This October, in collaboration with our friends at Los Sures, Mi Casa Studios and the office of City Council Member Antonio Reynoso, Spectacle is thrilled to host the first-ever Southside Film Festival, a three-day celebration of Latino cinema (plus a block party on October 9) combining short documentaries about the neighborhood around South 3rd Street, a one-night-only outdoor screening of Leon Gast’s seminal Fania Records documentary OUR LATIN THING (1972) and a reprise of our classic LA BODEGA SOLD DREAMS program spotlighting Nuyorican cinema of the 1960s and 70s.

SOUTHSIDE SHORTS PROGRAM
dir. various, 2015-2021
approx 90 mins. United States.
In English, and in Spanish with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8 – 7:30 PM in-theater
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10 – 7:30 PM in-theater

FILMMAKERS IN PERSON FOR Q+A!

This program spotlights filmmakers working in Williamsburg’s South Side, focusing in particular on portrait documentaries of beloved figures such as Tonita (Caribbean Sports Club), Papa Frenchie (Frenchie’s Gym) and boxer Wesley Ferrer, AKA “El Bongocero”.

NATAS ES SATAN
dir. Miguel Ángel Álvarez, 1977
89 mins. United States.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8 – 10 PM in-theater

Best known for his comic persona “El Men” back in Puerto Rico, Miguel Ángel Álvarez delivers a blood-curdling performance in the lurid 1977 exploitation thriller NATAS ES SATAN, as an NYPD officer who is literally the devil (re)incarnate. (Screenwriter Joe Zayas based his sordid tale of blackmail and murder on true events.) Despite being Satan, Natás is also a surprisingly plausible supervillain, at one point enacting vengeance on his enemy, a businessman named Victor (Frank Moro), by hiring a “double” (played by Moro again) to put him in a compromising position. Like LA TIGRESA, this film was shot entirely en español on location in Manhattan; while the dramatic stakes are small, NATAS ES SATAN succeeds as both a crime procedural and a hysterical psychodrama. Long before Natas has invited three transgender assassins over to his place to murder Victor during a DIY porn screening, you’ll agree the end product also feels not unlike an artifact from an alternate universe. Stay alert…. Natas may return!

NATAS ES SATAN is screening with English subtitles for the first time in the United States, translated by Aida Garrido and timed by Garret Linn.

YE YO
dir. Tony Betancourt, 1975
79 mins. United States/Puerto Rico.
In Spanish.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8 – MIDNIGHT in-theater

Puerto Ricans were imposed U.S. citizenship in 1917 via the Jones-Shafroth Act. Lore recounts that Puerto Ricans were given citizenship so that they could be discharged as cannon fodder for the First World War and all succeeding wars that the U.S. engaged in thereafter. Produced by Changó International Films and shot by the prolific adult film cinematographer Larry Revene, YE YO tells the story of Rogelio Sotomayor, a Vietnam veteran and former prisoner of war with PTSD who returns to New York after the war. Upon his return he finds his wife Nydia with a lover and murders them. In an epic, days-long run-off from corrupt cops, Ye Yo relies on his community for cover in this Blaxploitation inspired drama.

YE YO is screening with English subtitles for the first time in the United States, translated by Aida Garrido and timed by Garret Linn.

OUR LATIN THING
(NUESTRA COSA LATINA)
dir. Leon Gast, 1972
100 mins. United States.
In English and Spanish.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9 – 7:00 PM – OUTDOOR at LOS SURES COMMUNITY CENTER (145 S 3rd St)
and at stream.spectacletheater.com

FREE! ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Among other legends, 2021 witnessed the passing of documentarian Leon Gast (WHEN WE WERE KINGS) and salsa legend / “El Judio Marvellosio” Larry Harlow. In honor of both – as well as the first-ever Southside Film Festival – we’re hosting a one-night-only outdoor screening of Gast’s classic Fania Records documentary OUR LATIN THING, widely heralded as one of the greatest concert films ever made.

Gast’s relationship with Fania predates OUR LATIN THING, as he had photographed seminal album covers released by the then-burgeoning salsa label. As a result, OUR LATIN THING benefits from an obvious camaraderie between the stars – which, beside Harlow, include Ray Baretto, Johnny Pacheco, Hector Lavoe, José Feliciano and Willie Colón – and the filmmaker. The film spans two days, interweaving an epic concert at the now-defunct midtown Cheetah nightclub with street scenes from the Lower East Side – santeria, domino games, shaved ice, a riveting cockfight – with a roving camera whose ambling style anticipates works like Richard Linklater’s SLACKER. At the center of it all is the unforgettable Fania All-Stars concert at Cheetah – a sweaty, panoramic drama in its own right.

Spectacle is thrilled to present OUR LATIN THING, one night only, outdoors and online, free of charge, in a gorgeous new digital restoration courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.

Special thanks to Edda Manriques and Geri Spolan-Gast.

LA TIGRESA
dir. Glauco del Mar, 1969
85 mins. United States.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8 – MIDNIGHT in-theater

Glauco del Mar’s penultimate film LA TIGRESA is perhapsx his most accomplished, yet far less popular than his apogee, 1975’s TONO BICICLETA. It is in this bewilderingly feminist redemption narrative that we meet Patricia, a young woman living with her father, who is mercilessly ullied by her schoolmates, assaulted and raped in her home and is left with no resolve. Her alcoholic good-for-nothing father is killed during her attack. After inheriting some money and recovering her personal power, she sets off to avenge every single last person that did her wrong – making her list, and checking it twice. This classic redemption tale combines the amazing Perla Faith a legendary vedette with espiritismo, folklore, Miguel Poventud’s jangly guitar boleros, corrupt cops, and entrancing Harlem landscapes.

LA BODEGA SOLD DREAMS: SHORTS 1968-1980
dirs. Various
approx. 90 mins.
In English and Spanish with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10 – 3PM in-theater

Bracketed by two short TV documentaries – PUERTO RICO: A COLONY THE AMERICAN WAY, and THE DEVIL IS A CONDITION – this program looks at depictions of both Puerto Rican and Nuyorican culture regarding the island’s de facto status as an outpost of American imperialism. The material screened will include interviews with Ruben Berrios, leader of the Independence party, Rafael Hernández Colón, governor candidate for the Popular Democratic Party, and Carlos Romero Barceló, governor of the islands, known murderer, and darling of the Pro-Statehood party, the PNP. (Today, the PNP is the same political party incriminated in the recent upheavals over the #rickygate, #rickyrenuncia, #wandarenuncia, etcetera.)

SHORT EYES
dir. Robert M. Young, 1977
100 mins. United States.
In English.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10 – 5PM in-theater

Adapted by poet Miguel Piñero from his play of the same name, SHORT EYES is closely based on his experiences incarcerated at Sing Sing after an armed robbery charge. Robert M. Young (ALAMBRISTA!) shot the film on location in the infamous Tombs, on White Street, while the prison was fully operational; the plot follows a gang of Black and Puerto Rican inmates figuring out what to do with a bourgeois white inmate named Clark (Bruce Davidson, making his big screen debut) who has been accused of raping an underage girl. “Short Eyes” is the in-prison nickname for pederasts, and Piñero’s screenplay doesn’t hold back in dissecting the dog-eat-dog culture among the inmates – several of whom have designs on Clark, who they consider the lowest of the low. A flawlessly executed ensemble piece buttressed by a silky-yet-menacing Curtis Mayfield soundtrack, SHORT EYES is a gripping and surprisingly even-handed look at life behind bars, widely considered one of the greatest prison films ever made. Young’s compassionate realism and focus on authenticity is a perfect match for Piñero, who also acts in the film (as do Mayfield and Freddy Fender, in bit parts), and whose run-ins with law enforcement would continue during and after production.

(SHORT EYES will screen with a 17-minute clip of Miguel Piñero reading at Magic Gallery in 1984, preserved and digitized thanks to XFR Collective.)

OUT 1
dir. Jacques Rivette, 1971
773 mins. France.
In French w English subtitles.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3 – 10AM EST
ONLINE TICKETS

Spectacle is back! And how better to hack away at your deficit of hours missed in the dark with strangers than a marathon screening of Jacques Rivette’s colossal New Wave touchstone, OUT 1.

Set in “Paris and its double,” Rivette’s improvisation-heavy film follows two theater troupes reimagining Aeschylus’s tragedies as gestural avant-garde theater. Their rehearsals intersect with two swindlers who uncover (or don’t) a string of conspiratorial messages (or not) hinting to the existence of a secret organization (or nobody). Inquiries abound, solutions, not so much, as a post-’68 malaise motivates energies of paranoia and discovery in this durational dissection of reality (or this thing that looks like it). This marathon screening will mark OUT 1’s return to Spectacle 11 years after it was first shown here in 2010, well before its 2015 restoration made it widely available.

Program Schedule
Ep 1: 10am to 11:30am
Ep 2: 11:30am to 1:20pm
Ep 3: 1:30pm to 3:20pm
Break: 3:30pm to 4:30pm
Ep 4: 4:30pm to 6:15pm
Ep 5: 6:15pm to 7:45pm
Ep 6: 7:45pm to 9:25pm
Break: 9:30pm to 10:30pm
Ep 7: 10:30pm to 12:10am
Ep 8: 12:15am to 1:30am

Special thanks to Kino Lorber.

PANELSTORY
dir. Věra Chytilová, 1979.
Czechoslovakia. 100 min.
In Czech with English subtitles.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 2 – 7:30P + 10P EST in-theater and at stream.spectacletheater.com
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
ONLINE TICKETS

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. 

Tracey Moffatt may be best known in the art world as a photographer. But even her photographs have the precise staging, lighting, and narrative nuance of film stills, ambiguously illuminating troubled episodes of history and identity. When actually working in film, the effect is amplified further. Action unfolds in the isolated, artificial space of the photographic frame, where every element is perfected and fixed in place. Even when conveyed through the finely orchestrated swoop and pan of a sequence shot. Yet from these constructed scenes spring indelibly human subjects.

Daughter of an Aboriginal mother and white father, Moffatt grew up “between black relations and white relations” just as Aboriginal Australia was becoming politicized in the fight to reclaim its land rights. But disinterested in either the idealized or patronizing portrayals found in typical ethnographic cinema made about her community (and inevitably by outsiders), she sought more experimental approaches that could cut to the heart of the tales she told.

Programmed in collaboration with Women Make Movies.

beDEVIL
dir. Tracey Moffatt, 1993
90 mins. Australia.
In English.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 – 10PM EST in-theater and at stream.spectacletheater.com
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 – 10PM EST in-theater and at stream.spectacletheater.com
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 – 5PM EST in-theater and at stream.spectacletheater.com
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 – 7:30PM EST in-theater and at stream.spectacletheater.com

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.

AN EFFECT OF THE REAL: THE SHORT FILMS
dir. Tracey Moffat, 1987-1999
74 mins. Australia.
In English.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 – 5PM EST in-theater and at stream.spectacletheater.com
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 – 10PM EST in-theater and at stream.spectacletheater.com
FRIDAY. SEPTEMBER 17 – 10PM EST in-theater and at stream.spectacletheater.com
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 –  10PM EST in-theater and at stream.spectacletheater.com

NICE COLORED GIRLS
dir. Tracey Moffatt, 1987
16 mins. Australia.

Colonialist ethnographic narratives intertwine with a finely-crafted account of modern aboriginal women out on the town. To finance the night, they pick up a “captain” (old and white, of course) to exploit in turn, closing a historical cycle. The satisfaction of seeing these systems inverted is matched only by the pop verve of Moffatt’s filmmaking.

NIGHT CRIES: A RURAL TRAGEDY
dir. Tracey Moffatt, 1990
20 mins. Australia.

In an early expression of much of the stylization she’d later put to use in beDEVIL — matte paintings, stagey sets, otherworldly intercut memories — Moffatt explores a stifling interracial family relationship in the middle of nowhere. An aging black daughter cares for her ancient white mother alone in the arid outback, dreaming of freedom, but what else does she have? Meanwhile, popular Aboriginal crooner Jimmy Little haunts the margins of the story.

HEAVEN
dir. Tracey Moffatt, 1997
28 mins. Australia.

Flipping ingrained cinema codes, Moffatt exploits the unmediated POV possibilities of digital video in female gaze. No less intrusive than its male counterpart, Moffatt’s camera eye voyeuristically observes beefcake surfers changing clothes in beach parking lots or moves in for direct interrogation. But though her subjects speak to her, amused or irritated or perplexed, we never hear a word — the camera is too distracted, dropping regularly from chiseled pecs to bulging speedos.

ARTIST
dirs. Tracey Moffatt & Gary Hillberg, 1999
10 mins. Australia.

The plight of the artist as a viewed through cinema history: blocked inspiration, self-doubt, an uncomprehending public. Sometimes the only catharsis is to bring it all down. A transition point from Moffatt’s earlier films to later collage work.

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.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 11 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 14 – 5 PM with filmmaker Hayashi Kaizô and makeup artist Yoshida Mika for combination Zoom/IRL Q+A!
(This event is $10.)
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 26 – 10PM

GET YOUR TICKETS!

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.