BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JUNE commemorates the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, referred to in mainland China as 六四事件 – the “June 4 incident”. None of these movies adopts an explicitly polemical stance; instead, it’s a necessarily imperfect selection of works shedding light on the botched dreams and secret economies that came after the Cultural Revolution, but before the liberalizations of the 1990s – a process that led, of course, to the present moment’s extravaganza of state-managed turbocapitalism. In the spirit of the infamous “tank man” photograph (iconic to the rest of the world, but scrubbed near-entirely from the Chinese internet), this series takes a look at the cultural context surrounding the 1989 protests (and, implicitly, their bloody suppression) in media res.

BUMMING IN BEIJING
(流浪北京)
dir. Wu Wenguang, 1990
70 minutes.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.

MONDAY, JUNE 3 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 11 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 19 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, JUNE 27 – 10 PM

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In 1990, Chinese documentaries were almost exclusively stodgy, didactic talking-head affairs broadcast on state-run media. Then came Wu Wenguang’s BUMMING IN BEIJING, kicking off an entire independent documentary scene in the country. Shot directly before and after the Tiananmen Square Massacre on cameras taken from a government TV station, BUMMING IN BEIJING follows five broke bohemians (including future art stars like Zhang Dali, long before they found fame) in grimy late 80s Beijing. Shot in a vérité style that would soon be adopted by a new generation of filmmakers, the movie includes an onscreen mental breakdown, a time-capsule view of the emergence of the country’s avant-garde, and proof that the hippest place in China used to be KFC.

“The prolonged moments of near silence in BUMMING IN BEIJING produce the aesthetic effect of outlasting the remembered roar of government tanks.” – Ernest Larsen, Art In America

( poster by Wendy Cong Zhao )

BLACK SNOW
(本命年)
dir. Xie Fei, 1990
107 mins. China.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.

MONDAY, JUNE 3 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 11 – 10 PM
MONDAY, JUNE 24 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 28 – 10 PM

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Winner of the Silver Bear at the 1990 Berlinale, Xie Fei’s kitchen-sink drama BLACK SNOW was in production before the June 4 Incident, but reflects the bitterness and unease of the period from first frame to last without need for any explicit political statement or reference. In a smoldering early performance, Chinese superstar Jiang Wen (DEVILS ON THE DOORSTEP, KEEP COOL, ROGUE ONE) stars Li Huiquan, a derelict twentysomething returning home after a three-year term at a labor camp, having been implicated in the murder of a young man who was hanging out with his ex-girlfriend. Surrounded by alcoholic friends from childhood and squabbling adults in his claustrophobic slum, Li falls for a torch singer at his favorite nightclub named Yaqiu (Lin Cheng), and the ensuing struggles – freedom versus the need to make a living, going straight versus turning a profit – are unique to this vision of Beijing as a den of black-market iniquity, while linking seamlessly with the classic themes of film noir. Bleak but exhilarating to behold (largely thanks to Jiang’s tight-lipped leading turn), BLACK SNOW is ultimately about the lack of options for Li’s generation to have an undisturbed inner life, living in close quarters in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution.

“Li represents a lost generation of young people who rebel against the ideals of their forefathers and the traditions of their country… The tragedy is that they are at a loss where to go or what to believe in. Everyone in China now wants to find a new ideal, a new belief, because the Cultural Revolution destroyed our old beliefs and our old system… We realized, after it was too late, that we had been deceived — we had destroyed our past, our values, our lives, but had created nothing.” – Xie Fei

( poster by Wendy Cong Zhao )

THE SQUARE
(广场)
dirs. Zhang Yuan and Duan Jinchuan, 1994
100 mins. China.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, JUNE 4 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JUNE 10 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 18 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 21 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, JUNE 29 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, JUNE 30 – 5 PM

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Never before screened in New York City and long-suppressed in China, this documentary by the renowned Sixth Generation filmmaker Zhang Yuan (MAMA, SONS, BEIJING BASTARD) sprang from an innocent-enough idea in the years after the June 4 Incident: Tiananmen Square was a public space, so who was to stop Zhang (with Duan Jinchuan) from filming day-to-day mundanities in the guise of working for state TV? It’s a fascinating (and sometimes, dryly funny) glimpse at China on the eve of sweeping economic transition, with accoutrements of the Mao era perhaps uncanny present. Largely emptied out in the years after the Incident, this Square is defined by its absences, and the unease of its own legacy.

“Anyone who knows about Chinese history understands that whatever huge historical changes play out, Tiananmen Square is often the stage – for instance, the June Fourth Incident in 1989, Tomb-Sweeping Day in 1976 when crowds came out to mourn Zhou Enlai. In 1966 it was there in the square that Mao Zedong received more than six million Red Guards. If we go back even further, there is the 1949 ceremony to celebrate the founding of the People’s Republic of China and, if we like, we can go back even further to the May Fourth Movement and beyond. On one level, Tiananmen Square can be said to be a political symbol; at the same time, it is like a massive stage… Especially in the years following the June Fourth Incident, I noticed how quiet it had become. I would see people there flying kites, peddling things, going for strolls, and I would see so many policemen, plainclothes officers… I felt the pressing need to pick up my camera and record some of those more interesting people and attempt to capture that feeling of the square.” – Zhang Yuan

LAN YU
(藍宇)
dir. Stanley Kwan, 2001
96 mins. China/Hong Kong.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, JUNE 4 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JUNE 16 – 5 PM
THURSDAY, JUNE 20 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, JUNE 23 – 7:30 PM

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Based on a novel first published online by one “Beijing Comrade” in 1998, LAN YU is a breakthrough film, a queer drama set against the backdrop of the student movement that culminated in the Tiananmen Square Massacre. While the book was infamous for its erotic descriptive passages, director Stanley Kwan wanted to expand the source material to focus on the tortured romance between the story’s eponymous architecture student (Liu Ye) and his lover, a closeted businessman of the older generation named Chen Handong (Hu Jun). The result is a film that’s both elliptical and brutally sharp, a diagnosis in the class differences and mores (and thus, denials) that helped foment the dissent of the late eighties – in particular, the corruption of China’s bureaucratic (and, by proximity to government, emerging bourgeois) classes. It’s also an edge-of-your-seat portrayal of desire and devastation through Lan Yu’s fast-eroding innocence, with a plot spanning multiple years of unrequited passion.

Widely heralded as one of the greatest living Hong Kong filmmakers for works like CENTER STAGE and ROUGE, Stanley Kwan has still never gotten a proper retrospective in North America; hopefully these screenings will help renew interest in his fascinating and singular body of work. “In my last film THE ISLAND TALES, I made simple things too complicated, “he said. “And so this time I’ve tried to make complicated things less complicated, or simple things even simpler… What I was interested in was how we could transform June 4 into the moment that Chen Handong commits to Lan Yu… The fact that the story took place in Beijing, a city foreign to me, didn’t bother me…. I might not be Lan Yu and my boyfriend might not be Chen Handong, but virtually everything they go through in the novel I’ve been through with my partner.”

“Courageously simple and frank… The film eliminates most of the novel’s near-porno sex scenes and tones down the melodrama, producing a matter of fact and emotionally truthful account of a relationship marked by its time and place. Superbly acted, too.” – Time Out London

“Pulpy and mesmerizing.” – Carla Meyer, San Francisco Chronicle

In keeping with recent events with independent filmmakers currently forging their own paths – Nuotama Bodomo, Ricky D’Ambrose, Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn, Amir George – Spectacle is pleased to invite Chicago-based film critic and director Michael Glover Smith to our humble theater to present the New York City premiere of two recent works: MERCURY IN RETROGRADE (2017) and RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO (2018). Just in time for your most recent imploded relationship, Smith’s films draw unabashedly from the influence of Eric Rohmer, alongside classic walk-and-talk romantic comedies of the eighties and nineties. Already it’s a signature body of work, alternately warm and humanist but without Hollywood allusions about the pitfalls of complicated people trying to forge a life together in the Windy City (or, for that matter, anywhere else.)

MERCURY IN RETROGRADE
dir. Michael Glover Smith, 2017
105 mins. United States.

SATURDAY, MAY 25 – 5 PM with Q&A featuring Michael Glover Smith, producer Kevin Wright and actor Shane Simmons
ONE NIGHT ONLY! (This event is $10.)

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MERCURY IN RETROGRADE follows three couples who spend a weekend together on Lake Michigan: Jack (Jack C. Newell) and Golda (Alana Arenas) have been married for a decade, Richard (Kevin Wehby) and Isabelle (Roxane Mesquida) are in a committed love relationship but clearly on (or near) the rocks, and Peggy (Najarra Townsend) and Wyatt (Shane Simmons, who will reprise the character in Smith’s followup RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO) just linked up. Embracing the intrinsic anxiety of its classic setup, Smith’s film is a handcrafted trip into the terra incognita of monogamy, epitomized by a jarring sequence of dudes being old-fashioned dudes back at the cabin while (because) their partners have repaired to the local watering hole. MERCURY IN RETROGRADE is that rare slice-of-life film with a grip on the darkness below its surface, driven forward by its flawed characters’ alternating fears of being committed or alone (no spoilers!) and anchored by six committed performances from a pitch-perfect cast.

RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO
dir. Michael Glover Smith, 2018
69 mins. United States.

SATURDAY, MAY 25 – 7:30 PM with Q&A featuring Michael Glover Smith, with actors Claire Cooney and Rashaad Hall
ONE NIGHT ONLY! (This event is $10.)

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RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO is separated into three discrete vignettes: the first concerns a young man named Paul (Kevin Wehby) angling to woo a grad student named Delaney (Clare Cooney) he meets in a bar. Paul’s innocuous-enough pickup attempt sets the stage for a bittersweet and frequently hilarious rumination on compatibility in short-and-long-terms, perfectly matched by the subsequent passages. Part II follows a couple (Rashaad Hall and Matthew Sherbach) weighing whether to get a cat or a dog, while one half privately considers popping The Question. Perhaps inevitably, Part III addresses breakup, in the form of a 20something schlub named Wyatt (Shane Simmons) whose girlfriend Julie (Nina Garnet) happens upon him in bed with another woman. The overall portrait of dating life – with all its agonies, ecstasies and nauseating in-betweens – is drawn with a delicate touch and a knack for sparkling dialogue.

MICHAEL GLOVER SMITH‘s debut feature COOL APOCALYPSE (2015) won multiple awards at festivals across the U.S. and screened at Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center and Movies in the Park before being released on home video by Emphasis Entertainment. His second feature, MERCURY IN RETROGRADE, starring Roxane Mesquida and Najarra Townsend, won the top prizes at the 2018 Tallahassee Film Festival and the 2017 Full Bloom Film Festival and was the subject of a rave review by the Chicago Sun-Times’ Richard Roeper who wrote: “Smith has a deft touch for dialogue, creating six distinct characters who look and sound like people we know…a smart, funny, quietly effective and authentic slice of older millennial life.” His most recent feature, 2018’s RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO, is the final installment in his “relationship trilogy” and has won four awards in its first 10 festival screenings. He was a recipient of the Siskel Center’s Star Filmmaker award in 2017 and made Newcity Chicago’s “Film 50” list in 2018. He teaches film history at several Chicago-area colleges and is the author of the film blog Whitecitycinema.com.

SPLATTER UNIVERSITY (LIVE SCORE by Chris Burke)
dir. Richard W. Haines, 1984
78 min, USA

FRIDAY, MAY 24 – 7:30 PM and 10 PM
(This event is $10.)

Original score remixed and performed live by composer Chris Burke, aka glomag.

ONLINE TICKETS

• •

“You know it seems to me if you are going to kill someone you [should] at least know them real well.” — The morbid but sensible landlord Mrs. Bloom

Before making his mark with CLASS OF NUKE ‘EM HIGH, Richard Haines began work on his very first film in 1981, at age 24. The end result, after running out of time and money, is a straightforward, traditional horror movie that’s only an hour. Putting it aside for a year and then padding it out with some “Porky’s-type humor” (at the distributor’s request and to his dismay), Haines gets the original runtime up to a feature-length, distribution-friendly 78 minutes.

The end result is what feels like two films in one, a traditional horror and college party flick; the sudden switches back & forth in tone are both in conflict and complement each other sublimely. New instructor Julie Parker (an earnest and believable Forbes Riley) unravels a murder mystery while her students waste their youth away in a seemingly unrelated subplot–until they themselves are wasted.

Nearly 40 years later, Richard Haines’s directorial debut has finally been released on Blu-ray, courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome. And the literal rough edges of their newly-restored print is one of two reasons why Spectacle is proud to present what can be considered the ultimate version of SPLATTER UNIVERSITY; the look & feel of dirty & grainy of decades old 16 mm footage that’s been modernized to conform to HD only accentuates the off-kilter feeling.

The second reason is the remastered and revamped 80’s synth score by the film’s original composer, Chris Burke (THE TOXIC AVENGER, BLUE VENGEANCE, THE REFRIGERATOR). Someone over at somethingawful.com described it best as “Optimus Prime passing a kidney stone with his motor oil.” Hear it performed live at our very special screening, one that will also include a panel with Chris and other special guests.

• •

One can find more synth horror goodness from Chris Burke at glomag.bandcamp.com.

NATIONALITE: IMMIGRE
(NATIONALITY: IMMIGRANT)
Dir. Sidney Sokhona, 1975
France. 70 mins.
In French with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 8 – 7:30 PM + 10PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY
ALL PROCEEDS BENEFIT THE NEW YORK IMMIGRANT FREEDOM FUND

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The New York Immigrant Freedom Fund is a program of the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund in partnership with an advisory board of community-based organizations fighting to dismantle our punitive immigration and detention systems. The advisory board consists of African Communities Together, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Families for Freedom, Immigrant Defense Project, Make the Road New York, and the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project; other coalition partners include CAIR-NY.

OFFICIAL SELECTION – 1976 CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

Made by a young Parisian immigrant in his early 20s named Sidney Sokhona as he recoiled from a rash of exploitations and abuses in France’s African migrant community, NATIONALITÉ: IMMIGRÉ dramatizes the real-life rent strike undertaken by Sokhona and his neighbors in the Rue Riquet settlement housing, a “docu-fiction” of its own community in collaboration that’s unlike anything you’ve before seen in “world cinema”. One could hardly be blamed for interpreting the film as an endless litany of dehumanizing bureaucratic obstacle courses – as Serge Daney pointed out in his review “On Paper”, the film juts uncomfortably against the militant Left’s emphasis on using rupture theory to delegitimize the legal process, a high-minded option unavailable to immigrants like those depicted here. Sokhona took to filming after the Aubervilliers scandal of January 1970 – when five African migrants died in an overcrowded shelter on the periphery of Paris due to asphyxiation – prompting then-Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas to declare an end of these settlements, sometimes nicknamed bidonvilles or caves, by 1973. The filmmaker wasn’t so optimistic – but then, what NATIONALITÉ: IMMIGRÉ does offer is a rare glimpse at community organizing coming into praxis on both sides of the camera, with many of Sokhona’s neighbors playing themselves. (Sokhona financed the film in piecemeal fashion once scene at a time while working as a telephone operator.) While the thrust of NATIONALITÉ: IMMIGRÉ is unabashedly polemical, the loose narrative structure allows Sokhona to pursue fascinating side-stories and political tangents, at times dipping from what appears to be pure verite into a purely Brechtian exercise wherein immigrants are handed jobs in the form of huge placards, which they must carry around their necks, denoting their net worth to society in material terms.

In Cahiers du Cinema, Sokhona would elaborate to Daney and Jean-Pierre Oudart that “I was not sure that he who had loved NATIONALITÉ: IMMIGRÉ would like it – which does not mean that no one can love both. SAFRANA is, for me, the continuation of N:I. At the time it was done, compared to the reality of that time, there were a number of plans in the construction of the film itself on which we had to pass. For the first time, perhaps, people saw things they had never seen – so their membership was much simpler. I think people also ask: should a film about immigration be cinema? N.I. was in black and white, there was a certain desired poverty – it’s unthinkable to film an immigrant’s home in color…. People will go see a movie; of course they will see a subject, but it must be possible to express it in a very simple way. I think a political film – or engagé – can use other weapons, and touch a large number of people taking account of the movies.”

Assuming the position of both French and African filmmaker, Sokhona published a kind of manifesto in Cahiers du Cinema entitled “Notre Cinema” (Our Cinema), wherein he decried the cultural feedback loop enabled by state funding (especially in postcolonial cases), the incessant use of African landscapes as backdrops for tawdry Western melodramas, and the pigeonholing of black movies in festival programming – citing that the 1976 Cannes Film Festival included CAR WASH in its main slate, but consigned Ousmane Sembene’s CEDDO to competition in Directors’ Fortnight. If SAFRANA closes on an impossibly optimistic note for Sokhona (as the audience has, over the too-brief course of two movies, come to understand him), it reveals itself in hindsight as a byproduct of the French example, wherein the the organizing onscreen bears a utopian fruit that’s nevertheless untrustworthy. (Sokhona alleges that audiences were far more skeptical about the immigrants’ warm countryside reception in discussions following screenings in Paris.) What’s universalized in the humiliations of NATIONALITÉ: IMMIGRÉ remains – or as Sokhona put it to Cahiers, “Immigration has not only served to alienate us but also to teach us to be ashamed of what we were before. Any immigrant with a conscience realizes he has as much to claim on the workers’ side as the farmers’, today.”

~ screening with ~

aka NIGHT WARNING
dir. William Asher, 1981
96 min.

THURSDAY, MAY 2 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, MAY 9 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, MAY 10 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, MAY 15 – 10 PM

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“A true gem of the decade – the 1980’s most twisted, bizarre cinematic vision of motherhood” – John Kenneth Muir, Horror Movies of the 1980’s

In honor of Mother’s Day, Spectacle is happy to present the crazed aunt-mother slasher-spectacular BUTCHER, BAKER, NIGHTMARE MAKER aka NIGHT WARNING.

Susan Tyrrell (Fat City, Cry-Baby) delivers an off-the-charts lead performance as Cheryl, a woman raising her nephew Billy as her own son—who she happens to have a deeply repressed sexual attraction to—after the accidental death of his parents.

When Billy decides to leave for college, Cheryl murders a man in their home—claiming he was trying to assault her—in a desperate bid to get Billy to stay. Her plan backfires when the virulently homophobic police detective (Bo Svenson, having a little too much fun) becomes convinced that Billy, caught up in a gay love triangle, is the real murderer.

A gonzo slice of Grand Guignol exploitation filmmaking from veteran TV director William Asher, BBNM is a strange beast —not quite slasher-y enough for horror and a little too lurid for the thriller crowd (it made the ‘video nasty’ list despite the relatively tame body count, and one negative review referred to it as “Tennessee Williams’ version of Psycho”).

Despite the exploitative trappings, and without spoiling too much, the film’s views on sexuality turn out to be surprisingly modern—particularly by 1982 standards—making this slasher oddity well worth another look.