Anthology Film Archives

Throughout 2020 & 2021, ISSUE Project Room premiered ten works in its newly initiated “Distant Pairs” series. For this project, ISSUE commissions sound artists to produce collaborative work at a time when the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has drastically impacted their ability to travel and perform, and altered the nature of collective work and performance. Pairing artists in disparate locations who cannot work together in “traditional” ways, the “Distant Pairs” series examines the collaborative process, methods of working, and partnership amidst these constrained conditions.

These works originally premiered online and were experienced in disparate home screen and sound system arrangements. Now ISSUE and Anthology join forces for two evenings to present the works back-to-back in a cinematic environment, showcasing the varied compositional structures, cinematic orientations, and unique approaches to the “audiovisual” demands of our current age.

The series has included premieres from Joe McPhee & Taku Unami, Veryan Weston & Ingrid Laubrock, Dreamcrusher & Dis Fig, Ana da Silva & Phew, Sofia Jernberg & Tomeka Reid, Rob Thorne & Raven Chacon, Viola Yip & Laetitia Sonami, Cecilia Lopez & Carmen Baliero, Louis Carnell & Okkyung Lee, and Rashad Becker & FUJI||||||||||TA.

The screening on Wednesday, March 2 will feature a short conversation + Q&A with participating artists Viola Yip & Cecilia Lopez, whose “Distant Pairs” works were co-presented with Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center.

New commissions in ISSUE’s “Distant Pairs” series are being presented online on ISSUE’s website throughout February 2022. These works, in addition to the 2020 and 2021 commissions, will stream on ISSUE’s site and will be available on the Archive page after each premiere date.

PROGRAM 1:
TAKU UNAMI & JOE MCPHEE (2020, 15.5 min, digital)
VERYAN WESTON & INGRID LAUBROCK (2020, 60 min, digital)
DREAMCRUSHER & DIS FIG (2020, 16.5 min, digital)
ANA DA SILVA & PHEW (2020, 19 min, digital)
TOMEKA REID & SOFIA JERNBERG (2021, 14 min, digital)
ROB THORNE & RAVEN CHACON (2021, 37 min, digital)
Total running time: ca. 165 min.

Throughout 2020 & 2021, ISSUE Project Room premiered ten works in its newly initiated “Distant Pairs” series. For this project, ISSUE commissions sound artists to produce collaborative work at a time when the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has drastically impacted their ability to travel and perform, and altered the nature of collective work and performance. Pairing artists in disparate locations who cannot work together in “traditional” ways, the “Distant Pairs” series examines the collaborative process, methods of working, and partnership amidst these constrained conditions.

These works originally premiered online and were experienced in disparate home screen and sound system arrangements. Now ISSUE and Anthology join forces for two evenings to present the works back-to-back in a cinematic environment, showcasing the varied compositional structures, cinematic orientations, and unique approaches to the “audiovisual” demands of our current age.

The series has included premieres from Joe McPhee & Taku Unami, Veryan Weston & Ingrid Laubrock, Dreamcrusher & Dis Fig, Ana da Silva & Phew, Sofia Jernberg & Tomeka Reid, Rob Thorne & Raven Chacon, Viola Yip & Laetitia Sonami, Cecilia Lopez & Carmen Baliero, Louis Carnell & Okkyung Lee, and Rashad Becker & FUJI||||||||||TA.

The screening on Wednesday, March 2 will feature a short conversation + Q&A with participating artists Viola Yip & Cecilia Lopez, whose “Distant Pairs” works were co-presented with Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center.

New commissions in ISSUE’s “Distant Pairs” series are being presented online on ISSUE’s website throughout February 2022. These works, in addition to the 2020 and 2021 commissions, will stream on ISSUE’s site and will be available on the Archive page after each premiere date.

PROGRAM 2:
VIOLA YIP & LAETITIA SONMI (2021, 26.5 min, digital)
CECILIA LOPEZ & CARMEN BALIERO (2021, 28 min, digital)
LOUIS CARNELL (VISIONIST) & OKKYUNG LEE (2021, 22.5 min, digital)
RASHAD BECKER & FUJI||||||||||TA (2021, 47.5 min, digital)
Total running time: ca. 130 min + Q&A with Viola Yip & Cecilia Lopez.

(PRÄSTÄNKAN)

In this lyrical, early Dreyer comedy, a young parson wins a plum parish in 17th-century Norway, but is obliged to marry the widow of his deceased predecessor and pretend his attractive young fiancée is his sister. Dreyer’s touch is evident in the close-ups of the pastor’s would-be rivals and parishioners, and in a slow pan presaging the 360-degree views of VAMPYR.

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"A documentary on the life and ambitions of a young Lebanese cross-dresser. The video follows her journey from soldier to cabaret dancer in an effort to raise funds for her sex change operation. Shot in Beirut, CINEMA FOUAD weaves a complex and multi-layered story of sexuality, identity, and desire, and paints a compelling portrait of its subject." –THIRD WORLD NEWSREEL

“CINEMA FOUAD is a documentary portrait of Khaled El Kurdi, a Syrian trans woman living in Beirut where she earns a living as a domestic worker and belly dancer. Soueid shows us scenes of El Kurdi’s domestic world: eating, applying make-up, dancing in her bedroom, all while reflecting on her life and experiences. She often alludes to the aggressions she faces outside of the home – in the street – and through her adept defiance in the face of some of Soueid’s more goading questions, we recognize the echoing of these aggressions in his role as interviewer.” –Bidoun Project

One of Soueid’s finest and most representative cinematographic achievements, TANGO OF YEARNING melancholically exemplifies the relational essence of his cinema. It is at once a film about love (for cinema, for life and its characters), about Soueid’s work for the Lebanese state broadcaster Tele Liban, and about the mysterious death of the Egyptian Jewish actress Camelia. The film’s sinuous and free-flowing shape is not so much a rejection of the linear narratives of realism, but an acknowledgment of reality’s unmoored dynamics and the role memory plays in its construction.

Shot by the great German cinematographers Karl Freund and Rudolph Maté, MICHAEL concerns the unconsummated homosexual love between a painter and his manipulative, larcenous model. The Danish director Benjamin Christensen stars as artist Claude Zoret, modeled in part after Rodin, whose irrepressible love finds its most complete expression in his last painting.

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(INDAMA YA’ATI AL-MASA)

“On the surface, NIGHTFALL is a semi-autobiographical reconstruction of the militant years of Fatah’s Student Brigade; a series of conversations and interviews between the director and his old comrades, most of whom spend their time meditating their movement’s defeat in a state of drunken incoherence. Throughout NIGHTFALL, Soueid remains uncompromisingly bleak about the state of the Palestinian revolution at the turn of the new millennium. It is not just the individual militants who now suffer from a crisis of identity, but the very slogans of the struggle itself – and thus, its history. What is to be recovered, then, from the ramblings of these old Maoists?” –Francesco Anselmetti, SAFAR JOURNAL

(LA PASSION DE JEANNE D’ARC)

Spiritual rapture and institutional hypocrisy are brought to stark, vivid life in one of the most transcendent achievements of the silent era. Chronicling the trial of Joan of Arc in the final hours leading up to her execution, Dreyer depicts her torment with startling immediacy, employing an array of techniques – including expressionistic lighting, interconnected sets, and painfully intimate close-ups – to immerse viewers in her subjective experience. Anchoring Dreyer’s audacious formal experimentation is a legendary performance by Renée Falconetti, whose haunted face channels both the agony and the ecstasy of martyrdom.

“With THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC, there occurs a most striking change in both the film-maker’s style and his intensity of thematic concentration. A few potent shots in previous movies hardly promise the unique and brilliant imagery which here bursts forth frame after frame. […] The vision of JOAN is inspired or demoniac. Her passion is observed with clinical detail in the sharp-etched, stark compositions, many relentless close-ups. But this is also loving detail, for Joan is the first of Dreyer’s possessed, a lineage which may be traced through the victims of VAMPYR to Anne in DAY OF WRATH and Johannes in ORDET; characters who work out their passions throughout the process of their films with peculiar intensity and directness, so that identification with the director himself is implicit.” –Ken Kelman, FILM CULTURE

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(MA HATAFTU LI GHAYRIHA)

Through the story of a son reconstructing his father’s revolutionary past from a diary, Soueid draws a portrait of two generations of men, fathers and sons, who were revolutionaries of the 1970s. This is a poetic flight in time, back to when young men dreamed of changing the world with their own hands, and forward to a present where young men just want the security of a salaried job. At the same time, MY HEART BEATS ONLY FOR HER is a film about Lebanon’s schizophrenic modern history, caught in between the neoliberal lure of financial capitalism and the internationalist dreams of revolution. Between its sudden kindness and unforeseen brutality. Between Hong Kong and Hanoi.

"A documentary on the life and ambitions of a young Lebanese cross-dresser. The video follows her journey from soldier to cabaret dancer in an effort to raise funds for her sex change operation. Shot in Beirut, CINEMA FOUAD weaves a complex and multi-layered story of sexuality, identity, and desire, and paints a compelling portrait of its subject." –THIRD WORLD NEWSREEL

“CINEMA FOUAD is a documentary portrait of Khaled El Kurdi, a Syrian trans woman living in Beirut where she earns a living as a domestic worker and belly dancer. Soueid shows us scenes of El Kurdi’s domestic world: eating, applying make-up, dancing in her bedroom, all while reflecting on her life and experiences. She often alludes to the aggressions she faces outside of the home – in the street – and through her adept defiance in the face of some of Soueid’s more goading questions, we recognize the echoing of these aggressions in his role as interviewer.” –Bidoun Project

“Imagine that we are sitting in a very ordinary room. Suddenly we are told that there is a corpse behind the door. Instantly, the room we are sitting in has taken on another look. The light, the atmosphere have changed, though they are physically the same. This is because we have changed and the objects are as we conceive them. This is the effect I wanted to produce in VAMPYR.” –C.D.

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Soueid’s magnus opus, a gargantuan flux that is both timeless and multi-temporal, THE INSOMNIA OF A SERIAL DREAMER amalgamates the past into the present (“a present in the past tense”), and from the schizophrenic streets of Beirut opens onto the world: the world that a Middle East Airlines captain has traveled and now remembers from his patio (“the most unbearable passengers were those on the Beirut-Paris flight”), but also the world of boundless love one of Soueid’s friends has for the Egyptian singer and actress Souad Hosny. In order to fall asleep, the director asked his friends and artistic accomplices to tell him stories, resulting in a film of rarefied, oneiric beauty.

(VREDENS DAG)

“Carl Dreyer’s art begins to unfold at the point where most other directors give up. Witchcraft and martyrdom are his themes – but his witches don’t ride broomsticks, they ride the erotic fears of their persecutors. It is a world that suggests a dreadful fusion of Hawthorne and Kafka.” –Pauline Kael

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(VREDENS DAG)

“Carl Dreyer’s art begins to unfold at the point where most other directors give up. Witchcraft and martyrdom are his themes – but his witches don’t ride broomsticks, they ride the erotic fears of their persecutors. It is a world that suggests a dreadful fusion of Hawthorne and Kafka.” –Pauline Kael

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One of Soueid’s finest and most representative cinematographic achievements, TANGO OF YEARNING melancholically exemplifies the relational essence of his cinema. It is at once a film about love (for cinema, for life and its characters), about Soueid’s work for the Lebanese state broadcaster Tele Liban, and about the mysterious death of the Egyptian Jewish actress Camelia. The film’s sinuous and free-flowing shape is not so much a rejection of the linear narratives of realism, but an acknowledgment of reality’s unmoored dynamics and the role memory plays in its construction.

A farmer’s family is torn apart by faith, sanctity, and love – one child believes he’s Jesus Christ, a second proclaims himself agnostic, and the third falls in love with a fundamentalist’s daughter. Layering multiple stories of faith and rebellion, Dreyer’s adaptation of Kaj Munk’s play is a meditation on faith and fanaticism.

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(INDAMA YA’ATI AL-MASA)

“On the surface, NIGHTFALL is a semi-autobiographical reconstruction of the militant years of Fatah’s Student Brigade; a series of conversations and interviews between the director and his old comrades, most of whom spend their time meditating their movement’s defeat in a state of drunken incoherence. Throughout NIGHTFALL, Soueid remains uncompromisingly bleak about the state of the Palestinian revolution at the turn of the new millennium. It is not just the individual militants who now suffer from a crisis of identity, but the very slogans of the struggle itself – and thus, its history. What is to be recovered, then, from the ramblings of these old Maoists?” –Francesco Anselmetti, SAFAR JOURNAL

(MA HATAFTU LI GHAYRIHA)

Through the story of a son reconstructing his father’s revolutionary past from a diary, Soueid draws a portrait of two generations of men, fathers and sons, who were revolutionaries of the 1970s. This is a poetic flight in time, back to when young men dreamed of changing the world with their own hands, and forward to a present where young men just want the security of a salaried job. At the same time, MY HEART BEATS ONLY FOR HER is a film about Lebanon’s schizophrenic modern history, caught in between the neoliberal lure of financial capitalism and the internationalist dreams of revolution. Between its sudden kindness and unforeseen brutality. Between Hong Kong and Hanoi.

(VREDENS DAG)

“Carl Dreyer’s art begins to unfold at the point where most other directors give up. Witchcraft and martyrdom are his themes – but his witches don’t ride broomsticks, they ride the erotic fears of their persecutors. It is a world that suggests a dreadful fusion of Hawthorne and Kafka.” –Pauline Kael

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Soueid’s magnus opus, a gargantuan flux that is both timeless and multi-temporal, THE INSOMNIA OF A SERIAL DREAMER amalgamates the past into the present (“a present in the past tense”), and from the schizophrenic streets of Beirut opens onto the world: the world that a Middle East Airlines captain has traveled and now remembers from his patio (“the most unbearable passengers were those on the Beirut-Paris flight”), but also the world of boundless love one of Soueid’s friends has for the Egyptian singer and actress Souad Hosny. In order to fall asleep, the director asked his friends and artistic accomplices to tell him stories, resulting in a film of rarefied, oneiric beauty.

Films discussed in recent issues of the MFJ. This program of rarely screened moving-image works by distinguished artist filmmakers from four countries celebrates the publication of Millennium Film Journal No. 74.

Programmed by Grahame Weinbren & Jonathan Ellis. For more info regarding Millennium Film Journal, visit: https://millenniumfilmjournal.com/

Francis Alÿs
CHILDREN’S GAMES
Belgium/Nepal/Afghanistan/Mexico, 2011-17, 8 min, digital
“Depicting children at play in the bleak contexts of refugee camps or in landscapes devastated by war, Alÿs’s films trigger feelings of warm empathy as well as a mere enjoyment in watching the games. If vulnerable beings like children can cope with the grim conditions of war and poverty, there is hope for all mankind.” –Steven Jacobs in MFJ 71/72

Anal Shah
KALARIPAYATTU
U.S./India, 2017, 22 min, digital
“[T]he very form of Shah’s film is nonlinear, ever-moving, and multiplicative as opposed to linear, stable, and additive. This constellation method of montage – images branching out and forming connections with one another to form a multiplicity – allows each image to be itself and to join with others in an assemblage.” –Madison Brookshire in MFJ 74

Christoph Janetzko
THE MECHANICS
Germany/Cambodia, 2021, 23 min, digital
“Janetzko makes use of an armory of contemporary techniques, reflecting a deep familiarity with the arcane mysteries of digital video technology, which matches the analog skills in the mechanics’ oil-stained hands. It is a breathtaking visual statement.” –Ingo Petzke in MFJ 74

Amir Yatzif
ANOTHER PLANET
Israel, 2017, 48 min, digital
Collating existent digital models of one of the most awful places on earth, indeed another planet, the filmmaker interviews avatars of the designers placed within their own models.
“The model speaks the logic of a society obsessed with summoning and taming the future, with the management and prediction of risk, with its major social motors, like economy and security, driven by speculation. The model is meant to contain such future-oriented transactions within a safe space of action.” –Lalic Melamed in MFJ 74

Total running time: ca. 105 min.

“GERTRUD is as towering a master work in the narrative sound cinema as Brakhage’s THE ART OF VISION is in the nonnarrative cinema. Every detail, every motion, every word in GERTRUD has its right place, its own voice, and contributes to the whole and is beautiful. […] Every generation states its own position on love. GERTRUD is Dreyer’s statement on love, and it is pure, radiant, and perfect, like a ring.” –Jonas Mekas, MOVIE JOURNAL

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(LA CHUTE DE LA MAISON USHER)

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

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

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

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Founded in 2018, Sentient.Art.Film (SAF) is a creative distribution initiative and artist support network dedicated to increasing equity and supporting freedom of expression in independent film and moving image art. SAF has an international micropolitical orientation that centers marginalized voices, information sharing, community building, and courageous storytelling. Among SAF’s numerous initiatives, the fiscally sponsored Line of Sight project focuses on artist development (through mentorship and project support); discourse development and mutual aid (through the SAF Bulletin); and special projects in expanded cinema and moving image art (AR/VR and collective artmaking).

As part of the Line of Sight project, Sentient.Omnibus was conceived in January of 2021 out of the convergence of many different concerns, above all a desire to create a space in excess of the usual classifications of genre, period, nation-state, and medium. Organized by Keisha Knight, Carla Troconis, and Caroline Xia, Sentient.Omnibus is animated by a frustration with a curatorial and programming practice that so often divides and segregates Art and Film, fiction and nonfiction, this nationality from that nationality, and so on.

Designed to take place annually, the inaugural Sentient.Omnibus adopted the theme, “You Us Them.” All of the works that came together invoke intersubjectivity in form and often in the filmmaker’s or artist’s practice even though they live in different ecosystems. The pieces in “You Us Them” navigate the dynamic dance between inside and outside, compassion and isolation, fear and care in beautifully varied but consonant ways. The curatorial goal was to bring works and their makers into proximity with each other and to have a good time!

Guest-curated by Keisha Knight, Carla Troconis, and Caroline Xia.

Hee Young Pyun & Jiajun (Oscar) Zhang
IN THE BLANKS
2016, 17 min, digital
Traveling through empty London with the sound of a couple’s daily dialogue in different places, the film reinterprets the relationship between people and space.

Asia Stewart & Jasi Lampkin
LA NÉGRESSE BLANCHE
2020, 6.5 min, digital
Filmed over the course of a six-hour performance, LA NÉGRESSE BLANCHE illustrates the epidermalization of whiteness on a Black body.

Maegan Houang
IN FULL BLOOM
2019, 10 min, digital
The tale of a Vietnamese immigrant overcoming the loss of her partner. After her husband’s death, Cecile becomes an agoraphobic hoarder, paradoxically practicing what she loves – gardening – indoors without the help of direct sunlight.

Charmaine Lee
RACE TO THE BOTTOM
2021, 6 min, digital
This is a film to listen to. Charmaine Lee performs “Race to the Bottom,” a vocal improvisation using microphones, radios, and modular synthesis to reveal an intimate portrait of Lee’s polyphonic sensibilities.

Che R. Applewhaite
A NEW ENGLAND DOCUMENT
2020, 16 min, digital
An essay portrait of two Harvard ethnographers, this film documents their photographic archive anew.

Anna Gustavi
DOMIS
2020, 10 min, digital
DOMIS is about structure and destruction, power and dominance. The piece references classic art forms within film, theater, and storytelling. By using form as a structure, ideations draw question to the root of linearity.

Jovan James
THE JUMP OFF
2017, 5 min, digital
A gay young man in a passionate DL relationship struggles for legitimacy with his closeted lover.

Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner
A DEMONSTRATION
2020, 25 min, digital
A DEMONSTRATION is a monster film with no monsters.

John Brattin
THE TRIUMPH OF NIGHT
2006, 23 min, digital
A young woman is employed as a companion for a wealthy and sickly woman in a large house she shares with her homicidal husband, some weird servants, and a ghost.

Total running time: ca. 125 min.

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

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“In ZAHO ZAY, the directing team of Maéva Ranaïvojaona and Georg Tiller weaves together an unusual, haunting hybrid of documentary and fiction, lyric poetry and social reflection. It is a film that resists any easy synopsis, as its narrative aspect is fleeting, periodic, allusive. The voice of a woman (text by Jean-Luc Raharimanana) conjures up both the world she inhabits as the guard at a crowded prison in Madagascar, and the wandering, perhaps mythic father she scarcely knew – a murderer who decides his crimes by rolling dice. Like in João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata’s THE LAST TIME I SAW MACAO (2012), staged elements of fiction are allowed to enter the documentary frame – but fragments of this reality equally come to interact with the (largely off-screen) story via the montage. The poetic correspondences set up by this interaction of realms are rich and never schematic: being abandoned by a father who holds power over life and death is intertwined with the politics of a nation where ‘disaster and ferocity’ rule. Especially poignant and piercing is the place of ‘woman in the night of our country’ – sealed in the final glimpse of a women’s prison beside the male enclave.” –Adrian Martin, VIENNALE

Georg Tiller & Maéva Ranaïvojaona will be here in person for Q&As following all three 7:30 screenings!  The Q&A on Friday, March 11 will be moderated by Patrick Harrison, while the one on Sunday, March 13 will be moderated by Bingham Bryant.

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

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

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“In ZAHO ZAY, the directing team of Maéva Ranaïvojaona and Georg Tiller weaves together an unusual, haunting hybrid of documentary and fiction, lyric poetry and social reflection. It is a film that resists any easy synopsis, as its narrative aspect is fleeting, periodic, allusive. The voice of a woman (text by Jean-Luc Raharimanana) conjures up both the world she inhabits as the guard at a crowded prison in Madagascar, and the wandering, perhaps mythic father she scarcely knew – a murderer who decides his crimes by rolling dice. Like in João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata’s THE LAST TIME I SAW MACAO (2012), staged elements of fiction are allowed to enter the documentary frame – but fragments of this reality equally come to interact with the (largely off-screen) story via the montage. The poetic correspondences set up by this interaction of realms are rich and never schematic: being abandoned by a father who holds power over life and death is intertwined with the politics of a nation where ‘disaster and ferocity’ rule. Especially poignant and piercing is the place of ‘woman in the night of our country’ – sealed in the final glimpse of a women’s prison beside the male enclave.” –Adrian Martin, VIENNALE

Georg Tiller & Maéva Ranaïvojaona will be here in person for Q&As following all three 7:30 screenings!  The Q&A on Friday, March 11 will be moderated by Patrick Harrison, while the one on Sunday, March 13 will be moderated by Bingham Bryant.

ZORNS LEMMA
(1970, 60 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
“A major poetic work. Created and put together by a very clear eye-head, this original and complex abstract work moves beyond the letters of the alphabet, beyond words and beyond Freud. If you don’t understand it the first time you see it, don’t despair, see it again! When you finally ‘get it,’ a small light, possibly a candle, will light itself inside your forehead.” –Ernie Gehr
&
HAPAX LEGOMENA I: (nostalgia)
(1971, 36 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives, MoMA, and the NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, with funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation.)
“In (nostalgia) the time it takes for a photograph to burn (and thus confirm its two-dimensionality) becomes the clock within the film, while Frampton plays the critic, asynchronously glossing, explicating, narrating, mythologizing his earlier art, and his earlier life, as he commits them both to the fire of a labyrinthine structure; for Borges too was one of his earlier masters, and he grins behind the facades of logic, mathematics, and physical demonstrations which are the formal metaphors for most of Frampton’s films.” –P. Adams Sitney

Total running time: ca. 100 min.

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Georges Franju
BLOOD OF THE BEASTS / LE SANG DES BÊTES
1949, 20 min, 16mm. In French with English subtitles.
“This documentary on the slaughterhouses of Paris is one of the great masterpieces of the subversive cinema; here, for once, we are face to face with death, and are neither protected nor cheated. […] A dream-like quality permeates the intense realism of the images; a surrealist intent – akin to Buñuel’s slitting of the eyeball in UN CHIEN ANDALOU – is discernible in this anti-bourgeois film. But the eyeball, however shocking, was fictional; BLOOD OF THE BEASTS is real.” –Amos Vogel, FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART

Jean Genet
UN CHANT D’AMOUR
1950, 26 min, 35mm, silent. Brand-new 35mm print by Anthology!
“Genet’s only film – hounded by the censors, unavailable, secret – is an early and remarkably moving attempt to portray homosexual passions. Already a classic, it succeeds as perhaps no other film to intimate the explosive power of frustrated sex…. Like all Genet’s early work, the entire film is, in effect, a single onanistic fantasy, filled with desperate frustration and sensuous nostalgia.” –Amos Vogel, FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART
“There’s no smoke without fire; UN CHANT D’AMOUR is a communion in which Genet takes us into the prison in order to liberate us from it.” –Derek Jarman

Total running time: ca. 50 min.

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“Ernie Gehr [makes] cinematic magic, often from the least likely materials. Indeed, Gehr’s most famous film, SERENE VELOCITY (1970), in which the filmmaker transforms an institutional hallway in the basement of a classroom building at the State University of New York at Binghamton into a nexus of visual and conceptual energy, merely by adjusting his stationary camera’s zoom lens every four frames for twenty-three minutes, can be read as Gehr’s manifesto. For Gehr the most everyday spaces and the most mundane actions offer the imaginative filmmaker the most interesting potential. No other filmmaker, with the exception of Michael Snow, has so relentlessly and so productively explored the capacity of filmmaking to develop the visual (and auditory) opportunities afforded by the cinematic apparatus itself.” –Scott MacDonald, A CRITICAL CINEMA 5

Brand new prints!

REVERBERATION (1969, 23 min, 16mm)
SERENE VELOCITY (1970, 23 min, 16mm, silent)
&
STILL
1971, 54 min, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.

Total running time: ca. 105 min.

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“In ZAHO ZAY, the directing team of Maéva Ranaïvojaona and Georg Tiller weaves together an unusual, haunting hybrid of documentary and fiction, lyric poetry and social reflection. It is a film that resists any easy synopsis, as its narrative aspect is fleeting, periodic, allusive. The voice of a woman (text by Jean-Luc Raharimanana) conjures up both the world she inhabits as the guard at a crowded prison in Madagascar, and the wandering, perhaps mythic father she scarcely knew – a murderer who decides his crimes by rolling dice. Like in João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata’s THE LAST TIME I SAW MACAO (2012), staged elements of fiction are allowed to enter the documentary frame – but fragments of this reality equally come to interact with the (largely off-screen) story via the montage. The poetic correspondences set up by this interaction of realms are rich and never schematic: being abandoned by a father who holds power over life and death is intertwined with the politics of a nation where ‘disaster and ferocity’ rule. Especially poignant and piercing is the place of ‘woman in the night of our country’ – sealed in the final glimpse of a women’s prison beside the male enclave.” –Adrian Martin, VIENNALE

Georg Tiller & Maéva Ranaïvojaona will be here in person for Q&As following all three 7:30 screenings!  The Q&A on Friday, March 11 will be moderated by Patrick Harrison, while the one on Sunday, March 13 will be moderated by Bingham Bryant.

Griffith’s immensely influential silent epic intercuts four parallel tales from history (spanning Babylon, Christ’s Judea, Reformation Europe, and turn-of-the-century America) to embroider a moral tapestry on personal, social, and political repression through the ages. The visual poetry is overwhelming, especially in the massed crowd scenes, and the unbridled eroticism of the Babylon harem scenes demonstrates just what Hollywood lost when it later bowed to the Hays Code. While the (partly self-financed) production ruined Griffith financially and baffled audiences with its multiple plots and labyrinthine structure, it has been enormously influential on generations of filmmakers, including Eisenstein, who studied the film closely.

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(STACHKA)

Eisenstein’s interest in the Freudian father complex drives this psychological scenario in which non-actors step forward to acknowledge the viewer, illustrating Eisenstein’s desire to penetrate to the heart of cinema, sidestepping realism by ‘being real.’ Governmental restrictions made STRIKE the only completed film of a series intended to portray the road to revolution.

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“Launching the Yonemotos’ joint practice, GARAGE SALE is a campy X-rated feature centered on a story of marital upheaval between drag queen Goldie Glitters and her fair-haired husband Hero. A onetime member of San Francisco’s legendary Cockettes theatre troupe, Goldie was famously crowned Santa Monica College’s 1975 Homecoming Queen, captured in Bruce Yonemoto’s documentary HOMECOMING (1975). GARAGE SALE subverts the drag aspect of Goldie’s performance enabling her to sympathetically play a woman whose fantasies and expectations have been shaped by Hollywood romance films. The film follows the couple as Hero tries to regain Goldie’s love by seeking the advice of a cast of eccentric characters.” –TATE MODERN

Followed by:
GARAGE SALE II
1980, 31 min, video
“Featuring performances by artists Tony Oursler and Mike Kelley, GARAGE SALE II moves between a couple’s sexually dysfunctional relationship and a series of vignettes in which characters attempt to fulfill their desires through prosthetics, masturbation, manipulation and S&M.” –TATE MODERN

Total running time: ca. 120 min.

The screening on Thurs, March 17 will feature a Q&A with Bruce Yonemoto, moderated by Karl McCool, Distribution Director of Electronic Arts Intermix.

(BRONENOSETS POTEMKIN)

“POTEMKIN used [Eisenstein’s] new set of rules to create what has been called the most perfect and concise example of film structure. Like STRIKE, [POTEMKIN] has no hero, only the masses, and no plot, only an incident plucked from the pre-history of the Revolution.” –Standish Lawder, EISENSTEIN AND CONSTRUCTIVISM

“POTEMKIN was the first work to embody, in their most tangible form, various principles of construction peculiar to the medium: montage (or editing) and parallel action (the expansion of time through spatial manipulation); or, in sum, the purely formal deployment of objective action to create psychological dimensions. Eisenstein was not the first ‘film artist,’ but he was the first to be so pure, the first to use photography like painting in movement, photography like verbal imagery. As set down in his writings, his own theories inform us of this. Yet POTEMKIN must be seen to be believed.” –Parker Tyler

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Bruce & Norman Yonemoto
BASED ON ROMANCE
1979, 24 min, video
This stylized narrative is the first in the Yonemotos’ “Soap Opera Series”, in which they employ the traditional syntax and codes of melodrama to explore how mass media formulas manipulate desire and sexuality, fantasy and reality. Played out with the self-conscious acting and dialogue of a soap opera, this story of the dissolution of a contemporary romance is set in the context of the postmodern Southern California art scene. By emphasizing modes of representation – TV, movies, art – the Yonemotos reconstruct a narrative of melodrama itself, illustrating their assertion that personal dramas and romantic ideals are the result of media propaganda, a social fantasy that becomes reality.
&
Bruce & Norman Yonemoto
AN IMPOTENT METAPHOR
1979, 43 min, video
The ironic themes and strategies of the “Soap Opera Series” continue in this postmodern tale of artistic and sexual crises in Southern California. Boredom and alienation, the banality of fantasies and reality, and the need for idealized romance afflict the cliché-driven characters that wander through the Yonemotos’ narrative representation of the L.A. art scene. The pervasive cultural malaise is seen as conditioned behavior – conscious psychological manipulation by the mass media. Against this dominant media ideology, the central figure of the artist Norman, played by Norman Yonemoto, makes art to “expose the derivative nature of the romantic ideal” and “promote the examination of our personal contexts.”

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

The screening on Friday, March 18 will feature a Q&A with Bruce Yonemoto, as well as actor Wenden Baldwin (who appears in BASED ON ROMANCE), moderated by Rebecca Cleman, Executive Director of Electronic Arts Intermix.

The final installment of the Yonemotos’ “Soap Opera Series” uses the deadpan syntax of television melodrama to tell the story of Sumie, a young Japanese woman who marries an American surfer/filmmaker for the green card that will allow her to pursue her artistic career. Falling prey to the seductive Hollywood fantasy of romantic love, she loses her “American Dream” of independence. Casting an ironic eye on the Los Angeles lifestyle and art scene of the early 1980s, this stylized narrative asserts that the delirium of Hollywood “reality” – the collective memory of the media – has a manipulative impact on the “truth” of our personal lives. As Sumie says, “The way we see family, friends, relationships – even love – is mass media propaganda.”

Preceded by:
Bruce & Norman Yonemoto
ROMANIC
1980, 16 min, video
“Male/female relationships, as explored in all their nuances on the daytime ‘soaps’, serve as the inspiration for Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s ROMANIC, a story of a lovers quarrel which is both provoked by, and leads to arguments about, television. With serial repetition of the incident, we are given different perspectives (through variations in sound and image) and added information to change our initial assumptions about what we have observed.” –Louise Lewis, CALIFORNIA VIDEO

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

(OKTYABR)

“An imaginary document projected on actual locations, OCTOBER is the Soviet equivalent of the Sistine Chapel – an artist commissioned by the state has represented the sacred origins of the universe. Woodrow Wilson had famously hailed D.W. Griffith’s THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915) as ‘history written with lightning,’ but Eisenstein’s cosmic newsreel cum theoretical film poem goes beyond THE BIRTH OF A NATION, as well as his own BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, in drafting the past to serve the requirements of the present. No less than the revolutionaries who made October, Eisenstein understood himself as history’s tool. Thus consecrated to the Bolshevik faith, his OCTOBER is a perfect tautology – it clarifies and improves on history in the service of objective historical necessity.” –J. Hoberman, THE RED ATLANTIS: COMMUNIST CULTURE IN THE ABSENCE OF COMMUNISM

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Bruce & Norman Yonemoto
SPALDING GRAY’S MAP OF L.A.
1984, 28 min, video
The Yonemotos collaborated with performance artist Spalding Gray and actors Mary Woronov and Marshall Efron on this satire of the mythology of Los Angeles, juxtaposing a parodic fictional narrative with Gray’s autobiographical monologues. The ironic re-enactment of the New York artist’s encounter with the excess of Los Angeles focuses on the Southern Californian obsession with cars as cultural and consumer icons. In tragicomic monologues that punctuate the ongoing fantasy narrative, Gray traces his sentimental education through a series of anecdotal childhood memories that detail his romantic infatuation with cars.

Bruce & Norman Yonemoto
KAPPA
1986, 26 min, video. In collaboration with Mike Kelley.
Deconstructing the myth of Oedipus within the framework of an ancient Japanese folk story, the Yonemotos craft a highly charged discourse of loss and desire. Quoting from Buñuel, Freud, pop media and art, they place the symbology of Western psychosexual analytical theory into a cross-cultural context, juxtaposing the Oedipal and Kappa myths in a delirious collusion of form and content. The Kappa, a malevolent Japanese water imp, is played with eerie intensity by artist Mike Kelley; actress Mary Woronov plays Jocasta as a vamp from a Hollywood exploitation film. Steeped in perversions and violent longings, both the Kappa and Oedipus legends are presented in highly stylized, purposefully “degraded” forms, reflecting their media-exploitative cultural contexts. In this ironic yet oddly poignant essay of psychosexual compulsion and catharsis, the Yonemotos demonstrate that even in debased forms, cultural archetypes hold the power to move and manipulate.

Bruce & Norman Yonemoto
BLINKY
1988, 15.5 min, video. In collaboration with Jeffrey Vallance.
Writes Norman Yonemoto, “In the novella ‘Blinky The Friendly Hen’ (1978), artist Jeffrey Vallance documented the supermarket purchase of a frozen chicken and its burial in the Los Angeles S.P.C.A. Pet Memorial Park. Naming the fryer Blinky, Vallance transformed poultry into pet, paying tribute to the billions of hens sacrificed each year for our consumption. Ten years later questions of the true cause of Blinky’s death continue to swirl. BLINKY, the videotape, documents the search for this cause. Alas, like the shroud of Turin, Blinky’s death cannot be completely resolved. Blinky’s ten-year story ends where it began, in our culture’s glistening, dreamlike symbol of heavenly closure, the supermarket.”

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

The screening on Saturday, March 19 will feature a Q&A with Bruce Yonemoto, moderated by Tyler Maxin, Communications and Special Projects Associate at Electronic Arts Intermix.

(STAROYE I NOVOYE)

With OLD AND NEW, also known as THE GENERAL LINE, Eisenstein developed and perfected his theories of “mise-en-cadre,” using the montage of characters in the foreground and background to conjure meanings, and “overtonal montage,” bringing silent film to its zenith.

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“An early directorial effort, BROTHERS is part of the first wave of feature-length gay porn, made not long after Wakefield Poole’s landmark all-male BOYS IN THE SAND (1971) and the mainstream breakthrough of heterosexual classic DEEP THROAT (1972). Set in Los Angeles, BROTHERS tells the story of Vince, a brooding, mustachioed stud who’s visited by his kid brother Rick, a soldier serving in Vietnam. During Rick’s stay, the two siblings slowly confront their mutually hidden desires with an emotional intensity seldom seen in adult films. ‘The thing about making pornography is that it was a way of doing experimental pieces and actually using what I’d learned to make these feature films. And there was a guaranteed return on the investment,’ Norman said in an interview for the Getty’s 2008 exhibition California Video. ‘Back in the mid-seventies, I made the only anti-Vietnam War porno. People still are blown away by the piece. It’s about this big brother whose little brother comes home on leave. Toward the end, all of a sudden, you’re in the veterans’ cemetery. The older brother is there at his younger brother’s grave, and the audience is brought to tears. People weeping while watching a porno? It was unprecedented.’” –LIGHT INDUSTRY

Preceded by:
Norman Yonemoto & Nicholas Ursin
SECOND CAMPAIGN
1969, 19 min, 16mm-to-digital
Yonemoto’s collaboration with then-partner Nicholas Ursin focuses on the activists and anti-war demonstrations at People’s Park in Berkeley in 1969.

With Patricia Arquette, Michael Lerner, Ron Vawter, Mary Woronov, Greg Mehrten, and Michael Smith.
Steeped in irony, MADE IN HOLLYWOOD depicts the personal and cultural mediation of reality and fantasy, desire and identity, by the myths of television and cinema. Quoting from a catalogue of popular styles and sources, from TV commercials to THE WIZARD OF OZ, the Yonemotos construct a parable of the Hollywood image-making industry from a pastiche of narrative clichés: A small-town ingenue goes West to find her dream and loses her innocence; the patriarch of a Hollywood studio nears death; a New York couple seeks screenwriting fame and fortune in the movies. With deadpan humor and hyperbolic visual stylization, the Yonemotos layer artifice upon artifice, constructing an image-world where reality and representation, truth and simulation, are meaningless distinctions.

Preceded by:
Bruce & Norman Yonemoto
VAULT
1984, 12 min, video
In this tour-de-force of stylized deconstruction, the Yonemotos rewrite a traditional narrative of desire: boy meets girl, boy loses girl. Employing the hyperbolic, melodramatic syntax of Hollywood movies and commercial TV, they decode the Freudian symbology and manipulative tactics that underlie media representations of romantic love, and expose the power of this media “reality” to construct personal fictions. Using the psychoanalytic language of advertising, cinematic and television texts to tell the love story of a pole vaulter/concert cellist and a cowboy/Abstract Expressionist painter, they rupture the narrative with psychosexual metaphors and references to pop media and art.

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

The screening on Sun, Mar 20 will feature a Q&A with Bruce Yonemoto and actor Greg Mehrten (Mabou Mines, Wooster Group), who appears in MADE IN HOLLYWOOD!

(IVAN GROZNY)

“The first time in history a man has committed suicide by cinema,” quipped Dovzhenko. A state-sanctioned production, Ivan’s opulent furs and jewels color the black-and-white machinations by a demonic Czar bent on making his subjects’ lives a living hell – a statement pointed with outrage directly at Stalin.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Performance artist Karen Finley in person on Sun, Mar 20!

PANPANORAMA (2002, 4 min, digital)
PANPANORAMA features the famous “kiss” in Alfred Hitchcockʼs VERTIGO. The locations which panoramically circle around the lovers in VERTIGO are replaced with tracking shots from famous scenes in classic films from all over the world. By replacing the locations of the loversʼ desire, the installation underscores the fact that “global cinema” has faded into the background of the Hollywood cinematic desire.

PAPA (the original potato eaters) (2006, 11 min, digital)
PAPA replicates Van Gogh’s painting, “The Potato Eaters”, with the “uncivilized, unpeeled dusty faces” of the original Dutch peasants portrayed by an indigenous Andean Quechua family. Following the model of Luis Buñuel’s 1932 surrealist documentary, LAND WITHOUT BREAD, PAPA attempts to détourne the discourse typically adopted by the “voice of god” documentary form, simply by bringing the underlying elitism of such formalism to the foreground.

SOUNDS LIKE THE SOUND OF MUSIC (2007, 3 min, digital)
This video engages Peruvian culture by translating an iconographic American musical song into the indigenous Incan language of Quechua, offering an insight into a colonized culture that has successfully coexisted to this day with the dominant societies of Europe and the U.S.

BEFORE I CLOSE MY EYES (2010, 3.5 min, digital)
This video focuses on three contemporary Vietnamese men, dressed in Vietnam War-era uniforms, as they watch a recording of the historic televised suicide of Hòa thượng Thích Quảng Đức, the Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk who burned himself to death at a busy Saigon intersection on June 11, 1963, an act of protest that shocked the world and ultimately led to the demise of the American-supported Diem regime. The video is structured, shot for shot, after the pivotal mental breakdown scene in Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film PERSONA.

FRAMED (1989, 8 min, digital)
FRAMED positions U.S. government propaganda film footage of the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII at the heart of a contemplation of personal memory and mediated history.

FAR EAST OF EDEN (2016, 24 min, digital)
Featuring performance artist Karen Finley, FAR EAST OF EDEN sheds light on the dark side of the Santa Clara Valley. While researching a new project at the Montalvo Arts Residency, Finley was confronted with the racist policies and beliefs of its founder, art lover and senator James D. Phelan, who championed the Oriental Exclusion Act of the early 20th century. Joining forces with Bruce Yonemoto, the two artists have created a video work that connects Phelan’s hate speech and anti-immigrant rhetoric with the social-political atmosphere of the Trump era.

Plus, the premiere of a brand-new new work:
COSMOPOLITAN (2022, ca. 16 min, digital)
Focusing predominantly on Mexico City, this new work is an exploration of immigration and the ways in which different cultures intertwine or remain separate, via the prism of ethnic cuisines and the history of food. Excavating the surprising histories of various street foods, and interviewing individuals of different backgrounds, Yonemoto meditates on the visible and invisible manifestations of cross-cultural influence.

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

The screening on Sunday, March 20 will feature a Q&A with Bruce Yonemoto and performance artist Karen Finley, who stars in FAR EAST OF EDEN.

Bruce & Norman Yonemoto
A HISTORY OF CLOUDS
1991, 37 min, video
“A comprehensive and playful survey of how clouds have been depicted in art and photography over the centuries, in which talking heads appear in frames within frames, often moving across the screen. The film’s final section explores the work of artist Gary Lloyd, whose company supplies meticulously painted backdrops for TV and films, including the Yonemotos’ own MADE IN HOLLYWOOD.” –TATE MODERN

Bruce & Norman Yonemoto
ahistory
1992, 1 min, video
Europe’s enchantment with American consumer culture is depicted, as well-known European architectural landmarks – the Eiffel Tower, the Acropolis, London Bridge – are reflected in the glossy surface of a 1960s Cadillac convertible, the ultimate symbol of the “golden age” of American consumerism.

Bruce & Norman Yonemoto
JAPAN IN PARIS IN L.A.
1996, 30 min, 16mm-to-digital
JAPAN IN PARIS IN L.A. centers on Saeki Yuzo, an early twentieth-century Japanese artist who makes a pilgrimage to Paris to seek his artistic fortunes, only to find that ethnic and cultural differences stand in his way. Around this narrative, the Yonemotos construct a multi-layered and self-reflexive work, in which strategies of disjunction and contradiction are central. Highly theatrical in its mise en scene, the piece nevertheless makes constant play with the mechanics and trappings of cinematic convention, and employs explicitly experimental strategies, such as a disembodied voice that intones script directions. Shot in both color and black-and-white film stocks, and intercutting archival footage of turn-of-the-century Paris, artistic locus of its time, with scenes set in mid-century Los Angeles, the twentieth century’s Dream Factory, JAPAN IN PARIS IN L.A. is a complex meditation on issues of Modernity, representation, ethnocentrism, and identity.

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

Bruce & Norman Yonemoto
BASED ON ROMANCE
1979, 24 min, video
This stylized narrative is the first in the Yonemotos’ “Soap Opera Series”, in which they employ the traditional syntax and codes of melodrama to explore how mass media formulas manipulate desire and sexuality, fantasy and reality. Played out with the self-conscious acting and dialogue of a soap opera, this story of the dissolution of a contemporary romance is set in the context of the postmodern Southern California art scene. By emphasizing modes of representation – TV, movies, art – the Yonemotos reconstruct a narrative of melodrama itself, illustrating their assertion that personal dramas and romantic ideals are the result of media propaganda, a social fantasy that becomes reality.
&
Bruce & Norman Yonemoto
AN IMPOTENT METAPHOR
1979, 43 min, video
The ironic themes and strategies of the “Soap Opera Series” continue in this postmodern tale of artistic and sexual crises in Southern California. Boredom and alienation, the banality of fantasies and reality, and the need for idealized romance afflict the cliché-driven characters that wander through the Yonemotos’ narrative representation of the L.A. art scene. The pervasive cultural malaise is seen as conditioned behavior – conscious psychological manipulation by the mass media. Against this dominant media ideology, the central figure of the artist Norman, played by Norman Yonemoto, makes art to “expose the derivative nature of the romantic ideal” and “promote the examination of our personal contexts.”

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

The screening on Friday, March 18 will feature a Q&A with Bruce Yonemoto, as well as actor Wenden Baldwin (who appears in BASED ON ROMANCE), moderated by Rebecca Cleman, Executive Director of Electronic Arts Intermix.

The final installment of the Yonemotos’ “Soap Opera Series” uses the deadpan syntax of television melodrama to tell the story of Sumie, a young Japanese woman who marries an American surfer/filmmaker for the green card that will allow her to pursue her artistic career. Falling prey to the seductive Hollywood fantasy of romantic love, she loses her “American Dream” of independence. Casting an ironic eye on the Los Angeles lifestyle and art scene of the early 1980s, this stylized narrative asserts that the delirium of Hollywood “reality” – the collective memory of the media – has a manipulative impact on the “truth” of our personal lives. As Sumie says, “The way we see family, friends, relationships – even love – is mass media propaganda.”

Preceded by:
Bruce & Norman Yonemoto
ROMANIC
1980, 16 min, video
“Male/female relationships, as explored in all their nuances on the daytime ‘soaps’, serve as the inspiration for Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s ROMANIC, a story of a lovers quarrel which is both provoked by, and leads to arguments about, television. With serial repetition of the incident, we are given different perspectives (through variations in sound and image) and added information to change our initial assumptions about what we have observed.” –Louise Lewis, CALIFORNIA VIDEO

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

Bruce & Norman Yonemoto
SPALDING GRAY’S MAP OF L.A.
1984, 28 min, video
The Yonemotos collaborated with performance artist Spalding Gray and actors Mary Woronov and Marshall Efron on this satire of the mythology of Los Angeles, juxtaposing a parodic fictional narrative with Gray’s autobiographical monologues. The ironic re-enactment of the New York artist’s encounter with the excess of Los Angeles focuses on the Southern Californian obsession with cars as cultural and consumer icons. In tragicomic monologues that punctuate the ongoing fantasy narrative, Gray traces his sentimental education through a series of anecdotal childhood memories that detail his romantic infatuation with cars.

Bruce & Norman Yonemoto
KAPPA
1986, 26 min, video. In collaboration with Mike Kelley.
Deconstructing the myth of Oedipus within the framework of an ancient Japanese folk story, the Yonemotos craft a highly charged discourse of loss and desire. Quoting from Buñuel, Freud, pop media and art, they place the symbology of Western psychosexual analytical theory into a cross-cultural context, juxtaposing the Oedipal and Kappa myths in a delirious collusion of form and content. The Kappa, a malevolent Japanese water imp, is played with eerie intensity by artist Mike Kelley; actress Mary Woronov plays Jocasta as a vamp from a Hollywood exploitation film. Steeped in perversions and violent longings, both the Kappa and Oedipus legends are presented in highly stylized, purposefully “degraded” forms, reflecting their media-exploitative cultural contexts. In this ironic yet oddly poignant essay of psychosexual compulsion and catharsis, the Yonemotos demonstrate that even in debased forms, cultural archetypes hold the power to move and manipulate.

Bruce & Norman Yonemoto
BLINKY
1988, 15.5 min, video. In collaboration with Jeffrey Vallance.
Writes Norman Yonemoto, “In the novella ‘Blinky The Friendly Hen’ (1978), artist Jeffrey Vallance documented the supermarket purchase of a frozen chicken and its burial in the Los Angeles S.P.C.A. Pet Memorial Park. Naming the fryer Blinky, Vallance transformed poultry into pet, paying tribute to the billions of hens sacrificed each year for our consumption. Ten years later questions of the true cause of Blinky’s death continue to swirl. BLINKY, the videotape, documents the search for this cause. Alas, like the shroud of Turin, Blinky’s death cannot be completely resolved. Blinky’s ten-year story ends where it began, in our culture’s glistening, dreamlike symbol of heavenly closure, the supermarket.”

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

The screening on Saturday, March 19 will feature a Q&A with Bruce Yonemoto, moderated by Tyler Maxin, Communications and Special Projects Associate at Electronic Arts Intermix.

Bruce & Norman Yonemoto
A HISTORY OF CLOUDS
1991, 37 min, video
“A comprehensive and playful survey of how clouds have been depicted in art and photography over the centuries, in which talking heads appear in frames within frames, often moving across the screen. The film’s final section explores the work of artist Gary Lloyd, whose company supplies meticulously painted backdrops for TV and films, including the Yonemotos’ own MADE IN HOLLYWOOD.” –TATE MODERN

Bruce & Norman Yonemoto
ahistory
1992, 1 min, video
Europe’s enchantment with American consumer culture is depicted, as well-known European architectural landmarks – the Eiffel Tower, the Acropolis, London Bridge – are reflected in the glossy surface of a 1960s Cadillac convertible, the ultimate symbol of the “golden age” of American consumerism.

Bruce & Norman Yonemoto
JAPAN IN PARIS IN L.A.
1996, 30 min, 16mm-to-digital
JAPAN IN PARIS IN L.A. centers on Saeki Yuzo, an early twentieth-century Japanese artist who makes a pilgrimage to Paris to seek his artistic fortunes, only to find that ethnic and cultural differences stand in his way. Around this narrative, the Yonemotos construct a multi-layered and self-reflexive work, in which strategies of disjunction and contradiction are central. Highly theatrical in its mise en scene, the piece nevertheless makes constant play with the mechanics and trappings of cinematic convention, and employs explicitly experimental strategies, such as a disembodied voice that intones script directions. Shot in both color and black-and-white film stocks, and intercutting archival footage of turn-of-the-century Paris, artistic locus of its time, with scenes set in mid-century Los Angeles, the twentieth century’s Dream Factory, JAPAN IN PARIS IN L.A. is a complex meditation on issues of Modernity, representation, ethnocentrism, and identity.

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

Viking Eggeling
SYMPHONIE DIAGONALE (1924, 8 min, 35mm)
“This early experimental short is one of only two films completed by Swedish-born artist Viking Eggeling, who worked in Paris, Milan, and ultimately Germany. It utilizes paper cutouts, tin foil, and frame-by-frame photography to create a playful show in which cubist, even art deco, circles and lines dance – diagonally – across the black screen.” –FACETS

Dwinell Grant
COMPOSITION #2 CONTRATHEMIS (1941, 5 min, 16mm, silent)
“An attempt to develop visual abstract themes and to counterpoint them in a planned, formal composition.” –Dwinell Grant
STOP MOTION TESTS (1942, 3 min, 16mm, silent)
A pixillated self-portrait of the filmmaker in his studio.
COLOR SEQUENCE (1943, 3 min, 16mm, silent)
“Pure solid-color frames which fade, mutate and flicker. A research into color rhythms and perceptual phenomena.” –William Moritz

Ken Jacobs & Bob Fleischner
BLONDE COBRA
1959-63, 35 min, 16mm-to-35mm blow-up. With Jack Smith. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from The Film Foundation.
“BLONDE COBRA is an erratic narrative – no, not really a narrative, it’s only stretched out in time for convenience of delivery. It’s a look in on an exploding life, on a man of imagination suffering pre-fashionable Lower East Side deprivation and consumed with American 1950s, 40s, 30s disgust. Silly, self-pitying, guilt-strictured and yet triumphing – on one level – over the situation with style… enticing us into an absurd moral posture the better to dismiss us with a regal ‘screw off.’” –Ken Jacobs

Total running time: ca. 60 min.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW!

Performance artist Karen Finley in person on Sun, Mar 20!

PANPANORAMA (2002, 4 min, digital)
PANPANORAMA features the famous “kiss” in Alfred Hitchcockʼs VERTIGO. The locations which panoramically circle around the lovers in VERTIGO are replaced with tracking shots from famous scenes in classic films from all over the world. By replacing the locations of the loversʼ desire, the installation underscores the fact that “global cinema” has faded into the background of the Hollywood cinematic desire.

PAPA (the original potato eaters) (2006, 11 min, digital)
PAPA replicates Van Gogh’s painting, “The Potato Eaters”, with the “uncivilized, unpeeled dusty faces” of the original Dutch peasants portrayed by an indigenous Andean Quechua family. Following the model of Luis Buñuel’s 1932 surrealist documentary, LAND WITHOUT BREAD, PAPA attempts to détourne the discourse typically adopted by the “voice of god” documentary form, simply by bringing the underlying elitism of such formalism to the foreground.

SOUNDS LIKE THE SOUND OF MUSIC (2007, 3 min, digital)
This video engages Peruvian culture by translating an iconographic American musical song into the indigenous Incan language of Quechua, offering an insight into a colonized culture that has successfully coexisted to this day with the dominant societies of Europe and the U.S.

BEFORE I CLOSE MY EYES (2010, 3.5 min, digital)
This video focuses on three contemporary Vietnamese men, dressed in Vietnam War-era uniforms, as they watch a recording of the historic televised suicide of Hòa thượng Thích Quảng Đức, the Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk who burned himself to death at a busy Saigon intersection on June 11, 1963, an act of protest that shocked the world and ultimately led to the demise of the American-supported Diem regime. The video is structured, shot for shot, after the pivotal mental breakdown scene in Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film PERSONA.

FRAMED (1989, 8 min, digital)
FRAMED positions U.S. government propaganda film footage of the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII at the heart of a contemplation of personal memory and mediated history.

FAR EAST OF EDEN (2016, 24 min, digital)
Featuring performance artist Karen Finley, FAR EAST OF EDEN sheds light on the dark side of the Santa Clara Valley. While researching a new project at the Montalvo Arts Residency, Finley was confronted with the racist policies and beliefs of its founder, art lover and senator James D. Phelan, who championed the Oriental Exclusion Act of the early 20th century. Joining forces with Bruce Yonemoto, the two artists have created a video work that connects Phelan’s hate speech and anti-immigrant rhetoric with the social-political atmosphere of the Trump era.

Plus, the premiere of a brand-new new work:
COSMOPOLITAN (2022, ca. 16 min, digital)
Focusing predominantly on Mexico City, this new work is an exploration of immigration and the ways in which different cultures intertwine or remain separate, via the prism of ethnic cuisines and the history of food. Excavating the surprising histories of various street foods, and interviewing individuals of different backgrounds, Yonemoto meditates on the visible and invisible manifestations of cross-cultural influence.

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

The screening on Sunday, March 20 will feature a Q&A with Bruce Yonemoto and performance artist Karen Finley, who stars in FAR EAST OF EDEN.

“Based on a true incident, the film chronicles the wanderings of a woman and child looking for work and lodging in Paris. This is the only plot, and Hanoun has little interest in embellishing it with background and motivation: he never even makes it clear, for example, whether the woman is the child’s mother, guardian or companion. UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE is, more than a narrative, a formal stylistic exercise so rigorously disciplined and understated that it makes the visual asceticism of Robert Bresson seem almost Fellini-esque by comparison.”  –TIME

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

“Launching the Yonemotos’ joint practice, GARAGE SALE is a campy X-rated feature centered on a story of marital upheaval between drag queen Goldie Glitters and her fair-haired husband Hero. A onetime member of San Francisco’s legendary Cockettes theatre troupe, Goldie was famously crowned Santa Monica College’s 1975 Homecoming Queen, captured in Bruce Yonemoto’s documentary HOMECOMING (1975). GARAGE SALE subverts the drag aspect of Goldie’s performance enabling her to sympathetically play a woman whose fantasies and expectations have been shaped by Hollywood romance films. The film follows the couple as Hero tries to regain Goldie’s love by seeking the advice of a cast of eccentric characters.” –TATE MODERN

Followed by:
GARAGE SALE II
1980, 31 min, video
“Featuring performances by artists Tony Oursler and Mike Kelley, GARAGE SALE II moves between a couple’s sexually dysfunctional relationship and a series of vignettes in which characters attempt to fulfill their desires through prosthetics, masturbation, manipulation and S&M.” –TATE MODERN

Total running time: ca. 120 min.

The screening on Thurs, March 17 will feature a Q&A with Bruce Yonemoto, moderated by Karl McCool, Distribution Director of Electronic Arts Intermix.

With Patricia Arquette, Michael Lerner, Ron Vawter, Mary Woronov, Greg Mehrten, and Michael Smith.
Steeped in irony, MADE IN HOLLYWOOD depicts the personal and cultural mediation of reality and fantasy, desire and identity, by the myths of television and cinema. Quoting from a catalogue of popular styles and sources, from TV commercials to THE WIZARD OF OZ, the Yonemotos construct a parable of the Hollywood image-making industry from a pastiche of narrative clichés: A small-town ingenue goes West to find her dream and loses her innocence; the patriarch of a Hollywood studio nears death; a New York couple seeks screenwriting fame and fortune in the movies. With deadpan humor and hyperbolic visual stylization, the Yonemotos layer artifice upon artifice, constructing an image-world where reality and representation, truth and simulation, are meaningless distinctions.

Preceded by:
Bruce & Norman Yonemoto
VAULT
1984, 12 min, video
In this tour-de-force of stylized deconstruction, the Yonemotos rewrite a traditional narrative of desire: boy meets girl, boy loses girl. Employing the hyperbolic, melodramatic syntax of Hollywood movies and commercial TV, they decode the Freudian symbology and manipulative tactics that underlie media representations of romantic love, and expose the power of this media “reality” to construct personal fictions. Using the psychoanalytic language of advertising, cinematic and television texts to tell the love story of a pole vaulter/concert cellist and a cowboy/Abstract Expressionist painter, they rupture the narrative with psychosexual metaphors and references to pop media and art.

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

The screening on Sun, Mar 20 will feature a Q&A with Bruce Yonemoto and actor Greg Mehrten (Mabou Mines, Wooster Group), who appears in MADE IN HOLLYWOOD!

Ian Hugo
BELLS OF ATLANTIS
(1952, 10 min, 16mm. Preserved by the Library of Congress through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation.)
A film poem, based on Anaïs Nin’s HOUSE OF INCEST, narrated by and featuring Nin.
“[BELLS OF ATLANTIS was] inspired by the prologue to my HOUSE OF INCEST and the line: ‘I remember my first birth in water.’ The film evoked the watery depths of the lost continent of Atlantis. It is a lyrical journey into prenatal memories, the theme of birth and rebirth from the sea.” –Anaïs Nin

Ken Jacobs
LITTLE STABS AT HAPPINESS (1959-63, 18 min, 16mm. With Jack Smith.)
“Material was cut in as it came out of the camera, embarrassing moments intact. 100’ rolls timed well with music on old 78s. I was interested in immediacy, a sense of ease, and an art where suffering was acknowledged but not trivialized with dramatics. Whimsy was our achievement, as well as breaking out of step.” –Ken Jacobs

Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb, and James Agee
IN THE STREET (1952, 12 min, 16mm, b&w. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
“Informality is indeed the crucial and virtually definitive quality of IN THE STREET; it is even the guiding principle and vision. […] This is the extreme realization of a classic ‘naturalistic’ genre, the German ‘street film,’ where the street was imaged as the arena of the everyday and random, the channel in which the ‘stream of life’ conveniently became microcosmic.” –Ken Kelman, THE ESSENTIAL CINEMA

Willard Maas
GEOGRAPHY OF THE BODY (1943, 7 min, 16mm, b&w. Preserved by Anthology with support from The National Film Preservation Foundation.)
“The terrors and splendors of the human body as the undiscovered, mysterious continent.” –Willard Maas

Total running time: ca. 55 min.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

“An early directorial effort, BROTHERS is part of the first wave of feature-length gay porn, made not long after Wakefield Poole’s landmark all-male BOYS IN THE SAND (1971) and the mainstream breakthrough of heterosexual classic DEEP THROAT (1972). Set in Los Angeles, BROTHERS tells the story of Vince, a brooding, mustachioed stud who’s visited by his kid brother Rick, a soldier serving in Vietnam. During Rick’s stay, the two siblings slowly confront their mutually hidden desires with an emotional intensity seldom seen in adult films. ‘The thing about making pornography is that it was a way of doing experimental pieces and actually using what I’d learned to make these feature films. And there was a guaranteed return on the investment,’ Norman said in an interview for the Getty’s 2008 exhibition California Video. ‘Back in the mid-seventies, I made the only anti-Vietnam War porno. People still are blown away by the piece. It’s about this big brother whose little brother comes home on leave. Toward the end, all of a sudden, you’re in the veterans’ cemetery. The older brother is there at his younger brother’s grave, and the audience is brought to tears. People weeping while watching a porno? It was unprecedented.’” –LIGHT INDUSTRY

Preceded by:
Norman Yonemoto & Nicholas Ursin
SECOND CAMPAIGN
1969, 19 min, 16mm-to-digital
Yonemoto’s collaboration with then-partner Nicholas Ursin focuses on the activists and anti-war demonstrations at People’s Park in Berkeley in 1969.

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

A filmmaker who’s close to our hearts here at Anthology Film Archives, Ted Fendt has quietly laid claim to a unique patch of cinematic ground over the past several years, an artistic territory that represents the unlikely meeting point for what would seem to be incompatible elements: deadpan comedy, socially awkward suburbanite character studies, and the formal precision and exquisite (16mm) photography of auteurs such as Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Coming in the wake of his highly condensed, suburban New Jersey-set short films, and his first two, similarly compact features (SHORT STAY and CLASSICAL PERIOD), Fendt’s latest work – OUTSIDE NOISE – is both instantly recognizable and a significant departure.

Fendt’s earlier films were all remarkable for the almost anthropological attention they paid to the landscapes and residents of the Philadelphia suburbs of southwestern New Jersey, and for protagonists who set about their intellectual and interpersonal pursuits with a uniquely American degree of awkwardness. But OUTSIDE NOISE takes him far afield from his usual stomping grounds, focusing on three young women casting about for a sense of purpose in contemporary Berlin and Vienna. Daniela, Mia, and Natascha – three women just beginning to feel their way into their adult lives – share their predecessors’ intellectual curiosity and seriousness, and are similarly adrift. But their way of being in the world is profoundly distinct from that of Fendt’s previous characters. Nevertheless, Fendt’s peculiar cinematic gifts are fully in evidence here: a privileging of behavioral observation over plot, an extraordinary ability to capture subtle, fleeting moods and atmospheres, and a determination to conjure for his characters a filmic form that mirrors their perceptions and experiences rather than shoehorning their lives into conventional dramatic structures. Following the lead of his actresses (who developed and co-wrote the film with him), Fendt pushes OUTSIDE NOISE’s tone past the dry comedy of the earlier films, perfectly capturing a state of being that’s at once deeply melancholic and yet rapturously attuned to the beauty, textures, and potentialities of existence.

“OUTSIDE NOISE [is] a film about wandering and insomnia. Daniela can’t sleep, whether in New York, Berlin or Vienna. Mia has similar troubles, and Natascha seems to be quietly falling apart too. Is some outside noise keeping them in this half-vigilant, half-dormant state? We all know this noise, the heavy noise of empty days, it’s everywhere, like anxiety. The film seems to be a way of dealing with this state by means of beauty, light, and movement, based on the belief that to be fair is to be poetic.” –Lucía Salas, VIENNALE

“‘There used to be phone booths on every corner,’ says a customer. He is sitting on his sofa, talking to one of the cable technicians whose work leads Pavel Cuzuioc into a road movie through private households in Moldavia, Romania, Ukraine, and Bulgaria. While such an assessment may seem nostalgic or reactionary at first, there is far more to it than that. By observing the work of cable repairmen, the film also focuses on communication in regions marked by poverty, nationalism, and conflict – a delicate endeavor which the director balances out with a sense of absurdity. The film constantly shows that this work to help bring people in contact with the world and friends neither stops conflicts nor prevents a sense of isolation. After all, the true communication tool present for all those visited by the repairmen is the camera. They talk about their life and thus a double sense of access develops: one that is concerned with access to people, and one that is concerned with access to the modern world. As telephone cables are itself threatened by extinction in the age of digitalization, the film asks the important question of whether life is in harmony with or at war with modernization.” –Patrick Holzapfel, VIENNALE

Pavel Cuzuioc will be here for Q&As following all the 7:30 screenings.

On Friday, March 25, the Q&A will be moderated by Sasha Solovyeva, a New York City-based digital media maker and product designer at National Public Radio. Hailing from Moscow, Russia, Solovyeva has since lived and worked in Vienna, Prague, Rotterdam, Berlin, and NYC.

On Sunday, March 27, the Q&A will be moderated by Mona Nicoară, a New York-based, Romanian-born documentary filmmaker, festival programmer, and film educator.

“‘There used to be phone booths on every corner,’ says a customer. He is sitting on his sofa, talking to one of the cable technicians whose work leads Pavel Cuzuioc into a road movie through private households in Moldavia, Romania, Ukraine, and Bulgaria. While such an assessment may seem nostalgic or reactionary at first, there is far more to it than that. By observing the work of cable repairmen, the film also focuses on communication in regions marked by poverty, nationalism, and conflict – a delicate endeavor which the director balances out with a sense of absurdity. The film constantly shows that this work to help bring people in contact with the world and friends neither stops conflicts nor prevents a sense of isolation. After all, the true communication tool present for all those visited by the repairmen is the camera. They talk about their life and thus a double sense of access develops: one that is concerned with access to people, and one that is concerned with access to the modern world. As telephone cables are itself threatened by extinction in the age of digitalization, the film asks the important question of whether life is in harmony with or at war with modernization.” –Patrick Holzapfel, VIENNALE

Pavel Cuzuioc will be here for Q&As following all the 7:30 screenings.

On Friday, March 25, the Q&A will be moderated by Sasha Solovyeva, a New York City-based digital media maker and product designer at National Public Radio. Hailing from Moscow, Russia, Solovyeva has since lived and worked in Vienna, Prague, Rotterdam, Berlin, and NYC.

On Sunday, March 27, the Q&A will be moderated by Mona Nicoară, a New York-based, Romanian-born documentary filmmaker, festival programmer, and film educator.

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

A filmmaker who’s close to our hearts here at Anthology Film Archives, Ted Fendt has quietly laid claim to a unique patch of cinematic ground over the past several years, an artistic territory that represents the unlikely meeting point for what would seem to be incompatible elements: deadpan comedy, socially awkward suburbanite character studies, and the formal precision and exquisite (16mm) photography of auteurs such as Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Coming in the wake of his highly condensed, suburban New Jersey-set short films, and his first two, similarly compact features (SHORT STAY and CLASSICAL PERIOD), Fendt’s latest work – OUTSIDE NOISE – is both instantly recognizable and a significant departure.

Fendt’s earlier films were all remarkable for the almost anthropological attention they paid to the landscapes and residents of the Philadelphia suburbs of southwestern New Jersey, and for protagonists who set about their intellectual and interpersonal pursuits with a uniquely American degree of awkwardness. But OUTSIDE NOISE takes him far afield from his usual stomping grounds, focusing on three young women casting about for a sense of purpose in contemporary Berlin and Vienna. Daniela, Mia, and Natascha – three women just beginning to feel their way into their adult lives – share their predecessors’ intellectual curiosity and seriousness, and are similarly adrift. But their way of being in the world is profoundly distinct from that of Fendt’s previous characters. Nevertheless, Fendt’s peculiar cinematic gifts are fully in evidence here: a privileging of behavioral observation over plot, an extraordinary ability to capture subtle, fleeting moods and atmospheres, and a determination to conjure for his characters a filmic form that mirrors their perceptions and experiences rather than shoehorning their lives into conventional dramatic structures. Following the lead of his actresses (who developed and co-wrote the film with him), Fendt pushes OUTSIDE NOISE’s tone past the dry comedy of the earlier films, perfectly capturing a state of being that’s at once deeply melancholic and yet rapturously attuned to the beauty, textures, and potentialities of existence.

“OUTSIDE NOISE [is] a film about wandering and insomnia. Daniela can’t sleep, whether in New York, Berlin or Vienna. Mia has similar troubles, and Natascha seems to be quietly falling apart too. Is some outside noise keeping them in this half-vigilant, half-dormant state? We all know this noise, the heavy noise of empty days, it’s everywhere, like anxiety. The film seems to be a way of dealing with this state by means of beauty, light, and movement, based on the belief that to be fair is to be poetic.” –Lucía Salas, VIENNALE

“‘There used to be phone booths on every corner,’ says a customer. He is sitting on his sofa, talking to one of the cable technicians whose work leads Pavel Cuzuioc into a road movie through private households in Moldavia, Romania, Ukraine, and Bulgaria. While such an assessment may seem nostalgic or reactionary at first, there is far more to it than that. By observing the work of cable repairmen, the film also focuses on communication in regions marked by poverty, nationalism, and conflict – a delicate endeavor which the director balances out with a sense of absurdity. The film constantly shows that this work to help bring people in contact with the world and friends neither stops conflicts nor prevents a sense of isolation. After all, the true communication tool present for all those visited by the repairmen is the camera. They talk about their life and thus a double sense of access develops: one that is concerned with access to people, and one that is concerned with access to the modern world. As telephone cables are itself threatened by extinction in the age of digitalization, the film asks the important question of whether life is in harmony with or at war with modernization.” –Patrick Holzapfel, VIENNALE

Pavel Cuzuioc will be here for Q&As following all the 7:30 screenings.

On Friday, March 25, the Q&A will be moderated by Sasha Solovyeva, a New York City-based digital media maker and product designer at National Public Radio. Hailing from Moscow, Russia, Solovyeva has since lived and worked in Vienna, Prague, Rotterdam, Berlin, and NYC.

On Sunday, March 27, the Q&A will be moderated by Mona Nicoară, a New York-based, Romanian-born documentary filmmaker, festival programmer, and film educator.

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

A filmmaker who’s close to our hearts here at Anthology Film Archives, Ted Fendt has quietly laid claim to a unique patch of cinematic ground over the past several years, an artistic territory that represents the unlikely meeting point for what would seem to be incompatible elements: deadpan comedy, socially awkward suburbanite character studies, and the formal precision and exquisite (16mm) photography of auteurs such as Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Coming in the wake of his highly condensed, suburban New Jersey-set short films, and his first two, similarly compact features (SHORT STAY and CLASSICAL PERIOD), Fendt’s latest work – OUTSIDE NOISE – is both instantly recognizable and a significant departure.

Fendt’s earlier films were all remarkable for the almost anthropological attention they paid to the landscapes and residents of the Philadelphia suburbs of southwestern New Jersey, and for protagonists who set about their intellectual and interpersonal pursuits with a uniquely American degree of awkwardness. But OUTSIDE NOISE takes him far afield from his usual stomping grounds, focusing on three young women casting about for a sense of purpose in contemporary Berlin and Vienna. Daniela, Mia, and Natascha – three women just beginning to feel their way into their adult lives – share their predecessors’ intellectual curiosity and seriousness, and are similarly adrift. But their way of being in the world is profoundly distinct from that of Fendt’s previous characters. Nevertheless, Fendt’s peculiar cinematic gifts are fully in evidence here: a privileging of behavioral observation over plot, an extraordinary ability to capture subtle, fleeting moods and atmospheres, and a determination to conjure for his characters a filmic form that mirrors their perceptions and experiences rather than shoehorning their lives into conventional dramatic structures. Following the lead of his actresses (who developed and co-wrote the film with him), Fendt pushes OUTSIDE NOISE’s tone past the dry comedy of the earlier films, perfectly capturing a state of being that’s at once deeply melancholic and yet rapturously attuned to the beauty, textures, and potentialities of existence.

“OUTSIDE NOISE [is] a film about wandering and insomnia. Daniela can’t sleep, whether in New York, Berlin or Vienna. Mia has similar troubles, and Natascha seems to be quietly falling apart too. Is some outside noise keeping them in this half-vigilant, half-dormant state? We all know this noise, the heavy noise of empty days, it’s everywhere, like anxiety. The film seems to be a way of dealing with this state by means of beauty, light, and movement, based on the belief that to be fair is to be poetic.” –Lucía Salas, VIENNALE

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

A filmmaker who’s close to our hearts here at Anthology Film Archives, Ted Fendt has quietly laid claim to a unique patch of cinematic ground over the past several years, an artistic territory that represents the unlikely meeting point for what would seem to be incompatible elements: deadpan comedy, socially awkward suburbanite character studies, and the formal precision and exquisite (16mm) photography of auteurs such as Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Coming in the wake of his highly condensed, suburban New Jersey-set short films, and his first two, similarly compact features (SHORT STAY and CLASSICAL PERIOD), Fendt’s latest work – OUTSIDE NOISE – is both instantly recognizable and a significant departure.

Fendt’s earlier films were all remarkable for the almost anthropological attention they paid to the landscapes and residents of the Philadelphia suburbs of southwestern New Jersey, and for protagonists who set about their intellectual and interpersonal pursuits with a uniquely American degree of awkwardness. But OUTSIDE NOISE takes him far afield from his usual stomping grounds, focusing on three young women casting about for a sense of purpose in contemporary Berlin and Vienna. Daniela, Mia, and Natascha – three women just beginning to feel their way into their adult lives – share their predecessors’ intellectual curiosity and seriousness, and are similarly adrift. But their way of being in the world is profoundly distinct from that of Fendt’s previous characters. Nevertheless, Fendt’s peculiar cinematic gifts are fully in evidence here: a privileging of behavioral observation over plot, an extraordinary ability to capture subtle, fleeting moods and atmospheres, and a determination to conjure for his characters a filmic form that mirrors their perceptions and experiences rather than shoehorning their lives into conventional dramatic structures. Following the lead of his actresses (who developed and co-wrote the film with him), Fendt pushes OUTSIDE NOISE’s tone past the dry comedy of the earlier films, perfectly capturing a state of being that’s at once deeply melancholic and yet rapturously attuned to the beauty, textures, and potentialities of existence.

“OUTSIDE NOISE [is] a film about wandering and insomnia. Daniela can’t sleep, whether in New York, Berlin or Vienna. Mia has similar troubles, and Natascha seems to be quietly falling apart too. Is some outside noise keeping them in this half-vigilant, half-dormant state? We all know this noise, the heavy noise of empty days, it’s everywhere, like anxiety. The film seems to be a way of dealing with this state by means of beauty, light, and movement, based on the belief that to be fair is to be poetic.” –Lucía Salas, VIENNALE

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

A filmmaker who’s close to our hearts here at Anthology Film Archives, Ted Fendt has quietly laid claim to a unique patch of cinematic ground over the past several years, an artistic territory that represents the unlikely meeting point for what would seem to be incompatible elements: deadpan comedy, socially awkward suburbanite character studies, and the formal precision and exquisite (16mm) photography of auteurs such as Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Coming in the wake of his highly condensed, suburban New Jersey-set short films, and his first two, similarly compact features (SHORT STAY and CLASSICAL PERIOD), Fendt’s latest work – OUTSIDE NOISE – is both instantly recognizable and a significant departure.

Fendt’s earlier films were all remarkable for the almost anthropological attention they paid to the landscapes and residents of the Philadelphia suburbs of southwestern New Jersey, and for protagonists who set about their intellectual and interpersonal pursuits with a uniquely American degree of awkwardness. But OUTSIDE NOISE takes him far afield from his usual stomping grounds, focusing on three young women casting about for a sense of purpose in contemporary Berlin and Vienna. Daniela, Mia, and Natascha – three women just beginning to feel their way into their adult lives – share their predecessors’ intellectual curiosity and seriousness, and are similarly adrift. But their way of being in the world is profoundly distinct from that of Fendt’s previous characters. Nevertheless, Fendt’s peculiar cinematic gifts are fully in evidence here: a privileging of behavioral observation over plot, an extraordinary ability to capture subtle, fleeting moods and atmospheres, and a determination to conjure for his characters a filmic form that mirrors their perceptions and experiences rather than shoehorning their lives into conventional dramatic structures. Following the lead of his actresses (who developed and co-wrote the film with him), Fendt pushes OUTSIDE NOISE’s tone past the dry comedy of the earlier films, perfectly capturing a state of being that’s at once deeply melancholic and yet rapturously attuned to the beauty, textures, and potentialities of existence.

“OUTSIDE NOISE [is] a film about wandering and insomnia. Daniela can’t sleep, whether in New York, Berlin or Vienna. Mia has similar troubles, and Natascha seems to be quietly falling apart too. Is some outside noise keeping them in this half-vigilant, half-dormant state? We all know this noise, the heavy noise of empty days, it’s everywhere, like anxiety. The film seems to be a way of dealing with this state by means of beauty, light, and movement, based on the belief that to be fair is to be poetic.” –Lucía Salas, VIENNALE

Polish composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki (1933-2020) was one of the progenitors of avant-garde music of the 1960s. Creator of his own compositional idiom, “sonorism”, which became a hallmark of the so-called Polish School of Composition, he was an early recipient of the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers Prize for “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” (1961). Recipient of hundreds of prizes (including five Grammy Awards), he achieved a rare balance between radical experimentation and an approach to classical music that struck a chord within popular culture. Conducting his own concerts, he had a unique ability to elicit emotional responses from his audiences and to convey messages of profound humanism. Throughout his career, Penderecki worked in multiple forms – symphony, opera, concerto, vocal and chamber works – producing masterpieces such as “Dies Irae” (1967), “Jutrznia” (1970-71), and the opera “The Devils of Loudun” (1968-69). He was particularly drawn to religious music and was the first modern composer to revive the form of the Passion (with 1966’s “St. Luke’s Passion”).

Penderecki’s music was embraced early on in the cinematic realm. Though he rarely composed directly for feature films, exceptions include Wojciech Has’s THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT (1964) and THE CODES (1964), and Alain Resnais’s JE T’AIME, JE T’AIME. And his pre-existing compositions were often borrowed for film soundtracks, most famously appearing in William Friedkin’s THE EXORCIST (1973), Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING (1980), Jerzy Skolimowski’s HANDS UP! (1981), Andrzej Wajda’s KATYN (2007), and Martin Scorsese’s SHUTTER ISLAND (2010). More recently, Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” accompanied one of the most unforgettable scenes in David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN (2017).

Most of the film music Penderecki composed came in the first phase of his career, and was written for short films in his native Poland. In the early 1960s, he began writing film music at the Polish Radio Experimental Studio together with Eugeniusz Rudnik, a sound engineer and pioneer of electronic music. Penderecki was at first reluctant to explore electronic music (supposedly due to a serious electrical shock some years earlier), but at Rudnik’s urging he began to embrace its potential, and their collaboration would result in some of the most extraordinary film music of the era. Composing music for short films allowed Penderecki to test his ideas freely, on viewers who were not as skeptical as those he encountered in the classical music realm. The discoveries he made creating music with Rudnik in the “black room” of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio in Warsaw were later incorporated into Penderecki’s individual compositions, including “Polymorphia” (1961), a piece that opens Anthology’s film program, and “The Second Cello Concerto” (1974), the one that closes it.

Anthology is thrilled to host a program encompassing most of the short films that feature Penderecki’s music, both those for which he composed the music specially and those that incorporate previously written pieces.

Guest-curated by Adriana Prodeus, this program is co-presented with the Polish Cultural Institute New York; special thanks to Tomek Smolarski.



This program will screen theatrically at Anthology on March 29, as well as online from March 30-April 12. To access the Vimeo-on-Demand presentation, click here.

Aneta Grzeszykowska
BOLIMORPHY
Poland, 2008, 7.5 min, digital. Featuring Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Polymorphia” (1961).
The artist’s fragmented and duplicated body is seen as a disruption of a broken mechanism. Penderecki’s “Polymorphia” is used as an instrument of destruction to disturb “Bolero” by Maurice Ravel. Combining these two pieces with the disintegration of her own body lets the artist Aneta Grzeszykowska create a ballet of auto-destruction.

Kazimierz Urbański
THE CHARM OF THE TWO WHEELS / CZAR KÓŁEK
Poland, 1966, 6 min, 35mm-to-digital. Original music by Krzysztof Penderecki.
One of the highlights of Polish avant-garde cinema in the 1960s, this film is a critique of industry and its destructive influence on the environment. On the soundtrack Penderecki mixes a sped-up recording of Nikołaj Rimski-Korsakow’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” with electronically produced sounds representing the environment.

Leokadia Serafinowicz
BASILISK ENCOUNTER / SPOTKANIE Z BAZYLISZKIEM
Poland, 1961, 9.5 min, 35mm-to-digital. Original music by Krzysztof Penderecki.
This stop-motion version of the legend of the Basilisk terrifies thanks to flickering, unstable images, an encircling, labyrinthine space, and eerie electronic music. The movie combines sounds of the void, mockingly descending to the depths of subconsciousness, with a joyful accompaniment of a bedtime story. In Penderecki’s vision, the monster from the past heralds anxiety for the future.

Mirosław Kijowicz
THE HARLEQUIN / ARLEKIN
Poland, 1960, 6 min, 35mm-to-digital. Original music by Krzysztof Penderecki.
The Harlequin’s dance with balloons is set to vibrant percussion. Light and heavy forms float around the Harlequin, who is both a ballet master and a harpist.

Jerzy Zitzman
DON JUAN
Poland, 1963, 10 min, 35mm-to-digital. Original music by Krzysztof Penderecki.
A parodic account of the adventures of the character from Molière’s drama and Byron’s poem. The soundtrack exaggerates various sound effects – hoofbeats, gunshots, a choir, an Italian pop song – into a cacophonous collage. In this telling, Don Juan is a perpetual motion machine, generating endless collisions.

Krzysztof Dębowski
SPACE TRIP / WYCIECZKA W KOSMOS
Poland, 1961, 11 min, 35mm-to-digital. Original music by Krzysztof Penderecki.
This adaptation of the first part of Stanisław Lem’s STAR DIARIES narrates the adventures of space traveler Ijon Tichy on an uninhabited planet.

Krzysztof Dębowski
THE TRAP / PUŁAPKA
Poland, 1962, 9 min, 35mm-to-digital. Original music by Krzysztof Penderecki.
This sequel to SPACE TRIP, covering the second part of Lem’s STAR DIARIES, features an electronic soundtrack of whispers, whistling, and operatic cries.

Jerzy Zitzman
ICARUS / IKAR
Poland, 1966, 11 min, 35mm-to-digital
Penderecki’s favorite of his short film compositions, ICARUS combines cutouts with cartoon animation in the style of Jan Lenica. It comprises a kaleidoscope of flying shapes: a hat in the wind, sparrows, peacocks, a canary in a cage, and finally a tailor who sews himself a cape in order to fly. To rise above the ground in this world means to escape from brutal progress, which destroys all traces of the previous era. The invention of the flying machine, however, transforms the course of history – the past and the future switch places and become their own mirror reflections.

Steph Twyford-Rigley
PERSEPHONE / PERSEFONA
U.S., 2016, 3 min, digital. Featuring Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Cello Concerto No 1” (1973).
PERSEPHONE combines an excerpt from Penderecki’s “Cello Concerto No 1” with a static image of a shivering cat, emerging from the shade.

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

A filmmaker who’s close to our hearts here at Anthology Film Archives, Ted Fendt has quietly laid claim to a unique patch of cinematic ground over the past several years, an artistic territory that represents the unlikely meeting point for what would seem to be incompatible elements: deadpan comedy, socially awkward suburbanite character studies, and the formal precision and exquisite (16mm) photography of auteurs such as Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Coming in the wake of his highly condensed, suburban New Jersey-set short films, and his first two, similarly compact features (SHORT STAY and CLASSICAL PERIOD), Fendt’s latest work – OUTSIDE NOISE – is both instantly recognizable and a significant departure.

Fendt’s earlier films were all remarkable for the almost anthropological attention they paid to the landscapes and residents of the Philadelphia suburbs of southwestern New Jersey, and for protagonists who set about their intellectual and interpersonal pursuits with a uniquely American degree of awkwardness. But OUTSIDE NOISE takes him far afield from his usual stomping grounds, focusing on three young women casting about for a sense of purpose in contemporary Berlin and Vienna. Daniela, Mia, and Natascha – three women just beginning to feel their way into their adult lives – share their predecessors’ intellectual curiosity and seriousness, and are similarly adrift. But their way of being in the world is profoundly distinct from that of Fendt’s previous characters. Nevertheless, Fendt’s peculiar cinematic gifts are fully in evidence here: a privileging of behavioral observation over plot, an extraordinary ability to capture subtle, fleeting moods and atmospheres, and a determination to conjure for his characters a filmic form that mirrors their perceptions and experiences rather than shoehorning their lives into conventional dramatic structures. Following the lead of his actresses (who developed and co-wrote the film with him), Fendt pushes OUTSIDE NOISE’s tone past the dry comedy of the earlier films, perfectly capturing a state of being that’s at once deeply melancholic and yet rapturously attuned to the beauty, textures, and potentialities of existence.

“OUTSIDE NOISE [is] a film about wandering and insomnia. Daniela can’t sleep, whether in New York, Berlin or Vienna. Mia has similar troubles, and Natascha seems to be quietly falling apart too. Is some outside noise keeping them in this half-vigilant, half-dormant state? We all know this noise, the heavy noise of empty days, it’s everywhere, like anxiety. The film seems to be a way of dealing with this state by means of beauty, light, and movement, based on the belief that to be fair is to be poetic.” –Lucía Salas, VIENNALE

“Original 1905 film shot and probably directed by G.W. ‘Billy’ Bitzer, rescued via a paper print filed for copyright purposes with the Library of Congress. It is most reverently examined here, absolutely loved, with a new movie, almost as a side effect, coming into being.” –Ken Jacobs

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DUO CONCERTANTES (1962-64, 6 min, 16mm, b&w)
HAMFAT ASAR (1965, 13 min, 16mm, b&w)
GYMNOPEDIES (1968, 6 min, 16mm)
THE OLD HOUSE, PASSING (1966, 45 min, 16mm, b&w. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE (1968, 9 min, 35mm)
“With a taste for nostalgic romanticism…Jordan creates a magical universe of work using old steel engravings and collectable memorabilia. His 50-year pursuit into the subconscious mind gives him a place in the annals of cinema as a prolific animator on a voyage into the surreal psychology of the inner self.” –Jackie Leger

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS NOW! 

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

A filmmaker who’s close to our hearts here at Anthology Film Archives, Ted Fendt has quietly laid claim to a unique patch of cinematic ground over the past several years, an artistic territory that represents the unlikely meeting point for what would seem to be incompatible elements: deadpan comedy, socially awkward suburbanite character studies, and the formal precision and exquisite (16mm) photography of auteurs such as Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Coming in the wake of his highly condensed, suburban New Jersey-set short films, and his first two, similarly compact features (SHORT STAY and CLASSICAL PERIOD), Fendt’s latest work – OUTSIDE NOISE – is both instantly recognizable and a significant departure.

Fendt’s earlier films were all remarkable for the almost anthropological attention they paid to the landscapes and residents of the Philadelphia suburbs of southwestern New Jersey, and for protagonists who set about their intellectual and interpersonal pursuits with a uniquely American degree of awkwardness. But OUTSIDE NOISE takes him far afield from his usual stomping grounds, focusing on three young women casting about for a sense of purpose in contemporary Berlin and Vienna. Daniela, Mia, and Natascha – three women just beginning to feel their way into their adult lives – share their predecessors’ intellectual curiosity and seriousness, and are similarly adrift. But their way of being in the world is profoundly distinct from that of Fendt’s previous characters. Nevertheless, Fendt’s peculiar cinematic gifts are fully in evidence here: a privileging of behavioral observation over plot, an extraordinary ability to capture subtle, fleeting moods and atmospheres, and a determination to conjure for his characters a filmic form that mirrors their perceptions and experiences rather than shoehorning their lives into conventional dramatic structures. Following the lead of his actresses (who developed and co-wrote the film with him), Fendt pushes OUTSIDE NOISE’s tone past the dry comedy of the earlier films, perfectly capturing a state of being that’s at once deeply melancholic and yet rapturously attuned to the beauty, textures, and potentialities of existence.

“OUTSIDE NOISE [is] a film about wandering and insomnia. Daniela can’t sleep, whether in New York, Berlin or Vienna. Mia has similar troubles, and Natascha seems to be quietly falling apart too. Is some outside noise keeping them in this half-vigilant, half-dormant state? We all know this noise, the heavy noise of empty days, it’s everywhere, like anxiety. The film seems to be a way of dealing with this state by means of beauty, light, and movement, based on the belief that to be fair is to be poetic.” –Lucía Salas, VIENNALE

Humphrey Jennings
LISTEN TO BRITAIN (1941, 19 min, 35mm, b&w)
Jennings’s film is a masterpiece of sound mixing; it creates an audio landscape of Britain during the war, with images both accompanying and conflicting with the multitude of sounds.

Dimitri Kirsanoff
MÉNILMONTANT (1924-25, 38 min, 35mm, b&w, silent)
“[T]o a remarkable degree, MÉNILMONTANT seems an autonomous creation, as sophisticated and demanding as any narrative film of the silent period, without obvious imitators. Although Richard Abel has astutely called attention to aspects the film shares with Abel Gance’s LA ROUE (1923) and Leon Moussinac’s LE BRASIER ARDENT (1923)…and with Jean Epstein’s COEUR FIDELE (1923)…any comparison of the film as a whole with those admirable works would have to underline the intensity, uniqueness, and exceptional rigor of Kirsanoff’s achievement.” –P. Adams Sitney, THE CINEMA OF POETRY

Total running time: ca. 60 min.

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