This January, Spectacle brings you a supergroup of axe-shredding rock films: the no-budget odyssey of a female punk trio (along with its sequel), a dystopian punk comedy, a sci-fi post-punk musical, a snapshot of the early 80s Icelandic alternative music scene, a documentary on culture-jamming plunderphonic-ians Negativland, and a 60s concert film featuring perhaps the greatest amount of pop music stars ever assembled on one stage…

For those about to (watch movies about) rock: we salute you!

DESPERATE TEENAGE LOVEDOLLS
Dir. Dave Markey, 1984
USA, 60 min.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 10 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, JANUARY 23 – 7:30 PM

&

LOVEDOLLS SUPERSTAR
Dir. Dave Markey, 1986
USA, 81 min.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 10 – 9:00 PM
THURSDAY, JANUARY 23 – 9:00 PM (SPECIAL RELEASE SCREENING with Chris & Chad from King of the Witches in attendance!)

In the mid-1980’s Dave Markey and his WE GOT POWER crew were an unstoppable force in the Los Angeles underground scene. Armed with a Super-8 camera, together with the brothers MacDonald and their band Redd Kross Markey made what can only be described as a monument to the rough and tumble lifestyle that the genre embodied – DESPERATE TEENAGE LOVEDOLLS. A fiery tale of the meteoric rise of a group of all girl shredders known as The Lovedolls and, of course, their subsequent plummet back to the unforgiving streets. All told at a breakneck speed and accompanied by a fistful of hits for a soundtrack.

POPULATION: 1
Dir. Rene Daalder, 1986
USA, 60 min.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 3 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 15 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, JANUARY 28 – 10:00 PM

“Yes, had I known then about the guilt and the pain caused by being the sole survivor of a mass suicide pact, I wouldn’t have hesitated for one split second. I would have joined my fellow men in death.”

Good news: the apocalyptic sci-fi post-punk musical you’d hoped might exist actually does, and it’s called POPULATION: 1.

Starring Tomata du Plenty of seminal L.A. synth-punk pioneers The Screamers, directed by visually-oriented Dutch camp-slinger Rene Daalder—best known for 1976’s prescient MASSACRE AT CENTRAL HIGH—and featuring a fierce supporting performance by the literally unknown Sheela Edwards, POPULATION: 1’s sonically and optically hallucinogenic depiction of one lone man’s imaginary experience in the end times just might have you hoping for the wrath of God.

In a breadth of styles and formats, Daalder’s acrobatic protagonist sings, dances and dreams his way through countless interrelated depictions of the recently bygone world, all in mad step with a choreographed mass of hidden cameras, historical footage, vintage vamps and flying appliances. Throughout his journey he evokes countless characters, many played by offbeat legends such as Carel Struycken, Vampira, members of Los Lobos, frontman of The Mentors (and murderer of Kurt Cobain*) El Duce, and, yes, Beck—in his first screen appearance at the age of 12!

Preceding the feature will be Rene Daalder’s 17-minute, Grammy-nominated music video for Supertramp’s progressive-pop epic “Brother Where You Bound” that premiered in 1985 — the year before POPULATION: 1 — and quickly became infamous for its unusual violence and surreal imagery, all of which segues nicely into Daalder’s subsequent work.

[*just kidding]

ROCK IN REYKJAVIK
(aka Rokk í Reykjavík)
Dir: Friðrik Thór Friðriksson, 1982.
90 min. Iceland.
In Icelandic with English subtitles.

Special thanks to The Iclandic Film Centre

SATURDAY, JANUARY 18 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, JANUARY 21 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29 – 10:00 PM

Filmed by acclaimed Icelandic director Friðrik Thór Friðriksson in the winter of 1981-82, ROCK IN REYKJAVIK is a brief but poignant snapshot of the Icelandic alternative music scene in its embryonic form, capturing an era that would lay the groundwork for future groups like Björk and Sigur Rós to connect with a worldwide audience. Acting as a sort of Icelandic Decline of Western Civilization, a total of 19 bands are captured as they invade various rock clubs around the capital, following the lifting of a national ‘no live music’ ban.

Taking equal inspiration from American radio and neighboring English punks, the bold Nordics offer a little of everything: Loverboy-copping arena rockers, all female goth chauntresesses, neo-Nazi thrashers, weirdo noise art freaks (who have their chicken-decapitating performance broken up by a group of befuddled cops) and, perhaps most memorably, a trio of glue-sniffin’, guitar-smashin’ tween-aged anarchist crusties! And be on the lookout for a teenage Björk in the fierce post-punk band Tappi Tíkarrass (which translates to ‘Cork the Bitch’s Ass!’).

Working with the Icelandic Film Centre, Spectacle is proud to present this cultural landmark in a new HD transfer from a recent 2K restoration.

(And be sure to grab a free copy of the film’s eclectic soundtrack here.)

SONIC OUTLAWS
Dir. Craig Baldwin, 1995
USA, 87 min.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 18 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, JANUARY 21 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, JANUARY 28 – 7:30 PM

“In 1991 the Bay Area collage band Negativland was sued by Island Records for infringement of U2’s copyright and trademark.”

Craig Baldwin (b. 1952) has been making subversive experimental films from cannibalized 16mm “found” footage since the late 1970s. His works have always incorporated pseudo-documentarian gestures – such as his seminal Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991), which presents a satirical revisionist history of CIA interventionism in Latin America – but to date, Sonic Outlaws is his only actual documentary.

Rushing to support Negativland in their struggle against Island, Baldwin uses their legal troubles as a launching point into a larger conversation about appropriation, copyright law, and political activism, connecting these practices to their antecedents as well as their mainstream contemporaries.

Featuring interviews with artists Negativland, John Oswald, Emergency Broadcast Network, and The Tape Beatles, Baldwin’s film stands as an artifact of the golden age of “culture jamming,” as well as a record of the cultural moment when the legal concept of Fair Use first began to assert itself into the popular consciousness.

We are now at a point where the re-mix has become a firmly established form of artistic expression, but copyright laws still haven’t caught up. In today’s era of copyright trolls and DMCA takedown notices, Sonic Outlaws remains an incredibly important document of the litigious culture industry and a fiery call to reform a hopelessly outdated legal system.

THE T.A.M.I. SHOW
Dir. Steve Binder, 1964
USA, 123 min.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 11 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, JANUARY 14 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 17 – 7:30 PM

A seminal touchstone of rock and roll cinema featuring nearly every imaginable 60s pop music act under the sun, The T.A.M.I. Show might just be the greatest concert film ever based on the cast list alone: The Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, Lesley Gore, The Supremes, The Rolling Stones, and a half-dozen more all make appearances, and all feverishly blast through their hits to 3,000 shrieking junior high-schoolers trucked in to fill the audience seats at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. But beyond the music bill, there’s a prevailing sense of lightning being captured in a bottle: that an important cross-section of pop music royalty is being documented in a five-hour filming frenzy.

Staged a mere eight months after The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, The T.A.M.I. Show (an acroynm for Teenage Awards Music International) was originally conceived as the first in a series of yearly concerts and award ceremonies for a musical non-profit organization, with proceeds going to scholarships for kids. None of that panned out. However, the leftover artifact – shot with proto-digital cameras (dubbed ‘Electronovision’), edited live, and mixed to ear-blasting mono – is a direct mainline into the then-burgeoning ‘Teenage America’ sound: West Coast surf rock, East Coast ‘girl groups,’ British Invasion, the Motown sound, and Southern soul are all heartily represented.

Everyone is in top form here – a fiery Lesley Gore and soulful Marvin Gaye elicit strong applauses, in particular- but these all merely set the stage for James Brown and the Flamekeepers in a performance that has ascended to near mythical status. For 17 spellbinding minutes, Brown gives everything: manic footwork, blood-curtling wails, theatrical dancing and dives… a performance so enigmatic, that show headliners The Rolling Stones famously didn’t want to go on after him!  Even after 50 years, this is still the greatest rock performance ever filmed.

Following a brief theatrical run, the film became tangled in legal rights for decades, vanishing into the netherworld of bootleg VHS dubs until finally receiving a restored release in 2009. Spectacle is proud to present the restored version in its original widescreen presentation and original mono mix (which we’ll be sure to turn up as loud as possible).

TERMINAL CITY RICOCHET
Dir. Zale Dalen, 1990
Canada, 107 min.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 3 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, JANUARY 14 – 10:00 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 17 – 10:00 PM

With special thanks to Alternative Tentacles Records it is Spectacle’s honor to present the Canadian punk cult classic, Terminal City Ricochet. TCR is set in an dystopian version of Earth where there are only 6 inhabitable cities left on the planet. Everything has fallen to shit quite literally (with space junk raining from the sky), but ego-maniacal corrupt Mayoral incumbent candidate & talk show host Ross Glimore (Peter Breck) is attempting to run the city even deeper into the ground. To maintain his grip on power he must stage an election, and for that he needs fresh fear.

Enter Alex Stevens (Mark Bennett), a fed-up, cynical newspaper delivery boy who happens to witness Glimore run over one of his own supporters in his car and leave the scene of the accident. Glimore and his right hand thug Bruce Coddle (Biafra) hatch a plot to brand Stevens “the #1 terrorist threat” (based on his connection to rock ‘n’ roll music which, along with meat, is banned) to cow Terminal City into submission and steal another tabloid election. Stevens flees underground, where he stumbles into a resistance movement led in part by his newfound friend Beatrice (Lisa Brown) and a fugitive brain-damaged goalie from the Glimore-owned hockey team, and finds himself caught up in a plot to bring Glimore down, with the not-so-secret police (DOA’s Joe Keithley and pro-wrestling legend Gene Kiniski) hot on the trail.

This film originally aired on Canadian TV and was never released on VHS. Check it out if you’re a fan of Repo Man, Network, Ladies & Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains, Max Headroom & Suburbia.

I make bitter films. I hate mainstream society.

This January, Spectacle brings you two brutally honest documentaries from Japanese master Kazuo Hara. These intimate films present two unflinching portraits: one of the artist (and his failed love life) himself, and another of the horrors of World War II, 40 years later. Preceding the culture of reality TV and selfies by several decades, Hara puts a mirror up to himself, and his culture, without imposition or expectation.

Special thanks to Tidepoint Films

EXTREME PRIVATE EROS: LOVE SONG 1974
Dir. Kazuo Hara, 1974
Japan, 98 min.
In Japanese with English subtitles

TUESDAY, JANUARY 7 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 12 – 5:00 PM
MONDAY, JANUARY 27 – 10:00 PM

Shot over several years, Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974, a documentary about Hara’s ex-lover was a clarion call against a historically reserved Japanese culture. The film follows Miyuki Takeda, Hara’s ex and father of his son, as she navigates new relationships (first with a woman, and then with an American GI in Okinawa), raises her son, and explores life in 1970s Japan as an outspoken feminist. But the film isn’t just a portrait of the vulnerabilities of a radical feminist single mother, in a time when that wasn’t heard of; Miyuki often takes the opportunity of being filmed by her ex to let loose with what she really thinks about him as a partner, as a lover, and as a filmmaker.

As well as a portrait of two complicated, damaged people, the film is a portrait of Okinawa as a dysfunctional city, damaged by two decades of American military presence. Hara films the GI bars and the underage prostitutes that frequent the bars for business. Hara takes a detour into the life of a 14-year-old “Okinawa girl” Chichi, whose life converges and diverges from Miyuki’s story in intriguing ways.

Released around the same time as the groundbreaking PBS series An American Family (and predating the similarly-themed Sherman’s March by a decade), Extreme Private Eros takes a long, hard look at gender roles, romantic relationships, and what it means to be a family in 1970s Japan. Hara’s out-of-sync sound and hand-held photography are disorienting and intimate at the same time, giving the feel of an experimental film to a film with very real content. The results are bitter and sometimes hard to watch, but always compelling.

THE EMPEROR’S NAKED ARMY MARCHES ON
Dir. Kazuo Hara, 1988
Japan, 122 min.
In Japanese with English subtitles

TUESDAY, JANUARY 7 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 12 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JANUARY 27 – 7:30 PM

[TRIGGER WARNING: Wartime violence and atrocities]

The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On is a more plainly political, but no less revealing, portrait of Japan since World War II. Kenzo Ozukaki was tireless in his campaign against the commonly held idea in Japan that Emperor Hirohito was not responsible for war atrocities during World War II, even getting arrested in the process. Ozukaki ambushes former soldiers into giving him the answers that he is obsessed with finding. His obsession is unsettling; even people who agree with him politically seem unwilling after a certain point to stand in solidarity with Ozukaki, as his methods get more outrageous, and eventually violent.

The film became surprisingly popular in Japan, earning Hara the New Director Prize from the Directors Guild of Japan (and only 16 years after his first film Goodbye CP!) and drawing relatively large crowds for such controversial and alienating subject matter. Errol Morris has put The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On in his top 5 films of all time, high praise from a master of the documentary film (Michael Moore likes it too, if that’s more your speed). Through the entire movie, Hara remains a silent witness to Ozukaki’s increasing fanatacism and devotion to the only version of the truth he can possibly accept; but when is silence irresponsible? When are those in charge responsible for things they let happen? When is inaction morally indefensible?

The region of Emilia-Romagna in Northern Italy prides itself on its contributions to cinema. From a website promoting tourism in the region: “Emilia-Romagna has always had a strong cinematographic tradition, with a place of honour in the history of cinema for having spawned major filmmakers like Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra, Cesare Zavattini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pisolini [sic], Valerio Zurlini, Pupi Avati, Florestano Vancini and Liliana Cavani.”

Naturally, for the Emilia-Romagna tourism board these names are nothing but ornaments. The irreverent temperaments and iconoclastic impulses of Fellini, Pasolini, and Bertolucci are well known, and there are other transgressive figures among those listed who would scoff at being held up as exemplars of their region’s cultural heritage. Liliana Cavani was branded an enemy of the church when her early Galileo biopic was banned by the Italian authorities, and reviled even more for the Nazi eroticism in The Night Porter a few years later. Why is old-guard communist Valerio Zurlini included? Probably not because of his forgotten anticolonial prison film Seduto alla sua destra (released in the US as Black Jesus and retitled Super Brother for a VHS release) about Patrice Lumumba’s capture and torture by the Belgian authorities. The tourism bureau omitted Marco Bellocchio from its list, maybe because they forgot about him, or maybe because the intense anticlericalism and Maoism of his early films, such as China is Near and Long Live Red Proletarian May Day, make him an unsavory figure.

It is these three punks and pranksters, these black sheep and street-urchins, these thorns in the side of self-respecting Italian society whom the Spectacle Theater wishes to present to you, but through an entirely different set of films than those mentioned above. Liliana Cavani’s I Cannibali presents us with a near-future Milan where radicals are being killed in the street left and right, and exceptional legislation is passed to prevent their burial. Valerio Zurlini’s Desert of the Tartars in turn buries us in the absurdity of an imperial military outpost paralyzed by an eternal expectation of barbarian invasion, an obscure threat that is never realized. Marco Bellocchio’s In the Name of the Father is an Italian If… in which a Catholic boarding school and its administration are thoroughly disrespected and ridiculed by an utterly ungovernable student body led by a coldly calculating vanguard, and paternal authority in all its guises is literally slapped around from the first minute onward. Finally, Bellocchio’s Slap the Monster on Page One brings us back to Milan, where the streets are illuminated by erupting petrol bombs, and where student protesters, militant workers, and leftists of all stripes are being systematically criminalized by a powerful right-wing sensationalist newspaper helmed by an inscrutable but ultimately impotent Gian Maria Volonté.

THE YEAR OF THE CANNIBALS
a.k.a. I cannibali
Dir. Liliana Cavani, 1969
Italy, 95 mins.
In Italian with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 5 – 5:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22 – 10:00 PM

Liliana Cavani is probably best known for her portrayal of a complex erotic relationship between a former SS officer and a concentration camp survivor in her 1974 film The Night Porter. Largely overlooked however is her 1969 feature, The Year of the Cannibals, which investigates a different kind of obscene authority and the “natural rebellion” it provokes.

In this loose adaptation of Antigone set in a near-future Milan, the State has forbidden the removal of the bodies of rebels that litter the streets. As a result, the corpses are stepped over and ignored by the citizens, reminding us how a comfortable private existence in the metropolis everywhere means turning a blind eye to misery. Britt Ekland (The Man with the Golden Gun) and Pierre Clémenti (Pigsty, The Conformist) band together as vigilante body-snatchers in defiance of the decree, and ultimately face repression and execution. A radical chic romp that recalls A Hard Day’s Night and Clémenti’s work with Groupe Zanzibar, The Year of the Cannibals also offers a sober early analysis of the notorious “years of lead” in Italy, characterized by witch-hunts and wholesale incarceration of suspected militants.

“I intended to use the language of myth and universal symbols to avoid the revolutionary speeches that had become a cliché by 1969-1970. … [The Year of the Cannibals] is not the chronicle of a revolution, … but the spectral analysis of reality beyond the various episodes that characterized the demonstrations. I believe it is a comprehensive analysis, and primarily a discourse of generations.”
-Interview in Écran #26, June 1974

SLAP THE MONSTER ON PAGE ONE
a.k.a. Sbatti il mostro in prima pagina
Dir. Marco Bellocchio, 1972
Italy, 90 mins.
In Italian with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 19 – 5:00 PM
MONDAY, JANUARY 20 – 10:00 PM

At Il Giornale, Milan’s equivalent of The New York Post, editor-in-chief Gian Maria Volonté is in charge of engineering the headlines for maximum effect: A story about a self-immolation is sensitive material (“You can’t say ‘desperate’ and ‘unemployed’ … It’s a provocation!”) and has to be dealt with tactfully (“Dramatic Suicide of an Immigrant”), while criminal fanatics should be treated with the utmost severity (“The Circle is Closed: Fascists and Left Extremists United by TNT“).

When a high school student is found strangled in the woods, Volonté’s misinformation machine kicks into high gear to mythologize her as the very image of saintly innocence and chastity and to cast her classmates as a diabolical anarcho-Maoist conspiracy bent on chaos and corruption. With the elections closing in, a mysterious Christian Democrat candidate controls the newspaper’s editorial direction remotely from his kitsch-baroque office, engineering a defensive mass-hysteria over red guerrillas and provocateurs lurking in the shadows and threatening to dismantle civilization by force of Molotov cocktails and rock-n-roll.

Made in the early years of the massive proletarian and youth movements that erupted in Italy in the late 60s, Slap the Monster on Page One is both a partisan self-critique and a response to the climate of fear and repression generated by the reaction.

IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER
a.k.a. Nel nome del padre
Dir. Marco Bellocchio, 1971
Italy, 115 mins.
In Italian with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22 – 7:30 PM

“To ridicule, with farcical overtones, the hypocrisy of our religious institutions and their representatives: the confessors, the exorcists, the spiritual terrorists, those specialists in the fear of God, always trying to traumatize us. We hope that the audience will erupt in a liberating laugh, managing to be ironical about their own fears, their existential traumas! I wish I had the power to erase all priests and all churches!”

This could be a description of Bellocchio’s purpose in making In The Name of the Father, but it is spoken by Franco, a student at an unnamed Catholic boarding school where he—as part of a small intellectual vanguard—hopes to incite the rest of the already insubordinate student body to open rebellion. Another member, the rigorous and aristocratic Transeunti, is desperate to overcome the paralyzing mediocrity he sees permeating the school, and dreams of restoring a decaying institution whose former authority and social significance have almost completely eroded with the expansion of capitalist social relations and their norm-liquidating power.

The conflict between the administration and the students is supplemented by that between the students and the kitchen staff, a group of marginals, invalids, and former drunks whom the school has given the chance to redeem themselves through labor. Lou Castel, the star of Bellocchio’s debut feature Fists in the Pocket, is foremost among them in antagonizing the bourgeois students, spitting in their soup and sabotaging Franco and Transeunti’s didactic play.

Never before has paternal authority been so thoroughly discredited and revealed in its impotence. Dads, priests, wardens, and even God himself get their share of contempt heaped on them. In a scene reminiscent of the most beautiful shot in Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct, the boys in single file march up to a bust of the school’s founder and hawk loogies at him, drenching his face in mucus in slow motion.

THE DESERT OF THE TARTARS
a.k.a. Il deserto dei tartari
Dir. Valerio Zurlini, 1976
Italy, 140 mins.
In Italian with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 5 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 19 – 7:30 PM

“The older a nation’s history is, the more legends spring up. In the end, we don’t know what’s true and what isn’t.”

Largely overlooked director Valerio Zurlini’s The Desert of the Tartars is an allegory of the disintegration of Empire.

It is 1901. Lieutenant Drogo (played by frequent Costa-Gavras collaborator Jacques Perrin) graduates from the military academy and is immediately dispatched to the most remote fortress on the northern border of an unnamed empire to guard against a mythical impending barbarian invasion. The only sign of human presence in the desert beyond the border has been a group of mysterious horsemen glimpsed fifteen years prior by Captain Hortiz (Bergman favorite and exorcist Max von Sydow), and the only officer who has seen any action is the ancient and distinguished Colonel Nathanson (Fernando Rey of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The French Connection).

Years pass in performing pointless drills, maintaining the most painstaking decorum, and undertaking futile land-surveying missions in the surrounding desolation. Doctor Rovin (Jean-Louis Trintignant of The Conformist, My Night at Maude’s, and Z) has discovered rare bacteria living in the fortress’s walls, which ultimately lead to Lieutenant Drogo’s ill health and pathetic withdrawal from the fortress.

Described as “the grandest and most lavish existentialist parable ever made” (Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice), The Desert of the Tartars is about the historic necessity of empires to define themselves in opposition to an external threat, and the inevitable autoimmunitary destruction that threatens them from within.