Anthology Film Archives

(FRANCESCO, GIULLARE DI DIO)

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

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(LA RÈGLE DU JEU)

“Detested when it first appeared (for satirizing the French ruling class on the brink of the Second World War), almost destroyed by brutal cutting, restored in 1959 to virtually its original form, THE RULES OF THE GAME is now universally acknowledged as a masterpiece and perhaps Renoir’s supreme achievement. Its extreme complexity (it seems, after more than 20 viewings, one of the cinema’s few truly inexhaustible films) makes it peculiarly difficult to write about briefly.” –Robin Wood

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Made by filmmaker – and then-NYU-film-school-student – Hugh Kinniburgh in 1983, MALL CITY began life as a two-birds-with-one-stone project: the shoot was intended to produce both a music video for Kinniburgh’s band’s song, “Mall City”, and a short documentary for his documentary film class. Shooting at the Roosevelt Field Mall in Long Island, Kinniburgh and his small crew conducted on-the-spot, spontaneous interviews with the shoppers and mall rats they encountered, resulting in a 20-minute film that incorporated a few of their interviews and concluded with the music video. More than 30 years later, Kinniburgh revisited his Betamax video footage, recognized its social-historical value, and fashioned an extended version of the film that made room for much more of the interview material. The result is an invaluable time-capsule of the heyday of a typical suburban East Coast shopping mall, which has found a new life on the internet.

“I wonder where all those people are now. The kids must be in their late 40’s and 50’s. The old folks are gone. Record stores, the music store, video arcades…all just memories now. I’m glad we captured an essential part of east coast American life.” – Hugh Kinniburgh

Filmmaker Hugh Kinniburgh will be here in person for all three screenings!

Preceded by:
Dan Graham DEATH BY CHOCOLATE: WEST EDMONTON SHOPPING MALL (1986-05) 2005, 8 min, digital
Produced by Graham at the Banff Centre in Canada, DEATH BY CHOCOLATE draws on nearly twenty years’ worth of footage shot in the bizarre yet familiar arena of the shopping mall. The resulting work provides a coldly beautiful view of mall culture: its architecture, its consumer public, and its unique aesthetic world. This work also provides a corollary to Graham’s own prodigious writings and projects on the public spaces of corporate capitalism.

Cheryl Donegan FLUSHING 2003, 4 min, digital
“Shot at the Flushing Mall in Queens, New York, Flushing is a tour of a mall that doesn’t live up to the glossy standards of typical American consumer palaces, but is thereby perhaps a better place to understand the yearnings for fantasy via retailing.” –Cheryl Donegan

Jaime Davidovich THE GAP 1982-83, 16 min, video
Created for the Long Beach Museum of Art and aired as an episode of Davidovich’s cable-access program “The Live! Show”, this evening-news-style “special” finds him field-reporting on the status of video art in Long Beach, California. Davidovich visits a local shopping mall to poll strangers of all stripes and analyze their attitudes about the future of electronic art.

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

This program features works that take advantage of video’s capacity for feeding the performer’s and/or the audience’s image back to itself, drawing the audience into the work and creating a dynamic, often disorienting, and always revealing interplay between the viewer and the image.

Andy Warhol OUTER AND INNER SPACE 1965, 33 min, 16mm dual projection
“A mesmerizing double-projection starring Warhol’s Superstar Edie Sedgwick. Each of the projections presents Edie twice: ‘live’ Edie side-by-side with a pre-recorded video image of herself in profile, appearing to speak into her own ear. This was the first of Warhol’s experiments with a split screen, and it is a dizzying rupturing of filmic time and an inspired exercise in the reflexivity of new media.” –Ava Tews

Allan Kaprow HELLO 1969, 4.5 min, video
“In 1969, Kaprow created HELLO, an interactive video happening for THE MEDIUM IS THE MEDIUM, a 30-minute experimental television program with six visual artists [the other contributors included Aldo Tambellini, Otto Piene, and Nam June Paik]. Five television cameras and 27 monitors connected four remote locations over a closed-circuit television network. Groups of people were dispatched to the various locations with instructions as to what they would say on camera, such as ‘Hello, I see you,’ when acknowledging their own image or that of a friend. […] HELLO offered a critique of the disruptive manner by which technology mediates interaction. It metaphorically short-circuited the television network, thereby calling attention to the connections made between actual people.” –Kristine Stiles & Edward A. Shanken, MISSING IN ACTION: AGENCY AND MEANING IN INTERACTIVE ART

Richard Serra BOOMERANG 1974, 11 min, video. With Nancy Holt.
“Originally broadcast on public television in Amarillo, TX, BOOMERANG features Nancy Holt framed in a medium shot with a pair of headphones on her ears. We observe her as she speaks and then hears her words relayed back to her through a delayed transmission. Remarkably eloquent for one caught in such a feedback loop, Holt provides a monologue on experiencing time, thought, and oneself through technology.” –Ava Tews

C. Spencer Yeh LAUGHING GIRL LAUGHING AT LAUGHING GIRL 2008, 40 sec, digital
C. Spencer Yeh LAUGHING GIRL LAUGHING AT LAUGHING GIRL LAUGHING AT LAUGHING GIRL 2008, 40 sec, digital
In these short videos, C. Spencer Yeh brings OUTER AND INNER SPACE and BOOMERANG into the age of the internet meme.

Dan Graham PERFORMER/AUDIENCE/MIRROR 1975, 23 min, video
“A document of one of the many performance pieces with which Graham in this period explored questions of public and private identity, consciousness, and self-presentation. In this film, he positioned himself between the audience and a wall-size mirror, alternately describing his own actions and appearance, and those of the audience, who were visible to Graham and to themselves.” –CINEASTE

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

High school sweethearts Eric Matthews and Melody Austin are in love. But their romance is cut tragically short when Eric dies in a fire. One year later, Melody is trying to move on with her life and works at the newly built Midwood Mall. But the mall, which stands on the very site of Eric’s former home, has an uninvited guest: a shadowy, scarred figure who is hellbent on getting revenge against the mall’s crooked developers! Featuring star turns from MTV's Pauly Shore, Morgan Fairchild (DALLAS), and Ken Foree (DAWN OF THE DEAD), PHANTOM OF THE MALL: ERIC’S REVENGE is the finest slasher variant on THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA ever made. If you don’t believe us, wait until the scene where a bloody eyeball shows up in someone’s frozen yogurt.

Preceded by:
Cecelia Condit POSSIBLY IN MICHIGAN 1983, 11.5 min, video
An operatic fairy tale of cannibalism, desire, and dread in Middle America, a densely collaged narrative in which Beauty meets the Beast in the surreal landscape of shopping-mall suburbia. Two women with a penchant for “violence and perfume” take revenge on their animal-masked male persecutor. In this contemporary rendering of gothic enchantment, victim becomes aggressor and the familiar becomes the fantastic. POSSIBLY IN MICHIGAN is a classic tale of psychosexual horror, retold as an irreverent fantasy of the other.

Total running time: ca. 105 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

(DIE SCHÖPFER DER EINKAUFSWELTEN)

“Shopping is an everyday cultural act; it is inevitable, taken for granted. Entering into the world of shopping – the world of shopping malls – can be a Dantean voyage into hell or a redeeming ceremony of Communion. Everyone is familiar with this experience and knows what a mall looks like. This self-evident phenomenon is, however, the result of a highly complex process. The designing of shopping malls is overseen by an army of planners, managers and scientists: there are consultants, re-launch analysts, a central association, mall magazines. 6,000 guests and laboratories attended an annual convention in Las Vegas at which such questions were investigated as where the gaze of a customer falls and how a ‘spontaneous’ purchase can be induced. Farocki shows how mall producers look at malls when they want to find out, for example, how passers-by move, where they stop and where they reach for an article. He adds these images to the everyday ones – and gives them a magical charge.” –Antje Ehmann

Preceded by:
Yael Bartana ODDS AND ENDS 2005, 4 min, digital
ODDS AND ENDS invades the space of a shopping center – big, loud, pink. It is a meditation on consumerism and a narrative about individuals caught up in a process that mostly exceeds their will and control. Sometimes shot from above, it comprises a series of memorable images piled one after the other in a sequence that is joyful and critically distanced at the same time.

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

In June we launched an ongoing collaboration with Bidoun, the magazine and curatorial platform that, since 2004, has offered irreverent, intelligent, and original writing and projects from in and around the Middle East and its many diasporas.

For the second installment of this recurring series, which is guest-curated by Bidoun’s Tiffany Malakooti, we host a screening of French-Tunisian filmmaker Nadia El-Fani’s low-budget hacker drama, BEDWIN HACKER (2003).

For more info about Bidoun visit: https://www.bidoun.org/

Nadia El Fani
BEDWIN HACKER
2003, 99 min, 35mm-to-digital. In Arabic and French with English subtitles.
In this campy millennium cyber-thriller, culture jamming hacker Kalt, AKA “Bedwin Hacker”, hijacks European television stations from her Tunisian mountain hideout. With the help of her motley crew of freedom-loving poets, queers, and musicians, she broadcasts cryptic political messages delivered by a cartoon camel. Meanwhile, a French intelligence agent named Julia relentlessly pursues the elusive pirate, with whom she shares multiple romantic entanglements, past and present…

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Kevin Smith’s follow-up to his landmark debut, CLERKS, centers on two loafers, Jeremy London and Jason Lee, who spend way too much time hanging out at the mall. When Brodie (Lee) is dumped by his girlfriend, Shannen Doherty, he retreats to the mall with his best friend TS (London), whose girlfriend has also left him. Between brooding and visits to the food court, the unmotivated twosome decide to win their girlfriends back with the help of the ultimate delinquents, Silent Bob (Kevin Smith) and Jay (Jason Mewes), whose continuing adventures take the word “nuisance” to a whole new level.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Courtesy of Janus Films and the Royal Belgian Film Archive.

“The exuberant enchantments of the singing, dancing musical meet the feminist, formalist sensibility of Chantal Akerman in this uniquely captivating vision of love and survival in the age of late capitalism. Amid the consumerist wonderland of a shopping mall, a cadre of store employees bounce in and out of one another’s arms in a cycle of breakups, makeups, misunderstandings, and reunions, their romantic roundelay punctuated by imaginatively stylized production numbers. Working with frequent star Delphine Seyrig and a remarkable team of writers – who between them penned everything from JULES AND JIM to DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN – Akerman deftly balances the shiny pop pleasures of the genre with piercing variations on her signature themes, including a startlingly moving reflection on Jewish resilience and the legacy of the Holocaust.” –CRITERION

Preceded by:
Ayo Akingbade DEADPHANT 2020, 3 min, Super-8mm-to-digital
A portrait of Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre in South London, a weekend before it permanently closed, after 55 years, on September 24, 2020.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

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

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

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

CHOPPING MALL is a joyous hybrid of FRIDAY THE 13TH and DAWN OF THE DEAD…with robots! A group of horny teens, including Barbara Crampton (RE-ANIMATOR) and Kelli Maroney (NIGHT OF THE COMET), sneak into a mall. But they soon find themselves confronted with a team of blood-thirsty, high-tech Robo-killers. Packed with familiar faces from the Roger Corman stable (Paul Bartel, Mary Woronov, Dick Miller), this movie crams more slit-throats, lasers, and exploding robots into 77 minutes than most filmmakers can muster in an entire career.

Kyle Riismandel, cultural historian, Director of the Graduate Program in American Studies at Rutgers-Newark/New Jersey Institute of Technology, and author of “Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975-2001” will introduce CHOPPING MALL on Fri, Aug 4!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

NOCTURAMA is a terrorism thriller like no other, recalling Robert Bresson’s THE DEVIL, PROBABLY as much as it does George A. Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD. We first follow a group of tense, shifty adolescents as they prowl the streets and subways of Paris, learning through carefully delineated sequences that they’re already well underway with a bombing plot. And then it becomes something familiar, yet altogether different, as these subversives tuck away inside a shopping mall and lose themselves in consumer culture – clothes, televisions, toys, and a stirring soundtrack that includes Blondie, Chief Keef, Shirley Bassey, Bonello’s menacing electronic score, and Willow Smith. Will they survive the unseen, encroaching authorities? Or, as the walls close in, will they even survive each other? NOCTURAMA forgoes easy answers.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

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

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

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

“George Romero’s sequel to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is a more accomplished and more knowing film, tapping into two dark and dirty fantasies – wholesale slaughter and wholesale shopping – to create a grisly extravaganza with an acute moral intelligence. The graphic special effects (which sometimes suggest a shotgun Jackson Pollock) are less upsetting than Romero’s way of drawing the audience into the violence. As four survivors of the zombie war barricade themselves inside a suburban shopping mall, our loyalties and human sympathies are made to shift with frightening ease. Romero’s sensibility approaches the Swiftian in its wit, accuracy, excess, and profound misanthropy.” –Dave Kehr, CHICAGO READER

Plus: A selection of shopping mall TV ads from the 1970s & 80s!

Total running time: ca. 140 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

THE STORE is a film about the main Neiman-Marcus store and corporate headquarters in Dallas. The sequences in the film include the selection, presentation, marketing, pricing, advertising, and selling of a vast array of consumer products including designer clothes and furs, jewelry, perfumes, shoes, electronic products, sportswear, china and porcelain and many other goods. The internal management and organizational aspects of a large corporation are shown, i.e., sales meetings, development of marketing and advertising strategies, training, personnel practices and sales techniques.

Alexandra Lange, author of “Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall”, will introduce the screening of THE STORE on Sun, Aug 6!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

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

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

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

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

Total running time: ca. 60 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

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

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

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

With Pam Grier, Robert Forster, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert De Niro, Bridget Fonda, and Michael Keaton.

JACKIE BROWN is Tarantino’s supreme achievement, and still hands-down his most fully accomplished, impressively understated film. The master of pastiche, Tarantino here channels the gritty, low-key, human-scaled urban crime films of the 1970s, and the result is enormously satisfying, genuinely capturing not only the superficial trappings of the genre but the genuine flavor of a period in which crime films focused on texture, character, and process rather than sensation or spectacle. Tarantino’s privileging of dialogue and interaction over plot has never been put to such good use, and the film’s sublimely patient pacing, heartfelt affection for its characters, and refusal to indulge in cinematic fireworks, inspires an enormous nostalgia for a period rife with down-to-earth genre films. JACKIE BROWN centers on an intricate smuggling operation/robbery – depicted via a kaleidoscope of shifting perspectives – that plays out in the decidedly unglamorous, banal confines of a shopping mall department store and food court.

PLEASE NOTE: 

THE SUNDAY, AUGUST 6TH SCREENING WILL BE SHOWN AS A DCP. PLEASE STAY TUNED AS OTHER SCREENINGS *MAY* BE SHOWN ON 35MM. 8/6 TICKETS CAN BE EXCHANGED OR REFUNDED AT THE BOX OFFICE. 

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Distributed by Icarus Films.

CHEZ JOLIE COIFFURE takes place entirely inside a tiny salon in an underground shopping mall in the immigrant Brussels district of Matonge, where the charismatic, larger-than-life Sabine and her employees style extensions and glue on lashes while watching soaps, dishing romantic advice, sharing rumors about government programs to legalize migrants, and talking about life back home in West Africa. More than a place for women to get their hair done, Jolie Coiffure serves as a community hub for West African women. Fueled by endless cans of soda and cups of McDonald’s coffee, Sabine recruits for a tontine (an investment scheme paying each member a yearly annuity), organizes accommodation for a pregnant woman who lacks immigration papers, and, in quieter, more introspective moments, tells of her own harrowing journey to Belgium after working as a domestic under terrible conditions in Lebanon. Meanwhile, students and tourist groups walk past, pausing at the window and gawking. (At one point, Sabine urges Mbakam to turn her camera on them so they’ll go away; the director obliges.) CHEZ JOLIE COIFFURE is a highly revealing documentary, capturing the day-to-day lives and concerns of immigrant West African women in a space they can call their own.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

“Shot over several years in a variety of countries, CHAIN is a quietly corrosive portrait of two women drifting through a not-quite-locatable world of malls, corporate centers, and hotels. The film occupies the fertile ground where documentary and fiction converge, and registers a darkening emotional current in Cohen’s work, riding on a mix of yearning and skepticism, tenderness and outrage.” –Michael Almereyda

“I began the project by deciding to focus on the corporate and commercial landscapes that I had previously ‘framed out’ in my filmmaking, and to try to understand how these places were affecting the people within them. Wal-Mart, for example, opens a new store roughly every two days and yet the actual sites of such developments often take on a strange invisibility. Their presence can begin to seem inevitable and even natural. Rather than examining this phenomenon through the facts, experts, and arguments of the traditional documentary, CHAIN tells the stories of two women as this environment shapes their lives.” –Jem Cohen

Jem Cohen will be here in person for both screenings!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

CHOPPING MALL is a joyous hybrid of FRIDAY THE 13TH and DAWN OF THE DEAD…with robots! A group of horny teens, including Barbara Crampton (RE-ANIMATOR) and Kelli Maroney (NIGHT OF THE COMET), sneak into a mall. But they soon find themselves confronted with a team of blood-thirsty, high-tech Robo-killers. Packed with familiar faces from the Roger Corman stable (Paul Bartel, Mary Woronov, Dick Miller), this movie crams more slit-throats, lasers, and exploding robots into 77 minutes than most filmmakers can muster in an entire career.

Kyle Riismandel, cultural historian, Director of the Graduate Program in American Studies at Rutgers-Newark/New Jersey Institute of Technology, and author of “Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975-2001” will introduce CHOPPING MALL on Fri, Aug 4!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

High school sweethearts Eric Matthews and Melody Austin are in love. But their romance is cut tragically short when Eric dies in a fire. One year later, Melody is trying to move on with her life and works at the newly built Midwood Mall. But the mall, which stands on the very site of Eric’s former home, has an uninvited guest: a shadowy, scarred figure who is hellbent on getting revenge against the mall’s crooked developers! Featuring star turns from MTV's Pauly Shore, Morgan Fairchild (DALLAS), and Ken Foree (DAWN OF THE DEAD), PHANTOM OF THE MALL: ERIC’S REVENGE is the finest slasher variant on THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA ever made. If you don’t believe us, wait until the scene where a bloody eyeball shows up in someone’s frozen yogurt.

Preceded by:
Cecelia Condit POSSIBLY IN MICHIGAN 1983, 11.5 min, video
An operatic fairy tale of cannibalism, desire, and dread in Middle America, a densely collaged narrative in which Beauty meets the Beast in the surreal landscape of shopping-mall suburbia. Two women with a penchant for “violence and perfume” take revenge on their animal-masked male persecutor. In this contemporary rendering of gothic enchantment, victim becomes aggressor and the familiar becomes the fantastic. POSSIBLY IN MICHIGAN is a classic tale of psychosexual horror, retold as an irreverent fantasy of the other.

Total running time: ca. 105 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Kevin Smith’s follow-up to his landmark debut, CLERKS, centers on two loafers, Jeremy London and Jason Lee, who spend way too much time hanging out at the mall. When Brodie (Lee) is dumped by his girlfriend, Shannen Doherty, he retreats to the mall with his best friend TS (London), whose girlfriend has also left him. Between brooding and visits to the food court, the unmotivated twosome decide to win their girlfriends back with the help of the ultimate delinquents, Silent Bob (Kevin Smith) and Jay (Jason Mewes), whose continuing adventures take the word “nuisance” to a whole new level.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

“Consider OBSERVE AND REPORT as spiritual exercise for your heart. Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen) is the security chief at Forest Ridge Mall. He is a foul-mouthed young man with a chip on his shoulder. Most of the people he regularly encounters on his job experience him as a socially awkward person who makes them feel uncomfortable. He always seems to say the wrong things. […] Test yourself with OBSERVE AND REPORT, a raucous comedy written and directed by Jody Hill. See if you can open your heart to the struggle of this obnoxious and violent young man with outlandish dreams of grandeur. Does he push any of your buttons? Pay attention to see if there are any moments in the film when you actually sympathize with Ronnie’s plight and his ungainly attempt to redeem himself after blowing everything. We live in a society that accentuates the negative and always looks for flaws in people. OBSERVE AND REPORT, if you want to live dangerously, can point you in another direction, looking for the good even in loathsome individuals.” –Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, SPIRITUALITY & PRACTICE

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

With Pam Grier, Robert Forster, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert De Niro, Bridget Fonda, and Michael Keaton.

JACKIE BROWN is Tarantino’s supreme achievement, and still hands-down his most fully accomplished, impressively understated film. The master of pastiche, Tarantino here channels the gritty, low-key, human-scaled urban crime films of the 1970s, and the result is enormously satisfying, genuinely capturing not only the superficial trappings of the genre but the genuine flavor of a period in which crime films focused on texture, character, and process rather than sensation or spectacle. Tarantino’s privileging of dialogue and interaction over plot has never been put to such good use, and the film’s sublimely patient pacing, heartfelt affection for its characters, and refusal to indulge in cinematic fireworks, inspires an enormous nostalgia for a period rife with down-to-earth genre films. JACKIE BROWN centers on an intricate smuggling operation/robbery – depicted via a kaleidoscope of shifting perspectives – that plays out in the decidedly unglamorous, banal confines of a shopping mall department store and food court.

PLEASE NOTE: 

THE SUNDAY, AUGUST 6TH SCREENING WILL BE SHOWN AS A DCP. PLEASE STAY TUNED AS OTHER SCREENINGS *MAY* BE SHOWN ON 35MM. 8/6 TICKETS CAN BE EXCHANGED OR REFUNDED AT THE BOX OFFICE. 

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

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

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

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

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

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

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

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

CHOPPING MALL is a joyous hybrid of FRIDAY THE 13TH and DAWN OF THE DEAD…with robots! A group of horny teens, including Barbara Crampton (RE-ANIMATOR) and Kelli Maroney (NIGHT OF THE COMET), sneak into a mall. But they soon find themselves confronted with a team of blood-thirsty, high-tech Robo-killers. Packed with familiar faces from the Roger Corman stable (Paul Bartel, Mary Woronov, Dick Miller), this movie crams more slit-throats, lasers, and exploding robots into 77 minutes than most filmmakers can muster in an entire career.

Kyle Riismandel, cultural historian, Director of the Graduate Program in American Studies at Rutgers-Newark/New Jersey Institute of Technology, and author of “Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975-2001” will introduce CHOPPING MALL on Fri, Aug 4!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

High school sweethearts Eric Matthews and Melody Austin are in love. But their romance is cut tragically short when Eric dies in a fire. One year later, Melody is trying to move on with her life and works at the newly built Midwood Mall. But the mall, which stands on the very site of Eric’s former home, has an uninvited guest: a shadowy, scarred figure who is hellbent on getting revenge against the mall’s crooked developers! Featuring star turns from MTV's Pauly Shore, Morgan Fairchild (DALLAS), and Ken Foree (DAWN OF THE DEAD), PHANTOM OF THE MALL: ERIC’S REVENGE is the finest slasher variant on THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA ever made. If you don’t believe us, wait until the scene where a bloody eyeball shows up in someone’s frozen yogurt.

Preceded by:
Cecelia Condit POSSIBLY IN MICHIGAN 1983, 11.5 min, video
An operatic fairy tale of cannibalism, desire, and dread in Middle America, a densely collaged narrative in which Beauty meets the Beast in the surreal landscape of shopping-mall suburbia. Two women with a penchant for “violence and perfume” take revenge on their animal-masked male persecutor. In this contemporary rendering of gothic enchantment, victim becomes aggressor and the familiar becomes the fantastic. POSSIBLY IN MICHIGAN is a classic tale of psychosexual horror, retold as an irreverent fantasy of the other.

Total running time: ca. 105 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

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

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

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

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

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Made by filmmaker – and then-NYU-film-school-student – Hugh Kinniburgh in 1983, MALL CITY began life as a two-birds-with-one-stone project: the shoot was intended to produce both a music video for Kinniburgh’s band’s song, “Mall City”, and a short documentary for his documentary film class. Shooting at the Roosevelt Field Mall in Long Island, Kinniburgh and his small crew conducted on-the-spot, spontaneous interviews with the shoppers and mall rats they encountered, resulting in a 20-minute film that incorporated a few of their interviews and concluded with the music video. More than 30 years later, Kinniburgh revisited his Betamax video footage, recognized its social-historical value, and fashioned an extended version of the film that made room for much more of the interview material. The result is an invaluable time-capsule of the heyday of a typical suburban East Coast shopping mall, which has found a new life on the internet.

“I wonder where all those people are now. The kids must be in their late 40’s and 50’s. The old folks are gone. Record stores, the music store, video arcades…all just memories now. I’m glad we captured an essential part of east coast American life.” – Hugh Kinniburgh

Filmmaker Hugh Kinniburgh will be here in person for all three screenings!

Preceded by:
Dan Graham DEATH BY CHOCOLATE: WEST EDMONTON SHOPPING MALL (1986-05) 2005, 8 min, digital
Produced by Graham at the Banff Centre in Canada, DEATH BY CHOCOLATE draws on nearly twenty years’ worth of footage shot in the bizarre yet familiar arena of the shopping mall. The resulting work provides a coldly beautiful view of mall culture: its architecture, its consumer public, and its unique aesthetic world. This work also provides a corollary to Graham’s own prodigious writings and projects on the public spaces of corporate capitalism.

Cheryl Donegan FLUSHING 2003, 4 min, digital
“Shot at the Flushing Mall in Queens, New York, Flushing is a tour of a mall that doesn’t live up to the glossy standards of typical American consumer palaces, but is thereby perhaps a better place to understand the yearnings for fantasy via retailing.” –Cheryl Donegan

Jaime Davidovich THE GAP 1982-83, 16 min, video
Created for the Long Beach Museum of Art and aired as an episode of Davidovich’s cable-access program “The Live! Show”, this evening-news-style “special” finds him field-reporting on the status of video art in Long Beach, California. Davidovich visits a local shopping mall to poll strangers of all stripes and analyze their attitudes about the future of electronic art.

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

With Pam Grier, Robert Forster, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert De Niro, Bridget Fonda, and Michael Keaton.

JACKIE BROWN is Tarantino’s supreme achievement, and still hands-down his most fully accomplished, impressively understated film. The master of pastiche, Tarantino here channels the gritty, low-key, human-scaled urban crime films of the 1970s, and the result is enormously satisfying, genuinely capturing not only the superficial trappings of the genre but the genuine flavor of a period in which crime films focused on texture, character, and process rather than sensation or spectacle. Tarantino’s privileging of dialogue and interaction over plot has never been put to such good use, and the film’s sublimely patient pacing, heartfelt affection for its characters, and refusal to indulge in cinematic fireworks, inspires an enormous nostalgia for a period rife with down-to-earth genre films. JACKIE BROWN centers on an intricate smuggling operation/robbery – depicted via a kaleidoscope of shifting perspectives – that plays out in the decidedly unglamorous, banal confines of a shopping mall department store and food court.

PLEASE NOTE: 

THE SUNDAY, AUGUST 6TH SCREENING WILL BE SHOWN AS A DCP. PLEASE STAY TUNED AS OTHER SCREENINGS *MAY* BE SHOWN ON 35MM. 8/6 TICKETS CAN BE EXCHANGED OR REFUNDED AT THE BOX OFFICE. 

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

(DIE SCHÖPFER DER EINKAUFSWELTEN)

“Shopping is an everyday cultural act; it is inevitable, taken for granted. Entering into the world of shopping – the world of shopping malls – can be a Dantean voyage into hell or a redeeming ceremony of Communion. Everyone is familiar with this experience and knows what a mall looks like. This self-evident phenomenon is, however, the result of a highly complex process. The designing of shopping malls is overseen by an army of planners, managers and scientists: there are consultants, re-launch analysts, a central association, mall magazines. 6,000 guests and laboratories attended an annual convention in Las Vegas at which such questions were investigated as where the gaze of a customer falls and how a ‘spontaneous’ purchase can be induced. Farocki shows how mall producers look at malls when they want to find out, for example, how passers-by move, where they stop and where they reach for an article. He adds these images to the everyday ones – and gives them a magical charge.” –Antje Ehmann

Preceded by:
Yael Bartana ODDS AND ENDS 2005, 4 min, digital
ODDS AND ENDS invades the space of a shopping center – big, loud, pink. It is a meditation on consumerism and a narrative about individuals caught up in a process that mostly exceeds their will and control. Sometimes shot from above, it comprises a series of memorable images piled one after the other in a sequence that is joyful and critically distanced at the same time.

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

With Gibson Gowland, ZaSu Pitts, and Jean Hersholt.

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

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Courtesy of Janus Films and the Royal Belgian Film Archive.

“The exuberant enchantments of the singing, dancing musical meet the feminist, formalist sensibility of Chantal Akerman in this uniquely captivating vision of love and survival in the age of late capitalism. Amid the consumerist wonderland of a shopping mall, a cadre of store employees bounce in and out of one another’s arms in a cycle of breakups, makeups, misunderstandings, and reunions, their romantic roundelay punctuated by imaginatively stylized production numbers. Working with frequent star Delphine Seyrig and a remarkable team of writers – who between them penned everything from JULES AND JIM to DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN – Akerman deftly balances the shiny pop pleasures of the genre with piercing variations on her signature themes, including a startlingly moving reflection on Jewish resilience and the legacy of the Holocaust.” –CRITERION

Preceded by:
Ayo Akingbade DEADPHANT 2020, 3 min, Super-8mm-to-digital
A portrait of Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre in South London, a weekend before it permanently closed, after 55 years, on September 24, 2020.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

This program will channel the online video subculture devoted to exploring “dead” malls. The internet is replete with videos short and long (sometimes epically long) that find their authors indulging a strange compulsion to break into once-thriving, now-shuttered shopping centers, and to systematically document every abandoned, deteriorating space within, like anthropologists or explorers excavating the ancient ruins of a vanished culture – which in some sense is exactly what these structures represent.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

A dying shopping mall outside of Birmingham, Alabama, its patrons, and its tenants embody the diversity and tenderness of American culture in a changing South.

“Hands down the best film about the death of a shopping mall. Our tour guide is a jack-of-all-trades former Australian zookeeper leading an elegiac tour deep into the bowels of an Alabama mall on life support. JASPER MALL is a lyrical, surprisingly deep, thoughtful investigation into the sclerotic heart of the American Dream. Quirky and inventive, it holds up to the best of Errol Morris. It is DEATH OF A SALESMAN retold as DEATH OF A SHOPPING MALL.” –Jeffrey Radice, SLAMDANCE

Preceded by:
Sam Green & Carrie Lozano UTOPIA, PART 3: THE WORLD’S LARGEST SHOPPING MALL 2009, 13 min, digital
Four years after its construction, the South China Mall outside of Guangzhou – the largest mall in the world – sits virtually empty of both shops and shoppers. But the South China Mall is considered too big to fail. So, employees line up for flag-raising ceremonies and pep talks about “brand building” before going off to meticulously maintain the deserted concourses.

Nathan S. Duncan GHOST MALL 2011, 7 min, digital
A truly ghostly portrait of a dying mall in Austin, Texas, GHOST MALL comprises images of the shopping center’s almost entirely depopulated spaces, whose emptiness is all the more haunting thanks to the soundtrack of audio recordings in which several people share memories of formative experiences that took place there.

Total running time: ca. 110 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

With Gibson Gowland, ZaSu Pitts, and Jean Hersholt.

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

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

NOCTURAMA is a terrorism thriller like no other, recalling Robert Bresson’s THE DEVIL, PROBABLY as much as it does George A. Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD. We first follow a group of tense, shifty adolescents as they prowl the streets and subways of Paris, learning through carefully delineated sequences that they’re already well underway with a bombing plot. And then it becomes something familiar, yet altogether different, as these subversives tuck away inside a shopping mall and lose themselves in consumer culture – clothes, televisions, toys, and a stirring soundtrack that includes Blondie, Chief Keef, Shirley Bassey, Bonello’s menacing electronic score, and Willow Smith. Will they survive the unseen, encroaching authorities? Or, as the walls close in, will they even survive each other? NOCTURAMA forgoes easy answers.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

THE STORE is a film about the main Neiman-Marcus store and corporate headquarters in Dallas. The sequences in the film include the selection, presentation, marketing, pricing, advertising, and selling of a vast array of consumer products including designer clothes and furs, jewelry, perfumes, shoes, electronic products, sportswear, china and porcelain and many other goods. The internal management and organizational aspects of a large corporation are shown, i.e., sales meetings, development of marketing and advertising strategies, training, personnel practices and sales techniques.

Alexandra Lange, author of “Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall”, will introduce the screening of THE STORE on Sun, Aug 6!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

“Consider OBSERVE AND REPORT as spiritual exercise for your heart. Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen) is the security chief at Forest Ridge Mall. He is a foul-mouthed young man with a chip on his shoulder. Most of the people he regularly encounters on his job experience him as a socially awkward person who makes them feel uncomfortable. He always seems to say the wrong things. […] Test yourself with OBSERVE AND REPORT, a raucous comedy written and directed by Jody Hill. See if you can open your heart to the struggle of this obnoxious and violent young man with outlandish dreams of grandeur. Does he push any of your buttons? Pay attention to see if there are any moments in the film when you actually sympathize with Ronnie’s plight and his ungainly attempt to redeem himself after blowing everything. We live in a society that accentuates the negative and always looks for flaws in people. OBSERVE AND REPORT, if you want to live dangerously, can point you in another direction, looking for the good even in loathsome individuals.” –Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, SPIRITUALITY & PRACTICE

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

“Shot over several years in a variety of countries, CHAIN is a quietly corrosive portrait of two women drifting through a not-quite-locatable world of malls, corporate centers, and hotels. The film occupies the fertile ground where documentary and fiction converge, and registers a darkening emotional current in Cohen’s work, riding on a mix of yearning and skepticism, tenderness and outrage.” –Michael Almereyda

“I began the project by deciding to focus on the corporate and commercial landscapes that I had previously ‘framed out’ in my filmmaking, and to try to understand how these places were affecting the people within them. Wal-Mart, for example, opens a new store roughly every two days and yet the actual sites of such developments often take on a strange invisibility. Their presence can begin to seem inevitable and even natural. Rather than examining this phenomenon through the facts, experts, and arguments of the traditional documentary, CHAIN tells the stories of two women as this environment shapes their lives.” –Jem Cohen

Jem Cohen will be here in person for both screenings!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

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

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

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

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

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Distributed by Icarus Films.

CHEZ JOLIE COIFFURE takes place entirely inside a tiny salon in an underground shopping mall in the immigrant Brussels district of Matonge, where the charismatic, larger-than-life Sabine and her employees style extensions and glue on lashes while watching soaps, dishing romantic advice, sharing rumors about government programs to legalize migrants, and talking about life back home in West Africa. More than a place for women to get their hair done, Jolie Coiffure serves as a community hub for West African women. Fueled by endless cans of soda and cups of McDonald’s coffee, Sabine recruits for a tontine (an investment scheme paying each member a yearly annuity), organizes accommodation for a pregnant woman who lacks immigration papers, and, in quieter, more introspective moments, tells of her own harrowing journey to Belgium after working as a domestic under terrible conditions in Lebanon. Meanwhile, students and tourist groups walk past, pausing at the window and gawking. (At one point, Sabine urges Mbakam to turn her camera on them so they’ll go away; the director obliges.) CHEZ JOLIE COIFFURE is a highly revealing documentary, capturing the day-to-day lives and concerns of immigrant West African women in a space they can call their own.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Made by filmmaker – and then-NYU-film-school-student – Hugh Kinniburgh in 1983, MALL CITY began life as a two-birds-with-one-stone project: the shoot was intended to produce both a music video for Kinniburgh’s band’s song, “Mall City”, and a short documentary for his documentary film class. Shooting at the Roosevelt Field Mall in Long Island, Kinniburgh and his small crew conducted on-the-spot, spontaneous interviews with the shoppers and mall rats they encountered, resulting in a 20-minute film that incorporated a few of their interviews and concluded with the music video. More than 30 years later, Kinniburgh revisited his Betamax video footage, recognized its social-historical value, and fashioned an extended version of the film that made room for much more of the interview material. The result is an invaluable time-capsule of the heyday of a typical suburban East Coast shopping mall, which has found a new life on the internet.

“I wonder where all those people are now. The kids must be in their late 40’s and 50’s. The old folks are gone. Record stores, the music store, video arcades…all just memories now. I’m glad we captured an essential part of east coast American life.” – Hugh Kinniburgh

Filmmaker Hugh Kinniburgh will be here in person for all three screenings!

Preceded by:
Dan Graham DEATH BY CHOCOLATE: WEST EDMONTON SHOPPING MALL (1986-05) 2005, 8 min, digital
Produced by Graham at the Banff Centre in Canada, DEATH BY CHOCOLATE draws on nearly twenty years’ worth of footage shot in the bizarre yet familiar arena of the shopping mall. The resulting work provides a coldly beautiful view of mall culture: its architecture, its consumer public, and its unique aesthetic world. This work also provides a corollary to Graham’s own prodigious writings and projects on the public spaces of corporate capitalism.

Cheryl Donegan FLUSHING 2003, 4 min, digital
“Shot at the Flushing Mall in Queens, New York, Flushing is a tour of a mall that doesn’t live up to the glossy standards of typical American consumer palaces, but is thereby perhaps a better place to understand the yearnings for fantasy via retailing.” –Cheryl Donegan

Jaime Davidovich THE GAP 1982-83, 16 min, video
Created for the Long Beach Museum of Art and aired as an episode of Davidovich’s cable-access program “The Live! Show”, this evening-news-style “special” finds him field-reporting on the status of video art in Long Beach, California. Davidovich visits a local shopping mall to poll strangers of all stripes and analyze their attitudes about the future of electronic art.

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

An early documentary to portray the experiences of disabled people with compassion and complexity, Kazuo Hara’s searing debut is also one of the most unflinching films ever made about what it means to be an outsider. Produced in collaboration with the Green Lawn – a group of activists with cerebral palsy who work to raise awareness of the condition – GOODBYE CP blends jagged, shot-on-the-fly footage of the members’ seemingly Sisyphean struggle to take their message to the streets with raw, sometimes confrontational interviews in which they reveal the torment of living in a society cruelly indifferent to their existence. In making his subjects active participants in the film’s creation – a practice he would continue throughout his career – Hara powerfully asserts the humanity and agency of those who have long been denied both.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

NOCTURAMA is a terrorism thriller like no other, recalling Robert Bresson’s THE DEVIL, PROBABLY as much as it does George A. Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD. We first follow a group of tense, shifty adolescents as they prowl the streets and subways of Paris, learning through carefully delineated sequences that they’re already well underway with a bombing plot. And then it becomes something familiar, yet altogether different, as these subversives tuck away inside a shopping mall and lose themselves in consumer culture – clothes, televisions, toys, and a stirring soundtrack that includes Blondie, Chief Keef, Shirley Bassey, Bonello’s menacing electronic score, and Willow Smith. Will they survive the unseen, encroaching authorities? Or, as the walls close in, will they even survive each other? NOCTURAMA forgoes easy answers.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

When his wife, the outspoken feminist Miyuki Takeda, announced that she was leaving him in order to find herself, Kazuo Hara began this raw, intensely personal documentary as a way to both maintain a connection to the woman he still cared for and to make sense of their complex relationship. Granted at times shockingly intimate access to Miyuki’s personal life, Hara follows her wayward journey toward liberation as she explores her sexuality with both men and women, becomes pregnant and raises a family as a single mother, and grows increasingly disenchanted with the constraints of traditional social structures. A film as radical, complicated, and uncompromising as Miyuki herself, EXTREME PRIVATE EROS explodes the boundaries between subject and filmmaker to create a stunningly candid portrait of a woman willing to risk everything in her quest to live on her own terms.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Courtesy of Janus Films and the Royal Belgian Film Archive.

“The exuberant enchantments of the singing, dancing musical meet the feminist, formalist sensibility of Chantal Akerman in this uniquely captivating vision of love and survival in the age of late capitalism. Amid the consumerist wonderland of a shopping mall, a cadre of store employees bounce in and out of one another’s arms in a cycle of breakups, makeups, misunderstandings, and reunions, their romantic roundelay punctuated by imaginatively stylized production numbers. Working with frequent star Delphine Seyrig and a remarkable team of writers – who between them penned everything from JULES AND JIM to DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN – Akerman deftly balances the shiny pop pleasures of the genre with piercing variations on her signature themes, including a startlingly moving reflection on Jewish resilience and the legacy of the Holocaust.” –CRITERION

Preceded by:
Ayo Akingbade DEADPHANT 2020, 3 min, Super-8mm-to-digital
A portrait of Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre in South London, a weekend before it permanently closed, after 55 years, on September 24, 2020.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Made with a righteous political anger that anticipates the incendiary polemics of documentarians such as Michael Moore and Joshua Oppenheimer, Kazuo Hara’s most renowned film is a harrowing confrontation with one of Japanese history’s darkest chapters: the atrocities committed by the country’s military during World War II. Hara’s unforgettable subject and collaborator in THE EMPEROR’S NAKED ARMY MARCHES ON is Kenzo Okuzaki – a former soldier, convicted murderer, and defiantly anti-establishment agitator – who has made it his life’s mission to expose the crimes committed by Japanese officers against their own men while stationed in New Guinea. As the often-violent Okuzaki resorts to extreme measures in his crusade to find out the truth about what happened to two soldiers murdered by their commanders, what emerges is at once a shocking piece of investigative journalism, a courageous condemnation of militarism and blind obedience, and a riveting portrait of a single-minded man driven by a raw fury bordering on madness.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

A dying shopping mall outside of Birmingham, Alabama, its patrons, and its tenants embody the diversity and tenderness of American culture in a changing South.

“Hands down the best film about the death of a shopping mall. Our tour guide is a jack-of-all-trades former Australian zookeeper leading an elegiac tour deep into the bowels of an Alabama mall on life support. JASPER MALL is a lyrical, surprisingly deep, thoughtful investigation into the sclerotic heart of the American Dream. Quirky and inventive, it holds up to the best of Errol Morris. It is DEATH OF A SALESMAN retold as DEATH OF A SHOPPING MALL.” –Jeffrey Radice, SLAMDANCE

Preceded by:
Sam Green & Carrie Lozano UTOPIA, PART 3: THE WORLD’S LARGEST SHOPPING MALL 2009, 13 min, digital
Four years after its construction, the South China Mall outside of Guangzhou – the largest mall in the world – sits virtually empty of both shops and shoppers. But the South China Mall is considered too big to fail. So, employees line up for flag-raising ceremonies and pep talks about “brand building” before going off to meticulously maintain the deserted concourses.

Nathan S. Duncan GHOST MALL 2011, 7 min, digital
A truly ghostly portrait of a dying mall in Austin, Texas, GHOST MALL comprises images of the shopping center’s almost entirely depopulated spaces, whose emptiness is all the more haunting thanks to the soundtrack of audio recordings in which several people share memories of formative experiences that took place there.

Total running time: ca. 110 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

When fertilizer company Chisso began depositing wastewater with traces of mercury into the nearby sea, residents of Minimata town in Kyushu began to show symptoms of what came to be recognized as a dangerous disease. The first in a series that lasted until his death, Tsuchimoto’s socially committed documentary traces the townspeoples’ struggle to receive a formal apology from Chisso. The film still enrages audiences and provides crucial warnings against the perils of industrial pollution.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

David Hinton
DEAD DREAMS OF MONOCHROME MEN
1989, 50 min, 16mm-to-digital. With DV8 Physical Theatre.

&

Nico B. & Rozz Williams
PIG
1998, 23 min, 16mm-to-DCP

What better way to cool down in the sweltering August heat than by watching two chilling black-and-white gay serial killer flicks? First up is DEAD DREAMS OF MONOCHROME MEN (1989), a 51-minute wordless cinematic adaptation of a theatrical performance by the critically-lauded British DV8 Physical Theatre company, whose work uses dance, movement, and gesture to explore themes of masculinity, homosexuality, and violence in society. DEAD DREAMS is based on the case of gay serial killer and necrophile Dennis Nilsen, who killed and dismembered at least 12 men and boys in North London from 1978 to 1983. Both the original performance and film adaptation posit societal homophobia and repression as one of the root causes of Nilsen’s evil actions, vividly depicting the yearning, loneliness, lust, and anguish housed in the bars and clubs Nilsen frequented to find his victims. We’re following that with an even more unsettling short film, the notorious PIG (1998), a 23-minute experimental gay horror short directed by Dutch filmmaker Nico B. and the late, great gay rock icon Rozz Williams from the band Christian Death. PIG follows a man (played by Williams) who journeys to a house in the desert to meet another man for an S&M-tinged ritual murder. Released the same year Williams died by suicide, PIG mixes the melancholy surrealism of experimental classics like UN CHIEN ANDALOU and MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON with the gnarly pseudo-snuff film vibes of 1970s grindhouse titles like FACES OF DEATH and LAST HOUSE ON DEAD END STREET. Not for the faint of heart!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE!

Distributed by Grasshopper Film.

Completed in 2020, after more than a decade and a half of shooting and editing, renowned Japanese documentary filmmaker Kazuo Hara’s monumental documentary “MINAMATA Mandala” has yet to enjoy a New York City theatrical engagement, thanks to its emergence at the very beginning of the pandemic. In collaboration with Grasshopper Film, Anthology endeavors to remedy that fluke of timing by presenting several screenings of the new work, alongside both a selection of Hara’s earlier films and a special screening of Noriaki Tsuchimoto’s pioneering 1971 film, MINAMATA: THE VICTIMS AND THEIR WORLD (1971).

“An epic tale of struggle and commitment. Shot over 15 years, Hara Kazuo’s film documents the arduous legal and medical battles endured by the residents of Minamata, a city in southern Japan whose name has become synonymous with the infamous neurological disease. Sixty years since industrial wastewater from a chemical factory caused an outbreak of severe mercury poisoning, Minamata patients and their families continue to fight for legal recognition and compensation. Picking up where Noriaki Tsuchimoto left off with his own decades-long film series covering the issue, Kazuo Hara – considered his generation’s documentary master – displays headstrong patience and allegiance to his subjects, something that has become characteristic of his late-career period of prolific filmmaking. The monumental running time is more than warranted, as it gives space for the vibrant personalities of these committed fighters to shine through, showing them to be more than just victims.” –ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

“When I started to put together the team for HOW TO, I wanted to hire camera people & editors whose vision I really admired. This program showcases original work by a handful of crew members on the show who are all amazing artists in their own right.” –John Wilson

Nathan Truesdell WHEN THE LAPD BLOWS UP YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD (2022, 19 min, digital)
Tensions rise on a busy street as news organizations and local residents witness an extremely volatile situation turn into a literal powder keg.

Nellie Kluz THE SUNKEN SMILE (2019, 4 min, digital)
Self-contained, underwater, seasonal.

Nellie Kluz DD (2017, 3 min, digital)
A movie about one of my favorite restaurants.

Chris Maggio EVEN A BROKEN CLOCK IS RIGHT TWICE A DAY (2023, 14 min, digital)
Sometimes things that seem useless can be the most meaningful of all, even if only by accident.

Leia Jospé NO DELAY (2022, 4 min, digital)
Leia Jospé LET ME LUV U (2022, 3 min, digital)
Two music videos for songs by record producer and DJ Baauer.

Britni West TIRED MOONLIGHT (2015, 15-min excerpt from 76-min feature, Super-16mm-to-digital)
Every town has a post office, lovers, guns, switchblades, and beer. You just have to know where to look and when to look the other way. Pitting grand landscapes against dinners of fried chicken and the roar of V8 engines on Saturday nights, TIRED MOONLIGHT wanders through Solitaire games (always won), secrets lost in cavernous hearts, and the fifty miles of bad road that always gets you home.

LJ Frezza NOTHING (2014, 6.5 min, digital)
“Every shot from SEINFELD (1989-98) where nothing happens. A response to everyone I met in New York who said they’d love the city if only there weren’t so many people in it.” –LJ Frezza

LJ Frezza IS IT US? (2023, 6 min, digital)
“A freelance writer works on her column.” –LJ Frezza

Jess Pinkham PANOPTIJOHN (2023, ca. 15 min, digital)
A peek at John Wilson in production on HOW TO.

Assistant Editors of HOW TO WITH JOHN WILSON [AMERICAN BEAUTY à la John Wilson] (2023, 2.5 min, digital)
Courtesy of the Assistant Editors of HOW TO, an homage to an infamous moment from AMERICAN BEAUTY, John Wilson-style.

John Wilson MY MORNING WITH MAGIC MIKE (2023, ca. 9 min, digital)
A visit with the inimitable Mike Kuchar.

Total running time: ca. 105 min.

8/19 SOLD OUT!

8/24 SOLD OUT!

9/5 SOLD OUT!

**STANDBY LINE WILL FORM 1 HOUR PRIOR TO SCREENING TIME OUTSIDE THE FRONT DOORS**

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE!

Distributed by Grasshopper Film.

Completed in 2020, after more than a decade and a half of shooting and editing, renowned Japanese documentary filmmaker Kazuo Hara’s monumental documentary “MINAMATA Mandala” has yet to enjoy a New York City theatrical engagement, thanks to its emergence at the very beginning of the pandemic. In collaboration with Grasshopper Film, Anthology endeavors to remedy that fluke of timing by presenting several screenings of the new work, alongside both a selection of Hara’s earlier films and a special screening of Noriaki Tsuchimoto’s pioneering 1971 film, MINAMATA: THE VICTIMS AND THEIR WORLD (1971).

“An epic tale of struggle and commitment. Shot over 15 years, Hara Kazuo’s film documents the arduous legal and medical battles endured by the residents of Minamata, a city in southern Japan whose name has become synonymous with the infamous neurological disease. Sixty years since industrial wastewater from a chemical factory caused an outbreak of severe mercury poisoning, Minamata patients and their families continue to fight for legal recognition and compensation. Picking up where Noriaki Tsuchimoto left off with his own decades-long film series covering the issue, Kazuo Hara – considered his generation’s documentary master – displays headstrong patience and allegiance to his subjects, something that has become characteristic of his late-career period of prolific filmmaking. The monumental running time is more than warranted, as it gives space for the vibrant personalities of these committed fighters to shine through, showing them to be more than just victims.” –ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

“ANIMALICIOUS is a real gem from the golden era of 4x3 documentary. Mark Lewis has this amazing way of re-enacting horrific animal attacks with the real victims in a way that doesn’t feel pretentious like a lot of contemporary non-fiction films. The whole movie is really playful and never takes itself too seriously. I’ve paired it with a documentary I made in college called LOONER about a community of balloon fetishists I found in Binghamton. The film has a lot of sit-down interviews and I feel like there are formal similarities to ANIMALICIOUS.” –John Wilson

Mark Lewis
ANIMALICIOUS
1999, 52 min, digital
A film about fate, co-existence, vanity, justice, karma and forgiveness, ANIMALICOUS comprises six stories of people and the animals that shot them, fell on them, and generally caused mayhem of one sort or another. Filmed in Kentucky, Missouri, and England, ANIMALICOUS features a bomb-diving duck, a squirrel which thinks it’s landed on Normandy Beach, a hawk that could easily work for a hair growth pharmaceutical company, a parakeet, a turkey, a hungry snake, and one tiny little dog. It’s a funny but wry account of how animals can be a way of defining ourselves. In ANIMALICIOUS Lewis displays a genuine knack for uncovering the comic and quizzical relationships that exist between people and creatures great and small.

With:
John Wilson LOONER 2007, 13 min, digital
A short documentary about the veiled lives of balloon fetishists.

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

As a follow up to THE ENDLESS SUMMER, his groundbreaking, massively successful film about the evolving surf culture of the 1960s, director Bruce Brown turned his sights to a similarly specialized and under-documented subculture. In ON ANY SUNDAY, Brown was determined to capture the sport of motorcycling from his own unique perspective and lens. Along with his friends Steve McQueen, Malcolm Smith, and Mert Lawwill, Brown focused on the various disciplines of motorcycle racing, as well as the people and the community shaping it. From Mert Lawwill’s attempt to regain his Grand National #1 plate in dirt track and road racing, to Steve McQueen’s real-life weekend warrior racing in the desert and at the famed Elsinore Grand Prix, to Malcolm Smith’s other-worldly skills around the world at the International Six Days Trial, Baja racing, hill-climbing and trials, ON ANY SUNDAY is the quintessential motorcycle film.

“I first became a fan of Bruce Brown after watching THE ENDLESS SUMMER but after diving into his filmography, ON ANY SUNDAY quickly became my favorite of his. His narration is always really sweet and there are some great moments with Steve McQueen peppered throughout.” –John Wilson

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

INNOCENTS ABROAD takes a wry look at how Europeans and Americans stereotype each other, and also examines the validity of 20th-century-style, high-speed, mass tourism. It is a glimpse into an industry which is vital to the European economy, but which also takes a very real toll on the continent, both culturally and ecologically. The eclectic soundtrack includes Mozart, Bob Dylan, Sandy Denny, Jonathan Richman, and others.

“Les Blank filming a bunch of American tourists on a bus traveling around Europe. I feel like I don’t hear about this movie very often when people talk about his filmography, and it’s a rare feature-length project that deserves more attention.” –John Wilson

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

NYC PREMIERE!

An overview of the life and challenges of the late jazz great Bebo Valdés during his exile in Sweden, as seen through the eyes of his children, grandchildren, and friends, featuring many of his compositions and testimonials by Bebo himself.

Director Ricardo Bacallao in person!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Reflecting the fascination of a born-and-bred Bronx native with the “big skies” and extreme weather of the Great Plains, George Kuchar’s “Weather Diaries” were made during his annual vacations to the heartland, where he would stay in small, nondescript motel rooms, ostensibly waiting for tornados to materialize. In fact, the “Weather Diaries” encompass the immediate environment of the motels, the lives and habits of the people he encounters, George’s own loneliness, and his musings on things great and small. In WEATHER DIARY 5, a more socially-active addition to the series, we meet the natives and participate in the rituals of business and schooling and high hopes on the flatlands.

“I’ve watched the entire ‘Weather Diary’ series more times than I can count but number 5 has always been my favorite. Most of the editing seems to have been done in-camera which still baffles me. There’s even this one amazing scene when he’s getting a tour of a hair salon and instead of putting a music track over it in post-production, he actually carried around a tape player and made everyone scream over the Muzak playing in the room.” –John Wilson

With:
George Kuchar LOW LIGHT LIFE (1988, 15 min, video)
Shooting in low-light style, Kuchar documents his experiences with various underground filmmakers such as James Broughton and Ken Jacobs, then moves on to the other side of the Hollywood lifestyle to visit Nicholas Cage. Images of crowds and facial close-ups comprise this haunting tape.

George Kuchar AWARD (1992, 20 min, video)
A behind-the-scenes look at the man behind the trophy and the poisons that taint an otherwise jubilant jamboree.

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Made over the course of ten years, this epic work of activist cinema joins the citizens of Sennan, Osaka, as they embark on an unprecedented uphill legal battle to receive reparations from the government for exposing their community to the deadly toxins of the city’s asbestos factories. Through wrenching interviews with the victims whose lives have been shattered by the agonizing effects of asbestosis, SENNAN ASBESTOS DISASTER paints a damning portrait of how decades of negligence exacted a devastating human toll while revealing the ways in which the tragedy is deeply entwined with issues of class and anti-Korean discrimination. It’s also a galvanizing look at the power of collective action and what happens when ordinary people take on their own government – going up against an unfeeling, often maddeningly slow-moving bureaucracy in their unceasing fight for justice.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

“Shot in 1992 during the contested presidential election between George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, THE LAST PARTY feels uncannily auspicious from the retrospective lens of 2020. Directed by Mark Benjamin and Marc Levin, the documentary follows a young Robert Downey Jr. traversing a polarized America, navigating the waters of early nineties sociopolitical issues and their subsequent weaponization in lieu of the impending election.” –Eric Hehr, MAAK HAUS MAG

“Robert Downey Jr. is insufferable in this movie but it still manages to be one of the most beautiful documentaries I’ve ever seen. There are so many surprise cameos from 90s celebrities and the focal length is always really wide so you get all this amazing imagery on gorgeous film stock.” –John Wilson

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Rosa, a Holocaust survivor, is an octogenarian widow who has lived alone for more than 50 years in an apartment across from the United Nations. When an intruder breaks into her home, she takes him for a thief, a rapist, and then a Nazi agent. But he’s none of that.

Director Iván Acosta in person!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Kazuo Hara’s interest in iconoclastic figures living in opposition to mainstream society led him to begin work on A DEDICATED LIFE, an intimate, fly-on-the-wall portrait of the controversial writer Mitsuharu Inoue, a sometimes charming, sometimes combative, often frustrating novelist esteemed as one of postwar Japan’s literary lions. The project, however, soon spins off in unexpected directions, first when Inoue is diagnosed with terminal cancer, then when Hara begins to discover that the writer’s talents for fiction extend to his own life, the details of which he has been fabricating for decades. As the ailing author confronts his mortality and races to complete his final works, Hara begins digging into Inoue’s past in an attempt to separate the man from the myth, resulting in a unique, layered portrait of a complex figure whose very life was an extension of his art.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

“OVERNIGHT tells a riches-to-rags story, like ‘Project Greenlight’ played in reverse. ‘Greenlight,’ you will recall, is the Miramax contest to choose and produce one screenplay every year by a hopeful first-time filmmaker. In OVERNIGHT, the director starts out with a contract and money from Miramax, and works his way back to no contract, no film, and no money. Call it ‘Project Red Light.’” –Roger Ebert

“Any time I feel too cocky about anything during production I think of this movie and make a reminder to second guess myself. It’s a cautionary tale about creative hubris, in which the director of THE BOONDOCK SAINTS is so convinced of his own excellence that he eventually capsizes all his personal and professional relationships in pursuit of a mediocre action movie. It does weirdly become one of the first anti-Harvey Weinstein pieces of media to come out before all the ‘MeToo’ stuff, though.” –John Wilson

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

This witty and original film – the filmic counterpart to Whyte’s seminal book of the same name – is about the open spaces of cities and why some of them work for people while others don’t. Beginning at New York’s Seagram Plaza, one of the most used open areas in the city, the film proceeds to analyze why this space is so popular and how other urban oases, both in New York and elsewhere, measure up. Based on direct observation of what people actually do, the film presents a remarkably engaging and informative tour of the urban landscape and looks at how it can be made more hospitable to those who live in it.

“William Whyte is a legendary people watcher who likes to study the subtle ways public space is used. I think about this film constantly whenever I’m out shooting. It all feels very scientific but he has a little fun describing human behavior, like when he identifies the ‘girl watchers’ hanging out in a midtown plaza. My favorite part is when he studies the way that people use chairs.” –John Wilson

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

When his wife, the outspoken feminist Miyuki Takeda, announced that she was leaving him in order to find herself, Kazuo Hara began this raw, intensely personal documentary as a way to both maintain a connection to the woman he still cared for and to make sense of their complex relationship. Granted at times shockingly intimate access to Miyuki’s personal life, Hara follows her wayward journey toward liberation as she explores her sexuality with both men and women, becomes pregnant and raises a family as a single mother, and grows increasingly disenchanted with the constraints of traditional social structures. A film as radical, complicated, and uncompromising as Miyuki herself, EXTREME PRIVATE EROS explodes the boundaries between subject and filmmaker to create a stunningly candid portrait of a woman willing to risk everything in her quest to live on her own terms.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

“ANIMALICIOUS is a real gem from the golden era of 4x3 documentary. Mark Lewis has this amazing way of re-enacting horrific animal attacks with the real victims in a way that doesn’t feel pretentious like a lot of contemporary non-fiction films. The whole movie is really playful and never takes itself too seriously. I’ve paired it with a documentary I made in college called LOONER about a community of balloon fetishists I found in Binghamton. The film has a lot of sit-down interviews and I feel like there are formal similarities to ANIMALICIOUS.” –John Wilson

Mark Lewis
ANIMALICIOUS
1999, 52 min, digital
A film about fate, co-existence, vanity, justice, karma and forgiveness, ANIMALICOUS comprises six stories of people and the animals that shot them, fell on them, and generally caused mayhem of one sort or another. Filmed in Kentucky, Missouri, and England, ANIMALICOUS features a bomb-diving duck, a squirrel which thinks it’s landed on Normandy Beach, a hawk that could easily work for a hair growth pharmaceutical company, a parakeet, a turkey, a hungry snake, and one tiny little dog. It’s a funny but wry account of how animals can be a way of defining ourselves. In ANIMALICIOUS Lewis displays a genuine knack for uncovering the comic and quizzical relationships that exist between people and creatures great and small.

With:
John Wilson LOONER 2007, 13 min, digital
A short documentary about the veiled lives of balloon fetishists.

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

“When I started to put together the team for HOW TO, I wanted to hire camera people & editors whose vision I really admired. This program showcases original work by a handful of crew members on the show who are all amazing artists in their own right.” –John Wilson

Nathan Truesdell WHEN THE LAPD BLOWS UP YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD (2022, 19 min, digital)
Tensions rise on a busy street as news organizations and local residents witness an extremely volatile situation turn into a literal powder keg.

Nellie Kluz THE SUNKEN SMILE (2019, 4 min, digital)
Self-contained, underwater, seasonal.

Nellie Kluz DD (2017, 3 min, digital)
A movie about one of my favorite restaurants.

Chris Maggio EVEN A BROKEN CLOCK IS RIGHT TWICE A DAY (2023, 14 min, digital)
Sometimes things that seem useless can be the most meaningful of all, even if only by accident.

Leia Jospé NO DELAY (2022, 4 min, digital)
Leia Jospé LET ME LUV U (2022, 3 min, digital)
Two music videos for songs by record producer and DJ Baauer.

Britni West TIRED MOONLIGHT (2015, 15-min excerpt from 76-min feature, Super-16mm-to-digital)
Every town has a post office, lovers, guns, switchblades, and beer. You just have to know where to look and when to look the other way. Pitting grand landscapes against dinners of fried chicken and the roar of V8 engines on Saturday nights, TIRED MOONLIGHT wanders through Solitaire games (always won), secrets lost in cavernous hearts, and the fifty miles of bad road that always gets you home.

LJ Frezza NOTHING (2014, 6.5 min, digital)
“Every shot from SEINFELD (1989-98) where nothing happens. A response to everyone I met in New York who said they’d love the city if only there weren’t so many people in it.” –LJ Frezza

LJ Frezza IS IT US? (2023, 6 min, digital)
“A freelance writer works on her column.” –LJ Frezza

Jess Pinkham PANOPTIJOHN (2023, ca. 15 min, digital)
A peek at John Wilson in production on HOW TO.

Assistant Editors of HOW TO WITH JOHN WILSON [AMERICAN BEAUTY à la John Wilson] (2023, 2.5 min, digital)
Courtesy of the Assistant Editors of HOW TO, an homage to an infamous moment from AMERICAN BEAUTY, John Wilson-style.

John Wilson MY MORNING WITH MAGIC MIKE (2023, ca. 9 min, digital)
A visit with the inimitable Mike Kuchar.

Total running time: ca. 105 min.

8/19 SOLD OUT!

8/24 SOLD OUT!

9/5 SOLD OUT!

**STANDBY LINE WILL FORM 1 HOUR PRIOR TO SCREENING TIME OUTSIDE THE FRONT DOORS**

Kazuo Hara’s interest in iconoclastic figures living in opposition to mainstream society led him to begin work on A DEDICATED LIFE, an intimate, fly-on-the-wall portrait of the controversial writer Mitsuharu Inoue, a sometimes charming, sometimes combative, often frustrating novelist esteemed as one of postwar Japan’s literary lions. The project, however, soon spins off in unexpected directions, first when Inoue is diagnosed with terminal cancer, then when Hara begins to discover that the writer’s talents for fiction extend to his own life, the details of which he has been fabricating for decades. As the ailing author confronts his mortality and races to complete his final works, Hara begins digging into Inoue’s past in an attempt to separate the man from the myth, resulting in a unique, layered portrait of a complex figure whose very life was an extension of his art.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

As a follow up to THE ENDLESS SUMMER, his groundbreaking, massively successful film about the evolving surf culture of the 1960s, director Bruce Brown turned his sights to a similarly specialized and under-documented subculture. In ON ANY SUNDAY, Brown was determined to capture the sport of motorcycling from his own unique perspective and lens. Along with his friends Steve McQueen, Malcolm Smith, and Mert Lawwill, Brown focused on the various disciplines of motorcycle racing, as well as the people and the community shaping it. From Mert Lawwill’s attempt to regain his Grand National #1 plate in dirt track and road racing, to Steve McQueen’s real-life weekend warrior racing in the desert and at the famed Elsinore Grand Prix, to Malcolm Smith’s other-worldly skills around the world at the International Six Days Trial, Baja racing, hill-climbing and trials, ON ANY SUNDAY is the quintessential motorcycle film.

“I first became a fan of Bruce Brown after watching THE ENDLESS SUMMER but after diving into his filmography, ON ANY SUNDAY quickly became my favorite of his. His narration is always really sweet and there are some great moments with Steve McQueen peppered throughout.” –John Wilson

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

An early documentary to portray the experiences of disabled people with compassion and complexity, Kazuo Hara’s searing debut is also one of the most unflinching films ever made about what it means to be an outsider. Produced in collaboration with the Green Lawn – a group of activists with cerebral palsy who work to raise awareness of the condition – GOODBYE CP blends jagged, shot-on-the-fly footage of the members’ seemingly Sisyphean struggle to take their message to the streets with raw, sometimes confrontational interviews in which they reveal the torment of living in a society cruelly indifferent to their existence. In making his subjects active participants in the film’s creation – a practice he would continue throughout his career – Hara powerfully asserts the humanity and agency of those who have long been denied both.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

INNOCENTS ABROAD takes a wry look at how Europeans and Americans stereotype each other, and also examines the validity of 20th-century-style, high-speed, mass tourism. It is a glimpse into an industry which is vital to the European economy, but which also takes a very real toll on the continent, both culturally and ecologically. The eclectic soundtrack includes Mozart, Bob Dylan, Sandy Denny, Jonathan Richman, and others.

“Les Blank filming a bunch of American tourists on a bus traveling around Europe. I feel like I don’t hear about this movie very often when people talk about his filmography, and it’s a rare feature-length project that deserves more attention.” –John Wilson

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Made with a righteous political anger that anticipates the incendiary polemics of documentarians such as Michael Moore and Joshua Oppenheimer, Kazuo Hara’s most renowned film is a harrowing confrontation with one of Japanese history’s darkest chapters: the atrocities committed by the country’s military during World War II. Hara’s unforgettable subject and collaborator in THE EMPEROR’S NAKED ARMY MARCHES ON is Kenzo Okuzaki – a former soldier, convicted murderer, and defiantly anti-establishment agitator – who has made it his life’s mission to expose the crimes committed by Japanese officers against their own men while stationed in New Guinea. As the often-violent Okuzaki resorts to extreme measures in his crusade to find out the truth about what happened to two soldiers murdered by their commanders, what emerges is at once a shocking piece of investigative journalism, a courageous condemnation of militarism and blind obedience, and a riveting portrait of a single-minded man driven by a raw fury bordering on madness.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

“OVERNIGHT tells a riches-to-rags story, like ‘Project Greenlight’ played in reverse. ‘Greenlight,’ you will recall, is the Miramax contest to choose and produce one screenplay every year by a hopeful first-time filmmaker. In OVERNIGHT, the director starts out with a contract and money from Miramax, and works his way back to no contract, no film, and no money. Call it ‘Project Red Light.’” –Roger Ebert

“Any time I feel too cocky about anything during production I think of this movie and make a reminder to second guess myself. It’s a cautionary tale about creative hubris, in which the director of THE BOONDOCK SAINTS is so convinced of his own excellence that he eventually capsizes all his personal and professional relationships in pursuit of a mediocre action movie. It does weirdly become one of the first anti-Harvey Weinstein pieces of media to come out before all the ‘MeToo’ stuff, though.” –John Wilson

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

“Set against the backdrop of Japan’s cultural and political upheaval throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, THE MANY FACES OF CHIKA is an unconventional and evocative drama that charts the life of an enigmatic woman through her relationships. Sensuous and dreamlike, the film presents the single character of Chika through four different actresses (Takami Yoshimoto, Makiko Watanabe, Kumija Kim, Kaori Momoi), an experimental narrative device that suggests the various ways she is perceived by those who loved her as well as Chika’s changing inner life. Scripted/produced by Sachiko Kobayashi and directed by Kazuo Hara, THE FACES OF CHIKA is the documentarian duo’s first and only foray into narrative feature filmmaking and an often overlooked yet no less essential work within their oeuvre.” –JAPAN SOCIETY

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

“Kazuo Hara follows SENNAN ASBESTOS DISASTER with another epic project involving groups of ordinary citizens who band together to address injustice in contemporary Japan. Taking the newly instated calendar era name Reiwa (‘beautiful harmony’), actor-turned-politician Taro Yamamoto formed the Reiwa Shinsengumi (‘new squad’) party just three months before the July 2019 Japanese House of Councillors election, offering an ambitious leftist platform and staging jubilant political demonstrations with music and horses. Hara follows the party’s diverse slate of candidates including transgender Tokyo University professor Ayumi Yasutomi and disabled politicians Yasuhiko Funago and Eiko Kimura as they interrupt rightwing status quo and widespread political apathy. A project proposed to Hara by Yasutomi in the lead-up to her unprecedented political campaign, REIWA UPRISING is the first and only project completed by Hara without his partner Sachiko Kobayashi.” –JAPAN SOCIETY

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Reflecting the fascination of a born-and-bred Bronx native with the “big skies” and extreme weather of the Great Plains, George Kuchar’s “Weather Diaries” were made during his annual vacations to the heartland, where he would stay in small, nondescript motel rooms, ostensibly waiting for tornados to materialize. In fact, the “Weather Diaries” encompass the immediate environment of the motels, the lives and habits of the people he encounters, George’s own loneliness, and his musings on things great and small. In WEATHER DIARY 5, a more socially-active addition to the series, we meet the natives and participate in the rituals of business and schooling and high hopes on the flatlands.

“I’ve watched the entire ‘Weather Diary’ series more times than I can count but number 5 has always been my favorite. Most of the editing seems to have been done in-camera which still baffles me. There’s even this one amazing scene when he’s getting a tour of a hair salon and instead of putting a music track over it in post-production, he actually carried around a tape player and made everyone scream over the Muzak playing in the room.” –John Wilson

With:
George Kuchar LOW LIGHT LIFE (1988, 15 min, video)
Shooting in low-light style, Kuchar documents his experiences with various underground filmmakers such as James Broughton and Ken Jacobs, then moves on to the other side of the Hollywood lifestyle to visit Nicholas Cage. Images of crowds and facial close-ups comprise this haunting tape.

George Kuchar AWARD (1992, 20 min, video)
A behind-the-scenes look at the man behind the trophy and the poisons that taint an otherwise jubilant jamboree.

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

“Shot in 1992 during the contested presidential election between George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, THE LAST PARTY feels uncannily auspicious from the retrospective lens of 2020. Directed by Mark Benjamin and Marc Levin, the documentary follows a young Robert Downey Jr. traversing a polarized America, navigating the waters of early nineties sociopolitical issues and their subsequent weaponization in lieu of the impending election.” –Eric Hehr, MAAK HAUS MAG

“Robert Downey Jr. is insufferable in this movie but it still manages to be one of the most beautiful documentaries I’ve ever seen. There are so many surprise cameos from 90s celebrities and the focal length is always really wide so you get all this amazing imagery on gorgeous film stock.” –John Wilson

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE!

Distributed by Grasshopper Film.

Completed in 2020, after more than a decade and a half of shooting and editing, renowned Japanese documentary filmmaker Kazuo Hara’s monumental documentary “MINAMATA Mandala” has yet to enjoy a New York City theatrical engagement, thanks to its emergence at the very beginning of the pandemic. In collaboration with Grasshopper Film, Anthology endeavors to remedy that fluke of timing by presenting several screenings of the new work, alongside both a selection of Hara’s earlier films and a special screening of Noriaki Tsuchimoto’s pioneering 1971 film, MINAMATA: THE VICTIMS AND THEIR WORLD (1971).

“An epic tale of struggle and commitment. Shot over 15 years, Hara Kazuo’s film documents the arduous legal and medical battles endured by the residents of Minamata, a city in southern Japan whose name has become synonymous with the infamous neurological disease. Sixty years since industrial wastewater from a chemical factory caused an outbreak of severe mercury poisoning, Minamata patients and their families continue to fight for legal recognition and compensation. Picking up where Noriaki Tsuchimoto left off with his own decades-long film series covering the issue, Kazuo Hara – considered his generation’s documentary master – displays headstrong patience and allegiance to his subjects, something that has become characteristic of his late-career period of prolific filmmaking. The monumental running time is more than warranted, as it gives space for the vibrant personalities of these committed fighters to shine through, showing them to be more than just victims.” –ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

This witty and original film – the filmic counterpart to Whyte’s seminal book of the same name – is about the open spaces of cities and why some of them work for people while others don’t. Beginning at New York’s Seagram Plaza, one of the most used open areas in the city, the film proceeds to analyze why this space is so popular and how other urban oases, both in New York and elsewhere, measure up. Based on direct observation of what people actually do, the film presents a remarkably engaging and informative tour of the urban landscape and looks at how it can be made more hospitable to those who live in it.

“William Whyte is a legendary people watcher who likes to study the subtle ways public space is used. I think about this film constantly whenever I’m out shooting. It all feels very scientific but he has a little fun describing human behavior, like when he identifies the ‘girl watchers’ hanging out in a midtown plaza. My favorite part is when he studies the way that people use chairs.” –John Wilson

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

As a follow up to THE ENDLESS SUMMER, his groundbreaking, massively successful film about the evolving surf culture of the 1960s, director Bruce Brown turned his sights to a similarly specialized and under-documented subculture. In ON ANY SUNDAY, Brown was determined to capture the sport of motorcycling from his own unique perspective and lens. Along with his friends Steve McQueen, Malcolm Smith, and Mert Lawwill, Brown focused on the various disciplines of motorcycle racing, as well as the people and the community shaping it. From Mert Lawwill’s attempt to regain his Grand National #1 plate in dirt track and road racing, to Steve McQueen’s real-life weekend warrior racing in the desert and at the famed Elsinore Grand Prix, to Malcolm Smith’s other-worldly skills around the world at the International Six Days Trial, Baja racing, hill-climbing and trials, ON ANY SUNDAY is the quintessential motorcycle film.

“I first became a fan of Bruce Brown after watching THE ENDLESS SUMMER but after diving into his filmography, ON ANY SUNDAY quickly became my favorite of his. His narration is always really sweet and there are some great moments with Steve McQueen peppered throughout.” –John Wilson

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

“OVERNIGHT tells a riches-to-rags story, like ‘Project Greenlight’ played in reverse. ‘Greenlight,’ you will recall, is the Miramax contest to choose and produce one screenplay every year by a hopeful first-time filmmaker. In OVERNIGHT, the director starts out with a contract and money from Miramax, and works his way back to no contract, no film, and no money. Call it ‘Project Red Light.’” –Roger Ebert

“Any time I feel too cocky about anything during production I think of this movie and make a reminder to second guess myself. It’s a cautionary tale about creative hubris, in which the director of THE BOONDOCK SAINTS is so convinced of his own excellence that he eventually capsizes all his personal and professional relationships in pursuit of a mediocre action movie. It does weirdly become one of the first anti-Harvey Weinstein pieces of media to come out before all the ‘MeToo’ stuff, though.” –John Wilson

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

“ANIMALICIOUS is a real gem from the golden era of 4x3 documentary. Mark Lewis has this amazing way of re-enacting horrific animal attacks with the real victims in a way that doesn’t feel pretentious like a lot of contemporary non-fiction films. The whole movie is really playful and never takes itself too seriously. I’ve paired it with a documentary I made in college called LOONER about a community of balloon fetishists I found in Binghamton. The film has a lot of sit-down interviews and I feel like there are formal similarities to ANIMALICIOUS.” –John Wilson

Mark Lewis
ANIMALICIOUS
1999, 52 min, digital
A film about fate, co-existence, vanity, justice, karma and forgiveness, ANIMALICOUS comprises six stories of people and the animals that shot them, fell on them, and generally caused mayhem of one sort or another. Filmed in Kentucky, Missouri, and England, ANIMALICOUS features a bomb-diving duck, a squirrel which thinks it’s landed on Normandy Beach, a hawk that could easily work for a hair growth pharmaceutical company, a parakeet, a turkey, a hungry snake, and one tiny little dog. It’s a funny but wry account of how animals can be a way of defining ourselves. In ANIMALICIOUS Lewis displays a genuine knack for uncovering the comic and quizzical relationships that exist between people and creatures great and small.

With:
John Wilson LOONER 2007, 13 min, digital
A short documentary about the veiled lives of balloon fetishists.

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

PART 1

Distributed by Grasshopper Film.

Completed in 2020, after more than a decade and a half of shooting and editing, renowned Japanese documentary filmmaker Kazuo Hara’s monumental documentary “MINAMATA Mandala” has yet to enjoy a New York City theatrical engagement, thanks to its emergence at the very beginning of the pandemic. In collaboration with Grasshopper Film, Anthology endeavors to remedy that fluke of timing by presenting several screenings of the new work, alongside both a selection of Hara’s earlier films and a special screening of Noriaki Tsuchimoto’s pioneering 1971 film, MINAMATA: THE VICTIMS AND THEIR WORLD (1971).

“An epic tale of struggle and commitment. Shot over 15 years, Hara Kazuo’s film documents the arduous legal and medical battles endured by the residents of Minamata, a city in southern Japan whose name has become synonymous with the infamous neurological disease. Sixty years since industrial wastewater from a chemical factory caused an outbreak of severe mercury poisoning, Minamata patients and their families continue to fight for legal recognition and compensation. Picking up where Noriaki Tsuchimoto left off with his own decades-long film series covering the issue, Kazuo Hara – considered his generation’s documentary master – displays headstrong patience and allegiance to his subjects, something that has become characteristic of his late-career period of prolific filmmaking. The monumental running time is more than warranted, as it gives space for the vibrant personalities of these committed fighters to shine through, showing them to be more than just victims.” –ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

INNOCENTS ABROAD takes a wry look at how Europeans and Americans stereotype each other, and also examines the validity of 20th-century-style, high-speed, mass tourism. It is a glimpse into an industry which is vital to the European economy, but which also takes a very real toll on the continent, both culturally and ecologically. The eclectic soundtrack includes Mozart, Bob Dylan, Sandy Denny, Jonathan Richman, and others.

“Les Blank filming a bunch of American tourists on a bus traveling around Europe. I feel like I don’t hear about this movie very often when people talk about his filmography, and it’s a rare feature-length project that deserves more attention.” –John Wilson

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

“Shot in 1992 during the contested presidential election between George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, THE LAST PARTY feels uncannily auspicious from the retrospective lens of 2020. Directed by Mark Benjamin and Marc Levin, the documentary follows a young Robert Downey Jr. traversing a polarized America, navigating the waters of early nineties sociopolitical issues and their subsequent weaponization in lieu of the impending election.” –Eric Hehr, MAAK HAUS MAG

“Robert Downey Jr. is insufferable in this movie but it still manages to be one of the most beautiful documentaries I’ve ever seen. There are so many surprise cameos from 90s celebrities and the focal length is always really wide so you get all this amazing imagery on gorgeous film stock.” –John Wilson

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

PART 2

Distributed by Grasshopper Film.

Completed in 2020, after more than a decade and a half of shooting and editing, renowned Japanese documentary filmmaker Kazuo Hara’s monumental documentary “MINAMATA Mandala” has yet to enjoy a New York City theatrical engagement, thanks to its emergence at the very beginning of the pandemic. In collaboration with Grasshopper Film, Anthology endeavors to remedy that fluke of timing by presenting several screenings of the new work, alongside both a selection of Hara’s earlier films and a special screening of Noriaki Tsuchimoto’s pioneering 1971 film, MINAMATA: THE VICTIMS AND THEIR WORLD (1971).

“An epic tale of struggle and commitment. Shot over 15 years, Hara Kazuo’s film documents the arduous legal and medical battles endured by the residents of Minamata, a city in southern Japan whose name has become synonymous with the infamous neurological disease. Sixty years since industrial wastewater from a chemical factory caused an outbreak of severe mercury poisoning, Minamata patients and their families continue to fight for legal recognition and compensation. Picking up where Noriaki Tsuchimoto left off with his own decades-long film series covering the issue, Kazuo Hara – considered his generation’s documentary master – displays headstrong patience and allegiance to his subjects, something that has become characteristic of his late-career period of prolific filmmaking. The monumental running time is more than warranted, as it gives space for the vibrant personalities of these committed fighters to shine through, showing them to be more than just victims.” –ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

This witty and original film – the filmic counterpart to Whyte’s seminal book of the same name – is about the open spaces of cities and why some of them work for people while others don’t. Beginning at New York’s Seagram Plaza, one of the most used open areas in the city, the film proceeds to analyze why this space is so popular and how other urban oases, both in New York and elsewhere, measure up. Based on direct observation of what people actually do, the film presents a remarkably engaging and informative tour of the urban landscape and looks at how it can be made more hospitable to those who live in it.

“William Whyte is a legendary people watcher who likes to study the subtle ways public space is used. I think about this film constantly whenever I’m out shooting. It all feels very scientific but he has a little fun describing human behavior, like when he identifies the ‘girl watchers’ hanging out in a midtown plaza. My favorite part is when he studies the way that people use chairs.” –John Wilson

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

PART 3

Distributed by Grasshopper Film.

Completed in 2020, after more than a decade and a half of shooting and editing, renowned Japanese documentary filmmaker Kazuo Hara’s monumental documentary “MINAMATA Mandala” has yet to enjoy a New York City theatrical engagement, thanks to its emergence at the very beginning of the pandemic. In collaboration with Grasshopper Film, Anthology endeavors to remedy that fluke of timing by presenting several screenings of the new work, alongside both a selection of Hara’s earlier films and a special screening of Noriaki Tsuchimoto’s pioneering 1971 film, MINAMATA: THE VICTIMS AND THEIR WORLD (1971).

“An epic tale of struggle and commitment. Shot over 15 years, Hara Kazuo’s film documents the arduous legal and medical battles endured by the residents of Minamata, a city in southern Japan whose name has become synonymous with the infamous neurological disease. Sixty years since industrial wastewater from a chemical factory caused an outbreak of severe mercury poisoning, Minamata patients and their families continue to fight for legal recognition and compensation. Picking up where Noriaki Tsuchimoto left off with his own decades-long film series covering the issue, Kazuo Hara – considered his generation’s documentary master – displays headstrong patience and allegiance to his subjects, something that has become characteristic of his late-career period of prolific filmmaking. The monumental running time is more than warranted, as it gives space for the vibrant personalities of these committed fighters to shine through, showing them to be more than just victims.” –ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

First distributed by Mumia Abu-Jamal before his arrest and now nearing its 45th anniversary, MOVE: CONFRONTATION IN PHILADELPHIA (1980) comes to a New York City theater for the first time. The film charts the events in the summer of 1978 that resulted in the first siege by the Philadelphia police on the MOVE headquarters (an even more deadly and destructive siege would follow in 1985). Filmmakers Karen Pomer and Jane Mancini went to great lengths to expose the brutality that Philadelphia Police Commissioner, Frank Rizzo, inflicted on MOVE members Chuckie, Delbert, Janine, and Janet Africa, who survived only to serve nearly 40 years of collective prison sentences on falsified charges. These are some of the only recorded accounts that thoughtfully capture MOVE’s position toward (Black) self-determination, naturalism, and free nationalism. Co-director Karen Pomer will join us in person to introduce and answer questions following the screening.

This screening is guest-programmed by Melissa Lyde, founder of Alfreda’s Cinema. Launched in 2015, Alfreda’s Cinema is working towards becoming the only microcinema in Brooklyn to operate under the leadership of a Black woman with a mission to screen films that celebrate Black and non-Black people of color. For more info visit: www.instagram.com/alfredascinema/ 

Karen Pomer & Jane Mancini
MOVE: CONFRONTATION IN PHILADELPHIA
1980, 62 min, video
“The MOVE Organization is a family of committed revolutionaries, founded by John Africa in 1972. Life is their priority, and caring for life forms the core of their beliefs. ‘We know how threatening our message is to those in power and why they come down so hard on us. We expect it and we are prepared for it,’ said Africa. MOVE members survived two catastrophic attacks from the Philadelphia police within the span of 10 years, resulting in members – including children – being imprisoned and murdered. First-time filmmakers Karen Pomer and Jane Mancini risked their lives to record on the ground during the August 8, 1978, police siege of the MOVE home in Powelton Village. After that, they spent more than two and a half years researching and assembling this testimony.” –SHEFFIELD DOCFEST

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Made over the course of ten years, this epic work of activist cinema joins the citizens of Sennan, Osaka, as they embark on an unprecedented uphill legal battle to receive reparations from the government for exposing their community to the deadly toxins of the city’s asbestos factories. Through wrenching interviews with the victims whose lives have been shattered by the agonizing effects of asbestosis, SENNAN ASBESTOS DISASTER paints a damning portrait of how decades of negligence exacted a devastating human toll while revealing the ways in which the tragedy is deeply entwined with issues of class and anti-Korean discrimination. It’s also a galvanizing look at the power of collective action and what happens when ordinary people take on their own government – going up against an unfeeling, often maddeningly slow-moving bureaucracy in their unceasing fight for justice.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!