Born and raised in Finland, writer and astrologer Antero Alli spent most of his adult life in Portland, Oregon as a daring polymath in the underground performing arts. Making his name in experimental paratheater, Alli wrote, produced, and directed various works that toured the West Coast. He co-founded the Nomad VideoFilm Festival in 1992, and the next year he began making films of his own. When he passed in 2023, Alli left a legacy of 16 features and numerous music videos, shorts, and self-styled “videopoems” that mark him as one of the singular auteurs of the Pacific arthouse circuit.

In his vision statement, Alli said: “Each film made represents a personal dream coming true and a fulfillment of the dreams of those who join me. Filmmaking as a deep image river—flooding forth from an active dreamtime vortex where the personal awakens to the transpersonal through the lens of an insurrection of the Poetic Imagination.”

A determined opportunist, Alli’s entire filmography was produced in-house and self-distributed through Vertical Pool Productions, the collaborative art platform he created with his wife, musician Thia (Sylvi) Alli. With their budgets rarely exceeding $10,000, Alli’s films are explicitly irreverent concerning traditional Hollywood storytelling and lofty production garnish. The grainy DV-shot soliloquies dedicated to the countercultural scenes of Capitol Hill, Seattle, and Haight-Ashbury stand out firmly in an age of high-quality consumer-grade video recording technology.

In 2023, before Alli’s passing after a long battle with lymphoma, Spectacle screened his final film, BLUE FIRE, along with a virtual Q&A with the director. Now, we proudly present a posthumous retrospective of Alli’s finest works.

THE DRIVETIME
dir. Antero Alli, 1995
United States, 88 min.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, MARCH 15 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 21 – 10 PM

TICKETS

Flux is a techno-librarian assigned by government contract to travel back to 1999 to preserve video footage documenting police brutality against protesters and civilians in Seattle.

A self-styled “cyber-fi video” and a collaboration with astrologer, musician, and activist Rob Brezny, THE DRIVETIME is a true ’90s relic, part cyberpunk satirical drama and part lo-fi psychedelic essay film. Heavily inspired by early internet culture, THE DRIVETIME digitally paints a grim authoritative future (one all too familiar to our current reality) with humor, style, and hippie absurdism. It’s a hypnagogic time-traveling revolt that will bend the minds of even the most seasoned psychonauts.

One of the most chilling yet innovative cinematic essays on the flaws of today’s technology-obsessed society is Antero Alli’s THE DRIVETIME. This iconoclastic view of a future world projects a dazzling stream-of-consciousness skein of technical wizardry and provocative wordplay … THE DRIVETIME forces viewers to think about where our world is heading. This work should be seen by anyone who mistakenly believes that all’s calm and well in our little digital sphere.
—Phil Hall, Wired

Each screening will be accompanied by the short COLD FORCE.

HYSTERIA
dir. Antero Alli, 2002
United States, 81 min.

SATURDAY, MARCH 1 – 5 PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 9 – 5 PM (w/Q&A)
THURSDAY, MARCH 27 – 10 PM

TICKETS (GENERAL ADMISSION)

TICKETS (Q&A)

Ikar is a Croatian soldier whose Catholic faith reaches a breaking point during a vivid hallucination. As he tries to rebuild his life post-service in Oakland, his neighbors take an interest in him, changing the trajectory of all their lives.

Another collaboration, this time with lead actor Jakob Bokulich, as a response to the rising islamophobia in America post-9/11, HYSTERIA predates the five-alarm warnings rung by recent psychological faith smashes like Schrader’s FIRST REFORMED. Stunning in its dreamlike quality yet grounded by the chemistry between Anastasia Vega and Atosa Babaoff, who play the Iranian sisters who live next to Ikar, HYSTERIA is a chilling, surrealist fable about the perils of religious fundamentalism. Bokulich will join us for a Q&A after the March 9 screening.

Each screening will be accompanied by the short DRIVING MYSELF THERE.

THE ALCHEMY OF SULPHUR
dir. Antero Alli, 2021
United States, 108 min.

FRIDAY, MARCH 7 – 5 PM
SATURDAY, MARCH 22 – 5 PM
MONDAY, MARCH 31 – 10 PM (w/virtual Q&A)

TICKETS (GENERAL ADMISSION)

TICKETS (Q&A)

While dealing with a tumultuous breakup, Hope writes herself into a short story as a character who falls in love with a tree scholar named Phineas. As she becomes enraptured in her fiction, unexpected real-world consequences occur.

Possibly Alli’s most intimate film, the micro-mystical romantic drama THE ALCHEMY OF SULPHUR explores the spectrum of human sexuality, creative writing as coping, and dendrology. Its galaxy-brained performance art parable about love and desire is highlighted by local Portland collage artist Douglas Allen, featured in a whirlwind dual role as Phineas and Keith, an asexual interpretive dancer who becomes drawn to Hope’s creative process. A true poetic example of late style, THE ALCHEMY OF SULPHUR reflects on what ignites our imaginations. A virtual Q&A with Allen will follow the March 31 screening.

Each screening will be accompanied by the short WITCH BURNING.

TRACER
dir. Antero Alli, 2022
United States, 93 min.

SATURDAY, MARCH 8 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 18 – 7:30 PM (w/virtual Q&A)

TICKETS (GENERAL ADMISSION)

TICKETS (Q&A)

In the not-so-distant future, the Russian Mafia can enter the dream states of targets through skilled psychic agents known as Tracers. One Tracer (Douglas Allen) is tracking a gunrunner turned sailor who’s trying to bond with his son using the new designer drug C-9.

Alli uses a tech film noir to stage a postmodern postmortem on liberal democracy as we know it. Inspired by America’s cultural and political paranoia after the 2016 election and the attempted insurrection of January 2021, TRACER is an expressionistic snapshot of an empire’s funeral, more concerned with the interpersonal than gazing into the future. There will be a virtual Q&A with Allen after the March 18 screening.

Each screening will be accompanied by the short THE WORD WEIRD.

RIP ANTERO ALLI (1952-2023)

Special thanks to Thia (Sylvi) Alli.

L’OBSESSION TECHNIQUE: 16MM & SUPER8 FILM FROM LIGHT CONE + CJC + L’ETNA

L’Obsession Technique is a selection of works curated by MaLo Sutra Fish taken mostly from Light Cone and Collectif Jeune Cinéma catalogues, two major landmarks of the Parisian Experimental Scene. It is the extended version of a program shown at Emerson College, Boston, centered either around personal technical obsessions or presenting major film collectives, core subjects of MaLo Sutra Fish’s practice. Showcasing filmmakers from L’Etna and L’Abominable, with a special tribute to the Australian NanoLab, the common thread is the technical play as an illustration of memory.

MaLo is a member of the Parisian Film Collective L’Etna collaborating often with AgX Film Collective – Boston.

TICKETS

 

THIS LITTLE LIGHT OF MINE
Dir. MaLo Sutra Fish, 2020.
France. 8 min.
8mm-to-digital.

Shot in Super 8 Ektachrome and using the codes of experimental cinema, this short film evokes the 4 stages a person undergoes when having a tonic-clonic seizure, one of the most violent experiences the body inflicts on itself.

THE FOLLOWING IMAGES NEVER HAPPENED
Dir. Noé Grenier, 2022.
France. 7 min.
Digital.

THE FOLLOWING IMAGES NEVER HAPPENED is a found-footage short based on a 35mm trailer of Jan de Bont’s action film Twister. It refers to an incident of collective hallucination of screening that never took place: the May 22, 1996 screening of the same film at the Can-View Drive-In in southern Canada, cancelled due to a tornado alert. However, according to the urban legend, the viewers actually watched the film until the crucial scene, in the middle of a storm. The director recreates in a subjective, fragmentary way, along the lines of avant-garde cinema, the memory of images never projected, never seen, ultimately never happened – and yet, eerily familiar.

DECADENTIA
Dir. Guillaume Anglard, 2024.
France. 10 min.
8mm-to-digital.

Like an archive, DECADENTIA reveals the remains of an unknown civilization in a post-apocalyptic landscape.

CROSSING
Dir. Richard Tuohy, 2016.
Australia. 11 min.
16mm.

Across the sea. Across the street. Cross processed images of fraught neighbours Korea and Japan in a pointillist sea of grain.

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH BAG
Dir. Dianna Barrie, 2020-2021.
Australia. 6 min.
16mm

A cameraless portrait of the artist. Super 8 cartridges placed inside a black cotton bag, the film advanced via a hand crank. The tiny gaps in the fabric weave make for dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of tiny pinholes.

MUE(S)
Dir. Frédérique Menant, 2015.
France. 11 min.
16mm

I’ve crossed the solstices

In the shadows, a breath

Under the skin, a passage

Molting is an unspeakable experience.

When the moult detaches, it opens up a tiny space, from self to self, where the image trembles.

TERMINUS FOR YOU
Nicolas Rey, 1996.
France. 10 min.
16mm.

Terminus for you, by Nicolas Rey, takes us on a strange journey. That of passengers in the Paris metro. they use a moving railway which takes them from one platform to another, from one line to another and from one destination to the next. What do we actually see ?

AESTHETIC MEMORY
Dir. Isao Yamada, 1988.
Japan. 8 min.
8mm-to-digital.

Part of his practice to this day, Isao Yamada is usually found walking around with a super8 camera. Aesthetic Memory is part of his series Instant Daily Film Sketches.

“When walking with Yamada, I sense his toughness as a walker, and he has a unique attentiveness to every object , so when Yamada finds something interesting or beautiful, he stops and looks at it endlessly. But he also switches his attention quickly and suddenly moving to the next, already talking in a different context. This unique tempo, a mixture of concentration and openness to reality and his distinctive behaviour that seems to seek for a world which is quite different from the immediate reality, is intriguing…. You could say that it’s all about a journey, but this collection of works might particularly put you in the mood for ‘yes, it actually is’.”

-Higashi Yoichi

MICROCINEMA SOLIDARITY: Video Revelations from Visual Studies Workshop
dir. Various, 1971-1975
United States, 75 min
In English

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 22 – 5 PM

TICKETS (this event is $10)

Presented by Tara Merenda Nelson, VSW Curator.

Visual Studies Workshop (VSW) is a nonprofit artist space, audiovisual archive, and microcinema founded in 1969 in Rochester, NY with a mission to support the makers and interpreters of images. Critically interested in the role images play in society, VSW became a repository for discarded media deemed unusable or obsolete by larger institutions and has provided unrestricted access to artists interested in the creative reuse of archives.

Most tapes in the collection originate from artists, activists, citizen journalists, and public access programming from Central and Western New York, as well as significant early experimental artists’ video productions. VSW has worked to preserve the most unique—and endangered—tapes in this library.

This screening will present recently preserved tapes highlighting the vibrant, largely unseen history of video art and activism in New York State. Pulling from the archive of video collective Portable Channel, which operated between 1971-1986, the selections include homemade experiments with the electronic image by artists Steina and Woody Vasulkas, a Videofreex party (where everyone is using PortaPacks), and coverage of the 1971 Attica uprising.

NO SEX LAST NIGHT (DOUBLE BLIND)
dir. Sophie Calle and Greg Shephard, 1992
United States, 76 mins
In English and French

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 8 – 5 PM
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 13 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 19 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27 – 10 PM

TICKETS

“Both road movie and diary of a hopelessly neurotic romance between two passive-aggressives, No Sex Last Night is compelling viewing.”
—Amy Taubin, The Village Voice

French artist Sophie Calle turns her typically voyeuristic impulses inward, dragging her former lover, American photographer Greg Shephard, along for the ride in this fraught and daring auto-ethnographic documentation of romance on the rocks.

NO SEX LAST NIGHT begins with Calle “burying” her friend, the gay autofictional novelist Hervé Guibert, before embarking on a road trip from New York to California with Shephard in an untrustworthy Cadillac. The lovers, who have not lived together long, have their camcorders ablaze the whole way. Meant to be Calle’s first video project, the two photographers found themselves primarily interested in still images, and frozen excerpts from the camcorder footage make up most of the runtime.

Special thanks to Electronic Arts Intermix and Micah Gottlieb.

Few contemporary filmmakers have been so adept at depicting the myriad ways love hurts as François Ozon, who delights in placing his tortured lovers in a variety of dynamics, stepping back, and watching the psychological and sexual sparks fly. Alternately tender and cruel, and always very queer, his prolific run at the end of the millennium offers no shortage of Ant-Valentines fodder, presented here in new restorations by distributor Altered Innocence.

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SITCOM
dir. François Ozon, 1998
France, 80 min
In French with English subtitles

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 8 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 18 – 10 PM
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24 – 7:30 PM

TICKETS

An upper-middle-class family experiences upheaval when they adopt a laboratory mouse as a pet. As each member interacts with the new addition to the household, the animal exerts a strange power that prompts them to explore their repressed psychosexual desires. A satire of bourgeois values—something of a cross between John Waters and Luis Buñuel—Ozon offers surreal delights and a rollercoaster of perversion.

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CRIMINAL LOVERS
dir. François Ozon, 1999
France, 97 min
In French with English subtitles

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 7 – 10 PM
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 10 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 26 – 10 PM

TICKETS

After debuting as part of Anthology Film Archives’ Narrow Rooms series last year, the restoration of CRIMINAL LOVERS returns to New York. An audacious queer take on Hansel and Gretel, the film starts with a thrill kill that sends protagonists Alice and Luc down the rabbit hole. Like a wannabe Bonnie and Clyde, the couple flee their safe suburban lives before getting lost in a forest, only to find themselves trapped by a psychotic woodsman. What awaits in his cellar—from sexual enlightenment to karmic retribution—must be seen to be believed.

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WATER DROPS ON BURNING ROCKS
dir. François Ozon, 2000
France, 86 mins
In French with English subtitles

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 6 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 11 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14 – MIDNIGHT
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 22 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27 – 7:30 PM

TICKETS

WATER DROPS ON BURNING ROCKS adapts an unproduced play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ozon’s favorite filmmaker. Franz, a naïve 19-year-old, is seduced by smug yet alluring 50-year-old businessman Leopold and quickly moves into his apartment. Domestic bliss is short-lived as a sadomasochistic relationship takes root, and the power dynamics continue to shift upon the arrival of both men’s ex-girlfriends: the spry Anna and mysterious Véra. This ménage à quatre leads to sex, despair, and of course, a musical number.

Special thanks to Altered Innocence.