POTENTIALLY ILL-ADVISED: FILMS ABOUT ASSASSINATING YOUR POLITICAL LEADERS
“The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator.” - Thomas Pynchon
"The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination." - Voltaire
"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" - American expression
Films in this Program
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
105 minutes
“Terrorism is an invention of capitalism to better protect its capital,” Fassbinder once declared. That theory is put to the test in this wildly anarchic satire of guerrilla violence in which a band of leftist radicals inadvertently become puppets of the West German government, which uses them to justify its authoritarian policies. Slapstick comedy (including a game of keep-away with a volume of Bakunin) and oddball habits (the terrorists dress like prewar gangsters and play Monopoly) blend with wild visions and grandiose philosophical speculations. The film’s intertitles are taken from bathroom graffiti; its cinematic references (to Bresson, Tarkovsky, and, especially, Godard) are sublime, and the action scenes are filmed with a razor-sharp pulp efficacy. Fassbinder’s blend of paranoia and whiz-bang wonder stands as one of his most provocative and explosively controversial explorations of power and control.
David Cronenberg
103 minutes
David Cronenberg casually delivers one of the best Stephen King adaptations of all time. Waking up from a five-year coma after a car accident, former schoolteacher Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) discovers that he can see people’s futures and pasts when he touches them. When Johnny has a disturbing vision after he shakes the hand of an ambitious and amoral politician (Martin Sheen), he must decide if he should take drastic action to change the future. In a filmography filled with disgusting vile images oozing with drippy flesh, stomach/armpit death orifices, car crash orgasms, and bubbling pus, the finale of THE DEAD ZONE is perhaps Cronenberg’s most resonant.
Lina Wertmüller
120 minutes
The greatest anti-fascist sex worker romantic comedy you’ve never seen, Lina Wertmüller’s LOVE AND ANARCHY is a bawdy, beautiful, and brilliant masterpiece that demands to be rediscovered. On the eve of World War II, after the rise of fascist Italy, a newly radicalized farmer conspires with an anarchist sex worker to assassinate Benito Mussolini. While posing as her cousin in a high-end Roman brothel, the farmer falls in love with one of the girls and questions his dedication to the cause. Anchored by two dynamic performances from Wertmüller’s favorite actors and collaborators Mariangela Melato and Giancarlo Giannini, LOVE AND ANARCHY is a film of operatic emotion and subversive comedy - and a powerful statement on the terror of fascism and the ignoble fates of those who challenged it.
John Carpenter
99 minutes
Welcome to Carpenter’s 1981 vision of a dystopian 1997, in which Manhattan has been turned into an anarchic maximum-security prison fenced-off from the rest of the United States and ruled with an iron fist by Isaac Hayes’s diabolical arch-criminal potentate, the Duke. When an Air Force One crash strands the US President (Donald Pleasence, inexplicably British) on the lawless isle of Manahatta, merciless mercenary Snake Plissken (a resplendently eye-patched Russell) is the only man who can get the Chief Executive out alive… never mind that Snake’s a convicted criminal himself. What follows encompasses hang-gliding into the World Trade Center, vicious death match gladiatorial combat, and Harry Dean Stanton — which is to say, pure cinema. Arguably, Russell’s most iconic role. His beard stubble here belongs in the Library of Congress.
Zhang Yimou
99 minutes
Set in a pre-unified China, a nameless warrior (Jet Li) is being honored for defeating three of the king’s most dangerous enemies: Broken Sword (Tony Leung), Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung) and Moon (Zhang Ziyi). But the warrior has a secret: he’s planning to assassinate the Emperor.
HERO is alive with Chinese history, electrified by the dizzying sensuality of its convoluted love triangle, and ennobled by its embrace of the highest Taoist principles. Stunningly realized by Wong Kar-wai’s go-to cinematographer Christopher Doyle, the film’s color-coded set pieces are paced like breathstopping musical numbers. And while green curtains seem to exist solely so they can fall deliriously to the ground, there’s an overwhelming sense that the power of the sword is inextricably linked to the forces of color and nature. HERO is elliptical, primal, radically disjointed, feminist and devoted to the glory of China. Everything a wuxia should be and then some.
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FEATURE LENGTH
Totally FREE. No RSVP. First come, first admitted! Doors open 30 minutes before showtime.
Welcome to Seattle's premiere "blindfolded" screening series! The film title will not be announced until the seats are filled and the movieshow is about to commence.
Take the gamble of a chance encounter and discover the movie you didn't know you needed. We aim to provide an enjoyably disorienting experience in which you can indulge your curiosities without any intimidating barriers to entry. And besides, we just think it's sneaky and fun to keep sexy secrets. Don't you?
Movies from all o'er the globe, spanning from the dawn of cinema to its far-flung future. The only criterion is that the Beacon is going to bring out that private stock stuff every single time. We're giving you films that haven't been played to death, proffering an alternative history of cinema, a celebration of the breadth and depth of film history, a pulsating motion picture party.
Welcome to Seattle's premiere "blindfolded" screening series! The film title will not be announced until the seats are filled and the movieshow is about to commence.
Take the gamble of a chance encounter and discover the movie you didn't know you needed. We aim to provide an enjoyably disorienting experience in which you can indulge your curiosities without any intimidating barriers to entry. And besides, we just think it's sneaky and fun to keep sexy secrets. Don't you?
Movies from all o'er the globe, spanning from the dawn of cinema to its far-flung future. The only criterion is that the Beacon is going to bring out that private stock stuff every single time. We're giving you films that haven't been played to death, proffering an alternative history of cinema, a celebration of the breadth and depth of film history, a pulsating motion picture party.
Robert Kramer
100 minutes
The revered political filmmaker Robert Kramer’s work zeroed in on feelings of political chaos and antipathy as they manifested themselves at the height of the Vietnam War. THE EDGE remains a deeply affecting portrait of how disillusioned activists and artists were coping through a political horror show.
A troubled antiwar activist develops an irrepressible urge to assassinate the President of the United States. His resolve forces others in a fragmented and disillusioned group of political allies to face the threat of government counterintelligence and the temptations of middle-age security. It is also a film built from gestures and glances, gently observing the body movement and emotion of collective dialogue and the suddenness of conflict. According to Kramer, his characters existed in the “world of their looks and their words.”
“THE EDGE embodies something of the transitional conditions in present American society: structures of belief have broken down; the society has destroyed its own reason for being, its own rational; there is no longer meaningful activity within the society itself; but this non-significance has not yet been translated into a thrust for other alternative, into an awareness that social change and personal change are indeed possible — that is, into a movement that understands the terms of revolutionary change.” - Robert Kramer
A troubled antiwar activist develops an irrepressible urge to assassinate the President of the United States. His resolve forces others in a fragmented and disillusioned group of political allies to face the threat of government counterintelligence and the temptations of middle-age security. It is also a film built from gestures and glances, gently observing the body movement and emotion of collective dialogue and the suddenness of conflict. According to Kramer, his characters existed in the “world of their looks and their words.”
“THE EDGE embodies something of the transitional conditions in present American society: structures of belief have broken down; the society has destroyed its own reason for being, its own rational; there is no longer meaningful activity within the society itself; but this non-significance has not yet been translated into a thrust for other alternative, into an awareness that social change and personal change are indeed possible — that is, into a movement that understands the terms of revolutionary change.” - Robert Kramer
Masao Adachi
75 minutes
Veteran Japanese filmmaker Adachi Masao (b.1939) has remained an unrelenting firebrand and true radical throughout his long career. His newest work, REVOLUTION +1, extends the mode of politically outspoken activist cinema refined in the films he has made since returning to Japan after spending almost thirty years in Lebanon as part of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Deliberately more accessible than earlier avant-garde landmarks such as AKA SERIAL KILLER (1969), REVOLUTION +1 is nevertheless equally courageous and controversial in its direct address to an incendiary, even taboo, topic, here the motivations guiding the assassin of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Responding immediately to the shocking July 8, 2022 murder of the right-wing nationalist, known both for his aggressive economic policies and stubborn denial of Japanese war crimes, Adachi set out to make a film that could tell the untold story of the young assassin—named Kawakami Tatsuya in the film—who had been pushed into a life of extreme deprivation after his mother was pulled into an extreme and predatory religious cult, the notorious Unification Church, which was once a staunch Abe supporter. Making even harder-hitting his intervention against the non-critical assessment of Abe’s legacy by the political establishment, Adachi set out to direct his film in record time so it could, in fact, be released on the same date as Abe’s state funeral that September. Written in three days, shot in just over a week, REVOLUTION +1 is impressive for its crisp, sympathetic and nuanced account of Kawakami’s life and fatal act. The film proved as controversial and well received as designed: attracting both record audiences and massive protests, while sparking a national reckoning.
Responding immediately to the shocking July 8, 2022 murder of the right-wing nationalist, known both for his aggressive economic policies and stubborn denial of Japanese war crimes, Adachi set out to make a film that could tell the untold story of the young assassin—named Kawakami Tatsuya in the film—who had been pushed into a life of extreme deprivation after his mother was pulled into an extreme and predatory religious cult, the notorious Unification Church, which was once a staunch Abe supporter. Making even harder-hitting his intervention against the non-critical assessment of Abe’s legacy by the political establishment, Adachi set out to direct his film in record time so it could, in fact, be released on the same date as Abe’s state funeral that September. Written in three days, shot in just over a week, REVOLUTION +1 is impressive for its crisp, sympathetic and nuanced account of Kawakami’s life and fatal act. The film proved as controversial and well received as designed: attracting both record audiences and massive protests, while sparking a national reckoning.
