ROCATERRANIA
Dir. Brett Ingram, 2009
USA. 74 min

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 14th – 6:30 PM *BRETT INGRAM Q&A*
ONLINE TICKETS • FB EVENT (This event is $10.)
also:
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 17TH – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 22ND – 10:00 PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 29TH – 7:30 PM

A documentary feature exploring the secret world of scientific illustrator and self-taught artist Renaldo Kuhler (American, 1931–2013). For thirty years, Kuhler created hundreds of plates for the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, illustrating diverse flora and fauna for scientific journals, reference books, and exhibits. Unbeknownst to family, friends, and coworkers, Renaldo was also a prolific self-taught artist.

The son of Otto Kuhler, a renowned industrial designer, Renaldo was bullied and ridiculed by classmates, teachers, and headmasters simply for being different. When Otto moved the family from upstate New York to a remote cattle ranch in the Colorado Rockies, teenaged Renaldo found the isolation unbearable. He escaped to the private fantasy world of his notebooks, inventing an imaginary country he called Rocaterrania. For the next 60 years, Renaldo illustrated the nation’s history, a coded, metaphoric account of his own life. Situated on the border of New York and Canada, populated mostly by European immigrants, Rocaterrania has a unique government, language, religion, railroad infrastructure, movie industry, prison system, and a fully mapped geography of cities, mountains, lakes, rivers, and farmlands. It also has a political history fraught with turmoil, one that mirrors Renaldo’s own struggle for independence and freedom.

Featuring an eclectic original score by Merge Records recording artists Shark Quest, Rocaterrania unveils Kuhler’s stunning creation, intricately dovetailed with the powerful story of his life. —brettingram.com

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MONSTER ROAD
Dir. Brett Ingram, 2004
USA. 80 min

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 14TH – 9:00 PM *BRETT INGRAM Q&A*
ONLINE TICKETS • FB EVENT (This event is $10.)
also:
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 18TH – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23RD – 10:00 PM

MONSTER ROAD is a documentary feature exploring the wildly fantastic worlds of legendary animator Bruce Bickford. Bickford’s collaborations with rock musician Frank Zappa in the 1970s established him as an international cult artist. Decades later, the reclusive animator works alone in a basement studio near Seattle, producing films for no apparent audience. Enchanted forests, maniacal torture chambers, hamburgers that morph into mythical monsters, and epic battles between giants, fairies, and anachronistic historical figures populate just a small corner of Bickford’s animated universe.

Bruce is the sole caretaker of his father George, a retired aerospace engineer of the Cold War era who faces the tragic onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Struggling to pierce the fog of his painful memories, George considers the suffering of a life spent disengaged from his family and centered on the imperfections in those around him. His wondrous musings on the mysteries of the universe reflect a deep admiration for the implicit architect of such splendor while atheism prevents him from admitting the possibility of a God.

While the Bickfords lived a normal suburban life by all outward appearances, the brutality of Bruce’s obsessive childhood drawings and subsequent animations hints at a darker underbelly. Questions are raised for which there are no easy answers. MONSTER ROAD untangles myriad personal, artistic, and philosophical strands from the Bickfords’ lives to reveal an intricate web of motivations and influences fueling Bruce’s cinematic visions. —brettingram.com

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SUNDAY, OCTOBER 14 – 4:00 PM *Q&A WITH BRETT INGRAM*
ONLINE TICKETS • FB EVENT (This event is $10.)
also:
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 21ST – 5:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24TH – 10:00 PM

SHORTS PROGRAM:

SPENT
Dir. Brett Ingram and Christina Clum, 1994
USA. 7 min

SPENT is a dark stop-motion tableau about chaos, control, and destiny featuring an unlikely cast of puppets. Set to a mantra-like score resembling a self-help tape from hell, trapped demons and prisoners of monotony populate a craggy subterranean purgatory, each driven to its own course of destiny by an apocalyptic cyclist. —brettingram.com

PANIC ATTACK
Dir. Brett Ingram, 2000
USA. 13 minutes

“Imagine your body telling your brain it doesn’t want it in there anymore,” says Reade Whinnem, “and then doing everything it can to try and make it leave.” Whinnem suffers from Panic Anxiety Disorder, and in Panic Attack, we are taken full-throttle into Whinnem’s living nightmare. Juxtaposing stark monochromatic interviews with colorful home movies, stop-motion animation, and hyperkinetic time lapse cinematography, this short film illustrates with expressionistic force the physical and emotional roller-coaster ride Whinnem calls daily life, affirming the courage and determination it takes to survive battles no one else can witness. —brettingram.com

FREAK BOX
Dir. Brett Ingram, 1999
USA. 1 min

What do an organ grinder monkey, camera-headed robot, and two numbed out teenagers have in common? The symbiotic processes of the idiot box, as it turns out. Freak Box is a stop-motion satire of the lulling effects of television, an insidious electromechanical circus where viewers project – and find – themselves in the deceivingly homogenous pixel array. —brettingram.com

MOON PLOW
Dir. Brett Ingram, 1992
USA. 1 min

Moon Plow is an abstract experiment in line animation, loosely inspired by Native American creation myths with a dark, contemporary twist. —brettingram.com

MARS 1 & MARS 2
Dir. Brett Ingram, 1996
USA, 7 min

Short film pieces originally designed to run as loops as part of a large multimedia installation in a gallery environment, repurposed and combined for the Spectacle’s screen.

ARMOR OF GOD
Dir. Brett Ingram and Jim Haverkamp, 2001
USA. 13 min

Ear-splitting improvisational noise sculpture and Christianity are rarely mentioned in the same breath, but for percussionist Scotty Irving these twin passions form the core of his one-man act, Clang Quartet. Inspired by biblical verse and utilizing homemade instruments, costumes, and found objects, Irving serves up dramatic aural and visual symbolism at unfathomable volumes, challenging his audience to rethink traditional ideas of music and spirituality. When Irving’s motivations for walking so far out on musical and theological limbs are revealed, “the armor of God” becomes a metaphor for the courage to create and the power to silence one’s inner critic. —brettingram.com

LUCK OF A FOGHORN
Dir. Brett Ingram, 2008
USA. 28 min

Luck of a Foghorn is a documentary featurette about Seattle underground animator Bruce Bickford, former collaborator of musician Frank Zappa and creator of Prometheus’ Garden, one of the most original stop-motion films in animation history. Interweaving Bickford’s pulsing, violent, magical, and mesmerizing clay animation with atmospheric 16mm and Super 8mm cinematography, home movies, and sparse interviews, Luck of a Foghorn takes viewers behind the scenes and deep into the garden of Prometheus. —brettingram.com

TUESDAY OCTOBER 16 – 7:30 AND 10 PM (Ticket info below)
FB EVENT

The Imagine Science Film Festival returns for the third year with an evening at Spectacle. The theme of the 11th ISFF is SURVIVAL:

Crisis. Entropy. Extinction. Last year we celebrated the past ten years of the Imagine Science Film Festival’s existence, but this year we take a hard look ahead at the high stakes for all life on an Earth facing climate change, species loss, nuclear proliferation, the imminent exhaustion of our energy resources. Existence itself is not assured.

But wherever we consider such direly high stakes, we can also aspire to a better world. New technologies constantly open new possibilities and sociopolitical change opens the way for new ideas to take hold. For every dystopia, a corresponding utopia may be within reach. It may be a struggle, but the record of all life is that of an eon-spanning fight to stay alive.

This year, send us your speculative hopes and fears, your studies of tumultuous natural history and startling feats of adaptation, all your endings and new beginnings. Apoptosis versus immortal cell lines. Half-lives and radical life extension. Obsolete inventions inspiring crucial breakthroughs. Illness and regeneration. The deaths of stars and the necessary paths to SURVIVAL.

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SHORT FILM PROGRAM: SIGNALS, TRANSMISSIONS, VOICES
Various directors, 2016 – 2018.
85 min.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 16 – 7:30 PM

ONLINE TICKETS HERE

Glitching cats, phone sex with aliens, crystal healing, the mysterious universe. Each year, ISF reserves some of the wildest and most outré takes on scientific filmmaking for a recurring program at Spectacle Theater. Not so incidentally, many become favorites. These films, though rooted in scientific principles, transform traditional sci-film expectations with abstracted narratives, form-breaking documentary concepts, mind-bending visuals, and other essential experiments at the outer edges of our festival program. These techniques are no rarity in the rest of the festival, but never in such a concentration as here. This year’s program investigates communication in all its forms.

Somnium Lapidum
Dir. Emily Pelstring, 2017.
Canada, 3 min.

A stop-motion 16mm audiovisual meditation on the material animation of stones. Inspired by pseudo-scientific texts of the 15th and 16th centuries, when it was believed that a given gem’s powers could be absorbed through focused viewing, the film proposes an analogy between this belief and attraction of cinema. The title, Somnium Lapidum, or Dream Stones, is a reference to the imaginative content of the “Speculum Lapidum” and the dreamlike experience of cinematic viewership.

Long Distance Relationship
Dir. Carolina Markowicz, 2017.
Brazil, 5 min.

In Brazil, where all things are possible, a man takes part in an extraterrestrial phone sex operation.

In Glass Houses
Dir. Ariana Gerstein, 2017.
USA, 8 min.

An interview is conducted exploring methods used to facilitate a real research project whose aim it is to capture and analyze human micro-expressions for use by a variety of industries (including lie detection and entertainment/animation). But the particular research or the use of human subjects is really just a point of departure. This film takes a moment to touch on our use of technology and vice versa.

Persistence of Memory
Dir. Natalie Tsui, 2016.
Canada, 15 min.

A skilled programmer commences work for Galatea, a robotics company launching the next generation of personal companions. Unlike generic robot companions, the C-1000 is made to a client’s precise specifications, which either give the companion a unique personality and complex individuality, or replicate those of someone else. Against the backdrop of activist protests over outsourcing emotional connection, the programmer brings a C-1000 “to life” through trial and error.

Wherever You Go There We Are
Dir. Jesse McLean, 2017.
USA, 12 min.

In this experimental travelogue, efforts to sound human and look natural instead become artificial. The scenery is provided through photo-chromed vintage postcards, displaying not only scenic North American landscapes but also the rise of infrastructure and industry. Aspiring to look more realistic by adding color to a black and white image, the postcards (already a vulnerable method of correspondence caught between private and public) are instead documents of the fantastic. The road trip is narrated by an automated correspondent (all dialogue is taken from spam emails) who is both seductive and mercurial, his entreaties becoming increasingly foreboding and obtuse, in a relentless effort to capture our attentions.

Forest Paths
Dir. Michiel van Bakel, 2018.
Netherlands, 3 min.

A warped stroll through a forest. Animated still photographs reveal movement and light on the forest paths that are otherwise invisible to the human eye. Van Bakel made a ‘scanner-camera’ that extends human vision to near-infrared light in an other-worldly way. What’s this thing called vision? What’s the fundamental difference between what a robot discerns, what a flying insect detects or man’s observation?

Ugly
Dir. Nikita Diakur, 2017.
Germany, 12 min.

An ugly cat struggles to coexist in a fragmented and broken world, eventually finding a soulmate in a mystical chief. Choreographed in digital simulation errors and inspired by a story found on the internet, this could be the definitive melodrama of our times.

Phototaxis
Dir. Melissa Ferrari, 2017.
USA, 7 min.

Phototaxis draws parallels between Mothman, a prophetic and demonized creature in West Virginia lore, and Narcotics Anonymous, the primary treatment program in West Virginia’s addiction epidemic. Rooted in nonfiction, this experimental animated documentary contemplates synchronicity and the role of belief systems in perception and pseudoscience; the tendency to assign supernatural meaning to tragedy and the unknowable; anonymous and apocryphal oral histories; and the moth to the flame. To visualize these narratives, natural materials and pastel-on-paper palimpsest animation are woven together using a multiplane and analog overhead projection.

Sore Eyes for Infinity
Dir. Elli Vuorinen, 2016.
Finland, 12 min.

An optician’s workday is filled by a line of extraordinary customers, who, one by one, use the optical equipments in suspicious ways.

Poliangular
Dir. Alexandra Castellanos Solis, 2018.
Mexico, 8 min.

Searchers pursue mysterious and seemingly unreachable objects. And what will happen if they are found?

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THE MAN WITH THE MAGIC BOX
Dir. Bodo Kox, 2017.
Poland. 103 min.
NEW YORK PREMIERE

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 16 – 10 PM

ONLINE TICKETS HERE

A man without a memory and a woman seeking more than contemporary life seems to offer grapple with a dystopian future Warsaw and are drawn into the 20th-century past. But such an escape may not be allowed. A unique love story unfolding under omnipresent crisis and totalitarian oversight, crossing between collapsing near future and Soviet history, The Man with the Magic Box nods to genre classics while remaining very much itself. The pleasure of viewing, as much as in the mysterious storyline and strange, perfectly strange performances by the leads, is in the subtle, meticulous detail of the world. Here, people are relentlessly cut off from one another, terrorism is either inescapable or a real-estate development tool, advertising uncomfortably personal, and all aspects of life metered by a credit chip implanted in the hand — all so unfortunately plausible as to flash by as almost-familiar background texture here. At turns bleak, absurd, unsettling, and oddly affecting, the film defies synopsis while advancing with effortless imagination.

Preceded by:

Expire
Magali Magistry, 2017.
France, 14 min.

A toxic fog blankets the planet forcing people to live confined. But when you are fifteen like Juliette, real life truly begins outside.

CRUEL INTENTIONS 3
dir. Scott Ziehl, 2004.
USA, 85 min.
English.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24th
ONE NIGHT ONLY – 7:30 PM
ONLINE TICKETS
FB EVENT

CRUEL INTENTIONS 3 is a 2004 American teen drama film directed by Scott Ziehl and released direct-to-video in 2004. Despite its name, the film has almost no relation to the previous films in the series, except for the shared themes and the lead character in this film, Cassidy Merteuil, who is a cousin of one of the characters from the first film, Kathryn Merteuil.

Plot keywords: teen angst, sex, betrayal, wager, jealousy, love triangle, preparatory school, manipulation, sexual assault, seduction, infidelity, sequel, lust, bikini, leg spreading, cunnilingus

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, IMDB

MATCH CUTS is a weekly podcast centered on video, film and the moving image. Match Cuts Presents is dedicated to presenting de-colonialized cinema, LGBTQI films, Marxist diatribes, video art, dance films, sex films, and activist documentaries with a rotating cast of presenters from all spectrums of the performing and plastic arts and surrounding humanities. Match Cuts is hosted by Nick Faust and Kachine Moore.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28 – 7:30 PM

FB EVENT

GET REEL, the movie-based comedy show, returns in September with GET REEL: Once Upon a Reel. Hosted by Joe Castle Baker and Max Wittert, comics will be live-dubbing over movies with a fantasy edge–we’re talking scheming elves, wicked sorceresses, talking animals, and drunk dwarfs. Grab some beer, bring a date, and join us for night of magic.

QUEERCORE: HOW TO PUNK A REVOLUTION
dir. Yony Leyser, 2018
Germany/US, 83 mins

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 – 5 PM 
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 – 10 PM

ONLINE TICKETS HERE

In the mid-1980s, Bruce LaBruce and G. B. Jones, a pair of young Canadians, introduced the world to the burgeoning Toronto queer punk scene through homemade zines and scrappy films. In this pre-Internet era, there was no way of knowing that queercore consisted of just two people. Soon enough, their subversive creation spread beyond their bedrooms to attract actual adherents, spawning a radical underground subculture that challenged both the mainstream gay and homophobic punk scenes.

DESIRE WILL SET YOU FREE director Yony Leyser returns to Spectacle with this rich, completist archive of rare footage and narration from a sprawling guest list that includes Justin Vivian Bond, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Team Dresh, Pansy Division, Silas Howard, John Waters and many, many more.

Special thanks to Altered Innocence.