beDEVIL
dir. Tracey Moffatt, 1993
90 mins. Australia.
In English.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 8 – 5 PM
SATURDAY, JANUARY 29 – 10 PM
beDEVIL (Tracey Moffatt, 1993) from Spectacle on Vimeo.
Like a playful, lavishly-composed Australian folk horror triptych, beDEVIL tells three ghost stories unfolding along cultural fault lines in far-flung corners of the outback and offshore islands. In Moffatt’s Australia, though, it is modernity and not antiquity that threatens: her specters are trains, UFOs, and American soldiers. Through lavish stylization and kinetic editing (and embracing all artifice, even bits of digital manipulation), interviews are transformed into performance and memory into heightened drama, as the film blurs the lines not only between Aboriginal and immigrant (or colonial) worlds but also between modes of film and narrative. The resulting tableaux, fanciful and deeply saturated, will haunt not only for their brushes with the uncanny but their many-layered approach to the deeper questions of post-colonial life. At the time of its Cannes debut, beDEVIL was the first feature directed by an Aboriginal woman.
THE BLACK BEYOND TRILOGY
dir. Steven Toriano Berry, 1992
73 mins. United States.
In English.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 14 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 23 – 5 PM
SATURDAY, JANUARY 29 – 7:30 PM
THE BLACK BEYOND TRILOGY (S. Torriano Berry, 1986-1992) from Spectacle on Vimeo.
“What really lies beyond this world? A vast void of nothingness? Or a place where the justice and retribution not realized in this life becomes a governing force? Who really knows? When your turn comes, who will be waiting for you?”
Our original plan last Spectober was to invite S. Toriano Berry – a renown independent filmmaker and longtime scholar of African-American cinema – for a special 25th anniversary presentation of his hood classic THE EMBALMER (1996), a surprisingly earnest (and disgusting!) slasher thriller shot on a shoestring budget in Washington, D.C. Bureaucratic matters hindered the screening – for now – But Berry had an irresistible ace up his sleeve: a new digitization of his BLACK BEYOND TRILOGY. Shot on video, THE BLACK BEYOND anthologizes three tales of terror in a style clearly indebted to The Twilight Zone; per Berry’s voiceover introduction, the Black Beyond is a place where “darkness is more than nothingness, and justice is not blind…”
The trilogy consists of three episodes. In “Deathly Realities”, a serial killer hiding behind a rubber mask receives comeuppance from his victims, beyond the grave; in “The Coming of the Saturnites”, a space alien (played by Berry!) struggles to ingratiate himself among humans without blowing his cover; and in “Money’ll Eat You Up!!!” a rogue dollar bill (or “dirty green”) makes its victims disappear – a brutal riposte to Gordon Gekko’s then-popular mantra of “greed is good”. Shot in part as Berry was completing his film production studies at UCLA (and, later, teaching film at Howard), THE BLACK BEYOND combines trenchant social commentary on the African-American experience with lovingly lo-fi videographic and prosthetic effects, as terrifying as it is hilarious. Spectacle is thrilled to include this hidden gem of 1980s phantasmagoria in our annual BEST OF SPECTACLE 2021 program.
CASTRO
dir. Alejo Moguillansky, 2009
85 mins. Argentina.
In Spanish with English subtitles.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 16 – 7:30 PM
Part Langian conspiracy, part Chaplinesque comedy of work, and part city symphony – Alejo Moguillansky’s CASTRO is filled with a Nouvelle Vague-esque sense of endless playfulness and ingenuity. A mysterious man named Castro (Edgardo Castro) is wandering around Buenos Aires trying hard not to find a job (“Right now I have you, my body, and my head. If I get a job one, two, or three of those things might disappear,” he tells his girlfriend), while a gang of four comical crooks led by Castro’s ex-wife clumsily tail him. Filled with plenty of absurd comic asides (an inane secret code communicated through umbrellas, a mysterious and omnipresent upstairs neighbor who is always heard moving around the apartment, ominous job interviews that venture into the strangely personal); dusty, sun-drenched cinematography; and a silent movie worthy piano score, CASTRO is a startling and surprising debut that oozes charm.
THE GOLD BUG
(EL ESCARABAJO DE ORO)
dir. Alejo Moguillansky, 2014
Argentina, 100 minutes
In Spanish with English subtitles.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 16 – 5 PM
THE GOLD BUG (dirs. Alejo Moguillansky and Fia-Stina Sandlund, 2014) from Spectacle on Vimeo.
They all struggle: European Filmmakers vs. South American Filmmakers; Independent Cinema vs. Cinema Funds; Wild vs. Civilisation; North vs. South; Pirates vs. Pirates; An old XIX Century Politician vs. an old XIX Century feminist Poet; Producers vs. Directors; Edgar Allen Poe vs. Robert Louis Stevenson; Long John Silver vs. Captain Smollet; Adventure vs. Money; Beauty vs. Greed; The search of truth and wisdom vs. hypocrisy and wickedness; The rich vs. the poor; Men vs. Women; Fiction vs. Facts. They all struggle, but only one wins.
Commissioned by a Danish film festival as a movie about 19th century feminist poet, Victoria Benidectssen, THE GOLD BUG instead became a literal and figurative adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic adventure novel Treasure Island. Moguillansky, producer Mariano Llinas, and actors Walter Jakob and Rafael Spregelburd play themselves in the film as a group of Argentine actors who’ve chanced upon a 17th century treasure map leading to the northern Argentine province of Misiones. using the commission to make a film about Benedictsson as cover, the ensemble sets out to find the buried treasure while convincing the European producers and co-director that their real aim is to also make a biography about 19th-century Argentine political radical Leandro N. Alem, so as to avoid being neo-colonialist. Directly riffing off of the real world circumstances in which the movie itself came into being, THE GOLD BUG is a metatextual questioning of the possibility of filmmaking in a capitalist, Euro-centric film ecosystem.
CRIME WAVE
dir. John Paisz, 1985
80 mins. Canada.
In English.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 8 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, JANUARY 27 – 10 PM
CRIME WAVE centers on an awkward loner, Steven Penny (John Paizs), who turns out bizarre scenarios for color crime movies. Steven wants to turn in the best colour crime movie ever, but he has a problem – he can only write beginnings and ends to his scripts. No middles! Living above a family garage in suburbia and befriended by the landlord’s ten-year-old daughter (Eva Kovacs), we see excerpts from a number of Steven’s scripts, zany ideas based on get-rich-quick schemes. Finally frustrated by his creative block, he sets out for Kansas to meet Dr Jolly (Neil Lawrie), the script doctor.
EMPTY METAL
dirs. Adam Khalil, Bayley Sweitzer, 2018
85 mins. United States.
In English.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 9 – 5 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 21 – 7:30 PM WITH Q&A!
Set in the abusive police state of the contemporary United States, EMPTY METAL follows five groups of characters, each emblematic of a different extreme political ideology, as they attempt insurrection against the status quo: a queer noise band is coerced into a dangerous assassination plot by a family of militant Native Americans who are aided by a Rastafarian computer hacker who is old friends with a Buddhist hermit whose son is a local militia leader. This tangled web of marginalized voices is as diverse and contradictory as the nation that spun it, but there is a common thread: all the characters teeter on the dull knife blade that is contemporary American politics, but they refuse to fall right or left. Instead, they lash out from the soul, and under the radar, in an attempt to achieve what their mainstream predecessors have yet to accomplish.
And all the while, the drones are watching…
FLIGHT TO HELL
Dir. Alvaro Passeri, 2002
86 min. Italy.
In English.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 21 – MIDNIGHT
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
The obnoxious inhabitants of a flying casino face an infestation of parasitic bugs in Passeri’s followup to MUMMY THEME PARK. Abandoning the latter’s near-exclusive reliance on practical effects, FLIGHT shows Passeri experimenting with digital animation – his trademark visual style translates surprisingly well to the medium, offering a unique take on the sub-ILM polygonal creations which were rife among direct-to-video horror offerings in the early 2000s.
As per the DVD box:
Don screams out as a horrific monster is about to eat him alive! But then he wakes up. It’s only a dream! That day he boards his private plane, a flying casino, that caters to the needs of fantastically rich clients who want to play for high stakes at high altitudes. But then the plane is engulfed in a strange thick fog that seeps into the cabin. The evil mist transforms the passengers and crew one by one into monstrous half human, half insect creatures with a ravenous appetite for human flesh. Don realizes that it is his nightmare come true – it is his FLIGHT TO HELL!
MUMMY THEME PARK
Dir. Alvaro Passeri, 2000
86 min. Italy.
In English.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 22 – MIDNIGHT
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
“It would not be too bold to declare this film the Francis Ford Coppola’s BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA of Italian mummy movies.” – Senseless Cinema
A garish amalgam of Westworld and The Mummy, Passeri’s 2000 masterpiece addresses the controversial practice of planting microchips in mummies in order to staff fantasy theme parks. Transcending its influences, the film boasts a uniquely queasy visual style crafted from greasy animatronics and a painfully saturated color palette. The plot concerns two dimwitted American journalists caught in the meltdown of the titular Mummy Theme Park – this, of course, is of secondary significance aside the exercise in discount worldmaking achieved through Passeri’s fabric-store scenography and a script rife with non-sequiturs.
WIM VINK: UNDEAD KING OF THE NETHERLANDS from Spectacle on Vimeo.
There is no Heaven. There is Hell. Therefore, Heaven is only in Hell.
Wim Vink’s first and only feature length film, Heaven is Only in Hell is a no budget murderdrone
WIM VINK SHORTS BLOCK
SATURDAY, JANUARY 15 – MIDNIGHT
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
INVITATION TO HELL
DANCE MACABRE
Netherlands, 22 min.
Vink packs nearly every horror trope and then some into 22 minutes in a brain melting blast of pastiche and loving homage (including bits of score directly lifted from Goblin’s work with Argento and Fabio Frizzi, among others). From blood sacrifices to zombies to possessions, this short really does have it all and then some.
I WANT MORE, I WANT LESS
dir. Bryce Richardson, 2019
87 mins. United States.
In English.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 29 – 5 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
Having hosted premiere runs for idiosyncratic filmmakers like Juan-Daniel Molero, Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn and Jean-Gabriel Periot, Spectacle is proud to re-screen filmmaker Bryce Richardson’s debut feature I WANT MORE, I WANT LESS.
An accountant in Queens rents out the front of her store to a young man who repairs cell phones…and sometimes pickpockets them. She tries to mentor him, but is tested by his unscrupulous opportunism. Though the film explores how two people attempt to survive and thrive despite gentrification and the isolating, transactional nature of modern life, I Want More, I Want Less lingers on quiet moments, and never veers into didacticism.
Set against the backdrop of the 2016 elections (with scenes shot at real-life community board meetings and anti-Trump demonstrations), Richardson’s quotidian, sparse style evokes arthouse influences like Tsai Ming-Liang, but the film never belabors the distance between the audience and the characters. Semi-improvised, the screenplay instead allows Girma and Abbas to talk the way everyday people actually talk, a perfect match for Richardson’s unwavering eye for the details of how they manage to eke out a living in De Blasio-era NYC.
BRYCE RICHARDSON is a filmmaker originally from Houston, Texas, now based in New York. Richardson’s short films 2580 (2015) and ECLECTIC BRACKETS (2016) have played at festivals such as Slamdance, Woods Hole, Antimatter, and others. In 2011, the Metropolitan Playhouse produced “Baby Marty,” his one-act play. He currently serves on the board for Mono No Aware, a community-focused organization that teaches celluloid film production. I WANT MORE, I WANT LESS was shot over the course of nine weekends at real locations, including a very cluttered CPA’s office in Queens. The film won best screenplay at the Tacoma Film Festival.
LAUGHTER IN THE DARK
dir. Tony Richardson, 1969
United Kingdom & France. 104 mins.
In English.
THURSDAY, JANUARY 13 – 7:30 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
Adapted from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel of the same name, LAUGHTER IN THE DARK deals with the obsession of a middle-aged man (Nicol Williamson) and his younger cunning mistress Margot (Anna Karina)– think Scarlet Street meets the British new wave. Tony Richardson trades Nabokov’s 1930’s Berlin for the Swinging 60’s of London in this lustful thriller of deceit which was never released on home video and has rarely-screened since its 1969 release. Anna Karina shines in her all-English role as the charming irresistible seductress who cultivates something mysterious behind her delicate, wide eyes.
RENDEZVOUS À BRAY
(aka APPOINTMENT IN BRAY)
dir. André Delvaux, 1971
France/Belgium/Weat Germany, 86 min.
In French with English Subtitles
THURSDAY, JANUARY 13 – 10 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
“As much as I revere some of the Belgian films of Chantal Akerman, if I had to choose only one Belgian film to take with me to a desert island, I’d have a pretty rough time forsaking this 1971 masterpiece by André Delvaux.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum
Paris 1917: a young pianist (Mathieu Carrière) receives a note from an old friend in the Air Force to join him at his lush country estate that happens to be close to the front lines of World War I. He arrives but his friend is nowhere to be found, with only the quiet, beautiful housekeeper (Anna Karina) present. While he spends days waiting for his friend’s arrival, his mind wanders to past events. At night, the mysterious woman appears again…
Based on a short story from surrealist Julien Gracq, Belgian auteur André Delvaux marries his trademark amalgam of fantasy and reality to Gracq’s shape-shifting text. Much like the film protagonist, Delvaux got his start by playing the piano to silent films in 1950s Brussels, and his musicality is on full display in the film’s sonata-like form, weaving variations of memories and moments into an ambiguous, intriguing mood piece. Cloaked in dense Gothic atmospheres and muted colors, RENDEZVOUS À BRAY gives off a melancholy, dream-like aura, subtle in approach but haunted by unspoken desires and half-imagined nostalgia.
Working with Delvaux’s daughter, we’re honored to re-introduce this classic of Belgium cinema.
LITAN
dir. Jean-Pierre Mocky, 1982
France, 87 min
THURSDAY, JANUARY 6- 10 PM
THURSDAY, JANUARY 20- 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 28 – MIDNIGHT
LITAN (dir. Jean-Pierre Mocky, 1982) from Spectacle on Vimeo.
NEIGE
(SNOW)
dirs. Juliet Berto & Jean-Henri Roger, 1981
91 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.
THURSDAY, JANUARY 6 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, JANUARY 15 – 10 PM
“Indebted to the boilerplate romans de gare that are ubiquitous in France, NEIGE commingles danger with low-rent spectacle, never pretending to tamp down the carnival atmosphere of the drag where the vast majority of action unfolds. NEIGE is rife with details that would be absent from a more commercial-minded film: decrepit merry-go-rounds, smeared lipstick, a flickering neon windmill outside the Moulin Rouge, tea gone cold. It’s tempting to posit NEIGE as a hidden bridge between the Nouvelle Vague and the subsequent generation’s cinema du look: drunken street poetry shot through pop realism.” – Daryl J. Williams, Cinema Scope
“Berto and Roger were grunge before grunge.” – Dave Kehr, Curator, Museum of Modern Art
Special thanks to Jane Roger, JHR Films, Rialto Pictures and Adrienne Halpern (Studio Canal).
PANELSTORY
dir. Věra Chytilová, 1979.
Czechoslovakia. 100 min.
In Czech with English subtitles.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 7 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 28 – 10 PM
Věra Chytilová’s 1966 DAISIES may be her best known work of radical cinema, but it’s neither her last, nor arguably most significant. A decade later, at time when most of her Prague Spring contemporaries had fled Czechoslovakia or drastically reigned in once-experimental visions, she came back with the equally daring and essential PANELSTORY. Framed as a sort of ensemble comedy circulating among the many lives contained within a new Soviet-bloc housing complex, the film is actually a scathing satire shredding every available ideal of home and family. The whole film can be understood by its audaciously critical setting: lost in a wasteland of debris and stalled construction, still incomplete yet already falling into disrepair, riddled with half-functional elevators, the housing complex precisely mirrors the disintegrating families contained within, whose individual stories form a catalogue of bleakly hilarious dysfunction and despair. It might have been all too believably familiar to those living under similar conditions in Czechoslovakia at the time, but Chytilova’s disillusionment, as always, extends far beyond her immediate surroundings to call into question the thwarted utopian hopes of an entire industrialized world.
As with all of Chytilová’s best work, form here deftly follows function. The urban malaise is caught near-entirely in verité-style hand-held camerawork decades ahead of fashion, and rhythmically fragmented under anarchic editing that mixes apartment interiors with dystopian architecture and massive earth-moving operations. Even the sound design follows suit, as the characters are beset by cataclysmic atonal score (contrasted against a synth-funk interlude straight out of an aspirational 70s home furnishings showroom). What PANELSTORY may lack from the sheer stylistic invention of DAISIES, it makes up for in thematic cohesion.
After the collapse of the Prague Spring, Chytilová was among those directors cut out of the studio system for their brilliant excesses, which meant that she spent the years from 1970 to 1976 secretly directing commercials under the name of her husband (Jaroslav Kučera, her frequent cinematographer and collaborator). Pressures from international film festivals and a bold letter from directly to the president restating her sincere Socialist values allowed Chytilová to release THE APPLE GAME in 1976. But if that work seemed comparatively restrained, she pulled out all the stops for PANELSTORY. It’s unbelievable that such a film could have been produced under the noses of the state censors, and following its release, Chytilova found herself banned for another two years for her troubles. Seeing it again all these years later, PANELSTORY seems well worth the risks of getting it made.
Having considered PANELSTORY our “lodestar film” since opening in 2010, Spectacle is thrilled to host this one-night-only engagement of Chytilová’s unsung classic as part of our reopening festivities.
Special thanks to Troy Swain and Janus Films.
SEX DEMON
dir. J.C. Cricket, 1975
USA. 60 min.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 8 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, JANUARY 14 – 10 PM
SEX DEMON (dir. J.C. Cricket, 1975) from Spectacle on Vimeo.
“A non-stop shocker that both sizzles and chills. A totally daring new dimension in male erotica!” – Michael’s Thing
All hell breaks loose when John’s last-minute anniversary gift inadvertently causes his younger lover Jim to become possessed by a SEX DEMON in J.C. Cricket’s all-male horror film. Openly inspired by both The Exorcist and its Blaxploitation cousin, Abby, SEX DEMON is a ferocious mix of the erotic and the grotesque that’s primed and ready to shock audiences again after being lost for the past forty years. In the words of Gay Scene critic Bruce King, “the squeamish may not want to watch, but if you do, you won’t forget it!”
SEX DEMON was the first film effort by actor, erotic dancer, and gay television pioneer J.C. Cricket. After the release of this film, he’d go on to direct over a dozen more under various pseudonyms before cofounding and directing the gay public-access programs Christopher Street After Dark, Diversions, Connections, and Gay Morning America. Cricket passed away from AIDS-related complications in 1992.
Last screened theatrically in 1981 and never given a home video release, SEX DEMON is a crucial — yet long-lost — piece of queer horror history. Presented in a new 2k preservation from a recently discovered 16mm theatrical print.
Elizabeth Purchell is a queer film historian and archivist. Her Instagram project, Ask Any Buddy, explores the gay adult film industry’s role in both the development of queer cinema and the spread of gay culture at large.
CONTENT WARNING: This film contains a scene of sexual violence.
SPIDER BABY
dir. Jack Hill, 1967
81 mins. United States.
In English.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 9 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 14 – MIDNIGHT
“Though superficially similar to some of Charles Addams’ drawings, SPIDER BABY truly resembles nothing else in film.” – Nathaniel Thompson, Mondo Digital
The first solo feature from exploitation legend Jack Hill (FOXY BROWN), SPIDER BABY remains one of the wildest and weirdest horror films of the 1960s. The credits dub this “the maddest story ever told,” a promise that’s well on the way to being fulfilled in the opening scene alone, when Virginia traps and kills a hapless deliveryman in her makeshift web. She’s one of three siblings, including exploitation wild man Sid Haig, who suffer from a unique genetic disorder that causes them to regress back to childhood while retaining the physical strength and sexual maturity of adults. Lon Chaney, Jr. (THE WOLF MAN) gives one of his most memorable late performances as Bruno, who manages to cover up the crimes of the “kids” until two distant relatives lay claim to their house. Blending elements of gothic horror and gallows humor, SPIDER BABY drops somewhere between THE ADDAMS FAMILY and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.
TERROR NULLIUS
dir. Soda_Jerk, 2018
53 mins. Australia
In English.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 8 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, JANUARY 22 – 5 PM
THURSDAY, JANUARY 27 – 7:30 PM
Part political satire, eco-horror and road movie, TERROR NULLIUS is a political revenge fable constructed entirely from samples pirated from the Australian cinema cannon. Binding together a documentary impulse with speculative muckraking, Soda Jerk’s revisionist history opens a queer narrative space where cinema fictions and historical facts permeate each other in new ways. The apocalyptic desert camps of Mad Max 2 become the site of refugee detention, flesh-eating sheep are recast as anti-colonial insurgents and the women of Australian cinema go vigilante on Mel Gibson. Working within and against the official archive, Soda Jerk’s feature remix offers an incendiary un-writing of Australian national mythologies.
Funded by the Ian Potter Moving Image Commission in 2016, TERROR NULLIUS was notoriously disowned by the organisation just days prior to the film’s premiere in 2018. Offended by its politics, the Ian Potter’s conservative Board of Trustees described the work as “a very controversial piece of art” and “unAustralian”. The Guardian named the “dizzyingly ambitious satirical work” one of the best Australian films of the decade.
TERROR NULLIUS was commissioned by ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image)
TO SLEEP SO AS TO DREAM
(夢みるように眠りたい」フィルム修復)
dir. Hayashi Kaizô, 1986
73 mins. Japan.
Silent.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 15 – 5 PM
THURSDAY, JANUARY 20 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 30 – 7:30 PM
For those who remember Hayashi Kaizô’s MAIKU HAMA: #1 PRIVATE EYE trilogy we screened in 2018, a reprise of one of our favorites from this summer’s outdoor screenings in a gorgeous 2k restoration.
Born from the vestiges of some long forgotten dream, TO SLEEP SO AS TO DREAM is a hauntingly beautiful ode to the silent era that yearns for a distant past—back to an illusory world teeming with new excitements, novel invention and cryptic riddles. Under the faint glimmer of an electric lamp, an aging silver-screen starlet seeks the aid of two steadfast detectives when her darling daughter, the ethereal Bellflower, is kidnapped for ransom. The sleuths find themselves caught in a heady game of cat and mouse as they journey deeper into a sleepless realm of benshi performers, archetypal villainy and never-ending serials. Transposing the silent era’s cinematic language into a work that walks the line between antiquity and fantasy, dream and waking state, TO SLEEP SO AS TO DREAM casts a spell over the spectator in dream-like fashion, harking back to the magical, early days of cinema.
Special thanks to K.F. Watanabe, Tetsuki Ijichi and Arrow Films.
WHEEL OF ASHES
dir. Peter Emanuel Goldman, 1968
95 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 23 – 7:30 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
“I am nothing but passion and sex and pathetically chaotic poetry”
Photographed with a distinctive lyrical purity and funded in part with a grant awarded by Jean-Luc Godard, WHEEL OF ASHES serves as a gut-wrenching portrait of the tormented and solitary.
Pierre Clementi – then between starring roles for Buñuel and Pasolini – wanders aimlessly through the temptations of Saint-Germain-des-Prés as he attempts to relinquish himself from the corrupted urges of lust and desire and search for meaning through the teachings of Eastern and Western mysticism. Pierre’s tortured eyes reflect directly into Goldman’s lens, fully encapsulating Goldman’s visceral style as an instinctive and intuitive formalist of beauty. This is poetry as filmmaking and filmmaking as poetry.
Sleepwalking through beatnik cafes and underground nightclubs, Pierre is determined to walk until he has nowhere else to go. Rarely screened and often neglected, WHEELS OF ASHES was Goldman’s last completed narrative feature and is ripe for rediscovery.
screening with
POSITANO
dir. Pierre Clementi, 1968
25 mins. France.
Silent.
“The reconciliation of the visual with the colorful psychedelic impulses of these luscious times… To find again the chant of origins, images that inscribe themselves in us like a double and that wave to us. To grope for… In the dark room of multinational ideas, I quiver and I mumble.” — Pierre Clémenti
Featuring some of the most beautiful double/triple/etc exposures ever committed to film, POSITANO features Pierre Clementi’s family and friends (including Nico & Philippe Garrel) on their holiday trip in Italy. The footage is silent, colorful and seductive.
WHO KILLED VINCENT CHIN?
dir. Christine Choy, 1987
87 mins. United States.
In English
FRIDAY, JANUARY 28TH – 7:30 PM + Q&A WITH DIRECTOR CHRISTINE CHOY (this event is $10)
On a hot summer night in Detroit, Ronald Ebens, an autoworker, killed a young Chinese-American engineer with a baseball bat. Although he confessed, he never spent a day in jail. This gripping Academy Award-nominated film relentlessly probes the implications of the murder in the streets of Detroit, for the families of those involved, and for the American justice system.
THE YEAR OF THE PLAGUE
(EL ANO DE LA PESTE)
dir. Felipe Cazals, 1979
109 mins. Mexico.
In Spanish with English subtitles.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 7 – 10 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
Ten years after we showed his anti-anti-communism horror masterpiece CANOA, Spectacle is thrilled to reprise living master Felipe Cazals’ THE YEAR OF THE PLAGUE: a little-seen adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year transposed to 1970s Mexico. Working from an original idea proposed by his friend Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cazals uses the outbreak of a pandemic to diagnose the ills of Mexican society as he saw it: political corruption, snake-oil pundits on television, municipal apathy to the basic needs of lower-income citizens. The result is a bracing, terrifying vision of life out of junct 40 years ahead of coronavirus.
“Gabo (Marquez) is known as the creator of magical realism, but there is no magic to this film. We inserted a plague to create a different reality, in order to reveal problems within society. What can change is the way authorities will react to a crisis of this nature. To hide the truth is a power move, essentially linking all forms of power together. The president must say whatever is convenient for private interests. The whole reason he is in power is to create a distorted reality. The president, the private interests—their form of reality becomes the official truth. To take the pandemic seriously would necessitate destroying preexisting forms of power.” – Felipe Cazals, Filmmaker Magazine
Special thanks to Felipe Cazals, Herandy Goytia and IMCINE.
ZOO ZÉRO
dir. Alain Fleischer, 1978
France. 96 min.
In French with English subtitles.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 15 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JANUARY 21 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 30 – 5 PM
During a cataclysmic rainstorm in a Paris largely reduced to ruins and rubble, guests in baroque animal masks crowd a smokey nightclub called Noah’s Ark. Here, Eva (Eden and After’s Catherine Jourdan) takes the stage to perform a riviting song of illicit interspecies desire and a formative erotic experience involving a lion mauling at the Berlin Zoo. It’s the last number, of the night, and maybe of the city — “an accident or a disease” has ravaged the streets as trucks trundle over cobblestones with news of the military government in crisis and the animal world seems poised to reclaim lost ground from a waning humanity. But an encounter with a stranger at the club (a tuxedoed, stammering Pierre Clementi) sends Eva out into this city of crumbling bordellos and verdant parks to a series of fateful meetings with a fragmentary family — a mother ogre, a ventriloquist chauffeur who narrates the failure of the Spanish revolution with a Donald Duck puppet, twin foley artists, and, narrating from a vocoder organ at the heart the liminal human-animal space of the city zoo, a mournful Klaus Kinski. But like other pulp peaks of the 70s, this is less a film that suggests tidy synopsis than a true cinematic dream, where nocturnal correspondences between Mozart, escaped large cats, and the grasping of all-too-temporary human edifices override the logic of the waking world and categories become blurred by their own mysterious logic.
Exquisitely shot in oneirically shadowed day-for-night (and night-for-night) by Bruno Nuytten (of such Spectacle essentials as INDIA SONG, MON COEUR EST ROUGE, and POSSESSION!), and with assistant direction by Claire Denis, ZOO ZÉRO has been all but unseeable outside of messy bootleg transfers for far too long. Now, at last, artist and director Alain Fleischer’s masterpiece has been newly restored from 35mm, in a gorgeous HD transfer.
Newly restored HD print courtesy of Alain Fleischer, with English subtitles newly corrected and custom retimed by Spectacle volunteers.