AGAINST CIVILIZATION: SIX FILMS
“God first created silence: whole, indivisible, complete. All creatures—man, woman, beast, insect, bird, and fish—lived happily together with this silence until one day man and woman lay down together and between them created the first word. This displeased God deeply and in anger she shook out her bag of words over the world, sprinkling and showering her creation with them. Her word store rained down upon all creatures, shattering forever the whole that once was silence. God cursed the world with words and forever after it would be a struggle for man and woman to return to the original silence.”
- M. NourbeSe Philip
“As our plight deepens, we glimpse how much must be erased for our redemption.”
- John Zerzan
Films in this Program
Saul Bass
89 minutes
The one and only feature film directed by Saul Bass, the legendary designer whose title sequences offered strikingly modern thematic encapsulations of films by Preminger, Hitchcock, and others, PHASE IV is an ultra-ambitious feat of mind-bending, eye-popping imagist storytelling. The film’s astonishing ending was butchered on original release but now those essential final five minutes have been restored and returned to the movie!
Following a mysterious eclipse-like solar event, scientists begin to notice strange and unexplainable behavioral changes in ants. While initially written off as an unconcerning anomaly, it soon becomes apparent that the creatures have developed advanced intelligence along with the ability to work collectively. Scientists Ernest Hubbs and James Lesko have been transferred to a futuristic lab in a remote part of the Arizona desert in which to study these phenomena. However, when the ants begin to attack and kill both wildlife and humans, Hubbs and Lesko realize that the entire human race might now be at a deadly evolutionary disadvantage to the tiny insects
Bass holds back nothing in his swing-for-the-fences debut, displaying his dynamic visual sense through microphotography and just about any other technique you can think of in a stunner of a film that has garnered comparisons to 2001, generating the same sense of interstellar awe right here on planet Earth.
Following a mysterious eclipse-like solar event, scientists begin to notice strange and unexplainable behavioral changes in ants. While initially written off as an unconcerning anomaly, it soon becomes apparent that the creatures have developed advanced intelligence along with the ability to work collectively. Scientists Ernest Hubbs and James Lesko have been transferred to a futuristic lab in a remote part of the Arizona desert in which to study these phenomena. However, when the ants begin to attack and kill both wildlife and humans, Hubbs and Lesko realize that the entire human race might now be at a deadly evolutionary disadvantage to the tiny insects
Bass holds back nothing in his swing-for-the-fences debut, displaying his dynamic visual sense through microphotography and just about any other technique you can think of in a stunner of a film that has garnered comparisons to 2001, generating the same sense of interstellar awe right here on planet Earth.
Mick Jackson
112 minutes
The year is 1984, and anxieties surrounding nuclear annihilation, sparked by the ongoing Cold War, are at an all-time high. On the 23rd of September, a Sunday evening that would later be branded ‘The Night When Nobody Slept’, families across Britain would be glued to their televisions in horror. They were watching THREADS; a straight-to-television film depicting the nightmarish consequences of nuclear war in England, premiering for the first time on BBC Two. Combining a faux documentary style with methods typical of the British kitchen sink drama, THREADS plunged viewers into a relentlessly bleak vision of a post-apocalyptic world.
An attempt to ‘visualize the unthinkable’ THREADS is the love child of phenomenal English writer Barry Hines and renowned director Mick Jackson. Barry Hines, known for his exploration of the socio-economic struggles of northern working class England, lent to the film’s script a disturbing realism that would quite literally traumatize a generation. It’s been 40 years since the film was originally broadcast and it has lost none of its power to shock.
An attempt to ‘visualize the unthinkable’ THREADS is the love child of phenomenal English writer Barry Hines and renowned director Mick Jackson. Barry Hines, known for his exploration of the socio-economic struggles of northern working class England, lent to the film’s script a disturbing realism that would quite literally traumatize a generation. It’s been 40 years since the film was originally broadcast and it has lost none of its power to shock.
Hayao Miyazaki
133 minutes
One of Hayao Miyazaki’s many masterpieces, PRINCESS MONONOKE was released in the U.S. by Disney subsidiary Miramax in 1999 into a mainstream culture that still largely thought of animated films as children’s fare with easily defined heroes and villains. MONONOKE defied that expectation with a complex, often violent tale that pitted warring clans and creatures against each other in 14th-century Japan. Its flawed, human characters were headed by Ashitaka, a cursed prince, fated to wander the land; San, a fierce princess raised by wolves; and Lady Eboshi, a woman warrior driven to build an iron-clad sanctuary in a chaotic world.
Against the encroaching human realm, the natural world responds with equal ferocity, with animal spirits on the rampage and the great Shishi-gami, its majestic god of everything wild, the ultimate protector and also the biggest target. With its magnificent depictions of pristine, old-growth wilderness—inspired by the ancient forests on Japan’s Yakushima Island—PRINCESS MONONOKE tantalizes viewers with its vision of nature as sacred, undercut by the bittersweet knowledge that the very existence of human civilization is leading to its demise.
Against the encroaching human realm, the natural world responds with equal ferocity, with animal spirits on the rampage and the great Shishi-gami, its majestic god of everything wild, the ultimate protector and also the biggest target. With its magnificent depictions of pristine, old-growth wilderness—inspired by the ancient forests on Japan’s Yakushima Island—PRINCESS MONONOKE tantalizes viewers with its vision of nature as sacred, undercut by the bittersweet knowledge that the very existence of human civilization is leading to its demise.
Ben Russell
Ben Rivers
98 minutes
The title of A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS suggests several things at once: the primitive, the transcendental, a metaphor for cinema.
An immersive, at times mesmerizing experience, SPELL follows a nameless protagonist—played with Bressonian restraint by musician Robert A.A. Lowe—as he explores three markedly different existential options in search of utopia: as a member of a fifteen-person commune on a small Estonian island; living alone in the breathtaking wilds of northern Finland; and as a singer-guitarist for a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway.
Shot on Super 16mm in a collaboration between avant-garde heroes Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, SPELL is awash in atmosphere, bathed successively in natural, incandescent sunshine, the blues of a perpetual magic hour, and the stroboscopic concert lighting of a dingy bar. Liberated from conventional narrative causality, Robert's trajectory charts a continuous drift that signals a radical investigation of the self, an enigmatic effort to "ward off the darkness" that is engulfing our increasingly secularized world. Is this a search for fulfillment, mutual understanding, a gesture to quell boredom and unremitting solitude, an affront to utopianism, or simply a natural progression through life?
Choreographing the movements of their non-actors, Rivers and Russell explore a participatory ethnography with both their real-life characters and us, the viewers, drawing deeply from the elemental in order to shake us from our viewing habits. Bound by the structures that inevitably dictate our lives, it's easy to forget that the world is vast and ripe with possibilities, and that we should probably attempt a few alternate modes of existence before we leave this Earth behind.
An immersive, at times mesmerizing experience, SPELL follows a nameless protagonist—played with Bressonian restraint by musician Robert A.A. Lowe—as he explores three markedly different existential options in search of utopia: as a member of a fifteen-person commune on a small Estonian island; living alone in the breathtaking wilds of northern Finland; and as a singer-guitarist for a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway.
Shot on Super 16mm in a collaboration between avant-garde heroes Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, SPELL is awash in atmosphere, bathed successively in natural, incandescent sunshine, the blues of a perpetual magic hour, and the stroboscopic concert lighting of a dingy bar. Liberated from conventional narrative causality, Robert's trajectory charts a continuous drift that signals a radical investigation of the self, an enigmatic effort to "ward off the darkness" that is engulfing our increasingly secularized world. Is this a search for fulfillment, mutual understanding, a gesture to quell boredom and unremitting solitude, an affront to utopianism, or simply a natural progression through life?
Choreographing the movements of their non-actors, Rivers and Russell explore a participatory ethnography with both their real-life characters and us, the viewers, drawing deeply from the elemental in order to shake us from our viewing habits. Bound by the structures that inevitably dictate our lives, it's easy to forget that the world is vast and ripe with possibilities, and that we should probably attempt a few alternate modes of existence before we leave this Earth behind.
Peter Weir
106 minutes
Opening with the uncanny sight of a sunny, cloudless sky erupting into a torrential ice storm, Australian New Waver Peter Weir’s hallucinatory follow up to the haunting PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK is part murder mystery, part apocalyptic nightmare. When he agrees to defend a group of Aboriginal men charged with homicide, a Sydney lawyer (Richard Chamberlain) is plunged into a shadow world of secret societies, shamanic rituals, and an ancient doomsday prophecy. And then the black rain starts to fall.... Surely one of the wettest films ever made—nearly every frame is drenched in ominous, aqueous imagery—THE LAST WAVE sustains an air of dream-state dread as it builds towards its brain-bending climax.
“Strange, foreboding and brilliantly different from any film ever made in Australia, THE LAST WAVE is time past, future and present, a mingling of Aboriginal Dreamtime, Revelations, doomsday predictions and the Deluge.” — Sydney Morning Herald
“Strange, foreboding and brilliantly different from any film ever made in Australia, THE LAST WAVE is time past, future and present, a mingling of Aboriginal Dreamtime, Revelations, doomsday predictions and the Deluge.” — Sydney Morning Herald
Walon Green
Ed Spiegel
90 minutes
What film would dare go where science fiction and documentary meet? Where photographically viable evidence and narrative fiction intermingle? Where fiction threatens to tear a hole in truth? In this strange void torn asunder by contradiction there is only THE HELLSTROM CHRONICLE, one man’s journey to tell everyone that bugs are trying to TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!
Entomologist Dr. Nils Helstrom is here to rescue society from almost certain demise at the little paws of creepy-crawlies. According to the good doctor, unless we open our eyes to the threat of insects, who are mindlessly bent on destroying our precious civilization, we can kiss our pretty little lives goodbye. Using stunning 1970s macrophotography, a parade of documentary sequences capturing horrifying insects all around the world, the film argues for the cold brutality of the insect species as studied by Dr. Helstrom himself. As African driver ants consume iguanas whole and locusts destroy fertile farmland, the audience begins to wonder if we shouldn’t declare flat-out war on these damn bugs once and for all.
A perfect evening for anyone who’s ever rolled their eyes at the rose-colored classes of Planet Earth, THE HELLSTROM CHRONICLE is easily the most bizarre nature documentary ever produced. Don’t believe us? Maybe the film’s Oscar for Best Documentary Feature will change your mind.
Entomologist Dr. Nils Helstrom is here to rescue society from almost certain demise at the little paws of creepy-crawlies. According to the good doctor, unless we open our eyes to the threat of insects, who are mindlessly bent on destroying our precious civilization, we can kiss our pretty little lives goodbye. Using stunning 1970s macrophotography, a parade of documentary sequences capturing horrifying insects all around the world, the film argues for the cold brutality of the insect species as studied by Dr. Helstrom himself. As African driver ants consume iguanas whole and locusts destroy fertile farmland, the audience begins to wonder if we shouldn’t declare flat-out war on these damn bugs once and for all.
A perfect evening for anyone who’s ever rolled their eyes at the rose-colored classes of Planet Earth, THE HELLSTROM CHRONICLE is easily the most bizarre nature documentary ever produced. Don’t believe us? Maybe the film’s Oscar for Best Documentary Feature will change your mind.
