FRIDAY, APRIL 11 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, APRIL 13 – 7:30 PM
It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time. — W.G. Sebald
Before his untimely death at 45, Jonathan Schwartz built a formidable body of work as one of the most promising and accomplished experimental filmmakers of the 21st century. A professor at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Keene State College in New Hampshire, his 16mm works are fragments of fleeting spectral moments, navigating landscapes as varied as the glaciers of Iceland and a canopy of trees near his Vermont home with the same sense of wonder. Combining the ephemerality of childlike awe with grief and mortality, his work often parallels that of authors like W.G. Sebald in its attempts to wrestle with the elusiveness of memory through found objects, readings, and his elliptical imagery, creating a form that is wholly new and enthralling.
Spectacle is proud to present the first program of Schwartz’s work to screen in NYC since 2019, a rare opportunity to view much of it as intended, on 16mm in an intimate environment. The event will be introduced by Jonathan’s close friends Rebekah Rutkoff and Emily Drury. Rutkoff is a NYC-based writer. She is the author of The Irresponsible Magician: Essays and Fictions and Double Vision: The Cinema of Robert Beavers. Drury is a landscape designer based in Harrisville, New Hampshire.
A LEAF IS THE SEA IS A THEATER
Dir. Jonathan Schwartz, 2017.
United States. 17 mins, 16mm to digital.
You cannot describe a house on fire until the actual event takes place. Perhaps there will be no fire. Either you’ll have to deny the description as a fiction, or burn the house in accordance with the script. — Dziga Vertov
THE CRACK-UP
Dir. Jonathan Schwartz, 2017.
United States. 17 mins, 16mm to digital.
“… an excursion through fear, near collapse, and transformation that takes its name from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1936 autobiographical essay. Reflecting on life’s ‘process of breaking down,’ it is both extremely personal and also relevant to the difficult times we live in. With sublime 16mm footage of glaciers, monumental snow-covered landscapes, and an icy, roiling sea, The Crack-Up alternates strident sounds and brash rhythms and gestures of the camera with moments of arresting fragility and grace. Danger, death, the unexpected chaos, and destruction of life are all evoked with almost no human presence in the image. The sound of wind, rain, the cracking of frozen earth occasionally gives way to two voices: a female voice reciting from Fitzgerald’s text and a male voice struggling to use language at all. Schwartz’s film seems to take as its challenge Fitzgerald’s admonition to simultaneously ‘see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.'” — Irina Leimbacher
IF THE WAR CONTINUES
Dir. Jonathan Schwartz, 2012.
United States. 5 mins, 16mm.
“Jumpers move from right to left like the carriage return of a typewriter, while the landscape and rays of sunlight thrust lines in the opposite direction. The somehow nostalgic, slowed-down editing of the images contrasts with the preeminence of pounding sound, accompanied by a degraded, almost unintelligible narration from a cassette tape about the life and work of the German writer. As Schwartz points out, the soundtrack shares some similarities with Popul Vuh’s electronic score at the opening of Werner Herzog’s The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner (1974). This sound has the quality of a forgotten mantra or a robotic plea. The repeated motion swerves towards Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return: the temptation and fascination of going back to the origins by jumping away.” — Monica Saviron
FOR A WINTER
Dir. Jonathan Schwartz, 2007.
United States. 5 mins, 16mm.
“The camera remains static to capture the accelerated movements, shot frame-by-frame, of ice skaters on a sunny winter morning. They are not portrayed as living things—they don’t have the ability to speak, and they look like robots from another planet whose language is the sound of sharp razors on thick ice. They may very well be ghosts, and less alive than the figures of nature in an old book.” — Monica Saviron
WINTER BEYOND WINTER
Dir. Jonathan Schwartz, 2016.
United States. 11 mins, 16mm.
“Winter Beyond Winter confirms his gift for lyrically transposing what’s close at hand, in this case drawing a reverie of fatherhood from the short, sharp days of New England winter. The camera moves from laden trees to dazzled earth while on the soundtrack a boy reads. From here we follow an older man carrying skates and a boom mic into the woods. He turns a few elegant arcs around a small pond, the camera watching from the side before shaking off its melancholy and taking to the ice. One skater holds the image, the other the sound; the shot is their union.” — Max Goldberg
NEW YEAR SUN
Dir. Jonathan Schwartz, 2010.
United States. 3 mins, 16mm.
“… Schwartz approaches light traveling through water in all its forms. His macro lens strives to get closer to the essence, to the transparency of things, and yet, the tenebrous and doomed cry of a church’s bell, and the ascending, unstoppable pitch that accompany the images end up close to the sound of a derailed train—and the unfocused, unclear vision that comes with it.” — Monica Saviron
