Super 8
To witness the vulgar, Zap Comix–inspired panorama in Manuel DeLanda’s 1979 film ISM ISM—its blubbering testicle-breasts and segmented-plumber’s-pipe phallus scrawled in marker on the tiled walls of a Manhattan subway station, just to start—is to share in the brief, bewildering encounter a commuter may have had with street art before the soap and cleaning brushes arrived.
Agnès Varda’s aesthetic tides change, inviting us to switch positions of viewing, knowing, and feeling, for old narratives to wash away and new portals of sensation to open up.
Restoring, archiving, and exhibiting artists‘ films from the post-punk era.
“All evidence is wrong. It’s distressed—just like memory.”
It’s hard to pin down exactly what happens with Lost Portraits, an almost mythical series of Super 8 and 16mm shorts—filmed between 1982–85 in Mexico City and New York—depicting Nicolayevsky’s young friends and peers while he was a film student at NYU.
Filmmakers Andrew Lampert and Stom Sogo, who tragically passed away last year, trade impressions in an unpublished conversation from 2000.
In the early ’70s, Fitzgibbon made a series of radical films and then put them aside. P. Adams Sitney begins to unravel the story behind Fitzgibbon’s early, seductive flicker films to her latest iPhone movies.
Boston-based filmmaker Luther Price makes consciousness-puncturing works that, viewed once, may never be seen again.
Michael Ballou distrusts traditional art world classifications. His work is practical art; it follows his frank, literal, and can-do attitude of the Midwest, though often at the core of that onion is an idea so fleeting and spontaneous that a long contorted story involving a cast of dozens is the only explanation.
Our intrepid film correspondent Montana Wojczuk caught up with Jem Cohen for this podcast. They had a broad ranging discussion covering topics from 8mm film, to Jeff Koons.
An ode to being human and the need to express one’s self, Our City Dreams tells the story of the loves and the sufferings of five women who chose to move to New York City.
Director Kelly Reichardt first gained widespread notice with her 2006 film Old Joy, a paean to post–9/11 political and personal miasma played out in the campfire conversations and road-trip recollections of two longtime friends in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon.
On April 30th Jennifer Montgomery screened Threads of Belonging, her 2003 feature-length experimental video on the anti-psychiatry movement embodied in a fictive therapeutic community, at Orchard Gallery on New York’s Lower East Side. Montgomery’s first feature, Art for Teachers of Children, chronicled a boarding-school student’s affair with her photography teacher that bore a stark resemblance in spirit and history to Jock Sturges and Montgomery herself.
Todd Haynes, the director of Safe, first met Kelly Reichardt during the making of his film Poison. They take five to compare notes upon the release of Reichardt’s first feature film, River of Grass.
Underground USA is a satire of contemporary New York “scenemaking” in the form of an update of Sunset Boulevard, Underground USA is both a personal triumph for its creator, actor-director Eric Mitchell, and a further indication of the importance of New York’s new-wave film movement.
Sleepless Nights is a S8 Feature Film produced, written, and directed by Becky Johnston/ Voice Overs written by Gary Indiana/ Camera: Michael Oblowitz/ Starring: Marie-Paule, John Lurie, Eric Mitchell and Rene Ricard
Menage is a S8 feature film in two parts. “The Story of Myra and Ian” was adapted from and shot for the centerpiece of a theatrical production of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play Pre-Paradise Sorry Now in 1979.
Motive is a S8 Feature Film produced by Liza Bear and Michael McClard/ Written and directed by Michael McClard/ Starring Jimmy DeSana with Paula Greif, and Tim Collins, John Lurie, Rae Spencer-Cullen and Betsy Sussler. Motive premiered at the New Cinema in April of 1979.