WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13 – 7:30PM

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Screening presented in collarboation with Crater Magazine. Includes a reading from “We Buried Your Ashes But Not You: Capital,  Disability, and the Crisis of Womanhood in Anne Charlotte Robertson’s Reel 80: Emily Died” (publication forthcoming) by Emily Rose Apter.

“I believe in film being necessary every day,” filmmaker-diarist, Anne Charlotte Robertson, told film critic, Scott MacDonald, in a conversation on MacDonald’s back porch in 1992. She continued: “I’ve saddled myself with something, in effect, that prevents me from committing suicide. So it’s another way of saying that the film has kept me alive.”
That life-saving “something” was an exhaustive diary-keeping practice. As a child, Robertson kept a written diary and, in the mid-1970s, began recording daily scenes on her Super 8 camera. These hundreds of hours of footage—shot between school in Cambridge, MA and her mother’s house in Framingham—became her near-40-hour magnum opus, Five Year Diary (1997), consisting of 83 “reels” and chronicling not five but 16 years of life.

Gardens, true love, children, weight loss, death, filmmaking, schizoaffective disorders, medical professionals, drug regimens, side effects (arguably worse than the symptoms being treated in the first place): these were her raw materials, sketched with equal parts candor, humor, tenderness, and self-effacement. Layering sync-sound with voice-over narration, Robertson was quick to cut herself off—muddle, even contradict—her own first-hand experiences. And yet her films, often sequenced around the process of image-making, remain hyper-aware of their own architecture. “I’m trying to take a pretty picture, if that’s what you mean,” she retorted when MacDonald asked about technique.

Before her death in 2012, Robertson only presented the full Five Year Diary three times: twice in Boston and once in NY. She’d envisioned a multi-modal marathon event that enveloped trusted viewers with sound, image, and childhood artifacts—the fever pitch of pathologized consciousness. In the same conversation with MacDonald, Robertson noted: “Nobody, not even the psychiatrists, want to know how horrible the stories in your head are. I have never had a psychiatrist ask me, ‘And what do the voices say to you?’ […] They think that the person who is insane and hears voices is making them up and is in some way as evil as the voices.” For Robertson, both subject and object of her camera’s gaze, birth/death visibility/refusal expression/erasure illness/wellness were always negotiated, never binary. There were the symptoms—the voices, the delusions, the manic-depression—drenched in visual/sonic techniques, and there were the material conditions—more subtly rendered—that both produced these experiences and pathologized them. Out of this paradigm, she forged a uniquely feminist mode of diary-keeping that implicated film technique with the embodied and structural nodes of gender and illness.

Robertson could never afford to print copies of her films, and so was only ever editing and projecting the increasingly worn originals. Consequently, her screenings were full of “breakdowns” she explained, in more ways than one. It’s that falling apart/piecing back together that remains the essence of her work. In Five Year Diary, “art as survival” is neither metaphor nor platitude; it’s a way to flirt, sometimes dangerously so, with her own ability to keep on living. It’s therapy, not to correct but to heal, which—as Robertson knows as well as anyone—can feel an awful lot like coming undone. —Emily Rose Apter

TRT: 78 min.
The three reels in this program are from FIVE YEAR DIARY, descriptions are by Anne Charlotte Robertson and all are Super 8 on Digital Video.
Full Program Details:

REEL 23: A BREAKDOWN (AND) AFTER THE MENTAL HOSPITAL (SEPTEMBER 1—DECEMBER 13, 1982).
dir. Anne Charlotte Robertson
1991, 26 min.

“Within are documented a paranoid manic nervous breakdown, a description of a mental hospitalization, and the subsequent recovery period. Sound is of wild tape of the breakdown, and a hidden tape-recorded psychiatric session; the second soundtrack is narration from 1991.”

REEL 80: EMILY DIED (MAY 14—SEPTEMBER 26, 1994).
dir. Anne Charlotte Robertson
1994, 27 min.

“This is Reel 80 of my Super 8mm opus Five Year Diary. It covers the period May 14 to September 26, 1994. Within is personal documentary; midway occurs the death of my 3-year-old niece Emily ; the impact of her death is explored.”

REEL 81: MOURNING EMILY (SEPTEMBER 27, 1994—January 29, 1995).
dir. Anne Charlotte Robertson
1994, 25 min.

Anne Charlotte Robertson continues to mourn Emily’s death.

HEIKO’S WORLD
Dir. Dominik Galizia, 2021.
Germany. 118 min.
In German.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2 – 5PM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 10 – 5PM
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 27 – 7:30PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 30 – 7:30PM

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Heiko is a simple man living in Berlin. He eats currywurst, he sees his friends at the pub and he lives with his mother Belinda. When Belinda is suddenly diagnosed with a rare condition of the cornea, Heiko must turn to the only way he knows to make a quick buck; playing electronic darts for money. He quickly realizes that the more he drinks, the better he is at darts. Is he bound for glory or alcoholism? Find out this November as we proudly present Dominik Galizia’s Heiko’s World.

Based on a web series created by director Dominik Galizia and star Martin Rohde, this film was released in 2021 with criminally little overseas attention. It’s time to fix that. In anticipation of Rohde and Galizia’s newest film, Rock N Roll Ringo, we would like to shine a light on this charming modern comedy. Crack open a cold one and get acquainted with your new comfort movie.

This November, Spectacle is pleased to present a selection of films and a groundbreaking video made by and with Susan Kleckner, a pioneering filmmaker, photographer, performance artist, activist, and lifelong New Yorker who helped to define the Feminist Arts Movement.

Across disciplines, Kleckner worked individually and within groups to make art to empower the voices of women and minorities and as a tool for social progress. She was essential in uniting Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) with Feminists in the Arts in 1969, and in 1970 she became a founder of the Women’s Interart Center, a trailblazing alternative space that provided exhibition and training for women in a wide range of media arts. Over the next decade, she experienced her most fruitful period of cinematic production, making vital contributions to collective work alongside a handful of self-directed projects, which span documentary, fiction, experimental, and hybrid modes. Though this series just scratches the surface of her prolific output as a visual artist, it highlights the key moving image-based work from this stretch, shown together for the very first time.

Join us on Sunday, November 3^rd for a special collection of Kleckner’s short films followed by ANOTHER LOOK (AT THE MIAMI CONVENTION), a timely, yet forgotten artifact of feminist media activism that intervenes into the 1972 Democratic National Convention. The evening will conclude with a Q&A with William Kaizen, author of Against Immediacy: Video Art and Media Populism.

THREE LIVES
dir. Susan Kleckner, Louva Irvine, Robin Mide, & Kate Millett, 1971.
United States, 70 min.
In English.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1 – 5:00PM
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7 – 7:30PM
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22 – 10PM
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 27 – 10PM

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“Born of the then thriving personal-is-political impulse, Three Lives records a specific moment in another era yet still remains vital and absorbing today.” – Melissa Anderson, Artforum

The first feature length film produced by an all-female crew, THREE LIVES is a landmark documentary that explores the distinctive experiences of three “ordinary” white women living in America. The subjects include Kate Millet’s younger sister, Mallory Millett-Jones, who recently left her husband for an independent lifestyle in New York City; Lillian Shreve, a middle-aged chemist married contently for twenty-three years; and Robin Mide, a twenty-one-year-old queer artist and activist from Rockaway, Queens. Through candid interviews shot on grainy 16mm film stock, the film evokes solidarity between their varied backgrounds and effectively suggests that the most intimate, everyday experiences are infused with resounding political implications. Often credited solely to Millett, whose seminal text Sexual Politics funded part of its production, THREE LIVES is, in fact, a work of collective filmmaking. As co-director of the film and co-founder of the Women’s Liberation Cinema, Susan Kleckner’s intersectional, careful touch is essential to its lasting resonance.

ANOTHER LOOK (AT THE MIAMI CONVENTION)
Dir. Women’s Video News Service, 1972.
United States, 56 min.
In English.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 3 – 7:30PM (W/Q&A)
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8 – 5:00PM
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 12 – 10PM
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22 – MIDNIGHT

SPECIAL EVENT (11/3) TICKETS 

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Shortly after THREE LIVES, Kleckner joined another team of feminist filmmakers to produce the first all-woman broadcast television production, ANOTHER LOOK (AT THE MIAMI CONVENTION). Made by the Women’s Video News Service (WVNS), which included Kleckner, Wendy Appel, Pat de Pew, Mary Feldbauer, Carolyn Kreski, and Rita Ogden, ANOTHER LOOK covers the 1972 Democratic National Convention and the presidential candidacy of Shirley Chisholm, the first African American and the first woman to run for the Democratic nomination. Employing reflexive reportage that calls attention to their role in the video’s construction (itself a political statement), Kleckner and the crew center the voices most marginalized by mainstream coverage. Queer, Black, indigenous, and working-class perspectives are featured prominently alongside major figures of the women’s rights movement, such as Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Bella Abzug, as well as the era’s counter cultural milieu. Almost entirely forgotten and never screened in a traditional context, this rare document belongs in the canon of great works of media activism and, somewhat painfully, is as radical today as it was in 1972.

SHORTS PROGRAM
Dir. Susan Kleckner, 1973-1981.
United States, 65 min.
In English.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 3 – 5:00PM 

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Following her integral role in the collective efforts of THREE LIVES and ANOTHER LOOK, Kleckner began work on her first self-directed project, BIRTH FILM. A moving and intensely intimate verité documentary about a live, at-home birth, the film drew controversy upon its initial premier at the Whitney Museum in 1973, where viewers were reported to have become sick due to its graphic content. Hurt by this shortsighted reception, Kleckner took several years off from filmmaking. She returned with a string of remarkable 16mm shorts, represented in this program by AMAZING GRACE, BAG LADY FILM, and PIERRE FILM. Virtually impossible to see individually, let alone together, each work further displays her lifelong investments in performance, social justice, women’s rights, and alternative living.

AMAZING GRACE
Dir. Susan Kleckner, 1981.
United States, 4min.
In English.

Scene one of an unfinished project, AMAZING GRACE captures the quotidian routine of a homeless woman (prolific film and stage actress, Lynne Thigpen) as she awakes inside of a train car. With the titular tune as soundtrack, it questions the notion of “freedom” and who can claim it.

BAG LADY FILM
Dir. Susan Kleckner, 1976.
United States, 16min.
In English.

Adapting the aesthetics of cinema’s silent era, this short is a thematic precursor to AMAZING GRACE that follows a vagabond woman (Dale Soules) living on the fringes of society. The subject revels in a range of disobedient behavior and, without romanticization, points to how one might live outside of mainstream structures.

PIERRE FILM
Dir. Susan Kleckner, 1977.
United States, 13min.
In English.

An abstract evocation of rhythm and movement conveyed through superimposed ebbing tides, classical string performances, and an impassioned political speech.

BIRTH FILM
Dir. Susan Kleckner, 1973.
United States, 33min.
In English.

At once a statement on bodily autonomy and a counter to the abhorrent state of the American medical system, BIRTH FILM captures a woman, Kirstin Booth Glen, giving birth to a son in her home in New York City. Kleckner applies a tense, yet sensitive form to the film’s extended, explicit live-birth sequence, which is introduced by socially incisive commentary from Kirstin and her husband, Jeffrey. The Glens, both lawyers who fight for reproductive rights, view their decision to forgo a hospital to be as political as it is personal.

Special thanks to Lucie Bonvin (Documentaire sur grand écran), Jesse Pires (Lightbox Film Center), Bill Kaizen (UMass Amherst), Jeremy Smith (UMass Amherst), Sonya Milton, Linda Cummings, Paula Allen, and Susan Jahoda. 

CHARON / THE JAR
dir. Bruce Toscano, 1984
USA. 88 min.
In English.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6 – 10PM
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21 – 10PM
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 25 – 10PM

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THE JAR … it blows the lid off of terror!

A Motorist who comes upon an auto accident finds a bottle at the scene. The bottle contains a demon who proceeds to possess him.

For years only available in a terribly degraded and cropped pan-and-scan edit that made the visuals near indecipherable, THE JAR was regarded (if at all) as a complete failure, an artifact reserved for MST3K-riffing and not much else.

Thanks to a new remaster from TerrorVision, THE JAR can finally be seen for the unnerving art-house horror freakout it is, more than deserving of its own cult following. Despite its budgetary limitations, it manages to pull off a uniquely dreamlike and unsettling tone, falling somewhere between ERASERHEAD and JACOB’S LADDER.