(Crispin Glover, US 2005, 72 min., 35mm)
Known for his many memorable onscreen characters (Back to the Future, River’s Edge, Charlie’s Angels), actor Crispin Glover’s first effort as a director will not disappoint fans of his offbeat sensibilities. As visionary as anything ever dreamed up by Fellini or Herzog, the filmmaker describes his debut feature as “the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are snails, salt, a pipe, and how to get home, as tormented by an hubristic racist inner psyche.” He also explains that the film is his “psychological reaction to corporate controls of expression limiting the exploration of taboo.” Alternately shocking and awe-inspiring, Glover stars along with a supporting cast largely comprised of actors with Down’s Syndrome. Each screening will be preceded by a live presentation of Crispin Hellion Glover’s Big Slide Show, featuring illustration and commentary from eight of Glover’s books. The evening will conclude with a post-screening discussion of What Is It? and a booksigning. Tickets: $20, $15 members and students. No Take-10 tickets or passes. Advance tickets are available at www.eastmanhouse.org, (585) 271-3361 ext. 295, the Dryden Theatre box office, and the Museum’s admissions desk.
Follow this link to watch Glover’s unrated trailer for the film.
Tickets are no longer available online or by phone — you can still purchase tickets in person at the museum’s admission desk until 5:00, or at the Dryden theatre box-office, starting at 6:15.
(Program running time approx. 90 min., 16mm)
The world’s leading collector of classroom films and founder of A/V Geeks, Skip Elsheimer, presents this program of totally cracked-out, ephemeral films from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. Elsheimer has carved a niche for himself in the micro-cinema circuit and has a reputation for screening the absolute funniest, weirdest, stupidest films to ever come out of America. The titles for this program include TELEZONIA (1974), an infomercial hosted by a dandy in white tights who teaches children about the wonders of the telephone; VD IS FOR EVERYBODY (1970), a cautionary hygiene film that uses an infectious theme song to talk about an infectious disease; MALAKAPALAKADOO, SKIP TWO (1977), which is everybody’s favorite claymation about two children who turn themselves into singing beanbags; SHAKE HANDS WITH DANGER (1980), an industrial film that illustrates the hazards of heavy machinery with an absurd amount of fake gore and a catchy country tune; and as a grand finale, RO-REVUS TALKS ABOUT WORMS! (1970), a film where a frog puppet (who sounds a lot like Mr. T) cautions children about the dangers of intestinal parasites. Plus you’ll see a few mystery films! No Take-10 tickets or passes.
To read more on Skip and A/V Geeks, click here to read a longer article written by Michael Neault, or click here to visit his official website: avgeeks.com.
(Timothy & Stephen Quay, UK, total running time 81 min., 35mm and 16mm)
The Quay brothers, identical twins Timothy and Stephen, were raised in Philadelphia and later immigrated to London. There, they have holed up the past couple of decades where they rigorously toil on their painstaking, singular, exquisitely composed stop-motion animation. Their work appears to be influenced not by the animation that has preceded it but by the oddities of natural history: 18th-century curiosity cabinets, medi-cal anomalies, and outdated instruments of science. And their stories are influenced not by contemporary life but by ancient folk tales of the ma-cabre. Even though the brothers shroud their personal lives in mystery, we can still peer into their beautifully twisted psyche through their astonishing films. These two programs feature a near complete collection of their short films, shown almost entirely in new 35mm and 16mm prints!
STREET OF CROCODILES (1986), NOCTURNA ARTIFICIALIA (1979), THE COMB (1990), and IN ABSENTIA (2000).
(Timothy & Stephen Quay, UK, total running time 84 min., 35mm, 16mm and Beta-SP projection)
The Quay brothers, identical twins Timothy and Stephen, were raised in Philadelphia and later immigrated to London. There, they have holed up the past couple of decades where they rigorously toil on their painstaking, singular, exquisitely composed stop-motion animation. Their work appears to be influenced not by the animation that has preceded it but by the oddities of natural history: 18th-century curiosity cabinets, medical anomalies, and outdated instruments of science. And their stories are influenced not by contemporary life but by ancient folk tales of the macabre. Even though the brothers shroud their personal lives in mystery, we can still peer into their beautifully twisted psyche through their astonishing films. These two programs feature a near complete collection of their short films, shown almost entirely in new 35mm and 16mm prints!
THE CABINET OF JAN SVANKMAJER (1984), EPIC OF GILGAMESH (1985), THE PHANTOM MUSEUM (2003), STILLE NACHT I–IV (1988–1994), ANAMORPHOSIS (1991), and REHEARSALS FOR EXTINCT ANATOMIES (1988).
Program Two plays Saturday, February 17th, 8 p.m.
Program One plays again on Sunday, February 18th, 5 p.m. Program Two plays again at 7 p.m. that same night
(CRIA! RAISE RAVENS, Carlos Saura, Spain 1976, 107 min., Spanish with subtitles, 35mm)
Ana is a nine-year-old girl who believes she has the power of life and death over those near to her. Her dead mother (Geraldine Chaplin) reappears as a ghost and talks to the young girl, who remains stubbornly mute. Like most of Saura’s films made under the fascist regime of Francisco Franco, this fascinating, ambiguously haunting tale camouflages controversial political themes behind a veil of hints, symbols, and parables. New 35mm print!
Program Notes
Cria Cuervos
~Stephanie Stewart, The L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation
Cría Cuervos (Cria! or Raise Ravens, 1976) was the final film that noted auteur Carlos Saura shot under the reign of Francisco Franco in Spain. The film’s title is taken from the Spanish proverb “Raise ravens and they will scratch your eyes out” and alludes to the indelible mark left on Spanish society by the fascist Franco regime and the consequent struggle among Spaniards to overcome the constraints of that prolonged repressive period.
The 1976 release of Cría Cuervos straddled Spain’s Franco and post-Franco era. Franco was ushered to power in Spain in the late 1930s after leading a military coup against the elected Popular Front government. This devastating conflict, known as the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), was fought between the Francoists, or Nationalists, and the Loyalists who remained committed to the Popular Front government. Franco ultimately crushed the Loyalist forces and remained dictator of Spain for nearly forty years until his death in November of 1975.
The ramifications of the war and of Franco’s oppressive presence have been represented frequently in the post-Franco cinematic era by filmmakers such as Guillermo del Toro (The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth) and José Luis Cuerda (Butterfly). Carlos Saura, in contrast, started making allegorical films about the consequences of Franco’s ubiquitous presence in Spain while the dictator was still alive and well. Slipping these veiled themes past the vigilant eye of the Spanish censorship board during Franco’s rule was not an easy task, but Saura turned this restraint into a creative force and produced what many critics believe to be his finest artistic achievements in film. Saura explains, “For me and my compatriots, to make the stories we wanted to do, we had to use indirect methods. For example, we couldn’t use a linear structure or the ideas would be too clear. It often forced me to exercise my imagination” (Kinder, 1979, p.15-16). Saura was able to fully harness his imagination for Cría as the sole author of the screenplay – a first for the filmmaker up to that point. Cría Cuervos was, in fact, the last of Saura’s films to be subjected to censorship review (the censorship commissions in Spain were disbanded in 1977) and the last time he was beholden to the use of allegory to evoke a moral and political consciousness within the narrative structure of his films.
Cría serves as both a personal narrative of literal childhood and loss of innocence and as a political metaphor about the stunted growth of the figurative children of Franco, their own loss of innocence, and their struggle to free themselves from the lingering repressive atmosphere imposed on them by Francoist society. The film is seen through the eyes of nine year old Ana, a young girl who is traumatized by her mother’s death and clearly resentful of her authoritarian father, and later her authoritarian aunt. Ana remains emotionally frozen in time as she searches for a means of emancipation from her troubled home life.
Saura uses time as a prevailing literary device in the film. Author Marvin D’Lugo contends that “the film formulates the conflation of historical and personal time as a textual problem for the spectator to confront and decipher, that decipherment keyed to the historical issues that the Spaniard faces outside the film” (1991, p.131). The film asks its audience to take on the fractured emotional state of Ana, placing the spectator in the vicarious state of sorting out the tangled weave of personal choice and responsibility from the political and historical confines that hamper individual growth. Ana is only able to grow beyond her stunted emotional state after she recognizes that her own identity is separate from the strict socialization imposed on her by her militaristic father. Like Ana, Franco’s figurative children face the challenge of rescuing their own potential for growth from the political confines of the past.
In a statement filled with both insight and ambiguity above and beyond that of the film, Saura left the public with these words to ponder: “I believe we live immersed in a society that has been built upon an accumulation of errors. Some of these errors, I have no doubt, can be corrected. From that fact comes my reasoned optimism in the future, starting from the base of where we are now. But other errors, fundamental errors, are in the roots of our evolution…We are the products of a repressive education that has left us disarmed and defenseless in the face of many things” (D’Lugo, 1991, p.137).
