“If the desire of the Nouvelle Vague’s protagonists was to take over the industry and make it more pliable (notably by creating independent economic structures, in the manner of Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut), then the Lettrists’ strategy, by contrast, entailed resisting the least compromise with the film industry, just as with the art market” —Nicole Brenez, Introduction to Lettrist Cinema
Beginning in 1951, Lettrist filmmakers set out to destroy all of cinema’s existing rules. The art movement which sought out chiseled, infinitesimal, and imagined cinema, was short-lived and remains under-researched barring a few key texts by art historians Nicole Brenez and Kaira M. Cabañas. Among its members were Jean Isidore Isou, whose unfinished 9-hour cut of TRAITÉ DE BAVE ET D’ÉTERNITÉ caused a ruckus at the 1951 Cannes Film Festival. Isou’s scratched images and complimentary discordant soundtrack set the tone for future experiments in Lettrist Cinema: Guy Debord weaponized the black-screen in his feature debut HURLEMENTS EN FAVEUR DE SADE (1952), Gil Wolman created a flickering and vanishing film with L’ANTICONCEPT (1952), and François Dufrêne abandoned images altogether by projecting an imaginary film, TAMBOURS DU JUDGEMENT PREMIER (1952).
This September, Spectacle Theater is thrilled to present a small selection of Lettrist films as they were originally intended to be screened. As noted above, Isidore Isou’s TRAITÉ DE BAVE ET D’ÉTERNITÉ remains the most well-known film to come out of the Lettrist Movement, as its sustained lashing out against cinema’s conventions in all manner of offensive aesthetic and narrative gestures have made it a lodestar for filmmakers looking to reimagine the seventh art. Released around the same time is Maurice Lemaître’s LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ?, a self-destructive instructional film that the director cheekily described as “a boring jumble of commonplace ideas.” HURLEMENTS EN FAVEUR DE SADE and L’ANTICONCEPT continue the Lettrist investigation into a counter-cinema, engaging a negative image that bestows creative authority to the audience. In counterpoint, Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin’s (aka Marc’O) CLOSED VISION (1954) brings together an excess of images in a Joycean attempt at creating a stream-of-consciousness film. In GRIMACE (1967), Gudmundur Gudmundsson Ferro (aka Erró) returns to the Lettrist mission to separate cinema from its stars, stitching together amusing portraits of artists including Andy Warhol and Marguerite Duras into a playful visual poem.
TRAITÉ DE BAVE ET D’ÉTERNITÉ
(VENOM AND ETERNITY)
dir. Isidore Isou, 1951
France. 123 mins.
In French with English subtitles.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 3 – 5 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 – 7:30 PM
“Isou turns pictures upside down, scratches on them arbitrarily and does everything he can think of to spit upon and destroy the film image” —Stan Brakhage
To invoke Lettrism is to call on VENOM AND ETERNITY. Also known as SLIME AND ETERNITY, Isidore Isou’s sole feature is a film full of scratches that chisels its way to the beating heart of cinema. “If we can’t get past the photographic screen and reach something deeper, then cinema just doesn’t interest me,” he said. Looking to break away from the regressive sanctification of representation upheld by theorists like André Bazin, Isou’s film revels in its obscene and destructive character, tearing up the traditions of the medium to dream up a new alternative.
After premiering at Cannes Film Festival in 1951 and causing a scandal among festival attendees, VENOM AND ETERNITY was awarded the “Prix des spectateurs d’avant-garde” by Jean Cocteau. The award placed it in the same category as Maya Deren’s similarly lauded MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943), marking it an essential text in the canon of experimental cinema that would have a lasting influence on filmmakers ranging from Jean-Luc Godard to Stan Brakhage. Isou would later remark that Godard and Debord ripped him off.
LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ?
(HAS THE FILM ALREADY STARTED?)
dir. Maurice Lemaître, 1951
France. 62 mins.
In French with English subtitles.
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 – 7:30 PM, this event is $10
After working on Isou’s VENOM AND ETERNITY as an assistant director, Maurice Lemaître set out to make a film that not only attacked the conventions of filmmaking, but of filmgoing too. LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ? is a film that spills from the screen, as instructed by its script which expands upon the body of the film to include what should occur in the viewing room as it’s projected. Hellbent on provocation, Lemaître thought up LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ? as a way to shake up the moviegoing experience. Throughout the film, he directly addresses the audience with questions such as “Why are you here?” while they sit in the dark watching the movie also subject to the insults of “extras” taunting their ability to watch the whole thing through.
The film is made up of a series of kaleidoscopic images. Unlike Debord and Wolman, Lemaître stresses the visual quality of his cinema. LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ? is colorful, fun, and wholly unruly, reflecting the spirit of a passionate young filmmaker meddling with the rules of his craft.
HURLEMENTS EN FAVEUR DE SADE
(HOWLINGS IN FAVOR OF DE SADE)
dir. Guy Debord, 1952
France. 64 mins.
In French with English subtitles.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21 – 10 PM
In his first film, Guy Debord abandons the photographic image. Over the course of HURLEMENTS EN FAVEUR DE SADE, Debord along with fellow Lettrists Isou, Gil Wolman, Serge Berna, and Barbara Rosenthal speak over each other in aphorisms. The screen is white when they talk and black whenever there is silence. The film’s refusal to represent foretells Debord’s future critiques of image-culture, most notably the text from which this theater derives its name: SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE (1967). Eventually, Debord and Wolman would break away from the Lettrist Movement to carry out new acts of detournement as Situationsists. As such, their goals were more directly aligned with a Communist agenda. Yet, in their early works resides a conceptual spark that they would build upon throughout their careers as artists. This would become clearer in a Lettrist bulletin from 1956, in which Wolman declared their objective to be the creation of “a unitary urbanism” that synthesizes “arts and technology” in accordance “with new values of life.”
L’ANTICONCEPT (The Anticoncept)
dir. Gil J. Wolman, 1952
France. 60 minutes
In French. An English Transcript will be provided.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21 – 7:30 PM, this event is $10
“Wolman is one of the great inventors of negative forms after Hegel” —Nicole Brenez, Introduction to Lettrist Cinema
L’ANTICONCEPT is a sound film that alternates between black and white flickers. The film is projected on a helium-inflated balloon approximately two meters in diameter. A year after the film premiered at the Ciné-Club Avant-Garde 52, Debord declared L’ANTICONCEPT was “more offensive… than the images of Eisenstein, which frightened Europe for so long.” Although the Lettrists shared a proclivity for hyperbole, Debord’s statement accounts for Wolman’s incredible ability to leave behind all of cinema’s precepts and create a frightening alternative to the medium with his film.
CLOSED VISION
dir. Marc’O, 1954
France. 65 mins.
In English.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 01 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 03 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 09 – 10:00 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28 – 10:00 PM
Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin aka Marc’O played a major role in the history of Lettrism. With close ties to Jean Cocteau, Marc’O convinced the Cannes Film Festival in 1951 to screen Isidore Isou’s VENOM AND ETERNITY. He similarly organized screenings for his colleagues’ work, encouraging them to adopt new approaches to cinema and agitate audiences in viewing rooms to create more visceral encounters with the medium. Many of his suggestions—aquarium-cinema, aquatic-sports cinema, carousel cinema—were never actualized, yet his genius pervades in the work of his contemporaries.
Funnily enough, his own feature debut CLOSED VISION might be the film with the clearest narrative to come out of the Lettrist Movement. A consciousness collage in the style of James Joyce, CLOSED VISION works its way from a series of disparate images into a straightforward denouncement of cinema’s calcified classical form. At the time of its release, the film was praised by Luis Buñuel and Jean Cocteau, who called it “the most important experimental work since his own BLOOD OF THE POET.”
GRIMACE
dir. Erró, 1967
France. 45 mins.
Gibberish.
“GRIMACES is just what it says: grimaces. You see 180 internationally known artists making faces. The soundtrack is Lettrist poetry.” –Jonas Mekas
The Icelandic artist Erró’s GRIMACE was made over several years as he toured the globe snapping vignettes of famous artists. Edited together with a Lettrist poem in which Erró phonetically plays around with each artist’s name as its soundtrack, the film becomes a meditation on stardom and identity. Warping and renegotiating the relationship between the viewer and the celebrities on screen, GRIMACE’s simple premise proves effective.
Special thanks to RE:VOIR, Light Cone, Barbara Wolman and Hedy Wolman, Cristina Bertelli, Marc’O, Ed Halter and Thomas Beard at Light Industry, Julia Curl and Robert Schneider at the Film-Maker’s Cooperative, Connor Keep, Steve Macfarlane, and Isaac Hoff.
The Revolt of Nature sub-genre, also known as Natural Horror, consists of humans fighting for survival against plants, animals or other ecological terrors. Modern Natural Horror films trace their heritage back to two films, Alfred Hitchcock’s THE BIRDS (1963) and Steven Spielberg’s JAWS (1975), but the sub-genre has been around since the dawn of cinema.
The box office success of JAWS in the late 70s started a wave of Natural Horror movies, inspiring low-budget imitation films such as ORCA (1977), THE PACK (1977) and PIRANHA (1978). By the 90s, Natural Horror movies were common among summer blockbusters, with films like JURASSIC PARK (1993), ANACONDA (1997) and ARACHNOPHOBIA (1990) dominating the box office.
By the 2010s, the rise of digital cameras, cheap CGI and straight-to-DVD movies paved the way for micro-budget Natural Horror movies. Aided by these and other technological advancements, filmmakers sought to create movies from the 90s with budgets from the 70s, flooding the home video market with familiar favorites like MEGA SHARK VERSUS GIANT OCTOPUS (2009), SHARKNADO (2013) and ZOMBEAVERS (2014).
This August, Spectacle invites you to The Revolt of Nature. Return to where it all began with three 70s era Natural Horror films, only at Spectacle.
RAZORBACK
Dir. Russell Mulcahy. 1984.
Australia. 95 mins.
In English.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 9 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 – MIDNIGHT
An American wildlife activist goes missing in a town besieged by razorback boar attacks, and her husband travels to Australia to find her. When no one can tell him what happened to his missing wife, he soon suspects something even more sinister at play.
RAZORBACK is not a typical 80s creature feature. The influence of WAKE IN FRIGHT (1971), an Ozploitation staple, takes center stage as sweat and dirt ooze from the celluloid. The stunning visuals, shot by Academy Award-winning cinematographer Dean Semler, showcase the vastness of the Australian outback, creating an inescapable hellscape more deadly than the monster itself.
Australia is famous for its dangerous animals and miles of inhospitable land, so naturally some of the best Natural Horror movies were produced there. RAZORBACK was made during the peak of Australian exploitation cinema, also known as Ozploitation, and draws clear influences from its predecessors. RAZORBACK places you in a hallucinogenic fever dream of sand, sweat and dirt that will make you want to shower as soon as the credits roll.
BEN
Dir. Phil Karlson. 1972.
United States. 94 mins.
In English.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 – 10 PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 – 7:30 PM
A lonely boy named Danny befriends Ben, the rodent leader of a killer rat pack.
BEN (1972) is an exceptional sequel that aimed to capture the success of its predecessor, WILLARD (1971). The first movie tells the story of Willard, a young man driven mad by his grief, loneliness, and insufferable boss, who befriends a rat and attempts to train it in his basement. Where WILLARD is a character study of an introverted man, BEN documents the rodents that ravage the city, and its residents, while tracing the emotional relationship between Danny and Ben.
Michael Jackson’s “Ben” was written for the movie and is performed by Danny in a sweeping serenade to Ben during the film. The song earned BEN an Academy Award nomination and was the titular track of Michael Jackson’s second solo album.
DAY OF THE ANIMALS
Dir. William Girdler. 1977.
United States. 97 mins.
In English.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8 – MIDNIGHT
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 – 10 PM
Fluorocarbon gasses from aerosol cans damaged the ozone layer, and the dangerous level of ultraviolet rays affected animals in high altitudes. A group of hikers must fight for their lives as they experience the consequences of environmental apathy first-hand.
DAY OF THE ANIMALS (1977) was directed by Wiliam Girdler one year after his hit film GRIZZLY (1976). Both films share similar DNA, featuring live wild animals running amok, beautiful woodland settings, and Christopher George trying to save the day. Whereas GRIZZLY is widely considered a JAWS (1975) rip-off, DAY OF THE ANIMALS is an ecological thriller that showcases an environmentally conscious perspective.
When the movie was released, many critics were, unsurprisingly, dismissive of this ‘sci-fi’ film for its on-the-nose environmental themes. In one sense, the critics were indeed correct: DAY OF THE ANIMALS does place environmental themes front and center, with the opening title card reading, “This motion picture dramatizes what COULD happen in the near future IF we continue to do nothing to stop this damage to Nature’s protective shield for life on this planet.” Almost fifty years later, amid a climate of near-constant environmental catastrophe, DAY OF THE ANIMALS is more poignant than ever, and ready for reevaluation.
It seems that the only group who took to LSD more fervently than the hippies were the spooks. The spies. The CIA. LSD was first synthesized in the late 1930s and only by the early 1950s the US government started experimenting with the drug’s potential on human subjects with or without their knowledge or consent. The experiments were brought to light in the 1970s as Projects Bluebird/Artichoke, and most famously, MKUltra. But as you’ll see, this open secret was already the basis of spy thrillers in the late 1960s.
Do you like a good mystery? Are you open to entertaining a good conspiracy theory every now and again? Have you read one too many David McGowan books? This September come to Spectacle and scratch that itch as we highlight three films that explore the connection between covert ops, the search for mind control, and LSD.
MINDFIELD LA MÉMOIRE ASSASSINÉE
Dir. Jean-Claude Lord, 1989
Canada. 92 min
In English
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 2 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 – 7:30 PM
Not to be confused with the Alien Workshop video of the same name, MINDFIELD stars Michael Ironside as the hard-nosed sergeant, Kellen O’Reilly, who is fresh from a divorce, and at the center of a brewing police union strike. Errant memories, depression, and flashbacks plague O’Reilly who deals silently with his ongoing history of mental health issues.
The police union’s legal representative, Sarah Paradis (Lisa Langlois), is splitting her time between the strike and prosecuting an ongoing case against the medical facility Coldhaven and its head doctor, Satorius (Christopher Plummer). Paradis alleges that Satorius used CIA funds to “play with human brains” and conduct experiments on unsuspecting patients. But Sarah is not the only degree of separation that Sergeant O’Reilly has with Coldhaven. If O’Reilly can regain his memories, thwart a group of company men up from the states, and unlock the killer implanted deep inside, will he be able to close the books on Coldhaven once and for all?
Leave it to the Canadians to have the realist take on Project MKUltra. Jean-Claude Lord’s MINDFIELD is surprisingly grounded and gritty with Ironside giving possibly the most accurate on-screen performance of someone under the effects of LSD. Nailing that “oh fuck” moment when the peak hits and you realize any simple task is just too much to ask for. The CIA operatives are also not exaggerated to the levels of tinseltown sexiness seen in the likes of Ethan Hunt or Jack Ryan. They appear as they are, schlubs. Evil terrorist schlubs intertwined with organized crime. The CIA would never let Hollywood get away with such a portrayal.
THE NET DAS NETZ
Dir. Lutz Dammbeck, 2003
Germany. 115 min
In English and German with English subtitles
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 – 5 PM
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 – 7:30 PM
“How do computers, LSD, and hippies fit together?”
Hovering in a space between documentary and film essay, German multidisciplinary artist Lutz Dammbeck’s THE NET is a meandering line connecting the various dots between the recently deceased Ted Kaczynski, LSD, the CIA, hippies, and the internet. Structurally the film acts as a concept map, following word bubbles and their connecting lines as Dammbeck literally draws them.
THE NET uses Kaczynski and his backstory (a subject of CIA experimentation while a math student at Harvard?) to explore the loss of reality and its replacement with the virtual. Kaczynski’s refusal of this world is contrasted in the film by the characters of that ilk that he sought to destroy. Those who accepted and championed the global network and interconnectedness; like Whole Earth Catalog author Stewart Brand, literary agent (and Epstein pal) John Brockman, the physicist and philosopher Heinz von Foerster, and even computer scientist David Gelernter, a victim himself of the Unabomber.
LSD: FLESH OF THE DEVIL LSD – INFERNO PER POCHI DOLLARI
Dir. Massimo Mida, 1967
Italy. 86 min
In dubbed English
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 2 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 – MIDNIGHT
For the completists, this late sixties Italian Bond rip-off is complete with waterskiing, LSD, peeping, blow darts, helicopters, LSD, explosions, car chases, scuba diving, guns, and LSD.
The film starts off with a literal bang as a small boy takes out an entire cadre of ne’er do wells abducting a little girl, with only a toy car and some curare darts. This is our introduction to the film’s protagonist: Rex Miller. Flash forward and Rex is a fully grown secret agent, played by 1950s American TV actor Guy Madison. Working for an agency that is never named outright—but the name of his to-be-discovered coworker in the field may be a clue—Rex is up against a “secret organization with a strange name: ECHO”, and it’s mysterious kingpin, Mr. X. What is their evil plan? LSD baby.
The film’s “Flesh of the Devil” subtitle is a disappointing example of a studio attempting to sell the movie as something else to English speaking audiences. The original Italian title, which translates more closely to “LSD: Hell for a Few Dollars”, is far more enticing. Wait, you mean I get to see cool colors and people’s heads turn into animals? And it’s only a coupla bucks!? Far out man.
LE ORME
(aka FOOTPRINTS) (aka FOOTPRINTS ON THE MOON) (aka PRIMAL IMPULSE)
dir. Luigi Bazzoni, 1975
Italy. 96 mins.
In English (dubbed) with a few minutes of Italian.
TUESDAY, AUGUST 1 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 12 – 3 PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 18 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 21 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 30 – 7:30 PM
In Luigi Bazzoni’s uniquely hallucinatory LE ORME, memories of a science fiction film seen in childhood return to haunt Alice (Florinda Bolkan, of LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN). The fragments of the film lodged in her memory concern an astronaut left behind on the moon; as Alice becomes more and more preoccupied with this vision, her life begins to spin out of control.
Shown at Spectacle in its first “Spectober” programme, LE ORME (originally reedited and rereleased in the States and Europe as PRIMAL IMPULSE) is an unsung masterpiece of 70s genre cinema, marrying the sustained ambient dread of gialli with god-tier cinematography by Vittorio Storaro (just after lensing Elizabeth Taylor in the similarly mental IDENTITK and before Bertolucci’s epic folly NOVOCENTO.) Klaus Kinski features in an extended cameo as the head of Mission Control.
“This hallucinatory Italian film resists easy classification, attempting to subjectively portray the fractured, paranoid psyche of a woman suddenly haunted by memories of a bizarre science fiction film seen in childhood. Florinda Balkan drifts through cinematographer Vittorio Storaro‘s strange, beautiful tableaux much like Monica Vitti in RED DESERT. Often mischaracterized as a giallo—I suppose simply because it’s Italian and stars Balkan—this is more of a haunting puzzle film grinding inexorably toward abject hysterics.” —Screen Slate
“Psychedelically haunting… An existentialist adventure that combines the narrative mystery of SOLARIS with the vivid visions of Argento.” —Electric Sheep Magazine
“Seek it out and unravel its mystery…One of the most unique and overlooked Italian films of the ‘70s.” —Moon In The Gutter
This past February saw the passing of legendary Florida Man Ricou Browning, best known for embodying the “Gill Man” in the underwater passages of Jack Arnold’s classic CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON as well as its two sequels. We here at 124 S. 3rd Street wanted to pay homage to Browning’s less-known forays behind the camera as director and screenwriter, respectively.
This is not a career survey; Browning’s most famous creative work is probably the beloved dolphin franchise FLIPPER, which began as a theatrical film and was later adapted to television (before the infamous 1995 reboot with Elijah Wood and Isaac Hayes.) But these two films – the hate-filled grindhouse epic MR. NO LEGS and the bizarro-brain mutant crab thriller ISLAND CLAWS – both speak to Browning’s status as a pillar of Florida filmmaking, sure to offer delight and repulsion in equal measure on the last of these hot summer nights.
MR. NO LEGS
(aka GUN FIGHTER) (aka KILLERS DIE HARD)
dir. Ricou Browning, 1978
Tampa. 90 min.
In English.
MONDAY, AUGUST 7 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 12 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 17 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 19 – 5 PM
“Don’t Double Cross Him or He’ll Cut You Down To Size!”
Spectacle first showed MR. NO LEGS in the summer of 2013, to great acclaim. Here’s how that original synopsis went:
Set in the ugliest Tampa imaginable, MR. NO LEGS follows two self-righteous police detectives (one with the obligatory porn-stache) tracking dope dealers and corrupt fellow cops, while trying to stay out of the clutches of an unstoppable mob enforcer. Enter Mr. No Legs: a martial arts master with many a violent trick hidden up his sleeves—and wheelchair, including shotguns, switchblades and ninja stars!
Meanwhile, racists start a rumble in a bar involving midgets and drag queens, whores get into broken bottle fights, and everyone double-crosses everyone else. Mayhem galore! Featuring a shameless cast of B- and C-listers, including Richard Jaeckel, Lloyd Bochner, John Agar, Rance (Ron’s dad!) Howard, and real-life double amputee Ted Vollrath as the snarling titular hero, MR. NO LEGS is a convoluted, ultraviolent, mean-spirited B-movie actioner that’ll leave you crawling on the ground.
“Nasty and hateful, MR. NO LEGS is of comparable regional interest to Browning’s family-friendlier fare because its drug runners operate out of the Ybor City suburb of Tampa, smuggling heroin via the state’s signature ‘Cuban’ cigars, culminating in a brain-flattening freeway car chase (a la Dukes of Hazzard) that lasts almost fifteen minutes.”
—Daryl J. Williams, The Baffler
ISLAND CLAWS
(aka NIGHT OF THE CLAW) (aka GIANT CLAWS)
dir. Hernan Cardenas, 1980
Florida Straits. 82 min.
In English.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 5 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 9 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, AUGUST 15 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 19 – 3 PM
TV actor Robert Lansing (who also starred in Spectacle favorite 4-D MAN) and Barry Nelson (an American actor who nonetheless played James Bond in the original CASINO ROYALE, and who appeared in THE SHINING the same year he made ISLAND CLAWS) lead as marine biologists whose God-playing experiments result in crabs that grow to become eight feet long, terrorizing the town. These crabs are arguably the main draw of the film, and it makes sense: they were supervised by the great special effects artist Glen Robinson, of JAWS and the 1976 KING KONG remake.
Commingling the gee-whiz spirit of Atomic Era monster pictures with a noirish ambience via its Florida Keys locations, ISLAND CLAWS was Browning’s final go-round with his longtime creative partner and brother-in-law, screenwriter Jack Cowden. There’s an added dash of social consciousness as well, as one subplot concerns mistreatment of Hatian refugees and the film offers a panoramic portrait of a rural community besieged by toxic waste and rampant alcoholism.
Still not convinced? Check out this synopsis from one of the film’s many bootleg VHS releases…
Man is faced with his own destruction through 20th century technology. Nowhere is this more evident than in the lush tropical setting of ISLAND CLAWS. An experiment in Marine Biology goes terribly wrong in a sleepy little town near a nuclear power plant. Bizarre happenings create an aura of fear in the isolated village. Something, somewhere, is creating terror.
Suddenly it shows itself.
The vicious meat-eating crab, one hundred times its normal size, appears to destroy everyone and everything in the town.
The bone chilling climax is reached when the town has to slay the beast or be slain by it.
While the written word has been a constant since its advent, the technology used to create and display it has been in almost constant flux. What started as a slow evolution through stone and pen, exploded into moveable type; and has only increased in speed and innovation for the past 100 years. The lifespan of each technology grows shorter and shorter with every subsequent generation. Setting metal type by hand gives way to the Linotype and Monotype machines, which give way to photo type which gives way to Postscript and IKARUS, which become OpenType, which evolves into Variable Fonts, which gives way to… Well, where do we find ourselves now? This June—with AI getting more and more capable of replacing designers every new day—Spectacle, with support from Order Type Foundry, takes a moment to pause and look back at films highlighting typeface designers and lettering artists, the technologies of the past, and how they dealt (or didn’t deal) with the innovations of their time.
FINAL MARKS: THE ART OF THE CARVED LETTER
Dirs. Frank Muhly Jr. & Peter O’Neill, 1979
United States. 49 min
In English
TUESDAY, JUNE 6 – 7:30 PM [ Buy Tickets ] THURSDAY, JUNE 15 – 7:30 PM with Filmmaker Q&A, this event is $10 [ Buy Tickets ] THURSDAY, JUNE 22 – 10 PM [ Buy Tickets ]
FINAL MARKS documents the work of the John Stevens Shop in Newport, Rhode Island. Founded in 1705 by the eponymous English immigrant, the shop was run by his family for over 220 years until it was purchased by calligrapher John Howard Benson in the 1920s. It remains within the Benson family to this day. By the time the documentary was filmed in the late 1970’s, Benson’s son John Everett Benson, or “Fud”, ran the shop with his associates: John Hegnauer and Brooke Roberts; all of whom appear notably young and hip in bell-bottom jeans and sneakers. It should be noted that even by this point, carving letters into stone was already considered a dying art; replaced on graves and buildings by industrial techniques such as sandblasting, and pneumatic chisels.
The filmmakers were given complete access to the shop for over two years, allowing them to film intimate moments with the artisans in their day-to-day lives. As the subjects correspond with clients, source stone for the shop, and travel to Washington D.C. for an on-site commission adorning the then incomplete I.M. Pei extension of the National Gallery, directors Muhly and O’Neill take a subtle and restrained approach to capturing the shop’s endeavors; creating a film that is as meditative and contemplative as its subjects. The poised restraint of the camera’s movements is an equal match to the elegance of Benson’s lettering.
Fud Benson and Hegnauer act as the primary narrators of the film, musing about their motivations, beliefs, and ideologies as they relate to the practice and vocation of carving letters. For Benson and his team, cutting the stone is only a small part of the endeavor; designing the letterforms and their collective layout is the real challenge. Benson visits the Common Burial Ground in Newport, located just up the street from the shop, to investigate the stonework of those who came before him. He comments on his father’s early carving, his influences, and his abilities as a letterer and letter cutter; primarily focusing on how he used the ancient roman brush style to inform, and give personality to his stone cutting.
Screening with: CONVERSATIONS WITH PAUL RAND
Dir. Preston McClanahan, 1997
United States. 26 min
In English
Director Preston McClanahan is joined by FINAL MARKS filmmaker Peter O’Neill—acting as cinematographer—to document this conversation with famed graphic designer Paul Rand. Shot on 16mm in the designer’s Weston, Connecticut home, the film finds Rand informally discussing such topics as design, art, modernism, and aesthetics. Rand is congenial but at times stiff and codgerly; old and set in his ways. O’Neill’s camera work is just as sharp as it was in FINAL MARKS, elevating this short film and Rand’s work. Fun fact: the film’s titles are co-credited to prolific type designer, and then student, Cyrus Highsmith.
An Evening with Doug Wilson and the PRINTING FILMS Archive
A look at the methods of type creation through the ages and the growing pains of an industry and its workers as the technology changes generationally. With the specter of AI looming over today’s designers, it is interesting to look back at how working class and union typographers dealt with the transition of metal type to photographic processes. A selection of three films from the Printing Films Archive will showcase the historical methods of creating movable type (TYPE SPEAKS), how these methods were radically transformed in the 60s and 70s as new technology displaced the old (FROM HOT METAL TO COLD TYPE), and how workers and union members were affected by and dealt with this transition (FAREWELL ETAOIN SHRDLU).
Spectacle will be joined by Printing Films’s purveyor, Doug Wilson, who will be in attendance to commentate, give context to the films and answer audience questions. Doug Wilson is a writer, product designer and filmmaker based in Denver, Colorado. Wilson directed the 2012 feature-length documentary LINOTYPE: THE FILM which centers around the eponymous typecasting machine, its history, and its demise.
SUNDAY, JUNE 18 – 7:30 PM, One night only, this event is $10 [ Buy Tickets ]
Run of show:
1. TYPE SPEAKS
Dir. Unknown, American Type Founders Company, 1949
United States. 25 min
In English
Narrated by NBC radio personality Ben Grauer, this ATF-produced film is an in-depth and accessible showcase of how type is made from start to finish. From the design & pattern making, to the punch & matrices, to—ultimately—moveable type and the printed word. This film features Warren Chapell’s calligraphic sans serif typeface design, Lydian.
2. FROM HOT METAL TO COLD TYPE
Dir. Unknown, International Typographic Union, c. 1965
United States. 24 min
In English
Created by the International Typographic Union in the mid sixties to cajole union members into learning the new photographic methods of typesetting, this film begins with an explanation of the hot-metal process, then goes on to showcase the many photographic techniques used in setting type; from typesetting via paste-ups, to making plates, to developing negatives. The film follows each new process to the ultimate/inevitable printed conclusion.
3. FAREWELL ETAOIN SHRDLU
Dir. David Loeb Weiss, 1978
United States. 29 min
In English
Narrated by Carl Schlesinger, and named after the keyboard arrangement of the Linotype machine (Etaoin Shrdlu being the Qwerty of the pre-desktop computer age), this film documents the final day of hot metal typesetting within the composing room of the New York Times (Sunday, July 1st, 1978). The Linotype and Ludlow machines being used will be “by morning, relics of the past”. The film gives a detailed account of how a Linotype machine operates, its components, and how it is used by a trained compositor. Followed by the rest of the newspaper making process, including layout, proofing, mold making, and printing; all seen only minutes before deadline. One older staff member decides to make the night his last, retiring alongside the Linotype machine so as to avoid having to learn any of the new computerized photographic methods, which are detailed in the latter part of the film.
In a monologue at the end of the film, Schlesinger takes solace in the fact that, while these new computer processes have replaced what he once knew, there are still human hands, eyes, and minds behind them. If he only knew what was to come.
SYSTEMATICALLY SLOPPY: BRAM DE DOES, TYPE DESIGNER AND TYPOGRAPHER (SYSTEMATISCH SLORDIG: BRAM DE DOES, LETTERONTWERPER EN TYPOGRAAF)
Dir. Coraline Korevaar, 2003
Netherlands. 53 min
In Dutch with English subtitles
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 7 – 7:30 PM [ cancelled due to weather ] SUNDAY, JUNE 18 – 5 PM, featuring post-film discussion with Mathieu Lommen, Erik van Blokland, and Hannes Famira. This event is $10 [ Buy Tickets ] SATURDAY, JUNE 24 – 3 PM [ Buy Tickets ]
Amongst type designers, at least according to the writer, Bram de Does is legendary. A perfectionist obsessed with precision, his legacy and influence far outpace his production—creating only two typefaces in his lifetime. The quality of his types are so highly regarded that he is considered one of the greatest to ever do it. S-tier. SYSTEMATICALLY SLOPPY stars a large cast of Bram’s colleagues and contemporaries, as well as the man himself, in a discussion of his career, his work, his nature, and the nature of work itself. The film features interviews with prominent members of the Dutch type design community, like the late Gerard Unger, both Gerrit and Peter Matthias Noordzij, Mathieu Lommen, a few Enschedés, Jost Hochuli, and more.
The documentary, like Bram, is direct and workmanlike, and features a soundtrack of Bram’s own violin playing. It details Brams early life and career before type design: as an aspiring musician, and a graphic & a book designer for the Joh. Enschedé printing and foundry operation, where he grew to detest life in middle management. The second act of the film tells the origins of Bram’s two masterful typeface designs, Trinité and Lexicon. For a man so good at something, between both book design and type design, it’s wonderfully comforting to listen to him describe how much he loathed it. How much he would rather enjoy life, play music, and farm the land, than have to deal with bosses and Work with a capital W. Bram is mindnumblingly and unfuckwithably talented, but still feels tied to the job, because of a need for income, and is just as alienated as the rest of us.
Spectacle will be joined virtually by Mathieu Lommen and Erik van Blokland for a discussion with Hannes Famira following the film on Sunday June 18th. Lommen is a design historian and a curator of Graphic Design at the Allard Pierson museum of the University of Amsterdam. In addition to appearing on screen in the film, he initiated and edited “Bram de Does: typographer & type designer” in 2003, the first substantial publication devoted to De Does’s life and work. Erik van Blokland is a Dutch type designer, tool developer, and educator. He is the head of the TypeMedia masters program at the Royal Academy of Art, in The Hague, and sells original typefaces through his own LettError studio as well as through foundries like House Industries and Commercial Type. Hannes Famira is a type designer and filmmaker. He is the lead instructor at the Type@Cooper program at Cooper Union, and releases typefaces under his own name through Type Network.
Screening with: THE MAKING OF A RENAISSANCE BOOK
Pr. Dana Atchley, 1969
Belgium, United States. 21 min
In English
Shot entirely on location at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, this short film details the complete process of carving punches, striking and justifying matrices, casting type, and printing text, all of which is based on the writings of Christophe Plantin himself. Special thanks to Book Arts Press and the Rare Book School.
At its core the skate video is a marketing tool, the purpose of which is to increase sales of the industry’s hard and soft goods. Goods like skateboard decks, wheels, shoes, clothing, etc. The videos are usually produced and distributed by the companies who make these goods. They have a team of skateboarders who act as brand ambassadors, and are documented using the product they intend to sell. For this reason, Spectacle screening a skateboard video is rather unusual. In fact, up until now there had been only one to grace the space in the last 12 years, Alien Workshop’s incredible first audio/visual experience: MEMORY SCREEN. It should come as no surprise that the next video to appear would have to be of an artistic merit equal to or greater than the previous. Enter Colin Read’s SPIRIT QUEST, a video that a collective of film obsessives and video editors can only look at in awe. And unlike your usual branded marketing pieces, SPIRIT QUEST exists in a separate world: the independent skate video. The underground. Where the only products being sold are the video itself, and pure unadulterated stoke—which makes it all the more impressive.
With production spanning 4 years, and locations across multiple continents, SPIRIT QUEST is a manic feast of video editing. Undulating between skateboard action and archival animal documentary footage, weaving together the physical movements of both animal and skateboarder, and finding an abundance of similarities and metaphors between the two. Each chapter of the video references a different part of the animal and spirit kingdoms, correlating it with an aspect of skating or video making. Like the independently mobile eyes of a chameleon becoming two side-by-side VX1000 cameras, or bathing monkeys in a hot spring transforming into skaters in a New York City public fountain. Features an all-star cast including Quim Cardona, Bobby Worrest, Vincent Touzery, Taylor Nawrocki, Connor Kammerer, Hiroki Muraoka, and many more.
We acknowledge that while SPIRIT QUEST has a loyal following amongst practitioners, we hope to see many non-skaters in attendance, as this video has plenty to offer any audience.
Umberto Lenzi is one of Italy’s most prolific and under-appreciated filmmakers, having directed over sixty movies in four decades. Most genre fans may know of Umberto Lenzi from CANNIBAL FEROX (1981) and NIGHTMARE CITY (1980). Both films are solid gorefests, but their notoriety reflects only a fraction of Lenzi’s work. This series will focus on Lenzi’s pre-80s contributions to cinema and bring light to Lenzi’s more forgotten repertoire.
A QUIET PLACE TO KILL
(AKA PARANOIA)
Dir. Umberto Lenzi, 1970
Italy. 94 mins
In English
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 1 – 7:30 PM TUESDAY, MARCH 7 – 10 PM FRIDAY, MARCH 24 – 7:30 PM THURSDAY, MARCH 30 – 7:30 PM
After a fiery crash, professional race car driver, Helen, is invited to recuperate at her ex-husband’s villa. Once there, she forms an unexpected bond with her ex’s new wife, and the two women plot his murder. When their plan goes awry, Helen relies on her wits to hide the truth of what happened at sea.
By the end of the 60s, Lenzi directed the first of eight Gialli films, ORGASMO (1969), SO SWEET… SO PERVERSE (1969), A QUIET PLACE TO KILL (1970) and OASIS OF FEAR (1971). These four films represent Lenzi’s first cycle of Giallo, and three showcase his longtime collaboration with Oscar nominee Carroll Baker.
This film isn’t what audiences have come to expect from the Giallo genre, lacking excessive gore or a black-gloved killer. Instead, A QUIET PLACE TO KILL plays like a murder mystery featuring beautiful locations, double-crossing socialites, love triangles, and exciting plot twists.
EYEBALL
Dir. Umberto Lenzi, 1975
Italy. 92 mins
In English
SATURDAY, MARCH 4 – Midnight THURSDAY, MARCH 9 – 10 PM SATURDAY, MARCH 18 – Midnight FRIDAY, MARCH 24 – Midnight
A red-gloved murderer is gouging out the eyes of American tourists. It’s up to Inspector Tudela to discover the killer’s identity and stop them before their sick game is complete.
The international success of Argento’s THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (1970) ushered in the golden age of Giallo and enshrined the trope of the black-gloved killer. Lenzi directed four Gialli during this period: SEVEN BLOOD STAIND ORCHIDS (1971), KNIFE OF ICE (1972), SPASMO (1974) and EYEBALL (1975).
By 1975, the film market was oversaturated with subpar Gialli and the genre’s popularity waned. Lenzi reflected on this decline with his final Giallo, the satirical EYEBALL (1975), an intentionally low-brow film that never takes itself too seriously.
THE TOUGH ONES
(AKA ROME, ARMED TO THE TEETH)
Dir. Umberto Lenzi, 1976
Italy. 94 mins
In English
FRIDAY, MARCH 10 – Midnight TUESDAY, MARCH 14 – 10 PM FRIDAY, MARCH 24 – 10 PM TUESDAY, MARCH 28 – 10 PM
CONTENT WARNING: This film features depictions of sexual assault.
The anti-gang squad, led by the hot-headed Inspector Leo Tanzin, won’t let the rule of law stop their plans to bring down a criminal kingpin. After planting drugs on a suspect known as The Hunchback, Tanzin may have finally met his match.
The late 60s marked the beginning of a period of political violence and social unrest in Italy known as the Years of Lead. Italian filmmakers processed the movement by creating a wave of ultra-violent crime films known as Poliziottesch. These films not only showcase the criminals’ ferocity but also expose parallel brutality and corruption from within the police force.
For four years after EYEBALL, Lenzi turned his attention exclusively to Poliziotteschi films and directed ten movies in the genre between 1974 and 1979. Starring Poliziotteschi staples Maurizio Merli and Tomas Milian, THE TOUGH ONES (1976) is a white-knuckle roller coaster that takes no prisoners.
In case you missed them the first time around, need to see them again, or want to drag your friends to their next favorite flick: join us for our annual encore of the best films and programs that screened in 2022 as voted on by our volunteers and members.
Earth, present day. With human civilization facing ever-worsening climate calamities, the captains of industry set their sights on a new planet. Soon, a secret public-private partnership is selling tickets to Mars at a premium out of reach for the majority of the population, for whom the choice is either indentured servitude in the new offworld colony or perishing in the coming cataclysm. When the world’s governments decide to speed things up by declaring war on Earth and the rabble they’re leaving behind, the planet forges a strategic alliance with an unlikely partner: an underground luddite movement. Some will join the uprising, others will become fanatical defenders of entrenched power structures, while yet others will do everything in their power to continue living exactly the same way they always have. Its star-studded cast and astronomical production values — painstakingly purloined from some of the biggest blockbusters of the past three decades — make EARTH II the most expensive climate disaster epic to be produced for no money.
Starring Keanu Reeves, Will Smith, and Matt Damon, EARTH II reminds us that no matter how far into its final death spiral our species might be, life finds a way.
THE ANTI-BANALITY UNION is an anonymous collective who recut blockbusters to uncover their latent meaning, chiseling away at them to reveal Hollywood’s shameful, disavowed desires. The collective’s first compilation film was a reaction to the jingoism surrounding the tenth anniversary of September 11th, UNCLEAR HOLOCAUST (2011), which compiled every instance of New York City being destroyed in a Hollywood movie. They followed this up with POLICE MORTALITY (2013), which revealed the suicidal internal logic of the police apparatus by taking dozens of cop movies and cutting out the “bad guys,” leaving the cops free to massacre each other. STATE OF EMERGENCE (2014) was a zombie movie with no zombies, a distillation of the entire genre’s narcissistic immunopolitics into one gory feature. Now, the ABU has set its sights on climate collapse, scouring the past four decades of disaster movies and combining them into an action-packed analysis of Hollywood’s pathological climate grief in EARTH II.
Structured as if it were the final inhale and exhale of Mother Nature from her deathbed, the carefully assembled long takes and immersive soundscapes that make up Barley’s masterful debut feature transmute shadow-blanketed trees, waterfalls and sparse signs of wildlife into haunting alien figures. With one last breath, a decaying post-human world collapses into eternal abstraction. Shot on iPhone 6 Plus.
SCOTT BARLEY is an artist-filmmaker, drone musician, writer and lecturer working between Scotland and Wales whose films (much of which are generously accessible through his website) have been exhibited over the last decade at venues such as BFI Southbank, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Venice Biennale and Telluride Film Festival. In 2018, Barley co-founded the filmmaking collective Obscuritads, and in 2021, EYE Filmmuseum permanently inducted SLEEP HAS HER HOUSE into its archive. Since 2017, Barley has been making his ambitious second feature film, THE SEA BEHIND HER HEAD, with support from the BFI and DocSociety, along with two new shorts titled THE FLESH and WITHIN WITHOUT HORIZON.
John is just an average man working as a sound technician for a New York City news station, until one day his pregnant wife is brutally murdered after witnessing the kidnapping of a young woman in broad daylight. Turning to the police for help, John soon learns that the city is overrun with crime and the police are too busy to help. Dressing as a white ninja, John takes to the streets as a sword wielding vigilante hell bent on cleaning up the streets of the city he once loved by ridding it of muggers, pickpockets, rapists, and gang members. However, in John’s quest for justice, he soon finds himself the target of every criminal in the city, including a mysterious villain known only as the Plutonium Killer. Will John survive to become the hero that New York City so desperately needs?
Originally directed by and starring martial arts actor John Liu (The Secret Rivals, Invincible Armor) in his only American production, New York Ninja was filmed entirely on 35mm in 1984, but the project was abandoned during production resulting in all original sound materials, scripts, and treatments going missing. 35 years later, Vinegar Syndrome acquired the original unedited camera negative and painstakingly constructed and completed the film. Enlisting the voice talents of genre favorites: Don “The Dragon” Wilson (Bloodfist, Whatever it Takes), Linnea Quigley (Return of the Living Dead, Nightmare Sisters), Michael Berryman (The Hills have Eyes, Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies), Vince Murdocco (Night Hunter, LA Wars), Matt Mitler (The Mutilator, Battle for the Lost Planet), Leon Isaac Kennedy (Lone Wolf McQuade, Penitentiary), Ginger Lynn Allen (The Devil’s Rejects, Vice Academy), and Cynthia Rothrock (China O’Brien, Martial Law) Vinegar Syndrome is extremely proud to present this truly one of kind film experience. Restored in 4K from the original camera elements, New York Ninja is finally available in all of its ridiculous over-the-top glory for the first time ever after spending nearly four decades in film obscurity.
After the conniving understudy of an avant-garde theater group knocks off the star actor, he finds himself in a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse with Inspector Ike, New York City’s Greatest Police Detective.
A lost “TV movie” from the 1970’s, INSPECTOR IKE is a warm-hearted satire, a celebration of detective serials, mixing visual gags, slapstick, gross food, and heartfelt emotion, featuring a rogue’s gallery of NYC’s best comedians carried out with a deadpan absurdist sensibility inspired by COLUMBO and THE NAKED GUN.
“I do no penance in order to reach Heaven. I am not very pious either. But I am here, doing the only work I can offer to God, without shame: my poetry.”
Adapted from Octavio Paz’s The Traps of Faith, I, THE WORST OF ALL stars Assumpta Serna as Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, a real-life nun in 17th century Mexico who, having been a poet, a playwright, a philosopher and a composer, is still widely considered the most prolific author of the colonial era. Bemberg’s film details Sister Juana’s persecution at the hands of the Archbishop of Mexico (Lautaro Murua), using the Spanish Inquisition as a lens by which too indict more contemporary misogyny and homophobia within Latin America.
Bemberg’s final work was misrepresented by distributors at the time of its release; vintage VHS packaging quotes the Boston Globe as follows: “Lesbian passion SEETHING behind convent walls… Engrossing, Enriching & Elegant!” Nevertheless, I, THE WORST OF ALL was Argentina’s official submission for the Best Foreign Language Film of 1991. Ripe for rediscovery, it is a lovingly detailed and introspective historical drama that rewards patient viewing in its analysis of against-the-wall feminism.
“A biopic that apprehends there is no unriddling how genius is made, only observing with delight a mind that receives all of the world’s pleasures and pains through the screen of an animating knowledge. to write is a fervid, inexplicable compulsion that need find its outlet and languishes without” —Film critic Kit Duckworth
“An erotically charged, impassioned work. Assumpta Serna is luminous!” —The Village Voice
“Charged with an ambiguity and an irony that is electrifying… Bristles with a spirit of feminism and has us pondering its inescapable implications for the Roman Catholic Church today: what of the status of its women, of freedom of expression and intellectual pursuit?” —Los Angeles Times
In 13th century France, a Dominican Friar descends upon an Edenic village on orders from the Vatican to root out heretics in the countryside. There is little evidence of such heresy to motivate the hunt, but so sayeth the good book, seek and ye shall find. News of a “healing woman” practicing homeopathic medicine (and her practice’s provenance in the local legend of a saintly greyhound) disturbs the friar, and his subsequent confrontations with the healer begin a gentle philosophical march into the nature of faith and its many means of expression. Brooding on the peripheries are struggles of power, secular and otherwise, which are dissected for their tendencies to contradict and align when convenient.
SORCERESS is the collaboration of two filmmakers; Pamela Berger and Suzanne Schiffman. Pamela Berger is a medievalist specializing in iconography. She teaches film and medieval art at Boston College, and has directed two other films, The Imported Bridegroom and Killian’s Chronicles. Suzanne Schiffman was a behind-the-scenes powerhouse of the French New Wave, serving as a script-supervisor for Godard, writing numerous films for Truffaut (Day for Night, The Last Metro, among others) and collaborating closely with Rivette throughout his career, providing the scenario for many of his films and co-directing Out 1.
JOHN AND JANE centers on the personal and professional lives of six telemarketers working in a Bombay call center. Tasked with cajoling American customers into buying things, the workers single-mindedly chase the American dream in neoliberal India. Darkly comic and deeply unnerving, the refreshingly unconventional style of the documentary blurs the line between fact and fiction and provides a sobering look at the insidious effects of globalization on culture and identity in a highly unequal world.
“Call it George A. Romero’s Bollywood OFFICE SPACE… an enraged critique of Western excess that you can dance to.” –Slant Magazine
A family’s flat tire on a barren stretch of road, with only a diner dotting the landscape, leads them to Granny, the seemingly nice old woman who runs the establishment.
Released in 2004, SKINNED DEEP plays like a surreal riff on THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE from an alternate dimension. It follows a family on a cross country road trip who stumbes into a hellish diner run by ‘the Surgeon General’ and his nightmare family, including ‘Brian’ (who has a massive cranium) and ‘Plates’ – a maniac who throws….plates – played by Warwick Davis.
Clearly crafted with a lot of love and care, SKINNED DEEP is mandatory midnight viewing for slasher fans.
A secret organization of ruthless criminals known as The Vampires haunts the streets and ballrooms of Paris. Journalist Philippe Guérande seeks to unravel their nefarious plot. At the center of it all stands the mysterious and elusive muse to the criminals, Irma Vep, brought to life with a dangerously seductive glamour by the legendary Musidora.
Released in its day as 10 “episodes” over the course of 7 months, Les Vampires is now typically shown in marathon format—a drawn-out affair clocking in at 7 hours, by turns tedious and exhilarating. Its plotting is byzantine, consisting of reversals of identity and double- and triple-crosses, straining logic in deference to the theatricality of a given scenario.
Olivier Assayas has once again renewed interest in this classic of serialized cinema with the enormously entertaining mini-series revamp of his 1996 film Irma Vep. If cinema is truly in crisis, as Assayas enthusiastically proclaims (he promises this is good news), then perhaps a means of diagnosing its illness can be found in searching the images and modes of its past that still haunt us today. Though Irma Vep’s series run is now complete, those uninitiated to Feuillade’s vision are likely eager to spend more time within this fantastical world. With this in mind, Spectacle is pleased to present a marathon screening of Les Vampires, with a soundtrack composed of original works from local artists and friends of the theater.
After obliterating a fighter jet and its pilot, a mysterious flying object stalks a nearby island and its inhabitants: a young couple manning the lighthouse, and two visiting scuba divers. The craft jams all communications, making the nearby military installation unable to offer any help or deduce the intentions of this uninvited guest. The ship interacts with these poor trapped souls like a child wielding a magnifying glass over ants, possibly not realizing the violent effects of its own actions, making escape from the island a nightmare.
Released the same year as Spielberg’s CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and another movie about wars in stars (or something like that), FOES was written and directed by a young John Coats. Coats also did the special effects and appears on screen as Larry, the lighthouse operator. While this would be his only directorial credit, Coats went on to have a prolific career as a visual effects artist with credits including: RAMBO III, AUSTIN POWERS: THE SPY WHO SHAGGED ME, UHF, and WHITE CHICKS. With that career in mind, one can look at FOES as the auteur triumph that it is: the creation of a young artist working with what they had at their disposal. An incredible achievement for such a low budget. It’s a shame that Coats did not go on to direct more features, as this is a rather remarkable freshmen effort.
Shot around the Anacapa island off the coast of southern California, the location is one of the biggest stars in this film. Coats combines stunning helicopter shots with dazzling special effects to create a vibe that is solely FOES.
“The Tricontinental cinema must infiltrate the conventional cinema and blow it up.” – Glauber Rocha
Shot on location in a highly stylized high-contrast black & white, Glauber Rocha’s debut film, BARRAVENTO (1962) tells the tragic tale of a man who tries to liberate his people from the mystical Candomblé religion, which he recognizes an oppressive tool of social and political control.
Screening in a new restoration. Special thanks to Kino Lorber.
Screening with: ENTRE O MAR E O TENDAL
Dir. Alexandre Robatto Filho, 1953
21 mins. Brazil.
In Portuguese with English subtitles.
Dental surgeon Alexandre Robatto Filho had been filming documentary shorts in Salvador since the 1930s, but it was with ENTRE O MAR E O TENDAL that he refined and developed his authentic style. Shot in the Chega Nego and Carimbamba beaches, this short portrays the daily work of a fishing community as they catch xaréu fish (Caranx hippos).
“It’s better than sex. It’s better than love.” It’s cinema! Or CINEMANIA, to be exact. Stephen Kijak and Angela Christlieb’s documentary follows five film-obsessed New Yorkers in their daily trevails as they struggle to fit as many films as possible into a single day (3-6 is the average number). From spending their unemployment checks on movie tickets to surviving off meat-heavy, constipating diets (it reduces mid-screening bathroom visits), to hoarding stacks of old program notes, CINEMANIA is as vivid a portrait of what it means to be a film-lover as you can find on screen. As the film celebrates its 20th anniversary, we’re happy to host two of the film’s subjects on 10/23 to give their differing, and sometimes contentious, opinions on the film.
“I don’t go to weddings; I don’t go to funerals; I don’t visit people in the hospital if I have a screening to go to.”
“These are not crazy people. Maladjusted and obsessed, yes, but who’s to say what normal is? I think it makes more sense to see movies all day than to golf, play video games or gamble” – Roger Ebert
“There is not sufficient evidence for the non-existence of the city of Chronopolis. On the contrary, dreams and manuscripts similarly conclude that the history of this city is a history of eternity and desire. Despite the monotony of immortality, they live in expectation; a turning point will occur during a momentary encounter with a human being. This moment is, in fact, being prepared for.”
SURVIVAL RESEARCH LABS: SELECTED VIDEO WORKS
Founded in 1978 by inventor and engineer Mark Pauline, Survival Research Laboratories bring the concept of Industrial Performance Art to its most logical and extreme end. The bodies in a typical SRL happening are not breathing, but they’re certainly alive. Weapons-grade robotics and fresh carcasses find themselves engaged in a dangerous, cacophonous marriage of flesh, fire, steel, blood, oil, and electrocution. Tonight the field is filled with smoke, cannonballs, shattered glass, and hypnotized excruciating screams. The only institution that does mechano-mortal combat better is the U.S. Military.
TUESDAY, JANUARY 10 – 7:30 PM SATURDAY, JANUARY 14 – 7:30 PM MONDAY, JANUARY 23 – 7:30 PM
This fascinating political look at a little-known chapter in women’s history tells the story of “Jane,” the Chicago-based women’s health group who performed nearly 12,000 safe illegal abortions between 1969 and 1973 with no formal medical training.
Screening with: WITH A VENGEANCE: THE FIGHT FOR REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM
dir. Lori Hiris, 1989
40 min, United States.
In English.
This urgent and timely film is a history of the struggle for reproductive freedom since the 1960s, reflecting the wider history of the contemporary women’s movement. WITH A VENGEANCE is an empowering look at the strength and breadth of the current women’s movement which asks why current battles resemble those of the 60s. Rare archival footage and interviews with early abortion rights activists, including members of Redstockings and the JANE Collective, are intercut with young women who testify to the need for multi-racial grassroots coalitions. Flo Kennedy and Byllye Avery exemplify African American women’s roles as leaders, making connections between racism, reproductive freedom and healthcare for the poor.
A deliberately-paced dark comedy/murder mystery whodunit which begins as a tale of class struggle when a group of three wealthy land-developers try pressuring a young postman and his handicapped mother (played by Chabrol’s real-life wife) to sell their family home. Filled with conspiracy, blackmail and pranks gone too far, POULET AU VINAIGRE is an indictment of the wealthy starring an eccentric ensemble cast, each with their own duplicitous intentions.
Jumping between Paris and London as it traces the lives of two young women (Pascal Ogier and Leonie Mellinger) as they muse about ghosts and memories, Ken McMullen’s Ghost Dance falls somewhere between Celine and Julie Go Boating and San Soleil in its investigation into Jacques Derrida’s phantasmagoric philosophy. Though intellectually rigorous, the film maintains a humorous tone, balancing heady ideas alongside entrancing visuals and witty dialogue.
On a dark and stormy night, while his family are away, two strangers ring George Manning’s doorbell. He probably shouldn’t have answered it, he really shouldn’t have invited them in, and he definitely shouldn’t have slept with them. Now George must fight for his life and escape their DEATH GAME…
Staring academy award-nominated actors Sondra Locke and Seymour Cassel, DEATH GAME is a home invasion fever dream about a man’s poor decision-making.
Off-screen tension between neophyte director Peter Traynor and actors Locke and Cassel added organic chaos to the scripted mania. Producer Larry Spiegel agreed, saying that “the onscreen madness of DEATH GAME was fueled by the behind-the-scenes volatility.” Traynor’s inexperience as a director frustrated the cast, with Locke writing, “whenever the director didn’t know exactly what he was doing, which was all the time, he would suggest that either Colleen or I eat something or break something.” This sentiment was likely shared with actor, Seymour Cassel, who refused to loop his lines in post-production after filming a particularly brutal food-based scene. Cinematographer David Worth ultimately lent his voice to the film by painstakingly dubbing all of Cassel’s lines himself.
Eli Roth later remade the film, KNOCK KNOCK (2015), which was executive produced by DEATH GAME director Peter Traynor and lead actors Sondra Lock and Colleen Camp.
In the miserable Northeastern Brazil, a ruthless land Baron wants to throw a poor farming community out of their land. They unite in an attempt to overthrow the Baron and win back their freedom.
One of the zaniest Brazilian musicals is directed by one of the greatest film composers of Brazilian cinema. The film played the NYFF in 1974, but has since received little attention outside Brazil, where it has become a kind of cult hit over the last 20 years. The music is wonderful, and the campy aesthetics feel like nothing out of Brazilian cinema from this period.
Rosa von Praunheim teamed up with acclaimed photographer Mariette Pathy Allen for this nuanced portrait of American trans lives and politics in the 1990s. Similar in form to ARMY OF LOVERS and the AIDS Trilogy, this film explores the various factions of the burgeoning trans rights movement, from pioneers like Leslie Feinberg and Virginia Prince to events like the activist group Transexual Menace’s protest at the first Transgender Lobby Day and the Southern Comfort and Fantasia Fair conferences. Woefully underseen and rarely screened, TRANSEXUAL MENACE is an essential piece of trans film history that’s sadly now more relevant than ever.
ROSA VON PRAUNHEIM is a German film director, author, painter and one of the most famous gay rights activists in the German-speaking world. In over 50 years, von Praunheim has made more than 150 films (short and feature-length films). His works influenced the development of LGBTQ+ rights movements worldwide. He began his career associated to the New German Cinema as a senior member of the Berlin school of underground filmmaking. He took the artistic female name Rosa von Praunheim to remind people of the pink triangle that homosexuals had to wear in Nazi concentration camps, as well as the Frankfurt neighborhood of Praunheim where he grew up. A pioneer of Queer Cinema, von Praunheim has been an activist in the gay rights movement. He was an early advocate of AIDS awareness and safer sex. His films center on gay-related themes and strong female characters, are characterized by excess and employ a campy style. They have featured such personalities as Keith Haring, Larry Kramer, Diamanda Galás, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Judith Malina, Jeff Stryker, Jayne County, Divine and a row of Warhol superstars.
A mythic portrait of Elvis Presley (Jacob Snovel) and those in his orbit—particularly his wife Priscilla (Cate Jones)—during the weeks that led to his television comeback special in 1968. Haunted by surreal visions and ridden with self-doubt, the listless King of Rock ‘n Roll quarrels with his management, friends and family on the Graceland estate before a sudden tabloid claim of a bastard son sends him on an existential road trip.
From there, writer/director Mickey Reece conjures an entrancing journey that ruminates on the enigma of celebrity, the profundity of progeny, and the anxieties of art, while Joe Cappa’s stark black and white cinematography envelops the outstanding ensemble cast in a dreamlike glow that is unlike any Elvis flick you’ve ever encountered.
A CASE OF MIMICRY: SHORTS BY ANAHITA RAZMI
Anahita Razmi, 2004–2020
Germany, England, Iran. 55 min
In EnglishSUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 – 7:30 PM SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 – 5 PM WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28 – 7:30 PM
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Anahita Razmi is a video and performance artist based between Berlin, Germany, and London UK. Her films generate cognitive dissonance and question mainstream assumptions about culture, identity, and spirituality. Razmi uses tropes, the collective unconscious, and objects of national and cultural importance in a rather tongue-in-cheek way to elicit laughter and insight. In these films, she removes the traditional meaning of cultural symbols and instead employs new ideas, contexts, and situations onto them. This video series provides an overview of her works from the last two decades which have been shown across the world at galleries and institutions such as: Carbon 12, Dubai, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Museo Jumex, Mexico, The National Art Center, Tokyo, and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany.
This program of shorts by Anahita Razmi will feature the following pieces from 2004 to 2020, spanning the last twenty years of her career:
How your Veil can help you in the Case of an Earthquake (Lesson 1-8) is a video about a big earthquake in the region of Bam, Iran in December 2003. In the video, the Islamic veil – in this case, a “chador” – is used as a functional object. Shot in high contrast black and white, the video shows a rigorous instruction in eight steps on how to use your veil as a lifesaver in the case of an earthquake: a dry run, that is reminiscent of stewardess instructions.
AAAAAAAAAAAH merges a selection of different audio “AAAAAAAAAH”-extracts taken from pop songs and Islamic “azans” (call to prayer).
Here Scripts dives into representational values, equations and statements are dropped into uncertainty: as a video mashup, the work is juggling with notions of place and context, onsite vs offsite, narration vs construction, here vs elsewhere.
Scroll stock, pluck stock, click stock, drum stock, tap stock, rattle stock focuses on hand movements and technological devices, composing a choreography using online stock footage videos of scrolling hands and fingers.
White Wall Tehran is a very short video shot In January 2007 where Ramzi was stopped by the Iranian revolution guard on the streets in Tehran, because she had apparently been filming them with her video camera. They took her in and erased 27 seconds of her video by filming the white inner wall of their headquarters. The erasure is now the production of the artwork.
PARTIES uses black-and-white versions of logos and banners belonging to past and current Iranian political parties and groups, set to a snapping/clapping beat.
Middle East Coast West Coast is re-enacting the video “East Coast West Coast” (1969) by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. In the original video, Holt and Smithson improvise a conversation based on stereotypical and opposing positions of US East Coast and West Coast lifestyle, art, and artists. Holt assumes the role of an intellectual, conceptual artist from New York, while Smithson plays the laid-back Californian driven by feelings and instinct.
