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DAVID OREILLY: ONE NIGHT IN BROOKLYN

Posted on April 21, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

DAVID OREILLY: ONE NIGHT IN BROOKLYN
WEDNESDAY, MAY 13th – 7:30PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY – SOLD OUT!

This Summer™, Spectacle is thrilled to invite filmmaker and artist David OReilly to our humble theater for a rare public presentation of work he has described as including “narrative & experimental short films, commercial projects and other miscellaneous works ordered chronologically from between 2005 and 2014” and including parts of “unfinished, boring and objective failures on my part.” Doubtful. Long before he designed the interactive video games that kept Joaquin Phoenix company in Her, OReilly’s work has pushed and satirized modern 3D animation’s intrinsic sense of aesthetic self-comfort, with an unmistakable signature that’s as utilitarian-sleek as it is cajoling and dystopian. OReilly is a rupture theorist extraordinaire, whose other projects have include the metapostmodern home movie Octocat, the award-winning shorts Please Say Something and The External World, and last summer’s smash hit iPhone game-simulator Mountain. These titles may or may not be sampled in his event on the 13th, which promises to be at least 95% more awesome on the big screen and will be followed immediately by a Q&A with OReilly.

David OReilly is an Irish-born filmmaker and artist based in Los Angeles. His animation work has garnered over 80 awards including Berlin’s Golden Bear, the Cartoon D’Or and awards at Sundance and the Venice Film Festival. David’s short films have been the subject of several retrospectives internationally. He has lectured at Pixar, Harvard, Yale, USC, CalArts and at many other conferences, institutions and film festivals around the world. In 2012 he wrote, directed and produced a special episode of the Emmy Award-winning show Adventure Time; in 2014 he released his first video game Mountain and wrote on the acclaimed animated sitcom South Park. His website can be found here.

I WONDER IF YOU CAN TELL I AM ABOUT TO LAND

Posted on April 19, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

I WONDER IF YOU CAN TELL I AM ABOUT TO LAND
Dirs. Guillermo R. Gudiño and Georgia Wall, 2011-2015
USA, Mexico, Germany

SATURDAY, MAY 16 – 7:30 PM & 10 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Guillermo explains to Georgia:

“I am starting to imagine it as if it were a room somewhere
and then we are never together inside that room
and we take turns to go in
and continue building something.”

I WONDER IF YOU CAN TELL I AM ABOUT TO LAND is a movie created through a series of long distance video exchanges. The process began in September 2011 when Georgia, an American artist based in Chicago and Guillermo, a Mexican artist based in Mexico City, established an experimental structure for communicating.

The process started with a photo that Guillermo sent to Georgia. With this Georgia had a week to create a translation which was then sent to Guillermo for a subsequent translation. He in turn translated what he had received and this exchange went on weekly with the two having minimal to no communication other than the exchanged material. Now four years later, with Georgia living in New York and Guillermo in Berlin, the process continues.

The project both experiments with the concept of translation and its boundaries as well as the context of ever-shifting contemporary ways of communicating via the internet and social networks. In these modes of communication images, video and sound become as important as traditional text. I WONDER IF YOU CAN TELL I AM ABOUT TO LAND not only documents the exchanged translations but also functions like a wordless conversation revealing the very specific non-linguistic language that has developed between the two artists over the years.

L’ENFANT SECRET

Posted on April 19, 2015July 23, 2015 by spectacletheater

L’ENFANT SECRET
Dir. Philippe Garrel, 1979
France, 92 min.
In French with English subtitles

SUNDAY, MAY 3 – 5 PM
MONDAY, MAY 11 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, MAY 19 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, MAY 30 – 10 PM

L’ENFANT SECRET is an unbearably fragile film about unbearably fragile people. Every scene flirts with cinematic disaster, images play with overexposure, dialogue fades away under music taking exposition down with them. This is one of several films Philippe Garrel made about or with long time partner Nico, this film focusing on her relationship with her estranged son, who Garrel has named Swann. In addition to Proust, Garrel also asks his audience to think about Bresson when watching this film, using two Bressonian models as actors, Anne Wiazemsky (AU HASARD BALTHAZAR) and Henri de Maublanc (THE DEVIL PROBABLY). The film also deals with Garrel’s shock treatment cure for heroin addiction and the beginning of Nico’s own experience with the drug. Despite all these lurid details, the film is not propelled by force of its narrative. One could almost experience the film as nothing more than a repetition of a moment in which two people collapse into each other’s arms. There is a story, but as it’s written, it’s so small and weak that its emotional and intellectual heart can only move through the mechanics of cinematic compositions like electricity through a circuit. Images of violence and despair have more to do with the shapes and shades of grey Garrel expects you to watch him build poetry with throughout the film than it does with a confession from his torrid experience with drugs, cinema, love, and fame – but at the same time, he has plenty to say about that too.

SEARCH FOR THE EMPEROR’S GRAVE with LIVE SCORE

Posted on April 19, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

SEARCH FOR THE EMPEROR’S GRAVE
Dir. Andy Wagstaff
USA, 28 min.
Total runtime approx. 60 min.

With a live score by VOSTOK!

THURSDAY, MAY 21 – 7:30 PM & 10 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

SEARCH FOR THE EMPEROR’S GRAVE was a psychedelic no-budget sci-fi action show deemed too weird for early 2000s Brooklyn Community Access Television. The crew of the Vostok 6 rocket sent to space by the Soviet Union in the early 1960s is inadvertently sucked through a wormhole and experiences a distant part of space at some unknowable time in the future. Their quest is to return to their own time, and the show follows various adventures the crew experiences. Inspired by video art, this green-screen heavy outsider space opera is having its first public showing at Spectacle.

After the screenings the cosmonauts from VOSTOK will give a rare live performance! Having composed the film’s score, the band continues to write spaced-out tunes based on their intergalactic adventures. One night only!

THE TERROR OF PRODUCTION

Posted on April 19, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

We all know about the glamorous side of movie-making: we’re constantly bombarded with images of untouchable movie stars from magazine covers and gossip blogs. But what about the other side of the coin, where dreams are dashed and goals never reached? And why would anyone even choose to pursue the dream of stardom, when the odds of succeeding are astronomically low? This May, Spectacle presents THE TERROR OF PRODUCTION, a series exploring the dark side of the pursuit of artistic expressions. From actresses with messiah complexes to an insane makeup artist, THE TERROR OF PRODUCTION shines a light on the bitter, bilious aftertaste of ambition.

CONFESSIONS AMONG ACTRESSES
Dir. Yoshishige Yoshida, 1971
Japan, 124 min.
In Japanese with English subtitles

THURSDAY, MAY 14 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, MAY 19 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, MAY 25 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, MAY 29 – 7:30 PM

Kyoko, Aki, and Makiko are famous actresses starring together in the same film. Each woman, however, has her own crisis that makes acting in the film particularly harrowing. Kyoko has persistent, recurring dreams about her husband cheating on her with another woman. Aki is also troubled by the thought of her husband’s infidelity, and cannot forget a vicious attack on a close friend. Makiko divulges the story of a double suicide pact with a man who may have been closer than just a lover. Since these women are famous actresses, they must wear the mask of beauty, confidence, and perfection, and their traumas get swept under the rug.

Yoshishige Yoshida directs the film with his usual brilliant eye for framing and composition, with the added layer of being one of Yoshida’s only color films. The daily lives of these women overlap with the shooting of the film-within-the-film, and metatextual moments on the meaning of being an actress dovetail with moments of hysterical, beautiful melodrama. Yoshida cast his wife (and frequent collaborator) Mariko Okada as one of the actresses, adding another level of revelation to the film. Think of Persona-era Bergman, shot by the foremost director of Japan’s Art Theater Guild, and you’ll have a sense of the intensely personal, avant-garde, visually lush whirlwind that is CONFESSIONS AMONG ACTRESSES.

THE MANIPULATOR
Dir. Yabo Yablonsky, 1971
USA, 85 min.

SUNDAY, MAY 10 – 5 PM
SUNDAY, MAY 17 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, MAY 24 – 7:30 PM

“We all change. But that’s just the way it goes.”

Certain performances are for the ages. They transcend the actor and place the role into an realm of their own. They cut against the actor as we know them, they are a slap in the face to our assumptions, they are the films that make us uncomfortable with who we think we are and who we want to be. Consider Andy Griffith in A VOICE IN THE CROWD. Consider Ernest Borgnine in MARTY. That’s exactly what you’ll get from Mickey Rooney in THE MANIPULATOR, as intense a delivery as David Hess or Roger Watkins in a film that is about as weird as they come. Perhaps best considered a role-reversed Sunset Blvd. or a twist on the screen-queens-gone-bad roles of 70s Elizabeth Taylor or Joan Crawford circa Straight-Jacket, Mickey Rooney tears into the role of makeup artist B.J. Lang like a freight train, screaming his demented paranoid soliloquies over synth bloops and echoplex for days. In honor of his recent passing, Spectacle is proud to present Mickey Rooney’s true magnum opus: THE MANIPULATOR.

THE SECOND COMING OF SUZANNE
Dir. Michael Barry, 1974
USA, 90 min.

SUNDAY, MAY 17 – 5 PM
FRIDAY, MAY 22 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, MAY 26 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, MAY 28 – 10 PM

THE SECOND COMING OF SUZANNE stars Jared Martin as a filmmaker becoming more and more obsessive about his idea for a film about Christ as a woman. Suzanne (future Clint Eastwood paramour Sondra Locke) is the “lucky” leading lady who gets the starring role in Martin’s film, but as shooting gets more and more intense, the lines between Suzanne’s reality as an actress, and fiction as a messiah figure, become psychedelically blurred, ending up in tragedy.

Based on the Leonard Cohen song “Suzanne,” THE SECOND COMING OF SUZANNE is the kind of film that could only have been made in the 70s – art school sensibility, plus a lot of psychedelic drugs and an increasingly worried Richard Dreyfuss. It’s a wonderful showcase for Sondra Locke, who is even today incredibly underrated as an actress, and she throws herself into the madness here. Come for the art film, stay for the crucifixion.

STARRY EYES
Dir. Dennis Widmyer & Kevin Kolsch, 2014
USA, 98 min.

SATURDAY, MAY 9 – 7:30 PM & 10 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Skype Q&A with Directors Dennis Widmyer & Kevin Kolsch!

Ever get the suspicion that Hollywood is controlled by unseen forces that lurk behind the curtain of every big-budget production? STARRY EYES won’t do much to divest you of that opinion. Sarah (Alex Essoe, in a true star-making performance that brings to mind the hysterical physicality of Isabelle Adjani in POSSESSION) is a down-on-her-luck young actress, living in LA, hoping to achieve the dream of stardom, but also working in a fast food restaurant with a lascivious boss. With no prospects, a crappy job, and friends who are succeeding faster than her, Sarah goes for one last big audition for a horror film. Her acting doesn’t impress the casting agents, but her brutal self-injurious behaviour does. From there, it’s a trip down the rabbit hole through creepy auditions, tests of faith, and a contract Sarah cannot – and will not – refuse.

Part of the American independent horror renaissance of the last few years, STARRY EYES is a tense, intense, gory look at how the sausage is made in Hollywood. Directors Dennis Widmyer and Kevin Kolsch paint a portrait of Sarah’s degradation in LA so that we can’t resist, or really even argue with, the choices that she makes on her way to the top. Complete with a spare, creepy synth score, STARRY EYES harkens back to a creepier day in horror, when what’s inside each and every one of us was scarier than anything else.

Widmyer & Kolsch will join us after both screenings for a Q&A via Skype!

HIT 2 PASS

Posted on April 19, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

HIT 2 PASS
Dir. Kurt Walker, 2014
Canada, 72 min.

SUNDAY, MAY 3 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, MAY 14 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, MAY 26 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, MAY 31 – 7:30 PM

In Kurt Walker’s magnificent debut HIT 2 PASS, what initially appears a goofy road trip movie soon gives itself away as a scrupulous documentary dig into the Auto Racing Association of Prince George, British Columbia (billed on its website as “the playground of power”), and its annual “hit to pass” marathon. The rule is that drivers must collide with another car in order to pass it, and the film gives chase to three weeks spent by a future contestant and his father refurbishing a hot rod for the tournament, with special attention given to the endless nuts-and-bolts work that will make possible a few hours of summertime fun for a small crowd of spectators. In the first half of HIT 2 PASS, Walker’s command of multi-camera montage proves a delight, with cameras affixed to drones, mounted within the vehicle and even handed to children watching the track during the derby.

The simple phraseology of these rituals (the film’s very title a “sequelization” of an existing event, explicating that documentary is, unto itself, a dubious format of adaptation) begin to take on chewier, more socio-historico-politico-cultural kinds of meanings following the film’s one unedited, isolated sit-down interview. Walker is not just after cheap thrills, or even their material costs, but rather a vast and complicated cross-section of remembering and spectacle (itself a kind of willful un-learning). Unassuming at first blush, his images hang in memory as if glimpsed from a passing car on a long ride home, like a magic-hour graffito that reads, “OIL = DEATH”. Hit 2 Pass is as sincere, funny and mysterious as contemporary experimental cinema gets.

“Imagine Red Line 7000, the unforgettable race film by Hawks, crossed with Miguel Gomes’ Our Beloved Month of August via the intermediary of a ZX Spectrum and this would give you something resembling Hit 2 Pass.” – Francisco Ferreira, publico

“The atmosphere is all small-town affability and thick-sliced hoser accents. This alone would make a fascinating feature, but Walker ups the ante by making the assembly of the film just as interesting as the assembling of the Storozinkis’ hot rod. Segments organically trail off where other docs would cut. Off-screen questions and banter are left in. Many sequences look like abstract geometrical compositions scored by field recordings. Rather than make the film feel sloppy, they invigorate Hit 2 Pass with a vibrant sense of playfulness.” – Derek Godin, Dim The House Lights

“Hit 2 Pass is an act of genuine and tender interrogation and self-discovery that explores the gap between the immaterial excitement of video games and the complexity of life. Like the most humble and earnest first features, Walker’s film is open about its own imperfections so as to carve out its own distinctive and tentative place in the saturated imaginary of contemporary cinema.” –Giovanni Vimercati, Film Comment

TIMELESS BOTTOMLESS BAD MOVIE

Posted on April 19, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

TIMELESS BOTTOMLESS BAD MOVIE
Dir. Jang Sun-Woo, 1997
South Korea, 144 min.
In Korean with English subtitles

MONDAY, MAY 4 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, MAY 15 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, MAY 20 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, MAY 30 – 7:30 PM

Offering more than a few glimpses of pure transgressive brilliance, TIMELESS BOTTOMLESS BAD MOVIE has many layers of depth among its distinctive stink. Using documentary footage and reenactments, BAD MOVIE is about the alienated youth who riot for they have the energy and the disfranchised homeless who are just too tired to do anything about it. BAD MOVIE’s constantly shifting and warped narrative is never jagged, tired, or acts like it’s fucking around. Many vignettes come off as a classier Gregg Araki without the urgency, cheese, and panic, or even a pessimistic Wong Kar-Wai without the wonder and twee. Balancing between scenes of the two subjects first strike as lofty and loose, but as the film closes, their parallels turn into staggering segments of revelations full of perceptiveness. In a decade of laziness but heightened awareness, Jang Sun-Woo has crafted the nearly perfect Generation X version of a New Wave film.

PIOTR SZULKIN’S APOCALYPSE QUARTET

Posted on April 19, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

Two years after packing the house during our Eastern Bloc Apocalypse series, the remarkable work of Piotr Szulkin returns to Spectacle.

Criminally under-appreciated outside of his native Poland, Piotr Szulkin has hardly achieved cult status, even as other giants of Polish cinema (Andrzej Żuławski, Andrzej Wajda) get their due with retrospectives at respected theaters and museums. Born in Gdansk in 1950, Szulkin got his start at the State Higher School of Directing in 1975, producing animations, short documentary, and musicals. Working as a director, screenwriter, and novelist, his films occupy space on the bleaker fringes of the late Soviet period. His work stretches well into the 2000s, but it’s his dystopian “tetralogy”—four rarely screened science fiction films about the apocalypse produced in the twilight of Polish communism—that have been sought after by cinephiles for the past 30 years. Spectacle is proud to bring these films together for the first time as a major US retrospective.

Dismissive of the Polish critical establishment’s labeling of his work as sci-fi (he prefers the term “asocial fiction”), Szulkin’s vision of the apocalypse in the tetralogy is deeply rooted in the realities of life behind the Iron Curtain. Political violence, martial law, pervasive propaganda, and civilian apathy are the texture of his morbid future, set in worlds where humanity has been hobbled under the pressures of state control. Shot on spartan budgets in a gritty, expressive style, the films are wildly imaginative and inventive, even as they mine the depths of wasted potential and human exploitation for allegories of life under the 1980s Polish regime.

Spectacle is deeply grateful to Piotr Szulkin for his support of this series.

GOLEM
Dir. Piotr Szulkin, 1980
Poland, 92 min.
In Polish with English subtitles

MONDAY, MAY 4 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, MAY 18 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, MAY 23 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, MAY 24 – 5 PM

The first film of the quartet, GOLEM (1979), is a loose retelling of Der Golem, Gustav Meyrink’s 1914 novel. Replacing the ghettos of Prague with a garbage-strewn, dilapidated future, Szulkin’s adaptation trades the golem for “Pernat,” a clone manufactured for shadowy reasons by a totalitarian regime. Pernat, played with remarkable gentility by Szulkin favorite Marek Walczewski, interacts with the swifter edges of Polish society as he attempts to understand the institution that created him, and his purpose on the planet. Upon its release, the film won the Brown Lion at the Gdańsk Film Festival, but has been all but forgotten today.

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS: NEXT CENTURY
Dir. Piotr Szulkin, 1981
Poland, 92 min.
In Polish with English subtitles

SUNDAY, MAY 10 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, MAY 13 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, MAY 20 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, MAY 31 – 5 PM

This bleak homage to Orson Welles and H.G. Wells was released just weeks before Poland’s authoritarian government introduced martial law across the country to crush any semblance of political opposition. This tense atmosphere is directly reflected in the film, which begins with the arrival of an advanced civilization from Mars on December 18, 1999. The invaders find a pure and total police state, with a population kept in shackles by omnipresent television sets, used as a tool for propaganda. (Szulkin is famously dismissive of television, which is referred to here as “a box of excrement in living color.”) Sensing an opportunity to exploit humanity, the Martians engage the police force to abuse its populace, and force a local television host to collaborate with the state apparatus in a propaganda campaign to convince the civilian populace to donate blood. The host is bounced like a ping-pong ball between the police and the bloodthirsty Martians, ultimately attempting a thwarted rebellion that changes nothing. It went on to win the Grand Prix, and awards for Best Director and Best Screenplay at the Gdańsk Film Festival, along with the Special Jury Award at the International Film Festival in Trieste.

O-BI, O-BA: THE END OF CIVILIZATION
Dir. Piotr Szulkin, 1984
Poland, 85 min.
In Polish with English subtitles

FRIDAY, MAY 1 – 10 PM
MONDAY, MAY 11 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, MAY 22 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, MAY 28 – 7:30 PM

It is one year since nuclear war rolled over the world. Humanity has forgotten who won the war. The 850 survivors have herded together atop the Arctic Circle. There, underneath an insulated dome, they have succumbed to a group psychosis, clinging to the hope that a vessel called “The Ark” is en route to rescue them from their hell. Meanwhile, a subtle class system develops based around silver coins called “Arks,” and those without them die from malnutrition and exposure. As the protective dome begins to erode, morals and ethics follow suit, and the architect of “The Ark Myth” is forced to confront his hoax head on.

The obvious highlight of Szulkin’s apocalypse quartet, O-BI, O-BA is a vision of pure and total apocalypse unfettered by ornamental sentimentality.

GA-GA: GLORY TO THE HEROES
Dir. Piotr Szulkin, 1986
Poland, 84 min.
In Polish with English subtitles

TUESDAY, MAY 12 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, MAY 16 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, MAY 23 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, MAY 25 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, MAY 27 – 7:30 PM

GA-GA: GLORY TO THE HEROES, the comic end to the apocalypse quartet, begins with an interplanetary mission to an uninhabited planet called Australia 458. Instead of putting civilians in danger, the brutal regime forces Prisoner 287138, played by Wadja regular Daniel Olbrychski, to land on the unknown planet and claim it for humanity. To his surprise, the planet is the home of an equally insane regime that greets him as a celebrity, only to force him to commit crimes that will result in his public execution.

EVERYDAY CATASTROPHE: EUGENE LANG at the SPECTACLE

Posted on April 17, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

WEDNESDAY, MAY 6
8 PM – “IF A TREE FALLS”
10 PM – “CATASTROPHE”

THURSDAY, MAY 7
8 PM – “CATASTROPHE”
10 PM – “IF A TREE FALLS”

The students of Eugene Lang College at The New School present two evenings of public programming at the Spectacle Theater, as part of the experimental seminar “Collage, Collectivity and Curatorial Practice.” The course considers the politics of collectivity, in theory and practice, and seeks to intervene in the society of the spectacle through performance, and visual and auditory collage.

From winter to spring 2015, the students have gorged on a diet of theory and are now ready to put their supper to practice. The course considered such theorists as Jackie Wang, Siegfried Kracauer, Hannah Arendt, Guy Debord, and Umberto Eco, the paintings of Kihende Wiley, the films of Maya Deren and Jean-Luc Godard, the music of John Osborne and Pussy Riot, and the movements of Occupy, Arab Spring, and Black Lives Matter — all with an eye for the radical ideals of collectivity in art and action. Having divided into two groups (A and B), and working closely with Spectacle volunteers, each night will be dedicated to two distinct presentations programmed and created by the students, themed around Walter Benjamin’s notions of “Tradition” and “Catastrophe.”

Present at all screenings will be co-teachers Dr. Julie Beth Napolin, Assistant Professor at Eugene Lang, C. Spencer Yeh, artist and volunteer at Spectacle Theater, and student fellows Liam Battat and Thea Sass-Ainsworth.

Admission is $5. To ensure a space RSVP by May 5th to everydaycatastrophe@gmail.com, or take your chances at the door.

This project is a collaboration with the Civic Arts and Humanities Program at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts.

IF A TREE FALLS
Dir. Various, 2015
USA, ? min.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 6 – 8 PM
THURSDAY, MAY 7 – 10 PM

IF A TREE FALLS is an approach to countering both societal and cinematic hypnotism. An assault of the senses will theoretically wake the audience from the slumber induced by the conditions of spectacle. Abstract approaches to soundtrack i.e. live scoring, counterintuitive editing techniques and other creative uses of audible reality should temporarily make the unrealism of reality both more apparent and less appealing. Some of the materials we use are a Sony handycam and a Panasonic handheld camcorder, both from the 1990s, that take 8mm videocassettes. We invoke older technology in order to remind the audience of the beginning of digital recording and the nostalgia that is now associated with VHS film, reminding the viewer that vision has always been mediated.

This will not be an entertaining experience. But it is that distinction that we’re attempting to capture in an effort to break from the hypnosis of industrial film, which seeks to entertain and condition. This project isn’t an effort to entertain anyone. Running at thirty minutes, the film is meant to magnify the agony of hyper-stimuli/monotony as a way of intervening in the everyday haze of the Spectacle. If a tree fell, and no one was there to witness it, did it really happen? And if it happened, was it only real because someone was there to document it?

The project was created by Liam Battat (project leader), Amanda Bernhardt, Jahmal B Golden, Michele Manor Eric Bayless-Hall, Anna Papadimitriou, Mikaela Crelin, Sacha Kreitman, Andrew Poirier and Naomi Khanukayev

CATASTROPHE
Dir. Various, 2015
USA, 40 min.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 6 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, MAY 7 – 8 PM

Catastrophe – An event causing great and often sudden damage or suffering, a disaster.

Acts of catastrophe are totalizing—they destroy, conquer and ruin. It is our duty as humans to collectively and collaboratively deal with the aftermaths of these events. What do we do when disaster happens? How do we react? How can we rebound?

When Brian Williams reported live from Joplin, Missouri after the town was destroyed by a tornado, he brought catastrophe into American homes, exposing the world to the tragic aftermath of natural disaster. As Adam Curtis commented, Williams left the world in a state of “oh dear” by presenting them with the grave circumstances of disaster, and making it clear that there was nothing they could do about it.

Today, catastrophe is constant. Wars are being fought, wildfires are raging and Marco Rubio has announced he’s running for president. The everyday catastrophes of the world have heightened our perceptions into a state of constant fear, anguish and questioning. The media has changed catastrophe into a game of fear as opposed to a game of community. What is catastrophe? What are its effects? What does it do? And what does Brian Williams have to do with it?

Join us for a night of engaging audio-visual spectacle. This four-part event discusses catastrophe and its worldly effects. Encompassing personal catastrophe, natural disaster, mass incarceration and genocide, this event retells the history of catastrophe and the history of its influence. Using a mirage of audio-visual effects, two short films and a sonic exploration, this event will deconstruct “the spectacle of ‘the catastrophe.’”

A SHEEP WITHOUT A SHEPHERD: THE FILMS OF VICTOR FACCINTO

Posted on April 2, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

A SHEEP WITHOUT A SHEPHERD: THE FILMS OF VICTOR FACCINTO
Dir. Victor Faccinto, 1972-2010
USA, 52 min.
Presented on HDV and 16mm

SUNDAY APRIL 19 – 7:00 PM
Victor Faccinto will be present for a discussion / Q & A!

Co-presented by MONO NO AWARE
Special thanks to Victor Faccinto!

BE ADVISED : FILMS HAVE ADULT CONTENT

This special program will present a selection of Victor Faccinto’s film works made between 1972-2010. The influence of underground comics in the 60’s and the television in the 50’s, help to shape his innocent yet horrifying stories. His delicate animation skills make his unforgettable characters adorable, comic and vicious. Faccinto is not afraid of connecting his reality, imagination, and our reality together to remind us of the rawness in the countless desires of humans. He remains playful, using his own character ‘Video Vic’ to say, “You see? It’s all just simple.”

Screening program includes:

MR. SANDMAN – 1973 (16mm to DV, 1min 30sec, B/W)
FILET OF SOUL – 1972 (16mm to DV, 16min, color)
VISUAL REMAINS – 2001 (16mm to DV, 6min, color)
SHAMELESS, – 1974 (16mm film print, 14min)
NIGHTMARE – 2009 (DV 7:35min)
FLOWER STUDIES – 2010 (DV 6:43pm)

Faccinto’s never-ending passion for his innocent moving image techniques has evolved through cut-out animation, to 16mm film, and now to digital video. He uses simple objects and patterns to create raw and lively settings where the characters can playfully travel through time and space. The various methods utilized are visually simple yet masterful. As the audience is enticed into the vibrant world of Victor Faccinto, they are shocked as well by the darkness. In Filet of Soul, Shameless and Nightmare, he created the character named Video Vic. This iconic personality is psychologically tangled in the complexity of countless human desires. Video Vic maneuvers through worlds of love, lust, violence and sex. There is a palpable gap between Faccinto’s cheerful visual style and the brutal imagery. His films have the innate power to capture the characters’ vast inner conflicts, which then reflect our own humanity. The films may be painful to watch, but that is the celebration of human life that Faccinto offers us. Faccinto’s current work-in-progress is a digital video visually interpreting selected Japanese Tanka poems.“My creative decisions are made in real time during execution and directed by an instinctive visual perception that decides right from wrong and guides my next move forward. What it may mean or reference once completed, is always a surprise to me.” – V.F.