1991: THE YEAR PUNK BROKE

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1991: THE YEAR PUNK BROKE
Dir. Dave Markey, 1993.
95 min. USA.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 4 – 7:30 & 10:00 PM

RARE 16MM SCREENING! ONE NIGHT ONLY! $5 CASH AT THE DOOR!
Doors will open 30 min. before start time and the feature will begin promptly on time
Seating is limited and entry is first-come, first served — please arrive with your friends

Spectacle is pleased to launch 2014 with Dave Markey’s The Year Punk Broke, chronicling two weeks on tour with Sonic Youth in August, 1991. The much better-remembered and more cherished analog to Madonna’s Truth or Dare tour documentary also features extensive footage of Nirvana on the eve of Nevermind‘s release along with Dinosaur Jr., Mudhoney, The Ramones, Babes in Toyland, and Gumball — plus a great Courtney Love cameo.

Special thanks to Dave Markey, Peter Oleksik, Lee Ranaldo, and Steve Shelley

An Evening with Daniel Klag & Blood Revenge

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An Evening with Daniel Klag & Blood Revenge
A program of experimental short films and accompanying live score.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7 at 9:00 PM
TWO ARTISTS SCORING FIVE FILMS – ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Spectacle is pleased to welcome not one but TWO tone wizards out for an evening of experimental shorts and sonic slabs of melody and drone. A truly varied program with films ranging from the 1920’s to the early 70’s will be accompanied by the styles of Daniel Klag and Blood Revenge who will perform separately, as well as together, alongside the works of Jim Davis, Hilary Harris, and more.

Daniel Klag is a solo musician living in NYC. His latest release, Inner Earth (2013, Constellation Tatsu) is a pummeling envelope of warm syrupy drone created mostly with guitar tones and samplers. You can hear this and more at danielklag.bandcamp.com and for a discussion on how the album was made you can head on over to Prtls and read THIS.

Blood Revenge is Ben Felton. Felton plays long form songs on guitar, inspired by equal parts acoustic finger-picked blues music, Eastern ragas, the outdoors, and synthesizers. Think of it as either a soundtrack for your commute to work or the sonic landscape of your favorite vacation spot. You can see and hear more at: bloodrevenge.bandcamp.com as well as bloodrevenge.tumblr.com

Cassettes and LPs will be available at the show as well as 15 handmade and numbered mini posters (all different!) made by Spectacle for the event. The posters will be “pay what you want” with all proceeds split between the artists.

1) Blood Revenge performs to Jim Davis’ “Sea Rhythms” (1971, 9:50)

2) Daniel Klag performs to Hilary Harris’ “9 Variations of a Dance Theme” (1967, 13:01)

3) Blood Revenge performs to Joyce Wieland’s “Catfood” (1967, 13:39)

4) Daniel Klag performs to Oskar Fischinger’s “Wax Experiments” (1923-1927, 11:11)

5) Daniel Klag & Blood Revenge Duo perform to Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid’s “Meshes of the Afternoon” (1943, 14:26)

VHS-MAS! The Magic Christmas Tree / Elves

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Crack open a carton of egg nog and soak in the holiday cheer with this double serving of Christmas turkeys! The video boom of the 80s saw not only a glut of new content, but also the reappropriation of forgotten cheapies, freshly packaged to fool unsuspecting renters. With stores in constant demand of new titles, it’s only natural that home video companies would crank out some Christmas movies every year to make an easy December dollar. Presented here are two of the strangest, craziest Yuletide cash-ins to ever hit the shelves.


MAGIC CHRISTMAS TREE BANNER THE MAGIC CHRISTMAS TREE
Dir. Richard C. Parish, 1964
USA, 60 min

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10 – 8:00 PM

Using a magic ring given to him by the happy witch next door, Mark, the world’s least creative boy, summons a bitchy, wish-granting evergreen to do his bidding during the holiday season. He wishes for an hour of total control of the universe, then kidnaps Kris Kringle himself (played by what appears to be a drunk the producers slipped into a Santa outfit while he was blacked out.) Will Mark’s newfound powers ruin Christmas for everyone? Or will he see the light and save the day? Also featuring, a pervy giant.

In the pantheon of phoned-in kiddee matinee movies from the 60s, few are as cheap and cynical as THE MAGIC CHRISTMAS TREE. The only thing more disappointing than seeing this as a child in the 60s must have been seeing it as a child on VHS in the 80s. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll feel dirty for reasons you can’t quite pinpoint.


ELVES BANNER ELVES
Dir. Jeffrey Mandel, 1989
USA, 89 min

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10 – 9:30 PM

When teenager Kristen accidentally cuts her hand at a late night wiccan ceremony to the “Virgin of Anti-Christmas”, the blood that spills unleashes an unspeakable evil upon her small town! This demonic creature rips anyone in its way to shreds, but has a special, unwholesome interest in Kristen… Only she and retired-cop/recovering alcoholic/department store Santa/hobo Mike McGavin (TV’s Grizzly Adams, Dan Haggerty) solve the mystery and stop the madness. What they discover is truly, truly crazy.

Despite the film’s pluralized title, there’s only one elf on display here, which is basically a Halloween mask on a stick and monster glove. But hey, you get neo-Nazi occultists, castration, explosions, perms and boobs aplenty, a kitten drowned in a toilet, and lines like “Santa said oral.” ELVES transcends its straight-it-video budget and B-grade performances by being 110% committed to bat shit insanity 100% of the time.

BEST OF SPECTACLE 2013

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

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


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

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

Part of the series Arden & Bond

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

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

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


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

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

Part of the series MOLODOST: Films on Soviet Youth

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Part of the series Kôji Wakamatsu

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

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


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

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


Part of the series Anti-Valentines 2013

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

“NOT FOR THE PRUDISH.” -Variety


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Part of the series S†NDAYS

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

Part of the series Elio Petri

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

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

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

RADAR: Exchanges in Dance Film Frequencies

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WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 4 – 8:00 PM

RADAR: Exchanges in Dance Film Frequencies is a program dedicated to the exploration and evolution of dance film through connecting artists scene by scene. Curated by filmmaker/curator Adam Sekuler and choreographer Shannon Stewart, RADAR features movement based films of many budgets, styles and perspectives, creating a platform of local/national and international exchange that allows artists to publicly screen their work, discuss, get feedback, and meet other artists working in the same form. In 2013, RADAR screenings took place place in Philadelphia, Vancouver, Portland, and Minneapolis.

The Program

Embedded by Marissa Rae Niederhauser
Merely Mouthpiece by Adam Sekuler
Serpentine by Jessica Hester & Stephanie Wuertz
Nemo by Rob Tyler, Adrienne Leverette & Fred Nemo
Study For A Cruxifixion by Randy Sterling Hunter
Excerpt “Rite of Spring” by Kathy Rose
Nightinigale by Jacob Rosen, Kate Wallich
Say by Reggie Watts, Amy O’Neal, Gabriel Bienczycki
Behind The Front Lines by Katie Fleming
Humming Birds by Tracy Rector (Created for Dances Made, 2013)
1922 by Shannon Stewart, Adam Sekuler & Daniel Mimura

Total run-time: 72 minutes

THE GREAT THINKER: Kim Jong Il Propaganda Films

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PlasticMountainMajesty presents:

The Great Thinker: KIM JONG IL PROPAGANDA FILMS
Director: Kim Jong Il, North Korea
Appx. 100 min.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 29 – 8:00 PM

According to the computer that narrates these films, Kim Jong Il was a transformative, modernizing leader of North Korea.  He kept the “US imperialists” in check and brought a cultural revolution to N Korea and the world! KJI encouraged N Koreans to “take one thousand steps when a normal man would take one”. (??) …never mind the restrictions on freedoms of expression, travel, and press, forced labor camps, a medieval prison system, public executions, re-education camps, etc…

These films set the bar for bizarre dictator hype films!

Two films in the program:
 
The Great Thinker and Leadership of Korea.  One is a history of KJI with lots of archival footage of a young chain smoking Kim, looking cool and changing the world.  The other is a fellow North Korean’s praising essay film of KJI with many more of KJI’s achievements outlined.

Ready for parody and PhD’s.

& OTHER WORKS: KEREN CYTTER

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WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 20

SCREENINGS AT 8 AND 10 PM

“& Other Works” is a series of screenings focusing on film and video from contemporary artists organized by C. Spencer Yeh. “& Other Works” is an informal communal viewing experience, away from the white walls and passwords.

For November, we welcome Keren Cytter, with a program surveying her short-form works from the last few years. We may be biased towards the silver screen, but we think these cinematic fever dreams are the paramount expressions of Cytter’s artistic practices – a restless trajectory traversing fiction, choreography, poetry, theater, etc.

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VIDEO ART MANUAL
Dir. Keren Cytter, 2011.
DE. 15 min.
English, German w English subtitles.

OPEN HOUSE (3D)
Dir. Keren Cytter, 2011.
DE. 8 min.
English.

CORRECTIONS
Dir. Keren Cytter, 2013.
DE. 8 min.
English.

FOUR SEASONS
Dir. Keren Cytter, 2009.
DE. 12 min.
English.

LES RUISSELLEMENTS DU DIABLE (WHISPERS OF THE DEVIL)
Dir. Keren Cytter, 2008.
DE. 10 min.
French w English Subtitles.

DER SPIEGEL
Dir. Keren Cytter, 2008.
DE. 5 min.
German w English Subtitles, English.

SOMETHING HAPPENED
Dir. Keren Cytter, 2007.
DE. 8 min.
German w English Subtitles.

What’s that saying? Something about sticks and stones?

How often do you entertain that yearn “nothing is real” and that “nothing is happening”? Cytter employs the lurid signifiers of “action” as we’d call it in cinema. I wouldn’t necessarily say that she “makes it her own” – who wants to really claim ownership of the crappy gestures crafted by some other jerk-off dudes? What’s that thing about dramatic tension? Something about someone pulling a gun to get the conflict pumping? A drop of blood to get everyone’s attention? It’s ok – we are not being asked to question positions in the cultural hegemony – after all, one video contains the taboo-boo of a dude jerking off. It’s a cock, it’s hard, it’s being pulled. Adult content. The elephant in the room is being electrocuted. The spectacle is maintained. We’ll be providing the 3D glasses for Cytter’s “Open House.”

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Let’s try this again – here’s some borrowed (not appropriated) excerpts from a 2011 press release:

“In her films, Cytter explores stories of love, violence, sex, jealousy, betrayal and murder told in non-linear narrative in which time overlaps and characters mutate. The actors repeat lines, switch roles and recite directions aloud creating a shared lexicon through repetition and rhyme. Cytter’s fractured stories, suggestive of dream and memory, are often inspired by direct experience and observation but are filled with literary references, cinematic quotes and clichés drawn from popular culture that result in works that are existential dramas composed from seemingly incompatible genres.

In the film (Video Art Manual), Cytter offers a historical analysis of video art and its development the last forty years, focusing on the conditions of how contemporary video art is produced, installed and consumed.

In addition to films and works on paper, Cytter is the author of several novels and an opera libretto and the founder of D.I.E. NOW (Dance International Europe Now), a dance and theater company.” – Zach Feuer Gallery

Keren Cytter was born in Tel Aviv in 1977. She studied at The Avni Institute in Tel Aviv and received her degree from de Ateliers in Amsterdam. Cytter’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Moderna Museet, Stockholm;Tate Modern, London; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin and Kunsthalle Zürich. Her work was included in the 53rd Venice Biennial; Found in Translation, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; 8th Gwangju Biennale; Manifesta 7, Trentino; and Talking Pictures and K21 Kunstammlung Nordhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

GUITAR SOLO: TASHI DORJI AND PETER KOLOVOS

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MONDAY NOVEMBER 18

PERFORMANCES FROM BOTH ARTISTS AT 8 AND 10 PM

STUDY FOR FLIGHTDREAM
Dir. Joyce Campbell, 2013
NZ/US. 20 min.

TBD
Dir. ???, ????
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Music and movies, movies and music.  Unless you’re of Stan’s (Brakhage) Blood, you’ll agree that film has Milo’ed (or Oti’ed) organized sound since pretty much the beginning.  What is cinema’s favorite instrument?  I see you back there, waving to drop the Russian ANS Synthesizer.  For the purposes of this evening, I’m going to go with the GUITAR.

Join us for an evening of live scores with two unorthodox and exploratory slingers exemplary amongst the unorthodox and exploratory.  Dudes on guitar jamming to films?  Spectacle absolutely promises you no silly string – we like to think we know our jams and this jammy will be berry sweet and twangy.  Love dissolving to a smooth blues lick?  These sick six-squeezed and strangled sounds guarantee a ride into the sunset most avant.

Los Angeler Peter Kolovos makes a rare New York visit celebrating the recent release of his massive triple-LP release BLACK COLORS; he’ll be tackling a new moving visual study by New Zealand artist Joyce Campbell.  Bhutan-born, Asheville NC-based Tashi Dorji handplucks _TITLE_TBD_ from the Spectacle yolodex; this will be Tashi Dorji’s debut live performance in Brooklyn.

Tashi Dorji

“Tashi Dorji arrived in Asheville, North Carolina as an international student in 2000. He quickly fell in with the vibrant punk rock community, which flowed into free jazz, noise, experimental and other avant garde music.  His spirited improvisations—recorded live without any loops or effects—evoke a composite of influences from Derek Bailey to Mauritanian pulaar to the traditional music of his native Bhutan.” – Free Music Archive

“Growing up in Bhutan with little access to music except random bootlegged cassettes and shortwave radio, I listened to anything i could find. We didn’t have music school, TV or internet back then in Bhutan, so we had to use a lot of imagination and improvise what we thought we heard off of a tape player.” – Tashi Dorji

“Guitar skill is tough to judge. Some covet Eddie Van Halen, others Sandy Bull, most droll work from The Edge or those guys in all the bands that sound happily alike. Tashi Dorji wants it all and none of it.” – Tiny Mix Tapes

Peter Kolovos:

“Over more than a decade Peter Kolovos has created an incredibly physical and dynamic musical language using the electric guitar. He plays music that unpredictably flows from electrified fragments of sound which fold and expand in dense layers… Rather than set harmonic or rhythmic structures, he draws form from open sequences of sound events merged and propelled by a distinct internal logic. In his music Kolovos attempts to erase the line between intent and impulse and to create sounds that are immediate and unrepeatable.” – courtesy of the artist

“Kolovos molds his tactile guitar noise into such an array of shapes, it sounds like some kind of monstrous hybrid of electronics, acoustics, and otherworldly machinery… a sonic kaleidoscope.” – Pitchfork

“It’s hard to think of anyone who has so convincingly disassembled the entire goddamn instrument with this kind of bloody-minded intent.” – Volcanic Tongue

Joyce Campbell:

Joyce Campbell is an interdisciplinary artist based in Auckland and Los Angeles working in sculpture, photography, film and video installation whose recent work utilizes anachronistic photographic techniques to examine the collision of natural and cultural systems.  “Study for Flightdream” is a digital video short from a longer piece loosely based on a short story “Flugtraum” by the science fiction writer Mark von Schlegell.  The story charts the journey of a nameless protagonist as he plummets in a bathyscaphe into the ocean’s greatest depths, searching for a monstrous creature and his own certain erasure in a climactic illuminated instant of consumption that is both visual and corporeal.  Both narrative and abstract, “Flightdream” draws on the techniques of structuralist and experimental film to create the illusion of dropping though a richly textured liquid environment populated by biomorphic objects.  Campbell has previously worked with Peter Kolovos on the artwork for his 2008 album “New Bodies” and this is the first opportunity Kolovos and Campbell will experiment with sound and image in the context of a live performance.

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DASH SHAW & LIMITED ANIMATION

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FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8TH – 8PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

In conjunction with Comic Arts Brooklyn, cartoonist and animator Dash Shaw (New School) presents an evening of “limited” aka “low budget” animation.

Dash will be showing and discussing some of his own work, like the Sigur Ros video and Sundance selection Seraph, the “fast slideshow” Blind Date 4, and others, plus a bonus cartoon that’s inspired him: the “best episode” of the anime Robotech! Come watch some cartoons on a Friday night.  This is not to be missed.

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VETERANGEANCE

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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