THE OREGONIAN
Dir. Calvin Lee Reeder, 2011
USA, 81 min
In English

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 4 – 7:30PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14 – MIDNIGHT
MONDAY, OCTOBER 24 – 7:30PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 28 – 10PM

GET YOUR TICKETS!

After a car accident on a lonely stretch of road, a woman finds herself stranded and badly wounded with no memory of her name. A series of strange encounters leads her through the woods and sand, searching desperately for the answers she needs to finally be at peace.

Calvin Lee Reeder’s first feature film The Oregonian could be described as “Purgatorial Noise Horror”. A juxtaposition of breathtaking Pacific folk wilderness against derelict lo-fi nightmares. An aggravating piece of surreality with a gooey black sense of humor. Ojai Manson/Hipster sensory assault, edited to all hell, soaked in sickening reds and otherworldly greens. You may never want to eat an omelette again.

Who’s Watching: The Early Films of the Pacific Street Collective

On Saturday, October 29th, Spectacle and Cine-Móvil will host a tribute to the Pacific Street Collective and their early works of counter-surveillance. This program celebrates the 50th anniversary of RED SQUAD (1972), which will be followed up by the equally audacious SURVEILLANCE: WHO’S WATCHING? (1971).

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29TH – 7:30 PM

GET YOUR TICKETS!

Red Squad
dir. Pacific Street Collective, 1972
45 mins, USA.
In English

“An extraordinary work of investigative journalism.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Made by then-NYU students under the tutelage of Martin Scorsese, RED SQUAD sees the Pacific Street Collective disrupt and annoy extrajudicial police and FBI surveillance units who continually intruded on anti-Vietnam War demonstrations throughout the ‘70s. Their brave efforts to disclose these wanton acts of targeted surveillance by a prejudiced police force was acclaimed by critics, including Amos Vogel who dubbed it “an extraordinary political film.”

Surveillance: Who’s Watching?
dir. Pacific Street Collective, 1971
60 mins, USA.
In English.

SURVEILLANCE: WHO’S WATCHING? can be seen as a direct precursor to RED SQUAD, as young members of the newly formed Pacific Street Collective position themselves as bait during a peaceful demonstration to out members of Chicago PD’s radical squad on television. Despite catching PD knuckleheads Maurice Daly and Truman Stromberg in the act of surveillance, all three members of the Collective were arrested and told to leave Chicago under threat of violence, a testament to their courage as politically-motivated documentarians at an early point in their careers.

Special thanks to Steve Fischler, Joel Sucher and Cine-Móvil.

Cine Móvil is a pop-up cinema collective spreading revolutionary culture across the five boroughs. Founded in the wake of the 2020 uprisings, the collective endeavors to bring together audiences to view and discuss radical cinema. Cine Móvil recognizes the role that culture plays in movements, and aims to uplift the revolutionary consciousness of people, connecting the films they screen with the real material conditions which people and organizations face in the present. Cinema is for the people!

This SPECTOBER, we will invoke spectres on the screen. Probing the economic, social and political hauntings that possess the doomed state of our present condition, this program addresses the echoes of buried philosophies that reverberate beyond their graves.

Ken McMullen’s GHOST DANCE (1983) dives into a Derridean whirlpool as it reconciles the immortal nature of ghosts against the finitude of life, while Alan Klima’s GHOSTS AND NUMBERS locates a shared virtuality among phantoms and cybernetics. Legendary Spanish director Pere Portabella’s VAMPIR-CUADECUC (1971), a film forged on the fly as Jesús Franco filmed his own Count Dracula starring Christopher Lee, tessellates shards of making-of footage into an oblique allegory on dissent during dictatorial times. This subversion of Franco’s canonical narrative doubles as a disruptive act against Francisco Franco, collaging a mess of scenes that dispel the theatrical formulation of a grand political narrative. J.P. Sniadecki and artists Xu Ruotao and Huang Xiang’s YUMEN (2013) takes over this legacy, piecing together an anti-portrait of China’s economic prosperity through its exploration of a once-oil rich town now in ruins.

Special thanks to Elif Karlidag and Ken McMullen at Art Cinema, Documentary Educational Resources, Alan Klima, J.P. Sniadecki, Xu Ruotao, Huang Xiang and Cinema Guild.

GHOST DANCE
dir. Ken McMullen, 1983
100 mins, United Kingdom.
In English.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1 – 7:30pm
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 5 – 10pm
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21 – 7:30pm w Q/A from Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of Cinema Without Reflection
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25 – 7:30pm

GET YOUR TICKETS!

Jumping between Paris and London as it traces the lives of two young women (Pascal Ogier and Leonie Mellinger) as they muse about ghosts and memories, Ken McMullen’s Ghost Dance falls somewhere between Celine and Julie Go Boating and San Soleil in its investigation into Jacques Derrida’s phantasmagoric philosophy. Though intellectually rigorous, the film maintains a humorous tone, balancing heady ideas alongside entrancing visuals and witty dialogue.

VAMPIR-CUADECUC
dir. Pere Portabella, 1971
66 mins, Spain.
In English.

GET YOUR TICKETS! 

MONDAY, OCTOBER 3 – 10pm
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8 – 7:30pm
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 12 – 10pm
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 28 – 7:30pm w Q/A from Sara Nadal-Melsio, author of Politically Red

Shot on the sly while Jesús Franco shot his own Count Dracula, Vampir-Cuadecuc remixes making-of footage alongside an investigation into the figure of the vampire. Boasting a roaring score and high-contrast black and white, the fantasmic materialism of Portabella’s early experiment deconstructs the dominant cinematic and political narratives of the Franco regime.

GHOSTS AND NUMBERS 
dir. Alan Klima, 2009
66 mins, Thailand.
In Thai with English subtitles.

GET YOUR TICKETS! 

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1 – 5pm w Q/A w director Alan Klima
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8 – 5pm
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11 – 7:30pm
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25 – 10pm

Anthropologist Alan Klima’s directorial debut is set in the aftermath of the Asian monetary crisis and the collapse of the Thai baht. Narrated by a ghostly figure who wanders the colossal buildings left unfinished by the crash, Ghosts and Numbers embarks on a surreal trip through Bangkok as it tries to reckon with the wreckage of a financial fiasco.

YUMEN 
dirs. J.P. Sniadecki, Xu Ruotao & Huang Xiang, 2013
65 mins, China.
In Chinese with English subtitles.

GET YOUR TICKETS! 

MONDAY, OCTOBER 3 – 7:30pm
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11 – 10pm
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20 – 7:30pm w Q/A w director J.P. Sniadecki
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26 – 10pm

Commended as “a painful and nostalgic homage to a fading world and the medium which registered it,” after winning the Special Jury Award at FICUNAM, J.P. Sniadecki (of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab) and Chinese artists Xu Ruotao and Huang Xiang’s celluloid collage conjures a ghost story that aptly reflects the terrain it registers. Tracing the lives of lost souls hovering about a once-rich oil town now in ruins, Yumen (玉门) creates a spellbinding story registering the effects of late-stage capitalism.

MEU NOME É TONHO
Dir. Ozualdo Candeias, 1969
Brazil. 90 min
In Portuguese with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 – 7:30 PM 
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 – 7:30 PM – Special Event – Remote Q&A with Sao Paolo Critic, ‎Filipe Furtado – $10 

GET YOUR TICKETS!

NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE of HD RESTORATION

Spectacle Theater and Cinelimite are proud to present Ozualdo Candeias second feature, the essential Cinema Marginal film, MEU NOME É TONHO.

Completed just two years after Candeias’ debut cornerstone, A MARGEM, MEU NOME É TONHO is Candeias’ first exploration into the Brazilian western. Photographed by master cinematographer, Peter Overbeck (THE RED LIGHT BANDIT) and scored by the virtuosic Brazilian composer, Paulinho Nogueira, Candeias follow-up feature is a raw and poetic western which compares to almost nothing in the western canon (a la the Italian Spaghetti westerns of Leone or Corbucci or any of the films of John Ford, Hawks, etc).

Filled with an unsettling sense of macabre humor, unremitting violence, and a demonic collective laughter that is louder and perhaps even more perverse than the sounds of the colt revolvers from the antagonistic Manelão gang, MEU NOME É TONHO unravels as a sardonic descent into Candeias’ madness which includes an anarchic sense of pacing and some of the most remarkable and bewildering moments of montage and hand-held cinematography in the history of cinema.

The story of Tonho’s revenge on the Manelão gang while straightforward in nature is told through sparse dialog, symbolic imagery, and Candeias’ unique sense of pace which is felt and controlled by the ambient sounds of the terrain juxtaposed by the echoing laughter of the depraved, land-grabbing gang. MEU NOME É TONHO is not just essential Brazilian cinema but is also some of the most inventive filmmaking that came out of the 1960’s.

Special thanks to Eugenio Puppo and Heço Produções.