Anthology Film Archives

REVIVAL RUN – NEW RESTORATION!

Digitally restored by Anthology Film Archives in collaboration with The Municipal Art Society of New York and the Project for Public Spaces.

In 1980, the urbanist, sociologist, city planner, and writer William H. Whyte published a book based on the fruits of many years of research and observation into pedestrian behavior and city dynamics, conducted as part of his Street Life Project (which operated under the umbrella of the New York City Planning Commission). The result, “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces”, closely analyzed the functioning (or malfunctioning) of public spaces in various cities, above all in NYC. The book quickly became a classic text within the realm of city planning, and remains beloved not only for the perceptiveness, elegance, and wisdom of its insights into the ways city dwellers interact with the urban environment, but for its disarmingly unpretentious, no-nonsense, and often flat-out funny tone. Though the book is familiar to generations of teachers and students of urbanism and city planning, the project is not widely known outside those circles. Perhaps even less well known – but hopefully not for long – is that, as a supplement to the published text, Whyte simultaneously produced an hour-long film of the same name.

The film version of THE SOCIAL LIFE OF SMALL URBAN SPACES fully embodies all the qualities of the book: its intelligence, its empathetic, common-sense insight into what makes a city truly work for its residents (in contrast to the grandiose, often authoritarian instincts of architects, politicians, and developers), and its gentle yet often pointed wit. The film also boasts its own, unique qualities. Unlike the book, the film is graced by Whyte’s own voice: sounding very much like Jimmy Stewart’s city planner cousin, Whyte delivers the narration with a lack of polish and an often-self-deprecatory folksiness that’s charmingly at odds with the stentorian tone of most educational films. The film is also effectively a work of street photography. Though it was produced as a kind of filmic report and a pedagogical tool, Whyte and his team’s dedication to observing – and recording – the actual behavior of city dwellers, and their sharp eye for the behaviors and gestures that are most revealing of city life, result in a film that is – almost incidentally – a classic city symphony. Taking place primarily in New York (with brief detours to Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and other urban centers), THE SOCIAL LIFE OF SMALL URBAN SPACES is one of the great films about that strangest of creatures – the city dweller – in its natural habitat.

One of the few “civilians” who have appreciated and celebrated the film in recent years is filmmaker John Wilson, who programmed it during a carte-blanche at Anthology in 2023. We were so enamored with the film – which at that time was only available in a very poor-quality video transfer – that we embarked on a quest to locate better elements. In collaboration with Project for Public Spaces (an organization that grew out of Whyte’s Street Life Project) and the Municipal Art Society of New York (which acted as the film’s initial distributor and where Whyte was a board member), we have managed to restore the film. Now, as part of Project for Public Spaces’ 50th anniversary, and to celebrate the shared history of PPS and MAS, we are overjoyed to present the new, beautiful restoration with a week-long revival run.

“William Whyte is a legendary people watcher who likes to study the subtle ways public space is used. I think about this film constantly whenever I’m out shooting.” –John Wilson

Co-presented by the Municipal Art Society of New York (https://www.mas.org) and Project for Public Spaces (https://www.pps.org/).

On opening night – Fri, Sept 26 – following the 7pm screening, the Municipal Art Society and Project for Public Spaces will host a special panel discussion focusing on how social life and the public realm have evolved since the film’s original release in New York and beyond. Panelists will include ‍Rosa Chang (Gotham Park), Setha Low (CUNY), Claire Weisz (WXY Architecture), and moderator Nate Storring (Project for Public Spaces).

Following the screening on Sat, Sept 28 at 8pm, Colloquium for Unpopular Culture presents a special look at one of William Whyte’s lesser-known projects – fastidious photo documentation of an architectural feature he loathed: BLANK WALLS. The ca.-20-minute presentation will include a rare look at Whyte’s slides – a droll typological journey into photoconceptualism – accompanied by the performance of one of Whyte’s 1983 blank walls lectures by long time Whyte champions John Wilson and Nick Fraccaro.

On William H. Whyte’s birthday – Wed, Oct 1 – following the 7pm screening, the Social Life Project with Project for Public Spaces will host a special panel discussion focusing on how Holly’s insights have inspired their work and how that spark lives on today in the global placemaking movement. Panelists will include PPS and Social Life Project Founders Fred Kent, Kathy Madden, and Steve Davies, as well as Ethan Kent (PlacemakingX). Nate Storring (Project for Public Spaces) will introduce.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Ben Rivers
THIS IS MY LAND
2006, 14 min, 16mm
This hand-processed film was the first of Rivers’s portraits of Jake Williams.

“It struck me straight away that there were parallels between our ways of working – I have tried to be as self-reliant as possible and be apart from the idea of industry – Jake's life and garden are much the same – he can sustain himself from what he grows and so needs little from others. To Jake this isn’t about nostalgia for some treasured pre-electric past, but more, a very real future.” –Ben Rivers

Ben Rivers
I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING
2009, 30 min, 16mm-to-digital
Three years after first filming Jake Williams, Rivers included him in his episodic piece, I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING.

“Powell & Pressburger’s heroine in their magical I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING (1945) knows exactly where she’s going, and she tries to get there with stoic pig-headedness, but of course she never does. I decided to follow her lead and make my destination the same as hers, but with every intention of getting lost, following false leads, and trusting in the laws of serendipity, while winding my way through an almost abandoned, devastated Britain, to the Isle of Mull.” –Ben Rivers

Total running time: ca. 50 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

REVIVAL RUN – NEW RESTORATION!

Digitally restored by Anthology Film Archives in collaboration with The Municipal Art Society of New York and the Project for Public Spaces.

In 1980, the urbanist, sociologist, city planner, and writer William H. Whyte published a book based on the fruits of many years of research and observation into pedestrian behavior and city dynamics, conducted as part of his Street Life Project (which operated under the umbrella of the New York City Planning Commission). The result, “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces”, closely analyzed the functioning (or malfunctioning) of public spaces in various cities, above all in NYC. The book quickly became a classic text within the realm of city planning, and remains beloved not only for the perceptiveness, elegance, and wisdom of its insights into the ways city dwellers interact with the urban environment, but for its disarmingly unpretentious, no-nonsense, and often flat-out funny tone. Though the book is familiar to generations of teachers and students of urbanism and city planning, the project is not widely known outside those circles. Perhaps even less well known – but hopefully not for long – is that, as a supplement to the published text, Whyte simultaneously produced an hour-long film of the same name.

The film version of THE SOCIAL LIFE OF SMALL URBAN SPACES fully embodies all the qualities of the book: its intelligence, its empathetic, common-sense insight into what makes a city truly work for its residents (in contrast to the grandiose, often authoritarian instincts of architects, politicians, and developers), and its gentle yet often pointed wit. The film also boasts its own, unique qualities. Unlike the book, the film is graced by Whyte’s own voice: sounding very much like Jimmy Stewart’s city planner cousin, Whyte delivers the narration with a lack of polish and an often-self-deprecatory folksiness that’s charmingly at odds with the stentorian tone of most educational films. The film is also effectively a work of street photography. Though it was produced as a kind of filmic report and a pedagogical tool, Whyte and his team’s dedication to observing – and recording – the actual behavior of city dwellers, and their sharp eye for the behaviors and gestures that are most revealing of city life, result in a film that is – almost incidentally – a classic city symphony. Taking place primarily in New York (with brief detours to Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and other urban centers), THE SOCIAL LIFE OF SMALL URBAN SPACES is one of the great films about that strangest of creatures – the city dweller – in its natural habitat.

One of the few “civilians” who have appreciated and celebrated the film in recent years is filmmaker John Wilson, who programmed it during a carte-blanche at Anthology in 2023. We were so enamored with the film – which at that time was only available in a very poor-quality video transfer – that we embarked on a quest to locate better elements. In collaboration with Project for Public Spaces (an organization that grew out of Whyte’s Street Life Project) and the Municipal Art Society of New York (which acted as the film’s initial distributor and where Whyte was a board member), we have managed to restore the film. Now, as part of Project for Public Spaces’ 50th anniversary, and to celebrate the shared history of PPS and MAS, we are overjoyed to present the new, beautiful restoration with a week-long revival run.

“William Whyte is a legendary people watcher who likes to study the subtle ways public space is used. I think about this film constantly whenever I’m out shooting.” –John Wilson

Co-presented by the Municipal Art Society of New York (https://www.mas.org) and Project for Public Spaces (https://www.pps.org/).

On opening night – Fri, Sept 26 – following the 7pm screening, the Municipal Art Society and Project for Public Spaces will host a special panel discussion focusing on how social life and the public realm have evolved since the film’s original release in New York and beyond. Panelists will include ‍Rosa Chang (Gotham Park), Setha Low (CUNY), Claire Weisz (WXY Architecture), and moderator Nate Storring (Project for Public Spaces).

Following the screening on Sat, Sept 28 at 8pm, Colloquium for Unpopular Culture presents a special look at one of William Whyte’s lesser-known projects – fastidious photo documentation of an architectural feature he loathed: BLANK WALLS. The ca.-20-minute presentation will include a rare look at Whyte’s slides – a droll typological journey into photoconceptualism – accompanied by the performance of one of Whyte’s 1983 blank walls lectures by long time Whyte champions John Wilson and Nick Fraccaro.

On William H. Whyte’s birthday – Wed, Oct 1 – following the 7pm screening, the Social Life Project with Project for Public Spaces will host a special panel discussion focusing on how Holly’s insights have inspired their work and how that spark lives on today in the global placemaking movement. Panelists will include PPS and Social Life Project Founders Fred Kent, Kathy Madden, and Steve Davies, as well as Ethan Kent (PlacemakingX). Nate Storring (Project for Public Spaces) will introduce.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Ben Rivers
TWO YEARS AT SEA
2011, 88 min, 35mm. Print courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive.
Ben Rivers renewed his relationship with Jake Williams for this feature-length exploration of solitude and the present’s slow crawl into the future. Situated squarely within what seems to be the perfect environment for his sensibility and temperament, Jake goes about his daily routine across the four seasons in the near-complete absence of any human ties, with Rivers’s camera functioning as the lone connection between him and the world beyond his self-imposed isolation. The patient, uncritical perspective presented in TWO YEARS AT SEA enables Jake to come into focus as an individual who leads his life exactly as he chooses, and as a weathered object moving resolutely against the temporal current.

Ben Rivers
MORE THAN JUST A DRAM
2014, 5 min, 16mm-to-DCP
A visit to Jake to hear an ode to Whiskey.

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

NYC THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

“One conception of cinematic duration involves holding a shot for a long time, even – or especially – when dramatic action is scarcely present. A second form, less frequently deployed but equally a rebuff to a culture obsessed with speed and novelty, is created when a director commits to filming the same subject again and again, over a period of many years. Both come together in BOGANCLOCH, Ben Rivers’s return to the boreal existence of Jake Williams, the unassuming star of THIS IS MY LAND (2006) and TWO YEARS AT SEA (2011). Shot on color and hand-processed black-and-white film using anamorphic lenses, BOGANCLOCH is a textured portrait of a man who once travelled the oceans but now chooses to live alone in rural Aberdeenshire, in a home that gives the film its title. It is also, less obviously, a record of the friendship between he and Rivers, a filmmaker who knows that many other worlds can be discovered within this one, far from the madding crowd. Quietly, beguilingly, he shows that solitude is not synonymous with loneliness, and that to the curious gaze the stuff of daily life is alive with memory, magic and dreams.” –Erika Balsom, VIENNALE

“Fiercely self-sufficient, Williams has spent decades creating his own private world, one characterized by ritualized labor, the rhythm of the seasons, and his own priorities regarding how to spend his time. In some respects, Williams is an avatar for Rivers’s own filmmaking. Shooting in 16mm, hand-processing his footage, and editing it himself, Rivers is one in a long line of experimental filmmakers who abjure the industrial model in favor of artisanal image and sound creation. Both Rivers and Williams are committed to existence on their own terms, sharing the results with all and sundry.” –Michael Sicinski, IN REVIEW ONLINE

“[By] celebrating a way of being stripped down to the bare necessities, Rivers is also celebrating a more elemental approach to cinema, fiercely impervious to the demands of traditional storytelling and wholly open to the kind of wonders that would normally go unseen. With its capacity to wring bliss and beauty out of the most mundane routines, the film approximates something close to what Herzog once called ‘ecstatic truth’ – that mysterious, elusive type of truth that can only be reached through imagination. By the time BOGANCLOCH wraps…this tiny corner of the Highlands has become an immense expanse, this shaggy-haired loner a king of infinite space.” –Leonardo Goi, THE FILM STAGE

Ben Rivers will be here in person for selected screenings!

Distributed by The Cinema Guild.

Alongside the week-long run of BOGANCLOCH, we'll also be screening the earlier films Rivers made with Jake Williams; click here for more details.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

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

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

(VREDENS DAG)

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

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Ben Rivers
THIS IS MY LAND
2006, 14 min, 16mm
This hand-processed film was the first of Rivers’s portraits of Jake Williams.

“It struck me straight away that there were parallels between our ways of working – I have tried to be as self-reliant as possible and be apart from the idea of industry – Jake's life and garden are much the same – he can sustain himself from what he grows and so needs little from others. To Jake this isn’t about nostalgia for some treasured pre-electric past, but more, a very real future.” –Ben Rivers

Ben Rivers
I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING
2009, 30 min, 16mm-to-digital
Three years after first filming Jake Williams, Rivers included him in his episodic piece, I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING.

“Powell & Pressburger’s heroine in their magical I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING (1945) knows exactly where she’s going, and she tries to get there with stoic pig-headedness, but of course she never does. I decided to follow her lead and make my destination the same as hers, but with every intention of getting lost, following false leads, and trusting in the laws of serendipity, while winding my way through an almost abandoned, devastated Britain, to the Isle of Mull.” –Ben Rivers

Total running time: ca. 50 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(VREDENS DAG)

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

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

NYC THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

“One conception of cinematic duration involves holding a shot for a long time, even – or especially – when dramatic action is scarcely present. A second form, less frequently deployed but equally a rebuff to a culture obsessed with speed and novelty, is created when a director commits to filming the same subject again and again, over a period of many years. Both come together in BOGANCLOCH, Ben Rivers’s return to the boreal existence of Jake Williams, the unassuming star of THIS IS MY LAND (2006) and TWO YEARS AT SEA (2011). Shot on color and hand-processed black-and-white film using anamorphic lenses, BOGANCLOCH is a textured portrait of a man who once travelled the oceans but now chooses to live alone in rural Aberdeenshire, in a home that gives the film its title. It is also, less obviously, a record of the friendship between he and Rivers, a filmmaker who knows that many other worlds can be discovered within this one, far from the madding crowd. Quietly, beguilingly, he shows that solitude is not synonymous with loneliness, and that to the curious gaze the stuff of daily life is alive with memory, magic and dreams.” –Erika Balsom, VIENNALE

“Fiercely self-sufficient, Williams has spent decades creating his own private world, one characterized by ritualized labor, the rhythm of the seasons, and his own priorities regarding how to spend his time. In some respects, Williams is an avatar for Rivers’s own filmmaking. Shooting in 16mm, hand-processing his footage, and editing it himself, Rivers is one in a long line of experimental filmmakers who abjure the industrial model in favor of artisanal image and sound creation. Both Rivers and Williams are committed to existence on their own terms, sharing the results with all and sundry.” –Michael Sicinski, IN REVIEW ONLINE

“[By] celebrating a way of being stripped down to the bare necessities, Rivers is also celebrating a more elemental approach to cinema, fiercely impervious to the demands of traditional storytelling and wholly open to the kind of wonders that would normally go unseen. With its capacity to wring bliss and beauty out of the most mundane routines, the film approximates something close to what Herzog once called ‘ecstatic truth’ – that mysterious, elusive type of truth that can only be reached through imagination. By the time BOGANCLOCH wraps…this tiny corner of the Highlands has become an immense expanse, this shaggy-haired loner a king of infinite space.” –Leonardo Goi, THE FILM STAGE

Ben Rivers will be here in person for selected screenings!

Distributed by The Cinema Guild.

Alongside the week-long run of BOGANCLOCH, we'll also be screening the earlier films Rivers made with Jake Williams; click here for more details.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

BOOK RELEASE!

This program showcases a selection of otherworldly, enchanting, and psychedelic California film and video works. In the early 1970s, Conceptual artist Stephen Kaltenbach traded the downtown New York art world for a rural Northern California barn, where he spent most of the decade painting an enormous – and enormously cosmic – portrait of his dying father. This event celebrates a new oral history about the making of “Portrait of My Father “(1972-79) by Jordan Stein and published by J&L Books. The eclectic program illuminates various subjects in the book, including resplendent visions, spiritual awakening, and the ineffable nature of human consciousness. Stein will introduce each film with a short reading.

For more info about “Portrait of My Father”, visit: https://www.artbook.com/9780999365588.html

Adam Beckett SAUSAGE CITY (1974, 5.5 min, 16mm)
Gene Beery YOUR MOVE (ca. 2008, 2 min, digital)
Dorothy Wiley LETTERS (1972, 11 min, 16mm-to-digital)
Jordan Belson SAMADHI (1967, 6 min, 16mm)
Owen Land THANK YOU JESUS FOR THE ETERNAL PRESENT (1973, 6 min, 16mm)
Bruce Conner THE WHITE ROSE (1967, 7 min, 35mm)
Toney W. Merritt LONESOME COWBOY (1979, 30 sec, 16mm)
Amy Halpern INVOCATION (1982, 2 min, 16mm, silent)

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Ben Rivers
TWO YEARS AT SEA
2011, 88 min, 35mm. Print courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive.
Ben Rivers renewed his relationship with Jake Williams for this feature-length exploration of solitude and the present’s slow crawl into the future. Situated squarely within what seems to be the perfect environment for his sensibility and temperament, Jake goes about his daily routine across the four seasons in the near-complete absence of any human ties, with Rivers’s camera functioning as the lone connection between him and the world beyond his self-imposed isolation. The patient, uncritical perspective presented in TWO YEARS AT SEA enables Jake to come into focus as an individual who leads his life exactly as he chooses, and as a weathered object moving resolutely against the temporal current.

Ben Rivers
MORE THAN JUST A DRAM
2014, 5 min, 16mm-to-DCP
A visit to Jake to hear an ode to Whiskey.

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(VREDENS DAG)

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

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

NYC THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

“One conception of cinematic duration involves holding a shot for a long time, even – or especially – when dramatic action is scarcely present. A second form, less frequently deployed but equally a rebuff to a culture obsessed with speed and novelty, is created when a director commits to filming the same subject again and again, over a period of many years. Both come together in BOGANCLOCH, Ben Rivers’s return to the boreal existence of Jake Williams, the unassuming star of THIS IS MY LAND (2006) and TWO YEARS AT SEA (2011). Shot on color and hand-processed black-and-white film using anamorphic lenses, BOGANCLOCH is a textured portrait of a man who once travelled the oceans but now chooses to live alone in rural Aberdeenshire, in a home that gives the film its title. It is also, less obviously, a record of the friendship between he and Rivers, a filmmaker who knows that many other worlds can be discovered within this one, far from the madding crowd. Quietly, beguilingly, he shows that solitude is not synonymous with loneliness, and that to the curious gaze the stuff of daily life is alive with memory, magic and dreams.” –Erika Balsom, VIENNALE

“Fiercely self-sufficient, Williams has spent decades creating his own private world, one characterized by ritualized labor, the rhythm of the seasons, and his own priorities regarding how to spend his time. In some respects, Williams is an avatar for Rivers’s own filmmaking. Shooting in 16mm, hand-processing his footage, and editing it himself, Rivers is one in a long line of experimental filmmakers who abjure the industrial model in favor of artisanal image and sound creation. Both Rivers and Williams are committed to existence on their own terms, sharing the results with all and sundry.” –Michael Sicinski, IN REVIEW ONLINE

“[By] celebrating a way of being stripped down to the bare necessities, Rivers is also celebrating a more elemental approach to cinema, fiercely impervious to the demands of traditional storytelling and wholly open to the kind of wonders that would normally go unseen. With its capacity to wring bliss and beauty out of the most mundane routines, the film approximates something close to what Herzog once called ‘ecstatic truth’ – that mysterious, elusive type of truth that can only be reached through imagination. By the time BOGANCLOCH wraps…this tiny corner of the Highlands has become an immense expanse, this shaggy-haired loner a king of infinite space.” –Leonardo Goi, THE FILM STAGE

Ben Rivers will be here in person for selected screenings!

Distributed by The Cinema Guild.

Alongside the week-long run of BOGANCLOCH, we'll also be screening the earlier films Rivers made with Jake Williams; click here for more details.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

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

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

NYC THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

“One conception of cinematic duration involves holding a shot for a long time, even – or especially – when dramatic action is scarcely present. A second form, less frequently deployed but equally a rebuff to a culture obsessed with speed and novelty, is created when a director commits to filming the same subject again and again, over a period of many years. Both come together in BOGANCLOCH, Ben Rivers’s return to the boreal existence of Jake Williams, the unassuming star of THIS IS MY LAND (2006) and TWO YEARS AT SEA (2011). Shot on color and hand-processed black-and-white film using anamorphic lenses, BOGANCLOCH is a textured portrait of a man who once travelled the oceans but now chooses to live alone in rural Aberdeenshire, in a home that gives the film its title. It is also, less obviously, a record of the friendship between he and Rivers, a filmmaker who knows that many other worlds can be discovered within this one, far from the madding crowd. Quietly, beguilingly, he shows that solitude is not synonymous with loneliness, and that to the curious gaze the stuff of daily life is alive with memory, magic and dreams.” –Erika Balsom, VIENNALE

“Fiercely self-sufficient, Williams has spent decades creating his own private world, one characterized by ritualized labor, the rhythm of the seasons, and his own priorities regarding how to spend his time. In some respects, Williams is an avatar for Rivers’s own filmmaking. Shooting in 16mm, hand-processing his footage, and editing it himself, Rivers is one in a long line of experimental filmmakers who abjure the industrial model in favor of artisanal image and sound creation. Both Rivers and Williams are committed to existence on their own terms, sharing the results with all and sundry.” –Michael Sicinski, IN REVIEW ONLINE

“[By] celebrating a way of being stripped down to the bare necessities, Rivers is also celebrating a more elemental approach to cinema, fiercely impervious to the demands of traditional storytelling and wholly open to the kind of wonders that would normally go unseen. With its capacity to wring bliss and beauty out of the most mundane routines, the film approximates something close to what Herzog once called ‘ecstatic truth’ – that mysterious, elusive type of truth that can only be reached through imagination. By the time BOGANCLOCH wraps…this tiny corner of the Highlands has become an immense expanse, this shaggy-haired loner a king of infinite space.” –Leonardo Goi, THE FILM STAGE

Ben Rivers will be here in person for selected screenings!

Distributed by The Cinema Guild.

Alongside the week-long run of BOGANCLOCH, we'll also be screening the earlier films Rivers made with Jake Williams; click here for more details.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

NYC THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

“One conception of cinematic duration involves holding a shot for a long time, even – or especially – when dramatic action is scarcely present. A second form, less frequently deployed but equally a rebuff to a culture obsessed with speed and novelty, is created when a director commits to filming the same subject again and again, over a period of many years. Both come together in BOGANCLOCH, Ben Rivers’s return to the boreal existence of Jake Williams, the unassuming star of THIS IS MY LAND (2006) and TWO YEARS AT SEA (2011). Shot on color and hand-processed black-and-white film using anamorphic lenses, BOGANCLOCH is a textured portrait of a man who once travelled the oceans but now chooses to live alone in rural Aberdeenshire, in a home that gives the film its title. It is also, less obviously, a record of the friendship between he and Rivers, a filmmaker who knows that many other worlds can be discovered within this one, far from the madding crowd. Quietly, beguilingly, he shows that solitude is not synonymous with loneliness, and that to the curious gaze the stuff of daily life is alive with memory, magic and dreams.” –Erika Balsom, VIENNALE

“Fiercely self-sufficient, Williams has spent decades creating his own private world, one characterized by ritualized labor, the rhythm of the seasons, and his own priorities regarding how to spend his time. In some respects, Williams is an avatar for Rivers’s own filmmaking. Shooting in 16mm, hand-processing his footage, and editing it himself, Rivers is one in a long line of experimental filmmakers who abjure the industrial model in favor of artisanal image and sound creation. Both Rivers and Williams are committed to existence on their own terms, sharing the results with all and sundry.” –Michael Sicinski, IN REVIEW ONLINE

“[By] celebrating a way of being stripped down to the bare necessities, Rivers is also celebrating a more elemental approach to cinema, fiercely impervious to the demands of traditional storytelling and wholly open to the kind of wonders that would normally go unseen. With its capacity to wring bliss and beauty out of the most mundane routines, the film approximates something close to what Herzog once called ‘ecstatic truth’ – that mysterious, elusive type of truth that can only be reached through imagination. By the time BOGANCLOCH wraps…this tiny corner of the Highlands has become an immense expanse, this shaggy-haired loner a king of infinite space.” –Leonardo Goi, THE FILM STAGE

Ben Rivers will be here in person for selected screenings!

Distributed by The Cinema Guild.

Alongside the week-long run of BOGANCLOCH, we'll also be screening the earlier films Rivers made with Jake Williams; click here for more details.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

NYC THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

“One conception of cinematic duration involves holding a shot for a long time, even – or especially – when dramatic action is scarcely present. A second form, less frequently deployed but equally a rebuff to a culture obsessed with speed and novelty, is created when a director commits to filming the same subject again and again, over a period of many years. Both come together in BOGANCLOCH, Ben Rivers’s return to the boreal existence of Jake Williams, the unassuming star of THIS IS MY LAND (2006) and TWO YEARS AT SEA (2011). Shot on color and hand-processed black-and-white film using anamorphic lenses, BOGANCLOCH is a textured portrait of a man who once travelled the oceans but now chooses to live alone in rural Aberdeenshire, in a home that gives the film its title. It is also, less obviously, a record of the friendship between he and Rivers, a filmmaker who knows that many other worlds can be discovered within this one, far from the madding crowd. Quietly, beguilingly, he shows that solitude is not synonymous with loneliness, and that to the curious gaze the stuff of daily life is alive with memory, magic and dreams.” –Erika Balsom, VIENNALE

“Fiercely self-sufficient, Williams has spent decades creating his own private world, one characterized by ritualized labor, the rhythm of the seasons, and his own priorities regarding how to spend his time. In some respects, Williams is an avatar for Rivers’s own filmmaking. Shooting in 16mm, hand-processing his footage, and editing it himself, Rivers is one in a long line of experimental filmmakers who abjure the industrial model in favor of artisanal image and sound creation. Both Rivers and Williams are committed to existence on their own terms, sharing the results with all and sundry.” –Michael Sicinski, IN REVIEW ONLINE

“[By] celebrating a way of being stripped down to the bare necessities, Rivers is also celebrating a more elemental approach to cinema, fiercely impervious to the demands of traditional storytelling and wholly open to the kind of wonders that would normally go unseen. With its capacity to wring bliss and beauty out of the most mundane routines, the film approximates something close to what Herzog once called ‘ecstatic truth’ – that mysterious, elusive type of truth that can only be reached through imagination. By the time BOGANCLOCH wraps…this tiny corner of the Highlands has become an immense expanse, this shaggy-haired loner a king of infinite space.” –Leonardo Goi, THE FILM STAGE

Ben Rivers will be here in person for selected screenings!

Distributed by The Cinema Guild.

Alongside the week-long run of BOGANCLOCH, we'll also be screening the earlier films Rivers made with Jake Williams; click here for more details.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

NYC THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

“One conception of cinematic duration involves holding a shot for a long time, even – or especially – when dramatic action is scarcely present. A second form, less frequently deployed but equally a rebuff to a culture obsessed with speed and novelty, is created when a director commits to filming the same subject again and again, over a period of many years. Both come together in BOGANCLOCH, Ben Rivers’s return to the boreal existence of Jake Williams, the unassuming star of THIS IS MY LAND (2006) and TWO YEARS AT SEA (2011). Shot on color and hand-processed black-and-white film using anamorphic lenses, BOGANCLOCH is a textured portrait of a man who once travelled the oceans but now chooses to live alone in rural Aberdeenshire, in a home that gives the film its title. It is also, less obviously, a record of the friendship between he and Rivers, a filmmaker who knows that many other worlds can be discovered within this one, far from the madding crowd. Quietly, beguilingly, he shows that solitude is not synonymous with loneliness, and that to the curious gaze the stuff of daily life is alive with memory, magic and dreams.” –Erika Balsom, VIENNALE

“Fiercely self-sufficient, Williams has spent decades creating his own private world, one characterized by ritualized labor, the rhythm of the seasons, and his own priorities regarding how to spend his time. In some respects, Williams is an avatar for Rivers’s own filmmaking. Shooting in 16mm, hand-processing his footage, and editing it himself, Rivers is one in a long line of experimental filmmakers who abjure the industrial model in favor of artisanal image and sound creation. Both Rivers and Williams are committed to existence on their own terms, sharing the results with all and sundry.” –Michael Sicinski, IN REVIEW ONLINE

“[By] celebrating a way of being stripped down to the bare necessities, Rivers is also celebrating a more elemental approach to cinema, fiercely impervious to the demands of traditional storytelling and wholly open to the kind of wonders that would normally go unseen. With its capacity to wring bliss and beauty out of the most mundane routines, the film approximates something close to what Herzog once called ‘ecstatic truth’ – that mysterious, elusive type of truth that can only be reached through imagination. By the time BOGANCLOCH wraps…this tiny corner of the Highlands has become an immense expanse, this shaggy-haired loner a king of infinite space.” –Leonardo Goi, THE FILM STAGE

Ben Rivers will be here in person for selected screenings!

Distributed by The Cinema Guild.

Alongside the week-long run of BOGANCLOCH, we'll also be screening the earlier films Rivers made with Jake Williams; click here for more details.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Anthology recently became the repository and rights-holder for the moving-image work of Bruce Baillie, whose body of work represents one of the towering achievements of postwar American experimental cinema. Over the course of the last few years, we’ve been gradually preserving and striking new prints of his films, including classics (and crucial parts of Anthology’s Essential Cinema cycle) such as CASTRO STREET (1966) and ALL MY LIFE (1966). Now we’ve created new prints of Baillie’s magnum opus, the four-reel masterpiece QUICK BILLY (1970), in which Baillie synthesized his previous work to conjure up a breathtakingly ambitious, visually exquisite meditation on the cycle of life. Purporting, for its first three reels, to represent anadaptation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, QUICK BILLY embodies Baillie’s unsurpassed camera eye, his mastery of editing and superimposition, his profoundly philosophical sensibility, as well as his mischievous sense of humor and bold sense of play. The latter qualities manifest most dramatically in the fourth and final reel, which – in a dramatic stylistic about-face – morphs into a kind of Beat parody of a melodramatic silent-era Western.

While Anthology has shown QUICK BILLY annually as part of the Essential Cinema since time immemorial, our existing prints had become worn and faded. Restored now to its full glory, QUICK BILLY has never looked better! To celebrate, we’ll be presenting the film over the course of a long weekend accompanied by the six uncut “Rolls” – also newly restored – that Baillie distributed alongside the feature.

“The essential experience of transformation between Life and Death, death and birth, or rebirth in four reels…” –Bruce Baillie

“One of the masterpieces of the American avant-garde…a rare ‘synoptic’ film that tries to construct an entire cosmos. [It] immerses viewers in a timeless flow of indistinct forms that nearly obliterates self and place – the clarity of an erotic encounter ends when the woman leans forward into darkness. The finale is a parody western in which Baillie satirizes the aggression therest of his film abjures.” –Fred Camper, CHICAGO READER

“Baillie identifies all forms of the Self with the cinema. QUICK BILLY’s first two reels present a first-person cinema (offering a document of a delirious consciousness becoming adapted to the actual world), Reel Three offers a second-person cinema (with Baillie looking at a family album and observing pictures of himself as though they were of another with whom he has an intimate relation), and Reel Four offers a third-person narrative. Through this taxonomic organization, Baillie suggests that cinema evolved out of consciousness and over time assumed forms increasingly distant from the deep Self. In presenting these cinematic modes in reverse chronology, Baillie suggests that the cinema’s original and true nature is as a document of consciousness.” –Bruce Elder, LA FURIA UMANA

Followed by:
Bruce Baillie
QUICK BILLY: SIX ROLLS (Numbers 14, 41, 43, 46, 47, and 52)1968-69, 16 min, 16mm, silent. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives
“The ‘rolls’ took the form of a correspondence, or theater, between their author and Stan Brakhage, in the winter of 1968-69. They’re kind of the magic cousins of the film.” –Bruce Baillie

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Anthology recently became the repository and rights-holder for the moving-image work of Bruce Baillie, whose body of work represents one of the towering achievements of postwar American experimental cinema. Over the course of the last few years, we’ve been gradually preserving and striking new prints of his films, including classics (and crucial parts of Anthology’s Essential Cinema cycle) such as CASTRO STREET (1966) and ALL MY LIFE (1966). Now we’ve created new prints of Baillie’s magnum opus, the four-reel masterpiece QUICK BILLY (1970), in which Baillie synthesized his previous work to conjure up a breathtakingly ambitious, visually exquisite meditation on the cycle of life. Purporting, for its first three reels, to represent anadaptation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, QUICK BILLY embodies Baillie’s unsurpassed camera eye, his mastery of editing and superimposition, his profoundly philosophical sensibility, as well as his mischievous sense of humor and bold sense of play. The latter qualities manifest most dramatically in the fourth and final reel, which – in a dramatic stylistic about-face – morphs into a kind of Beat parody of a melodramatic silent-era Western.

While Anthology has shown QUICK BILLY annually as part of the Essential Cinema since time immemorial, our existing prints had become worn and faded. Restored now to its full glory, QUICK BILLY has never looked better! To celebrate, we’ll be presenting the film over the course of a long weekend accompanied by the six uncut “Rolls” – also newly restored – that Baillie distributed alongside the feature.

“The essential experience of transformation between Life and Death, death and birth, or rebirth in four reels…” –Bruce Baillie

“One of the masterpieces of the American avant-garde…a rare ‘synoptic’ film that tries to construct an entire cosmos. [It] immerses viewers in a timeless flow of indistinct forms that nearly obliterates self and place – the clarity of an erotic encounter ends when the woman leans forward into darkness. The finale is a parody western in which Baillie satirizes the aggression therest of his film abjures.” –Fred Camper, CHICAGO READER

“Baillie identifies all forms of the Self with the cinema. QUICK BILLY’s first two reels present a first-person cinema (offering a document of a delirious consciousness becoming adapted to the actual world), Reel Three offers a second-person cinema (with Baillie looking at a family album and observing pictures of himself as though they were of another with whom he has an intimate relation), and Reel Four offers a third-person narrative. Through this taxonomic organization, Baillie suggests that cinema evolved out of consciousness and over time assumed forms increasingly distant from the deep Self. In presenting these cinematic modes in reverse chronology, Baillie suggests that the cinema’s original and true nature is as a document of consciousness.” –Bruce Elder, LA FURIA UMANA

Followed by:
Bruce Baillie
QUICK BILLY: SIX ROLLS (Numbers 14, 41, 43, 46, 47, and 52)1968-69, 16 min, 16mm, silent. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives
“The ‘rolls’ took the form of a correspondence, or theater, between their author and Stan Brakhage, in the winter of 1968-69. They’re kind of the magic cousins of the film.” –Bruce Baillie

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Made at the height of the tech boom of the late 1990s, Monika Treut’s Teddy Award-winning GENDERNAUTS is a portrait of a group of trans artists, activists, and academics living in San Francisco – including historian Susan Stryker, web designer Stafford, video artists Jordy Jones and Texas Tomboy, intersex activist Hida Viloria, and “Goddess of Cyberspace” Sandy Stone. Treut also catches up with Annie Sprinkle and Max Wolf Valerio, who she first profiled in 1992’s FEMALE MISBEHAVIOR. Viewed now, over 25 years since its initial release, GENDERNAUTS remains a fascinatingly multifaceted look at the way that technology and the internet reshaped trans culture at the close of the 20th century.

“The criticism I get is from people who say, ‘Where’s the suffering in this?’ I happen to choose to deal with people who choose what they want to become. Transgendered people are one of the best-connected minorities on the Internet. It’s the perfect medium for people to have different personas. It’s making everyone transgendered in a way.” –Monika Treut

Preceded by:

Short films by Tex Starr (aka Texas Tomboy):

RAVE PORN (1996, 3 min, SD Video-to-DCP)
Jean Genet meets 90s rave culture.

ALIEN AUTOPSY (1995, 2 min, SD Video-to-DCP)
An X-Files-inspired medical procedure.

CALVIN KLEIN SPOOF #2 (1995, 1 min, SD Video-to-DCP)
A twist on a familiar ad campaign.

ALIENATOR (1996, 3 min, SD Video-to-DCP)
An erotic alien abduction, made at SFAI for the 10th anniversary of MIX NYC.

Total running time: ca. 100 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Anthology recently became the repository and rights-holder for the moving-image work of Bruce Baillie, whose body of work represents one of the towering achievements of postwar American experimental cinema. Over the course of the last few years, we’ve been gradually preserving and striking new prints of his films, including classics (and crucial parts of Anthology’s Essential Cinema cycle) such as CASTRO STREET (1966) and ALL MY LIFE (1966). Now we’ve created new prints of Baillie’s magnum opus, the four-reel masterpiece QUICK BILLY (1970), in which Baillie synthesized his previous work to conjure up a breathtakingly ambitious, visually exquisite meditation on the cycle of life. Purporting, for its first three reels, to represent anadaptation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, QUICK BILLY embodies Baillie’s unsurpassed camera eye, his mastery of editing and superimposition, his profoundly philosophical sensibility, as well as his mischievous sense of humor and bold sense of play. The latter qualities manifest most dramatically in the fourth and final reel, which – in a dramatic stylistic about-face – morphs into a kind of Beat parody of a melodramatic silent-era Western.

While Anthology has shown QUICK BILLY annually as part of the Essential Cinema since time immemorial, our existing prints had become worn and faded. Restored now to its full glory, QUICK BILLY has never looked better! To celebrate, we’ll be presenting the film over the course of a long weekend accompanied by the six uncut “Rolls” – also newly restored – that Baillie distributed alongside the feature.

“The essential experience of transformation between Life and Death, death and birth, or rebirth in four reels…” –Bruce Baillie

“One of the masterpieces of the American avant-garde…a rare ‘synoptic’ film that tries to construct an entire cosmos. [It] immerses viewers in a timeless flow of indistinct forms that nearly obliterates self and place – the clarity of an erotic encounter ends when the woman leans forward into darkness. The finale is a parody western in which Baillie satirizes the aggression therest of his film abjures.” –Fred Camper, CHICAGO READER

“Baillie identifies all forms of the Self with the cinema. QUICK BILLY’s first two reels present a first-person cinema (offering a document of a delirious consciousness becoming adapted to the actual world), Reel Three offers a second-person cinema (with Baillie looking at a family album and observing pictures of himself as though they were of another with whom he has an intimate relation), and Reel Four offers a third-person narrative. Through this taxonomic organization, Baillie suggests that cinema evolved out of consciousness and over time assumed forms increasingly distant from the deep Self. In presenting these cinematic modes in reverse chronology, Baillie suggests that the cinema’s original and true nature is as a document of consciousness.” –Bruce Elder, LA FURIA UMANA

Followed by:
Bruce Baillie
QUICK BILLY: SIX ROLLS (Numbers 14, 41, 43, 46, 47, and 52)1968-69, 16 min, 16mm, silent. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives
“The ‘rolls’ took the form of a correspondence, or theater, between their author and Stan Brakhage, in the winter of 1968-69. They’re kind of the magic cousins of the film.” –Bruce Baillie

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Twenty years after making GENDERNAUTS, Monika Treut returns to San Francisco to catch up with her subjects and find out where time and life have led them. What she finds is a city transformed: what had once been a utopia for trans communities has now grown largely inaccessible due to rising costs and gentrification. Sandy Stone, Stafford, Susan Stryker, Max Wolf Valerio, and Annie Sprinkle all return in this lovely – if bittersweet – document of trans elderhood and enduring activism in the face of an affordability crisis and a repressive government.

“[A] powerful and uplifting queer communion of intimate conversations…being witness to it feels like sitting in a quiet corner with all the most interesting guests at a party.” –James Kleinmann, THE QUEER REVIEW

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(VERFÜHRUNG – DIE GRAUSAME FRAU)

Wanda (Mechthild Großmann) is a dominatrix who runs an S/M performance space in Hamburg where she stages elaborate sexual rituals for a discerning audience. Cruelty is her profession, but constructing traps for her lovers – including the lovelorn Gregor (Udo Kier), the naive and innocent Justine (Sheila McLaughlin), and the jaded Caren (Carola Regnier) – is her specialty. All know the rules of the game, but not all are willing to play their roles – but the show must go on…

“Sex may just be a passing fad. The age of tenderness is over. What is being presented: the world of sadomasochistic symbols, the rhythm of suffering, the pleasure of torment.” –Monika Treut & Elfi Mikesch

“This is S/M by Avedon, outfits by Dior.” –FILM COMMENT

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(DIE JUNGFRAUENMASCHINE)

Dorothee Müller (Ina Blum) is a German journalist researching an article about the nature of romantic love – something she desperately needs, given her dysfunctional relationships with former lover Heinz (Gad Klein) and brother Bruno (Marcelo Uriona). In the Oz of San Francisco, Dorothee finds exactly what she was looking for – and then some – thanks to the help of lesbian strip show barker Susie Sexpert (Susie Bright), drag king Ramona (Shelly Mars), and her mysteriously kinky neighbors (Cleo Dubois and Fakir Musafar). When Dorothy surfaces like a dazzled tourist on the wilder shores of the city’s thriving lesbian community, she has discovered her true sexuality…and left some illusions behind. Part German Expressionist satire, part sapphic travelogue, VIRGIN MACHINE is a seminal – and fiercely controversial – work of lesbian cinema.

“If the film’s sexual politics relate Treut to Fassbinder – it’s like THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT without the angst and melodrama – the black-and-white look of the film harks to the velvet of Germany’s glory days, the expressionist films of the 20s.” –John Harkness, NOW

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Anthology recently became the repository and rights-holder for the moving-image work of Bruce Baillie, whose body of work represents one of the towering achievements of postwar American experimental cinema. Over the course of the last few years, we’ve been gradually preserving and striking new prints of his films, including classics (and crucial parts of Anthology’s Essential Cinema cycle) such as CASTRO STREET (1966) and ALL MY LIFE (1966). Now we’ve created new prints of Baillie’s magnum opus, the four-reel masterpiece QUICK BILLY (1970), in which Baillie synthesized his previous work to conjure up a breathtakingly ambitious, visually exquisite meditation on the cycle of life. Purporting, for its first three reels, to represent anadaptation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, QUICK BILLY embodies Baillie’s unsurpassed camera eye, his mastery of editing and superimposition, his profoundly philosophical sensibility, as well as his mischievous sense of humor and bold sense of play. The latter qualities manifest most dramatically in the fourth and final reel, which – in a dramatic stylistic about-face – morphs into a kind of Beat parody of a melodramatic silent-era Western.

While Anthology has shown QUICK BILLY annually as part of the Essential Cinema since time immemorial, our existing prints had become worn and faded. Restored now to its full glory, QUICK BILLY has never looked better! To celebrate, we’ll be presenting the film over the course of a long weekend accompanied by the six uncut “Rolls” – also newly restored – that Baillie distributed alongside the feature.

“The essential experience of transformation between Life and Death, death and birth, or rebirth in four reels…” –Bruce Baillie

“One of the masterpieces of the American avant-garde…a rare ‘synoptic’ film that tries to construct an entire cosmos. [It] immerses viewers in a timeless flow of indistinct forms that nearly obliterates self and place – the clarity of an erotic encounter ends when the woman leans forward into darkness. The finale is a parody western in which Baillie satirizes the aggression therest of his film abjures.” –Fred Camper, CHICAGO READER

“Baillie identifies all forms of the Self with the cinema. QUICK BILLY’s first two reels present a first-person cinema (offering a document of a delirious consciousness becoming adapted to the actual world), Reel Three offers a second-person cinema (with Baillie looking at a family album and observing pictures of himself as though they were of another with whom he has an intimate relation), and Reel Four offers a third-person narrative. Through this taxonomic organization, Baillie suggests that cinema evolved out of consciousness and over time assumed forms increasingly distant from the deep Self. In presenting these cinematic modes in reverse chronology, Baillie suggests that the cinema’s original and true nature is as a document of consciousness.” –Bruce Elder, LA FURIA UMANA

Followed by:
Bruce Baillie
QUICK BILLY: SIX ROLLS (Numbers 14, 41, 43, 46, 47, and 52)1968-69, 16 min, 16mm, silent. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives
“The ‘rolls’ took the form of a correspondence, or theater, between their author and Stan Brakhage, in the winter of 1968-69. They’re kind of the magic cousins of the film.” –Bruce Baillie

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Vicky (Shelley Kästner) is a German expat working as a waitress in the East Village while also dreaming of making it as an actor. She’ll have to give the performance of a lifetime when her stodgy father (Alfred Edel) hastily makes plans to visit her. As Vicky rushes to hide the aspects of her lifestyle that she doesn’t think he’ll approve of – namely, her gay roommate Ben (David Bronstein) and lesbian lover Lisa (Mary Lou Grailau) – only to become involved with a handsome stranger with a mysterious past (Michael Massee) in the process, Pops winds up tangled up with “post-porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle. A supremely kinky (yet surprisingly wholesome) sex comedy, MY FATHER IS COMING is also a loving tribute to the East Village and is notable for being one of the first feature films to prominently feature a trans man character.

“A cheerful cornucopia of kinkiness where genders and sexual preferences aren’t simply bent – they’re twisted into corkscrews.” –Stephen Holden, NEW YORK TIMES

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Treut presents four short documentaries about individuals who live and act outside of society’s expectations of womanhood. In DR. PAGLIA (1992), Sexual Personae writer and academic Camille Paglia holds court with author Bruce Henderson. In ANNIE (1989), “post-porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle gives a PCA (Public Cervix Announcement). BONDAGE (1983) is a look at lesbian sadomasochism with Carol from New York’s Lesbian Sex Mafia. Finally, in the groundbreaking MAX (1992), trans poet Max Wolf Valerio discusses his life and transition. What emerges from these four very different portraits is a compelling snapshot of those at the forefront of blurring and expanding the definition of sex and gender at the close of the 20th century.

“FEMALE MISBEHAVIOR is a totally accurate picture of my everyday life as a social and sexual alien.” –Camille Paglia

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Eva Norvind was born Eva Johanne Chegodaieva Sakonskaja in 1944, the daughter of a Russian prince and a Finnish sculptor in Trondheim, Norway. DIDN’T DO IT FOR LOVE traces the many stages of her unbelievable life story: from her early success as a showgirl in Paris to her transformation into Mexico’s Marilyn Monroe in the 1960s, her subsequent career as a journalist in the 1970s, and culminating in her establishing herself as New York’s most famous and business-savvy dominatrix in the 1980s. DIDN’T DO IT FOR LOVE is an odyssey through the wilderness of sexuality, capturing Eva’s search for the wellspring of her obsessive drive to dominate.

“Treut has always aimed her camera at the front lines of the sexual avant-garde. But with her latest documentary she’s managed to leap across the socio-sexual battlefield as never before. […] Armed with more present lives than Shirley MacLaine has past ones, Norvind is as eloquent as she is paradoxical.” –David Ehrenstein, NEW TIMES

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(VERFÜHRUNG – DIE GRAUSAME FRAU)

Wanda (Mechthild Großmann) is a dominatrix who runs an S/M performance space in Hamburg where she stages elaborate sexual rituals for a discerning audience. Cruelty is her profession, but constructing traps for her lovers – including the lovelorn Gregor (Udo Kier), the naive and innocent Justine (Sheila McLaughlin), and the jaded Caren (Carola Regnier) – is her specialty. All know the rules of the game, but not all are willing to play their roles – but the show must go on…

“Sex may just be a passing fad. The age of tenderness is over. What is being presented: the world of sadomasochistic symbols, the rhythm of suffering, the pleasure of torment.” –Monika Treut & Elfi Mikesch

“This is S/M by Avedon, outfits by Dior.” –FILM COMMENT

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(DIE JUNGFRAUENMASCHINE)

Dorothee Müller (Ina Blum) is a German journalist researching an article about the nature of romantic love – something she desperately needs, given her dysfunctional relationships with former lover Heinz (Gad Klein) and brother Bruno (Marcelo Uriona). In the Oz of San Francisco, Dorothee finds exactly what she was looking for – and then some – thanks to the help of lesbian strip show barker Susie Sexpert (Susie Bright), drag king Ramona (Shelly Mars), and her mysteriously kinky neighbors (Cleo Dubois and Fakir Musafar). When Dorothy surfaces like a dazzled tourist on the wilder shores of the city’s thriving lesbian community, she has discovered her true sexuality…and left some illusions behind. Part German Expressionist satire, part sapphic travelogue, VIRGIN MACHINE is a seminal – and fiercely controversial – work of lesbian cinema.

“If the film’s sexual politics relate Treut to Fassbinder – it’s like THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT without the angst and melodrama – the black-and-white look of the film harks to the velvet of Germany’s glory days, the expressionist films of the 20s.” –John Harkness, NOW

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Vicky (Shelley Kästner) is a German expat working as a waitress in the East Village while also dreaming of making it as an actor. She’ll have to give the performance of a lifetime when her stodgy father (Alfred Edel) hastily makes plans to visit her. As Vicky rushes to hide the aspects of her lifestyle that she doesn’t think he’ll approve of – namely, her gay roommate Ben (David Bronstein) and lesbian lover Lisa (Mary Lou Grailau) – only to become involved with a handsome stranger with a mysterious past (Michael Massee) in the process, Pops winds up tangled up with “post-porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle. A supremely kinky (yet surprisingly wholesome) sex comedy, MY FATHER IS COMING is also a loving tribute to the East Village and is notable for being one of the first feature films to prominently feature a trans man character.

“A cheerful cornucopia of kinkiness where genders and sexual preferences aren’t simply bent – they’re twisted into corkscrews.” –Stephen Holden, NEW YORK TIMES

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

June Leaf married the great photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank in 1975, and they were together until his death in 2019. Even more than most artists, Frank and Leaf’s lives were inextricably intertwined with their creative work, and Frank’s later films in particular comprise highly distinctive diary films in which he documents and muses on his life and environment. This program gathers some of the films of Frank’s in which Leaf makes brief but especially memorable appearances.

TRUE STORY (2004/08, 26 min, video)
Speaking in voiceover, Frank narrates scenes shot in his homes in New York and Nova Scotia. His rambling commentary returns to familiar themes of memory, and the loss of friends and family members. Brief excerpts from earlier films are shown, along with Frank’s photographs, the art of his wife, June Leaf, and extraordinarily detailed letters written by his son, Pablo (1951-94).

I REMEMBER (1998, 7 min, video)
Frank narrates a charming re-enactment of his visit to the home of Alfred Stieglitz. The cast comprises June Leaf as Georgia O’Keeffe, artist Jerome Sother as Robert Frank, and Frank himself in the role of Stieglitz.

HOME IMPROVEMENTS (1985, 29 min, video)
Robert Frank’s first video project, HOME IMPROVEMENTS is about the relationship between Frank’s life as an artist and his personal life, and how the two are inevitably intertwined. Made with a half-inch video Portapak it includes numerous sequences with June Leaf.

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Treut presents four short documentaries about individuals who live and act outside of society’s expectations of womanhood. In DR. PAGLIA (1992), Sexual Personae writer and academic Camille Paglia holds court with author Bruce Henderson. In ANNIE (1989), “post-porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle gives a PCA (Public Cervix Announcement). BONDAGE (1983) is a look at lesbian sadomasochism with Carol from New York’s Lesbian Sex Mafia. Finally, in the groundbreaking MAX (1992), trans poet Max Wolf Valerio discusses his life and transition. What emerges from these four very different portraits is a compelling snapshot of those at the forefront of blurring and expanding the definition of sex and gender at the close of the 20th century.

“FEMALE MISBEHAVIOR is a totally accurate picture of my everyday life as a social and sexual alien.” –Camille Paglia

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Made at the height of the tech boom of the late 1990s, Monika Treut’s Teddy Award-winning GENDERNAUTS is a portrait of a group of trans artists, activists, and academics living in San Francisco – including historian Susan Stryker, web designer Stafford, video artists Jordy Jones and Texas Tomboy, intersex activist Hida Viloria, and “Goddess of Cyberspace” Sandy Stone. Treut also catches up with Annie Sprinkle and Max Wolf Valerio, who she first profiled in 1992’s FEMALE MISBEHAVIOR. Viewed now, over 25 years since its initial release, GENDERNAUTS remains a fascinatingly multifaceted look at the way that technology and the internet reshaped trans culture at the close of the 20th century.

“The criticism I get is from people who say, ‘Where’s the suffering in this?’ I happen to choose to deal with people who choose what they want to become. Transgendered people are one of the best-connected minorities on the Internet. It’s the perfect medium for people to have different personas. It’s making everyone transgendered in a way.” –Monika Treut

Preceded by:

Short films by Tex Starr (aka Texas Tomboy):

RAVE PORN (1996, 3 min, SD Video-to-DCP)
Jean Genet meets 90s rave culture.

ALIEN AUTOPSY (1995, 2 min, SD Video-to-DCP)
An X-Files-inspired medical procedure.

CALVIN KLEIN SPOOF #2 (1995, 1 min, SD Video-to-DCP)
A twist on a familiar ad campaign.

ALIENATOR (1996, 3 min, SD Video-to-DCP)
An erotic alien abduction, made at SFAI for the 10th anniversary of MIX NYC.

Total running time: ca. 100 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(STACHKA)

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

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

Twenty years after making GENDERNAUTS, Monika Treut returns to San Francisco to catch up with her subjects and find out where time and life have led them. What she finds is a city transformed: what had once been a utopia for trans communities has now grown largely inaccessible due to rising costs and gentrification. Sandy Stone, Stafford, Susan Stryker, Max Wolf Valerio, and Annie Sprinkle all return in this lovely – if bittersweet – document of trans elderhood and enduring activism in the face of an affordability crisis and a repressive government.

“[A] powerful and uplifting queer communion of intimate conversations…being witness to it feels like sitting in a quiet corner with all the most interesting guests at a party.” –James Kleinmann, THE QUEER REVIEW

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

AFA RESTORATION PREMIERE!

With Allan Arbus, Albert Henderson, Michael Sullivan, Elsie Downey, Robert Downey Jr., Hervé Villechaize, Pablo Ferro, and Toni Basil. Cinematography by Peter Powell. Music by Jack Nitzsche.

Restored by Anthology Film Archives and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Special thanks to Brian Block, Cyma Rubin, and Rosemary Rogers.

Following the commercial failure of POUND, Downey embarked on what would become his biggest, boldest, and most ambitious film: GREASER’S PALACE. Thanks to the backing of independent producer Cyma Rubin, Downey was able for the first time both to work with a substantial production budget and to shoot outside NYC (the film was made on location in New Mexico).

A delightfully demented, surreal, and subversive religious allegory set in the days of covered wagons and American pioneers, GREASER’S is, at its core, an avant-garde parody of the classic American Western. Originally pitched as “Christ coming back in a Western,” the film follows Jesse (Allan Arbus), a zoot-suited Christ figure, from his sudden arrival at a small desert outpost to his prophesied death soon thereafter. Along the way, and much to the delight and bafflement of the outpost’s eccentric population, Jesse performs a variety of miracles, among them a show-stopping boogie-woogie performance in the wooden “palace” of the brutal, de facto leader Seaweedhead Greaser.

While GREASER’S only had a short theatrical run, and has rarely been shown on film since, it found an audience years later on home video, as well as prominent champions such as directors Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen brothers. Fortunately, the original 35mm negative, long thought to be lost, was rediscovered in 2017. This rediscovery enabled Anthology to initiate the years-long process of fully restoring this independent classic, Downey’s most singular work.

“Giant themes, fabulous crazy story-line, brilliant performances, camerawork, editing, music and design, hilarious comedy, unspeakably heartbreaking (but sometimes funny) violence, and transcendent emotional and spiritual richness – GREASER’S PALACE has got it all and it comes together and cooks in a way that makes it impossible to describe GREASER’S as anything less than one of the very boldest and greatest motion pictures ever made.” –Jonathan Demme

“Come share this vision as much as you can afford to. This is the best movie I have ever seen.” –Paul Krassner, THE REALIST

“A beautiful film, photographed in exquisite color, distinguished by Downey’s genius for the off-beat look at life, his remarkable sense of social satire, and his talent for utterly zany gags.” –Judith Crist, NEW YORK MAGAZINE

We will screen the 35mm restoration from Fri-Mon and the DCP restoration from Tues-Thurs.

The producer of GREASER'S PALACE, Cyma Rubin, will be here in person for a Q&A following the screening on Sun, Oct 19 at 4:30!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Eva Norvind was born Eva Johanne Chegodaieva Sakonskaja in 1944, the daughter of a Russian prince and a Finnish sculptor in Trondheim, Norway. DIDN’T DO IT FOR LOVE traces the many stages of her unbelievable life story: from her early success as a showgirl in Paris to her transformation into Mexico’s Marilyn Monroe in the 1960s, her subsequent career as a journalist in the 1970s, and culminating in her establishing herself as New York’s most famous and business-savvy dominatrix in the 1980s. DIDN’T DO IT FOR LOVE is an odyssey through the wilderness of sexuality, capturing Eva’s search for the wellspring of her obsessive drive to dominate.

“Treut has always aimed her camera at the front lines of the sexual avant-garde. But with her latest documentary she’s managed to leap across the socio-sexual battlefield as never before. […] Armed with more present lives than Shirley MacLaine has past ones, Norvind is as eloquent as she is paradoxical.” –David Ehrenstein, NEW TIMES

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(VERFÜHRUNG – DIE GRAUSAME FRAU)

Wanda (Mechthild Großmann) is a dominatrix who runs an S/M performance space in Hamburg where she stages elaborate sexual rituals for a discerning audience. Cruelty is her profession, but constructing traps for her lovers – including the lovelorn Gregor (Udo Kier), the naive and innocent Justine (Sheila McLaughlin), and the jaded Caren (Carola Regnier) – is her specialty. All know the rules of the game, but not all are willing to play their roles – but the show must go on…

“Sex may just be a passing fad. The age of tenderness is over. What is being presented: the world of sadomasochistic symbols, the rhythm of suffering, the pleasure of torment.” –Monika Treut & Elfi Mikesch

“This is S/M by Avedon, outfits by Dior.” –FILM COMMENT

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

AFA RESTORATION PREMIERE!

With Allan Arbus, Albert Henderson, Michael Sullivan, Elsie Downey, Robert Downey Jr., Hervé Villechaize, Pablo Ferro, and Toni Basil. Cinematography by Peter Powell. Music by Jack Nitzsche.

Restored by Anthology Film Archives and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Special thanks to Brian Block, Cyma Rubin, and Rosemary Rogers.

Following the commercial failure of POUND, Downey embarked on what would become his biggest, boldest, and most ambitious film: GREASER’S PALACE. Thanks to the backing of independent producer Cyma Rubin, Downey was able for the first time both to work with a substantial production budget and to shoot outside NYC (the film was made on location in New Mexico).

A delightfully demented, surreal, and subversive religious allegory set in the days of covered wagons and American pioneers, GREASER’S is, at its core, an avant-garde parody of the classic American Western. Originally pitched as “Christ coming back in a Western,” the film follows Jesse (Allan Arbus), a zoot-suited Christ figure, from his sudden arrival at a small desert outpost to his prophesied death soon thereafter. Along the way, and much to the delight and bafflement of the outpost’s eccentric population, Jesse performs a variety of miracles, among them a show-stopping boogie-woogie performance in the wooden “palace” of the brutal, de facto leader Seaweedhead Greaser.

While GREASER’S only had a short theatrical run, and has rarely been shown on film since, it found an audience years later on home video, as well as prominent champions such as directors Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen brothers. Fortunately, the original 35mm negative, long thought to be lost, was rediscovered in 2017. This rediscovery enabled Anthology to initiate the years-long process of fully restoring this independent classic, Downey’s most singular work.

“Giant themes, fabulous crazy story-line, brilliant performances, camerawork, editing, music and design, hilarious comedy, unspeakably heartbreaking (but sometimes funny) violence, and transcendent emotional and spiritual richness – GREASER’S PALACE has got it all and it comes together and cooks in a way that makes it impossible to describe GREASER’S as anything less than one of the very boldest and greatest motion pictures ever made.” –Jonathan Demme

“Come share this vision as much as you can afford to. This is the best movie I have ever seen.” –Paul Krassner, THE REALIST

“A beautiful film, photographed in exquisite color, distinguished by Downey’s genius for the off-beat look at life, his remarkable sense of social satire, and his talent for utterly zany gags.” –Judith Crist, NEW YORK MAGAZINE

We will screen the 35mm restoration from Fri-Mon and the DCP restoration from Tues-Thurs.

The producer of GREASER'S PALACE, Cyma Rubin, will be here in person for a Q&A following the screening on Sun, Oct 19 at 4:30!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(DIE JUNGFRAUENMASCHINE)

Dorothee Müller (Ina Blum) is a German journalist researching an article about the nature of romantic love – something she desperately needs, given her dysfunctional relationships with former lover Heinz (Gad Klein) and brother Bruno (Marcelo Uriona). In the Oz of San Francisco, Dorothee finds exactly what she was looking for – and then some – thanks to the help of lesbian strip show barker Susie Sexpert (Susie Bright), drag king Ramona (Shelly Mars), and her mysteriously kinky neighbors (Cleo Dubois and Fakir Musafar). When Dorothy surfaces like a dazzled tourist on the wilder shores of the city’s thriving lesbian community, she has discovered her true sexuality…and left some illusions behind. Part German Expressionist satire, part sapphic travelogue, VIRGIN MACHINE is a seminal – and fiercely controversial – work of lesbian cinema.

“If the film’s sexual politics relate Treut to Fassbinder – it’s like THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT without the angst and melodrama – the black-and-white look of the film harks to the velvet of Germany’s glory days, the expressionist films of the 20s.” –John Harkness, NOW

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Treut presents four short documentaries about individuals who live and act outside of society’s expectations of womanhood. In DR. PAGLIA (1992), Sexual Personae writer and academic Camille Paglia holds court with author Bruce Henderson. In ANNIE (1989), “post-porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle gives a PCA (Public Cervix Announcement). BONDAGE (1983) is a look at lesbian sadomasochism with Carol from New York’s Lesbian Sex Mafia. Finally, in the groundbreaking MAX (1992), trans poet Max Wolf Valerio discusses his life and transition. What emerges from these four very different portraits is a compelling snapshot of those at the forefront of blurring and expanding the definition of sex and gender at the close of the 20th century.

“FEMALE MISBEHAVIOR is a totally accurate picture of my everyday life as a social and sexual alien.” –Camille Paglia

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Vicky (Shelley Kästner) is a German expat working as a waitress in the East Village while also dreaming of making it as an actor. She’ll have to give the performance of a lifetime when her stodgy father (Alfred Edel) hastily makes plans to visit her. As Vicky rushes to hide the aspects of her lifestyle that she doesn’t think he’ll approve of – namely, her gay roommate Ben (David Bronstein) and lesbian lover Lisa (Mary Lou Grailau) – only to become involved with a handsome stranger with a mysterious past (Michael Massee) in the process, Pops winds up tangled up with “post-porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle. A supremely kinky (yet surprisingly wholesome) sex comedy, MY FATHER IS COMING is also a loving tribute to the East Village and is notable for being one of the first feature films to prominently feature a trans man character.

“A cheerful cornucopia of kinkiness where genders and sexual preferences aren’t simply bent – they’re twisted into corkscrews.” –Stephen Holden, NEW YORK TIMES

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Made at the height of the tech boom of the late 1990s, Monika Treut’s Teddy Award-winning GENDERNAUTS is a portrait of a group of trans artists, activists, and academics living in San Francisco – including historian Susan Stryker, web designer Stafford, video artists Jordy Jones and Texas Tomboy, intersex activist Hida Viloria, and “Goddess of Cyberspace” Sandy Stone. Treut also catches up with Annie Sprinkle and Max Wolf Valerio, who she first profiled in 1992’s FEMALE MISBEHAVIOR. Viewed now, over 25 years since its initial release, GENDERNAUTS remains a fascinatingly multifaceted look at the way that technology and the internet reshaped trans culture at the close of the 20th century.

“The criticism I get is from people who say, ‘Where’s the suffering in this?’ I happen to choose to deal with people who choose what they want to become. Transgendered people are one of the best-connected minorities on the Internet. It’s the perfect medium for people to have different personas. It’s making everyone transgendered in a way.” –Monika Treut

Preceded by:

Short films by Tex Starr (aka Texas Tomboy):

RAVE PORN (1996, 3 min, SD Video-to-DCP)
Jean Genet meets 90s rave culture.

ALIEN AUTOPSY (1995, 2 min, SD Video-to-DCP)
An X-Files-inspired medical procedure.

CALVIN KLEIN SPOOF #2 (1995, 1 min, SD Video-to-DCP)
A twist on a familiar ad campaign.

ALIENATOR (1996, 3 min, SD Video-to-DCP)
An erotic alien abduction, made at SFAI for the 10th anniversary of MIX NYC.

Total running time: ca. 100 min.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

AFA RESTORATION PREMIERE!

With Allan Arbus, Albert Henderson, Michael Sullivan, Elsie Downey, Robert Downey Jr., Hervé Villechaize, Pablo Ferro, and Toni Basil. Cinematography by Peter Powell. Music by Jack Nitzsche.

Restored by Anthology Film Archives and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Special thanks to Brian Block, Cyma Rubin, and Rosemary Rogers.

Following the commercial failure of POUND, Downey embarked on what would become his biggest, boldest, and most ambitious film: GREASER’S PALACE. Thanks to the backing of independent producer Cyma Rubin, Downey was able for the first time both to work with a substantial production budget and to shoot outside NYC (the film was made on location in New Mexico).

A delightfully demented, surreal, and subversive religious allegory set in the days of covered wagons and American pioneers, GREASER’S is, at its core, an avant-garde parody of the classic American Western. Originally pitched as “Christ coming back in a Western,” the film follows Jesse (Allan Arbus), a zoot-suited Christ figure, from his sudden arrival at a small desert outpost to his prophesied death soon thereafter. Along the way, and much to the delight and bafflement of the outpost’s eccentric population, Jesse performs a variety of miracles, among them a show-stopping boogie-woogie performance in the wooden “palace” of the brutal, de facto leader Seaweedhead Greaser.

While GREASER’S only had a short theatrical run, and has rarely been shown on film since, it found an audience years later on home video, as well as prominent champions such as directors Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen brothers. Fortunately, the original 35mm negative, long thought to be lost, was rediscovered in 2017. This rediscovery enabled Anthology to initiate the years-long process of fully restoring this independent classic, Downey’s most singular work.

“Giant themes, fabulous crazy story-line, brilliant performances, camerawork, editing, music and design, hilarious comedy, unspeakably heartbreaking (but sometimes funny) violence, and transcendent emotional and spiritual richness – GREASER’S PALACE has got it all and it comes together and cooks in a way that makes it impossible to describe GREASER’S as anything less than one of the very boldest and greatest motion pictures ever made.” –Jonathan Demme

“Come share this vision as much as you can afford to. This is the best movie I have ever seen.” –Paul Krassner, THE REALIST

“A beautiful film, photographed in exquisite color, distinguished by Downey’s genius for the off-beat look at life, his remarkable sense of social satire, and his talent for utterly zany gags.” –Judith Crist, NEW YORK MAGAZINE

We will screen the 35mm restoration from Fri-Mon and the DCP restoration from Tues-Thurs.

The producer of GREASER'S PALACE, Cyma Rubin, will be here in person for a Q&A following the screening on Sun, Oct 19 at 4:30!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Twenty years after making GENDERNAUTS, Monika Treut returns to San Francisco to catch up with her subjects and find out where time and life have led them. What she finds is a city transformed: what had once been a utopia for trans communities has now grown largely inaccessible due to rising costs and gentrification. Sandy Stone, Stafford, Susan Stryker, Max Wolf Valerio, and Annie Sprinkle all return in this lovely – if bittersweet – document of trans elderhood and enduring activism in the face of an affordability crisis and a repressive government.

“[A] powerful and uplifting queer communion of intimate conversations…being witness to it feels like sitting in a quiet corner with all the most interesting guests at a party.” –James Kleinmann, THE QUEER REVIEW

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Eva Norvind was born Eva Johanne Chegodaieva Sakonskaja in 1944, the daughter of a Russian prince and a Finnish sculptor in Trondheim, Norway. DIDN’T DO IT FOR LOVE traces the many stages of her unbelievable life story: from her early success as a showgirl in Paris to her transformation into Mexico’s Marilyn Monroe in the 1960s, her subsequent career as a journalist in the 1970s, and culminating in her establishing herself as New York’s most famous and business-savvy dominatrix in the 1980s. DIDN’T DO IT FOR LOVE is an odyssey through the wilderness of sexuality, capturing Eva’s search for the wellspring of her obsessive drive to dominate.

“Treut has always aimed her camera at the front lines of the sexual avant-garde. But with her latest documentary she’s managed to leap across the socio-sexual battlefield as never before. […] Armed with more present lives than Shirley MacLaine has past ones, Norvind is as eloquent as she is paradoxical.” –David Ehrenstein, NEW TIMES

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

AFA RESTORATION PREMIERE!

With Allan Arbus, Albert Henderson, Michael Sullivan, Elsie Downey, Robert Downey Jr., Hervé Villechaize, Pablo Ferro, and Toni Basil. Cinematography by Peter Powell. Music by Jack Nitzsche.

Restored by Anthology Film Archives and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Special thanks to Brian Block, Cyma Rubin, and Rosemary Rogers.

Following the commercial failure of POUND, Downey embarked on what would become his biggest, boldest, and most ambitious film: GREASER’S PALACE. Thanks to the backing of independent producer Cyma Rubin, Downey was able for the first time both to work with a substantial production budget and to shoot outside NYC (the film was made on location in New Mexico).

A delightfully demented, surreal, and subversive religious allegory set in the days of covered wagons and American pioneers, GREASER’S is, at its core, an avant-garde parody of the classic American Western. Originally pitched as “Christ coming back in a Western,” the film follows Jesse (Allan Arbus), a zoot-suited Christ figure, from his sudden arrival at a small desert outpost to his prophesied death soon thereafter. Along the way, and much to the delight and bafflement of the outpost’s eccentric population, Jesse performs a variety of miracles, among them a show-stopping boogie-woogie performance in the wooden “palace” of the brutal, de facto leader Seaweedhead Greaser.

While GREASER’S only had a short theatrical run, and has rarely been shown on film since, it found an audience years later on home video, as well as prominent champions such as directors Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen brothers. Fortunately, the original 35mm negative, long thought to be lost, was rediscovered in 2017. This rediscovery enabled Anthology to initiate the years-long process of fully restoring this independent classic, Downey’s most singular work.

“Giant themes, fabulous crazy story-line, brilliant performances, camerawork, editing, music and design, hilarious comedy, unspeakably heartbreaking (but sometimes funny) violence, and transcendent emotional and spiritual richness – GREASER’S PALACE has got it all and it comes together and cooks in a way that makes it impossible to describe GREASER’S as anything less than one of the very boldest and greatest motion pictures ever made.” –Jonathan Demme

“Come share this vision as much as you can afford to. This is the best movie I have ever seen.” –Paul Krassner, THE REALIST

“A beautiful film, photographed in exquisite color, distinguished by Downey’s genius for the off-beat look at life, his remarkable sense of social satire, and his talent for utterly zany gags.” –Judith Crist, NEW YORK MAGAZINE

We will screen the 35mm restoration from Fri-Mon and the DCP restoration from Tues-Thurs.

The producer of GREASER'S PALACE, Cyma Rubin, will be here in person for a Q&A following the screening on Sun, Oct 19 at 4:30!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

AFA RESTORATION PREMIERE!

With Allan Arbus, Albert Henderson, Michael Sullivan, Elsie Downey, Robert Downey Jr., Hervé Villechaize, Pablo Ferro, and Toni Basil. Cinematography by Peter Powell. Music by Jack Nitzsche.

Restored by Anthology Film Archives and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Special thanks to Brian Block, Cyma Rubin, and Rosemary Rogers.

Following the commercial failure of POUND, Downey embarked on what would become his biggest, boldest, and most ambitious film: GREASER’S PALACE. Thanks to the backing of independent producer Cyma Rubin, Downey was able for the first time both to work with a substantial production budget and to shoot outside NYC (the film was made on location in New Mexico).

A delightfully demented, surreal, and subversive religious allegory set in the days of covered wagons and American pioneers, GREASER’S is, at its core, an avant-garde parody of the classic American Western. Originally pitched as “Christ coming back in a Western,” the film follows Jesse (Allan Arbus), a zoot-suited Christ figure, from his sudden arrival at a small desert outpost to his prophesied death soon thereafter. Along the way, and much to the delight and bafflement of the outpost’s eccentric population, Jesse performs a variety of miracles, among them a show-stopping boogie-woogie performance in the wooden “palace” of the brutal, de facto leader Seaweedhead Greaser.

While GREASER’S only had a short theatrical run, and has rarely been shown on film since, it found an audience years later on home video, as well as prominent champions such as directors Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen brothers. Fortunately, the original 35mm negative, long thought to be lost, was rediscovered in 2017. This rediscovery enabled Anthology to initiate the years-long process of fully restoring this independent classic, Downey’s most singular work.

“Giant themes, fabulous crazy story-line, brilliant performances, camerawork, editing, music and design, hilarious comedy, unspeakably heartbreaking (but sometimes funny) violence, and transcendent emotional and spiritual richness – GREASER’S PALACE has got it all and it comes together and cooks in a way that makes it impossible to describe GREASER’S as anything less than one of the very boldest and greatest motion pictures ever made.” –Jonathan Demme

“Come share this vision as much as you can afford to. This is the best movie I have ever seen.” –Paul Krassner, THE REALIST

“A beautiful film, photographed in exquisite color, distinguished by Downey’s genius for the off-beat look at life, his remarkable sense of social satire, and his talent for utterly zany gags.” –Judith Crist, NEW YORK MAGAZINE

We will screen the 35mm restoration from Fri-Mon and the DCP restoration from Tues-Thurs.

The producer of GREASER'S PALACE, Cyma Rubin, will be here in person for a Q&A following the screening on Sun, Oct 19 at 4:30!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

AFA RESTORATION PREMIERE!

With Allan Arbus, Albert Henderson, Michael Sullivan, Elsie Downey, Robert Downey Jr., Hervé Villechaize, Pablo Ferro, and Toni Basil. Cinematography by Peter Powell. Music by Jack Nitzsche.

Restored by Anthology Film Archives and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Special thanks to Brian Block, Cyma Rubin, and Rosemary Rogers.

Following the commercial failure of POUND, Downey embarked on what would become his biggest, boldest, and most ambitious film: GREASER’S PALACE. Thanks to the backing of independent producer Cyma Rubin, Downey was able for the first time both to work with a substantial production budget and to shoot outside NYC (the film was made on location in New Mexico).

A delightfully demented, surreal, and subversive religious allegory set in the days of covered wagons and American pioneers, GREASER’S is, at its core, an avant-garde parody of the classic American Western. Originally pitched as “Christ coming back in a Western,” the film follows Jesse (Allan Arbus), a zoot-suited Christ figure, from his sudden arrival at a small desert outpost to his prophesied death soon thereafter. Along the way, and much to the delight and bafflement of the outpost’s eccentric population, Jesse performs a variety of miracles, among them a show-stopping boogie-woogie performance in the wooden “palace” of the brutal, de facto leader Seaweedhead Greaser.

While GREASER’S only had a short theatrical run, and has rarely been shown on film since, it found an audience years later on home video, as well as prominent champions such as directors Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen brothers. Fortunately, the original 35mm negative, long thought to be lost, was rediscovered in 2017. This rediscovery enabled Anthology to initiate the years-long process of fully restoring this independent classic, Downey’s most singular work.

“Giant themes, fabulous crazy story-line, brilliant performances, camerawork, editing, music and design, hilarious comedy, unspeakably heartbreaking (but sometimes funny) violence, and transcendent emotional and spiritual richness – GREASER’S PALACE has got it all and it comes together and cooks in a way that makes it impossible to describe GREASER’S as anything less than one of the very boldest and greatest motion pictures ever made.” –Jonathan Demme

“Come share this vision as much as you can afford to. This is the best movie I have ever seen.” –Paul Krassner, THE REALIST

“A beautiful film, photographed in exquisite color, distinguished by Downey’s genius for the off-beat look at life, his remarkable sense of social satire, and his talent for utterly zany gags.” –Judith Crist, NEW YORK MAGAZINE

We will screen the 35mm restoration from Fri-Mon and the DCP restoration from Tues-Thurs.

The producer of GREASER'S PALACE, Cyma Rubin, will be here in person for a Q&A following the screening on Sun, Oct 19 at 4:30!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

AFA RESTORATION PREMIERE!

With Allan Arbus, Albert Henderson, Michael Sullivan, Elsie Downey, Robert Downey Jr., Hervé Villechaize, Pablo Ferro, and Toni Basil. Cinematography by Peter Powell. Music by Jack Nitzsche.

Restored by Anthology Film Archives and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Special thanks to Brian Block, Cyma Rubin, and Rosemary Rogers.

Following the commercial failure of POUND, Downey embarked on what would become his biggest, boldest, and most ambitious film: GREASER’S PALACE. Thanks to the backing of independent producer Cyma Rubin, Downey was able for the first time both to work with a substantial production budget and to shoot outside NYC (the film was made on location in New Mexico).

A delightfully demented, surreal, and subversive religious allegory set in the days of covered wagons and American pioneers, GREASER’S is, at its core, an avant-garde parody of the classic American Western. Originally pitched as “Christ coming back in a Western,” the film follows Jesse (Allan Arbus), a zoot-suited Christ figure, from his sudden arrival at a small desert outpost to his prophesied death soon thereafter. Along the way, and much to the delight and bafflement of the outpost’s eccentric population, Jesse performs a variety of miracles, among them a show-stopping boogie-woogie performance in the wooden “palace” of the brutal, de facto leader Seaweedhead Greaser.

While GREASER’S only had a short theatrical run, and has rarely been shown on film since, it found an audience years later on home video, as well as prominent champions such as directors Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen brothers. Fortunately, the original 35mm negative, long thought to be lost, was rediscovered in 2017. This rediscovery enabled Anthology to initiate the years-long process of fully restoring this independent classic, Downey’s most singular work.

“Giant themes, fabulous crazy story-line, brilliant performances, camerawork, editing, music and design, hilarious comedy, unspeakably heartbreaking (but sometimes funny) violence, and transcendent emotional and spiritual richness – GREASER’S PALACE has got it all and it comes together and cooks in a way that makes it impossible to describe GREASER’S as anything less than one of the very boldest and greatest motion pictures ever made.” –Jonathan Demme

“Come share this vision as much as you can afford to. This is the best movie I have ever seen.” –Paul Krassner, THE REALIST

“A beautiful film, photographed in exquisite color, distinguished by Downey’s genius for the off-beat look at life, his remarkable sense of social satire, and his talent for utterly zany gags.” –Judith Crist, NEW YORK MAGAZINE

We will screen the 35mm restoration from Fri-Mon and the DCP restoration from Tues-Thurs.

The producer of GREASER'S PALACE, Cyma Rubin, will be here in person for a Q&A following the screening on Sun, Oct 19 at 4:30!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Joseph Papp, who hailed GREASER’S PALACE as “a masterpiece” and “a classic to be seen again and again,” offered Downey a slot in his newly contracted CBS series for which he was to produce thirteen feature-length teleplays. Using largely the same crew from GREASER’S, Downey adapted and directed David Rabe’s award-winning anti-Vietnam War play STICKS AND BONES. Instead of shooting it on film and then transferring it to video for broadcast, as was standard practice, Downey insisted on shooting the whole thing on new video technology: 2” Quad videotape. Believing the teleplay was too controversial, at the last minute CBS indefinitely postponed airing it. When they eventually broadcast it five months later, half of the affiliate stations refused to carry it (an unprecedented move for the time). Outraged, Papp canceled his entire series contract over CBS’s actions, which he called “a cowardly cop-out and a rotten affront to freedom of speech.”

STICKS AND BONES was thought to survive only on badly dubbed U-Matic videotapes with burned-in timecode, but a 2” master videotape belonging to cinematographer Peter Powell was recently discovered and subsequently preserved by Anthology, and we’re delighted to premiere the restoration as part of this series.

Restored by Anthology Film Archives. Special thanks to Gus Powell and Maurice Schechter.

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The night before Benjamin is set to leave his small town to start his gay porn career in L.A., his best friend Dom ropes him into smuggling contraband across the Canadian border for extra cash. But it’s not any ordinary drug run. The two men are forced to swallow strange insect grubs encased in condoms. It’s said if these bugs bite you, some experience pleasure while others experience pain. But the danger of carrying these lethal larvae in their intestines pales in comparison to the threat posed by the vicious man at the center of the whole smuggling operation. When we showed Carter Smith’s groundbreaking 2006 gay horror short BUGCRUSH in March, the audience was so freaked out that we decided to screen Smith’s nightmarish semi-sequel, SWALLOWED, set in the same universe but with completely different characters played by Emmy nominee Cooper Koch (MONSTERS: THE LYLE AND ERIK MENENDEZ STORY), Jose Colon, Jenna Malone (DONNIE DARKO), and legendary gay actor Mark Patton, best known for his starring role in the gay NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET sequel FREDDY’S REVENGE. We’ll be joined by one of SWALLOWED’s biggest fans – film and theater critic Kyle Turner – to introduce this evening’s spooky season screening.

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Highly personal and at the same time completely illogical, this cacophonous comedy (also known as MOMENT TO MOMENT, and even as JIVE) has virtually no semblance of a storyline or plot. The great Elsie Downey, the director’s then-wife and the mother of his children (who are featured prominently throughout), drives the film with her boisterous performance in what may very well be more than ten roles. Shot and edited piecemeal over a few years, TWO TONS… is a collage of everything from staged scenes to home movies, and features a soundtrack by the legendary Jack Nitzsche and David Sanborn.

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(BRONENOSETS POTEMKIN)

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

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

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The unexpected underground success of Downey’s no-budget feature CHAFED ELBOWS (1966), composed mostly of stills, caught the attention of an advertising production company who hired him “to try experimental stuff,” as he later put it. Inspired by his experiences working within the industry, Downey wrote PUTNEY SWOPE (1969), an uproarious and deeply subversive swipe at the advertising world – and at capitalism in general. PUTNEY was a surprise hit on the art-house circuit leading to extended runs and praise from critics and viewers alike and remains Downey’s best-known film today.

In the film, an advertising agency’s only Black executive is unexpectedly voted chairman, at which point he institutes a series of radical reforms while rebranding the agency “Truth and Soul, Inc.” Downey seamlessly edited standalone commercial parodies throughout the film, which would inspire future sketch comedies like “Mr. Show” and “Kids in the Hall”.

Restoration courtesy of All Channel and the American Genre Film Archive. PUTNEY SWOPE was restored by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

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This program showcases the hallucinatory video work of Mexican artist Sergio Hernández Francés (1964-95), whose experimentation across theater, cinema, music, and new media influenced a generation of artists in Mexico. Making ample use of chromakey, collage, and a psychedelic sensibility, works like SUEÑO DE SERPIENTE and LOKOPHONIA helped establish Mexico City’s experimental video scene and are among the most striking early artistic responses to the AIDS crisis in Mexico. Despite his influence, Hernández Francés’s work has rarely been seen since his death from AIDS-related complications in 1995. The work in this program was rescued by video art pioneer Ximena Cuevas as part of her acclaimed compilation Los Archivos X and is being reintroduced today through the efforts of artist Jorge Bordello.

This screening is presented in collaboration with Visual AIDS, in tandem with the Third Annual Visual AIDS Research Symposium at the Museum of Modern Art on October 24.

With an introduction by Jorge Bordello.

SERPENT’S DREAM / SUEÑO DE SERPIENTE 1991, 8 min, analogue-video-to-digital
DEADLY SINS / PECADOS CAPITALES 1993, 9 min, analogue-video-to-digital
AH CABALA VIDA 1993, 6 min, analogue-video-to-digital
LOKOPHONIA 1991, 11 min, analogue-video-to-digital

Total running time: ca. 40 min.

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POUND, an adaptation of Downey’s own off-off Broadway play THE COMEUPPANCE, is a truly outlandish parable about dogs (played by many of his regular actors) facing “death or adoption” within an animal shelter. Based solely on the box-office success of PUTNEY SWOPE, POUND was produced and distributed by United Artists, who had allegedly assumed it was going to be an animated film. Rated X and too strange for mainstream tastes, the film was a resounding commercial failure for the studio, an experience that ensured Downey would remain a Hollywood outsider for years to come.


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Joseph Papp, who hailed GREASER’S PALACE as “a masterpiece” and “a classic to be seen again and again,” offered Downey a slot in his newly contracted CBS series for which he was to produce thirteen feature-length teleplays. Using largely the same crew from GREASER’S, Downey adapted and directed David Rabe’s award-winning anti-Vietnam War play STICKS AND BONES. Instead of shooting it on film and then transferring it to video for broadcast, as was standard practice, Downey insisted on shooting the whole thing on new video technology: 2” Quad videotape. Believing the teleplay was too controversial, at the last minute CBS indefinitely postponed airing it. When they eventually broadcast it five months later, half of the affiliate stations refused to carry it (an unprecedented move for the time). Outraged, Papp canceled his entire series contract over CBS’s actions, which he called “a cowardly cop-out and a rotten affront to freedom of speech.”

STICKS AND BONES was thought to survive only on badly dubbed U-Matic videotapes with burned-in timecode, but a 2” master videotape belonging to cinematographer Peter Powell was recently discovered and subsequently preserved by Anthology, and we’re delighted to premiere the restoration as part of this series.

Restored by Anthology Film Archives. Special thanks to Gus Powell and Maurice Schechter.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(OKTYABR)

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

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Highly personal and at the same time completely illogical, this cacophonous comedy (also known as MOMENT TO MOMENT, and even as JIVE) has virtually no semblance of a storyline or plot. The great Elsie Downey, the director’s then-wife and the mother of his children (who are featured prominently throughout), drives the film with her boisterous performance in what may very well be more than ten roles. Shot and edited piecemeal over a few years, TWO TONS… is a collage of everything from staged scenes to home movies, and features a soundtrack by the legendary Jack Nitzsche and David Sanborn.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

POUND, an adaptation of Downey’s own off-off Broadway play THE COMEUPPANCE, is a truly outlandish parable about dogs (played by many of his regular actors) facing “death or adoption” within an animal shelter. Based solely on the box-office success of PUTNEY SWOPE, POUND was produced and distributed by United Artists, who had allegedly assumed it was going to be an animated film. Rated X and too strange for mainstream tastes, the film was a resounding commercial failure for the studio, an experience that ensured Downey would remain a Hollywood outsider for years to come.


CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

The unexpected underground success of Downey’s no-budget feature CHAFED ELBOWS (1966), composed mostly of stills, caught the attention of an advertising production company who hired him “to try experimental stuff,” as he later put it. Inspired by his experiences working within the industry, Downey wrote PUTNEY SWOPE (1969), an uproarious and deeply subversive swipe at the advertising world – and at capitalism in general. PUTNEY was a surprise hit on the art-house circuit leading to extended runs and praise from critics and viewers alike and remains Downey’s best-known film today.

In the film, an advertising agency’s only Black executive is unexpectedly voted chairman, at which point he institutes a series of radical reforms while rebranding the agency “Truth and Soul, Inc.” Downey seamlessly edited standalone commercial parodies throughout the film, which would inspire future sketch comedies like “Mr. Show” and “Kids in the Hall”.

Restoration courtesy of All Channel and the American Genre Film Archive. PUTNEY SWOPE was restored by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Joseph Papp, who hailed GREASER’S PALACE as “a masterpiece” and “a classic to be seen again and again,” offered Downey a slot in his newly contracted CBS series for which he was to produce thirteen feature-length teleplays. Using largely the same crew from GREASER’S, Downey adapted and directed David Rabe’s award-winning anti-Vietnam War play STICKS AND BONES. Instead of shooting it on film and then transferring it to video for broadcast, as was standard practice, Downey insisted on shooting the whole thing on new video technology: 2” Quad videotape. Believing the teleplay was too controversial, at the last minute CBS indefinitely postponed airing it. When they eventually broadcast it five months later, half of the affiliate stations refused to carry it (an unprecedented move for the time). Outraged, Papp canceled his entire series contract over CBS’s actions, which he called “a cowardly cop-out and a rotten affront to freedom of speech.”

STICKS AND BONES was thought to survive only on badly dubbed U-Matic videotapes with burned-in timecode, but a 2” master videotape belonging to cinematographer Peter Powell was recently discovered and subsequently preserved by Anthology, and we’re delighted to premiere the restoration as part of this series.

Restored by Anthology Film Archives. Special thanks to Gus Powell and Maurice Schechter.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

NEW YORK PREMIERE!

In her haunting debut feature, Mexican filmmaker and visual artist Sofía Peypoch returns to the site of her kidnapping, undertaking a visceral excavation of memory beneath the earth’s surface. Through intimate, tactile gestures – her hands probing the soil alongside others replicating this chimerical act – the film weaves personal trauma with ancestral history, positioning the earth as an unyielding witness that refuses to forget. Combining film, photography, ceramic sculpture, and found objects, Peypoch crafts a sensory meditation on memory as a living, mutable space where past and present converge. EARTH ALTARS intricately explores how archaeology lends historical depth to intimate trauma, creating a profound dialogue between personal and collective histories.

Followed by a Q&A with the director!

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

Joseph Papp, who hailed GREASER’S PALACE as “a masterpiece” and “a classic to be seen again and again,” offered Downey a slot in his newly contracted CBS series for which he was to produce thirteen feature-length teleplays. Using largely the same crew from GREASER’S, Downey adapted and directed David Rabe’s award-winning anti-Vietnam War play STICKS AND BONES. Instead of shooting it on film and then transferring it to video for broadcast, as was standard practice, Downey insisted on shooting the whole thing on new video technology: 2” Quad videotape. Believing the teleplay was too controversial, at the last minute CBS indefinitely postponed airing it. When they eventually broadcast it five months later, half of the affiliate stations refused to carry it (an unprecedented move for the time). Outraged, Papp canceled his entire series contract over CBS’s actions, which he called “a cowardly cop-out and a rotten affront to freedom of speech.”

STICKS AND BONES was thought to survive only on badly dubbed U-Matic videotapes with burned-in timecode, but a 2” master videotape belonging to cinematographer Peter Powell was recently discovered and subsequently preserved by Anthology, and we’re delighted to premiere the restoration as part of this series.

Restored by Anthology Film Archives. Special thanks to Gus Powell and Maurice Schechter.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW!

(STAROYE I NOVOYE)

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

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NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN! FILMMAKER IN PERSON DURING OPENING WEEKEND!

The feature debut of Portuguese filmmaker Marta Mateus is a forceful collision of documentary reality and myth. In the Alentejo region of southern Portugal, where Mateus is from, a peasant community of grape-pickers become agents in an open-air ritual of remembrance and rebellion. It’s harvest time and there’s discontent in the fields. Suddenly, a black bull is on the loose, and the laborers must scramble for refuge high up in the oak trees. As the specter of the beast looms below, they share bread and wine, memories and dreams, the history of the landscape and of struggles past and present. Night begins to fall, and time swells. The wind that brings the heatwave, it burns. A fable-like film rich with language and monumental gesture, FIRE OF WIND announces a rare voice in contemporary cinema, an artist of deep political commitment steeped in the great filmmaking traditions of Portugal, all the while forging a singular new path forward.

“The bright sunshine of the opening vine-picking sequences gives way to some of the most remarkable nighttime images in recent memory, with faces now illuminated by shafts of moonlight as the workers keep their marooned vigil. Time slips as past and present, reverie and reality seem to merge in the night. […] FIRE OF WIND feels wrought out of a profound connection with the landscape and buried history of the wine country where Mateus grew up.” –Sam Wigley, BFI

“Mateus’s beguiling debut is lyrical, full of poetry and deeply symbolic imagery. Beautifully shot with natural light and formed with striking compositions reminiscent of master filmmaker Pedro Costa, Mateus captures her characters in a remarkable state of grace.” –Kazik Radwanski, TIFF

On the occasion of Mateus’s visit to NYC, we will also present screenings of her acclaimed short film, BARBS, WASTELANDS (2017), as well as a series of films guest-selected by Mateus; click here for more details.

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(IVAN GROZNY)

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

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“A world dominated by Technology is lost for Liberty.” –George Bernanos

These three films resurrect the vital force of poetic existence against technocracy. With rare sculptural potency, these works materialize absences in order to render them sensory.

António Reis
JAIME
1974, 35 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Portuguese with English subtitles. Digitization by Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema.
Jaime Fernandes drew in pencil and ballpoint pen, and wrote abundantly, in the last three years of his life. Jaime was one of the “numbered men, subjugated to the orderly,” who spent more than thirty years in a psychiatric hospital in Lisbon. Using a handheld camera from the perspective of an “unarmed human eye” that peers out with exceptional brilliance and energy, the film makes the figures revealed in these drawings and written words blossom, roaming through their traces, volumes and temperatures in a rapport with “all its poetic, dramatic and biographical implications,” as António Reis describes. Within a plastic ascesis, the lustrous water of a meadow, the vertiginous sylvan daisies and the patients attain a communal “dignity of statues.” An epiphany of sounds and images that shapes an extraordinary film, raising vita and opus in the same pulse.

Pedro Costa
OUR MAN / O NOSSO HOMEM
2010, 25 min, DCP. In Portuguese with English subtitles.
In Costa’s short film, O NOSSO HOMEM, the son, whose name is José Alberto Tavares Silva, is haunted by a correspondence addressed to him. Haunted across a compound of plural times, the film unfolds in the present, suspended in a life-or-death battle for freedom. The daily battle of the margins to hold back the course of the river, our sick and poisoned river. Our man stands for all of us, as every person’s liberty is inherently collective. A political and sentimental cartography of our community and of humanity’s state of siege.

Jean-Marie Straub
FRANCE AGAINST THE ROBOTS / LA FRANCE CONTRE LES ROBOTS
2020, 10 min, DCP. In French with English subtitles.
This last film by Jean-Marie Straub was adapted from George Bernanos’ essay of the same name, *pour Jean-Luc [Godard], his fellow director and comrade, with whom he shared a lakeside promenade in Rolle, where they both lived toward the end of their lives. “The revolution we are announcing will overturn the entire existing order or it will not take place at all.” A raw and beautiful testament. A manifesto on the absolute necessity of fighting for freedom.

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

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