Author: Zach Fleming

THE WIND OF AYAHUASCA

Posted on by Zach Fleming

THE WIND OF AYAHUASCA
(El Viento del Ayahuasca)
Dir. Nora de Izcue, 1983
Perú. 88 mins.
In Spanish and Quechua with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 6 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 10 – 5 PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15 – 10 PM

TICKETS HERE

Nora de Izcue’s political filmmaking over the last fifty years has made her one of Perú’s most significant filmmakers. Through her involvement with the New Latin American Cinema Foundation and the International School of Film and TV in Cuba, De Izcue has “played an integral role in supporting films and filmmakers in Latin America and beyond,” in the words of film scholar Christine Mladic Janney. Her land reform documentary RUNAN CAYCU (WE ARE THE PEOPLE) is considered a landmark work of Latin American ‘70s filmmaking. Filmed in Quechua and employing a similar visual language to the work of Santiago Álvarez, RUNAN CAYCU remains a powerful document of labor-organization in Perú. De Izcue has continued making insightful documentaries about her nation’s racial, class, and gender disparities, while also balancing projects inspired by magical realist author Gabriel García Marquéz. Her feature fiction debut THE WIND OF AYAHUASCA combines her political perspective with her interest in regional myths.

Made in 1983, THE WIND OF AYAHUASCA was the first Peruvian feature directed by a woman. It is also considered one of the first films to depict ayahuasca use in an authentic fashion. The film’s more fantastical elements –– chiefly the representation of mythical water people named Yacurunas –– fit squarely within its reality, one that is never stable and always revealing more than initially meets the eye. Neatly balancing anthropological footage with more dream-like sequences of drug use, THE WIND OF AYAHUASCA represents a singular creative feat in the history of Peruvian cinema.

We’re proud to host the New York premiere of this landmark film. As an accompaniment, we will be showing Nora de Izcue’s newly translated short film CANCIÓN AL VIEJO FISGA QUE ACECHA EN LOS LAGOS AMAZÓNICOS (SONG TO THE OLD FISH THAT LURKS IN THE AMAZONIAN LAKES) before each screening.

Special thanks to George Schmalz at Kino Lorber, Karoline Pelikan, Nora de Izcue and Steve Macfarlane.

FROZEN SLASHERS

Posted on by Zach Fleming

As we reach the end of the year, the days shorter, the cold seeping into your bones, there is one comfort we can always turn to – and that is, of course, slasher films.

This December, join us for a trio of under-seen winter-bound slashers, featuring everything from glam rock to parapsychologists – and most importantly, snow!

BLOOD TRACKS
dir. Mats Helge, 1985
Sweden/UK. 81 minutes.
In English

MONDAY, DECEMBER 18 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 23 – MIDNIGHT

TICKETS HERE

Their beat and music knocked them dead!!

A film crew producing a rock music video decides to shoot at an abandoned factory above the snow line. When an avalanche strands them, a murderous family living in the factory attacks and kills many of them.

If you love a slasher with its own theme song – you’ve come to the right place! Sort of a brain damaged Glam Rock-ified Swedish THE HILLS HAVE EYES, BLOOD TRACKS doesn’t re-invent the wheel, but it is a bona fide good time at the movies.

FATAL EXAM
dir. Jack Snyder, 1990
United States. 112 minutes.
In English

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 2 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 8 – 5 PM

TICKETS HERE

A group of parapsychology students, as part of their final project, head to a secluded house where a man murdered his entire family. Soon, they discover the dark and terrible secrets that lie within.

We’d be lying if we said this wasn’t a little too long, but when there’s as much genuine sincerity and charm on display (not to mention eminently quotable and batshit dialogue) as there is in FATAL EXAM, who are we to complain?

Shot on 16mm in St Louis in 1985 but not finished til 1990 due to budget constraints, Spectacle is thrilled to present this unique supernatural slasher.

Screening from the new Vinegar Syndrome remaster, courtesy of American Genre Film Archives.

MOONSTALKER
dir. Michael S O’Rourke, 1989
United States. 92 minutes.
In English

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 1 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15 – MIDNIGHT

TICKETS HERE

Campfire stories can be deadly

During the winter season, a family camping in the woods, and a group of camp counselors training in the same forest both find themselves being killed one by one by an unhinged psycho.

Take the standard 80’s slasher formula, crank it up to 11, add a massive dose of regional low-budget charm, and you’ve got yourself a MOONSTALKER(shot under the name CAMPER STAMPER!). Shot in Reno, Nevada, it was reportedly a huge labor of love for all involved, featuring almost entirely first time actors (including future TV stars Blake Gibbons, Kelly Mullis and John Marzilli), as well as one of the higher body counts in the genre. A true winter horror classic.

Screening from the new Vinegar Syndrome remaster, courtesy of American Genre Film Archives.

IT’S ONLY A MOVIE

Posted on by Zach Fleming

IT’S ONLY A MOVIE
Dir. Kevin O’Brien, 2021
United States. 90 mins.
In English.

REGULAR TICKETS HERE

Q&A TICKETS HERE

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 2 – 10 PM
MONDAY, DECEMBER 11 – 7:30 PM ft Q&A w Director Kevin O’Brien – this event is $10
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 22 – MIDNIGHT

In this SOV-horror hidden gem, a traveling filmmaker passing through Ohio ingratiates a couple of young nobodies and convinces them to star in his low-budget slasher SCARECROW. As the production devolves into chaos, the director begins to lose his grip on reality.

Special thanks to Collette O’Brien, Kevin O’Brien and Zak Goodwin.

LATE SOVIET SYMBOLISM: A BLOC-GOTHIC DOUBLE FEATURE

Posted on by Zach Fleming

The last years of Soviet cinema saw a surprising return to the stylistic extravagances of prerevolutionary symbolism. The gallows humor and logorrheic tendencies of the early twentieth-century avant-garde influenced a singularly disorienting style among filmmakers in the Soviet bloc, who translated the linguistic excess of their forebears into a deliriously overcooked aesthetic that gambled coherence for the sake of immersing audiences in the lush psychoses of the late nineteenth-century aristocracy. This December, Spectacle is proud to present two seldom-screened works that best embody this decadent strain of cinema in the waning days of the Union.


DAMNED HOUSE OF HAJN
(Prokletí domu Hajnů)
Dir. Jiří Svoboda, 1989.
Czechoslovakia. 107 min.
In Czech with English subtitles.

TICKETS HERE

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 1 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 7 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 17 – 5 PM

A callow social climber marries into the family of a Czech soap magnate, only to find himself navigating the florid psychosexual manifestations of his new relations. Leering over the proceedings is Uncle Cyril, a feral painter who labors in the attic of the family estate, scheming to fulfill his incestual desires while under the impression that he enjoys the cover of invisibility. Characterized by vertiginous camerawork and jaundiced color grading, Damned House of Hajn presents a uniquely claustrophobic variation on the Czech gothic horror tradition.


MISTER DESIGNER
(Господин оформитель)
Dir. Oleg Teptsov, 1987.
Soviet Union. 103 min.
In Russian with English subtitles.

TICKETS HERE

MONDAY, DECEMBER 11 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 17 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 20 – 10 PM

Set in the last days of tsarist Russia, Mister Designer traces the meticulously choreographed decline of a St. Petersburg aesthete determined to realize his defining masterwork while navigating an unhealthy fixation on mannequins. The execution of the film mirrors the baroque inclinations of the protagonist, lingering on meticulously composed tableaux vivant staged in lavish aristocratic interiors, frequently stalling the languid action to present confounding allegories in the form of expressionist dance interludes.

AN EVENING WITH LAURA CITARELLA

Posted on by Zach Fleming

Continuing our ongoing showcase of the work of Argentine film collective El Pampero Cine, we’re happy to host producer and filmmaker Laura Citarella in a special presentation of OSTENDE and TRENQUE LAUQUEN. Both starring Laura Paredes as a stranger in a small town in the Buenos Aires Province who finds herself embroiled in an ever-expanding web of mysteries, the two films are playful mirrors of each other that tease out new mysteries and resonances between themselves when seen together.

 

TRENQUE LAUQUEN
Dir. Laura Citarella, 2022
Argentina, 260 Minutes
In Spanish with English Subtitles

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7 – 5 PM – In person Q&A with Laura Citarella after the screening

GET TICKETS HERE!

One of the year’s best and most underappreciated films, Laura Citarella’s TRENQUE LAUQUEN is a marvel of low-budget ambition. Shot over the course of five years with the barest of means, the film is an epic mosaic of stories-within-stories that never abandons its simple, observational roots even as it pulls off ever-increasing feats of narrative dexterity. The second part in what is likely to become a series of films directed by Citarella and starring Laura Paredes, we’re happy to be showing the film in a double feature with its predecessor OSTENDE.

“A large-scale epic on a small-scale canvas, Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen (2023) is a brain-teaser of a film, a baroque shrine to the endless possibilities of storytelling that’s as focused on grand gestures of narrative dexterity as it is on observational studies of mundane details. At the core of the film is the mystery of a missing woman, Laura (Laura Paredes, also the film’s co-writer), and the attempts by her husband, Rafael (Rafael Spregelburd), and lover, Ezequiel (Ezequiel Pierri), to find her in the small town of Trenque Lauquen, Argentina. With clear nods to Antonioni (the first chapter is titled “La Aventura”) and Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) Trenque Lauquen weaves a metaphysical mystery on the fungibility of identity and the nature of storytelling itself.

A semi-sequel to—or perhaps remake of—Citarella’s earlier Ostende (2011), which also featured Laura Paredes listlessly wandering around a colorless small town in the Buenos Aires province, Trenque Lauquen carries over the paranoia, hazardous curiosity, and unstated romantic longing which defined the character of Laura in the previous film. A botanical researcher and radio host, the Laura of Trenque Lauquen is both the mysterious, absent center of the film and the jumping-off point from which the film’s myriad stories explode out. The closer the film brings us toward solving the mystery of Laura the further it also drags us into the labyrinthian tales that spin endlessly outward from her character: cryptic markings in library books leading to a secret trove of love letters; an eco-terrorist couple embroiled in a sci-fi conspiracy plot. The result is a head-spinning game that interrogates our desire for understanding and the fundamental fantasies underpinning storytelling.”

– Screen Slate

OSTENDE
Dir. Laura Citarella, 2011
Argentina, 85 minutes
In Spanish with English Subtitles

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7 – 10 PM – In-person intro with Laura Citarella before the screening

GET TICKETS HERE!

Thanks to a radio contest, a girl wins four vacation days in a huge hotel in Ostende, in the Buenos Aires province. It’s the low season, and she gets to the place alone. Her boyfriend will join her a few days later. On the beach there’s plenty of sun but also too much wind; and a not very sophisticated bar with a waiter that talks too much. In this place with no obligations or big attractions apart from a windy beach nearby and the not-so-tempting ocean, the girl starts to pay attention –maybe too much, maybe not enough– to the strange behavior of an old man who’s accompanied by two young women. Flirting with both Hitchcock and Rohmer from a light, feminine perspective, Laura Citrella demonstrates the entrancing possibilities of storytelling in her first film.

 

MYSTERY HALLOWEEN SCREENING

Posted on by Zach Fleming

XXXXXXXX: XXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXX
dir. XXXX XXXXXX, 1993
83 mins. USA.
In English.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31 – 10 PM

GET YOUR TICKETS!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN, SPECTATOES!!!

Join us for a 1-time mystery screening of an early 90’s cult splatter masterpiece – currently in the process of a loving remaster, we couldn’t get access to the new version in time for our proper Spectober programming, but in celebration of the season, we’re bringing back the old VHS rip for a final spin, with the director’s blessing no less!

Bring a big ol bucket o candy and get ready for a head exploding bloodbath!

 

A NIGHT WITH LEONARDO PIRONDI AND ZAZIE RAY-TRAPIDO

Posted on by Zach Fleming

Last April, Spectacle presented EARTH/GRAIN/PIXEL, a selection of formally investigative, mesmerizing, and sci-fi-infused experimental shorts from emerging Brazilian filmmaker Leonardo Pirondi.

To celebrate the occasion of Pirondi and filmmaking partner Zazie Ray-Trapido’s upcoming screenings of WHEN WE ENCOUNTER THE WORLD among this year’s New York Film Festival Currents lineup, Spectacle will host a special one-night shorts showcase of the duo’s respective avant-doc ventures into the collision points between the analog, the cybernetic, and the world caught in between.

Both Pirondi and Ray-Trapido will be gracing the theater in the flesh on Friday, October 6th to present and discuss recent 16mm films, a world premiere, and exciting works in progress.

FRIDAY, 10/6 – 7:30 PM

GET YOUR TICKETS!

NONA
dir. Zazie Ray-Trapido, 2022
USA. 6 mins.

A lush portrait of the filmmaker’s grandmother as she approaches her 90th decade and a marker of Ray-Trapido’s skills with collaborating with documentary “subjects,” NONA weaves together vibrant small-gauge tableaus to evoke a warm synergy between aging and blooming. Eva, the titular hero, provides a narration as compelling and distinct as the visuals make her out to be, ranging from her experiences as a Holocaust survivor to her eagerness to start the next chapter in her life.

SMPTE FOREST
dir. Leonardo Pirondi, 2023
USA. 3 mins.

A world premiere of the latest piece in Pirondi’s ongoing ALCHEMICAL VIRTUAL series of formalist micro-length shorts. In line with previous entries, SMPTE FOREST operates as a tech-minded haiku, creating lasting impressions through analog and digital hybridity. The filmmaker’s own description is worth citing here:

“iPhone video and SMPTE color bars were filmed on 16mm at 24fps. The digital overscan of the celluloid is played back at 0.24fps (1% of the original speed). The film is a sequence of 15-second shots in which the computer creates hundreds of frames sampling from three frames. It chooses how to build natural forms out of one of the standard test patterns of NTSC video created by The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.”

VISÃO DO PARAÍSO
(VISION OF PARADISE)
dir. Leonardo Pirondi, 2022
Brazil, UK, USA. 16 mins.

Connecting the search for the mythical island of Hy-Brazil off of the Irish coast in the late 15th Century to the race for imagined territories within today’s simulated worlds, VISÃO DO PARAÍSO presents a hypnotic investigation into the ideological underpinnings of unreal and surreal forms of cartographic landscapes through a myriad of inter-medial sources, such as colonial maps, video game time-lapses, and microscopic views of computer circuitry.

TWO WORKS IN PROGRESS
dirs. Leonardo Pirondi and Zazie Ray-Trapido, 20??
USA. 27 mins.

THE REDEEMER: SON OF SATAN

Posted on by Zach Fleming

THE REDEEMER: SON OF SATAN aka CLASS REUNION MASSACRE
dir. Constantine S. Gochis, 1978
United States. 84 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, 10/21 – 7:30PM
FRIDAY, 10/27 – 10PM

BOTH SCREENINGS WILL BE FROM AN ORIGINAL 16MM PRINT! $10 TICKETS!

GET YOUR TICKETS!

If you have a craving for terror… come to the class reunion

Six people are trapped within the confines of their old high school during the 10th high school reunion with a psychotic, masked preacher who kills them off for their sinful lives they have made for themselves.

What to say about a regional horror film that opens with a fully clothed child walking out of a lake and getting onto a shuttle bus to a church?

Shot entirely in Staunton, Virginia, THE REDEEMER follows a crazed preacher who orchestrates a fake high school reunion for six sinful classmates (why not seven? we’ll never know), trapping them inside their abandoned old school and picking them off one by one in a series of elaborately staged (and variously costumed) kills – each victim very loosely, though sometimes not at all, connected with one of the seven (six?) deadly sins.

Easily one of the strangest proto-slashers to come out of the 70’s, THE REDEEMER, intentionally or not, manages to capture a rare, disturbingly dreamlike feel from start to finish that never lets up as we follow the preacher’s warped attempts at moral reasoning for each murder.

THE ABSENCE OF MILK IN THE MOUTHS OF THE LOST

Posted on by Zach Fleming

THE ABSENCE OF MILK IN THE MOUTHS OF THE LOST
dir. Case Esparros, 2023
United States. 75 min.
In English.

SPECIAL EVENT

SUNDAY 10/8, 7:30 AND 10PM – TICKETS ARE $10

GET TICKETS HERE!

A single mother struggles with the grief of her missing child on the one-year anniversary of her disappearance, while her neighborhood milkman begins to feel a strong connection to her grief.”

Starring Hannah Weir, Amelie Fernandez, River Faught, and the infamous underground musician Gary Wilson as “The Milkman”. Featuring an original score from Aaron Dilloway (Wolf Eyes).

On October 8th, please join us in welcoming director Case Esparros to Spectacle for the New York premiere of THE ABSENCE OF MILK IN THE MOUTHS OF THE LOST. Followed by a Q&A with moderator Charlotte Ercoli.

COLLAGE HORREUR

Posted on by Zach Fleming

As our dear bodega is serenaded in shrieks and showered in gore this SPECTOBER, we are excited to exhume COLLAGE HORREUR, an accompanying series of contemporary experimental horror films that reanimate, reuse, and remix found materials to summon novel sensations and dreadful meta-epiphanies from the genre.

In the case of Péter Lichter and Bori Máté’s THE PHILOSOPHY OF HORROR, celluloid itself becomes the object of both bodily and psychic slaughter as a pair of iconic horror film prints are brutalized into nightmarish abstraction. Aristotelis Maragkos’ THE TIMEKEEPERS OF ETERNITY takes a similarly hands-on approach through the volatile manipulation of a cosmic horror miniseries that has been entirely printed and re-edited on paper. Charlie Shackleton’s FEAR ITSELF sees the filmmaker’s grasp of the video essay form stitch together a daunting and diverse filmography to reflect upon the complications of horror film connoisseurship.

Preceding THE PHILOSOPHY OF HORROR will be two vampiric shorts by the Croatian collage animation maestro Dalibor Barić: the upbeat and bloodthirsty THE HORROR OF DRACULA and ALL CATACOMBS ARE GRAY, an interpretation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s sapphic 19th century novella CARMILLA. Barić’s sonic reworking of TWILIGHT ZONE clips paired with comic book cutouts, MY GAME OF LONGING, will also play before THE TIMEKEEPERS OF ETERNITY. For the non-Q&A screenings of FEAR ITSELF, audiences will have a chance to see Ben Rivers’ short film TERROR! as another complementary meditation on the joys of being afraid.

Alongside remote Q&As with many of these filmmakers, the local found sound DJ duo, Vampÿrates, will climb aboard the theater on Friday the 13th for a special one-night performance to sink their fangs into the willing eyes and ears of spectators through the wee hours.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HORROR: A SYMPHONY OF FILM THEORY
dirs. Péter Lichter and Bori Máté, 2020
60 mins. Hungary.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4 – 10 PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 9 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 28 – 3 PM FEATURING REMOTE DIRECTOR Q&A / THIS EVENT IS $10

GET YOUR TICKETS!
GET TICKETS FOR DIRECTOR Q&A SCREENING HERE!

Deriving its name from Noël Carroll’s seminal book on the poetics of horror, Lichter and Máté use excerpts from the text as framing devices to move from scholarly taxonomy to visceral affect as a pair of film prints are cut, scratched, painted, overlapped, and recombined to a point of mesmerizing and indecipherable grisliness. The victims of choice? A certain 80’s classic concerning a vengeful monster that kills teenagers in their dreams, and its sequel.

Screening with:

THE HORROR OF DRACULA
dir. Dalibor Barić, 2010
5 mins. Croatia.

ALL CATACOMBS ARE GRAY
dir. Dalibor Barić, 2013
20 mins. Croatia.

THE TIMEKEEPERS OF ETERNITY
dir. Aristotelis Maragkos, 2021
64 mins. Greece.
In English.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 9 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 21 – 3 PM FEATURING REMOTE DIRECTOR Q&A / THIS EVENT IS $10
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 26 – 10 PM

GET YOUR TICKETS!
GET TICKETS FOR DIRECTOR Q&A SCREENING HERE!

In a painstaking process that calls to mind the Library of Congress Paper Print Film Collection (an initiative that ended up giving many films an afterlife beyond their initial celluloid deaths), Maragkos printed each frame of a 3-hour 1995 miniseries adaptation of a novella by the world’s most famous horror writer onto black and white paper to then rephotograph them back into motion with many artistic liberties taken along the way. Visible crinkles, cuts, and tears inflicted on the paper images create both dramatic emphasis and nihilistic resonance as ten passengers aboard a night-time flight awaken to realize everyone aboard has vanished.

Screening with:

MY GAME OF LONGING
dir. Dalibor Barić, 2013
10 mins. Croatia.

FEAR ITSELF
dir. Charlie Shackleton, 2015
88 mins. United Kingdom.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7 – 3 PM FEATURING REMOTE DIRECTOR Q&A / THIS EVENT IS $10
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 10 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 17 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27 – 5 PM

GET YOUR TICKETS!
GET TICKETS FOR DIRECTOR Q&A SCREENING HERE!

Recovering from the grief of a lost sibling, a woman in voice-over reflects on her paradoxical repulsion and fixation with viewing horror films in seclusion. Shackleton’s visual track takes us through a century-spanning tour of the genre, eclectically sampling hundreds of well-known and obscure gems from around the world. While its essayistic qualities are squared confidently in the foreground, FEAR ITSELF never lets intellectualizing overcome an ever-present sense of impending fright.

Screening with:

TERROR!
dir. Ben Rivers, 2007
24 mins. United Kingdom.

ONE NIGHT ONLY! FRIDAY, 10/13 AT MIDNIGHT

GET TICKETS HERE!

“Featuring, our music videos & video music, stolen treasures & unburied graves,
detournèd objects & cultural corpses, including:

BELA LUGOSI’S DEAD,
DAHLIA NOIR,
BIOMUTANTEN,
HEART OF (SHATTERED) GLASS,
VAMPYR/BLOOD,
ULTRAVIOLET CATASTROPHE,
& LES VAMPIRES (in inverse~reverse~negative).

With these (ab)original works by Vampÿrates, aka, Richard Sylvarnes & Bradley Eros.”

Special thanks to Mackenzie Lukenbill, Nate Dorr, the Vampÿrates, and Wouter Jansen.