SMALL TOWN ECSTASY
dir. Jay Blumenfield, 2002
United States. 84 min.
In English.

ONE NIGHT ONLY!

TUESDAY, APRIL 2 – 7:30 PM (This event is $10. Admission includes access to the discussion with Blumenfield following a complimentary screening of SMALL TOWN ECSTASY.)

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“Aren’t people great?”

Hollywood Entertainment is proud to present Jay Blumenfield’s SMALL TOWN ECSTASY, a film of unrivaled familial tension and religious grace. One of the only films to capture glimpses of the Northern California rave scene, it shows us a family on the brink of collapse punctuated with strobe lights and pummeling trance synth. Like taking ecstasy, this is a story of the highest highs and the lowest lows once the music stops.

A 40 year old preacher’s son and father of four, Scott’s post-divorce crisis takes an atypical form. Rather than getting a Porsche or starting a cover band, he indulges in underground trance and jungle raves under the influence of ecstasy with his 20 year old son. The two go to raves in matching Adidas visors and baggy pants looking for light shows, bass, and pills while his new lifestyle creates tension between his ex-wife and younger children. Scott loves the rave and wants to share the feeling with his children without any comprehension of the dangers that lie ahead.

In 1964, the Moog became the first commercial synthesizer ever sold. Sixty years later, the marriage of synthesizers and cinema has woven a rich tapestry of filmic possibilities. In particular, synths have become the soulmate of genre and surrealist cinema. While most cinephiles are familiar with the unmistakable stylings of John Carpenter and Wendy Carlos, there exists an endless well of lesser-known film composers who have used synthesizers to great effect.

This April, we’ve brought together underscreened gems with otherworldly atmospheres that are heightened by their synthesizer scores; from the absurdist black comedy of THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, to the potently restrained sounds of VIGIL, to the dreadful dissonance of SPIRITS OF THE AIR, GREMLINS OF THE CLOUDS, to the glittering melodies of DEAD MOUNTAINEER’S HOTEL, returning to Spectacle after twelve years. Come to your favorite collectively run cinema to bathe in sensory delights!

Join us for a Q&A with TWENTIETH CENTURY director Matthew Rankin in person on Friday, April 19th at 7:30 pm.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Dir. Matthew Rankin, 2019.
Canada. 90 min.
In English and French.

TUESDAY, APRIL 2 – 10 PM [ TICKETS ]
SATURDAY, APRIL 13 – MIDNIGHT [ TICKETS ]
FRIDAY, APRIL 19 – 7:30 PM, w/ Filmmaker Q&A, this event is $10 [ Q&A TICKETS ]
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24 – 10 PM [ TICKETS ]

In 2019, singular Canadian filmmaker, animator, and documentarian Matthew Rankin unleashed his first feature in the form of a surrealist satirical fever dream depicting the rise of Canada’s longest-serving— and perhaps loneliest— Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King. Viewers follow King through his trials and tribulations as he strives to become the man his mother has been grooming him to be since birth: preserver of the National Disappointment. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY takes extensive liberties in its dramatization of real historical figures and events while nailing prevailing notions that Canadianness is synonymous with earnestness, shame, and passive aggression.

From beginning to end, it is a maximalist work of art set against gorgeous German Expressionist backdrops which create intentional artificiality, suggesting that the concept of Canada may, in itself, be fake. Highlighting its hyper-stylization is a score that vacillates between synthwave and patriotic fanfare by composers Christophe Lamarche-Ledoux and Peter Venne. Come to the Burning S for a viewing experience unlike any other (and to support the ongoing efforts to increase appreciation for Canadian culture in Williamsburg, Brooklyn).

Preceded by:

THE TESLA WORLD LIGHT
dir. Matthew Rankin, 2017
Canada. 8 mins.
In English.

DEAD MOUNTAINEER’S HOTEL
(HUKKUNUD ALPINISTI HOTELL)
Dir. Grigori Kromanov, 1979.
Estonia. 84 min.
In Estonian with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, APRIL 6 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, APRIL 21 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 25 – 7:30 PM

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Returning to Spectacle after 12 years, DEAD MOUNTAINEER’S HOTEL is a sleek blend of thriller, noir, and science fiction based on the Strugatsky brothers’ novel of the same name. Opening with a winding upward mountain drive, we meet Inspector Peter Glebsky en route to respond to an anonymous tip at an isolated hotel in the Alps. Though all seems well upon arrival, he opts to stay the night and finds himself trapped by an avalanche with his bizarre fellow guests. It soon becomes clear that everything is not as it seems.

The hotel itself is a marvel of modern architecture in black and neon set sharply against bright, pristine snow, while its interior brings to mind the unforgettable and deeply ’70s mise-en-scene of cult classics like MESSIAH OF EVIL. The score by pioneering Estonian synth programmer and prog rocker Sven Grünberg, composed on an EMS Synthi 100, is an ethereal auditory dreamscape.

Special thanks to the Estonian Film Institute.

VIGIL
Dir. Vincent Ward, 1984.
New Zealand. 90 min.
In English.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 3 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, APRIL 12 – MIDNIGHT
TUESDAY, APRIL 23 – 10 PM
MONDAY, APRIL 29 – 7:30 PM

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The first New Zealand film ever to compete in Cannes, VIGIL is an unsettling, atmospheric drama about an eleven-year-old girl named Toss who witnesses the falling death of her father while out herding sheep on their remote farm. The only other witness is a mysterious hunter, Ethan, who carries her father’s body back home. Shortly afterward, Ethan begins working on the farm with Toss’s grandfather, Birdie. As Ethan’s relationship with her mother becomes sexually charged, Toss’s distrust toward him increases in complexity. We see the world through the eyes of a girl on the precipice of teenagehood as she experiences change, loss, and the invasion of her small, isolated world. Breathtaking imagery and unorthodox framing are complimented by composer Jack Body’s score, which combines synthesizers with string instruments to build a restrained soundscape that pierces the film’s potent, unreleased tension. This arthouse coming-of-age story, wearing the clothes of folk horror, is an indispensable contribution to the misty sheepcore canon.

SPIRITS OF THE AIR, GREMLINS OF THE CLOUDS
Dir. Alex Proyas, 1987.
Australia. 93 min.
In English.

FRIDAY, APRIL 5 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 10 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, APRIL 14 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 18 – 7:30 PM

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Alex Proyas’s first feature is a striking, surreal, and meditative post-apocalyptic sci-fi set in the Australian outback. The film follows Felix and Betty, two ultra-religious siblings, who have lived their lives in complete isolation until the arrival of Smith, a mysterious wanderer who is attempting to elude vague malicious pursers. Smith and Felix form an unlikely friendship as Felix’s hyperfixation proves to be Smith’s only route to salvation: building a flying machine. Meanwhile, Betty acquires a hyperfixation of her own through her obsessive distrust of Smith.

SPIRITS OF THE AIR, GREMLINS OF THE CLOUDS is a low-budget audiovisual tour-de-force. The film’s quirkiness and borderline steampunk aesthetics walk a fine line that never crosses over from inventiveness into cringe. While synthesizers typically bring to mind tight, catchy electronic melodies, they are, at their core, experimental instruments of infinite possibilities; composer Peter Miller expertly captures the film’s arid isolation with his lingering, dissonant score. If you’ve ever longed to watch a version of MAD MAX that was inspired by Tarkovsky, this is the film for you.

WHO AM I THIS TIME?
Dir. Jonathan Demme, 1982.
United States. 53 min.
In English.

MONDAY, APRIL 1 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 6 – 5 PM
SUNDAY, APRIL 14 – 5 PM
TUESDAY, APRIL 30 – 10 PM

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Helene Shaw (Susan Sarandon) is directionless when she arrives in the small town of North Crawford. Harry Nash (Christopher Walken) is a meek hardware store clerk who by night transforms into iconic characters of the stage. When Helene is cast alongside Harry in a community theater production of A Streetcar Named Desire, it kicks off a passionate romance. However, as they get to know one another the lines between their characters and real life blur. WHO AM I THIS TIME? is an examination of performances we put on in our everyday lives. This made-for-TV film, originally broadcast on PBS as a part of the American Playhouse series, was adapted from a Kurt Vonnegut story. Jonathan Demme, hot off of the award-winning Melvin and Howard, directs with his usual humanist sensibility. WHO AM I THIS TIME? is TV entertainment at its peak with an all-star team in front of and behind the camera.

Screenings Will Be Preceded By:

TRISHA BROWN’S ACCUMULATION WITH TALKING PLUS WATER MOTOR
Dir. Jonathan Demme, 1986.
United States. 11 min.
In English.

BILBAO
dir. Bigas Luna, 1978
Spain. 98 min.
In Spanish and Catalan with English subtitles

FRIDAY, APRIL 5TH – 5 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 11TH – 10 PM
MONDAY, APRIL 15TH – 10 PM
FRIDAY, APRIL 26TH – 7:30 PM (W/Q&A)

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A disturbed middle-aged man (Ángel Jové) becomes obsessed with a stripper and prostitute named Bilbao on his nighttime prowls through Barcelona’s Chinatown. He follows and studies her, setting a plan in motion for her abduction. Shot in 16mm, the second feature shot by Bigas Luna following TATUAJE (1979) was actually his first to premiere on Spanish screens, shattering the taboos of Spanish society of the era and inaugurating a cinema of iconoclasm and eroticism.

In BILBAO, we share a dangerous intimacy with our obsessive protagonist. His thoughts and words, images and objects, sounds and pieces of music repeat incessantly over the course of the film, haunting him and us, as they reappear in sinister unexpected ways, stained by the rising tides of his lust and shaped by the shifting contours of his perversions. His everyday objects turned fetish objects become our fetish objects, as we join him in the crafting of his idealized sex object and the construction of his ultimate crime.

“Luna’s debut is a wonderful ample catalog of perversions, a voyeuristic exercise full of suggestive imagery… that brings the most fetishistic and twisted Alfred Hitchock to the damned and dirty Barcelona of the late seventies.” -Xavi Sánchez Pons

Each screening of BILBAO will be preceded by a video introduction from Carolina Sanabria, author of Bigas Luna, El ojo voraz.

The April 26th screening of BILBAO will be followed by a special discussion about the film in Spanish with Santiago Fouz-Hernández and Carolina Sanabria of The Bigas Luna Tribute and Casilda García López of Tierra Extraña NY.

CANICHE
(Poodle)
dir. Bigas Luna, 1979
Spain. 90 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles

FRIDAY, APRIL 12TH – 7:30 PM (W/Q&A)
FRIDAY, APRIL 19TH – 5 PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 25TH – 10 PM
MONDAY, APRIL 29TH – 10 PM

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I SEE A DARKNESS
dirs. Katherine Waugh and Fergus Daly, 2023
Ireland. 133 mins.
In English.

FRIDAY, MARCH 15 – 7 PM followed by a discussion with Katherine Waugh and Fergus Daly
SUNDAY, MARCH 17 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, MARCH 25 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 31 – 5 PM

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This March, Spectacle is honored to host the U.S. premiere of I SEE A DARKNESS, a new essay-documentary about both the origins and the future of photographic imaging directed by Katherine Waugh and Fergus Daly.

Following Trevor Paglen’s edict that “It’s imperative for other artists to pick up where [Harun] Farocki left off, lest we plunge even further into the darkness of a world whose images remain invisible yet control us in evermore profound ways”, the makers of I SEE A DARKNESS describe the film as a political and philosophical manifesto for seeing differently. While pushing back against standardized myths of individual genius, Waugh and Daly thread their exploration of this technology’s origins with the story of Lucien Bull (1876-1972), an Irish-born inventor and key figure in the development of chronophotography and onetime assistant to Étienne-Jules Marey. I SEE A DARKNESS also considers the work of Harold E. Edgerton, who developed high-speed film cameras on behalf of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, thus meditating on the relationship of innovation to the natural world and resulting in a kind of threnody for the untold number of animals sacrificed in the name of so-called scientific progress.

Born of a multimedia installation project spanning several years and dedicated to the memory of the filmmakers’ close friend and collaborator Sylvère Lotringer, I SEE A DARKNESS combines historical footage from dozens of archives with original material shot at locations such as the Conservatoire des Techniques de la Cinémathèque Française, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Death Valley, the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, White Sands National Park and others. The result is an unforgettable rumination on the way supposedly objective practices (whether time-based cinematography in the 19th century, or AI-enabled digital imaging in the 21st) are perhaps inevitably deployed to political ends.

I SEE A DARKNESS ultimately questions what was disappeared in the ‘progressive’ narrative of image-capture technologies, especially considerations of the non-human and animal, and gestures towards what Jean-Christophe Bailly reminds us of when he writes: “the world in which we live is gazed upon by other beings, that the visible is shared among creatures, and that a politics should be invented on this basis, if it is not too late.”

“I’ve always liked that quote from Nietzsche, ‘We hear only those questions for which we are capable of finding an answer’, which suggests that to really think critically we must create new modes of questioning rather than seek easy answers, that fostering new problematics is what thinking in film (as in any art) should promote… In this sense, the way different subjects come together in I SEE A DARKNESS became a kind of organic process whereby certain ideas, concepts, histories, and political  and philosophical concerns, formed their own Venn diagram and impetus, finding expression in the final film in the form of creating new questions.” – Katherine Waugh

“After a recent viewing of their film I SEE A DARKNESS, it is safe to say that Katherine Waugh and Fergus Daly’s new work together is not only one of the most significant Irish films of this century but one of the most significant films of this century more generally. This is a work that not only engages with critical and pertinent philosophical ideas but it places itself among a rarer breed of film essay that will actively do the work of philosophy, while also engaging and creating clarity around complex philosophical thought and ideas. It is in my opinion a stunning achievement and a work that should be widely seen.” – Daniel Fitzpatrick, Co-Director of aemi

“Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh may not be the most recognizable names on the Irish filmmaking landscape but over the last 20 years they have proved themselves to be pre-eminent crafters of the film essay. They have used both the world and mechanics of cinema as springboards to a range of deeply considered ideas and observations. I SEE A DARKNESS is a typically cerebral and meticulously constructed meditation on a variety of topics ranging from image capture to the atomic bomb. Engrossing!” – Don O’Mahony & Si Edwards, Programmers, Cork Film Festival

This event is presented in association with the Irish Film Institute’s IFI International programme supported by Culture Ireland. Special thanks to Ruairí McCann.