“When it comes to motion pictures, I’ve always been a lot more interested in the motion than the pictures. Images, in fact, have always been for me primarily a medium through which motion (or energy) can manifest.” —Fred Worden

The four decades of work that comprise avant-gardist Fred Worden’s cinematic explorations are a constantly evolving set of collisions (and collusions) involving images and abstractions that range from satirical jabs at the self-seriousness of experimental film culture, sincere tributes and contemplations of the medium, or pure jolts of pulsating visual energy—but most often, all of the above. Throughout his artistic life and career as a professor, Worden has found himself at the epicenter of creative communities on the west coast (where he graduated from CalArts and made early collaborations with Chris Langdon), the east coast (evidenced in his longtime friendships with the likes of Ken Jacobs and Ernie Gehr), and in between (as a member of the Criss-Cross artists group from Boulder). Despite the acclaim of his peers and past showcases of his work at some of our city’s most prestigious venues in past decades (including, MoMA, New York Film Festival, and the Whitney Biennial), Worden’s work has endured a protracted period of neglect from exhibition at a time where appreciation for experimental film has reached a recent zenith.

In the hopes of introducing Worden’s incomparable contributions to a new generation of New York-based nervous systems, Spectacle is honored to present a career-spanning retrospective across two nights thanks to the generous support of guest co-programmer Paul Attard, archivist Mark Toscano, Fred Worden, and his family.

Programs 1 and 2 on Friday, December 6th, will be projected almost entirely on 16mm prints, while Programs 3 and 4 on Saturday, December 7th, encompass Worden’s uniquely humorous and perception-scrambling forays into the frontiers of digital video.

Mark Toscano will be present at each screening to provide extended introductions to the programs.

Co-programming and program introductions written by Paul Attard. Special thanks to Mark Toscano, Fred Worden, and Monique Ernst.

Additional thanks to Audrey Johnson, Mark Maloney, Brett Kashmere and Seth Mitter (Canyon Cinema), Robert Schneider (The Film-makers’ Cooperative), Kathy Del Beccaro, Sebastian Becerra, and Paul Crucero

STROBE WARNING. Most of the films in this program contain intense flicker effects unsafe for those sensitive to light.

PROGRAM 1
OPTICAL REVERIES: EARLY FILM SKETCHES

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6 – 7:30PM

SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS

Comprised of some of Worden’s earliest cinematic experiments, this program brings together a selection of titles that film preservationist Mark Toscano once described as “sketches”—works that are short, sweet, to the point, and entirely unconcerned with making any “big” statement. Mostly formal and silent in nature, these films are far from clinical; Worden’s trademark wit remains ever-present. Whether addressing the audience directly in VENUSVILLE, zooming through space in IN & OUT, scratching directly onto celluloid in BOULEVARD, or reveling in the primordial power of light in THROBS, these titles fully embrace what could be described as “termite art.”

VENUSVILLE
Dir. Fred Worden, Chris Langdon, 1973
United States. 10 min.

“The two filmmakers had a bet: how easily can you tell the difference between a moving image of a still object, and a freeze frame of the same? Pretty easily. No montage, no human subjects, minimal visual content, and the artists basically pissing on the fourth wall by calling attention in every way possible to the artifice of what they’re doing. An anti-film school film made at film school.” —Mark Toscano

FOUR FRAMES
Dir. Fred Worden
1976. United States.
10 min. 16mm.
Silent.

“Color/form, light/shadow, flatness/depth, figuration/abstraction, landscape/paint, all collaging and colliding in an exploratory, arrhythmic, kinetic dance constructed a frame at a time by Fred Worden on his optical printer. This early film now reveals itself as a revelatory early warning sign of Worden’s filmmaking to come, comprising ten minutes extrapolated from only four frames of source imagery.” —Mark Toscano

BON AMI
1977. United States.
7 min. 16mm.
Silent.

“This little-seen abstract work of Worden’s began with short expressionistic/biomorphic color sequences he generated from scratched and abraded film strips made via a liberal application of the titular cleaning agent. These passages were then spun into an elusive, experiential coherence via Fred’s analytic and poetic optical printing, resulting in an evolving cascade of loops and rhythms.” —Mark Toscano

HERE, THERE, NOW, LATER
1983. United States.
3 min. 16mm.
Silent.

“An almost offhand drive through a mountain tunnel is optically recomposed by Worden to create perceptual collisions between dark and light, presence and absence. The delineated curve of the roadway maintains its spatial integrity, a visual axis for Worden’s flickering temporal reorganizations.” —Mark Toscano

IN & OUT
1983. United States.
3 min. 16mm.
Silent.

“Employing a view of the World Trade Center shot at a seemingly casual angle from an apartment window, Worden employs single frame optical printing to rapidly alternate between different times of day/night, as well as apartment lights on/off, exploding and collapsing these opposing interior and exterior spaces.” —Mark Toscano

PLOTTING THE GREY SCALE: 2 OR 3 QUICK TRAVERSES
1985. United States.
7 min. 16mm.
Silent.

“A monochromatic field study of sorts, along perpendicular axes. Varying shades of grey flicker in increasing intensity, giving way to a kinetic study of activated organic forms deriving from rapidly changing optically printed freeze frames of trees. A variation on the grey flicker recurs, climaxing in a modestly manipulated study of leaves moving in the wind. Overall, this unusual and visually affecting film brings together some of Worden’s most elemental interests, including stasis, motion, rhythm, visual consonance and dissonance, and the tension between the pictorial and the abstract, all with a characteristic phenomenological undercurrent.” —Mark Toscano

LURE
1986. United States.
5 min. 16mm. Silent.

“An accident on a frozen lake. A story spread across a visual matrix in parallel with the spread across the breaking ice of the hero/victim. Gambling and luxuriating on nature’s thin ice mandates a payback, no? Welcome to that sinking feeling.” —Fred Worden

BOULEVARD
1989. United States.
9 min. 16mm.

“Conceived as a homage and an answer to Len Lye’s hand-processed FREE RADICALS. Lye’s film consists of direct, non-photographic markings on the emulsion, accompanied by a soundtrack of African percussion (surely exotic for the time). Lye’s choice, after a long career in both commercial and experimental cinema, to turn to such bare and primitive material (“aboriginal” was his chosen term) fits with my own obsession with sticking as closely as possible to the primary elements of the film in order to invoke the underlying and real power of cinema.” —Fred Worden

THROBS
1972. United States.
7 min. 16mm.

“Fred Worden’s magical CalArts thesis film collages all manner of spectacle (car crashes, football, circus, television) into a hypnotic and dream-like reverie that feels somehow personal, as if a revisited catalog of images that might once have given him delight in his youth. The eclectic source material, woven together with genuine and unexpected beauty on the optical printer, moves from refrain to refrain with a fluidity that suggests a free-associating cinematic consciousness, a momentary pause in the now on the then.” —Mark Toscano

“My 1973 CalArts MFA film. A first stab at orchestrating the flow of images on a purely kinetic/musical basis. A product of the then wondrous seeming optical printer housed in the bowels of the CalArts Film School. My first ride on that big machine.” —Fred Worden

Approximate running time (with intro and a reel change break): 86 min.

STROBE WARNING. Most of the films in this program contain intense flicker effects unsafe for those sensitive to light.

PROGRAM 2
MONOCHROME PULSES: 16mm B&W FLICKER FILMS

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6 – 10PM

SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS

“Not enough is said about darkness. Much of what I do stars darkness. Couldn’t do it without a yielding embracing darkness. Talk to Fred Worden about bringing forward the hidden intervals of darkness during projection. Give it a role, as in my Nervous works, as in Fred’s, Tony Conrad, Victor Grauer, Peter Kubelka, and entwined with hits of light we see things never seen before.” —Ken Jacobs

Described by Worden himself as “Optical Crack for the mind and body” (and “dangerously non-addictive”—though I would disagree with that statement), these “flicker films” are some of the most visceral and vibrant works in his oeuvre. Starting with INSOMNIA, a warm-up of sorts before plunging headfirst into the primordial abyss, and continuing with a suite of titles that will have you questioning the very faculties of your eyesight (AUTOMATIC WRITING 2, THE OR CLOUD, and IF ONLY), this is a night for only the most hardcore experimental film junkies looking for a good hit. Capping things off is ONE, which Ken Jacobs selected as the best film of the 1990s: “Fred Worden’s ONE is the breakthrough film of the decade for me in terms of passage to undreamt-of cine-phenomena/esthetic experience. Loosens the brains good.” Trust me when I say that after this screening, your noggin will feel like an over-stretched glob of Silly Putty.

INSOMNIA
Dir. Fred Worden, 1983
United States. 5 min. 16mm
Silent.

“INSOMNIA is the most minimal and self-referential of Worden’s films. It consists entirely of punched holes in black leader. The fractal reference is secured spatially by using punches of two different sizes, and temporally by the distribution of the punches along the strip of leader. In some ways this is Worden’s purest pattern film. We are presented only with a pattern of black and white. There is no imagery to compete for our attention. But somehow we see the film as representational. The white struggles against the black in an attempt to pour into the foreground. It is as if the ancient cosmology were true: The stars are holes in the canopy that shrouds the earth. We yearn to leave the world of darkness and appearance for the world of reality and light on the other side.” —Dale Jamieson

AUTOMATIC WRITING 2
2000. United States.
11 min. 16mm.
Silent.

“Continued explorations of automatism as a practical guide to negotiating the mysterious zone where light and no-light flutter in a fecund equipoise. A homemade rocket to realms unknown to any movie camera or photo lens. In the end, perhaps nothing more than a search for an experience of continuity, a kind of sanity. Failing sanity, a wild ride at least.” —Fred Worden

THE OR CLOUD
2001. United States.
7 min. 16mm.
Silent.

“A guided adventure for the eyeballs. And as such, also, of necessity, an adventure of the mind (how could it be otherwise?). I believe there is a current which runs at the core of all beings, call it the life force, a dynamic which in individuals reflects both the personal and the universal. Up on the screen, frames in motion, a rushing stream of articulated energy to resonate with that inner biological current. Adventurous eyeballing then, in the ideal, an epiphanous moment of mutual recognition and commiseration between energy forms. ‘There is a vibration which exists to enrapture and console us.’ (Rilke). I like to think this vibration can be detected streaming out THE OR CLOUD.” —Fred Worden

IF ONLY
2003. United States.
8 min. 16mm.
Silent.

“The bubble shaped orb of the human head, perched atop its touchy-feely transport system has seven moist openings through which everything outside comes in: two eyes, two nostrils, one mouth and two ears. Inside the bubblehead, bubble universes spawn ad infinitum and the only passable direction is directly into the steady headwinds of an ever-advancing infinity of veils. A high wire bobbing and weaving just to stay upright. These artful if endless veil penetrations are at once the human job description as well as nature’s shot at vindicating the transient in the face of the impassive infinite. Nature makes the orifices moist so things can stick, at least momentarily. And so the intoxicated camera operator shoots the moon slipping through the barren trees. The rabbit hole’s light shadow appears and he obliges, head first, no looking back. His cranium (like yours) is packed with illusions, but down the rabbit hole they treasure the same just so long as they’re custom fabricated, hand tooled and conscious. Down this hole, stalking the unforeseen non-translatable is all. Join in here.” —Fred Worden

ONE
1998. United States.
23 min. 16mm.
Silent.

“In contrast to superficial works that have made abstraction a purely decorative affair, Fred Worden has made a phenomenal film. Pushing the language of cinematic abstraction towards new horizons, seizing new possibilities and our cervical perception. ONE catalyzes a whirlwind of unexpected images whose origin seems to be the screen or the activity and the gaze of the spectator.” —Mark McElhatten

Approximate running time (with intro and reel change break): 80 min.

STROBE WARNING. Most of the films in this program contain intense flicker effects unsafe for those sensitive to light.

PROGRAM 3
NATURALLY OCCURRING STARS: EARLY VIDEO WORKS

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7 – 5PM

SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS

Like many other moving-image artists of his generation at the turn of the millennium—including the aforementioned Ken Jacobs, Ernie Gehr, and Andrew Noren—Worden successfully developed a distinct cinematic language for the digital age. Rather than merely replicating what he had achieved with 16mm film, he embraced the possibilities of the new medium, pushing its technology to the limit with retina-shredding experiments—some explicitly recalling cinema’s silent roots (HERE), others seemingly designed to induce splitting headaches (EVERYDAY BAD DREAM)—that are as forward-thinking as they are incendiary. In particular, BLUE POLE(S), the program’s closer, blazes with the intensity of a constellation of twinkling stars.

AMONGST THE PERSUADED
Dir. Fred Worden, 2004.
United States. 23 min.

“The human susceptibility to delusional thinking has, at least, this defining characteristic: easy to spot in others, hard to see in oneself. The filmmaker, racked by the inescapable observation that it is delusional thinking that is the common denominator driver of so many contemporary man-made disasters gins up a vehicle meant to ruthlessly uncover and expose his own particular brand of pathological believing. This film is about us. I believe it’s true. See the iron jaws of the mechanism at work as the filmmaker falls into the biggest and most obvious delusion of all: the belief that he can master his own delusions by making a film about them.” —Fred Worden

HERE
2005. United States.
10 min.

“HERE is a place, an optical location brought into being through conjuring in order to accommodate a clandestine rendezvous between Sir Laurence Olivier and Georges Méliès. Early cinema audiences, we are told, were mesmerized by the cinematic apparitions and impossible cavortings realized by the sly Melies. Those first paying customers had, apparently, no need for plots, movie stars or sharp ideas. Direct conjuring was more than enough. Could that work HERE?” —Fred Worden

EVERYDAY BAD DREAM
2006. United States.
6 min.

“What at one minute would be unfathomable and at sixty minutes a strident provocation, is at six minutes still gnomic yet rich and involving. […] The motion and the sound indicates an odd territory where even mundane amusement has hit a dead end. Like discarded wrappers left behind when the treats have melted. As with a migraine or bad acid, we are at the mercy of our receptors picking up static or worse. A bad signal to noise ratio in the perceptual field. […] On any given day this is a place always too conveniently located nearby, meant to be sidestepped. A sandtrap. A glitch. The convex depression of a failed epiphany given amplitude. Has anyone ever tried to represent this before in its proper proportion and to the betterment of an art?” —Mark McElhatten

BLUE POLE(S)
2005. United States.
20 min.

“Worden finds a digital outlet for the research into visual phenomena pursued in his films, creating one of the most startling abstract works of recent years. Video signal as constellation of light, piercing a cosmos of noetic possibilities. Its soundtrack is the equally mesmerizing “London Fix” by Tom Hamilton, an electronic composition based on the fluctuating price of gold. This strange brew is visual voodoo of the highest order.” —Mark Webber

Approximate running time (with intro): 88 min.

STROBE WARNING. Most of the films in this program contain intense flicker effects unsafe for those sensitive to light.

PROGRAM 4
RECIPES FOR OCULAR STIMULATION

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7 – 7:30PM

SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS

Step right up, folks, and behold the wild, mind-bending world of Fred Worden and his hallucinatory digital works! In TIME’S ARROW, faces zip past on a freeway to nowhere, lost in the flow of time and space. Then, brace yourselves for WHEN WORLDS COLLUDE, where images break free from reality, before taking a trip with 1859, built on a lens flare so psychedelic you’d swear it’s illegal—except it ain’t! Finally, ALL MY LIFE brings the storm (literally), blending time, memory, and cinema into a piece that is equal parts nostalgic and neurotic.

NORTH SHORE
Dir. Fred Worden, 2007.
United States. 11 min.

“Worden’s latest might be a sort of semi-homage to Ken Jacobs, since it uses many of the techniques (strobing, left / right oscillation, rotating forms) that characterize the Nervous System, particularly in its video incarnation. But Worden has been working for years now at exploring the tension between surface and depth in the abstract image, the cognitive zone where the push and pull of masses and voids across the screen prompts discrete phenomena to coagulate into an all-over activation of the picture plane. NORTH SHORE takes this approach in a bizarre new direction, since (as was the case with Worden’s last Views entry, EVERYDAY BAD DREAM) it is nearly impossible to discern just what one is looking at until the very last. (And even then, I’m not 100% sure.)” —Michael Sicinski

TIME’S ARROW
2007. United States.
11 min.

“Out on my freeway, directionality is elusive. The faces in the windows appear and then disappear, some moving out ahead, some falling behind, some moving so fast as to be beyond registering, others sliding by so languidly you’d think they want something from you. What’s irreversible is the plain fact that once they disappear from view, they’re gone forever. No amount of freeway jostling is ever likely to bring them by again. Each time I think to myself: one more person I’ll never know.” —Fred Worden

WHEN WORLDS COLLUDE
2008. United States.
14 min.

“An experimental film structured as a kind of specialized playground in which highly representational images are freed from their duties to refer to things outside of themselves. The images run free in their new lightness making unforeseeable, promiscuous connections with each other and developing an inexplicable, non-parsable plot line that runs along with all the urgency of any good thriller. When worlds collude, something outside of description is always just about to happen.” —Fred Worden

1859
2009. United States.
11 min.

“Built out of a 30-frame clip of a lens flare. LSD is illegal, 1859 is not.” —Fred Worden

ALL MY LIFE
2009. United States.
19 min.

“A dramatic weather front led to images that in turn invoked memories of Bruce Baillie’s 1966 film of the same name. The passage of time would seem to be the common theme that both films share.” —Fred Worden

Approximate running time (with intro): 86 min.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13 – 7:30PM

GET TICKETS!

Screening presented in collarboation with Crater Magazine. Includes a reading from “We Buried Your Ashes But Not You: Capital,  Disability, and the Crisis of Womanhood in Anne Charlotte Robertson’s Reel 80: Emily Died” (publication forthcoming) by Emily Rose Apter.

“I believe in film being necessary every day,” filmmaker-diarist, Anne Charlotte Robertson, told film critic, Scott MacDonald, in a conversation on MacDonald’s back porch in 1992. She continued: “I’ve saddled myself with something, in effect, that prevents me from committing suicide. So it’s another way of saying that the film has kept me alive.”
That life-saving “something” was an exhaustive diary-keeping practice. As a child, Robertson kept a written diary and, in the mid-1970s, began recording daily scenes on her Super 8 camera. These hundreds of hours of footage—shot between school in Cambridge, MA and her mother’s house in Framingham—became her near-40-hour magnum opus, Five Year Diary (1997), consisting of 83 “reels” and chronicling not five but 16 years of life.

Gardens, true love, children, weight loss, death, filmmaking, schizoaffective disorders, medical professionals, drug regimens, side effects (arguably worse than the symptoms being treated in the first place): these were her raw materials, sketched with equal parts candor, humor, tenderness, and self-effacement. Layering sync-sound with voice-over narration, Robertson was quick to cut herself off—muddle, even contradict—her own first-hand experiences. And yet her films, often sequenced around the process of image-making, remain hyper-aware of their own architecture. “I’m trying to take a pretty picture, if that’s what you mean,” she retorted when MacDonald asked about technique.

Before her death in 2012, Robertson only presented the full Five Year Diary three times: twice in Boston and once in NY. She’d envisioned a multi-modal marathon event that enveloped trusted viewers with sound, image, and childhood artifacts—the fever pitch of pathologized consciousness. In the same conversation with MacDonald, Robertson noted: “Nobody, not even the psychiatrists, want to know how horrible the stories in your head are. I have never had a psychiatrist ask me, ‘And what do the voices say to you?’ […] They think that the person who is insane and hears voices is making them up and is in some way as evil as the voices.” For Robertson, both subject and object of her camera’s gaze, birth/death visibility/refusal expression/erasure illness/wellness were always negotiated, never binary. There were the symptoms—the voices, the delusions, the manic-depression—drenched in visual/sonic techniques, and there were the material conditions—more subtly rendered—that both produced these experiences and pathologized them. Out of this paradigm, she forged a uniquely feminist mode of diary-keeping that implicated film technique with the embodied and structural nodes of gender and illness.

Robertson could never afford to print copies of her films, and so was only ever editing and projecting the increasingly worn originals. Consequently, her screenings were full of “breakdowns” she explained, in more ways than one. It’s that falling apart/piecing back together that remains the essence of her work. In Five Year Diary, “art as survival” is neither metaphor nor platitude; it’s a way to flirt, sometimes dangerously so, with her own ability to keep on living. It’s therapy, not to correct but to heal, which—as Robertson knows as well as anyone—can feel an awful lot like coming undone. —Emily Rose Apter

TRT: 78 min.
The three reels in this program are from FIVE YEAR DIARY, descriptions are by Anne Charlotte Robertson and all are Super 8 on Digital Video.
Full Program Details:

REEL 23: A BREAKDOWN (AND) AFTER THE MENTAL HOSPITAL (SEPTEMBER 1—DECEMBER 13, 1982).
dir. Anne Charlotte Robertson
1991, 26 min.

“Within are documented a paranoid manic nervous breakdown, a description of a mental hospitalization, and the subsequent recovery period. Sound is of wild tape of the breakdown, and a hidden tape-recorded psychiatric session; the second soundtrack is narration from 1991.”

REEL 80: EMILY DIED (MAY 14—SEPTEMBER 26, 1994).
dir. Anne Charlotte Robertson
1994, 27 min.

“This is Reel 80 of my Super 8mm opus Five Year Diary. It covers the period May 14 to September 26, 1994. Within is personal documentary; midway occurs the death of my 3-year-old niece Emily ; the impact of her death is explored.”

REEL 81: MOURNING EMILY (SEPTEMBER 27, 1994—January 29, 1995).
dir. Anne Charlotte Robertson
1994, 25 min.

Anne Charlotte Robertson continues to mourn Emily’s death.

HEIKO’S WORLD
Dir. Dominik Galizia, 2021.
Germany. 118 min.
In German.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2 – 5PM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 10 – 5PM
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 27 – 7:30PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 30 – 7:30PM

TICKETS HERE

Heiko is a simple man living in Berlin. He eats currywurst, he sees his friends at the pub and he lives with his mother Belinda. When Belinda is suddenly diagnosed with a rare condition of the cornea, Heiko must turn to the only way he knows to make a quick buck; playing electronic darts for money. He quickly realizes that the more he drinks, the better he is at darts. Is he bound for glory or alcoholism? Find out this November as we proudly present Dominik Galizia’s Heiko’s World.

Based on a web series created by director Dominik Galizia and star Martin Rohde, this film was released in 2021 with criminally little overseas attention. It’s time to fix that. In anticipation of Rohde and Galizia’s newest film, Rock N Roll Ringo, we would like to shine a light on this charming modern comedy. Crack open a cold one and get acquainted with your new comfort movie.

This November, Spectacle is pleased to present a selection of films and a groundbreaking video made by and with Susan Kleckner, a pioneering filmmaker, photographer, performance artist, activist, and lifelong New Yorker who helped to define the Feminist Arts Movement.

Across disciplines, Kleckner worked individually and within groups to make art to empower the voices of women and minorities and as a tool for social progress. She was essential in uniting Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) with Feminists in the Arts in 1969, and in 1970 she became a founder of the Women’s Interart Center, a trailblazing alternative space that provided exhibition and training for women in a wide range of media arts. Over the next decade, she experienced her most fruitful period of cinematic production, making vital contributions to collective work alongside a handful of self-directed projects, which span documentary, fiction, experimental, and hybrid modes. Though this series just scratches the surface of her prolific output as a visual artist, it highlights the key moving image-based work from this stretch, shown together for the very first time.

Join us on Sunday, November 3^rd for a special collection of Kleckner’s short films followed by ANOTHER LOOK (AT THE MIAMI CONVENTION), a timely, yet forgotten artifact of feminist media activism that intervenes into the 1972 Democratic National Convention. The evening will conclude with a Q&A with William Kaizen, author of Against Immediacy: Video Art and Media Populism.

THREE LIVES
dir. Susan Kleckner, Louva Irvine, Robin Mide, & Kate Millett, 1971.
United States, 70 min.
In English.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1 – 5:00PM
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7 – 7:30PM
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22 – 10PM
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 27 – 10PM

TICKETS

“Born of the then thriving personal-is-political impulse, Three Lives records a specific moment in another era yet still remains vital and absorbing today.” – Melissa Anderson, Artforum

The first feature length film produced by an all-female crew, THREE LIVES is a landmark documentary that explores the distinctive experiences of three “ordinary” white women living in America. The subjects include Kate Millet’s younger sister, Mallory Millett-Jones, who recently left her husband for an independent lifestyle in New York City; Lillian Shreve, a middle-aged chemist married contently for twenty-three years; and Robin Mide, a twenty-one-year-old queer artist and activist from Rockaway, Queens. Through candid interviews shot on grainy 16mm film stock, the film evokes solidarity between their varied backgrounds and effectively suggests that the most intimate, everyday experiences are infused with resounding political implications. Often credited solely to Millett, whose seminal text Sexual Politics funded part of its production, THREE LIVES is, in fact, a work of collective filmmaking. As co-director of the film and co-founder of the Women’s Liberation Cinema, Susan Kleckner’s intersectional, careful touch is essential to its lasting resonance.

ANOTHER LOOK (AT THE MIAMI CONVENTION)
Dir. Women’s Video News Service, 1972.
United States, 56 min.
In English.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 3 – 7:30PM (W/Q&A)
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8 – 5:00PM
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12 – 10PM
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22 – MIDNIGHT

SPECIAL EVENT (11/3) TICKETS 

TICKETS

Shortly after THREE LIVES, Kleckner joined another team of feminist filmmakers to produce the first all-woman broadcast television production, ANOTHER LOOK (AT THE MIAMI CONVENTION). Made by the Women’s Video News Service (WVNS), which included Kleckner, Wendy Appel, Pat de Pew, Mary Feldbauer, Carolyn Kreski, and Rita Ogden, ANOTHER LOOK covers the 1972 Democratic National Convention and the presidential candidacy of Shirley Chisholm, the first African American and the first woman to run for the Democratic nomination. Employing reflexive reportage that calls attention to their role in the video’s construction (itself a political statement), Kleckner and the crew center the voices most marginalized by mainstream coverage. Queer, Black, indigenous, and working-class perspectives are featured prominently alongside major figures of the women’s rights movement, such as Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Bella Abzug, as well as the era’s counter cultural milieu. Almost entirely forgotten and never screened in a traditional context, this rare document belongs in the canon of great works of media activism and, somewhat painfully, is as radical today as it was in 1972.

SHORTS PROGRAM
Dir. Susan Kleckner, 1973-1981.
United States, 65 min.
In English.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 3 – 5:00PM 

TICKETS

Following her integral role in the collective efforts of THREE LIVES and ANOTHER LOOK, Kleckner began work on her first self-directed project, BIRTH FILM. A moving and intensely intimate verité documentary about a live, at-home birth, the film drew controversy upon its initial premier at the Whitney Museum in 1973, where viewers were reported to have become sick due to its graphic content. Hurt by this shortsighted reception, Kleckner took several years off from filmmaking. She returned with a string of remarkable 16mm shorts, represented in this program by AMAZING GRACE, BAG LADY FILM, and PIERRE FILM. Virtually impossible to see individually, let alone together, each work further displays her lifelong investments in performance, social justice, women’s rights, and alternative living.

AMAZING GRACE
Dir. Susan Kleckner, 1981.
United States, 4min.
In English.

Scene one of an unfinished project, AMAZING GRACE captures the quotidian routine of a homeless woman (prolific film and stage actress, Lynne Thigpen) as she awakes inside of a train car. With the titular tune as soundtrack, it questions the notion of “freedom” and who can claim it.

BAG LADY FILM
Dir. Susan Kleckner, 1976.
United States, 16min.
In English.

Adapting the aesthetics of cinema’s silent era, this short is a thematic precursor to AMAZING GRACE that follows a vagabond woman (Dale Soules) living on the fringes of society. The subject revels in a range of disobedient behavior and, without romanticization, points to how one might live outside of mainstream structures.

PIERRE FILM
Dir. Susan Kleckner, 1977.
United States, 13min.
In English.

An abstract evocation of rhythm and movement conveyed through superimposed ebbing tides, classical string performances, and an impassioned political speech.

BIRTH FILM
Dir. Susan Kleckner, 1973.
United States, 33min.
In English.

At once a statement on bodily autonomy and a counter to the abhorrent state of the American medical system, BIRTH FILM captures a woman, Kirstin Booth Glen, giving birth to a son in her home in New York City. Kleckner applies a tense, yet sensitive form to the film’s extended, explicit live-birth sequence, which is introduced by socially incisive commentary from Kirstin and her husband, Jeffrey. The Glens, both lawyers who fight for reproductive rights, view their decision to forgo a hospital to be as political as it is personal.

Special thanks to Lucie Bonvin (Documentaire sur grand écran), Jesse Pires (Lightbox Film Center), Bill Kaizen (UMass Amherst), Jeremy Smith (UMass Amherst), Sonya Milton, Linda Cummings, Paula Allen, and Susan Jahoda.