THE TEN PILLARS OF BEACON: CELEBRATING OUR FIFTH ANNIVERSARY
When the Beacon first opened, we posed a question: What is a movie? After five years of diligent hard work exploring, analyzing and attempting to illuminate the answers to this mystery, we are now prepared to present our findings. THE TEN PILLARS OF BEACON are the essence of cinema - the fundamental elements which uniquely comprise the artistic pursuit of filmmaking. That’s right, we’ve decoded the genome. We’ve unlocked the key. These are the building blocks whose final synthesis culminates in the singular joy of movie watching.
Jean Epstein termed the particular revelation that occurs when a real thing or person is transmuted into moving images as photogénie. This aesthetic ideal is only achieved in the very best films, sequences or shots wherein the moving thing or person is poetically transformed through the act of seeing and reveals something larger than itself, ballooning with meaning and metaphor. Element by element, shot by shot, scene by scene – why go to the cinema? As we move forward we must remember and reflect on why we came here in the first place.
For each pillar we’ve selected a film which screened at the cinema sometime in our first half-decade to have a return engagement in celebration of the spirit of renewal and rediscovery. We invite you to heed this sounding bell and congregate for some worshipful viewing. The grounding commitments of THE TEN PILLARS OF BEACON will act as a guide for the understanding of all cinema; a prolegomena to any future movie-viewing. Come keep the faith.
I. IMAGE
II. SOUND
III. MONTAGE
IV. DURATION
V. ARMED STRUGGLE
VI. SEX
VII. BLOOD
VIII. KUNG-FU
IX. A WOMAN LOSING HER MIND
X. REVELATION
Films in this Program
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
124 minutes
THE TEN PILLARS OF BEACON: IMAGE
“External images act on me, transmit movement to me, and I return movement: how could images be in my consciousness since I am myself image, that is, movement?” - Gilles Deleuze
“The more real things get, the more like myths they become.” - R.W. Fassbinder
The origins of the earliest cinematic records are debatable but in the final analysis it doesn’t matter who first made photographs move. The living eye, unable to preserve the sights it beheld, was gifted the ability to see again. Through the invention of a mystically alchemical process known as cinema, the objects of the world were transformed into the subjects of a movie, able to be returned to infinitely, forever preserving a pocket of time. Reality itself would never be the same, all because the world is so full of images demanding to be remembered. Few films make louder demands than THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT.
In the early 1970s, Rainer Werner Fassbinder discovered the American melodramas of Douglas Sirk (like ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS and IMITATION OF LIFE) and was inspired by them to begin working in a new, more intensely emotional register. One of the first and best-loved films of this period in his career is THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT, which balances a realistic depiction of tormented romance with staging that remains true to the director’s roots in experimental theater. This unforgettable, unforgiving dissection of the imbalanced relationship between a haughty fashion designer (Margit Carstensen) and a beautiful but icy ingenue (Hanna Schygulla)—based, in a sly gender reversal, on the writer-director’s own desperate obsession with a young actor—is a true Fassbinder affair, featuring full-throttle performances by an all-female cast.
Inspired by the melancholic images of Douglas Sirk, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (later a major Scorsese collaborator) works entirely within a single room. Using voyeuristic angles and gently gliding pans, he manages to frame the film’s drama in ways that do more than justice to the beauty of the actors and setting. With any other cinematographer, BITTER TEARS could have been a failure. But there may exist no more beautiful images in all of cinema.
“BITTER TEARS has perhaps the most rigorous frames-within-framing of the director’s career, particularly as fashioned by the rafters and the shelves that cordon the women off into separate squares, reducing them to isolated sculptures that appear to be ready to join all the other artifacts that have been assembled for Petra’s elaborate loft, while mirrors provide us brief, jolting X-rays-within-X-rays of their souls.” – Chuck Bowen
“External images act on me, transmit movement to me, and I return movement: how could images be in my consciousness since I am myself image, that is, movement?” - Gilles Deleuze
“The more real things get, the more like myths they become.” - R.W. Fassbinder
The origins of the earliest cinematic records are debatable but in the final analysis it doesn’t matter who first made photographs move. The living eye, unable to preserve the sights it beheld, was gifted the ability to see again. Through the invention of a mystically alchemical process known as cinema, the objects of the world were transformed into the subjects of a movie, able to be returned to infinitely, forever preserving a pocket of time. Reality itself would never be the same, all because the world is so full of images demanding to be remembered. Few films make louder demands than THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT.
In the early 1970s, Rainer Werner Fassbinder discovered the American melodramas of Douglas Sirk (like ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS and IMITATION OF LIFE) and was inspired by them to begin working in a new, more intensely emotional register. One of the first and best-loved films of this period in his career is THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT, which balances a realistic depiction of tormented romance with staging that remains true to the director’s roots in experimental theater. This unforgettable, unforgiving dissection of the imbalanced relationship between a haughty fashion designer (Margit Carstensen) and a beautiful but icy ingenue (Hanna Schygulla)—based, in a sly gender reversal, on the writer-director’s own desperate obsession with a young actor—is a true Fassbinder affair, featuring full-throttle performances by an all-female cast.
Inspired by the melancholic images of Douglas Sirk, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (later a major Scorsese collaborator) works entirely within a single room. Using voyeuristic angles and gently gliding pans, he manages to frame the film’s drama in ways that do more than justice to the beauty of the actors and setting. With any other cinematographer, BITTER TEARS could have been a failure. But there may exist no more beautiful images in all of cinema.
“BITTER TEARS has perhaps the most rigorous frames-within-framing of the director’s career, particularly as fashioned by the rafters and the shelves that cordon the women off into separate squares, reducing them to isolated sculptures that appear to be ready to join all the other artifacts that have been assembled for Petra’s elaborate loft, while mirrors provide us brief, jolting X-rays-within-X-rays of their souls.” – Chuck Bowen
Jacques Tati
115 minutes
THE TEN PILLARS OF BEACON: SOUND
Henri Langlois, founder and curator of La Cinematheque Francaise, claimed in the early ‘60s that Jean Vigo was the only filmmaker who had mastered the use of sound. Maybe he was right, maybe not – but what we know for certain is that he had not seen Jacques Tati’s PLAYTIME yet.
As a painter adds the final flourishes on their masterpiece, Jacques Tati places dabs of sound in just the right places to amplify a gag. Tati famously recorded sound for his films in post, and with particular and exacting judgment. Yet, it is not dialogue, narrative, text or big explosions that motivate the sound design of PLAYTIME but humor. The sounds of footsteps, weird vinyl chairs, broken machines and background dialogue are what decorate and push forward our journey navigating the comedically uncomfortable spaces of a modern capitalist landscape.
Jacques Tati’s gloriously choreographed, nearly wordless comedies about confusion in an age of high technology reached their apotheosis with PLAYTIME. For this monumental achievement, a nearly three-year-long, bank-breaking production, Tati again thrust his recurring protagonist, the lovably old-fashioned Monsieur Hulot, along with a host of other lost souls, into a baffling modern world, this time Paris. With every inch of its super-wide frame crammed with hilarity and inventiveness, PLAYTIME is a lasting record of a modern era tiptoeing on the edge of oblivion.
“All of Tati’s artfulness consists in destroying clarity with clarity. The dialogues are not at all incomprehensible; rather, they are insignificant, and their insignificance is revealed by this very clarity. Tati achieves this by deforming the intensity of the various levels of sound, sometimes going so far as to maintain the sound of an offscreen action over a scene shot silent. For the most part, his sound decor is made up of realistic elements: bits of conversations, cries, various kinds of remarks. None, however, is strictly located in a dramatic situation. In relation to this background noise, sudden noises take on an entirely false prominence.” -Andre Bazin
Henri Langlois, founder and curator of La Cinematheque Francaise, claimed in the early ‘60s that Jean Vigo was the only filmmaker who had mastered the use of sound. Maybe he was right, maybe not – but what we know for certain is that he had not seen Jacques Tati’s PLAYTIME yet.
As a painter adds the final flourishes on their masterpiece, Jacques Tati places dabs of sound in just the right places to amplify a gag. Tati famously recorded sound for his films in post, and with particular and exacting judgment. Yet, it is not dialogue, narrative, text or big explosions that motivate the sound design of PLAYTIME but humor. The sounds of footsteps, weird vinyl chairs, broken machines and background dialogue are what decorate and push forward our journey navigating the comedically uncomfortable spaces of a modern capitalist landscape.
Jacques Tati’s gloriously choreographed, nearly wordless comedies about confusion in an age of high technology reached their apotheosis with PLAYTIME. For this monumental achievement, a nearly three-year-long, bank-breaking production, Tati again thrust his recurring protagonist, the lovably old-fashioned Monsieur Hulot, along with a host of other lost souls, into a baffling modern world, this time Paris. With every inch of its super-wide frame crammed with hilarity and inventiveness, PLAYTIME is a lasting record of a modern era tiptoeing on the edge of oblivion.
“All of Tati’s artfulness consists in destroying clarity with clarity. The dialogues are not at all incomprehensible; rather, they are insignificant, and their insignificance is revealed by this very clarity. Tati achieves this by deforming the intensity of the various levels of sound, sometimes going so far as to maintain the sound of an offscreen action over a scene shot silent. For the most part, his sound decor is made up of realistic elements: bits of conversations, cries, various kinds of remarks. None, however, is strictly located in a dramatic situation. In relation to this background noise, sudden noises take on an entirely false prominence.” -Andre Bazin
Orson Welles
89 minutes
THE TEN PILLARS OF BEACON: MONTAGE
What kind of magic happens when two images talk to each other? Montage can be thought of as a trick. By placing two shots next to each other with a cut, we can be fooled into a lot of things. It happens in the news when they use shots of protests from other times and places to emphasize the wickedness of the left. Sometimes a film will use archival footage of a real event and place it next to actors portraying people from that time to emphasize the reality which they’re referencing. In Lev Kuleshov’s famous experiment, a shot of a man staring straight ahead placed next to other objects or things (food, a grave and a woman) makes his expression read differently each time (hungry, sad, or lustful). F FOR FAKE is a construction reveling in its own deception and the particular duplicity of an editor.
In F FOR FAKE, a free-form sort-of documentary by Orson Welles, the legendary filmmaker (and self-described charlatan) gleefully reengages with the central preoccupation of his career: the tenuous lines between illusion and truth, art and lies. Beginning with portraits of the world- renowned art forger Elmyr de Hory and his equally devious biographer, Clifford Irving, Welles embarks on a dizzying journey that simultaneously exposes and revels in fakery and fakers of all stripes—not the least of whom is Welles himself. Charming and inventive, F FOR FAKE is an inspired prank, a clever examination of the essential duplicity of cinema, and a soaring tribute to the power of art.
What kind of magic happens when two images talk to each other? Montage can be thought of as a trick. By placing two shots next to each other with a cut, we can be fooled into a lot of things. It happens in the news when they use shots of protests from other times and places to emphasize the wickedness of the left. Sometimes a film will use archival footage of a real event and place it next to actors portraying people from that time to emphasize the reality which they’re referencing. In Lev Kuleshov’s famous experiment, a shot of a man staring straight ahead placed next to other objects or things (food, a grave and a woman) makes his expression read differently each time (hungry, sad, or lustful). F FOR FAKE is a construction reveling in its own deception and the particular duplicity of an editor.
In F FOR FAKE, a free-form sort-of documentary by Orson Welles, the legendary filmmaker (and self-described charlatan) gleefully reengages with the central preoccupation of his career: the tenuous lines between illusion and truth, art and lies. Beginning with portraits of the world- renowned art forger Elmyr de Hory and his equally devious biographer, Clifford Irving, Welles embarks on a dizzying journey that simultaneously exposes and revels in fakery and fakers of all stripes—not the least of whom is Welles himself. Charming and inventive, F FOR FAKE is an inspired prank, a clever examination of the essential duplicity of cinema, and a soaring tribute to the power of art.
Tsai Ming-liang
82 minutes
THE TEN PILLARS OF BEACON: DURATION
“Cinema was born in the rush and push of the turn of the newly electrified last century. Its continued existence–at least as a popular art, or an art at all–is threatened in a new century that is no less frantic in its own way. Changes occur with reckless speed, the assumption being that by the time anyone has noticed, the moment for protest will have passed… Against this, Tsai’s gentle protest is perhaps too quiet to be heard above the din of ceaseless activity, but worth registering all the same. Through cinema, GOODBYE, DRAGON INN tells us, time can be held in abeyance for a moment, or can be studied over and over again in its passing; in the cinema, they tell us, 1967 can for a couple of hours link hands with 2003. And if time can be regained through cinema, who is to say that cinema will fare so poorly in the hands of time.” – Nick Pinkerton
The guy who took duration to another level, making it the primary focus of his career as an artist in so many ways, is Tsai Ming-liang. Not only with his long takes and sprawling sequences, but by focusing on the image of a single man for over 30 years. We have seen Lee Kang-sheng’s body change from his adolescence into his middle age through Tsai’s features and short films, merging the duration of a real person’s life into the medium itself. GOODBYE, DRAGON INN marks duration as a primary focus of his career and is a melancholic love letter to the cinema.
Like the Royal Theater in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and the title movie house in CINEMA PARADISO, the Fu-Ho is shutting down for good. A palace with seemingly mile-wide rows of red velvet seats, the likes of which you’ve seen only in your most nostalgic dreams (though they’re beginning to fray), the Fu-Ho’s valedictory screening is King Hu’s 1967 wuxia epic DRAGON INN, playing to a motley smattering of spectators. The standard grievances persist: patrons snack noisily and remove their shoes, treating this temple of cinema like their living room, but as we watch the enveloping film deep into a pandemic, the sense that moviegoing as a communal experience is slipping away takes on a powerful and painful resonance.
Yet GOODBYE, DRAGON INN, released nearly two decades ago, is too multifaceted to collapse into a simple valentine to the age of pre-VOD cinephilia. A minimalist where King Hu was a maximalist, preferring long, static shots and sparse use of dialogue, Tsai rises to the narrative challenges he sets for himself and offers the slyest, most delicate of character arcs (the manager, a woman with an iron brace on her leg, embarks on a torturous odyssey to deliver food to the projectionist, played by Lee Kang-sheng). By the time the possibility arises that the theater is haunted, we’ve already identified it as a space outside of time—indeed, two stars of Hu’s original opus, Miao Tien and Shih Chun, watch their younger selves with tears in their eyes, past and present commingling harmoniously and poignantly.
“Cinema was born in the rush and push of the turn of the newly electrified last century. Its continued existence–at least as a popular art, or an art at all–is threatened in a new century that is no less frantic in its own way. Changes occur with reckless speed, the assumption being that by the time anyone has noticed, the moment for protest will have passed… Against this, Tsai’s gentle protest is perhaps too quiet to be heard above the din of ceaseless activity, but worth registering all the same. Through cinema, GOODBYE, DRAGON INN tells us, time can be held in abeyance for a moment, or can be studied over and over again in its passing; in the cinema, they tell us, 1967 can for a couple of hours link hands with 2003. And if time can be regained through cinema, who is to say that cinema will fare so poorly in the hands of time.” – Nick Pinkerton
The guy who took duration to another level, making it the primary focus of his career as an artist in so many ways, is Tsai Ming-liang. Not only with his long takes and sprawling sequences, but by focusing on the image of a single man for over 30 years. We have seen Lee Kang-sheng’s body change from his adolescence into his middle age through Tsai’s features and short films, merging the duration of a real person’s life into the medium itself. GOODBYE, DRAGON INN marks duration as a primary focus of his career and is a melancholic love letter to the cinema.
Like the Royal Theater in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and the title movie house in CINEMA PARADISO, the Fu-Ho is shutting down for good. A palace with seemingly mile-wide rows of red velvet seats, the likes of which you’ve seen only in your most nostalgic dreams (though they’re beginning to fray), the Fu-Ho’s valedictory screening is King Hu’s 1967 wuxia epic DRAGON INN, playing to a motley smattering of spectators. The standard grievances persist: patrons snack noisily and remove their shoes, treating this temple of cinema like their living room, but as we watch the enveloping film deep into a pandemic, the sense that moviegoing as a communal experience is slipping away takes on a powerful and painful resonance.
Yet GOODBYE, DRAGON INN, released nearly two decades ago, is too multifaceted to collapse into a simple valentine to the age of pre-VOD cinephilia. A minimalist where King Hu was a maximalist, preferring long, static shots and sparse use of dialogue, Tsai rises to the narrative challenges he sets for himself and offers the slyest, most delicate of character arcs (the manager, a woman with an iron brace on her leg, embarks on a torturous odyssey to deliver food to the projectionist, played by Lee Kang-sheng). By the time the possibility arises that the theater is haunted, we’ve already identified it as a space outside of time—indeed, two stars of Hu’s original opus, Miao Tien and Shih Chun, watch their younger selves with tears in their eyes, past and present commingling harmoniously and poignantly.
Heiny Srour
62 minutes
THE TEN PILLARS OF BEACON: ARMED STRUGGLE
Cinema can be used as a vessel for resistance, a tool to hasten the breaking of chains, a beacon call for global transformation towards new collectively-forged futures.
In the late 60s, Dhofar rose up against the British-backed Sultanate of Oman, in a democratic, feminist guerrilla movement. Director Heiny Srour and her team crossed 500 miles of desert and mountains by foot, under bombardment by the British Royal Air Force, to reach the conflict zone and capture this rare record of a now mostly-forgotten war.
Using archival footage, lyrical pamphleteering, and dialectic montage, Srour’s documentary depicts an armed struggle devoid of testosterone or muscular militarism, where every single aspect of society is patiently subverted. Land and water are collectivized, cooking is no longer the exclusive prerogative of women, and education is not just for men. Rather than religiously waiting for the fateful day of liberation, it is the practice of everyday life that is organically revolutionized. The fight against British neo-colonialism, patriarchal hierarchy, tribal divisions, Arab collaborationism, and cultural integralism is conducted collectively.
Never is a single aspect considered or dealt with separately, something mirrored in the very narrative structure of the documentary, which is in fact devoid of individual protagonists. A polyphony of voices and stances coalesce into a mosaic where the very matrix of domination is questioned and dismantled. There is neither a cute, innocent child with whom the audience can sympathize and cleanse its conscience, nor a hero with whom to identify. There are no cartoonish villains to moralistically simplify the structural nature of injustice. There is not even an ending, except the material one imposed by the film’s length, for however defeated and forgotten by history are the struggles chronicled in THE HOUR OF LIBERATION HAS ARRIVED, they have lost none of their urgency and relevance.
Cinema can be used as a vessel for resistance, a tool to hasten the breaking of chains, a beacon call for global transformation towards new collectively-forged futures.
In the late 60s, Dhofar rose up against the British-backed Sultanate of Oman, in a democratic, feminist guerrilla movement. Director Heiny Srour and her team crossed 500 miles of desert and mountains by foot, under bombardment by the British Royal Air Force, to reach the conflict zone and capture this rare record of a now mostly-forgotten war.
Using archival footage, lyrical pamphleteering, and dialectic montage, Srour’s documentary depicts an armed struggle devoid of testosterone or muscular militarism, where every single aspect of society is patiently subverted. Land and water are collectivized, cooking is no longer the exclusive prerogative of women, and education is not just for men. Rather than religiously waiting for the fateful day of liberation, it is the practice of everyday life that is organically revolutionized. The fight against British neo-colonialism, patriarchal hierarchy, tribal divisions, Arab collaborationism, and cultural integralism is conducted collectively.
Never is a single aspect considered or dealt with separately, something mirrored in the very narrative structure of the documentary, which is in fact devoid of individual protagonists. A polyphony of voices and stances coalesce into a mosaic where the very matrix of domination is questioned and dismantled. There is neither a cute, innocent child with whom the audience can sympathize and cleanse its conscience, nor a hero with whom to identify. There are no cartoonish villains to moralistically simplify the structural nature of injustice. There is not even an ending, except the material one imposed by the film’s length, for however defeated and forgotten by history are the struggles chronicled in THE HOUR OF LIBERATION HAS ARRIVED, they have lost none of their urgency and relevance.
Elizabeth Purchell
77 minutes
THE TEN PILLARS OF BEACON: SEX
What image on the screen is more titillating, more transgressive, more important than unsimulated sex. We need no excuse, no plot, no rhyme or reason to screen sex on the big screen and we could not dream of apologizing.
Long before films like LOVE, SIMON and CALL ME BY YOUR NAME became common fare at the multiplex, the only places gay men could see their lives and lusts depicted on screen with any degree of honesty was at their local all-male adult cinema. From coming out stories to romances, melodramas to camp comedies, the hundreds of films churned out by the gay adult film industry throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s were a driving force behind the spread of gay culture and constitute a largely forgotten cinematic document of the era — films that were often shot in actual queer spaces, starred the people who frequented them, and then played back in movie theaters that doubled as safe communal spaces for members of the community.
ASK ANY BUDDY is a throbbing feature-length fever-dream collage of real desire, cruising and fucking. The piece uses fragments from 126 theatrical feature films spanning the years 1968-1986 to create a kaleidoscopic day in the life snapshot of urban gay culture in the era — or at least how it looked in the movies.
From casual tearoom cruising to actual police raids, ASK ANY BUDDY uses rare footage shot at dozens of real bathhouses, bars, movie theaters, pride parades and legendary hotspots like New York’s West Side Piers to explore both the sex film genre’s unique blend of fantasy and reality and its role in documenting a subculture that was just starting to come into visibility in the years immediately following the Stonewall Riots. Nearly half of the films excerpted in ASK ANY BUDDY were personally digitized just for their inclusion here.
What image on the screen is more titillating, more transgressive, more important than unsimulated sex. We need no excuse, no plot, no rhyme or reason to screen sex on the big screen and we could not dream of apologizing.
Long before films like LOVE, SIMON and CALL ME BY YOUR NAME became common fare at the multiplex, the only places gay men could see their lives and lusts depicted on screen with any degree of honesty was at their local all-male adult cinema. From coming out stories to romances, melodramas to camp comedies, the hundreds of films churned out by the gay adult film industry throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s were a driving force behind the spread of gay culture and constitute a largely forgotten cinematic document of the era — films that were often shot in actual queer spaces, starred the people who frequented them, and then played back in movie theaters that doubled as safe communal spaces for members of the community.
ASK ANY BUDDY is a throbbing feature-length fever-dream collage of real desire, cruising and fucking. The piece uses fragments from 126 theatrical feature films spanning the years 1968-1986 to create a kaleidoscopic day in the life snapshot of urban gay culture in the era — or at least how it looked in the movies.
From casual tearoom cruising to actual police raids, ASK ANY BUDDY uses rare footage shot at dozens of real bathhouses, bars, movie theaters, pride parades and legendary hotspots like New York’s West Side Piers to explore both the sex film genre’s unique blend of fantasy and reality and its role in documenting a subculture that was just starting to come into visibility in the years immediately following the Stonewall Riots. Nearly half of the films excerpted in ASK ANY BUDDY were personally digitized just for their inclusion here.
Dario Argento
127 minutes
THE TEN PILLARS OF BEACON: BLOOD
Bright red and all over the place is just the way we like to see it.
Anticipating the eerie magic of SUSPIRIA, DEEP RED finds Dario Argento and creative partner Daria Nicolodi presenting a simple, Christmas-set slasher. At least, that’s what it appears to be. But within two minutes, it’s obvious that there’s nothing “simple” about DEEP RED at all. This revolutionized the classy, ultra-violent sub-genre known as giallo into a self-reflexive nightmare of blood-soaked witnessing as Argento emphasizes the relentlessness of the cinematic gaze and the importance of “looking” in order to get at supreme truth. Full of funhouse of mirrors and secret doors, games of memory and chance, screwball comedy, dolls, psychics, ghosts, witches, and an absurd amount of amateur sleuthing, DEEP RED also features one of the all-time great Goblin soundtracks - a spook-a-delic prog-rock masterpiece that beautifully complements the movie’s dreamy mood!
“Dario Argento’s first full-fledged masterpiece, DEEP RED is a riveting thriller whose secrets carefully unravel via a series of carefully calibrated compositions that become not unlike virtual gateways into Freudian pasts. Argento delicately grapples with issues of feminism and masculinity within the film’s meticulously visual exegesis of a troubled psyche.” - Ed Gonzalez, Slant
Bright red and all over the place is just the way we like to see it.
Anticipating the eerie magic of SUSPIRIA, DEEP RED finds Dario Argento and creative partner Daria Nicolodi presenting a simple, Christmas-set slasher. At least, that’s what it appears to be. But within two minutes, it’s obvious that there’s nothing “simple” about DEEP RED at all. This revolutionized the classy, ultra-violent sub-genre known as giallo into a self-reflexive nightmare of blood-soaked witnessing as Argento emphasizes the relentlessness of the cinematic gaze and the importance of “looking” in order to get at supreme truth. Full of funhouse of mirrors and secret doors, games of memory and chance, screwball comedy, dolls, psychics, ghosts, witches, and an absurd amount of amateur sleuthing, DEEP RED also features one of the all-time great Goblin soundtracks - a spook-a-delic prog-rock masterpiece that beautifully complements the movie’s dreamy mood!
“Dario Argento’s first full-fledged masterpiece, DEEP RED is a riveting thriller whose secrets carefully unravel via a series of carefully calibrated compositions that become not unlike virtual gateways into Freudian pasts. Argento delicately grapples with issues of feminism and masculinity within the film’s meticulously visual exegesis of a troubled psyche.” - Ed Gonzalez, Slant
????
120ish
THE TEN PILLARS OF BEACON: KUNG-FU
There is no genre of film that surpasses the raw artistry of ‘kung-fu’. Spanning from the beauty of lavish epic wuxia to no-budget slap-stick hilarity, Chinese martial arts films are simply too exciting for us to select just one. So get ready to pick your battles with this themed spin on our FIVE MINUTES TO LIVE! series!
Here's the deal. You buy a ticket. We show you the first five minutes of five different mystery kung-fu movies. Then everybody votes on which one to watch in its entirety! You've got FIVE MINUTES TO KILL!!
Come have an encounter with the unexpected free from the burden of preconceptions. We'll promise a wild time if you promise to be open to anything.
There is no genre of film that surpasses the raw artistry of ‘kung-fu’. Spanning from the beauty of lavish epic wuxia to no-budget slap-stick hilarity, Chinese martial arts films are simply too exciting for us to select just one. So get ready to pick your battles with this themed spin on our FIVE MINUTES TO LIVE! series!
Here's the deal. You buy a ticket. We show you the first five minutes of five different mystery kung-fu movies. Then everybody votes on which one to watch in its entirety! You've got FIVE MINUTES TO KILL!!
Come have an encounter with the unexpected free from the burden of preconceptions. We'll promise a wild time if you promise to be open to anything.
Andrzej Żuławski
124 minutes
THE TEN PILLARS OF BEACON: A WOMAN LOSING HER MIND
“Rarely has the screen been subject to such awe-inspiring fits of hysteria… all suggesting a purification process that leads to a higher state of being akin to divinity.” – Kier-la Janisse
There would be no cinema if women didn’t go absolutely ape shit every now and then. What makes her do it? What does she want? The subject of great interest by directors, writers and actors alike, women’s minds have been dissected again and again for our viewing pleasure. You can find her in any genre– from arthouse interpretations like CONTEMPT or PERSONA to comedies like A NEW LEAF, and most often and to the most dramatic effect in horror. Yet, she has yet to be understood– and this is her greatest gift. As a symbol, the psychotic woman is the ultimate embodiment of cinema at its most mysterious, frightening and compelling.
Banned upon its original release in 1981, Andrzej Żuławski’s stunningly choreographed nightmare of a marriage unraveling is an experience unlike any other. Professional spy Mark (Sam Neill) returns to his West Berlin home to find his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani, in a role that earned her immortality) insistent on a divorce. As Anna’s frenzied behavior becomes ever more alarming, Mark discovers a truth far more sinister than his wildest suspicions. With its pulsating score, visceral imagery, and some of the most haunting performances ever captured on screen, POSSESSION is cinematic delirium at its most intoxicating.
“Rarely has the screen been subject to such awe-inspiring fits of hysteria… all suggesting a purification process that leads to a higher state of being akin to divinity.” – Kier-la Janisse
There would be no cinema if women didn’t go absolutely ape shit every now and then. What makes her do it? What does she want? The subject of great interest by directors, writers and actors alike, women’s minds have been dissected again and again for our viewing pleasure. You can find her in any genre– from arthouse interpretations like CONTEMPT or PERSONA to comedies like A NEW LEAF, and most often and to the most dramatic effect in horror. Yet, she has yet to be understood– and this is her greatest gift. As a symbol, the psychotic woman is the ultimate embodiment of cinema at its most mysterious, frightening and compelling.
Banned upon its original release in 1981, Andrzej Żuławski’s stunningly choreographed nightmare of a marriage unraveling is an experience unlike any other. Professional spy Mark (Sam Neill) returns to his West Berlin home to find his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani, in a role that earned her immortality) insistent on a divorce. As Anna’s frenzied behavior becomes ever more alarming, Mark discovers a truth far more sinister than his wildest suspicions. With its pulsating score, visceral imagery, and some of the most haunting performances ever captured on screen, POSSESSION is cinematic delirium at its most intoxicating.
Mikhail Kalatozov
97 minutes
THE TEN PILLARS OF BEACON: REVELATION
A powerful moment of revelation. When it is done well, an instance of revelation collapses whatever narrative we may have been drawn in by and links hands with understanding beyond reason. Whatever reason you left your home to come to the cinema vanishes and you are totally one with the dream. These moments seem to teleport us outside of time or place, they grab hold of something deep inside the collective imagination and shake us out of whatever limits we thought we had. For us movie-going heathens, any movie can feel like touching or speaking with god. Shots or lines of dialogue can dig so deep through our retinas that they scratch our souls. When we watch other people in a film have this same revelation in their own time and space, and that coalesces with our own revelation, we become one. These instances deserve their own spotlight and so we have picked from the ether one of the many great revelations to share with you again. Amen.
This landmark film by the virtuosic Mikhail Kalatozov was heralded as a revelation in the post-Stalin Soviet Union and the international cinema community alike. It tells the story of Veronica (Tatiana Samoilova) and Boris (Alexei Batalov), a couple who are blissfully in love until World War II tears them apart. With Boris at the front, Veronica must try to ward off spiritual numbness and defend herself from the increasingly forceful advances of her beau’s draft-dodging cousin. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival, THE CRANES ARE FLYING is a superbly crafted drama with impassioned performances and viscerally emotional, gravity-defying cinematography by Kalatozov’s regular collaborator Sergei Urusevsky.
“The link between man and the world is broken. Henceforth, this link must become an object of belief: it is the impossible which can only be restored within a faith. Belief is no longer addressed to a different or transformed world. Man is in the world as if in a pure optical and sound situation. The reaction of which man has been dispossessed can be replaced only by belief. Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what he sees and hears. The cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only link.” - Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image
A powerful moment of revelation. When it is done well, an instance of revelation collapses whatever narrative we may have been drawn in by and links hands with understanding beyond reason. Whatever reason you left your home to come to the cinema vanishes and you are totally one with the dream. These moments seem to teleport us outside of time or place, they grab hold of something deep inside the collective imagination and shake us out of whatever limits we thought we had. For us movie-going heathens, any movie can feel like touching or speaking with god. Shots or lines of dialogue can dig so deep through our retinas that they scratch our souls. When we watch other people in a film have this same revelation in their own time and space, and that coalesces with our own revelation, we become one. These instances deserve their own spotlight and so we have picked from the ether one of the many great revelations to share with you again. Amen.
This landmark film by the virtuosic Mikhail Kalatozov was heralded as a revelation in the post-Stalin Soviet Union and the international cinema community alike. It tells the story of Veronica (Tatiana Samoilova) and Boris (Alexei Batalov), a couple who are blissfully in love until World War II tears them apart. With Boris at the front, Veronica must try to ward off spiritual numbness and defend herself from the increasingly forceful advances of her beau’s draft-dodging cousin. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival, THE CRANES ARE FLYING is a superbly crafted drama with impassioned performances and viscerally emotional, gravity-defying cinematography by Kalatozov’s regular collaborator Sergei Urusevsky.
“The link between man and the world is broken. Henceforth, this link must become an object of belief: it is the impossible which can only be restored within a faith. Belief is no longer addressed to a different or transformed world. Man is in the world as if in a pure optical and sound situation. The reaction of which man has been dispossessed can be replaced only by belief. Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what he sees and hears. The cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only link.” - Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image
