Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
ZOË LUND
July 12 – July 18
July 12-18, 2024
Actor, agitator, musician, and writer, Zoë Lund (née Tamerlis) was always politically inclined. Born in New York City in 1962, she dropped out of college in 1979. A year later, she’d make her acting debut in Abel Ferrara’s MS .45.
“Young Political Filmmaker Shooting at Mount Holyoke,” reads the headline of a 1983 news clipping. Below, a picture of Lund “working on a film about the radicalization of a young woman.” Uninterested in mute beauty, she wanted to write and produce her own projects.
In the 1980s, Lund appeared in several feature films and television shows, including Larry Cohen’s SPECIAL EFFECTS and MIAMI VICE. At this time, she was also the partner and collaborator of the filmmaker and activist Edouard de Laurot – best known for BLACK LIBERATION (1967), featuring Malcolm X.
In 1992, Lund wrote the screenplay of Ferrara’s BAD LIEUTENANT, in which she also starred, addressing her own addiction to heroin. She died in Paris in 1999, at the age of 37, of heart failure due to cocaine use, leaving behind several unpublished novels, short stories, essays, and screenplays.
Last year, Stephanie LaCava and Manon Lutanie (as Small Press/Editions Lutanie) released a book of Lund’s early poetry titled simply ‘Poems’. They also spent a few months looking for the lost 16mm HOT TICKET, a two-minute film which Lund directed for the Rotterdam Film Festival in 1993. Thanks to LaCava and Lutanie’s efforts, the original copy was eventually found at and restored by the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. It will premiere in the context of this program alongside a selection of films related to Lund, in the hope of highlighting the radical nature of her work and thought.
Guest-programmed and presented by Stephanie LaCava and Manon Lutanie, in collaboration with Robert Lund. Special thanks to Robert Lund; Mijke de Jong; and Rachèl van Olm; as well as to Nicole Brenez; Antoine Thirion; Michelle Carey; and Leenke Ripmeester (Eye Filmmuseum).
For more info about the publication ‘Poems’, visit: https://shop.smallpressnyc.com/products/poems
SPECIAL EVENT!
Zoë Lund
HOT TICKET
1993, 2 min, 16mm-to-digital. In English. World premiere of new restoration!
Followed by:
Edouard de Laurot & Zoë Lund
STORY OF AN ORDINARY MAN
1997, 40 min, 35mm, silent
“HOT TICKET constitutes a visual apologue. Like everything Zoë created (for instance her performance in MS .45, the script of BAD LIEUTENANT, and her unpublished novel trilogy 490), it returns us to the most naked and vivid state of existential necessity. […] What is this hot ticket that guarantees the inversion of entry and exit, theatre and world, birth…and death…cinema and reality? […] The proposition spoken off-screen by Lund offers the essential formula of ethical exigency; it necessarily founds all culture of protest, the revolutionary imperative, and the vigilant safeguard of hope.” –Nicole Brenez, SENSES OF CINEMA
HOT TICKET is the only existing film by Zoë Lund. Written and directed in three days on the occasion of the Rotterdam Film Festival in 1993, it features Lund stepping out of a cinema to enter the real world. She stops at the box office to buy a ticket, before rushing into the night.
The premiere of its new restoration will follow a series of readings and performances of Lund’s early poetry and select scenes from her screenplays. It will be paired with the screening of a 40-minute reel of original footage by the activist and filmmaker Edouard de Laurot, Lund’s partner and collaborator in the early 1980s. Edited by Lund in the context of an event devoted to de Laurot, which took place at the Cinémathèque française in Paris in 1997, it features production footage for films shot in the 1960s and 1970s but never completed. It has not been shown since.
The program will be introduced by Stephanie LaCava, Manon Lutanie, and Robert Lund. The readers and performers for the event will include LaCava, Dasha Nekrasova, and Diamond Stingily!Tues, July 16 at 7:30.
PLUS:
Abel Ferrara
MS .45
1981, 80 min, 35mm-to-DCP
Eerie and unforgettable, MS. 45 is an essential snapshot of New York City in the early 1980s from Abel Ferrara, one of the greatest and most unique living filmmakers on the planet. Thana (Zoë Lund, here credited as Zoë Tamerlis) is a garment worker who’s brutally assaulted twice in the same day. Shocked to her core, Thana’s nights become consumed by vengeful prowls through the city, which result in men winding up on the wrong end of a bullet. Knocking the DEATH WISH rip-off subgenre into a new stratosphere, MS. 45 showcases a haunting performance from Lund and Ferrara’s knack for transforming limited resources into genre revolutions.
“It has a wild energy, like an exploding star cluster.” –Stephanie Zacharek, VILLAGE VOICE
On July 17 & 18, preceded by:
Zoë Lund HOT TICKET 1993, 2 min, 16mm-to-digital. In English. World premiere of new restoration!
Fri, July 12 at 7:00, Sun, July 14 at 9:00, Wed, July 17 at 7:00, and Thurs, July 18 at 9:15.
Abel Ferrara
BAD LIEUTENANT
1992, 96 min, 35mm. NC-17 version!
“Zoë Lund collaborated with Abel Ferrara in creating one of cinema’s most unforgettable cops, a New York Detective named in the credits only as LT (Harvey Keitel). […] Ferrara originally offered the writing assignment to his longtime collaborator Nicholas St John, but he turned it down. Ferrara then offered the job to Zoë Lund, who completed a draft in two weeks. BAD LIEUTENANT takes on complex notions of religious faith, and the search for redemption in a debased society. Some critics called it the ultimate Catholic guilt trip film, while others interpreted it as a modern-day Christ story, which was closer to Lund’s intention. In Nick Johnstone’s interview with Lund in ‘Abel Ferrara: The King of New York (Omnibus Press, 1999),’ she comments: ‘If someone has a more human sense of justice and the priorities of justice, I think that person could be judged as corrupt. Corruption does not make the Lieutenant a sinner. I always like to point out that Christ himself hung out with whores and tax collectors.’” –Ron Pettersson, SENSES OF CINEMA
On July 17, preceded by:
Zoë Lund HOT TICKET 1993, 2 min, 16mm-to-digital. In English. World premiere of new restoration!
Fri, July 12 at 9:15, Sun, July 14 at 6:45, and Wed, July 17 at 9:00.
Temístocles López
EXQUISITE CORPSES
1989, 95 min, 35mm-to-digital
This little-seen underground feature by Venezuelan-born filmmaker Temístocles López comes on as a countercultural take on MIDNIGHT COWBOY, with Gary Knox as Tim, a hick trombone player from Oklahoma who arrives in New York looking to make a name for himself. But before long it takes the first of several U-turns, morphing first into a gay-themed musical and then into a spy thriller parody. Featuring lots of downtown 1980s NYC texture and a sublimely up-for-anything spirit, EXQUISITE CORPSES is also graced with a typically sublime performance from Zoë Lund: appearing on the scene halfway through as sultry femme fatale Belinda, she stops the film in its tracks with an unforgettable musical number, singing her own Kurt Weill-inflected song, “I’ll Have My Cake and Eat It Too.”
“If Tim is initially unable to accept that masculinity and femininity need not be rigidly defined concepts…it is Lund, with her bright red lipstick and curious manner of speaking, who demonstrates how gender roles can be parodied to specifically political ends (her ‘feminine’ persona is as much a drag act as Tim’s routine in stockings and a dress), just as Lopez demonstrates how narrative ‘norms’ can be subverted through a process of deconstruction.” –Brad Stevens, SENSES OF CINEMA
Preceded by:
Franz Harland
THE HOUSEGUEST
1989, 31 min, 35mm-to-digital
“[In 1989] Zoë Lund took the principal role in a strange and rare thirty-minute, black-and-white film directed by Austrian-born director Franz Harland. Credited this time under the name of Zoë Tamerlaine, she plays Marla, the bewitching, tempting host to a ‘professional houseguest’ (Bolek Gryczinski, a painter who died of AIDS), and bride of a rather confused fisherman (a rare film appearance by John Cale, who also composed the score). In a mysterious and comic atmosphere conjured from spiritualism, dreams and incongruous jokes, the husband faints and the woman seduces the unknown Pole, who ends up magically disappearing under Marla’s mischievous gaze.” –Sophie Charlin, SENSES OF CINEMA
Total running time: ca. 130 min.
Sat, July 13 at 6:00 and Mon, July 15 at 7:15.
Larry Cohen
SPECIAL EFFECTS
1984, 106 min, 35mm
This relatively neglected film by the inimitable Larry Cohen (IT’S ALIVE, GOD TOLD ME TO, Q) is a kind of homage to VERTIGO (it’s based on an unproduced screenplay Cohen wrote in the mid-1960s, which Hitchcock himself professed an interest in). A highly ambitious, thematically rich satirical meditation on exploitation filmmaking, SPECIAL EFFECTS stars Eric Bogosian as Chris Neville, a director who films the murder of a young actress, and then attempts to cover up the murder by incorporating the footage into his next movie. As always, Zoë Lund steals the film, playing both the murder victim and the young woman (bearing an uncanny resemblance to the deceased) who Neville hires to “play” her in his movie.
“In Cohen’s whip-smart satire SPECIAL EFFECTS – a sleazier, more Pop VERTIGO – [Lund is] all coltish energy, playing a double role as a pinup model who comes to a bad end and a clever rich girl coaxed into impersonating her.” –Kristin Jones, FILM COMMENT
On July 18, preceded by:
Zoë Lund HOT TICKET 1993, 2 min, 16mm-to-digital. In English. World premiere of new restoration!
Sat, July 13 at 9:00, Sun, July 14 at 4:15, and Thurs, July 18 at 6:45.
