VARIOLA VERA
Dir: Goran Marković, 1982
Yugoslavia, 104 min.
In Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 28 – 10:00 PM

A profoundly chilling dramatization of the true events surrounding a smallpox epidemic that hit former Yugoslavia in 1972, VARIOLA VERA presents a terrifying situation of how panic-stricken individuals and governments respond to an outbreak.

A pilgrim visiting a distant land returns to Yugoslavia with a flute and an infectious disease within it. His sickness grows and he ends up at Belgrade General Hospital, amongst a staff of doctors and nurses who seem more concerned with work gossip than saving the man’s life. The disease spreads throughout the hospital and soon enough, everyone is sealed off and locked inside the building in quarantine while the government desperately tries to find a solution.

Despite featuring a grisly plot line, director Goran Marković keeps the film from sliding into mere sensationalism, instead grounding it in tense realism and acute human drama, which makes it all the more startling once the body count begins to rise.

A potent mixture of body horror and disaster film, VARIOLA VERA is one of the most frightening ‘virus’ films ever made.

Best known for 1970’s Mick Jagger-starring PERFORMANCE (codirected with Nicolas Roeg), Scottish filmmaker Donald Cammell (1934 – 1996) was many things – a child of the aristocracy, a Crowley-inflected mystic who worked with the likes of Kenneth Anger, a skeptic of auteurism, a man described by Roman Polanski as “wicked”. This October, Spectacle is pleased to present two direly under-sung classics from this late cine-provocateur, both cowritten by Cammell and his widow China Kong.

TRIGGER WARNING: WHITE OF THE EYE features visceral sequences of murder and violence; both versions of WILD SIDE feature a harrowing rape sequence.

WHITE OF THE EYE
Dir. Donald Cammell, 1987
U.K./U.S., 110 minutes.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22 – 10:00 PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 26 – 10:00 PM

“The only difference between a hunter and a killer…. is his prey.”

While Cammell’s producers were merely seeking to capitalize on the 80s brood of lurid cheapies, he and Kong would take an utterly different tack; the director described his adaptation of pulp author Margaret Tracy’s Mrs. White as “an artistic exploration of man’s need to destroy.” A family man (David Keith) is suspected of being a gated-community serial killer; Cathy Moriarty (RAGING BULL) stars as his wife. Scored by Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason, White of the Eye is an unmissable gem, a unique case study in onscreen violence, alienating Southwestern landscapes and characters carrying aching – insane, even – contradictions.

“As the action twists a benign homestead into a domestic nightmare, signature Cammell forms resurface—startling flash-cuts between the recent past and present creating schizoid sensations, an exaggerated emphasis on the eyeball as visual fulcrum for transitional delirium, and a soundtrack that announces invocation and possession.” – Chris Chang, Film Comment

“By far the most accomplished thriller I have seen this year. Deserves to be feted.” – Derek Malcolm, The Guardian

“A mesmerizing mosaic of a film.” – Nigel Andrews, Financial Times

WILD SIDE
Dir. Donald Cammell, 1995.
U.S., 110 min. (Director’s cut); 95 min. (Nu Image re-edit)

Nu Image Re-edit
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3 – MIDNIGHT

Director’s Cut
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3 – 10:00 PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, OCTOBER 26 – 7:30 PM

Donald Cammell’s fourth film in as many decades, the brilliant and berserk WILD SIDE is a beyond-salacious slab of psycho-noir starring Anne Heche as “Alex”, a Long Beach investment banker-cum sex worker for the rich and powerful. Tonight, that means Bruno – a shadowy millionaire money launderer (Christopher Walken, plus wig) – and perhaps also his valet, a sleazy undercover cop by the name of Tony (Steven Hauer, of Scarface fame). Cammell’s signature refracted narrative comes into play when Alex meets Bruno’s wife Virginia (Joan Chen), up-turning audience expectations for late-nite sleaze into a surprisingly tender, psychologically astute, and crushingly desperate queer love story. (There’s also a sublime Ryuichi Sakamoto score, and a concurrent subplot about a virus on a floppy disk that, if it fell into the wrong hands, would bring the western world to its knees.)

After Nu Image Productions wrested control of WILD SIDE away from Cammell and recut the film into the schizoid quasi-porn they thought they had paid for, the filmmaker saw fit to take his own life. In 2000, Kong supervised a painstaking, posthumous recut with editor Frank Mazzola; this October, Spectacle is thrilled to present both the damned and saved versions of WILD SIDE.

“Games are again played with power and identity, dangerous games but not fatal ones this time; if there is one difference between the Cammell of 1968 and of 1995 that stands out above all others, it is the replacement of Artaudian cruelty with an affectionate generosity towards his characters.” – Maximilian Le Cain, Senses of Cinema

“When this film was premiered at last year’s Edinburgh Festival, it was accompanied by a remarkable on-stage talk from Mazzola and Kong, who were able to show extracts from the butchered, and utterly different ‘TV version’: furnishing us with an unmissable masterclass in the realities of film editing and a radical essay in the textual aspects of cinema. I hope that Mr Mazzola and Ms Kong can be persuaded to repeat this lecture all over the country.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

As with so many Eastern European cinemas, Czechoslovakia’s flourished in the 1960s under relaxed censorship and state funding for wild experimentation on a level we can only dream of in the U.S. Before Soviet tanks rolled in, crushing the Prague Spring (and proposals for democratic elections) in 1968, the Czech New Wave had hit such international recognition as to have produced two academy award winners in the States, as well as more deliciously outré masterpieces like Vera Chytilova’s anarchic Daisies and Juraj Herz’s macabre satire of the lead-up to WWII THE CREMATOR.

But this series isn’t about the Czech New Wave, it’s about what happened after, when those same visionary directors refused to go away or give up their visions. For some, this ultimately meant fleeing to the West, but for Chytilova and Herz it would mean decades more of developing their art and fighting to get some of their best and most radical films made, first under Communist restriction and then against the new funding complications of capitalism. Chytilova was blacklisted from working entirely twice (for her work in the 60s, and again after her scathingly brilliant PANELSTORY, for about eight years total, during which she directed commercials under the name of her husband and cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera), while Herz’s career became a constant battle against compromise, bureaucratic red tape, and American directors borrowing scenes (as when bits of his own lived WWII concentration camp experiences may have made their way into SCHINDLER’S LIST).

Perhaps this is why both found success during forays into genre cinema in the 80s, where the official oversight was lower than in supposedly serious filmmaking. Perhaps this is why these films, sci-fi horrors both, are so uniquely strange and fantastic. (And, as a bonus, we’re also including Herz’s 90s nightmare vision of the post-modern shopping mall).

Chytliova passed away last year at the age of 85 after directing her last feature in 2006 and continuing to teach at FAMU, while Herz, now 81, is still at work on new films.

FERAT VAMPIRE
A.k.a. Upír z Feratu
Dir. Juraj Herz, 1981
Czechoslovakia, 94 min.
In Czech with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 4 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10 – 10:00 PM
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25 – 5:00 PM

While Juraj Herz honed his horror chops on THE CREMATOR and gothic-psychedelic past Spectober favorite MORGIANNA, FERAT VAMPIRE may actually be his best. A sinister car corporation prepares to launch the Vampire, a flashy, modernist sports car with very peculiar engineering, mysteriously low gas requirements, and a flurry of marketable rumors of death and danger that international press constantly eats up. An ambulence driver (director Jiri Menzel, who snagged one of those 60s Best Foreign Film Oscars for CLOSELY OBSERVED TRAINS!) suspects something is up after his ex-racecar driver partner (Dagmar Havlová, later first lady of the Czech Republic!!) falls under the spell of the prototype. Soon, both are drawn deep into a stylish surrealist noir of hidden motives, doubles, corporate marketing machinations, and Cronenbergian bio-mechanical terror (actually arguably referenced by Cronenberg for Videodrome two years later!) As reality dissolves, even the logical linking scenes get taken over by absurdist vignettes of our uneasy symbiosis with the automotive world.

WOLF’S CHALET
A.k.a. Vlci bouda
Dir. Vera Chytilová, 1987
Czechoslovakia, 92 min.
In Czech with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 7 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 30 – 10:00 PM

An absolute and stunning outlier amongst the satiric relationship comedies Vera Chytilova was making at the time, Wolf’s Chalet opens essentially as a Chytilova teen ski movie, with all attendant teen behavior patterns familiar from the American 80s in evidence. Seriously, it’s either an impressive testament to the universal archetype of 80s teens, or to the increasing porousness of the Iron Curtain by the mid-80s, as it almost seems like anyone on the cast could have skied off-set and into a scene from BETTER OFF DEAD at any moment. But it gets better: the instructors at the remote alpine camp are not what they seem, strange events occur overnight, and soon the teens are turning on one another as ambiguous tensions and mysterious dread overtake the story. And then, Chytilova, a life-long Socialist however frustrated with the political realities she had to work under, manages to inject political allegory as a further layer in the wild mix of the film. While also assuring that you’ll never look at a snow man the same way again.

PASSAGE
A.k.a. Pasáz
Dir. Juraj Herz, 1997
Czechoslovakia, 104 min.
In Czech with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16 – 10PM
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 30 – 7:30 PM

In PASÁZ (PASSAGE), one of his late career films from 1997, Juraj Herz explores the deep animal fear we experience when setting foot inside a shopping mall. It is the fear of an unending self-contained world of buying and selling, so like the new Capitalism the Czech Republic had recently been plunged into.

The hero of PASÁZ Mikhail Forman, a banker out for a shopping trip wanders the murky halls and crannies of the mall with the presumed initial goal of picking up an anniversary gift for his wife. The shopping trip turns sinister as Mikhail encounters various mall types with unclear identities, his own identity is stripped away, and causality becomes a closed loop, like that of a shopping mall arcade. Packed with vague anxieties about bureaucracy and the modern world, this one is a true masterpiece of the “Man propelled against his will on journey, which takes place in a compressed time frame, and from which he emerges forever changed” genre.