a highly-opinionated selection of things happening around town, and sometimes out of town. this month's page here.
sun. sept. 2 easy rider FREE 8 PM @ biker movie night @ satellite scarface @ cinespia @ hollywood forever los angeles plays itself @ aero the man who stole the sun FREE 7 PM @ reel grit @ afi the ambassador 7 PM @ silent movie theatre klovn 9:20 PM @ silent movie theatre mon. sept. 3 pangea @ pehrspace the good the bad and the ugly (extended version) @ aero brent weinbach (9:00) @ meltdown the ambassador 3:00 7:00 PM @ silent movie theatre klovn 5:15 PM @ silent movie theatre tue. sept. 4 in cold blood (1967) 1 PM @ lacma the ambassador 10:50 PM @ silent movie theatre wed. sept. 5 the graduate FREE 8 PM @ silver lake picture show @ silver lake polka dot plaza the outlaw josey wales @ aero the kiss @ silent movie theatre the ambassador 10:15 PM @ silent movie theatre thu. sept. 6 negativland @ echo portrait of the poet as experimental filmmaker FREE 7 PM @ 7 dudley cinema @ beyond baroque austrian experimental cinema: 4. from a to z and back @ ucla film archive the earrings of madame de..., le plaisir @ aero licence to kill, goldeneye @ lacma john c. reilly, tom brosseau @ largo sea lions @ the smell the ambassador 10:40 PM @ silent movie theatre little otik @ silent movie theatre stray frames @ family bookstore crocodile, raw force @ grindhouse film festival @ new beverly fri. sept. 7 austrian experimental cinema: 5. cinema revisited @ ucla film archive lance bangs/immortal volume: music work 1990-2012 8 PM @ silent movie theatre 1990: the bronx warriors MIDNIGHT @ silent movie theatre catholic spit @ cia north by northwest @ egyptian pepe le moko, touchez pas au grisbi @ aero negativland FREE 8 PM @ la luz de jesus sat. sept. 8 l.a. anarchist bookfair @ barnsdall park the twilight zone: the shelter, the new people, night gallery: class of '99 @ ucla film archive pee wee's big adventure @ devil's night drive-in dead meadow @ echoplex a cut above the rest: an in-depth look at the world of editing and post-production 2 PM @ aero diabolique, eyes without a face @ aero films by abraham ravett 8 PM @ epfc manhattan @ cinespia @ hollywood forever logan's run (1976) 8 PM @ arclight hollywood enemy alien FREE (w/ RSVP) 2 PM @ japanese american national museum darkness light darkness: jan svankmajer shorts 4 PM @ silent movie theatre lance bangs presents: come laugh with us 8 PM @ silent movie theatre sterling roswell FREE 6 PM @ permanent records sun. sept. 9 planet of the apes (1968) 7 PM, suspense: nightmare at ground zero @ ucla film archive thee oh sees, sic alps @ el rey starman (70mm) @ egyptian the rules of the game, boudu saved from drowning @ aero red onions @ redwood the great silence 7:00 9:30 PM @ silent movie theatre mon. sept. 10 cinema abstractions & avant garde films FREE 6 PM @ documental @ unurban unforgiven @ aero lavender diamond FREE (w/ RSVP) @ echo the godfather 8 PM @ 25 cent films @ chinese theatre the great silence 10:30 PM @ silent movie theatre tue. sept. 11 the mark of zorro 6 PM @ inside the vaults @ ampas linwood dunn the great silence 10:40 PM @ silent movie theatre wed. sept. 12 children of men, nineteen eighty-four @ egyptian the abyssinians @ dub club @ echoplex thu. sept. 13 driftwood singers @ echo brannigans law @ 5 star bar sans soleil @ egyptian german army @ complex live and let die, the spy who loved me @ lacma tricky poses and taxing conditions: performance and media 7 PM @ moca grand ave conspirators of pleasure @ silent movie theatre fri. sept. 14 the yellow canary, assault on a queen @ ucla film archive eternal summers @ bootleg john and faith hubley @ ampas samuel goldwyn neonates, no babies @ house on the hill grin without a cat @ egyptian when harry met sally, my blue heaven @ aero naomi punk, dunes, infinite body @ blue star sat. sept. 15 austrian experimental cinema: 6. passing time @ ucla film archive dum dum girls @ lobster fest @ ports o’call village brannigans law @ the smell chris marker short films, remembrance of things to come, case of the grinning cat @ egyptian new works salon 8 PM @ epfc true romance @ cinespia @ hollywood forever magoo at the oscars 7 PM @ alex theatre animal house, revenge of the nerds @ street food cinema @ exposition park faust 5 PM @ silent movie theatre traxx MIDNIGHT @ silent movie theatre fletch @ barnsdall outdoor movies sun. sept. 16 conan o'brien & jeff garlin @ largo catwalk, ringo deathstarr @ echo mon. sept. 17 the last bolshevik, one day in the life of andrei arsenevich @ egyptian lavender diamond FREE (w/ RSVP) @ echo the meaning of life, a fish called wanda @ new beverly tue. sept. 18 the meaning of life, a fish called wanda @ new beverly dead meadow FREE @ yost theatre (santa ana) wed. sept. 19 playhouse 90: requiem for a heavyweight, westinghouse desilu playhouse: the man in the funny suit @ ucla film archive autolux @ bootleg lonely are the brave @ egyptian the giants @ aero shallow grave, trainspotting @ new beverly thu. sept. 20 black cat white cat FREE 8 PM @ center for the arts eagle rock lilys @ bootleg soft pack @ del monte speakeasy @ townhouse ace in the hole, paths of glory @ egyptian major league, major league ii @ aero die another day @ lacma lunacy @ silent movie theatre shallow grave, trainspotting @ new beverly it's such a beautiful day 10:30 PM @ silent movie theater fri. sept. 21 austrian experimental cinema: 7. visiting our neighbors @ ucla film archive the bad and the beautiful, lust for life @ egyptian the sound we see: la & rotterdam FREE 8 PM @ efpc filmmobile six organs of admittance @ echo it happened one night, vibes @ new beverly it's such a beautiful day 10 PM @ silent movie theater sat. sept. 22 the clock (noon saturday through noon sunday) FREE @ lacma austrian experimental cinema: 8. whose reality? @ ucla film archive ken boothe @ los globos spartacus @ egyptian chuck jones tribute shorts program 4 PM @ aero auto focus @ aero the exorcist @ cinespia @ hollywood forever trees and branches: cage jarvinen and tempwerks 9 PM @ beyond baroque mike watt & the missingmen @ bootleg alice 5 PM @ silent movie theatre it happened one night, vibes @ new beverly alps @ silent movie theater it's such a beautiful day 10 PM @ silent movie theater dogtooth MIDNIGHT @ silent movie theater sun. sept. 23 only angels have wings 7 PM @ ucla film archive 20,000 leagues under the sea 4 PM @ egyptian the wages of fear 4:00 7:30 PM @ new beverly alps @ silent movie theater it's such a beautiful day 9:30 PM @ silent movie theater mon. sept. 24 edge effects: color reversal films by timoleon wilkins 8:30 PM @ redcat the princess bride @ egyptian ai weiwei: never sorry FREE @ hammer lavender diamond FREE (w/ RSVP) @ echo the wages of fear 8 PM @ new beverly alps @ silent movie theater it's such a beautiful day 10 PM @ silent movie theater tue. sept. 25 beach house, dustin wong @ wiltern two mules for sister sara @ aero chang'an boulevard FREE 11:00 AM-8:00 PM @ hammer disturbing the peace FREE @ hammer dum dum girls FREE 7 PM @ origami vinyl shriek of the mutilated, invasion of the blood farmers @ grindhouse film fest @ new beverly alps 10:30 PM @ silent movie theater wed. sept. 26 beach house, dustin wong @ wiltern beijing: the second ring & the third ring FREE 11:00 AM-8:00 PM @ hammer one recluse FREE @ hammer a separation, this is not a film @ new beverly punishment park @ silent movie theater alps 10:45 PM @ silent movie theater thu. sept. 27 wargames, hackers @ egyptian dum dum girls, dunes, tremellow @ los globos fall into noise: la air/will o'laughlen 8 PM @ epfc dr. no, casino royale (2006) @ lacma surviving life @ silent movie theatre a separation, this is not a film @ new beverly alps 5 PM @ silent movie theater punishment park 10:15 PM @ silent movie theater brazil @ film-to-film festival @ ampas samuel goldwyn fri. sept. 28 army of darkness MIDNIGHT @ nuart jon brion @ largo 2001: a space odyssey 11 PM @ cinerama anniversary @ arclight cinerama dome tenebre MIDNIGHT @ silent movie theatre the long day closes, of time and the city @ new beverly punishment park 5:30 PM @ silent movie theater animated and live action shorts program @ film-to-film festival @ ampas linwood dunn experimental film program 9:30 PM @ film-to-film festival @ ampas linwood dunn sat. sept. 29 vertigo (70mm) @ egyptian the profound otherness of early cinema 8 PM @ epfc the films of alia syed: a screening and conversation FREE 2 PM @ lacma the sound dimension, the lions @ alexadria mezz bar l'aura moire @ decadance super soiree @ mr. t's the long day closes 4:00 7:30 PM, of time and the city 5:45 9:15 PM @ new beverly the war game, culloden @ silent movie theater punishment park 10:15 PM @ silent movie theater doc program #1 2 PM @ film-to-film festival @ ampas linwood dunn doc program #2 4 PM @ film-to-film festival @ ampas linwood dunn spider baby @ film-to-film festival @ ampas linwood dunn carnival of souls 9:30 PM @ film-to-film festival @ ampas linwood dunn sun. sept. 30 it's a mad mad mad mad world 4:30 PM @ cinerama anniversary @ arclight cinerama dome willoughby @ bootleg neil hamburger @ satellite punishment park 9:15 PM @ silent movie theater cache, benny's video @ egyptian mon. oct. 1 the second cabin: stemple pass 8:30 PM @ redcat judgment at nuremberg 8 PM @ new beverly punishment park 10:45 PM @ silent movie theater rick bahto: selections from accretions FREE 8 PM @ the wulf video nasties: moral panic censorship & videotape FREE 10 PM @ nightmare city: a video nasties celebration @ silent movie theater night warning MIDNIGHT @ nightmare city: a video nasties celebration @ silent movie theater tue. oct. 2 2001: a space odyssey 8:15 PM @ cinerama anniversary @ arclight cinerama dome deerhoof @ echoplex judgment at nuremberg 8 PM @ new beverly punishment park 5:30 PM @ silent movie theater hell of the living dead MIDNIGHT @ nightmare city: a video nasties celebration @ silent movie theater bouquet, mt. eerie @ pehrspace the house i live in FREE @ melnitz movies @ ucla james bridges bride of frankenstein (1935), dracula (1931) @ ampas samuel goldwyn tue. oct. 3 punishment park 10:15 PM @ silent movie theater the cyclops, the food of the gods @ egyptian bouquet, mt. eerie @ center for the arts eagle rock the witch who came from the sea MIDNIGHT @ nightmare city: a video nasties celebration @ silent movie theater occupy la: looking back / looking forward FREE 9 PM @ epfc thu. oct. 4 mark cantor's jazz films FREE 7 PM @ 7 dudley cinema @ beyond baroque how the west was won 7 PM @ cinerama anniversary @ arclight cinerama dome fri. oct. 5 hard eight, boogie nights @ new beverly sat. oct. 6 eagle rock music festival luckman jazz orchestra: tribute to kenny dorham @ luckman theatre boogie nights 4:20 9:30 PM, hard eight 7:30 PM @ new beverly gattaca @ barnsdall outdoor movies sun. oct. 7 the motorcycle diaries FREE 8 PM @ biker movie night @ satellite magnolia 3:30 7:30 PM @ new beverly mon. oct. 8 enter the i-hop FREE 6 PM @ documental @ unurban magnolia 8 PM @ new beverly tue. oct. 9 corin tucker band @ echo punch-drunk love, there will be blood @ new beverly wed. oct. 10 punch-drunk love, there will be blood @ new beverly sat. oct. 13 sunset boulevard @ barnsdall outdoor movies tue. oct. 16 we're not broke FREE 7 PM @ usc ray stark wed. oct. 17 sunset boulevard FREE @ hammer thu. oct. 18 neil hamburger @ satellite fri. oct. 19 faust @ redcat sat. oct. 20 soft pack, crocodlies @ echoplex mon. oct. 22 animated golden and restored 8:30 PM @ china onscreen biennial: ripples of time and modernity @ redcat tue. oct. 23 beijing flickers 8:30 PM @ china onscreen biennial: ripples of time and modernity @ redcat wed. oct. 24 melvins @ masonic lodge @ hollywood forever fri. oct. 26 jon brion @ largo earth @ center for the arts eagle rock sat. oct. 27 frankenstein meets the wolfman 2:00 8:00 PM @ alex theatre house on haunted hill @ barnsdall outdoor movies mon. oct. 29 silent mountains singing oceans and slivers of time: six films by david gatten 8:30 PM @ redcat wed. oct. 31 the cat and the canary (w/ live organ accompaniment) 8 PM @ disney hall thu. nov. 1 afi fest derailroaded FREE 7 PM @ larry "wild man" fischer nite @ 7 dudley cinema @ beyond baroque fri. nov. 2 afi fest sat. nov. 3 afi fest sun. nov. 4 afi fest the girl on a motorcycle FREE 8 PM @ biker movie night @ satellite mon. nov. 5 afi fest the poetics of place: films by rose lowder 8:30 PM @ redcat tue. nov. 6 afi fest wed. nov. 7 afi fest surname viet given name nam 8:30 PM @ redcat thu. nov. 8 afi fest cat power @ palladium sat. nov. 10 the sea and cake @ bootleg mon. nov. 12 protest music films FREE 6 PM @ documental @ unurban fri. nov. 16 jon brion @ largo sat. nov. 17 tame impala @ fonda mon. nov. 19 reconversao 8:30 PM @ redcat fri. nov. 23 tamaryn, tropic of cancer @ echo sat. nov. 24 three stooges big screen event 2:00 8:00 PM @ alex theatre tue. nov. 27 dissolution FREE 7 PM @ usc ray stark thu. nov. 29 charles bradley & the menahan street band @ ucla royce hall fri. nov. 30 moon duo @ casbah (SD) sat. dec. 1 moon duo @ down & out sun. dec. 2 the wild ride FREE 8 PM @ biker movie night @ satellite fri. dec. 14 wooden shjips, trans am @ los globos sat. dec. 15 ty segall @ el rey fri. dec. 21 jon brion @ largo sat. dec. 29 the greatest cartoons ever 2:00 7:00 PM @ alex theatre WHAT IT IS: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry AI WEIWEI DOCUMENTARIES The Hammer presents three days of documentaries about and by China’s most famous international artist and its most outspoken domestic critic—Ai Weiwei. Ai’s detainment for three months in a secret detention center sparked a global outcry from human rights activists and the art world. Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry is the inside story of a dissident for the digital age who inspires global audiences and blurs the boundaries of art and politics. First-time director Alison Klayman gained unprecedented access to Ai while working as a journalist in China. Her detailed portrait provides a nuanced exploration of contemporary China and one of its most compelling public figures. (Dir. Klayman. Run time 91 min) ALICE The most gloriously macabre “Alice” adaptation ever filmed, Jan Svankmajer’s 1988 live-action/animation masterpiece of fur, bones, clicks, creaks and squeaks captivates from the very first frame, as it immediately envelops you in its Iron-Curtain-fantasy-by-way-of-Eraserhead spell. In Svankmajer’s world, the character of Alice is almost incidental to the truly incredible (and at times, genuinely shocking) menagerie of makeshift critters that populate this sawdust-and-grime Wonderland. As Alice is pelted, chased and simply baffled by the increasing madness, the film’s intense, completely enveloping sound design — which highly accentuates every rickety footstep, drop of liquid, turning gear and rustled leaf — becomes a delirious and visceral symphony to which the sound of all future dreamscapes should be measured. Definitely best seen and heard on the big screen, Svankmajer’s tour de force of weirdness remains unparalleled, even in the infinite gallery of Alice permutations. Dir. Jan Svankmajer, 1988, 35mm, 84 min. ALPS Yorgos Lanthimos’s follow-up to cult sensation/Academy Award nominee Dogtooth is another darkly comic, absurdist vision of (in)human relationships, focusing on a mysterious underground organization that helps mourners get over their losses by impersonating the deceased. “We’re going to say this only once. We recommend you go in to Alps as cold as possible. It’s not quite like anything you’ve seen (its closest relative being, well, Dogtooth), and part of its pleasure is watching it play out. Lanthimos continues to prove himself a supremely controlled, disciplined filmmaker: his use of focus alone could form the basis of a film school class, and it’s always interesting to note what he doesn’t show, frequently cutting off or obscuring faces and relying on body language. Alps has proven Lanthimos to be one of the most fascinating filmmakers anywhere right now.” — Oliver Lyttelton, Indiewire THE AMBASSADOR This darkly comic, genre-bending piece of gonzo journalism from international provocateur Mads Brügger (filmmaker of Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Red Chapel) rips the corroded lid off the global scheme of political corruption and exploitation happening in one of the most dangerous places on the planet: the Central African Republic. Armed with a phalanx of hidden cameras, black-market diplomatic credentials and a bleeding-edge wit, Brügger transforms himself into an outlandish caricature of a European-African consul. As he immerses himself in the life-threatening underworld of nefarious bureaucrats, Brügger encounters blood diamond smuggling, bribery, and even murder — while somehow managing to crack amazing razor-sharp barbs at every step along the way. From each absurdly terrifying/hilarious situation to the next, The Ambassador is a one-of-a-kind excursion from the man whom The Huffington Post has called “the most provocative filmmaker in the world.” Dir. Mads Brügger, 2012, HD Presentation, 97 minutes ANIMATED AND LIVE ACTION SHORTS PROGRAM A year ago the Academy Film Archive launched an ambitious effort called "Project Film-to-Film," aimed at preserving as many films on film as possible over a two-year period. The initiative’s main goal is to take advantage of the current availability of film stock to create new prints of a diverse range of motion pictures, encompassing the whole history of the art form. The wide variety of titles range from "Navajo," the only film to receive Oscar nominations for both Documentary Feature and Cinematography, to "Naked Yoga," a short once presumed lost, and "Carnival of Souls," a cult favorite that has been rescued from late-night television and restored to the big screen. This inaugural "Film-to-Film" Festival highlights a sampling of these treasures – some already well known, others ready to be rediscovered. This program illustrates the wide range of films preserved by the Film-to-Film initiative, including a rare short made by the Academy itself, intriguing works by noted animators and the big-screen debut of crooner Phil Harris. OF MEN AND DEMONS, John Hubley and Faith Hubley (1969, 16mm, color, 9 min.) Academy Award nominee: Short Subject (Cartoon) SO THIS IS HARRIS, Mark Sandrich (1933, 35mm, black-and-white, 28 min.) Academy Award winner: Short Subject (Comedy) THE UNICYCLE RACE, Robert Swarthe (1966, 35mm, color, 7 min.) RAILWAY WITH A HEART OF GOLD, Carson "Kit" Davidson (1965, 16mm, color, 15 min.) SCREEN ACTORS, (1950, 35mm, black-and-white, 9 min.) ANIMATED, GOLDEN AND RESTORED The inaugural edition of the three-week bicoastal showcase of Chinese cinema brings two evenings of eye-opening animated and live-action film, respectively, to REDCAT. On October 22, the program “Animated, Golden and Restored” offers a rare glimpse at the luminous output of the “twin Golden Ages of Shanghai animation” (1950s–60s and late 1970s– early 80s). Digitally restored by the China Film Archive, the shorts include Pigsy Eats Watermelon (1958), a vibrant paper-cut animation by the pioneering Wan brothers; Baby Tadpoles Look for Their Mother (1960), the first of the ink-wash masterpieces by ASIFA lifetime achievement honoree Te Wei; and, as a bonus, China’s earliest extant animation, The Mouse and the Frog (1934), showing Disney and Fleischer influences. Assault on a Queen (1966) Directed by Jack Donohue In this Ocean’s Eleven-style caper (with a Duke Ellington score), Frank Sinatra stars as a former submarine officer leading small band of misfit adventurers. When the gang’s attempt to locate lost treasure leads them to a sunken World War II German U-Boat, they recover and refurbish the vessel with an eye to high-jacking the Queen Mary on the open sea. Paramount Pictures. Producer: William Goetz. Screenwriter: Rod Serling. Based on the novel by Jack Finney. Cinematographer: William H. Daniels. Editor: Archie Marshek. Cast: Frank Sinatra, Virna Lisi, Tony Franciosa, Richard Conte, Alf Kjellin. 35mm, color, 106 min. AUSTRIAN EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA: 4. FROM A TO Z AND BACK Inspired by the first film images ever shot in La Ciotat to sophisticated references to Hitchcock, this program questions media, the passage of time and different technologies used to create moving images. From the horizontal to the vertical and at differing speeds, intensities or fluctuations, various modes of cinematographic dislocation are explored. And in doing so nearly every possible manner of moving from one place to another is employed, whether traditional or virtual. Total running time: 71 min. L'Arrivée (1997-1998). Directed by Peter Tscherkassky. 35mm, b/w, 2 min. Luukkaankangas–Updated, Revisited (2005). Directed by Dariusz Kowalski. Digital video, color, 7 min. Mir Mig Men (2002). Directed by Karoe Goldt. Digital video, color, 5 min. Perfekt 2 (1982). Directed by Dietmar Brehm. 16mm, b/w, 12 min. Film–An Exercise in illusions II (1983). Directed by Lisl Ponger. 35mm, color, silent, 4 min. Adjungierte Dislokationen (Adjunct Dislocations) (1973). Directed by VALIE EXPORT. Digital video, b/w, 10 min. 5/67 TV (1967). Directed by Kurt Kren. 16mm, b/w, silent, 4 min. Alpine Passage (2006). Directed by Michaela Schwentner. Digital video, color, 8 min. Vertigo Rush (2007). Directed by Johann Lurf. 35mm, color, 19 min. AUSTRIAN EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA: 5. CINEMA REVISITED Revisiting classical cinema in order to reinvent and create entirely new artistic visions is an attribute of Austrian avant-garde audiovisual production over the past twenty-five years, and it also represents a source of fascination for today’s curious filmgoers. Here, images of Barbara Stanwyck are reappropriated, Anna Magnani’s voice accompanies scenes of Italian suburbia, Mickey Rooney and July Garland are vivisectioned, Barbara Hershey is attacked by the apparatus, and the poetry of early cinema is resurrected in all its beauty in Film Is. All this, in addition to material taken from hundreds of other sources, contributes to the creation of unique cinematographic languages. Total running time: 81 min. Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998). Directed by Martin Arnold. 16mm, b/w, 15 min. Borgate (2008). Directed by Lotte Schreiber. Digital video, color, b/w, 15 min. Outer Space (1999). Directed by Peter Tscherkassky. 35mm, b/w,10 min. Film Is. 7–Comic (2002). Directed by Gustav Deutsch. 35mm, color, b/w, 19 min. Mosaik Mècanique (Notes on Film 03) (2008). Directed by Norbert Pfaffenbichler. 35mm, b/w, 9 min. Picture Again (2003). Directed by Linda Christanell. 16mm, color, silent, 10 min. Zwölf Boxkämpfer jagen Viktor quer über den großen Sylter Deich 140 9 (2009). Directed by Johann Lurf. 35mm, color, 3 min. The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog (2009). Directed by Johann Lurf. 35mm, color, 3 min. AUSTRIAN EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA: 6. PASSING TIME The passage of time and a certain amount of distance were probably necessary before visual artists began questioning the reality and aftermath of Nazism. This program introduces several rarely screened works that directly confront recent Austrian history, and they had obvious and radical social, political and artistic repercussions for the Viennese Actionists and the student protests of May ’68. Time has passed over dark horizons to become permeated with transforming cities or history in neighbouring countries through the use of judiciously chosen found footage. Total running time: 79 min. NS Trilogie Part II: Feeling Kazet (1997). Directed by Linda Christanell. 16mm on digital video, color, 14 min. Nightstill (2007). Directed by Elke Groen. 35mm, color, 9 min. Kunst & Revolutionary Art & Revolution (1968). Directed by Ernst Schmidt Jr. 16mm, b/w, color, silent, 2 min. 55/95 (1994). Directed by Gustav Deutsch. 16mm, b/w, 1 min. Ein drittes Reich (A Third Reich) (1975). Directed by Alfred Kaiser. 16mm, b/w, 29 min. Tito-Material (1998). Directed by Elke Groen. 16mm, color, 5 min. Cityscapes (2007). Directed by Michaela Grill, Martin Stiewert. 35mm, b/w, 16 min. 20/68 Schatzi (1968). Directed by Kurt Kren. 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 min. AUSTRIAN EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA: 7. VISITING OUR NEIGHBORS Small or isolated countries have always had a disproportionate interest in the world surrounding them. The key issue in these works is analyzing the observation of “exotic” images, editing and re-editing material of the past and present. Fictional and documentary approaches and reconstructed found footage question social interactions within a 1950s farming community, moral and visual colonialism, the view of foreignness and a collective experience with migrants and refugees. Formally, they function by transposing sounds and images, and aesthetically through the displacement of communities and individuals. Total running time: 100 min. An diesen Abenden (On Those Evenings) (1952). Directed by Herbert Vesely. 35mm, b/w, 23 min. Pool (1990). Directed by Dietmar Brehm. 16mm, color, silent, 4 min. Sonne halt! Sun Stop! (1959-1960). Directed by Ferry Radax. 35mm, b/w, 25 min. Key West (2002). Directed by Thomas Aigelsreiter. Digital video, b/w, 5 min. Film Ist. 9–Eroberung Film Is. 9–Conquest (2002). Directed by Gustav Deutsch. 35mm, b/w, 18 min. Passagen (Passages) (1996). Directed by Lisl Ponger. 35mm, color, 11 min. Unsere Afrikareise (Our Trip to Africa) (1961-1966). Directed by Peter Kubelka. 16mm, color, 13 min. AUSTRIAN EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA: 8. WHOSE REALITY? These four “choreographed” documentaries play out in the interstices between inside and outside, public and private, visible and invisible, being in control and out of control, and they explore different aspects of the political arena. From a performance to an essay on the status of refugees and illegal immigrants in Fortress Europe, surveillance, public spaces and hyper-real public housing are questioned and traditional family models are undermined. Total running time: 73 min. 6/64 Mama und Papa (1964). Directed by Kurt Kren. 16mm, color, silent, 4 min. Body Trail (2008). Directed by Michael Palm, Willi Dorner. Digital video, b/w, 8 min. Forst (2005). Directed by Ascan Breuer, Ursula Hansbauer and Wolfgang Konrad. Digital video, color, 50 min. Somewhere, Late Afternoon (2007). Directed by Ella Raidel and Hongjohn Lin. Digital video, color, 11 min. THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL 1952, Warner Bros., 118 min, USA, Dir: Vincente Minnelli Hugely entertaining - and still on-target - drama of the relentless scramble to succeed in Hollywood, starring Kirk Douglas as producer Jonathan Shields, a born hustler who creates great movies while he alienates everyone who loves him – including Lana Turner as the alcoholic daughter of a Barrymore-like matinee idol, Barry Sullivan as a trusting young director and Dick Powell as a sharp-tongued screenwriter. BEIJING FLICKERS The inaugural edition of the three-week bicoastal showcase of Chinese cinema brings two evenings of eye-opening animated and live-action film, respectively, to REDCAT. On October 23, Zhang Yuan, the best- known exponent of the post 1990s “Urban Generation” of Chinese filmmakers, presents Beijing Flickers (2012), an incisive yet lyrical exploration of the lives of young people “trying to make it” in the melting pot of social contradictions and hybrid cultural values that Beijing has become. Beijing: The Second Ring & The Third Ring Screening runs from 11AM-8PM. Beijing: The Second Ring is a document of the two opposite views of traffic flow on 33 bridges along Beijing’s Second Ring. The artist records a single frame for one minute for each view on the bridge. The entire piece is made up of 66 segments, entirely shot on cloudy days. The Rings—or traffic loops— are important urban structural elements of Beijing. The circular rings govern the whole spatial organization of the city’s urban fabric. Like the Chang’an Boulevard piece, the act of recording is minimal, focusing on the process of pure observation and the nature of time. The film documents the historic aspects of the city, modern development, its nearly 13 million people, mass transport, and the urban reality that defines Beijing. (2005, Video, 1 h 6 min) Beijing: The Third Ring is a document of the two opposite views of traffic flow on 55 bridges along Beijing’s Third Ring. The entire piece is made up of 110 segments. As opposed to Beijing: The Second Ring, which was entirely shot on cloudy days, the segments or this film were shot on sunny days. (2005, Video, 1 h 50 min) BLACK CAT, WHITE CAT This month, we will be showing the Yugoslavian comedy, Black Cat, White Cat. Even though it's a narrative film and not a documentary, by using non-actors and actual Roma settings, Emir Kusturica gives a raucous but sincere portrayal of gypsy life. Although it was filmed in 1998, so many of the issues and situations presented feel relevant still, as Roma struggle to keep a place for their traditional nomadic lifestyle in the post-Soviet landscape of the Eastern Bloc. "Mr. Kusturica so evidently adores all of the film's other characters that Black Cat, White Cat becomes a wild, warts-and-all celebration of their lives and like Fellini, Kusturica finds true grace where it's least expected and makes films utterly, uncompromisingly his own". -- Janet Maslin, New York Times BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING (BOUDU SAUVE DES EAUX) 1932, Janus Films, 84 min, France, Dir: Jean Renoir In Jean Renoir's delightful, moving comedy, Michel Simon plays hirsute Parisian tramp Boudu, who plunges into the Seine only to be saved from suicide by a bourgeois bookseller, Edouard Lestingois (Charles Granval). Edouard takes the hobo under his wing and invites him home as a permanent houseguest, but little does he know that Boudu's presence will irreparably shake the wealthy, comfortable Lestingois family to its core. The inspiration for Paul Mazursky's 1986 comedy DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS. In French with English subtitles. BRAZIL A year ago the Academy Film Archive launched an ambitious effort called "Project Film-to-Film," aimed at preserving as many films on film as possible over a two-year period. The initiative’s main goal is to take advantage of the current availability of film stock to create new prints of a diverse range of motion pictures, encompassing the whole history of the art form. The wide variety of titles range from "Navajo," the only film to receive Oscar nominations for both Documentary Feature and Cinematography, to "Naked Yoga," a short once presumed lost, and "Carnival of Souls," a cult favorite that has been rescued from late-night television and restored to the big screen. This inaugural "Film-to-Film" Festival highlights a sampling of these treasures – some already well known, others ready to be rediscovered. Surrounded by both controversy and acclaim, Terry Gilliam’s film "Brazil" is set in an alternative reality "somewhere in the 20th century," where civil servant Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) fights a hopeless battle against a totalitarian state. The film earned Academy Award nominations for Original Screenplay (Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, Charles McKeown) and Art Direction (Art Direction: Norman Garwood; Set Decoration: Maggie Gray). The stellar supporting cast includes Katherine Helmond, Jim Broadbent, Robert De Niro, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Charles McKeown and Michael Palin. Original Director's Cut, 142 min., color, 35mm CARNIVAL OF SOULS A year ago the Academy Film Archive launched an ambitious effort called "Project Film-to-Film," aimed at preserving as many films on film as possible over a two-year period. The initiative’s main goal is to take advantage of the current availability of film stock to create new prints of a diverse range of motion pictures, encompassing the whole history of the art form. The wide variety of titles range from "Navajo," the only film to receive Oscar nominations for both Documentary Feature and Cinematography, to "Naked Yoga," a short once presumed lost, and "Carnival of Souls," a cult favorite that has been rescued from late-night television and restored to the big screen. This inaugural "Film-to-Film" Festival highlights a sampling of these treasures – some already well known, others ready to be rediscovered. World premiere of the Academy Film Archive's new restoration from the original negative. Director Herk Harvey's only feature film was made on a tiny budget with a crew largely composed of industrial filmmakers from Lawrence, Kansas. Filled with evocative images, the film tells the story of a young woman who seemingly survives a car crash but is haunted by a ghostly figure that is somehow connected to an abandoned carnival pavilion. 35mm, black-and-white, 78 min. CASE OF THE GRINNING CAT 2004, Icarus Films, 58 min, France, Dir: Chris Marker In his last full-length film, French cinema-essayist Chris Marker reflects on French and international politics, art and culture at the start of the new millennium. In French with English subtitles. THE CAT AND THE CANARY The will of wealthy Cyrus West is read to his relatives, who spend the night in his mansion and are stalked by “The Cat,” a mysterious escapee from the local asylum, who claws his victims like canaries. Directed by German Expressionist filmmaker Paul Leni, this 1927 classic silent film is accompanied by Clark Wilson on Walt Disney Concert Hall’s incredible organ. Chang’an Boulevard Screening runs from 11AM-8PM. The film is a record of Chang’an Boulevard at a sequence of measured distances along its 45 kilometers length from east to west. At each measured increment, the artist records a single frame for one minute. The whole film is composed of 608 one-minute segments. The length of the film is 10 hours and 13 minutes. Beijing, the capitol of China for over 600 years, has a prime architectural orientation and order to its urban fabric. The structure of the city is divided in half by Chang’an Boulevard along the east-west axis. After 1949, Chang’an Boulevard and the heart of the city, Tiananmen Square, became China’s main cultural political center and landmark. The film records the city through the transformation of urban landscape. The act of recording is minimal: it is filmed in a peaceful, quiet manner, focusing on the nature of time and pure observation. The work reveals Beijing as an organic whole, capturing the rhythms of the city, its social structure, cityscape, socialist-planned economy, capitalist market, political power center, commercial buildings, and industrial units as pieces of a multi-layered urban collage. CHRIS MARKER SHORT FILMS * “La Jetee” (1964, New Yorker, 30 min). Marker’s most famous film (and his only work of pure fiction), “La Jetee” is an agonizing cry of love to a world gone by, the story of a man drawn through time by the image of a woman standing on the jetty at Orly Airport. A candidate for one of the greatest films ever made; certainly, it’s the most romantic. In French and German with English subtitles. * “Junkopia” (1981, 6 min). This short by Marker, Frank Simone and John Chapman about the Emeryville Mudflats in Northern California is the only film Marker made in the United States. In French with English subtitles. * “Cat Listening to Music,” (1990, 3 min). Marker fans are familiar with the cartoon representation of Guillaume-en-Egypte, Marker's beloved pet cat, which has become the reclusive filmmaker's alter ego. In this charming short, Marker reveals the real-life Guillaume, stretched out lazily in the filmmaker's apartment, as he listens to the lilting rhythms of a piano sonata by Federico Mompou. * “An Owl Is An Owl” (1990, 3 min). A visit to an aviary yields a rhythmically edited series of close-ups of the rapidly rotating or intently staring feathered heads of a colorful variety of owls, accompanied by an ambient electronic soundtrack. * “Zoo Piece” (1990, 3 min). A leisurely paced montage of animals, many of them confined in cages or enclosures - including seals, kangaroos, leopards, gorillas, wolves, monkeys, ostriches and a sleeping rhinoceros. * “Bullfight in Okinawa” (1992, 4 min). Two enormous black bulls engage in a contest of brute force, egged on by their screaming handlers, as they butt heads and lock horns in an attempt to rout their opponent. * “Slon Tango” (1993, 4 min). In this astonishing, sustained shot, an elephant in the Ljubljana Zoo ambles around its enclosure, performing syncopated dance steps to the accompaniment of Igor Stravinsky's "Tango." Chuck Jones Tribute Shorts Program Join us for an afternoon of classic shorts by animation genius Chuck Jones, who gave us Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, Tom and Jerry and the Grinch. Lineup includes “For Scent-i-Mental Reasons,” “Rabbit Fire,” “Ali Baba Bunny,” “Duck Amok,” “Ducksters,” “Robin Hood Daffy,” “Dock Dodgers and the 24 ½ Century,” “What’s Opera Duck,” “One Froggy Evening,” “There They Go-Go-Go,” “Little Beau Pepe,” “Rabbit Seasoning,” “No Barking,” “Dot & the Line” and more! 90 min. CINEMA ABSTRACTIONS & AVANT GARDE FILMS - Rare films that evoke this quote: "Early in life I experimented with peyote, LSD and so on. But in many ways my films are ahead of my own experience. The new art and other forms of expression reveal the influence of mind-expansion. And finally we reach the point where there virtually is no separation between science, observation and philosophy." - Jordan Belson. Many of the filmmakers have been featured in the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Bryan Konefsky's Experiments In Cinema. THE CLOCK LACMA presents another special twenty-four-hour screening of Christian Marclay's The Clock beginning Saturday, September 22, at noon and ending at noon on Sunday, September 23. The Clock is a twenty-four-hour single-channel montage constructed from thousands of moments of cinema and television history depicting the passage of time. Marclay has excerpted each of these moments from their original contexts and edited them together to create a functioning timepiece synchronized to local time wherever it is viewed—marking the exact time in real time for the viewer for twenty-four consecutive hours. The sampled clips come from films of all genres, time periods, and cultures, some lasting only seconds, others minutes, and have been culled from hundreds of films, famous and obscure, into a seamless whole. The result, a melding of video and reality, unfolds with a seemingly endless cast of cameos. By making the film available in its entirety, this free screening will allow The Clock to be viewed in the way Marclay intended. CONSPIRATORS OF PLEASURE It’s the feel-good fleshly foible fest of the fall season! A sweetly humorous and completely out-there ballet of vignettes on the subject of surrealistic self-gratification, Svankmajer’s Conspirators of Pleasure is the arresting portrait of of hardcore sexual fetishists whose lives pirouette around one another in serendipitous fashion. Inspired by the work of notorious perverts like Luis Bunuel, Max Ernst, Sigmund Freud and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, this one-of-a-kind feature features absolutely no dialogue, instead honing in on the splendiferous depravity of six seemingly “normal” folks whose obsessions bring them together: a postal carrier, a news agent, a newscaster, the newscaster’s husband, a middle-aged woman, and her neighbor. With a fevered intensity that only increases as the storylines weave themselves tighter against each other, Svankmajer’s devious human puppetry reaches its orgasmic zenith in an absurdly comic group climax that displays, according to Film Threat Magazine, a “sympathetic voodoo magic worked by a team of discreet players so intense that genius is sparked, and makes vital and gorgeous the previously inert and obscene.” WOW! Dir. Jan Svankmajer, 1996, 35mm, 85 min. CULLODEN Culloden (1964, 72 mins.) meticulously reconstructs the 1746 conflict that marked the last pitch battle to take place on British soil. "A shattering grunt's-eye view of warfare, where victory is an illusion best viewed on horseback" (Sam Adams, Philadelphia City Paper). DARKNESS LIGHT DARKNESS: JAN SVANKMAJER SHORTS Svankmajer’s feature films have introduced countless arthouse audiences to a singular, slanted world of European decay — a delectably skewed stew that twists the familiar (body parts, food, household objects) to reveal the carnal absurdities of the everyday human condition — but nowhere is this vision more encapsulated and undiluted than in his prolific and rarely screened short films. Emerging from behind the Iron Curtain in the late ‘60s, his explosive early films evaded rampant governmental censorship by working within the “assumedly safe” medium of the animated short, employing stop-motion, puppetry, cut-out animation, experimental techniques and any means necessary to covertly inject his symbolic subversion into the Czech cinematic bloodstream. Slabs of meat copulating on countertops, bodies crumbling and merging in a sea of ecstatic clay, anthropomorphic food devouring itself and vomiting up more anthropomorphic food — all are right at home within Svankmajer’s mini-morsels of morbidity, but perhaps nowhere more at home as in the shared darkness of a theater, viscerally twitching and flickering on the big screen in 35mm! DERAILROADED: INSIDE THE MIND OF LARRY "WILD MAN" FISCHER 2nd Annual LARRY "WILD MAN" FISCHER NITE - Celebrate a sympathetic and touching journey through the thunderstorms of the mind of paranoid-schizophrenic Larry "Wild Man" Fischer and his discordant encounters in the music business live readings, performances and rare film clips. Fischer wandered the mean streets of L.A. singing his totally unique brand of songs for 10¢ to passersby. He was discovered by Frank Zappa, with whom he cut his first record album, including the enduring dada rock classic "Merry Go Round." A precursor to punk, Fischer became an underground club and concert favorite. Over the course of 40 years, he appeared on national television (Rowan & Martin's Laugh-in) and the Top 50 music charts in England, was the subject of his own comic book, was the first artist to be recorded on Rhino Records, and sang a duet with Rosemary Clooney. Hear testimonies in DERAILROADED: INSIDE THE MIND OF LARRY "WILD MAN" FISCHER, Josh Rubin & Jeremy Lubin's acclaimed 2006 documentary, with Frank & Gail Zappa, Weird Al Yankovic, Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh, Solomon Burke, Dr. Demento, and Billy Mumy (Barnes & Barnes). "The troubled life & distorted times of LA's 'Godfather of Outsider Music'...equal parts hilarity & heartbreak" -MOJO. Disturbing the Peace Ai documents the trial of the journalist and civil rights advocate Tan Zuoren, who investigated government corruption when a school building collapsed during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, killing 512 students. Tan was charged with “inciting subversion of state power” and sentenced to five years in prison. (2009, Dir. Ai, 78 min.) DISSOLUTION (HITPARKUT) A Film by Nina Menkes with David Fire Followed by a Q&A with Nina Menkes, moderated by SCA Professor David James. Dissolution (HITPARKUT) combines an almost surreal fairy-tale energy with brutal black and white realism to explore the condition of violence which permeates contemporary Israeli society. Shot in Yafo (the predominantly Arab area of Tel Aviv), the movie follows the moral collapse and first glimmer of redemption, of a young, morose Israeli Jew, played by David (Didi) Fire. B&W. Running time: 88 minutes. DOC PROGRAM #1 A year ago the Academy Film Archive launched an ambitious effort called "Project Film-to-Film," aimed at preserving as many films on film as possible over a two-year period. The initiative’s main goal is to take advantage of the current availability of film stock to create new prints of a diverse range of motion pictures, encompassing the whole history of the art form. The wide variety of titles range from "Navajo," the only film to receive Oscar nominations for both Documentary Feature and Cinematography, to "Naked Yoga," a short once presumed lost, and "Carnival of Souls," a cult favorite that has been rescued from late-night television and restored to the big screen. This inaugural "Film-to-Film" Festival highlights a sampling of these treasures – some already well known, others ready to be rediscovered. The afternoon's first program illustrates the diverse topics of the documentaries covered by the initiative, with a short about the spiritual aspects of Hatha yoga, and the Maysles brothers' portrait of movie distributor Joseph E. Levine. NAKED YOGA, Paul Cordsen (1974, 35mm, color, 25 min.) Academy Award nominee: Documentary Short Subject SHOWMAN, Albert Maysles and David Maysles (1963, 35mm, black-and-white, 52 min.) DOC PROGRAM #2 A year ago the Academy Film Archive launched an ambitious effort called "Project Film-to-Film," aimed at preserving as many films on film as possible over a two-year period. The initiative’s main goal is to take advantage of the current availability of film stock to create new prints of a diverse range of motion pictures, encompassing the whole history of the art form. The wide variety of titles range from "Navajo," the only film to receive Oscar nominations for both Documentary Feature and Cinematography, to "Naked Yoga," a short once presumed lost, and "Carnival of Souls," a cult favorite that has been rescued from late-night television and restored to the big screen. This inaugural "Film-to-Film" Festival highlights a sampling of these treasures – some already well known, others ready to be rediscovered. The afternoon's second documentary program features two titles that use a semi-documentary approach to convey stories of World War II rumor-mongering and the cultural conflict faced by a young Navajo boy. MR. BLABBERMOUTH!, Basil Wrangell (1942, 35mm, black-and-white, 19 min.) Academy Award nominee: Documentary Short Subject NAVAJO, Norman Foster (1952, 35mm, black-and-white, 70 min.) Academy Award nominee: Documentary Feature; Black-and-White Cinematography DOGTOOTH Combining the gripping, unpredictable tension of a prime Polanski thriller, the perfectly-executed production design of a Wes Anderson contraption and the freaky-deaky blackly comic absurdity of a David Lynch nightmare, Dogtooth is easily one of the most unique filmic creations of the last few years. On par with Antichrist and Enter The Void for sheer audacity, this intoxicating mixture of physical violence and verbal comedy is the story of three teens perpetually confined to their parents’ isolated estate, and kept under strict rule and regimen — an inscrutable scenario suggesting a warped experiment in social conditioning. Fully utilizing every last inch of onscreen space, Lanthimos paints the blackest of portraits with austere, antiseptic visuals, and elicits a total warped commitment from his entire cast — thus indelibly immersing you into a claustrophobic emotional netherworld never before seen. Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009, 35mm, 96 min. EDGE EFFECTS: COLOR REVERSAL FILMS BY TIMOLEON WILKINS The sublime 16mm films of Los Angeles experimentalist Timoleon Wilkins trace their roots to the romantic and diaristic traditions of the American avant-garde. Making a virtue of working on the edge of celluloid history, he is among a handful of cinematographers still using reversal film. His sumptuous Kodachrome and Ektachrome images resonate with an ecstatic love of color and contrast, relentlessly uncovering beauty amid the untenable realities of modern life across the Americas. Wilkins’ magnum opus Drifter (1996–2010)—winner of the Ann Arbor Film Festival’s prestigious Stan Brakhage Film at Wit’s End Award—is “the ballad of a lone wanderer, an atmospheric anthology of places and faces.” The program also includes Los Caudales (2005), The Crossing (2007) and a series of in-camera originals. In person: Timoleon Wilkins Enemy Alien Filmmaker Konrad Aderer finds echoes of his own family’s World War II internment in post-9/11 detentions of Muslim immigrants and joins the fight to free Farouk, a Palestinian activist who organizes resistance among his fellow detainees. ENTER THE I-HOP Filmmaker/musician Xaime Casillas (in person) will screen his exciting 12 minute short film ENTER THE I-HOP showing at 6pm and 8pm. This '70s Super 8mm kung fu documentary about the West LA "Kung Fu Studio" visits locations near the Unurban with spectacular fun footage of West Side youths learning kung-fu moves in the back alleys. Plus rare martial arts film clips to fill out the evening. "Enter the I-Hop" captures the influence Bruce Lee had on neighborhood teenagers. It colorfully documents the little known lineage and influence "Ark Yuey Wong" (the Grandfather of Kung Fu) had on the West Side. The Kung Fu Studio was located right next door to Arlene's Donuts at the corner of Bundy and Santa Monica Boulevard, now the new I-Hop restaurant. It shared space with the Odyssey Theatre back in the day. Xaime Casillas is creator of the "Arizona gonna get Knocked Out" project in 2010, (a nationally recognized recording featured on NPR by music aficionado Betto Arcos). Casillas presents an evening of kicks, punches and snaps of circa 70's Schwinn bicycles. If you like Martial Arts, Kung Fu, and Westside History, come join us for a fun evening of kiai yells and other overdone voice overs. EXPERIMENTAL FILM PROGRAM A year ago the Academy Film Archive launched an ambitious effort called "Project Film-to-Film," aimed at preserving as many films on film as possible over a two-year period. The initiative’s main goal is to take advantage of the current availability of film stock to create new prints of a diverse range of motion pictures, encompassing the whole history of the art form. The wide variety of titles range from "Navajo," the only film to receive Oscar nominations for both Documentary Feature and Cinematography, to "Naked Yoga," a short once presumed lost, and "Carnival of Souls," a cult favorite that has been rescued from late-night television and restored to the big screen. This inaugural "Film-to-Film" Festival highlights a sampling of these treasures – some already well known, others ready to be rediscovered. The boundaries of the film medium are stretched, ignored and laughed at in these experimental shorts that manipulate sight, sound, narrative and the relationship between filmmaker and spectator. EYE MYTH, (Stan Brakhage, 1967, 35mm, color, silent 24fps, 9 seconds) NIGHT MULCH & VERY, (Stan Brakhage, 2001, 35mm, color, silent 24fps, 6 min.) EXPERIMENTS IN MOTION GRAPHICS, (John Whitney, 1968, 16mm, color, sound, 11min.) MADAME MAO'S LOST LOVE LETTERS, (Tom Leeser & Diana Wilson,1983, 35mm, color, sound, 3 min.) BABOBILICONS, (Daina Krumins, 1982, 35mm, color, sound, 16 min.) PENCIL BOOKLINGS, (Kathy Rose, 1978, 35mm, color, sound, 14 min.) FURIES, (Sara Petty, 1977, 35mm, color, sound, 3 min.) SONOMA, (Sky-David, formerly known as Dennis Pies, 1977, 35mm, color, sound, 7 min.) BACKGROUND, (Carmen D'Avino, 1973, 35mm, color, sound, 20 min.) Academy Award nominee: Documentary Short Subject FALL INTO NOISE: LA AIR / WILL O’LOUGHLEN LA AIR is a new artist-in-residence program that invites Los Angeles filmmakers to utilize EPFC resources in creating a new work over a four-week period. Will O’Loughlen was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota in 1967. He completed his undergraduate degree in Communications at the University of Memphis in 1997. O’Loughlen resides in Los Angeles, California and currently works as a bookkeeper and for UCLA's Department of World Arts & Cultures. He has been involved as a film festival director and programmer for a variety of festivals in the last decade. O’Loughlen is also a filmmaking educator and has taught at the Echo Park Film Center for the past five years. He has been an independent filmmaker since 1997. His LA AIR project Fall Into Noise explores his continuing fascination with landscape and architecture, for double projection Super 8 with live noise performed by the artist. He will also show two shorts from his recent travels: Istan-bully and I Don't Know, Kenya? FAUST Svankmajer used every weapon in his animated arsenal — including actual fire and brimstone — to bring his own unflinching fever dream of Faust to life. A broiling carnival of demon puppets and unsettling lyricism, the film follows an Everyman through Prague as he choreographs his own ruin. Though every frame is unmistakably his, Svankmajer’s Faust is dizzy with allusions — nightmarish life-size puppets of Lucifer and Helen of Troy kick up the ashes of Marlowe, Goethe, and Kafka as the timeless story furtively dismantles and reassembles itself. Svankmajer finds increasingly novel ways to illustrate the Everyman’s tenuous (and debatable) relationship with his own free will — an egg cracked open turns the whole world dark, pointed cuts reveal human hands manipulating puppet strings. As in the Faust legend itself, it’s the creator’s cryptic intentions that transform an old saw about a deal with the devil into a mirror of unspeakable existential horror. Dir. Jan Svankmajer, 1994, 35mm, 97 min. FILMS BY ABRAHAM RAVETT Abraham Ravett holds a B.F.A and M.F.A in filmmaking and photography and has been an independent filmmaker for the past thirty years. In tandem with a current exhibition of Polaroid SX-70 photographs at Orange Coast College, Costa Mesa, CA, filmmaker and Hampshire College Professor Abraham Ravett will present a program of recent and previously made films. The screening includes three films that reflect the complexities of filial relationships; the lingering impact of the Holocaust, and with Horse/Kappa/House, the Japanese rural landscape is presented as a space of loss, memory and collective history. Program: The March (1999), Horse/Kappa/House (1995), and Tziporah (2007) on 16mm; Notes for a Polish Jew (2012) on DVD. Presented and curated by Ravett's former student Eve LaFountain. The Films of Alia Syed: A Screening and Conversation In conjunction with the exhibition Eating Grass, LACMA celebrates artist Alia Syed’s West Coast debut with a special screening of select works in their original 16mm format. Priya (2008-2011) is an extended aerial shot of a twirling Kathak dancer. The footage was then buried in various organic materials and left to deteriorate, merging the skin of the film with the body of the dancer. A Story Told (2006-2008), a woman’s tale of a doomed love affair originally made as an installation piece, combines 16mm film, DVD projection, and monitors in a multichannel piece that will be restaged in a cinema setting. In Fatima’s Letter (1994), a woman recounts in a letter to a friend memories of an event she previously witnessed in Pakistan that are evoked by the faces she sees while riding the London Underground. Also featured are two of Syed’s earlier black and white works: Watershed (1994), a film about the pain of speaking, and Swan (1989), an abstract piece that captures the silent power of this graceful animal preparing to take flight. Between screenings, the artist will discuss her work with Film Independent at LACMA curator Elvis Mitchell. THE GIANTS (LES GÉANTS) 2011, 85 min, Belgium, Dir: Bouli Lanners Each summer, preteen brothers Zak and Seth find themselves alone and without resources in their parents' summer home, routinely abandoned by their increasingly absent mother. When they meet Danny, a street-smart local teenager, they tag along with him and slowly learn to embrace the startling independence that's been foisted upon them. Official selection of the Cannes 2011 Directors Fortnight. "Disarming lead performances and beautiful natural settings in an ambling evocation of adolescent discovery." - The Hollywood Reporter. In French with English subtitles. Belgian beer reception to follow the screening. THE GREAT SILENCE Screened from the world’s only surviving 35mm print of the film — so catch it now, as you might never have the chance to see it theatrically again! An absolute must-see for western fans, exploitation buffs, and arthouse audiences alike, The Great Silence is a pinnacle in the spaghetti western canon, and the crown jewel in the filmography of director Sergio Corbucci (Django). In the snowswept wilds of Utah — a revolutionary locale for an Italian western — bounty hunter Klaus Kinski has the run of an economically depressed town that’s a haven for collecting prices on victims’ heads, until he meets his match in a mysterious mute outlaw (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who’s roped by a young women into avenging her husband’s murder. In a magnificent non-speaking role, Trintignant cleanly conveys the dense moral ambiguity lurking within a gun-slinging mute who strikes only in self-defense — and is matched every step of the way by the Aryan Kinski, whose fascist behavior gives the film a much more disturbing political subtext than an average Euro western. Never theatrically released in the U.S., Corbucci’s down-tempo, gritty masterpiece remains a milestone in the Italian genre experience, and a potent, unforgettable whallop light years apart from desert-bound ilk like the Sergio Leone classics. Dir. Sergio Corbucci, 1968, 35mm, 105 min. GRIN WITHOUT A CAT (LE FOND DE L’AIR EST ROUGE) 1977, Icarus Films, 180 min, France, Dir: Chris Marker As brilliant as it is indescribable, GRIN WITHOUT A CAT looks at the rise and fall of the worldwide revolutionary movement, from France in May 1968, to the anti-Vietnam riots in the United States, to the terrible Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring. The French title of the film is untranslatable in English; roughly, it means "Revolution Is in the Air," a metaphor at once wistful and ever-hopeful. Given the current world situation, GRIN WITHOUT A CAT is, now more than ever, an epic event not to be missed. In one of the film’s many high points, Marker dissects the famous Odessa Steps sequence in BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN - a revolutionary landmark that never actually occurred. In French, Spanish, and German with English subtitles. HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD While Fulci’s zombiefests were busy traumatizing audiences around the world, Bruno Mattei’s insane Hell of the Living Dead rode along in their wake, to become one of the most ridiculously entertaining Italian gut-munchers of the early ‘80s. A chemical lab in New Guinea is sent into an uproar when two of its workers accidentally unleash a plague, thanks to interference of a pesky rat. Rampant flesh-eating madness ensues as this company, designed to provide for its third world environment, instead unleashes zombies on the jungle-dwelling populace. In a desperate, zero-budget attempt to patchwork together a hit that would ape Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (right down to cribbing its Goblin score, along with a handful of the band’s other cues from fellow Italo-schlockslinger Luigi Cozzi’s Contamination), Mattei throws just about everything against the wall here to see what might stick: a little mondo footage, some nudity, some city mayhem, jungle mayhem, and in the oddest bit during the climax, one character turned into a human puppet, years before Peter Jackson did the same bit with Brain Dead. This film is madness — and it is fun. Dirs. Bruno Mattei & Claudio Fragasso, 1980, 35mm, 101 min. IT'S SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAY Many folks think of Don Hertzfeldt as the source of some of the most quotable, hilarious, original animation to ever clobber the festival circuit (and get nominated for an Oscar) — but his evolution over the past decade has elevated his unmistakable sensibility to levels that are explosively artful, affecting, and often still hilarious. At the young age of 35, Hertzfeldt has amassed a body of work unparalleled in modern animation. His meticulously crafted shorts continue to amaze and inspire audiences globally, as his work blends traditional animation, experimental optical effects, trick photography, and new digital hybrids into works all printed out one frame at a time, captured entirely on an antique 35mm animation stand (one of the last remaining cameras of its kind left in America.) Join Cinefamily in a special engagement of It’s Such A Beautiful Day, a feature-length combination of his recent “Bill” trilogy of short films that’s been almost a decade in the making, and that addresses just as well as any live-action masterpiece the agony, ecstasy, and ultimate absurdity of being human. Dir. Don Hertzfeldt, 2012, HD presentation, 70 min. JOHN AND FAITH HUBLEY An Academy Salute to John and Faith Hubley Hosted by John Canemaker The husband-and-wife team of John and Faith Hubley brought a humanistic perspective and a distinctly modern style to postwar American animation. The films they made together, and independently, influenced a generation of animators worldwide and earned many honors, including three Academy Awards. At the time of their marriage in 1955, John Hubley had been in the industry for 20 years, first at Disney, then Columbia/Screen Gems, and later as creative director and production chief at UPA. Faith Elliott had worked in Hollywood since the early 1940s as a music and film editor and script supervisor at Columbia and Republic Pictures. After their careers in Hollywood were derailed by the blacklist, they relocated to New York and embarked on a personal and professional partnership that revolutionized independent animation. The Hubleys resolutely maintained their artistic freedom, taking on commercial projects in order to fund their personal films. They tackled controversial themes such as environmental pollution, race relations, war and overpopulation, as well as celebrating the joy of children at play and young people in love. Following John’s death in 1977, Faith continued making films until her death in 2001. Academy Award-winning animator and renowned animation historian John Canemaker hosts an in-depth look at these two iconoclastic artists. The program showcases four of John Hubley's UPA shorts and a selection of TV commercials; Faith's favorite of her solo shorts; and six shorts produced by John and Faith Hubley together, including an exciting surprise: newly discovered footage of a never-completed animated version of Façade, by Edith Sitwell and William Walton. THE KISS “Garbo’s acting, across near a century of time, can still put a tingle in your gut. Garbo makes you suspend disbelief.” — Chris Edwards, Silent Volume Both MGM’s and Greta Garbo’s final silent film, The Kiss finds the Swedish Sphinx in the middle of a heady love quadrangle/courtroom drama approaching a Fassbinderian level of geometric complexity. After an innocent encounter between a corpulent, jealous husband, his impossibly beautiful wife (Garbo) and a teenage admirer turns wrong, crime-ridden tragedy ensues — but Garbo takes the rap, and is represented by the handsome lawyer who is also secretly her real true love on the side. Whew — did you get all that? This whirlwind melodrama not only features important synchronized sound effects (replicated live at the Cinefamily!), but also a brilliant wardrobe for Garbo designed by Adrian, (the costumier of classics like The Wizard Of Oz and Camille), who very quickly rose through the ranks at MGM, and whose iconic work for Garbo is so integral to the actress’s persona that without it, it’s possible she might’ve been just another Scandinavian starlet. The program opens with the 1916 Charlie Chaplin short One A.M., featuring an inebriated Charlie going head-to-head with a vengeful Murphy bed — plus, historian Jeffrey Vance will introduce The Kiss following the short! The Kiss Dir. Jacques Feyder, 1929, 35mm, 65 min. (Archival 35mm print courtesy of Library of Congress) One A.M. Dir. Charles Chaplin, 1916, 35mm, 32 min. (Archival 35mm print courtesy of Academy Film Archive and Film Preservation Associates) LANCE BANGS/IMMORTAL VOLUME: MUSIC WORK 1990-2012 For the past two decades and change, Cinefamily friend Lance Bangs has been ceaselessly killin’ it in the realm of music videos, concert films and documentary — and it’s about time you stand up and give him an armload of hurrahs. This man has worked with and filmed pretty much every single every major cool band you’ve ever listened to, and tonight, Lance will be with us to take a guided tour through his career. You’ll see short films, music videos, concert footage, tour projections and collaborations featuring Arcade Fire, Archers of Loaf, Belle & Sebastian, Guided By Voices, Jay Reatard, LCD Soundsystem, Menomena, Neutral Milk Hotel, No Age/Black Flag, Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, Pavement, R.E.M., The Shins, Sleater-Kinney, Elliott Smith, Sonic Youth, Syd Tha Kid, the White Stripes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and others. The evening’s show will also include an excerpt from Lance’s forthcoming feature-length doc about legendary Louisville, KY band Slint, as well as moments from the unreleased feature length concert film Arthurfest — and a live music performance by special mystery guests! THE LAST BOLSHEVIK 1993, Icarus Films, 116 min, France, Dir: Chris Marker If there’s anything to equal SANS SOLEIL, it may be THE LAST BOLSHEVIK, Chris Marker’s astonishing look at the history of 20th-century Russia through the life and work of his dear friend, filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin. Told in the form of six letters to the late Medvedkin, THE LAST BOLSHEVIK is a film of heartbreaking devotion (to a friend, to an ideology, to film itself), of acidic wit and endless curiosity - oh, hell, we’ve run out of superlatives on this one. It’s simply one of the best films from the past decade - don’t miss it! In French and Russian with English subtitles. LE PLAISIR 1952, Janus Films, 97 min, Dir: Max Ophuls Max Ophuls brings his opulent, dazzling style to this triptych of tales by Guy de Maupassant about the ironies, compromises and pleasures of the human condition. Set in an array of richly textured, late 19th-century locales, spanning the bucolic French countryside to the artists’ studios and urban bordellos of Paris. With an all-star French cast including Jean Gabin, Simone Simon and Danielle Darrieux. Stanley Kubrick once named it as his favorite film. In French with English subtitles. LITTLE OTIK “Before I was born did you sometimes take me out of your tummy and put me back in again?” Little Otik is Svankmajer at his most viscous — a laboratory’s worth of fluids oozes, bleeds, and trickles through each sequence, capturing with a colorful, saturated beauty the inescapable muckiness of existing in bodies that are driven, and often ruined, by hunger. This Grimm-like fairy tale is narrated by a droll, curious little deviant who witnesses the horrific results of a childless couple’s decision to begin raising a varnished log that gains sentience in response to their parenting. Incidentally, the tree-baby in question — Little Otik — has an insatiable taste for human flesh, and it’s not long before he starts eating the building’s tenants, to the increasing chagrin of his adoring parents. Part fable and part satire, the film skewers society’s passive tendencies toward physical repression with results that are in turn hilarious, gruesome, and visually remarkable. The scope of Svankmajer’s stop-motion and puppetry are unprecedented here, but it’s the extended Chagall-inspired cut-out animation storybook segment that binds Little Otik‘s gooey experiments into something strangely sublime. Dir. Jan Svankmajer, 2000, 35mm, 132 min. LONELY ARE THE BRAVE 1962, Universal, 107 min, USA, Dir: David Miller David Miller helmed screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s mournful masterpiece, a hymn to rugged individualism and freedom slowly being strangled to death by voracious urban development. Kirk Douglas, a Korean War vet, is a footloose cowboy who lives most of his life under the stars, going from job to job, and not averse to cutting his way through barbed-wire fences when they get in his way. His uncompromising spirit is severely challenged when he breaks out of jail after a minor offense, and the entire county’s police force tries to recapture him before he can leave the territory. Walter Matthau is the pursuing sheriff, a thoughtful man with a growing, begrudging admiration for his fugitive, and Gena Rowlands is Douglas’ faithful friend, a woman who fears the world will sooner or later crush him. Discussion before the film with actor Kirk Douglas. LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF 2003, 169 min, Dir: Thom Andersen A must-see for Los Angeles history buffs and cinema enthusiasts. Marvel at the hundreds of archival and film clips revealing an almost secret history of the City of Angels. A Cinematheque favorite - see it now on the big screen! LUNACY “Ladies and gentlemen, what you are about to see is a horror film — with all the degeneracy peculiar to that genre. It is not a work of art. Today, art is all but dead anyway.” — Jan Svankmajer’s on-screen introduction to Lunacy Overflowing with remarkable images that remain impossible to un-see, Lunacy is a love poem to that one ineffable fact about human existence: that we’re all nothing but walking bags of meat. Punctuated by by an extraordinary series of stop-motion vignettes starring disembodied tongues, sinew and flesh, the film — inspired by both Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis De Sade (“to whom the film owes its blasphemy and subversiveness”) — is a refreshingly bizarre investigation of freedom, control and punishment. “I am neither fool nor hypocrite,” declares the Marquis, as he rescues a mentally disturbed young man and whisks him off to his estate for bizarre sexual rituals and mindfucks, and then on to an experimental lunatic asylum for his final cure. Svankmajer’s most explicit exploration of madness, and his most erotically-charged work, Lunacy is like Quills on acid — with a side of raw meat! Dir. Jan Svankmajer, 2005, 35mm, 118 min. LUST FOR LIFE 1956, Warner Bros., 122 min, USA, Dir: Vincente Minnelli Director Vincente Minnelli, screenwriter Norman Corwin and star Kirk Douglas team up for one of the greatest biopics ever made in this story of the life and work of Vincent Van Gogh. Using a color scheme based on Van Gogh's own work, the filmmakers create a delirious, deeply subjective portrait of an artist. MAGOO AT THE OSCARS 'Magoo at the Alex' presents two once in a lifetime programs honoring UPA Pictures, the little studio that changed the course of animation around the world. Why is UPA so important? Many people feel that the precise moment when animation 'grew up' began with the surprise 1951 Animated Short Oscar going to UPS' Gerald McBoing Boing after 20 years of the coveted golden statuette going only to Disney, Warner Bros., and MGM, the animation juggernauts of the 30s and 40s. From then on, independent animated shorts around the world were taken seriously as a true art form for adults as well as children. 'Magoo at the Oscars' is the evening event, with screenings of all fifteen UPA Oscar-nominated shorts plus five Mister Magoo favorites. All will be shown in gorgeously restored 35mm prints from Sony Pictures, including UPA's three Oscar winners: Gerald McBoing Boing, When Magoo Flew, and Magoo's Puddle Jumper, the last two in Cinemascope. THE MAKIOKA SISTERS The Makioka Sisters chronicles the life and affairs of four sisters in late '30s Japan. An older, conservative sister tries to continue family traditions and pretensions to status, while the younger sisters discover the new freedoms becoming available to them. "This Kon Ichikawa film has a triumphant simplicity about it. You don't just watch the film--you coast on its rhythms and glide past the precipitous spots" (Pauline Kael, The New Yorker). The cast includes Juzo Itami, who would later emerge as a prominent director with The Funeral, Tampopo and A Taxing Woman. In Japanese with English subtitles. 1983, Japan, 35mm, 140 minutes. 35mm print made in 2011! directed by Kon Ichikawa; starring Keiko Kishi, Yoshiko Sakuma, Sayuri Yoshinaga, Yûko Kotegawa; in Japanese with English subtitles. THE MAN WHO STOLE THE SUN A misfit high-school science teacher decides to build his own atomic bomb. He steals isotopes from a nuclear reactor and manages to create two warheads, but at the same time is present at a botched school-bus hijacking and is publicly coronated as a hero. Nevertheless, he uses the bombs to extort the police, first by demanding that baseball games be shown without commercial interruptions and then by having the Rolling Stones play in Japan despite their drug bust. Soon it's a race to see what wins first: the determined cop who's after him, the bomb he's carrying, or a burgeoning case of radiation poisoning. 1979. MARK CANTOR's JAZZ FILMS Screening and discussing sonic cinema, seminal historian CANTOR pulls from his stellar collection of over 4,000 separate titles to feature rarities in jazz, blues, Swing, Western Swing, pop, rhythm and blues, country-western, vernacular dance & vaudeville with Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Stan Getz, Sarah Vaughan, Benny Goodman, Ernie Andrews, Art Blakey, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Buddy Collette, Erroll Garner, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Louis Armstrong, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Dinah Washington and many more. "Mark Cantor has one of the very best collections of jazz films in the world. He was an invaluable asset to our Jazz series whose generous advice helped us unearth some extraordinary footage. Mark is an essential resource to anyone making a film about jazz." - Ken Burns. Film archivist and historian Mark Cantor has been active as a researcher and preservationist in the area of music on film for the past thirty years. During that time he has assembled one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of popular music on film existing in the United States.....more than four thousand titles in total. Along with the public exhibitions of jazz and blues films, Mr. Cantor has served as a consultant in the production of a large number of documentaries and feature film presentations. As a well-known authority on the subject of music on film, Mr. Cantor is contacted on a regular basis by filmmakers, television producers, newspersons and writers for information relating to jazz music and its documentation on film. He regularly publishes articles on jazz film in the Journal of the International Association of Jazz Record Collectors. THE MARK OF ZORRO A 10th Anniversary Celebration of the Academy's Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study This evening will feature behind-the-scenes building tours of the Academy’s Pickford Center, and a film program featuring a rare Mary Pickford short and the Los Angeles premiere of the Academy Film Archive’s new print of “The Mark of Zorro” (1920), starring Douglas Fairbanks. During the ten years since the Academy acquired the former Don Lee Mutual Television Studios (and Cadillac showroom) on the corner of Vine and Fountain, the building has been extensively renovated. The former TV soundstages have been converted into the popular Linwood Dunn Theater and numerous amazing spaces that the public has rarely been allowed to see – until now. Between 6 and 7:30 p.m., the Academy’s world-renowned preservation, research and technical staff will conduct tours that showcase the collections and preservation and research work of the Academy Film Archive, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the Margaret Herrick Library and the Academy’s Science and Technology Council. Included in these one-of-a-kind tours will be the climate-controlled storage vaults for rare film materials, library holdings and motion picture artifacts; film preservation and restoration facilities; exhibition prep and object conservation areas; and studio and laboratory facilities for advancing state-of-the-art motion picture technology. Following the tours, at 8 p.m., the audience will be treated to a program of Academy Film Archive restoration projects starring two of the Academy’s founders: the Center’s namesake, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, for whom the Academy’s library building in Beverly Hills was named. Come and celebrate our anniversary with us! The New People (pilot) (ABC, 9/22/69) Directed by George McCowan In this precursor to "Lost," a group of American exchange students is marooned on a Pacific island. Pocked with abandoned buildings for a canceled atomic test, the unsettling locale becomes home for the young survivors, who are forced to confront their prejudices as they form a new society. Screenwriter: Rod Serling. Cast: Tiffany Bolling, Nancy DeCarl, Richard Kiley. 16mm, color, 51 min. NEW WORKS SALON Several local and visiting artists will present new in-progress or recently completed works. Bay Area-based Zach Iannazzi will be here with two recent 16mm films; Wildness Regained! from 2008 presents factless documents of a man-altered landscape, and his two-projector When I Get Back From Massachusetts from 2011 in which New England bliss looms a little strange. Local artist Pablo Valencia will project a new collection of Super 8 miniatures: portraits, landscapes, abstractions. And Pat O’Neill presents his new digital video Painter and Ball 4-14, which is, in part, a record of summer overtaking spring outside my studio window, while a chunky little manikin levitates in joyous captivity. Ross Lipman will present the newest part of his The Perfect Heart of Flux, a cycle of works on the nature of organic change: Casa Loma (Dignity and Impudence). Casa Loma was the unfinished dream mansion of Canadian industrial magnate Henry Pellatt. A self-made millionaire, Pellatt was derided by fellow aristocrats for nouveau-riche pretentions: the house and its décor considered by many an ornate fake. Its original contents were sold at Pellatt’s bankruptcy auction in 1924. Today the building is a museum; its current curators filling its halls with furniture and trappings of the general era. In one corridor, carefully lit, is a folk-art portrait of two dogs accompanied by the sentimental epithet, “Dignity and impudence.” Night Gallery: Class of '99 (NBC, 9/22/71) Directed by Jeannot Szwarc In a future society, a domineering professor (Price) serves as proctor over a diverse group of college students for a final exam where bigotry is encouraged and evaluated—with an unexpected twist. Screenwriter: Rod Serling. Cast: Vincent Price, Brandon de Wilde, Randolph Mantooth. Beta SP, color, 25 min. NIGHT WARNING Part of the pleasure in arranging a month’s worth of Video Nasties in order of ascending “Nastiness” is that, at the beginning, a few of our favorites are bound to cause the sublime question: “Why on earth did the U.K. government ever think that this film was dangerous enough to be banned?” We’ll never know the answer, but thankfully it gives us an excuse to bring you Night Warning, a prime vehicle for the late, great Susan Tyrrell. Elfin, tawdry, foul-mouthed, and consummately theatrical, Tyrrell was once referred to by Pauline Kael as “an entire school of acting” — and once referred to by Rex Reed as having “a body like an unmade bed.” Here, Tyrrell creates a raging character that is impossible to ignore, and yet is strangely lovable in her totally misguided intentions. When lonely Cheryl sees that her only source of happiness, her nephew Billy (Jimmy McNichol), is about to grow up and leave for college, it sets about a series of increasingly deranged acts resulting in murder — and worse! Her mania is matched by Bo Svenson as a homophobic detective willing to ignore or manipulate evidence to prove his assertion that Billy is a gay psychopath. Essential headscratching wackiness. Dir. William Asher, 1982, 35mm, 96 min. 1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS Welcome to the future: in a catastrophic uprising, where the Bronx is declared a high-risk district and the cops have officially washed their hands of the whole enchilada, the dregs of society inhabiting a colorful post-Escape From New York/post-The Warriors urban wasteland have violently rebelled. Armed with spikes, blades and skull-adorned choppers, “Trash” and his Riders engage in a nonstop war against cannibals and other sentient crud — and the results are killer! Marauding manimals, sci-fi thug weaponry, cutthroat gangs (bikers! hockey players! pimps! tap dancers!), flamethrower-wielding police on horseback, and all-time performances by Fred “The Hammer” Williamson and teenaged Marco di Gregorio (Thunder Warrior aka Italian Rambo) make this vicious “re-imagining” of the John Carpenter and Walter Hill classics a high point in the Enzo G. Castellari (The Inglorious Bastards, Keoma) canon. Delivering everything you want from an early ‘80s post-nuke adventure, this unforgettable descent into the futuristic inferno screens from an insanely rare original 35mm print! Dir. Enzo Castellari, 1982, 35mm, 86 min. ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF ANDREI ARSENEVICH 1999, Icarus Films, 55 min, France, Dir: Chris Marker "The best single piece of [Andrei] Tarkovsky criticism I know of, clarifying the overall coherence of his oeuvre while leaving all the principal mysteries in his films intact. It becomes clear early on that Marker was an intimate friend of Tarkovsky and his family, and was shooting home-video footage of some of Tarkovsky’s final days in the mid-1980s, when he was dying of cancer, for Tarkovsky and his family’s use as well as his own. But this is handled throughout with exquisite tact and restraint and is never allowed to intrude on the poetic analysis of the features. In fact, the video interweaves biography and autobiography with poetic and political insight in a manner that seldom works as well as it does here, perhaps because personal affection and poetic analysis are rarely as compatible as Marker makes them." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader One Recluse In June 2008, Yang Jia carried a knife, a hammer, a gas mask, pepper spray, gloves and Molotov cocktails to the Zhabei Public Security Branch Bureau and killed six police officers, injuring another police officer and a guard. He was arrested on the scene, and was subsequently charged with intentional homicide. In the following six months, while Yang Jia was detained and trials were held, his mother mysteriously disappeared. One Recluse is a documentary that traces the reasons and motivations behind the tragedy and investigates a trial process filled with shady cover-ups and questionable decisions. The film provides a glimpse into the realities of a government-controlled judicial system and its impact on the citizens’ lives. (Dir. Ai Weiwei. Run Time 120 min.) ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS Directed by Howard Hawks Jean Arthur and her character, Bonnie Lee, hold their own superbly in this thrilling story of masculine honor. As recently-arrived showgirl, Annie falls for Geoff Carter (Grant), the cynical director of an air courier operation in the Andes. Arthur’s Bonnie reveals an emotional maturation that rivals the film’s aeronautic exploits and its face-offs between the men whose emotional baggage leads to danger and even tragedy. Columbia Pictures Corp. Producer: Howard Hawks. Screenwriter: James Furthman. Based on a story by Howard Hawks. Cinematographer: Joseph Walker, Elmer Dyer. Editor: Viola Lawrence. Cast: Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Richard Barthelmess, Rita Hayworth, Thomas Mitchell. 35mm, b/w, 121 min. Playhouse 90: Requiem for a Heavyweight (CBS, 10/11/56) Directed by Ralph Nelson Serling’s virtuosity depicting men under pressure reached its zenith with this live teleplay, later adapted as a feature film. The drama seethes with pathos in its portrait of the indignity that befalls a small-time boxer, used up and discarded by his exploitative handlers. The intense scenario offeredwrenching parts to its leading cast, and coaxed a heartbreaking turn from Jack Palance as a man cruelly left with seemingly no future. Producer: David J. Eagle, Martin Manulis, Alvin Rakoff. Screenwriter: Rod Serling. Cinematographer: Albert Kurland. Cast: Jack Palance, Keenan Wynn, Kim Hunter, Ed Wynn, Max Baer. 35mm, b/w, 85 min. THE POETICS OF PLACE: FILMS BY ROSE LOWDER Rose Lowder is one of Europe’s most influential and celebrated cinematic treasures—a filmmaker and scholar who first trained as a painter and sculptor, then later studied with filmmaker Jean Rouch. Since 1977 Lowder has made more than 50 films that create complex single-frame matrices, bordering eerily on the edge of animation. Whether filming the view from her Avignon window, the French countryside, or centuries-old structures, Lowder composes highly charged, multiple-perspective mosaics that explore nature’s visual wonders and the underlying ecology of specific places. She investigates the world around her with a scientist’s precision, and exalts it with a singular vibrancy of form and color. The program includes the early masterwork Rue des Teinturiers (1977), the series of stunning one-minute cinematic studies, Bouquets 11–20 (2005–10), and the recent tour-de-force Jardin du sel (Garden of salt, 2011). In person: Rose Lowder PORTRAIT OF THE POET AS EXPERIMENTAL FILMMAKER - Historian/Lit Critter Gerry Fialka screens films and discusses the interconnections between film and poetry. These artforms expand our notions of reality both inner and outer. How is the interior dialogue (consciousness) the essence of the human condition? How does it inform content vs. form issues? Explore Poe, the Symbolists, Hollis Frampton, Walt Whitman, William Farley, Jack Kerouac, Charles Olson, Henry Ferrini, Robert Creeley, and Beat films up to contemporary New Media makers. Drawing on witty and insightful analysis of poet/experimental filmmakers Jean Cocteau, James Broughton, Maya Deren, Marie Menken, Abigail Child, Bob Branaman, Jack Smith, Yoko Ono and Stan Brakhage, Fialka reviews first-person lyrical visions. This multi-media event includes rare film clips of Diane DiPrima, Amiri Baraka, Bukowski, Beckett, Burroughs and Gary Snyder, as well as live readings accompanied by film projections that stir up new metaphors via self-reflexive synthesis. Come into deeper awareness of synesthesia and the non-physical via spoken word and moving image art. "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling." - Oscar Wilde. Radically change the paradigms of sense ratio shifting. Turn the eye into an ear ala McLuhan's percepts. Fialka's observations provoke the rascality retrieval of Man (Cine-poem) Ray and Curtis Harrington, who transformed Poe into cinema. "Poets understand texts better than most information technologists." - Jerome McGann. "You don't have to be a communist to be anti-capitalist. It is enough to be a poet." - Jonas Mekas, seminal experimental filmmaker. THE PROFOUND OTHERNESS OF EARLY CINEMA “Early cinema was once considered to consist of clumsy attempts to find the way to a kind of film narrative style that was ‘intrinsic’ to the medium, the style we now call classic cinema. In fact, the films of the early period are the results of other, equally valid ways of seeing. Classic cinema draws the eye and the mind of the spectator in and exerts a control over what is seen and felt, whereas early cinema was a phenomenon to be looked at, a show to be enjoyed and examined in detail… looking back at early cinema can freshen our vision.” – Eileen Bowser. This program looks at early cinema in all its “profound otherness.” The first half presents Nöel Burch’s Correction Please, Or, How We Got Into Pictures, a playful essay that explores early cinema and its evolution. The second half features five films by Edwin Porter, the pioneer whose work straddles the primitive and classic styles of film and, as Burch puts it, is “a locus of contradictions which informed the development of the cinema in its beginnings…one foot effectively ‘in the past’ and one ‘in the future’…Porter’s steps forward in fact end by accentuating some features of the primitive cinema even more strongly than before.” 1903-1979, 85 min, 16mm & DVD. PUNISHMENT PARK Peter Watkins' 1971 masterpiece of dystopian filmmaking has aged frighteningly well--its scathing indictment of authoritative government has proven horribly relevant in our post-9/11 world. Framed as a pseudo-documentary, the film explores the potential ramifications of a 1950 Security Act that enables political prisoners to be held without rights in military concentration camps. Herded together for a march through the burning Californian desert, a ragtag band of leftist dissidents realize that the deck has been stacked brutally against them. "This is satire of the most intimately powerful sort" Peter Watkins---USA---1971---88 mins. RECONVERSAO Portugal/USA, 65 mins, video With Reconversão (Reconversion), Thom Andersen opens another fascinating chapter of his ongoing investigation of architectural landscapes, their filmic representation, and their relation to history, by focusing on 17 buildings and projects by the often-controversial Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura—winner of the 2011 Pritzker Prize. Echoing Dziga Vertov’s concepts and Eadweard Muybridge’s techniques (shooting only one or two frames per second), Andersen masterfully brings forward what makes Souto de Moura an original: the incorporation of the passing of time into architectural designs, positing them within a history fraught with class struggle and societal changes, in a continuum with ruins—from which they may originate, and to which they will return—and with nature—which they frame, and by which they are framed. In person: Thom Andersen REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO COME (LE SOUVENIR D’UN AVENIR) 2001, First Run Features/Icarus Films, 42 min, France, Dir: Chris Marker, Yannick Bellon This "cine-essay" by Chris Marker is dense and demanding, a splendid reminder that his nimble, capacious mind has lost none of its agility, poetry or power. Ostensibly a portrait of French photographer Denise Bellon, focusing on the two decades between 1935 and 1955, the film leaps and backtracks, Marker-style, from subject to subject, from a family portrait of Bellon and her two daughters, Loleh and Yannick (the latter co-authored the film), to a wide-ranging history of surrealism, of the city of Paris, of French cinemas and the birth of the cinémathèque, of Europe, the National Front, the Second World War and Spanish Civil War, and postwar politics and culture. In French with English subtitles. (Notes by James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario.) Rick Bahto: Selections from Accretions $0 / over the course of several hours, projections of a selection of new 35mm slides from an expanding collection of thousands of images, using 1, 2, and 3 projectors. THE RULES OF THE GAME (LA REGLE DU JEU) 1939, Janus Films, 110 min, France, Dir: Jean Renoir Considered one of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir's seminal upstairs-downstairs portrait is at once a lyrically light comedy of manners and a damning critique of French upper-crust society. A weekend hunting party at the sprawling country home of Marquis Robert de la Cheyniest (Marcel Dalio) proves disastrous as the party's invitees - and the manor's waitstaff - harbor secrets from each other, and engage in increasingly messy trysts and tête-à-têtes, set against the background of a lovelorn aviator's welcome-home celebration. In French with English subtitles. THE SECOND CABIN: STEMPLE PASS World premiere USA, 2012, 121 mins., video. Composed of four static shots of the same landscape, each taken from the same angle but during different seasons, Stemple Pass is the last installment in a series of films by James Benning—following Two Cabins (2011) and Nightfall (2011)—made in relation to cabins he built in the Sierra Nevada. His two cabins are replicas: one of the retreat described by Henry David Thoreau in walden and the other of the hideout of Ted Kaczynski, the notorious Unabomber, where he fabricated explosive devices from the early 1970s to 1995. The Kaczynski cabin is seen at a distance, with smoke from the chimney indicating an unseen human presence; on the soundtrack, in between moments of pregnant silence (inhabited by natural sounds), Benning’s voice can be heard struggling with Kaczynski’s texts— including a very disturbing diary. In person: James Benning SILENT MOUNTAINS, SINGING OCEANS, AND SLIVERS OF TIME: SIX FILMS BY DAVID GATTEN Over the last 15 years, David Gatten has explored the intersection of the printed word and moving image with a depth and imagination unique to cinema. Making connections across fields of knowledge and meaning, Gatten’s films generate tactile compositions and draw novel conclusions from 19th-century scientific treatises, “outdated” 20th-century instructional texts, and rare books from 17th- and 18th-century personal libraries. Gatten, a leading figure dedicated to mining 16mm film’s continuing expressive possibilities in the digital era, was recently included in Cinema scope’s “Best Fifty Filmmakers Under Fifty.” This program, Part 3 of a touring retrospective, consists of six films made between 1998 and 2010. Part 1 screens at the Velaslavasay Panorama on October 27 and Part 2 at Los Angeles Filmforum on October 28. In person: David Gatten THE SOUND WE SEE: LA & ROTTERDAM City Symphonies are a style of filmmaking created in the 1920’s that sought to celebrate the urban environment by capturing its form and flow on motion picture film, free of actors and narrative devices. Earlier this year, two of our staff members spent four months working with immigrant and at-risk youth at WORM in Rotterdam, Holland to create a modern-day City Symphony. This film was a sister project to The Sound We See: A Los Angeles City Symphony created in 2010 by 37 local teenagers. Both films celebrate local landscapes while inviting audiences to reexamine notions of place and identity. FREE OUTDOOR EVENT, corner of W. 37th Street and S. Hill Street 90089. SPIDER BABY A year ago the Academy Film Archive launched an ambitious effort called "Project Film-to-Film," aimed at preserving as many films on film as possible over a two-year period. The initiative’s main goal is to take advantage of the current availability of film stock to create new prints of a diverse range of motion pictures, encompassing the whole history of the art form. The wide variety of titles range from "Navajo," the only film to receive Oscar nominations for both Documentary Feature and Cinematography, to "Naked Yoga," a short once presumed lost, and "Carnival of Souls," a cult favorite that has been rescued from late-night television and restored to the big screen. This inaugural "Film-to-Film" Festival highlights a sampling of these treasures – some already well known, others ready to be rediscovered. World premiere of the Academy Film Archive's new restoration from the original negative. Special guests Jack Hill, Quinn Redeker and Beverly Washburn Filmed in 1964 but not released theatrically until 1968, this cult classic marked the solo directorial debut of writer-director Jack Hill. The eerie story follows three siblings suffering from a rare genetic disorder that causes them to regress to a primal state of being and act out with savage, incestuous and animalistic behavior. 35mm, black-and-white, 81 min. SURNAME VIET, GIVEN NAME NAM USA, 1989, 108mins., 16mm Twenty-three years after its premiere, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s film remains a post-colonial classic, tackling issues of translation and untranslatability: from a Vietnamese transcript of half-spoken voices recorded at night, to the French publication of these interviews, to their re-translation into English by a native Vietnamese speaker, to the patient efforts of ordinary Vietnamese women to memorize and utter them—then to the lyrics of Vietnamese ballads translated into English subtitles—and finally to Trinh delivering, in English, fragments of oral history, epic poems, and folk sayings about women’s role in society. What is lost and what is gained in this multiple-entry process, in this palimpsest of half-erased texts? What is not gained is a “knowledge-about” a certain object: Vietnam. And what is not lost is a certain truth about the bodies of Vietnamese women. In person: Trinh T. Minh-ha SURVIVING LIFE Surviving Life, the most recent — and if his claims are to be believed, last — offering of madness from Jan Švankmajer begins with an apology from the director himself. It seems the Czech master of surrealist animation intended the feature to be fully live-action, but due to budgetary restraints, was forced to adopt a cut-out style (à la Terry Gilliam’s work for Monty Python) to convey the bulk of his twisted tale. A self-described “psychoanalytical comedy,” the film follows the travails of soul-deadened office worker Eugene, as he attempts by way of therapy to reconcile his dreary waking life with his increasingly bizarre and rewarding dream life. The two lives quickly begin to get jumbled, however, yielding an onslaught of wild, prismatic visions replete with arguing portraits of Jung and Freud, enormous wrestling tongues and a nude woman with a chicken head. Like any Švankmajer film, Surviving Life is a unique and twisted vision that must be seen to be believed. Dir. Jan Svankmajer, 2010, 35mm, 109 min. Suspense: Nightmare at Ground Zero (CBS, 8/18/53) Directed by Robert Mulligan In this eerily atmospheric live television drama directed by Robert Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird), a henpecked artist hired by the U.S. Army to supply mannequins for an atomic test plots a horrific solution to dispose of his nagging wife. Screenwriter: Rod Serling. Cast: O.Z. Whitehead, Louise Larabee, Calvin Thomas. Beta SP, b/w, 30 min. TRAXX This comical adventure pokes fun at Rambo as it chronicles the exploits of Traxx, a Texas Highway patrolman who leaves the state police to become a soldier-of-fortune in Hadleyville where he gets into baking funky cookies and working as a sort of town bouncer helping to clean up the burg. While there he and the Mayor, Alexandria Cray have a passionate affair. Real trouble comes to town in the form of the fearsome Uzi-toting Guzik brothers who have come to throw the do-gooder out. To draw him out, the nefarious brothers kidnap the town Little League team. Schedule permitting, Shadoe Stevens will be at the Cinefamily in person to introduce the film! 1 hr. 24 min., Dir. Jerome Gary, 1987. Tricky Poses and Taxing Conditions: Performance and Media The advent of portable video equipment enabled artists to document and distribute performance events captured in real time. Some artists went further to create performance for media, replicating performances from past performances and confronting the challenging space created by bodies. This screening includes films by Bas Jan Ader, Candace Compton, Sam Erenberg, Morgan Fisher, Cynthia Maughan, Bruce Nauman, Paul McCarthy, Susan Mogul, Richard Newton, Allan Sekula, and Grahame Weinbren that raise questions about the nature and purpose of performance, and also playfully look at how the camera, filmmaker, and projectionist also perform their roles. In person: Sam Erenberg and Richard Newton The Twilight Zone: The Shelter (CBS, 9/29/61) Directed by Lamont Johnson Best neighbors become worst nightmares when an imminent nuclear attack sends one family scurrying to their fallout shelter—as their friends howl for mercy, then for blood, outside the implacably sealed door. Screenwriter: Rod Serling. Cast: Larry Gates, Joseph Bernard, Jack Albertson. 16mm, b/w, 25 min. VIDEO NASTIES: MORAL PANIC, CENSORSHIP & VIDEOTAPE “...this film isn’t just relevant to horror fans; this is a film that is relevant to every adult human being. It is a lesson and a warning about the nature of censorship, and the very real threats it presents to civil liberty.” – Ben Bussey, Brutal as Hell What better way to kick off one of the most insane film series Cinefamily’s ever done than with the definitive documentary about the series’ subject? Prepare to be corrupted and depraved by this exhaustive guide to the Video Nasties phenomenon — one of the most extraordinary and scandalous eras in the history of British film. This critically-acclaimed doc features interviews with British horror filmmakers Neil Marshall (The Descent, Doomsday) and Christopher Smith (Severance, Black Death), alongside the UK government officials on the other side of the Nasties controversy, and rare archive footage featuring James Ferman (director of the BBFC 1975-1999) & Mary Whitehouse. Taking in the explosion of home video, the erosion of civil liberties, the introduction of draconian censorship measures, hysterical press campaigns and the birth of many careers born in blood and videotape, this important film also reflects on the influence this peculiar era still exerts on us today. This screening is a free-admission event (first-come, first-served!) Dir. Jake West, 2010, digital presentation, 72 min. THE WAR GAME The War Game (1965, 49 mins.) is an unnerving documentary-style film showing what could happen if Britain came under a nuclear attack. The production so horrified the BBC that this has never been screened on British TV. Widely considered to be one of the most powerful anti-war films ever made, Watkins' film was the winner of the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. WE'RE NOT BROKE America is in the grip of a societal economic panic. Lawmakers cry “We’re Broke!” as they slash budgets, lay off schoolteachers, police, and firefighters, crumbling our country’s social fabric and leaving many Americans scrambling to survive. Meanwhile, multibillion-dollar American corporations like Exxon, Google and Bank of America are making record profits. And while the deficit climbs and the cuts go deeper, these corporations—with intimate ties to our political leaders—are concealing colossal profits overseas to avoid paying U.S. income tax. We're Not Broke is the story of how U.S. corporations have been able to hide over a trillion dollars from Uncle Sam, and how seven fed-up Americans from across the country, take their frustration to the streets . . . and vow to make the corporations pay their fair share. Running time: 81 minutes. Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse: The Man in the Funny Suit (CBS, 4/15/60) Directed by Ralph Nelson Comedian Ed Wynn, his son, actor, Keenan Wynn, and Rod Serling appear as themselves in this backstage docudrama about the making of "Playhouse 90: Requiem for a Heavyweight.” As rehearsals for the live "Requiem" falter, production concerns mount when it appears that comedian Ed Wynn (best known as “The Perfect Fool”) might be miscast in his first dramatic role. Screenwriter: Raph Nelson. Cast: Keenan Wynn, Ed Wynn, Desi Arnaz. 16mm, b/w, 60 min. The Yellow Canary (1963) Directed by Buzz Kulik Director Buzz Kulik and Serling collaborated on numerous classic "Twilight Zone" episodes and the 1972 dramatic TV special "A Storm in Summer." Here, they create high drama around a profligate rock musician (Boone) on a mission to find his kidnapped son. Estranged from his wife (Eden) and most of his friends, the self-centered philanderer must martial his manhood to solve the crime, put his life in order and save his child. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp. Producer: Maury Dexter. Screenwriter: Rod Serling, from the novel by Whit Masterson. Cinematographer: Floyd Crosby. Editor: Jodie Copelan. Cast: Pat Boone, Barbara Eden, Steve Forrest, Jack Klugman, Jesse White. 35mm, b/w, 93 min.