THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 1 – 10 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 – Midnight
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 – Midnight 

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Miami, 1984. At the scene of a grizzly murder, news reporter Fran Hudson discovers a connection between a Jonestown survivor and a TV executive’s missing son. The lead sends her deep into the madness of the jungle and face-to-face with Colonel Brian Horn’s cult-like cannibal army.

CUT AND RUN serves as the final film in Ruggero Deodato’s cannibal trilogy following LAST CANNIBAL WORLD (1977) and CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST(1980). After his first two films were condemned for their depictions of genuine animal cruelty, Deodato appears to have taken pity on his audience (which is to say that no animals were harmed in the making of this film). However, CUT AND RUN is hardly a ride on Disney’s Jungle Cruise; this film is the coked-up loved child of APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) and ZOMBI 2 (1979).

The film began its life as a script written by Wes Craven, but his version never saw the light of day. Deodato eventually picked up the project and cast longtime Craven collaborator Michael Berryman, hot off the set of HILLS HAVE EYES PART 2 (1984). Berryman is joined by genre all-stars Richard Lynch, Lisa Blout, Barbara Magnolfi, and Karen Black.

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Detective Stacev is called to investigate after three sisters discover a dismembered pimp in their washing machine. However, when the body goes missing, everyone’s a suspect. The detective puts it all on the line to untangle a web of secrets, seduction, and subterfuge or risks being left out to dry.

Don’t let the title fool you, THE WASHING MACHINE is not a killer appliance movie. Produced during the height of the erotic thriller boom of the late 80s and early 90s, THE WASHING MACHINE applies a typical giallo story to an erotic thriller framework. The result is a bizarre masterpiece dripping in questionable motivations, immoral characters, and insane twists. Accompanying the on-screen madness is an electrifying soundtrack by Goblin keyboardist, and longtime Deodato collaborator, Claudio Simonetti.

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A psychic finds herself tapping into the “energy” of a deceased phone operator. She also finds that her friends soon begin dying mysteriously. An investigator determines to track down the cause.

Rounding out our trio of Deodato films is this extremely wacky English language supernatural thriller, based on a story by frequent Argento collaborator Franco Ferrini (PHENOMENA, OPERA, DEMONS, DEMONS 2). It follows a British model (Charlotte Lewis) after her recent arrival in Rome. A psychic presence begins to stalk her as a series of grisly and increasingly bizarre telephone related murders occur. Bursting with over the top 80’s absurdity, creative FX, and a perfectly dated ‘funky’ soundtrack.

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One of the fundamental figures of American avant-garde cinema, LARRY GOTTHEIM has composed a diverse body of work over the span of 50 years. His films stretch the boundaries of cinema as a vessel for deeply personal and philosophical expression and explore the rich blurred zone between the life of the mind and the material world. In 1967, Gottheim founded the Cinema Department at Binghamton University, which was the first regular undergraduate program that dealt with cinema as a personal art, bringing along key avant garde filmmakers like Ken Jacobs and Ernie Gehr as faculty. Considering the theme of nature in art and functions of racial, cultural and personal identity, Gottheim’s practice explores the ways in which time, movement, and becoming are bound up in a complex relation between formal cinematic patterns and pro-filmic subjects. In the beginning is the ending. (All film descriptions written by the artist.)

BLUES
1969. 8 ½ mins. 16mm at 16fps.

“A close continuous view of a bowl of blueberries and milk. A spoon comes in and scoops up some of the berries, presumably to be eaten, until they are all gone. The milk, that is always there, manifests itself more and more as the berries are removed and finally seems to rise up and be washed over by light that struck the end of the camera roll as it was removed from the camera. A malfunction with the camera motor of a rare 8mm Bolex produces a regular pulse against the slight flicker of the shutter at silent speed. There are already indications of a mystery as some of the berries move down as though charged by the energy of the camera’s and viewer’s concentration. This is my first real film; all the others rise out of this one.”

CORN
1970. 11 mins. 16mm.

“This is one of the films that came out of a rejection of expressive camera work, sound, language, editing. I wanted to offer a rich experience of phenomena and associations that could come from a continuous moving image the length of a roll of film. The scene is a space of ceremony, of an offering. This is the world of my house in the country, of my marriage to a potter whose bowl represents her. She is the actor. There are actions that have to do with the transformation of ears of corn into sustenance. These actions take place within a space/time theater of slow continuous changes of light and shadow. There are long spaces where the viewer is free to look at various parts of the screen and, with the steam that rises from the cooked ears, into the very grains of the film itself. The sinuous dance of steam is a counterpart to the fog of FOG LINE. The two films are joined.”

DOORWAY
1970. 7 ½ mins. 16mm at 16 fps.

“Finally I moved the camera, in a slow pan from one side of the wide door of my wife’s pottery studio to the other. While the camera is panning left, the visual sense is of the features of the near and far landscape moving right. The doorway itself marks a plane separating the inside from the outside, as windows will do in other films. Because of the change in temperature between the inside and outside there is a pulse that is visible along with the shutter’s pulse when the film is projected at the correct silent speed. This pulse seems like the pulse of vision that emanates out from the camera, making a moving cow stand frozen behind another. That image stands out from the other material as most charged with meaning, but it too passes by. The lines of hills and fences end edges continue the motif of the line in FOG LINE, and prefigure HORIZONS.”

THOUGHT
1970. 7 ½ mins. 16mm at 16 fps.

“The last of my continuous shot silent films. There is a very limited field of view, with small sliding and focus motions, but a lot to see. The previous films grew out of formal ideas, without much conscious concern with meaning, but now I was becoming aware of the implications of these works, and so I gave it this title.”

HARMONICA
1971. 10 ½ mins. 16mm.

“This concludes the series of continuous shot films, but now with sound. The sound is produced by the car and the people inside it. The car window is both a screen and a plane that separates the inner world from the outside. Shelley, the performer, generates the primary sound when he breaks through that plane. The film is popular because of the vibrant energy of the performer, the music, and the autumn landscape, but it is also complex. As with the previous films, I myself am passive. The driver and the car and Shelley are the creative forces. He is the first of many avatars, doubles of me, that appear in many of my films and that became one thread of my later attraction to ceremonial possession.”

KNOT/NOT
2019. 22 mins. Video.

‘“KNOT”—wrapping things up, tying things up. “NOT “– cross out, erasure. Material from a documentary about conductor Wilhelm Fürtwangler, material from a graffiti stencil work on a brick wall near where I live, a stencil of a girl writing something on the wall, what she wrote crossed out by another act of graffiti. These are the main elements. Also footage looking down at the water of Pearl Harbor with the ruins of battleship Arizona beneath. It had turned red with age. And some footage from Manchester the morning after the terrorists struck. All composed against a sound piece, a multiplication table repeated in four languages. Everything superimposed. It’s not just about what it’s about, but also memory, negatives that try to get negated. About music and painting. Politics, longing and regret. Superimposition is the primary device. The doubling and tripling suggest many implications.’

Special thanks to Malkah Manouel, Christian Flemm and Phil Coldiron.

Penny Slinger is an avant-garde artist from Great Britain and a celebrated figure in the early feminist art movement. She is known for her radical, erotic, and mystical photo collages.While studying at the Chelsea College of Arts, Penny became heavily influenced by Max Ernest and mid-1920s surrealism. At the start of her career, she developed a series of early films that used her body as a canvas, surveying unsettling and macabre topics such as the relationship between architecture and decay, altered states of consciousness, and the occult. Experimenting with mediums such as collage and photography, Penny would elicit upheaval in her exhibitions throughout the UK.

Spectacle is honored to host her for a Q&A on September 17 where we will show Lilford Hall and An Exorcism, The Works together.

The entire program, Alchemy and Ecstasy, will feature three films from Penny Slinger to feature an overview of her early video art from the 1960s to the 1970s– a formative period in her overall career, which has spanned over five decades.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 8 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 – 7:30 PM

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This program features six films from the 1960s and early 1970s. In these videos, Penny is still a student at the Chelsea College of Arts, experimenting with surrealism. Her early work depicts a range of techniques, such as incorporating multiple exposures and time-lapse. With her lens, she observes a range of morbid and nostalgic topics such as mummification, Alice in Wonderland, and feelings of entrapment.

AN EXORCISM, THE WORKS
Dir. Penny Slinger, 2020
UK, 33 minutes
In English

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17 – 5 PM, with filmmaker Q&A (this event is $10)
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20 – 10 PM

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Lilford Hall: A short experimental art video shot inside a decaying mansion, where Penny intimately chronicles the ‘unraveling’ of the Self from dualistic limitations and the projections of others.

An Exorcism, The Works: An animated film created in 2019 by Slinger and her partner Dhiren Dasu. During the 1970s, as she worked on the content for the hauntingly surreal series of collages in Slinger’s seminal publication An Exorcism (1977), she also wrote a synonymous film script and crafted an expanded version of the publication, which includes additional collage works and text. These materials were never published. As the collages from the series have gained exposure over the years, Slinger sought to further contextualize these visuals within the larger original narrative arc. It was to that end that she decided to make An Exorcism – The Works.