WEDNESDAY, APRIL 4 – 7:30 PM
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
Please note admission for this event is $10. ONLINE TICKETS HERE
In advance of his feature debut NOTES ON AN APPEARANCE playing New Directors New Films, Spectacle is thrilled to host filmmaker and critic Ricky D’Ambrose for a special screening of his early works followed by a Q&A.
These four short films—draft variations on a theme or two, made between 2011 and 2016—anticipate NOTES ON AN APPEARANCE. (Ricky’s earliest, THE STRANGER, has never been shown publicly before!)
“D’Ambrose suggests that he’s searching for a way to make films that break with the dominant mode of independent filmmaking. In order to construct his own cinematic future—and the era’s—he’s trying to reconstruct its past.” – The New Yorker
“SIX CENTS IN THE POCKET is framed around Clyde’s errand for a woman named Risa. The less you know about what happens in the next 14 minutes, the better. Suffice to say, this seemingly low-budget Brooklyn chamber drama, is actually more like a classic city symphony from the 1920s. What to call it: Arch-minimalism? Sensational Bressonianism?” – BOMB
THE STRANGER
2011. 32 minutes.
An anonymous young man appears in the apartment of a young couple, promising the two graduate students a better, less insular life with him in Berlin. Attracted to what they consider the man’s political and artistic preoccupations, the couple withdraws from school, quits their jobs, destroys their belongings, and waits impatiently for the return of the stranger, who never returns.
PILGRIMS
2013. 14 minutes.
In a city afflicted by increasingly violent protests, a dying young man is visited in his apartment by a refugee, a political radical, and a priest.
SIX CENTS IN THE POCKET
2015. 14 minutes.
A young man with a small, diminishing supply of money drifts in and out of the New York apartment of a couple traveling overseas.
SPIRAL JETTY
2017. 16 minutes.
An applauded New York intellectual hires a young archivist to whitewash her late psychologist father’s reputation by eliminating a forbidding, potentially incriminating paper trail.
Total runtime approximately 76 minutes.
Ricky D’Ambrose was born in Livingston, New Jersey, United States in 1987. He studied English Literature and Cinema Studies. Since 2013, he has shot and edited a series of video-recorded directors’ talks for the online film magazine MUBI Notebook, and written film reviews and essays. Following these shorts, NOTES ON AN APPEARANCE is his first feature film.