SHADOWS PASS AWAY: THREE REMASTERED FILMS BY SCOTT BARLEY

SHADOWS PASS AWAY: THREE REMASTERED FILMS BY SCOTT BARLEY

Posted on by smacfarlane

Intended to be witnessed in complete darkness, Spectacle is pleased to dim the lights extra low for a sampling of recently remastered works from acclaimed slow cinema practitioner Scott Barley, whose immersive and dread-inducing nocturnal landscape films have found international recognition despite relative underappreciation in New York City. Throughout August, Barley’s seminal shot-on-iPhone feature debut SLEEP HAS HER HOUSE will be preceded by two other dense doses of ecological and cosmic terror: HINTERLANDS and WOMB.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3 – 5PM with Scott Barley for remote Q+A!
(This event is $10.)
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 – MIDNIGHT
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 – 10 PM

GET YOUR TICKETS!

SLEEP HAS HER HOUSE
dir. Scott Barley, 2017; 2021 remaster
United Kingdom. 90 mins.

Structured as if it were the final inhale and exhale of Mother Nature from her deathbed, the carefully assembled long takes and immersive soundscapes that make up Barley’s masterful debut feature transmute shadow-blanketed trees, waterfalls and sparse signs of wildlife into haunting alien figures. With one last breath, a decaying post-human world collapses into eternal abstraction. Shot on iPhone 6 Plus.

screening with

HINTERLANDS
2016; 2019 remaster. United Kingdom.
7 mins.

Something seems to be coming from the sky, but we are pulled into its grasp before we can comprehend what awaits. Initially inspired by a repetitive nightmare and the first-person viewpoint of Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro’s canceled video game project SILENT HILLS, Barley ended up repurposing 5 minutes of footage shot from a car passenger seat to create this descent into blunt-forced formalist horror.

WOMB
2017; 2019 remaster. United Kingdom.
17 mins.

Though some of Barley’s earlier films feature human beings on camera, WOMB marks a decisive development in his aesthetic treatment of darkness, death and rebirth. Within a pitch-dark maw that opens between the stars, writhing bodies suspended in the void become as immense and uncanny as any of Barley’s wilderness tableaus.

SCOTT BARLEY is an artist-filmmaker, drone musician, writer and lecturer working between Scotland and Wales whose films (much of which are generously accessible through his website) have been exhibited over the last decade at venues such as BFI Southbank, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Venice Biennale and Telluride Film Festival. In 2018, Barley co-founded the filmmaking collective Obscuritads, and in 2021, EYE Filmmuseum permanently inducted SLEEP HAS HER HOUSE into its archive. Since 2017, Barley has been making his ambitious second feature film, THE SEA BEHIND HER HEAD, with support from the BFI and DocSociety, along with two new shorts titled THE FLESH and WITHIN WITHOUT HORIZON.

Total runtime: 114 min. These films contain intense strobing sequences that may not be safe for those sensitive to light.

PENNY SLINGER: ALCHEMY AND ECSTASY

Posted on by Zach Fleming

PENNY SLINGER: ALCHEMY AND ECSTASY

Penny Slinger is an avant-garde artist from Great Britain and a celebrated figure in the early feminist art movement. She is known for her radical, erotic, and mystical photo collages.While studying at the Chelsea College of Arts, Penny became heavily influenced by Max Ernest and mid-1920s surrealism. At the start of her career, she developed a series of early films that used her body as a canvas, surveying unsettling and macabre topics such as the relationship between architecture and decay, altered states of consciousness, and the occult. Experimenting with mediums such as collage and photography, Penny would elicit upheaval in her exhibitions throughout the UK.

Spectacle is honored to host her for a Q&A on September 17 where we will show Lilford Hall and An Exorcism, The Works together.

The entire program, Alchemy and Ecstasy, will feature three films from Penny Slinger to feature an overview of her early video art from the 1960s to the 1970s– a formative period in her overall career, which has spanned over five decades.

PENNY SLINGER: EARLY FILMS

EARLY FILMS
Dir. Penny Slinger, 1960s
UK, 40 minutes
Silent

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 8 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 – 7:30 PM

GET YOUR TICKETS!

This program features six films from the 1960s and early 1970s. In these videos, Penny is still a student at the Chelsea College of Arts, experimenting with surrealism. Her early work depicts a range of techniques, such as incorporating multiple exposures and time-lapse. With her lens, she observes a range of morbid and nostalgic topics such as mummification, Alice in Wonderland, and feelings of entrapment.

PENNY SLINGER: LILFORD HALL and AN EXORCISM, THE WORKS

LILFORD HALL
Dir. Penny Slinger, 1969
UK, 79 minutes
Silent

AN EXORCISM, THE WORKS
Dir. Penny Slinger, 2020
UK, 33 minutes
In English

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17 – 5 PM, with filmmaker Q&A (this event is $10)
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20 – 10 PM

GET YOUR TICKETS!

Lilford Hall: A short experimental art video shot inside a decaying mansion, where Penny intimately chronicles the ‘unraveling’ of the Self from dualistic limitations and the projections of others.

An Exorcism, The Works: An animated film created in 2019 by Slinger and her partner Dhiren Dasu. During the 1970s, as she worked on the content for the hauntingly surreal series of collages in Slinger’s seminal publication An Exorcism (1977), she also wrote a synonymous film script and crafted an expanded version of the publication, which includes additional collage works and text. These materials were never published. As the collages from the series have gained exposure over the years, Slinger sought to further contextualize these visuals within the larger original narrative arc. It was to that end that she decided to make An Exorcism – The Works.

CLEARCUT

Posted on by Ben Tuttle

 

 

CLEARCUT
Dir. Ryszard Bugajski, 1991
Canada. 100 min

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 1 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 – 5 PM

GET YOUR TICKETS!

 

Peter Maguire (Ron Lea) is a white lawyer from Toronto, representing an unspecified indigenous tribe in rural Canada against an encroaching paper mill’s thirst for profit. Maguire is unsuccessful in keeping the company from building a road and clear-cutting their way through the tribe’s land, but his frustrations only manifest as platitudes and fantasies of revenge. That is, until the arrival of Arthur (Graham Greene), a mysterious native, who kidnaps the mill’s owner and drags both him and Maguire into the forest to enact the lawyer’s once empty threats. As the Wisakedjak—a trickster of indigenous folklore—Arthur’s unrelenting violence is doled out with a sardonic stoicism. His actions upon the mill’s owner mimicking the treatment of the trees and land by the loggers and paper mill.

With a screenplay based on the novel A Dream Like Mine by M.T. Kelly, Bugajski’s film places white liberal pacifism in the cross hairs, and questions if violence is necessary and moral in the face of capitalism, the state, and environmental destruction. The answers, and the difference between right and wrong, may not be so… CLEARCUT.

ALI IN WONDERLAND

Posted on by smacfarlane


ALI IN WONDERLAND
(علي في بلاد العجائب)
dirs. Djouhra Abouda and Alain Bonnamy, 1976
59 mins. Algeria/France.
In French and Arabic with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 9 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 19 – 10 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 22 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 27 – 5 PM

4K RESTORATION – NYC PREMIERE

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Miraculously blending styles of militant polemical and experimental essay filmmaking, ALI IN WONDERLAND speaks to the struggle of Maghrebi workers in Paris in the 1970s. Djouhra Abouda and Alain Bonnamy made the film in their twenties, as participants of the Centre Universitaire de Vincennes – a leftist cinema collective formed in the aftermath of the May 1968 uprisings. Fully living up to their stated intention to imbue images “like blows of the fist” upon the film’s viewers, Abouda and Bonnamy paint a visceral and unforgettable portrait of migrant exploitation as it manifests (whether in history or today) in western urban capitals – essential viewing alongside Spectacle favorites like Sidney Sokhona’s NATIONALITE: IMMIGRE and Madubuko Diakite’s THE INVISIBLE PEOPLE.

Formally playful yet ferociously political, ALI IN WONDERLAND is among the most important Francophone films of the (increasingly so-called) postcolonial era, yet has been unavailable to see for decades. Following streaming engagements organized by our friends at Another Gaze and ArteEast in 2021, Spectacle is thrilled to host the New York City premiere of ALI IN WONDERLAND’s new 4K restoration, based on original negatives and a 16mm exhibition copy, supervised by Léa Morin at Image Retrouvée in collaboration with the filmmakers.

“Shaky and stirring, ALI IN WONDERLAND shows an increasingly devastating conflict between the actions of workers and those of the society that employs them without ever seeing or considering them. Luxury shops and boutiques selling haute couture contrast brutally with the living conditions and work undertaken by the Algerians. Images of narrow walkways between tower blocks, slums, substandard apartments, respond figuratively to society’s repressive order of police violence and racism, as well as France’s colonial legacy (the filmmakers include archival images of the Algerian War of Independence, the Sétif massacre, and photographs taken by journalist Élie Kagan on the night of the Paris Massacre of 1961). Abouda and Bonnamy make use of the full audio-visual arsenal of experimental cinema at the time: superimposition and flicker; mosaic images and split screen; fast and slow motion; the integration of still images and animation; jump cuts and shots where the cut is almost imperceptible; and glitching and distortion, either done in-camera or in the edit. Each aesthetic choice is justified by a politics that is precise and easy to decipher – following in the footsteps of the soviet tradition of “ciné-poing” / “cine-fist” (Eisenstein) and even the “ciné-œil” / “cine-eye” (after Esther Choub and Dziga Vertov) and avant-garde documentary of the twenties and thirties (Alberto Cavalcanti, Hans Richter, Jean Vigo).

The montage brings together musical and vocal refrains with visual motifs and the repetition of certain sounds and images takes the viewer into an almost ‘fantastical’ dimension (as noted by the writer Tahar Ben Jelloun in Le Monde in 1978), making the city feel even more oppressive, presented like a great biopolitical and disciplinary laboratory. This ensemble of themes (work, city, lodging, women, children, men, sex work) is contained within a circular construct that echoes the “City Symphonies” genre of the twenties, beginning and ending at night with a shot of the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs-Élysées, having taken the viewer through all the stages in a day in the life of an Algerian worker.” – Federico Rossin, Cahiers du Cinema (via Another Gaze)

screening with

ALGERIE COLOURS
dirs. Djouhra Abouda and Alain Bonnamy, 1972
16 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

CINE-CITE
dirs. Djouhra Abouda and Alain Bonnamy, 1974
15 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

Via Association TALITHA Films. Special thanks to Peter Limbrick and Lea Morin.

(poster by Benjamin Tuttle)

DOOMED

Posted on by smacfarlane

DOOMED
dir. Allen Riley, 2021
58 mins. United States.
In English.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 6 – 7 PM with filmmaker Allen Riley in person for Q+A!
(This event is $10.)
TUESDAY, AUGUST 9 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 13 – 5 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 22 – 10 PM

GET YOUR TICKETS!

DOOMED is a grunge fantasy narrative made with point-and-shoot cameras. The film was made by a group of friends in the hills and swamps surrounding Stroudsburg, PA during the course of three years. With a backpack, a couple of small cameras, a digital audio recorder and a thrift store tripod that had missing feet, the cast created a lo-fi parable about the creative process told through 90’s alternative rock iconography.

According to Riley (the director), the production crept into a realm of immersive fiction with the cast/crew living collectively for weeks and even sleeping overnight in the abandoned chicken coop where the interior scenes were filmed.

The centerpiece of DOOMED is a fantastical tree creature named Glofin constructed using burlap, latex, alpaca wool, and glass taxidermy eyes. At one point, production was halted when Glofin was destroyed by wild animals which marked the end of the film’s production, but years later, a complete narrative within the footage was about to be salvaged and constructed. As a grunge opera, the musical score was physically processed using analog cassette tapes recorded by Riley, who practiced guitar as a teenager in the 90s. The resulting film is charged with spontaneous energy and moments of heavy reverb.

Louis Feuillade’s LES VAMPIRES

Posted on by spectacletheater


LES VAMPIRES
(THE VAMPIRES)
dir. Louis Feuillade, 1915-1916
417 mins. France.
Silent with English inter-titles.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 20- 11AM to 7PM (This event is $15)

GET TICKETS

A secret organization of ruthless criminals known as The Vampires haunts the streets and ballrooms of Paris. Journalist Philippe Guérande seeks to unravel their nefarious plot. At the center of it all stands the mysterious and elusive muse to the criminals, Irma Vep, brought to life with a dangerously seductive glamour by the legendary Musidora.

Released in its day as 10 “episodes” over the course of 7 months, Les Vampires is now typically shown in marathon format—a drawn-out affair clocking in at 7 hours, by turns tedious and exhilarating. Its plotting is byzantine, consisting of reversals of identity and double- and triple-crosses, straining logic in deference to the theatricality of a given scenario.

Olivier Assayas has once again renewed interest in this classic of serialized cinema with the enormously entertaining mini-series revamp of his 1996 film Irma Vep. If cinema is truly in crisis, as Assayas enthusiastically proclaims (he promises this is good news), then perhaps a means of diagnosing its illness can be found in searching the images and modes of its past that still haunt us today. Though Irma Vep’s series run is now complete, those uninitiated to Feuillade’s vision are likely eager to spend more time within this fantastical world. With this in mind, Spectacle is pleased to present a marathon screening of Les Vampires, with a soundtrack composed of original works from local artists and friends of the theater.

CALVING: A PROGRAM OF 3 SHORT FILMS

Posted on by spectacletheater

COWS AND FLIES
dir. Jack Hogan, 2021
Ireland, Germany, USA. 25 mins

THE ISLAND
dir. Sam Keogh, 2022
Ireland, Germany. 29 mins.

WATERSHED
dir. Linda Stupart, 2020
UK. 11 mins.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 25, 7:30 PM – ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Please join us for “Calving”, a program of three videos by Jack Hogan, Sam Keogh and Linda Stupart where archipelagos are inundated, maps redrawn and the borders between bodies and their environment disintegrate.

Each video seeks to gain critical purchase on some of the effects and contradictions of climate collapse as they reach toward their respective themes of mapping, ecology and survival. Calving refers to the birth of a calf by a cow, or the process of the creation of an iceberg when a large chunk of ice splits off from an ice shelf or glacier.

Jack Hogan’s Cows and Flies traces lines between imposed individuation and mapmaking, in the broadest sense of flattening and establishing or contesting boundaries: how rich social lives and shared places are fragmented and stripped of information, context and complexity, in order to be instrumentalized, branded and easily consumed.

Sam Keogh’s The Island draws connections between the competitive premise of Fortnite and ecofascist fantasies of an individualist fight to the death in the context of resource scarcity and climate collapse.

And Watershed by Linda Stupart combines fictionalized, scientific and historical narratives of water, pollution and contagion towards a utopian proposal of bodies’ capacity for survival when viscerally reconnected with our immediate environments.

Posted in Uncategorized

ANARCHY BURGER: SWEATIN’ TO THE OLDIES + CAKE BOY

Posted on by spectacletheater

SATURDAY, AUGUST 13 – 7:30 PM
A double screening of both films followed by a Q&A with Joe Escalante of The Vandals (This event is $10)

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This film series presents works from Kung Fu Films and Records, the record label and production company of Joe Escalante, lead member of the seminal punk band: The Vandals.

Since the early 1980s, the Vandals have cultivated a legacy through their melodic/skate punk albums such as Peace Thru Vandalism and When in Rome Do As The Vandals. Hailing from Southern California, The Vandals emerged alongside other influential acts such as T.S.O.L, the Adolescents, and Black Flag.

ANARCHY BURGER is a selection of movies related to the Vandals. The programming features a chaotic and hilarious remastered 2002 version of “Sweatin’ to the Oldies,” a live punk show with behind-the-scenes footage, never before seen clips, and interviews of the band members from the early 90s that proves their music needs to be seen and heard; and “Cake Boy,” a full-length comedy about a depressed cake maker who falls in love, joins a band on tour, and goes on to fulfill his dream of winning a cake making competition against a very formidable opponent in the bakery world.

CAKE BOY
dir. Joe Escalante, 2005
90 min. United States.
In English.

THURSDAY, AUGUST 4 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, AUGUST 28 – 7:30 PM

GET YOUR TICKETS!

SWEATIN’ TO THE OLDIES
dir. Jeff Stein, 2002
66 min. United States.
In English.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 16 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 26 – MIDNIGHT

GET YOUR TICKETS!

We will have a special screening of both films back-to-back on 8/13 followed by a Q&A with Joe Escalante from the Vandals, where you can ask him about anything and everything related to the films, music, or what it is like to be a 59-year-old man in a punk band.

Posted in Uncategorized

DOOMED

Posted on by spectacletheater

DOOMED
dir. Allen Riley, 2021
58 mins. United States.
In English.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 6 – 7 PM followed by a Q+A with director Allen Riley!
(This event is $10.)
TUESDAY, AUGUST 9 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 13 – 5 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 22 – 10 PM

GET YOUR TICKETS!

A grunge band falls under the spell of an enchanted tree while struggling with their incomplete music in a remote cabin.

DOOMED is a grunge fantasy narrative made with point-and-shoot cameras. The film was made by a group of friends in the hills and swamps surrounding Stroudsburg, PA during the course of three years. With a backpack, a couple of small cameras, a digital audio recorder and a thrift store tripod that had missing feet, the cast created a lo-fi parable about the creative process told through 90’s alternative rock iconography.

According to director Allen Riley, the production crept into a realm of immersive fiction with the cast/crew living collectively for weeks and even sleeping overnight in the abandoned chicken coop where the interior scenes were filmed.

The centerpiece of DOOMED is a fantastical tree creature named Glofin constructed using burlap, latex, alpaca wool, and glass taxidermy eyes. At one point, production was halted when Glofin was destroyed by wild animals which marked the end of the film’s production, but years later, a complete narrative within the footage was about to be salvaged and constructed. As a grunge opera, the musical score was physically processed using analog cassette tapes recorded by Riley, who practiced guitar as a teenager in the 90s. The resulting film is charged with spontaneous energy and moments of heavy reverb.

Posted in Uncategorized

TWO FILMS BY GABRIEL BARTALOS

Posted on by smacfarlane

This August, join us for two feature films (and a few odds and end short surprises!) from Gabriel Bartalos, the practical effects mad man behind most of the LEPRECHAUN series, as well as a resume that spans from DAWN OF THE DEAD and FRANKENHOOKER to TIM AND ERIC’S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE. There’s something for everyone (?) in these two singular ‘horror’ flicks from a living effects master.

SKINNED DEEP
dir. Gabriel Bartalos, 2004
97 mins. United States.
In English.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 7 – 5 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 8 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 20 – 9:30 PM with Q&A with Gabriel Bartalos
(This event is $10.)
SATURDAY, AUGUST 27 – MIDNIGHT

GET YOUR TICKETS!

A family’s flat tire on a barren stretch of road, with only a diner dotting the landscape, leads them to Granny, the seemingly nice old woman who runs the establishment.

Released in 2004, SKINNED DEEP plays like a surreal riff on THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE from an alternate dimension. It follows a family on a cross country road trip who stumbes into a hellish diner run by ‘the Surgeon General’ and his nightmare family, including ‘Brian’ (who has a massive cranium) and ‘Plates’ – a maniac who throws….plates – played by Warwick Davis.

Clearly crafted with a lot of love and care, SKINNED DEEP is mandatory midnight viewing for slasher fans.

SAINT BERNARD
dir. Gabriel Bartalos, 2019
97 mins. United States.
In English.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 6 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 18 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 26 – 9:30 PM – with Q&A with Gabriel Bartalos
(This event is $10.)
TUESDAY, AUGUST 30 – 7:30 PM

GET YOUR TICKETS!

A classical musical conductor unravels into the abyss of insanity.

Gabriel’s second feature manages to outdo its predecessor in terms of both scope and tone – SAINT BERNARD has far more in common with experimental classics like ERASERHEAD than the bizarro 70s/80s slasher fare of SKINNED DEEP.

Those expecting a linear narrative (or the WTF slasher antics of SKINNED DEEP) will have their expectations twisted like a Bartalos clay sculpture, and if you allow yourself to get on the movie’s wavelength, there is a lot to love – a sincere, surreal exploration of obsession and addiction, full of chaos and mind blowing practical effects.