“We just wanted to make small, good films and raise a family. A terrific life.” – Faith Hubley

This August, animator and filmmaker Emily Hubley will be at Spectacle for three discrete presentations of moving image work. The first is a selection of short films by her parents, the legendary animators John and Faith Hubley; the second is a survey of Faith’s solo works, spanning from 1975 to 2001. Finally, Emily will present a selection of her own animations, many of them made in collaboration with her mother and siblings. All three screenings will be followed by Q&A.

John Hubley was an art director at Disney who would do innovative work in Hollywood before being blacklisted and moving East; like Theodore Geisel, he worked on some 1940s cartoons which are, in hindsight, jawdroppingly progressive: he produced and storyboarded Chuck Jones’ United Automotive Workers’ short HELL-BENT FOR ELECTION (1944), which features a burly laborer not dissimilar from the ones in Russian Constructivist murals, and production-designed United Productions of America (UPA)’s THE BROTHERHOOD OF MAN (1946), an anti-racism PSA that would later serve as evidence that the company was steeped in “un-American” politics. But it was Hubley’s partnership with his wife Faith (herself a lifelong feminist and antifascist who had worked a number of jobs in Hollywood) that would result in some of the most beguiling alternative cartoons to emerge from the postwar period. Their careers straddled old-guard animation under the protectorates of Disney and Warner-size studios, and the emergence of avant-garde, experimental forms; their style was suffused with the kind of flat, jazzy modernism those same companies would ape in later years in order to save money on animation.

Working as a team, the Hubleys’ collaborators included Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Carter, Herb Alpert, and Garry Trudeau and Ella Fitzgerald; they designed segments for Sesame Street and The Electric Workshop, and fielded a number of Academy Awards (as well as nominations.) Frequently casting their children as voice actors (notably in 1959’s MOONBIRD, 1967’s A WINDY DAY, and 1972’s COCKABOODY – animated around audio recordings of the kids), the Hubleys strove to push animation ahead of what John called “pigs and bunnies”. They continued to do that even after his untimely death at the age of 62 – in the middle of working with him on A Doonesbury Special, which would be finished by Faith and broadcast on NBC the following year. Faith Hubley would continue the family business, but with a style that broke off from the collaborations with her late husband. Her solo credits – starting with 1975’s W.O.W. (WOMEN OF THE WORLD) – bundle together international forms and ancient mythologies. She would make 25 films between John’s death and her own in 2001, including the metaphysical feature THE COSMIC EYE in 1986.

Much of it hand-drawn, Emily’s animations pick up her parents’ thread of drawing inspiration from everyday life: while her most famous work is probably the “Origin of Love” sequence in John Cameron Mitchell’s HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH, her 2009 feature THE TOE TACTIC toured nationwide and she has done music videos for her sister Georgia’s band Yo La Tengo (“Before We Run”) as well as Kate Vargas (“Call Back The Dogs”). Her shorts from the 80s and 90s betray a punk sensibility, but with a wry tenderness that’s consistent with the movies she collaborated on as a child. We’ll be showing a selection curated by Emily herself, plus her latest, BRAINWORM BILLY (made in collaboration with Max Rosenthal.)

( from MOONBIRD, 1959 )

FRIDAY, AUGUST 10 – 7:30 PM
Q&A with Emily Hubley
(This event is $10)

ONLINE TICKETS HERE

Actor Frank Mosley has been a frequent presence in American independent cinema for over a decade. As both a leading man and ubiquitous character actor, he’s appeared in films helmed by established indie darlings (Shane Carruth, David Lowry) and rising stars (Dylan Pasture, Cameron Bruce Nelson). His dance card may be full to bursting, but Mosley is more than just a pretty face.

As a director and writer, he has exhibited work at many of the world’s foremost festivals: Slamdance, Maryland Film Festival, Sidewalk Film Festival, and Champs-Elysée, to name a few. His fascination with matters of identity, memory, and temporality bleed through every frame of his films – few directors working today can touch Mosley’s narrative and media savvy. Spectacle is honored to bring his most recent efforts – three shorts, and a laudatory feature – to a discerning New York audience.

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FRANK MOSLEY SHORTS PROGRAM

 

ONLINE TICKETS HERE
FB EVENT

SATURDAY, AUGUST 25 – 7:00 PM

PARTHENON
Dir. Frank Mosley, 2017.
USA, 14 mins.

A naked body moves a stranger to empathy. PARTHENON is a slippery, dizzying diptych that questions the limits of our perception.

CASA DE MI MADRE
Dir. Frank Mosley, 2016.
USA, 12 mins.

A fire rages in the woods near a village. This fire triggers a memory in a lonely, middle-aged woman. And this memory pushes her to utter aloud the words she’s always wanted to say.

Produced in Cuba with the support of Black Factory Cinema and Escuela Internacionales de Cine y Tv in San Antonio de los Banos (EICTV), and made under the guidance of master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. The result of Mosley’s selection as a participant in the 2016 Workshop for Auteurs, the film examines grief, transference, and the consequences of role-playing.

SPIDER VEINS
Dir. Frank Mosley, 2016.
USA, 15 mins.

Two women, seemingly strangers, confront one another in an old house with conflicting memories of the same dress. By turns mysterious and shocking, the film’s fragile narrative begins to unravel, but the women’s relationship teeters closer to truth.

Loosely inspired by Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”, SPIDER VEINS is a mercurial investigation into varying levels of everyday artifice.

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HER WILDERNESS
Dir. Frank Mosley, 2014.
USA, 64 mins.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 25 – 9 PM
AND
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26 – 7:30 PM

ONLINE TICKETS HERE
FB EVENT

HER WILDERNESS weaves an elliptical, minimalist narrative of a lost, wandering child in the wake of an affair that may or may not have even happened. The film has been called “a unique work with a distinctive voice” (Indiewire), “a mesmerizing film by a superb actor and filmmaker” (RogerEbert.com), “a delicately fate-fixated mid-length enigma” (Keyframe), “the sort of fulfillment of good poetry” (Hammer To Nail), “one of the best undistributed films of 2015” (Film Pulse), and “the best experimental narrative of the year…at once alien and achingly resonant” (Indie Outlook).

HER WILDERNESS (2014) – Official trailer from Frank Mosley on Vimeo.

 

ST. FRANCIS HEARS A NOISE
Dir. Jimmy Schaus, 2018
USA

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 15 – 7:00 PM
**ONE NIGHT ONLY** Q&A WITH DIRECTOR

ONLINE TICKETS HERE
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A psychotronic, picaresque science fiction romp about a sound recordist whose special microphone picks up messages from beyond. Some of these sounds are stolen by a sinister underground production network to unlock latent psychic energy from the young actors they routinely exploit. Francis, the titular protagonist, sets off on a journey to investigate and retrieve his precious sounds, only to uncover a vast network of control in which he may already be enmeshed.

Known to many as the godfather of Japanese cyberpunk cinema for his rock-heavy, high-octane, biker films Burst City and Crazy Thunder Road, Sogo (now known as Gakuryu) Ishii is an important precursor to many of the cult icons that dominate Japanese cinemas reputation such as Takashi Miike and Shinya Tsukamoto. Yet much more protean than much of his modest reputation admits, by the time the 90s came around, Ishii all but abandoned the leather stuffed aesthetic of his early films in favor of a slower, dream-like style concerned with metaphysical questions of identity and romantic desire. Suffuse with unsolvable mysteries that spiral endlessly out of control; a hypnotic editing style that relies on lethargic tracking shots and a sublime sense of empty architectural spaces mixed with rapid impressionistic montages and jarring auditory shifts; and a quietly transgressive gender subtext that echoes his earlier punk ambitions – ANGEL DUST, AUGUST IN THE WATER, and LABYRINTH OF DREAMS form a loose trilogy of semi-forgotten, but entirely umissibe and unique masterworks of Japanese cinema. These three are presented here with Ishii’s 1984 film, THE CRAZY FAMILY, a key bridge between his earlier anarchic punk films and his more methodical 90’s output.

( poster by Stephanie Monohan )

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ANGEL DUST
Dir. Sogo Ishii, 1994
Japan, 116 min.
In Japanese, English subs

FRIDAY, AUGUST 3 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 8 – 10 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 20 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, AUGUST 28 – 7:30 PM

6 PM every Monday a woman drops dead on the Tokyo Metro leaving no clues as to who killed her. Stupefied, the police enlist psychologist Setsuko to profile the killer and predict his next moves. When the trail leads her to her former lover, Dr. Rei Aku, a mind-control obsessed psychiatrist who performs bizarre psychological experiments in from his mountain dome hideaway, Setsuko starts to experience bizarre hallucinations and premonitions related to the killings.

Drenched in vomit colored neon greens and filled with a nauseating sense of modernist alienation, ANGEL DUST echoes many of the themes and styles explored by Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s while retaining the psychedelic techniques and hypnotic narrative structure that forms a distinct part of Ishii’s 90’s style.

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AUGUST IN THE WATER
Dir. Sogo Ishii, 1995
Japan, 117 min.
In Japanese, English subs

SATURDAY, AUGUST 11 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, AUGUST 14 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 23 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, AUGUST 26 – 7:30 PM

When mysterious new girl at school and world class diving protege, Izumi, comes to town, strange things start happening – a giant heat wave consumes the town, bizzare rocks appear in the forest, and all the water in the pool turns to stone during Izumi’s most important dive. Izumi’s hopelessly romantic classmate, Ukiya, follows her as they try to figure out what’s happening. Yet far from the supernatural thriller which it may resemble on the surface, AUGUST IN THE WATER, is filled with its own completely hypnotic energy and teenage sense of wonder. Ishii utilizes meditative tracking shots across glimmering swimming pools, dreamy dissolves between cloudy skies, and a web of unsolved mysteries tethered to new age spiritualism to create a work that might be as far he could possibly get from the rebellious aggression of his early punk films.

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LABYRINTH OF DREAMS
Dir. Sogo Ishii, 1997
Japan, 90 min.
In Japanese, English subs

SATURDAY, AUGUST 4 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, AUGUST 7 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 17 – MIDNIGHT
SUNDAY, AUGUST 26 – 5 PM

“A Freudian fable of the night, filled with moons, rain, dark tunnels and imminent collisions.”
-Tony Rayns, Senses of Cinema

Ishii’s Hitchcockian tale of romantic obsession and aggression begins in a surrealist mixture of dream, memory, and rumor. When bus conductor, Tomiko (Rena Komine), gets assigned to work with bus driver Niitaka (Tadanobu Asano, Ichii the Killer and Bright Future), not only does she think that he looks like the man from her dreams, but that he also might be the man who married and killed her friend and co-worker. Determined to get revenge, Tomiko seduces him. But when she finds herself irresistibly attracted to him she gets obsessed with testing the sincerity of his murderous desires. Shot in dreamy black and white, Ishii melds many of the guttural DIY techniques of his early punk years with moody expressionist compositions reminiscent of Maya Deren to create a film both aggressive and disorienting as well as melancholic and contemplative.

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THE CRAZY FAMILY
Dir. Sogo Ishii, 1984
Japan, 106 min.
In Japanese, English subs

THURSDAY, AUGUST 2 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 9 – 10 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 13 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 25 – MIDNIGHT

“Mixing sledgehammer social satire with rapid-fire cinematic dementia, this is an unforgettable excursion into the darkest recesses of middle-class values.”
–Shock Cinema Magazine

After moving into a nice suburban home on the outskirts of Tokyo, the Kobayashi family seems to be living the domestic dream. That is until they all start trying to kill and fuck each other. With a fascist grandpa running shouting WWII era Japanese military slogans in in his army uniform, a son who builds giant neon shrines to his college entrance exams, and a sex-starved mother running around the house with a pot on her head trying to kill everyone with her kitchen knives, Ishii’s take-down of the Japanese family unit is a gleefully delirious satire and a clear precursor to such Takashi Miike family dramas like VISITOR Q and THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS.