This February, Spectacle is thrilled to host two consecutive evenings with Lithuanian filmmaker ROMAS ZABARAUSKAS, self-described enfant terrible of the burgeoning scene of Baltic LGBTQ cinema and longtime friend of 124 S. 3rd Street.
THE LAWYER
(ADVOKATAS)
dir. Romas Zabarauskas, 2020
97 mins. Lithuania.
In Lithuanian with English subtitles.
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 1 – 7:30PM with filmmaker Q+A ONE NIGHT ONLY!
Zabarauskas’ most recent feature THE LAWYER follows a corporate attorney in Belgrade named Marius (Eimutis Kvosciauskas) who becomes obsessed with a Syrian refugee (and sex-cam worker) named Ali (Dogac Yildiz). But what initially seems like an exoticized (if not predatory) fixation gives way to a muted and complex rumination on inequality within inequalities. Ali refuses to become a martyr of bourgeois respectability politics for Marius, and their encounter forces the more bourgeois man to confront the limitations of his own privileged bubble – building to a surprising third act that manages to refuse both miserablism and “love conquers all” sentimentality. Evenly sensual and unsentimental, THE LAWYER is a shrewd depiction of the contradictions inherent in a time of “human rights” for some but not all, and the hypocrisy that comes when mores around homosexuality – at least, in major urban areas – are allegedly shifting for the better.
YOU CAN’T ESCAPE LITHUANIA
(NUO LIETUVOS NEPABEGSI)
dir. Romas Zabarauskas, 2016
80 mins. Lithuania.
In Lithuanian with English subtitles.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2 – 7:30PM with filmmaker Q+A ONE NIGHT ONLY!
Romas Zabarauskas’ YOU CAN’T ESCAPE LITHUANIA is a shapeshifting, whiplash-inducing road movie which may seem initially autobiographical (the main character is an enfant terrible LGBTQ filmmaker from Lithuania named Romas) but soon gives way to a metaphysical nesting doll of narratives and counternarratives. Critically feted but not yet a financial success, Romas (Denisas Kolomyckis) agrees to help his star actress Indre (Irina Lavrinovic) escape Lithuania after she kills her mother (in what appears to be self-defense) following an argument over her inheritance. Romas’ boyfriend Carlos (Adrian Escobar) is opposed to the plan, but doesn’t speak the language shared by Romas and Indre, and so tensions mount – worsened by the emergence of what appears to be a sexuality-crossing love triangle. Deadpan and hilarious, YOU CAN’T ESCAPE LITHUANIA evokes Godard’s anti-cinema of the late 1960s, Chuck Jones’ DUCK AMUCK or Wojciech Has’ classic THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT.
screens with
PORNO MELODRAMA
dir. Romas Zabarauskas, 2011
32 mins. Lithuania.
In Lithuania with English subtitles.
Akvilė and Jonas were a couple until Jonas fell in love with a man. But Akvilė cannot forget her lover and continues to appear in porn films, even without him. She begs her childhood sweetheart to make one more film with her. Jonas agrees – but only so that he can leave the country with his lover.
ROMAS ZABARAUSKAS is an inspiring queer success from the New East, from the Berlinale debut of his short PORNO MELODRAMA (2011) to his third feature THE LAWYER (2020) – selected for 30+ festivals, including 7 opening, centerpiece or closing ceremonies. These films introduced diversity to Lithuanian screens, delivering genre-bending films and reflecting on the (im)possibility of meaningful political action. Based in Vilnius with his fiancé Kornelijus, Romas gives back to the LGBT+ community through his activism, recognized with the Harvey Milk Foundation’s LGBTQ Champion Award in 2021. He is currently mid-production on his fourth feature, slated for release in 2024.
Punks. Rockstars. Singer-songwriters. All of these have gotten their due at ROCKUARY. But what about the composer, that sometimes gentle, sometimes overcharged musical force armed with maniacal meticulousness and creative wizardry?
This ROCKUARY, Spectacle presents THE COMPOSERS CYCLE, a series devoted to brilliant musical tinkerers. Dorian Supin’s ARVO PÄRT — AND THEN CAME THE MORNING AND THE EVENING (1990) shows the eponymous composer hard at work, doubly troubled by the political struggles in his native Estonia and perceived inability to honor the Divine with his compositions. Filmmakers Alfi Sinniger, Duncan Ward, and Gabriella Cardazzo, all refract the famed Brian Eno’s personality through their own cinematic language, producing unique portraits that tenderly reveal his mystic manner of music-making. ENO (1973) and BRIAN ENO: IMAGINARY LANDSCAPES (1989) both show the self-proclaimed “synthesist” at different points in his musical career, testifying to his energized verve to experiment. Andrés Duque, conversely, films composer Oleg Nikolaevich Karavaichuk reminiscing on his legacy as he is about to turn 90 in OLEG AND THE RARE ARTS (2016). And Elizabeth Lennard’s TOKYO MELODY: A FILM ABOUT RYUICHI SAKAMOTO (1985) offers a look at the renown composer piecing together his first solo album, commenting on his years with Yellow Magic Orchestra, and pondering over where his career will take him next. With all its variants, THE COMPOSERS CYCLE attests to histories of continued experimentation with music, showcasing personalities on the brink of artistic breakthroughs, or reflecting on their brilliant careers.
ARVO PÄRT: AND THEN CAME THE MORNING AND THE EVENING
dir. Dorian Supin, 1990
61 mins, Estonia, Finland
In German, Russian and Estonian with English subtitles.
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 5 – 5:00 PM FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10 – 10:00 PM WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 15 – 10:00 PM FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24 – 10:00 PM
In this curious portrait of the famed Estonian composer, documentarian Dorian Supin spins Arvo Pärt’s melancholy musings into a treatise bearing transcendental weight that shares more in common with the films of Andrei Tarkovsky than your average music documentary. As Pärt waxes poetic on everything from churches to peeling potatoes, intercut scenes of nature reveal the sublime power of his art: one that seduces the listener toward divine trance.
Shot during the turbulent Estonian Revolution, Supin also uses his documentary as a way for Pärt to impart his humanist philosophy before the camera. He does so begrudgingly, as though defeated. And when he can’t find the words to comment on the ills of the world, as well as his own sense of political ineffectuality, he lays his head on his piano and plays. From here spring the film’s most touching moments, with his compositions performing as both a palliative from politics and evidence to the conditions that inspire it.
BRIAN ENO: IMAGINARY LANDSCAPES
dirs. Duncan Ward & Gabriella Cardazzo, 1989
41 mins, United Kingdom
In English
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 15 – 7:30 PM SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19 – 5:00 PM w/ Q&A (This event is $10) SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 25 – 10:00 PM TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28 – 7:30 PM
In Duncan Ward and Gabriella Cardazzo’s BRIAN ENO: IMAGINARY LANDSCAPES, the composer appears more reserved than he was in his younger years. Past his rock-phase, Eno is still seen experimenting with synthesizers and reflecting on his ritualistic manner of composing. As Eno muses on music, directors Ward and Cardazzo play with dreamy montages of cityscapes and desert landscapes that complement his words. Between the synthesist’s words and the directors’ images, a riveting collage coalesces to the tunes of the master composer.
screening with
ENO
dir. Alfi Sinniger, 1973
24 mins, United Kingdom
In English
ENO is Brian Eno at his most scintillating: a rock-star in Roxy get-up aspiring to shake up the genre’s foundations. Alfi Sinniger presents his eponymous subject candidly. Eno is shown meticulously toying with synthesizers, scribbling in his many notebooks, and furiously looking to come up with the next musical concoction that he believes will change the world. Alfi Sinniger’s ENO is a far cry from more recent documentaries on the famed composer, capturing him at the precipice of a fabulous career to come, high-strung on all the ideas that would soon spill from his mind.
OLEG AND THE RARE ARTS
(Oleg y las raras artes)
dir. Andrés Duque, 2016
70 mins, Spain
In Russian with English subtitles
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 7 – 7:30 PM SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 12 – 5:00 PM w/ Q&A (This event is $10) SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19 – 7:30 PM SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 25 – 7:30 PM
Having outlived his peers and disgruntled by the recent history of musicianship in Russia, Oleg Nikolaevich Karavaichuk bears his soul on screen. In a series of interviews with director Andrés Duque, Karavaichuk denounces Russian society’s diminishing respect for cultural affairs and the lack of innovation in his field.
Walking around his sylvan neighborhood on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, Karavaichuk also remarks on what being an artist was under Stalinism and recalls living among like-minded artists such as Andrei Tarkovsky. Duque’s small portrait of one of Russia’s most idiosyncratic musicians produces a larger commentary on the de-evolution of art in contemporary society, and the role power-hungry politicians play in sidelining experiments in expression.
TOKYO MELODY: A FILM ABOUT RYUICHI SAKAMOTO
dir. Elizabeth Lennard, 1985
62 mins, France and Japan
In Japanese, English and French with English subtitles
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 5 – 7:30 PM MONDAY, FEBRUARY 13 – 10:00 PM TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21 – 7:30 PM SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 25 – 5:00 PM w/ Q&A (This event is $10)
In TOKYO MELODY: A FILM ABOUT RYUICHI SAKAMOTO, the eponymous composer is seen at the height of his popularity, performing alongside Yellow Magic Orchestra across Japan, and investing his remaining time toward developing his solo compositions. Filmmaker Elizabeth Lennard captures Sakamoto at his most stylish and sedulous; Sakamoto is seen discussing his aesthetic interests, understanding of time, and the influence new technologies will have on the future music production.
During one of the film’s most touching sequences, the composer is filmed performing a piano duet with his wife Akiko Yano, aka “Japan’s Kate Bush.” In the afterglow of an early popular music career and moving toward establishing himself as a globally renowned composer, Sakamoto glints with genius throughout Lennard’s taut documentary. As a time-capsule of 1980s Japan, and Sakamoto’s role in its music scene, TOKYO MELODY offers a brilliant mix of insightful reveries, arresting sights, and fabulously rendered scenes from everyday life.
Special thanks to Courtney Muller, Karin Rõngelep at the Arvo Pärt Centre, Dorian Supin, Duncan Ward, Alfi Sinniger, Sarah Born at CatPics, Serrana Torres, Andrés Duque, and Elizabeth Lennard.
This ANTI-VALENTINE’S Spectacle Theater presents Shunichi Nagasaki’s HEART, BEATING IN THE DARK. In this bleak anti-romance, a couple on the lam retreats to a tumbledown apartment where their anxieties boil to sexual and violent heights. Shot on 8mm, this early work by one of Japan’s most underappreciated subversive filmmakers remains one of his most unbridled works of pure nihilism.
Swaying to its jazz soundtrack, HEART, BEATING IN THE DARK offers an improvisatory mishmash of recollections wherein the film’s leads adopt rituals of reclusiveness to cope with their reality. From this solitude, a tender vulnerability yearning to be understood makes itself known. Nagasaki, showing the wreckage of youthful souls that took too many wrong turns, generously offers mangled bits of heart to his viewers, hoping they tend to the wounds, rather than disappear to the same state of alienation.
Special thanks to Yuri Kubota at Pia Film Festival and Alexander Fee.
Better known as Scumbalina to terminally online trash film enthusiasts, Spectacle is proud to host an evening with filmmaker and artist Caroline Kopko, live and in-person. Join us on February 18th for wave after wave of analog video distortion, the first gay pharaoh alien movie star, a stroll through late night Chinatown, and the premiere of her newest piece, Active Volcano.
TAIWAN NIGHT MARKET
Dir. Caroline Kopko, 2018.
USA. 27 min.
Orange Vampires
Dir. Caroline Kopko, 2018.
USA. 4 min.
Surrender
Dir. Caroline Kopko, 2019.
USA. 12 min.
Heaven’s Hands
Dir. Caroline Kopko, Trevor Bather 2021.
USA. 15 min.
Active Volcano (premiere)
Dir. Caroline Kopko, 2022.
USA. 20-25 min.
Cinderella’s Tolerance Trailer
Dir. Caroline Kopko, 2023.
USA. ?? min.
In case you missed them the first time around, need to see them again, or want to drag your friends to their next favorite flick: join us for our annual encore of the best films and programs that screened in 2022 as voted on by our volunteers and members.
Earth, present day. With human civilization facing ever-worsening climate calamities, the captains of industry set their sights on a new planet. Soon, a secret public-private partnership is selling tickets to Mars at a premium out of reach for the majority of the population, for whom the choice is either indentured servitude in the new offworld colony or perishing in the coming cataclysm. When the world’s governments decide to speed things up by declaring war on Earth and the rabble they’re leaving behind, the planet forges a strategic alliance with an unlikely partner: an underground luddite movement. Some will join the uprising, others will become fanatical defenders of entrenched power structures, while yet others will do everything in their power to continue living exactly the same way they always have. Its star-studded cast and astronomical production values — painstakingly purloined from some of the biggest blockbusters of the past three decades — make EARTH II the most expensive climate disaster epic to be produced for no money.
Starring Keanu Reeves, Will Smith, and Matt Damon, EARTH II reminds us that no matter how far into its final death spiral our species might be, life finds a way.
THE ANTI-BANALITY UNION is an anonymous collective who recut blockbusters to uncover their latent meaning, chiseling away at them to reveal Hollywood’s shameful, disavowed desires. The collective’s first compilation film was a reaction to the jingoism surrounding the tenth anniversary of September 11th, UNCLEAR HOLOCAUST (2011), which compiled every instance of New York City being destroyed in a Hollywood movie. They followed this up with POLICE MORTALITY (2013), which revealed the suicidal internal logic of the police apparatus by taking dozens of cop movies and cutting out the “bad guys,” leaving the cops free to massacre each other. STATE OF EMERGENCE (2014) was a zombie movie with no zombies, a distillation of the entire genre’s narcissistic immunopolitics into one gory feature. Now, the ABU has set its sights on climate collapse, scouring the past four decades of disaster movies and combining them into an action-packed analysis of Hollywood’s pathological climate grief in EARTH II.
Structured as if it were the final inhale and exhale of Mother Nature from her deathbed, the carefully assembled long takes and immersive soundscapes that make up Barley’s masterful debut feature transmute shadow-blanketed trees, waterfalls and sparse signs of wildlife into haunting alien figures. With one last breath, a decaying post-human world collapses into eternal abstraction. Shot on iPhone 6 Plus.
SCOTT BARLEY is an artist-filmmaker, drone musician, writer and lecturer working between Scotland and Wales whose films (much of which are generously accessible through his website) have been exhibited over the last decade at venues such as BFI Southbank, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Venice Biennale and Telluride Film Festival. In 2018, Barley co-founded the filmmaking collective Obscuritads, and in 2021, EYE Filmmuseum permanently inducted SLEEP HAS HER HOUSE into its archive. Since 2017, Barley has been making his ambitious second feature film, THE SEA BEHIND HER HEAD, with support from the BFI and DocSociety, along with two new shorts titled THE FLESH and WITHIN WITHOUT HORIZON.
John is just an average man working as a sound technician for a New York City news station, until one day his pregnant wife is brutally murdered after witnessing the kidnapping of a young woman in broad daylight. Turning to the police for help, John soon learns that the city is overrun with crime and the police are too busy to help. Dressing as a white ninja, John takes to the streets as a sword wielding vigilante hell bent on cleaning up the streets of the city he once loved by ridding it of muggers, pickpockets, rapists, and gang members. However, in John’s quest for justice, he soon finds himself the target of every criminal in the city, including a mysterious villain known only as the Plutonium Killer. Will John survive to become the hero that New York City so desperately needs?
Originally directed by and starring martial arts actor John Liu (The Secret Rivals, Invincible Armor) in his only American production, New York Ninja was filmed entirely on 35mm in 1984, but the project was abandoned during production resulting in all original sound materials, scripts, and treatments going missing. 35 years later, Vinegar Syndrome acquired the original unedited camera negative and painstakingly constructed and completed the film. Enlisting the voice talents of genre favorites: Don “The Dragon” Wilson (Bloodfist, Whatever it Takes), Linnea Quigley (Return of the Living Dead, Nightmare Sisters), Michael Berryman (The Hills have Eyes, Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies), Vince Murdocco (Night Hunter, LA Wars), Matt Mitler (The Mutilator, Battle for the Lost Planet), Leon Isaac Kennedy (Lone Wolf McQuade, Penitentiary), Ginger Lynn Allen (The Devil’s Rejects, Vice Academy), and Cynthia Rothrock (China O’Brien, Martial Law) Vinegar Syndrome is extremely proud to present this truly one of kind film experience. Restored in 4K from the original camera elements, New York Ninja is finally available in all of its ridiculous over-the-top glory for the first time ever after spending nearly four decades in film obscurity.
After the conniving understudy of an avant-garde theater group knocks off the star actor, he finds himself in a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse with Inspector Ike, New York City’s Greatest Police Detective.
A lost “TV movie” from the 1970’s, INSPECTOR IKE is a warm-hearted satire, a celebration of detective serials, mixing visual gags, slapstick, gross food, and heartfelt emotion, featuring a rogue’s gallery of NYC’s best comedians carried out with a deadpan absurdist sensibility inspired by COLUMBO and THE NAKED GUN.
“I do no penance in order to reach Heaven. I am not very pious either. But I am here, doing the only work I can offer to God, without shame: my poetry.”
Adapted from Octavio Paz’s The Traps of Faith, I, THE WORST OF ALL stars Assumpta Serna as Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, a real-life nun in 17th century Mexico who, having been a poet, a playwright, a philosopher and a composer, is still widely considered the most prolific author of the colonial era. Bemberg’s film details Sister Juana’s persecution at the hands of the Archbishop of Mexico (Lautaro Murua), using the Spanish Inquisition as a lens by which too indict more contemporary misogyny and homophobia within Latin America.
Bemberg’s final work was misrepresented by distributors at the time of its release; vintage VHS packaging quotes the Boston Globe as follows: “Lesbian passion SEETHING behind convent walls… Engrossing, Enriching & Elegant!” Nevertheless, I, THE WORST OF ALL was Argentina’s official submission for the Best Foreign Language Film of 1991. Ripe for rediscovery, it is a lovingly detailed and introspective historical drama that rewards patient viewing in its analysis of against-the-wall feminism.
“A biopic that apprehends there is no unriddling how genius is made, only observing with delight a mind that receives all of the world’s pleasures and pains through the screen of an animating knowledge. to write is a fervid, inexplicable compulsion that need find its outlet and languishes without” —Film critic Kit Duckworth
“An erotically charged, impassioned work. Assumpta Serna is luminous!” —The Village Voice
“Charged with an ambiguity and an irony that is electrifying… Bristles with a spirit of feminism and has us pondering its inescapable implications for the Roman Catholic Church today: what of the status of its women, of freedom of expression and intellectual pursuit?” —Los Angeles Times
In 13th century France, a Dominican Friar descends upon an Edenic village on orders from the Vatican to root out heretics in the countryside. There is little evidence of such heresy to motivate the hunt, but so sayeth the good book, seek and ye shall find. News of a “healing woman” practicing homeopathic medicine (and her practice’s provenance in the local legend of a saintly greyhound) disturbs the friar, and his subsequent confrontations with the healer begin a gentle philosophical march into the nature of faith and its many means of expression. Brooding on the peripheries are struggles of power, secular and otherwise, which are dissected for their tendencies to contradict and align when convenient.
SORCERESS is the collaboration of two filmmakers; Pamela Berger and Suzanne Schiffman. Pamela Berger is a medievalist specializing in iconography. She teaches film and medieval art at Boston College, and has directed two other films, The Imported Bridegroom and Killian’s Chronicles. Suzanne Schiffman was a behind-the-scenes powerhouse of the French New Wave, serving as a script-supervisor for Godard, writing numerous films for Truffaut (Day for Night, The Last Metro, among others) and collaborating closely with Rivette throughout his career, providing the scenario for many of his films and co-directing Out 1.
JOHN AND JANE centers on the personal and professional lives of six telemarketers working in a Bombay call center. Tasked with cajoling American customers into buying things, the workers single-mindedly chase the American dream in neoliberal India. Darkly comic and deeply unnerving, the refreshingly unconventional style of the documentary blurs the line between fact and fiction and provides a sobering look at the insidious effects of globalization on culture and identity in a highly unequal world.
“Call it George A. Romero’s Bollywood OFFICE SPACE… an enraged critique of Western excess that you can dance to.” –Slant Magazine
A family’s flat tire on a barren stretch of road, with only a diner dotting the landscape, leads them to Granny, the seemingly nice old woman who runs the establishment.
Released in 2004, SKINNED DEEP plays like a surreal riff on THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE from an alternate dimension. It follows a family on a cross country road trip who stumbes into a hellish diner run by ‘the Surgeon General’ and his nightmare family, including ‘Brian’ (who has a massive cranium) and ‘Plates’ – a maniac who throws….plates – played by Warwick Davis.
Clearly crafted with a lot of love and care, SKINNED DEEP is mandatory midnight viewing for slasher fans.
A secret organization of ruthless criminals known as The Vampires haunts the streets and ballrooms of Paris. Journalist Philippe Guérande seeks to unravel their nefarious plot. At the center of it all stands the mysterious and elusive muse to the criminals, Irma Vep, brought to life with a dangerously seductive glamour by the legendary Musidora.
Released in its day as 10 “episodes” over the course of 7 months, Les Vampires is now typically shown in marathon format—a drawn-out affair clocking in at 7 hours, by turns tedious and exhilarating. Its plotting is byzantine, consisting of reversals of identity and double- and triple-crosses, straining logic in deference to the theatricality of a given scenario.
Olivier Assayas has once again renewed interest in this classic of serialized cinema with the enormously entertaining mini-series revamp of his 1996 film Irma Vep. If cinema is truly in crisis, as Assayas enthusiastically proclaims (he promises this is good news), then perhaps a means of diagnosing its illness can be found in searching the images and modes of its past that still haunt us today. Though Irma Vep’s series run is now complete, those uninitiated to Feuillade’s vision are likely eager to spend more time within this fantastical world. With this in mind, Spectacle is pleased to present a marathon screening of Les Vampires, with a soundtrack composed of original works from local artists and friends of the theater.
After obliterating a fighter jet and its pilot, a mysterious flying object stalks a nearby island and its inhabitants: a young couple manning the lighthouse, and two visiting scuba divers. The craft jams all communications, making the nearby military installation unable to offer any help or deduce the intentions of this uninvited guest. The ship interacts with these poor trapped souls like a child wielding a magnifying glass over ants, possibly not realizing the violent effects of its own actions, making escape from the island a nightmare.
Released the same year as Spielberg’s CLOSE ENCOUNTERS and another movie about wars in stars (or something like that), FOES was written and directed by a young John Coats. Coats also did the special effects and appears on screen as Larry, the lighthouse operator. While this would be his only directorial credit, Coats went on to have a prolific career as a visual effects artist with credits including: RAMBO III, AUSTIN POWERS: THE SPY WHO SHAGGED ME, UHF, and WHITE CHICKS. With that career in mind, one can look at FOES as the auteur triumph that it is: the creation of a young artist working with what they had at their disposal. An incredible achievement for such a low budget. It’s a shame that Coats did not go on to direct more features, as this is a rather remarkable freshmen effort.
Shot around the Anacapa island off the coast of southern California, the location is one of the biggest stars in this film. Coats combines stunning helicopter shots with dazzling special effects to create a vibe that is solely FOES.
“The Tricontinental cinema must infiltrate the conventional cinema and blow it up.” – Glauber Rocha
Shot on location in a highly stylized high-contrast black & white, Glauber Rocha’s debut film, BARRAVENTO (1962) tells the tragic tale of a man who tries to liberate his people from the mystical Candomblé religion, which he recognizes an oppressive tool of social and political control.
Screening in a new restoration. Special thanks to Kino Lorber.
Screening with: ENTRE O MAR E O TENDAL
Dir. Alexandre Robatto Filho, 1953
21 mins. Brazil.
In Portuguese with English subtitles.
Dental surgeon Alexandre Robatto Filho had been filming documentary shorts in Salvador since the 1930s, but it was with ENTRE O MAR E O TENDAL that he refined and developed his authentic style. Shot in the Chega Nego and Carimbamba beaches, this short portrays the daily work of a fishing community as they catch xaréu fish (Caranx hippos).
“It’s better than sex. It’s better than love.” It’s cinema! Or CINEMANIA, to be exact. Stephen Kijak and Angela Christlieb’s documentary follows five film-obsessed New Yorkers in their daily trevails as they struggle to fit as many films as possible into a single day (3-6 is the average number). From spending their unemployment checks on movie tickets to surviving off meat-heavy, constipating diets (it reduces mid-screening bathroom visits), to hoarding stacks of old program notes, CINEMANIA is as vivid a portrait of what it means to be a film-lover as you can find on screen. As the film celebrates its 20th anniversary, we’re happy to host two of the film’s subjects on 10/23 to give their differing, and sometimes contentious, opinions on the film.
“I don’t go to weddings; I don’t go to funerals; I don’t visit people in the hospital if I have a screening to go to.”
“These are not crazy people. Maladjusted and obsessed, yes, but who’s to say what normal is? I think it makes more sense to see movies all day than to golf, play video games or gamble” – Roger Ebert
“There is not sufficient evidence for the non-existence of the city of Chronopolis. On the contrary, dreams and manuscripts similarly conclude that the history of this city is a history of eternity and desire. Despite the monotony of immortality, they live in expectation; a turning point will occur during a momentary encounter with a human being. This moment is, in fact, being prepared for.”
SURVIVAL RESEARCH LABS: SELECTED VIDEO WORKS
Founded in 1978 by inventor and engineer Mark Pauline, Survival Research Laboratories bring the concept of Industrial Performance Art to its most logical and extreme end. The bodies in a typical SRL happening are not breathing, but they’re certainly alive. Weapons-grade robotics and fresh carcasses find themselves engaged in a dangerous, cacophonous marriage of flesh, fire, steel, blood, oil, and electrocution. Tonight the field is filled with smoke, cannonballs, shattered glass, and hypnotized excruciating screams. The only institution that does mechano-mortal combat better is the U.S. Military.
TUESDAY, JANUARY 10 – 7:30 PM SATURDAY, JANUARY 14 – 7:30 PM MONDAY, JANUARY 23 – 7:30 PM
This fascinating political look at a little-known chapter in women’s history tells the story of “Jane,” the Chicago-based women’s health group who performed nearly 12,000 safe illegal abortions between 1969 and 1973 with no formal medical training.
Screening with: WITH A VENGEANCE: THE FIGHT FOR REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM
dir. Lori Hiris, 1989
40 min, United States.
In English.
This urgent and timely film is a history of the struggle for reproductive freedom since the 1960s, reflecting the wider history of the contemporary women’s movement. WITH A VENGEANCE is an empowering look at the strength and breadth of the current women’s movement which asks why current battles resemble those of the 60s. Rare archival footage and interviews with early abortion rights activists, including members of Redstockings and the JANE Collective, are intercut with young women who testify to the need for multi-racial grassroots coalitions. Flo Kennedy and Byllye Avery exemplify African American women’s roles as leaders, making connections between racism, reproductive freedom and healthcare for the poor.
A deliberately-paced dark comedy/murder mystery whodunit which begins as a tale of class struggle when a group of three wealthy land-developers try pressuring a young postman and his handicapped mother (played by Chabrol’s real-life wife) to sell their family home. Filled with conspiracy, blackmail and pranks gone too far, POULET AU VINAIGRE is an indictment of the wealthy starring an eccentric ensemble cast, each with their own duplicitous intentions.
Jumping between Paris and London as it traces the lives of two young women (Pascal Ogier and Leonie Mellinger) as they muse about ghosts and memories, Ken McMullen’s Ghost Dance falls somewhere between Celine and Julie Go Boating and San Soleil in its investigation into Jacques Derrida’s phantasmagoric philosophy. Though intellectually rigorous, the film maintains a humorous tone, balancing heady ideas alongside entrancing visuals and witty dialogue.
On a dark and stormy night, while his family are away, two strangers ring George Manning’s doorbell. He probably shouldn’t have answered it, he really shouldn’t have invited them in, and he definitely shouldn’t have slept with them. Now George must fight for his life and escape their DEATH GAME…
Staring academy award-nominated actors Sondra Locke and Seymour Cassel, DEATH GAME is a home invasion fever dream about a man’s poor decision-making.
Off-screen tension between neophyte director Peter Traynor and actors Locke and Cassel added organic chaos to the scripted mania. Producer Larry Spiegel agreed, saying that “the onscreen madness of DEATH GAME was fueled by the behind-the-scenes volatility.” Traynor’s inexperience as a director frustrated the cast, with Locke writing, “whenever the director didn’t know exactly what he was doing, which was all the time, he would suggest that either Colleen or I eat something or break something.” This sentiment was likely shared with actor, Seymour Cassel, who refused to loop his lines in post-production after filming a particularly brutal food-based scene. Cinematographer David Worth ultimately lent his voice to the film by painstakingly dubbing all of Cassel’s lines himself.
Eli Roth later remade the film, KNOCK KNOCK (2015), which was executive produced by DEATH GAME director Peter Traynor and lead actors Sondra Lock and Colleen Camp.
In the miserable Northeastern Brazil, a ruthless land Baron wants to throw a poor farming community out of their land. They unite in an attempt to overthrow the Baron and win back their freedom.
One of the zaniest Brazilian musicals is directed by one of the greatest film composers of Brazilian cinema. The film played the NYFF in 1974, but has since received little attention outside Brazil, where it has become a kind of cult hit over the last 20 years. The music is wonderful, and the campy aesthetics feel like nothing out of Brazilian cinema from this period.
Rosa von Praunheim teamed up with acclaimed photographer Mariette Pathy Allen for this nuanced portrait of American trans lives and politics in the 1990s. Similar in form to ARMY OF LOVERS and the AIDS Trilogy, this film explores the various factions of the burgeoning trans rights movement, from pioneers like Leslie Feinberg and Virginia Prince to events like the activist group Transexual Menace’s protest at the first Transgender Lobby Day and the Southern Comfort and Fantasia Fair conferences. Woefully underseen and rarely screened, TRANSEXUAL MENACE is an essential piece of trans film history that’s sadly now more relevant than ever.
ROSA VON PRAUNHEIM is a German film director, author, painter and one of the most famous gay rights activists in the German-speaking world. In over 50 years, von Praunheim has made more than 150 films (short and feature-length films). His works influenced the development of LGBTQ+ rights movements worldwide. He began his career associated to the New German Cinema as a senior member of the Berlin school of underground filmmaking. He took the artistic female name Rosa von Praunheim to remind people of the pink triangle that homosexuals had to wear in Nazi concentration camps, as well as the Frankfurt neighborhood of Praunheim where he grew up. A pioneer of Queer Cinema, von Praunheim has been an activist in the gay rights movement. He was an early advocate of AIDS awareness and safer sex. His films center on gay-related themes and strong female characters, are characterized by excess and employ a campy style. They have featured such personalities as Keith Haring, Larry Kramer, Diamanda Galás, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Judith Malina, Jeff Stryker, Jayne County, Divine and a row of Warhol superstars.
A mythic portrait of Elvis Presley (Jacob Snovel) and those in his orbit—particularly his wife Priscilla (Cate Jones)—during the weeks that led to his television comeback special in 1968. Haunted by surreal visions and ridden with self-doubt, the listless King of Rock ‘n Roll quarrels with his management, friends and family on the Graceland estate before a sudden tabloid claim of a bastard son sends him on an existential road trip.
From there, writer/director Mickey Reece conjures an entrancing journey that ruminates on the enigma of celebrity, the profundity of progeny, and the anxieties of art, while Joe Cappa’s stark black and white cinematography envelops the outstanding ensemble cast in a dreamlike glow that is unlike any Elvis flick you’ve ever encountered.
To mark the 20th anniversary of Deborah Stratman’s IN ORDER NOT TO BE HERE, Spectacle presents a special screening with the generous support of Video Data Bank. Alongside the filmmaker’s unsettling nocturnal tour through suburban non-places will be four more shorts from Stratman’s inimitable body of work that showcase her deft investigations of optical technology and land use, stretching from the Canadian Yukon to the cosmos.
Stick around after the show for a remote Q&A with Deborah Stratman and Joaquín de la Puente, the show stopping “running man” of IN ORDER NOT TO BE HERE.
IN ORDER NOT TO BE HERE
dir. Deborah Stratman, 2002
USA, 35 min
In English
Composed entirely of night-time footage set in empty parking lots, stores and suburban neighborhoods, this haunting piece illuminates suburban America’s spiritual vacancies as well as its physical ones. The static banality of these spaces become more ominous as Stratman weaves in allusions to the mechanisms of police violence and surveillance that maintain the apparent safety and comfort of these environments, culminating in a breathtaking finale as an anonymous man (Joaquín de la Puente) makes an inhuman effort to escape middle-America’s panopticon.
…THESE BLAZEING STARRS!
dir. Deborah Stratman, 2011
USA, 14 min
In English
In this found-footage essay film, the mystic associations ascribed to comets in classical belief systems are juxtaposed with the empirical gaze of NASA experiments. Though the modern probing of celestial bodies strives for objectivity, Stratman’s deployment of these films defamiliarize these objects in hallucinogenic fashion to outline a long, futile tradition of human beings attempting to augur truth from the stars.
HACKED CIRCUIT
dir. Deborah Stratman, 2014
USA, 15 min
In English
Stratman returns to the subject of surveillance in this seemingly unsuspicious demystification of sound design in Hollywood filmmaking. A tracking shot that ventures from the street and into a recording studio observes a Foley artist record noises for a climactic scene in Francis Ford Copolla’s paranoid thriller THE CONVERSATION. As the invisibility of this craftsmanship takes on a parallel to the invisibility of the state’s all-seeing eye, Stratman’s camera floats back into the night and leaves us to question the unseen forces governing our daily existence.
OPTIMISM
dir. Deborah Stratman, 2018
USA/Canada, 15 min
In English
Assembled with Super 8 footage shot while working in Dawson City, Canada, this small town symphony observes the day-to-day existence of a sunless snow-swept world living in the shadow of a 19th-century mining boom. While the wealth obtained through the theft and extraction of native land from this place have left it, denizens of the town’s period-themed casino grasp for their chance to strike gold.
LAIKA
dir. Deborah Stratman, 2021
USA, 5 min
In English
The legacy of space test dogs, both pioneers and fodder for scientific progress, are paid tribute in this music video for experimental composer Olivia Block.
Deborah Stratman is an artist and filmmaker based in Chicago, Illinois whose work has been featured at venues and festivals around the world, including MoMA, Centre Pompidou, Austrian Film Museum, Sundance, CHP:DOX and TIFF ‒just to name a few. Alongside a large and diverse filmography of short films, Stratman has brought her distinctive modes of experimental documentary filmmaking into several acclaimed features, such as O’ER THE LAND (2009) and THE ILLINOIS PARABLES (2016).
This showcase would not be possible without the support of Video Data Bank. Special thanks to Bradley Eros and Benji Santos.
The second part of Dominic Gagnon’s tetralogy exploring “the cardinal points of the internet in a post-truth era,” GOING SOUTH follows its controversial predecessor, OF THE NORTH, with a wide-ranging look at the first-world’s often-fraught relationship and imagining of the global south. Culled from a wide swath of internet videos Gagnon creates an auto-ethnographic portrait of the droll, post-apocalyptic, digitally-suffused banal existence we call contemporary life. From cruise ship revelers swimming through typhoons to Grandmothers narrating walkthroughs of survival videogames to all sorts of wannabe social media presences airing their anxieties and purse contents on the internet, Gagnon slowly paints a bleak, portrait of today’s malaise without ever seeking to narrativize or directly comment upon it.
“Without leaving the comfort of his own browser, Gagnon has made a film cosmic in scope, including material that could be taken as his own gloss on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), shuttling as he does between outer space and prehistory, albeit a prehistory of a very contemporary sort. Gagnon’s collage offers us a panoramic view of a human race convinced of salvation through the self, including and especially through the optimal monetization of personal branding and validation via metrics, while its shared home dies for want of collective action, mankind unable to find common cause in preserving the environment due to an increasingly epidemic mistrust in any passed down knowledge that isn’t derived from firsthand experience. In the end you’ve only got yourself! You only know what you know, you know?
Rather than any single latitude, the imagery here locates us generally in the vague terrain of vacation, retreat, getaway—there is merriment on waterslides, bros in wetsuits barfing up the contents of beer bongs, and a nude woman well into middle age being airbrush body-painted before strolling the precincts of a Fantasy Fest street fair in Key West. Very often, though, there is trouble in paradise, with things found going terribly awry on account of either environmental catastrophe, human incompetence, or a combination of the two. A cruise ship swimming pool is seen sloshing about in choppy waters; parasailers are blown off-course by an incoming storm; airplanes are disturbed by incoherent and insurgent passengers or witnessed in the process of crash landing protocol.” —Nick Pinkerton, Reverse Shot
A former musician, Russel, with inner demons and a prosthetic hand dive into the mysterious and sinister world of his downstairs neighbor. As he searches for work in Hollywood’s underbelly. His former boss owes him money, his partner is always out of town and inaccessible, and his new downstairs neighbor, Gary keeps him awake at night with strange noises. But everything changes one evening when Gary pays Russell a visit introducing him to a sinister world of an accelerationist conspiracy.
There will be a Q&A with the filmmaker following the screening on Friday, 12/2.
BONEY PILES is a harrowing film about the impact of war on children and how it affects their psyche. Dissonant images of youth and the consequences of war are shown in striking contrast to one another. The film explores the lives of children who live near the front lines of Ukraine’s war with Russia, the Donbass region. For the children featured in the film, their lives resemble the Hunger Games—dystopian. They scavenge for pieces of metal or dig graves for subsistence while day by day they forget what their former lives were before the war started.
In partnership with Icarus Films, Spectacle is thrilled to host this tribute to the late and great documentarian Heddy Honigmann, who passed on in May of 2022. Her 1992 documentary METAL AND MELANCHOLY – about taxicab drivers in her native Peru – was a surprise Spectacle hit when we showed it in 2012; this miniature tribute reprises that film plus four others, representing a small taste of Honigmann’s overall filmmaking career, which spanned four decades and several continents. Honigmann was renown for her incisive perspective on the foibles of humankind, and her ability to seek answers to delicate questions without probing or harassing her subject-collaborators. Taken in sum, they represent a vision of nonfiction filmmaking equally as shrewd as it is compassionate. “I don’t do interviews,” Honigmann said. “I make conversation.”
METAL AND MELANCHOLY
dir. Heddy Honigmann, 1992
Peru/The Netherlands, 80 min
In Spanish w/ English subtitles
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 2 – 10 PM THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8 – 10 PM MONDAY, DECEMBER 19 – 7:30 PM
“I once read that a famous Spanish poet said that Peru was made of metal and melancholy. He was right, perhaps because pain and poverty have made us hard as the hardest of our metals, and melancholy because we are also tender and we long for better times that were lost in oblivion. “
This documentary is an offbeat “road movie” in which acclaimed documentarian Heddy Honigmann travels with, and thereby discovers the stories of, taxi drivers in Lima. In the early 1990s, in response to Peru’s inflationary economy and a government destabilized by corruption and Shining Path terrorism, many middle-class professionals used their own cars to moonlight as taxi drivers in order to weather the financial crisis. METAL AND MELANCHOLY learns how these part-time cabbies, including a teacher, a Ministry of Justice employee, a film actor, and a policeman, among others, manage to navigate through Lima’s congested, pothole-filled streets in dilapidated cars whose survival techniques are as fascinating as those of their owners.
“Offers a candid and kaleidoscopic view of the poverty-stricken metropolis through each driver-philosopher’s tale of hardship. Some of the stories are disarmingly amusing, even comical; others are poignant and sobering.” — Ted Shen, Chicago Reader
O AMOR NATURAL
dir. Heddy Honigmann, 1995
76 mins. Brazil.
In Brazilian Portuguese with English subtitles.
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 4 – 7:30 PM FRIDAY, DECEMBER 9 – 10 PM MONDAY, DECEMBER 19 – 10 PM
O AMOR NATURAL is a documentary film about the erotic poetry of one of the greatest Latin American poets of the 20th century, the Brazilian Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987).
The erotic poems of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, a household name in Brazil, remained unpublished during his lifetime, as he feared they would be deemed pornographic. In this celebration of his poetry and sensual vision, elderly residents of Rio read his poems and comment on their graphic, voluptuous imagery with tremendous candor and enthusiasm. “We’re old. We’re not dead!” interjects one reader, as memories of stolen pleasures and bittersweet melancholy unfold. Says Honigmann: “The poems sometimes functioned as a kind of corkscrew, sometimes as a glass of water, sometimes as a glass of brandy.”
“Approaching literature not through critical analysis but through its effect on everyday people – in this case, elderly Brazilians gamely reciting the poet’s voluptuous verses – this warm, simple film uncovers a rich vein of ageless, grassroots sensuality and joie de vivre.” —Variety
THE UNDERGROUND ORCHESTRA
dir. Heddy Honigmann, 1999
108 mins. Peru/France.
In French with English subtitles.
MONDAY, DECEMBER 5 – 7:30 PM SATURDAY, DECEMBER 10 – 5 PM TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13 – 7:30 PM
THE UNDERGROUND ORCHESTRA is a glorious documentary profile of musicians who play on the sidewalks of Paris and in the Metro. Honigmann illuminates the lives and music of a ragtag group of international bohemians: an Argentine pianist, Romanian father and son violinists, a Venezuelan harpist, and singers from Mali and Vietnam. All are united by their experiences with political repression, and by a luminous spirit and boundless courage that led them to flee any number of horrendous situations throughout the world. Finding refuge in Paris, music becomes their economic lifeline, but as this film makes movingly clear, it is also a shining metaphor for their will to survive.
FOREVER
dir. Heddy Honigmann, 2007
95 mins. Peru/France.
In French with English subtitles.
MONDAY, DECEMBER 5 – 10 PM SATURDAY, DECEMBER 10 – 10 PM TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13 – 10 PM
Through a leisurely tour of the world-famous Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the final resting place for legendary writers, composers, painters and other artists from around the world, FOREVER provides an unusually poignant, emotionally powerful meditation on relations between the living and the dead, and the immortal power of art. During its visits to many famous graves – including those of Frédéric Chopin, Marcel Proust, Guillaume Apollinaire, Amadeo Modigliani, Oscar Wilde, Jean-Auguste Ingres, Maria Callas, Georges Méliès, Jim Morrison, Yves Montand and Simone Signoret – FOREVER also introduces us to the Parisians and tourists who make pilgrimages to these tombs, whether to pay their respects, leave flowers or personal messages, or even to tend to the upkeep of the tombstones. The film also pays moving tribute to talented young artists who died prematurely as well as to the less celebrated deceased remembered primarily by next of kin.
Honigmann’s own artistry is also on display here, including a poetic cinematic style that conveys the melancholy beauty of the cemetery’s memorial statuary and tombstones, and her ability to elicit surprisingly intimate human-interest stories from those she encounters. As a result, FOREVER will provide every viewer the opportunity to reflect on the transcendental importance of art in our lives, on our need to commune with the spirits of the departed, and perhaps on our own mortality as well.
OBLIVION
dir. Heddy Honigmann, 2008
93 mins. Peru.
In Spanish with English subtitles.
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7 – 10 PM MONDAY, DECEMBER 12 – 10 PM FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16 – 10 PM
OBLIVION focuses on Peru’s capital city of Lima, revealing its startling contrasts of wealth and poverty, and how many of its poorest citizens have survived decades of economic crisis, terrorism and government violence, denial of workers’ rights, and political corruption. Demonstrating anew Honigmann’s extraordinary talent as one of the most empathetic of documentary filmmakers, OBLIVION provides intimate and moving portraits of street musicians, singers, vendors, shoeshine boys, and the gymnasts (some mere children) and jugglers who perform at traffic stops.
The film also visits with small business owners, from a leather-goods repairman and a presidential sash manufacturer to a frog-juice vendor, and contrasts the work and home environments of bartenders, waiters and waitresses employed at Lima’s finest restaurants and hotels but who live in slums in the city’s surrounding hillsides. For most viewers, who are reminded of Peru only by news reports of a major earthquake, a presidential election or the discovery of a decades-old mass grave of army massacre victims, OBLIVION introduces us to the everyday reality of Lima, celebrating a people who, albeit politically powerless, have resisted being consigned to oblivion.
