Page 133 – Spectacle Theater

WHEN I DIE I’LL MAKE MOVIES IN HELL: The Late Films of Doris Wishman

Posted on February 18, 2014December 19, 2019 by spectacletheater

Doris Wishman’s career is a history lesson in exploitation cinema. One of the most prolific female filmmakers of all time, she also had an inimitable sense of style. Her cinematic vernacular favors light switches and radiators as equally as it does faces and bodies. Her camera leers and lingers, creating an off-kilter sense of unease in even the most mundane scenes. After making some of the most well known nudist camp pictures (BLAZE STARR GOES NUDIST, NUDE ON THE MOON) she dove deep into “roughies” craze of the 60s, producing nasty clas-sicks like BAD GIRLS GO TO HELL and THE SEX PERILS OF PAULETTE. In the 70s, she teamed up with the uber-endowed Chesty Morgan to make the surreal sex thrillers DEADLY WEAPONS and DOUBLE AGENT 73 before foraying into hardcore, which just wasn’t her scene.

Since the 70s, Wishman’s output slowed, but her late work still bares her oddball signature. Shooting with whatever camera she could get her hands on and finishing by any means necessary, her final films show a truly idiosyncratic auteur unwilling to go quietly into the night. We’re proud to present four of those features – sex-change shockumentary LET ME DIE A WOMAN, the truly insane slasher A NIGHT TO DISMEMBER, return to form SATAN WAS A LADY, and her incredibly rare video experiment DILDO HEAVEN.

A NIGHT TO DISMEMBER
Dir. Doris Wishman, 1983
USA, 69 min.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5 – 10:00 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 14 – MIDNIGHT

It’s almost impossible to adequately explain the effect A NIGHT TO DISMEMBER has on the brain. Wishman had completed her first foray into 80s horror when the processing lab declared bankruptcy and a disgruntled employee destroyed most of the footage. Contractually bound to distributors, she finished the movie by any means necessary – using every frame of the remaining footage, re-writing the script, and shooting new scenes. What remains is a singular achievement in the history of motion pictures. It’s a non-stop, blood-soaked, nudity-packed assault on the senses, and like all great train wrecks, it’s impossible to look away.

SATAN WAS A LADY
Dir. Doris Wishman, 2001
USA, 80 min.

MONDAY, MARCH 3 – 10:00 PM
SATURDAY, MARCH 29 – 7:30 PM

Wishman’s first feature in almost two decades is a throwback to the female-driven tales of sex and psychosis she excelled in during the 60s. Longing for “that touch of mink,” stripper/dominatrix Cleo will go to any depraved lengths to get what she wants. Betrayal! Blackmail! Murder! Go-go dancing! A coronary inducing phone call! Will she obtain the object of her desire? Music takes an unusual forefront here, as Cleo’s live-in beatnik boyfriend croons along to the action. Shot on 35mm film in the sleaze Mecca that is Miami, SATAN feels like a love-letter to a bygone era – where all you needed to make a feature film were a few bucks, a handful of rooms, two to three strippers, and the craziest idea you could come up with.

DILDO HEAVEN
Dir. Doris Wishman, 2002
USA, 80 min.

FRIDAY, MARCH 7 – 10:00 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 14 – 10:00 PM

“This is the story of Lisa, Beth, and Tess. Three girls who shared an apartment and lived in perfect harmony. Each of these girls had the same desire: to seduce her boss.” But what’s a girl to do when romance doesn’t work out? Wishman’s first video production has the threadbare plot, awkward staging, and ample nudity we’ve come to expect, but with a surreal, self-referential tone that’s unique among her oeuvre. Characters watch old Doris Wishman films on TV. Random sequences from seemingly lost productions are thrown in for the hell of it. The Chicago Reader hit the nail on the head, “The miscues also fascinate, wildly off in a way that reveals the artifice of commercial product.” It’s also her first “comedy” since her nudie productions – a wacky, confounding montage of cliché, camp, and wink-wink titillation.

LET ME DIE A WOMAN
Dir. Doris Wishman, 1977
USA, 79 min.

FRIDAY, MARCH 7 – MIDNIGHT
SUNDAY, MARCH 16 – 7:30 PM

Wishman’s sole foray into non-fiction is a disorienting, explicit, forward-thinking time capsule of sex-changes in the 70s. Combining interviews with noted surgeon Dr. Leo Wollman and his patients, soft porn dramatic re-enactments, and graphic surgery footage, LET ME DIE A WOMAN manages to be both exploitive and enlightening. Amidst its sleazy shocks and ramshackle sets, the subjects’ sincere desire to tell their story earns our genuine empathy. Like all of Wishman’s films, WOMAN is one of a kind, and must be seen to be believed.

Courtesy of Something Weird Video.

LA GUARIMBA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Posted on February 17, 2014December 23, 2019 by spectacletheater

ONE NIGHT ONLY!
SUNDAY, MARCH 2 – 8:00 PM

Spectacle is proud to present the best of the La Guarimba International Film Festival!

La Guarimba International Film Festival is a socio-cultural project in Amantea, a small town in the south of Italy.
The festival was created by a group of artists from different places of the world who believe in the benefit of working together for others. Thanks to this we had cleaned and reopened the Arena Sicoli, an old outdoor movie theater with 900 seats, to show the official selection.

The Festival was born to bring the cinema to the people and the people to the cinema, with the aim of giving back the magic of the cinematography to the town’s inhabitants, to spread the work of local and international filmmakers and also to foster the culture of Calabria.

AND NOW the festival is coming to THE SPECTACLE!

THE PROGRAM (75 min.):

Trailer of #AboutTheResistance, the documentary about the festival, and about cinema as an act of resistance.

EMILIO
Dir. Angelo Cretella, 2013
Italy, 15 min.

Emilio, a guy as good as his 200kg, frequently travels, on his tiny scooter, the country roads leading to the farm where the prostitute Alida resides.

COME TO VENICE
Dir. Benedetta Panisson, 2012
Italy, 20 min.

A scream, but more on the silent side. It’s the voice of Venetians, of those who live the city, of its waterways, of its sea.

OH WILLY…
Dir. Emma De Swaef and Marc James Roels, 2011
Belgium, 17 min.

Forced to return to his naturist roots, Willy bungles his way into noble savagery.

DREAMING APECAR
Dir. Dario Samuele Leone, 2012
Italy, 20 min.

Caterina is a 45 year old Italian woman who has been without a job for months, so she accepts work as a caregiver for Gheorghe, an elderly, lively Romanian stuck in a wheelchair.

BIG JOY: THE ADVENTURES OF JAMES BROUGHTON

Posted on February 17, 2014December 23, 2019 by spectacletheater

BIG JOY: THE ADVENTURES OF JAMES BROUGHTON
Dir. Stephen Silha & Eric Slade. Co-Director: Dawn Logsdon. 2013
USA, 82 min.

Director Stephen Silha in attendance!

ONE NIGHT ONLY!
MONDAY, MARCH 24 – 8:00 PM

Years before the Beats arrived in San Francisco, the city exploded with artistic expressions – painting, theatre, film, poetry. At its center was the groundbreaking filmmaker and poet James Broughton. BIG JOY explores Broughton’s passionate embrace of a life of pansexual transcendence and a fiercely independent mantra: “follow your own weird.” His remarkable story spans the post-war San Francisco Renaissance, his influence on the Beat generation, escape to Europe during the McCarthy years, a lifetime of acclaim for his joyous experimental films and poetry celebrating the human body, finding his soulmate at age 61, and finally, his ascendancy as a revered bard of sexual liberation.

FMC PRESENTS FILMS BY ANJA CZIOSKA (on 16mm!)

Posted on February 17, 2014December 23, 2019 by spectacletheater

FMC PRESENTS FILMS BY ANJA CZIOSKA
Dir. Anja Czioska, 1991-1997
USA/Germany, approx. 46 min, 16mm

ONE NIGHT ONLY!
SATURDAY, MARCH 22 – 7:00 PM
16mm projection! Presented by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, with an introduction by FMC Director MM Serra.

Anja Czioska, born 1965, is a German-born filmmaker, performance artist and curator. She was a student at Städelschule Frankfurt under Kasper König and Peter Kubelka, and is co-founder and co-director of the Kunstverein Familie Montez, an important institution of the contemporary art scene in Frankfurt.

This program of shorts will be comprised of thirteen films Czioska made between 1991 and 1997. Moments of everyday life captured not unawares, but performed provocatively for the camera. The films, all under eight minutes, most shot on Super-8 and some hand-developed, have a common theme of nakedness; not only literally. They are unpretentious and unabashedly running over…

The Film-Makers’ Cooperative is the largest archive and distributor of independent and avant-garde films in the world. Created by artists in 1961, as the distribution branch of the New American Cinema Group, the Coop has more than 5,000 films, videotapes and DVDs in its collection.

SHIWA (1991) S-8 blown up to 16mm, b/w, sound, 3 min.
Music is Ataypura by Yma Sumac. “You can see light film… and maybe a wonderful naked body.” -AC

FILM SCRIBBLES: BIRGIT SHOWER, LONDON (1993) S-8 blown up to 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 min.
“Birgit takes a shower with an old thing that is normally used to boil water.” -AC

FILM SCRIBBLES: FÜẞE IM MEER (FEET IN THE SEA) (1992) S-8 blown up to 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 min.
“You can see feet and hands in the North Sea water. It comes and goes in a poetical way.” -AC

FILM SCRIBBLES: IM GRAS (IN THE GRASS) (1994) S-8 blown up to 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 min.
“Anja wears only a rubbermask in the grass.” -AC

FILM SCRIBBLES: SHOWER, ROTTERDAM (1991) S-8 blown up to 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 min.
“Debut shower. The camera on a tripod on the ‘timer’ and I move very slowly so that the viewer has the impression that something is wrong.” -AC

FILM SCRIBBLES: DACH (ROOF) (1994) 16mm, hand-developed, b/w, silent, 3 min.
“Roofs of San Francisco. This is the filming of a friend, Inga and myself sunbathing and playing with the camera.” -AC

FILM SCRIBBLES: DUSCH (SHOWER) (1994) 16mm, hand-developed, b/w, silent, 3 min.
“This is the same type of movie that achieved in Rotterdam in 1991. I tried to film me while I took a shower, but the mist and fog are overriding factors.” -AC

FILM SCRIBBLES: UNTERWASSER (UNDERWATER) (1994) 16mm, hand-developed, b/w, silent, 3 min.
“I shot from the water holding my camera in hand. The film is projected upside down, so that you feel that I drink all the water around me. Some movies make me look like a dead person in the water, others show me trying to catch my breath.” -AC

JONAS MEKAS, FRIDAY 13. OKT. 1995 NYC (1995) 16mm, b/w, silent. 6 min.
“Jonas, Birgit and Anja take a trip to the Brooklyn Bridge. Taxi driving, beer buying, drinking, doing funny things and dancing. It was a nice afternoon.” -AC

BOLERO (1995) 16mm, color, sound. 7 min.
Music is Bolero by Ravel. “Timo is Sybille. They get married. Romantic film performance-dance in a gravel pit.” -AC

PRINCESS MARINA (1996) 16mm, color, sound. 3 min.
Music is Marina by Rocco Granata. “Marina eats a carrot. Marina is a Princess. Marina is naked.” -AC

ION DANCE (1997) S-8 blown up to 16mm, b/w, silent. 3 min.
“Ion Garnica is a dancer of the Frankfurt Forsythe Ballet. It’s a naked dance improvisational performance only for the camera.” -AC

ION SHOWER (1997) S-8 blown up to 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 min.
“Ion Garnica, sweaty after dancing, takes a shower.” -AC

KINETIC CINEMA: A SCREENING AND DISCUSSION WITH NEL SHELBY

Posted on February 17, 2014December 23, 2019 by spectacletheater

KINETIC CINEMA: A SCREENING AND DISCUSSION WITH NEL SHELBY
Dir. Nel Shelby, Various years
USA, ca. 90 min.

ONE NIGHT ONLY!
THURSDAY, MARCH 13 – 8:00 PM

Pentacle is pleased to invite Nel Shelby, an extraordinarily talented dance videographer, to present an evening of films and videos that have inspired her illustrious career in dance and video.

Nel writes: “When I double-majored in dance and broadcast video, I had no idea where it would lead. Now, when I sit in a dark theater watching dance, trying to type as many notes as possible into my iPhone, I pinch myself and wonder if there’s any place I’d rather be. (The answer is NO!) Whenever I walk into a theater, it feels like home. Whether it’s midtown Manhattan, Vail, Colorado, or Becket, Massachusetts, each and every day I am inspired by the work that I do. More than anything, I want artists to have beautiful video to showcase their work so they can book more performances and keep sharing what they do best.”

Nel Shelby, Founder and Principal of Nel Shelby Productions, is deeply dedicated to the preservation and promotion of dance through documentation of live performances, fully edited marketing reels, live-stream capture, and documentaries and films that encapsulate the essence of nonprofit organizations.

Her New York City-based video production company has grown to encompass a diverse list of dance clients including American Ballet Theater II, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, Gallim Dance, Gotham Arts, Kate Weare and Company, Keigwin + Company, Monica Bill Barnes Company, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Shen Wei Dance Arts, Wendy Whelan and many more. She has filmed performances at venues throughout the greater New York area including The Joyce Theater, New York Live Arts, Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, St. Mark’s Church and Judson Church, to name a few.

For the past eight years, Nel has served as Festival Videographer for the internationally celebrated Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in the Berkshires. Each season at the Pillow, Nel’s responsibilities include documenting aspects of festival culture in addition to its 20 mainstage dance performances, filming and overseeing documentation of more than 100 free performances and events, managing two dance videography interns and an apprentice, and educating students about the technical and philosophical aspects of filming dance.

She now also serves as Resident Videographer at the Vail International Dance Festival where she spent her first summer creating five short dance documentary films about the festival in addition to documenting its events and performances. Her longer-form, half-hour documentary on Vail’s festival, THE ALTITUDE OF DANCE, debuted on Rocky Mountain PBS in May 2013.

This year, she is creating four short films for Wendy Whelan’s Restless Creature. In 2012, she collaborated with Adam Barruch Dance to create a short film titled FOLIE A DEUX, which was selected and screened at the Dance on Camera Festival in New York City. Nel’s videos for the New Jersey Hall of Fame were shown to an audience of 2000 people, and she is currently editing a dance documentary featuring Nejla Y. Yatkin that she filmed for three-and-a-half weeks in Central America in 2010. Nel has a long personal history with movement – she has a B.A. in dance and is a certified Pilates instructor. She continues to train with world-renowned Master Teachers Romana Krysnowska and Sari Pace, original students of Joseph Pilates. In addition to her dance degree, Nel holds a B.S. in broadcast video. She often collaborates with her wonderful husband, dance photographer Christopher Duggan on creative projects with dancers in New York City and beyond. They live with their beautiful daughter Gracie in Manhattan.

Kinetic Cinema, is a regular screening series of Pentacle’s Movement Media curated by invited guest artists who create evenings of films and videos that have been influential to their own work as artists. When artists are asked to reflect upon how the use of movement in film and media arts has influenced their own art, a plethora of new ideas, material, and avenues of exploration emerge. From cutting edge motion capture animation to Michael Jackson music videos, from Gene Kelly musicals to Kenneth Anger films, Kinetic Cinema is dedicated to the recognition and appreciation for “moving” pictures. We have presented these evenings at Collective: Unconscious, Chez Bushwick, IRT, Launchpad, Green Space, Uniondocs, CRS, 3rd Useless and The Tank in New York City, as well as at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.

For more info on the current Kinetic Cinema season please visit our website and our blog, movetheframe.com.

About Pentacle’s Movement Media

Pentacle’s Movement Media provides services, strategies, and opportunities for dance artists to make dance works for screen and use media to promote and enhance their artistic pursuits. The core activities of Movement Media are screenings, consulting services, workshops, and interactive media publications (blogs, social networking, online videos, etc). These services address a growing need for dance artists to engage with Media, particularly online and on new media platforms, in order to reach audiences, grow artistically, and stay relevant in today’s media-rich world.

Pentacle’s Movement Media programming is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. KINETIC CINEMA is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. The 2014 season of Kinetic Cinema is made possible through the contributions of generous individuals like you.

JON JOST

Posted on February 14, 2014December 23, 2019 by spectacletheater

“Perhaps Jost’s work doesn’t reach a wider audience because he works in an uncompromising fashion and on a shoestring budget with nonprofessional casts. The perverse irony is that although his films aren’t readily accessible in theaters, they are in themselves highly accessible.” -Kevin Thomas, LA Times

Despite theatrical releases of his films All the Vermeers in New York (1990) and The Bed You Sleep In (1993), Jon Jost remains virtually unknown to moviegoers. A founding member of Newsreel, the leftist filmmaking collective, and a hardcore experimentalist in his early career, Jost has made 34 feature films, all of which he has written, directed, shot, and edited (and most he has also produced). His films are about what drive people, about psychology and society, and about expressing the interior of individual thought. In many ways, his films are about communication.

Jost is foremost a visual filmmaker, using images to express the inner thoughts and feelings of his characters. His cinema possess a type of naturalism rarely seen in narrative works, and through the occasionally rough delivery of his actors, as well as his own technical experimentations, he consistently foregrounds the cinematic process. His practice is “more concerned with evoking a place, time, and milieu than with a dramatically shaped story” (Jonathan Rosenbaum) and has been compared to John Cassavetes, Jim Jarmusch, and Robert Bresson.Though he has worked abroad, the majority of Jost’s films are broadly concerned with the American experience, and in particular the pressures that can be created by notions of masculinity in this culture. We’re extremely thrilled to welcome Jost to Spectacle present two vintage Jost films from the decade leading up to his first theatrical release, as well as two recent works that return to Jost’s experimental roots.

SLOW MOVES
Dir. Jon Jost, 1983
USA, 93 min.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 22 – 10PM

DIRECTOR IN ATTENDANCE!

SLOW MOVES chronicles a love story about two somewhat forlorn characters, both of them loners. Julie (Roxanne Rogers) is a native Californian who has been living in San Francisco for about four years. a highly disciplined, hard-working young woman. Jeff (Marshall Gaddis) is an out of work construction worker specializing in handling steel girders at great heights who’s lost his nerve after a minor injury. The two meet on the Golden Gate Bridge and after a brief and awkward courtship, live together with the usual problems of money and work. They are not particularly happy together; they have nothing better to do. Sometimes, she says, there’s ”this incredible connection, then sometimes it’s just gone.” After struggling to find happiness in SF, they find a sense of illusory freedom following the American dream of the open road. The film’s long takes play with the films title and evoke in the film of a sense of tragic inevitability.

Shot in 5 days on a budget of $8,000 with an improvised script, the film contains minimal dialogue, with most of the story told through narration by the main characters, as well as (presumably) the filmmaker himself. It is a film about filmmaking itself, its production foregrounded in one of its opening scenes as Julie’s narration comments on a suicide that happened “when we were making this film.” Perhaps the greatest instance of this foregrounding occurs when the two visit a camera obscura, a particularly long scene where I tour guide gives an oral history of photography. We are told that this world of ours contains so many people and so many stories. This couple provides just one of those stories and ”like most people, they did not tell their story well.”

“… it is quite serious about demonstrating how the simplest of plots can be visually manipulated into a vehicle of tension and suspense. Technique is layered upon technique, all the while pushing the story forward to its shabby and oddly affecting little conclusion. Slow Moves deserves all the exposure it can get.” – John J. O’Conner, The New York Times

PARABLE
Dir. Jon Jost, 2008
USA, 72 min.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 22 – 8PM

DIRECTOR IN ATTENDANCE!

“Nebraska, 2007.

A parable of the Bush era; swiftly jumping genres, a cowboy surrogate/Bush is thrown out of his house, is picked up by a man who needs a driver, buddy-bonds with him, they sing a Christian camp song, do a robbery and killing, and cowboy then rapes and shoots his new buddy. We arrive in a bucolic farm where a woman is kept on a rope, a man attempts to untie a knotted rope; and after a long and weird interlude including some heavy breathing, the cowboy arrives, seduces and is screwing the woman, and is killed and dumped with other bodies from Abu Ghraib.

PARABLE works on a visual and visceral level for which a synoptic summary is impossible. It is a reflection of The Time of Bush in America, a squalid period of corruption equal to our country’s worst, or, as if possible, even the worst. The film tackles this era with a melange of genres typical of our culture, a culture which distills in reality down to cartoons and in which a trajectory from domestic melodrama leads axiomatically to Abu Ghraib. PARABLE is history as farce, an American tragedy limned by the Flintstones and Simpsons, where seriousness has been subsumed by “reality TV,” and the populace has been reduced to zombie-like consumers busy eating themselves.” – JonJost.com

BELL DIAMOND
Dir. Jon Jost, 1986
USA, 96 min.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 23 – 7PM

DIRECTOR IN ATTENDANCE!

Marshall Gaddis (also named Jeff) returns in similar role, playing an out of work Vietnam Vet in Butte, Montana. His wife, Cathy, (Sarah Wyss) leaves him after seven years when she feels there is no longer communication between them and – more painfully and pointedly – because she is unable to have a child owing to his sterility from exposure to Agent Orange. The characters spend a lot of their time talking about their problems with no sense of how to solve them, and there is a real sense throughout that the problems of the characters are due to circumstances beyond their control.

Exploring these circumstances, in many ways, the film is just as much about Butte as the relationship. Using real time, Jost links Jeff’s story to that of American labor history (in a brilliant sequence), and the film is peppered with some of the finest pictorial representations of the working-class West imaginable – cloud filled skies, cyclone fences, desolate factories, pipelines, old tanks. In a particularly telling scene, Jeff and his friends break into the old Bell Diamond copper mine, from which they was laid off when it closed down.

“Among the ten best of the year. Formally exquisite and politically pointed study of an alienated Vietnam vet against the background of a bankrupted mining town.” – Dave Kehr, Chicago Tribune

“… with a story developed by the filmmaker and cast and completely improvised, the film deals with characters who are neither articulate nor particularly attractive, but pays them the kind of respect and attention that they would never receive from other quarters. Visually Jost’s most impressive work to date. The impact of the film’s original form of realism arrives only gradually, but once it registers, it becomes indelible.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

THE NARCISSUS FLOWERS OF KATSURA-SHIMA
Dir. Jon Jost, 2012
Japan, 76 min.
In Japanese with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 23 – 5PM

DIRECTOR IN ATTENDANCE!

“THE NARCISSUS FLOWERS OF KATSURA-SHIMA was shot on a small island off the coast of North Eastern Japan, six months after the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. A work of elemental simplicity, it shows the aftermath of this catastrophe on the island, and allows the inhabitants ample space to tell the stories of the day of the disaster and its impact upon them and the island. Embroidered with several Japanese traditional poems and haunting imagery, this film seeks to enter into the living reality of these simple fishermen and women.” -JonJost.com

SAMARA LUBELSKI: AN EVENING OF LIVE SCORES

Posted on February 11, 2014December 23, 2019 by spectacletheater

ONE NIGHT ONLY!
THURSDAY, MARCH 27 – PERFORMANCES AT 8:00 and 10:00 PM

We are incredibly stoked to welcome the awesome singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Samara Lubelski for a special evening of two unique live score performances.

Lubelski may be known for her solo albums on De Stijl, Ecstatic Peace!, and the Social Registry, or as a veteran of the Tower Recordings, the Sonora Pine, and Hall of Fame. She currently performs as a duo with Marcia Bassett (of Zaimph), with German weirdo outfit Metabolismus, Metal Mountains (with Helen Rush and PG Six), and Chelsea Light Moving (with Thurston Moore).

Ever the bad-ass, Lubelski will present a solo improvised violin set at 8 PM, and then a song set on voice and guitar at 10 PM. The performances are (respectively) accompanied by visuals themed URBAN ROMANCE (SQUALOR) and SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS (EXCERPTS). Those themes are subject to change, but what we know for sure is that this is going to RULE.

REVISIONIST HISTORIES OF CHINA

Posted on February 2, 2014December 23, 2019 by spectacletheater

This February, the Spectacle goes against the party line.

From the 50s to the 70s, Mao had to deal not only with the landlords, the compradors, and all the other running dogs of the international bourgeoisie, but also with foreign filmmakers seemingly bent on making a mockery of the sincere efforts of the Chinese communists to build a new society out of the ruins of the old. Before and during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, these camera-wielding counterrevolutionaries exposed Chinese everyday life as less-than-radically-transformed in many of its aspects, and contributed to a worldwide demystification of the processes of labor-aristocratization and bureaucratization then taking place in that vast country. Some did it with more polemical intent than others. For a cross-section of the different critical attitudes then circulating on the subject of Communist China, this series brings together the naïve, the sarcastic, and the acerbic.

CHINAMEN, ONE MORE EFFORT IF YOU WANT TO BE REVOLUTIONARIES!
a.k.a. Peking Duck Soup; Chinois, encore un effort pour être révolutionnaires!
Dir. René Vienet, 1977
France, 112 mins.
In English

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 5 – 7PM

Known primarily for his pioneering cinematic détournement Can Dialectics Break Bricks?, which put Situationist slogans in the mouths of kung-fu fighting Koreans, René Vienet also wrote Enragés and Situationists in the Occupations Movement, one of the most comprehensive first-hand accounts of the events of May ’68 in France. A sinologist, Vienet was expelled from China while on a study trip in 1966, and was subsequently fired — twice! — from his post at the French National Center for Scientific Research for his attacks on defenders of Mao within their ranks.

In CHINAMEN, ONE MORE EFFORT IF YOU WANT TO BE REVOLUTIONARIES!, Vienet uses subverted archival footage and a sardonic voiceover to denounce Mao’s deformed socialist state machine as a grotesque caricature of a revolutionary society. Whereas his previous two détournements spoofed kung-fu movies and pinku flicks, this one attacks the political documentary and disassembles it into its constituent tropes. Legendary French literary and film critic Georges Charensol called it “in my opinion the best film in the history of cinema.”

SUNDAY IN PEKING
a.k.a. Dimanche à Pekin
Dir. Chris Marker, 1956
France, 18 mins.
In French with English subtitles

In 1956, recently beatified cinema-essayist Chris Marker spent a couple of weeks in Peking and shot this travelogue. As the title suggests, the subject is a single, typical day in the life of the Chinese capital. Marker turns his camera on mask-wearing mysophobes, top-level athletes, and sword-wielding retirees to weave a magical, embellished tapestry of Peking in which the most egregious Orientalist illusions are deployed with sarcastic relish. Marker’s irony was not noticed by everyone: unlike the other two filmmakers in this series, Marker was rejected not by the Chinese government but by the Berlin Film Festival for what it perceived as shameless Communist propaganda.

The highly personal lyricism of Marker’s commentary in Sunday in Peking, newly translated and subtitled for the Spectacle, shows the influence of Alain Resnais, with whom Marker had just collaborated on STATUES ALSO DIE and NIGHT AND FOG. The score is conducted by famed French New Wave composer Georges Delerue, whose distinctive scores include SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER and CONTEMPT. Other collaborators include Agnès Varda, who acted as the film’s “sinological advisor” — whatever that entailed.

Special thanks to Allison Kruse for the new translation.

CHUNG KUO – CINA
Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1972
Italy, 208 mins.
In Italian with English subtitles

THURSDAY, JANUARY 6, 7PM

More reviled by the Chinese government than possibly any other filmmaker in history is Michelangelo Antonioni. What could have led Antonioni, not known for his outspoken criticism of the Chinese or any other state, to be condemned to a massive campaign of public ridicule and denunciation diffused throughout the largest population in the world? Answer: CHUNG KUO – CINA, a three-hour long documentary commissioned by the Chinese embassy in Rome and RAI Television during the dusk years of the Cultural Revolution.

Shot over 22 days in Beijing, Henan Province, Suzhou, Nanjing, and Shanghai, with a strict itinerary imposed by the Party officials appointed to guide Antonioni’s crew, CHUNG KUO was supposed to become a panoramic document of socialist progress. But through a series of tactical deviations from his assigned trajectory, Antonioni ended up producing a touchingly naïve and intimate portrait of everyday life in early 1970s China. The film’s decidedly unmonumental character provoked severe indignation from the Party: the Chinese ambassador led his staff in a walkout at a screening in Washington, newspaper editorials with titles like “A Vicious Motive, Despicable Tricks” were collected into a 200-page booklet called The Chinese People Will Not Stand for Being Denigrated: A Collection of Criticisms of Antonioni’s Anti-China Film, and even a taunt-song called “Let’s Make Antonioni Mad” was widely taught to Chinese schoolchildren.

From the first images of an old man doing tai chi while riding a bike, to an eye-popping cesarian section performed with nothing but acupuncture needles for anesthesia, CHUNG KUO is amazing as a travelogue, a historical document, and a study in the minutiae of human interaction.

AN EVENING WITH TOM CARTER

Posted on January 31, 2014December 19, 2019 by spectacletheater

ONE NIGHT ONLY: WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 26 – PERFORMANCES AT 8 and 10 PM

Few figures are so literally and figuratively instrumental in the contemporary underground musical landscape as Tom Carter. Heads know the deal with Carter, from his longtime Texan legend Charalambides and solo explorations on Kranky, up through more recent ventures Eleven Twenty-Nine, Sarin Smoke, and collaborations with Martha Colburn. And new ears are always welcomed into his inimitable take on the United States of Altered. We are stokedelically stoked about bringing Tom Carter to the theater for this special live score event.

Carter and Spectacle have collaborated on a specially handpicked and assembled cut of visuals for this evening, PHANTOM MALLE. An epic work of self-aware ethnographic gaze is stripped of its precocious voice, leaving behind only the lovely cinematography. We could almost call it “Chopping Malle,” but somehow PHANTOM MALLE is more poetic.

LINKS
freemusicarchive.org/music/Tom_Carter/
www.wholly-other.com/
www.kranky.net/artists/cartert.html

JONAS REINHARDT’S GANYMEDE

Posted on January 28, 2014December 23, 2019 by spectacletheater

JONAS REINHARDT’S GANYMEDE
Dir. Various, 2014
USA, 35 min.

ONE NIGHT ONLY: THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 20 – SCREENINGS AT 8 and 10 PM

Join us this stellar evening for premiere screenings of GANYMEDE, a new audio/visual hybrid from electro-artbeat unit JONAS REINHARDT.

“GANYMEDE is an experimental film set on the solar system’s largest moon. On Ganymede, it is thought that volcanic vents supply the necessary power to fuel life. This film imagines unknown extra-terrestrial life forms engaged in ritualistic aquatic dance beneath a sky of ice. The resulting way of life is depicted as fluctuating pulses of energy abstracted beyond conventional consciousness.

Using a battery of synthesizers and repeating patterns, JONAS REINHARDT delves into the chaotic unknown seeking transcendence and achieving a spiritual ‘other’ defined by ecstatic reverie.”

The crew of Brooklyn-based collaborative filmmakers for this expedition include Antonia Kuo, Josh Lewis, Kenneth Zoran Curwood, Shona Masarin, Ben Mosca, Lily Jue Sheng.

JONAS REINHARDT is also celebrating the publication of GANYMEDE as a vinyl record and DVD set from Constellation Tatsu.

LINKS
jonasreinhardt.com/
www.ctatsu.com/