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Women Make Movies and Spectacle Present: LOVE & DIANE

Posted on November 4, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

Women Make Movies and Spectacle co-present:

LOVE & DIANE
Dir. Jennifer Dworkin, 2002
USA, 155 min.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13 – 8PM
One night only!

Just over ten years ago, Jennifer Dworkin’s groundbreaking documentary broadly addressed issues of poverty in New York City though a sensitive portrait of one family and an unflinching chronicle of their experiences with the occasionally Kafka-esque government programs that were ostensibly meant to help them.

With a narrative constructed by following the Hazzard family – principally Diane, her daughter Love, and Love’s newborn son Donyaeh – for eight years, this documentary’s scope and breadth allow it to tell its story without resorting either to pure, soulless cinéma vérité or to bland “issue” filmmaking. There are no talking heads here. Instead, an immersive experience fairly captures the life of a family trying to persevere in the face of daunting challenges and a society’s pervasive indifference.

Visit the Women Make Movies website to read more about LOVE & DIANE. If you view the press kit for the film there is a full interview available with Jennifer Dworkin by Michelle Materre, a WMM program consultant! Special thanks to WMM!

NOVEMBER MIDNIGHTS

Posted on November 4, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1: NEKROMANTIK
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2: NEKROMANTIK 2

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8: EVIL TOWN
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9: PICK-UP

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 15: SATAN’S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16: BELLADONNA OF SADNESS

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22: THE BRIDE OF FRANK (HOSTED BY SCOOTER MCCRAE!)
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23: THE PROWLER

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 29: SLASHG/V/NG: BLOOD RAGE
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 30: SLASHG/V/NG: HOME SWEET HOME

In the wake of Halloween, as Thanksgiving and the Holiday Season approach, it is not uncommon to feel a sinister wave of nostalgia for late-October’s frightful ceremonies and gleeful celebrations of the macabre.

At Spectacle we understand this feeling—we experience it too, particularly in the wake of our yearly SPECTOBER programming—and that’s why this first weekend of November is dedicated to a tradition of dark desire all too infrequently celebrated in today’s culture: necrophilia.

Also called ‘thanatophilia’ or ‘necrolagnia,’ necrophilia—a word derived from the Greek etymons ‘nekros‘ (“dead”) and ‘philia‘ (“love”)—is the sexual attraction to corpses. A rare yet potent paraphilia, the record of its existence has persisted throughout human history; it can be found in the most ancient of Egyptian and Greek texts as well as in today’s newspaper at your local corner store. Jeffrey Dahmer was a vocal proponent; wild animals love it.

Yet few depictions of necrophilia in popular culture are as humanizing and romantic as those found in pioneering transgressive German filmmaker Jörg Buttgereit’s two “NEKRomantik” films, from 1987 and 1991. With a limited budget and unlimited audacity, Buttgereit depicts marginalized characters without judgement or ridicule, left to their circumstances with a realism and directness that startles, perplexes and remains lodged in the brain.

Join us for two consecutive midnights immediately following All Hallow’s Eve in which we highlight two severe works that feature not only the most sacred act between man and corpse, but groundbreaking and challenging depictions of the extremity of the human condition.

Special thanks to Nico B., Jörg Buttgereit and Cult Epics in their cooperation with this program.

NEKROMANTIK
Jörg Buttgereit, 1987.
West Germany. 71m.
In German with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1ST – MIDNIGHT
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

[TRIGGER WARNING: This film contains scenes of explicit sexual contact, mutilation, rear female nudity, violence, frontal male nudity, dark humor, disembowelment, nihilism, decapitation, deviant sex, depictions of murder, frontal female nudity, a depiction of the actual killing of an animal, ejaculation, mental illness, rear male nudity, criminal mischief, dismemberment, sexual perversion, blood, adult language and necrophilia.]

“What lives that does not live from the death of someone else?” -V.L. Compton

Rob and Betty are a perfect match: they bathe in blood, collect body parts and share a fetish for unresponsive flesh that neither can adequately satisfy for the other. Rob has a dream job working for Joe’s Cleaning Company, removing dead bodies from the scenes of public accidents. One day he brings home the mother lode and the couple’s sexual dynamic is changed forever… but paradise is fleeting.

Upon its release in 1987, NEKRomantik was of course immediately banned in virtually every country that became aware of it (across four separate continents). Although never officially banned in the UK—it even played at a number of film festivals, including Leeds in 2012—it was nevertheless confiscated repeatedly during bootleg video raids and customs inspections.

NEKROMANTIK 2
Jörg Buttgereit, 1991.
Germany. 102m.
In German with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2ND – MIDNIGHT
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

“I want to master life and death.” -Ted Bundy

Picking up right where its predecessor left off, NEKRomantik 2 continues the saga of Rob and Betty while also focusing on like-minded grave-robber Monika. Once Monika strikes up a romance with Mark, a nebbish man who dubs soundtracks for porn films, the extent to which he is able to understand and tolerate her proclivities is tested.

Boasting a longer run-time and marginally greater production values than NEKRomantik, Buttgereit’s sequel remains, uh, not at all for the squeamish. Considerably higher-profile and therefore more controversial upon release, NEKRomantik 2 was confiscated by Munich police just 12 days after its premiere.

According to an interview with Buttgereit in 2006, “my films are not banned anymore in Germany. They are totally legal now and officially labeled as ‘art.’ We spent two years in court to get my films back on the market.”

In 2009, Hermann Kopp’s terrifying music for both NEKRomantik films—as well as Buttgereit’s 1990 film Der Todesking (The Death King)—was released on the vinyl LP compilation ‘Nekronology,’ released by Aesthetic Records.

NEKROMANTIK 2 (Jörg Buttgereit, 1991) NSFW from Spectacle Theater on Vimeo.

EVIL TOWN
Dir. Curtis Hanson, Larry Spiegel, Peter S. Traynor, Mardi Rustam, 1977
USA, 88 Min.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8 – MIDNIGHT

A cult movie in search of a cult. This insane movie mash-up concerns young men and women who amble into the titular evil town (pop. 666 – that is not even a joke) and befall a multitude of bizarre deaths. There are psycho yokels capturing young women and using them as sex slaves, killer old people, and a doctor trying to experiment on the pituitary glands of (obviously) unwilling patients looking to unlock the secrets of youth.

Featuring some of the most mind-numbing dialogue, incredulous kill scenes, violence against old people, and a doctor who can’t correctly pronounce the word pituitary – which is central to his experiments – this is one of those cases of a film that needs to be seen to be believed.

PICK-UP
Dir. Bernard Hirschenson
USA, 80 min.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9 – MIDNIGHT

“It’s sure gonna be a bad trip. I can feel it.”

Chuck is delivering a mobile home through Florida when he stops and picks up Carol and Maureen. Despite Maureen’s reservations, they board, only to get stuck in the Everglades, where they wander through the swamp, come across characters out of a Firesign Theater album, are visited by gods and clowns and, through a series of flashbacks, discover the plans fate has for them. A definite rural Florida freakout and at times close to a drive-in Fellini film, Pick-up was the only movie made by the majority of the cast (including all the main actors) and moves with the logic of a hash dream, combining tarot readings, modular synth and indian percussion songs, a *lot* of nudity and a constantly shifting vibe moving between bucolic hippie love-in and exploitation dread, Pick-up covers a lot of ground during its 80 minutes and offers something for every midnight movie fan.

[Trigger Warning: This film contains a scene of a church molestation and an implied rape & murder.]]

SATAN’S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS
Dir. David Lowell Rich, 1973.
78 min. USA.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 15 – MIDNIGHT

One day a screenwriter asked himself, “What would it be like if there existed a school for girls — run by Satan?” He turned this idea into money, and this movie is the result.

BELLADONNA OF SADNESS
(aka: Kanashimi no Belladonna, The Tragedy of Belladonna)
Dir. Eiichi Yamamoto, 1973
89 min. Japan.
In Japanese with English subtitles

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16 – MIDNIGHT

WARNING: This film contains scenes of animated sexual and bloody violence as well as persistent flashing colors which may be triggering to some viewers.

Shortly after marrying her beloved Jean, Jeanne is raped by a vicious baron in the rural village where she lives. Though she returns home to Jean who encourages her to move on with him and look towards their future together, Jeanne can’t escape these demons…literally. Soon she begins to be visited by a shape-shifting being whispering in her ear to seek revenge on the baron who treated her so cruelly. Jean has become a tax collector but when he can’t gather enough to make his quota, the baron has his hand cut off as a form of payment. Jeanne slips deeper into her hallucinations as visions of time and other worlds fly by her eyes, pushing her towards her ultimate goal. Driven away from the village and even turned away by her beloved – Jeanne makes a pact with a spirit in the woods (Spoiler alert: it’s the devil) and gains immense magical powers which she then uses against those who have wronged her.

Yamamoto’s swirling, hypnotic, visionary film seems to, at times, almost melt off the screen. So too will your brain as you witness this colorful and fluid masterpiece. Think of Fantasia by way of Pinku on the best drugs you’ve ever done and then add and funky psychedelic soundtrack and you’re getting close. Based loosely on a 19th century French tome called La Sorcière by Jules Michelet this brain-bender will transport you to places unknown and then back in time for Sunday brunch…but will you be the same? (No.)

THE BRIDE OF FRANK
Dir. Steve Ballot, 1996.
USA. 89 min.
Hosted by Scooter McCrae!

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22 – MIDNIGHT

In some shadowy nether zone fluctuating between neorealism and surrealism is where you’ll find Steve Ballot’s one-and-only feature length excursion into the realm of SOV madness, THE BRIDE OF FRANK. Using non-actors and the warehouse location he was working at during the time he shot FRANK, writer and director Ballot paints an unforgettably Boschian panorama of hilarious atrocities that leave a viewer simultaneously laughing, shaking their head in disgust and nodding in empathetic understanding as the haplessly homeless hero of this epic tale, Frank, searches for his one true love amidst acts of killing, maiming and – most memorably of all – making good on his promise to rip off a head and shit down somebody’s neck (don’t worry, they deserve their fate). From the opening scene where a little girl is bludgeoned to death and had her brains eaten until the catchiest, most toe-tapping end credits song you’ll ever bop in your seat to, this is truly a movie NOT LIKE ANY OTHER. Offensive on every possible level while also retaining a charmingly warm view of the human condition under the most dire of circumstances, THE BRIDE OF FRANK needs to be seen and deserves to be elevated from the relative obscurity in which it has languished for too many years. Screening will be hosted by low budget stalwart Scooter McCrae, who will provide his own uncanny insights into SOV moviemaking and self-deprecating good humor to make the night unforgettable.

TRIGGER WARNINGS: Violence, abusive language, rape.

THE PROWLER
Dir. Joseph Zito, 1981.
USA. 89 min.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – MIDNIGHT

June 28, 1945: having sent a Dear John letter to her soldier boyfriend, Rosemary attends the Avalon Bay annual graduation with her new squeeze — but before they can hit the punch bowl, a ghastly soldier plunges a pitchfork through the pair. Thirty-fire years later, the town prepares for its first dance since the tragedy: is the trauma due to repeat itself? This standout slasher is noteworthy for being described by legendary make-up artist Tom Savini — whose combat experience is an avowed influence on his work — as his proudest moment. Made at a time when more mainstream slashers were reeling back, THE PROWLER is a shocking bloodbath.

SLASHG/V/NG: BLOOD RAGE (1987) & HOME SWEET HOME (1981)

When it comes to holiday horrors there’s no shortage of slasher films that have left their bloody mark on the calendar of our collective memory: HALLOWEEN, SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT, BLACK CHRISTMAS, MY BLOODY VALENTINE, UNCLE SAM, hell — even APRIL FOOL’S DAY! So where’s the Thanksgiving slasher film? Eli Roth teased us in GRINDHOUSE and THANKSKILLING valiantly attempted to CARVE out a place in holiday horrordom, but there’s just something different about an anthropomorphic talking turkey that doesn’t quite provide the same satisfaction as an offensive caricature of a mentally ill murderer slicing and dicing teens in bloody and ritualistic fashion with pseudo-psychological underpinnings.

What Spectacle is offering up are two forgotten slashers set on TURKEY DAY! Come stuff yourself with a big ol’ sandwich loaded with the detritus of pop culture! CINEMATIC LEFTOVERS, lukewarm and soaked in mayonnaise baby!

BLOOD RAGE
John Grissmer, 1987
USA, 84 min.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 29 – MIDNIGHT

“It’s not cranberry sauce.”

Louise Lasser turns in a subtle, sympathetic performance in this otherwise ridiculous and notoriously gory slasher. This one has to be seen to be believed!

10 years ago one of two twin brothers, Todd and Terry, committed a violent murder, the problem is the authorities locked the wrong one up! Now Todd has escaped and is coming home for Thanksgiving dinner while his brother Terry is up to his old tricks, slashing and maiming like a low rent Patrick Bateman with popped collar and chilling preppie affect, and blaming Todd for his bloody handiwork. So now, it’s up to Todd to stop his murdering sibling before he fucks up Thanksgiving for everyone … PERMANENTLY.

Seen in a heavily cut version, BLOOD RAGE (NIGHTMARE AT SHADOW WOODS) is a slice of Florida shot weirdness that reaches new levels of jaw dropping, hyperactive bloodletting. Odd, bloody, laughably “psychological”, claustrophobic and heavy on the synth – this is one forgotten slasher treat worth giving thanks for.

HOME SWEET HOME
Nettie Pena, 1981
USA, 85 min.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 30 – MIDNIGHT

This one might as well be called BODY COUNT BY JAKE because our insane slasher is played by none other than fitness guru and Family Channel icon Jake Steinfeld!

It’s Thanksgiving and an escaped mental patient jacked up on PCP is on a gleeful, cackling rampage in southern California, and he’s making his way toward a Thanksgiving dinner at a secluded ranch populated by characters straight out of a shitty improv class.

Seriously, this one is from another planet.

HOME SWEET HOME was directed by porn veteran Nettie Pena and features ILSA director Don Edmonds, so the latent sleaze factor on this slasher is pretty high. Painful improv, confused characterizations, and a mime-faced magician with a backpack guitar amp running around, shredding and pissing off everyone — audience included. Sound weird? It is.

NO EXPECTATIONS: TODD VEROW

Posted on November 2, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

TODD VEROW IN ATTENDANCE FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22nd!

Todd Verow did and does what a lot of people talk about doing – he makes movies. AND he does it often, with no excuses. Spectacle is proud to present four early works by the “once and future king of DV”.

A veteran of punk and queer cinema, Verow is the eye behind the detached yet dynamic compositions which comprise the playfully nihilistic work of Jon Moritsugu. But where Moritsugu’s films spend most of their time in vacuous tableaus, and revel in a kind of expectation quashing, antagonistic stillness, Verow’s early punk works are hyperactive all nighters of DV ADD. Verow has a glitter-soaked map of Nowhere, and his films manically careen from one soul crushingly small apartment to another in search of pills, booze, sex, but most of all – a place to crash.

Verow’s camera is wild, unpredictable, too close (everyone needs a close-up), too dark (who needs lights?), and too bright (that morning sun can hit like a ton of bricks). In short, it’s exciting and beautiful and like his characters, it never stops moving. These wild, restless films about addiction and the perils and pleasures of living nakedly in the moment manage to stay quite surprisingly upbeat; even in the lowest lows there is a tender and charming optimism, all furnished by Verow’s own stable of superstars and chameleons, some low key (Bill Dwyer) and some outrageous (Eric Sapp, Philly).

Club kids, undiscovered punk legends, wannabe stars, junkies, real losers, users, drag queens – they’re still here down on the exhausted LES (out in the wastelands of suburbia too), still searching, still laughing, still smiling and partying with no expectations. Verow is the only filmmaker who can keep up with them.

LITTLE SHOTS OF HAPPINESS
Dir. Todd Verow, 1997
USA, 83 min.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22 – 7:30 PM (with Verow in attendance!)

Bonnie Dickenson plays Frances, a cubicle clock watcher with a secret – instead of going home at night to her Jack Torrance-esque husband and their stultifying suburban home, she does a quick costume change in the office bathroom and hits the town in search of sex, booze, and, most importantly, a place to spend the night. Little Shots Of Happiness is a gleeful, sexy, sometimes goofy, sometimes scary and unpredictable journey of one woman who has decided it’s worth some weirdness to see what’s out there.

Spring boarding from the idea of making a movie with just a camera, no lights and direct sound, this perfectly absurd yet oddly realistic premise (a woman living out a suitcase in her office) allows Verow and his crew to sketch another characteristically wild, aesthetically restless, raw, funny little movie. Bonnie Dickenson provides the charming, understated heart of Little Shots – taking sex, drugs, and violence all in stride, even with smiling good humor. Shot in Boston and featuring the early Verow regulars, this one is so stripped-down that while it evokes the episodic narrative adventures of the nouvelle vague, its minimalist humanism might be more akin to their spiritual father, Roberto Rossellini, with more techno, sex and drugs.

SHUCKING THE CURVE
Dir. Todd Verow, 1998
USA, 89 min.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 17 – 5:00 PM
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22 – 10:00 PM (with Verow in attendance!)

In Shucking The Curve, Verow finds the perfect premise for his most wildly gleeful exploration of negative capability – a New York City apartment hunt.

Suzanne Fountain (Bonnie Dickenson) has just arrived in New York City with a sort of perfunctory dream of being an actress and accumulating some experiences. But soon after arriving at an old friend’s apartment, who promptly hits her up for cash and then disappears, she finds herself in one bizarre and desperate situation after another in
her search for a new place to stay, and discovers that the city is more dangerous, tempting and duplicitous than she might have expected.

Like La Dolce Vita on DV, Curve traces a Dantesque course through the LES ranging from grotesquely beautiful (and hilarious) scenes of debauchery to delicate moments of human connection to the stark and grim realities of being broke and addicted. In quick, unadorned fashion, with his outlandish cast of regulars, Verow creates a fast and exhilarating tribute to those days and nights that go on and on, before the your body catches up to your spirit.

ONCE AND FUTURE QUEEN
Dir. Todd Verow, 2000
USA, 76 min.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 27 – 7:30 PM

It’s not easy being a legendary genius no one knows about, but it’s sure fun to watch one try and make everyone understand that – especially when it’s Aunty Matter (Verow regular Philly), a walking talking punk rock id, whose stage antics fall somewhere between Edith Massey and G.G. Allin.

In typical Verow fashion Aunty Matter crawls across lower Manhattan looking for pills, booze, sex and a place to crash. She’s struggling to keep her band together and to stay high and alive – it’s not easy though -because after all, a lovable pariah is still a pariah. Follow the Once And Future Queen as she bounces from bedroom to bedroom, bathroom to bathroom, gobbling pills, guzzling booze, pissing everyone off, all in search of what else? More.

Queen is a fast and ugly, rough and hilarious downward spiral which showcases Philly, Verow’s compulsively watchable Divine -a philosophy spewing punk rock queen who you can’t help but love and root for. It’s also filled with lot’s of nasty, raw punk and some lofi visual passages that explore the possibilities of grainy, free form video poetry.

A SUDDEN LOSS OF GRAVITY
Dir. Todd Verow, 2000
USA, 90 min.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24 – 5:00 PM

A Sudden Loss Of Gravity is Verow’s sprawling love letter (hate mail?) to small town life, where self destruction and boredom go hand in hand, and being weird and wasted is the only way to survive.

Set in Bangor, Maine (Verow’s hometown and the inspiration for his own Bangor Films), Gravity is the most ambitious and complex -narratively and temporally – of Verow’s early works. This makeshift period piece weaves multiple characters, narratives, past and present events, digressions and strange dead ends into a meditation on suburban angst and the terror and the beauty of burning hot and bright. Along the way though, there are quiet odes to human connnection and what at first comes on like a ragged, trash odyssey through the heart of teenage nihilsm turns out a measured, multi-faceted picture of longing, regret, rage and second chances.

Made with the detailed care and knowledge that comes from hometown filmmaking, this one is for anyone who ever loved and hated their own small town, and felt the desire to share the particular flavor of their own experience with someone else – a task Verow transforms into his own brand of poetry.

NEW IRISH UNDERGROUND FILM

Posted on November 2, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7th – 7:30PM & 10PM
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21st – 7:30PM & 10PM
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5th – 7:30PM & 10PM

(Detailed synopses below)

Irish cinema has never been renowned for harboring a vibrant underground or experimental film scene. There have been significant exceptions (most importantly, aspects of the Irish “First Wave” of the 1970s), but it’s only in recent years that a body of films has emerged that offer a powerful rebuttal to that perception. While to announce a fully-fledged “movement” would be premature, it is safe to say that the work of the four filmmakers featured in this series – Rouzbeh Rashidi, Maximilian Le Cain, Dean Kavanagh and Michael Higgins – represent an important new direction in Irish cinema.

Working with minimal and usually non-existent budgets, primarily on video, with zero crew and casts typically drawn from friends and family, all four filmmakers have been developing at a prolific rate over the past few years. Between them, they have produced 32 features since 2008 – though it must be admitted Rashidi, who in 2012 alone directed 9 features and 76 short films, has been the most insanely fertile contributor. All the filmmakers are members of the Experimental Film Society, an international organization founded by Rashidi aiming “to produce and promote films by its members” who are “distinguished by an uncompromising, no-budget devotion to personal, experimental cinema.” As this series will make clear, they have also been known to appear in each other’s films, and even collaborate on film projects together from time to time. (Strangely enough, Rashidi, Le Cain and Kavanagh have even released three albums of sound art together, under the collective moniker “Cinema Cyanide”.)

For the most part, the films operate in an uncanny space between experimental and narrative film. On the one hand, generally eschewing plot and any conventional notion of “eventfulness” in favor of the immediate sensuousness of images and sounds and their juxtaposition – on the other hand, using performers, locations, lighting and sound design to evoke affects and atmospheres more readily associated with genre cinema, especially the horror film. Le Cain, also an accomplished critic, once wrote about David Lynch that he “frees the paranoia of noir from the straightjacket of narrative … [drowning] the plot in a great tidal wave of emotion”, and one can identify a similar impulse at work across many of these films. Le Cain adds that “the most unsettling aspect of [Lynch’s work] is that the fear seems to come from a source that is deeper than the plot indicates.”

It’s this deeper level that these filmmakers mostly concern themselves with. As the title of the opening film, There is No Escape from the Terrors of the Mind (2013), makes explicit, the unease evoked is existential rather than circumstantial: it’s much more about the nature of perception, memory and consciousness than anything that can be resolved, or even expressed, through action or dialogue. Usually forsaking plot entirely to tackle these depths head-on, the films mostly seem to reside in a strange, subterranean world free of the typical “narrative” trappings of our daily life. Jobs, money, the State, even social interaction, are rarely visible. Instead, there are bodies and there are spaces, there are sensations and there are memories, and there is the coming-into-being and intermingling of each of these through processes of perception (and cinema).

When language is foregrounded in these worlds – for example, in Higgins’ Birds on a Wire (2011) or Rashidi’s Bipedality (2010) – it is usually fragile and woefully insufficient. Le Cain has described Bipedality as one of Rashidi’s last films to feature extensive dialogues, as a study of “how inadequate language is to communicate feeling, or to grapple with the mysteries of existing in any given moment in relation to another person or simply to the world that surrounds one”, a world that is, in contrast, “almost overwhelmingly vivid and sensuous.” It’s our primal and problematic relationship to the world in this sense, that each of these filmmakers focus on in different ways: not the world before the Word (in the sense of Brakhage’s “untutored eye”) so much as a world beneath the Word, a subterranean field of sensations that is always available to us but which we can rarely share or articulate in social or verbal terms.

Although it’s worth thinking through the question of whether this aesthetic direction is ultimately limited by its rejection of social or political contingencies and distrust of verbal expression, Le Cain’s thoughts on Rashidi make an opposing case that could apply to all four filmmakers: “He is not interested in cinema as arecord or replication of communication, but in what cinema can itself best communicate through sound and image. … He is concerned with the intensely private experiences of perception that perhaps cinema alone has the tools to communicate adequately.”

Or put another way, we could pick up the idea of filmmakers Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni from their recent film In Search of Uiq (2013) that, “In our universe, we are tuned to the frequency that corresponds to the reality of capitalism … An infinite number of parallel realities coexist with us in the same room, although we cannot tune into them.” At their best, Rashidi, LeCain, Kavanagh and Higgins have found ways to tune into some of those other frequencies, and now invite us to join them.

Programmed by Donal Foreman, with special thanks to the Experimental Film Society.

For more information please visit: www.experimentalfilmsociety.com, www.rouzbehrashidi.com, www.maximilianlecain.com, www.deankavanagh.com, and www.mgmh.me.

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 7th – 7:30PM
HSP: THERE IS NO ESCAPE FROM THE TERRORS OF THE MIND
(Rouzbeh Rashidi, 120mins, 2013)

“HSP: There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind consists of three medium length instalments of an ongoing film project by Rashidi, Homo Sapiens Project. These instalments, when watched back-to-back, will function as a single film structured in episodes. A mysterious loner, perhaps a poet, journeys through a series of uncanny surrealistic landscapes with an unclear purpose. His adventure is divided into three sections. The main theme of this experiment is to compare the eerier qualities of different landscapes and interpose the characters within them, elaborating the project’s ongoing preoccupation with extracting sinister moods from ordinary settings. In a way, these can be seen as experimental horror films in which an atmosphere of dread is evoked and sustained without the expected narrative trappings.” – Rashidi

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 7th – 10PM
BIPEDALITY (Rouzbeh Rashidi, 68mins, 2010)

“It is rare and thrilling to encounter a film that seems to pre-exist the viewer’s presence, one which pitches the audience into a disturbingly private universe and trusts it to find its bearings within an alien environment that belongs more to the characters than the spectator. There is no better example of this than Rouzbeh Rashidi’s magnificent and profoundly mysterious new underground feature Bipedality (2010). A two-hander focusing exclusively on a young couple played by Dean Kavanagh and Julia Gelezova, it troublingly articulates the way in which two people, even while sharing an intimate relationship, can remain mysterious to each other- and perhaps also to themselves.” – Le Cain

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21st – 7:30PM
A HARBOUR TOWN (Dean Kavanagh, 92mins, 2013)

“A young girl lives with her brother in a small cottage in the countryside. In the city a Health Inspector explores an abandoned building. It is unclear what has happened but it is evident that there have been environmental changes. A terrible sense of dread ensues and separates the brother and sister. The brother continues with his mundane chores in isolation, while the young girl drifts further away into the depths of a large rotting forest where she eventually disappears.” – Kavanagh

“Based in a small town in Co. Wicklow, working alone, without budgets and with casts more often than not drawn from his family, Kavanagh is a melancholy visionary of brooding isolation. His obscure narratives tend to focus either on the private rituals of home life or mysterious journeys to or from ‘home’, to or from memory…. His is unquestionably a cinema of contemplation: places, objects, faces, atmospheres and their immediate emotional charge are his stock in trade. Rather than telling stories in any traditional sense, his best films generate a slow, throbbing ache that invades and haunts his viewers. His world is rainswept, claustrophobic, fixated on details, with even his urban images steeped in rural gloom.” – Le Cain

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21st – 10pm
SHORT FILMS: MAXIMILIAN LE CAIN & VICKY LANGAN (60mins)

Since 2010, sound/performance artist Vicky Langan (aka Wölflinge) and experimental filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain have been working together in a unique creative audio-visual partnership. This is built on the strikingly fitting match between Langan’s magnetic, often troublingly intense presence as a performer and Le Cain’s distinctively jarring, disruptive visual rhythms. So far, they have completed eight moving image works together, six of which are presented in this program:

CONTACT (2011, 3 mins) uses Super-8 elements in constructing a dialectical relationship between film image and material.

WOLFLINGE 17/11/’10 (2011, 8 mins) is a haunting visual interpretation of a performance by Langan that breaks down the boundaries between spectator and performer.

LIGHT/SOUND (2010, 9 mins), their first video, acclaimed by critic Fergus Daly as one of the top ten films of 2010 in the Senses of Cinema magazine end of year poll, was chosen for distribution by Paris-based experimental film cooperative Collectif Jeune Cinéma.

HEREUNDER (2011, 12 mins) is an intense, fragmented (auto)biographical portrait of Vicky, which sets her adrift amidst lockers of garden shed bric-a-brac from which she summons an ocean of sound.

DESK 13 (2011, 8 mins) brings a darker, more erotic aspect of their vision to the fore.

DIRT (2012, 12 mins) is a phantasmagoric mélange of live performances and elements of gothic horror, resulting in a haunting, intense and sometimes humorous portrait of Wölflinge.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5th – 7.30pm
HISTORY OF WATER (Dean Kavanagh, 62mins, 2012)
BIRDS ON A WIRE (Michael Higgins, 63mins, 2011)

This double bill of hour-long pieces by Dean Kavanagh and Michael Higgins are perhaps the most identifiably Irish films in the season, focused as they are on the texture of rural landscapes and atmospheres.

Kavanagh’s first long-form work, History of Water, draws tremendous visual power out of a limited series of characters and spaces around his family home and native town of Greystones, Co. Wicklow.

The minimal and even hermetic scope of the film is countered by consistently rich and sensuous imagery in which local weather plays an evocative part. The underlying unease which is developed and at times becomes overwhelming, is hinted at in Kavanagh’s own synopsis of the film, which seems to function both as a description of the film’s narrative and its production: “A young man films his family to better understand them. As a result he becomes destroyed by them.”

On the other hand, Michael Higgins’ Birds on a Wire, the third film in his “road movie trilogy”, takes a paradoxically austere and static approach to a touristic journey along Ireland’s west coast. Two Polish women “experience both Ireland’s mythical history and contemporary weather patterns”, through a series of mostly distanced black and white tableaus, emphasizing the interplay of bodies, earth, weather and the flow of time much more than any contextual specifics of geography or personality.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5th – 10pm
WEIRD WEIRD MOVIE KIDS DO NOT WATCH THE MOVIE
(Maximilian Le Cain / Rouzbeh Rashidi, 80mins, 2013)

Weird Weird Movie Kids Do Not Watch The Movie is the second collaborative feature film between Rouzbeh Rashidi and Maximilian Le Cain. This hypnotic, visually and sonically immersive exploration of a haunted space unfolds in two parts. In the first, a woman (Eadaoin O’Donoghue) dissolves her identity into the ghostly resonances she finds in the rooms and corridors of a sprawling, atmospheric seaside basement property. In the second, a man (Rashidi), existing in a parallel dimension of the same space, pursues a bizarre and perverse amorous obsession.

EDITH CARLMAR: The Tragedies

Posted on October 29, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

Special thanks to the Norwegian Film Institute (NFI).

A singularly witty and dexterous auteur, Norway’s pioneering female filmmaker Edith Carlmar is ripe for a reappraisal in world cinema. Carlmar and her husband Otto co-managed their own production company, Carlmar Film A/S, with which they collaborated with a diverse community of technicians, artists and performers – including the then-teenage Liv Ullman, whose debut lead at 21 was Edith’s final film as director, The Wayward Girl. Making ten movies in as many years, the Carlmars built an astonishing resume in the 1950s before abandoning filmmaking forever when they were at the top of their game.

Today Edith’s legacy suggests a nearly clear split between flinty, ice-cold film noirs – often evincing a rare female perspective – and romantic comedies that’ll make your jaw drop even today with their sexual candor. She was in particular a master of eroticized close-ups and devastating quiet moments, never flinching from emotions (pleasurable or painful) most American directors wouldn’t touch with a fork.

That said, Carlmar Film A/S was an unabashedly commercial enterprise, at a time of deeply felt prudishness in Norway. The Carlmars made hits for a popular audience, and proudly paid all their grants back to the government. Never betraying her blue-collar roots, Edith left the distribution rights to her entire catalog to FILMVETERANENE, a union of Norwegian industry veterans. Alongside them, Spectacle is thrilled to team up with the Norwegian Film Institute to blow the dust off these classics of Scandinavian cinema this autumn.

DEATH IS A CARESS
(Døden er et kjærtegn)
dir. Edith Carlmar, 1949
88 mins. Norway.
In Norwegian with English subtitles.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4th – 7:30PM
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 15th – 10PM

Carlmar’s fierce and mesmerizing debut film follows a Erik (Claus Wiese), a young auto mechanic, and his torrid love affair with Sonja (Bjørg Riiser-Larsen) – an older, married woman. Death Is A Caress luxuriates in beautifully staged meetings and whisperings, private moments refiltered into Erik’s voice-over account of how the affair swallowed up his life. Carlmar’s ensemble always has a wisecrack ready in response for him, but this conventional linear device also allows the filmmakers to throw their weight into wordless, lush sequences of huge import: benders, moments of heated passion, curious interior observations.

Pressed against the stoically clueless Erik, Sonja’s catty, desperately lonely femme fatale turns the film into a grand game of emotional chess as they plunge deeper into their doomed romance. Carlmar would perhaps take future subject matters more seriously in her aesthetic, but it hardly matters: Caress is haunting in how it executes one luminous, golden-era pirouette after another. Ingeniously wry, Carlmar’s filmmaking never fully tips its hat to the audience; if the film has a noir’s backbone, its filling is closer to the knotted domestic drama of Tennessee Williams. Through Erik’s virginal eye, Caress is breathtakingly sensual, making his first loss of innocence its own champagne-drunk landscape.

MAIMED
(Skadeskutt)
dir. Edith Carlmar, 1951
87 mins. Norway.
In Norwegian with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6th – 10PM
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 27th – 10PM

Neither a thriller nor a weepie, Maimed introduces itself as a case study, bookended with comments from a jovial old psychiatrist. If Carlmar’s first film is baroque, Maimed is decidedly a chamber piece, an attempt to conjure thrashing waves of emotion from confined spaces and situations. Carsten Winger stars as Einar Wang, an architect who keeps himself distant and cold from life; after he attempts suicide, he’s paralyzed and placed in an asylum. His wife Else (Eva Bergh) uncovers her husband’s soul-crushing depression, spurred by a deep neurosis about his inability to have children – and the hidden fact of a girlfriend’s abortion earlier in his life.

Growing impatient with the couple’s inability to conceive as Einar improves, Else soon solicits the help of her husband’s best friend. Einar takes incremental steps towards re-entering society as a formerly insane person, but the new baby – indeed, the cloud of hereditary insanity floating over their household – drives him mad all over again. Meanwhile Else, persuades herself her choice was ultimately better for them both – her feelings between Rolf, Einar and her infant son a little too well compartmentalized.

Building to an explosive conclusion, Maimed avails itself a dark underside of life-wearinesss. The asylum scenario sees the Carlmars cracking a bevy of Norwegian society’s veneers, giving some of the most memorable lines to addicts and sociopaths (and lumping the doctors in with them.) The exploration of madness as a contaminant that thrives on self-awareness sets the film worlds apart from its contemporaries, and Otto Carlmar’s script doesn’t shy in its plummet into reality.

YOUNG WOMAN MISSING
(Ung frue forsvunnet)
dir. Edith Carlmar, 1953
90 mins. Norway.
In Norwegian with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9th – 10PM
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 15th – 7:30PM

Perhaps the saddest film in this series, Young Woman Missing is also Carlmar’s most political, transferring the audience’s sympathies from husband to wife after reevaluating the life of its titular young woman. When well-to-do academic Arne (Adolf Bjerke) returns home from a “men’s weekend” to find his wife Eva (Astri Jacobson) missing, he calls the police. They eventually begin to uncover facts about Eva’s earlier life – including that she was pregnant – and grapple with the question of how much to involve her prudish, unsympathetic husband.

Carlmar’s depiction of Eva’s marriage to Arne is little less than a straitjacket of classist and sexist overexpectation, causing him to crush the very thing in her that attracted him in the first place: her innocence. That said, Young Woman Missing also allows the audience to be surprised by Eva herself, and her jejune traipse into drug addiction during an earlier romance.

Carlmar’s focus on the wellbeing of her characters and their decision-making processes makes the film a quixotic – as opposed to punitive – tragedy. Ultimately a story of good intentions and overpowering weakness, the sum result is less Hollywood style finger-wagging than a ragged inscription of a human life, wrapped in the haunting beauty of Oslo’s frigid weather.

Dennis Hopper’s BACKTRACK

Posted on October 29, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

BACKTRACK (Director’s Cut)
Dir. Dennis Hopper, 1990-92
102 mins. US.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4th – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12th – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 30th – 9:30 PM

1990 AD: FOLLOWING the colossal success of his supporting roles in Hoosiers (1986, Anspaugh) and Blue Velvet (1987, Lynch) and a well-regarded directing turn (Colors, 1988), Dennis Hopper was finally back on top of the world again. A fallen countercultural icon who had ridden with Terry Southern, tripped with Jack Nicholson, and kicked it with Hitler in a classic Twilight Zone episode, he had fallen from grace in a long list of D-roles, the epochal anti-Western (and Spectacle favorite) The Last Movie in 1971 and the tortured production of Out Of The Blue nearly a decade later.

Finally back in the saddle with some sexual cachet and critical acclaim, Hopper cast a potpourri of old friends and deep-fried favorites including (but by no means limited to) Dean Stockwell, Joe Pesci, Fred Ward and John Turturro in his latest project, Backtrack. Hopper locked himself in the lead role of Milo—a sax-obsessed mob hitman with a loosely calibrated sensitive side. After up-and-coming conceptual artist Anne Benton (Jodie Foster) witnesses one of Milo’s whack-jobs in Seattle, the powers that be (including Vincent Price as the Don of Milo’s “family”) send him to find her in Arizona to snuff her out. However as the VHS box says, once they’ve met it’s hard to un-meet, and Milo admits he doesn’t know whether to trust Anne, to love her, or… to kill her.

What ensues is equal parts renagade-on-the-lam drama, 90s acid western action and meet-cute RomCom. Along with two filmmaking buddy Alex Cox, Hopper squeezed and tugged his feelings about postmodern art, industrialization, colonialism, jazz, soft rock, middle age, and the American road trip into a lurid balm for the soul—a kind of mashup of Lynch, Wenders, Antonioni and Scorsese with baffling, impenetrable results. Modeled closely on Jenny Holzer, Foster’s character is shown making and premiering work that was created by Holzer specifically for Backtrack – for example, installations of scrolling neon text doling out prophecies such as “EVEN YOUR FAMILY CAN BETRAY YOU.”

The resultant 3-hour film was too hot for Vestron, so it was ripped from Hopper’s hands, butchered and released as Catchfire; in protest, Hopper changed his directorial credit to the old DGA standby for disgraced edits, Alan Smithee. Only in ’92 did he get the chance to release his dialectical final cut—blasted out onto late-nite cable in a brief flare, but overall neglected like the honky-tonk swamp pop of yesteryear.

Until nw. Spectacle’s long-running, always well-advised love affair with Hopper’s work reaches further backwards than ever with this rare screening of the lost and forgotten director’s cut, available (and thus, screening) exclusively on VHS.

DASH SHAW & LIMITED ANIMATION

Posted on October 29, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8TH – 8PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

In conjunction with Comic Arts Brooklyn, cartoonist and animator Dash Shaw (New School) presents an evening of “limited” aka “low budget” animation.

Dash will be showing and discussing some of his own work, like the Sigur Ros video and Sundance selection Seraph, the “fast slideshow” Blind Date 4, and others, plus a bonus cartoon that’s inspired him: the “best episode” of the anime Robotech! Come watch some cartoons on a Friday night. This is not to be missed.

NEKRO WEEKEND

Posted on October 28, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

Special thanks to Nico B., Jörg Buttgereit and Cult Epics in their cooperation with this program.

NEKROMANTIK
Jörg Buttgereit, 1987.
West Germany. 71m.
In German with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1ST – MIDNIGHT
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

“What lives that does not live from the death of someone else?” -V.L. Compton

NEKROMANTIK 2
Jörg Buttgereit, 1991.
Germany. 102m.
In German with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2ND – MIDNIGHT
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

“I want to master life and death.” -Ted Bundy

NEKROMANTIK 2 (Jörg Buttgereit, 1991) NSFW from Spectacle Theater on Vimeo.

VETERANGEANCE

Posted on October 28, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

They say old soldiers never die… in observance of Veteran’s Day, Spectacle teams up with Blue Underground to present three tales of martial vengeance from beyond the grave. On Veteran’s Day itself, we run the gory classics THE PROWLER and DEATHDREAM back-to-back. They return for an encore presentation on Saturday, November 23, along with UNCLE SAM, presented by filmmaker, Blue Underground CEO, and legendary raconteur Bill Lustig.

DEATHDREAM
Dir. Bob Clark, 1972.
USA. 88 min.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 11 – 10:00 PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – 7:00 PM

He promised he’d come back! Brilliantly directed by Bob Clark (BLACK CHRISTMAS, A CHRISTMAS STORY), DEATHDREAM weaves allegory for Vietnam soldiers returning as PTSD-afflicted heroin junkies with unsettling oedipal conflict by telling the story of a soldier, declared dead, who surprises his grieving family by suddenly returning home. Andy looks and sounds the same, but he isn’t quite right: an emotionless husk, unable to reconnect with his family and friends, and suffering from some unknown physical ailment. Yet it’s not TLC that Andy needs to regain his sense of self, but blood — preferably fresh, human blood, mainlined via syringe — and when Andy’s parents have no choice but to face facts, they are horribly divided as to how to treat their darling boy’s affliction.

Often cited as an overlooked genre classic, DEATHDREAM benefits from a smart script, assured direction, and pitch-perfect performances. As Andy, Richard Backus brings an understated menace to his role that strikes a resoundingly creepy note. It’s effectively contrasted by the outstanding performances of John Marley and Lynn Carlin, recent co-stars of Cassavetes’s FACES, who treat the material with dignity, elevating it to the status of a rare horror film that manages to blend graphic gore with almost overwhelming emotional impact. And as in A CHRISTMAS STORY, Clark directs with a familiar sensitivity to domestic situations and the nuances of suburbia. The result, as genre aficionados have long known, is one of the most well-rounded and affecting masterpieces of horror cinema.

THE PROWLER
Dir. Joseph Zito, 1981.
USA. 89 min.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 11 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – MIDNIGHT

UNCLE SAM
Dir. Bill Lustig, 1996.
USA. 89 min.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – 9:30 PM – BILL LUSTIG IN ATTENDANCE!

Re-teaming MANIAC COP director Lustig and screenwriter Larry Cohen, UNCLE SAM is a cult favorite 1997 slasher about a soldier killed by friendly fire during Desert Storm who busts out of his casket to kill flag burners and other unpatriotic types. Bearing Lustig and Cohen’s idiosyncratic blend of social commentary and no shortage of gore, UNCLE SAM is further distinguished by appearances by William Smith, Isaac Hayes, P.J. Soles, and the electrifying Robert Forster.

Mr. Johnny Legend’s TV IN ACIDLAND

Posted on October 28, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

TV IN ACIDLAND
Program 1: In the Beginning… (the birth of “live” TV late 1940s – 1955)
Program 2: The Modern Age (1955 – early ‘70s)
Dir. Johnny Legend, collected footage, 2012
USA, 153 min. with intermission

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 3 – 8:00PM
One night only with Johnny Legend in attendance!

GROUCHO MARX AND THE PROFESSOR OF HIPOLOGY
BETTY WHITE’S TIRED HOUSEWIFE BLOOD
MILTON BERLE WIGGLES WILDLY

“A hand-made montage of the most shudderingly strange and awesomely revealing moments early television could offer… the damndest thing you ever saw!” –Boho Beat

Mr. Johnny Legend is a savior of forgotten horror films, wrestling promoter, Rockabilly Hall of Famer, and director of documentaries, improvised happenings, hot tub pornos and collected ephemera. But of all his unruly projects in several decades of haunting Hollywood, Mr. Legend considers TV IN ACIDLAND “undoubtedly the most ambitious and incredibly entertaining of them all. The majority of the footage here has never been shown theatrically and has remained virtually unseen by most viewers for over half a century.”

This astounding time capsule of the golden age of “really live” television is a non-stop collection of classic variety shows, skits, commercials, and indescribable oddities featuring the biggest (and strangest) stars of the era, many making their broadcast debut. It is an unabashed cinematic “love-letter” to the first quarter century of televised insanity!

Starring Marilyn Monroe, Jack Benny, Peter Lorre, Ernie Kovacs, Steve Allen, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Liberace, Groucho Marx, Lucy and Desi, Buster Keaton, Jonathan Winters, Rod Serling, Edward G. Robinson, Judy Garland, Jackie Gleason, James Dean… and many, many more!

PLUS…
Johnny Legend really live and in person to share his personal stories of Hollywood stardom and madness!