Thursday, October 18- 8 PM

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.