SHOOT THE WHALE will be preceded by a short excerpt from Philip Makanna’s subsequent film WITH ENOUGH BANANAS.
*****
UNDER THIS SKY
THERE IS NO BEGINNING NO MIDDLE NO END
UNDER THIS SKY
EVERYTHING HAPPENS AT ONCE
THESE EVENTS
ARE FRAGMENTS OF A TRUE STORY
CAREFULLY CHOSEN
AND PRESENTED EXACTLY AS THEY HAPPENED
*****
Filmed in 1970 in Death Valley, Mono Lake, Hoover Dam and a local Greek temple, then edited in a glorious year at Francis Coppola’s American Zoetrope Studios, SHOOT THE WHALE follows a madcap troupe of revolutionary philosophers through an endless American purgatory. Dubbed by the filmmaker as “the one and only WWII Cowboy Circus Electronic Musical Comedy,” it is desert-gonzo street theater.
Philip Makanna came to filmmaking through painting and sculpture, teaching a spectacularly early course of fine arts video (says Makanna “we called it television”) in the late ’60s at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. He was commissioned by Jim Newman of the Dilexi Foundation to make his first foray into broadcast television, The Empire of Things for KQED, described by Gene Youngblood as an “Expressionist painting of green shadows and purple highlights quivering in a liquid mosaic of hues.”
In SHOOT THE WHALE, Makanna continues to experiment with video manipulations, interspersing the improvised action with expressionistic circus performance.
The film enlists an intriguing array of Bay Area counter-culture fixtures. Performing duties are assumed by the East Bay Sharks, a street theater troupe that included Darryl Henriques (later of JUMANJI and STAR TREK VI). The score was composed by Robert Ashley and “Blue” Gene Tyranny at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College. Jim Newman, its producer, followed SHOOT THE WHALE with Sun Ra’s SPACE IS THE PLACE soon after.
Though the film was screened at Cannes and enjoyed some rabble-rousing midnight screenings around the Bay Area, it has gone largely unseen until the recent re-discovery of its masters – lost for 30 years and rescued by the Prelinger Archive.
This screening marks the NYC debut of its restoration.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9 – 10 PM SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 17 – MIDNIGHT WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 21 – 10 PM FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30 – MIDNIGHT
Family can really be a drag.
Norman’s bloodline is supposedly cursed by witches from 300 years ago, and he’s just made a horror film about it. After a wrap party at their primary location (which also happens to be Norman’s family home where the legend of the curse began), crew members start dying one by one – are the stories true, or is Norman losing his mind?
An unabashed riff on Suspiria, Norman and crew clearly had a blast playing with light, color, and not giving a damn about the barebones plot. With the release of Suspiria-reimagined this month, we thought it would be the perfect opportunity to air this less-known but (almost) equally entertaining sibling from across the pond.
GLEN OR GLENDA
dir. Edward D. Wood Jr, 1953
USA, 61 min.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 2 – MIDNIGHT THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8 – 7:30 PM SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10 – 10 PM THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 15 – 10 PM SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 18 – 7:30 PM FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – 10 PM
“In the making of this film, which deals with a strange and curious subject, no punches have been pulled– no easy way out has been taken. Many of the smaller parts are portrayed by persons who actually are, in real life, the character they portray on the screen. This is a picture of stark realism– taking no sides — but giving you the facts — ALL the facts — as they are today… YOU ARE SOCIETY — JUDGE YE NOT…”
Opening with and extended monologue by The Scientist (Bela Lugosi, dead) he “explains” that in humanity’s search for the unknown many startling things come to light. While investigating the suicide of a transvestite, Inspector Warren seeks the help of Dr. Alton who tells him the sordid tale of a man named Glen (Ed Wood). Glen’s wife Barbara (Dolores Fuller, Ed Wood’s real life girlfriend at the time) accuses him of having another woman in his life but little does she know the “other woman” is Glen’s female counterpart – Glenda! Recounted in flashback we see Glen wearing his sisters clothes for Halloween and then never wanting to take them off. Shunned by his family, Glen must keep his desires a secret. Now it’s up to Glen to decide if he should tell his blushing bride-to-be about his double life…
One of 3 films directed by Ed Wood in 1953, GLEN OR GLENDA was shot in just 4 days, propped up by almost 14 minutes of stock footage, and padded out with erotic vignettes by producer George Weiss. The film was initially to be a profile of Christine Jorgensen who had dominated the headlines only a year before. After Jorgensen turned the filmmakers down they decided to go a different route, though many of the films promotional materials still tried to sell it as a profile of Jorgensen. Though no official sequel was ever filmed Glen/Glenda would show up in two of Wood’s novels later on. After film fell into public domain it was released dozens if not hundreds of times garnering quite a reputation along the way. David Lynch is such a fan of this film that he used the “blowing wind” sound effect from it in his film ERASERHEAD!
TAKE IT OUT IN TRADE
dir. Edward D. Wood Jr, 1970
USA, 77 min.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 3 – MIDNIGHT MONDAY, NOVEMBER 5 – 10 PM TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 13 – 7:30 PM FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 16 – 7:30 PM
“Ed gave you free reign, he let you do your thing. You showed him what you could do and then you went ahead and did it. Eddie let you improvise a lot. A lot. Because he was not stuck to any one particular concept or idea.”
– Michael Donovan O’Donnell, “Nightmare Of Ecstasy”
A private dick named Mac McGregor (Michael Donovan O’Donnell) is brought in to help Frank and Donna Stanley, a couple search for their missing daughter. The trail leads him to a house of ill-repute. Inside are all manners of perversions and titillating sights to behold…can he keep his nose to the grindstone and bring the girl home?
Thought lost for years TAKE IT OUT IN TRADE was rediscovered by Ed Wood biographer Rudolph Grey while doing research for his book “Nightmare of Ecstasy.” Additionally, in the 1990’s 3 reels of bloopers, behind the scenes footage, and alternate takes were discovered in a theater in Santa Monica, California. Not screened in NYC since Anthology’s massive retrospective in 2014, TAKE IT OUT IN TRADE is finally set for home release by AGFA later this month.
Note: Both of these films contain scenes of sexual violence which may be offensive. Viewer discretion is advised.
This November, as we gear up for the start of the nightmare that is HOLIDAY SEASON, Spectacle is serving up two heaping helpings of MORAL TERROR – films with black and white visions of good and evil, where every transgression is followed by a lesson (usually deadly).
Both of these offerings are made for TV, but that doesn’t lessen the thrills – including haunting scarecrows, nightmare children, and the hobo-ization of a Wall Street scumbag.
DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW
dir. Frank Felitta, 1981
96 min, USA
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 3 – 10 PM FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9 – MIDNIGHT SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 11 – 7:30 PM SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 24 – MIDNIGHT TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 27 – 10 PM
‘Mar-vel-ous! I was terrified!’ – Vincent Price
Dark Night of the Scarecrow is a made-for-TV horror film about a subject we’ve all become a little too familiar with lately: a gross miscarriage of justice.
When word spreads around town that little Marylee has been killed by gentle giant and local dullard Bubba (Larry Drake – Darkman, Dr. Giggles), five good-ol-boys decide to take ‘justice’ into their own hands by organizing a flash-mob and murdering Bubba in cold blood. Literal moments after the deed is done, word comes over the radio that Marylee is fine – in fact, Bubba saved her.
The murderers are acquitted on the grounds of ‘self-defense’ (lol) but its not long before a scarecrow turns up on the property of the ringleader…
If you like moody, creeping thrillers and a healthy serving of true karmic justice, this one is not to be missed. A true gem of a film.
Screening the blu-ray remaster courtesy of CALIFORNIA PICTURES INC.
ALIEN ZONE aka THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD
dir. Shannon Miller
1978, USA
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 1 – 10 PM SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 4 – 7:30 PM SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10 – MIDNIGHT FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 16 – 10 PM TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 20 – 10 PM
A rarely seen American anthology that attempted to capture the glory of the Amicus days in the UK, Shannon Miller directs this series of five alternately creepy and hilarious shorts, with a wraparound story centered on an adulterer who’s taxi accidentally drops him off outside of a funeral home.
After asking to use the phone, our adulterer is given a tour of the funeral home’s current residents by the caretaker, who takes him through each demise in great detail, each one addressing a different ‘sin’ of sorts.
Though it doesn’t quite reach the heights of Scarecrow, it is definitely a unique ride, featuring everything from evil trick or treaters to a hidden-camera-serial-killer to a cat-and-mouse game between rival Private Investigators.
The early 80s of West Berlin was accessible to David Bowie and Nick Cave, however it remained a secluded scene unto itself, a fallen city shared between the French, the Brits, and the Americans. Much of the architecture was unchanged from the war, and a post-war generation of musicians and artists were able to live cheap, work little, squat housing, and stay out all night. Muscha’s DECODER is a Spectacle favorite making a return appearance, paired for the first time with B MOVIE: LUST AND SOUND IN WEST BERLIN 1979-1989. The latter can be something of a companion piece, featuring a lot of the same faces in a more music-doc format. Muscha was from Dusseldorf, but came to Berlin for many of the same reasons as the English narrator in LUST AND SOUND. For both the Super 8 footage in LUST AND SOUND and the rich color portraits in DECODER, these are must-sees on a bigger screen with a bigger sound.
DECODER
Dir. Muscha, Trini Trimpop, 87 min.
West Germany, 1984
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 1 – 7:30 PM TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 6 – 7:30 PM SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 11 – 5 PM SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 17 – 10 PM FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 23- MIDNIGHT MONDAY, NOVEMBER 26 – 10 PM
This film should be watched stoned, on whatever substance, as both a tribute to William S. Burroughs and to ensure complete and proper absorption. DECODER is a quiet bureaucratic surveillance drama, but then it’s a color-soaked, Benjamin-tinged struggle over information and control. It stars Bill Rice (who you know from Andrew Horn’s DOOMED LOVE), a man impeccably sensitive and equally expressive under vibrant colored lights. There are fast food joints, great tunes, Genesis P-Orridge, Christiane F, and the true answer to whether music recorded from frogs in distress can incite revolution.
“Information is like a bank – some of us are rich, and some of us are poor. ALL OF US CAN BE RICH.”
New Poster by isabel lezcano
B MOVIE: LUST AND SOUND IN WEST BERLIN
Dir. Jörg A. Hoppe, Klaus Maeck, Heiko Lange, 92 min.
Germany, 2015
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 4 – 5 PM THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8 – 10 PM MONDAY, NOVEMBER 12 – 7:30 PM WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 14 – 10 PM FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – 7:30 PM SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 25 – 7:30 PM
This film follows Manchester-born and bored Mark Reeder, who is driven by a love for Can and Edgar Froese to West Berlin in the late 70s. As a budding band manager and eventual radio show host on the BBC, he immerses himself in the scene and documents his new love for the wild and vibrant city. He is present for the squatters rights skirmishes and nights out til 7 am at clubs and bars, where bands like Malaria!, Einstürzende Neubauten and Die Toten Hosen come to define new sounds in a limitless world of creative freedom and easy poverty.
This decade was also that of the Super 8, and Reeder dabbles in pornos and arty shorts as well as more conventional documentary filming. The resulting footage is grainy and raw – squatters clashing with police, punk shows in basement squats, and interviews with musicians unconcerned with commercial viability or trying to capture a scene on film. Reeder talks us through his transformation from a Virgin records employee in Manchester to a Berliner band manager, trying to expose the world to music sung in German. West Berlin acts like it doesn’t need Mark Reeder, but as a scene flourishes, dies out and is reborn, it is a favor that an outsider fell in love with it and wanted the world to know.
CALLING ALL LEFTISTS! The past few years have been a whirlwind: exhausting, invigorating,
and ripe with potential. It’s tremendously difficult, when in the thick of it, to pause, reflect, or
even find a moment to catch a breath. Especially when “it” refers to the rise of fascism on a
global scale, with any number of future cataclysms hovering just over the horizon. But we
digress.
Join us, then, for a series that asks: if not now, when? Come for great works of radical political
filmmaking, stay for the generative discussions, or even just to commiserate about how little has
fundamentally changed over the past 100 years (the span of time which the films in this series
will cover). The hope is that this forum for authentic representations of successes, defeats, and
the messy work of political action, will be thrilling, edifying, and maybe even inspire your next
organizing project.
To butcher the title of a great film for the sake of a moderately applicable pun: “Throw away your dogma, rally in the cinema.”
I’ll Be Your Eyes, You’ll Be Mine
dir. Keja Kramer and Stephen Dwoskin
France, 2006
In French with English Subtitles, 47 mins
THURSDAY, JUNE 13 – 7:30 PM (double feature with It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve)
TUESDAY, JUNE 25 – 7:30 PM (double feature with It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve)
Stephen Dwoskin: I think [Robert Kramer] was getting worn out in his search a bit, finding a way through, in an abstract sort of way, not knowing any longer exactly how to handle the material without getting into a repetition. Not knowing how far to go! You need a lot of energy to do it, you need a lot of motivation, because making films is a bit like a drug – and if you OD on it, it’s pretty hard. You can get lost very easily in it, like being stoned, and then demobilised, don’t you agree? I don’t know where Robert was in his private life, you probably know better.
Keja Kramer [Robert’s daughter]: I don’t think there’s another life than the film when you are in it.
Dwoskin: Well, making a film is life!
Kramer: Exactly, so he wasn’t living at home; he was shooting every day.
Dwoskin: But it’s also about how one feels about a relationship to one’s self at that time. To keep the ball bouncing – sometimes it’s very easy to give up. Making films for many people … it’s really hard work. If you lose your motivation for a moment, the whole thing could fall apart; it’s very heavy, very intense, and that intensity can be very exhausting …
Kramer: I was laughing to myself about shooting I’ll Be Your Eyes, and the idea of all those situations of dragging the tripod on a bicycle because it was too heavy to carry, and all these cameras on my back, walking out to the middle of a field to change into that green suit and turning the camera on, having nobody behind the camera, wandering around … In those moments, when you’re working within such a lonely configuration, you have only your own motivation to go on, your own self …
Dwoskin: Yeah, it’s the same.
Kramer: … for acknowledgement. But, even working here, when it’s just the two of us, you feel like there’s no world – the whole world is just this world, these images that we’ve pulled in.
-conversation between the directors recorded 2/11/ 06, published online in Rouge #9
It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve: Masao Adachi
dir. Nicole Brenez and Philippe Grandrieux
France, 2011
In French with English subtitles, 74 min
Avant-garde cinema is not primarily defined by its economic origins, nor by a doctrinaire platform, nor a singular aesthetic: it diverts a technology born of military and industrial needs, reinscribes it within a dynamic of emancipation and therefore participates in a vast critical movement that culminates in the 18th century with the philosophy of Kant and the Enlightenment. If the work of art’s primary territory is that of the conscience or the work of faculties, its challenge consists of continuously reconfiguring the symbolic, to question the division between art and life, such as the humiliating division between the ideal and reality. For an avant-garde artist, art only has sense in its refusal, in its contesting, its pulverization of the limits of the symbolic; it exists as an end within itself or as a means of directly intervening in the real…
The portrait here is not a link, not a report, not a clarification, nor an unveiling. It gathers and gives itself the means (visual, stylistic) of reconstituting the unsounded, volumetric, immeasurable properties of a presence, a fortiori when it concerns the presence of a creator with an exceptional historical journey. A two-dimensional image provides us with an approximate figure; it cannot open us up to the being whose contours it adjusts like a skimpy outfit and, more often than not, falls back on an archetype or a cliché. Far from the usual portraits, that of Masao Adachi by Philippe Grandrieux resembles nothing aside from James Joyce’s Ulysses, an inverted Ulysses: a psychic odyssey that guides us from an internal monologue, through confidence, by the objectification of external witnesses, by spatial and temporal contextualization, by epiphanies born of the appearances of faces, by the constructivist revelation of the means of its production, and in its conclusion, describes to us the utter complexity of a being without having consigned him to an identity—as we are wont to do to those we love because, seen through a loving light, they flood us with an inexhaustible infinity.
-from “Cultural Guerrillas,” Brenez and Grandreux’s manifesto on the substance of their collaboration, published 3/1/12 at Moving Image Source
For May Day, two films on occupation and “claiming space:” one a testament to the strength of female workers, the other a salvo against the legitimacy of state borders.
COMPAÑERAS
Grupo Alavio, 2004
Argentina, 38 min
MONDAY MAY 6 – 7:30 PM TUESDAY, MAY 21 – 7:30 PM
Grupo Alavio is an anarchist film collective, their name an homage to the itinerant workers of the early 20th-century who would disseminate propaganda kept in their avios (knapsacks). Drawing inspiration from these fleet-footed labor activists of yesteryear, the group travels from town to town filming the struggles of laborers endeavoring to build collective strength and overcome socioeconomic injustice. These documentaries subvert many of the bourgeois tendencies common to the genre; they are self-funded and screened in the break rooms of municipal and factory workers in order to build solidarity and show the nuts-and-bolts process of workers unionizing and, in some notable cases, seizing the means of production. This particular film spotlights female Argentinian workers under diverse circumstances, united in their pursuit of personal and collective autonomy.
TECTONICS
Peter Bo Rappmund, 2012
US, 60 min
MONDAY MAY 6 – 7:30 PM TUESDAY, MAY 21 – 7:30 PM
(Part of a double feature with COMPAÑERAS)
A border is both a place and an idea; it is a line on the ground that cuts through people, destroying the land onto which it is forced. But what does a border look like? What are its sounds? And how can these sights and sounds be presented in a manner that is decolonizing in its effects? Rappmund attempts this by closely observing the U.S. Mexico borderland itself, its monuments, cacti, air traffic, flags, walls and fences. These objects hide as much as they reveal, so Rappmund’s methods depict this territory as both familiar and strange, resulting in a landscape documentary that is also animation. Whatever the border is, however many borders there are to know and fight, some of its realities are contained within this film.
Exactly a month after the innocent pranks of April Fools come the fiery clowning of May Day. On April 1st, join us for a Surprise Screening that looks at the connection between these holidays, and find out what it means to have your soda and drink it, too (politically speaking). Both films are playing in succession at 7:30 and again at 10:00 PM.
MONDAY, APRIL 1 – 7:30 and 10 PM
In December 1970, the Polish government announced price raises on many basic goods, including dairy and coal. Strikes, demonstrations and workplace occupations spread across the Baltic coast. This film is not about that. It is about something that happened in the months before those events. It is about something that is still happening now.
MONDAY, APRIL 1 – 7:30 and 10 PM
This past January, one of the great radical filmmakers passed away. A filmmaker whose work has been referred to as “anarchic,” in its form and political antics, perhaps more than any other. Burning Frame has decided to celebrate this director how he would have wanted, which is to say in the most perverse way possible: by screening his anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist Outback comedy, the only film that dares address the deliciously diabolical role of carbonated beverages in planet-wide corporate hegemony. Journey with us back to a time when the Left didn’t want you to eat candy or have fun, when watching primetime resulted in false consciousness, when discrepancies in musical taste were a cause for division and ad hominem finger pointing. For Just One Night we take a break from our regularly scheduled doom and gloom for a program devoted to the questions that are really on our minds: Does the industrial nature of most 20th-century cinema make it inherently bourgeois? Is art class war by other means? Are you a Pepper™?
TO DIE IN MADRID
Dir. Frederic Rossif, 1963
85 min.
Frederic Rossif’s masterful To Die In Madrid was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1963. Not that awards matter: plaudits or no, this is the greatest film about the Spanish Civil War ever made, and a seminal work in the documentary genre. Filled with indelible imagery from the war, and accompanied by narration that is by turns rousing and heartfelt, this is a vivid elegy to the brave efforts that were made against the fascist front. A film which demands to be seen by radical leftists, and anyone who believes that our revolution one day will come.
An explicit work of docu-propaganda that was screened in London with assistance from Emma Goldman, Fury Over Spain resonates today, both as an insightful vision of from the past and a powerful call to arms today. Produced as a collaborative effort by, and featuring copious footage of, the F.A.I. (Iberian Anarchist Federation) and C.N.T. (Anarchist National Confederation of Labor) as they mounted a defense of the besieged Madrid and launched offensives in Catalonia.
playing with: THE WILL OF A PEOPLE
Louis Frank, 1938
45 min.
An impressively wide-ranging survey of the terrain of lived experience during the Spanish Civil War, The Will of a People presents the nuts-and-bolts of the war effort (everything from weapon-making to food-harvesting) woven throughout with commentary on Spain’s historical iconography.
REBELLIOUS CITY
Dir. Willy Lindwer, 80 min.
Netherlands, 2015
TUESDAY, JANUARY 22 – 7:30 PM
A recent, under-seen documentary, chronicling the Provo movement, a loose-knit collection of Dutch radicals and artists who captured the popular imagination and spurred change with boldly confrontational happenings. Featuring the likes of Cor Jaring, Roel van Duijn, Saar Stolk, Luud Schimmelpennink, Hans Metz, Bernhard de Vries, Irene van de Weetering, and Robert Jasper Grootveld, as they talk about the creative, playful and inspiring Sixties and the rise and fall of the Provo Movement.
THE TROUBLEMAKERS
dir. Robert Manchover, 50 min.
USA, 1966
TUESDAY, JANUARY 22 – 10 PM
In the late 60s, the Newark Community Union Project was created as a bloc within the Students for a Democratic Society. Their aim was to engage with the inner-city black community in Newark. The result is an unflinchingly honest film about the difficulties of community organizing, particularly attempts to engage across divides of race and class. Despite the group’s work to overcome these hurdles, the government does not bend to the community’s small demands — demonstrating the utter futility that is engaging with government bureaucracy. Produced with involvement from the late Robert Kramer.
screening with: COINTELPRO: THE FBI’S WAR ON BLACK AMERICA
dir. Denis Mueller and Deb Ellis, 53 min.
USA, 1989
A clear-eyed run through of how the U.S. Government conspired to violently quell the Black Power movement.
THE EDGE
Dir. Robert Kramer, 100 mins.
USA, 1968
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 15 – 7:30 and 10 PM
Shot in 1967, at the height of the American antiwar protests, The Edge captures a particular strain of ideological tension felt by the radical organizers of the time, between the pragmatism of peaceful organization and movement building, and the appeal of individual acts of insurrectionary violence — a tension that necessarily threatens the cohesion of the organizing bodies which, in this film, ultimately fracture under the weight of the resulting discord. A piercing study of the dangers of disillusionment and isolation in radical spaces, the film also perceptively deals with the friction that often exists between radicality and the maintenance of personal relationships. A radical work of narrative filmmaking, both in content and form. The late, great leftist filmmaker Robert Kramer, a founding member of the legendary Newsreel outfit, shot this ambitious project on a microbudget, fashioning aesthetic limitations into a political tool. The imagery is stark and no-frills, the overdubbed dialogue disembodied and distant — at once an expression of interiority and a seething, repressed exteriority that painfully rises to the surface.
This film will be followed by a special Encore Program at 10:00.
REBELLION IN PATAGONIA (aka LA PATAGONIA REBELDE)
Dir. Hector Olivera, 1974.
Argentina. 110 minutes.
REBELLION IN PATAGONIA represents a sterling work of Anarchist memorialization bravely brought to the screen by it’s director, Hector Olivera. Based on Oswaldo Bayer’s historical novel Patagonia Rebelde, about an anarcho-syndicalist labor union’s insurrectionary uprising against the Argentinian elite in the 1920s, which was banned and publicly burned in the 70’s along with the aforementioned feature film adaptation.
The film begins with an anarchist-led hotel workers’ strike so successful one forgets how the working class could ever lose sight of its inherent collective strength. But soon after the workers’ victory, cold reality swings back into sharp focus as the landowners conspire with the government to violently repress the strikers and rollback the gains made, a turn which the strikers had not foreseen. A cautionary tale for trusting state powers to uphold hard-won gains in worker’s rights.
For decades, Argentinian politics swung between the Nationalist populism of Juan Peron and a series of military coups, eventually centrally coordinated under Operation Condor, aimed at suppressing the socialist elements that made Peron so widely popular.
In 1976 the military seized power once again, ushering in a brutal 7 year dictatorship in which the film was banned, Bayer, Olivera, and several of the film’s actors were blacklisted, and Cepernic was imprisoned. In jail, he asked his warden if he deserved such cruel treatment simply for being a member of a Left-of-center party. “No, you’re not a prisoner because of your affiliation,” the warden reportedly said. “You’re a prisoner because you allowed Rebellion in Patagonia to be filmed.”
This film will be followed by a special Encore Program at 10:00.
October rings in the next GET REEL with heavy church bells. GET Reel, the movie-based comedy show, returns with the theme “Unholy Communion.” Come pray away the un-Christian abomination of H*llowe’en. Comedians will live-dub over movies that fit the month’s theme, and hosts Joe and Max will ensure everyone has a very sacred evening.
D E E P is a showcase of experimental films, web videos, and art pieces unearthed from the darker side of the internet, lovingly curated by filmmaker Chris Osborn. Founded in 2013 by Osborn during his time working as a Vimeo staff member, D E E P began as a channel that existed to showcase a burgeoning community of artists making groundbreaking work designed with the internet in mind. Now, with over 100,000 followers online, four years of IRL screenings and a monthly webseries in collaboration with Memory, D E E P is suiting up to premiere its first feature length film: Roger Hayn’s CONGRATULATIONS DEBBY.
Debby, already a proud mother of three, is overjoyed to learn that she is pregnant once again. Thrilled with the bright possibilities of the future, she is determined to share her good news with friends, family, and acquaintances. Yet despite the magnitude of her announcement, nobody in town seems to be quite as excited as Debby. To make matters worse, her children are too busy to even return her phone calls. The further Debby pushes to surprise her loved ones with the news, the faster her world hurtles in a direction she never imagined. A warped, uncanny melodrama which plunges into the depths of its protagonist’s interiors, CONGRATULATIONS DEBBY is both a shape-shifting mystery film as well as an exercise in formal distortion.
A conversation between Hayn and Osborn will follow both screenings.
“Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it. But is all looting progressive, are all copies an improvement on their originals? What if the future came to depend on the looting of the professional looters ‒ of the class that multiplies financial, legal, and cultural claims to capital ‒ by those with ever less to lose
Bookended by the London riots of 2011, DEAD THE ENDS is a dizzying, urgent retelling of the story at the heart of Chris Marker’s La Jetee.
Deploying dystopian sci fi, animated gifs, emojis and La Jetee ‘derivatives’ such as 12 Monkeys and The Edge of Tomorrow, it creates a nervous montage inspired as much by Ponzi fraudster Bernie Madoff’s forged trading receipts as Eisensteins’s notes for a film version of Marx’s Capital. Beginning in a future London ravaged by global war, the film time-travels back to the suspension of dollar-gold convertibility in 1971, and forward to the cop-infiltration of activist groups in the 1990s, ending with the urban insurrections that flamed the UK in August 2011. Recursive-convulsive, structure-busting-looping, Dead The Ends is militant cinema at its wildest.”
BENEDICT SEYMOURis a filmmaker, writer, and musician. His published work includes video, fiction, and criticism, as well as several film soundtracks with artists such as Melanie Gilligan and Maija Timonen. His (mostly collaborative) music projects include Petit Mal, Antifamily, Traum and 트G. He is a long-term member of the editorial collective of Mute Magazine and Lecturer on the Fine Art MFA at Goldsmiths. He lives and works in London. His feature-length film, Dead the Ends, premiered in LUX’s Experimenta strand at the London Film Festival last year.
Caroline Golum’s rosé-refracted debut feature A FEAST OF MAN is a hilarious drawing-room comedy that pushes its audience to ask unspeakable questions of itself, performing a ruthless re-exhumation of THE BIG CHILL by way of Whit Stillman, Henry James and a pinch of Bette Gordon. Laurence Joseph Bond stars as Gallagher, a wealthy ne’er-do-well sitting on preciously guarded millions; when Gallagher dies in an untimely accident (kept mysteriously offscreen), his valet James (Zach Fleming) summons the late aristocrat’s closest friends (a murderer’s row of a cast including Frank Mosley, Marleigh Dunlap, Chris Shields and Katey Parker) to the family home in upstate New York, where he presents them with Gallagher’s final will and testament via videoconference. It’s revealed that the tony young codger will bequeath his fortune to the group, split evenly, but only if they agree, unanimously, to eat his corpse. A weekend of flashbacks, double-crosses and coastal-elite hand-wringing ensues: some characters retreat further into forced juvenilia while others, remembering all the slights and jealousies of their near/post-adolescent years, find an opportunity to avenge their lost youth. But throughout, the clock ticks with one question: will they go through with it?
A FEAST OF MAN is not like other movies: Golum’s screenplay (co-written by the prolific Dylan Pasture) is at once laden with one-liners and hijinks, yet keeps the audience guessing how blackened its heart really is, how low its comedy of rich people’s poor manners can, and will, go. While the leaves begin to wither and summer’s haze turns to polluted dust, Spectacle is thrilled to invite Golum, Pasture and their cast for a handful of special A FEAST OF MAN screenings with Q&As to follow.
CAROLINE GOLUM is a filmmaker, programmer, and critic living in New York. Her work has screened in venues from Birmingham, Alabama to Brisbane, Australia. As a writer she has contributed to Variety, Little White Lies, the now-defunct alt-weekly L Magazine, and Bright Wall/Dark Room. She is a senior correspondent for Screen Slate and her weekly radio feature, “The Movie Minute,” can be heard every Friday morning on WFMU’s drive time morning show, “Wake and Bake with Clay Pigeon.” Her next film, about 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich, will begin production in 2019.
Cristina Cacioppo has been working as a programmer for almost twenty years, starting out at her campus cinema at University of Florida. Since then she has worked with Ocularis, Women in Film & Video/New England, 92YTribeca and for the past five years with the Alamo Drafthouse, now heading programming at their Downtown Brooklyn location. She is a devoted fan of the works of Agnès Varda and Jean-Claude Van Damme.
Hillary Weston is a New York-based writer. She is the social media director for The Criterion Collection, as well as a staff writer for their online publication, and has written for Film Quarterly, BOMB, Interview, BlackBook, MUBI, Teen Vogue, and others.
Andrew Lampert is an artist who primarily works with moving images and performance, but he also teaches, writes and restores artist and independent films.
NOTE:
We are pulling this month’s screenings of a R**** P******* film, previously slated to pair with Caroline Golum’s A FEAST OF MAN. As a collective of programmers operating in a space constricted by budget and time, there was not a enough internal discussion about this film. We have received some considerate and fair criticism, particularly in light of the activity in the Supreme Court, which has moved us to suspend the three screenings. We appreciate the feedback.
