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.

OUT 1
dir. Jacques Rivette, 1971
773 mins. France.
In French w English subtitles.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3 – 10AM EST
ONLINE TICKETS

Spectacle is back! And how better to hack away at your deficit of hours missed in the dark with strangers than a marathon screening of Jacques Rivette’s colossal New Wave touchstone, OUT 1.

Set in “Paris and its double,” Rivette’s improvisation-heavy film follows two theater troupes reimagining Aeschylus’s tragedies as gestural avant-garde theater. Their rehearsals intersect with two swindlers who uncover (or don’t) a string of conspiratorial messages (or not) hinting to the existence of a secret organization (or nobody). Inquiries abound, solutions, not so much, as a post-’68 malaise motivates energies of paranoia and discovery in this durational dissection of reality (or this thing that looks like it). This marathon screening will mark OUT 1’s return to Spectacle 11 years after it was first shown here in 2010, well before its 2015 restoration made it widely available.

Program Schedule
Ep 1: 10am to 11:30am
Ep 2: 11:30am to 1:20pm
Ep 3: 1:30pm to 3:20pm
Break: 3:30pm to 4:30pm
Ep 4: 4:30pm to 6:15pm
Ep 5: 6:15pm to 7:45pm
Ep 6: 7:45pm to 9:25pm
Break: 9:30pm to 10:30pm
Ep 7: 10:30pm to 12:10am
Ep 8: 12:15am to 1:30am

Special thanks to Kino Lorber.

I WANT MORE, I WANT LESS
dir. Bryce Richardson, 2019
87 mins. United States.
In English.

NEW YORK CITY PREMIERE!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9 – 7:30 PM with filmmaker Q+A
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 – 7:30 PM with filmmaker Q+A
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 – 7:30 PM with filmmaker Q+A
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 12 – 7:30 PM with filmmaker Q+A
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 13 – 7:30 PM EST only at stream.spectacletheater.com (with filmmaker Q+A)

Having hosted premiere runs for idiosyncratic filmmakers like Juan-Daniel Molero, Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn and Jean-Gabriel Periot, Spectacle is proud to show filmmaker Bryce Richardson’s debut feature I WANT MORE, I WANT LESS – an engagement originally slated for April 2020 (remember her?)

An accountant in Queens rents out the front of her store to a young man who repairs cell phones…and sometimes pickpockets them. She tries to mentor him, but is tested by his unscrupulous opportunism. Though the film explores how two people attempt to survive and thrive despite gentrification and the isolating, transactional nature of modern life, I Want More, I Want Less lingers on quiet moments, and never veers into didacticism.

Set against the backdrop of the 2016 elections (with scenes shot at real-life community board meetings and anti-Trump demonstrations), Richardson’s quotidian, sparse style evokes arthouse influences like Tsai Ming-Liang, but the film never belabors the distance between the audience and the characters. Semi-improvised, the screenplay instead allows Girma and Abbas to talk the way everyday people actually talk, a perfect match for Richardson’s unwavering eye for the details of how they manage to eke out a living in De Blasio-era NYC.

BRYCE RICHARDSON is a filmmaker originally from Houston, Texas, now based in New York. Richardson’s short films 2580 (2015) and ECLECTIC BRACKETS (2016) have played at festivals such as Slamdance, Woods Hole, Antimatter, and others. In 2011, the Metropolitan Playhouse produced “Baby Marty,” his one-act play. He currently serves on the board for Mono No Aware, a community-focused organization that teaches celluloid film production. I WANT MORE, I WANT LESS was shot over the course of nine weekends at real locations, including a very cluttered CPA’s office in Queens. The film won best screenplay at the Tacoma Film Festival.

THE HALT
(ANG HUPA)
dir. Lav Diaz, 2019
276 mins. Philippines.
In Tagalog with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 – 5PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 – 2PM
ONLINE TICKETS

The Philippines, 2034: A world devastated by a pandemic, darkened by clouds of volcanic smoke caused by global warming, living under the thumb of a repressive dictator. Remind you of anything? Even if THE HALT premiered at Cannes in 2019, Diaz’ eerily prophetic sci-fi noir still more unnerving for its distressed portrait of society than the uncanny accuracy of its thought experiment.

At the root of this disturbing landscape is the senile military dictator President Navarre (Joel Lamangan), whose favorite hobby is feeding the bodies of drug users to his crocodiles and who plans on murdering all of the country’s political dissidents while blaming it on the raging pandemic. As a plot to assassinate Navarre slowly develops, the film offers a wide ranging mosaic people struggling through a world rife with brutality. Working with dozens of characters ranging from a gang of street orphans to an ex-rock star turned guerrilla revolutionary to a sex worker with an unquenchable thirst for blood, Diaz uses his measured, languorous rhythm to craft a portrait that layers its social commentary in observational richness and emotional depth.

With his lengthy runtimes and glacial editing speed, Diaz has long held a reputation as the king of what some have quickly called “slow cinema.” Boasting a 4 ½ hour-plus runtime, THE HALT is no exception to this eye-catching (and numbing) aesthetic approach. Hypnotic in its unique narrative rhythms and mesmerizing with its stark chiaroscuro cinematography which conjures up the dark psychological terrain of classic noir, THE HALT’s emotional and aesthetic power extends far beyond its aggressive political ambitions.

Special thanks to Lav Diaz and Spring Films.

WHO WILL START ANOTHER FIRE
dirs. Nicole Amani Magabo Kiggundu, Jermaine Manigault, Olive Nwosu, Nicole Otero, Emily Packer & Lesley Steele, Faye Ruiz, Samira Saraya, Peier Tracy Shen & Alex Westfall, 2021.
130 mins. Israel-Palestine/Nigeria/Philippines/United States/Uganda.
In various languages with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 17 – 7PM ONLINE and IRL with filmmaker Jermaine Manigault in person for Q&A
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 – 7PM ONLINE and IRL with filmmakers Emily Packer and Lesley Steele in person for Q&A

An omnibus film featuring nine works by emerging filmmakers of color, WHO WILL START ANOTHER FIRE is the inaugural project of Dedza Films, a distribution initiative focused on showcasing underrepresented communities and the next wave of international storytellers. The collection’s title alludes to Malawian poet Jack Mapanje’s Before Chilembwe Tree (1981), in which he asks, “Who will start another fire?”, in other words, who will be the face of the next revolution? By omitting the question mark but retaining his language, the film proposes an answer to his question.

PEIER “TRACY” SHEN  is a Chinese writer-director currently based in Los Angeles. Her shorts were selected to GSA BAFTA Student Shortlist and Oscar-qualifying festivals such as Cleveland, LA Shorts, St. Louis, Nashville, and Cinequest, among others. Her feature screenplay A GRADUATION is selected to participate in the Cine Qua Non Script Revision Lab, sponsored by IMCINE and the Academy. She is also a member of the BAFTA LA Newcomers Program 2021. She graduated with honors from Columbia University, with a double major in English and Film & Media Studies, and recently obtained her MFA in Directing from the AFI Conservatory. She’s drawn to the incommunicable– the unexamined memories that shape a person, the nebulous connections between strangers, and the unconquerable distance between cultures and classes. Her characters, somehow always out of place, are set to embark on the challenging task of finding themselves in the world. Peier is currently in development of the feature LIKE FLYING, a coming-of-age dramedy about a young Chinese girl confronting her first heartbreaks at an English language camp in the U.S.

NICOLE AMANI MAGABO KIGGUNDU is a Ugandan-American writer, director, producer and journalist. Family Tree was inspired by the ambivalent nature of family. Nicole is currently writing a play about a past Ugandan president and his prime minister, and is developing her first feature, GOOD GIRL, about a woman’s struggle to choose between her truth and family.

OLIVE NWOSU (born in Lagos, Nigeria) is a BAFTA LA 2020 scholar, Alex Sichel Fellow at Columbia University School of the Arts, and one of four ‘African Promises’ directors selected for the Institut Français’ Africa-2020 program. Olive studied documentary filmmaking in Prague and worked in advertising in London, before moving to New York to attend Columbia University School of the Arts, where she will receive an MFA in Screenwriting and Directing. Her short film TROUBLEMAKER has received the Best Student Film Award at Discover Film Festival in London, and played as part of the African Perspectives Section at Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival. Olive’s work is generally informed by the fragmentary nature of her experiences across various continents and identities. Themes typically focus on the place of the outsider and the African, challenging the status quo of whom and what we have grown accustomed to seeing on screen.

SAMIRA SARAYA is a Palestinian actor, writer, and director currently based in Tel Aviv. In her early twenties, Saraya began performing in drag as an LGBTQ+ activist, and was making her living as a hospital nurse. Saraya’s first career breakthrough occurred in 2011 when she landed a lead role in the successful Israeli TV show Minimum Wage, and has since continued acting in critically acclaimed films and TV shows— most notably, Fauda, the hit Israeli TV drama. For her 2017 performance in DEATH OF A POETESS, Saraya won the Best Actress Award at the Jerusalem Film Festival and won the Honorable Mention award for her short Polygraph in 2020 at TLVFest, Tel Aviv’s International LGBT Film Festival. Saraya has a graduate degree in directing from Tel Aviv University, and made her directing debut with Polygraph in 2020, which features the first openly lesbian relationship in Palestinian cinema.

FAYE RUIZ is a filmmaker based in Tucson, AZ. Her filmmaking is guided primarily by her experiences as a Latinx trans woman. Her interests lie first and foremost in telling the stories of trans women of color by unraveling the stereotypes, falsities and all things that flatten the lives of these women as they exist in fiction. In her work, she aims to express all the things that are contradictory, messy, fun and human about the trans experience. Finding new ways to push the boundaries of what trans narratives can mean is what drives her to make films.

EMILY PACKER is an experimental non-fiction filmmaker with an interest in border culture and geography. Emily was a fellow in the 2018-2019 Collaborative Studio at UnionDocs in Brooklyn, and is a proud alumna of the anomalous Hampshire College. Her work has been screened across the country, including at Anthology Film Archives, BlackStar Film Festival, DOCNYC, and others, including a three-day border art event that she organized in San Diego-Tijuana called “Arte on the Line”. In addition to her independent work, Emily is a freelance editor, producer, and serves on programming committees for film festivals in New York City. Emily collects voicemails for future use; consider yourself notified.

LESLEY STEELE is a visual storyteller with a background in video & film production and digital design. Originally a New York City native from The Bronx, Lesley obtained a BFA in Design Technology from Parsons The New School for Design, as well as a Masters in Directing from the School of Visual Arts. She writes, directs and edits short and long-form videos. Inspired by avant-garde experimental film, her work reflects the juxtaposition of mediums, including 16mm and analog tape, to explore new meaning in the moving image. Previously, Lesley has worked as a Shooter and Editor for Genius News, and a Digital Designer at MTV & Nickelodeon, Buzzfeed and HB.

ALEX WESTFALL (b. 1997, Manila, Philippines) is a visual artist interested in constructing inner worlds, interrogating cultural histories, and the relationship between dreams and memory. She graduated from Brown University in 2020 with a BA in Modern Culture & Media and is an alumna of the Telluride Film Festival Student Symposium.

NICOLE OTERO is a writer, director and editor. Her directorial debut SLIP screened in the shorts program at the 2019 Indie Memphis Film Festival. Nicole also shot and edited an experimental documentary on artist and founder of the Underground Museum, Noah Davis in 2016. Untitled: In Process was exhibited at the Frye Museum in Seattle and the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Nicole has also edited several works for major museum exhibitions including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the New Museum in New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and more.

JERMAINE MANIGAULT (b. 1991, Queens, New York) is an African-American director, screenwriter, and producer. The son of a New York dancer and a Philadelphia writer, Jermaine studied Psychology and Film Studies while working on sets as a production assistant. While a PA, Jermaine began to write and experiment with visuals and courted investors for his debut short film, Language is Dead (2017). Starring James Physick and Academy Award® Nominee Kim Krizan, the film follows a man who seeks the aid of a therapist after questioning the validity of words when they fail to describe his emotions. It went on to win the Audience Choice Award for Best Short Film in New York at the Kew Gardens Festival of Cinema, and Best Screenplay at the Sydney Indie Film Festival in Sydney, Australia. After returning from the European Premiere of Language is Dead at the Four Seasons Film Festival in London in 2018, Jermaine traveled to Charleston, South Carolina to visit multiple slave plantations while writing his second short film, NOT BLACK ENOUGH (2020). The film garnered a mention in The New York Times before its debut last fall and has thus far screened at 5 international festivals (3 Oscar & 4 BAFTA-Qualifying). In 2018, Jermaine launched 30 Hours Productions, a production company dedicated to illuminating the stories of underrepresented groups. As an active NAACP member, he created the Young Black Creators Initiative, a mentorship program for Black youths who will be invited to the set of all films produced by the company in an attempt to educate them on the wide range of roles behind the camera to help empower them when deciding a career path. Jermaine is currently writing the script for his debut feature film.