Anthology Film Archives

FIRST U.S. THEATRICAL RELEASE!

This week-long run represents ARREBATO’s first U.S. theatrical release, and will include screenings of a 4K digital restoration as well as a newly struck 35mm print, both courtesy of Anus Films and Altered Innocence.

“A major cult classic in Spain and a cinematic cornerstone of the post-Franco Movida Madrileña countercultural movement, ARREBATO is bafflingly all but unknown in the U.S. It’s an unclassifiable, nonlinear narrative amalgamation of drug use, allegorical vampirism, and abject, despondent cinephilia: the compulsion to film, watch films, and be filmed. Eusebio Poncela (Almodóvar’s LAW OF DESIRE) is José, a preppy B-horror filmmaker and heroin addict who has just two brief but memorable encounters with Pedro (Will Moore), an obsessive, aspiring experimental filmmaker and fellow user. As the film begins, José receives a mysterious package from Pedro with an audio cassette, a reel of Super 8 film, and an apartment key. José and his girlfriend (Cecilia Roth, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER) pop in the tape, thread up the film, and cozy up to a creepy confessional in which Pedro narrates the history and fallout of his and José’s encounters.

ARREBATO is grim, anarchic, hilarious, and terrifying – and a shockingly accomplished film for someone who had previously worked on low-or-no-budget Super 8 experimental films. One may not readily identify it as a genre film, and yet its relationship to horror literature is incredibly rich, substantial, and artfully woven through. Although it’s in a vastly different register, ARREBATO might give viewers the same sensation as the first time they saw Zulawski’s POSSESSION: Where has this movie been all my life?” –Jon Dieringer

[ARREBATO will screen on 35mm on Fri-Sun, Oct 1-3 at 6:30 & 9:00; all other screenings will be of the new 4K DCP restoration.]

This year, as a way of celebrating the return of filmgoing in New York City and the survival of the city’s independent and repertory cinemas, Film at Lincoln Center is expanding the footprint of the 59th New York Film Festival, and partnering with local arthouse theaters to bring NYFF59 to new audiences throughout the city. Anthology is delighted to take part in this show of cultural unity, as a host venue for two NYFF59 screenings (as well as one of the venues for the Amos Vogel centennial celebration, which will begin at the festival and then fan out across town through the fall). Here at Anthology we will host screenings on Thursday, September 30 and Friday, October 1, featuring films by filmmakers whose work we’ve demonstrated an ongoing commitment to over the years: Quebecois director Denis Côté and radically independent American filmmaker Ted Fendt.

In addition to Anthology, NYFF59 is partnering with BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) in Fort Greene, Brooklyn; Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, Westchester; and Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem. The festival will also present four outdoor screenings at Damrosch Park on the Lincoln Center campus, offering audiences another way to experience the festival.

Advance tickets for these screenings will go on sale on September 7 at noon; click here to access the NYFF59 Film Guide, and click here for Ticket Information.

Ted Fendt
OUTSIDE NOISE
Germany/South Korea/Austria, 2021, 61 min, 16mm-to-35mm. In English and German with English subtitles.
The latest feature from Philadelphian micro-independent treasure Ted Fendt (CLASSICAL PERIOD, NYFF56) finds the filmmaker, writer, projectionist, and translator in a contemplative mode, shooting for the first time abroad. With his customary mix of narrative restraint and intellectual curiosity, Fendt follows a small group of young women through Berlin and Vienna over the course of several months, particularly Daniela, who has just returned from traveling in New York and is dealing with a bout of insomnia. Shot on 16mm and glowing with natural light, OUTSIDE NOISE – co-written by Fendt and his two lead actors, Daniela Zahlner and Mia Sellmann – is an authentic depiction of the tremors and pleasures of the in-between years of our early thirties.

FIRST U.S. THEATRICAL RELEASE!

This week-long run represents ARREBATO’s first U.S. theatrical release, and will include screenings of a 4K digital restoration as well as a newly struck 35mm print, both courtesy of Anus Films and Altered Innocence.

“A major cult classic in Spain and a cinematic cornerstone of the post-Franco Movida Madrileña countercultural movement, ARREBATO is bafflingly all but unknown in the U.S. It’s an unclassifiable, nonlinear narrative amalgamation of drug use, allegorical vampirism, and abject, despondent cinephilia: the compulsion to film, watch films, and be filmed. Eusebio Poncela (Almodóvar’s LAW OF DESIRE) is José, a preppy B-horror filmmaker and heroin addict who has just two brief but memorable encounters with Pedro (Will Moore), an obsessive, aspiring experimental filmmaker and fellow user. As the film begins, José receives a mysterious package from Pedro with an audio cassette, a reel of Super 8 film, and an apartment key. José and his girlfriend (Cecilia Roth, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER) pop in the tape, thread up the film, and cozy up to a creepy confessional in which Pedro narrates the history and fallout of his and José’s encounters.

ARREBATO is grim, anarchic, hilarious, and terrifying – and a shockingly accomplished film for someone who had previously worked on low-or-no-budget Super 8 experimental films. One may not readily identify it as a genre film, and yet its relationship to horror literature is incredibly rich, substantial, and artfully woven through. Although it’s in a vastly different register, ARREBATO might give viewers the same sensation as the first time they saw Zulawski’s POSSESSION: Where has this movie been all my life?” –Jon Dieringer

[ARREBATO will screen on 35mm on Fri-Sun, Oct 1-3 at 6:30 & 9:00; all other screenings will be of the new 4K DCP restoration.]

(DIE MÖRDER SIND UNTER UNS)

With the German film industry out of commission since late 1944, German cinema re-emerged in 1946 with THE MURDERERS ARE AMONG US, produced by the newly-formed Soviet-backed production company DEFA, which would become the East German state-run film studio. Soviet authorities seized on the creation of DEFA as an attempt to use film as a tool to re-educate and de-Nazify the German citizens. THE MURDERERS ARE AMONG US created the groundwork for the Trümmerfilm (Rubble Film), a style somewhat analogous to Italian neorealism. THE MURDERERS ARE AMONG US shares neorealism’s focus on location shooting and an attention to the routines of everyday life, but places more emphasis on a psychological approach that also nods to the expressionist films of the Weimar era – it examines German guilt, trauma, psychological repression of crimes committed by ordinary people, and the necessity of accepting responsibility.

“In 1945, the artist Susanne Wallner returns to Berlin after spending three years in a concentration camp. Yet amid the ruins, she is filled with a renewed energy for life. When she arrives at her old apartment, she finds that Dr. Hans Mertens has taken up residence there. A physician and former German officer, Mertens is haunted by the wartime execution of Polish civilians, which he did nothing to prevent. Under Susanne’s care, the broken man gathers new strength. Then, by chance, Mertens meets his former captain and decides to take the law into his own hands.” –DEFA FILM LIBRARY

FIRST U.S. THEATRICAL RELEASE!

This week-long run represents ARREBATO’s first U.S. theatrical release, and will include screenings of a 4K digital restoration as well as a newly struck 35mm print, both courtesy of Anus Films and Altered Innocence.

“A major cult classic in Spain and a cinematic cornerstone of the post-Franco Movida Madrileña countercultural movement, ARREBATO is bafflingly all but unknown in the U.S. It’s an unclassifiable, nonlinear narrative amalgamation of drug use, allegorical vampirism, and abject, despondent cinephilia: the compulsion to film, watch films, and be filmed. Eusebio Poncela (Almodóvar’s LAW OF DESIRE) is José, a preppy B-horror filmmaker and heroin addict who has just two brief but memorable encounters with Pedro (Will Moore), an obsessive, aspiring experimental filmmaker and fellow user. As the film begins, José receives a mysterious package from Pedro with an audio cassette, a reel of Super 8 film, and an apartment key. José and his girlfriend (Cecilia Roth, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER) pop in the tape, thread up the film, and cozy up to a creepy confessional in which Pedro narrates the history and fallout of his and José’s encounters.

ARREBATO is grim, anarchic, hilarious, and terrifying – and a shockingly accomplished film for someone who had previously worked on low-or-no-budget Super 8 experimental films. One may not readily identify it as a genre film, and yet its relationship to horror literature is incredibly rich, substantial, and artfully woven through. Although it’s in a vastly different register, ARREBATO might give viewers the same sensation as the first time they saw Zulawski’s POSSESSION: Where has this movie been all my life?” –Jon Dieringer

[ARREBATO will screen on 35mm on Fri-Sun, Oct 1-3 at 6:30 & 9:00; all other screenings will be of the new 4K DCP restoration.]

(GERMANIA ANNO ZERO)

The concluding film of Rossellini’s war trilogy was written in memory of his recently-deceased first-born son. We follow 12-year-old Edmund as he wanders through the ruins of Berlin, trying to support his family through black marketeering. Made in Rossellini’s observational and elliptical style, GERMANY YEAR ZERO perfectly embodies the dividing line between a pre- and post-1945 sensibility.

“Haunted by the shadows of skeleton-buildings, the Neorealist world of Germany is quiet and plaintive. Its surface and the faces of its youth, pockmarked with scars. It is a world where the young have faces of the old, smoke cigarettes and sell themselves into hard labor, street crime or prostitution. Rossellini follows the events with distance, the distance of somebody who doesn’t speak the language and is working through a feeling rather than a story, allowing the events to take shape through the reality of the city streets, in the faces, lives and dialect of the non-actors plucked from their natural environments to re-enact the stories of their own people.” –Tina Marie Camilleri, SENSES OF CINEMA

Preserved by the Library of Congress.

Jacques Tourneur uses the ruins of Berlin to great effect in this espionage thriller. Noir stalwart Robert Ryan and Merle Oberon meet an important anti-Nazi German émigré returning to Berlin to give a speech at a peace conference. Shortly after their encounter the émigré is assassinated – or so they think. Upon discovering that he was in fact a decoy and that the real man is missing, they’re drawn into a Berlin teeming with sordid characters, a thriving black market, and an underground cabal of Nazis intent on returning to power.

Preceded by:
Jonas Mekas REMINISZENZEN AUS DEUTSCHLAND (Filmed 1971/93/edited 2012, 25 min, digital)
“This movie is my attempt to provide a brief introduction to the Germany period of my life, July 1944 to October 1949. Using original photos from that period, taken by myself and my brother Adolfas, and film/video footage from 1971 and 1993, I revisit Elmshorn, Flensburg, Wiesbaden, Mainz and Kassel where I spent five years of my life – first as a Forced Laborer in a war prisoner’s camp, and later as a Displaced Person in displaced persons camps. The soundtrack consists of brief excerpts from my written diaries of that period, current reflections, and passages from the writings of Wolfgang Borchert.” –Jonas Mekas

FIRST U.S. THEATRICAL RELEASE!

This week-long run represents ARREBATO’s first U.S. theatrical release, and will include screenings of a 4K digital restoration as well as a newly struck 35mm print, both courtesy of Anus Films and Altered Innocence.

“A major cult classic in Spain and a cinematic cornerstone of the post-Franco Movida Madrileña countercultural movement, ARREBATO is bafflingly all but unknown in the U.S. It’s an unclassifiable, nonlinear narrative amalgamation of drug use, allegorical vampirism, and abject, despondent cinephilia: the compulsion to film, watch films, and be filmed. Eusebio Poncela (Almodóvar’s LAW OF DESIRE) is José, a preppy B-horror filmmaker and heroin addict who has just two brief but memorable encounters with Pedro (Will Moore), an obsessive, aspiring experimental filmmaker and fellow user. As the film begins, José receives a mysterious package from Pedro with an audio cassette, a reel of Super 8 film, and an apartment key. José and his girlfriend (Cecilia Roth, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER) pop in the tape, thread up the film, and cozy up to a creepy confessional in which Pedro narrates the history and fallout of his and José’s encounters.

ARREBATO is grim, anarchic, hilarious, and terrifying – and a shockingly accomplished film for someone who had previously worked on low-or-no-budget Super 8 experimental films. One may not readily identify it as a genre film, and yet its relationship to horror literature is incredibly rich, substantial, and artfully woven through. Although it’s in a vastly different register, ARREBATO might give viewers the same sensation as the first time they saw Zulawski’s POSSESSION: Where has this movie been all my life?” –Jon Dieringer

[ARREBATO will screen on 35mm on Fri-Sun, Oct 1-3 at 6:30 & 9:00; all other screenings will be of the new 4K DCP restoration.]

(DER VERLORENE)

This is the sole feature film directed by legendary actor Peter Lorre, and like Charles Laughton’s NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, it’s both a remarkable accomplishment and a tantalizing glimpse of a directorial vision never again made manifest. Lorre not only directed but also co-wrote and starred in THE LOST ONE, making it a truly astonishing demonstration of his multi-faceted genius. Taking a brief hiatus from his Hollywood career, Lorre made the film in postwar Germany, basing the story on a news item about the suicide of German scientist Dr. Rothe in a displaced persons camp. Lorre took this seed as the inspiration for a story reminiscent of the role that made him famous – the child-killer Hans Beckert in Fritz Lang’s M (1931) – but here his protagonist’s slide into serial murder is not only mirrored by the brutality of Nazi Germany but actively covered up by the government for which he performs secret research. A haunting film about guilt and the legacy of a society suffused with violence, THE LOST ONE somehow encompasses the expressionism of early Fritz Lang, the classicism of the Hollywood studio era, and the realism of postwar European cinema.

“Hardly a film prefigured fascism as accurately as M, and hardly a film has recaptured fascism as accurately as THE LOST ONE.” –Harun Farocki

Preceded by:
Henri Cartier-Bresson
THE RETURN / LE RETOUR
(1945, 33 min, 35mm-to-digital. Co-directed with Richard Banks. In French with English subtitles.)
Henri Cartier-Bresson documents the arduous, difficult journey faced by POWs and displaced persons as they return to France.

FIRST U.S. THEATRICAL RELEASE!

This week-long run represents ARREBATO’s first U.S. theatrical release, and will include screenings of a 4K digital restoration as well as a newly struck 35mm print, both courtesy of Anus Films and Altered Innocence.

“A major cult classic in Spain and a cinematic cornerstone of the post-Franco Movida Madrileña countercultural movement, ARREBATO is bafflingly all but unknown in the U.S. It’s an unclassifiable, nonlinear narrative amalgamation of drug use, allegorical vampirism, and abject, despondent cinephilia: the compulsion to film, watch films, and be filmed. Eusebio Poncela (Almodóvar’s LAW OF DESIRE) is José, a preppy B-horror filmmaker and heroin addict who has just two brief but memorable encounters with Pedro (Will Moore), an obsessive, aspiring experimental filmmaker and fellow user. As the film begins, José receives a mysterious package from Pedro with an audio cassette, a reel of Super 8 film, and an apartment key. José and his girlfriend (Cecilia Roth, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER) pop in the tape, thread up the film, and cozy up to a creepy confessional in which Pedro narrates the history and fallout of his and José’s encounters.

ARREBATO is grim, anarchic, hilarious, and terrifying – and a shockingly accomplished film for someone who had previously worked on low-or-no-budget Super 8 experimental films. One may not readily identify it as a genre film, and yet its relationship to horror literature is incredibly rich, substantial, and artfully woven through. Although it’s in a vastly different register, ARREBATO might give viewers the same sensation as the first time they saw Zulawski’s POSSESSION: Where has this movie been all my life?” –Jon Dieringer

[ARREBATO will screen on 35mm on Fri-Sun, Oct 1-3 at 6:30 & 9:00; all other screenings will be of the new 4K DCP restoration.]

(PRAWDZIWY KONIEC WIELKIEJ WOJNY)

Archival print courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

One of the earliest films, at least in Poland, to treat the experience of the camps on the level of an individual psyche, THE REAL END OF THE GREAT WAR centers on an architect, Juliusz, who has recently returned home from a concentration camp with PTSD. Unable to speak, he is prone to flashbacks of torture at the hands of the SS. Having thought him long dead, his wife Roza takes him in with a mix of pity and compassion, but also repulsion at his mental state. Incapable of coping with what he has been reduced to, she turns to her lover and plans to leave Juliusz behind. Kawalerowicz approaches the material with the cool hand of Antonioni, displaying a sensitive awareness of contemporary European art cinema of that period. The film is a melancholy and mature examination of the inability of a survivor to truly communicate or express the unimaginable.

Preceded by:
Wojciech Has & Stanislaw Rozewicz BRZOZOWA STREET / ULICA BRZOZOWA (1947, 9 min, 35mm-to-digital. In Polish with English subtitles.)
A newsreel about the rebuilding of Warsaw.

Total running time: ca. 105 min.

Formerly known as the GPO Film Unit before the war, the Crown Film Unit was moved to the Ministry of Information and became one of the most important propaganda outlets for the British war effort. Some filmmakers associated with Crown during the war had been active participants in the interwar British documentary movement. The most famous member of the Unit, Humphrey Jennings’s influence and stature as a filmmaker played a large part in the critical respect frequently bestowed on the Crown Film Unit. By 1946, the Ministry of Information was closed but the Crown Film Unit continued to produce social-minded short documentaries about the post-war moment in Britain and the project of helping to rebuild the world. This selection of short films includes a range of topics from displacement, POWs, re-educating Germany and Japan, and the challenge of conceptualizing what kind of world to build after six years of total war.

With the exception of A DIARY FOR TIMOTHY, all exhibition copies are courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.

Humphrey Jennings A DIARY FOR TIMOTHY (1945, 38 min, 35mm)
Humphrey Jennings A DEFEATED PEOPLE (1946, 18 min, 35mm-to-digital)
Terry Trench THE WAY FROM GERMANY (1946, 11 min, 35mm-to-digital)
Basil Wright THIS WAS JAPAN (1945, 11 min, 35mm-to-digital)
Graham Wallace TRAINED TO SERVE (1948, 9 min, 35mm-to-digital)
Total running time: ca. 90 min.

FIRST U.S. THEATRICAL RELEASE!

This week-long run represents ARREBATO’s first U.S. theatrical release, and will include screenings of a 4K digital restoration as well as a newly struck 35mm print, both courtesy of Anus Films and Altered Innocence.

“A major cult classic in Spain and a cinematic cornerstone of the post-Franco Movida Madrileña countercultural movement, ARREBATO is bafflingly all but unknown in the U.S. It’s an unclassifiable, nonlinear narrative amalgamation of drug use, allegorical vampirism, and abject, despondent cinephilia: the compulsion to film, watch films, and be filmed. Eusebio Poncela (Almodóvar’s LAW OF DESIRE) is José, a preppy B-horror filmmaker and heroin addict who has just two brief but memorable encounters with Pedro (Will Moore), an obsessive, aspiring experimental filmmaker and fellow user. As the film begins, José receives a mysterious package from Pedro with an audio cassette, a reel of Super 8 film, and an apartment key. José and his girlfriend (Cecilia Roth, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER) pop in the tape, thread up the film, and cozy up to a creepy confessional in which Pedro narrates the history and fallout of his and José’s encounters.

ARREBATO is grim, anarchic, hilarious, and terrifying – and a shockingly accomplished film for someone who had previously worked on low-or-no-budget Super 8 experimental films. One may not readily identify it as a genre film, and yet its relationship to horror literature is incredibly rich, substantial, and artfully woven through. Although it’s in a vastly different register, ARREBATO might give viewers the same sensation as the first time they saw Zulawski’s POSSESSION: Where has this movie been all my life?” –Jon Dieringer

[ARREBATO will screen on 35mm on Fri-Sun, Oct 1-3 at 6:30 & 9:00; all other screenings will be of the new 4K DCP restoration.]

(NAGAYA SHINSHIROKU)

Ozu’s first film after the war is set in the ruins and desperation of bombed-out Japan. A young boy who has been abandoned by his father is reluctantly given shelter by a woman who lost her husband to American bombing raids. Ozu balances his characters’ dire living situation with comic melodrama, providing an optimistic, hopeful vision of the future for the defeated nation rooted in his characteristic humanism.

FIRST U.S. THEATRICAL RELEASE!

This week-long run represents ARREBATO’s first U.S. theatrical release, and will include screenings of a 4K digital restoration as well as a newly struck 35mm print, both courtesy of Anus Films and Altered Innocence.

“A major cult classic in Spain and a cinematic cornerstone of the post-Franco Movida Madrileña countercultural movement, ARREBATO is bafflingly all but unknown in the U.S. It’s an unclassifiable, nonlinear narrative amalgamation of drug use, allegorical vampirism, and abject, despondent cinephilia: the compulsion to film, watch films, and be filmed. Eusebio Poncela (Almodóvar’s LAW OF DESIRE) is José, a preppy B-horror filmmaker and heroin addict who has just two brief but memorable encounters with Pedro (Will Moore), an obsessive, aspiring experimental filmmaker and fellow user. As the film begins, José receives a mysterious package from Pedro with an audio cassette, a reel of Super 8 film, and an apartment key. José and his girlfriend (Cecilia Roth, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER) pop in the tape, thread up the film, and cozy up to a creepy confessional in which Pedro narrates the history and fallout of his and José’s encounters.

ARREBATO is grim, anarchic, hilarious, and terrifying – and a shockingly accomplished film for someone who had previously worked on low-or-no-budget Super 8 experimental films. One may not readily identify it as a genre film, and yet its relationship to horror literature is incredibly rich, substantial, and artfully woven through. Although it’s in a vastly different register, ARREBATO might give viewers the same sensation as the first time they saw Zulawski’s POSSESSION: Where has this movie been all my life?” –Jon Dieringer

[ARREBATO will screen on 35mm on Fri-Sun, Oct 1-3 at 6:30 & 9:00; all other screenings will be of the new 4K DCP restoration.]

(POBEDA NA PRAVOBEREZHNOI UKRAINE I IZGNANIE NEMETSIKH ZAKHVATCHIKOV ZA PREDELY UKRAINSKIKH SOVIETSKIKH ZEMEL)

Aleksandr Dovzhenko and frequent collaborator Yuliya Solntseva were commissioned by Soviet authorities to make this war-time propaganda film, which follows the Red Army as it pushes the Germans westward out of Ukraine. The filmmakers highlight German atrocities, the relief of liberation, documents of Soviet military rallies, and speeches by leaders and generals like future premier Nikita Khrushchev. Dovzhenko and Solntseva’s rousing anti-fascist film shows an undeniable gift for combat scenes – not surprising given Dovzhenko’s silent-era classics like ARSENAL and AEROGRAD, and Solntseva’s masterwork THE STORY OF THE FLAMING YEARS (for which she was the first woman to win Best Director at Cannes in 1961).

Emil Weiss
FALKENAU, THE IMPOSSIBLE
1988, 61 min, digital
For over 30 years Emil Weiss has been making documentaries dealing with the Holocaust and its legacy. Part historical documentary, part portrait film, FALKENAU, THE IMPOSSIBLE focuses on maverick director Samuel Fuller’s experiences during the war, in particular his unit’s liberation of the Falkenau concentration camp. Fuller bears witness to his experience by returning to Falkenau to describe what he saw and narrating the film footage he shot in his blunt, hard-boiled reporter’s voice.

Preceded by:
Alain Resnais
NIGHT AND FOG / NUIT ET BROUILLARD
(1955, 32 min, 35mm. In French with English subtitles. Print courtesy of the Institut français.)
Resnais’s groundbreaking short documentary on the Holocaust.

Preserved by the Library of Congress.

Jacques Tourneur uses the ruins of Berlin to great effect in this espionage thriller. Noir stalwart Robert Ryan and Merle Oberon meet an important anti-Nazi German émigré returning to Berlin to give a speech at a peace conference. Shortly after their encounter the émigré is assassinated – or so they think. Upon discovering that he was in fact a decoy and that the real man is missing, they’re drawn into a Berlin teeming with sordid characters, a thriving black market, and an underground cabal of Nazis intent on returning to power.

Preceded by:
Jonas Mekas REMINISZENZEN AUS DEUTSCHLAND (Filmed 1971/93/edited 2012, 25 min, digital)
“This movie is my attempt to provide a brief introduction to the Germany period of my life, July 1944 to October 1949. Using original photos from that period, taken by myself and my brother Adolfas, and film/video footage from 1971 and 1993, I revisit Elmshorn, Flensburg, Wiesbaden, Mainz and Kassel where I spent five years of my life – first as a Forced Laborer in a war prisoner’s camp, and later as a Displaced Person in displaced persons camps. The soundtrack consists of brief excerpts from my written diaries of that period, current reflections, and passages from the writings of Wolfgang Borchert.” –Jonas Mekas

FIRST U.S. THEATRICAL RELEASE!

This week-long run represents ARREBATO’s first U.S. theatrical release, and will include screenings of a 4K digital restoration as well as a newly struck 35mm print, both courtesy of Anus Films and Altered Innocence.

“A major cult classic in Spain and a cinematic cornerstone of the post-Franco Movida Madrileña countercultural movement, ARREBATO is bafflingly all but unknown in the U.S. It’s an unclassifiable, nonlinear narrative amalgamation of drug use, allegorical vampirism, and abject, despondent cinephilia: the compulsion to film, watch films, and be filmed. Eusebio Poncela (Almodóvar’s LAW OF DESIRE) is José, a preppy B-horror filmmaker and heroin addict who has just two brief but memorable encounters with Pedro (Will Moore), an obsessive, aspiring experimental filmmaker and fellow user. As the film begins, José receives a mysterious package from Pedro with an audio cassette, a reel of Super 8 film, and an apartment key. José and his girlfriend (Cecilia Roth, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER) pop in the tape, thread up the film, and cozy up to a creepy confessional in which Pedro narrates the history and fallout of his and José’s encounters.

ARREBATO is grim, anarchic, hilarious, and terrifying – and a shockingly accomplished film for someone who had previously worked on low-or-no-budget Super 8 experimental films. One may not readily identify it as a genre film, and yet its relationship to horror literature is incredibly rich, substantial, and artfully woven through. Although it’s in a vastly different register, ARREBATO might give viewers the same sensation as the first time they saw Zulawski’s POSSESSION: Where has this movie been all my life?” –Jon Dieringer

[ARREBATO will screen on 35mm on Fri-Sun, Oct 1-3 at 6:30 & 9:00; all other screenings will be of the new 4K DCP restoration.]

(DIE MÖRDER SIND UNTER UNS)

With the German film industry out of commission since late 1944, German cinema re-emerged in 1946 with THE MURDERERS ARE AMONG US, produced by the newly-formed Soviet-backed production company DEFA, which would become the East German state-run film studio. Soviet authorities seized on the creation of DEFA as an attempt to use film as a tool to re-educate and de-Nazify the German citizens. THE MURDERERS ARE AMONG US created the groundwork for the Trümmerfilm (Rubble Film), a style somewhat analogous to Italian neorealism. THE MURDERERS ARE AMONG US shares neorealism’s focus on location shooting and an attention to the routines of everyday life, but places more emphasis on a psychological approach that also nods to the expressionist films of the Weimar era – it examines German guilt, trauma, psychological repression of crimes committed by ordinary people, and the necessity of accepting responsibility.

“In 1945, the artist Susanne Wallner returns to Berlin after spending three years in a concentration camp. Yet amid the ruins, she is filled with a renewed energy for life. When she arrives at her old apartment, she finds that Dr. Hans Mertens has taken up residence there. A physician and former German officer, Mertens is haunted by the wartime execution of Polish civilians, which he did nothing to prevent. Under Susanne’s care, the broken man gathers new strength. Then, by chance, Mertens meets his former captain and decides to take the law into his own hands.” –DEFA FILM LIBRARY

FIRST U.S. THEATRICAL RELEASE!

This week-long run represents ARREBATO’s first U.S. theatrical release, and will include screenings of a 4K digital restoration as well as a newly struck 35mm print, both courtesy of Anus Films and Altered Innocence.

“A major cult classic in Spain and a cinematic cornerstone of the post-Franco Movida Madrileña countercultural movement, ARREBATO is bafflingly all but unknown in the U.S. It’s an unclassifiable, nonlinear narrative amalgamation of drug use, allegorical vampirism, and abject, despondent cinephilia: the compulsion to film, watch films, and be filmed. Eusebio Poncela (Almodóvar’s LAW OF DESIRE) is José, a preppy B-horror filmmaker and heroin addict who has just two brief but memorable encounters with Pedro (Will Moore), an obsessive, aspiring experimental filmmaker and fellow user. As the film begins, José receives a mysterious package from Pedro with an audio cassette, a reel of Super 8 film, and an apartment key. José and his girlfriend (Cecilia Roth, ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER) pop in the tape, thread up the film, and cozy up to a creepy confessional in which Pedro narrates the history and fallout of his and José’s encounters.

ARREBATO is grim, anarchic, hilarious, and terrifying – and a shockingly accomplished film for someone who had previously worked on low-or-no-budget Super 8 experimental films. One may not readily identify it as a genre film, and yet its relationship to horror literature is incredibly rich, substantial, and artfully woven through. Although it’s in a vastly different register, ARREBATO might give viewers the same sensation as the first time they saw Zulawski’s POSSESSION: Where has this movie been all my life?” –Jon Dieringer

[ARREBATO will screen on 35mm on Fri-Sun, Oct 1-3 at 6:30 & 9:00; all other screenings will be of the new 4K DCP restoration.]

(NAGAYA SHINSHIROKU)

Ozu’s first film after the war is set in the ruins and desperation of bombed-out Japan. A young boy who has been abandoned by his father is reluctantly given shelter by a woman who lost her husband to American bombing raids. Ozu balances his characters’ dire living situation with comic melodrama, providing an optimistic, hopeful vision of the future for the defeated nation rooted in his characteristic humanism.

(DER VERLORENE)

This is the sole feature film directed by legendary actor Peter Lorre, and like Charles Laughton’s NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, it’s both a remarkable accomplishment and a tantalizing glimpse of a directorial vision never again made manifest. Lorre not only directed but also co-wrote and starred in THE LOST ONE, making it a truly astonishing demonstration of his multi-faceted genius. Taking a brief hiatus from his Hollywood career, Lorre made the film in postwar Germany, basing the story on a news item about the suicide of German scientist Dr. Rothe in a displaced persons camp. Lorre took this seed as the inspiration for a story reminiscent of the role that made him famous – the child-killer Hans Beckert in Fritz Lang’s M (1931) – but here his protagonist’s slide into serial murder is not only mirrored by the brutality of Nazi Germany but actively covered up by the government for which he performs secret research. A haunting film about guilt and the legacy of a society suffused with violence, THE LOST ONE somehow encompasses the expressionism of early Fritz Lang, the classicism of the Hollywood studio era, and the realism of postwar European cinema.

“Hardly a film prefigured fascism as accurately as M, and hardly a film has recaptured fascism as accurately as THE LOST ONE.” –Harun Farocki

Preceded by:
Henri Cartier-Bresson
THE RETURN / LE RETOUR
(1945, 33 min, 35mm-to-digital. Co-directed with Richard Banks. In French with English subtitles.)
Henri Cartier-Bresson documents the arduous, difficult journey faced by POWs and displaced persons as they return to France.

(GERMANIA ANNO ZERO)

The concluding film of Rossellini’s war trilogy was written in memory of his recently-deceased first-born son. We follow 12-year-old Edmund as he wanders through the ruins of Berlin, trying to support his family through black marketeering. Made in Rossellini’s observational and elliptical style, GERMANY YEAR ZERO perfectly embodies the dividing line between a pre- and post-1945 sensibility.

“Haunted by the shadows of skeleton-buildings, the Neorealist world of Germany is quiet and plaintive. Its surface and the faces of its youth, pockmarked with scars. It is a world where the young have faces of the old, smoke cigarettes and sell themselves into hard labor, street crime or prostitution. Rossellini follows the events with distance, the distance of somebody who doesn’t speak the language and is working through a feeling rather than a story, allowing the events to take shape through the reality of the city streets, in the faces, lives and dialect of the non-actors plucked from their natural environments to re-enact the stories of their own people.” –Tina Marie Camilleri, SENSES OF CINEMA

Formerly known as the GPO Film Unit before the war, the Crown Film Unit was moved to the Ministry of Information and became one of the most important propaganda outlets for the British war effort. Some filmmakers associated with Crown during the war had been active participants in the interwar British documentary movement. The most famous member of the Unit, Humphrey Jennings’s influence and stature as a filmmaker played a large part in the critical respect frequently bestowed on the Crown Film Unit. By 1946, the Ministry of Information was closed but the Crown Film Unit continued to produce social-minded short documentaries about the post-war moment in Britain and the project of helping to rebuild the world. This selection of short films includes a range of topics from displacement, POWs, re-educating Germany and Japan, and the challenge of conceptualizing what kind of world to build after six years of total war.

With the exception of A DIARY FOR TIMOTHY, all exhibition copies are courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.

Humphrey Jennings A DIARY FOR TIMOTHY (1945, 38 min, 35mm)
Humphrey Jennings A DEFEATED PEOPLE (1946, 18 min, 35mm-to-digital)
Terry Trench THE WAY FROM GERMANY (1946, 11 min, 35mm-to-digital)
Basil Wright THIS WAS JAPAN (1945, 11 min, 35mm-to-digital)
Graham Wallace TRAINED TO SERVE (1948, 9 min, 35mm-to-digital)
Total running time: ca. 90 min.

Stan Brakhage
SONGS 1-14
1964-65, ca. 53 min, 8mm-to-16mm, silent
“SONG 1: Portrait of a lady. SONGS 2 & 3: Fire and a mind’s movement in remembering. SONG 4: Three girls playing with a ball. Hand painted. SONG 5: A childbirth song. SONG 6: The painted veil via moth-death. SONG 7: San Francisco. SONG 8: Sea creatures. SONG 9: Wedding source and substance. SONG 10: Sitting around. SONG 11: Fires, windows, an insect, a lyre of rain scratches. SONG 12: Verticals and shadows caught in glass traps. SONG 13: A travel song of scenes and horizontals. SONG 14: Molds, paints and crystals.” –Stan Brakhage

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(DER VERLORENE)

This is the sole feature film directed by legendary actor Peter Lorre, and like Charles Laughton’s NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, it’s both a remarkable accomplishment and a tantalizing glimpse of a directorial vision never again made manifest. Lorre not only directed but also co-wrote and starred in THE LOST ONE, making it a truly astonishing demonstration of his multi-faceted genius. Taking a brief hiatus from his Hollywood career, Lorre made the film in postwar Germany, basing the story on a news item about the suicide of German scientist Dr. Rothe in a displaced persons camp. Lorre took this seed as the inspiration for a story reminiscent of the role that made him famous – the child-killer Hans Beckert in Fritz Lang’s M (1931) – but here his protagonist’s slide into serial murder is not only mirrored by the brutality of Nazi Germany but actively covered up by the government for which he performs secret research. A haunting film about guilt and the legacy of a society suffused with violence, THE LOST ONE somehow encompasses the expressionism of early Fritz Lang, the classicism of the Hollywood studio era, and the realism of postwar European cinema.

“Hardly a film prefigured fascism as accurately as M, and hardly a film has recaptured fascism as accurately as THE LOST ONE.” –Harun Farocki

Preceded by:
Henri Cartier-Bresson
THE RETURN / LE RETOUR
(1945, 33 min, 35mm-to-digital. Co-directed with Richard Banks. In French with English subtitles.)
Henri Cartier-Bresson documents the arduous, difficult journey faced by POWs and displaced persons as they return to France.

Preserved by the Library of Congress.

Jacques Tourneur uses the ruins of Berlin to great effect in this espionage thriller. Noir stalwart Robert Ryan and Merle Oberon meet an important anti-Nazi German émigré returning to Berlin to give a speech at a peace conference. Shortly after their encounter the émigré is assassinated – or so they think. Upon discovering that he was in fact a decoy and that the real man is missing, they’re drawn into a Berlin teeming with sordid characters, a thriving black market, and an underground cabal of Nazis intent on returning to power.

Preceded by:
Jonas Mekas REMINISZENZEN AUS DEUTSCHLAND (Filmed 1971/93/edited 2012, 25 min, digital)
“This movie is my attempt to provide a brief introduction to the Germany period of my life, July 1944 to October 1949. Using original photos from that period, taken by myself and my brother Adolfas, and film/video footage from 1971 and 1993, I revisit Elmshorn, Flensburg, Wiesbaden, Mainz and Kassel where I spent five years of my life – first as a Forced Laborer in a war prisoner’s camp, and later as a Displaced Person in displaced persons camps. The soundtrack consists of brief excerpts from my written diaries of that period, current reflections, and passages from the writings of Wolfgang Borchert.” –Jonas Mekas

Stan Brakhage
MY MOUNTAIN: SONG 27 1968, 25 min, 8mm-to-16mm
MY MOUNTAIN: SONG 27: PART 2: RIVERS 1969, 33 min, 8mm-to-16mm
SONGS 28-29 1966/86, 21 min, 8mm-to-16mm
“MY MOUNTAIN: SONG 27: A study of Arapahoe Peak in all the seasons of two years’ photography…the clouds and weathers that shape its place in landscape – much of the photography a-frame-at-a-time. SONG 27: PART 2: RIVERS: A series of eight films intended to echo the themes of MY MOUNTAIN: SONG 27. SONG 28: Scenes as texture. SONG 29: A portrait of the artist’s mother.” –Stan Brakhage
Total running time: ca. 85 min.

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

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(DIE MÖRDER SIND UNTER UNS)

With the German film industry out of commission since late 1944, German cinema re-emerged in 1946 with THE MURDERERS ARE AMONG US, produced by the newly-formed Soviet-backed production company DEFA, which would become the East German state-run film studio. Soviet authorities seized on the creation of DEFA as an attempt to use film as a tool to re-educate and de-Nazify the German citizens. THE MURDERERS ARE AMONG US created the groundwork for the Trümmerfilm (Rubble Film), a style somewhat analogous to Italian neorealism. THE MURDERERS ARE AMONG US shares neorealism’s focus on location shooting and an attention to the routines of everyday life, but places more emphasis on a psychological approach that also nods to the expressionist films of the Weimar era – it examines German guilt, trauma, psychological repression of crimes committed by ordinary people, and the necessity of accepting responsibility.

“In 1945, the artist Susanne Wallner returns to Berlin after spending three years in a concentration camp. Yet amid the ruins, she is filled with a renewed energy for life. When she arrives at her old apartment, she finds that Dr. Hans Mertens has taken up residence there. A physician and former German officer, Mertens is haunted by the wartime execution of Polish civilians, which he did nothing to prevent. Under Susanne’s care, the broken man gathers new strength. Then, by chance, Mertens meets his former captain and decides to take the law into his own hands.” –DEFA FILM LIBRARY

(PRAWDZIWY KONIEC WIELKIEJ WOJNY)

Archival print courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

One of the earliest films, at least in Poland, to treat the experience of the camps on the level of an individual psyche, THE REAL END OF THE GREAT WAR centers on an architect, Juliusz, who has recently returned home from a concentration camp with PTSD. Unable to speak, he is prone to flashbacks of torture at the hands of the SS. Having thought him long dead, his wife Roza takes him in with a mix of pity and compassion, but also repulsion at his mental state. Incapable of coping with what he has been reduced to, she turns to her lover and plans to leave Juliusz behind. Kawalerowicz approaches the material with the cool hand of Antonioni, displaying a sensitive awareness of contemporary European art cinema of that period. The film is a melancholy and mature examination of the inability of a survivor to truly communicate or express the unimaginable.

Preceded by:
Wojciech Has & Stanislaw Rozewicz BRZOZOWA STREET / ULICA BRZOZOWA (1947, 9 min, 35mm-to-digital. In Polish with English subtitles.)
A newsreel about the rebuilding of Warsaw.

Total running time: ca. 105 min.

Emil Weiss
FALKENAU, THE IMPOSSIBLE
1988, 61 min, digital
For over 30 years Emil Weiss has been making documentaries dealing with the Holocaust and its legacy. Part historical documentary, part portrait film, FALKENAU, THE IMPOSSIBLE focuses on maverick director Samuel Fuller’s experiences during the war, in particular his unit’s liberation of the Falkenau concentration camp. Fuller bears witness to his experience by returning to Falkenau to describe what he saw and narrating the film footage he shot in his blunt, hard-boiled reporter’s voice.

Preceded by:
Alain Resnais
NIGHT AND FOG / NUIT ET BROUILLARD
(1955, 32 min, 35mm. In French with English subtitles. Print courtesy of the Institut français.)
Resnais’s groundbreaking short documentary on the Holocaust.

(NAGAYA SHINSHIROKU)

Ozu’s first film after the war is set in the ruins and desperation of bombed-out Japan. A young boy who has been abandoned by his father is reluctantly given shelter by a woman who lost her husband to American bombing raids. Ozu balances his characters’ dire living situation with comic melodrama, providing an optimistic, hopeful vision of the future for the defeated nation rooted in his characteristic humanism.

The enclosure of the commons was a political project long before it was a public health one. Whatever happened to the ancient agora? What became of the public sphere? Can the film theater – especially one closed to the general public – fill the role of a community consciousness-raising space? Featuring three experiments in cross-cultural discourse, the films in this program beg the question of just what the nature of dialogue is.

Horatio Baltz BAM & RAWLS GRAB A SLICE (2019, 6 min, digital)
Issraa Elkogali Häggström DIARY OF A PROTEST (2011, 4 min, digital)
Rage Against the Machine & The Ummah Chroma KILLING IN THY NAME (2021, 16 min, digital)

The panelists for this program will be:

Artist and filmmaker Tiffany Sia
Writer and curator Laura Raicovich
Commissioner of New York City's Department of Cultural Affairs, Gonzalo Casals
Public programmer and writer Kazembe Balagun
Urban policy/planning professor emeritus Tom Angotti

“Includes the complete DOG STAR MAN and a full extension of the singularly visible themes of it. Inspired by that period of music in which the word ‘symphonia’ was created and by the thought that the term, as then, was created to name the overlap and enmeshing of suites, this film presents the visual symphony that DOG STAR MAN can be seen as and also all the suites of which it is composed. But as it is a film, and a work of music, the above suggests only one of the possible approaches to it. For instance, as ‘cinematographer,’ at source, means ‘writer of movement,’ certain poetic analogies might serve as well. The form is conditioned by the works of art which have inspired DOG STAR MAN, its growth of form by the physiology and experiences (including experiences of art) of the man who made it. Finally, it must be seen for what it is.” –Stan Brakhage

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WORLDWIDE THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON FOR OPENING WEEKEND!

(JIA TING LU XIANG)

A searing exploration of the lasting repercussions of China’s one-child policy, Qiong Wang’s debut film is also one of the most ambitious and gut-wrenching documentary features in recent memory. Filmed over the course of more than seven years, ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS patiently constructs a portrait of Wang’s own family, probing sensitively but unsentimentally into the history, interrelationships, personal dynamics, and calcified emotional wounds of her parents, her siblings, and the uncle and aunt who play a crucial role within her family’s story.

ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS explores the legacy of the “original sin” lying at the heart of her family history. Having already had two daughters, Qiong’s parents found themselves desperate for a son. When they learned that their third child would also be a daughter, they made a decision destined to transform their own lives as well as that of their children and grandchildren. Qiong reveals these traumas in all their particularity while always making it clear that her family’s plight is one that afflicted whole generations. At the heart of ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS is Qiong’s sister Jin, who, thanks largely to the scale and duration of the film and the sustained attention with which Qiong is able to chronicle her life, ultimately attains a genuinely tragic stature. Yet Jin also remains emblematic of women who are fighting to claim their place in the world, in spite of policies and cultures that systematically devalue female lives.

“An astonishing feature debut. [Ms. Wang captures] vulnerability, joy, pain, and anguish with insight and delicate artistry. A major new voice in nonfiction cinema.” –59TH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

Director Qiong Wang will be here in person for Q&As following the screenings on Sat & Sun, Oct 16 & 17!

Born in 1950 in Yorktown, NY, Marjorie Keller was a leading scholar of experimental cinema and an accomplished filmmaker whose wondrously impressionistic film diaries record fragments of everyday life that she superlatively transformed through elliptical editing and contrapuntal sound design. Her work, as described by film theorist Robin Blaetz, “drew from her rich domestic world to fashion gemlike renderings of the conflicts and challenges facing a feminist in the second half of the twentieth century.” In 1981, critic Amy Taubin praised her as “perhaps the only major filmmaker that the American independent film has produced since the end of the Sixties.”

As an undergraduate at Tufts University in the late 1960s, Keller studied with filmmaker Saul Levine and participated in political demonstrations that would ultimately get her expelled from college. Relocating to Chicago, Keller enrolled at the School of the Art Institute where she studied with Stan Brakhage, who – along with fellow film artists like Marie Menken and Gregory Markopoulos – would have a profound influence on her work. She later moved to NYC and received a PhD in film studies from NYU in 1983. Marrying fellow film scholar P. Adams Sitney in 1986, Keller associated herself with groups like the Collective for Living Cinema and Film-Makers’ Cooperative while working as a professor at the University of Rhode Island from 1975 until her unexpected death in 1994.

Her body of work includes 27 films and the 1985 book THE UNTUTORED EYE: CHILDHOOD IN THE FILMS OF COCTEAU, CORNELL, AND BRAKHAGE. She also authored an animated pop-up book called THE MOON ON THE PORCH (1986) and, at the time of her death, was in the midst of an unfinished work that was to trace the history of women avant-garde filmmakers, from pioneers like Germaine Dulac and Maya Deren to then-emerging artists such as Peggy Ahwesh and Su Friedrich.

We’re thrilled to premiere three brand-new Anthology preservations, which will screen alongside a selection of Keller films that we’ve preserved in the past, adding up to a brief survey of her singular work.

Special thanks to Colorlab, Audio Mechanics, and P. Adams Sitney.

Preservation premiere!
SHE/VA (1973, 3 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.)
A young dancer rechoreographed through film editing.

THE OUTER CIRCLE (1973, 7 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.)
“This film doesn’t get anywhere…just like adolescence. The hair comes off, the hair goes on, the hairdresser moves this way and that, the music comes on again and again, Kathy and Steve do and don’t break up, it’s all true, it’s all a lie. I want people to be as free as possible when they watch it…” –Marjorie Keller

SIX WINDOWS (1979, 6.5 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.)
“This film began as a view out six windows in a crescendo of evocation. Each window is a layer in a different style of representation. Each view reminds me of my past… Really, it’s a self-portrait.” –Marjorie Keller

Preservation premiere!
DAUGHTERS OF CHAOS (1980, 19.5 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.)
“The film deals simultaneously with girls becoming women, woman looking back on her childhood. It is pervaded with voluptuousness, with longing: the woman, disappointed in love, looking for lost innocence, the girl yearning for the power of her sex.” –Anne Becker

THE FALLEN WORLD (1983, 9.5 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
“An elegy for a Newfoundland dog named Melville.” –Marjorie Keller

Preservation premiere!
PART IV: GREEN HILL (c. 1986, 4 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.)
This lyrical film records observations of the filmmaker’s year in a rented house on a tidal inlet in Rhode Island while her own house was being built nearby.

Total running time: ca. 55 min.

WORLDWIDE THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON FOR OPENING WEEKEND!

(JIA TING LU XIANG)

A searing exploration of the lasting repercussions of China’s one-child policy, Qiong Wang’s debut film is also one of the most ambitious and gut-wrenching documentary features in recent memory. Filmed over the course of more than seven years, ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS patiently constructs a portrait of Wang’s own family, probing sensitively but unsentimentally into the history, interrelationships, personal dynamics, and calcified emotional wounds of her parents, her siblings, and the uncle and aunt who play a crucial role within her family’s story.

ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS explores the legacy of the “original sin” lying at the heart of her family history. Having already had two daughters, Qiong’s parents found themselves desperate for a son. When they learned that their third child would also be a daughter, they made a decision destined to transform their own lives as well as that of their children and grandchildren. Qiong reveals these traumas in all their particularity while always making it clear that her family’s plight is one that afflicted whole generations. At the heart of ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS is Qiong’s sister Jin, who, thanks largely to the scale and duration of the film and the sustained attention with which Qiong is able to chronicle her life, ultimately attains a genuinely tragic stature. Yet Jin also remains emblematic of women who are fighting to claim their place in the world, in spite of policies and cultures that systematically devalue female lives.

“An astonishing feature debut. [Ms. Wang captures] vulnerability, joy, pain, and anguish with insight and delicate artistry. A major new voice in nonfiction cinema.” –59TH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

Director Qiong Wang will be here in person for Q&As following the screenings on Sat & Sun, Oct 16 & 17!

Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.

“All that is, is light.” –Johannes Scotus Erigena

“[Brakhage shot] THE TEXT OF LIGHT in (through) a large crystal ashtray. This magnificent film – a slow montage of iridescent splays of light and shifting landscapes of sheer color, which acknowledges debts to Turner and American Romantic landscape painters as well as to James Davis, the pioneer film-maker of light projections – is the culmination of Brakhage’s exploration of anamorphosis.” –P. Adams Sitney, VISIONARY FILM

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Born in 1950 in Yorktown, NY, Marjorie Keller was a leading scholar of experimental cinema and an accomplished filmmaker whose wondrously impressionistic film diaries record fragments of everyday life that she superlatively transformed through elliptical editing and contrapuntal sound design. Her work, as described by film theorist Robin Blaetz, “drew from her rich domestic world to fashion gemlike renderings of the conflicts and challenges facing a feminist in the second half of the twentieth century.” In 1981, critic Amy Taubin praised her as “perhaps the only major filmmaker that the American independent film has produced since the end of the Sixties.”

As an undergraduate at Tufts University in the late 1960s, Keller studied with filmmaker Saul Levine and participated in political demonstrations that would ultimately get her expelled from college. Relocating to Chicago, Keller enrolled at the School of the Art Institute where she studied with Stan Brakhage, who – along with fellow film artists like Marie Menken and Gregory Markopoulos – would have a profound influence on her work. She later moved to NYC and received a PhD in film studies from NYU in 1983. Marrying fellow film scholar P. Adams Sitney in 1986, Keller associated herself with groups like the Collective for Living Cinema and Film-Makers’ Cooperative while working as a professor at the University of Rhode Island from 1975 until her unexpected death in 1994.

Her body of work includes 27 films and the 1985 book THE UNTUTORED EYE: CHILDHOOD IN THE FILMS OF COCTEAU, CORNELL, AND BRAKHAGE. She also authored an animated pop-up book called THE MOON ON THE PORCH (1986) and, at the time of her death, was in the midst of an unfinished work that was to trace the history of women avant-garde filmmakers, from pioneers like Germaine Dulac and Maya Deren to then-emerging artists such as Peggy Ahwesh and Su Friedrich.

We’re thrilled to premiere three brand-new Anthology preservations, which will screen alongside a selection of Keller films that we’ve preserved in the past, adding up to a brief survey of her singular work.

Special thanks to Colorlab, Audio Mechanics, and P. Adams Sitney.

Preservation premiere!
SHE/VA (1973, 3 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.)
A young dancer rechoreographed through film editing.

THE OUTER CIRCLE (1973, 7 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.)
“This film doesn’t get anywhere…just like adolescence. The hair comes off, the hair goes on, the hairdresser moves this way and that, the music comes on again and again, Kathy and Steve do and don’t break up, it’s all true, it’s all a lie. I want people to be as free as possible when they watch it…” –Marjorie Keller

SIX WINDOWS (1979, 6.5 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.)
“This film began as a view out six windows in a crescendo of evocation. Each window is a layer in a different style of representation. Each view reminds me of my past… Really, it’s a self-portrait.” –Marjorie Keller

Preservation premiere!
DAUGHTERS OF CHAOS (1980, 19.5 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.)
“The film deals simultaneously with girls becoming women, woman looking back on her childhood. It is pervaded with voluptuousness, with longing: the woman, disappointed in love, looking for lost innocence, the girl yearning for the power of her sex.” –Anne Becker

THE FALLEN WORLD (1983, 9.5 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
“An elegy for a Newfoundland dog named Melville.” –Marjorie Keller

Preservation premiere!
PART IV: GREEN HILL (c. 1986, 4 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.)
This lyrical film records observations of the filmmaker’s year in a rented house on a tidal inlet in Rhode Island while her own house was being built nearby.

Total running time: ca. 55 min.

WORLDWIDE THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON FOR OPENING WEEKEND!

(JIA TING LU XIANG)

A searing exploration of the lasting repercussions of China’s one-child policy, Qiong Wang’s debut film is also one of the most ambitious and gut-wrenching documentary features in recent memory. Filmed over the course of more than seven years, ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS patiently constructs a portrait of Wang’s own family, probing sensitively but unsentimentally into the history, interrelationships, personal dynamics, and calcified emotional wounds of her parents, her siblings, and the uncle and aunt who play a crucial role within her family’s story.

ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS explores the legacy of the “original sin” lying at the heart of her family history. Having already had two daughters, Qiong’s parents found themselves desperate for a son. When they learned that their third child would also be a daughter, they made a decision destined to transform their own lives as well as that of their children and grandchildren. Qiong reveals these traumas in all their particularity while always making it clear that her family’s plight is one that afflicted whole generations. At the heart of ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS is Qiong’s sister Jin, who, thanks largely to the scale and duration of the film and the sustained attention with which Qiong is able to chronicle her life, ultimately attains a genuinely tragic stature. Yet Jin also remains emblematic of women who are fighting to claim their place in the world, in spite of policies and cultures that systematically devalue female lives.

“An astonishing feature debut. [Ms. Wang captures] vulnerability, joy, pain, and anguish with insight and delicate artistry. A major new voice in nonfiction cinema.” –59TH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

Director Qiong Wang will be here in person for Q&As following the screenings on Sat & Sun, Oct 16 & 17!

Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.

EYES
(1970, 36 min, 16mm, silent)
“After wishing for years to be given the opportunity of filming some of the more ‘mystical’ occupations of our Times – some of the more obscure Public Figures which the average imagination turns into ‘bogeymen’... viz.: Policemen, Doctors, Soldiers, Politicians, etc.: – I was at last permitted to ride in a Pittsburgh police car, camera in hand, the final several days of September 1970.” –Stan Brakhage

DEUS EX
(1971, 34 min, 16mm, silent)
“I have been many times very ill in hospitals; and I drew on all that experience while making DEUS EX in West Penn. Hospital of Pittsburgh; but I was especially inspired by the memory of one incident in an emergency room of San Francisco’s Mission District: while waiting for medical help, I had held myself together by reading an April-May 1965 issue of ‘Poetry Magazine’: and the following lines from Charles Olson’s ‘Cole’s Island’ had especially centered the experience, ‘touchstone’ of DEUS EX, for me: Charles begins the poem with the statement ‘I met Death –’ And then: ‘He didn’t bother me, or say anything. Which is / not surprising, a person might not, in the circumstances; / or at most a nod or something. Or they would. But they wouldn’t, / or you wouldn’t think to either, / it was Death. And / He certainly was, the moment I saw him.’” –Stan Brakhage

THE ACT OF SEEING WITH ONE’S OWN EYES
(1971, 32 min, 16mm, silent)
“Brakhage, entering, with his camera, one of the forbidden, terrific locations of our culture, the autopsy room. It is a place wherein, inversely, life is cherished, for it exists to affirm that no one of us may die without our knowing exactly why. All of us, in the person of the coroner, must see that, for ourselves, with our own eyes.” –Hollis Frampton

Total running time: ca. 105 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Born in 1950 in Yorktown, NY, Marjorie Keller was a leading scholar of experimental cinema and an accomplished filmmaker whose wondrously impressionistic film diaries record fragments of everyday life that she superlatively transformed through elliptical editing and contrapuntal sound design. Her work, as described by film theorist Robin Blaetz, “drew from her rich domestic world to fashion gemlike renderings of the conflicts and challenges facing a feminist in the second half of the twentieth century.” In 1981, critic Amy Taubin praised her as “perhaps the only major filmmaker that the American independent film has produced since the end of the Sixties.”

As an undergraduate at Tufts University in the late 1960s, Keller studied with filmmaker Saul Levine and participated in political demonstrations that would ultimately get her expelled from college. Relocating to Chicago, Keller enrolled at the School of the Art Institute where she studied with Stan Brakhage, who – along with fellow film artists like Marie Menken and Gregory Markopoulos – would have a profound influence on her work. She later moved to NYC and received a PhD in film studies from NYU in 1983. Marrying fellow film scholar P. Adams Sitney in 1986, Keller associated herself with groups like the Collective for Living Cinema and Film-Makers’ Cooperative while working as a professor at the University of Rhode Island from 1975 until her unexpected death in 1994.

Her body of work includes 27 films and the 1985 book THE UNTUTORED EYE: CHILDHOOD IN THE FILMS OF COCTEAU, CORNELL, AND BRAKHAGE. She also authored an animated pop-up book called THE MOON ON THE PORCH (1986) and, at the time of her death, was in the midst of an unfinished work that was to trace the history of women avant-garde filmmakers, from pioneers like Germaine Dulac and Maya Deren to then-emerging artists such as Peggy Ahwesh and Su Friedrich.

We’re thrilled to premiere three brand-new Anthology preservations, which will screen alongside a selection of Keller films that we’ve preserved in the past, adding up to a brief survey of her singular work.

Special thanks to Colorlab, Audio Mechanics, and P. Adams Sitney.

Preservation premiere!
SHE/VA (1973, 3 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.)
A young dancer rechoreographed through film editing.

THE OUTER CIRCLE (1973, 7 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.)
“This film doesn’t get anywhere…just like adolescence. The hair comes off, the hair goes on, the hairdresser moves this way and that, the music comes on again and again, Kathy and Steve do and don’t break up, it’s all true, it’s all a lie. I want people to be as free as possible when they watch it…” –Marjorie Keller

SIX WINDOWS (1979, 6.5 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.)
“This film began as a view out six windows in a crescendo of evocation. Each window is a layer in a different style of representation. Each view reminds me of my past… Really, it’s a self-portrait.” –Marjorie Keller

Preservation premiere!
DAUGHTERS OF CHAOS (1980, 19.5 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.)
“The film deals simultaneously with girls becoming women, woman looking back on her childhood. It is pervaded with voluptuousness, with longing: the woman, disappointed in love, looking for lost innocence, the girl yearning for the power of her sex.” –Anne Becker

THE FALLEN WORLD (1983, 9.5 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
“An elegy for a Newfoundland dog named Melville.” –Marjorie Keller

Preservation premiere!
PART IV: GREEN HILL (c. 1986, 4 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.)
This lyrical film records observations of the filmmaker’s year in a rented house on a tidal inlet in Rhode Island while her own house was being built nearby.

Total running time: ca. 55 min.

WORLDWIDE THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON FOR OPENING WEEKEND!

(JIA TING LU XIANG)

A searing exploration of the lasting repercussions of China’s one-child policy, Qiong Wang’s debut film is also one of the most ambitious and gut-wrenching documentary features in recent memory. Filmed over the course of more than seven years, ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS patiently constructs a portrait of Wang’s own family, probing sensitively but unsentimentally into the history, interrelationships, personal dynamics, and calcified emotional wounds of her parents, her siblings, and the uncle and aunt who play a crucial role within her family’s story.

ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS explores the legacy of the “original sin” lying at the heart of her family history. Having already had two daughters, Qiong’s parents found themselves desperate for a son. When they learned that their third child would also be a daughter, they made a decision destined to transform their own lives as well as that of their children and grandchildren. Qiong reveals these traumas in all their particularity while always making it clear that her family’s plight is one that afflicted whole generations. At the heart of ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS is Qiong’s sister Jin, who, thanks largely to the scale and duration of the film and the sustained attention with which Qiong is able to chronicle her life, ultimately attains a genuinely tragic stature. Yet Jin also remains emblematic of women who are fighting to claim their place in the world, in spite of policies and cultures that systematically devalue female lives.

“An astonishing feature debut. [Ms. Wang captures] vulnerability, joy, pain, and anguish with insight and delicate artistry. A major new voice in nonfiction cinema.” –59TH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

Director Qiong Wang will be here in person for Q&As following the screenings on Sat & Sun, Oct 16 & 17!

WORLDWIDE THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON FOR OPENING WEEKEND!

(JIA TING LU XIANG)

A searing exploration of the lasting repercussions of China’s one-child policy, Qiong Wang’s debut film is also one of the most ambitious and gut-wrenching documentary features in recent memory. Filmed over the course of more than seven years, ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS patiently constructs a portrait of Wang’s own family, probing sensitively but unsentimentally into the history, interrelationships, personal dynamics, and calcified emotional wounds of her parents, her siblings, and the uncle and aunt who play a crucial role within her family’s story.

ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS explores the legacy of the “original sin” lying at the heart of her family history. Having already had two daughters, Qiong’s parents found themselves desperate for a son. When they learned that their third child would also be a daughter, they made a decision destined to transform their own lives as well as that of their children and grandchildren. Qiong reveals these traumas in all their particularity while always making it clear that her family’s plight is one that afflicted whole generations. At the heart of ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS is Qiong’s sister Jin, who, thanks largely to the scale and duration of the film and the sustained attention with which Qiong is able to chronicle her life, ultimately attains a genuinely tragic stature. Yet Jin also remains emblematic of women who are fighting to claim their place in the world, in spite of policies and cultures that systematically devalue female lives.

“An astonishing feature debut. [Ms. Wang captures] vulnerability, joy, pain, and anguish with insight and delicate artistry. A major new voice in nonfiction cinema.” –59TH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

Director Qiong Wang will be here in person for Q&As following the screenings on Sat & Sun, Oct 16 & 17!

WORLDWIDE THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON FOR OPENING WEEKEND!

(JIA TING LU XIANG)

A searing exploration of the lasting repercussions of China’s one-child policy, Qiong Wang’s debut film is also one of the most ambitious and gut-wrenching documentary features in recent memory. Filmed over the course of more than seven years, ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS patiently constructs a portrait of Wang’s own family, probing sensitively but unsentimentally into the history, interrelationships, personal dynamics, and calcified emotional wounds of her parents, her siblings, and the uncle and aunt who play a crucial role within her family’s story.

ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS explores the legacy of the “original sin” lying at the heart of her family history. Having already had two daughters, Qiong’s parents found themselves desperate for a son. When they learned that their third child would also be a daughter, they made a decision destined to transform their own lives as well as that of their children and grandchildren. Qiong reveals these traumas in all their particularity while always making it clear that her family’s plight is one that afflicted whole generations. At the heart of ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS is Qiong’s sister Jin, who, thanks largely to the scale and duration of the film and the sustained attention with which Qiong is able to chronicle her life, ultimately attains a genuinely tragic stature. Yet Jin also remains emblematic of women who are fighting to claim their place in the world, in spite of policies and cultures that systematically devalue female lives.

“An astonishing feature debut. [Ms. Wang captures] vulnerability, joy, pain, and anguish with insight and delicate artistry. A major new voice in nonfiction cinema.” –59TH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

Director Qiong Wang will be here in person for Q&As following the screenings on Sat & Sun, Oct 16 & 17!

Within the canonical film world, the voices most associated with “radicality” either came from wealth (Buñuel, Godard, etc.) or bit the elite hands that later fed them (Pasolini, the L.A. Rebellion). What can the aspiring radical learn from these class traitors? Or from their blindspots? Can we ever see the world anew when looking through bourgeois eyes? Featuring three interloping investigations of factory life, this program asks what a bourgeois sees when they look at another class from the perspective of their own.

Jacques Willemont RESUMPTION OF WORK AT THE WONDER FACTORY / LA REPRISE DU TRAVAIL AUX USINES WONDER (1968, 11 min, 16mm-to-digital)
Joyce Wieland SOLIDARITY (1973, 11 min, 16mm)
Georges Franju BLOOD OF THE BEASTS / LE SANG DES BÊTES (1949, 22 min, 35mm-to-digital)

WORLDWIDE THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON FOR OPENING WEEKEND!

(JIA TING LU XIANG)

A searing exploration of the lasting repercussions of China’s one-child policy, Qiong Wang’s debut film is also one of the most ambitious and gut-wrenching documentary features in recent memory. Filmed over the course of more than seven years, ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS patiently constructs a portrait of Wang’s own family, probing sensitively but unsentimentally into the history, interrelationships, personal dynamics, and calcified emotional wounds of her parents, her siblings, and the uncle and aunt who play a crucial role within her family’s story.

ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS explores the legacy of the “original sin” lying at the heart of her family history. Having already had two daughters, Qiong’s parents found themselves desperate for a son. When they learned that their third child would also be a daughter, they made a decision destined to transform their own lives as well as that of their children and grandchildren. Qiong reveals these traumas in all their particularity while always making it clear that her family’s plight is one that afflicted whole generations. At the heart of ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS is Qiong’s sister Jin, who, thanks largely to the scale and duration of the film and the sustained attention with which Qiong is able to chronicle her life, ultimately attains a genuinely tragic stature. Yet Jin also remains emblematic of women who are fighting to claim their place in the world, in spite of policies and cultures that systematically devalue female lives.

“An astonishing feature debut. [Ms. Wang captures] vulnerability, joy, pain, and anguish with insight and delicate artistry. A major new voice in nonfiction cinema.” –59TH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

Director Qiong Wang will be here in person for Q&As following the screenings on Sat & Sun, Oct 16 & 17!

[The descriptions for this program are taken from the original Cinema 16 program notes; Vogel credited those for GLEN FALLS SEQUENCE and THE POTTED PSALM to San Francisco’s Art in Cinema Society.]

Douglass Crockwell GLEN FALLS SEQUENCE (1946, 8 min, 16mm)
A non-objective film, concerned primarily with the intuitive expression of the artist through the play and hazard of his medium. The fluid imagery is left for each of us to interpret in his own way. Crockwell would be the last to explain the “meaning” in his work. He writes: “About 8 years ago, I set up an animation easel with the camera mounted overhead and the work area arranged much as a draftsman’s desk, except that it consisted of several movable layers of glass slightly separated. The basic idea was to paint continuing pictures on these various layers with plastic paint, adding at times and removing at times. This basic process was changed from time to time with varying results and I have still made no attempt yet to stabilize the method.”

Stanley Hawes, Julian Huxley, and Stuart Legg MONKEY INTO MAN (1938, 20 min, 16mm. Print courtesy of the Yale Film Archive.)
Not by any means a truly comprehensive scientific study, this film nevertheless conveys in a popular fashion facts as to the development and habits of various types of apes. Skillful direction and interesting commentary almost succeed in transforming the film into an “entertainment” piece.

A MOTION PICTURE STUDY OF MARTHA GRAHAM FROM HER DANCE LAMENTATION (1943, 10 min, 16mm-to-digital. Produced by the Harmon Foundation. Photographed by Simon and Herta Moselio. Choreography by Martha Graham. Courtesy of Martha Graham Resources, a division of the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, Inc.)
This masterpiece of interpretive dance is done entirely from a sitting position, with repeated close-ups, revealing Martha Graham’s dance technique in great detail. Because of its interesting movements and sculptural planes, the film should prove of interest not merely to students of dance, but also to artists and sculptors.

Sidney Peterson & James Broughton THE POTTED PSALM (1946, 19 min, 16mm. THE POTTED PSALM has been preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation.)
Shot in San Francisco during the summer of 1946, this film undertakes a visual penetration of the chaotic inner complexities of our post-war society, heretofore the preoccupation of serious modern writers. The film medium is potentially a more natural one than literature in dealing with the sub-verbal realms of the subconscious since it is more analogous to the dream world and its imagery. But the contents of the dream world are divorced from rationality and possess a necessary ambiguity. Thus the only possible approach to a film of this sort – indeed, in a sense, to any work of art – is to accept the ambiguity without interjection of the question: Why? Since we all possess an infinite universe of ambiguity within us, these images are meant to play upon that world, and not our rational senses.

Philip Stapp BOUNDARY LINES (1947, 12 min, 16mm. Courtesy of the International Film Foundation and the USC SCA Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive.)
This outstanding cartoon successfully combines a social message with unique color animation, provocative commentary and a distinguished musical score.

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

NY THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

The first solo feature from Joshua Bonnetta, THE TWO SIGHTS (AN DÀ SHEALLADH) explores the disappearing tradition of second sight in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Devoting the soundtrack to locals’ accounts of haunting experiences – phantom horses, ghost voices, and other supernatural phenomena – Bonnetta connects their testimonies with striking 16mm images and a carefully-curated sonic montage of the physical and aural environment of these enchanted islands. THE TWO SIGHTS is an ethnographic marvel of non-fiction filmmaking that thrills the eyes and ears and invites us into the extra-sensory beyond.

“In the past, the gift of receiving visual or aural signs from the future was handed down from generation to generation on the Outer Hebrides islands off the Scottish coast. Between 2017 and 2019, Canadian artist Joshua Bonnetta set about exploring their landscapes and collecting the oral history of this visionary gift. As in his previous documentary feature, EL MAR LA MAR, co-directed with J.P. Sniadecki in the Sonoran desert, this work of ethnographic collection creates a sensorial world populated by ghosts: stories of engulfed villages, beached whales, drowned horses, Gaelic songs, and voices carrying messages of personal or community events. A project stamped with historical materialism yet no less deeply formalist, if we recall that P. Adams Sitney famously described the North American avant-garde as visionary; and that Bonnetta is no less of a filmmaker than an acoustician. The two sights in the title are those of a film in which image and sound each follow their own course while also being portents that interact in a game of anticipation, of echoes and unison. At times on alert, at times in torpor, the spectator is enveloped in a world as vivid as it is unreal; ‘a thin place’ in the words of a woman whose beautiful consolatory singing stirs the sea into soft ripples, at the extremely thin frontier between sky and sea, between foreknowledge and memory.” –Antoine Thirion, CINÉMA DU RÉEL

Fri-Thurs, Oct 22-28 at 6:45 & 9:00 nightly. Additional screenings on Sat & Sun at 4:30.

Immediately following the week-long engagement of THE TWO SIGHTS, Anthology will present the series “Folk Horror” (Oct 28-Nov 11). That program will highlight a subgenre of horror films that could almost be kissing cousins of THE TWO SIGHTS, which evokes some of the same atmosphere in a nonfictional context. For more details of “Folk Horror”, click here.

Robert Anderson THE FEELING OF REJECTION (1947, 21 min, 16mm)
“The case history of Margaret, a 23-year-old girl who has physical disorders with no physical causes. A psychiatrist shows her the root of her troubles – childhood overprotection and discouragement of her efforts to express herself, resulting in a crippling fear of failure and a complete inability to assert herself. When Margaret understands her problem, she develops new and healthier habits of behavior.” –NATIONAL FILM BOARD OF CANADA

John & James Whitney FILM EXERCISES 1-5 (1943-45, 18 min, 16mm)
“The visual images in these films were created by shining light through flexible masks, so that the camera was filming direct light rather than light reflected from drawings. The results seem like dazzling neon apparitions, that were as novel and shocking as the accompanying soundtrack.” –William Moritz

John Ferno AND SO THEY LIVE (1940, 25 min, 35mm-to-digital. Edited by Irving Lerner. Courtesy of the Library of Congress and the National Film Preservation Foundation.)
“Stark, realistic documentary showing poorly educated ‘mountain peoples’ living in poverty and stricken with disease. Their solace comes in strong family bonds and the prospect of improved educational opportunities. John Ferno had been a cameraman for Joris Ivens and Henri Storck.” –FIELD GUIDE TO SPONSORED FILMS

Norman McLaren
HEN HOP (1942, 4 min, 35mm-to-digital)
“This joyful short animation features a dancing hen that transforms into an egg. The film was made without a camera by Norman McLaren, who drew directly onto 35mm movie stock with ordinary pen and ink. Color was added optically.” –NATIONAL FILM BOARD OF CANADA
FIVE FOR FOUR (1942, 3 min, 35mm-to-digital)
“This animated short serves as a wartime savings campaign. Symbolic figures, drawn directly on 35mm film stock, move and dance against a simple painted background. The score is ‘Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie,’ by Albert Ammons.” –NATIONAL FILM BOARD OF CANADA

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

NY THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

The first solo feature from Joshua Bonnetta, THE TWO SIGHTS (AN DÀ SHEALLADH) explores the disappearing tradition of second sight in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Devoting the soundtrack to locals’ accounts of haunting experiences – phantom horses, ghost voices, and other supernatural phenomena – Bonnetta connects their testimonies with striking 16mm images and a carefully-curated sonic montage of the physical and aural environment of these enchanted islands. THE TWO SIGHTS is an ethnographic marvel of non-fiction filmmaking that thrills the eyes and ears and invites us into the extra-sensory beyond.

“In the past, the gift of receiving visual or aural signs from the future was handed down from generation to generation on the Outer Hebrides islands off the Scottish coast. Between 2017 and 2019, Canadian artist Joshua Bonnetta set about exploring their landscapes and collecting the oral history of this visionary gift. As in his previous documentary feature, EL MAR LA MAR, co-directed with J.P. Sniadecki in the Sonoran desert, this work of ethnographic collection creates a sensorial world populated by ghosts: stories of engulfed villages, beached whales, drowned horses, Gaelic songs, and voices carrying messages of personal or community events. A project stamped with historical materialism yet no less deeply formalist, if we recall that P. Adams Sitney famously described the North American avant-garde as visionary; and that Bonnetta is no less of a filmmaker than an acoustician. The two sights in the title are those of a film in which image and sound each follow their own course while also being portents that interact in a game of anticipation, of echoes and unison. At times on alert, at times in torpor, the spectator is enveloped in a world as vivid as it is unreal; ‘a thin place’ in the words of a woman whose beautiful consolatory singing stirs the sea into soft ripples, at the extremely thin frontier between sky and sea, between foreknowledge and memory.” –Antoine Thirion, CINÉMA DU RÉEL

Fri-Thurs, Oct 22-28 at 6:45 & 9:00 nightly. Additional screenings on Sat & Sun at 4:30.

Immediately following the week-long engagement of THE TWO SIGHTS, Anthology will present the series “Folk Horror” (Oct 28-Nov 11). That program will highlight a subgenre of horror films that could almost be kissing cousins of THE TWO SIGHTS, which evokes some of the same atmosphere in a nonfictional context. For more details of “Folk Horror”, click here.

Arne Sucksdorff WIND FROM THE WEST / VINDEN FRÅN VÄSTER (1942, 17 min, 35mm. Print courtesy of the Swedish Film Institute.)
“A blend of fact and fantasy, set in the land of the Lapps in northernmost Sweden. In a schoolhouse young Nils sits dreamily longing that he might go with the older Lapps on their yearly migration to the mountains. Presently the boy dozes, and in his dream the voice of the Wind from the West speaks to him, and takes him on a visit to the mountains.” –MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

AGGRESSION AND DESTRUCTION GAMES: BALLOONS (1941, 17 min, 16mm-to-digital. Produced by the Department of Child Study, Vassar College. Courtesy of Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive.)
Two boys, both between the ages of four and five, are subjects in a study of aggressive and destructive impulses. The film shows how differently two children, but a few months apart in age and from similar backgrounds, respond to a graduated series of opportunities and invitations to break balloons. Demonstration film of a projective technique developed by L. Joseph Stone.

Sergei Eisenstein, Grigori Alexandrov, Eduard Tissé, and Sol Lesser DEATH DAY (1931-34, 15 min, 16mm)
“One of three films released by Upton Sinclair through producer Sol Lesser, DEATH DAY is comprised of footage shot by Sergei Eisenstein for his unfinished film QUE VIVA MEXICO! This short subject focuses on the Day of the Dead festivities and is an homage to the artist José Guadalupe Posada. Though Eisenstein did not edit this film, his exquisite sense of Mexico and its people, culture and traditions are clearly evident.” –Bruce Posner, UNSEEN CINEMA

Paul Rotha THE WORLD IS RICH (1947, 35 min, 35mm. Print courtesy of the British Film Institute.)
“An early release from the newly created Central Office of Information, [THE WORLD IS RICH] was part of a trend in British documentary towards international subject matter. But it was also an informal sequel to Rotha’s 1943 film WORLD OF PLENTY, concerned as it is with the food situation confronted by the globe in the early years after WWII. […] The film is frankly promotional – for the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization…yet it is also viscerally angry that humankind and its political systems have allowed famine to occur and persist.” –BFI SCREENONLINE

Total running time: ca. 90 min.

[The descriptions for this program are taken from the original Cinema 16 program notes.]

Curtis Harrington ON THE EDGE (1949, 6 min, 16mm)
Dream or reality? A dark and doom-haunted episode of desperation is acted out by two people in a setting of eerie desolation. A striking new experimental film by Curtis Harrington, producer of FRAGMENT OF SEEKING.

THE ATOM STRIKES (Army Pictorial Service/U.S. Army Signal Corps, 1948, 31 min, 35mm-to-digital. Courtesy of A/V Geeks.)
First detailed account of the effects of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, just released: an unprecedented film document. Includes dramatic interview with a survivor.

THE WORK OF U.P.A.
Cinema 16 proudly presents the first comprehensive compilation of the work of United Productions of America (producers of Columbia’s sensational cartoon GERALD MCBOING-BOING) whose outstanding films promise to revolutionize the American cartoon field.
Pete Burness TROUBLE INDEMNITY (1950, 7 min, 35mm)
John Hubley PUNCHY DE LEON (1950, 7 min, 35mm)
Pete Burness BUNGLED BUNGALOW (1950, 7 min, 35mm)
Robert Cannon GERALD MCBOING-BOING (1950, 8 min, 35mm. Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.)

Lester F. Beck HYPNOTIC BEHAVIOR (1949, 25 min, 16mm. Print courtesy of A/V Geeks.)
In a series of unstaged, authentic experiments two subjects are hypnotized and in trance experience insensibility to pain; blindness and deafness; eye and arm catalepsy; post-hypnotic amnesia. According to instructions given in the trance state, the same photographs appear amusing to one subject, depressing to the other in a fascinating last sequence. Produced by Dr. Lester F. Beck, Department of Psychology, University of Oregon.

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

NY THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

The first solo feature from Joshua Bonnetta, THE TWO SIGHTS (AN DÀ SHEALLADH) explores the disappearing tradition of second sight in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Devoting the soundtrack to locals’ accounts of haunting experiences – phantom horses, ghost voices, and other supernatural phenomena – Bonnetta connects their testimonies with striking 16mm images and a carefully-curated sonic montage of the physical and aural environment of these enchanted islands. THE TWO SIGHTS is an ethnographic marvel of non-fiction filmmaking that thrills the eyes and ears and invites us into the extra-sensory beyond.

“In the past, the gift of receiving visual or aural signs from the future was handed down from generation to generation on the Outer Hebrides islands off the Scottish coast. Between 2017 and 2019, Canadian artist Joshua Bonnetta set about exploring their landscapes and collecting the oral history of this visionary gift. As in his previous documentary feature, EL MAR LA MAR, co-directed with J.P. Sniadecki in the Sonoran desert, this work of ethnographic collection creates a sensorial world populated by ghosts: stories of engulfed villages, beached whales, drowned horses, Gaelic songs, and voices carrying messages of personal or community events. A project stamped with historical materialism yet no less deeply formalist, if we recall that P. Adams Sitney famously described the North American avant-garde as visionary; and that Bonnetta is no less of a filmmaker than an acoustician. The two sights in the title are those of a film in which image and sound each follow their own course while also being portents that interact in a game of anticipation, of echoes and unison. At times on alert, at times in torpor, the spectator is enveloped in a world as vivid as it is unreal; ‘a thin place’ in the words of a woman whose beautiful consolatory singing stirs the sea into soft ripples, at the extremely thin frontier between sky and sea, between foreknowledge and memory.” –Antoine Thirion, CINÉMA DU RÉEL

Fri-Thurs, Oct 22-28 at 6:45 & 9:00 nightly. Additional screenings on Sat & Sun at 4:30.

Immediately following the week-long engagement of THE TWO SIGHTS, Anthology will present the series “Folk Horror” (Oct 28-Nov 11). That program will highlight a subgenre of horror films that could almost be kissing cousins of THE TWO SIGHTS, which evokes some of the same atmosphere in a nonfictional context. For more details of “Folk Horror”, click here.

[The descriptions for this program are taken from the original Cinema 16 program notes.]

CORAL WONDERLAND (1950, 30 min, 16mm-to-digital. Produced by Noel & Kelly Monkman, with commentary by Wilfrid Thomas. Courtesy of A/V Geeks.)
A journey into a mysterious universe: Luxurious coral growths and startling, underwater creatures of the island reefs come to life in magnificent color under the microscope.

Jiri Trnka SONG OF THE PRAIRIE / ARIE PRERIE (1949, 21 min, 35mm-to-DCP. Courtesy of the Czech National Film Archive.)
A delicious satire on Westerns, enacted by Trnka’s (THE EMPEROR’S NIGHTINGALE) charming puppets, complete with a damsel in distress and a rootin’ tootin’ climax.

Chester Kessler PLAGUE SUMMER (1951, 17 min, 16mm)
The record of a journey of six allegorical characters through landscapes brutalized by war. A hand-drawn adaptation by Chester Kessler of Kenneth Patchen’s “Journal of Albion Moonlight.” “Drawn with extraordinary imagination.” –Lewis Jacobs, EXPERIMENT IN FILM

Giles Healey MAYA THROUGH THE AGES (1949, 45 min, 16mm)
An exploration of the most brilliant New World Civilization of Pre-Columbian times, including Healey’s historic trek into the jungles of Chiapas, the discovery of the temples of Bonampak with their unique frescoes, and his unforgettable encounter with the present day descendants of the Mayas, the strange Lacandona Indians, Stone Age survivors in our time.

Total running time: ca. 120 min.

Alfréd Radok
DISTANT JOURNEY
1949, 103 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Czech and German with English subtitles. Distributed by Janus Films.
“Alfréd Radok’s unaccountably neglected masterpiece, an unrelenting epic of human suffering and degradation, recounts for all time the horror and the realities of the concentration camp universe. Intentionally intensified, non-realist film techniques (borrowing from both the expressionist and surrealist tradition) add to the dramatic impact of this unique work of film art.” –CINEMA 16 PROGRAM NOTES

“The most brilliant and the most powerful film on the subject ever made…departs from stark literalness into a strange, horrible, fantastic grotesqueness that truly comprehends those black barbarities. […] A quality of nightmare and madness builds up, until the final episode of mass destruction causes a hypnosis of insanity.” –NEW YORK TIMES

NY THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

The first solo feature from Joshua Bonnetta, THE TWO SIGHTS (AN DÀ SHEALLADH) explores the disappearing tradition of second sight in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Devoting the soundtrack to locals’ accounts of haunting experiences – phantom horses, ghost voices, and other supernatural phenomena – Bonnetta connects their testimonies with striking 16mm images and a carefully-curated sonic montage of the physical and aural environment of these enchanted islands. THE TWO SIGHTS is an ethnographic marvel of non-fiction filmmaking that thrills the eyes and ears and invites us into the extra-sensory beyond.

“In the past, the gift of receiving visual or aural signs from the future was handed down from generation to generation on the Outer Hebrides islands off the Scottish coast. Between 2017 and 2019, Canadian artist Joshua Bonnetta set about exploring their landscapes and collecting the oral history of this visionary gift. As in his previous documentary feature, EL MAR LA MAR, co-directed with J.P. Sniadecki in the Sonoran desert, this work of ethnographic collection creates a sensorial world populated by ghosts: stories of engulfed villages, beached whales, drowned horses, Gaelic songs, and voices carrying messages of personal or community events. A project stamped with historical materialism yet no less deeply formalist, if we recall that P. Adams Sitney famously described the North American avant-garde as visionary; and that Bonnetta is no less of a filmmaker than an acoustician. The two sights in the title are those of a film in which image and sound each follow their own course while also being portents that interact in a game of anticipation, of echoes and unison. At times on alert, at times in torpor, the spectator is enveloped in a world as vivid as it is unreal; ‘a thin place’ in the words of a woman whose beautiful consolatory singing stirs the sea into soft ripples, at the extremely thin frontier between sky and sea, between foreknowledge and memory.” –Antoine Thirion, CINÉMA DU RÉEL

Fri-Thurs, Oct 22-28 at 6:45 & 9:00 nightly. Additional screenings on Sat & Sun at 4:30.

Immediately following the week-long engagement of THE TWO SIGHTS, Anthology will present the series “Folk Horror” (Oct 28-Nov 11). That program will highlight a subgenre of horror films that could almost be kissing cousins of THE TWO SIGHTS, which evokes some of the same atmosphere in a nonfictional context. For more details of “Folk Horror”, click here.

An Evening of Poetic & Surrealist Films

Robert Vickrey TEXTURE OF DECAY (1953, 11 min, 16mm-to-digital. Digitized by Anthology Film Archives, courtesy of the Estate of Robert Remsen Vickrey.)
Painter Robert Vickrey was well-known in his day for his magical realist style and his technical brilliance (in particular his mastery of the Renaissance technique of egg tempera painting), as well as for his writings on art and the numerous portraits he painted for Time Magazine. Vickrey was also enamored of the cinema, and made several short films of his own as part of the NYC experimental film scene in the 1950s. Rarely screened today, these works include TEXTURE OF DECAY, which concerns a man driven to suicide by the atmosphere of an abandoned house.

Charles & Ray Eames HOUSE: AFTER FIVE YEARS OF LIVING (1955, 11 min, 16mm)
“An exploration of the Eames House and Studio, made five years after Charles and Ray began living there. It is composed entirely of still images shot as 35mm transparencies by Charles between 1949 and 1955.” –EAMES OFFICE

Sidney Peterson THE PETRIFIED DOG (1948, 19 min, 16mm)
THE PETRIFIED DOG has been preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation.
“With macabre slapstick, Peterson evokes a child’s fantasies of birth, love, and death in terms of chiropractors, fights, flights, and eternal triangles. The soundtrack is highly experimental.” –GROVE PRESS FILM CATALOG

Herman G. Weinberg AUTUMN FIRE (1931, 23 min, 16mm)
“Weinberg’s second personal film is a poetic evocation of an absent lover as imagined by the central female character, whom Weinberg loved and sought to marry. Very sophisticated editing adds to the misty cinematography. Happily, actress Erna Bergman accepted Weinberg’s proposal soon after she saw the film.” –Robert A. Haller

Oskar Fischinger MOTION PAINTING 1 (1947, 11 min, 16mm)
“Volumes could be written about this film which stands in length and complexity as Fischinger’s major work. It is perhaps the only one of his films which is truly and completely (or purely) abstract (or absolute). Its images are actors in a complex being which modulates and transforms itself before our eyes, an object and an experience at the same time, something we must feel and contemplate, and meditate through.” –William Moritz, FILM CULTURE

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

NY THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

The first solo feature from Joshua Bonnetta, THE TWO SIGHTS (AN DÀ SHEALLADH) explores the disappearing tradition of second sight in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Devoting the soundtrack to locals’ accounts of haunting experiences – phantom horses, ghost voices, and other supernatural phenomena – Bonnetta connects their testimonies with striking 16mm images and a carefully-curated sonic montage of the physical and aural environment of these enchanted islands. THE TWO SIGHTS is an ethnographic marvel of non-fiction filmmaking that thrills the eyes and ears and invites us into the extra-sensory beyond.

“In the past, the gift of receiving visual or aural signs from the future was handed down from generation to generation on the Outer Hebrides islands off the Scottish coast. Between 2017 and 2019, Canadian artist Joshua Bonnetta set about exploring their landscapes and collecting the oral history of this visionary gift. As in his previous documentary feature, EL MAR LA MAR, co-directed with J.P. Sniadecki in the Sonoran desert, this work of ethnographic collection creates a sensorial world populated by ghosts: stories of engulfed villages, beached whales, drowned horses, Gaelic songs, and voices carrying messages of personal or community events. A project stamped with historical materialism yet no less deeply formalist, if we recall that P. Adams Sitney famously described the North American avant-garde as visionary; and that Bonnetta is no less of a filmmaker than an acoustician. The two sights in the title are those of a film in which image and sound each follow their own course while also being portents that interact in a game of anticipation, of echoes and unison. At times on alert, at times in torpor, the spectator is enveloped in a world as vivid as it is unreal; ‘a thin place’ in the words of a woman whose beautiful consolatory singing stirs the sea into soft ripples, at the extremely thin frontier between sky and sea, between foreknowledge and memory.” –Antoine Thirion, CINÉMA DU RÉEL

Fri-Thurs, Oct 22-28 at 6:45 & 9:00 nightly. Additional screenings on Sat & Sun at 4:30.

Immediately following the week-long engagement of THE TWO SIGHTS, Anthology will present the series “Folk Horror” (Oct 28-Nov 11). That program will highlight a subgenre of horror films that could almost be kissing cousins of THE TWO SIGHTS, which evokes some of the same atmosphere in a nonfictional context. For more details of “Folk Horror”, click here.

MAY 1959:
[The descriptions for this program are taken from the original Cinema 16 program notes.]

John Hubley ADVENTURES OF ASTERISK (1957, 10 min, 35mm. Print courtesy of Cinema Conservancy.)
Brilliant, witty and highly original attempt to explain the philosophy of modern art not by narrative, but by purely visual means. Vibraphone: Lionel Hampton.

Jean Mitry PACIFIC 231 (1949, 12 min, 16mm. Print courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.)
The nervous rhythm of Arthur Honegger’s celebrated symphonic poem fully captured in a masterpiece of editing and photography.

Carmen D’Avino THE ROOM (1959, 5 min, 16mm. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive.)
A destitute room, transmuted by the startling magic of stop-motion photography into a luxuriant explosion of color. A new work by D’Avino (THE BIG O).

Integration: The Unsolved Problem
Lee Bobker & Lester Becker CRISIS IN LEVITTOWN (1957, 32 min, 16mm. Print courtesy of Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive.)
Unrehearsed and often startling interviews with residents, filmed during disturbances following arrival of first [Black] family.

Robert Cannon & John Hubley BROTHERHOOD OF MAN (1947, 11 min, 35mm-to-digital. Courtesy of the Library of Congress and the National Film Preservation Foundation.)
Based on Dr. Benedict’s “races of Mankind”, this triumphant work of film art has already become a contemporary classic.

[This program also included a film entitled THE FACE OF THE SOUTH, which was produced by the Department of Social Education and Action of the Presbyterian Church USA in cooperation with the Southern Regional Council, and comprised an illustrated lecture by the then-Executive Director of the SRC, George Mitchell. We were unable to locate this film in any form – instead, we’re combining the May 1959 program with a screening Vogel presented in February 1960. That program was followed by a discussion with James Baldwin; Marshall Stearns (professor and President of the Institute of Jazz Studies); screenwriter Mark Kennedy; and writer and editor Nat Hentoff.]

FEBRUARY 1960:
Edward Bland
THE CRY OF JAZZ
1959, 34 min, 16mm-to-35mm blow-up, b&w. Restored by Anthology Film Archives with funding provided by The Film Foundation. Lab work by Cineric Inc.; sound restoration by BluWave Audio. Additional support from The Orphans Film Symposium.
One of the most radical films of its era and a definitive landmark of the New American Cinema movement. Celebrated by Jonas Mekas and derided by James Baldwin among many others, CRY is one of the earliest and most outspoken documentary films made by an African-American. Produced many years before the blossoming Black Power movement, CRY presents a still controversial and completely riveting analysis of jazz and African-American culture that is as searing as it is honest. Music is provided by the singular Sun Ra and his Arkestra, who are seen and heard performing at the height of their swing heyday. Shot with practically no budget by a volunteer crew numbering some 65 people, THE CRY OF JAZZ was the only film made by Ed Bland who went on to have a distinguished career as composer, arranger, and producer for the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Elvin Jones, and many, many others.

Melvin Van Peebles THREE PICKUP MEN FOR HERRICK (1957, 9 min, 35mm-to-digital)
“In a desolate urban landscape a group of sad [Black and White men] compete with each other in an ageless ritual. A strange blend of lyricism and social commentary.” –GROVE PRESS FILM CATALOG

Total running time: ca. 115 min.

NY THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

The first solo feature from Joshua Bonnetta, THE TWO SIGHTS (AN DÀ SHEALLADH) explores the disappearing tradition of second sight in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Devoting the soundtrack to locals’ accounts of haunting experiences – phantom horses, ghost voices, and other supernatural phenomena – Bonnetta connects their testimonies with striking 16mm images and a carefully-curated sonic montage of the physical and aural environment of these enchanted islands. THE TWO SIGHTS is an ethnographic marvel of non-fiction filmmaking that thrills the eyes and ears and invites us into the extra-sensory beyond.

“In the past, the gift of receiving visual or aural signs from the future was handed down from generation to generation on the Outer Hebrides islands off the Scottish coast. Between 2017 and 2019, Canadian artist Joshua Bonnetta set about exploring their landscapes and collecting the oral history of this visionary gift. As in his previous documentary feature, EL MAR LA MAR, co-directed with J.P. Sniadecki in the Sonoran desert, this work of ethnographic collection creates a sensorial world populated by ghosts: stories of engulfed villages, beached whales, drowned horses, Gaelic songs, and voices carrying messages of personal or community events. A project stamped with historical materialism yet no less deeply formalist, if we recall that P. Adams Sitney famously described the North American avant-garde as visionary; and that Bonnetta is no less of a filmmaker than an acoustician. The two sights in the title are those of a film in which image and sound each follow their own course while also being portents that interact in a game of anticipation, of echoes and unison. At times on alert, at times in torpor, the spectator is enveloped in a world as vivid as it is unreal; ‘a thin place’ in the words of a woman whose beautiful consolatory singing stirs the sea into soft ripples, at the extremely thin frontier between sky and sea, between foreknowledge and memory.” –Antoine Thirion, CINÉMA DU RÉEL

Fri-Thurs, Oct 22-28 at 6:45 & 9:00 nightly. Additional screenings on Sat & Sun at 4:30.

Immediately following the week-long engagement of THE TWO SIGHTS, Anthology will present the series “Folk Horror” (Oct 28-Nov 11). That program will highlight a subgenre of horror films that could almost be kissing cousins of THE TWO SIGHTS, which evokes some of the same atmosphere in a nonfictional context. For more details of “Folk Horror”, click here.

Alfréd Radok
DISTANT JOURNEY
1949, 103 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Czech and German with English subtitles. Distributed by Janus Films.
“Alfréd Radok’s unaccountably neglected masterpiece, an unrelenting epic of human suffering and degradation, recounts for all time the horror and the realities of the concentration camp universe. Intentionally intensified, non-realist film techniques (borrowing from both the expressionist and surrealist tradition) add to the dramatic impact of this unique work of film art.” –CINEMA 16 PROGRAM NOTES

“The most brilliant and the most powerful film on the subject ever made…departs from stark literalness into a strange, horrible, fantastic grotesqueness that truly comprehends those black barbarities. […] A quality of nightmare and madness builds up, until the final episode of mass destruction causes a hypnosis of insanity.” –NEW YORK TIMES

NY THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

The first solo feature from Joshua Bonnetta, THE TWO SIGHTS (AN DÀ SHEALLADH) explores the disappearing tradition of second sight in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Devoting the soundtrack to locals’ accounts of haunting experiences – phantom horses, ghost voices, and other supernatural phenomena – Bonnetta connects their testimonies with striking 16mm images and a carefully-curated sonic montage of the physical and aural environment of these enchanted islands. THE TWO SIGHTS is an ethnographic marvel of non-fiction filmmaking that thrills the eyes and ears and invites us into the extra-sensory beyond.

“In the past, the gift of receiving visual or aural signs from the future was handed down from generation to generation on the Outer Hebrides islands off the Scottish coast. Between 2017 and 2019, Canadian artist Joshua Bonnetta set about exploring their landscapes and collecting the oral history of this visionary gift. As in his previous documentary feature, EL MAR LA MAR, co-directed with J.P. Sniadecki in the Sonoran desert, this work of ethnographic collection creates a sensorial world populated by ghosts: stories of engulfed villages, beached whales, drowned horses, Gaelic songs, and voices carrying messages of personal or community events. A project stamped with historical materialism yet no less deeply formalist, if we recall that P. Adams Sitney famously described the North American avant-garde as visionary; and that Bonnetta is no less of a filmmaker than an acoustician. The two sights in the title are those of a film in which image and sound each follow their own course while also being portents that interact in a game of anticipation, of echoes and unison. At times on alert, at times in torpor, the spectator is enveloped in a world as vivid as it is unreal; ‘a thin place’ in the words of a woman whose beautiful consolatory singing stirs the sea into soft ripples, at the extremely thin frontier between sky and sea, between foreknowledge and memory.” –Antoine Thirion, CINÉMA DU RÉEL

Fri-Thurs, Oct 22-28 at 6:45 & 9:00 nightly. Additional screenings on Sat & Sun at 4:30.

Immediately following the week-long engagement of THE TWO SIGHTS, Anthology will present the series “Folk Horror” (Oct 28-Nov 11). That program will highlight a subgenre of horror films that could almost be kissing cousins of THE TWO SIGHTS, which evokes some of the same atmosphere in a nonfictional context. For more details of “Folk Horror”, click here.

WOODLANDS DARK AND DAYS BEWITCHED explores the folk horror phenomenon from its beginnings in a trilogy of films – Michael Reeves’s WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968), Piers Haggard’s BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW (1971), and Robin Hardy’s THE WICKER MAN (1973) – through its proliferation on British television in the 1970s and its culturally specific manifestations in American, Asian, Australian, and European horror, to the genre’s revival over the last decade. WOODLANDS is directed by Kier-La Janisse, film writer, programmer, publisher, producer, founder of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, and author or editor of numerous books including “House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films” (2012) and “Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s” (2015). Touching on over 200 films and featuring over 50 interviewees, it investigates the many ways that we alternately celebrate, conceal, and manipulate our own histories in an attempt to find spiritual resonance in our surroundings.

One of the highpoints of 1960s horror cinema, WITCHFINDER GENERAL is a fictionalized account of 17th-century witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins, who, claiming to have been appointed “Witch Finder Generall” by Parliament during the English Civil War, proceeded to wreak murderous havoc throughout the country. Terrifically entertaining and genuinely horrific, as much for its unflinching portrait of moral corruption as for its depiction of archaic torture and execution, WITCHFINDER GENERAL was released in the U.S. as THE CONQUEROR WORM in order to capitalize on the success of Roger Corman’s and Vincent Price’s recent series of Poe adaptations. Graced with an uncharacteristically restrained but altogether extraordinary performance from Price, and helmed by the gifted Michael Reeves (SHE BEAST, THE SORCERERS), who died of an overdose at the age of 25 shortly after completing the film, it’s a peerlessly chilling masterpiece.

“Patrick Wymark plays a local judge skeptical of fears relating to the supernatural, but who is forced to reckon with the strange happenings in his town: children discovering strange body parts and then mysteriously losing their own, people falling ill and going mad, not to mention the group of young people who have decided to form a coven and stage their own Black Mass. […] THE BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW…impressively captures malevolence as an all-encompassing, almost cosmic energy, a force that permeates both people and the air they breathe and the ground on which they walk. If there is a true spiritual forebear for the small yet highly-discussed wave of modern films that are revisiting folk horror, it’s this one.” –Stephanie Monohan, SCREEN SLATE

Jonathan Miller
WHISTLE AND I’LL COME TO YOU
1968, 42 min, 16mm-to-digital
“A masterpiece of economical horror that remains every bit as chilling as the day it was first broadcast, this was the first, and arguably the best, of the M.R. James adaptations that peppered BBC schedules during the late 1960s and 70s, and an advance warning of a new tradition of Christmas ghost stories. […] Absorbing the lessons of Val Lewton’s legendary team at RKO Studios in the early 1940s…Miller uses suggestion rather than direct representation, and builds and sustains an eerie atmosphere with a diverse array of stylistic devices – exaggerated sound and lighting effects, high and low camera angles, disorienting extreme close-ups, teasingly obstructing our view with trees, railings or other objects. The ghostly manifestations, particularly the Professor’s dream/hallucination on the beach, conjure terror from the minimum of special effects.” –Mark Duguid, BFI SCREENONLINE
&
James McTaggart
ROBIN REDBREAST
1970, 70 min, 16mm-to-digital. Written by John Bowen.
Well-known in the UK, where it was broadcast on television as part of the extraordinary “Play for Today” strand, but relatively obscure in the U.S., ROBIN REDBREAST is a particularly pure example of folk horror, and an unmistakable influence on THE WICKER MAN. Norah Palmer (Anna Cropper) is a television script editor who temporarily moves to a remote English country village to rebuild her life. At first, she finds that the villagers are friendly, if a little eccentric. When she becomes pregnant after a dalliance with the handsome villager Rob, she begins to suspect the locals of conspiring against her, preventing her from leaving the village for her home in London. Combining unsettling folk rituals and insular regional communities, with a tone that’s at once absurdist and genuinely scary, ROBIN REDBREAST was directed by the renowned producer/director James McTaggart, from a script by John Bowen, who was responsible for numerous memorable teleplays and novels during the 1960s-80s.

After receiving an anonymous letter about a missing 12-year-old girl, devoutly Christian Police Sergeant Neil Howie (Woodward) travels by seaplane to a remote Scottish island to investigate. But the islanders welcome neither his badge nor religious devotion, for Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee) and his devoted followers worship only the pagan gods of old – and those gods demand a sacrifice. Howie fears for the missing girl’s life and follows every possible lead to find her – despite the islanders’ interference – before she becomes a human sacrificial lamb.

“MESSIAH OF EVIL marks the unsettling directorial debut by husband and wife team Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, who were later to become screenwriting collaborators on AMERICAN GRAFFITI and INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, among other films. When a woman arrives at a small seaside town to visit her artist father, all she finds is an empty house and his bizarre journal entries of warnings. As she searches for him in vain, she encounters an interesting trio researching an old legend about a ‘Blood Moon.’ They soon learn the secret of the town, one that has turned the local dead into eye-bleeding, flesh-eating zombies who terrorize all in this slow-paced, peculiarly moody classic of low-budget American independent filmmaking.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

Preceded by:
Larry Yust THE LOTTERY (1969, 18 min, 16mm. Provided with permission from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.)
Produced by Encyclopædia Britannica as an educational film, this adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s famously chilling short story was a classroom staple throughout the 1970s, and surely one of the most disturbing films to be intentionally unleashed on young minds (aside of course from those predicated on grisly car crashes). THE LOTTERY was directed by Larry Yust (the son of longtime Encyclopædia Britannica editor-in-chief Walter Yust), a prolific director of educational films who would go on to make the cult classic HOMEBODIES (1974). It also features the screen debut of the great Ed Begley Jr.

British writer Nigel Kneale is one of the most interesting figures of postwar British film and television. He’s best known – both in the UK and beyond – for his “Quatermass” serials (originally created for television, but successfully adapted for the big screen by Hammer Film Productions), while within Great Britain he’s also acclaimed for his 1954 television adaptation of Orwell’s NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, his modern ghost story THE STONE TAPE (1972), and other works. Most of his films and teleplays lean towards science fiction or conventional horror, but MURRAIN – made for the short-lived anthology series “Against the Crowd” – is nothing if not folk horror. MURRAIN concerns a veterinarian who arrives in a small village in order to treat a virus afflicting the local livestock, only to discover that the villagers have already diagnosed the problem: a solitary old woman who they’re convinced is a witch. Engaging with the themes of reason, superstition, prejudice, and gender conflict that course throughout the genre, MURRAIN is a beautifully understated but peerlessly unsettling example of the form.

PLUS: A SURPRISE SHORT FILM!

“A forgotten gem of a fascinating period of U.S. filmmaking. Though it has the title of a horror film and a few obligatory scares, by and large it’s a nuanced drama about mental illness. The title character is a timid woman recently released from a psychiatric ward; she and her husband move to a small town to start life over at a calmer pace. The title promises a psychotic breakdown and it does occur, but it arrives slowly and sadly. Jessica claims to be haunted by the ghost of a local story she hears, but (as in a Val Lewton film) her greatest fear is of herself. […] In its central relationship (and the complexity with which it’s portrayed) the film often resembles Ingmar Bergman’s THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY, though it’s hardly a slavish Bergman imitation in the way that Woody Allen’s would be in the 80s and 90s. JESSICA shares with other enduring American films of its era a proud sense of regionalism and a tone that’s generally conversational and unpretentious.” –Ben Sachs, CINE-FILE

Based on the classic novella by Nikolai Gogol – and previously adapted by Mario Bava as BLACK SUNDAY – the first horror film ever produced in the Soviet Union remains genuinely frightening. In 19th century Russia, a seminary student is forced to spend three nights with the corpse of a beautiful young witch. But when she rises from the dead to seduce him, it will summon a nightmare of fear, desire, and the ultimate demonic mayhem.