ONE WEEK ONLY! APRIL 9 – 15 – Filmmaker in attendance at most screenings!

This April, Spectacle is pleased to present the first retrospective of film and video artist James Fotopoulos in over a decade—an eternity relative the supernatural profligacy of Fotopoulos’s label-defying output. Perhaps no other moviemaker so categorically denies compartmentalization, falsifying dichotomies of underground and art film, narrative and abstraction, and black box and white cube, while unabashedly appropriating, celebrating, and upturning the conventions of the horror, sci-fi, hardboiled, and melodramatic genres.

For this retrospective, which only scratches the surface of Fotopoulos’s filmography, we focus primarily on narrative work, including all five of his feature-length 16mm films, four hybrid-narrative videos, and the four-part back-and-forth 16mm/video feature CHRISTABEL, included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial yet unseen in its original formats since its 2001 premiere. Peppered throughout in night-at-the-movies style we’ll also showcase various shorts programmed alongside features and other bits of audiovisual mood-enhancing odds-and-ends.

Organized in close collaboration with the artist, the series features personal film prints and brand-new video transfers made directly from the masters. Skewing toward early works, it comes on the heels of a solo show at Microscope Gallery, which included the premieres of recent works THE GIVEN (2015) and THERE (2014). Along with DIGNITY (2012), a feature that premiered at Spectacle last year, they represent a sort of full-circle return to the formal approaches of the early films in this retrospective.

This retrospective is also preceded by a selection of feature-length abstract works presented at Millennium Film Workshop on April 2. Details on show here.

Special thanks to The Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Rebecca Cleman.

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ZERO
Dir. James Fotopoulos, 1997
USA, 142 min. 16mm.

Screening on 16mm for the first time in New York since its premiere!

THURSDAY, APRIL 9 – 8:00 PM – Filmmaker in attendance!

 Made when the director was still in his teens, ZERO is a highly disturbing (and deadpan hilarious) portrait of a mentally unhinged loser biding his time shitting, unravelling, ranting, and sharing moments of tenderness with a mannequin head, his only friend and lover. Placed throughout are highly affecting and evocative sequences of toned, hand-painted imagery and highly unconventional film processing representing death, disease, decay, and sex, and pastoral interludes that suggest a state of mental tranquility that’s already too far gone.

The director describes ZERO as a “a two-and-a-half-hour endurance test,” but for better or worse, that might be an overstatement: ZERO is as hideous as it is riveting in its rhythm and pacing. Yet it is by no stretch appropriate for the easily offended.

ZERO has been essentially unseen—and not shown at all on 16mm—in New York since it’s sparsely attended premiere. This is an unmissable chance to catch one of Fotopoulos’s most important yet rarely seen films.

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MIGRATING FORMS
Dir. James Fotopoulos, 1999
USA, 80 min. 16mm.

Screening on 16mm!

FRIDAY, APRIL 10 – 7:30 PM – Filmmaker in attendance!
FRIDAY, APRIL 10 – MIDNIGHT – Filmmaker in attendance!
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 15 – 10:00 PM

“A kind of stripped down ERASERHEAD … MIGRATING FORMS has a formal purity and obsessive power that’s all too rare these days.” –Amy Taubin, Village Voice

A movie about a man, a woman, and a room in which they habitually engage in deeply uneasy coitus—sex both rote and fever-pitched, which seems somehow motivated by the paradoxically repulsive and magnetic draw of a phallic tumor extruding from the woman’s back. It’s a pulverizingly minimalist masterpiece of finely-tuned anxiety.

MIGRATING FORMS justly earns comparison to David Cronenberg for its psychosomatic representation of disease and body horror, as well as the uncanniness of the banality in the work of David Lynch. But, particularly in light of Fotopoulos’ subsequent profusion of work, one might also draw comparisons to ceaselessly prolific trash-row auteurs like Joseph Sarno and Andy Milligan, in comparison to whom the arthouse, experimental cinema, and gallery is Fotopoulos’s 42nd Street. For some, the greatest virtue of sexploitation is its hypnotic, drone-like banality, which is here consciously perverted into avant-garde extremes. It’s often said that as the exploitation film dried up its techniques of sensationalism and salesmanship were assimilated by Hollywood; it’s less often noted that, removed from any established market—this is the tail-end of the decade that saw the sanitization of Times Square—the weirdness of marginal cinema truly broods in uncompromising movies like MIGRATING FORMS.

MIGRATING FORMS literally redefined the underground. It was a sensation at its New York premiere, with Amy Taubin writing that “[MIGRATING FORMS] alone gives the Underground Film Festival a reason for being.” The statement was prophetic: in 2008 the name of the festival was changed accordingly to reflect the kind of protean, hybrid, relentlessly unclassifiable cinema Fotopoulos had ushered in.

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BACK AGAINST THE WALL
Dir. James Fotopoulos, 2000
USA, 94 min. 16mm.

Screening on 16mm!

FRIDAY, APRIL 10 – 10:00 PM – Filmmaker in attendance!
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 15 – 7:30 PM

“The term ‘noir’ only begins to describe the malignant atmosphere that seeps like a poison gas through James Fotopoulos’s grimy, clanging film.” –Stephen Holden, The New York Times

Back Against the Wall presents an atmosphere of ever-increasing doom, as a woman named June seems to engage in a grotesque personal experiment that involves hitching herself to defective men. Each of the film’s three chapters is devoted to one of them; Levey is a speed-reading rage freak prone to seizures and melancholy, pornographer or pimp Vince is friendlier but his professional contacts keep knocking out his teeth, and finally we encounter Ed, a truly singular creation who is stricken with a terminal disease and spends long moments whispering nonsense. The backdrop is a menacing and featureless Middle America with its shitty drugs, prefab motel rooms and mediocre towns. A generic mud-stained farmhouse is the depressing setting for a porno shoot where June and other women dress up as a sexy cowgirl, a sexy cow and a sexy child holding a teddy bear, respectively.

The film’s sorrows are particular and finely tuned, focusing on the impending stage of all sorts of disasters we can only imagine, with incredible grace and humor in long silences, grim non sequiturs and a surreal air of decay.

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CHRISTABEL
Dir. James Fotopoulos, 2001
USA, 74 min. 16mm/video.

Screening for the first time since its premiere in its original alternating 16mm/video back-and-forth format!

SATURDAY, APRIL 11 – 7:30 PM – Filmmaker in attendance!

“Christabel is an abstract interpretation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished Gothic poem about female possession. Adhering to the poem’s structure the film is presented in four parts – Two digital video half hour segments and then two short 16mm conclusions. The contemporary relevance of the poem’s symbols and themes is underlined using performance combined with heavy image and sound layering.” —JF

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FAMILIES
Dir. James Fotopoulos, 2002
USA, 97 min. 16mm.

Screening on 16mm!

SUNDAY, APRIL 12 – 7:30 PM – Filmmaker in attendance!

“The experience of this rich film is a completely unique mix of alienation and empathy, horror and bemusement—it should go in the time capsule, as a token of life on earth at the turn of the millennium.” —Rebecca Cleman, Screen Slate

A hybrid film that intentionally clashes techniques and syntaxes, FAMILIES is a series docufictional vignettes in a rural industrial town as portrayed through Fotopoulous’ singular eye.

“Life in a rural industrial town: a teenage boy, his family, friends and failed attempt at love are investigated through stark black-and-white photography and static long takes. Filmed in a fusion of authentic and staged documentation, with robotic performances by actors and non-actors, the piece meditates on the mundane existence of human and animal life.” —JF

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HYMN
Dir. James Fotopoulos, 2002
USA, 90 min. Video.

MONDAY, APRIL 13 – 7:30 PM – Filmmaker in attendance!

“A digital poem of the flesh unfolding in near mathematical structural precision.” HYMN borders upon abstraction, voyeurism, and pornography, presenting digitally processed video of copulation interpolated with flicker, painting, sound, and sculpture. Bathed in teal hues and uncanny glimmers, HYMN is one of Fotopoulos’s most hypnotic and seductive works. It also speaks latently to pre-broadband Internet sex culture, based as it is upon footage commissioned from Fotopoulos by a teenage couple who had discovered his work online and invited him to film them as part of a tape-trading ring.

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THE NEST
Dir. James Fotopoulos, 2003
USA, 78 min. 16mm.

Screening on 16mm!

SUNDAY, APRIL 12 – 10:00 PM – Filmmaker in attendance!

“THE NEST suggests that other great suburban tract of the ‘80s, Don DeLillo’s WHITE NOISE, but rather than being about a toxic airborne event, THE NEST simply is one.” —Spencer Parsons, Cinematexas

“Filmed in saturated colors on out-of-date film stocks with an aggressive soundtrack, the story of The Nest is told – The marriage of two young professionals unravels after an unnamed accident physically and emotional traumatizes the wife. Government agents, shadowy investigators and transgender beings appear, trying to solve the nervous-breakdown-mystery of secret alien forces that chose the couple as their target. In-camera tricks, drawings, derelict optical printing, miniatures, puppets and prosthetic makeup effects convey the dual collapse of the protagonists’ lives and the film structure as one unified entity.” —JF

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ESOPHAGUS
Dir. James Fotopoulos, 2004
USA, 70 min. Video.

MONDAY, APRIL 13 – 10:00 PM – Filmmaker in attendance!

“The origins of the universe told through the lens of an experimental film and video sci-fi horror-show fusion: Alien women trapped in a colorfully hand-scratched film-textured hotel room, genetically mutated men slowly driven mad in a white digital prison, the high contrast landscapes of Mars, and a futuristic tribe of a giant, an elf and a witch in their decaying suicide-home.” —JF

On the bleeding edge of narrative, abstraction, and pure experimentation, ESOPHAGUS is a hypnotic multi-part film/video hybrid. In the beginning, rhythmic, undulating pulses of color give way to scratched images of lovemaking. In amateurish digital video, a group of imprisoned men are driven mad by repetitious digital computer voices. The computer vocals continue in a profane, sing-songy back-and-forth over images of a dark elf and witch before the pair depart for Mars, bringing the narrative full circle into a brooding digital soup.

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THE ANT HILL
Dir. James Fotopoulos, 2004
USA, 60 min. Video.

SATURDAY, APRIL 11 – 10:00 PM – Filmmaker in attendance!
TUESDAY, APRIL 14 – 10:00 PM

“At the center of this video, one of Chicagoan James Fotopoulos’s strongest works, is a cult founded by a man who says he’s obeying instructions from a forest apparition. The sparse narrative follows the usual cult arc—the leader requires obedience, the followers perform revolting tasks (most, thankfully, offscreen), and two plan an escape. But this is less realistic storytelling than contemplative satire—the leader wears a hokey beard and crown, and the actors speak like automatons. In a prologue the leader writhes nude, almost epileptic, alongside a woman, suggesting Fotopoulos’s key theme: our bodies, and existence itself, are the real traps.” —Fred Camper, The Chicago Reader

“When a cult leader’s vision of the end of the world is not fulfilled he beings the systematic humiliation and destruction of his followers. The derelict play unfolds on a barren stage with bursts of animation, field recordings of sound, alien creatures and dime store costumes – a high school production aesthetic of the most extreme nature.” —JF

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THE SKY SONG
Dir. James Fotopoulos, 2007
USA, 127 min. Video.

TUESDAY, APRIL 14 – 7:30 PM

Remember your suspicion that the Microsoft Paperclip and your 56k modem were agents of Interzone working in tandem to surveil our collective dreams? In 2007, Fotopoulos unearthed one of their communiques and refashioned it as THE SKY SONG, an unsettling Western melodrama submerged in a seething vat of pixelated noise.

According to Fotopoulos, the film concerns a “quest for revenge” that takes a man “on a journey to reconcile the horrors of his past — illness, murder, lost love and war.” Ostensibly accurate, that synopsis does little to prepare viewers for the phantasmagoric succession of video effects or the comically flatlined dialogue that orbit some obscure truths about our fixation with the old west. A wry digital primitive, Fotopoulos costumes his actors in K-Mart halloween kitsch and surrounds them with graphics sketched in MS Paint. The resulting work lashes against your nerves before summoning sounds and images of sublime surreality.

Stripped of all majesty, this is where the Western belongs in the 21st century: reduced, exploded and crudely refabricated.

Last month’s JUCHE YOUR ILLUSION I surveyed films made in North Korea. For the second part of the series, Spectacle presents three films about North Korea made by filmmakers outside the country.

North Korea’s seclusion results in a peculiar dichotomy; films emerging from within reflect a disconnectedness from the outside world, while works about North Korea made elsewhere must contend with the country’s deliberate attempts at obfuscation. These films largely rely upon brief glimpses, piecemeal second-hand information and, paradoxically, North Korea’s own propaganda, which outside filmmakers parse according to, or in spite of, their own subjectivity. Cinema from each side, generally oppositional to the other and informed by respective biases, can obscure as much as it reveals. It can also serve as a useful reminder of our own subjectivity vis a vis the more familiar propaganda inherent in our own domestic art and discourse.

The films in JUCHE YOUR ILLUSION II both reinforce and undermine the portrait of North Korea presented in the first part of the series. JUCHE II includes a work completely indebted to propaganda (in which upstate NY stands in for NK); a meticulously redesigned vacation video by a French tourist; and the video diary of a woman conflicted by her own familial ties to North Korea.

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DEAR PYONGYANG
Dir. Yonghi Yang, 2005
Japan, 107 min.
In Korean and Japanese with English subtitles

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 1 – 10 PM
MONDAY, APRIL 6 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, APRIL 24 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, APRIL 28 – 7:30 PM

Yonghi Yang is one of nearly a million zainichi, Koreans living in Japan. Beginning in 1959 and lasting 20 years, many zainichi, even of South Korean nationality, left Japan for North Korea as part of a widespread repatriation movement inspired by North Korea’s economic growth and the promise of Korean reunification. These returnees have never been allowed to leave.

Three of those who went were Yang’s brothers, sent in the 1970s by their father, the leader of the pro-North movement in Japan. Yang documents several family trips to Pyongyang to visit her brothers, now grown and with families of their own, who survive in large part due to supplies shipped to them from Japan by their parents, who remained there along with Yang. Despite his sons’ poor living standards, Yang’s father remains staunchly loyal to North Korea, an ideological dilemma for Yang, who struggles to comprehend why her father broke apart his family and wishes to officially change her nationality to South Korea. Though he reproaches his daughter for what he considers her disloyalty to his life’s work, over the ten-year filming period, his steadfastness gives way to indications of regret and a willingness to compromise.

DEAR PYONGYANG received prizes at Berlin and Sundance and is at once an intimate portrait of a family divided by borders and ideology, a rare firsthand glimpse into daily life in North Korea’s capital and an unflinching meditation on the long shadow cast by Korea’s tragic past.

Thanks to Tidepoint Pictures

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INTERNATIONAL TOURISM
aka Tourisme International
Dir. Marie Voignier
France, 48 min.
No dialogue; English intertitles

FRIDAY, APRIL 4 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, APRIL 7 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 18 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 22 – 10 PM

How does a dictatorship exhibit itself to the tourists visiting it? What kind of narration, actors, and staging does it summon? INTERNATIONAL TOURISM has been shot as a recording of a show on the scale of a whole country, North Korea. Museums, painters’ studios, cinema production houses, or a chemical factory are presented to us by North Korean guides whose voices we never hear—for the film has been completely dubbed in at the editing stage in order to create anew a sonorous universe completely disconnected from the official discourses: all sounds have been rerecorded in order to restore the density of spaces, the murmur of tourists, the gestures of the guides, with the exception of the voices. The guides do speak, but we never hear them, and paradoxically, this muteness reveals in a better, enfolded way the coercion of the regime on the spaces and the bodies.

The journey is interspersed with title cards, in which we learn that the President himself is concerned with every detail, that painting seems to replace photography, that all movies are overdubbed for fear of any excess. The film questions the way the nation fabricates its images, between politics, mythology and imagination. Amidst this confrontation between the images of power and the gaze of tourists, we perceive the silent choreography of the touristic guides—those rigid but gracious actors of a country in perpetual self-representation.

Courtesy of Marie Voignier

 

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THE JUCHE IDEA
Dir. Jim Finn
USA, 62 min.
In Korean and English with English subtitles

SUNDAY, APRIL 5 – 5 PM
TUESDAY, APRIL 21 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, APRIL 26 – 5 PM

Yoon Jung, a South Korean video artist, moves to a collective farm & artist colony in North Korea with the hope of revitalizing Juche cinema for the 21st century. Jim Finn’s ingenious satire THE JUCHE IDEA is told through interviews with Yoon Jung at work on the farm (actually upstate NY), the films she makes as part of her residency (“The Tiny Dentures of Imperialism”, “English as a Socialist Language”), and a sampling of real North Korean propaganda and state-sanctioned films set against quotes from Kim Jong-il’s “On the Art of Cinema.”

THE JUCHE IDEA, one of Finn’s “utopian comedies,” and the final part of his Communist Trilogy, is a wildly inventive and experimental hybrid of mockumentary, satire, agitprop, science fiction and reality, which mocks and illuminates the concept of Juche and the cult of personality surrounding Kim Jong-il, while slyly pointing the finger at capitalism and America, itself a peculiar country in which movie stars, not film theorists, become beloved leaders.

RODRIGO D: NO FUTURO
Dir. Victor Gaviria, 1990
Colombia, 93 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles

FRIDAY, APRIL 3 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, APRIL 21 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 25 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 30 – 10 PM

Sort of like a South American SUBURBIA, Victor Gaviria’s debut feature RODRIGO D: NO FUTURO trades the relatively cush reality of Reagan-era America for the drug money-fueled inferno of Medellin in 1988.

Here we follow adolescent ne’er-do-well Rodrigo D as he tools around town with his ne’er-do-well punk friends romancing babes, playing in shitty bands, dealing drugs, dodging cops, bumming beer money, and/or brazenly robbing people on the street.

As Colombia’s first ever film accepted at Cannes, RODRIGO D: NO FUTURO gained international recognition for its gripping neorealist depiction of Escobar-era Colombia, a place that three years later would earn the ignominious distinction of “murder capital of the world.” Six of the film’s actors were killed after the film wrapped.

Featuring a soundtrack almost black metal in its gritty nihilism, RODRIGO D: NO FUTURO is at once charming (who doesn’t love punkers terrorizing the neighborhood) and disturbing as Gaviria’s embedded position allows us to witness a society on the verge of implosion.

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THE TERRITORY
Dir. Raúl Ruiz, 1981
Portugal, 104 min.
In English and French with English subtitles

TUESDAY, MARCH 3 – 7:30
MONDAY, MARCH 9 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 20 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 22 – 5 PM

Madness in excess but with a snowballing narrative effect, Raúl Ruiz’s THE TERRITORY takes peculiar people and surrounds them in a more peculiar setting and eventually plunges us into their inevitable lunacy. Ruiz’s hidden gem follows a group who embark on a hiking trip and get lost after ditching their guide. The situation turns vastly surreal with bright pops of color in photography but never turns into psychedelia. While the film is littered with non-sequitur jokes, it is more faithful to being an intellectual fantasy horror than a comedy. Compared to the bulk of his output during his eccentric 1980s era, THE TERRITORY can be considered one of Ruiz’s more accessible films of this time.

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THREE CROWNS OF THE SAILOR
Dir. Raúl Ruiz, 1983
France, 117 min.
In French with English subtitles

THURSDAY, MARCH 5 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, MARCH 16 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 20 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 22 – 7:30 PM

One of the 1980s’ art house masterpieces, Raúl Ruiz’s THREE CROWNS OF THE SAILOR is an absolutely absurd if not profound ghost ship tall tale that sails on a existential nonsense map to nowhere. Spoken in strange code, most of the cryptic language answers questions that were never asked and revels in its fractured fake histories. It is a story that is on another realm with multiverses being pulled through a singular and revelations of alternate characters that may have not existed. The film comes as a strategic stream of conscience that tries to shoe lace faded memories to the fragmented damaged stories. THREE CROWNS OF THE SAILOR is filled to the brim with over complicated ideas and none of them would work if humor and a grain of salt wasn’t included.

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3 RUIZ SHORTS: VOYAGE OF THE HAND / ZIG ZAG / DOG’S DIALOGUE
Dir. Raúl Ruiz, 1985, 1980, and 1977
France, 25 min. / 31 min. / 22 min.
In French and English with English subtitles

TUESDAY, MARCH 3 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 8 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, MARCH 16 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, MARCH 19 – 10 PM

As a special supplemental collection to the two full lengths featured this month, these three shorts from Ruiz are perhaps his most notable and clever of this era. Presented in reverse chronological order, the program begins with VOYAGE OF THE HAND, one of his more successful impromptu nonsense nightmares. It focuses on the story of a man’s left hand, but in true Ruiz nature, many elements begin to blur. The second short ZIG ZAG is about a man reluctantly joining in a grand scale cartography game of conundrums where the rules constantly change and the scope grows infinitely. The final short in this collection is the landmark DOG’S DIALOGUE which set the off-center tone for the oncoming decades for Ruiz. Presented in the superior English language version, DOG’S DIALOGUE is an act of tomfoolery employing only stock footage and stills. By using clever repetition, what begins as a melodrama of a lovelorn woman breaks into other people’s narratives and eventually dissolves into an endless loop.

BLOW JOB
aka Soffio Erotico
Dir. Alberto Cavallone, 1980
Italy, 78 min.
In Italian with English subtitles

SATURDAY, MARCH 7 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 10 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 15 – 5 PM
WEDNESDAY, 18 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, MARCH 26 – 10 PM

Reportedly inspired by Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, BLOW JOB is a full blown out of body experience. What begins as a romantic retreat quickly heads south when a young couple, Diana and Stéfano, are evicted from their hotel room. Capitalizing on the conveniently timed suicide of their upstairs neighbor, the two sneak off to the races, intent on gambling away the last of their funds. There, Stéfano meets a mysterious, one-eyed woman who enlists his aid in exchange for the name of the winning pony. Fulfilling his end of the bargain, Stéfano and Diana drive the woman to her compound, where voodoo, mind-swapping and naked dance parties unwittingly await them. Building to its explosive, surrealist third act, BLOW JOB displays unexpectedly layered yet winking nuance — nevermind the title.

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BLUE MOVIE
Dir. Alberto Cavallone, 1978
Italy, 84 min.
In Italian with English subtitles

MONDAY, MARCH 2 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 6 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 10 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 24 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 31 – 7:30 PM

“Cavallone made his masterpiece with this 1978 film, a sort of BLOW-UP as written by George Bataille and directed by Guy Debord…Much more than just a curiosity for compulsive Italian B-movie fans, BLUE MOVIE is a singular mixture of Situationist polemic, genre deconstruction, and zero budget auteurism.” – Film Comment

Not to be confused with the claustrophobic Warhol film of the same name, BLUE MOVIE is an almost unplaceable genre exercise in trauma and perverse affection. Perhaps the most visually distinctive of the three films in this series, BLUE MOVIE pairs Silvia, grief stricken after an attempted rape, with her rescuer, a mysterious photographer by the name of Claudio, who has some skeletons of his own. What emerges is a bizarre love affair along two parallel tracks of madness.

[Trigger Warning: Repeated scenes of attempted rape.]

Special thanks to Raro Video.

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MAN, WOMAN AND BEAST
aka Spell – Dolce mattatoio
Dir. Alberto Cavallone, 1977
Italy, 100 min.
In Italian with English subtitles

MONDAY, MARCH 2 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, MARCH 7 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, MARCH 12 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 17 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 29 – 5 PM

A man too concerned with collages to confront his mute wife’s psychosexual mania; a daughter impregnated by her father at her grandfather’s funeral; a butcher a little too devoted to his products — that’s just the tip of the very bizarre iceberg in Alberto Cavallone’s anti-pastoral pastiche, MAN, WOMAN AND BEAST. Elemental though the title may be, this hallucinatory jaunt through an Italian village on the eve of an annual Catholic festival rewards repeat viewings thanks to its rhythmic cuts and roving narrative. By the ecstatic, percussive, feces-covered close, you can no longer be certain if the beast is man, meat, or what the film’s women must become in order to survive.