Author: spectacletheater

THE EAST IS RED – A SONG AND DANCE EPIC

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THE EAST IS RED
Dir. Wang Ping, 1965.
PRC. 117 min.
Mandarin.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 – 10:00 PM

What can we say? We’re damn surprised this hasn’t yet screened in the peeling walls of Spectacle, everyone’s favorite “lost and forgotten” community screening space; our cozy creaking frame around the questionable and curious. Is it low-hanging fruit? Maybe just a bit back and to the left? Is it a glorious paean romanticizing radical resistance role-play amongst ravenous refurbishing and reselling of riverside residency? Here’s an “r” word – RED.

Sisters and brothers, presenting the biggest, loudest, most glorious Mao-sical ever – THE EAST IS RED: A SONG AND DANCE EPIC. Produced and released by the real BIG RED MACHINE on the eve of the mid-60’s Cultural Revolution, THE EAST IS RED trumpets the trials and tribulations of the Communist Party in China – from its birth in proletarian imperialist resistance, through the final boWW of the Japanese, all the way to the last steps of the Kuomin-tango. The massive cast is studded with beautiful voices and movement, clad in costumes of a time long crushed. Think of Diane Warren if Michael Bay was Chairperson. Been jonesing for a bit of that 2008 Summer Olympics ceremony jazz, minus the Budweiser food trucks and brown M&Ms with the UPS logo? Throw out your Adidas, put this on your social list and invite your comrades to take a proper gander at this propaganda.

BANDIDO’S GOLD: Unearthed Spaghetti Western Treasures

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This quartet of lesser known, yet truly great spaghetti westerns is chocked full of gripping action, relentless violence, and brooding intensity with gritty style to spare.

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BANDIDOS
Dir. Massimo Dallamano 1967.
Italy. 91 min.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 14 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 – 10:00 PM

Outlaw Billy Kane holds up a train only to find his former mentor-of-arms, renowned gunman Richard Martin, is one of the passengers. Kane shoots Martin’s hands before letting him escape. Years later Martin meets Ricky Shot (!), an escaped convict who was falsely accused for the robbery. He takes Shot under his wing and together they head on the trail of vengeance.

This standout spaghetti western was the directorial debut of A Fistful of Dollars cinematographer Massimo Dallamano. It was also his last western, though he went on to make other excellent films, including the infamous giallo What Have they Done to Solange? and the poliziotteschi Colt .38 Special Squad. Though uncredited, it is reported that Dallamano also shot Bandidos, which would explain its incredibly accomplished and distinct look, featuring brilliant panoramas and deep focus. A tight, compelling, highly revered, and ESSENTIAL spaghetti western.

Read more about BANDIDOS on the Spaghetti Western Database, whose reviewer states that “Dallamano probably comes closer to Leone than any other director of spaghetti westerns.”

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$10,000 BLOOD MONEY
Dir. Romolo Guerrieri 1967.
Italy. 94 min.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 21 – 10:00 PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 – 10:00 PM

Rogue bounty hunter Django mockingly taunts low-life bandit Manuel, who only has a measly $3,000 price on his head. Inspired by spite, hatred and villainous pride, Manuel ups the stakes, first with murder, and then by kidnapping a land baron’s daughter, finally netting Django’s $10,000 bounty minimum. But when Manuel ruthlessly targets Django’s saloon girl lover Mijanou (Loredana Nusciak from Django), vengeance becomes the main incentive, transforming the hunt into an ornery blood feud.

The first in a pair of inspired bounty hunter films from the crafty production team of Mino Loy and the late Luciano Martino (brother of Sergio), and the pen of prolific screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi. Featuring spaghetti western stalwart Gianni Garko (Sartana) as the ‘good’ and Claudio Camaso as ‘the bad.’ Its high style, surreal touches, fully loaded tropes, extreme anti-heroics, amorality and existentialism all add up to an exemplary spaghetti western. NOT TO BE MISSED!

Read more about $10,000 BLOOD MONEY on the Spaghetti Western Database, which calls it “one of the best unofficial Django films … beautiful, almost surreal” and “one of the finest Italian Westerns ever made.”

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VENGEANCE IS MINE
Dir. Gianni Fago 1967.
Italy. 91 min.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 – 10:00 PM

Gianni Garko and Claudio Camaso breathe more life into their anti-hero and villain roles from $10,000 Blood Money, here with an added Cain-and-Abel-like classicism. This time it’s John the bounty hunter (Garko) versus army deserter-turned-outlaw Clint (Camaso), half-brothers, embittered with extreme mutual hatred. John just served time, falsely accused of his father’s murder by none other than Cint. Can John keep his promise to his mother to bring Clint in alive?

Vengeance is Mine (aka $100,000 Per Killing) further explores morality via bounty hunters and bandits strongly linked by their existential attitudes towards money, life, and death; provocative ideas thrillingly played out against a satisfyingly gritty landscape. High production values, surprising plot twists, violent set pieces, and a hint towards profundity prove both films top entries in the genre.

Read more about VENGEANCE IS MINE on the Spaghetti Western Database, whose reviewer states that it is “probably as close as an Italian genre movie from the sixties … could get to Greek and Victorian drama.”

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CEMETERY WITHOUT CROSSES
Dir. Robert Hossein 1969.
Italy. 85 min.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 9 – 10:00 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 28 – 7:30 PM

CEMETERY WITHOUT CROSSES (Robert Hossein, 1969) from Spectacle Theater on Vimeo.

After her husband is mercilessly hanged by a ruthless land baron, Maria implores Manuel, an old flame, to infiltrate the killer’s ranch and wreak vengeance. Manuel reluctantly leaves the ghost town where he lives to embark on the mission, but is ever haunted by his unrequited affection for Maria

Prolific French actor Robert Hossein directed and starred in this inspired homage to his friend Sergio Leone. As sharpshooter Manuel, he dons one black glove (channeling the cool of garage rock band The Music Machine?) and imbues the whole production with laconic ennui. A visually striking and brooding picture, the requisite gritty and violent tropes are delivered with an artistic fervor ahead of its time. A MUST SEE!

Read more about CEMETERY WITHOUT CROSSES on the Spaghetti Western Database, whose reviewers call it “not your average spaghetti,” and “a truly moving classic of the genre.”

THE FUTURE WEIRD: THE BLACK ATLANTIS

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MONDAY, AUGUST 26 – 8:00 PM

The Future Weird is a bimonthly series exploring contemporary film from the global south – with an African bias. Our title, “the future weird”, is inspired by The State’s ongoing documentation of non-western futurisms: http://www.thestate.ae/

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According to Afrofuturist legend, Drexciya is a sunken land inhabited by the children of African women who were drowned during the Middle Passage. Since they were never born, these children continued to breath underwater: first through amniotic fluid, then through lungs better suited to the new world. Join us as we go in search of the “Black Atlantis”.

Water is a cleansing force through which our bodies may be reborn, but it is also a site of memory where disappeared and suppressed things resurface, wash up, or return to us as detritus. Through myths that traverse the Black diaspora we meet a beautiful and dangerous sea goddess named mama wata. Following tourists and then refugees fleeing Europe, we consider stories concerning identity, slavery and commerce, high seas adventure, and the joint appeal and terror of being visited by ancestors or haunted by an unknown past.

& OTHER WORKS: MELANIE GILLIGAN

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WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18TH

CRISIS IN THE CREDIT SYSTEM and SELF-CAPITAL at 8 PM
POPULAR UNREST at 10 PM

ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE
ONE NIGHT ONLY

“& Other Works” is a series of screenings focusing on film and video from contemporary artists organized by C. Spencer Yeh. “& Other Works” is an informal communal viewing experience, away from the white walls and passwords.

For September we welcome artist Melanie Gilligan, writer and director (and editor and etc). Originally deployed online in episodic form, &OW brings you these three tales of crisis, self, and unrest – uninterrupted. We’ll take care of clicking “play next” – you just sit back and enjoy. Gilligan will be present this evening and available for questions, should you have any.

In case you couldn’t tell from the titles, the primary inspiration and subject matter of these works is our contemporary capitalist economic system. Choosing to dramatize instead of document inserts subjective loops within that vast and obtuse tangle of snakes and ladders – when we receive information, we process with all our defenses and criticality; when we see stories, we can’t help but search for a niche or foothold. Gilligan borrows frames and devices from popular media to build an accessibility, but retains license to break free from the expectations binding more commercial attempts basted with similar info-sauce (neither Margin Call nor Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps depicts a floating computer graphics cube speckled with disembodied limbs).

SELF-CAPITAL
Dir. Melanie Gilligan, 2009.
UK. 24 min.
English.

No more is this evident than with Self-Capital, in which an individual named “Global Economy” undergoes extensive psychological evaluation and experimental therapy. Having recently experienced a traumatic breakdown, we follow Global Economy from her initial diagnosis, through sessions and body-actualizing exercise, to the final prognosis (for now). The same actor portrays all roles, flattening any figurative reading of casting decision and gender portrayal, not to mention a certain, uhhh, economy in filmmaking ;-).

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CRISIS IN THE CREDIT SYSTEM
Dir. Melanie Gilligan, 2008.
UK. 38 min.
English.

“A major investment bank runs a brainstorming and role-playing session for its employees, asking them to come up with strategies for coping with today’s dangerous financial climate. Role-playing their way into increasingly bizarre scenarios, they find themselves drawing disturbing conclusions about the deeper significance of the crisis and its effects beyond the world of finance. Crisis is the result of extensive research and conversation with major hedge fund managers, key financial journalists, economists, bankers and debt activists.” – courtesy of the artist

You could call Crisis in the Credit System a dark comedy, except that the scenarios and lingo are expressly presented intact – there is no need to embellish or satirize to elicit the type of nervous laughter in the face of total madness. With alarming prescience, Crisis was in production during, and released shortly after the collapse of financial services firm Lehman Brothers in 2008.

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POPULAR UNREST
Dir. Melanie Gilligan, 2010.
UK. 71 min.
English.

“Popular Unrest is a multi-episode drama set in a future not so different from the present, that is shaped by the convergence of capital, biopolitics and ‘big data’. The film explores a world in which the self is reduced to physical biology, directly subject to the needs of capital. Shot in London with a cast of twelve main actors, the film’s form is partly inspired by David Cronenberg’s ‘body horror’ and American television dramas CSI, Dexter and Bones, where reality is perceived through a pornographic forensics of empirical and visceral phenomena.” – courtesy of the artist

The vision of futuristic society in Popular Unrest doesn’t front as allegory or parody, as other dystopian media visions are often served; the results are intentionally literal and stifling. Detaching the caustic docudrama that drives Crisis in the Credit System, Popular Unrest foregrounds Gilligan’s own speculations on the issues and themes her work is concerned with; she carves the players and the pieces, and fixes the game played. We realize that as fantastical as the teams and rules are, they are no more unreasonable than the working myths constructed to parse the overwhelming systems of economic exchange in our actual times. On top of that,

Here’s the checkboard and pawns of Popular Unrest – “The Spirit” is the ruling belief system, the force by which people are divined. “The Spirit” is a cloud, the inevitable accumulation and deification of society’s collective material and economic aspiration. People work, and any extracurricular activity is regulated to support the ability to work. The individual has no choice but to become mercenary, as individual worth is increasingly defined in isolation. However, eco-systemic chaos despises status quo, so the see-saw is seated with two inexplicable phenomena. There’s “groupings,” in which strangers congregate and bond due to an unidentifiable urge to meet with one another. Then, as counterbalance to these mysterious love-ins, there’s a mysterious floating knife that murders people without warning or apparent reason.

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Melanie Gilligan is an artist and writer born in Toronto in 1979. She currently lives in London and New York and works in a variety of media including video, performance, text, installation and music. Gilligan completed a BA (Hons) Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in 2002 and was a Fellow with the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Programme in 2004/5. She has presented solo exhibitions at institutions including Chisenhale Gallery (London), Kölnischer Kunstverein (Cologne), Transmission Gallery (Glasgow), The Banff Centre, (Banff), Franco Soffiantino Gallery (Turin), Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (Toronto), and VOX centre de l’image contemporaine (Montreal). In 2008, commissioned by Artangel Interaction, Gilligan released Crisis in the Credit System, a four-part fictional mini drama about the recent financial crisis. Gilligan has taught widely in Europe and North America, and has appeared in numerous group exhibitions worldwide, including Manifesta 8 (Murcia, Spain) in 2010. Her writings on art, politics and finance have appeared in magazines such as Artforum, Texte zur Kunst and Grey Room and in recent volumes such as Canvases and Careers Today(Sternberg Press) and Intangible Economies (Fillip).

SAMUEL FULLER AND THE BIG RED ONE

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SAMUEL FULLER AND THE BIG RED ONE
Thys Ockersen, 1979.
Netherlands. 75 min. (+ 50 min. Secret Screening!)
In English.

Presented by Screen Slate and programmed by Cullen Gallagher.

Visit Screen Slate for an exclusive interview with Thys Ockersen!

MONDAY, AUGUST 12 – 8:00 PM

New York Premiere in Celebration of Samuel Fuller’s 101st Birthday! Followed by another mind-blowing Samuel Fuller rarity from 1990 (50 min.)

Originally made for Dutch television and never commercially released in the United States either theatrically or on video, Thys Ockersen’s SAMUEL FULLER AND THE BIG RED ONE (1979) will be makes its New York Premiere here at Spectacle.

Ockersen’s documentary is an invaluable record of one of cinema’s greatest figures at work on his magnum opus—a unique and deeply personal WWII epic grounded in Fuller’s own wartime experience landing on D-Day. On the beach, behind the scenes, and on the front lines, Ockersen’s film is a gritty and enlightening portrait of an artist at work at the peak of his career. As electric, charismatic, poetic, and tough as any of the characters from his films, Fuller is his own best leading man. Also featuring interviews with Lee Marvin and Mark Hamill, SAMUEL FULLER AND THE BIG RED ONE is a fond tribute to the director, and a perfect way to celebrate the memory of Fuller, who would be turning 101 this August 12th.

Afterwards, we’ll screen one of Samuel Fuller’s final works — an insane rarity you won’t want to miss.

Special thanks to Thys Ockersen.

THE BIG REVEAL

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MONDAY, AUGUST 5 – 8:00 PM

Unveiling The Sparrow‘s music video for new single “Something Deep In Me Screams for You,” featuring:

  • Composing genius Masaya Ozaki
  • Filmmaking visionary Martin Noboa
  • Burgeoning screen stars Natalie Zitter and Alex Erikson

And, of course,
The Sparrow’s big raw heart

PARTLY ART: A NIGHT OF ORPHANED MEDIA

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TUESDAY, AUGUST 13TH – 8:00 PM – ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Co-presented by 3Ton Cinema & SPCL NTRST.

Join us for a two-tiered, multi-format immersion into a cornucopia of found media… manipulated, archived, re-contextualized, collected and always deeply-loved.

This night celebrates two milestones in one: a kick-off of 3TON Cinema’s 16mm digitization campaign ‘20,000 ft. Dash’ as well as the premiere screening of SPCL NTRST’s first full-length album ‘Category: Health.’

Alongside cartoon bits, surprises and an excerpt from a film about digestive systems, 3TON Cinema will present a potpourri of orphan material from their 16mm collection. Highlight include: DRAGONFOLD (1979, 7m), a computer-animated illustration of ‘how to fill space’ created by recently-deceased Brooklyn filmmakers Bruce and Katharine Cornwell, FREE FALL (1964, 9m), Arthur Lipsett’s “attempt to express in filmic terms an intensive flow of life [and] the transformation of a physical phenomena into psychological ones,” and A FLOWERING PLANT FROM SEED TO SEED (1980, 12m), a time-lapse film depicting the growth cycle of tomatoes.

Accompanying live experimental/electronic score to these films will be provided by Matt Wellins (http://mattwellins.com) and Qixoni:

 

Following this, SPCL NTRST will debut the entirety of their new ‘Category: Health’ album, which manipulates found tapes that tackle the theme of health from a variety of styles and perspectives into a roughly 30m assembly.

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Since 2009, 3Ton Cinema has been making an effort to collect, exhibit and appreciate 16mm films. Inspired largely by the work of Oddball Films and Other Cinema, then spurred initially by a generous donation of films from the Prelinger Archive in San Francisco, CA, 3TON’s aim is to examine, share and re-purpose their 1000+ film collection.

More info: http://3toncinema.info

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SPCL NTRST is an A/V band who fixate on analog video sources to create new ‘music videos’ out of only the audio and video material found on each individual artifact. Their currently focus is on ephemeral –educational, promotional, corporate, industrial, etc.– VHS tapes.

More info: http://spclntrst.com

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WELCOME TO APPLIED FICTION: The Films of Jean Pierre Bekolo

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“We shouldn’t just be making movies, we should be changing reality.”

Director Jean Pierre Bekolo has been making spirited, avant-garde films in and about his native Cameroon for the past twenty years. His imaginative work criticizes both his country’s dictatorship, as well as Western cinematic conventions, offering a fresh perspective of Africa, of cinema, and especially of African cinema.

This month, Spectacle is proud to present a full retrospective of Bekolo’s films, along with the North American premiere of his latest, The President.

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QUARTIER MOZART
dir. Jean Pierre Bekolo, 1992
80 mins. Cameroon.
In French with English subtitles.

THURSDAY AUGUST 8th – 7:30PM
SATURDAY AUGUST 24th – 10PM

Bekolo’s rolicking debut Quartier Mozart takes on the politics and magic of gender roles in Yaounde’s working class district. The adventure begins when schoolgirl “Queen of the Hood” asks a local sorceress what it would like to be a man. Mama Thekla puts her into the body of a ladykiller to find out. Chaos ensues when he falls for the police chef’s daughter, Thekla is not far behind, and while she guides the freshly-minted “My Guy”, she’ll take the penis off any man who shakes her hand. Bekolo’s impish editing and hip-hop score give new meaning to a popular folktale.

(Winner of the 1992 Prix Afrique en Creation at the Cannes Film Festival.)

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ARISTOTLE’S PLOT
dir. Jean Pierre Bekolo, 1996
72 mins. France/UK/Zimbabwe
In English, and French with English subtitles.

FRIDAY AUGUST 9th – 10PM
FRIDAY AUGUST 30th –  7:30PM

In 1996, the British Film Institute commissioned Bekolo as the African filmmaker for its series celebrating the first 100 years of film. Poor BFI, it couldn’t have been ready for Aristotle’s Plot. This is a balls-to-the-walls meditation on the meaning and purpose of “African film” with aesthetic, rather than geographic, ambition. As critic Michael Dembrow has observed, you need to listen as much as you watch to understand this movie. “Much the experience comes from the sound-track–from the lyrics to songs and, more importantly, Bekolo’s voice-over narration. As we try to put all the pieces together, the plot turns back on itself, scenes are repeated, characters prance around like the pawns and symbols that they are.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.


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LES SAIGNANTES
(The Blood-lettes)
dir. Jean Pierre Bekolo, 2005
Cameroon. 97 mins.
In French with English subtitles

WEDNESDAY, JULY 31st – 8PM (as part of THE FUTURE WEIRD: VISIONS OF EXCESS)
SATURDAY, AUGUST 10th – 10PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 23rd – 10PM

Les Saignantes is the best African sci-fi vampire political satire with homoerotic overtones you’ve ever seen. Best friends Majolie and Chouchou are two beautiful young women trying to get ahead in a near-future Cameroon. After accidentally killing a powerful politician during sex, the two come up with a plot to dispose of the body, and get into the glamorous wakes that have taken over the local nightlife.

As the girls tear their way through the corrupt ruling class, using their their feminine wiles and magical powers, Bekolo drops inter-titles into the film, commenting on the difficulties of filmmaking in an oppressive political climate. With a feminist subtext and cinematography like a blacklight rave, Les Saignantes is a beautiful, disorienting, and truly original work.

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LE PRESIDENT
(The President)
dir. Jean Pierre Bekolo, 2013
Cameroon. 64 mins.
In French with English subtitles

US PREMIERE!

THURSDAY AUGUST 15th – 7:30PM
THURSDAY AUGUST 22nd – 7:30PM
TUESDAY AUGUST 27th – 10PM

“Our president was betrothed to Cameroon with great love and passion, yet over the years the fire has died. He spends more time in Switzerland than in Cameroon. What is he – too good for us now?” – JEAN-PIERRE BEKOLO

The night before an important summit in the near-future, the head of state vanishes into ostensibly thin air. Potential heirs and overthrow-ers converge around the capitol, while bloggers, hangers-on and talking heads tussle with the president’s problematic legacy. Never snarling, Bekolo gestures both unmistakably towards Cameroon’s own 31-year president Paul Biya as well as the varied bigshots across the continent who have consolidated post-colonial power in the vacuum of leadership.

Bekolo’s newest film is a fake documentary that asks barbed, tough-love questions of his homeland’s catastrophic experiments with democracy. “It was through the small screen that he punctuated every moment of my life!”

THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING: As Told By Raymond Pettibon

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Sundays this August, Spectacle presents three classic tapes by Raymond Pettibon.

Know mostly for his prolific production of profound, abrasive pen-and-ink drawings that pitch-perfectly skewer the confounding, sickening and day-to-day aspects of modern American existence, our program features Pettibon’s filmic examinations of a long-term obsession of his: the incestuous and nefarious worlds of American Subculture, its private languages, aesthetics, ideologies — and its specific and violent contradictions .  These films train Pettibon’s singular black humor, his scrappy DIY approach, and his biting, incisive dialogue on three of the most notorious subcultures of recent history: The Manson Family, Patty Hearst and her Symbionese Liberation Army, and The Weather Underground.  Starring, among others, Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Mike Watt, Pat Smear, Dez Cadena and other legends of California’s underground scene of the 1980’s.

Special thanks to Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). Catalogue texts reprinted with permission.

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THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING: WEATHERMAN ’69
Dir. Raymond Pettibon, 1989
USA. 122 mins.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 4th – 7:30PM & 10PM

Featuring a cast that includes Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, Mike Watt of the legendary hardcore band Minutemen, and Pettibon himself, this deadpan narrative pays dubious homage to the 1960’s radical underground. In this crudely rendered home video of a commune of stoned revolutionaries, the cameras are hand-held, the edits in-camera, and the dialogue is wryly on-target. Pettibon’s band of outsiders reenacts a countercultural moment defined by rock music, drugs, and ideological paradox — and in so doing, captures their own late-80’s West Coast grunge milieu as well.

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JUDGMENT DAY THEATER: THE BOOK OF MANSON
Dir. Raymond Pettibon, 1989
USA. 118 mins.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 11th – 7:30PM & 10PM

A day in the life of Manson and his dysfunctional family, as filtered through Pettibon’s distinctive sensibility. In this fictional verite drama, Pettibon and co-director Dave Markey envision the paranoid obsessions and violent anomie of an apocalyptic cult in the waning of the 1960s. As in all of Pettibon’s tapes, the sense of insularity (they all appear to be shot in one living room), the slacker/punk aesthetic, and the deadpan ensemble of amateur actors combine with Pettibon’s startlingly original writing to form a bleakly ironic, if often outrageous, evocation of an American subculture.

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CITIZEN TANIA
dir. Raymond Pettibon, 1989
USA. 87 minutes.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 25th – 7:30PM & 10PM

The 1970’s saga of heiress Patty Hearst’s abduction by the Symbionese Liberation Army — and her subsequent transformation into a gun-toting radical — is told as an absurdist drama of countercultural alienation. The tape’s raw, deliberately home-made execution provides an abject theater for the crude sexual and racial politics of the would-be revolutionaries.

REMIX TO COGNITON

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Re-Made/Re-Modeled Cinema from the Film Society of the Spectacle
One Week Only! • August 16 – 22

In its two-and-a-half years, Spectacle has often functioned as a creative space, offering its screen to amateur or established editor-filmmaker-curators as a means of exploring new ways of engaging with the moving image. Evoking the traditions of New York arthouses, third-world videotheques, and the stoner chill pad in your high school friend’s treehouse, it’s put forth an earnest effort to color outside the lines of the canon, and has never shied away from dismantling it, puzzling at the parts, and feverishly reassembling them while hoping Dad doesn’t notice. Though artists have drawn inspiration from the cinematic apparatus by rejiggering its constituent parts since the form’s inception, international video sharing, increased bandwidth, and the ready proliferation of digital moviemaking tools have provided unprecedented material, accessibility, and ease of making movies like BLADE RUNNER totally new and better.

Likewise, though Big Cinema exhibition is not likely to be outpaced for long, we are presently at a moment where the gap in audience-perceived quality between a $150,000 D-Cinema system and some thing we got at B&H is relatively small. Therefore, as we have crested the digital conversion, DIY HD remixes are capable of carrying as much screen-authority as the now-primarily-video content displayed at hallowed cinema grounds like Film Forum and IFC Center. When, interviewed by intrepid boy-reporter Keannu Reeves in the 2012 documentary SIDE-BY-SIDE, Fox Filmed Entertainment CEO Tom Rothman portentously cautions that we are entering an era in which “anyone can make a movie,” this is probably what he’s sad about. Join us, friends, in salting the wound.

REMIX TO COGNITION is a week-long serving of work made from repurposed footage that was born at Spectacle or is otherwise associated with its all-volunteer staff roster. As in most cases, 100% of ticket sales or donations go directly to supporting the space.
THE LINE-UP
FRI / 16 / 8P – Unclear Holocaust w/ Golden Eye*
FRI / 16 / 10P – South Third Forever: Year One
SAT / 17 / 8P & 10P – Cognition Point (In SPECTRASENSORY 3D Smell-O-Vision)
SAT / 17 / 12A – Hollywood Burn w/ Nuke ‘Em Duke*

SUN / 18 / 10P – Replicant City w/ Boldly Going

MON / 19 / 7.30P – Tough Guys w/ a bout de souffle
MON / 19 / 10P – I Hate Myself and I Want to Die
TUE / 20 / 8P & 10P – MIL KDU DES score Sound Stage Massacre
WED / 21 / 8P – Police Mortality and Protect and Serve w/ Death Wish*
WED / 21 / 10P – South Third Forever: Like Tears in the Rain

*These three screenings are FREE but the artists encourage donations to Spectacle.

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UNCLEAR HOLOCAUST
The Anti-Banality Union, 2011. 65 min. U.SS.A.
Amerikan with some Arabic.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 16 – 8:00 PM

Unclear Holocaust is a feature-length autopsy of Hollywood’s New York-destruction fantasy, comprised of scenes from over 50 studio-system star vehicles, special effects showcases, and outright representational terrorisms from the last eighty years of Amerikan cinema and re-edited into one hyper-heretical master-narrative.

“It is the unrivaled assembly of the greatest amount of capital and private property heretofore captured in one frame, that, with unfathomable narrative efficacy, suicides itself in an annihilatory flux of fire, water, and aeronautics”, say the directors. “The prequel to 9/11”, say others.

With GOLDEN EYE (LJ Frezza, 2013. 6 min.)

Propaganda is the dissemination of data and surveillance is the collection of data. The James Bond series of films is a collection of propaganda, glorifying the practice of espionage. This video is an abridged history of surveillance in the 20th Century, comprised of every James Bond movie released before the War on Terror. It is an examination of the semi-permanent State of Exception in which US Citizens find ourselves, where extralegal proceedings have become the standard operating procedure.

This screening is FREE but the artists encourage donations to Spectacle.

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SOUTH THIRD STREET FOREVER: YEAR ONE
Compiled by C. Spencer Yeh, 2010-2011/2013.
USA.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 16 – 10:00 PM

In just over two-and-a-half years, Spectacle has created over 600 custom trailers running one-to-two minutes in length. This compilation, assembled by artist and prolific Spectacle trailer editor C. Spencer Yeh, spotlights selections from the theater’s first year of operation. They offer a glimpse into the unorthodox curatorial decisions of a fledgling microcinema run by a small handful of non-professional misfit film and video enthusiasts. Working at a fervent pace to assemble material for their rigorous seven-day-a-week programming schedule, the editors developed a singular vernacular that exists on a separate plane than the traditional techniques of commercial exploitation.

A second compilation, spotlighting Spectacle’s growth toward collective actualization, follows on August 21.

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COGNITION POINT
Jon Dieringer & Vanessa McDonnell, 2013.
45 min. USA/USSR.

Showing in Our Very Own <<<SPECTRASENSORY 3D>>> Smell-O-Vision Process!

SATURDAY, AUGUST 17 – 8:00 & 10:00 PM

In this singular live collaboration, Jon Dieringer & Vanessa McDonnell enrapture the senses with abstracted imagery from stunning 1950-60’s USSR sci-fi movies, post-converted to anaglyph 3D, and accompanied live by free-associated smells, transporting the audience to heretofore unimagined worlds.

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HOLLYWOOD BURN
Soda_Jerk with Sam Smith, 2011.
52 min. Australia.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 17 – MIDNIGHT

HOLLYWOOD BURN is an anti-copyright epic constructed from hundreds of samples plundered from the Hollywood archive. Made over 10 years, it is a bombastic free culture call-to-arms and an expensive copyright lawsuit waiting to happen.

Mimicking the hyperbolic rhetoric of today’s copyright cops, it pits a righteous league of video pirates against the evil tyrant Moses and his Copyright Commandments. Determined to alter the present by changing the past, the pirates travel back to 1955 to construct the ultimate weapon: an Elvis Presley video-clone. Part sci-fi + rom com + biblical epic + action movie, this remix manifesto adopts the tactical responses of the parasite, feeding off the body of Hollywood and inhabiting its cinematic structures and codes. The unwitting all-star cast includes Elvis Presley, Charlton Heston, Batman, Bette Davis, Jaws, Jesus, the Hulk, the Hoff and the Ghostbusters.

This screening is FREE but the artists encourage donations to Spectacle.

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REPLICANT CITY
Akiva Saunders & Brendan Shields, 2012.
USA. 53 min.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 18 – 10:00 PM

SPARKLE MOTION provides a live score to the greatest sci-fi detective allegory ever made, remixed and condensed by Akiva Saunders into 53 minutes of android noir apocalypse.

Brendan Shields is a cinephile and longtime bedroom DJ under the name Sparkle Motion. He is also one half of Smash TV together with Ben Craw.

REPLICANT CITY from Spectacle Theater on Vimeo.

with BOLDLY GOING (LJ Frezza, 2010. 4 min.)

Ignoring the Prime Directive, Captain James T. Kirk becomes entangled in conflicts spawned by his own interventionist policies. By the time he realizes his error, it has become clear that he has no choice but to continue his perpetually escalating campaign.

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TOUGH GUYS
Jon Dieringer, 2012.
USA. 111 min.

MONDAY, AUGUST 19 – 7:30 PM

This is Mean Streets, otherwise untouched, with the pop songs ripped out replaced by amateur cover versions from YouTube—25 in all directly corresponding to the original. The result is a wholesale dismantling of authorship, cinematic space, expectation, and the intellectual property of The Rolling Stones, Ltd., whose songs—and music of other genres including early rock, soul, doo wop, rhythm and blues, Cazone Napoletana, opera and salsa—are now performed variously by wayward narcoleptics, fried teenagers, amateur tenors, Polish pre-teen beauty pageant contestants, hip dads and people testing out new keyboards. An analysis of vicarious cultural production as practiced by Martin Scorsese, YouTube performers, and the artist, Tough Guys is also a joyous paean to egalitarianism and the enduring, irrepressible folk underpinnings of tight-assed corporate culture.

The Scorsesean ‘needle drop’ style of scoring with pop music inspired a whole new branch of the film industry—a mammoth bureaucracy of rights, licensing, music supervisors, clearance coordinators and entertainment lawyers with attendant opportunities for marketing and brand synergy between corporate film and music; Tough Guys elbows its way toward an imagined alternative space.

With A BOUT DE SOUFFLE (LJ Frezza, 2010, 2 min.)

A machinima remake of Godard’s a bout de souffle (1960) by way of Grand Theft Auto 4.

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I HATE MYSELF AND I WANT TO DIE
Greg Eggebeen & Ben Shapiro, 2012.
USA. 40 min.

MONDAY, AUGUST 19 – 10:00 PM

The biographical story of Nirvana through the media detritus left in Kurt Cobain’s wake. A brand new narrative-compilation of lost interviews, rabid fan tributes, insensitive true-crime shows, crushing live footage, and even Kurt’s long-lost 1984 homemade horror film, Horror Movies (Kurt’s Bloody Suicide).

Original event trailer:

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MIL KDU DES score UNIVERSE
1960. Canada.
30 min.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 20 – 8:00 & 10:00 PM

Note: Due to a last minute death in the MIL KDU DES keyboard family, the group will no longer be performing to a remixed version of THE SOUND STAGE MASSACRE. Instead, the band has chosen to compose an all-new score to 1960’s breathtaking UNIVERSE.

Universe is a lost triumph, creating a vast and awe-inspiring portrait of the universe as it might appear to a space-traveller, and delving into the astronomer’s art. The austere beauty of its images inspired Stanley Kubrick’s 2001.

Below is an original trailer from a previous screening:

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POLICE MORTALITY
Anti-Banality Union, 2013.
66 min. U.SS.A.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 21 – 8:00 PM

Do you ever try to imagine the last crime?
Suspect that Robocop is the 99%?
Or wish that the pigs would off themselves, so you don’t have to?

Leave it to Hollywood and the Anti-Banality Union, in the world premiere of POLICE MORTALITY, the vengeful follow-up to last year’s 9/11 bonanza UNCLEAR HOLOCAUST.

The immaculate suicide of one police officer begins to reveal the contradictions of police existence to a force which, finding itself utterly irreconcilable with itself, resorts to communism, terrorism, and ultimately terminal civil war, eradicating the prevailing organization of life in the process.

Original event trailer:

PROTECT AND SERVE
Greg Eggebeen & Ben Shaprio, 1930-2011.
26 min. USA.

A short compilation of golden-age police procedural tutorials, self-defense training vids, and the most nightmarish amateur footage of macings, beatdowns, and brutal assaults ever captured by the public.

This screening is FREE but the artists encourage donations to Spectacle.

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SOUTH THIRD STREET FOREVER: LIKE TEARS IN THE RAIN
Compiled by C. Spencer Yeh, 2011-2013.
USA.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 21 – 10:00 PM

In just over two-and-a-half years, Spectacle has created over 600 custom trailers running one-to-two minutes in length. This compilation, assembled by artist and prolific Spectacle trailer editor C. Spencer Yeh, spotlights selections from the theater’s second year of operation to present day.

Advancing from Year One, Like Tears in the Rain explores work that becomes more formalized in certain aspects while reflecting a kaleidoscopic array of approaches. It focuses on the transition of Spectacle from a very (very) small handful of owner-programmer-volunteer-janitor-editors to a larger group leveraging collective action and the power of friendship to realize the goal of forming a self-sustaining off-non-profit seven-day-a-week screening space that shows awesome stuff all the time. Though fleeting in purpose, and advertising one-off shows at a DIY venue in a city in which such spaces are themselves ephemeral by nature of fashion and circumstance, it is hoped these pieces might stand as a testament to what is surely one of the most prolific programming and found-footage collectives in the city.