This September, Spectacle presents three incredibly savage, incredibly savory kung fu films that launched the career of martial arts star Sonny Chiba and became landmarks of Japanese exploitation cinema – THE STREET FIGHTER TRILOGY!

Following the crossover success of Bruce Lee (who died the previous year), the mighty Japanese film company Toei decided to gamble on a considerably darker, more nasty brand of martial arts action with an unknown actor as the star. The result was THE STREET FIGHTER- a hard-boiled, gore-drenched exploitation classic that spawned an entire franchise of sequels and spinoffs.

Praised by fans as some of the best kung fu films of the era and worshipped by Tarantino for decades, don’t miss this chance to experience grindhouse exploitation at its finest!

Presented UNCUT and in their ORIGINAL JAPANESE LANGUAGE!

THE STREET FIGHTER
Dir: Shigehiro Ozawa, 1974
Japan, 87 min.
In Japanese with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1 – 7:30PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 – 7:30PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 – 10PM

Sonny Chiba IS Tokuma Tsurugi: a high-priced, high-voltage assassin hired by the Yakuza to kidnap the heiress of a deceased billionaire. When his demands are too high, all-out chaos ensues. Shortly thereafter, the body count starts to grow…

A significant shift away from the classic, technical martial arts, THE STREET FIGHTER features numerous sequence of raw, shockingly graphic brawls and battles that garnered the film the first ever X rating solely for violence. Chiba is pure brute force, an anti-hero that acts not out of honor, but for self-satisfaction. But even for a character with zero morals, Chiba’s magnetic personality shines through, lending his mercenary killer a sparkly, devilish demeanor.

A prime cut of juicy 70s kung-fu topped with an X-ray blast to the skull, THE STREET FIGHTER is unadulterated escapism of the bloodiest order.

RETURN OF THE STREET FIGHTER
Dir, Shigehiro Ozawa, 1974
Japan, 79 min.
In Japanese with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1 – 10PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 – 10PM
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 – 7:30PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 – 5PM

Chiba returns in full beast mode for THE SREET FIGHTER TRILGOY’s second entry!

Once again hired by the Yakuza to do their dirty business, Tsurugi must grapple with potentially killing an old friend and an old nemesis hellbent on revenge!

THE STREET FIGHTER’S LAST REVENGE
Dir, Shigehiro Ozawa, 1974
Japan, 80 min.
In Japanese with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2 – 10PM
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8 – 10PM
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 – 10PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 – 7:30PM

THE STREET FIGHTER TRILGOY concludes with Sonny Chiba channeling James Bond!

THE STREET FIGHTER’S LAST REVENGE takes a turn towards spy film and finds Tsurugi using a fistful of gadgets and masks to battle a sombrero-donned, laser-wielding Mexican bandito!

Featuring pinku legend Ike Reiko!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 – 10:00 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 – 8:00 PM ** w/ Alyce Wittenstein, Steve Ostringer, & Garrett Oliver in attendance for intro/Q&A! **
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 28 – 10:00 PM

Alyce Wittenstein has been called the “Queen of the New York Underground” and this September, Spectacle is pleased to play host to her and the films making up her MULTIPLE FUTURES trilogy. These films are jam packed with familiar faces, exquisite set pieces, snappy dialogue, and dazzling costumes. While the films have indeed been shown the world over, these screenings will be the first in New York in almost two decades. Join us all month for these remarkable films in a celebration of science fiction, hilarity, character actors, and ghastly view of a not-too-distant world.

PLUS
Special guests, vintage press and screening ephemera from around the world, original props, maybe some custom made buttons, outtakes, and more!

BETAVILLE
Dir. Alyce Wittenstein, 1986
20 min.

The first in what would come to be known as the MULTIPLE FUTURES trilogy, BETAVILLE – a post-modern nightmare – finds a down and out detective Coman Gettme (played by Wittenstein mainstay Steve Ostringer) returning to his hometown after a chance meeting with The Girl (Holly Adams). Once the two arrive in Gettme’s Cadillac things immediately go from bad to worse for this gumshoe when he learns, over a slice at Stromboli’s, that High Fashion is the new law in town. Gettme becomes obsessed with The Girl and is determined to meet back up with her and “save” her from the these fashionable fascists.

BETAVILLE kicks off the trilogy in a pitch perfect send up of the French New Wave and science fiction, and turns noir on it’s ear while (literally) running through some familiar parts of NYC. Holly Adams is nothing short of dynamite and Ostringer’s distinctive production design would lay the groundwork for the look of the films to come. Years before becoming Brewmaster at the Brooklyn Brewery, Garrett Oliver was co-producer on the film. The short would go on to be nominated for a number of awards at festivals and play all over the world – often (unsurprisingly) alongside Godard’s ALPHAVILLE.

“Most of the detective narrator dialogue is clever, the cinematography is excellent, and I liked the (sort of) industrial music and the song by the Singing Squirrels.” – Michael J. Weldon, Psychotronic Magazine #2, 1989.

NO SUCH THING AS GRAVITY
Dir. Alyce Wittenstein, 1989
40 min.

In the not too distant future the LaFont corporation has all but taken over Earth. The company has revolutionized all elements of style, beauty, education, and housing but in the process (progress?!) has shipped many of Earth’s more “useless” inhabitants to the mysterious man made planet – and the largest scale experiment in human history – known as Nova Terra. Two scientists – Kay Zorn (Holly Adams) and Albert Leenhardt (Steve Robinson) are about to receive a prestigious award for their work on the LaFont Facelifter when they learn that Nova Terra is disrupting the Earth’s gravitational pull and will soon collide if it’s not destroyed. A headstrong lawyer and Kay’s boyfriend – Adam Malkonian (a scenery chewing Nick Zedd) – mouths off to a judge (the incomparable Taylor Mead – RIP) while defending a human teacher and is ordered to be relocated to the doomed planet. After meeting with the ambassador of Nova Terra (Emmanuelle Chaulet of Eric Rohmer’s BOYFRIENDS AND GIRLFRIENDS), Malkonian learns that perhaps the LaFont Corporation hasn’t been entirely truthful about what really happens on Nova Terra and vows to stop the destruction.

Wittenstein’s first sync sound film is overflowing with amazing set pieces and incredible performances. Some scenes were shot at the New York Hall of Science – including an Ames room and a number of other dazzling optical illusions. Look out for cameos from Michael J. Anderson (TWIN PEAKS), Wittenstein’s father as the insidious Andreas LaFont, and the director herself on Nova Terra.

THE DEFLOWERING
Dir. Alyce Wittenstein, 1994
40 min.

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old are dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” – Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks.

The quote above opens Wittenstein’s third and final film – THE DEFLOWERING. Again featuring some of Wittenstein’s tried and true players – Holly Adams, Emmanuelle Chaulet, Taylor Mead, and more – the film concerns yet another evil corporation this time HUXLEY BIO-TECH and their means to sanitize/beautify this world of ours. This time Wittenstein (with Ostringer back on production design) takes the costuming helm as well.

The TIB (Total Immune Breakdown) virus has left the planet reeling and lethal allergic reaction are at an all time high. Huxley’s efforts to produce perfect, designer children that are immune to viruses have had the side effect of hyper-allergic reactions. Why isn’t anything being done about allergies? No one wants to fund it! With the mortality rate skyrocketing, can mankind bounce back and feel the soft caress of skin against skin ever again or will the line at the Holo-Memorial Funeral Home grow ever longer?

BOY WONDER: THE SHORT FILMS OF CURTIS HARRINGTON
Dir, Curtis Harrington, 1946-2002
Total program time: 96 min.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17 – 10:00 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 – 10:00 PM

** Don’t miss this month’s Harrington Midnights, Friday the 18th and Saturday the 19th! **

Special thanks to Flicker Alley and Drag City

If you happened to catch perennial Spectacle favorite NIGHT TIDE earlier this summer, then you know the strange power the film’s director Curtis Harrington can command. And like NIGHT TIDE, Harrington’s short films have a similar haunted allure…

Before having an incredibly diverse career that saw him direct everything from tv shows like CHARLIE’S ANGELS and DYNASTY to tv movies-of-the-week to low-budget studio flicks to Roger Corman schlock-fests, Harrington was part of the West Coast experimental film scene and an early pioneer of New Queer Cinema aesthetics.

Recently restored to their full glory, Spectacle is delighted to showcase the early shorts of an important yet criminally overlooked filmmaker who orbited the spheres of both Hollywood and the avant-garde.

“…tense, surreal abstract art suffused with a queer sensibility. Like his friend Kenneth Anger, Harrington used the cinematic language of B-movies to express what it was like to be a gay man in America in the mid-20th century, grappling with the often-intertwined feelings of fear and desire.” –The Dissolve

FRAGMENT OF SEEKING
Dir, Curtis Harrington, 1946
USA, 14 min.

Made at the age of 20 when Harrington was a film student at USC, FRAGMENT OF SEEKING features Harrington cryptically addressing his homosexuality in a double role. A year later, Harrington’s friend and frequent collaborator Kenneth Anger would cover similar terrain with FIREWORKS.

“A climactic fragment from the existence of an adolescent Narcissus.” –Curtis Harrington

PICNIC
Dir, Curtis Harrington, 1948
USA, 22 min.

Harrington extends ideas from FRAGMENT OF SEEKING onto a bigger canvas as a family outing on a beach turns off-kilter as a young man pursues a mysterious woman.

“A satirical comment on middle class life frames a dream-like continuity in which the protagonist pursues an illusory object of desire.” –Curtis Harrrington

ON THE EDGE
Dir, Curtis Harrington, 1949
USA, 6 min.

A man, a woman, a ball of yarn, and the bubbling mud pits of the Salton Sea’s post-apocalyptic wastelands. Featuring Harrington’s mother and father in the lead roles.

“A beautiful and frightening allegory of human frailty.” –Harvard Film Archive

THE ASSIGNATION
Dir, Curtis Harrington, 1953
USA, 7 min.

A Death-like figure in a Venetian mask takes a gondola ride through Venice’s canals before arriving at his destination.

“… invites comparison with Nicolas Roeg’s DON’T LOOK NOW: The lush color cinematography used in both only brings out more strikingly the decrepit majesty of Venice’s slow slide into the surrounding marshlands.” –Slant Magazine

THE WORMWOOD STAR
Dir, Curtis Harrington, 1955
USA, 10 min.

A visually dazzling portrait of legendary artist/poet/actress/occultist Majorie Cameron, filmed at her studio amongst her paintings (most of which she later burned in an act of ritualized suicide). A must-see for fans of the counter-culture icon.

“…a mini-masterpiece…” –Dangerous Minds

USHER
Dir, Curtis Harrington, 2002
USA, 37 min.

A fitting, campy end to Harrington’s career, USHER is Harrington’s long-gesticulating adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Fall Of The House Of Usher.” Made when Harrington was 76 years old, USHER is a larger-scale reworking of Harrington’s first 8mm short and the last film he would make before his death in 2007.

AND STILL I RISE: THE SHORT FILMS OF NGOZI ONWURAH
Dir. Ngozi Onwurah
1988-1993, 70 min

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 – 5:00 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 – 7:30 PM

Born in Nigeria in 1966 to a Nigerian father and white British mother, Ngozi Onwurah migrated with her mother and brother to England as a child to avoid civil war. In her groundbreaking work as a filmmaker – Onwurah was the first black British woman to have a film theatrically released in Britain, 1995’s WELCOME II THE TERRORDOME – this tension is palpable: the tension between her black and white heritages, the tension between violence and peace, the tension of simply being a black woman in hostile territory.

Spectacle is proud to present three of Ngozi Onwurah’s early short works, to bring her sorely underseen films into the light.

Special thanks to Ashley Clark and Women Make Movies

COFFEE COLORED CHILDREN
Dir. Ngozi Onwurah, 1988
15 minutes

A raw, unmitigated portrait of Onwurah’s childhood fears regarding her race, COFFEE COLORED CHILDREN portrays a young black girl and her brother who will go to any lengths to be white. The film is a stark portrayal of what happens when children of color internalize racism, and how it damages a young psyche.

THE BODY BEAUTIFUL
Dir. Ngozi Onwurah, 1991
23 minutes

THE BODY BEAUTIFUL is another stunning piece of autobiographical filmmaking from Onwurah. Starring the director herself, alongside her mother Madge, the film is a devastating story about a young biracial model whose white mother undergoes a radical mastectomy. The film is a tribute to Madge, as well as an exploration of black and white bodies within traditional feminine beauty standards.

AND STILL I RISE
Dir. Ngozi Onwurah, 1993
30 minutes

Named after, and inspired by, a Maya Angelou poem, AND STILL I RISE is a searing exploration of popular culture’s fetishization of, and hatred for, black women’s sexuality. Rather than the dramatization of the other two films, Onwurah created a documentary portrait of mass media’s representations of black women, and the real, detrimental effects that these representations have on the lives of actual black women.

Of the filmmakers associated with the so-called New Swiss Cinema, itself not particularly well-known abroad, Michel Soutter has perhaps the least claim to being any kind of household name. Alain Tanner and Claude Goretta are known outside their homeland, but Soutter has largely remained what he consciously started out as: a provincial filmmaker. Throughout his three-decade long career he stuck to the region between Geneva and Fribourg, setting all his films in the cities and their immediate environs. This geographical intimacy translates to a personal intimacy. His main focus is always the little particularities and material details of the lives of his characters, the clothes they wear and the furnishings in their houses. But what makes Soutter interesting is not the mere documentary value of his films—the immortalization of various minutiae of life in the provinces—but the purposes he uses it for: denouncing the spiritual vacuity of the Swiss bourgeoisie, finding value in idle playfulness, and lending his voice to a frustrated generation of directionless rebels who rattle their golden fetters if not actually breaking through them.

In his later films Soutter would go on to collaborate with such well-known figures of French cinema as Jean-Louis Trintignant, Delphine Seyrig, and Pierre Clémenti, but in his early works he employed such home-bred talent as Jean-Luc Bideau, who also worked frequently with Tanner and Goretta. This series of Soutter’s first five features aims to highlight the charming modesty of his themes, his economy of means, and the subterranean force running through the apparent calmness of his work: the schizophrenic boredom of the Swiss, which makes the restless among them leap from one though to another arbitrarily, poetically, trying to learn to feel again by feigning joy and rage and dispassionately emulating real passions.

THE MOON WITH TEETH
a.k.a. La Lune avec les dents
Dir. Michel Soutter, 1966
Switzerland, 75 min.
In French with English subtitles

SATURDAY, AUGUST 1 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 6 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26 – 10:00 PM

“I was twenty. I won’t let anyone say it’s the most beautiful time of life.”

The first line of Sartre’s schoolmate and Resistance fighter Paul Nizan’s 1931 novella, Aden-Arabie, is echoed by William, the young and restless subject of Soutter’s first feature. William lives an uprooted life, structured by a worthless bowling alley job and punctuated by self-destructive binges. He’s the first of Soutter’s lonely rebel protagonists, young men with deep reserves of undirected energy and shapeless yearnings for liberation. He’s virile, brooding, and violent. He regards children, virginity, and love as weaknesses. With his materialistic nihilism, it’s as if he was picked straight out of a Dostoevsky novel: “You know how science defines life? Gradual degeneration culminating in death.”

William’s terminal dissatisfaction derives from that other major theme of Soutter’s: Swiss society. In his films, the Swiss are either content professionals and housewives or quarrelsome misfits without any positive vision of the ultimate upheaval that would deliver them from the airless luxury prison that Switzerland represents for them. Shoplifting out of boredom, William resorts to a typically Swiss argument when caught: “I was trying to economize.”

HASCHISCH
Dir. Michel Soutter, 1968
Switzerland, 77 min.
In French with English subtitles

SATURDAY, AUGUST 1 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 12 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, AUGUST 23 – 5:00 PM

Soutter’s second feature fared better with the critics. At the very least, it showed the director’s mettle to continue building on his main preoccupations—feckless, aimless youth, absence of political solidarity and the anemic qualities of Swiss society—that had been the subject of so much initial derision. Like William in LA LUNE AVEC LES DENTS, Mathieu is another disciple of dissatisfaction trudging through everyday life. “Living together gets boring. We just save money,” says his friend, Bruno. An actor of the theater, Mathieu has few prospects in this trade, save for empty promises from his producer. At this point, he’s more a kind of flaneur—only, his sojourns don’t occur along the boulevards and arcades of Baudelaire’s Paris, but on the sterile streets of a nondescript town. All is bleak morass. Frustrated with his work in the theater, Mathieu decides he wants out of Switzerland. Matthew asks Bruno, a car mechanic, if he wants to split for Anatolia. Bruno agrees, breakups with his girlfriend and spiffs up his car. Meanwhile, Mathieu must pick up a theater friend, Pauline, an actress of note, from the airport. Naturally, Mathieu falls in love with her, and suddenly, leaving for Anatolia becomes all the more difficult.

In HASCHISCH, there aren’t any scenes of drugged-out dope fiends, but the title’s narcotic connotations run true throughout the film: Soutter captures his actors deep in the haze of their own private worlds as they walk through an unconvincing reality, one which always depresses the shoulders and dulls the mind (Pauline: “Good thing we don’t think!”). Soutter’s characters are always sharply aware of the moribund nature of their lives, but are unable act on their own desire for change. In one scene, Mathieu is in the recording studio and recites, ironically, a few lines by the Turkish poet, Nâzım Hikmet: “I contemplate Switzerland from the train. Her towns are boring but her sanatoriums are gay! Could I live among such respectable folks? Maybe when I’m 90…Why have I written about Switzerland?”

THE APPLE
a.k.a. La Pomme
Dir. Michel Soutter, 1969
Switzerland, 85 min.
In French with English subtitles

SUNDAY, AUGUST 9 – 5:00 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 15 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 31 – 7:30 PM

Soutter’s third feature follows a handful of young idlers and professionals in Geneva, living out the kind of sluggish, arbitrary existence that a country as suffocatingly prosperous as Switzerland makes possible. Something of a solitary revolutionary, Simon is mapping out the places in Geneva where Lenin lived in exile before the 1905 uprising. Simon’s boss, Marcel, is a jet-setting reporter and a perfect symbol of Swiss complacency, living in a suburban villa that he calls his “refuge from revolutions, civil wars, crises, and coups d’état.” When Simon’s girlfriend Laura comes to visit, a bitter triangle drama develops among them, as Simon’s hatred for Marcel and the world he represents keeps growing.

THE APPLE has been compared to Jean Eustache’s 1967 short film SANTA CLAUSE HAS BLUE EYES (starring Jean-Pierre Léaud) for its ability to capture all the nuances of both the happiness and the malaise of indecisive adolescents. Beyond that, it offers snapshots of late 1960s Geneva, an acerbic commentary on the self-satisfied, smug inertia of the Swiss bourgeoisie, and an indictment of the journalistic profession. As Simon says, “Switzerland has its ass placed squarely on the Third World,” and Soutter goes to infuriating lengths to convey the stiflingly peaceful postwar atmosphere that its isolated rebels feel a growing urge to break through.

JAMES OU PAS
Dir. Michel Soutter, 1970
Switzerland, 80 min.
In French with English subtitles

MONDAY, AUGUST 10 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 24 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26 – 7:30 PM

If Soutter steered clear of any attempt to build a plot in his previous features, in JAMES OU PAS, Soutter offers enough dramatic inflections to show a marked change in his practice. As in Antonioni’s BLOW-UP, a witness to a potential act of crime jumpstarts the film. Hearing a gunshot, Hector (played by the irrepressible Jean-Luc Bideau), a low-wage cabdriver, stops his car midway somewhere in the Swiss fields and follows the man he suspects was responsible for the shooting. Instead, Hector runs into James, an enigmatic bachelor who lives all alone in his ivory-tower pad. James convinces him to pick up his friend Eva from the airport, and suddenly Hector—accustomed to a rote schedule—finds himself entangled with a group of strangers in a time and place he does not recognize. Hector’s quandary prompted Jean-Louis Bory to call JAMES OU PAS Soutter’s re-formulation of Hamlet’s “to be or not to be.” More to the point, as Soutter’s most perceptive critic, Freddy Buache, noted, a Soutter film usually boils down to “men and women at the intersection of everywhere and nowhere … brought together in unexpected situations by chance, and they have to unmask or mask themselves, become believable or make-believe, speak to each other, and, intentionally or not, confess to being what they are.”

Soutter’s dry humor finds its perfect mouthpiece in Bideau, who can rattle off monologues with jovial ease. The rotating cast of characters and chance encounters recall some of the fluid cat-and-mouse games of Jacques Rivette. Gone are the Bressonian, stone-faced types from his earlier films. The droll, everyday languorousness of Swiss life still remains in the backdrop, but with Soutter’s newly formed comic lightness, the absurd registers most strongly in JAMES OU PAS. Dazed from the turn of events, Hector, growing increasingly unable to distinguish reality from his own thoughts, says to himself, as if entranced, “I want life to be as it always has been: monotonous and comfortable.” Can anyone escape Soutter’s Swiss Inferno?

THE SURVEYORS
a.k.a. Les Arpenteurs
Dir. Michel Soutter, 1972
Switzerland, 81 min.
In French with English subtitles

MONDAY, AUGUST 3 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 8 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19 – 7:30 PM

In his fifth feature, Soutter breaks his rule of portraying only the idle classes of Swiss society and the equally idle would-be fugitives from it. Leon—a lion of a man with a thick caterpillar mustache and heavy mutton chops—is a land surveyor whose job brings him to the country estate of Alice, a dreamy blonde who picks strawberries in the garden and never misses teatime with her mother. After a fleeting liaison in Alice’s house with a mysterious English woman who disappears as quickly as she appeared, Leon becomes terrified for his own sake (Was she of legal age? Will there be criminal charges? Was I trespassing?) and hires a lawyer to save his skin. An inveterate egoist, Leon’s statement of principle could easily double as a slogan of Swiss isolationism: “We’re never as strong as when we’re alone.”

THE SURVEYORS is firmly implanted in Soutter’s usual milieu of professionals living in the prosperous Swiss countryside, a world of lawyers, cellists, and noncommittally philosophizing young ladies. But here he adds an element of foreboding: the surveyors are invading the provinces, planning to build God knows what awful roads or shopping centers. The gentry are feeling a nebulous panic growing inside them. What will happen to our Switzerland of quaint chalets and verdant hills?