What was 9/11? It depends who you ask. A news anchor would tell you it was a national tragedy; a conspiracist, an inside job; a leftist, an empire’s comeuppance; a film critic, the year’s biggest blockbuster; and your cousin, a meme. In his typically blasé fashion, Baudrillard called it “the absolute event,” while the renowned German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen controversially called the attacks “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.” A pattern emerges: from the moment American Airlines Flight 11 was piloted into the North Tower, it has been remarkably difficult to comprehensively define 9/11.

The attacks were encoded in the national memory over seemingly endless minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months of media coverage. A quarter of a century later, it is tempting to think of 9/11 as a media event announcing material reality’s final, total subordination to the image—as Baudrillard said, “They did it. We wished it.” Yet to conceive of 9/11 in only these terms would be to overlook the lived horrors of the day and the insidious reverberations of a nationwide psychic trauma. From our historical vantage, the events of September 11 seem as fundamental to our current reality as the air we breathe. In recognition of the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11, 2001, Spectacle presents a selection of films that confront the phenomenal and psychic impact of the attacks, and the indelible scar they left on the world. There was before, and this is after.

Program 1: REICHSTAG 9/11 & DISINTEGRATION LOOP 1.1

REICHSTAG 9/11
Dir. Ken Jacobs, 2016.
United States. 38 min.
Silent.

“The Eternalism is a method of making images more real. … Time and space are monumentalized.”
—Ken Jacobs

“I fear cruelty, despise it, and it exists. It exists. It’s often called patriotism.”
—Ken Jacobs

With Reichstag 9/11, Jacobs applies his Eternalism method to heavily distorted witness-recorded footage of the September 11 attacks. Here, the metaphysical qualities of the method assume a mournful tone—as we watch the towers repeatedly collapse, we simultaneously watch them rebuild themselves. It is as if Jacobs still sees them and their occupants there, as if the space itself wore a scar. The title alludes to the burning of the Reichstag in 1933, suggesting a similar exploitation of a population’s fear and anger by an imperial power seeking to expand its reach.

WARNING: This film contains sequences of intense strobing effects.

Special thanks to the Jacobs Family.

screening with

DISINTEGRATION LOOP 1.1
Dir. William Basinski, 2001.
United States. 62 min.

“All of a sudden the world had changed. It had taken on new meaning. As the days and months went by, people just cascaded into their own disintegration loops of fear, terror and anxiety. But also there was a rethinking going on about what had value. There was a lot of compassion in the public sphere amongst New Yorkers.”
—William Basinski

August of 2001 found William Basinski, uninspired and unemployed, at a personal nadir. Rummaging through his old work for inspiration, he rediscovered some loops of slowed-down muzak he had recorded on tape in the 1980s. He began digitizing the recordings, intending to use them for a new piece. In the process of rerecording the loops, the ferric oxide coating the tapes began to flake away, the fidelity of the recordings decreasing with each loop. The Disintegration Loops are thus a record of Basinski’s real-time capture of information disappearing into nothingness. Basinski completed his rerecording process on the morning of September 11, 2001, a few hours before he was scheduled to interview for a job at the World Trade Center.

That evening, from the rooftop of his Williamsburg loft on North 11th Street, Basinski played the loops and watched the smoke plumes from lower Manhattan billow out over the Upper Bay. He borrowed a friend’s video camera and recorded the last hour of the day’s light, until the black plume of smoke was indistinguishable from the night sky. He later set the loops to this footage. A landmark of twenty-first century avant-garde process music, The Disintegration Loops are considered one of the most significant works of art related to 9/11.

We will be time-syncing our September 11, 2026 screening to play exactly 25 years later as the sun sets over Spectacle, blocks from where Basinski made the loops.

Special thanks to William Basinski and Jeremy deVine.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 – 7:10PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 – 5PM
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 – 10PM

TICKETS

Program 2: THE UNRECOVERED

THE UNRECOVERED
Dir. Roger Copeland, 2007.
United States. 130 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 – 7PM; w Q&A (This event will be $10.)
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 – 7PM; w Q&A (This event will be $10.)
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 – 5PM
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 – 10PM

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“Were there two towers because there was too much meaning on September 11th to be contained in just one tower?”

So asks the Artist, one of three intertwined paranoiacs in Roger Copeland’s sprawling post-9/11, DIY, Brechtian fever dream. Proposing a twist on the axiom that the urge to destroy is also a creative urge, Copeland’s film suggests that all creativity is paranoid, and all paranoia is creative. It depicts a world that exists in “a state of semiotic arousal, a horniness for meaning.” Taking place in October of 2001, the film cuts between the story of a young girl who thinks the father that walked out on her family might be among the unrecovered dead at Ground Zero; the self-proclaimed BioEvangelist, who, in between compulsively consuming media coverage of the attacks’ aftermath in his basement chemistry lab, plans his own epistolary reckoning; and the aforementioned Artist, who monologues (livestreams?) from his studio about the ways the “death artists” have put art on the defensive.

To an audience in 2026, its diagnoses might seem rather obvious, its degree of sincerity inscrutable; but to an audience in 2007, The Unrecovered offered a proto-experience of a world that would not fully mature for nearly two more decades. Guided by an overtly didactic montage, it recalls the works of Sergei Eisenstein and Adam Curtis, while its Spalding Gray–like monologues of semiotic analysis-paralysis and its sometimes clunky, low-fidelity computer graphics presage more ironic, contemporary aesthetics as seen in media by personalities like Brad Troemel and Conner O’Malley (try to keep track of the number of times Fight Club is mentioned—you can’t). Truth be told, The Unrecovered might be well described as “What if Godard directed Loose Change?”

The Unrecovered” explores modes of perception in an age of fear, paranoia, and messianic fervor; it has the persistent throb and hallucinatory jab of a nightmarish hangover…  Haunting… gut-punching… brainy and gutsy… “The Unrecovered”  can  ‘spook us to a higher  recognition of what true  shock and awe look like.”
—James Wolcott, Vanity Fair

“I was knocked out. Really gets under your skin… A grand tour of some very difficult stuff.”
—Eric Bogosian

Special thanks to Roger Copeland.

Program 3: CIRCLING ZERO

CIRCLING ZERO: WE SEE ABSENCE
Dir. Ken Jacobs, 2002.
United States. 110 min.
In English.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 – 10PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 14 – 7:30PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 – 5PM

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The primary image of Circling Zero is of lower Manhattan’s disfigured skyline. A slowly dissipating column of smoke indicates where the towers once stood, looming over the city like a ghost. The film is a verité documentary of the few weeks following September 11; Jacobs himself described it as “not so much a work as a sampling of the ongoing actuality.” His camera captures the élan vital of the city as it adapts to a changed environment, steadfastly incorporating this new reality into the familiar routines of daily life.

Special thanks to the Jacobs family.

Program 4: THE TIME WE KILLED

THE TIME WE KILLED
Dir. Jennifer Reeves, 2004.
United States. 94 mins.
In English.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 – 7:30PM (This event is $10.)
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 – 7:30PM (This event is $10.)

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Soon, I realized the citizens are as vicious and self-involved as ever. And me, I wondered if I could perform such a spectacular suicide.

Like The Unrecovered, Jennifer Reeves’s The Time We Killed is concerned, above all, with the psychic fallout of the attacks. While The Unrecovered pursues a manic immediacy, Reeves numbly and associatively follows the reverberations of the day’s events as they lead into the Bush administration’s echo chamber of lies and jingoism conceived to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Robin is an agoraphobic writer, unable to leave her apartment for three years following the September 11 attacks. The film is a poetic, black-and-white collage of high-contrast images and similarly binary thinking; in constant voiceover Robin either ponders death or laments a past lust for life, evinced by her recollection of once-passionate but long since ended love affairs. In what could be considered a spiritual forebear to the anhedonic monologuing of Ottessa Moshgfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Reeves condenses a certain posture of the post-9/11 national psyche into an amnesiac individual, one who is trying to remember—yet also willing to forget—how things might once have been.

16mm print courtesy of The Film-Makers’ Cooperative.

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THE SKY IS CLEAR AND BLUE TODAY
Dir. Ricky D’Ambrose, 2019.
United States. 16 mins.
In English and German with English subtitles.

Ricky D’Ambrose’s short film centers on a German filmmaker who has been hired to recreate the infamous photograph taken by Thomas Hoepker of five young, hip New Yorkers posed on the Brooklyn waterfront, seemingly relaxed and unbothered by the wreckage of the Twin Towers smoldering across the river. D’Ambrose’s typically dispassionate, Bressonian approach uses the image as a jumping-off point to investigate the (f)utility of the sort of interpretive gamesmanship that surrounded this and other images of the attacks.

 

 

 

While the brutal dictatorship and resulting censorship of the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos regime ought to have smothered the country’s film industry throughout the 1970s and 80s, it wound up producing what is now referred to as The Second Golden Age of Philippines Cinema. The country was lucky enough to have a libertarian-inclined censorship office head, and most of the boundary-pushing films of that era did well enough financially and critically to allow for the Marcos regime to accept a certain amount of cinematic criticism. Nevertheless, it still wouldn’t have been called a Golden Age without directors such as Lino Brocka, Kidlat Tahimik, and Mike De Leon all managing to push boundaries via their own forms of melodrama, docufiction, social realism, and more.

Despite being considered the second-most important Filipino director after Brocka in his home country, the work of Second Golden Age director Ishmael Bernal has not been screened as often abroad in recent years, in part due to print scarcity. Notorious for his sharp wit, the openly gay Bernal was a subversive ironist and a committed feminist. His films frequently used the roles of women to skewer what he saw as a sick society under the Marcos regime, best summed up by a line from his provocatively-titled essay Why The Martial Law Will Affect Your Sex Life: “Here we are, being practically ruled by a stranger who shall parade the chills and fevers of his ego and what are we going to do about it? We are going to be gripped by hysteria, that’s what.” This attitude culminated in the consensus pick for his masterpiece, Himala (1982), a study of the blind faith of the Philippines and the grip of hysteria that comes with it – it has only been vindicated with the country’s election of another Ferdinand Marcos to the Presidency. Bernal has subsequently remained a touchstone for the two key figures from the subsequent Third Golden Age: Spectacle favorites Lav Diaz and Raya Martin.

Spectacle is pleased to announce a partial retrospective of some of Bernal’s best-known work from the heart of the Second Golden Age, showing in rarely-screened 2K/4K restorations to allow for a new appreciation of why Bernal’s contributions to Filipino cinema are considered some of the country’s boldest and best.

Special thanks to Thellie Castro-Palanisamy & Cathrina Lim-Achacoso (ABS-CBN).

A SPECK IN THE WATER
(NUNAL SA TUBIG)
Dir. Ishmael Bernal, 1976.
Philippines. 118 min.
In Tagalog with English subtitles.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 – 10 PM [w/ intro]
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 – 5 PM

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SPECIAL INTRO by filmmaker Isabel Sandoval (Lingua Franca, Moonglow) on September 19th!

This film has hardcoded Japanese subtitles due to the 2K restoration being based off the sole extant 35mm print.

In the impoverished village of Santa Fe, some investors capitalize on fish pens growing bangus (milkfish) under the care of Mang Pedro (Ruben Rustia). But for some mysterious reason, the fish are dying. To save the situation, they decide to salt the fish and dry them under the sun. Benjamin (George Estregan), who owns a boat that shuttles passengers to town, has a regular passenger Chedeng (Daria Ramirez), who is going to be a midwife soon. Chedeng has a close friend and neighbor, Maria (Elizabeth Oropesa), but unknown to each other, they are both having an affair with Benjamin. When Maria becomes pregnant, she becomes Chedeng’s first patient and a disastrous situation that ends in tragedy ensues.

“A Speck in the Water reappears as one of the most personal early works by Bernal, when he was most assured and daring in his innovative style. Today, it looks like a forgotten masterpiece, but at the time of release, the film was very unevenly received by local film critics. Some of them said it was ‘un-Filipino,’ and even [that it looked] ‘French!’ However, as one sharp critic, Hernando, wrote: ‘Nunal sa Tubig is so well crafted, complex, sharp, and to a certain degree, abstruse, that the film requires complete concentration and openness to a new film concept, and, whenever necessary, a willingness to see it again.’” – Max Tessier

TISOY!
Dir. Ishmael Bernal, 1977.
Philippines. 120 min.
In Tagalog with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 – 7:30 PM

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Based on a popular comic strip by Nonoy Marcelo, Tisoy (Christopher de Leon) is a bohemian balikbayan [Filipino term for repatriate] searching for his father. He gets help from his friends as they scour the immaculately clean Metro Manila as well as reunite him with his high-school sweetheart.

“Bernal, taking a momentary step away from the melodramas he specialized in, used [the comics] to create a story full of gags, hidden social metaphors, and meta-jokes. To say that Tisoy! is as straightforward narratively as the synopsis makes it seem would be a lie. It’s a mosaic of stories and characters which, despite being connected to one another, would be able to stand strongly on their own. Above all, Tisoy! is a satire made during the time of martial law. When cinema served as a tool against the government, Bernal used it to not only criticize the situation – fancy menu items while most of the country was impoverished due to the rapid urbanization, or streets that apparently weren’t as clean as he portrayed them – but also to mock other films made during that time.” – Magdalena Nieświec

HIMALA
(MIRACLE)
Dir. Ishmael Bernal, 1982.
Philippines. 124 min.
In Tagalog with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 – 5 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 – 7:30 PM

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When plain orphan Elsa (Nora Aunor) begins having visions of the Virgin Mary, the rest of the residents of her isolated village find themselves questioning their own beliefs and values. Soon, Elsa is healing people with a variety of ailments. As word of this phenomenon spreads, tourists, pilgrims, patients and a documentary filmmaker all arrive on a quest to partake in the miracle.

“Bernal himself described the film as ‘…not just the story of a couple of characters. It is also the story of a society. And that is Himala. What I show in Himala is the picture of a society that is ill. A society which has no recourse but to cling to apparitions and miracles. It is not important if there really was a miracle or not. What is important is the need of a people to believe.’” – ABS-CBN

“Web site users voted to award the late Filipino director Ishmael Bernal’s film the top prize in the CNN APSA Viewers Choice Award for Best Asia-Pacific Film of All Time, edging Akira Kurosawa’s acknowledged classic Seven Samurai into second place.” – Fei Phoon

The dog days of Summer are upon us and it’s hotter than Hell in New York. The triumphant Knicks colors that kicked off the season giving way to orange haze billowing in from up North and blue floodwater swelling around our feet.

It’s high time we lit out for the coast, packed our things and hit the highway for sunnier shores. Maybe we’ll pick up a few friends along the way, throw in with the great mélange of maniacs, drifters, murderers, perverts, and thieves that this wretched country has to offer.

The American Interstate as an endless journey through Hell. A profusion of cherry lights, high beams, and overheads darting aimlessly across its black expanse. Lost souls driving straight on to oblivion, into the unknown terrors that lurk around every bend and behind every blind. All the while, the Devil sits pretty in the passenger seat.

HIGHWAY HYPNOSIS
Dir. Ken Camp, 1984
United States. 63 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 1 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 6 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, AUGUST 9 – 5 PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26 – 10 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 31 – 7:30 PM

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WARNING: This film contains sequences of intense strobe effects.

One year after our EZTV series, we return to the hallowed video gallery with the first shot-on-video feature by Ken Camp (MANTRA), a monumental work of narrative video art and queer horror, following the Los Angeles Freeway Killer (Leonard Lumpkin) as he stalks the desert highways between L.A. and Las Vegas in search of his next victim.

Camp once remarked that if film is a screen between ourselves and the world around us, then video is a window: A thesis which HIGHWAY HYPNOSIS takes to its extreme. In lieu of a traditional narrative, the film is mainly structured around the Killer’s silent, trancelike drives. Camp’s camera takes in countless real-life motorists, pedestrians, and passersby, all with the unsettling undercurrent that any one of them could end up a victim. As the film progresses, these drives are punctuated by acts of sex and violence that push the viewer to the fringes of the Killer’s impenetrable psychology, into “the frightening zone where lay the genetic codes and memories that make us all killers.”

Special thanks to Muscle Distribution.

HELL’S HIGHWAY
Dir. Jeff Leroy, 2002
United States. 70 min.
In English.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 5 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 20 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, AUGUST 23 – 5 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 29 – MIDNIGHT

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While on a road trip through Death Valley, four college friends pick up a hitchhiker named Lucinda (Phoebe Dollar) who soon reveals herself as a bloodthirsty maniac. The group finally manages to rid her from their car, only for her to reappear around every corner and down every bend like a murderous desert mirage.

In the early years of the post-BLAIR WITCH found footage boom, DIY legend and Spectacle fave Jeff Leroy (RAT SCRATCH FEVER) gifted us this SOV horror gem that’s part-DV travelogue and part-low budget splatterfest. The film goes 0 to 60 right out the gate and doesn’t slow down from there, with Leroy packing it to the brim with crafty gore, exploding miniatures, in-camera tricks, and one iconic sequence in which Ron Jeremy gets his dick cut off (though, alas, not in real life). But the real star of the show is Phoebe Dollar, who turns in a multi-faceted multi-character performance that punches well above its micro-budget weight class and ranks among one of the all time great horror turns.

Special thanks to Jeff Leroy.

MANSON FAMILY MOVIES
Dir. John Aes-Nihil, 1984
United States. 87 min.
No spoken language.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 14 – MIDNIGHT
SATURDAY, AUGUST 22 – MIDNIGHT

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Once upon a time in Hollywood, a former Beach Boys affiliate-turned-amateur Beatles historian directed a few of his most impressionable friends to commit a series of grizzly murders across Southern California, in what became one of the defining moments of 60s popular / counter culture and the nation’s ever-growing, ever-morbid fascination with “true crime”.

Between the years of 1974 to 1979, not long after Manson Family trials had concluded, enigmatic artist and connoisseur of fringe culture, John Aes-Nihil, embarked on a project to “re-stage” the events leading up to the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders as a series of faux home movies, based on the legend that the Family had at one point stolen camera equipment to document their actions. The resulting feature— which, coincidentally, premiered in 1984 at EZTV alongside HIGHWAY HYPNOSIS— truly lives up to its filmmaker’s namesake Aesthetic Nihilism: Shot entirely on Super8mm and completely silent save for an accompanying soundtrack mostly comprised of music made by the Family itself (plus a little Patty Duke for good measure). The film re-frames the Manson Family story as a first-person travelogue across Southern California, imbued with chillingly realistic detail as we bear (false) witness to one of the most notorious events of the American century.

Special thanks to Aes-Nihil and Aes-Nihil Productions.

JANIE
Dir. Jack Bravman (and/or Roberta Findlay, depending on who you ask), 1970
United States. 65 min.
In English.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 7 – MIDNIGHT
SATURDAY, AUGUST 15 – MIDNIGHT

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Janie (Linda Vair) is your typical teenage girl. She likes boys, hates school, and thinks most adults are stupid and disgusting. One afternoon, she and her best friend decide to skip school and hitchhike out of their small nondescript town. But when her friend and their driver pull over for a little afternoon delight, Janie’s own psychotic impulses take the wheel, revealing to her the orgiastic pleasure she derives from murder and mayhem. Janie then heads back to the road to thumb another ride, soon to be another bloody corpse left in her wake.

Rounding out our series of nightmare travelogues is this gratuitously sleazy and psychedelic softcore affair, shot, narrated, co-starring, and allegedly co-directed by sexploitation filmmaker extraordinaire, Roberta Findlay (Bravman is the sole directorial credit on the film, though he himself has admitted that Findlay did most of the actual directing; ironically a claim which Findlay denies). Come for the (ahem) titillating encounters between Janie and her would be lovers, but stay for the spontaneous violence, deep fried acid rock grooves, and Findlay’s unhinged voiceover narration as Janie’s own conscience, as deeply poetic as it is disturbing.

Special thanks to Alpha Blue Archive.

SATAN’S MENAGERIE
dir. Gary Griffith, 2001
USA. 101 min.
In English with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 8 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19 – 10 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 24 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 28 – MIDNIGHT

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See – Vampires! Demons! Ghouls! And Satan Himself!

The monsters of the world gather at a one-of-a-kind gathering. Who will attend and what kind of carnage will break out?

Dr. Craymoor (co-writer Thomas V. Powers, doing his best hammy public-access-Vincent Price) is a paranormal talk show host who dabbles in the dark arts in pursuit of fame and riches. We’ll refrain from spoiling the (surprisingly convoluted) plot, but it involves, among other things, a Vietnam vet turned werewolf, a half-man half-amphibian who escapes from a carnival sideshow, and the disciples of a centuries old blood cult called the ‘Sons of Jeramin’.

Not released until the early 2000s and shot in the mid-90s on whatever money one-shot filmmaker Gary Griffith could scrape together (including cash from selling his own comic book collection), SATAN’S MENAGERIE approximates the feeling of channel surfing through B-movies late at night while in the grip of a severe fever.

This August, Spectacle presents four rarely-screened feature (or at least near feature-length) films from underground legend George Kuchar, all presented in 16mm.

From his first 16mm effort (Corruption of the Damned) to one of the most ambitious of the many films he made with his San Francisco Art Institute classes (Symphony for a Sinner), these four programs provide a neat (if not necessarily concise) survey of Kuchar’s work before his eventual transition into working with video in the 80s. So big in scope… so massive in emotional impact… join us and thrill to every buttock-numbing hour.

16mm prints courtesy of Anthology Film Archives

PROGRAM 1: CORRUPTION OF THE DAMNED

SATURDAY, AUGUST 15 – 5 PM

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CORRUPTION OF THE DAMNED
Dir. George Kuchar, 1965
In English, 55 min.

The film is a cross between The Silence, L’Aventura, and Terrytoons… In it there can be found beauty, glamour, sophistication and smut. An enormous amount of people were rounded up to participate in cameo-roles. For some it was the first time in front of a movie camera but that did not stop them from behaving just as wantonly as they would under normal circumstances. One thing of interest is that Donna Kerness meets Gina Zuckerman at the climax of the film. The motion picture screen’s greatest sexpots are together for the first time in the same scene! If you don’t know what the word sexpot means, wait until you see Donna Kerness’s frying pans! And, if you think they’re great, stay awake and you’ll get a peek at Gina Zuckerman’s noodle-strainer! – GK

Plus:

COLOR ME SHAMELESS
dir. George Kuchar, 1967
In English, 30 min.

This movie was made when I was a bit depressed which is nothing new, but also the main actor, Bob Cowan, happened to be depressed also and so we had a wonderful time working together. One of the actresses was also separated from her husband at this time and the movie solidifies into concrete the repressed desires of everyone who works with me, or more realistically, instead of concrete, the production becomes a frozen, brittle enema bag that slowly thaws and can only be appreciated along channels previously blocked by organic reality. – GK

PROGRAM 2: UNSTRAP ME

SATURDAY, AUGUST 15 – 7:30 PM

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UNSTRAP ME
dir. George Kuchar, 1968
In English, 77 min.

Starring Walter Gutman and a lot of women with a few elephants. This film is my longest movie in color because someone else produced it. It has a lot of scenery and the soundtrack has a lot of sound. I went to Cape Cod, New Jersey and Florida and got drunk in most of those places because Walter drinks a lot and I had nothing else to do between shooting. The drunkenness did not affect my shooting but many people think that it did. – GK

PROGRAM 3: THE DEVIL’S CLEAVAGE

SUNDAY, AUGUST 16 – 5 PM

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THE DEVIL’S CLEAVAGE
dir. George Kuchar, 1973
In English, 107 min.

This is my latest picture and it was pretty late in getting out because I’ve been sort of busy lately working in and out of the classroom and in and out of the gutter. It’s a black and white film and I wanted to make a really big picture… a mammoth drama of people in a jam. It took two years to make and got kind of constipated at times but I finally squeezed it out when I realized I had a feature film on my hands. The longest film I had previously made was 70 minutes… (Unstrap Me). It was rightfully labeled as flabby which is a word that wouldn’t fit The Devil’s Cleavage. Bloated would be a more suitable adjective for this film. To create a bloated fresco of people in emotional trouble sort of excited me but of course it was very exhausting since I wound up bloated and exhausted after the thing was finished. – GK

PROGRAM 4: SYMPHONY FOR A SINNER

SUNDAY, AUGUST 16 – 7:30 PM

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SYMPHONY FOR A SINNER
dir. George Kuchar, 1979
In English, 56 min.

The tuneful, tacky and lavish saga of an exotic dancer and her passionate relationship with her parole officer. Sprinkled throughout this colorful tale are cameo appearances, choreography, songs, and something for everyone. – GK

Plus:

BACK TO NATURE
dir. George Kuchar, 1976
In English, 10 min.

Scenes for this film were shot in Death Valley and Kings Canyon, Sequoia National Park. It’s a love story of betrayal, a search for happiness, fulfillment and misery among nature’s grandeur. – GK

AQUEERIUS
dir. George Kuchar, 1980
In English, 8 min.

Young men and women awash in the vital forces that gush forth from flaccid hoses or dribble relentlessly from nozzles. – GK