a highly-opinionated selection of things happening around town, and sometimes out of town. this month's page here.
tue. oct. 4
jerry beck's cartoon monster mash 2011 8 PM @ silent movie theatre
bleached @ los globos
north by northwest 1:30 PM @ skirball
wed. oct. 5
the bat (1926) 8 PM @ silent movie theatre
sleepy sun @ troubadour
the verdict @ aero
the set-up, fat city @ new beverly
the blues brothers, neighbors @ ucla film archive @ million dollar theater
the flytraps @ five stars bar
thu. oct. 6
power & control: lsd in the 60s FREE 8 PM @ beyond baroque
island of lost souls (1932), dr. jekyll and mr. hyde (1931) @ egyptian
no babies @ the smell
rolling thunder FREE 7 PM @ usc ray stark
fri. oct. 7
the loons @ ruby room (SD)
serpico, 12 angry men @ aero
mondo mystery night movie series (films TBA) @ new beverly
giorgio moroder's "metropolis" 7:45 PM @ silent movie theatre
stop motion magazine film festival 8 PM @ epfc
daughters of the dust, four women @ ucla film archive
dark passage, the naked kiss @ hm157
saccharine trust (10:00) @ cafe 322
sat. oct. 8
young frankenstein @ devil's night drive-in
frankenstein (1931), bride of frankenstein, son of frankenstein @ egyptian
mondo mystery night movie series (films TBA) @ new beverly
giorgio moroder's "metropolis" 3:00 5:15 7:30 PM @ silent movie theatre
daydream therapy, bush mama @ ucla film archive
the forgotten space FREE @ lacma
land of look behind (screening), the expanders (live set) @ hm157
sun. oct. 9
gary war @ echo
the innocents, the haunting (1963) @ egyptian
network, the pawnbroker @ aero
mondo mystery night movie series (films TBA) @ new beverly
giorgio moroder's "metropolis" 3:00 5:15 10:40 PM @ silent movie theatre
the hitcher @ silent movie theatre
shopping bag spirits and freeway fetishes (plus shorts program) 7 PM @ ucla film archive
dream states: the avant-garde of the 1940s and 1950s @ filmforum @ spielberg theatre @ egyptian
mon. oct. 10
giorgio moroder's "metropolis" 5:15 PM @ silent movie theatre
the renderers, cosmonauts, kim free @ the smell
the blues brothers 8 PM @ arclight hollywood
animation of the unconsciousness: calarts and the teachings of jules engel 8:30 PM @ redcat
tue. oct. 11
brand x FREE 7 PM @ hammer
dirt dress, trmrs, pangea @ echo
giorgio moroder's "metropolis" 7:30 9:45 PM @ silent movie theatre
the swimmer 1 PM @ lacma
saboteur FREE 1:30 PM @ skirball
judgment at nuremberg @ ampas samuel goldwyn
wed. oct. 12
aloe blacc @ detroit bar
murder on the orient express @ aero
the fly, videodrome @ ucla film archive @ million dollar theater
thu. oct. 13
thrones @ satellite
fright night (1985) @ silent movie theatre
my brother's wedding (director's cut) @ ucla film archive
a day at the pool 8 PM, work to surf @ the other venice film festival @ beyond baroque
upsilon acrux (9:45) FREE @ three clubs
driftwood singers (7:30) FREE @ stories books
fri. oct. 14
son of dracula 8 PM @ bollywood bloodbath @ silent movie theatre
silent comedy shorts program @ aero
went the day well? 7:30 9:30 PM @ new beverly
a day in the life of willie faust, penitentiary @ ucla film archive
werner schroeter/elfi mikesch: a voice that lingers day 1 8:30 PM @ redcat
barbara manning (10:30) @ taix
sat. oct. 15
the fuse @ blue star
dirt dress @ pehrspace
djin aquarian/plastic crimewave & the everafter, michael yonkers @ HM157
went the day well? 1:30 3:30 5:30 7:30 9:30 PM @ new beverly
the stuff 7 PM @ an evening with larry cohen @ silent movie theatre
rome open city, days of glory @ ucla film archive
werner schroeter/elfi mikesch: a voice that lingers day 2 6:00 PM @ redcat
ezra buchla @ home room
sun. oct. 16
went the day well? 1:30 3:30 5:30 7:30 9:30 PM @ new beverly
the private files of j. edgar hoover 5:30 PM, q: the winged serpent, it's alive @ larry cohen triple feature @ silent movie theatre
obsession 7 PM @ ucla film archive
cool moms, neonates @ echo
industry town: the avant-garde and hollywood @ filmforum @ spielberg theatre @ egyptian
mon. oct. 17
went the day well?, the fallen idol @ new beverly
bicycle thieves, shoeshine @ ucla film archive
janie geiser: "nervous films," secret stories 8:30 PM @ redcat
100 seven inch records by john wiese (opening reception) 6-9 PM @ family
tue. oct. 18
portishead @ shrine
the loves of pharoah @ egyptian
went the day well?, brighton rock (1947) @ new beverly
willard (1971) 8 PM, 2nd film TBA @ silent movie theatre
guess who's coming to dinner 1 PM @ lacma
modern times @ lacma
brad cloepfil with gus van sant FREE 7 PM @ hammer
wed. oct. 19
portishead @ shrine
mad monster party 6:30 PM, whatever happened to baby jane? @ outdoor movie night @ heritage square
went the day well?, the third man @ new beverly
easy rider, two-lane blacktop @ ucla film archive @ million dollar theater
ty segall FREE 6 PM @ permanent records
thu. oct. 20
shellac @ eagle rock center for the arts
budget rock 10 @ bottom of the hill/parkside, SF
ray charles - live in france 1961 @ egyptian
went the day well?, brighton rock (1947) @ new beverly
kinema nippon presents nippon re-read - radical fragments and abstractions from japan i & ii 8 PM @ epfc
fri. oct. 21
devon williams, tamaryn @ echo
zombie MIDNIGHT @ new beverly
willard (1971) 8 PM, wild beasts, (third feature TBA) @ silent movie theatre
poltergeist FREE 8 PM @ friday night flicks @ pershing square
shellac @ eagle rock center for the arts
budget rock 10 @ bottom of the hill/parkside, SF
jon brion @ largo
nashville ramblers @ 'til two club (SD)
the guns of navarone @ egyptian
the raven, masque of the red death @ aero
shipley street, brick by brick, rich (plus shorts program) @ ucla film archive
sat. oct. 22
zombie MIDNIGHT @ new beverly
plan 9 from outer space 2:00 8:00 PM @ alex theatre
budget rock 10 @ bottom of the hill/parkside, SF
trmrs @ the smell
aloe blacc @ el rey
jon brion @ largo
haunted scavenger hunts of angelino heights 4 PM @ la conservancy
dr. jekyll and mr. hyde (1941) @ heritage square
nashville ramblers @ ventura club TBA
blazing saddles @ egyptian
evil roy slade FREE 9:15 PM @ egyptian
house on haunted hill (1958), the abominable dr. phibes (1971) @ aero
the pocketbook, bless their little hearts @ ucla film archive
sun. oct. 23
budget rock 10 @ bottom of the hill/parkside, SF
haunted scavenger hunts of angelino heights 4 PM @ la conservancy
land of the pharoahs 5:30 PM @ egyptian
theater of blood, witchfinder general @ aero
hour glass 7 PM, ashes & embers @ ucla film archive
tribute to the fall, sea lions (tribute to the wedding present) @ part time punks @ echo
film/music/forms - early abstractions of the 1940s and 1950s @ filmforum @ spielberg theatre @ egyptian
mon. oct. 24
proto-ethnographic works 8:30 PM @ redcat
tue. oct 25
nostalgia for the light FREE 7 PM @ usc ray stark
uncle boonmee who can recall his past lives 7 PM @ lacma
the innkeepers, house (1986) @ silent movie theatre
night of the demon 1 PM @ lacma
uncle boonmee who can recall his past lives 7 PM @ lacma
strange boys FREE 7 PM @ origami vinyl
ezra buchla FREE @ the smell
wed. oct. 26
strange boys, mikal cronin @ troubadour
horror of dracula, the curse of the werewolf @ aero
nilbog (live performance, 8:00), goodbye uncle tom @ silent movie theatre
young frankenstein, love at first bite @ ucla film archive @ million dollar theater
way out west, the music box @ ucla film archive
brent weinbach 8 PM @ ucb
thu. oct. 27
creature from the black lagoon (1954, 3-D), bend of the river @ egyptian
la air 2: rick bahto 8 PM @ epfc
i & i: an african allegory, child of resistance @ ucla film archive
accattone @ lacma
fri. oct. 28
thee cormans, thee tee pees, south bay surfers FREE @ viva fresh
thee oh sees @ alex's bar
the lost boys @ egyptian
the haunted house (1921) 8 PM, haunted spooks @ haunted films in haunted places @ epfc filmmobile
welcome home brother charles @ ucla film archive
100 most outrageous kills 8 PM, the house by the cemetery @ silent movie theatre
sat. oct. 29
pet sematary, tourist trap, the pit, videodrome, alice sweet alice, just before dawn @ dusk-to-dawn horrorthon @ aero
films by paul clipson & music by tashi wada 8 PM @ epfc
bitter rice, without pity @ ucla film archive
the warlocks (12:00) @ twin peaks halloween party @ the smell
three short films on the japanese american internment during world war ii 2 PM @ beyond baroque
the crimson kimono 3 PM @ japanese american national museum
nobunny @ los globos
sun. oct. 30
the cabinet of dr. caligari (1920, w/ live organ accompaniment) @ disney hall
thee oh sees @ ukranian cultural center
island of lost souls 4:00 7:30, them! 5:30 9:00 @ new beverly
thee cormans, nobunny @ alex's bar
mulholland dr. @ egyptian
distributing the avant-garde: the creative film society collection @ filmforum @ spielberg theatre @ egyptian
paisan 7 PM @ ucla film archive
the pit and the pendulum (1961) 1 PM, the masque of the red death (1964), house of wax (1953), the tingler, the fly (1958), witchfinder general FREE @ lacma
mon. oct. 31
the tingler (in 'percepto') 8 PM @ silent movie theatre
island of lost souls, them! @ new beverly
tue. nov. 1
wild flag @ casbah (SD)
suzan pitt and jim trainor: a conversation in light and darkness 8:30 PM @ redcat
wed. nov. 2
wild flag @ troubadour
restrepo FREE 7 PM, the tillman story @ ampas linwood dunn
driftwood singers @ echo
thu. nov. 3
wild flag @ troubadour
derailroaded: inside the mind of larry "wild man" fischer FREE 7 PM @ beyond baroque
the woods 8 PM @ downtown independent
fri. nov. 4
miracle in milan, umberto d. @ ucla film archive
c.r.a.s.h., abe vigoda @ the smell
sat. nov. 5
scream festival 2011: sounding images 8:30 PM @ redcat
several friends, killer of sheep @ ucla film archive
dunes, john wiese @ the smell
sun. nov. 6
bleached, kit @ the smell
a day's pleasure 4:10 7:30, sunnyside 4:40 8:00, the idle class 5:10 8:30, the circus 5:55 9:15 @ new beverly
mon. nov. 7
bandits of orgosolo @ ucla film archive
a day's pleasure, sunnyside, the idle class, the circus @ new beverly
wed. nov. 9
to live & die in L.A., the french connection @ ucla film archive @ million dollar theater
thu. nov. 10
run lola run FREE (rsvp) 8 PM @ luckman fine arts complex
sat. nov. 12
mouthbreathers @ nomad gallery
illusions, fragrance, as above so below, rain @ ucla film archive
sun. nov. 13
the horse, cutting horse @ ucla film archive
doin' it on tape: video from the woman's building @ filmforum @ spielberg theatre @ egyptian
mon. nov. 14
two nights with ernie gehr: early films and new digital works 8:30 PM @ redcat
the finches FREE @ silverlake lounge
tue. nov. 15
two nights with ernie gehr: early films and new digital works 8:30 PM @ redcat
wed. nov. 16
lawrence of arabia @ ucla film archive @ million dollar theater
il posto @ ucla film archive
the finches @ the smell
resurrect dead: the mystery of the toynbee tiles FREE 7 PM @ usc ray stark
fri. nov. 18
"insight": experimental theater of hollywood television FREE @ ucla film archive
true romance MIDNIGHT @ nuart
sat. nov. 19
sankofa, the diary of an african nun @ ucla film archive
sun. nov. 20
black art black artists, festival of mask, varnette's world, trumpetistically clora bryant @ ucla film archive
resistance: stanton kaye's georg and bruce lane's unc. @ filmforum @ spielberg theatre @ egyptian
mon. nov. 21
collapse into image 8:30 PM @ redcat
tue. nov. 22
outrage FREE 8:50 PM @ usc ray stark
wed. nov. 23
barton fink, barfly @ ucla film archive @ million dollar theater
fri. nov. 25
the loons @ tin can alehouse (SD)
back to the future MIDNIGHT @ nuart
sat. nov. 26
three stooges big screen event 2:00 8:00 PM @ alex theatre
wed. nov. 30
five easy pieces, the king of marvin gardens @ ucla film archive @ million dollar theater
fri. dec. 2
slogan FREE (rsvp) 8 PM @ luckman fine arts complex
a clockwork orange MIDNIGHT @ nuart
sat. dec. 3
los angeles free music society FREE @ getty center
wallace berman's underground 8 PM @ armory center for the arts
sun. dec. 4
gabi on the roof in july FREE 6 PM @ usc ray stark
tue. dec. 6
the sea and cake @ troubadour
wed. dec. 7
to sleep with anger @ ucla film archive
fri. dec. 9
harvest: 3,000 years @ ucla film archive
sat. dec. 10
when it rains, passing through @ ucla film archive
mon. dec. 12
naomi uman: the ukrainian time machine 8:30 PM @ redcat
wed. dec. 14
the day the earth stood still (1951), this island earth @ ucla film archive @ million dollar theater
fri. dec. 16
the trip MIDNIGHT @ nuart
sat. dec. 17
the rosa parks story FREE 4 PM, selma lord selma @ ucla film archive
mon. dec. 26
greatest cartoons ever 2:00 7:00 PM @ alex theatre
fri. jan. 6
wild at heart ("uncut" version) MIDNIGHT @ nuart
WHAT IT IS:
Accattone
1961/b&w/120 min.
Scr: Sergio Citti, Pier Paolo Pasolini; dir: Pier Paolo Pasolini; w/ Franco Citti, Franca Pasut.
Director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film is an absorbing view from the gutter that forever changed the definition of Italian Neo-Realism. The film stays on the heels of the hustler Accattone as he preys on one young woman after another. Franco Citti, one of the many non-professional actors discovered by Pasolini, hauntingly embodies the lead role, abetting Pasolini’s creation of a somber and unforgettable tone poem—which was later fittingly saluted by Morrissey in his song “You Have Killed Me.” The crystalline cinematography is by Tonino Delli Colli who went on to shoot The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West before returning to work with Pasolini on Canterbury Tales and Salo.
ALICE SWEET ALICE (aka COMMUNION), 1976, Warner Bros., 98 min. Dir. Alfred Sole. Karen (a very young Brooke Shields) is strangled on the day of her first communion, and her older sister Alice becomes the prime suspect.
Animation of the Unconsciousness: CalArts and the Teachings of Jules Engel
“Jules Engel’s work speaks for itself. Direct and lucid, it requires no paraphrase. The language, which is universal… comes from the center of his being.” —Lucretia Cole
Presented as part of Pacific Standard Time and co-presented by Los Angeles Filmforum.
Founded and directed by Jules Engel (1909–2003), the CalArts Film Graphics Program (later called “Experimental Animation”) sought to push the boundaries of animation. Through his teaching, and the example of his own work, Engel fostered the emergence of a new form of animation—freewheeling, transgressive, and imaginative. What happens when an animator follows a line, a patch of color, or a shape into the unconscious? What wild images would emerge; how could one image lead to another? What can we learn about art and the human condition from these brave forays into the unknown depths of the mind? Such were the questions posed by Engel’s own films—Shapes and Gestures (1976), Wet Paint (1977), Hors d’oeuvre (1978)—and by the students carrying his legacy: Kathy Rose (Mirror People, 1974), Adam Beckett (Flesh Flows, 1974), Dennis Pies/Sky David (Aura-Corona, 1974), Henry Selick (Phases, 1978), Lisze Bechtold (Moon Breath Beat, 1980), and others.
As Above, So Below (1973)
Directed by Larry Clark
A rediscovered masterpiece, director Larry Clark’s As Above, So Below comprises a powerful political and social critique in its portrayal of Black insurgency. The film opens in 1945 with a young boy playing in his Chicago neighborhood and then follows the adult Jita-Hadi as a returning Marine with heightened political consciousness. Like The Spook Who Sat By the Door and Gordon’s War, As Above, So Below imagines a post-Watts rebellion state of siege and an organized Black underground plotting revolution. With sound excerpts from the 1968 HUAC report “Guerrilla Warfare Advocates in the United States,” As Above, So Below is one of the more politically radical films of the L.A. Rebellion.
Producer/Screenwriter/Cinematographer/ Editor: L. Clark. Cast: Nathaniel Taylor, Lyvonne Walder, Billy Middleton, Gail Peters, Kodjo. 16mm, color, 52 min.
Ashes & Embers
Directed by Haile Gerima
Nay Charles is an African American Vietnam veteran who no longer fits in, can’t find a job and has difficulty establishing a connection with his politically committed girlfriend. Depressed, the film’s antihero leaves his home state of Washington for a new, better life in Los Angeles where he ends up arrested by the police.
Like his protagonist, director Haile Gerima is both drawn to and skeptical of the Black nationalist ideology espoused by Charles’ girlfriend and her discussion group. Charles’ alienation from both middle class African Americans who have accommodated themselves to the system and radicals willing to change society is rooted in the institutionalized racism of white society, which for the most part remains an invisible but powerful presence. Like other L.A. Rebellion filmmakers, Gerima illustrates that racism, as well as Third World Liberation struggles, through photo and film montages of news film material. Charles’ grandmother represents the tough fighting spirit of a generation that survived slavery and Jim Crow, her lush, green farm returning us metaphorically to the rural Ethiopia of Gerima’s youth. In the end, Gerima places his faith in African American youths, who represent a future in which they will stand tall, a final vision of utopia after the grim lessons of contemporary race relations in America.
Before completing production on Ashes & Embers, Gerima founded Mypheduh Films to distribute both his own work and that of other African filmmakers being ignored by American distributors. Opening at New York’s Film Forum, Ashes and Embers has been screened widely on the festival circuit.
Producer: Haile Gerima. Screenwriter: Haile Gerima. Cinematographer: Augustin E. Cubano. Editor: Haile Gerima. Cast: Evelyn A. Blackwell, John Anderson, Norman Blalock, Kathy Flewellen, Uwezo Flewellen. 16mm, color, 129 min. In-person: filmmaker Haile Gerima.
Bandits of Orgosolo (Benditi a Orgosolo)
Directed by Vittorio De Seta
After bandits use his remote sheepfold as a hideout, a shepherd already underwater on his bank loans is forced to flee from corrupt police deep into the treacherous mountains with his flock. In his first fiction feature, documentarian Vittorio De Seta grounds this rural thriller with rich ethnographic detail to craft a devastating masterpiece about fate and the fragility of life on the economic fringes.
Producer: Vittorio De Seta. Screenwriter: Vittorio De Seta, Vera Gherarducci. Cinematographer: Vittorio De Seta. Editor: Jolanda Benvenuti. Cast: Michele Cossu, Peppeddu Cucco, Vittorina Pisano. 35mm, b/w, in Italian with English subtitles, 98 min.
BEND OF THE RIVER
1952, Universal, 91 min, USA, Dir: Anthony Mann
James Stewart stars as a former border raider who narrowly escapes the hangman's noose (he still smarts from the rope) and is trying to start over again in the wide-open Oregon country. Instead, he winds up involved with the wily and charming Arthur Kennedy in a wagon train that includes the eligible Laurie Baile (Julie Adams) and a load of supplies worth their weight in gold. One of director Anthony Mann's finest films, combining action, character and landscape in a seamless and wildly satisfying package.
Bitter Rice (Riso amaro) (Italy, 1949)
Directed by Giuseppe De Santis
On the run from the cops, a jewel thief’s moll hides out among the migrant women workers who journey to Northern Italy every year for the rice harvest. She builds a fragile bond with her fellow workers until her past catches up with her in director Giuseppe De Santis’ scorching crime drama set against a portrait of rural labor and exploitation.
Producer: Dino De Laurentiis. Screenwriter: Corrado Alvaro, Giuseppe De Santis, Carlo Lizzani, Carlo Musso, Ivo Perilli, Gianni Puccini. Cinematographer: Otello Martelli. Editor: Gabriele Varriale. Cast: Vittorio Gassman, Silvana Mangano, Doris Dowling, Raf Vallone, Checco Rissone. 35mm, b/w, in Italian with English subtitles, 108 min.
BLACK ARTS, BLACK ARTISTS
Directed by Elyseo J. Taylor
As the only Black faculty member in UCLA’s film school, Elyseo Taylor was an influential teacher and advocate for students of color. In voiceover dialogue with woodcut printmaker Van Slater, Taylor’s film examines the status of contemporary Black artists. A visual survey of Black art since the 19th century, punctuated with jazz and blues selections, outlines pressures to prove artistic capability, to suit white and middle-class Black tastes and to make explicit political statements.
Cast: Van Slater. 16mm, color, 16 min.
BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS
Directed by Billy Woodberry
Bless Their Little Hearts represents the closure and pinnacle of a neorealist strand within what’s now described as the L.A. Rebellion, which dates to Charles Burnett’s Several Friends (1969). Billy Woodberry’s film chronicles the devastating effects of underemployment on a family in the same Los Angeles community depicted in Killer of Sheep (1977), and it pays witness to the ravages of time in the short years since its predecessor. Nate Hardman and Kaycee Moore deliver gut-wrenching performances as the couple whose family is torn apart by events beyond their control. If salvation remains, it’s in the sensitive depiction of everyday life, which persists throughout.
By 1978, when Bless’ production began, Burnett, then 34, was already an elder statesman and mentor to many within the UCLA film community, and it was he who encouraged Woodberry to pursue a feature length work. In a telling act of trust, Burnett offered the newcomer a startlingly intimate 70-page original scenario and also shot the film. He furthermore connected Woodberry with his cast of friends and relatives, many of whom had appeared in Killer of Sheep, solidifying the two films’ connections.
Yet critically, he then held back further instruction, leaving Woodberry to develop the material, direct and edit. As Woodberry reveals, “He would deliberately restrain himself from giving me the solution to things.” The first-time feature director delivered brilliantly, and the result is an ensemble work that represents the cumulative visions of Woodberry, Burnett and their excellent cast.
Whereas Burnett’s original scenario placed emphasis on the spiritual crisis of Hardman’s Charlie Banks, the then-married Woodberry, alongside Moore and Hardman, further developed the domestic relationships within the film and articulated the depiction of a family struggling to stay alive in a world of rapidly vanishing prospects.
In retrospect, the film’s ending can be seen as a spiritual goodbye not just for Banks, but for Burnett, who would move away from his neorealist work with his next film, the classic To Sleep With Anger (1990); for Woodberry, who moved into documentary; and for Hardman, who left cinema shortly after. The film remains an unforgettable landmark in American cinema.
Producer: Billy Woodberry. Screenwriter: Charles Burnett. Cinematographer: Charles Burnett. Editor: Billy Woodberry. Cast: Nate Hardman, Kaycee Moore, Angela Burnett, Ronald Burnett, Kimberly Burnett. 35mm, b/w, 84 min. In-person: filmmaker Billy Woodberry.
Brad Cloepfil with Gus Van Sant
Oregon-born architect Brad Cloepfil’s work—which includes the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and Wieden+Kennedy’s world headquarters—has been described as “by design anti-spectacular.” Cloepfil sits down with friend and filmmaker Gus Van Sant (Milk, Good Will Hunting) to discuss the inspiration that drives them and their shared beginnings in and continued love for the Pacific Northwest. Cloepfil’s new book is Allied Works Architecture.
Brand X
Brand X is a scrappy, absurdist parody of a television show. Made in the early 1970s, it touched on the Vietnam War, sex, drugs, and technology. Filmmaker Wynn Chamberlain was a fixture in the 1960s New York pop art world and filmed his friends Abbie Hoffman, Sam Shepard, and Sally Kirkland. Brand X has recently resurfaced after its mysterious disappearance more than 40 years ago, and the Hammer is proud to offer one its first “rescreenings.”
(1970, Dir. Wynn Chamberlain, color & b/w, 87 min.)
Brick By Brick (1982)
Directed by Shirikiana Aina
Brick by Brick documents a late-’70s Washington, D.C., ignored by the media, from which poor Black residents are being pushed out. Images of monuments contrast with prescient images of gentrification and homelessness. An alternative is provided by the Seaton Street project, in which tenants united to purchase buildings. Participants discuss their effort as part of a worldwide struggle against displacement.
Producer: Shirikiana Aina. Screenwriter: Shirikiana Aina. Cinematographer: Ellen Sumter, Norma Blalock. Editor: Shirikiana Aina. Cast: Lester Wakefield. 16mm, color, 33 min.
BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN
1935, Universal, 75 min, USA, Dir: James Whale
"Warning! The Monster Demands a Mate!" Widely considered the high point of the 1930s Universal horror cycle, BRIDE is a brilliant blend of black humor and Gothic style. Boris Karloff reprises his greatest role as the Monster, with Colin Clive as his reluctant "father," the hilariously creepy Ernest Thesiger as Dr. Pretorius and Elsa Lanchester as the screaming-mimi Bride.
BRIGHTON ROCK
Pinkie Brown (Richard Attenborough) is a small town hoodlum whose gang runs a protection racket based at Brighton race course. When Pinkie orders the murder of a rival, Fred (Alan Wheatley), the police believe it to be suicide. This doesn't convince Ida Arnold (Hermione Baddeley), who was with Fred just before he died, and she sets out to find the truth. She comes across naive waitress Rose (Carol Marsh), who can prove that Fred was murdered. 1947, UK, 35mm, 92 minutes. directed by John Boulting; screenplay by Graham Greene & Terence Rattigan, based on Greene's novel; starring Richard Attenborough, Carol Marsh, Hermione Baddeley
BUSH MAMA
Directed by Haile Gerima
Inspired after having seen a Black woman in Chicago evicted in winter, director Haile Gerima developed Bush Mama as his UCLA thesis film. Gerima blends narrative fiction, documentary, surrealism and political modernism in his unflinching story about a pregnant welfare recipient in Watts. Featuring the magnetic Barbara O. Jones as Dorothy, Bush Mama is an unrelenting and powerfully moving look at the realities of inner city poverty and systemic disenfranchisement of African Americans.
The film explores the different forces that act on Dorothy in her daily dealings with the welfare office and social workers as she is subjected to the oppressive cacophony of state-sponsored terrorism against the poor. Motivated by the incarceration of her partner T.C. (Johnny Weathers) and the protection of her daughter and unborn child, Dorothy undergoes an ideological transformation from apathy and passivity to empowered action. Ultimately uplifting, the film chronicles Dorothy’s awakening political consciousness and her assumption of her own self-worth.
With Bush Mama, Gerima presents an unflinching critique of the surveillance state and unchecked police power. The film opens with actual footage of the LAPD harassing Gerima and his crew during the shooting.
Producer: Haile Gerima. Screenwriter: Haile Gerima. Cinematographer: Charles Burnett, Roderick Young. Editor: Haile Gerima. Cast: Barbara-O (Barbara O. Jones), Johnny Weathers, Susan Williams, Cora Lee Day. 16mm, b/w, 97 min. New print struck from a 16mm b/w duplicate negative and the original 16mm track negative.
Child of Resistance (1972)
Directed by Haile Gerima
Inspired by a dream director Haile Gerima had after seeing Angela Davis handcuffed on television, Child of Resistance follows a woman (Barbara O. Jones) who has been imprisoned as a result of her fight for social justice. In a film that challenges linear norms of time and space, Gerima explores the woman’s dreams for liberation and fears for her people through a series of abstractly rendered fantasies.
Producer/Screenwriter/Editor: H. Gerima. Cast: Barbara O. Jones, James Dougall. 16mm, b/w & color, 36 min.
Collapse Into Image
“Hubbard uses flowers, balloons, plastic letters, and other mundane things in bizarre, at times aggressive ways, calling attention to their purpose and altering them through a series of vaudevillian maneuvers.” —Artforum
Drawn from some of the most distinctive media installations of the last few years, this program showcases projects by artists who translate their extended, multifaceted creative processes onto the picture plane of the moving image and, through this transposition, invite new thinking about time, space, actions and materials. The selection includes recent works by Erika Vogt, known for her rich and rigorous practice of abstracting images and layering media. Also featured are Alex Hubbard’s often humorous, always thought-provoking videos, wherein painterly surfaces exist only to be dismantled, as in his most spatially complex piece to date, The Border, The Ship (2011). William E. Jones, meanwhile, salvages, alters, manipulates, or recontextualizes archival footage and photography, challenging the opposition between flatness and depth while deconstructing the relationship between power and imagemaking—vividly shown in Spatial Disorientation (2011), which is receiving its theatrical premiere.
In person: William E. Jones, Erika Vogt
THE CRIMSON KIMONO, 1959, Sony Repertory, 82 min. As the classic noir period was fading, director Sam Fuller (THE NAKED KISS) came out blasting with the first of a series of wildly original, and often wildly erratic, crime thrillers. This one starts as a pulpy policier, with a pair of L.A. cops (Glenn Corbett, James Shigeta) hunting the killer of a stripper. Midway it twists into a heated romantic triangle with both cops falling for a key witness. The best passages explore the Nisei experience in America, and Shigeta’s torment at falling for a Caucasian woman. Fantastic vintage footage of Little Tokyo, with kinetic inspiration colliding into stilted exposition — watch for flying shrapnel. With Victoria Shaw and Anna Lee. "…a triumph of grungy lyricism… Fuller's feat is giving the film's nonstop interrogations, meetings, and confrontations profound racial and political meaning." - Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine. With an introduction by noir scholar ALAN K. RODE.
THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
1961, Universal, 93 min, UK, Dir: Terence Fisher
Director Terence Fisher’s atmospheric thriller not only has the distinction of being not only Oliver Reed’s first leading role but also Hammer Studios’ only werewolf film. And a chillingly fine werewolf film it is, with cursed Reed the offspring born on Christmas Day to a mute servant girl (Yvonne Romain) raped by a bestial beggar (Richard Wordsworth) in the dungeons of the sadistic Marques Siniestro (deliciously depraved Anthony Dawson). Kindly Don Alfredo (Clifford Evans) raises Reed in a good home, but when the sensitive young man reaches puberty and his desires are thwarted, the result is a frenzy of bloody carnage. Discussion between films with Bela Lugosi Jr., publisher and artist Kerry Gammill, editor and screenwriter Sam F. Park, writer Robert Tinnell and filmmaker Mike Hill.
CUTTING HORSE
Directed by Larry Clark
Director Larry Clark’s revisionist Western, and second independent feature, appropriates and reconfigures genre tropes to tell the emotional story of a man struggling to put things right in his life, and in the community he once called home. Tyler is called back to the land where his former boss Sanchez still breeds horses. A strong, silent Black man, as stalwart as the freed slaves who had once worked with Mexican cattle-herding vaqueros in the old West, Tyler arrives with a reputation as an exceptional trainer of “cutting horses” (those that are cultivated to isolate and rein in unruly cattle). It is because of that talent that he has been summoned again, this time to train two specific horses as competitive champions. There he joins Doc Pete and Ray, two other members of Sanchez’ team.
Unfortunately, Tyler also carries the taint of having once assaulted the unruly son of local political boss Neil Stone, himself a prominent landowner and industrialist who envies Sanchez’ property and horses. Never mind that Tyler’s former violence had actually been vengeance for the younger Stone having molested Sanchez’ daughter Rosa (once Tyler’s lover, since then married to Ray). Now the passionate Tyler must walk a straight and narrow line in order to achieve his principal goal, and not be dissuaded. Distractions emerge in many forms, as the industrialist attempts to sabotage Sanchez, trip up Tyler and even buy the loyalty of the less insightful Ray. Gratifyingly, not only skill and hard-earned wisdom, but also honor, prove to be effective counterbalances to the schemes of powerful Stone as the competitive “cutting horse” event nears. Even new love seems a possibility.
The American West is a far cry from the settings of most L.A. Rebellion pictures. However, it offers a serviceable (not to mention beautiful) field against which to enact a story with resonance for Black audiences, one of a man who must be better than his peers, do battle with specters from the past and seek means other than violence to prevail in his worthy goal.
Producer: Larry Clark. Screenwriter: David Hentz, Larry Clark. Cinematographer: Alexandra Cantin, Ruben O’Malley. Editor: Larry Clark. Cast: Albert Harris, Cesar E. Flores, Robert Earl Crudup, Melissa Cellura, Rufus Norris. 35mm, color, 124 min.
A DAY AT THE POOL, 24mn, USA, by Ian Douglass & Eric Fulford
A Day at the Pool is a documentary-style film that attempts to uncover the true origins of modern skateboarding. Interviews with Tony Alva, Stacy Peralta, Jay Adams and the rest of the Dogtown Crew reveal that an anonymous local kid may have been largely responsible for the skateboarding revolution that lead to their success in the late 70s.
Daydream Therapy (1977)
Directed by Bernard Nicolas
Daydream Therapy is set to Nina Simone’s haunting rendition of “Pirate Jenny” and concludes with Archie Shepp’s “Things Have Got to Change.” Filmed in Burton Chace Park in Marina del Rey by activist-turned-filmmaker Bernard Nicolas as his first project at UCLA, this short film poetically envisions the fantasy life of a hotel worker whose daydreams provide an escape from workplace indignities.
Producer: Bernard Nicolas. Screenwriter: Bernard Nicolas. Cinematographer: Bernard Nicolas. Editor: Bernard Nicolas. Cast: Marva Anderson, Keith Taylor, Gay Abel-Bey, Larry Bell, Jeff Cox. Digital video, transferred from 16mm, b/w & color, 8 min.
A Day in the Life of Willie Faust, or Death on the Installment Plan (1972)
Directed by Jamaa Fanaka (as Walt Gordon)
Jamaa Fanaka’s first project plays off the Blaxploitation’s genre conventions, an adaption of Goethe’s “Faust” presented with a non-synchronous soundtrack and superimposed over a remake of Super Fly (1972). Often out of focus with an overactive camera, the film immediately exudes nervous energy, but unlike Priest’s elegant cocaine consumption in Super Fly, Willie’s arm gushes blood as he injects heroin. A morality tale in two reels.
Producer: Jamaa Fanaka. Screenwriter: Jamaa Fanaka. Cinematographer: Gary, Glenn, Boots. Editor: Jamaa Fanaka, Cast: Baby Katina, Walt, Lynn, Carmen, Boots, Snooks, Gary. Digital video, transferred from 16mm blow-up from 8mm, color, 20 min.
Days of Glory (Giorni di gloria) (Italy, 1945)
Directed by Luchino Visconti, Marcello Pagliero, Giuseppe De Santis and Mario Serandrei
Produced for the Allies’ Psychological Warfare Branch, this devastating documentary about the German occupation of Rome and the Italian Resistance movement between 1943 and 1945 provides graphic insight into the violence and turmoil of the period during which the neo-realist impulse emerged as it exemplifies the movement’s aesthetic and moral imperatives.
Producer: Fulvio Ricci. Screenwriter: Umberto Calosso, Umberto Barbaro. Editor: Mario Serandrei, Carlo Alberto Chiesa. 35mm, b/w, in Italian with English subtitles, 70 min.
DERAILROADED: INSIDE THE MIND OF LARRY "WILD MAN" FISCHER
JOSH RUBIN and JEREMY LUBIN'S (in person) sympathetic and touching journey through the thunderstorms of the mind of paranoid-schizophrenic LARRY "WILD MAN" FISCHER follows his discordant encounters in the music business. 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 and 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. With FRANK and 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.
The Diary of an African Nun (1977)
Directed by Julie Dash
A nun in Uganda weighs the emptiness she finds in her supposed union with Christ. Adapted from a short story by Alice Walker, the film was a deliberate first move by its director toward narrative filmmaking, though its graphic simplicity and pantomimed performance by Barbara O. Jones give it an intensity that anticipates Julie Dash’s work on Daughters of the Dust.
Producer: Julie Dash. Screenwriter: Alice Walker. Cinematographer: Orin Mitchell. Editor: Julie Dash. Cast: Barbara O. Jones, Barbara Young, Makimi Price, Ron Flagge, Renee Carraway. 16mm, b/w, 15 min. In-person: filmmaker Julie Dash.
Distributing the Avant-Garde: The Creative Film Society Collection
Film historian Anthony Slide, while writing an appraisal letter for the film collection of late 1960’s film distributor Creative Film Society, stated that “Any student researching the rise of the independent and experimental American film in the 1960s and 1970s would find this collection invaluable, and it is unlikely that a collection of this scope exists elsewhere. It is in many ways a tribute to a filmmaking experience that has disappeared.”
Organized by Robert Pike, the first person to write a dissertation on avant-garde films from the West Coast, and later by his wife Angie Pike, the Creative Film Society collection was a wide-ranging, idiosyncratic assortment of non-commerical films and comic and animated shorts. Tonight we feature selections from the CFS collection, a mix of visionary student work, rarities and more canonical films made in Los Angeles, ranging from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Furies ((1977, 35mm (orig. 16mm), color, sound, 3min.)) Directed by Sara Petty
Carnival ((ca.1955, 16mm, color, sound, 8min.)) Directed by Donald Bevis, Jim May and Herb Bertel
The Further Adventures of Uncle Sam ((1970, 35mm, color, sound, 12 min.)) Directed by Dale Case and Robert Mitchell
One Hundred and Eight Movements ((19XX, 16mm, color, sound, 7min.)) Directed by Peggy Wolff
The Unicycle Race ((1966, 35mm, color, sound, 7.5min.) ) Directed by Robert Swarthe
Microsecond ((1970, 16mm, color, 5min.) ) Directed by Dan McLaughlin
The Towers ((1955, 16mm, color, 13min.)) Directed by William Hale
Gumbasia ((1955, 16mm, color, 3min.)) Directed by Art Clokey
The Critic ((1963, 35mm, color, sound, 4min.)) Directed by Ernie Pintoff
Mobile Static ((1969, 16mm, color, 6min.)) Directed by Helmut Schultz
Waiting ((1952, 16mm, color, sound, 12min.)) Directed by Flora Mock
Wu Ming ((1977, 16mm, color, silent 24fps, 17min.)) Directed by James Whitney
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE
1931, Warner Bros., 97 min, USA, Dir: Rouben Mamoulian
Although it’s not as nuanced as the later Spencer Tracy version, many people prefer this pre-Code shocker. Fredric March won a Best Actor Oscar for his performance, going way over the top with facial tics and bestial mannerisms in his Hyde persona, coming off like an urbane, simian werewolf with the gift of speech. Miriam Hopkins is the unfortunate barmaid Ivy, and Rose Hobart is Muriel, Dr. Jekyll’s devoted fiancée. Director Rouben Mamoulian and cinematographer Karl Struss make revolutionary use of the camera, doing things way ahead of their time in movement, point of view and editing, endowing many sequences with a fluid feel in what is essentially a set-bound piece. The characters of Muriel (Beatrix in the Tracy version) and her father did not appear in Stevenson’s original story, but were invented later by playwright T.R. Sullivan in an 1887 stage adaptation.
Doin' It on Tape: Video from the Woman's Building
Alexandra Juhasz and artist Jerri Allyn co-host this screening that features video artworks, public service announcements and documentary footage from the Woman's Building and the L.A. Women's Video Center. The LAWVC was cofounded at the WB by Nancy Angelo, Candace Compton, and Annette Hunt in 1976 and joined by Jerri Allyn in 1977. Featured artists include: Nancy Angelo, Candace Compton, Annette Hunt, Cheri Gaulke, Starr Goode, Suzanne Lacy, Leslie Labowitz-Starus, Susan Mogul, Sheila Ruth, Jane Thurmond, and more . . .
Dream States: The avant-garde of the 1940s and 1950s
The American Avant-Garde film started coming into its own in Los Angeles during and after World War II. At first influenced by several key films from Europe, particularly Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet, along with influences from psychoanalysis and surrealism, the filmmakers often invoked dream states and elements of Surrealism. We start our series with the classic Maya Deren film, Meshes of the Afternoon, generally considered the seminal American Avant-Garde film, made on North Kings Road above the Sunset Strip. A pair of other canonical films also were crafted here, Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks and Man Ray’s Juliet. And Alfred Hitchcock asked Salvador Dali to craft a surreal sequence for the film Spellbound. But beyond these lay a further range of works, not as well known, but equally daring.
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943, 16mm, b/w, 14min.) Directed by Maya Deren
Spellbound, Salvador Dali directed sequence (1945, 3 min.) Directed by Salvador Dali and Alfred Hitchcock
Fireworks (1947, 16mm or 35mm, b/w, sound, 15min.) Directed by Kenneth Anger
Juliet (ca.1940, 16mm, silent, 3.5min.) Directed by Man Ray
On the Edge (1949, 16mm, b/w, sound, 6min., restored print from the Academy Film Archive) Directed by Curtis Harrington
Psyche (Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort, part 1) (1947, 16mm, color, sound, 25min.) Directed by Gregory Markopoulos
House of Cards (1947, 16mm, b/w, sound, 16min.) Directed by Joseph Vogel
What is a Man (1958, 16mm, color, sound, 9min.) Directed by Sara Kathryn Arledge
EVIL ROY SLADE
1972, Universal, 97 min, USA, Dir: Jerry Paris
"Your ruby red lips taste like prairie dust." Jerry Paris ("The Dick Van Dyke Show") directs this hilariously bonkers made-for-TV cult classic, with John Astin starring as Evil Roy Slade, the teddybear-toting "meanest villain in the West" who falls for and is convinced to live the straight life of a family man by sweet schoolteacher Betsy Potter (Pamela Austin). But Roy’s criminal past catches up to him, and the egomaniacal singing Marshal Bing Bell (Dick Shawn) starts to pursue him. With an all-star cast that includes Mickey Rooney as railroad tycoon Nelson L. Stool, Milton Berle as Betsy's reluctant cousin Foss, and Dom DeLuise as pacifist psychologist Logan Delp.
THE FALLEN IDOL
In one of his finest performances, Ralph Richardson plays a butler who is idolized by eight-year-old Bobby Henrey. Drawn into the butler's tangled personal life during a weekend when his parents are away, the boy learns that Richardson is accused of having murdered his wife. The screenplay is by Graham Greene from his story The Basement Room, and the film marks the first of three collaborations between Greene and director Carol Reed. 1948, UK, 35mm, 95 minutes. directed by Carol Reed; written by Graham Greene; starring Ralph Richardson, Michèle Morgan, Jack Hawkins, Bernard Lee, Dora Bryan
Film/Music/Forms – Early Abstractions of the 1940s and 1950s
Another strain of experimental filmmaking in Los Angeles, predating the War but continuing and expanding after it, was the abstract film, usually (but not always) created through animation. Other examples evolve from a dance film tradition but chose to use the human figure as an abstract form.
Radio Dynamics (1942, 35mm, color, silent, 4 min.) Directed by Oskar Fischinger
Film Exercises #4 and #5 (ca.1945, 16mm, color, sound, 13min.) Directed by John Whitney and James Whitney
Introspection (1947, 16mm, color, sound, 8 min) Directed by Sara Kathryn Arledge
Mahzel (ca.1949, 16mm, b/w, sound, 3min.) Directed by John Whitney
Prelude (1950, 16mm, color, sound, 3min.) Directed by Curt Opliger
Phantasmagoria (1949, b/w, silent, 4min.) Directed by Curt Opliger
Color Fragments (1948, 16mm, color, silent, 11min.) Directed by Elwood Decker
Crystals (1951, 16mm, color, silent 24fps, 2.5min.) Directed by Elwood Decker
Sophisticated Vamp (1951/1958, 16mm, color, sound, 4 min.) Directed by Lynn Fayman
Yes and No (1957, 16mm, color, 2min.) Directed by Dan McLaughlin
Title sequence from Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958, 3 min., 35mm) Directed by John Whitney and Saul Bass
Yantra (1957, 16mm, color, 8 min.) Directed by James Whitney
Paper Moon (1949, 16mm, color, sound, 4min.) Directed by Flora Mock
Moonlight Sonata (1948, color, sound, 7.5 min.) Directed by Frank Collins and Donald Meyer
FILMS BY PAUL CLIPSON & MUSIC BY TASHI WADA
Paul Clipson and Tashi Wada present a performance of their ongoing film and music collaboration. Clipson’s largely improvised and in-camera edited films employ multiple exposures, dissolves and macro imagery, that bring to light subconscious preoccupations and unexpected visual forms. Wada’s recent work focuses on sound perception as a basis for direct listening experiences.
The Forgotten Space
2010/color/112 min./digital
Scr/dir: Allan Sekula & Noël Burch.
This new essay film by Allan Sekula and Noël Burch looks at everyday people whose role in the global economy goes largely undocumented: displaced farmers and villagers in Holland and Belgium, underpaid truck drivers in Los Angeles, tent city occupants in Ontario, California, seafarers aboard mega-ships shuffling between Asia and Europe, factory workers and Filipino maids in China. Drawing from interviews, archival materials and footage from films such as Josef von Sternberg’s The Salvation Hunters, The Forgotten Space offers a lucid and lyrical portrait of worker’s conditions, the inhuman scale of sea trade, the imbalance of international trade and the secret lives of port cities. Sekula and Burch closely track the seemingly minor details obscured by the pervasive illusion of an interconnected, “flat” world economy. The film intermingles Sekula’s incisive commentary with astounding vistas of industry—from cavernous factory floors to crowded cityscapes—and intimate first-person testimonies.
Over forty years, Sekula’s photography and writing has focused on the conditions of laborers and The Forgotten Space is based upon his book and exhibition project Fish Story. Burch, an author of such seminal works of cinematic scholarship as Theory of Film Practice and To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese, is co-director with Thom Andersen of Red Hollywood and, with Sekula, of Reagan Tape, which will be screened as part of the exhibition Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981 at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The Forgotten Space won a Special Orizonti Jury Prize at the 2010 Venice Film Festival. “I'm sure that I learned a lot more from The Forgotten Space than I did from any other feature that I saw last year, fiction or nonfiction... The film's most haunting and persistent image is the multicolored and anonymous rectangular steel containers loaded on the ships, evoking giant versions of children's building blocks while never betraying what their actual contents might be—an apt illustration of the concealments and shiny surfaces of the globalized economy itself.”—Jonathan Rosenbaum.
Fragrance (1991)
Directed by Gay Abel-Bey
When George visits his family before heading off to the Vietnam War, he is confronted by the conflicting ideals of his veteran father, who encourages his patriotism, and his militant brother, who urges him to stay home in protest. The complex issue of whether African Americans should be fighting for justice at home or abroad is registered most poignantly in the youngest son Bobby, a schoolboy torn between the political allegiances of his father and older brothers.
Producer/Screenwriter: G. Abel-Bey. Cinematographer: Steven S. Poitras. Editor: G. Abel-Bey, S. Torriano Berry. Cast: Fumilayo, Leslie Rainey, Roy Fegan, Raymond Dunmore, Tony Ginn.
Digital video, transferred from ¾” videotape, b/w, 38 min.
FRANKENSTEIN
1931, Universal, 70 min, USA, Dir: James Whale
"A Monster Science Created – But Could Not Destroy!" Boris Karloff had appeared in more than 75 films before FRANKENSTEIN turned him almost overnight into a screen legend. His performance here - anguished, eloquent, wordless - remains one of the most hauntingly powerful in all cinema. With Colin Clive, Edward Van Sloan, Dwight Frye.
GIORGIO MORODER'S "METROPOLIS"
The legendary rockin’ alternate version of Fritz Lang’s silent sci-fi classic, on the big screen for the first time in almost thirty years! In 1981, electronic music pioneer/three-time Oscar-winning composer Giorgio Moroder began a years-long endeavor to restore Metropolis, the very first attempt since the film’s original 1920s release. During the process, Moroder gave the film a controversial new score, which included pop songs from some of the biggest stars of the early MTV era (Pat Benatar, Billy Squier, Freddie Mercury, Bonnie Tyler, Adam Ant, Jon Anderson and more!) Missing footage was also re-edited back into the film, intertitles were removed and replaced with subtitles, and sound effects/color tinting were added, creating an all new experience, and an all-new film. But for more than a quarter century, Moroder’s Metropolis has remained out of circulation, until now. Utilizing one of the few remaining prints available, Kino Lorber has created a brand-new HD transfer in the best possible quality — just as it was seen in its August 1984 release!
Dir. Fritz Lang, 1927/1984, HD presentation, 82 min.
Greatest Cartoons Ever
The day after Christmas has always been a big day for releasing movies, as many families are looking for something to do after all the presents have been opened and all the parties are over. This year, on December 26th, the Alex Film Society will be presenting our 2nd Annual, family oriented special event that provides a really great alternative to the other pre-packaged Hollywood extravaganzas.
THE GREATEST CARTOONS EVER! showcases some of the very best theatrical cartoons from the movies' Golden Age, featuring iconic characters like Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Popeye, Betty Boop, Donald and Daffy, even the original Superman, projected in 35mm on the big screen at the Alex Theatre.
Animation historian and author Jerry Beck and producer Frank Gladstone have programmed a hugely entertaining cinematic trip back to a time when animated cartoons were more than an opening act; they were often the most popular part of going to the movies.
Harvest: 3,000 Years
Directed by Haile Gerima
Director Haile Gerima’s first feature work to be set in Africa employs visions of his native Ethiopia to construct a post-colonial allegory of class exploitation. Filmed in the tumultuous days following the overthrow of Haile Selassie, the portrait of an abject peasant family toiling under the scornful eye of a wealthy landowner exhibits the spontaneity of a documentary. But it also displays the assuredness and authority of a master storyteller in the sweep of its conceptual rigor and moral stand.
We are exposed to several characters, as it were, without introduction. They are members of a poor family that rise and begin tending cattle and plowing fields. Their feudal lord, a Western-attired tyrant, barks orders and criticism from a seat on his shaded front porch. Another figure, meagerly dressed, calls out insults to the landowner. These almost archetypal figures take on more specific identities as we learn that the seeming madman once owned property now expropriated and held by the landowner, and that although the peasant family may toil dutifully, its members seethe with memories and visions of another way of life. In time, a critique of modern Ethiopia (and by implication, neocolonial Africa) emerges that criticizes coming political reconfigurations as just the latest way in which others may now exploit the land and the poor.
Gerima unfolds several loosely connected episodes (indeed, the “action” of the film often seems trained on an ever-more subtle understanding of certain facts of daily life, rather than on a plot), but the film also employs freewheeling shifts in register, such that political speeches in public spaces contrast with exclamatory addresses to the camera, and verbal abuse of workers alternates with fairly Buñuelian images of human beings being driven by a whip, with no qualification of the “reality” of any situation, all to the accompaniment of an evocative musical soundscape. When the “plot” finally offers its fulfillment, the effect is devastating. In this early work, Gerima strove for something more than an individual story, achieving a bracing polemic and an impassioned narrative of bleak and haunting beauty.
Producer/Screenwriter: H. Gerima. Cinematographer: Eliot Davis. Editor: Phillip Kuretsky. Cast: Kasu Asfaw, Gebru Kasa, Worke Kasa. 16mm, b/w, 150 min.
THE HAUNTED HOUSE
Buster Keaton is a bank teller who becomes involved in a hold-up, counterfeiters, and a theatrical troupe posing as spooks in a haunted house. 1921, 21 mins.
HAUNTED SPOOKS
The action in Haunted Spooks is sparked by Harold's romantic problems. The opening sequence has him disappointed in love and trying, with notable lack of success, to commit suicide. Eventually he marries a pretty girl (Mildred Davis, who would marry Lloyd in real life three years later and remain his wife until her death in 1969). The couple moves into a mansion that is spooked... The movie began filming on August 9, 1919 and halted on the 23rd of that month due to an accident. Lloyd was posing for publicity photos, and a prop bomb exploded in his hand. He lost two fingers, his face was badly burned and he was temporarily blinded. In subsequent films, he is usually seen wearing gloves. After four months of recovering the film resumed on January 5, 1920 through the 25th. There was very little public knowledge about Lloyd's fingers, but people knew of the accident. Lloyd wanted it that way because he did not want people to watch his films for sympathy or curiosity, but to watch his films "because they were good, laughable, and delightful comedies"
THE HAUNTING
1963, Warner Bros., 112 min, USA, Dir: Robert Wise
"Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone…" Paranormal researcher Richard Johnson leads a team of clairvoyants (Julie Harris, Claire Bloom) to determine if the notorious, bad karma-filled Hill House is truly haunted. What he doesn’t bargain for is intensely neurotic Harris developing an unhealthy sensitivity to the mansion’s evil-charged atmosphere. Based on Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House, this is one of the all-time classics of the genre. In supernatural CinemaScope! With Russ Tamblyn.
HORROR OF DRACULA
1958, Warner Bros., 82 min, UK, Dir: Terenece Fisher
Director Terence Fisher and screenwriter Jimmy Sangster’s stripped-to-the-basics, expertly paced take on Bram Stoker’s popular bloodsucker remains one of the most satisfying, just plain exciting Gothic horror films ever made. From Christopher Lee’s revelatory, broodingly romantic performance as Dracula (introducing a sexual frisson to the proceedings) to Fisher’s masterful direction, from Peter Cushing’s Professor Van Helsing to Jack Asher’s atmosphere-drenched cinematography and James Bernard’s superb score, this is perfection. One of Hammer’s most enduring masterpieces! Discussion between films with Bela Lugosi Jr., publisher and artist Kerry Gammill, editor and screenwriter Sam F. Park, writer Robert Tinnell and filmmaker Mike Hill.
The Horse (1973)
Directed by Charles Burnett
In this haunting coming-of-age tale that its director, Charles Burnett, has described as a “kind of allegory of the South,” an African American boy gently tends to a horse that is to be shot as a group of white men passively look on. Burnett artfully employs a sparse lyricism, juxtaposing the stillness of the rural setting against the disquiet imbued by the impending violence.
Producer: Charles Burnett. Screenwriter: Charles Burnett. Cinematographer: Ian Conner. Editor: Charles Burnett. Cast: Gordon Houston, Maury Wright, Gary Morrin, Roger Collins, George Williams. 16mm, color, 14 min.
Hour Glass (1971)
Directed by Haile Gerima
A young African American male rethinks his role as a basketball player for white spectators as he begins reading the works of Third World theoreticians like Frantz Fanon, and contemplates the work of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Angela Davis. Highly metaphoric rather than realistic, Haile Gerima’s “Project One” (an early student film project at UCLA) visualizes through montage the process of coming to Black consciousness.
Producer: Haile Gerima. Screenwriter: Haile Gerima. Cinematographer: Haile Gerima, Larry Clark. Editor: Haile Gerima. Cast: Mel Rosier. Digital video, b/w & color, 14 min.
I & I: An African Allegory (1979)
Directed by Ben Caldwell
Director Ben Caldwell designed I & I as a “résumé piece” to showcase his skills in experimental filmmaking, dramatic filmmaking and documentary. Drawing from Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel, Two Thousand Seasons, Caldwell meditates on reciprocity and on the concept of “I and I” which postulates no division between people, whereas the splitting of “you” from “I” is an invention of the devil designed to brew trouble in the world.
Producer/Screenwriter/Cinematographer/Editor: B. Caldwell. Cast: Pamela B. Jones, Al Cowart, Marcia Bullock, Pearl Collins, Byron Simmons. 16mm, color, 32 min.
Illusions (1982)
Directed by Julie Dash
Set in Hollywood during WWII, Illusions tells the story of Mignon Duprée, a studio executive passing for white, and Ester Jeeter, an African American singer hired to dub the voice of a white movie star. The film is a gripping critique of the power of the movies to shape perception as it explores the multiple illusions created by Hollywood and the very illusion of racial identity.
Producer/Screenwriter: J. Dash. Cinematographer: Ahmed El Maanouni. Editor: J. Dash, Charles Burnett. Cast: Lonette McKee, Rosanne Katon, Ned Bellamy, Jack Radar, Fernando Lundi Faust. 16mm, b/w, 36 min. In-person: Filmmaker Julie Dash.
Il Posto
Directed by Ermanno Olmi
Under pressure from his nagging, working-class parents, the dutiful Domenico applies for a civil service job. Among the applicants, he encounters the fetching Antonietta and strikes up a charmingly awkward relationship. Whatever dewy-eyed nostalgia might typically accompany such adolescent milestones is dispelled by director Ermanno Olmi who frames Domenico’s entry into adulthood against the drudgery and resignation of his fellow office drones.
Producer: Alberto Soffientini. Screenwriter: Ermanno Olmi. Cinematographer: Lamberto Caimi. Editor: Carla Colombo. Cast: Loredana Detto, Sandro Panzeri, Tullio Kezich, Mara Revel, Guido Chiti. 35mm, b/w, in Italian with English subtitles, 120 min.
Industry Town: The Avant-Garde and Hollywood
Many experimental works have explicitly played with the primary film industry (Hollywood and beyond), parodying its forms or structures of manufacture or utilizing images from classic and not-so-classic films as the raw material for new creations.
The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra (1928, 16mm (orig. 35mm), b/w, silent, 11min.) Directed by Robert Florey, Slavko Vorkapich and Gregg Toland
Puce Moment (1949, 16mm, 6 min.) Directed by Kenneth Anger
The Loves of Franistan (1949, 16mm, b/w, sound, 9min.) Directed by Jules Schwerin
The Death of the Gorilla (1966, 16mm, color, 16min., restored print from the Academy Film Archive) Directed by Peter Mays
6-18-67 (1967, 5 min) Directed by George Lucas
Title (1971, 16mm, b/w & color, sound, 20min.) Directed by John Baldessari
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1975, 16mm (or video), color, sound, 2min.) Directed by Jack Goldstein
Cue Rolls (1974, 16mm, colour, sound, 5:30) Directed by Morgan Fisher
Zebra Skin Clutch (1977-78, 2:03, b&w) Directed by Cynthia Maughan
Based on Romance (1979, 24:15) Directed by Norman Yonemoto and Bruce Yonemoto
THE INNOCENTS
1961, 20th Century Fox, 100 min, UK, Dir: Jack Clayton
Director Jack Clayton also directed British New Wave gems ROOM AT THE TOP and THE PUMPKIN EATER, but his most famous film remains this goosepimple-inducing, shuddery adaptation of Henry James’ classic ghost story, “Turn Of The Screw.” Deborah Kerr is a repressed governess who is convinced that the ghosts of the previous governess and the woman’s equally dead, cruel lover, Quint (Peter Wyngarde), haunt the mansion and grounds of her innocent young charges (Martin Stephens, Pamela Franklin). Reality, superstition and warped psychology collide in this riveting, brilliantly photographed jewel of a film (lensed by future horror director Freddie Francis).
"Insight": Experimental Theater of Hollywood Television
Created, produced and hosted by Paulist priest Father Ellwood E. Kieser (1929–2000), the landmark anthology television series “Insight” debuted in the 1960-61 season and aired nationally in syndication for well over two decades. Top Hollywood artists such as Rod Serling, Ida Lupino, Bob Newhart, Patty Duke, William Peter Blatty, Michael Crichton and Martin Sheen contributed their talents to the series, drawn by the show’s reputation for stretching the creative boundaries of television. Fondly remembered for its “Twilight Zone”-esque tone, “Insight” received critical acclaim and won numerous Emmy Awards for addressing difficult social issues and humanist themes, often with black humor or stark realism.
UCLA Film & Television Archive is pleased to join Paulist Productions in celebrating this lost television cult-classic with a panel discussion, a series highlight reel and a screening of the star-studded episodes “Locusts Have No King” (1965) and “The Poker Game” (1969).
In-person: Rev. Eric Andrews, President, Paulist Productions, and actor Martin Sheen (schedule permitting).
"Insight: Locusts Have No King" (1965)
Directed by Ted Post
In this noir-tinged episode, a businessman is drugged and jailed on morals charges as he stands against political corruption in his municipality.
Screenwriter: Gilbert Ralston. Cast: William Shatner, Geraldine Brooks. DigiBeta, b/w, Approx 30 min.
"Insight: The Poker Game" (1969)
Directed by Ralph Senensky
A friendly card game turns brutal as an idealistic hippie reveals the prejudices, hang-ups and dark hidden frailties among a group of middle-aged men.
Screenwriter: Jack Hanrahan. Cast: Ed Asner, Bill Bixby, Jeffrey Hunter, Beau Bridges. DigiBeta, b/w, Approx 30 min.
ISLAND OF LOST SOULS
1932, Universal, 70 min, USA, Dir: Erle C. Kenton
Director Erle C. Kenton adapted H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau into one of the classic Pre-Code horror shockers. Originally released by Paramount to compete with Universal’s monster menagerie, ironically Universal now owns the rights. Seaman Richard Arlen is marooned on vivisectionist Charles Laughton’s private isle, where he has developed a race of subhumans from various wild animals in his "House of Pain." An old-school chiller that remains scary to this day. Bela Lugosi is the ringleader of the beast-men. With Kathleen Burke as Lota, the Panther Woman. "…a remarkably powerful film." – Time Out (London). New Digital Restoration of the Uncut Theatrical Version! Introduction to the double feature by John Landis.
Janie Geiser: "Nervous Films," Secret Stories
“Geiser gives voice to the reaches of the unconscious, pointing to the abandoned splendor that exists prior to the rules of society and language.” —RES
World Premiere
Janie Geiser’s new series of experimental films—Ghost Algebra (2009), Kindless Villain (2010), The Floor of the World (2010) and Ricky (2011)—weave textures of overlaid visual and aural elements haunted by lonely, frightened or sinister figures. Sad women, ambiguous children and weightless ghosts hover between life and death, light and shadow, porous earth and uncertain skies. Geiser brings collage to a new level, as a space traversed by cut-out silhouettes, purloined drawings and fragments of black-and-white films. The image trembles, is cropped, elusive, a forbidden sight snatched from darkness; the spectator is invited to trek though the suggested layers of meaning as through the intricate foliage of an enchanted forest. Also showing: the world premiere of a surprise film.
In person: Janie Geiser
JERRY BECK'S CARTOON MONSTER MASH 2011
For the fourth year in a row, Cinefamily’s resident animation historian Jerry Beck (CartoonBrew.com) will be programming his “monster mash-up” of classic cartoon monsters, spooks and witches — from Casper the Friendly Ghost and Witch Hazel through TV’s Groovie Goolies and Milton the Monster, all on the big screen using rare 35mm and 16mm film prints that range from ghoulishly red Eastmancolor or gorgeously garish Technicolor! We will also be running a small selection of creepy, fantastic independent films, including Marv Newland’s Sing Beast Sing (1980) and Ian Emes’ The Beard (1978). Be prepared, foolish mortals! This selection of hellish tricks and horrific treats will more than satisfy your animated sweet tooth (err, fangs!)
JUST BEFORE DAWN, 1981, Picturmedia, 90 min. Dir. Jeff Lieberman. The director of SQUIRM brings us this entry in the Woodsploitation subgenre made famous by DELIVERANCE, SOUTHERN COMFORT, and HUNTER'S BLOOD. This time, a group of young campers find themselves face to face with a murderous mountain man and angry hillbillies. Beautiful U.K. Print! 8 Extra Minutes!
KINEMA NIPPON PRESENTS NIPPON RE-READ – RADICAL FRAGMENTS AND ABSTRACTIONS FROM JAPAN I & II
A spectrum of experimental moving image works from Japan, ranging from late 60s to contemporary works, are presented in Kinema Nippon’s two-part program. Although varying greatly in their formal and aesthetic concerns, the works all rigorously reexamine the everyday through their respective experiments and innovations in their medium. Kinema Nippon is a series of fund-raising screenings that present curated programs of experimental films, video art and Japanese classics, held in several international cities in collaboration with local film and art institutions. By presenting film and video work to celebrate the visionary cinema of Japan, Kinema Nippon mobilizes the moving image as a catalyst for cultural awarenss and unity during this crucial time. All proceeds from the screening will go to disaster relief efforts.
LA AIR 2: RICK BAHTO
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. October’s resident, Rick Bahto, has an on-going series of films that are made in response to the work of other artists. During his residency, he will complete a project For Paul Clipson, dealing with aspects of the expansive body of Super 8 work from the filmmaker of that name. The screening will present this portion of Bahto’s films alongside the work of the artists to whom they are dedicated, with films and slide documentation of works by Karen Johannesen, Pablo Valencia, and Paul Clipson. He will also present films, slides, and audio documents of performances of the work of Mark So, including documentary footage of his performance of So’s work parallel to the earth (in the angles where the grass writing goes on), which was begun in mid-September and will continue on indefinitely.
LAND OF THE PHARAOHS
1955, Warner Bros., 144 min, USA, Dir: Howard Hawks
This truly phenomenal CinemaScope fantasia of ancient Egypt features pharaoh Jack Hawkins, who is obsessed with building an eternal monument to his glory, while nympho wife Joan Collins (at her slinky, scheming best) tries to orchestrate his murder. Stunning technical credits all around, with a script co-written by William Faulkner (!), and sumptuous art direction by the legendary Alexander Trauner. "When I first saw it as a kid, LAND OF THE PHAROAHS became my favorite film." - Martin Scorsese. Discussion following with Oscar- and Tony-nominated costume designer Julie Weiss and other guests TBA, moderated by production designer John Muto.
Love at First Bite (1979)
Directed by Stan Dragoti
When the Romanian government confiscates his castle to turn it into a training center for gymnasts, Dracula packs up and heads to New York, where he takes up residence at the Plaza Hotel, discovers the wonders of blood banks, and woos fashion model Cindy Sondheim with some fancy disco moves, while Cindy's psychiatrist/boyfriend haplessly attempts to thwart Dracula's ambitions.
American International Pictures. Producer: Joel Freeman. Screenwriter: Robert Kaufman. Cinematographer: Edward Rosson. Editor: Allan Jacobs, Mort Fallick. Cast: George Hamilton, Susan Saint James, Richard Benjamin, Dick Shawn, Arte Johnson. 35mm, color, 96 min.
THE LOVES OF PHARAOH
1922, 100 min, Germany, Dir: Ernst Lubitsch
Featuring thousands of extras and spectacularly grandiose production design on Berlin backlots, THE LOVES OF PHARAOH rivals METROPOLIS as the most ambitious German production of the silent era, and was director Ernst Lubitsch's (THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER, TROUBLE IN PARADISE) last lavish German film before he left to work in Hollywood. Emil Jannings, international star and winner of the first "Best Actor" Oscar, plays Egyptian pharaoh Amenes, who must marry the daughter of the Ethiopian king (Paul Wegener, best known as director-star of THE GOLEM) to prevent war. Things get complicated when the pharaoh's adviser Ramphis (Harry Liedtke) sets his eye on the object of Amenes' affection, Theonis (silent era icon Dagny Servaes). For decades available only in fragments all over the European continent, this landmark film has been beautifully digitally restored and will be accompanied by the original symphonic orchestral score of acclaimed opera composer Eduard Kunneke.
MAD MONSTER PARTY
Generations of monster-loving kiddies (and nostalgic adults) have enjoyed this feature from the stop-motion animators of Rankin/Bass. Boris Karloff provides the voice and likeness for Baron Frankenstein, who announces his retirement, which sets off a competition among those who want to succeed him as leader of The Worldwide Organization of Monsters. Phyllis Diller is the voice and likeness of the Frankenstein monster's bride and other party guests include the monster itself, Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and the Invisible Man. Dir. Jules Bass---USA---1967---94 mins.
Miracle in Milan (Miracolo a Milano) (Italy, 1951)
Directed by Vittorio De Sica
An unusual injection of fantasy into the neo-realist vein, director Vittorio De Sica’s follow-up to Bicycle Thieves (based on a novel by Zavattini) presents a baby discovered in a cabbage patch who, with the help of a magic dove, grows up to lead a shantytown revolt against oil-driven industrialists. Tipping his hat to René Clair and Charlie Chaplin, De Sica offers a warm, delightful fairy tale.
Producer: Umberto Scarpelli. Based on a novel by Cesare Zavattini. Screenwriter: Cesare Zavattini, Vittorio De Sica. Cinematographer: G.R. Aldo. Editor: Eraldo Da Roma. Cast: Francesco Golisano, Brunella Bova, Emma Gramatica, Paolo Stoppa, Guglielmo Barnabò. 35mm, b/w, in Italian with English subtitles, 101 min.
The Music Box (1932)
Directed by James Parrott
This Academy Award-winning short depicts the pair attempting to move a piano up a large flight of steps.
Hal Roach Studios, MGM. Producer: Hal Roach. Screenwriter: H. M. Walker. Cinematographer: Len Powers. Editor: Richard Currier. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Gladys Gale, Billy Gilbert, William Gillespie. HDCam b/w, 29 min.
MY BROTHER'S WEDDING
Directed by Charles Burnett
When we first see Pierce Mundy (Everette Silas) in director Charles Burnett’s feature follow-up to Killer of Sheep (1977) he’s on the move. Making his way on a summer afternoon down a cracked sidewalk in South Central Los Angeles, he’s heading to see the mother of his best friend about to return from prison. A voice from behind catches him up short: “Hey, Pierce!” In the long shot that introduces him, Pierce turns mid-stride, looks to the woman calling him and in a single fluid move, looks away, exasperated, back toward his intended destination. “Come see my sister’s baby!” Though he’s tall and lean, we feel the petulant weight in his every step as he retreats in the direction he’s just come.
This sequence, though brief, deftly establishes the major themes of My Brother’s Wedding, and the power of Burnett’s unadorned style. Pulled in opposing directions by loyalty to family and friends, Pierce feels suspended in place. Recently laid off from his factory job, he marks time working at his family’s dry cleaning store under the watchful eye of his mother (Jesse Holmes) and swapping loaded jabs with his brother’s upper-middle-class fiancée (Gaye Shannon-Burnett). In the face of a diminished future, the return of Pierce’s best friend, Soldier (Ronald E. Bell), holds out a nostalgic escape to childhood, albeit one burdened by the decimation of his generation through violence and incarceration. “Where is everyone?” Soldier asks of the old crew. “It’s you and me,” Pierce replies.
While the contour of Pierce’s situation is familiar, Burnett fleshes it out with richly observed detail. Shooting on location, Burnett doesn’t simply capture locales; he reveals, through incidents and episodes both humorous and poignant, the network of relationships that pull and tug at the lives on screen. The revelation of character becomes seamlessly bound to the revelation of community. When, in the film’s finale, Pierce once again faces a choice of which direction to turn, both literally and metaphorically, his decision resonates well beyond his personal history.
After a troubled production, My Brother’s Wedding premiered at New Directors/New Films in 1984 in a 115-minute rough-cut version but it wasn’t released theatrically until 1991. More than a decade later, Burnett cut 30 minutes from the film for its 2007 re-release reflecting his original intentions. The shorter director’s cut is the version being presented in this series.
Producer: Charles Burnett, Gaye Shannon-Burnett. Screenwriter: Charles Burnett. Cinematographer: Charles Burnett. Editor: Tom Pennick. Cast: Everette Silas, Jessie Holmes, Gaye Shannon-Burnett, Dennis Kemper, Ronald E. Bell. Digital video, color, 82 min.
Preceded by the short A Little Off The Mark, with filmmaker Robert Wheaton in person.
Naomi Uman: The Ukrainian Time Machine
“Like a crochet needle swiftly passing through loops of silk and wool… Naomi Uman’s camera lives amongst the people, homes and villages she films.” —Vancouver Cinematheque
In 2006, experimental filmmaker Naomi Uman returned to the land her great-grandparents had left a hundred years earlier. Living among the babushky of a tiny Ukrainian village, she discovered a lifestyle that didn’t seem to have changed much in a century, and set out to make a series of “precise miniatures of a rural life that’s fading” (Robert Flaherty Seminar) shot in 16mm, while keeping a video diary. In Kalendar (2008, 16mm, silent, 11 min.), a series of exquisite snapshots examine the meanings of the months in the Ukrainian calendar. Videodiary 2-1-2006 to Present (2011, video, 83 min.) reframes the previous elements into a larger narrative struggling with issues of identity, gender, and her intimate connection with the history of Judaism and global immigration.
In person: Naomi Uman
Night of the Demon
1957/b&w/95 min.
Scr: Charles Bennett, Hal E. Chester; dir: Jacques Tourneur; w/ Dana Andrews, Peggy Cummins, Niall MacGinnis
An anthropologist investigates a devil worshipper who commands a deadly demon. Please note: We will be screening the film's longer, British-release version.
Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz) (2010)
Directed by Patricio Guzman
The uniquely arid conditions of Chile's Atacama Desert make it an ideal location for both viewing the night sky through its crystal clear atmosphere and hunting for indigenous artifacts, perfectly preserved inits dry earth. But the astronomers and archeologists are not the only ones at work in the Atacama, which has become a pilgrimage site, of sorts, for the relatives of political prisoners who sift the sands for remains that were dumped in the dessert by the Pinochet regime, which operated a death camp in the region. Through interviews and images, illuminating and haunting, Guzman builds subtle, surprising links between these seekers in the stars and sands. The result is an emotionally compelling and intellectually dazzlingly meditation on our constantly shifting relationship with the past.
Producer: Meike Martens, Renate Sachse. Screenplay: Patricio Guzman. Cinematographer: Katell Djian. Editor: Patricio Guzman. HDcam, Color, 90 min.
Obsession (Ossessione)
Directed by Luchino Visconti
Director Luchino Visconti employs the story of lust and greed at the pulpy heart of James M. Cain’s novel, “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” as a framework to present the poverty and decay of the Po River Valley in the starkest terms. In so doing, he earned the ire of the fascist government, which banned the film, and set the terms for the neo-realist movement to follow.
Based on a novel by James M. Cain. Screenwriter: L. Visconti, Mario Alicata, Giuseppe De Santis, Gianni Puccini. Cinematographer: Aldo Tonti, Domenic Scala. Editor: Mario Serandrei. Cast: Clara Calamai, Massimo Girotti, Dhia Cristiani, Elio Marcuzzo, Vittorio Duse.
35mm, b/w, in Italian with English subtitles, 139 min.
OUTRAGE
Several subsidiary bosses gather at a lavish lunch with “Mr. Chairman,” the head of the ruling Sanno-kai crime organization which controls the Greater Tokyo area. Sannokai underboss Kato warns Ikemoto about his overt dealings with family outsider Murase, an old-timer with whom he recently made a pact in prison. In an effort to ease Mr. Chairman’s suspicions, Ikemoto asks fellow boss Otomo to do his dirty work for him by making a minor but obvious move against Murase.
Otomo’s actions are the start of a ruthless series of conflicts and betrayals. Before long, several yakuza clans are out for blood in their constant battle for power and money. The rival bosses fight to rise through the ranks by scheming and making short-lived allegiances. In this corrupt world where there are no heroes, it’s Bad Guy vs. Bad Guy in a spiraling outrage of gang warfare…
Paisan (Paisà)
Directed by Roberto Rossellini
One of director Roberto Rossellini’s earliest narrative experiments is this six-episode account of Italy’s liberation that charts the horrors, ironies and poignancies of war stretching from Sicily to the northern Po Valley. Cultures and languages collide as Allied soldiers, street urchins, Franciscan monks and partisans intermingle. The deceptively offhanded production underscores the natural confusion; the moments of human clarity register as revelation.
Producer: Roberto Rossellini. Screenwriter: Sergio Amidei, Klaus Mann, Federico Fellini, Alfred Hayes, Marcello Pagliero, Roberto Rossellini, Rod E. Geiger. Cinematographer: Otello Martelli. Editor: Eraldo Da Roma. Cast: Carmela Sazio, Robert Van Loon, Benjamin Emmanuel.
35mm, b/w, in Italian with English subtitles, 120 min.
Passing Through
Directed by Larry Clark
Eddie Warmack, an African American jazz musician, is released from prison for the killing of a white gangster. Not willing to play for the mobsters who control the music industry, including clubs and recording studios, Warmack searches for his mentor and grandfather, the legendary jazz musician Poppa Harris. Director Larry Clark's film theorizes that jazz is one of the purest expressions of African American culture, embodying the struggles of generations of Blacks going back to slavery times, but now hijacked by a white culture that brutally exploits jazz musicians for profit. The opening seven-minute credit sequence is accordingly an homage to jazz and jazz musicians, privileging the raw energy of the music, while the concert footage appears virtually abstractly as a riot of blues, reds and whites. The film repeatedly returns to scenes of various musicians improvising jazz, as well as flashback scenes (in black-and-white) in which Poppa teaches Warmack to play saxophone, leading a French critic to call Passing Through “the only jazz film in the history of cinema.”
It is the Africanism of Poppa, as the spiritual center of Passing Through, that ties together Black American jazz and the liberation movements of Africa and North America. In the early flashback sequences in sepia, Clarence Muse appears in African dress and teaches saxophone under the sky. Poppa teaches Warmack that the music comes from the soil, from the earth, leading Womack to bury his saxophone to improve his playing. The film’s final montage incorporates shots of African leaders with a close-up of Poppa’s eye and close-ups of Black hands holding the soil, thus semantically connecting jazz, Africa and the earth in one mystical union, and by extension justifying the liberation of the earth through violent struggle, whether in Africa or Los Angeles.
Clark completed the film while participating in the fellows program at the American Film Institute. The film’s world premiere took place at “Filmex,” the Los Angeles Film Festival in 1977, subsequently won a special jury prize at the Locarno Film Festival (Switzerland) and played film festivals in Edinburgh (1978), Perth (1978) and Moscow (1979).
Producer: L. Clark. Screenwriter: L. Clark, Ted Lange. Cinematographer: Roderick Young, George Geddis. Editor: Larry Clark. Cast: Nathaniel Taylor, Clarence Muse, Pamela Jones, Johnny Weathers, Della Thomas. 35mm, color, 111 min. In-person: filmmaker Larry Clark and actor Ted Lange.
PENITENTIARY
Directed by Jamaa Fanaka
After being framed for the murder of a white biker, Martel “Too Sweet” Gordone is incarcerated in prison, where he learns to box himself to freedom. Shot in seven weeks primarily at the L.A. Lincoln Heights jail and partially financed through a New York State Council on the Arts grant, Penitentiary’s prison yard was filmed on UCLA’s back lot, behind Melnitz Hall. Leon Isaac Kennedy was first brought in as a producer, then offered himself as star when Glynn Turman (Cooley High) became unavailable. The film went on to become the most commercially successful film of the L.A. Rebellion.
If Passing Through and Bush Mama see the United States as a giant prison for African American males, then director Jamaa Fanaka’s Penitentiary depicts prison as a microcosm of Black America. Considered to be a late paradigmatic example of Blaxploitation, Penitentiary allegorizes African American life, seeing the prison system as a continual violent struggle against both external (the prison itself) and internal (fellow prisoners) forces, played out on the bodies of inmates, who are either sexual “sissies” (the exploited) or “beasts” (the exploiters). Within the conventions of exploitation cinema, whether the Blaxploitation, prison or boxing genre—the latter two categories having histories that go back to the early silent period—Fanaka visualizes the physical punishment of African American male bodies and the threat of rape that has been endemic to their existence since slavery days, and is still a fact of life in the present, both in prison and outside of it. Fanaka zooms in on the ritualistic establishment of pecking orders among African American gang members, carved out in blood on their bodies, to which in prison is added the continual threat of anal rape, violence and violent sex, contributing to their dehumanization. In a prison that is almost exclusively filled with Black inmates, Fanaka sketches out a crisis in African American masculinity, which though the result of white racism, now perpetuates itself almost exclusively through “Black on Black” crime, thus returning to one of the themes of the filmmaker’s Emma Mae.
Producer: Jamaa Fanaka. Screenwriter: Jamaa Fanaka. Cinematographer: Marty Ollstein. Editor: Betsy Blankett. Cast: Leon Isaac Kennedy, Thommy Pollard, Gloria Delaney, Donovan Womack, Hazel Spear. 35mm, color, 99 min. New print struck from a 35mm color reversal intermediate and the original 35mm track negative. In-person: filmmaker Jamaa Fanaka.
THE PIT, 1981, New World Pictures, 97 min. Dir. Lew Lehman. Lonely Jamie Benjamin is the butt of jokes and harassment - until he makes a discovery deep in the forest that enables him to exact violent revenge against those who have wronged him. One of the strangest horror films of the '80s.
The Pocketbook (1980)
Directed by Billy Woodberry
In the course of a botched purse-snatching, a boy comes to question the path of his life. Billy Woodberry’s second film, and first completed in 16mm, adapts Langston Hughes’ short story, “Thank You, Ma’am,” and features music by Leadbelly, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis.
Producer: Billy Woodberry. Screenwriter: Billy Woodberry. Cinematographer: Mario DeSilva, Gary Gaston, Charles Burnett. Editor: B. Woodberry. Cast: Ella “Simi” Nelson, Ray Cherry, David Jenkins, Al Williams, Christopher Thompson, Phillip Weatherspoon. 35mm, b/w, 13 min.
POWER & CONTROL: LSD IN THE 60's
Seminal gonzo documentary ARON RANEN'S (in person) peripatetic journey uncovers the secret history of psychedelics from legitimate experiments conducted at the Harvard Divinity School to the bizarre plans to dose unknowing Johns in a CIA run brothel. LSD was made illegal in 1966 right at of the height of the Anti-War and Counter-Culture Movements. Ranen's journeys to find out why? With RAM DASS and PAUL KRASSNER.
Plus two shorts:
BLACK HAIR (2006, 30m)
African American Women purchase roughly 80% of the wigs and extensions bought here in America, yet own practically no piece of this business. Ranen's investigative documentary looks into the Korean monopolization of the African American Beauty Supply Business and what some Black Americans are doing to take it back.
SEMANTIC WARRIOR (2011, 10m)
Sneak preview of Ranen's new compelling documentary on the life and times of attorney TONY SERRA, pot smoking social justice warrior. He was portrayed by JAMES WOODS in the Hollywood movie True Believer.
Proto-Ethnographic Works
“Downey’s insertion of himself into Yanomami life... questions the place of the observer of another culture.”
—Constance Penley
Presented as part of Pacific Standard Time
This anthropology-themed program surveys strategies used by video artists who disavow “objectivity” in exploring cultural experiences different from their own, and instead actively participate with their subjects. In The Singing Mute (1978), Juan Downey spends nine months with a Yanomami tribe in the Amazon. Other artists critique the outsider gaze—Terese Svoboda in Headhunters (1992), Sandra Kogut in What Do You Think People Think Brazil Is? (1990). Wendy Clarke’s Love Tapes (1974–88) invites 800 people to record thoughts about love, while Lowell Darling and Ilene Segalove befriend retired prizefighters-turned-Hollywood entertainers in The Cauliflower Alley Tapes, Part One (1976). In Rahime, Femme Kurde de Turquie (1979), a Kurdish villager recounts her trials in Istanbul to Nil Yalter and Nicole Croiset, who construct imagery to complement her story. Finally, Azian Nurudin’s What Does Pop Art, Pop Music, Pornography and Politics Have to Do with Real Life? (1990) is a Warhol remake exhorting us to pay closer attention to our surroundings.
In person: Nancy Buchanan, Kathy Rae Huffman, Azian Nurudin
Curated by Nancy Buchanan. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Exchange and Evolution: Worldwide Video Long Beach, 1974–1999 at the Long Beach Museum of Art, curated by Kathy Rae Huffman.
Rain (1978)
Directed by Melvonna Ballenger
Director Melvonna Ballenger’s Rain shows how awareness can lead to a more fulfilling life. In the film, a female typist goes from apathetic to empowered through the help of a man giving out political fliers on the street. Using John Coltrane’s song “After the Rain,” Ballenger’s narration of the film meditates on rainy days and their impact. The rain in this short film doesn’t signify defeat, but offers renewal and “a chance to recollect, a cool out.”
Producer/Screenwriter: M. Ballenger. Cast: Evlynne Braithwaite, Bernard Nicolas, Ijeoma Iloputaife, Michael Friend, Keith Williams. Digital video, transferred from ¾” videotape, b/w, 16 min.
RAY CHARLES - LIVE IN FRANCE 1961
2011, Reelin' in the Years Productions, 105 min, USA, Dir: David Peck
Lost for 50 years, these newly discovered concerts were filmed at the 1961 Antibes Jazz Festival in France and present Ray Charles in his prime with the original Raelettes and his legendary band (including David “Fathead” Newman and Hank Crawford.) These initial European concerts opened the door for Charles to become one of America’s most revered international stars. Produced by the Grammy-nominated filmmakers at Reelin' in the Years Productions, this compilation features original 16mm films that have been newly transferred and digitally restored. "Seeing and hearing Ray perform so brilliantly 50 years ago in France is an inspiration and reminds us just how gifted this man was and what an amazing and special talent he had. This film is a fantastic way for us to continue to celebrate Ray Charles and his beautiful legacy." - Jamie Foxx
Resistance: Stanton Kaye’s Georg and Bruce Lane’s unc.
Stanton Kaye’s legendary, award-winning Georg (1964) is an affecting, formally inventive narrative that follows a German émigré in America seeking to escape the encroaching militarism that threatens his family’s existence. The film unfolds as a series of diaristic sequences supposedly assembled after the protagonist’s death, as a found audiovisual document, a formal approach that was a great influence on Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary, and countless other films that followed.
In counterpoint to Kaye’s experimental verité-fiction, Bruce Lane’s distilled, three-minute epic unc.(1966) crystallizes a whole generation’s paranoia and disgust at old-fashioned American militarism and patriotism.
In person: Stanton Kaye, Bruce Lane
Georg (1964, 16mm, b/w, 50 min.) Directed by Stanton Kaye
unc. (1966, 16mm, color, 3min., restored print from the Academy Film Archive) Directed by Bruce Lane
RESURRECT DEAD: THE MYSTERY OF THE TOYNBEE TILES
Strangeness is afoot. Most people don't notice the hundreds of cryptic tiled messages about resurrecting the dead that have been appearing in city streets over the past three decades. But Justin Duerr does. For years, finding an answer to this long-standing urban mystery has been his obsession. He has been collecting clues that the tiler has embedded in the streets of major cities across the U.S. and South America. But as Justin starts piecing together key events of the past he finds a story that is more surreal than he imagined, and one that hits disturbingly close to home.
Rich (1982)
Directed by S. Torriano Berry
On the day of his high school graduation, an African American youth battles for self-determination as a convergence of forces, including his family and the neighborhood gang where he lives, attempt to shuttle him toward a future of lowered expectations. At once gritty and tender, the character study features an intimate scene shot chiaroscuro on location at the Watts Towers.
Producer: S. Torriano Berry. Screenwriter: S. Torriano Berry. Cinematographer: Iverson White. Editor: S. Torriano Berry. Cast: Steve T. Berry, Susann Akers, Haskell V. Anderson III, Krystoffer Fields, Joey Murray. 16mm, b/w, 22 min.
Sankofa
Directed by Haile Gerima
Powerful, moving and highly acclaimed, director Haile Gerima’s Sankofa is a masterpiece of cinema that has had a transformative impact on audiences since its release in 1993. This empowering film tells a story of slavery and of the African Diaspora from the perspective of the enslaved, challenging the romanticizing of slavery prevalent in American culture.
Sankofa was developed from 20 years of research into the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the experiences of African slaves in the New World. The film represents complex characters and empowering moments of resilience that assert humanity in the face of subjugation. Unlike Hollywood’s depiction of slavery, Gerima presents the often suppressed history of slave resistance and rebellion and represents the enslaved as agents of their own liberation.
The story begins with Mona (Oyafunmike Ogunlano), an African American model on a fashion shoot at the former slave castles in Cape Coast, Ghana. Mona undergoes a journey back in time and place to a slave plantation in North America where she becomes Shola, a house slave, and experiences the suffering of slavery firsthand. In becoming Shola and returning to her past culture and heritage, Mona is able to recover her lost slave identity and confront her ancestral experience. Shola’s interactions with her fellow slaves are marked with humanity and dignity, most notably with Shango (Mutabaruka), a rebellious field slave, and Nunu (Alexandra Duah), one of the few slaves to remember her life in Africa before being stolen by Europeans.
The film’s narrative structure follows the concept of “Sankofa,” an Akan word that signifies the recuperation of one’s past in order to comprehend the present and find one’s future.
Producer/Screenwriter/Editor: H. Gerima. Cinematographer: Augustin Cubano. Cast: Kofi Ghanaba, Oyafunmike Ogunlano, Alexandra Duah, Nick Medley, Mutabaruka. 35mm, color, 124 min.
SCREAM Festival 2011: Sounding Images
Co-presented with the Southern California Resource for Electro-Acoustic Music.
Electro-acoustic music merges seamlessly with electronically generated or enhanced imagery in this screening of 11 international works—a program that attests to the ongoing maturation of an electronic “inter-arts” that transcends disciplines, genres and geographies. Whether created through collaborations between artists and technicians at major art centers, or by digitally savvy individual artmakers in faraway outposts, these composites of sound and image share in common aesthetic imagination and skillful technique.
Selma, Lord, Selma (1999)
Directed by Charles Burnett
“Human progress,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. explained, “is neither automatic nor inevitable. … Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.” In director Charles Burnett’s film Selma, Lord, Selma, the youthful eyes of 11-year-old female protagonist Sheyann Webb is the lens in which we see the determined bravery and compassionate humanity that was the hallmark of the Civil Rights Movement.
Set against the backdrop of the racially tumultuous 1960s, Selma, Lord, Selma is based on Sheyann Webb and Rachel West Nelson’s memoir "Selma, Lord, Selma: Girlhood Memories of the Civil Rights Days" (1997). Produced by Walt Disney Pictures, the film premiered on the ABC network on Jan. 17, 1999, one day before King’s national holiday.
Chronicling the events leading up to the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches led by King and many notable Black and white civil rights leaders, Burnett’s film eloquently dramatizes African Americans’ fight to exercise their constitutional right to vote. Based on these historical events, including the horror of Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, the film celebrates the triumph of American humanity and nonviolent civil disobedience. Starring the late Yolanda King, daughter of King, the film honors King’s legacy of equality, love, change and courage in the face of bigotry, racism and hatred.
In taking a child’s point of view, Burnett employs a narrative strategy common to the L.A. Rebellion. Through the eyes of an innocent young girl, we learn that the fight for freedom demands faith and fortitude, education and empathy, strength and service. A film for the whole family to reflect on not just the darkness of the past but on the eve of a new dawn in America’s history, Selma, Lord, Selma reminds us, as King proclaimed, that “the time is always right to do what is right.”
Producer: Christopher Seitz. Based on the book by Sheyann Webb and Rachel West Nelson as told to Frank Sikora. Screenwriter: Cynthia Whitcomb. Cinematographer: John Simmons. Editor: Nancy Richardson. Cast: Mackenzie Astin, Jurnee Smollett, Clifton Powell, Ella Joyce, Yolanda King. Digital video, color, 88 min.
THE SET-UP
One of the best movies ever made about the seedy world of professional boxing. Robert Ryan stars as Bill "Stoker" Thompson, a proud but aging palooka who really believes he is just one punch away from a big purse. Filmed in real time, this hard-hitting drama still packs a major wallop. The top notch cast includes Audrey Totter, George Tobias, Wallace Ford and Percy Helton. Screenplay based on a narrative poem by Joseph Moncure March. 1949, USA, 35mm, 73 minutes. directed by Robert Wise; starring Robert Ryan, Audrey Totter, George Tobias, Alan Baxter, Wallace Ford
Several Friends (1969)
Directed by Charles Burnett
In director Charles Burnett’s first student film, eccentric and endearing young people interact in a variety of everyday settings: outside a liquor store, in a living room, fixing a car. Burnett’s ability to draw out vivid characterizations from an ensemble of actors—as well as his sensitivity to the expressive potential of working class props and spaces—is already in ample evidence.
Producer: Charles Burnett. Screenwriter: Charles Burnett. Cinematographer: Jim Watkins. Editor: Charles Burnett. Cast: Andy Burnett, Eugene Cherry, Charles Bracy, Donna Deitch, Cassandra Wright. 35mm, color, 22 min.
Shipley Street (1981)
Directed by Jacqueline Frazier
A construction worker, frustrated with his inability to get ahead, decides with his wife to send their daughter to an all-white Catholic school, where the girl is confronted with harsh discipline and racist attitudes. Jacqueline Frazier’s film neatly encapsulates the unthinking, everyday racism of white institutions and their trafficking of offensive racial stereotypes, paying particular attention to their effects on young children.
Screenwriter: Jacqueline Frazier. Cinematographer: Robert Holguin, Joseph Callaway, James Babig, James Jeffery, Dan Riesenfeld. Editor: Porsche Stewart, Janice Cook, J. Frazier. Cast: Leslie Smith, Don Maharry, Sandra Sprouling Jacques, Dwana Willis, Edith Barry.
16mm, color, 25 min.
Shoeshine (Sciuscià, 1946)
Directed by Vittorio De Sica
The first foreign film to receive an Oscar, this piercing melodrama follows two hard-working orphans imprisoned for a petty crime. Fresh performances and deft plotting magnify the boys’ neglect and exploitation by a corrupt society. “The camera disappeared,” Orson Welles once said of it, “the screen disappeared; it was just life."
Producer: Palo William Tamburella. Screenwriter: Sergio Amidei, Adolfo Franci, Cesare Giulio Viola, Cesare Zavattini. Cinematographer: Anchise Brizzi. Editor: Niccolò Lazzari. Cast: Franco Interlenghi, Rinaldo Smordoni, Aniello Mele, Bruno Ortensi, Emilio Cigoli. 35mm, b/w, in Italian with English subtitles, 95 min.
Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space (1981)
Directed by Barbara McCullough
Barbara McCullough’s journey as a film- and video-maker has focused less on finished products and more on processes, at once aesthetic and spiritual. Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space represents a significant stretch along McCullough’s path, where she conversed with other L.A.-based Black artists about the role of ritual in Black life and creative practice. Visual artist David Hammons likens his activities to vanguard musicians as he improvises an outdoor composition of found objects. Poets Raspoeter Ojenke, Kenneth Severin, K. Curtis Lyle and Kamau Daa’ood describe and display their synergistic approaches, as do improvisational musicians Freedom in Expression, accompanying one another with voice and percussion. Kinshasha Cornwill and Houston Cornwill describe their performance/visual art collaborations. Senga Nengudi recalls feeling “possessed” while dancing in costume at the collaborative performance she staged to open her “Freeway Fets” installation at a Los Angeles freeway underpass. And in an intimate conversation, Betye Saar offers McCullough an inspiring definition of ritual: It is not just a rite, but also what feels “right,” a process that builds the artist’s confidence and the traditions that can be passed along to future generations.
McCullough uses video footage, still photographs, interview audio and musical selections by Don Cherry to explore how her own film and video practice fits into Black traditions of performance and visual arts. McCullough opens Shopping Bag Spirits with footage from her own project, Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification, a landmark of Black and feminist experimental filmmaking. In addition to featuring alternate shots, McCullough’s 16mm film footage is enhanced with video effects. Blighted urban ruins become enchanted with glowing purples and blues, as video technologies (explored in courses with Shirley Clarke), add new dimensions to McCullough’s repertoire.
Producer: Barbara McCullough. Screenwriter: Barbara McCullough. Cinematographer: Barbara McCullough, Bernard Nicolas, John Simmons, Roderick Young. Editor: Barbara McCullough. Digital video, color, 60 min.
Silent Comedy Shorts Program
We’re bringing you more of your favorite early comedians and pranksters this month! Presented with live piano accompaniment.
Program will include:
“Two Tars,” (1928, 21 min.) Sailors Stanley and Oliver rent a car while ashore, but a massive traffic jam filled with grumpy drivers interrupts their plans in this hilarious Laurel and Hardy short. Print courtesy of the Constellation Center Collection at the Academy Film Archive.
“The Goat,” (1921, 27 min.) After Buster Keaton is mistakenly identified as the notorious outlaw Dead Shot Dan, he hides out in the home of a lady friend - and her police chief father!
More films to be added. Live Musical Accompaniment!
SLOGAN
Serge, a successful television commercials producer in his early 40's, travels to Venice to enter his films in a festival. Dissatisfied with his life and his marriage, Serge meets Evelyne, a pretty 18-year-old English girl, and makes her his mistress. He rents an apartment and lives with her while waiting for his divorce. Evelyne soon tires of him, however, and abandons him for a Venetian speedboat driver. In search of companionship and consolation, Serge picks up another young woman. Directed by: Pierre Grimblat. Starring: Serge Gainsbourg, Jane Birkin and Andréa Parisy. Runtime: 90 min. France, 1969
SON OF FRANKENSTEIN
1939, Universal, 99 min, USA, Dir: Rowland V. Lee
The third atmospheric installment in Universal’s FRANKENSTEIN franchise and inspiration for Mel Brooks' YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN finds Henry Frankenstein’s grown-up son, Wolf (Basil Rathbone), returning to the family estate with his wife and son (Josephine Hutchinson and Donnie Dunagan) after many years. The laboratory is in ruins - nevertheless Wolf soon becomes enmeshed in his family’s nefarious legacy when he finds the dormant monster (Boris Karloff) being looked after by a vengeful gallows survivor, the crook-necked Ygor (a very creepy Bela Lugosi). Universal was firing on all cylinders with its bolt-necked creature when it released this exceptionally entertaining tall tale. Watch for Lionel Atwill as the one-armed police chief (he lost his missing appendage to a previous encounter with the monster).
STOP MOTION MAGAZINE FILM FESTIVAL
This festival brings together stop motion animation from all over the world to join together for one night of fun and laughs. This year’s animated entries will be in the style of claymation, puppet animation, and toy animation, with films ranging from quirky simple films to pro level stop-mo epics. Audience members should be over the age of 13 and accompanied by an adult (Viewer Discretion is Advised).
Suzan Pitt and Jim Trainor: A Conversation in Light and Darkness
“A quirky, original vision of human and animal nature… Trainor’s lines and shapes don’t simply waver—they pulsate.”
—Fred Camper, Chicago Reader
“[Pitt’s] animation is a visual orgy… A luscious ice cream cone dripping with despair, surreality, hope and redemption.” —Animation Nation
West Coast premiere
Suzan Pitt and Jim Trainor have brought the art of animation to new levels of artistic maturity and depth, and their films entertain haunting correspondences with each other. Pitt’s Visitation (2011, 16mm, 8:50 min.) allows a glimpse into the strange and surrealist aura of “an outer-world night.” Her earlier El Doctor (2006, 35mm, 23 min.), which takes place in crumbling Mexican hospital, is a visual poem traveling between desperation and dark comedy. In Alpert Award winner Jim Trainor’s The Presentation Theme (2008, 16mm, 14 min.), a Peruvian prisoner of war is outmaneuvered by a blood-drinking priestess. Also by Trainor: Harmony (2004, 16mm, 12 min.), about animal and human guilt; The Magic Kingdom (2002, 16mm, 7 min.), imagined in a blue-green jungle; and The Moschops (2000, 16mm, 13 min.), a rueful account of faux prehistoric creatures.
In person: Suzan Pitt, Jim Trainor
THEATER OF BLOOD
1973, MGM Repertory, 104 min, UK, Dir: Douglas Hickox
A tour-de-force for Vincent Price as a Shakespearean actor who uses "thematic" murder methods to dispose of the critics who’ve panned his stage portrayals. Featuring a Who’s Who of great British acting talent, including Diana Rigg, Ian Hendry, Jack Hawkins, Robert Morley and Price’s wife, Coral Browne.
THREE SHORT FILMS ON THE JAPANESE AMERICAN INTERNMENT DURING WORLD WAR II
Benefit for a monument on the northwest corner of Venice and Lincoln Boulevards.
"Music Man of Manzanar"
The story of Lou Frizzell. Directed by Brian Maeda
"Stand Up For Justice"
The story of Ralph Lazo. Directed by John Esaki
"Days of Waiting"
The story of Estelle Ishigo. Directed by Steven Okazaki
Three Stooges Big Screen Event
Stooges In History –– Sort of!
This Year, we will take a look back in time to various period of history with our boys as the guides. Subject to great 35mm prints being available, our line up is:
BACK TO THE WOODS (1937)
GOOFS AND SADDLES (1937)
MUMMIES DUMMIES (1948)
HIGHER THAN A KITE (1943)
WEE WEE MONSIEUR (1938)
Our extra added attraction this year will be a tribute to the early television hosts who brought the Stooges films to kids all over the country via their local after-school shows during the late 1950s and 1960s. We'll be taking a nostalgic look at Officer Joe Boulton, Skipper Chuck Zink, Chuck McCann, Sandy Becker, Sally Starr, Cowboy Bob Glaze, etc. etc. That should put us in the mood to go back in time with Moe, Larry, Curly and Shemp.
Running time approximately 2 hours.
THE TINGLER
Our month-long Halloween celebration concludes with the spine-tingling horror of The Tingler, William Castle’s weirdo masterpiece of gimmickry about a lobster-shaped monster that feeds on terror within the human body! Aside from being the first film to use LSD as a plot device, the original theatrical run was presented in “Percepto,” whereby theater patrons were administered buzzer shocks in their seats, to simulate the monster’s attack. The result, of course, was giddy insanity, as star Vincent Price’s voice urges patrons to “scream for your lives!” Best of all, The Tingler features a major subplot based on the Silent Movie Theatre itself and its original owners, the Hamptons. Feel a tingle up your spine as you watch these scenes set in the very location where you are sitting — and maybe a tingle on your tuchas when we shock you Castle-style with real wired seats! Experience The Tingler in “Percepto”!
Dir. William Castle, 1959, 35mm, 82 min.
To Live & Die in L.A. (1985)
Directed by William Friedkin
From robbery, murder, and exploitation to a riveting car chase on a crowded Los Angeles freeway, Secret Service agent Richard Chance will stop at nothing to bring down the evil counterfeiter who killed his partner. William L. Petersen and Willem Dafoe are standouts in William Friedkin's crime thriller, which also features a Wang Chung score.
MGM/UA. Producer: Irving H. Levin. Screenwriter: William Friedkin, Gerald Petievich. Cinematographer: Robby Muller. Editor: Scott Smith. Cast: William L. Petersen, Willem Dafoe, John Pankow, Debra Feuer, John Turturro. 35mm, color, 116 min.
To Sleep With Anger
Directed by Charles Burnett
Director Charles Burnett’s first feature to be widely released by a major distributor enjoyed universal critical acclaim, with stellar reviews appearing in the Chicago Reader, Los Angeles Times, New Yorker and Variety. Despite a virtually nonexistent studio marketing campaign that led to disappointing box office, the film received a significant number of prestigious accolades, including several top honors at the Independent Spirit Awards, a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and a National Society of Film Critics Award for best screenplay.
Featuring a highly accomplished ensemble cast headed by the film’s executive producer, actor Danny Glover, To Sleep With Anger concerns a transplanted African American family’s metaphorical and metaphysical tug-of-war between their comfortable life in Los Angeles and the age-old superstitions and cultural traditions native to their former home in the South. The catalyst for this mortal conflict is a beloved family friend from back home, Harry Mention (Glover), a “trickster” who arrives unexpectedly with a twinkle in his eye and a soul-rooted connection to the more sinister aspects of Southern folklore. As Harry’s initially charming, but ultimately devilish, conjuring gradually infiltrates three generations of the family unit, deep-seated fractures in their interrelationships are forced to confrontation.
A wholly original work that draws closely from Burnett’s personal ties to the South (the director was born in Mississippi) and to South Central Los Angeles where he grew up, To Sleep With Anger is a singular artistic achievement that transcends categorization, seamlessly incorporating elements of family drama, dark comedy and magical realism. Within this densely layered framework, Burnett incisively, yet subtly, examines the complexities of modern middle-class Black life amid the challenges of reconciling the past with the present. The result is an indelibly humanistic fable, rich in poetic symbolism and firmly grounded in a recognizable reality.
Producer: Caldecott Chubb, Thomas S. Byrnes, Darin Scott. Screenwriter: C. Burnett. Cinematographer: Walter Lloyd. Editor: Nancy Richardson. Cast: Danny Glover, Paul Butler, DeVaughn Nixon, Vonetta McGee, Carl Lumbly. 35mm, color, 102 min.
TOURIST TRAP, 1979, Compass International Pictures, 90 min. Dir. David Schmoeller. A group of friends enters a mysterious remote museum, only to discover that it’s owned by a murderous stalker. With Chuck Connors.
Trumpetistically, Clora Bryant (1989)
Directed by Zeinabu irene Davis
This film presents a fond and informative portrait of pioneering female jazz trumpeter Clora Bryant, a proponent of West Coast jazz whose early stints with the International Sweethearts of Rhythm led eventually to collaborations with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, among others. Rich with tunes and anecdotes, the documentary handsomely details Bryant’s long journey in music and her influence on generations of musicians.
Wimmin with a Mission Productions. Producer: Zeinabu irene Davis, Marc Arthur Chery. Screenwriter: Z. irene Davis, Lillian E. Benson. Cinematographer: Katherine Engstrom, Willie Dawkins, Charles Burnett, S. Torriano Berry, Yasu Tsuji, Biya Ababulga, Pierre Desir. Editor: L. E. Benson. Co-Editor: Katherine Engstrom. Cast: Clora Bryant, Dizzy Gillespie, James Newton, Helen Cole, Teddy Edwards. DVCam, b/w & color, 57 min. In-person: filmmakers Zeinabu irene Davis and Carroll Parrott Blue.
Two Nights with Ernie Gehr: Early Films and New Digital Works
“A filmmaker’s filmmaker whose movies are so tough-minded and lucid it is as if they were produced to demonstrate the marvels of the motion picture apparatus.” —J. Hoberman
Ernie Gehr’s unsurpassed body of films and videos from the past 43 years combines richly conceived and rigorous cinematic structures with a profound sensitivity for the physical world around him. This two-program series begins on Monday with four recent digital works: Crystal Palace (2002/2011), Auto-Collider IX (2010), Thank You for Visiting (2010), and Abracadabra (2009). The quartet features, according to Gehr, “Lake Tahoe on steroids, aerobic eye exercises in San Francisco, Brooklyn’s Red Hook after midnight, and for those with a special weakness for the baffling mysteries of early cinema: spiritualism, crashing through stone walls, a remake of the sinking of the Titanic, and, as a grand finale, the dance-of-the-century!” Tuesday’s screening revisits Gehr’s earliest 16mm films: Morning (1968), Wait (1968), Reverberation (1969), Transparency (1969), History (1970), Field (1970), and Serene Velocity (1970)—one of the few experimental films included in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry as an American landmark. These rarely screened shorts are elegant, concise and acutely observed explorations of cinematic space, and established Gehr as one of our foremost avant-gardists.
In person: Ernie Gehr
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
2010/color/113 min.
Writer and director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul; w/ Thanapat Saisaymar, Jenjira Pongpas and Sakda Kaewbuadee
Suffering from acute kidney failure, Uncle Boonmee has chosen to spend his final days surrounded by his loved ones in the countryside. Surprisingly, the ghost of his deceased wife appears to care for him, and his long lost son returns home in a non-human form. Contemplating the reasons for his illness, Boonmee treks through the jungle with his family to a mysterious hilltop cave—the birthplace of his first life. Winner of the 2010 Palme d’Or Cannes Film Festival.
Wallace Berman’s Underground
In the mid-1960s, Wallace Berman inspired and communed with a close-knit circle of actors and artists, who screened their underground films domestically among a group of Topanga Canyon bohemians. These films were influenced by Berman’s spiritualist and radically amateur concepts of art, that nevertheless thrived in the intersection among art, Hollywood, and the institutions of the semi-commercial underground.
Featuring Russ Tamblyn and/or George Herms in person.
Aleph (1956-66, 8 min.) Directed by Wallace Berman
Breakaway (1966, 5 min.) Directed by Bruce Conner
Way Out West (1937)
Directed by James W. Horne
Perhaps the greatest of the feature films starring comedy duo Laurel and Hardy, Way Out West finds Stan and Ollie traveling to Brushwood Gulch to deliver the deed to a gold mine to the daughter of a recently deceased friend. The chance at instant fortune causes the girl's employers (a shady saloon owner and his dance hall girlfriend) to hide her true identity from the Boys in an attempt to obtain the deed for themselves. All the typical Laurel and Hardy routines are present, but the Boys also do a couple of very endearing musical numbers, including a memorable soft shoe dance.
Hal Roach Studios, MGM. Screenwriter: James Parrott. Cinematographer: Art Lloyd. Editor: Bert Jordan. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Sharon Lynne, James Finlayson, Rosina Lawrence, Stanley Fields. 35mm, b/w, 65 min.
Welcome Home, Brother Charles
Directed by Jamaa Fanaka
A remarkable testament to the ambition, talent and sheer will of its creator, Welcome Home, Brother Charles was independently produced, written, directed and edited by Jamaa Fanaka as an improbable undergraduate project at UCLA. With a budget cobbled together by Fanaka from competitive grants and his parents’ savings, the film’s production ran 17 months, with shooting limited to weekends to allow unfettered access to university cinema equipment. Further cutting expenses by eliminating sets, Fanaka shot the film entirely on location in South Los Angeles and at UCLA (with fellow student and L.A. Rebellion auteur Charles Burnett serving as camera operator).
Strongly advised against attempting a feature film as a class project, Fanaka saw his completed picture through to a national theatrical distribution deal with Crown International Pictures. By 1976, Variety heralded Fanaka's auspicious debut in a profile titled, "Birth of a Black Director" and reported that his student film had grossed more than $500,000 in its first six months of exhibition. The wunderkind went on to complete two more released features while still a student: his graduate thesis project, Emma Mae (1976), and the franchise-launching cult classic, Penitentiary (1979).
Marketed as a Blaxploitation film (and later released to home video in edited form under the exploitative title, Soul Vengeance), Welcome Home, Brother Charles subversively co-opts expected genre conventions in order to examine plantation-born racial myths surrounding Black male sexuality and white fears of “miscegenation.” From the film’s foreshadowing opening image of a wood-carved African sculpture under titles to its cult-favorite ultra-shock ending, Fanaka unblinkingly drives his thematic raison d'etre home with raw conviction and verve. On its surface a revenge tale of an African American man framed and abused by the white establishment, Fanaka’s exaggerated symbolism and subtext elevates the film to unexpected parallel tracks of surrealism and social commentary.
Producer: Jamaa Fanaka. Screenwriter: Jamaa Fanaka. Cinematographer: James Babij. Editor: Jamaa Fanaka. Cast: Marlo Monte, Reatha Grey, Stan Kamber, Tiffany Peters, Ben Bigelow. 35mm, color, 91 min. In-person: filmmaker Jamaa Fanaka.
WENT THE DAY WELL?
Released in the US as Forty-Eight Hours, Went the Day Well? is a solidly constructed wartime melodrama. Actually, the film covers 72 hours in the life of the small British village of Bramley Green, which serves as the focal point for an attempted German invasion. Immediately upon parachuting in the community, vicious Nazi officer Ortier (Basil Sydney) makes contact with local Fifth Columnist Oliver Wileford (Leslie Banks), using the film's British title as their password... The British home guardsmen and German soldiers seen in the film were drawn from the ranks of of the real-life Gloucestershire Regiment, who volunteered their services for this patriotic morale-booster. 1942, UK, 35mm, 92 minutes. New 35mm Restoration!
directed by Alberto Cavalcanti; based on a story by Graham Greene; starring Leslie Banks, C.V. France, Valerie Taylor, Marie Lohr, Basil Sydney
Werner Schroeter/Elfi Mikesch: A Voice That Lingers
“Schroeter’s flair for lush visuals and heightened emotions introduced an operatic sensibility to the New German Cinema movement.” — Dave Kehr, The New York Times
U.S. premiere
Werner Schroeter (1945–2010) created one of the most significant oeuvres of the New German Cinema, a legacy of more than 20 visually and aurally stunning features, among them Willow Springs (1973), Palermo oder Wolfsburg (1980), Malina (1991), and Deux (2002). His intimate collaborations with divas such as Magdalena Montezuma, Candy Darling, Ingrid Caven, Maria Callas, and Isabelle Huppert go beyond mere camp: Schroeter’s protagonists exhaust themselves in music, melodrama, or visual excess to express consuming passions. When love is gone and death has come, he once said, “the expression remains, like a quake, a shivering sensation.” Schroeter had shot most of his earlier films, but, beginning with Der Rosenkönig (1986), experimental filmmaker Elfi Mikesch became his regular DP, and she went on to accumulate extensive footage on his work and, in particular, the last four years of his life. This two-night program includes the U.S. debut of Mikesch’s insightful, affectionate documentary Mondo Lux – Die Bilderwelten Des Werner Schroeter (2011, “Mondo Lux – The Visual Worlds of Werner Schroeter”) and a selection of Schroeter’s work, including Deux (2002), starring Isabelle Huppert in a dual role, and the cult film Der Tod der Maria Malibran (1972, “The Death of Maria Malibran”), one of Michel Foucault’s favorites.
SCREENING SCHEDULE
FRI OCT 14 | 8:30 PM
Werner Schroeter: Der Tod der Maria Malibran (The Death of Maria Malibran, 1972, 16mm, 104 min) plus a surprise film!
SAT OCT 15 | 6 PM: DOUBLE BILL
Elfi Mikesch: Mondo Lux—Die Bilderwelten Des Werner Schroeter (Mondo Lux—The Visual Worlds of Werner Schroeter, 2011, HDCAM, 97 min.), followed by Werner Schroeter: Deux (2002, 35mm, 121 min).
When It Rains (1995)
Directed by Charles Burnett
On New Year’s Day, a man tries to help a woman pay her rent and learns a lesson in connecting with others in a community. Ayuko Babu, founding director of the Pan African Film Festival of Los Angeles, assumes the lead role in a pleasingly empathic reading.
Leapfrog Production. Producer: Chantal Bernheim. Screenwriter: C. Burnett. Cast: Ayuko Babu, Kenny Merritt, Charles Bracy, Soul, R. Ray Barness. 16mm, color, 13 min.
WITCHFINDER GENERAL
1968, MGM Repertory, 98 min, UK, Dir: Michael Reeves
Although he made only four features before his tragic death at age 25, British director Michael Reeves left an indelible mark on Gothic horror with his brooding tales of madness and hysteria. Vincent Price stars here in one of his most brutally terrifying roles, as real-life witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins, dedicated to ridding England of suspected satanists and instead falling prey to his own horrifying, repressive methods. Ian Ogilvy co-stars as a young soldier trying to end Hopkins’ reign of terror.
Without Pity (Senza pietà) (Italy, 1947)
Directed by Alberto Lattuada
Co-written by Federico Fellini, Without Pity casts an unflinching eye on smuggling and prostitution in post-war Italy. A young Italian woman enmeshed in the seedy underworld of the port city Livorno turns for comfort to a sympathetic African American G.I., himself grappling with the U.S. Army’s racism. Together, they formulate a desperate plan of escape.
Producer: Clemente Fracassi. Based on a story by Ettore M. Margadonna. Screenwriter: Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Alberto Lattuada. Cinematographer: Aldo Tonti. Cast: Carla Del Poggio, John Kitzmiller, Pierre Claude, Giulietta Masina, Lando Muzio, Daniel Jones. 35mm, b/w, in Italian with English subtitles, 90 min.
The Woods
written and directed by Matthew Lessner
Idealistic twenty-somethings driven by a higher calling of a utopia, fashionably answer the call to change by mobilizing a movement deep into the woods, armed with a ridiculous amount of Cost-Co reserves and technology. Playfully incisive, this first feature's take on revolt is a classic for the Millennial generation. Q&A with filmmakers.
Cast: Justin Phillips, Toby David, Adam Mortemore, Nicola Persky, Chris Edley
WORK TO SURF, 45mn, USA, by Allen Sarlo
Allen Sarlo, aka "The Wave Killer", aka "The King of Mailbu". Allen was surfing by age 6, at 14 he was surfing the infamous "Cove" at the POP pier. The film, "Dogtown, Z Boys" documented his adolescence and captured a celluloid preview of his athletically intense surfing style. In 1974, at 16 Allen took first place at the prestigious Malibu 4-A contest, to the chagrin of the older surfers. He tells his adventure as a surfer and the many contests he wins. The surf life style film "Work to Surf" is Allen's latest adventure, it's a bio documentary with a 'feel good' message. Allen is an active member of Surfrider Foundation, rallying over the years for cleaner water at Malibu's "Surfrider Beach".