CHOPPING MALL
Dir. Jim Wynorski 1986
USA 77 minutes.

A group of young shopping mall employees stay behind for a late night party in one of the stores. When the mall goes on lock-down before they can get out, the robot security system malfunctions, and goes on a killing spree.

ONE NIGHT ONLY!
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 1ST – 10:00pm
(This screening is $10)

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Join us for a night of music, movies and mixed media with antifolk legend Jeffrey Lewis.
Lewis will perform a short acoustic set and then present the film Chopping Mall which he has never seen! After the film he will take questions from the audience.

About Jeffrey Lewis: Jeffrey Lewis and his various bandmates have perfected a scuzzy, urban style of indie-folk, developing from late-90s New York City bedroom tapes into a mighty 21st Century mash-up of folksy spiel and artsy garage, like Pete Seeger meeting Sonic Youth. A born and raised denizen of the Lower East Side, Lewis’s home recordings were discovered by Rough Trade Records in 2001 (famed label of The Smiths, The Strokes, Belle & Sebastian and more) while Lewis was briefly living in Austin, Texas. Since the 2001 release of his first official album “The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane and Other Favorites” on Rough Trade Records, Lewis has toured the world and released numerous acclaimed albums on Rough Trade and other labels. He’s built a worldwide fanbase while regularly changing band names, most recently recording as Jeffrey Lewis & The Voltage for Don Giovanni Records and Moshi Moshi Records.

LITAN
dir. Jean-Pierre Mocky, 1982
87 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

Sunday, October 3 – 7:30pm
Saturday, October 23 – 10pm
Friday, October 29 – 10pm

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STREAMING AT STREAM.SPECTACLETHEATER.COM
Tuesday, October 5 – 7:30pm

In conjunction with our Spectober presentation of Mexican filmmaker Emiliano Rocha Minter’s 2018 feature WE ARE THE FLESH, Spectacle is thrilled to revisit the seminal works of his mother, video artist and filmmaker Sarah Minter (1953-2016). Minter’s lightly fictionalized punk films NADIE ES INOCENTE and ALMA PUNK (as well as shorts codirected with her then-partner Gregorio Rocha, also included in this series) served as testimony to teenage nihilism, crumbling infrastructure and a new generation of olvidados on the margins of society.

NADIE ES INOCENTE
(NO ONE IS INNOCENT)
dir. Sarah Minter, 1985-87
55 mins. Mexico.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

Saturday, October 2 – 5pm
Thursday, October 28 – 7:30pm

ONLINE TICKETS

STREAMING AT STREAM.SPECTACLETHEATER.COM
Monday, October 11 – 7:30pm

No hay
no hay futuro
No hay
No hay amor
No hay
No hay cemento
Yey yey
Los mierdas soy yo

Sarah Minter’s no-future classic NADIE ES INOCENTE is a fictionalized document of the chavos banda (youth gang) punk community in the slums of Mexico City’s Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl (also known as Neza York) shot on Betacam over a number of years. Minter structures the film around bad trip of a reformed punk named Kara as he takes the train from Neza back to the main city; delivered in both flashback and voiceover monologue, his memories serve as desolate testimony from an apocalyptic adolescence. NADIE ES INOCENTE was written and performed in collaboration (Minter would later say, complicity) with the young Mierdas Punks who play themselves onscreen, and betrays Minter’s extraordinary access. The film also repurposes 16mm concert footage from her collaboration with Gregorio Rocha SABADO DE MIERDA (SATURDAY OF SHIT), using slow motion and inventive sound editing to give big-screen gravitas to handheld shots of desert throwdowns as Kara’s self-extinguishing memories. Shown and distributed locally on VHS in New York City by Karen Ranucci’s Downtown Video for years before it was seen in Mexico, NADIE ES INOCENTE is a remarkable and unsentimental depiction of teenage life and urban displacement.

screens with

SAN FRENESI
(SAINT FRENZY)
dirs. Sarah Minter and Gregorio Rocha, 1983
34 mins. Mexico.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

Starring Maribel Mejia as a young woman who goes on a road trip reeling from a string of heartbreaks and bad relationships, Minter’s early collaboration with her then-partner Rocha feels more apiece with the French New Wave influences of a successive generation. (She spoke admiringly about Godard in an interview, but described her later ideas as more directly influenced by Dziga Vertov.) There isn’t a ton of evidence of the staccato editing that would mark NADIE ES INOCENTE, but one prolonged sex scene – in which a furiously edited sequence of sound effects takes center stage over abstracted imagery – can only hint at the individual liberation to follow.

ALMA PUNK
dir. Sarah Minter, 1991-92
56 mins. Mexico.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

Saturday, October 2 – 10pm
Thursday, October 14 – 7:30pm
Friday, October 22 – 7:30pm

ONLINE TICKETS

STREAMING AT STREAM.SPECTACLETHEATER.COM
Tuesday, October 12 – 7:30pm

Part-improvised and starring a cast of nonactors led by real-life punk Ana Hernandez (as Alma, which also means “soul”), ALMA PUNK traces the tortuous path of a young riot grrl from the Mexico City punk scene as she moves north to Tijuana and, eventually, towards the United States. It confidently breaks with the rules of staging docudrama with an unsparing look at Alma’s love life, unfakeable scene bohemianism and extensive location footage of Mexico before NAFTA and after the 1985 earthquake. “I feel like no one is supporting me,” Alma says. “Guys want everything and give nothing in return. Isn’t that so?” Like NADIE ES INOCENTE, this film uses the intimacy and flexibility of video (this time, 3/4″) to wring innovation in the editing room, this time to give Alma a similarly alienated and jittery headspace.

(screens with)

SABADO DE MIERDA
(SATURDAY OF SHIT)
dirs. Sarah Minter and Gregorio Rocha
25 mins. 1988.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

Bookended with snippets of This Heat’s classic 1979 slow-burn “Twilight Furniture”, SABADO DE MIERDA is a classic rockers-versus-punks story set in a near-autonomous version of Neza York in the year 2000, lorded over by teenage punk gangs. The movie plays at once like riveting docudrama and sprawling music video: capturing one massive crowd scene, Minter and Rocha paid off police officers to stage an intervention that sends dozens of punks scattering between the floodlights. The desert depicted is at once a Mad Max-influenced arena of brawling moshpits and mob rule, but also a permanent freedom from the rules and demands of society.

NADIE ES INOCENTE: 20 YEARS LATER
(NADIE ES INOCENTE: 20 ANOS DESPUES)
dir. Sarah Minter, 2010
72 mins. Mexico.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

Saturday, October 2 – 7:30pm
Thursday, October 28 – 10:00pm

ONLINE TICKETS

STREAMING AT STREAM.SPECTACLETHEATER.COM
Monday, October 11 – 10:00pm

In one of her final linear video works before her untimely death in 2016, Sarah Minter revisited the community of punks from Nezahualcoyotl (or “Neza York”) vividly captured in NADIE ES INOCENTE, indeed, twenty years later. 20 ANOS DESPUES necessarily becomes a portrait of Mexico’s post-NAFTA economic growth, the onset of middle age, and the mellowing of nihilist sensibilities: one punk has become a hardcore Christian, while another exorcises his anger by painting grotesque oil portraits. The result is a sober, yet moving, depiction of life’s surprising longeurs (not entirely unlike Michael Apted’s UP series) but for the members of the Mierdas Punks like Juan Martinez (“el Kara” in NADIE ES INOCENTE), one of several of Minter’s teenage antiheroes who didn’t make it.

SARAH MINTER (1953-2016) was a pioneering video and installation artist, a photographer, curator and avant-garde theater performer from Mexico. She spent her early 20s collaborating with Juan Carlos Uviedo, an exiled Argentinean theater director who had migrated to Mexico City after many years heading the Living Theatre at La Mama in the East Village. Minter’s video works are bitter, unforgettable dispatches from the margins of society, drawn in opposition to the tropes and food chains of TV documentary and theatrical distribution; she later experimented with looped installations shot over the course of many years. This is how she described her approach to video as opposed to film:

“I learned to edit and resolve things technically on my own. Creative and financial independence are very important to me, especially if we remember that in the 1980s there was practically no existing support of any kind. I saw people trying to get things done and it took them ten years to make their next movie. That was basically the panorama. They were all failed attempts, and on top of all that, independent film was totally hermetic… If you got money to film, you had to do it with a high percentage of union workers, and if not, you had to pay replacement fees. And once you’d pulled it off it wasn’t easy to show your work. There weren’t festivals in the same quantity as there are today; in Mexico there were hardly any at all, and there were very few in the rest of the world—it wasn’t easy even for famous people. The only kinds of film that kept getting made were Mexican sex comedies and totally commercial movies, which controlled everything.”

PLASTIC FRENCH
dir. Dan Simolke, 2021.
USA 99 min.

Friday , October 15 – 7pm w/ filmmakers in attendance
Thursday, October 21 – 7pm w/ filmmakers in attendance
(These screenings are $10)

ONLINE TICKETS

STREAMING ONLINE AT STREAM.SPECTACLETHEATER.COM
Monday, October 18 – 7:30pm

A group of ambitious people must choose different paths as they clash against money and power in a sex-driven parallel reality New York City. Up-and-coming artists Raya (Rand Faris) and Mia (Isabella Forti) struggle in pursuit of individuality, as young magnates Will (Will Sandler) and Kat (Christina Leonardi) must decide what their influence and power will serve. Meanwhile Mia’s personal gigolo (Alexander Maysonet) returns to his hidden world of indentured pawns in the manipulative games of the rich. In order to seek freedom and transcendence, they must first come to terms with their own human needs and natures.

DANCE GODDESS
dir. Hamid Khan, 1987
82 min, USA
In English.
In Urdu w/ English subtitles.

MONDAY, AUGUST 16 – 8PM at The City Reliquary backyard (7:30 PM doors)
ONLINE TICKETS

As part of our mid-pandemic pre-reopening festivities, Spectacle is beyond thrilled to host an outdoor encore screening of Hamid Khan’s DANCE GODDESS in collaboration with our friends at The City Reliquary. Here’s the pitch from 2017…

Over the years, the Grand Ballroom at 124 S. 3rd St. has played host to many a lost musical – the nearly-mythical ROCK N’ ROLL HOTEL, the dearly melancholic DOOMED LOVE – and now, it is with great pleasure that we announce the world premiere of a film orphaned for 30 years… Hamid Kahn’s DANCE GODDESS.

After moving to America and having a successful career as a real estate attorney, Hamid found he missed the culture of India, particularly the movies and music. He dreamed of making the first American Bollywood movie, and so he wrote, produced, and directed DANCE GODDESS. Sparing no expense, he hired the best cinematographer, best dancers, and obtained permits to shoot scenes all over the city. To market the film internationally, all of the original actors dubbed their lines in both English and Urdu, and Kahn filmed alternate versions of every song in both languages. We will be presenting both versions of the film throughout the month.

The film follows Julie, who arrives at New York City’s Khan Dance Studios from London with but a simple dream – to be the greatest dancer in the world. She has a fire in her heart and believes with the right connections, she won’t need luck. Julie immediately strikes a rapport with lead dancer Mike… much to the chagrin of Mike’s dance partner and secret/not-so-secret girlfriend and weed addict Maggie. Julie and Mike mesh so well from the jump they begin singing the film’s first song, “Dream On”, to the applause of their classmates. Has Doc (the director himself, Hamid Khan) found his proverbial DANCE GODDESS?, he wonders aloud. Soon, Julie finds herself embroiled in a struggle between her heart’s desires (Mike) and her dreams (dance). Why can’t she have both, she wonders aloud a number of times? With the help of Doc, Julie meets up with Jack – a famous producer – who promises to get her all the way to Broadway.

DANCE GODDESS hits the ground twirling (ever twirling) around 80’s Manhattan with a huge dance sequence taking place in the middle of Times Square (“It’s the heart of New York!” Mike tells Julie), complete with gawking tourists and rubbernecking locals. Marvel at the marquees of long lost theaters advertising hits like THE LOST BOYS, DISORDERLIES, WARRIOR OF SHAOLIN, THE TORMENTORS, and more! Delight in typefaces gone by and cheer for banks that no longer exist. The fashions, the passions, and the beat of the city abound in DANCE GODDESS’ all-singing, all-dancing kaleidoscope.

Special thanks to Hamid Khan and to David Ginn without whom this would not have been possible.

PANELSTORY
dir. Věra Chytilová, 1979.
Czechoslovakia. 100 min.
In Czech with English subtitles.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 2 – 7:30P + 10P EST in-theater and at stream.spectacletheater.com
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
ONLINE TICKETS

Věra Chytilová’s 1966 DAISIES may be her best known work of radical cinema, but it’s neither her last, nor arguably most significant. A decade later, at time when most of her Prague Spring contemporaries had fled Czechoslovakia or drastically reigned in once-experimental visions, she came back with the equally daring and essential PANELSTORY. Framed as a sort of ensemble comedy circulating among the many lives contained within a new Soviet-bloc housing complex, the film is actually a scathing satire shredding every available ideal of home and family. The whole film can be understood by its audaciously critical setting: lost in a wasteland of debris and stalled construction, still incomplete yet already falling into disrepair, riddled with half-functional elevators, the housing complex precisely mirrors the disintegrating families contained within, whose individual stories form a catalogue of bleakly hilarious dysfunction and despair. It might have been all too believably familiar to those living under similar conditions in Czechoslovakia at the time, but Chytilova’s disillusionment, as always, extends far beyond her immediate surroundings to call into question the thwarted utopian hopes of an entire industrialized world.

As with all of Chytilová’s best work, form here deftly follows function. The urban malaise is caught near-entirely in verité-style hand-held camerawork decades ahead of fashion, and rhythmically fragmented under anarchic editing that mixes apartment interiors with dystopian architecture and massive earth-moving operations. Even the sound design follows suit, as the characters are beset by cataclysmic atonal score (contrasted against a synth-funk interlude straight out of an aspirational 70s home furnishings showroom). What PANELSTORY may lack from the sheer stylistic invention of DAISIES, it makes up for in thematic cohesion.

After the collapse of the Prague Spring, Chytilová was among those directors cut out of the studio system for their brilliant excesses, which meant that she spent the years from 1970 to 1976 secretly directing commercials under the name of her husband (Jaroslav Kučera, her frequent cinematographer and collaborator). Pressures from international film festivals and a bold letter from directly to the president restating her sincere Socialist values allowed Chytilová to release THE APPLE GAME in 1976. But if that work seemed comparatively restrained, she pulled out all the stops for PANELSTORY. It’s unbelievable that such a film could have been produced under the noses of the state censors, and following its release, Chytilova found herself banned for another two years for her troubles. Seeing it again all these years later, PANELSTORY seems well worth the risks of getting it made.

Having considered PANELSTORY our “lodestar film” since opening in 2010, Spectacle is thrilled to host this one-night-only engagement of Chytilová’s unsung classic as part of our reopening festivities.

Special thanks to Troy Swain and Janus Films.