Anthology Film Archives

“SARRAOUNIA is a rare species of film in the history of African cinema. Although numerous projects existed that sought to celebrate African resistance to European colonial conquest, African cinema’s dependence on the political economy of its former colonizers has for the most part made this aspiration nearly impossible. The film owes much of its existence to Thomas Sankara, the former head of state of Burkina Faso who, upon learning of Hondo’s difficulties in Niger, offered to let him shoot the film in Burkino Faso and put technicians, actors and the Burkinabe army at his disposal. By adapting Abdoulaye Mamani’s eponymous book, Hondo chose to make an epic of one page of the great encyclopedia of African resistance against colonialism. Following the notorious 1884-85 Berlin conference, European countries engaged in a collective assault on the African continent in order to take over its lands and resources, thereby inaugurating the age of catastrophe. Headed for Lake Chad in Central Africa, the infamous and bloodthirsty Voulet Chanoine French military expedition, which is seeking to enact a French version of the British Cape-to-Cairo imperial fantasy, crosses paths with the indomitable and incomparable strategist Queen Sarraounia of the Azna, who bravely resists their incursion.” –Aboubakar Sanogo

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(WATANI, UN MONDE SANS MAL)

“Shot in black and white on a shoestring budget in a minimalist mode and with winks toward silent cinema and hip hop culture, WATANI was inspired by news of the daily humiliation of migrants and a general context of fear. The film contrasts the lives of two characters who lose their job the same day: Patrick Clement, a married bank clerk with two daughters and a wife now in a wheelchair following a terrorist attack, and Mamadou Sylla, an African immigrant and a father of two, who is a garbage collector. While the latter seeks employment in vain, the former drifts slowly into the hands of extremist right wing groups who attack and kill black and Arab migrants in the dark of the night. Symbolically rich, the film has important resonances with the longer history of France’s relationship to its former colonies, namely the famous October 17, 1961 massacre of Algerian migrants in Paris directed by the then police chief himself in reprisal against the FLN’s independence struggle. In this film, Hondo de-emphasizes speech and stresses the cine-discursive potential of the articulation of sound and image tracks, making this a genuine montage film and leaving it up to the spectator to make the necessary connections.” –Aboubakar Sanogo

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Med Hondo & Bernard Nantet
BALLADE AUX SOURCES [work print]
1965, 31 min, 16mm-to-DCP, no dialogue. Collection Ciné-Archives.
“BALLADE AUX SOURCES, Med Hondo’s first film, is a documentary about the journey of an African emigrant through his native land shortly after the independence of North Africa. This film allows us to glimpse the themes that are dear to Med Hondo: pan-Africanism and pre-colonial African history. It is presented as a ‘restoration in progress’ without sound.” –Annabelle Aventurin

Med Hondo
MY NEIGHBOURS / MES VOISINS
1971, 35 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles. Collection Ciné-Archives.
“MES VOISINS is in many ways a child of the cinéma vérité debates of the early 1960s, which foregrounded the use of synchronized sound and lightweight cameras to represent the real. The possibility of approaching the migrants and capturing their testimonies was predicated on that technology. As Hondo was a virulent critic of Jean Rouch, it is ironic that MES VOISINS embodied some of his techniques, such as the concept of the interactive camera, the foregrounding of the interview, and the notion that observation alone is not enough.” –Aboubakar Sanogo

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

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Special thanks to Ken & Flo Jacobs.

“Although a reworking of a theme that the comedians used quite frequently, SONS OF THE DESERT is a thoroughly fresh and delightful comedy, quite certainly the best and the subtlest of all their features. Straightforward slapstick is limited to a relatively few gags, and the humor derives principally from situations and characterizations. Flawlessly timed, with ruthless (and profitable) pruning of the footage allotted to any one gag, the film is a particularly felicitous collaboration between Laurel & Hardy and director William A. Seiter, a specialist in romantic comedy and human drama. Unexpectedly, he turns out to have been the ideal director for them, polishing their own comedy values with his own wit, charm and taste.” –William K. Everson, THE FILMS OF LAUREL AND HARDY

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This program focuses on Robert Breer and Kenneth Anger, as well as painter and animator Carmen D’Avino, whose once-celebrated films have fallen into relative obscurity. Breer lived in Paris from 1949-59, a period that saw him develop his highly distinctive and still unparalleled approach to experimental animation. Anger too was in Paris after the war, from 1950-53, during which time he began filming the project that would become RABBIT’S MOON. Like Breer, D’Avino’s art encompassed both painting and filmmaking. His films attracted a great deal of attention at the time, both within the avant-garde film scene and in the wider cultural sphere (PIANISSIMO and BACKGROUND were nominated for Academy Awards). Though his films were mostly created following his return to the U.S. in 1951, his experiences in France were formative. As part of this program, we’ll be screening two of his greatest early films, as well as 1973’s BACKGROUND, which explicitly explores his time in Paris.

Kenneth Anger
RABBIT’S MOON 1950-70, 15 min, 35mm. Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, with funding from the Film Foundation.

Robert Breer
RECREATION 1956, 1.5 min, 16mm-to-35mm
MOTION PICTURES NO. 1 1956, 4.5 min, 16mm, silent
JAMESTOWN BALOOS 1957, 6 min, 16mm-to-35mm
EYEWASH 1959, 3 min, 16mm-to-35mm
RECREATION, JAMESTOWN BALOOS, and EYEWASH were preserved by Anthology with generous support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Carmen D’Avino
THE ROOM 1959, 5 min, 16mm. Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.
PIANISSIMO 1963, 6 min, 35mm. Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.
BACKGROUND 1973, 19 min, 35mm. Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

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Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy
BALLET MÉCANIQUE (1924, 19 min, 35mm, silent. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
“The two fundamental works of the graphic cinema from the 1920s made without animation were Fernand Léger’s BALLET MÉCANIQUE and Marcel Duchamp’s ANEMIC CINEMA. By extending a metaphor from several of his paintings into film, Léger compared a universe of human actions and everyday objects to the functions of a machine.” –P. Adams Sitney, VISIONARY FILM

René Clair & Francis Picabia
ENTR’ACTE (1924, 22 min, 35mm)
One of the indisputable masterpieces of Dada cinema, ENTR’ACTE was created, as its title suggests, to function as a diversion in between the two acts of Francis Picabia and Erik Satie’s avant-garde ballet RELÂCHE.

Man Ray
LE RETOUR À LA RAISON (1923, 2 min, 16mm, silent)
ÉTOILE DE MER (1927, 13 min, 16mm, silent)
EMAK BAKIA (1927, 18 min, 35mm, silent)
“All the films I have made have been improvisations. I did not write scenarios. It was automatic cinema. I worked alone. My intention was to set in motion the compositions I made in photography. As for the camera, I use it to capture something I do not want to paint. But I am not interested in producing ‘beautiful photography’ for the cinema.” –Man Ray, “All the Films I Have Made” (1965)

Marcel Duchamp & Man Ray
ANEMIC CINEMA (1926, 7 min, 35mm, silent)
“Duchamp alternates head-on views of his illusion-producing roto-reliefs with similarly turned discs of words, elaborate French puns printed spirally, creating a fluctuation of illusory depth within a very narrow spectrum (from the slightly convex or slightly concave illusions) to the flat readings. In this, his only film, Duchamp typically crystallized the significance of the graphic film.” –P. Adams Sitney, VISIONARY FILM

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

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(LA MAUDITE GALETTE)

Roland and Berthe are a struggling working-class Montreal couple who receive a visit from Roland’s estranged and wealthy Uncle Arthur. After a $500 gift is ill-received, Berthe hatches a plan to take what she feels entitled to. She and Roland make a trip to Arthur’s remote country house to steal the rest of his fortune, but soon find that their lodger Ernest has trailed them and has plans for the money himself, causing what should have been a simple heist to spiral towards a cascade of shocking violence. Arcand’s first feature is a wily ride into Canuxploitation and established him as a force to be reckoned with. His protagonists, while conniving, commit their acts with none of the resourcefulness of the typical screen criminal. They seem guilty of only two things: desperation and the momentary lapse of judgment that comes along with it.

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“The few facts that are known about Maclaine are, at best, sketchy. He was a published poet, a sort of down and out San Francisco bohemian who later became one of the psychic casualties of that scene. His last years were spent at Sunnyacres, a state mental hospital in Fairfield, California. These films, along with Ron Rice’s, are clearly the most significant work to come out of the beat period.” –J.J. Murphy

All films preserved by Anthology Film Archives.

THE MAN WHO INVENTED GOLD (1957, 14 min, 16mm)
BEAT (1958, 6 min, 16mm)
SCOTCH HOP (1959, 5.5 min, 16mm)
THE END (1953, 35 min, 16mm)
Total running time: ca. 65 min.

[THE MAN WHO INVENTED GOLD, BEAT, and SCOTCH HOP are not part of the Essential Cinema collection, but they are included here as a special bonus.]

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(LA VIE RÊVÉE)

Considered the first publicly financed film by a female director in Quebec, DREAM LIFE tracks the romantic desires of two young Montreal women as they discuss their dreams, desires, and interior lives. Directed with a deep love of life and experimental curiosity, Dansereau’s film moves seamlessly from the young girls’ romantic fantasies to the deflating reality they’re forced to confront in the harsh light of day. A trip to the countryside leaves them contemplating the nature of love itself. A distinctive coming-of-age film, told with beauty and austerity, it is also a film that is prone to bouts of visual experimentation. The two women, lost in alienation, build an almost impossible closeness as they approach the anxiety of having to settle down. Maybe men are a disappointment, but with dreams this good what does it matter?

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Archival print courtesy of the Cinémathèque québécoise.

Charles Méthot is hopeless. His seedy bar has run out of patrons. His marriage is in ruins. Even the bartenders seem sick to death of the clientele, at one point exclaiming, “All men without women, get out!” In desperation, he turns to his pal Larry, who offers him a job as the night manager of the local cabaret, an equally seedy joint that at least has customers. He tries to settle down with a dancer at his new job, but she soon steals his car. Booze, hopelessness, and despair loom around every corner. 25-year-old André Forcier captures it all with respect, tenderness, and flair in his second feature, never turning his back on his characters even when they seem at risk of turning in on themselves.

André Forcier and his writing and producing partner Linda Pinet will be here for a Q&A on Tues, April 9! Following the screening and Q&A, there will be a reception in the lobby!

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“Since 1950 I have been keeping a film diary. I have been walking around with my Bolex and reacting to the immediate reality: situations, friends, New York, seasons of the year. On some days I shot ten frames, on others ten seconds, still on others ten minutes. Or I shot nothing. When one writes diaries, it’s a retrospective process: you sit down, you look back at your day, and you write it all down. To keep a film (camera) diary, is to react (with your camera) immediately, now, this instant: either you get it now, or you don’t get it at all.” –Jonas Mekas

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(L’EAU CHAUDE, L’EAU FRETTE)

Restored DCP courtesy of Éléphant / Collection Cinémathèque québécoise.

A provocateur whose work was as feverish as Scorsese’s and as grotesque as Fellini’s (minus the maestro’s oppressive presence), André Forcier was the province’s reigning enfant terrible, and an even more influential social critic at the time. Unlike Denys Arcand, Forcier was devoted to the working class, failed artists, and those on the extreme fringes. A PACEMAKER AND A SIDECAR is perhaps his most cohesive, liveliest piece, concentrating on the inhabitants of a run-down tenement in Montréal. The community is effectively run by a ruthless loan shark named Polo, who’s planning a birthday celebration for himself. Unfortunately for him, his enemies aren’t as cowed by him as he believes.

Preceded by:
Claude Jutra THE DEVIL’S TOY / ROULI-ROULANT 1966, 15 min, 35mm-to-digital
“Skateboarding is not a crime” – long before it was scrawled on the alleyway walls of the United States and the world, skateboarding was all the rage in Montreal, Quebec, until it was briefly banned. This short documentary explores that period of time, and provides a mesmerizing portrait of teenage life and rebellion in the suburbs of Montreal.

Total running time: ca. 115 min.

André Forcier and his writing and producing partner Linda Pinet will be in person on Tues & Wed, April 9 & 10!

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(LES BONS DÉBARRAS)

Archival print courtesy of the Cinémathèque québécoise.

Manon, a precocious but obsessive young woman, clings to her mother Michelle’s every breath in the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec. Her desperate need for affection takes a dark turn when Michelle reveals that she’s pregnant. Plagued by incessant poverty and the burden of caring for her mentally disabled brother Guy, Michelle is faced with a fever pitch of cataclysmic change that will sunder their family unit forever. Beautifully shot by renowned cinematographer Michel Brault, GOOD RIDDANCE adopts a palette of dark, shadowy hues, giving way to a patchwork of desolate early winter landscapes. With a screenplay by acclaimed but reclusive novelist Réjean Ducharme, the film is elevated by a searing lead performance by child actor Charlotte Laurier.

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Courtesy of Éléphant / Collection Cinémathèque québécoise.

In the chill of an impossibly cold winter night, a washed-up bowler, Bert, lives in the back of a 71’ Sedan outside Montreal’s Moonshine Bowling Alley. He awakens one night to find an albino stranger, François, nearly frozen to death in the snow. Bert revives him and they develop a friendship built upon shared insight and years of social neglect. François purports to be from the mythical land of Albinie, and summons Bert to revive his courage and his long-lost bowling dreams. The two bowl by day, and concoct schemes and well-meaning plans in the back of Bert’s car by night, forming a tender bond that breaks the monotonous desolation of their lives.

André Forcier and his writing and producing partner Linda Pinet will be in person on Wed & Thurs, April 10 & 11!

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(ELVIS GRATTON: LE KING DES KINGS)

Courtesy of Éléphant / Collection Cinémathèque québécoise.

This 1985 feature film packages together the three short films that introduced Quebec audiences to the character of Elvis (Bob) Gratton, who would become an inescapable part of Quebecois pop culture in the 1980s and 90s. Bob Gratton wants nothing more in life than to be a famous Elvis impersonator. When he learns of a local TV talent show contest whose prize is a cruise to the island of “Santa Banana”, he jumps at the opportunity. During the second film, an overweight Bob is summoned back to the spotlight by a talent agent, only to find that he has “outgrown” his Elvis suit in his middle age. In the third and final act, Bob has become the head of a media organization, manipulating and designing the news, and altering the public’s perspective and consumption at will. The film was made as a critique of the perceived political failure of the Quebec Federalists and their refusal to vote for independence. It satirized them as U.S.-loving, unsophisticated, and as dim-witted as Gratton himself.

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Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from The Film Foundation. Special thanks to Cineric, Inc., and Trackwise.

“The film consists of four parts. The first part contains some footage from my first years in America, 1949-52. The second part was shot in August 1971 in Lithuania. The third part is in Elmshorn, near Hamburg, where I spent eight months in a forced labor camp. The fourth part is in Vienna (1971) with Peter Kubelka, [Hermann] Nitsch, Annette Michelson, Ken Jacobs, etc. The film deals with home, memory, and culture.” –Jonas Mekas

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Courtesy of Éléphant / Collection Cinémathèque québécoise.

Structured as a triptych, Lancôt’s second feature follows two disillusioned teenagers who exist in a world of isolation and loneliness, ignored by their parents and the gentrifying city around them. In the first two chapters, they each make tentative advances towards genuine connection with two older men from the margins of Quebecois society. Soon, however, their good-natured plans sour under the weight of unseen forces (political and otherwise), and they are left vulnerable and unable to cope with the urban chaos surrounding them. The final third of the triptych concerns their star-crossed bond, and a pact that will lead them to their doom.

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(TRISTESSE MODÈLE RÉDUIT)

Jeannot, a young adult with Down’s Syndrome, lives a gentle, placid suburban life. His parents control his schedule with clockwork precision, and his only escape to the outside world is through his model car collection or by observing the frogs that end up in his swimming pool. His world is turned upside down by the arrival of a young caretaker, Pauline, who challenges his parents’ conviction that Jeannot cannot fend for himself. Riding the wave of freedom brought on by this break in his routine, Jeannot begins to assemble a plan and to build the courage to transcend the diminished expectations of his suffocating home life.

Preceded by:
Robert Morin & Lorraine Dufour THE MYSTERIOUS PAUL / LE MYSTÉRIEUX PAUL 1983, 26.5 min, digital
A desperate circus performer, Paul, seeks to continue his dangerous sword swallowing even after his doctors and his family warn him he’s closing in on death. Paul is an enigma, his need to perform seems to defy every convention, even his own death is a price easily paid to live out his soul’s one ambition. A performer at heart, his family struggles to keep him satisfied within a domestic existence, while the danger and thrill of the circus life beckons him from every dark hall.

Total running time: ca. 115 min.

Robert Morin will be here in person for a Q&A on Thurs, April 18! Following the screening and Q&A, there will be a reception in the lobby!

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ROBERT MORIN
“An unclassifiable filmmaker, Robert Morin influenced a whole generation of artists with his lucid vision of society and an approach guided by pure creative impulse. Since the 1970s, he has continued to multiply projects, to impose not only his style and his vision of the world, but a way of making cinema and video as an artist who does not accept any compromise. The imagination of this filmmaker fiercely committed to the heart of everyday life is inseparable from the critical view he casts on society. Morin is also known for having founded, with friends, the Montreal Videoscopic Production Cooperative (the Coop Video) in 1977, at a time when access to film production was almost impossible and financial support from the government was difficult to obtain.” –CINEMA QUEBECOIS

(QUICONQUE MEURT, MEURT À DOULEUR)

Vitriolic alienation and dismay course through the walls of an apartment full of desperate junkies in Morin’s unforgettable film. Making their last stand against the Montreal police, the denizens of the apartment have shot one police officer and are holding another hostage. Meanwhile, the crew of a reality TV show has become trapped alongside the junkies, and captures their final testaments and philosophical ramblings. For his bold experiment in meta-narrative, Morin mixes gonzo documentary and the struggle of real-life addicts to chilling and visceral effect.

“I didn’t want to make a film about dope as such, I wanted to make a political film. That is, how people who are into drugs see society. We put them on the margins, and from the margins, they have a very particular vision of society. That’s what interested me.” –Robert Morin

Robert Morin will be here in person for a Q&A on Fri, April 19!

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ROBERT MORIN
“An unclassifiable filmmaker, Robert Morin influenced a whole generation of artists with his lucid vision of society and an approach guided by pure creative impulse. Since the 1970s, he has continued to multiply projects, to impose not only his style and his vision of the world, but a way of making cinema and video as an artist who does not accept any compromise. The imagination of this filmmaker fiercely committed to the heart of everyday life is inseparable from the critical view he casts on society. Morin is also known for having founded, with friends, the Montreal Videoscopic Production Cooperative (the Coop Video) in 1977, at a time when access to film production was almost impossible and financial support from the government was difficult to obtain.” –CINEMA QUEBECOIS

Archival print courtesy of the Cinémathèque québécoise.

Charles Méthot is hopeless. His seedy bar has run out of patrons. His marriage is in ruins. Even the bartenders seem sick to death of the clientele, at one point exclaiming, “All men without women, get out!” In desperation, he turns to his pal Larry, who offers him a job as the night manager of the local cabaret, an equally seedy joint that at least has customers. He tries to settle down with a dancer at his new job, but she soon steals his car. Booze, hopelessness, and despair loom around every corner. 25-year-old André Forcier captures it all with respect, tenderness, and flair in his second feature, never turning his back on his characters even when they seem at risk of turning in on themselves.

André Forcier and his writing and producing partner Linda Pinet will be here for a Q&A on Tues, April 9! Following the screening and Q&A, there will be a reception in the lobby!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(L’EAU CHAUDE, L’EAU FRETTE)

Restored DCP courtesy of Éléphant / Collection Cinémathèque québécoise.

A provocateur whose work was as feverish as Scorsese’s and as grotesque as Fellini’s (minus the maestro’s oppressive presence), André Forcier was the province’s reigning enfant terrible, and an even more influential social critic at the time. Unlike Denys Arcand, Forcier was devoted to the working class, failed artists, and those on the extreme fringes. A PACEMAKER AND A SIDECAR is perhaps his most cohesive, liveliest piece, concentrating on the inhabitants of a run-down tenement in Montréal. The community is effectively run by a ruthless loan shark named Polo, who’s planning a birthday celebration for himself. Unfortunately for him, his enemies aren’t as cowed by him as he believes.

Preceded by:
Claude Jutra THE DEVIL’S TOY / ROULI-ROULANT 1966, 15 min, 35mm-to-digital
“Skateboarding is not a crime” – long before it was scrawled on the alleyway walls of the United States and the world, skateboarding was all the rage in Montreal, Quebec, until it was briefly banned. This short documentary explores that period of time, and provides a mesmerizing portrait of teenage life and rebellion in the suburbs of Montreal.

Total running time: ca. 115 min.

André Forcier and his writing and producing partner Linda Pinet will be in person on Tues & Wed, April 9 & 10!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(L’EAU CHAUDE, L’EAU FRETTE)

Restored DCP courtesy of Éléphant / Collection Cinémathèque québécoise.

A provocateur whose work was as feverish as Scorsese’s and as grotesque as Fellini’s (minus the maestro’s oppressive presence), André Forcier was the province’s reigning enfant terrible, and an even more influential social critic at the time. Unlike Denys Arcand, Forcier was devoted to the working class, failed artists, and those on the extreme fringes. A PACEMAKER AND A SIDECAR is perhaps his most cohesive, liveliest piece, concentrating on the inhabitants of a run-down tenement in Montréal. The community is effectively run by a ruthless loan shark named Polo, who’s planning a birthday celebration for himself. Unfortunately for him, his enemies aren’t as cowed by him as he believes.

Preceded by:
Claude Jutra THE DEVIL’S TOY / ROULI-ROULANT 1966, 15 min, 35mm-to-digital
“Skateboarding is not a crime” – long before it was scrawled on the alleyway walls of the United States and the world, skateboarding was all the rage in Montreal, Quebec, until it was briefly banned. This short documentary explores that period of time, and provides a mesmerizing portrait of teenage life and rebellion in the suburbs of Montreal.

Total running time: ca. 115 min.

André Forcier and his writing and producing partner Linda Pinet will be in person on Tues & Wed, April 9 & 10!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Courtesy of Éléphant / Collection Cinémathèque québécoise.

In the chill of an impossibly cold winter night, a washed-up bowler, Bert, lives in the back of a 71’ Sedan outside Montreal’s Moonshine Bowling Alley. He awakens one night to find an albino stranger, François, nearly frozen to death in the snow. Bert revives him and they develop a friendship built upon shared insight and years of social neglect. François purports to be from the mythical land of Albinie, and summons Bert to revive his courage and his long-lost bowling dreams. The two bowl by day, and concoct schemes and well-meaning plans in the back of Bert’s car by night, forming a tender bond that breaks the monotonous desolation of their lives.

André Forcier and his writing and producing partner Linda Pinet will be in person on Wed & Thurs, April 10 & 11!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

All films preserved by Anthology Film Archives.

GLIMPSE OF THE GARDEN (1957, 5 min, 16mm)
ARABESQUE FOR KENNETH ANGER (1961, 4 min, 16mm)
EYE MUSIC IN RED MAJOR (1961, 4 min, 16mm, silent)
NOTEBOOK (1962-63, 10 min, 16mm, silent)
GO! GO! GO! (1962-64, 12 min, 16mm, silent)
ANDY WARHOL (1965, 17 min, 16mm)
LIGHTS (1964-66, 7 min, 16mm, silent)

“Marie Menken pioneered the radical transformation of the handheld, somatic camera into a formal matrix that would underpin an entire work in the films she made between 1945 and 1965. […] The extraordinary cinematic style that I have been calling Menken’s somatic camera has been her most influential gift to the American avant-garde cinema. It is an embodiment of the Emersonian invention of a pictorial air, the spiritual emancipation automatically brought about by ‘certain mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position.’ It is also analogous to the equally Emersonian somatic theory of poesis Charles Olson was developing at nearly the same time: his emphasis on breath and proprioception corresponds to Menken’s identification of the camera with her body in motion and her cultivation of the respiratory and nervous agitation of the handheld camera even in its quietest moments.” –P. Adams Sitney, EYES UPSIDE DOWN

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

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Courtesy of Éléphant / Collection Cinémathèque québécoise.

In the chill of an impossibly cold winter night, a washed-up bowler, Bert, lives in the back of a 71’ Sedan outside Montreal’s Moonshine Bowling Alley. He awakens one night to find an albino stranger, François, nearly frozen to death in the snow. Bert revives him and they develop a friendship built upon shared insight and years of social neglect. François purports to be from the mythical land of Albinie, and summons Bert to revive his courage and his long-lost bowling dreams. The two bowl by day, and concoct schemes and well-meaning plans in the back of Bert’s car by night, forming a tender bond that breaks the monotonous desolation of their lives.

André Forcier and his writing and producing partner Linda Pinet will be in person on Wed & Thurs, April 10 & 11!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

THE GREAT BLONDINO
(1967, 42 min, 16mm. Preservation print, with thanks to the Academy Film Archive.)

“The original Blondino was a 19th-century tightrope artist who among other feats crossed Niagara Falls trundling a wheelbarrow. In this film, Nelson sees Blondino as a metaphor for those who still try. Too subtle to be allegorical, the picture is in the shape of a quixotic search in which the goal is the journey and the means is the end.” –MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

“It is…difficult to get at the rich visual texture that is the film’s most striking attribute. Long stretches are concerned with Blondino’s visions, dreams, and dreams within dreams. The film unfolds in brief recurring patterns of imagery. Even the more straightforward sections are dense with interpolated newsreel and TV commercial footage, visual gags, and homemade special effects. The net effect is funny, seamless, and elusive.” –J. Hoberman, “A Filmmakers Filming Monograph”

&

BLEU SHUT
(1970, 33 min, 16mm. Preservation print, with thanks to the Academy Film Archive.)

“Boat-name quizzes, dogs, cuts from Dreyer’s JOAN OF ARC in montage with a sultry whore, a car running up a ramp and crashing, pornography, a passionate embrace by a thirties hero and heroine; all somehow implicating Dreyer and Joan in the perverse synthesis of sex and technology. What’s happening here? Basically Nelson is leaving things unsaid.” –Leo Regan

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

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(LA MAUDITE GALETTE)

Roland and Berthe are a struggling working-class Montreal couple who receive a visit from Roland’s estranged and wealthy Uncle Arthur. After a $500 gift is ill-received, Berthe hatches a plan to take what she feels entitled to. She and Roland make a trip to Arthur’s remote country house to steal the rest of his fortune, but soon find that their lodger Ernest has trailed them and has plans for the money himself, causing what should have been a simple heist to spiral towards a cascade of shocking violence. Arcand’s first feature is a wily ride into Canuxploitation and established him as a force to be reckoned with. His protagonists, while conniving, commit their acts with none of the resourcefulness of the typical screen criminal. They seem guilty of only two things: desperation and the momentary lapse of judgment that comes along with it.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(TRISTESSE MODÈLE RÉDUIT)

Jeannot, a young adult with Down’s Syndrome, lives a gentle, placid suburban life. His parents control his schedule with clockwork precision, and his only escape to the outside world is through his model car collection or by observing the frogs that end up in his swimming pool. His world is turned upside down by the arrival of a young caretaker, Pauline, who challenges his parents’ conviction that Jeannot cannot fend for himself. Riding the wave of freedom brought on by this break in his routine, Jeannot begins to assemble a plan and to build the courage to transcend the diminished expectations of his suffocating home life.

Preceded by:
Robert Morin & Lorraine Dufour THE MYSTERIOUS PAUL / LE MYSTÉRIEUX PAUL 1983, 26.5 min, digital
A desperate circus performer, Paul, seeks to continue his dangerous sword swallowing even after his doctors and his family warn him he’s closing in on death. Paul is an enigma, his need to perform seems to defy every convention, even his own death is a price easily paid to live out his soul’s one ambition. A performer at heart, his family struggles to keep him satisfied within a domestic existence, while the danger and thrill of the circus life beckons him from every dark hall.

Total running time: ca. 115 min.

Robert Morin will be here in person for a Q&A on Thurs, April 18! Following the screening and Q&A, there will be a reception in the lobby!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

ROBERT MORIN
“An unclassifiable filmmaker, Robert Morin influenced a whole generation of artists with his lucid vision of society and an approach guided by pure creative impulse. Since the 1970s, he has continued to multiply projects, to impose not only his style and his vision of the world, but a way of making cinema and video as an artist who does not accept any compromise. The imagination of this filmmaker fiercely committed to the heart of everyday life is inseparable from the critical view he casts on society. Morin is also known for having founded, with friends, the Montreal Videoscopic Production Cooperative (the Coop Video) in 1977, at a time when access to film production was almost impossible and financial support from the government was difficult to obtain.” –CINEMA QUEBECOIS

Script by Carl Meyer based on the story “A Trip to Tilsit” by Herman Sudermann. Photographed by Charles Rosher and Karl Strauss. With George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor.

Murnau’s first American film is an allegory set in no particular time or place, about a man who is temporarily overruled by his passions, inflamed by the power of evil as personified by the city woman, and who finally returns to his senses and the orderly family life of the country. It is a virtuoso exercise representing the expressiveness of the silent film as it neared its end.

“SUNRISE becomes the lyrical culmination of a strain of German Expressionism that, married to American technology, could almost serve as a definition of the cinema. For the studio apparatus, enabling the creation of a spiritually and spatially unified microcosm, corresponds to the way the mind, in Expressionism, experiences reality – organizing it, imbuing it with personal associations, patterns, significances, until finally the only reality is a mental reality.” –Molly Haskell

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(LA MAUDITE GALETTE)

Roland and Berthe are a struggling working-class Montreal couple who receive a visit from Roland’s estranged and wealthy Uncle Arthur. After a $500 gift is ill-received, Berthe hatches a plan to take what she feels entitled to. She and Roland make a trip to Arthur’s remote country house to steal the rest of his fortune, but soon find that their lodger Ernest has trailed them and has plans for the money himself, causing what should have been a simple heist to spiral towards a cascade of shocking violence. Arcand’s first feature is a wily ride into Canuxploitation and established him as a force to be reckoned with. His protagonists, while conniving, commit their acts with none of the resourcefulness of the typical screen criminal. They seem guilty of only two things: desperation and the momentary lapse of judgment that comes along with it.

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All films in this program are b&w and silent.

THE CONJUROR / L’ILLUSIONISTE FIN DE SIÈCLE (1899, 1 min, 35mm)
TRIP TO THE MOON / VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE (1902, 12 min, 35mm)
THE PALACE OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS / LE PALAIS DES MILLE ET UNE NUITS (1905, 21 min, 35mm)
MERRY FROLICS OF SATAN / LES QUATRES CENT FARCES DU DIABLE (1906, 18 min, 35mm)
DELIRIUM IN A STUDIO / ALI BARBOUYOU ALI BOUF À L’HUILE (1907, 5 min, 35mm)

Magician, master of special effects, Méliès broke with the realistic (Lumière) mode of cinema and celebrated unlimited fantasy and artificiality (in its best sense).

“All early filmmakers were fascinated at first with the camera’s possibilities for tricks and illusionism. In fact, many were magicians before becoming filmmakers. But it was Georges Méliès, the French magician, producer of spectacles, actor, artist, and poet, who had the imagination and enthusiasm to fully exploit its marvels. His films are spectacles that amaze and delight. He created fantastic visions – all of them curious, some of them comic.” –MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Total running time: ca. 60 min.

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(QUICONQUE MEURT, MEURT À DOULEUR)

Vitriolic alienation and dismay course through the walls of an apartment full of desperate junkies in Morin’s unforgettable film. Making their last stand against the Montreal police, the denizens of the apartment have shot one police officer and are holding another hostage. Meanwhile, the crew of a reality TV show has become trapped alongside the junkies, and captures their final testaments and philosophical ramblings. For his bold experiment in meta-narrative, Morin mixes gonzo documentary and the struggle of real-life addicts to chilling and visceral effect.

“I didn’t want to make a film about dope as such, I wanted to make a political film. That is, how people who are into drugs see society. We put them on the margins, and from the margins, they have a very particular vision of society. That’s what interested me.” –Robert Morin

Robert Morin will be here in person for a Q&A on Fri, April 19!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

ROBERT MORIN
“An unclassifiable filmmaker, Robert Morin influenced a whole generation of artists with his lucid vision of society and an approach guided by pure creative impulse. Since the 1970s, he has continued to multiply projects, to impose not only his style and his vision of the world, but a way of making cinema and video as an artist who does not accept any compromise. The imagination of this filmmaker fiercely committed to the heart of everyday life is inseparable from the critical view he casts on society. Morin is also known for having founded, with friends, the Montreal Videoscopic Production Cooperative (the Coop Video) in 1977, at a time when access to film production was almost impossible and financial support from the government was difficult to obtain.” –CINEMA QUEBECOIS

Script by Carl Meyer based on the story “A Trip to Tilsit” by Herman Sudermann. Photographed by Charles Rosher and Karl Strauss. With George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor.

Murnau’s first American film is an allegory set in no particular time or place, about a man who is temporarily overruled by his passions, inflamed by the power of evil as personified by the city woman, and who finally returns to his senses and the orderly family life of the country. It is a virtuoso exercise representing the expressiveness of the silent film as it neared its end.

“SUNRISE becomes the lyrical culmination of a strain of German Expressionism that, married to American technology, could almost serve as a definition of the cinema. For the studio apparatus, enabling the creation of a spiritually and spatially unified microcosm, corresponds to the way the mind, in Expressionism, experiences reality – organizing it, imbuing it with personal associations, patterns, significances, until finally the only reality is a mental reality.” –Molly Haskell

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

(QUE DIEU BÉNISSE L’AMÉRIQUE)

The day is September 11, 2001. Maurice Ménard, a police inspector in Laval, Quebec has been tasked with finding a brutal killer of sex offenders who is still on the loose. The offenders have been posted on notices scattered through street corners and businesses of the residential neighborhood. Details emerge that the killer has been feeding his victims meals before ending their lives, but who is he and where will he strike next? A classic whodunnit begins to engulf the psychology of the town’s inhabitants but things are not what they seem. As far off images of September 11 play out on television screens throughout the film’s various locations – a pawn shop, an all you can eat buffet, etc. – the inhabitants of the town are strangely oblivious. Who is the real killer? Will he be discovered before time runs out? Morin probes the psychology of small-town life while critiquing the lack of empathy of his closest neighbors in the U.S. What is the result when individuality has gone mad?

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

ROBERT MORIN
“An unclassifiable filmmaker, Robert Morin influenced a whole generation of artists with his lucid vision of society and an approach guided by pure creative impulse. Since the 1970s, he has continued to multiply projects, to impose not only his style and his vision of the world, but a way of making cinema and video as an artist who does not accept any compromise. The imagination of this filmmaker fiercely committed to the heart of everyday life is inseparable from the critical view he casts on society. Morin is also known for having founded, with friends, the Montreal Videoscopic Production Cooperative (the Coop Video) in 1977, at a time when access to film production was almost impossible and financial support from the government was difficult to obtain.” –CINEMA QUEBECOIS

Robert Morin will be here in person on Fri, April 19!

Featuring the world premiere of films made locally with the support of MONO in Spring 2024.

This program will include films made through the educational initiatives of MONO NO AWARE, a cinema-arts nonprofit organization and film positive community working to promote connectivity through the cinematic experience. Established in 2007 and based in downtown Brooklyn, MONO NO AWARE presents monthly artist-in-person screenings, facilitates equipment rentals, operates a film distribution initiative, maintains wet & dry lab facilities, and hosts an annual exhibition for contemporary artists and international filmmakers whose work incorporates Super-8mm, 16mm, 35mm, or altered light projections.

For more info visit: www.mononoawarefilm.com

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

The films on this program are hand-tinted and silent.

A DIABOLICAL TENANT / UN LOCATAIRE DIABOLIQUE (1909, 8 min, 35mm)
THE CASCADE OF FIRE / LA CASCADE DE FEU (1904, 3 min, 35mm)
VOYAGE ACROSS THE IMPOSSIBLE / LE VOYAGE À TRAVERS L’IMPOSSIBLE (1904, 20 min, 35mm)
THE HUNCHBACK FAIRY / LA FÉE CARABOSSE (1906, 13 min, 35mm)

Total running time: ca. 50 min.

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Courtesy of Éléphant / Collection Cinémathèque québécoise.

Structured as a triptych, Lancôt’s second feature follows two disillusioned teenagers who exist in a world of isolation and loneliness, ignored by their parents and the gentrifying city around them. In the first two chapters, they each make tentative advances towards genuine connection with two older men from the margins of Quebecois society. Soon, however, their good-natured plans sour under the weight of unseen forces (political and otherwise), and they are left vulnerable and unable to cope with the urban chaos surrounding them. The final third of the triptych concerns their star-crossed bond, and a pact that will lead them to their doom.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

All films in this program are b&w and silent.

EXTRAORDINARY ILLUSIONS / ILLUSIONS FUNAMBULESQUES (1903, 3 min, 16mm)
THE ENCHANTED WELL / LE PUITS FANTASTIQUE (1903, 3 min, 16mm)
TUNNEL UNDER THE CHANNEL / LE TUNNEL SOUS LA MANCHE (1907, 25 min, 35mm)
THE APPARITION / LE REVENANT (1903, 3 min, 16mm)
THE DOCTOR’S SECRET / HYDROTHÉRAPIE FANTASTIQUE (1909, 11 min, 35mm)
SIGHTSEEING THROUGH WHISKY / PAUVRE JEAN OU LES MESAVENTURES D’UN BUVEUR (1909, 5 min, 35mm)

Total running time: ca. 55 min.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

(LA VIE RÊVÉE)

Considered the first publicly financed film by a female director in Quebec, DREAM LIFE tracks the romantic desires of two young Montreal women as they discuss their dreams, desires, and interior lives. Directed with a deep love of life and experimental curiosity, Dansereau’s film moves seamlessly from the young girls’ romantic fantasies to the deflating reality they’re forced to confront in the harsh light of day. A trip to the countryside leaves them contemplating the nature of love itself. A distinctive coming-of-age film, told with beauty and austerity, it is also a film that is prone to bouts of visual experimentation. The two women, lost in alienation, build an almost impossible closeness as they approach the anxiety of having to settle down. Maybe men are a disappointment, but with dreams this good what does it matter?

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Courtesy of the Artist and The Modern Institute / Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow.

MUM’S CARDS 2018, 9 min, 16mm-to-DCP
“In his intimate portrait, Fowler’s mother reflects on her life’s work as a sociologist in Glasgow and, through a collection of hand-written notes, illuminates the personal and political nuances that make up a life devoted to intellectual inquiry.” –NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

ENCEINDRE 2018, 20.5 min, 16mm-to-DCP
The first collaboration between Fowler and acclaimed sound recordist Chris Watson, ENCEINDRE is a study in film and sound of two 16th century fortified cities: Berwick in the northeast of England and Pamplona in the Navarre region of the north of Spain.

HOUSES (FOR MARGARET) 2019, 5 min, 16mm-to-DCP
Fowler’s first tribute to Margaret Tait was created on the occasion of her centenary. Setting off to Tait’s native Orkney, Fowler creates a record of her life and work through images of her past dwellings and filming locations, excerpts from her production diaries, and the reciting of her poem “Houses” in which she reflects on the meaning of home.

CÉZANNE 2019, 6.5 min, 16mm-to-DCP
Shot in and around the studio and garden of the painter Paul Cézanne in Aix-en-Provence and also on the mountain Saint Victoire, the focus of a long running series of paintings made between 1882-1906.

PATRICK 2020, 21 min, 16mm-to-DCP
“Fowler’s work has long asked how we come to know someone in their absence. He has explored this question by creating posthumous portraits of individuals through precise compositions of the things they have left behind: recorded images and sounds, papers and notes, artwork, the spaces through which they moved, and the testimonies of friends who remain among the living. PATRICK evokes the life of its eponymous music producer [Patrick Cowley] by all these means, taking in the postindustrial charms of San Francisco’s now-gentrified South of Market district, once famous for its dance clubs and leather bars, as if searching for Cowley’s still-lingering energy.” –Ed Halter

FOR DAN 2021, 12.5 min, 16mm-to-DCP
A companion piece to MUM’S CARDS, FOR DAN explores an intense period of correspondence between the artist’s late father and his closest friend, radical university lecturer Dan O’Neill.

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

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Courtesy of the Artist and The Modern Institute / Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow.

Drawing on a wealth of unseen archival material, including sound recordings, film rushes, offcuts and unpublished notebooks, Luke Fowler’s new feature film focuses on Margaret Tait, one of Scotland’s most enigmatic filmmakers. The film takes one of Tait’s unrealized scripts for Channel 4, entitled “Heartlandscape: Visions of Ephemerality and Permanence”, as its starting point and considers Tait’s life and work grounded within the landscape of Orkney. Tait was not interested in filming the scenery but instead looked at the precise details that constitute a place, the small things that are often overlooked. Exploring the process of filmmaking itself from the perspective of a fellow artist sensitive to Tait’s understanding of film as a poetic medium, BEING IN A PLACE pays tribute to the strengths in her method, the importance of fragmented bodies of work, and the intrinsic value in failure.

“Fowler translates his own experience of entering Tait’s world on the Orkney Islands and elsewhere into a restlessly ecstatic and haptic collage of images, sounds, words and memories. Without losing his own sense of looking at the world, he manages to convey a similar appreciation of the abrupt nature of beauty as Tait did; you might call it kinship or the evocation of a particular perception, a portrait not of a person but of her being.” –Patrick Holzapfel, VIENNALE

Preceded by:
Margaret Tait A PORTRAIT OF GA 1952, 5 min, 16mm
Portrait of the filmmaker’s mother. Filmed back on Orkney.

Margaret Tait HAPPY BEES 1954, 17 min, 16mm
“HAPPY BEES was intended to be an evocation of what it was like to be a small child in Orkney; when, one (wrongly) remembers, it was sunny all the time, and everything is bursting with life. A film about what surrounds a child, so quite a lot of it is watched at child level.” –Margaret Tait

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

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(LES BONS DÉBARRAS)

Archival print courtesy of the Cinémathèque québécoise.

Manon, a precocious but obsessive young woman, clings to her mother Michelle’s every breath in the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec. Her desperate need for affection takes a dark turn when Michelle reveals that she’s pregnant. Plagued by incessant poverty and the burden of caring for her mentally disabled brother Guy, Michelle is faced with a fever pitch of cataclysmic change that will sunder their family unit forever. Beautifully shot by renowned cinematographer Michel Brault, GOOD RIDDANCE adopts a palette of dark, shadowy hues, giving way to a patchwork of desolate early winter landscapes. With a screenplay by acclaimed but reclusive novelist Réjean Ducharme, the film is elevated by a searing lead performance by child actor Charlotte Laurier.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(QUE DIEU BÉNISSE L’AMÉRIQUE)

The day is September 11, 2001. Maurice Ménard, a police inspector in Laval, Quebec has been tasked with finding a brutal killer of sex offenders who is still on the loose. The offenders have been posted on notices scattered through street corners and businesses of the residential neighborhood. Details emerge that the killer has been feeding his victims meals before ending their lives, but who is he and where will he strike next? A classic whodunnit begins to engulf the psychology of the town’s inhabitants but things are not what they seem. As far off images of September 11 play out on television screens throughout the film’s various locations – a pawn shop, an all you can eat buffet, etc. – the inhabitants of the town are strangely oblivious. Who is the real killer? Will he be discovered before time runs out? Morin probes the psychology of small-town life while critiquing the lack of empathy of his closest neighbors in the U.S. What is the result when individuality has gone mad?

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

ROBERT MORIN
“An unclassifiable filmmaker, Robert Morin influenced a whole generation of artists with his lucid vision of society and an approach guided by pure creative impulse. Since the 1970s, he has continued to multiply projects, to impose not only his style and his vision of the world, but a way of making cinema and video as an artist who does not accept any compromise. The imagination of this filmmaker fiercely committed to the heart of everyday life is inseparable from the critical view he casts on society. Morin is also known for having founded, with friends, the Montreal Videoscopic Production Cooperative (the Coop Video) in 1977, at a time when access to film production was almost impossible and financial support from the government was difficult to obtain.” –CINEMA QUEBECOIS

Robert Morin will be here in person on Fri, April 19!

(LA VIE RÊVÉE)

Considered the first publicly financed film by a female director in Quebec, DREAM LIFE tracks the romantic desires of two young Montreal women as they discuss their dreams, desires, and interior lives. Directed with a deep love of life and experimental curiosity, Dansereau’s film moves seamlessly from the young girls’ romantic fantasies to the deflating reality they’re forced to confront in the harsh light of day. A trip to the countryside leaves them contemplating the nature of love itself. A distinctive coming-of-age film, told with beauty and austerity, it is also a film that is prone to bouts of visual experimentation. The two women, lost in alienation, build an almost impossible closeness as they approach the anxiety of having to settle down. Maybe men are a disappointment, but with dreams this good what does it matter?

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Born and raised in NYC, William Klein relocated permanently to France in 1948, where he would create the body of photographic and cinematic work for which he is justly renowned. But there is one relatively ignored corner of his filmography: the films he made for French TV in the early-to-mid 1960s. Created for the news magazine show “Cinq colonnes à la une”, LE BUSINESS ET LA MODE (1962), LES TROUBLES DE LA CIRCULATION (1962), and GARE DE LYON (1963) find Klein investigating various dimensions of French culture. For WILLIAM KLEIN AUX GRANDS MAGASINS (1964), which was aired as part of the long-running TV series “Les femmes aussi”, Klein films Simone Signoret as she wanders through a department store and interviews various women she encounters there.

William Klein
LE BUSINESS ET LA MODE 1962, 15 min, 16mm-to-digital. In French with English subtitles.
LES TROUBLES DE LA CIRCULATION 1962, 15 min, 16mm-to-digital. In French with English subtitles.
GARE DE LYON 1963, 12.5 min, 16mm-to-digital. In French with English subtitles.

WILLIAM KLEIN AUX GRANDS MAGASINS
1964, 44 min, 16mm-to-digital. In French with English subtitles.

Total running time: ca. 90 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Courtesy of Éléphant / Collection Cinémathèque québécoise.

Structured as a triptych, Lancôt’s second feature follows two disillusioned teenagers who exist in a world of isolation and loneliness, ignored by their parents and the gentrifying city around them. In the first two chapters, they each make tentative advances towards genuine connection with two older men from the margins of Quebecois society. Soon, however, their good-natured plans sour under the weight of unseen forces (political and otherwise), and they are left vulnerable and unable to cope with the urban chaos surrounding them. The final third of the triptych concerns their star-crossed bond, and a pact that will lead them to their doom.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(TRISTESSE MODÈLE RÉDUIT)

Jeannot, a young adult with Down’s Syndrome, lives a gentle, placid suburban life. His parents control his schedule with clockwork precision, and his only escape to the outside world is through his model car collection or by observing the frogs that end up in his swimming pool. His world is turned upside down by the arrival of a young caretaker, Pauline, who challenges his parents’ conviction that Jeannot cannot fend for himself. Riding the wave of freedom brought on by this break in his routine, Jeannot begins to assemble a plan and to build the courage to transcend the diminished expectations of his suffocating home life.

Preceded by:
Robert Morin & Lorraine Dufour THE MYSTERIOUS PAUL / LE MYSTÉRIEUX PAUL 1983, 26.5 min, digital
A desperate circus performer, Paul, seeks to continue his dangerous sword swallowing even after his doctors and his family warn him he’s closing in on death. Paul is an enigma, his need to perform seems to defy every convention, even his own death is a price easily paid to live out his soul’s one ambition. A performer at heart, his family struggles to keep him satisfied within a domestic existence, while the danger and thrill of the circus life beckons him from every dark hall.

Total running time: ca. 115 min.

Robert Morin will be here in person for a Q&A on Thurs, April 18! Following the screening and Q&A, there will be a reception in the lobby!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

ROBERT MORIN
“An unclassifiable filmmaker, Robert Morin influenced a whole generation of artists with his lucid vision of society and an approach guided by pure creative impulse. Since the 1970s, he has continued to multiply projects, to impose not only his style and his vision of the world, but a way of making cinema and video as an artist who does not accept any compromise. The imagination of this filmmaker fiercely committed to the heart of everyday life is inseparable from the critical view he casts on society. Morin is also known for having founded, with friends, the Montreal Videoscopic Production Cooperative (the Coop Video) in 1977, at a time when access to film production was almost impossible and financial support from the government was difficult to obtain.” –CINEMA QUEBECOIS

Borhane Alaouié

LETTER FROM A TIME OF EXILE / LETTRE D’UN TEMPS D’EXIL
1988, 52 min, 16mm-to-digital. In Arabic and French with English subtitles.
Scripted by Najwa Barakat and shot in a pseudo-documentary style, LETTER FROM A TIME OF EXILE presents the stories of four Lebanese men whose lives have taken unexpected turns due to the Civil War: Abdallah, a former militia member, Karim, an unemployed journalist living in Paris, Rizkallah, a car salesman in Brussels, and Nessim, a surgeon who came to Strasbourg. Narrated with subtle humor, LETTER FROM A TIME OF EXILE is both a portrait of people in exile, and the cities in which they currently reside.

“Borhane Alaouié is a topographer, he films the places. Like all of the people who chose to live elsewhere, he knows what a place means.” –Serge Daney

Akram Zaatari
ALL IS WELL ON THE BORDER / AL SHAREET BI-KHAYR
1997, 44 min, video. In Arabic with English subtitles.
Focusing on the Israeli occupation of the South, ALL IS WELL is an early example of Zaatari’s explorations into postwar Lebanese memory culture through the collection of testimonies and documents. Working at a television station at the time, Zaatari was particularly interested in the ways in which histories of resistance were mediated and exploited in their dissemination. In ALL IS WELL, Zaatari centers his own mediation by having genuine testimonies and letters from imprisoned fighters read by actors, revealing their teleprompters and script pages on screen. ALL IS WELL is an attempt to present an image of resistance and incarceration without valorization or objectification of suffering.

Total running time: ca. 100 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(QUICONQUE MEURT, MEURT À DOULEUR)

Vitriolic alienation and dismay course through the walls of an apartment full of desperate junkies in Morin’s unforgettable film. Making their last stand against the Montreal police, the denizens of the apartment have shot one police officer and are holding another hostage. Meanwhile, the crew of a reality TV show has become trapped alongside the junkies, and captures their final testaments and philosophical ramblings. For his bold experiment in meta-narrative, Morin mixes gonzo documentary and the struggle of real-life addicts to chilling and visceral effect.

“I didn’t want to make a film about dope as such, I wanted to make a political film. That is, how people who are into drugs see society. We put them on the margins, and from the margins, they have a very particular vision of society. That’s what interested me.” –Robert Morin

Robert Morin will be here in person for a Q&A on Fri, April 19!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

ROBERT MORIN
“An unclassifiable filmmaker, Robert Morin influenced a whole generation of artists with his lucid vision of society and an approach guided by pure creative impulse. Since the 1970s, he has continued to multiply projects, to impose not only his style and his vision of the world, but a way of making cinema and video as an artist who does not accept any compromise. The imagination of this filmmaker fiercely committed to the heart of everyday life is inseparable from the critical view he casts on society. Morin is also known for having founded, with friends, the Montreal Videoscopic Production Cooperative (the Coop Video) in 1977, at a time when access to film production was almost impossible and financial support from the government was difficult to obtain.” –CINEMA QUEBECOIS

Newly digitized, this behind-the-scenes look at Ron Vawter, as he restages his acclaimed solo performance piece ROY COHN/JACK SMITH in Amsterdam, has not screened for nearly 20 years. Produced for German television, this documentary portrait is a self-professed “act of love” for Vawter. The result, in evocative, grainy black-and-white video, is an intimate glimpse of Vawter and his director and life partner Greg Mehrten in the final months of Vawter’s life.

Preceded by a never-before-screened funding pitch by Vawter for FREE FALL, in which the actor describes his life and career.

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(QUE DIEU BÉNISSE L’AMÉRIQUE)

The day is September 11, 2001. Maurice Ménard, a police inspector in Laval, Quebec has been tasked with finding a brutal killer of sex offenders who is still on the loose. The offenders have been posted on notices scattered through street corners and businesses of the residential neighborhood. Details emerge that the killer has been feeding his victims meals before ending their lives, but who is he and where will he strike next? A classic whodunnit begins to engulf the psychology of the town’s inhabitants but things are not what they seem. As far off images of September 11 play out on television screens throughout the film’s various locations – a pawn shop, an all you can eat buffet, etc. – the inhabitants of the town are strangely oblivious. Who is the real killer? Will he be discovered before time runs out? Morin probes the psychology of small-town life while critiquing the lack of empathy of his closest neighbors in the U.S. What is the result when individuality has gone mad?

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

ROBERT MORIN
“An unclassifiable filmmaker, Robert Morin influenced a whole generation of artists with his lucid vision of society and an approach guided by pure creative impulse. Since the 1970s, he has continued to multiply projects, to impose not only his style and his vision of the world, but a way of making cinema and video as an artist who does not accept any compromise. The imagination of this filmmaker fiercely committed to the heart of everyday life is inseparable from the critical view he casts on society. Morin is also known for having founded, with friends, the Montreal Videoscopic Production Cooperative (the Coop Video) in 1977, at a time when access to film production was almost impossible and financial support from the government was difficult to obtain.” –CINEMA QUEBECOIS

Robert Morin will be here in person on Fri, April 19!

Recorded during the initial run of the Obie Award-winning ROY COHN/JACK SMITH, this video documents the seminal performance piece as it was first seen by New York audiences. In its first half, Ron Vawter, following a script by Gary Indiana, conjures an after-dinner speech as it might have been delivered by notorious right wing political figure and closeted gay man Roy Cohn, as he addresses “The American Association for the Protection of the Family”. In its second half, Vawter re-emerges on stage in flamboyant costume as fiercely queer performance art pioneer, Jack Smith. Together, the two portraits present a complex, incisive, and discomforting view of queer identities as they collide with American culture.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(UMARETE WA MITA KEREDO…)

In referring to this film Ozu stated, “I started to make a film about grownups. While I had originally planned to make a fairly bright little story, it changed while I was working on it and came out very dark.” The story concerns a very average suburban office worker, with a wife and two very un-average sons, who is unable to stand up to his boss.

“Joyful…as true and as moving and as timely today as it was in 1932.” –Jonas Mekas

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New preservation print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.

Shot at New York’s The Kitchen just six months before Ron Vawter died, filmmaker Jill Godmilow’s version of ROY COHN/JACK SMITH remixes Vawter’s celebrated theater piece by intercutting its two acts. Whereas the original stage production was divided into two separate and opposing parts, “Roy Cohn” and “Jack Smith”, Godmilow deftly cuts back and forth from one portrait to the other throughout her film, creating an ongoing conversation between the two contrasting figures and reinventing the highly acclaimed theater piece for a cinema audience. This screening will represent the premiere of a new preservation of this important film.

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(CHICHI ARIKI)

“One of Ozu’s most perfect films. There is a naturalness and a consequent feeling of inevitability that is rare in cinema […] Critics have called the performance of Chishu Ryu in this film one of the best in the history of Japanese cinema, and they are right […] THERE WAS A FATHER has become one of the country’s most esteemed classics” –Donald Richie

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(CHICHI ARIKI)

“One of Ozu’s most perfect films. There is a naturalness and a consequent feeling of inevitability that is rare in cinema […] Critics have called the performance of Chishu Ryu in this film one of the best in the history of Japanese cinema, and they are right […] THERE WAS A FATHER has become one of the country’s most esteemed classics” –Donald Richie

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New preservation print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.

Shot at New York’s The Kitchen just six months before Ron Vawter died, filmmaker Jill Godmilow’s version of ROY COHN/JACK SMITH remixes Vawter’s celebrated theater piece by intercutting its two acts. Whereas the original stage production was divided into two separate and opposing parts, “Roy Cohn” and “Jack Smith”, Godmilow deftly cuts back and forth from one portrait to the other throughout her film, creating an ongoing conversation between the two contrasting figures and reinventing the highly acclaimed theater piece for a cinema audience. This screening will represent the premiere of a new preservation of this important film.

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(UMARETE WA MITA KEREDO…)

In referring to this film Ozu stated, “I started to make a film about grownups. While I had originally planned to make a fairly bright little story, it changed while I was working on it and came out very dark.” The story concerns a very average suburban office worker, with a wife and two very un-average sons, who is unable to stand up to his boss.

“Joyful…as true and as moving and as timely today as it was in 1932.” –Jonas Mekas

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Recorded during the initial run of the Obie Award-winning ROY COHN/JACK SMITH, this video documents the seminal performance piece as it was first seen by New York audiences. In its first half, Ron Vawter, following a script by Gary Indiana, conjures an after-dinner speech as it might have been delivered by notorious right wing political figure and closeted gay man Roy Cohn, as he addresses “The American Association for the Protection of the Family”. In its second half, Vawter re-emerges on stage in flamboyant costume as fiercely queer performance art pioneer, Jack Smith. Together, the two portraits present a complex, incisive, and discomforting view of queer identities as they collide with American culture.

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(UMARETE WA MITA KEREDO…)

In referring to this film Ozu stated, “I started to make a film about grownups. While I had originally planned to make a fairly bright little story, it changed while I was working on it and came out very dark.” The story concerns a very average suburban office worker, with a wife and two very un-average sons, who is unable to stand up to his boss.

“Joyful…as true and as moving and as timely today as it was in 1932.” –Jonas Mekas

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This program consists of recent short films covered in Millennium Film Journal No. 79. Descriptive texts below are excerpted from the issue.

The Millennium Film Workshop gratefully acknowledges support for the Millennium Film Journal by the following individuals and organizations: Deborah and Dan Duane; Walter and Karla Goldschmidt Foundation; Anonymous donors; and New York State Council on the Arts.

If you’d like to support the publication of the Millennium Film Journal with a tax deductible gift, please access https://millenniumfilmjournal.com/donations/donation-form/

Takeshi Murata & Christopher Rutledge LARRY U.S., 2023, 4 min, digital
“To the rhythm of blaring electronic beats, the titular CGI canine emerges. Larry sheds skins, liquifies like molten volcanic lava, swims, multiplies, frays at the edges, solidifies into plastic, becomes a 3D model, and finally adopts the form of other animals before dissolving into a Lynda Benglis-like pour of digital goo.” –Rachel Valinsky

Steve Reinke SUNDOWN Canada, 2023, 8 min, digital
“Drawing out a constellation of memories, observations, and more philosophical reflections on the ways that art processes inevitable death, Reinke ponders the strange feeling of seeing a retrospective of his own work installed in Vienna – retrospective, is, after all, one way of calling narrative to a close.” –Rachel Valinsky

Wayne Koestenbaum STIGMA PUDDING U.S., 2023, 6 min, digital
“Over the last five years, Wayne’s made more than 200 short films, but STIGMA PUDDING is the first which combines original painting with digital video. Now that he’s at last put felt-tip to film-stock, he’s created something more opulent and vivid, remarkable for ‘the increasing vibrance of the color’ and ‘the peculiarity and individuation of the marks.’” –Nick Gamso

Kevin Jerome Everson BOYD V. DENTON U.S., 2023, 3 min, digital
“BOYD V. DENTON is titled after the court case mandating the closure of the prison in 1990. Here black and white visual imagery abstracts the prison into flickering mosaics while grainy walkie-talkie audio emits banalities.” –Rachel Hutcheson

Kevin Jerome Everson AIR FORCE TWO U.S., 2023, 5 min, digital
“Everson uses erratic handheld camerawork to inspect prison cells used for the corresponding Hollywood film. The frantic pacing and jostling of the image contrasts with the deadpan voiceover reading the screenplay of the earlier film’s Moscow prison break scene.” –Rachel Hutcheson

Aria Dean ABATTOIR, U.S.A.! U.S., 2023, 11 min, digital
“A bright orange light pulsates expressionistically against a black background, abrupt and shocking. Then the play of light stops, and we are again ‘outside,’ in a harsh institutional light, as a door swings open, and the camera enters and pivots around a sterile room. There are no bodies in this space. There is only the surface of unctuous red fluid that covers the floor as a bloody remnant of an enduring past.” –Vera Dika

Suneil Sanzgiri AT HOME BUT NOT AT HOME U.S., 2019, 11 min, digital
“The imbrication of past and present in Sanzgiri’s films addresses the retrospective urgency of haunting… In the realm of technical imaging, remembering becomes an act of imagination, a process of world-building.” –Ally Luo

Kathryn Ramey FALL U.S., 2006, 5 min, 35mm
“When a heterosexual dude makes a film about his kids, that is very political. When a woman makes a film that engages with the act of being a parent, it’s often seen as less significant. That shows how political it is because even now, motherhood is a terrible double bind. When I was expecting my first child, I was told by more than one female filmmaker, ‘Forget it, you’re done, you’ll never make a film again.’” –Kathryn Ramey, in dialogue with Sarah Keller & Yangqiao Lu

Vincent Grenier TABULA RASA Canada, 1993-2004, 8 min, digital
“This is such loaded material, heavily marked by time and social place, the architecture evoking prison and damage, and yet as elegantly constructed as shifting Japanese shoji panels. It is the voices of instructor and student, heard off screen, that pierce like a dagger and reverberate throughout the space ideas about power and reality.” –Joanna Kiernan

Marie Menken ARABESQUE FOR KENNETH ANGER U.S., 1958-61, 5 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
“Made with Anger’s (literal) support, the film consists of controlled hand-held camera moves that follow repetitive patterns of ornamental ceramics and other geometric surfaces in the Alhambra’s Islamic architecture. The restraint of the music matches the film’s erotic visual rhythms without overdetermining or dominating.” –Grahame Weinbren

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

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THE POTTED PSALM and THE PETRIFIED DOG have been preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. MR. FRENHOFFER AND THE MINOTAUR and THE LEAD SHOES have been preserved by Anthology with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.

THE POTTED PSALM (1946, 19 min, 16mm)
THE PETRIFIED DOG (1948, 19 min, 16mm)
MR. FRENHOFFER AND THE MINOTAUR (1949, 21 min, 16mm)
THE LEAD SHOES (1949, 17 min, 16mm)

“These images are meant to play not on our rational senses, but on the infinite universe of ambiguity within us.” –Sidney Peterson

“Sidney Peterson’s work and sensibility are those of a native American surrealist. Many of his films chronicle the picaresque adventures of a wacky protagonist and use disjunctive editing strategies to construct new time and space relations…. But perhaps their best-known feature is the use of distorted, funhouse mirror-images, which he created by shooting with an anamorphic lens. […] In his films, he investigates extreme states of consciousness, and the primary tool of his epistemology of irrationalism is the photographic image distorted and transformed to register the impact of those states.” –R. Bruce Elder, IMAGE AND IDENTITY

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

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(ZNOY)

Seventeen-year-old Kemal goes to work on a state farm during the Virgin Lands campaign – and clashes with its authoritarian leader – in this debut feature by the legendary Soviet Ukrainian director Larisa Shepitko.

“While Shepitko’s tilted shots and rapid cutting reveal a debt to Eisenstein, her gently lyrical compositions express an elemental relationship among machines, humans, land, and sky.” –Fred Camper, CHICAGO READER

Intro and Q&A with Masha Shpolberg (Bard College).

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This program shines a spotlight on artist Shinkichi Tajiri, who is best known for his sculptural work, but who also made a number of fascinating films. Born in Los Angeles to first-generation Japanese immigrants, Tajiri enlisted in the army to escape imprisonment in the Japanese concentration camps that the U.S. government created during the war. Moving to Paris in 1948, he was based there for most of the next decade, a period in which he studied with sculptor Ossip Zadkine and painter (and filmmaker) Fernand Léger, collaborated with the CoBrA group of artists, and co-founded Galerie Huit. Tajiri’s first film, VIPERS (1955), which he intended to evoke the experience of taking psychoactive drugs, was awarded the Golden Lion for ‘Best Use of Film Language’ at the Cannes Film Festival. For this program, we’ll be presenting four of Tajiri’s short films, as well as Johan van der Keuken’s 1962 film portrait of Tajiri and Carmen D’Avino’s 1950 documentary VERNISSAGE OF AMERICAN ARTISTS, which provides glimpses of Tajiri and several other American artists in Paris at the time.

All the films in this program, with the exception of VERNISSAGE OF AMERICAN ARTISTS, are screened courtesy of the Eye Filmmuseum.

Shinkichi Tajiri
THE VIPERS 1955, 9.5 min, 16mm. Co-cinematography by Baird Bryant.
MAD NEST 1955, 4.5 min, 16mm
FERDI 1955, 12 min, 16mm-to-digital
BICYCLES 1960, 5 min, 16mm-to-digital

Johan van der Keuken
TAJIRI 1962, 12 min, 16mm-to-digital

Carmen D’Avino
VERNISSAGE OF AMERICAN ARTISTS 1950, 18 min, 16mm-to-digital

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

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(KONEC SRPNA V HOTELU OZON)

The lingering effects of a nuclear war have wiped out most of humanity. A small group of survivors – all women – roam the Earth in search of a male to continue the human race. LATE AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE is a brilliant, underappreciated gem of the Czechoslovak New Wave.

Intro and Q&A with Barbora Bartunkova (MoMA) on Fri, April 26.

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(RO NARUKISOSU)

When elderly children’s book author Yamazaki hires young sex worker Leo for a BDSM session, the paddling he receives impacts him in a much deeper way than he expects. Bitter and regretful over his lost looks, failed love life, and declining health, Yamazaki becomes instantly smitten with Leo, who reminds him of his younger self and offers a last chance to get things right. Forging an unlikely friendship – though Yamazaki hopes for more – the two men embark on a journey of self-reflection and mirroring that forces each to face their uncertain futures. Writer/director Tsuyoshi Shôji’s emotionally rich comedic drama is perhaps the most sexually frank and kink-positive entry so far in the burgeoning subgenre of films about gay elders (SWAN SONG, TURTLES). Anchored by actor Taijiro Tamura’s melancholic lead performance, and featuring stunningly surreal erotic moments that would surely be cut out of an American remake, OLD NARCISSUS is a rare gem that deserves to be seen by as wide a queer audience as possible. We’re thrilled to present the film’s New York Premiere as part of “Narrow Rooms”

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(CZUŁE MIEJSCA)

At the end of the 20th century, an ecological disaster has left the air contaminated and exhausted the Earth’s natural resources. Experts estimate that there is enough water and food to ensure humanity’s survival only for another ten years. Against this backdrop, Jan, a TV repairman, tries to win over the glamorous and elusive Ewa.

Intro and Q&A with Tomek Smolarski (Polish Cultural Institute New York).

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“It was in summer 1993 when I first saw films by Margaret Tait. Not in a cinema, but at a 16mm editing table in the Filmmakers Co-op office in London. The room was not dark enough, the image small, but I was inspired and deeply touched by something that is difficult to put into words. Till today I ask myself, what is it that I admire so much in Margaret Tait’s films? They are timeless and speak directly to our inner self, plain and clear and complex at the same time. Her images are simple, nothing special, her camera movements motivated by an inner impulse, often surprising, like her editing. If we see her films, something remains secret, inexplicable but not hidden. Tait said: ‘The cinema I care about is at the level of poetry.’ Perhaps this best explains what defies explanation.

I have selected seven short films for the program to show a range, starting with one of her earliest films, A PORTRAIT OF GA, from 1952 and ending with her last film, GARDEN PIECES, from 1998. The program concludes with one of my own short films, which I filmed during my visit to Orkney in 1995.” –Ute Aurand

PROGRAM 1:
A PORTRAIT OF GA 1952, 5 min, 16mm
AERIAL 1974, 4 min, 16mm
THE LEADEN ECHO AND THE GOLDEN ECHO 1955, 7 min, 16mm
COLOUR POEMS 1974, 12 min, 16mm
CALYPSO 1955, 4 min, DCP
HAPPY BEES 1954, 17 min, 16mm
GARDEN PIECES 1998, 12 min, 16mm
Ute Aurand GLIMPSES FROM A VISIT TO ORKNEY IN SUMMER 1995 2020, 5 min, 16mm, color, silent

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

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“It was in summer 1993 when I first saw films by Margaret Tait. Not in a cinema, but at a 16mm editing table in the Filmmakers Co-op office in London. The room was not dark enough, the image small, but I was inspired and deeply touched by something that is difficult to put into words. Till today I ask myself, what is it that I admire so much in Margaret Tait’s films? They are timeless and speak directly to our inner self, plain and clear and complex at the same time. Her images are simple, nothing special, her camera movements motivated by an inner impulse, often surprising, like her editing. If we see her films, something remains secret, inexplicable but not hidden. Tait said: ‘The cinema I care about is at the level of poetry.’ Perhaps this best explains what defies explanation.

I have selected seven short films for the program to show a range, starting with one of her earliest films, A PORTRAIT OF GA, from 1952 and ending with her last film, GARDEN PIECES, from 1998. The program concludes with one of my own short films, which I filmed during my visit to Orkney in 1995.” –Ute Aurand

PROGRAM 2:
WHERE I AM IS HERE 1963, 35 min, 16mm
“Starting with a six-line script which just noted down a kind of event to occur, and recur, my aim was to construct a film with its own logic, its own correspondences within itself, and its own echoes and rhymes and comparisons, all through close exploration of the everyday, the commonplace, in the city of Edinburgh.” –Margaret Tait

A PLACE OF WORK 1976, 31 min, 16mm
“A close study of one garden and house and what could be seen there and heard there within the space of time from June 1975 to November 1975. An evocation of a place (in Orkney) with lifelong associations and latterly used as a work place. A family home, from which at the time of filming, the family had long gone. My own home in childhood and off and on through the years, eventually returned to and worked in (and on). Filmed in the months before leaving it.” –Margaret Tait

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

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(CHERNOBYL. KHRONIKA TRUDNYKH NEDEL)

This documentary was shot by a team of Ukrainian filmmakers in the weeks immediately following the Chernobyl disaster. Part documentation of the clean-up effort and part essay film, it uses the unique tools of cinema as a medium to reflect on this catastrophe of unprecedented scale. The team was aware that spending so much time in the “zone” and filming directly above the exploded fourth reactor could prove fatal, yet felt a duty to do so anyway. The director, Volodymyr Shevchenko, fought a ten-month battle against the Soviet censors and succumbed to radiation sickness shortly before the film was finally released.

Intro and Q&A with Masha Shpolberg (Bard College).

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(FEHÉR ISTEN)

An allegorical tale in which an abandoned dog searches desperately for his beloved owner. When his search fails, he joins a canine revolt against the dogs’ human abusers. The film, which skillfully blends melodrama, adventure, and a touch of horror to pose questions about contemporary Hungary, was awarded the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes.

Preceded by:
Almantas Grikevičius
TIME PASSES THROUGH THE CITY / LAIKAS EINA PER MIESTĄ
Lithuania, 1966, 20 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Lithuanian with English subtitles.
The main protagonist of this film is time itself as it passes through Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. Drawing on both the Soviet avant-garde and French cinéma vérité, it peels back intersecting layers of the city’s history. The white horse wandering the streets becomes a poignant symbol of the way streets and buildings retain the memory of ages past.

Intro and Q&A with Lukas Brasiskis (e-flux and Columbia University) and Raymond DeLuca (University of Kentucky-Lexington).

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(MAT)

Based on the novel by Maxim Gorky.

With the simple theme of a working-class mother growing in political consciousness through participation in revolutionary activity, this film established Pudovkin as one of the major figures of the Soviet cinema. A student of Kuleshov and an admirer of Griffith’s films, he was writing his first book of film theory at the same time he was making MOTHER. His expert cutting on movement and his associated editing of unrelated scenes to form what he called a “plastic synthesis” are amply demonstrated here. Although in direct opposition to Eisenstein’s shock montage, Pudovkin used a linkage method advanced far beyond Kuleshov’s theories.

“In the final episode Pudovkin resorts to the now famous simile of the ice-floe breaking up against the bastions of the great bridge with a movement parallel to that of the procession of men and women marching with the Red Flag held high before them, until they are scattered and broken by the cavalry. The ice-floe intensifies the action by its strong forward movement far more than by its obvious symbolism. The purpose of Pudovkin’s technique is to sublimate the action of every part of his film, so that the commonplace is raised to the level of a kind of epic poem.” –Roger Manvell, THE FILM AND THE PUBLIC

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Pat O’Neill
SAUGUS SERIES 1974, 19 min, 16mmS
AUGUS SERIES is actually seven short films, united by a common soundtrack. Each is an evolving “still life” made up of meticulously assembled but spatially contradictory elements.
“SAUGUS SERIES exhibits the possibilities of the optical printer with considerable self-confidence and élan. The colors are deeply saturated; radically incompatible spaces are meticulously pieced together; moving images are layered in front of each other or masked within ‘negative’ spaces outlined by the absence of an object; a multiplicity of textures and densities and the dynamics of particles in turmoil enliven the imagery.” –P. Adams Sitney, MILLENNIUM FILM JOURNAL

Hans Richter
RHYTHMUS 21 1921, 3 min, 35mm, silent
“Its content is essentially rhythm, the formal vocabulary is elemental geometry, and the structural principle is counterpoint of contrasting opposites.” –Standish Lawder
TWO PENNY MAGIC / ZWEIGROSCHENZAUBER 1929, 2 min, 16mm
Produced as a commercial for a German illustrated magazine, this film is an experiment with visual rhymes.
EVERYTHING REVOLVES, EVERYTHING TURNS / ALLES DREHT SICH, ALLES BEWEGT SICH 1929, 9 min, 16mm
“Richter’s unique and fascinating view of magic and cruelty in a carnival side-show.” –Cecile Starr

Paul Sharits
N:O:T:H:I:N:G
1968, 36 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
“Based in part on the Tibetan Mandala of the Five Dhyani Buddhas/a journey toward the center of pure consciousness (Dharma-Dhatu Wisdom)/space and motion generated rather than illustrated/time-color energy create virtual shape/in negative time, growth is inverse decay.” –Paul Sharits
T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G 1969, 12 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
“Starring poet David Franks whose voice appears on the soundtrack/an uncutting and unscratching mandala.” –Paul Sharits

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

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A family voluntarily isolates themselves in their home, which slowly transforms from a sanctuary into a prison. The drama unfolds from the perspective of a mother and her sons, culminating in a tense climax that reveals the mystery of their seclusion.

Intro by Meta Mazaj (University of Pennsylvania).

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(KONEC SRPNA V HOTELU OZON)

The lingering effects of a nuclear war have wiped out most of humanity. A small group of survivors – all women – roam the Earth in search of a male to continue the human race. LATE AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE is a brilliant, underappreciated gem of the Czechoslovak New Wave.

Intro and Q&A with Barbora Bartunkova (MoMA) on Fri, April 26.

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