beDEVIL
dir. Tracey Moffatt, 1993
90 mins. Australia.
In English.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 8 – 5 PM
SATURDAY, JANUARY 29 – 10 PM
beDEVIL (Tracey Moffatt, 1993) from Spectacle on Vimeo.
Like a playful, lavishly-composed Australian folk horror triptych, beDEVIL tells three ghost stories unfolding along cultural fault lines in far-flung corners of the outback and offshore islands. In Moffatt’s Australia, though, it is modernity and not antiquity that threatens: her specters are trains, UFOs, and American soldiers. Through lavish stylization and kinetic editing (and embracing all artifice, even bits of digital manipulation), interviews are transformed into performance and memory into heightened drama, as the film blurs the lines not only between Aboriginal and immigrant (or colonial) worlds but also between modes of film and narrative. The resulting tableaux, fanciful and deeply saturated, will haunt not only for their brushes with the uncanny but their many-layered approach to the deeper questions of post-colonial life. At the time of its Cannes debut, beDEVIL was the first feature directed by an Aboriginal woman.
THE BLACK BEYOND TRILOGY
dir. Steven Toriano Berry, 1992
73 mins. United States.
In English.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 14 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 23 – 5 PM
SATURDAY, JANUARY 29 – 7:30 PM
THE BLACK BEYOND TRILOGY (S. Torriano Berry, 1986-1992) from Spectacle on Vimeo.
“What really lies beyond this world? A vast void of nothingness? Or a place where the justice and retribution not realized in this life becomes a governing force? Who really knows? When your turn comes, who will be waiting for you?”
Our original plan last Spectober was to invite S. Toriano Berry – a renown independent filmmaker and longtime scholar of African-American cinema – for a special 25th anniversary presentation of his hood classic THE EMBALMER (1996), a surprisingly earnest (and disgusting!) slasher thriller shot on a shoestring budget in Washington, D.C. Bureaucratic matters hindered the screening – for now – But Berry had an irresistible ace up his sleeve: a new digitization of his BLACK BEYOND TRILOGY. Shot on video, THE BLACK BEYOND anthologizes three tales of terror in a style clearly indebted to The Twilight Zone; per Berry’s voiceover introduction, the Black Beyond is a place where “darkness is more than nothingness, and justice is not blind…”
The trilogy consists of three episodes. In “Deathly Realities”, a serial killer hiding behind a rubber mask receives comeuppance from his victims, beyond the grave; in “The Coming of the Saturnites”, a space alien (played by Berry!) struggles to ingratiate himself among humans without blowing his cover; and in “Money’ll Eat You Up!!!” a rogue dollar bill (or “dirty green”) makes its victims disappear – a brutal riposte to Gordon Gekko’s then-popular mantra of “greed is good”. Shot in part as Berry was completing his film production studies at UCLA (and, later, teaching film at Howard), THE BLACK BEYOND combines trenchant social commentary on the African-American experience with lovingly lo-fi videographic and prosthetic effects, as terrifying as it is hilarious. Spectacle is thrilled to include this hidden gem of 1980s phantasmagoria in our annual BEST OF SPECTACLE 2021 program.
CASTRO
dir. Alejo Moguillansky, 2009
85 mins. Argentina.
In Spanish with English subtitles.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 16 – 7:30 PM
Part Langian conspiracy, part Chaplinesque comedy of work, and part city symphony – Alejo Moguillansky’s CASTRO is filled with a Nouvelle Vague-esque sense of endless playfulness and ingenuity. A mysterious man named Castro (Edgardo Castro) is wandering around Buenos Aires trying hard not to find a job (“Right now I have you, my body, and my head. If I get a job one, two, or three of those things might disappear,” he tells his girlfriend), while a gang of four comical crooks led by Castro’s ex-wife clumsily tail him. Filled with plenty of absurd comic asides (an inane secret code communicated through umbrellas, a mysterious and omnipresent upstairs neighbor who is always heard moving around the apartment, ominous job interviews that venture into the strangely personal); dusty, sun-drenched cinematography; and a silent movie worthy piano score, CASTRO is a startling and surprising debut that oozes charm.
THE GOLD BUG
(EL ESCARABAJO DE ORO)
dir. Alejo Moguillansky, 2014
Argentina, 100 minutes
In Spanish with English subtitles.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 16 – 5 PM
THE GOLD BUG (dirs. Alejo Moguillansky and Fia-Stina Sandlund, 2014) from Spectacle on Vimeo.
They all struggle: European Filmmakers vs. South American Filmmakers; Independent Cinema vs. Cinema Funds; Wild vs. Civilisation; North vs. South; Pirates vs. Pirates; An old XIX Century Politician vs. an old XIX Century feminist Poet; Producers vs. Directors; Edgar Allen Poe vs. Robert Louis Stevenson; Long John Silver vs. Captain Smollet; Adventure vs. Money; Beauty vs. Greed; The search of truth and wisdom vs. hypocrisy and wickedness; The rich vs. the poor; Men vs. Women; Fiction vs. Facts. They all struggle, but only one wins.
Commissioned by a Danish film festival as a movie about 19th century feminist poet, Victoria Benidectssen, THE GOLD BUG instead became a literal and figurative adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic adventure novel Treasure Island. Moguillansky, producer Mariano Llinas, and actors Walter Jakob and Rafael Spregelburd play themselves in the film as a group of Argentine actors who’ve chanced upon a 17th century treasure map leading to the northern Argentine province of Misiones. using the commission to make a film about Benedictsson as cover, the ensemble sets out to find the buried treasure while convincing the European producers and co-director that their real aim is to also make a biography about 19th-century Argentine political radical Leandro N. Alem, so as to avoid being neo-colonialist. Directly riffing off of the real world circumstances in which the movie itself came into being, THE GOLD BUG is a metatextual questioning of the possibility of filmmaking in a capitalist, Euro-centric film ecosystem.
CRIME WAVE
dir. John Paisz, 1985
80 mins. Canada.
In English.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 8 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, JANUARY 27 – 10 PM
CRIME WAVE centers on an awkward loner, Steven Penny (John Paizs), who turns out bizarre scenarios for color crime movies. Steven wants to turn in the best colour crime movie ever, but he has a problem – he can only write beginnings and ends to his scripts. No middles! Living above a family garage in suburbia and befriended by the landlord’s ten-year-old daughter (Eva Kovacs), we see excerpts from a number of Steven’s scripts, zany ideas based on get-rich-quick schemes. Finally frustrated by his creative block, he sets out for Kansas to meet Dr Jolly (Neil Lawrie), the script doctor.
EMPTY METAL
dirs. Adam Khalil, Bayley Sweitzer, 2018
85 mins. United States.
In English.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 9 – 5 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 21 – 7:30 PM WITH Q&A!
Set in the abusive police state of the contemporary United States, EMPTY METAL follows five groups of characters, each emblematic of a different extreme political ideology, as they attempt insurrection against the status quo: a queer noise band is coerced into a dangerous assassination plot by a family of militant Native Americans who are aided by a Rastafarian computer hacker who is old friends with a Buddhist hermit whose son is a local militia leader. This tangled web of marginalized voices is as diverse and contradictory as the nation that spun it, but there is a common thread: all the characters teeter on the dull knife blade that is contemporary American politics, but they refuse to fall right or left. Instead, they lash out from the soul, and under the radar, in an attempt to achieve what their mainstream predecessors have yet to accomplish.
And all the while, the drones are watching…
FLIGHT TO HELL
Dir. Alvaro Passeri, 2002
86 min. Italy.
In English.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 21 – MIDNIGHT
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
The obnoxious inhabitants of a flying casino face an infestation of parasitic bugs in Passeri’s followup to MUMMY THEME PARK. Abandoning the latter’s near-exclusive reliance on practical effects, FLIGHT shows Passeri experimenting with digital animation – his trademark visual style translates surprisingly well to the medium, offering a unique take on the sub-ILM polygonal creations which were rife among direct-to-video horror offerings in the early 2000s.
As per the DVD box:
Don screams out as a horrific monster is about to eat him alive! But then he wakes up. It’s only a dream! That day he boards his private plane, a flying casino, that caters to the needs of fantastically rich clients who want to play for high stakes at high altitudes. But then the plane is engulfed in a strange thick fog that seeps into the cabin. The evil mist transforms the passengers and crew one by one into monstrous half human, half insect creatures with a ravenous appetite for human flesh. Don realizes that it is his nightmare come true – it is his FLIGHT TO HELL!
MUMMY THEME PARK
Dir. Alvaro Passeri, 2000
86 min. Italy.
In English.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 22 – MIDNIGHT
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
“It would not be too bold to declare this film the Francis Ford Coppola’s BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA of Italian mummy movies.” – Senseless Cinema
A garish amalgam of Westworld and The Mummy, Passeri’s 2000 masterpiece addresses the controversial practice of planting microchips in mummies in order to staff fantasy theme parks. Transcending its influences, the film boasts a uniquely queasy visual style crafted from greasy animatronics and a painfully saturated color palette. The plot concerns two dimwitted American journalists caught in the meltdown of the titular Mummy Theme Park – this, of course, is of secondary significance aside the exercise in discount worldmaking achieved through Passeri’s fabric-store scenography and a script rife with non-sequiturs.
WIM VINK: UNDEAD KING OF THE NETHERLANDS from Spectacle on Vimeo.
There is no Heaven. There is Hell. Therefore, Heaven is only in Hell.
Wim Vink’s first and only feature length film, Heaven is Only in Hell is a no budget murderdrone
WIM VINK SHORTS BLOCK
SATURDAY, JANUARY 15 – MIDNIGHT
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
INVITATION TO HELL
DANCE MACABRE
Netherlands, 22 min.
Vink packs nearly every horror trope and then some into 22 minutes in a brain melting blast of pastiche and loving homage (including bits of score directly lifted from Goblin’s work with Argento and Fabio Frizzi, among others). From blood sacrifices to zombies to possessions, this short really does have it all and then some.
I WANT MORE, I WANT LESS
dir. Bryce Richardson, 2019
87 mins. United States.
In English.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 29 – 5 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
Having hosted premiere runs for idiosyncratic filmmakers like Juan-Daniel Molero, Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn and Jean-Gabriel Periot, Spectacle is proud to re-screen filmmaker Bryce Richardson’s debut feature I WANT MORE, I WANT LESS.
An accountant in Queens rents out the front of her store to a young man who repairs cell phones…and sometimes pickpockets them. She tries to mentor him, but is tested by his unscrupulous opportunism. Though the film explores how two people attempt to survive and thrive despite gentrification and the isolating, transactional nature of modern life, I Want More, I Want Less lingers on quiet moments, and never veers into didacticism.
Set against the backdrop of the 2016 elections (with scenes shot at real-life community board meetings and anti-Trump demonstrations), Richardson’s quotidian, sparse style evokes arthouse influences like Tsai Ming-Liang, but the film never belabors the distance between the audience and the characters. Semi-improvised, the screenplay instead allows Girma and Abbas to talk the way everyday people actually talk, a perfect match for Richardson’s unwavering eye for the details of how they manage to eke out a living in De Blasio-era NYC.
BRYCE RICHARDSON is a filmmaker originally from Houston, Texas, now based in New York. Richardson’s short films 2580 (2015) and ECLECTIC BRACKETS (2016) have played at festivals such as Slamdance, Woods Hole, Antimatter, and others. In 2011, the Metropolitan Playhouse produced “Baby Marty,” his one-act play. He currently serves on the board for Mono No Aware, a community-focused organization that teaches celluloid film production. I WANT MORE, I WANT LESS was shot over the course of nine weekends at real locations, including a very cluttered CPA’s office in Queens. The film won best screenplay at the Tacoma Film Festival.
LAUGHTER IN THE DARK
dir. Tony Richardson, 1969
United Kingdom & France. 104 mins.
In English.
THURSDAY, JANUARY 13 – 7:30 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
Adapted from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel of the same name, LAUGHTER IN THE DARK deals with the obsession of a middle-aged man (Nicol Williamson) and his younger cunning mistress Margot (Anna Karina)– think Scarlet Street meets the British new wave. Tony Richardson trades Nabokov’s 1930’s Berlin for the Swinging 60’s of London in this lustful thriller of deceit which was never released on home video and has rarely-screened since its 1969 release. Anna Karina shines in her all-English role as the charming irresistible seductress who cultivates something mysterious behind her delicate, wide eyes.
RENDEZVOUS À BRAY
(aka APPOINTMENT IN BRAY)
dir. André Delvaux, 1971
France/Belgium/Weat Germany, 86 min.
In French with English Subtitles
THURSDAY, JANUARY 13 – 10 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
“As much as I revere some of the Belgian films of Chantal Akerman, if I had to choose only one Belgian film to take with me to a desert island, I’d have a pretty rough time forsaking this 1971 masterpiece by André Delvaux.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum
Paris 1917: a young pianist (Mathieu Carrière) receives a note from an old friend in the Air Force to join him at his lush country estate that happens to be close to the front lines of World War I. He arrives but his friend is nowhere to be found, with only the quiet, beautiful housekeeper (Anna Karina) present. While he spends days waiting for his friend’s arrival, his mind wanders to past events. At night, the mysterious woman appears again…
Based on a short story from surrealist Julien Gracq, Belgian auteur André Delvaux marries his trademark amalgam of fantasy and reality to Gracq’s shape-shifting text. Much like the film protagonist, Delvaux got his start by playing the piano to silent films in 1950s Brussels, and his musicality is on full display in the film’s sonata-like form, weaving variations of memories and moments into an ambiguous, intriguing mood piece. Cloaked in dense Gothic atmospheres and muted colors, RENDEZVOUS À BRAY gives off a melancholy, dream-like aura, subtle in approach but haunted by unspoken desires and half-imagined nostalgia.
Working with Delvaux’s daughter, we’re honored to re-introduce this classic of Belgium cinema.
LITAN
dir. Jean-Pierre Mocky, 1982
France, 87 min
THURSDAY, JANUARY 6- 10 PM
THURSDAY, JANUARY 20- 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 28 – MIDNIGHT
LITAN (dir. Jean-Pierre Mocky, 1982) from Spectacle on Vimeo.
NEIGE
(SNOW)
dirs. Juliet Berto & Jean-Henri Roger, 1981
91 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.
THURSDAY, JANUARY 6 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, JANUARY 15 – 10 PM
“Indebted to the boilerplate romans de gare that are ubiquitous in France, NEIGE commingles danger with low-rent spectacle, never pretending to tamp down the carnival atmosphere of the drag where the vast majority of action unfolds. NEIGE is rife with details that would be absent from a more commercial-minded film: decrepit merry-go-rounds, smeared lipstick, a flickering neon windmill outside the Moulin Rouge, tea gone cold. It’s tempting to posit NEIGE as a hidden bridge between the Nouvelle Vague and the subsequent generation’s cinema du look: drunken street poetry shot through pop realism.” – Daryl J. Williams, Cinema Scope
“Berto and Roger were grunge before grunge.” – Dave Kehr, Curator, Museum of Modern Art
Special thanks to Jane Roger, JHR Films, Rialto Pictures and Adrienne Halpern (Studio Canal).
PANELSTORY
dir. Věra Chytilová, 1979.
Czechoslovakia. 100 min.
In Czech with English subtitles.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 7 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 28 – 10 PM
Věra Chytilová’s 1966 DAISIES may be her best known work of radical cinema, but it’s neither her last, nor arguably most significant. A decade later, at time when most of her Prague Spring contemporaries had fled Czechoslovakia or drastically reigned in once-experimental visions, she came back with the equally daring and essential PANELSTORY. Framed as a sort of ensemble comedy circulating among the many lives contained within a new Soviet-bloc housing complex, the film is actually a scathing satire shredding every available ideal of home and family. The whole film can be understood by its audaciously critical setting: lost in a wasteland of debris and stalled construction, still incomplete yet already falling into disrepair, riddled with half-functional elevators, the housing complex precisely mirrors the disintegrating families contained within, whose individual stories form a catalogue of bleakly hilarious dysfunction and despair. It might have been all too believably familiar to those living under similar conditions in Czechoslovakia at the time, but Chytilova’s disillusionment, as always, extends far beyond her immediate surroundings to call into question the thwarted utopian hopes of an entire industrialized world.
As with all of Chytilová’s best work, form here deftly follows function. The urban malaise is caught near-entirely in verité-style hand-held camerawork decades ahead of fashion, and rhythmically fragmented under anarchic editing that mixes apartment interiors with dystopian architecture and massive earth-moving operations. Even the sound design follows suit, as the characters are beset by cataclysmic atonal score (contrasted against a synth-funk interlude straight out of an aspirational 70s home furnishings showroom). What PANELSTORY may lack from the sheer stylistic invention of DAISIES, it makes up for in thematic cohesion.
After the collapse of the Prague Spring, Chytilová was among those directors cut out of the studio system for their brilliant excesses, which meant that she spent the years from 1970 to 1976 secretly directing commercials under the name of her husband (Jaroslav Kučera, her frequent cinematographer and collaborator). Pressures from international film festivals and a bold letter from directly to the president restating her sincere Socialist values allowed Chytilová to release THE APPLE GAME in 1976. But if that work seemed comparatively restrained, she pulled out all the stops for PANELSTORY. It’s unbelievable that such a film could have been produced under the noses of the state censors, and following its release, Chytilova found herself banned for another two years for her troubles. Seeing it again all these years later, PANELSTORY seems well worth the risks of getting it made.
Having considered PANELSTORY our “lodestar film” since opening in 2010, Spectacle is thrilled to host this one-night-only engagement of Chytilová’s unsung classic as part of our reopening festivities.
Special thanks to Troy Swain and Janus Films.
SEX DEMON
dir. J.C. Cricket, 1975
USA. 60 min.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 8 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, JANUARY 14 – 10 PM
SEX DEMON (dir. J.C. Cricket, 1975) from Spectacle on Vimeo.
“A non-stop shocker that both sizzles and chills. A totally daring new dimension in male erotica!” – Michael’s Thing
All hell breaks loose when John’s last-minute anniversary gift inadvertently causes his younger lover Jim to become possessed by a SEX DEMON in J.C. Cricket’s all-male horror film. Openly inspired by both The Exorcist and its Blaxploitation cousin, Abby, SEX DEMON is a ferocious mix of the erotic and the grotesque that’s primed and ready to shock audiences again after being lost for the past forty years. In the words of Gay Scene critic Bruce King, “the squeamish may not want to watch, but if you do, you won’t forget it!”
SEX DEMON was the first film effort by actor, erotic dancer, and gay television pioneer J.C. Cricket. After the release of this film, he’d go on to direct over a dozen more under various pseudonyms before cofounding and directing the gay public-access programs Christopher Street After Dark, Diversions, Connections, and Gay Morning America. Cricket passed away from AIDS-related complications in 1992.
Last screened theatrically in 1981 and never given a home video release, SEX DEMON is a crucial — yet long-lost — piece of queer horror history. Presented in a new 2k preservation from a recently discovered 16mm theatrical print.
Elizabeth Purchell is a queer film historian and archivist. Her Instagram project, Ask Any Buddy, explores the gay adult film industry’s role in both the development of queer cinema and the spread of gay culture at large.
CONTENT WARNING: This film contains a scene of sexual violence.
SPIDER BABY
dir. Jack Hill, 1967
81 mins. United States.
In English.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 9 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 14 – MIDNIGHT
“Though superficially similar to some of Charles Addams’ drawings, SPIDER BABY truly resembles nothing else in film.” – Nathaniel Thompson, Mondo Digital
The first solo feature from exploitation legend Jack Hill (FOXY BROWN), SPIDER BABY remains one of the wildest and weirdest horror films of the 1960s. The credits dub this “the maddest story ever told,” a promise that’s well on the way to being fulfilled in the opening scene alone, when Virginia traps and kills a hapless deliveryman in her makeshift web. She’s one of three siblings, including exploitation wild man Sid Haig, who suffer from a unique genetic disorder that causes them to regress back to childhood while retaining the physical strength and sexual maturity of adults. Lon Chaney, Jr. (THE WOLF MAN) gives one of his most memorable late performances as Bruno, who manages to cover up the crimes of the “kids” until two distant relatives lay claim to their house. Blending elements of gothic horror and gallows humor, SPIDER BABY drops somewhere between THE ADDAMS FAMILY and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.
TERROR NULLIUS
dir. Soda_Jerk, 2018
53 mins. Australia
In English.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 8 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, JANUARY 22 – 5 PM
THURSDAY, JANUARY 27 – 7:30 PM
Part political satire, eco-horror and road movie, TERROR NULLIUS is a political revenge fable constructed entirely from samples pirated from the Australian cinema cannon. Binding together a documentary impulse with speculative muckraking, Soda Jerk’s revisionist history opens a queer narrative space where cinema fictions and historical facts permeate each other in new ways. The apocalyptic desert camps of Mad Max 2 become the site of refugee detention, flesh-eating sheep are recast as anti-colonial insurgents and the women of Australian cinema go vigilante on Mel Gibson. Working within and against the official archive, Soda Jerk’s feature remix offers an incendiary un-writing of Australian national mythologies.
Funded by the Ian Potter Moving Image Commission in 2016, TERROR NULLIUS was notoriously disowned by the organisation just days prior to the film’s premiere in 2018. Offended by its politics, the Ian Potter’s conservative Board of Trustees described the work as “a very controversial piece of art” and “unAustralian”. The Guardian named the “dizzyingly ambitious satirical work” one of the best Australian films of the decade.
TERROR NULLIUS was commissioned by ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image)
TO SLEEP SO AS TO DREAM
(夢みるように眠りたい」フィルム修復)
dir. Hayashi Kaizô, 1986
73 mins. Japan.
Silent.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 15 – 5 PM
THURSDAY, JANUARY 20 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 30 – 7:30 PM
For those who remember Hayashi Kaizô’s MAIKU HAMA: #1 PRIVATE EYE trilogy we screened in 2018, a reprise of one of our favorites from this summer’s outdoor screenings in a gorgeous 2k restoration.
Born from the vestiges of some long forgotten dream, TO SLEEP SO AS TO DREAM is a hauntingly beautiful ode to the silent era that yearns for a distant past—back to an illusory world teeming with new excitements, novel invention and cryptic riddles. Under the faint glimmer of an electric lamp, an aging silver-screen starlet seeks the aid of two steadfast detectives when her darling daughter, the ethereal Bellflower, is kidnapped for ransom. The sleuths find themselves caught in a heady game of cat and mouse as they journey deeper into a sleepless realm of benshi performers, archetypal villainy and never-ending serials. Transposing the silent era’s cinematic language into a work that walks the line between antiquity and fantasy, dream and waking state, TO SLEEP SO AS TO DREAM casts a spell over the spectator in dream-like fashion, harking back to the magical, early days of cinema.
Special thanks to K.F. Watanabe, Tetsuki Ijichi and Arrow Films.
WHEEL OF ASHES
dir. Peter Emanuel Goldman, 1968
95 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 23 – 7:30 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
“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.
WHO KILLED VINCENT CHIN?
dir. Christine Choy, 1987
87 mins. United States.
In English
FRIDAY, JANUARY 28TH – 7:30 PM + Q&A WITH DIRECTOR CHRISTINE CHOY (this event is $10)
On a hot summer night in Detroit, Ronald Ebens, an autoworker, killed a young Chinese-American engineer with a baseball bat. Although he confessed, he never spent a day in jail. This gripping Academy Award-nominated film relentlessly probes the implications of the murder in the streets of Detroit, for the families of those involved, and for the American justice system.
THE YEAR OF THE PLAGUE
(EL ANO DE LA PESTE)
dir. Felipe Cazals, 1979
109 mins. Mexico.
In Spanish with English subtitles.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 7 – 10 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
Ten years after we showed his anti-anti-communism horror masterpiece CANOA, Spectacle is thrilled to reprise living master Felipe Cazals’ THE YEAR OF THE PLAGUE: a little-seen adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year transposed to 1970s Mexico. Working from an original idea proposed by his friend Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cazals uses the outbreak of a pandemic to diagnose the ills of Mexican society as he saw it: political corruption, snake-oil pundits on television, municipal apathy to the basic needs of lower-income citizens. The result is a bracing, terrifying vision of life out of junct 40 years ahead of coronavirus.
“Gabo (Marquez) is known as the creator of magical realism, but there is no magic to this film. We inserted a plague to create a different reality, in order to reveal problems within society. What can change is the way authorities will react to a crisis of this nature. To hide the truth is a power move, essentially linking all forms of power together. The president must say whatever is convenient for private interests. The whole reason he is in power is to create a distorted reality. The president, the private interests—their form of reality becomes the official truth. To take the pandemic seriously would necessitate destroying preexisting forms of power.” – Felipe Cazals, Filmmaker Magazine
Special thanks to Felipe Cazals, Herandy Goytia and IMCINE.
ZOO ZÉRO
dir. Alain Fleischer, 1978
France. 96 min.
In French with English subtitles.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 15 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 21 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 30 – 5 PM
During a cataclysmic rainstorm in a Paris largely reduced to ruins and rubble, guests in baroque animal masks crowd a smokey nightclub called Noah’s Ark. Here, Eva (Eden and After’s Catherine Jourdan) takes the stage to perform a riviting song of illicit interspecies desire and a formative erotic experience involving a lion mauling at the Berlin Zoo. It’s the last number, of the night, and maybe of the city — “an accident or a disease” has ravaged the streets as trucks trundle over cobblestones with news of the military government in crisis and the animal world seems poised to reclaim lost ground from a waning humanity. But an encounter with a stranger at the club (a tuxedoed, stammering Pierre Clementi) sends Eva out into this city of crumbling bordellos and verdant parks to a series of fateful meetings with a fragmentary family — a mother ogre, a ventriloquist chauffeur who narrates the failure of the Spanish revolution with a Donald Duck puppet, twin foley artists, and, narrating from a vocoder organ at the heart the liminal human-animal space of the city zoo, a mournful Klaus Kinski. But like other pulp peaks of the 70s, this is less a film that suggests tidy synopsis than a true cinematic dream, where nocturnal correspondences between Mozart, escaped large cats, and the grasping of all-too-temporary human edifices override the logic of the waking world and categories become blurred by their own mysterious logic.
Exquisitely shot in oneirically shadowed day-for-night (and night-for-night) by Bruno Nuytten (of such Spectacle essentials as INDIA SONG, MON COEUR EST ROUGE, and POSSESSION!), and with assistant direction by Claire Denis, ZOO ZÉRO has been all but unseeable outside of messy bootleg transfers for far too long. Now, at last, artist and director Alain Fleischer’s masterpiece has been newly restored from 35mm, in a gorgeous HD transfer.
Newly restored HD print courtesy of Alain Fleischer, with English subtitles newly corrected and custom retimed by Spectacle volunteers.
ZOO ZERO
ZOO ZÉRO
dir. Alain Fleischer, 1978
France. 96 min.
In French with English subtitles.
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 4 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 12 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 20 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 28 – 10 PM
During a cataclysmic rainstorm in a Paris largely reduced to ruins and rubble, guests in baroque animal masks crowd a smokey nightclub called Noah’s Ark. Here, Eva (Eden and After’s Catherine Jourdan) takes the stage to perform a riviting song of illicit interspecies desire and a formative erotic experience involving a lion mauling at the Berlin Zoo. It’s the last number, of the night, and maybe of the city — “an accident or a disease” has ravaged the streets as trucks trundle over cobblestones with news of the military government in crisis and the animal world seems poised to reclaim lost ground from a waning humanity. But an encounter with a stranger at the club (a tuxedoed, stammering Pierre Clementi) sends Eva out into this city of crumbling bordellos and verdant parks to a series of fateful meetings with a fragmentary family — a mother ogre, a ventriloquist chauffeur who narrates the failure of the Spanish revolution with a Donald Duck puppet, twin foley artists, and, narrating from a vocoder organ at the heart the liminal human-animal space of the city zoo, a mournful Klaus Kinski. But like other pulp peaks of the 70s, this is less a film that suggests tidy synopsis than a true cinematic dream, where nocturnal correspondences between Mozart, escaped large cats, and the grasping of all-too-temporary human edifices override the logic of the waking world and categories become blurred by their own mysterious logic.
Exquisitely shot in oneirically shadowed day-for-night (and night-for-night) by Bruno Nuytten (of such Spectacle essentials as INDIA SONG, MON COEUR EST ROUGE, and POSSESSION!), and with assistant direction by Claire Denis, ZOO ZÉRO has been all but unseeable outside of messy bootleg transfers for far too long. Now, at last, artist and director Alain Fleischer’s masterpiece has been newly restored from 35mm, in a gorgeous HD transfer.
Newly restored HD print courtesy of Alain Fleischer, with English subtitles newly corrected and custom retimed by Spectacle volunteers.
BURNING FRAME: A MONTHLY ANARCHIST FILM SERIES
CALLING ALL LEFTISTS! The past few years have been a whirlwind: exhausting, invigorating, and ripe with potential. It’s tremendously difficult, when in the thick of it, to pause, reflect, or even find a moment to catch a breath. Especially when “it” refers to the rise of fascism on a global scale, with any number of future cataclysms hovering just over the horizon. But we digress.
Join us, then, for a series that asks: if not now, when? Come for great works of radical political filmmaking, stay for the generative discussions, or even just to gossip and gripe. The hope is that this forum for authentic representations of successes, defeats, and the messy work of political action, will be thrilling, edifying, and maybe even inspire your next organizing project. To butcher the title of a great film for the sake of a moderately applicable pun: “Throw away your dogma, rally in the cinema.”
WHEN YOU PLAY ME LOUD VOL. 1: POP AGAINST COPS
dirs. Various, 1967-2020
80 mins.
SUNDAY, MARCH 22 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 31 – 7:30 PM
“Someone afraid of dancing is somehow afraid of many other things, you know?” – Claire Denis
Your friendly neighborhood anarchists humbly offer a tour of the music video and its discontents. If you love to hop, wiggle and boogie then come on by for a showcase of sound colliding with image, iconographic subversions and praxis lived to the hilt. But still you ask, why this? We’ll give Emma the final word: “I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to became a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. ‘I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.’ Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything.”
ALL FOR THE FANS
BACKSTAGE
Dir. Emmanuelle Bercot, 2005.
France, 112 mins.
In French with English subtitles.
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 2 – 5 PM
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 6 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 13 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 16 – 10 PM
An oddball forgotten gem of the oughts – but still relevant as ever in the age of tween internet fandom – European festival mainstay Emmanuelle Bercot’s most striking film is a knotty teen pop opera with emotional intensity set to a speaker-blowing high. The great Isild Le Besco, French cinema’s go-to for young queer hysteria, gives a fiercely committed performance as a high school girl hopelessly stanning for pop star Emmanuelle Seigner (The Ninth Gate, Venus in Fur). Their paths cross as the result of a bizarre MTV-style contest, and soon both women find their lives hopelessly entwined in a relationship of shifting power dynamics. Agnès Godard, cinematographer for Claire Denis, gives the film an edge that’s woozy, love-drunk, stark, and surreal.
DER FAN
aka Trance.
Dir. Eckhart Schmidt, 1982.
Germany, 89 min.
In German with English subtitles.
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 6 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 9 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 20 – 7:30 PM
In the wake of films like CHRISTIANE F., studies of displaced, dysfunctional German youth were a dime a dozen. However, the forerunner in the sweepstakes for the most memorable and disturbing entry would have to be DER FAN.
Like every other teenager in school, Simone has a crush on a rock star. When her idol, the lead singer ‘R’, comes to town to make a television appearance Simone is gripped by a trance-like state, leaving school, friends and parents behind her. However, when Simone comes to realize the shallow nature of the ‘glamorous’ music industry and of ‘R’ himself, she plans a calculated, ritualistic and bloody revenge on her obsession.
An unsettling blend of new wave pop culture, adolescent angst, and full-blooded horror, this nasty little art house shocker caught more than a few unsuspecting viewers off guard and earned a bit of a cult following in the process. Imagine a John Hughes film with Michael Haneke in the driver’s seat and you’re getting close…
BEST OF SPECTACLE 2015
To mark the conclusion of Spectacle’s 5th full calendar year of operation, our programming collective has selected their favorites from among our regular series features shown throughout the past 12 months. The result, BEST OF SPECTACLE (aka BoS2K15), provides an opportunity to revisit some of 2015’s greatest discoveries, thrills and audience-pleasers.
As the year draws to a close, Spectacle would like to acknowledge the audiences, artists and distributors who have pitched in their support, vision and feedback. Thank you for another brilliant year! We’ll save you a seat in 2016.
LIVING STARS
HARD TO BE A GOD
YOU CALL THIS PROGRESS!? ALYCE WITTENSTEIN AT SPECTACLE
PULGASARI
HEAD SPACE: AN ANIMATION SHOWCASE
FERAT VAMPIRE
DOROTHEA’S REVENGE
AKOUNAK TEDALAT TAHA TAZOUGHAI
WHITE OF THE EYE
BAKENEKO: A VENGEFUL SPIRIT (aka THE CURSED SWAMP)
TROUBLE EVERY DAY
GOLEM
LIVING STARS
Dir. Mariano Cohn & Gastón Duprat, 2014
Argentina, 63 min.
TUESDAY, JANUARY 12 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, JANUARY 23 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 31 – 5 PM
This remarkable, moving documentary presents dozens of real people in Buenos Aires, in long static tripod takes, simply dancing to pop music. In their kitchens, offices, and garages, identified in the film by their name and occupation, they include all ages, diverse lifestyles and all levels of talent, each with a common and infectious enthusiasm. In the background, their pets, families and friends go about their lives – playing video games, welding, reading magazines, watching with amusement or joining in. Everything in the frame, both incidental and carefully arranged, contributes to a loving portrait of each person, and of the universal qualities of all people. The seemingly simple premise has an overwhelming cumulative effect of shared humanity and pure joy, consistently surprising and endlessly fascinating.
“There’s a world of backstory in the details: the mom willing to steer a fan so her son’s cape will flap in the breeze, the brother who rolls his eyes as his older sister gets sexy, the daughter who can’t stop laughing as her dad shakes it to the Spice Girls. I’ve never seen anything that gave me more hope for equality and tolerance than a young man in his kitchen in full drag grinding it to “Toxic” in front of his entire family. When his wig flies off, grandma leaps to hand it back, and as he slipped it back on with a diva flourish, the crowd around me burst into applause.” – LA Weekly
HARD TO BE A GOD
aka Es ist nicht leicht ein Gott zu sein
Dir. Peter Fleischmann, 1989
West Germany/France/Switzerland/USSR, 119 min.
In German with English subtitles
TUESDAY, JANUARY 5 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 15 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, JANUARY 19 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, JANUARY 28 – 7:30 PM
Part of Peter Fleischmann: Trolling the Backwaters series.
Featuring “I Offer Unto Thee Something Beautiful, Something Burnt” by Antoni Maiovvi from the “Battlestar Transreplica” EP released on Seed Records.
Following the recent release of Aleksei German’s long-awaited, grimly visceral masterpiece and testament, HARD TO BE A GOD, Spectacle is proud to present Peter Fleischmann’s much less lauded, sometimes heavily ridiculed, adaptation of the same source novel. With a broader color palette, a more intelligible narrative, a more merciful runtime, and bigger hair, Fleischmann’s version is more likely to draw comparisons to HIGHLANDER and CONAN THE BARBARIAN than to THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES.
On a distant planet with a human civilization centuries behind that of Earth, the warrior Rumata—who is really Anton, an earthling scientist in disguise—is forced to assume the throne of the city-sate of Arkanar, which has just been vacated by King Pierre Clémenti (LES IDOLES, THE YEAR OF THE CANNIBALS, PIGSTY). Anton is on a quest to reach the city of Irukan to find the fabled scholar Budach, who he believes can single-handedly launch a Renaissance and pull this violent world out of its dark ages.
Co-written by Jean-Claude Carrière (frequent collaborator of Pierre Étaix and Luis Buñuel and screenwriter of THE TIN DRUM) and featuring Werner Herzog as a scheming merchant, Fleischmann’s HARD TO BE A GOD offers a lusher, giddier rendition of the legendary Strugatsky brothers’ novel.
YOU CALL THIS PROGRESS!? ALYCE WITTENSTEIN AT SPECTACLE
THURSDAY, JANUARY 7 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 12 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, JANUARY 19 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 24 – 7:30 PM
Alyce Wittenstein has been called the “Queen of the New York Underground” and once again, Spectacle is pleased to play host to the films making up her MULTIPLE FUTURES trilogy. These films are jam packed with familiar faces, exquisite set pieces, snappy dialogue, and dazzling costumes. While the films have indeed been shown the world over, these encore screenings will be the first second in New York in almost two decades. Join us for these remarkable films in a celebration of science fiction, hilarity, character actors, and ghastly view of a not-too-distant world.
BETAVILLE
Dir. Alyce Wittenstein, 1986
20 min.
The first in what would come to be known as the MULTIPLE FUTURES trilogy, BETAVILLE – a post-modern nightmare – finds a down and out detective Coman Gettme (played by Wittenstein mainstay Steve Ostringer) returning to his hometown after a chance meeting with The Girl (Holly Adams). Once the two arrive in Gettme’s Cadillac things immediately go from bad to worse for this gumshoe when he learns, over a slice at Stromboli’s, that High Fashion is the new law in town. Gettme becomes obsessed with The Girl and is determined to meet back up with her and “save” her from the these fashionable fascists.
BETAVILLE kicks off the trilogy in a pitch perfect send up of the French New Wave and science fiction, and turns noir on it’s ear while (literally) running through some familiar parts of NYC. Holly Adams is nothing short of dynamite and Ostringer’s distinctive production design would lay the groundwork for the look of the films to come. Years before becoming Brewmaster at the Brooklyn Brewery, Garrett Oliver was co-producer on the film. The short would go on to be nominated for a number of awards at festivals and play all over the world – often (unsurprisingly) alongside Godard’s ALPHAVILLE.
“Most of the detective narrator dialogue is clever, the cinematography is excellent, and I liked the (sort of) industrial music and the song by the Singing Squirrels.” – Michael J. Weldon, Psychotronic Magazine#2, 1989.
NO SUCH THING AS GRAVITY
Dir. Alyce Wittenstein, 1989
40 min.
In the not too distant future the LaFont corporation has all but taken over Earth. The company has revolutionized all elements of style, beauty, education, and housing but in the process (progress?!) has shipped many of Earth’s more “useless” inhabitants to the mysterious man made planet – and the largest scale experiment in human history – known as Nova Terra. Two scientists – Kay Zorn (Holly Adams) and Albert Leenhardt (Steve Robinson) are about to receive a prestigious award for their work on the LaFont Facelifter when they learn that Nova Terra is disrupting the Earth’s gravitational pull and will soon collide if it’s not destroyed. A headstrong lawyer and Kay’s boyfriend – Adam Malkonian (a scenery chewing Nick Zedd) – mouths off to a judge (the incomparable Taylor Mead – RIP) while defending a human teacher and is ordered to be relocated to the doomed planet. After meeting with the ambassador of Nova Terra (Emmanuelle Chaulet of Eric Rohmer’s BOYFRIENDS AND GIRLFRIENDS), Malkonian learns that perhaps the LaFont Corporation hasn’t been entirely truthful about what really happens on Nova Terra and vows to stop the destruction.
Wittenstein’s first sync sound film is overflowing with amazing set pieces and incredible performances. Some scenes were shot at the New York Hall of Science – including an Ames room and a number of other dazzling optical illusions. Look out for cameos from Michael J. Anderson (TWIN PEAKS), Wittenstein’s father as the insidious Andreas LaFont, and the director herself on Nova Terra.
THE DEFLOWERING
Dir. Alyce Wittenstein, 1994
40 min.
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old are dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” – Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks.
The quote above opens Wittenstein’s third and final film – THE DEFLOWERING. Again featuring some of Wittenstein’s tried and true players – Holly Adams, Emmanuelle Chaulet, Taylor Mead, and more – the film concerns yet another evil corporation this time HUXLEY BIO-TECH and their means to sanitize/beautify this world of ours. This time Wittenstein (with Ostringer back on production design) takes the costuming helm as well.
The TIB (Total Immune Breakdown) virus has left the planet reeling and lethal allergic reaction are at an all time high. Huxley’s efforts to produce perfect, designer children that are immune to viruses have had the side effect of hyper-allergic reactions. Why isn’t anything being done about allergies? No one wants to fund it! With the mortality rate skyrocketing, can mankind bounce back and feel the soft caress of skin against skin ever again or will the line at the Holo-Memorial Funeral Home grow ever longer?
PULGASARI
aka Bulgasari
Dir. Sang-ok Shin, 1985
North Korea, 95 min.
In Korean with English subtitles
SATURDAY, JANUARY 9 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, JANUARY 14 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JANUARY 18 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, JANUARY 28 – 10 PM
Part of the Juche Your Illusion I: Cinema of North Korea series.
Over the span of 20 years, Sang-ok Shin – sometimes called “the Orson Wells of South Korea” – made upwards of 60 films but all that changed in 1978 when the studio closed. Things would go from bad to worse when in what should be an unbelievable turn of events, Shin and his wife (actress Choi Eun-Hee) were kidnapped by Kim Jong-il. Kim’s intent was to have Shin create films showcasing the power and might of the Korea Workers Party for all the world to see, with Choi Eun-Hee as their star. Before their escape to Vienna in 1986, and after years in prison camps, they would make 7 films – PULGASARI being a crown jewel among them.
While seemingly an obvious Godzilla rip-off, the film is about an evil king in feudal Korea who learns of a coming peasant rebellion. The king gathers all the metal he can find – farming tools, cooking pots, etc – to make into weapons to squash the small army. A dying blacksmith uses the last of his strength to create a monster made of rice – Pulgasari. When his daughters blood hits it, the monster comes to life and traverses the countryside, eating iron – as monsters are wont to do.
Not seen outside of Korea for over a decade after its release, the film has gained a cult following for its special effects – with Kenpachiro Satsuma who was Godzilla for over a decade in the Pulgasari costume!
HEAD SPACE: AN ANIMATION SHOWCASE
Various, 1978-2015
66 min
FRIDAY, JANUARY 8 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 13 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, JANUARY 21 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 24 – 5 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 29 – 10 PM
Spectacle is proud to present HEAD SPACE, a showcase of animated works exploring dimensions both interior and outlying. Featuring an extremely talented and creative group working in a diverse array of styles, the shorts wander through strange and sometimes sketchy landscapes, including alternate-universe appliance stores, the ramblings of Charles Manson, environmental catastrophes in the Dutch style of painting, and a houseplant’s musings. Some, like Sally Cruikshank’s Make Me Psychic, are established classics; others feature newer animators working in looping GIF format, presented away from the small screen’s momentary pleasures to fully appreciate the art that it is. Occasionally gross, often beautiful, and always interesting, HEAD SPACE is a sampler of the thoughts happening inside and out of each frame.
Featuring works by:
| Signe Baumane | Barbara Benas | Lisa Crafts |
| Sally Cruikshank | Penelope Gazin | Faye Kahn |
| Celeste Lai & Peyton Skyler | Amy Lockhart | Lyla Ribot |
| Leah Shore | Claire van Ryzin | Wendy Zhao |
FERAT VAMPIRE
A.k.a. Upír z Feratu
Dir. Juraj Herz, 1981
Czechoslovakia, 94 min.
In Czech with English subtitles.
TUESDAY, JANUARY 5 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, JANUARY 16 – 10 PM
MONDAY, JANUARY 18 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 27 – 7:30 PM
Part of the Bohemian Delirium: Czech Horror in the 80s and 90s series.
While Juraj Herz honed his horror chops on THE CREMATOR and gothic-psychedelic past Spectober favorite MORGIANNA, FERAT VAMPIRE may actually be his best. A sinister car corporation prepares to launch the Vampire, a flashy, modernist sports car with very peculiar engineering, mysteriously low gas requirements, and a flurry of marketable rumors of death and danger that international press constantly eats up. An ambulence driver (director Jiri Menzel, who snagged one of those 60s Best Foreign Film Oscars for CLOSELY OBSERVED TRAINS!) suspects something is up after his ex-racecar driver partner (Dagmar Havlová, later first lady of the Czech Republic!!) falls under the spell of the prototype. Soon, both are drawn deep into a stylish surrealist noir of hidden motives, doubles, corporate marketing machinations, and Cronenbergian bio-mechanical terror (actually arguably referenced by Cronenberg for Videodrome two years later!) As reality dissolves, even the logical linking scenes get taken over by absurdist vignettes of our uneasy symbiosis with the automotive world.
DOROTHEA’S REVENGE
aka Dorotheas Rache
Dir. Peter Fleischmann, 1974
West Germany/France, 92 min.
In German with English subtitles
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 6 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JANUARY 11 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 22 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 27 – 10 PM
Part of Peter Fleischmann: Trolling the Backwaters series.
The shortlist of fans for Fleischmann’s sex satire is nothing to scoff at. Among its most ardent fans were several household names of European arthouse: Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Claude Chabrol. Then there’s the post-surrealist group the Panic Movement (comprised of Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Roland Topor) who liked the film so much that they even decided to bestow upon the film a little reward—the “prix du group panic.”
Dorothea is a 16-year old girl from Hamburg, brought up in a typical, bourgeois family. This changes one day when she comes down for breakfast and her parents find her completely disheveled—a Martian has just raped her. So begins Dorothea’s sex odyssey, as she seeks to understand her body and its various uses in an incereasingly consumerist society. The key to the film is that she approaches these question of sex with every ounce of naiveté common to a young girl. She tries to make softcore porn with her friends, and when that doesn’t work, she gives prostution a turn, and so on and so forth. There’s seemingly no end to this excursion.
Fleischmann proved that he could produce biting political commentary within the confines of fiction in HUNTING SCENES FROM BAVARIA. Eschewing the traditional narrative scaffolding and riding on the back of a sex wave in European cinema—Vilgot Sjöman’s I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW), Dušan Makavejev’s WR: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM, and the films of Walerian Borowczyk are key predecessors—Fleischmann enlists a slew of experimental techniques, like having the characters routinely break the fourth wall and construing a hodge podge of stylistically contradictory scenes, from conversations with Christ on the cross to BDSM rituals. Moreover, humor is a constant presence, something that can’t be said for many of the period’s Eurotrash sexploitations. In one scene, there’s a shot of three men getting an erection, played to brassy, courtly music. It’s the promise of entertainment that gives an otherwise powerful political satire its enduring glow.
AKOUNAK TEDALAT TAHA TAZOUGHAI
aka Rain the Color of Blue with a little Red in it
Dir. Christopher Kirkley
Niger/United States
2015, 75 min
In Tamashek with English subtitles
SATURDAY, JANUARY 9 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, JANUARY 12 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 17 – 5 PM
TUESDAY, JANUARY 26 – 10 PM
In 1979 Roger Corman wanted a disco movie, so his staff made sure that he was the only one on the production with a script that said “Disco High School.” Two weeks before shooting, director Allan Arkush broke it to his producer that everyone else’s scripts were called Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, and the Ramones were a punk band. “Why can’t they be disco,” Corman asked. Arkush responded, “You can’t blow up a high school to disco music.”
Since at least 1956, when Bill Haley & His Comets starred in Rock Around the Clock, the musician-centered rock drama has been one of the most versatile vehicles for pop proselytizing. There have been many tweaks to the Rock Around the Clock formula—musical genres, locales, vérité aesthetics—and Prince‘s Purple Rain might be called the capitalist variant. In 1975 the New York Time’s Vincent Canby famously asked, “What is Jaws but a big-budget Roger Corman film,” and by 1984 Corman’s operation had effectively been steamrolled by appropriation of exploitation formula’s amid Hollywood’s economies of scale. Purple Rain is also a big-budget Corman film, but despite its unabashedly generic construction it towers above other rock dramas as a true watershed: the genre’s first steroidally capitalistic Hollywood blockbuster.
So, it’s at least patently funny that the first fiction feature ever produced in the Tuareg language, which is spoken by about 1 million people in parts of Algeria, Libya, Mali, and Niger, is nominally a remake of Purple Rain. Or, sort of: there is no Tuareg word for “purple,” so Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai actually translates to “rain the color of blue with a little red in it.” Constructed around the personality of naturally charismatic lead Mduo Moctar and set in the world of Tuareg guitar music in Agadez, Niger—most internationally recognized for the work of Bombino (who is, come to think of it, signed to a subsidiary of Prince’s former record label)—Akounak gushes with pure, earnest enthusiasm for its sweded source material. Shrouded in mystery and kicking up desert sands on his purple motorcycle while riding between home recording studios and guitar parties, Moctar is a brilliant and even more likable analog to Prince’s “The Kid.” Whereas Purple Rain is premised about calculated obfuscation of ostensibly autobiographical detail—I learned as much about Minneapolis and Prince from Purple Rain as I did string theory—Akounak‘s filmmakers take a Rouch-lite approach to their collaboratively produced riff on social mores, religiosity, and third world distribution models.
Make no mistake: Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai works as blissful, effervescent entertainment, and it’s beautifully shot and edited like a fiction film even as its DIY production and documentary ethos shine through. Like the conglomerate clockwork strategies underpinning Purple Rain, it will make you a believer and a fan. —Jon Dieringer (Screen Slate)
WHITE OF THE EYE
Dir. Donald Cammell, 1987
U.K./U.S., 110 minutes.
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 6 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, JANUARY 14 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, JANUARY 23 – 10 PM
MONDAY, JANUARY 25 – 10 PM
Part of the Cammell After Dark series.
“The only difference between a hunter and a killer…. is his prey.”
While Cammell’s producers were merely seeking to capitalize on the 80s brood of lurid cheapies, he and Kong would take an utterly different tack; the director described his adaptation of pulp author Margaret Tracy’s Mrs. White as “an artistic exploration of man’s need to destroy.” A family man (David Keith) is suspected of being a gated-community serial killer; Cathy Moriarty (RAGING BULL) stars as his wife. Scored by Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason, WHITE OF THE EYE is an unmissable gem, a unique case study in onscreen violence, alienating Southwestern landscapes and characters carrying aching – insane, even – contradictions.
“As the action twists a benign homestead into a domestic nightmare, signature Cammell forms resurface—startling flash-cuts between the recent past and present creating schizoid sensations, an exaggerated emphasis on the eyeball as visual fulcrum for transitional delirium, and a soundtrack that announces invocation and possession.” – Chris Chang, Film Comment
“By far the most accomplished thriller I have seen this year. Deserves to be feted.” – Derek Malcolm, The Guardian
“A mesmerizing mosaic of a film.” – Nigel Andrews, Financial Times
BAKENEKO: A VENGEFUL SPIRIT (aka THE CURSED SWAMP)
Dir. Yoshihiro Ishikawa, 1968
Japan, 86 min.
In Japanese with English subtitles.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 8 – 10 PM
MONDAY, JANUARY 11 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 17 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JANUARY 25 – 7:30 PM
Part of the Cats in the Cradle to the Grave: Three Japanese Ghost Stories series.
Lord Nabeshima, who rose to power by murdering his master, demands that the young Yujiki become his concubine. When she refuses to submit, he murders her and her fiance Yuki. Yujiki’s cat consumes her blood and becomes her avenging spirit, possessing one of Nabeshima’s wives and murdering his vassals, his concubines and his only son.
Ishikawa was one of the writers of BLACK CAT MANSION, and though he directed few films, Bakeneko displays directorial genius. Beginning in a quietly haunting vein reminiscent of UGETSU, BAKENEKO descends into a nightmarish parade of splattered blood, decapitations and ghosts gnawing on severed limbs.
TROUBLE EVERY DAY
Dir. Claire Denis, 2001
France, 101 min.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 10 – 5 PM
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 13 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 22 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, JANUARY 30 – 7:30 PM
An American doctor (Vincent Gallo) arrives in Paris with his new wife (Tricia Vessey). They are ostensibly on honeymoon, but he is strangely distant and preoccupied with finding a former a colleague. Meanwhile, a French couple live in seclusion, the husband (Alex Descas) both caring for and imprisoning his wife (Béatrice Dalle, exuding a primal power) whose mysterious illness has reduced her to a vehicle for her own bloodlust. Connections between these characters reveal themselves slowly; exposition here is a distant second to a deep sensuality in the truest sense of the word. Denis’ tactile approach to filmmaking is in full effect, the camera mapping out fragile bodies with careful, almost predatory attention, creating a discomfiting sense of intimacy. TROUBLE EVERY DAY is a film felt as much as viewed, and when it reaches its bloody apex, that’s a truly frightening thing.
GOLEM
Dir. Piotr Szulkin, 1980
Poland, 92 min.
In Polish with English subtitles.
MONDAY, JANUARY 4 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 10 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, JANUARY 26 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 29 – 7:30 PM
GOLEM (1979) is a loose retelling of Der Golem, Gustav Meyrink’s 1914 novel. Replacing the ghettos of Prague with a garbage-strewn, dilapidated future, Szulkin’s adaptation trades the golem for “Pernat,” a clone manufactured for shadowy reasons by a totalitarian regime. Pernat, played with remarkable gentility by Szulkin favorite Marek Walczewski, interacts with the swifter edges of Polish society as he attempts to understand the institution that created him, and his purpose on the planet. Upon its release, the film won the Brown Lion at the Gdańsk Film Festival, but has been all but forgotten today.
SPECTOBER MIDNIGHTS
FRIDAY, SPECTOBER 2: 555
SATURDAY, SPECTOBER 3: WILD SIDE
FRIDAY, SPECTOBER 9: THE UNDERTAKER AND HIS PALS
SATURDAY, SPECTOBER 10: BALLET DOWN THE HIGHWAY
FRIDAY, SPECTOBER 16: HEADLESS EYES
SATURDAY, SPECTOBER 17: THE NIGHT BEFORE
FRIDAY, SPECTOBER 23: MARLEY’S REVENGE: THE MONSTER MOVIE
SATURDAY, SPECTOBER 24: FIFTH ANNUAL SPECTACLE SHRIEK SHOW
FRIDAY, SPECTOBER 30: TROUBLE EVERY DAY
SATURDAY, SPECTOBER 31: COMING SOON
Massacre Video presents: 555
Dir. Wally Koz, 1988.
90 min, USA.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2 – MIDNIGHT
From The First Annual Spectacle Shriek Show. (2011)
A hippie killer with a sex-fueled, murderous bloodlust is on a rampage and he’s brutally murdering innocent young couples! A nationwide trend of killings with the same m.o. happens to catch the eyes of Detective Haller and Sergeant Connor. Every five years, within five days of each other, the killer strikes! Now it’s up to Haller and Connor to find out who is behind these grisly murders. Who is this crazed, blood thirsty hippie? And more importantly, what is the significance of the third ‘five’?
Written by Roy Koz and directed by Wally Koz, this rare SOV splatter-classic has recently been given the royal treatment by Massacre Video with a DVD, special edition DVD, and an already eBay fodder clamshell.
WILD SIDE
Dir. Donald Cammell, 1995.
U.S., 110 min. (Director’s cut); 95 min. (Nu Image re-edit)
Nu Image Re-edit
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3 – MIDNIGHT
Director’s Cut
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3 – 10:00 PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 26 – 7:30 PM
Donald Cammell’s fourth film in as many decades, the brilliant and berserk WILD SIDE is a beyond-salacious slab of psycho-noir starring Anne Heche as “Alex”, a Long Beach investment banker-cum sex worker for the rich and powerful. Tonight, that means Bruno – a shadowy millionaire money launderer (Christopher Walken, plus wig) – and perhaps also his valet, a sleazy undercover cop by the name of Tony (Steven Hauer, of Scarface fame). Cammell’s signature refracted narrative comes into play when Alex meets Bruno’s wife Virginia (Joan Chen), up-turning audience expectations for late-nite sleaze into a surprisingly tender, psychologically astute, and crushingly desperate queer love story. (There’s also a sublime Ryuichi Sakamoto score, and a concurrent subplot about a virus on a floppy disk that, if it fell into the wrong hands, would bring the western world to its knees.)
After Nu Image Productions wrested control of WILD SIDE away from Cammell and recut the film into the schizoid quasi-porn they thought they had paid for, the filmmaker saw fit to take his own life. In 2000, Kong supervised a painstaking, posthumous recut with editor Frank Mazzola; this October, Spectacle is thrilled to present both the damned and saved versions of WILD SIDE.
“Games are again played with power and identity, dangerous games but not fatal ones this time; if there is one difference between the Cammell of 1968 and of 1995 that stands out above all others, it is the replacement of Artaudian cruelty with an affectionate generosity towards his characters.” – Maximilian Le Cain, Senses of Cinema
“When this film was premiered at last year’s Edinburgh Festival, it was accompanied by a remarkable on-stage talk from Mazzola and Kong, who were able to show extracts from the butchered, and utterly different ‘TV version’: furnishing us with an unmissable masterclass in the realities of film editing and a radical essay in the textual aspects of cinema. I hope that Mr Mazzola and Ms Kong can be persuaded to repeat this lecture all over the country.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Lunchmeat VHS Fanzine presents: THE UNDERTAKER AND HIS PALS
Dir. T.L.P. Swicegood, 1966.
63 min, USA.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9 – MIDNIGHT
From The Spectacle Shriek Show II. (2012)
Two degenerate café owners cook up a depraved alliance with a demented Undertaker and run amok through town on their motorcycles, hacking up hot dames and cleaving craniums. Select portions of the corpses are served up as daily specials at the café and The Undertaker gets to bury the leftovers. But when a pair of local detectives smell something fishy afoot, the trio’s reign of terror runs into some trouble.
One of Lunchmeat Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Josh Schafer’s all-time favorite flicks, this pioneering pitch black comedy is a kitschy slice of pure drive-in delirium that plants its tongue firmly in cheek, then bites it off and spits it out onto a sizzling hot plate ready for you to enjoy. Once you’ve ingested the wacky slab o’ cinema cheeze that is THE UNDERTAKER AND HIS PALS, you’ll never get the taste out of your mouth!
Dig it!
BALLET DOWN THE HIGHWAY
Dir. Jack Deveau
USA, 93 min, 1975
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20 – 7:30 PM
Opposites attract when a New York ballet dancer’s car breaks down on the highway and he is rescued by a closeted truck driver. An ambivalent romance blossoms until he finds the city apartment he shares with his boyfriend, a fellow dancer, filled with horny truckers. Filled with sadness and unrequited longing, BALLET DOWN THE HIGHWAY is directed by Jack Deveau, whose disco-tastic DRIVE screened at Spectacle in 2014.
Spectacle Midnights presents: HEADLESS EYES
Dir. Kent Bateman, 1971.
78 min, USA.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16 – MIDNIGHT
From The Third Annual Spectacle Shriek Show. (2013)
You know how it is for starving artists, right? I mean, look at your clothes. Anyway, it used to be even harder! So hard that some of them turned to a life of crime. This is especially true in the case of Arthur Malcolm. Down on his luck, Arthur is caught robbing an apartment and loses his eye in the process. Once he’s healed he’s out on the streets and, brother, he is HEATED. Arthur sets about on a mad killing spree, gouging out the eyes of his victims with a spoon. He collects the eyes for his artwork, you see. This continues for some time with mixed results.
This film was directed by Kent Bateman, father of Jason and Justine, in the streets of a now long gone version of NYC. According to this film, it was a time when a hooker would approach a man covered in blood in the middle of the day in order to turn a trick. The good old days. In addition to this movie being totally batshit insane with a FIERCE mutant soundtrack, it’s a veritable snapshot of a city as nasty as they come. The performances are hammy and intense, like Easter dinner in a mental institution.
Not to be missed!
THE NIGHT BEFORE
Dir. Arch Brown
USA, 72 min, 1973
MONDAY, OCTOBER 12 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17 – MIDNIGHT
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20 – 10:00 PM
THE NIGHT BEFORE gets its straightforward gay porn “narrative” out of the way in the first half before getting on with being exceptionally odd and psychedelic. There’s body painting, someone sucking a disembodied cock that appears out of a bowl of fruit, a woman dancing in Central Park for no reason, and if you want to see an orgy scene
where a dildo goes in so deep it comes out someone’s mouth, this film is highly recommended. Also appearing: kittens.
Horror Boobs presents: MARLEY’S REVENGE: THE MONSTER MOVIE
Dir. Jet Eller, 1989.
83 min, USA.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23 – MIDNIGHT
From The Fourth Annual Spectacle Shriek Show. (2014)
“I don’t know about you, man, but I’m still huuuuungry.”
Two bozos get picked up by a gang of vigilantes out to scrub the streets of scum after mistaking the men for drug smugglers. The problem is they’re actually smuggling in their aunt and uncle. The four are whisked away to the local island where they murder all the other drug smugglers. You know what though? None of this even matters because once they get to the island things get really out of hand. Zombies rise from the grave, a giant hell monster shows up, and the vigilantes aren’t too pleased either. How will anyone escape this island alive?
Another marathon mainstay and VHS monolith, Horror Boobs has been providing not only marathon fare but midnight fodder at Spectacle for over a decade![citation needed] This years entry is…well, something special indeed.
Featuring a completely new transfer and other goodies. If you saw this at the marathon last year, you still haven’t truly seen it. A house favorite and rare treat!
TROUBLE EVERY DAY
Dir. Claire Denis, 2001
France, 101 mins.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 30 – MIDNIGHT
An American doctor (Vincent Gallo) arrives in Paris with his new wife (Tricia Vessey). They are ostensibly on honeymoon, but he is strangely distant and preoccupied with finding a former a colleague. Meanwhile, a French couple live in seclusion, the husband (Alex Descas) both caring for and imprisoning his wife (Béatrice Dalle, exuding a primal power) whose mysterious illness has reduced her to a vehicle for her own bloodlust. Connections between these characters reveal themselves slowly; exposition here is a distant second to a deep sensuality in the truest sense of the word. Denis’ tactile approach to filmmaking is in full effect, the camera mapping out fragile bodies with careful, almost predatory attention, creating a discomfiting sense of intimacy. TROUBLE EVERY DAY is a film felt as much as viewed, and when it reaches its bloody apex, that’s a truly frightening thing.
TROUBLE EVERY DAY
TROUBLE EVERY DAY
Dir. Claire Denis, 2001
France, 101 mins.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 30 – MIDNIGHT
An American doctor (Vincent Gallo) arrives in Paris with his new wife (Tricia Vessey). They are ostensibly on honeymoon, but he is strangely distant and preoccupied with finding a former a colleague. Meanwhile, a French couple live in seclusion, the husband (Alex Descas) both caring for and imprisoning his wife (Béatrice Dalle, exuding a primal power) whose mysterious illness has reduced her to a vehicle for her own bloodlust. Connections between these characters reveal themselves slowly; exposition here is a distant second to a deep sensuality in the truest sense of the word. Denis’ tactile approach to filmmaking is in full effect, the camera mapping out fragile bodies with careful, almost predatory attention, creating a discomfiting sense of intimacy. TROUBLE EVERY DAY is a film felt as much as viewed, and when it reaches its bloody apex, that’s a truly frightening thing.