Past screenings by Zena Grey and/or Mark Toscano will live here for reference/curiosity. If you’re REALLY curious about all the screenings Mark has programmed going back to 2002, then you can find that HERE. A record of Zena’s programming history is currently in progress and will be linked when ready!
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Thursday, December 18, 2025 @ 8pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
Happy Holidays from George Kuchar
Lightstruck invites you to celebrate the weary winter months of the impending holiday season with us as best as we know how, through the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-smelling video camera of George Kuchar. Like an untended litter box, George’s enormous body of video work is strewn with festive nuggets of every kind, but it is wintertime and Christmas that seem to receive the most fervent attention. Themes of family, friends, food, firesides, kitsch, ritual, embarrassment, guilt, and indigestion comprise the perfect ingredients for one of our all-time favorite filmmaker’s magnetic, diaristic gaze, as he approaches the holiday season with love, tenderness, humor, and horror.
Lightstruck is thrilled to present a selection of four of our favorite George Kuchar holiday videos, combining like mulled wine to give you a warm tingling sensation followed the next morning by a headache and maybe a little agita. In Frigid Escapades, George visits Gene Youngblood in Santa Fe but makes it back to the Bay Area in time for dinner with Lawrence Jordan and Joanna McClure. In Migration of the Blubberoids, a wintery visit to mom in The Bronx is an occasion for tensions to ferment over ring cake from Artuso Pastry Shop. Xmas 1986 is an emotional epic centered around family and community, with a moving visit to dying friend Curt McDowell forming the centerpiece of one of George’s greatest mixes of the comic, tragic, and eccentric. Our holiday evening will close with the unsurpassably entitled Fill Thy Crack With Whiteness, a music-driven montage with plenty of laughs, various Xmas gatherings, and groans of yuletide cheer to send us all stumbling out into the eternally snowless Los Angeles night.
PROGRAM:
Frigid Escapades (2007) 10m
Migration of the Blubberoids (1989) 12m
Xmas 1986 (1986) 36.5m
Fill Thy Crack with Whiteness (1989) 14m
Program and notes by Mark Toscano. All videos courtesy of Video Data Bank, with additional thanks to Michelle Silva and a tip of Santa’s hat to Mike Kuchar.
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Monday, December 8, 2025 @ 8pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol’s
WOMEN IN REVOLT on 16mm!
introduced by Liz Purchell!
co-presented with Hollywood Entertainment!
Lightstruck is thrilled to partner with Liz Purchell and Hollywood Entertainment for an extremely rare 16mm screening of Paul Morrissey & Andy Warhol’s infamous, transgressive, and hilarious satire, Women In Revolt!
“Man-hating dykes Jackie (Curtis) and Holly (Woodlawn) plot to recruit bored Long Island socialite Candy (Darling) away from her incestuous relationship with her brother and into joining their militant feminist organization, the Politically Involved Girls, in Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol’s anarchic satire. Shot in spurts over the course of a year—during which Warhol and Morrissey also decamped to Paris to shoot Andy Warhol’s L’amour (1972) and the fall release of Trash (1970) led none other than George Cukor to launch an Oscar campaign for Woodlawn—Women in Revolt serves both as Warhol’s response to Valerie Solanas and the capper to his seven years of frenetic moviemaking in New York, with Morrissey fully taking over the reins with the Factory’s next production, the Los Angeles-shot Heat (1972). Much has been said about the way that Morrissey and Warhol’s casting of their three trans superstars as cis women was meant to make them the butt of the joke (men playing feminist women, get it?), though that reading is perhaps a bit harsh and doesn’t give the filmmakers enough credit. In giving Curtis, Darling, and Woodlawn a full hundred minutes to run wild—and pitting them against each other to jockey for screen time—one could argue instead that the film merely serves as both a remarkable showcase for their individual talents and personalities and something of a cautionary tale for what happens when you cast not one but three divas in the same film. Loud, raucous, and maybe a little exhausting, Women in Revolt! is a groundbreaking work of trans cinema and one of the great—if sadly underseen—underground films.” (Liz Purchell)
With special guest Liz Purchell to introduce the film!
Program by Lightstruck & Hollywood Entertainment. 16mm print courtesy of Paul Morrissey Film Trust.
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Thursday, November 13, 2025 @ 8pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
Bill Viola’s I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like
Lightstruck is honored to present Bill Viola’s riveting, radically empathic consideration of animal consciousness and collective humanity, I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like. Structured in five parts, Viola’s 1986 feature-length video is a deeply felt, personal essay that privileges presence, observation, and emotional texture over didactic analysis, resulting in a powerful rumination on our relationship to animals and “the irreconcilable otherness of an intelligence ordered around a world we can share in body but not in mind.” (Viola)
Viola’s journey in exploring these inner states of being and communion brilliantly avoids any claims to facile, rational comprehension and instead occupies a space of mystery, ambiguity, and fascination with the ultimate unknowability of the animal soul. Working largely beyond language or modes of conventional documentary, time also slows down in Viola’s video, creating a space of vivid contemplation. As his exploration goes deeper and further, it becomes increasingly an inward investigation for each of us, a meditation on shared humanity and enhanced self-awareness.
Ultimately, I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like, as expressed by the title itself, is a philosophically rich consideration of the self as understood through the intelligent creatures around us, and the degree to which our comprehension of existence resists definition, allowing space for something more powerful, spiritual, and profound.
program:
I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986)
by Bill Viola
video, color, stereo sound, 89 minutes
Program by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano. Notes by Mark Toscano. Thanks to Kira Perov and Bill Viola Studio. Additional thanks to Astra Price.
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Thursday, October 23, 2025 @ 8pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
DECODINGS: A Queer Film Tribute to Carl Bogner
First and foremost, this program is a celebration of queer avant-garde filmmaking and filmmakers, featuring incredible work by Curt McDowell, Barbara Hammer, Michael Wallin, George Kuchar, Su Friedrich, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and even two extremely rare shorts by Gus Van Sant. But this program is, for us, also a celebration of a wonderful human being who devoted himself not just to the cause of championing queer film and experimental cinema, but of film expression in general, and the practitioners, communities, students, and peers he brightened with his wonderful presence. Whether you knew Carl Bogner or not is not important and certainly not a prerequisite for enjoying this show. Just as Carl would have wanted, this program is about the films, which are beautiful, hilarious, tender, and surprising, representing only a tiny slice (albeit a GLORIOUS slice) of the varied and prismatic enormity of queer experimental film history.
It’s common to celebrate and raise a glass to a recently departed filmmaker or other publicly prominent figure in the media arts, but sadly less typical to celebrate those whose more behind-the-scenes influence is quietly, immeasurably profound. Although perhaps not necessarily a household name to even the wider independent film community, Carl Bogner is a legend to those who knew and loved him, through his incredible wit, charm, sensitivity, generosity, deep intelligence, and tireless commitment to alternative cinema and spreading the good word about its ineluctable charms. His former UW Milwaukee students speak devotedly of his inspirational guidance and his stewardship of the city’s LGBT Film/Video Festival inspired countless through his passionate engagement. His company was a rich pleasure, carried thrillingly by his magnetic, devilish, devoted personality. He did innumerable things to promote and support queer film, experimental film, and the incredible fun and excitement to be derived from its engagement, without losing the richness of its intellectual rigor. In fact, Carl made intellectual rigor fun too.
The world lost Carl Bogner far too soon on December 15, 2024, and Lightstruck wanted to celebrate him in a way we hoped he would appreciate, by presenting a program that offers a particular, hopefully Bogneresque consideration of the complex expressions of identity, desire, humor, longing, and sweet sadness to be found in films from the queer avant-garde, as embodied in this program, which also happens to contain a number of Carl’s personal favorites. Like so many others whose paths he crossed, we’ve taken great inspiration from his example in valuing and even insisting on the power, meaning, and fun to be had in showing and sharing films with our community, and hope you’ll come enjoy these films with us, in the memory of Carl Bogner and his beautiful soul.
Lightstruck presents:
DECODINGS: A Queer Film Tribute to Carl Bogner
The program:
My Friend (1983) by Gus Van Sant, 16mm, 3m
Wieners & Buns Musical (1972) by Curt McDowell, 16mm, 16m
Nightmare Typhoon (1983) by Gus Van Sant, 16mm, 8m
Double Strength (1978) by Barbara Hammer, 16mm, 15m
Season of Sorrow (1996) by George Kuchar, video, 12.5m
Gently Down the Stream (1981) by Su Friedrich, 16mm silent, 14m
Decodings (1988) by Michael Wallin, 16mm, 15m
Mobile Men (2008) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, digital, 3.5m
total = 87m
Program and notes by Mark Toscano. 16mm print of Decodings courtesy of Canyon Cinema. Restored 16mm prints of Nightmare Typhoon, Wieners & Buns Musical, and Gently Down the Stream courtesy of the Academy Film Archive and the filmmakers, with additional thanks to Melinda McDowell. Double Strength was restored by Electronic Arts Intermix and the Academy Film Archive through the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation. Print of My Friend courtesy of Gus Van Sant. Mobile Men courtesy of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Season of Sorrow provided by Video Data Bank. Special thanks to Thomas Schur, Jesse McLean, Kati Katchever, and Ben Balcom.
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Thursday, October 9, 2025 @ 8pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
Sabin Bălașa: The Eternal Dream
(complete retrospective!)
Lightstruck presents an evening of transcendent animation by Romanian visionary painter, Sabin Bălașa. Working in a self-described style of cosmic romanticism, Bălașa’s hypnotically expressive and textural “animated painting films” exist in a universe all their own, alive with alien lifeforms and ethereal landscapes which elegantly delve into the complex philosophical and psycho-social dramas of our modern world. Prepare to be transported to a celestial realm of ecstatic consciousness, beyond language, space, and time.
Fiercely independent, poetically minded, and spiritually charged, Sabin Bălașa consistently forged his own path, rejecting the commercial limitations of a fickle art world, devoted to his ever-evolving artistic practices. Showing remarkable talent from an early age, Bălașa studied fine art in Bucharest and Italy through the ‘50s and ‘60s and became known for his evocative and metaphorical surrealist paintings. Always fascinated by the language of film and the rich storytelling traditions of his culture, Bălașa embraced animation for a relatively short period of his career, creating nine laboriously hand-painted films between 1966 and 1979. Bălașa’s films, like his paintings, possess a mystical, uneasy, otherworldly quality, laden with symbolism and motion that undulates like a fever-dreamt fairy tale. Beneath their elements of fantasy and lore, his expressive animations serve as contemporary criticisms of oppressive socio-political systems, tyrannical patriarchy, and passive consumerism, while always balanced with a pure love for humanity and belief in the capacity of art as a vital tool for empathy, connection, and spiritual growth. Ever eclipsing expectation and defying conformity, Bălașa rejected the concept of animation as caricature, enabling an evolution of his highly trained brush and far out imagination to sequentially activate his canvas, generating something entirely unique, timeless, metaphysical, and divine.
With the collaboration of his son, Tudor Bălașa, we are overjoyed to present this retrospective program of all nine of Sabin Bălașa’s animated films, including Return to the Future, a politically controversial masterwork from 1971, reunited with its long-absent original score by Alvin Curran, which Lightstruck was thrilled to assist in recovering with thanks to Cineteca di Bologna.
Program by Mark Toscano and Zena Grey. Notes by Zena Grey. Extra special thanks to Tudor Bălașa. With gratitude to Corina Micu at Romanian Film Centre and Andrea Meneghelli at Cineteca di Bologna.
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Thursday, September 4, 2025 @ 8pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
Larry Clark’s
PASSING THROUGH (1977) on 16mm!
A singular work of independent cinematic expression, Larry Clark’s 16mm feature Passing Through (1977) is a film inspired by and intertwined with the history, culture, and language of jazz as an African-American art form. In its dynamic structure, deep humanism, and bold experimentation, Clark’s filmmaking seems to embody and channel the very essence of American jazz as a fundamental Black art, an ecology of African-American identity and history that defies white cultural hegemony through struggle, resistance, collectivity, and creativity. The result is a massively self-assured and radically independent work of integral vision, embodied by both Clark and his collaborating crew, which included filmmakers Julie Dash and Charles Burnett.
Dedicated “to Herbert Baker and other Black Musicians known and unknown,” the film follows Eddie Warmack (Nathaniel Taylor), a jazz musician recently released from prison, as he navigates a Los Angeles revealed as site of both community liberation and the ongoing violence of exploitation. The film’s daring and experimental visual language palpably expresses a heightened subjectivity and emotionality, as well as proposing a radical formal style that challenges the predictable cinematic grammar of much commercial cinema. Featuring music from Horace Tapscott and the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, Clark’s film charts a sharply rendered and deep-hearted journey for its protagonist as he passes through the realm of the mythic while also remaining grounded in vivid reality.
In keeping with Clark’s ideological motivations, Passing Through is intended for viewing only in a communal theatrical setting, where its resonant energy and ideas can best communicate with and engage the assembled audience. Lightstruck is deeply honored to be able to share this unforgettable film with you, with immense thanks to and admiration for the UCLA Film & Television Archive and Larry Clark himself.
Lightstruck presents:
Passing Through (1977)
Directed, produced, and edited by Larry Clark
Written by Ted Lange and Larry Clark
16mm, bw & color, 111min.
16mm print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive and Larry Clark
Program by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano. Notes by Mark Toscano. Huge thanks to Larry Clark for his support and trust, and to Todd Wiener and Steven Hill at UCLA Film & Television Archive.
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Pacific Northwest friends! Lightstruck will be presenting an encore of our show Nobuhiro Aihara: Third Eye Animation on Saturday, August 23, 8pm, at Mini Mart City Park! Or if you know folks in Seattle and environs who like amazing psychedelic animation, please let them know!
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Three Thursdays at 8pm
June 5, June 26, July 10, 2025
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LIGHTSTRUCK PRESENTS:
a tribute to Gene Youngblood’s book
EXPANDED CINEMA
In 1970, 28-year-old Gene Youngblood published a book that would come to be not only a defining text of experimental cinema, but also a radical new blueprint for understanding our evolving relationship to film, video, and computers as mediating apparati for externalizing the human psyche. This book is Expanded Cinema, and it still represents a high bar for visionary thinking about media, machines, and their capability for facilitating deep psychic and emotional expression.
With the volatile debates and growing concerns about the role technology has come to play in our psychic and social health affecting so many of us, Gene Youngblood’s more optimistic, semi-utopian conceptions are well worth revisiting. One thing is clear: collective community experience of art/media/performance has more value than ever in a fragmented and destabilized culture. In tribute to this massively influential and still-riveting book, Lightstruck has curated three full programs of films discussed in Expanded Cinema, most of them rarely screened and many showing in beautiful 16mm prints.
Spanning the outer realms of visionary and psychedelic/cybernetic cinema of the 1960s, these programs will include major experimental classics alongside unexpected treasures, featuring films by Stan Brakhage, Pat O’Neill, Carolee Schneemann, Will Hindle, Michael Snow, Scott Bartlett, John & James Whitney, Jordan Belson, John Whitney Jr., Lillian Schwartz, Nam June Paik, Jud Yalkut, Yayoi Kusama, Single Wing Turquoise Bird, Arlo Acton & Terry Riley, and many more.
We hope you can join us for this incredibly rare assembly of radical and exploratory films, all of which formed the component parts to Gene Youngblood’s prescient ruminations on the transcendent expression and communion achievable through a conscious and empathic engagement with technology and cinema.
“When we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded consciousness. … At this point in the Paleocybernetic Age, the messages of society as expressed in the intermedia network have become almost totally irrelevant to the needs and actualities of the organism. … It is the primary purpose of this book to explore the new messages that exist in the cinema, and to examine some of the image-making technologies that promise to extend man’s communicative capacities beyond his most extravagant visions.” (Gene Youngblood)
“Gene Youngblood’s book is the most brilliant conceptioning of the objectively positive use of the Scenario-Universe principle, which must be employed by humanity to synchronize its senses and its knowledge in time to ensure the continuance of that little, three-and-one-half-billion-member team of humanity now installed by evolution aboard our little Space Vehicle Earth.” (R. Buckminster Fuller)
Programs and notes by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano. Series note by Mark Toscano. Poster art by Robert Beatty!
June 5, 2025 @ 8pm:
Expanded Cinema Program 1:
Synaesthetic Cinema & The Myth of Entertainment
“The artist is always an anarchist, a revolutionary, a creator of new worlds imperceptibly gaining on reality.” (Gene Youngblood)
Our first evening devoted to Gene Youngblood’s groundbreaking 1970 book Expanded Cinema draws on his exploration of the various unfolding trends that marked 1960s experimental filmmaking as an evolving language of deep psychic and emotional articulation. In the book’s first two chapters, Youngblood identifies a new thread of cinematic expression that defined itself in response – and in partial opposition – to the emergence of television. Artists sought to reconcile and harmonize external and internal worlds through the uniquely expressive medium of film, devising and evolving numerous radical, even transgressive techniques for extending its imaging capabilities, including complex superimposition, hyperkinetic montage, photographic transformations, experimental hand-processing, and physical manipulation of the film strip. These techniques provided doorways for artists to explore deeper recesses of the mind and soul, through visionary ruminations on identity, memory, fear, sexuality, and the prismatic complexity of subjective consciousness.
We’ll be screening six 16mm films identified by Youngblood as exceptional and representative examples of the synaesthetic cinema he defines in Part Two of Expanded Cinema: Dog Star Man: Part 4 (1964) by Stan Brakhage, 7362 (1967) by Pat O’Neill, XFilm (1968) by John Schofill, Fuses (1967) by Carolee Schneemann, and Chinese Firedrill (1968) by Will Hindle; after a short intermission, the evening will conclude with Wavelength (1967) by Michael Snow.
Program by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano. Notes by Mark Toscano. Poster art by Robert Beatty. All films courtesy of the artists and Canyon Cinema. Prints of Dog Star Man: Part 4 and 7362 courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.
June 26, 2025 @ 8pm:
Expanded Cinema Program 2:
Cosmic Consciousness & Cybernetic Cinema
In our second program focusing on Gene Youngblood’s 1970 book Expanded Cinema, Lightstruck will focus on artists who – through their visionary use of incredible machines both homemade and hi-tech – produced works that sought to extend and externalize human consciousness in a cinematic form uniting mind, heart, spirit, and soul. Youngblood was fascinated by the ambitious and artful employment of technology in motion pictures in the 1960s, and saw both the humble DIY innovations and the massive mainframes alike as potential conduits for enhanced human engagement, and an evolutionary stepping-stone for multi-sensorial exploration.
Trailblazing and wildly diverse computer animations by Stan VanDerBeek and Lillian Schwartz (each working with pioneer Ken Knowlton), as well as John Whitney and Michael Whitney, will establish the radical abstraction origins of the computer arts. In the analog domain, James Whitney’s rapturous masterpiece Lapis and three unparalleled films by Jordan Belson will make perhaps the most convincing possible argument for cinema as a vehicle for contemplative transcendence. The evening will conclude with what we believe to be the first 16mm performance of John Whitney Jr.’s legendary three-screen film, Side Phase Drift, in over 50 years, with John Jr. himself operating the center projector. This will definitely be a very special show not to be missed!
Program by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano. Notes by Mark Toscano. Poster art by Robert Beatty. Enormous thanks to John Whitney Jr. for his trust and time working with us to present his three-screen film, and to Raymond Foye for providing new 16mm screening prints of Jordan Belson’s films. Further thanks to John Whitney Jr. and the Academy Film Archive for providing the Whitney films. Thanks to The Henry Ford Museum and Kristen Gallerneaux for the Lillian Schwartz films, and the Film-makers’ Cooperative for the work of Stan VanDerBeek.
July 10, 2025 @ 8pm:
Expanded Cinema Program 3:
Television & Intermedia
Our third and final installment of this three-part series devoted to Gene Youngblood’s 1970 book Expanded Cinema explores the outermost reaches of technological innovation spanning the late ‘60s to early ‘70s, highlighting creative connectivity through exceptional investigations of the cathode ray tube and other far-out forms of aesthetic-synesthetic interactivity.
To Youngblood, the possibility of film and video broadcast by way of television offered far more than just an endpoint of entertainment to a stultified, couch-bound public. TV and video proposed a new gateway to instantaneous global communication and with it a framework for the expansion of human awareness through the immediate convergence of millions on a massive scale. Youngblood optimistically pondered the “Videosphere”, chronicling and predicting near-infinite capabilities and opportunities for electronic transmission already being probed by filmmakers such as Nam June Paik, Scott Bartlett, Tom DeWitt Ditto, and Aldo Tambellini. Through use of projections, videotronics, light shows, sensory environments, and the fertile conjunctions of performance and media, fresh forms of self-expression were being synthesized by artists like Carolee Schneemann, Jud Yalkut, Yayoi Kusama, Single Wing Turquoise Bird, and other radical innovators.
Our Expanded Cinema series concludes with a selection of stimulating film and video works by these and many other artists, all of them seeking to redefine and extend the moving image as an artistic practice pushing far beyond the screen. The program will open with a live feedback installation by video artist Jennifer Juniper Stratford, and will culminate in a consciousness-altering 1969 television collaboration between kinetic sculptor Arlo Acton and visionary composer Terry Riley.
Program by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano. Notes by Zena Grey. Poster art by Robert Beatty. Special thanks to Jennifer Juniper Stratford. All films courtesy of the artists/distributors, and supplied by (and with huge thanks to) David Lebrun, Jon Shibata at Pacific Film Archive, Karl McCool at Electronic Arts Intermix, Canyon Cinema, Light Cone, and The Film-makers’ Cooperative.
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Thursday, May 15, 2025, 8pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LIGHTSTRUCK:
16mm BRAIN FOOD
Unlike the numbing, stultifying hypnotism of our pervasive, persistent hellscape of endless electronic screens, Lightstruck believes that 16mm film projection has a nutrifying effect on the brain and it should be experienced in plentiful doses at semi-frequent intervals. In order to help facilitate this, we offer a unique program entitled 16mm Brain Food, for which we have catered an all-16mm meal of generous portions and incomparable flavors.
Spanning a 90-minute selection of twelve films chosen for their salutary and mind-expanding qualities, 16mm Brain Food includes errant eyeballs, psy-fi animations, fragmented dancescapes, flickering abstractions, secret language rebuses, illusionary kinetic sculptures, hand-drawn hypervirtuosities, DIY lenscraft, optical surprises, undisciplined slime molds, and the Capitol Records building launching a rocket into space.
Program curated by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano. Notes by Mark Toscano. Thanks to the artists and their families and Canyon Cinema! Enigma courtesy of Kristen Gallerneaux and The Henry Ford Museum. Prints of Los Ojos, Roseblood, The Maltese Cross Movement, Wirework, Loose Corner, and Animato courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.
This program is dedicated to Tomonari Nishikawa.
Los Ojos (1975) by Gary Beydler, 2m
Market Street (2005) by Tomonari Nishikawa, 4m
Roseblood (1974) by Sharon Couzin, 8m
Enigma (1972) by Lillian Schwartz, 4m
Fantasy (1976) by Vince Collins, 3m
The Maltese Cross Movement (1967) by A.K. Dewdney, 7m
Wirework (1992) by Michael Rudnick, 4m
Film-Wipe-Film (1983) by Paul Glabicki, 27m
Small Foveal Fields (1981) by Robert Russett, 5m
Loose Corner (1986) by Anita Thacher, 10m
Babobilicons (1982) by Daina Krumins, 16m
Animato (1977) by Mike Jittlov, 3m
TOTAL: 93m
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Thursday, April 17, 2025, 8pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LIGHTSTRUCK:
TALES OF THE DUMPSTER KID
by Ula Stöckl & Edgar Reitz
“In form and content possibly the most original German avant-garde work of the seventies…” (Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art)
Between 1969-1971, Ula Stöckl (The Cat Has Nine Lives) and Edgar Reitz (Heimat) produced one of the most engaging and iconoclastic film projects of the New German Cinema, completely rejecting the standards and tropes of a contemporary film landscape already in extreme flux. With proto-punk spirit and dark, sardonic humor, the filmmakers dramatize the daringly absurd adventures of a Kübelkind (“Dumpster Kid”, played by the perfect Kristine de Loup), whose unpredictable meanderings through various narrative vignettes represents a radical feminist odyssey of chilling social commentary and outrageous satire.
Through its various episodes (ranging in length from one minute to nearly a half-hour), Tales of the Dumpster Kid resolutely maintains its simple yet striking visual style, while cavalierly raiding and reshaping a whole host of narrative genres – musical, comedy, family drama, gangster, horror, erotic, fairy tale, and even The Three Musketeers – each one of them repurposed to the filmmakers’ ends with an incisive yet dada spirit. Alternately audacious, hilarious, disturbing, and unexpectedly moving, Stöckl and Reitz’s project is the cinematic embodiment of righteous contrarianism.
The Dumpster Kid was born from the filmmakers’ mutual dissatisfaction with the established, arbitrary guidelines of getting films made and seen, “because in 1969 we had no desire to make another ninety-minute film that would get no distribution.” Instead, they completely rewrote the rules of what could comprise contemporary cinema, conceiving of a massive, evolving project devoted to the titular character who functioned as a stand-in not only for the artists’ own defiance, but for the oppressed and outraged women still demanding radical change at the end of the sixties. Made on a limited scale in an immensely playful spirit, the filmmakers also consciously populated the films with their friends; in one case this meant a 28-year-old Werner Herzog delivering one of his creepiest performances as a soft-spoken sadist.
Of a projected 64 episodes, 22 were actually produced, running well over three hours in total. For this program, befitting the playful and intentional anti-structure of the project, Lightstruck will provide a menu of film choices, and the audience will determine which episodes are seen, in which order, on the night of the program. The evening will run no more than 120 minutes, meaning it will be up to you to determine what we see at the show!
This program contains adult material.
Geschichten vom Kübelkind (Tales of the Dumpster Kid) (1969-71)
Directed by Ula Stöckl & Edgar Reitz
Starring Kristine de Loup
Total program: approximately 120 minutes.
Program curated by Zena Grey, Mark Toscano, and you. Notes by Mark Toscano. Thanks to Gesa Knolle and Arsenal Distribution.
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Thursday, March 6, 2025, 8pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LIGHTSTRUCK:
Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s SALAAM CINEMA
New restoration!
Lightstruck is ecstatic to share one of our favorite films about cinema from one of the world’s genuine filmmaking luminaries in a brand new restoration!
When a modest casting call generates an overwhelming response from thousands of film hopefuls, Mohsen Makhmalbaf informs his would-be actors that they – and the process of auditioning them – will itself comprise the subject of his film. What follows is a thrillingly original and profound meditation on the nature of power dynamics, control, resistance, and the symbolic/actual space of liberation and empowerment that cinema offers and withholds with shocking caprice.
With Makhmalbaf himself on screen for the majority of the film, alternately engaging and terrorizing his cast, he embodies the role of dictatorial director, brazenly wielding his power to explore the stressed edges of cinematic humanism, and calling vividly to mind much larger political structures which may also follow this troubling but seductive model.
As in so many works by Makhmalbaf and his contemporaries in Iran, the boundaries between fiction, recreation, nonfiction, and truth are permeable and elusive, and ultimately dissolve to reveal the seemingly contradictory duality of deep authenticity and willful artifice at the heart of all cinema. In Salaam Cinema, a full range of human emotion is explored – exuberance, hilarity, desire, desperation, shame, cruelty, resistance, and rapture – all without leaving the audition stage. The result is a complicated, riveting, and exhilarating metatextual rumination on the philosophical dynamics of the medium itself, created by one of Iran’s greatest artist-thinkers about cinema, its complexities, and its prismatic mirroring of the human condition.
“Our filmmaking is somewhere between documentary and narrative fiction, between truth and opinion, between politics and poetry.” (Mohsen Makhmalbaf)
Salaam Cinema (1995)
Directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf
75 minutes. Color. In Persian with English subtitles.
Program by Zena Grey & Mark Toscano. Notes by Mark Toscano. Enormous thanks to Maysam Makhmalbaf and Makhmalbaf Film House. Additional thanks to Kathy Geritz.
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Thursday, February 6, 2025, 8pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LIGHTSTRUCK:
Tom Palazzolo: AMERICA’S IN REAL TROUBLE
Painter, photographer, and filmmaker, Tom Palazzolo emerged out of the Chicago underground experimental scene of the ‘60s, inspired by the vérité documentaries of D.A. Pennebaker and Ricky Leacock to craft a playful and unfiltered style all his own. Loaded with visual puns, quirky characters, and pointed political montage, Palazzolo scrutinizes America’s idiosyncrasies, warts and all, with wonder, care, and critical awareness. Witty and insightful, hilarious and devastating, these films peer deep into the complicated heart and soul of America and energetically invite us to reflect and respond. As we contend with churning currents of political extremism, radical revolution, and profound distress for the future of humanity, now is the time to re-examine these unique, introspective, and highly entertaining renderings of a complex American social identity.
Raw, curious, lovingly satirical, and occasionally raunchy, Palazzolo’s candid, kinetic portraits are a people-watcher’s dream, populated with Main Street parades, snarky deli managers, divisive campaign rallies, eccentric massage parlors, melodramatic family gatherings, and nudist beauty pageants. Under the vibrant surface of these seemingly quaint depictions lie witty, poignant examinations of blatantly corrupt and broken socio-political systems. Palazzolo’s films find splendor in the subtle complexities of human nature, counterbalancing the taboo and prosaic while cultivating a deeply empathetic, inquisitive gaze upon a diverse array of remarkable-yet-familiar characters and events. Lightstruck is honored to present a selection of these special films, spanning the late-’60s to mid-’70s, compassionately examining a United States enmeshed in political upheaval and cultural awakening.
Films screening:
America’s In Real Trouble (1967), a bopping Motown montage of Chicago’s Memorial Day parade.
Jerry’s (1974), an adoring ode to cantankerously charismatic deli owner, Jerry Meyers.
Campaign (1968), quick-cut coverage of Chicago’s tumultuous 1968 Democratic convention featuring moments with Abbie Hoffman, William S. Burroughs, Dick Gregory and others.
Ricky and Rocky (1972, made with Jeff Kreines), one suburban Polish-Italian family’s “surprise” wedding shower.
Hot Nasty (1972), a cheeky, charming, bittersweet view into Big Bertha’s massage parlor.
Love It/Leave It (1973), a monumental socio-political collage film juxtaposing various penetrating views of Americana, featuring the annual Naked City contest in Roselawn, Indiana.
Program and notes by Zena Grey. Immense thanks to and films provided by Tom Palazzolo (America’s in Real Trouble, Jerry’s, Love It/Leave It), Jeff Kreines (Ricky and Rocky), and The Chicago Film Archives (Campaign and Hot Nasty)!
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Thursday, January 30, 2025, 7:00pm
Xcèntric @ The CCCB, Barcelona, Spain
The Confessions of Curt McDowell
I (Mark) programmed this show, though I won’t be there – hope you enjoy it if you are able to be there!
Dirty, playful, bawdy, freaky, raunchy, sexy, brilliant, campy, punky, puerile, gross, glamorous…there are not enough evocative adjectives to accurately encompass the innumerable pleasures of Curt McDowell’s resolutely queer and radically multi-sexual body of film work in all its florid fecundity.
A contemporary and occasional collaborator of the Kuchar brothers, San Francisco-based Curt McDowell produced an utterly remarkable body of work between the late 1960s and his death in 1987 from AIDS-related illness. In his exquisitely made yet wildly audacious films, he drew vividly on his obsessions with sex, pop music, performance, comedy, melodrama, and the delicious dichotomy of the gorgeous and the grotesque. Most notorious for his nearly three-hour horror/comedy/porno/melodrama/cult classic Thundercrack! (1975), McDowell also created numerous hilarious, intimate, provocative, and unexpectedly profound short films over his tragically short career.
The Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles has been home to Curt McDowell’s films since 2014, and since then has been actively working to restore his entire body of work. This program will feature an eclectic selection of these restorations, ranging from sensitive portraiture to voyeuristic erotica to scatological farce.
Program by Mark Toscano. All films restored by and courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.
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Thursday, January 30, 2025, 7:30pm
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
Phil Solomon: To a Song Dissolved in the Dawn
Few figures in the experimental film world have left an impact like Phil Solomon (1954–2019), who created some of the most emotionally resonant and exquisitely beautiful film images of the past several decades. Solomon was beloved as an influential film poet and devoted educator with a nearly thirty-year tenure as a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. He was particularly known for his singular work as an analog film alchemist, chemically altering and rephotographing images to produce experiences of cinematic rapture. Though the results were visually stunning, his techniques were no superficial gimmick; for Solomon, the manipulation of film emulsion achieved a visceral and affecting form to match the complex personal and cultural subject matter he devoted himself to, from his Jewish American identity to the deaths of his parents and the eerie dreamworlds of childhood vision.
Program and note by Mark Toscano.
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Friday, January 24, 2025, 8pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LIGHTSTRUCK:
GOOD-BY KEIICHI TANAAMI: Animation From the Pop Subconscious
Lightstruck is deeply honored to present this special program of films by Keiichi Tanaami, spanning early hand-drawn animations, psychedelic formalist deconstructions, and more recent, truly delirious digital works that channel and madly reconfigure his radical Pop origins.
One of Japan’s most influential, provocative, and wildly imaginative Post-WWII artists, Keiichi Tanaami ceaselessly poured his hallucinatory and visionary sensibility into drawing, painting, collage, design, fashion, graphic arts, and nearly every other medium imaginable. As part of his extensive artistic practice, Tanaami also produced a substantial body of experimental film and animation work over the course of decades, tapping boldly into the personal and societal subconscious to explore themes ranging from manic consumerism, American cultural imperialism, and the deep-flowing collective trauma affecting post-War Japan.
We present this program in loving memory of and gratitude to Keiichi Tanaami.
Please note that this program contains some adult material. This program also contains flickering images.
Program by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano. Notes by Mark Toscano. Enormous thanks to Yuki Itaya, Kana Nanzuka, and Shinji Nanzuka of Nanzuka Gallery, Tokyo, who provided the beautiful new digital masters of Tanaami’s films for this program.
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Tuesday, January 7, 2025, 8pm
WHAMMY! Analog Media, Los Angeles
Feelings Not Ruined by Words: The Animations of Karen Yasinsky
Karen Yasinsky in person!
Working with elements of stop motion, rotoscope, performance, hand-drawing, found footage, and always a stimulating current of philosophical curiosity, Baltimore artist Karen Yasinsky mines hitherto underexplored depths of the emotional subconscious in her rivetingly unusual films. Often mixing animation and live action material in a bewitchingly strange and ambiguous collage, Yasinsky’s films create an open, uncanny space of existential examination where fundamentally human conflicts and confusions can emerge and congeal for closer contemplation.
Curated by Mark Toscano, this program will feature a full range of Yasinsky’s animation, including the Los Angeles premiere of her latest film, I’m Not Your Monster!
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Saturday, December 14, 2024, 7:30pm
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles
NAKED SPACES: LIVING IS ROUND (1985)
New 4K restoration with Trinh T. Minh-ha in person!
Trinh T. Minh-ha’s widely acclaimed first feature, filmed in rural West Africa, radically challenges and redefines the perspectives, tropes, and politics of ethnographic cinema. Trinh upends the power imbalance and exoticizing colonial gaze so often embedded in this mode of documentary by decentralizing the filmmaker, whose voice and vision has historically been authoritative, observational, and detached. Through the absence of artificial narrative, explanatory voiceover, or presumptuous analysis, her film eschews simplistic, didactic objectification and instead attempts to achieve something else: an empathetic engagement driven by curiosity and a genuine, conscious humanism.
Program and note by Mark Toscano. Special thanks to Jon Shibata and Pacific Film Archive.
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Thursday, December 12, 2024, 8pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LIGHTSTRUCK:
Bogdan Dziworski: Sensational Truths
With their wildly adventurous cinematography, editing, and sound, the short documentaries of Polish film virtuoso Bogdan Dziworski create a thrillingly immersive space for an intensely engaged, experiential approach to their subject matter, decades before Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab films would seek to do something quite similar. Graduating from the famed Łódź film school in 1965, Dziworski pioneered a revelatory language of observational nonfiction filmmaking that eschewed all claims to fly-on-the-wall realism and instead transparently engaged in an often surrealist and unequivocally stylized film language, seeking to enhance his subjects with a heightened, eccentric sensoriality that only cinema can offer.
While Dziworski’s editing is sculptural and kinetic, and his cinematography operatic and daring, his sound work is particularly extensive, using unconventional cutting and mixing techniques, and an elaborate approach to foley that guides our engagement just as powerfully as the visuals. These are documentaries unlike any others: deeply empathetic, uncommonly strange constructions that are exhilaratingly, unapologetically cinematic.
In recent years, we fell in love with Dziworski’s fantastic films, and are very excited to present a selection of four of our favorites as part of Lightstruck. The program includes: Skiing Scenes with Franz Klammer (1980), his hilarious and visually outrageous collaboration with Zbig Rybczyński and Gerald Kargl (Angst); Classical Biathlon (1978), one of his most expressive and immersive athletic films; A Few Stories About a Man (1983), a remarkable portrait of Jerzy Orłowski, armless graphic artist, in various typical and atypical sequences; and Szapito (1984), a moving and exquisitely sensitive film in which a retired circus troupe assembles to recreate some of their long ago routines. We hope you’ll join us to experience these intricate, artful, and – quite frankly – massively entertaining films, still incredibly fresh and cinematically adventurous 40+ years after their making.
Program by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano. Notes by Mark Toscano. Thanks to Marek Pelski at WFO Film Studio for providing the films.
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Friday-Saturday, December 6-7, 2024
Spectacle, Brooklyn, NY
MOTION OVER PICTURES: TWO EVENINGS OF FRED WORDEN
Four Fred Worden programs curated by Paul Attard with/for Spectacle!
This isn’t a Lightstruck program, and it also wasn’t curated by Zena Grey or Mark Toscano, but Mark will intro at these shows and we’re very excited about them. Fred Worden is a dearly favorite filmmaker, and also longtime friend! Seating is very limited, but hope to see you there!
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Monday, November 25, 2024, 7:30pm
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
The Divine Visions of Ishu Patel
Internationally esteemed for his stunning animated shorts, two-time Oscar nominee Ishu Patel has influenced and inspired generations of fans and fellow animators with his gorgeously crafted and exquisitely realized films. Often working in completely different techniques for each production, his philosophically rich and deeply affecting films redefined the boundaries of artistry and expression in the world of independent animation.
Born in Gujarat, India, in 1942, Patel was inspired to explore animation through his early experiences with films by Norman McLaren and other National Film Board of Canada (NFB) animators, eventually relocating to Montreal in the early 1970s. Working with the NFB, he went on to create several extraordinary short, experimental animations, as well as organize animation workshops around the world.
This program features six of Patel’s most memorable and visionary works, including his Oscar-nominated films Paradise (1984) and The Bead Game (1977), as well as Afterlife (1978)—his breathtaking rumination on death and transformation, made entirely by animating luminous, backlit plasticine on glass.
Programmed and note by Academy Film Archive Senior Film Preservationist Mark Toscano. All films courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada.
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Three Thursdays @ 8pm: November 7, 14, & 21, 2024
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LIGHTSTRUCK:
BETZY BROMBERG: A 3-SHOW 16MM RETROSPECTIVE!
Lightstruck is overjoyed to present its first ever artist-in-person retrospective, with three different programs – November 7, 14, and 21 – of all-16mm work by one of our favorite filmmakers, the truly singular Betzy Bromberg. Unparalleled film artist, inspiring educator, and even erstwhile optical effects wizard, Bromberg has been making work almost exclusively on 16mm since the mid-1970s, first in New York and then in her adoptive home of Los Angeles. In recent years, we’ve thrilled at her rapturously expressive abstract feature-length films, and this three-program retrospective aims in part to chart the genesis of those works by focusing on Bromberg’s rich spectrum of filmmaking between 1977-1996.
All three evenings will feature a conversation following the films with Betzy Bromberg in person! This trio of programs also offers a rare opportunity to follow the thrilling trajectory of her early body of work as she defined an evolving sensibility through her revelatory and intensely creative engagement with the 16mm film medium. We think the sum experience of all three programs will reaffirm Bromberg’s status as a film artist of exquisite sensorial ingenuity, uncommon empathic intimacy, and as one of the great alchemist-poets of the medium.
Zena made this wonderful trailer for the retrospective:
November 7, 2024 @ 8pm:
Betzy Bromberg Program 1 – The Present Tense (1977-1980)
The retrospective launches with a trio of deeply affecting, punk-inflected works spanning Bromberg’s period in New York and her relocation to Los Angeles. Electric in their energy and powerfully emotional, Bromberg forged an intensely textural approach to making films early on, concerned with her intimate community, urban environs, and layers of social politics. These films are urgent, visually adventurous, and loaded with a raw empathic viscerality that finds unexpected connection with her recent work through their remarkable articulation of the blissfully ephemeral. Demonstrating an already sophisticated filmmaking sensibility underneath their ragged vitality, the cumulative effect of these three early works is remarkably beautiful and unexpectedly moving.
Screening: Petit Mal (1977), Ciao Bella (1978), Soothing the Bruise (1980)
November 14, 2024 @ 8pm:
Betzy Bromberg Program 2 – Radiating Space (1981-1987)
Responding in part to the alien landscape of her new West Coast home and the looming ideologies of Reagan-era America, Bromberg further activates the film medium through the use of radical image and sound manipulation that expresses an anxious, dark psychedelia. A heightened material subjectivity marks the two films in this program, exploring the fraught imbalance between humans and the natural world that heals/harms us, palpably under the shadowy threat of ecological and nuclear peril. Bromberg’s lush and pyrotechnic Tom Waits promo film for his song “Temptation” will close this program as an extended moment of magical fancy.
Screening: Marasmus (1981), Az Iz (1983), Temptation (1987)
November 21, 2024 @ 8pm:
Betzy Bromberg Program 3 – Divinity Gratis (1989-1996)
Bromberg’s first feature-length work Divinity Gratis concludes the retrospective, with so many of her interests, passions, and obsessions in filmic and thematic expression coming to their apotheosis. Seven years in the making, Divinity Gratis tackles no less than the cosmic history of human existence through a funhouse mirror of prismatic associations, vividly tinted by the hopes and fears of the atomic age. Audiovisually daring and unabashedly sensual, Divinity Gratis is both a culmination of Bromberg’s earlier explorations and a thrilling gateway to the elemental mysticism of her current cinematic journey.
Screening: Divinity Gratis (1996)
Programs curated by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano. Notes by Mark Toscano. Huge thanks to Betzy Bromberg.
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Thursday, October 17, 2024, 6pm & 8pm (2 showtimes!)
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LIGHTSTRUCK:
The 3-D 16mm Phantasmagoria of Zoe Beloff
6PM SHOW: https://link.dice.fm/Tfb9624e0cde
8PM SHOW: https://link.dice.fm/E03e38220c4e
THE 3-D 16MM PHANTASMAGORIA OF ZOE BELOFF
Polarized glasses will be provided! Zoe Beloff in person!
Presented in collaboration with 3-D SPACE, The Center for Stereoscopic Photography, Art, Cinema, and Education; and the LA 3-D Club!
Lightstruck is thrilled to present its first-ever artist-in-person program with two haunting and otherworldly 16mm films in stunning 3-D by multimedia artist, filmmaker, author, media archeologist, and educator, Zoe Beloff! Brilliantly blending highly inventive female-driven narratives, pre- and early-cinematic devices, social politics, and a cultivated knowledge of the deeply esoteric, Beloff crafts a singular filmic language which must be physically experienced to be believed. The pair of films in this program excavate forgotten historical records through fictionalized visions of two women discovering and exploring their inner power, despite the forces which attempt to subvert and control them. In Charming Augustine (2005), a woman suffering from hysterical fits in turn-of-the-century Paris unwittingly becomes an asylum sensation. Collaging magic lantern slides, early animation, and live-action psychological accounts, Shadow Land or Light from the Other Side (2000) peers into the life and mind of a spirit medium who displays telekinetic abilities and produces ghostly apparitions while challenging enduring societal expectations.
Employing a literally immersive filmic space, Beloff suggests an alternate cinematic timeline through which she deftly fuses past and present to form something entirely new and remarkable. This is a rare opportunity to experience these two films in their original and most unusual format. Polarized glasses will be provided to all attendees and Zoe Beloff will be present to introduce the program and take questions after!
screening:
Shadow Land or Light From the Other Side (2000), 32m
Charming Augustine (2005), 38m
70m total
Program curated by Mark Toscano and Zena Grey. Notes by Zena Grey. Immeasurable thanks to Eric Kurland.
3-D SPACE operates a nonprofit museum in Echo Park, dedicated to the art, science, and history of stereoscopic images, and presents 3-D movie screenings and exhibitions around Southern California.
The LA 3-D Club has been meeting monthly since 1955, and provides a community for stereoscopic photographers, artists, collectors, and enthusiasts to share their 3-D work and interests.
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Thursday, October 10, 2024, 7:30pm
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
Betzy Bromberg: Glide of Transparency
In person: Betzy Bromberg.
“I like exalted states and long for finding ways to conjure the mystical and to transcend reality. Life is surely all mystery but filmmaking is indeed a ritual for me.” — Betzy Bromberg
Internationally recognized for her vivid and otherworldly cinematic experiences, Los Angeles filmmaker Betzy Bromberg harnesses the fundamental qualities of film to explore astonishing microcosmic vistas of incredible mystery and beauty. Long devoted to 16mm analog filmmaking, Bromberg’s career has evolved from her diaristic and punk-inflected works of the 1970s to the ecstatic, organic abstractions she has explored in her last few films, though her interest in presence, consciousness, and the transience of existence remain vivid themes throughout.
Bromberg’s films are unabashedly immersive, intensely sensorial, and unexpectedly affecting, conjuring audiovisual experiences that emphasize the fluid, ephemeral transcendence of consciousness and subjective experience. Glide of Transparency—an intimate reverie on the hidden phantasmagoria of nature—is, in many ways, the culmination thus far of her singular filmmaking sensibility.
Programmed and note by Academy Film Archive Senior Film Preservationist Mark Toscano.
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Thursday, September 12, 2024, 8pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LIGHTSTRUCK:
Ximena Cuevas: Melodramas y Pasiones
An absolute icon of Mexican video art, Ximena Cuevas has produced an unforgettable and magnetic body of work since the 1980s. Ranging from witty, punctuated miniatures to complex, multi-faceted epics of media criticism, Cuevas wields a wildly eclectic array of video textures to investigate and confront her targets through a penetrating, but frequently playful queer feminist lens.
At Lightstruck, we’re longtime fans of Cuevas’s work and its combination of perversely arch satire with revelatory sociopolitical insights. Often employing languages of Latin-American melodrama, home video, and the aesthetics of television and advertising, Cuevas peels back the surface on subjects ranging from the vapidity of popular media, contemporary Mexican identity and US cultural imperialism, the aestheticized suffering of women, and even satirizing herself as the martyred and solitary artist.
Program curated by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano. Notes by Mark Toscano. This program would not have been possible without the generous sponsorship of Video Data Bank, and with immense thanks to Ximena Cuevas.
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Friday, August 23, 2024, 7:30pm
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
Los Angeles Site Seeing:
Views of the City From the Academy Film Archive
Los Angeles has made wildly varied appearances in films from the American avant-garde; few seem to tire of the endless expressive opportunities offered by the City of Angels. In a range of kaleidoscopic offerings spanning 75 years of experimental filmmaking, this program will lead us on an unconventional tour around Los Angeles and its vicinity, stretching from the inspiring optimism of the Watts Towers to the urban apocalypse of a Santa Monica supermarket in 1963, with many stops in between.
Drawing exclusively from the holdings of the Academy Film Archive, this program will feature all titles in their original 16mm and 35mm formats, many of them in restorations by the Archive, and featuring some little-known and rarely screened works of Los Angeles experimental filmmaking.
Programmed and note by Academy Film Archive Senior Film Preservationist Mark Toscano.
All films are from the Academy Film Archive and presented courtesy of the filmmakers or their estates.
Towers of Watts; Now, You Can Do Anything; Muscle Beach; Bump City; Shoppers Market; and Now Playing were restored by the Academy Film Archive, and all other films are screening in new prints from the Archive.
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Thursday, August 22, 2024, 8pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LIGHTSTRUCK:
Mostafa Derkaoui’s
About Some Meaningless Events
(50th anniversary!)
ABOUT SOME MEANINGLESS EVENTS
(De quelques événements sans signification)
Directed by Mostafa Derkaoui, 1974, 78m
In person: Artist/curator Mounir Souss to introduce the film
Lightstruck is thrilled to present a one-of-a-kind film described by critic and scholar Erika Balsom as “one of the great works of 1970s political modernism”. Only recently found and restored after being banned then lost for nearly 50 years, Moroccan filmmaker Mostafa Derkaoui’s About Some Meaningless Events is a truly remarkable, singular film in which a radical filmmaking group interacts with various people and places in working-class Casablanca neighborhoods in search of a definition – and direction – for a new Moroccan cinema. Their explorations of the contemporary urban milieu routinely and unpredictably collapse distinctions between documentary and narrative, with an electric intelligence and contagious energy that is as engaging and playful as it is utterly committed and urgent.
Derkaoui had studied at the famed film school in Łódź, and brought its characteristic dynamism and formal invention to the project, along with the propulsive jazz of Włodzimierz Nahorny, which forms the film’s memorable soundtrack. Tightly composed and kinetically edited, the frame is frequently filled with bustling activity and palpable energy. An impression of rich spontaneity dominates, even as the thread of a story starts to emerge, forcing the filmmakers to confront the intrusion of a narrative upon their ostensibly documentary reality. Refusing to submit to simple genre classification or description, About Some Meaningless Events is not only a proposal for a new Moroccan cinema, but is an exhilarating and revelatory deconstruction of political filmmaking itself.
In Moroccan Arabic and French with English subtitles.
Program by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano with Mounir Souss. Program handout and introduction by Mounir Souss. Short program note by Mark Toscano. Immense thanks to Léa Morin/Talitha and the Filmoteca de Catalunya for restoring this film.
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Friday, August 16, 2024, 8pm
Whammy! Analog Media
ANIMATION BY NUMBERS #2
In its second installment, curator Mark Toscano will bring a mystery selection of historical and contemporary experimental animations, favoring the unusual, obscure, and remarkable! The films will be pre-numbered arbitrarily 1-20, and the audience will roll a 20-sided die to determine the program order!
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Sunday, August 11, 2024, 7:30pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES FILMFORUM:
belit sağ: through an empathic lens
belit sağ in person!
Filmforum is honored to host filmmaker belit sağ in person from Amsterdam for her first single artist show in Los Angeles!
Keenly challenging our sometimes jaded expectations of political filmmaking, belit sağ’s video work is remarkable and vital for its complex emotionality, deep engagement, and thoughtful, purposeful manipulation of the moving image. Through her subtle and varying interventions, she brings targets such as censorship, racism, corruption, fascism, oppression, and state-sanctioned violence into sharp and unexpectedly sensitive focus. Employing a dynamic mix of aesthetic and formal strategies with eclectic creativity, her work functions as a radical, critical inquiry into the very act of photography and representation, a conscious insistence on the use of the camera and the recorded image for purposes of connection and compassion over exploitation.
Despite the intimate and often deceptively informal nature of her gaze and the highly subjective, first-person consideration of topic, her thoughtful use and manipulation of video, voice, and the written word create a complex audiovisual language that resonates upward and outward to encompass much larger political and philosophical considerations. Photographs are rephotographed, multiplied, or fragmented, and her frequent use of Turkish-language voiceover permeates the screen visually, as subtitles sometimes take on a life of their own. Text becomes image and images become language, creating a dynamic mediated space for her compassion, outrage, and rigorous, empathetic inquiry.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano. Many thanks to belit and to Almudena Escobar López.
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Thursday, July 25, 2024, 8pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LIGHTSTRUCK:
Roy Cohn/Jack Smith by Jill Godmilow
ROY COHN/JACK SMITH
Directed by Jill Godmilow
1994, 16mm, color, 89m
Lightstruck is honored to present the Los Angeles premiere of a new 16mm preservation print of Jill Godmilow’s riveting and empathetic film of Ron Vawter’s singular performance piece, Roy Cohn/Jack Smith. Vawter – influential actor and founding member of the famed Wooster Group – devised the original one-man show in 1992, focusing on two wildly different and intricately complex gay icons, with the Roy Cohn segment written by Gary Indiana and the Jack Smith segment a recreation of Smith’s 1981 performance, “What’s Underground About Marshmallows”.
With mesmerizing engagement, Vawter dually inhabits the figures of the closeted Cohn, notorious lawyer/prosecutor who counted Joseph McCarthy and Donald Trump among his close associates, and the extraordinary Smith, a one-of-a-kind artist and filmmaker whose legendary performances unapologetically celebrated his radically queer and kaleidoscopic sensibility. Both men were of a similar age and died from AIDS-related complications in the late 1980s, as would Vawter himself only months after the filming of this restaged 1993 performance at The Kitchen with Godmilow. In exploring both men’s public images as similarly eccentric and flamboyant personas, Vawter’s own presence as embodying actor hovers vividly near the surface, accentuated by Godmilow’s approach to intercutting the originally separate halves of the piece. The result is a fascinating triple portrait scrutinizing the social and political complexities of generational gay identity in the immediate wake of the homophobic denial and bigotry of the 1980s.
Program by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano. Notes by Mark Toscano. New 16mm print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive. Special thanks to Jill Godmilow and Ricky Herbst.
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Sunday, June 23, 2024, 7:30pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES FILMFORUM:
Alee Peoples: Something Pretending To Be Something Else
Alee Peoples: Something Pretending To Be Something Else
Filmmaker in person!
Please join us for a program celebrating the weirdly transformative power of analog film as we attempt to elevate the mystical ordinary and conjure the ineffable through the work of the one and only Alee Peoples. Although her wide-ranging art practice spans numerous mediums, Los Angeles-based Peoples’ filmmaking perhaps crystallizes her various interests and esoteric notions the most vividly. Working predominantly in 16mm, Peoples’ films are full of mystery, confusion, surprise, and revelation, weaving an uncanny emotional collage from deceptively simple or seemingly offhand materials that blur the lines between the wilfully formal and the radically informal.
Filled with gloriously strange and surprising humanity (and humans), Peoples’ films almost play out like conceptual rebuses, employing a deeply familiar yet totally unpredictable language of social, ritual, and quotidian observation. On the surface, her work is funny, unexpected, seductive, and unabashedly and engagingly odd, but the cumulative effect of each film as it unfolds is to materialize a revelatory present tense embodying complex social, political, and philosophical inquiries.
Program and note by Mark Toscano.
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Thursday, April 18, 2024, 8pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LIGHTSTRUCK:
Hungarian Animation: Legends & Dreams
One of the vital regions of bold experimentation in avant-garde animation, Hungarian artists have produced a startlingly eclectic array of lyrical, hypnotic visions that are as conscious in their socio-political messaging as they are vivid in their aesthetic and technique. Lightstruck is excited to present this assembly of wildly inventive and visually stunning short films from a revolutionary period in animation for Hungary, spanning the late 1960s to the mid-1980s.
Screening in recent restorations from the Hungarian National Film Archive, this selection of films invokes the language of legends and the logic of dreams to explore diverse questions of national identity, political instability and psychic liberation, featuring techniques including pencil drawing, cel animation, cutouts, progressive loops, and even stop motion with cookies and beans. We are thrilled to share these intensely memorable, surprising, and often hallucinatory films as a testament to the radical imaginations and prodigious talents of this golden age of Hungarian experimental animation.
Very special thanks to Annaida Orosz and the Hungarian National Film Archive. Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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Saturday, March 30, 2024, 7:30pm
Academy Museum, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
Takashi Ito: Animating Spirits
Japanese film wizard Takashi Ito is rightfully considered one of the most unique and thrilling practitioners of experimental cinema over the last few decades, and his 16mm films routinely leave audiences awestruck. Utilizing a combination of extraordinary in-camera animation techniques and inspired photographic alchemy, Ito harnesses the fundamental processes of cinema with his visionary and technically astonishing analog methods to create films that re-fashion reality and conjure the impossible.
This extremely rare program of films by Ito features a wide range of his astonishing shorts, including ecstatic photo animations, ghostly apparitions, and ruminations on family and individuality, all screening in 16mm prints flown in from Japan just for this program.
Programmed and note by Academy Film Archive Senior Film Preservationist Mark Toscano. All films courtesy of Image Forum, Tokyo. Special thanks to Takashi Ito and Koyo Yamashita.
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Thursday, March 14, 2024, 8pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LIGHTSTRUCK:
Cheryl Dunye: Shorts from the ’90s
Although known most widely for her hugely influential 1996 feature The Watermelon Woman, Cheryl Dunye preceded this iconic film with an eclectic series of totally magnetic short films and videos produced in the early-mid 1990s. These works, such as Janine, She Don’t Fade, The Potluck and the Passion, Greetings From Africa, and others, not only introduce us to the formative work of an inspired artist exploring different modes of subjective expression, but also serve as a generation-defining exploration of a Black lesbian cinematic viewpoint.
Throughout the six shorts in this program, Dunye’s voice as a conceptualist, writer, director, and performer are marked by her sharp humor and intimate, philosophical writing, framed within inventive and playful formal structures and direct address storytelling. These are crucial works of 1990s queer cinema, with a confidence, wit, charm, and daring intelligence that has cemented them as classics of personal filmmaking. Lightstruck is thrilled to present a full program of Dunye’s early short videos, concluding with a 16mm print of her 1996 film Greetings From Africa.
All shorts courtesy of Janus Films. 16mm print of Greetings From Africa courtesy of the Academy Film Archive. This program contains some adult content. Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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Thursday, February 22, 2024 , 8pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LIGHTSTRUCK:
Nobuhiro Aihara: Third Eye Animation
Lightstruck is overjoyed to present a pair of programs showcasing the staggering animated short films of Japanese visionary Nobuhiro Aihara. From the mid-1960s to his unexpected passing in 2011, Aihara produced a truly astonishing body of animated work, often employing virtuosic hand-drawn abstractions and a tactile engagement with the forces of nature, resulting in a deep-feeling, transcendent cinematic psychedelia like no other.
A constant experimenter, Aihara was always exploring new modes of manifesting time, natural energies, and complex emotionality, sometimes juxtaposing delicate moments of ecstatic, meditative beauty with utterly chaotic, cacophonous, surrealist freakouts. His films have very rarely screened in the U.S., and we hope that this modest offering will raise awareness of one of the greatest talents of visionary cinema and experimental animation the medium has ever seen.
Program I at 8pm, Program II at approximately 930pm. One admission is good for both programs! Several of the films in these programs contain flicker.
Huge thanks to Hirofumi Sakamoto and the family of Nobuhiro Aihara. Program by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano, notes by Mark Toscano.
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Saturday, February 17, 2024, 7:30pm
Academy Museum, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
Welcome to the West Coast Underground
In the 1960s–1970s, the notion of “underground cinema” represented an incredibly varied film culture that sought to challenge, transgress, and thumb its nose at a mainstream media landscape that was seen as regressive and calcified, and definitely not representing the contemporary moment. Independent cinemas, alternative film societies, activist arts groups, campus film clubs, and numerous other venues and organizations propelled the phenomenon of underground cinema to the forefront of cutting-edge cinematic culture.
This program—inspired by the Academy Museum’s current exhibition Outside the Mainstream—is an all-16mm, all–West Coast snapshot of films that found a home in the experimental cinema underground, ranging from post-Beatnik tomfoolery to comic gender performance satire to a talking blues retelling of the life of Jesus. Poetry, humor, and irreverence abound, culminating in a Ben Van Meter film documenting his and Bruce Conner’s appearance on Art Linkletter’s show to explain how they’re not actually pornographers.
Program and note by Mark Toscano. All films courtesy of the Academy Film Archive, Canyon Cinema, and the filmmakers.
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Tuesday, January 30, 2024, 8pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LIGHTSTRUCK:
Steven Arnold’s Luminous Procuress +
Jack Smith’s Yellow Sequence
Steven Arnold’s Luminous Procuress and The Yellow Sequence by Jack Smith, both in 16mm!
Multidisciplinary artist and Dalí protégé, Steven Arnold fearlessly distinguished himself as a singular and pivotal creative force in the burgeoning Bay Area underground art scene of the 60s and 70s. Exploring new realms of consciousness through the aid of psychedelic substances, Arnold engaged with a colorful cast of free thinkers to create an idiosyncratic body of work exploring themes of fantasy, transformation, surrealism, self-discovery, and cutting-edge fashion. In 1970, after making multiple experimental short films and programming the Nocturnal Dream Shows – an avant-garde midnight screening series in San Francisco – Arnold made his only feature, Luminous Procuress. Featuring exuberant performances from drag legends The Cockettes and an otherworldly Buchla score by electronic composer Warner Jepson, this film explores a queer, colorful, and sensual dream-space unlike any other. Erotic, esoteric, and positively hallucinatory, prepare to transcend through a strange realm of absolute opulence, allegory, liberation and divine beauty.
Luminous Procuress will be preceded by Jack Smith’s The Yellow Sequence, featuring performances from Tiny Tim, Mario Montez, a mermaid, and various ‘30s horror movie monsters.
This program contains adult content.
Program and notes by Zena Grey. Special thanks to Jon Shibata. 16mm preservation print of Luminous Procuress courtesy of the Pacific Film Archive and Harry Tsvi Strauch. 16mm print of The Yellow Sequence courtesy of Canyon Cinema.
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Friday, January 19, 2024, 7pm
Xcèntric @ The CCCB, Barcelona, Spain
There is Something on Your Mind:
Restored Los Angeles Artists’ Films
from the Academy Film Archive
As a film preservationist at the Academy Film Archive, I’ve been specializing in the conservation, restoration, and curation of experimental film for more than twenty years. It’s such an honor and pleasure to do this work, but I particularly love to curate programs, because sharing these films with interested and engaged audiences is like falling in love with them over and over again for me. It’s my first time screening films in Barcelona in person, so I wanted to bring a personal selection of some of my favorite 16mm American experimental films I’ve worked on, with a special emphasis on Los Angeles-centric films that may be somewhat lesser known, but which will likely be exciting discoveries for many viewers.
There have been a lot of pop philosophical jokes about Los Angeles not being a place, but rather a state of mind, and despite the cliché, there is some truth to this sentiment. It’s also an incredibly geographically diverse place, so constructing a single holistic identity for it as a comprehensible space seems futile. Essentially, Los Angeles is really hard to define and summarize, but I dearly love it, so I thought it would be interesting to share a program that contains work by artists who are perhaps inspired by their time in Los Angeles to explore different subjective spaces/states of mind.
The films in this program were all made by artists who live (or at one point lived) in Los Angeles, and represent a wildly diverse array of audiovisual explorations of inner and outer space. Over 88 minutes, we’ll experience animation, live action, documentary, poetry, optical transformations, landscape studies, psychedelic sci-fi, musical palm trees, infrared photography, roadkill, and a Petula Clark song that will almost certainly be stuck in your head for a long time after the show is over.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano. All films will screen in restored 16mm prints from the Academy Film Archive with thanks to the filmmakers. Kristallnacht was restored by the Academy Film Archive and the Pacific Film Archive with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
This screening is part of a symposium on film archiving called Encuentro sobre archivos cinematográficos, also at The CCCB on January 18-19, 2024.
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Tuesday, January 16, 2024, 8:30pm
Light Cone, Luminor Hôtel de Ville, Paris, France
Absolute Abstraction: Five American Artists
This program focuses on five American artists (Robert Breer, Robert Russett, Lillian Schwartz, John Whitney, and James Whitney) who developed eclectic practices devoted to abstraction, inspired by diverse references including hard-edge abstract painting, cellular formations, optical/neural connections, and Islamic geometrical patterns.
Whether via pioneering computer animation, extensive research of optical phenomena, or handmade animation techniques, these artists explored and channeled the primal energy of abstract cinema to produce immersive works of deep emotional and perceptual engagement.
Program and note by Mark Toscano. Lillian Schwartz films courtesy of the Henry Ford Museum with thanks to Kristen Gallerneaux. Robert Russett films courtesy of Moving Image from the Collections of The Henry Ford and the Academy Film Archive.
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Thursday, December 14, 2023, 8pm
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
This remarkable film by the extraordinary Haile Gerima (Bush Mama, Sankofa) is a true masterclass in radical documentary filmmaking. It’s a masterclass in filmmaking, period. It feels almost like a blueprint for an alternative approach to documentary and film activism which privileges inclusion, empathy, urgency, emotion, and engagement over the more typical assembly of organized facts and anecdotes.
Wilmington 10 – USA 10,000 is about so much more than the Wilmington 10. Gerima instead shows us how the wrongful conviction of the group is one component of a much larger and more complex issue, centered on both the racism of the criminal justice system and the systematic oppression of political activism and activists. But movingly, the film is also about family, community, and resilience. Gerima shows us that to talk about injustice and oppression, one must also talk about and to those who are affected by and who are fighting to dismantle these systems. The attention, devotion, respect, and love he clearly shows his subjects is inspiring and dimensionalizes and humanizes the notion of a struggle, the details of which can sometimes be lost on a larger scale.
I had the extreme honor of working on a restoration of this riveting film at the Academy Film Archive, and I’ve been very eager for it to screen again in LA, since few people were able to attend its only previous local showing two years ago. Please join us to close out the Fall 2023 season of Lightstruck by experiencing this amazing, crucial film. This film screens courtesy of the Academy Film Archive, with very special thanks to Haile Gerima, Shirikiana Aina, and Merawi Gerima. Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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Sunday, December 10, 2023
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES FILMFORUM:
Hayoun Kwon: Virtually Real
Hayoun Kwon in person!
Los Angeles Filmforum is thrilled to welcome internationally acclaimed media artist Hayoun Kwon to present her immersive digital animation work in her first solo screening in Southern California. Originally from South Korea, Paris-based Kwon employs numerous tools – including first-person game engines, VR, and various forms of CG – to conjure worlds both real and imagined in a startling documentary mode that blurs the lines between evidence and speculation. Kwon is a rare artist whose dazzling visuals and technological engagement are fully matched and dimensionalized by her powerfully critical perspective and subtle conceptualizing and framing of her subject matter.
Her early breakout film Lack of Evidence conjures landscapes and spaces of uncertain stability in telling the dramatic story of a young Nigerian’s application for asylum in France. In three remarkable pieces from 2013-2015, Kwon examines the border and DMZ between North and South Korea, allowing three very different technical and aesthetic strategies to enable deep critical and poetic investigation of the implications of this highly politicized frontier. In her more recent work, her subjective and vivid documentary mode of inquiry has employed VR and interactivity as the spectator inhabits fantastic but complex landscapes of unexpected social and political resonance.
With support from the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, Filmforum has been honored to commission a new work from Hayoun Kwon, and this film – The Butterfly Dream – will have its premiere in our screening, with the filmmaker in person to discuss her work.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano. Special thanks to Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.
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Friday, November 17, 2023
Academy Museum, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
Maureen Selwood: Animating the Interior
Maureen Selwood in person!
Over her wide-ranging career as a visual artist working in installation, performance, and particularly animation, Maureen Selwood has created a pioneering body of work that is vividly evocative and marked by a tender and intimate poetry. Often focusing on stories, memories, and dreams that reframe and foreground women’s subjectivity and experience, Selwood’s animated films employ multiple techniques and textures to showcase her highly lyrical and unmistakably personal approach to line, color, and movement. Surrealist moments of surprise and humor combine with themes of loss, grief, resistance, and empowerment, resulting in a memorable cinematic sensibility that is deeply empathetic as it externalizes complex emotions and consciousness with great awareness and beauty.
The Academy Film Archive has been home to Selwood’s collection since 2016, and this program features restorations of several of her 16mm and 35mm films, in addition to a selection of digital work.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
Thursday, November 16, 2023
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
Since the early 1970s, many wildly creative Estonian artists have produced an incredibly influential and diverse body of experimental animation that rivals the traditions of any other European country. Though the vitality of Estonian animation extends back even decades more, the work that began to emerge at this time via brilliant and irreverent artists such as Rein Raamat and Priit Pärn made a huge impact, inspiring an adventurousness in animation practice marked by eclectic techniques and an unusually expressive and audacious visual style. Themes of dehumanization, oppression, and radical liberation permeate many of these intoxicating films, with their complexity of idea and vision only matched by their dark humor and anarchic spirit.
This program will feature gorgeous recent restorations (courtesy of the Estonian Film Institute) of strange, surrealistic, and often morbidly humorous films by Priit Pärn, Rein Raamat, Janno Põldma, Rao Heidmets, Mati Kütt, and Ando Keskküla. Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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Monday, October 23, 2023
Academy Museum, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
Early & Late Brakhage: Academy Restorations
Since 2004, the Academy Film Archive has been the home of the collection of experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage (1933–2003). With a career that spanned more than fifty years, Brakhage’s influence and legacy as an artist of radical innovation cannot be overstated. Ultimately producing a body of work comprising well over three hundred films, Brakhage tirelessly pursued ever-evolving articulations of intimate human vision and experience, inspiring generations of filmmakers in the global avant-garde, as well as directors such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas.
The Academy has restored several dozen films by Brakhage, but because of the sheer volume of his output, restoration work is always ongoing. For this program, in the year that would have marked his 90th birthday, we are pleased to present a sampling of restoration work of Brakhage’s films by the Academy Film Archive, with a unique focus on films drawn from his earliest years of production alongside films from his last years of activity.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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Thursday, October 19, 2023
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
For nearly eight decades, maverick image-maker Lawrence Jordan has been an unstoppable force of creative spirit. Combining a passion for avant-garde art and cinema, free-associative Jungian symbolism, and alchemical theories of transformation, Jordan has conjured over 70 films ranging from dynamic live action expeditions through peyote farms and cityscapes, to his iconically dreamlike stop-motion collage animations.
Early collaborator and colleague of Stan Brakhage, assistant to Joseph Cornell, co-founder of the Camera Obscura Society, and founder of San Francisco’s first 16mm experimental film theater, Lawrence Jordan helped redefine the West Coast as a thriving space for cinematic experimentation while generating a singular style distinguishing him from his poetic contemporaries. Working exclusively on 16mm film to illustrate his alluring and occasionally haunting visions, at age 90, Jordan continues to infuse the medium with fresh perspective.
This dazzling installment of Lightstruck presents a diverse array of 16mm films (courtesy of Canyon Cinema) which span Jordan’s career, including a Los Angeles premiere of his 2021 film, Belle Du Jour!
Program and notes by Zena Grey.
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Tuesday, October 3 & Thursday, October 5, 2023
Image Forum Festival, Tokyo, Japan
The Astonishing Frame:
16mm Restorations from the Academy Film Archive
This program is named for a lost 1904 film by the legendary French magician and filmmaker, Georges Méliès. Méliès was one of the earliest filmmakers who understood the power of film to create moments of surprise, magic, and amazement. In experimental cinema, I have myself often been drawn to the work of filmmakers who are inspired by these same desires – to create a sense of engagement and wonder in the audience – and I wanted to curate a program of 16mm experimental films that embodied these intentions.
The films in this program include animation, time-lapse photography, complex optical printing, contact printing, hand-processing, graphical experiments, and many other explorations and manipulations of the film material and frame, each resulting in a miraculous and surprising cinematic experience that only film can offer. All of these films will be shown in restored 16mm prints I had the honor of working on at the Academy Film Archive.
This selection is also in tribute to the amazing history of Japanese experimental cinema, which is incredibly eclectic, but which has produced a particularly astonishing variety of work that employs the illusionistic capabilities of film to truly excite us (such as films by Matsumoto, Ito, Kota, Sonoda, and so many others). I hope that these poetic and magical films will surprise and thrill you; I chose this program for Image Forum from among some of my very favorite films I’ve had the pleasure to restore.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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Sunday, September 24, 2023
2220 Arts & Archives
LOS ANGELES FILMFORUM:
Collision Center: Movies by Mike Stoltz
Artist, filmmaker, curator, educator, musician, all-around sound and image maker Mike Stoltz has been an integral presence in the Los Angeles film community and the international experimental film landscape for over a decade now. His cinematic explorations are deeply engaging, thrilling, sometimes cacophonously energetic experiences that truly give us radical and fresh ideas about representation, space, and the very nature of seeing and hearing. But much more than mere audiovisual experiments, Stoltz’s films challenge our relationship to urban and domestic landscapes, politicizing them on a formal and material level, underscoring and heightening our empathetic response and conceptual consciousness. Themes of humanity, incarceration, liberation, and the latent embedded complexity of our inhabited landscapes mix thoughtfully in a brew that also employs the fundamental intensities of film and cinema to create a visceral connection to his subject matter.
Mike Stoltz is currently on leave from Los Angeles, but we’re thrilled to welcome him back to town for this special solo screening, comprising the majority of his cinematic works, almost all showing in their original 16mm. Come celebrate his presence and his work with us in an eye- and ear-popping feast of radical abstraction/figuration, optical fragmentation, and some of the richest and gnarliest audiovisual collisions around.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano. Please note that this program contains flicker.
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Friday, September 22, 2023
Academy Museum, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
The Tawdry Visions of George & Mike Kuchar
“George and Mike Kuchar’s films were my first inspiration… these were the pivotal films of my youth, bigger influences than Warhol, Kenneth Anger, even The Wizard of Oz. Here were directors I could idolize—complete crackpots without an ounce of pretension, outsiders to even ‘underground’ sensibilities who made exactly the films they wanted to make without any money, starring their friends.
“The Kuchar brothers gave me the self-confidence to believe in my own tawdry vision.” – John Waters
Twins George and Mike Kuchar were born in 1942, growing up in a working-class Bronx neighborhood where their frequent moviegoing represented a cathartic escape into a world of hyperbolic fantasy that felt totally alien in contrast to their daily surroundings. They began to make their own 8mm films as teenagers (first collaboratively, and soon after individually), producing numerous ambitious and elaborately designed mini-epics in eye-popping Kodachrome before Jonas Mekas and other New York experimental film denizens finally caught up with them in the mid-1960s.
These films (and the hundreds more that followed) ooze with massive inspiration and creativity—not to mention infectious, often uproarious humor—and manage miraculously to be utterly earnest without naïveté and brilliantly satirical without a whiff of irony.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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Thursday, September 14, 2023
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
Lightstruck presents: Alchemy of the Alphabet: Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma (1970) with Su Friedrich’s Sink or Swim (1990). Both films will screen in their original 16mm format, with Sink or Swim presented in a new print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive. Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
Two mesmerizing alphabetic masterpieces of the American avant-garde! Hollis Frampton’s indescribable Zorns Lemma (1970) is one of the towering experimental films of its time, a major work that blazed a path for the New American Cinema into the 1970s and beyond. Its deconstruction of language and consciousness in a mode combining the structural/conceptual with the vividly experiential has remained a reference point for numerous artists since.
Twenty years later, and in partial response to Frampton’s film, Su Friedrich produced one of her most complex, humanistic, and utterly engrossing works, Sink or Swim (1990), in which the alphabet serves as a throughline for Friedrich to unpack a woman’s relationship to her father. Though rooted firmly in language and arresting monochrome imagery combining original and found footage, Friedrich somehow achieves the miraculous effect of a cumulative and deeply felt empathetic awareness that exists beyond literal description.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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Friday, August 25, 2023
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
This first edition of the new monthly experimental film series Lightstruck will feature two big reels of 16mm West Coast psychedelic films from the 1960s-’70s curated by Mark Toscano, almost entirely in new or restored film prints, and including the restoration world premiere of Donald Fox’s legendary cosmic epic Omega (1970).
Beyond mind-bending films by Pat O’Neill, Barbara Hammer, Adam Beckett, Chick Strand, Will Hindle, David Lebrun, Kathy Rose, and many others, the evening will also feature DJ sets before/between/after the films by Cameron Stallones (Sun Araw)!
Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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Saturday, June 3, 2023
Academy Museum, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
Made in Hollywood by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto
Bruce Yonemoto and Patricia Arquette in person!
Since the mid-1970s, Los Angeles artists Bruce and Norman Yonemoto have crafted a crucial body of video work that has remained as relevant and insightful as it is devastatingly funny. Particularly in their work of the 1980s–1990s, they employed the language and tropes of television, advertising, and mass media to construct brightly colored video works that skewer the hypermediation of human experience and its distortion of emotion and identity into farce and spectacle.
One of their most acclaimed and ambitious works, Made in Hollywood, stars a perfectly cast, 22-year-old Patricia Arquette as a starry-eyed new arrival in Hollywood, alongside acting powerhouses Mary Woronov, Ron Vawter, and Michael Lerner. A darkly satirical pastiche of television and dream factory cliches, Made in Hollywood is nearly a definitive summation of the Yonemotos’ ongoing themes and targets. Deconstructing and rebuilding a Tinseltown narrative from scratch, the result is a bitingly funny, effortlessly sophisticated examination of the layers of lurid artifice that confuse the boundaries between reality, fantasy, and desire.
Made in Hollywood will be preceded by the Yonemotos’ short video Vault, a hilarious and exhilaratingly absurd compression of mass media attitudes on love and loss.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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April 20, 2023
Academy Museum, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
Amy Halpern: Unowned Luxuries
This program also screened 2/10-2/11/2023 at Museum of the Moving Image, NY, NY and 3/30/23 at Light Field Film Festival, San Francisco.
Amy Halpern (1953–2022) is cherished not only for her memorable and beautiful films, but also for her inexhaustible engagement and enthusiasm as a devoted presence in the Los Angeles film and arts community. She had a profound curiosity about nearly everything and everyone she encountered, and her extensive body of film work reflects this passion for the sights, sounds, textures, and complex connections to be found and explored in the world around us.
This eclectic program includes an intricate sampling of Amy Halpern’s films spanning multiple decades, including several LA premieres drawn from the final batch of new 16mm films she released in June 2022. The title, Unowned Luxuries, not only derives from a small series of short films she authored (two of which are featured in this program), but could be understood as defining a larger philosophical approach Halpern took to her filmmaking practice. Many of her films take the form of loving and attentive appreciations of people, animals, places, things, and experiences that she related to as “luxuries” for her to hold, treasure, and share, and yet which retain their essential autonomous qualities to resist complete capture, remaining “unowned” despite also being Halpern’s (and ours) to behold and delight in.
Program by Mark Toscano and David Lebrun. Notes by Mark Toscano.
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April 16, 2023
Billy Wilder Theatre, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Amy Halpern: Falling Lessons
This program also screened 2/10-2/11/2023 at Museum of the Moving Image, NY, NY and 3/30/23 at Light Field Film Festival, San Francisco.
Program by Mark Toscano and David Lebrun.
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April 2, 2023
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES FILMFORUM:
Amy Halpern: Plausible Light Sources
This program also screened 2/10-2/11/2023 at Museum of the Moving Image, NY, NY.
Program by Mark Toscano and David Lebrun.
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FEBRUARY 6, 2023
Academy Museum, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
Thom Andersen: Work on Film
Thom Andersen in person!
Thom Andersen is no stranger to Los Angeles cinephiles, and his extensive work as a filmmaker, programmer, critic, teacher, writer, historian, and movie lover has had an enormous and meaningful impact on generations of audiences and students alike. With Red Hollywood (1996) and Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), Andersen established an international reputation as one of contemporary cinema’s most keen-eyed and thoughtful essayists, with a singular and deeply committed perspective on the complexities and particularities of film history, which he has continued to develop.
Years prior to these watershed films, Andersen’s first flurry of filmmaking activity in his 20s reflects a similar diversity, engagement, and interest in the layered and reverberating implications of cultural and historical moments and the images that seek to represent them. His interest in exploring and responding to experiences and spaces of resonant ephemerality prefigure his later opuses in which the incidental subtexts in cinema history are revealed to be much more meaningful than we could have imagined.
This program will survey Andersen’s three influential short films from the 1960s, all in restored prints from the Academy Film Archive, along with his personal and elegiac return to 16mm, the acclaimed Get Out of the Car (2010). Thom Andersen will then join us for a discussion about his work, followed by a presentation of his ambitious and illuminating documentary, Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1974).
Program by Hyesung ii and Mark Toscano. Notes by Mark Toscano.
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JANUARY 19, 2023
Academy Museum, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
Mike Henderson: The Blues and the Abstract Truth
Mike Henderson in person!
Blues musician, painter, and filmmaker, the truly original artist Mike Henderson’s creative path found its luminous trajectory upon his relocation from Missouri to San Francisco in the mid-1960s, where he had come to study at the San Francisco Art Institute, one of the only desegregated schools available to him at the time. Quickly befriending remarkable artists and musicians such as Bruce Nauman, Robert Nelson, Jay DeFeo, William T. Wiley, and even Jerry Garcia, Henderson established himself as a multi-disciplinary artist and educator with a one-of-a-kind vision drawing on his complex notions of identity, society, and the elusive mystery of art itself.
His 16mm short films, spanning the late 1960s to the mid 1980s, represent an incredibly fresh and engaging sensibility that is equal parts painting, blues, and film. Self-taught as a filmmaker, Henderson’s films approach the unique qualities of the medium in an unexpected way. These films—whether they be his talking blues shorts, his films querying Black history and identity, or his bewitching, semi-abstract works of the 1980s—are full of visual, intellectual, and emotional pleasures as they navigate the confusions and curiosities of consciousness. Engaging, exciting, hilarious, and humane, his films often grapple with the very essence of artistic creation itself, as if to ask (quoting his dear friend Wiley), “What’s it all mean?”
The Academy Film Archive has been conserving and restoring Mike Henderson’s films since 2008. This program represents the first time these remarkable and illuminating works are being seen in Los Angeles.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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JANUARY 8, 2023
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES FILMFORUM:
HAND MADE: Recent Films by Dicky Bahto
Artist, curator, and educator Dicky Bahto is not only widely known for his extensive practice in photography, film, installation, performance, and his numerous collaborations with luminaries of experimental music, but also as an educator and curator who has inspired and influenced many years of students and audiences alike with his profound appreciation and passion for the time-based arts and beyond. His varied and complex engagement with moving image and photographic media is steeped in a deeply felt humanity and empathy, manifesting through his inspired photographic eye and frequently direct interaction with and appreciation of the material vitality of film and cinema. His films achieve heightened emotional states of great intimacy and poetry, often channeling the uniquely aleatory qualities of film to carry a sensuality and spirituality hovering in the space between loving depiction and vaporous abstraction.
Filmforum is thrilled to showcase the work of its longtime friend and periodic collaborator, as we present a program of recent work by Dicky Bahto, including pieces made in collaboration with musicians Sarah Davachi and Raum (Liz Harris + Jefre Cantu-Ledesma). The evening will conclude with a new expanded cinema collaboration with Tashi Wada.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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DECEMBER 16, 2022
Academy Museum, Los Angeles
Radical Archaeologies: Films by Greta Snider
This program also screened 2/24/2023 at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, with Greta Snider in person.
Greta Snider in person!
Greta Snider emerged as a filmmaker from the 1980s San Francisco DIY/punk scene with a vital and multi-layered perspective, examining the margins of society, identity, and experience. Alternative narratives, subcultures, and lifestyles are explored with great sensitivity, humor, and a genuinely fresh reorientation of vision that engages the audience on numerous emotional, intellectual, and visceral levels. Snider frequently works very materially with the film medium, whether through hand-processing, optical printing, or other tactile approaches. Often exploring difficult and complex concepts such as grief, trauma, sexuality, abortion, death, and pleasure, Snider’s activation of the film material creates an immersive and immediate space for her investigations to unfold. Despite the intensity of her themes, these films are extremely stimulating, deeply insightful, and often incredibly fun.
The Academy Film Archive is home to Greta Snider’s collection, and this program will feature numerous North American restoration premieres from the Archive.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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DECEMBER 11, 2022
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES FILMFORUM:
Curt McDowell: True, Blue, & Very Taboo
Melinda McDowell in person!
McDowell’s short feature Taboo (The Single & The LP) is easily one of his most complex and fascinatingly ambitious films, as it interweaves several narrative and conceptual threads, which include board games, erotic obsessions, and an extended rumination on (and dramatization of!) some mysterious bathroom graffiti. Long thought lost, this singular, memorable film will be preceded by McDowell’s hilarious and unexpectedly tender home movie excursion A Visit to Indiana, and the surrealist and romantic fantasia True Blue & Dreamy.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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DECEMBER 11, 2022
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES FILMFORUM:
Curt McDowell: Peed Into The Wind
Melinda McDowell in person!
McDowell’s first short feature Peed Into The Wind is a hilarious satire on stardom and desire, steeped in comic intrigue and DIY melodrama. Starring a whole cavalcade of his regular company of performers, Peed anchors a program that also features the metatextual Truth for Ruth, his beloved musical short Boggy Depot, and the wonderfully charming and nearly-never-seen absurdity The Mean Brothers “Get Stood Up”.
“Peed Into The Wind smears across the screen like one of those dirty underground comic books. It’s loaded with a lot of big scenes and unusual looking people that make this epic resemble a clogged toilet. Unfortunately, since several of the performers were not as loyal as Ainslie Pryor and John Thomas, the plot is difficult to follow but in no way hinders the sewer-like sequences. It’s quite enjoyable and possesses the releasing power of an enema.” (George Kuchar)
Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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DECEMBER 9, 2022
Academy Museum, Los Angeles
The Confessions of Curt McDowell
Melinda McDowell in person!
Dirty, playful, bawdy, freaky, raunchy, sexy, brilliant, campy, punky, puerile, gross, glamorous…there are not enough evocative adjectives to accurately encompass the innumerable pleasures of Curt McDowell’s resolutely queer and radically multi-sexual body of film work in all its florid fecundity.
A contemporary of John Waters and the Kuchar brothers, San Francisco-based McDowell produced a stimulating body of films between the late 1960s and his death in 1987 from HIV/AIDS, drawing vividly on his obsessions with sex, pop music, performance, comedy, melodrama, and the delicious dichotomy of the gorgeous and the grotesque. Most notorious for his nearly three-hour horror/comedy/porno/melodrama/cult classic Thundercrack! (1975), McDowell also created numerous hilarious, intimate, audacious, and unexpectedly profound short films over his tragically short career.
The Academy Film Archive has been home to Curt McDowell’s films since 2014, and since then has been actively working to restore his entire body of work. This program will feature an eclectic selection of these restorations, most showing for the first time in Los Angeles, and including the world premiere of the restoration of McDowell’s most provocative and acclaimed short film, Loads.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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OCTOBER 24, 2022
Academy Museum, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
Sally Cruikshank & Vince Collins: Cartoons for Convoluted Craniums!
Sally Cruikshank in person!
Sally Cruikshank and Vince Collins both studied animation at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1970s and were two of the most brilliantly creative talents of the new wave of experimental animators then emerging. Both were influenced by classic cartoons and underground comics alike, and their respective approaches in boldly colorful cel animation reflected an appropriately surreal and anarchic response to an America still deeply embroiled in the Vietnam War, in a post-psychedelic era marked by massive upheaval and unrest. Cel animation had long been the standard medium of the industry, but few American experimental animators engaged with it as deeply and creatively as Cruikshank and Collins. Its historical identity and aesthetic properties represent a unique visual language offering vibrant approaches to movement, color, layering, and form, and these two artists explored its qualities in radical and innovative ways.
Vince Collins won a Student Academy Award for his 1974 film Euphoria and continued to produce a hyper-distinctive body of short animation work into the 1980s that combined vividly colorful, mind-melting abstractions with weird and unpredictable transformations. Employing a visual vocabulary of often eccentric grotesquerie in constant flux, Collins gained perhaps his widest notoriety for the singularly creative and provocative cult short Malice in Wonderland (1982), made in collaboration with his wife, the artist Miwako Collins. The Academy Film Archive has been restoring Collins’s complete body of short films since 2019, and this program will represent the world premiere of these new restorations, featuring multiple films not previously distributed or seen for decades.
Sally Cruikshank’s classic Quasi at the Quackadero (1975) is one of the most widely circulated independent animated shorts in the history of the medium, earning it a well-deserved spot on the National Film Registry. Tapping into some of the same uneasy and hysterical energy that Collins also mined, Cruikshank’s films often explore a fascination with the mayhem and imagination of classic studio animation from the early 1930s, transporting that energy to a contemporary context in which the surrealism and character tropes take on a complex significance and satirical humor. What better way to respond to a world gone mad than with something even madder? Cruikshank’s films reside at the Academy Film Archive, and this program will feature beautiful film prints generously donated to the Archive by Cruikshank and her husband, Jon Davison.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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SEPTEMBER 15, 2022
Academy Museum, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
Derek Jarman: Super 8 Revelations
James Mackay in person!
Few filmmakers have earned the descriptor of “legendary,” but Derek Jarman (1942–1994) is one this word seems to fit. With innovation and an intensity of devotion to his cinematic craft, Jarman produced a radical and hugely influential series of films over the course of his tragically short life, including the acclaimed features Jubilee (1978), Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1987), and Blue (1993). Known for their mystery, beauty, and evocative texture, Jarman’s films often employed classical myth, narrative, and history in a complex interplay that tackled topics ranging from queer sensuality and identity to often brutal and brilliant indictments of Thatcher’s Britain and the outmoded mores and political ideologies it represented.
However, the intimacy, presence, and audiovisual experimentation of these more widely known feature films have their origins in Jarman’s prodigious Super 8 filmmaking practice, which roughly spanned the period from 1970 to 1983, during which he produced approximately 80 short films of incredible diversity. The Super 8 medium, with its lower cost, practical limitations, and unique aesthetic properties, inspired Jarman to experiment freely and develop a complex and exciting cinematic language that deeply informed his later work, not to mention the work of generations of artists he inspired.
Thanks to the Luma Foundation and Jarman’s longtime friend and producer, James Mackay, these rarely seen Super 8 films have been newly digitized in recent years, in an appropriately experimental manner that acknowledges Jarman’s tendency to often show these films at different speeds and with different soundtracks, giving them an unfixed form that resisted definitive characterization. In translating Jarman’s Super 8 films for digital presentation, Mackay has not only made these remarkable works accessible, but also revived the unique qualities of spectacle and strange magic that they embody for an immersive and revelatory cinematic experience. Featuring soundtracks by Coil, Simon Fisher Turner, Nick Hudson, and Cyclobe, this program will showcase an eclectic array of Jarman’s Super 8 films chosen especially for this occasion.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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AUGUST 4, 2022
Academy Museum, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
Animation from Another World: Chronopolis and Shorts by Piotr Kamler
Piotr Kamler is one of the most startlingly creative animators in the history of the medium. Originally from Poland, Kamler has been based in France since the late 1950s and over a decades-long career has produced a series of animated films that intermix various techniques and aesthetic vocabularies in service of a singular and otherworldly imagination. With a rich visual language that combines genuinely fantastic imagery with a strangely intimate and affecting emotional power, his films inhabit a cinematic space that is both intensely engaging and mesmerizingly alien. Filled with images and ideas of staggering uniqueness and palpable wonder, Kamler’s films manage to involve us in an immersive, fantastical experience while we nevertheless remain consciously awed by the exquisiteness of his craft.
Kamler’s universe is often one in which semi-abstract narratives unfold in landscapes that simultaneously evoke mythic metaphorical tales and vivid science fiction. The cryptic and mystical quality of his films is further enhanced by his numerous collaborations with some of the most significant avant-garde composers in Europe, most of whom were associated with the radically influential Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), including Bernard Parmegiani, François Bayle, and Luc Ferrari.
This program will bring together a selection of five of Kamler’s incredible short animated films screening in new digital masters overseen by the director himself, followed by a rare 35mm presentation of his widely acclaimed masterwork, Chronopolis (1982/1988), an indescribable cult classic of visionary filmmaking.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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JULY 14, 2022
Academy Museum, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
An Evening with Christopher Harris: New Restorations
Christopher Harris in person!
Recently restored by the Academy Film Archive, Christopher Harris’s memorable and evocative short feature, still/here, employs striking black-and-white 16mm cinematography and reflective associative editing to explore the social and infrastructural failings at work in the predominantly Black, under-resourced north side of St. Louis, Missouri. Evoking history and community in an approach mixing formal observation with subjective impressionism, this multi-layered experimental film essay is further enhanced by an illuminating collage soundtrack which incorporates quotidian sounds, music, interviews, and ambient recordings.
Rather than explore his themes through explanatory voiceovers or didactic montage, Harris’s film takes a much more experiential approach guided by time and texture, allowing us to see thoughtfully through his eyes and draw our own connections through the images and evidence he provides us. Sequences of urban decay and depopulated domestic spaces are framed and connected through his attentive lens, asking the audience to form conclusions about what we’re seeing, as well as to become aware of our own voyeurism. In what ways are we bystanders to or participants in the systems that allowed this to happen?
Accompanying the feature will be another recent Harris restoration produced in collaboration with Canyon Cinema, the optically printed, high-contrast short Reckless Eyeballing. In this visually arresting work of radical rephotography, Harris draws on various cinematic and media depictions of Black outlaws and weaves them into a complex collage that complicates the tropes and implications of the “threat” of the Black gaze.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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JUNE 29, 2022
Academy Museum, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
Images of the World and the Inscription of War
Jay Cassidy in person!
A visionary work of essay filmmaking, Images of the World and the Inscription of War is a defining and revelatory cinematic investigation by one of the medium’s most inspiring practitioners, Harun Farocki (1944–2014). As the film unfolds with increasing complexity and insight, Farocki spins his initial point of inquiry—the phenomenon of uninterpreted “blind spots” in Allied aerial photographs during World War II—into a much larger consideration of the interdependent relationship between war and photography. Far from representing true factual evidence, photographic records are often both a reflection of and an influence on the biases and identities of those behind and in front of the camera. In wartime, these deviations from objectivity can have powerful and far-reaching consequences, and Farocki explores his thesis with nuance, clarity, and poetic humanity in this riveting classic.
We are pleased to present Farocki’s masterpiece in a recent digital restoration by the Harun Farocki Institute produced from the original 16mm film elements. Preceding the film will be Academy Award–nominated film editor Jay Cassidy’s chilling short protest film, The Best of May, 1968 (1972), in which liberated US bombing footage and home movies filmed in Vietnam were appropriated by the filmmaker to confront audiences with a photographic record of the war that was otherwise kept hidden.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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MAY 2, 2022
Academy Museum, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
Latent Image: Three Films on Space, Time, and Change
Tacita Dean, Margaret Honda, and Daïchi Saïto in person!
Space, time, and change are fundamental qualities of cinema, but the variety of ways they can be uniquely explored in analog motion picture film have led many artists to develop their own techniques, ideas, and languages in which the physicality of the medium plays an important role. This one-of-a-kind program showcases three very different films from three exceptional artists, each exploring and celebrating the vividly immersive nature of film by approaching its materiality in a variety of visually phenomenal ways.
Tacita Dean’s rumination on J.G. Ballard, the Spiral Jetty, and contrasts of human and geologic time is a spectacular anamorphic canvas of complex and poetic in-camera compositing, using a unique system of custom-designed photographic masks. Made without a camera and even lacking an actual film negative, Margaret Honda’s monumental Spectrum Reverse Spectrum heightens our consciousness of cinematic space and time, as it cycles through the entire film color spectrum and back again over the course of a single roll of 70mm print film. And in its Los Angeles premiere, Montreal-based Daïchi Saïto’s latest film, earthearthearth, creates a painterly and ecstatic vision of the landscapes of the Andes Mountains, with sensitive cinematography transformed by his characteristically elaborate and articulate analog image manipulation.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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APRIL 14, 2022
Academy Museum, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
Strain Andromeda The
Anne McGuire in person!
What if you took a film in which all the traditional elements—dramatic through line, character development, narrative causality—were reliably in place, and then perfectly undid them all? In this utterly engrossing and iconic work of editorial alchemy, artist Anne McGuire disassembled Robert Wise’s 1971 thriller The Andromeda Strain (presented on Sunday, May 8 in the museum’s Oscar® Sundays film series) and put it back together with each of the film’s individual shots in exact reverse structural order. The result is an uncanny experience, creating a destabilized disaster narrative in which every expected property of cinematic storytelling is subverted. Cause-and-effect becomes effect-and-cause as McGuire genetically engineers her source material to uncover an entirely new and strange layer of narrative engagement.
McGuire’s video works often interrogate the basic tropes and structures of the moving image, as well as our interest in creating spectacle out of everyday experiences. However, Strain Andromeda The—the first in a series of conceptually related works by the artist, including Adventure Poseidon The and Snatchers Body The Of Invasion—manages the inverse, creating an un-spectacle in which the increasing paranoia and complexity of a pandemic narrative is gradually smoothed into reconstituted simplicity, literally shot by shot.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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FEBRUARY 26, 2022
Academy Museum, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
★ by Johann Lurf
Johann Lurf in person!
A one-of-a-kind cinematic experience, Vienna-based filmmaker Johann Lurf’s ★ is quite literally the ultimate cosmic trip through the entire history of cinema.
Drawing on extensive clips from countless films throughout the history of motion pictures, Lurf constructs an epic chronological assembly of sequences of the starry sky from the very beginning of cinema up to the present year (the film is updated annually). Each clip retains its original accompanying audio, resulting in an exhilarating experience that is at turns hypnotic, defining, and perversely comic. Lurf positions the audience as the ever-dreaming stargazers, while also celebrating the illusionism of cinema; we never quite forget that we are witnessing a sped-up history of not just motion picture technological development, but also the modern evolution of humanity’s relationship to the magnitude of space. The night sky as depicted throughout cinema is both intimate and unimaginably vast, and Lurf’s magnificent film is a brilliantly immersive and self-aware tribute to both of those grand emotional scales of cinematic engagement.
The 2022 edition of ★ will be preceded by Lurf’s short film Twelve Tales Told, in which he interweaves a dozen major studio logos to create a cinematic time-sculpture celebrating and satirizing the epic-scale branding of industrial cinema.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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JANUARY 28, 2022
Academy Museum, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
World Building in Experimental Animation
Jeron Braxton, Adebukola Bodunrin, Ezra Claytan Daniels, Sky David, and Janie Geiser in person!
World-building is a crucial concept in cinematic creation, facilitating the audience’s empathy with and immersion into the universe a film is conjuring. In animation, where often the world is being built utterly from scratch out of the filmmakers’ imaginations, the world-building itself can play an even more fundamental role in the basic definition, expression, and reception of the work. Inspired by the Academy Museum’s temporary exhibition celebrating master animation world-builder Hayao Miyazaki, this program explores the radically diverse and wildly imaginative approaches that some experimental animators have taken in creating their own audiovisual universes. This program features three recent digital shorts alongside three classic films restored by the Academy Film Archive, each developing and exploring its own incredibly unique and vivid landscape in a way that only animation can enable. Through techniques including stop-motion, cel animation, computer generated imagery (CGI), and complex photographic experimentation, these six films invite us into their worlds as they variously touch on video games, antique toys, Afrofuturism, mystical visions, space bunnies, and phallic asparagus.
Program and notes by Mark Toscano.
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DECEMBER 6, 2021
Academy Museum, Los Angeles
AVAILABLE SPACE:
Barbara Hammer: History Lessons
Florrie Burke in person!
Barbara Hammer (1939–2019) was one of cinema’s irrefutable visionaries and pioneers, forging a bold, creative, engaged, and empathic new language for filmmaking from a radical feminist and lesbian sensibility. Over her fifty-year film career, Hammer worked in an incredibly diverse array of techniques and styles to help create a new queer and feminist cinema that was sensual, responsive, inquisitive, and fearless, and which never shied away from complex and challenging themes.
Liberally employing a mixture of innocent, picturesque, risqué, and explicit images in numerous cinematic techniques, History Lessons charts a new history of lesbian identity from the 19th century to the present. Hammer reimagines and recreates history and visual culture in ways both playful and profound as she maps a lesbian consciousness across our collective visual experience.
Preceding History Lessons will be our series’ namesake film, Available Space, as well as one of Hammer’s final works, a collaborative project produced with filmmaker Matt Wolf that revisits a location from her own History Lessons and examines the loss of a key locus of lesbian life in New York City now erased by the sweeping force of gentrification.
Program and notes by K.J. Relth-Miller and Mark Toscano.
LIGHTSTRUCK 