DELIRIUM
Dir. Cosmotropia de Xam, 2015
Germany/Italy/Switzerland, 79 minutes

TUESDAY, MARCH 1 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 4 – 10:00 PM
SATURDAY, MARCH 12 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, MARCH 25 – 7:30 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

Parasites that take over brains. Paranoia and Amnesia controlling the city. A state of emergency. Who is this mysterious person, who controls the parasites and what is her plan? A clockwork of puzzle pieces.

Cosmotropia de Xam, mastermind behind the band Mater Suspiria Vision, unleashes their latest art horror cinema experiment Delirium on Brooklyn at Spectacle Theater.

LOVE THE ONE YOU LOVE
Dir. Jenna Bass, 2014.
South Africa. 88 minutes.
In English and Xhosa (subtitled).

THURSDAY, MARCH 3 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 13 – 5:00 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 18 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 30 – 7:30 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

Remember that t-shirt that said “COUPLES ARE BORING AND EVERYBODY KNOWS IT”? Now that Anti-Valentine’s is over, Spectacle is pleased to present a swirling and intimate vision of modern dating from South Africa: Jenna Bass’ feature debut LOVE THE ONE YOU LOVE.

Anchored by the thousand-gigawatt chemistry of stars Chi Mhende and Andile Nebulane, the film posits love and autonomy at seductive odds, piercing out angles on the most telling minutiae of a relationship’s long and winding forge. Mhende stars as Terri, a phone sex worker who, while deeply in love with her boyfriend Sandile (Nebulane), can’t help but wonder if things are too perfect. Along the way, a despondent IT worker named Eugene (Loew Venter) uncovers a master-list of couples on the Dark Web that serves as justification to try winning back his ex, with whose much younger brother he has kept a fraught friendship.

The two plot strands go unlinked until the film’s third act, a disarmingly sober counterbalancing of romance and reality; the film’s blurring of conspiracy and superstition makes for a perfect analogue with a lover’s mindset. Largely improvised around a twenty-page treatment and aided immeasurably by a steady and endlessly observant handheld camera, LOVE is equal parts tactile psychodrama and freewheeling, hyperlinked RomCom. Bass’ film digs deeper into timeless conundrums of trust and compatibility than the sociopolitics of its Cape Town milieu, but questions about identity and class in the New South Africa are never far from the viewer’s mind. Simpler times resurface as impressionistic digital fragments; passionate arguments and awkward yearnings play out in remarkably real time.

“What is likely a tight budget is masked by Bass’ intimate, rather than irritatingly shaky, hand held camerawork and a dedication to her characters’ words and how they relate to each other. The film has more than one sequence that feels like we, as viewers, are eavesdropping as much as watching the romantic drama unfold.” – Elizabeth Kerr, The Hollywood Reporter

“We need more diverse narratives about Africa – the ones in films like SEX, OKRA AND SALTED BUTTER, PUMZI, and LOVE THE ONE YOU LOVE.” – Lindiwe Dovey, The Guardian

LIFESTYLE PORN PT. II
Special thanks to João Pedro Rodrigues, Joaquim Sapinho, and Rosa Films.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 9 – 8:00 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

Curated by Gabriel Abrantes, Alexander Carver, Benjamin Crotty and Daniel Schmidt, LIFESTYLE PORN, PART II is a rejoinder to a program of short queer films screened at Light Industry (LIFESTYLE PORN, PART I) from the last 60 years, marking a shift in the cinematic stylizations of homoeroticism from the guise of criminal marginality to bourgeois “lifestyle” fetishism.

The Spectacle program features LE MURA DI SANA, a short film made in Yemen by Pier Paolo Pasolini as an appeal to UNESCO, against what he perceived to be the corrupting forces of global economic development. Pasolini’s films and activism alike championed a certain romanticization of poverty and the “pre-modern” lifestyle as vitalist and sexually liberated, as a viable alternative to the repressive architecture of the burgeoning global-capitalist world of rampant consumerism and mono-culture. Whereas modern subcultural lifestyles have often exploited and have been exploited by cinematic form to various political ends, Pasolini sought to politicize the entirety of the developing world in service of his cinematic, aesthetic and personal anti-modernist politics.

The feature presentation is O FANTASMA, by contemporary Portuguese filmmaker João Pedro Rodrigues: a meditation on the alienated sexual encounters of a Lisbon garbage collector whose obsessions are the film’s sole subject. Here the refuse of the fully modernized city becomes the debased medium through which the protagonist’s burgeoning sexual fetishisms arise. Rodrigues’ ‘Fantasma’ can be seen as the ghost of Pasolini’s eccentric idealisms.

Structured as a “before and after” of ‘Late Capitalism’, the program will begin with a radical Marxist’s direct political appeal to curb capitalistic destruction of the “good life”, and thus to preserve and valorize the perceived innocence of pre-modern sexual freedoms and political naiveté. The “after” of these fantasies are imaged in O FANTASMA as the vast landfill of Lisbon – a monument to the rotting detritus of consumer culture that has displaced Pasolini’s unalienated innocence.

Friends with Benefits, a retrospective of works by Abrantes, Carver, Crotty, and Schmidt, will run at the Film Society of Lincoln Center from February 5-11. LIFESTYLE PORN, PART I plays Light Industry on Tuesday, February 2nd.

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)