“These films were not made together; nor with the idea of showing them together. But when they came together, we felt they had an attitude in common. Implicit in this attitude is a belief in freedom, in the importance of people and the significance of the everyday.

As filmmakers we believe that:
– No film can be too personal.
– The image speaks. Sound amplifies and comments.
– Size is irrelevant. Perfection is not an aim.
– An attitude means a style. A style means an attitude.”

This was the manifesto of Free Cinema as written in 1956 by four friends and filmmakers: Lindsey Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and Lorenza Mazzetti. Three of them – Anderson, Reisz, and Richardson – would all go on to become massively successful film artists in their own right, but Mazzetti’s career was less public and less mainstream. When she passed away in 2020 at 92 years of age, she left behind the legacy of a remarkable life and a small but powerful body of work that, when contrasted with her peers and collaborators, is largely underappreciated. She was a novelist, a filmmaker, a painter – and an intensely political ideologue who understood the importance of eschewing the power structures that contributed to the exploitation and suffering of people everywhere. Mazzetti herself narrowly escaped execution at the hands of Nazis in 1944. At the time, she was living with her cousin Robert Einstein (brother of Albert) and his family when retreating German officers slaughtered everyone in the house – Mazzetti was spared because she did not have a Jewish last name. This hellish experience colored Mazzetti’s life and would bring a theme of alienation into much of her work.

The two films presented in this program, K and Together, are some of Mazzetti’s earliest. Upon arriving in England, she practically forced her way into admission at the Slade School of Art, telling then principal William Coldstream that she should be let in because, in her words, “I am a genius!” He did as he was told. Later, without permission, Mazzetti “borrowed” film equipment to make K and flippantly told the development lab to bill the school directly. Coldstream allowed Mazzetti’s film to screen under the condition that the audience reaction would determine her future at the program. Not only did her peers applaud the work, but Denis Forman of the BFI was in attendance and offered her the option to make a film that she wasn’t risking jail time for. The result was Together – the first publicly funded film made in the UK by a woman director.

*Special thanks to Another Gaze Journal for their recent and much-needed reissue of Lorenza Mazzetti’s 1961 novel The Sky is Falling (Il cielo cade) and for their assistance in coordinating this program.*

SUNDAY, MARCH 3 – 7:30PM
SATURDAY, MARCH 16 – 7:30PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 31 – 7:30PM

ADVANCED TICKETS

 

K
Dir. Lorenza Mazzetti,1953
United Kingdom, 29 min.
In English

K is perhaps the first film adaptation of Franz Kafka’s 1915 novel The Metamorphosis. Mazzetti’s work here presaged the Free Cinema movement with her on-location shooting and inclusion of non-actors. She also crafted a rather humorous portrayal of Gregor Samsa owing much to the performance of the character by the late British painter Michael Andrews.

TOGETHER
Dir. Lorenza Mazzetti (with Denis Horne), 1956
United Kingdom, 51 min.
In English

Shot on 35mm and with a budget of only £2000, Together brought the aesthetics of Italian neo-realism to the British working class and was the only fiction film presented in the first Free Cinema program in 1956. The story follows two deaf friends living in a shoebox apartment in London’s East End as they walk each day to their factory jobs, on the way experiencing life in suspended silence. Throughout the film, the two men are hounded across barren bombed-out lots by rowdy children, dirty and smiling, whose real playground songs are a time capsule used as backdrop here in Mazzetti’s work. Sprawling across outdoor markets filled with buskers, beggars, produce stands, and street food and on into cramped bars, circus shows, and alleyways, Together is as much a documentation of a long gone part of London’s past as it is a heartbreaking tale of the alienation of outsiders.

TESOROS
(AKA TREASURE)
Dir. Flavia Furtado, 2023
Chile. 90 mins.
In Spanish with English subtitles

SATURDAY, MARCH 2ND – 5 PM
SATURDAY, MARCH 16TH – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 20TH – 10PM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 27TH – 7:30 PM + Q&A

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ADVANCE TICKETS Q&A

This March, we’re delighted to present the New York Premiere of Flavia Furtado’s TESOROS, a documentary about flea markets in South America. In her dreamy tour through Chile, Brazil, and Argentina’s flea markets, Furtado pieces together a tender portrait of Latin American street vendors that doubles as a biting critique of capitalist culture. The filmmaker’s striking bricolage—a blend of street interviews, personal anecdotes, and urban legends—provides an illuminating glimpse at an undervalued corner of the Latin American economy.

Flavia Furtado is a Brazilian-Chilean filmmaker and DJ. Her films have shown at Anthology Film Archives and New York’s Experimental Film Society. More recently, she was selected to participate in Berlinale Talents.

Special thanks to Flavia Furtado, Kevin Gonzalez, Steve Macfarlane and Sylvie Shamlian.

The Masters of Italian Exploitation series returns to Spectacle this March to showcase Luigi Bazzoni, one of Italy’s unsung masters of genre cinema. Bazzoni began his career as the assistant director to Mauro Bolognini before stepping into the director’s chair in 1963 with the short films DI DOMENICA and UN DELITTO. Two years later, Bazzoni would direct his first feature film, THE POSSESSED, and follow it up with four more. Even though he only directed five feature films in his career, they are regarded as some of the best Spaghetti Western and Giallo movies ever made.

LE ORME, Bazzoni’s final feature, played throughout 2023 at Spectacle, returning for the best of Spectacle in January 2024. This series will focus on his earlier Giallo films, THE POSSESSED and THE FIFTH CORD.

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THE POSSESSED
(AKA LA DONNA DEL LAGO)
(AKA THE LADY OF THE LAKE)
dir. Luigi Bazzoni, Franco Rossellini. 1965.
Italy. 94 mins.
In Italian with English Subs.

FRIDAY, MARCH 8TH – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13TH – 10 PM
SATURDAY, MARCH 23RD – 5 PM
THURSDAY, MARCH 28TH – 7:30 PM

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Upon returning to a sleepy lakeside town, a writer learns that the woman he had been infatuated with has died by suicide. Devastated by the news, he investigates her death and soon discovers a dark secret.

Bazzoni’s first feature-length film, THE POSSESSED, is a mastery of slow-burn mystery and suspense. The film delivers classic Noir tropes – a sad investigator, a mysterious woman, and a dead body – with flashes of excessive violence and a hint of the supernatural, foreshadowing the future of Giallo.

Thematically and tonally similar to Bazoni’s later film LE ORME, THE POSSESSED plunges the audience into a familiar tale of deception and self-doubt. Whereas LE ORME relied on color to create the film’s dream-like aesthetic, Bazzoni shot THE POSSESSED in black and white. The cinematography gives THE POSSESSED a haunted quality that accentuates the ominous atmosphere, resulting in a tone closer to a nightmare than a dream.

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THE FIFTH CORD
(AKA  GIORNATA NERA PER I’ARIETE)
(AKA BLACK DAY OF THE RAM)
dir. Luigi Bazzoni, 1971.
Italy. 93 mins.
In Italian with English Subs.

FRIDAY, MARCH 8TH – 10 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 12TH – 10 PM
MONDAY, MARCH 18TH – 10 PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 24TH – 5 PM

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Andrea, an alcoholic journalist, is thrust into chaos after a killer targets his acquaintances. As the prime suspect, he must race against the clock to discover the killer’s identity and clear his name. 

Where Bazzoni’s other thrillers inspired or drew inspiration from Giallo films, THE FIFTH CORD falls squarely within the genre. Even though the Giallo genre is often synonymous with eccentricity and violence, which this film has incredible flourishes of, Bazzoni doesn’t stray too far from his signature slow burn, reserved style. This combination makes THE FIFTH CORD an anxiety-inducing fever dream that will keep you guessing until the last moment.

With cinematography by Vittorio Storara (APOCALYPSE NOW, LE ORME), a score by Ennio Morricone, and a killer performance by Franco Nero, THE FIFTH CORD is widely considered one of the most visually and audibly stunning Giallos ever made.

This February, Spectacle continues with our Palestine fundraising series, spotlighting films from across the Arab world with two programs of documentaries made within the context of Palestine-solidarity filmmaking in the tumultuous decades of the 1970s and ‘80s. Each of these films were directed by Arab women, and with the exception of Jocelyne Saab’s BEIRUT, MY CITY, were all made in collaboration with, or with support from, the Palestine Cinema Institute (PCI) in Lebanon and the General Union of Palestinian Women.

Films from Khadijeh Habashneh, founder of the General Union of Palestinian Women, and Jocelyne Saab describe the situation for the women and orphans of Palestine, while films from Lebanon by Jocelyne Saab and Randa Chahal Sabbag document that nation’s sprawling and drawn-out civil war and its intersections with contemporaneous events in Palestine.

All proceeds raised will benefit relief efforts. Special thanks is given to Samirah Alkassim for her assistance in assembling this program.

Content warning: These programs contains explicit images of war and death.

PROGRAM 1: TWO FILMS BY JOCELYNE SAAB

Jocelyne Saab began her career as a documentarian at the outset of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. She would spend the next decade and a half documenting the many splintering conflicts of the war and its effects across her homeland. Following her experience working as second unit director on Volker Schlöndorff’s Circle of Deceit (1981), Saab began to work in fiction and would only rarely return to documentary, stating in a 1982 interview that, “This documentary phase wasn’t only linked to my personal history; it was determined by my country’s political situation and Lebanon’s cinema history. My trajectory is a bit like that of other Lebanese filmmakers. If I decided to move to fiction it’s because, after speaking in a ‘militant’ manner, I now want the image to speak as much as possible.”

Spectacle is proud to present two of Saab’s early documentaries: the French television-commissioned Palestinian Women (1973) and the second installment of her masterful Beirut Trilogy, Beirut, My City (1983).

PALESTINIAN WOMEN
(LES FEMMES PALESTINIENNES)
Dir. Jocelyne Saab, 1974.
France, State of Palestine. 15 mins.
In Arabic and French with English subtitles.

This early work by Saab finds her interviewing Palestinian women (students and soldiers, mothers and children), giving these often unheard voices a chance to speak to their conditions and experiences of the occupation. This early work by Saab was commissioned by French television, but was never aired and long thought lost. In it, one can see the stirrings of her investigations into the twin themes of liberty and memory that she would follow for the rest of her career.

screening with
BEIRUT, MY CITY
(بيروت مدينتي)
Dir. Jocelyne Saab, 1983.
Lebanon, France. 38 min.
In Arabic and French with English subtitles.

Near the start of the film, Saab and her co-writer, Lebanese playwright Roger Assaf, consider their ambivalence towards their native Beirut before the war; “A supermarket of fishy business and betrayal, that’s what Beirut was.” But the affection for the city evident in Saab’s images – of its architecture and its coastline, to say nothing of its people – betray these feelings. Later, Assaf’s gentle voiceover describes Beirut as a utopia, and because of what Saab has shown us, it is easy to believe him. 

These conflicting feelings over a place and its history are what Saab and Assaf pry at in this short but profoundly moving masterwork. Assaf considers the corruptibility of memory, lamenting that, “Man always believes what he sees, and what he sees ends up cheating him.” Saab’s footage is intercut with news coverage of the war – occupying soldiers, bombings, entire families of corpses. Yet Saab’s own scenes of life in Beirut assert the power of the image to correct memory. If memory is produced by bearing witness, Saab entreats us to look with her, and to consider which images we choose to remember.

TICKETS HERE
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 5 – 7:30PM
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10 – 5PM
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 21 – 7:30PM
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 25 – 5PM

PROGRAM 2: CHILDREN, NEVERTHELESS & STEP BY STEP…

Paired together, Khadijeh Habashneh’s Children, Nevertheless and Randa Chahal Sabbag’s Step by Step provide a micro and macro view on neighboring Lebanon and Palestine’s history of solidarity and discord, both motivated by the Arab Nationalist movement.

CHILDREN, NEVERTHELESS
(أطفال …ولكن)
Dir. Khadijeh Habashneh, 1979.
State of Palestine. 22 mins.
In Arabic with English subtitles.

In 1976, the Tel al-Zatar refugee camp came under siege from right-wing militias looking to expel Palestinians from Lebanon. The violence peaked with a massacre in which hundreds of children died and 15,000 residents were forced to flee — half of them children, some of them too small to be able to say their own names. Produced by the PCI and the GUPW, Children Nevertheless (also known as Children Without Childhood) shows the lives of the orphans of those killed in the massacre now living in Bait El-Somoud, a housing facility which was established for them by the GUPW. Habashneh’s film discusses the contradictions between the International Declaration of Child Rights and the reality of the living conditions of Palestinian children suffering in diaspora camps and under the Israeli occupation.

screening with
STEP BY STEP…
(Pas á pas…)
Dir. Randa Chahal Sabbag, 1979.
Lebanon, France. 80 mins.
In Arabic and French with English subtitles.

Shot between February 1976 and March 1978, Step by Step compacts the chaos of the Lebanese civil war into its short run time using archival images, news broadcasts, interviews, and raw documentary footage. Sabbag’s work is sprawling, brutal, and poetic in its approach and clarity even as the span of history it attempts to communicate is long and winding. In the lead up to the civil war, Palestinian refugees spilled in increasing numbers through the Lebanese border and the PLO’s operations within Lebanon alarmed the conservative Phalangist Party. Formed in 1936 by Pierre Gemayel after visiting Germany, the Phalangists were a right-wing Maronite Christian political group that dominated the Lebanese civil war, collaborated with Israel, and fought against pro-Palestinian forces. Sabbag’s film places the Palestinian struggle for liberation in the context of this broader conflict, tracing the dismemberment of Lebanon and the shifting balance of powers in the Middle East as the United States (via Henry Kissinger) manipulated the region during this time.

TICKETS HERE
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7 – 7:30PM
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 11 – 5PM
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 24 – 5PM
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 26 – 7:30PM

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CLASSIC PARTS – R. G. STUDIOS
Dir. R. G. Miller
United States. 40 mins.
In English

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 4 – 7 PM
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 16– MIDNIGHT
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 18 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 29 – 10 PM

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In this collection of sci-fi shorts, Kansas-based filmmaker R.G. Miller taps into a dimension beyond the Twilight Zone. Working with familiar sci-fi tropes—inter-dimensional travel, scientific mishaps, monsters—on a low-budget, Miller’s films are a product of creative ambition and aesthetic limitations. Much like the subjects they entertain, short films like THE WAVE MATTER MACHINE and THE SHADOW PEOPLE assume an experimental and incendiary quality that is alternately baffling and sublime. As a whole, CLASSIC PARTS compiles the best of Miller’s action sci-fi thrillers, which star himself, friends and action figures.

R.G. Miller has been making zero-budget “Internet Art Films” of unmatched zeal out of his home in Wichita, KS for decades. 

This presentation is part of an ongoing collaboration between Spectacle and the Queens-based art publisher Random Man Editions, which specializes in broadcasting various genres of the indescribable and documenting fringe practices across analogue and digital media. More information available at randomman.net.

Special thanks to Random Man Editions, Steve Macfarlane and Steven Niedbala.