Over five decades, the French artist Jean-Louis Costes has constructed an immense body of work. A prolific songwriter, musician, performance artist, writer and filmmaker, he is perhaps best known, if he is known at all, for his music, especially his synth-driven industrial noise, though his musical output, like his film work, is impressively and deceptively varied. The comparison “the French GG Allin” comes from the bodily confrontation and audience provocation in their respective live performances. It can offer a rough orientation for viewers unfamiliar with Costes, but does nothing to explain his artistic project. Inside of France, his books are respected, while his incendiary satirical lyrics have made him the target of lawsuits and criminal investigations.

Abroad, some will know his collaborations with Lisa Carver (Suckdog, Rollerderby), his former wife. Film viewers may recognize him from Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s BAISE-MOI (2000) and Gaspar Noé’s IRREVERSIBLE (2002). Yet his own film work is rarely screened, sitting at the bottom of his public reception, as unhinged as it is underseen. In fact, this program is the first serious retrospective of his films in the United States. The majority of the subtitles in English were created specifically for this program.

“The people who come to my shows are the outsiders of their own groups. It will be punks who are no longer totally satisfied with punk, goths although those won’t admit it. So they’re people who break away from their groups. It’s the anti-social people from everywhere.” – Jean-Louis Costes

“Costes is the ultimate French absurdist, and he and Lisa Carver wrote operas together and performed them at punk clubs. The mixture of personality and identity was fierce and mind-boggling and far more complex and intelligent than just accidental genius.” – Thurston Moore

Costes did not set out to make films, just as he did not set out to make music alone. He tried to play in bands, but nobody would take him. He set up a reel-to-reel in his flat and started alone. Piano on one track, vocals on the other. The one-second delay between the record and playback heads produced a chaotic style. He refused to choose between melody and noise, between pop and weird sounds, between lyric and texture, and he refused to give up making the unlikely thing of all of those at once. He wrote his own songs, recorded them himself, dubbed his own cassettes, and invented his own label. By 1984 the synthesis held. The home studio he built in his Saint-Denis basement gave him the freedom to produce music on his own terms.

The camcorder was bought to archive performances for VHS sales. He turned it on himself in his ruined loft. The first film, ONLY GOD SEES ME (DIEU SEUL ME VOIT), featured in Program 3, was a solo recording with no crew and no editing experience. The films in this retrospective come out of that lineage. The films were made because the camcorder, the basement, and the body were already there, and because he could take the camcorder on the road. No audience was presumed in advance. The result is a body of films that moves from Saint-Denis to Tokyo, New York, and the Amazonian jungle, and remains outside traditional circuits of exhibition, with no label, no distributor, and no institutional support.

This retrospective gathers a representative selection of short- and medium-length films from 1990 to 2006.

This is a retrospective for viewers willing to meet explicit, confrontational underground work directly. The films are formally and emotionally unhinged, and the lower register is fully present, staged through fiction and performance. Scatological content recurs. Often in revolting detail. Sexual content is unembarrassed and frequently violent. Sexual frustration runs through. But none of this exists, Costes claims, without dramaturgical necessity. The films remove the usual aesthetic protections. A romantic and playful streak runs through the work, although usually against all evidence. The slapstick humor, beauty, tenderness, frailty, weakness, and failure are part of the mechanism.

Program 1 is the clearest entry point, built around travel, media panic, and street romance. Program 2 turns inward: DEADLY GAS IN TOKYO is lonely and stylized, and I LOVE STUFF is the joyous, deranged pressure point. Program 3 is the wildcard, built around solitude, private ritual, and mystical collapse.

Each program features an unique introduction recorded for Spectacle by Jean-Louis Costes.

 

 

PROGRAM 1: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE

THURSDAY, JULY 16 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JULY 20 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JULY 24 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, JULY 28 – 7:30 PM

TICKETS

“You’re in a kind of niche where nobody wants to touch anything related to failure. You know, everything about shame, failure in a person. That’s something that’s not show business at all… I deal with everything that is the hidden side of humanity.” – Jean-Louis Costes

MORPHO
Dir. Jean-Louis Costes, 1998
In French with English subtitles, 26 min.

A female scientist ventures into the Amazonian jungle in search of a legendary butterfly. A hunter offers to guide her to a remote spot where the creature is said to appear. But the hunter, played by Costes himself, turns out to be a dangerous sexual maniac. Pulp jungle exploitation shot almost entirely at remote locations in French Guiana. Reedited for DVD in 2007.

THE HEZBOLLAH VIRUS
Dir. Jean-Louis Costes, 2001
In French with English subtitles, 8 min.

Put in perspective by the September 11 events, a critique of the desensitization at work in media exposure, and the numbness produced by repeated exposure.

CRACK KISS
Dir. Jean-Louis Costes, 1991
In French with English subtitles, 23 min.

Costes in New York, hooked on crack because of a woman (Lydia Zamm). Shot on location in New York City, with an eclectic cast. Early-90s New York City sleaze in loose camcorder form: hotel rooms, street romance, and a ravaged downtown that refuses to stay in the background.

 

PROGRAM 2: THE MAD MASTER OF SAINT-DENIS

THURSDAY, JULY 16 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, JULY 21 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, JULY 25 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, JULY 29 – 7:30 PM

TICKETS

“Yes, I think I make operas. Well, in my head, they are operas, because there is a script. People think it is performance art, that we do whatever… work with the body, roll around in filth. But no: in my head, it is a romantic narrative. I couldn’t act like an idiot, or even drop my pants, without a narrative justification.” – Jean-Louis Costes

DEADLY GAS IN TOKYO
Dir. Jean-Louis Costes, 1995
Silent, 17 min.

A short film about loneliness and lost love. Costes in a shady Tokyo hotel room, surrounded by bars and love hotels. The woman he met won’t return his calls, so he fills the time playing with himself, his keyboard, and a plastic bag.

I LOVE STUFF
Dir. Jean-Louis Costes, 1996
In French with English subtitles, 51 min.

A couple struggling to pay the bills kidnaps their impotent neighbor’s wife and mails torture videos to her husband as ransom to get out of their financial hole! Costes plays the couple’s sadistic transvestite half, while his partner plays its dominatrix other half. Instead of paying the ransom, the impotent husband finds the ransom tapes arousing and asks for more videos, and from there things get a little more slippery.

 

PROGRAM 3: I LIVE ALONE

FRIDAY, JULY 17 – 11:55 PM
SATURDAY, JULY 25 – 11:55 PM

TICKETS

“I live alone deep in the countryside. Three hens and a rooster are my only friends. I’m out of money and will have to eat my hens. Then I’ll commit suicide.” Jean-Louis Costes

KILL & FUCK (excerpts from SEVEN DEADLY SINS AND A GRACE)
Dir. Jean-Louis Costes, 2005
In French unsubtitled, 4 min

From the SEVEN DEADLY SINS AND A GRACE collection.

NOOKY
Dir. Jean-Louis Costes, 1990
In French with English subtitles, 13 min.

Left alone, a man reverts to infancy: diapers, toys, and a deposit on the carpet. Every adult hides a child who just wants to be held. With Lisa Suckdog Carver.

DISCO COW
Dir. Jean-Louis Costes, 2025
Silent, 1 min.

In the Pyrenees Mountains, cows dance in the pastures and ring bells night and day.

ONLY GOD SEES ME (DIEU SEUL ME VOIT)
Dir. Jean-Louis Costes, 1990
Silent, 30 min.

Solitary home performance. The title is a Haitian expression for what one does in private when no one but God is watching.

SAUL AND THE SORCERESS
Dir. Jean-Louis Costes, 1997
In French with English subtitles, 22 min.

After yet another fight with his girlfriend, a man obsessed with the biblical story of Saul flees halfway across the world to Saül, a town in the Amazonian jungle of French Guiana, gets drunk, and walks into the night with a machete. His wife follows and finds him too late. One of the director’s strangest and most mystical films. Domestic collapse becomes biblical fatalism: a man mistakes escape for destiny, and discovers love only as regret after repair proves impossible.

Special Thanks to Jean-Louis Costes

Translation and Subtitles by Benjamin Pequet

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the early Aughts, two filmmakers from the South made the groundbreaking, campy queer films, FRATERNITY MASSACRE AT HELL ISLAND and HELLBENT. These films subverted how gay men and their relationships were portrayed at the time, exploring their identities, friendships, coming out and finding love. From a pledge night event on a cursed island in Memphis to a wild Halloween night out in West Hollywood, these friends and lovers fight to survive until morning as they battle homophobia and crazed, masked murderers.

Fraternity Massacre was filmed 20 years ago by Memphis-based filmmaker Mark Jones. He previously wrote the screwball comedy ELI PARKER IS GETTING MARRIED? (2000) and later directed TENNESSEE QUEER (2014), plus a series of short films from 2016-2025. Two of the shorts will screen before the main attraction which hasn’t been screened in New York since 2007.

HELLBENT celebrated its 20th anniversary last year. Originally from Fort Worth, Paul Etheredge filmed this over a two-year period in West Hollywood and marked his directorial debut. It was one of the first queer slasher films, and influenced a wave of stylistic, queer horror films in the 2000s. Etheredge went on to release THE OTHER in 2025.

FRATERNITY MASSACRE AT HELL ISLAND
Dir. Mark Jones, 2007.
United States. 80 min.
In English.

FRIDAY, JULY 3 – 10:00 PM
THURSDAY, JULY 9 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, JULY 14 – 10:00 PM
FRIDAY, JULY 31 – MIDNIGHT

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Coming out is hard enough, especially when there is a maniacal killer clown on the loose! New pledge Jack Jones and his secret boyfriend struggle with coming out to their fraternity brothers. Before dawn, he realizes he is not alone and seeks acceptance in the harsh environment of a southern fraternity in the early 2000s. Meanwhile, students start being brutally murdered and everyone seems to have a motive. As the pledges are locked on a cursed island overnight, can Jack survive the homophobia and deranged killer running rampant on Hell Island?

Preceded by a screening of:

HENRY
Dir. Mark Jones, 2018.
United States. 7 min.
In English.

A grieving man in the deep south is told by a sibling that he cannot bring a loved one to his father’s funeral.

THE COACH, THE PRINCIPAL AND THE COMPROMISE
Dir. Mark Jones, 2018.
United States. 6 min.
In English.

In order to stem increased homophobic violence at a high school, a Principal presents an unusual solution to the heads of the theater and football departments.

HELLBENT
Dir. Paul Etheredge, 2004.
United States. 85 min.
In English.

SUNDAY, JUNE 28 –  5:30 PM
FRIDAY, JULY 3 –  MIDNIGHT
MONDAY, JULY 13 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, JULY 31 – 10 PM

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It’s Halloween night in West Hollywood and everyone is dressed to kill hoping to take home costume prizes and more. A group of twenty-something friends plan a big night out as they pursue their crushes, until a brooding maniac clad in leather stalks the gay bars and hook-up spots on Santa Monica Boulevard. Who will go home alone…or even worse, who will never make it home again?

FWENDS 
Dir. Sophie Somerville. 2025. 
Australia. 92 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, JUNE 6 – 10 PM
MONDAY, JUNE 8 – 10 PM 
SATURDAY, JUNE 20 – 7:30 (Virtual Q&A with Director/Co-writer Sophie Somerville!)
MONDAY, JUNE 22 – 10 PM

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Spectacle is proud to announce the US premiere of Australian filmmaker Sophie Somerville’s feature debut FWENDS (2025). The film is a low budget, hang out style friendship comedy that follows 20-something long distance friends Em (Emmanuelle Mattana) and Jessie (Melissa Gan) as they spend a weekend walking about Melbourne. Em is struggling with harassment at her high powered “dream job” as a lawyer, and Jessie is a stagnant stoner, adrift after an ugly breakup. Their reunion takes an unexpected turn when the pair get locked out of Jessie’s apartment, so naturally they decide to take MDMA, leading to some kaleidoscopic moments of confession and mutual understanding.

A dialogue-heavy exploration into the complexities of female friendship, the film’s personal tone naturally flows from comedic to serious, and back again. This is due in part to the collaborative nature of the script, which Somerville wrote alongside Mattana and Gan. Somerville once fittingly described the film as capturing “how being in your 20s means staring into a dark, deep, meaningless void,” though we promise the film is a comedy. Come alone or bring your fwends!

Winner of the Caligari Film Award at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival.

Preceded by:

LINDA 4EVA
Dir. Sophie Somerville. 2023.
Australia. 14 min.
In English.

This coming-of-age comedy short follows Linda (Shaelyn Connor) as she embarks on the worst nightmare of every self-deprecating, angsty young teenager: a day out to the beach. Wildly vivid art direction and a mix of animations bring Linda’s inner world to life. Winner of the Best Short Film Director Award at the 2023 Sydney Film Festival.

FORBIDDEN LOVE: THE UNASHAMED STORIES OF LESBIAN LIVES
dir. Aerlyn Weissman & Lynne Fernie, 1992.
Canada, 84 mins.
In English.

SATURDAY, JUNE 6 — 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 10 — 7:30 PM (16mm, $10)
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 17 — 7:30 PM (16mm, $10)

TICKETS

2k restoration by the National Film Board of Canada, 16mm print provided by the New York Public Library.  

Wryly following in the tradition of the 1965 exploitation “documentary” Chained Girls, Weissman and Fernie’s Forbidden Love is a sweet and tender oral history of mid-century Canadian lesbianism dressed up in pulp trappings. Reveling in the aesthetics of verboten paperbacks and sleazy exposé, this style is merely an ironic wink of a framing encapsulating the true stories of openly gay women in the forties, fifties, and sixties, searching for community, rebellion and love. Nine women dramatize their own personal histories, and the filmmakers additionally interview lesbian pulp novelist Ann Bannon. Along with the feature documentaries of Barbara Hammer and the fictional melodrama of Desert Hearts, Forbidden Love played a role in reclaiming the lesbian narrative from tragedy to triumph, becoming a staple in many young queers’ first KG freeleech queues in the decades since. Lovingly restored by the National Film Board of Canada in 2022 from a 16mm interpositive (the film is shot on a mix of 16mm and 35mm), Spectacle is pleased to show the film both in its recently cleaned-up digital form as well as on a 16mm print, care of the NYPL.

The colorful, quirky style that is associated with the members of the West Coast experimental film scene has long been defined by the foundational work of Bruce Baillie, Robert Nelson, and Pat O’Neill. Despite being every bit as critical to that scene’s origins and their subversions of New Age aesthetics, the small body of work that Will Hindle (1929-87) left behind has frequently resulted in many of his 11 films being far more discussed than seen. The increasing rarity of prints in good condition has further contributed to a certain obscurity, despite praise from writers such as Amos Vogel and Gene Youngblood. Happily, the breadth and depth of his work has experienced something of a revival in appreciation, with Joshua Minsoo Kim of Tone Glow putting together the first complete retrospective of Hindle’s filmography, Unknown Nostalgia, at Chicago’s Sweet Void Cinema in December 2024. Spectacle followed suit with their own complete retrospective, Unearthly Poetic Visions, in July 2025.

Spectacle is pleased to bring back a 6-film sampler of Will Hindle’s films due to collective demand for another dip into the pool. Whether you saw these films previously or not, it’s likely that this might be the last chance for New Yorkers to see the only good print of Watersmith in existence for quite a while, along with the rarity of theatrical screenings for his other titles. Come on in, the water’s fine.

Co-programmed by Andrew Reichel and Giovanni Santia. Special thanks to Joshua Minsoo Kim, Mark Toscano, Canyon Cinema, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and Lynne Sachs.

SATURDAY, JUNE 13 – 5:15 PM
SUNDAY, JUNE 14 – 5:15 PM

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NON CATHOLICAM
1963. United States.
10 min. 16mm.

Soundtrack by Paul Hindemith. Cinematography assistance from Bruce Baillie.

“In 1958, Will Hindle shot, edited, and printed a film called Catholicam, which does not seem to have been circulated. He returned to this film in 1963, re-edited and augmented it with additional material, and released it as Non Catholicam.” – Mark Toscano

“Another granddaddy of the American Personal Film movement. Set to the music of Hindemith, filmed entirely in a Gothic cathedral and edited to precision counter-point. An almost somber beginning that rises to brilliant exaltation. As with Pastorale, extremely innovative for its day and even now. Entire film was an ‘optical print’ to retain light nuances.” – Canyon Cinema

FFFTCM
1967. United States.
5 min. 16mm.

AKA Fanfare for the Common Man. Music by Aaron Copland.

“Renewed income and the ability to work on one’s own produced this feeling and work. A Promethean awakening, de-bonding of the human spirit … reaching for the unfiltered blaze of Light and Life. The driving sounds of heart beat, fanfare for the Common Man and devotional chants. A time of sharing … a touch of vision in the night.” – Canyon Cinema

“FFFTCM arrived in mid-1967, and it was like a 180-degree turn. It was a film that bet violently on life… for being, for advancement, for the right to look for and get a job. It didn’t look like it was going to be distributed, but a review by Lenny Lipton helped and they bought it. More than one person has told me that they see it as an orgasmic movie. In his new book, R. Pike, from Creative Films, says it’s a movie about ‘male masturbation.’” – Will Hindle

CHINESE FIREDRILL
1968. United States.
25 min. 16mm.

Cinematography assistance by John Luther Schofill.

“Hindle’s prize-laden work of cataclysmic visual and mental schisms stands as one-of-a-kind. Human universals crammed into a moment (infinity?) in one small enclosure (the universe?). The identifying viewer will judge.” – Canyon Cinema

“Many people appear in the movie (again, it’s like a first time), but very briefly, in the manner of memories or visions. The film focuses on the whirlpool of the room/cell/universe in which a Hungarian gypsy lives. And there is a disjunction. The editing will take the film even further. The Savage 1967.” – Will Hindle

BILLABONG
1968. United States.
9 min. 16mm.

“Winner of the main prize of the Oberhausen (Germany) International Film Festival, Billabong has gone on to even greater acclaim than its much-awarded predecessor. Now in collections and archives on three continents, Billabong … mates verité camera and violently creative and master editing … revealing the mood of youths contained by the government. On location in Oregon. Empathetic in the extreme.” – Canyon Cinema

“A remarkably intimate and at times palpably erotic study of boys in a Job Corps camp on the Oregon coast, Billabong is a sensuously humanist encounter with alienated youth, told in the filmmaker’s trademark undulating lap dissolves and scintillatingly grainy high contrasts. Loneliness and longing-for-elsewhere alternate with horseplay and horniness, and hijinks around urinals and pool tables culminate in an ecstatic moment of onanistic release.” – Chuck Stephens

WATERSMITH
1969. United States.
32 min. 16mm.

“Perhaps Hindle’s magnum opus to date. New York Times critic Vincent Canby calls Watersmith ‘beautiful abstract patterns of lines of energy. A kind of ode to physical grace.’ A deceptively ‘calm’ film requiring an equally calm audience and a superior soundtrack reproduction system, Watersmith weaves its lone visual threads closer and closer until the screen is awash with multiple levels of artistic achievement, technical supremacy, physical and mental demands and rewards … for the relaxed and receptive viewer. Not a flash and funk work. A film to be seen again and again.” – Canyon Cinema

“Watersmith is a mind movie. Hindle turns his film into a celebration of the freedom of bodies moving through water, the implacable grace of human forms freed from gravity. It ripples between reality and abstraction. There hasn’t been a movie quite like this since Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia.” – Entertainment World

“‘I was photographing champion swimmers,’ Hindle said of the Olympic athletes he shot, ‘and I wanted to be a champion filmer.’” – Joshua Minsoo Kim

SAINT FLOURNOY LOBOS-LOGOS AND THE EASTERN EUROPE FETUS TAXING JAPAN BRIDES IN WEST COAST PLACES SUCKING ALABAMA AIR
1970. United States.
12 min. 16mm.

“Presaging details and intent of Charles Manson’s cult and actions was not meant to be one of this film’s greater attributes. It was, however, filmed uncannily months before the facts were known. The resemblance is oblique. The film: the mysticism of a ‘calling,’ a journey to be made, a vision in mid-desert to behold and oneness with it all. Filmed in Death Valley.” – Canyon Cinema

“The title of celebrated ’70s experimental-filmmaking mainstay and current cine-avant-garde Invisible Man Will Hindle’s Saint Flournoy Lobos-Logos and the Eastern Europe Fetus Taxing Japan Brides in West Coast Places Sucking Alabama Air (1970) is almost impossible to remember. The film itself—a gorgeously photographed, fluidly edited slice of fin de siècle ’60s love and dread, shot largely in Death Valley, and both of the Manson Family moment and altogether adrift in time—is impossible to forget. In it, a shirtless bearded dude in flour-sack yoga pants treks and stumbles barefoot through the white-hot desert, pausing occasionally to assume the lotus position and radiate silent “om”s into the shimmering heat—Gus Van Sant’s Gerry (2002) as one man show. Dude might be ‘Saint Flournoy Lobos-Logos’ (whoever that is), we’re never really sure. The ‘Eastern Europe Fetus’ shows up, “crawling” through a fiery mandala in some indeterminate space and looking like a cross between 2001: A Space Odyssey’s (1968) star child and one of those hideous little edible chocolate babies. There are lens flares and eclipse halos, dude’s supple movements mesmerizingly match cut and complexly lap-dissolved one into the next, and there are more dudes, and nudes, dancing on balconies to bongos and the tinkling of ice cubes in drink glasses echoing down through the canyon…then the orange slash of a shadow-play knife in the night.” – Chuck Stephens

TRT: 93 min + reel changes