SCARLET STREET
dir. Fritz Lang, 1945.
USA, 102 min.

SATURDAY, JULY 1 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, JULY 7 – MIDNIGHT
SATURDAY, JULY 22 – MIDNIGHT

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“How can a man be so dumb?”
The noir and the femme fatale will forever be bound together, merrily going to Hell, dragging all suckers, chumps, marks, rubes and shills into an endless abyss of suffering and death. As well they should! Noir, at its black heart, is about tearing a (seemingly) ordinary Joe to *nothing* while the audience howls for more. We’ll find that here, on SCARLET STREET, but with a director like Fritz Lang there’s more than one twist on the way to the noose. Based on Georges de La Fouchardière’s novel and play La Chienne (also the basis for the equally great Jean Renoir film by the same name), SCARLET STREET is, quite simply, one of the essential film noirs.

The great Edward G. Robinson plays Christopher Cross, the sap in question, at the end of a sad quarter-century of working as a cashier, enduring his wife and putting what little light still shines in him towards his painting hobby. Like most saps, Chris wants little more than to be some damsel’s white knight, and that chance actually arrives when he gets between va-va-va-voom Kitty (Joan Bennett, who was in everything from BULLDOG DRUMMOND to SUSPIRIA) and cheap hood Johnny (Dan Duryea of WINCHESTER ’73). Through a series of scams, lies, forgeries and tragedies, Chris and Kitty begin one of the darkest descents the screen has brought us, with Lang constantly, methodically twisting the knife, masterfully ratcheting up the tension all the way to the end. Fans of Lang’s earlier, more directly Expressionistic work like SPIES and the MABUSE films will find lots to love here, Robinson truly plays one of cinema’s great sad sacks, Joan Bennett is the embodiment of weaponized seduction, all combining to make a film absolutely perfect for a hot summer night when you can’t sleep and your soul cries for something, *anything* but the dreary monotony of our pointless lives. Great date film, too!

A NIGHT IN HOLLYWOOD
Dir. William C. Thompson (1953)
USA, 61 min.

FRIDAY, JULY 14 – MIDNIGHT
SATURDAY, JULY 29 – MIDNIGHT

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“If YOU got what it takes, you can do the rhumba SHAKE!”
Not every city, county or province has it’s own hubba-hubba theatre of the arts for lovers where a regular rube can see a real live American Burlesque show, baggy-pants comedians and all, so not a few eggheads in the film department got to thinking “What if we shoot a full burlesque show, soup to nuts, as though you were right there in the action instead of in the back hall of the American Legion?” and so the roadshow burlesque film was born. Our director here is William C. Thompson, who the hepcats out there know from the amazing DAUGHTER OF HORROR, and the goon crew know as Ed Wood’s cinematographer. He does a real nice job staying out of the way, letting the show do the work, so even the dopiest mark in the theater’s guaranteed laffs-a-plenty, thanks to no less than the great Jean Carroll, one of the first true female comics. We also have some big names on the Burlesque scene: Misty Ayres, who gets unjustly dismissed as a Marilyn knockoff, here in her first film (she’d later show up in the ultrascuzzy BAD GIRLS DO CRY) and one of the true queens of the art, Tempest “The 4D Girl” Storm.

With a surprise at the end (we won’t spoil it, so don’t you spoil it for other viewers!) it’s the perfect introduction to the hurley-burley world of Burlesque in its prime. Don’t forget: the password to get in is PLAY IT ON THE G-STRING!

SEE ALSO: SERIES PAGE ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED? FOR HERCULES, PLAYING MIDNIGHTS ALL JULY!

ONE NIGHT ONLY – Tuesday July 25 – 7:30 PM

Introduced by Jules Suo

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

MATCH CUTS PRESENTS and Spectacle Theater present THE TRUTH SHALL NOT SINK WITH SEWOL (AKA DIVING BELL), a Korean documentary on the 2014 Sewol Ferry Disaster and the aftermath which followed, framed, and extended the tragedy.

THE TRUTH SHALL NOT SINK WITH SEWOL (AKA DIVING BELL)

dir. Lee Sang-ho and Awn Hae-ryong, 2014.
South Korea, 77 min.
Korean with English subtitles.

MATCH CUTS is a weekly podcast centered on video, film and the moving image. Match Cuts Presents is dedicated to presenting de-colonialized cinema, LGBTQI films, Marxist diatribes, video art, dance films, sex films, and activist documentaries with a rotating cast of presenters from all spectrums of the performing and plastic arts and surrounding humanities. Match Cuts is hosted by Nick Faust and Kachine Moore.

Jules Suo is a writer/director based in New York City. She is a graduate of Fashion Institute of Technology, she attended New York University for film. Her short film 528NY is a short prequel to DOSI which has screened at film festivals around the globe. Currently in post on her feature film. She is the assistant programmer at Kaffny film festival.
http://www.uisigfilms.com

With our SOUTH OF HEAVEN: Supernatural Mexican Westerns series all but a distant rider in the sunset, Spectacle has partnered with our pals at Camp Motion Pictures to bring the early works of Brazilian basement & beach auteur Ivan Cardoso to Brooklyn’s big screen. Cardoso, though champion of genre film back home, was largely unknown in these United States (outside of VHS releases by Something Weird Video) until only very recently. This July we’re presenting his first four forays into film in the form of 1 short and 3 features featuring more tropes than you can shake a stake at – vampires, mummies, carnivorous plants, masked villains, radio detectives, unlicensed Alfred Hitchcock overdubs, Coffin Joe cameos, and more.

THE SECRET OF THE MUMMY (a/k/a: O Segredo da Múmia)
dir. Ivan Cardoso, 1982
85 min, Brazil
In Portuguese w/English subs.

TUESDAY, JULY 4 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, JULY 11 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, JULY 21 – MIDNIGHT
SATURDAY, JULY 29 – 5 PM

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A tale as old as time: Dr. Vitus, a disgraced scientist (Wilson Grey who would go on to be one of Cardoso’s go to character actors for the majority of his career) devotes his dying days to the reconstruction of a map that had been divided into 8 parts and scattered to the winds with their owners meeting most mysterious deaths.

On a trip to Egypt he finds a mummy, Runamb, and brings it with him back to Brazil. You aren’t going to believe this – but it comes to life and wreaks havoc on all in his path obsessing over Nadia, a dancer who had scorned him when he was alive – well, more alive anyway.

Fleshing out his vision after NOSFERATO IN BRAZIL, Cardoso again takes advantage of the countryside and finds juicy roles for the legendary José Mojica Marins – better known as Coffin Joe – and Regina Casé (THE SECOND MOTHER).

NOSTERATO IN BRAZIL (a/k/a: Nosferato no Brasil)
dir: Ivan Cardoso, 1970
27 min, Brazil
Silent
Screening with THE SECRET OF THE MUMMY

In 19th century Budapest, the titular Nosferato roams the countryside feasting on various voluptous victims and engaging in a number of sword fights. A run in with a prince (you can tell by his hair) finds the bloodsucker on the wrong side of a crucifix. Flash forward to 1970 and Nosferato is now more groovy than ghoulie. More bloodsucking ensues.

Cardoso’s 8mm short certainly sets the stage for what would become some of his more signature moves – a mutated sun kissed soundtrack, the blending of horror and comedy, showcasing the natural beauty of Brazil and it’s inhabitants, and alternating between black & white and color footage.

Torquato Neto, a well known poet and composer in his native Brazil is Vlad all over in this hippy dippy send up of coffin banging alongside Scarlet Moon and a gaggle of others. Tragically, he would take his own life only 2 years later at the age of 28.

THE SEVEN VAMPIRES (a/k/a: As Sete Vampires)
dir. Ivan Cardoso, 1986
100 min, Brazil
In Portuguese w/English subs.

SATURDAY, JULY 1 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, JULY 9 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JULY 17 – 5 PM
TUESDAY, JULY 25 – 10 PM

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“Cardoso favors a genre he himself dubs “Terrir” – a play on “terror” and “rir” (laugh) which builds on cinematic codes already internalized by the spectator, specifically those of the classic horror film. With Cardoso we have a parody of parody since the chanchada was already parodic. In a Brazilian synthesis of Roger Corman and Mel Brooks, Ivan Cardoso gives new life to generic cliches, vampirizing, as it were, preexisting films and genres absorbing and preforming the “blood” of other texts.” – Brazilian Cinema by Randal Johnson, Robert Stam.

At no point in his career is the above quote more presciant than in THE SEVEN VAMPIRES. The film is truly all over the place zigging and zagging til it seems like it could burst of out of the screen at any second.

Botanist Frederico Rossi receives a meat-loving-but-mute poisonous plant that his wife immediately dislikes. His futile attempt at making an (pl)antidote only see him devoured and Sylvia mutilated, losing not only her arm but also her interest in dance and socializing. She ages rapidly and takes the last of the antidote and though it seems to help at first it becomes apparent that all is not well…

Not long after, Sylvia is approached about essentially getting the band back together and, rekindling her love of dance combined with her newfound love of vampiric murder, creates “The Transylvanian Follies” a flock of fanged femme fatales.

Graveyard fights, the aforementioned Hitchcock overdubs, and 50’s pop songs lifted straight from HELLO MARY LOU: PROM NIGHT 2 (the superior PROM NIGHT film) follow in rapid succession leaving the viewer with nary a moment to catch their breath.

THE SCARLET SCORPION (a/k/a: O ESCORPIAO ESCARLATE)
dir. Ivan Cardoso, 1990
90 min, Brazil
In Portuguese w/English subs.

SATURDAY, JULY 8 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JULY 10 – 10 PM
MONDAY, JULY 17 – 7:30 PM

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Opening with a faux national news reel, THE SCARLET SCORPION, is Cardoso’s vision crystalized and funneled through one of the countries most beloved pop-culture icons – The Angel.

A billionaire playboy who fights crime, The Angel was all over comics and radio dramas. In fact, in THE SCARLET SCORPION, the news reel ends with the country at a standstill as the announcement of a new Angel show comes over the airwaves. As the story continues the events of the radio show inspire the work of a copycat – none other than Angel’s archival – The Scarlet Scorpion himself! Angel must match wits with Scarlet Scorpion in order to save the love of his life – a fashion designer by the name of Gloria.

Though not horror by any stretch – THE SCARLET SCORPION is nothing if not thrilling (and hilarious). Cardoso would continue to make films into 2013 with one still listed at “in post-production” on IMDb but THE SCARLET SCORPION caps off our Summer series with a bang.

“My work attempts to investigate what a body can do, in terms of its presence, its posture, its movement, its beauty and sadly, its use-value. Cinema, it seems, shares its own postures, movements, affects and use-values. My films seek to place these shared techniques of body and film into close dialogue, in an attempt to bring us close to a body’s presence while knowing that such an effort is always doomed to fail.

Such an approach naturally tends towards characters and situations typical to queer cinema, and yet in this cultural moment of increased mainstream marketability of queer cinema and a healthy cottage industry of self-satisfied queer festivals, the genre now slips into the lazily transcendent land of pure liberation or pure death.

In the films collected here, I seek to trace a certain alternative tendency among young filmmakers, one that looks elsewhere. These are films that finds political, social, and aesthetic potentials in queerness without isolating it as such, allowing its bodies and characters to move through the specific currents of their own desires and hopes without calcifying those movements. These are bodies that find out what else a body can do. If these films here can be labelled queer cinema, and they can, it’s for this reason. They are more interested in cracks and inconsistencies in cinema and identity than in a dull unity, a cinema full of branching potentials and desires. These are the films I keep in my head as I work.

They are also a cinema made by my dear friends, with the exception of one filmmaker who I’ve only encounter briefly. Bodies seek out fellow bodies, and an aesthetic appreciation is often just as stickily sensual as physical attraction. Sardonic and deeply felt, these films give me hope that the body isn’t dead and that we’ll find new ways to fuck.” – Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli

WEDNESDAY, JULY 5 – 7:30 PM

EMPATHY
dir. Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli, 2016
83 mins. United States. 

EMPATHY is Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli’s debut feature, a performative documentary following Em, a queer sex worker as she attempts to quit heroin, that mulls on the self-presentation inherent in documentary, sex work, and the neoliberal body, as dance music, noise music and silence fill the gaps.

FUCK WORK
dir. Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli, 2015
12 mins. United States. 

FUCK WORK follows a queer dominatrix and her work relationship with a police officer. Described by Rovinelli as “an ultimately failed film, it nevertheless gave me space to begin working out an approach that led to EMPATHY, a sort of pop-working-out of the same techniques.”

WEDNESDAY, JULY 12 – 7:30 PM

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THE BLUE DEVILS (LOS DIABLOS AZULES)
dir. Charlotte Bayer-Broc, 2017
48 mins. France/Chile.

A musical starring Bayer-Broc in a role intended for a friend lost to suicide, the film places queer-witch costuming and a multi-gendered femme cast into an acting-out of a Chilean musical cycle that describes the death of striking miners at the hands of the state. Finding a distinctly queer element in the transmission of politicized grief across time, the film is deeply moving and direct while refusing to offer any easy gendered reading.

mothertongue.m3u
dir. Rachika S, Neo Sora, 2017
23 mins. United States.

mothertongue.m3u is the musical project of Rachika S and Biki Zoom, who reside in Brooklyn and Tokyo, respectively. It is also an ambient music video co-directed by Rachika S and Neo Sora, consisting of nothing more than four variously-trans bodies on a bed while projections of trains and octopuses spill across their features as they reach out to one another, strip, kiss, reach out, identity formed and collapsing in the gaps between movements. It stars Rovinelli in the mostly nude, and Rachika will perform a central role in Rovinelli’s next film. It’s also quite moving.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 19 – 7:30 PM

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FORT BUCHANAN
dir. Benjamin Crotty, 2014
65 mins. France/Tunisia.

Following a mixed-gender group of “army wives” from an idyllic forest cabin to an army base in Iraq, with much mud wrestling in between, Fort Buchanan is winning comedic riff on both 90s American TV drams and Éric Rohmer that eventually establishes itself as a truly contemporary collapsing of the unstable distinctions between persona, gender, and politics. A free play of loosened signifiers that never fails to make some kind of sense even as it absolutely doesn’t, it’s hilarious, hot, and arguably a new form of cinema itself.

NOVA DUBAI
dir. Gabriel Vinagre, 2014.
55 mins. Brazil.

NOVA DUBAI (55 min, 2014, Art of the Real) is Gustavo Vinagre’s hardcore-porn anti-gentrification film. It is what it pretends to be, but in the cracks of this film teem bodies rabidly seeking out new ways of interacting with the rampant real estate speculation shooting up new buildings in a suburb of Brazil. Oscillating from the abject to the beautiful to the impossible to the violent, it’s porn-punk in the Bruce LaBruce tradition shot through with a hyper-contemporary hyper-connected mesh of overloaded imagery.

We heard you like anime.

And Bootlegging.

Come chill out your adult brain all July, with CAPTAIN OF COSMOS (Uju Heukgisa), SAVIOR OF EARTH (Computer Haekjeonham Pokpa Daejakjeon), RAIDERS OF GALAXY (Super Majingga 3), and DEFENDERS OF SPACE (Bulsajo Robot Phoenix King)!

Also, Pete Toms made us (another) AWESOME poster !

CAPTAIN OF COSMOS (AKA Uju Heukgisa)
dir. Jong-hui Park, 1979
78 minutes, South Korea
Dubbed in English.

MONDAY, JULY 3 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, JULY 6 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, JULY 15 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, JULY 30 – 5 PM

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In this anime with shades of Captain Harlock and Gundam, the Cosmos Warriors are a team tasked with the duty of protecting freedom, justice and peace in the universe. When the insidious Green People kill the Cosmos Master and hijack a spaceship full of innocent spacefarers, it’s up to Captain Leo to thwart their malicious plot against the people of earth.

SAVIOR OF THE EARTH (AKA Computer Haekjeonham Pokpa Daejakjeon)
dir. Su-yong Jeong, 1983
68 minutes, South Korea
dubbed in English

TUESDAY, JULY 11 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, JULY 20 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, JULY 26 – 10 PM

SPECIAL SEPTEMBER SCREENING
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 1 – MIDNIGHT

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In this anime, informally known as KOREAN TRON, the Saviors of the Earth enter the electronic world of the sinister Doctor Butler when he throws the world into the state of chaos via acts of terrorism in the USA, Japan, France and the Pacific Ocean. Doctor Butler intends to enslave the world with his powerful Dark Energy computers, so it’s up to Dr. Kim, Sheila and Keith to save the humanity in the Deadly Game, a virtual battlefield. Allegedly, comic writer Roy Thomas (creator of Wolverine, Luke Cage and Iron Fist) worked on the English language version.

RAIDERS OF GALAXY (AKA Super Majingga 3)
dir. Seung-cheol Park, 1982
67 minutes, South Korea
dubbed in English

WEDNESDAY, JULY 5 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, JULY 16 – 5 PM
SATURDAY, JULY 22 – 7:30 PM

Imagine the anime classic Mazinger Z, only cheaper. Much, much cheaper. When the wicked T. Devil plots to take control of the galaxy, he enlists evil Andrew to help him in his quest for inter-galactic domination. Andrew starts capturing all of Earth’s spaceships in order to investigate the planet. Meanwhile, Earth’s scientists become curious about the disappearing ships and form a squad to investigate. When Andrew begins the invasion, the squad must enter into an epic (yet minimally animated) space battle with the aliens (and a robot dog). The fate of the world at stake!

DEFENDERS OF SPACE (AKA Bulsajo Robot Phoenix King)
dir. Su-yong Jeong, 1984
65 minutes, South Korea
dubbed in English

SUNDAY, JULY 9 – 5 PM
MONDAY, JULY 24 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JULY 31 – 10 PM

SPECIAL SEPTEMBER SCREENING
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 – MIDNIGHT

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Elements of Mazinger Z, Gundam, Space Battleship Yamato and Transformers are borrowed liberally in this mecha mini-epic. Nicholas, ruler of the Zinba Empire, wants to expand his territory by turning the Earth into his own private territory. A group of youngsters discover the destruction on Earth while vacationing on Mars and enlist cave-dwelling Dr. Han and Fred to find an immortal bird called the Phoenix King, a mythical guardian of Earth with the power to defeat Nicholas.