2014 IN FILM
Season Four: Year In Review
Never did we dream that such a charismatic rule breaker as Alex Cox would appear at Basilica the same month as the “Pope of Trash” pioneer John Waters, to take our film programming to the next level! The Basilica film dream team was joined throughout our season by artists far, near, and in our own backyard: feminist icon Barbara Hammer, acute documentarian Salomé Lamas and acclaimed film and television director Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Forging connections between film, music and art, Basilica SoundScape included projections by Zia Anger, Maxwell Paparella, Nathan Corbin and Stephen G. Rhodes as part of the Kiln Films series. We also hosted a late night screening of Dead Poets Society in honor of the late Robin Williams, with an introduction by our friends from down the river, Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer, and co-presented by Secret Cinema, an organization which presents large-scale cultural experiences in abandoned spaces.
BASILICA SCREENINGS PRESENTS: NO MAN’S LAND (TERRA DE NINGUÉM)
Thursday July 24 | 8 PM | $5-$10 Sliding Scale
THURSDAY, JULY 24, 8 PM
NO MAN’S LAND (TERRA DE NINGUÉM), Salomé Lamas, 2012, 72 min
// Salomé Lamas in person for Q&A! Introduction by Joana Pimenta //
Walter Benjamin states that History is where the singular crystallizes into a fixed whole – it is from this premise that we depart. I establish that the conversation (in this film) takes place in “no man’s land” i.e neither in my comfort zone, nor in Paulo de Figueiredo’s. Such premise should generate a feeling of dislocation for both parties. Initially, the location should be anonymous. Gradually, what is off-screen gains weight and the awareness of a time and a place is established. Nevertheless, it is still difficult to identify where we are. I would like to highlight the distinction between reporting (facts) and literature (imagination), without being too explicit. The difference between “literature” and “reportage” does not uphold; we believe in the documentary because it is made of “reportage”. We remove one or two fictional bricks and the wall of ‘authentic’ reality collapses. What is left is imagination, which imprints in our memory a real world that I try to describe artistically.
I tell Paulo that I want to tell the story of his life. He consents.
This can be a film about violence, but deep down, it’s a film about moments of human experience. It’s not about History as it is understood academically; these are fragments, jump cuts of a non-linear type.
What is authentic is the story that Paulo tells and the moment that happens between me and his breathing. It’s in this breathing that the documentary is built. It’s in this meeting point that the viewer should feel that he is tearing down the limit between fact and fiction. His sublime portrayal of cruelty, of the paradoxes of power and of the revolutions that dethroned him – only served to erect new bureaucracies, new cruelties and new paradoxes. His work as a mercenary lies on the space that exists between these two worlds.
Trauma is outside memory, outside history. It is (un)representable, unmemorable, and unforgettable. How can we know the trauma i.e. how can its impossibility to be represented be presented? And isn’t history an original container of trauma? The work of memory, and it’s memorial processes of transformation of time and space, of the politic, of the public and the private, of the nation and the family isn’t it a process of desire?
– Salomé Lamas
BASILICA SCREENINGS: JULY
Workingman’s Death | Black Moon | The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, preceded by Bim Bam Boom | No Man’s Land | Los Angeles Plays Itself
BASILICA SCREENINGS is a film series that presents an array of works from new and repertory narrative features, documentaries, experimental films, to video and media art, often with filmmakers and special guests in attendance for a discussion following the screenings. Programmed by Basilica Hudson’s film curator Aily Nash, and creative directors Melissa Auf der Maur and Tony Stone.
All films begin at 8 pm and are $5-10 sliding scale, unless otherwise noted.
BASILICA SCREENINGS: JULY
Thursday, July 3, 8 PM
WORKINGMAN’S DEATH, Michael Glawogger, Austria, 2005, 120 min
// Tribute Screening //
Thursday, July 10, 8 PM
BLACK MOON, Louis Malle, France, 1975, 100 min
Thursday, July 17, 8 PM
THE BALLAD OF GENESIS AND LADY JAYE, Marie Losier, 2011, 72 min
preceded by BIM BAM BOOM, Marie Losier, 2013, 12 min.
// Marie Losier in person for Q&A! //
Thursday, July 24, 8 PM
NO MAN’S LAND (TERRA DE NINGUÉM), Salomé Lamas, Portugal, 2012, 72 min
// Salomé Lamas in person for Q&A! Introduction by Joana Pimenta //
Thursday, July 31, 8 PM
LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF, Thom Andersen, 2003, 169 min
// Introduction by writer Colin Beckett //
THURSDAY, JULY 3, 8 PM
WORKINGMAN’S DEATH, Michael Glawogger, Austria, 2005, 120 min
// Tribute Screening //
TRAILER
Today’s manual laborers are no longer celebrated with hymns of praise. They must be content with encouraging one another that backbreaking work is better than no work at all. In the Ukraine, a group of men spend long days crawling through cramped shafts of illegal coal mines. Sulfur gatherers in Indonesia brave the smoky heat of an active volcano and the treacherous trip back down. Blood, fire and stench are routine for workers at a crowded open-air slaughterhouse in Nigeria. Pakistani men use little more than their bare hands to dismantle an abandoned oil tanker for scrap metal. Steelworkers in China fear they could be a dying breed. Five portraits of heavy manual labor, increasingly less visible in our technological 21st Century.
This is a tribute screening to the filmmaker, Michael Glawogger, who passed away on April 22, 2014 in Liberia, where he was planning his next film.
THURSDAY, JULY 10, 8 PM
BLACK MOON, Louis Malle, France, 1975, 100 min
TRAILER
Louis Malle meets Lewis Carroll in this bizarre and bewitching trip down the rabbit hole. After skirting the horrors of a mysterious war being waged in the countryside, beautiful young Lily (Cathryn Harrison) takes refuge in a remote farmhouse, where she becomes embroiled in the surreal domestic life of an extremely unconventional family. Evocatively shot by cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Black Moon is a Freudian tale of adolescent sexuality set in a post-apocalyptic world of shifting identities and talking animals. It is one of Malle’s most experimental films and a cinematic daydream like no other.
THURSDAY, JULY 17, 8 PM
THE BALLAD OF GENESIS AND LADY JAYE, Marie Losier, 2011, 72 min
preceded by BIM BAM BOOM, Marie Losier, 2013, 12 min.
// Marie Losier in person for Q&A! //
TRAILER
An intimate, affecting portrait of the life and work of groundbreaking performance artist and music pioneer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV) and his other half and collaborator, Lady Jaye, centered around the daring sexual transformations the pair underwent for their “Pandrogyne” project.
“Marie’s technique is very revolutionary…it’s like Fellini meets documentary. It’s a very new, radical way of making documentaries, and quite honestly, we think that what Marie does and the way she does it will be the template for the future. She is totally unique, very deep with a great sense of joy and emotions below her humor.” – Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
“P-Orridge is revealed as an innate artist who inflects and illuminates every aspect of existence, high and low, exalted and humble, with a singular sensibility; Losier’s film captures the poignant paradoxes, the ecstasies and burdens, of the transformation of life into art.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker
THURSDAY, JULY 24, 8 PM
NO MAN’S LAND (TERRA DE NINGUÉM), Salomé Lamas, Portugal, 2012, 72 min
// Salomé Lamas in person for Q&A! Introduction by Joana Pimenta //
TRAILER
Paolo, a mercenary, narrates and performs his own history, constructing a record which slowly reveals in its turns of phrase and mismatched events, a series of doubts and contradictions. He narrates his involvement as a hired killer for special military forces during the Portuguese colonial war, the part he played in the GAL (Antiterrorist Liberation Group), a death squad illegally established by the Spanish government to annihilate high officials of ETA, and his work as a mercenary for the CIA in El Salvador. Rather than being interested in affirming the veracity of the historical record or in proving an official narrative, No Man’s Land dwells in the present moment of witnessing, the space inhabited by the performance of a memory. – Joana Pimenta
No Man’s Land has screened widely at festivals including the Berlinale, FID Marseille, Viennale, MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, and elsewhere.
THURSDAY, JULY 31, 8 PM
LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF, Thom Andersen, 2003, 169 min
// Introduction by writer Colin Beckett //
TRAILER
“Newly remastered and reedited, Thom Andersen’s 2003 opus, Los Angeles Plays Itself traces the development and evolution of Los Angeles, ‘the most photographed city in the world’. Composed of hundreds of film clips drawn from a century of cinema with a voiceover that is both lucid and humorous, the film garnered broad critical acclaim and is considered one of the essential documentaries of the 2000s.” – Ann Arbor Film Festival
“It is with Los Angeles Plays Itself that Andersen synthesized a style fully adequate to his ambitions. His wide-ranging investigation into cinema’s uses of the city unfolds in a seamless montage and makes its claims in an unabashedly personal, somewhat unreliable register without diminishing their urgency. Andersen turns our attention to the people and events that the best-known visions of the city have overlooked, and to the overlooked visions that have captured such people’s lives.” – Colin Beckett, The Brooklyn Rail
AUGUST FILM SCREENINGS PREVIEW
A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS by Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, with Russell in person for Q&A, COLONY OF LIGHT screenings with work by Basma Alsharif, Peter Burr, Bonnie Jones, Ted Kennedy, Jodie Mack, Xander Marro, Ben Russell, Jonathan Schwartz, Fern Silva, and Ruth Somalo, with all artists present.
Works courtesy of the artists, Laura Coxson/Janus Films, and Paulo Barata/O SOM E A FÚRIA.