WILD REEDS

WILD REEDS
dir. André Téchiné, 1994
France. 114 min.
In French with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, MARCH 3 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 7 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22 – 10 PM

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New York theatrical premiere of new restoration by Altered Innocence and Anus Films.

Set against the backdrop of the last days of the French-Algerian war and amidst the lush landscapes of Southern France, WILD REEDS is a coming-of-age saga looking at the sexual awakening of four teenagers. The quartet discover sensual delights while grappling with inner-conflict and political differences. Sensitive François (Gaël Morel) and feminist-communist Maïté (Élodie Bouchez) are in a somewhat stunted relationship, bonding over a mutual love for movies and rock’n’roll. However when François meets Serge (Stéphane Rideau), a handsome muscular youth from the local farming community, he comes to acknowledge his latent homosexuality, while Maïté is seduced by Henri (Frédéric Gorny), a teenage exile whose political stance is in complete opposition to hers. A powerful take on adolescent sexuality and social turmoil, André Téchiné’s WILD REEDS is a poignant, moving, and life affirming expression of teenage angst and triumph.

COUNTRY GOLD

COUNTRY GOLD
dir. Mickey Reece, 2023
USA. 83 min.
In English.

ONE NIGHT ONLY!

FRIDAY, MARCH 17 – 7:30 PM w/ Q&A (This event is $10)

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A spiritual follow-up to his award-winning Elvis biopic ALIEN, COUNTRY GOLD surreally satirizes American celebrity as it captures two music legends at a fictionalized career crossroads. Set In 1994, it tells the story of Troyal Brux (Mickey Reece), an up-and-coming country music star, as he joins Country legend George Jones (MINARI’s Ben Hall) for a wild night on the town in Nashville – the eve before George plans to get cryogenically frozen.

Mickey Reece is “one of the DIY indie world’s best-kept secrets”. Since 2008, he has amassed a remarkable catalog of unique feature films out of Oklahoma, including T-REX (2014), ALIEN (2017), STRIKE DEAR MISTRESS AND CURE HIS HEART (2018), CLIMATE OF THE HUNTER (2019), AGNES (2021). COUNTRY GOLD is his 29th film.

VIDEOPHOBIA

VIDEOPHOBIA
dir. Daisuke Miyazaki, 2019
Japan. 88 min.
In Japanese w/English subs.

MONDAY, MARCH 6 – 7:30 PM w/ Q&A (This event is $10)
FRIDAY, MARCH 17 – 10:00 PM
MONDAY, MARCH 27 – 10:00 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 31 – 7:30 PM

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Ai (Tomona Hirota) is a young twentysomething adrift in Osaka, an aspiring actress barely making ends meet between shifts dressing as a mascot at her local shopping district and gigs as an erotic webcam performer. Following a one-night stand with an unremarkable cosmetics salesman, her life is thrown into chaos when she discovers that a video of their encounter, recorded without her knowledge or consent, has been posted online. The deeper she investigates, the more she unravels, growing increasingly paranoid in the presence of technology and other people.

Like VIDEODROME for the iPhone era, Daisuke Miyazaki’s stark techno-thriller takes our obsession with and dependency on modern technology and spins it into all our worst fears come to life. How do we maintain a sense of self when so much of our memory has already been ceded to our devices? What metrics are there to determine what on the internet is truly real and what is not, especially in this era of deep-fakes and A.I.-generated imagery? What lengths will Ai go to to correct the injustice of this video living on into digital perpetuity? Or is her only option to see the woman as somebody else.

CARNIVAL IN THE NIGHT

CARNIVAL IN THE NIGHT
dir. Masashi Yamamoto, 1981
Japan. 108 min.
In Japanese w/English subs.

FRIDAY, MARCH 3 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 8 – 10:00 PM
MONDAY, MARCH 13 – 10:00 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 31 – 10:00 PM

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This Rockuary, Spectacle Theater and Rain Trail Pictures invite you to take a walk on the wild side with Masashi Yamamoto’s micro-budget no wave masterpiece, CARNIVAL IN THE NIGHT.

Made at the tail end of the 1970s as Japan’s major studio system was in disarray, the film is one of the crown jewels of the country’s jishu movement: A creative storm of independent, anti-institutional, borderline anarchist filmmakers operating outside of commercial cinema structures, and who would help shape Japanese cinema for decades to come.

The film follows Kumi (Kumiko Ota playing a lightly fictionalized version of herself, similar to her later character in Yamamoto’s ROBINSON’S GARDEN), a newly divorced single mother and aspiring punk rocker, as she embarks on an unusual odyssey along the fringes of Tokyo’s night life. Her journey takes her through the seedier side of the city’s DIY punk scene; each stranger, each sexual encounter, each random act of violence more unsettling than the last.

Much like the “no wave” film movement that was simultaneously taking shape in New York, Yamamoto’s film blurs the line between documentary and fiction in a way that underscores the prickly creative energy of its corresponding musical scene. The gritty 16mm photography and verité shooting style help capture the transgressive ethos of Tokyo’s underground in its most unbridled form, contrasting images of a country in the midst of an economic boom against the lives of its squatters, hustlers, criminals, and low-lifes.

“These are Yamamoto’s politics: to squat, to squander, and to soil reality. Whether anyone takes notice is beyond him; his unceasing state of resistance exists beyond society and blooms by virtue of its separation from its norms. ‘I only plan to make the kinds of films I want to make,’ he has said, ‘and aim at nothing more than a small circle of spectators.'”
– Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer, SCREEN SLATE

DANDY DUST

DANDY DUST
Dir. A. Hans Scheirl, 1998
Austria. 94 min.
In English

THURSDAY MARCH 2ND, 10PM
SATURDAY MARCH 18TH, 10PM
SATURDAY MARCH 25TH, MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY MARCH 31ST, MIDNIGHT

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Dust, a split-personality cyborg of fluid gender, zooms through time and space in search of his/her own memories and a sense of understanding. S/he travels from the Planet of White Dust where war is constant, to the Planet of Blood and Swelling, a hybrid of his/her father’s body.

A cyborg with a split personality and fluid gender zooms through time to collect his/her selves in a struggle against a family obsessed by lineage: This cartoon-like futuristic low-budget horror satire by the Austro-British filmmaker Hans Scheirl turns the real into the absurd, for the duration of a small cybernetic, chemo-sexual film adventure at least. Identity is just a matter of creativity, and far beyond cinema’s limitations. – (Stefan Grissemann)

A GOTHIC WESTERN DUO

This March, Spectacle is thrilled to present a duo of underseen Gothic-Western gems – a 1970 ghostly revenge thriller from Italy, and an American western anthology from 1990.

AND GOD SAID TO CAIN aka E DIO DISSE A CAINO
dir. Antonio Margheriti, 1970
Italy, 101 min.
In English.

WEDNESDAY MARCH 1ST, 7:30PM
FRIDAY MARCH 10TH, 10PM
MONDAY MARCH 20TH, 10PM
WEDNESDAY MARCH 29TH, 10PM

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THE DARKEST WESTERN EVER MADE

An innocent man sentenced to ten years in prison for a crime he did not commit is released from jail, promising to seek revenge on the guilty.

AND GOD SAID TO CAIN starts off feeling like a standard western, but quickly morphs into something more sinister and ominous. Starring Klaus Kinski as Gary Hamilton, the wrongly imprisoned gunslinger seeking revenge, and directed by Italian genre mainstay Antonio Margheriti – who directed a whopping 53 films in total, including THE LONG HAIR OF DEATH and CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE – anyone looking for a moodier than average revenge western, look no further!

GRIM PRAIRIE TALES
dir. Wayne Coe, 1990
USA, 86 min.
In English.

SATURDAY MARCH 4TH, 10PM
FRIDAY MARCH 17TH, MIDNIGHT
TUESDAY MARCH 21ST, 10PM
SUNDAY MARCH 26TH, 5PM

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HIT THE TRAIL …. TO TERROR

A cynical bounty hunter and a clerk traveling through the prairie rest by a campfire telling four stories of terror to each other.

A western-horror anthology film, featuring a wraparound story starring Brad Dourif and James Earl Jones, shot by Janucz Kaminski. Need we say more?

GRIM PRAIRIE TALES leans further into psychological horror, even drama, than one might expect from the synopsis – like a Twilight Zone-adjacent anthology from another dimension. Screening from the best looking available known copy (ripped directly from laserdisc!), Spectacle is proud to present this collection of spooky frontier tales.

FROM THE BOWLS OF MEMORY: TWO FILMS FROM IRELAND, A LAND OF FICTION AND ABSENCES

The writer Seamus Deane once noted a curious contradiction with many of Ireland’s great writers of the 19th and early 20th century. Figures such as Synge, Yeats and Joyce, all developed highly unique distinctive ‘languages’ which often entailed navigating a tightrope tension between established tradition and a basis in reality and the tendency towards insularity, even self-parody. Deane puts it down partly to, that all three and more felt the pull to “articulate the national consciousness”, of what was, all at once, a very old, new and unformed nation. Only to find their aim varyingly diverted, mutated and then defined by the reality that there was no “unity of culture”, to quote Yeats, but a slippery hodgepodge of political, religious, ethnic, and local identities, each with their own diversity of ways of speaking and being. This is certainly true to some degree every part of this wide world but Ireland, repeatedly melted down and alchemized under the pressure of centuries of concerted colonial projects, which often explicitly pitted its various peoples against each other, is a particularly distorted funhouse mirror which artists still scan for stability or otherwise embrace in all it.

Another version of this crisis of identity can be found within Irish cinema whose history has progressed in a series of fits and starts. Marked by the tendency towards mimicking modes and styles of American, British and European cinemas, as well attempts to find new, Irish cinemas, often in recognition of Ireland as a multiplicity scarred by history. The 1970s and 1980s was a particularly rich period with a new spirit of formal adventurism, iconoclasm, and a search for previously ignored subjects, textures and wounds, invigorating both young Irish filmmakers—taking not only some from modernist cinema movements abroad but, in certain cases learned their craft–and filmmakers drawn from elsewhere.

This series presents two films, COILIN AND PLATONIDA and BUDAWANNY, from this period and persuasion. Both are ventures out into Ireland’s much mythicized west, where rather than harp on the hard and fast clichés they use to landscape, its people and its cultural and historical baggage to forge daring, experimental works of cinema which adventurously play with the cliché of Ireland as the pre-modern berth and product of superstition and legend, while countering its most recognizable images with striking ellipses and abstractions.

COILIN AND PLATONIDA
dir. James Scott, 1976
85 mins. UK, Ireland, Germany.
Silent, with Piano accompaniment and English and German intertitles

SATURDAY MARCH 18, 5PM with filmmaker James Scott in person for Q&A moderated by guest programmer Ruairí McCann
(This event is $10.)
WEDNESDAY MARCH 22, 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY MARCH 29, 7:30 PM

TICKETS

James Scott is one of the most inventive artists to embark on Irish cinema. Born and raised in England in 1941 by artist parents, his father being the legendary Northern Irish painter, William Scott. His initial (and still active and fecund) practice of painting quickly widened to pursue a deep interest in cinema and filmmaking. Drawing on the world of visual art, as well as film influences ranging from Godard, the New American Cinema and Italian wunderkinds Bernardo Bertolucci and Marco Bellocchio, he spent the 60s making several acclaimed short art documentaries and experimental narratives. The 70s brought him into the world of radically left-wing, collaborative filmmaking as a member of the militant and deconstructive Berwick Street Film Collective. He also left Britain and the contemporary, present tense worlds of pop art, swinging London and the world of night cleaners and their unionisation to travel to Ireland and into a fable.

His second solo feature, COILIN AND PLATONIDA (1976), originally aired on the German TV station ZDF and following other screenings was praised by the likes of Jonathan Rosenbaum (who placed it in his top ten of 1976) and Stephen Dwoskin. It takes as its material a Nikolai Leskov short story, transplanting its peculiar melodrama of a young man called Coilin (Coilin O Finneadha), ill-treated and luckless since childhood who eventually makes a makeshift community along with his cousin Platonida (Frankie Allen) and a pair of adopted orphans played by Scott’s own children Alex Scott (age 9) and Rosie Scott (age 5.) This is but one radical choice in a film flooded with them, for Scott casts local non-actors and after shooting in Super 8, ‘refilmed’ in 16mm using multiple projectors. It’s also a silent film, opting not for dialogue or narration as its primary voice but intertitles, full piano accompaniment by Rod Melvin, and brief but striking bursts of the Gaelic folk lament Úna Bhán. All of these elements create an aura of antiquity, melodrama and palpable uncertainty to a film that often looks and moves like vapour, where absences and moments of ambiguity smart and resonate more than clear, recognizable images. It amounts to a unique rendition of how myth can move and grow, from land to land, generation to generation, medium to medium, with its powerful combination of specificity, allusiveness and mystery.

BUDAWANNY
dir. Bob Quinn, 1987
79 mins. Ireland.
In English and silent with intertitles.

SATURDAY MARCH 18 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY MARCH 23 – 7:30 PM

TICKETS

COILIN AND PLATONIDA was in made with close connection with Irish cinema’s ‘First Wave’, a loose collective of filmmakers, including Joe Comerford, Thaddeus O’Sullivan, Cathal Black and Pat Murphy, who made a string of subversive films in the 70s, 80s and beyond. Joe Comerford was Scott’s first cinematographer, with the DP for the ‘re-filmed’ sequences, Adam Barker-Mill, going on to shoot Comerford’s acclaimed feature debut as a director, DOWN THE CORNER (1977), and there’s a cameo appearance from an instigator of this most radical period, Bob Quinn.

Like Scott, Quinn is a multi-hyphenate: a filmmaker, a novelist, a cultural critic, a visual artist, an anthropologist and, in all these avenues, a maverick. Quinn came to moving images in the 1960s through making documentary shorts and series for the fledging national broadcaster RTÉ. After very public departure from RTÉ, in protest over the station’s increasing commercialization, and period of rest and travel abroad, led to a creative resurgence in the 1970s as an increasingly experimental, independent filmmaker. The trigger was a relocation, from the cultural center of Dublin where he was born and raised, to a geographic and political periphery, Connemara where his appreciation and then close studies of the Irish language as well as traditional music and craft forms would become a significant line of inquiry and influence in his work.

BUDAWANNY, his first film intended for theatrical distribution, is in significant part a silent film as well. Set on remote Clare Island, off Ireland’s Atlantic coast, it recounts the tale of a priest (the great Donal McCann, in perhaps his finest performance), his forbidden love affair and the lives of the local community, in black & white with silent film techniques. This melodrama is reflected on, in retrospect and in color and sound, with scenes featuring the local bishop (Peadar Lamb) who finds himself caught between protocol and his own crisis of faith. The muteness but visual precision of Quinn’s form, aided by Roger Doyle’s extraordinary electro-acoustic score, evokes the wordless yet deeply expressive forces of nature, desire, and regret, as well as the oppressive regime of the Catholic Church, which favors silence and buried transgressions over dissension.

RUAIRI McCANN is an Irish writer, programmer and musician, Belfast born and based but raised in Sligo. He is an editor at Ultra Dogme and photogénie and has contributed to aemi online, Screen Slate, MUBI Notebook and Sight & Sound.

Programmed in collaboration with Ruairí McCann. This event is brought to you in collaboration with the Irish Film Institute’s IFI International Programme supported by Culture Ireland. Special thanks to Bob Quinn, James Scott and ZDF (Germany) and the Irish Film Institute (IFI).

   

MASTERS OF ITALIAN EXPLOITATION: UMBERTO LENZI

Umberto Lenzi is one of Italy’s most prolific and under-appreciated filmmakers, having directed over sixty movies in four decades. Most genre fans may know of Umberto Lenzi from CANNIBAL FEROX (1981) and NIGHTMARE CITY (1980). Both films are solid gorefests, but their notoriety reflects only a fraction of Lenzi’s work. This series will focus on Lenzi’s pre-80s contributions to cinema and bring light to Lenzi’s more forgotten repertoire.


A QUIET PLACE TO KILL

A QUIET PLACE TO KILL
(AKA PARANOIA)
Dir. Umberto Lenzi, 1970
Italy. 94 mins
In English

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 1 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 7 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 24 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, MARCH 30 – 7:30 PM

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After a fiery crash, professional race car driver, Helen, is invited to recuperate at her ex-husband’s villa. Once there, she forms an unexpected bond with her ex’s new wife, and the two women plot his murder. When their plan goes awry, Helen relies on her wits to hide the truth of what happened at sea.

By the end of the 60s, Lenzi directed the first of eight Gialli films, ORGASMO (1969), SO SWEET… SO PERVERSE (1969), A QUIET PLACE TO KILL (1970) and OASIS OF FEAR (1971). These four films represent Lenzi’s first cycle of Giallo, and three showcase his longtime collaboration with Oscar nominee Carroll Baker.

This film isn’t what audiences have come to expect from the Giallo genre, lacking excessive gore or a black-gloved killer. Instead, A QUIET PLACE TO KILL plays like a murder mystery featuring beautiful locations, double-crossing socialites, love triangles, and exciting plot twists.


EYEBALL

EYEBALL
Dir. Umberto Lenzi, 1975
Italy. 92 mins
In English

SATURDAY, MARCH 4 – Midnight
THURSDAY, MARCH 9 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, MARCH 18 – Midnight
FRIDAY, MARCH 24 – Midnight

PURCHASE TICKETS

A red-gloved murderer is gouging out the eyes of American tourists. It’s up to Inspector Tudela to discover the killer’s identity and stop them before their sick game is complete.

The international success of Argento’s THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (1970) ushered in the golden age of Giallo and enshrined the trope of the black-gloved killer. Lenzi directed four Gialli during this period: SEVEN BLOOD STAIND ORCHIDS (1971), KNIFE OF ICE (1972), SPASMO (1974) and EYEBALL (1975).

By 1975, the film market was oversaturated with subpar Gialli and the genre’s popularity waned. Lenzi reflected on this decline with his final Giallo, the satirical EYEBALL (1975), an intentionally low-brow film that never takes itself too seriously.


THE TOUGH ONES

THE TOUGH ONES
(AKA ROME, ARMED TO THE TEETH)
Dir. Umberto Lenzi, 1976
Italy. 94 mins
In English

FRIDAY, MARCH 10 – Midnight
TUESDAY, MARCH 14 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 24 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 28 – 10 PM

PURCHASE TICKETS

CONTENT WARNING: This film features depictions of sexual assault.

The anti-gang squad, led by the hot-headed Inspector Leo Tanzin, won’t let the rule of law stop their plans to bring down a criminal kingpin. After planting drugs on a suspect known as The Hunchback, Tanzin may have finally met his match.

The late 60s marked the beginning of a period of political violence and social unrest in Italy known as the Years of Lead. Italian filmmakers processed the movement by creating a wave of ultra-violent crime films known as Poliziottesch. These films not only showcase the criminals’ ferocity but also expose parallel brutality and corruption from within the police force.

For four years after EYEBALL, Lenzi turned his attention exclusively to Poliziotteschi films and directed ten movies in the genre between 1974 and 1979. Starring Poliziotteschi staples Maurizio Merli and Tomas Milian, THE TOUGH ONES (1976) is a white-knuckle roller coaster that takes no prisoners.

With a special thanks to Grindhouse Releasing.


DAD & STEP-DAD

DAD & STEP-DAD
dir. Tynan Delong, 2023
80 min, USA
In English

THURSDAY MARCH 9TH, 7:30PM – DIRECTOR Q&A W ELEANORE PIENTA & SUNITA MANI
FRIDAY MARCH 10TH, 7:30PM – DIRECTOR Q&A W AIDY BRYANT
SATURDAY MARCH 11TH, 5PM – DIRECTOR Q&A W JOHN REYNOLDS
SUNDAY MARCH 12TH, 7:30PM – DIRECTOR Q&A W EDY MODICA
MONDAY MARCH 13TH, 7:30PM – DIRECTOR Q&A W NAOMI FRY
TUESDAY MARCH 14TH, 7:30PM – DIRECTOR Q&A W JO FIRESTONE
WEDNESDAY MARCH 15TH, 7:30PM – DIRECTOR Q&A W SURPRISE GUEST
THURSDAY MARCH 16TH, 7:30PM – DIRECTOR Q&A W LANCE OPPENHEIM

All screenings $10! A few walk-up tickets will be avail for sold out screenings, contingent on number of no-shows for pre-purchase

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Sometimes raising a son takes two different guys

Dad & Step-Dad is a slow-burn, character-driven family comedy that follows Jim (Dad), Dave (Step-Dad) and Suzie (Mom), three lost souls who spend the weekend together at a cabin upstate in an effort to bond for the sake of their 13-year-old son, Branson. Tensions mount however as differing parenting techniques come to the fore.

A symphony of passive aggressive quibbles delivered in hushed tones, furtive glances, and tense silence, the film plays like Frederick Wiseman directing an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Listed in Esquire as one of the “41 Most Anticipated Films of 2023,” Dad & Step-Dad was shot in 4 days during the summer of 2021 with a production budget of only $18,000 and is entirely improvised, based off of a robust outline and several rehearsals.

Tynan DeLong is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY, working as a filmmaker, actor and writer. He can currently be seen in the Netflix-streaming documentary Mortified Nation. As a prolific filmmaker, making over 20 shorts since 2018, his work has been featured at the Maryland Film Festival, Nitehawk Film Festival, the Brooklyn Comedy Festival, NoBudge Live and New Cinema Club screenings, as well as his own residency for the 2019 season at the Wythe Hotel. Online, he’s been profiled in Vulture, Paste, Splitsider, NoBudge, Booom.TV and Vice. As an actor, he has appeared in several short films and series, including Vimeo Staff Pick The Astronauts. His debut feature, Dad & Step-Dad, was recently listed in Esquire as one of the “41 Most Anticipated Films of 2023” and is set to be released in 2023.

ROCKUARY

This February, Spectacle Theater is thrilled to bring you ROCKUARY once again: