“The Sixties was personal, mostly desperation and despair, the torn lining of the glowing coat. We were lost souls, echoes of broken glass. It was cafes and conversation, folk music, poetry, sexual hunger, irreconcilable conflicts, despair, aimlessness and chaos.” –  Peter Emanuel Goldman

Special thanks to Peter Emanuel Goldman, Balthazar Clementi and Pip Chodorov of Re:Voir.

ECHOES OF SILENCE
dir. Peter Emanuel Goldman, 1965
76 mins. United States.
In English.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 3 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 – 7:30 PM
ONLINE TICKETS

‘His people come to life simply and believably – more believably than most of the people in the Chabrol and Truffaut cinema… the film has a thematic and formal beauty that is remarkable.’ – Jonas Mekas

“The most exciting new filmmaker in recent years…. ECHOES OF  SILENCE, his first film, is a stunning piece of work.’ – Susan Sontag

ECHOES OF SILENCE is a collection of gestures, glances, interspersed & unrelated, encounters both memorable and of the banal, the hyper-sexual & sensual movements of shadows, New York City’s somnambulist population of onlookers and the haunted and alienated youth who wander and go to art museums and coffee houses and fall in love and use each other and fuck, despairing collectively engulfed in their solitude.  

Captured in a mode of poetic realism that borrows from the French New Wave, ECHOES establishes a new form of cinematic poetry featuring a documentary-like guerilla style, consistent with Mekas’ meandering Bolex and its contemporaries in the New York City underground. Goldman’s 1965 debut is a staggering piece of original cinema featuring a non-diegetic soundtrack that incorporates the filmmaker’s own vinyl collection along with photography, watercolor paintings and handwritten text. This is essential cinema for the underground: a ballad for New York in the early Sixties, a despairing ode to being twenty-something and searching for something more. 

WHEEL OF ASHES 
dir. Peter Emanuel Goldman, 1968
95 mins. France. 
In French with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 3 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 – 10 PM
ONLINE TICKETS

“Every morning i ask myself, how was i going to live?”
“I am nothing but passion and sex and pathetically chaotic poetry” 

Photographed with a distinctive lyrical purity and funded in part with a grant awarded by Jean-Luc Godard, WHEEL OF ASHES serves as a gut-wrenching portrait of the tormented and solitary.

Pierre Clementi – then between starring roles for Buñuel and Pasolini – wanders aimlessly through the temptations of Saint-Germain-des-Prés as he attempts to relinquish himself from the corrupted urges of lust and desire and search for meaning through the teachings of Eastern and Western mysticism. Pierre’s tortured eyes reflect directly into Goldman’s lens, fully encapsulating Goldman’s visceral style as an instinctive and intuitive formalist of beauty. This is poetry as filmmaking and filmmaking as poetry.

Sleepwalking through beatnik cafes and underground nightclubs, Pierre is determined to walk until he has nowhere else to go. Rarely screened and often neglected, WHEELS OF ASHES was Goldman’s last completed narrative feature and is ripe for rediscovery.

screening with

POSITANO
dir. Pierre Clementi, 1968
25 mins. France.
Silent.

“The reconciliation of the visual with the colorful psychedelic impulses of these luscious times… To find again the chant of origins, images that inscribe themselves in us like a double and that wave to us. To grope for… In the dark room of multinational ideas, I quiver and I mumble.” — Pierre Clémenti

Featuring some of the most beautiful double/triple/etc exposures ever committed to film, POSITANO features Pierre Clementi’s family and friends (including Nico & Philippe Garrel) on their holiday trip in Italy. The footage is silent, colorful and seductive.