Anthology Film Archives

(THE FORGOTTEN ONES)

“Buñuel shows the sad condition of the poor without embellishing them, because if there is one thing Buñuel hates it is that artificial sweetness imparted to all the poor which we so frequently see in the traditional film. If, as usually happens in motion pictures, the moral principals approved by conventional society are carefully observed by members of the poorest classes…then these principals have some universal validity. However, Buñuel is concerned with exposing the opposite.” –Emilio Garcia Riera, FILM CULTURE

“[LOS OLVIDADOS] lashes the mind like a red-hot iron and leaves one’s conscience no opportunity to rest.” –André Bazin

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(LES AMIGUES DE L’ÀGATA)

LES AMIGUES DE L’ÀGATA is a thoughtful and delicate portrait of four young friends through the eyes of Àgata. Now in her first year at university, Àgata finds her relationship with her school friends transformed, both in their daily lives in Barcelona as well as during a trip to the Costa Brava. For this exceptional final thesis film, all four directors shared in the various film production roles, with the assistance of mentors including Isaki Lacuesta and Elías León Siminiani.

Please note: After going to press with our printed calendar, we learned that co-director Laura Rius is not able to be here for the originally-scheduled screening on Sunday, June 4.  As a result we've added an earlier screening, on Friday, June 2 at 6:30.  Laura Rius will be here in person for that show!

Opening Night Sponsored by Cervezas Alhambra.

Chema García Ibarra THE DISCO SHINES / LA DISCO RESPLANDECE, 2016, 13 min, Turkey & Spain
The shadow of the mountain grows as the evening falls. Five lads get ready for the evening: they have booze, music and a car. It doesn’t matter if the disco shut down years ago.

In this highly original and comical film, three Spanish directors tell three stories: about a woman who becomes passionately excited by inanimate objects throughout the city (a parking meter, a metal bridge, etc); a man who follows his father in order to unravel his secret; and a couple of friends who suddenly, as if felled by a virus, display improper behavior against their will. These three interwoven storylines seem at first sight to have little to do with each other, but in each the characters are visited by an unexpected and strangely addictive sensation, which knocks them out of their daily routine and forces them to come to terms with issues such as love, faith, and human will.

Please note: Our printed calendar lists the showtime for this screening as 8:00, but the film will actually begin at 8:30pm.  We apologize for any inconvenience.

Preceded by:
Alberto Vázquez SCENERY / DECORADO 2016, 12 min, b&w, Spain & France
The world is a wonderful stage, but the casting is deplorable.

René Clair and Francis Picabia ENTR’ACTE (1924, 22 min, 35mm, b&w)
A masterpiece of Dada and a feat of cinema magic. Made as intermission entertainment for the Ballet Suédois from an impromptu scene by Francis Picabia.

Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1928, 22 min, 35mm, b&w)
Twenty-two minutes of pure, scandalous dream-imagery, a stream of images from which anything that could be given a rational meaning was rigorously excluded. It’s still the unsurpassed masterpiece of the surrealist cinema.

Luis Buñuel LAND WITHOUT BREAD / LAS HURDES: TIERRA SIN PAN (1932, 28 min, 35mm, b&w. With English narration.)
“A documentary describing, matter-of-factly, a region of Spain so ravaged by epidemic poverty that there our worst fantasies find their objective correlative.” –Raymond Durgnat

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

(INGEN KO PÅ ISEN)

“Language and landscape as a gateway to a new life.” A young Galician emigrates to Sweden, where he performs several part-time jobs while trying to embark on a film career. The challenge of learning a new language and the fascination of an unusual landscape soon become two fundamental stimuli in the face of the difficulties of adapting to a new country. Inspired in part by Jonas Mekas (both by his memoir, “I Had Nowhere to Go,” and his pioneering diary films), Domínguez Serén utilizes his constant documentation of his new habitat, his various trades, and his new relationships, to reflect on his new status as an immigrant.

Preceded by:
Natalia Marín NEW MADRID 2016, 10 min, Spain.
An experimental essay on cities built as a simulacrum and the failed utopia as a result of the experiment on the eight towns called the United States of Madrid.

The first part of Halleck’s career is distinguished in large part by her devotion to working with children – under the auspices of several different organizations she utilized film as a tool for engaging with underprivileged kids and encouraging them to express themselves. This uniquely pedagogical approach to the medium produced numerous films that are little seen today but remain vibrant, vital, and charming. The first film in this program, CHILDREN MAKE MOVIES, was made at the Lower East Side’s Lillian Wald Recreation Rooms. Most of the other works screening here were the result of Halleck’s most sustained venture into working with children: from 1968-72, she taught filmmaking at the Otisville School for Boys, a reformatory run by the NY State Division for Youth. Her efforts there, which encompassed both showing movies to her students and helping them to make their own films, gave rise to numerous 16mm shorts, a selection from which we’ll be presenting here (along with a related film, HEY THERE LONELY GIRL, made at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center of the A.M.E. Zion Church in Middletown, NY, with a group of girls who were friends of Halleck’s Otisville students).

DeeDee Halleck CHILDREN MAKE MOVIES (1961, 13 min, 16mm, b&w)

OTISVILLE SCHOOL FOR BOYS FILMS:
Jose Rodriguez GET ON THE GOOD FOOT (1972, 17.5 min, 16mm)
Vanio & Spann THE BLOODY CRIME CRUSHER (1971, 12 min, 16mm)
Milton Lefty Diaz THE BEGINNING OF MY END (1969, 8 min, 16mm)
Abraham Cardona HAIR (1972, 5 min, 16mm)
Charles Smith & Kenneth Brown A MADMAN’S WORLD (1971, 6 min, 16mm)

Flora Hunter & Cindy D HEY THERE LONELY GIRL (1970, 8.5 min, 16mm)

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

(OLEG Y LAS RARAS ARTES)

Several biographical facts: Oleg Nikolayevich Karavaychuk (1927-2016) played the piano for Stalin as a child prodigy, attended the Leningrad Conservatory, and in the course of his career primarily wrote music for theatre and film – for instance, for Paradjanov and Muratova. In Russia, he is admired for his music and his playing, but also for his unique and eccentric personality. At the age of 89, Karavaychuk is still a controversial and puzzling figure in Russian culture. Who is this man, who looks as if he stepped out of a story by Gogol? The beautiful film that Andrés Duque has made about him is a gift to the viewer, a gift from an old artist who wants to be reconciled with the world and who transports us away from reality with words, gestures, and piano playing, free of social conventions, to a world where clashing dissonants have a liberating beauty.

Preceded by:
Velasco Broca OUR FRIEND THE MOON / NUESTRA AMIGA LA LUNA, 2016, 15 min, Spain b&w
Hadji is a disabled young Hindu man who lives humbly on the banks of the Ganges River. After losing what little he had, he is accepted as a disciple by a strange spiritual leader of Russian origin. This alliance will lead them to some bizarre events that will have consequences through a synchronous principle in other parts of the West. This short film is inspired by the third century Gnostic text The Hymn of the Pearl.

THE PLEASURE GARDEN (1953, 38 min, 35mm, b&w)
THE BED (1968, 19 min, 16mm)
THE GOLDEN POSITIONS (1970, 32 min, 16mm)
HIGH KUKUS (1974, 3 min, 16mm)

Broughton’s films are celebrations of the joy of living. If there is such a thing as American Zen, Broughton is the master of it.

“Broughton was and is a poet, sometimes a dramatist. Yet whatever the mode, his style is remarkably consistent: urbane and witty with the persona of the naïve, or the simpleton, or the child. Like the poems, the films record the basic rites of passage, the search for love, the primal relationships, with ironic insight: there are parents who are children, a rube who’s really the artist, a loony wise man.” –P. Adams Sitney

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

(LES AMIGUES DE L’ÀGATA)

LES AMIGUES DE L’ÀGATA is a thoughtful and delicate portrait of four young friends through the eyes of Àgata. Now in her first year at university, Àgata finds her relationship with her school friends transformed, both in their daily lives in Barcelona as well as during a trip to the Costa Brava. For this exceptional final thesis film, all four directors shared in the various film production roles, with the assistance of mentors including Isaki Lacuesta and Elías León Siminiani.

Please note: After going to press with our printed calendar, we learned that co-director Laura Rius is not able to be here for the originally-scheduled screening on Sunday, June 4.  As a result we've added an earlier screening, on Friday, June 2 at 6:30.  Laura Rius will be here in person for that show!

Opening Night Sponsored by Cervezas Alhambra.

Chema García Ibarra THE DISCO SHINES / LA DISCO RESPLANDECE, 2016, 13 min, Turkey & Spain
The shadow of the mountain grows as the evening falls. Five lads get ready for the evening: they have booze, music and a car. It doesn’t matter if the disco shut down years ago.

MURAL ON OUR STREET
(1965, 26, min, 16mm)
Depicts the building of a ceramic mural, from the initial sketch classes to the final installation at 305 Henry Street. A lively steel band sound track accompanies the enthusiastic testimony of the participants.

MR. STORY
(1972, 28 min, 16mm. Co-directed by Anita Thacher.)
An 88-year-old resident of Bloomingburg, New York, Albert Story reminisces about his life and the difficulties of growing older. Still active, he canes chair seats, plants a garden, and changes a tire.

JARASLAWA
(1973, 15 min, 16mm)
An exquisite portrait of Jaraslawa, who bakes bread and piroski as she talks about her recipes and her life. This lyrical experimental film has a sound track by the Penny Whistlers.

“JARASLAWA is a marvel. […] The hands work with more than grace: with the rhythm and sureness of a natural process worn into them by 60 years of practice. The old face and its very slightly shifting expressions are a visual commentary on the hands’ work. It is a musician listening to the music she makes.” –Richard Eder, NEW YORK TIMES

BRONX BAPTISM
(1980, 27 min, 16mm. Photographed by Richard Serra, DeeDee Halleck, and Babette Mangolte.)
A lyrical, intimate celebration of baptism, filmed at a Pentecostal Church in the South Bronx. Community creation in the midst of economic devastation: the heart of a heartless world.

“BRONX BAPTISM records the proud ritual of the Pentecostal Church John 3:16 in the South Bronx. It’s easy to see what would attract a filmmaker to this Puerto Rican congregation: the huge cross over the altar slides open to reveal a glass-walled baptism tank backed by a painted waterfall – the baptismal ritual is celebrated to the flock in the guise of a giant living TV show.” –B. Ruby Rich, CHICAGO READER

Total running time: ca. 100 min.

Oliver Laxe’s stunning new film is a breathtakingly shot ‘Eastern western’ that follows a mysterious caravan carrying a dying sheikh into the Moroccan Atlas Mountains. Somewhere in the desert, a caravan is escorting an elderly sheik to the village where he was born. His last wish is to be buried with his loved ones. But death does not wait. Without their leader, the company grows fearful. And at the foot of a mountain pass, they refuse to continue, entrusting the body to two men who agree to carry on and bring it to its final destination. But who are these men? And do they really know the way? Meanwhile, in another world, a mysterious young man is chosen to find the caravan. Richly suggestive and profoundly hypnotic, MIMOSAS is a head-scratcher whose meanings remain elusive even as its imagery and structural gambits lodge deeply in your mind.

This encore presentation of MIMOSAS follows Anthology’s theatrical premiere run of the film, taking place from April 14-20.

Preceded by:
Lois Patiño FAJR 2016, 12 min, Spain
In the Moroccan desert, the night dilutes forms and silence slides through sand. Dawn starts then to draw silhouettes of dunes while motionless figures punctuate the landscape. From the abstraction of the night, light returns its dimension to space and their volume to bodies. Stillness concentrates the gaze and duration densifies it. The adhan (muslim call to pray) sounds and immobility, that was condensing, begins to irradiate. And now the bodies are those which dissolve into the desert.

WAITING FOR THE INVASION: U.S. CITIZENS IN NICARAGUA
(1984, 28 min, video)
Made shortly after the invasion of Grenada by the US, this film documents the fear and anger of US citizens who have come to Nicaragua to help the Sandinista revolution and fear that their own country will wage war on this new nation.

THE GRINGO IN MAÑANALAND
(1995, 61 min, video)
Since the turn of the 20^th century, popular media in the U.S. have promoted a stereotyped image of Latin America in order to justify the concept of U.S. dominance in the hemisphere. THE GRINGO IN MAÑANALAND uses travelogues, dramatic films, industrial films, newsreels, military footage, geographical textbook illustrations, and political cartoons to lay out the essential myths: the hero discovers paradise and bananas, he has a problem with bandits and women, he calls in the marines, the bandits cooperate, and the good neighbors are happy. These images not only shaped how Americans viewed Latin Americans, but through exportation, also affected how Latin Americans view themselves. Through juxtaposition and irony, the film demonstrates cultural imperialism at work. It is a comedy, a melodrama, an adventure story and, as today’s headlines attest, a tragic farce.

“An instant classic…all gringos should see it!” –Erik Barnouw

“An ingenious examination of the U.S. tragi-comedy in Latin America.” –Craig Baldwin

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

Unless otherwise noted, all the films in this program are silent. With the exception of GNIR REDNOW, all films have been preserved by Anthology Film Archives.

ROSE HOBART (ca. 1936, 20 min, 16mm, sound)
COTILLION (ca. 1940s-1968, 8 min, 16mm, b&w. Completed by Larry Jordan.)
THE MIDNIGHT PARTY (ca. 1940s-1968, 3.5 min, 16mm, b&w. Completed by Larry Jordan.)
THE CHILDREN’S PARTY (ca. 1940s-1968, 8 min, 16mm. Completed by Larry Jordan.)
CENTURIES OF JUNE (1955, 10 min, 16mm. Photographed by Stan Brakhage.)
THE AVIARY (1954, 11 min, 16mm, b&w. Photographed by Rudy Burckhardt.)
GNIR REDNOW (1955, 5 min, 16mm. Photographed by Stan Brakhage.)
NYMPHLIGHT (1957, 8 min, 16mm. Photographed by Rudy Burckhardt.)
A LEGEND FOR FOUNTAINS (1957/65, 17 min, 16mm, b&w. Photographed by Rudy Burckhardt; completed by Larry Jordan.)
ANGEL (1957, 3 min, 16mm. Photographed by Rudy Burckhardt.)

The poet of magic realities. Pioneer of recycled (found) images. ROSE HOBART and the Trilogy (COTILLION, MIDNIGHT PARTY & CHILDREN’S PARTY) are some of the earliest collage films created. The others were directed by Cornell (and photographed by Stan Brakhage and Rudy Burckhardt) at some of his favorite locations.

Total running time: ca. 105 min.

For full program listings, visit www.newfilmmakers.com.

The films in this program – all of which have been preserved by Anthology Film Archives – are not part of the Essential Cinema cycle, but are being screened as a special supplement to Program 1.

All films in this program are silent.

BOYS’ GAMES (1957, 5 min, 16mm)
BOOKSTALLS (ca. late-1930s, 11 min, 16mm)
BY NIGHT WITH TORCH AND SPEAR (ca. 1940s, 9 min, 16mm)
NEW YORK–ROME–BARCELONA–BRUSSELS (ca. 1940s, 10 min, 16mm)
VAUDEVILLE DE-LUXE (ca. 1940s, 12 min, 16mm)
MULBERRY STREET (ca. 1957, 9 min, 16mm, b&w. Photographed by Rudy Burckhardt.)
JOANNE, UNION SQUARE (ca. 1954, 8 min, 16mm. Photographed by Rudy Burckhardt.)
CLOCHES À TRAVERS LES FEUILLES (1957, 4 min, 16mm. Photographed by Rudy Burckhardt.)
CHILDREN (ca. 1957/65, 8 min, 16mm. Photographed by Rudy Burckhardt.)

Rare Cornell; more magic cinema from the master collagist. Variations of films made by Cornell, plus collage films discovered by archivists after his death.

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

Print courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

In 1969 Yolande Du Luart was studying film at UCLA while Angela Davis held a teaching position in the philosophy department. Sensing the urgency of Davis’s work in and outside the classroom, Du Luart requested her permission to film her. The resulting documentary follows the multiple lines of Davis’s political and intellectual engagement in the late 1960s as she helped shape the Black liberation movement. Providing rare images of Davis teaching, writing, speaking, and organizing, the film chronicles Davis’s life at the moment when Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California, attempted to dismiss her from her position at UCLA.

(YUKINOJÔ HENGE)

This screening is co-presented with the Japan Foundation.

“Ichikawa’s 1963 masterpiece, one of the most dazzling and stylistically audacious Japanese films ever made, has to be seen to be believed…. The film was putatively made to celebrate the 300th film appearance of box-office idol Kazuo Hasegawa, and is in fact a remake of a 1938 film by Teinosuke Kinugasa that featured Hasegawa in the same parts. Ichikawa uses it as an unprecedented opportunity for unbridled stylistic play (the film’s use of ‘Scope and color is breathtaking), Shakespearean complication (Hasegawa plays two parts, one of them in drag), and a fascinating investigation into the relationship between theater and cinema. The hero is a Kabuki female impersonator out to avenge the death of his parents, and the plot proceeds somewhat like a film noir (with revelatory flashbacks), while adroitly mixing onstage and offstage action. […] [P]erhaps the most remarkable aspect of this singular experiment is its demonstration that theater and film are more kissing cousins than distant relations – the more stage bound the film gets, the more cinematic it becomes. If you’ve never seen this, prepare to be stunned.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

With the ongoing series RE-VISIONS: AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL FILM 1975-90, Anthology spotlights the generation(s) of experimental film artists who emerged after the final formation in 1975 of our Essential Cinema repertory screening cycle. As hotly debated as it was widely celebrated, the EC had a seismic effect (for better or worse) on both cinema studies scholarship and international film curatorial practice. Even though the EC was intended as a direct response to the exclusion of the avant-garde from official Film History, by so concisely outlining a canon it effectively shifted critical and public interest away from the still developing experimental film movement and focused attention squarely on certain artists and works considered to be historically important. Subsequent generations of cinema artists have never received the same level of intellectual/institutional recognition or encouragement. We believe that it is high time for a re-evaluation.

With the support of a significant grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Anthology has been engaged in a multi-year project to preserve significant works by a wide range of cinema artists who largely became active or reached their prime after 1975. Rather than attempt to amend the EC, RE-VISIONS uses it as a starting point from which to explore the continuities, fractures, corollaries, and connections between cinema artists of the last 40 years and the previous avant-garde film movements. Much like their predecessors, these artists continued to tirelessly push at the parameters of cinematic form.

RE-VISIONS features single-artist screenings of our new preservations alongside other exemplary and enticing titles spanning each artist’s career, as well as group shows bringing together multiple artists. When possible, artists will appear in person to discuss their work and answer questions.

Special thanks to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Audio Mechanics, BB Optics, Cinema Arts, Cineric, Colorlab, The Film Foundation, FotoKem, the Mike Kelly Foundation for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, the National Film Preservation Foundation, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Trackwise, Video and Film Solutions, Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film & Television, and all the artists who were involved in this project.

JEFF PREISS
FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
Jeff Preiss has achieved the rare and delicate balancing act of working both in high-profile mainstream contexts and in the realm of uncompromisingly independent, small-gauge, experimental cinema. Inspired by the diary films of Jonas Mekas and Warren Sonbert, he began in the early 1980s making silent, semi-narrative works born out of his practice of shooting with his Regular 8mm Bolex on a daily basis. He’s called these works “lyric home newsreels” that aim to “balance ‘home movie’ sentimentality with concerns of formal (and literal) interpretation.”

When the photographer Bruce Weber saw Preiss’s work he enlisted him as cinematographer on a string of collaborations including the feature documentaries BROKEN NOSES (1987) and LET’S GET LOST (1988), an acclaimed portrait of jazz legend Chet Baker. That film’s success led Preiss to work directing commercials and music videos (including videos for Iggy Pop, Malcolm McLaren, REM, and the B-52s, and advertisements for Nike, Coca-Cola, Sony, American Express, etc.). In 2014, his first narrative feature, LOW DOWN, based on the life of jazz pianist Joe Albany, and starring John Hawkes, Elle Fanning, and Glenn Close, won best cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival and best actress at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Even as he has developed these mainstream projects, Preiss has continued to work in the avant-garde realm. In 2005, he co-founded the NYC experimental gallery, Orchard. And in 2012, he completed STOP, an epic home movie compiled from 2,500 rolls of 16mm film. For these RE-VISIONS screenings, we will be debuting our own brand-new preservations of some of Preiss’s earliest Regular 8mm Kodachrome films, in gorgeous 2K transfers, as well as presenting a screening of his magnum opus, STOP.

All the films in this program have been restored by Anthology Film Archives with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
LUDLOW ST. NEWSREEL PT. 1 (1981, 8.5 min, Regular 8mm-to-2K digital, silent)
LUDLOW ST. NEWSREEL PT. 2 (1981, 12.5 min, Regular 8mm-to-2K digital, silent)
FRED IN HELL TRAILER (1982, 9 min, Regular 8mm-to-2K digital, silent)
STARING SHARON (1984, 8.5 min, Regular 8mm-to-2K digital, silent)
WILD KINGDOM, PT 2: BOY TOWN (1984, 14 min, Regular 8mm-to-2K digital, silent)
WINTER BUSES – CAR WASH – 14TH STREET TREES (ca. 1985, 3 min, Regular 8mm-to-2K digital, silent)
BROKEN NOSES NEWSREEL (1987, 19 min, Regular 8mm-to-2K digital, silent. Made with Bruce Weber.)

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

(EIN MANN WIE EVA)

With Eva Mattes.

“[A] hypnotic, unorthodox, appropriately profane paean to Rainer Werner Fassbinder. […] Starring as Fassbinder – called Eva in the film – is the ever-surprising Eva Mattes, who was herself a member of the Fassbinder stock company, appearing most memorably as the murderous, teen-age nymphet of JAIL BAIT (1972). Made up to look like the later Fassbinder, complete with scraggly whiskers and wearing the familiar granny glasses, jeans, leather jacket and slouch hat, she is a nightmare vision of Fassbinder. It is not, however, a drag impersonation. It’s a bifocal performance for, though Miss Mattes looks like Fassbinder, the voice is always recognized as that of Miss Mattes. The point is not to call attention to Fassbinder’s homosexuality, but to the performance aspects of his life and his work. […] A MAN LIKE EVA is in no way a biographical film, or a parody. It's a seriously daring contemplation of the career of one of the most gifted, most troubling, most original filmmakers of his time.” –Vincent Canby, NEW YORK TIMES

(OCAÑA: RETRATO INTERMITENTE)

A documentary portrait of Barcelona in the 1970s, and of José Pérez Ocaña, a homosexual painter from Andalucía. Ocaña expresses himself freely, recounting stories of his hard life and his opinions of the world, while Pons intermixes his direct testimony with scenes of his life in the streets (walking half naked along Barcelona’s famous street, La Rambla, singing a song in a crowded bar, or organizing a drag queen procession). An invaluable record of the gay and lesbian experience in Spain during an era in which homosexuals were officially considered “morally dangerous” and hence legally persecuted, OCAÑA is also an extraordinary portrait of an unforgettable personality.

With the ongoing series RE-VISIONS: AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL FILM 1975-90, Anthology spotlights the generation(s) of experimental film artists who emerged after the final formation in 1975 of our Essential Cinema repertory screening cycle. As hotly debated as it was widely celebrated, the EC had a seismic effect (for better or worse) on both cinema studies scholarship and international film curatorial practice. Even though the EC was intended as a direct response to the exclusion of the avant-garde from official Film History, by so concisely outlining a canon it effectively shifted critical and public interest away from the still developing experimental film movement and focused attention squarely on certain artists and works considered to be historically important. Subsequent generations of cinema artists have never received the same level of intellectual/institutional recognition or encouragement. We believe that it is high time for a re-evaluation.

With the support of a significant grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Anthology has been engaged in a multi-year project to preserve significant works by a wide range of cinema artists who largely became active or reached their prime after 1975. Rather than attempt to amend the EC, RE-VISIONS uses it as a starting point from which to explore the continuities, fractures, corollaries, and connections between cinema artists of the last 40 years and the previous avant-garde film movements. Much like their predecessors, these artists continued to tirelessly push at the parameters of cinematic form.

RE-VISIONS features single-artist screenings of our new preservations alongside other exemplary and enticing titles spanning each artist’s career, as well as group shows bringing together multiple artists. When possible, artists will appear in person to discuss their work and answer questions.

Special thanks to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Audio Mechanics, BB Optics, Cinema Arts, Cineric, Colorlab, The Film Foundation, FotoKem, the Mike Kelly Foundation for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, the National Film Preservation Foundation, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Trackwise, Video and Film Solutions, Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film & Television, and all the artists who were involved in this project.

STOP
(1995-2012, 120 min, 16mm-to-digital)
“STOP is a feature-length chronicle distilled from 2,500 100-ft rolls of 16mm film shot between 1995 and 2011 – organized sequentially by numbered lab rolls of camera negative into four half-hour parts. It operates around the conventions of home movies: the images are of my own life and in classic home-movie tradition the alternating subjects of family, friends, and travel are set by the filmstrip with absolute chronological certainty. Subjects repeat in cycles while others form internal episodes. But as home-movie impulses dictate, the central subject is my child. Among the stops referred to in the title, one was the act of assigning an end within the accumulating mass of my personal archive – so that a film could be possibly shaped. Many converging threads of ends and transformations were candidates, but most evident was the quintessential end of nearly all home-movie cycles: the awkward end of my child’s prepubescence – in this case hinging on a heroically decisive transformation of gender expression.” –Jeff Preiss

Preceded by:
WARREN SONBERT (1988, 3 min, Regular 8mm-to-2K digital, silent. Restored by Anthology Film Archives with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.)

From the collection of George Eastman Museum.

Perhaps no other Hollywood director of the period featured cross-dressing as consistently as Tod Browning. No less than three of his films contrive to maneuver their male characters into impersonating women: FREAKS, THE UNHOLY THREE, and THE DEVIL-DOLL. Perhaps the least known of the three, THE DEVIL-DOLL marks the fourth collaboration between Browning and Lionel Barrymore, who stars here as a Paris banker framed for embezzlement and murder. Among his fellow inmates is a scientist who has developed a method for shrinking humans to the size of a small doll. When Barrymore escapes, he takes advantage of this technique to take revenge on those who betrayed him, while donning the disguise of an elderly female doll-maker. Almost as strange as the plot itself is the fact that the film was co-written by Erich von Stroheim!

“The more one knows about MGM and the Barrymores, the more fascinating this is. THE DEVIL-DOLL is a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer product and MGM was the most conservative, right-wing studio in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Lionel Barrymore was an addict, but he was also Louis B. Mayer’s favorite actor. And William Randolph Hearst was Mayer’s favorite American. Real American, that is. Andy Hardy was his favorite fictional American.” –Lypsinka

With the ongoing series RE-VISIONS: AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL FILM 1975-90, Anthology spotlights the generation(s) of experimental film artists who emerged after the final formation in 1975 of our Essential Cinema repertory screening cycle. As hotly debated as it was widely celebrated, the EC had a seismic effect (for better or worse) on both cinema studies scholarship and international film curatorial practice. Even though the EC was intended as a direct response to the exclusion of the avant-garde from official Film History, by so concisely outlining a canon it effectively shifted critical and public interest away from the still developing experimental film movement and focused attention squarely on certain artists and works considered to be historically important. Subsequent generations of cinema artists have never received the same level of intellectual/institutional recognition or encouragement. We believe that it is high time for a re-evaluation.

With the support of a significant grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Anthology has been engaged in a multi-year project to preserve significant works by a wide range of cinema artists who largely became active or reached their prime after 1975. Rather than attempt to amend the EC, RE-VISIONS uses it as a starting point from which to explore the continuities, fractures, corollaries, and connections between cinema artists of the last 40 years and the previous avant-garde film movements. Much like their predecessors, these artists continued to tirelessly push at the parameters of cinematic form.

RE-VISIONS features single-artist screenings of our new preservations alongside other exemplary and enticing titles spanning each artist’s career, as well as group shows bringing together multiple artists. When possible, artists will appear in person to discuss their work and answer questions.

Special thanks to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Audio Mechanics, BB Optics, Cinema Arts, Cineric, Colorlab, The Film Foundation, FotoKem, the Mike Kelly Foundation for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, the National Film Preservation Foundation, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Trackwise, Video and Film Solutions, Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film & Television, and all the artists who were involved in this project.

JEFF PREISS
FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
Jeff Preiss has achieved the rare and delicate balancing act of working both in high-profile mainstream contexts and in the realm of uncompromisingly independent, small-gauge, experimental cinema. Inspired by the diary films of Jonas Mekas and Warren Sonbert, he began in the early 1980s making silent, semi-narrative works born out of his practice of shooting with his Regular 8mm Bolex on a daily basis. He’s called these works “lyric home newsreels” that aim to “balance ‘home movie’ sentimentality with concerns of formal (and literal) interpretation.”

When the photographer Bruce Weber saw Preiss’s work he enlisted him as cinematographer on a string of collaborations including the feature documentaries BROKEN NOSES (1987) and LET’S GET LOST (1988), an acclaimed portrait of jazz legend Chet Baker. That film’s success led Preiss to work directing commercials and music videos (including videos for Iggy Pop, Malcolm McLaren, REM, and the B-52s, and advertisements for Nike, Coca-Cola, Sony, American Express, etc.). In 2014, his first narrative feature, LOW DOWN, based on the life of jazz pianist Joe Albany, and starring John Hawkes, Elle Fanning, and Glenn Close, won best cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival and best actress at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Even as he has developed these mainstream projects, Preiss has continued to work in the avant-garde realm. In 2005, he co-founded the NYC experimental gallery, Orchard. And in 2012, he completed STOP, an epic home movie compiled from 2,500 rolls of 16mm film. For these RE-VISIONS screenings, we will be debuting our own brand-new preservations of some of Preiss’s earliest Regular 8mm Kodachrome films, in gorgeous 2K transfers, as well as presenting a screening of his magnum opus, STOP.

All the films in this program have been restored by Anthology Film Archives with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
LUDLOW ST. NEWSREEL PT. 1 (1981, 8.5 min, Regular 8mm-to-2K digital, silent)
LUDLOW ST. NEWSREEL PT. 2 (1981, 12.5 min, Regular 8mm-to-2K digital, silent)
FRED IN HELL TRAILER (1982, 9 min, Regular 8mm-to-2K digital, silent)
STARING SHARON (1984, 8.5 min, Regular 8mm-to-2K digital, silent)
WILD KINGDOM, PT 2: BOY TOWN (1984, 14 min, Regular 8mm-to-2K digital, silent)
WINTER BUSES – CAR WASH – 14TH STREET TREES (ca. 1985, 3 min, Regular 8mm-to-2K digital, silent)
BROKEN NOSES NEWSREEL (1987, 19 min, Regular 8mm-to-2K digital, silent. Made with Bruce Weber.)

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

CHARLES BUSCH IN PERSON!

With Charles Busch, Natasha Lyonne, Jason Priestley, Frances Conroy, Philip Baker Hall, and Nora Dunn.

“One thing is certain. Charles Busch’s Hollywood Star-System-era, glamorama drag is fabulous. In DIE, MOMMIE, DIE!, the veteran performer channels Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in Angela Arden, equal parts steely reserve and ‘feminine’ vulnerability. […] DIE, MOMMIE, DIE! references not only specific stars, but also classic ‘women’s’ pictures like NOW, VOYAGER (1942), IMITATION OF LIFE (1959), and SUNSET BLVD (1950). The script (written by Busch, based on his stage play of the same name) pokes relentless fun at the conventions of the genre, the protocols of domesticity and the possibilities of women’s independence. […] [It] seems to complement and extend the themes of Todd Haynes’s FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002). If Haynes’s film confronted us with the thinly veiled racism, sexism, class pretensions, and homophobia implicit within Sirkian melodramas, DIE, MOMMIE, DIE! demands we acknowledge the homoeroticism, camp, parody and queer pleasures simultaneously available within those same films.” –Todd R. Ramlow, POP MATTERS

“Thanks to Charles Busch for agreeing to appear at these screenings. Also, come for the memorable reference to Carol Lynley.” –Lypsinka

(ICH MÖCHTE KEIN MANN SEIN)

From the collection of George Eastman Museum.

“I DON’T WANT TO BE A MAN is a wonderful and eye-opening early comedy of sexual identity; in addition to showcasing Lubitsch’s witty direction of actors and predilection for risqué situations, it also shows how early on the director developed milieu as a comic and dramatic force. Tomboy Ossi Oswalda, who boldly indulges in drinking, smoking, playing poker, and similar unladylike activities, is placed in the care of a male guardian who vows to ‘cut her down to size.’ Chafing under his reign, she decides to go all out and live like a man, in convincing drag; the two ‘men’ smoke cigars, drink, and wind up a little too cozy in the back seat of a cab.” –PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

“It is stupid to treat Charlie as a clown of genius. If there had never been a cinema he would undoubtedly have been a clown of genius, but the cinema has allowed him to raise the comedy of circus and music hall to the highest aesthetic level. Chaplin needed the medium of the cinema to free comedy completely from the limits of space and time imposed by the stage or the circus arena. […] [The] best Chaplin films can be seen over and over again with no loss of pleasure – indeed the very opposite is the case. It is doubtless a fact that the satisfaction derived from certain gags is inexhaustible, so deep does it lie, but it is furthermore supremely true that comic form and aesthetic value owe nothing to surprise. The latter is exhausted the first time around and is replaced by a much more subtle pleasure, namely the delight of anticipating and recognizing perfection.” –André Bazin, WHAT IS CINEMA

CHARLES CHAPLIN, PROGRAM 1
All the Chaplin shorts in this and the following programs are silent.
A WOMAN (1915, 20 min, 16mm, b&w)
EASY STREET (1917, 19 min, 16mm, b&w)
A DOG’S LIFE (1918, 33 min, 35mm, b&w)

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

(EIN MANN WIE EVA)

With Eva Mattes.

“[A] hypnotic, unorthodox, appropriately profane paean to Rainer Werner Fassbinder. […] Starring as Fassbinder – called Eva in the film – is the ever-surprising Eva Mattes, who was herself a member of the Fassbinder stock company, appearing most memorably as the murderous, teen-age nymphet of JAIL BAIT (1972). Made up to look like the later Fassbinder, complete with scraggly whiskers and wearing the familiar granny glasses, jeans, leather jacket and slouch hat, she is a nightmare vision of Fassbinder. It is not, however, a drag impersonation. It’s a bifocal performance for, though Miss Mattes looks like Fassbinder, the voice is always recognized as that of Miss Mattes. The point is not to call attention to Fassbinder’s homosexuality, but to the performance aspects of his life and his work. […] A MAN LIKE EVA is in no way a biographical film, or a parody. It's a seriously daring contemplation of the career of one of the most gifted, most troubling, most original filmmakers of his time.” –Vincent Canby, NEW YORK TIMES

Andrew Busti has been making handmade films in various forms since 1999. His work revolves around the idea of the subjective and the languages that evolve through experience and perception. He is the technical director for the Film Studies Program at University of Colorado in Boulder and teaches classes in Alternative Process and Alchemical Cinema. He works with artists, museums, and archives through the name Analogue Industries Ltd., facilitating new works, helping to preserve any work that may be of value, and always striving to support analog cinema in all its ongoing forms. He is a founding member of Process Reversal, a nonprofit artist-run analog film initiative that currently educates, informs, supports, and outfits artist-run film labs and communities around the globe. He is an integral part of the new media preservation program for Film Studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder. When not working long hours and helping others make films or trying to actually make his own, he might be found cooking in his very small kitchen, incessantly smoking cigarettes, drinking scotch, and ruminating on all the lost hours that slip through his fingers…. He currently obsesses about the reclaiming and refining of silver from the photographic process .999 percent of his time.

For his Show & Tell program, Busti will present three films from his in-progress project, 26 PULSE WROUGHT (film for rewinds), which will ultimately comprise nine parts, as well as selected earlier works, and at least one live performance! As if that’s not enough, he has also curated a group program devoted primarily to films that have been created with the support of Process Reversal (as well as by filmmakers associated with the group).

26 PULSE WROUGHT
(film for rewinds)
A series of 9 films investigating subjective languages, languages of subjectivity, and interpretive modes through coded polyphonic articulate signals. A cinema of illumination and reflection.

Screening tonight:
26 PULSE WROUGHT – (FILM FOR REWINDS) VOL. I: WINDOWS FOR RECURSIVE TRIANGULATION (2014, 3 min, 16mm)
26 PULSE WROUGHT – (FILM FOR REWINDS) VOL. III: PARALLEL BEAMS OR THE INEFFABLE INEFFCIENCY OF WORDS (2015, 3 min, 16mm, b&w)
26 PULSE WROUGHT – (FILM FOR REWINDS) VOL. II: EXCEPTIONAL VIOLENTS (2017, 4 min, 16mm, b&w)

Additional films and performances to be announced!

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

Jose Rodriguez-Soltero
LUPE
(1966, 50 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.)
Unlike Andy Warhol’s film of the same name, which emphasizes the decline of Mexican Hollywood star Lupe Velez (and Edie Sedgwick), Rodriguez-Soltero’s contemporaneous version is a sumptuous film that celebrates both Velez and Puerto Rican underground actor Mario Montez, who plays Velez. Drawing on the collaboration of Theater of the Ridiculous stars Lola Pashalinski and Charles Ludlam, LUPE is one of the finest films from the New York underground, offering an ecstatic explosion of color, costume, music, camp performance, and complex superimpositions.
&
Robert Wade Chatterton
PASSION IN A SEASIDE SLUM
(1961, 32 min, 8mm-to-16mm, silent. With Taylor Mead. Preserved by Los Angeles Film Forum, Academy Film Archive, and Anthology Film Archives, with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.)
“Mead plays ‘the faggot’ who persistently cruises a butch guy intent only on fishing in one of the canals. Using the magic wand of a radio antenna, Mead transforms himself into ever more implausible drag figures in his attempts to garner the guy’s interest, but only succeeds in soliciting his amused laughs. Chatterton’s self-conscious, light-hearted treatment of homosexual desire fueled by Mead’s inventive and uproarious performance make for a seminal – if previously forgotten – example of queer underground cinema.” –Marc Siegel

Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.

VENUS BOYZ explores the world of drag kings, intersex individuals, and transgender women through in-depth interviews and clips of performances. Featuring drag kings Mo B. Dick, DRED Gerestant, Storme Webber, Diane Torr, Del la Grace Volcano, and Bridge Markland, it is a fascinating look at a rarely-chronicled culture. The transformations these women undergo are astonishing, whether for purely artistic reasons or for more deeply rooted emotional ones. Baur captures the passion that the performers bring to the stage and never judges their motives or choices. Instead, she presents a world that many people may have never considered, and makes it accessible to the masses.

“An utterly fascinating, beautifully crafted exploration of the world of drag kings. Baur’s quietly resplendent documentary is as carefully composed and structured as the manufactured masculine personae of the women she’s filming. Shot over a period of several years, [it] profits greatly from a relaxed intimacy with its subjects who, being people that matter-of-factly flaunt a sexual duality, spend a lot of time discoursing on the nature of gender, performance, empowerment, and social role-playing.” –Ronnie Scheib, VARIETY

Presented by Andrew Busti of Process Reversal.

A program of contemporary films exploring “The Other Side” of the line. Communication with and/or through mediums, residues, and intelligences that may or may not be located within our current “Time/Space.” These films collectively speak from a concurrent field of light, while addressing questions of materiality, spirituality, and ethereality, in regards to the essence of the physical and its perceived presence.

Andrew Kim WILL O’ THE WISP (2013, 23 min, 16mm)
Alee Peoples THEM ORACLES (2012, 7.5 min, 16mm)
Mike Stoltz HALF HUMAN, HALF VAPOR (2015, 11.5 min, 16mm)
Sarah Biagini THE BLACK SPOUT (2017, 9 min, 16mm)
David Gatten FILM FOR INVISIBLE INK, CASE NO. 71: BASE-PLUS-FOG (2006, 10 min, 16mm, b&w)
Erin Espelie 视网膜 (A NET TO CATCH THE LIGHT) (2016, 8.5 min, HD-and-16mm-to-digital)
Kelly Sears A TONE BETWEEN LIGHTNESS AND DARKNESS (2015, 7.5 min, digital)
Heather Trawick CENTRE OF THE CYCLONE (2015, 12 min, 16mm)
Eric Stewart WAKE, (2015, 8 min, 16mm, b&w, silent)
Taylor Dunne CORN MOTHER (2012, 6 min, 16mm, silent)
Curt Heiner LIMITED SIGHT DISTANCE (2017, 7 min, 16mm, silent)
Eric Coombs ESMERILLION: Y GWYLLT (2017, 10 min, 16mm)

Total running time: ca. 125 min.

With Barbra Streisand, Amy Irving, and Mandy Patinkin.

“Adapted from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story/play, this engaging musical is set in a Jewish community in Poland in the early 20th century. After her father’s death, Yentl (Streisand) wants to continue her study of the Talmud but, according to tradition, that is strictly a man’s work. So Yentl adopts a male alter ego and enrolls in a Jewish religious school – where she winds up in a romantic triangle with a fellow student (Patinkin) and his fiancée (Irving). Streisand’s directorial debut raises thoughtful questions about religious and gender identity. Its score earned Oscars for Michel Legrand and lyricists Alan & Marilyn Bergman.” –AMERICAN CINEMATHEQUE

“I missed this in 1983. I’m looking forward to seeing it on a big screen. Let’s make Barbara great again!” –Lypsinka

PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO AN UNAVOIDABLE SHIPPING PROBLEM, THE 35MM PRINT OF 'YENTL' WILL NOT ARRIVE IN TIME FOR THE SCREENING ON MONDAY, JUNE 12.  WE WILL BE SCREENING THE FILM DIGITALLY THAT NIGHT, BUT IT WILL SCREEN ON 35MM FOR ITS TWO REPEAT SCREENINGS (ON JUNE 16 & 18).  WE APOLOGIZE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE!

This camp classic follows Marcie Clark (Ann Block), a polyester suburban housewife dissatisfied with her bouffant-and-barbecue lifestyle, who is hot on the trail of an old high school chum, Susan Jane Smith (Francesca Rosa). When she reconnects with Susan Jane (now “Sujana”), Marcie stumbles into the wild and wacky world of San Francisco bohemia circa 1980, replete with wild drag queens and glitter, kooky artists, Mohawk hairdos, new wave slackers, and a pool of well-known celebutants. Featuring appearances by Lulu, Coco Vega, and members of the legendary theater group The Angels of Light, as well as a vibrant soundtrack by Bay Area bands Tuxedo Moon, Noh Mercy with Esmerelda, Ben Bossi of Romeo Void, The Wasp Women, Indoor Life with Jorge Socarras and others, it’s a truly “only in San Francisco” tale.

“It is stupid to treat Charlie as a clown of genius. If there had never been a cinema he would undoubtedly have been a clown of genius, but the cinema has allowed him to raise the comedy of circus and music hall to the highest aesthetic level. Chaplin needed the medium of the cinema to free comedy completely from the limits of space and time imposed by the stage or the circus arena. […] [The] best Chaplin films can be seen over and over again with no loss of pleasure – indeed the very opposite is the case. It is doubtless a fact that the satisfaction derived from certain gags is inexhaustible, so deep does it lie, but it is furthermore supremely true that comic form and aesthetic value owe nothing to surprise. The latter is exhausted the first time around and is replaced by a much more subtle pleasure, namely the delight of anticipating and recognizing perfection.” –André Bazin, WHAT IS CINEMA

CHARLES CHAPLIN, PROGRAM 2
SHOULDER ARMS (1918, 37 min, 35mm, b&w)
A DAY’S PLEASURE (1919, 19 min, 35mm, b&w)
THE IDLE CLASS (1921, 32 min, 35mm, b&w)

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

LYPSINKA IN PERSON!
FREE SCREENING!

With Dennis Hopper, Penelope Ann Miller, Eric Bogosian, and Lypsinka. Print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

One of Paul Schrader’s more unusual projects (which is saying something), the made-for-TV WITCH HUNT is a sequel to the earlier, HBO-produced CAST A DEADLY SPELL. Like its predecessor, it’s a mash-up of private-eye tropes and the supernatural, with Dennis Hopper taking over the role of the not-so-subtly-named H. Phillip Lovecraft (previously played by Fred Ward). In an alternate Los Angeles circa 1950 where witchcraft is commonplace, Hopper’s magic-wary gumshoe is on a case that could blow the whole town sky high. A multi-barbed satire of Hollywood and Cold War paranoia WITCH HUNT features a memorable drag performance by none other than our Cross-Dressing film series guest-curator Lypsinka, who will present the film in person and regale us with tales of the film shoot!

“One of the memories I have of the filming of this cult opus is that the O.J. Simpson chase and the firing of Faye Dunaway from the stage production of SUNSET BOULEVARD happened at the same time. ‘Just another day in Los Angeles,’ I thought then.” –Lypsinka

“It is stupid to treat Charlie as a clown of genius. If there had never been a cinema he would undoubtedly have been a clown of genius, but the cinema has allowed him to raise the comedy of circus and music hall to the highest aesthetic level. Chaplin needed the medium of the cinema to free comedy completely from the limits of space and time imposed by the stage or the circus arena. […] [The] best Chaplin films can be seen over and over again with no loss of pleasure – indeed the very opposite is the case. It is doubtless a fact that the satisfaction derived from certain gags is inexhaustible, so deep does it lie, but it is furthermore supremely true that comic form and aesthetic value owe nothing to surprise. The latter is exhausted the first time around and is replaced by a much more subtle pleasure, namely the delight of anticipating and recognizing perfection.” –André Bazin, WHAT IS CINEMA

CHARLES CHAPLIN, PROGRAM 3
PAY DAY (1922, 22 min, 35mm, b&w)
THE PILGRIM (1923, 41 min, 35mm, b&w)

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

For full program listings, visit www.newfilmmakers.com.

(OCAÑA: RETRATO INTERMITENTE)

A documentary portrait of Barcelona in the 1970s, and of José Pérez Ocaña, a homosexual painter from Andalucía. Ocaña expresses himself freely, recounting stories of his hard life and his opinions of the world, while Pons intermixes his direct testimony with scenes of his life in the streets (walking half naked along Barcelona’s famous street, La Rambla, singing a song in a crowded bar, or organizing a drag queen procession). An invaluable record of the gay and lesbian experience in Spain during an era in which homosexuals were officially considered “morally dangerous” and hence legally persecuted, OCAÑA is also an extraordinary portrait of an unforgettable personality.

(YUKINOJÔ HENGE)

This screening is co-presented with the Japan Foundation.

“Ichikawa’s 1963 masterpiece, one of the most dazzling and stylistically audacious Japanese films ever made, has to be seen to be believed…. The film was putatively made to celebrate the 300th film appearance of box-office idol Kazuo Hasegawa, and is in fact a remake of a 1938 film by Teinosuke Kinugasa that featured Hasegawa in the same parts. Ichikawa uses it as an unprecedented opportunity for unbridled stylistic play (the film’s use of ‘Scope and color is breathtaking), Shakespearean complication (Hasegawa plays two parts, one of them in drag), and a fascinating investigation into the relationship between theater and cinema. The hero is a Kabuki female impersonator out to avenge the death of his parents, and the plot proceeds somewhat like a film noir (with revelatory flashbacks), while adroitly mixing onstage and offstage action. […] [P]erhaps the most remarkable aspect of this singular experiment is its demonstration that theater and film are more kissing cousins than distant relations – the more stage bound the film gets, the more cinematic it becomes. If you’ve never seen this, prepare to be stunned.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

From the collection of George Eastman Museum.

Perhaps no other Hollywood director of the period featured cross-dressing as consistently as Tod Browning. No less than three of his films contrive to maneuver their male characters into impersonating women: FREAKS, THE UNHOLY THREE, and THE DEVIL-DOLL. Perhaps the least known of the three, THE DEVIL-DOLL marks the fourth collaboration between Browning and Lionel Barrymore, who stars here as a Paris banker framed for embezzlement and murder. Among his fellow inmates is a scientist who has developed a method for shrinking humans to the size of a small doll. When Barrymore escapes, he takes advantage of this technique to take revenge on those who betrayed him, while donning the disguise of an elderly female doll-maker. Almost as strange as the plot itself is the fact that the film was co-written by Erich von Stroheim!

“The more one knows about MGM and the Barrymores, the more fascinating this is. THE DEVIL-DOLL is a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer product and MGM was the most conservative, right-wing studio in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Lionel Barrymore was an addict, but he was also Louis B. Mayer’s favorite actor. And William Randolph Hearst was Mayer’s favorite American. Real American, that is. Andy Hardy was his favorite fictional American.” –Lypsinka

One of the most celebrated and beloved of all silent films, THE GOLD RUSH features Chaplin’s most distinctive alter-ego, the little tramp, as he wins fortune and love in the Yukon. Filled with impressive sight gags and heartrending pathos, the film deserves its reputation as one of the touchstones of modern comedy. This version features Chaplin's own music and poetic narration, added for the 1942 reissue.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.

VENUS BOYZ explores the world of drag kings, intersex individuals, and transgender women through in-depth interviews and clips of performances. Featuring drag kings Mo B. Dick, DRED Gerestant, Storme Webber, Diane Torr, Del la Grace Volcano, and Bridge Markland, it is a fascinating look at a rarely-chronicled culture. The transformations these women undergo are astonishing, whether for purely artistic reasons or for more deeply rooted emotional ones. Baur captures the passion that the performers bring to the stage and never judges their motives or choices. Instead, she presents a world that many people may have never considered, and makes it accessible to the masses.

“An utterly fascinating, beautifully crafted exploration of the world of drag kings. Baur’s quietly resplendent documentary is as carefully composed and structured as the manufactured masculine personae of the women she’s filming. Shot over a period of several years, [it] profits greatly from a relaxed intimacy with its subjects who, being people that matter-of-factly flaunt a sexual duality, spend a lot of time discoursing on the nature of gender, performance, empowerment, and social role-playing.” –Ronnie Scheib, VARIETY

With Barbra Streisand, Amy Irving, and Mandy Patinkin.

“Adapted from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story/play, this engaging musical is set in a Jewish community in Poland in the early 20th century. After her father’s death, Yentl (Streisand) wants to continue her study of the Talmud but, according to tradition, that is strictly a man’s work. So Yentl adopts a male alter ego and enrolls in a Jewish religious school – where she winds up in a romantic triangle with a fellow student (Patinkin) and his fiancée (Irving). Streisand’s directorial debut raises thoughtful questions about religious and gender identity. Its score earned Oscars for Michel Legrand and lyricists Alan & Marilyn Bergman.” –AMERICAN CINEMATHEQUE

“I missed this in 1983. I’m looking forward to seeing it on a big screen. Let’s make Barbara great again!” –Lypsinka

PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO AN UNAVOIDABLE SHIPPING PROBLEM, THE 35MM PRINT OF 'YENTL' WILL NOT ARRIVE IN TIME FOR THE SCREENING ON MONDAY, JUNE 12.  WE WILL BE SCREENING THE FILM DIGITALLY THAT NIGHT, BUT IT WILL SCREEN ON 35MM FOR ITS TWO REPEAT SCREENINGS (ON JUNE 16 & 18).  WE APOLOGIZE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE!

With Charlotte Rampling, Anthony Higgins, Victoria Abril, and Pierre Étaix.

Oshima’s sole collaboration with maverick screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière stars Charlotte Rampling as Margaret, a bored diplomat’s wife who falls – hard – for a sad-eyed chimp named Max. The film’s milieu is lush, gilded, airheaded, hollow – a fragile social ecosystem to be tested if ever there was one, while the visual punchline of Max’s cohabitation with the Paris elite lends the film a concurrent measure of mystery. Beyond the pleasures of Oshima’s savagely anemic staging and Michel Portal’s silken score, MAX MON AMOUR details another path taken only by an intrepid few: it’s a rare glimpse at Buñuel-lite surrealism well into the 80s, blown up to big-budget proportions vis-à-vis Max himself, portrayed by actress Aisla Berk in a seamless monkey suit courtesy of the great Rick Baker.

MONKEY SHINES teeters uncomfortably between withering satire and over-earnest chamber drama, like a Reagan-era upgrade of MURDERS AT THE RUE MORGUE. Jason Beghe plays Allan, a jock-turned-quadriplegic in a freak (if not fated) encounter with a truck, given a capuchin monkey named Ella for help around the house. For a time, the two are thick as thieves – but once Ella begins receiving liquified human brains one transfusion at a time, the psychic link between her and Allan takes things in a more gruesome direction, with Ella wielding a switchblade against anyone she sees as a threat. Romero’s first stab at studio filmmaking was besieged by problems and shrugged off upon general release, which is a shame: the faux-happy ending (mandated by Orion Pictures) suffuses the story with schizophrenic irresolution, and Ella – a mix of animatronics and trained monkey performers – manages to become the story’s true hero with the slimmest screen time.

“In between these soggy slices of bread the MONKEY SHINES sandwich is packed with meat – an imposing family melodrama full of faces, tension, strong feelings, and personalities, and very little wasted motion, culminating in what is probably the most protracted and successful suspense set piece in any movie this year.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

Jose Rodriguez-Soltero
LUPE
(1966, 50 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.)
Unlike Andy Warhol’s film of the same name, which emphasizes the decline of Mexican Hollywood star Lupe Velez (and Edie Sedgwick), Rodriguez-Soltero’s contemporaneous version is a sumptuous film that celebrates both Velez and Puerto Rican underground actor Mario Montez, who plays Velez. Drawing on the collaboration of Theater of the Ridiculous stars Lola Pashalinski and Charles Ludlam, LUPE is one of the finest films from the New York underground, offering an ecstatic explosion of color, costume, music, camp performance, and complex superimpositions.
&
Robert Wade Chatterton
PASSION IN A SEASIDE SLUM
(1961, 32 min, 8mm-to-16mm, silent. With Taylor Mead. Preserved by Los Angeles Film Forum, Academy Film Archive, and Anthology Film Archives, with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.)
“Mead plays ‘the faggot’ who persistently cruises a butch guy intent only on fishing in one of the canals. Using the magic wand of a radio antenna, Mead transforms himself into ever more implausible drag figures in his attempts to garner the guy’s interest, but only succeeds in soliciting his amused laughs. Chatterton’s self-conscious, light-hearted treatment of homosexual desire fueled by Mead’s inventive and uproarious performance make for a seminal – if previously forgotten – example of queer underground cinema.” –Marc Siegel

With Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Marilyn Monroe, and Charles Coburn.

The screwball comedy patented by Howard Hawks and Cary Grant in BRINGING UP BABY gets one last ride in MONKEY BUSINESS, wherein a lab chimp named Esther innocently spikes a chemical company’s water supply with “rejuvenation elixir” – and hijinks ensue. Grant stars as the airheaded scientist responsible for developing the mystery concoction, pepped-up and freshly obsessed with his secretary (Marilyn Monroe) after a few sips of the stuff. While Hawks manages to juxtapose broad slapstick with much implied psychological horror, this “fountain of youth” allows for set piece after another with Hawks’s ensemble spiraling further out of control – a poetic realignment of youth and old age with man’s evolutionary forge.

“Very funny and strangely frightening – Hawks’s comedies are invariably more pessimistic than his dramas – MONKEY BUSINESS ranks with the best works of the American cinema.” –Dave Kehr, CHICAGO READER

(EIN MANN WIE EVA)

With Eva Mattes.

“[A] hypnotic, unorthodox, appropriately profane paean to Rainer Werner Fassbinder. […] Starring as Fassbinder – called Eva in the film – is the ever-surprising Eva Mattes, who was herself a member of the Fassbinder stock company, appearing most memorably as the murderous, teen-age nymphet of JAIL BAIT (1972). Made up to look like the later Fassbinder, complete with scraggly whiskers and wearing the familiar granny glasses, jeans, leather jacket and slouch hat, she is a nightmare vision of Fassbinder. It is not, however, a drag impersonation. It’s a bifocal performance for, though Miss Mattes looks like Fassbinder, the voice is always recognized as that of Miss Mattes. The point is not to call attention to Fassbinder’s homosexuality, but to the performance aspects of his life and his work. […] A MAN LIKE EVA is in no way a biographical film, or a parody. It's a seriously daring contemplation of the career of one of the most gifted, most troubling, most original filmmakers of his time.” –Vincent Canby, NEW YORK TIMES

With Gérard Depardieu, Marcello Mastroianni, and James Coco.

From the auteur behind DILLINGER IS DEAD comes an incense-seared dystopia of post-Sixties bohemianism, landing somewhere between SKIDOO and THE GOODBYE GIRL. BYE BYE MONKEY’s foundational image is both its funniest and its hardest to forget: the slowly deflating corpse of King Kong, sprawled out anonymously on a beach opposite the World Trade Center. When handyman Lafayette (Depardieu) and his friend Luigi (Mastroianni) happen upon the deceased gargantua, they discover a beautiful orphaned chimp left behind, who they nickname Cornelius, in a nod to PLANET OF THE APES. A decidedly problematic (if not anti-humanist) picture, BYE BYE MONKEY is equal parts fare-thee-well to childhood phantasmagoria and rumination on the coarse brutality of man (and thus, his art) – a tragedy of dashed expectations made explicit by the Imperial Rome Wax Museum where Lafayette and Luigi work.

This camp classic follows Marcie Clark (Ann Block), a polyester suburban housewife dissatisfied with her bouffant-and-barbecue lifestyle, who is hot on the trail of an old high school chum, Susan Jane Smith (Francesca Rosa). When she reconnects with Susan Jane (now “Sujana”), Marcie stumbles into the wild and wacky world of San Francisco bohemia circa 1980, replete with wild drag queens and glitter, kooky artists, Mohawk hairdos, new wave slackers, and a pool of well-known celebutants. Featuring appearances by Lulu, Coco Vega, and members of the legendary theater group The Angels of Light, as well as a vibrant soundtrack by Bay Area bands Tuxedo Moon, Noh Mercy with Esmerelda, Ben Bossi of Romeo Void, The Wasp Women, Indoor Life with Jorge Socarras and others, it’s a truly “only in San Francisco” tale.

(ICH MÖCHTE KEIN MANN SEIN)

From the collection of George Eastman Museum.

“I DON’T WANT TO BE A MAN is a wonderful and eye-opening early comedy of sexual identity; in addition to showcasing Lubitsch’s witty direction of actors and predilection for risqué situations, it also shows how early on the director developed milieu as a comic and dramatic force. Tomboy Ossi Oswalda, who boldly indulges in drinking, smoking, playing poker, and similar unladylike activities, is placed in the care of a male guardian who vows to ‘cut her down to size.’ Chafing under his reign, she decides to go all out and live like a man, in convincing drag; the two ‘men’ smoke cigars, drink, and wind up a little too cozy in the back seat of a cab.” –PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

(KINGU KONGU NO GYAKUSHÛ)

It’s tantamount to spoilage to disclose that KING KONG ESCAPES is an adaptation of a children’s TV show: Kong’s final live-action appearance in Japan is a delirious crossbreed of big-monster pugilism and Bond-era supervillainy, achieved in the visage of the evil Dr. Who (Eisei Amamoto, dubbed by the legendary Paul Frees). After developing a faulty Mechani-Kong to mine the radioactive Element X from the mineral hellscapes of Antarctica, Who kidnaps and hypnotizes the real ape king – originally under U.N. surveillance, led by the beyond-wooden Rhodes Reason (brother of THIS ISLAND EARTH’s Rex), genre standby Akira Takarada, and Linda Miller. (As the inevitable love interest, Miller delivers perhaps the most matronly Fay Wray committed to film.) A trans-planetary chase follows; long before the two Kongs have squared off at Tokyo Tower with Miller in the middle, Honda’s film – which also doubles, per usual, as an eyeball-busting buffet of modular 1960s pop-art production design – has more than delivered on its premise.

PLEASE NOTE: We intended to screen KING KONG ESCAPES on 16mm but the print that arrived is both badly faded and a cropped version of the Cinemascope original.  Rather than show such a compromised version of the film, we'll be screening it digitally.

(YUKINOJÔ HENGE)

This screening is co-presented with the Japan Foundation.

“Ichikawa’s 1963 masterpiece, one of the most dazzling and stylistically audacious Japanese films ever made, has to be seen to be believed…. The film was putatively made to celebrate the 300th film appearance of box-office idol Kazuo Hasegawa, and is in fact a remake of a 1938 film by Teinosuke Kinugasa that featured Hasegawa in the same parts. Ichikawa uses it as an unprecedented opportunity for unbridled stylistic play (the film’s use of ‘Scope and color is breathtaking), Shakespearean complication (Hasegawa plays two parts, one of them in drag), and a fascinating investigation into the relationship between theater and cinema. The hero is a Kabuki female impersonator out to avenge the death of his parents, and the plot proceeds somewhat like a film noir (with revelatory flashbacks), while adroitly mixing onstage and offstage action. […] [P]erhaps the most remarkable aspect of this singular experiment is its demonstration that theater and film are more kissing cousins than distant relations – the more stage bound the film gets, the more cinematic it becomes. If you’ve never seen this, prepare to be stunned.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

In Frederick Wiseman’s signature style, PRIMATE begins as a droll examination of Atlanta’s Yerkes Primate Research Center (complete with scenes of scientists nursing baby chimps with milk bottles), soon to become one of the veteran documentarian’s most harrowing interrogative works. PRIMATE’s scenes of animal research are as damning as anything in TITICUT FOLLIES, while the hands-off shooting strategy invites unflattering comparisons between the supposedly superior keepers of the apes, and their (literally) tortured charges. PRIMATE wastes zero energy philosophizing on the nature of what goes down at Yerkes, as nearly every scene invites the audience to ask the same question in a different way: Wherefore the cost of (human) knowledge?

“What’s particularly striking about this dynamic between inmate and scientist, particularly in light of Wiseman’s earlier film, is that it continually problematizes our perspective as viewers. With whom are we to identify: primate or researcher? Both, or neither?” –Leo Goldsmith, NOT COMING TO A THEATER NEAR YOU

CHARLES BUSCH IN PERSON!

With Charles Busch, Natasha Lyonne, Jason Priestley, Frances Conroy, Philip Baker Hall, and Nora Dunn.

“One thing is certain. Charles Busch’s Hollywood Star-System-era, glamorama drag is fabulous. In DIE, MOMMIE, DIE!, the veteran performer channels Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in Angela Arden, equal parts steely reserve and ‘feminine’ vulnerability. […] DIE, MOMMIE, DIE! references not only specific stars, but also classic ‘women’s’ pictures like NOW, VOYAGER (1942), IMITATION OF LIFE (1959), and SUNSET BLVD (1950). The script (written by Busch, based on his stage play of the same name) pokes relentless fun at the conventions of the genre, the protocols of domesticity and the possibilities of women’s independence. […] [It] seems to complement and extend the themes of Todd Haynes’s FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002). If Haynes’s film confronted us with the thinly veiled racism, sexism, class pretensions, and homophobia implicit within Sirkian melodramas, DIE, MOMMIE, DIE! demands we acknowledge the homoeroticism, camp, parody and queer pleasures simultaneously available within those same films.” –Todd R. Ramlow, POP MATTERS

“Thanks to Charles Busch for agreeing to appear at these screenings. Also, come for the memorable reference to Carol Lynley.” –Lypsinka

With Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Geoffrey Lewis, and Beverly D’Angelo.

James Fargo’s trash-talking, bare-knuckle road comedy stars Clint Eastwood as Philo, a rambling truck driver and handyman whose best pal is a beer-swilling orangutan named Clyde. Philo falls hard for Lynn (Locke), a honky-tonk torch singer, and follows her – with Clyde and his friend Orville (Lewis) – all the way to Denver in an extended BLUES BROTHERS-worthy chase sequence, where new enemies are accumulated one stoplight at a time. While the film was extensively derided upon release, in hindsight it appears one of Eastwood’s more lived-in vehicles, with the flinty icon playing against type. Even with the mischievous Clyde (portrayed throughout by an orangutan named Manis, who sadly did not return for ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN) playing cupid, the real-life chemistry between Eastwood and Locke makes for a surprisingly melancholy denouement.

With Barbra Streisand, Amy Irving, and Mandy Patinkin.

“Adapted from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story/play, this engaging musical is set in a Jewish community in Poland in the early 20th century. After her father’s death, Yentl (Streisand) wants to continue her study of the Talmud but, according to tradition, that is strictly a man’s work. So Yentl adopts a male alter ego and enrolls in a Jewish religious school – where she winds up in a romantic triangle with a fellow student (Patinkin) and his fiancée (Irving). Streisand’s directorial debut raises thoughtful questions about religious and gender identity. Its score earned Oscars for Michel Legrand and lyricists Alan & Marilyn Bergman.” –AMERICAN CINEMATHEQUE

“I missed this in 1983. I’m looking forward to seeing it on a big screen. Let’s make Barbara great again!” –Lypsinka

PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO AN UNAVOIDABLE SHIPPING PROBLEM, THE 35MM PRINT OF 'YENTL' WILL NOT ARRIVE IN TIME FOR THE SCREENING ON MONDAY, JUNE 12.  WE WILL BE SCREENING THE FILM DIGITALLY THAT NIGHT, BUT IT WILL SCREEN ON 35MM FOR ITS TWO REPEAT SCREENINGS (ON JUNE 16 & 18).  WE APOLOGIZE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE!

With Jeff Bridges, Charles Grodin, and Jessica Lange.

John Guillermin and Dino De Laurentiis’s uberspectacular KING KONG is nothing if not star-powered: Jessica Lange makes her debut as a hypersexualized new Fay Wray, against Jeff Bridges’s slightly damp turn as a know-it-all hippie scientist and Charles Grodin’s mustache-twirling event-producer heavy. Even if this relatively somber remake didn’t pan out, as promised by the original poster, to be “The most exciting original motion picture event of all time,” the nominal attraction remains beyond reproach. Effects maestro Carlo Rambaldi went on to win a Special Achievement Oscar, while his deputy Rick Baker piloted the Kong suit himself, kaiju-eiga style, for many of KING KONG’s wider shots – the massive animatronic Kong barely functioning, in yet another of several meta-ironies accorded by the film’s overripe, post-carnival-showmanship packaging.

“This new KONG isn’t a horror movie – it’s an absurdist love story. When the 40-foot Kong stands bleeding and besieged at the top of the World Trade Center, and his blonde (Lange) pleads with him to pick her up, so that the helicopters won’t shoot at him, even Wagner’s dreams seem paltry.” –Pauline Kael, WHEN THE LIGHTS GO DOWN

With Bela Lugosi and Erik Gemora.

Florey’s grisly adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s 1841 short story about a serial killer named Dr. Mirakle (Bela Lugosi) is primo Pre-Code. Mirakle takes to kidnapping young virgins in search of a mate for his woebegone right hand – a gnashing gorilla named Erik (played, in still-persuasive costume, by Charles “king of the gorilla men” Gemora). A classic Depression-era charlatan in 19th-century pancake makeup, Mirakle uses unmistakably Darwinist language to entice the huddled masses, even as the pileup of bodies begins to give him away. The search culminates in a rooftop showdown between the police and Erik that evokes both Merian C. Cooper’s KING KONG (whose success probably had something to do with this film’s obscurity), and the coming generation of films noir – abetted here by the deliriously cobwebbed angles of master Expressionist cinematographer Karl Freund. Down and dirty by 1932 standards, MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE is anchored by Lugosi’s fearless performance – nowhere near as famous as his turn as Frankenstein’s monster, but just as besieged by primeval inner contortions.

With:
Jeff Krulik I CREATED LANCELOT LINK (1999, 15.5 min, video)
Wherein veteran comedy writers Stan Burns and Michael Marmer discuss LANCELOT LINK, SECRET CHIMP – their 1970s morning TV fixture, starring real chimps in skits patterned after shows like THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. and GET SMART. In this pocket-size tribute to a bygone era of animal-performer entertainment, Burns and Marmer discuss the minutiae of lighting and overdubbing their simian counterparts, how to ad-lib with chimps, and reexamine clips from the show – including the freak-a-delic all-chimp band Evolution Revolution.

(GOLIATHON)

The Shaw Brothers’ attempt to capitalize on the success of 1976’s KING KONG resulted in MIGHTY PEKING MAN – an astonishing ensemble thriller lodged somewhere between envious knockoff and loving spoof. Danny Lee (of INFRAMAN infamy) stars as an anthropologist hired by a slimy promoter to find the legendary Himalayan gorilla monster known as Utam, or Mighty Peking Man; even he fails to account for the possibility of the giant monkey’s partner, an orphaned bombshell named Samantha (Evelyn Craft, clad from start to finish in a primordial Ursula Andress-style leather bikini). MIGHTY PEKING MAN is a dazzling showcase of optical effects: rear-projected animal attacks, gushing prosthetic limbs, and more than a few matte-enabled civilian casualties – to say nothing of the Peking Man himself, yet another lovelorn ape whose charisma handily surpasses the puny interlopers on the ground.

“I am awarding MIGHTY PEKING MAN three stars, for general goofiness and a certain level of insane genius…but I cannot in good conscience rate it higher than INFRA-MAN.” –Roger Ebert, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

(KOKO, LE GORILLE QUI PARLE)

Barbet Schroder’s extraordinary KOKO serves as inevitable counterpoint to the school of research displayed in Wiseman’s PRIMATE; KOKO as much depicts its eponymous gorilla as it does Penny Patterson, the California primatologist teaching her to “speak” using American Sign Language. Despite remarkable access, Schroeder maintains a balanced skepticism towards his human lead, whose methods are called into doubt by her contemporaries even as the film dives deeper into her relationship with Koko. For this, it must be the most intimate depiction of human-ape synergy in this series – but KOKO also has big questions on its mind, including how animals less special than Koko are to be protected in a modernizing (and largely uncaring) world, how its namesake reacts when she knows she’s on-camera, and whether “personhood” belongs to humans only.

AFA MEMBERS ONLY – FREE SCREENING!

Once every calendar we offer a special, AFA Members Only screening, featuring sneak-previews of upcoming features, programs of rare materials from Anthology’s collections, in-person filmmaker presentations, and more! The benefits of an Anthology membership have always been plentiful: free admission to over 100 Essential Cinema programs, reduced admission to all other shows, discounted AFA publications. But with these screenings – free and open only to members – we sweeten the pot even further.

Juliet Berto & Jean-Henri Roger
SNOW / NEIGE
(1981, 90 min, 35mm. In French with English subtitles. With Juliet Berto, Jean-François Stévenin, and Robert Liensol.)
French actress Juliet Berto is internationally famous – and justifiably so – for her iconic performances in films by Godard (LA CHINOISE, WEEKEND), Rivette (OUT 1, CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING, DUELLE), Glauber Rocha (CLARO), Alain Tanner (MIDDLE OF THE WORLD), and others. But on this side of the Atlantic, her work as a director is virtually unknown. The first of her three feature films, NEIGE was co-directed by Jean-Henri Roger, who was formerly a collaborator of Godard’s during his Dziga Vertov Group period. Featuring a typically remarkable performance by Berto in the lead role, it is the story of Anita, a barmaid caught up in events beyond her control. After Bobby, a teenage drug pusher she has been attempting to care for, is killed, Anita finds herself trying to help out a gay user who depended on Bobby for his drug connection, and gets pulled deeper into the underworld. We’re thrilled to present this extremely rare screening of Berto’s directorial debut.

Reception at 7:00!

With Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Marilyn Monroe, and Charles Coburn.

The screwball comedy patented by Howard Hawks and Cary Grant in BRINGING UP BABY gets one last ride in MONKEY BUSINESS, wherein a lab chimp named Esther innocently spikes a chemical company’s water supply with “rejuvenation elixir” – and hijinks ensue. Grant stars as the airheaded scientist responsible for developing the mystery concoction, pepped-up and freshly obsessed with his secretary (Marilyn Monroe) after a few sips of the stuff. While Hawks manages to juxtapose broad slapstick with much implied psychological horror, this “fountain of youth” allows for set piece after another with Hawks’s ensemble spiraling further out of control – a poetic realignment of youth and old age with man’s evolutionary forge.

“Very funny and strangely frightening – Hawks’s comedies are invariably more pessimistic than his dramas – MONKEY BUSINESS ranks with the best works of the American cinema.” –Dave Kehr, CHICAGO READER

For full program listings, visit www.newfilmmakers.com.

MONKEY SHINES teeters uncomfortably between withering satire and over-earnest chamber drama, like a Reagan-era upgrade of MURDERS AT THE RUE MORGUE. Jason Beghe plays Allan, a jock-turned-quadriplegic in a freak (if not fated) encounter with a truck, given a capuchin monkey named Ella for help around the house. For a time, the two are thick as thieves – but once Ella begins receiving liquified human brains one transfusion at a time, the psychic link between her and Allan takes things in a more gruesome direction, with Ella wielding a switchblade against anyone she sees as a threat. Romero’s first stab at studio filmmaking was besieged by problems and shrugged off upon general release, which is a shame: the faux-happy ending (mandated by Orion Pictures) suffuses the story with schizophrenic irresolution, and Ella – a mix of animatronics and trained monkey performers – manages to become the story’s true hero with the slimmest screen time.

“In between these soggy slices of bread the MONKEY SHINES sandwich is packed with meat – an imposing family melodrama full of faces, tension, strong feelings, and personalities, and very little wasted motion, culminating in what is probably the most protracted and successful suspense set piece in any movie this year.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

With Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Geoffrey Lewis, and Beverly D’Angelo.

James Fargo’s trash-talking, bare-knuckle road comedy stars Clint Eastwood as Philo, a rambling truck driver and handyman whose best pal is a beer-swilling orangutan named Clyde. Philo falls hard for Lynn (Locke), a honky-tonk torch singer, and follows her – with Clyde and his friend Orville (Lewis) – all the way to Denver in an extended BLUES BROTHERS-worthy chase sequence, where new enemies are accumulated one stoplight at a time. While the film was extensively derided upon release, in hindsight it appears one of Eastwood’s more lived-in vehicles, with the flinty icon playing against type. Even with the mischievous Clyde (portrayed throughout by an orangutan named Manis, who sadly did not return for ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN) playing cupid, the real-life chemistry between Eastwood and Locke makes for a surprisingly melancholy denouement.

With Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Marilyn Monroe, and Charles Coburn.

The screwball comedy patented by Howard Hawks and Cary Grant in BRINGING UP BABY gets one last ride in MONKEY BUSINESS, wherein a lab chimp named Esther innocently spikes a chemical company’s water supply with “rejuvenation elixir” – and hijinks ensue. Grant stars as the airheaded scientist responsible for developing the mystery concoction, pepped-up and freshly obsessed with his secretary (Marilyn Monroe) after a few sips of the stuff. While Hawks manages to juxtapose broad slapstick with much implied psychological horror, this “fountain of youth” allows for set piece after another with Hawks’s ensemble spiraling further out of control – a poetic realignment of youth and old age with man’s evolutionary forge.

“Very funny and strangely frightening – Hawks’s comedies are invariably more pessimistic than his dramas – MONKEY BUSINESS ranks with the best works of the American cinema.” –Dave Kehr, CHICAGO READER

Bruce Conner
A MOVIE (1958, 12 min, 16mm)
COSMIC RAY (1961, 4 min, 16mm)
REPORT (1965, 13 min, 16mm)

“Conner stands as a kind of twentieth century Peter Breughel. For like the great Flemish master he distorts the visible world in order to penetrate a reality of being rather than appearances; his vision is cosmic in breadth; he deals with some of the most provocative issues, both artistic and otherwise, of his time; and finally, with an evocative ambiguity and painful irony he touches something which we sometimes call the human experience.” –Carl I. Belz, FILM CULTURE

COSMIC RAY and REPORT have been preserved by Anthology through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program funded by The Film Foundation.

Tony Conrad
THE FLICKER
(1966, 30 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology with funding provided by the National Film Preservation Foundation.)

“THE FLICKER is a tremendous harnessing of the raw power, the elemental material of the cinematic medium – light itself – to transport the spectator slowly at first, hardly perceptibly, then accelerating, through a non-objective non-abstract world of sheer energy. Time becomes the compelling pulse of white into black and back, space becomes the unbounded expansion and contraction of force; the screen becomes a new sun, the audience its creatures.” –Ken Kelman

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

With Jeff Bridges, Charles Grodin, and Jessica Lange.

John Guillermin and Dino De Laurentiis’s uberspectacular KING KONG is nothing if not star-powered: Jessica Lange makes her debut as a hypersexualized new Fay Wray, against Jeff Bridges’s slightly damp turn as a know-it-all hippie scientist and Charles Grodin’s mustache-twirling event-producer heavy. Even if this relatively somber remake didn’t pan out, as promised by the original poster, to be “The most exciting original motion picture event of all time,” the nominal attraction remains beyond reproach. Effects maestro Carlo Rambaldi went on to win a Special Achievement Oscar, while his deputy Rick Baker piloted the Kong suit himself, kaiju-eiga style, for many of KING KONG’s wider shots – the massive animatronic Kong barely functioning, in yet another of several meta-ironies accorded by the film’s overripe, post-carnival-showmanship packaging.

“This new KONG isn’t a horror movie – it’s an absurdist love story. When the 40-foot Kong stands bleeding and besieged at the top of the World Trade Center, and his blonde (Lange) pleads with him to pick her up, so that the helicopters won’t shoot at him, even Wagner’s dreams seem paltry.” –Pauline Kael, WHEN THE LIGHTS GO DOWN

(KINGU KONGU NO GYAKUSHÛ)

It’s tantamount to spoilage to disclose that KING KONG ESCAPES is an adaptation of a children’s TV show: Kong’s final live-action appearance in Japan is a delirious crossbreed of big-monster pugilism and Bond-era supervillainy, achieved in the visage of the evil Dr. Who (Eisei Amamoto, dubbed by the legendary Paul Frees). After developing a faulty Mechani-Kong to mine the radioactive Element X from the mineral hellscapes of Antarctica, Who kidnaps and hypnotizes the real ape king – originally under U.N. surveillance, led by the beyond-wooden Rhodes Reason (brother of THIS ISLAND EARTH’s Rex), genre standby Akira Takarada, and Linda Miller. (As the inevitable love interest, Miller delivers perhaps the most matronly Fay Wray committed to film.) A trans-planetary chase follows; long before the two Kongs have squared off at Tokyo Tower with Miller in the middle, Honda’s film – which also doubles, per usual, as an eyeball-busting buffet of modular 1960s pop-art production design – has more than delivered on its premise.

PLEASE NOTE: We intended to screen KING KONG ESCAPES on 16mm but the print that arrived is both badly faded and a cropped version of the Cinemascope original.  Rather than show such a compromised version of the film, we'll be screening it digitally.

With Charlotte Rampling, Anthony Higgins, Victoria Abril, and Pierre Étaix.

Oshima’s sole collaboration with maverick screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière stars Charlotte Rampling as Margaret, a bored diplomat’s wife who falls – hard – for a sad-eyed chimp named Max. The film’s milieu is lush, gilded, airheaded, hollow – a fragile social ecosystem to be tested if ever there was one, while the visual punchline of Max’s cohabitation with the Paris elite lends the film a concurrent measure of mystery. Beyond the pleasures of Oshima’s savagely anemic staging and Michel Portal’s silken score, MAX MON AMOUR details another path taken only by an intrepid few: it’s a rare glimpse at Buñuel-lite surrealism well into the 80s, blown up to big-budget proportions vis-à-vis Max himself, portrayed by actress Aisla Berk in a seamless monkey suit courtesy of the great Rick Baker.

With Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Geoffrey Lewis, and Beverly D’Angelo.

James Fargo’s trash-talking, bare-knuckle road comedy stars Clint Eastwood as Philo, a rambling truck driver and handyman whose best pal is a beer-swilling orangutan named Clyde. Philo falls hard for Lynn (Locke), a honky-tonk torch singer, and follows her – with Clyde and his friend Orville (Lewis) – all the way to Denver in an extended BLUES BROTHERS-worthy chase sequence, where new enemies are accumulated one stoplight at a time. While the film was extensively derided upon release, in hindsight it appears one of Eastwood’s more lived-in vehicles, with the flinty icon playing against type. Even with the mischievous Clyde (portrayed throughout by an orangutan named Manis, who sadly did not return for ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN) playing cupid, the real-life chemistry between Eastwood and Locke makes for a surprisingly melancholy denouement.

With Jeff Bridges, Charles Grodin, and Jessica Lange.

John Guillermin and Dino De Laurentiis’s uberspectacular KING KONG is nothing if not star-powered: Jessica Lange makes her debut as a hypersexualized new Fay Wray, against Jeff Bridges’s slightly damp turn as a know-it-all hippie scientist and Charles Grodin’s mustache-twirling event-producer heavy. Even if this relatively somber remake didn’t pan out, as promised by the original poster, to be “The most exciting original motion picture event of all time,” the nominal attraction remains beyond reproach. Effects maestro Carlo Rambaldi went on to win a Special Achievement Oscar, while his deputy Rick Baker piloted the Kong suit himself, kaiju-eiga style, for many of KING KONG’s wider shots – the massive animatronic Kong barely functioning, in yet another of several meta-ironies accorded by the film’s overripe, post-carnival-showmanship packaging.

“This new KONG isn’t a horror movie – it’s an absurdist love story. When the 40-foot Kong stands bleeding and besieged at the top of the World Trade Center, and his blonde (Lange) pleads with him to pick her up, so that the helicopters won’t shoot at him, even Wagner’s dreams seem paltry.” –Pauline Kael, WHEN THE LIGHTS GO DOWN

Brendt Barbur, Founding Festival Director, was compelled to start the Bicycle Film Festival when he was hit by a bus while riding his bike in New York City. He insisted on turning his negative experience into a positive one.

The BFF was founded 17 years ago at Anthology Film Archives as a celebration of the bicycle through film, art, and music. The Festival has since traveled to over 75 cities worldwide.

For more information and tickets, visit: www.bicyclefilmfestival.com

MONKEY SHINES teeters uncomfortably between withering satire and over-earnest chamber drama, like a Reagan-era upgrade of MURDERS AT THE RUE MORGUE. Jason Beghe plays Allan, a jock-turned-quadriplegic in a freak (if not fated) encounter with a truck, given a capuchin monkey named Ella for help around the house. For a time, the two are thick as thieves – but once Ella begins receiving liquified human brains one transfusion at a time, the psychic link between her and Allan takes things in a more gruesome direction, with Ella wielding a switchblade against anyone she sees as a threat. Romero’s first stab at studio filmmaking was besieged by problems and shrugged off upon general release, which is a shame: the faux-happy ending (mandated by Orion Pictures) suffuses the story with schizophrenic irresolution, and Ella – a mix of animatronics and trained monkey performers – manages to become the story’s true hero with the slimmest screen time.

“In between these soggy slices of bread the MONKEY SHINES sandwich is packed with meat – an imposing family melodrama full of faces, tension, strong feelings, and personalities, and very little wasted motion, culminating in what is probably the most protracted and successful suspense set piece in any movie this year.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

With Charlotte Rampling, Anthony Higgins, Victoria Abril, and Pierre Étaix.

Oshima’s sole collaboration with maverick screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière stars Charlotte Rampling as Margaret, a bored diplomat’s wife who falls – hard – for a sad-eyed chimp named Max. The film’s milieu is lush, gilded, airheaded, hollow – a fragile social ecosystem to be tested if ever there was one, while the visual punchline of Max’s cohabitation with the Paris elite lends the film a concurrent measure of mystery. Beyond the pleasures of Oshima’s savagely anemic staging and Michel Portal’s silken score, MAX MON AMOUR details another path taken only by an intrepid few: it’s a rare glimpse at Buñuel-lite surrealism well into the 80s, blown up to big-budget proportions vis-à-vis Max himself, portrayed by actress Aisla Berk in a seamless monkey suit courtesy of the great Rick Baker.

With Gérard Depardieu, Marcello Mastroianni, and James Coco.

From the auteur behind DILLINGER IS DEAD comes an incense-seared dystopia of post-Sixties bohemianism, landing somewhere between SKIDOO and THE GOODBYE GIRL. BYE BYE MONKEY’s foundational image is both its funniest and its hardest to forget: the slowly deflating corpse of King Kong, sprawled out anonymously on a beach opposite the World Trade Center. When handyman Lafayette (Depardieu) and his friend Luigi (Mastroianni) happen upon the deceased gargantua, they discover a beautiful orphaned chimp left behind, who they nickname Cornelius, in a nod to PLANET OF THE APES. A decidedly problematic (if not anti-humanist) picture, BYE BYE MONKEY is equal parts fare-thee-well to childhood phantasmagoria and rumination on the coarse brutality of man (and thus, his art) – a tragedy of dashed expectations made explicit by the Imperial Rome Wax Museum where Lafayette and Luigi work.

Brendt Barbur, Founding Festival Director, was compelled to start the Bicycle Film Festival when he was hit by a bus while riding his bike in New York City. He insisted on turning his negative experience into a positive one.

The BFF was founded 17 years ago at Anthology Film Archives as a celebration of the bicycle through film, art, and music. The Festival has since traveled to over 75 cities worldwide.

For more information and tickets, visit: www.bicyclefilmfestival.com

(KOKO, LE GORILLE QUI PARLE)

Barbet Schroder’s extraordinary KOKO serves as inevitable counterpoint to the school of research displayed in Wiseman’s PRIMATE; KOKO as much depicts its eponymous gorilla as it does Penny Patterson, the California primatologist teaching her to “speak” using American Sign Language. Despite remarkable access, Schroeder maintains a balanced skepticism towards his human lead, whose methods are called into doubt by her contemporaries even as the film dives deeper into her relationship with Koko. For this, it must be the most intimate depiction of human-ape synergy in this series – but KOKO also has big questions on its mind, including how animals less special than Koko are to be protected in a modernizing (and largely uncaring) world, how its namesake reacts when she knows she’s on-camera, and whether “personhood” belongs to humans only.

(GOLIATHON)

The Shaw Brothers’ attempt to capitalize on the success of 1976’s KING KONG resulted in MIGHTY PEKING MAN – an astonishing ensemble thriller lodged somewhere between envious knockoff and loving spoof. Danny Lee (of INFRAMAN infamy) stars as an anthropologist hired by a slimy promoter to find the legendary Himalayan gorilla monster known as Utam, or Mighty Peking Man; even he fails to account for the possibility of the giant monkey’s partner, an orphaned bombshell named Samantha (Evelyn Craft, clad from start to finish in a primordial Ursula Andress-style leather bikini). MIGHTY PEKING MAN is a dazzling showcase of optical effects: rear-projected animal attacks, gushing prosthetic limbs, and more than a few matte-enabled civilian casualties – to say nothing of the Peking Man himself, yet another lovelorn ape whose charisma handily surpasses the puny interlopers on the ground.

“I am awarding MIGHTY PEKING MAN three stars, for general goofiness and a certain level of insane genius…but I cannot in good conscience rate it higher than INFRA-MAN.” –Roger Ebert, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

JOSEF KOUDELKA & DIRECTOR GILAD BARAM IN PERSON!

This film follows Josef Koudelka in his journey photographing Israel and Palestine from one enigmatic and visually spectacular location to the next. In each location a scene unfolds, gradually introducing us to Koudelka’s method of working, his perception of the world he is documenting, and the people he encounters. A fascinating dialogue emerges between the moving images Baram films and Koudelka’s still photographs, as Baram places the photographer in his own breathtaking compositions. Austere images of landscapes divided by concrete walls and barbed wire reveal the tragic absurdity of the infamous conflict. Baram’s long-term documentation of the photographer in the field, together with the exclusive use of Koudelka’s photographic archive, result in a unique record that offers a rich and intimate look into the solitary creative process of one of photography’s greatest living masters.

The screening of KOUDELKA is presented in collaboration with the International Center of Photography, on the occasion of the exhibition, “Magnum Manifesto.” Co-produced by ICP and Magnum Photos, this landmark exhibition celebrates the 70th anniversary of the renowned photo agency created by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Chim (David Seymour) in May 1947. The exhibition is curated by Clément Chéroux, with Clara Bouveresse and ICP Associate Curator Pauline Vermare and is on view at the ICP Museum (250 Bowery) from May 26-September 3.

The presence of director Gilad Baram has been made possible by generous support from the Czech Center New York.

A limited number of advance tickets are available through Brown Paper Tickets:

With Bela Lugosi and Erik Gemora.

Florey’s grisly adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s 1841 short story about a serial killer named Dr. Mirakle (Bela Lugosi) is primo Pre-Code. Mirakle takes to kidnapping young virgins in search of a mate for his woebegone right hand – a gnashing gorilla named Erik (played, in still-persuasive costume, by Charles “king of the gorilla men” Gemora). A classic Depression-era charlatan in 19th-century pancake makeup, Mirakle uses unmistakably Darwinist language to entice the huddled masses, even as the pileup of bodies begins to give him away. The search culminates in a rooftop showdown between the police and Erik that evokes both Merian C. Cooper’s KING KONG (whose success probably had something to do with this film’s obscurity), and the coming generation of films noir – abetted here by the deliriously cobwebbed angles of master Expressionist cinematographer Karl Freund. Down and dirty by 1932 standards, MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE is anchored by Lugosi’s fearless performance – nowhere near as famous as his turn as Frankenstein’s monster, but just as besieged by primeval inner contortions.

With:
Jeff Krulik I CREATED LANCELOT LINK (1999, 15.5 min, video)
Wherein veteran comedy writers Stan Burns and Michael Marmer discuss LANCELOT LINK, SECRET CHIMP – their 1970s morning TV fixture, starring real chimps in skits patterned after shows like THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. and GET SMART. In this pocket-size tribute to a bygone era of animal-performer entertainment, Burns and Marmer discuss the minutiae of lighting and overdubbing their simian counterparts, how to ad-lib with chimps, and reexamine clips from the show – including the freak-a-delic all-chimp band Evolution Revolution.

(KOKO, LE GORILLE QUI PARLE)

Barbet Schroder’s extraordinary KOKO serves as inevitable counterpoint to the school of research displayed in Wiseman’s PRIMATE; KOKO as much depicts its eponymous gorilla as it does Penny Patterson, the California primatologist teaching her to “speak” using American Sign Language. Despite remarkable access, Schroeder maintains a balanced skepticism towards his human lead, whose methods are called into doubt by her contemporaries even as the film dives deeper into her relationship with Koko. For this, it must be the most intimate depiction of human-ape synergy in this series – but KOKO also has big questions on its mind, including how animals less special than Koko are to be protected in a modernizing (and largely uncaring) world, how its namesake reacts when she knows she’s on-camera, and whether “personhood” belongs to humans only.

Kristi Zea (Director/Producer), Jacki Ochs (Executive Producer), and Caroline Goodman-Thomases (Producer)

An intimate portrait of the groundbreaking artist Elizabeth Murray, only the fifth woman to have a career retrospective at MoMA. The film explores the relationship between Murray’s family life and her career, while reconsidering her place in contemporary art history. Vérité footage, home videos, and excerpts from her journals (voiced by Meryl Streep) reveal the artist’s fierce ambition and internal conflicts.

In Frederick Wiseman’s signature style, PRIMATE begins as a droll examination of Atlanta’s Yerkes Primate Research Center (complete with scenes of scientists nursing baby chimps with milk bottles), soon to become one of the veteran documentarian’s most harrowing interrogative works. PRIMATE’s scenes of animal research are as damning as anything in TITICUT FOLLIES, while the hands-off shooting strategy invites unflattering comparisons between the supposedly superior keepers of the apes, and their (literally) tortured charges. PRIMATE wastes zero energy philosophizing on the nature of what goes down at Yerkes, as nearly every scene invites the audience to ask the same question in a different way: Wherefore the cost of (human) knowledge?

“What’s particularly striking about this dynamic between inmate and scientist, particularly in light of Wiseman’s earlier film, is that it continually problematizes our perspective as viewers. With whom are we to identify: primate or researcher? Both, or neither?” –Leo Goldsmith, NOT COMING TO A THEATER NEAR YOU

For full program listings, visit www.newfilmmakers.com.

Viking Eggeling
SYMPHONIE DIAGONALE
(1924, 8 minutes, 35mm, b&w)

Alberto Cavalcanti
RIEN QUE LES HEURES / NOTHING BUT THE HOURS
(1928, 52 minutes, 35mm, b&w)
A “city symphony” interweaving documentary, experimental, and narrative elements that provide vivid images of Paris in the mid-1920s.

Total running time: ca. 65 minutes.

(LA TERCERA ORILLA)

NEW YORK PREMIERE!

This slow-burn drama follows 17-year-old Nicolas, who lives with his mother and younger siblings in a small provincial city in Argentina. His estranged father, Jorge, a respected doctor, has decided that Nicolas will be his successor in both his medical practice and agricultural business. Nicolas obeys his father, but hates him. He has seen his mother suffer because of Jorge’s double life – having started a new family, Jorge refuses to acknowledge Nicolas’s mother or her children publicly. As tensions between father and son grow, Nicolas realizes that he must make a choice and take action for the sake of his future. Executive produced by Martin Scorsese, this fourth feature film by acclaimed Argentinean director Murga premiered in the official competition at the Berlinale.

“[A] beautifully achieved film in which the most important things remain unspoken and placid surfaces belie cauldrons of violent emotion. […] It’s easy to see why Martin Scorsese has taken such a keen interest in Murga’s work. She is, not unlike the young Scorsese himself, very much a ‘neighborhood’ filmmaker, who renders her native milieu – the sleepy provincial towns of Entre Rios, north of Buenos Aires – with an intensely lyrical, sensuous gaze.” –Scott Foundas, VARIETY

[PLEASE NOTE: WE'VE ADDED AN ADDITIONAL SCREENING OF "THIRD SIDE OF THE RIVER" ON SATURDAY, JULY 1 AT 7:15.  FILMMAKER CELINA MURGA WILL BE HERE IN PERSON FOR A Q&A FOLLOWING THIS SHOW AS WELL!]

Tommy Turner in attendance for discussion with programmer/media conservator Jon Dieringer (EAI).

An artist working in print, performance, photography, and film, Tommy Turner is a key figure of the Downtown No Wave and Cinema of Transgression scenes. While working days as a genetic research scientist and nights as a bartender at the legendary Peppermint Lounge, the New York native rose to prominence through his zine Redrum and collaborations with artists such as Richard Kern and David Wojnarowicz. In the mid-1980s, Turner directed a number of arresting small-gauge films that retain the ability to inspire shock, awe, and revulsion, while conveying a biting sense of humor and incisive social commentary. With a cinematic oeuvre running approximately the length of a single feature film, Turner’s subject matter has managed to encompass the intersections of black magic, domestic dysfunction, addiction, rock ‘n’ roll, demagoguery, murder, and wasted teenhood, often addressed through gleefully graphic, lo-fi special effects that verge between clinical detachment and sardonic irreverence.

Tonight’s program will premiere brand new preservations of Turner’s SIMONLAND and RAT TRAP, along with WHERE EVIL DWELLS, made with David Wojnarowicz.

Both SIMONLAND and RAT TRAP were preserved by Fales Library & Special Collections/NYU in collaboration with Electronic Arts Intermix through the National Film Preservation Foundation Avant-Garde Masters program. Special thanks to Brent Phillips, Rebecca Cleman, Bill Brand, Richard Kern, and Tessa Hughes-Freeland.

SIMONLAND
(1984, 12 min, Super 8-to-16mm. Made with Richard Kern.)
In the unsettling, absurdist SIMONLAND, a grotesque, televangelist-style demagogue leads his studio audience and isolated viewers through a psychotic game of Simon Says with twisted results.

RAT TRAP
(1985, 12 min, Super 8-to-16mm. Made with Tessa Hughes-Freeland.)
A no-holds-barred portrait of addiction, RAT TRAP is an unflinching portrayal of a junkie injecting heroin cut with footage of (already expired) rodents being tortured and maimed, all underscored by a fiery guitar rock solo, painting a grim picture of numbing daily grind, dependency, and domestic urban squalor.

WHERE EVIL DWELLS
(1985, 33 min, Super 8-to-16mm. Made with David Wojnarowicz.)
Friends and collaborators, Turner and Wojnarowicz became fixated on the recent story of Ricky Kasso, teenage heavy metal fan and self-described “Acid King” of Northport, Long Island, who was the subject of media hysteria when he committed the pseudo-ritual-satanic murder of a fellow teen in the woods while wearing an AC/DC t-shirt. Shooting off a script based on interviews with Kasso’s friends, the pair ultimately edited their footage into a 30-minute “trailer” that represents an anarchic, assaultive, and wildly expressionistic take on what Wojnarowicz described as “the imposed Hell of the suburbs.” It’s complemented by a spectacular title song by Wiseblood (a collaboration between Roli Mosimann of Swans and J.G. Thirlwell of Foetus) and distorted hard rock radio jams.

Total running time: ca. 60 min.