Strange Culture

PlasticMountainMajesty presents:

Strange Culture

Strange Culture
Dir: Lynn Hershman Leeson, 2007
75 min. USA

ONE NIGHT ONLY!
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19: 8:00pm

The surreal nightmare of internationally-acclaimed artist and professor Steve Kurtz began when his wife, Hope, died in her sleep of heart failure.

When paramedics arrived they became suspicious when they noticed petri dishes and other scientific equipment related to Kurtz’s art in his home. They summoned the FBI, who detained Kurtz on suspicion of “bioterrorism”. Dozens of agents in Hazmat suits sifted through his work and impounded his computers, manuscripts, books, cat, and even his wife’s body.

At the time, Kurtz was unable to publicly speak about his case for legal reasons. Hershman worked around this and employed a hybrid narrative/documentary form to tell Kurtz’ story involving reenactments, interviews, news reports, and animation to scrutinze post-9/11 paranoia and suggest that Kurtz was targeted because his work questions government policies.

An important work of critique on the W. Bush presidential era that is still relevant today, despite the change in administrations.

We are lucky enough to have director Lynn Hershman Leeson in attendance to introduce Strange Culture and hold a QnA afterward.

PORTUGAL UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL (NYC Edition)

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After a one-session stopover in Sheffield, UK, the Portugal Underground Film Festival (P.U.F.F.) arrives for a very special marathon edition at Spectacle.

The mission of P.U.F.F. is as follows:

– Promote an independent, underground and different way to watch films, together with a social, controversial and free of tabu way to approach main society issues.
– Promote Portugal around the world. P.U.F.F.’s native country is full of treasures and secrets that deserve to be known…

OPENING NIGHT: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6th – 7:30 PM


OK, Good (Daniel Martinico, USA, 2012)
preceded by The Smell Of Candles (Adriana Martins da Silva, 2012)

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 7th – 12:00 PM – 12:00 AM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 8th – 12:00 PM – 12:00 AM

VIEW THE FULL LINE UP & SELECTED TRAILERS

THE KING OF THE CELTS

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THE KING OF THE CELTS
Dir. Matt Bonner, 2013.
USA. 86 min.

ONE NIGHT ONLY!
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 – 7:30 PM and 10:00 PM

Director Matt Bonner in attendance!

PlasticMountainMajesty presents:

Inspired by visions starting at the age of 7 1/2, John Sweeney made it his life’s mission to right some of the wrongs done to Ireland throughout history; and reunite the 32 Counties of Ireland…with John as their king.

The King of the Celts is the feature-length documentary debut from Matt Bonner and tells the story of John Sweeney O’Neill: Irish immigrant to America, US Army paratrooper, former NYPD, and self-professed King of the Celts.

We travel with John as he returns to his home county of Cork, Ireland, with his Irish crown, heraldic swords, and no doubts regarding the mission at hand; to challenge the English landlords still in Ireland, whose ancestors obtained their lands during the “Troubles” (British colonial era) and under often extremely cruel or dubious conditions. John confronts and challenges descendents of Oliver Cromwell and others in his efforts to reunite Ireland under the Irish Crown.

John’s story is a reminder of where one man’s drive can take him despite near unanimous voices around him telling him to stop.

JOHN BUT NOT FORGOTTEN: A Tribute to Ritter and Cash

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JOHN BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
The Day We Lost Ritter and Cash: A Screening Tribute

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 – ONE NIGHT ONLY!

One bitter fall evening, during a span of three hours caught in the space between September 11 and 12, 2003, we lost two great entertainers: Johnny Cash and John Ritter. One decade after this tragedy, Spectacle celebrates the only way it knows how: by showing an obscure movie in which Johnny Cash plays a psychotic guitar-slinging killer, and a hilarious made-for-TV cheesefest about John Ritter getting carjacked in front of a Starbucks and moving his family to a techno-totalitarian gated housing community.


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THE COLONY
Dir: Rob Hedden, 1995.
84 min. USA.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 – 7:30 PM

In this probably-made-for-theaters, dumped-to-TV gem, John Ritter plays a loving father and electronic security consultant who grows concerned about the crime is spilling from the city into the WASP-y suburbs. After being carjacked in front of a Starbucks, he urgently packs up his family and moves to The Colony, an idyllic gated housing community owned by his employer where all needs are provided for — except, perhaps, freedom. It begins as Ritter is cited for improper jogging attire, and continues with the eerie reprogramming efforts of the local school, who make the kids in Village of the Damned look like undisciplined riff-raff. As Ritter moves up the corporate ladder, he becomes emboldened to speak up: but at what cost to his family’s true security?

An overlooked LOL-a-minute gem from the genius who brought you Friday the 13th Part VII: Jason Takes a Soundstage in Vancouver, THE COLONY is a total cheesefest that nevertheless spotlights John Ritter’s irrepressible World’s Greatest Dad appeal.

Advisement: THE COLONY is being presented uncut in its original aspect ratio with watermarks from the television station it was recorded off of.


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FIVE MINUTES TO LIVE
Dir: Bill Karn, 1961.
75 min. USA.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 – 10:00 PM

The first and greatest of only two Johnny Cash acting roles finds the Man In Black playing up his badboy appeal to shocking extremes that must be seen to be believed. A forerunner of movies like The Sadist and the home invasion genre, FIVE MINUTES TO LIVE stars Cash as “Johnny,” a psychotic guitar-slinging bank robber who hides out in a suburban town to cool down after icing the fuzz during a botched job. There, after killing his girlfriend in cold blood, he gets roped into a new scheme: he’ll break into the home of a bank president and hold his wife hostage while his partners carry out the job, the condition being that if he doesn’t receive a phone call every five minutes to reassure him that the job is continuing as planned, the wife will be killed. The majority of this film details the shameless sadistic glee with which Johnny torments his victim, turning the screw ever tighter as the seconds tick by.

A terse, lurid thriller, FIVE MINUTES TO LIVE is a pat yarn enhanced by its low-budget appeal. It’s an at once surprisingly and understandably overlooked gem: you’ve never seen Cash this morally bankrupt before.

Advisement: This film contains non-graphic scenes of sadistic violence that may disturb some viewers.

WREKMEISTER HARMONIES

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SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 1st
8PM! ONE NIGHT ONLY!

 

Chicago-based sound artist J.R. Robinson has been creating live, ambient tonefields in museums around the US and Europe over the past two years-including the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Pompidou Center in Paris, and The Art Center Berlin. His new record You’ve Always Meant So Much To Me (Thrill Jockey ) Came out June 11th.

Robinson has injected these recordings into collaborations with some like-minded heavy hitters from the noise, post-rock and jazz worlds such as David Yow (Jesus Lizard/Scratch Acid), Mark Shippy & Pat Samson (US Maple), Azita Youssefi, John Herndon & Jeff Parker (Tortoise), Keefe Jackson, Fred Lonberg-Holm and Ken Vandermark. The result (dubbed Wrekmeister Harmonies), is a distinctive hybrid of sound art and avant-garde musics, evoking the essences & influences of masterworks like Joe McPhee’s Nation Time, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and the sound collages of Stockhausen.

“It’s an incredibly emotional and intelligent piece of work and one that fully deserves to be listened to in its entirety.”Louder Than War

“Even though You’ve Always Meant So Much to Me begins quietly, it doesn’t stay that way. It builds until, a little over halfway through, it erupts into crashing, monumental doom, and you finally understand why Robinson brought in all those monsters of metal.” – Decibel Magazine

“A harrowing tableau of lonesome drones, hiss, degraded noise and moans that build to a towering schizm of thunder, earth, sky and guitar that feel just as destructively chaotic as the crest of any storm. The lines of classical nuance and metal combustion erode between the overlapping waves of guitar that build to the epic finale. Robinson proves that Wrekmeister are just as at home with the Sunn o))) crowd as they are with Johann Johannsson and the museum set. I can only imagine what a spectacle the piece is live but on record, it’s still a floor to ceiling house shaker and a good way to accompany any storm raging outside your windows.”Raven Sings The Blues

You’ve Always Meant So Much to Me is one of the most gorgeous and captivating single tracks we’ve ever heard.”A Closer Listen
“If anything, it’s an anti-crescendo, a way for the sonic ugliness to get even uglier before we’re allowed to hear something pretty. Beneath all that darkness is beauty, and that too reveals itself more and more on subsequent listens…Like so many album-length songs by heavy acts… part of the charm is in never being satisfied with what you’ve just heard. Each listen unveils something new, and that something is different for each listener.”Invisible Oranges

20 YEARS OF CUFF

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20 YEARS OF CUFF
Chicago Underground Film Festival is the longest running underground film festival in the world. Founded the same year as the now defunct NYUFF, it remains a vibrant & evolving home for radically dissenting filmmaking, and the defining example for underground film events all over the world. This program brings together legendary shorts from the festival’s first twenty years.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17 – 8:00 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 – 8:00 PM

LINEUP & NOTES FROM FESTIVAL DIRECTOR BRYAN WENDORF:

LIGHT FUSE GET AWAY Dir. Ivan Lerner, 1994, 17 min.
When we began work on the first Chicago Underground Film Festival one of the first things we did was place a call for submissions ad in the Film Threat Video Guide which in those pre-internet years was THE source for info on contemporary underground film. We also sent submission info to every film reviewed in the magazine including this video by former Screw editor and current Spectacle programmer Ivan Lerner.

MONDAY 9:02 AM Dir. Tyler Hubby, 1995, 11 min.
Tyler Hubby was one of many graduates of George Kuchar’s Electro-graphic Sinema classes at the San Francisco Art Institute who was a regular fixture during the early years of CUFF. This 16mm film, comprised of a single unedited 11-minute take shot from inside a second-floor apartment is inspired by the idea Michael Snow’s avant-garde classic Wavelength. Although if my memory is correct Tyler didn’t actually actually see Wavelength until AFTER making this. Today Tyler lives in Los Angeles and has edited a number of great independent documentaries like The Devil and Daniel Johnson.

CLIT-O-MATIC: THE ADVENTURES OF WHITE TRASH GIRL
Dir. Jennifer Reeder, 1996, 8 min.
Chicagoan Jennifer Reeder made a name for herself in the 90s underground film scene with this Waters/Kuchar inspired feminist super-hero series she produced as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She still lives in Chicago where she’s constantly inspiring new generations of image makers as Associate Professor Moving Image at the University of Illinois Chicago. She continues to screen her experimental narratives around the world including CUFF.

DANCE HABIBI DANCE Dir. Usama Alshaibi, 1998, 3 min.
Usama Alshaibi was a graduate of Columbia College Chicago when he produced this video inspired by Richard Kern’s Submit to Me series. His work has followed two distinct strains exploring his Iraqi heritage and his interest in transgressive sexuality. In 2006 he directed the feature length documentary Nice Bombs about his journey back to Iraq after the fall of the Hussein regime. He is currently pursuing his masters degree at Boulder Art Institute and is completing a new documentary feature American Arab produced with Kartemquin Films.

THE BATS Dir. Jim Trainor, 1998, 8 min.
Jim Trainor was a Manhattan bartender when he made his first amazing animated film The Fetishist which had its world premiere at CUFF in 1997. He followed up with The Bats which firmly established him as one the great contemporary underground filmmakers working in animation. He lives in Chicago now and teaches at the School of the Art Institute and is currently completing his first live action film using human actors to portray the mating habits of wasps.

MEAT FUCKER Dir. Shawn Durr, 1999, 32 min.
Shawn Durr had a brief but important place in the late 90s Chicago underground. Meat Fucker was his best known film. Following in the Kuchar tradition of over the top queer melodrama but upping the ante on the ridiculous. NYUFF’s Ed Halter once referred to his work as “Kuchar on crack” while Chicago experimental film critic Fred Camper compared Meat Fucker favorably to Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks. Shawn followed Meat Fucker with the features Fucked in the Face and The Last Fuck before retiring from filmmaking. He still lives in Chicago.

THE PSYCHOTIC ODYSSEY OF RICHARD CHASE Dir. Carey Burtt, 1999, 6 min.
Another New York filmmaker who was a regular at CUFF at the turn of the millennium. When we showed this film in 1999 to notoriously prickly Chicago Reader film critic Fred Camper at a press screening I remember him looking at me as the film ended and asking “Did you like THAT?” “yes” I nervously responded, “Good, because I think its GREAT!” replied Camper. Camper’s printed review said “The film’s antiliteralism is a wonderful rebuke to our glut of graphically violent movies… Burtt’s playful depiction of the gruesome story encourages us to think about it rather than wallow in it.”

THE FABULOUS STAINS: BEHIND THE MOVIE
Dir. Sarah Jacobson & Sam Green, 2000, 11 min.
The importance of San Fransisco filmmaker Sarah Jacobson to CUFF in our early years can’t be overstated. After attending the festival’s inaugural year with her short I Was a  Teenage Serial Killer, Sarah became a one woman word of mouth PR machine for the festival. Spreading the word about us everywhere she went and encouraging filmmakers she met to send us their work. In our third year we opened with the world premiere of her feature Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore and in 1998 she presented the first public screening in 15 year’s of Lou Adler’s proto-riot girl comedy Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains. Footage of that screening appears in this documentary co-directed by another SF based CUFF alumnus Sam Green (The Rainbow Man/John 3:16 and The Weather Underground) and originally produced for Jon Pierson’s IFC series Split Screen. Sadly, Sarah died of cancer in 2004 but her legacy lives on through a grant program for women filmmakers set up by Sam and Sarah’s mother.

WUSTENSPRINGMAUS Dir. Jim Finn, 2002, 3 min.
Jim Finn also studied at Columbia College where he was part of the same graduating class as Usama Alshaibi. Wustenspringmaus combines his love of animals and his interest in marxist political theory. Themes he continued to explore in his “Communist Trilogy” of features; Interkosmos, The Juche Idea and La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo. Today he lives in Boston and is an Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute in New York.

AMERICA’S BIGGEST DICK Dir. Bryan Boyce, 2005, 4 min.
San Francisco’s Bryan Boyce first attended CUFF in 1997 with a little seen comedic short called Lard but he soon became internationally known for his critiques of American culture using appropriation and found footage. He continues to screen his work at festivals like CUFF and Ann Arbor but also releases work directly through his YouTube channel in order to keep his satire timely and fresh.

HOLD ME NOW Dir. Michael Robinson 2008, 5 min.
This karaoke video by prolific experimental film and video artist Michael Robinson was originally produced for the sadly defunct Portland Documentary and Experimental Film Festival (better known as PDX). We showed it at CUFF soon after where it won an award for best music video. For best results sing along.

THE ETERNAL QUARTER INCH Dir. Jesse McLean, 2008, 9 min
Jesse McLean began screening her work at CUFF while she was a student in Pittsburgh. PA but I didn’t actually meet her until she moved to Chicago to pursue her master’s at UIC. Upon graduating she relocated to Iowa City where she continues to be a fixture on the international experimental and underground film and video scene. Her work looks at the intersection of culture, technology and human behavior using a combination of found footage and original material.

THIS IS MY SHOW Dir. Lori Felker, 2009, 15 min.
Chicago based media artist Lori Felker has worn many hats with CUFF over the years. Co-programming and coordinating the festival, serving as projectionist and technical director as well as participating as a filmmaker herself. This video is part of a series of works that celebrate and spoof cable access television. Lori had to leave the projection booth during the 2009 festival to participate in the Q&A after this piece screened. It also received an honorable mention from the jury that year. Lori recently scaled back her CUFF duties to focus on her new position as Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

THE STORY OF THE EYE Dir. Nicole Jefferson Asher, 2012, 12 min.
This feminist musical adaptation of the infamous transgressive novel by Georges Bataille screened at the 20th CUFF this past March. It stars and features music composed by performance artist Kevin Blechdom–Kristin Erickson, a member of the faculty of The Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts and was directed by Nicole Jefferson Asher who has numerous credits in theater, film and television, creating projects for HBO, MTV, Nickelodeon Movies and Spike Lee’s 40 Acres and a Mule Film Works. She is currently writing and directing her first feature Betty, the story of funk singer Betty Davis, the second wife of jazz musician Miles Davis.

TRIGGER WARNING: STROBE EFFECTS

SAMUEL FULLER AND THE BIG RED ONE

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SAMUEL FULLER AND THE BIG RED ONE
Thys Ockersen, 1979.
Netherlands. 75 min. (+ 50 min. Secret Screening!)
In English.

Presented by Screen Slate and programmed by Cullen Gallagher.

Visit Screen Slate for an exclusive interview with Thys Ockersen!

MONDAY, AUGUST 12 – 8:00 PM

New York Premiere in Celebration of Samuel Fuller’s 101st Birthday! Followed by another mind-blowing Samuel Fuller rarity from 1990 (50 min.)

Originally made for Dutch television and never commercially released in the United States either theatrically or on video, Thys Ockersen’s SAMUEL FULLER AND THE BIG RED ONE (1979) will be makes its New York Premiere here at Spectacle.

Ockersen’s documentary is an invaluable record of one of cinema’s greatest figures at work on his magnum opus—a unique and deeply personal WWII epic grounded in Fuller’s own wartime experience landing on D-Day. On the beach, behind the scenes, and on the front lines, Ockersen’s film is a gritty and enlightening portrait of an artist at work at the peak of his career. As electric, charismatic, poetic, and tough as any of the characters from his films, Fuller is his own best leading man. Also featuring interviews with Lee Marvin and Mark Hamill, SAMUEL FULLER AND THE BIG RED ONE is a fond tribute to the director, and a perfect way to celebrate the memory of Fuller, who would be turning 101 this August 12th.

Afterwards, we’ll screen one of Samuel Fuller’s final works — an insane rarity you won’t want to miss.

Special thanks to Thys Ockersen.

THE BIG REVEAL

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MONDAY, AUGUST 5 – 8:00 PM

Unveiling The Sparrow‘s music video for new single “Something Deep In Me Screams for You,” featuring:

  • Composing genius Masaya Ozaki
  • Filmmaking visionary Martin Noboa
  • Burgeoning screen stars Natalie Zitter and Alex Erikson

And, of course,
The Sparrow’s big raw heart

PARTLY ART: A NIGHT OF ORPHANED MEDIA

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TUESDAY, AUGUST 13TH – 8:00 PM – ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Co-presented by 3Ton Cinema & SPCL NTRST.

Join us for a two-tiered, multi-format immersion into a cornucopia of found media… manipulated, archived, re-contextualized, collected and always deeply-loved.

This night celebrates two milestones in one: a kick-off of 3TON Cinema’s 16mm digitization campaign ‘20,000 ft. Dash’ as well as the premiere screening of SPCL NTRST’s first full-length album ‘Category: Health.’

Alongside cartoon bits, surprises and an excerpt from a film about digestive systems, 3TON Cinema will present a potpourri of orphan material from their 16mm collection. Highlight include: DRAGONFOLD (1979, 7m), a computer-animated illustration of ‘how to fill space’ created by recently-deceased Brooklyn filmmakers Bruce and Katharine Cornwell, FREE FALL (1964, 9m), Arthur Lipsett’s “attempt to express in filmic terms an intensive flow of life [and] the transformation of a physical phenomena into psychological ones,” and A FLOWERING PLANT FROM SEED TO SEED (1980, 12m), a time-lapse film depicting the growth cycle of tomatoes.

Accompanying live experimental/electronic score to these films will be provided by Matt Wellins (http://mattwellins.com) and Qixoni:

 

Following this, SPCL NTRST will debut the entirety of their new ‘Category: Health’ album, which manipulates found tapes that tackle the theme of health from a variety of styles and perspectives into a roughly 30m assembly.

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Since 2009, 3Ton Cinema has been making an effort to collect, exhibit and appreciate 16mm films. Inspired largely by the work of Oddball Films and Other Cinema, then spurred initially by a generous donation of films from the Prelinger Archive in San Francisco, CA, 3TON’s aim is to examine, share and re-purpose their 1000+ film collection.

More info: http://3toncinema.info

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SPCL NTRST is an A/V band who fixate on analog video sources to create new ‘music videos’ out of only the audio and video material found on each individual artifact. Their currently focus is on ephemeral –educational, promotional, corporate, industrial, etc.– VHS tapes.

More info: http://spclntrst.com

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REMIX TO COGNITON

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Re-Made/Re-Modeled Cinema from the Film Society of the Spectacle
One Week Only! • August 16 – 22

In its two-and-a-half years, Spectacle has often functioned as a creative space, offering its screen to amateur or established editor-filmmaker-curators as a means of exploring new ways of engaging with the moving image. Evoking the traditions of New York arthouses, third-world videotheques, and the stoner chill pad in your high school friend’s treehouse, it’s put forth an earnest effort to color outside the lines of the canon, and has never shied away from dismantling it, puzzling at the parts, and feverishly reassembling them while hoping Dad doesn’t notice. Though artists have drawn inspiration from the cinematic apparatus by rejiggering its constituent parts since the form’s inception, international video sharing, increased bandwidth, and the ready proliferation of digital moviemaking tools have provided unprecedented material, accessibility, and ease of making movies like BLADE RUNNER totally new and better.

Likewise, though Big Cinema exhibition is not likely to be outpaced for long, we are presently at a moment where the gap in audience-perceived quality between a $150,000 D-Cinema system and some thing we got at B&H is relatively small. Therefore, as we have crested the digital conversion, DIY HD remixes are capable of carrying as much screen-authority as the now-primarily-video content displayed at hallowed cinema grounds like Film Forum and IFC Center. When, interviewed by intrepid boy-reporter Keannu Reeves in the 2012 documentary SIDE-BY-SIDE, Fox Filmed Entertainment CEO Tom Rothman portentously cautions that we are entering an era in which “anyone can make a movie,” this is probably what he’s sad about. Join us, friends, in salting the wound.

REMIX TO COGNITION is a week-long serving of work made from repurposed footage that was born at Spectacle or is otherwise associated with its all-volunteer staff roster. As in most cases, 100% of ticket sales or donations go directly to supporting the space.
THE LINE-UP
FRI / 16 / 8PUnclear Holocaust w/ Golden Eye*
FRI / 16 / 10PSouth Third Forever: Year One
SAT / 17 / 8P & 10PCognition Point (In SPECTRASENSORY 3D Smell-O-Vision)
SAT / 17 / 12AHollywood Burn w/ Nuke ‘Em Duke*

SUN / 18 / 10PReplicant City w/ Boldly Going

MON / 19 / 7.30PTough Guys w/ a bout de souffle
MON / 19 / 10PI Hate Myself and I Want to Die
TUE / 20 / 8P & 10PMIL KDU DES score Sound Stage Massacre
WED / 21 / 8PPolice Mortality and Protect and Serve w/ Death Wish*
WED / 21 / 10PSouth Third Forever: Like Tears in the Rain

*These three screenings are FREE but the artists encourage donations to Spectacle.


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UNCLEAR HOLOCAUST
The Anti-Banality Union, 2011. 65 min. U.SS.A.
Amerikan with some Arabic.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 16 – 8:00 PM

Unclear Holocaust is a feature-length autopsy of Hollywood’s New York-destruction fantasy, comprised of scenes from over 50 studio-system star vehicles, special effects showcases, and outright representational terrorisms from the last eighty years of Amerikan cinema and re-edited into one hyper-heretical master-narrative.

“It is the unrivaled assembly of the greatest amount of capital and private property heretofore captured in one frame, that, with unfathomable narrative efficacy, suicides itself in an annihilatory flux of fire, water, and aeronautics”, say the directors. “The prequel to 9/11”, say others.

With GOLDEN EYE (LJ Frezza, 2013. 6 min.)

Propaganda is the dissemination of data and surveillance is the collection of data. The James Bond series of films is a collection of propaganda, glorifying the practice of espionage. This video is an abridged history of surveillance in the 20th Century, comprised of every James Bond movie released before the War on Terror. It is an examination of the semi-permanent State of Exception in which US Citizens find ourselves, where extralegal proceedings have become the standard operating procedure.

This screening is FREE but the artists encourage donations to Spectacle.


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SOUTH THIRD STREET FOREVER: YEAR ONE
Compiled by C. Spencer Yeh, 2010-2011/2013.
USA.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 16 – 10:00 PM

In just over two-and-a-half years, Spectacle has created over 600 custom trailers running one-to-two minutes in length. This compilation, assembled by artist and prolific Spectacle trailer editor C. Spencer Yeh, spotlights selections from the theater’s first year of operation. They offer a glimpse into the unorthodox curatorial decisions of a fledgling microcinema run by a small handful of non-professional misfit film and video enthusiasts. Working at a fervent pace to assemble material for their rigorous seven-day-a-week programming schedule, the editors developed a singular vernacular that exists on a separate plane than the traditional techniques of commercial exploitation.

A second compilation, spotlighting Spectacle’s growth toward collective actualization, follows on August 21.


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COGNITION POINT
Jon Dieringer & Vanessa McDonnell, 2013.
45 min. USA/USSR.

Showing in Our Very Own <<<SPECTRASENSORY 3D>>> Smell-O-Vision Process!

SATURDAY, AUGUST 17 – 8:00 & 10:00 PM

In this singular live collaboration, Jon Dieringer & Vanessa McDonnell enrapture the senses with abstracted imagery from stunning 1950-60’s USSR sci-fi movies, post-converted to anaglyph 3D, and accompanied live by free-associated smells, transporting the audience to heretofore unimagined worlds.


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HOLLYWOOD BURN
Soda_Jerk with Sam Smith, 2011.
52 min. Australia.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 17 – MIDNIGHT

HOLLYWOOD BURN is an anti-copyright epic constructed from hundreds of samples plundered from the Hollywood archive. Made over 10 years, it is a bombastic free culture call-to-arms and an expensive copyright lawsuit waiting to happen.

Mimicking the hyperbolic rhetoric of today’s copyright cops, it pits a righteous league of video pirates against the evil tyrant Moses and his Copyright Commandments. Determined to alter the present by changing the past, the pirates travel back to 1955 to construct the ultimate weapon: an Elvis Presley video-clone. Part sci-fi + rom com + biblical epic + action movie, this remix manifesto adopts the tactical responses of the parasite, feeding off the body of Hollywood and inhabiting its cinematic structures and codes. The unwitting all-star cast includes Elvis Presley, Charlton Heston, Batman, Bette Davis, Jaws, Jesus, the Hulk, the Hoff and the Ghostbusters.

This screening is FREE but the artists encourage donations to Spectacle.



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REPLICANT CITY
Akiva Saunders & Brendan Shields, 2012.
USA. 53 min.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 18 – 10:00 PM

SPARKLE MOTION provides a live score to the greatest sci-fi detective allegory ever made, remixed and condensed by Akiva Saunders into 53 minutes of android noir apocalypse.

Brendan Shields is a cinephile and longtime bedroom DJ under the name Sparkle Motion. He is also one half of Smash TV together with Ben Craw.

REPLICANT CITY from Spectacle Theater on Vimeo.

with BOLDLY GOING (LJ Frezza, 2010. 4 min.)

Ignoring the Prime Directive, Captain James T. Kirk becomes entangled in conflicts spawned by his own interventionist policies. By the time he realizes his error, it has become clear that he has no choice but to continue his perpetually escalating campaign.


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TOUGH GUYS
Jon Dieringer, 2012.
USA. 111 min.

MONDAY, AUGUST 19 – 7:30 PM

This is Mean Streets, otherwise untouched, with the pop songs ripped out replaced by amateur cover versions from YouTube—25 in all directly corresponding to the original. The result is a wholesale dismantling of authorship, cinematic space, expectation, and the intellectual property of The Rolling Stones, Ltd., whose songs—and music of other genres including early rock, soul, doo wop, rhythm and blues, Cazone Napoletana, opera and salsa—are now performed variously by wayward narcoleptics, fried teenagers, amateur tenors, Polish pre-teen beauty pageant contestants, hip dads and people testing out new keyboards. An analysis of vicarious cultural production as practiced by Martin Scorsese, YouTube performers, and the artist, Tough Guys is also a joyous paean to egalitarianism and the enduring, irrepressible folk underpinnings of tight-assed corporate culture.

The Scorsesean ‘needle drop’ style of scoring with pop music inspired a whole new branch of the film industry—a mammoth bureaucracy of rights, licensing, music supervisors, clearance coordinators and entertainment lawyers with attendant opportunities for marketing and brand synergy between corporate film and music; Tough Guys elbows its way toward an imagined alternative space.

With A BOUT DE SOUFFLE (LJ Frezza, 2010, 2 min.)

A machinima remake of Godard’s a bout de souffle (1960) by way of Grand Theft Auto 4.


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I HATE MYSELF AND I WANT TO DIE
Greg Eggebeen & Ben Shapiro, 2012.
USA. 40 min.

MONDAY, AUGUST 19 – 10:00 PM

The biographical story of Nirvana through the media detritus left in Kurt Cobain’s wake. A brand new narrative-compilation of lost interviews, rabid fan tributes, insensitive true-crime shows, crushing live footage, and even Kurt’s long-lost 1984 homemade horror film, Horror Movies (Kurt’s Bloody Suicide).

Original event trailer:


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MIL KDU DES score UNIVERSE
1960. Canada.
30 min.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 20 – 8:00 & 10:00 PM

Note: Due to a last minute death in the MIL KDU DES keyboard family, the group will no longer be performing to a remixed version of THE SOUND STAGE MASSACRE. Instead, the band has chosen to compose an all-new score to 1960’s breathtaking UNIVERSE.

Universe is a lost triumph, creating a vast and awe-inspiring portrait of the universe as it might appear to a space-traveller, and delving into the astronomer’s art. The austere beauty of its images inspired Stanley Kubrick’s 2001.

Below is an original trailer from a previous screening:


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POLICE MORTALITY
Anti-Banality Union, 2013.
66 min. U.SS.A.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 21 – 8:00 PM

Do you ever try to imagine the last crime?
Suspect that Robocop is the 99%?
Or wish that the pigs would off themselves, so you don’t have to?

Leave it to Hollywood and the Anti-Banality Union, in the world premiere of POLICE MORTALITY, the vengeful follow-up to last year’s 9/11 bonanza UNCLEAR HOLOCAUST.

The immaculate suicide of one police officer begins to reveal the contradictions of police existence to a force which, finding itself utterly irreconcilable with itself, resorts to communism, terrorism, and ultimately terminal civil war, eradicating the prevailing organization of life in the process.

Original event trailer:

PROTECT AND SERVE
Greg Eggebeen & Ben Shaprio, 1930-2011.
26 min. USA.

A short compilation of golden-age police procedural tutorials, self-defense training vids, and the most nightmarish amateur footage of macings, beatdowns, and brutal assaults ever captured by the public.

This screening is FREE but the artists encourage donations to Spectacle.


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SOUTH THIRD STREET FOREVER: LIKE TEARS IN THE RAIN
Compiled by C. Spencer Yeh, 2011-2013.
USA.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 21 – 10:00 PM

In just over two-and-a-half years, Spectacle has created over 600 custom trailers running one-to-two minutes in length. This compilation, assembled by artist and prolific Spectacle trailer editor C. Spencer Yeh, spotlights selections from the theater’s second year of operation to present day.

Advancing from Year OneLike Tears in the Rain explores work that becomes more formalized in certain aspects while reflecting a kaleidoscopic array of approaches. It focuses on the transition of Spectacle from a very (very) small handful of owner-programmer-volunteer-janitor-editors to a larger group leveraging collective action and the power of friendship to realize the goal of forming a self-sustaining off-non-profit seven-day-a-week screening space that shows awesome stuff all the time. Though fleeting in purpose, and advertising one-off shows at a DIY venue in a city in which such spaces are themselves ephemeral by nature of fashion and circumstance, it is hoped these pieces might stand as a testament to what is surely one of the most prolific programming and found-footage collectives in the city.