Monthly Series – Page 8 – Spectacle Theater

KRIK? KRAK! TALES OF A NIGHTMARE

Posted on May 28, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

KRIK? KRAK! TALES OF A NIGHTMARE
Dir: Jac Avila & Vanyoska Gee, 1988.
78 min. Haiti.
In Creole/French/English with subtitles.
Special thanks to Facets.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3 – 7:30PM
SUNDAY, JUNE 7 – 5PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 16 – 7:30PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 23 – 10PM

A blistering travelogue of hell, Jac Avila and Vanyoska Gee’s classic surrealist-documentary KRIK? KRAK! takes a traditional Haitian call-and-response and morphs it into a broad survey of national instability. The filmmakers capture roiling scenes of unimaginable poverty and repression, juxtaposed against the tropical paradise drawn by the official-ese of 24-year president François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his backers in Washington.

Featuring interviews with the secret police, refugees, cane sugar harvesters, US immigration officials and black magic priests, Avila and Gee’s landscape of Haiti appears doomed to gridlocked schizophrenia. As the “first free black republic” is passed from one Duvalier to the next, KRIK? KRAK! deals images like clods of dirt, crumbling whenever the narrative begins to get a foothold – the ultimate document of life under voodoo dictatorship.

“Krik? Krak! carries the political documentary into the realm of the fantastic. The story of Haiti’s misery under two generations of Duvaliers is told impressionistically, mingling absolutely extraordinary documents of daily life (including an interview with Papa Doc himself) and scenes from fiction films to convey what a straightforward documentary cannot: the continual shifts between levels of reality in Haitian life, some of which are inaccessible to the camera, in particular, the omnipresence of the Voodoo religion. Krik? Krak! is at the same time a great horror film in the tradition of Haxan (Witchcraft through the Ages).” – Bill Krohn, Cahiers du Cinema

WAVES OF MUTILATION

Posted on May 28, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

WAVES OF MUTILATION

Ah, summer at the beach. The sand between your toes, the ocean breeze in your hair—but what’s that washing ashore? That’s right, it’s WAVES OF MUTILATION, Spectacle’s spectacular summer series of surf, sand, and slaughter! Ditch the boardwalk for these sea-side horror classics that will send chills down your spine on the hottest of nights.

NIGHT TIDE
Dir. Curtis Harrington, 1961
USA, 85 min.

SATURDAY, JUNE 6 – 7:30PM
SUNDAY, JUNE 14 – 7:30PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 19 – 10PM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 24 – 10PM

Dennis Hopper’s underseen first starring role is also one of his most memorable. In Night Tide he plays Johnny Drake, a sailor on shore leave in a sleepy port town. When the locals get word of his fledgling romance with Mora, the strange young woman who works as the mermaid attraction at the marina carnival, Johnny learns that Mora’s former suitors have a history of being mysteriously slain under the full moon. Might it have something to do with her conviction that she’s the cursed descendent of a mythic race of sea creatures?

Something like a waterlogged sister to Herk Harvey’s similarly low-budget Carnival of Souls, Night Tide creates an eerie atmosphere that lingers after the lights come on.

THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA
Dir. Matt Cimber, 1976
USA, 88 min.

TUESDAY, JUNE 9 – 10PM
MONDAY, JUNE 15 – 10PM
SUNDAY, JUNE 21 – 5PM
TUESDAY, JUNE 30 – 7:30PM

Molly (Millie Perkins) is a good-natured but troubled barmaid in a seaside town, haunted by repressed memories of the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. Her trauma manifests in a drinking problem and a twisted obsession with men; she dotes on her adoring nephews, idolizes her deceased father’s memory, and moons over burly football players like a lovestruck teen—even as she fantasizes about murdering them. During a night of particularly heavy binge drinking, Molly loses a few hours, and her grisly desires begin to leave the realm of fantasy.

Despite the dubious distinction of making the UK’s infamous ‘video nasties’ list, THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA isn’t quite an exploitation flick. Surprisingly complex, and elevated by a truly inspired performance from Perkins, this little film is too weird, and too bold to be anything but art.

MILLIGAN MIDNIGHTS

Posted on April 28, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

SATURDAY, MAY 2: SEEDS OF SIN
FRIDAY, MAY 15: SEEDS OF SIN
SATURDAY, MAY 16: THE BODY BENEATH
FRIDAY, MAY 29: THE BODY BENEATH
…

There is no director like Staten Island’s own Andy Milligan. Made under extreme conditions, with miniscule budgets, Milligan makes seemingly simple horror flicks into nightmarish melodramas seething with rage, lust and hatred. Do they look cheap? Does everything seem entirely real? No? PAY ATTENTION. Milligan’s camera moves in ways so deeply foreign to viewers, and develops storylines closer to his early work staging Lord Dunsany and Jean Genet plays, that it’s no wonder he’s got his fair share of detractors (Stephen King said of The Ghastly Ones “the work of morons with cameras”), but over the years a small but fanatical following has formed, willing to look deeper into these films. Assisted by the late, great Mike Vraney of Something Weird, a tireless collector of Milligan original prints, and given deeper personal context thanks to Jimmy McDonough’s heartbreaking book The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan, the time is long overdue for a reconsideration of his work (thankfully recently begun in the UK by BFI as assisted by Vraney and director Nicholas Winding Refn), and with our Milligan Midnights series, we hope to bring a series of his films to Spectacle Midnights in the hope that Milligan himself might crack a rare smile from his unmarked grave somewhere in LA.

“I don’t see how anyone can write off Andy Milligan as just an exceptionally strange exploitation hack when his films are full of these beautiful eerie moments contained in these compositions that can last for a minute + or just a second because his weird camera is always moving and twisting and making your eyes travel in ways you’d never have expected them to…I can’t think of anyone else who’d have filmed a scene in which a woman lets her vampire cult leader into the house to have his minions bite her husband this way!” –Zynab Hashim

SEEDS OF SIN
Dir. Andy Milligan, 1968
USA, 84 min.

SATURDAY, MAY 2 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, MAY 15 – MIDNIGHT

“Sown in Incest! Harvested in Hate!”

Carol Manning takes the liberty to invite her siblings to a Christmas dinner at her familial home much to her mother’s displeasure. The members of the Manning family have not seen each other in years due to the resentment they have for each other. The only “love” that exists amongst them is limited to the incestuous affairs that they engaged in behind their mother’s back as children. The only tie between the siblings is the hatred they feel for their mother Claris. Claris is an aging widow who has survived many marriages and has amassed a large fortune as a result. She “dislikes” her children very much would rather not see any of them ever again. She feels that her children are like vultures flying overhead awaiting for the first sign of her death so they can swoop in and pick her pockets clean! Fortunately for the vultures, death is lurking just around the corner! For there is a murderer on the loose in the Manning estate! This shadowy figure is killing off members of the Manning family by orchestrating a series of “accidents”. Who could it be? Will Claris’s fortune survive? Who will reap THE SEEDS OF SIN?

SEEDS OF SIN has all of the trappings of a gothic tale. There is a stately familial home, dark secrets, incest, rape, murder and to top it all off there are beautiful roses featured throughout the entire film! Yet, unlike a “traditional” gothic tale, Seeds focuses on a Matriarchy instead of a Patriarchy. The story features several dominant female characters. These female characters greatly exert their power over the male characters in the film. It is a truly refreshing twist to the gothic “formula”. Think of it as a version of “Fall Of The House Of Usher”, but with more sex and violence and a lessened threat of being buried alive!

SEEDS is one of Andy Milligan’s greatest and most personal films. Andy is telling us the story of a broken family that is eerily similar to his own. He is breathing through his wounds in every frame. The overwhelmingly dominant female theme which is often explored in his work is presented here in full bloom in the form of Claris who is very similar to Andy’s mother. The character of Buster is like Milligan as a young man. The weak and down trodden paternal figure is a mirror image of Andy’s father. Seeds literally is Andy Milligan’s horrific family life scarred into celluloid. Sadly, SEEDS, like many other Milligan films has been tampered with badly by the greedy little hands of producers who wanted to make a buck selling sex. There are several “hardcore” scenes that have been edited into the film so that it would be more profitable. As a result certain scenes that were shot by Andy have been lost. Luckily, there is a trailer for the film that has pieces of some of the “lost” scenes from the film.

Always remember “Nothing can kill a bitch like momma!” Long Live Andy Milligan!

THE BODY BENEATH
Dir. Andy Milligan, 1970
UK, 82 min.

There is no director like Staten Island’s own Andy Milligan. Made under extreme conditions, with miniscule budgets, Milligan makes seemingly simple horror flicks into nightmarish melodramas seething with rage, lust and hatred. Do they look cheap? Does everything seem entirely real? No? PAY ATTENTION. Milligan’s camera moves in ways so deeply foreign to viewers, and develops storylines closer to his early work staging Lord Dunsany and Jean Genet plays, that it’s no wonder he’s got his fair share of detractors (Stephen King said of The Ghastly Ones “the work of morons with cameras”), but over the years a small but fanatical following has formed, willing to look deeper into these films. Assisted by the late, great Mike Vraney of Something Weird, a tireless collector of Milligan original prints, and given deeper personal context thanks to Jimmy McDonough’s heartbreaking book The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan, the time is long overdue for a reconsideration of his work (thankfully recently begun in the UK by BFI as assisted by Vraney and director Nicholas Winding Refn), and with our Milligan Midnights series, we hope to bring a series of his films to Spectacle Midnightd in the hope that Milligan himself might crack a rare smile from his unmarked grave somewhere in LA.

SATURDAY, MAY 16 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, MAY 29 – MIDNIGHT

“Tonight is the yearly meeting. We must have the sacrifice.”

We begin with THE BODY BENEATH, a film Milligan made during his time in the UK. First-timers may find the film “talky” or “chatty” — that’s Milligan, and you’ll either get into it or you won’t. There’s a hypnotic slowness to Milligan’s films, which is one of the main reasons the “let’s see some boobs and blood” crowd never took to him, no matter how much green-faced nightgown action we get. And we get a LOT of it, with vampire lord Reverend Algernon Ford (played by Gavin Reed) realizing his pure bloodline was dying out after centuries of inbreeding. He seeks to find the non-vampire members of his bloodline and convert them, all of which sounds about right for a midnight, but it’s Milligan’s teeth-grinding misanthropy which brings us to a different level, so far from the laughable kitch it may at first seem. With one of Milligan’s best actors, Berwick Kaler, playing the hunchback Spool and a (comparably) larger budget than his earlier films, plus a jaw-dropping orgy of cannibalism that must be seen to be believed, It’s arguably one of the best entry points to his work. We have a slew of other Milligans coming up, so don’t sleep! Ever! MILLIGAN MIDNIGHTS SHALL NEVER DIE!

“Few filmmakers can boast of having a recognisable style, but when you see a Milligan movie, you are in no doubt whose film it is. He was sort of a Douglas Sirk figure – there’s so much subtext in his movies. And the more you get into them, the more you realise that they were made by someone who was very tormented, and very intelligent; a sensitive man who used film as an artform to express his views on life.” -Nicholas Winding Refn

LEPTIRICA

Posted on April 23, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

LEPTIRICA
aka The Butterfly
Dir. Djordje Kadijevic, 1973
Yugoslavia, 63 min.

FRIDAY, MAY 1 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, MAY 5 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, MAY 12 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, MAY 29 – 10 PM

LEPTIRICA (aka THE BUTTERFLY) is a Yugoslavian horror classic. Still lauded as the first horror film in the former Yugoslavia, it is based on a story by Serbian writer Milovan Gislic, “After 90 Years”, which drew heavily on Serbian folklore to create one of the earliest modern renderings of the vampire myth in Europe, 17 years even before Bram Stoker had written Dracula. The film’s director Djordje Kadijevic, instead of conforming to horror trends of United States and Western Europe did Gislic’s story justice by adhering closely to the style and tropes of Slavic folktale. Accompanied by Milovan Trikovic’s haunting score of dissonantly tonal Balkan choral music, the film reinforces its geographic identity within the mythological narratives of fear that inhabit the mountainous forests of Southeastern Europe.

In the film, yet another in a string of dead millers is discovered violently murdered in the village of Zarodjani after having spent one night in a famously cursed local mill. The desperate towsnmen fearing starvation if the mill ceases to work, recruit a local youth, Strahinja, to brave a night under its roof. Strahinja in an attempt to impress Radojka, a shepherd’s daughter, accepts the challenge. After Strahinja manages to survive an attack by the same creature, the men of the village haphazardly band together to attempt to seek out and destroy the dead man, Sava Savonovic, they suspect is responsible for the nocturnal marauding.

Kadijevic’s LEPTIRICA with its bright 1970’s color palette and the ever-present death-knell of the choral singers looming over the unfortunate lovers ends up lying somewhere between comedy, horror and dark Slavic fairy tale. Yet while the film manages to evoke a communist-era Grimm fairy tale, unlike the Grimms, Yugoslavians somehow always manage to find humor in the face of death.

L’ENFANT SECRET

Posted on April 19, 2015July 23, 2015 by spectacletheater

L’ENFANT SECRET
Dir. Philippe Garrel, 1979
France, 92 min.
In French with English subtitles

SUNDAY, MAY 3 – 5 PM
MONDAY, MAY 11 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, MAY 19 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, MAY 30 – 10 PM

L’ENFANT SECRET is an unbearably fragile film about unbearably fragile people. Every scene flirts with cinematic disaster, images play with overexposure, dialogue fades away under music taking exposition down with them. This is one of several films Philippe Garrel made about or with long time partner Nico, this film focusing on her relationship with her estranged son, who Garrel has named Swann. In addition to Proust, Garrel also asks his audience to think about Bresson when watching this film, using two Bressonian models as actors, Anne Wiazemsky (AU HASARD BALTHAZAR) and Henri de Maublanc (THE DEVIL PROBABLY). The film also deals with Garrel’s shock treatment cure for heroin addiction and the beginning of Nico’s own experience with the drug. Despite all these lurid details, the film is not propelled by force of its narrative. One could almost experience the film as nothing more than a repetition of a moment in which two people collapse into each other’s arms. There is a story, but as it’s written, it’s so small and weak that its emotional and intellectual heart can only move through the mechanics of cinematic compositions like electricity through a circuit. Images of violence and despair have more to do with the shapes and shades of grey Garrel expects you to watch him build poetry with throughout the film than it does with a confession from his torrid experience with drugs, cinema, love, and fame – but at the same time, he has plenty to say about that too.

THE TERROR OF PRODUCTION

Posted on April 19, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

We all know about the glamorous side of movie-making: we’re constantly bombarded with images of untouchable movie stars from magazine covers and gossip blogs. But what about the other side of the coin, where dreams are dashed and goals never reached? And why would anyone even choose to pursue the dream of stardom, when the odds of succeeding are astronomically low? This May, Spectacle presents THE TERROR OF PRODUCTION, a series exploring the dark side of the pursuit of artistic expressions. From actresses with messiah complexes to an insane makeup artist, THE TERROR OF PRODUCTION shines a light on the bitter, bilious aftertaste of ambition.

CONFESSIONS AMONG ACTRESSES
Dir. Yoshishige Yoshida, 1971
Japan, 124 min.
In Japanese with English subtitles

THURSDAY, MAY 14 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, MAY 19 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, MAY 25 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, MAY 29 – 7:30 PM

Kyoko, Aki, and Makiko are famous actresses starring together in the same film. Each woman, however, has her own crisis that makes acting in the film particularly harrowing. Kyoko has persistent, recurring dreams about her husband cheating on her with another woman. Aki is also troubled by the thought of her husband’s infidelity, and cannot forget a vicious attack on a close friend. Makiko divulges the story of a double suicide pact with a man who may have been closer than just a lover. Since these women are famous actresses, they must wear the mask of beauty, confidence, and perfection, and their traumas get swept under the rug.

Yoshishige Yoshida directs the film with his usual brilliant eye for framing and composition, with the added layer of being one of Yoshida’s only color films. The daily lives of these women overlap with the shooting of the film-within-the-film, and metatextual moments on the meaning of being an actress dovetail with moments of hysterical, beautiful melodrama. Yoshida cast his wife (and frequent collaborator) Mariko Okada as one of the actresses, adding another level of revelation to the film. Think of Persona-era Bergman, shot by the foremost director of Japan’s Art Theater Guild, and you’ll have a sense of the intensely personal, avant-garde, visually lush whirlwind that is CONFESSIONS AMONG ACTRESSES.

THE MANIPULATOR
Dir. Yabo Yablonsky, 1971
USA, 85 min.

SUNDAY, MAY 10 – 5 PM
SUNDAY, MAY 17 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, MAY 24 – 7:30 PM

“We all change. But that’s just the way it goes.”

Certain performances are for the ages. They transcend the actor and place the role into an realm of their own. They cut against the actor as we know them, they are a slap in the face to our assumptions, they are the films that make us uncomfortable with who we think we are and who we want to be. Consider Andy Griffith in A VOICE IN THE CROWD. Consider Ernest Borgnine in MARTY. That’s exactly what you’ll get from Mickey Rooney in THE MANIPULATOR, as intense a delivery as David Hess or Roger Watkins in a film that is about as weird as they come. Perhaps best considered a role-reversed Sunset Blvd. or a twist on the screen-queens-gone-bad roles of 70s Elizabeth Taylor or Joan Crawford circa Straight-Jacket, Mickey Rooney tears into the role of makeup artist B.J. Lang like a freight train, screaming his demented paranoid soliloquies over synth bloops and echoplex for days. In honor of his recent passing, Spectacle is proud to present Mickey Rooney’s true magnum opus: THE MANIPULATOR.

THE SECOND COMING OF SUZANNE
Dir. Michael Barry, 1974
USA, 90 min.

SUNDAY, MAY 17 – 5 PM
FRIDAY, MAY 22 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, MAY 26 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, MAY 28 – 10 PM

THE SECOND COMING OF SUZANNE stars Jared Martin as a filmmaker becoming more and more obsessive about his idea for a film about Christ as a woman. Suzanne (future Clint Eastwood paramour Sondra Locke) is the “lucky” leading lady who gets the starring role in Martin’s film, but as shooting gets more and more intense, the lines between Suzanne’s reality as an actress, and fiction as a messiah figure, become psychedelically blurred, ending up in tragedy.

Based on the Leonard Cohen song “Suzanne,” THE SECOND COMING OF SUZANNE is the kind of film that could only have been made in the 70s – art school sensibility, plus a lot of psychedelic drugs and an increasingly worried Richard Dreyfuss. It’s a wonderful showcase for Sondra Locke, who is even today incredibly underrated as an actress, and she throws herself into the madness here. Come for the art film, stay for the crucifixion.

STARRY EYES
Dir. Dennis Widmyer & Kevin Kolsch, 2014
USA, 98 min.

SATURDAY, MAY 9 – 7:30 PM & 10 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Skype Q&A with Directors Dennis Widmyer & Kevin Kolsch!

Ever get the suspicion that Hollywood is controlled by unseen forces that lurk behind the curtain of every big-budget production? STARRY EYES won’t do much to divest you of that opinion. Sarah (Alex Essoe, in a true star-making performance that brings to mind the hysterical physicality of Isabelle Adjani in POSSESSION) is a down-on-her-luck young actress, living in LA, hoping to achieve the dream of stardom, but also working in a fast food restaurant with a lascivious boss. With no prospects, a crappy job, and friends who are succeeding faster than her, Sarah goes for one last big audition for a horror film. Her acting doesn’t impress the casting agents, but her brutal self-injurious behaviour does. From there, it’s a trip down the rabbit hole through creepy auditions, tests of faith, and a contract Sarah cannot – and will not – refuse.

Part of the American independent horror renaissance of the last few years, STARRY EYES is a tense, intense, gory look at how the sausage is made in Hollywood. Directors Dennis Widmyer and Kevin Kolsch paint a portrait of Sarah’s degradation in LA so that we can’t resist, or really even argue with, the choices that she makes on her way to the top. Complete with a spare, creepy synth score, STARRY EYES harkens back to a creepier day in horror, when what’s inside each and every one of us was scarier than anything else.

Widmyer & Kolsch will join us after both screenings for a Q&A via Skype!

HIT 2 PASS

Posted on April 19, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

HIT 2 PASS
Dir. Kurt Walker, 2014
Canada, 72 min.

SUNDAY, MAY 3 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, MAY 14 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, MAY 26 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, MAY 31 – 7:30 PM

In Kurt Walker’s magnificent debut HIT 2 PASS, what initially appears a goofy road trip movie soon gives itself away as a scrupulous documentary dig into the Auto Racing Association of Prince George, British Columbia (billed on its website as “the playground of power”), and its annual “hit to pass” marathon. The rule is that drivers must collide with another car in order to pass it, and the film gives chase to three weeks spent by a future contestant and his father refurbishing a hot rod for the tournament, with special attention given to the endless nuts-and-bolts work that will make possible a few hours of summertime fun for a small crowd of spectators. In the first half of HIT 2 PASS, Walker’s command of multi-camera montage proves a delight, with cameras affixed to drones, mounted within the vehicle and even handed to children watching the track during the derby.

The simple phraseology of these rituals (the film’s very title a “sequelization” of an existing event, explicating that documentary is, unto itself, a dubious format of adaptation) begin to take on chewier, more socio-historico-politico-cultural kinds of meanings following the film’s one unedited, isolated sit-down interview. Walker is not just after cheap thrills, or even their material costs, but rather a vast and complicated cross-section of remembering and spectacle (itself a kind of willful un-learning). Unassuming at first blush, his images hang in memory as if glimpsed from a passing car on a long ride home, like a magic-hour graffito that reads, “OIL = DEATH”. Hit 2 Pass is as sincere, funny and mysterious as contemporary experimental cinema gets.

“Imagine Red Line 7000, the unforgettable race film by Hawks, crossed with Miguel Gomes’ Our Beloved Month of August via the intermediary of a ZX Spectrum and this would give you something resembling Hit 2 Pass.” – Francisco Ferreira, publico

“The atmosphere is all small-town affability and thick-sliced hoser accents. This alone would make a fascinating feature, but Walker ups the ante by making the assembly of the film just as interesting as the assembling of the Storozinkis’ hot rod. Segments organically trail off where other docs would cut. Off-screen questions and banter are left in. Many sequences look like abstract geometrical compositions scored by field recordings. Rather than make the film feel sloppy, they invigorate Hit 2 Pass with a vibrant sense of playfulness.” – Derek Godin, Dim The House Lights

“Hit 2 Pass is an act of genuine and tender interrogation and self-discovery that explores the gap between the immaterial excitement of video games and the complexity of life. Like the most humble and earnest first features, Walker’s film is open about its own imperfections so as to carve out its own distinctive and tentative place in the saturated imaginary of contemporary cinema.” –Giovanni Vimercati, Film Comment

TIMELESS BOTTOMLESS BAD MOVIE

Posted on April 19, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

TIMELESS BOTTOMLESS BAD MOVIE
Dir. Jang Sun-Woo, 1997
South Korea, 144 min.
In Korean with English subtitles

MONDAY, MAY 4 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, MAY 15 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, MAY 20 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, MAY 30 – 7:30 PM

Offering more than a few glimpses of pure transgressive brilliance, TIMELESS BOTTOMLESS BAD MOVIE has many layers of depth among its distinctive stink. Using documentary footage and reenactments, BAD MOVIE is about the alienated youth who riot for they have the energy and the disfranchised homeless who are just too tired to do anything about it. BAD MOVIE’s constantly shifting and warped narrative is never jagged, tired, or acts like it’s fucking around. Many vignettes come off as a classier Gregg Araki without the urgency, cheese, and panic, or even a pessimistic Wong Kar-Wai without the wonder and twee. Balancing between scenes of the two subjects first strike as lofty and loose, but as the film closes, their parallels turn into staggering segments of revelations full of perceptiveness. In a decade of laziness but heightened awareness, Jang Sun-Woo has crafted the nearly perfect Generation X version of a New Wave film.

PIOTR SZULKIN’S APOCALYPSE QUARTET

Posted on April 19, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

Two years after packing the house during our Eastern Bloc Apocalypse series, the remarkable work of Piotr Szulkin returns to Spectacle.

Criminally under-appreciated outside of his native Poland, Piotr Szulkin has hardly achieved cult status, even as other giants of Polish cinema (Andrzej Żuławski, Andrzej Wajda) get their due with retrospectives at respected theaters and museums. Born in Gdansk in 1950, Szulkin got his start at the State Higher School of Directing in 1975, producing animations, short documentary, and musicals. Working as a director, screenwriter, and novelist, his films occupy space on the bleaker fringes of the late Soviet period. His work stretches well into the 2000s, but it’s his dystopian “tetralogy”—four rarely screened science fiction films about the apocalypse produced in the twilight of Polish communism—that have been sought after by cinephiles for the past 30 years. Spectacle is proud to bring these films together for the first time as a major US retrospective.

Dismissive of the Polish critical establishment’s labeling of his work as sci-fi (he prefers the term “asocial fiction”), Szulkin’s vision of the apocalypse in the tetralogy is deeply rooted in the realities of life behind the Iron Curtain. Political violence, martial law, pervasive propaganda, and civilian apathy are the texture of his morbid future, set in worlds where humanity has been hobbled under the pressures of state control. Shot on spartan budgets in a gritty, expressive style, the films are wildly imaginative and inventive, even as they mine the depths of wasted potential and human exploitation for allegories of life under the 1980s Polish regime.

Spectacle is deeply grateful to Piotr Szulkin for his support of this series.

GOLEM
Dir. Piotr Szulkin, 1980
Poland, 92 min.
In Polish with English subtitles

MONDAY, MAY 4 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, MAY 18 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, MAY 23 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, MAY 24 – 5 PM

The first film of the quartet, GOLEM (1979), is a loose retelling of Der Golem, Gustav Meyrink’s 1914 novel. Replacing the ghettos of Prague with a garbage-strewn, dilapidated future, Szulkin’s adaptation trades the golem for “Pernat,” a clone manufactured for shadowy reasons by a totalitarian regime. Pernat, played with remarkable gentility by Szulkin favorite Marek Walczewski, interacts with the swifter edges of Polish society as he attempts to understand the institution that created him, and his purpose on the planet. Upon its release, the film won the Brown Lion at the Gdańsk Film Festival, but has been all but forgotten today.

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS: NEXT CENTURY
Dir. Piotr Szulkin, 1981
Poland, 92 min.
In Polish with English subtitles

SUNDAY, MAY 10 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, MAY 13 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, MAY 20 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, MAY 31 – 5 PM

This bleak homage to Orson Welles and H.G. Wells was released just weeks before Poland’s authoritarian government introduced martial law across the country to crush any semblance of political opposition. This tense atmosphere is directly reflected in the film, which begins with the arrival of an advanced civilization from Mars on December 18, 1999. The invaders find a pure and total police state, with a population kept in shackles by omnipresent television sets, used as a tool for propaganda. (Szulkin is famously dismissive of television, which is referred to here as “a box of excrement in living color.”) Sensing an opportunity to exploit humanity, the Martians engage the police force to abuse its populace, and force a local television host to collaborate with the state apparatus in a propaganda campaign to convince the civilian populace to donate blood. The host is bounced like a ping-pong ball between the police and the bloodthirsty Martians, ultimately attempting a thwarted rebellion that changes nothing. It went on to win the Grand Prix, and awards for Best Director and Best Screenplay at the Gdańsk Film Festival, along with the Special Jury Award at the International Film Festival in Trieste.

O-BI, O-BA: THE END OF CIVILIZATION
Dir. Piotr Szulkin, 1984
Poland, 85 min.
In Polish with English subtitles

FRIDAY, MAY 1 – 10 PM
MONDAY, MAY 11 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, MAY 22 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, MAY 28 – 7:30 PM

It is one year since nuclear war rolled over the world. Humanity has forgotten who won the war. The 850 survivors have herded together atop the Arctic Circle. There, underneath an insulated dome, they have succumbed to a group psychosis, clinging to the hope that a vessel called “The Ark” is en route to rescue them from their hell. Meanwhile, a subtle class system develops based around silver coins called “Arks,” and those without them die from malnutrition and exposure. As the protective dome begins to erode, morals and ethics follow suit, and the architect of “The Ark Myth” is forced to confront his hoax head on.

The obvious highlight of Szulkin’s apocalypse quartet, O-BI, O-BA is a vision of pure and total apocalypse unfettered by ornamental sentimentality.

GA-GA: GLORY TO THE HEROES
Dir. Piotr Szulkin, 1986
Poland, 84 min.
In Polish with English subtitles

TUESDAY, MAY 12 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, MAY 16 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, MAY 23 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, MAY 25 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, MAY 27 – 7:30 PM

GA-GA: GLORY TO THE HEROES, the comic end to the apocalypse quartet, begins with an interplanetary mission to an uninhabited planet called Australia 458. Instead of putting civilians in danger, the brutal regime forces Prisoner 287138, played by Wadja regular Daniel Olbrychski, to land on the unknown planet and claim it for humanity. To his surprise, the planet is the home of an equally insane regime that greets him as a celebrity, only to force him to commit crimes that will result in his public execution.

PETER FLEISCHMANN: TROLLING THE BACKWATERS

Posted on March 19, 2015December 25, 2019 by spectacletheater

Hardly anyone seems to have heard of Peter Fleischmann. This in spite of the fact that from 1969 to 1989 he made half a dozen features with some of the most celebrated talents of French and German cinema. After an education at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques and a discipleship with Jacques Rozier (one of the lesser-known names of the French New Wave), Fleischmann recruited a handful of actors from the stables of his New German Cinema companions and shot his first feature, HUNTING SCENES FROM BAVARIA. Later in the same year, he and Volker Schlöndorff started Hallelujah Film, an independent production company that would go on to produce most of Fleischmann’s own films, as well as films by Schlöndorff and Louis Malle. During his motley career, Fleischmann hopped adroitly between genres, from formally restrained play adaptations to buddy cop movies, soft-core pornography, and medieval sci-fi epics. Despite collaborating with the likes of Jean-Claude Carrière, Hanna Schygulla, Alain Derobe, Michel Piccoli, and Fernando Arrabal, Fleischmann has not become a household name even in cinephile circles in this country. This series is Spectacle’s attempt to help bring more attention to his stylistically eclectic, pan-European body of work than it has thus far received.

DOROTHEA’S REVENGE
aka Dorotheas Rache
Dir. Peter Fleischmann, 1974
West Germany/France, 92 min.
In German with English subtitles

SUNDAY, APRIL 5 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, APRIL 24 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 30 – 7:30 PM

The shortlist of fans for Fleischmann’s sex satire is nothing to scoff at. Among its most ardent fans were several household names of European arthouse: Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Claude Chabrol. Then there’s the post-surrealist group the Panic Movement (comprised of Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Roland Topor) who liked the film so much that they even decided to bestow upon the film a little reward—the “prix du group panic.”

Dorothea is a 16-year old girl from Hamburg, brought up in a typical, bourgeois family. This changes one day when she comes down for breakfast and her parents find her completely disheveled—a Martian has just raped her. So begins Dorothea’s sex odyssey, as she seeks to understand her body and its various uses in an incereasingly consumerist society. The key to the film is that she approaches these question of sex with every ounce of naiveté common to a young girl. She tries to make softcore porn with her friends, and when that doesn’t work, she gives prostution a turn, and so on and so forth. There’s seemingly no end to this excursion.

Fleischmann proved that he could produce biting political commentary within the confines of fiction in HUNTING SCENES FROM BAVARIA. Eschewing the traditional narrative scaffolding and riding on the back of a sex wave in European cinema—Vilgot Sjöman’s I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW), Dušan Makavejev’s WR: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM, and the films of Walerian Borowczyk are key predecessors—Fleischmann enlists a slew of experimental techniques, like having the characters routinely break the fourth wall and construing a hodge podge of stylistically contradictory scenes, from conversations with Christ on the cross to BDSM rituals. Moreover, humor is a constant presence, something that can’t be said for many of the period’s Eurotrash sexploitations. In one scene, there’s a shot of three men getting an erection, played to brassy, courtly music. It’s the promise of entertainment that gives an otherwise powerful political satire it’s enduring glow.

THE HAMBURG SYNDROME
aka Die Hamburger Krankheit
Dir. Peter Fleischmann, 1979
West Germany/France, 117 min.
In German with English subtitles

TUESDAY, APRIL 7 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 25 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, APRIL 28 – 10 PM

The film opens with a conference—a euphoric call to arms—on human longevity. A speaker bellows to a tired crowd, “Nobody denies that death is something natural, but mankind has proven more than once that it controls nature!” Meanwhile, a contagious disease spreads through the streets of Hamburg, leaving its victims in the fetal position.
Helmut Griem (THE DAMNED, THE DESERT OF THE TARTARS) plays the charismatic Professor Sebastian Ellerwein. While the bureaucrats are quick to pull the trigger on some kind of grand scheme to assure the masses, Ellerwein cautions against fighting what one doesn’t understand. Yet he’s alone in this opinion. Pandemonium ensues. The State rushes in to impose some semblance of order, desperate to pin the virus on anyone it can. The citizens react like mad hogs and turn on each other as earthquakes shake the city and men in white jumpers snag beautiful women off the streets.The mechanism of scapegoating thematized in HUNTING SCENES FROM BAVARIA returns on a vaster scale.

Jean Michel Jarre’s synth-laden soundtrack meshes seamlessly with this frenzied dystopia, and the cast is rounded out by the incorrigible, wheelchair-bound Fernando Arrabal in his last film appearance. The false promises of modernist utopian schemes have rarely been as effectively exposed as they are in THE HAMBURG SYNDROME.

HARD TO BE A GOD
aka Es ist nicht leicht ein Gott zu sein
Dir. Peter Fleischmann, 1989
West Germany/France/Switzerland/USSR, 119 min.
In German with English subtitles

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 1 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, APRIL 6 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, APRIL 26 – 7:30 PM

Featuring “I Offer Unto Thee Something Beautiful, Something Burnt” by Antoni Maiovvi from the “Battlestar Transreplica” EP released on Seed Records.

Following the recent release of Aleksei German’s long-awaited, grimly visceral masterpiece and testament, HARD TO BE A GOD, Spectacle is proud to present Peter Fleischmann’s much less lauded, sometimes heavily ridiculed, adaptation of the same source novel. With a broader color palette, a more intelligible narrative, a more merciful runtime, and bigger hair, Fleischmann’s version is more likely to draw comparisons to HIGHLANDER and CONAN THE BARBARIAN than to THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES.

On a distant planet with a human civilization centuries behind that of Earth, the warrior Rumata—who is really Anton, an earthling scientist in disguise—is forced to assume the throne of the city-sate of Arkanar, which has just been vacated by King Pierre Clémenti (LES IDOLES, THE YEAR OF THE CANNIBALS, PIGSTY). Anton is on a quest to reach the city of Irukan to find the fabled scholar Budach, who he believes can single-handedly launch a Renaissance and pull this violent world out of its dark ages.

Co-written by Jean-Claude Carrière (frequent collaborator of Pierre Étaix and Luis Buñuel and screenwriter of THE TIN DRUM) and featuring Werner Herzog as a scheming merchant, Fleischmann’s HARD TO BE A GOD offers a lusher, giddier rendition of the legendary Strugatsky brothers’ novel.

Because of the unforeseen success of the recent premiere run of Aleksei German’s version of HARD TO BE A GOD, Anthology Film Archives is bringing it back for another week-long run, Friday, April 23 – Tuesday, April 28. If you didn’t get a chance to experience it in January, make sure you don’t miss it this time around. For more information, visit Anthology’s Premieres page.

HUNTING SCENES FROM BAVARIA
aka Jagdszenen aus Niederbayern
Dir. Peter Fleischmann, 1969
West Germany, 88 min.
In Lower Bavarian with English subtitles

SATURDAY, APRIL 4 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, APRIL 17 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 22 – 7:30 PM

Based on a play by Lower Bavarian dramatist Martin Sperr, Hunting Scenes from Bavaria forces Angela Winkler (THE LOST HONOR OF KATHARINA BLUM, THE LEFT-HANDED WOMAN) and Fassbinder-favorite Hanna Schygulla to put on thick, rural south-German accents and tosses them into a maelstrom of provincial resentment and homophobia. These yokels are so nasty in so many ways that the federal state of Bavaria should have sued Fleischmann for slander.

When young farmhand Abram (Martin Sperr) comes back to town after a long hiatus, the scowling villagers rev up their malicious-gossip-machine. Rumors start spreading about Abram’s stint in prison and his newfound taste for men, until life becomes intolerable for everyone who remains friendly with him. Brandishing an impressive range of degrading epithets, the people of the village accuse each other of everything from licentiousness to mental retardation, all in a disheartening setting of mud, dust, and broken farming equipment.

A mayor tipping his hat as he drives through town on a tractor, a band of idle Arabs who loaf around in conformity with their ethnic stereotype, and a gaggle of local children assembling spontaneously to watch a pig’s brain being scooped out, boiled, and eaten—all shot in glorious, high-contrast black and white with exceptionally precise camerawork by Alain Derobe, one-time collaborator of such illustrious figures of French underground and radical cinema as José Bénazéraf and Marin Karmitz.

WEAK SPOT
aka La Faille
Dir. Peter Fleischmann, 1975
West Germany/Italy/France, 90 min.
In French with English subtitles

FRIDAY, APRIL 3 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 18 – 10 PM
MONDAY, APRIL 27 – 10 PM

If you’re looking for a cinematic representation of the Greek military regime of 1975, and Costa-Gavras’s Z is too boring or moralistic, then this near-forgotten piece of political screwball might be what you’re looking for.

“To be a peaceable citizen means nothing,” says the Director of the Special Service, the clandestine state security agency at the center of the narrative. A stream of such “peaceable citizens” flows steadily through their offices, interrogated and tortured for their suspected involvement in “subversive” activities. When [such and such] is picked up in a local sports bar and tossed into a web of accusations that becomes more and more absurd with the Director’s every paranoid hypothesis, special agents Michel Piccoli (THEMROC, DILLINGER IS DEAD) and Mario Adorf (CALIBER 9, THE TIN DRUM) are assigned to transport him to the Capital for what they know will be a brutal interrogation session. Expecting to be released with apologies as soon as the mix-up is cleared, [such and such] goes along. The long voyage from the provinces to the Capital is slowed to a snail’s pace by a million seemingly unforeseen obstacles (the car breaks down, they miss their ferry) and the wager becomes: Will he try to escape, or will he trust the law to exonerate him? Is he a naïve fool or will he figure out what’s really going on?

Part political thriller, part buddy cop movie, WEAK SPOT combines the imagery of 70s Mediterranean machismo (gold chains, tans, chest hair, huge lapels) with the anarchic satirical sensibility of Dario Fo and Elio Petri. The totally “transparent, logical society” envisioned by the Director of the Special Service, in which citizens no longer need to be interrogated because they volunteer all their secrets in a constantly open flow of information, is an uncannily accurate prediction of the totalitarian system that has been implemented on a global scale within the past decade. Both timely and unmistakably of its time, WEAK SPOT is not to be missed.