Author: spectacletheater

KINETIC CINEMA: A SCREENING AND DISCUSSION WITH NEL SHELBY

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NELSHELBY_BANNER2 KINETIC CINEMA: A SCREENING AND DISCUSSION WITH NEL SHELBY
Dir. Nel Shelby, Various years
USA, ca. 90 min.

ONE NIGHT ONLY!
THURSDAY, MARCH 13 – 8:00 PM

Pentacle is pleased to invite Nel Shelby, an extraordinarily talented dance videographer, to present an evening of films and videos that have inspired her illustrious career in dance and video.

Nel writes: “When I double-majored in dance and broadcast video, I had no idea where it would lead. Now, when I sit in a dark theater watching dance, trying to type as many notes as possible into my iPhone, I pinch myself and wonder if there’s any place I’d rather be. (The answer is NO!) Whenever I walk into a theater, it feels like home. Whether it’s midtown Manhattan, Vail, Colorado, or Becket, Massachusetts, each and every day I am inspired by the work that I do. More than anything, I want artists to have beautiful video to showcase their work so they can book more performances and keep sharing what they do best.”

Nel Shelby, Founder and Principal of Nel Shelby Productions, is deeply dedicated to the preservation and promotion of dance through documentation of live performances, fully edited marketing reels, live-stream capture, and documentaries and films that encapsulate the essence of nonprofit organizations.

Her New York City-based video production company has grown to encompass a diverse list of dance clients including American Ballet Theater II, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, Gallim Dance, Gotham Arts, Kate Weare and Company, Keigwin + Company, Monica Bill Barnes Company, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Shen Wei Dance Arts, Wendy Whelan and many more. She has filmed performances at venues throughout the greater New York area including The Joyce Theater, New York Live Arts, Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, St. Mark’s Church and Judson Church, to name a few.

For the past eight years, Nel has served as Festival Videographer for the internationally celebrated Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in the Berkshires. Each season at the Pillow, Nel’s responsibilities include documenting aspects of festival culture in addition to its 20 mainstage dance performances, filming and overseeing documentation of more than 100 free performances and events, managing two dance videography interns and an apprentice, and educating students about the technical and philosophical aspects of filming dance.

She now also serves as Resident Videographer at the Vail International Dance Festival where she spent her first summer creating five short dance documentary films about the festival in addition to documenting its events and performances. Her longer-form, half-hour documentary on Vail’s festival, THE ALTITUDE OF DANCE, debuted on Rocky Mountain PBS in May 2013.

This year, she is creating four short films for Wendy Whelan’s Restless Creature. In 2012, she collaborated with Adam Barruch Dance to create a short film titled FOLIE A DEUX, which was selected and screened at the Dance on Camera Festival in New York City. Nel’s videos for the New Jersey Hall of Fame were shown to an audience of 2000 people, and she is currently editing a dance documentary featuring Nejla Y. Yatkin that she filmed for three-and-a-half weeks in Central America in 2010. Nel has a long personal history with movement – she has a B.A. in dance and is a certified Pilates instructor. She continues to train with world-renowned Master Teachers Romana Krysnowska and Sari Pace, original students of Joseph Pilates. In addition to her dance degree, Nel holds a B.S. in broadcast video. She often collaborates with her wonderful husband, dance photographer Christopher Duggan on creative projects with dancers in New York City and beyond. They live with their beautiful daughter Gracie in Manhattan.

Kinetic Cinema, is a regular screening series of Pentacle’s Movement Media curated by invited guest artists who create evenings of films and videos that have been influential to their own work as artists. When artists are asked to reflect upon how the use of movement in film and media arts has influenced their own art, a plethora of new ideas, material, and avenues of exploration emerge. From cutting edge motion capture animation to Michael Jackson music videos, from Gene Kelly musicals to Kenneth Anger films, Kinetic Cinema is dedicated to the recognition and appreciation for “moving” pictures. We have presented these evenings at Collective: Unconscious, Chez Bushwick, IRT, Launchpad, Green Space, Uniondocs, CRS, 3rd Useless and The Tank in New York City, as well as at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.

For more info on the current Kinetic Cinema season please visit our website and our blog, movetheframe.com.

About Pentacle’s Movement Media

Pentacle’s Movement Media provides services, strategies, and opportunities for dance artists to make dance works for screen and use media to promote and enhance their artistic pursuits. The core activities of Movement Media are screenings, consulting services, workshops, and interactive media publications (blogs, social networking, online videos, etc). These services address a growing need for dance artists to engage with Media, particularly online and on new media platforms, in order to reach audiences, grow artistically, and stay relevant in today’s media-rich world.

Pentacle’s Movement Media programming is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. KINETIC CINEMA is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. The 2014 season of Kinetic Cinema is made possible through the contributions of generous individuals like you.

JON JOST

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“Perhaps Jost’s work doesn’t reach a wider audience because he works in an uncompromising fashion and on a shoestring budget with nonprofessional casts. The perverse irony is that although his films aren’t readily accessible in theaters, they are in themselves highly accessible.” -Kevin Thomas, LA Times

Despite theatrical releases of his films All the Vermeers in New York (1990) and The Bed You Sleep In (1993), Jon Jost remains virtually unknown to moviegoers. A founding member of Newsreel, the leftist filmmaking collective, and a hardcore experimentalist in his early career, Jost has made 34 feature films, all of which he has written, directed, shot, and edited (and most he has also produced). His films are about what drive people, about psychology and society, and about expressing the interior of individual thought. In many ways, his films are about communication.

Jost is foremost a visual filmmaker, using images to express the inner thoughts and feelings of his characters. His cinema possess a type of naturalism rarely seen in narrative works, and through the occasionally rough delivery of his actors, as well as his own technical experimentations, he consistently foregrounds the cinematic process. His practice is “more concerned with evoking a place, time, and milieu than with a dramatically shaped story” (Jonathan Rosenbaum) and has been compared to John Cassavetes, Jim Jarmusch, and Robert Bresson.Though he has worked abroad, the majority of Jost’s films are broadly concerned with the American experience, and in particular the pressures that can be created by notions of masculinity in this culture. We’re extremely thrilled to welcome Jost to Spectacle present two vintage Jost films from the decade leading up to his first theatrical release, as well as two recent works that return to Jost’s experimental roots.

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SLOW MOVES
Dir. Jon Jost, 1983
USA, 93 min.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 22 – 10PM

DIRECTOR IN ATTENDANCE!

SLOW MOVES chronicles a love story about two somewhat forlorn characters, both of them loners. Julie (Roxanne Rogers) is a native Californian who has been living in San Francisco for about four years. a highly disciplined, hard-working young woman. Jeff (Marshall Gaddis) is an out of work construction worker specializing in handling steel girders at great heights who’s lost his nerve after a minor injury. The two meet on the Golden Gate Bridge and after a brief and awkward courtship, live together with the usual problems of money and work. They are not particularly happy together; they have nothing better to do. Sometimes, she says, there’s ”this incredible connection, then sometimes it’s just gone.” After struggling to find happiness in SF, they find a sense of illusory freedom following the American dream of the open road. The film’s long takes play with the films title and evoke in the film of a sense of tragic inevitability.

Shot in 5 days on a budget of $8,000 with an improvised script, the film contains minimal dialogue, with most of the story told through narration by the main characters, as well as (presumably) the filmmaker himself. It is a film about filmmaking itself, its production foregrounded in one of its opening scenes as Julie’s narration comments on a suicide that happened “when we were making this film.” Perhaps the greatest instance of this foregrounding occurs when the two visit a camera obscura, a particularly long scene where I tour guide gives an oral history of photography. We are told that this world of ours contains so many people and so many stories. This couple provides just one of those stories and ”like most people, they did not tell their story well.”

“… it is quite serious about demonstrating how the simplest of plots can be visually manipulated into a vehicle of tension and suspense. Technique is layered upon technique, all the while pushing the story forward to its shabby and oddly affecting little conclusion. Slow Moves deserves all the exposure it can get.”  – John J. O’Conner, The New York Times

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PARABLE
Dir. Jon Jost, 2008
USA, 72 min.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 22 – 8PM

DIRECTOR IN ATTENDANCE!

“Nebraska, 2007.

A parable of the Bush era; swiftly jumping genres, a cowboy surrogate/Bush is thrown out of his house, is picked up by a man who needs a driver, buddy-bonds with him, they sing a Christian camp song, do a robbery and killing, and cowboy then rapes and shoots his new buddy. We arrive in a bucolic farm where a woman is kept on a rope, a man attempts to untie a knotted rope; and after a long and weird interlude including some heavy breathing, the cowboy arrives, seduces and is screwing the woman, and is killed and dumped with other bodies from Abu Ghraib.

PARABLE works on a visual and visceral level for which a synoptic summary is impossible. It is a reflection of The Time of Bush in America, a squalid period of corruption equal to our country’s worst, or, as if possible, even the worst. The film tackles this era with a melange of genres typical of our culture, a culture which distills in reality down to cartoons and in which a trajectory from domestic melodrama leads axiomatically to Abu Ghraib. PARABLE is history as farce, an American tragedy limned by the Flintstones and Simpsons, where seriousness has been subsumed by “reality TV,” and the populace has been reduced to zombie-like consumers busy eating themselves.” – JonJost.com

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BELL DIAMOND
Dir. Jon Jost, 1986
USA, 96 min.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 23 – 7PM

DIRECTOR IN ATTENDANCE!

Marshall Gaddis (also named Jeff) returns in similar role, playing an out of work Vietnam Vet in Butte, Montana. His wife, Cathy, (Sarah Wyss) leaves him after seven years when she feels there is no longer communication between them and – more painfully and pointedly – because she is unable to have a child owing to his sterility from exposure to Agent Orange. The characters spend a lot of their time talking about their problems with no sense of how to solve them, and there is a real sense throughout that the problems of the characters are due to circumstances beyond their control.

Exploring these circumstances, in many ways, the film is just as much about Butte as the relationship. Using real time, Jost links Jeff’s story to that of American labor history (in a brilliant sequence), and the film is peppered with some of the finest pictorial representations of the working-class West imaginable – cloud filled skies, cyclone fences, desolate factories, pipelines, old tanks. In a particularly telling scene, Jeff and his friends break into the old Bell Diamond copper mine, from which they was laid off when it closed down.

“Among the ten best of the year. Formally exquisite and politically pointed study of an alienated Vietnam vet against the background of a bankrupted mining town.”  – Dave Kehr, Chicago Tribune

 “… with a story developed by the filmmaker and cast and completely improvised, the film deals with characters who are neither articulate nor particularly attractive, but pays them the kind of respect and attention that they would never receive from other quarters. Visually Jost’s most impressive work to date. The impact of the film’s original form of realism arrives only gradually, but once it registers, it becomes indelible.”  – Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

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THE NARCISSUS FLOWERS OF KATSURA-SHIMA
Dir. Jon Jost, 2012
Japan, 76 min.
In Japanese with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 23 – 5PM

DIRECTOR IN ATTENDANCE!

“THE NARCISSUS FLOWERS OF KATSURA-SHIMA was shot on a small island off the coast of North Eastern Japan, six months after the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. A work of elemental simplicity, it shows the aftermath of this catastrophe on the island, and allows the inhabitants ample space to tell the stories of the day of the disaster and its impact upon them and the island. Embroidered with several Japanese traditional poems and haunting imagery, this film seeks to enter into the living reality of these simple fishermen and women.” -JonJost.com

SAMARA LUBELSKI: AN EVENING OF LIVE SCORES

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SAMARA LUBELSKI

ONE NIGHT ONLY!
THURSDAY, MARCH 27 – PERFORMANCES AT 8:00 and 10:00 PM

We are incredibly stoked to welcome the awesome singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Samara Lubelski for a special evening of two unique live score performances.

Lubelski may be known for her solo albums on De Stijl, Ecstatic Peace!, and the Social Registry, or as a veteran of the Tower Recordings, the Sonora Pine, and Hall of Fame. She currently performs as a duo with Marcia Bassett (of Zaimph), with German weirdo outfit Metabolismus, Metal Mountains (with Helen Rush and PG Six), and Chelsea Light Moving (with Thurston Moore).

Ever the bad-ass, Lubelski will present a solo improvised violin set at 8 PM, and then a song set on voice and guitar at 10 PM. The performances are (respectively) accompanied by visuals themed URBAN ROMANCE (SQUALOR) and SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS (EXCERPTS). Those themes are subject to change, but what we know for sure is that this is going to RULE.

REVISIONIST HISTORIES OF CHINA

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This February, the Spectacle goes against the party line.

From the 50s to the 70s, Mao had to deal not only with the landlords, the compradors, and all the other running dogs of the international bourgeoisie, but also with foreign filmmakers seemingly bent on making a mockery of the sincere efforts of the Chinese communists to build a new society out of the ruins of the old. Before and during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, these camera-wielding counterrevolutionaries exposed Chinese everyday life as less-than-radically-transformed in many of its aspects, and contributed to a worldwide demystification of the processes of labor-aristocratization and bureaucratization then taking place in that vast country. Some did it with more polemical intent than others. For a cross-section of the different critical attitudes then circulating on the subject of Communist China, this series brings together the naïve, the sarcastic, and the acerbic.

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CHINAMEN, ONE MORE EFFORT IF YOU WANT TO BE REVOLUTIONARIES!
a.k.a. Peking Duck Soup; Chinois, encore un effort pour être révolutionnaires!
Dir. René Vienet, 1977
France, 112 mins.
In English

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 5 – 7PM

Known primarily for his pioneering cinematic détournement Can Dialectics Break Bricks?, which put Situationist slogans in the mouths of kung-fu fighting Koreans, René Vienet also wrote Enragés and Situationists in the Occupations Movement, one of the most comprehensive first-hand accounts of the events of May ’68 in France. A sinologist, Vienet was expelled from China while on a study trip in 1966, and was subsequently fired — twice! — from his post at the French National Center for Scientific Research for his attacks on defenders of Mao within their ranks.

In CHINAMEN, ONE MORE EFFORT IF YOU WANT TO BE REVOLUTIONARIES!, Vienet uses subverted archival footage and a sardonic voiceover to denounce Mao’s deformed socialist state machine as a grotesque caricature of a revolutionary society. Whereas his previous two détournements spoofed kung-fu movies and pinku flicks, this one attacks the political documentary and disassembles it into its constituent tropes. Legendary French literary and film critic Georges Charensol called it “in my opinion the best film in the history of cinema.”

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SUNDAY IN PEKING
a.k.a. Dimanche à Pekin
Dir. Chris Marker, 1956
France, 18 mins.
In French with English subtitles

In 1956, recently beatified cinema-essayist Chris Marker spent a couple of weeks in Peking and shot this travelogue. As the title suggests, the subject is a single, typical day in the life of the Chinese capital. Marker turns his camera on mask-wearing mysophobes, top-level athletes, and sword-wielding retirees to weave a magical, embellished tapestry of Peking in which the most egregious Orientalist illusions are deployed with sarcastic relish. Marker’s irony was not noticed by everyone: unlike the other two filmmakers in this series, Marker was rejected not by the Chinese government but by the Berlin Film Festival for what it perceived as shameless Communist propaganda.

The highly personal lyricism of Marker’s commentary in Sunday in Peking, newly translated and subtitled for the Spectacle, shows the influence of Alain Resnais, with whom Marker had just collaborated on STATUES ALSO DIE and NIGHT AND FOG. The score is conducted by famed French New Wave composer Georges Delerue, whose distinctive scores include SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER and CONTEMPT. Other collaborators include Agnès Varda, who acted as the film’s “sinological advisor” — whatever that entailed.

Special thanks to Allison Kruse for the new translation.

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CHUNG KUO – CINA
Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1972
Italy, 208 mins.
In Italian with English subtitles

THURSDAY, JANUARY 6, 7PM

More reviled by the Chinese government than possibly any other filmmaker in history is Michelangelo Antonioni. What could have led Antonioni, not known for his outspoken criticism of the Chinese or any other state, to be condemned to a massive campaign of public ridicule and denunciation diffused throughout the largest population in the world? Answer: CHUNG KUO – CINA, a three-hour long documentary commissioned by the Chinese embassy in Rome and RAI Television during the dusk years of the Cultural Revolution.

Shot over 22 days in Beijing, Henan Province, Suzhou, Nanjing, and Shanghai, with a strict itinerary imposed by the Party officials appointed to guide Antonioni’s crew, CHUNG KUO was supposed to become a panoramic document of socialist progress. But through a series of tactical deviations from his assigned trajectory, Antonioni ended up producing a touchingly naïve and intimate portrait of everyday life in early 1970s China. The film’s decidedly unmonumental character provoked severe indignation from the Party: the Chinese ambassador led his staff in a walkout at a screening in Washington, newspaper editorials with titles like “A Vicious Motive, Despicable Tricks” were collected into a 200-page booklet called The Chinese People Will Not Stand for Being Denigrated: A Collection of Criticisms of Antonioni’s Anti-China Film, and even a taunt-song called “Let’s Make Antonioni Mad” was widely taught to Chinese schoolchildren.

From the first images of an old man doing tai chi while riding a bike, to an eye-popping cesarian section performed with nothing but acupuncture needles for anesthesia, CHUNG KUO is amazing as a travelogue, a historical document, and a study in the minutiae of human interaction.

AN EVENING WITH TOM CARTER

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AN EVENING WITH TOM CARTER

ONE NIGHT ONLY: WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 26 – PERFORMANCES AT 8 and 10 PM

Few figures are so literally and figuratively instrumental in the contemporary underground musical landscape as Tom Carter. Heads know the deal with Carter, from his longtime Texan legend Charalambides and solo explorations on Kranky, up through more recent ventures Eleven Twenty-Nine, Sarin Smoke, and collaborations with Martha Colburn. And new ears are always welcomed into his inimitable take on the United States of Altered. We are stokedelically stoked about bringing Tom Carter to the theater for this special live score event.

Carter and Spectacle have collaborated on a specially handpicked and assembled cut of visuals for this evening, PHANTOM MALLE. An epic work of self-aware ethnographic gaze is stripped of its precocious voice, leaving behind only the lovely cinematography. We could almost call it “Chopping Malle,” but somehow PHANTOM MALLE is more poetic.

LINKS
freemusicarchive.org/music/Tom_Carter/
www.wholly-other.com/
www.kranky.net/artists/cartert.html

JONAS REINHARDT’S GANYMEDE

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JONAS REINHARDT’S GANYMEDE

JONAS REINHARDT’S GANYMEDE
Dir. Various, 2014
USA, 35 min.

ONE NIGHT ONLY: THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 20 – SCREENINGS AT 8 and 10 PM

Join us this stellar evening for premiere screenings of GANYMEDE, a new audio/visual hybrid from electro-artbeat unit JONAS REINHARDT.

“GANYMEDE is an experimental film set on the solar system’s largest moon. On Ganymede, it is thought that volcanic vents supply the necessary power to fuel life. This film imagines unknown extra-terrestrial life forms engaged in ritualistic aquatic dance beneath a sky of ice. The resulting way of life is depicted as fluctuating pulses of energy abstracted beyond conventional consciousness.

Using a battery of synthesizers and repeating patterns, JONAS REINHARDT delves into the chaotic unknown seeking transcendence and achieving a spiritual ‘other’ defined by ecstatic reverie.”

The crew of Brooklyn-based collaborative filmmakers for this expedition include Antonia Kuo, Josh Lewis, Kenneth Zoran Curwood, Shona Masarin, Ben Mosca, Lily Jue Sheng.

JONAS REINHARDT is also celebrating the publication of GANYMEDE as a vinyl record and DVD set from Constellation Tatsu.

LINKS
jonasreinhardt.com/
www.ctatsu.com/

FEBRUARY MIDNIGHTS

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LASER_MISSION_BANNER LASER MISSION
Dir. BJ Davis, 1989
USA, 84 min.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 1 – MIDNIGHT

On Saturday February 1st at MIDNIGHT, we are celebrating what would have been the 49th birthday of BRANDON LEE. Who is that, you ask? You’re reading this on a computer, right?

Before he was THE CROW (but definitely after his LEGACY OF RAGE), Lee was Michael Gold – a cocky, self-righteous asshole who upends his fully free agent status and chooses to accept a LASER MISSION on offer from the CIA (but, like, eschewing CASH MONEY USA in favor of action man SWAGGER ethics). There’s something about the WORLD’S LARGEST DIAMOND gone missing, along with some LASER expert (expertly lazied by ERNEST BORGNINE) being held in Angola (or somewhere) by the KGB (or Cuban military or some Austrian madman or something). All this adds up to is TROUBLE and the potential END of the WESTERN WORLD as we KNOW IT. When not donning gross disguises to fool bumbling cartoon humans, Gold is totes in NEGGING WAR III with terminal television episoder DEBI MONAHAN (who may or may not be portraying a daughter or a double agent or whatever).

Even if you HAVE seen LASER MISSION, you won’t want to MISS our special WIDESCREEN presentation, with all the EXPLOSIVE action (and sometimes admittedly great wide tracking shots) as NEVER BEFORE SEEN in domestic US BARGAIN BINS and FIFTY-FILM DVD collections. Unfortunately we weren’t able to get our hands on the legendary FULLY UNCUT version on GERMAN VHS, but if you come by SATURDAY FEBRUARY 1ST, maybe we’ll SHOW you some STILLS AND talk you THROUGH THE cuts.

If you HAVEN’T seen LASER MISSION, then grab your favorite brand of adult diapers and head the hell over here. Sounds appealing? Then make like an ORANGE and GET JUICED.

 


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ARTIFACT VIDEO CLUB PRESENTS
PIZZA
Karthik Subbaraj, 2012
India, 127 min.
In Tamil with poor yet remarkably effective English subtitles

Artifact Video Club is conceptually premised upon screening international bootlegs of popular cinema. See end of description for notes on quality.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 7 – MIDNIGHT

What is two hours long and kicks ass? PIZZA.

You have never seen a movie like PIZZA. This charming and offbeat Kollywood romantic horror comedy thriller is sort of like a mix between Edgar Wright, Luis Buñuel, Henri George Clouzot, Nora Ephron, and pizza. It’s about a guy who delivers pizza and is compelled to marry his live-in girlfriend, an aspiring horror novelist, following an unexpected pregnancy. But after the protagonist suddenly finds himself participating in the exorcism of his boss’s daughter, really weird stuff — like, weirder than randomly participating in the exorcism of his boss’s daughter — starts to happen.. Forty minutes in, PIZZA ruptures into an extended, hallucinatory, and terrifying horror film sonata before taking another left turn or two through mystery and thriller genres and delivering a hot, satisfying conclusion. It leaves one feeling really, stupidly great. Movies really don’t get as sweet, terrifying, strange, smart, and funny as PIZZA.

Audiences agreed. PIZZA was a huge critical and commercial success in Tamil cinemas and has already been remade in Kannada, Bengali and Hindi, dubbed into Telugu, and followed up with a generally unrelated sequel, PIZZA II: VILLA, in which the title food, pizza, appears to play an even more tangential or perhaps even non-existent role.

Anyway, as with life itself: Kollywood cinema simply does not get better than PIZZA.

This is the second screening of Spectacle’s unauthorized contemporary international pop cinema bootleg midnight screening series ARTIFACT VIDEO CLUB. Nodding to our international colleagues running Ghana movie clubs and VCD videotheques, AVC is an intrepid exploration of vernacular cinema from around the globe. Intentionally half-baked in concept and execution, AVC dwells in the ether between armchair anthropology, misapplied critical theory, and superfried midnight madness.

Please be advised that PIZZA will be served with piracy-prevention watermarks and superimposed anti-smoking warnings that appear every time anyone smokes a cigarette. Which is a lot, ‘cause delivering pizzas is stressful!!!


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SAMURAI REINCARNATION (Makai tenshô)
Dir. Kinji Fukasaku, 1981
Japan, 121 min.
In Japanese with English subtitles

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 8 – MIDNIGHT

“I don’t want a sword that can only kill human beings. I want to kill devils.”
Director Kinji Fukasaku (Battle Royale, Graveyard of Honor) teams up with his old pal Sonny Chiba (The Street Fighter series) facing off against Kenji Sawada (The Happiness of the Katakuris) for all the supernatural swordfighting you can handle in Samurai Reincarnation. After the defeat and massacre of his troops, a general renounces God and sells his soul for the ability to bring the dead back to life, building an undead army. Meanwhile, swordsman Yagyu Jubei seeks an evil sword able not only to kill people but demons as well. From here, there’s swordfights aplenty (no surprise this film was the inspiration for the video game Samurai Showdown), crazy effects, jaw-dropping award-winning art direction and more of everything — those expecting a staid Edo-era period piece might not like it, but any cold-as-ice Chiba fan will be delighted. There’s even an unhealthy dollop of nudity and Roman porno-style sexual depravity for the midnight trenchcoat crew! Keep an eye out for a small role by Tomisaburo Wakayama (Lone Wolf & Cub)!

VDN_bannerVASE DE NOCES
(aka Wedding Trough, aka The Pig Fucking Movie)
Dir. Thierry Zéno, 1974
Belgium, 79 min.

Special thanks to Thierry Zéno

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 15TH – MIDNIGHT

40TH ANNIVERSARY! • FIRST US SCREENING IN 20+ YEARS!

[TRIGGER WARNING: Contains simulated scenes of animal cruelty, animal killings, bestiality, defecation, coprophagia, and unsimulated scenes of vomiting and live animal birth.]

A nightmarish, haunting dirge with an often-maligned reputation, VASE DE NCOES is a notorious 1974 film concerning a lone farmer’s sexual relations with his favorite sow. And while the subject matter is shocking, it’s certainly not in the name of exploitation. In fact, there’s a fair amount going on for a film infamously bestowed the US title of ‘The Pig Fucking Movie’…

Set in a post-apocalypse rural farm, the unnamed man tends to his daily activities, before eventually fixing his eye on a large sqealing pig. A few fantasies later, the farmer finds himself alone with his love interest and they copulate, with the pig eventually giving birth to three piglets. When he takes an invested interest in raising them, the piglets try to rejoin their mother, setting off a chain of events that push the film into darker and more phantasmagorical territories…

Completely devoid of dialogue, fermented in Year Zero bleakness, shot in monochromatic black-and white and featuring a raucous sound design of Gregorian chants, early electronic synthesizers, and animal wailings of all kinds, the film feels beamed from another plane of existence. Indeed, its comparisons to Eraserhead are justified in the technical and aesthetics departments, though interestingly it was released two years prior to David Lynch’s debut.

The last exit on the fringe film highway, VASE DE NOCES is a film more whispered about than actually seen, chiefly due to its extremely limited screenings since its initial festival run (which included Cannes and New Directors/New Films, amongst others). Finally, in 2009, German distributor Camera Obscura granted the film its first-ever official release and a new restoration, though the film is still not commercially available in the US. Working with director Thierry Zéno, Spectacle is proud to present the new restored digital version of this legendary arthouse oddity on the occasion of its 40th anniversary.

“Both obscene and spiritual… not for the squeamish.” -MoMA

“A journey to the end of the night… a mystical allegory… continuously fascinating, continuously disquieting.” -Film Comment

“This bizarre, hypnotic, humorless tale of a demented farm boy and his four-legged barnyard sweetheart may be the ultimate in solipsistic filmmaking. Whatever one’s reaction to it… it cannot be passed of as a mere piece of cinematic sensationalism… a combination of grand-guignol, theatre-of-cruelty and demonic mysticism…” -Buck Henry

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ANIMAL PROTECTOR
Dir. Mats Helge, 1988
Sweden/USA, 96 min.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 21 – MIDNIGHT

Like Spectacle after-dark idols Godfrey Ho (HARD BASTARD) and Arizal (AMERICAN HUNTER), Swedish filmmaker Mats Helge singlehandedly helmed dozens of cornea-crushing Z-grade action pictures in the 70s and 80s, only a fistful of which are accounted for today. Perhaps second-famous after his much-whispered-about THE NINJA MISSION, ANIMAL PROTECTOR sees Helge standing at the cynosure of 80s late-night movie financing. Shooting in and around a Scottish castle, Helge’s camera betrays a magnetic pull towards David Carradine’s demented hardass Colonel Whitlock. Lording over an operation guarded by special ops, infantrymen and non-American Green Berets, Whitlock is no mere animal-experimenting megavillain but a damn Reagan-era Doctor Moreau.

For a time, Helge’s bleak vision is like watching a powerful Bond villain with no comeuppance anywhere near to the horizon. But justice does indeed touch down at Whitlock’s doorsteeple in the hands of C.I.A. agent Santino (A.R. Hellquist), plus a bevy of uzi-gun toting blondes in shredded jeans and camo. Impassioned to free Whitlock’s mammalian victims (if without an escape plan beyond the island), the crew chews up scores of foot soldiers and flunkies before running smack into its greatest obstacle: Whitlock. Carradine the order-barker suddenly morphs into Carradine the wild man of kung fu, exploding out of the castle and onto the beach. There, Santino’s mission vanishes into the sunrise in a one-on-one deathmatch that can only define both men as animal.

ROAR_BANNER ROAR
Dir. Noel Marshall, 1981
USA, 102 min.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 22 – MIDNIGHT

Made over the course of 10 years and with a reported 70 crew injuries – most notably a tiger mauling that resulted in what was perhaps Melanie Griffith’s first (and certainly not last) plastic surgery — ROAR emerges in hindsight as one of history’s most expensive home movies, a Hollywood albatross never released theatrically in the US.

Tippi Hedrin (THE BIRDS) and husband/producer Noel Marshall were at the time noted animal rights activists with a menagerie of cheetahs and tigers kept in waiting at their Acton, California ranch, “The Shambala Preserve”. They doubled the Golden State location as exotic Africa and cast themselves as an animal researcher and estranged wife, respectively, who reconnect against a backdrop of escaped tigers and evil game hunters, pouring $17 million dollars into a still-unrecovered black hole in the process.

But of course none of that counts in a film where Tippi Hedrin gets flipped upside down by an elephant en route to a would-be heartwarmer of an ending that lands closer to perverse surrealism. The notorious production had trouble corralling its fauna, and it shows all over: everything and everyone is out of control here. Perhaps most important is that however dunderheaded it may be, ROAR is exactly what it purports to be: a naïve safari picture in the tradition of Trader Horn and Hatari! whose raw encounter with the animal species triumphs over narrative, ethical, and – yes, hygienic – concerns.


smokeem_banner NUKING OZ AT MIDNIGHT: SMOKE ‘EM IF YOU GOT ‘EM & OTHER SICK HUMOR VISIONS OF THE APOCALYPSE IN AUSTRALIA 

SMOKE ‘EM IF YOU GOT ‘EM
Dir. Ray Boseley, 1988
Australia, 48 min.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28 – MIDNIGHT

With:
DUCKED & COVERED: A SURVIVAL GUIDE TO THE POST APOLCALYPSE
Dir. Nathaniel Lindsay, 2009
Australia, 8:26 min.

I LOVE SARAH JANE
Dir. Spencer Susser, 2007
Australia, 14 min.

SPIDER
Dir. Nash Edgerton, 2007
Australia, 9 min.

From ON THE BEACH to THE ROAD WARROR to TOMORROW, WHEN THE WAR BEGAN, Australia has figured prominently in cinematic depictions of the events surrounding total war, including the use of thermonuclear weapons.

Maybe it’s something to do with the “Convict Stain,” but Oz has also found itself to be ground zero for some of the more twisted takes on atomic destructions (if not physical, then spiritual). Not quite bummers from Down Under, these shorts view The End of Civilization, whether overtly or not, with a bleak, black humor—this evening, the Spectacle presents two atomic war perspectives, one zombie apocalypse, and one relationship apocalypse, because sometimes a breakup really feels like the end of the world.

“So what are we going to do? Take it easy and conserve our strength, or are we gonna run ourselves ragged?!?”, demands party-thrower Jon (Rob Howard) in his well-stocked bomb shelter in Ray Boseley’s marvelous SMOKE ‘EM IF YOU GOT ‘EM (at 48 minutes, a sort of cinematic novella). The bombs have dropped, the land is scorched, and the heavy radiation is penetrating the bunker, dooming everyone.

At the shelter, all who survived are invited to knock back a few, chow down, and puff a bong. “This is a casual affair: Come as you are, smoke ’em if ya got ’em,” he says.

Released and highly praised by Chris Gore’s Film Threat in 1988, SMOKE ‘EM IF YOU GOT ‘EM was promptly lost and forgotten. Snappy and stylish, wearing its Aussie Punk Rock heritage on its sleeve (the singer in the film’s band has that Birthday Party look about him), it’s the best soiree you could ever be invited to—lots of good food, great booze and drugs, wanton sex—it’s just too bad the End of the World is happening.

Made in the Reagan-Bush Era when nuclear war was expected at any moment—Whew! Sure glad those days are over — SMOKE ‘EM IF YOU GOT ‘EM is infused with pitch-black, yet often dry or absurdist humor, which, as Slow Radiation Death creeps upon the characters, becomes philosophical, bittersweet and even sentimental sometimes.

Joining SMOKE ‘EM IF YOU GOT ‘EM are three additional short films, all of which are sick, sick, sick.

Nash Edgerton (director of 2008’s acclaimed THE SQUARE) helms the first short of the program: SPIDER (2007), where a hapless, immature prankster might as well be dropping an atomic weapon into his love life.

The Zombie Apocalypse makes its way Down Under in Spencer Susser’s I LOVE SARAH JANE (2007), but not even that can stop the serious crush young Jimbo has on classmate Sarah Jane (current “It Girl” Mia Wasikowska in a very early role) in this DAWN OF THE DEAD/LORD OF THE FLIES mash-up.

Early-1980s public safety films are expertly spoofed in Nathaniel Lindsay’s animated DUCKED & COVERED: A SURVIVAL GUIDE TO THE POST APOCALYPSE (2009) in this evening’s penultimate short. Now you will know what to do when the killer robots show up, or if you have too many skulls lying around.

BONGO-A-GO-GO: FACT VS. FICTION IN BEAT CINEMA

Posted on by spectacletheater

Norman Mailer called them the “white negroes.” Hollywood smeared them as drug-addicts, nihilists, and nymphomaniacs. They were the ‘Beats’, America’s original hipsters. Contemporary hysterical portrayals meet true slices of bohemian life this February at Spectacle Theater. See poets, junkies, and con men mawkishly adorn the affectations of the ‘Beat’ and learn why the Man has been trying to keep the hepcats down for so long.


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BEAT GIRL
AKA Wild For Kicks
Dir. Edmund T. Gréville, 1960
UK, 85 min.
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 3 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27 – 10:00 PM

Beat goes to England in this over-the-top tale of a poor little rich girl rebelling against her wealthy dad’s remarriage. Why does the local stripper seem to recognize her new stepmom? Will the strip-club owner (played with oily perfection by Christopher Lee) get his hands on the young wildcat? Are drinking and fighting really for squares? With plenty of music, kicks, and nihilism for the disillusioned kids who survived the Blitz.

BEAT GIRL bannerBEAT GIRL
AKA Wild For Kicks
Dir. Edmund T. Gréville, 1960
UK, 85 min.
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 3 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27 – 10:00 PM

Beat goes to England in this over-the-top tale of a poor little rich girl rebelling against her wealthy dad’s remarriage. Why does the local stripper seem to recognize her new stepmom? Will the strip-club owner (played with oily perfection by Christopher Lee) get his hands on the young wildcat? Are drinking and fighting really for squares? With plenty of music, kicks, and nihilism for the disillusioned kids who survived the Blitz.
Beat Girl 7

Beat Girl 2

Screening with:

Village Sunday banner
GREENWICH VILLAGE SUNDAY
Dir. Stewart Wilensky, c. 1960s
USA, 13 min.

Documentarian Stewart Wilensky’s crowd-pleasing short about the lighter (read: drug-and-murder free) aspects of bohemian life in 1960s New York City. Narrated by “Christmas Story” author Gene Shepherd, before he, like, sold out, man.


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THE BEAT GENERATION
Dir. Charles F. Haas, 1959
USA, 95 min.
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 19 – 10:00 PM
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24 – 7:30 PM

America’s hard-on for Beat depravity reached fever pitch with Charles Haas’ B-noir of perversion, crime, and striped boat-neck shirts. Steve Cochran (the eponymous “Legs Diamond”) stars as a womanizing coffee house creep, whose double life as a prominent scenester always lands him a step ahead of LAPD’s homicide unit.

Screening with:

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STREET FAIR 1959
Dir. Edward Silverstone Taylor, 1959
USA, 7 min.

A home movie of San Francisco’s Grant Avenue during its heyday as a beat Mecca. Zeitgiesty luminaries Bob Kaufman, Wallace Berman, and their respective old ladies make appearances.


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A BUCKET OF BLOOD
Roger Corman, 1959.
USA, 66 min.
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24 – 10:00 PM
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27 – 7:30 PM
“Life is an obscure hobo, bumming a ride on the omnibus of art.”
Chump janitor Walter Paisley spends all day surrounded by beatniks, jazz musicians, artists and their groupies at hip coffee shop The Yellow Door. He desperately aspires to the life of an artist, but hasn’t got an ounce of talent. What he does have is an accidentally dead cat, a lump of clay, and a vague idea…. When Walter’s new ‘sculpture’ makes him an overnight sensation, all the rats come out of the woodwork to get a piece of the action, and Walter’s forced to find more ‘subjects’ for his art. It’s a fast-paced Corman classic that manages sympathy for its hapless murderer while skewering the art world around him.

Screening with

BOBBIE JO AND THE BEATNIK
(from Episode 16, Season 1 of “Petticoat Junction”)
Dir. Paul Henning, 1964
USA, 26 min.

An episode of “Petticoat Junction” featuring young Dennis Hopper as a beat poet whose nihilistic vibes disrupt the square harmony of Hootersville.

THE FILMS OF RONNIE CRAMER with JOE BOB BRIGGS

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“Ronnie Cramer, an inspired demento who has made some of the finest
underground films of this century.” – JOE BOB BRIGGS

BACK_STREET_JANE_RONNIE_CRAMER_BANNER BACK STREET JANE
Dir. Ronnie Cramer, 1989
USA, Runtime N/A

FRIDAY, JANUARY 24 – 10:00 PM
Hosted by Joe Bob Briggs!

“Yesterday she was a thief … today she’s an extortionist … tomorrow she’ll be rich … or dead!” Screamed the tagline of BACK STREET JANE, the first stand-alone feature from musician, visual artist and filmmaker Ronnie Cramer. Shot in lurid 16mm, BACK STREET JANE is the rare Film Noir-inspired film that doesn’t come off as imitation. This is genuine, bare-knuckle low-budget filmmaking, as gritty as it gets. A tough-as-Hell jaunt to the wrong side of town so
packed with drugs, violence, sex and vengeance that upon release it garnished high praise from scores of indie review zines and mags across the country; including Psychotronic Video, who said: “Non-stop double-crosses and plot surprises in the tradition of movies like ‘The Killing’ and ‘The Asphalt Jungle’!” – Psychotronic Video


EVEN_HITLER_HAD_GF_RONNIE_CRAMER_BANNER EVEN HITLER HAD A GIRLFRIEND
Dir. Ronnie Cramer, 1991
USA, 98 min.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 24 – MIDNIGHT
Hosted by Joe Bob Briggs!

“One of the funniest goldurn movies I’ve ever watched. One of the greatest independent comedies ever made.” – Joe Bob Briggs

It’s only now that other filmmakers are catching up to the completely unhinged tone of Ronnie’s Cramer’s masterpiece – in fact most people still don’t get it. EVEN HITLER HAD A GIRLFRIEND is a true black comedy, telling the pathetic story of night security guard Marcus Templeton. We come in near the end of Marcus’ downward spiral, he’s reached adulthood only to realize he has nothing to show for it but body fat. Desperate and unable to find a woman that would actually have sex with him, he starts calling 1-900 numbers and begins a rapidly growing addiction that might just be more than he can handle.

The lines separating satire from confession; art-film from shot-on-video nudie-comedy; and black humor from compassion are impossibly blurred, EVEN HITLER HAD A GIRLFRIEND is truly and forever an underground classic as well as a film that stands by itself – there’s just nothing else like it.


HITLER_TAPES_RONNIE_CRAMER_BANNER THE HITLER TAPES
Dir. Ronnie Cramer, 1994
USA, 55 min.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 25 – 10:00 PM
Hosted by Joe Bob Briggs!

Marcus Templeton is back, armed with an endless collection of cassette tapes he recorded while calling 1-900 numbers! THE HITLER TAPES isn’t a proper sequel, but it’s an essential entry nonetheless. Andren Scott, the actor who played Templeton in Cramer’s EVEN HITLER HAD A GIRLFRIEND, was tragically killed when he witnessed a robbery take place. THE HITLER TAPES remained unfinished until it was decided that the existing footage should be used and it was combined with unused material from EVEN HITLER HAD A GIRLFRIEND. THE HITLER TAPES is a testament to the strength of Cramer’s unique style in EVEN HITLER HAD A GIRLFRIEND, it still works here. And most certainly we’re lucky that there’s another film featuring Andren Scott’s totally one-of-a-kind portrayal of Templeton: hilarious, awkward, and completely endearing.


HIGHWAY_AMAZON_RONNIE_CRAMER_BANNER HIGHWAY AMAZON
Dir. Ronnie Cramer, 2001
USA, 70 min.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 25 – MIDNIGHT
Hosted by Joe Bob Briggs!

HIGHWAY AMAZON was Cramer’s first documentary feature, and like his narrative films it’s not easy to pin this one down to any exact type. After years of unrewarding jobs and ridicule over her desire to work out and be muscular, Christine Fetzer has finally found happiness. She travels across the country and, by appointment, for pay, wrestles men. And beats the hell out of them. Like Cramer’s best work, what is painfully hilarious quickly becomes something stranger and more honest; almost like a glorious, secret celebration for the Weird among us to hopefully find and connect with one day. With Cramer’s incredibly sly and intelligent filmmaking, Fetzer quickly shatters the myriad of perceptions that the audience had formed for her and steps out into the light where we can see her for what she really is: herself. Some people may make fun of Christine Fetzer and laugh at her, some may call her a freak, or some may think she’s ugly. But that’s what they always say about those strong enough to truly find themselves.

BLACK LIZARD (KUROTOKAGE) 黒蜥蜴

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blacklizard_bannerBLACK LIZARD (KUROTOKAGE) 黒蜥蜴
Dir. Kinji Fukasaku, 1968
Japan, 112 min.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 10 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28 – 10:00 PM

“Black Lizard, you are an old-fashioned romanticist. In this age, soiled by corruption and murder, you believe that crime should wear a gorgeous gown, with a train fifteen feet long.”

From the infamous 1969 pinku film HORRORS OF MALFORMED MEN, to Koji Wakamatsu’s 2010 film CATEPILLAR, legendary pulp novelist Ranpo Edogawa’s demented works have inspired Japanese artists and directors for the better part of a century.

One of his enduring creations is BLACK LIZARD, a femme fatale jewel thief who appeared in a detective serial in the 30s. In the 60s, Yukio Mishima wrote a stage adaptation of her story, and his interpretation in turn became the basis of Kinji Fukasaku’s film. In its fixation on the relationship between death and beauty, Mishima’s hand is evident—even before he makes a cameo as a human taxidermy specimen.

Akihiro Miwa, a celebrated female impersonator and Mishima’s close friend, plays the lead role fairly straight, even with a kind of queenly grace. The film itself is refreshingly sincere in its weirdness, never inviting laughter at its bewigged star, or even at its objectively wacked-out plot. Which is not to say that it isn’t funny, just that it probably wasn’t conceived as the campy marvel it is.