Please join Canal Street Research Association and Spectacle for a screening of P.I. SNAPS, Monica Sharf’s portrait of private investigator Dempster Leech, and Yvonne Rainer’s FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO…, starring Rainer, Leech, Shirley Soffer, John Erdman, Renfreu Neff, James Barth, Epp Kotkas, Sarah Soffer, Tannis Hugill, and Valda Setterfield.
P.I. SNAPS
dir. Monica Sharf, 1997
United States. 17 mins.
FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO…
dir. Yvonne Rainer, 1971
United States. 90 mins.
TUESDAY, APRIL 19 – 7 PM followed by Q+A with Monica Sharf and Dempster Leech (remote)
ONE NIGHT ONLY at Canal Street Research Association
In the 80s and 90s, private investigator Dempster Leech was one of the city’s foremost experts on luxury counterfeiting. Working undercover, he often assisted the boutique law firm Harcourt & Pavia who represented the Fendi family—working with а young litigator named Sonia Sotomayor.
A former actor, Leech once described the job of rooting out fakes as a version of reality that “came closer to pleasing than the versions of reality I was dealing with as an actor.” Casting and directing “pretext investigations” was for Leech akin to choreographing performance—but with “real” results. Decades prior, Leech had starred in downtown choreographer-filmmaker Yvonne Rainer’s FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO…, a meditation on artifice that channeled Rainer’s No Manifesto (1965), refusing spectacle in favor of exposing the mechanisms of cliché.
Followed by a conversation around fiction, reality, cliché and artifice with director Monica Sharf, Dempster Leech, Spectacle’s Steve Macfarlane and Canal Street Research Association.
Venue:
Canal Street Research Association
264 Canal Street., #5E
New York, NY 10013
