Page 92 – Spectacle Theater

SOUTH OF HEAVEN: SUPERNATURAL WESTERNS

Posted on March 20, 2017December 28, 2019 by smacfarlane

This April, Spectacle is pleased to present a collection of throwbacks on horseback from down Mexico way. Four supernatural westerns covering everything from witches to werewolves, from the devil to Dracula: it may still be chilly in NYC, but here at the Goth Bodega it’s Spring Break.

THE LIVING COFFIN
(aka EL GRITO DE LA MUERTE)
dir. Fernando Mendez, 1959
72 minutes. Mexico.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, APRIL 7 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, APRIL 16 – 5 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 27 – 10PM

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Lawman Gaston and his partner Crazy Wolf saunter into town to investigate an attempted murder. When they arrive, the family tells a harrowing tale of haunting and mischief that’s been keeping them up at night. Can the duo solve this mystery and release the family from their terrible curse? Are the tombs beneath the residence truly housing the dead? Has the Crying Woman returned to exact a terrible revenge? Will they escape the deadly swamp?

While the legend of The Crying Woman was done many times before and after this film, EL GRITO DE LA MUERTE (the original title, translating to “The Cry of Death”) owes as much to the gothic offerings of Poe as it does to the tropes of Scooby Doo.

Gaston Santos (a well known bullfighter turned actor) teams up once again with director Fernando Mendez, writer Ramón Obón and cinematographer Víctor Herrera who all earlier that same year made the beautiful and shadowy Spectober favorite THE BLACK PIT OF DR. M.

THE RIDER OF THE SKULLS
(aka EL CHARRO DE LAS CALAVERAS)
dir. Alfredo Salazar, 1965
80 minutes. Mexico.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, APRIL 2 – 5 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 8 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 15 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 20 – 10 PM

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A masked rider (not Zorro) arrives in a sleepy Mexican villa in the midst of a slew of vicious werewolf attacks during what seems like a solid month of full moons. The Rider is given lodging by a señorita and her young son – Perico – who appear to be the next targets of the flannel-clad lycanthrope. The Rider, with the help of a local witch dispatches of the monster who turns out to be the boys father. As he rides off into the sunset with Perico by his side one may expect the credits to roll but don’t rise from the opulent comfort of your seat just yet, viewer, this adventure is far from over. The Rider (now taller and with a different mask) along with the help of a new boy and their manservant Cléofas (the films “comic relief”) fight a vampire in some highly unconvincing day for night photography. It’s worth mentioning that the vampire not only has the giant head of a bat but also has the power to change into an equally unconvincing rubber bat and flies off. Finally, The Rider faces his deadliest foe yet when he teams up with a woman in possession of the cabeza of none other than the Headless Horseman and his two robed skeleton henchmen leading to a machete fight at sunset.

Director Alfredo Salazar is best known for his contributions to Mexican horror in the form of many, many Santo/Blue Demon movies as well as penning such psychotronic fare as THE NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES and the should-be classic THE MAN & THE MONSTER (produced by and starring his brother Abel). Star Dagoberto Rodríguez had a 30-or-so year career in Mexican film and television, which is more than likely the reason he removes his mask and reveals his identity in the middle of the film. Due to its “monster of the week” feeling and suspicious change of companions/mask/location/etc the working assumption is that THE RIDER OF THE SKULLS is actually three episodes of a serial stitched together to make it feature length. Nevertheless, Salazar wears his love of classic Universal monsters on his sleeve and creates a film unlike any other.

GHOST TOWN
(aka EL PUEBLO FANTASMA)
dir. Alfredo B. Crevenna, 1965
80 min, Mexico
In Spanish w/ English subtitles

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 5 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 13 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 15 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 26 – 10 PM

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The Rio Kid bursts onto the screen promising to lay waste to anyone claiming to be a faster gunslinger than he! Little do the townsfolk know that the reason The Rio Kid is so quick with the pistolero is because he’s been alive for 200 years and drinks the blood of his victims. Enter El Texano (clearing his family name) and his partner Don Nestor (fresh out of prison) – both vowing revenge!

More black and white genre blending from mid-60’s Mexico: while this film features more singing than the others in our series, it also has one of the more sympathetic antiheroes of the group. While The Rio Kid is in fact a literal monster, he also comes off as somewhat of a folk hero when he stops the assault of a young woman. In the end though, the duo save the town but cannot save the subtitles – that one’s on us.

THE DEVIL HORSE
(aka EL CABALLO DEL DIABLO)
dir. Federico Curiel, 1975
88 min, Mexico
In Spanish w/ English subtitles

SATURDAY, APRIL 1 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 22 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY APRIL 26 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 29 – 10 PM

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More songs, more comedy, and tons more fistfights and bar brawls than one might expect from a Faustian western but here we are. When a young man dies he makes a deal with the devil in exchange for his soul (classic) and returns to Earth. Despite being considerably more evil and taking it out on animals and family, no one seems to have a problem with him until the aforementioned Devil’s Horse gallops in.

Curiel like Salazar contributed to the seemingly never-ending avalanche of Santo films throughout the the 60’s and 70’s and 1968’s THE EVIL ONES but is most well known for his vampire films including – EMPIRE OF DRACULA and THE VAMPIRE GIRLS.

REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2016)

Posted on March 20, 2017December 28, 2019 by spectacletheater

REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2016)
dir. Taralyn Thomas & Jean-Luc Unger
2016, 93 min.

SUNDAY APRIL 2 – 7:30 PM
CO-DIRECTOR TARALYN THOMAS IN ATTENDANCE

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73QU13M 4 4 D734M is a ballz2thewall, no-budget, feature-length “remake” of REQUIEM FOR A DREAM; part crowd-pleasing avant-comedy, part vitriolic attack on hollywood & mainstream american “culture,” part mind-bending technical experiment in sound and image! Filmed in 3 days and edited over 2 years, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2016) is a farcical, hard-hitting drug drama and genuine DIY meltdown.

REQUIEM has previously screened at Dynasty Center and Memphis Hotel in Los Angeles CA. It will screen at the Echo Park Film Center sometime in April.

Copies of the film will be available at the screening in a limited-run VHS edition published by Vingo Vongo Videos.

MATCH CUTS PRESENTS: PAUL CHAN’S TIN DRUM TRILOGY (PRESALES SOLD OUT)

Posted on March 20, 2017December 28, 2019 by spectacletheater

TIN DRUM TRILOGY
dir. Paul Chan, 2002-2005.
USA, 111 min.
English, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

TUESDAY, APRIL 4 – 7:00 PM–PRESALE TICKETS SOLD OUT
ARTIST IN ATTENDANCE

Spectacle Theater is excited to collaborate with critical platform Match Cuts on a new series of screenings. Scroll down for more information on Match Cuts.

“Each video in the series was made utilizing different experimental traditions, but with one consistent theme: that to love your enemy is to know you enemy… The Bush administration (in RE:_THE OPERATION), Iraqis (in BAGHDAD…), and the religious right living in red-state America (in Now promise now threat) are all perceived, rightly or wrongly, as enemies. The task of all three videos has been to make the friend/enemy distinction more difficult while at the same time giving a time-based critique of the political tragedy/farce that is our first five years of the twenty-first Century.” – Paul Chan

The TIN DRUM TRILOGY is comprised of:

RE:_THE OPERATION
2002, 27 min.

“Based on a set of drawings that depict George W. Bush’s administration as wounded soldiers in the war against terrorism, RE:THE_OPERATION explores the sexual and philosophical dynamics of war through the lives of the members as they physically engage each other and the “enemy”. Letters, notes, and digital snapshots “produced” by the members on their tour of duty become the basis of video portraits that articulate the neuroses and obsessions compelling them toward an infinite war. Part M*A*S*H*, part Three’s Company, part philosophical meditation, with a dash of character assassination thrown in.”

BAGHDAD IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
2003, 51 min.

“BAGHDAD IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER is an ambient video essay of life in Baghdad before the invasion and occupation. Men dance, women draw and sufis sing as they await the coming of another war. In seven languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish).”

NOW PROMISE NOW THREAT
2005, 33 min.

“Now too late, he understood her. The heart that pumped out love, the mouth that spoke the Word, didn’t count.” – Toni Morrison, “Beloved”

“Part documentary, part visual manifesto, NOW PROMISE NOW THREAT uses Omaha, Nebraska (population 390,000, literally located in the middle of the U.S.) as a site and subject to follow the often unexpected lines connecting people, religion and politics in ‘red state’ America. An evangelical pastor opposes the mixing of church and state on religious grounds. An anti-abortion mother deplores the hypocrisy of the pro-life movement for being pro-war. A young man wants to die for his country so he can–at last–have a life worthy of living. Now promise now threat mixes interviews with locally produced footage and kidnapping videos from Iraq transformed into fields of undulating color to create a moving ‘apologia’ for the united red states of America.”

PAUL CHAN is an American artist, writer and publisher. His single channel videos, projections, animations and multimedia projects are influenced by outsider artists, playwrights, and philosophers such as Henry Darger, Samuel Beckett, Theodor W. Adorno, and Marquis de Sade. Paul Chan’s work concerns topics including geopolitics, globalization, and their responding political climates, war documentation, violence, deviance, and pornography, language, and new media.

Chan has exhibited his work at the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, documenta, the Serpentine Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, and other institutions. Chan has also engaged in a variety of publishing projects, and, in 2010, founded the art and ebook publishing company Badlands Unlimited, based in New York. Chan’s essays and interviews have appeared in Artforum, Frieze, Flash Art, October, Tate, Parkett, Texte Zur Kunst, Bomb, and other magazines and journals.

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, and produced by Meg Murnane.

INDIE BEAT: A MORNING LIGHT

Posted on March 8, 2017December 28, 2019 by smacfarlane

A MORNING LIGHT
dir. Ian Clark, 2016
82 minutes. USA.

THURSDAY, MARCH 16 – 7:30 PM – ONE NIGHT ONLY!

In collaboration with The Playlist’s Indie Beat podcast, Spectacle is pleased to present a one-night-only special screening of Ian Clark’s A MORNING LIGHT. Clark’s film is an atmospheric, sci-fi thriller focused on Zach and Ellyn—who begin to sense a strange presence has embedded itself in the forest. As they immerse themselves in the surrounding wilderness their experiences become progressively more bizarre. Do the sounds and light phenomena affecting them come from somewhere else, or is this merely an invention of their perception?

Starring ZACH WEINTRAUB • CELIA ROWLSON-HALL • AUSTIN WILL • DUSTY DECKER
Music by ELEH • Colorist SEAN WELLS • Wardrobe Design BRONWYN LESLIE
Produced by BENJAMIN WIESSNER • JIM CUMMINGS • IAN CLARK
Written, Directed, Edited, Photographed by IAN CLARK
Made with Support from BORSCHT • OREGON ARTS COMMISSION • NW DOCUMENTARY • STRAHLEN • SNOWGHOST

“A cinematic approximation of the metaphysical.” — Kevin Rakestraw, FILM PULSE

“Visually stunning and sonically unsettling.” — ATLANTA FILM FESTIVAL

METAMORPHOSES

Posted on March 8, 2017December 28, 2019 by smacfarlane

METAMORPHOSES
dir. Christophe Honoré, 2014
France. 102 minutes.
In French with English subtitles.

METAMORPHOSES (Christophe Honoré, 2014) from Spectacle Theater on Vimeo.

THURSDAY, MARCH 23 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, MARCH 25 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 26 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 28 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, MARCH 30 – 10 PM

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When Europa skips class and meets a magnetic young man named Jupiter, she embarks on an unexpected and magical journey. Traveling aboard Jupiter’s eight-wheel truck, they arrive in a mythical land inhabited by powerful gods who can transform humans into plants or animals in the blink of an eye. Europa watches, listens, and plays in their immortal home, becoming acquainted with Jupiter’s friends, Bacchus and Orpheus. As the confrontation between seductive, yet vengeful gods and innocent mortals unfolds, Europa grasps a greater sense of life and love in this revelatory modern-day retelling of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

“Playful, dirty, edgy, and wondrous.” – Dustin Chang, ScreenAnarchy

“A remarkably beautiful film.” – Jonathan Romney, Film Comment

Special thanks to Monument Releasing.

ARCHIE’S BETTY

Posted on March 7, 2017December 28, 2019 by smacfarlane

ARCHIE’S BETTY
dir. Gerald Peary, 2015
US. 70 minutes.

FRIDAY, MARCH 10 – 7:30 PM – w/introduction from comic book artist Robin Chapman
SUNDAY, MARCH 12 – 5 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 24 – 10 PM
MONDAY, MARCH 27 – 7:30 PM

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A kaleidoscope of compulsion, comics history, and passionate fandom, ARCHIE’S BETTY starts as a light and straightforward documentary on the origins of the Archie Comics gang. But soon, the story twists into a strange small town mystery when director Gerald Peary discovers that his well-known, 25-year-old, article on the subject might have been a little inaccurate. Original Archie artist Bob Montana left more loose ends than clues as to who Archie, Betty, Veronica, Moose, Jughead – and even Mr. Weatherbee and Ms Grundy – might have been inspired by. Naturally, the residents of Montana’s hometown of Haverhill seem to all be sure that they know the real story. But … who’s right?

Packed with interviews from Archie Comics writers and artists, Archie historians, Montana’s classmates, and Peary himself, ARCHIE’S BETTY is the culmination of the director’s lifelong obsession with the Riverdale gang.

Robyn Chapman is an editor, a publisher, and (sometimes) a cartoonist. She is the proprietor of Paper Rocket Minicomics and The Tiny Report, and she has had many different jobs in comics. She spent five years at The Center for Cartoon Studies, initially as their first fellow and later as their program coordinator and a faculty member. During her time at CCS she earned her MFA, having previously earned her BFA at the Savannah College of Art and Design. For a time she worked at Brooklyn’s best comic shop, Desert Island. Previously she worked as an assistant editor at Graphic Universe, the graphic novel imprint of Lerner Publishing Group. Currently she is an associate editor at First Second.

She is the editor/publisher of the Micro-Press Yearbook and the author of Drawing Comics Lab (Quarry Books). In the spring of 2016 she debuted Twin Bed, her first solo comic in a long, long time.

“Delightful, touching, and appropriately comic.” – Ross McElwhee

“It’s such a fun and touching personal documentary. Highly recommended
for viewers of all ages from birth to beyond the infinite. Even if you are not
a comic book fan, you will love the story this movie tells. If you are nostalgic
for the 1950s, you will be in seventh heaven.” – Joseph McBride, film historian and biographer

SPECIAL DISCOVERIES FROM MUBI

Posted on March 7, 2017December 28, 2019 by smacfarlane

SILVERED WATER, SYRIA SELF-PORTRAIT
dirs. Wiam Bedirxcan and Ossama Mohammed, 2014
Syria. 110 minutes.
In Arabic with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, MARCH 11 – 7:30 PM – ONE NIGHT ONLY!

A look at first-hand video accounts of violence in modern-day Syria as filmed by activists in the besieged city of Homs.

“Introducing an essential dialectical element to the film, Mohammed’s powerful found footage essay is gradually woven into new footage shot on the ground during the siege of Homs by co-director Wiam Simav Bedirxan, a woman whose Kurdish name gives the film its title. She and Mohammed begin a correspondence, one of words but also presumably of video, he from afar in Paris and she walking the besieged streets in Syria, wandering among exploding buildings, deserted streets, and with young children in “revolutionary” schoolrooms. Her footage, more solitary, high-definition, less violent and more diary-like than than the piecemeal shotgun blast of images from Mohammed’s collection, feels like a direct extension of her sight, sensations and thoughts. Less pointed (and loaded) then the “key” sequences of the Mohammed’s montage, nevertheless Bedirxan’s images, when alongside or feathered into the found footage, speaks of filming as living, the camera “seen as a weapon by the regime.

Her footage is not of protests or bloody deaths but of the interiors, city corners, injured street cats, and young children that make up her daily, isolated life, “images,” she says, “that flee into my small camera.” Mohammed, despite some desperate-feeling footage shot in Paris, fundamentally seems to have no camera, only eyes and videos. The two, Bedirxan and Mohammed, trade longings and self-doubts, each somewhat talking to themselves, images as monologues. But when placed next to or within the work of the other, the film forms a kind of larger scale correspondence between the two, of exile and besieged, man and woman, Syrian and Kurd. He speaks of different kinds of cinema, cinema of “realism,” of “the marvelous,” of “murder,” “the poetic,” and of “fantasy.” He speaks of cinema of murderers, and of cinema of victims. Implicitly, what he speaks of and what he and Bedirxan have made is a cinema of witnessing and of experiencing, of nearness and distance, and of exile and of homeland.” – Daniel Kasman, MUBI

SILVERED WATER, SYRIA SELF-PORTRAIT is now streaming on MUBI. Available March 3 – April 2. Watch here.

Official Selection: Toronto Film Festival, Cannes Special Screening, Locarno Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Busan Film Festival, London Film Festival, Vienna Film Festival, CPH: DOX Copenhagen Film Festival and Torino Film Festival

BETWEEN FENCES

dir. Avi Mograbi, 2016
Israel/France. 71 minutes.
In Hebrew, Tigrigna, and Arabic

SATURDAY, MARCH 18 – 7:30 PM – ONE NIGHT ONLY!

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Avi Mograbi and Chen Alon meet African asylum-seekers in a detention facility in the middle of the Negev desert where they are confined by the state of Israel. Together, they question the status of the refugees in Israel using “Theater of the Oppressed” techniques. What leads men and women to leave everything behind and go towards the unknown? Can the Israelis working with the asylum seekers put themselves in the refugees’ shoes?

BETWEEN FENCES will be available to stream on MUBI starting March 17. Watch here.

Official Selection: Berlinale — Forum, Cinéma du Réel, Rio de Janeiro Film Festival and DocAviv Film Festival

MUBI is a curated online cinema, streaming hand-picked award-winning, classic, and cult films from around the globe. Every day, MUBI’s film experts present a new film and you have 30 days to watch it. Whether it’s an acclaimed masterpiece, a gem fresh from the world’s greatest film festivals, or a beloved classic, there are always 30 beautiful hand-picked films to discover.

MARCH MIDNIGHTS

Posted on February 27, 2017March 6, 2022 by spectacletheater

PART OF THE SPRING MIDNIGHT SERIES:
NASCHY AS II WANNA BE: RETURN OF NASCHY

HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB
Dir. Carlos Aured, 1975
Spain, 95 min. (original cut)
In Spanish with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, MARCH 4 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, MARCH 10 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 15 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, MARCH 25 – MIDNIGHT

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“Bastards! I curse you all!”
It’s been exactly four years since the great Jacinto Molina Álvarez, aka Paul Naschy, last graced a midnight here at Spectacle. The time has never been better for the Spanish Lon Chaney to haunt the twee streets of Williamsburg, his bare-chested bravado and wry wit a perfect balance to gallons of Tempra-red blood and unspeakable black magic. The lord of the night returns for midnights through 2017! It’s time to get…
AS NASCHY AS II WANNA BE!

The year is 1454, and the diabolical warlock Alaric de Marnac (Naschy, natch) and his mistress Mabille De Lancré (Emma Cohen, from CUT-THROATS NINE and Jess Franco’s AL OTRO LADO DEL ESPEJO) are accused of witchcraft, vampirism and lycanthropy before being tortured and killed (and Marnac gets his head cut off!), but not before cursing the offspring of their killers. Now it’s the 1970s, and a group of friends led by Hugo de Marnac (Naschy in a second role!) and Maurice Roland (Naschy regular Victor “Vic Morror” Alcazar) attend a seance, asking tongue-in-cheek about the location of Marnac’s head. Spoiler hint: they find it, and a whole lot more…Directed by Carlos Aured (BLUE EYES OF THE BROKEN DOLL, THE MUMMY’S REVENGE, contrasting beautiful French landscapes with gruesome murders (don’t worry, our cut’s the original Spanish version with all gore/nudity intact), it’s an excellent introduction to Naschy’s non-werewolf roles, with everything you’d want from a midnight: gallows revenge speeches, nightgowns aplenty, and Naschy’s talking head in a box! Be sure to join us this March as HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB!

RETOURNEMENT A RIVERDELL
Dir. Various, 1989/1991
America, 100 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, MARCH 11 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, MARCH 24 – MIDNIGHT
SATURDAY, MARCH 31 – MIDNIGHT

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Somewhere deep within everybody, there’s a town as American as apple pie – a place where a ginger-headed princox and his next door neighbor’s daughter might share a malt fizz at the corner medicine shop, where a weathered jalopy still bolts down the street quicker than those new automobiles from Korea or Japan. A lifetime away from the time a certain weekly program helpfully venn-diagrammed America’s favorite happy fool with the garish intrigue of David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS, there was RETOURNEMENT A RIVERDELL: a foreign film in English, assembled by elite power structures to emboss postwar nostalgia in magnetic tape, kicking around the loneliest late-night airwaves of television before a slow death (and shameful rebirth) on VHS under a different name.

The film offers a glimpse into the disappointments of growing up that can be called Lacanian: Archiie comes home to find Riverdell has changed, but not nearly enough. While Regggie has assumed the position of a cutthroat AMERICAN PSYCHO-style businessman, Archiie must wrestle with his own suburban privilege a priori the evaporating mirage of his childhood home… And in the same mirror he witnesses not just the crestfallen zeitgeist of a generation, but a deeper contraction within his own morals – having spent his entire adult life avoiding that old predicament with Bettty and Veronika.

RETOURNEMENT is not entirely unlike Laurence Kasdan’s THE BIG CHILL: in essence, a documentary of curdled Boomer expectations smuggled like candy contraband into a TV dinner narrative template. When Jughead and his idiot son bob their way through a New Jack Swing cover of “Honey Honey” in front of pretty much everybody in town, the real lesson of RETOURNAMENT A RIVERDELL reveals itself thus: time’s passage makes fools of us all.

PRIDE OF PLACE

Posted on February 25, 2017December 28, 2019 by spectacletheater

PRIDE OF PLACE
Dir. Dorothea Gazidis and Kim Longinotto, 1976
UK, 60 mins.

MONDAY, MARCH 1 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, MARCH 6 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 19 – 5:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 31 – 10 PM

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If you caught last month’s SCRUBBERS (Zetterling, 1982), don’t miss PRIDE OF PLACE, the documentary by and for revolutionary teen boarding school prisoners.

Director Kim Longinotto was banished to a Buckinghamshire boarding school at the tender age of 10. Seven years later, she flew the coop and – after a few down-and-out years – landed at England’s National Film and Television School.

The time came for Longinotto to pick up a camera, and she wielded it like a hammer against her punitive alma mater. The resulting film, made with co-director Dorothea Gazidis, blew the lid off England’s august propensity for stiff upper lips and institutional child abuse.

PRIDE OF PLACE is an observational documentary that refuses to hear both sides. Shot from the students’ point of view, Longinotto and Gazidis regard their setting as a junior police state. They leave no room for finger-wagging. You won’t hear morning talk show bromides about “sparing the rod.”

One year after PRIDE OF PLACE was released, the aforementioned boarding school was closed by the state. After seven years in this brutal borstal, a spell on the streets, and a return to the scene of the crime, Longinotto got the last word.

Special thanks to Women Make Movies.

IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI

Posted on February 17, 2017December 28, 2019 by spectacletheater

(aka WE TURN IN THE NIGHT, CONSUMED BY FIRE)
dir. Guy Debord, 1978
France, 96 mins.
In French with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, MARCH 4 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 8 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, MARCH 13 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 19 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 24 – 7:30 PM

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“I will make no concessions to the public in this film… Since the cinema public needs more than anything to face these bitter truths, which concern it so intimately but which are so widely repressed, it cannot be denied that a film that for once renders it the harsh service of revealing that its problems are not so mysterious as it imagines, nor even perhaps so incurable if we ever manage to abolish classes and the state — it cannot be denied that such a film has at least that one virtue. It will have no other.” – Guy Debord

Everyone’s favorite Situationist returns to Spectacle for the first time with IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI, the notorious magnum opus of “anti-cinema” that closed out the filmmaking career of French philosopher and writer Guy Debord.

If THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE has been proven beyond-relevant in the interceding years (as is so often the case, relevant beyond the confines of its actual self as a piece of text), IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI is a “repudiation of legends”, a densely layered film essay that slavishly interrogates (and rationalizes) its author’s defiance. Here Debord is reflexively caustic, littering the film with subtweets of his then-contemporaries and the myths surrounding his own legend – taking particular umbrage at the notion that he was a theorist (as opposed to practitioner), and, albeit in veiled terms, the New Left’s inability to subvert the grand lines of mass exploitation outside major city struggles.

In an eerily measured voiceover narration, Debord takes shots at unions (‘“always ready to prolong the grievances of the proletariat for another thousand years in order to preserve their own role as its defender”), culture critics (“amazingly enough, despite all the obvious evidence to the contrary, there are still some cretins, among the specialized spectators hired to edify their fellow viewers, who claim that it is ‘dogmatic’ to state some truth in a film unless it is also proved by images”), establishment intellectuals (“they have wasted their time at college, bargain shopping for worn-out fragments of secondhand knowledge”), and the spectating audience itself – or rather, what Debord calls “the complete vacuity of mediatized society”.

IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI is thus a political coming-of-age tale in its own way. Many of its images were culled from the ostensibly benign bourgeois French and American movies Debord so hated; more than an enigmatic few would appear to have been shot by Debord himself, or collected over the years. The montagery is genteel by 2017 standards, but there is real power to Debord’s insistence – albeit despairing – that “avant-gardes only have one time”. The fleeting, clean-limned nature of this assemblage speaks for itself: while THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE diagnosed a half-awake system of power, Debord here holds both image and consumer equally culpable for the broader distraction – a still-terrifying idea today.

Special thanks to Ken Knabb, Konrad Steiner and NOT BORED!.

“Has the time come to challenge this unscathed interlocutor? I could do so, inasmuch as his nostalgia blinds Debord, in spite of himself, to the current context of what all his perseverance derives from. You can’t just have thirty years of history end on a shot of the high waters of the Venice lagoon and expect to get away with it….

But we also need to understand poetry’s protective function. Why was it in the resource of art that twice – first with the Surrealists after October 1917 and then with the Situationists in the early 1960s – new historical circumstances produced, in France, a true break, unprecedented intensity, tremendous repercussions with regard to an ossified political Marxism? Marxism should learn from such amazing cunning! We won’t miss the opportunity this time.

This Marxism – of which Debord, in terms of the ethics of the subject, would be the interlocutor and, in his own way, the equal – I could call a living Marxism.” – Alain Badiou, Le Perroquet, 1981

(aka WE TURN IN THE NIGHT, CONSUMED BY FIRE) dir. Guy Debord, 1978 France, 96 mins. In French with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, MARCH 4 – 10 PM WEDNESDAY, MARCH 8 – 7:30 PM MONDAY, MARCH 13 – 10 PM SUNDAY, MARCH 19 – 7:30 PM FRIDAY, MARCH 24 – 7:30 PM

(aka WE TURN IN THE NIGHT, CONSUMED BY FIRE)
dir. Guy Debord, 1978
France, 96 mins.
In French with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, MARCH 4 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 8 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, MARCH 13 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 19 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 24 – 7:30 PM