Anthology Film Archives

Baxter St is proud to present Balloons Umbrellas & Snow, a solo show of lens-based work by the New York-based artist Matthew Placek. Taking place concurrently at Baxter St’s gallery at 126 Baxter Street and at Anthology Film Archives, this exhibition draws from a growing archive of 35mm film photographs taken by Placek over the past three decades. Balloons Umbrellas & Snow consists of a selection of photographs from his archive installed at Baxter St, and the first public presentation of Placek’s ongoing eponymous video work on view at Anthology Film Archives. Conceived to be experienced in tandem, the multi-site exhibition continues Placek’s ongoing exploration of memory as well his commitment to capturing presence, in particular the places and people in his community and the relationships between them across time.

The exhibition will be on view both at Baxter St. (126 Baxter Street, NYC) and at Anthology Film Archives, where it will be viewable through October 15, from noon to 5pm, Tuesday through Saturday (with extended hours on September 7 and September 15 until 8pm).

Balloons Umbrellas & Snow is presented by Baxter St. at CCNY and made possible with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

ABOUT MATTHEW PLACEK
Born in Ohio, Matthew Placek relocated to New York City in 1997 to pursue his interests in photography, video, and installation. His commitment to capturing presence, whether as a sense of place, the passage of time, and/or the relationships between people, has led to his multimedia output. Placek’s practice is durational and also engaged with the archive. Of primary concern to Placek is negotiating uninterrupted concentration from both his viewers and subjects, which he does through expanding the formal and conceptual notions of portraiture. As our attention spans diminish due to the spatio-temporal dislocations of our era, the frenzied use of cell phones and social media, he aims to cultivate a moment with the sitter that lasts longer than a glance and can generate immersive and resonant experiences.

Placek has collaborated with notable contemporary artists such as Marina Abramovic, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Vanessa Beecroft, Richard Prince, Brice Marden, Cindy Sherman, James Ivory, and Yoko Ono. His individual and collaborative work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Kitchen, Deitch Projects, Mary Boone Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma, the Sundance Film Festival’s “New Frontier,” The Toronto International Film Festival, The Stockholm International Film Festival, The National Young Arts Foundation and the National Monument Fort Jay at Governors Island. He has been awarded grants from The National Young Arts Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. His residencies include The Pocantico Center at the Rockefeller estate and Marfa, Texas.

For more info about Baxter St., click here.

DALÍ OSTER NEWSREEL (1964, 20 min, 16mm)
This was filmed on January 24, 1964, during Prof. Oster’s demonstration of moiré patterns. He is shown with Salvador Dalí. Sound: Voices of Prof. Oster and Salvador Dalí.

TIME AND FORTUNE VIETNAM NEWSREEL (1968, 4 min, 16mm. With Adolfas Mekas. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.)
A spoof interview with War Minister of Lapland concerning war in Vietnam. A few practical suggestions are given, among them a suggestion to turn the conduction of war over to the mafia. The Minister is played by Adolfas Mekas.

SELF-PORTRAIT (1980, 20 min, video. Made in collaboration with Robert Schoenbaum.)
One twenty-minute take, a soliloquy, myself talking about myself. Taped in collaboration with Robert Schoenbaum, at the house/porch of Sally Dixon, St. Paul.

Total running time: ca. 50 min.

DR. CARL G. JUNG OR LAPIS PHILOSOPHORUM (Filmed 1950 (by Jerome Hill), edited 1991 (by Jonas Mekas), 29 min, 16mm)
In the summer of 1950, Jerome Hill went to Zurich with the intention of making a film about Dr. Carl G. Jung. The film focuses on Jung as a person. Jerome Hill recorded for posterity unique and revealing fragments of the daily life of one of the twentieth century’s key spiritual and intellectual figures. We see Dr. Jung at work, during his leisure hours, and we hear him expound on the poetry and eternity of stones. After Jerome Hill’s death in 1972 the unfinished film was deposited with Anthology Film Archives. I edited the footage with extreme respect for Jerome Hill and Dr. Jung, keeping myself out as much as possible.

QUARTET NUMBER ONE (Filmed 1974-85, edited 1991, 8 min, 16mm)
Around 1991 I began to worry about the huge amount of unedited footage that I had on my shelves. I had to do something with it before it began to fade. One idea was to begin to edit it all in the form of quartets. This quartet was my first try in that direction. I was not too happy with it and did not continue the project. Instead, I began working on a much bigger idea which resulted in AS I WAS MOVING AHEAD OCCASIONALLY I SAW BRIEF GLIMPSES OF BEAUTY.

IMPERFECT 3-IMAGE FILMS (1995, 6 min, 16mm, silent)
In 1995 Julius Ziz came up with an idea of films made up of only three images. He asked me to contribute some three-image films of my own to a Three-Image Film Festival he organized at Anthology. This film is my contribution to that genre of cinema. Since my filming style depends a lot on shooting frame by frame, these are imperfect 3-image films.

SONG OF THE SALAMANDER (1996, 10 min, 16mm)
This film has to do with the early years of my daughter Oona, when she was three or four years old.

CINEMA IS NOT 100 YEARS OLD (1996, 4 min, video)
The real history of the cinema is the invisible history – history of friends getting together doing the thing they love – for us the cinema is beginning with every new buzz of the projector. With every new buzz of our cameras our hearts jump forwards, my friends! Cinema is not 100 years old.

Total running time: ca. 60 min.

Created in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the composer-driven non-profit opera company Experiments in Opera, EVERYTHING FOR DAWN is an original coming-of-age story spanning the 1990s. Dawn is a teenager coping with the impact of her father’s suicide. Her personal tragedy becomes public when his paintings become celebrated as “outsider art.” With each of the opera’s ten episodes written by a different librettist/composer pairing, all under the direction of Alison Moritz, this epic new video opera series examines the ways we seek solace in a broken world, community intersectionality, and the rationale for making art.

The libretto for EVERYTHING FOR DAWN was written by Jason Cady, Adrienne Danrich, Lauren D’Errico, Krista Knight, Jerry Lieblich, and Jerome A. Parker. The music was written by Clarice Assad, Jason Cady, Melissa Dunphy, Miguel Frasconi, Paul Kerekes, Phil Kline, Pauline Kim, Aaron Siegel, Kamala Sankaram, and Matthew Welch.

This screening will feature all 10 episodes, split into three acts, with a brief intermission between each act.

For more info about Experiments in Opera visit: http://experimentsinopera.com/

To purchase tickets for this screening visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/everything-for-dawn-premiere-screening-event-tickets-399581187087

Christine Rebet’s practice spans works on paper, installations, performance art, and the moving image, but regardless of the medium, drawing stands at the heart of all her projects. Born and raised in Lyon, France, educated in New York and London, and currently working between Paris and NYC, Rebet harnesses the power of drawing and animation to envision and enact various kinds of metamorphoses. Whether abstract, metaphorical, natural, geological, environmental, cultural, or mechanical, the metamorphoses in her works tend to evoke ongoing processes of inner transformations or explorations. On the other hand, they reflect Rebet’s interest in non-Western cultural traditions and rituals, as well as in the practice of archaeology, with its preoccupation with – and attempted reversal of – the transformations wrought by time. Thematically, Rebet’s work focuses on the elaboration of historical traumas in the context of a personal reinterpretation and a consequent reanimation, while aesthetically it’s suffused with her inspired, dynamic handling of line, color, and composition.

We’re pleased to host Rebet for a selection of her moving-image works, as well as a piece she has chosen to place in dialogue with her own films: artist Tacita Dean’s DISAPPEARANCE AT SEA (1996). Rebet will be here in person to introduce and discuss the program.

BBN [BRAND BAND NEWS] (2005, 3.5 min, 35mm-to-digital)
Two sisters – shot dead – hitchhike in a field, hoping to be assigned a new life. The wind captures their wish and disseminates it through different broadcasts and lands in a ghostly theater. Tim Bröss, an expert in mystery, attempts to distribute the sisters’ spirits in the voice of a ventriloquist trainee.

BLACK CABINET (2007, 5 min, 35mm-to-digital)
THE BLACK CABINET is inspired by the heyday of spiritualism in late 19th-century Europe, when mediums introduced oil “spirit paintings” to summon the dead and bring messages from beyond. Rather than putting the characters in contact with spirits from the past, the séance prefigures the future twentieth century, characterized by despotic rulers.

THE SQUARE (2011, 4 min, 16mm-to-digital)
“THE SQUARE invokes Samuel Beckett’s 1981 television piece QUAD, echoing the synchronized footsteps of QUAD’s four dancers and the palette of their hooded costumes. With hand-laid trails of powdered wood, metal, plaster, and clay, Rebet’s work traces the agonies of confinement and incarceration, while alluding to the simple, ennobling act of the protest march and the liberating shared space of the public square.” –Lillian Davies, ARTFORUM

IN THE SOLDIER’S HEAD (2015, 4.5 min, 16mm-to-digital)
Rebet tells the story of her father who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in the Algerian War. This very personal film makes use of a process that consists of filming ink drawings submerged in water, causing ghostly hallucinations to emerge spectre-like in the middle of a desert. The film revives the torment of the soldier’s repressed memories, as much as it refers to French society’s symptomatic denial of its colonial past.

THUNDERBIRD (2018, 5.5 min, 16mm-to-digital)
THUNDERBIRD is about Girsu, one of the earliest cities known to mankind. Sumerian Prince Gudea ordered the construction of the city and many temples after dreaming of Thunderbird, the god Ningirsu’s lion-headed and winged avatar.
“The myth is revisited in an almost hypnotic way by Christine Rebet, whose moving images seem to bring the ancient city back to life. In her ink drawings on paper, the artist accompanies her symbolic representations with analyses by archaeologist Sébastien Rey, with whom she has worked for several years.” –Béatrice Gross, THE ART NEWSPAPER

BREATHE IN BREATHE OUT (2019, 8 min, digital)
Inspired by a recent journey in the north of Thailand, this film follows the spiritual journey of a monk as he descends a mountain. On the screen, animal, plant, and architectural transformations evoke nature and its devastation.

OTOLITHE (2021, 4 min, digital)
OTOLITHE takes its inspiration from fijiri, the traditional songs of pearl divers in the Persian Gulf. These ritual songs accompany them and give them courage during their long voyages at sea; they punctuate the collective work: raising the anchor, hoisting the mainsail or maneuvering the oars. OTOLITHE offers a sublimated repertoire of these ancestral practices, like the collective memory of a past world and an ode to the world’s most ancient jewel: the pearl.

Plus:
Tacita Dean DISAPPEARANCE AT SEA (1996, 14 min, 16mm. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery New York/Paris, Frith Street Gallery, London.)
Shot on location at the lighthouse on St Abb’s Head in Berwick-upon-Tweed in northern England, this film consists of seven lengthy shots captured by a static camera that alternate between close-ups of the rotating lighthouse bulbs and footage looking out to sea. As the film progresses the scene changes from dusk to nightfall, with the color of the sky shifting through a range of yellows, reds, and purples. It was inspired by the story of Donald Crowhurst (1932-69), a British businessman and amateur sailor who died while attempting a voyage around the world during which he falsified his progress.

Total running time: ca. 55 min.

TO BUY TICKETS CLICK HERE!

NOTES ON FILM-MAKERS’ COOPERATIVE
1999, 40 min, digital
I tell a brief history of how the Film-Makers’ Cooperative came into being. I show the original location, and some early photos and documents related to the creation of the Coop, its early days, some of the people involved in it, the New American Cinema Group, etc. Dedicated to Barbara Rubin.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A MAN WHO CARRIED HIS MEMORY IN HIS EYES
2000, 53 min, video
A condensed survey of my first 50 years in New York – physically and mentally. Made for the Musée d’Art Moderne show in Paris.

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

A video record of a mental and physical journey through 5,000 years of Egypt at the End of History; an attempt to reconnect with the Source, with Jean Houston acting as Virgil; as Sebastian watches and absorbs it all from the corner of his eye, focusing on the tip of the Great Pyramid. All very personal, and it goes on and on, perhaps of very little meaning to others, but of crucial importance to myself, a record not for Entertainment or Public Exhibition, but something to share with friends, one long evening. Maybe there is a letter to my friends about a very crucial journey back to Ithaca – and a present for Sebastian, something that he’ll rediscover when he’ll be approaching the age when I, Odysseus, began my own travels – this may serve him as a beginner’s map – the Fates will give him better ones.

(LA CHUTE DE LA MAISON USHER)

Epstein deploys slow-motion, intricate lighting, and stylized sets to create an atmosphere of doom in this famous avant-garde expressionist Poe adaptation (combining both the eponymous tale and another Poe story, “The Oval Portrait”). Starring Marguerite Gance, wife of French director Abel Gance, it was also made with the participation of a young Luis Buñuel, who served as Epstein’s second assistant.

“Since the French Impressionist school has always considered the cinema to be like a visual symphony, we might call this film by Epstein the cinematic equivalent of Debussy’s works.” –Henri Langlois

Preceded by:
Jean Epstein
THE THREE-SIDED MIRROR / LA GLACE À TROIS FACES
(1927, 38 min, 35mm. French intertitles with English voiceover.)
“[Epstein’s] dependence on the close-up, his obsession with the totemic power of the object, his freewheeling mastery of cutting, variation of camera speed, and trust in the interpretive abilities of the audience, all come to a head with THE THREE-SIDED MIRROR. The fractured narrative follows the relations of three separate women…with a handsome, stylish, affluent young man. In the course of the film, he breaks an engagement with each of them in turn, tooling off in a sports car to his eventual demise.” –Brad Weismann, SENSES OF CINEMA

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

The feature debut of both its directors and its star, Willem Dafoe, THE LOVELESS takes place in the late 1950s, a time of generational conflict, of immense social change, of bold fashions and toe-tapping music. A motorcycle gang roars into a small southern town en route to the Daytona races, unnerving and angering the locals with their standoffish attitude and disrespect for social niceties. When one of their number, the charismatic Vance (Dafoe), hooks up with sportscar-driving Telena (Marin Kanter), he incurs the wrath of the girl’s father, setting the gang on a collision course with the rest of the town as simmering tensions boil over into violent retribution. Raw, angry and honest, THE LOVELESS evokes, with unflinching clarity, both an attitude and a bygone era, exploring the tensions between two very different Americas.

“Bigelow’s first feature immediately reveals her canny talent for simultaneously fulfilling and deconstructing popular film genres. Set in the 1950s and starring a young, pomaded Willem Dafoe in his screen debut as the charismatic leader of a leather-clad and immoral bike gang, THE LOVELESS deliberately uproots the genre’s traditional embrace of youthful rebellion by introducing a notably noir shading and sharp feminist perspective into its story of generational and gender conflict. Bigelow’s training in painting and experimental cinema informs the film’s (relatively) slow pace, meticulous framing, and sparse, deliberately iconic dialogue – not to mention the evocation of Kenneth Anger’s SCORPIO RISING in the camera’s close attention to the bikers’ gleaming chrome and leather.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

LETTERS TO FRIENDS… FROM NOWHERE… VIDEO LETTER #1
1997, 88 min, video
By the mid-nineties I had already collected hundreds and hundreds of hours of video material. In 1997 I began to think what to do with it. One way, I thought, was to begin to make some of it available to my friends via video letters. This was the first one. It includes miscellaneous moments from my home life, my life at Anthology Film Archives, travels and meetings with friends in Europe, etc. After the first Letter however I was distracted by other projects and so this LETTER TO FRIENDS remains a unique one. (There was another one, with a Lithuanian narration, intended for Lithuanian “consumption.” That one also remains a unique try.)

LETTER TO JOHN FROM JONAS (1999, 25 min, video)
“In this video letter to curator John Hanhardt, recorded as a response to a proposal for Anthology Film Archives to merge with the Guggenheim Museum, Mekas declares his conviction that Anthology must remain proudly independent.” –Anthology Film Archives

A LETTER TO PENNY ARCADE (2001, 15 min, video)
I made this video on June 23rd, 2001, as a video letter to my dear friend Penny Arcade who a few days earlier had asked me why I love New York. I truly and truly love New York! This LETTER TO PENNY ARCADE is also my Love Letter to New York.

Total running time: ca. 135 min.

Amid the fangs and crucifixes that began to proliferate in mid-1990s American cinema, Abel Ferrara turned to the genre for THE ADDICTION, a distinctly personal take on creatures of the night. Philosophy student Kathleen (Lili Taylor) is dragged into an alleyway on her way home from class by Casanova (Annabella Sciorra) and bitten on the neck. She quickly falls ill but realizes this isn’t any ordinary disease when she develops an aversion to daylight and a thirst for human blood. Having made a big-budget foray into science fiction two years earlier with BODY SNATCHERS, Ferrara’s approach to the vampire movie is in a lower key. Shot on the streets of New York, like so many of his major works, and beautifully filmed in black and white, THE ADDICTION sees the filmmaker working on his own terms and at his very best: raw, shocking, intense, intelligent, and masterful.

“A black-and-white, Lower Manhattan-set, revisionist vampire saga, Abel Ferrara’s rap-scored, sumptuously shot, sin-obsessed opus establishes an acute, at times lacerating, tension between visual pleasure and narrative scuzz. The movie ponders the mystery of existence by reveling in splatterific materialism – noisy ERs and bloody bandages, the messy minutiae of urban vampirism.” –J. Hoberman, THE VILLAGE VOICE

“A quivering nexus of AIDS allegory, identity crisis, historical unease, and socio-economic panic.” –SLANT MAGAZINE

PLEASE NOTE: THE ADDICTION will screen on DCP Mon-Thurs, and on 35mm Fri-Sun!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Baxter St is proud to present Balloons Umbrellas & Snow, a solo show of lens-based work by the New York-based artist Matthew Placek. Taking place concurrently at Baxter St’s gallery at 126 Baxter Street and at Anthology Film Archives, this exhibition draws from a growing archive of 35mm film photographs taken by Placek over the past three decades. Balloons Umbrellas & Snow consists of a selection of photographs from his archive installed at Baxter St, and the first public presentation of Placek’s ongoing eponymous video work on view at Anthology Film Archives. Conceived to be experienced in tandem, the multi-site exhibition continues Placek’s ongoing exploration of memory as well his commitment to capturing presence, in particular the places and people in his community and the relationships between them across time.

The exhibition will be on view both at Baxter St. (126 Baxter Street, NYC) and at Anthology Film Archives, where it will be viewable through October 15, from noon to 5pm, Tuesday through Saturday (with extended hours on September 7 and September 15 until 8pm).

Balloons Umbrellas & Snow is presented by Baxter St. at CCNY and made possible with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

ABOUT MATTHEW PLACEK
Born in Ohio, Matthew Placek relocated to New York City in 1997 to pursue his interests in photography, video, and installation. His commitment to capturing presence, whether as a sense of place, the passage of time, and/or the relationships between people, has led to his multimedia output. Placek’s practice is durational and also engaged with the archive. Of primary concern to Placek is negotiating uninterrupted concentration from both his viewers and subjects, which he does through expanding the formal and conceptual notions of portraiture. As our attention spans diminish due to the spatio-temporal dislocations of our era, the frenzied use of cell phones and social media, he aims to cultivate a moment with the sitter that lasts longer than a glance and can generate immersive and resonant experiences.

Placek has collaborated with notable contemporary artists such as Marina Abramovic, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Vanessa Beecroft, Richard Prince, Brice Marden, Cindy Sherman, James Ivory, and Yoko Ono. His individual and collaborative work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Kitchen, Deitch Projects, Mary Boone Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma, the Sundance Film Festival’s “New Frontier,” The Toronto International Film Festival, The Stockholm International Film Festival, The National Young Arts Foundation and the National Monument Fort Jay at Governors Island. He has been awarded grants from The National Young Arts Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. His residencies include The Pocantico Center at the Rockefeller estate and Marfa, Texas.

For more info about Baxter St., click here.

SILENCE, PLEASE (2000, 6 min, video. To be shown first silently, then with sound.)
Made for a billboard projection project in Luxembourg, a project that never became a reality, this video is an exercise in silence and sound.

REQUIEM FOR A MANUAL TYPEWRITER (2000, 19 min, video)
Taped myself on February 16, 2000, at the Poetry Project reading. All about me struggling to type on a roll of computer paper. It’s my tribute to, and celebration of the manual typewriter, the ecstasy of typing on my Olympia Deluxe.

REMEDY FOR MELANCHOLY (2000, 20 min, video)
Includes four sketches: With Peter Kubelka at St-Michel; our cat Apache and Nina Hagen; children of the School for Violin; Ken Jacobs and his books. Put together in this order on the occasion of the “Remedy for Melancholy” exhibition at the Contemporary Art Center of Vilnius.

EIN MÄRCHEN AUS ALTEN ZEITEN (2001, 6 min, video)
The title comes from a poem of a German poet, Heine. The 9/11 event was so beyond normal human comprehension that I had to put it into the category of a fairy tale. I have a pile of old literary magazines from end of 19th century and beginning of the 20th – and I was searching for some image from the past to introduce this event – and I found this young girl in her dream of something like she could be thinking about things of long long ago – since then I have discovered that it was a photograph by a very well-known end-of 19th-century woman photographer, but I do not remember her name right this moment – The 9/11 event was so beyond my comprehension – you can understand and react to a death of one, or two persons, but I could not react to the death of 2,500 people – it was an abstraction, a fairy tale – that’s why I framed my 9/11 film (shot from my roof) with the fairytale, with the image watching this story, the story of 9/11. Like any other fairy tale coming from the past – by this girl, this child dreaming, listening, and dreaming about the tales coming from the past.

FATHER AND DAUGHTER (2005, 4.5 min, digital)
Yes, father and daughter. Here is the perfect love, as beautiful as it can be. With Rumple and Shiva, my two cats.

Total running time: ca. 60 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

The feature debut of both its directors and its star, Willem Dafoe, THE LOVELESS takes place in the late 1950s, a time of generational conflict, of immense social change, of bold fashions and toe-tapping music. A motorcycle gang roars into a small southern town en route to the Daytona races, unnerving and angering the locals with their standoffish attitude and disrespect for social niceties. When one of their number, the charismatic Vance (Dafoe), hooks up with sportscar-driving Telena (Marin Kanter), he incurs the wrath of the girl’s father, setting the gang on a collision course with the rest of the town as simmering tensions boil over into violent retribution. Raw, angry and honest, THE LOVELESS evokes, with unflinching clarity, both an attitude and a bygone era, exploring the tensions between two very different Americas.

“Bigelow’s first feature immediately reveals her canny talent for simultaneously fulfilling and deconstructing popular film genres. Set in the 1950s and starring a young, pomaded Willem Dafoe in his screen debut as the charismatic leader of a leather-clad and immoral bike gang, THE LOVELESS deliberately uproots the genre’s traditional embrace of youthful rebellion by introducing a notably noir shading and sharp feminist perspective into its story of generational and gender conflict. Bigelow’s training in painting and experimental cinema informs the film’s (relatively) slow pace, meticulous framing, and sparse, deliberately iconic dialogue – not to mention the evocation of Kenneth Anger’s SCORPIO RISING in the camera’s close attention to the bikers’ gleaming chrome and leather.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

NOTES ON UTOPIA
Filmed 2003-04, edited 2005, 55 min, digital
The Utopia Station project is making me rethink and try to sum-up all my past thoughts on utopia, all the variations of it, including the Garden of Eden, Paradise, utopian social, political and poetic theories, etc. As I am going through this process of rethinking, periodically I videotape my thoughts on the subject. An open-ended video – more parts may be added to it in the future. My thoughts on it change as time goes, as I am trying to figure it out for myself, the meaning of it, the practice of it, the possibility of it, in the past, today and in the future.

A DAYDREAM (2010, 1 min, digital. Editor: Linda Burchill.)
It was only a daydream … between two closed eyelids … a tree … in a place I didn’t recognize … a tree full of invisible birds … in a mysterious conversation … all very celestial … dreamy … I thought it went for a very, very long time … Then I opened my eyes … I was amazed how brief it was, the moment … and how long.
“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” (Edgar Allan Poe, “Eleonora”)

FIRST CLASS FLIGHT (2011, 19 min, digital)
There I am, I am treated with the First Class ticket. Evening. But all the businessmen are already sleeping. I can’t sleep. I discover a bar. I talk about Occupy Wall Street, and have another drink in the First Class night bar with lovely, sleepy bar girls.

HAPPY EASTER RIDE (2012, 15.5 min, digital. Music by Dalius Naujo Orchestra.)

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Amid the fangs and crucifixes that began to proliferate in mid-1990s American cinema, Abel Ferrara turned to the genre for THE ADDICTION, a distinctly personal take on creatures of the night. Philosophy student Kathleen (Lili Taylor) is dragged into an alleyway on her way home from class by Casanova (Annabella Sciorra) and bitten on the neck. She quickly falls ill but realizes this isn’t any ordinary disease when she develops an aversion to daylight and a thirst for human blood. Having made a big-budget foray into science fiction two years earlier with BODY SNATCHERS, Ferrara’s approach to the vampire movie is in a lower key. Shot on the streets of New York, like so many of his major works, and beautifully filmed in black and white, THE ADDICTION sees the filmmaker working on his own terms and at his very best: raw, shocking, intense, intelligent, and masterful.

“A black-and-white, Lower Manhattan-set, revisionist vampire saga, Abel Ferrara’s rap-scored, sumptuously shot, sin-obsessed opus establishes an acute, at times lacerating, tension between visual pleasure and narrative scuzz. The movie ponders the mystery of existence by reveling in splatterific materialism – noisy ERs and bloody bandages, the messy minutiae of urban vampirism.” –J. Hoberman, THE VILLAGE VOICE

“A quivering nexus of AIDS allegory, identity crisis, historical unease, and socio-economic panic.” –SLANT MAGAZINE

PLEASE NOTE: THE ADDICTION will screen on DCP Mon-Thurs, and on 35mm Fri-Sun!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Baxter St is proud to present Balloons Umbrellas & Snow, a solo show of lens-based work by the New York-based artist Matthew Placek. Taking place concurrently at Baxter St’s gallery at 126 Baxter Street and at Anthology Film Archives, this exhibition draws from a growing archive of 35mm film photographs taken by Placek over the past three decades. Balloons Umbrellas & Snow consists of a selection of photographs from his archive installed at Baxter St, and the first public presentation of Placek’s ongoing eponymous video work on view at Anthology Film Archives. Conceived to be experienced in tandem, the multi-site exhibition continues Placek’s ongoing exploration of memory as well his commitment to capturing presence, in particular the places and people in his community and the relationships between them across time.

The exhibition will be on view both at Baxter St. (126 Baxter Street, NYC) and at Anthology Film Archives, where it will be viewable through October 15, from noon to 5pm, Tuesday through Saturday (with extended hours on September 7 and September 15 until 8pm).

Balloons Umbrellas & Snow is presented by Baxter St. at CCNY and made possible with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

ABOUT MATTHEW PLACEK
Born in Ohio, Matthew Placek relocated to New York City in 1997 to pursue his interests in photography, video, and installation. His commitment to capturing presence, whether as a sense of place, the passage of time, and/or the relationships between people, has led to his multimedia output. Placek’s practice is durational and also engaged with the archive. Of primary concern to Placek is negotiating uninterrupted concentration from both his viewers and subjects, which he does through expanding the formal and conceptual notions of portraiture. As our attention spans diminish due to the spatio-temporal dislocations of our era, the frenzied use of cell phones and social media, he aims to cultivate a moment with the sitter that lasts longer than a glance and can generate immersive and resonant experiences.

Placek has collaborated with notable contemporary artists such as Marina Abramovic, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Vanessa Beecroft, Richard Prince, Brice Marden, Cindy Sherman, James Ivory, and Yoko Ono. His individual and collaborative work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Kitchen, Deitch Projects, Mary Boone Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma, the Sundance Film Festival’s “New Frontier,” The Toronto International Film Festival, The Stockholm International Film Festival, The National Young Arts Foundation and the National Monument Fort Jay at Governors Island. He has been awarded grants from The National Young Arts Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. His residencies include The Pocantico Center at the Rockefeller estate and Marfa, Texas.

For more info about Baxter St., click here.

The feature debut of both its directors and its star, Willem Dafoe, THE LOVELESS takes place in the late 1950s, a time of generational conflict, of immense social change, of bold fashions and toe-tapping music. A motorcycle gang roars into a small southern town en route to the Daytona races, unnerving and angering the locals with their standoffish attitude and disrespect for social niceties. When one of their number, the charismatic Vance (Dafoe), hooks up with sportscar-driving Telena (Marin Kanter), he incurs the wrath of the girl’s father, setting the gang on a collision course with the rest of the town as simmering tensions boil over into violent retribution. Raw, angry and honest, THE LOVELESS evokes, with unflinching clarity, both an attitude and a bygone era, exploring the tensions between two very different Americas.

“Bigelow’s first feature immediately reveals her canny talent for simultaneously fulfilling and deconstructing popular film genres. Set in the 1950s and starring a young, pomaded Willem Dafoe in his screen debut as the charismatic leader of a leather-clad and immoral bike gang, THE LOVELESS deliberately uproots the genre’s traditional embrace of youthful rebellion by introducing a notably noir shading and sharp feminist perspective into its story of generational and gender conflict. Bigelow’s training in painting and experimental cinema informs the film’s (relatively) slow pace, meticulous framing, and sparse, deliberately iconic dialogue – not to mention the evocation of Kenneth Anger’s SCORPIO RISING in the camera’s close attention to the bikers’ gleaming chrome and leather.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Amid the fangs and crucifixes that began to proliferate in mid-1990s American cinema, Abel Ferrara turned to the genre for THE ADDICTION, a distinctly personal take on creatures of the night. Philosophy student Kathleen (Lili Taylor) is dragged into an alleyway on her way home from class by Casanova (Annabella Sciorra) and bitten on the neck. She quickly falls ill but realizes this isn’t any ordinary disease when she develops an aversion to daylight and a thirst for human blood. Having made a big-budget foray into science fiction two years earlier with BODY SNATCHERS, Ferrara’s approach to the vampire movie is in a lower key. Shot on the streets of New York, like so many of his major works, and beautifully filmed in black and white, THE ADDICTION sees the filmmaker working on his own terms and at his very best: raw, shocking, intense, intelligent, and masterful.

“A black-and-white, Lower Manhattan-set, revisionist vampire saga, Abel Ferrara’s rap-scored, sumptuously shot, sin-obsessed opus establishes an acute, at times lacerating, tension between visual pleasure and narrative scuzz. The movie ponders the mystery of existence by reveling in splatterific materialism – noisy ERs and bloody bandages, the messy minutiae of urban vampirism.” –J. Hoberman, THE VILLAGE VOICE

“A quivering nexus of AIDS allegory, identity crisis, historical unease, and socio-economic panic.” –SLANT MAGAZINE

PLEASE NOTE: THE ADDICTION will screen on DCP Mon-Thurs, and on 35mm Fri-Sun!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Baxter St is proud to present Balloons Umbrellas & Snow, a solo show of lens-based work by the New York-based artist Matthew Placek. Taking place concurrently at Baxter St’s gallery at 126 Baxter Street and at Anthology Film Archives, this exhibition draws from a growing archive of 35mm film photographs taken by Placek over the past three decades. Balloons Umbrellas & Snow consists of a selection of photographs from his archive installed at Baxter St, and the first public presentation of Placek’s ongoing eponymous video work on view at Anthology Film Archives. Conceived to be experienced in tandem, the multi-site exhibition continues Placek’s ongoing exploration of memory as well his commitment to capturing presence, in particular the places and people in his community and the relationships between them across time.

The exhibition will be on view both at Baxter St. (126 Baxter Street, NYC) and at Anthology Film Archives, where it will be viewable through October 15, from noon to 5pm, Tuesday through Saturday (with extended hours on September 7 and September 15 until 8pm).

Balloons Umbrellas & Snow is presented by Baxter St. at CCNY and made possible with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

ABOUT MATTHEW PLACEK
Born in Ohio, Matthew Placek relocated to New York City in 1997 to pursue his interests in photography, video, and installation. His commitment to capturing presence, whether as a sense of place, the passage of time, and/or the relationships between people, has led to his multimedia output. Placek’s practice is durational and also engaged with the archive. Of primary concern to Placek is negotiating uninterrupted concentration from both his viewers and subjects, which he does through expanding the formal and conceptual notions of portraiture. As our attention spans diminish due to the spatio-temporal dislocations of our era, the frenzied use of cell phones and social media, he aims to cultivate a moment with the sitter that lasts longer than a glance and can generate immersive and resonant experiences.

Placek has collaborated with notable contemporary artists such as Marina Abramovic, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Vanessa Beecroft, Richard Prince, Brice Marden, Cindy Sherman, James Ivory, and Yoko Ono. His individual and collaborative work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Kitchen, Deitch Projects, Mary Boone Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma, the Sundance Film Festival’s “New Frontier,” The Toronto International Film Festival, The Stockholm International Film Festival, The National Young Arts Foundation and the National Monument Fort Jay at Governors Island. He has been awarded grants from The National Young Arts Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. His residencies include The Pocantico Center at the Rockefeller estate and Marfa, Texas.

For more info about Baxter St., click here.

Flaherty’s pioneering ethnographic film depicts the struggle for survival of Inuit hunter Nanook and his family. Though rife with staged scenes, anachronisms, and an indulgence in the myth of the “noble savage” (Nanook was in fact an Inuit man named Allakariallak, who hunted not with harpoons and spears but with a rifle), NANOOK OF THE NORTH is a work of great lyricism, simplicity of design, and genuine affection for its protagonists, and its force is undiminished almost 100 years after it was made.

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The feature debut of both its directors and its star, Willem Dafoe, THE LOVELESS takes place in the late 1950s, a time of generational conflict, of immense social change, of bold fashions and toe-tapping music. A motorcycle gang roars into a small southern town en route to the Daytona races, unnerving and angering the locals with their standoffish attitude and disrespect for social niceties. When one of their number, the charismatic Vance (Dafoe), hooks up with sportscar-driving Telena (Marin Kanter), he incurs the wrath of the girl’s father, setting the gang on a collision course with the rest of the town as simmering tensions boil over into violent retribution. Raw, angry and honest, THE LOVELESS evokes, with unflinching clarity, both an attitude and a bygone era, exploring the tensions between two very different Americas.

“Bigelow’s first feature immediately reveals her canny talent for simultaneously fulfilling and deconstructing popular film genres. Set in the 1950s and starring a young, pomaded Willem Dafoe in his screen debut as the charismatic leader of a leather-clad and immoral bike gang, THE LOVELESS deliberately uproots the genre’s traditional embrace of youthful rebellion by introducing a notably noir shading and sharp feminist perspective into its story of generational and gender conflict. Bigelow’s training in painting and experimental cinema informs the film’s (relatively) slow pace, meticulous framing, and sparse, deliberately iconic dialogue – not to mention the evocation of Kenneth Anger’s SCORPIO RISING in the camera’s close attention to the bikers’ gleaming chrome and leather.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Flaherty’s third major film portrays the lives of a family of fisher folk on the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway, Ireland. Flaherty selected the location and subjects because of their isolation as the westernmost outpost of European civilization. In addition, the daily struggle between the islanders and the sea perfectly suited his interests and concerns. The scenes at sea are breathtaking.

“His passionate devotion to the portrayal of human gesture and of a man’s fight for his family makes the film an incomparable account of human dignity. Better than anyone, Flaherty knew how to show the true face of Man.” –Georges Sadoul

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Amid the fangs and crucifixes that began to proliferate in mid-1990s American cinema, Abel Ferrara turned to the genre for THE ADDICTION, a distinctly personal take on creatures of the night. Philosophy student Kathleen (Lili Taylor) is dragged into an alleyway on her way home from class by Casanova (Annabella Sciorra) and bitten on the neck. She quickly falls ill but realizes this isn’t any ordinary disease when she develops an aversion to daylight and a thirst for human blood. Having made a big-budget foray into science fiction two years earlier with BODY SNATCHERS, Ferrara’s approach to the vampire movie is in a lower key. Shot on the streets of New York, like so many of his major works, and beautifully filmed in black and white, THE ADDICTION sees the filmmaker working on his own terms and at his very best: raw, shocking, intense, intelligent, and masterful.

“A black-and-white, Lower Manhattan-set, revisionist vampire saga, Abel Ferrara’s rap-scored, sumptuously shot, sin-obsessed opus establishes an acute, at times lacerating, tension between visual pleasure and narrative scuzz. The movie ponders the mystery of existence by reveling in splatterific materialism – noisy ERs and bloody bandages, the messy minutiae of urban vampirism.” –J. Hoberman, THE VILLAGE VOICE

“A quivering nexus of AIDS allegory, identity crisis, historical unease, and socio-economic panic.” –SLANT MAGAZINE

PLEASE NOTE: THE ADDICTION will screen on DCP Mon-Thurs, and on 35mm Fri-Sun!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Baxter St is proud to present Balloons Umbrellas & Snow, a solo show of lens-based work by the New York-based artist Matthew Placek. Taking place concurrently at Baxter St’s gallery at 126 Baxter Street and at Anthology Film Archives, this exhibition draws from a growing archive of 35mm film photographs taken by Placek over the past three decades. Balloons Umbrellas & Snow consists of a selection of photographs from his archive installed at Baxter St, and the first public presentation of Placek’s ongoing eponymous video work on view at Anthology Film Archives. Conceived to be experienced in tandem, the multi-site exhibition continues Placek’s ongoing exploration of memory as well his commitment to capturing presence, in particular the places and people in his community and the relationships between them across time.

The exhibition will be on view both at Baxter St. (126 Baxter Street, NYC) and at Anthology Film Archives, where it will be viewable through October 15, from noon to 5pm, Tuesday through Saturday (with extended hours on September 7 and September 15 until 8pm).

Balloons Umbrellas & Snow is presented by Baxter St. at CCNY and made possible with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

ABOUT MATTHEW PLACEK
Born in Ohio, Matthew Placek relocated to New York City in 1997 to pursue his interests in photography, video, and installation. His commitment to capturing presence, whether as a sense of place, the passage of time, and/or the relationships between people, has led to his multimedia output. Placek’s practice is durational and also engaged with the archive. Of primary concern to Placek is negotiating uninterrupted concentration from both his viewers and subjects, which he does through expanding the formal and conceptual notions of portraiture. As our attention spans diminish due to the spatio-temporal dislocations of our era, the frenzied use of cell phones and social media, he aims to cultivate a moment with the sitter that lasts longer than a glance and can generate immersive and resonant experiences.

Placek has collaborated with notable contemporary artists such as Marina Abramovic, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Vanessa Beecroft, Richard Prince, Brice Marden, Cindy Sherman, James Ivory, and Yoko Ono. His individual and collaborative work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Kitchen, Deitch Projects, Mary Boone Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma, the Sundance Film Festival’s “New Frontier,” The Toronto International Film Festival, The Stockholm International Film Festival, The National Young Arts Foundation and the National Monument Fort Jay at Governors Island. He has been awarded grants from The National Young Arts Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. His residencies include The Pocantico Center at the Rockefeller estate and Marfa, Texas.

For more info about Baxter St., click here.

ACT OF FAITH / ACTO DE FE (1970, 17 min, Super-8mm-to-digital)
Shot in Los Angeles, while Ospina was attending the UCLA Film School, ACT OF FAITH is an adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s short story “Erostratus”, about a man on the verge of despair who decides to buy a gun and go out to kill at random.

SELF-PORTRAIT (ASLEEP) / AUTORRETRATO (DORMIDO) (1971, 4 min, Super-8mm-to-digital)
“We all know that Andy Warhol made a film lasting more than 5 hours of a man sleeping. After viewing it, I asked myself, ‘What would happen if I removed Warhol’s tedious passages?’ This is why I decided to film myself sleeping during 10 hours with an automatic shutter that took a frame every 10 seconds to make the only film directed by a sleeping man.” –Luis Ospina

LISTEN, LOOK! / OIGA, VEA! (1972, 28 min, 16mm-to-digital. Co-directed by Carlos Mayolo.)
A film about the consequences of the sixth Pan American Games on the city of Cali, seen from the point of view of those who could not afford to enter the stadiums.

THE BOMBING OF WASHINGTON / EL BOMBARDEO DE WASHINGTON (1972, 1 min, 16mm-to-digital)
By means of found footage and creative editing, the film creates the illusion that Washington has been bombed from the air.

ASUNCIÓN (1975, 17 min, 16mm-to-digital. Co-directed by Carlos Mayolo.)
In this joyful and impertinent short film, a housemaid takes revenge on her masters.

THE VAMPIRES OF POVERTY / AGARRANDO PUEBLO (1978, 29 min, 16mm-to-digital. Co-directed by Carlos Mayolo.)
“Made with Carlos Mayolo, THE VAMPIRES OF POVERTY is a classic and still provocative work exploring the role of film in social and political life. Following a film crew’s search for the most abject subject to exploit in their ‘militant’ film, the work is a landmark in the history of documentary film questioning the values and motivations of so-called ‘political’ filmmakers.” –TATE MODERN

“Deliberately detached from the accusatory militant left, Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo launch in 1978 what could be called their cinematic-political thesis: THE VAMPIRES OF POVERTY, an outrageous protest of national and international documentary models, which at the time – and even today – shamelessly exploited all kinds of third-world suffering (referred to by the directors as “poverty-porn”) and exported it to European television stations and festivals. Counter-informative from beginning to end and in every sense of the word, the film mixes staged and real scenes of a typical film crew commissioned by a German television channel to seek out
archetypical social horrors, trampling over the basic principles of professional ethics, the meaning of information and, naturally, sociological research.” –Isleni Cruz Carvajal, DOCUMENTARY IN LATIN AMERICA

Total running time: ca. 100 min.

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Amid the fangs and crucifixes that began to proliferate in mid-1990s American cinema, Abel Ferrara turned to the genre for THE ADDICTION, a distinctly personal take on creatures of the night. Philosophy student Kathleen (Lili Taylor) is dragged into an alleyway on her way home from class by Casanova (Annabella Sciorra) and bitten on the neck. She quickly falls ill but realizes this isn’t any ordinary disease when she develops an aversion to daylight and a thirst for human blood. Having made a big-budget foray into science fiction two years earlier with BODY SNATCHERS, Ferrara’s approach to the vampire movie is in a lower key. Shot on the streets of New York, like so many of his major works, and beautifully filmed in black and white, THE ADDICTION sees the filmmaker working on his own terms and at his very best: raw, shocking, intense, intelligent, and masterful.

“A black-and-white, Lower Manhattan-set, revisionist vampire saga, Abel Ferrara’s rap-scored, sumptuously shot, sin-obsessed opus establishes an acute, at times lacerating, tension between visual pleasure and narrative scuzz. The movie ponders the mystery of existence by reveling in splatterific materialism – noisy ERs and bloody bandages, the messy minutiae of urban vampirism.” –J. Hoberman, THE VILLAGE VOICE

“A quivering nexus of AIDS allegory, identity crisis, historical unease, and socio-economic panic.” –SLANT MAGAZINE

PLEASE NOTE: THE ADDICTION will screen on DCP Mon-Thurs, and on 35mm Fri-Sun!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

The feature debut of both its directors and its star, Willem Dafoe, THE LOVELESS takes place in the late 1950s, a time of generational conflict, of immense social change, of bold fashions and toe-tapping music. A motorcycle gang roars into a small southern town en route to the Daytona races, unnerving and angering the locals with their standoffish attitude and disrespect for social niceties. When one of their number, the charismatic Vance (Dafoe), hooks up with sportscar-driving Telena (Marin Kanter), he incurs the wrath of the girl’s father, setting the gang on a collision course with the rest of the town as simmering tensions boil over into violent retribution. Raw, angry and honest, THE LOVELESS evokes, with unflinching clarity, both an attitude and a bygone era, exploring the tensions between two very different Americas.

“Bigelow’s first feature immediately reveals her canny talent for simultaneously fulfilling and deconstructing popular film genres. Set in the 1950s and starring a young, pomaded Willem Dafoe in his screen debut as the charismatic leader of a leather-clad and immoral bike gang, THE LOVELESS deliberately uproots the genre’s traditional embrace of youthful rebellion by introducing a notably noir shading and sharp feminist perspective into its story of generational and gender conflict. Bigelow’s training in painting and experimental cinema informs the film’s (relatively) slow pace, meticulous framing, and sparse, deliberately iconic dialogue – not to mention the evocation of Kenneth Anger’s SCORPIO RISING in the camera’s close attention to the bikers’ gleaming chrome and leather.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

“A key work of what Carlos Mayolo described as ‘Gótico tropical’ (Tropical Gothic) cinema, PURE BLOOD marks a development in the work of the Grupo de Cali filmmakers following the suicide of Andrés Caicedo in 1977. Shifting from documentary works to experiment with narrative feature films, Ospina created a unique hybrid that mixes genre conventions with intellectual parody. PURE BLOOD is a biting satire on Colombian landowners, social divisions and the vampirism at the heart of capitalism in Latin America. Inspired by a story from Ospina’s youth, the film follows the ‘Monster of the Valley’, an urban legend of a figure who prayed on the bodies and blood of young men. The film centers on a bedridden sugar tycoon who communicates with the outside world by closed circuit TV and is kept alive by blood transfusions.” –TATE MODERN

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Baxter St is proud to present Balloons Umbrellas & Snow, a solo show of lens-based work by the New York-based artist Matthew Placek. Taking place concurrently at Baxter St’s gallery at 126 Baxter Street and at Anthology Film Archives, this exhibition draws from a growing archive of 35mm film photographs taken by Placek over the past three decades. Balloons Umbrellas & Snow consists of a selection of photographs from his archive installed at Baxter St, and the first public presentation of Placek’s ongoing eponymous video work on view at Anthology Film Archives. Conceived to be experienced in tandem, the multi-site exhibition continues Placek’s ongoing exploration of memory as well his commitment to capturing presence, in particular the places and people in his community and the relationships between them across time.

The exhibition will be on view both at Baxter St. (126 Baxter Street, NYC) and at Anthology Film Archives, where it will be viewable through October 15, from noon to 5pm, Tuesday through Saturday (with extended hours on September 7 and September 15 until 8pm).

Balloons Umbrellas & Snow is presented by Baxter St. at CCNY and made possible with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

ABOUT MATTHEW PLACEK
Born in Ohio, Matthew Placek relocated to New York City in 1997 to pursue his interests in photography, video, and installation. His commitment to capturing presence, whether as a sense of place, the passage of time, and/or the relationships between people, has led to his multimedia output. Placek’s practice is durational and also engaged with the archive. Of primary concern to Placek is negotiating uninterrupted concentration from both his viewers and subjects, which he does through expanding the formal and conceptual notions of portraiture. As our attention spans diminish due to the spatio-temporal dislocations of our era, the frenzied use of cell phones and social media, he aims to cultivate a moment with the sitter that lasts longer than a glance and can generate immersive and resonant experiences.

Placek has collaborated with notable contemporary artists such as Marina Abramovic, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Vanessa Beecroft, Richard Prince, Brice Marden, Cindy Sherman, James Ivory, and Yoko Ono. His individual and collaborative work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Kitchen, Deitch Projects, Mary Boone Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma, the Sundance Film Festival’s “New Frontier,” The Toronto International Film Festival, The Stockholm International Film Festival, The National Young Arts Foundation and the National Monument Fort Jay at Governors Island. He has been awarded grants from The National Young Arts Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. His residencies include The Pocantico Center at the Rockefeller estate and Marfa, Texas.

For more info about Baxter St., click here.

(ANDRÉS CAICEDO: UNOS POCOS BUENOS AMIGOS)

“Using the unfinished film, ANGELITA Y MIGUEL ÁNGEL, by Andrés Caicedo and Carlos Mayolo, as a structuring device, friends of prolific film critic and writer Andrés Caicedo, an unforgettable figure of the group of Cali in the 1970s who left an incredible amount of texts, reflect upon his life, his work, and his suicide at the age of 25, testify to his influence in the cultural life of Colombia, and remember his strong and touching personality.” –DOCLISBOA

Preceded by:
Jorge Nieto & Luis Ospina
IN SEARCH OF “MARIA” / EN BUSCA DE “MARIA”
1985, 16 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Spanish with English subtitles. Karen Lamassonne: Art Direction. Courtesy of the Cinemateca de Bogota.
“Based on the only four surviving shots of the first Colombian silent film, MARÍA (1921), by directors Máximo Calvo (Colombia) and Alfredo del Diestro (Spain), IN SEARCH OF ‘MARIA’ combines historical research, interviews, and scenic reconstruction to rescue the memory of a lost film.” –DOCLISBOA

Total running time: ca. 100 min.

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Amid the fangs and crucifixes that began to proliferate in mid-1990s American cinema, Abel Ferrara turned to the genre for THE ADDICTION, a distinctly personal take on creatures of the night. Philosophy student Kathleen (Lili Taylor) is dragged into an alleyway on her way home from class by Casanova (Annabella Sciorra) and bitten on the neck. She quickly falls ill but realizes this isn’t any ordinary disease when she develops an aversion to daylight and a thirst for human blood. Having made a big-budget foray into science fiction two years earlier with BODY SNATCHERS, Ferrara’s approach to the vampire movie is in a lower key. Shot on the streets of New York, like so many of his major works, and beautifully filmed in black and white, THE ADDICTION sees the filmmaker working on his own terms and at his very best: raw, shocking, intense, intelligent, and masterful.

“A black-and-white, Lower Manhattan-set, revisionist vampire saga, Abel Ferrara’s rap-scored, sumptuously shot, sin-obsessed opus establishes an acute, at times lacerating, tension between visual pleasure and narrative scuzz. The movie ponders the mystery of existence by reveling in splatterific materialism – noisy ERs and bloody bandages, the messy minutiae of urban vampirism.” –J. Hoberman, THE VILLAGE VOICE

“A quivering nexus of AIDS allegory, identity crisis, historical unease, and socio-economic panic.” –SLANT MAGAZINE

PLEASE NOTE: THE ADDICTION will screen on DCP Mon-Thurs, and on 35mm Fri-Sun!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

“A key work of what Carlos Mayolo described as ‘Gótico tropical’ (Tropical Gothic) cinema, PURE BLOOD marks a development in the work of the Grupo de Cali filmmakers following the suicide of Andrés Caicedo in 1977. Shifting from documentary works to experiment with narrative feature films, Ospina created a unique hybrid that mixes genre conventions with intellectual parody. PURE BLOOD is a biting satire on Colombian landowners, social divisions and the vampirism at the heart of capitalism in Latin America. Inspired by a story from Ospina’s youth, the film follows the ‘Monster of the Valley’, an urban legend of a figure who prayed on the bodies and blood of young men. The film centers on a bedridden sugar tycoon who communicates with the outside world by closed circuit TV and is kept alive by blood transfusions.” –TATE MODERN

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

The feature debut of both its directors and its star, Willem Dafoe, THE LOVELESS takes place in the late 1950s, a time of generational conflict, of immense social change, of bold fashions and toe-tapping music. A motorcycle gang roars into a small southern town en route to the Daytona races, unnerving and angering the locals with their standoffish attitude and disrespect for social niceties. When one of their number, the charismatic Vance (Dafoe), hooks up with sportscar-driving Telena (Marin Kanter), he incurs the wrath of the girl’s father, setting the gang on a collision course with the rest of the town as simmering tensions boil over into violent retribution. Raw, angry and honest, THE LOVELESS evokes, with unflinching clarity, both an attitude and a bygone era, exploring the tensions between two very different Americas.

“Bigelow’s first feature immediately reveals her canny talent for simultaneously fulfilling and deconstructing popular film genres. Set in the 1950s and starring a young, pomaded Willem Dafoe in his screen debut as the charismatic leader of a leather-clad and immoral bike gang, THE LOVELESS deliberately uproots the genre’s traditional embrace of youthful rebellion by introducing a notably noir shading and sharp feminist perspective into its story of generational and gender conflict. Bigelow’s training in painting and experimental cinema informs the film’s (relatively) slow pace, meticulous framing, and sparse, deliberately iconic dialogue – not to mention the evocation of Kenneth Anger’s SCORPIO RISING in the camera’s close attention to the bikers’ gleaming chrome and leather.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Working for the popular education arm of the GDR’s state film production, DEFA, Peter Ulbrich traveled to Vietnam in 1957 and made several optimistic short films, among them WHERE ONCE SAT KINGS and THE FISHERMEN FROM VINH-MOC, both of which depict a country recently liberated from foreign domination and now on a steady path to socialism. When on his second trip to Vietnam in 1966 he witnessed the havoc wreaked by U.S. bombers, Ulbrich made the compilation film THINK OF MY COUNTRY, a scorching indictment of the U.S. intervention identifying the destruction of a socialist society as its driving motive.

Accompanying footage from various unidentified sources, the voice-over presents a Vietnamese village mayor as the film’s narrator, introducing us to the harrowing effects of the U.S. air raids as well as the skillful (and successful) resistance of the Vietnamese. Presenting captured U.S. pilots as anti-heroes, his account culminates in the question: “Who made them into what they have become?”

Alongside Ulbrich’s work, we’ll be screening 100, an atypically conceptual film by DEFA documentarists Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann, “two of the most clever political propagandists of our time” (Amos Vogel, writing in 1974). 100 is a sobering illustration of the legend that American soldiers who used the term “Vietnamese,” instead of referring to their opponents as “animals,” were forced to do one hundred push-ups.

Peter Ulbrich WHERE ONCE SAT KINGS / WO EINST KÖNIGE SASSEN (1957, 9 min, 35mm. In German with projected English subtitles. Archival print courtesy of the Bundesarchiv.)
Peter Ulbrich THE FISHERMEN FROM VINH-MOC / DIE FISCHER VON VINH-MOC (1958, 17 min, 35mm. In German with projected English subtitles. Archival print courtesy of the Bundesarchiv.)
Peter Ulbrich THINK OF MY COUNTRY / DENKT AN MEIN LAND (1966, 19 min, 35mm, b&w. In German with projected English subtitles. Archival print courtesy of the Deutsche Kinemathek.)
Walter Heynowski & Gerhard Scheumann 100 (1971, 6 min, 35mm. No dialogue. Archival print courtesy of the Deutsche Kinemathek.)

Total running time: ca. 55 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Amid the fangs and crucifixes that began to proliferate in mid-1990s American cinema, Abel Ferrara turned to the genre for THE ADDICTION, a distinctly personal take on creatures of the night. Philosophy student Kathleen (Lili Taylor) is dragged into an alleyway on her way home from class by Casanova (Annabella Sciorra) and bitten on the neck. She quickly falls ill but realizes this isn’t any ordinary disease when she develops an aversion to daylight and a thirst for human blood. Having made a big-budget foray into science fiction two years earlier with BODY SNATCHERS, Ferrara’s approach to the vampire movie is in a lower key. Shot on the streets of New York, like so many of his major works, and beautifully filmed in black and white, THE ADDICTION sees the filmmaker working on his own terms and at his very best: raw, shocking, intense, intelligent, and masterful.

“A black-and-white, Lower Manhattan-set, revisionist vampire saga, Abel Ferrara’s rap-scored, sumptuously shot, sin-obsessed opus establishes an acute, at times lacerating, tension between visual pleasure and narrative scuzz. The movie ponders the mystery of existence by reveling in splatterific materialism – noisy ERs and bloody bandages, the messy minutiae of urban vampirism.” –J. Hoberman, THE VILLAGE VOICE

“A quivering nexus of AIDS allegory, identity crisis, historical unease, and socio-economic panic.” –SLANT MAGAZINE

PLEASE NOTE: THE ADDICTION will screen on DCP Mon-Thurs, and on 35mm Fri-Sun!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Emile de Antonio
IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG
1968, 104 min, 35mm, b&w
“IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG is an assemblage of news footage and interviews that presents an overview of the Vietnam War; Ho Chi Minh is the hero, and the theme is not, as might be expected, the tragic destruction of Vietnam but the triumph of Vietnam over the American colossus.” –Pauline Kael, THE NEW YORKER

“IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG was/is an organizing weapon, a collage/history of the people’s struggle in Vietnam. That collage was made with the help of the DRV [Democratic Republic of Vietnam], the NLF [National Liberation Front], French Marxists, film and television friends of the Czech Democratic Republic, the German Democratic Republic, U.S. deserters, antiwar veterans, and the antiwar movement itself. It was made when the Movement was young, large, high on struggle and emotion, and without knowledge of what had happened in Vietnam, when it happened and why.” –Emile de Antonio, responding in 1983 to Bill Nichols’s description of IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG as a typical example of a “left-liberal film”

When Emile de Antonio set out to collect archival footage for IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG, his already existing relations to East German film institutions became instrumental. The prestigious Documentary Film Festival in Leipzig – where de Antonio had presented his earlier films, POINT OF ORDER (1964) and RUSH TO JUDGMENT (1966), and where IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG would pick up a Silver Dove Award in 1968 – helped him contact North Vietnamese representatives, and the East German State Film Archive invited him to search their collection for useful footage. It was probably during his archive visit in East Berlin in 1967 that de Antonio met Peter Ulbrich. Their starkly different cinematic styles and situations in life notwithstanding, the two filmmakers maintained a regular correspondence that lasted until a few months before de Antonio passed away in 1989. In one of his last letters to Ulbrich, de Antonio proposed co-directing a film on Hansjoachim Tiedge, a famous West German double agent seeking refuge in the GDR in 1985.

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The feature debut of both its directors and its star, Willem Dafoe, THE LOVELESS takes place in the late 1950s, a time of generational conflict, of immense social change, of bold fashions and toe-tapping music. A motorcycle gang roars into a small southern town en route to the Daytona races, unnerving and angering the locals with their standoffish attitude and disrespect for social niceties. When one of their number, the charismatic Vance (Dafoe), hooks up with sportscar-driving Telena (Marin Kanter), he incurs the wrath of the girl’s father, setting the gang on a collision course with the rest of the town as simmering tensions boil over into violent retribution. Raw, angry and honest, THE LOVELESS evokes, with unflinching clarity, both an attitude and a bygone era, exploring the tensions between two very different Americas.

“Bigelow’s first feature immediately reveals her canny talent for simultaneously fulfilling and deconstructing popular film genres. Set in the 1950s and starring a young, pomaded Willem Dafoe in his screen debut as the charismatic leader of a leather-clad and immoral bike gang, THE LOVELESS deliberately uproots the genre’s traditional embrace of youthful rebellion by introducing a notably noir shading and sharp feminist perspective into its story of generational and gender conflict. Bigelow’s training in painting and experimental cinema informs the film’s (relatively) slow pace, meticulous framing, and sparse, deliberately iconic dialogue – not to mention the evocation of Kenneth Anger’s SCORPIO RISING in the camera’s close attention to the bikers’ gleaming chrome and leather.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE

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In a personal practice of honesty around the perspective of those who are framing our experiences, asinnajaq begins this month-long screening series with an introduction. This program includes films by asinnajaq as well as her father, Jobie Weetaluktuk.

Jobie Weetaluktuk INUKSHOP (2009, 2 min, digital)
asinnajaq THREE THOUSAND (2017, 14 min, digital)
Jobie Weetaluktuk UMIAQ SKIN BOAT (2008, 31 min, Betacam-to-digital)

Total running time: ca. 50 min.

With Jobie Weetaluktuk in person. Additional guests TBA. Moderated by asinnajaq, filmmaker and curator.

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Baxter St is proud to present Balloons Umbrellas & Snow, a solo show of lens-based work by the New York-based artist Matthew Placek. Taking place concurrently at Baxter St’s gallery at 126 Baxter Street and at Anthology Film Archives, this exhibition draws from a growing archive of 35mm film photographs taken by Placek over the past three decades. Balloons Umbrellas & Snow consists of a selection of photographs from his archive installed at Baxter St, and the first public presentation of Placek’s ongoing eponymous video work on view at Anthology Film Archives. Conceived to be experienced in tandem, the multi-site exhibition continues Placek’s ongoing exploration of memory as well his commitment to capturing presence, in particular the places and people in his community and the relationships between them across time.

The exhibition will be on view both at Baxter St. (126 Baxter Street, NYC) and at Anthology Film Archives, where it will be viewable through October 15, from noon to 5pm, Tuesday through Saturday (with extended hours on September 7 and September 15 until 8pm).

Balloons Umbrellas & Snow is presented by Baxter St. at CCNY and made possible with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

ABOUT MATTHEW PLACEK
Born in Ohio, Matthew Placek relocated to New York City in 1997 to pursue his interests in photography, video, and installation. His commitment to capturing presence, whether as a sense of place, the passage of time, and/or the relationships between people, has led to his multimedia output. Placek’s practice is durational and also engaged with the archive. Of primary concern to Placek is negotiating uninterrupted concentration from both his viewers and subjects, which he does through expanding the formal and conceptual notions of portraiture. As our attention spans diminish due to the spatio-temporal dislocations of our era, the frenzied use of cell phones and social media, he aims to cultivate a moment with the sitter that lasts longer than a glance and can generate immersive and resonant experiences.

Placek has collaborated with notable contemporary artists such as Marina Abramovic, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Vanessa Beecroft, Richard Prince, Brice Marden, Cindy Sherman, James Ivory, and Yoko Ono. His individual and collaborative work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Kitchen, Deitch Projects, Mary Boone Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma, the Sundance Film Festival’s “New Frontier,” The Toronto International Film Festival, The Stockholm International Film Festival, The National Young Arts Foundation and the National Monument Fort Jay at Governors Island. He has been awarded grants from The National Young Arts Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. His residencies include The Pocantico Center at the Rockefeller estate and Marfa, Texas.

For more info about Baxter St., click here.

(ADIÓS A CALI)

“This two-chapter documentary series made for regional TV is made up of a crucial moment in Cali and Ospina’s relationship with his hometown: a crossroads where the rupture with the big city of his youth becomes inevitable and painful. The first part, “Cali plano X plano” (“Cali Frame by Frame”), is a counterpoint of image and sound on the destruction of architectural heritage. The second, “Adiós a Cali / ¡Ah, diosa Kali!” (“Goodbye to Cali / Oh, Goddess Kali”), brings together opposing testimonies of local artists who have discussed the topic of the city and the demolishers that have been striving to destroy it.” –CARTAGENA DE INDIAS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (FICCI)

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

REVIVAL ENGAGEMENT!

(KHRUSTALYOV, MASHINU!)

Titled after the apocryphal exclamation of Soviet security chief Lavrentiy Beria as he rushed to Stalin’s deathbed, this blackly funny, deliriously immersive satire distills the anticipation and anxiety in the Moscow air, as the Soviet despot lay dying. In the late winter of 1953, the lives of nearly half the planet are in Stalin’s hands. A military surgeon, General Yuri Georgievich Klensky, finds himself a target of the “Doctors’ Plot”: the anti-Semitic conspiracy accusing Jewish doctors in Moscow of planning to assassinate the Soviet elite. Pursued, abused, and marked for the gulags, Yuri is chased and dragged through a Stalinist Soviet nightmare. His desperate, jolting journey encapsulates the madness of the era. Directed by Aleksei German (HARD TO BE A GOD), KHRUSTALYOV, MY CAR! proved wildly provocative when it was screened at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, despite being championed as the best film of the festival by that year’s jury president, Martin Scorsese.

​​“One of the most disturbing Russian films of all time, KHRUSTALYOV, MY CAR! provides the audience with a firsthand experience of the madness, paranoia and absurdity that pervaded Moscow during the final days of Stalin’s regime. Seven years in the making, Aleksei German’s angry masterpiece is an extraordinary example of cinematic modernism and a visceral interrogation of the calamity of the Stalinist era. [...] Loosely adapted by German and his wife Svetlana Karmalita from the dissident poet Joseph Brodsky’s story ‘In a Room and a Half’, KHRUSTALYOV is partly founded in history but largely based on the filmmaker’s memory of growing up. The plot is not difficult to follow, but the meaning and significance is overwhelming and elusive due to the film’s fragmentary visual logic and maddening detail, incongruous connections and hysterical tone. The viewer is purposefully disorientated while following fragments and dead-ends at a dizzying speed and through mumbled snatches of dialogue. As if in a nightmare, there is no clear sense of what is going on; whose perspective we are viewing the action from and how it all fits together.” –Greg Dolgopolov, SENSES OF CINEMA

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AT YOUR FEET / AL PIE (1991, 26 min, digital)
A film about shoeshiners in the streets of Cali. A pure piece of direct cinema in the first installment of the crafts trilogy.

AT YOUR HEAD / AL PELO (1991, 26 min, digital)
Hairdressers in Cali discuss life, work, dreams, beauty, fashion, and homosexuality. The filmmaker is having a haircut too. Second installment of the crafts trilogy.

AT YOUR SERVICE / A LA CARRERA (1991, 26 min, digital)
The taxi drivers of Cali, both those working the day shift and those working the night shift, talk about work, customers, and violence, revealing their vision of the city, real or fantasized. Third installment of the crafts trilogy.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Baxter St is proud to present Balloons Umbrellas & Snow, a solo show of lens-based work by the New York-based artist Matthew Placek. Taking place concurrently at Baxter St’s gallery at 126 Baxter Street and at Anthology Film Archives, this exhibition draws from a growing archive of 35mm film photographs taken by Placek over the past three decades. Balloons Umbrellas & Snow consists of a selection of photographs from his archive installed at Baxter St, and the first public presentation of Placek’s ongoing eponymous video work on view at Anthology Film Archives. Conceived to be experienced in tandem, the multi-site exhibition continues Placek’s ongoing exploration of memory as well his commitment to capturing presence, in particular the places and people in his community and the relationships between them across time.

The exhibition will be on view both at Baxter St. (126 Baxter Street, NYC) and at Anthology Film Archives, where it will be viewable through October 15, from noon to 5pm, Tuesday through Saturday (with extended hours on September 7 and September 15 until 8pm).

Balloons Umbrellas & Snow is presented by Baxter St. at CCNY and made possible with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

ABOUT MATTHEW PLACEK
Born in Ohio, Matthew Placek relocated to New York City in 1997 to pursue his interests in photography, video, and installation. His commitment to capturing presence, whether as a sense of place, the passage of time, and/or the relationships between people, has led to his multimedia output. Placek’s practice is durational and also engaged with the archive. Of primary concern to Placek is negotiating uninterrupted concentration from both his viewers and subjects, which he does through expanding the formal and conceptual notions of portraiture. As our attention spans diminish due to the spatio-temporal dislocations of our era, the frenzied use of cell phones and social media, he aims to cultivate a moment with the sitter that lasts longer than a glance and can generate immersive and resonant experiences.

Placek has collaborated with notable contemporary artists such as Marina Abramovic, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Vanessa Beecroft, Richard Prince, Brice Marden, Cindy Sherman, James Ivory, and Yoko Ono. His individual and collaborative work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Kitchen, Deitch Projects, Mary Boone Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma, the Sundance Film Festival’s “New Frontier,” The Toronto International Film Festival, The Stockholm International Film Festival, The National Young Arts Foundation and the National Monument Fort Jay at Governors Island. He has been awarded grants from The National Young Arts Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. His residencies include The Pocantico Center at the Rockefeller estate and Marfa, Texas.

For more info about Baxter St., click here.

(NUESTRA PELÍCULA)

Before his imminent death from AIDS, Colombian artist Lorenzo Jaramillo looks back over his life through the prism of the five senses. Like Wim Wenders in LIGHTNING OVER WATER, Ospina films his friend while speaking with passion about painting, cinema, and many other topics. OUR FILM is a moving portrait of a brilliant mind.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

REVIVAL ENGAGEMENT!

(KHRUSTALYOV, MASHINU!)

Titled after the apocryphal exclamation of Soviet security chief Lavrentiy Beria as he rushed to Stalin’s deathbed, this blackly funny, deliriously immersive satire distills the anticipation and anxiety in the Moscow air, as the Soviet despot lay dying. In the late winter of 1953, the lives of nearly half the planet are in Stalin’s hands. A military surgeon, General Yuri Georgievich Klensky, finds himself a target of the “Doctors’ Plot”: the anti-Semitic conspiracy accusing Jewish doctors in Moscow of planning to assassinate the Soviet elite. Pursued, abused, and marked for the gulags, Yuri is chased and dragged through a Stalinist Soviet nightmare. His desperate, jolting journey encapsulates the madness of the era. Directed by Aleksei German (HARD TO BE A GOD), KHRUSTALYOV, MY CAR! proved wildly provocative when it was screened at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, despite being championed as the best film of the festival by that year’s jury president, Martin Scorsese.

​​“One of the most disturbing Russian films of all time, KHRUSTALYOV, MY CAR! provides the audience with a firsthand experience of the madness, paranoia and absurdity that pervaded Moscow during the final days of Stalin’s regime. Seven years in the making, Aleksei German’s angry masterpiece is an extraordinary example of cinematic modernism and a visceral interrogation of the calamity of the Stalinist era. [...] Loosely adapted by German and his wife Svetlana Karmalita from the dissident poet Joseph Brodsky’s story ‘In a Room and a Half’, KHRUSTALYOV is partly founded in history but largely based on the filmmaker’s memory of growing up. The plot is not difficult to follow, but the meaning and significance is overwhelming and elusive due to the film’s fragmentary visual logic and maddening detail, incongruous connections and hysterical tone. The viewer is purposefully disorientated while following fragments and dead-ends at a dizzying speed and through mumbled snatches of dialogue. As if in a nightmare, there is no clear sense of what is going on; whose perspective we are viewing the action from and how it all fits together.” –Greg Dolgopolov, SENSES OF CINEMA

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(LA DESAZÓN SUPREMA: RETRATO INCESANTE DE FERNANDO VALLEJO)

Freely expressing his loves and hates, controversial Colombian writer Fernando Vallejo (living in Mexico) breaks with an ingrained literary tradition: that of the omniscient writer who sees and knows everything. The film covers not only his literary output but also his many other interests: cinema, music, science, and politics. Made with the full support and participation of the author, it provides a portrait of one of the finest of Spanish-language writers.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Baxter St is proud to present Balloons Umbrellas & Snow, a solo show of lens-based work by the New York-based artist Matthew Placek. Taking place concurrently at Baxter St’s gallery at 126 Baxter Street and at Anthology Film Archives, this exhibition draws from a growing archive of 35mm film photographs taken by Placek over the past three decades. Balloons Umbrellas & Snow consists of a selection of photographs from his archive installed at Baxter St, and the first public presentation of Placek’s ongoing eponymous video work on view at Anthology Film Archives. Conceived to be experienced in tandem, the multi-site exhibition continues Placek’s ongoing exploration of memory as well his commitment to capturing presence, in particular the places and people in his community and the relationships between them across time.

The exhibition will be on view both at Baxter St. (126 Baxter Street, NYC) and at Anthology Film Archives, where it will be viewable through October 15, from noon to 5pm, Tuesday through Saturday (with extended hours on September 7 and September 15 until 8pm).

Balloons Umbrellas & Snow is presented by Baxter St. at CCNY and made possible with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

ABOUT MATTHEW PLACEK
Born in Ohio, Matthew Placek relocated to New York City in 1997 to pursue his interests in photography, video, and installation. His commitment to capturing presence, whether as a sense of place, the passage of time, and/or the relationships between people, has led to his multimedia output. Placek’s practice is durational and also engaged with the archive. Of primary concern to Placek is negotiating uninterrupted concentration from both his viewers and subjects, which he does through expanding the formal and conceptual notions of portraiture. As our attention spans diminish due to the spatio-temporal dislocations of our era, the frenzied use of cell phones and social media, he aims to cultivate a moment with the sitter that lasts longer than a glance and can generate immersive and resonant experiences.

Placek has collaborated with notable contemporary artists such as Marina Abramovic, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Vanessa Beecroft, Richard Prince, Brice Marden, Cindy Sherman, James Ivory, and Yoko Ono. His individual and collaborative work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Kitchen, Deitch Projects, Mary Boone Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma, the Sundance Film Festival’s “New Frontier,” The Toronto International Film Festival, The Stockholm International Film Festival, The National Young Arts Foundation and the National Monument Fort Jay at Governors Island. He has been awarded grants from The National Young Arts Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. His residencies include The Pocantico Center at the Rockefeller estate and Marfa, Texas.

For more info about Baxter St., click here.

(UN TIGRE DE PAPEL)

The life of Pedro Manrique Figueroa, a pioneer of collage in Colombia, is like an adventure novel that is both incomplete and contradictory. Taking his life and work as a pretext, this mockumentary takes the viewer on a journey through history from the year 1934 up until 1981, when the artist mysteriously disappeared from view. A PAPER TIGER is itself a collage, where art and politics rub shoulders, and where truth and lies are placed side by side.

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REVIVAL ENGAGEMENT!

(KHRUSTALYOV, MASHINU!)

Titled after the apocryphal exclamation of Soviet security chief Lavrentiy Beria as he rushed to Stalin’s deathbed, this blackly funny, deliriously immersive satire distills the anticipation and anxiety in the Moscow air, as the Soviet despot lay dying. In the late winter of 1953, the lives of nearly half the planet are in Stalin’s hands. A military surgeon, General Yuri Georgievich Klensky, finds himself a target of the “Doctors’ Plot”: the anti-Semitic conspiracy accusing Jewish doctors in Moscow of planning to assassinate the Soviet elite. Pursued, abused, and marked for the gulags, Yuri is chased and dragged through a Stalinist Soviet nightmare. His desperate, jolting journey encapsulates the madness of the era. Directed by Aleksei German (HARD TO BE A GOD), KHRUSTALYOV, MY CAR! proved wildly provocative when it was screened at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, despite being championed as the best film of the festival by that year’s jury president, Martin Scorsese.

​​“One of the most disturbing Russian films of all time, KHRUSTALYOV, MY CAR! provides the audience with a firsthand experience of the madness, paranoia and absurdity that pervaded Moscow during the final days of Stalin’s regime. Seven years in the making, Aleksei German’s angry masterpiece is an extraordinary example of cinematic modernism and a visceral interrogation of the calamity of the Stalinist era. [...] Loosely adapted by German and his wife Svetlana Karmalita from the dissident poet Joseph Brodsky’s story ‘In a Room and a Half’, KHRUSTALYOV is partly founded in history but largely based on the filmmaker’s memory of growing up. The plot is not difficult to follow, but the meaning and significance is overwhelming and elusive due to the film’s fragmentary visual logic and maddening detail, incongruous connections and hysterical tone. The viewer is purposefully disorientated while following fragments and dead-ends at a dizzying speed and through mumbled snatches of dialogue. As if in a nightmare, there is no clear sense of what is going on; whose perspective we are viewing the action from and how it all fits together.” –Greg Dolgopolov, SENSES OF CINEMA

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(ADIÓS A CALI)

“This two-chapter documentary series made for regional TV is made up of a crucial moment in Cali and Ospina’s relationship with his hometown: a crossroads where the rupture with the big city of his youth becomes inevitable and painful. The first part, “Cali plano X plano” (“Cali Frame by Frame”), is a counterpoint of image and sound on the destruction of architectural heritage. The second, “Adiós a Cali / ¡Ah, diosa Kali!” (“Goodbye to Cali / Oh, Goddess Kali”), brings together opposing testimonies of local artists who have discussed the topic of the city and the demolishers that have been striving to destroy it.” –CARTAGENA DE INDIAS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (FICCI)

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Baxter St is proud to present Balloons Umbrellas & Snow, a solo show of lens-based work by the New York-based artist Matthew Placek. Taking place concurrently at Baxter St’s gallery at 126 Baxter Street and at Anthology Film Archives, this exhibition draws from a growing archive of 35mm film photographs taken by Placek over the past three decades. Balloons Umbrellas & Snow consists of a selection of photographs from his archive installed at Baxter St, and the first public presentation of Placek’s ongoing eponymous video work on view at Anthology Film Archives. Conceived to be experienced in tandem, the multi-site exhibition continues Placek’s ongoing exploration of memory as well his commitment to capturing presence, in particular the places and people in his community and the relationships between them across time.

The exhibition will be on view both at Baxter St. (126 Baxter Street, NYC) and at Anthology Film Archives, where it will be viewable through October 15, from noon to 5pm, Tuesday through Saturday (with extended hours on September 7 and September 15 until 8pm).

Balloons Umbrellas & Snow is presented by Baxter St. at CCNY and made possible with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

ABOUT MATTHEW PLACEK
Born in Ohio, Matthew Placek relocated to New York City in 1997 to pursue his interests in photography, video, and installation. His commitment to capturing presence, whether as a sense of place, the passage of time, and/or the relationships between people, has led to his multimedia output. Placek’s practice is durational and also engaged with the archive. Of primary concern to Placek is negotiating uninterrupted concentration from both his viewers and subjects, which he does through expanding the formal and conceptual notions of portraiture. As our attention spans diminish due to the spatio-temporal dislocations of our era, the frenzied use of cell phones and social media, he aims to cultivate a moment with the sitter that lasts longer than a glance and can generate immersive and resonant experiences.

Placek has collaborated with notable contemporary artists such as Marina Abramovic, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Vanessa Beecroft, Richard Prince, Brice Marden, Cindy Sherman, James Ivory, and Yoko Ono. His individual and collaborative work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Kitchen, Deitch Projects, Mary Boone Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma, the Sundance Film Festival’s “New Frontier,” The Toronto International Film Festival, The Stockholm International Film Festival, The National Young Arts Foundation and the National Monument Fort Jay at Governors Island. He has been awarded grants from The National Young Arts Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. His residencies include The Pocantico Center at the Rockefeller estate and Marfa, Texas.

For more info about Baxter St., click here.

“A key work of what Carlos Mayolo described as ‘Gótico tropical’ (Tropical Gothic) cinema, PURE BLOOD marks a development in the work of the Grupo de Cali filmmakers following the suicide of Andrés Caicedo in 1977. Shifting from documentary works to experiment with narrative feature films, Ospina created a unique hybrid that mixes genre conventions with intellectual parody. PURE BLOOD is a biting satire on Colombian landowners, social divisions and the vampirism at the heart of capitalism in Latin America. Inspired by a story from Ospina’s youth, the film follows the ‘Monster of the Valley’, an urban legend of a figure who prayed on the bodies and blood of young men. The film centers on a bedridden sugar tycoon who communicates with the outside world by closed circuit TV and is kept alive by blood transfusions.” –TATE MODERN

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

REVIVAL ENGAGEMENT!

(KHRUSTALYOV, MASHINU!)

Titled after the apocryphal exclamation of Soviet security chief Lavrentiy Beria as he rushed to Stalin’s deathbed, this blackly funny, deliriously immersive satire distills the anticipation and anxiety in the Moscow air, as the Soviet despot lay dying. In the late winter of 1953, the lives of nearly half the planet are in Stalin’s hands. A military surgeon, General Yuri Georgievich Klensky, finds himself a target of the “Doctors’ Plot”: the anti-Semitic conspiracy accusing Jewish doctors in Moscow of planning to assassinate the Soviet elite. Pursued, abused, and marked for the gulags, Yuri is chased and dragged through a Stalinist Soviet nightmare. His desperate, jolting journey encapsulates the madness of the era. Directed by Aleksei German (HARD TO BE A GOD), KHRUSTALYOV, MY CAR! proved wildly provocative when it was screened at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, despite being championed as the best film of the festival by that year’s jury president, Martin Scorsese.

​​“One of the most disturbing Russian films of all time, KHRUSTALYOV, MY CAR! provides the audience with a firsthand experience of the madness, paranoia and absurdity that pervaded Moscow during the final days of Stalin’s regime. Seven years in the making, Aleksei German’s angry masterpiece is an extraordinary example of cinematic modernism and a visceral interrogation of the calamity of the Stalinist era. [...] Loosely adapted by German and his wife Svetlana Karmalita from the dissident poet Joseph Brodsky’s story ‘In a Room and a Half’, KHRUSTALYOV is partly founded in history but largely based on the filmmaker’s memory of growing up. The plot is not difficult to follow, but the meaning and significance is overwhelming and elusive due to the film’s fragmentary visual logic and maddening detail, incongruous connections and hysterical tone. The viewer is purposefully disorientated while following fragments and dead-ends at a dizzying speed and through mumbled snatches of dialogue. As if in a nightmare, there is no clear sense of what is going on; whose perspective we are viewing the action from and how it all fits together.” –Greg Dolgopolov, SENSES OF CINEMA

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(NUESTRA PELÍCULA)

Before his imminent death from AIDS, Colombian artist Lorenzo Jaramillo looks back over his life through the prism of the five senses. Like Wim Wenders in LIGHTNING OVER WATER, Ospina films his friend while speaking with passion about painting, cinema, and many other topics. OUR FILM is a moving portrait of a brilliant mind.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Baxter St is proud to present Balloons Umbrellas & Snow, a solo show of lens-based work by the New York-based artist Matthew Placek. Taking place concurrently at Baxter St’s gallery at 126 Baxter Street and at Anthology Film Archives, this exhibition draws from a growing archive of 35mm film photographs taken by Placek over the past three decades. Balloons Umbrellas & Snow consists of a selection of photographs from his archive installed at Baxter St, and the first public presentation of Placek’s ongoing eponymous video work on view at Anthology Film Archives. Conceived to be experienced in tandem, the multi-site exhibition continues Placek’s ongoing exploration of memory as well his commitment to capturing presence, in particular the places and people in his community and the relationships between them across time.

The exhibition will be on view both at Baxter St. (126 Baxter Street, NYC) and at Anthology Film Archives, where it will be viewable through October 15, from noon to 5pm, Tuesday through Saturday (with extended hours on September 7 and September 15 until 8pm).

Balloons Umbrellas & Snow is presented by Baxter St. at CCNY and made possible with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

ABOUT MATTHEW PLACEK
Born in Ohio, Matthew Placek relocated to New York City in 1997 to pursue his interests in photography, video, and installation. His commitment to capturing presence, whether as a sense of place, the passage of time, and/or the relationships between people, has led to his multimedia output. Placek’s practice is durational and also engaged with the archive. Of primary concern to Placek is negotiating uninterrupted concentration from both his viewers and subjects, which he does through expanding the formal and conceptual notions of portraiture. As our attention spans diminish due to the spatio-temporal dislocations of our era, the frenzied use of cell phones and social media, he aims to cultivate a moment with the sitter that lasts longer than a glance and can generate immersive and resonant experiences.

Placek has collaborated with notable contemporary artists such as Marina Abramovic, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Vanessa Beecroft, Richard Prince, Brice Marden, Cindy Sherman, James Ivory, and Yoko Ono. His individual and collaborative work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Kitchen, Deitch Projects, Mary Boone Gallery, Galleria Lia Rumma, the Sundance Film Festival’s “New Frontier,” The Toronto International Film Festival, The Stockholm International Film Festival, The National Young Arts Foundation and the National Monument Fort Jay at Governors Island. He has been awarded grants from The National Young Arts Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. His residencies include The Pocantico Center at the Rockefeller estate and Marfa, Texas.

For more info about Baxter St., click here.

In an era of gay big-screen romances, Cable-TV Christmas movies, and prestige Oscar-bait, there’s no shortage of affirming content for homocathected cineastes. Recent years have seen an establishment of a “gay film canon” that pops up on streaming services during Pride month. But there are hundreds of stranger, darker, and more exhilarating films that often fall through the cracks. “Narrow Rooms” is a series that celebrates these weird gay films, historically ignored or derided but shared like viruses amongst lovers of edgy, unvarnished queer cinema. Taking its name from James Purdy’s twisted gay S&M Southern Gothic novel, “Narrow Rooms” is a celebration of film faggotry, gay villains, horny homos, and heterodoxy. After 12 years co-curating the acclaimed artist-selected Queer/Art/Film series and programming for mainstream LGBT film festivals, filmmaker and writer Adam Baran finally gets to pick his own favorite flicks for adventurous audiences at Anthology Film Archives, an institution that has celebrated edgy, shocking, groundbreaking gay cinema for over 50 years.

Curated and presented by Adam Baran, “Narrow Rooms” will continue throughout the fall.

Special thanks to Gustavo Vinagre.

NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE!
Gustavo Vinagre
UNLEARNING TO SLEEP / DESAPRENDER A DORMIR
2021, 96 min, DCP. In Portuguese with English subtitles.
In a small apartment in São Paolo, Brazil, Flávio spends his days editing gay porn while his husband, José, tries to calculate when Earth will colonize Mars. Together, they’re a couple in crisis. Flávio’s lost his sex drive, because when you look at men fucking all day for work you don’t want to do it when the day is done. Frustrated and horny, José pursues a Grindr hookup with a green-haired jock who may be from outer space. As their relationship fractures, realities start to blur and Flávio starts hallucinating himself and José into the porn he’s editing. Throw in a dildo that displays scenes from some of cinema’s greatest classics, a YouTube hypnotist, and a lot of big butts and dongs, and you have a recipe for a wild gay night out at the movies! Directed by Gustavo Vinagre, who’s made some of the most exciting and sex-positive queer cinema in recent years (NOVA DUBAI, DIVINELY EVIL, GOD HAS AIDS) and starring Vinagre and his then-husband, filmmaker Caetano Gotardo (ALL THE DEAD ONES), UNLEARNING TO SLEEP is an explicit, meta sci-fi sex-comedy about capitalism, coupledom, and copulation. We’re lucky to have Vinagre in town (his most recent must-see film THREE TIDY TIGERS TIED A TIE TIGHTER is screening at this year’s NYFF) to introduce the film and participate in a Q&A after the screening.

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REVIVAL ENGAGEMENT!

(KHRUSTALYOV, MASHINU!)

Titled after the apocryphal exclamation of Soviet security chief Lavrentiy Beria as he rushed to Stalin’s deathbed, this blackly funny, deliriously immersive satire distills the anticipation and anxiety in the Moscow air, as the Soviet despot lay dying. In the late winter of 1953, the lives of nearly half the planet are in Stalin’s hands. A military surgeon, General Yuri Georgievich Klensky, finds himself a target of the “Doctors’ Plot”: the anti-Semitic conspiracy accusing Jewish doctors in Moscow of planning to assassinate the Soviet elite. Pursued, abused, and marked for the gulags, Yuri is chased and dragged through a Stalinist Soviet nightmare. His desperate, jolting journey encapsulates the madness of the era. Directed by Aleksei German (HARD TO BE A GOD), KHRUSTALYOV, MY CAR! proved wildly provocative when it was screened at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, despite being championed as the best film of the festival by that year’s jury president, Martin Scorsese.

​​“One of the most disturbing Russian films of all time, KHRUSTALYOV, MY CAR! provides the audience with a firsthand experience of the madness, paranoia and absurdity that pervaded Moscow during the final days of Stalin’s regime. Seven years in the making, Aleksei German’s angry masterpiece is an extraordinary example of cinematic modernism and a visceral interrogation of the calamity of the Stalinist era. [...] Loosely adapted by German and his wife Svetlana Karmalita from the dissident poet Joseph Brodsky’s story ‘In a Room and a Half’, KHRUSTALYOV is partly founded in history but largely based on the filmmaker’s memory of growing up. The plot is not difficult to follow, but the meaning and significance is overwhelming and elusive due to the film’s fragmentary visual logic and maddening detail, incongruous connections and hysterical tone. The viewer is purposefully disorientated while following fragments and dead-ends at a dizzying speed and through mumbled snatches of dialogue. As if in a nightmare, there is no clear sense of what is going on; whose perspective we are viewing the action from and how it all fits together.” –Greg Dolgopolov, SENSES OF CINEMA

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AT YOUR FEET / AL PIE (1991, 26 min, digital)
A film about shoeshiners in the streets of Cali. A pure piece of direct cinema in the first installment of the crafts trilogy.

AT YOUR HEAD / AL PELO (1991, 26 min, digital)
Hairdressers in Cali discuss life, work, dreams, beauty, fashion, and homosexuality. The filmmaker is having a haircut too. Second installment of the crafts trilogy.

AT YOUR SERVICE / A LA CARRERA (1991, 26 min, digital)
The taxi drivers of Cali, both those working the day shift and those working the night shift, talk about work, customers, and violence, revealing their vision of the city, real or fantasized. Third installment of the crafts trilogy.

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REVIVAL ENGAGEMENT!

(KHRUSTALYOV, MASHINU!)

Titled after the apocryphal exclamation of Soviet security chief Lavrentiy Beria as he rushed to Stalin’s deathbed, this blackly funny, deliriously immersive satire distills the anticipation and anxiety in the Moscow air, as the Soviet despot lay dying. In the late winter of 1953, the lives of nearly half the planet are in Stalin’s hands. A military surgeon, General Yuri Georgievich Klensky, finds himself a target of the “Doctors’ Plot”: the anti-Semitic conspiracy accusing Jewish doctors in Moscow of planning to assassinate the Soviet elite. Pursued, abused, and marked for the gulags, Yuri is chased and dragged through a Stalinist Soviet nightmare. His desperate, jolting journey encapsulates the madness of the era. Directed by Aleksei German (HARD TO BE A GOD), KHRUSTALYOV, MY CAR! proved wildly provocative when it was screened at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, despite being championed as the best film of the festival by that year’s jury president, Martin Scorsese.

​​“One of the most disturbing Russian films of all time, KHRUSTALYOV, MY CAR! provides the audience with a firsthand experience of the madness, paranoia and absurdity that pervaded Moscow during the final days of Stalin’s regime. Seven years in the making, Aleksei German’s angry masterpiece is an extraordinary example of cinematic modernism and a visceral interrogation of the calamity of the Stalinist era. [...] Loosely adapted by German and his wife Svetlana Karmalita from the dissident poet Joseph Brodsky’s story ‘In a Room and a Half’, KHRUSTALYOV is partly founded in history but largely based on the filmmaker’s memory of growing up. The plot is not difficult to follow, but the meaning and significance is overwhelming and elusive due to the film’s fragmentary visual logic and maddening detail, incongruous connections and hysterical tone. The viewer is purposefully disorientated while following fragments and dead-ends at a dizzying speed and through mumbled snatches of dialogue. As if in a nightmare, there is no clear sense of what is going on; whose perspective we are viewing the action from and how it all fits together.” –Greg Dolgopolov, SENSES OF CINEMA

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ACT OF FAITH / ACTO DE FE (1970, 17 min, Super-8mm-to-digital)
Shot in Los Angeles, while Ospina was attending the UCLA Film School, ACT OF FAITH is an adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s short story “Erostratus”, about a man on the verge of despair who decides to buy a gun and go out to kill at random.

SELF-PORTRAIT (ASLEEP) / AUTORRETRATO (DORMIDO) (1971, 4 min, Super-8mm-to-digital)
“We all know that Andy Warhol made a film lasting more than 5 hours of a man sleeping. After viewing it, I asked myself, ‘What would happen if I removed Warhol’s tedious passages?’ This is why I decided to film myself sleeping during 10 hours with an automatic shutter that took a frame every 10 seconds to make the only film directed by a sleeping man.” –Luis Ospina

LISTEN, LOOK! / OIGA, VEA! (1972, 28 min, 16mm-to-digital. Co-directed by Carlos Mayolo.)
A film about the consequences of the sixth Pan American Games on the city of Cali, seen from the point of view of those who could not afford to enter the stadiums.

THE BOMBING OF WASHINGTON / EL BOMBARDEO DE WASHINGTON (1972, 1 min, 16mm-to-digital)
By means of found footage and creative editing, the film creates the illusion that Washington has been bombed from the air.

ASUNCIÓN (1975, 17 min, 16mm-to-digital. Co-directed by Carlos Mayolo.)
In this joyful and impertinent short film, a housemaid takes revenge on her masters.

THE VAMPIRES OF POVERTY / AGARRANDO PUEBLO (1978, 29 min, 16mm-to-digital. Co-directed by Carlos Mayolo.)
“Made with Carlos Mayolo, THE VAMPIRES OF POVERTY is a classic and still provocative work exploring the role of film in social and political life. Following a film crew’s search for the most abject subject to exploit in their ‘militant’ film, the work is a landmark in the history of documentary film questioning the values and motivations of so-called ‘political’ filmmakers.” –TATE MODERN

“Deliberately detached from the accusatory militant left, Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo launch in 1978 what could be called their cinematic-political thesis: THE VAMPIRES OF POVERTY, an outrageous protest of national and international documentary models, which at the time – and even today – shamelessly exploited all kinds of third-world suffering (referred to by the directors as “poverty-porn”) and exported it to European television stations and festivals. Counter-informative from beginning to end and in every sense of the word, the film mixes staged and real scenes of a typical film crew commissioned by a German television channel to seek out
archetypical social horrors, trampling over the basic principles of professional ethics, the meaning of information and, naturally, sociological research.” –Isleni Cruz Carvajal, DOCUMENTARY IN LATIN AMERICA

Total running time: ca. 100 min.

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(ANDRÉS CAICEDO: UNOS POCOS BUENOS AMIGOS)

“Using the unfinished film, ANGELITA Y MIGUEL ÁNGEL, by Andrés Caicedo and Carlos Mayolo, as a structuring device, friends of prolific film critic and writer Andrés Caicedo, an unforgettable figure of the group of Cali in the 1970s who left an incredible amount of texts, reflect upon his life, his work, and his suicide at the age of 25, testify to his influence in the cultural life of Colombia, and remember his strong and touching personality.” –DOCLISBOA

Preceded by:
Jorge Nieto & Luis Ospina
IN SEARCH OF “MARIA” / EN BUSCA DE “MARIA”
1985, 16 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Spanish with English subtitles. Karen Lamassonne: Art Direction. Courtesy of the Cinemateca de Bogota.
“Based on the only four surviving shots of the first Colombian silent film, MARÍA (1921), by directors Máximo Calvo (Colombia) and Alfredo del Diestro (Spain), IN SEARCH OF ‘MARIA’ combines historical research, interviews, and scenic reconstruction to rescue the memory of a lost film.” –DOCLISBOA

Total running time: ca. 100 min.

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This program focuses on the personal. From the important and changing relationship to our surroundings – through our familial and ancestral relations – right past the epidermis and into the soul.

Siku Allooloo SPIRIT EMULSION (2022, 7 min, 16mm-to-digital)
Zulaa Urchuud ULAANBAATARIZATION (2017, 3 min, 16mm-to-digital)
Zulaa Urchuud NOMADTITUDE (2021, 7 mins, 16mm-to-digital)
Lada Suomenrinne YOU & ME (2018, 2 min, digital)
Lada Suomenrinne Я неба (2022, 17 min, digital)
Lindsay McIntyre SEEING HER (2020, 4 min, digital)

Total running time: ca. 45 min.

With select filmmakers in person. Additional guests TBA. Moderated by asinnajaq, filmmaker and curator.

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(LA DESAZÓN SUPREMA: RETRATO INCESANTE DE FERNANDO VALLEJO)

Freely expressing his loves and hates, controversial Colombian writer Fernando Vallejo (living in Mexico) breaks with an ingrained literary tradition: that of the omniscient writer who sees and knows everything. The film covers not only his literary output but also his many other interests: cinema, music, science, and politics. Made with the full support and participation of the author, it provides a portrait of one of the finest of Spanish-language writers.

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(UN TIGRE DE PAPEL)

The life of Pedro Manrique Figueroa, a pioneer of collage in Colombia, is like an adventure novel that is both incomplete and contradictory. Taking his life and work as a pretext, this mockumentary takes the viewer on a journey through history from the year 1934 up until 1981, when the artist mysteriously disappeared from view. A PAPER TIGER is itself a collage, where art and politics rub shoulders, and where truth and lies are placed side by side.

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PROMISES: THROUGH CONGRESS is a collaboration between visual artist Julie Mehretu, electronic music composer Sam Shepherd (Floating Points), and filmmaker Trevor Tweeten. This 46-minute film features Mehretu’s expansive painting Congress (2003) and the album Promises by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra, released by Luaka Bop. Five years in the making, Promises is a continuous piece of music presented in nine movements for saxophone, strings, keyboards and electronics, composed by Floating Points. It was one of the most celebrated albums of 2021.

While composing Promises, Shepherd would refer to and get lost within Mehretu’s painting: “I wanted to perpetuate this idea of being centered in the middle of the painting with its details swirling around you and this film is an extrapolation of that idea, of being in the middle of this perfect storm which only slowly reveals itself.” Once the album was completed, Shepherd understood how influential Mehretu’s paintings had become to him, particularly in his composition of the string section, performed by the LSO, in the center of the piece. The film, which references Michael Snow’s 1967 film WAVELENGTH, was designed to draw people deep into the painting, and allow them to get lost on their own. The film was shot by Tweeten in the winter of 2021 on location at The Broad during an exhibition that featured Mehretu’s work, including Congress.

Following last year’s premiere at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Mehretu said, “It is an immense honor to be in the orbit of this brilliant, mesmerizing and transformative album composed by Sam Shepard, with one of the living legends of music, Pharoah Sanders. It feels like both a balm and a calling of this precarious, vertiginous time.”

Aside from the premiere at The Whitney, the film has screened very rarely, at The Broad in Los Angeles and Barbican Center in London. Starting in November, it will be featured on the Criterion Channel as part of its “Free Jazz on Film” program.

These screenings are presented by Luaka Bop.

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Long before Hollywood films like CALL ME BY YOUR NAME and LOVE, SIMON became common fare at the multiplex, the only place gay men could see their lives and lusts depicted on screen with any degree of honesty was at their local all-male adult cinema. From coming-out stories to romances, horror to camp comedy, the hundreds of features churned out by the gay adult film industry throughout the 1960s-80s were a driving force behind the spread of gay culture and constitute a largely forgotten cinematic document of the era. These films were often shot in actual queer spaces, starred the people who frequented them, and were then screened in movie theaters that doubled as safe communal spaces for members of the community.

The video component of a multimedia project that also encompasses an acclaimed podcast and Instagram feed, Elizabeth Purchell’s ASK ANY BUDDY compiles fragments from over 125 feature films to create a kaleidoscopic, dreamlike snapshot of the era. An official selection of nearly two-dozen international film festivals including BFI Flare and Outfest, ASK ANY BUDDY is a funny, sexy portrait of urban gay life in the years following the Stonewall Riots – or at least how it looked in the movies.

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Iconic gay sex symbol Peter Berlin writes, directs, produces, edits, and stars in a film that one VECTOR reviewer succinctly described as being “Peter Berlin’s paean to Peter Berlin – or at least the character of Peter Berlin.” That character is Helmut, a German Adonis admired and desired by every person he comes in contact with – including members of the Cockettes – but who only loves the blind boy who can’t judge him for his looks and won’t see them fade with age.

One of the more unusual – and artistically ambitious – films to come out of San Francisco’s gay underground film scene, THAT BOY will be screened in a brand-new 2K restoration – taken from the long-lost original film elements – that will be making its world premiere in this series!

“Even if THAT BOY had not attained the level of artistic quality sought by its maker, Peter Berlin’s popularity would have carried it on to box-office success. The fact that he did not choose to trade on his popularity by making a ‘safe picture,’ but aimed instead for an even higher level of quality, is admirable. He is a man with an exciting moviemaking future.” –Harold Fairbanks, THE ADVOCATE

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Long before Hollywood films like CALL ME BY YOUR NAME and LOVE, SIMON became common fare at the multiplex, the only place gay men could see their lives and lusts depicted on screen with any degree of honesty was at their local all-male adult cinema. From coming-out stories to romances, horror to camp comedy, the hundreds of features churned out by the gay adult film industry throughout the 1960s-80s were a driving force behind the spread of gay culture and constitute a largely forgotten cinematic document of the era. These films were often shot in actual queer spaces, starred the people who frequented them, and were then screened in movie theaters that doubled as safe communal spaces for members of the community.

The video component of a multimedia project that also encompasses an acclaimed podcast and Instagram feed, Elizabeth Purchell’s ASK ANY BUDDY compiles fragments from over 125 feature films to create a kaleidoscopic, dreamlike snapshot of the era. An official selection of nearly two-dozen international film festivals including BFI Flare and Outfest, ASK ANY BUDDY is a funny, sexy portrait of urban gay life in the years following the Stonewall Riots – or at least how it looked in the movies.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(À LA RECHERCHE DE DOUGLAS)

Haunted by visions of his American ex-lover, a lonely Parisian is given the opportunity to search for him in New York City – but only until he has five orgasms – in this moody supernatural fantasy from acclaimed cinematographer François About. The last of the handful of all-male features made in the city by French film crews around the turn of the decade, HEAD TRIP finds the filmmaker making full use of New York’s endless sexual possibilities – including a scene shot inside the Statue of Liberty!

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A slacker whose only real ambition in life is to meet all the interesting people in New York does just that – or does he? – when he runs into a photographer in Central Park one day. An early release by the New York-based Hand in Hand Films that drew comparisons to the work of Cocteau and Fellini, THE NIGHT BEFORE is also the sole big-budget production by gay film and theater pioneer Arch Brown, who is credited with being the very first person to shoot gay hardcore in New York for the mysterious underground screening group Cinema 16. This screening will be from a rare original 16mm release print.

“THE NIGHT BEFORE is a damn good film!… It is solid and genuinely inventive with sex scenes that are sexy, fantasies that are fantastic and a wonderful – no, brilliant – musical score! If you liked BOYS IN THE SAND you’ll love THE NIGHT BEFORE.” –Jack Doroshow (Flawless Sabrina), MICHAEL’S THING

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Long before Hollywood films like CALL ME BY YOUR NAME and LOVE, SIMON became common fare at the multiplex, the only place gay men could see their lives and lusts depicted on screen with any degree of honesty was at their local all-male adult cinema. From coming-out stories to romances, horror to camp comedy, the hundreds of features churned out by the gay adult film industry throughout the 1960s-80s were a driving force behind the spread of gay culture and constitute a largely forgotten cinematic document of the era. These films were often shot in actual queer spaces, starred the people who frequented them, and were then screened in movie theaters that doubled as safe communal spaces for members of the community.

The video component of a multimedia project that also encompasses an acclaimed podcast and Instagram feed, Elizabeth Purchell’s ASK ANY BUDDY compiles fragments from over 125 feature films to create a kaleidoscopic, dreamlike snapshot of the era. An official selection of nearly two-dozen international film festivals including BFI Flare and Outfest, ASK ANY BUDDY is a funny, sexy portrait of urban gay life in the years following the Stonewall Riots – or at least how it looked in the movies.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

The partnership of filmmaker Steve Scott and gay superstar Al Parker produced some of the most popular all-male films of the era – from a gay-bent remake of AN UNMARRIED WOMAN to their hardcore document of the inaugural Gay Games – but none is quite as enduring as TURNED ON! The plot couldn’t be any simpler: Al Parker spots Falcon model Sky Dawson at a bar one night; both are into each other, but the connection is missed amidst other hookups in the bathroom. Falling asleep later that night Parker remembers a key detail – the logo of real-life L.A. bathhouse Mac’s Baths on Dawson’s shirt – sending him on a frenzied dream pursuit of the man that got away. Working with his regular D.P. Tom Howard and an original score by the mysterious “Forbidden Overture,” TURNED ON! finds director Scott utilizing his talents as a Hollywood set designer to transform an actual bathhouse into a sleazy fantasy playground for Parker and Dawson to run wild through.

“There is really nothing to complain about in the entire film: it is profoundly conceived; it is relentlessly arousing; it is flawlessly cast; it is stunningly photographed; and most of all, it is deeply perceptive in both its portrait of gay life in the fast lane before AIDS and in its timeless revelations about the power of the sexual impulse.” –Jerry Douglas, MANSHOTS

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Long before Hollywood films like CALL ME BY YOUR NAME and LOVE, SIMON became common fare at the multiplex, the only place gay men could see their lives and lusts depicted on screen with any degree of honesty was at their local all-male adult cinema. From coming-out stories to romances, horror to camp comedy, the hundreds of features churned out by the gay adult film industry throughout the 1960s-80s were a driving force behind the spread of gay culture and constitute a largely forgotten cinematic document of the era. These films were often shot in actual queer spaces, starred the people who frequented them, and were then screened in movie theaters that doubled as safe communal spaces for members of the community.

The video component of a multimedia project that also encompasses an acclaimed podcast and Instagram feed, Elizabeth Purchell’s ASK ANY BUDDY compiles fragments from over 125 feature films to create a kaleidoscopic, dreamlike snapshot of the era. An official selection of nearly two-dozen international film festivals including BFI Flare and Outfest, ASK ANY BUDDY is a funny, sexy portrait of urban gay life in the years following the Stonewall Riots – or at least how it looked in the movies.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Paranoid over the state of his disintegrating relationship, a man receives a cryptic invitation that simply states “10:30 P.M. Monday” in this shocking S/M riff on Wakefield Poole’s BIJOU. 10:30 P.M. MONDAY was both the first film by Lucas Severin – whose identity remains a mystery to this very day – and one of the very last S/M films to be made and exhibited in Los Angeles. Fred Halsted’s long-delayed SEXTOOL would finally hit theaters just months later, and with it came a decree from the city’s notoriously homophobic Chief of Police Ed Davis that films of the sort would never play within city limits ever again. To quote the advertising materials for the first film to (unsuccessfully) test this policy, Roger Earl’s landmark BORN TO RAISE HELL: “Not for the very squeamish!” This screening will be from a rare original 16mm release print featuring 20 minutes not present on any currently circulating version of the film.

“Due to the unusual nature of this film, Patrons are advised to be on time for all performances!”

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Long before Hollywood films like CALL ME BY YOUR NAME and LOVE, SIMON became common fare at the multiplex, the only place gay men could see their lives and lusts depicted on screen with any degree of honesty was at their local all-male adult cinema. From coming-out stories to romances, horror to camp comedy, the hundreds of features churned out by the gay adult film industry throughout the 1960s-80s were a driving force behind the spread of gay culture and constitute a largely forgotten cinematic document of the era. These films were often shot in actual queer spaces, starred the people who frequented them, and were then screened in movie theaters that doubled as safe communal spaces for members of the community.

The video component of a multimedia project that also encompasses an acclaimed podcast and Instagram feed, Elizabeth Purchell’s ASK ANY BUDDY compiles fragments from over 125 feature films to create a kaleidoscopic, dreamlike snapshot of the era. An official selection of nearly two-dozen international film festivals including BFI Flare and Outfest, ASK ANY BUDDY is a funny, sexy portrait of urban gay life in the years following the Stonewall Riots – or at least how it looked in the movies.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Shot during the gay community’s fight against the Briggs Initiative and Anita Bryan’s Save Our Children campaign, Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.’s second narrative feature moves far beyond the simple utopian romanticism of his debut, PASSING STRANGERS, by injecting overt political messages about gay imprisonment and the emotional tolls of the closet into a simple, yet artistically ambitious love story. Out, young gay man Larry and his imprisoned older lover, Richard, are effectively pushed back into the closet out of fear that an outing would lead to a longer, harsher sentence in isolation. As Richard’s release nears, Larry tries to fill the emotional void with casual sex, but the question persists: will the spark still be there when Richard gets out?

This screening represents the North American premiere of the Bressan Project’s new 2K restoration of the uncut feature from its original film elements, which restores nearly 15 minutes of footage that had been missing from the previously-available video release.

“What Bressan has given us is what we’ve wanted to see for so long, something neither Hollywood – which concentrated on producing the heterosexual fantasy – nor the specifically gay (which is to say porno) movie producers have given us: the gay love fantasy.” –John Schauer, THE ADVOCATE

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Iconic gay sex symbol Peter Berlin writes, directs, produces, edits, and stars in a film that one VECTOR reviewer succinctly described as being “Peter Berlin’s paean to Peter Berlin – or at least the character of Peter Berlin.” That character is Helmut, a German Adonis admired and desired by every person he comes in contact with – including members of the Cockettes – but who only loves the blind boy who can’t judge him for his looks and won’t see them fade with age.

One of the more unusual – and artistically ambitious – films to come out of San Francisco’s gay underground film scene, THAT BOY will be screened in a brand-new 2K restoration – taken from the long-lost original film elements – that will be making its world premiere in this series!

“Even if THAT BOY had not attained the level of artistic quality sought by its maker, Peter Berlin’s popularity would have carried it on to box-office success. The fact that he did not choose to trade on his popularity by making a ‘safe picture,’ but aimed instead for an even higher level of quality, is admirable. He is a man with an exciting moviemaking future.” –Harold Fairbanks, THE ADVOCATE

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Gender, class, and the military-industrial complex all come under attack in this critically acclaimed satire from AMERICA HURRAH playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie and straight-for-pay auteur Chuck Vincent. Along with Wakefield Poole’s BOYS IN THE SAND and Jack Deveau’s LEFT-HANDED, AMERICAN CREAM was one of the early hits of New York porno chic – a flippant hardcore comedy with serious artistic aspirations that premiered with a then-uncommon month-long run at New York’s Players Theatre, paired with Genet’s UN CHANT D’AMOUR.

“One of the best porno flicks ever, one which – like L.A. PLAYS ITSELF before it – uses the genre to comment on gay oppression and liberation… Much the most satisfying thing about AMERICAN CREAM is that it achieves some artistic stature without trying very hard.” –Stuart Byron, VILLAGE VOICE

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(ZEMESTAN)

It is winter. A man is fired from his job. Out of options, he decides to go and find work abroad, leaving behind his young wife and daughter. Months pass and his family hears no word from him. A stranger, a young mechanic, arrives in town in search of work. His eyes wander to the beautiful woman whom he hears no longer has a husband. IT’S WINTER is a melancholic portrayal of a generation torn between the urge to leave the country, its ties to the homeland and its struggle to survive.

“An austerely beautiful parable about men and their painfully conflicted view of themselves: a wintry tale that calmly occupies its own poetic time and space, and has an enigma at its core with something of the Martin Guerre myth.” –Peter Bradshaw, THE GUARDIAN

“Rafi Pitts’s remarkable IT’S WINTER is one of those films that forces you to rethink your preconceptions about Iranian cinema. Although recognisably in a taut, austere Iranian mold, the film feels new in several ways. Its central figure is not just an anti-hero but is abrasively unsympathetic; its narrative structure suggests an odd mix of film noir and Kafka; and its sexual undertones are surprisingly upfront, albeit in a very discreet way.” –Jonathan Romney, SCREEN DAILY

Preceded by:
Mahyar Mandegar
WHITE WINGED HORSE
2020, 20 min, digital. In Persian with English subtitles.
The figure of a white-winged horse has haunted Taha since childhood. Many years ago he had begged his sweetheart to escape their war-torn town together with him. But she chose to stay behind, for she promised her heart to the one who appeared to her as a white-winged horse. Now Taha returns with big hopes that he can win her heart. Alas, amnesia reigns supreme in his old hometown. Hardly a soul still believes in the power of poetry and magic.

To purchase tickets for this screening, click here.

(SHEKARCHI)

“Filmed during the months leading up to the 2009 presidential election in Iran, THE HUNTER still seethes with fury – and anticipates the blood that would spill after the vote. Rafi Pitts’s oblique fourth feature opens with a clang of electric guitars and a 1980 photograph of Revolutionary Guards on motorcycles about to run over an upside-down U.S. flag. The din soon ends as we see Ali (Pitts, haunted and hollow) loading a rifle in the woods. The taciturn graveyard-shift warehouse security guard, recently released from jail for a never-specified crime, shuttles between work and home via Tehran’s clogged highways while listening to Ayatollah Khamenei on the car radio. To avenge the deaths of his beloved wife and six-year-old daughter, killed during off-screen protests, Ali takes out two cops sniper-style and flees to a forest in the north. Pitts, who was born in 1967 in Iran and fled the country in 1981 for England, and cinematographer Mohammad Davudi frequently frame Ali in striking long shots: The protagonist is dwarfed by his surroundings, whether the labyrinthine entrance to his apartment building or the steep dirt incline he descends after killing the police officers. The open spaces stifle just as much as the claustrophobic hearing rooms and stairwells do in [the contemporaneous] Iranian drama, Asghar Farhadi’s A SEPARATION.” –Melissa Anderson, VILLAGE VOICE

Preceded by:
Chris Marker
LA JETÉE
1962, 29 min, digital. In French with English subtitles.
“This strange and poetic film…is a fusion of science fiction, psychological fable and photomontage, and creates in its unique way a series of potent images of the inner landscapes of time. Apart from a brief three-second sequence – a young woman’s hesitant smile, a moment of extraordinary poignancy, like a fragment of a child’s dream – the thirty-minute film is composed entirely of still photographs. Yet this succession of disconnected images is a perfect means of projecting the quantified memories and movements through time that are the film’s subject matter.” –J.G. Ballard, ‘La Jetée: Academy One’, New Worlds, 1966

To purchase tickets for this screening, click here.

Cronenberg’s third feature film, SHIVERS depicts the gradual breakdown of civilization within a high-rise apartment building, thanks to a scientifically-engineered sexually-transmitted parasite that unleashes uncontrollable sexual urges in its hosts. SHIVERS reflects the influence of the great novelist J.G. Ballard – in particular it demonstrates close parallels with Ballard’s contemporaneous novel, HIGH RISE – a connection that would become explicit just over 20 years later when Cronenberg would adapt Ballard’s CRASH. In both novel and film, the high-rise acts as both a microcosm of society and as a kind of inexplicable trap that the residents can not (or will not) escape. SHIVERS was the first film in which Cronenberg’s mature style and sensibility came fully into focus, and it established the distinctive form of “body horror” that would become his trademark.

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“Picking up where the taboo-busting SHIVERS left off, RABID is the next-level iteration of Cronenberg’s obsession with sexual body violence in the form of a late nite creature feature. After a motorcycle accident, former adult film star Marilyn Chambers wakes up in a hospital with new skin and a new appetite. As the city of Montréal is transformed into an incubator for gunk-spewing vampires, the ghostly Chambers finds herself at war with her body and the world. Featuring a focused and intense performance from Chambers, clever statements on vanity and greed, and a grotesque lil’ beastie who looks like a penis with teeth, RABID is a high-water mark in lysergic horror. This includes the show-stopping scene that involves a machine gun and Santa Claus.” –AMERICAN GENRE FILM ARCHIVE

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Following a brief detour into non-horror moviemaking that resulted in the racing drama FAST COMPANY, Cronenberg returned to the “body horror” sub-genre he pioneered, with one of his signature pictures, THE BROOD. Imported UK stars Oliver Reed, as a controversial psychotherapist, and Samantha Eggar, as his “queen bee” patient, appear alongside Canadian Art Hindle, as Eggar’s estranged husband fighting her for custody of their young daughter. Reed encourages his patients to rid themselves of their mental illnesses by bringing about physiological changes in their bodies…leading to the spawning of a brood of murderous mutant children who act on Eggar’s rages. Referring to the coincidence of its release in the same year as a far more mainstream take on similar topics, Cronenberg has called THE BROOD “my version of KRAMER VS. KRAMER,” while noting that that film’s “happy ending” was a million miles away from his take on divorce and child custody battles, an experience he himself was still raw from during the development of THE BROOD.

“‘Bad and fucked-up mommies,’ appalling and enthralling, are the heart of this grand fable of repulsion, shot by Cronenberg with frigid vehemence in the midst of his own divorce and child-custody anxieties. Shedding the grindhouse skin of the early films for a cool-clinical sheen, it exhumes the deformed feelings of relationships erected on circles of pain while locating a bruised new dignity in the characters caught in them.” –Fernando Croce, CINEPASSION

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Cronenberg’s third feature film, SHIVERS depicts the gradual breakdown of civilization within a high-rise apartment building, thanks to a scientifically-engineered sexually-transmitted parasite that unleashes uncontrollable sexual urges in its hosts. SHIVERS reflects the influence of the great novelist J.G. Ballard – in particular it demonstrates close parallels with Ballard’s contemporaneous novel, HIGH RISE – a connection that would become explicit just over 20 years later when Cronenberg would adapt Ballard’s CRASH. In both novel and film, the high-rise acts as both a microcosm of society and as a kind of inexplicable trap that the residents can not (or will not) escape. SHIVERS was the first film in which Cronenberg’s mature style and sensibility came fully into focus, and it established the distinctive form of “body horror” that would become his trademark.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

“Picking up where the taboo-busting SHIVERS left off, RABID is the next-level iteration of Cronenberg’s obsession with sexual body violence in the form of a late nite creature feature. After a motorcycle accident, former adult film star Marilyn Chambers wakes up in a hospital with new skin and a new appetite. As the city of Montréal is transformed into an incubator for gunk-spewing vampires, the ghostly Chambers finds herself at war with her body and the world. Featuring a focused and intense performance from Chambers, clever statements on vanity and greed, and a grotesque lil’ beastie who looks like a penis with teeth, RABID is a high-water mark in lysergic horror. This includes the show-stopping scene that involves a machine gun and Santa Claus.” –AMERICAN GENRE FILM ARCHIVE

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Cronenberg’s third feature film, SHIVERS depicts the gradual breakdown of civilization within a high-rise apartment building, thanks to a scientifically-engineered sexually-transmitted parasite that unleashes uncontrollable sexual urges in its hosts. SHIVERS reflects the influence of the great novelist J.G. Ballard – in particular it demonstrates close parallels with Ballard’s contemporaneous novel, HIGH RISE – a connection that would become explicit just over 20 years later when Cronenberg would adapt Ballard’s CRASH. In both novel and film, the high-rise acts as both a microcosm of society and as a kind of inexplicable trap that the residents can not (or will not) escape. SHIVERS was the first film in which Cronenberg’s mature style and sensibility came fully into focus, and it established the distinctive form of “body horror” that would become his trademark.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Following a brief detour into non-horror moviemaking that resulted in the racing drama FAST COMPANY, Cronenberg returned to the “body horror” sub-genre he pioneered, with one of his signature pictures, THE BROOD. Imported UK stars Oliver Reed, as a controversial psychotherapist, and Samantha Eggar, as his “queen bee” patient, appear alongside Canadian Art Hindle, as Eggar’s estranged husband fighting her for custody of their young daughter. Reed encourages his patients to rid themselves of their mental illnesses by bringing about physiological changes in their bodies…leading to the spawning of a brood of murderous mutant children who act on Eggar’s rages. Referring to the coincidence of its release in the same year as a far more mainstream take on similar topics, Cronenberg has called THE BROOD “my version of KRAMER VS. KRAMER,” while noting that that film’s “happy ending” was a million miles away from his take on divorce and child custody battles, an experience he himself was still raw from during the development of THE BROOD.

“‘Bad and fucked-up mommies,’ appalling and enthralling, are the heart of this grand fable of repulsion, shot by Cronenberg with frigid vehemence in the midst of his own divorce and child-custody anxieties. Shedding the grindhouse skin of the early films for a cool-clinical sheen, it exhumes the deformed feelings of relationships erected on circles of pain while locating a bruised new dignity in the characters caught in them.” –Fernando Croce, CINEPASSION

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

“Picking up where the taboo-busting SHIVERS left off, RABID is the next-level iteration of Cronenberg’s obsession with sexual body violence in the form of a late nite creature feature. After a motorcycle accident, former adult film star Marilyn Chambers wakes up in a hospital with new skin and a new appetite. As the city of Montréal is transformed into an incubator for gunk-spewing vampires, the ghostly Chambers finds herself at war with her body and the world. Featuring a focused and intense performance from Chambers, clever statements on vanity and greed, and a grotesque lil’ beastie who looks like a penis with teeth, RABID is a high-water mark in lysergic horror. This includes the show-stopping scene that involves a machine gun and Santa Claus.” –AMERICAN GENRE FILM ARCHIVE

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Following a brief detour into non-horror moviemaking that resulted in the racing drama FAST COMPANY, Cronenberg returned to the “body horror” sub-genre he pioneered, with one of his signature pictures, THE BROOD. Imported UK stars Oliver Reed, as a controversial psychotherapist, and Samantha Eggar, as his “queen bee” patient, appear alongside Canadian Art Hindle, as Eggar’s estranged husband fighting her for custody of their young daughter. Reed encourages his patients to rid themselves of their mental illnesses by bringing about physiological changes in their bodies…leading to the spawning of a brood of murderous mutant children who act on Eggar’s rages. Referring to the coincidence of its release in the same year as a far more mainstream take on similar topics, Cronenberg has called THE BROOD “my version of KRAMER VS. KRAMER,” while noting that that film’s “happy ending” was a million miles away from his take on divorce and child custody battles, an experience he himself was still raw from during the development of THE BROOD.

“‘Bad and fucked-up mommies,’ appalling and enthralling, are the heart of this grand fable of repulsion, shot by Cronenberg with frigid vehemence in the midst of his own divorce and child-custody anxieties. Shedding the grindhouse skin of the early films for a cool-clinical sheen, it exhumes the deformed feelings of relationships erected on circles of pain while locating a bruised new dignity in the characters caught in them.” –Fernando Croce, CINEPASSION

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!