Anthology Film Archives

FREE SCREENINGS!

Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Preservation funded through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by the Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Laboratory services by Cinetech, Ascent Media, NT Picture and Sound, Dolby Laboratories, and Audio Mechanics.

Samuel Beckett, the celebrated author of WAITING FOR GODOT, made a single work for projected cinema. It’s in essence a chase film, the craziest ever committed to celluloid. It’s a chase between camera and pursued image that finds existential dread embedded in the very apparatus of the movies itself. The link to cinema’s essence is evident in the casting, as the chased object is none other than an aged Buster Keaton, who was understandably befuddled at Beckett and director Alan Schneider’s imperative that he keep his face hidden from the camera’s gaze. The archetypal levels resonate further in the exquisite cinematography of Academy Award-winner Boris Kaufman, whose brothers Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman created the legendary self-reflexive masterpiece MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA. Commissioned and produced by Grove Press’s Barney Rosset, FILM is at once the product of a stunningly all-star assembly of talent, and a cinematic conundrum that asks more questions than it answers.

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

FILMMAKER IN PERSON FOR OPENING NIGHT!

Produced by Amy Heller and Dennis Doros, with special thanks to Ross Lipman.

In 1964 author Samuel Beckett set out on one of the strangest ventures in cinematic history: his embattled collaboration with silent-era genius Buster Keaton on the production of a short, title-less avant-garde film. Beckett was nearing the peak of his fame, which would culminate in his receiving a Nobel Prize five years later. Keaton, in his waning years, never lived to see Beckett’s canonization. The film they made along with director Alan Schneider, renegade publisher Barney Rosset, and Academy Award-winning cinematographer Boris Kaufman, and which was eventually titled FILM, has been the subject of praise, condemnation, and controversy for decades. Yet the eclectic participants are just one part of a story that stretches to the very birth of cinema, and spreads out to our understanding of human consciousness itself.

NOTFILM is a feature-length experimental essay on FILM’s production and its philosophical implications. Directed by filmmaker and archivist Ross Lipman, who has contributed immeasurably to film culture over the past couple decades, both through his own films and his extraordinary work preserving classics such as SCORPIO RISING, WANDA, THE EXILES, KILLER OF SHEEP, and many, many more, NOTFILM is a kind of documentary manifestation of the unique illustrated lectures he’s presented at venues around the world in recent years. Featuring in-depth interviews with many of those who participated in the creation of FILM, it is also a treasure trove of archival materials, including audio recordings of the production meetings between Beckett, Rosset, Schneider, and others, and outtakes from the film shoot itself. No ordinary ‘making-of’ film, NOTFILM is clearly the work of a fiercely committed filmmaker and archivist, and digs deeply both into the film’s production and its multiple layers of meaning.

“NOTFILM is a definitive documentary account of the making of Samuel Beckett’s only film work and both a brilliant examination of its significance in relation to both Beckett’s other dramatic works and to film theory, drawing on many touchstones in film history ranging from Keaton to Vertov to Murnau to make its arguments. Without contesting the critical consensus that Beckett’s FILM is a failure (a position maintained even by Beckett and his main collaborator, director Alan Schneider), Lipman very persuasively and masterfully shows its continuing importance.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum

Selected screenings of NOTFILM will be presented by the following special guests:

**Friday, April 1 (Opening Night): Director Ross Lipman
**Saturday & Sunday, April 2 & 3 at 8pm: Producers Amy Heller & Dennis Doros
**Tuesday, April 5: Editor and publisher Jeannette Seaver, who appears in NOTFILM

A LIMITED NUMBER OF ADVANCE TICKETS ARE AVAILABLE NOW!

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

FILMMAKER IN PERSON FOR OPENING NIGHT!

Produced by Amy Heller and Dennis Doros, with special thanks to Ross Lipman.

In 1964 author Samuel Beckett set out on one of the strangest ventures in cinematic history: his embattled collaboration with silent-era genius Buster Keaton on the production of a short, title-less avant-garde film. Beckett was nearing the peak of his fame, which would culminate in his receiving a Nobel Prize five years later. Keaton, in his waning years, never lived to see Beckett’s canonization. The film they made along with director Alan Schneider, renegade publisher Barney Rosset, and Academy Award-winning cinematographer Boris Kaufman, and which was eventually titled FILM, has been the subject of praise, condemnation, and controversy for decades. Yet the eclectic participants are just one part of a story that stretches to the very birth of cinema, and spreads out to our understanding of human consciousness itself.

NOTFILM is a feature-length experimental essay on FILM’s production and its philosophical implications. Directed by filmmaker and archivist Ross Lipman, who has contributed immeasurably to film culture over the past couple decades, both through his own films and his extraordinary work preserving classics such as SCORPIO RISING, WANDA, THE EXILES, KILLER OF SHEEP, and many, many more, NOTFILM is a kind of documentary manifestation of the unique illustrated lectures he’s presented at venues around the world in recent years. Featuring in-depth interviews with many of those who participated in the creation of FILM, it is also a treasure trove of archival materials, including audio recordings of the production meetings between Beckett, Rosset, Schneider, and others, and outtakes from the film shoot itself. No ordinary ‘making-of’ film, NOTFILM is clearly the work of a fiercely committed filmmaker and archivist, and digs deeply both into the film’s production and its multiple layers of meaning.

“NOTFILM is a definitive documentary account of the making of Samuel Beckett’s only film work and both a brilliant examination of its significance in relation to both Beckett’s other dramatic works and to film theory, drawing on many touchstones in film history ranging from Keaton to Vertov to Murnau to make its arguments. Without contesting the critical consensus that Beckett’s FILM is a failure (a position maintained even by Beckett and his main collaborator, director Alan Schneider), Lipman very persuasively and masterfully shows its continuing importance.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum

Selected screenings of NOTFILM will be presented by the following special guests:

**Friday, April 1 (Opening Night): Director Ross Lipman
**Saturday & Sunday, April 2 & 3 at 8pm: Producers Amy Heller & Dennis Doros
**Tuesday, April 5: Editor and publisher Jeannette Seaver, who appears in NOTFILM

A LIMITED NUMBER OF ADVANCE TICKETS ARE AVAILABLE NOW!

FREE SCREENINGS!

Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Preservation funded through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by the Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Laboratory services by Cinetech, Ascent Media, NT Picture and Sound, Dolby Laboratories, and Audio Mechanics.

Samuel Beckett, the celebrated author of WAITING FOR GODOT, made a single work for projected cinema. It’s in essence a chase film, the craziest ever committed to celluloid. It’s a chase between camera and pursued image that finds existential dread embedded in the very apparatus of the movies itself. The link to cinema’s essence is evident in the casting, as the chased object is none other than an aged Buster Keaton, who was understandably befuddled at Beckett and director Alan Schneider’s imperative that he keep his face hidden from the camera’s gaze. The archetypal levels resonate further in the exquisite cinematography of Academy Award-winner Boris Kaufman, whose brothers Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman created the legendary self-reflexive masterpiece MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA. Commissioned and produced by Grove Press’s Barney Rosset, FILM is at once the product of a stunningly all-star assembly of talent, and a cinematic conundrum that asks more questions than it answers.

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

FILMMAKER IN PERSON FOR OPENING NIGHT!

Produced by Amy Heller and Dennis Doros, with special thanks to Ross Lipman.

In 1964 author Samuel Beckett set out on one of the strangest ventures in cinematic history: his embattled collaboration with silent-era genius Buster Keaton on the production of a short, title-less avant-garde film. Beckett was nearing the peak of his fame, which would culminate in his receiving a Nobel Prize five years later. Keaton, in his waning years, never lived to see Beckett’s canonization. The film they made along with director Alan Schneider, renegade publisher Barney Rosset, and Academy Award-winning cinematographer Boris Kaufman, and which was eventually titled FILM, has been the subject of praise, condemnation, and controversy for decades. Yet the eclectic participants are just one part of a story that stretches to the very birth of cinema, and spreads out to our understanding of human consciousness itself.

NOTFILM is a feature-length experimental essay on FILM’s production and its philosophical implications. Directed by filmmaker and archivist Ross Lipman, who has contributed immeasurably to film culture over the past couple decades, both through his own films and his extraordinary work preserving classics such as SCORPIO RISING, WANDA, THE EXILES, KILLER OF SHEEP, and many, many more, NOTFILM is a kind of documentary manifestation of the unique illustrated lectures he’s presented at venues around the world in recent years. Featuring in-depth interviews with many of those who participated in the creation of FILM, it is also a treasure trove of archival materials, including audio recordings of the production meetings between Beckett, Rosset, Schneider, and others, and outtakes from the film shoot itself. No ordinary ‘making-of’ film, NOTFILM is clearly the work of a fiercely committed filmmaker and archivist, and digs deeply both into the film’s production and its multiple layers of meaning.

“NOTFILM is a definitive documentary account of the making of Samuel Beckett’s only film work and both a brilliant examination of its significance in relation to both Beckett’s other dramatic works and to film theory, drawing on many touchstones in film history ranging from Keaton to Vertov to Murnau to make its arguments. Without contesting the critical consensus that Beckett’s FILM is a failure (a position maintained even by Beckett and his main collaborator, director Alan Schneider), Lipman very persuasively and masterfully shows its continuing importance.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum

Selected screenings of NOTFILM will be presented by the following special guests:

**Friday, April 1 (Opening Night): Director Ross Lipman
**Saturday & Sunday, April 2 & 3 at 8pm: Producers Amy Heller & Dennis Doros
**Tuesday, April 5: Editor and publisher Jeannette Seaver, who appears in NOTFILM

A LIMITED NUMBER OF ADVANCE TICKETS ARE AVAILABLE NOW!

FREE SCREENINGS!

Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Preservation funded through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by the Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Laboratory services by Cinetech, Ascent Media, NT Picture and Sound, Dolby Laboratories, and Audio Mechanics.

Samuel Beckett, the celebrated author of WAITING FOR GODOT, made a single work for projected cinema. It’s in essence a chase film, the craziest ever committed to celluloid. It’s a chase between camera and pursued image that finds existential dread embedded in the very apparatus of the movies itself. The link to cinema’s essence is evident in the casting, as the chased object is none other than an aged Buster Keaton, who was understandably befuddled at Beckett and director Alan Schneider’s imperative that he keep his face hidden from the camera’s gaze. The archetypal levels resonate further in the exquisite cinematography of Academy Award-winner Boris Kaufman, whose brothers Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman created the legendary self-reflexive masterpiece MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA. Commissioned and produced by Grove Press’s Barney Rosset, FILM is at once the product of a stunningly all-star assembly of talent, and a cinematic conundrum that asks more questions than it answers.

FREE SCREENINGS!

Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Preservation funded through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by the Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Laboratory services by Cinetech, Ascent Media, NT Picture and Sound, Dolby Laboratories, and Audio Mechanics.

Samuel Beckett, the celebrated author of WAITING FOR GODOT, made a single work for projected cinema. It’s in essence a chase film, the craziest ever committed to celluloid. It’s a chase between camera and pursued image that finds existential dread embedded in the very apparatus of the movies itself. The link to cinema’s essence is evident in the casting, as the chased object is none other than an aged Buster Keaton, who was understandably befuddled at Beckett and director Alan Schneider’s imperative that he keep his face hidden from the camera’s gaze. The archetypal levels resonate further in the exquisite cinematography of Academy Award-winner Boris Kaufman, whose brothers Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman created the legendary self-reflexive masterpiece MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA. Commissioned and produced by Grove Press’s Barney Rosset, FILM is at once the product of a stunningly all-star assembly of talent, and a cinematic conundrum that asks more questions than it answers.

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

FILMMAKER IN PERSON FOR OPENING NIGHT!

Produced by Amy Heller and Dennis Doros, with special thanks to Ross Lipman.

In 1964 author Samuel Beckett set out on one of the strangest ventures in cinematic history: his embattled collaboration with silent-era genius Buster Keaton on the production of a short, title-less avant-garde film. Beckett was nearing the peak of his fame, which would culminate in his receiving a Nobel Prize five years later. Keaton, in his waning years, never lived to see Beckett’s canonization. The film they made along with director Alan Schneider, renegade publisher Barney Rosset, and Academy Award-winning cinematographer Boris Kaufman, and which was eventually titled FILM, has been the subject of praise, condemnation, and controversy for decades. Yet the eclectic participants are just one part of a story that stretches to the very birth of cinema, and spreads out to our understanding of human consciousness itself.

NOTFILM is a feature-length experimental essay on FILM’s production and its philosophical implications. Directed by filmmaker and archivist Ross Lipman, who has contributed immeasurably to film culture over the past couple decades, both through his own films and his extraordinary work preserving classics such as SCORPIO RISING, WANDA, THE EXILES, KILLER OF SHEEP, and many, many more, NOTFILM is a kind of documentary manifestation of the unique illustrated lectures he’s presented at venues around the world in recent years. Featuring in-depth interviews with many of those who participated in the creation of FILM, it is also a treasure trove of archival materials, including audio recordings of the production meetings between Beckett, Rosset, Schneider, and others, and outtakes from the film shoot itself. No ordinary ‘making-of’ film, NOTFILM is clearly the work of a fiercely committed filmmaker and archivist, and digs deeply both into the film’s production and its multiple layers of meaning.

“NOTFILM is a definitive documentary account of the making of Samuel Beckett’s only film work and both a brilliant examination of its significance in relation to both Beckett’s other dramatic works and to film theory, drawing on many touchstones in film history ranging from Keaton to Vertov to Murnau to make its arguments. Without contesting the critical consensus that Beckett’s FILM is a failure (a position maintained even by Beckett and his main collaborator, director Alan Schneider), Lipman very persuasively and masterfully shows its continuing importance.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum

Selected screenings of NOTFILM will be presented by the following special guests:

**Friday, April 1 (Opening Night): Director Ross Lipman
**Saturday & Sunday, April 2 & 3 at 8pm: Producers Amy Heller & Dennis Doros
**Tuesday, April 5: Editor and publisher Jeannette Seaver, who appears in NOTFILM

A LIMITED NUMBER OF ADVANCE TICKETS ARE AVAILABLE NOW!

FREE SCREENINGS!

Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Preservation funded through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by the Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Laboratory services by Cinetech, Ascent Media, NT Picture and Sound, Dolby Laboratories, and Audio Mechanics.

Samuel Beckett, the celebrated author of WAITING FOR GODOT, made a single work for projected cinema. It’s in essence a chase film, the craziest ever committed to celluloid. It’s a chase between camera and pursued image that finds existential dread embedded in the very apparatus of the movies itself. The link to cinema’s essence is evident in the casting, as the chased object is none other than an aged Buster Keaton, who was understandably befuddled at Beckett and director Alan Schneider’s imperative that he keep his face hidden from the camera’s gaze. The archetypal levels resonate further in the exquisite cinematography of Academy Award-winner Boris Kaufman, whose brothers Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman created the legendary self-reflexive masterpiece MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA. Commissioned and produced by Grove Press’s Barney Rosset, FILM is at once the product of a stunningly all-star assembly of talent, and a cinematic conundrum that asks more questions than it answers.

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

FILMMAKER IN PERSON FOR OPENING NIGHT!

Produced by Amy Heller and Dennis Doros, with special thanks to Ross Lipman.

In 1964 author Samuel Beckett set out on one of the strangest ventures in cinematic history: his embattled collaboration with silent-era genius Buster Keaton on the production of a short, title-less avant-garde film. Beckett was nearing the peak of his fame, which would culminate in his receiving a Nobel Prize five years later. Keaton, in his waning years, never lived to see Beckett’s canonization. The film they made along with director Alan Schneider, renegade publisher Barney Rosset, and Academy Award-winning cinematographer Boris Kaufman, and which was eventually titled FILM, has been the subject of praise, condemnation, and controversy for decades. Yet the eclectic participants are just one part of a story that stretches to the very birth of cinema, and spreads out to our understanding of human consciousness itself.

NOTFILM is a feature-length experimental essay on FILM’s production and its philosophical implications. Directed by filmmaker and archivist Ross Lipman, who has contributed immeasurably to film culture over the past couple decades, both through his own films and his extraordinary work preserving classics such as SCORPIO RISING, WANDA, THE EXILES, KILLER OF SHEEP, and many, many more, NOTFILM is a kind of documentary manifestation of the unique illustrated lectures he’s presented at venues around the world in recent years. Featuring in-depth interviews with many of those who participated in the creation of FILM, it is also a treasure trove of archival materials, including audio recordings of the production meetings between Beckett, Rosset, Schneider, and others, and outtakes from the film shoot itself. No ordinary ‘making-of’ film, NOTFILM is clearly the work of a fiercely committed filmmaker and archivist, and digs deeply both into the film’s production and its multiple layers of meaning.

“NOTFILM is a definitive documentary account of the making of Samuel Beckett’s only film work and both a brilliant examination of its significance in relation to both Beckett’s other dramatic works and to film theory, drawing on many touchstones in film history ranging from Keaton to Vertov to Murnau to make its arguments. Without contesting the critical consensus that Beckett’s FILM is a failure (a position maintained even by Beckett and his main collaborator, director Alan Schneider), Lipman very persuasively and masterfully shows its continuing importance.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum

Selected screenings of NOTFILM will be presented by the following special guests:

**Friday, April 1 (Opening Night): Director Ross Lipman
**Saturday & Sunday, April 2 & 3 at 8pm: Producers Amy Heller & Dennis Doros
**Tuesday, April 5: Editor and publisher Jeannette Seaver, who appears in NOTFILM

A LIMITED NUMBER OF ADVANCE TICKETS ARE AVAILABLE NOW!

FREE SCREENINGS!

Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Preservation funded through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by the Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Laboratory services by Cinetech, Ascent Media, NT Picture and Sound, Dolby Laboratories, and Audio Mechanics.

Samuel Beckett, the celebrated author of WAITING FOR GODOT, made a single work for projected cinema. It’s in essence a chase film, the craziest ever committed to celluloid. It’s a chase between camera and pursued image that finds existential dread embedded in the very apparatus of the movies itself. The link to cinema’s essence is evident in the casting, as the chased object is none other than an aged Buster Keaton, who was understandably befuddled at Beckett and director Alan Schneider’s imperative that he keep his face hidden from the camera’s gaze. The archetypal levels resonate further in the exquisite cinematography of Academy Award-winner Boris Kaufman, whose brothers Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman created the legendary self-reflexive masterpiece MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA. Commissioned and produced by Grove Press’s Barney Rosset, FILM is at once the product of a stunningly all-star assembly of talent, and a cinematic conundrum that asks more questions than it answers.

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

FILMMAKER IN PERSON FOR OPENING NIGHT!

Produced by Amy Heller and Dennis Doros, with special thanks to Ross Lipman.

In 1964 author Samuel Beckett set out on one of the strangest ventures in cinematic history: his embattled collaboration with silent-era genius Buster Keaton on the production of a short, title-less avant-garde film. Beckett was nearing the peak of his fame, which would culminate in his receiving a Nobel Prize five years later. Keaton, in his waning years, never lived to see Beckett’s canonization. The film they made along with director Alan Schneider, renegade publisher Barney Rosset, and Academy Award-winning cinematographer Boris Kaufman, and which was eventually titled FILM, has been the subject of praise, condemnation, and controversy for decades. Yet the eclectic participants are just one part of a story that stretches to the very birth of cinema, and spreads out to our understanding of human consciousness itself.

NOTFILM is a feature-length experimental essay on FILM’s production and its philosophical implications. Directed by filmmaker and archivist Ross Lipman, who has contributed immeasurably to film culture over the past couple decades, both through his own films and his extraordinary work preserving classics such as SCORPIO RISING, WANDA, THE EXILES, KILLER OF SHEEP, and many, many more, NOTFILM is a kind of documentary manifestation of the unique illustrated lectures he’s presented at venues around the world in recent years. Featuring in-depth interviews with many of those who participated in the creation of FILM, it is also a treasure trove of archival materials, including audio recordings of the production meetings between Beckett, Rosset, Schneider, and others, and outtakes from the film shoot itself. No ordinary ‘making-of’ film, NOTFILM is clearly the work of a fiercely committed filmmaker and archivist, and digs deeply both into the film’s production and its multiple layers of meaning.

“NOTFILM is a definitive documentary account of the making of Samuel Beckett’s only film work and both a brilliant examination of its significance in relation to both Beckett’s other dramatic works and to film theory, drawing on many touchstones in film history ranging from Keaton to Vertov to Murnau to make its arguments. Without contesting the critical consensus that Beckett’s FILM is a failure (a position maintained even by Beckett and his main collaborator, director Alan Schneider), Lipman very persuasively and masterfully shows its continuing importance.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum

Selected screenings of NOTFILM will be presented by the following special guests:

**Friday, April 1 (Opening Night): Director Ross Lipman
**Saturday & Sunday, April 2 & 3 at 8pm: Producers Amy Heller & Dennis Doros
**Tuesday, April 5: Editor and publisher Jeannette Seaver, who appears in NOTFILM

A LIMITED NUMBER OF ADVANCE TICKETS ARE AVAILABLE NOW!

FREE SCREENINGS!

Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Preservation funded through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by the Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Laboratory services by Cinetech, Ascent Media, NT Picture and Sound, Dolby Laboratories, and Audio Mechanics.

Samuel Beckett, the celebrated author of WAITING FOR GODOT, made a single work for projected cinema. It’s in essence a chase film, the craziest ever committed to celluloid. It’s a chase between camera and pursued image that finds existential dread embedded in the very apparatus of the movies itself. The link to cinema’s essence is evident in the casting, as the chased object is none other than an aged Buster Keaton, who was understandably befuddled at Beckett and director Alan Schneider’s imperative that he keep his face hidden from the camera’s gaze. The archetypal levels resonate further in the exquisite cinematography of Academy Award-winner Boris Kaufman, whose brothers Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman created the legendary self-reflexive masterpiece MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA. Commissioned and produced by Grove Press’s Barney Rosset, FILM is at once the product of a stunningly all-star assembly of talent, and a cinematic conundrum that asks more questions than it answers.

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

FILMMAKER IN PERSON FOR OPENING NIGHT!

Produced by Amy Heller and Dennis Doros, with special thanks to Ross Lipman.

In 1964 author Samuel Beckett set out on one of the strangest ventures in cinematic history: his embattled collaboration with silent-era genius Buster Keaton on the production of a short, title-less avant-garde film. Beckett was nearing the peak of his fame, which would culminate in his receiving a Nobel Prize five years later. Keaton, in his waning years, never lived to see Beckett’s canonization. The film they made along with director Alan Schneider, renegade publisher Barney Rosset, and Academy Award-winning cinematographer Boris Kaufman, and which was eventually titled FILM, has been the subject of praise, condemnation, and controversy for decades. Yet the eclectic participants are just one part of a story that stretches to the very birth of cinema, and spreads out to our understanding of human consciousness itself.

NOTFILM is a feature-length experimental essay on FILM’s production and its philosophical implications. Directed by filmmaker and archivist Ross Lipman, who has contributed immeasurably to film culture over the past couple decades, both through his own films and his extraordinary work preserving classics such as SCORPIO RISING, WANDA, THE EXILES, KILLER OF SHEEP, and many, many more, NOTFILM is a kind of documentary manifestation of the unique illustrated lectures he’s presented at venues around the world in recent years. Featuring in-depth interviews with many of those who participated in the creation of FILM, it is also a treasure trove of archival materials, including audio recordings of the production meetings between Beckett, Rosset, Schneider, and others, and outtakes from the film shoot itself. No ordinary ‘making-of’ film, NOTFILM is clearly the work of a fiercely committed filmmaker and archivist, and digs deeply both into the film’s production and its multiple layers of meaning.

“NOTFILM is a definitive documentary account of the making of Samuel Beckett’s only film work and both a brilliant examination of its significance in relation to both Beckett’s other dramatic works and to film theory, drawing on many touchstones in film history ranging from Keaton to Vertov to Murnau to make its arguments. Without contesting the critical consensus that Beckett’s FILM is a failure (a position maintained even by Beckett and his main collaborator, director Alan Schneider), Lipman very persuasively and masterfully shows its continuing importance.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum

Selected screenings of NOTFILM will be presented by the following special guests:

**Friday, April 1 (Opening Night): Director Ross Lipman
**Saturday & Sunday, April 2 & 3 at 8pm: Producers Amy Heller & Dennis Doros
**Tuesday, April 5: Editor and publisher Jeannette Seaver, who appears in NOTFILM

A LIMITED NUMBER OF ADVANCE TICKETS ARE AVAILABLE NOW!

(LES ANGES DU PÉCHÉ)

“We know how much both Dominicans and filmmakers, each for their own reasons, love the spectacle of a beautiful death. […] Listening to this film is tremendously pleasurable for the mind and for the heart. Not a single sentimental sentence or pedantic remark, no catechism, no emotional outbursts; the dialogue is humane and full of grandeur and goodness; it grabs and holds the soul without any of the artifices of religious eloquence; occasionally it even gives us a glimpse of the more exquisite nourishments of mischievousness and tenderness.” (“Angels of Sin,” 1943)

With the Marx Brothers.

“Like the Marx Brothers disguised as Russian airmen (in A NIGHT AT THE OPERA – a work which I regard as allegorical of many a textual problem), I am, at the beginning of my presentation, rigged out with a large false beard which, drenched little by little with the flood of my own words (a substitute for the jug of water from which the Mute, Harpo, guzzles away on the Mayor of New York’s rostrum), I then feel coming unstuck piecemeal in front of everybody.” (“Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers,” 1971)

With Greta Garbo and John Gilbert.

“Garbo offered to one’s gaze a sort of Platonic Idea of the human creature, which explains why her face is almost sexually undefined, without however leaving one in doubt. It is true that this film (in which Queen Christina is by turns a woman and a young cavalier) lends itself to this lack of differentiation; but Garbo does not perform in it any feat of transvestism; she is always herself, and carries without pretense, under her crown or her wide-brimmed hats, the same snowy solitary face. The name given to her, the Divine, probably aimed to convey less a superlative state of beauty than the essence of her corporeal person, descended from a heaven where all things are formed and perfected in the clearest light.” (“Garbo’s Face,” 1955)

With Gérard Blain, Jean-Claude Brialy, and Bernadette Lafont.

“Everything on the surface of LE BEAU SERGE is accurate (except when it translates the story directly: the snow is fake, for example): the fields, the village, the hotel, the town square, the clothes, objects, faces and gestures, everything that bears up under the gaze, everything that is literal, that only signifies an insignificant existence or an existence whose significance is well beyond the consciousness of the characters. A fundamental elegance infuses the beginning of the film where, thankfully, nothing happens apart from a subtle contradiction of rural life, cut short – a must, so that there’s something to look at – by the appearance of a young bourgeois in a duffel coat and wafting scarf, reading CAHIERS DU CINÉMA and drinking bad coffee in the local bar.” (“Cinema Right and Left,” 1959)

Hubert Aquin
OF SPORT AND MEN / LE SPORT ET LES HOMMES
(1961, 59 min, 16mm, b&w. In French with projected English subtitles.)
Barthes’ only screenwriting credit is attached to this documentary by one of Quebec’s most iconic intellectuals. Its “phenomenology of sport” is an extension of the MYTHOLOGIES project conceived especially for cinema, and written when Barthes’ engagement with moving images were at their early-sixties peak. He and Aquin worked together closely on this montage-driven film, exploring the power bullfighting, auto racing, the Tour de France, hockey (which Barthes flew to Canada to watch), and soccer exercised over athletes, crowds, and nations.

Michel Brault, Marcel Carrière, Claude Fournier & Claude Jutra
WRESTLING / LA LUTTE
(1961, 28 min, 35mm, b&w)
“We met Roland Barthes at a party, and he said, ‘You’re doing a film on wrestling? I’d love to go with you!’ He was in Montreal at the time. We told him we were going to show the audience that wrestling was fake, but he told us it wouldn’t work: ‘Are you crazy? You can’t destroy theater. Theater is theater, and wrestling is the people’s theater, it’s their way of participating in the fight between good and evil. Why destroy that?’” –Michel Brault, in Gilles Noël’s LE CHEVAL DE TROIE DE L’ESTHÉTIQUE, 2005

(BRONENOSETS POTEMKIN)

“The primary force of Eisenstein is due to the fact that no image is boring, you are not obliged to wait for the next in order to understand and be delighted; it is a question not of a dialectic (that time of the patience required for certain pleasures) but of a continuous jubilation made up of a summation of perfect instants.” (“Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,” 1973).

(PROFESSIONE: REPORTER)

With Jack Nicholson, Maria Schneider, and Jenny Runacre.

“The artist is someone who stops to look insistently, and I imagine you became a filmmaker because the camera is an eye whose technical properties compel it to look. What you add to this character trait, which all filmmakers share, is that you look at things radically, until they are exhausted. On the one hand, you look incessantly at what you were not expected to look at either by political convention (the poor farmers in China) or by narrative convention (the dead times of an adventure). On the other, your preferred hero is someone who looks (a photographer, a reporter). This is dangerous, because to look longer than expected (I insist on this added intensity) disturbs established orders of every kind, to the extent that normally the time of the look is controlled by society; hence the scandalous nature of certain photographs and certain films, not the most indecent or the most combative, but just the most ‘posed.’” (“Dear Antonioni,” 1980)

This group program brings together several filmmakers who were active here in New York City – mostly on the Lower East Side – in the 1980s, during a period of incredible creative energy and cross-pollination between art forms. Esther Shatavsky’s wondrous BEDTIME STORY is a collage film masterpiece that’s made as much from splicing tape as it is from celluloid. Henry Hills’s RADIO ADIOS and MONEY are formally complex, rapid-fire portraits of downtown Lower Manhattan, with appearances from musicians John Zorn, Christian Marclay, and Arto Lindsay, poets Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, and Hannah Weiner, dancer and choreographer Sally Silvers, and filmmakers Abigail Child and George Kuchar, among others. Richard Kern’s GOODBYE 42^ND STREET documents the Deuce in all its grimy, aggressive 1980s glory, while YOU KILLED ME FIRST is a blast of No Wave/punk subversion – as is Nick Zedd’s outrageous and hilarious POLICE STATE. MM Serra’s FIVE FILMS embody a similar DIY Lower East Side spirit, but introduces a distinctive dimension of lyrical eroticism. Taken together these seven films demonstrate both the unbounded energy that animated the downtown NYC underground film scene in these years and that each of these filmmakers shared, as well as the thrillingly diverse forms they each developed.

Unless otherwise noted, all films have been preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Henry Hills and MM Serra will be here in person!

Esther Shatavsky
BEDTIME STORY (1981, 6 min, 16mm-to-35mm, b&w, silent)
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Film Preservation Foundation.

Henry Hills
RADIO ADIOS (1982, 10.5 min, 16mm)
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Film Preservation Foundation
MONEY (1985, 15 min, 16mm-to-35mm)

Richard Kern
GOODBYE 42ND STREET (1983, 4 min, Super 8mm-to-16mm)
YOU KILLED ME FIRST (1985, 12 min, Super 8mm-to-16mm)

MM Serra
FIVE FILMS (1984-88, 10 min, 16mm, color/b&w)

Nick Zedd
POLICE STATE (1987, 18 min, 16mm)

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

(LES SOEURS BRONTË)

With Isabelle Adjani, Marie-France Pisier, Isabelle Huppert, Pascal Greggory, Patrick Magee, and Roland Barthes.

“What’s told is the subtle story of what we might call a familial micro-network. […] And, because this little circle is quite homogenous, the differences which gradually distinguish this game’s players from each other have something darkly tragic about them, for they owe nothing to the circumstances or even to the temperaments involved, but instead result from a sort of moral biology (if the expression can be permitted), which leads these human plants to evolve differently, according to the place they occupy in the game of the sexes.” (“There is no man,” 1979)

(LO STRANIERO)

With Marcello Mastroianni, Anna Karina, Bernard Blier, and Bruno Cremer.

“In our society, any man who does not cry at his mother’s funeral is liable to be condemned to death,” commented Albert Camus about his 1942 novel THE STRANGER, in which the anti-hero Meursault kills a man for no discernible reason apart from the influence of the burning Algerian sun. In the trial that follows, Meursault is sentenced to death more for his social behavior than for the crime he has committed. If THE STRANGER remains Camus’ most famous novel, its screen adaptation does not occupy the same place in Visconti’s filmography. Stuck between the Italian maestro’s neo-realist and ‘German’ periods, the movie has often been reproached for its overly scrupulous fidelity to the novel. Nonetheless, almost fifty years after its release, the film still arouses the interest of both Camus and Visconti aficionados, as well as devotees of Marcello Mastroianni, who delivers a captivating performance as Meursault.

Raymonde Carasco completed her doctoral thesis under the direction of Roland Barthes, who contributed a thrilling, highly significant, and still-untranslated text to her defense, “L’essai en fête.” Situated at the crossroads of ethnography and experimental cinema, her films and essays share a set of reference points (Eisenstein, Pasolini, Buñuel) and a field of interests (details, fragments, cultural symbols) with Barthes’ work.

The prints of both Carasco films are from the collection of La Cinémathèque de Toulouse.

GRADIVA ESQUISSE I
(1978, 25 min, 16mm)
“Gradiva is a figure of salvation, a fortunate escape, a kindly Eumenid. But just as the Eumenides are merely former Erinyes, goddesses of torment, there also exists, in the amorous realm, a ‘wicked’ Gradiva. The loved being, if only unconsciously and for motives which may proceed from his own neurotic advantages, then seems to be determined to lodge me even deeper in my delirium, to sustain and to aggravate the amorous wound….” (A LOVER’S DISCOURSE: FRAGMENTS, 1977)

CIGURI – TARAHUMARAS 98 – LA DANSE DU PEYOTL
(1998, 42 min, 16mm. In French with English subtitles.)
An episode from a documentary cycle involving the Rarámuri or Tarahumara people of Northern Mexico. This film addresses rites of winter as well as peyote and bakaka rites. Its commentary, read by Raymonde Carasco and Jean Rouch, is drawn from texts by Antonin Artaud.

(ROBERTE CE SOIR)

With Denise Morin-Sinclaire, Pierre Klossowski, Martin Loeb, Barbet Schroeder, Michel Berto, Juliet Berto, Alain Cuny, and Jean-François Stévenin.

“I was enchanted by Pierre Klossowski and Pierre Zucca’s ROBERTE CE SOIR, which I saw at a private screening. The film deploys a range of effects (popular, melodramatic, novelistic, parodic, metaphysical, perverse) each of which is quite powerful – starting with the mussel lunch, which is impossible to retell without laughing – but whose sum total risks offending everybody, from the general public to the avant-garde. It is a work untouched by fashion, high or low. Why? Perhaps because each scene has an imperious clarity – the dazzling obviousness of tableaux vivants – and because that clarity goes unrecuperated: it is not a ‘clarification,’ there is no last word. One might call it a comedy, but it is a Nietzschean comedy, as enigmatic as Nietzsche’s last period, about which Klossowski has written so well.” (“The Chronicle,” 1979)

(LOIN DES HOMMES)

With Viggo Mortensen and Reda Kateb.

Algeria, 1954. A reclusive French ex-soldier (Viggo Mortensen), since become a solitary schoolteacher in the Algerian mountains, is thrown into the midst of a rebellion when he’s ordered to escort a villager accused of murder to prison. While the rebellion rumbles in the valley, their journey leads them through a deadly firefight between settlers and rebels. The two men, on opposite sides of the conflict, must join forces to survive in these early days of the Algerian War of Independence. Basing his film on Camus’ short story “The Guest,” French filmmaker David Oelhoffen creates a penetrating western set among the magnificent landscapes of the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. The dynamic between the two protagonists, both of whom face difficult moral choices, explores dilemmas of accountability and condemnation.

For full program listings, visit www.newfilmmakers.com.

Hubert Aquin
OF SPORT AND MEN / LE SPORT ET LES HOMMES
(1961, 59 min, 16mm, b&w. In French with projected English subtitles.)
Barthes’ only screenwriting credit is attached to this documentary by one of Quebec’s most iconic intellectuals. Its “phenomenology of sport” is an extension of the MYTHOLOGIES project conceived especially for cinema, and written when Barthes’ engagement with moving images were at their early-sixties peak. He and Aquin worked together closely on this montage-driven film, exploring the power bullfighting, auto racing, the Tour de France, hockey (which Barthes flew to Canada to watch), and soccer exercised over athletes, crowds, and nations.

Michel Brault, Marcel Carrière, Claude Fournier & Claude Jutra
WRESTLING / LA LUTTE
(1961, 28 min, 35mm, b&w)
“We met Roland Barthes at a party, and he said, ‘You’re doing a film on wrestling? I’d love to go with you!’ He was in Montreal at the time. We told him we were going to show the audience that wrestling was fake, but he told us it wouldn’t work: ‘Are you crazy? You can’t destroy theater. Theater is theater, and wrestling is the people’s theater, it’s their way of participating in the fight between good and evil. Why destroy that?’” –Michel Brault, in Gilles Noël’s LE CHEVAL DE TROIE DE L’ESTHÉTIQUE, 2005

With Gérard Blain, Jean-Claude Brialy, and Bernadette Lafont.

“Everything on the surface of LE BEAU SERGE is accurate (except when it translates the story directly: the snow is fake, for example): the fields, the village, the hotel, the town square, the clothes, objects, faces and gestures, everything that bears up under the gaze, everything that is literal, that only signifies an insignificant existence or an existence whose significance is well beyond the consciousness of the characters. A fundamental elegance infuses the beginning of the film where, thankfully, nothing happens apart from a subtle contradiction of rural life, cut short – a must, so that there’s something to look at – by the appearance of a young bourgeois in a duffel coat and wafting scarf, reading CAHIERS DU CINÉMA and drinking bad coffee in the local bar.” (“Cinema Right and Left,” 1959)

With the Marx Brothers.

“Like the Marx Brothers disguised as Russian airmen (in A NIGHT AT THE OPERA – a work which I regard as allegorical of many a textual problem), I am, at the beginning of my presentation, rigged out with a large false beard which, drenched little by little with the flood of my own words (a substitute for the jug of water from which the Mute, Harpo, guzzles away on the Mayor of New York’s rostrum), I then feel coming unstuck piecemeal in front of everybody.” (“Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers,” 1971)

Joël Calmettes
SARTRE-CAMUS, A FRACTURED FRIENDSHIP / CAMUS, SARTRE: UNE AMITIÉ DÉCHIRÉE
(2014, 52 min, digital. In French with English subtitles.)
Sartre and Camus, the most famous French writers of the 20th century, form a legendary and inseparable couple. These two extraordinary thinkers propelled the figure of the politically engaged writer into the limelight. Throughout the 1940s, Sartre and Camus were close friends. But in 1952, after a period of disaffection, they publically feuded, often resorting to polemics. There were many reasons for their rupture – literary, philosophical, political, and personal – including deeply divergent beliefs, as well as jealousy and resentment. The relationship between the two iconoclastic thinkers was simple yet tormented, and mundane yet remarkable. Their conflict pressured generations of intellectuals to choose sides. This film features a multitude of personal accounts and a wealth of obscure archival materials, including a previously unreleased recording of Sartre talking about Camus.

Joël Calmettes
LIVING WITH CAMUS / VIVRE AVEC CAMUS
(2013, 52 min, digital. In French with English subtitles.)
Albert Camus is today the most widely read 20th-century French writer. In 2013, for the celebration of the centenary of his birth, Joël Calmettes decided to seek out Camus’ impassioned readers all around the world. Indeed, Camus’ admirers form a vast ‘community’ that extends far beyond national borders, and comprises people from radically different walks of life, including well-known artists such as Patti Smith, but also a priest, an American death penalty opponent, a Chicago attorney, a Japanese calligrapher, a French policewoman, and a dancer from Yaoundé. Camus’ work has had a strong impact on each of them: some have seen their destiny change after reading his books, some almost worship him. In LIVING WITH CAMUS, Calmettes reminds us that books are not only the domain of scholars and critics, but live and thrive in the mute relationship between an author and his readers.

(LES ANGES DU PÉCHÉ)

“We know how much both Dominicans and filmmakers, each for their own reasons, love the spectacle of a beautiful death. […] Listening to this film is tremendously pleasurable for the mind and for the heart. Not a single sentimental sentence or pedantic remark, no catechism, no emotional outbursts; the dialogue is humane and full of grandeur and goodness; it grabs and holds the soul without any of the artifices of religious eloquence; occasionally it even gives us a glimpse of the more exquisite nourishments of mischievousness and tenderness.” (“Angels of Sin,” 1943)

With Greta Garbo and John Gilbert.

“Garbo offered to one’s gaze a sort of Platonic Idea of the human creature, which explains why her face is almost sexually undefined, without however leaving one in doubt. It is true that this film (in which Queen Christina is by turns a woman and a young cavalier) lends itself to this lack of differentiation; but Garbo does not perform in it any feat of transvestism; she is always herself, and carries without pretense, under her crown or her wide-brimmed hats, the same snowy solitary face. The name given to her, the Divine, probably aimed to convey less a superlative state of beauty than the essence of her corporeal person, descended from a heaven where all things are formed and perfected in the clearest light.” (“Garbo’s Face,” 1955)

Let’s dance! Bathe yourself in Bowie with Anthology’s encore presentation of the “KGB Movie Friends” very hefty and heartfelt BIG BOWIE BASH: A TRIBUTE! Celebrate the bounty of everything Bowie, with clips, videos, performance footage, interviews, and miscellany… The expected and unexpected – moment to moment an adventure in unveiling – going deep – from all eras of The Oddity’s life lived as no one else… This 4-plus-hour event that had the Kraine Theater crowd rapt and packed beyond capacity til the wee hours can now be seen at Anthology at a much more reasonable hour – so, bring the kids! Surprising and moving – the Sunday night KGB “Movie Friends” team of Chris Jacobson, Sean Price Williams, and Stephen Gurewitz, et al, have put together what many feel may be “the best movie of the year” – full of feeling and fun – a singular experience not to be missed that will have you singing, crying, laughing, gasping, and…dancing in the streets!

“KGB Movie Friends” – for lack of any official name – is a weekly Sunday night screening hosted/curated/programmed/whatevered – by the same core group for the past 5 plus years and running… Just a bunch of freaks watching a most likely pretty weird movie together – with a nice big screen, real theater seats, and drinks from bar-buddy, Louie, upstairs… Every Sunday – 11pm – at the Kraine Theater below the bar at KGB – and free to all…
More class-sicks than classics – weird or wonderful, wacky or whacked – you never know what you might see – but odds are it will be something you’ve never seen before…

If you’d like to find out what the Movie Friends are showing on any given Sunday, just text 917-251-4139 to be added to the Sunday Night Movie Missives list. Everyone should be a Movie Friend!

(PROFESSIONE: REPORTER)

With Jack Nicholson, Maria Schneider, and Jenny Runacre.

“The artist is someone who stops to look insistently, and I imagine you became a filmmaker because the camera is an eye whose technical properties compel it to look. What you add to this character trait, which all filmmakers share, is that you look at things radically, until they are exhausted. On the one hand, you look incessantly at what you were not expected to look at either by political convention (the poor farmers in China) or by narrative convention (the dead times of an adventure). On the other, your preferred hero is someone who looks (a photographer, a reporter). This is dangerous, because to look longer than expected (I insist on this added intensity) disturbs established orders of every kind, to the extent that normally the time of the look is controlled by society; hence the scandalous nature of certain photographs and certain films, not the most indecent or the most combative, but just the most ‘posed.’” (“Dear Antonioni,” 1980)

(DOWN THERE)

When Chantal Akerman passed away late last year, the cinema lost one of its most important and irreplaceable voices. Her stature has been amply demonstrated by the many tributes taking place throughout the New York repertory film community – numerous screenings and talks have taken place in recent months, and more are on the way, not least a comprehensive retrospective at BAMcinématek in April.

That Anthology should take part in these tributes is only fitting, since our ties with Akerman are deep and longstanding. In recent years we’ve hosted Chantal and shown her films on many occasions, including presenting the NYC premiere engagements of her last two fiction features, LA CAPTIVE and ALMAYER’S FOLLY. But Chantal also credited Anthology as a key source of inspiration during the year and a half she spent living in New York in the early 1970s; according to her, it was here (or rather at our original home at the Public Theater) that she was introduced to the work of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, and others, who would exert a decisive influence on her work.

And so it’s with this background in mind that we pay our own tribute to Akerman by hosting encore screenings of her extraordinary final work, NO HOME MOVIE (immediately following its run at BAMcinématek), alongside the long-awaited NYC premiere engagement of a film that stands in close and fascinating dialogue with it, 2006’s LÀ-BAS (DOWN THERE). A personal documentary that Akerman shot almost entirely within a Tel Aviv apartment, LÀ-BAS shares with NO HOME MOVIE a profound interiority (both literal and figurative), a haunting stillness, a concern with Jewish identity, and an emphasis on the relationship between Akerman and her mother. Ultimately, both films comprise a heartbreaking meditation on the loss – or impossibility – of a sense of belonging. A filmmaker who explored deeply personal themes with uncompromising perception and unparalleled formal innovation, Akerman was a giant of world cinema, and her death represents an enormous loss.

LÀ-BAS and NO HOME MOVIE are distributed by Icarus Films; special thanks to Jonathan Miller & Livia Bloom.

Made during a brief stay in Israel, where Akerman was teaching at the University of Tel Aviv, LÀ-BAS takes the chamber play to its ultimate extreme: it is almost entirely chamber. Filmed predominantly from within the apartment where she was residing during her time in Tel Aviv, LÀ-BAS finds Akerman, in voiceover, musing on her family, her Jewish identity, and her childhood, while with her camera she creates a counterpoint between the interior of the apartment and the outside world visible through the aperture of its windows. Reluctant to make a filmic ‘statement’ about Israel, with LÀ-BAS Akerman has created instead a deeply reflective film that indirectly, and without rhetoric, engages with ‘the Israel question,’ wondering whether normal life is possible in this place and whether filming is a viable way of grappling with its complexities.

“Before, after, and between the narrative feature films…that anchor her status as a world-class filmmaker and one of the most indispensable of her post-Godard generation, Akerman has made some 20 works (films, performances, gallery installations) whose basic form is the letter – sometimes written to her by another, or by her to another, but most often by and to herself. […] LÀ-BAS…is both the most fragile and most powerful of these works.” –Amy Taubin, FILM COMMENT

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Site-specific yet secretly connected, Alassane and Moullet’s tales of bandits on the loose pillage the mightiest of Hollywood genres just as it was beginning to crumble. They also point to how roles and relationships were being reconfigured in the wake of American cultural imperialism. Though the western was a potent form of global and cultural hegemony, these films demonstrate that its forms and codes could also be ingeniously subverted, mobilized as tools for creative appropriation and resistance.

Scholar, poet, and current Schomburg Center fellow Tsitsi Jaji will be here for a discussion following the screening on April 15.

Moustapha Alassane
AN ADVENTURER’S HOMECOMING / RETOUR D’UN AVENTURIER
(Niger, 1966, 34 min, 16mm. In Hausa and French with projected English subtitles.)
&
Serge Moati
COWBOYS ARE BLACK / LES COWBOYS SONT NOIRS
(Niger, 1966, 15 min, 16mm. In French with projected English subtitles.)
Jimi flies back to his native village after a long absence and convinces his friends to become cowboys. Renamed Black Cooper, John Kelly, Breaker, Billy Walter, and Queen Christine, they steal horses, terrorize sheepherders, and brawl in the neighborhood saloon to the horror of the locals. Drawing maximum effects from an economy of means, Alassane’s brilliant comedy intertwines central modernization plots in West Africa and Europe after the war (a traveller’s return, the youth problem, the arrival of new technology) with the outlaw gang and frontier-town-under-attack narratives that were mainstays of the western genre. By stripping these stories of their conventional moral weight, he opens his film, “the first African western,” to the widest scope of possible interpretations. As a complement to the screening, this program also includes a short making-of documentary by Serge Moati, which was shot in Niamey during production.

Luc Moullet
A GIRL IS A GUN / UNE AVENTURE DE BILLY LE KID
(France, 1971, 100 min, 35mm. In French with projected English subtitles.)
Jean-Pierre Léaud hits a squirrely, plant-eating career peak as Billy, a cold-hearted killer who encounters a young woman (Marie-Christine Questerbert) and yearns to experience human emotions. Glassier than GREASER’S PALACE, braver than EL TOPO, with a budget so tight it turns asceticism into psychedelia, Moullet’s feature pares down and empties out its appropriated form until all that remains are landscapes, bodies, a few gunshots, and a place to hide the gold. It’s at that point, in the last fifteen minutes, that things really take off. Friends, seek no more: this is it.

Total running time: ca. 155 min.

When Chantal Akerman passed away late last year, the cinema lost one of its most important and irreplaceable voices. Her stature has been amply demonstrated by the many tributes taking place throughout the New York repertory film community – numerous screenings and talks have taken place in recent months, and more are on the way, not least a comprehensive retrospective at BAMcinématek in April.

That Anthology should take part in these tributes is only fitting, since our ties with Akerman are deep and longstanding. In recent years we’ve hosted Chantal and shown her films on many occasions, including presenting the NYC premiere engagements of her last two fiction features, LA CAPTIVE and ALMAYER’S FOLLY. But Chantal also credited Anthology as a key source of inspiration during the year and a half she spent living in New York in the early 1970s; according to her, it was here (or rather at our original home at the Public Theater) that she was introduced to the work of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, and others, who would exert a decisive influence on her work.

And so it’s with this background in mind that we pay our own tribute to Akerman by hosting encore screenings of her extraordinary final work, NO HOME MOVIE (immediately following its run at BAMcinématek), alongside the long-awaited NYC premiere engagement of a film that stands in close and fascinating dialogue with it, 2006’s LÀ-BAS (DOWN THERE). A personal documentary that Akerman shot almost entirely within a Tel Aviv apartment, LÀ-BAS shares with NO HOME MOVIE a profound interiority (both literal and figurative), a haunting stillness, a concern with Jewish identity, and an emphasis on the relationship between Akerman and her mother. Ultimately, both films comprise a heartbreaking meditation on the loss – or impossibility – of a sense of belonging. A filmmaker who explored deeply personal themes with uncompromising perception and unparalleled formal innovation, Akerman was a giant of world cinema, and her death represents an enormous loss.

LÀ-BAS and NO HOME MOVIE are distributed by Icarus Films; special thanks to Jonathan Miller & Livia Bloom.

Akerman’s final work, released shortly after her death and inevitably shadowed by it, NO HOME MOVIE is a sustained portrait of her mother, Natalia. A crucial figure in Akerman’s cinema throughout her career, Natalia was born in Poland, fled to Belgium during the war, and was eventually sent to and survived Auschwitz. NO HOME MOVIE documents the last months of her life, and of Natalia and Akerman’s relationship, with the intimacy and domesticity of a diary film. Akerman seems to film perpetually, recording her conversations with her mother, in person, via phone, and over Skype, as well as Natalia simply existing, in long, uneventful passages that call to mind Akerman’s masterpiece, JEANNE DIELMAN. But like LÀ-BAS, NO HOME MOVIE’s simplicity and apparent artlessness are deceptive, masking a great depth of feeling, a palpable sense of searching, and a desire to confront, by means of the camera, mortality, time, and loss.

“In an age of seductive slickness, of Instagram-curated happiness, Akerman continues to confront what Joan Didion termed ‘the unspeakable peril of the everyday,’ doing so in a disarmingly honest, unembellished way which gives weight and credence to nervous collapses, emotional impairment, and fears about the precariousness of life. Both elliptical and tryingly quotidian, NO HOME MOVIE is a shattering contemplation of loss and grief as much as it is a search for identity and calm, for rootedness from a perpetually nomadic, breathless soul. It is not a home movie: it is a movie about having no home.” –Andréa Picard, CINEMA SCOPE

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Raymonde Carasco completed her doctoral thesis under the direction of Roland Barthes, who contributed a thrilling, highly significant, and still-untranslated text to her defense, “L’essai en fête.” Situated at the crossroads of ethnography and experimental cinema, her films and essays share a set of reference points (Eisenstein, Pasolini, Buñuel) and a field of interests (details, fragments, cultural symbols) with Barthes’ work.

The prints of both Carasco films are from the collection of La Cinémathèque de Toulouse.

GRADIVA ESQUISSE I
(1978, 25 min, 16mm)
“Gradiva is a figure of salvation, a fortunate escape, a kindly Eumenid. But just as the Eumenides are merely former Erinyes, goddesses of torment, there also exists, in the amorous realm, a ‘wicked’ Gradiva. The loved being, if only unconsciously and for motives which may proceed from his own neurotic advantages, then seems to be determined to lodge me even deeper in my delirium, to sustain and to aggravate the amorous wound….” (A LOVER’S DISCOURSE: FRAGMENTS, 1977)

CIGURI – TARAHUMARAS 98 – LA DANSE DU PEYOTL
(1998, 42 min, 16mm. In French with English subtitles.)
An episode from a documentary cycle involving the Rarámuri or Tarahumara people of Northern Mexico. This film addresses rites of winter as well as peyote and bakaka rites. Its commentary, read by Raymonde Carasco and Jean Rouch, is drawn from texts by Antonin Artaud.

(LES SOEURS BRONTË)

With Isabelle Adjani, Marie-France Pisier, Isabelle Huppert, Pascal Greggory, Patrick Magee, and Roland Barthes.

“What’s told is the subtle story of what we might call a familial micro-network. […] And, because this little circle is quite homogenous, the differences which gradually distinguish this game’s players from each other have something darkly tragic about them, for they owe nothing to the circumstances or even to the temperaments involved, but instead result from a sort of moral biology (if the expression can be permitted), which leads these human plants to evolve differently, according to the place they occupy in the game of the sexes.” (“There is no man,” 1979)

The story of the cultural outsider discovering France had been part of the European cultural imaginary since at least the 18th century, when Montesquieu’s PERSIAN LETTERS met with popular acclaim. But it was also a popular trope with pioneering figures in Francophone African cinema (Vierya’s AFRIQUE-SUR-SEINE, Sembène’s BLACK GIRL, Ousseïni’s PARIS, IT’S PRETTY), empowering directors to reverse the traditional viewing positions established by the colonial gaze. The protagonists featured in both of the films screening here – played brilliantly by Robert Liensol (SOLEIL Ô) and Damouré Zika (PETIT À PETIT) – arrive in France with unfettered enthusiasm, but their enchantment quickly fades. Though the films share some plot twists (loosely) in common, the whimsical, distended journey of PETIT À PETIT stands in stark contrast (sometimes jarringly so) with the biting, economical critique of SOLEIL Ô.

Hondo’s first feature film, SOLEIL Ô follows a black African accountant who migrates to Paris in hopes of making a better life for himself. France turns out to be less welcoming than he had imagined, however. Confronted by racism and adversity at every turn, the accountant finds himself increasingly alienated from those around him. Beaten down by the excesses and cruelty of French society, he comes to realize that there is only one way out of this nightmare – he must reconcile himself with the spirit and force of the black revolutionaries who came before him. SOLEIL Ô is part manifesto, part existentialist quest, and part avant-garde aesthetic experiment. It’s a must-see for anyone interested in post-Independence African cinema, but it also resonates powerfully with our contemporary moment. Through its striking images, dynamic rhythms, and caustic humor, viewers are offered unique insights into the insidious legacies wrought by colonial racism, cultural imperialism, and capitalist greed.

When Chantal Akerman passed away late last year, the cinema lost one of its most important and irreplaceable voices. Her stature has been amply demonstrated by the many tributes taking place throughout the New York repertory film community – numerous screenings and talks have taken place in recent months, and more are on the way, not least a comprehensive retrospective at BAMcinématek in April.

That Anthology should take part in these tributes is only fitting, since our ties with Akerman are deep and longstanding. In recent years we’ve hosted Chantal and shown her films on many occasions, including presenting the NYC premiere engagements of her last two fiction features, LA CAPTIVE and ALMAYER’S FOLLY. But Chantal also credited Anthology as a key source of inspiration during the year and a half she spent living in New York in the early 1970s; according to her, it was here (or rather at our original home at the Public Theater) that she was introduced to the work of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, and others, who would exert a decisive influence on her work.

And so it’s with this background in mind that we pay our own tribute to Akerman by hosting encore screenings of her extraordinary final work, NO HOME MOVIE (immediately following its run at BAMcinématek), alongside the long-awaited NYC premiere engagement of a film that stands in close and fascinating dialogue with it, 2006’s LÀ-BAS (DOWN THERE). A personal documentary that Akerman shot almost entirely within a Tel Aviv apartment, LÀ-BAS shares with NO HOME MOVIE a profound interiority (both literal and figurative), a haunting stillness, a concern with Jewish identity, and an emphasis on the relationship between Akerman and her mother. Ultimately, both films comprise a heartbreaking meditation on the loss – or impossibility – of a sense of belonging. A filmmaker who explored deeply personal themes with uncompromising perception and unparalleled formal innovation, Akerman was a giant of world cinema, and her death represents an enormous loss.

LÀ-BAS and NO HOME MOVIE are distributed by Icarus Films; special thanks to Jonathan Miller & Livia Bloom.

Akerman’s final work, released shortly after her death and inevitably shadowed by it, NO HOME MOVIE is a sustained portrait of her mother, Natalia. A crucial figure in Akerman’s cinema throughout her career, Natalia was born in Poland, fled to Belgium during the war, and was eventually sent to and survived Auschwitz. NO HOME MOVIE documents the last months of her life, and of Natalia and Akerman’s relationship, with the intimacy and domesticity of a diary film. Akerman seems to film perpetually, recording her conversations with her mother, in person, via phone, and over Skype, as well as Natalia simply existing, in long, uneventful passages that call to mind Akerman’s masterpiece, JEANNE DIELMAN. But like LÀ-BAS, NO HOME MOVIE’s simplicity and apparent artlessness are deceptive, masking a great depth of feeling, a palpable sense of searching, and a desire to confront, by means of the camera, mortality, time, and loss.

“In an age of seductive slickness, of Instagram-curated happiness, Akerman continues to confront what Joan Didion termed ‘the unspeakable peril of the everyday,’ doing so in a disarmingly honest, unembellished way which gives weight and credence to nervous collapses, emotional impairment, and fears about the precariousness of life. Both elliptical and tryingly quotidian, NO HOME MOVIE is a shattering contemplation of loss and grief as much as it is a search for identity and calm, for rootedness from a perpetually nomadic, breathless soul. It is not a home movie: it is a movie about having no home.” –Andréa Picard, CINEMA SCOPE

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(PETIT À PETIT)

The story of the cultural outsider discovering France had been part of the European cultural imaginary since at least the 18th century, when Montesquieu’s PERSIAN LETTERS met with popular acclaim. But it was also a popular trope with pioneering figures in Francophone African cinema (Vierya’s AFRIQUE-SUR-SEINE, Sembène’s BLACK GIRL, Ousseïni’s PARIS, IT’S PRETTY), empowering directors to reverse the traditional viewing positions established by the colonial gaze. The protagonists featured in both of the films screening here – played brilliantly by Robert Liensol (SOLEIL Ô) and Damouré Zika (PETIT À PETIT) – arrive in France with unfettered enthusiasm, but their enchantment quickly fades. Though the films share some plot twists (loosely) in common, the whimsical, distended journey of PETIT À PETIT stands in stark contrast (sometimes jarringly so) with the biting, economical critique of SOLEIL Ô.

A rare screening of the full four-hour version of Rouch’s post-68 epic, PETIT À PETIT, which until now has only circulated here in its ‘commercial’ 90-minute edit. Made in collaboration with Damouré Zika, Lam Ibrahima Dia, Illo Gaudel, and Tallou Mouzourane, and featuring filmmaker Safi Faye, the film returns to Montesquieu’s PERSIAN LETTERS. Zika and Dia play 20th-century versions of Montesquieu’s protagonists Rica and Usbek, coming to France to determine whether it can provide viable models for African life. This four-year project, which Rivette cited as the decisive influence on OUT 1, was a fearless experiment in duration-based improvisation and a crucial pivot between Rouch’s earlier ethno-fictions and the sync-sound work of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. It was also completely out of phase with its time, working between cultural contexts at a moment when the borders between them had solidified, and eliding practical politics in favor of a political imaginary. The long cut is a revelation, restoring rhythm, detail, and complexity to a work which always involved far more than its plot.

(DOWN THERE)

When Chantal Akerman passed away late last year, the cinema lost one of its most important and irreplaceable voices. Her stature has been amply demonstrated by the many tributes taking place throughout the New York repertory film community – numerous screenings and talks have taken place in recent months, and more are on the way, not least a comprehensive retrospective at BAMcinématek in April.

That Anthology should take part in these tributes is only fitting, since our ties with Akerman are deep and longstanding. In recent years we’ve hosted Chantal and shown her films on many occasions, including presenting the NYC premiere engagements of her last two fiction features, LA CAPTIVE and ALMAYER’S FOLLY. But Chantal also credited Anthology as a key source of inspiration during the year and a half she spent living in New York in the early 1970s; according to her, it was here (or rather at our original home at the Public Theater) that she was introduced to the work of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, and others, who would exert a decisive influence on her work.

And so it’s with this background in mind that we pay our own tribute to Akerman by hosting encore screenings of her extraordinary final work, NO HOME MOVIE (immediately following its run at BAMcinématek), alongside the long-awaited NYC premiere engagement of a film that stands in close and fascinating dialogue with it, 2006’s LÀ-BAS (DOWN THERE). A personal documentary that Akerman shot almost entirely within a Tel Aviv apartment, LÀ-BAS shares with NO HOME MOVIE a profound interiority (both literal and figurative), a haunting stillness, a concern with Jewish identity, and an emphasis on the relationship between Akerman and her mother. Ultimately, both films comprise a heartbreaking meditation on the loss – or impossibility – of a sense of belonging. A filmmaker who explored deeply personal themes with uncompromising perception and unparalleled formal innovation, Akerman was a giant of world cinema, and her death represents an enormous loss.

LÀ-BAS and NO HOME MOVIE are distributed by Icarus Films; special thanks to Jonathan Miller & Livia Bloom.

Made during a brief stay in Israel, where Akerman was teaching at the University of Tel Aviv, LÀ-BAS takes the chamber play to its ultimate extreme: it is almost entirely chamber. Filmed predominantly from within the apartment where she was residing during her time in Tel Aviv, LÀ-BAS finds Akerman, in voiceover, musing on her family, her Jewish identity, and her childhood, while with her camera she creates a counterpoint between the interior of the apartment and the outside world visible through the aperture of its windows. Reluctant to make a filmic ‘statement’ about Israel, with LÀ-BAS Akerman has created instead a deeply reflective film that indirectly, and without rhetoric, engages with ‘the Israel question,’ wondering whether normal life is possible in this place and whether filming is a viable way of grappling with its complexities.

“Before, after, and between the narrative feature films…that anchor her status as a world-class filmmaker and one of the most indispensable of her post-Godard generation, Akerman has made some 20 works (films, performances, gallery installations) whose basic form is the letter – sometimes written to her by another, or by her to another, but most often by and to herself. […] LÀ-BAS…is both the most fragile and most powerful of these works.” –Amy Taubin, FILM COMMENT

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(ROBERTE CE SOIR)

With Denise Morin-Sinclaire, Pierre Klossowski, Martin Loeb, Barbet Schroeder, Michel Berto, Juliet Berto, Alain Cuny, and Jean-François Stévenin.

“I was enchanted by Pierre Klossowski and Pierre Zucca’s ROBERTE CE SOIR, which I saw at a private screening. The film deploys a range of effects (popular, melodramatic, novelistic, parodic, metaphysical, perverse) each of which is quite powerful – starting with the mussel lunch, which is impossible to retell without laughing – but whose sum total risks offending everybody, from the general public to the avant-garde. It is a work untouched by fashion, high or low. Why? Perhaps because each scene has an imperious clarity – the dazzling obviousness of tableaux vivants – and because that clarity goes unrecuperated: it is not a ‘clarification,’ there is no last word. One might call it a comedy, but it is a Nietzschean comedy, as enigmatic as Nietzsche’s last period, about which Klossowski has written so well.” (“The Chronicle,” 1979)

Modernization and development have been linked to the triumph of western technocracy and the notion of progress. But for many living in the global South, the engines and institutions of development have been anything but progressive. The two films brought together by this program are not simply critiques of neo-colonial and neoliberal developmental logic; through their surreal, poetic musings, both films – though with different means and to different ends – encourage us to imagine the possibility of an alternative world order.

On April 17, Faye Ginsburg (NYU) will be here for a discussion following the screening of MADAME L’EAU. Space allowing, ticket holders for BAMAKO will be admitted as well.

Their land drought-stricken, three Nigerien farmers (and their donkey) travel to Holland to investigate the possibility of importing windmill technology for use on the plains of Niger. A follow-up to JAGUAR, PETIT À PETIT, and COCORICO MONSIEUR POULET! – undertaken with his longtime filmmaking partners Damouré Zika, Lam Ibrahima Dia, and Tallou Mouzourane – Rouch’s feature is a surreal tale of mythic proportions, full of antic humor and poetic digressions. But beyond the laughs and reveries, MADAME L’EAU is also a poignant commentary on the ‘poisoned gifts’ brought to West Africa by development projects. As Faye Ginsburg once remarked, this is a film about what the world would look like “if Jean Rouch was the president of the World Bank.”

(DOWN THERE)

When Chantal Akerman passed away late last year, the cinema lost one of its most important and irreplaceable voices. Her stature has been amply demonstrated by the many tributes taking place throughout the New York repertory film community – numerous screenings and talks have taken place in recent months, and more are on the way, not least a comprehensive retrospective at BAMcinématek in April.

That Anthology should take part in these tributes is only fitting, since our ties with Akerman are deep and longstanding. In recent years we’ve hosted Chantal and shown her films on many occasions, including presenting the NYC premiere engagements of her last two fiction features, LA CAPTIVE and ALMAYER’S FOLLY. But Chantal also credited Anthology as a key source of inspiration during the year and a half she spent living in New York in the early 1970s; according to her, it was here (or rather at our original home at the Public Theater) that she was introduced to the work of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, and others, who would exert a decisive influence on her work.

And so it’s with this background in mind that we pay our own tribute to Akerman by hosting encore screenings of her extraordinary final work, NO HOME MOVIE (immediately following its run at BAMcinématek), alongside the long-awaited NYC premiere engagement of a film that stands in close and fascinating dialogue with it, 2006’s LÀ-BAS (DOWN THERE). A personal documentary that Akerman shot almost entirely within a Tel Aviv apartment, LÀ-BAS shares with NO HOME MOVIE a profound interiority (both literal and figurative), a haunting stillness, a concern with Jewish identity, and an emphasis on the relationship between Akerman and her mother. Ultimately, both films comprise a heartbreaking meditation on the loss – or impossibility – of a sense of belonging. A filmmaker who explored deeply personal themes with uncompromising perception and unparalleled formal innovation, Akerman was a giant of world cinema, and her death represents an enormous loss.

LÀ-BAS and NO HOME MOVIE are distributed by Icarus Films; special thanks to Jonathan Miller & Livia Bloom.

Made during a brief stay in Israel, where Akerman was teaching at the University of Tel Aviv, LÀ-BAS takes the chamber play to its ultimate extreme: it is almost entirely chamber. Filmed predominantly from within the apartment where she was residing during her time in Tel Aviv, LÀ-BAS finds Akerman, in voiceover, musing on her family, her Jewish identity, and her childhood, while with her camera she creates a counterpoint between the interior of the apartment and the outside world visible through the aperture of its windows. Reluctant to make a filmic ‘statement’ about Israel, with LÀ-BAS Akerman has created instead a deeply reflective film that indirectly, and without rhetoric, engages with ‘the Israel question,’ wondering whether normal life is possible in this place and whether filming is a viable way of grappling with its complexities.

“Before, after, and between the narrative feature films…that anchor her status as a world-class filmmaker and one of the most indispensable of her post-Godard generation, Akerman has made some 20 works (films, performances, gallery installations) whose basic form is the letter – sometimes written to her by another, or by her to another, but most often by and to herself. […] LÀ-BAS…is both the most fragile and most powerful of these works.” –Amy Taubin, FILM COMMENT

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Modernization and development have been linked to the triumph of western technocracy and the notion of progress. But for many living in the global South, the engines and institutions of development have been anything but progressive. The two films brought together by this program are not simply critiques of neo-colonial and neoliberal developmental logic; through their surreal, poetic musings, both films – though with different means and to different ends – encourage us to imagine the possibility of an alternative world order.

On April 17, Faye Ginsburg (NYU) will be here for a discussion following the screening of MADAME L’EAU. Space allowing, ticket holders for BAMAKO will be admitted as well.

BAMAKO brings to life a world where ordinary citizens can take institutions like the IMF and the World Bank to trial; where those who have suffered most from unjust forms of governance are able to seek redress, or, at the very least, have their voices heard. The trial unfolds in the full light of day, in a crowded, dusty courtyard; its formal proceedings punctuated by the day-to-day activities of life in the surrounding neighborhood. Alongside robed lawyers pleading their case, alongside witnesses testifying, children play, friends chat, and meals are prepared. Melé (Aïssa Maïga), a local nightclub singer, struggles with the dissolution of her relationship to her unemployed husband, Chaka (Tiécoura Traoré). Anchoring the film in patient camera work and the formalities of the courtroom drama, Sissako remains, nevertheless, a poet – weaving in and out of multiple storylines, showing how political, social, and economic injustice transform even the most intimate of spaces.

When Chantal Akerman passed away late last year, the cinema lost one of its most important and irreplaceable voices. Her stature has been amply demonstrated by the many tributes taking place throughout the New York repertory film community – numerous screenings and talks have taken place in recent months, and more are on the way, not least a comprehensive retrospective at BAMcinématek in April.

That Anthology should take part in these tributes is only fitting, since our ties with Akerman are deep and longstanding. In recent years we’ve hosted Chantal and shown her films on many occasions, including presenting the NYC premiere engagements of her last two fiction features, LA CAPTIVE and ALMAYER’S FOLLY. But Chantal also credited Anthology as a key source of inspiration during the year and a half she spent living in New York in the early 1970s; according to her, it was here (or rather at our original home at the Public Theater) that she was introduced to the work of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, and others, who would exert a decisive influence on her work.

And so it’s with this background in mind that we pay our own tribute to Akerman by hosting encore screenings of her extraordinary final work, NO HOME MOVIE (immediately following its run at BAMcinématek), alongside the long-awaited NYC premiere engagement of a film that stands in close and fascinating dialogue with it, 2006’s LÀ-BAS (DOWN THERE). A personal documentary that Akerman shot almost entirely within a Tel Aviv apartment, LÀ-BAS shares with NO HOME MOVIE a profound interiority (both literal and figurative), a haunting stillness, a concern with Jewish identity, and an emphasis on the relationship between Akerman and her mother. Ultimately, both films comprise a heartbreaking meditation on the loss – or impossibility – of a sense of belonging. A filmmaker who explored deeply personal themes with uncompromising perception and unparalleled formal innovation, Akerman was a giant of world cinema, and her death represents an enormous loss.

LÀ-BAS and NO HOME MOVIE are distributed by Icarus Films; special thanks to Jonathan Miller & Livia Bloom.

Akerman’s final work, released shortly after her death and inevitably shadowed by it, NO HOME MOVIE is a sustained portrait of her mother, Natalia. A crucial figure in Akerman’s cinema throughout her career, Natalia was born in Poland, fled to Belgium during the war, and was eventually sent to and survived Auschwitz. NO HOME MOVIE documents the last months of her life, and of Natalia and Akerman’s relationship, with the intimacy and domesticity of a diary film. Akerman seems to film perpetually, recording her conversations with her mother, in person, via phone, and over Skype, as well as Natalia simply existing, in long, uneventful passages that call to mind Akerman’s masterpiece, JEANNE DIELMAN. But like LÀ-BAS, NO HOME MOVIE’s simplicity and apparent artlessness are deceptive, masking a great depth of feeling, a palpable sense of searching, and a desire to confront, by means of the camera, mortality, time, and loss.

“In an age of seductive slickness, of Instagram-curated happiness, Akerman continues to confront what Joan Didion termed ‘the unspeakable peril of the everyday,’ doing so in a disarmingly honest, unembellished way which gives weight and credence to nervous collapses, emotional impairment, and fears about the precariousness of life. Both elliptical and tryingly quotidian, NO HOME MOVIE is a shattering contemplation of loss and grief as much as it is a search for identity and calm, for rootedness from a perpetually nomadic, breathless soul. It is not a home movie: it is a movie about having no home.” –Andréa Picard, CINEMA SCOPE

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For both Jean-Luc Godard (working in France in the 1960s) and Jean-Pierre Bekolo (working in Cameroon in the early 2000s), the future is alarmingly close at hand. And it is not just a period in time – it’s a landscape filled with shadows, obscurity, violence, and danger; threats we do not and cannot fully understand. But in spite of the dystopian imagery that fills these two features, they are nevertheless bound together by a streak of optimism that runs through their respective cores. “We’re in a tunnel and one day there will be light,” Bekolo said of THE BLEEDERS. “There will be a new dawn,” he insisted. Let’s hope so.

On April 18, Noah Tsika (Queens College) will be here for a discussion following the screening of ALPHAVILLE. Space allowing, ticket holders for THE BLEEDERS will be admitted as well.

With Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, and Akim Tamiroff.

Though labeled science fiction, Godard later admitted that ALPHAVILLE could just as easily have been a western (“Every western is like that, there’s a sheriff who arrives somewhere […] to find a prisoner and take him away [and] the film lasts the length of time it takes to find him, or the time it takes to take him away, or a little of both”). It’s also a kind of film noir made with writers like Peter Cheyney and Carter Brown in mind. At its heart, however, as in so many New Wave features, lies an Orphic narrative, the story of Lemmy Caution venturing into unknown territory and bringing back the woman he loves. Beneath these concatenated genres lies a plea for romanticism and a critique of modern life that builds from positions Godard had elaborated in A MARRIED WOMAN.

When Chantal Akerman passed away late last year, the cinema lost one of its most important and irreplaceable voices. Her stature has been amply demonstrated by the many tributes taking place throughout the New York repertory film community – numerous screenings and talks have taken place in recent months, and more are on the way, not least a comprehensive retrospective at BAMcinématek in April.

That Anthology should take part in these tributes is only fitting, since our ties with Akerman are deep and longstanding. In recent years we’ve hosted Chantal and shown her films on many occasions, including presenting the NYC premiere engagements of her last two fiction features, LA CAPTIVE and ALMAYER’S FOLLY. But Chantal also credited Anthology as a key source of inspiration during the year and a half she spent living in New York in the early 1970s; according to her, it was here (or rather at our original home at the Public Theater) that she was introduced to the work of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, and others, who would exert a decisive influence on her work.

And so it’s with this background in mind that we pay our own tribute to Akerman by hosting encore screenings of her extraordinary final work, NO HOME MOVIE (immediately following its run at BAMcinématek), alongside the long-awaited NYC premiere engagement of a film that stands in close and fascinating dialogue with it, 2006’s LÀ-BAS (DOWN THERE). A personal documentary that Akerman shot almost entirely within a Tel Aviv apartment, LÀ-BAS shares with NO HOME MOVIE a profound interiority (both literal and figurative), a haunting stillness, a concern with Jewish identity, and an emphasis on the relationship between Akerman and her mother. Ultimately, both films comprise a heartbreaking meditation on the loss – or impossibility – of a sense of belonging. A filmmaker who explored deeply personal themes with uncompromising perception and unparalleled formal innovation, Akerman was a giant of world cinema, and her death represents an enormous loss.

LÀ-BAS and NO HOME MOVIE are distributed by Icarus Films; special thanks to Jonathan Miller & Livia Bloom.

Akerman’s final work, released shortly after her death and inevitably shadowed by it, NO HOME MOVIE is a sustained portrait of her mother, Natalia. A crucial figure in Akerman’s cinema throughout her career, Natalia was born in Poland, fled to Belgium during the war, and was eventually sent to and survived Auschwitz. NO HOME MOVIE documents the last months of her life, and of Natalia and Akerman’s relationship, with the intimacy and domesticity of a diary film. Akerman seems to film perpetually, recording her conversations with her mother, in person, via phone, and over Skype, as well as Natalia simply existing, in long, uneventful passages that call to mind Akerman’s masterpiece, JEANNE DIELMAN. But like LÀ-BAS, NO HOME MOVIE’s simplicity and apparent artlessness are deceptive, masking a great depth of feeling, a palpable sense of searching, and a desire to confront, by means of the camera, mortality, time, and loss.

“In an age of seductive slickness, of Instagram-curated happiness, Akerman continues to confront what Joan Didion termed ‘the unspeakable peril of the everyday,’ doing so in a disarmingly honest, unembellished way which gives weight and credence to nervous collapses, emotional impairment, and fears about the precariousness of life. Both elliptical and tryingly quotidian, NO HOME MOVIE is a shattering contemplation of loss and grief as much as it is a search for identity and calm, for rootedness from a perpetually nomadic, breathless soul. It is not a home movie: it is a movie about having no home.” –Andréa Picard, CINEMA SCOPE

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(LES SAIGNANTES)

For both Jean-Luc Godard (working in France in the 1960s) and Jean-Pierre Bekolo (working in Cameroon in the early 2000s), the future is alarmingly close at hand. And it is not just a period in time – it’s a landscape filled with shadows, obscurity, violence, and danger; threats we do not and cannot fully understand. But in spite of the dystopian imagery that fills these two features, they are nevertheless bound together by a streak of optimism that runs through their respective cores. “We’re in a tunnel and one day there will be light,” Bekolo said of THE BLEEDERS. “There will be a new dawn,” he insisted. Let’s hope so.

On April 18, Noah Tsika (Queens College) will be here for a discussion following the screening of ALPHAVILLE. Space allowing, ticket holders for THE BLEEDERS will be admitted as well.

A sci-fi-action-horror hybrid, THE BLEEDERS is set in a highly stylized rendering of Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé, in the year 2025. Structured by the nocturnal misadventures of Majolie and Chouchou – female prostitutes mixed up in a morbid sexual and political imbroglio – elements as diverse as the supernatural, the fantastic, gore, and humor are woven together to form a scathing critique of contemporary social and sexual (necro)politics. In both its aesthetic and its narrative, THE BLEEDERS borrows heavily from the wildly popular Nigerian film industry. But where Nollywood films have often been chided for their lack of polish and politics, Bekolo’s feature proves savvy and sophisticated. Sutured together by a series of (Godardian inspired?) intertitles, the film also asks if (and how) popular art forms – like cinema – can play a role in challenging and transforming the status quo.

(DOWN THERE)

When Chantal Akerman passed away late last year, the cinema lost one of its most important and irreplaceable voices. Her stature has been amply demonstrated by the many tributes taking place throughout the New York repertory film community – numerous screenings and talks have taken place in recent months, and more are on the way, not least a comprehensive retrospective at BAMcinématek in April.

That Anthology should take part in these tributes is only fitting, since our ties with Akerman are deep and longstanding. In recent years we’ve hosted Chantal and shown her films on many occasions, including presenting the NYC premiere engagements of her last two fiction features, LA CAPTIVE and ALMAYER’S FOLLY. But Chantal also credited Anthology as a key source of inspiration during the year and a half she spent living in New York in the early 1970s; according to her, it was here (or rather at our original home at the Public Theater) that she was introduced to the work of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, and others, who would exert a decisive influence on her work.

And so it’s with this background in mind that we pay our own tribute to Akerman by hosting encore screenings of her extraordinary final work, NO HOME MOVIE (immediately following its run at BAMcinématek), alongside the long-awaited NYC premiere engagement of a film that stands in close and fascinating dialogue with it, 2006’s LÀ-BAS (DOWN THERE). A personal documentary that Akerman shot almost entirely within a Tel Aviv apartment, LÀ-BAS shares with NO HOME MOVIE a profound interiority (both literal and figurative), a haunting stillness, a concern with Jewish identity, and an emphasis on the relationship between Akerman and her mother. Ultimately, both films comprise a heartbreaking meditation on the loss – or impossibility – of a sense of belonging. A filmmaker who explored deeply personal themes with uncompromising perception and unparalleled formal innovation, Akerman was a giant of world cinema, and her death represents an enormous loss.

LÀ-BAS and NO HOME MOVIE are distributed by Icarus Films; special thanks to Jonathan Miller & Livia Bloom.

Made during a brief stay in Israel, where Akerman was teaching at the University of Tel Aviv, LÀ-BAS takes the chamber play to its ultimate extreme: it is almost entirely chamber. Filmed predominantly from within the apartment where she was residing during her time in Tel Aviv, LÀ-BAS finds Akerman, in voiceover, musing on her family, her Jewish identity, and her childhood, while with her camera she creates a counterpoint between the interior of the apartment and the outside world visible through the aperture of its windows. Reluctant to make a filmic ‘statement’ about Israel, with LÀ-BAS Akerman has created instead a deeply reflective film that indirectly, and without rhetoric, engages with ‘the Israel question,’ wondering whether normal life is possible in this place and whether filming is a viable way of grappling with its complexities.

“Before, after, and between the narrative feature films…that anchor her status as a world-class filmmaker and one of the most indispensable of her post-Godard generation, Akerman has made some 20 works (films, performances, gallery installations) whose basic form is the letter – sometimes written to her by another, or by her to another, but most often by and to herself. […] LÀ-BAS…is both the most fragile and most powerful of these works.” –Amy Taubin, FILM COMMENT

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(DOWN THERE)

When Chantal Akerman passed away late last year, the cinema lost one of its most important and irreplaceable voices. Her stature has been amply demonstrated by the many tributes taking place throughout the New York repertory film community – numerous screenings and talks have taken place in recent months, and more are on the way, not least a comprehensive retrospective at BAMcinématek in April.

That Anthology should take part in these tributes is only fitting, since our ties with Akerman are deep and longstanding. In recent years we’ve hosted Chantal and shown her films on many occasions, including presenting the NYC premiere engagements of her last two fiction features, LA CAPTIVE and ALMAYER’S FOLLY. But Chantal also credited Anthology as a key source of inspiration during the year and a half she spent living in New York in the early 1970s; according to her, it was here (or rather at our original home at the Public Theater) that she was introduced to the work of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, and others, who would exert a decisive influence on her work.

And so it’s with this background in mind that we pay our own tribute to Akerman by hosting encore screenings of her extraordinary final work, NO HOME MOVIE (immediately following its run at BAMcinématek), alongside the long-awaited NYC premiere engagement of a film that stands in close and fascinating dialogue with it, 2006’s LÀ-BAS (DOWN THERE). A personal documentary that Akerman shot almost entirely within a Tel Aviv apartment, LÀ-BAS shares with NO HOME MOVIE a profound interiority (both literal and figurative), a haunting stillness, a concern with Jewish identity, and an emphasis on the relationship between Akerman and her mother. Ultimately, both films comprise a heartbreaking meditation on the loss – or impossibility – of a sense of belonging. A filmmaker who explored deeply personal themes with uncompromising perception and unparalleled formal innovation, Akerman was a giant of world cinema, and her death represents an enormous loss.

LÀ-BAS and NO HOME MOVIE are distributed by Icarus Films; special thanks to Jonathan Miller & Livia Bloom.

Made during a brief stay in Israel, where Akerman was teaching at the University of Tel Aviv, LÀ-BAS takes the chamber play to its ultimate extreme: it is almost entirely chamber. Filmed predominantly from within the apartment where she was residing during her time in Tel Aviv, LÀ-BAS finds Akerman, in voiceover, musing on her family, her Jewish identity, and her childhood, while with her camera she creates a counterpoint between the interior of the apartment and the outside world visible through the aperture of its windows. Reluctant to make a filmic ‘statement’ about Israel, with LÀ-BAS Akerman has created instead a deeply reflective film that indirectly, and without rhetoric, engages with ‘the Israel question,’ wondering whether normal life is possible in this place and whether filming is a viable way of grappling with its complexities.

“Before, after, and between the narrative feature films…that anchor her status as a world-class filmmaker and one of the most indispensable of her post-Godard generation, Akerman has made some 20 works (films, performances, gallery installations) whose basic form is the letter – sometimes written to her by another, or by her to another, but most often by and to herself. […] LÀ-BAS…is both the most fragile and most powerful of these works.” –Amy Taubin, FILM COMMENT

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Site-specific yet secretly connected, Alassane and Moullet’s tales of bandits on the loose pillage the mightiest of Hollywood genres just as it was beginning to crumble. They also point to how roles and relationships were being reconfigured in the wake of American cultural imperialism. Though the western was a potent form of global and cultural hegemony, these films demonstrate that its forms and codes could also be ingeniously subverted, mobilized as tools for creative appropriation and resistance.

Scholar, poet, and current Schomburg Center fellow Tsitsi Jaji will be here for a discussion following the screening on April 15.

Moustapha Alassane
AN ADVENTURER’S HOMECOMING / RETOUR D’UN AVENTURIER
(Niger, 1966, 34 min, 16mm. In Hausa and French with projected English subtitles.)
&
Serge Moati
COWBOYS ARE BLACK / LES COWBOYS SONT NOIRS
(Niger, 1966, 15 min, 16mm. In French with projected English subtitles.)
Jimi flies back to his native village after a long absence and convinces his friends to become cowboys. Renamed Black Cooper, John Kelly, Breaker, Billy Walter, and Queen Christine, they steal horses, terrorize sheepherders, and brawl in the neighborhood saloon to the horror of the locals. Drawing maximum effects from an economy of means, Alassane’s brilliant comedy intertwines central modernization plots in West Africa and Europe after the war (a traveller’s return, the youth problem, the arrival of new technology) with the outlaw gang and frontier-town-under-attack narratives that were mainstays of the western genre. By stripping these stories of their conventional moral weight, he opens his film, “the first African western,” to the widest scope of possible interpretations. As a complement to the screening, this program also includes a short making-of documentary by Serge Moati, which was shot in Niamey during production.

Luc Moullet
A GIRL IS A GUN / UNE AVENTURE DE BILLY LE KID
(France, 1971, 100 min, 35mm. In French with projected English subtitles.)
Jean-Pierre Léaud hits a squirrely, plant-eating career peak as Billy, a cold-hearted killer who encounters a young woman (Marie-Christine Questerbert) and yearns to experience human emotions. Glassier than GREASER’S PALACE, braver than EL TOPO, with a budget so tight it turns asceticism into psychedelia, Moullet’s feature pares down and empties out its appropriated form until all that remains are landscapes, bodies, a few gunshots, and a place to hide the gold. It’s at that point, in the last fifteen minutes, that things really take off. Friends, seek no more: this is it.

Total running time: ca. 155 min.

When Chantal Akerman passed away late last year, the cinema lost one of its most important and irreplaceable voices. Her stature has been amply demonstrated by the many tributes taking place throughout the New York repertory film community – numerous screenings and talks have taken place in recent months, and more are on the way, not least a comprehensive retrospective at BAMcinématek in April.

That Anthology should take part in these tributes is only fitting, since our ties with Akerman are deep and longstanding. In recent years we’ve hosted Chantal and shown her films on many occasions, including presenting the NYC premiere engagements of her last two fiction features, LA CAPTIVE and ALMAYER’S FOLLY. But Chantal also credited Anthology as a key source of inspiration during the year and a half she spent living in New York in the early 1970s; according to her, it was here (or rather at our original home at the Public Theater) that she was introduced to the work of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, and others, who would exert a decisive influence on her work.

And so it’s with this background in mind that we pay our own tribute to Akerman by hosting encore screenings of her extraordinary final work, NO HOME MOVIE (immediately following its run at BAMcinématek), alongside the long-awaited NYC premiere engagement of a film that stands in close and fascinating dialogue with it, 2006’s LÀ-BAS (DOWN THERE). A personal documentary that Akerman shot almost entirely within a Tel Aviv apartment, LÀ-BAS shares with NO HOME MOVIE a profound interiority (both literal and figurative), a haunting stillness, a concern with Jewish identity, and an emphasis on the relationship between Akerman and her mother. Ultimately, both films comprise a heartbreaking meditation on the loss – or impossibility – of a sense of belonging. A filmmaker who explored deeply personal themes with uncompromising perception and unparalleled formal innovation, Akerman was a giant of world cinema, and her death represents an enormous loss.

LÀ-BAS and NO HOME MOVIE are distributed by Icarus Films; special thanks to Jonathan Miller & Livia Bloom.

Akerman’s final work, released shortly after her death and inevitably shadowed by it, NO HOME MOVIE is a sustained portrait of her mother, Natalia. A crucial figure in Akerman’s cinema throughout her career, Natalia was born in Poland, fled to Belgium during the war, and was eventually sent to and survived Auschwitz. NO HOME MOVIE documents the last months of her life, and of Natalia and Akerman’s relationship, with the intimacy and domesticity of a diary film. Akerman seems to film perpetually, recording her conversations with her mother, in person, via phone, and over Skype, as well as Natalia simply existing, in long, uneventful passages that call to mind Akerman’s masterpiece, JEANNE DIELMAN. But like LÀ-BAS, NO HOME MOVIE’s simplicity and apparent artlessness are deceptive, masking a great depth of feeling, a palpable sense of searching, and a desire to confront, by means of the camera, mortality, time, and loss.

“In an age of seductive slickness, of Instagram-curated happiness, Akerman continues to confront what Joan Didion termed ‘the unspeakable peril of the everyday,’ doing so in a disarmingly honest, unembellished way which gives weight and credence to nervous collapses, emotional impairment, and fears about the precariousness of life. Both elliptical and tryingly quotidian, NO HOME MOVIE is a shattering contemplation of loss and grief as much as it is a search for identity and calm, for rootedness from a perpetually nomadic, breathless soul. It is not a home movie: it is a movie about having no home.” –Andréa Picard, CINEMA SCOPE

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Modernization and development have been linked to the triumph of western technocracy and the notion of progress. But for many living in the global South, the engines and institutions of development have been anything but progressive. The two films brought together by this program are not simply critiques of neo-colonial and neoliberal developmental logic; through their surreal, poetic musings, both films – though with different means and to different ends – encourage us to imagine the possibility of an alternative world order.

On April 17, Faye Ginsburg (NYU) will be here for a discussion following the screening of MADAME L’EAU. Space allowing, ticket holders for BAMAKO will be admitted as well.

Their land drought-stricken, three Nigerien farmers (and their donkey) travel to Holland to investigate the possibility of importing windmill technology for use on the plains of Niger. A follow-up to JAGUAR, PETIT À PETIT, and COCORICO MONSIEUR POULET! – undertaken with his longtime filmmaking partners Damouré Zika, Lam Ibrahima Dia, and Tallou Mouzourane – Rouch’s feature is a surreal tale of mythic proportions, full of antic humor and poetic digressions. But beyond the laughs and reveries, MADAME L’EAU is also a poignant commentary on the ‘poisoned gifts’ brought to West Africa by development projects. As Faye Ginsburg once remarked, this is a film about what the world would look like “if Jean Rouch was the president of the World Bank.”

When Chantal Akerman passed away late last year, the cinema lost one of its most important and irreplaceable voices. Her stature has been amply demonstrated by the many tributes taking place throughout the New York repertory film community – numerous screenings and talks have taken place in recent months, and more are on the way, not least a comprehensive retrospective at BAMcinématek in April.

That Anthology should take part in these tributes is only fitting, since our ties with Akerman are deep and longstanding. In recent years we’ve hosted Chantal and shown her films on many occasions, including presenting the NYC premiere engagements of her last two fiction features, LA CAPTIVE and ALMAYER’S FOLLY. But Chantal also credited Anthology as a key source of inspiration during the year and a half she spent living in New York in the early 1970s; according to her, it was here (or rather at our original home at the Public Theater) that she was introduced to the work of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, and others, who would exert a decisive influence on her work.

And so it’s with this background in mind that we pay our own tribute to Akerman by hosting encore screenings of her extraordinary final work, NO HOME MOVIE (immediately following its run at BAMcinématek), alongside the long-awaited NYC premiere engagement of a film that stands in close and fascinating dialogue with it, 2006’s LÀ-BAS (DOWN THERE). A personal documentary that Akerman shot almost entirely within a Tel Aviv apartment, LÀ-BAS shares with NO HOME MOVIE a profound interiority (both literal and figurative), a haunting stillness, a concern with Jewish identity, and an emphasis on the relationship between Akerman and her mother. Ultimately, both films comprise a heartbreaking meditation on the loss – or impossibility – of a sense of belonging. A filmmaker who explored deeply personal themes with uncompromising perception and unparalleled formal innovation, Akerman was a giant of world cinema, and her death represents an enormous loss.

LÀ-BAS and NO HOME MOVIE are distributed by Icarus Films; special thanks to Jonathan Miller & Livia Bloom.

Akerman’s final work, released shortly after her death and inevitably shadowed by it, NO HOME MOVIE is a sustained portrait of her mother, Natalia. A crucial figure in Akerman’s cinema throughout her career, Natalia was born in Poland, fled to Belgium during the war, and was eventually sent to and survived Auschwitz. NO HOME MOVIE documents the last months of her life, and of Natalia and Akerman’s relationship, with the intimacy and domesticity of a diary film. Akerman seems to film perpetually, recording her conversations with her mother, in person, via phone, and over Skype, as well as Natalia simply existing, in long, uneventful passages that call to mind Akerman’s masterpiece, JEANNE DIELMAN. But like LÀ-BAS, NO HOME MOVIE’s simplicity and apparent artlessness are deceptive, masking a great depth of feeling, a palpable sense of searching, and a desire to confront, by means of the camera, mortality, time, and loss.

“In an age of seductive slickness, of Instagram-curated happiness, Akerman continues to confront what Joan Didion termed ‘the unspeakable peril of the everyday,’ doing so in a disarmingly honest, unembellished way which gives weight and credence to nervous collapses, emotional impairment, and fears about the precariousness of life. Both elliptical and tryingly quotidian, NO HOME MOVIE is a shattering contemplation of loss and grief as much as it is a search for identity and calm, for rootedness from a perpetually nomadic, breathless soul. It is not a home movie: it is a movie about having no home.” –Andréa Picard, CINEMA SCOPE

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Modernization and development have been linked to the triumph of western technocracy and the notion of progress. But for many living in the global South, the engines and institutions of development have been anything but progressive. The two films brought together by this program are not simply critiques of neo-colonial and neoliberal developmental logic; through their surreal, poetic musings, both films – though with different means and to different ends – encourage us to imagine the possibility of an alternative world order.

On April 17, Faye Ginsburg (NYU) will be here for a discussion following the screening of MADAME L’EAU. Space allowing, ticket holders for BAMAKO will be admitted as well.

BAMAKO brings to life a world where ordinary citizens can take institutions like the IMF and the World Bank to trial; where those who have suffered most from unjust forms of governance are able to seek redress, or, at the very least, have their voices heard. The trial unfolds in the full light of day, in a crowded, dusty courtyard; its formal proceedings punctuated by the day-to-day activities of life in the surrounding neighborhood. Alongside robed lawyers pleading their case, alongside witnesses testifying, children play, friends chat, and meals are prepared. Melé (Aïssa Maïga), a local nightclub singer, struggles with the dissolution of her relationship to her unemployed husband, Chaka (Tiécoura Traoré). Anchoring the film in patient camera work and the formalities of the courtroom drama, Sissako remains, nevertheless, a poet – weaving in and out of multiple storylines, showing how political, social, and economic injustice transform even the most intimate of spaces.

(DOWN THERE)

When Chantal Akerman passed away late last year, the cinema lost one of its most important and irreplaceable voices. Her stature has been amply demonstrated by the many tributes taking place throughout the New York repertory film community – numerous screenings and talks have taken place in recent months, and more are on the way, not least a comprehensive retrospective at BAMcinématek in April.

That Anthology should take part in these tributes is only fitting, since our ties with Akerman are deep and longstanding. In recent years we’ve hosted Chantal and shown her films on many occasions, including presenting the NYC premiere engagements of her last two fiction features, LA CAPTIVE and ALMAYER’S FOLLY. But Chantal also credited Anthology as a key source of inspiration during the year and a half she spent living in New York in the early 1970s; according to her, it was here (or rather at our original home at the Public Theater) that she was introduced to the work of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, and others, who would exert a decisive influence on her work.

And so it’s with this background in mind that we pay our own tribute to Akerman by hosting encore screenings of her extraordinary final work, NO HOME MOVIE (immediately following its run at BAMcinématek), alongside the long-awaited NYC premiere engagement of a film that stands in close and fascinating dialogue with it, 2006’s LÀ-BAS (DOWN THERE). A personal documentary that Akerman shot almost entirely within a Tel Aviv apartment, LÀ-BAS shares with NO HOME MOVIE a profound interiority (both literal and figurative), a haunting stillness, a concern with Jewish identity, and an emphasis on the relationship between Akerman and her mother. Ultimately, both films comprise a heartbreaking meditation on the loss – or impossibility – of a sense of belonging. A filmmaker who explored deeply personal themes with uncompromising perception and unparalleled formal innovation, Akerman was a giant of world cinema, and her death represents an enormous loss.

LÀ-BAS and NO HOME MOVIE are distributed by Icarus Films; special thanks to Jonathan Miller & Livia Bloom.

Made during a brief stay in Israel, where Akerman was teaching at the University of Tel Aviv, LÀ-BAS takes the chamber play to its ultimate extreme: it is almost entirely chamber. Filmed predominantly from within the apartment where she was residing during her time in Tel Aviv, LÀ-BAS finds Akerman, in voiceover, musing on her family, her Jewish identity, and her childhood, while with her camera she creates a counterpoint between the interior of the apartment and the outside world visible through the aperture of its windows. Reluctant to make a filmic ‘statement’ about Israel, with LÀ-BAS Akerman has created instead a deeply reflective film that indirectly, and without rhetoric, engages with ‘the Israel question,’ wondering whether normal life is possible in this place and whether filming is a viable way of grappling with its complexities.

“Before, after, and between the narrative feature films…that anchor her status as a world-class filmmaker and one of the most indispensable of her post-Godard generation, Akerman has made some 20 works (films, performances, gallery installations) whose basic form is the letter – sometimes written to her by another, or by her to another, but most often by and to herself. […] LÀ-BAS…is both the most fragile and most powerful of these works.” –Amy Taubin, FILM COMMENT

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(DOWN THERE)

When Chantal Akerman passed away late last year, the cinema lost one of its most important and irreplaceable voices. Her stature has been amply demonstrated by the many tributes taking place throughout the New York repertory film community – numerous screenings and talks have taken place in recent months, and more are on the way, not least a comprehensive retrospective at BAMcinématek in April.

That Anthology should take part in these tributes is only fitting, since our ties with Akerman are deep and longstanding. In recent years we’ve hosted Chantal and shown her films on many occasions, including presenting the NYC premiere engagements of her last two fiction features, LA CAPTIVE and ALMAYER’S FOLLY. But Chantal also credited Anthology as a key source of inspiration during the year and a half she spent living in New York in the early 1970s; according to her, it was here (or rather at our original home at the Public Theater) that she was introduced to the work of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, and others, who would exert a decisive influence on her work.

And so it’s with this background in mind that we pay our own tribute to Akerman by hosting encore screenings of her extraordinary final work, NO HOME MOVIE (immediately following its run at BAMcinématek), alongside the long-awaited NYC premiere engagement of a film that stands in close and fascinating dialogue with it, 2006’s LÀ-BAS (DOWN THERE). A personal documentary that Akerman shot almost entirely within a Tel Aviv apartment, LÀ-BAS shares with NO HOME MOVIE a profound interiority (both literal and figurative), a haunting stillness, a concern with Jewish identity, and an emphasis on the relationship between Akerman and her mother. Ultimately, both films comprise a heartbreaking meditation on the loss – or impossibility – of a sense of belonging. A filmmaker who explored deeply personal themes with uncompromising perception and unparalleled formal innovation, Akerman was a giant of world cinema, and her death represents an enormous loss.

LÀ-BAS and NO HOME MOVIE are distributed by Icarus Films; special thanks to Jonathan Miller & Livia Bloom.

Made during a brief stay in Israel, where Akerman was teaching at the University of Tel Aviv, LÀ-BAS takes the chamber play to its ultimate extreme: it is almost entirely chamber. Filmed predominantly from within the apartment where she was residing during her time in Tel Aviv, LÀ-BAS finds Akerman, in voiceover, musing on her family, her Jewish identity, and her childhood, while with her camera she creates a counterpoint between the interior of the apartment and the outside world visible through the aperture of its windows. Reluctant to make a filmic ‘statement’ about Israel, with LÀ-BAS Akerman has created instead a deeply reflective film that indirectly, and without rhetoric, engages with ‘the Israel question,’ wondering whether normal life is possible in this place and whether filming is a viable way of grappling with its complexities.

“Before, after, and between the narrative feature films…that anchor her status as a world-class filmmaker and one of the most indispensable of her post-Godard generation, Akerman has made some 20 works (films, performances, gallery installations) whose basic form is the letter – sometimes written to her by another, or by her to another, but most often by and to herself. […] LÀ-BAS…is both the most fragile and most powerful of these works.” –Amy Taubin, FILM COMMENT

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This spring, David Domingo, one of Spain’s most important underground filmmakers, embarks on his first U.S. tour, and Anthology is lucky enough to host him for the NYC-stop on his journey. Born in Valencia in 1973 and based in Barcelona, Domingo (aka Stanley Sunday, aka Davidson) has amassed a body of work that encompasses 18 short films, 3 feature-length video works (including his personal take on BAMBI and THE EXORCIST: THE MUSICAL), numerous music videos, crazy live Super-8 and 16mm performances, and the fanzine “One day in the life of Jonas Mekas.” In the beginning his tools of choice were a VHS camera and VCR, which he used to create his own remakes of favorite films, as well as short films starring his sister and grandmother. But soon he discovered his now-favored format of Super-8mm, which he’s used to make most of his subsequent films.

Fueled by a highly iconoclastic and riotously funny cascade of free-associative imagery, his work conjures up a fantastic personal universe that features frequent appearances from popular artifacts and icons including Disney films, Michael Jackson, comic-book superheroes, and more. Homoerotic imagery is a constant in his films as well, with recurring motifs such as the phallic Frankfurt Weiner, which has become his trademark. By combining footage taken from classic films or B-movies with his own imagery, and abstract moments with live-action scenes enacted by the members of his own ‘star-system,’ Domingo deconstructs all existing hierarchies and causes-and-effects. A devotee of the avant-garde and experimental film tradition, he pays consistent homage to Bruce Conner, Andy Warhol, Iván Zulueta, Kenneth Anger, and the Kuchar Brothers.

Domingo’s films have been screened and exhibited in many of the preeminent museums, art centers, and film festivals in Spain, such as Xcèntric (the cinema of the Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Centro Galego de Artes da Imaxe and S(8) Mostra de cine periférico in Coruña, and Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia. It’s high time that they find an audience in the United States!

This program has been made possible by the Program for the Internationalization of Spanish Culture (PICE), under the Mobility grants awarded by the state company Acción Cultural Española (AC/E); for more info about AC/E, visit www.accioncultural.es. Special thanks to Adam Hyman (Los Angeles Film Forum).

SÚPER 8 (1996, 8 min, Super-8mm)
THE SPEEDY MANSION / LA MANSIÓN ACELERADA (1997, 10 min, Super-8mm, b&w)
BREAKFAST AND SNACKS / DESAYUNOS Y MERIENDAS (2002, 7 min, Super-8mm)
WHAT THE…! / RAYOS Y CENTELLAS (2004, 4 min, Super-8mm)
SWEATY MOVIE / PELÍCULA SUDOROSA (2009, 18 min, Super-8mm, color/b&w)
A MOVIE THAT PORTRAYS THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD AS SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF A CAT (DISNEY
ATTRACTION HIGHLIGHTS Nº 1) (2009, 5 min, Super-8mm, color/b&w)

Total running time: ca. 60 min.

When Chantal Akerman passed away late last year, the cinema lost one of its most important and irreplaceable voices. Her stature has been amply demonstrated by the many tributes taking place throughout the New York repertory film community – numerous screenings and talks have taken place in recent months, and more are on the way, not least a comprehensive retrospective at BAMcinématek in April.

That Anthology should take part in these tributes is only fitting, since our ties with Akerman are deep and longstanding. In recent years we’ve hosted Chantal and shown her films on many occasions, including presenting the NYC premiere engagements of her last two fiction features, LA CAPTIVE and ALMAYER’S FOLLY. But Chantal also credited Anthology as a key source of inspiration during the year and a half she spent living in New York in the early 1970s; according to her, it was here (or rather at our original home at the Public Theater) that she was introduced to the work of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, and others, who would exert a decisive influence on her work.

And so it’s with this background in mind that we pay our own tribute to Akerman by hosting encore screenings of her extraordinary final work, NO HOME MOVIE (immediately following its run at BAMcinématek), alongside the long-awaited NYC premiere engagement of a film that stands in close and fascinating dialogue with it, 2006’s LÀ-BAS (DOWN THERE). A personal documentary that Akerman shot almost entirely within a Tel Aviv apartment, LÀ-BAS shares with NO HOME MOVIE a profound interiority (both literal and figurative), a haunting stillness, a concern with Jewish identity, and an emphasis on the relationship between Akerman and her mother. Ultimately, both films comprise a heartbreaking meditation on the loss – or impossibility – of a sense of belonging. A filmmaker who explored deeply personal themes with uncompromising perception and unparalleled formal innovation, Akerman was a giant of world cinema, and her death represents an enormous loss.

LÀ-BAS and NO HOME MOVIE are distributed by Icarus Films; special thanks to Jonathan Miller & Livia Bloom.

Akerman’s final work, released shortly after her death and inevitably shadowed by it, NO HOME MOVIE is a sustained portrait of her mother, Natalia. A crucial figure in Akerman’s cinema throughout her career, Natalia was born in Poland, fled to Belgium during the war, and was eventually sent to and survived Auschwitz. NO HOME MOVIE documents the last months of her life, and of Natalia and Akerman’s relationship, with the intimacy and domesticity of a diary film. Akerman seems to film perpetually, recording her conversations with her mother, in person, via phone, and over Skype, as well as Natalia simply existing, in long, uneventful passages that call to mind Akerman’s masterpiece, JEANNE DIELMAN. But like LÀ-BAS, NO HOME MOVIE’s simplicity and apparent artlessness are deceptive, masking a great depth of feeling, a palpable sense of searching, and a desire to confront, by means of the camera, mortality, time, and loss.

“In an age of seductive slickness, of Instagram-curated happiness, Akerman continues to confront what Joan Didion termed ‘the unspeakable peril of the everyday,’ doing so in a disarmingly honest, unembellished way which gives weight and credence to nervous collapses, emotional impairment, and fears about the precariousness of life. Both elliptical and tryingly quotidian, NO HOME MOVIE is a shattering contemplation of loss and grief as much as it is a search for identity and calm, for rootedness from a perpetually nomadic, breathless soul. It is not a home movie: it is a movie about having no home.” –Andréa Picard, CINEMA SCOPE

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The story of the cultural outsider discovering France had been part of the European cultural imaginary since at least the 18th century, when Montesquieu’s PERSIAN LETTERS met with popular acclaim. But it was also a popular trope with pioneering figures in Francophone African cinema (Vierya’s AFRIQUE-SUR-SEINE, Sembène’s BLACK GIRL, Ousseïni’s PARIS, IT’S PRETTY), empowering directors to reverse the traditional viewing positions established by the colonial gaze. The protagonists featured in both of the films screening here – played brilliantly by Robert Liensol (SOLEIL Ô) and Damouré Zika (PETIT À PETIT) – arrive in France with unfettered enthusiasm, but their enchantment quickly fades. Though the films share some plot twists (loosely) in common, the whimsical, distended journey of PETIT À PETIT stands in stark contrast (sometimes jarringly so) with the biting, economical critique of SOLEIL Ô.

Hondo’s first feature film, SOLEIL Ô follows a black African accountant who migrates to Paris in hopes of making a better life for himself. France turns out to be less welcoming than he had imagined, however. Confronted by racism and adversity at every turn, the accountant finds himself increasingly alienated from those around him. Beaten down by the excesses and cruelty of French society, he comes to realize that there is only one way out of this nightmare – he must reconcile himself with the spirit and force of the black revolutionaries who came before him. SOLEIL Ô is part manifesto, part existentialist quest, and part avant-garde aesthetic experiment. It’s a must-see for anyone interested in post-Independence African cinema, but it also resonates powerfully with our contemporary moment. Through its striking images, dynamic rhythms, and caustic humor, viewers are offered unique insights into the insidious legacies wrought by colonial racism, cultural imperialism, and capitalist greed.

(LES SAIGNANTES)

For both Jean-Luc Godard (working in France in the 1960s) and Jean-Pierre Bekolo (working in Cameroon in the early 2000s), the future is alarmingly close at hand. And it is not just a period in time – it’s a landscape filled with shadows, obscurity, violence, and danger; threats we do not and cannot fully understand. But in spite of the dystopian imagery that fills these two features, they are nevertheless bound together by a streak of optimism that runs through their respective cores. “We’re in a tunnel and one day there will be light,” Bekolo said of THE BLEEDERS. “There will be a new dawn,” he insisted. Let’s hope so.

On April 18, Noah Tsika (Queens College) will be here for a discussion following the screening of ALPHAVILLE. Space allowing, ticket holders for THE BLEEDERS will be admitted as well.

A sci-fi-action-horror hybrid, THE BLEEDERS is set in a highly stylized rendering of Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé, in the year 2025. Structured by the nocturnal misadventures of Majolie and Chouchou – female prostitutes mixed up in a morbid sexual and political imbroglio – elements as diverse as the supernatural, the fantastic, gore, and humor are woven together to form a scathing critique of contemporary social and sexual (necro)politics. In both its aesthetic and its narrative, THE BLEEDERS borrows heavily from the wildly popular Nigerian film industry. But where Nollywood films have often been chided for their lack of polish and politics, Bekolo’s feature proves savvy and sophisticated. Sutured together by a series of (Godardian inspired?) intertitles, the film also asks if (and how) popular art forms – like cinema – can play a role in challenging and transforming the status quo.

THE POTTED PSALM (1946, 18.5 min, 16mm. Co-directed by Sidney Peterson.)
MOTHER’S DAY (1948, 22 min, 16mm)
FOUR IN THE AFTERNOON (1951, 15 min, 16mm)
LOONY TOM, THE HAPPY LOVER (1951, 10 min, 16mm)
Four films by an American avant-garde film pioneer. His films are celebrations of the joy of living. If there is such a thing as American Zen, Broughton is the master of it.

“For Broughton, making films did not make him less of a poet; it made him more of a poet. Like Jean Cocteau, Broughton insisted that poetry was not limited to ‘verse,’ and that it was the most precise word to describe his activities. […] His ‘filmic passion’ led him not to commercial cinema…but to a ‘life of vision’ in which he might experience ‘a poetry that would reveal on a large screen what my feelings looked like.’” –Jack Foley, FULL, FRONTAL MYSTERY: THE FILMS OF JAMES BROUGHTON

Total running time: ca. 70 min.

SPECIAL SCREENINGS – RAYNAL AND MEKAS IN PERSON!

With Jonas Mekas, Jackie Raynal, André S. Labarthe, and Patrice Rollet.

Jackie Raynal has been a crucial figure in both French and American film culture for the past fifty years, as a filmmaker (DEUX FOIS), actress and editor (she has worked with everyone from Eric Rohmer, Jean-Daniel Pollet, and Philippe Garrel, to Ulrike Ottinger, Yvonne Rainer, and Abel Ferrara), and as the Director of the legendary Bleecker Street Cinema through the late 1970s-80s. Having already created one short film about Jonas Mekas [NOTES ON JONAS MEKAS (2000)], Raynal was commissioned by Andre S. Labarthe to create a more expansive portrait of her longtime friend and colleague, for the long-running program “Cinéma, de notre temps.” The result is both an affectionate, loose, and handmade film, in the tradition of Mekas’s own work, and a self-reflexive essay on the difficulty of making a portrait about a filmmaker whose entire oeuvre comprises a series of self-portraits. Asking herself, “What can one film regarding Jonas Mekas that he hasn’t already filmed himself?,” Raynal has created a playful and revealing work. Thanks in large part to the onscreen presence of Labarthe and the eloquent Mekas scholar Patrice Rollet, REMINISCENCES stealthily and unassumingly develops from a charmingly casual portrait into a penetrating, rigorous meditation on the multiple dimensions and enduring importance of Mekas’s cinema.

Jackie Raynal and Jonas Mekas will be here in person for selected screenings!
Jackie Raynal will be in person on Saturday & Sunday. Jonas will join her for both of the screenings on Saturday! 

MOTHER’S DAY 1948, 22 min, 16mm
FOUR IN THE AFTERNOON 1951, 15 min, 16mm
LOONY TOM, THE HAPPY LOVER 1951, 10 min, 16mm

“For Broughton, making films did not make him less of a poet; it made him more of a poet. Like Jean Cocteau, Broughton insisted that poetry was not limited to ‘verse,’ and that it was the most precise word to describe his activities. […] His ‘filmic passion’ led him not to commercial cinema…but to a ‘life of vision’ in which he might experience ‘a poetry that would reveal on a large screen what my feelings looked like.’” –Jack Foley, FULL, FRONTAL MYSTERY: THE FILMS OF JAMES BROUGHTON

Total running time: ca. 50 min.

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Conventional attempts at plot synopsis wither in the face of L’ÂGE D’OR. In Buñuel’s words, “The story is a sequence of moral and surrealist aesthetics. The sexual instinct and the sense of death form the substance of the film. It is a romantic film performed in full surrealistic frenzy.”

SPECIAL SCREENINGS – RAYNAL AND MEKAS IN PERSON!

With Jonas Mekas, Jackie Raynal, André S. Labarthe, and Patrice Rollet.

Jackie Raynal has been a crucial figure in both French and American film culture for the past fifty years, as a filmmaker (DEUX FOIS), actress and editor (she has worked with everyone from Eric Rohmer, Jean-Daniel Pollet, and Philippe Garrel, to Ulrike Ottinger, Yvonne Rainer, and Abel Ferrara), and as the Director of the legendary Bleecker Street Cinema through the late 1970s-80s. Having already created one short film about Jonas Mekas [NOTES ON JONAS MEKAS (2000)], Raynal was commissioned by Andre S. Labarthe to create a more expansive portrait of her longtime friend and colleague, for the long-running program “Cinéma, de notre temps.” The result is both an affectionate, loose, and handmade film, in the tradition of Mekas’s own work, and a self-reflexive essay on the difficulty of making a portrait about a filmmaker whose entire oeuvre comprises a series of self-portraits. Asking herself, “What can one film regarding Jonas Mekas that he hasn’t already filmed himself?,” Raynal has created a playful and revealing work. Thanks in large part to the onscreen presence of Labarthe and the eloquent Mekas scholar Patrice Rollet, REMINISCENCES stealthily and unassumingly develops from a charmingly casual portrait into a penetrating, rigorous meditation on the multiple dimensions and enduring importance of Mekas’s cinema.

Jackie Raynal and Jonas Mekas will be here in person for selected screenings!
Jackie Raynal will be in person on Saturday & Sunday. Jonas will join her for both of the screenings on Saturday! 

(THE FORGOTTEN ONES)

“Buñuel shows the sad condition of the poor without embellishing them, because if there is one thing Buñuel hates it is that artificial sweetness imparted to all the poor which we so frequently see in the traditional film. If, as usually happens in motion pictures, the moral principals approved by conventional society are carefully observed by members of the poorest classes…then these principals have some universal validity. However, Buñuel is concerned with exposing the opposite.” –Emilio Garcia Riera, FILM CULTURE

“[LOS OLVIDADOS] lashes the mind like a red-hot iron and leaves one’s conscience no opportunity to rest.” –André Bazin

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In-between Hollywood and the emerging cinematic underground, New York in the 1950s and 60s was home to a little-known but vibrant feature film industry. Beyond bigger names like John Cassavetes and Morris Engel, scores of hopeful, independent filmmakers cobbled together low-budget productions with few prospects for critical or commercial success. From waterfront wise guys to Village beatniks, from film noir to existential comedies, ‘Made in New York’ signified a quirky, vibrant, indie aesthetic that in many ways laid the foundation for later New York-based auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Abel Ferrara, Jim Jarmusch, and Spike Lee, among others. This ongoing series will expose and explore New York’s pioneering contributions to the low-budget independent feature.

Introduced by series curator Michael Bowen, Adjunct Lecturer at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Thanks to the Museum of Modern Art Film Department.

Doran William “Bill” Cannon’s biggest claims to fame were undoubtedly the screenplays he penned for two of Hollywood’s most inscrutable comedies of the late 1960s: Otto Preminger’s SKIDOO (1968) and Robert Altman’s BREWSTER MCCLOUD (1970). He had launched his career several years earlier in New York, however, writing and directing a long-lost ‘calling card’ film clearly signaling his love for off-kilter humor. A charms-all romantic comedy with a counter-cultural edge, THE SQUARE ROOT OF ZERO (1963) pits a pair of Village beatniks against a clan of moneyed squares vacationing on the Maine coast. At turns silly and surreal, the film features black-and-white cinematography by indie lenser Sheldon Rochlin (GUNS IN THE TREES) and a soundtrack (actually released on vinyl!) by FANTASY ISLAND composer Elliot Kaplan.

René Clair and Francis Picabia ENTR’ACTE (1924, 22 min, 35mm, b&w)
A masterpiece of Dada and a feat of cinema magic. Made as intermission entertainment for the Ballet Suédois from an impromptu scene by Francis Picabia.

Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1928, 22 min, 35mm, b&w)
Twenty-two minutes of pure, scandalous dream-imagery, a stream of images from which anything that could be given a rational meaning was rigorously excluded. It’s still the unsurpassed masterpiece of the surrealist cinema.

Luis Buñuel LAND WITHOUT BREAD / LAS HURDES: TIERRA SIN PAN (1932, 28 min, 35mm, b&w. With English narration.)
“A documentary describing, matter-of-factly, a region of Spain so ravaged by epidemic poverty that there our worst fantasies find their objective correlative.” –Raymond Durgnat

Total running time: ca. 75 min.

For full program listings, visit www.newfilmmakers.com.

SPECIAL REVIVAL SCREENING – STAR MATTHEW BARRY IN PERSON!

With Jill Clayburgh, Matthew Barry, Veronica Lazar, Renato Salvatori, Fred Gwynne, Alida Valli, and Roberto Benigni.

Life imitates opera in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oedipal melodrama, set in disco-era Rome. An American opera diva (Clayburgh) moves to Italy with her troubled adolescent son Joe (Matthew Barry) after the sudden death of her husband, the boy’s presumed father. While celebrating Joe’s thirteenth birthday, she discovers he’s developed a heroin habit and has fallen in with a rough crowd. As her attempts to rescue him take a disturbing turn, from smothering affection to incest, mother and son escape Rome on a journey through Italy to find Joe’s real father.

“LA LUNA is not a movie about why the mother acts in this way. It is a movie fascinated that she does act in this way. It is melodramatic. Operatic. At the end, the music of Verdi, very loud, over the climax, literally eats the bourgeois drama!” –Bernardo Bertolucci

“Bertolucci has sprung his gourd this time. …[H]e’s got a soap opera and a Freudian case history (traditional enemies in their natural states) and he’s forcing them to copulate!” –Roger Ebert

“Bertolucci’s Jungian remake of HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL! […] Loud, vulgar, and frequently obnoxious, the film nevertheless has a perfect integrity in its excesses. This is filmmaking from the groin, unabashed and unrestrained.” –Dave Kehr, CHICAGO READER

This event is organized and presented by film journalist and programmer David Savage.

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion, moderated by David Savage, with the film’s star, Matthew Barry, as well as Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, U.S. film curator, Venice Film Festival, and Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator, Dept. of Film and Video, Whitney Museum of American Art.

A limited number of advance tickets are available now at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2540195

For full program listings, visit www.newfilmmakers.com.

Abigail Bess & Jane Applegate ICARUS STOPS FOR BREAKFAST (2016, 15 min, digital). SNEAK PREVIEW!
A young misfit couple on their first romantic camping trip to the mountains get more than they bargained for when they find they have inadvertently trapped an owl in the back of their pickup truck.

Lisa Reznik LEFT BANK BOOKSELLER (2012, 27.5 min, digital)
Prohibitions against obscenity were making it impossible for James Joyce to publish his novel ULYSSES. That is, until Sylvia Beach, the young American proprietor of the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company, courageously offered to publish Joyce’s revolutionary novel in France.

Jane Applegate & Crystal Jordan UNFINISHED (2015, 20 min, digital). SNEAK PREVIEW!
Sandy, a young call girl, is surprised when she makes a house call to a suburban home. Her client is not the father who hired her, but his son, Adam, a talented young artist dying from leukemia. Becoming his muse, Sandy provides him with a deep and life affirming connection before his death.

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

For full program listings, visit www.newfilmmakers.com.

From the cerebral hemisphere to animation inspired by Dr. Oliver Sacks, the filmmakers in this program explore personal, ritualistic, and group behaviors. “Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us…” –Oliver Sacks

Jay Rosenblatt (San Francisco, CA) AFRAID SO (2006, 3 min, digital)
Roddy Bogawa (NY, NY) I’M SIMPLY OVERWHELMED, I JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY – THANK YOU ALL VERY MUCH. GOOD NIGHT (2005, 25 min, digital)
Jeanette Louie (Livingston, NJ) AMYGDALA (2013, 10 min, digital)
Daniel Sousa (Pawtucket, RI) FERAL (2012, 13 min, digital)
Bill Morrison (NY, NY) LIGHT IS CALLING (2004, 8 min, 35mm-to-digital)
Sam Ball (San Francisco, CA) PLEASURES OF URBAN DECAY (2000, 17 min, digital)
Tess Martin (Rotterdam, The Netherlands) THE LOST MARINER (2014, 6 min, digital)
Emily Hubley (West Orange, NJ) AND/OR (2012, 6 min, digital)
Total running time: ca. 95 min.

We take a whirlwind voyage through defining moments of Black History, and hear urgency in the voices of young people of color trying to make sense of gun violence in their community. The power of art as therapy and an emotional exploration of the duality of man and the place for God in a sometimes dismal world help to guide our understanding of personal and group protest.

Martine Chartrand (Canada) BLACK SOUL (AME NOIRE) (2002, 10 min, digital)
Vincent Grenier (Ithaca, NY) TABULA RASA (2004, 8 min, digital)
Terrence Fisher & Daniel Howard (Brooklyn, NY) BULLETS IN THE HOOD: A BED-STUY STORY (2004, 22 min, digital)
Gregg De Domenico (Brooklyn, NY) HIP PRIEST (2011, 27 min, digital, b&w)
Stefan Sharff (NY, NY) SELMA TO MONTGOMERY (1965, 10 min, 16mm-to-digital)
James Hollenbaugh (Lancaster, PA) SELF PORTRAIT PORTRAIT (2014, 6 min, Super 8mm-to-digital, b&w)
Total running time: ca. 90 min.

Unless otherwise noted, all the films in this program are silent. With the exception of GNIR REDNOW, all films have been preserved by Anthology Film Archives.

ROSE HOBART (ca. 1936, 20 min, 16mm, sound)
COTILLION (ca. 1940s-1968, 8 min, 16mm, b&w. Completed by Larry Jordan.)
THE MIDNIGHT PARTY (ca. 1940s-1968, 3.5 min, 16mm, b&w. Completed by Larry Jordan.)
THE CHILDREN’S PARTY (ca. 1940s-1968, 8 min, 16mm. Completed by Larry Jordan.)
CENTURIES OF JUNE (1955, 10 min, 16mm. Photographed by Stan Brakhage.)
THE AVIARY (1954, 11 min, 16mm, b&w. Photographed by Rudy Burckhardt.)
GNIR REDNOW (1955, 5 min, 16mm. Photographed by Stan Brakhage.)
NYMPHLIGHT (1957, 8 min, 16mm. Photographed by Rudy Burckhardt.)
A LEGEND FOR FOUNTAINS (1957/65, 17 min, 16mm, b&w. Photographed by Rudy Burckhardt; completed by Larry Jordan.)
ANGEL (1957, 3 min, 16mm. Photographed by Rudy Burckhardt.)

The poet of magic realities. Pioneer of recycled (found) images. ROSE HOBART and the Trilogy (COTILLION, MIDNIGHT PARTY & CHILDREN’S PARTY) are some of the earliest collage films created. The others were directed by Cornell (and photographed by Stan Brakhage and Rudy Burckhardt) at some of his favorite locations.

Total running time: ca. 105 min.

The filmmakers in this program find inspiration from the man-made and natural world, mutiny on the high seas, inter-species romance, and the murderous and dark themes of film noir in this wild mash-up of forms.

Osbert Parker (London, UK) YOURS TRULY (2007, 7 min, digital)
Scott Stark (Austin, TX) BLOOM (2012, 11 min, digital)
Eva Weber (London, UK) THE SOLITARY LIFE OF CRANES (2008, 27 min, digital)
Tom Brown (Brooklyn, NY) TEETH (2015, 6 min, digital)
Josh Gibson (Durham, NC) KUDZU VINE (2011, 20 min, 35mm, b&w)
Luke Jaeger (Northampton, MA) FISHWIFE (2014, 4 min, digital)
Anna Fitch (San Francisco, CA) THE BURNING WIGS OF SEDITION (2010, 10 min, digital)
Total running time: ca. 90 min.

Filmmakers search through 25 years of footage, a woman takes a fantastical journey through memories, and we see a haunting portrait of the fragile future of films made on film. From Eadweard Muybridge to the poetic memoirs of seven Syrian girls in a refugee camp in Jordan, the nature of cinematic storytelling is examined, probed, and explored.

Lindsay McIntyre (Alberta, Canada) WHERE WE STAND (2014, 5 min, 16mm-to-digital)
Lynne Sachs & Sean Hanley (Brooklyn, NY) STARFISH AORTA COLOSSUS (2015, 5 min, 8mm-to-digital)
Janie Geiser (Los Angeles, CA) LOST MOTION (1999, 11 min, 16mm)
Joanna Priestly (Portland, OR) MISSED ACHES (2009, 4 min, digital)
Seoungho Cho (Elmhurst, NY) HORIZONTAL INTIMACY (2011, 9 min, digital)
Reynold Reynolds (Berlin, Germany) SECRET MACHINE (2009, 10 min, digital)
Stacey Steers (Boulder, CO) PHANTOM CANYON (2006, 10 min, 35mm, b&w)
Laura Doggett (Durham, NC) FILMS BY SYRIAN GIRLS (2015, 22 min, digital)
Lynn Tomlinson (Owings Mills, MD) THE BALLAD OF HOLLAND ISLAND HOUSE (2015, 4 min, digital)
Total running time: ca. 85 min.