: a woman using a monster in her pool to kill her husband and other “enemies”, a disrespectful actor encountering some real zombies on set, and most importantly, a disgruntled teacher who hates Halloween getting a lesson in terror from the spirits of Halloween. Terrible acting and dubbing only add to the experience, as well as some of the deepest New Jersey accents ever to appear on film, plus, of course, the incredible low budget splatter FX goodness you come here for.

MERCANO EL MARCIANO
(MERCANO, THE MARTIAN)
dir. Juan Antin, 2002
73 mins. Argentina.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 28 – 10 PM

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Do you like Martians? Tex Avery-paced animation? Political satire? Rude humor? Subtitles? Then have we got a movie for you!

From Argentina, and a combination of traditional and computer animation, the Spanish-language MERCANO EL MARCIANO is the epitome of a cult movie: not too many people have seen this, but those that do, love it. When animation comes out of a region where it is not an “industry”—like the US, Japan or France—it tends to use the medium for more than just brainwashing children and increasing sales of soon-to-be-forgotten toys.

In this film, after a space probe from Earth squashes his “dog,” angry alien Mercano flies his saucer to Earth to register a complaint—only to find that the Earth is so fucked up and evil that even a Martian armed with a death ray can’t catch a break.

The film is a twist on the “fish out of water” and “Martian Invasion” tropes, and uses the spaceman’s naiveté of our greedy and malevolent ways to drive the humor. Stranded in Buenos Aires, the sad and lonely Martian (who looks like a cross between Charlie Brown and a pickle) wanders through a city that has been devastated by poverty, corporate greed, violence, and uncertainty, all the while chased by trigger-happy cops (dub the flick into English and you could say he landed in NYC). In an attempt to “phone home,” the extraterrestrial steals a laptop, but instead winds up befriending a teen sci-fi geek. But the kid’s yuppie-executive father is plotting total global consumer enslavement—and he intends to use Mercano’s outer space technology to get it, eventually entrapping the unfortunate alien in a giant test tube. But those foolish humans don’t know what tricks those “men from Mars” have…

Originally released in 2002, this was the first independent Argentine full-length animated film in 30 years. MERCANO EL MARCIANO was originally produced as a series of shorts for Argentina’s MTV, and the flick is certainly a kissing cousin to South Park and Beavis & Butthead—and not just because of the outrageous gross-out humor, deliberately crude animation, and a propensity for musical numbers, but as a barbed and absurdist take on contemporary capitalist society.

Created while Argentina’s economy was melting down, the film has even greater resonance today with a global recession, thuggish world leaders in the pockets of corporations, and nightmarish austerity measures forced down people’s throats ruining social services. “Now… the whole world [has] started to collapse and I am not surprised at all,” said director Juan Antin in 2013. Antin has gone on to make the family-friendly Netflix hit PACHAMAMA (2019), which, among the plucky adolescent protagonist’s misadventures and antics with various cute animals, actually has a strong, subversive anti-authoritarian streak running through it.

Featured in multiple international film festivals, MERCANO was the winner of the Audience Award at Spain’s Catalonian International Film Festival in 2002, as well as the Special Jury Mention at the Festival du Film d’Animation Annecy 2002 in France. Mercano el Marciano has also been shown at the Melbourne Latin American Film Festival, San Sebastian Film Festival, the Latin American Film Festival of Washington D.C., the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival and many others.

Hankering for a good old-fashioned slasher, but sick of all those slick production values and coherent plots? Look no further than Spectacle’s very special October retrospective of early Tim Ritter joints.

The offerings in this series were all written and directed by Ritter between the ages of 16 and 19, and boy does it show, as he delves into insecure white-male panic head on. If that sounds too serious or self aware, don’t worry, these SOV classics are neither of those things. They are a great deal of fun, though!

TRUTH OR DARE: A CRITICAL MADNESS
dir. Tim Ritter, 1986
87 mins. United States.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 8 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 30 – 7:30 PM

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Mike Strauber is just your average Joe, working a 9-to-5 to support his doting wife Sharon. That is, until he comes home early from work and catches her in the throes of passion with his best friend Jerry. Mike spirals into madness, hallucinating a new female companion who nudges him into some playful self mutilation and murder via a game of, you guessed it, Truth or Dare! The bodies begin to stack up quickly in increasingly unique ways, including a brief side-trip through a mental hospital and a golden mask for some reason.

KILLING SPREE
dir. Tim Ritter, 1987
88 mins. United States.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 1 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 6 – 5 PM
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 30 – 10 PM

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What can you say about a film starring a man named Asbestos Felt? Not much.

Tom is convinced his wife is sleeping around on him, so he goes on a killing spree, offing anyone he suspects might be philandering with his her – but this time, the victims aren’t staying dead!

KILLING SPREE is essentially TRUTH OR DARE? turned to 11, trading in the same themes and paranoia as his previous feature but managing to go even more berserk, indulging in cheap porn-parody setups to kills as Tom reads sleazy short stories his wife has written and fantasizes himself into a murderous rage.

The best suburbia takedown this side of EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, with exterior locations so bland they’re dreamlike, and interiors so stylishly decorated and warped by neon lighting they become a nightmare. Also make sure to stick around for an end-credit-rap-recap that will truly blow your mind.

Special thanks to American Genre Film Archive.

The Imagine Science Film Festival has been melding art and science in interdisciplinary hybrid programming since 2008. While the festival travels throughout New York City each year, we always save some of the most audacious memorable reconfigurations of scientific themes for Spectacle. This year, this will extend over three full programs of recovered memories, post-anthropocene flicker film, and dystopian data massage.

ISFF 2019 PROGRAM 1: SELF CARE, ALCHEMY, AND OTHER LIFE HACKS
dir. Various, 2016 – 2019
83 mins.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22 – 7:30 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

ONLINE TICKETS

How do we preserve ourselves in uncertain times, when even body and identity may become commercially harvestable data and threats take on unpredictable forms? Our annual wide-ranging program of animation and experimental film explores all this and more. Watch for: unsettling sociologies of social media, unconventional conversations on health, technological history informing personal visions, and a literal preservation process in the frames of stop motion.

Freeze Frame (Soetkin Verstegen | 5 min | Belgium | 2019)
Shalva (Danna Windsor | 3 min | USA | 2018)
Slug Life (Sophie Koko Gate | 7 min | UK | 2018)
Las del Diente (Ana Perez Lopez | 5 min | USA | 2018)
The Desert (Ben Bigelow | 14 min | USA | 2018)
Reverie of the Puppets (Kathy Rose | 5 min | USA | 2018)
Pwdre Ser the rot of stars (Charlotte Pryce | 7 min | UK | 2018)
Cyanovisions (Tiare Ribeaux & Jody Stillwater | 14 min | USA | 2019)
iBooks (Odile Postic | 4 min | USA | 2018)
Call of Comfort (Brenda Lien | 9 min | Germany | 2018)
Your Last Day on Earth (Marc Martínez Jordán | 13 min | Spain | 2019)

Content Warning: Male genitals undergoing wax strip hair removal.

ISFF 2019 PROGRAM 2: MODERN HAUNTINGS
dir. Various, 2018
65 mins.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22 – 10 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY! 

ONLINE TICKETS

As the night goes on, we’ll allow some of the phantoms banished by science back into the discourse. Here, the psychiatric myth of the “recovered memory” drives the Satanic Panic of the early 1980s, ghosts are reanimated by 3D scan, and information itself haunts deep water and the margins of international law.

Demonic (Pia Borg | 29 min | Australia | 2018)
Tropics (Mathilde Lavenne | 14 min | France / Mexico | 2018)
Cablestreet (Meredith Lackey | 22 min | USA | 2018)

ISFF 2019 PROGRAM 3: TWILIGHT GEOLOGIES
dir. Various, 2018-2019
85 mins.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23 – 7:30 PM

ONLINE TICKETS

Otherworldly mineral landscapes glisten and flicker, sunset throws vast shadows across the clouds, craters dream, and the entire anthropocene Earth shivers and collapses in a deathly shimmer. This program collects four brilliant experiments in light, landscape, and perception, harnessing the luminous photochemical mechanics of film and projection itself to heighten the experience of climactic celestial and earthly events. These are films that demand to be seen splashed large and in the total darkness of a cinema, in their full apocalyptic and regenerative power.

CW: Viewers should be advised that several films in this program make use of strobe effects.

Altiplano (Malena Szlam | 16 min | Chile/Argentina/Canada | 2018)
Umbra (Johannes Krell & Florian Fischer | 20 min | Germany | 2018)
It Has to Be Lived Once and Dreamed Twice (Rainer Kohlberger | 28 min | Austria | 2019)
Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream? (Diana Vidrascu | 21 min | France / Portugal | 2019)