While the written word has been a constant since its advent, the technology used to create and display it has been in almost constant flux. What started as a slow evolution through stone and pen, exploded into moveable type; and has only increased in speed and innovation for the past 100 years. The lifespan of each technology grows shorter and shorter with every subsequent generation. Setting metal type by hand gives way to the Linotype and Monotype machines, which give way to photo type which gives way to Postscript and IKARUS, which become OpenType, which evolves into Variable Fonts, which gives way to… Well, where do we find ourselves now? This June—with AI getting more and more capable of replacing designers every new day—Spectacle, with support from Order Type Foundry, takes a moment to pause and look back at films highlighting typeface designers and lettering artists, the technologies of the past, and how they dealt (or didn’t deal) with the innovations of their time.

FINAL MARKS: THE ART OF THE CARVED LETTER
Dirs. Frank Muhly Jr. & Peter O’Neill, 1979
United States. 49 min
In English

TUESDAY, JUNE 6 – 7:30 PM   [ Buy Tickets ]
THURSDAY, JUNE 15 – 7:30 PM with Filmmaker Q&A, this event is $10   [ Buy Tickets ]
THURSDAY, JUNE 22 – 10 PM   [ Buy Tickets ]

FINAL MARKS documents the work of the John Stevens Shop in Newport, Rhode Island. Founded in 1705 by the eponymous English immigrant, the shop was run by his family for over 220 years until it was purchased by calligrapher John Howard Benson in the 1920s. It remains within the Benson family to this day. By the time the documentary was filmed in the late 1970’s, Benson’s son John Everett Benson, or “Fud”, ran the shop with his associates: John Hegnauer and Brooke Roberts; all of whom appear notably young and hip in bell-bottom jeans and sneakers. It should be noted that even by this point, carving letters into stone was already considered a dying art; replaced on graves and buildings by industrial techniques such as sandblasting, and pneumatic chisels.

The filmmakers were given complete access to the shop for over two years, allowing them to film intimate moments with the artisans in their day-to-day lives. As the subjects correspond with clients, source stone for the shop, and travel to Washington D.C. for an on-site commission adorning the then incomplete I.M. Pei extension of the National Gallery, directors Muhly and O’Neill take a subtle and restrained approach to capturing the shop’s endeavors; creating a film that is as meditative and contemplative as its subjects. The poised restraint of the camera’s movements is an equal match to the elegance of Benson’s lettering.

Fud Benson and Hegnauer act as the primary narrators of the film, musing about their motivations, beliefs, and ideologies as they relate to the practice and vocation of carving letters. For Benson and his team, cutting the stone is only a small part of the endeavor; designing the letterforms and their collective layout is the real challenge. Benson visits the Common Burial Ground in Newport, located just up the street from the shop, to investigate the stonework of those who came before him. He comments on his father’s early carving, his influences, and his abilities as a letterer and letter cutter; primarily focusing on how he used the ancient roman brush style to inform, and give personality to his stone cutting.

Screening with:
CONVERSATIONS WITH PAUL RAND
Dir. Preston McClanahan, 1997
United States. 26 min
In English

Director Preston McClanahan is joined by FINAL MARKS filmmaker Peter O’Neill—acting as cinematographer—to document this conversation with famed graphic designer Paul Rand. Shot on 16mm in the designer’s Weston, Connecticut home, the film finds Rand informally discussing such topics as design, art, modernism, and aesthetics. Rand is congenial but at times stiff and codgerly; old and set in his ways. O’Neill’s camera work is just as sharp as it was in FINAL MARKS, elevating this short film and Rand’s work. Fun fact: the film’s titles are co-credited to prolific type designer, and then student, Cyrus Highsmith.

An Evening with Doug Wilson and the PRINTING FILMS Archive

A look at the methods of type creation through the ages and the growing pains of an industry and its workers as the technology changes generationally. With the specter of AI looming over today’s designers, it is interesting to look back at how working class and union typographers dealt with the transition of metal type to photographic processes. A selection of three films from the Printing Films Archive will showcase the historical methods of creating movable type (TYPE SPEAKS), how these methods were radically transformed in the 60s and 70s as new technology displaced the old (FROM HOT METAL TO COLD TYPE), and how workers and union members were affected by and dealt with this transition (FAREWELL ETAOIN SHRDLU).

Spectacle will be joined by Printing Films’s purveyor, Doug Wilson, who will be in attendance to commentate, give context to the films and answer audience questions. Doug Wilson is a writer, product designer and filmmaker based in Denver, Colorado. Wilson directed the 2012 feature-length documentary LINOTYPE: THE FILM which centers around the eponymous typecasting machine, its history, and its demise.

SUNDAY, JUNE 18 – 7:30 PM, One night only, this event is $10   [ Buy Tickets ]

Run of show:

1. TYPE SPEAKS
Dir. Unknown, American Type Founders Company, 1949
United States. 25 min
In English

Narrated by NBC radio personality Ben Grauer, this ATF-produced film is an in-depth and accessible showcase of how type is made from start to finish. From the design & pattern making, to the punch & matrices, to—ultimately—moveable type and the printed word. This film features Warren Chapell’s calligraphic sans serif typeface design, Lydian.

2. FROM HOT METAL TO COLD TYPE
Dir. Unknown, International Typographic Union, c. 1965
United States. 24 min
In English

Created by the International Typographic Union in the mid sixties to cajole union members into learning the new photographic methods of typesetting, this film begins with an explanation of the hot-metal process, then goes on to showcase the many photographic techniques used in setting type; from typesetting via paste-ups, to making plates, to developing negatives. The film follows each new process to the ultimate/inevitable printed conclusion.

3. FAREWELL ETAOIN SHRDLU
Dir. David Loeb Weiss, 1978
United States. 29 min
In English

Narrated by Carl Schlesinger, and named after the keyboard arrangement of the Linotype machine (Etaoin Shrdlu being the Qwerty of the pre-desktop computer age), this film documents the final day of hot metal typesetting within the composing room of the New York Times (Sunday, July 1st, 1978). The Linotype and Ludlow machines being used will be “by morning, relics of the past”. The film gives a detailed account of how a Linotype machine operates, its components, and how it is used by a trained compositor. Followed by the rest of the newspaper making process, including layout, proofing, mold making, and printing; all seen only minutes before deadline. One older staff member decides to make the night his last, retiring alongside the Linotype machine so as to avoid having to learn any of the new computerized photographic methods, which are detailed in the latter part of the film.

In a monologue at the end of the film, Schlesinger takes solace in the fact that, while these new computer processes have replaced what he once knew, there are still human hands, eyes, and minds behind them. If he only knew what was to come.

SYSTEMATICALLY SLOPPY: BRAM DE DOES, TYPE DESIGNER AND TYPOGRAPHER
(SYSTEMATISCH SLORDIG: BRAM DE DOES, LETTERONTWERPER EN TYPOGRAAF)
Dir. Coraline Korevaar, 2003
Netherlands. 53 min
In Dutch with English subtitles

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 7 – 7:30 PM   [ cancelled due to weather ]
SUNDAY, JUNE 18 – 5 PM, featuring post-film discussion with Mathieu Lommen, Erik van Blokland, and Hannes Famira. This event is $10   [ Buy Tickets ]
SATURDAY, JUNE 24 – 3 PM   [ Buy Tickets ]

Amongst type designers, at least according to the writer, Bram de Does is legendary. A perfectionist obsessed with precision, his legacy and influence far outpace his production—creating only two typefaces in his lifetime. The quality of his types are so highly regarded that he is considered one of the greatest to ever do it. S-tier. SYSTEMATICALLY SLOPPY stars a large cast of Bram’s colleagues and contemporaries, as well as the man himself, in a discussion of his career, his work, his nature, and the nature of work itself. The film features interviews with prominent members of the Dutch type design community, like the late Gerard Unger, both Gerrit and Peter Matthias Noordzij, Mathieu Lommen, a few Enschedés, Jost Hochuli, and more.

The documentary, like Bram, is direct and workmanlike, and features a soundtrack of Bram’s own violin playing. It details Brams early life and career before type design: as an aspiring musician, and a graphic & a book designer for the Joh. Enschedé printing and foundry operation, where he grew to detest life in middle management. The second act of the film tells the origins of Bram’s two masterful typeface designs, Trinité and Lexicon. For a man so good at something, between both book design and type design, it’s wonderfully comforting to listen to him describe how much he loathed it. How much he would rather enjoy life, play music, and farm the land, than have to deal with bosses and Work with a capital W. Bram is mindnumblingly and unfuckwithably talented, but still feels tied to the job, because of a need for income, and is just as alienated as the rest of us.

Spectacle will be joined virtually by Mathieu Lommen and Erik van Blokland for a discussion with Hannes Famira following the film on Sunday June 18th. Lommen is a design historian and a curator of Graphic Design at the Allard Pierson museum of the University of Amsterdam. In addition to appearing on screen in the film, he initiated and edited “Bram de Does: typographer & type designer” in 2003, the first substantial publication devoted to De Does’s life and work. Erik van Blokland is a Dutch type designer, tool developer, and educator. He is the head of the TypeMedia masters program at the Royal Academy of Art, in The Hague, and sells original typefaces through his own LettError studio as well as through foundries like House Industries and Commercial Type. Hannes Famira is a type designer and filmmaker. He is the lead instructor at the Type@Cooper program at Cooper Union, and releases typefaces under his own name through Type Network.

Screening with:
THE MAKING OF A RENAISSANCE BOOK
Pr. Dana Atchley, 1969
Belgium, United States. 21 min
In English

Shot entirely on location at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, this short film details the complete process of carving punches, striking and justifying matrices, casting type, and printing text, all of which is based on the writings of Christophe Plantin himself. Special thanks to Book Arts Press and the Rare Book School.

Series sponsored by:

SLOPPY JANE PRESENTS: ‘MADISON’ THE COMPLETE VISUAL ALBUM
dir. Mika Lungulov-Klotz, 2023
United States. 45 mins.
In English.

ONE NIGHT ONLY!

FRIDAY, MAY 19 – 7:30 PM

Q&A to follow with Mika Lungulov-Klotz + Haley Dahl!

GET YOUR TICKETS!

Spectacle is thrilled to premiere Sloppy Jane’s ‘Madison’ The Complete Visual Album.

In 2021, Brooklyn-based band Sloppy Jane released their album, “Madison” via Saddest Factory Records. The album is a testament to unrequited love, and was recorded entirely in a natural cave with 21 musicians.

From the project’s conception, director Mika Lungulov-Klotz and bandleader Haley Dahl dreamed of collaborating on a visual component to carry the listener through the album in its entirety. This visual narrative been shot, edited, and archived over years— some videos were even made at the same time as the album was being recorded in 2019.

This series of interconnected music videos is a surreal kaleidoscope of the Sloppy Jane cinematic universe, set in a world where everything that has ever happened is happening forever, and everyone gets to play every part. Pay attention to the outfits, the fingernails, and the color blue.

(Recommended prior viewing: the music videos for Sloppy Jane’s previous album, Willow, in track list order)

SUNDAY, APRIL 30 – 7:30 PM

ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Suggested donation $10

The year was not quite 1968, and Chris Marker went to record the strike that had occupied a French textile factory in Besançon. His eventual documentary BE SEEING YOU dissatisfied some of the unionists involved, so Marker organized workshops in filmmaking basics, loaning out equipment to workers. The response-movie CLASS OF STRUGGLE shows them collectively making itself, editing footage beneath this banner: Cinema is not magic; it is a technique and a science, a technique born from science and put in service of a will: the will of workers to liberate themselves.

Few films get assembled by hand any longer. The spectacle of Hollywood is mostly the drudgery of visual-effects shops, and thousands of the unionized projectionists who once screened such movies have been replaced by encrypted DCP files. The Freelance Solidarity Project was founded in 2018 by digital media workers, another industry that lives off exploiting precarious labor. Now a division of the National Writers Union, it campaigns alongside editorial staff and street vendors alike to raise wages for all.

In Michèle Rosier’s 1976 film MON COEUR EST ROUGE, a Parisian marketer starts interviewing other women about makeup, but “drop the skincare routine” eventually segues to feminist sociology, the way solidarity can emerge through a meaningful glance. Following this screening of MON COEUR EST ROUGE, writer Chris Randle, a member of FSP’s steering committee, will discuss the cinematic labor movement with projectionists Benji and Lily Sarosi. You can’t eat prestige, yet some venerable arthouse theaters in New York City pay their staff as little as $15 per hour. If there is a future for that public cinema experience, how can we make it a truly collective one? “What is beautiful is not what is written in the tabloids,” one of the Besançon strikers said. “It’s what the working class does. Isn’t that culture?”

MON CŒUR EST ROUGE
(MY HEART IS RED)
dir. Michèle Rosier, 1976
110 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

MON CŒUR EST ROUGE stars Françoise Lebrun as Clara, a market research analyst hired by a big cosmetics company to interview women from different walks of life about their makeup-purchasing habits. (Rosier’s original treatment for the film put it like this: “What began as research for better ways to lie to women becomes a quest for truths only women can reveal.”) The process sees her probing questions of femininity in a Paris that’s modernizing at a rapid rate; while Clara strikes up a spur-of-the-moment romance along the way, much of the film concerns people’s embrace of (and resistance to) the new freedoms of the Sixties and Seventies. MON CŒUR EST ROUGE is a bruisingly funny cross-examination of second wave feminism and its discontents – ending in an extraordinary finale at a “Women’s Fair”, with a murderer’s row of Rosier’s collaborators playing luminaries such as Freud, Sartre, Aristotle, Marx and Shakespeare in drag – provoking dreams of an alternative history away from masculine supremacy. Screening with brand-new English subtitles translated by Claudia Eve Beauchesne.

PURA SANGRE
(PURE BLOOD)
dir. Luis Ospina, 1982
98 min. Colombia.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

ONE NIGHT ONLY!

THURSDAY, MAY 11 – 7:30 PM + 10 PM, followed by a discussion with actress and art director Karen Lamassonne, moderated by writer Steve Macfarlane

GET YOUR TICKETS!

In partnership with the Latin American Film Center (LAFC) as part of their Third Cinema series, Spectacle is thrilled to reprise the late Colombian maverick Luis Ospina’s groundbreaking debut feature PURA SANGRE (“pure blood”), followed by a conversation with actress, painter and art director Karen Lamassonne.

The first feature film produced by the storied Grupo de Cali – named for their hometown – PURA SANGRE follows a trio of health aides to a dying sugar magnate named Don Roberto who find themselves blackmailed into abducting and murdering children for the purposes of keeping him alive, one blood transfusion at a time. As writer Andres Caicedo referred to Cali as “a city that doesn’t open its doors to desperate men”, Ospina’s careful eye registers the mercenaries’ dispassionate crimes with surreal casualness. Filmmaker Carlos Mayolo (CARNE Y TU CARNE) stars as one of Don Roberto’s three contract killers, giving deadpan casualness to a day’s work committing one atrocity after another.

A cinephilic work par excellence, PURA SANGRE invites metatextual scrutiny across each of its cool-registered plotlines, as Don Roberto watches JOHNNY GUITAR and CITIZEN KANE from his deathbed. The conspiracy at its heart invites any number of analogies: in interviews Mayolo and Ospina both discussed the “monster of Mangones” terrorizing Cali growing up, a string of disappearances and murders of young boys that haunted a generation of neighborhood kids. Contemporaneously, Don Roberto’s empire finds itself in hock to sleazy drug dealers, widening the scope of PURA SANGRE’s design of tragedy. Ospina’s vision of evil can barely even be called “satiric” but nonetheless is, cutting both backwards and forwards in history.

“I can’t be objective about PURA SANGRE. I did the storyboards, I have this very tight bond with it. I don’t see its characters as horrible people, necessarily, but the story is indeed horrible. The movie is not bloody, because the blood is all contained in hypodermic needles, in bags. It was also a film financed by the government, so in a way it’s a reflection of them, an image they are exporting of Colombia, and it’s not great. But a lot of the film is based on incidents that really happened, even though it’s fiction. It is so much more real than a vampire film—but it’s also the traditional story of the vampire, who sucks the blood of the poor people. It’s also very Colombian. If an Argentine sees it, they’ll know it’s Colombian. And for a lot of people that was terrible. The story is especially awful for people who have children. I didn’t have children then; I have a son now. I didn’t show him PURA SANGRE until he had graduated high school, and he tells me he thought that was good.” – Karen Lamassonne

KAREN LAMASSONNE is a painter and video artist, born in New York in 1954 to a Colombian mother and Argentine father. and raised in a multi-cultural and multi-lingual environment, Lamassonne has lived and worked in the United States, Colombia, France, Germany and Italy. Her work is always autoreferential; a response to her environment and emotions in which eroticism is a silent participant. She began her artistic activities in Bogotá in 1974, where she forged relationships with local artists and galleries which stimulated her production. During the 1980´s she lived in Cali, a defining period for her career, where she bonded with the dynamic group of artists and filmmakers known as “The Grupo de Cali”. During this period she combined her cinematographic experience to create works in photography and video. At the same time she complemented her painting with Art Direction, Costume Design, Editing and Acting in different national and international productions. Her experience and drive have led to a multifaceted creative output across the disciplines of fine arts, design, film, theater and music. She lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.

STEVE MACFARLANE is a filmmaker, programmer and writer based in Ridgewood, NY. He is an active volunteer at Spectacle, where he has curated screenings for over ten years, and has also presented movies at MoMA, the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture (NMAAHC), Anthology Film Archives and other institutions. He has been at work on a monograph about Nancy Meyers since 2018.

Organized in collaboration with the Latin American Film Center, sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.