NINE-TENTHS OF THE LAW: SQUATTERS’ CINEMA
In 2019, a radical group calling itself the Cinéma La Clef Revival Collective forced their way into the derelict building which housed La Clef ('The Key'), a '70s-era cinema originally opened and operated by Claude Franck-Forter in Paris's 5th arrondissement. Over the years, the cinema was home to many vibrant programs - most significantly Images d'Ailleurs, which focused on screening works by African diaspora filmmakers and films from the Arab world - before its shuttering in 2015 by owners intent on selling the property for redevelopment. In a history of La Clef hosted on their site, Franck-Forter explains, "For me, a key represents a mythical, almost magical object, because its etymology in several languages describes either something that allows access to be limited, or the opposite, that is, to open it widely." The partisans of La Clef Revival blew things wide open, launching a communally programmed and operated squatter's cinema.
Recounting a 2022 visit to the cinema, Nick Pinkerton writes, "The reason for my support of La Clef Revival is a conviction that culture that comes from the ground up - that is, people united by common cause just getting together and doing a thing - is almost invariably superior to that which comes from the top down." We believe that principle holds true in the more base material world of everyday survival as well. This is a film series committed to kicking the door in and helping life collectively flourish in the fertile terrain of all our empty spaces.
When squatters move into a building, it is no longer 'abandoned'. People have claimed it, built it, loved it, hurt no one through it, made absolutely no profit through it, created their own lives in it, and called it home. Instead of swelling overcrowded housing waiting lists, instead of relying on overburdened social services, instead of living outside, instead of sleeping on friends' couches or in shelters for years while waiting for an apartment to open up in the most expensive, exclusionary rental market in history, people decide to exercise and satisfy one of the most natural urges in the world: to make their own space for life.
Rent is an abstract commodity. A building is only built once, but it is paid for many, many times over by the continual payment of rents which in themselves have no relation to an equal 'something' given in return. Rents are never calculated by costs to the owner but by what the market will bear - the maximum amount that the owners figure they can possibly get for something which is essential to our survival. Landlords and real estate speculators are vampires. They actually produce nothing at all but somehow, one way or another, manage to control just about all of the space on earth, and make all the rest of us pay for it by working our whole lives simply to exist. In a free market economy, only those who control the market are free. We are all homeless.
A battle has been taking place since the dawn of capitalism - the battle for space. Space can be land, it can be the structures that sit upon the land, it can also be the space in your head, your ideas, your cultural, political, artistic beliefs, or the ways you pursue your desires. Space is a place you live passionately, not as a commodity, a statistic, a prisoner or a tourist. All of these kinds of spaces are under siege from the world of things as they are, a world that is threatened by the implications of the world that could be. The earth is being steadily and purposefully denuded of every routine pleasure that makes life possible and worth living. This certainly isn't limited to cinemas but the aggression on that front has been particularly virulent. That's why a communal triumph like the Cinéma La Clef Revival Collective is so inspiring.
At the Beacon, we're on the side of cinema and people, and at this juncture, that doesn't leave space for quibbling over property law. Join us in breaking and entering a new world.
Can't pay? No one turned away! (Pending seating availability)
Films in this Program
Marc Singer
82 minutes
"You'd be surprised what the human mind and the human body can adjust to."
The existence of people living in the tunnels underneath New York City was once considered an urban legend, but DARK DAYS, filmed over two-and-a-half years in the mid-'90s, proved definitively that not only did these people exist, but that they had managed to create lives out what the rest of the city left behind.
In the Amtrak tunnels underneath New York's Penn Station, braving dangerous conditions and perpetual night, a community takes root. Exploring this surprisingly domestic subterranean world, DARK DAYS unearths a way of life unimaginable to those above. Under the initiative of director Marc Singer – who had never previously even held a camera – the film becomes a collaborative endeavor. The tunnel-dwellers assemble into a crew. Some hold lights and microphones, others draw on their professional pasts to tap electricity and construct fresh tracks for dolly shots. The financial dividends of the film are going to be used toward finding permanent housing. Much of the film's power comes from being shot in black & white, its chiaroscuric beauty making it the proletarian antithesis of MANHATTAN. Undergirding this extraordinarily honest look at the challenges and camaraderie of trying to live without a permanent home, a superb original score by DJ Shadow lends the proceedings an air of steely majesty.
Through stories simultaneously heartbreaking, hilarious, intimate, and off the cuff, these stygian settlers reveal their reasons for taking refuge and their struggle to survive underground on their own terms. DARK DAYS a creative collaboration that remains a soulful and enduring document of life on the fringe.
"Even if it proves to be the only film Marc Singer ever makes, it's still an astonishing achievement, a triumph of doggedness, solidarity and artistic vision. While it has never lost its power to move and astound, it feels ever more pertinent each passing year. The darkness encroaches." - Sukhdev Sandhu
The existence of people living in the tunnels underneath New York City was once considered an urban legend, but DARK DAYS, filmed over two-and-a-half years in the mid-'90s, proved definitively that not only did these people exist, but that they had managed to create lives out what the rest of the city left behind.
In the Amtrak tunnels underneath New York's Penn Station, braving dangerous conditions and perpetual night, a community takes root. Exploring this surprisingly domestic subterranean world, DARK DAYS unearths a way of life unimaginable to those above. Under the initiative of director Marc Singer – who had never previously even held a camera – the film becomes a collaborative endeavor. The tunnel-dwellers assemble into a crew. Some hold lights and microphones, others draw on their professional pasts to tap electricity and construct fresh tracks for dolly shots. The financial dividends of the film are going to be used toward finding permanent housing. Much of the film's power comes from being shot in black & white, its chiaroscuric beauty making it the proletarian antithesis of MANHATTAN. Undergirding this extraordinarily honest look at the challenges and camaraderie of trying to live without a permanent home, a superb original score by DJ Shadow lends the proceedings an air of steely majesty.
Through stories simultaneously heartbreaking, hilarious, intimate, and off the cuff, these stygian settlers reveal their reasons for taking refuge and their struggle to survive underground on their own terms. DARK DAYS a creative collaboration that remains a soulful and enduring document of life on the fringe.
"Even if it proves to be the only film Marc Singer ever makes, it's still an astonishing achievement, a triumph of doggedness, solidarity and artistic vision. While it has never lost its power to move and astound, it feels ever more pertinent each passing year. The darkness encroaches." - Sukhdev Sandhu
Penelope Spheeris
Philip Munnoch
111 minutes
SUBURBIA (1983, 94 minutes)
Deciding it was easier to turn punks into actors than to turn actors into punks, writer/director Penelope Spheeris (THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION) cast all non-professional actors – with the exception of the two leads – in her harsh rendering of communal squatter life and punk culture.
Escaping troubles at home, runaways in 1980s southern California create their own teenage dystopia in an abandoned suburban housing development. Neither heroes nor victims, the teens remain steadfastly loyal to their new family and new freedoms while fighting, harassing, and stealing from enemies who are not always unsympathetic. But their solidarity will be tested when they become the target of Citizens Against Crime, a group of unhappy suburbanites. Featuring live performances by classic SoCal punk bands T.S.O.L., D.I. and the Vandals, SUBURBIA is the punk answer to the iconic 80s teen movie: anarchic, nihilistic and painfully realistic.
"Not only the best movie ever made about punks, but one of the great films of all time." – Zack Carlson, Destroy All Movies!!!: The Complete Guide to Punks on Film
SQUATPARTY (1981, 17 minutes)
In this singular slice of Captain Zip-shot cinéma vérité, we meet a perky plethora of punk girls, lying about in their respective squats, possibly contemplating trips into town, or possibly not. Mostly they seem quite happy staying in, knocking back red wine like water, swigging vodka (straight from the bottle, of course), scrounging baccy off each other, smoking endless ciggies, chatting, laughing, messing about for the camera, and generally having a lovely time. None of them make it out of the house.
"What stands out most is that punk was not a culture taken overly seriously by its protagonists. Those writing straight-faced treatise on its influence today would do well to watch these women pissing around in their flat, slathering on facepaint." - Joshua Surtees, Vice
Deciding it was easier to turn punks into actors than to turn actors into punks, writer/director Penelope Spheeris (THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION) cast all non-professional actors – with the exception of the two leads – in her harsh rendering of communal squatter life and punk culture.
Escaping troubles at home, runaways in 1980s southern California create their own teenage dystopia in an abandoned suburban housing development. Neither heroes nor victims, the teens remain steadfastly loyal to their new family and new freedoms while fighting, harassing, and stealing from enemies who are not always unsympathetic. But their solidarity will be tested when they become the target of Citizens Against Crime, a group of unhappy suburbanites. Featuring live performances by classic SoCal punk bands T.S.O.L., D.I. and the Vandals, SUBURBIA is the punk answer to the iconic 80s teen movie: anarchic, nihilistic and painfully realistic.
"Not only the best movie ever made about punks, but one of the great films of all time." – Zack Carlson, Destroy All Movies!!!: The Complete Guide to Punks on Film
SQUATPARTY (1981, 17 minutes)
In this singular slice of Captain Zip-shot cinéma vérité, we meet a perky plethora of punk girls, lying about in their respective squats, possibly contemplating trips into town, or possibly not. Mostly they seem quite happy staying in, knocking back red wine like water, swigging vodka (straight from the bottle, of course), scrounging baccy off each other, smoking endless ciggies, chatting, laughing, messing about for the camera, and generally having a lovely time. None of them make it out of the house.
"What stands out most is that punk was not a culture taken overly seriously by its protagonists. Those writing straight-faced treatise on its influence today would do well to watch these women pissing around in their flat, slathering on facepaint." - Joshua Surtees, Vice
Tsai Ming-liang
118 minutes
When a burial-plot salesman (Lee Kang-sheng) steals a key out of a lock, a triangle of longing emerges between himself, a street vendor and a real-estate agent - taking form in a series of clandestine erotic encounters inside the vacant apartment which they're all illegally occupying.
After his debut feature REBELS OF THE NEON GOD delivered youthful exuberance and queer desire in hectic, color-saturated Taipei, Tsai Ming-liang reunited with his acting muse Lee for a project that would take Taiwan's 'Second New Wave' to lofty new heights. The winner of the Venice Golden Lion in 1994 – as decided by a jury headed by David Lynch! – VIVE L'AMOUR features less than a hundred lines of dialogue, instead emphasizing noisy traffic intersections, clacking high-heels, bleeping tills and erotically labored breathing. This story of a bizarre love triangle finds Tsai developing his own masterful, utterly distinct style distinguished by lovelorn longing, perverse deadpan comedy, and elegantly composed long-takes that chew on bright blue telephone boxes and neon-lit night markets. Tsai's highly mesmerizing approach results in one of his most haunting, sexy and accessible portraits of urban alienation. Writer Nicholas de Villiers perfectly summed it up when he titled his book about 'sexual disorientation in the films of Tsai Ming-liang' Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy.
"His community of solitary beings poke about the spaces of Tsai-ville, driven by secret needs and not-so-secret ones like desire. His spaces are ever-shifting homes – in the organic animal mode more than the razing human – spaces with new purposes, that shape as much as they are shaped, brought into being under Tsai's patient eye." - Nicholas Rapold, Reverse Shirt
"Loneliness here is always interwoven with real estate – not a typical theme for an auteur, but Tsai makes it his own by elevating his enclosed spaces, often abandoned or their ownership fraught, to the level of costars." -Travis Jeppesen, Artforum
"Striking and beautiful VIVE L'AMOUR remains one of the key modernist works of contemporary cinema. Working principally without dialogue–with a feeling for both modern architecture and urban despair that often recalls Michaelangelo Antonioni–it gathers force slowly but builds to a powerful and devastating finale." -Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
After his debut feature REBELS OF THE NEON GOD delivered youthful exuberance and queer desire in hectic, color-saturated Taipei, Tsai Ming-liang reunited with his acting muse Lee for a project that would take Taiwan's 'Second New Wave' to lofty new heights. The winner of the Venice Golden Lion in 1994 – as decided by a jury headed by David Lynch! – VIVE L'AMOUR features less than a hundred lines of dialogue, instead emphasizing noisy traffic intersections, clacking high-heels, bleeping tills and erotically labored breathing. This story of a bizarre love triangle finds Tsai developing his own masterful, utterly distinct style distinguished by lovelorn longing, perverse deadpan comedy, and elegantly composed long-takes that chew on bright blue telephone boxes and neon-lit night markets. Tsai's highly mesmerizing approach results in one of his most haunting, sexy and accessible portraits of urban alienation. Writer Nicholas de Villiers perfectly summed it up when he titled his book about 'sexual disorientation in the films of Tsai Ming-liang' Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy.
"His community of solitary beings poke about the spaces of Tsai-ville, driven by secret needs and not-so-secret ones like desire. His spaces are ever-shifting homes – in the organic animal mode more than the razing human – spaces with new purposes, that shape as much as they are shaped, brought into being under Tsai's patient eye." - Nicholas Rapold, Reverse Shirt
"Loneliness here is always interwoven with real estate – not a typical theme for an auteur, but Tsai makes it his own by elevating his enclosed spaces, often abandoned or their ownership fraught, to the level of costars." -Travis Jeppesen, Artforum
"Striking and beautiful VIVE L'AMOUR remains one of the key modernist works of contemporary cinema. Working principally without dialogue–with a feeling for both modern architecture and urban despair that often recalls Michaelangelo Antonioni–it gathers force slowly but builds to a powerful and devastating finale." -Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Juliet Bashore
Charlie Chaplin
Frank Lebon
Newsreel
137 minutes
A collection of shorts spanning over a century of cinema in celebration and interrogation of the act of squatting.
THE BATTLE OF TUNTENHAUS PART I & II (1991/1993)
The wall has fallen. Berlin has reunified. But there are new zones of transgression to be carved out and explored. Mainzer Straße is a hot spot of squatters and anti-fascist fights. One of the squats on this notorious strees, the Tuntenhaus (‘House of Queers’), becomes a specific target of both their neo-Nazi neighbors and the iron fist of the capitalist state. Juliet Bashore’s legendary documentary follows the daily struggle of the queens and queers to create and defend a place for themselves in the chaos and unrest after the fall of communism. The extraordinary union of the anarchist/autonomous and gay scenes meets the onlooking yet involved sympathizers, who also end up in conflict with the squatters as a result of their filming. The film is a unique testimony to the violent and momentous eviction of the people from the streets.
A DOG’S LIFE (1918)
Charlie Champlin’s Little Tramp is the patron saint of sleeping rough. In A DOG’S LIFE he finds companionship with two fellow outcasts - Scraps, a stray mongrel, and Edna Purviance as a young girl exploited as a hostess in a disreputable dive - on his quest to find a safe place to stay. Chaplin’s finest short film, representing the apex of his mastery over the developing medium, is sophisticated, uproarious and beautiful. Bursting with immaculately fine-tuned slapstick and just the right dollop of achingly raw sentiment, it’s one of the finest films ever made about being poor.
DIDDLY SQUAT (2020)
With a baby on the way and pressure mounting from all sides, it is time for Archy and Rachel to get their act together and find somewhere to live, whatever it takes. When Kenny, a local pillar of the community, returns to his beloved carpentry studio and finds his livelihood threatened, we learn just how far he’ll go to protect his home. Told from the perspective of both the squatter and the squatted, DIDDLY SQUAT is a hyperkinetic urban short story told with electrifying style. Live action, still photos, and animation are all incorporated by young British photographer and filmmaker Frank Lebon as he fuses together influences ranging from Dziga Vertov to Ken Loach to Satoshi Kon in his narrative debut. Featuring a pulsating score by Mount Kimbie.
BREAK AND ENTER (1971)
Produced by the pioneering radical documentary collective Newsreel, BREAK AND ENTER captures the militant historical antecedents to tomorrow’s housing reclamation movement. In 1970, several hundred displaced Puerto Rican and Dominican families, with women in the forefront, reclaim housing left vacant amidst New York City’s “urban renewal” programs. They pull the boards off the doors, clean and repair the buildings and enact Operation Move-In, a powerful head-on confrontation with the material forces of gentrification.
“The film is one of the first to represent working class Latinos - particularly Latinas - as active agents of change in new social movements. BREAK AND ENTER can be understood as part of the Puerto Rican cultural renaissance or innovative cultural formations that emerged in the city during the late 1960s and unsettled the distinctions between art and politics as well as imagined new ways of being in the city.” - Frances Negron-Muntaner
THE BATTLE OF TUNTENHAUS PART I & II (1991/1993)
The wall has fallen. Berlin has reunified. But there are new zones of transgression to be carved out and explored. Mainzer Straße is a hot spot of squatters and anti-fascist fights. One of the squats on this notorious strees, the Tuntenhaus (‘House of Queers’), becomes a specific target of both their neo-Nazi neighbors and the iron fist of the capitalist state. Juliet Bashore’s legendary documentary follows the daily struggle of the queens and queers to create and defend a place for themselves in the chaos and unrest after the fall of communism. The extraordinary union of the anarchist/autonomous and gay scenes meets the onlooking yet involved sympathizers, who also end up in conflict with the squatters as a result of their filming. The film is a unique testimony to the violent and momentous eviction of the people from the streets.
A DOG’S LIFE (1918)
Charlie Champlin’s Little Tramp is the patron saint of sleeping rough. In A DOG’S LIFE he finds companionship with two fellow outcasts - Scraps, a stray mongrel, and Edna Purviance as a young girl exploited as a hostess in a disreputable dive - on his quest to find a safe place to stay. Chaplin’s finest short film, representing the apex of his mastery over the developing medium, is sophisticated, uproarious and beautiful. Bursting with immaculately fine-tuned slapstick and just the right dollop of achingly raw sentiment, it’s one of the finest films ever made about being poor.
DIDDLY SQUAT (2020)
With a baby on the way and pressure mounting from all sides, it is time for Archy and Rachel to get their act together and find somewhere to live, whatever it takes. When Kenny, a local pillar of the community, returns to his beloved carpentry studio and finds his livelihood threatened, we learn just how far he’ll go to protect his home. Told from the perspective of both the squatter and the squatted, DIDDLY SQUAT is a hyperkinetic urban short story told with electrifying style. Live action, still photos, and animation are all incorporated by young British photographer and filmmaker Frank Lebon as he fuses together influences ranging from Dziga Vertov to Ken Loach to Satoshi Kon in his narrative debut. Featuring a pulsating score by Mount Kimbie.
BREAK AND ENTER (1971)
Produced by the pioneering radical documentary collective Newsreel, BREAK AND ENTER captures the militant historical antecedents to tomorrow’s housing reclamation movement. In 1970, several hundred displaced Puerto Rican and Dominican families, with women in the forefront, reclaim housing left vacant amidst New York City’s “urban renewal” programs. They pull the boards off the doors, clean and repair the buildings and enact Operation Move-In, a powerful head-on confrontation with the material forces of gentrification.
“The film is one of the first to represent working class Latinos - particularly Latinas - as active agents of change in new social movements. BREAK AND ENTER can be understood as part of the Puerto Rican cultural renaissance or innovative cultural formations that emerged in the city during the late 1960s and unsettled the distinctions between art and politics as well as imagined new ways of being in the city.” - Frances Negron-Muntaner
Sam Raimi
99 minutes
Our Squatters' Cinema series stands on its head in order to see things from the owners' perspective for a change. Little surprise, it's a goddamn nightmare! DRAG ME TO HELL represents the ultimate in eviction-related horror and stands as the only honest film about the 2008 housing crisis.
A loan officer (Alison Lohman), smothering her conscience to impress her boss, refuses to take pity on an ancient "G*psy" woman about to lose her home. The hag hisses a hex, and the banker's life plan is derailed by a chain of diabolical interventions that play like Seventeen magazine's "Embarrassing Moments" as written by Antonin Artaud. Desperate and fearful, the banker turns to mystical countermeasures to try and save her soul while evil forces work to push her to a breaking point.
DRAG ME TO HELL was director Sam Raimi's return to the illicit combination of Lovecraftian ichor and Hal Roach slapstick that made him a Fangoria star with the EVIL DEAD films. His old barreling camera and viscous ickiness are back. But here the standard tropes of the horror genre are repurposed to represent the emerging horrors of our dangerous new economic order - one in which uncertainty and risk are commodified, the reciprocity of credit is turned into "payback", and whose singular obsession with liquidity destroys social connections and renders whole populations vulnerable to ruin. This Grand Guignol gutbucket-horror allegory, operating with the karmic logic of E.C. Comics, is here to get revenge for the entire subprime mortgage meltdown.
"In Raimi's film, the formal mechanisms of suspense become an index of the somatic tolls of risk; the visual excesses of gore are now the signs of financial contagion and toxicity. Like the characterization of complex financial derivatives as 'Frankenstein's monsters,' Raimi's film draws on the traditions of horror to describe a new kind of terror—the deadliness of financialized debt and credit crisis. In so doing, DRAG ME TO HELL returns our attention to the original source of our fear, denaturalizing our acceptance of these new economic forms and systems and refusing any imaginative, psychic, or ideological solutions to the social contradictions that underwrite them." - Annie McClanahan, Post4
A loan officer (Alison Lohman), smothering her conscience to impress her boss, refuses to take pity on an ancient "G*psy" woman about to lose her home. The hag hisses a hex, and the banker's life plan is derailed by a chain of diabolical interventions that play like Seventeen magazine's "Embarrassing Moments" as written by Antonin Artaud. Desperate and fearful, the banker turns to mystical countermeasures to try and save her soul while evil forces work to push her to a breaking point.
DRAG ME TO HELL was director Sam Raimi's return to the illicit combination of Lovecraftian ichor and Hal Roach slapstick that made him a Fangoria star with the EVIL DEAD films. His old barreling camera and viscous ickiness are back. But here the standard tropes of the horror genre are repurposed to represent the emerging horrors of our dangerous new economic order - one in which uncertainty and risk are commodified, the reciprocity of credit is turned into "payback", and whose singular obsession with liquidity destroys social connections and renders whole populations vulnerable to ruin. This Grand Guignol gutbucket-horror allegory, operating with the karmic logic of E.C. Comics, is here to get revenge for the entire subprime mortgage meltdown.
"In Raimi's film, the formal mechanisms of suspense become an index of the somatic tolls of risk; the visual excesses of gore are now the signs of financial contagion and toxicity. Like the characterization of complex financial derivatives as 'Frankenstein's monsters,' Raimi's film draws on the traditions of horror to describe a new kind of terror—the deadliness of financialized debt and credit crisis. In so doing, DRAG ME TO HELL returns our attention to the original source of our fear, denaturalizing our acceptance of these new economic forms and systems and refusing any imaginative, psychic, or ideological solutions to the social contradictions that underwrite them." - Annie McClanahan, Post4
Senka Domanović
87 minutes
FREE SCREENING! NO RSVP, JUST COME OUT. DOORS OPEN 30 MIN BEFORE SHOWTIME.
In November 2014, a group of young filmmakers, together with political activists, former cinema employees and enthusiasts, violently entered the abandoned, privatized and intentionally destroyed cinema Zvezda in Belgrade.
“Every time I watch Senka Domanović’s brilliant doc about the occupation of the Zvezda cinema that I was an active participant in, I start thinking about why that occupation was such a huge event in Serbian cultural and political history in the 2010s. What triggered such a reaction from the public? For three months, a number of Serbian – and international – politicians, journalists, filmmakers, all had something to say about it. But a group of activists occupied a ruined cinema? So what? Zvezda was so special because that Belgrade movie theatre had become a symbol of the devastating effects of the transition to capitalism in Serbia. It triggered people’s anger against the crimes of privatization, the brutal sellout of the socially owned enterprises that left thousands unemployed, poor and hopeless. It was a statement that the promises of a wonderful future on the free market were lies – and that we have to do something about it.
OCCUPIED CINEMA captures that anger, but also the desire of students, filmmakers, workers and leftist activists to organize and create a better alternative, at least in the movie theatre, while at the same time reflecting upon why they failed to succeed. The movie plays out like a curious combination of Godard’s LA CHINOISE and Barbara Kopple’s HARLAN COUNTY, USA. Observational segments, shot in real-time with a moving and dynamic camera, are juxtaposed with interviews with the activists. In that way, the movie shows and tells: we see the dreams and realities of the activists, their misunderstandings and conflicts, we follow closely the breakup of the group, and see different characters reflecting on their roles in the plot. The film can be read as an allegory for every futile collective effort, or for every revolution that eats its own children. And that’s actually my logline for OCCUPIED CINEMA: Film is politics; cinema is society.” - Ivan Velisavljević Film archivist, curator and critic
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: “It is commonly held that we are living in times where people have lost their trust in institutions and the state. The occupation of the cinema was a opportunity for people to come together, to self-organize and manage a contained micro economy essentially bypassing the market logic and break away from the ideological apparatus of the state. There we had a rare gathering of artists, activists, former cinema employees, standing up together against the injustice -- and moment later everything collapsed. My film is an attempt to understand this transformation. In terms of style, ethics and production, this film relies on the cinéma vérité method. OCCUPIED CINEMA, as an investigative documentary, putting things in medias res. The camera doesn’t hide its presence, it invites movement members as well as the cinema goers to a dialogue.”
In November 2014, a group of young filmmakers, together with political activists, former cinema employees and enthusiasts, violently entered the abandoned, privatized and intentionally destroyed cinema Zvezda in Belgrade.
“Every time I watch Senka Domanović’s brilliant doc about the occupation of the Zvezda cinema that I was an active participant in, I start thinking about why that occupation was such a huge event in Serbian cultural and political history in the 2010s. What triggered such a reaction from the public? For three months, a number of Serbian – and international – politicians, journalists, filmmakers, all had something to say about it. But a group of activists occupied a ruined cinema? So what? Zvezda was so special because that Belgrade movie theatre had become a symbol of the devastating effects of the transition to capitalism in Serbia. It triggered people’s anger against the crimes of privatization, the brutal sellout of the socially owned enterprises that left thousands unemployed, poor and hopeless. It was a statement that the promises of a wonderful future on the free market were lies – and that we have to do something about it.
OCCUPIED CINEMA captures that anger, but also the desire of students, filmmakers, workers and leftist activists to organize and create a better alternative, at least in the movie theatre, while at the same time reflecting upon why they failed to succeed. The movie plays out like a curious combination of Godard’s LA CHINOISE and Barbara Kopple’s HARLAN COUNTY, USA. Observational segments, shot in real-time with a moving and dynamic camera, are juxtaposed with interviews with the activists. In that way, the movie shows and tells: we see the dreams and realities of the activists, their misunderstandings and conflicts, we follow closely the breakup of the group, and see different characters reflecting on their roles in the plot. The film can be read as an allegory for every futile collective effort, or for every revolution that eats its own children. And that’s actually my logline for OCCUPIED CINEMA: Film is politics; cinema is society.” - Ivan Velisavljević Film archivist, curator and critic
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: “It is commonly held that we are living in times where people have lost their trust in institutions and the state. The occupation of the cinema was a opportunity for people to come together, to self-organize and manage a contained micro economy essentially bypassing the market logic and break away from the ideological apparatus of the state. There we had a rare gathering of artists, activists, former cinema employees, standing up together against the injustice -- and moment later everything collapsed. My film is an attempt to understand this transformation. In terms of style, ethics and production, this film relies on the cinéma vérité method. OCCUPIED CINEMA, as an investigative documentary, putting things in medias res. The camera doesn’t hide its presence, it invites movement members as well as the cinema goers to a dialogue.”
Kim Ki-duk
88 minutes
I don’t think words make everything understandable.
Tae-suk (Jae Hee), a motorcycle vagabond petty criminal, and early adopter of selfies with a deadly powerful golf swing, navigates the city like a helpful poltergeist– staying in temporarily vacant homes until their owners return from vacation to new light bulbs and rearranged furniture. When he trespasses on the residence of Sun-hwa (Lee Seung-yeon), an abused housewife and former model with a penchant for vengeance and a need for affection, it is love at first break-in. After a golf-off with her POS husband, Sun-hwa is whisked away into the shadowy life of Tae-suk.
The lovers haunt one empty apartment after another followed by Sun-hwa’s persistent ex-husband and an ever-growing cast of grumbling homeowners. But 3-IRON is not a typical love story and results in neither a wedding or a funeral, but the sort of romantic entanglement that transcends all earthly reason and cannot be expressed in the measly verbiage of “I love you” (or sarranghae, for that matter).
Béla Balázs, a noted influence on writer of 3-IRON, Hye Seung Chung, wrote of the silent soliloquy enacted on the screen by the human face in close-up: “In this silent monologue the solitary human soul can find a tongue more candid and uninhibited than in any spoken soliloquy, for it speaks instinctively, subconsciously.” This Balázsian notion comes to fruition in the inaction of love beyond language in 3-IRON visualized by haunting. Caring becomes a mutual persistence beyond the veil. Vulnerability becomes a supernatural ability that physicists throw their arms up in despair, incapable of understanding. The tale of Tae-suk and Sun-hwa achieves the level of a pure cinematic experience not unlike returning to the silent movie houses of the first decade of cinema.
In a series about squatting, Kim Ki-duk’s film is the missing piece of the puzzle– finding harmony in disrupting privatized space by incorporating the aesthetic of haunting removed from the horror genre. Some human connections cannot be confined to a singular house in time, they must roam from empty room to empty room.
Tae-suk (Jae Hee), a motorcycle vagabond petty criminal, and early adopter of selfies with a deadly powerful golf swing, navigates the city like a helpful poltergeist– staying in temporarily vacant homes until their owners return from vacation to new light bulbs and rearranged furniture. When he trespasses on the residence of Sun-hwa (Lee Seung-yeon), an abused housewife and former model with a penchant for vengeance and a need for affection, it is love at first break-in. After a golf-off with her POS husband, Sun-hwa is whisked away into the shadowy life of Tae-suk.
The lovers haunt one empty apartment after another followed by Sun-hwa’s persistent ex-husband and an ever-growing cast of grumbling homeowners. But 3-IRON is not a typical love story and results in neither a wedding or a funeral, but the sort of romantic entanglement that transcends all earthly reason and cannot be expressed in the measly verbiage of “I love you” (or sarranghae, for that matter).
Béla Balázs, a noted influence on writer of 3-IRON, Hye Seung Chung, wrote of the silent soliloquy enacted on the screen by the human face in close-up: “In this silent monologue the solitary human soul can find a tongue more candid and uninhibited than in any spoken soliloquy, for it speaks instinctively, subconsciously.” This Balázsian notion comes to fruition in the inaction of love beyond language in 3-IRON visualized by haunting. Caring becomes a mutual persistence beyond the veil. Vulnerability becomes a supernatural ability that physicists throw their arms up in despair, incapable of understanding. The tale of Tae-suk and Sun-hwa achieves the level of a pure cinematic experience not unlike returning to the silent movie houses of the first decade of cinema.
In a series about squatting, Kim Ki-duk’s film is the missing piece of the puzzle– finding harmony in disrupting privatized space by incorporating the aesthetic of haunting removed from the horror genre. Some human connections cannot be confined to a singular house in time, they must roam from empty room to empty room.
Roy Del Ruth
116 minutes
We hope your Christmas tree is still up and those cookies are still out for Santa because it is time to discover your new favorite movie on the subject. And it is going to charm a bunch of vagrants into your home while you are on vacation, so you should probably bake more cookies.
In IT HAPPENED ON 5TH AVENUE, a vacant mansion of world’s-richest-man Michael O’Conner (Charles Ruggles) becomes a safe haven for several New Yorkers without homes. World-class-vagrant Aloysius T. McKeever (Victor Moore) who has squatted his residence every winter, makes himself at home once again. But this year, he takes in Jim Bullock (Don DeFore), a World War II veteran evicted from his apartment by none other than Mr. O’Conner himself.
As the men make themselves at home in the empty estate, they accumulate a troupe of other down-on-their-luck Americans. When Mr. O’Conner comes home early and discovers them, he has the bright idea to dress up as a homeless man himself in order to be granted admittance into his own home– and stays in this disguise indefinitely. As the mansion’s guests spend Christmas together, they show the curmudgeon O’Conner what family is all about, caring for one another out of the goodness of their hearts in this surprisingly radical comedy. IT HAPPENED ON 5TH AVENUE manages to deliver a very thorough account of squatter’s rights worth paying attention to. Take notes!
In IT HAPPENED ON 5TH AVENUE, a vacant mansion of world’s-richest-man Michael O’Conner (Charles Ruggles) becomes a safe haven for several New Yorkers without homes. World-class-vagrant Aloysius T. McKeever (Victor Moore) who has squatted his residence every winter, makes himself at home once again. But this year, he takes in Jim Bullock (Don DeFore), a World War II veteran evicted from his apartment by none other than Mr. O’Conner himself.
As the men make themselves at home in the empty estate, they accumulate a troupe of other down-on-their-luck Americans. When Mr. O’Conner comes home early and discovers them, he has the bright idea to dress up as a homeless man himself in order to be granted admittance into his own home– and stays in this disguise indefinitely. As the mansion’s guests spend Christmas together, they show the curmudgeon O’Conner what family is all about, caring for one another out of the goodness of their hearts in this surprisingly radical comedy. IT HAPPENED ON 5TH AVENUE manages to deliver a very thorough account of squatter’s rights worth paying attention to. Take notes!
Pedro Costa
171 minutes
Living in ghost houses other people left empty…
Portuguese cinematic poet Pedro Costa has thus far made five films in, about, and with residents of the shanty village on the coast of Lisbon known as Fontainhas. Today there’s no longer any Fontainhas left standing at all but that hasn’t stopped him yet. After making his first narrative feature OSSOS there in 1997, it quickly became obvious that, as Costa puts it, “the neighborhood refused this kind of cinema, it didn’t want it.” The rough terrain of rubble and unpaved streets swiftly overpowered the necessities of a traditional film set. Three years into filming in Fontainhas, Costa was forced to succumb to the city’s overbearing dilapidation and was left with only his two legs, a tripod, the camera, and his actors - the real residents of the neighborhood who were crumbling along with it. As reality penetrated the production, narrative fiction was forced to give way to documentary and IN VANDA’S ROOM was born.
IN VANDA’S ROOM loosely follows, in poetic fragments, the lives of Vanda Duarte and her neighbors. As buildings are torn down around them, they have become squatters in their own neighborhood, embracing the quick release of hard drug use and self-destruction to survive the oppressive weight of their circumstances. The conditions of the location and its inhabitants are what form Costa’s rich style; deep pools of black shadows (lighting in these conditions was unreliable) and a documentary-like realism capturing vanishing space and people (every day the city changed and continuity was an impossible expectation). Managing to achieve the texture of a Vermeer painting with a low-fi digital camera, Costa’s film intimately captures vignettes of daily life that transcend the frame; a cinema of moments. Even without introduction or explanation, his observational style weaves a beautiful basket of relationships, exchange, and boundaries within a close community that seems to be in the process of disintegrating between each cut. IN VANDA’S ROOM is a mesmerizing film that could have only been made in the exact moments that it was, capturing the impermanence of our societies and the everlasting impact of the relationships inside of them.
“The 21st century begins for cinema with Pedro Costa’s IN VANDA’S ROOM.” - Shigehiko Hasumi
“IN VANDA’S ROOM remains one of the most important works of the entire film medium. The failure of a political situation can only be effectively and authentically expressed through the depiction of its poorest conditions of living. But what makes VANDA leap from political inquiry to total masterpiece are the moments of real beauty in this film. The colors, the shafts of light, the smoke, the faces. Laughter, reminiscences, the giving of flowers from one to another. How could one forget the steam lifting off of a nude silhouette on a hot day? But the final shot may very well be the first true cinematic image of the 21st century.” - Neil Bahadur
Portuguese cinematic poet Pedro Costa has thus far made five films in, about, and with residents of the shanty village on the coast of Lisbon known as Fontainhas. Today there’s no longer any Fontainhas left standing at all but that hasn’t stopped him yet. After making his first narrative feature OSSOS there in 1997, it quickly became obvious that, as Costa puts it, “the neighborhood refused this kind of cinema, it didn’t want it.” The rough terrain of rubble and unpaved streets swiftly overpowered the necessities of a traditional film set. Three years into filming in Fontainhas, Costa was forced to succumb to the city’s overbearing dilapidation and was left with only his two legs, a tripod, the camera, and his actors - the real residents of the neighborhood who were crumbling along with it. As reality penetrated the production, narrative fiction was forced to give way to documentary and IN VANDA’S ROOM was born.
IN VANDA’S ROOM loosely follows, in poetic fragments, the lives of Vanda Duarte and her neighbors. As buildings are torn down around them, they have become squatters in their own neighborhood, embracing the quick release of hard drug use and self-destruction to survive the oppressive weight of their circumstances. The conditions of the location and its inhabitants are what form Costa’s rich style; deep pools of black shadows (lighting in these conditions was unreliable) and a documentary-like realism capturing vanishing space and people (every day the city changed and continuity was an impossible expectation). Managing to achieve the texture of a Vermeer painting with a low-fi digital camera, Costa’s film intimately captures vignettes of daily life that transcend the frame; a cinema of moments. Even without introduction or explanation, his observational style weaves a beautiful basket of relationships, exchange, and boundaries within a close community that seems to be in the process of disintegrating between each cut. IN VANDA’S ROOM is a mesmerizing film that could have only been made in the exact moments that it was, capturing the impermanence of our societies and the everlasting impact of the relationships inside of them.
“The 21st century begins for cinema with Pedro Costa’s IN VANDA’S ROOM.” - Shigehiko Hasumi
“IN VANDA’S ROOM remains one of the most important works of the entire film medium. The failure of a political situation can only be effectively and authentically expressed through the depiction of its poorest conditions of living. But what makes VANDA leap from political inquiry to total masterpiece are the moments of real beauty in this film. The colors, the shafts of light, the smoke, the faces. Laughter, reminiscences, the giving of flowers from one to another. How could one forget the steam lifting off of a nude silhouette on a hot day? But the final shot may very well be the first true cinematic image of the 21st century.” - Neil Bahadur
Masashi Yamamoto
119 minutes
On a drunken walk home, bohemian drug dealer Kumi (Kumiko Ohta) discovers an abandoned building on the outskirts of Tokyo. Attracted by the vast, untapped space overrun with luxuriant vegetation (and its potential for drug-addled isolation), she promptly sells all of her belongings and retreats from the world. She carves an island for herself out of the sprawling squat, where she is free to grow cabbage and express herself in any way she pleases—only interrupted by the occasional intrusion from her lover, left behind in civilization, and a mysteriously antagonistic pig-tailed girl who seems to live in the landscape.
Lensed by frequent Jim Jarmusch collaborator Tom DiCillo, Masashi Yamamoto’s anticapitalist punk statement ROBINSON'S GARDEN is a radical vision of a multicultural, marginal Tokyo, far removed from the dominant, consumerist image of the city during the bustling era of Japan’s economic bubble.
“A punk movie that understands being a punk isn’t just about being a charismatic sociopath who does a lot of drugs. being a punk is also about half-heartedly doing a pushup, walking around a forest despondently kicking grass, and getting really into gardening but being kind of shitty at it.” - Michael DeForge
Lensed by frequent Jim Jarmusch collaborator Tom DiCillo, Masashi Yamamoto’s anticapitalist punk statement ROBINSON'S GARDEN is a radical vision of a multicultural, marginal Tokyo, far removed from the dominant, consumerist image of the city during the bustling era of Japan’s economic bubble.
“A punk movie that understands being a punk isn’t just about being a charismatic sociopath who does a lot of drugs. being a punk is also about half-heartedly doing a pushup, walking around a forest despondently kicking grass, and getting really into gardening but being kind of shitty at it.” - Michael DeForge
Alfonso Cuarón
109 minutes
At the time of its release in 2006, CHILDREN OF MEN was perceived as a stern warning about xenophobia, totalitarianism, and the rise of the security state. A powerful indictment of the post-9/11 cultural landscape, the film vividly distills what Naomi Klein writes about in The Shock Doctrine: how the chaos resulting from crisis creates opportunities for the powerful. Today, CHILDREN OF MEN - loosely based on P.D. James' 1992 novel - has moved from the uncanny to the borderline prophetic; taking on a deeper and even more sinister salience. It all too painfully reflects a broken Earth devoid of hope and purpose.
The film follows Theo (Clive Owen), a depressed activist-turned-bureaucrat living in an austere and climate-ravaged London in 2027. A pandemic without clear cause has rendered humanity entirely infertile, giving way to myriad overlapping crises and plunging the globe into chaos. Theo returns to his radical past when he is reunited with his insurgent ex-wife (Julianne Moore), who tasks him with getting transport papers for a migrant woman, Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), from his cousin in the government. When Kee turns out to be pregnant, Theo is forced to fight through both insurgents and military police hoping to get her to a rumored team of scientists who may be able to save her – and potentially the human race as well.
But the most resonant part of the film is the harrowing illustration of a country that has lost all hope. Systemic failures pile on top of each other one after another, and no light is visible at the end of the tunnel. At the extreme end, it speaks to the rising tide of 'doomerism' that is increasingly prevalent today – the notion that we are on an irreversible downward spiral of collapse and there's no way out. In CHILDREN OF MEN, the feeling of stagnation and malaise created by the crisis of fertility (which demands to be seen as symbolic of humanity's very real global climate emergency) leaves a defeated and lifeless people, with no hope of repairing themselves, simply trudging through the chaos as the last lights of civilization slowly fade out.
As Mark Fisher writes in his modern classic Capitalist Realism: "In the world of CHILDREN OF MEN, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist. Public space is abandoned, given over to uncollected garbage and stalking animals. Neoliberals have celebrated the destruction of public space but, contrary to their official hopes, there is no withering away of the state in CHILDREN OF MEN, only a stripping back of the state to its core military and police functions. The catastrophe in CHILDREN OF MEN is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through."
And yet, amidst the doom, there's no mistaking why this movie was originally released on Christmas Day back in 2006. Within this film there is also a kernel of miraculous, redemptive hope. It may just be the best version of the Nativity story ever put to celluloid. We're all squatting together now, our little mangers behind the abandoned facades of a derelict planet.
The film follows Theo (Clive Owen), a depressed activist-turned-bureaucrat living in an austere and climate-ravaged London in 2027. A pandemic without clear cause has rendered humanity entirely infertile, giving way to myriad overlapping crises and plunging the globe into chaos. Theo returns to his radical past when he is reunited with his insurgent ex-wife (Julianne Moore), who tasks him with getting transport papers for a migrant woman, Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), from his cousin in the government. When Kee turns out to be pregnant, Theo is forced to fight through both insurgents and military police hoping to get her to a rumored team of scientists who may be able to save her – and potentially the human race as well.
But the most resonant part of the film is the harrowing illustration of a country that has lost all hope. Systemic failures pile on top of each other one after another, and no light is visible at the end of the tunnel. At the extreme end, it speaks to the rising tide of 'doomerism' that is increasingly prevalent today – the notion that we are on an irreversible downward spiral of collapse and there's no way out. In CHILDREN OF MEN, the feeling of stagnation and malaise created by the crisis of fertility (which demands to be seen as symbolic of humanity's very real global climate emergency) leaves a defeated and lifeless people, with no hope of repairing themselves, simply trudging through the chaos as the last lights of civilization slowly fade out.
As Mark Fisher writes in his modern classic Capitalist Realism: "In the world of CHILDREN OF MEN, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist. Public space is abandoned, given over to uncollected garbage and stalking animals. Neoliberals have celebrated the destruction of public space but, contrary to their official hopes, there is no withering away of the state in CHILDREN OF MEN, only a stripping back of the state to its core military and police functions. The catastrophe in CHILDREN OF MEN is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through."
And yet, amidst the doom, there's no mistaking why this movie was originally released on Christmas Day back in 2006. Within this film there is also a kernel of miraculous, redemptive hope. It may just be the best version of the Nativity story ever put to celluloid. We're all squatting together now, our little mangers behind the abandoned facades of a derelict planet.
Brian De Palma
92 minutes
One of history's most notorious squatters is the Phantom of the Opera. And the greatest film inspired by Gaston Leroux's classic story is PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE!
Of course it's also just as much an adaptation of Faust and The Picture of Dorian Gray as it is Opera. In just an hour and a half, director Brian De Palma folds a ridiculous amount of narrative into PHANTOM and yet it never feels rushed or overstuffed. Every moment is more inventive than the last, and there are elements of the director's style all over: the public horror of CARRIE, the surveillance technology of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, the coked-out sleaze of SCARFACE. But it's also vastly different from anything he'd ever make again - in part because the movie is as defined by one of its stars and composers, Paul Williams, as it is by De Palma.
PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is a stylistic balancing act, drifting between genres - from expressionist horror to slapstick comedy to searing melodrama - to tell the tragic saga of a passionate artist devoured by the ruthlessness of the music business. Williams, then a songwriter for acts like the Carpenters and Three Dog Night, spoofs everything from Phil Spector-produced teen pop to Alice Cooper-like shock rock on the soundtrack and in his role as villain tastemaker Swan.
The film does what all good satire does: it cuts to the truth by going beyond it. De Palma draws on the tropes and themes of classic stories and creates images that are almost mythic. The story is as much a parable as it is a parody, a fairy tale-like warning about the damage celebrity can do to the psyche, leaving one no choice but to take to the rafters in response.
Of course it's also just as much an adaptation of Faust and The Picture of Dorian Gray as it is Opera. In just an hour and a half, director Brian De Palma folds a ridiculous amount of narrative into PHANTOM and yet it never feels rushed or overstuffed. Every moment is more inventive than the last, and there are elements of the director's style all over: the public horror of CARRIE, the surveillance technology of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, the coked-out sleaze of SCARFACE. But it's also vastly different from anything he'd ever make again - in part because the movie is as defined by one of its stars and composers, Paul Williams, as it is by De Palma.
PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is a stylistic balancing act, drifting between genres - from expressionist horror to slapstick comedy to searing melodrama - to tell the tragic saga of a passionate artist devoured by the ruthlessness of the music business. Williams, then a songwriter for acts like the Carpenters and Three Dog Night, spoofs everything from Phil Spector-produced teen pop to Alice Cooper-like shock rock on the soundtrack and in his role as villain tastemaker Swan.
The film does what all good satire does: it cuts to the truth by going beyond it. De Palma draws on the tropes and themes of classic stories and creates images that are almost mythic. The story is as much a parable as it is a parody, a fairy tale-like warning about the damage celebrity can do to the psyche, leaving one no choice but to take to the rafters in response.
Vittorio De Sica
97 minutes
Between releasing his two Neorealist classics BICYCLE THIEVES (1948) and UMBERTO D. (1952), Vitorrio De Sica mustered a wild storm of whimsy: MIRACLE IN MILAN. Managing to achieve the same level of class-consciousness with a nudge and a wink, this lesser known Italian fable lends De Sica's oeuvre a flare that shouldn’t be overlooked.
Straight out of an Alice Guy-Blaché film, our hero Totò (Francesco Golisano) is introduced in infancy, naked and wailing in a cabbage patch. He's discovered by a charming elderly milkmaid who raises him as her own until she passes on and Totò is let loose upon the Neorealist landscape. However our protagonist is anything but a Bruno or Umberto; he triumphantly enters the working world saying “Buongiorno!” to every solemn stranger he passes as he makes his way towards the shanty town where he will begin to build a life.
Totò turns the tough situations that his community of squatters face into games with the children and finds humor in just about every unfortunate circumstance. Buoyantly he traverses his new world until one day two landowners discover this well-established slum village and threaten to demolish it. This seems like it could be the end of the community, but the two men are overcome by the strength of Totò and his neighbors, agreeing to let them stay. That is, until digging a hole for a maypole, they discover the land contains that liquid gold that the elite so desperately crave... oil.
With a style comparable to that magical touch of Powell and Pressburger, De Sica’s inventive approach to class struggle in MIRACLE IN MILAN takes on a totally different feeling: courageous rebellion, creativity and play in the face of deep inequality.
Straight out of an Alice Guy-Blaché film, our hero Totò (Francesco Golisano) is introduced in infancy, naked and wailing in a cabbage patch. He's discovered by a charming elderly milkmaid who raises him as her own until she passes on and Totò is let loose upon the Neorealist landscape. However our protagonist is anything but a Bruno or Umberto; he triumphantly enters the working world saying “Buongiorno!” to every solemn stranger he passes as he makes his way towards the shanty town where he will begin to build a life.
Totò turns the tough situations that his community of squatters face into games with the children and finds humor in just about every unfortunate circumstance. Buoyantly he traverses his new world until one day two landowners discover this well-established slum village and threaten to demolish it. This seems like it could be the end of the community, but the two men are overcome by the strength of Totò and his neighbors, agreeing to let them stay. That is, until digging a hole for a maypole, they discover the land contains that liquid gold that the elite so desperately crave... oil.
With a style comparable to that magical touch of Powell and Pressburger, De Sica’s inventive approach to class struggle in MIRACLE IN MILAN takes on a totally different feeling: courageous rebellion, creativity and play in the face of deep inequality.
Kevin Brownlow
Andrew Mollo
95 minutes
On April 1, 1649, a British religious sect called the Diggers sets out to form a commune and till the soil on “common” land - which by law permits grazing, but not settlement or cultivation. Led by Gerard Winstanley, theirs is a nonviolent action to reclaim land for the poor who had been dispossessed by Oliver Cromwell’s recent Civil War. But the local villagers see the Diggers’ “occupation” as a threat to their livelihood and, led by a Presbyterian parson, take action to harass and burn them out.
Kevin Brownlow’s activities as a hugely influential film historian have tended to erase both memory and recognition of the two extraordinary features he made in collaboration with Andrew Mollo. In this adaptation of David Caute’s historical novel Comrade Jacob, the two directors decorate the story of England’s first commune with unromantic details of Cromwell’s era, and edit the film with the emphasis one expects from silent film expert Brownlow.
Employing more real-life activists than professional actors, the film includes Sid Rawle of “The New Diggers” (otherwise known as the recipient of an island from John Lennon, which supported a short-lived but successful commune). “We made the film to see if it is possible to make an absolutely authentic historical film,” says Brownlow, “Even the animals came from rare breeds, and the armor for the battle scene came from the Tower of London.”
WINSTANLEY is as close to the seventeenth century as cinema gets, and it is a study of a heroic attempt to improve the lives of people. As Winstanley wrote in his pamphlets, and as he says in the film: “Was the earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the Earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a fruitful land; or was it made to preserve all her children?”
“There’s really not much to be said for WINSTANLEY, except that it’s the most mysteriously beautiful English film since the best of Michael Powell (which it resembles in no other respect) and the best pre-twentieth-century historical film I can recall since THE RISE OF LOUIS XIV [Rossellini] or Straub-Huillet’s Bach film [CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH]. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but I can’t help it. Mysteriously beautiful films which tell one something about the past are rare commodities, and one certainly doesn’t expect to find anything as idiosyncratic as this one in the English cinema. Like BARRY LYNDON, it is s-f about the past where a vanished era becomes the focus of the same sort of curiosity, awe and wonder commonly reserved for the future. It refuses to pander to simplistic demands for ‘contemporary relevance’ (rather than let this emerge naturally from the material), betraying a respect for the audience that is all but anachronistic.” - Jonathan Rosenbaum
Kevin Brownlow’s activities as a hugely influential film historian have tended to erase both memory and recognition of the two extraordinary features he made in collaboration with Andrew Mollo. In this adaptation of David Caute’s historical novel Comrade Jacob, the two directors decorate the story of England’s first commune with unromantic details of Cromwell’s era, and edit the film with the emphasis one expects from silent film expert Brownlow.
Employing more real-life activists than professional actors, the film includes Sid Rawle of “The New Diggers” (otherwise known as the recipient of an island from John Lennon, which supported a short-lived but successful commune). “We made the film to see if it is possible to make an absolutely authentic historical film,” says Brownlow, “Even the animals came from rare breeds, and the armor for the battle scene came from the Tower of London.”
WINSTANLEY is as close to the seventeenth century as cinema gets, and it is a study of a heroic attempt to improve the lives of people. As Winstanley wrote in his pamphlets, and as he says in the film: “Was the earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the Earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a fruitful land; or was it made to preserve all her children?”
“There’s really not much to be said for WINSTANLEY, except that it’s the most mysteriously beautiful English film since the best of Michael Powell (which it resembles in no other respect) and the best pre-twentieth-century historical film I can recall since THE RISE OF LOUIS XIV [Rossellini] or Straub-Huillet’s Bach film [CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH]. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but I can’t help it. Mysteriously beautiful films which tell one something about the past are rare commodities, and one certainly doesn’t expect to find anything as idiosyncratic as this one in the English cinema. Like BARRY LYNDON, it is s-f about the past where a vanished era becomes the focus of the same sort of curiosity, awe and wonder commonly reserved for the future. It refuses to pander to simplistic demands for ‘contemporary relevance’ (rather than let this emerge naturally from the material), betraying a respect for the audience that is all but anachronistic.” - Jonathan Rosenbaum
Juraj Jakubisko
78 minutes
Shot immediately after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and studded with cultural and historical references, BIRDS, ORPHANS AND FOOLS evokes the cinema of Godard, Buñuel and the anarchic air of Vera Chytilová. Jakubisko’s exhilarating and free-wheeling film is by turns playful, surreal and, finally, increasingly nightmarish. Without explicitly referencing the ‘68 invasion, it presents a dilapidated, unmistakably post-invasion world-gone-mad to which the only viable response is to embrace foolishness.
The film concerns a threesome who bunker down together to collectively keep the world’s ills at bay, but not their rivaling affections for one another. The sexually fluid Yorick (Jiří Sýkora), who was raised in an institution for children with intellectual disabilities; his best friend and roommate Andrzej (Philippe Avron), a virginal Polish photographer, and Marta (MARKETA LAZAROVÁ’s eponymous Magda Vášáryová) , a buzz cut-sporting young woman initially mistaken by Yorick for a man when he wakes up after a gay party - presented with remarkable matter-of-factness - to find her in their apartment.
Their newly adopted group home is sprawling, ramshackle and strangely porous, freely admitting entry and egress through a variety of unorthodox portals, including to an aged landlord, young children and countless small birds. Its strewn furnishings afford many opportunities for ludic and giddily intertextual japes and dress-up set-pieces. The film is a dizzying ride. Cinematographer Igor Luther and composer Zdeněk Liška make for the perfect accomplices to realize Jakubisko’s freewheeling, kaleidoscopic vision, offering expressionistic audiovisual rhymes for Yorick, Andrzej and Marta’s desultory, carnivalesque follies, maintaining a captivating revel even when the mood of this most baroque of films turns grimly mordant.
“A mad universe of surrealist tableaux and bizarre actions. This unconventional fantasy blends dream and reality, tenderness and cruelty. A delirious tour de force.” - Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art
“It becomes obvious in seconds why director Juraj Jakubisko is known as ‘the Slovak Fellini’ and has also attracted comparisons with Peter Greenaway, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Sergei Parajanov. Filled with dazzling, hallucinatory images but suppressed until the Velvet Revolution unlocked the vaults, this is another extraordinary rediscovery of Slovak cinema.” - Michael Brooke
“Jakubisko is kin to Brazil’s Glauber Rocha, America’s Robert Downey, Mexico’s Alejandro Jodorovski, Yuri Ilyenko of the Ukraine, Sergei Paradzhanov of Armenia, Miklós Jancsó of Hungary, and in a way to Poland’s Stanislaw Kutz. They share a world in which the basic color is blood red, the dominant sign is that of death, the main diversion is violence, in which heroes dance a merry jig of revolution and war, only to add their heads to the others that have fallen.” - Antonín J. Liehm1
FOR FANS OF: DAISIES; a post-apocalyptic version of BAND OF OUTSIDERS; if JULES AND JIM were directed by Emir Kusturica at his most chaotic; Lars Von Trier’s THE IDIOTS and choosing to confront social oppression by acting like a dumbass; three-way love in a gutted American convertible.
The film concerns a threesome who bunker down together to collectively keep the world’s ills at bay, but not their rivaling affections for one another. The sexually fluid Yorick (Jiří Sýkora), who was raised in an institution for children with intellectual disabilities; his best friend and roommate Andrzej (Philippe Avron), a virginal Polish photographer, and Marta (MARKETA LAZAROVÁ’s eponymous Magda Vášáryová) , a buzz cut-sporting young woman initially mistaken by Yorick for a man when he wakes up after a gay party - presented with remarkable matter-of-factness - to find her in their apartment.
Their newly adopted group home is sprawling, ramshackle and strangely porous, freely admitting entry and egress through a variety of unorthodox portals, including to an aged landlord, young children and countless small birds. Its strewn furnishings afford many opportunities for ludic and giddily intertextual japes and dress-up set-pieces. The film is a dizzying ride. Cinematographer Igor Luther and composer Zdeněk Liška make for the perfect accomplices to realize Jakubisko’s freewheeling, kaleidoscopic vision, offering expressionistic audiovisual rhymes for Yorick, Andrzej and Marta’s desultory, carnivalesque follies, maintaining a captivating revel even when the mood of this most baroque of films turns grimly mordant.
“A mad universe of surrealist tableaux and bizarre actions. This unconventional fantasy blends dream and reality, tenderness and cruelty. A delirious tour de force.” - Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art
“It becomes obvious in seconds why director Juraj Jakubisko is known as ‘the Slovak Fellini’ and has also attracted comparisons with Peter Greenaway, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Sergei Parajanov. Filled with dazzling, hallucinatory images but suppressed until the Velvet Revolution unlocked the vaults, this is another extraordinary rediscovery of Slovak cinema.” - Michael Brooke
“Jakubisko is kin to Brazil’s Glauber Rocha, America’s Robert Downey, Mexico’s Alejandro Jodorovski, Yuri Ilyenko of the Ukraine, Sergei Paradzhanov of Armenia, Miklós Jancsó of Hungary, and in a way to Poland’s Stanislaw Kutz. They share a world in which the basic color is blood red, the dominant sign is that of death, the main diversion is violence, in which heroes dance a merry jig of revolution and war, only to add their heads to the others that have fallen.” - Antonín J. Liehm1
FOR FANS OF: DAISIES; a post-apocalyptic version of BAND OF OUTSIDERS; if JULES AND JIM were directed by Emir Kusturica at his most chaotic; Lars Von Trier’s THE IDIOTS and choosing to confront social oppression by acting like a dumbass; three-way love in a gutted American convertible.
Spike Jonze
113 minutes
Squatting bodies! Squatting genders!
The auspicious feature film debut of both visionary music-video director Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman is a frazzled fantasy gut-buster, set into motion when puppeteer Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) lands a corporate job at the mysterious “LesterCorp” and stumbles across a portal that leads to the mind of John Malkovich (John Malkovich, naturally), allowing him - and wife Cameron Diaz, and co-worker crush Catherine Keener - to hijack the increasingly disconcerted actor for 15 minutes at a time. Never has Kaufman’s writing been more overtly queer than in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH as Diaz’s character, inhabiting Malkovich’s body, quickly moves from egg to gender euphoria! Surely this whole state of affairs could never rapidly devolve into an emotional, sexual, existential nightmare…
Featuring domesticated primates, melancholy marionettes, Freud, non sequiturs, emasculation, slapstick, Abelard and Heloise, and visits to the seventh-and-a-half floor. Come be all that someone else can be!
The auspicious feature film debut of both visionary music-video director Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman is a frazzled fantasy gut-buster, set into motion when puppeteer Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) lands a corporate job at the mysterious “LesterCorp” and stumbles across a portal that leads to the mind of John Malkovich (John Malkovich, naturally), allowing him - and wife Cameron Diaz, and co-worker crush Catherine Keener - to hijack the increasingly disconcerted actor for 15 minutes at a time. Never has Kaufman’s writing been more overtly queer than in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH as Diaz’s character, inhabiting Malkovich’s body, quickly moves from egg to gender euphoria! Surely this whole state of affairs could never rapidly devolve into an emotional, sexual, existential nightmare…
Featuring domesticated primates, melancholy marionettes, Freud, non sequiturs, emasculation, slapstick, Abelard and Heloise, and visits to the seventh-and-a-half floor. Come be all that someone else can be!
