73QU13M 4 4 D734M is a ballz2thewall, no-budget, feature-length “remake” of REQUIEM FOR A DREAM; part crowd-pleasing avant-comedy, part vitriolic attack on hollywood & mainstream american “culture,” part mind-bending technical experiment in sound and image! Filmed in 3 days and edited over 2 years, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2016) is a farcical, hard-hitting drug drama and genuine DIY meltdown.
REQUIEM has previously screened at Dynasty Center and Memphis Hotel in Los Angeles CA. It will screen at the Echo Park Film Center sometime in April.
Copies of the film will be available at the screening in a limited-run VHS edition published by Vingo Vongo Videos.
PRIVATE LIVES – a hallucinatory filmic exploration by Cammisa Buerhaus into the hyper-real world of Bill and Hillary Clinton, their mythic proportions and amorphous, shape shifting tendencies in three parts. The film moves from the private correspondences of Hillary Rodham Clinton to the political legacy of William Jefferson Clinton, supported by an all star cast, including Monica Lewinsky, Jon Benet Ramsey, Debbie Harry, and Justin Trudeau. Presented through the refractory lens of popular entertainment television programs like E True Hollywood Story and Entertainment Tonight, PRIVATE LIVES gives us lives – not lived – but putrefied.
PRIVATE LIVES features Buerhaus in multiple roles, brief cameo appearances by Eve Essex and cult musician Tamio Shiraishi, as well as words and music originally written by Jill Kroesen.
PRIVATE LIVES originally premiered as part of the NY Performance Artists Collective’s Spilling Over event at the Knockdown Center, Queens NY, but we’re giving it a quick timely screening before ELECTION DAY 2016.
Cammisa Buerhaus is a sound artist and actress based in NYC. She uses image and sound to synthesize critiques of politics and gender. Buerhaus has recently screened her new film Performance By Appointment in Stockholm, premiered compositions at The Whitney Museum of American Art for Felix Bernstein’s opera Bieber Bathos Elegy, and currently tours as a lead actress with the theatre company The NYC Players, presenting The Evening in Lisbon, Brussels, Bologna, Paris, Toulouse, Marseille, and Athens. Other collaborative projects include the improv duo 大凶風呂 and a reprisal of Hillary Clinton for Cecilia Corrigan’s film Motherland. Her work has been reviewed in The Wire, Artforum, and Texte Zur Kunst.
ONE DAY PINA ASKED…
dir. Chantal Akerman, 1983.
USA, 57 min.
In French with English subtitles.
ONE NIGHT ONLY
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 28 – 7:30 PM
PRE-SALES SOLD OUT
Spectacle Theater is excited to collaborate with critical platform Match Cuts on a new series of screenings. Scroll down for more information on Match Cuts.
An encounter between two of the most remarkable women artists of the 20th century, ONE DAY PINA ASKED… is Chantal Akerman’s look at the work of choreographer Pina Bausch and her Wuppertal, Germany-based dance company. “This film is more than a documentary on Pina Bausch,” a narrator announces at the outset, “it is a journey through her world, through her unwavering quest for love.”
Capturing the company’s rehearsals and performances over a five-week European tour, Akerman takes us inside their process. She interviews members of the company, who Bausch chose not only for their talents, but for certain intangible personal qualities as well. The dancers describe the development of various dances, and the way that Bausch calls upon them to supply autobiographical details around which the performances were frequently built.
Akerman also shows us excerpts from performances of Bausch dances, including Komm Tanz Mit Mir (Come Dance with Me) (1977), Nelken (Carnations) (1982), Walzer (1982), and 1980 (1980), all recorded with Akerman’s singular visual touch.
“When I watched one of Pina’s performances for the first time a couple of years ago, I was overcome by an emotion I can’t quite define,” Akerman says. ONE DAY PINA ASKED… is an attempt to define that emotion by traveling deep into Bausch’s world.
“Akerman’s film is a work of modestly daring wonder, of exploration and inspiration. With her audacious compositions, decisive cuts, and tightrope-tremulous sense of time-and her stark simplicity-it shares, in a way that Wenders’s film doesn’t, the immediate exhilaration of the moment of creation. Akerman’s film is of a piece with Bausch’s dances.” — Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Match Cuts is a weekly podcast centered on video, film and the moving image. Match Cuts Presents is dedicated to presenting de-colonialized cinema, LGBTQI films, Marxist diatribes, video art, dance films, sex films, and activist documentaries with a rotating cast of presenters from all spectrums of the performing and plastic arts and surrounding humanities. Match Cuts is hosted by Nick Faust and Kachine Moore, and produced by Meg Murnane.
Crunch a leaf, smash a pumpkin, key a car! The time is at hand. Tricks, treats, and everything in between – the 6th (!!!) Annual (!!!) SPECTACLE SHRIEK SHOW is upon us! Post up for 12ish (probably 14) hours of cerebellum boiling insanity with your favorite Spectaghouls. This year we have the premiere of Appalachian satanists, perilous board games, some rare and secret archival prints from Radical Hardware, as well as the usual who’s who of fiendish friends, shorts, songs, and surprises. After five years strong of marathons this one is truly one for the books. Don’t miss out! As always, $25 for the day or $5 each film.
NOON: THE SCREAMING SKULL
2PM: Camp Motion Pictures presents SPLATTER FARM
4PM: Junk Food Dinner presents BEYOND THE GATES
6PM: Radical Hardware presents SPARE THE ROD…
8PM: DON’T LET THE DEVIL IN
10PM: Vinegar Syndrome presents HORROR HOUSE ON HIGHWAY 5
MIDNIGHT: Massacre Video presents WOMEN’S FLESH: MY RED GUTS
THE SCREAMING SKULL
dir. Alex Nicol, 1958
68 min, USA
In English
Newlyweds Eric and Jenni decide it’s a good idea to move back to the mansion where Eric’s first wife died under mysterious circumstances. Luckily for the couple, the grounds have been maintained by an old family friend – Mickey (director Alex Nichol) the gardener. After settling in, the already mentally exhausted Jenni begins hearing bumps/screams in the night. Is the ghost of Marianne come back to seek revenge? Is it her jerky new husband gaslighting her? Some combination of both? Hard to say, we think you can guess though. Fun fact: when the film was first released director Nichol promised a free burial to anyone who died of fright during the climax of the film.
Camp Motion Pictures presents: SPLATTER FARM
dir. John & Mark Polonia, 1987
70 min, USA
In English
Special thanks to Mark Polonia!
Two twin brothers (played by the filmmakers, as they are wont to do) visit their aunt at her farm seated deep in beautiful rural Pennsylvania. While they think they’ll simply be honing their green thumbs and helping their dear old auntie, things take a harrowing turn. Can you believe it? Terrible acts abound, folks are turning up missing (or worse!), and it’s revealed their aunt’s farmhand has a very disturbing set of extra-curricular activities.
The Polonia Brothers hold a special place in the hearts of us here at Spectacle. Having had a blast with FEEDERS once upon a midnight, we at the Shriek Show are honored to be blessed with showing this slab of analog insanity to an audience hungry for tape hiss and mini-Butterfingers especially hot on the heels of Mark Polonia’s new work. As always, many thanks to Camp Motion Pictures who have been down with the burning S since forever.
Junk Food Dinner presents: BEYOND THE GATES
dir. Jackson Stewart, 2016
84 minutes, USA
In English
Special thanks to Jackson Stewart!
Two estranged brothers reunite at their missing father’s video store to liquidate the property and sell off his assets. As they dig through the store, they find a VCR board game dubbed ‘Beyond The Gates’ that holds a connection to their father’s disappearance and deadly consequences for anyone who plays it.
Cult film podcast juggernauts Junk Food Dinner (who provided commentary for the upcoming blu-ray release) and filmmaker Jackson Stewart bring a loving tribute to the evil’s of VHS and tabletop gaming to Spectacle for a special Halloween treat. Barbara Crampton (FROM BEYOND) stars alongside Chase Willamson (THE GUEST) and Brea Grant (HALLOWEEN II) in a flick certain to make you reconsider picking up the dice ever again. Also, we’ll be giving away a copy of NIGHTMARE (The Video Board Game) to a lucky audience member so you can experience the terror at home or maybe a motel that still has a VCR in it but no continental breakfast.
Radical Hardware presents: SPARE THE ROD… (Secret 16mm!)
dir. Robert Enrico / Don Weis, 1964 / 1963
60 min, France / USA
In English
Oooooooh baby. It’s about six o’clock. The 6th annual Shriek Show is rolling right along and we are in the ZONE! The sun is setting, it’s TWILIGHT! Man it’s almost like we’re in some sort of TWILIGHT ZONE. Like you’re so comfy in your seat and you hear the soothing whir of a projector as it fires up. Yeah that’s the stuff. It’s almost like Radical Hardware is coming through the velvet curtains and screening not one but two pristine 16mm archival prints of a beloved and game-changing show from almost 55 years ago. Crazy right? Like maybe you’d be watching two works written by genre masters Richard Matheson and Ambrose Bierce. Is it an illusion? Is it a secret screening? Is it the first time in Shriek Show history we’ve had the 16mm projector out? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
DON’T LET THE DEVIL IN (NY Premiere!)
dir. Courtney Fathom Sell, 2016
80 min, USA
In English
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAr9eiiSqf0
After suffering a miscarriage, Newlyweds John and Samantha Harris relocate from New York City to a small Appalachian town where they become wrapped up in a nightmarish tapestry of evil.
Sell’s film eschews conventional genre and instead hops gleefully around – owing as much to the backwoods horrors of last years standout MIDNIGHT as it does to Satanic Panic mainstays like ROSEMARY’S BABY. Aided by the rolling hills and picturesque backdrop of rural West Virginia, the film lures the viewer into an expansive wilderness and then manages to trap you in it. Also featuring Ed Wood/Mark Pirro player Conrad Brooks!
Vinegar Syndrome presents HORROR HOUSE ON HIGHWAY 5 (New restoration!)
Dir. Richard Casey, 1985
87 minutes, USA
In English
A mysterious killer, wearing a Nixon mask, terrorizes and murders a young couple. A professor assigns his students a project investigating the strange events connected to a possibly dead Nazi scientist, Dr. Fredrick Bartholomew. The doctor’s assistant kidnaps students, holding them hostage and torturing them. Meanwhile, Nixon stalks the night!
One of the most confusing and compelling homemade horror films ever made, future music video director Richard Casey’s debut feature film, shot over years on nights and weekends, is a delirious collage of oddball gore, ludicrous plot twists, and a general milieu of weirdness unlike anything else in cinema history. Newly restored from original 16mm vault elements by the almighty Vinegar Syndrome, HORROR HOUSE ON HIGHWAY 5 finally gets the treatment it so richly deserves. A head-scratcher of this magnitude hasn’t graced the Shriek Show screen since…well, probably last year!
Massacre Video presents WOMEN’S FLESH: MY RED GUTS
Dir. Tomakichi Anaru, 1999
54 min, Japan
In Japanese
Director Tomakichi Anaru made a splash with his first feature and foray into the field of extreme cinema – TUMBLING DOLL OF FLESH, a pseudo-snuff nightmare – but WOMEN’S FLESH: MY RED GUTS is more of a slice of life. Like we’re seeing something we’re not supposed to see. Finger eating, tongue slicing, dismal bathroom lighting, and flashbacks flicker across the screen while you squirm in your seats. Massacre Video (a Shriek Show/Spectacle mainstay) has never been one to shy away from rare and often shocking titles – MONDO MAGIC, THE ABOMINATION, and 555, all come to mind – but this is one for the books.
Closing out this years marathon with easily one of the most grizzly entries to date, this is not for the faint of heart – consider yourself warned.
A documentary focusing on the British artist Vicki Bennett and her project People Like Us. Her work takes you on a journey into a world where literally anything can happen. Using her skills as an editor and a great sense of humor, she lets you roam through a world of imagination filled with contrasts and chance encounters between the past and the present. In performances, video work, music and collages, Bennett conveys that nothing is really what it seems.
CHANGE ITSELF: AN ART APART – GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE
Dir. Carl Abrahamsson, 2016
Sweden, 58 min.
TUESDAY DECEMBER 13 – 7:30 PM
(Originally Screened in October 2016)
To sum up the life and work of British artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is close to impossible. Not only because of the wide range of artistic disciplines, but also because of the timespan, since the mid 1960s to the present day, that has been saturated by hundreds of records, thousands of concerts, exhibitions, interviews, videos, spoken word performances, collages, sculptures, philosophy, cultural engineering, occultism and radical transgender concepts. A couple of descriptions are still valid after these 50 years of active creativity and provocation. P-Orridge is a romantic existentialist and a cultural engineer. Everything is both work as such and seed for cultural and behavioral change.
The Pacific Rim island and U.S. protectorate of Guam is best known as a military base and tourist playground, leading to a thriving industry of strip clubs and brothels catering to soldiers and Japanese tourists. In the documentary EXOTIC, director Amy Oden (FROM THE BACK OF THE ROOM), explores the complexities of the industry from the point of view of the island’s sex workers, many of whom travel from the United States for seasonal work. They describe the preferences of their customers, the joys and abuses of the job, and the precarious relationship with their “big sister” Korean bosses. More unexpected hierarchies and cross-cultural fetishism develop at each turn. Along with contributions by advocates Annie Sprinkles and Rachel Aimee, the film contextualizes a global struggle to legalize sex work within the daily struggles of women in a this, tiny often overlooked island.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8 – 10:00PM (NYC Premiere) SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15 – 10:00PM
Filmmaker Kat Hunt in attendance!
ADVANCE TICKETS SOLD OUT!
Innovative new docu-fiction WHAT’S REVENGE by interdisciplinary artist and director Kat Hunt adapts elements from 70’s pulp revenge cinema to address the problems and pitfalls of relationships in the modern age. The film uses a blend of staged reenactments of real events and fictionalized scenarios inspired by the lived experiences of the cast and crew. A feminist piece of genre-bending film, made by an entirely female production team, Hunt plays the chief provocateur in a story of two friends seeking to explain the reason behind the injustices inflicted upon them by the men in their lives. Hunt’s character makes a personal mission of revisiting these indignities upon “the men” in question, on a mission to take their power back in the process. By using non-actors and their stories throughout, Hunt crafts a complex and comedic take on relationships and filmmaking.
SATURDAY, JULY 9TH – 7:30 AND 10:00 PM ONE NIGHT ONLY! FACEBOOK EVENT:(click this)
Spectacle celebrates the art of the video mixtape with this night of smash cuts, samples, recontextualisation, and wholesale appropriation.
7:30 PM – MATH ROCK COUNTDOWN
10:00 PM – MIXTAPE MIXTAPE
MATH ROCK COUNTDOWN
Edited by Preston Spurlock, 2016.
???. 85 min.
The premier of MATH ROCK COUNTDOWN, a longform video mashup created by multimedia artist Preston Spurlock. Culled from scores of VHS tapes, MRC is an 85-minute bombast of talk shows, sitcoms, commercials, instructional videos, and pure analog glitch. Images aggressively jockey for foremost position in the viewer’s mind. Jingles, one-liners, purple prose weave in and out of inadvertent musicality, forming a clattering soundtrack. Smash edits, smeary abstractions, and overlays create subliminal threads between lust and sensitivity, sex and death, steak and lobster, Steve Urkel and nuclear holocaust. Visual diamonds picked and arranged out of a grungy heap of cultural detritus. A museum of microseconds. Dots on a timeline. Connect them as you see fit.
MIXTAPE MIXTAPE
Dir. ????? ?????, ????.
???. 80 min.
MIXTAPE MIXTAPE is an exclusive reel of our favorite mixtape moments. We’re dig deep into our collection of pre-internet video compilations, underground film fest screeners, VHS oddities, and contemporary mixes, pulling out the best and juiciest bits for you, and presenting you with a charcuterie plate of well-cured weirdness. Sure not to disappoint.
Milorad Milinkovic’s student film DOKUMENTARAC depicts Satan Panonski, Yugoslavia’s legendary beat poet, punk utopian, performance artist, and war criminal, in all his brutal complexity. Opening with the best known footage of his “Hard Blood Shock” Body Art performance, which mixes self-mutilation, chaotic punk rock, and spoken word, Milinkovic also captures scenes from a radio interview where he outlines his dreams of creating a communal “rock n’ roll state”, and his return to the mental asylum where he spent the better part of the 80s for murder. Self-identifying as “Punk by nationality, friend by profession,” we see his brilliant ugliness and intensity that lead to comparisons with both Marina Abramovic and G.G. Allin. Like his albums and the myths of Panonski’s life and death (during the Yugoslav Wars a little more than a year after the film), it has up until now only circulated underground on VHS tapes traded at flea markets across Eastern Europe. If Panonski was Yugoslavia’s G.G., then this is their HATED.
DOKUMENTARAC was translated by Bojan Cizmic and A.M. Gittlitz as part of a new fanzine about Panonski, the creative and destructive urges of the punk movement, and their parallels to the collapse of Yugoslavia and Socialism. This special event will feature clips from his performances, readings from a new biography, translated poetry and lyrics by Nikolina Lazetic, and an essay on the relationship between nationalism and punk in Yugoslavia by Patrick Offenheiser. All attendees will receive a free copy!
BUGS is the first feature-length by Canadian artist duo LIFE OF A CRAPHEAD (aka Amy Lam and Jon McCurley).
“Bugs is a satire about a bug society and its most successful family. The Bug Prime Minister, Shay (Gerry Campbell), has ruled the Bug Garden for many years and is finally, reluctantly, retiring. He’s chosen his niece, Gaston (Liz Peterson), to take over — but Gaston, who is plagued with ambitions to be the Bug Garden’s most respected politician-architect-filmmaker — is folding under the pressure. Dan is his other niece, but she’s a dreamer and can’t be trusted; she’s full of conflicting ideals and tries to act on all of them.
Shay goes to the Oracle for advice and they foretell that his family can’t be saved. Meanwhile, a government worker/aspiring comedian Sexy Bug (Glenn Macaulay) and his best friend Rob (Peter Kalyniuk) are sick of the Shay family’s rule. They plot to vandalize a monument being built to honour the family. From afar, the neighboring Bird Country celebrates another Bug political failure.
From the Bug Garden’s most sought-after awards, the “Fuck Me Awards,” to the Bug version of SNL, the story mines the absurdity of life within a patriarchal society obsessed with success. Produced on a shoestring with a large cast and crew of artists and comedians over the last 5 years, the Bug universe is set in the middle of the real world, creating multiple layers of reality that interact with each other — satirizing contemporary pop culture and politics in a wholly inventive way.”
BUGS will have its US premiere at Night Gallery in Los Angeles, then will crawl its way up and over to Spectacle Theater (appropriately) in the heart of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Special thanks to Matthew Thurber and Antonia Kuo for making the screening possible.
Life of a Craphead is the collaboration of Amy Lam and Jon McCurley since 2006. Their work spans performance art, film, and curation. Projects include The Life of a Craphead Fifty Year Retrospective, 2006-2056 (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2013), an fake career retrospective of all the work they will ever make; Double Double Land Land (Gallery TPW, Toronto, 2009), a play interrupted by a staged wedding; and Free Lunch (2007), a public, anonymously-advertised free lunch serving everything on the menu of a restaurant. Life of a Craphead also run and host the monthly performance art show Doored, which recently toured to Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam; Flux Factory in NYC; and the Lodge at LACA, Los Angeles. They performed frequently on live comedy shows including at Laugh Sabbath (Toronto) and UCB Theatre (L.A. & NYC) between 2006-09. Life of a Craphead have been artists-in-residence at the Macdowell Colony, U.S.; the Banff Centre, Canada; and Wunderbar, U.K.; and their work has been featured in Canadian Art, C Magazine, and Art in America. They are Chinese and Vietnamese and live and work in Toronto, Canada.
THE SCREAMING SKULL
Camp Motion Pictures presents: SPLATTER FARM
Radical Hardware presents: SPARE THE ROD… (Secret 16mm!)
