Two Square Miles | Assault on Precinct 13 | Perfumed Nightmare | Detropia

BASILICA SCREENINGS is a weekly film series which presents an array of works ranging from new and repertory narrative features, documentaries, experimental films, video and media art, as well as guest curated programs, often with filmmakers and special guests in attendance for a discussion following the screenings.

All films will begin at 8 pm and are $5-10 sliding scale, unless otherwise noted.

BASILICA SCREENINGS: OCTOBER
Friday, October 5 – 7 PM
TWO SQUARE MILES, Barbara Ettinger & Sven Huseby, 2006, 90 min.
Discussion with Barbara Ettinger, Sven Huseby and Same Pratt

Thursday, October 11
ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, John Carpenter, 1976, 91 min.

Thursday, October 18
PERFUMED NIGHTMARE, Kidlat Tahimik, 1977, 93 min., 16 mm, In Tagalog with English subtitles

Thursday, October 25
DETROPIA, Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady, 2012, 90 min.
Q&A with Rachel Grady

Friday, October 5 – 7 PM
TWO SQUARE MILES
Barbara Ettinger & Sven Huseby, 2006, 90 min.

A discussion with Barbara Ettinger, Sven Huseby, and Sam Pratt will follow the screening.

With its thriving main street, diverse population and healthy rate of revitalization, Hudson, New York could be seen as a model of small-town America. Hudson is dealing with the same issues that communities of all sizes face: ever-widening income gaps and the loss of a middle class; threats to health and environment by polluting corporations, gentrification and homogenization; and a compromised democratic process. Local business and small farms find it impossible to compete against national chains, while long-standing friction persists along racial and economic lines. Residents are divided in their support for a proposed 300-million-dollar cement plant owned by a Swiss multinational corporation. Without a doubt, the project will have substantial impacts on the community’s health, environment and economy. The fight against the plant is a vehicle through which different parts of the community come together, as politicians and executives try to divide the community for their own purposes. TWO SQUARE MILES takes a closer look at this small community in a state of flux, and is an extended observation of an American small town in transition, raising questions about Hudson’s future that are mirrored in changing communities across the nation.

Thursday, October 11
ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13
John Carpenter, 1976, 91 min.

From the director of Halloween and The Thing, ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 combines elements of the classic western and the modern thriller—a cult favorite, it is one of John Carpenter’s very best. In this unrelenting action masterpiece, a police station under siege from a vicious street gang becomes a cataclysmic battleground where only the strongest survive. Inspired by Howard Hawks’ immortal western, Rio Bravo, this is an explosive gem from one of cinema’s great frightmasters.

Thursday, October 18
PERFUMED NIGHTMARE
Kidlat Tahimik, 1977, 93 min, 16mm. In Tagalog with English subtitles.

Kidlat Tahimik in person!
Introduction by Ed Halter and post-screening discussion with Kidlat Tahimik.

Basilica Hudson is thrilled to host legendary Philippine filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik during his US retrospective tour for a screening of his masterpiece PERFUMED NIGHTMARE on 16mm. Born in 1942, during the American occupation of the Philippines, Tahimik is best known for this remarkable, uncategorizable, and entirely unique film, a semi-autobiographical fable that tells the story of his awakening to, and reaction against, American cultural colonialism. Winner of the Berlin Film Festival International Critics Award.

“One of the most original and poetic works of cinema made anywhere in the seventies.” –Werner Herzog

“Kidlat Tahimik drew on his own experience living “in a cocoon of Americanized dreams” for this tale of a village jitney driver, Kidlat, faithful student of Voice of America and its many lessons, and founder of his local Werner Von Braun fan club. Kidlat hopes to become an astronaut, or at the very least strike it rich, in the promised land; he makes it as far as Europe (the film was shot in Paris, Germany, and the Philippines), where a series of rude and comical awakenings unfolds and Kidlat learns that the modern world is far from paradise. Tahimik, who became a protégé of Werner Herzog in Munich, is a faux naif who uses the genuine naiveté of his hero to inscribe a powerful portrait of the American colonization of Filipino dreams. But, like the charming, festooned “jeepny” Tahimik constructed from an abandoned U.S. Army vehicle, the film creates something wholly new and imaginative from the discards of colonialism.” –Judy Bloch

Ed Halter is a critic and curator living in New York City. He is a founder and director of Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New York, and his writing has appeared in Artforum, The Believer, Bookforum, Cinema Scope, frieze, Little Joe, Mousse, Rhizome, Triple Canopy, the Village Voice and elsewhere. From 1995 to 2005, he programmed and oversaw the New York Underground Film Festival, and he has curated screenings and exhibitions at Artists Space, BAM, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the ICA, London, the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, PARTICIPANT INC., and Tate Modern, as well as the cinema for Greater New York 2010 at MoMA PS1 and the film and video program for the 2012 Whitney Biennial. He teaches in the Film and Electronic Arts department at Bard College, and is currently writing his second book, a critical history of contemporary experimental cinema in America.

This screening is part of a retrospective tour of Tahimik’s work, which will be shown at Harvard Film Archives, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, Anthology Film Archives (NYC), New Orleans Film Festival and Tulane University. Organized by Jed Rapfogel, programmer at Anthology Film Archives and independent curator Aily Nash.

Thursday, October 25
DETROPIA
Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady, 2012, 90 min.

Filmmaker Rachel Grady will be present for a Q&A after the screening.

Detroit’s story has encapsulated the iconic narrative of America over the last century— the Great Migration of African Americans escaping Jim Crow; the rise of manufacturing and the middle class; the love affair with automobiles; the flowering of the American dream; and now . . . the collapse of the economy and the fading American mythos.

With its vivid, painterly palette and haunting score, DETROPIA sculpts a dreamlike collage of a grand city teetering on the brink of dissolution. As houses are demolished by the thousands, automobile-company wages plummet, institutions crumble, and tourists gawk at the “charming decay,” the film’s vibrant, gutsy characters glow and erupt like flames from the ashes. These soulful pragmatists and stalwart philosophers strive to make ends meet and make sense of it all, refusing to abandon hope or resistance. Their grit and pluck embody the spirit of the Motor City as it struggles to survive postindustrial America and begins to envision a radically different future. —Caroline Libresco, Sundance Film Festival Senior Programmer

“The most moving documentary I have seen in years.” —David Denby, THE NEW YORKER