Anthology Film Archives

Pat O’Neill
SAUGUS SERIES (1974, 19 min, 16mm) 
SAUGUS SERIES is actually seven short films, one-and-a-half to six minutes long, united by a common soundtrack. Each is an evolving “still life” made up of meticulously assembled but spatially contradictory elements.
“SAUGUS SERIES exhibits the possibilities of the optical printer with considerable self-confidence and élan. The colors are deeply saturated; radically incompatible spaces are meticulously pieced together; moving images are layered in front of each other or masked within ‘negative’ spaces outlined by the absence of an object; a multiplicity of textures and densities and the dynamics of particles in turmoil enliven the imagery. […] The displaced objects and the uncanny juxtapositions of Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, and Curtis Harrington take on meaning from their relationship to the human figures that encounter them. As such, they become symbolic functions. O’Neill, a native of southern California, seems to be telling us that such a symbolic and psychologically personalized landscape loses its significance in a space like Los Angeles which is so overwhelmed by fragmented representations and gerrybuilt perspectives.” –P. Adams Sitney, MILLENNIUM FILM JOURNAL

Hans Richter
RHYTHMUS 21 (1921, 3 min, 35mm, silent)
“Its content is essentially rhythm, the formal vocabulary is elemental geometry, and the structural principle is counterpoint of contrasting opposites.” –Standish Lawder

TWO PENNY MAGIC / ZWEIGROSCHENZAUBER (1929, 2 min, 16mm)
Produced as a commercial for a German illustrated magazine, this film is an experiment with visual rhymes.

EVERYTHING REVOLVES, EVERYTHING TURNS / ALLES DREHT SICH, ALLES BEWEGT SICH (1929, 9 min, 16mm)
“Richter’s unique and fascinating view of magic and cruelty in a carnival side-show.” –Cecile Starr

Paul Sharits
N:O:T:H:I:N:G
(1968, 36 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.)
“Based in part on the Tibetan Mandala of the Five Dhyani Buddhas/a journey toward the center of pure consciousness (Dharma-Dhatu Wisdom)/space and motion generated rather than illustrated/time-color energy create virtual shape/in negative time, growth is inverse decay.” –Paul Sharits

T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1969, 12 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
“Starring poet David Franks whose voice appears on the soundtrack/an uncutting and unscratching mandala.” –Paul Sharits

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

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REVIVAL RUN!

Written by Patrice Chéreau and Hervé Guibert. New 4K restoration (from the original camera negative) courtesy of Altered Innocence & Anus Films! Special thanks to Adam Baran.

Presented at Anthology in November, in the context of Adam Baran’s monthly series “Narrow Rooms”, which features a selection of dark and uncompromising queer films, Patrice Chéreau’s early feature THE WOUNDED MAN (1983) was a revelation: an amazingly accomplished work that genuinely channels the transgressive, unsanitized sensibility of Jean Genet, and boasts extraordinary performances by its two leads. THE WOUNDED MAN is distinguished above all by a sublimely disorienting narrative approach and tonal register. Its erotically-charged world seems to spring into existence at the very moment of its protagonist’s sexual awakening, while the tone veers from profoundly disturbing to darkly comic to disarmingly tender. Leading us to exhilaratingly mysterious and unfamiliar spaces both physical and psychological, THE WOUNDED MAN is a film that deserves to be far better known in the U.S., and we’re thrilled to bring it back for a full revival engagement.

"Henri is a frustrated teenager living with his parents in a provincial French coastal town. When they drag him to the train station to bid adieu to his sister, Henri sneaks off to a secluded bathroom and interrupts a hustler named Jean satisfying the masochistic desires of an older male client. Henri falls desperately in love with the straight hoodlum, but Jean evades Henri’s affections. Undeterred, Henri shadows Jean as he traverses the dark and dangerous underbelly of their sleepy village. But as he descends deeper and deeper into Jean’s world, there may not be an easy way out. Patrice Chéreau’s 1983 drama is one of the most bleak and beautiful portraits of gay erotic obsession ever assembled, boasting a breakout lead performance by young Jean-Hugues Anglade and a script that took co-writers Chéreau and legendary gay French author and activist Hervé Guibert six years to perfect. The result is a rich, strange and sumptuous film that reveals new truths on each viewing." - Adam Baran

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(FRANCESCO, GIULLARE DI DIO)

“Roberto Rossellini’s buoyant 1950 masterpiece is a glorious hallucination of perfect harmony between man and nature. The Franciscans arrive at Assisi in the first reel and leave in the last. In between, as they say, nothing happens and everything happens. Rossellini is able to suggest the scope and rhythm of an entire lost way of life through a gradual accumulation of well-observed detail. The Franciscans are at once inspired and slightly foolish, but Rossellini maintains a profound respect for the grandeur of their delusions. A great film, all the more impressive for being apparently effortless.” –Dave Kehr

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

REVIVAL RUN!

Written by Patrice Chéreau and Hervé Guibert. New 4K restoration (from the original camera negative) courtesy of Altered Innocence & Anus Films! Special thanks to Adam Baran.

Presented at Anthology in November, in the context of Adam Baran’s monthly series “Narrow Rooms”, which features a selection of dark and uncompromising queer films, Patrice Chéreau’s early feature THE WOUNDED MAN (1983) was a revelation: an amazingly accomplished work that genuinely channels the transgressive, unsanitized sensibility of Jean Genet, and boasts extraordinary performances by its two leads. THE WOUNDED MAN is distinguished above all by a sublimely disorienting narrative approach and tonal register. Its erotically-charged world seems to spring into existence at the very moment of its protagonist’s sexual awakening, while the tone veers from profoundly disturbing to darkly comic to disarmingly tender. Leading us to exhilaratingly mysterious and unfamiliar spaces both physical and psychological, THE WOUNDED MAN is a film that deserves to be far better known in the U.S., and we’re thrilled to bring it back for a full revival engagement.

"Henri is a frustrated teenager living with his parents in a provincial French coastal town. When they drag him to the train station to bid adieu to his sister, Henri sneaks off to a secluded bathroom and interrupts a hustler named Jean satisfying the masochistic desires of an older male client. Henri falls desperately in love with the straight hoodlum, but Jean evades Henri’s affections. Undeterred, Henri shadows Jean as he traverses the dark and dangerous underbelly of their sleepy village. But as he descends deeper and deeper into Jean’s world, there may not be an easy way out. Patrice Chéreau’s 1983 drama is one of the most bleak and beautiful portraits of gay erotic obsession ever assembled, boasting a breakout lead performance by young Jean-Hugues Anglade and a script that took co-writers Chéreau and legendary gay French author and activist Hervé Guibert six years to perfect. The result is a rich, strange and sumptuous film that reveals new truths on each viewing." - Adam Baran

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW!

THE WOUNDED MAN was the result of a collaboration between film and theater director Patrice Chéreau and the great French writer Hervé Guibert (1955-91), the author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction including the seminal AIDS-themed novel, “To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life”. During the final year of his life, which was cut tragically short by AIDS, Guibert returned to the cinema to create a video chronicle of the impact of his disease. On the occasion of our revival run of THE WOUNDED MAN, we present two very rare U.S. screenings of this extraordinary work of autobiographical cinema.

“In 1992, MODESTY AND SHAME, in which Guibert stages himself in the form of an autofiction, was broadcast in France posthumously on channel TF1. […] One thinks of Chantal Akerman filming her sick mother in her Brussels apartment (NO HOME MOVIE [2015]) or her first short film, SAUTE MA VILLE (1968), in which she commits suicide in her suffocating kitchen. In both of them, there is the same experience of self-destruction, up to the blackness of the image, up to suicide. One also thinks of Nanni Moretti and his diary (CARO DIARIO [1993]), in which he alternates between autobiographical scenes involving hospital visits and exile to the Aeolian Islands. But while Akerman and Moretti attempted a form of survival through the act of filming, Guibert sought absolution through the Warholian streamliner: he offered himself to the crowd of divine TV viewers as an absolute sacrifice.” –Charles Teyssou, MOUSSE MAGAZINE

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW!

REVIVAL RUN!

Written by Patrice Chéreau and Hervé Guibert. New 4K restoration (from the original camera negative) courtesy of Altered Innocence & Anus Films! Special thanks to Adam Baran.

Presented at Anthology in November, in the context of Adam Baran’s monthly series “Narrow Rooms”, which features a selection of dark and uncompromising queer films, Patrice Chéreau’s early feature THE WOUNDED MAN (1983) was a revelation: an amazingly accomplished work that genuinely channels the transgressive, unsanitized sensibility of Jean Genet, and boasts extraordinary performances by its two leads. THE WOUNDED MAN is distinguished above all by a sublimely disorienting narrative approach and tonal register. Its erotically-charged world seems to spring into existence at the very moment of its protagonist’s sexual awakening, while the tone veers from profoundly disturbing to darkly comic to disarmingly tender. Leading us to exhilaratingly mysterious and unfamiliar spaces both physical and psychological, THE WOUNDED MAN is a film that deserves to be far better known in the U.S., and we’re thrilled to bring it back for a full revival engagement.

"Henri is a frustrated teenager living with his parents in a provincial French coastal town. When they drag him to the train station to bid adieu to his sister, Henri sneaks off to a secluded bathroom and interrupts a hustler named Jean satisfying the masochistic desires of an older male client. Henri falls desperately in love with the straight hoodlum, but Jean evades Henri’s affections. Undeterred, Henri shadows Jean as he traverses the dark and dangerous underbelly of their sleepy village. But as he descends deeper and deeper into Jean’s world, there may not be an easy way out. Patrice Chéreau’s 1983 drama is one of the most bleak and beautiful portraits of gay erotic obsession ever assembled, boasting a breakout lead performance by young Jean-Hugues Anglade and a script that took co-writers Chéreau and legendary gay French author and activist Hervé Guibert six years to perfect. The result is a rich, strange and sumptuous film that reveals new truths on each viewing." - Adam Baran

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW!

THE WOUNDED MAN was the result of a collaboration between film and theater director Patrice Chéreau and the great French writer Hervé Guibert (1955-91), the author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction including the seminal AIDS-themed novel, “To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life”. During the final year of his life, which was cut tragically short by AIDS, Guibert returned to the cinema to create a video chronicle of the impact of his disease. On the occasion of our revival run of THE WOUNDED MAN, we present two very rare U.S. screenings of this extraordinary work of autobiographical cinema.

“In 1992, MODESTY AND SHAME, in which Guibert stages himself in the form of an autofiction, was broadcast in France posthumously on channel TF1. […] One thinks of Chantal Akerman filming her sick mother in her Brussels apartment (NO HOME MOVIE [2015]) or her first short film, SAUTE MA VILLE (1968), in which she commits suicide in her suffocating kitchen. In both of them, there is the same experience of self-destruction, up to the blackness of the image, up to suicide. One also thinks of Nanni Moretti and his diary (CARO DIARIO [1993]), in which he alternates between autobiographical scenes involving hospital visits and exile to the Aeolian Islands. But while Akerman and Moretti attempted a form of survival through the act of filming, Guibert sought absolution through the Warholian streamliner: he offered himself to the crowd of divine TV viewers as an absolute sacrifice.” –Charles Teyssou, MOUSSE MAGAZINE

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW!

(FRANCESCO, GIULLARE DI DIO)

“Roberto Rossellini’s buoyant 1950 masterpiece is a glorious hallucination of perfect harmony between man and nature. The Franciscans arrive at Assisi in the first reel and leave in the last. In between, as they say, nothing happens and everything happens. Rossellini is able to suggest the scope and rhythm of an entire lost way of life through a gradual accumulation of well-observed detail. The Franciscans are at once inspired and slightly foolish, but Rossellini maintains a profound respect for the grandeur of their delusions. A great film, all the more impressive for being apparently effortless.” –Dave Kehr

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

REVIVAL RUN!

Written by Patrice Chéreau and Hervé Guibert. New 4K restoration (from the original camera negative) courtesy of Altered Innocence & Anus Films! Special thanks to Adam Baran.

Presented at Anthology in November, in the context of Adam Baran’s monthly series “Narrow Rooms”, which features a selection of dark and uncompromising queer films, Patrice Chéreau’s early feature THE WOUNDED MAN (1983) was a revelation: an amazingly accomplished work that genuinely channels the transgressive, unsanitized sensibility of Jean Genet, and boasts extraordinary performances by its two leads. THE WOUNDED MAN is distinguished above all by a sublimely disorienting narrative approach and tonal register. Its erotically-charged world seems to spring into existence at the very moment of its protagonist’s sexual awakening, while the tone veers from profoundly disturbing to darkly comic to disarmingly tender. Leading us to exhilaratingly mysterious and unfamiliar spaces both physical and psychological, THE WOUNDED MAN is a film that deserves to be far better known in the U.S., and we’re thrilled to bring it back for a full revival engagement.

"Henri is a frustrated teenager living with his parents in a provincial French coastal town. When they drag him to the train station to bid adieu to his sister, Henri sneaks off to a secluded bathroom and interrupts a hustler named Jean satisfying the masochistic desires of an older male client. Henri falls desperately in love with the straight hoodlum, but Jean evades Henri’s affections. Undeterred, Henri shadows Jean as he traverses the dark and dangerous underbelly of their sleepy village. But as he descends deeper and deeper into Jean’s world, there may not be an easy way out. Patrice Chéreau’s 1983 drama is one of the most bleak and beautiful portraits of gay erotic obsession ever assembled, boasting a breakout lead performance by young Jean-Hugues Anglade and a script that took co-writers Chéreau and legendary gay French author and activist Hervé Guibert six years to perfect. The result is a rich, strange and sumptuous film that reveals new truths on each viewing." - Adam Baran

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW!

REVIVAL RUN!

Written by Patrice Chéreau and Hervé Guibert. New 4K restoration (from the original camera negative) courtesy of Altered Innocence & Anus Films! Special thanks to Adam Baran.

Presented at Anthology in November, in the context of Adam Baran’s monthly series “Narrow Rooms”, which features a selection of dark and uncompromising queer films, Patrice Chéreau’s early feature THE WOUNDED MAN (1983) was a revelation: an amazingly accomplished work that genuinely channels the transgressive, unsanitized sensibility of Jean Genet, and boasts extraordinary performances by its two leads. THE WOUNDED MAN is distinguished above all by a sublimely disorienting narrative approach and tonal register. Its erotically-charged world seems to spring into existence at the very moment of its protagonist’s sexual awakening, while the tone veers from profoundly disturbing to darkly comic to disarmingly tender. Leading us to exhilaratingly mysterious and unfamiliar spaces both physical and psychological, THE WOUNDED MAN is a film that deserves to be far better known in the U.S., and we’re thrilled to bring it back for a full revival engagement.

"Henri is a frustrated teenager living with his parents in a provincial French coastal town. When they drag him to the train station to bid adieu to his sister, Henri sneaks off to a secluded bathroom and interrupts a hustler named Jean satisfying the masochistic desires of an older male client. Henri falls desperately in love with the straight hoodlum, but Jean evades Henri’s affections. Undeterred, Henri shadows Jean as he traverses the dark and dangerous underbelly of their sleepy village. But as he descends deeper and deeper into Jean’s world, there may not be an easy way out. Patrice Chéreau’s 1983 drama is one of the most bleak and beautiful portraits of gay erotic obsession ever assembled, boasting a breakout lead performance by young Jean-Hugues Anglade and a script that took co-writers Chéreau and legendary gay French author and activist Hervé Guibert six years to perfect. The result is a rich, strange and sumptuous film that reveals new truths on each viewing." - Adam Baran

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW!

REVIVAL RUN!

Written by Patrice Chéreau and Hervé Guibert. New 4K restoration (from the original camera negative) courtesy of Altered Innocence & Anus Films! Special thanks to Adam Baran.

Presented at Anthology in November, in the context of Adam Baran’s monthly series “Narrow Rooms”, which features a selection of dark and uncompromising queer films, Patrice Chéreau’s early feature THE WOUNDED MAN (1983) was a revelation: an amazingly accomplished work that genuinely channels the transgressive, unsanitized sensibility of Jean Genet, and boasts extraordinary performances by its two leads. THE WOUNDED MAN is distinguished above all by a sublimely disorienting narrative approach and tonal register. Its erotically-charged world seems to spring into existence at the very moment of its protagonist’s sexual awakening, while the tone veers from profoundly disturbing to darkly comic to disarmingly tender. Leading us to exhilaratingly mysterious and unfamiliar spaces both physical and psychological, THE WOUNDED MAN is a film that deserves to be far better known in the U.S., and we’re thrilled to bring it back for a full revival engagement.

"Henri is a frustrated teenager living with his parents in a provincial French coastal town. When they drag him to the train station to bid adieu to his sister, Henri sneaks off to a secluded bathroom and interrupts a hustler named Jean satisfying the masochistic desires of an older male client. Henri falls desperately in love with the straight hoodlum, but Jean evades Henri’s affections. Undeterred, Henri shadows Jean as he traverses the dark and dangerous underbelly of their sleepy village. But as he descends deeper and deeper into Jean’s world, there may not be an easy way out. Patrice Chéreau’s 1983 drama is one of the most bleak and beautiful portraits of gay erotic obsession ever assembled, boasting a breakout lead performance by young Jean-Hugues Anglade and a script that took co-writers Chéreau and legendary gay French author and activist Hervé Guibert six years to perfect. The result is a rich, strange and sumptuous film that reveals new truths on each viewing." - Adam Baran

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW!

Karl Freund, Carl Mayer & Walter Ruttmann
BERLIN, SYMPHONY OF A CITY / BERLIN, DIE SYMPHONIE DER GROSSTADT
1927, 65 min, 35mm-to-DCP, silent. 16mm collection print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Ruttmann and company’s seminal, groundbreaking film is a valentine to the ‘new’ Berlin of the late 1920s. Beginning at dawn and ending after midnight, it shows Berliners hard at work by day and possessed by the city’s thriving nightlife. Essentially a feature-length montage, the film was heavily influenced by Soviet documentary experiments like Dziga Vertov’s KINO-PRAVDA and was itself very influential in fostering the ‘city symphony’ genre and other documentary hybrid styles to come.

Frank Stauffacher SAUSALITO (1948, 10 min, 16mm)
“His love for a place in which he lived (Sausalito) and his poetic sensitiveness, to interpret here and there the ordinary in extraordinary scenes, changed the ‘quasi-documentary’ character of the film and made it a poetic essay, a model and new form for ‘city’ films.” –Hans Richter, FILM CULTURE

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

REVIVAL RUN!

Written by Patrice Chéreau and Hervé Guibert. New 4K restoration (from the original camera negative) courtesy of Altered Innocence & Anus Films! Special thanks to Adam Baran.

Presented at Anthology in November, in the context of Adam Baran’s monthly series “Narrow Rooms”, which features a selection of dark and uncompromising queer films, Patrice Chéreau’s early feature THE WOUNDED MAN (1983) was a revelation: an amazingly accomplished work that genuinely channels the transgressive, unsanitized sensibility of Jean Genet, and boasts extraordinary performances by its two leads. THE WOUNDED MAN is distinguished above all by a sublimely disorienting narrative approach and tonal register. Its erotically-charged world seems to spring into existence at the very moment of its protagonist’s sexual awakening, while the tone veers from profoundly disturbing to darkly comic to disarmingly tender. Leading us to exhilaratingly mysterious and unfamiliar spaces both physical and psychological, THE WOUNDED MAN is a film that deserves to be far better known in the U.S., and we’re thrilled to bring it back for a full revival engagement.

"Henri is a frustrated teenager living with his parents in a provincial French coastal town. When they drag him to the train station to bid adieu to his sister, Henri sneaks off to a secluded bathroom and interrupts a hustler named Jean satisfying the masochistic desires of an older male client. Henri falls desperately in love with the straight hoodlum, but Jean evades Henri’s affections. Undeterred, Henri shadows Jean as he traverses the dark and dangerous underbelly of their sleepy village. But as he descends deeper and deeper into Jean’s world, there may not be an easy way out. Patrice Chéreau’s 1983 drama is one of the most bleak and beautiful portraits of gay erotic obsession ever assembled, boasting a breakout lead performance by young Jean-Hugues Anglade and a script that took co-writers Chéreau and legendary gay French author and activist Hervé Guibert six years to perfect. The result is a rich, strange and sumptuous film that reveals new truths on each viewing." - Adam Baran

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW!

S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED
1968-70, 41 min, 16mm. Restored by Anthology Film Archives.
“Yes, S:S:S:S:S:S is beautiful. The successive scratchings of the stream-image film is very powerful vandalism. The film is a very complete organism with all the possible levels really recognized.” –Michael Snow

COLOR SOUND FRAMES
1974, 26 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
“A film in which Sharits sums up his researches in the area of film strip (in opposition to the individual frames). The film strips move horizontally and vertically; two strips move simultaneously in opposite directions; variations in color; action of sprocket-holes. Very methodically and scientifically he covers the area. […] COLOR SOUND FRAMES advances one area of cinema or one area of researches in cinema (call it art if you wish) to a new climax, to a new peak: his exploration is so total, so perfect.” –Jonas Mekas, VILLAGE VOICE

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

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FILM NOS. 1-5, 7, 10 (EARLY ABSTRACTIONS) (ca. 1946-57, 23 min, 16mm-to-35mm. Restored by Anthology Film Archives and The Film Foundation with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.)

FILM NO. 11 (MIRROR ANIMATIONS) (ca. 1957, 4 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)

FILM NO. 14 (LATE SUPERIMPOSITIONS) (1964, 28 min, 16mm-to-35mm. Restored by Anthology Film Archives and The Film Foundation with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.)

“My cinematic excreta is of four varieties: – batiked animations made directly on film between 1939 and 1946; optically printed non-objective studies composed around 1950; semi-realistic animated collages made as part of my alchemical labors of 1957 to 1962; and chronologically super-imposed photographs of actualities formed since the latter year. All these works have been organized in specific patterns derived from the interlocking beats of the respiration, the heart and the EEG Alpha component and should be observed together in order, or not at all, for they are valuable works, works that will forever abide – they made me gray.” –Harry Smith

Total running time: ca. 60 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

REVIVAL RUN!

Written by Patrice Chéreau and Hervé Guibert. New 4K restoration (from the original camera negative) courtesy of Altered Innocence & Anus Films! Special thanks to Adam Baran.

Presented at Anthology in November, in the context of Adam Baran’s monthly series “Narrow Rooms”, which features a selection of dark and uncompromising queer films, Patrice Chéreau’s early feature THE WOUNDED MAN (1983) was a revelation: an amazingly accomplished work that genuinely channels the transgressive, unsanitized sensibility of Jean Genet, and boasts extraordinary performances by its two leads. THE WOUNDED MAN is distinguished above all by a sublimely disorienting narrative approach and tonal register. Its erotically-charged world seems to spring into existence at the very moment of its protagonist’s sexual awakening, while the tone veers from profoundly disturbing to darkly comic to disarmingly tender. Leading us to exhilaratingly mysterious and unfamiliar spaces both physical and psychological, THE WOUNDED MAN is a film that deserves to be far better known in the U.S., and we’re thrilled to bring it back for a full revival engagement.

"Henri is a frustrated teenager living with his parents in a provincial French coastal town. When they drag him to the train station to bid adieu to his sister, Henri sneaks off to a secluded bathroom and interrupts a hustler named Jean satisfying the masochistic desires of an older male client. Henri falls desperately in love with the straight hoodlum, but Jean evades Henri’s affections. Undeterred, Henri shadows Jean as he traverses the dark and dangerous underbelly of their sleepy village. But as he descends deeper and deeper into Jean’s world, there may not be an easy way out. Patrice Chéreau’s 1983 drama is one of the most bleak and beautiful portraits of gay erotic obsession ever assembled, boasting a breakout lead performance by young Jean-Hugues Anglade and a script that took co-writers Chéreau and legendary gay French author and activist Hervé Guibert six years to perfect. The result is a rich, strange and sumptuous film that reveals new truths on each viewing." - Adam Baran

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW!

Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and Cineric, Inc.

“NO. 12 can be seen as one moment – certainly the most elaborately crafted moment – of the single alchemical film which is Harry Smith’s life work. In its seriousness, its austerity, it is one of the strangest and most fascinating landmarks in the history of cinema. Its elaborately constructed soundtrack in which the sounds of various figures are systematically displaced onto other images reflects Smith’s abiding concern with auditory effects.” –P. Adams Sitney

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"Director John Binder was inspired to write the script for this warm-hearted character study on small-town hucksters, evangelical revivalism, and UFOs after a chance encounter with a human interest newspaper article about a couple in Waldport, Oregon, who had started their own religion. Only superficially inspired by the mid-’70s exploits of Heaven’s Gate founders Marshall “Bo” Applewhite and Bonnie “Peep” Nettles, the film follows drifter Sheldon Bart (Fred Ward, in one of his most resourceful roles) and revival tent faith healer Brother Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) as their paths cross with a supermarket clerk with a religious affinity towards UFOs (Cindy Williams). With a rollicking country music soundtrack and deft performances all around, Binder spins a rather sympathetic portrayal of mass hysteria – as if ELMER GANTRY were told with the gentle, home-spun touch of early Jonathan Demme, with a dash of the psychotronic absurdism of REPO MAN thrown in for good measure." –Tyler Maxin

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Jack Smith
SCOTCH TAPE (1962, 3 min, 16mm)
A junkyard musical.

Jack Smith
FLAMING CREATURES
1963, 45 min, 16mm, b&w
“[Smith] graced the anarchic liberation of new American cinema with graphic and rhythmic power worthy of the best of formal cinema. He has attained for the first time in motion pictures a high level of art which is absolutely lacking in decorum; and a treatment of sex which makes us aware of the restraint of all previous filmmakers.” –FILM CULTURE

Ron Rice
CHUMLUM (1964, 23 min, 16mm-to-35mm. With Jack Smith, Beverly Grant, Mario Montez, Joel Markman, Frances Francine, Guy Henson, Barry Titus, Zelda Nelson, Gerard Malanga, Barbara Rubin, and Frances Stillman. Music by Angus MacLise. Restored by Anthology Film Archives and The Film Foundation with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.)
“A hallucinatory micro-epic filmed during lulls in the production of Smith’s NORMAL LOVE and one of the great ‘heroic doses’ of ’60s underground cinema, a movie so sumptuously and serenely psychedelic it appears to have been printed entirely on gauze.” –Chuck Stephens, CINEMA SCOPE

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

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“Based on true events, ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ focuses almost entirely on the story of one Alcatraz inmate Frank Morris (Clint Eastwood) as he plans and executes his escape from what was once the most secure prison in America. Starting from the moment when Morris is escorted into “The Rock,” the film immediately constructs an environment of closure and constraint, and, with quick sequences lacking any exposition, it ingeniously avoids drawing meaning out of the circumstances of imprisonment and instead simply points to the act of escape as a natural response.” –Evelyn Emile

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“Based on THE DESTROYER, a long-running series (149 titles so far!) of pulp novels created by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir concerning the exploits of super-agent Remo Williams, the movie version roped in BOND director Guy Hamilton and sometime BOND screenwriter Christopher Wood. But the magic didn’t happen; it seemed that the world…didn’t really see the need for what was described on the film’s release as a ‘red, white and blue-collar’ version of 007. […] The tone of the film is relentlessly tongue-in-cheek, much of it is played for laughs and too much time is spent focusing on Remo’s training. He’s paired up with inscrutable Korean martial arts guru Chiun (played, uncomfortably, by famously non-Korean actor/dancer Joel Grey). […] But despite its stodgy pace and idling, unhurried narrative, there’s plenty to recommend in THE ADVENTURE BEGINS. Craig Safan’s fabulously 1980s synth-drenched score is instantly memorable and the [film] is worth the price of admission just for the breathtaking action sequence set on and around the Statue of Liberty, covered in scaffolding at the time of the filming. Years before CGI and green screen took much of the real skill out of this type of big set-piece, the sequence is all the more impressive because it’s done with real stuntmen on a real location taking what look like insane risks for the sake of a motion picture.” –Paul Mount, STARBURST MAGAZINE

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“Seen from a 40-year remove – when Donald Trump’s presidency has again inspired many Americans to regard their country with shame and dismay – [SOUTHERN COMFORT] seems courageous, even cathartic in its blunt critique of all-American hubris, aggression, and paranoia. It takes place in the Louisiana bayou sometime in 1973. A squad of National Guard soldiers, almost all of them hot-headed jerks, get assigned to weekend maneuvers in an endless stretch of swamp. They soon get lost, and, during a stand-off with a bunch of Cajun hunters, one soldier opens fire on the strangers with a round of blanks. The Cajuns, reasonably taking this as an act of aggression, declare war on the Guardsmen; over the next couple days, the soldiers’ situation goes from bad to worse, with nearly all of them falling prey to the backwoods trappers and their own in-fighting. SOUTHERN COMFORT exhibits the same economical storytelling and fine-calibrated suspense as Hill’s earlier THE DRIVER and THE WARRIORS, but the abstract quality of those films is replaced here by a concrete sense of anger. More impressively, Hill delivers his anti-American anger through narrative elements familiar from countless American action movies, making the film a genuinely subversive one.” –Ben Sachs

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SPECIAL SCREENING! FILMMAKERS IN PERSON!

It’s been ten years since Banana Bag & Bodice’s beloved experimental production SPACE//SPACE made waves in the New York theater scene (“WAITING FOR GODOT in space”, raved the New York Times). Now the married performance artist duo who created that infamous work are squeezed into the first wave of pandemic lockdown: alone in their attic, they rehash their claustrophobic container tale of two brothers stuck in a space capsule – but this time performing for a bank of empty seats. The play, and their relationship with their eight-year-old son, Zoom-schooling in the house below, merge into a semi-permeable dream about marriage, parenting, performance, and the elasticity of time in the age of Coronavirus.

SPACE//SPACE is a hybrid cinematic collaboration between writer/director Alex Harvey and Banana Bag & Bodice (aka Jason Craig and Jessica Jelliffe). A hall of narrative mirrors that keeps revealing and then hiding its subjects behind continually crumbling fourth walls, the film ponders the nature of relationships in isolation and the ways in which families perform for each other – and fail to perform for each other. Ultimately a grief cry made by artists and lovers, SPACE//SPACE laments an era where aliveness and physical connection are endangered species.

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“Based on true events, ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ focuses almost entirely on the story of one Alcatraz inmate Frank Morris (Clint Eastwood) as he plans and executes his escape from what was once the most secure prison in America. Starting from the moment when Morris is escorted into “The Rock,” the film immediately constructs an environment of closure and constraint, and, with quick sequences lacking any exposition, it ingeniously avoids drawing meaning out of the circumstances of imprisonment and instead simply points to the act of escape as a natural response.” –Evelyn Emile

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SPECIAL SCREENING! FILMMAKERS IN PERSON!

It’s been ten years since Banana Bag & Bodice’s beloved experimental production SPACE//SPACE made waves in the New York theater scene (“WAITING FOR GODOT in space”, raved the New York Times). Now the married performance artist duo who created that infamous work are squeezed into the first wave of pandemic lockdown: alone in their attic, they rehash their claustrophobic container tale of two brothers stuck in a space capsule – but this time performing for a bank of empty seats. The play, and their relationship with their eight-year-old son, Zoom-schooling in the house below, merge into a semi-permeable dream about marriage, parenting, performance, and the elasticity of time in the age of Coronavirus.

SPACE//SPACE is a hybrid cinematic collaboration between writer/director Alex Harvey and Banana Bag & Bodice (aka Jason Craig and Jessica Jelliffe). A hall of narrative mirrors that keeps revealing and then hiding its subjects behind continually crumbling fourth walls, the film ponders the nature of relationships in isolation and the ways in which families perform for each other – and fail to perform for each other. Ultimately a grief cry made by artists and lovers, SPACE//SPACE laments an era where aliveness and physical connection are endangered species.

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“A single mother (Suzy Amis) comes home one day to find her suburban house in disarray and her two young children missing; a police lieutenant (Fred Ward) turns up and, convinced she murdered the children, proceeds to question her at length. These are the only two characters in this playlike, rather ritualized chamber piece with sadomasochistic overtones, which never strays from the house and its immediate environs. Written and precisely directed by Beth B and shot in Germany, this independent effort is sustained by the talented actors, though how much one warms to the ambiguous goings-on will depend a great deal on one’s own psychosexual predilections.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

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“THE RIGHT STUFF condenses the early history of America’s space program – from the moment that Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947 to the various solo missions by astronauts undertaken in the early 1960s. The story is structured as a mosaic of characters, fragments and vignettes. We see teams of proud, professional pilots confront, time and again, a sea of ‘suits’: politicians, engineers, bureaucrats. We see the generally disintegrating marital and family lives of the astronauts. We see the entire circus of media coverage of the space flights. And we see the top-level machinations of White House officials as they look at smuggled footage of Russian technological achievements, and then plot the next frantic counter-move in the space race. […] THE RIGHT STUFF is Kaufman’s most perfectly achieved film, and also his most eloquent, since it creates a precarious but superb equilibrium between patriotic belief and ironic disbelief, between vulgarity and sublimity, between experimental filmmaking and the Lucas-Spielberg blockbuster. […] I rate it among the great American films of the 1980s.” –Adrian Martin

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To celebrate the publication of a new book on the films of Stan Brakhage by esteemed scholar Fred Camper – and on the occasion of a visit to NYC from Camper himself – we present a very special program focusing on the relatively rare instances in Brakhage’s filmography in which he departed from the 16mm film gauge. The program will feature a selection of works drawn from his 8mm SONG cycle, as well as all the 35mm Brakhage films that are currently in circulation, with all films screening on their intended formats.

To be released on January 14 – which marks the 90th anniversary of Brakhage’s birth – “Seeking Brakhage” (2023, Eyewash Books) encompasses five decades worth of Camper’s writing on the filmmaker, and features an introduction by P. Adams Sitney. For more info visit: www.eyewashbooks.com/camper 

“Truth to materials’ is a statement that, though less fashionable today, I still think informs some of the best art. The artist, it argues, should use media in ways that acknowledge their natures. Brakhage’s films are replete with momentary illusions, but the emphasis is on ‘momentary’; they do not seek to lose the viewer in substitute worlds, as his ‘worlds’ are constantly changing. It is natural, too, that his films vary according to the materials with which they are made, the acknowledgement of which reflects a fundamental honesty.

“The majority of Brakhage’s work was created on 16mm film. But he also worked with three types of 8mm: standard 8mm, Super-8, and also briefly in Polavision, a short-lived format which used a unique type of 8mm film instantly processed in its cartridges. Additionally, he hand-painted on 35mm film (as well as 70mm, reduced to 35mm in printing). This program presents a selection of his standard 8mm SONGS, as well as all of his 35mm films (with the exception of two that are not currently available on 35mm).

“The differences between the two gauges, particularly when the films are shown in their original formats, is vast. Brakhage used the size of 35mm to create hand-painted images with a detail not possible in the smaller formats, as in INTERPOLATIONS for instance, which offers forest-like densities in which the viewer can feel lost. He used 8mm more as a highly developed sketch book, in which often lush yet fragile illusions momentarily coalesce out of evanescent imagery, yet with thought-provoking moments that, among other things, may refer in varied and complex ways to their own making.” –Fred Camper

We’ll also take advantage of Camper’s presence in NYC to highlight the little-known but fascinating 16mm films he made himself, all of which have been newly restored (only on 16mm) by the Chicago Film Society.

All the films in this program are silent.

8mm:
SONG 1 1964, 4 min, 8mm
SONG 2 1964, 2 min, 8mm
SONG 3 1964, 3 min, 8mm
SONG 6 1964, 2 min, 8mm
SONG 7 1964, 2.5 min, 8mm
SONG 13 1965, 3 min, 8mm
SONG 21 1965, 5 min, 8mm
SONG 22 1965, 3 min, 8mm

35mm:
EYE MYTH 1967, 9 sec, 35mm
THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS 1981, 1.5 min, 35mm
NIGHTMUSIC 1986, 30 sec, 35mm
THE DANTE QUARTET 1987, 6 min, 35mm
RAGE NET 1988, 1 min, 35mm
INTERPOLATIONS 1-5 1992, 12 min, 35mm
NIGHT MULCH 2001, 2 min, 35mm
VERY 2001, 4 min, 35mm
CHINESE SERIES 2003, 2.5 min, 35mm

Total running time (with pauses and discussion): ca. 105 min.

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“Based on true events, ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ focuses almost entirely on the story of one Alcatraz inmate Frank Morris (Clint Eastwood) as he plans and executes his escape from what was once the most secure prison in America. Starting from the moment when Morris is escorted into “The Rock,” the film immediately constructs an environment of closure and constraint, and, with quick sequences lacking any exposition, it ingeniously avoids drawing meaning out of the circumstances of imprisonment and instead simply points to the act of escape as a natural response.” –Evelyn Emile

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Artist, scholar, and teacher Fred Camper has been a well-known and influential member of the avant-garde cinema scene since the late 1960s. An early viewing of Gregory Markopoulos’s TWICE A MAN, at the age of fifteen, introduced him to the possibilities and allure of experimental filmmaking. As an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Camper co-founded the M.I.T. Film Society in 1965, which allowed him to see a wide range of films and develop his critical writing through weekly program notes. Establishing his reputation with articles that appeared in the journals Film Culture, Cinema, and Screen, he later found a home at the Chicago Reader, where he published numerous pieces on films and art from 1986-2010. His profoundly perceptive and illuminating writings have also appeared in Millennium Film Journal, Artforum, ArtNews, Motion Picture, and the Soho Weekly News. In recent years, Camper has taught regular courses at the School of the Art of Chicago and Columbia College Chicago and exhibited his own digital artwork at galleries in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere.

Though Camper is justifiably revered within avant-garde and auteurist circles for his critical writings, his own filmmaking efforts are far less recognized. In the late 1960s, Camper produced five short films over the course of three years, which, like his writings, demonstrate his dual interests in the avant-garde cinema and the auteurist canon. His body of work represents a unique synthesis of these seemingly disparate influences, often locating an aesthetic epiphany in a forgotten work of Hollywood cinema and extrapolating a rigorous and suggestive way of seeing that can be applied to non-narrative ends.

Camper’s films have been out of distribution since the mid-1970s, and have been shown together only once since then, when curator Patrick Friel presented two programs under his White Light Cinema banner in Chicago in 2011. Over the last several years, however, working directly with Camper, the Chicago Film Society has preserved all five films from the original elements. Available once again, only on 16mm per Camper’s wishes, the films demonstrate that Camper is not only one of our most important and invaluable film scholars and critics, but also a formidable film artist in his own right.

All films preserved by Chicago Film Society. DAN POTTER and BATHROOM preserved with the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation. WELCOME TO COME and A SENSE OF THE PAST preserved through the NFPF’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant Program and the Film Foundation; funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

Alongside our friends at the Museum of the Moving Image, we’re pleased to present the first public screenings of these new preservations.

Special thanks to Kyle Westphal (Chicago Film Society).

JOAN GOES TO MISERY 1967, 8 min, 16mm
“Both a ‘short story’ – a film about a girl who rejects ‘reality’ to live in her own private world – and a film about progressive states of mind. Joan goes to a two-room apartment, removes wigs, false eyelashes, makeup; depressed at her own appearance, she lies on the bed and over-eats. The soundtrack (‘It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to…’) adds irony to her ‘orgy.’ But it is her isolation from human contact, and her entrance into a self-indulgent fantasy world that are central ‘themes’ of the film.” –Fred Camper

A SENSE OF THE PAST 1967, 4 min, 16mm, silent
This short work is an explicit homage to Stan Brakhage. (The titles are even scratched in black leader à la Brakhage.) Largely a fragmentary description of a shadowy room, its dark portents are suggested by stacks of old letters piled on a desk.

“A SENSE OF THE PAST was shot without pre-planning during a long weekend reading Henry James, and I would like to think that its form was somewhat influenced by his passive descriptions that seem to both evoke and conceal great, not fully articulated, traumas.” –Fred Camper

DAN POTTER 1967-68, 39 min, 16mm, silent
“Though not a portrait, it was inspired by the way Gregory J. Markopoulos’s portraits in GALAXIE intermingle the identities of his figures with objects around them; less obvious influences are F.W. Murnau’s TABU and the relationships between figures and backgrounds in the films of Howard Hawks.” –Fred Camper

WELCOME TO COME 1968, 3 min, 16mm
“As much a fragment as a completed film, it suggests more than it answers: an almost-mystical suggestion of an idea. A long slow zoom from a warm room interior to a close shot of dark blue tree branches seen outside the window. A film about the eye’s ability to move subjectively from one place to a completely different one; about the ability of the imagination to discover and enter ‘other worlds’ hidden amidst the surface clutter of everyday surroundings.” –Fred Camper

“One of the most successful tours de force ever promulgated on the U.S. screen. […] The shifting expectations, some horrible in nature, which it manages to evoke in a spectator during its incredibly brief running time are heightened by an astute use of the Beach Boys’ recording which provides the title. WELCOME TO COME is a prospective small classic.” –Stuart Byron, VARIETY

BATHROOM 1968-69, 25 min, 16mm, silent
“BATHROOM shows a somewhat seedy bathroom, beginning with a stab at seeing it ‘objectively’ that soon fails; the forms descend into what I hope is a terrifying, even self-destroying irrationality. One inspiration was the long take depiction of madness at the end of Edgar G. Ulmer’s DETOUR; another, the two out-of-focus shots of the altar near the end of Douglas Sirk’s THE FIRST LEGION.” –Fred Camper

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

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“One of the great cult movies of its era. A genuine mix of horror and comedy – where the horror elements are still quite scary, and the comedy witty and fast – this tale of an attack by wormlike monsters that burrow and travel underground did okay business theatrically, but became a massive hit on video, even spawning some sequels. As a hybrid genre effort, it really is quite rare – the kind of picture where no element overpowers the others. And Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon are terrific as the two wisecracking handymen who find themselves having to battle these mysterious creatures.” –Bilge Ebiri, VULTURE

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"Director John Binder was inspired to write the script for this warm-hearted character study on small-town hucksters, evangelical revivalism, and UFOs after a chance encounter with a human interest newspaper article about a couple in Waldport, Oregon, who had started their own religion. Only superficially inspired by the mid-’70s exploits of Heaven’s Gate founders Marshall “Bo” Applewhite and Bonnie “Peep” Nettles, the film follows drifter Sheldon Bart (Fred Ward, in one of his most resourceful roles) and revival tent faith healer Brother Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) as their paths cross with a supermarket clerk with a religious affinity towards UFOs (Cindy Williams). With a rollicking country music soundtrack and deft performances all around, Binder spins a rather sympathetic portrayal of mass hysteria – as if ELMER GANTRY were told with the gentle, home-spun touch of early Jonathan Demme, with a dash of the psychotronic absurdism of REPO MAN thrown in for good measure." –Tyler Maxin

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“Seen from a 40-year remove – when Donald Trump’s presidency has again inspired many Americans to regard their country with shame and dismay – [SOUTHERN COMFORT] seems courageous, even cathartic in its blunt critique of all-American hubris, aggression, and paranoia. It takes place in the Louisiana bayou sometime in 1973. A squad of National Guard soldiers, almost all of them hot-headed jerks, get assigned to weekend maneuvers in an endless stretch of swamp. They soon get lost, and, during a stand-off with a bunch of Cajun hunters, one soldier opens fire on the strangers with a round of blanks. The Cajuns, reasonably taking this as an act of aggression, declare war on the Guardsmen; over the next couple days, the soldiers’ situation goes from bad to worse, with nearly all of them falling prey to the backwoods trappers and their own in-fighting. SOUTHERN COMFORT exhibits the same economical storytelling and fine-calibrated suspense as Hill’s earlier THE DRIVER and THE WARRIORS, but the abstract quality of those films is replaced here by a concrete sense of anger. More impressively, Hill delivers his anti-American anger through narrative elements familiar from countless American action movies, making the film a genuinely subversive one.” –Ben Sachs

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A rare example of a perfect novel leading to an almost equally perfect film, MIAMI BLUES is an adaptation of the first of the Hoke Moseley books by the peerless writer Charles Willeford, a national treasure if ever there was one. Filming a novel as singular and flawless as MIAMI BLUES would seem to be a project doomed to failure, but veteran filmmaker George Armitage achieves the near-impossible, capturing the book’s sublime mixture of black comedy, random violence, quasi-existential absurdity, disarming charm, and deglamorized feel for American lives, whether law-abiding or otherwise. Armitage is immeasurably aided by indelible performances by Alec Baldwin, as the blithely psychopathic Fred (“Junior”) Frenger, Jennifer Jason Leigh as his impossibly innocent pick-up, Susie, and, above all, Fred Ward, who is perfectly cast as the long-suffering, quasi-ridiculous, yet paradoxically dignified cop Hoke Moseley.

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NO PRESIDENT was Jack Smith’s third feature film. In this version, restored by filmmaker Jerry Tartaglia, the scenes alternate between elaborate tableaux shot at Smith’s Greene Street loft with found footage of former presidential candidate Wendell Willkie. The film features underground stars, including Tally Brown, Jerry Sims, Irving Rosenthal, Donna Kerness, Mario Montez, and Charles Henri Ford.

“The last of Jack Smith’s 16mm features – austerely black and white, more an exercise in sensibility than craft – evolved out of his November 1967 program, Horror and Fantasy at Midnight. Like Ken Jacobs’s STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH, Horror and Fantasy at Midnight would mix original material with found footage including newsreel footage of the 1940 Republican Convention that nominated Wendell Willkie to run for president. By late March 1968, Horror and Fantasy had coalesced into Kidnapping and Auctioning of Wendell Willkie (sic) by the Love Bandit – an all black-and-white presentation starring writer Irving Rosenthal as the infant Wendell abducted by a mustachioed pirate and sold on the block of a slave market. In early January 1969, the movie had its theatrical premiere as NO PRESIDENT. For musical accompaniment Smith played records and also used the soundtracks of the found material, albeit slowed down for being projected at silent speed. The surviving version NO PRESIDENT alternates scenes shot in the Plaster Foundation with found footage – including a Lowell Thomas travelogue of Sumatra, a clip, apparently from the late 1940s, of an unidentified couple singing ‘A Sunday Kind of Love’, and newsreel footage of candidate Willkie addressing the future Farmers of America. […] Parker Tyler would hail NO PRESIDENT as ‘an even more daring exploitation of the themes in FLAMING CREATURES, and the Selection Committee for the newly established Anthology Film Archives voted to include both in its canon of essential cinema.” –J. Hoberman

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“With CARRIAGE TRADE, Sonbert began to challenge the theories espoused by the great Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s; he particularly disliked the ‘knee-jerk’ reaction produced by Eisensteinian montage. In both lectures and writings about his own style of editing, Sonbert described CARRIAGE TRADE as ‘a jig-saw puzzle of postcards to produce varied displaced effects.’ This approach, according to Sonbert, ultimately affords the viewer multi-faceted readings of the connections between shots through the spectator’s assimilation of ‘the changing relations of the movement of objects, the gestures of figures, familiar worldwide icons, rituals and reactions, rhythm, spacing, and density of images.” –Jon Gartenberg

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“Based on THE DESTROYER, a long-running series (149 titles so far!) of pulp novels created by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir concerning the exploits of super-agent Remo Williams, the movie version roped in BOND director Guy Hamilton and sometime BOND screenwriter Christopher Wood. But the magic didn’t happen; it seemed that the world…didn’t really see the need for what was described on the film’s release as a ‘red, white and blue-collar’ version of 007. […] The tone of the film is relentlessly tongue-in-cheek, much of it is played for laughs and too much time is spent focusing on Remo’s training. He’s paired up with inscrutable Korean martial arts guru Chiun (played, uncomfortably, by famously non-Korean actor/dancer Joel Grey). […] But despite its stodgy pace and idling, unhurried narrative, there’s plenty to recommend in THE ADVENTURE BEGINS. Craig Safan’s fabulously 1980s synth-drenched score is instantly memorable and the [film] is worth the price of admission just for the breathtaking action sequence set on and around the Statue of Liberty, covered in scaffolding at the time of the filming. Years before CGI and green screen took much of the real skill out of this type of big set-piece, the sequence is all the more impressive because it’s done with real stuntmen on a real location taking what look like insane risks for the sake of a motion picture.” –Paul Mount, STARBURST MAGAZINE

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“WAVELENGTH is without precedent in the purity of its confrontation with the essence of cinema: the relationships between illusion and fact, space and time, subject and object. It is the first post-Warhol, post-Minimal movie; one of the few films to engage those higher conceptual orders which occupy modern painting and sculpture. It has rightly been described as a ‘triumph of contemplative cinema’.” –Gene Youngblood, L.A. FREE PRESS

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“HENRY & JUNE is daringly, heroically sexy. Its subject is the relationship between the American writer Henry Miller (Fred Ward) and his wife, June (Uma Thurman), and their friend and lover, Anais Nin (Maria de Medeiros), in the Paris of the 1930s. But beyond that, the film is about sex itself, and it’s bold in the sense that, like Kaufman’s previous film, THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, it expresses its themes of liberation and the quest for identity in erotic terms, seriously and uncompromisingly and for adults. […] As Miller, Ward gives a hilarious rendition of burly American bravado, but he keeps the character’s vulgarities in balance with his artistic drives. This is a star performance with a character actor’s authenticity. It’s a driving, impassioned piece of comic acting.” –Hal Hinson, WASHINGTON POST

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Restored by Anthology Film Archives with funding provided by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and The Film Foundation. Special thanks to Dan DeVincent, Simon Lund, and Adam Wangerin (Cineric, Inc.).

“This neat, finely tuned, hypersensitive film examines the outside and inside of a banal prefab classroom, stares at an asymmetrical space so undistinguished that it’s hard to believe the whole movie is confined to it, and has this neckjerking camera gimmick which hits a wooden stop arm at each end of its swing. Basically it’s a perpetual motion film which ingeniously builds a sculptural effect by insisting on time-motion to the point where the camera’s swinging arcs and white wall field assume the hardness, the dimensions of a concrete beam.
“In such a hard, drilling work, the wooden clap sounds are a terrific invention, and, as much as any single element, create the sculpture. Seeming to thrust the image outward off the screen, these clap effects are timed like a metronome, sometimes occurring with torrential frequency.” –Manny Farber, ARTFORUM, 1970

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“One of the great cult movies of its era. A genuine mix of horror and comedy – where the horror elements are still quite scary, and the comedy witty and fast – this tale of an attack by wormlike monsters that burrow and travel underground did okay business theatrically, but became a massive hit on video, even spawning some sequels. As a hybrid genre effort, it really is quite rare – the kind of picture where no element overpowers the others. And Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon are terrific as the two wisecracking handymen who find themselves having to battle these mysterious creatures.” –Bilge Ebiri, VULTURE

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This program gathers three of the films Hammid (then Hackenschmied) made before emigrating from Czechoslovakia – the classic city symphony AIMLESS WALK (1930), the architectural landscape study PRAGUE CASTLE (1931), and the experimental advertising film THE HIGHWAY SINGS (1937) – as well as two of the renowned short works he made in collaboration with his partner Maya Deren after arriving in the U.S.: the pioneering and enormously influential American experimental film MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943), and THE PRIVATE LIFE OF A CAT (1944), which we’ll be screening from a newly-struck 16mm print.

All the films in this program have been preserved by Anthology Film Archives.

Alexander Hammid AIMLESS WALK / BEZÚČELNÁ PROCHÁZKA 1930, 8 min, 35mm
Hammid’s first film, AIMLESS WALK is a city symphony that turns away from a purely celebratory approach to the city. The camera follows a detached protagonist on his wanderings, as his highly subjective journey becomes a fragmented visualization of urban landscapes.

Alexander Hammid PRAGUE CASTLE / NA PRAŽSKÉM HRADĚ 1931, 11 min, 35mm
“In collaboration with the composer Frantisek Bartos, I have tried…to find the relationship between architectonic form and music; between an image and a tone; between the movement of a picture and the movement of music; and between the space of a picture and the space of a tone.” –Alexander Hammid, CINEMA QUARTERLY, 1933

Alexander Hammid & Elmar Klos THE HIGHWAY SINGS / SILNICE ZPÍVÁ 1937, 4 min, 35mm.
Commissioned by the shoe company Bata – which for a time also produced tires, among other products – this film traces the journey of a “singing tire” from the factory to its final destination on an automobile.

Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON 1943, 14 min, 16mm, silent
“[MESHES] was an ideal form of collaboration at that particular point, when [Deren] was completely new to film. But she was developing in film so quickly that she felt that collaboration was no longer necessary. She felt that she had mastered the medium enough to be able to think in it directly. She could, outside of the technical side, which she left to me. She left the execution to me, very trustingly.” –Alexander Hammid, in THE LEGEND OF MAYA DEREN

Alexander Hammid THE PRIVATE LIFE OF A CAT 1946, 29 min, 16mm. Words and narration by Maya Deren. BRAND NEW 16MM PRINT!
Perhaps the most important of Hammid’s independent American films – made in collaboration with Maya Deren, but primarily his own work – THE PRIVATE LIFE OF A CAT is also one of the first experimental films about birth, anticipating key works such as Stan Brakhage’s WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING (1959), Marjorie Keller’s MISCONCEPTION (1977), and others. It screens here in a brand-new 16mm print, representing the rarely-seen sound version of the film, which is significantly longer than the silent version, and includes narration written and delivered by Maya Deren and music composed by Gene Forrell.

“The film was offered by the cat…. She had practically insisted because she wanted somebody to be present during the delivery.” –Alexander Hammid

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

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"Director John Binder was inspired to write the script for this warm-hearted character study on small-town hucksters, evangelical revivalism, and UFOs after a chance encounter with a human interest newspaper article about a couple in Waldport, Oregon, who had started their own religion. Only superficially inspired by the mid-’70s exploits of Heaven’s Gate founders Marshall “Bo” Applewhite and Bonnie “Peep” Nettles, the film follows drifter Sheldon Bart (Fred Ward, in one of his most resourceful roles) and revival tent faith healer Brother Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) as their paths cross with a supermarket clerk with a religious affinity towards UFOs (Cindy Williams). With a rollicking country music soundtrack and deft performances all around, Binder spins a rather sympathetic portrayal of mass hysteria – as if ELMER GANTRY were told with the gentle, home-spun touch of early Jonathan Demme, with a dash of the psychotronic absurdism of REPO MAN thrown in for good measure." –Tyler Maxin

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“THE RIGHT STUFF condenses the early history of America’s space program – from the moment that Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947 to the various solo missions by astronauts undertaken in the early 1960s. The story is structured as a mosaic of characters, fragments and vignettes. We see teams of proud, professional pilots confront, time and again, a sea of ‘suits’: politicians, engineers, bureaucrats. We see the generally disintegrating marital and family lives of the astronauts. We see the entire circus of media coverage of the space flights. And we see the top-level machinations of White House officials as they look at smuggled footage of Russian technological achievements, and then plot the next frantic counter-move in the space race. […] THE RIGHT STUFF is Kaufman’s most perfectly achieved film, and also his most eloquent, since it creates a precarious but superb equilibrium between patriotic belief and ironic disbelief, between vulgarity and sublimity, between experimental filmmaking and the Lucas-Spielberg blockbuster. […] I rate it among the great American films of the 1980s.” –Adrian Martin

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Restored by The Museum of Modern Art and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.

“This powerful collaboration of the international Left documents the emerging Nazi threat around and in Czechoslovakia, and stands as an example of frontierless, truly committed political filmmaking, no matter the era. Herbert Kline, the American producer/director who had codirected the groundbreaking Spanish anti-Fascist work HEART OF SPAIN and helped run the leftist filmmakers' organization Frontier Film (NATIVE LAND), enlisted local filmmakers Alexander Hackenschmied and Hans Burger to document and expose the rise of Nazism and the Czechoslovak political crisis. In addition to riveting documentary footage, the film includes agitprop performances by [the cabaret performers] Voskovec and Werich. CRISIS premiered two days before Czechoslovakia was occupied by Hitler’s Germany; the pavilion in New York where it was screened became the only place where the country still existed. Hackenschmied and Burger narrowly escaped to the United States; the former changed his name to Hammid, and later married Maya Deren, codirecting the seminal MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON.” –PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

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A rare example of a perfect novel leading to an almost equally perfect film, MIAMI BLUES is an adaptation of the first of the Hoke Moseley books by the peerless writer Charles Willeford, a national treasure if ever there was one. Filming a novel as singular and flawless as MIAMI BLUES would seem to be a project doomed to failure, but veteran filmmaker George Armitage achieves the near-impossible, capturing the book’s sublime mixture of black comedy, random violence, quasi-existential absurdity, disarming charm, and deglamorized feel for American lives, whether law-abiding or otherwise. Armitage is immeasurably aided by indelible performances by Alec Baldwin, as the blithely psychopathic Fred (“Junior”) Frenger, Jennifer Jason Leigh as his impossibly innocent pick-up, Susie, and, above all, Fred Ward, who is perfectly cast as the long-suffering, quasi-ridiculous, yet paradoxically dignified cop Hoke Moseley.

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Cinematography by Alexander Hammid & Douglas Slocombe. Restored by The Museum of Modern Art with support from the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation.

“The work of Herbert Kline, a member of New York’s left-leaning Film and Photo League, and the Czech photographer and editor Alexandr Hackenschmied, this pulse-pounding documentary offers an image of Europe on the very brink of war, from German troops rolling into the Free City of Danzig (captured on the spot by Kline and his young cinematographer, Douglas Slocombe, here on his first professional assignment) to Londoners lining the banks of the Thames with sandbags as they look anxiously into the sky, awaiting the first wave of German bombers. With a narration written by the British novelist James Hilton (LOST HORIZON) and read by the actor Fredric March, LIGHTS OUT IN EUROPE was addressed to an American public still uncertain of what role, if any, the United States should play in the European conflict. With its indelible images of refugees fleeing before the Nazi troupes, including the heartbreaking aftermath of an aerial attack on a train carrying women and children to the Polish border, the documentary makes its case without propagandistic embellishment. For the director John Ford, quoted in newspaper advertisements, LIGHTS OUT IN EUROPE was ‘the most intelligent use to which the camera has yet been put’, while the Communist review New Masses, committed to the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, sternly warned its readers, ‘Everybody had better stay away from this picture.’” –Dave Kehr, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

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Archival print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

“In his first work written for the screen and his only screen documentary (actually more of a docudrama told in the form of a parable), Steinbeck concentrates on one symbolic family. An indigenous couple, Ventura and Esperanza, live with their six children in the small and remote pueblo of Santiago, somewhere on the central plateau of Mexico. The film focuses on their oldest son, Juan Diego, who attempts to bridge two very different worlds, one traditional and one modern. […] Steinbeck became involved in the project when friends introduced him to Herbert Kline, a distinguished young director who had recently directed four anti-fascist documentaries. Steinbeck wrote what he called an elastic story that could be stretched to fill the circumstances the film team found when they moved into a real back country village. THE FORGOTTEN VILLAGE was filmed in the states of Puebla and Tlaxcala, Mexico for $35,000, using a non-professional cast of mostly indigenous residents of the region.” –Jeffrey Bickel, UCLA FILM & TELEVISION ARCHIVE

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“One of the great cult movies of its era. A genuine mix of horror and comedy – where the horror elements are still quite scary, and the comedy witty and fast – this tale of an attack by wormlike monsters that burrow and travel underground did okay business theatrically, but became a massive hit on video, even spawning some sequels. As a hybrid genre effort, it really is quite rare – the kind of picture where no element overpowers the others. And Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon are terrific as the two wisecracking handymen who find themselves having to battle these mysterious creatures.” –Bilge Ebiri, VULTURE

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“HENRY & JUNE is daringly, heroically sexy. Its subject is the relationship between the American writer Henry Miller (Fred Ward) and his wife, June (Uma Thurman), and their friend and lover, Anais Nin (Maria de Medeiros), in the Paris of the 1930s. But beyond that, the film is about sex itself, and it’s bold in the sense that, like Kaufman’s previous film, THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, it expresses its themes of liberation and the quest for identity in erotic terms, seriously and uncompromisingly and for adults. […] As Miller, Ward gives a hilarious rendition of burly American bravado, but he keeps the character’s vulgarities in balance with his artistic drives. This is a star performance with a character actor’s authenticity. It’s a driving, impassioned piece of comic acting.” –Hal Hinson, WASHINGTON POST

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“As a portrait of an artist AIMLESS WALK – ALEXANDER HAMMID refuses to surrender either to mythologizing the chosen subject or to that flood of fact and information which turns many documentary films into hours of dry scholastic pedagogy. The film is interested in the apparently inessential in the life of photographer and filmmaker Alexander Hammid…. And it respects his wishes – ‘I don’t like to talk. I express myself always in images. Otherwise I like silence.’ The inessentials are Hammid’s essentials – the daily doings in his New York apartment; how he sews on a button, makes his own yoghurt or the long walks and subway journeys through Manhattan with echoes from his first film in 1930, AIMLESS WALK, shot during the heyday of Prague avant-garde film and before his emigration. Throughout the film, Kudláček associates her observations with beautiful passages from Hammid’s experimental films, for example, the classic MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON which he produced in 1943 together with his wife Maya Deren. Splinters are knitted together in chains, threads of sound and whispering pictures become dense, that is the intonation of the film.” –Alexander Horwath

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Hammid’s work with Kline prompted Irving Lerner to invite him to join the crew at the Office of War Information in 1943. During the war Hammid directed four films for the OWI’s Overseas Branch: VALLEY OF THE TENNESSEE and HYMN OF THE NATIONS (both 1944), and A BETTER TOMORROW (on the NYC public school system) and LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (both 1945). Hammid referred to the OWI’s mission as “making patriotic films for European consumption.” Despite their propagandistic intent, the OWI films are distinguished in documentary history thanks to the participation of some of the best documentary filmmakers of the day: in addition to Hammid, the OWI recruited Irving Jacoby, Boris Kaufman, Irving Lerner, Sidney Meyers, Willard Van Dyke, and others.

Alexander Hammid
VALLEY OF THE TENNESSEE
1944, 29 min, 16mm
A moving and human story of the work of the Tennessee Valley Authority in rescuing the people of the Tennessee Valley from floods and erosion. Hammid’s film is remarkable for its treatment of larger issues through the reactions of individuals – in particular, a child, a young farmer, and an older farmer – and the economy and insight of its visuals.

Alexander Hammid
HYMN OF THE NATIONS
1944, 31 min, 16mm-to-digital
Toscanini’s famed concerts for radio were the first to bring important music to a mass audience and in these years were the passionately anti-fascist conductor’s central vehicle for political activism; his broadcasts were highly successful in raising funds through war bonds. This performance in December 1943 of Verdi’s “Hymn of the Nations” was staged in Radio City’s studio 8H to simulate the concert Toscanini conducted celebrating the fall of Mussolini.

“Reportedly the most famous and most popular of the OWI overseas films, this is not only a rare photographic record of Toscanini at work, but also a masterful piece of planning, camera work, and sound editing.” –Richard M. Barsam, NONFICTION FILM: A CRITICAL HISTORY

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

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“A single mother (Suzy Amis) comes home one day to find her suburban house in disarray and her two young children missing; a police lieutenant (Fred Ward) turns up and, convinced she murdered the children, proceeds to question her at length. These are the only two characters in this playlike, rather ritualized chamber piece with sadomasochistic overtones, which never strays from the house and its immediate environs. Written and precisely directed by Beth B and shot in Germany, this independent effort is sustained by the talented actors, though how much one warms to the ambiguous goings-on will depend a great deal on one’s own psychosexual predilections.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

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Formed soon after WWII by Irving Jacoby, Willard Van Dyke, Henwar Rodakiewicz, and John Ferno – all of whom had worked for the Office of War Information – Affiliated Film Producers similarly employed some of the finest documentary filmmakers of the period to create short films about American culture, intended to guide social behavior. In addition to the founding members, Affiliated utilized filmmakers including Hammid (who made several films for the company), Ricky Leacock, Shirley Clarke, and others.

Alexander Hammid
WHO’S BOSS
1950, 16 min, 16mm-to-digital
“Deals with the struggle between a young married couple to attain a balance of power in their relationship. After two years of conflict and a serious quarrel, they decide to make a determined cooperative effort to salvage their marriage. Although adjustment is slow and difficult, they ultimately achieve a balance that enables both of them to contribute equally to ‘breadwinning’ and ‘homemaking.’” –ACMI

Alexander Hammid
ANGRY BOY
1950, 33 min, 16mm
“Simple, affecting case study produced for social workers and psychologists and illustrating how counseling can help children come to terms with anger. Young Tommy Randall has been caught stealing money from his teacher’s purse and receives help from a psychiatrist. A psychiatric social worker enables his mother to better understand her relationship with her son. This sensitive documentary is filled with revealing behavioral details.” –Rick Prelinger, FIELD GUIDE TO SPONSORED FILMS

Alexander Hammid
MARRIAGE FOR MODERNS: IT TAKES ALL KINDS
1950, 19 min, 16mm
“This film shows a series of young people, each one reacting to an identical tense situation, and each one disclosing the essential pattern of his or her personality. Successful marriages, the film stresses, are those where the partners choose each other with care, with a sure knowledge of each other, and then accept each other for what they are – not for what each might wish the other to be.” –ACMI

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

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A rare example of a perfect novel leading to an almost equally perfect film, MIAMI BLUES is an adaptation of the first of the Hoke Moseley books by the peerless writer Charles Willeford, a national treasure if ever there was one. Filming a novel as singular and flawless as MIAMI BLUES would seem to be a project doomed to failure, but veteran filmmaker George Armitage achieves the near-impossible, capturing the book’s sublime mixture of black comedy, random violence, quasi-existential absurdity, disarming charm, and deglamorized feel for American lives, whether law-abiding or otherwise. Armitage is immeasurably aided by indelible performances by Alec Baldwin, as the blithely psychopathic Fred (“Junior”) Frenger, Jennifer Jason Leigh as his impossibly innocent pick-up, Susie, and, above all, Fred Ward, who is perfectly cast as the long-suffering, quasi-ridiculous, yet paradoxically dignified cop Hoke Moseley.

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Hammid was particularly drawn to the arts, and made numerous exquisite films about and in collaboration with artists, musicians, composers, and dancers. This program pairs THE PHOTOGRAPHER, Willard Van Dyke’s famous portrait of photographer Edward Weston (which was edited by Hammid), with NIGHT JOURNEY, an enchanting film version of Martha Graham’s 1947 ballet of the same name, which was drawn from the Oedipus legend and featured set design by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

Willard Van Dyke
THE PHOTOGRAPHER
1950, 30 min, 16mm. Edited by Alexander Hammid. With Edward Weston.

A portrait of Edward Weston as the quintessential example of the pioneer artistic photographer. Van Dyke uses a thorough study of Weston’s subject matter, especially the California landscape and his friends, to explore the photographer as a distinct personality and father of a new and expanding medium.

Alexander Hammid
NIGHT JOURNEY
1960, 30 min, 16mm. Set design by Isamu Noguchi.

“Martha Graham’s NIGHT JOURNEY, transferred to the screen, is one of the most exciting art films I have ever seen…even more powerful in its new form than it is on stage, and this means it is highly potent fare, for in the theater it stands as one of Miss Graham’s truly monumental creations.” –Walter Terry, NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

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Associate Director and Editor: Alexander Hammid.

For this ambitious attempt to create a genuine fusion of two art forms, the composer and librettist Gian Carlo Menotti collaborated with Alexander Hammid to produce a film version of his own opera. Menotti’s only foray into the cinema (though he did later produce operas for television), THE MEDIUM is a highly stylized, haunting, and unique experiment.

“Menotti wandered only once into the world of cinema, splendidly directing this version of his tragic opera about a fake spiritualist thrust into spiraling madness by an unseen hand at her throat. This magnificent chimera, although without progeny, is perfectly realized as an eerie, claustrophobic chamber piece, with a musical style that exists somewhere between Beat and Bartok [and with] monstrous characters and images only conceivable in a fevered or an operatic mind (where else would one find Toby the deaf mute gypsy boy, or defiant eyelids sealed with hot candle wax), yet fully realizable nowhere else but the cinema….” –TIME OUT

Preceded by:
Alexander Hammid
THE GENTLEMAN IN ROOM 6
1951, 10 min, 16mm. Cinematography by Boris Kaufman. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art.

Hammid’s short film concerns a derelict and forgotten character hiding in a room somewhere in South America, who is confronted by three of his old associates, each of whom provides further clues to his identity.

Total running time: ca. 100 min.

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IN THE WAVES is an expressive documentary that depicts the life of 80-year-old Joan Alma Mills in her aging coastal village. Following the death of her younger sister, Joan finds herself confronted by the fragility of life. As she tries to come to terms with her loss Joan searches for meaning in the natural world around her. Weaving intimate thoughts with lyrical imagery, IN THE WAVES was crafted by Joan’s granddaughter Jacquelyn Mills. In essence, the film is an intergenerational love-letter, an ebb and flow between dream and reality, past and present, a glimpse of childhood and an encounter with the end-of-life.

“IN THE WAVES has a delicate, tranquil beauty, absorbing all of Cape Breton’s natural splendor into its fluid montage.” –CINEMA SCOPE

Preceded by:

Jacquelyn Mills FOR WENDY 2008, 10 min, 16mm-to-digital
Inspired by true events, three children try to understand the death of their mother through exploring nature.

Jacquelyn Mills LEAVES 2013, 5 min, 35mm-to-digital
A short haiku exploring the subtle intimacies between two people in their last night together.

Jacquelyn Mills FORGIVE HERE 2020, 4 min, 16mm-to-digital
To forgive is to be forgiven. A 16mm film created in Northern Iceland.

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

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Hammid began the final act of his constantly morphing filmmaking career in 1962, when he partnered with filmmaker and painter Francis Thompson to execute a commission for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. The resulting films – TO THE FAIR! and TO BE ALIVE! – were instant successes, and the pair would continue to collaborate for more than a decade. Returning to similarly optimistic territory with their 1967 Montreal Expo film WE ARE YOUNG!, Hammid and Thompson secured their reputation as the go-to guys for sentiment and spectacle. Their legacy as filmmakers and boosters of human civilization lives on in some truly unlikely places, including the 70mm IMAX film format, which the pair pioneered for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s grand opening in 1976. The film that inaugurated that museum – TO FLY!, for which Hammid was the Supervising Editor – remains one of the most widely-seen documentary films in history, thanks to its status for many years as a perennial presence, not only on the National Air and Space Museum’s screen but at IMAX and science center theaters throughout the nation.

Francis Thompson & Alexander Hammid TO BE ALIVE! 1964, 18 min, 35mm-to-digital. Courtesy of SC Johnson.
Alexander Hammid & Wheaton Galentine TO THE FAIR! 1964, 27 min, 35mm-to-digital. Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library.
Francis Thompson & Alexander Hammid WE ARE YOUNG! 1967, 20 min, six-screen 35mm-to-DCP. Courtesy of Library & Archives Canada.
Greg MacGillivray & Jim Freeman TO FLY! 1976, 27 min, 70mm-IMAX-to-DCP. Editing Supervisor: Alexander Hammid.

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

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This program gathers three of the films Hammid (then Hackenschmied) made before emigrating from Czechoslovakia – the classic city symphony AIMLESS WALK (1930), the architectural landscape study PRAGUE CASTLE (1931), and the experimental advertising film THE HIGHWAY SINGS (1937) – as well as two of the renowned short works he made in collaboration with his partner Maya Deren after arriving in the U.S.: the pioneering and enormously influential American experimental film MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943), and THE PRIVATE LIFE OF A CAT (1944), which we’ll be screening from a newly-struck 16mm print.

All the films in this program have been preserved by Anthology Film Archives.

Alexander Hammid AIMLESS WALK / BEZÚČELNÁ PROCHÁZKA 1930, 8 min, 35mm
Hammid’s first film, AIMLESS WALK is a city symphony that turns away from a purely celebratory approach to the city. The camera follows a detached protagonist on his wanderings, as his highly subjective journey becomes a fragmented visualization of urban landscapes.

Alexander Hammid PRAGUE CASTLE / NA PRAŽSKÉM HRADĚ 1931, 11 min, 35mm
“In collaboration with the composer Frantisek Bartos, I have tried…to find the relationship between architectonic form and music; between an image and a tone; between the movement of a picture and the movement of music; and between the space of a picture and the space of a tone.” –Alexander Hammid, CINEMA QUARTERLY, 1933

Alexander Hammid & Elmar Klos THE HIGHWAY SINGS / SILNICE ZPÍVÁ 1937, 4 min, 35mm.
Commissioned by the shoe company Bata – which for a time also produced tires, among other products – this film traces the journey of a “singing tire” from the factory to its final destination on an automobile.

Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON 1943, 14 min, 16mm, silent
“[MESHES] was an ideal form of collaboration at that particular point, when [Deren] was completely new to film. But she was developing in film so quickly that she felt that collaboration was no longer necessary. She felt that she had mastered the medium enough to be able to think in it directly. She could, outside of the technical side, which she left to me. She left the execution to me, very trustingly.” –Alexander Hammid, in THE LEGEND OF MAYA DEREN

Alexander Hammid THE PRIVATE LIFE OF A CAT 1946, 29 min, 16mm. Words and narration by Maya Deren. BRAND NEW 16MM PRINT!
Perhaps the most important of Hammid’s independent American films – made in collaboration with Maya Deren, but primarily his own work – THE PRIVATE LIFE OF A CAT is also one of the first experimental films about birth, anticipating key works such as Stan Brakhage’s WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING (1959), Marjorie Keller’s MISCONCEPTION (1977), and others. It screens here in a brand-new 16mm print, representing the rarely-seen sound version of the film, which is significantly longer than the silent version, and includes narration written and delivered by Maya Deren and music composed by Gene Forrell.

“The film was offered by the cat…. She had practically insisted because she wanted somebody to be present during the delivery.” –Alexander Hammid

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

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“For the last 40 years, environmentalist and naturalist Zoe Lucas has been living on Sable Island, a slender strip of land off the coast of Nova Scotia, cataloguing its flora and fauna, as well as the growing amounts of waste that wash up on its shores. Director Jacqueline Mills travels there to follow Lucas in her everyday routine, as she wanders the island, observes plants and insects, checks in on seals and wild horses, removes globules of plastic from the sand. They record everything, one with paper and pen, the other via 16mm film; everything here leaves a trace. Mills enters into a relationship with the island too, burying film stock among living roots or attaching microphones to the wooden frame of an abandoned building, helping this place make sounds and images of its own, as ravishing and resonant as all the others. So many things can be gleaned from one small island: the gentle daily grind of science, the concurrent isolation and interconnectedness of any space in the world, the accumulated matter and meaning of a life’s work and a vast ecosystem, the need to make the workings of any documentary visible. A film that never tries to hide what it is: the blissfully organic result of an encounter.” –James Lattimer, VIENNALE

“GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE shows us that conversations between artists and scientists are uniquely poised to reveal the truths of the so-called natural and human worlds, and that documentary methods can preserve the wonder of a little-seen, though not entirely untouched, place.” –Esmé Hogeveen, BOMB MAGAZINE

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Cinematography by Alexander Hammid & Douglas Slocombe. Restored by The Museum of Modern Art with support from the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation.

“The work of Herbert Kline, a member of New York’s left-leaning Film and Photo League, and the Czech photographer and editor Alexandr Hackenschmied, this pulse-pounding documentary offers an image of Europe on the very brink of war, from German troops rolling into the Free City of Danzig (captured on the spot by Kline and his young cinematographer, Douglas Slocombe, here on his first professional assignment) to Londoners lining the banks of the Thames with sandbags as they look anxiously into the sky, awaiting the first wave of German bombers. With a narration written by the British novelist James Hilton (LOST HORIZON) and read by the actor Fredric March, LIGHTS OUT IN EUROPE was addressed to an American public still uncertain of what role, if any, the United States should play in the European conflict. With its indelible images of refugees fleeing before the Nazi troupes, including the heartbreaking aftermath of an aerial attack on a train carrying women and children to the Polish border, the documentary makes its case without propagandistic embellishment. For the director John Ford, quoted in newspaper advertisements, LIGHTS OUT IN EUROPE was ‘the most intelligent use to which the camera has yet been put’, while the Communist review New Masses, committed to the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, sternly warned its readers, ‘Everybody had better stay away from this picture.’” –Dave Kehr, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

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Restored by The Museum of Modern Art and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.

“This powerful collaboration of the international Left documents the emerging Nazi threat around and in Czechoslovakia, and stands as an example of frontierless, truly committed political filmmaking, no matter the era. Herbert Kline, the American producer/director who had codirected the groundbreaking Spanish anti-Fascist work HEART OF SPAIN and helped run the leftist filmmakers' organization Frontier Film (NATIVE LAND), enlisted local filmmakers Alexander Hackenschmied and Hans Burger to document and expose the rise of Nazism and the Czechoslovak political crisis. In addition to riveting documentary footage, the film includes agitprop performances by [the cabaret performers] Voskovec and Werich. CRISIS premiered two days before Czechoslovakia was occupied by Hitler’s Germany; the pavilion in New York where it was screened became the only place where the country still existed. Hackenschmied and Burger narrowly escaped to the United States; the former changed his name to Hammid, and later married Maya Deren, codirecting the seminal MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON.” –PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

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“For the last 40 years, environmentalist and naturalist Zoe Lucas has been living on Sable Island, a slender strip of land off the coast of Nova Scotia, cataloguing its flora and fauna, as well as the growing amounts of waste that wash up on its shores. Director Jacqueline Mills travels there to follow Lucas in her everyday routine, as she wanders the island, observes plants and insects, checks in on seals and wild horses, removes globules of plastic from the sand. They record everything, one with paper and pen, the other via 16mm film; everything here leaves a trace. Mills enters into a relationship with the island too, burying film stock among living roots or attaching microphones to the wooden frame of an abandoned building, helping this place make sounds and images of its own, as ravishing and resonant as all the others. So many things can be gleaned from one small island: the gentle daily grind of science, the concurrent isolation and interconnectedness of any space in the world, the accumulated matter and meaning of a life’s work and a vast ecosystem, the need to make the workings of any documentary visible. A film that never tries to hide what it is: the blissfully organic result of an encounter.” –James Lattimer, VIENNALE

“GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE shows us that conversations between artists and scientists are uniquely poised to reveal the truths of the so-called natural and human worlds, and that documentary methods can preserve the wonder of a little-seen, though not entirely untouched, place.” –Esmé Hogeveen, BOMB MAGAZINE

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Hammid was particularly drawn to the arts, and made numerous exquisite films about and in collaboration with artists, musicians, composers, and dancers. This program pairs THE PHOTOGRAPHER, Willard Van Dyke’s famous portrait of photographer Edward Weston (which was edited by Hammid), with NIGHT JOURNEY, an enchanting film version of Martha Graham’s 1947 ballet of the same name, which was drawn from the Oedipus legend and featured set design by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

Willard Van Dyke
THE PHOTOGRAPHER
1950, 30 min, 16mm. Edited by Alexander Hammid. With Edward Weston.

A portrait of Edward Weston as the quintessential example of the pioneer artistic photographer. Van Dyke uses a thorough study of Weston’s subject matter, especially the California landscape and his friends, to explore the photographer as a distinct personality and father of a new and expanding medium.

Alexander Hammid
NIGHT JOURNEY
1960, 30 min, 16mm. Set design by Isamu Noguchi.

“Martha Graham’s NIGHT JOURNEY, transferred to the screen, is one of the most exciting art films I have ever seen…even more powerful in its new form than it is on stage, and this means it is highly potent fare, for in the theater it stands as one of Miss Graham’s truly monumental creations.” –Walter Terry, NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW!

Hammid began the final act of his constantly morphing filmmaking career in 1962, when he partnered with filmmaker and painter Francis Thompson to execute a commission for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. The resulting films – TO THE FAIR! and TO BE ALIVE! – were instant successes, and the pair would continue to collaborate for more than a decade. Returning to similarly optimistic territory with their 1967 Montreal Expo film WE ARE YOUNG!, Hammid and Thompson secured their reputation as the go-to guys for sentiment and spectacle. Their legacy as filmmakers and boosters of human civilization lives on in some truly unlikely places, including the 70mm IMAX film format, which the pair pioneered for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s grand opening in 1976. The film that inaugurated that museum – TO FLY!, for which Hammid was the Supervising Editor – remains one of the most widely-seen documentary films in history, thanks to its status for many years as a perennial presence, not only on the National Air and Space Museum’s screen but at IMAX and science center theaters throughout the nation.

Francis Thompson & Alexander Hammid TO BE ALIVE! 1964, 18 min, 35mm-to-digital. Courtesy of SC Johnson.
Alexander Hammid & Wheaton Galentine TO THE FAIR! 1964, 27 min, 35mm-to-digital. Courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library.
Francis Thompson & Alexander Hammid WE ARE YOUNG! 1967, 20 min, six-screen 35mm-to-DCP. Courtesy of Library & Archives Canada.
Greg MacGillivray & Jim Freeman TO FLY! 1976, 27 min, 70mm-IMAX-to-DCP. Editing Supervisor: Alexander Hammid.

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

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“For the last 40 years, environmentalist and naturalist Zoe Lucas has been living on Sable Island, a slender strip of land off the coast of Nova Scotia, cataloguing its flora and fauna, as well as the growing amounts of waste that wash up on its shores. Director Jacqueline Mills travels there to follow Lucas in her everyday routine, as she wanders the island, observes plants and insects, checks in on seals and wild horses, removes globules of plastic from the sand. They record everything, one with paper and pen, the other via 16mm film; everything here leaves a trace. Mills enters into a relationship with the island too, burying film stock among living roots or attaching microphones to the wooden frame of an abandoned building, helping this place make sounds and images of its own, as ravishing and resonant as all the others. So many things can be gleaned from one small island: the gentle daily grind of science, the concurrent isolation and interconnectedness of any space in the world, the accumulated matter and meaning of a life’s work and a vast ecosystem, the need to make the workings of any documentary visible. A film that never tries to hide what it is: the blissfully organic result of an encounter.” –James Lattimer, VIENNALE

“GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE shows us that conversations between artists and scientists are uniquely poised to reveal the truths of the so-called natural and human worlds, and that documentary methods can preserve the wonder of a little-seen, though not entirely untouched, place.” –Esmé Hogeveen, BOMB MAGAZINE

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW!

Hammid’s work with Kline prompted Irving Lerner to invite him to join the crew at the Office of War Information in 1943. During the war Hammid directed four films for the OWI’s Overseas Branch: VALLEY OF THE TENNESSEE and HYMN OF THE NATIONS (both 1944), and A BETTER TOMORROW (on the NYC public school system) and LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (both 1945). Hammid referred to the OWI’s mission as “making patriotic films for European consumption.” Despite their propagandistic intent, the OWI films are distinguished in documentary history thanks to the participation of some of the best documentary filmmakers of the day: in addition to Hammid, the OWI recruited Irving Jacoby, Boris Kaufman, Irving Lerner, Sidney Meyers, Willard Van Dyke, and others.

Alexander Hammid
VALLEY OF THE TENNESSEE
1944, 29 min, 16mm
A moving and human story of the work of the Tennessee Valley Authority in rescuing the people of the Tennessee Valley from floods and erosion. Hammid’s film is remarkable for its treatment of larger issues through the reactions of individuals – in particular, a child, a young farmer, and an older farmer – and the economy and insight of its visuals.

Alexander Hammid
HYMN OF THE NATIONS
1944, 31 min, 16mm-to-digital
Toscanini’s famed concerts for radio were the first to bring important music to a mass audience and in these years were the passionately anti-fascist conductor’s central vehicle for political activism; his broadcasts were highly successful in raising funds through war bonds. This performance in December 1943 of Verdi’s “Hymn of the Nations” was staged in Radio City’s studio 8H to simulate the concert Toscanini conducted celebrating the fall of Mussolini.

“Reportedly the most famous and most popular of the OWI overseas films, this is not only a rare photographic record of Toscanini at work, but also a masterful piece of planning, camera work, and sound editing.” –Richard M. Barsam, NONFICTION FILM: A CRITICAL HISTORY

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

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“For the last 40 years, environmentalist and naturalist Zoe Lucas has been living on Sable Island, a slender strip of land off the coast of Nova Scotia, cataloguing its flora and fauna, as well as the growing amounts of waste that wash up on its shores. Director Jacqueline Mills travels there to follow Lucas in her everyday routine, as she wanders the island, observes plants and insects, checks in on seals and wild horses, removes globules of plastic from the sand. They record everything, one with paper and pen, the other via 16mm film; everything here leaves a trace. Mills enters into a relationship with the island too, burying film stock among living roots or attaching microphones to the wooden frame of an abandoned building, helping this place make sounds and images of its own, as ravishing and resonant as all the others. So many things can be gleaned from one small island: the gentle daily grind of science, the concurrent isolation and interconnectedness of any space in the world, the accumulated matter and meaning of a life’s work and a vast ecosystem, the need to make the workings of any documentary visible. A film that never tries to hide what it is: the blissfully organic result of an encounter.” –James Lattimer, VIENNALE

“GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE shows us that conversations between artists and scientists are uniquely poised to reveal the truths of the so-called natural and human worlds, and that documentary methods can preserve the wonder of a little-seen, though not entirely untouched, place.” –Esmé Hogeveen, BOMB MAGAZINE

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Archival print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

“In his first work written for the screen and his only screen documentary (actually more of a docudrama told in the form of a parable), Steinbeck concentrates on one symbolic family. An indigenous couple, Ventura and Esperanza, live with their six children in the small and remote pueblo of Santiago, somewhere on the central plateau of Mexico. The film focuses on their oldest son, Juan Diego, who attempts to bridge two very different worlds, one traditional and one modern. […] Steinbeck became involved in the project when friends introduced him to Herbert Kline, a distinguished young director who had recently directed four anti-fascist documentaries. Steinbeck wrote what he called an elastic story that could be stretched to fill the circumstances the film team found when they moved into a real back country village. THE FORGOTTEN VILLAGE was filmed in the states of Puebla and Tlaxcala, Mexico for $35,000, using a non-professional cast of mostly indigenous residents of the region.” –Jeffrey Bickel, UCLA FILM & TELEVISION ARCHIVE

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This program gathers three of the films Hammid (then Hackenschmied) made before emigrating from Czechoslovakia – the classic city symphony AIMLESS WALK (1930), the architectural landscape study PRAGUE CASTLE (1931), and the experimental advertising film THE HIGHWAY SINGS (1937) – as well as two of the renowned short works he made in collaboration with his partner Maya Deren after arriving in the U.S.: the pioneering and enormously influential American experimental film MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943), and THE PRIVATE LIFE OF A CAT (1944), which we’ll be screening from a newly-struck 16mm print.

All the films in this program have been preserved by Anthology Film Archives.

Alexander Hammid AIMLESS WALK / BEZÚČELNÁ PROCHÁZKA 1930, 8 min, 35mm
Hammid’s first film, AIMLESS WALK is a city symphony that turns away from a purely celebratory approach to the city. The camera follows a detached protagonist on his wanderings, as his highly subjective journey becomes a fragmented visualization of urban landscapes.

Alexander Hammid PRAGUE CASTLE / NA PRAŽSKÉM HRADĚ 1931, 11 min, 35mm
“In collaboration with the composer Frantisek Bartos, I have tried…to find the relationship between architectonic form and music; between an image and a tone; between the movement of a picture and the movement of music; and between the space of a picture and the space of a tone.” –Alexander Hammid, CINEMA QUARTERLY, 1933

Alexander Hammid & Elmar Klos THE HIGHWAY SINGS / SILNICE ZPÍVÁ 1937, 4 min, 35mm.
Commissioned by the shoe company Bata – which for a time also produced tires, among other products – this film traces the journey of a “singing tire” from the factory to its final destination on an automobile.

Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON 1943, 14 min, 16mm, silent
“[MESHES] was an ideal form of collaboration at that particular point, when [Deren] was completely new to film. But she was developing in film so quickly that she felt that collaboration was no longer necessary. She felt that she had mastered the medium enough to be able to think in it directly. She could, outside of the technical side, which she left to me. She left the execution to me, very trustingly.” –Alexander Hammid, in THE LEGEND OF MAYA DEREN

Alexander Hammid THE PRIVATE LIFE OF A CAT 1946, 29 min, 16mm. Words and narration by Maya Deren. BRAND NEW 16MM PRINT!
Perhaps the most important of Hammid’s independent American films – made in collaboration with Maya Deren, but primarily his own work – THE PRIVATE LIFE OF A CAT is also one of the first experimental films about birth, anticipating key works such as Stan Brakhage’s WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING (1959), Marjorie Keller’s MISCONCEPTION (1977), and others. It screens here in a brand-new 16mm print, representing the rarely-seen sound version of the film, which is significantly longer than the silent version, and includes narration written and delivered by Maya Deren and music composed by Gene Forrell.

“The film was offered by the cat…. She had practically insisted because she wanted somebody to be present during the delivery.” –Alexander Hammid

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

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Formed soon after WWII by Irving Jacoby, Willard Van Dyke, Henwar Rodakiewicz, and John Ferno – all of whom had worked for the Office of War Information – Affiliated Film Producers similarly employed some of the finest documentary filmmakers of the period to create short films about American culture, intended to guide social behavior. In addition to the founding members, Affiliated utilized filmmakers including Hammid (who made several films for the company), Ricky Leacock, Shirley Clarke, and others.

Alexander Hammid
WHO’S BOSS
1950, 16 min, 16mm-to-digital
“Deals with the struggle between a young married couple to attain a balance of power in their relationship. After two years of conflict and a serious quarrel, they decide to make a determined cooperative effort to salvage their marriage. Although adjustment is slow and difficult, they ultimately achieve a balance that enables both of them to contribute equally to ‘breadwinning’ and ‘homemaking.’” –ACMI

Alexander Hammid
ANGRY BOY
1950, 33 min, 16mm
“Simple, affecting case study produced for social workers and psychologists and illustrating how counseling can help children come to terms with anger. Young Tommy Randall has been caught stealing money from his teacher’s purse and receives help from a psychiatrist. A psychiatric social worker enables his mother to better understand her relationship with her son. This sensitive documentary is filled with revealing behavioral details.” –Rick Prelinger, FIELD GUIDE TO SPONSORED FILMS

Alexander Hammid
MARRIAGE FOR MODERNS: IT TAKES ALL KINDS
1950, 19 min, 16mm
“This film shows a series of young people, each one reacting to an identical tense situation, and each one disclosing the essential pattern of his or her personality. Successful marriages, the film stresses, are those where the partners choose each other with care, with a sure knowledge of each other, and then accept each other for what they are – not for what each might wish the other to be.” –ACMI

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

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“For the last 40 years, environmentalist and naturalist Zoe Lucas has been living on Sable Island, a slender strip of land off the coast of Nova Scotia, cataloguing its flora and fauna, as well as the growing amounts of waste that wash up on its shores. Director Jacqueline Mills travels there to follow Lucas in her everyday routine, as she wanders the island, observes plants and insects, checks in on seals and wild horses, removes globules of plastic from the sand. They record everything, one with paper and pen, the other via 16mm film; everything here leaves a trace. Mills enters into a relationship with the island too, burying film stock among living roots or attaching microphones to the wooden frame of an abandoned building, helping this place make sounds and images of its own, as ravishing and resonant as all the others. So many things can be gleaned from one small island: the gentle daily grind of science, the concurrent isolation and interconnectedness of any space in the world, the accumulated matter and meaning of a life’s work and a vast ecosystem, the need to make the workings of any documentary visible. A film that never tries to hide what it is: the blissfully organic result of an encounter.” –James Lattimer, VIENNALE

“GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE shows us that conversations between artists and scientists are uniquely poised to reveal the truths of the so-called natural and human worlds, and that documentary methods can preserve the wonder of a little-seen, though not entirely untouched, place.” –Esmé Hogeveen, BOMB MAGAZINE

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Associate Director and Editor: Alexander Hammid.

For this ambitious attempt to create a genuine fusion of two art forms, the composer and librettist Gian Carlo Menotti collaborated with Alexander Hammid to produce a film version of his own opera. Menotti’s only foray into the cinema (though he did later produce operas for television), THE MEDIUM is a highly stylized, haunting, and unique experiment.

“Menotti wandered only once into the world of cinema, splendidly directing this version of his tragic opera about a fake spiritualist thrust into spiraling madness by an unseen hand at her throat. This magnificent chimera, although without progeny, is perfectly realized as an eerie, claustrophobic chamber piece, with a musical style that exists somewhere between Beat and Bartok [and with] monstrous characters and images only conceivable in a fevered or an operatic mind (where else would one find Toby the deaf mute gypsy boy, or defiant eyelids sealed with hot candle wax), yet fully realizable nowhere else but the cinema….” –TIME OUT

Preceded by:
Alexander Hammid
THE GENTLEMAN IN ROOM 6
1951, 10 min, 16mm. Cinematography by Boris Kaufman. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art.

Hammid’s short film concerns a derelict and forgotten character hiding in a room somewhere in South America, who is confronted by three of his old associates, each of whom provides further clues to his identity.

Total running time: ca. 100 min.

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“As a portrait of an artist AIMLESS WALK – ALEXANDER HAMMID refuses to surrender either to mythologizing the chosen subject or to that flood of fact and information which turns many documentary films into hours of dry scholastic pedagogy. The film is interested in the apparently inessential in the life of photographer and filmmaker Alexander Hammid…. And it respects his wishes – ‘I don’t like to talk. I express myself always in images. Otherwise I like silence.’ The inessentials are Hammid’s essentials – the daily doings in his New York apartment; how he sews on a button, makes his own yoghurt or the long walks and subway journeys through Manhattan with echoes from his first film in 1930, AIMLESS WALK, shot during the heyday of Prague avant-garde film and before his emigration. Throughout the film, Kudláček associates her observations with beautiful passages from Hammid’s experimental films, for example, the classic MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON which he produced in 1943 together with his wife Maya Deren. Splinters are knitted together in chains, threads of sound and whispering pictures become dense, that is the intonation of the film.” –Alexander Horwath

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With Gibson Gowland, ZaSu Pitts, and Jean Hersholt.

“Reduced from an eight-and-a-half-hour running time to slightly over two hours, [GREED] is perhaps more famous for the butcher job performed on it than for Stroheim’s great and genuine accomplishment. Though usually discussed as a masterpiece of realism (it was based on a novel by the naturalist writer Frank Norris), it is equally sublime in its high stylization, which ranges from the highly Brechtian spectacle of ZaSu Pitts making love to her gold coins to deep-focus compositions every bit as advanced as those in CITIZEN KANE. It is probably the most modern in feel of all silent films, establishing ideas that would not be developed until decades later.” –Dave Kehr, CHICAGO READER

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“For the last 40 years, environmentalist and naturalist Zoe Lucas has been living on Sable Island, a slender strip of land off the coast of Nova Scotia, cataloguing its flora and fauna, as well as the growing amounts of waste that wash up on its shores. Director Jacqueline Mills travels there to follow Lucas in her everyday routine, as she wanders the island, observes plants and insects, checks in on seals and wild horses, removes globules of plastic from the sand. They record everything, one with paper and pen, the other via 16mm film; everything here leaves a trace. Mills enters into a relationship with the island too, burying film stock among living roots or attaching microphones to the wooden frame of an abandoned building, helping this place make sounds and images of its own, as ravishing and resonant as all the others. So many things can be gleaned from one small island: the gentle daily grind of science, the concurrent isolation and interconnectedness of any space in the world, the accumulated matter and meaning of a life’s work and a vast ecosystem, the need to make the workings of any documentary visible. A film that never tries to hide what it is: the blissfully organic result of an encounter.” –James Lattimer, VIENNALE

“GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE shows us that conversations between artists and scientists are uniquely poised to reveal the truths of the so-called natural and human worlds, and that documentary methods can preserve the wonder of a little-seen, though not entirely untouched, place.” –Esmé Hogeveen, BOMB MAGAZINE

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW!

With Gibson Gowland, ZaSu Pitts, and Jean Hersholt.

“Reduced from an eight-and-a-half-hour running time to slightly over two hours, [GREED] is perhaps more famous for the butcher job performed on it than for Stroheim’s great and genuine accomplishment. Though usually discussed as a masterpiece of realism (it was based on a novel by the naturalist writer Frank Norris), it is equally sublime in its high stylization, which ranges from the highly Brechtian spectacle of ZaSu Pitts making love to her gold coins to deep-focus compositions every bit as advanced as those in CITIZEN KANE. It is probably the most modern in feel of all silent films, establishing ideas that would not be developed until decades later.” –Dave Kehr, CHICAGO READER

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

“For the last 40 years, environmentalist and naturalist Zoe Lucas has been living on Sable Island, a slender strip of land off the coast of Nova Scotia, cataloguing its flora and fauna, as well as the growing amounts of waste that wash up on its shores. Director Jacqueline Mills travels there to follow Lucas in her everyday routine, as she wanders the island, observes plants and insects, checks in on seals and wild horses, removes globules of plastic from the sand. They record everything, one with paper and pen, the other via 16mm film; everything here leaves a trace. Mills enters into a relationship with the island too, burying film stock among living roots or attaching microphones to the wooden frame of an abandoned building, helping this place make sounds and images of its own, as ravishing and resonant as all the others. So many things can be gleaned from one small island: the gentle daily grind of science, the concurrent isolation and interconnectedness of any space in the world, the accumulated matter and meaning of a life’s work and a vast ecosystem, the need to make the workings of any documentary visible. A film that never tries to hide what it is: the blissfully organic result of an encounter.” –James Lattimer, VIENNALE

“GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE shows us that conversations between artists and scientists are uniquely poised to reveal the truths of the so-called natural and human worlds, and that documentary methods can preserve the wonder of a little-seen, though not entirely untouched, place.” –Esmé Hogeveen, BOMB MAGAZINE

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW!