Monthly Series – Page 18 – Spectacle Theater

BONNIE’S KIDS

Posted on December 28, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

BONNIE’S KIDS
Dir. Arthur Marks, 1973
USA, 105 min.

MONDAY, JANUARY 6 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JANUARY 13 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 26 – 7:30 PM

[TRIGGER WARNING: Forewarned is forearmed–Bonnie’s Kids and their friends don’t play nice: scenes of violence, attempted sexual assault, incest, deviant behavior and general mean-spiritedness abound.]

Bonnie’s Kids like the kind of kicks that could kill you!
Hang out with “Bonnie’s Kids” — you’ll have a blast!
Bonnie’s Kids—they’ll blow you…away.

Forgotten and largely unseen since its initial release in 1973, Bonnie’s Kids is a lost neo-noir sleaze classic that deserves rediscovering. It’s so much more than drive-in/grindhouse filler: It’s a great twist on the “femme fatale on the run” theme, one that really toys with the audience, like an especially malicious cat with a hapless mouse.

Rather than a film, Bonnie’s Kids honestly feels more like a sleazy paperback book you’d pick up in a junkshop while on vacation—and you only picked it up in the first place because of its lurid cover—but you cannot stop reading it once you’ve started. When you’re done, you want to tell all your friends about it.

What starts off as a dopey white-trash teen-sex-romp rapidly mutates into something else far more sinister, finally metastasizing into the savage B-movie love child of Elmore Leonard and Charles Willeford.

With both barrels of a shotgun, Ellie (Tiffany Bolling) and her jailbait sister, 15-year-old Myra (the oh-so-naughty Robin Mattson), have escaped the clutches of their molesting stepdad, and split to the big city of San Jose (!?!) to enjoy the good life with their Uncle Ben (veteran character actor Scott Brady; this flick is overflowing with recognizable faces), a gent whose publishing empire is a cross between Playboy and Hustler.

While Ben’s lesbian wife takes a shining to young Myra, Ellie oozes her charms at the publisher until he uses her to “run an errand,” which turns out to mean picking up a half a million dollars of stolen loot!

After hooking up with a lunkheaded but handsome private eye (Steve Sandor, later the evil biker from The Ninth Configuration), Ellie double-crosses Ben—and of course he sends henchmen after her. And this is where things really pick up: the goons are a salt & pepper team, Digger (Timothy Brown) and Eddie (Alex Rocco, veteran of a zillion hard-boiled flicks, but best remembered for getting shot in the eye in The Godfather). Eddie is the leader, and he’s like a cousin of Richard Stark’s paperback novel anti-hero “Parker,” a no-bullshit professional, but both he and Digger are intelligent, hard-working and tenacious—as well as ruthlessly vicious.

Although usually set in the bright, almost blinding sunshine, Bonnie’s Kids continues the film noir tradition of creating a world that is dark, brutal and hopeless—an existential nightmare. For the most part, everyone is mean or on the make, and the nicest character is considered by others to be a “pervert” and a “creep.”

Like a good pulp thriller, Bonnie’s Kids is willing to throw you curveballs. As the film advances, it gets more and more mean-spirited: innocent bystanders are slaughtered, good Samaritans have their heads kicked in, and a blood and mayhem are left in the awesomely tawdry Ellie’s wake. Meanwhile, she and her Private Dick get worse and worse: they are not nice people.

Through the help of crisp cinematography, great use of unique locations in the Southwest (all of which are now probably gone due to expanding urban development), and a grim, fatalistic and genuinely ironic ending, Bonnie’s Kids is a wonderfully nasty neo-noir. Subtlety isn’t its strong suit, but soon what had been a TV-movie-style of artlessness, becomes a cold, dispassionate vision—akin to villain Alex Rocco’s point of view, almost as if he was infusing the film with his personality.

This is a B-movie that keeps getting better and better as it moves along—tracking its protagonists on their one-way express trip straight to hell. But it’s the superbly crafted rise and fall of Ellie, the doomed trailer trash valkyrie who risked it all for the sweet life, that really makes the flick.

Played with loads of killer attitude by the superfine Tiffany Bolling (also the star of The Candy Snatchers, as well as Kingdom of the Spiders), protagonist Ellie is the missing link between Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven, the psycho go-go girls of Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill! and ice-cold evil super-genius Wendy Kroy of The Last Seduction. A white trash demoness using razor-sharp guile and a body built for sin to get what she wants, Ellie’s only semi-civilized, though, and still a danger to herself—not to mention everybody else around her…

And as for sweet, sexy Myra? Heh-heh-heh, just watch the movie and you’ll find out… (But it’s really a perfect ending—honestly!)

BEST OF SPECTACLE 2013

Posted on November 25, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

To mark the conclusion of Spectacle’s third full calendar year of operation, our programming collective has selected their favorites from among the regular series features each other showed throughout the past twelve months. The result, BEST OF SPECTACLE (aka BoS2K13), provides an opportunity to revisit some of 2013’s greatest discoveries, thrills and audience-pleasers.

As the year draws to a close, Spectacle would like to acknowledge the audiences, artists and distributors who have pitched in their support, vision and feedback. Thank you for another brilliant year! We’ll save you a seat in 2014.

ANTI-CLOCK
Dir. Jane Arden & Jack Bond, 1979
92 min. UK.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15 – 5:00 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21 – 7:30 PM

Part of the series Arden & Bond

A mixed-media riddle, fractured psychodrama and slow-burning sci-fi thriller all fused into one, Anti-Clock- the final feature born out of Arden and Bond’s collaboration and only one in which they are credited as co-directors- is the CCTV output of your most paranoid, hypnagogic distress.

Ostensibly a loose narrative about an experimental psychiatric procedure that deconstructs the past, present and future of a suicidal young man, Arden and Bond employ a variety of film and video processing techniques to conjure a world in which mind and screen are enigmatically intertwined. As described in the opening credits (appropriately buried in a sea of television static), Anti-Clock is a ‘time stop’ of obsessive self-revelation.

The film premiered at the London Film Festival in 1979 and experienced a short run in NYC in 1980 before being shelved in 1982 after Jane Arden’s suicide.

ASSA
Dir. Sergei Solovyov, 1987
Soviet Union, 153 min.
Russian with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 1 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15 – 7:30 PM

Part of the series MOLODOST: Films on Soviet Youth

Assa came to recognition and cult status as one of the first films to bring underground rock culture into the Soviet mainstream, featuring songs by bands such as Aquarium, Soyuz Kompozitorov, Bravo, and Kino (whose lead singer Viktor Tsoi, also featured in Igla, plays himself in the film). Assa reflected a time of change in the USSR, as emphasized in Tsoi’s song “We Wait for Change,” consequently adopted by the real-life Russian opposition movement Solidarnost as its anthem. Set in Crimea during the late 1980s, Assa follows the story of Alika, a young nurse who is romantically involved with Krymov, her much older patient and the leader of an organized crime group. Despite her relationship with Krymov, Alika starts falling for a young rock musician named Bananan (played by the avant-garde artist Afrika). Bananan introduces Alika to his countercultural world of music and art. When the jealous Krymov begins to notice a change in Alika’s emotions toward him, he stages a plan to eliminate Bananan from Alika’s life forever. Assa has a playful, absurdist touch, combining sober moments with dreamlike sequences. Experimental scenes of hand-painted abstract patterns and inter-titles explaining youth slang are interspersed throughout the film. One amusing subplot that develops follows Krymov reading a book of the assassination attempt on Russia’s Tsar Paul I—the “Mad Tsar”. As he reads, a fantasy reenactment plays parallel to the main story. Perhaps this text foreshadows the inevitable fate of the Union: according to the assassins, they were only abolishing a power from Russia that had gone mad.

BOXER
Dir. Shûji Terayama, 1977
94 min. Japan.
In Japanese with English subtitles.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 12 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 18 – 7:30 PM

Dense with glorious tints and nail-biting moments, Shûji Terayama’s Boxer pits avant-garde and crowd-pleaser sensibilities against each other with downright jugular results.

The story is old as sin: a withered ex-champion, fueled by bitterness and drink, takes a young drifter under his wing. In a society that rewards cowardice and conformity, the student’s values are shaken by his mentor’s discipline and focus, but it’s hard to tell if the retired boxer is steady, or just plain berserk.

Spectacle favorite Terayama (Pastoral, Emperor Tomato Ketchup), who wrote boxing commentary as a hobby between plays and movies, gives the story a dazzling palette and lightning swiftness, but also a necessary sense of respect for the body – and the weight of its punishment.

THE EMBRYO HUNTS IN SECRET
Dir. Kôji Wakamatsu, 1966
72 min. Japan.
In Japanese with English subtitles.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 12 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, DECEMBER 16 – 10:00 PM

Part of the series Kôji Wakamatsu

One part art house, one part Grindhouse, The Embryo Hunts In Secret was made right after Wakamatsu left Nikkatsu. This classic film presents a brutal exploration of the Japanese psyche seen through a child-like megalomaniac’s perspective.

This is a man who keeps his girlfriend imprisoned in their small apartment, controlling her every move and torturing her in between bouts of denial and self-induced humiliation. In the end, she gets revenge.

DER FAN
aka Trance
Dir. Eckhart Schmidt, 1982
89 min. Germany.
In German with English subtitles.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 2 – 10:00 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14 – 7:30 PM

Part of the series Anti-Valentines 2013

In the wake of films like Christiane F., studies of displaced, dysfunctional German youth were plentiful. However, the frontrunner in the sweepstakes for the most memorable and disturbing entry would have to be Der Fan.

Like every other teenager in school, Simone has a crush on a rock star. And because this is Germany in the 80s, that rock star fronts a Kraftwerk-style new wave/minimal wave solo project. When the lead singer ‘R’ (lead singer of the real-life German pop group Rheingold) comes to town to make a television appearance, she’s suddenly gripped by a trance-like state… leaving school, friends and parents behind her. However, when Simone comes to realize the shallow nature of the ‘glamorous’ music industry and of ‘R’ himself, she plans a calculated revenge on her obsession that builds to one of the most shocking and brutal endings ever committed to celluloid.

An unsettling blend of new wave pop culture, adolescent angst, and full-blooded horror, this nasty little art-house shocker caught more than a few unsuspecting viewers off guard and earned a bit of a cult following in the process. Imagine a John Hughes vehicle with Michael Haneke in the driver’s seat and you’re getting close…

MARQUIS
Dir. Henri Xhonneux. 1989
78 min. France.
In French with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3 – 10:00 PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 20 – 10:00 PM

Clumped in your history book between the chapters on French Revolution and pioneering 18th century erotic fiction grows a horny, pornographic mold called MARQUIS.

Immersed in a world in which uncanny animal masks mirror the spirit of the character within, a canine Marquis de Sade serves a prison sentence for allegedly raping the bovine Justine… but the situation may be more complicated than it seems. In between bouts of banter with his anthropomorphic, meter-long penis Colin, the Marquis gets down to writing a few of his more infamous scenes—many depicted in surreal claymation. Before too long the Revolution has begun, but where will it leave the Marquis?

Co-written by Henri Xhonneux and Roland Topor—animator of 1973′s inimitable surrealist classic “Fantastic Planet”—MARQUIS’s bizarre tone swings at will between irreverent perversion and clear-headed satire, never failing to entertain and utterly confound.

“This is one of the strangest movies I have ever seen. I found it to be discomforting and just weird. It makes you squirm in your seat and wonder what the people making this are like in real life. It’s definitely entertaining and it sort of sucks you in, especially if you don’t know French and have to read subtitles. It is certainly not American and it is certainly very peculiar. I have never seen a movie where everyone is wearing life-like animal costumes and acting like humans in very abnormal ways. This movie gives me the chills. However, I would watch it again just because it is so fascinatingly WEIRD.” -IMDB user ‘ethylester’

“NOT FOR THE PRUDISH.” -Variety

MARY JANE’S NOT A VIRGIN ANYMORE
Dir. Sarah Jacobson, 1998.
98 min. USA.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11 – 10:00 PM
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 19 – 10:00 PM

Part of the series You Can’t Keep Me Quiet!: Films by Sarah Jacobson

Sarah Jacobson (1971-2004) was an independent filmmaker who led a DIY filmmaking movement in the 90s. She wrote and directed several short films, documentaries, music videos and a feature film. She formed Station Wagon Productions with her mother and producer Ruth Jacobson and with her help, Sarah self-promoted and distributed her films all over the country. Originally from New Jersey and Minneapolis, Jacobson studied briefly at Bard College and then at the San Francisco Art Institute with George Kuchar.

She directed I Was a Teenage Serial Killer in 1993, which she described as the story of “a 19-year-old girl who has a series of run-ins with various condescending men.” Jacobson’s slap-in-the-face feminist interpretation of “sexy”/violent B movies found a cult following. Jacobson went on to make her feature Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore a few years later.

Too in your face to be an after-school special, Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore is a movie about sex from a girl’s point of view. After a gross and unceremonious “first time,” Jane learns about the joys of pleasing herself and asking for what she wants from her punky co-workers at a Midwestern movie theater (with Jello Biafra and Davey Havok cameos). the film debuted at the Chicago Underground Film Festival in 1997 and sold out at Sundance and SXSW; Jacobson promoted the film the year previous at the Independent Film Market with homemade “Not a Virgin” stickers that her and her mom made at Kinko’s.

After cancer ended Sarah Jacobson’s life in 2004, her mother Ruth and Sam Green established the Sarah Jacobson Film Grant to support young women “whose work embodies some of the things Sarah stood for: a fierce DIY approach to filmmaking, a radical social critique, and thoroughly underground sensibility.” Find out more about the Sarah Jacobson Film Grant here.

DAS MILLIONENSPIEL
Dir. Tom Toelle & Wolfgang Menge, 1970
96 min. West Germany.
In German with New English subtitles.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 2 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21 – 10:00 PM

Long before The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, Series 7: The Contenders and even The Running Man, 1970’s Das Millionenspeil portrays a deadly reality television contest in which a participant is given seven days to elude a trio of professional assassins and win a $1 million prize.

Based on a 1958 story by Robert Sheckley often cited as the first predicting the advent of reality television, Das Millionenspeil was itself made for German television and interspersed with convincing false advertisements, psychedelic studio interludes and man-on-the-street documentary bit. And moreso than all its followers, its a richly unsettling satire of government, broadcast and entertainment sectors colluding and engendering various alliances and sympathies among the public they entangle.

It also represents some of the first-ever recordings by the legendary CAN, then known as The Inner Space. Their propulsive title track and ambient interludes provide the backbone of an unusually polished, thrilling and subsequently little-seen production.

MOD FUCK EXPLOSION
Dir. Jon Moritsugu, 1994
76 min. USA.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 18 – 10:00 PM

Part of the series Postmodernism: Who Cares? The Complete Jon Moritsugu

Combining the tropes of 60s art-house cinema with the primitive punk aesthetics of the Cinema of Transgression, Jon Moritsugu has been making movies far outside the mainstream for over twenty-five years. While his work has screened at venues as high profile as the Sundance, Berlin and Toronto Film Festivals and even public television, he continually shirks convention and classification. After making his name with a series of hand-made 16mm features, he’s recently embraced video with a fervor and a freeness to which every young filmmaker should be paying attention. Moritsugu’s world is overflowing with eye-popping production design, eardrum-destroying rock ‘n’ roll, gross-outs aplenty and deadpan one-liners you’ll be quoting for weeks.

In this teen angst epic, London (Amy Davis) longs for love and leather jackets. Meanwhile, vicious Mods wage a turf war against a gang of lip-synched Asian bikers.

“A dynamic punk odyssey of a pair of innocent teens adrift in a violent urban world; Moritsugu unleashes a barrage of powerful images and hard-driving music.” – Los Angeles Times

LES SAIGNANTES
aka The Blood-lettes
Dir. Jean Pierre Bekolo, 2005
Cameroon. 97 min.
In French with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13 – 10:00 PM
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 19 – 7:30 PM

Part of the series Welcome to Applied Fiction: The Films of Jean Pierre Bekolo

Les Saignantes is the best African sci-fi vampire political satire with homoerotic overtones you’ve ever seen. Best friends Majolie and Chouchou are two beautiful young women trying to get ahead in a near-future Cameroon. After accidentally killing a powerful politician during sex, the two come up with a plot to dispose of the body, and get into the glamorous wakes that have taken over the local nightlife.

As the girls tear their way through the corrupt ruling class, using their their feminine wiles and magical powers, Bekolo drops inter-titles into the film, commenting on the difficulties of filmmaking in an oppressive political climate. With a feminist subtext and cinematography like a blacklight rave, Les Saignantes is a beautiful, disorienting, and truly original work.

SCHOOL OF THE HOLY BEAST
Dir. Norifumi Suzuki, 1974
91 min. Japan.
In Japanese with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 22 – 5:00 PM

Part of the series S†NDAYS

Something foul is afoot at the Sacred Heart Convent, as Yumi Takigawa discovers after cloistering herself to search for traces of her mother, who had disappeared into the monastery years before. Once there, she becomes privy to dark secrets and sadistic games. In the hands of brilliant director Norifumi Suzuki, Sacred Heart is a wonderful and terrifying world of sensuality and violence rendered with masterful visual panache. Equally notorious for its exploitational extremes as its stunning artistry, School of the Holy Beast is a twisted rabbit hole of sin and vice that absolutely lives up to its legendary cult reputation.

SWEET BUNCH
Dir. Nikos Nikolaidis, 1983
154 min. Greece.
In Greek with English subtitles.
New restoration presented in HD.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8 – 8:00 PM
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 22 – 7:30 PM

Part of the series Dead Wax: A Nikolaidis Double A-Side

Nikos Nikolaidis (1939-2007) is one of Greece’s most masterful and subversive filmmakers, yet his work remains inexplicably neglected abroad. Best known in the States for his transgressive, kinky horror-noir pastiche SINGAPORE SLING, his distinctive oeuvre encompasses many works embraced by radicals, outcasts and misfits, while earning an unexpected place within the pantheon of critically acclaimed national cinema of his native country.

Nikolaidis’s most acclaimed film charts a string of increasingly bizarre circumstances in the lives of four misanthropic housemates. An episodic, surreal, and offbeat paranoid epic in the spirit of Celine and Julie Go Boating, SWEET BUNCH weaves various plot strands as the characters cheat, steal, sleep, swindle and dance their way to oblivion, represented here by an extreme climax that clarifies the title’s allusion to Sam Peckinpah.

Veering between magical effervescence and hard-bitten cynicism, SWEET BUNCH is a neon-bathed yowl from a generation born into immediate obsolescence; what Vrasidas Karalis calls “an elegy and farewell to the innocence of a forgotten generation through poetic realism and colorful expression.” It’s further distinguished by nimble performances; a rich pop soundtrack; deftly choreographic sequences that would make Scorsese blush; and vintage-vortex production design encompassing offbeat knicknacks, Victorian junk, and jukejoint neons.

In it’s most recent list the Greek Film Critics Association (PEKK) ranked SWEET BUNCH among the country’s ten greatest films, and its idiosyncratic influence lingers in the work of Athina Rachel Tsangari and Giorgos Lanthimos. Nevertheless, SWEET BUNCH remains unavailable on DVD outside of Greece and previously had not been shown in New York in nearly 13 years. Here’s your chance to catch up on a national classic all-too overlooked outside its borders.

THE TELEPHONE BOOK
Dir. Nelson Lyon. 1971
80 min. USA.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 20 – 7:30 PM

Sexually frustrated gamine Alice (Sarah Kennedy) is freed from her apartment-bound malaise when she receives the world’s greatest obscene phone call from one “John Smith.” Setting out on picaresque journey through the Manhattan white pages in search of its maker, Alice encounters ego-crazed porn directors, perverted psychologists and priapic shut-ins. Her trip grows more and more deranged (interrupted by first-person interviews with phone freaks), climaxing in one of the nuttiest half-hours of 1970s cinema.

Directed by Saturday Night Live writer Nelson Lyon and produced by Merv Bloch, creator of some of the movie industry’s best ad campaigns, The Telephone Book is hilarious and disturbing in equal measure, featuring Warhol Factory regulars, a man with a never-ending erection, and a lurid animation sequence (that is mostly to blame for its X rating). This is the Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask…for the porn-house crowd, with one caveat: it’s not porn and it never pretends to be.

THE WORKING CLASS GOES TO HEAVEN
aka La Classe Operaia Va in Paradiso
Dir. Elio Petri, 1971
112 min. Italy.
In Italian with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 1 – 5:00 PM
MONDAY, DECEMBER 16 – 7:30 PM

Part of the series Elio Petri

“Such films should be burned.”
–Jean-Marie Straub

Shot in a factory occupied by striking workers, The Working Class Goes to Heaven is Petri’s investigation of the restructuring of capitalist social relations and the waning primacy of the mass worker as the holder of revolutionary agency (Gian Maria Volonté stars as “Lulu Massa”). Student militants and union bureaucrats battle over piecework at the factory gates, while the workers themselves remain in a state of fatal ambivalence.

The mutilation of the body and the consciousness of the worker here receives one of its clearest cinematic expressions. The worker’s total incorporation into the machine of large-scale industry also occasions the most Deleuzian moment in Petri’s oeuvre: “The machine starts to move. Arms, legs, mouth tongue … The food goes down, and here is the machine that crushes it. A shit-making factory!”

NO EXPECTATIONS: TODD VEROW

Posted on November 2, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

TODD VEROW IN ATTENDANCE FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22nd!

Todd Verow did and does what a lot of people talk about doing – he makes movies. AND he does it often, with no excuses. Spectacle is proud to present four early works by the “once and future king of DV”.

A veteran of punk and queer cinema, Verow is the eye behind the detached yet dynamic compositions which comprise the playfully nihilistic work of Jon Moritsugu. But where Moritsugu’s films spend most of their time in vacuous tableaus, and revel in a kind of expectation quashing, antagonistic stillness, Verow’s early punk works are hyperactive all nighters of DV ADD. Verow has a glitter-soaked map of Nowhere, and his films manically careen from one soul crushingly small apartment to another in search of pills, booze, sex, but most of all – a place to crash.

Verow’s camera is wild, unpredictable, too close (everyone needs a close-up), too dark (who needs lights?), and too bright (that morning sun can hit like a ton of bricks). In short, it’s exciting and beautiful and like his characters, it never stops moving. These wild, restless films about addiction and the perils and pleasures of living nakedly in the moment manage to stay quite surprisingly upbeat; even in the lowest lows there is a tender and charming optimism, all furnished by Verow’s own stable of superstars and chameleons, some low key (Bill Dwyer) and some outrageous (Eric Sapp, Philly).

Club kids, undiscovered punk legends, wannabe stars, junkies, real losers, users, drag queens – they’re still here down on the exhausted LES (out in the wastelands of suburbia too), still searching, still laughing, still smiling and partying with no expectations. Verow is the only filmmaker who can keep up with them.

LITTLE SHOTS OF HAPPINESS
Dir. Todd Verow, 1997
USA, 83 min.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22 – 7:30 PM (with Verow in attendance!)

Bonnie Dickenson plays Frances, a cubicle clock watcher with a secret – instead of going home at night to her Jack Torrance-esque husband and their stultifying suburban home, she does a quick costume change in the office bathroom and hits the town in search of sex, booze, and, most importantly, a place to spend the night. Little Shots Of Happiness is a gleeful, sexy, sometimes goofy, sometimes scary and unpredictable journey of one woman who has decided it’s worth some weirdness to see what’s out there.

Spring boarding from the idea of making a movie with just a camera, no lights and direct sound, this perfectly absurd yet oddly realistic premise (a woman living out a suitcase in her office) allows Verow and his crew to sketch another characteristically wild, aesthetically restless, raw, funny little movie. Bonnie Dickenson provides the charming, understated heart of Little Shots – taking sex, drugs, and violence all in stride, even with smiling good humor. Shot in Boston and featuring the early Verow regulars, this one is so stripped-down that while it evokes the episodic narrative adventures of the nouvelle vague, its minimalist humanism might be more akin to their spiritual father, Roberto Rossellini, with more techno, sex and drugs.

SHUCKING THE CURVE
Dir. Todd Verow, 1998
USA, 89 min.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 17 – 5:00 PM
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22 – 10:00 PM (with Verow in attendance!)

In Shucking The Curve, Verow finds the perfect premise for his most wildly gleeful exploration of negative capability – a New York City apartment hunt.

Suzanne Fountain (Bonnie Dickenson) has just arrived in New York City with a sort of perfunctory dream of being an actress and accumulating some experiences. But soon after arriving at an old friend’s apartment, who promptly hits her up for cash and then disappears, she finds herself in one bizarre and desperate situation after another in
her search for a new place to stay, and discovers that the city is more dangerous, tempting and duplicitous than she might have expected.

Like La Dolce Vita on DV, Curve traces a Dantesque course through the LES ranging from grotesquely beautiful (and hilarious) scenes of debauchery to delicate moments of human connection to the stark and grim realities of being broke and addicted. In quick, unadorned fashion, with his outlandish cast of regulars, Verow creates a fast and exhilarating tribute to those days and nights that go on and on, before the your body catches up to your spirit.

ONCE AND FUTURE QUEEN
Dir. Todd Verow, 2000
USA, 76 min.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 27 – 7:30 PM

It’s not easy being a legendary genius no one knows about, but it’s sure fun to watch one try and make everyone understand that – especially when it’s Aunty Matter (Verow regular Philly), a walking talking punk rock id, whose stage antics fall somewhere between Edith Massey and G.G. Allin.

In typical Verow fashion Aunty Matter crawls across lower Manhattan looking for pills, booze, sex and a place to crash. She’s struggling to keep her band together and to stay high and alive – it’s not easy though -because after all, a lovable pariah is still a pariah. Follow the Once And Future Queen as she bounces from bedroom to bedroom, bathroom to bathroom, gobbling pills, guzzling booze, pissing everyone off, all in search of what else? More.

Queen is a fast and ugly, rough and hilarious downward spiral which showcases Philly, Verow’s compulsively watchable Divine -a philosophy spewing punk rock queen who you can’t help but love and root for. It’s also filled with lot’s of nasty, raw punk and some lofi visual passages that explore the possibilities of grainy, free form video poetry.

A SUDDEN LOSS OF GRAVITY
Dir. Todd Verow, 2000
USA, 90 min.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 5 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24 – 5:00 PM

A Sudden Loss Of Gravity is Verow’s sprawling love letter (hate mail?) to small town life, where self destruction and boredom go hand in hand, and being weird and wasted is the only way to survive.

Set in Bangor, Maine (Verow’s hometown and the inspiration for his own Bangor Films), Gravity is the most ambitious and complex -narratively and temporally – of Verow’s early works. This makeshift period piece weaves multiple characters, narratives, past and present events, digressions and strange dead ends into a meditation on suburban angst and the terror and the beauty of burning hot and bright. Along the way though, there are quiet odes to human connnection and what at first comes on like a ragged, trash odyssey through the heart of teenage nihilsm turns out a measured, multi-faceted picture of longing, regret, rage and second chances.

Made with the detailed care and knowledge that comes from hometown filmmaking, this one is for anyone who ever loved and hated their own small town, and felt the desire to share the particular flavor of their own experience with someone else – a task Verow transforms into his own brand of poetry.

NEW IRISH UNDERGROUND FILM

Posted on November 2, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7th – 7:30PM & 10PM
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21st – 7:30PM & 10PM
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5th – 7:30PM & 10PM

(Detailed synopses below)

Irish cinema has never been renowned for harboring a vibrant underground or experimental film scene. There have been significant exceptions (most importantly, aspects of the Irish “First Wave” of the 1970s), but it’s only in recent years that a body of films has emerged that offer a powerful rebuttal to that perception. While to announce a fully-fledged “movement” would be premature, it is safe to say that the work of the four filmmakers featured in this series – Rouzbeh Rashidi, Maximilian Le Cain, Dean Kavanagh and Michael Higgins – represent an important new direction in Irish cinema.

Working with minimal and usually non-existent budgets, primarily on video, with zero crew and casts typically drawn from friends and family, all four filmmakers have been developing at a prolific rate over the past few years. Between them, they have produced 32 features since 2008 – though it must be admitted Rashidi, who in 2012 alone directed 9 features and 76 short films, has been the most insanely fertile contributor. All the filmmakers are members of the Experimental Film Society, an international organization founded by Rashidi aiming “to produce and promote films by its members” who are “distinguished by an uncompromising, no-budget devotion to personal, experimental cinema.” As this series will make clear, they have also been known to appear in each other’s films, and even collaborate on film projects together from time to time. (Strangely enough, Rashidi, Le Cain and Kavanagh have even released three albums of sound art together, under the collective moniker “Cinema Cyanide”.)

For the most part, the films operate in an uncanny space between experimental and narrative film. On the one hand, generally eschewing plot and any conventional notion of “eventfulness” in favor of the immediate sensuousness of images and sounds and their juxtaposition – on the other hand, using performers, locations, lighting and sound design to evoke affects and atmospheres more readily associated with genre cinema, especially the horror film. Le Cain, also an accomplished critic, once wrote about David Lynch that he “frees the paranoia of noir from the straightjacket of narrative … [drowning] the plot in a great tidal wave of emotion”, and one can identify a similar impulse at work across many of these films. Le Cain adds that “the most unsettling aspect of [Lynch’s work] is that the fear seems to come from a source that is deeper than the plot indicates.”

It’s this deeper level that these filmmakers mostly concern themselves with. As the title of the opening film, There is No Escape from the Terrors of the Mind (2013), makes explicit, the unease evoked is existential rather than circumstantial: it’s much more about the nature of perception, memory and consciousness than anything that can be resolved, or even expressed, through action or dialogue. Usually forsaking plot entirely to tackle these depths head-on, the films mostly seem to reside in a strange, subterranean world free of the typical “narrative” trappings of our daily life. Jobs, money, the State, even social interaction, are rarely visible. Instead, there are bodies and there are spaces, there are sensations and there are memories, and there is the coming-into-being and intermingling of each of these through processes of perception (and cinema).

When language is foregrounded in these worlds – for example, in Higgins’ Birds on a Wire (2011) or Rashidi’s Bipedality (2010) – it is usually fragile and woefully insufficient. Le Cain has described Bipedality as one of Rashidi’s last films to feature extensive dialogues, as a study of “how inadequate language is to communicate feeling, or to grapple with the mysteries of existing in any given moment in relation to another person or simply to the world that surrounds one”, a world that is, in contrast, “almost overwhelmingly vivid and sensuous.” It’s our primal and problematic relationship to the world in this sense, that each of these filmmakers focus on in different ways: not the world before the Word (in the sense of Brakhage’s “untutored eye”) so much as a world beneath the Word, a subterranean field of sensations that is always available to us but which we can rarely share or articulate in social or verbal terms.

Although it’s worth thinking through the question of whether this aesthetic direction is ultimately limited by its rejection of social or political contingencies and distrust of verbal expression, Le Cain’s thoughts on Rashidi make an opposing case that could apply to all four filmmakers: “He is not interested in cinema as arecord or replication of communication, but in what cinema can itself best communicate through sound and image. … He is concerned with the intensely private experiences of perception that perhaps cinema alone has the tools to communicate adequately.”

Or put another way, we could pick up the idea of filmmakers Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni from their recent film In Search of Uiq (2013) that, “In our universe, we are tuned to the frequency that corresponds to the reality of capitalism … An infinite number of parallel realities coexist with us in the same room, although we cannot tune into them.” At their best, Rashidi, LeCain, Kavanagh and Higgins have found ways to tune into some of those other frequencies, and now invite us to join them.

Programmed by Donal Foreman, with special thanks to the Experimental Film Society.

For more information please visit: www.experimentalfilmsociety.com, www.rouzbehrashidi.com, www.maximilianlecain.com, www.deankavanagh.com, and www.mgmh.me.

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 7th – 7:30PM
HSP: THERE IS NO ESCAPE FROM THE TERRORS OF THE MIND
(Rouzbeh Rashidi, 120mins, 2013)

“HSP: There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind consists of three medium length instalments of an ongoing film project by Rashidi, Homo Sapiens Project. These instalments, when watched back-to-back, will function as a single film structured in episodes. A mysterious loner, perhaps a poet, journeys through a series of uncanny surrealistic landscapes with an unclear purpose. His adventure is divided into three sections. The main theme of this experiment is to compare the eerier qualities of different landscapes and interpose the characters within them, elaborating the project’s ongoing preoccupation with extracting sinister moods from ordinary settings. In a way, these can be seen as experimental horror films in which an atmosphere of dread is evoked and sustained without the expected narrative trappings.” – Rashidi

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 7th – 10PM
BIPEDALITY (Rouzbeh Rashidi, 68mins, 2010)

“It is rare and thrilling to encounter a film that seems to pre-exist the viewer’s presence, one which pitches the audience into a disturbingly private universe and trusts it to find its bearings within an alien environment that belongs more to the characters than the spectator. There is no better example of this than Rouzbeh Rashidi’s magnificent and profoundly mysterious new underground feature Bipedality (2010). A two-hander focusing exclusively on a young couple played by Dean Kavanagh and Julia Gelezova, it troublingly articulates the way in which two people, even while sharing an intimate relationship, can remain mysterious to each other- and perhaps also to themselves.” – Le Cain

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21st – 7:30PM
A HARBOUR TOWN (Dean Kavanagh, 92mins, 2013)

“A young girl lives with her brother in a small cottage in the countryside. In the city a Health Inspector explores an abandoned building. It is unclear what has happened but it is evident that there have been environmental changes. A terrible sense of dread ensues and separates the brother and sister. The brother continues with his mundane chores in isolation, while the young girl drifts further away into the depths of a large rotting forest where she eventually disappears.” – Kavanagh

“Based in a small town in Co. Wicklow, working alone, without budgets and with casts more often than not drawn from his family, Kavanagh is a melancholy visionary of brooding isolation. His obscure narratives tend to focus either on the private rituals of home life or mysterious journeys to or from ‘home’, to or from memory…. His is unquestionably a cinema of contemplation: places, objects, faces, atmospheres and their immediate emotional charge are his stock in trade. Rather than telling stories in any traditional sense, his best films generate a slow, throbbing ache that invades and haunts his viewers. His world is rainswept, claustrophobic, fixated on details, with even his urban images steeped in rural gloom.” – Le Cain

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21st – 10pm
SHORT FILMS: MAXIMILIAN LE CAIN & VICKY LANGAN (60mins)

Since 2010, sound/performance artist Vicky Langan (aka Wölflinge) and experimental filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain have been working together in a unique creative audio-visual partnership. This is built on the strikingly fitting match between Langan’s magnetic, often troublingly intense presence as a performer and Le Cain’s distinctively jarring, disruptive visual rhythms. So far, they have completed eight moving image works together, six of which are presented in this program:

CONTACT (2011, 3 mins) uses Super-8 elements in constructing a dialectical relationship between film image and material.

WOLFLINGE 17/11/’10 (2011, 8 mins) is a haunting visual interpretation of a performance by Langan that breaks down the boundaries between spectator and performer.

LIGHT/SOUND (2010, 9 mins), their first video, acclaimed by critic Fergus Daly as one of the top ten films of 2010 in the Senses of Cinema magazine end of year poll, was chosen for distribution by Paris-based experimental film cooperative Collectif Jeune Cinéma.

HEREUNDER (2011, 12 mins) is an intense, fragmented (auto)biographical portrait of Vicky, which sets her adrift amidst lockers of garden shed bric-a-brac from which she summons an ocean of sound.

DESK 13 (2011, 8 mins) brings a darker, more erotic aspect of their vision to the fore.

DIRT (2012, 12 mins) is a phantasmagoric mélange of live performances and elements of gothic horror, resulting in a haunting, intense and sometimes humorous portrait of Wölflinge.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5th – 7.30pm
HISTORY OF WATER (Dean Kavanagh, 62mins, 2012)
BIRDS ON A WIRE (Michael Higgins, 63mins, 2011)

This double bill of hour-long pieces by Dean Kavanagh and Michael Higgins are perhaps the most identifiably Irish films in the season, focused as they are on the texture of rural landscapes and atmospheres.

Kavanagh’s first long-form work, History of Water, draws tremendous visual power out of a limited series of characters and spaces around his family home and native town of Greystones, Co. Wicklow.

The minimal and even hermetic scope of the film is countered by consistently rich and sensuous imagery in which local weather plays an evocative part. The underlying unease which is developed and at times becomes overwhelming, is hinted at in Kavanagh’s own synopsis of the film, which seems to function both as a description of the film’s narrative and its production: “A young man films his family to better understand them. As a result he becomes destroyed by them.”

On the other hand, Michael Higgins’ Birds on a Wire, the third film in his “road movie trilogy”, takes a paradoxically austere and static approach to a touristic journey along Ireland’s west coast. Two Polish women “experience both Ireland’s mythical history and contemporary weather patterns”, through a series of mostly distanced black and white tableaus, emphasizing the interplay of bodies, earth, weather and the flow of time much more than any contextual specifics of geography or personality.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5th – 10pm
WEIRD WEIRD MOVIE KIDS DO NOT WATCH THE MOVIE
(Maximilian Le Cain / Rouzbeh Rashidi, 80mins, 2013)

Weird Weird Movie Kids Do Not Watch The Movie is the second collaborative feature film between Rouzbeh Rashidi and Maximilian Le Cain. This hypnotic, visually and sonically immersive exploration of a haunted space unfolds in two parts. In the first, a woman (Eadaoin O’Donoghue) dissolves her identity into the ghostly resonances she finds in the rooms and corridors of a sprawling, atmospheric seaside basement property. In the second, a man (Rashidi), existing in a parallel dimension of the same space, pursues a bizarre and perverse amorous obsession.

EDITH CARLMAR: The Tragedies

Posted on October 29, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

Special thanks to the Norwegian Film Institute (NFI).

A singularly witty and dexterous auteur, Norway’s pioneering female filmmaker Edith Carlmar is ripe for a reappraisal in world cinema. Carlmar and her husband Otto co-managed their own production company, Carlmar Film A/S, with which they collaborated with a diverse community of technicians, artists and performers – including the then-teenage Liv Ullman, whose debut lead at 21 was Edith’s final film as director, The Wayward Girl. Making ten movies in as many years, the Carlmars built an astonishing resume in the 1950s before abandoning filmmaking forever when they were at the top of their game.

Today Edith’s legacy suggests a nearly clear split between flinty, ice-cold film noirs – often evincing a rare female perspective – and romantic comedies that’ll make your jaw drop even today with their sexual candor. She was in particular a master of eroticized close-ups and devastating quiet moments, never flinching from emotions (pleasurable or painful) most American directors wouldn’t touch with a fork.

That said, Carlmar Film A/S was an unabashedly commercial enterprise, at a time of deeply felt prudishness in Norway. The Carlmars made hits for a popular audience, and proudly paid all their grants back to the government. Never betraying her blue-collar roots, Edith left the distribution rights to her entire catalog to FILMVETERANENE, a union of Norwegian industry veterans. Alongside them, Spectacle is thrilled to team up with the Norwegian Film Institute to blow the dust off these classics of Scandinavian cinema this autumn.

DEATH IS A CARESS
(Døden er et kjærtegn)
dir. Edith Carlmar, 1949
88 mins. Norway.
In Norwegian with English subtitles.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4th – 7:30PM
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 15th – 10PM

Carlmar’s fierce and mesmerizing debut film follows a Erik (Claus Wiese), a young auto mechanic, and his torrid love affair with Sonja (Bjørg Riiser-Larsen) – an older, married woman. Death Is A Caress luxuriates in beautifully staged meetings and whisperings, private moments refiltered into Erik’s voice-over account of how the affair swallowed up his life. Carlmar’s ensemble always has a wisecrack ready in response for him, but this conventional linear device also allows the filmmakers to throw their weight into wordless, lush sequences of huge import: benders, moments of heated passion, curious interior observations.

Pressed against the stoically clueless Erik, Sonja’s catty, desperately lonely femme fatale turns the film into a grand game of emotional chess as they plunge deeper into their doomed romance. Carlmar would perhaps take future subject matters more seriously in her aesthetic, but it hardly matters: Caress is haunting in how it executes one luminous, golden-era pirouette after another. Ingeniously wry, Carlmar’s filmmaking never fully tips its hat to the audience; if the film has a noir’s backbone, its filling is closer to the knotted domestic drama of Tennessee Williams. Through Erik’s virginal eye, Caress is breathtakingly sensual, making his first loss of innocence its own champagne-drunk landscape.

MAIMED
(Skadeskutt)
dir. Edith Carlmar, 1951
87 mins. Norway.
In Norwegian with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6th – 10PM
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 27th – 10PM

Neither a thriller nor a weepie, Maimed introduces itself as a case study, bookended with comments from a jovial old psychiatrist. If Carlmar’s first film is baroque, Maimed is decidedly a chamber piece, an attempt to conjure thrashing waves of emotion from confined spaces and situations. Carsten Winger stars as Einar Wang, an architect who keeps himself distant and cold from life; after he attempts suicide, he’s paralyzed and placed in an asylum. His wife Else (Eva Bergh) uncovers her husband’s soul-crushing depression, spurred by a deep neurosis about his inability to have children – and the hidden fact of a girlfriend’s abortion earlier in his life.

Growing impatient with the couple’s inability to conceive as Einar improves, Else soon solicits the help of her husband’s best friend. Einar takes incremental steps towards re-entering society as a formerly insane person, but the new baby – indeed, the cloud of hereditary insanity floating over their household – drives him mad all over again. Meanwhile Else, persuades herself her choice was ultimately better for them both – her feelings between Rolf, Einar and her infant son a little too well compartmentalized.

Building to an explosive conclusion, Maimed avails itself a dark underside of life-wearinesss. The asylum scenario sees the Carlmars cracking a bevy of Norwegian society’s veneers, giving some of the most memorable lines to addicts and sociopaths (and lumping the doctors in with them.) The exploration of madness as a contaminant that thrives on self-awareness sets the film worlds apart from its contemporaries, and Otto Carlmar’s script doesn’t shy in its plummet into reality.

YOUNG WOMAN MISSING
(Ung frue forsvunnet)
dir. Edith Carlmar, 1953
90 mins. Norway.
In Norwegian with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9th – 10PM
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 15th – 7:30PM

Perhaps the saddest film in this series, Young Woman Missing is also Carlmar’s most political, transferring the audience’s sympathies from husband to wife after reevaluating the life of its titular young woman. When well-to-do academic Arne (Adolf Bjerke) returns home from a “men’s weekend” to find his wife Eva (Astri Jacobson) missing, he calls the police. They eventually begin to uncover facts about Eva’s earlier life – including that she was pregnant – and grapple with the question of how much to involve her prudish, unsympathetic husband.

Carlmar’s depiction of Eva’s marriage to Arne is little less than a straitjacket of classist and sexist overexpectation, causing him to crush the very thing in her that attracted him in the first place: her innocence. That said, Young Woman Missing also allows the audience to be surprised by Eva herself, and her jejune traipse into drug addiction during an earlier romance.

Carlmar’s focus on the wellbeing of her characters and their decision-making processes makes the film a quixotic – as opposed to punitive – tragedy. Ultimately a story of good intentions and overpowering weakness, the sum result is less Hollywood style finger-wagging than a ragged inscription of a human life, wrapped in the haunting beauty of Oslo’s frigid weather.

Dennis Hopper’s BACKTRACK

Posted on October 29, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

BACKTRACK (Director’s Cut)
Dir. Dennis Hopper, 1990-92
102 mins. US.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4th – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12th – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 30th – 9:30 PM

1990 AD: FOLLOWING the colossal success of his supporting roles in Hoosiers (1986, Anspaugh) and Blue Velvet (1987, Lynch) and a well-regarded directing turn (Colors, 1988), Dennis Hopper was finally back on top of the world again. A fallen countercultural icon who had ridden with Terry Southern, tripped with Jack Nicholson, and kicked it with Hitler in a classic Twilight Zone episode, he had fallen from grace in a long list of D-roles, the epochal anti-Western (and Spectacle favorite) The Last Movie in 1971 and the tortured production of Out Of The Blue nearly a decade later.

Finally back in the saddle with some sexual cachet and critical acclaim, Hopper cast a potpourri of old friends and deep-fried favorites including (but by no means limited to) Dean Stockwell, Joe Pesci, Fred Ward and John Turturro in his latest project, Backtrack. Hopper locked himself in the lead role of Milo—a sax-obsessed mob hitman with a loosely calibrated sensitive side. After up-and-coming conceptual artist Anne Benton (Jodie Foster) witnesses one of Milo’s whack-jobs in Seattle, the powers that be (including Vincent Price as the Don of Milo’s “family”) send him to find her in Arizona to snuff her out. However as the VHS box says, once they’ve met it’s hard to un-meet, and Milo admits he doesn’t know whether to trust Anne, to love her, or… to kill her.

What ensues is equal parts renagade-on-the-lam drama, 90s acid western action and meet-cute RomCom. Along with two filmmaking buddy Alex Cox, Hopper squeezed and tugged his feelings about postmodern art, industrialization, colonialism, jazz, soft rock, middle age, and the American road trip into a lurid balm for the soul—a kind of mashup of Lynch, Wenders, Antonioni and Scorsese with baffling, impenetrable results. Modeled closely on Jenny Holzer, Foster’s character is shown making and premiering work that was created by Holzer specifically for Backtrack – for example, installations of scrolling neon text doling out prophecies such as “EVEN YOUR FAMILY CAN BETRAY YOU.”

The resultant 3-hour film was too hot for Vestron, so it was ripped from Hopper’s hands, butchered and released as Catchfire; in protest, Hopper changed his directorial credit to the old DGA standby for disgraced edits, Alan Smithee. Only in ’92 did he get the chance to release his dialectical final cut—blasted out onto late-nite cable in a brief flare, but overall neglected like the honky-tonk swamp pop of yesteryear.

Until nw. Spectacle’s long-running, always well-advised love affair with Hopper’s work reaches further backwards than ever with this rare screening of the lost and forgotten director’s cut, available (and thus, screening) exclusively on VHS.

VETERANGEANCE

Posted on October 28, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

They say old soldiers never die… in observance of Veteran’s Day, Spectacle teams up with Blue Underground to present three tales of martial vengeance from beyond the grave. On Veteran’s Day itself, we run the gory classics THE PROWLER and DEATHDREAM back-to-back. They return for an encore presentation on Saturday, November 23, along with UNCLE SAM, presented by filmmaker, Blue Underground CEO, and legendary raconteur Bill Lustig.

DEATHDREAM
Dir. Bob Clark, 1972.
USA. 88 min.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 11 – 10:00 PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – 7:00 PM

He promised he’d come back! Brilliantly directed by Bob Clark (BLACK CHRISTMAS, A CHRISTMAS STORY), DEATHDREAM weaves allegory for Vietnam soldiers returning as PTSD-afflicted heroin junkies with unsettling oedipal conflict by telling the story of a soldier, declared dead, who surprises his grieving family by suddenly returning home. Andy looks and sounds the same, but he isn’t quite right: an emotionless husk, unable to reconnect with his family and friends, and suffering from some unknown physical ailment. Yet it’s not TLC that Andy needs to regain his sense of self, but blood — preferably fresh, human blood, mainlined via syringe — and when Andy’s parents have no choice but to face facts, they are horribly divided as to how to treat their darling boy’s affliction.

Often cited as an overlooked genre classic, DEATHDREAM benefits from a smart script, assured direction, and pitch-perfect performances. As Andy, Richard Backus brings an understated menace to his role that strikes a resoundingly creepy note. It’s effectively contrasted by the outstanding performances of John Marley and Lynn Carlin, recent co-stars of Cassavetes’s FACES, who treat the material with dignity, elevating it to the status of a rare horror film that manages to blend graphic gore with almost overwhelming emotional impact. And as in A CHRISTMAS STORY, Clark directs with a familiar sensitivity to domestic situations and the nuances of suburbia. The result, as genre aficionados have long known, is one of the most well-rounded and affecting masterpieces of horror cinema.

THE PROWLER
Dir. Joseph Zito, 1981.
USA. 89 min.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 11 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – MIDNIGHT

June 28, 1945: having sent a Dear John letter to her soldier boyfriend, Rosemary attends the Avalon Bay annual graduation with her new squeeze — but before they can hit the punch bowl, a ghastly soldier plunges a pitchfork through the pair. Thirty-fire years later, the town prepares for its first dance since the tragedy: is the trauma due to repeat itself? This standout slasher is noteworthy for being described by legendary make-up artist Tom Savini — whose combat experience is an avowed influence on his work — as his proudest moment. Made at a time when more mainstream slashers were reeling back, THE PROWLER is a shocking bloodbath.

UNCLE SAM
Dir. Bill Lustig, 1996.
USA. 89 min.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – 9:30 PM – BILL LUSTIG IN ATTENDANCE!

Re-teaming MANIAC COP director Lustig and screenwriter Larry Cohen, UNCLE SAM is a cult favorite 1997 slasher about a soldier killed by friendly fire during Desert Storm who busts out of his casket to kill flag burners and other unpatriotic types. Bearing Lustig and Cohen’s idiosyncratic blend of social commentary and no shortage of gore, UNCLE SAM is further distinguished by appearances by William Smith, Isaac Hayes, P.J. Soles, and the electrifying Robert Forster.

EL DEPENDIENTE

Posted on October 27, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

EL DEPENDIENTE
Dir. Leonardo Favio, 1969.
78 min. Argentina.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 30 – 7:30 PM

Next month we launch our third annual Best of Spectacle, a look back at some of our highlights from the previous year. In anticipation, we revisit a gem from 2012 that didn’t make last year’s series.

Despite being considered by a handful of Spectacle programmers as one of the greatest movies we’ve ever shown, El Dependiente played to empty houses: here’s your chance to catch up with a guaranteed mindblowing, where-has-this-movie-been-all-my-life experience.

El Dependeinte is the third feature directed by Leonardo Favio, Argentina’s own Gainsbourgian renaissance man with the dual distinction of being a ’60s and ’70s pop icon and accomplished filmmaker. Whereas his first two features bear out of the influence of his mentor, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, and Robert Bresson (and Crónica de un niño solo strongly suggesting Vigo’s Zéro de conduite), El Dependiente is another beast entirely that can perhaps only be compared to the startlingly similar Eraserhead (1977) in its suffocating portrayal of abject dread brutally punctuated with disturbing, absurdist humor.

Walter Vidarte plays the title clerk, who works in a hardware store in a desolate provincial town. He ashamedly finds himself indulging in fantasies of the accidental death of his kind employer so that he one day might inherit the store. Each night on his way home he becomes transfixed by a gorgeous young woman lurking under the street light. His approaching her eventually leads to a string of muted nocturne encounters in the girl’s dilapidated coutryard that grow increasingly anxious under the auspices of her doting, manically overbearing mother.

Filmed in a stark chiaroscuro rife with vast, empty spaces, eerie ellipses and an almost palpable sense of the forlorn curdling into a brooding menace, El Dependiente is, despite its considerable humor and charm, an ever-tightening knot in the stomach and one of the most abstruse, perplexing anti-date movies ever made.

PRAXIS MAKES PERFECT: THREE FILMS BY MARGARETHE VON TROTTA

Posted on October 22, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

Margarethe von Trotta’s last two films, VISION: FROM THE LIFE OF HILDEGARD VON BINGEN from 2010 and HANNAH ARENDT, released earlier this year, are both portraits of contemplative women. In contrast, this set of three films from the first decade of her career deals with praxis, and courageous women who make the leap to it.

All made in the wake of the revolutionary violence that followed the splintering of the student movement and the extraparliamentary opposition in Germany in the late 1960s, these films represent three different approaches to an analysis of the possibilities this violence opened up and those that it closed off.

They all have a factual basis: THE SECOND AWAKENING OF CHRISTA KLAGES was inspired by the case of a Munich kindergarten teacher who robbed a bank to save her daycare center from debt, and whose 1975 trial a protesting von Trotta was arrested at. THE GERMAN SISTERS, a thinly veiled account of RAF-member Gudrun Ensslin’s relationship with her reformist sister, offers a stark portrayal of Ensslin’s experience in a maximum security prison and her sister’s quest to prove that her controversial death could not have been a suicide. Finally, ROSA LUXEMBURG recounts the life of the fiery orator and revolutionary, her disappointment with the German Socialist Party’s opportunism during the war, her work with Karl Liebknecht leading up to the Spartacist uprising, and her brutal murder during its bloody suppression in 1919.

More than simple attempts to reclaim maligned or abused historical figures, these films can be seen as examinations of the systemic violence embodied in institutions like marriage, rent, legislative bodies, and prisons, and of the more or less revolutionary responses it can prompt.

THE SECOND AWAKENING OF CHRISTA KLAGES
a.k.a. Das zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages
Dir. Margarethe von Trotta, 1978
West Germany, 89 mins.
In German with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2 – 10:00 PM
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 25 – 7:30 PM

To save her kindergarten from being replaced with a strip club, Christa Klages grabs the rentier-bull by the money-horns, acknowledging that real justice is something to be wrested from a reluctant society by force. Let down by a mild, too-honest protestant priest, whose sermon about martyrdom in Brecht’s Mother Courage underlines his own cowardliness, and shadowed by a resentful bank clerk whose smug volunteer police work infuriates the viewer at every turn, Christa finally finds solidarity and tenderness in a forgotten childhood friendship.

THE SECOND AWAKENING is Von Trotta’s first solo film, having collaborated with Volker Schlöndorff on THE LOST HONOR OF KATHARINA BLUM in 1975 and COUP DE GRÂCE in 1976.

Special thanks to MKS Video.

THE GERMAN SISTERS
a.k.a. Die bleierne Zeit, Marianne and Juliane
Dir. Margarethe von Trotta, 1981
West Germany, 102 mins.
In German with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 10 – 5:00 PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16 – 7:30 PM

DIE BLEIERNE ZEIT gets its title from a poem by Hölderlin and conjures the oppressive atmosphere of postwar Germany, with the bleak and aimless consumer society being built through the “economic miracle” and the heritage of fascism that the majority of Germans were reluctant to address. Its Italian title, ANNI DI PIOMBO, became the phrase used to describe the wave of revolutionary violence and ensuing repression in Italy in the 70s. The overcast skies and modern prison blocks, along with the black and white newsreels of extermination camps and third-world misery that radicalize the Ensslin sisters, make for an overall cinematic texture that is just as leaden as the title promises.

ROSA LUXEMBURG
a.k.a. Die Geduld der Rosa Luxemburg
Dir. Margarethe von Trotta, 1986
West Germany, 120 mins.
In German with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 17 – 7:30 PM

It seems to me that this whole madhouse, this moral mire in which we now crawl, can in an instant, as if by magic, be changed into something great.

Almost thirty years before von Trotta cast Barbara Sukowa as famed political philosopher Hannah Arendt, the two of them gave cinematic expression to the life of a revolutionary theorist more impatient to grasp the reins of the historical process. Sukowa’s portrayal of “Red Rosa” is fiery and rousing, and her exhortations for the proletariat to smash the bourgeois order are so emphatic that the crowd should immediately file out of the cinema and do it.

Luxemburg has been invoked as a hero and martyr by many institutional forms of the German left, including the East German Socialist Unity Party and the present-day parliamentary party Die Linke. However, Luxemburg was critical of participation in any form of bourgeois democracy, and her intransigence is underscored in von Trotta’s film.

Lizzie Borden’s WORKING GIRLS

Posted on October 22, 2013December 22, 2019 by spectacletheater

WORKING GIRLS
Dir. Lizzie Borden, 1986
USA, 93 min.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 10 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 25 – 10:00 PM

Independent filmmaker Lizzie Borden, director of the underground feminist classic BORN IN FLAMES (1983), directed her next feature WORKING GIRLS in 1986. Taking a more widely accessible approach in style and story structure, WORKING GIRLS follows three prostitutes working in an upscale brothel through one long day at work. The film is told largely through the eyes of Molly (Louise Smith), a woman with an Ivy League education who’s lying to her live-in girlfriend about her new job. Gina plans to open her own beauty salon when she’s saved enough money, and Dawn is a young law student trying to finish her homework in between clients.

Borden spent six months interviewing prostitutes in various economic situations to find out about the conditions in which they worked and how they felt about their jobs. WORKING GIRLS was made partly in response to some feminists’ anti-pornography stance and the Canadian documentary/exposé NOT A LOVE STORY (1981) which condemned pornography and, in Borden’s view, made many women working in the sex industry feel bad about their choices.

In this culture one hears constantly about the sacrifice you have to make for doing prostitution. I’ve been attacked by everyone: by feminists who say, ‘You’re soft-peddling prostitution; prostitution is wrong’; and by spiritual women who say you can’t have all these sexual encounters without doing damage to your soul. But nobody criticizes the forty-hour workweek. Nobody criticizes the fact that for the most part people are trained into positive thinking about jobs that don’t make use of half their talents. There are bad things about prostitution, but they’re not the ones you see in the movies.

Incredibly smart and insighful WORKING GIRLS is a film about a group of women choosing prostitution as a means to support themselves, and it succeeds at expressing a message that is neither pro- nor anti-prostitution. Through its screenplay (co-written with Sandra Kay), direction and camerawork, it reveals sex work as a normal job for many, with long hours, less than desired pay, a ringing phone, and a micro-managey boss (Madam). (Can work ever be sexy?) In addition, it consciously attempts to shift the camera-eye from a male gaze by avoiding voyeuristic approach in the cinematography.

There’s no shot in the film where you see Molly’s body the way a man would frame her body to look at it, except when she’s looking at herself that way…

WORKING GIRLS is the realest movie about sex work (and perhaps work under capitalism) we’ve seen in awhile — by no means an erotic film, it will likely make you blush and laugh awkwardly for its directness.

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Quotes from Lizzie Borden in “Interview with Lizzie Borden.” Author(s): Scott MacDonald and Lizzie Borden. Feminist Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2, The Problematics of Heterosexuality (Summer, 1989), pp. 327-245.

WORKING GIRLS Dir. Lizzie Borden, 1986 USA, 93 min.

WORKING GIRLS
Dir. Lizzie Borden, 1986
USA, 93 min.