Calling all Bloodeaters, Love Butchers and Neon Maniacs! The lights go down, the screen lights up and every one of your senses is flooded with ghastly terror from beyond the fetid grave. Spend your Sundays drenched in blood and quivering with fear with a mystery (as in, we don’t tell you what we’re showing until you get here) horror flick from the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s or 90’s every other week.
THEMROC
Dir. Claude Faraldo, 1973.
France. 110 min.
In grunts.
FRIDAY, MARCH 4 – MIDNIGHT
MONDAY, MARCH 7 – 10:00 PM
THURSDAY, MARCH 17 – 10:00 PM
SATURDAY, MARCH 26 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, MARCH 31 – 7:30PM
With only a vague U.S. release and a blind eye turned by all but the most annoyingly nerdy film buffs, this surreal French satire doubles as a pitch-black freak-out. But when writer/director Claude Faraldo starts to lose it and settle for straight absurdism, THEMROC’s bizarre view of working-class revolution is, as Shock Cinema puts it, “worth a look, if only for its audacity. The most inspired aspect of this Working Class Rant is the fact that nobody on-screen utters a single word of intelligible dialogue, with the entire story told in grunts, howls or simple gibberish. At first glance, the middle-aged Themroc (Michel Piccoli) seems like your typical, brutish, dirty-undershirted factory laborer. And his day goes straight into the crapper once he arrives at his dreary job, and is called onto the carpet after playing voyeur on a manager and his leggy secretary. With a lifestyle this demeaning and repetitious, it’s no big surprise when Themroc suddenly goes bonkers, and for the first time in his miserable life, breaks free of his 9-to-5 shackles. The second he gets home, this disgruntled wacko wrecks his apartment (unlike modern-day Americans, who’d prefer to grab a gun and shoot their boss) and begins acting like a modern-day Neanderthal.“
Luis Ospina was a founding member of Colombia’s Grupo de Cali, an interdisciplinary collective dedicated to capturing the vitality of Colombian life and hypocrisy in how it was presented to the world. Formed in the early 70s, the group contributed immensely to Colombia’s nearly nonexistent film industry, founding Cine Club de Cali (“The Cali Film Club”), printing the film magazine Ojo al Cine, and creating numerous documentaries and fiction films. Grupo de Cali rejected the gravity of Third Cinema tenets holding sway at the time, especially the definition of documentary as “a cinema of facts and irrefutable truth,” opting to disrupt with black humor and reveal truth as subjective.
Having attended film school at UCLA, Ospina in particular warped Hollywood genres to paradoxically reveal larger truths about Colombia’s political climate. But it’s his subversion of documentary that helped Ospina achieve his ultimate goal of preserving personalities and places from oblivion. Ospina said he would “never be able to make a film that didn’t have to do with [his] city”. Each work in this series reflects Cali’s casual horrors and wary joy – Ospina’s documentaries are not necessarily true, but always truthful.
ANDRÉS CAICEDO: UNOS POCOS BUENOS AMIGOS
aka Andrés Caicedo: A Few Good Friends
Dir. Luis Ospina, 1986.
Colombia. 82 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles.
SUNDAY, MARCH 13 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, MARCH 21 – 7:30PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 29 – 10:00 PM
“May no one know your name and no one give you shelter. May you remain free of Fame’s foul schemes. If you leave a body of work behind, die easy, trusting in only a few good friends.”
– Andrés Caicedo, Long Live Music!
Cult author, playwright and poet Andrés Caicedo’s work captured the vitality and frustration of a generation of Colombians, avoiding magical realism’s twee sheen in favor of grounded social observation. Never directly acknowledging the heavy shadow narco-political violence cast over his city of Cali, Caicedo instead conveyed urban life’s inherent fatalism through stories of malcontent youth.
His influence resonates deeply through present-day Colombia, but as the opening scene of A FEW GOOD FRIENDS makes painfully clear, only nine years after his death no one in his hometown, forget country, remembers who he was. As the above quote suggests this is partly Caicedo’s own doing – at age 25, the day his first novel was published, he took his own life. Ospina’s documentary is an attempt to resurrect a self-erased man through his own words; taking that same quote to heart, A FEW GOOD FRIENDS focuses as much on Caicedo’s brief life and body of work as on his continued impact on friends left behind.
LA DESAZÓN SUPREMA: RETRATO INCESANTE DE FERNANDO VALLEJO
aka The Supreme Uneasiness: Incessant Portrait of Fernando Vallejo
Dir. Luis Ospina, 2003.
Colombia. 91 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 9 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 25 – 10:00 PM
MONDAY, MARCH 28 – 10:00 PM
From the opening shot capturing his own shadow filming, Ospina cheerfully defies documentary’s pretense to objectivity and impartiality in his documentary on controversial author Fernando Vallejo. Best known in the U.S. for his novel Our Lady of the Assassins (later made into a film of the same name by Barbet Schroeder), Vallejo left Colombia for Mexico in 1971 after censorship of his first film. He turned to writing, and in 2007 publicly renounced his Colombian citizenship, declaring it had always been an abusive and miserable country, but upon election of then-President Álvaro Uribe found it was stupid to boot. For someone so vehemently outspoken against Colombia, all Vallejo’s work, including three films made in Mexico, centers on the country; much like Ospina, he feels an unseverable connection to his homeland in spite of its horrors and corruption.
Vallejo’s writing, nearly always first-person, blurs the line between fiction and autobiography, and Ospina’s content to let his subject dictate the form – his presence behind the camera is continually called out by Vallejo, who delights in breaking the wall between subject and filmmaker. Both act audaciously, Vallejo with his perpetual soft-spoken blasphemies, Ospina with his unabashed use of video effects including picture-in-picture, mobile graphics, and text overlay. Ospina’s is the sin of friendly informality in a genre affecting somber elegance to convey ‘serious’ intent.
Beauty isn’t necessary to portray two intertwined characters on both sides of the screen – an author who lost hope in the language of film constantly flashing new facets of personality, presented by a director who overwhelms the screen with text – both haunted by places and people that no longer exist.
GRUPO DE CALI: 1971–1978
Total running time: 68 minutes
SUNDAY, MARCH 6 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, MARCH 19 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, MARCH 28 – 7:30 PM
OIGA, VEA!
aka See, Hear!
Co-directed by Carlos Mayolo.
1971. 27 min.
Made in the style of a straight-shooting As The World Turns… style mini-documentary, OIGA, VEA! serves as psychic exposé of Cali upon the arrival of the 6th annual Panamerican Games in 1971. Shooting with a handheld 16mm camera “borrowed” from Carlos Mayolo’s ad agency workplace, the film finds wobbly panoramas on spectacular assemblages, but always from the outside – an exteriority which defines itself fuller in the film’s cockeyed dissection of the Games’ pomp and circumstance. Rallies of military might serve only to demonstrate their planners’ unmistakable Cold War anxieties, and proprietary feats of infrastructural know-how – like a new railroad track, received by some shantytowns like manna from heaven – exposed for the limited-time-only publicity perks they are. Ospina and Mayolo steal glimpses at once officially decorative and incisively marginal; by the film’s end, the bitterness engendered by the project has been transferred in total from the shantytowns outside the Games’ encampment, and directly into the audience.
CALI: LA PELICULA
aka Cali: The Movie
1973. 13 min.
The frantic, colorful CALI DE PELICULA is antithesis to the sort of pedantic ‘misery porn’ Mayolo and Ospina would mock in AGARRANDO PUEBLO. Like a Mondo movie without the voiceover, Ospina and Mayolo frame bullfighting as silent slapstick, turn voyeuristic girl-watching ominous with a horror heartbeat, and capture life at street level, a pagan carnival churning by. Dancing, so vital to social life in the area, is shown in all its movement and color, but capturing faces without smiles or real joy – even enjoying themselves Cali’s citizens are cautious.
AGARRANDO PUEBLO
aka The Vampires of Poverty
Co-directed by Carlos Mayolo.
1978. 28 min.
This program concludes with AGARRANDO PUEBLO, widely recognized as the Group’s masterpiece. Mayolo and Ospina star as effigies of themselves, wielding Bolexes and Nagras on a mission to make the perfect cine de sobreprecio (“surcharge film”) for German television – skewering a then-commonplace of Colombian cinema dictated by the Committee for Quality Control, a government-supported bureau intended to help foster a national cinema but a de facto organ of censorship. Retitled THE VAMPIRES OF POVERTY in English, “Agarrando Pueblo” mistranslates a number of ways along the lines of “the clutching of poverty” and “the tricking of the people” – Ospina described it as a popular regional phrase at the time. The certainly film gives away as much (if not more) of its antiheroes’ sleazy postcolonial errand as it does the poverty they seek. Who is clutching whom? While the filmmakers are obviously the supposed vampires, the film is also explicit in the way their exposure to an impoverished zone gets their minds going about the potential windfall for their own careers (aided, inevitably, by a few lines of blow back at the hotel.)
In his The Aesthetic of Hunger (first presented at a festival in 1965, modified and republished in the early 70s) Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha criticized a certain trend in Latin American cinema that played up tropes of poverty as a kind of image-dependency. Rocha posited that these countries were still living under the same colonialism as yesteryear, only the means of representation (establishing poverty as an indomitable symptom/destiny, and not the result of socioeconomic policies) had changed.
The tension of this encounter – between the type of European-inflected filmmakers Rocha referred to as “above zero” for their filmmaking resources, and Cali’s poorest – reaches a remarkable boiling point in AGARRANDO PUEBLO. It’s unclear whether the documentarians’ expedition is being turned on its head, or in fact fulfilling its original intent too perfectly; the barrier between color footage of the slums and black-and-white footage of the filmmakers gets shakier. As Mayolo himself likened the experience of shooting OIGA, VEA! to having “150 assistant directors”, PUEBLO brings it all back home when one of the documentary’s “stars” refuses to participate, becoming all the more desirable a subject for the filmmakers. The man is played by one Luis Alfonso Londo, a longtime resident of the El Guabal shantytown profiled in OIGA, VEA! According to the filmmakers, they first met Londo when he jumped out and asked them: “Ah, con que agarrando pueblo, no?”
Canadian documentarian Ron Mann has been chronicling the odd corners of North American pop culture for more than 30 years. This March, Spectacle Theater is proud to present four of this acclaimed filmmaker’s finest explorations of the 20th century’s subversive ephemera.
TWIST
Dir. Ron Mann, 1992
Canada, 74 minutes
TUESDAY, MARCH 1 – 10:00 PM
SATURDAY, MARCH 5 – 10:00PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 6 – 5:00 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH18 – 10:00 PM
In TWIST, Mann traces the history of popular dance post-WW2 and the rise of the adolescent demographic. TWIST includes music and interviews from Little Richard, Chubby Checker, Frankie Avalon, Hank Ballard and Fats Domino, among others.
COMIC BOOK CONFIDENTIAL
Dir. Ron Mann, 1988
US/Canada, 90 minutes
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, MARCH 3 – 10:00 PM
THURSDAY, MARCH 10 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, MARCH 19 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 22 – 10:00 PM
In the groundbreaking COMIC BOOK CONFIDENTIAL, Mann interviews some of the comics world’s most innovative talents, from veterans like Will Eisner and Jack Kirby to underground legends like Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton to the 80’s vanguard of Charles Burns, Lynda Barry and the Hernandez Brothers. Also features Sue Coe, Al Feldstein, Bill Gaines, Bill Griffith, Harvey Kurtzman, Stan Lee, Frank Miller, Francoise Mouly, Art Speigelman, Harvey Pekar and other artists who helped defined the medium of comics.
GRASS
Dir. Ron Mann, 1999
Canada, 80 minutes
SATURDAY, MARCH 5 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, MARCH 11 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 16 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 22 – 7:30 PM
GRASS covers the U.S. government’s demonization and subsequently war on marijuana. Narrated by actor and drug activist Woody Harrelson.
TALES OF THE RAT FINK
Dir. Ron Mann, 2006
Canada, 78 Minutes
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 8 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, MARCH 10 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 20 – 7:30 PM
2006’s TALES OF THE RAT FINK presents a biography of cult icon hot rod artist Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, creator of Rat Fink, featuring appearances and narration by John Goodman, Ann-Margret, the Smothers Brothers, Matt Groening, Jay Leno, Stone Cold Steve Austin, ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons and Brian Wilson (yes, Brian Wilson).
DELIRIUM
Dir. Cosmotropia de Xam, 2015
Germany/Italy/Switzerland, 79 minutes
TUESDAY, MARCH 1 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 4 – 10:00 PM
SATURDAY, MARCH 12 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, MARCH 25 – 7:30 PM
Parasites that take over brains. Paranoia and Amnesia controlling the city. A state of emergency. Who is this mysterious person, who controls the parasites and what is her plan? A clockwork of puzzle pieces.
Cosmotropia de Xam, mastermind behind the band Mater Suspiria Vision, unleashes their latest art horror cinema experiment Delirium on Brooklyn at Spectacle Theater.
[gfycat id=”NauticalPhysicalDuckbillcat”]
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH: SONATA FOR VIOLA
(Altovaya Sonata, Dmitriy Shostakovich)
dirs. Alexandr Sokurov and Semyon Aranovich, 1981-1986
Russian Federation. 74 mins.
In English with Russian subtitles.
SATURDAY, MARCH 5 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, MARCH 17 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, MARCH 21 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 29 – 7:30 PM
Special thanks to Facets.
Culled almost entirely from archival footage, SONATA FOR VIOLA is a masterfully hushed essay-portrait of Russia’s most famous modern composer, Dmitri Shostakovich. Co-directors Sokurov and Aranovich balance a pictorial history of 20th century Russia against their subject’s own trials and travails, without talking-head interviews or in-hindsight reconsiderations. Beyond clips from propaganda films and contemporaneous newsreels, Aranovich and Sokurov bring to light an invaluable wealth of primary sources: photos and home movies from Shostakovich’s own life, and a bittersweet audio recording of a brief phone call between Shostakovich and his colleague David Oistrakh – the only instance of the composer’s voice in the film, outside an anti-fascist speech made during the war.
Made while the filmmakers were at Leningrad’s State Documentary Film Production studio (LSDF), SONATA carries a scathing critique of Shostakovich’s state persecution which was, unto itself, couched in a language of aesthetics: following Russian victory in WWII, Shostakovich’s beloved symphonies were disowned by state-favored composers for their excess “formalism” and alleged disconnection from the proletariat. For this issue – delicately parsed in the narrative, as this was a state-financed documentary – Sonata for Viola was nevertheless confiscated by KGB and suppressed until the perestroika years; upon its completion, the filmmakers were told by the authorities that “Shostakovich is far from being forgiven.”
Sokurov split up the reels and stashed part of the original cut at his own apartment, the rest in a friend’s countryside dacha. Elegaic but never gimlet-eyed to the point of nostalgia, SONATA FOR VIOLA plays its subject’s grand stature against the inexorable creative silence that followed his persecution, prompting essential questions about politicalized norms, the waxing and waning of Kremlin-approved aesthetics, and the pursuit of sublimity under totalitarianism. If the music is what looms largest, that’s the film’s inevitability: Shostakovich made all the more enigmatic as a cornered antihero, glimpsed almost entirely in one of history’s least-forgiving limelights.
LOVE THE ONE YOU LOVE
Dir. Jenna Bass, 2014.
South Africa. 88 minutes.
In English and Xhosa (subtitled).
THURSDAY, MARCH 3 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 13 – 5:00 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 18 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 30 – 7:30 PM
Remember that t-shirt that said “COUPLES ARE BORING AND EVERYBODY KNOWS IT”? Now that Anti-Valentine’s is over, Spectacle is pleased to present a swirling and intimate vision of modern dating from South Africa: Jenna Bass’ feature debut LOVE THE ONE YOU LOVE.
Anchored by the thousand-gigawatt chemistry of stars Chi Mhende and Andile Nebulane, the film posits love and autonomy at seductive odds, piercing out angles on the most telling minutiae of a relationship’s long and winding forge. Mhende stars as Terri, a phone sex worker who, while deeply in love with her boyfriend Sandile (Nebulane), can’t help but wonder if things are too perfect. Along the way, a despondent IT worker named Eugene (Loew Venter) uncovers a master-list of couples on the Dark Web that serves as justification to try winning back his ex, with whose much younger brother he has kept a fraught friendship.
The two plot strands go unlinked until the film’s third act, a disarmingly sober counterbalancing of romance and reality; the film’s blurring of conspiracy and superstition makes for a perfect analogue with a lover’s mindset. Largely improvised around a twenty-page treatment and aided immeasurably by a steady and endlessly observant handheld camera, LOVE is equal parts tactile psychodrama and freewheeling, hyperlinked RomCom. Bass’ film digs deeper into timeless conundrums of trust and compatibility than the sociopolitics of its Cape Town milieu, but questions about identity and class in the New South Africa are never far from the viewer’s mind. Simpler times resurface as impressionistic digital fragments; passionate arguments and awkward yearnings play out in remarkably real time.
“What is likely a tight budget is masked by Bass’ intimate, rather than irritatingly shaky, hand held camerawork and a dedication to her characters’ words and how they relate to each other. The film has more than one sequence that feels like we, as viewers, are eavesdropping as much as watching the romantic drama unfold.” – Elizabeth Kerr, The Hollywood Reporter
“We need more diverse narratives about Africa – the ones in films like SEX, OKRA AND SALTED BUTTER, PUMZI, and LOVE THE ONE YOU LOVE.” – Lindiwe Dovey, The Guardian
This March, Spectacle presents a diptych of blistering econo-graphic deep dives by celebrated documentarian Stephanie Black. H-2 WORKER profiles migrant laborers flown from Jamaica to Florida to cut sugarcane, at the behest of big-box food manufacturers taking advantage of the extranational economy. LIFE AND DEBT, the more famous of the two, returns to Jamaica to methodically dissect Clinton-era loan policies and import/export subsidies, while pitting the island nation’s jawdropping poverty against its tourist-friendly image. Black – whose career originated in environmental activism – has clearly cultivated a unique relationship to the island nation, and yet these are anything but grass-is-greener reaffirmations of exotic stereotypes. Instead, her films show us the Caribbean we know, deep down, we’ve been seeing all along: a mirage of paradise operated by an elite few, kept for the foreign dollars of a few more.
DVDs of both H-2 Worker and Life and Debt will be available for purchase at Spectacle during this series.
H-2 WORKER
dir. Stephanie Black, 1990
USA/Jamaica. 70 mins.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 9 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 15 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, MARCH 24 – 7:30 PM – ONE NIGHT ONLY ON 16MM FILM – Q&A with filmmaker Stephanie Black
SUNDAY, MARCH 27 – 5:00 PM
GRAND JURY PRIZE WINNER – 1990 SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL
Shot guerilla-style over the course of two years, H-2 WORKER is an unmissable document of pre-NAFTA neoliberalism, made at a time when over ten thousand Jamaican men per year were coming to toil in the sugarcane fields of Florida. (The filmmaker herself appears with her back to the camera, when the crew is not-so-subtly advised to cease shooting at one of the company stores where laborers can buy snacks, toothpaste, etc.) Aided by legendary cinematographer Mayrse Alberti (Creed, Crumb), H-2 WORKER captures a microcosm of indentured servitude: dimly lit dormitories, dusk-to-dawn shifts, brutal deductions in pay from both the sugar company side (and upon remittance to Jamaica.)
While the beyond-cheap labor is defended by sundry American executives as a lucky break for Jamaica’s depressed economy – the opposite of a “handout” – cane harvesters inevitably begin organizing for the purposes of work stoppage. With heartbreaking snatches from letters written by the workers to their families back home, Black’s debut exposé wears its advocating spirit on its sleeve, brazenly appealing for a change in the status quo in classic advocacy-doc style. The H-2 program was ultimately disbanded after a fifty-million-dollar class-action lawsuit, but the film’s contemporary pertinence speaks for itself: the wages offered these men are paltry to the point of destitution, but they’re working a job with no real claimants on the U.S. side. Sound familiar?
“H-2 WORKER does not pretend to offer any answers, but it solidly frames issues about the economy, employment and the treatment of workers who seem just steps away from slavery.” – Caryn James, The New York Times
[gfycat id=”SameElaborateCoelacanth”]
LIFE AND DEBT
dir. Stephanie Black, 2001
USA/Jamaica. 80 mins.
MONDAY, MARCH 7 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY MARCH 15 – 10:00 PM
THURSDAY, MARCH 24 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 30 – 10:00 PM
“Every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native would like to find a way out. Every native would like a rest. Every native would like a tour. But some natives – most natives in the world – cannot go anywhere. They’re too poor to escape the realities of their lives, and they’re too poor to live properly in the place where they live – which is the very place that you, the tourist, want to go.”
Narrated by Jamaica Kincaid (reworking the second-person narration of her 1988 classic A Small Place), Black’s breakout 2001 documentary interrogates the power structures imposed by the Bretton Woods organizations on so-called “developing” economies, and the psychological chasm that separates a nation’s exported reputation from reality on the ground. LIFE AND DEBT investigates International Monetary Fund levers in agonizing detail: “structural adjustments” designed to keep Jamaica’s post-colonial government in permanent debt, brutal export subsidies on agriculture, and loopholes for American fashion companies – many of whom are directly namechecked in the film, via first-hand testimonies from textile workers, paid an infinitesimal wage by American standards.
Not unlike the reggae-intensive soundtrack (featuring tracks by Peter Tosh, Buju Banton, Sizzla and the Marleys), the film finds melancholy drenched in beauty. While it’s a tired trope to call a film’s cinematography “sumptuous”, Black and her team of cinematographers (including Malik Sayeed) use their 35mm palette to sharply play Jamaica’s endemic lushness against itself, interrogating tropical tourist desire as its own system of imaging and control. Arguably the most rigorous dissection of postcolonial economic policy ever committed to film, LIFE AND DEBT is a penetrating critique of what the “New World Order” actually means for millions, and a sober-eyed ode to a culture in embattled flux.
“In Stephanie Black’s devastating, artful, and intelligent documentary, Jamaican farmers tell of the downward spiral of one livelihood after another: Cheap American-imported powdered milk usurps the local dairy supply, Chiquita squashes Jamaican banana farmers, Idaho potatoes nudge out regionally grown crops.” – Lenora Todaro, The Village Voice
“After the structural adjustments, the cuts in public expenditure, the removal of tariffs on imports, the privatisations and devaluations, Jamaica is still plagued by financial crisis. Development plans have been abandoned as the vision of independence recedes. LIFE AND DEBT is a very powerful weapon in the arsenal of the global movement for a more equitable economic order.” – Linton Kwesi Johnson, The Guardian
ONE NIGHT ONLY – WITH LIVE PERFORMANCE
SATURDAY, MARCH 12 – 7:30 and 10:00PM
“I’m a female Charlie Chaplin, I could have made slapstick comedy. I’m thinking more and more about acting again, in my films. My body in a movie is very important, it says something by itself, it has the weight of the Real. I can’t have actresses playing my clumsiness.” – Chantal Akerman
F is for Frame features a series of short video works by artists who use the camera to reframe, unframe, and construct feminists performances and identities. The artists use their bodies in a number of ways, ranging from minimal cameos and the use of childhood home video footage to staged performances created for the camera. Dialoguing with the history of feminist artists who positioned their bodies as sites for production and political intervention, the range of selected videos create a constellation of contemporary feminist strategies produced by and for the camera.
curated by bottom.
bottom is Millie Kapp & Georgia Wall’s curatorial project. F IS FOR FRAME is their second curatorial endeavor. bottom will be introducing the evening with a live interview generated from platonic lyfe partnership.
Basma Alsharif
we began by measuring distance (excerpt) 3:30
Maliea Croy
You Go Girl 4:48
Mary Helena Clark
Palms 8:23
EJ Hill
Girl 2:52
Rachel James
How to make work that messes up temporality and puts you beside yourself while making a process 7:49
Anne Kunsmiller
on chopping wood, or something, while dying in the wood, or else 8:11
Marissa Perel
If you are the desert, i’ll be the sea 4:47
Alex Schmidt
Adults with Braces: Trude Donovan 5:00
Colin Self
AVIDDIVA (excerpt) 5:59
Martine Syms
Notes on Gesture 10:27
Lili White
I: SNAKEFOOT 5:22
LIFESTYLE PORN PT. II
Special thanks to João Pedro Rodrigues, Joaquim Sapinho, and Rosa Films.
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 9 – 8:00 PM
Curated by Gabriel Abrantes, Alexander Carver, Benjamin Crotty and Daniel Schmidt, LIFESTYLE PORN, PART II is a rejoinder to a program of short queer films screened at Light Industry (LIFESTYLE PORN, PART I) from the last 60 years, marking a shift in the cinematic stylizations of homoeroticism from the guise of criminal marginality to bourgeois “lifestyle” fetishism.
The Spectacle program features LE MURA DI SANA, a short film made in Yemen by Pier Paolo Pasolini as an appeal to UNESCO, against what he perceived to be the corrupting forces of global economic development. Pasolini’s films and activism alike championed a certain romanticization of poverty and the “pre-modern” lifestyle as vitalist and sexually liberated, as a viable alternative to the repressive architecture of the burgeoning global-capitalist world of rampant consumerism and mono-culture. Whereas modern subcultural lifestyles have often exploited and have been exploited by cinematic form to various political ends, Pasolini sought to politicize the entirety of the developing world in service of his cinematic, aesthetic and personal anti-modernist politics.
The feature presentation is O FANTASMA, by contemporary Portuguese filmmaker João Pedro Rodrigues: a meditation on the alienated sexual encounters of a Lisbon garbage collector whose obsessions are the film’s sole subject. Here the refuse of the fully modernized city becomes the debased medium through which the protagonist’s burgeoning sexual fetishisms arise. Rodrigues’ ‘Fantasma’ can be seen as the ghost of Pasolini’s eccentric idealisms.
Structured as a “before and after” of ‘Late Capitalism’, the program will begin with a radical Marxist’s direct political appeal to curb capitalistic destruction of the “good life”, and thus to preserve and valorize the perceived innocence of pre-modern sexual freedoms and political naiveté. The “after” of these fantasies are imaged in O FANTASMA as the vast landfill of Lisbon – a monument to the rotting detritus of consumer culture that has displaced Pasolini’s unalienated innocence.
Friends with Benefits, a retrospective of works by Abrantes, Carver, Crotty, and Schmidt, will run at the Film Society of Lincoln Center from February 5-11. LIFESTYLE PORN, PART I plays Light Industry on Tuesday, February 2nd.
