SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20 – ALL DAY
only at stream.spectacletheater.com

This February, Spectacle is proud to host New York City’s first-ever film retrospective of interdisciplinary German artist Dore O., featuring a rare screening of her breakthrough work KALDALON on 16mm film.

Trained as a painter, O. was cofounder of the Hamburger Filmschau, alongside with her husband and collaborator Werner Nekes. For all the psychedelia of her early work, subsequent films are rigorous in refractory experimentation: rear-projections, double-impositions, repeated frames and breathtaking lunges of the handheld camera, which seems bolstered as much by raw impulse as it does by any guiding principle of onscreen organization. O.’s work establishes its own space-time linearities, then argues them against each other–sometimes content with a mild flicker, a closing or opening aperture or a flurry of blunt smears. This is a playful and often freefalling visual poetics, best left to wash over you pure and analyzed later (or better yet, not at all.)

“Landscape exists only as a view through windows and doors, individual images are in opposition to themselves, growing closer together or dissolving into each other. Besides compressed images, the breaking of spaces and of course time, there are shots which have been left undoctored. Attraction, amalgamation, and removal of half of the image with the goal of a sensual topology are the principal formal means of the chosen language. One image devours the other.” —Dore O.

Special thanks to Dore O. and The Filmmakers’ Co-op.

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PROGRAM ONE
JÜM-JÜM. 1967. 11 min. Co-directed with Werner Nekes.
ALASKA. 1968. 16 min.
LAWALE. 1969. 28 min.
Total running time: 55 min.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 1 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 18 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 23 – 10:00 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

Starring a very young Dore O., JÜM-JÜM centers on a single frame: a girl sitting on a swing, billowing from one side to the other against a static tri-color painting of, indeed, a gigantic, hand-painted phallus. The film derives its syntax from its editing, timed to Nekes & O.’s auditory textures–which sound, alternatingly, like pots and pans being banged together, and/or a sped-up audio track of a child giggling. Shorn from these simple filmic materials, JÜM-JÜM is the first of many works by Dore O. that abound in suggestion while defying easy lateral (or literal) interpretations.

Described only by its maker as “an emigration film”, ALASKA marks a startling declaration of intent: post-Freudian and anti-dialectical, smacking of intimacy while it declines even the meagerest sketches of a concurrent plot. Dore O’s camera cautiously tracks structures and partitions before centering its field of vision on an ebbing tide at magic hour. The beach’s lapping waves grow more discomfiting as flashes of still-and-moving reminiscences are intercut, often held tantalizingly out of focus. ALASKA’s soundtrack–a rising and falling string section, as steady as it is erratic–allows the entire film to hang as one long moment of semi-conscious suspense. Shots are not juxtaposed so much as shot lengths.

Both LAWALE and ALASKA use their editing schemes to create points of contact and departure, frustrating accommodating narratives until the images have no choice but to plateau–say, a young woman floating adrift in the ocean in ALASKA, an elderly relative playing piano in LAWALE. In the latter film, scenes of familial life pile up with Fassbinder-ian tidiness, only occasionally thrown against moments of internal reprieve or looseness of the outward-facing frame. If ALASKA was intimate, LAWALE is (for the rigor of its language of remembrance) the far more explicitly autobiographical film: the unwillingness to remember, the inability to forget.

“The austere images in LAWALE tell more about the completely individual process of a young woman’s emancipation than whole novels do.” –Peter Steinhart, Rheinische Post, 1969

“I almost became addicted to these pictures, but they were not sufficient to dispel the gloom.” –Wilhem Roth, Filmkritik, November 1969

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PROGRAM TWO
KALDALON. 1970/1. 45 min.
BLONDE BARBAREI. 1972. 25 min.
FROZEN FLASHES. 1976. 30 min.

Total running time: 95 min.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 3 – 10:00 PM
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 23 – 7:30 PM
PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

ONE NIGHT ONLY ON 16MM FILM!
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 17 – 8:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 17 – 10:00 PM
PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

Shot on a trip to a spectacular glacial lagoon in Iceland, KALDALON broadly expands the the scenographic overtures of O.’s first films while teasing out new subtexts of control and romance, bathing the viewer in gorgeous images that nonetheless fail to linger quite long enough. It’s rumored that the film began as an attempt to recapture the Northern Lights on celluloid – but it’s also the first of O.’s shorts (since JÜM-JÜM, anyway) to use wall-projection as its own technique of superimposition. The camera works here as birdlike spectator, fastidious indexer, topographical scanner and – with two discrete shots uneasily sloped together in the frame’s center – as a remarkable simulacra for human eyesight.

Shot in black and white but sepiatoned in post-production, BLONDE BARBAREI represents a partial test-run for what would become KASKARA, again engaging notions of spectatorship – albeit shrouded in far darker context this go-round. A camera tenuously considers the world outside its paneled apartment windows, foregrounding a woman’s silhouette (Dore’s?) in its reluctant and never-voyeuristic sweeps of the lens.

FROZEN FLASHES is O.’s first film in total silence, again taxonomizing (you could almost say taxidermy-ing) disparate moments – here, a sequence of insinuating and, indeed, frozen poses, flash-photographed in erstwhile darkness – to probe the role of the static image in the barely-conscious. Finally, BEUYS – co-directed, again, with Nekes – is a ten-minute long, single-shot portrait of Joseph Beuys, begging the question of verisimilitude often left unaddressed (to say the least) in O.’s other works.

“KALDALON is simply one of the most beautiful pieces of ‘personal’ filmmaking I’ve ever seen, but I don’t want to limit it to a particular category, because it is also very much a film about film, and the processes which make it up.” – Tony Reif, Vancouver Cinematheque

“Perhaps coming closest of her works to the Brakhage aesthetic, KALDALON is a very beautiful and complete work.” — Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice

“Yes, the windows are factory windows, each consisting of many various glass panes which accounts probably for an association of church windows. But as in a church, it is the closed-in atmosphere, the sadness, the tendency to move slowly, that counts. “So that BLONDE BARBAREI is a metaphor, for the life certainly of a woman (but then of men too?), lives imprisoned in the worlds around them, bourgeois marriage, bourgeois professions, everything that looms above & around us, ‘inescapably.” — Andreas Weiland, Filmmaker’s Co-op

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PROGRAM THREE
KASKARA. 1974. 21 min.
BEUYS. 1981. 11min. Co-directed with Werner Nekes.
BLINDMAN’S BALL. 1989. 35 min.
Total running time: 71 min.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 5 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 15 – 10:00 PM
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 25 – 7:30 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

KASKARA retains the freedom that marked ALASKA’s underside, with little-to-none of the nausea – but the film additionally “builds” on the questions of kinship and memory haunting O.’s earlier work via its exercised myopia, making it a game of pictures: how many ways can one look at a house (including views outside from within)? If KALDALON mediated its images by their means of acquisition – the airplane, the car, the boat, the river, the screen – KASKARA is content to divide and unite the same constituent fields of preexisting space, all but exhorting viewers to do the same while contemplating their own surroundings (domestic or otherwise).

BLINDMAN’S BALL again implements the glassy refractions of O.’s early work, using the filmmaker’s signature double-exposures as discrete narrative idioms unto themselves. The appearance of a front-projected “screen” for memories within the bigger frame is a form of vindication for the nameless victim and his nurse. Other reminiscences are stirred into tactility by unexpected turns in whatever exists of the film’s drama, so the tearing of a piece of fabric guides the eponymous Blindman into a queasy reverie about childhood haircuts. If this is O.’s bleakest work yet, it’s also the most resplendent in its rear-view on internalized trauma and repressed memory, assigning specific colors and optical procedures to the kinds of haptic memories rarely distilled into the moving image.

“KASKARA is less a synthetic than an antithetical work: it poses the window as the way out, as a promise of space and peace. Each half, in a play of reflections and multiple exposures, seems to be an echo of the other.” — Dominique Noguez, L’art Vivant, February 1975

“Beuys speaks about his conception of art for ten minutes with his face pointed at the wall, his back to the camera. This radical, simple form appears fully adequate for the film’s topic. There were, however, vociferous protests by the audience…The question appears to be mainly of a rhetorical nature, in which way Beuys could have come closer to meeting its subject’s works. More briefly, more precisely, unelaborated does not seem to be possible – a great artistic film.” — Info-Medium, 1981

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PROGRAM FOUR
CANDIDA. 1991. 45 mins.
XOANAN. 1994. 11 mins.
EYE-STEP. 2000. 25 mins.
Total running time: 81 min.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 7 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 15 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 19 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 28 – 5:00 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

Perhaps O.’s most expansive production yet, CANDIDA is an adaptation of Frans Masereel’s 1920 woodcut-novel “The Idea”. The story concerns the form of a woman (Jara Bernardes) – whether she’s concocted from scratch like Maria in Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS, or merely raised in darkness, remains open to interpretation – thrown from her prison-like domicile, only to make a crazed sprint for the city. O. introduces her eponymous heroine first as an object of patriarchal lust: naked in a glass reflection, painted over – literally! – one brush-stroke at a time by her scraggly-haired creator. Next we see him facing a wall, which the film transforms into a window with its next cut: a handheld perspective out a high-up apartment building. The frame tilts sideways, upside-down, pans down to the street and back up to the brick structure, as if weighing the camera’s own sense of gravity against its dizzying surroundings. O. cuts back to the wall/window, but this time with a superimposition of Candida hanging over the “edge” – again, these filmic devices leave much to the viewer’s imagination – arms flailing in slow motion.

Exterior, again: the image de-escalates from one floor to the next in a soothing drop, and cuts back to the now-completed superimposition: overladen with the sound of a cartoonish slide whistle, Candida flails her limbs, the camera pirouetting around her, and we realize we’re watching Bernardes wriggle, prostrate, on a floor someplace. Bound by rising and falling synthesizer leitmotifs, her story is told almost entirely in these kinds of stripped-down, exploded modernist tableaux. Swallowed and spit out by the cityscape (embodied in both swarms of rapacious dudes, and transient location footage from Hamburg/Paris/Bahia/Vienna/NYC), Candida finds solace ultimately in the multiplication of her own image – not merely persisting, but ultimately dominating. As ever, O.’s forever loosening and tightening multiple exposures carry their attendant compositions far beyond simple equations of montage.

More description-defying still is XOANAN, O.’s portrait of the painter Afrane Adje Twumm. Fabric finds another onscreen metaphor for the plastic arts, wherein bodies and walls are draped in cloth, doubling back on the hazy double-projected daydreams of ALASKA. O. trains her camera on a body of water as it passes the promenade, capturing idling youths and passing families as specks of silhouette crossing the film’s unnamed territory, bound only by rocks at the screen’s bottom and the sky above. EYE-STEP – the latest work in the program – traces a series of forever-winding staircases like liminal excerpts from an endless memory-spool, asking the viewer which spaces their eyes may have taken for granted along the ambling path. Scored to a lilting, plaintive accordion tango with no apparent beginning, middle or end, the frame tiptoes from suicidally vertiginous to borderline-sacrosanct in the space of a few beats, before circling back to retrace its steps yet again.

This February, join us in celebrating ANTI-VALENTINE’S: a salute to all the things that make love so awful.

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THE BURNING CRUCIBLE w/ live score by Stephanie Neptune
aka Le Brasier Ardent
Dir. Ivan Mosjoukine, 1923.
France. 96 min.
In French with English subtitles.

** One night only! **

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 27 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 27 – 10:00 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

“One day, I saw Le Brasier Ardent. The audience howled and whistled, shocked by a film so different from their usual fare. I was ecstatic…I decided to abandon my trade, ceramics, to try to make films.” – Jean Renoir

Too surreal to be straightforward romance, too sweet and sentimental to be anything but, silent oddity THE BURNING CRUCIBLE combines French amour-fou with Russian mystical melancholy in this tale of a detective who falls in love with the ‘lost wife’ he’s honor-bound to return to her doting husband.

The only directorial feature by Russian star Ivan Mosjoukine (who also wrote and played 11 different roles in the film), THE BURNING CRUCIBLE reflects the unique synthesis that made Mosjoukine himself so popular in his adopted country. Described by one admirer as ‘the subtle alchemist of passion and pain’, here he plays famous detective ‘Z’, who haunts the dreams of young wife Elle (played by Mosjoukine’s real-life wife Nathalie Lissenko). Elle and her husband, a doting, wealthy businessman, have grown apart. Tormented by jealous visions, the husband chases her through the streets of Paris in a scene worthy of Buster Keaton, accidentally stumbling into a unique detective agency dedicated to finding lost items – including the affection of wives. Unwittingly hiring the very man Elle’s dreamt of, he puts Z on the case, but in trying to discover the root of Elle’s apathy, Z uncovers a shared passion for Paris and a growing attraction to the lively young woman.

All this takes place on sets far too large for the human scale, amid truly bizarre set pieces including a dance contest literally to the death, a secret society with rooms of disembodied organs, and the swankest bedroom in Paris. Less ‘anti-‘ and more valentine to the bittersweetness of falling in love,THE BURNING CRUCIBLE’s earnestness is constantly tempered by a hefty dose of surreal humor.

In the same spirit, Spectacle presents the film with live score by DJ Stephanie Neptune (aka SPACE JAM). Having opened for everyone from Kode9 to Laurel Halo to Robert Hood as a resident at TURRBOTAX®, she now runs CLEAR USA, a record label dedicated to releasing subterranean electronic music from between the coasts.

 

 

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SUBMISSION
aka Scandalo
Dir. Salvatore Samperi, 1976
Italy. 102 min.
In Italian with English subtitles.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 1 – 10:00 PM
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 13 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 16 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 22 – 10:00 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

[WARNING: Contains simulated scenes of sexual degradation and statutory rape.]

France, 1940: Right before the Nazis invade… a pharmacist named Elaine (Lisa Gastoni) trapped in a dull marriage has her desires sharply re-awakened when her store’s shopboy Armand (Franco Nero) mistakenly gropes her, thinking it was the younger shopgirl. Instead of firing Armand, Elaine allows the groping to happen again.

Soon enough, Elaine enters into a heavy sado-masochistic relationship with him, in which Armand continually upps the ante regarding dominance and humiliation. The more he pushes, the more control she loses. Once nude public shaming, knives, and ether sniffing enter the picture, there’s no turning back, and the film careens wildly towards a nihilistic, apocalyptic conclusion.

Italian director Salvatore Samperi made a career out of erotic films, mostly in the ‘Italian sex comedy’ sub genre. His dramatic works, however, are complex studies of unusual sexual relationships. SUBMISSION is, by far, his most intense and disturbing, with the historical backdrop acting as a political allegory and heightening the film’s subversive power.

“Dynamic!… Spectacular! Sex is used as a lethal weapon. A unique display of erotic fireworks!” –Playboy

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LES BICHES
aka Bad Girls.
Dir. Claude Chabrol, 1968
France. 94 min.
In French with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 2 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 14 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 26 – 10:00 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

The bored bisexual millionaire Frédérique (Stéphane Audran) picks up a homeless young street artist named Why (Jacqueline Sassard), invites her back to her apartment, and seduces her. Frédérique then whisks her away to her chic villa in Saint-Tropez for the winter season. They soon meet the dashing architect Paul (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and both fall for him, setting in motion a ‘ménage à trois’ of flirtation and deception…

Featuring knockout performances and sumptuous cinematography, LES BICHES is a showcase of Claude Chabrol’s trademark tension and atmosphere. While a tortured lesbian relationship is certainly scandalous material, Chabrol telegraphs a controlled but still sexually charged approach that elicits a stylish, icy eroticism.

Often referred to as the film that kickstarted Chabrol’s golden age, LES BICHES is a hypnotic tapestry of jealousy, possession, and sexual ambiguity.

“… a moody, quiet, highly personal expression.” -Roger Ebert

“A calm, exquisite study… Impeccably performed, often bizarrely funny, the film winds, with brilliant clarity, through a maze of shadowy emotions to a splendidly Grand-Guignolesque ending.” -Time Out London

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BEHINDERT
Dir. Stephen Dwoskin, 1974
Germany. 94 min.
In German with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 7 – 5:00 PM
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12 – 10:00 PM
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 18 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24 – 10:00 PM

Part of the Best of Best of Spectacle series.

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

Special thanks to The Estate of Stephen Dwoskin

Described by Stephen Dwoskin as “a documentary without being one,” the basis of BEHINDERT is autobiographical: the story of a physically disabled man and a physically normal woman- played by Dwoskin (who has a post-polio disability) and Carola Regnier- who confront the difficulties of a relationship. The two were no longer a couple at the time Dwoskin made the film, yet it burns with the passion and intensity of true love.

With minimal dialogue and a stirring drone score by Gavin Bryars, Dwoskin uses extended takes and extreme close-ups of Regnier’s eyes, feet, hands, and face to create a sustained, hypnotic atmosphere that is simply unparalleled.

An intimate, unsentimental and haunting evocation of desire.

OFFICIAL SELECTION – 1974 CANNES FILM FESTIVAL – DIRECTOR’S FORTNIGHT

“Nothing short of a revelation… this is Dwoskin’s masterpiece. Indeed, I have come to regard it as one of the greatest works in cinema history… BEHINDERT remains Dwoskin’s most daring and artistically successful attempt to splice his “first person” mode of cinema with a staged fiction—creating a kind of cubistic complexity from the constantly shuffled perspectives. The ‘fourth look’ which Willemen intuited – not exactly the look of the characters, the spectator, or even the camera-eye, but some other, more forbidding look, like the gaze of society itself – hovers over the interstices between these images, these tableaux, these scenes from a relationship. From a film-history standpoint, Dwoskin’s breakthrough here is prophetic. Anticipating the ongoing novelistic autobiography of Philippe Garrel’s work since the 1980s, BEHINDERT plays a thrilling, almost vampiric game with the proximity of real-life experience to its fictive recreation—especially as its principals are the actual former lovers!” -Film Quarterly

“The mere mention of a film concerned with the subject of physical disability conjures up preconceived notions and images as to the type of film it is. It is put aside as a medical/social document of little importance, particularly by film people who think of films as ‘political,’ ‘narrative,’ ‘entertainment,’ ‘poetic,’ or ‘structural.’ This film is about the physically normal and disabled in confrontation, but not literal relations. It is a documentary without being one. The content lies beneath the film. The material is treated subjectively, and crosses fiction with realistic documents, without a clear distinction.” -Stephen Dwoskin

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THE RED SQUIRREL
aka La Ardilla Roja
Dir. Julio Médem, 1993.
Spain. 114 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 6 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 14 – 5:00 PM
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 19 – 10:00 PM

Part of the Best of Best of Spectacle series.

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

A bruising satire of pop musicianship more than a little indebted to the Hitchcockian identity-swap, THE RED SQUIRREL is a painfully unsung masterpiece, maybe the pinnacle of Julio Médem’s white-hot 1990s streak (beginning with COWS in 1991 and culminating in the more famous SEX AND LUCIA a decade later.) On the verge of taking his own life, a grunge musician named Jota (Nancho Novo) witnesses a motorcycle accident on the beach, suddenly tasking himself with helping coax Lisa (Emma Suarez) – a beyond-voluptuous blonde – out of her thick fog of amnesia. The two strike up a romance based just as much on his lies as their latent (and undeniable) chemistry; they hit the road in matching leather outfits, and cozily absorb themselves into a suburban family’s vacation at a gossipy campsite – the nominal Ardilla Roja, in a region between Basque country and Castile.

Long before Lisa has taken to donning herself in a sleevelss tee with nothing on it but a gigantic xerox of Jota’s face, things have gotten weird. A mysterious stranger from the past inevitably threatens to upend Jota’s reprieve from real life, and soon you’ll realize the film has begun – without asking permission – to peel back the membranes separating memories from dreams, and dreams from desires. Anchored by the meticulous, insinuating performances of Novo and Suarez, THE RED SQUIRREL is a serpentine head trip with erotic frisson to spare – one of the sharpest and most vivid un-romances to ever hit the big screen. (Bonus factoid: legend has it this film had Stanley Kubrick recommending Médem to Steven Spielberg for the job of directing THE MASK OF ZORRO, which the Spanish auteur duly declined.)

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LES SAIGNANTES
Aka The Blood-lettes
Dir. Jean Pierre Bekolo, 2005.
Cameroon. 97 min.
In French with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 5 – 10:00 PM
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 13 – 10:00 PM
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 22 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 28 – 7:30 PM

Part of the Best of Best of Spectacle series.

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

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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THE MONSTER AND THE STRIPPER
(Aka The Exotic Ones)
Dir. Ron Ormond, 1968.
USA. 91 min.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 6 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12 – MIDNIGHT
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 26 – MIDNIGHT

Part of the Best of Best of Spectacle series.

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE 

Any attempt at classing up this sleazy 60s gem stopped with its original title, THE EXOTIC ONES, and even that failed as it switched to the more accurate THE MONSTER AND THE STRIPPER on rerelease. With a lot more stripper than monster, this film is pure 60s trash GOLD, and the last made before director Ron Ormond turned toward moralizing Christian fare.

What a film to go out on though – beginning with a gloriously overlong open call for “talent” at a “New Orleans” burlesque joint (actually a claustrophobically-shot Methodist Church), we’re treated to a bevy of beauties featuring star dancer Titania (I couldn’t make this up) and her famous Fire Dance strutting their stuff to the running Dada commentary of the film’s co-producer and wife of Ron Ormond, June Carr.

Ormond himself plays demented Tony Clifton doppleganger/club owner Nemo, first seen torturing a man foolish enough to steal his money with the contents of a spittoon. Word reaches Nemo a monster’s been murdering hillbillies in the swamps of Louisiana, and Titania suggests a Beauty and The Beast act with the beast ripping off all her clothes. NO OTHER ACT will do, and Nemo finds himself in the monster-hunting business. With a team led by son Tim Ormond (a trifecta of Nashville’s First Family of Film!) they wander into the swamps and capture the beast, played by rockabilly also-ran Sleepy LaBeef (dare I say the Meatloaf of rockabilly?).

Back at the club, Little Timmy befriends the monster, who in turn falls for one of Titania’s new dance rivals. The whole town is abuzz and eager to see the Monster and the Stripper, but will the show go off without a hitch? Of course not.

For all the supposed sleaze, this exploitation film doesn’t feel exploitive – it’s a bizarro family affair where nothing makes a lick of sense, but everyone’s having a damn fine time onscreen. SEE a man get beaten with his own arm! WATCH a couple play dueling oversized harmonicas! MARVEL at hair and eye makeup that would make Divine puke with jealousy! HEAR dialogue that sounds like it was written with Noir Cliché refrigerator magnets! WITNESS – THE MONSTER AND THE STRIPPER! (and a lot of other strippers too)

To mark the conclusion of Spectacle’s 5th full calendar year of operation, our programming collective has selected their favorites from among our regular series features shown throughout the past 12 months. The result, BEST OF SPECTACLE (aka BoS2K15), provides an opportunity to revisit some of 2015’s greatest discoveries, thrills and audience-pleasers.

As the year draws to a close, Spectacle would like to acknowledge the audiences, artists and distributors who have pitched in their support, vision and feedback. Thank you for another brilliant year! We’ll save you a seat in 2016.

LIVING STARS
HARD TO BE A GOD
YOU CALL THIS PROGRESS!? ALYCE WITTENSTEIN AT SPECTACLE
PULGASARI
HEAD SPACE: AN ANIMATION SHOWCASE
FERAT VAMPIRE
DOROTHEA’S REVENGE
AKOUNAK TEDALAT TAHA TAZOUGHAI
WHITE OF THE EYE
BAKENEKO: A VENGEFUL SPIRIT (aka THE CURSED SWAMP)
TROUBLE EVERY DAY
GOLEM

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LIVING STARS
Dir. Mariano Cohn & Gastón Duprat, 2014
Argentina, 63 min.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 12 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, JANUARY 23 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 31 – 5 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

This remarkable, moving documentary presents dozens of real people in Buenos Aires, in long static tripod takes, simply dancing to pop music. In their kitchens, offices, and garages, identified in the film by their name and occupation, they include all ages, diverse lifestyles and all levels of talent, each with a common and infectious enthusiasm. In the background, their pets, families and friends go about their lives – playing video games, welding, reading magazines, watching with amusement or joining in. Everything in the frame, both incidental and carefully arranged, contributes to a loving portrait of each person, and of the universal qualities of all people. The seemingly simple premise has an overwhelming cumulative effect of shared humanity and pure joy, consistently surprising and endlessly fascinating.

“There’s a world of backstory in the details: the mom willing to steer a fan so her son’s cape will flap in the breeze, the brother who rolls his eyes as his older sister gets sexy, the daughter who can’t stop laughing as her dad shakes it to the Spice Girls. I’ve never seen anything that gave me more hope for equality and tolerance than a young man in his kitchen in full drag grinding it to “Toxic” in front of his entire family. When his wig flies off, grandma leaps to hand it back, and as he slipped it back on with a diva flourish, the crowd around me burst into applause.” – LA Weekly

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HARD TO BE A GOD
aka Es ist nicht leicht ein Gott zu sein
Dir. Peter Fleischmann, 1989
West Germany/France/Switzerland/USSR, 119 min.
In German with English subtitles

TUESDAY, JANUARY 5 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 15 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, JANUARY 19 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, JANUARY 28 – 7:30 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

Part of Peter Fleischmann: Trolling the Backwaters series.

Featuring “I Offer Unto Thee Something Beautiful, Something Burnt” by Antoni Maiovvi from the “Battlestar Transreplica” EP released on Seed Records.

Following the recent release of Aleksei German’s long-awaited, grimly visceral masterpiece and testament, HARD TO BE A GOD, Spectacle is proud to present Peter Fleischmann’s much less lauded, sometimes heavily ridiculed, adaptation of the same source novel. With a broader color palette, a more intelligible narrative, a more merciful runtime, and bigger hair, Fleischmann’s version is more likely to draw comparisons to HIGHLANDER and CONAN THE BARBARIAN than to THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES.

On a distant planet with a human civilization centuries behind that of Earth, the warrior Rumata—who is really Anton, an earthling scientist in disguise—is forced to assume the throne of the city-sate of Arkanar, which has just been vacated by King Pierre Clémenti (LES IDOLES, THE YEAR OF THE CANNIBALS, PIGSTY). Anton is on a quest to reach the city of Irukan to find the fabled scholar Budach, who he believes can single-handedly launch a Renaissance and pull this violent world out of its dark ages.

Co-written by Jean-Claude Carrière (frequent collaborator of Pierre Étaix and Luis Buñuel and screenwriter of THE TIN DRUM) and featuring Werner Herzog as a scheming merchant, Fleischmann’s HARD TO BE A GOD offers a lusher, giddier rendition of the legendary Strugatsky brothers’ novel.

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YOU CALL THIS PROGRESS!? ALYCE WITTENSTEIN AT SPECTACLE

THURSDAY, JANUARY 7 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 12 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, JANUARY 19 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 24 – 7:30 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

Alyce Wittenstein has been called the “Queen of the New York Underground” and once again, Spectacle is pleased to play host to the films making up her MULTIPLE FUTURES trilogy. These films are jam packed with familiar faces, exquisite set pieces, snappy dialogue, and dazzling costumes. While the films have indeed been shown the world over, these encore screenings will be the first second in New York in almost two decades. Join us for these remarkable films in a celebration of science fiction, hilarity, character actors, and ghastly view of a not-too-distant world.

BETAVILLE
Dir. Alyce Wittenstein, 1986
20 min.

The first in what would come to be known as the MULTIPLE FUTURES trilogy, BETAVILLE – a post-modern nightmare – finds a down and out detective Coman Gettme (played by Wittenstein mainstay Steve Ostringer) returning to his hometown after a chance meeting with The Girl (Holly Adams). Once the two arrive in Gettme’s Cadillac things immediately go from bad to worse for this gumshoe when he learns, over a slice at Stromboli’s, that High Fashion is the new law in town. Gettme becomes obsessed with The Girl and is determined to meet back up with her and “save” her from the these fashionable fascists.

BETAVILLE kicks off the trilogy in a pitch perfect send up of the French New Wave and science fiction, and turns noir on it’s ear while (literally) running through some familiar parts of NYC. Holly Adams is nothing short of dynamite and Ostringer’s distinctive production design would lay the groundwork for the look of the films to come. Years before becoming Brewmaster at the Brooklyn Brewery, Garrett Oliver was co-producer on the film. The short would go on to be nominated for a number of awards at festivals and play all over the world – often (unsurprisingly) alongside Godard’s ALPHAVILLE.

“Most of the detective narrator dialogue is clever, the cinematography is excellent, and I liked the (sort of) industrial music and the song by the Singing Squirrels.” – Michael J. Weldon, Psychotronic Magazine#2, 1989.

NO SUCH THING AS GRAVITY
Dir. Alyce Wittenstein, 1989
40 min.

In the not too distant future the LaFont corporation has all but taken over Earth. The company has revolutionized all elements of style, beauty, education, and housing but in the process (progress?!) has shipped many of Earth’s more “useless” inhabitants to the mysterious man made planet – and the largest scale experiment in human history – known as Nova Terra. Two scientists – Kay Zorn (Holly Adams) and Albert Leenhardt (Steve Robinson) are about to receive a prestigious award for their work on the LaFont Facelifter when they learn that Nova Terra is disrupting the Earth’s gravitational pull and will soon collide if it’s not destroyed. A headstrong lawyer and Kay’s boyfriend – Adam Malkonian (a scenery chewing Nick Zedd) – mouths off to a judge (the incomparable Taylor Mead – RIP) while defending a human teacher and is ordered to be relocated to the doomed planet. After meeting with the ambassador of Nova Terra (Emmanuelle Chaulet of Eric Rohmer’s BOYFRIENDS AND GIRLFRIENDS), Malkonian learns that perhaps the LaFont Corporation hasn’t been entirely truthful about what really happens on Nova Terra and vows to stop the destruction.

Wittenstein’s first sync sound film is overflowing with amazing set pieces and incredible performances. Some scenes were shot at the New York Hall of Science – including an Ames room and a number of other dazzling optical illusions. Look out for cameos from Michael J. Anderson (TWIN PEAKS), Wittenstein’s father as the insidious Andreas LaFont, and the director herself on Nova Terra.

THE DEFLOWERING
Dir. Alyce Wittenstein, 1994
40 min.

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old are dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” – Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks.

The quote above opens Wittenstein’s third and final film – THE DEFLOWERING. Again featuring some of Wittenstein’s tried and true players – Holly Adams, Emmanuelle Chaulet, Taylor Mead, and more – the film concerns yet another evil corporation this time HUXLEY BIO-TECH and their means to sanitize/beautify this world of ours. This time Wittenstein (with Ostringer back on production design) takes the costuming helm as well.

The TIB (Total Immune Breakdown) virus has left the planet reeling and lethal allergic reaction are at an all time high. Huxley’s efforts to produce perfect, designer children that are immune to viruses have had the side effect of hyper-allergic reactions. Why isn’t anything being done about allergies? No one wants to fund it! With the mortality rate skyrocketing, can mankind bounce back and feel the soft caress of skin against skin ever again or will the line at the Holo-Memorial Funeral Home grow ever longer?

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PULGASARI
aka Bulgasari
Dir. Sang-ok Shin, 1985
North Korea, 95 min.
In Korean with English subtitles

SATURDAY, JANUARY 9 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, JANUARY 14 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JANUARY 18 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, JANUARY 28 – 10 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

Part of the Juche Your Illusion I: Cinema of North Korea series.

Over the span of 20 years, Sang-ok Shin – sometimes called “the Orson Wells of South Korea” – made upwards of 60 films but all that changed in 1978 when the studio closed. Things would go from bad to worse when in what should be an unbelievable turn of events, Shin and his wife (actress Choi Eun-Hee) were kidnapped by Kim Jong-il. Kim’s intent was to have Shin create films showcasing the power and might of the Korea Workers Party for all the world to see, with Choi Eun-Hee as their star. Before their escape to Vienna in 1986, and after years in prison camps, they would make 7 films – PULGASARI being a crown jewel among them.

While seemingly an obvious Godzilla rip-off, the film is about an evil king in feudal Korea who learns of a coming peasant rebellion. The king gathers all the metal he can find – farming tools, cooking pots, etc – to make into weapons to squash the small army. A dying blacksmith uses the last of his strength to create a monster made of rice – Pulgasari. When his daughters blood hits it, the monster comes to life and traverses the countryside, eating iron – as monsters are wont to do.

Not seen outside of Korea for over a decade after its release, the film has gained a cult following for its special effects – with Kenpachiro Satsuma who was Godzilla for over a decade in the Pulgasari costume!

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HEAD SPACE: AN ANIMATION SHOWCASE
Various, 1978-2015
66 min

FRIDAY, JANUARY 8 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 13 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, JANUARY 21 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 24 – 5 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 29 – 10 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

Spectacle is proud to present HEAD SPACE, a showcase of animated works exploring dimensions both interior and outlying. Featuring an extremely talented and creative group working in a diverse array of styles, the shorts wander through strange and sometimes sketchy landscapes, including alternate-universe appliance stores, the ramblings of Charles Manson, environmental catastrophes in the Dutch style of painting, and a houseplant’s musings. Some, like Sally Cruikshank’s Make Me Psychic, are established classics; others feature newer animators working in looping GIF format, presented away from the small screen’s momentary pleasures to fully appreciate the art that it is. Occasionally gross, often beautiful, and always interesting, HEAD SPACE is a sampler of the thoughts happening inside and out of each frame.

Featuring works by:

Signe Baumane	Barbara Benas	Lisa Crafts
Sally Cruikshank	Penelope Gazin	Faye Kahn
Celeste Lai & Peyton Skyler	Amy Lockhart	Lyla Ribot
Leah Shore	Claire van Ryzin	Wendy Zhao

 

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FERAT VAMPIRE
A.k.a. Upír z Feratu
Dir. Juraj Herz, 1981
Czechoslovakia, 94 min.
In Czech with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 5 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, JANUARY 16 – 10 PM
MONDAY, JANUARY 18 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 27 – 7:30 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

Part of the Bohemian Delirium: Czech Horror in the 80s and 90s series.

While Juraj Herz honed his horror chops on THE CREMATOR and gothic-psychedelic past Spectober favorite MORGIANNA, FERAT VAMPIRE may actually be his best. A sinister car corporation prepares to launch the Vampire, a flashy, modernist sports car with very peculiar engineering, mysteriously low gas requirements, and a flurry of marketable rumors of death and danger that international press constantly eats up. An ambulence driver (director Jiri Menzel, who snagged one of those 60s Best Foreign Film Oscars for CLOSELY OBSERVED TRAINS!) suspects something is up after his ex-racecar driver partner (Dagmar Havlová, later first lady of the Czech Republic!!) falls under the spell of the prototype. Soon, both are drawn deep into a stylish surrealist noir of hidden motives, doubles, corporate marketing machinations, and Cronenbergian bio-mechanical terror (actually arguably referenced by Cronenberg for Videodrome two years later!) As reality dissolves, even the logical linking scenes get taken over by absurdist vignettes of our uneasy symbiosis with the automotive world.

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DOROTHEA’S REVENGE
aka Dorotheas Rache
Dir. Peter Fleischmann, 1974
West Germany/France, 92 min.
In German with English subtitles

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 6 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JANUARY 11 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 22 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 27 – 10 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

Part of Peter Fleischmann: Trolling the Backwaters series.

The shortlist of fans for Fleischmann’s sex satire is nothing to scoff at. Among its most ardent fans were several household names of European arthouse: Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Claude Chabrol. Then there’s the post-surrealist group the Panic Movement (comprised of Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Roland Topor) who liked the film so much that they even decided to bestow upon the film a little reward—the “prix du group panic.”

Dorothea is a 16-year old girl from Hamburg, brought up in a typical, bourgeois family. This changes one day when she comes down for breakfast and her parents find her completely disheveled—a Martian has just raped her. So begins Dorothea’s sex odyssey, as she seeks to understand her body and its various uses in an incereasingly consumerist society. The key to the film is that she approaches these question of sex with every ounce of naiveté common to a young girl. She tries to make softcore porn with her friends, and when that doesn’t work, she gives prostution a turn, and so on and so forth. There’s seemingly no end to this excursion.

Fleischmann proved that he could produce biting political commentary within the confines of fiction in HUNTING SCENES FROM BAVARIA. Eschewing the traditional narrative scaffolding and riding on the back of a sex wave in European cinema—Vilgot Sjöman’s I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW), Dušan Makavejev’s WR: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM, and the films of Walerian Borowczyk are key predecessors—Fleischmann enlists a slew of experimental techniques, like having the characters routinely break the fourth wall and construing a hodge podge of stylistically contradictory scenes, from conversations with Christ on the cross to BDSM rituals. Moreover, humor is a constant presence, something that can’t be said for many of the period’s Eurotrash sexploitations. In one scene, there’s a shot of three men getting an erection, played to brassy, courtly music. It’s the promise of entertainment that gives an otherwise powerful political satire its enduring glow.

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AKOUNAK TEDALAT TAHA TAZOUGHAI
aka Rain the Color of Blue with a little Red in it
Dir. Christopher Kirkley
Niger/United States
2015, 75 min
In Tamashek with English subtitles

SATURDAY, JANUARY 9 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, JANUARY 12 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 17 – 5 PM
TUESDAY, JANUARY 26 – 10 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

In 1979 Roger Corman wanted a disco movie, so his staff made sure that he was the only one on the production with a script that said “Disco High School.” Two weeks before shooting, director Allan Arkush broke it to his producer that everyone else’s scripts were called Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, and the Ramones were a punk band. “Why can’t they be disco,” Corman asked. Arkush responded, “You can’t blow up a high school to disco music.”

Since at least 1956, when Bill Haley & His Comets starred in Rock Around the Clock, the musician-centered rock drama has been one of the most versatile vehicles for pop proselytizing. There have been many tweaks to the Rock Around the Clock formula—musical genres, locales, vérité aesthetics—and Prince‘s Purple Rain might be called the capitalist variant. In 1975 the New York Time’s Vincent Canby famously asked, “What is Jaws but a big-budget Roger Corman film,” and by 1984 Corman’s operation had effectively been steamrolled by appropriation of exploitation formula’s amid Hollywood’s economies of scale. Purple Rain is also a big-budget Corman film, but despite its unabashedly generic construction it towers above other rock dramas as a true watershed: the genre’s first steroidally capitalistic Hollywood blockbuster.

So, it’s at least patently funny that the first fiction feature ever produced in the Tuareg language, which is spoken by about 1 million people in parts of Algeria, Libya, Mali, and Niger, is nominally a remake of Purple Rain. Or, sort of: there is no Tuareg word for “purple,” so Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai actually translates to “rain the color of blue with a little red in it.” Constructed around the personality of naturally charismatic lead Mduo Moctar and set in the world of Tuareg guitar music in Agadez, Niger—most internationally recognized for the work of Bombino (who is, come to think of it, signed to a subsidiary of Prince’s former record label)—Akounak gushes with pure, earnest enthusiasm for its sweded source material. Shrouded in mystery and kicking up desert sands on his purple motorcycle while riding between home recording studios and guitar parties, Moctar is a brilliant and even more likable analog to Prince’s “The Kid.” Whereas Purple Rain is premised about calculated obfuscation of ostensibly autobiographical detail—I learned as much about Minneapolis and Prince from Purple Rain as I did string theory—Akounak‘s filmmakers take a Rouch-lite approach to their collaboratively produced riff on social mores, religiosity, and third world distribution models.

Make no mistake: Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai works as blissful, effervescent entertainment, and it’s beautifully shot and edited like a fiction film even as its DIY production and documentary ethos shine through. Like the conglomerate clockwork strategies underpinning Purple Rain, it will make you a believer and a fan. —Jon Dieringer (Screen Slate)

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WHITE OF THE EYE
Dir. Donald Cammell, 1987
U.K./U.S., 110 minutes.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 6 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, JANUARY 14 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, JANUARY 23 – 10 PM
MONDAY, JANUARY 25 – 10 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

Part of the Cammell After Dark series.

“The only difference between a hunter and a killer…. is his prey.”

While Cammell’s producers were merely seeking to capitalize on the 80s brood of lurid cheapies, he and Kong would take an utterly different tack; the director described his adaptation of pulp author Margaret Tracy’s Mrs. White as “an artistic exploration of man’s need to destroy.” A family man (David Keith) is suspected of being a gated-community serial killer; Cathy Moriarty (RAGING BULL) stars as his wife. Scored by Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason, WHITE OF THE EYE is an unmissable gem, a unique case study in onscreen violence, alienating Southwestern landscapes and characters carrying aching – insane, even – contradictions.

“As the action twists a benign homestead into a domestic nightmare, signature Cammell forms resurface—startling flash-cuts between the recent past and present creating schizoid sensations, an exaggerated emphasis on the eyeball as visual fulcrum for transitional delirium, and a soundtrack that announces invocation and possession.” – Chris Chang, Film Comment

“By far the most accomplished thriller I have seen this year. Deserves to be feted.” – Derek Malcolm, The Guardian

“A mesmerizing mosaic of a film.” – Nigel Andrews, Financial Times

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BAKENEKO: A VENGEFUL SPIRIT (aka THE CURSED SWAMP)
Dir. Yoshihiro Ishikawa, 1968
Japan, 86 min.
In Japanese with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 8 – 10 PM
MONDAY, JANUARY 11 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 17 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JANUARY 25 – 7:30 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

Part of the Cats in the Cradle to the Grave: Three Japanese Ghost Stories series.

Lord Nabeshima, who rose to power by murdering his master, demands that the young Yujiki become his concubine. When she refuses to submit, he murders her and her fiance Yuki. Yujiki’s cat consumes her blood and becomes her avenging spirit, possessing one of Nabeshima’s wives and murdering his vassals, his concubines and his only son.

Ishikawa was one of the writers of BLACK CAT MANSION, and though he directed few films, Bakeneko displays directorial genius. Beginning in a quietly haunting vein reminiscent of UGETSU, BAKENEKO descends into a nightmarish parade of splattered blood, decapitations and ghosts gnawing on severed limbs.

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TROUBLE EVERY DAY
Dir. Claire Denis, 2001
France, 101 min.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 10 – 5 PM
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 13 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 22 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, JANUARY 30 – 7:30 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

An American doctor (Vincent Gallo) arrives in Paris with his new wife (Tricia Vessey). They are ostensibly on honeymoon, but he is strangely distant and preoccupied with finding a former a colleague. Meanwhile, a French couple live in seclusion, the husband (Alex Descas) both caring for and imprisoning his wife (Béatrice Dalle, exuding a primal power) whose mysterious illness has reduced her to a vehicle for her own bloodlust. Connections between these characters reveal themselves slowly; exposition here is a distant second to a deep sensuality in the truest sense of the word. Denis’ tactile approach to filmmaking is in full effect, the camera mapping out fragile bodies with careful, almost predatory attention, creating a discomfiting sense of intimacy. TROUBLE EVERY DAY is a film felt as much as viewed, and when it reaches its bloody apex, that’s a truly frightening thing.

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GOLEM
Dir. Piotr Szulkin, 1980
Poland, 92 min.
In Polish with English subtitles.

MONDAY, JANUARY 4 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 10 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, JANUARY 26 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 29 – 7:30 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

GOLEM (1979) is a loose retelling of Der Golem, Gustav Meyrink’s 1914 novel. Replacing the ghettos of Prague with a garbage-strewn, dilapidated future, Szulkin’s adaptation trades the golem for “Pernat,” a clone manufactured for shadowy reasons by a totalitarian regime. Pernat, played with remarkable gentility by Szulkin favorite Marek Walczewski, interacts with the swifter edges of Polish society as he attempts to understand the institution that created him, and his purpose on the planet. Upon its release, the film won the Brown Lion at the Gdańsk Film Festival, but has been all but forgotten today.

SATAN PANONSKI: DOKUMENTARAC and ZINE RELEASE
Dir. Milroad Milinkovic, 1990.
Yugoslavia, 34 min.
In Croatian with English subtitles

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10 – 8:00 PM

A release of a new fanzine about Croatian punk Satan Panonski, who lived a life of violence and poetry before being killed in the outset of the Balkan wars in 1992. The event will feature a newly translated documentary, clips from performances, and readings from a biography by A.M. Gittlitz, newly translated poetry and lyrics by Nikolina Lazetic, and an essay on the relationship between nationalism and punk in Yugoslavia by Patrick Offenheiser.

SATAN PANONSKI: DOKUMENTARAC is a Serbian student film featuring the best footage of Panonski’s “Hard Blood Shock” Body Art performance, which mixes self-mutilation, chaotic punk rock, and spoken word. Also captured are a radio interview where he outlines his dreams of creating a communal “rock n’ roll state”, and his return to the mental asylum where he spent the better part of the 80s for murder. Self-identifying as “Punk by nationality, friend by profession” we see his full tragic range of emotions that lead to comparisons with both Marina Abramovic and GG Allin. If Panonski was Yugoslavia’s GG, then this is their HATED. Like his albums and the myths of Panonski’s life and death, it has up until now only circulated underground on VHS tapes traded at flea markets across Eastern Europe, and has likely never before been screened in the United States.