SOUND AND FURY
(DE BRUIT ET DE FUREUR)
dir. Jean-Claude Brisseau, 1989
95 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 6 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 15 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 20 – MIDNIGHT
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 25 – 10 PM CLOSED

Considered an important entry in French cinema’s new naturalism from one of the most promising French filmmakers of the Eighties, SOUND AND FURY presents a shocking, surreal, and humanistic look at the tragic lives of impoverished children living in the Paris projects.

Bruno is a teenaged boy who has just moved into a high-rise project with his hard working but absent mother. Other than his pet bird Superman keeping him company, Bruno is alone. The apartment is located in one of the city’s roughest suburbs and Bruno’s involvement with crime seems inevitable. Shortly after, he is befriended by the streetwise but deeply troubled Jean-Roger, and Bruno goes out thieving, destroying property and harming people with a vengeance… hoping to receive the type of attention he so desperately wants at home.

“SOUND AND FURY is less concerned with social problems and their possible solutions than with evoking the pervasive aimlessness of a world that lives entirely in the present tense. The film records the specific details of terrible events without editorial comment… Mr. Brisseau has such authority as a director that he can slip into and out of moments of wildly heightened reality without prompting derisive giggles. The movie is soundly based.” – Vincent Canby, The New York Times

“None of my films are realistic, and certainly not naturalistic, including SOUND AND FURY, even though it touched on a certain social reality. They all contain a shadow zone. I do like to come back to social reality, but I do it through the mixing of genres and the insertion of surrealist elements. When the Cinémathèque Française asked me to select some films that had influenced me to accompany a retrospective of my work, I realized that I’d chosen movies that all assumed an air of realism while completely evading it. Take Alain Resnais’s LA GUERRE EST FINIE: the film seems to deal with the political reality of the time, and yet that isn’t what Resnais filmed. In my own work, the subject is never naturalism but a certain kind of relation to reality. With each film, I try to find a new way to confront these complex relations. Watching one of my movies, you always have to ask yourself if you’re reading it correctly—for instance, should you be laughing at a film that began in such a somber way. During the first screening of SOUND AND FURY, the younger audience members laughed, and I was more or less with them. Meanwhile, the more serious viewers felt the kids had no right to make fun of such things.” – Jean-Claude Brisseau, as told to Frédéric Bonnaud in Film Comment

Special thanks to Altered Innocence and Matthew Sniegoski.

This October, in collaboration with our friends at Los Sures, Mi Casa Studios and the office of City Council Member Antonio Reynoso, Spectacle is thrilled to host the first-ever Southside Film Festival, a three-day celebration of Latino cinema (plus a block party on October 9) combining short documentaries about the neighborhood around South 3rd Street, a one-night-only outdoor screening of Leon Gast’s seminal Fania Records documentary OUR LATIN THING (1972) and a reprise of our classic LA BODEGA SOLD DREAMS program spotlighting Nuyorican cinema of the 1960s and 70s.

SOUTHSIDE SHORTS PROGRAM
dir. various, 2015-2021
approx 90 mins. United States.
In English, and in Spanish with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8 – 7:30 PM in-theater
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10 – 7:30 PM in-theater

FILMMAKERS IN PERSON FOR Q+A!

This program spotlights filmmakers working in Williamsburg’s South Side, focusing in particular on portrait documentaries of beloved figures such as Tonita (Caribbean Sports Club), Papa Frenchie (Frenchie’s Gym) and boxer Wesley Ferrer, AKA “El Bongocero”.

NATAS ES SATAN
dir. Miguel Ángel Álvarez, 1977
89 mins. United States.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8 – 10 PM in-theater

Best known for his comic persona “El Men” back in Puerto Rico, Miguel Ángel Álvarez delivers a blood-curdling performance in the lurid 1977 exploitation thriller NATAS ES SATAN, as an NYPD officer who is literally the devil (re)incarnate. (Screenwriter Joe Zayas based his sordid tale of blackmail and murder on true events.) Despite being Satan, Natás is also a surprisingly plausible supervillain, at one point enacting vengeance on his enemy, a businessman named Victor (Frank Moro), by hiring a “double” (played by Moro again) to put him in a compromising position. Like LA TIGRESA, this film was shot entirely en español on location in Manhattan; while the dramatic stakes are small, NATAS ES SATAN succeeds as both a crime procedural and a hysterical psychodrama. Long before Natas has invited three transgender assassins over to his place to murder Victor during a DIY porn screening, you’ll agree the end product also feels not unlike an artifact from an alternate universe. Stay alert…. Natas may return!

NATAS ES SATAN is screening with English subtitles for the first time in the United States, translated by Aida Garrido and timed by Garret Linn.

YE YO
dir. Tony Betancourt, 1975
79 mins. United States/Puerto Rico.
In Spanish.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8 – MIDNIGHT in-theater

Puerto Ricans were imposed U.S. citizenship in 1917 via the Jones-Shafroth Act. Lore recounts that Puerto Ricans were given citizenship so that they could be discharged as cannon fodder for the First World War and all succeeding wars that the U.S. engaged in thereafter. Produced by Changó International Films and shot by the prolific adult film cinematographer Larry Revene, YE YO tells the story of Rogelio Sotomayor, a Vietnam veteran and former prisoner of war with PTSD who returns to New York after the war. Upon his return he finds his wife Nydia with a lover and murders them. In an epic, days-long run-off from corrupt cops, Ye Yo relies on his community for cover in this Blaxploitation inspired drama.

YE YO is screening with English subtitles for the first time in the United States, translated by Aida Garrido and timed by Garret Linn.

OUR LATIN THING
(NUESTRA COSA LATINA)
dir. Leon Gast, 1972
100 mins. United States.
In English and Spanish.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9 – 7:00 PM – OUTDOOR at LOS SURES COMMUNITY CENTER (145 S 3rd St)
and at stream.spectacletheater.com

FREE! ONE NIGHT ONLY!

Among other legends, 2021 witnessed the passing of documentarian Leon Gast (WHEN WE WERE KINGS) and salsa legend / “El Judio Marvellosio” Larry Harlow. In honor of both – as well as the first-ever Southside Film Festival – we’re hosting a one-night-only outdoor screening of Gast’s classic Fania Records documentary OUR LATIN THING, widely heralded as one of the greatest concert films ever made.

Gast’s relationship with Fania predates OUR LATIN THING, as he had photographed seminal album covers released by the then-burgeoning salsa label. As a result, OUR LATIN THING benefits from an obvious camaraderie between the stars – which, beside Harlow, include Ray Baretto, Johnny Pacheco, Hector Lavoe, José Feliciano and Willie Colón – and the filmmaker. The film spans two days, interweaving an epic concert at the now-defunct midtown Cheetah nightclub with street scenes from the Lower East Side – santeria, domino games, shaved ice, a riveting cockfight – with a roving camera whose ambling style anticipates works like Richard Linklater’s SLACKER. At the center of it all is the unforgettable Fania All-Stars concert at Cheetah – a sweaty, panoramic drama in its own right.

Spectacle is thrilled to present OUR LATIN THING, one night only, outdoors and online, free of charge, in a gorgeous new digital restoration courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.

Special thanks to Edda Manriques and Geri Spolan-Gast.

LA TIGRESA
dir. Glauco del Mar, 1969
85 mins. United States.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8 – MIDNIGHT in-theater

Glauco del Mar’s penultimate film LA TIGRESA is perhapsx his most accomplished, yet far less popular than his apogee, 1975’s TONO BICICLETA. It is in this bewilderingly feminist redemption narrative that we meet Patricia, a young woman living with her father, who is mercilessly ullied by her schoolmates, assaulted and raped in her home and is left with no resolve. Her alcoholic good-for-nothing father is killed during her attack. After inheriting some money and recovering her personal power, she sets off to avenge every single last person that did her wrong – making her list, and checking it twice. This classic redemption tale combines the amazing Perla Faith a legendary vedette with espiritismo, folklore, Miguel Poventud’s jangly guitar boleros, corrupt cops, and entrancing Harlem landscapes.

LA BODEGA SOLD DREAMS: SHORTS 1968-1980
dirs. Various
approx. 90 mins.
In English and Spanish with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10 – 3PM in-theater

Bracketed by two short TV documentaries – PUERTO RICO: A COLONY THE AMERICAN WAY, and THE DEVIL IS A CONDITION – this program looks at depictions of both Puerto Rican and Nuyorican culture regarding the island’s de facto status as an outpost of American imperialism. The material screened will include interviews with Ruben Berrios, leader of the Independence party, Rafael Hernández Colón, governor candidate for the Popular Democratic Party, and Carlos Romero Barceló, governor of the islands, known murderer, and darling of the Pro-Statehood party, the PNP. (Today, the PNP is the same political party incriminated in the recent upheavals over the #rickygate, #rickyrenuncia, #wandarenuncia, etcetera.)

SHORT EYES
dir. Robert M. Young, 1977
100 mins. United States.
In English.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10 – 5PM in-theater

Adapted by poet Miguel Piñero from his play of the same name, SHORT EYES is closely based on his experiences incarcerated at Sing Sing after an armed robbery charge. Robert M. Young (ALAMBRISTA!) shot the film on location in the infamous Tombs, on White Street, while the prison was fully operational; the plot follows a gang of Black and Puerto Rican inmates figuring out what to do with a bourgeois white inmate named Clark (Bruce Davidson, making his big screen debut) who has been accused of raping an underage girl. “Short Eyes” is the in-prison nickname for pederasts, and Piñero’s screenplay doesn’t hold back in dissecting the dog-eat-dog culture among the inmates – several of whom have designs on Clark, who they consider the lowest of the low. A flawlessly executed ensemble piece buttressed by a silky-yet-menacing Curtis Mayfield soundtrack, SHORT EYES is a gripping and surprisingly even-handed look at life behind bars, widely considered one of the greatest prison films ever made. Young’s compassionate realism and focus on authenticity is a perfect match for Piñero, who also acts in the film (as do Mayfield and Freddy Fender, in bit parts), and whose run-ins with law enforcement would continue during and after production.

(SHORT EYES will screen with a 17-minute clip of Miguel Piñero reading at Magic Gallery in 1984, preserved and digitized thanks to XFR Collective.)

After working as a set designer and visual effects artist for the likes of Luigi Cozzi and Ruggero Deodato in the 1980s, Alvaro Passeri directed a series of singularly bizarre sci-fi features around the turn of the millennium. His films were the inverse of the popular genre blockbusters of the period – never scaling his ambitions to meet his budget, Passeri developed a distinct style based on rubbery body horror and a permanently canted fish-eye lens. While he is best known for the video rental staple CREATURES FROM THE ABYSS (aka PLANKTON), Spectacle is proud to present two of his lesser-known features for a one-night blowout.

These films will screen in-theater as well as simultaneously at stream.spectacletheater.com.

FLIGHT TO HELL
Dir. Alvaro Passeri, 2002
86 min. Italy.
In English.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 – 7:30 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

The obnoxious inhabitants of a flying casino face an infestation of parasitic bugs in Passeri’s followup to MUMMY THEME PARK. Abandoning the latter’s near-exclusive reliance on practical effects, FLIGHT shows Passeri experimenting with digital animation – his trademark visual style translates surprisingly well to the medium, offering a unique take on the sub-ILM polygonal creations which were rife among direct-to-video horror offerings in the early 2000s.

As per the DVD box:

Don screams out as a horrific monster is about to eat him alive! But then he wakes up. It’s only a dream! That day he boards his private plane, a flying casino, that caters to the needs of fantastically rich clients who want to play for high stakes at high altitudes. But then the plane is engulfed in a strange thick fog that seeps into the cabin. The evil mist transforms the passengers and crew one by one into monstrous half human, half insect creatures with a ravenous appetite for human flesh. Don realizes that it is his nightmare come true – it is his FLIGHT TO HELL!

MUMMY THEME PARK
Dir. Alvaro Passeri, 2000
86 min. Italy.
In English.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 – 10 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

“It would not be too bold to declare this film the Francis Ford Coppola’s BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA of Italian mummy movies.” – Senseless Cinema

A garish amalgam of Westworld and The Mummy, Passeri’s 2000 masterpiece addresses the controversial practice of planting microchips in mummies in order to staff fantasy theme parks. Transcending its influences, the film boasts a uniquely queasy visual style crafted from greasy animatronics and a painfully saturated color palette. The plot concerns two dimwitted American journalists caught in the meltdown of the titular Mummy Theme Park – this, of course, is of secondary significance aside the exercise in discount worldmaking achieved through Passeri’s fabric-store scenography and a script rife with non-sequiturs.

This program celebrates the recent efforts made by Brooklyn Museum to preserve its audiovisual collection. Featured here are two newly digitized works, including a 1937 nitrate film shot on the streets of Brooklyn and a 1962 film on art conservation. While the keeping of juridical paper archives has been instinctive to societies for millennia, the preservation of film languished for much of its early history. It was not until cinema’s legitimization as an art form and the founding of institutions like the British Film Institute, Museum of Modern Art, and Cinémathèque française that this blight in our culture and history began to be amended.

However, film also occupies a place outside of artistic canons. Peter Delpeut, along with computer artist Hoos Blotkamp and filmmaker Eric De Kuyper, created a new collection policy in the 1990s during their tenures at the Nederlands Filmmuseum. Their endeavor coincided with film historiography’s growing concern for endangered films and led to the creation of the “Bits & Pieces” collection. This collection comprises fragmented films that are neither eminently related to auteurs nor formal artistic movements. As a director, Delpeut made his name as a found footage filmmaker who appropriated such fragments. He represents something of a progenitor to artists like Gustav Deutsch and Bill Morrison, with his film Lyrical Nitrate preceding the latter’s Decasia by a decade. For Delpeut, the derogatory idiom which describes history as an “ash heap” or a “dustbin” rings untrue. He has described his work from within the archive as the most emotional period in his film-related life. It is this emotion which he shares with his audiences by wresting images of surprising beauty and pathos from their obscurity and neglect.

This program of three screenings featuring the films of Brooklyn Museum, Peter Delpeut, Harun Farocki, and Mark-Paul Meyer honors art conservators and archivists. Prelude short films demonstrating conservation techniques like vacuum hot tables and wet-transfers are at once educational and beautiful. The craquelure of oil paintings and the decomposition of film which these technical interventions intend to remedy introduce a sense of biological infirmity to the cultural heritage which we often presume to be immutable and everlasting. The feature length films of this program explicitly address art and build on the related motifs of transience and materiality in different ways, ranging from Delpeut’s lyrical lamentations to Farocki’s capitalist critique.

We would like to thank Video Data Bank and Eye Filmmusuem as generous contributors to this program.

PETER DELPEUT AND THE ASH HEAP OF FILM HISTORY #1
Sunday, October 3 – 5pm

ONLINE TICKETS

BROOKLYN PROGRESS
1937.
10 mins. United States.

LYRICAL NITRATE 1905-1919
dir. by Peter Delpeut, 1991.
51 mins. Netherlands

Brooklyn Progress is a nitrate film whose original camera negative was discovered in Brookyln Museum’s audiovisual collection by archivist Molly Seegers in 2016. In a serendipity not unlike the discovery of Japan’s oldest negative film – which was until recently under the continuous care of a toothpaste corporation – the archive has transformed a petty propaganda film otherwise lost to time into a precious artifact which displays in verité a burgeoning Brooklyn from nearly a century ago. Originally created for Borough President Raymon V. Ingersoll’s re-election campaign, Brooklyn Progress takes a tour of the achievements of his administration through the eyes of two ordinary citizens as they walk through the city’s streets. The only other extant physical copy of the film is held by the Museum of Modern Art. The Brooklyn Museum negative has since been preserved, digitized, and deposited in the Library of Congress.

Lyrical Nitrate 1905-1915 is a found footage film by Peter Delpeut comprising fragments of the Jean Desmet Collection, which was the first film collection to be selected by UNESCO for the Memory of the World Register. In the context of the Nederlands Filmmuseum’s preservation work and the often repeated adage of “Nitrate Can’t Wait,” Lyrical Nitrate is a nostalgic lamentation for material fragility and the irrevocably lost. It registers both the euphoria and pathos which the images of the past invoke in their variable states, whether silent, scored, tinted, toned, whole, or fragmented.

PETER DELPEUT AND THE ASH HEAP OF FILM HISTORY #2
Sunday, October 17 – 5pm

ONLINE TICKETS

THE HIDDEN LIFE OF A PAINTING
dir. by Caroline Keck, 1962.
20 mins. United States.

TREASURES FROM THE RIJKSMUSEUM
dir. by Peter Delpeut, 2000.
48 mins. Netherlands.

STILL LIFE
dir. by Harun Farocki, 1991.
56 mins. Germany.

The Hidden Life of a Painting was produced by two pioneer conservators during the Exposition of Painting Conservation held at Brooklyn Museum in 1962. With great mid-century charm and a degree of self-effacement, narrator and director Caroline Keck relays the ordinary and surprising ways artworks are preserved and cared for through the use of microscopes, fire extinguishers, polarizing screens, vacuum hot tables, and x-rays. The film concludes with a loaned painting being packed in a crate addressed to Amsterdam.

Peter Delpeut picks up where the Kecks left off and takes us to Holland. Although Treasures of the Rijksmuseum deviates from the found footage works for which Delpeut is most well-known, it elaborates on the same themes of history and materiality. Dust gathers in art depots and the mise-en-scène of the museum requires careful coordination from light technicians and art handlers. The film comes together like a choreography –a wordless homily on the assiduous labors of museum staff and a mediation on their measured movements as they prepare paintings for public display, including Rembrandt’s monumental The Night Watch.

Harun Farocki approaches art materiality with a different kind of emotion by drawing a parallel between the Flemish and Dutch traditions of still life painting with modern advertising. Still Life follows two painstaking photoshoots for a beer and wristwatch advert, the hypnotic mundanity of which can ascend to reverie and perverse delight. A sentiment that is likely shared by the other filmmakers in this program, Farocki states that “when you look at things, the men who made them are unimaginable.”  Still Life may either convince us to look at advertisements with a renewed aesthetic acuity or to scrutinize the capitalism and crude systems of patronage undergirding the history of art. Continuing the themes present in much of his oeuvre, Farocki strives to scrutinize a fundamental aspect of our increasingly visual culture by critically examining the ontologies of the image.

PETER DELPEUT AND THE ASH HEAP OF FILM HISTORY #3
Sunday, October 24 – 5pm

ONLINE TICKETS

OUR INFLAMMABLE FILM HERITAGE
dir. by Mark-Paul Meyer, 1994.
20 mins. Netherlands.

FORBIDDEN QUEST
dir. by Peter Delpeut, 1993.
70 mins. Netherlands.

Our Inflammable Nitrate Heritage is a short film directed by Mark-Paul Meyer, who is presently the Expanded Cinema Curator at Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. Using the restoration of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1918 Meyer aus Berlin as an example, the film shows the time-consuming and complex work processes which allow film archivists to make the best possible copy of a deteriorated film. Although commissioned by the Cineteca del Comune di Bologna and intended for pedagogical value, Our Inflammable Nitrate Heritage is also a visual delight partaking in the same grace and process-oriented hypnosis of Peter Delpeut’s Treasures from the Rijksmuseum and Harun Farocki’s Still Life.

While the wet-gate transfer demonstrated in Our Inflammable Nitrate Heritage is one of the most indispensable techniques in bringing clarity to old images, the motif of water takes on a sense of mystery and icy opacity in Peter Delpeut’s second feature film Forbidden Quest. This mockumentary presents the reflections of the only survivor of a secret South Pole expedition, who is played by the great Irish stage actor Joseph O’Connor. The archival footage used to illustrate this fictional expedition was shot in precarious, real-life conditions in the first three decades of the twentieth century by cameramen such as Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley, to whom this film is dedicated. Their images assume a shade of horror and foreboding with a storytelling reminiscent of Verne, Melville, and perhaps even H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. The visages of people and animals against the backdrop of an inhospitable, unchartered territory are presented in silence. As audiences, we confront film as a ghostly indexical trace to the past and contemplate the enormity of the Shakelton Journey and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.