Born Dallas Mayr in Livingston, New Jersey, Jack Ketchum arrived on the horror scene with his debut novel Off Season in 1981. Off Season, an updating of the Sawney Beane story, drew the outrage of the Village Voice, which publicly scolded the novel’s publisher for printing violent pornography. Over the next 37 years, until his death in 2018, he would write over 20 novels and novellas, five of which have been adapted for the silver screen. A protégé of horror writer Robert Bloch, Ketchum’s novels eschewed the supernatural for unflinching and unsettling studies of man’s capacity for evil, often drawing on true crime for inspiration. While never failing to deliver the genre goods, weaving provocative scenarios pushing the boundaries of the macabre and twisted tales of sex, murder and torture for hardened extreme horror gore-hounds, Ketchum’s writing distinguishes itself from that of his Splatterpunk contemporaries for its sobriety, restraint and empathy which lend a tragic and mournful tone to the carnage.

THE LOST
dir. Chris Sivertson, 2006
United States. 119 min.
In English.

THURSDAY, 10/5 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, 10/20 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, 10/24 – 7:30 PM

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Once upon a time, a boy named Ray Pye put crushed beer cans in his boots to make himself taller.

These words open both Jack Ketchum’s novel and Chris Sivertson’s cinematic adaptation of THE LOST, introducing us to Ray Pye, a teenage psychopath played with narcissistic glee and murderous male fragility by Marc Senter. Jack Ketchum drew his inspiration for the character of Ray Pye from the real life convicted serial killer Charles Schmid and Senter’s interpretation is a nightmare vision of suburban rot and everyday evil.

When 19-year-old Ray, with the help of his two lackey friends, murders two innocent campers for kicks, he becomes the target of Detective Charles Schilling. Unable to gather enough evidence to bring charges, four years pass, but Schilling won’t give up the chase. When Katherine Wallace, a seductive and mysterious new girl arrives in town, Ray’s reign of power is challenged and his wall of secrecy begins to crumble, leading to an explosive violent finale.

“The narrative moves along at a slow grind, taking its time developing each of the characters and their unsettling relationships. But it works and the threads all come together with a truly savage and unforgettable finale… THE LOST is a triumph of independent cinema – a bold novel turned equally bold film that will haunt you for a very long time.” – Dread Central

“Far more unsettlingly savage than many horror thrillers… undeniably fascinating and deadly serious from start to finish” – Variety

THE WOMAN
dir. Lucky McKee, 2011
United States. 101 min.
In English.

THURSDAY, 10/12 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, 10/20 – 10 PM
MONDAY, 10/23 – 10 PM

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The last survivor of a cannibalistic cave-dwelling clan from Ketchum’s earlier work OFFSPRING is hunted and captured by a country lawyer in THE WOMAN, co-written by Ketchum with the film’s director Lucky McKee (MAY, ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE). Imprisoning the eponymous feral woman (Pollyanna Mcintosh, returning in a powerhouse performance) in the family’s cellar, the all-American dad (a loathsome Sean Bridges) commences a program of domestication, attempting to tame the ferocious female while turning his family into accomplices to her subjugation . THE WOMAN is an unbearably tense, gruesome, provocative and disturbing experience, whose scenes of cotidian domestic abuse will haunt and outrage the viewer as much as its scenes of savage animalistic violence.

“THE WOMAN picks right up where 2009’s OFFSPRING (also an adaptation of a Jack Ketchum book) left off. It’s a totally different beast though, and it is as much infused with Ketchum’s DNA as it is with McKee’s. That should come as no surprise at all since they collaborated on both the book and the screenplay. Ketchum’s predilection for tales of the inherent savagery in man, and McKee’s for the role women play in our patriarchal society, come to a head in the brutal and visceral masterpiece they created together.

What differentiates both adaptations, though, is that, unlike OFFSPRING, THE WOMAN plays with the notion of who the real monsters are. Now, “the savages are not the monsters” might seem like a tired cliché, and to a certain extent it is, but in the hands of McKee and Ketchum it becomes fresh, even poignant, and regains its status as an uncomfortable universal truth. This becomes even more true to the extent that THE WOMAN is not so much about the divide between civilization and savagery as it is about how men try to “civilize” women or to expel the savagery perceived within them.”  -Simon Cogen, Horror HomeRoom

This September, Spectacle is proud to present a retrospective of the luminary American experimental filmmaker SCOTT BARTLETT in collaboration with The Film-Makers’ Cooperative. Thank you to the generosity of the Co-Op and joint programmer Robert Schneider, the films in this program will be projected on 16mm.

Scott Barlett (1943 – 1990) was a traveling man with a fancy for strobing lights and fast motion. His films are pure psychedelia. Patching together philosophical ramblings on mystic traditions, hit songs from the ‘60s and ‘70s, and wobbly light patterns, Bartlett creates pithy works of genius. To this day, he remains best known for 1968’s OFFON, a gleaming vision of the cosmos that tested the limits of early video technology and set Bartlett down a path of stalwart experimentation within the cinematic tradition.

After OFFON’s success, Bartlett relocated to San Francisco where he became a light-show pioneer, creating flicker films for concerts and art shows all over the city. His films caught the attention of Stanley Kubrick (who took inspiration from OFFON for 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY), Ken Russell, and Movie Brats George Lucas and Francis Coppola who tried but failed to get his science fiction epic INTERFACE off the ground. Nonetheless, his keen graphic sensibilities are sprinkled throughout many Hollywood films, including ALTERED STATES and MORE AMERICAN GRAFFITI. But his true talent is best displayed throughout his unbridled directorial ventures which combine his fascinations with psychedelics, mysticism, and outer space into visual portals that open gateways into unseen dimensions of cinematic splendor.

PROGRAM ONE: To the Moon and Beyond

MAKING OFFON. 1981. 10 mins.
METANOMEN. 1966. 8 mins.
SERPENT. 1971. 14 mins.
MOON 1969. 1969. 10 mins.
OFFON. 1968. 9 mins.

Total runtime approx 50 mins.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 – 3:00 PM, this event is $10
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Scott Bartlett was haunted by outer space throughout his life. In a lecture at the Carnegie Museum of Art, he said he wanted to express “the meaning of the universe” by depicting visions of the cosmos that surpassed the limits of human consciousness. His crowning achievement, OFFON, might represent the zenith of these ambitions, but Bartlett’s intense curiosity in space is shared across many of his short films.

Made in 1981, while Bartlett was teaching in Los Angeles, MAKING OFFON dives back into his origins as a filmmaker and sets the scene for his artistic mission. His first film, METANOMEN, still sees him stuck on Earth. Collaging images of skyscrapers into a rollicking city tour, the film foretells Bartlett’s consuming interest with worlds beyond our own. SERPENT — a magic mushroom-inspired retelling of the Eden myth — finds Bartlett playing with recycled imagery in an attempt to link various historical narratives into a short parable about humanity’s destructive tendencies. MOON 1969 and OFFON take Bartlett elsewhere and are best described by film critic Gene Youngblood as “the cosmos in continual transformation” and explorations of the “fundamental realities below the surface of normal perception” respectively.

PROGRAM TWO: It was the ‘70s

1970. 1972. 30 min.
A TRIP TO THE MOON. 1968. 32 min.

Total runtime approx. 62 mins.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 – 3:00 PM, this event is $10
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Bartlett’s longest works are also the most emblematic of his era. The tragicomic 1970 is a city symphony unlike any other. Moving between personal documentary and city portrait, 1970 displays Bartlett’s incredible ability to shift between the world’s micro and macro elements in his artistic practice. In A TRIP TO THE MOON, he films a conversation between seven artists discussing astrology and I Ching. Bartlett’s effortless control of the edit complements the artists’ metaphysical conversation, as he superimposes talking heads and cuts away to abstract images that illustrate their heady ideas.

PROGRAM THREE: Cultural Studies

LOVEMAKING. 1970. 13 min. (Not on 16mm; New Restoration from BAMPFA)
GREENFIELD. 1977. 13 min.
HEAVY METAL. 1979. 13 min.
MEDINA. 1976. 15 min.
SOUND OF ONE. 1976. 11 min.

Total runtime approx 65 mins.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 – 3:00 PM, this event is $10
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Always absorbed by his surroundings, Bartlett made exceptional ethnographic works and personal portraits throughout his life. In LOVEMAKING, he tackled his eponymous subject matter head on, creating an anti-sexploitation film that luxuriates in its romantic imaging of sex. GREENFIELD sees him venture to a commune in Northern California where he becomes absorbed in the free rhythms of its residents’ work and leisure. For HEAVY METAL, Bartlett used elaborate optical techniques to explore early gangster films. MEDINA and SOUND OF ONE both center Bartlett’s interests in non-Western traditions. Here, Bartlett surrenders himself to his environs, letting their patterns and actions guide his camera’s movement.

>Special thanks to Robert Schneider at The Film-Makers’ Co-Op.

“If the desire of the Nouvelle Vague’s protagonists was to take over the industry and make it more pliable (notably by creating independent economic structures, in the manner of Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut), then the Lettrists’ strategy, by contrast, entailed resisting the least compromise with the film industry, just as with the art market” —Nicole Brenez, Introduction to Lettrist Cinema

Beginning in 1951, Lettrist filmmakers set out to destroy all of cinema’s existing rules. The art movement which sought out chiseled, infinitesimal, and imagined cinema, was short-lived and remains under-researched barring a few key texts by art historians Nicole Brenez and Kaira M. Cabañas. Among its members were Jean Isidore Isou, whose unfinished 9-hour cut of TRAITÉ DE BAVE ET D’ÉTERNITÉ caused a ruckus at the 1951 Cannes Film Festival. Isou’s scratched images and complimentary discordant soundtrack set the tone for future experiments in Lettrist Cinema: Guy Debord weaponized the black-screen in his feature debut HURLEMENTS EN FAVEUR DE SADE (1952), Gil Wolman created a flickering and vanishing film with L’ANTICONCEPT (1952), and François Dufrêne abandoned images altogether by projecting an imaginary film, TAMBOURS DU JUDGEMENT PREMIER (1952).

This September, Spectacle Theater is thrilled to present a small selection of Lettrist films as they were originally intended to be screened. As noted above, Isidore Isou’s TRAITÉ DE BAVE ET D’ÉTERNITÉ remains the most well-known film to come out of the Lettrist Movement, as its sustained lashing out against cinema’s conventions in all manner of offensive aesthetic and narrative gestures have made it a lodestar for filmmakers looking to reimagine the seventh art. Released around the same time is Maurice Lemaître’s LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ?, a self-destructive instructional film that the director cheekily described as “a boring jumble of commonplace ideas.” HURLEMENTS EN FAVEUR DE SADE and L’ANTICONCEPT continue the Lettrist investigation into a counter-cinema, engaging a negative image that bestows creative authority to the audience. In counterpoint, Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin’s (aka Marc’O) CLOSED VISION (1954) brings together an excess of images in a Joycean attempt at creating a stream-of-consciousness film. In GRIMACE (1967), Gudmundur Gudmundsson Ferro (aka Erró) returns to the Lettrist mission to separate cinema from its stars, stitching together amusing portraits of artists including Andy Warhol and Marguerite Duras into a playful visual poem.

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TRAITÉ DE BAVE ET D’ÉTERNITÉ
(VENOM AND ETERNITY)
dir. Isidore Isou, 1951
France. 123 mins.
In French with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 3 – 5 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 – 7:30 PM

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“Isou turns pictures upside down, scratches on them arbitrarily and does everything he can think of to spit upon and destroy the film image” —Stan Brakhage

To invoke Lettrism is to call on VENOM AND ETERNITY. Also known as SLIME AND ETERNITY, Isidore Isou’s sole feature is a film full of scratches that chisels its way to the beating heart of cinema. “If we can’t get past the photographic screen and reach something deeper, then cinema just doesn’t interest me,” he said. Looking to break away from the regressive sanctification of representation upheld by theorists like André Bazin, Isou’s film revels in its obscene and destructive character, tearing up the traditions of the medium to dream up a new alternative.

After premiering at Cannes Film Festival in 1951 and causing a scandal among festival attendees, VENOM AND ETERNITY was awarded the “Prix des spectateurs d’avant-garde” by Jean Cocteau. The award placed it in the same category as Maya Deren’s similarly lauded MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943), marking it an essential text in the canon of experimental cinema that would have a lasting influence on filmmakers ranging from Jean-Luc Godard to Stan Brakhage. Isou would later remark that Godard and Debord ripped him off.

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LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ?
(HAS THE FILM ALREADY STARTED?)
dir. Maurice Lemaître, 1951
France. 62 mins.
In French with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 – 7:30 PM, this event is $10

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After working on Isou’s VENOM AND ETERNITY as an assistant director, Maurice Lemaître set out to make a film that not only attacked the conventions of filmmaking, but of filmgoing too. LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ? is a film that spills from the screen, as instructed by its script which expands upon the body of the film to include what should occur in the viewing room as it’s projected. Hellbent on provocation, Lemaître thought up LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ? as a way to shake up the moviegoing experience. Throughout the film, he directly addresses the audience with questions such as “Why are you here?” while they sit in the dark watching the movie also subject to the insults of “extras” taunting their ability to watch the whole thing through.

The film is made up of a series of kaleidoscopic images. Unlike Debord and Wolman, Lemaître stresses the visual quality of his cinema. LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ? is colorful, fun, and wholly unruly, reflecting the spirit of a passionate young filmmaker meddling with the rules of his craft.

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HURLEMENTS EN FAVEUR DE SADE
(HOWLINGS IN FAVOR OF DE SADE)
dir. Guy Debord, 1952
France. 64 mins.
In French with English subtitles.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21 – 10 PM

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In his first film, Guy Debord abandons the photographic image. Over the course of HURLEMENTS EN FAVEUR DE SADE, Debord along with fellow Lettrists Isou, Gil Wolman, Serge Berna, and Barbara Rosenthal speak over each other in aphorisms. The screen is white when they talk and black whenever there is silence. The film’s refusal to represent foretells Debord’s future critiques of image-culture, most notably the text from which this theater derives its name: SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE (1967). Eventually, Debord and Wolman would break away from the Lettrist Movement to carry out new acts of detournement as Situationsists. As such, their goals were more directly aligned with a Communist agenda. Yet, in their early works resides a conceptual spark that they would build upon throughout their careers as artists. This would become clearer in a Lettrist bulletin from 1956, in which Wolman declared their objective to be the creation of “a unitary urbanism” that synthesizes “arts and technology” in accordance “with new values of life.”

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L’ANTICONCEPT
(The Anticoncept)
dir. Gil J. Wolman, 1952
France. 60 minutes
In French. An English Transcript will be provided.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21 – 7:30 PM, this event is $10

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“Wolman is one of the great inventors of negative forms after Hegel” —Nicole Brenez, Introduction to Lettrist Cinema

L’ANTICONCEPT is a sound film that alternates between black and white flickers. The film is projected on a helium-inflated balloon approximately two meters in diameter. A year after the film premiered at the Ciné-Club Avant-Garde 52, Debord declared L’ANTICONCEPT was “more offensive… than the images of Eisenstein, which frightened Europe for so long.” Although the Lettrists shared a proclivity for hyperbole, Debord’s statement accounts for Wolman’s incredible ability to leave behind all of cinema’s precepts and create a frightening alternative to the medium with his film.

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CLOSED VISION
dir. Marc’O, 1954
France. 65 mins.
In English.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 01 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 03 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 09 – 10:00 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28 – 10:00 PM

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Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin aka Marc’O played a major role in the history of Lettrism. With close ties to Jean Cocteau, Marc’O convinced the Cannes Film Festival in 1951 to screen Isidore Isou’s VENOM AND ETERNITY. He similarly organized screenings for his colleagues’ work, encouraging them to adopt new approaches to cinema and agitate audiences in viewing rooms to create more visceral encounters with the medium. Many of his suggestions—aquarium-cinema, aquatic-sports cinema, carousel cinema—were never actualized, yet his genius pervades in the work of his contemporaries.

Funnily enough, his own feature debut CLOSED VISION might be the film with the clearest narrative to come out of the Lettrist Movement. A consciousness collage in the style of James Joyce, CLOSED VISION works its way from a series of disparate images into a straightforward denouncement of cinema’s calcified classical form. At the time of its release, the film was praised by Luis Buñuel and Jean Cocteau, who called it “the most important experimental work since his own BLOOD OF THE POET.”

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GRIMACE
dir. Erró, 1967
France. 45 mins.
Gibberish.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 – 5 PM, this event is $10

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“GRIMACES is just what it says: grimaces. You see 180 internationally known artists making faces. The soundtrack is Lettrist poetry.” –Jonas Mekas

The Icelandic artist Erró’s GRIMACE was made over several years as he toured the globe snapping vignettes of famous artists. Edited together with a Lettrist poem in which Erró phonetically plays around with each artist’s name as its soundtrack, the film becomes a meditation on stardom and identity. Warping and renegotiating the relationship between the viewer and the celebrities on screen, GRIMACE’s simple premise proves effective.

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Special thanks to RE:VOIR, Light Cone, Barbara Wolman and Hedy Wolman, Cristina Bertelli, Marc’O, Ed Halter and Thomas Beard at Light Industry, Julia Curl and Robert Schneider at the Film-Maker’s Cooperative, Connor Keep, Steve Macfarlane, and Isaac Hoff.

This September, Spectacle is thrilled to welcome avant-garde filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Maximilien Luc Proctor for two consecutive nights of films and discussion, including the first-ever NYC screening of Proctor’s 16mm works. This program was organized in collaboration with Phil Coldiron, who prefaces Proctor’s work as follows:

Lately, it can feel like a bleak joke to apply the adjective “independent” to anything related to the movies. Criticism mostly exists as content marketing for VC-backed corporations. The world of the indie narrative film is a dispiriting swamp of calling cards, and the spaces that once housed the historical avant-garde are clotted with interlopers from the blue-chip art world making work that often feels like sitting through a grant proposal. Still, there are scattered reasons for hope, chief among them the new small-scale lyricism that’s recently blossomed across Europe: films shot on 8- and 16mm with Bolexes passed between friends, processed on the cheap in cooperative labs, and shown in venues that make no promise of anything besides an audience that actually cares.

This is the context from which the Oklahoma-born, Berlin-based Maximilien Luc Proctor has emerged. Over the last few years, beyond running Ultra Dogme, a gratifyingly scrappy platform for criticism and streaming, and playing in the decidedly algorithm-unfriendly band Two Nice Catholic Boys (alongside UD editor Ruairí McCann), Proctor has produced a few dozen films, most of them single rolls of celluloid edited in camera. Ranging from the Arcadian village of Raftis to the American Southwest, he records oblique impressions with a sharp eye for composition and an intuitive sense of rhythm, gently arguing in favor of the minor and the fleeting. This early-career survey brings together a selection of his shorts along with the digital feature, SREĆAN PUT, and offers a rare opportunity to chart the ongoing refinement of a young artist’s craft in real time.

PROGRAM ONE: NESTED FOCUS
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 – 7:30 PM with Maximilien Luc Proctor in person for Q+A!
(This event is $10.)

ONE NIGHT ONLY! ADVANCE TICKETS

ALL THE BEST
2022. 3 min. 16mm.

CRUCES
2023. 6 min. 16mm.

WASHINGTON (UNTITLED)
2022. 4 min. 16mm.

FLUID DYNAMICS: STEADY FLOW
2022. 4 min. 16mm.

FLUID DYNAMICS: UNSTEADY FLOW
2022. 2 min. 16mm.

RAFTI(S)
2022. 2 min. 16mm.

(against interpretation)
2023. 4 min. 16mm.

FLUID FRAGMENTS
2023. 4 min. 16mm.

PROGRAM TWO: HAPPY TRAILS
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 – 7:30 PM with Maximilien Luc Proctor in person for Q+A!
(This event is $10.)

ONE NIGHT ONLY! ADVANCE TICKETS

the sound of the sky reflected in water
2021. 3 min. Super 8mm-to-digital.

summercycle iii
2022. 3 min. Super 8mm-to-digital.

summercycle iv
2023. 3 min. Super 8mm-to-digital.

SREĆAN PUT
(HAPPY TRAILS)
2021. 93 min. Digital.

MAXIMILIEN LUC PROCTOR is a French-American filmmaker, critic and curator. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma with honors in Film and Media Studies in 2014 before moving to Heidelberg, where he shot his first feature film, FRAGMENTS OF A MEMORY OF A FILM, while working as a barista and karaoke host. In 2017 he moved to Berlin and completed his second feature film, SREĆAN PUT, in 2021. He records music in the band Two Nice Catholic Boys and co-hosts a monthly analog screening salon with Christian Flemm. He is the founder and co-editor of Ultra Dogme, and the avant-garde instructor for Berlin’s Art-on-the-Run film school.

The filmmaker would like to give special thanks to the people who helped make these films possible: phili c, Christian Flemm, Ruairí McCann, Martin Bremer, Malkah Manouel, Florian Weigl, Nicholas Christenson, Tijana Perović, Oath, Valentin Duceac, Bali Govindarajan, Big Waves of Pretty, Bobi, and my families