FMC PRESENTS FILMS BY ANJA CZIOSKA
Dir. Anja Czioska, 1991-1997
USA/Germany, approx. 46 min, 16mm

ONE NIGHT ONLY!
SATURDAY, MARCH 22 – 7:00 PM
16mm projection! Presented by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, with an introduction by FMC Director MM Serra.

Anja Czioska, born 1965, is a German-born filmmaker, performance artist and curator. She was a student at Städelschule Frankfurt under Kasper König and Peter Kubelka, and is co-founder and co-director of the Kunstverein Familie Montez, an important institution of the contemporary art scene in Frankfurt.

This program of shorts will be comprised of thirteen films Czioska made between 1991 and 1997. Moments of everyday life captured not unawares, but performed provocatively for the camera. The films, all under eight minutes, most shot on Super-8 and some hand-developed, have a common theme of nakedness; not only literally. They are unpretentious and unabashedly running over…

The Film-Makers’ Cooperative is the largest archive and distributor of independent and avant-garde films in the world. Created by artists in 1961, as the distribution branch of the New American Cinema Group, the Coop has more than 5,000 films, videotapes and DVDs in its collection.

SHIWA (1991) S-8 blown up to 16mm, b/w, sound, 3 min.
Music is Ataypura by Yma Sumac. “You can see light film… and maybe a wonderful naked body.” -AC

FILM SCRIBBLES: BIRGIT SHOWER, LONDON (1993) S-8 blown up to 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 min.
“Birgit takes a shower with an old thing that is normally used to boil water.” -AC

FILM SCRIBBLES: FÜẞE IM MEER (FEET IN THE SEA) (1992) S-8 blown up to 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 min.
“You can see feet and hands in the North Sea water. It comes and goes in a poetical way.” -AC

FILM SCRIBBLES: IM GRAS (IN THE GRASS) (1994) S-8 blown up to 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 min.
“Anja wears only a rubbermask in the grass.” -AC

FILM SCRIBBLES: SHOWER, ROTTERDAM (1991) S-8 blown up to 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 min.
“Debut shower. The camera on a tripod on the ‘timer’ and I move very slowly so that the viewer has the impression that something is wrong.” -AC

FILM SCRIBBLES: DACH (ROOF) (1994) 16mm, hand-developed, b/w, silent, 3 min.
“Roofs of San Francisco. This is the filming of a friend, Inga and myself sunbathing and playing with the camera.” -AC

FILM SCRIBBLES: DUSCH (SHOWER) (1994) 16mm, hand-developed, b/w, silent, 3 min.
“This is the same type of movie that achieved in Rotterdam in 1991. I tried to film me while I took a shower, but the mist and fog are overriding factors.” -AC

FILM SCRIBBLES: UNTERWASSER (UNDERWATER) (1994) 16mm, hand-developed, b/w, silent, 3 min.
“I shot from the water holding my camera in hand. The film is projected upside down, so that you feel that I drink all the water around me. Some movies make me look like a dead person in the water, others show me trying to catch my breath.” -AC

JONAS MEKAS, FRIDAY 13. OKT. 1995 NYC (1995) 16mm, b/w, silent. 6 min.
“Jonas, Birgit and Anja take a trip to the Brooklyn Bridge. Taxi driving, beer buying, drinking, doing funny things and dancing. It was a nice afternoon.” -AC

BOLERO (1995) 16mm, color, sound. 7 min.
Music is Bolero by Ravel. “Timo is Sybille. They get married. Romantic film performance-dance in a gravel pit.” -AC

PRINCESS MARINA (1996) 16mm, color, sound. 3 min.
Music is Marina by Rocco Granata. “Marina eats a carrot. Marina is a Princess. Marina is naked.” -AC

ION DANCE (1997) S-8 blown up to 16mm, b/w, silent. 3 min.
“Ion Garnica is a dancer of the Frankfurt Forsythe Ballet. It’s a naked dance improvisational performance only for the camera.” -AC

ION SHOWER (1997) S-8 blown up to 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 min.
“Ion Garnica, sweaty after dancing, takes a shower.” -AC

This February, the Spectacle goes against the party line.

From the 50s to the 70s, Mao had to deal not only with the landlords, the compradors, and all the other running dogs of the international bourgeoisie, but also with foreign filmmakers seemingly bent on making a mockery of the sincere efforts of the Chinese communists to build a new society out of the ruins of the old. Before and during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, these camera-wielding counterrevolutionaries exposed Chinese everyday life as less-than-radically-transformed in many of its aspects, and contributed to a worldwide demystification of the processes of labor-aristocratization and bureaucratization then taking place in that vast country. Some did it with more polemical intent than others. For a cross-section of the different critical attitudes then circulating on the subject of Communist China, this series brings together the naïve, the sarcastic, and the acerbic.

CHINAMEN, ONE MORE EFFORT IF YOU WANT TO BE REVOLUTIONARIES!
a.k.a. Peking Duck Soup; Chinois, encore un effort pour être révolutionnaires!
Dir. René Vienet, 1977
France, 112 mins.
In English

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 5 – 7PM

Known primarily for his pioneering cinematic détournement Can Dialectics Break Bricks?, which put Situationist slogans in the mouths of kung-fu fighting Koreans, René Vienet also wrote Enragés and Situationists in the Occupations Movement, one of the most comprehensive first-hand accounts of the events of May ’68 in France. A sinologist, Vienet was expelled from China while on a study trip in 1966, and was subsequently fired — twice! — from his post at the French National Center for Scientific Research for his attacks on defenders of Mao within their ranks.

In CHINAMEN, ONE MORE EFFORT IF YOU WANT TO BE REVOLUTIONARIES!, Vienet uses subverted archival footage and a sardonic voiceover to denounce Mao’s deformed socialist state machine as a grotesque caricature of a revolutionary society. Whereas his previous two détournements spoofed kung-fu movies and pinku flicks, this one attacks the political documentary and disassembles it into its constituent tropes. Legendary French literary and film critic Georges Charensol called it “in my opinion the best film in the history of cinema.”

SUNDAY IN PEKING
a.k.a. Dimanche à Pekin
Dir. Chris Marker, 1956
France, 18 mins.
In French with English subtitles

In 1956, recently beatified cinema-essayist Chris Marker spent a couple of weeks in Peking and shot this travelogue. As the title suggests, the subject is a single, typical day in the life of the Chinese capital. Marker turns his camera on mask-wearing mysophobes, top-level athletes, and sword-wielding retirees to weave a magical, embellished tapestry of Peking in which the most egregious Orientalist illusions are deployed with sarcastic relish. Marker’s irony was not noticed by everyone: unlike the other two filmmakers in this series, Marker was rejected not by the Chinese government but by the Berlin Film Festival for what it perceived as shameless Communist propaganda.

The highly personal lyricism of Marker’s commentary in Sunday in Peking, newly translated and subtitled for the Spectacle, shows the influence of Alain Resnais, with whom Marker had just collaborated on STATUES ALSO DIE and NIGHT AND FOG. The score is conducted by famed French New Wave composer Georges Delerue, whose distinctive scores include SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER and CONTEMPT. Other collaborators include Agnès Varda, who acted as the film’s “sinological advisor” — whatever that entailed.

Special thanks to Allison Kruse for the new translation.

CHUNG KUO – CINA
Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1972
Italy, 208 mins.
In Italian with English subtitles

THURSDAY, JANUARY 6, 7PM

More reviled by the Chinese government than possibly any other filmmaker in history is Michelangelo Antonioni. What could have led Antonioni, not known for his outspoken criticism of the Chinese or any other state, to be condemned to a massive campaign of public ridicule and denunciation diffused throughout the largest population in the world? Answer: CHUNG KUO – CINA, a three-hour long documentary commissioned by the Chinese embassy in Rome and RAI Television during the dusk years of the Cultural Revolution.

Shot over 22 days in Beijing, Henan Province, Suzhou, Nanjing, and Shanghai, with a strict itinerary imposed by the Party officials appointed to guide Antonioni’s crew, CHUNG KUO was supposed to become a panoramic document of socialist progress. But through a series of tactical deviations from his assigned trajectory, Antonioni ended up producing a touchingly naïve and intimate portrait of everyday life in early 1970s China. The film’s decidedly unmonumental character provoked severe indignation from the Party: the Chinese ambassador led his staff in a walkout at a screening in Washington, newspaper editorials with titles like “A Vicious Motive, Despicable Tricks” were collected into a 200-page booklet called The Chinese People Will Not Stand for Being Denigrated: A Collection of Criticisms of Antonioni’s Anti-China Film, and even a taunt-song called “Let’s Make Antonioni Mad” was widely taught to Chinese schoolchildren.

From the first images of an old man doing tai chi while riding a bike, to an eye-popping cesarian section performed with nothing but acupuncture needles for anesthesia, CHUNG KUO is amazing as a travelogue, a historical document, and a study in the minutiae of human interaction.

JONAS REINHARDT’S GANYMEDE
Dir. Various, 2014
USA, 35 min.

ONE NIGHT ONLY: THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 20 – SCREENINGS AT 8 and 10 PM

Join us this stellar evening for premiere screenings of GANYMEDE, a new audio/visual hybrid from electro-artbeat unit JONAS REINHARDT.

“GANYMEDE is an experimental film set on the solar system’s largest moon. On Ganymede, it is thought that volcanic vents supply the necessary power to fuel life. This film imagines unknown extra-terrestrial life forms engaged in ritualistic aquatic dance beneath a sky of ice. The resulting way of life is depicted as fluctuating pulses of energy abstracted beyond conventional consciousness.

Using a battery of synthesizers and repeating patterns, JONAS REINHARDT delves into the chaotic unknown seeking transcendence and achieving a spiritual ‘other’ defined by ecstatic reverie.”

The crew of Brooklyn-based collaborative filmmakers for this expedition include Antonia Kuo, Josh Lewis, Kenneth Zoran Curwood, Shona Masarin, Ben Mosca, Lily Jue Sheng.

JONAS REINHARDT is also celebrating the publication of GANYMEDE as a vinyl record and DVD set from Constellation Tatsu.

LINKS
jonasreinhardt.com/
www.ctatsu.com/

For updates on this special screening of HUMANOID FREEWAY, please visit the Facebook event page. Due to privacy settings, you may need to friend the host.

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.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 31 – 7:30 PM

With MARGARETHE VON TROTTA and BARBARA SUKOWA in attendance!

ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Margarethe von Trotta’s 1981 film Die bleierne Zeit is a paradigmatic film of the New German Cinema. It brings together many of the themes that preoccupied the directors associated with that moment: the reluctance of Germans to face their recent history, the continuity of fascist structures well beyond the fall of the Reich, the family as the smallest cell of the State, the sexual division of labor, and the petty bourgeois fear of otherness. Many German directors working in the post-68 period explored these themes, notably R.W. Fassbinder in Fear of Fear and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Alexander Kluge in Patriotinnen and Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave, Helke Sander in The All-Around Reduced Personality, and Helma Sanders-Brahms in Beneath the Paving Stones the Beach, but they receive perhaps their strongest and clearest expression here.

Die bleierne Zeit also directly addresses the motivations and consequences of armed struggle against a democratic state. The Red Army Faction was generally reviled in German civil society, and the attitude towards them within the ultra-left, from within whose ranks it sprung, was a mix of admiration and disappointment. A generation that swore not to repeat the mistakes of its parents’ generation had to take drastic action—that much was clear to everyone—but the debate quickly shifted its attention away from this unquestionable ethical imperative. The dominant discourse concerned itself with legal questions about whether taking “innocent” lives could ever be justified on political grounds, and whether the RAF’s activities should be considered political acts in the first place. In leftist circles the debate was strategically motivated: would armed struggle succeed in destroying nothing but the popular support that the anti-imperialist movement, the student movement, and the women’s movement had been slowly able to generate? These questions were collectively addressed in the omnibus film Germany in Autumn to which von Trotta’s frequent collaborators Volker Schöndorff and R.W. Fassbinder contributed, and Die bleierne Zeit could be considered a delayed contribution to this debate.

By following the thinly fictionalized story of Gudrun Ensslin through the relationship that she developed with her sister while in prison, Die bleierne Zeit focuses on something that is unbelievably rare in mainstream cinema: a strong friendship between women that is not mediated by a man. This is a feature that all of her films have in common, from The Second Awakening of Christa Klages to Hannah Arendt. Like Helke Sander and Helma Sanders-Brahms, von Trotta often thematizes the question of what kind of work—political, intellectual, or otherwise—women are qualified to engage in, and her films have been said to “offer a glimpse of a post-patriarchal cinema.”

This January, the Spectacle is proud to welcome Margarethe von Trotta to an encore screening of Die bleierne Zeit. Von Trotta will introduce the screening, which will be followed by a discussion on these themes and on von Trotta’s work in general.