Anthology Film Archives

PRESERVATION PRINT!

With Joanne Dru, John Agar, Ben Johnson, Harry Carey Jr., and Victor McLaglen. Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

“Of all John Ford’s lyrical films, this 1949 feature is the one that most nearly leaves narrative behind; it is pure theme and variation, centered on the figure of a retiring cavalry officer (John Wayne, playing with strength and conviction a man well beyond his actual age). The screenplay (by Frank Nugent and Laurence Stallings) is entirely episodic, and it ends in a magnificently sustained series of anticlimaxes, suggesting it could spin out forever. In Ford’s superbly creative hands, it becomes perhaps the only avant-garde film ever made about the importance of tradition.” –Dave Kehr, CHICAGO READER

PRESERVATION PRINT!

With David Wayne, Howard Da Silva, and Raymond Burr. Preserved by the Library of Congress.

It’s impossible to imagine improving upon Fritz Lang’s legendary M (1931), which contains one of the greatest performances of all time courtesy of Peter Lorre. But a film by Joseph Losey is nothing to sneeze at, especially one from his fascinating American period (before he was blacklisted and relocated to the UK). And comparisons to Lang/Lorre aside, his version of M is a terrific, tightly constructed work, and a prime example of 1950s Hollywood filmmaking. Boasting incredible LA location work, with unforgettable sequences set in the now-vanished Bunker Hill neighborhood and in the famous Bradbury building (whose highly picturesque atrium has been utilized in films including BLADE RUNNER and D.O.A.), M is a remarkable achievement in its own right.

With Rock Hudson. Print courtesy of the ConstellationCenter Collection at the Academy Film Archive.

Among his most rarely-screened films, Douglas Sirk’s Technicolor western TAZA, SON OF COCHISE features Rock Hudson as Taza, a young Apache who believes in peace but whose brother thirsts for war. Originally shot in 3D, but never released in that form, TAZA remains a visually stunning work, replete with masterful widescreen compositions and lyrical location photography. And while the casting of Hudson as an Apache is all too easy to ridicule, Sirk elicits a performance from his leading man that, in its sensitivity and soulfulness, points towards their work together on masterpieces such as MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS, and WRITTEN ON THE WIND.

RESTORATION PRINT!

With Charles Farrell, Rose Hobart, and Lee Tracy. Archival print courtesy of 20th Century Fox.

Ferenc Molnar’s 1909 play LILIOM has been well served cinematically – the 1934 adaptation by Fritz Lang was preceded just four years earlier by a version directed by the somewhat more obscure but no less masterful Frank Borzage. The play concerns the relationship between a working-class young woman named Julia and Liliom, a carnival barker who loves but abuses her. After Julia becomes pregnant, Liliom is killed in a robbery intended to finance their future life. Doomed to spend his afterlife in purgatory, he’s eventually given one day to earn entry to heaven by doing a good deed for Julia and their daughter. It’s hard to imagine two directors whose sensibilities were further apart than Borzage and Lang, and true to form, Borzage’s LILIOM is the more deeply felt of the two. Focusing on Julia at least as much as Liliom, Borzage creates a typically luminous, frankly emotional paean to the transfiguring power of love.

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

With Stewart Granger, George Sanders, Joan Greenwood, and Viveca Lindfors. Thanks to Warner Brothers.

Though it’s rarely identified as such, MOONFLEET is in the very top tier of Fritz Lang’s oeuvre: a work of profound emotional resonance and conviction, it’s among the greatest of all films on the subject of childhood. Based on an 1898 novel by J. Meade Faulkner, it tells the story of John Mohune, a young orphan thrust into a perilous, cutthroat world of smugglers, pirates, and other criminals. Left with no family, John presents himself to his mother’s ex-lover, the shady Jeremy Fox, who at first considers his unexpected charge an unwelcome burden but gradually forms a bond with the child. A gothic melodrama with the flavor of a fairy tale, MOONFLEET is both a rousing adventure and a deeply moving chronicle of innocence and sacrifice in a cruel world.

PRESERVATION PRINT!

With Dolores del Rio and Warner Baxter. Preserved by the Library of Congress.

“Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel RAMONA, about the mixed-race ward of a California sheep rancher and her tragic love affair with a full-blooded Indian, had long haunted the American imagination, inspiring a stage adaptation and at least two previous films (two more would follow) before this visually stunning 1928 interpretation directed by Edwin Carewe, a rare Hollywood filmmaker of Native American descent. The Mexican actress Dolores del Rio stars as the title character; her tortured lover is the somewhat less convincing Warner Baxter.” –MoMA

With Vincent Price and Jane Asher. Thanks to Park Circus.

Made with a (slightly) bigger budget and longer shooting schedule than the previous films in his Edgar Allan Poe cycle, MASQUE found Corman (with the help of cinematographer and future director Nicolas Roeg) enjoying greater freedom to explore new stylistic paths, resulting in one of the most visually striking of the Poe films, and arguably Corman’s masterpiece.

“[A] work of consummate imaginative power and originality. In medieval Italy, the devil-worshipping Prince Prospero (Price) abducts an innocent village girl (Asher) and tries to interest her in his diabolical goings-on while the plague rages outside his castle. This is both beautiful and horrifying, with a fine sense of ambiguity and a wealth of subtleties.” –Don Druker, CHICAGO READER

Maria Petschnig is an Austrian-born, New York-based artist who works in video, performance, and installation. Described by NEW YORK TIMES critic Karen Rosenberg as presenting a “gentler version of Viennese Actionism’s extreme body art or of the gender-bending epics of Matthew Barney,” Petschnig’s powerfully provocative and strangely funny videos explore a seedy, awkward kind of eroticism, constantly inverting subject-object relations with a keen understanding of the body and sexuality. Her lens captures a world that is fetishized, disquieting, and humorous, realized in dry, dark fantasies and crude dystopias. The videos posit a contemporary response to the old politics of identity by challenging the viewer to avoid an easy alliance with third-wave feminism’s reclaiming of sexuality as power. Instead, these intimate performances in front of (rather than for) the camera suggest a representation of pathos and loneliness among society’s fringe. Her work has screened widely at venues including Random Institute, Zurich, Switzerland (2015), Kino Arsenal, Berlin (2014), On Stellar Rays, New York (2013), and Performa 11, New York (2011) amongst many others.

This program celebrates the publication of a book on Petschnig’s work titled NINETEEN VIDEOS that will be co-published this May by Black Dog Publishing, London, and On Stellar Rays Gallery, New York, with support from The Austrian Federal Chancellery and the Austrian Cultural Forum New York.

HOLODECK (2002/08, 2 min, video)
MINNIE (2007, 6 min, video)
PETSCHSNIGGLE (2013, 6 min, digital)
PEEP (2003, 6 min, video)
C. (2014, 28 min, digital. World premiere screening!)
VASISTAS (2013, 5 min, digital)
STEPPIN’ OUT FOR LUNCH (2013, 6 min, digital)
PAREIDOLIA (2008, 3 min, video)

Total running time: ca. 65 min.

With Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn. Thanks to Universal Pictures.

Rousingly directed by Walsh, this film features Gregory Peck as the captain of a seagoing schooner whose wife is abducted on their wedding day by a Russian prince. Romantic adventure abounds as Peck rescues his bride but finds himself in a schooner race through appalling gale conditions from San Francisco to seal-hunting grounds off Alaska, where they run afoul of occupying Russian authorities. THE WORLD IN HIS ARMS is a gorgeously photographed film, with an unusually dark, velvety palette, and one that demands to be seen on 35mm!

With Richard Widmark. Archival print courtesy of 20th Century Fox.

“A study in race-hate the Old Western way, this worthy follow-up to BROKEN ARROW finds director Delmer Daves returning to Arizona’s Martian valleys and mesas, this time filming in overwhelming, hallucinatory CinemaScope. George Mathews’s swinish Sheriff Bull Harper is bringing Richard Widmark’s ‘Comanche’ Todd to justice for the murder of the other three Harper brothers. But when the wagon train of settlers that they’re traveling with is attacked by Apaches, the despised Todd, who has lived most of his life with the Indians, becomes the last line of defense for the few surviving youths of the party, leading them through the ‘Canyon of Death’ in a wagon made from the remaining wreckage.” –Nick Pinkerton

The archival 35mm print we screened during our 2013 Delmer Daves retrospective was among the most revelatory and eye-popping we’ve ever had the privilege of projecting, and we’re overjoyed to have the opportunity to bring it back!

A wholly unique figure from the heyday of the NY underground, Jud Yalkut (1938-2013) was a multi-media pioneer whose radical films and videos remain as trippy and innovative today as they were back then. Born and raised in NYC, Yalkut studied literature before turning to experimental cinema in the early 1960s. A member of the groundbreaking collective USCO and an early creative partner of Nam June Paik, Yalkut collaborated with or documented a who’s who of important artists while also making his own distinguished films. He left for Dayton in 1973 to spearhead the film and video department at Wright State University and continued to be a major figure in the Ohio arts scene for the rest of his life. Yalkut’s expansive body of work deserves serious reinvestigation, and these two tribute programs celebrate his unique accomplishments by presenting some of his best-known works alongside an exciting array of never-before-seen footage.

Presented in collaboration with Electronic Arts Intermix (eai.org).

Special thanks to Peg Rice.

PROGRAM 1:
The first three films in this freewheeling program were made by Yalkut while part of the influential USCO group in the mid-1960s. The other exciting titles represent a selection from the plethora of camera rolls and raw footage included in Yalkut’s voluminous collection that were recently acquired by Anthology. These spectacular reels present rare documentation of many of the prime movers and shakers of the era.

TURN TURN TURN (1966, 10 min, 16mm)
DIFFRACTION FILM (1965, 10 min, 16mm)
US DOWN BY THE RIVERSIDE (1966, 3 min, 16mm)
CHARLOTTE MOORMAN IN COCA COLA HAPPENING AT JUDSON HALL (1966, ca. 3 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent)
COKE IS HAPPENING COMMERICAL (ca. 1966, 1 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent)
GIDEON BACHMANN AND WEST GERMAN TELEVISION CREW AT USCO CHURCH (ca. 1967, ca. 3 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent)
LIVING THEATER IN “THE MYSTERIES” (ca. 1968, ca. 3 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent)
BEATLES CONCERT AT SHEA STADIUM (ca. 1966, ca. 3 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent)
LOWER EAST SIDE MONTAGE (ca. 1960s, ca. 3 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent)
WBAI RADIO NAKED HAPPENING (ca. 1960s, ca. 3 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent)
DIETER ROT, VIDEOTAPE STUDY BY PAIK (ca. 1960s, ca. 3 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent)
MUSICA ELECTRONICA VIVA (M.E.V.) AT THE BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC (1967, ca. 3 min, 16mm-to-digital, silent)

Total running time: ca. 55 min.

PRESERVATION PRINT!

With Joanne Dru, John Agar, Ben Johnson, Harry Carey Jr., and Victor McLaglen. Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

“Of all John Ford’s lyrical films, this 1949 feature is the one that most nearly leaves narrative behind; it is pure theme and variation, centered on the figure of a retiring cavalry officer (John Wayne, playing with strength and conviction a man well beyond his actual age). The screenplay (by Frank Nugent and Laurence Stallings) is entirely episodic, and it ends in a magnificently sustained series of anticlimaxes, suggesting it could spin out forever. In Ford’s superbly creative hands, it becomes perhaps the only avant-garde film ever made about the importance of tradition.” –Dave Kehr, CHICAGO READER

Poets responding to the impossible but inevitable question: What is poetry? Result: a close-up of the normally private space of art definition. For his tripartite project begun in 2002, art is/poetry is/music is, Quasha has recorded over one thousand artists/poets/musicians of all kinds in 11 countries and 24 languages, and the ongoing work has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, and other public venues, as well as extensively online. Quasha terms this “a work in intimate speaking portraiture.” The often prolonged initial conversations are edited to several minutes and show only the full-screen face of the speaking poet.

This program features new portraits, comprising Volume II of poetry is, presented along with panel discussions by several of the poets filmed, including Charles Bernstein, Elaine Equi, Patricia Spears Jones, Vincent Katz, Jerome Sala, and Charles Stein, as well as George Quasha. Co-directors and hosts of the event are poets Kimberly Lyons and Vyt Bakaitis. Previous volumes and further commentary can be seen at quasha.com/art-is.

This all-day event, to be held on Saturday, June 6 in the Maya Deren Theater, will be open to all and free of charge.

With Stewart Granger, George Sanders, Joan Greenwood, and Viveca Lindfors. Thanks to Warner Brothers.

Though it’s rarely identified as such, MOONFLEET is in the very top tier of Fritz Lang’s oeuvre: a work of profound emotional resonance and conviction, it’s among the greatest of all films on the subject of childhood. Based on an 1898 novel by J. Meade Faulkner, it tells the story of John Mohune, a young orphan thrust into a perilous, cutthroat world of smugglers, pirates, and other criminals. Left with no family, John presents himself to his mother’s ex-lover, the shady Jeremy Fox, who at first considers his unexpected charge an unwelcome burden but gradually forms a bond with the child. A gothic melodrama with the flavor of a fairy tale, MOONFLEET is both a rousing adventure and a deeply moving chronicle of innocence and sacrifice in a cruel world.

I.B. TECHNICOLOR PRINT!

Archival print courtesy of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

Originally released as MR. BUG GOES TO TOWN, HOPPITY is one of only two feature films created by the great Dave and Max Fleischer who, thanks to their work on Betty Boop, Popeye, and other peerless animation classics, are among the giants of American pop culture. Made two years after their first feature, GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, HOPPITY was a financial disaster for the Fleischers – the costly production (as well as the brothers’ fraying relationship) helped hasten the demise of their studio, and the timing of the film’s release, which happened to fall two days before the cataclysm of Pearl Harbor, further doomed it. Nevertheless, the Fleischers’ fecund imagination and their brilliant, highly distinctive style of animation are fully in evidence. HOPPITY is a woefully neglected work from these American masters.

This screening will be introduced by Electronic Arts Intermix's Distribution Director, Rebecca Cleman!

A wholly unique figure from the heyday of the NY underground, Jud Yalkut (1938-2013) was a multi-media pioneer whose radical films and videos remain as trippy and innovative today as they were back then. Born and raised in NYC, Yalkut studied literature before turning to experimental cinema in the early 1960s. A member of the groundbreaking collective USCO and an early creative partner of Nam June Paik, Yalkut collaborated with or documented a who’s who of important artists while also making his own distinguished films. He left for Dayton in 1973 to spearhead the film and video department at Wright State University and continued to be a major figure in the Ohio arts scene for the rest of his life. Yalkut’s expansive body of work deserves serious reinvestigation, and these two tribute programs celebrate his unique accomplishments by presenting some of his best-known works alongside an exciting array of never-before-seen footage.

Presented in collaboration with Electronic Arts Intermix (eai.org).

Special thanks to Peg Rice.

PROGRAM 2:
Yalkut’s moving image work transcended and transformed media as he explored and merged film, video, expanded cinema, performance, and installation. This approach embodied the “intermix” that was at the core of Howard Wise’s founding manifesto for Electronic Arts Intermix, the nonprofit media arts center and distributor, which remains alive and well today and will be co-presenting this program. Starting in 1966 and continuing into the 1970s, he collaborated with Nam June Paik on a series of significant video-film pieces, creating extraordinary conversations between the medium of film and the electronic manipulations of video. These ideas extended to kinetic reworkings of performances and art events, as seen in his 1973 video realization of Paik and Charlotte Moorman performing John Cage’s 26’.1.1499” FOR STRING PLAYER, and his digital rendering of Moholy-Nagy’s 1930 kinetic sculpture LIGHT-SPACE MODULATOR.

26’1.1499” FOR A STRING PLAYER (1973, 42 min, video)
LIGHT DISPLAY: COLOR (2002, 7 min, digital, silent)
VIDEO SYNTHESIZER AND “TV CELLO” COLLECTIBLES (1965-71, 23.5 min (excerpts), video, silent)
VIDEO-FILM CONCERT (1966-72, 34.5 min (excerpts), video, b&w/color)

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

With Vincent Price and Jane Asher. Thanks to Park Circus.

Made with a (slightly) bigger budget and longer shooting schedule than the previous films in his Edgar Allan Poe cycle, MASQUE found Corman (with the help of cinematographer and future director Nicolas Roeg) enjoying greater freedom to explore new stylistic paths, resulting in one of the most visually striking of the Poe films, and arguably Corman’s masterpiece.

“[A] work of consummate imaginative power and originality. In medieval Italy, the devil-worshipping Prince Prospero (Price) abducts an innocent village girl (Asher) and tries to interest her in his diabolical goings-on while the plague rages outside his castle. This is both beautiful and horrifying, with a fine sense of ambiguity and a wealth of subtleties.” –Don Druker, CHICAGO READER

RESTORATION PRINT!

With Charles Farrell, Rose Hobart, and Lee Tracy. Archival print courtesy of 20th Century Fox.

Ferenc Molnar’s 1909 play LILIOM has been well served cinematically – the 1934 adaptation by Fritz Lang was preceded just four years earlier by a version directed by the somewhat more obscure but no less masterful Frank Borzage. The play concerns the relationship between a working-class young woman named Julia and Liliom, a carnival barker who loves but abuses her. After Julia becomes pregnant, Liliom is killed in a robbery intended to finance their future life. Doomed to spend his afterlife in purgatory, he’s eventually given one day to earn entry to heaven by doing a good deed for Julia and their daughter. It’s hard to imagine two directors whose sensibilities were further apart than Borzage and Lang, and true to form, Borzage’s LILIOM is the more deeply felt of the two. Focusing on Julia at least as much as Liliom, Borzage creates a typically luminous, frankly emotional paean to the transfiguring power of love.

(PRÄSTÄNKAN)

A lyrical, early Dreyer comedy. A young parson wins a plum parish in 17th-century Norway, but is obliged to marry the widow of his deceased predecessor and pretend his attractive young fiancée is his sister. The master’s touch is evident in the close-ups of the pastor’s would-be rivals and parishioners, and in a slow pan presaging the 360-degree views of VAMPYR.

(LETYAT ZHURAVLI)

With Tatiana Samoilova and Alexei Batalov. Archival print courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive.

“One of the most acclaimed Soviet films of all time. Set during WWII, it is a tragic story of the shattering of love and youthful ambitions by war. Two young sweethearts, Veronica (Tatiana Samoilova) and Boris (Alexei Batalov), are certain they will marry and live happily ever after. Then, Boris volunteers for the army. Kalatozov employs the kind of visually extravagant style that had been prohibited by Stalinist dogma since the silent era. With its unusual angles, huge close-ups, and bravura editing techniques, the film recalls the best of the Soviet masters Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, and Eisenstein. It is also distinguished by extraordinary performances, especially that of Samoilova, and by a sense of personal intimacy unique in the Soviet cinema of its time.” –Judy Bloch, PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

PRESERVATION PRINT!

With David Wayne, Howard Da Silva, and Raymond Burr. Preserved by the Library of Congress.

It’s impossible to imagine improving upon Fritz Lang’s legendary M (1931), which contains one of the greatest performances of all time courtesy of Peter Lorre. But a film by Joseph Losey is nothing to sneeze at, especially one from his fascinating American period (before he was blacklisted and relocated to the UK). And comparisons to Lang/Lorre aside, his version of M is a terrific, tightly constructed work, and a prime example of 1950s Hollywood filmmaking. Boasting incredible LA location work, with unforgettable sequences set in the now-vanished Bunker Hill neighborhood and in the famous Bradbury building (whose highly picturesque atrium has been utilized in films including BLADE RUNNER and D.O.A.), M is a remarkable achievement in its own right.

With Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn. Thanks to Universal Pictures.

Rousingly directed by Walsh, this film features Gregory Peck as the captain of a seagoing schooner whose wife is abducted on their wedding day by a Russian prince. Romantic adventure abounds as Peck rescues his bride but finds himself in a schooner race through appalling gale conditions from San Francisco to seal-hunting grounds off Alaska, where they run afoul of occupying Russian authorities. THE WORLD IN HIS ARMS is a gorgeously photographed film, with an unusually dark, velvety palette, and one that demands to be seen on 35mm!

With Rock Hudson. Print courtesy of the ConstellationCenter Collection at the Academy Film Archive.

Among his most rarely-screened films, Douglas Sirk’s Technicolor western TAZA, SON OF COCHISE features Rock Hudson as Taza, a young Apache who believes in peace but whose brother thirsts for war. Originally shot in 3D, but never released in that form, TAZA remains a visually stunning work, replete with masterful widescreen compositions and lyrical location photography. And while the casting of Hudson as an Apache is all too easy to ridicule, Sirk elicits a performance from his leading man that, in its sensitivity and soulfulness, points towards their work together on masterpieces such as MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS, and WRITTEN ON THE WIND.

(SEN NOCI SVATOJÁNSKÉ)

AFA MEMBERS ONLY – FREE SCREENING!

Once every calendar we offer a special, AFA Members-Only screening, featuring sneak-previews of upcoming features, programs of rare materials from Anthology’s collections, in-person filmmaker presentations, and more! The benefits of an Anthology membership have always been plentiful: free admission to over 100 Essential Cinema programs, reduced admission to all other shows, discounted AFA publications. But with these screenings – free and open only to members – we sweeten the pot even further.

Print courtesy of the Ron Merk Collection at the Academy Film Archive.

This calendar’s AFA Members Only event dovetails with our “This Is Celluloid: 35mm” series. Thanks to the Academy Film Archive, we will be screening a mint condition 35mm print of legendary Czech animator Jirí Trnka’s masterpiece, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, in its original Czech-language version! For this highly faithful adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, created using brilliantly designed and painstakingly crafted puppets (the train of Titania’s dress, for instance is composed of dozens of individually animated fairies), Trnka spared no expense in order to shoot on glorious Eastmancolor stock, resulting in a film of great visual beauty. Rarely screened today, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM is a pinnacle of puppet animation and a treat in every sense.

Beer and pizza reception at 7:00!

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

PRESERVATION PRINT!

With Dolores del Rio and Warner Baxter. Preserved by the Library of Congress.

“Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel RAMONA, about the mixed-race ward of a California sheep rancher and her tragic love affair with a full-blooded Indian, had long haunted the American imagination, inspiring a stage adaptation and at least two previous films (two more would follow) before this visually stunning 1928 interpretation directed by Edwin Carewe, a rare Hollywood filmmaker of Native American descent. The Mexican actress Dolores del Rio stars as the title character; her tortured lover is the somewhat less convincing Warner Baxter.” –MoMA

RESTORATION PRINT!

With Charles Farrell, Rose Hobart, and Lee Tracy. Archival print courtesy of 20th Century Fox.

Ferenc Molnar’s 1909 play LILIOM has been well served cinematically – the 1934 adaptation by Fritz Lang was preceded just four years earlier by a version directed by the somewhat more obscure but no less masterful Frank Borzage. The play concerns the relationship between a working-class young woman named Julia and Liliom, a carnival barker who loves but abuses her. After Julia becomes pregnant, Liliom is killed in a robbery intended to finance their future life. Doomed to spend his afterlife in purgatory, he’s eventually given one day to earn entry to heaven by doing a good deed for Julia and their daughter. It’s hard to imagine two directors whose sensibilities were further apart than Borzage and Lang, and true to form, Borzage’s LILIOM is the more deeply felt of the two. Focusing on Julia at least as much as Liliom, Borzage creates a typically luminous, frankly emotional paean to the transfiguring power of love.

Elsewhere on this calendar Anthology celebrates the inimitable glory of 35mm, and this edition of Unessential Cinema follows suit, albeit with a typically playful twist. Tonight’s program will sample a wide array of Regular and Super 8mm reduction prints of classic films originally produced on 35mm. Way before streaming, prior to Blu-Ray, predating DVD, and even earlier than VHS, home entertainment meant watching your favorite movies in super-condensed small-gauge copies intended for living room projection. Severely cropped, illogically edited, stripped of sound, or sometimes even given new narration, these home movie prints are proof positive of how little control a filmmaker has over their work, or should we say ‘product.’ You have never seen your favorite movies so…small. Prepare to squint!

Expect the following:
BALLET MECANIQUE (1924, regular 8mm edit) by Fernand Leger and Dudley Murphy.
TAXI DRIVER (1976, Super 8mm edit) by Martin Scorsese. Courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive.
An Elvis Movie!
A Sci-Fi Epic!
And more!

UNESSENTIAL CINEMA SCREENINGS ARE FREE FOR AFA MEMBERS!

With Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, Mickey Rourke, Nicolas Cage, Vincent Spano, and Dennis Hopper. Archival print courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive.

In 1983, still reeling from the financial and critical disaster of ONE FROM THE HEART, Francis Ford Coppola made back-to-back films based on novels by Oklahoma writer S.E. Hinton. The first, THE OUTSIDERS, is a sensitive and affecting young adult classic that helped introduce a who’s-who of soon-to-be stars (including Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Diane Lane, and Tom Cruise). Sharing much of that film’s crew, as well as actors Dillon and Lane (who are joined by Mickey Rourke, Nicolas Cage, and Dennis Hopper), RUMBLE FISH is a very different kettle of fish: set within the ritualized milieu of a motorcycle gang, shot on high-contrast black-and-white film (with occasional flashes of color), and with an experimental score by Stewart Copeland of The Police, it’s among Coppola’s most boldly stylized films, and one of the most avant-garde commercial films of the 1980s. Like much of Coppola’s 1980s work, it was terribly undervalued at the time, and is ripe for rediscovery.

With live reading and sounds

Anthology hosts the first film retrospective of NYC-based filmmaker/poet, Stephanie Gray, who has been making experimental and documentary Super 8 films (and videos) since 1998. Prolific and active in the Super 8 scene, Gray has made more than 57 short films, many diaristic or city-symphonic. Her work often deals with the city (or vanishing city), along with queer, feminist, and hearing loss themes.

Gray began making films in Buffalo, through community workshops at the pioneering Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center. Her early work grew out of her interest in the decaying urban infrastructure of Buffalo. Upon moving to NYC, she found herself documenting a similar urban transformation (though in this case the result not of economic stagnation but of skyrocketing rents and greed), an ongoing project that marks her work to this day. Gray’s work is distinguished as well by her approach to sound – many of her films feature sampled, distorted, or layered soundtracks, and her screenings are almost always accompanied by live musical performances, or by Gray’s own live voiceovers or readings from her poetry.

Coinciding with the publication of her second poetry collection, SHORTHAND AND ELECTRIC LANGUAGE STARS, this retrospective will encompass three programs: one highlighting Gray’s early work in Buffalo, another focusing on more recent work made since her arrival in NYC, and a final program devoted to films on the theme of “vanishing New York.” It’s an overdue showcase for an artist active for nearly 20 years, whose work simultaneously slows down and speeds up the urban transformations that have taken place in recent years, and meditates on, to borrow one of Gray’s film titles, “what we thought we knew/what we knew we thought.”

Co-sponsored by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs and Mono No Aware.
Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, the publisher of SHORTHAND AND ELECTRIC LANGUAGE STARS, which will include a selection of Gray’s film stills and essays by Eileen Myles (on Gray’s poetry) and Ariel Goldberg (on Gray’s films). Thanks to publisher Brenda Iijima. Copies will be available for sale at the screenings.

“This program is in partial honorific memory of Kodachrome, PacLab, Anne Charlotte Robertson, Super 8 sound film, and DeRobertis, reflected in 5 Roses Pizza’s windows, and which I didn’t get to film. RIP to all.” –S.G.

PROGRAM 1
Earlyness: queeahs, bflo, myles, metal, hearing
I LOVED THIS CITY (2000, 3.5 min, Super 8mm, with live reading)
THIS IS THE BIKE RIDE TO WORK (2002, 6.5 min, Super 8mm, b&w, with live reading)
WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? (2000, 3.5 min, Super 8mm, b&w)
DEAR JOAN (1999, 3.5 min, Super 8mm, b&w, with live reading)
KRISTY (2003, 6.5 min, Super 8mm, b&w)
I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT EILEEN MYLES’ SCHOOL OF FISH POEM (2002, 3.5 min, Super 8mm, b&w, with live reading)
NEVER HEARD THE WORD IMPOSSIBLE (2007, 6.5 min, Super 8mm, b&w)
CLOSE YR HEARING FOR THE CAP(SHUNS) (2000, 32 min, video)
Total running time: ca. 70 min

I.B. TECHNICOLOR PRINT!

Archival print courtesy of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

This bizarre but delightful Glam Rock extravaganza brings together a plethora of then-popular bands, including Mud, The Glitter Band, Scott Fitzgerald, The Rubettes, Slik, and Bob Kerr’s Whoopee Band (less a who’s who! than a who’s who?). Featuring performances by all of the above, as well as cameos from Freddie Jones, Herman’s Hermits-member Peter Noone, and more, NEVER TOO YOUNG embeds the whole thing in a story involving a near-future dystopia in which pop music has been banned from TV in the UK. A young man named Hero (Peter Denyer) and his driver (Jones) convert an old ice cream van into a Group Detector Van, and travel around Britain in search of groups to play at a huge concert. Has to be seen to be believed!

With Oleg Yankovskiy and Erland Josephson. Thanks to Kino Lorber.

This brooding late masterpiece by Tarkovsky, his penultimate feature film, is a darkly poetic vision of exile. It was the first of his features to be made outside of Russia, the home to which he would never return. According to Tarkovsky, in Russian the word “nostalghia” conveys “the love for your homeland and the melancholy that arises from being far away.” This debilitating form of homesickness is embodied in the film by Andrei, a Russian intellectual doing research in Italy. Written with frequent Michelangelo Antonioni collaborator Tonino Guerra, NOSTALGHIA is a mystical and mysterious collision of East and West, shot with the tactile beauty unique to Tarkovsky.

“NOSTALGHIA is not so much a movie as a place to inhabit for two hours.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

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

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(YONG ZHE WU JU)

IMMACULATE PRINT!

With Yuen Biao and Leung Kar Yan. Archival print courtesy of the American Genre Film Archive.

Yuen Biao (DRAGONS FOREVER) and Leung Kar Yan (THE VICTIM) star as young men seeking to learn kung fu from a legendary master. Meanwhile, a crazed kung fu killer named White Tiger is randomly putting on spooky makeup and unleashing his martial arts skills on unsuspecting victims. It’s up to the two young men to stop White Tiger, but not until they master laundry-fu, and fight a mysterious double-faced villain. Featuring Yuen Biao’s acrobatic skills, a jaw-dropping kung fu lion-dance sequence, and some of the most incredible martial arts choreography ever put on film.

With live reading and sounds

Anthology hosts the first film retrospective of NYC-based filmmaker/poet, Stephanie Gray, who has been making experimental and documentary Super 8 films (and videos) since 1998. Prolific and active in the Super 8 scene, Gray has made more than 57 short films, many diaristic or city-symphonic. Her work often deals with the city (or vanishing city), along with queer, feminist, and hearing loss themes.

Gray began making films in Buffalo, through community workshops at the pioneering Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center. Her early work grew out of her interest in the decaying urban infrastructure of Buffalo. Upon moving to NYC, she found herself documenting a similar urban transformation (though in this case the result not of economic stagnation but of skyrocketing rents and greed), an ongoing project that marks her work to this day. Gray’s work is distinguished as well by her approach to sound – many of her films feature sampled, distorted, or layered soundtracks, and her screenings are almost always accompanied by live musical performances, or by Gray’s own live voiceovers or readings from her poetry.

Coinciding with the publication of her second poetry collection, SHORTHAND AND ELECTRIC LANGUAGE STARS, this retrospective will encompass three programs: one highlighting Gray’s early work in Buffalo, another focusing on more recent work made since her arrival in NYC, and a final program devoted to films on the theme of “vanishing New York.” It’s an overdue showcase for an artist active for nearly 20 years, whose work simultaneously slows down and speeds up the urban transformations that have taken place in recent years, and meditates on, to borrow one of Gray’s film titles, “what we thought we knew/what we knew we thought.”

Co-sponsored by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs and Mono No Aware.
Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, the publisher of SHORTHAND AND ELECTRIC LANGUAGE STARS, which will include a selection of Gray’s film stills and essays by Eileen Myles (on Gray’s poetry) and Ariel Goldberg (on Gray’s films). Thanks to publisher Brenda Iijima. Copies will be available for sale at the screenings.

“This program is in partial honorific memory of Kodachrome, PacLab, Anne Charlotte Robertson, Super 8 sound film, and DeRobertis, reflected in 5 Roses Pizza’s windows, and which I didn’t get to film. RIP to all.” –S.G.

PROGRAM 2
Recentness: What You thought You Knew/What You Knew You Thought
With live sound performances by Rachael Guma and Gabriel Guma!
BALLOONS TIED UP YOUR SKY (2012, 11 min, Super 8mm, b&w, live sound)
ALSO KNOWN AS (2011, 3 min, Super 8mm, with live reading)
CAUGHT IN YOUR FLICKERING WEATHER (2011, 12 min, Super 8mm, b&w, live sound)
SATANIC BIBLE ON INTERLIBRARY LOAN (2011, 9 min, Super 8mm, with live reading)
SEEING THRU BUFFALOS (2010, 12 min, Super 8mm, b&w/color, with live reading)
WHAT YOU THOUGHT YOU KNEW/WHAT YOU KNEW YOU THOUGHT (2014, 3 min, Super 8mm, live sound)
DRESSES AND MOUNTAINS INTO WINDOWS (2014, 7 min, Super 8mm, b&w, with live reading)
Plus new film surprises!
Total running time: ca. 75 min

With Barbara Hershey and Ron Silver.

Despite what would seem to be a singularly unpromising if not blatantly offensive concept for a mainstream Hollywood horror movie – a middle-class single mother (Barbara Hershey) is repeatedly raped by an unseen supernatural force – THE ENTITY is an exceptionally accomplished film. Deeply disturbing but also genuinely perceptive, it ultimately qualifies as a near-feminist work, with Hershey having to battle not only against the mysterious force that’s persecuting her but also against a male-dominated culture that refuses to give her story any credence. THE ENTITY features an astonishing performance of great dignity from Hershey, above all during the remarkable sequences between her and a sympathetic psychiatrist played by Ron Silver, which comprise such serious and frank discussions of sexuality that they could only have reached the multiplex by being smuggled in under cover of genre filmmaking.

With Vincent Gallo, Christina Ricci, Ben Gazzara, Mickey Rourke, Rosanna Arquette, Jan-Michael Vincent, and Anjelica Huston. Thanks to Lions Gate Entertainment.

For his directorial debut, actor and frequent Claire Denis collaborator Vincent Gallo made the exceedingly unusual decision to shoot on 35mm color reversal stock, giving the film a subtly distinctive look that, along with its fine performances, Cassavetes-inflected camerawork and textures, and unique tone, made it clear that this was not a typical vanity project. Gallo stars as a recently released convict who, en route to Buffalo to visit his family, kidnaps a young woman, Layla (Ricci), and forces her to pose as his wife. Strangely sanguine about the kidnapping, Layla gradually forms an unusual bond with her captor. BUFFALO ’66 displays Gallo’s unique combination of disaffected cool and emotional rawness, and features an incredible supporting cast that includes Mickey Rourke, Rosanna Arquette, Ben Gazzara, and Anjelica Huston.

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

With Nigel Terry, Helen Mirren, Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, and Nicol Williamson.

Blending several Arthurian legends, Boorman’s extravagant, ambitious 1981 film is one of the most visually expressive, at times almost abstract, commercial films of its time. In his retelling of the Grail legend, Boorman replaces Galahad with Perceval as the purest knight of the Round Table and makes Arthur the Fisher King. Featuring an amazing cast that includes Nigel Terry, Helen Mirren, Nicol Williamson, and pre-stardom Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson, and Patrick Stewart, EXCALIBUR fearlessly and unapologetically courts silliness, and largely as a result, ultimately achieves a genuinely majestic sense of wonder. A true feast for the eyes and ears!

With live reading and sounds

Anthology hosts the first film retrospective of NYC-based filmmaker/poet, Stephanie Gray, who has been making experimental and documentary Super 8 films (and videos) since 1998. Prolific and active in the Super 8 scene, Gray has made more than 57 short films, many diaristic or city-symphonic. Her work often deals with the city (or vanishing city), along with queer, feminist, and hearing loss themes.

Gray began making films in Buffalo, through community workshops at the pioneering Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center. Her early work grew out of her interest in the decaying urban infrastructure of Buffalo. Upon moving to NYC, she found herself documenting a similar urban transformation (though in this case the result not of economic stagnation but of skyrocketing rents and greed), an ongoing project that marks her work to this day. Gray’s work is distinguished as well by her approach to sound – many of her films feature sampled, distorted, or layered soundtracks, and her screenings are almost always accompanied by live musical performances, or by Gray’s own live voiceovers or readings from her poetry.

Coinciding with the publication of her second poetry collection, SHORTHAND AND ELECTRIC LANGUAGE STARS, this retrospective will encompass three programs: one highlighting Gray’s early work in Buffalo, another focusing on more recent work made since her arrival in NYC, and a final program devoted to films on the theme of “vanishing New York.” It’s an overdue showcase for an artist active for nearly 20 years, whose work simultaneously slows down and speeds up the urban transformations that have taken place in recent years, and meditates on, to borrow one of Gray’s film titles, “what we thought we knew/what we knew we thought.”

Co-sponsored by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs and Mono No Aware.
Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, the publisher of SHORTHAND AND ELECTRIC LANGUAGE STARS, which will include a selection of Gray’s film stills and essays by Eileen Myles (on Gray’s poetry) and Ariel Goldberg (on Gray’s films). Thanks to publisher Brenda Iijima. Copies will be available for sale at the screenings.

“This program is in partial honorific memory of Kodachrome, PacLab, Anne Charlotte Robertson, Super 8 sound film, and DeRobertis, reflected in 5 Roses Pizza’s windows, and which I didn’t get to film. RIP to all.” –S.G.

PROGRAM 3
Too lateness: the vanishing new yawk city
With Jeremy Slater performing sounds with selected silent films!
MORE BREAD FOREVER (2004, 6.5 min, Super 8mm, b&w, live sound)
SOMEDAY BEHIND CONEY ISLAND (2006/11, 11 min, Super 8mm, b&w, with live reading)
I BOUGHT THE LAST FOUR BAGELS AT JON VIE PASTRIES, NEW YEAR’S EVE, (2004 2004, 6.5 min, Super 8mm, b&w, live sound)
MAGIC COULDN’T SAVE MAGIC SHOES (2010, 6.5 min, Super 8mm, b&w/color, live sound)
STOREFRONTS BEFORE OTHER STOREFRONTS (2008, 6.5 min, Super 8mm, b&w, with live reading)
IT’S NOT ROSES FOR FIVE ROSES PIZZA (2009, 6.5 min, Super 8mm, b&w, live sound)
NO BLUE SKY FOR THE BLUE SKY DINER (2008, 3.5 min, Super 8mm, b&w, with live reading)
GERTEL’S GALORE LORE ORE (2007, 6.5 min, Super 8mm, b&w, live sound)
YOU KNOW THEY WANT TO DISAPPEAR HELL’S KITCHEN AS CLINTON (2010, 17 min, Super 8mm, b&w/color, with live reading)
Total running time: ca. 75 min

With Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, Mickey Rourke, Nicolas Cage, Vincent Spano, and Dennis Hopper. Archival print courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive.

In 1983, still reeling from the financial and critical disaster of ONE FROM THE HEART, Francis Ford Coppola made back-to-back films based on novels by Oklahoma writer S.E. Hinton. The first, THE OUTSIDERS, is a sensitive and affecting young adult classic that helped introduce a who’s-who of soon-to-be stars (including Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Diane Lane, and Tom Cruise). Sharing much of that film’s crew, as well as actors Dillon and Lane (who are joined by Mickey Rourke, Nicolas Cage, and Dennis Hopper), RUMBLE FISH is a very different kettle of fish: set within the ritualized milieu of a motorcycle gang, shot on high-contrast black-and-white film (with occasional flashes of color), and with an experimental score by Stewart Copeland of The Police, it’s among Coppola’s most boldly stylized films, and one of the most avant-garde commercial films of the 1980s. Like much of Coppola’s 1980s work, it was terribly undervalued at the time, and is ripe for rediscovery.

Founded in 1954, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen has been one of the premier showcases for short and experimental films for 60 years and counting. Famous as the site of the Oberhausen Manifesto, which transformed German cinema and helped launch the New German Cinema movement, the festival continues to draw filmmakers, curators, critics, and cineastes to the Ruhr region every May. In addition to the annual event itself, the Festival also operates one of the largest, oldest, and most highly respected short film archives in the world. Today the collection encompasses nearly 2,000 titles, among them many unique prints and works by major filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger, Santiago Álvarez, Maya Deren, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, Jan Lenica, George Lucas, Matthias Müller, Roman Polanski, Alain Resnais, and Jan Švankmajer. And following each festival, a selection of highlights from the most recent edition, as well as classics from the collection, are presented at cinemas throughout the world as part of the “Oberhausen on Tour” program.

This year Anthology joins forces with the Goethe-Institut New York to host Oberhausen’s annual touring program. Here at Anthology we will showcase classic Latin American films from the Festival’s archive, while on Thursday, June 18 the Goethe-Institut will present some of the highlights of the 2014 festival (for more info on the Goethe-Institut’s screening, visit www.goethe.de/newyork).

Special thanks to Wenzel Bilger & Sara Stevenson (Goethe-Institut New York).

LATIN AMERICAN PROGRAM
For many years the festival’s motto was “Way to the Neighbor.” This was meant to apply not only to Eastern Europe, but also to other “neighbors” who came onto the scene in the 1970s and 80s: Latin America, for example, from which the political films of the “Third Cinema” began to emerge. These documentary films addressed the social and political situation in the countries of Latin America, focusing mainly on the arbitrary rule by dictatorships, the unremitting poverty of the population, and the constant attempts by the U.S. to expand its influence on the continent. This program focuses on several such films, as well as a more recent piece that demonstrates the continuities that exist today. Overall, the program takes a short trip in time through the history of Latin American short-form filmmaking, and in the process reflects developments in the Oberhausen festival and its archive. Nearly all works on view here won major awards in Oberhausen.

Rúben Gámez THE SECRET FORMULA / LA FÓRMULA SECRETA
(Mexico, 1966, 43 min, 35mm, b&w. In Spanish with English subtitles.)

Luiz Alberto Pereira OPERATION BRAZIL / OPERAÇÃO BRASIL
(Brazil, 1985, 11 min, 35mm, b&w. In Portuguese with English subtitles.)

Francisco César Filho & Tata Amaral WE WANT THE AIRWAVES! / QUEREMOS AS ONDAS DO AR!
(Brazil, 1986, 11 min, 35mm. In Portuguese with English subtitles.)

Enrique Colina BETTER LATE THAN NEVER / MAS VALE TARDE QUE NUNCA
(Cuba, 1986, 8 min, 35mm. No dialogue.)

Felipe Bragança & Marina Meliande HIS NAME (THE CLOWN) / O NOME DELE (O CLÓVIS)
(Brazil, 2004, 15 min, 35mm. In Portuguese with English subtitles.)

Total running time: ca. 95 min.

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

With Oleg Yankovskiy and Erland Josephson. Thanks to Kino Lorber.

This brooding late masterpiece by Tarkovsky, his penultimate feature film, is a darkly poetic vision of exile. It was the first of his features to be made outside of Russia, the home to which he would never return. According to Tarkovsky, in Russian the word “nostalghia” conveys “the love for your homeland and the melancholy that arises from being far away.” This debilitating form of homesickness is embodied in the film by Andrei, a Russian intellectual doing research in Italy. Written with frequent Michelangelo Antonioni collaborator Tonino Guerra, NOSTALGHIA is a mystical and mysterious collision of East and West, shot with the tactile beauty unique to Tarkovsky.

“NOSTALGHIA is not so much a movie as a place to inhabit for two hours.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

With James Taylor, Dennis Wilson, and Warren Oates.

“Taylor and Wilson are the drivers of a supercharged ’55 Chevy, and Oates is the owner of a new GTO; they meet and agree to race from New Mexico to the east coast, though an assortment of side interests periodically distracts them, including various hitchhikers (among them Laurie Bird). (GTO hilariously assumes a new persona every time he picks up a new passenger, rather like the amorphous narrator in Wurlitzer’s novel NOG.) The movie starts off as a narrative but gradually grows into something much more abstract – it’s unsettling but also beautiful.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

I.B. TECHNICOLOR PRINT!

Archival print courtesy of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

This bizarre but delightful Glam Rock extravaganza brings together a plethora of then-popular bands, including Mud, The Glitter Band, Scott Fitzgerald, The Rubettes, Slik, and Bob Kerr’s Whoopee Band (less a who’s who! than a who’s who?). Featuring performances by all of the above, as well as cameos from Freddie Jones, Herman’s Hermits-member Peter Noone, and more, NEVER TOO YOUNG embeds the whole thing in a story involving a near-future dystopia in which pop music has been banned from TV in the UK. A young man named Hero (Peter Denyer) and his driver (Jones) convert an old ice cream van into a Group Detector Van, and travel around Britain in search of groups to play at a huge concert. Has to be seen to be believed!

The wildly uncouth cinema of Jon Moritsugu has been over-stimulating audiences worldwide since emerging from the depths of the mid-1980s underground scene. Raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, by an arts teacher and an organic chemist, Moritsugu studied filmmaking and semiotics as an undergraduate at Brown University. Equally inspired by experimental cinema of the 1960s, alternative music culture, and French theory, Moritsugu synthesized his influences into a punked-out aesthetic that is roughhewn yet crystal clear in its satire and shock value. Whether creating jam-packed shorts or balls to the wall features, all his films have a spazzed out look and logic that cannot help but to amaze. This series celebrates Anthology’s recent preservation of the early shorts BRAINDEAD and DER ELVIS, as well as the new 2K scan by distributor Vinegar Syndrome of TERMINAL USA. And to make it a truly unmissable weekend, we’ll be throwing in rare 16mm screenings of three ultra-outlandish Moritsugu features.

“There’s a whole tradition of films made out of the detritus of popular culture – SCORPIO RISING, the Kenneth Anger film from 1963 being a kind of paradigm. [Moritsugu] is in that tradition. And he’s adding new things.” –J. Hoberman

Special thanks to Jon Moritsugu, Amy Davis, and Joe Rubin (Vinegar Syndrome).

PROGRAM 1:
BRAINDEAD (1987, 1 min, 16mm)
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Don’t blink or you’ll miss this scratched and hand-colored slap in the face.

DER ELVIS (1987, 23 min, 16mm)
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
A punk-as-fuck guerrilla dissection of the King himself, this riotously funny and simultaneously heady hurricane of a film is the ultimate take down of a stupid American myth. Undoubtedly one of the most impressive and precocious student films ever made, guaranteed.

TERMINAL USA
(1993, 57 min, 16mm)
Famously controversial for pressing all the right buttons about Asian-American identity amongst other hot topics, TERMINAL USA is the sordid soap opera tale of an Asian-American family’s descent into drugs, disaster, disgrace, and just about every other awful thing you can imagine. No taboo is left untouched in this hysterical jaw-dropper that rather amazingly received funding from PBS and actually screened in over 150 television markets.

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

With Vincent Gallo, Christina Ricci, Ben Gazzara, Mickey Rourke, Rosanna Arquette, Jan-Michael Vincent, and Anjelica Huston. Thanks to Lions Gate Entertainment.

For his directorial debut, actor and frequent Claire Denis collaborator Vincent Gallo made the exceedingly unusual decision to shoot on 35mm color reversal stock, giving the film a subtly distinctive look that, along with its fine performances, Cassavetes-inflected camerawork and textures, and unique tone, made it clear that this was not a typical vanity project. Gallo stars as a recently released convict who, en route to Buffalo to visit his family, kidnaps a young woman, Layla (Ricci), and forces her to pose as his wife. Strangely sanguine about the kidnapping, Layla gradually forms an unusual bond with her captor. BUFFALO ’66 displays Gallo’s unique combination of disaffected cool and emotional rawness, and features an incredible supporting cast that includes Mickey Rourke, Rosanna Arquette, Ben Gazzara, and Anjelica Huston.

With Nigel Terry, Helen Mirren, Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, and Nicol Williamson.

Blending several Arthurian legends, Boorman’s extravagant, ambitious 1981 film is one of the most visually expressive, at times almost abstract, commercial films of its time. In his retelling of the Grail legend, Boorman replaces Galahad with Perceval as the purest knight of the Round Table and makes Arthur the Fisher King. Featuring an amazing cast that includes Nigel Terry, Helen Mirren, Nicol Williamson, and pre-stardom Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson, and Patrick Stewart, EXCALIBUR fearlessly and unapologetically courts silliness, and largely as a result, ultimately achieves a genuinely majestic sense of wonder. A true feast for the eyes and ears!

(LA PASSION DE JEANNE D’ARC)

A work that exemplifies Dreyer’s philosophy: simplicity is the most complex idea of all. Although renowned for its spare acts, lack of embellishment, and use of simple shots, Dreyer’s masterpiece reveals the natural complexity of an un-retouched face (often existing alone, filling up the frame) and a landscape of history as individual as the lines on that face. Made in 1927-28, it continues to haunt the cinema, looking more and more avant-garde as the years go by.

With Oleg Yankovskiy and Erland Josephson. Thanks to Kino Lorber.

This brooding late masterpiece by Tarkovsky, his penultimate feature film, is a darkly poetic vision of exile. It was the first of his features to be made outside of Russia, the home to which he would never return. According to Tarkovsky, in Russian the word “nostalghia” conveys “the love for your homeland and the melancholy that arises from being far away.” This debilitating form of homesickness is embodied in the film by Andrei, a Russian intellectual doing research in Italy. Written with frequent Michelangelo Antonioni collaborator Tonino Guerra, NOSTALGHIA is a mystical and mysterious collision of East and West, shot with the tactile beauty unique to Tarkovsky.

“NOSTALGHIA is not so much a movie as a place to inhabit for two hours.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

The wildly uncouth cinema of Jon Moritsugu has been over-stimulating audiences worldwide since emerging from the depths of the mid-1980s underground scene. Raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, by an arts teacher and an organic chemist, Moritsugu studied filmmaking and semiotics as an undergraduate at Brown University. Equally inspired by experimental cinema of the 1960s, alternative music culture, and French theory, Moritsugu synthesized his influences into a punked-out aesthetic that is roughhewn yet crystal clear in its satire and shock value. Whether creating jam-packed shorts or balls to the wall features, all his films have a spazzed out look and logic that cannot help but to amaze. This series celebrates Anthology’s recent preservation of the early shorts BRAINDEAD and DER ELVIS, as well as the new 2K scan by distributor Vinegar Syndrome of TERMINAL USA. And to make it a truly unmissable weekend, we’ll be throwing in rare 16mm screenings of three ultra-outlandish Moritsugu features.

“There’s a whole tradition of films made out of the detritus of popular culture – SCORPIO RISING, the Kenneth Anger film from 1963 being a kind of paradigm. [Moritsugu] is in that tradition. And he’s adding new things.” –J. Hoberman

Special thanks to Jon Moritsugu, Amy Davis, and Joe Rubin (Vinegar Syndrome).

PROGRAM 2:
MY DEGENERATION
(1989, 65 min, 16mm)
“Shot in Providence, RI in 1989 on dirty color reversal 16mm, MY DEGENERATION tells the story of a teen-girl punk band who sell out to become guitar-thrashing shills for the American Beef Institute, featuring a typically sharp-toothed performance by Moritsugu’s longtime collaborator (and spouse) Amy Davis as band member Justine B. With its flashes of abraded emulsion and cardboard-creature animations, the film is especially inventive, poising its narrative elements against a bevy of experimental interventions. The results comprise the ne plus ultra of underground cinema, influenced by the early comedies of John Waters but pushing the midnight-movie aesthetic to new extremes, reveling in its own willful crudity to the point of pure formalism while at the same time satirizing the ethos of indie rock on the cusp of its ascension into the mainstream.” –LIGHT INDUSTRY

With James Taylor, Dennis Wilson, and Warren Oates.

“Taylor and Wilson are the drivers of a supercharged ’55 Chevy, and Oates is the owner of a new GTO; they meet and agree to race from New Mexico to the east coast, though an assortment of side interests periodically distracts them, including various hitchhikers (among them Laurie Bird). (GTO hilariously assumes a new persona every time he picks up a new passenger, rather like the amorphous narrator in Wurlitzer’s novel NOG.) The movie starts off as a narrative but gradually grows into something much more abstract – it’s unsettling but also beautiful.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

The wildly uncouth cinema of Jon Moritsugu has been over-stimulating audiences worldwide since emerging from the depths of the mid-1980s underground scene. Raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, by an arts teacher and an organic chemist, Moritsugu studied filmmaking and semiotics as an undergraduate at Brown University. Equally inspired by experimental cinema of the 1960s, alternative music culture, and French theory, Moritsugu synthesized his influences into a punked-out aesthetic that is roughhewn yet crystal clear in its satire and shock value. Whether creating jam-packed shorts or balls to the wall features, all his films have a spazzed out look and logic that cannot help but to amaze. This series celebrates Anthology’s recent preservation of the early shorts BRAINDEAD and DER ELVIS, as well as the new 2K scan by distributor Vinegar Syndrome of TERMINAL USA. And to make it a truly unmissable weekend, we’ll be throwing in rare 16mm screenings of three ultra-outlandish Moritsugu features.

“There’s a whole tradition of films made out of the detritus of popular culture – SCORPIO RISING, the Kenneth Anger film from 1963 being a kind of paradigm. [Moritsugu] is in that tradition. And he’s adding new things.” –J. Hoberman

Special thanks to Jon Moritsugu, Amy Davis, and Joe Rubin (Vinegar Syndrome).

PROGRAM 3:
MOD FUCK EXPLOSION
(1994, 69 min, 16mm)
Winner of Best Film at the 1995 New York Underground Film Fest, this movie, like almost all his features, stars the incomparable Amy Davis, Moritsugu’s scene-stealing wife and longtime collaborator. Her searing presence triggers a chain of events that pits mods against bikers in a loud and raucous film that more than lives up to it’s rocking title.

“Jon Moritsugu hit some weird epiphany during the making of this film, which was his first mass-watchable work. Jon’s wife Amy Davis plays a performance art girl who’s caught in a rumble between a small group of mods and a Japanese motorcycle gang. […] The performances are weird, intentionally screwed up, and dumb, but that’s part of the film’s brilliance. If you’re a fan of strange flicks, you’ll start remembering the lines and using them. […] Awesome soundtrack by Unrest and Karyo Tengoku.” –GIANT ROBOT


MOD FUCK EXPLOSION STAR DESI DEL VALLE IN PERSON!
Desi del Valle is an actor who also wrote, produced, and directed two short films, CRUEL, and BACK TO LIFE. As both an actor and film distributor, she was a participant in the 1990's New Queer Cinema movement; and Mod-Fuck Explosion marks her feature film acting debut, though not the last time she would play "a boy". 

(ORDET)

An existential morality essay by the master of the long take, in which a man who believes he is Jesus Christ soon begins to convince those around him. Based on the play by Kaj Munk, ORDET is a meditation on faith and fanaticism.

With Barbara Hershey and Ron Silver.

Despite what would seem to be a singularly unpromising if not blatantly offensive concept for a mainstream Hollywood horror movie – a middle-class single mother (Barbara Hershey) is repeatedly raped by an unseen supernatural force – THE ENTITY is an exceptionally accomplished film. Deeply disturbing but also genuinely perceptive, it ultimately qualifies as a near-feminist work, with Hershey having to battle not only against the mysterious force that’s persecuting her but also against a male-dominated culture that refuses to give her story any credence. THE ENTITY features an astonishing performance of great dignity from Hershey, above all during the remarkable sequences between her and a sympathetic psychiatrist played by Ron Silver, which comprise such serious and frank discussions of sexuality that they could only have reached the multiplex by being smuggled in under cover of genre filmmaking.

The wildly uncouth cinema of Jon Moritsugu has been over-stimulating audiences worldwide since emerging from the depths of the mid-1980s underground scene. Raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, by an arts teacher and an organic chemist, Moritsugu studied filmmaking and semiotics as an undergraduate at Brown University. Equally inspired by experimental cinema of the 1960s, alternative music culture, and French theory, Moritsugu synthesized his influences into a punked-out aesthetic that is roughhewn yet crystal clear in its satire and shock value. Whether creating jam-packed shorts or balls to the wall features, all his films have a spazzed out look and logic that cannot help but to amaze. This series celebrates Anthology’s recent preservation of the early shorts BRAINDEAD and DER ELVIS, as well as the new 2K scan by distributor Vinegar Syndrome of TERMINAL USA. And to make it a truly unmissable weekend, we’ll be throwing in rare 16mm screenings of three ultra-outlandish Moritsugu features.

“There’s a whole tradition of films made out of the detritus of popular culture – SCORPIO RISING, the Kenneth Anger film from 1963 being a kind of paradigm. [Moritsugu] is in that tradition. And he’s adding new things.” –J. Hoberman

Special thanks to Jon Moritsugu, Amy Davis, and Joe Rubin (Vinegar Syndrome).

PROGRAM 4:
FAME WHORE
(1997, 70 min, 16mm)
Crude and rude, not to forget lewd, FAME WHORE continued Moritsugu’s attempt to engage a wider public without losing one ounce of his trademark weirdness. This piercing satire intercuts three outlandish stories about people striving for overnight success and features standout performances by the mesmerizing Amy Davis and brash Peter Friedrich. Oh yeah, it also stars an imaginary St. Bernard who walks on two legs. Winner of Best Film at the 1997 New York Underground Film Festival, FAME WHORE also features a kickass soundtrack by the likes of Barbara Manning, Dub Narcotic Sound System, and the Angry Samoans.

“Luridly florid…like a porno flick with the fucking parts cut out.” –VILLAGE VOICE

The wildly uncouth cinema of Jon Moritsugu has been over-stimulating audiences worldwide since emerging from the depths of the mid-1980s underground scene. Raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, by an arts teacher and an organic chemist, Moritsugu studied filmmaking and semiotics as an undergraduate at Brown University. Equally inspired by experimental cinema of the 1960s, alternative music culture, and French theory, Moritsugu synthesized his influences into a punked-out aesthetic that is roughhewn yet crystal clear in its satire and shock value. Whether creating jam-packed shorts or balls to the wall features, all his films have a spazzed out look and logic that cannot help but to amaze. This series celebrates Anthology’s recent preservation of the early shorts BRAINDEAD and DER ELVIS, as well as the new 2K scan by distributor Vinegar Syndrome of TERMINAL USA. And to make it a truly unmissable weekend, we’ll be throwing in rare 16mm screenings of three ultra-outlandish Moritsugu features.

“There’s a whole tradition of films made out of the detritus of popular culture – SCORPIO RISING, the Kenneth Anger film from 1963 being a kind of paradigm. [Moritsugu] is in that tradition. And he’s adding new things.” –J. Hoberman

Special thanks to Jon Moritsugu, Amy Davis, and Joe Rubin (Vinegar Syndrome).

PROGRAM 1:
BRAINDEAD (1987, 1 min, 16mm)
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Don’t blink or you’ll miss this scratched and hand-colored slap in the face.

DER ELVIS (1987, 23 min, 16mm)
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
A punk-as-fuck guerrilla dissection of the King himself, this riotously funny and simultaneously heady hurricane of a film is the ultimate take down of a stupid American myth. Undoubtedly one of the most impressive and precocious student films ever made, guaranteed.

TERMINAL USA
(1993, 57 min, 16mm)
Famously controversial for pressing all the right buttons about Asian-American identity amongst other hot topics, TERMINAL USA is the sordid soap opera tale of an Asian-American family’s descent into drugs, disaster, disgrace, and just about every other awful thing you can imagine. No taboo is left untouched in this hysterical jaw-dropper that rather amazingly received funding from PBS and actually screened in over 150 television markets.

Total running time: ca. 85 min.

(YONG ZHE WU JU)

IMMACULATE PRINT!

With Yuen Biao and Leung Kar Yan. Archival print courtesy of the American Genre Film Archive.

Yuen Biao (DRAGONS FOREVER) and Leung Kar Yan (THE VICTIM) star as young men seeking to learn kung fu from a legendary master. Meanwhile, a crazed kung fu killer named White Tiger is randomly putting on spooky makeup and unleashing his martial arts skills on unsuspecting victims. It’s up to the two young men to stop White Tiger, but not until they master laundry-fu, and fight a mysterious double-faced villain. Featuring Yuen Biao’s acrobatic skills, a jaw-dropping kung fu lion-dance sequence, and some of the most incredible martial arts choreography ever put on film.

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

(THE GHOST FREQUENCY)

NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE SCREENING!

FILMMAKER IN PERSON FOR Q&A MODERATED BY SCHOLAR AND CRITIC SUKHDEV SANDHU!

LA FREQUENZA FANTASMA paints a portrait of a crumbling village nestled on the mountains of Calabria, in the south of Italy. It is the story of a place suspended in time and space, a place of sounds, smells, and numberless thresholds where the memory of a mythical past and the present are inextricably intertwined. It is an investigation into the nature of collective and personal history, into the origin and preservation of memory – how it is etched and perpetrated, both in the minds of the people who still live there, and in that of the soil, the ruins, matter itself. It is the story of the relationship between animate and inanimate matter, and of how this relationship turns into the motor and purpose of existence – a search for the sacred patterns of the quotidian within the rhythms of nature.

“A seance, an eavesdropping, a mysterious bolero: LA FREQUENZA FANTASMA is a striking essay film that enshrines and expands the poetics of place, people and memory.” –Sukhdev Sandu, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

“A compelling, lyrical and beautifully realized portrait of people and place, of the universal need for home and roots and at the same time a precisely calibrated site-specific exploration, LA FREQUENZA FANTASMA marks the emergence of a bold new film essayist in Chiara Ambrosio.” –Gareth Evans, WHITECHAPEL GALLERY

(BRONENOSETS POTEMKIN)

Eisenstein’s constructivist montage and rigid, super-structured plot share equal weight with a seemingly spontaneous, inflamed emotion.

The 15th Annual Bicycle Film Festival returns to Anthology Film Archives, its birthplace and home for 15 consecutive years. The BFF has held events in 75 cities worldwide, to an accumulated audience of over 1 million people.

Brendt Barbur, Founding Festival Director, was compelled to start the Bicycle Film Festival when he was hit by a bus while riding his bike in New York City. Determined to turn his negative experience into a positive one, in 2001 he started the BFF as a platform to celebrate the bicycle through music, art and, of course, film.
For more info, visit www.bicyclefilmfestival.com.

(STACHKA)

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

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

The 15th Annual Bicycle Film Festival returns to Anthology Film Archives, its birthplace and home for 15 consecutive years. The BFF has held events in 75 cities worldwide, to an accumulated audience of over 1 million people.

Brendt Barbur, Founding Festival Director, was compelled to start the Bicycle Film Festival when he was hit by a bus while riding his bike in New York City. Determined to turn his negative experience into a positive one, in 2001 he started the BFF as a platform to celebrate the bicycle through music, art and, of course, film.
For more info, visit www.bicyclefilmfestival.com.

(OKTYABR)

Eisenstein celebrates the baroque in OCTOBER, as opposed to the Greek classicism of POTEMKIN, disappointing audience expectations at the time. “Intellectual cinema” starts here.

(STAROYE I NOVOYE)

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

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS NOW! 

The 15th Annual Bicycle Film Festival returns to Anthology Film Archives, its birthplace and home for 15 consecutive years. The BFF has held events in 75 cities worldwide, to an accumulated audience of over 1 million people.

Brendt Barbur, Founding Festival Director, was compelled to start the Bicycle Film Festival when he was hit by a bus while riding his bike in New York City. Determined to turn his negative experience into a positive one, in 2001 he started the BFF as a platform to celebrate the bicycle through music, art and, of course, film.
For more info, visit www.bicyclefilmfestival.com.

(IVAN GROZNY)

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

A once-a-calendar opportunity to take a peek at the teeming hive of creativity hiding behind the scenes at Anthology, thanks to the film- and video-making efforts of AFA’s staff, friends, fellow-travelers, and devotees.

A humorous, moving, intimate, and courageous film that portrays the transformation of a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship to one of acceptance and love, as we follow the personal story of the filmmaker.