“I’ve wasted the greater part of my life looking for money and trying to get along… trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paintbox which is a movie. I’ve spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with a movie. It’s about two percent moviemaking and ninety-eight percent hustling. It’s no way to spend a life.”
— Orson Welles, Filmmaker

“For a time I considered sparing your wretched little planet, Cybertron. But now… You shall witness… Its DISMEMBERMENT!”
— Unicron, Planet-eater

Orson Welles: “The Boy Wonder” turned enfant terrible of Hollywood. Twice named the greatest director of all time in separate polls conducted by the British Film Institute, and the filmmaker who cinephiles around the world believe to be, if not one the greatest, undoubtedly one of the most consequential of all time. Welles passed away in 1985 at the age of 70, a mere five days after having completed his final performance: The voice of Unicron, the gargantuan planet-eating menace from the 1986 animated Transformers movie. A regrettably undignified end to the career of a man who once revolutionized the film industry and our concept of cinematic auteurship with his landmark debut, CITIZEN KANE.

Despite KANE’s recognition as a groundbreaking achievement, Welles spent most of his career unable to fund projects of his own artistic control, instead finding himself embroiled in constant battles with studios and producers over the budget, tone, casting, and length of his films. By the 1970s, Welles had turned to self-financing his work, choosing to lease out his famously mercurial, larger-than-life personality to any number of talk shows, commercials, television shows, voice-overs, and cheapie productions willing to offer the money needed to keep his productions afloat. Perhaps jaded by his Sisyphean tenure in Hollywood, Welles eventually grew ambivalent about his legacy in the film industry, lamenting the amount of time spent having to finance his work as opposed to actually working, and going so far as to refer to his time as a filmmaker as “about 2% moviemaking and 98% hustling”.

Thankfully, that 2% has lived on through continued repertory screenings, restorations, and even the long-belated completion of Welles’ final feature, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, in 2018. But we here at Spectacle believe that it’s important to acknowledge not just the man’s completed films, but the painstaking efforts it took for him to get them to that point— The endless parade of B-movie villains, documentary narrators, cameo appearances, and thankless bit parts that collectively comprise his “hustle”. In that spirit, Spectacle Theater is excited to present this series featuring some of our favorite selections from that 98%.

THE MAN WHO SAW TOMORROW
dir. Robert Guenette, 1981
USA. 88 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, APRIL 1 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, APRIL 14 – MIDNIGHT
THURSDAY, APRIL 27 – 10 PM

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In the early 1980s, before the era of Ancient Aliens and Beyond Belief, Orson Welles hosted this HBO “documentary” special about the life of Michel de Nostradame— aka Nostradamus— the 16th-century French apothecary and reputed seer whose “prophecies” “many” “experts” portend to have come true. Whether or not Nostradamus’ hundreds of vaguely provocative four-line poems were truly prophetic of future events (they weren’t) is still up for debate (it isn’t), but one thing he couldn’t predict is that this cable TV oddity would live a healthy second life on the 90s VHS market.

Much of the film’s lasting popularity has to do with Welles, who’s star power greatly outshines the material. Welles truly makes a meal out of his hosting duties, filling his oak-paneled library with a thick haze of cigar smoke as he struts around in an all-black ruffled suit. He alternates between skepticism and suggestion with aplomb, delivering lines like, “Was it coincidence… Or prophecy?”; ”Was he a QUACK… Or was he a true PROPHET?” with such unwarranted bravado that one wonders if he’s actually starting to enjoy himself. This is, after all, the same person who gave us F FOR FAKE, whose influence is felt in Robert Guenette’s dramatizations of Nostradamus’ predictions.

NECROMANCY
dir. Bert I. Gordon, 1972
USA. 83 min.
In English.

MONDAY, APRIL 3 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, APRIL 11 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, APRIL 21 – MIDNIGHT
SATURDAY, APRIL 29 – 10 PM

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From Spectacle favorite Bert I. Gordon (PICTURE MOMMY DEAD) comes this occult thriller about bringing life to the dead and death to the living. Pamela Franklin (THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE) and Michael Ontkean (TWIN PEAK’s Sheriff Truman) star as Lori and Frank, a married couple who relocate to a northern California town following a recent tragedy. Lori is unnerved when she begins to have bizarre visions upon their arrival, and her suspicions only deepen once they meet Frank’s new boss, the mysterious Mr. Cato (Orson Welles), who appears to maintain an outsized influence among the locals.

Filming took place in 1970, shortly after Welles’ return to Hollywood following the collapse of his decades-in-the-works DON QUIXOTE project, and according to Josh Karp’s The Making of The Other Side of the Wind, was one of the first projects that Welles openly acknowledged he had taken mainly for the money. Thankfully for him, there wasn’t much effort required on his part, what with most of his scenes limited to the same few interiors and Mr. Cato’s uncanny ability to communicate entire monologues via fireplace. Yet he still excels in the role, giving off an otherworldly vibe as he coldly delivers lines like, “You’ll forgive me if I sometimes lose myself in my enthusiasm”.

WILD REEDS
dir. André Téchiné, 1994
France. 114 min.
In French with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, MARCH 3 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 7 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22 – 10 PM

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New York theatrical premiere of new restoration by Altered Innocence and Anus Films.

Set against the backdrop of the last days of the French-Algerian war and amidst the lush landscapes of Southern France, WILD REEDS is a coming-of-age saga looking at the sexual awakening of four teenagers. The quartet discover sensual delights while grappling with inner-conflict and political differences. Sensitive François (Gaël Morel) and feminist-communist Maïté (Élodie Bouchez) are in a somewhat stunted relationship, bonding over a mutual love for movies and rock’n’roll. However when François meets Serge (Stéphane Rideau), a handsome muscular youth from the local farming community, he comes to acknowledge his latent homosexuality, while Maïté is seduced by Henri (Frédéric Gorny), a teenage exile whose political stance is in complete opposition to hers. A powerful take on adolescent sexuality and social turmoil, André Téchiné’s WILD REEDS is a poignant, moving, and life affirming expression of teenage angst and triumph.

ONE NIGHT ONLY!

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16 – 7:30 PM (This event is $10)

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To mark the 20th anniversary of Deborah Stratman’s IN ORDER NOT TO BE HERE, Spectacle presents a special screening with the generous support of Video Data Bank. Alongside the filmmaker’s unsettling nocturnal tour through suburban non-places will be four more shorts from Stratman’s inimitable body of work that showcase her deft investigations of optical technology and land use, stretching from the Canadian Yukon to the cosmos.

Stick around after the show for a remote Q&A with Deborah Stratman and Joaquín de la Puente, the show stopping “running man” of IN ORDER NOT TO BE HERE.

IN ORDER NOT TO BE HERE
dir. Deborah Stratman, 2002
USA, 35 min
In English

Composed entirely of night-time footage set in empty parking lots, stores and suburban neighborhoods, this haunting piece illuminates suburban America’s spiritual vacancies as well as its physical ones. The static banality of these spaces become more ominous as Stratman weaves in allusions to the mechanisms of police violence and surveillance that maintain the apparent safety and comfort of these environments, culminating in a breathtaking finale as an anonymous man (Joaquín de la Puente) makes an inhuman effort to escape middle-America’s panopticon.

…THESE BLAZEING STARRS!
dir. Deborah Stratman, 2011
USA, 14 min
In English

In this found-footage essay film, the mystic associations ascribed to comets in classical belief systems are juxtaposed with the empirical gaze of NASA experiments. Though the modern probing of celestial bodies strives for objectivity, Stratman’s deployment of these films defamiliarize these objects in hallucinogenic fashion to outline a long, futile tradition of human beings attempting to augur truth from the stars.

HACKED CIRCUIT
dir. Deborah Stratman, 2014
USA, 15 min
In English

Stratman returns to the subject of surveillance in this seemingly unsuspicious demystification of sound design in Hollywood filmmaking. A tracking shot that ventures from the street and into a recording studio observes a Foley artist record noises for a climactic scene in Francis Ford Copolla’s paranoid thriller THE CONVERSATION. As the invisibility of this craftsmanship takes on a parallel to the invisibility of the state’s all-seeing eye, Stratman’s camera floats back into the night and leaves us to question the unseen forces governing our daily existence.

OPTIMISM
dir. Deborah Stratman, 2018
USA/Canada, 15 min
In English

Assembled with Super 8 footage shot while working in Dawson City, Canada, this small town symphony observes the day-to-day existence of a sunless snow-swept world living in the shadow of a 19th-century mining boom. While the wealth obtained through the theft and extraction of native land from this place have left it, denizens of the town’s period-themed casino grasp for their chance to strike gold.

LAIKA
dir. Deborah Stratman, 2021
USA, 5 min
In English

The legacy of space test dogs, both pioneers and fodder for scientific progress, are paid tribute in this music video for experimental composer Olivia Block.

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Deborah Stratman is an artist and filmmaker based in Chicago, Illinois whose work has been featured at venues and festivals around the world, including MoMA, Centre Pompidou, Austrian Film Museum, Sundance, CHP:DOX and TIFF ‒just to name a few. Alongside a large and diverse filmography of short films, Stratman has brought her distinctive modes of experimental documentary filmmaking into several acclaimed features, such as O’ER THE LAND (2009) and THE ILLINOIS PARABLES (2016).

This showcase would not be possible without the support of Video Data Bank. Special thanks to Bradley Eros and Benji Santos.

LAGUNA AVE
dir. David Buchanan, 2021
USA, 80 min
In English

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 2 – 7:30 PM w/ Q&A (This event is $10)
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16 – MIDNIGHT

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A former musician, Russel, with inner demons and a prosthetic hand dive into the mysterious and sinister world of his downstairs neighbor. As he searches for work in Hollywood’s underbelly. His former boss owes him money, his partner is always out of town and inaccessible, and his new downstairs neighbor, Gary keeps him awake at night with strange noises. But everything changes one evening when Gary pays Russell a visit introducing him to a sinister world of an accelerationist conspiracy.

There will be a Q&A with the filmmaker following the screening on Friday, 12/2.

In partnership with Icarus Films, Spectacle is thrilled to host this tribute to the late and great documentarian Heddy Honigmann, who passed on in May of 2022. Her 1992 documentary METAL AND MELANCHOLY – about taxicab drivers in her native Peru – was a surprise Spectacle hit when we showed it in 2012; this miniature tribute reprises that film plus four others, representing a small taste of Honigmann’s overall filmmaking career, which spanned four decades and several continents. Honigmann was renown for her incisive perspective on the foibles of humankind, and her ability to seek answers to delicate questions without probing or harassing her subject-collaborators. Taken in sum, they represent a vision of nonfiction filmmaking equally as shrewd as it is compassionate. “I don’t do interviews,” Honigmann said. “I make conversation.”

METAL AND MELANCHOLY
dir. Heddy Honigmann, 1992
Peru/The Netherlands, 80 min
In Spanish w/ English subtitles

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 2 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8 – 10 PM
MONDAY, DECEMBER 19 – 7:30 PM

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“I once read that a famous Spanish poet said that Peru was made of metal and melancholy. He was right, perhaps because pain and poverty have made us hard as the hardest of our metals, and melancholy because we are also tender and we long for better times that were lost in oblivion. “

This documentary is an offbeat “road movie” in which acclaimed documentarian Heddy Honigmann travels with, and thereby discovers the stories of, taxi drivers in Lima. In the early 1990s, in response to Peru’s inflationary economy and a government destabilized by corruption and Shining Path terrorism, many middle-class professionals used their own cars to moonlight as taxi drivers in order to weather the financial crisis. METAL AND MELANCHOLY learns how these part-time cabbies, including a teacher, a Ministry of Justice employee, a film actor, and a policeman, among others, manage to navigate through Lima’s congested, pothole-filled streets in dilapidated cars whose survival techniques are as fascinating as those of their owners.

“Offers a candid and kaleidoscopic view of the poverty-stricken metropolis through each driver-philosopher’s tale of hardship. Some of the stories are disarmingly amusing, even comical; others are poignant and sobering.” — Ted Shen, Chicago Reader

O AMOR NATURAL
dir. Heddy Honigmann, 1995
76 mins. Brazil.
In Brazilian Portuguese with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 4 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 9 – 10 PM
MONDAY, DECEMBER 19 – 10 PM

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O AMOR NATURAL is a documentary film about the erotic poetry of one of the greatest Latin American poets of the 20th century, the Brazilian Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987).

The erotic poems of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, a household name in Brazil, remained unpublished during his lifetime, as he feared they would be deemed pornographic. In this celebration of his poetry and sensual vision, elderly residents of Rio read his poems and comment on their graphic, voluptuous imagery with tremendous candor and enthusiasm. “We’re old. We’re not dead!” interjects one reader, as memories of stolen pleasures and bittersweet melancholy unfold. Says Honigmann: “The poems sometimes functioned as a kind of corkscrew, sometimes as a glass of water, sometimes as a glass of brandy.”

“Approaching literature not through critical analysis but through its effect on everyday people – in this case, elderly Brazilians gamely reciting the poet’s voluptuous verses – this warm, simple film uncovers a rich vein of ageless, grassroots sensuality and joie de vivre.” —Variety

THE UNDERGROUND ORCHESTRA
dir. Heddy Honigmann, 1999
108 mins. Peru/France.
In French with English subtitles.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 5 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 10 – 5 PM
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13 – 7:30 PM

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THE UNDERGROUND ORCHESTRA is a glorious documentary profile of musicians who play on the sidewalks of Paris and in the Metro. Honigmann illuminates the lives and music of a ragtag group of international bohemians: an Argentine pianist, Romanian father and son violinists, a Venezuelan harpist, and singers from Mali and Vietnam. All are united by their experiences with political repression, and by a luminous spirit and boundless courage that led them to flee any number of horrendous situations throughout the world. Finding refuge in Paris, music becomes their economic lifeline, but as this film makes movingly clear, it is also a shining metaphor for their will to survive.

FOREVER
dir. Heddy Honigmann, 2007
95 mins. Peru/France.
In French with English subtitles.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 5 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 10 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13 – 10 PM

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Through a leisurely tour of the world-famous Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the final resting place for legendary writers, composers, painters and other artists from around the world, FOREVER provides an unusually poignant, emotionally powerful meditation on relations between the living and the dead, and the immortal power of art. During its visits to many famous graves – including those of Frédéric Chopin, Marcel Proust, Guillaume Apollinaire, Amadeo Modigliani, Oscar Wilde, Jean-Auguste Ingres, Maria Callas, Georges Méliès, Jim Morrison, Yves Montand and Simone Signoret – FOREVER also introduces us to the Parisians and tourists who make pilgrimages to these tombs, whether to pay their respects, leave flowers or personal messages, or even to tend to the upkeep of the tombstones. The film also pays moving tribute to talented young artists who died prematurely as well as to the less celebrated deceased remembered primarily by next of kin.

Honigmann’s own artistry is also on display here, including a poetic cinematic style that conveys the melancholy beauty of the cemetery’s memorial statuary and tombstones, and her ability to elicit surprisingly intimate human-interest stories from those she encounters. As a result, FOREVER will provide every viewer the opportunity to reflect on the transcendental importance of art in our lives, on our need to commune with the spirits of the departed, and perhaps on our own mortality as well.

OBLIVION
dir. Heddy Honigmann, 2008
93 mins. Peru.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7 – 10 PM
MONDAY, DECEMBER 12 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16 – 10 PM

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OBLIVION focuses on Peru’s capital city of Lima, revealing its startling contrasts of wealth and poverty, and how many of its poorest citizens have survived decades of economic crisis, terrorism and government violence, denial of workers’ rights, and political corruption. Demonstrating anew Honigmann’s extraordinary talent as one of the most empathetic of documentary filmmakers, OBLIVION provides intimate and moving portraits of street musicians, singers, vendors, shoeshine boys, and the gymnasts (some mere children) and jugglers who perform at traffic stops.

The film also visits with small business owners, from a leather-goods repairman and a presidential sash manufacturer to a frog-juice vendor, and contrasts the work and home environments of bartenders, waiters and waitresses employed at Lima’s finest restaurants and hotels but who live in slums in the city’s surrounding hillsides. For most viewers, who are reminded of Peru only by news reports of a major earthquake, a presidential election or the discovery of a decades-old mass grave of army massacre victims, OBLIVION introduces us to the everyday reality of Lima, celebrating a people who, albeit politically powerless, have resisted being consigned to oblivion.