COMMITTED
Dir. Sheila McLaughlin & Lynne Tillman, 1984
USA, 77 min. 16mm.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 19 – 7:30PM – ONE NIGHT ONLY!
MCLAUGHLIN & TILLMAN IN ATTENDANCE FOR Q&A!

Special thanks to the New York Public Library!

My favorite patient, a display of patience,
Disease-covered Puget Sound
She’ll come back as fire, And burn all the liars,
leave a blanket of ash on the ground
“Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” — Nirvana

No one ever came to me and said, “You’re a fool. There isn’t such a thing as God. Somebody’s been stuffing you.” It wasn’t a murder. I think God just died of old age. And when I realized that he wasn’t any more, it didn’t shock me. It seemed natural and right.
From God Dies — Frances Farmer

Frances Farmer was born in Seattle in 1913. The myths surrounding her life are perhaps better known than the details. She was an actress on stage and screen through the mid 1930’s-40s, and was the subject of multiple scandals and sensationalized accounts. Despite her attempts at launching a serious career in the theater, Farmer was often cast as a harlot in B-movies at Paramount Pictures. After arrests for drunk driving and assault, Farmer was involuntarily committed to a mental institution. She spent the next seven years institutionalized, five of those years in Western State Hospital in Steilacoom, WA, receiving insulin shock and shock therapy, and even, rumor has it, a transorbital lobotomy (though there are many deniers and little proof.) Farmer was released in 1950 under her mother’s custody and her full civil rights weren’t restored until 1953.

COMMITTED (1984), co-directed by Sheila McLaughlin and Lynne Tillman, is a narrative film of the story of Frances Farmer. Highly scripted and shot in the style of 40s noirs, McLaughlin and Tillman construct a film narrated by Farmer (played by McLaughlin), in which she tells her side of the story, as “neither victim nor heroine.” COMMITTED focuses on the troubled relationship between Farmer and her mother, and examines social and political norms of the time, including the burgeoning use of psychiatry to cure “undesirables” and “disturbed” women.

The kind of horror we were dealing with was an institutionalized horror, not necessarily the most virulent physical violence, but a different kind of violence, which is the violence against ideas and the violence of the family, or the violence of psychiatry in its treatment of patients. — Lynne Tillman

Directed by Sheila McLaughlin and Lynne Tillman and starring McLaughlin, Victoria Boothby and Lee Breuer, a 16mm print of COMMITTED (1984) will be presented one night only on Tuesday, November 19th, 7:30 PM. McLaughlin and Tillman will be in attendance for a Q&A!

Poster by Barbara Kruger

COMMITTED courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

*Read the full essay God Dies by Frances Farmer, written as a high school senior, which won her First Place and $100 in a contest sponsored by The Scholastic in 1931. “If the young people of this city are going to hell,” one Baptist minister reportedly told his congregation, “Frances Farmer is surely leading them there.”

Other quotes from:
Lamche, Pascale. “Committed Women.” Framework 0.26 (Jan 1, 1985): 39.

HYMNS OF THE GOLDEN BAT
In Search Of The Original Caped Crusader

Various. 100 minutes.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24TH – 8PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Consistent with SPECTOB3R’s enveloping mist of strange-smelling macabre, please join us for a one-off tribute to Japan’s Ōgon Batto (alias Fantaman / Fantasmagórico / Phantoma.)

A flying, self-teleporting and invincible “god of justice” (whose family is originally from Atlantis), the Bat was frozen in an Egyptian sarcophagus for two thousand years before being rediscovered by a little girl and announcing himself – reanimated by her tears – as a “protector of the weak.” Wraithlike and never not grinning, the Bat strikes fear into the hearts of his enemies and metes out punishment before retreating to his maximum security hideout somewhere in the Japanese alps in a snap.

Although the Bat first became famous across Japan for his appearances in manga, his initial origins are something of a mystery. It has been proposed that the Bat was adapted from a series of no-name pulp novels reaching back to the era of World War I; alternately, some have theorized that the Bat was born in a type of serialized Japanese street theater called kamishibai, appearing on watercolor-painted slides run in and out of a portable stage.

Whatever his true origins, it’s worth remembering that the Bat always existed as an image first – a visual punch to the brain, really – with any number of plots and stories conveniently wrapped around him. By the 1950s and 60s, the Bat was a force for Japanese pop culture, and soon fans were clamoring to see him emblazoned on both big and small screens. Priming audiences for the Bat’s hugely successful anime series on Saturday morning TV, Toei released Hajime Satô’s brassy, shimmering widescreen Golden Bat in 1966.

Slathered in lush you-can’t-make-this-up eye candy, the film sits at the zenith of gonzo postwar Japanese phantasmagoria. Chock full of laser beams, spaceships, teleportations, photon-clones, giant drills, a space-crab villain with two giant iron vice-grips for hands, a sinister cult of scarred-flesh mutant scientists and the Bat’s unstoppable prowess in hand-to-hand combat, Golden Bat is unmissable for fans of Godzilla, Ultraman, Kamen Rider or Ishirō Honda’s masterful space opera Gorath. (With a very young Sonny Chiba!)

Prior to Satô’s film, we’ll be hopscotching around the Bat’s mysterious perennial appearances/evaporations in the anime world over the last five decades as well – because some legends never die.

(Poster by Andrew “Drinkman” Cimelli)

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 19 at 7:00 and 9:30 PM

Two shows! One night only! Turner in attendance for discussion at both shows with Rebecca Cleman, Distribution Director, Electronic Arts Intermix

Tickets available at the door

Spectacle is pleased to welcome Tommy Turner for a very special screening of works made in the mid-1980’s and the Brooklyn premiere of his latest video, THE BLACK KNIGHTS OF SKILLMAN. Among the other work, we’re pleased to offer a pristine, restored 16mm presentation of WHERE EVIL DWELLS, made in collaboration with David Wojnarowicz.

An artist working in print, performance, photography, and film, Turner is considered a key figure of Downtown No Wave Cinema. The New York native rose to prominence through his zine Redrum and collaborations, both in front of and behind the camera, with David Wojnarowicz and Richard Kern. In the mid-1980’s, Turner directed a number of arresting small gauge films that have in the intervening years only gained the ability to inspire shock, awe, revulsion, and — depending on the audience member’s orientation — deeply satisfying laughter. In a cinematic oeuvre running approximately feature length, his subject matter has touched upon Satanism, family dysfunction, heresy, taxidermy, addiction, dismemberment, dumbshit rock ‘n’ roll, arcane mysticism, torture, Evangelicism, murder, and misspent teenhood, all rendered in sadistically graphic detail that verges between clinical detachment and sardonic irreverence.

Among them is WHERE EVIL DWELLS (Super 8-to-16mm, 1986, 31 min.), co-directed with Wojnarowicz. The pair of friends became fixated on the recent story of Ricky Kasso, teenage heavy metal fan and self-described “Acid King” of Northport, Long Island, who became the subject of media hysteria when he committed the pseudo-ritual-satanic murder of a fellow teen in the woods while wearing an AC/DC t-shirt. Shooting off a script based on interviews with Kasso’s friends, the pair ultimately edited their footage into a 30-minute “trailer” that represents an anarchic, assaultive, and wildly expressionistic take on what Wojnarowicz described as “the imposed Hell of the suburbs.” It’s complemented by a spectacular title song by Wiseblood (a collaboration between Roli Mosimann of Swans and J.G. Thirlwell of Foetus) and distorted hard rock radio jams.

In the unsettling, absurdist SIMONLAND (Super 8-to-video, 1984, 11 min.), made with Richard Kern, a televangelist leads his studio audience and isolated viewers through a psychotic game of Simon Says with grotesque results. THE MAGICIAN (Super 8-to-video, 1998, 9 min.), shot with Rick Rodine, features a chaotic melange of documentary, performance, and found footage to riff on the destruction of elements fire, water, air, and earth.

The program culimates in the Brooklyn premiere of THE BLACK KNIGHTS OF SKILLMAN, an HD experimental narrative shot on location at Flynn’s Garden Inn, a neighborhood pub in Sunnyside, Queens, located around the corner from Turner’s current residence. Cast with a colorful selection of roughneck regulars and freaks, SKILLMAN is an off-the-wall, gory gangster fantasy that is as much a neighborhood portrait as a journey into Hell. Having more in common with Blood Feast than Cheers, SKILLMAN has the feel of a collaborative effort while maintaining Turner’s distinctive signature.

The films in this program are graphic and disturbing. Audience discretion is strongly advised.

INTO THE THIRD DIMENSION WITH ZOE BELOFF

CHARMING AUGUSTINE (2005) in Stereoscopic 16mm!
SHADOW LAND OR LIGHT FROM THE OTHER SIDE (2000) in Stereoscopic 16mm!

MONDAY, OCTOBER 14 – 8:00PM

One night only! Director Zoe Beloff in attendance!

Spectacle is proud to welcome back Zoe Beloff, whose Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society Dream Films combined found footage, early Freudian analysis and the history of Coney Island into a series of films by turns hilarious, poignant and mysterious. She returns with further journeys into possession, hysteria and the virtual with two 16mm films in 3D! Rarely seen in this format, this is an opportunity to experience these films as originally intended, an opportunity not to miss.

CHARMING AUGUSTINE, 2005
Stereoscopic 16mm B/W, 40 min.

Beloff’s works regularly combine historical research and flights of imagination, both of which play into Charming Augustine, an exploration of the effect the invention of motion pictures had on psychology. Augustine, an inmate at the Parisian asylum the Salpetriere, suffers from hysterical attacks of a very theatrical nature. Over the course of the film, what begins as a medical document of a patient’s attacks changes into a subjective examination of her own experience as she becomes the “star” of the film at a time when notions of how cinema works had yet to be codified, finally concluding with her removing herself from the role she had created. Utilizing the stereoscope format similar to daguerreotype images, the viewer looks into a world where Sarah Bernhardt, D.W. Griffith and Eadweard Muybridge find connections in ways we in the 21st century might not otherwise find.

SHADOW LAND OR LIGHT FROM THE OTHER SIDE, 2000
Stereoscopic 16mm B/W, 32 min.

Inspired by Elizabeth d’Esperance’s autobiography, this investigation of spiritualism, projection (in multiple senses) and the virtual looks at how subjective notions of insanity can be. It’s also a look at the parallels between early cinema and stage magic, as “spook shows” incorporated lenses and projections to create the illusion of spirits interacting with the living. A young girl conjures imaginary friends, finding companionship until she is declared mad, later discovering her madness has a home in the vast spiritualist movement of the late 19th century. Compiled from magic lantern slides, stereoscopic recreations of documentary films and glass negatives, Shadow Land examines the female medium from both the passive sense (in that women were considered ideal subjects for possession due to their “docile” nature) and active, even transgressive sense (much of spiritualism connected with sexuality in ways terrifying to Victorian sensibilities).