The Wall Street Journal Critic’s Pick!
Brooklyn Magazine Critic’s Pick!
Bedford + Bowery Critic’s Pick!
The L Magazine Critic’s Pick!

Anna Karina possesses an otherworldly style, magnetism and grace that has helped her become perhaps the most recognizable face in world cinema. Her legendary collaborations with Jean-Luc Godard on VIVRE SA VIE, BAND OF OUTSIDERS, PIERROT LE FOU, and several others made her an international star and an icon of the French New Wave, but their off-screen marriage was tumultuous, and they permanently separated in 1966.

Following their split, Godard took a turn for his most politically-minded directorial period and Karina branched out into different lead roles, working with everyone from Luchino Visconti to Rainer Werner Fassbinder. For this series, Spectacle has selected three of her lesser-known but equally enthralling works made after her separation from Godard: the radiant pop musical ANNA, the mysterious chamber drama RENDEZVOUS À BRAY, and the heady sci-fi thriller THE TIME TO DIE.

Special thanks to Ricki Askin, Clémentine De Blieck, Cathérine Delvaux, Chris Etscheid, Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, and Universal Music.

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ANNA
Dir. Pierre Koralnik, 1967
France, 85 min.
In French with English subtitles.

U.S. PREMIERE!
WITH CUSTOM ENGLISH SUBTITLES CREATED BY SPECTACLE!

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 – 10:00 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 – 10:00 PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 – 10:00 PM

A kaleidoscopic, energetic burst of bright colors, infectious musical numbers, and absurdly charming performances, ANNA is a pop-art musical masterpiece that has been locked away for far too long.

Originally made as the first color film for French TV, Anna Karina stars as a shy artist who is unknowngly photographed one day and soon becomes the obsession of an advertising executive (played by French New Wave stalwart Jean-Claude Brialy). He plasters her image up all over town in an attempt to discover the mystery girl, whom he doesn’t seem to notice is the same girl that he keeps bumping into whose wearing those nerdy-chic glasses…

But really, this is all just an excuse for zany, irrestistable fun. The Yé-Yé music, scored and soundtracked by French pop icon Serge Gainsbourg (who also makes several on-screen appearances), is some of the most infectious and catchy work of his career, with Karina’s vocals shining throughout, including the famous ‘Roller Girl’ number that has since been referenced in countless fashion spreads. Every sequence features candy-coated visuals and sumptuous costuming soaked in the era’s impeccable style, all supported by ace contributions from key Godard personnel, including editor Françoise Collin (BAND OF OUTSIDERS, PIERROT LE FOU, 2 OR 3 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER) and DP Wally Kurant (MASCULINE FEMININE). Impossible to resist, the film feels like a pitch-perfect melding of Godard’s A WOMAN IS A WOMAN and Demy’s THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, with Karina’s adorable beauty and effervescent charm as the center of attention. And be on the lookout for a Marianne Faithfull cameo!

The film was a hit on French television in the late 60s and received a brief Japanese theatrical run in the 90s, but has since vanished and, to the best of our knowledge, has never screened before in the US. Working with Universal Music, Spectacle is enthralled to present this lost gem of 60s French cinema.

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RENDEZVOUS À BRAY
Dir. André Delvaux, 1971
France/Belgium/West Germany, 86 min.
In French with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 14 – 5:00 PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 – 7:30 PM

*OFFICIAL SELECTION – 1971 BERLIN FILM FESTIVAL*

Paris 1917: a young pianist (Mathieu Carrière) receives a note from an old friend in the Air Force to join him at his lush country estate that happens to be close to the front lines of World War I. He arrives but his friend is nowhere to be found, with only the quiet, beautiful housekeeper (Anna Karina) present. While he spends days waiting for his friend’s arrival, his mind wanders to past events. At night, the mysterious woman appears again…

Based on a short story from surrealist Julien Gracq, Belgian auteur André Delvaux marries his trademark subtle blurring of fantasy and reality to Gracq’s shape-shifting text. Much like the film protagonist, Delvaux got his start by playing the piano to silent films in 1950s Brussels, and his musicality shows in the film’s sonata-like form, weaving variations of memories and moments into an ambiguous, intriguing mood piece. Cloaked in dense Gothic atmospheres and muted colors, RENDEZVOUS À BRAY gives off a melancholy, dream-like aura, subtle in approach but haunted by unspoken desires and half-remembered, half-imagined nostalgia.

Working with Delvaux’s daughter, we’re honored to present this classic of Belgium cinema.

“One of the most erotic films ever made… try to imagine a quiet blend of Jules and Jim and Gertrud filmed in color (the cinematographer is the great Ghislain Cloquet, who also did superb work for Demy, Bresson, Polanski, and Penn) and you’ll start to get some idea of the mood… as much as I revere some of the Belgian films of Chantal Akerman, if I had to choose only one Belgian film to take with me to a desert island, I’d have a pretty rough time forsaking this 1971 masterpiece by André Delvaux.” -Jonathan Rosenbaum

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THE TIME TO DIE
(aka Le temps de mourir)
Dir. André Farwagi, 1970
France, 81 min.
In French with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 – 10:00 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 – 10:00 PM

A woman (Anna Karina) rides a white horse, carrying a videotape case. She approaches a metal tree and the horse throws her off, knocking her unconscious and sending the videotape case rolling down a hill. The case lands next to a sleeping bodyguard. He awakens and takes the case to his boss’s mansion. The tape shows security camera footage of his boss being assassinated. But the boss is still alive, and he is determined to find out the origins of the tape and his alleged future killer. Soon enough, the boss and bodyguards stumble upon the unconscious woman, who awakens and seems to know the future…

A stylish, puzzling sci-fi mystery dealing with time travel and destiny, THE TIME TO DIE features loads of retro-cool technology futurisms and immaculate production design, but also manages to treat its subject matter with philosophical seriousness and respect. It supposes that the future is something not only inevitable, but unavoidable. The best we can do is hurl forwards towards our destiny.

MISS NUDE AMERICA
(aka The Miss Nude America Contest)
Dir. James P. Blake, 1976.
USA, 71 min.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 – 10:00 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 – 7:30 PM

Naked City was a nudist colony in Roselawn, Indiana, the brainchild of Dick Drost, a charismatic cross between Hugh Hefner (his idol and nemesis) and Charles Manson, confined to a wheelchair due to muscular dystrophy. Drost was an ambitious man who planned to build several Naked Cities “with buildings and skyscrapers” all over the world.  This plan, and his ultimate dream “to be head of state of the United States or Communist China or the Soviet Union” was derailed in the 1980s after he was charged with molesting a 13-year old girl and plead guilty to 10 sex-related misdemeanors, exiling him from Indiana. Legal and financial woes forced Naked City to close in 1986, and Drost’s current whereabouts are unknown, though he is rumored to have died penniless and legless not long ago.

Filmed throughout 1975, MISS NUDE AMERICA was made during happier times. Even at its heyday, Naked City appears to be, in the words of a blogger named Steve, “a cross between a blue collar strip joint and a beer chugging stop for long distance truckers,” where the entrance gate is a giant woman’s leg which moves up and down to admit cars. But Drost’s own enormous, futuristic office resembles the Korova Milk Bar by way of 8½’s harem fantasy, a tin-foiled wonderland where various nude mistresses do his bidding, and clothed matronly women do his accounting.

Naked City comes alive during its annual Miss Nude America contest, which, though Drost describes it as “the most ambitious, Esalen-type group therapy in the whole world,” seems more like a fairly typical beauty pageant (“the incentive is that there is an automatic $1000-a-week booking fee [for stripping] attached to the winner”) where naked amateurs, $300-a-week strippers and aspiring Penthouse models prance around onstage, to the excited and befuddled gazes of gawking truck-drivers, curious midwestern tourists, and Drost’s own nude parents, who are among his disciples.

Too raunchy for widespread release, and too tame for the porn circuit, MISS NUDE AMERICA, which has remained largely unseen since its release, has found its rightful home in an old bodega on South Third Street. Playing like an episode of “Mad Mad House” directed by the Maysles, it is a hugely fascinating, highly entertaining and somewhat competently directed documentary from an era of carefree sexual permissiveness and creepy sexual predators.

NEGATIVE PLEASURE LABOR DAY MASSACRE

SATURDAY, AUGUST 30 – 10PM & MIDNIGHT
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Hot off the heels of June’s Felony Comics Crime Spree, Spectacle Theater and Negative Pleasure Publications presents the Negative Pleasure Labor Day Massacre, a screening of two twisted horror movies in anticipation of the release of NPP’s newest book, Night Burgers, a day-glo comic experience featuring all new work by Victor Kerlow (Everything Takes Forever, The New Yorker), Josh Burggraf (Kid Space Heater, Future Shock), Anthony Meloro (Misper), Jason Murphy (Me Nut Nut Nut), Amy Searles (Jeans Comics) and Ken Johnson (The New York Times).

Join the creators and Negative Pleasure publisher Harris Smith for screenings of SCREAM BLOODY MURDER at 10pm and THE SATAN KILLER at midnight. Start your autumn drenched in blood!

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SCREAM BLOODY MURDER
Dir. Marc B. Ray, 1973
USA, 90 min.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 30 – 10PM

A troubled young man with a hook for a hand (he lost it as a boy while killing his father with a tractor) and a serious aversion to sex murders anyone who gets in the way of his love for a prostitute in this grimy slasher flick from 1973. Much in the vein of films like THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA and CRIMINALLY INSANE, SCREAM BLOODY MURDER seems to have crawled directly from the gutter, (though actually it was made by the writers of Ann-Margret and Raquel Welch TV specials) with a warped internal logic that effectively drags you into it’s bleak, blood-drenched world. From the creators of THE SEVERED ARM.

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THE SATAN KILLER
(aka DEATH PENALTY)
Dir. Stephen Calamari, 1993
USA, 90 min.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 30 – MIDNIGHT

A boozy addled, revenge-driven cop squares off with a crank fueled, devil-worshipping biker the hardboiled, mind-ruining crime flick THE SATAN KILLER. Filmed entirely on location in Virgina Beach, VA, and directed by the questionably named Stephen Calamari (most likey the film’s star, Steve Sayre) THE SATAN KILLER (aka Death Penalty and Rampage) features a little bit of something for everyone- murder, machine guns, drugs, drag queens, private eyes, beach babes, former male nurses, a frequently-visited t-shirt shop, punks, pimps, a frequently-visited coffee shop, strippers, a haunted house and a scene where the killer screams at a church, “You never fooled me!”

COLLATERALIZED DAMAGE (REMIX)
2014. Edit by Jean-Louis Piquette / Live DJ set by Zed The Professor.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 29 – 10PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Spectacle is thrilled to welcome Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx to our humble theater for a live DJ set to mark the 10th birthday of Michael Mann’s beyond-moody crime thriller COLLATERAL. As an essay on the nature of indifference, the film tends to belabor existentialist clichés about the value of living in the present and the need for improvisation. But as an experiment in the potential for digital video to capture the distinctive glow of Los Angeles? It’s an indispensable addendum to the constant, almost bionic repicturing of America’s most populous, smog-encrusted megacity, with Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron’s HD cameras careening down blackened arterials, capturing backlit plastic signs and streaking white-hot neon from one lonely strip mall to the next.

To commemorate 8.6.04, the mysterious video editor Jean-Louis Piquette – a cat who cut his teeth on Spec trailers, so cool he doesn’t even attend his own screenings – will realign the film’s frames, while Zed the Professor (The New School) will provide a live-DJ set rescore. The result is a new kind of cinema-as-wallpaper, in which noir fantasies about the City of Angels are digitalized and compressed almost to the point of un-recognizability. (And it started like any other night….)

“Perhaps Jost’s work doesn’t reach a wider audience because he works in an uncompromising fashion and on a shoestring budget with nonprofessional casts. The perverse irony is that although his films aren’t readily accessible in theaters, they are in themselves highly accessible.” -Kevin Thomas, LA Times

Despite theatrical releases of his films All the Vermeers in New York (1990) and The Bed You Sleep In (1993), Jon Jost remains virtually unknown to moviegoers. A founding member of Newsreel, the leftist filmmaking collective, and a hardcore experimentalist in his early career, Jost has made 34 feature films, all of which he has written, directed, shot, and edited (and most he has also produced). His films are about what drive people, about psychology and society, and about expressing the interior of individual thought. In many ways, his films are about communication.

Jost is foremost a visual filmmaker, using images to express the inner thoughts and feelings of his characters. His cinema possess a type of naturalism rarely seen in narrative works, and through the occasionally rough delivery of his actors, as well as his own technical experimentations, he consistently foregrounds the cinematic process. His practice is “more concerned with evoking a place, time, and milieu than with a dramatically shaped story” (Jonathan Rosenbaum) and has been compared to John Cassavetes, Jim Jarmusch, and Robert Bresson.Though he has worked abroad, the majority of Jost’s films are broadly concerned with the American experience, and in particular the pressures that can be created by notions of masculinity in this culture. We’re extremely thrilled to welcome Jost to Spectacle present two vintage Jost films from the decade leading up to his first theatrical release, as well as two recent works that return to Jost’s experimental roots.

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SLOW MOVES
Dir. Jon Jost, 1983
USA, 93 min.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 22 – 10PM

DIRECTOR IN ATTENDANCE!

SLOW MOVES chronicles a love story about two somewhat forlorn characters, both of them loners. Julie (Roxanne Rogers) is a native Californian who has been living in San Francisco for about four years. a highly disciplined, hard-working young woman. Jeff (Marshall Gaddis) is an out of work construction worker specializing in handling steel girders at great heights who’s lost his nerve after a minor injury. The two meet on the Golden Gate Bridge and after a brief and awkward courtship, live together with the usual problems of money and work. They are not particularly happy together; they have nothing better to do. Sometimes, she says, there’s ”this incredible connection, then sometimes it’s just gone.” After struggling to find happiness in SF, they find a sense of illusory freedom following the American dream of the open road. The film’s long takes play with the films title and evoke in the film of a sense of tragic inevitability.

Shot in 5 days on a budget of $8,000 with an improvised script, the film contains minimal dialogue, with most of the story told through narration by the main characters, as well as (presumably) the filmmaker himself. It is a film about filmmaking itself, its production foregrounded in one of its opening scenes as Julie’s narration comments on a suicide that happened “when we were making this film.” Perhaps the greatest instance of this foregrounding occurs when the two visit a camera obscura, a particularly long scene where I tour guide gives an oral history of photography. We are told that this world of ours contains so many people and so many stories. This couple provides just one of those stories and ”like most people, they did not tell their story well.”

“… it is quite serious about demonstrating how the simplest of plots can be visually manipulated into a vehicle of tension and suspense. Technique is layered upon technique, all the while pushing the story forward to its shabby and oddly affecting little conclusion. Slow Moves deserves all the exposure it can get.”  – John J. O’Conner, The New York Times

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PARABLE
Dir. Jon Jost, 2008
USA, 72 min.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 22 – 8PM

DIRECTOR IN ATTENDANCE!

“Nebraska, 2007.

A parable of the Bush era; swiftly jumping genres, a cowboy surrogate/Bush is thrown out of his house, is picked up by a man who needs a driver, buddy-bonds with him, they sing a Christian camp song, do a robbery and killing, and cowboy then rapes and shoots his new buddy. We arrive in a bucolic farm where a woman is kept on a rope, a man attempts to untie a knotted rope; and after a long and weird interlude including some heavy breathing, the cowboy arrives, seduces and is screwing the woman, and is killed and dumped with other bodies from Abu Ghraib.

PARABLE works on a visual and visceral level for which a synoptic summary is impossible. It is a reflection of The Time of Bush in America, a squalid period of corruption equal to our country’s worst, or, as if possible, even the worst. The film tackles this era with a melange of genres typical of our culture, a culture which distills in reality down to cartoons and in which a trajectory from domestic melodrama leads axiomatically to Abu Ghraib. PARABLE is history as farce, an American tragedy limned by the Flintstones and Simpsons, where seriousness has been subsumed by “reality TV,” and the populace has been reduced to zombie-like consumers busy eating themselves.” – JonJost.com

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BELL DIAMOND
Dir. Jon Jost, 1986
USA, 96 min.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 23 – 7PM

DIRECTOR IN ATTENDANCE!

Marshall Gaddis (also named Jeff) returns in similar role, playing an out of work Vietnam Vet in Butte, Montana. His wife, Cathy, (Sarah Wyss) leaves him after seven years when she feels there is no longer communication between them and – more painfully and pointedly – because she is unable to have a child owing to his sterility from exposure to Agent Orange. The characters spend a lot of their time talking about their problems with no sense of how to solve them, and there is a real sense throughout that the problems of the characters are due to circumstances beyond their control.

Exploring these circumstances, in many ways, the film is just as much about Butte as the relationship. Using real time, Jost links Jeff’s story to that of American labor history (in a brilliant sequence), and the film is peppered with some of the finest pictorial representations of the working-class West imaginable – cloud filled skies, cyclone fences, desolate factories, pipelines, old tanks. In a particularly telling scene, Jeff and his friends break into the old Bell Diamond copper mine, from which they was laid off when it closed down.

“Among the ten best of the year. Formally exquisite and politically pointed study of an alienated Vietnam vet against the background of a bankrupted mining town.”  – Dave Kehr, Chicago Tribune

 “… with a story developed by the filmmaker and cast and completely improvised, the film deals with characters who are neither articulate nor particularly attractive, but pays them the kind of respect and attention that they would never receive from other quarters. Visually Jost’s most impressive work to date. The impact of the film’s original form of realism arrives only gradually, but once it registers, it becomes indelible.”  – Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

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THE NARCISSUS FLOWERS OF KATSURA-SHIMA
Dir. Jon Jost, 2012
Japan, 76 min.
In Japanese with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 23 – 5PM

DIRECTOR IN ATTENDANCE!

“THE NARCISSUS FLOWERS OF KATSURA-SHIMA was shot on a small island off the coast of North Eastern Japan, six months after the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. A work of elemental simplicity, it shows the aftermath of this catastrophe on the island, and allows the inhabitants ample space to tell the stories of the day of the disaster and its impact upon them and the island. Embroidered with several Japanese traditional poems and haunting imagery, this film seeks to enter into the living reality of these simple fishermen and women.” -JonJost.com