THE MURDER OF SANTA CLAUS
Dir. Christian-Jaque, 105 min.
France, 1941.
In French with English subtitles

TUES, DECEMBER 13- 10PM
SAT, DECEMBER 17- MIDNIGHT
WED, DECEMBER 21- 7:30PM
FRI, DECEMBER 23- 10PM

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After the fall of France to Nazi forces in 1940, it took little time for the German government to end all film production except for a state-run production company. That company was Continental Films, established in October 1940, and its first film, released a year later, was L’Assassinat du père Noël, translated as The Murder Of Santa Claus. Based on the Pierre Very novel, the film is a kind of fairy tale that slowly turns both more magical and darker, a film at stark contrast to the circumstances of its creation, and yet deeply connected in ways which become stranger and more subversive as we reach the solving of the title’s riddle.

An old watchmaker, playing Santa Claus, is found dead, and on a primary level the film is a detective story led by the rules of the fantastic, as likely to drift into love story or fable as anything. Led by the great Harry Baur (THE GOLEM), who plays the watchmaker with charm to burn, the performances all bring a brio and mystery which ties perfectly with the astonishingly dreamlike setting. Director Christian-Jaque (A LOVER’S RETURN, FANFAN LA TULIPE), in one of his first films, works for the first time with actress Renée Faure, who would become not only his go-to star, but his wife as well. Anyone looking to avoid yuletide treacle should definitely investigate this rarely-seen gem.

Harry Baur, a year later, was arrested by the Gestapo after attempting to defend his wife; he was released in 1943 but died shortly thereafter under “mysterious circumstances”.

Spectacle is celebrating 10 years of MONO NO AWARE with A NEW YORK 8MMINUTE!

From the 1920s to the dawn of the VHS age, commercial films originally shot on 16mm or 35mm were reduced to smaller-gauge film prints, namely Super 8mm, for the home viewer. These “reduction prints” or “digest editions” were hastily truncated to 20 minutes or less, with gaps in plot often bridged with awkward narration and bizarre montage. Quality varied wildly; sometimes color movies were presented in black-and-white, other times sound was missing entirely.

Spectacle joins with Mono No Aware, fellow keepers of the Super 8mm flame, to present a double-feature program dedicated to celebrating these digests.

(note: 7:30 and 10 PM programs are ticketed separately)

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NOVEMBER 14TH 7:30 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY! SCREENING ON SUPER 8MM!

At 7:30 PM, we present a SURPRISE ASSORTMENT of Super 8mm reduction prints of both Hollywood classics and b-movies, including one in faded 3D.

 

NOVEMBER 14TH 10:00 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

At 10 PM, Spectacle presents A NEW YORK 8MMINUTE: REDUCE TO COGNITION, which channels the spirit of the theater’s own REMIX TO COGNITION series (presenting works by our volunteer staff and associates, with a focus on the repurposed and remodeled). Join us as we present our custom-edited digests of feature films screened from similarly retrograde formats.

 

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Based on the infamous case of nurse-butcher Richard Speck—also portrayed in Kōji Wakamatsu’s VIOLATED ANGELS (1967), B-movies from 2002, 2007 and 2012, the original US poster for Fernando Di Leo’s SLAUGHTER HOTEL (1971), a Wesley Willis song, self-appointed ‘murder metal’ band Macabre’s 1993 tune “What The Heck Richard Speck?: Eight Nurses You Wrecked,” and, uh, master painter Gerhard Richter’s 1966 work “Eight Student Nurses”—this unusually sadistic international co-production is indeed the only version that grafts his story onto The Troubles in Belfast, Northern Ireland and re-casts Speck as a Vietnam vet, all while depicting a sexual perversity that allegedly outpaces that of the real-life killer.

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 THE SATAN KILLER
(aka DEATH PENALTY)
Dir. Stephen Calamari, 1993
USA, 90 min.

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A boozy addled, revenge-driven cop squares off with a crank fueled, devil-worshipping biker the hardboiled, mind-ruining crime flick THE SATAN KILLER. Filmed entirely on location in Virgina Beach, VA, and directed by the questionably named Stephen Calamari (most likey the film’s star, Steve Sayre) THE SATAN KILLER (aka Death Penalty and Rampage) features a little bit of something for everyone- murder, machine guns, drugs, drag queens, private eyes, beach babes, former male nurses, a frequently-visited t-shirt shop, punks, pimps, a frequently-visited coffee shop, strippers, a haunted house and a scene where the killer screams at a church, “You never fooled me!”

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A MORE PERFECT UNION
Dir. Steve and Ari Sheinkin, 105 min.
USA, 1995

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 4 – MIDNIGHT
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12 – MIDNIGHT

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Possibly owing to the success of another film set in Austin, A MORE PERFECT UNION stumbles aboard an East Texas zeitgeist-bus of scrambled ambition and self-importance. Four roommates, being equal parts young, inexperienced, white and male, are fed up with involuntary membership in the bland Clinton-era generation. So they decide to secede and start their own country from the comfort of their ubiquitous 90s oversized couch. Stu, who wears culottes and refuses to leaves the house, provides the bulk of the philosophical leadership. The country eventually rallies around goals of Justice and Revenge, taking them into rebel territory and adolescent vigilante justice. Featuring local Austin tunes from the likes of Sidehackers, Magneto USA, Yah Yah Littleman, Javelin Boot and Prescott Curlywolf.

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SEXANDROIDE
Dir. Michel Ricaud, 1987
France, 51 minutes

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 5 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 18 – MIDNIGHT

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Welcome to the temple of fear and eroticism, as a monstrous madman slowly mutilates poor young girls! See the sensual act of voodoo preformed on an innocent bar patron! View the lustful bite of a vampire!
Originally marketed in France as blurring the lines between fiction and reality, this rarely seen, often talked about, shot-on-video classic is finally making its Spectacle debut. A unique and bizarre flick that defies easy classification, Sexandroide is a must for fans of extreme entertainment. Simultaneously sexy and sick, Sexandroide has it all.

This March, Spectacle presents a diptych of blistering econo-graphic deep dives by celebrated documentarian Stephanie Black. H-2 WORKER profiles migrant laborers flown from Jamaica to Florida to cut sugarcane, at the behest of big-box food manufacturers taking advantage of the extranational economy. LIFE AND DEBT, the more famous of the two, returns to Jamaica to methodically dissect Clinton-era loan policies and import/export subsidies, while pitting the island nation’s jawdropping poverty against its tourist-friendly image. Black – whose career originated in environmental activism – has clearly cultivated a unique relationship to the island nation, and yet these are anything but grass-is-greener reaffirmations of exotic stereotypes. Instead, her films show us the Caribbean we know, deep down, we’ve been seeing all along: a mirage of paradise operated by an elite few, kept for the foreign dollars of a few more.

DVDs of both H-2 Worker and Life and Debt will be available for purchase at Spectacle during this series. 

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H-2 WORKER
dir. Stephanie Black, 1990
USA/Jamaica. 70 mins.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 9 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 15 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, MARCH 24 – 7:30 PM – ONE NIGHT ONLY ON 16MM FILM – Q&A with filmmaker Stephanie Black
SUNDAY, MARCH 27 – 5:00 PM 

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

GRAND JURY PRIZE WINNER – 1990 SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL

Shot guerilla-style over the course of two years, H-2 WORKER is an unmissable document of pre-NAFTA neoliberalism, made at a time when over ten thousand Jamaican men per year were coming to toil in the sugarcane fields of Florida. (The filmmaker herself appears with her back to the camera, when the crew is not-so-subtly advised to cease shooting at one of the company stores where laborers can buy snacks, toothpaste, etc.) Aided by legendary cinematographer Mayrse Alberti (Creed, Crumb), H-2 WORKER captures a microcosm of indentured servitude: dimly lit dormitories, dusk-to-dawn shifts, brutal deductions in pay from both the sugar company side (and upon remittance to Jamaica.)

While the beyond-cheap labor is defended by sundry American executives as a lucky break for Jamaica’s depressed economy – the opposite of a “handout” – cane harvesters inevitably begin organizing for the purposes of work stoppage. With heartbreaking snatches from letters written by the workers to their families back home, Black’s debut exposé wears its advocating spirit on its sleeve, brazenly appealing for a change in the status quo in classic advocacy-doc style. The H-2 program was ultimately disbanded after a fifty-million-dollar class-action lawsuit, but the film’s contemporary pertinence speaks for itself: the wages offered these men are paltry to the point of destitution, but they’re working a job with no real claimants on the U.S. side. Sound familiar?

“H-2 WORKER does not pretend to offer any answers, but it solidly frames issues about the economy, employment and the treatment of workers who seem just steps away from slavery.” – Caryn James, The New York Times

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LIFE AND DEBT
dir. Stephanie Black, 2001
USA/Jamaica. 80 mins.

MONDAY, MARCH 7 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY MARCH 15 – 10:00 PM
THURSDAY, MARCH 24 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 30 – 10:00 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

“Every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native would like to find a way out. Every native would like a rest. Every native would like a tour. But some natives – most natives in the world – cannot go anywhere. They’re too poor to escape the realities of their lives, and they’re too poor to live properly in the place where they live – which is the very place that you, the tourist, want to go.”

Narrated by Jamaica Kincaid (reworking the second-person narration of her 1988 classic A Small Place), Black’s breakout 2001 documentary interrogates the power structures imposed by the Bretton Woods organizations on so-called “developing” economies, and the psychological chasm that separates a nation’s exported reputation from reality on the ground. LIFE AND DEBT investigates International Monetary Fund levers in agonizing detail: “structural adjustments” designed to keep Jamaica’s post-colonial government in permanent debt, brutal export subsidies on agriculture, and loopholes for American fashion companies – many of whom are directly namechecked in the film, via first-hand testimonies from textile workers, paid an infinitesimal wage by American standards.

Not unlike the reggae-intensive soundtrack (featuring tracks by Peter Tosh, Buju Banton, Sizzla and the Marleys), the film finds melancholy drenched in beauty. While it’s a tired trope to call a film’s cinematography “sumptuous”, Black and her team of cinematographers (including Malik Sayeed) use their 35mm palette to sharply play Jamaica’s endemic lushness against itself, interrogating tropical tourist desire as its own system of imaging and control. Arguably the most rigorous dissection of postcolonial economic policy ever committed to film, LIFE AND DEBT is a penetrating critique of what the “New World Order” actually means for millions, and a sober-eyed ode to a culture in embattled flux.

“In Stephanie Black’s devastating, artful, and intelligent documentary, Jamaican farmers tell of the downward spiral of one livelihood after another: Cheap American-imported powdered milk usurps the local dairy supply, Chiquita squashes Jamaican banana farmers, Idaho potatoes nudge out regionally grown crops.” – Lenora Todaro, The Village Voice

“After the structural adjustments, the cuts in public expenditure, the removal of tariffs on imports, the privatisations and devaluations, Jamaica is still plagued by financial crisis. Development plans have been abandoned as the vision of independence recedes. LIFE AND DEBT is a very powerful weapon in the arsenal of the global movement for a more equitable economic order.” – Linton Kwesi Johnson, The Guardian

LIFESTYLE PORN PT. II
Special thanks to João Pedro Rodrigues, Joaquim Sapinho, and Rosa Films.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 9 – 8:00 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

Curated by Gabriel Abrantes, Alexander Carver, Benjamin Crotty and Daniel Schmidt, LIFESTYLE PORN, PART II is a rejoinder to a program of short queer films screened at Light Industry (LIFESTYLE PORN, PART I) from the last 60 years, marking a shift in the cinematic stylizations of homoeroticism from the guise of criminal marginality to bourgeois “lifestyle” fetishism.

The Spectacle program features LE MURA DI SANA, a short film made in Yemen by Pier Paolo Pasolini as an appeal to UNESCO, against what he perceived to be the corrupting forces of global economic development. Pasolini’s films and activism alike championed a certain romanticization of poverty and the “pre-modern” lifestyle as vitalist and sexually liberated, as a viable alternative to the repressive architecture of the burgeoning global-capitalist world of rampant consumerism and mono-culture. Whereas modern subcultural lifestyles have often exploited and have been exploited by cinematic form to various political ends, Pasolini sought to politicize the entirety of the developing world in service of his cinematic, aesthetic and personal anti-modernist politics.

The feature presentation is O FANTASMA, by contemporary Portuguese filmmaker João Pedro Rodrigues: a meditation on the alienated sexual encounters of a Lisbon garbage collector whose obsessions are the film’s sole subject. Here the refuse of the fully modernized city becomes the debased medium through which the protagonist’s burgeoning sexual fetishisms arise. Rodrigues’ ‘Fantasma’ can be seen as the ghost of Pasolini’s eccentric idealisms.

Structured as a “before and after” of ‘Late Capitalism’, the program will begin with a radical Marxist’s direct political appeal to curb capitalistic destruction of the “good life”, and thus to preserve and valorize the perceived innocence of pre-modern sexual freedoms and political naiveté. The “after” of these fantasies are imaged in O FANTASMA as the vast landfill of Lisbon – a monument to the rotting detritus of consumer culture that has displaced Pasolini’s unalienated innocence.

Friends with Benefits, a retrospective of works by Abrantes, Carver, Crotty, and Schmidt, will run at the Film Society of Lincoln Center from February 5-11. LIFESTYLE PORN, PART I plays Light Industry on Tuesday, February 2nd.