ARCHIE’S BETTY
dir. Gerald Peary, 2015
US. 70 minutes.

FRIDAY, MARCH 10 – 7:30 PM – w/introduction from comic book artist Robin Chapman
SUNDAY, MARCH 12 – 5 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 24 – 10 PM
MONDAY, MARCH 27 – 7:30 PM

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A kaleidoscope of compulsion, comics history, and passionate fandom, ARCHIE’S BETTY starts as a light and straightforward documentary on the origins of the Archie Comics gang.  But soon, the story twists into a strange small town mystery when director Gerald Peary discovers that his well-known, 25-year-old, article on the subject might have been a little inaccurate.  Original Archie artist Bob Montana left more loose ends than clues as to who Archie, Betty, Veronica, Moose, Jughead – and even Mr. Weatherbee and Ms Grundy – might have been inspired by. Naturally, the residents of Montana’s hometown of Haverhill seem to all be sure that they know the real story.  But … who’s right?

Packed with interviews from Archie Comics writers and artists, Archie historians, Montana’s classmates, and Peary himself, ARCHIE’S BETTY is the culmination of the director’s lifelong obsession with the Riverdale gang.

Robyn Chapman is an editor, a publisher, and (sometimes) a cartoonist. She is  the proprietor of Paper Rocket Minicomics and The Tiny Report, and she has had many different jobs in comics. She spent five years at The Center for Cartoon Studies, initially as their first fellow and later as their program coordinator and a faculty member. During her time at CCS she earned her MFA, having previously earned her BFA at the Savannah College of Art and Design. For a time she worked at Brooklyn’s best comic shop, Desert Island. Previously she worked as an assistant editor at Graphic Universe, the graphic novel imprint of Lerner Publishing Group. Currently she is an associate editor at First Second.

She is the editor/publisher of the Micro-Press Yearbook and the author of Drawing Comics Lab (Quarry Books). In the spring of 2016 she debuted Twin Bed, her first solo comic in a long, long time.

“Delightful, touching, and appropriately comic.” – Ross McElwhee

“It’s such a fun and touching personal documentary. Highly recommended
for viewers of all ages from birth to beyond the infinite. Even if you are not
a comic book fan, you will love the story this movie tells. If you are nostalgic
for the 1950s, you will be in seventh heaven.” – Joseph McBride, film historian and biographer

PART OF THE SPRING MIDNIGHT SERIES:
NASCHY AS II WANNA BE: RETURN OF NASCHY

HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB
Dir. Carlos Aured, 1975
Spain, 95 min. (original cut)
In Spanish with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, MARCH 4 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, MARCH 10 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 15 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, MARCH 25 – MIDNIGHT

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“Bastards! I curse you all!”
It’s been exactly four years since the great Jacinto Molina Álvarez, aka Paul Naschy, last graced a midnight here at Spectacle. The time has never been better for the Spanish Lon Chaney to haunt the twee streets of Williamsburg, his bare-chested bravado and wry wit a perfect balance to gallons of Tempra-red blood and unspeakable black magic. The lord of the night returns for midnights through 2017! It’s time to get…
AS NASCHY AS II WANNA BE!

The year is 1454, and the diabolical warlock Alaric de Marnac (Naschy, natch) and his mistress Mabille De Lancré (Emma Cohen, from CUT-THROATS NINE and Jess Franco’s AL OTRO LADO DEL ESPEJO) are accused of witchcraft, vampirism and lycanthropy before being tortured and killed (and Marnac gets his head cut off!), but not before cursing the offspring of their killers. Now it’s the 1970s, and a group of friends led by Hugo de Marnac (Naschy in a second role!) and Maurice Roland (Naschy regular Victor “Vic Morror” Alcazar) attend a seance, asking tongue-in-cheek about the location of Marnac’s head. Spoiler hint: they find it, and a whole lot more…Directed by Carlos Aured (BLUE EYES OF THE BROKEN DOLL, THE MUMMY’S REVENGE, contrasting beautiful French landscapes with gruesome murders (don’t worry, our cut’s the original Spanish version with all gore/nudity intact), it’s an excellent introduction to Naschy’s non-werewolf roles, with everything you’d want from a midnight: gallows revenge speeches, nightgowns aplenty, and Naschy’s talking head in a box! Be sure to join us this March as HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB!

RETOURNEMENT A RIVERDELL
Dir. Various, 1989/1991
America, 100 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, MARCH 11 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, MARCH 24 – MIDNIGHT
SATURDAY, MARCH 31 – MIDNIGHT

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Somewhere deep within everybody, there’s a town as American as apple pie – a place where a ginger-headed princox and his next door neighbor’s daughter might share a malt fizz at the corner medicine shop, where a weathered jalopy still bolts down the street quicker than those new automobiles from Korea or Japan. A lifetime away from the time a certain weekly program helpfully venn-diagrammed America’s favorite happy fool with the garish intrigue of David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS, there was RETOURNEMENT A RIVERDELL: a foreign film in English, assembled by elite power structures to emboss postwar nostalgia in magnetic tape, kicking around the loneliest late-night airwaves of television before a slow death (and shameful rebirth) on VHS under a different name.

The film offers a glimpse into the disappointments of growing up that can be called Lacanian: Archiie comes home to find Riverdell has changed, but not nearly enough. While Regggie has assumed the position of a cutthroat AMERICAN PSYCHO-style businessman, Archiie must wrestle with his own suburban privilege a priori the evaporating mirage of his childhood home… And in the same mirror he witnesses not just the crestfallen zeitgeist of a generation, but a deeper contraction within his own morals – having spent his entire adult life avoiding that old predicament with Bettty and Veronika.

RETOURNEMENT is not entirely unlike Laurence Kasdan’s THE BIG CHILL: in essence, a documentary of curdled Boomer expectations smuggled like candy contraband into a TV dinner narrative template. When Jughead and his idiot son bob their way through a New Jack Swing cover of “Honey Honey” in front of pretty much everybody in town, the real lesson of RETOURNAMENT A RIVERDELL reveals itself thus: time’s passage makes fools of us all.

(aka WE TURN IN THE NIGHT, CONSUMED BY FIRE)
dir. Guy Debord, 1978
France, 96 mins.
In French with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, MARCH 4 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 8 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, MARCH 13 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, MARCH 19 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 24 – 7:30 PM

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“I will make no concessions to the public in this film… Since the cinema public needs more than anything to face these bitter truths, which concern it so intimately but which are so widely repressed, it cannot be denied that a film that for once renders it the harsh service of revealing that its problems are not so mysterious as it imagines, nor even perhaps so incurable if we ever manage to abolish classes and the state — it cannot be denied that such a film has at least that one virtue. It will have no other.” – Guy Debord

Everyone’s favorite Situationist returns to Spectacle for the first time with IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI, the notorious magnum opus of “anti-cinema” that closed out the filmmaking career of French philosopher and writer Guy Debord.

If THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE has been proven beyond-relevant in the interceding years (as is so often the case, relevant beyond the confines of its actual self as a piece of text), IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI is a “repudiation of legends”, a densely layered film essay that slavishly interrogates (and rationalizes) its author’s defiance. Here Debord is reflexively caustic, littering the film with subtweets of his then-contemporaries and the myths surrounding his own legend – taking particular umbrage at the notion that he was a theorist (as opposed to practitioner), and, albeit in veiled terms, the New Left’s inability to subvert the grand lines of mass exploitation outside major city struggles.

In an eerily measured voiceover narration, Debord takes shots at unions (‘“always ready to prolong the grievances of the proletariat for another thousand years in order to preserve their own role as its defender”), culture critics (“amazingly enough, despite all the obvious evidence to the contrary, there are still some cretins, among the specialized spectators hired to edify their fellow viewers, who claim that it is ‘dogmatic’ to state some truth in a film unless it is also proved by images”), establishment intellectuals (“they have wasted their time at college, bargain shopping for worn-out fragments of secondhand knowledge”), and the spectating audience itself – or rather, what Debord calls “the complete vacuity of mediatized society”.

IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI is thus a political coming-of-age tale in its own way. Many of its images were culled from the ostensibly benign bourgeois French and American movies Debord so hated; more than an enigmatic few would appear to have been shot by Debord himself, or collected over the years. The montagery is genteel by 2017 standards, but there is real power to Debord’s insistence – albeit despairing – that “avant-gardes only have one time”. The fleeting, clean-limned nature of this assemblage speaks for itself: while THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE diagnosed a half-awake system of power, Debord here holds both image and consumer equally culpable for the broader distraction – a still-terrifying idea today.

Special thanks to Ken Knabb, Konrad Steiner and NOT BORED!.

“Has the time come to challenge this unscathed interlocutor? I could do so, inasmuch as his nostalgia blinds Debord, in spite of himself, to the current context of what all his perseverance derives from. You can’t just have thirty years of history end on a shot of the high waters of the Venice lagoon and expect to get away with it….

But we also need to understand poetry’s protective function. Why was it in the resource of art that twice – first with the Surrealists after October 1917 and then with the Situationists in the early 1960s – new historical circumstances produced, in France, a true break, unprecedented intensity, tremendous repercussions with regard to an ossified political Marxism? Marxism should learn from such amazing cunning! We won’t miss the opportunity this time.

This Marxism – of which Debord, in terms of the ethics of the subject, would be the interlocutor and, in his own way, the equal – I could call a living Marxism.” – Alain Badiou, Le Perroquet, 1981

SWASTIKA
Dir. Philippe Mora, 1974.
UK. 95 min.
In German with English subtitles.

FRIDAY, MARCH 3 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, MARCH 9 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, MARCH 21 – 10 PM
MONDAY, MARCH 27 – 10 PM

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“If Hitler is dehumanized and shown only as a devil, any future Hitler may not be recognized, simply because he is a human being.”

So reads the opening titles of Philippe Mora’s SWASTIKA, a statement that perhaps has never been more pertinent than in the world of 2017.  Released in 1974, the documentary has only recently been freed from a ban in Germany that lasted until 2010. Artfully pieced together from COLOR home movies (shot by Eva Braun & her sister), propaganda reels, footage of massive rallies, and german newsreels, SWASTIKA provides a never-before-seen glimpse into the private and public life of Hitler, his cohorts, and the willing country they led into the deepest fires of hell.

One can only watch with a fascination that is laced with dread, a feeling that finally gives way to the crushing weight of history. What emerges from underneath the rubble of disbelief, is perhaps the greatest lesson we can hope to learn from history: That evil is not so easily recognized, that it can rise to unimaginable heights with the polite and orderly cooperation of ordinary people, that it lurks behind the banality of the everyday.

AMERICAN MYSTIC
dir. Alex Mar, 2010.
USA, 80 min.
English.

TUESDAY, MARCH 28 – 7:30 PM
DIRECTOR ALEX MAR IN ATTENDANCE! *ONE NIGHT ONLY!*

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Spectacle Theater is excited to collaborate with critical platform Match Cuts on a new series of screenings.  Scroll down for more information on Match Cuts.

“Set against the rich, color-soaked backdrop of America’s rural landscapes, Alex Mar’s lyrical documentary braids together the stories of three young Americans who have chosen to sacrifice comforts in order to embrace the fringes of alternative religion. The subjects include Chuck, a Lakota Sioux sundancer in the badlands of South Dakota; Morpheus, a Pagan priestess living off the grid in northern California’s old mining country; and Kublai, a Spiritualist medium in the former revivalist district of upstate New York.

In the radical, separatist spirit of early America, each has extracted themselves from the mainstream in order to live immersed in their faith and to seize a different way of life. Mar takes a personal, visually lush approach, enveloping the viewer in the subjects’ experience of their controversial faiths through their own words, their rituals, and the sprawling, majestic imagery that makes up each of their worlds.

Director Alex Mar is also the author of Witches of America, which was inspired by and features some of the subjects of this film. Signed paperbacks will be available at the screening.

The movie was produced by Mar and Nicholas Shumaker, and edited by Andy Grieve (Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure, Alex Gibney’s Going Clear). It features cinematography by Gregory Mitnick and a score by composer Nathan Larson (formerly of the band Shudder to Think).”

Match Cuts is a weekly podcast centered on video, film and the moving image. Match Cuts Presents is dedicated to presenting de-colonialized cinema, LGBTQI films, Marxist diatribes, video art, dance films, sex films, and activist documentaries with a rotating cast of presenters from all spectrums of the performing and plastic arts and surrounding humanities. Match Cuts is hosted by Nick Faust and Kachine Moore.