WARM BLOOD AND THE FILMS OF SIX STAIR

This September, Spectacle is proud to present a week long run of Rick Charnoski’s new experimental feature film WARM BLOOD, alongside skate films and documentary collaborations between Rick Charnoski and Buddy Nichols, founders of SIX STAIR FILMS, including FRUIT OF THE VINE, DEATHBOWL TO DOWNTOWN, and the roadtrip documentary NORTHWEST.

WARM BLOOD
dir. by Rick Charnoski, 2023
USA. 86 minutes
In English.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 – 7:30PM
THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 14- 7:30PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 15 – 7:30PM, Q&A MODERATED BY JOHN VEIT
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 – 5:00PM, Q&A MODERATED BY JOHN VEIT
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17 – 7:30PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 – 7:30PM
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 – 7:30PM

ALL WARM BLOOD SCREENINGS FEATURE A Q&A WITH THE FILMMAKERS / $10 TICKETS

SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS

Set in the underbelly of 1980s Modesto, California, Warm Blood uses the real-life diary of a teenage runaway named Red (newcomer Haley Isaacson) returning home to find her father. In his narrative feature debut, director Rick Charnoski’s history as a skate video director informs the frenetic storytelling style, as he combines Red’s nihilist musings with a collage of documentary and B-movie meta-narratives that paint a seedy picture of life on the outskirts of town. Talk-radio bits and punk music underscore the auditory cacophony of doom, while frequent Kelly Reichardt collaborator Christopher Blauvelt (First Cow, The Bling Ring) lends his immersive, naturalist lens shooting on gritty 16mm film. While Red searches the streets, a constant foreboding presence looms around the chemically toxic river polluting the town. Via a cable-access news reporter interviewing the local residents about its impact, Charnoski infuses today’s growing apathy around the insurmountable nature of our man-made ecological disasters into this raw, politically subversive tale.

FRUIT OF THE VINE
dir. Rick Charnoski and Buddy Nichols, 2002
USA. 74 minutes
In English

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 – 10PM – THIS EVENT FEATURES A Q&A MODERATED BY JOCKO WEYLAND
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 15 – 10PM
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26 – 10PM

SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS

GENERAL ADMISSION TICKETS

FRUIT OF THE VINE is a super 8mm film that documents the incredible and often dangerous lengths that skateboarders go to in order to ride deserted, empty swimming pools. It is not a historical documentary, but a collection of stories shot in 1999 while Coan and Rick traveled from southern California to Seattle and around the east coast in search of pools to ride. FRUIT OF THE VINE profiles the people who search for, find, break into, and ultimately glean some use out of these pieces of the American suburban wasteland. With skate luminaries like Tony Alva, Lance Mountain, Steve Baily, Salba, Shaggy, Chris Senn, Pete the Ox, Tony Farmer, Tom Groholski, Mark Hubbard, Pat Quirk and many more. Soundtrack features Bad Religion, The Clay Wheels, Steel Wool, The Loudmouths and more.

DEATHBOWL TO DOWNTOWN
dir. Rick Charnoski and Buddy Nichols, 2008
USA. 86 minutes
In English

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 – 7:30PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14 – 10PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 – 10PM

GENERAL ADMISSION TICKETS

On one level Deathbowl to Downtown is about street skating, but it’s also an overview of skateboarding’s shift from the parks and pools of the 70s, to the ramp skating in the 80s, to the street ascendancy of the 1990s and beyond. An entertaining, thought provoking take on why the action on New York’s hectic streets represents skateboarding to millions of people worldwide.

NORTHWEST
dir. Rick Charnoski and Buddy Nichols, 2003
USA. 74 minutes
In English

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 9 – 5PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 – 10PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 – 10PM

GENERAL ADMISSION TICKETS

In this real-life road movie, Coan Nichols and Rick Charnoski focus their lenses on hand-sculpted concrete skate parks, and the skaters who build and ride them, while making friends, visiting old ones, and wreaking havoc across the Pacific Northwest.

After the underground success of their first film, the super 8mm skateboard classic Fruit of the Vine (1999), Coan “Buddy” Nichols and Rick Charnoski founded the independent production company Six Stair, which operates under the same DIY ethics of the subculture that raised them: skateboarding and punk rock. Since 1999 Nichols and Charnoski have charted an unorthodox path, making a broad range of films that consistently go beyond tired tropes to illuminate deeper truths.

After catching the eye of renowned cinematographer Christopher Doyle for their specialty in Super 8mm and 16mm filmmaking, he tapped Charnoski and Nichols to shoot the dream sequences for Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park (2007). They have since worked with a wide range of respected artists and filmmakers including Cameron Crowe, Richard Serra, Peter Beard, Julian Schnabel, and NeckFace as well as on commercial projects for Vans, Nike, Converse, Mountain Dew and the Gold Effie Award winning Ouch! campaign for Tylenol.

Their documentary work includes Tent City (2003), which followed the notorious Anti Hero skate team throughout Australia; Pearl Jam‘s Vote for Change? (released 2008), capturing the band’s “Vote For Change” tour across America; the feature length Deathbowl to Downtown (2009) narrated by Chloe Sevigny as well as many other short films. Other subjects they have turned their attention and cameras to are Christo’s “Gates” project, fashion shows, music videos, surfing, airplane flight, and Jamaican dub pioneers.

They’ve shown their work worldwide at countless skate shops and hole-in-the wall venues, as well as the Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, The Graduate School of Architecture, at Columbia University, Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, the MU Art Foundation in The Netherlands, the Melbourne International Film Festival in Australia, MOCA Tucson and MoMA New York.

Currently they produce and direct the popular web series “Love Letters to Skateboarding” for Vans and are in development of their first narrative feature (Warm Blood) and continue to work on a variety of both independent and commercial projects out of their back alley studio in Hollywood, CA.

Special thanks to Factory 25

DANDY DUST
Dir. A. Hans Scheirl, 1998
Austria. 94 min.
In English

THURSDAY MARCH 2ND, 10PM
SATURDAY MARCH 18TH, 10PM
SATURDAY MARCH 25TH, MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY MARCH 31ST, MIDNIGHT

PURCHASE TICKETS

Dust, a split-personality cyborg of fluid gender, zooms through time and space in search of his/her own memories and a sense of understanding. S/he travels from the Planet of White Dust where war is constant, to the Planet of Blood and Swelling, a hybrid of his/her father’s body.

A cyborg with a split personality and fluid gender zooms through time to collect his/her selves in a struggle against a family obsessed by lineage: This cartoon-like futuristic low-budget horror satire by the Austro-British filmmaker Hans Scheirl turns the real into the absurd, for the duration of a small cybernetic, chemo-sexual film adventure at least. Identity is just a matter of creativity, and far beyond cinema’s limitations. – (Stefan Grissemann)

The writer Seamus Deane once noted a curious contradiction with many of Ireland’s great writers of the 19th and early 20th century. Figures such as Synge, Yeats and Joyce, all developed highly unique distinctive ‘languages’ which often entailed navigating a tightrope tension between established tradition and a basis in reality and the tendency towards insularity, even self-parody. Deane puts it down partly to, that all three and more felt the pull to “articulate the national consciousness”, of what was, all at once, a very old, new and unformed nation. Only to find their aim varyingly diverted, mutated and then defined by the reality that there was no “unity of culture”, to quote Yeats, but a slippery hodgepodge of political, religious, ethnic, and local identities, each with their own diversity of ways of speaking and being. This is certainly true to some degree every part of this wide world but Ireland, repeatedly melted down and alchemized under the pressure of centuries of concerted colonial projects, which often explicitly pitted its various peoples against each other, is a particularly distorted funhouse mirror which artists still scan for stability or otherwise embrace in all it.

Another version of this crisis of identity can be found within Irish cinema whose history has progressed in a series of fits and starts. Marked by the tendency towards mimicking modes and styles of American, British and European cinemas, as well attempts to find new, Irish cinemas, often in recognition of Ireland as a multiplicity scarred by history. The 1970s and 1980s was a particularly rich period with a new spirit of formal adventurism, iconoclasm, and a search for previously ignored subjects, textures and wounds, invigorating both young Irish filmmakers—taking not only some from modernist cinema movements abroad but, in certain cases learned their craft–and filmmakers drawn from elsewhere.

This series presents two films, COILIN AND PLATONIDA and BUDAWANNY, from this period and persuasion. Both are ventures out into Ireland’s much mythicized west, where rather than harp on the hard and fast clichés they use to landscape, its people and its cultural and historical baggage to forge daring, experimental works of cinema which adventurously play with the cliché of Ireland as the pre-modern berth and product of superstition and legend, while countering its most recognizable images with striking ellipses and abstractions.

COILIN AND PLATONIDA
dir. James Scott, 1976
85 mins. UK, Ireland, Germany.
Silent, with Piano accompaniment and English and German intertitles

SATURDAY MARCH 18, 5PM with filmmaker James Scott in person for Q&A moderated by guest programmer Ruairí McCann
(This event is $10.)
WEDNESDAY MARCH 22, 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY MARCH 29, 7:30 PM

TICKETS

James Scott is one of the most inventive artists to embark on Irish cinema. Born and raised in England in 1941 by artist parents, his father being the legendary Northern Irish painter, William Scott. His initial (and still active and fecund) practice of painting quickly widened to pursue a deep interest in cinema and filmmaking. Drawing on the world of visual art, as well as film influences ranging from Godard, the New American Cinema and Italian wunderkinds Bernardo Bertolucci and Marco Bellocchio, he spent the 60s making several acclaimed short art documentaries and experimental narratives. The 70s brought him into the world of radically left-wing, collaborative filmmaking as a member of the militant and deconstructive Berwick Street Film Collective. He also left Britain and the contemporary, present tense worlds of pop art, swinging London and the world of night cleaners and their unionisation to travel to Ireland and into a fable.

His second solo feature, COILIN AND PLATONIDA (1976), originally aired on the German TV station ZDF and following other screenings was praised by the likes of Jonathan Rosenbaum (who placed it in his top ten of 1976) and Stephen Dwoskin. It takes as its material a Nikolai Leskov short story, transplanting its peculiar melodrama of a young man called Coilin (Coilin O Finneadha), ill-treated and luckless since childhood who eventually makes a makeshift community along with his cousin Platonida (Frankie Allen) and a pair of adopted orphans played by Scott’s own children Alex Scott (age 9) and Rosie Scott (age 5.) This is but one radical choice in a film flooded with them, for Scott casts local non-actors and after shooting in Super 8, ‘refilmed’ in 16mm using multiple projectors. It’s also a silent film, opting not for dialogue or narration as its primary voice but intertitles, full piano accompaniment by Rod Melvin, and brief but striking bursts of the Gaelic folk lament Úna Bhán. All of these elements create an aura of antiquity, melodrama and palpable uncertainty to a film that often looks and moves like vapour, where absences and moments of ambiguity smart and resonate more than clear, recognizable images. It amounts to a unique rendition of how myth can move and grow, from land to land, generation to generation, medium to medium, with its powerful combination of specificity, allusiveness and mystery.

BUDAWANNY
dir. Bob Quinn, 1987
79 mins. Ireland.
In English and silent with intertitles.

SATURDAY MARCH 18 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY MARCH 23 – 7:30 PM

TICKETS

COILIN AND PLATONIDA was in made with close connection with Irish cinema’s ‘First Wave’, a loose collective of filmmakers, including Joe Comerford, Thaddeus O’Sullivan, Cathal Black and Pat Murphy, who made a string of subversive films in the 70s, 80s and beyond. Joe Comerford was Scott’s first cinematographer, with the DP for the ‘re-filmed’ sequences, Adam Barker-Mill, going on to shoot Comerford’s acclaimed feature debut as a director, DOWN THE CORNER (1977), and there’s a cameo appearance from an instigator of this most radical period, Bob Quinn.

Like Scott, Quinn is a multi-hyphenate: a filmmaker, a novelist, a cultural critic, a visual artist, an anthropologist and, in all these avenues, a maverick. Quinn came to moving images in the 1960s through making documentary shorts and series for the fledging national broadcaster RTÉ. After very public departure from RTÉ, in protest over the station’s increasing commercialization, and period of rest and travel abroad, led to a creative resurgence in the 1970s as an increasingly experimental, independent filmmaker. The trigger was a relocation, from the cultural center of Dublin where he was born and raised, to a geographic and political periphery, Connemara where his appreciation and then close studies of the Irish language as well as traditional music and craft forms would become a significant line of inquiry and influence in his work.

BUDAWANNY, his first film intended for theatrical distribution, is in significant part a silent film as well. Set on remote Clare Island, off Ireland’s Atlantic coast, it recounts the tale of a priest (the great Donal McCann, in perhaps his finest performance), his forbidden love affair and the lives of the local community, in black & white with silent film techniques. This melodrama is reflected on, in retrospect and in color and sound, with scenes featuring the local bishop (Peadar Lamb) who finds himself caught between protocol and his own crisis of faith. The muteness but visual precision of Quinn’s form, aided by Roger Doyle’s extraordinary electro-acoustic score, evokes the wordless yet deeply expressive forces of nature, desire, and regret, as well as the oppressive regime of the Catholic Church, which favors silence and buried transgressions over dissension.

RUAIRI McCANN is an Irish writer, programmer and musician, Belfast born and based but raised in Sligo. He is an editor at Ultra Dogme and photogénie and has contributed to aemi online, Screen Slate, MUBI Notebook and Sight & Sound.

Programmed in collaboration with Ruairí McCann. This event is brought to you in collaboration with the Irish Film Institute’s IFI International Programme supported by Culture Ireland. Special thanks to Bob Quinn, James Scott and ZDF (Germany) and the Irish Film Institute (IFI).

   

CINEMANIA
Dir. Angela Christleib and Stephen Kijak, 2002
USA, 83 minutes
In English

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 02 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 05 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 17 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23 – 7:30 PM w/ Q&A
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26 – 7:30 PM

GET YOUR TICKETS!

Featuring an in-person Q&A with the film’s subjects on Sunday 10/23 at 7:30 PM!

“It’s better than sex. It’s better than love.” It’s cinema! Or CINEMANIA, to be exact. Stephen Kijak and Angela Christlieb’s documentary follows five film-obsessed New Yorkers in their daily trevails as they struggle to fit as many films as possible into a single day (3-6 is the average number). From spending their unemployment checks on movie tickets to surviving off meat-heavy, constipating diets (it reduces mid-screening bathroom visits), to hoarding stacks of old program notes, CINEMANIA is as vivid a portrait of what it means to be a film-lover as you can find on screen. As the film celebrates its 20th anniversary, we’re happy to host two of the film’s subjects on 10/23 to give their differing, and sometimes contentious, opinions on the film.

“I don’t go to weddings; I don’t go to funerals; I don’t visit people in the hospital if I have a screening to go to.”

“These are not crazy people. Maladjusted and obsessed, yes, but who’s to say what normal is? I think it makes more sense to see movies all day than to golf, play video games or gamble” – Roger Ebert

SHRIEK SHOW XI

WELCOME BACK to the official return of the IN PERSON SHRIEK SHOW MARATHON!

After a brief hiatus last year (and a remote-stream marathon in 2020 for the Spec-Twitch-Heads), we are ready to melt faces for 12+ straight hours in person again.

Mystery meat all day and night long, starting at NOON and ending when your brain leaks out your ears and/or after the midnight movie.

Those brave enough to stay for all features can expect a satisfying arc / certain ‘rhyming’ elements from one movie to the next, so stick around if you can!

Hints + rough showtimes below, expect random shorts + trailers + goodies between screenings. BYOScreams.

GET YOUR TICKETS!

10/22 – NOON TO 1:30AM
$5/MOVIE OR $25 FOR DAY-PASS

NOON –
XXX XXXX XXXX XX XXXXX
dir ??????? ??????????, 196X
Italy, 90 min
English dub

We kick off our day of screams with a heady dose of gothic witchcraft goodness with this underseen black and white mid-60’s classic, starring one of Italy’s greatest scream queens.

2PM
XXX XXXXX XX XXXXXXXXXX
dir XXXXXXX XXXXX, 198X
Italy, 86 min
English dub

One of dozens of made-for-TV schlock gems by one of Italy’s most prolific horror directors – fans of our MADE FOR ITALIAN TV series from a few years ago (or any of the GHOST HOUSE / LA CASA series), take note!

4PM
XXXXX
dir. XXXXXX XXX, 197X
Japan, 103 min
In Japanese with English subtitles

Up next as an afternoon aperitif, the most ‘serious’ film of the day – a surprisingly moody folk horror eco-freakout from Japan, focusing on a town about to be exploited for its natural resources and a vengeful spirit. Still has a generous helping of sleaze though, don’t worry!

6PM
XXXXXX XXXXXXX
Dir. XXXX XXXXXX, 199X
USA, 71 min
In English

Enough with the polished, ‘classy’ sleaze – time for home brew SOV premium grade trash!

Teens helping one of their uncle’s clean out a barn on haunted Native American land, cursed during the Trail of Tears, accidentally unleash an ancient demonic force.

Jokes aside, this no budget Missouri-shot Evil Dead labor of love is better than it has any right to be, packing an impressive amount of gore and inventive camera techniques – not to mention flat exposition in thick Missouri accents (and fashions) into 70 minutes.

8PM
XXXXXX XXXXXX
dir. XXXXX XXXXX, 198X
Mexico, 83 min
In Spanish with English subtitle

It’s about 8pm, and its time for the tough stuff. This recently remastered Spanish horror flick feels like a direct mix of RABID DOGS and TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD as it follows a group of young degenerates on a crime spree, who eventually stumble onto the myth of a vast fortune buried in catacombs beneath abandoned ruins in the countryside (and also, maybe, a satanic curse?!).

This one will keep you off balance til the end, a real underseen gem of a facemelter.

10PM
XXXXX XXXXXXXX
dir. XXX XXXXXX, 198X
USA, 74 min
In English

Up next, a psychotic brew of every type of horror flick imaginable from one of the greats of homebrew horror (hint: shot in Maryland…)

A Vietnam vet on a killing spree links up with a group of criminals, also on a bit of a spree – their flight to the countryside brings them to the home of a family who isn’t what they seem…

The less said about this one the better, but it’s grimey in all the ways you could hope for and over before you know it.

MIDNIGHT
XXXXXX XXXXXXXXX
dir. XXXXX XXXXXX, 199X
Canada, 82 min
In English

As your sanity slowly slips away, the casio tones of our final SOV feature of the night wash over you, and you think, ‘yeah, this is it, this is the best movies have ever been’

Two cops investigating a suicide find a tape cassete recounting a group of teens’ strange night at a farm. Shot in Canada (and for some reason, recently re-released with ‘revamped’ atrocious CGI FX (which we will NOT be showing)), this is the hidden Halloween garbage classic you didn’t know you needed.

Not the goriest of the night, but maybe the most unhinged in its own way, and a truly special sign off for this year’s Shriek Show.