SALLY & JESS
dir. John Wintergate, 1989
United States. 94 mins.
In English.

SATURDAY, APRIL 12 – 5pm – ONE NIGHT ONLY!

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Spectacle is thrilled to collaborate with our friends from Filmmuseum Boise on a rare screening of SALLY & JESS, John Wintergate’s little-seen (and Idaho-shot) followup to the infamous BOARDINGHOUSE.

A “family film” in content and production, SALLY & JESS is John Wintergate’s unreleased follow-up to BOARDINGHOUSE, his noted 1982 SOV feature. Filmed in 1989 in McCall, Idaho, the film follows the titular brother and sister (played by Wintergate’s children, Shanti and Kodey) as they navigate the fallout of their parents’ (Wintergate and his wife, Kalassu) deaths, fleeing from foster care while a child murderer operates in the area.

Less a horror film than an adventure film with some peril (a specialty of the Mouse House once upon a time) the film is at its best when it’s focused on the Wintergate family spending time together and with friends. It uses the big skies and nearby swaths of forest to make the movie feel larger than its budget. The close knit nature of the small town, pop. 2000, where it was made manifests on screen as actual community resources assemble to aid in the fictional search for the runaways.

SALLY & JESS is a snapshot of a time before the 90s boom turned “indie film” into a cottage industry where you follow every book and manual, trying your best to pass for legitimate studio product, hoping to be rise within reach of the brass ring and cash in on the promise of fame and acclaim, when making an independent movie could simply be a novelty, made for the hell of it, something you show to your friends, and then years later reminisce, “remember when they made that movie in town? What a time that was.”

“Idaho sees a lot of filmmaking among the locals, but not a lot of filmgoing. Until recently, the only repertory screenings run would be the yearly reruns of the usual franchise titles. Filmmuseum Boise (and its earlier iterations) was started to fill the void in film programming. If the only way to view a film I would see in NYC is to run it myself, then I guess that’s what I gotta do. I am very pleased to flip things around in this case and bring an Idaho film to the city.” – Alex Hansen, founder + curator of Filmmuseum Boise

2024 marked two decades since the Cannes debut of WHISKY, a drolly melancholic comedy from Uruguayan writer-director duo Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella. WHISKY combined a kind of shit-eating Beckettian existentialism with rigorously controlled filmmaking; while the movie took home an Un Certain Regard prize and was widely heralded as an important work of new Latin American cinema, Rebella sadly took his own life in 2006, at the untimely age of 32.

This spring, Spectacle is proud to host anniversary screenings of WHISKY as well as the earlier Stoll/Rebella comedy 25 WATTS (2001), and to spotlight two features Stoll made after his friend’s death. These films testify to a brilliant and idiosyncratic collaboration (and thus a great loss for cinema), as well as Stoll’s continued importance as an artist equally enamored of formal experimentation, film history, and the eternal comedy of being human.

Special thanks to Cinema Tropical, Lucía Malandro, Jesse Trussell, and Pablo Stoll.

 

25 WATTS
dir. Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella, 2001
Uruguay. 93 mins.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, APRIL 8 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 19 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, APRIL 22 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, APRIL 25 – 7:30 PM followed by remote Q+A with Pablo Stoll
(This event is $10.) 

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Un barrio. Tres pibes. Veinticuatro horas.

Stoll and Rebella’s breakout debut details the lives (or lack thereof) of a trio of teenage friends kicking rocks over a hungover and dissatisfied 24 hours in Montevideo.

Shot in arresting, high-contrast black and white film, 25 WATTS drew inevitable comparisons with CLERKS and LA HAINE. While it is often austere, Stoll and Rebella take conspicuous pleasure in brief digressions in style, like when the camera adopts the perspective of a spinning vinyl record or an 11th-hour flashback disrupts the sleepy narrative pace. Almost a quarter century later, 25 WATTS feels like a playful, even punkish antidote to the taxidermied mise-en-scene that came to dominate twee arthouse cinema in the 2000s.

While 25 WATTS was the most recognized film in Uruguayan history at the time of its festival run, the filmmakers were uncomfortable at the idea of representing a national cinema. Nevertheless, this is a precise portrait of a culture that doesn’t know quite what to do with its young men, resulting in a turn-of-the-millennium slacker comedy par excellence (and anticipating the even more bone-dry WHISKY).

“A very charming and funny derivation of the Jarmusch manner from Uruguay… The basic focus is on three hungover slackers one busy Saturday in Montevideo. I served on the jury for the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Film that awarded its acting prize to the three likable leads (Daniel Hendler, Jorge Temponi, Alfonso Tort), and the film won many well-deserved festival prizes elsewhere (including a couple in Rotterdam.)”— Jonathan Rosenbaum

WHISKY
dir. Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella, 2004
Uruguay. 94 mins.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

THURSDAY, APRIL 10 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 17 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, APRIL 22 – 7:30 PM followed by remote Q+A with Pablo Stoll
(This event is $10.)
MONDAY, APRIL 28 – 10 PM

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Stoll and Rebella did not return to the disaffected teenage milieu of 25 WATTS for their second feature, but instead pivoted into a tale of existential crisis past the point of midlife. 60-year-old Jacobo (Andrés Pazos) operates a sock factory in Montevideo. When his more successful older brother Herman (Jorge Belani) surprises him with a visit after years of estrangement, Jacobo can’t face the idea of him walking in on a life that is blatantly unsatisfying and a factory on the verge of shutting down. So Jacobo asks his employee Marta (Mirella Pascual) to pose as his wife for the weekend. A love triangle ensues.

Seen by many as the duo’s masterpiece, WHISKY is a beyond-deadpan family comedy of matters. It’s a barbed rumination on middle-class success that revels in negative emotional space. This even extends to the title, a reference to how Uruguayans say “Whisky!” the same way Americans say “Cheese!” when getting their pictures taken.

“Repeated near-Bressonian sequences track Jacobo as he opens the plant: shots of hands flipping switches and machines whirring to life establish a cinematic rhythm that propels the film through its first half… [WHISKY]’s neat bifurcation suggests a pair of filmmakers gradually becoming fascinated with larger questions of narrative structure.” — Jeff Reichert, Reverse Shot

“The story of two souls seemingly stuck in neutral (with a third in relentless drive), the film is a model of both fiscal and narrative economy, and the kind of work—gleaned from the mysteries of consciousness, telling quotidian details and a sense of aesthetic proportion—that is too often missing from American independent cinema.” — Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

HIROSHIMA
dir. Pablo Stoll, 2009
Uruguay. 80 mins.
Silent with English intertitles.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, APRIL 7 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 12 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, APRIL 18 – 10 PM

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Like 25 WATTS, Stoll’s first solo credit as director takes place over the course of one 24-hour period. But it would be too easy to call HIROSHIMA a synthesis of that film’s slacker vibes and WHISKY’s mimetic tragicomedy, anchored by the filmmaker casting his real-life family—chiefly his brother Juan Andres Stoll as the protagonist, also named Juan. This Juan struggles to communicate with the people around him; Stoll subtracts human (and animal!) voices from the film’s equation, making HIROSHIMA a “silent musical.” The only audio is the music piped in through Juan’s discman as he makes his way from morning (working a joyless bakery gig) to night, where performing with his punk band The Genuflexes may offer an outlet.

While HIROSIHIMA does not explicitly reference Rebella’s death, its funereal atmosphere and trance state will resonate with anyone dumbstruck by grief. But Stoll’s film is also a game (and often hilarious) homage to pre-verbal cinema, using intertitles for spoken dialogue. This approach reveals a cinephilic love of experimentation wholly consistent with the earlier films, despite the almost neorealist trappings of the long takes and forlorn vistas, all building toward a payoff gag that must be seen to be believed.

“Actually nothing happens in this movie. But I was never bored throughout the screening. Makes me wonder…” — JvH48, IMDb

“…A wacky version of a certain kind of hybrid movie from cinema’s transition era from silence to sound, films in which sound was used expressively (even perversely) by the likes of Rene Clair and Alfred Hitchcock… We all see, a hundred times a week, examples of mainstream editing seamlessly, invisibly reinforcing the illusion of dialogue between characters, each of whom occupies his or her own close-up. By contrast, Stoll reminds us how dialogue was typically cut during the silent age, indistinguishable from visual force… HIROSHIMA is nothing less than trippy classicism.” — Tom Keough, The Seattle Times

THREE
dir. Pablo Stoll, 2012
Uruguay. 115 mins.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, APRIL 1 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 9 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 17 – 10 PM
MONDAY, APRIL 21 – 7:30 PM

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Another acerbic portrait of human folly and repression, THREE was expanded from a treatment Stoll and Rebella worked on together, another comic grotesquerie of family dysfunction. Humberto de Vargas stars as Rudolfo, a floundering 40-something dentist who attempts to reconnect with his alienated ex-wife Graciela (Sara Bessio) and teenage daughter Ana (Anaclara Ferreyra Palfy), who forms the film’s emotional center of gravity. Rudolfo is dissatisfied with his new marriage, Graciela is focused on her dying mother, and the void of attention from her parents leaves Ana to seek it in the wrong places.

THREE feels very much like a melancholic (and realistic) take on the quirky family dramedies that dominated the 2010s and 2020s, mostly drawn in brief, episodic scenes that gesture toward a bigger scope than is warranted by the material. The combined tension and lightness of touch that made WHISKY feel like watching bugs squirm under a microscope is here, but Stoll’s acute melancholy is impossible to miss, and the filmmaker again uses music (this time, punk and indie tracks from Uruguayan bands) to chart queasy emotional landscapes.

“This film screams ‘Uruguayan’ in so many ways, at least the stereotypes conveyed in previous films by the duo Rebella/Stoll and subsequent movies that followed their style in the Uruguayan Wave that began in the 2000’s. Being released in 2012, technologically speaking it looks like it was shot some ten years earlier: plenty of tube tv’s, white CRT monitors, VHS players, etc… A great soundtrack by local bands, usually very underappreciated in the spanish-speaking world, let alone outside of it. Loved the stylish 1990’s football jerseys from Defensor and other smaller sides from their local league and abroad.” — jaibeseret, Letterboxd

A FUGITIVE FROM THE PAST (飢餓海峡)
(STRAITS OF HUNGER)
Dir. Tomu Uchida, 1964.
Japan. 183 min.
In Japanese with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, April 5 – 5 PM
FRIDAY, April 11 – 10 PM
MONDAY, April 14 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, April 24 – 7:30 PM

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Tsunejirō Uchida, nicknamed “Tom,” chose to spell his professional name as 内田吐夢, using kanji meaning “to spit out dreams”—an irresistible metaphor for a consummately fluent image-maker who worked across epochs and genres.

Destined to be rediscovered by Anglo-European audiences every other decade or so, Uchida began his career with triumphs such as the now-lost peasant epic Earth, Kinema Jumpo’s best film of 1939 and a romantic depiction of rural labor that was used to recruit settlers to the Japanese colonial possession of Manchuria. Uchida himself went to Manchuria in the late 1930s, intending to make propaganda films. The director’s flirtation with extreme nationalism climaxed in 1945, as Russian forces moved in. In accordance with the values of bushidô, the true believer head of the Manchurian Film Cooperative took poison and died in Uchida’s arms.

Uchida stayed in Manchuria for almost a decade more, never directing a film, but studying dialectics and working for a time in a coal mine. The films he made upon resuming his career in Japan in the 1950s express a chastened, revisionist take on the symbols and narratives of Japanese empire and tradition. Stories of outcasts and amour fou, in modes from jidai geki to crime saga to folktale to dramedy, they also jump across registers from pulpy naturalism to candy-colored theatrical artifice. Diverse to the point of self-obscuring in their range of subject matter and setting, his films are united by fleet cutting, muscular closeups, and dynamic widescreen blocking, charged with a unique intensity.

Perhaps the capstone of Uchida’s career and the great uncanonized epic of ’60s Japanese cinema, A Fugitive from the Past begins with a desperate home invasion in Hokkaido in 1947, on the same night as a notorious ferry disaster. Two ex-convicts are among the bodies that wash up on shore, but a third man escapes with the loot. A decade later, the discovery of another body reopens the case.

Shot on 16mm and blown up to 35mm, with periodic jolts from solarization and other photographic tricks, the film has the tawdry tabloid urgency of Kurosawa’s High and Low or The Bad Sleep Well, a melancholy undercurrent of ruinous obsession a la Zodiac, and an inquiry into guilt and reinvention that’s operatic in its scope.

FRIDAY, APRIL 11 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, APRIL 13 – 7:30 PM

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It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time. — W.G. Sebald

Before his untimely death at 45, Jonathan Schwartz built a formidable body of work as one of the most promising and accomplished experimental filmmakers of the 21st century. A professor at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Keene State College in New Hampshire, his 16mm works are fragments of fleeting spectral moments, navigating landscapes as varied as the glaciers of Iceland and a canopy of trees near his Vermont home with the same sense of wonder. Combining the ephemerality of childlike awe with grief and mortality, his work often parallels that of authors like W.G. Sebald in its attempts to wrestle with the elusiveness of memory through found objects, readings, and his elliptical imagery, creating a form that is wholly new and enthralling.

Spectacle is proud to present the first program of Schwartz’s work to screen in NYC since 2019, a rare opportunity to view much of it as intended, on 16mm in an intimate environment. The event will be introduced by Jonathan’s close friends Rebekah Rutkoff and Emily Drury. Rutkoff is a NYC-based writer. She is the author of The Irresponsible Magician: Essays and Fictions and Double Vision: The Cinema of Robert Beavers. Drury is a landscape designer based in Harrisville, New Hampshire.

A LEAF IS THE SEA IS A THEATER
Dir. Jonathan Schwartz, 2017.
United States. 17 mins, 16mm to digital.

You cannot describe a house on fire until the actual event takes place. Perhaps there will be no fire. Either you’ll have to deny the description as a fiction, or burn the house in accordance with the script. — Dziga Vertov

THE CRACK-UP
Dir. Jonathan Schwartz, 2017.
United States. 17 mins, 16mm to digital.

“… an excursion through fear, near collapse, and transformation that takes its name from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1936 autobiographical essay. Reflecting on life’s ‘process of breaking down,’ it is both extremely personal and also relevant to the difficult times we live in. With sublime 16mm footage of glaciers, monumental snow-covered landscapes, and an icy, roiling sea, The Crack-Up alternates strident sounds and brash rhythms and gestures of the camera with moments of arresting fragility and grace. Danger, death, the unexpected chaos, and destruction of life are all evoked with almost no human presence in the image. The sound of wind, rain, the cracking of frozen earth occasionally gives way to two voices: a female voice reciting from Fitzgerald’s text and a male voice struggling to use language at all. Schwartz’s film seems to take as its challenge Fitzgerald’s admonition to simultaneously ‘see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.'” — Irina Leimbacher

IF THE WAR CONTINUES
Dir. Jonathan Schwartz, 2012.
United States. 5 mins, 16mm.

“Jumpers move from right to left like the carriage return of a typewriter, while the landscape and rays of sunlight thrust lines in the opposite direction. The somehow nostalgic, slowed-down editing of the images contrasts with the preeminence of pounding sound, accompanied by a degraded, almost unintelligible narration from a cassette tape about the life and work of the German writer. As Schwartz points out, the soundtrack shares some similarities with Popul Vuh’s electronic score at the opening of Werner Herzog’s The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner (1974). This sound has the quality of a forgotten mantra or a robotic plea. The repeated motion swerves towards Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return: the temptation and fascination of going back to the origins by jumping away.” — Monica Saviron

FOR A WINTER
Dir. Jonathan Schwartz, 2007.
United States. 5 mins, 16mm.

“The camera remains static to capture the accelerated movements, shot frame-by-frame, of ice skaters on a sunny winter morning. They are not portrayed as living things—they don’t have the ability to speak, and they look like robots from another planet whose language is the sound of sharp razors on thick ice. They may very well be ghosts, and less alive than the figures of nature in an old book.” — Monica Saviron

WINTER BEYOND WINTER
Dir. Jonathan Schwartz, 2016.
United States. 11 mins, 16mm.

“Winter Beyond Winter confirms his gift for lyrically transposing what’s close at hand, in this case drawing a reverie of fatherhood from the short, sharp days of New England winter. The camera moves from laden trees to dazzled earth while on the soundtrack a boy reads. From here we follow an older man carrying skates and a boom mic into the woods. He turns a few elegant arcs around a small pond, the camera watching from the side before shaking off its melancholy and taking to the ice. One skater holds the image, the other the sound; the shot is their union.” — Max Goldberg

NEW YEAR SUN
Dir. Jonathan Schwartz, 2010.
United States. 3 mins, 16mm.

“… Schwartz approaches light traveling through water in all its forms. His macro lens strives to get closer to the essence, to the transparency of things, and yet, the tenebrous and doomed cry of a church’s bell, and the ascending, unstoppable pitch that accompany the images end up close to the sound of a derailed train—and the unfocused, unclear vision that comes with it.” — Monica Saviron

 

VALI: THE WITCH OF POSITANO
Dir. Sheldon Rochlin and Flame Schon, 1967
United States / United Kingdom / Italy, 62 mins
In English

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 30 – 7:30 PM

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It is in the bohemian’s nature to be a multihyphenate—or in the multihyphenate’s nature to be bohemian. Take Vali Myers, an Australian artist, dancer, and occultist, and self-proclaimed “creatrix.” She’s the captivating subject of Sheldon Rochlin and Flame Schon’s 1965 documentary Vali: The Witch of Positano. Instantly recognizable by her shock of red hair, facial tattoos, gold teeth, and kohl-lined eyes, Myers procured art related to her many talents: surreal, fluid paintings and drawings which revolved around primogenial magic and femininity, often depicting arcane supernatural figures. Myers was born in Sydney in 1930 to a merchant navy officer and a violinist, and by age 14 she had moved to St. Kilda, where she worked in factories and as an art model to pursue dance, her main passion beyond drawing.

By 17, Myers was lead dancer of the Melbourne Modern Ballet Company, and two years later she boarded a ship to Paris. The city was ravaged by war, and Myers, unable to find work, fell into a subculture of refugees, writers, and artists. (During this time, Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken photographed her for his seminal roman à clef Love on the Left Bank and made her the lead of his 1972 film Death in Port Jackson Hotel.) Myers was imprisoned multiple times for vagrancy and eventually expelled from Paris, only to return years later, at which point her artwork was discovered by The Paris Review‘s George Plimpton (a portfolio of her drawings ran in the magazine’s spring 1958 edition).

Flitting between Europe, Melbourne, and New York, Myers developed an artistic network, associating with figures like Abbie Hoffman and Patti Smith, and was encouraged to exhibit her talents by Andy Warhol and Salvador Dalí. After leaving Paris to quell her opium addiction, Myers settled in Positano in Southern Italy, where her cottage by the sea became a wildlife sanctuary, as if plucked from a fairy tale. Several films were made about Myers and her artistry, including Death in Port Jackson Hotel, Vali’s World (1984), Vali’s Diary (1984), The Tightrope Dancer (1989), and Painted Lady (2002), but none were as local to the most earnest slice of her life as Vali.

Spectacle is pleased to host Toronto-based critic and curator Saffron Maeve for a special event. Her series Contours is dedicated to films that thematize arts like painting, sculpture, sketching, and performance. In Rochlin and Schon’s hourlong experimental documentary, we visit Myers at her Positano dwelling, where she is seen dancing, chatting with friends and visitors, rolling in bed with her lover, tending to animals, engaging in occult rituals, and briefly painting. The film hop-skips between reality and phantasm, acting as an affective archive for this nonconformist artist to play within. Dreams are indulged, fantasies are taken as fact, and oblique rituals make for hyperreality. It’s clear Myers’ flavor of celebrity is unusual, but the filmmakers tend to both her worldview and public perception, keeping in mind that art is rarely made consciously.

Special thanks to Saffron Maeve and filmmaker Flame Schon.