HERE’S TO THE FUTURE!
Dir. Gina Telaroli, 2014
USA, 76 mins.
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5 – 10:00 PM – FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 10 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 11 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12 – 7:30PM
Filmmaker Gina Telaroli will join us for HERE’S TO THE FUTURE!, preempted by a screening of her 2011 feature TRAVELING LIGHT and her 2015 short SILK TATTERS, on November 5th. Buy tickets here.
In conjunction with the independent online release of Kurt Walker’s HIT 2 PASS and Gina Telaroli’s HERE’S TO THE FUTURE!, Spectacle is thrilled to host the latter for a limited (and rare) run on the big screen.
In her follow-up to the acclaimed TRAVELING LIGHT (2011), Telaroli again combines fictional, documentary, and experimental filmmaking modes to create a beguiling group portrait of people coming together for a daylong journey. After recording the hushed quiet of an Amtrak train, HERE’S TO THE FUTURE! finds Telaroli turning her attention to a much wilder, more hectic environment: a bustling film set.
On a late-summer Sunday in 2011, a female director (Telaroli herself) gathers a team of filmmakers, writers, musicians, artists, critics, and friends in an apartment to recreate a scene from Michael Curtiz’s Depression-era drama THE CABIN IN THE COTTON. Over plates of pasta and glasses of red wine, a round robin of non-professional actors take turns performing the same scene, again and again, in different permutations. With a freedom influenced by pre-Code Hollywood, cameras, phones, and laptops are scattered around the set at almost every possible angle, documenting the action – both in front of and behind the camera – as it unfolds, from rehearsals to equipment adjustments to the banter between takes. An intimate, playful, and spontaneous look into the collaborative cinematic process emerges, a snapshot of the filmmaker’s perennial struggle to capture fleeting moments before the day (and light) slip away.
HERE’S TO THE FUTURE! is a hybrid work that blurs several lines – between reality and fiction, between a movie and its “making of,” between Old Hollywood and present-day independent cinema, between film criticism and filmmaking, between structuralist rigor and a loose hangout vibe inspired by Howard Hawks’s HATARI! – to create something strange and new.
“Though HERE’S TO THE FUTURE! leaves the “finished” product an open question, it suggests that by allowing greater transparency with our methods, we may find new ways to discover that movies really are about (and made by) real people. Telaroli has crafted the most generous kind of experiment: it doesn’t know what comes next, but it reveres collaboration and feedback on a micro level, and shares the joy of that process.” —Micah Gottlieb, The Fanzine
“Transition, in this case, may be a bit of a misnomer: here, conventional distinctions between narrative and documentary are washed away. What remains is the armature of filmmaking itself, a deeply collaborative process reliant on the legwork of its individual participants.” —Caroline Golum, The L Magazine
TRAVELING LIGHT
Dir. Gina Telaroli, 2011
USA, 58 mins.
with SILK TATTERS
Dir. Gina Telaroli, 2014
USA, 17 mins.
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5 – 7:30 PM – FILMMAKER IN PERSON!
Filmmaker Gina Telaroli will join us for a screening of her 2011 feature TRAVELING LIGHT and her 2015 short SILK TATTERS, followed by HERE’S TO THE FUTURE on November 5th. Buy tickets here.
An Amtrak train pulls out of Penn Station in New York City on a cold, sunny February morning. The train moves forward as the landscape changes—the East Coast giving way to the Midwest. Passengers fill their roles, the snow begins to fall and the next train station is announced, all while the light continues shifting, bouncing, swelling and slouching into eventual darkness.
“A narrative abandoned twice—first when the cast and crew were halted by a snowstorm halfway through their journey and forced to split; later when GT eschewed all narratives at the editing table to figure only their traces—Traveling Light plays as erstwhile fiction and erstwhile documentary, a travelogue of nothing more than the conditions of it’s making. Deceptively simple, a kind of found piece of concrete dialogue between track sounds and a dwindling light that halfway through turns the movie from half-representational to half-abstract, it’s one of the only recent films, narrative, avant-garde, or otherwise, that seems to have sacrificed itself to its subjects to determine its course.” —David Phelps, The L Magazine
“Trains have long served as a metonymy for cinema—a tradition that dates back to Lumiere’s famous short films—but Telaroli’s conceit underscores their phenomenological similarity: sitting still while observing motion. Telaroli restages the dissolving of space into light and texture. Her movie taps into a variety of natural and found rhythms, from the thoroughly rationalized timetable of arrivals and departures to the cosmic ebb and flow of seasonal and circadian cycles.” –Tom McCormack, Altscreen