Anthology Film Archives

CHARLIE AHEARN IN PERSON!

In the infancy of hip-hop, Brooklyn-born photographer Jamel Shabazz documented the pioneers of music and style who would launch an enduring worldwide phenomenon. In JAMEL SHABAZZ STREET PHOTOGRAPHER, Charlie Ahearn pays tribute to both Shabazz and those who defined hip-hop before it had definition. More than just vintage shots of kids rocking sneakers and savvy street style in Times Square and Fort Greene Park, Shabazz’s photographs have hundreds of stories behind them, and Ahearn’s film gives voice to these images with intimate interviews with Shabazz himself, graffiti pioneer and hip-hop historian Fred “Fab 5 Freddy” Brathwaite, legendary rapper KRS-One, and many others.

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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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CHARLIE AHEARN IN PERSON!

Charlie Ahearn
DOIN’ TIME IN TIMES SQUARE
1991, 39 min, video
During the production of WILD STYLE in 1980, Ahearn moved with his wife Jane Dickson to a corner loft with views of 8th Ave and 43rd St. Awakened nightly by howling from the street, he was ready with his video camera to shoot the transgender habitués of the infamous hangout, Sally’s Hideaway, throwing garbage cans at cops. Show World, Dobbs Hats, and Paradise Alley offered lovely backdrops to another drug deal gone bad. Home movies of his son Joe’s birthday parties and the arrival of his daughter Eve clashed with street fights down below. Times Square’s New Year’s Eve mob scenes marked the passage of time until Ahearn’s building was demolished to make way for the new Disney-fied Times Square.

Józef Robakowski
FROM MY WINDOW / Z MOJEGO OKNA
1978-99, 19 min, 16mm-to-digital
“In 1978, Robakowski moved into an apartment in a newly-built high-rise in the center of Łódź. That’s when he began filming the people and events he could see from his kitchen window. Looking down onto the public square below, his witty pseudo-documentary observes the daily activities of his neighbors and mass gatherings such as the annual May Day marches. …[The] film spans 20 years with an invisible, omniscient narrator in the manner of a classic 19th-century novel.” –Walter Seidl, KONTAKT COLLECTION

Eve Heller
ASTOR PLACE
1997, 10 min, 16mm, silent
“Passersby at Astor Place in New York City speak silent volumes as they move by the mirrored surface of a diner window. I wanted to capture the unscripted choreography of the street, its dance of gazes and riddle of identities.” –Eve Heller

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

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FREE SCREENING!

Since 1989, Visual AIDS – a New York based non-profit that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy – has mobilized art institutions for Day With(out) Art. A day of mourning and action that uses art to respond to the ongoing HIV and AIDS crisis, Day With(out) Art encourages universities, museums, art institutions, and AIDS organizations to present related programming on or around World AIDS Day, which falls on December 1.

This year, Visual AIDS has organized “Red Reminds Me…”, a program of seven videos reflecting the emotional spectrum of living with HIV today. Through the red ribbon and other visuals, HIV and AIDS has been long associated with the color red and its connotations – blood, pain, tragedy, and anger. “Red Reminds Me…” invites viewers to consider a complex range of images and feelings surrounding HIV, spanning eroticism and intimacy, mothering and kinship, luck and chance, memory and haunting. The commissioned artists deploy parody, melodrama, theater, irony, and horror to build a new vocabulary for representing HIV today.

The title is drawn from the words of Stacy Jennings, an activist, poet, and long-term survivor with HIV, who writes: “Red reminds me, red reminds me, red reminds me…to be free.” Linking “red” to freedom, Jennings flips the usual connotations of the color and offers a new way of thinking about the complexity of living with HIV. Just as a prism bends and refracts light, “Red Reminds Me…” expands the emotional spectrum of living with HIV. It shows us that while grief, tragedy, and anger define parts of the epidemic, the full picture contains deep, nuanced, and sometimes contradictory feelings.

The artists in this program were selected through an open call process juried by artists/activists aAliy A. Muhammad and Jessica Whitbread, curator Alper Turan, and community organizer Josué Lopez.

Visual AIDS is a New York-based non-profit that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over. For more info, visit: visualaids.org

Gian Cruz DEAR KWONG CHI (2024, digital)
Cruz creates a video letter to the late artist Tseng Kwong Chi, drawing from the experience of living with HIV in diaspora. Across continents and decades, Kwong Chi’s legacy acts as an anchor for Cruz amongst limited representations of Asian narratives in AIDS histories.

Milko Delgado EL CLUB DEL SIDA (2024, digital)
Taking its title from a sensational telenovela episode, EL CLUB DEL SIDA cycles through a lifetime of heavily stigmatizing images about HIV and AIDS. Delgado plays with multiple aesthetics – documentary, horror, comedy – to explore the various relationships he has had with AIDS over the course of his life.

Imani Harrington AGE OF KNOWING / SCRAPED (2024, digital)
A professor is asked to help a young child who has been Scraped and is soon faced with a moral dilemma that either exposes the truth or upholds a lie. With a nostalgic aesthetic, AGE OF KNOWING / SCRAPED traces memories of an AIDS past that continue to haunt the present.

David Oscar Harvey AMBIVALENCE: ON HIV & LUCK (2024, digital)
This film tackles the disorienting experience of existing with a manageable condition that our present culture insists on representing in terms of its bleak past. Interested in figuring HIV differently, the film presents a series of visual puns merging the iconography of HIV and AIDS with popular symbols of luck.

Mariana Iacono and Juan De La Mar EL VIH SE ENAMORÓ DE MI (HIV FELL IN LOVE WITH ME) (2024, digital)
HIV FELL IN LOVE WITH ME tells the story of a woman with HIV embracing her sexuality and reconnecting with her pleasure. Filmed with an erotic aesthetic, the video reflects a pursuit towards sexual justice and autonomy for women living with HIV.

Nixie IT’S GIVING (2024, digital)
Through home videos, archival footage, and fantasy landscapes, IT’S GIVING explores the connection between caregiving for a child and caregiving for a dying community. What does it mean for an HIV+ person, who carries the history and present of the AIDS-crisis in their DNA, to foster new life?

Vasilios Papapitsios PARAPRONOIA (2024, digital)
Papapitsios describes PARAPRONOIA as a “meditation on how we can(not) heal in the environments that make us sick, from the perspective of an infected neurodivergent faggot.” Combining auto-fiction with magical realism, Papapitsios humorously reimagines narratives around mental health and chronic illness.

Total running time: ca. 60 min.

Meredith Monk
BOOK OF DAYS
1989, 75 min, 35mm
Meredith Monk’s first feature-length film, BOOK OF DAYS, is a meditation on time, drawing parallels between the Middle Ages (a time of war, plague, and fear of the Apocalypse) and the 1980s (a time of racial and religious conflict, the AIDS epidemic, and fear of nuclear annihilation). The film centers on a young girl from the Jewish community of a medieval village during the time of the Black Death who has inexplicable visions of the future. As the plague descends upon the village, scapegoating and blame are cast with tragic consequences.

Preceded by:
Robert Withers TURTLE DREAMS 1987, 10 min, 16mm. Concept and music: Meredith Monk.
Meredith Monk & Bob Rosen ELLIS ISLAND 1982, 28 min, 35mm

Total running time: ca. 120 min.

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This program features two notable cinematic adaptations of Monk’s iconic performance works. Robert Withers’s 16 MILLIMETER EARRINGS (1980), made over a decade after Monks’s 1966 breakthrough multimedia work, reconstructs a documentation of a 1977 performance for film, using most of the original film sequences and sound elements. PARIS, Meredith Monk and Ping Chong’s video adaptation of their theater work from 1973, imagines the City of Lights through a series of promenades, portraits, and cackling mime faces. These two works will be preceded by a selection of Monk’s short silent films from 1966-94, most frequently presented as standalone installations or as film elements within performance works.

Meredith Monk CHILDREN 1967, 8 min, 16mm. Camera by Phill Niblock.
Meredith Monk 16 MILLIMETER EARRINGS 1966, 4 min, 16mm
Meredith Monk BALL BEARING 1968, 6.5 min, 16mm. Camera by Meredith Monk & George Landow.
Meredith Monk QUARRY 1975, 5.5 min, 16mm-to-digital
Meredith Monk ELLIS ISLAND 1979, 6.5 min, 16mm-to-digital
Meredith Monk FACES 1994, 5 min, video
Meredith Monk MOUNTAIN 1971, 6 min, 16mm-to-digital
Robert Withers 16 MILLIMETER EARRINGS 1979, 25 min, 16mm. Conceived, composed, choreographed, and performed by Meredith Monk.
Mark Lowry & Kathryn Escher PARIS 1982, 28 min, video. Conceived and performed by Meredith Monk & Ping Chong.

Total running time: ca. 100 min.

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SONGS OF ASCENSION (SHRINE) reimagines a live performance of Monk’s music theater work of the same name, recorded on location in Ann Hamilton’s tower at The Oliver Ranch in Geyserville, California. Inspired by ritual motifs of ascension and circumambulation throughout time, SONGS OF ASCENSION envelops the viewer in Monk’s expansive weaving together of music, movement, and architecture, supported by the tower’s height, double helical staircase, and unique acoustic properties. Preceded by HAND MANDALA and HAND REFLECTION, two video works made in 2018 for “Cellular Songs” and reimagined as standalone installations, and ROTATION, an audio-video installation born from Monk’s latest music theater work “Indra’s Net”.

Meredith Monk HAND MANDALA 2018, 4 min, digital
Meredith Monk HAND REFLECTION 2016, 4.5 min, digital
Meredith Monk ROTATION 2021, 10 min, digital
Dyanna Taylor SONGS OF ASCENSION (SHRINE) 2023, 40 min, digital. Conceived and performed by Meredith Monk.

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

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Meredith Monk & Amram Nowak
QUARRY
1977, 82 min, 16mm-to-DCP. The 2019 restoration of this film was made possible, in part, by grants from the Women’s Film Preservation Fund of New York Women in Film & Television, and the National Film Preservation Fund, as well as numerous individuals.
Monk’s meditation on WWII and recurring cycles of intolerance, fascism, and cruelty in history, QUARRY originated in 1976 as a live stage work utilizing elements of music, images, movement, dialogue, film, sound, and light, and was filmed in the Lepercq Space at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1977. QUARRY centers on a sick American child (played by Monk herself) whose world darkens as her illness progresses, this darkening including the rise of a dictator.

Preceded by:
Phill Niblock JUICE: A CANTATA IN THREE INSTALLMENTS 1969, 13 min, 16mm
A documentary filmed by composer Phill Niblock in 1969 capturing Monk’s landmark site-specific performance work.

Total running time: ca. 100 min.

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It all started with a heartbeat. Sandra Llano-Mejía’s IN PULSO (1978), the first video artwork made by a Colombian artist to be exhibited in Colombia (along with Ricardo Castaño’s AUTORRETRATO), is structured around an electrocardiogram of her heart. An embodied and scientific self-portrait of the artist ushered in the birth of a medium in the country, and it would only take a few years for it to develop into a fully-fledged scene with its own exhibitions like the Medellín Modern Art Museum (MAMM) Videoart Biennial in 1986.

This program brings together four pioneers of Colombian video art to trace the contours of its early history. Colombian video art came to life in the late 1970s and early 80s, right at the start of one of the country’s most tumultuous historical periods and relatively late to the global scene. But this tardiness gave early Colombian video art its distinctive flavor. Combining influences from established international video artists with idiosyncratically Colombian gestures, the first attempts at video art explored the emotional and visceral textures of the country while attempting to escape the darker aspects of quotidian reality. Whether it is Llano-Mejia’s approximations to the body, Karen Lamassonne’s intimate musings, Véronique Mondéjar’s references to the televisual, or Gilles Charalambos’s erotic provocations against the artistic establishment, these figures represent the transnational, citational, and innovative qualities that characterized this exciting period of Colombian art. Together, they provide a fruitful avenue to explore the country’s history.

Guest-curated by Juan Camilo Velásquez, who also wrote the description above.

This screening is supported by the Latinx Project's Public Humanities Fellowship at New York University.

Sandra Llano-Mejía IN-PULSO (1978, 30 min, video)
Karen Lamassonne SECRETOS DELICADOS (1982, 23 min, video)
Véronique Mondéjar ASA NISI MASA (1989, 15 min, video)
Gilles Charalambos X (1988, 7 min, video)
Gilles Charalambos CÁLCULOS EXTÁTICOS (1993, 4 min, video)

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

Meredith Monk
GIRLCHILD DIARY
2014, 86 min, digital
In her 50th year of creating work that combines voice, movement, and image, Meredith Monk revisits her iconic piece “Education of a Girlchild” for this evocative documentary centering on the 1993 Joyce Theater reunion of that production’s brilliant cast. GIRLCHILD DIARY offers a unique look at Monk’s unconventional creative process, interweaving music, photographs, interviews, and performance footage to illuminate a crossover artist still radical after all these years.

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In LEBANON, IN A WHIRLWIND, Saab pieces together the many facets and fault lines of a country on the brink of civil war. Though on the political surface the impending conflict may have looked like a religious clash, the director investigates, with both lucidity and empathy, the socio-economic causes that fueled it. Her journalistic rigor avoids any simplification to expose instead the complex and interconnected factors at play, including the centrality of the Palestinian Resistance which, as the REJECTION FRONT shows, was not a political monolith. Both films are traversed by a palpable sense of volatility, capturing Lebanon in a state of febrile tension as emancipatory and reactionary forces face off.

REJECTION FRONT / LE FRONT DU REFUS
1975, 13 min, 16mm-to-DCP

Total running time: ca. 90 min.

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ROMANCE
1976, 130 min, video. Courtesy of Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2014.M.6).

“No one else really understood that ROMANCE was a great movie, the equal of early Jacques Rivette movies. I’m glad that it has been restored and will be seen in a different context and at a different moment.” –Amy Taubin

“ROMANCE was the first feature-length fictional narrative made in video. In it, Bowes used cinema craft and technique to shadow and subvert the structure and content of conventional narrative fiction – for example, casting Karen Achenbach, as the lead male character. The film concludes with a final, highly choreographed, 20-minute single take. ROMANCE premiered with a four-night screening at The Kitchen, and was also televised on WNYC.” –Charles Ruas

“The plot revolves around Tom (Ed Bowes) and his girlfriend Kathleen (Elizabeth Cannon) and what occurs when her mother and androgynous brother Tommy (Karen Achenbach) come to visit. Tom is receiving transcripts of his innermost thoughts in anonymous letters. Sexual ambiguity, symbiotic relationships, and self-identity are all at play here. Structured in long, uncut takes with beautiful camera work by Tom Bowes, the real-time aesthetic of the work is the result of the script, in which much of the action takes place in drifting conversations.” –Marita Sturken, “Television Fictions: An Interview with Ed Bowes,” AFTERIMAGE (May 1986)

Introduced by Amy Taubin!

Overshadowed by other, more internationally prominent conflicts, the Sahwaris’ ongoing struggle for self-determination in the Western Sahara, from Spanish and then Moroccan occupation, is at the heart of this documentary. Saab does something that journalists rarely do, which is to listen to the people in front of her camera so that their condition is articulated in their words, not hers, and on their own political terms. The film also serves as a reminder of the Arab world’s heterogeneity, and pays testament to Saab’s genuine internationalism. Her camera and solidarity, in fact, were not reserved for her own people, but for all popular masses fighting against oppression and imperialism.

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

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

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“When anger is imprisoned, it bursts into flames,” observes the stupefied voiceover in BEIRUT, NEVER AGAIN. While in her previous documentary, LEBANON IN TURMOIL, the Lebanese director had pieced together the causes behind the imminent explosion, in this film she captures the dislocation that followed it. The film is a morphological treatment of a city dismembered by war, in the guise of an audiovisual poem. The focus is on the metaphysical improbability of the new landscape designed by armed confrontations, at once violently hyperreal and totally surreal. A counterpoint to the paternoster of the male Palestinian fighter is provided in PALESTINIAN WOMEN, where the director tells the ordinary stories of women living under regional imperialism. Neither displacement nor gender dissuade these women from their lives.

PALESTINIAN WOMEN / LES FEMMES PALESTINIENNES
1974, 11 min, 16mm-to-DCP

BEIRUT, NEVER AGAIN / BEYROUTH JAMAIS PLUS
1976, 37 min, 16mm-to-DCP

Total running time: ca. 55 min.

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BETTER, STRONGER
1978, 60 min, video
“BETTER, STRONGER stands in contrast to the lilting pace of ROMANCE. It begins with an intense monologue by its main character, Lana (Karen Achenbach), which continues at a fairly relentless pace throughout. It is not a seductive story like ROMANCE, but an aggressive one that often jabs and pokes at the audience. Lana’s character is a high-energy, talkative actress who has returned to New York from California for a brief visit. She visits her family and cousins, who are a rowdy and obnoxious bunch, and storms from one scene to another. […] Bowes made BETTER, STRONGER as an artist-in-residence at the Television Laboratory at WNET/Thirteen. The tape is distinguished by its preoccupation with and relentless poetic use of language. […] While BETTER, STRONGER, like ROMANCE, would seem to have a direct plot line, Bowes has structured the action loosely with no central crisis or resolution.” –Marita Sturken, “Television Fictions: An Interview with Ed Bowes,” AFTERIMAGE (May 1986)

HOW TO FLY
1980, 30 min, video
“With HOW TO FLY, Bowes abandoned plot entirely, finding other forms of structure. He wanted to show that stories do not have to obsessively organize and explain data, and that television’s hundreds of simultaneous, fragmented narratives – news, fiction, commercials, sports, etc. – had prepared audiences for this new type of structure.” –Charles Ruas

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

Possibly due to the time passed (three years into the war) or because of its epistolary nature, LETTER FROM BEIRUT possesses a more probing quality. There is an attempt to make sense out of senselessness, to record the many, ineluctable ways in which life keeps going on despite the devastation of war. In the second installment of her “Beirut Trilogy”, the director boards a bus to gauge the daily strategies of survival adopted by the country’s men and women. Ordinary reality is haunted by a conflict that has redrawn the coordinates of the everyday, has restricted freedom of movement and inflicted on the population a sense of permanent indeterminacy. Not without a sense of disenchantment, CHILDREN OF WAR reveals how the conflict has monopolized even the imagination of kids who now playfully enact, in their games and school-less days, the horror of war.

CHILDREN OF WAR / LES ENFANTS DE LA GUERRE
1976, 11.5 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles.

LETTER FROM BEIRUT / LETTRE DE BEYROUTH
1978, 50 min, 16mm-to-DCP

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

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ENTANGLEMENT
2009, 63 min, digital. Co-written with Anne Waldman, with poetry from Robert Creeley and Eileen Myles.

“Digital technologies are supposed to distance us from our material surroundings, but in Ed Bowes’s hands, they accentuate the physical world. His exquisite new film, ENTANGLEMENT, shot in high definition, lingers over skin pores, strands of hair, a clutch of flowers, a chair’s back. The accompanying script – written with poet Anne Waldman – is philosophical, abstract, while remaining as sensual as the camera’s vision. Together, image and word draw attention to the nuances of love, language, and touch that we frequently overlook in our bustling everyday lives.” –Alan Gilbert

SEAHORSE POWDER ROOM
2018, 41 min, digital
SEAHORSE POWDER ROOM spends personal time with two adults and two children; variously writers, thinkers, and musicians, presenting in a weave of text, considerations of Judith Butler and queer poetics, a severed fox head and performance, as they mix in the shadow of words, light, and impermanence.

Total running time: ca. 110 min.

The 1982 siege of Beirut was to leave a permanent mark on Jocelyne Saab’s memory and that of her city. BEIRUT, MY CITY begins with the director in front of the camera, surveying the destruction of her own family home at the hands of the Israeli air force. The house is, in her own words, the house of every Lebanese confronted by the memory of carbonized ruins. There is a sense of febrile immediacy that scorches every frame of this film, something that the spectator feels rather than sees. The film’s recovery of the final farewell of West Beirut to the fedayeen, forced out of Lebanon by the Zionist invasion, is vehement and glowing. The aftermath is chronicled in the melancholic but somewhat hopeful SHIP OF EXILE, which sees Saab aboard to document the evacuation of the PLO from Beirut.

BEIRUT, MY CITY / BEYROUTH, MA VILLE
1982, 37 min, 16mm-to-DCP

SHIP OF EXILE / LE BATEAU DE L’EXIL
1982, 16 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles.

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

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In these two documentaries, we have attempts at ethnographic filmmaking. In EGYPT, CITY OF THE DEAD, which begins in a cemetery where the living and the dead reside next to one another, Saab carries out a polyphonic survey of the Egyptian capital at a time of transition. As Arab nationalism and socialism were confronted by infitah neoliberalism, the film examines the emerging social reality through a humorous political economy. Where western accounts would have likely been alienated by such culture from below, Saab exposes the material forces that inform social relations and the changing shape of Egyptian society. In a postscript of sorts, nine years later, the director returns to Egypt with GHOSTS OF ALEXANDRIA to look at the vestigial traces of a once “cosmopolitan” city where economic and political disenfranchisement has bolstered socio-religious conservatism at society’s margins.

EGYPT, CITY OF THE DEAD / EGYPTE: LA CITÉ DES MORTS
1977, 36 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles.

GHOSTS OF ALEXANDRIA / LES FANTÔMES D’ALEXANDRIE
1986, 18 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Arabic and French with English subtitles.

Total running time: ca. 60 min.

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This program gathers together three important works for which Ed Bowes served as cinematographer.

Kathryn Bigelow
THE SET-UP
1978, 17 min, 35mm. Restored by The Museum of Modern Art with support from the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation.
“Kathryn Bigelow still had one foot in the world of political art theory when she shot her first film. In this parody of machismo, two men beat each other to a pulp. The blows are real – Bigelow later said she had no idea of how to direct the actors to pull their punches – but the style is as camp as Kenneth Anger’s SCORPIO RISING.” –Amy Taubin

Vito Acconci
THE RED TAPES, TAPE 3: TIME LAG
1977, 44 min, video
THE RED TAPES is Acconci’s masterwork, a three-part epic that is one of the major works in video. Designed originally for video projection, the work is structured to merge video space – the close-up – with filmic space – the landscape. Acconci maps a topography of the self within a cultural and social context, locating personal identity through history, cultural artifacts, language, and representation. In the third and final part, TAPE 3: TIME LAG, the space is theatrical and the action is communication, as Acconci and actors act out a “rehearsal of America.”

Richard Foreman
TOTAL RAIN
1989, 28 min, video. With Kate Manheim, Ron Vawter, and Richard Foreman.
In this “video play”, which was shown on WGBH/WNET’s series, “New Television”, playwright/director Richard Foreman explores his relationship with actors, and examines the impact of William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” – and in particular the character of Quentin Compson – on his work.

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

In a Beirut metaphysically disfigured by almost a decade of warfare, a young woman comes of age at a time that seems stuck, suspended. Human relations have been violently deprived of any prospect or certainty, youth of any sweetness, and her platonic entanglement with a painter is marooned by the city’s timelessness. “Newspapers no longer have a date,” says someone in an abandoned theatre. Life goes on but it is unclear in which direction it is headed. Every sentiment and thing seem destined to be frustrated in a film that poetically captures the crippling incertitude of everyday life encircled by death. Saab stages in this film the horror of wartime inertia.

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THE VALUE OF SMALL SKELETONS
2012, 46 min, digital
Co-written with poet Anne Waldman, THE VALUE OF SMALL SKELETONS describes the world, relationships, and interior imagination of a character named Merit.

GRISAILLE
2013, 44 min, digital. Text by Ed Bowes with poetry by Robert Duncan and Anne Waldman.
“In GRISAILLE (which is a painterly and stained glass term referring to the use of ‘gris’: gray) we encounter five figures – all women – or as Bowes calls them ‘presenters’ who seem to overlap and know one another. They sleep, read, write and contemplate their own consciousness and rehearse their mind grammar, and contemplate paintings, gender, a Robert Duncan poem that relates to a mother as a falconress. They exist in a mysterious landscape of texture, unfathomable shapes, and extraordinary color. The tones of painters Bonnard, de Kooning, Picasso, as well as Renaissance art, have inspired the color and shape of GRISAILLE.” –Anne Waldman

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

These three films, each in their own specific way, evince Saab’s determination never to severe radical politics from the biographies of those that embrace it and whose existences are changed as a result. The biopolitical spawn of internationalist love and solidarity, Mei Shigenobu is the daughter of a PFLP guerrilla leader and the Japanese Red Army leader Fusako Shigenobu. Just like Dr. Hoa, the Vietnamese doctor and revolutionary at the center of THE LADY OF SAIGON, Mei’s mother lent her entire life to the armed fight for liberation. On the run and living in Beirut clandestinely, Fusako Shigenobu brought new life in and to the struggle. The very conception of life, and the body that first nurtures it and then delivers it to the world, is both the subject and the setting of FÉCONDATION IN VIDEO which observes emancipation from the phallic masculinity through artificial insemination.

FERTILIZATION IN VIDEO / FÉCONDATION IN VIDEO
1991, 23 min, video

THE LADY OF SAIGON / LA DAME DE SAIGON
1997, 61 min, video

MY NAME IS MEI SHIGENOBU
2018, 7 min, digital

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

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“When anger is imprisoned, it bursts into flames,” observes the stupefied voiceover in BEIRUT, NEVER AGAIN. While in her previous documentary, LEBANON IN TURMOIL, the Lebanese director had pieced together the causes behind the imminent explosion, in this film she captures the dislocation that followed it. The film is a morphological treatment of a city dismembered by war, in the guise of an audiovisual poem. The focus is on the metaphysical improbability of the new landscape designed by armed confrontations, at once violently hyperreal and totally surreal. A counterpoint to the paternoster of the male Palestinian fighter is provided in PALESTINIAN WOMEN, where the director tells the ordinary stories of women living under regional imperialism. Neither displacement nor gender dissuade these women from their lives.

PALESTINIAN WOMEN / LES FEMMES PALESTINIENNES
1974, 11 min, 16mm-to-DCP

BEIRUT, NEVER AGAIN / BEYROUTH JAMAIS PLUS
1976, 37 min, 16mm-to-DCP

Total running time: ca. 55 min.

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SPITTING GLASS
1990, 54 min, video
“A story about the life of a young academic starring Rosie Hall. A large part of the story takes place in the liminal areas of her consciousness. The film was produced by Amy Taubin. The film was commissioned by and played on Channel Four in England and on public TV throughout the U.S., where it was broadcast in the 1990 season of ‘New Television’ via WGBH/WNET.” –Charles Ruas

“An adult tale of psychological disintegration presented from the point of view of a single, professional woman living in New York, SPITTING GLASS is told in a deadpan manner, with some humor and considerable irony. The program powerfully conveys an experience of mental confusion and frustration rooted in social contradictions. Soon her own thoughts are tormenting her as conflict and anger surface in some disturbing and antisocial behavior. Conversations and confrontations spill over into one another; voices become distorted and insights emerge in fragments as the protagonist moves through a series of unsatisfying encounters in her daily routine. She’d like to ‘find a new approach’ in the midst of this personal moral crisis, but can’t decide if she should go out West or kill her father.” –WGBH

AKILAH OLIVER: THREE READINGS (2011, 14 min, digital)
A portrait of the African American poet through her powerful and moving work. Akilah passed away in February of 2011.

“Bowes transcends with never-before-seen imagery, whether in cine-poem, or transcending the frame with poet Akilah Oliver reading.” –Alystyre Julian

A PUNCH IN THE GUT OF A STAR
2024, 34 min, digital. Made in collaboration with Zohra Zaka, Anne Waldman, and Emma Gomis. World premiere!
Ed Bowes’s most recent project, A PUNCH IN THE GUT OF A STAR, was filmed in 2020 during the pandemic. Set in Colorado and based on a text by Anne Waldman and the Catalan-American poet Emma Gomis, it is centered on the dreamy, poetic pod they formed together during this enigmatic time.

Total running time: ca. 105 min.

Possibly due to the time passed (three years into the war) or because of its epistolary nature, LETTER FROM BEIRUT possesses a more probing quality. There is an attempt to make sense out of senselessness, to record the many, ineluctable ways in which life keeps going on despite the devastation of war. In the second installment of her “Beirut Trilogy”, the director boards a bus to gauge the daily strategies of survival adopted by the country’s men and women. Ordinary reality is haunted by a conflict that has redrawn the coordinates of the everyday, has restricted freedom of movement and inflicted on the population a sense of permanent indeterminacy. Not without a sense of disenchantment, CHILDREN OF WAR reveals how the conflict has monopolized even the imagination of kids who now playfully enact, in their games and school-less days, the horror of war.

CHILDREN OF WAR / LES ENFANTS DE LA GUERRE
1976, 11.5 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles.

LETTER FROM BEIRUT / LETTRE DE BEYROUTH
1978, 50 min, 16mm-to-DCP

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

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The 1982 siege of Beirut was to leave a permanent mark on Jocelyne Saab’s memory and that of her city. BEIRUT, MY CITY begins with the director in front of the camera, surveying the destruction of her own family home at the hands of the Israeli air force. The house is, in her own words, the house of every Lebanese confronted by the memory of carbonized ruins. There is a sense of febrile immediacy that scorches every frame of this film, something that the spectator feels rather than sees. The film’s recovery of the final farewell of West Beirut to the fedayeen, forced out of Lebanon by the Zionist invasion, is vehement and glowing. The aftermath is chronicled in the melancholic but somewhat hopeful SHIP OF EXILE, which sees Saab aboard to document the evacuation of the PLO from Beirut.

BEIRUT, MY CITY / BEYROUTH, MA VILLE
1982, 37 min, 16mm-to-DCP

SHIP OF EXILE / LE BATEAU DE L’EXIL
1982, 16 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles.

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

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It all started with a heartbeat. Sandra Llano-Mejía’s IN PULSO (1978), the first video artwork made by a Colombian artist to be exhibited in Colombia (along with Ricardo Castaño’s AUTORRETRATO), is structured around an electrocardiogram of her heart. An embodied and scientific self-portrait of the artist ushered in the birth of a medium in the country, and it would only take a few years for it to develop into a fully-fledged scene with its own exhibitions like the Medellín Modern Art Museum (MAMM) Videoart Biennial in 1986.

This program brings together four pioneers of Colombian video art to trace the contours of its early history. Colombian video art came to life in the late 1970s and early 80s, right at the start of one of the country’s most tumultuous historical periods and relatively late to the global scene. But this tardiness gave early Colombian video art its distinctive flavor. Combining influences from established international video artists with idiosyncratically Colombian gestures, the first attempts at video art explored the emotional and visceral textures of the country while attempting to escape the darker aspects of quotidian reality. Whether it is Llano-Mejia’s approximations to the body, Karen Lamassonne’s intimate musings, Véronique Mondéjar’s references to the televisual, or Gilles Charalambos’s erotic provocations against the artistic establishment, these figures represent the transnational, citational, and innovative qualities that characterized this exciting period of Colombian art. Together, they provide a fruitful avenue to explore the country’s history.

Guest-curated by Juan Camilo Velásquez, who also wrote the description above.

This screening is supported by the Latinx Project's Public Humanities Fellowship at New York University.

Sandra Llano-Mejía IN-PULSO (1978, 30 min, video)
Karen Lamassonne SECRETOS DELICADOS (1982, 23 min, video)
Véronique Mondéjar ASA NISI MASA (1989, 15 min, video)
Gilles Charalambos X (1988, 7 min, video)
Gilles Charalambos CÁLCULOS EXTÁTICOS (1993, 4 min, video)

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

In LEBANON, IN A WHIRLWIND, Saab pieces together the many facets and fault lines of a country on the brink of civil war. Though on the political surface the impending conflict may have looked like a religious clash, the director investigates, with both lucidity and empathy, the socio-economic causes that fueled it. Her journalistic rigor avoids any simplification to expose instead the complex and interconnected factors at play, including the centrality of the Palestinian Resistance which, as the REJECTION FRONT shows, was not a political monolith. Both films are traversed by a palpable sense of volatility, capturing Lebanon in a state of febrile tension as emancipatory and reactionary forces face off.

REJECTION FRONT / LE FRONT DU REFUS
1975, 13 min, 16mm-to-DCP

Total running time: ca. 90 min.

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Overshadowed by other, more internationally prominent conflicts, the Sahwaris’ ongoing struggle for self-determination in the Western Sahara, from Spanish and then Moroccan occupation, is at the heart of this documentary. Saab does something that journalists rarely do, which is to listen to the people in front of her camera so that their condition is articulated in their words, not hers, and on their own political terms. The film also serves as a reminder of the Arab world’s heterogeneity, and pays testament to Saab’s genuine internationalism. Her camera and solidarity, in fact, were not reserved for her own people, but for all popular masses fighting against oppression and imperialism.

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In these two documentaries, we have attempts at ethnographic filmmaking. In EGYPT, CITY OF THE DEAD, which begins in a cemetery where the living and the dead reside next to one another, Saab carries out a polyphonic survey of the Egyptian capital at a time of transition. As Arab nationalism and socialism were confronted by infitah neoliberalism, the film examines the emerging social reality through a humorous political economy. Where western accounts would have likely been alienated by such culture from below, Saab exposes the material forces that inform social relations and the changing shape of Egyptian society. In a postscript of sorts, nine years later, the director returns to Egypt with GHOSTS OF ALEXANDRIA to look at the vestigial traces of a once “cosmopolitan” city where economic and political disenfranchisement has bolstered socio-religious conservatism at society’s margins.

EGYPT, CITY OF THE DEAD / EGYPTE: LA CITÉ DES MORTS
1977, 36 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles.

GHOSTS OF ALEXANDRIA / LES FANTÔMES D’ALEXANDRIE
1986, 18 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Arabic and French with English subtitles.

Total running time: ca. 60 min.

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These three films, each in their own specific way, evince Saab’s determination never to severe radical politics from the biographies of those that embrace it and whose existences are changed as a result. The biopolitical spawn of internationalist love and solidarity, Mei Shigenobu is the daughter of a PFLP guerrilla leader and the Japanese Red Army leader Fusako Shigenobu. Just like Dr. Hoa, the Vietnamese doctor and revolutionary at the center of THE LADY OF SAIGON, Mei’s mother lent her entire life to the armed fight for liberation. On the run and living in Beirut clandestinely, Fusako Shigenobu brought new life in and to the struggle. The very conception of life, and the body that first nurtures it and then delivers it to the world, is both the subject and the setting of FÉCONDATION IN VIDEO which observes emancipation from the phallic masculinity through artificial insemination.

FERTILIZATION IN VIDEO / FÉCONDATION IN VIDEO
1991, 23 min, video

THE LADY OF SAIGON / LA DAME DE SAIGON
1997, 61 min, video

MY NAME IS MEI SHIGENOBU
2018, 7 min, digital

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

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SARA DRIVER IN PERSON ON DECEMBER 12!

Rootless Hungarian émigré Willie (John Lurie), his pal Eddie (Richard Edson), and visiting sixteen-year-old cousin Eva (Eszter Balint) always manage to make the least of any situation, whether aimlessly traversing the drab interiors and environs of New York City, Cleveland, or an anonymous Florida suburb. With its delicate humor and dramatic nonchalance, Jim Jarmusch’s one-of-a-kind minimalist masterpiece, STRANGER THAN PARADISE, forever transformed the landscape of American independent cinema.

“In 1982, Robert Frank and June Leaf were our friends. A year or so earlier Jim met Robert. They were both jury members at the Big Muddy Film Festival at the Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Jim and Robert discovered we only lived a few blocks away from each other in NYC. Jim edited the first half hour of STRANGER THAN PARADISE (we made the first half hour in 1982 and completed the film in 1984) in our fourth-floor tenement apartment on Prince St. Jim was working on a rented, antiquated upright Moviola. We couldn’t afford to rent an editing room. Jim had his outtakes taped to the wall. He drilled holes in the dining room table we found on the street for the 35mm rewinds. While Jim was finishing the first half hour, Robert came up to the apartment to see the film on the small screen of the Moviola. He liked that the film was so minimal, handmade, and do-it-yourself. His approval and encouragement meant a lot to Jim.” –Sara Driver

Preceded by:
Lewie Kloster & Noah Kloster STRANGER THAN ROTTERDAM WITH SARA DRIVER 2021, 9 min, digital
STRANGER THAN ROTTERDAM WITH SARA DRIVER uses inspired cut-out puppet animation to tell the (incredible but true!!) story of an ingenious, resourceful, and risky scheme STRANGER THAN PARADISE producer Sara Driver and Rotterdam Festival director Huub Bals concocted to help complete the film, a stratagem that encompassed Robert Frank’s notorious Rolling Stones doc, COCKSUCKER BLUES.

Total running time: ca. 105 min.

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In a Beirut metaphysically disfigured by almost a decade of warfare, a young woman comes of age at a time that seems stuck, suspended. Human relations have been violently deprived of any prospect or certainty, youth of any sweetness, and her platonic entanglement with a painter is marooned by the city’s timelessness. “Newspapers no longer have a date,” says someone in an abandoned theatre. Life goes on but it is unclear in which direction it is headed. Every sentiment and thing seem destined to be frustrated in a film that poetically captures the crippling incertitude of everyday life encircled by death. Saab stages in this film the horror of wartime inertia.

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With Kevin J. O’Connor, Harris Yulin, Tom Waits, Bulle Ogier, Roberts Blossom, Jim Jarmusch, David Johansen, Arto Lindsay, Joe Strummer, Rockets Redglare.

“Autumnal, verging on wintry, CANDY MOUNTAIN is a film of off-putting attitude and unobtrusive splendor. This Robert Frank/Rudy Wurlitzer collaboration resurrects the ghost of beatnik aspiration – it’s as mocking and elegiac as befits the testament of two reclusive counter-culture heroes. […] As beautiful as it is mannered, as sad as it is funny, [this] is a film about the end of the road, the end of America, the end of Endsville. Incandescently nondescript, this may be the first movie to make Canada seem uncanny.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

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Colonization is always a story of arrivals, departures, and returns. Following her spectral love story and woman-centered indictment of neocolonial labor exploitation, ATLANTIQUE (2019), the fantasy-infused documentary DAHOMEY is Mati Diop’s second feature. The Franco-Senegalese filmmaker returns to the terrain of restless spirits and haunting pasts to situate still unfolding efforts for the restitution of the African cultural patrimony looted by colonial powers. In 2021, 26 (of at least 7,000) artworks taken from the Kingdom of Dahomey in an 1892 invasion were returned to Cotonou, in their remapped home territory of the present-day Republic of Benin. Released from their long imprisonment in the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, these items are not merely silent objects, but a vital inheritance which continues to speak to and with the present. Maintaining her cinematic signature of hybridity, DAHOMEY is a collage of forensic observation and spiritual reanimation – the latter delivered through the voiceover interventions of the recovered statue of King Ghezo. Significantly, his crackly tones are spoken in Fon, defying the colonial imposition of the French language. Diop’s tightly-coiled documentary centralizes the importance of sustaining and recuperating a plural and collective store of indigenous knowledge and memory. DAHOMEY takes seriously the question of what constitutes a cultural heritage, as part of a vigorous debate which makes up the second half of the film, as students at the University of Abomey-Calavi in Benin complicate, demystify, and dissect what could otherwise be uncritically celebrated as an easy victory.

Preceded by:
Chris Marker & Alain Resnais
STATUES ALSO DIE / LES STATUES MEURENT AUSSI
1953, 30 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles.
Where anti-colonial cinema is concerned, banning and censorship are a badge of honor. Commissioned by Présence Africaine, the magazine and publishing house started by Alioune Diop as a home for Pan-African thought, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s essay film was swiftly stifled in their home country. This was an unsurprising fate for an early cinematic denunciation of the cultural ravages, violent pillaging, and remorseless thefts wrought by French colonization. Resnais and Marker’s close visual attention to African statues and masks formally protests their transformation into commodities by the European art world’s mechanisms of capture and commercialization. The documentary levels a robust diatribe against the legitimacy of museums – especially taking aim at one bathed in the miasma of ethnography, the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. With its tones of necromancy and reanimation, STATUES ALSO DIE served as a rare French recognition that the materials recoded as “African art objects” were materializations of entire cosmologies, and spiritual and social systems. The opening lines spoken over a dark screen offer a poetic introduction: “When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.”

Total running time: ca. 100 min.
Followed by a special panel discussion!

This program highlights the artistic (and spiritual) affinities between Robert Frank and the legendary Harry Smith. In the early 1960s, Frank was among the first to recognize that the mysterious experimental animator Harry Smith and the compiler of the ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC were one and the same. He later befriended Smith, whose art, life, and profoundly counter-cultural sensibility exerted a major fascination on him. The program will feature Frank’s film, HARRY SMITH AT THE BRESLIN HOTEL, which chronicles Smith’s 1984 eviction from one of the many hotels he called home throughout his life, as well as Smith’s own biographical FILM NO. 14 (LATE SUPERIMPOSITIONS), and several rare moving-image documents of Smith.

“Harry, I think he was a genius. He was to me the only person I met in my life that transcended everything. He seemed to always be able to give you an answer that was really at the end of the line.” –Robert Frank

“I guess Robert and Harry were both insiders and outsiders (inside-out-siders?). They cared so deeply about so many things but were also quite capable of just not giving a fuck, especially when it came to things like wearing clean shirts or pleasing the establishment. In their work, they didn’t like to repeat themselves. They both had a lot of pain, left a lot behind.” –Jem Cohen

Robert Frank
HARRY SMITH AT THE BRESLIN HOTEL2018, 11 min, DCP

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

Robert Frank
MOVING PICTURES
1994, 16 min, video

Plus, additional films to be announced!
Total running time: ca. 60 min.

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In Chantal Akerman’s inimitable TOUTE UNE NUIT, the modern city and its inhabitants are captured in fragmentary, elliptical visions of desire, frustration, and loneliness, with more than two dozen characters appearing in fleeting vignettes that tease the possibility of larger narratives. Applying a formalist framework to tableau-like sequences drenched in moody atmosphere, Akerman fashions a new cinematic grammar that combines structuralist rigor with the dreamy solitude of Edward Hopper: in her hands, human intimacy and alienation are dramatically heightened by paring down dialogue and foregrounding delicate and sudden gestures, sounds, and glances. Alongside magnus opus JEANNE DIELMAN, TOUTE UNE NUIT is one of the legendary Belgium director’s greatest triumphs: a charming, avant-garde melodrama that is as much about the weight of time as the longing for connection.

“I went to the movies a number of times with Robert. I remember we walked out of KOYAANISQATSI after about twenty minutes. Robert said, ‘It looks like a fucking airlines commercial.’ We also once saw a James Bond film together – I forget which one, but from the Pierce Brosnan period. It was very enjoyable on a big screen. Robert’s comment: ‘Not much sex for a Bond film, though.’ But the film we both loved the most was TOUTE UNE NUIT by Chantal Akerman, from 1982. Robert loved the structure, the photography, the rhythm… We both agreed it’s truly a beautiful and evocative film, and highly recommended.” –Jim Jarmusch

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A polemical pastiche and ludic film essay, Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno’s AFRICA, I WILL FLEECE YOU summons the history of colonization to explain the present. Set in Cameroon – which holds the unfortunate, singular status of having been colonized by France, Germany and Britain – the documentary presents an effective account of the harsh realities of neocolonialism on the African continent. Teno’s presence is woven through the insertion of his own childhood memories and an ironic first-person voiceover which guides the narrative through archives, interviews, performances, and across the brute violences of invasion, betrayals of colonial education, and uninterrupted continuum of damage. Opening with a fable and taking its title from a children’s song, his feature is a captivating delight, which succeeds in identifying what might still be embers of possibility in the inheritance of once autonomous societies and indigenous cultures that are not yet entirely lost.

Jim is a horse-hung photographer who specializes in titillating spreads for a hot New York gay porn magazine called Juice. But at the start of his weekend, his ungrateful bosses task him with finding a fresh face for the new issue by Monday, or he’s out on his juicy ass! Jim has in mind a gorgeous young blonde he passes on his morning jogs, but it’ll take some work to convince him. In the meantime, Jim seeks out several frisky friends to entice them to pose, leading to an extended middle sequence that intercuts between several gorgeously shot scenes of muscled man-on-man action, temporarily pausing the film’s narrative to absolutely no one’s unhappiness. In the final act, JUICE reveals itself as a sweet gay romantic comedy as well as a humpy gay porno flick par excellence. Pioneering gay independent director Arthur J. Bressan’s acclaimed films, like PASSING STRANGERS and FORBIDDEN LETTERS, often included explicit sexual scenes, alongside unusually emotional narratives and clever writing. JUICE displays all of these characteristics, offering a commentary on the challenges of using one’s own sexuality to create “content” that’s likely to resonate with both porn consumers and makers in this era of OnlyFans and JustForFans. Throw in some wry comedic skewering of the gay social scene in early 1980s New York, rare footage of the exteriors of long-defunct horny gay nightspots, and a hilarious theme song, and you’ve got yourself a can’t-miss flick.

We are thrilled to screen this new 2K restoration of Bressan’s penultimate film, in tandem with the screening at the IFC Center of the restoration of his Dean Johnson-starring DADDY DEAREST, as part of Elizabeth Purchell and KJ Shepherd’s “Cruising the Movies” series; for more info on the IFC screening, taking place on Monday, December 9, visit: https://www.ifccenter.com/series/cruising-the-movies/

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Stan Lathan STATUES HARDLY EVER SMILE 1971, 19 min, 16mm-to-DCP
“They began to feel that the space belonged to them.” For six weeks in 1971, a group of middle school students were invited to participate in a performance project at the Brooklyn Museum. What is traditionally a locus of cautious movements and hushed voices was turned into a chaotic theater of improvisatory playfulness. The credits of the lush 16mm film produced by Chamba Productions is a lesson in the Black Independent filmmaking scene in New York: directed by Stan Lathan, produced by St. Clair Bourne and Kent Garrett, and edited by Kathleen Collins. Much of the children’s collective choreography takes place in a large, empty rotunda, as they reanimate a space of carceral stillness with their running around, jumping, dancing and stop-motion games – arriving at a ritualistic understanding of themselves in relation to the space and its holdings. STATUES HARDLY EVER SMILE documents the performative and contemplative relationship established between the students and objects in an exhibition on Ancient Egypt, generating a contact zone of creative pedagogy and inspired curiosity, transgressing museum norms and spilling back out into the streets and surrounding community.

Sarah Maldoror AND THE DOGS WERE QUIET / ET LES CHIENS SE TAISAIENT 1978, 13 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles.
Briefly returning to her acting origins, the French and Guadeloupean filmmaker Sarah Maldoror adapted the Martinican poet, playwright, and politician Aimé Césaire’s play of the same name to the screen. A co-founder of Les Griots, the first theatrical troupe of exclusively African and Afro-descendent actors in France in 1956, she had also previously participated in its theatrical production. Maldoror applied her lyrical and militant lens to a work centered on the Haitian Revolution and the death of Toussaint L’Ouverture to offer its Black, anti-colonial spirit another life through cinema. Her version adds a pedagogic dimension to the invective, specifically targeting the anthropological Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Playing the role of “mother” opposite Gabriel Glissant (who starred in Med Hondo’s incendiary 1970 SOLEIL Ô), Maldoror’s staging presents AND THE DOGS WERE QUIET in pieces, set amongst a visiting group of students and the museum’s storage area of caged African objects.

Manthia Diawara DIASPORA CONVERSATIONS: FROM GORÉE TO DOGON 2000, 47 min, digital
This documentary begins with a group of children gathered around the Maison des Esclaves – the House of Slaves – on Gorée Island in Senegal, whose Door of No Return has become a site of commemoration and pilgrimage, marking a final point of departure in the transatlantic slave trade. Malian scholar Manthia Diawara and American actor Danny Glover take this charged location as their own starting point for a journey across West Africa, travelling by train, van, and boat to explore the complicated and shared histories of the continent and diaspora. Emphasizing the importance of dialogue and the recuperation of fragmented, interlinked histories, they also confront the continuum of colonization in the predatory tourist industry of globalization. The film features a rich set of appearances by Senegalese musician Youssou N’Dour, Malian Minister of Culture Aminata Traoré, American poet Ted Joans, and more, with the recently passed steward of Black Cinema Clyde Taylor as one of the cameramen.

Camille Billops TAKE YOUR BAGS 1998, 11 min, 16mm-to-DCP
“My take on slavery,” begins the voiceover by infinitely multidisciplinary storyteller and archivist Camille Billops, in one of the many experimental documentaries she made with her partner James Hatch. This short film navigates cultural memory within the context of slavery, exposing the artistic and spiritual theft which accompanied the enslavement of Africans. Billops’s take on the looting of “dreams and memories” targets the further plundering by artists such as Matisse, Braque, and Picasso, and the structures of Euro-American art museums.

Nii Kwate Owoo YOU HIDE ME 1970/2024, 16 min, 16mm-to-DCP. YOU HIDE ME was made in 1970 and re-edited in the early 1990s. In 2024, the director once more returned to his work to create this version, which is based on a digitally restored 16mm duplicate negative and was made possible by a collaboration between Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, the British Film Institute, and Nii Kwate Owoo.
Ghanaian filmmaker Nii Kwate Owoo’s deliciously clandestine subversion of his access to the British Museum’s hidden holdings coincided with some of the earlier calls for restitution. Shooting in one day and under urgent conditions, Owoo and his team revealed the overflowing storage vaults of stolen African objects, artefacts, and artworks. The film powerfully holds up over 50 years later, situating a militant demand for repatriation in clear historical terms. In testament to the related importance of African and Afro-descent stewardship, the film’s recent resurfacing is significantly due to the work of Guyanese-born June Givanni’s Pan African Cinema Archive in London.

Total running time: ca. 95 min.
Introduced by Yasmina Price

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“King and Moya went to Dutch Harbor, Alaska – the most westerly point of the United States – to trace the edge of things and to move beyond paved roads toward blurred horizons of sea, sky and rock. They returned from this Aleutian Island port and its multi-million-dollar industry built on the migrations of Bering Sea crab with an edge vision of obsession, decline and elemental beauty. Set to an improvised score of crystalline precision by Michael Krassner and the Boxhead Ensemble [featuring Will Oldham (Palace), Douglas McCombs (Tortoise) and the ubiquitous Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs], the film’s images preserve and celebrate the fiercely independent spirit of a completely unique community and landscape in a meditative exploration of ‘the last place to go.’” –Gareth Evans, LONDON FILM FESTIVAL

“It’s hard to take Robert’s influence on frontally. There is no me without him (who on earth would I be, I wonder?), just as there is no DUTCH HARBOR without him. There is a way in which making this film felt like stepping inside of his work – simply moving through space on Unalaska Island felt like living inside of a scratched print from Nova Scotia. Before I ever knew him, Robert taught me how to look – and to some extent, how to live. The fact that the film eventually led to our meeting and an intermittent friendship… I don’t know how it all works. No words. He told me that DUTCH HARBOR was ‘A good film. An honest film,’ but we never talked about it at length. It brought us together. And that means the very world.” –Braden King

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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, b&w. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
“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.

Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive in cooperation with Faces Distribution Corporation. Preservation funded by The Ahmanson Foundation, The Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s PULL MY DAISY and John Cassavetes’s SHADOWS (in the revised version that has come down to us) both appeared in 1959, and from the beginning they were closely linked. By some accounts, the screenings at New York’s Paris Theater in 1958 of the first version of SHADOWS helped inspire Frank and Leslie to make PULL MY DAISY. Appropriate, then, that when Cassavetes premiered his revised version of SHADOWS, at Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16 in November 1959, in a program entitled “The Cinema of Improvisation”, it was presented as a double bill with Frank and Leslie’s film. Exhibition history aside, the two films were heralded, above all by Jonas Mekas (albeit speaking of the first version of SHADOWS), as representing the advent of a new, countercultural American cinema that was in tune with the artistic and political ferment and the vital creative energies brewing in American culture at the time.

“When I began writing my Movie Journal, it was the beginning of the New American Cinema. Cassavetes had just completed SHADOWS. Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie were shooting PULL MY DAISY. The film bug had already bitten us, and the air was becoming more and more charged with energy and expectations. We felt that cinema was only beginning – with us!” –Jonas Mekas

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Matthias De Groof
PALIMPSEST OF THE AFRICA MUSEUM2019, 69 min, DCP. In French with English subtitles.
Made in collaboration with Congolese journalist Mona Mpembele, Belgian scholar Matthias De Groof’s documentary addresses the 2013 renovation of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels. PALIMPSEST OF THE AFRICA MUSEUM is a forensic investigation of the uncertain limbo that results when old hegemonies are met with efforts to transform them. Grouped under the efficient, if opaque, title of “Les 6,” a group of relevant experts and museum staff are filmed in the midst of conversations by turns impassioned, placid, exasperated, and lucid about how the reopened museum might negotiate its role in the brutal history of Belgian colonization of the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo, accounting for the particularly horrifying years under King Leopold II. Also included is the footage of several commemorative gatherings by the Congolese diaspora as “symbolic acts to reappropriate history,” archival materials, and additional talking heads (such as the particularly stellar Joseph Ibongo Gilungule, then director of DRC’s national museums). Accompanied throughout by a voiceover performing an animation of the museum’s African objects, the documentary ends with what is always telling information about institutions: the budget.

Manthia Diawara
MAISON TROPICALE2008, 58 min, DCP. In French with English subtitles.
The fate of “Les Maisons Tropicales” exemplifies the slippage between practical objects and artworks within a colonial context. Designed by French architect and designer Jean Prouvé, these prefabricated, transportable houses of aluminum and steel were made for efficient disassembly and reassembly in the late 1940s, intended to fill housing shortages in Niamey and Brazzaville, the capitals of the Republic of Niger and Republic of the Congo, then French colonies. Under unquestionably predatory circumstances, once a growing appreciation for Prouvé resulted in the houses accruing cultural cachet in 2000, several were bought and returned to Europe as coveted objects of modernist design and eventually auctioned for millions. In collaboration with Portuguese artist Ângela Ferreira, Manthia Diawara’s astute filmic archeology turns on the twisted continuum of this narrative, threading neocolonialism, mercenary economics, and the stakes of cultural patrimony. The interviews with former residents of the houses supply a key dimension of oral history.

Total running time: ca. 130 min.

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“Robin Bolger: Yesterday, you said the last good movie you’d recently seen was BLUE VELVET. I agree with you on that, I think that was close to perfect. Did you see David Lynch’s view of America? Can you talk about that a little bit, why you liked that movie so much?

Robert Frank: Yeah, I saw the brutality, a certain craziness, an hypocrisy, I saw very strong criticism. I also felt that he really understood, to put it in that form of a movie. It’s horrifying. It had a very big effect on me afterwards, thinking about it. When I saw it, I was really horrified, I thought ‘Jesus, this is really going a bit too far on the other side.’ But the next day when I thought about it I accepted it totally. Wonderful, if you don’t have to pussy-foot around. And at the same time, it was entertaining. It kept you in suspense, it was well done. I also like the first movie by him, ERASERHEAD.” –THE PICTURES ARE A NECESSITY: ROBERT FRANK IN ROCHESTER, NY, November 1988 (edited by William S. Johnson)

“King and Moya went to Dutch Harbor, Alaska – the most westerly point of the United States – to trace the edge of things and to move beyond paved roads toward blurred horizons of sea, sky and rock. They returned from this Aleutian Island port and its multi-million-dollar industry built on the migrations of Bering Sea crab with an edge vision of obsession, decline and elemental beauty. Set to an improvised score of crystalline precision by Michael Krassner and the Boxhead Ensemble [featuring Will Oldham (Palace), Douglas McCombs (Tortoise) and the ubiquitous Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs], the film’s images preserve and celebrate the fiercely independent spirit of a completely unique community and landscape in a meditative exploration of ‘the last place to go.’” –Gareth Evans, LONDON FILM FESTIVAL

“It’s hard to take Robert’s influence on frontally. There is no me without him (who on earth would I be, I wonder?), just as there is no DUTCH HARBOR without him. There is a way in which making this film felt like stepping inside of his work – simply moving through space on Unalaska Island felt like living inside of a scratched print from Nova Scotia. Before I ever knew him, Robert taught me how to look – and to some extent, how to live. The fact that the film eventually led to our meeting and an intermittent friendship… I don’t know how it all works. No words. He told me that DUTCH HARBOR was ‘A good film. An honest film,’ but we never talked about it at length. It brought us together. And that means the very world.” –Braden King

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U.S. PREMIERE!

Having shown two of their three previous films, THE WORK OF MACHINES (2010) and THE BETRAYED SQUARE (2017), Anthology is delighted to follow up with the U.S. premiere of the latest category-busting, inspired work from MML Collective, a trio of artists comprising Gilles Lepore and Maciej & Michał Mądracki. A collaboration with poet and sound artist Stéphane Montavon, TRACKING SATYRS transforms Sophocles’s satyr play “Ikhneutai” into an enigmatic, formally challenging, and stylistically striking mixture of experimental cinema, theater, performance art, documentary, and political commentary.

“Apollo has lost his herd of cows. Furious, he begs the forest spirits to help him. Sylenus and a gang of satyrs agree to find his cows, trusting his promises of money and freedom, but the traces are lost and the satyrs drift, before encountering the disrespectful monster who has stolen the cows from their master. This monster is none other than a toddler named Hermes – frustrated at not being recognized as a god, he insists on inventiveness and cruelty to prove his divine belonging, alongside his guardian nymph Cyllene. Will the Satyrs discovery be worth the price of their freedom? An update of Sophocles’s ‘Ikhneutai’, TRACKING SATYRS reconceives the play in the form of a docu-fiction, filmed in modern-day Poland. Mixing antiquity and modernity, blurring representations, and inviting us to observe those on the margins, it becomes a counter-model which reflects our time through a narrative that’s at once funny and disturbing.” –MML Collective

SARA DRIVER IN PERSON ON DECEMBER 12!

Rootless Hungarian émigré Willie (John Lurie), his pal Eddie (Richard Edson), and visiting sixteen-year-old cousin Eva (Eszter Balint) always manage to make the least of any situation, whether aimlessly traversing the drab interiors and environs of New York City, Cleveland, or an anonymous Florida suburb. With its delicate humor and dramatic nonchalance, Jim Jarmusch’s one-of-a-kind minimalist masterpiece, STRANGER THAN PARADISE, forever transformed the landscape of American independent cinema.

“In 1982, Robert Frank and June Leaf were our friends. A year or so earlier Jim met Robert. They were both jury members at the Big Muddy Film Festival at the Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Jim and Robert discovered we only lived a few blocks away from each other in NYC. Jim edited the first half hour of STRANGER THAN PARADISE (we made the first half hour in 1982 and completed the film in 1984) in our fourth-floor tenement apartment on Prince St. Jim was working on a rented, antiquated upright Moviola. We couldn’t afford to rent an editing room. Jim had his outtakes taped to the wall. He drilled holes in the dining room table we found on the street for the 35mm rewinds. While Jim was finishing the first half hour, Robert came up to the apartment to see the film on the small screen of the Moviola. He liked that the film was so minimal, handmade, and do-it-yourself. His approval and encouragement meant a lot to Jim.” –Sara Driver

Preceded by:
Lewie Kloster & Noah Kloster STRANGER THAN ROTTERDAM WITH SARA DRIVER 2021, 9 min, digital
STRANGER THAN ROTTERDAM WITH SARA DRIVER uses inspired cut-out puppet animation to tell the (incredible but true!!) story of an ingenious, resourceful, and risky scheme STRANGER THAN PARADISE producer Sara Driver and Rotterdam Festival director Huub Bals concocted to help complete the film, a stratagem that encompassed Robert Frank’s notorious Rolling Stones doc, COCKSUCKER BLUES.

Total running time: ca. 105 min.

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JEM COHEN IN PERSON!

“It was 1992 and I’d never been out of the U.S. on my own when I lit out for Eastern Europe with a backpack full of cameras and a cassette recorder. When the Berlin wall fell in ’89 I felt sure much of what was left of ‘old Europe’ would soon disappear, so I was already late. This was still pre-internet, at least for me, and no real plan seemed like the best plan and Super 8 the best flypaper. Going there also felt like coming home, which in a sense it was. Walter Benjamin, Kafka, wandering Jews…these were also signs pointing to…Robert Frank. When I finished the film in ‘94 I sent him a VHS (along with a copy of Ben Katchor’s ‘Cheap Novelties’) in care of his gallery. That he’d watch it and answer were the last things I expected. The hand-written letter that came back about the film floored and encouraged me, and spurred a surprising, occasionally frustrating, always amazing 30-year relationship with Robert and June Leaf.” –Jem Cohen

U.S. PREMIERE!

Having shown two of their three previous films, THE WORK OF MACHINES (2010) and THE BETRAYED SQUARE (2017), Anthology is delighted to follow up with the U.S. premiere of the latest category-busting, inspired work from MML Collective, a trio of artists comprising Gilles Lepore and Maciej & Michał Mądracki. A collaboration with poet and sound artist Stéphane Montavon, TRACKING SATYRS transforms Sophocles’s satyr play “Ikhneutai” into an enigmatic, formally challenging, and stylistically striking mixture of experimental cinema, theater, performance art, documentary, and political commentary.

“Apollo has lost his herd of cows. Furious, he begs the forest spirits to help him. Sylenus and a gang of satyrs agree to find his cows, trusting his promises of money and freedom, but the traces are lost and the satyrs drift, before encountering the disrespectful monster who has stolen the cows from their master. This monster is none other than a toddler named Hermes – frustrated at not being recognized as a god, he insists on inventiveness and cruelty to prove his divine belonging, alongside his guardian nymph Cyllene. Will the Satyrs discovery be worth the price of their freedom? An update of Sophocles’s ‘Ikhneutai’, TRACKING SATYRS reconceives the play in the form of a docu-fiction, filmed in modern-day Poland. Mixing antiquity and modernity, blurring representations, and inviting us to observe those on the margins, it becomes a counter-model which reflects our time through a narrative that’s at once funny and disturbing.” –MML Collective

“I heard about Alan Clarke’s ROAD from Robert and June Leaf and eventually saw the film at Anthology (where else? For years it was nearly impossible to see any Clarke, especially the TV work). Clarke, a renegade who pushed the BBC as far as it could go and then some, was (like Robert) a kind of lyrical realist. And like June he was an unflinching master observer of human gesture. ROAD is pissed and funny. It made sense that they liked it.” –Jem Cohen

ROAD is an adaptation of Jim Cartwright’s stage play, which comprised a series of interconnected glimpses into the lives of the residents of a single street in an unnamed Lancashire town over the course of a single evening. Though the original play – consisting largely of soliloquies and very little action – might not have seemed a natural for cinematic adaptation, Clarke (PENDA’S FEN; SCUM; ELEPHANT) transformed it into another of his Steadicam-saturated masterpieces. Freely mixing effects both patently cinematic and patently theatrical – the constantly roving camera on the one hand, and occasional direct-to-camera soliloquies on the other – ROAD is a typically shattering depiction of the tragic consequences of social and economic stagnation.

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“Robin Bolger: Yesterday, you said the last good movie you’d recently seen was BLUE VELVET. I agree with you on that, I think that was close to perfect. Did you see David Lynch’s view of America? Can you talk about that a little bit, why you liked that movie so much?

Robert Frank: Yeah, I saw the brutality, a certain craziness, an hypocrisy, I saw very strong criticism. I also felt that he really understood, to put it in that form of a movie. It’s horrifying. It had a very big effect on me afterwards, thinking about it. When I saw it, I was really horrified, I thought ‘Jesus, this is really going a bit too far on the other side.’ But the next day when I thought about it I accepted it totally. Wonderful, if you don’t have to pussy-foot around. And at the same time, it was entertaining. It kept you in suspense, it was well done. I also like the first movie by him, ERASERHEAD.” –THE PICTURES ARE A NECESSITY: ROBERT FRANK IN ROCHESTER, NY, November 1988 (edited by William S. Johnson)

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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Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive in cooperation with Faces Distribution Corporation. Preservation funded by The Ahmanson Foundation, The Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s PULL MY DAISY and John Cassavetes’s SHADOWS (in the revised version that has come down to us) both appeared in 1959, and from the beginning they were closely linked. By some accounts, the screenings at New York’s Paris Theater in 1958 of the first version of SHADOWS helped inspire Frank and Leslie to make PULL MY DAISY. Appropriate, then, that when Cassavetes premiered his revised version of SHADOWS, at Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16 in November 1959, in a program entitled “The Cinema of Improvisation”, it was presented as a double bill with Frank and Leslie’s film. Exhibition history aside, the two films were heralded, above all by Jonas Mekas (albeit speaking of the first version of SHADOWS), as representing the advent of a new, countercultural American cinema that was in tune with the artistic and political ferment and the vital creative energies brewing in American culture at the time.

“When I began writing my Movie Journal, it was the beginning of the New American Cinema. Cassavetes had just completed SHADOWS. Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie were shooting PULL MY DAISY. The film bug had already bitten us, and the air was becoming more and more charged with energy and expectations. We felt that cinema was only beginning – with us!” –Jonas Mekas

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EVERYBODY STREET illuminates the lives and work of New York’s iconic street photographers – including Bruce Davidson, Mary Ellen Mark, Elliott Erwitt, Ricky Powell, and Jamel Shabazz – and the incomparable city that has inspired them for decades. Shot by renowned photographer Cheryl Dunn on both black-and-white 16mm and color HD video, the documentary pays tribute to the spirit of street photography through a cinematic exploration of New York City, and captures the visceral rush, singular perseverance, and at times immediate danger customary to these artists.

Preceded by:
William Klein CONTACTS: WILLIAM KLEIN 1983, 15 min, 35mm-to-digital
“Klein dissects the contact sheet from one recent roll of film, deconstructing his editing technique and injecting a brutally honest assessment of his art. As the New York Times put it, ‘Half a century of work can add up to two blinks of an eye.’” –WALKER ART CENTER

Total running time: ca. 105 min.

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Every year, hundreds of thousands of Chinese migrants are drawn to the allure of Shanghai, one of the world’s most vibrant cities, with hopes of earning a decent living. Some end up in the dark alleys of Nanjing Road, Shanghai’s largest shopping street, where they learn to hustle and scrape together any kind of living they can. Dayong Zhao arrived in Shanghai in 2004 and began documenting their lives using digital video. He saw their stories as overlooked portraits of the deep social impact caused by China’s rapid economic growth. Zhao uses bold, exaggerated compositions in order to emphasize the relationship between his vagrant subjects and the city streets they inhabit. The result is a raw, vivid portrait of physical and psychological rootlessness.

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In this offbeat “road movie,” acclaimed documentarian Heddy Honigmann travels with, and records the stories of, taxi drivers in Lima. In the early 1990s, in response to Peru’s inflationary economy and a government destabilized by corruption and Shining Path terrorism, many middle-class professionals used their own cars to moonlight as taxi drivers in order to weather the financial crisis. Through the filmmaker’s distinctive approach – “I don’t do interviews,” Honigmann has explained, “I have conversations” – METAL AND MELANCHOLY explores how these part-time cabbies, including a teacher, a Ministry of Justice employee, a film actor, and a policeman, among others, manage to navigate through Lima’s congested, pothole-filled streets in dilapidated cars whose survival techniques are as fascinating as those of their owners.

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Viking Eggeling
SYMPHONIE DIAGONALE (1924, 8 min, 35mm, silent)
“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.

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Robert Frank
ONE HOUR / C’EST VRAI
1990, 60 min, video. © June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, distributed by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Jonas Mekas
A WALK
1990, 60 min, video
These two hour-long, single-take videos both have their roots in Philippe Grandrieux’s French television project, “Live” (which also encompassed hour-long pieces by Robert Kramer, Stephen Dwoskin, Ken Kobland, and Grandrieux himself). Robert Frank’s contribution is an eye-opening and inspired ramble through downtown NYC, which combines verité footage of a (now largely vanished) East Village (including a glimpse of Anthology), improvisation, and scripted elements (during the seemingly spontaneous walk, the camera just happens to come across figures such as Taylor Mead, Bill Rice, Tom Jarmusch, and Peter Orlovsky).
Jonas Mekas created an hour-long work for Grandrieux’s project as well – MOB OF ANGELS: A BAPTISM – but was unhappy with the result and never submitted it (he later reevaluated the film and released it separately). But later that year he made another unedited hour-long video work, A WALK, which he described thusly: “On a rainy day, I have a walk through the early Soho. I begin my walk on 80 Wooster Street and continue towards the Williamsburg bridge, where, 58 minutes later, still raining, my walk ends. As I walk, occasionally I talk about what I see or I tell some totally unrelated little stories that come to my mind as I walk. This video was my early exercise in the one-shot video form.”

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FILMMAKER IN PERSON!

Charlie Ahearn’s seminal WILD STYLE is a loosely-scripted narrative film that also functions as an invaluable glimpse into the graffiti and hip-hop cultures, showcasing the art and music of legends such as Fab 5 Freddy and graffiti artist Lee Quiñones. Its story follows the exploits of maverick tagger Zoro (Quiñones), whose work attracts the attention of an East Village art fancier (Patti Astor) who commissions him to paint the stage for a giant Rapper’s Convention, and features additional appearances from Grandmaster Flash, Busy Bee, The Cold Crush Brothers, and more.

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For this bold, epic-length experiment in “automatic” street photography, filmmaker Djamil Beloucif installed a digital camera in the center of Algiers, alongside a note instructing passersby how to start recording. The result finds a cross-section of Algiers residents interacting with the camera in various ways, performing for the camera, philosophizing, and expressing their thoughts on life, culture, politics, sports, city life, and much, much more. Lasting four-and-a-half hours, LE COIN DES VAURIENS comprises a wide-ranging catalogue of individual portraits, and becomes a kind of city symphony made by the city’s residents themselves. The structure and nature of the work means that it can be seen as a whole, or in parts – we encourage audiences to come and go during the course of the screening.

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In Chantal Akerman’s inimitable TOUTE UNE NUIT, the modern city and its inhabitants are captured in fragmentary, elliptical visions of desire, frustration, and loneliness, with more than two dozen characters appearing in fleeting vignettes that tease the possibility of larger narratives. Applying a formalist framework to tableau-like sequences drenched in moody atmosphere, Akerman fashions a new cinematic grammar that combines structuralist rigor with the dreamy solitude of Edward Hopper: in her hands, human intimacy and alienation are dramatically heightened by paring down dialogue and foregrounding delicate and sudden gestures, sounds, and glances. Alongside magnus opus JEANNE DIELMAN, TOUTE UNE NUIT is one of the legendary Belgium director’s greatest triumphs: a charming, avant-garde melodrama that is as much about the weight of time as the longing for connection.

“I went to the movies a number of times with Robert. I remember we walked out of KOYAANISQATSI after about twenty minutes. Robert said, ‘It looks like a fucking airlines commercial.’ We also once saw a James Bond film together – I forget which one, but from the Pierce Brosnan period. It was very enjoyable on a big screen. Robert’s comment: ‘Not much sex for a Bond film, though.’ But the film we both loved the most was TOUTE UNE NUIT by Chantal Akerman, from 1982. Robert loved the structure, the photography, the rhythm… We both agreed it’s truly a beautiful and evocative film, and highly recommended.” –Jim Jarmusch

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“Robin Bolger: Yesterday, you said the last good movie you’d recently seen was BLUE VELVET. I agree with you on that, I think that was close to perfect. Did you see David Lynch’s view of America? Can you talk about that a little bit, why you liked that movie so much?

Robert Frank: Yeah, I saw the brutality, a certain craziness, an hypocrisy, I saw very strong criticism. I also felt that he really understood, to put it in that form of a movie. It’s horrifying. It had a very big effect on me afterwards, thinking about it. When I saw it, I was really horrified, I thought ‘Jesus, this is really going a bit too far on the other side.’ But the next day when I thought about it I accepted it totally. Wonderful, if you don’t have to pussy-foot around. And at the same time, it was entertaining. It kept you in suspense, it was well done. I also like the first movie by him, ERASERHEAD.” –THE PICTURES ARE A NECESSITY: ROBERT FRANK IN ROCHESTER, NY, November 1988 (edited by William S. Johnson)