January 2009 in Tobyhanna, PA. Three young men (Jack Bensinger, Eric Rahill and Conner O’Malley) self-document their attempt to write and record a rap album in one night. Shot on digital video from the era, this hazy portrayal of after-hours suburban life captures the inescapable boredom as a catalyst for bad decisions. The feature directorial debut of comedian Conner O’Malley and editor Danny Scharar. The final theatrical screening in Los Angeles!

Followed by a Q+A with Conner O’Malley, Danny Scharar, Eric Rahill, Jack Bensinger, Harris Mayersohn & Meryl Faye Crock moderated by a special guest.

Please note that this screening is not eligible for Brain Dead Studios membership discounts, and tickets must be purchased separately.

Rap World

Brain Dead Studios

WHIP IT

THIS NIGHT I’LL POSSESS YOUR CORPSE

Los Feliz Theatre

Longlegs / The First Omen

New Beverly Cinema



New media visionary Shu Lea Cheang directs this avant-anarcho eco-satire in which a lesbian couple living on Staten Island find themselves ensnared in a vast conspiracy involving a ghost ship of nuclear refuse, ominous television commercials, and deadly cat food. Envisioning New York City as a toxic waste dump of consumerist detritus, Fresh Kill offers a bracing, queer feminist response to the patriarchal poison of corporate capitalism.

Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and networker working at the interface between video, net-based installation, software interaction and durational performance. For over four decades, her practice explores subjects that are in a state of constant flux, including racial relations, the ecological impact of humans, information dissemination, the ethics of biotechnology and sexual politics.

Mindy Seu is a designer and technologist based in New York City and Los Angeles, currently teaching as an Associate Professor at University of California, Los Angeles in the Department of Design Media Arts. She is the authoring editor of the Cyberfeminism Index (2023).




Mindy Seu joins Now Instant to introduce Shu Lea Cheang's Fresh Kill.


Fresh Kill

Now Instant Image Hall

Darla in Space

Nosferatu the Vampyre

Vidiots

Troll 2

Saturday Night

Vista Theatre

Set up as the fall guy in a string of slasher murders, Boone decides he’ll hide by crossing the threshold that separates “us” from “them” and sneak into the forbidden subterranean realm of Midian.

Nightbreed

HIGH TIDE

MUTE WITNESS

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin

The Most Dangerous Game

The second feature from director-choreographer Bob Fosse uses rich color, especially purple, in its depiction of decadent, Weimar-era Berlin.

Cabaret

Academy Museum

Giant Robot: Asian Pop Culture and Beyond / Chungking Express

Hammer Museum

True Romance

Starship Troopers

Anora

Writer-director Jorge G. Gutierrez and producer Guillermo del Toro join forces for this visually dazzling animated musical set in a Mexican town during Día de los Muertos

The Book of Life

In this 1953 musical comedy adapted from Anita Loos’s searingly funny 1925 novella—which also spawned a now-lost silent film in 1928 and a smash Broadway production in 1949—Howard Hawks’s Lorelei (Marilyn Monroe) is resplendent.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

museum visitors can experience a curated selection of delightful animated short films from the National Film Board of Canada in the state-of-the-art David Geffen Theater with the purchase of a general admission ticket.

Weekend Short Cuts: Animation from the National Film Board of Canada

In Marlene Dietrich’s fifth collaboration with filmmaker Josef von Sternberg, Dietrich plays German chanteuse turned American housewife Helen Faraday

Blonde Venus

Terminal USA / Mysterious Skin

THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA

The Secret World, 2023, is the first full-length feature film by Jeff Preiss and Josiah McElheny, following two earlier collaborative film projects in 2008 and 2021. The film was initially conceived as an exploration of how to create a portrait of a mutual friend, Christine Burgin, through the lens of her unique personal library. The result is a phantasmagoria of structural and intuitive methodologies. Throughout, Burgin is heard informally leading a guided tour of extraordinary books, while the images that appear on the screen, constructed out of polychromatic layers, are scrambled and reformed into a riotous mélange. Everything seen in the film has been transmuted through a process of “re-filming” on a hand-held 16mm Bolex camera, ultimately unifying the incompatible formats of film, VHS video and 35mm slides.

Taking form as a shifting clockwork of thirty, short chapters, the film responds to the library's matrix of visionary ideas. Looked at another way, it is a home movie, a record of the friendships between the filmmakers and the film’s central subject. The physical nature of the library—a collection of books in which the authors have each created their own self-contained universe—is re-envisioned as a labyrinth larger than the space that contains it.

Alternating chapters shift between short visual essays built out of an arsenal of hallucinogenic color transformations and an intimate narration describing 19th and 20th century iconoclastic figures, from Dinshah Ghadiali, Eva Carrière, Charles Ford, Richard Shaver, to Wilhelm Reich. This mostly forgotten cast of characters —while often famous or infamous in their own time— engaged in wildly diverse enterprises, including photographs that purported to directly visualize thought emanating through the skull, or histories of the lost Atlantean people discovered inside of rock formations, to creating perpetual motion machines and photographic documentation of the manifestation of “ectoplasm” during historic performances. The musical cadence of Burgin's voice grounds these mysteries, suggesting that together they constitute a necessary way of thinking about collective reality.

Jeff Preiss has been widely active since the 1980s as a filmmaker, cinematographer, curator and visual artist. Through the 80s and 90s he was co-director of the East Village venue Films Charas and a board member of The Collective For Living Cinema. His films from this time were restored and preserved in 2014 by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and have been screened internationally. Highlights include: the Rem Koolhaas commissioned 33 SEQUENCES SPANNING 4 TRIPS TO THE DUTCH EMBASSY IN BERLIN (for the OMA retrospective CONTENT), the 2012 experimental feature STOP, a 50th NY Film Festival selection, 2014’s feature film Low Down, winner of the Sundance award for cinematography and Karlovy Vary, Best Actress, the 2019 MoMA premiere of 14 Standard 8mm Reels, as well as collaborative works made with artists including Joan Jonas, Andrea Fraser, and Anthony McCall. Preiss's influential work as a Director of Photography includes Bruce Weber's 1989 Oscar-nominated Let’s Get Lost, and the 1984 Rosa Von Praunheim produced Vampire Film, DER BIS. In 1995 Preiss co-founded the production company Epoch Films, directing for clients including Iggy Pop, Malcolm McLaren, REM, B52s, Nike, Coke, etc. In 2005 he co-founded the experimental gallery ORCHARD. Recent solo exhibitions include: More Than I Looked For (2020), Stedelijk Museum, and ORCHARD Documents (2023), Celmentin Seedorf, Köln. In 2023, Museion Bolzano presented Time Frame: Jeff Preiss / Dan Graham. Preiss’ work is in collections including MoMA, MOCA LA, and the Hessel Museum of Art. Currently, Preiss sits on the board of Light Industry, a venue for cinema in all of it’s forms, in Brooklyn, NY.

Josiah McElheny’s sculptures, paintings, installations, performances, and films engage with the history of ideas across wide-ranging fields of study—from literature to architecture, music theory, and astronomy—transforming this research into physical form. His works often combine glass or mirror with other materials, to emphasize the importance of the act of looking “as a subject in and of itself.” A skilled glassblower, McElheny frequently incorporates hand-blown and shaped glass within evocative assemblages, whose mode of presentation creates a sense of unsettled ideals, and a challenge to fixed definitions. For McElheny, glass—with its qualities of reflectivity, transparency, and enigmatic mutability—highlights the interactive potential between the object and viewer. The material serves as a productive agent, inciting chance encounters between forms and ideas that point toward alternative histories and futures. Josiah McElheny (b. 1966, Boston, MA) has exhibited widely, including solo shows at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, CA (2019); Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, TX (2018); MAK Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna, Austria (2016); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2013), Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2012), Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, England (2011), Museo de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain (2009), Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2007), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2007), Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2002), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2001), The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA (1999) and the Seattle Art Museum, WA (1995). His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; and Tate Modern, London, UK among others. McElheny lives and works in New York, New York.

This program is organized by Justen Leroy, Director of Public Programs and Community Outreach, and Alitzah Oros, Public Programming Associate.



The Secret World - Screening and Conversation with Jeff Preiss and Josiah McElheny

MOCA Grand Avenue

The Navigator

Old Town Music Hall

Día de los Muertos Celebration

Coco

Macario

Beetlejuice

Ghost

Los Angeles Filmforum and the Vincent Price Art Museum present *Experimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, Program 7. Carolina Caycedo: The Lives of Rivers.*

Tickets are free; RSVP requested. Carolina Caycedo in person for Q&A.

~

Filmforum hosts Carolina Caycedo in conjunction with *We Place Life at the Center / Situamos la vida en el centro*, an art and environmental justice exhibition at the Vincent Price Art Museum. This film program showcases Caycedo’s film and video work, emphasizing the artist’s commitment to promoting the teachings of reciprocity with nature and personifying rivers, watersheds, plants, and other non-human beings as political agents.

In her video work, Caycedo utilizes varying modes – documentary, dance, visual effects, observational, poetic, meditative – to explore the milieu, the losses, and the possible re-births, of waterways in the Americas. The films contrast the lifestyles of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples in their understanding of the uses of and debts owed to the rivers that give us life. These beautiful films express indigenous beliefs while reckoning with modernity, using the visual technology of today in common cause with activists and stakeholders seeking to restore our rivers and by extension, ourselves.

Curated by Adam Hyman

LA Filmforum: Carolina Caycedo – The Lives of Rivers

2220 Arts + Archives

To celebrate the anniversary of the first Gojira film, which was released in theaters in Japan exactly 70 years ago, the Academy Museum presents its first-ever all-day marathon, featuring five classic and contemporary Godzilla films. 

Godzilla-Thon! Movie Marathon

The galleries and Academy Museum Store will be open to members and their guests only. 

Member Appreciation Day

Introduction by filmmaker Kibwe Tavares. Q&A with filmmakers Jennifer Phang and Alex Rivera moderated by Senior Public Programmer Paul Malcolm.

Labor: Sleep Dealer / Advantageous

A Night of Palestinian Genre Shorts

The Maltese Falcon

GuadaLAjara Film Festival: Transformation Vibes Shorts Block

GuadaLAjara Film Festival: Rent Free

VIDEOCYBERNOIRVEMBER: DECODER (1984)

WHAMMY!

King Vidor’s 1925 silent war drama The Big Parade depicts World War I through a realistic lens and became the fundamental guide for other war films in Hollywood. 

The Big Parade

Gene Wilder, as the iconic on-screen Willy Wonka from Roald Dahl’s 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, plays a mistrusting, volatile chocolate manufacturer who hides five Golden Tickets in his famous Wonka Bars.

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory in 4K

Cinematic Void Presents DIABOLIQUE

Tasked with creating illustrations for a new edition of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novel Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray was so captivated by the story of the Roy family that he became a filmmaker in order to adapt it

Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) in 35mm

Lightstruck presents: *Betzy Bromberg: A 3-show 16mm Retrospective*

November 7: Program 1 – The Present Tense (1977-1980)

Betzy Bromberg in person

~

Lightstruck is overjoyed to present its first ever artist-in-person retrospective, with three different programs – November 7, 14, and 21 – of all-16mm work by one of our favorite filmmakers, the truly singular Betzy Bromberg. Unparalleled film artist, inspiring educator, and even erstwhile optical effects wizard, Bromberg has been making work almost exclusively on 16mm since the mid-1970s, first in New York and then in her adoptive home of Los Angeles. In recent years, we’ve thrilled at her rapturously expressive abstract feature-length films, and this three-program retrospective aims in part to chart the genesis of those works by focusing on Bromberg’s rich spectrum of filmmaking between 1977-1996. ~

Program 1 of 3: The retrospective launches with a trio of deeply affecting, punk-inflected works spanning Bromberg’s period in New York and her relocation to Los Angeles. Electric in their energy and powerfully emotional, Bromberg forged an intensely textural approach to making films early on, concerned with her intimate community, urban environs, and layers of social politics. These films are urgent, visually adventurous, and loaded with a raw empathic viscerality that finds unexpected connection with her recent work through their remarkable articulation of the blissfully ephemeral. Demonstrating an already sophisticated filmmaking sensibility underneath their ragged vitality, the cumulative effect of these three early works is remarkably beautiful and unexpectedly moving.

All three evenings will feature a conversation following the films with Betzy Bromberg in person! This trio of programs also offers a rare opportunity to follow the thrilling trajectory of her early body of work as she defined an evolving sensibility through her revelatory and intensely creative engagement with the 16mm film medium. We think the sum experience of all three programs will reaffirm Bromberg’s status as a film artist of exquisite sensorial ingenuity, uncommon empathic intimacy, and as one of the great alchemist-poets of the medium.

Screening length = approximately 60 minutes.

Program curated by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano. Notes by Mark Toscano. Huge thanks to Betzy Bromberg.

Lightstruck: Betzy Bromberg program 1 (1977-1980)

Platinum Blonde was the first of Frank Capra's many collaborations with the future Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Riskin (It Happened One Night).

Platinum Blonde

In person: Sophia Loren and Edoardo Ponti. This harrowing tale finds Cesira (Sophia Loren) fleeing the 1943 German invasion of the Italian capital city for her childhood village of Ciociaria.

In person: Sophia Loren and Edoardo Ponti.

Two Women (La ciociara) in 4K with Sophia Loren and Edoardo Ponti

All About Lily Chou-Chou

Love & Basketball

The Life Ahead (La vita davanti a sé) with Sophia Loren and Edoardo Ponti

Tekkonkinkreet

Making Mr. Right on 35mm

House on 35mm

Active Cultures presents *Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien: Langit Lupa*. A Film Screening and Conversation with Xenia Tupas, followed by *Dapat Bawiin (We Shall Reclaim): A Celebration*.

~

Active Cultures presents the Los Angeles premiere of the Berlin and New York-based duo’s newest film, *Langit Lupa (Heaven and Earth)* (2023). The film will be followed by a conversation between Enzo, Ami and Xenia Tupas, a movement elder who grew up on Negros Island, and whose personal history is intimately woven with the story in the film. A lifelong journalist and human rights activist, Xenia has served the same plantation workers who demanded systemic change during the people’s strike in 1985, fighting for peasant’s rights for fair land redistribution after the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law was passed in the wake of Marcos’ deposition.

Join us after the screening and talk at 7 PM for *Dapat Bawiin (We Shall Reclaim)*, a community celebration featuring food and performances by Los Angeles Filipinx chefs and musicians. All are welcome!

5 PM: Screening of Ami Lien & Enzo Camacho: Langit Lupa (Heaven and Earth) (2023)

6 PM: Talk with the artists and Xenia Tupas

7–10 PM: Dapat Bawiin, a Community Celebration

This program is part of a weekend long series of programs called *Langit Lupa*. For over a decade, Berlin and New York-based artists Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien have developed a multidisciplinary practice addressing geopolitical relations by attending to localized forms of dispossession, survival, and resistance, particularly in the context of the Philippines. Their current work pays particular attention to agricultural practices and the exploitation of land and labor in Negros, an island known for sugarcane production in the Philippines.

Ami Lien & Enzo Camacho: Langit Lupa (Heaven and Earth)

A Manhattan couple (Geena Davis and Hugh Laurie) adopt a mouse to be a sibling to their young son (Jerry Maguire’s Jonathan Lipnicki) in this re-imagining of E. B. White’s classic 1945 novel. 

Stuart Little

Few movies are more synonymous with color than The Wizard of Oz, MGM's musical adaptation of L. Frank Baum's magical book.

The Wizard of Oz in 4K

Based on Giuseppe Marotta’s popular novel, The Gold of Naples is a charming anthology tribute to the coastal city of its title and was a pivotal film in Sophia Loren’s career.

The Gold of Naples (L’oro di Napoli) in 4K

Is He or Isn’t He?: Man Facing Southeast / The Brother From Another Planet

Modern Times

The Great Dictator

The Rescuers

Smog

My Cousin Vinny

Los Angeles Filmforum presents *Experimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film, Program 8 – Beautiful Science: Re-contextualizing Science Film into Film Art.*

Includes films by Barbara Hammer, Dr. James Sibley Watson, F. Percy Smith and Mary Field, and Stuart A. Staples.

Full program at: https://www.lafilmforum.org/schedule/summer-fall-2024/experimentations-8-beautiful-science/

~

The utilization of prior footage, recontextualized, is a common practice in experimental filmmaking. This program highlights two supreme examples, both drawing on earlier “science” films utilizing remarkable photographic techniques to create new art, one utilizes cine-radiography to examine the interior of the human body in action; the other a meditative tribute to one of the primary pioneers of microscopic and time-lapse photography.

In a research visit at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, Barbara Hammer came upon some of the reels of x-ray films, or cinefluorography, by Dr. James Sibley Watson, also known in the film world for his films *The Fall of the House of Usher* (1928) and *Lot in Sodom* (1933). Watson was also a doctor who developed a method of filming the innards of people by x-rays (most likely unhealthy large doses). There are over 233 x-ray films at the George Eastman Museum, most of which are not preserved, digitized, or available for viewing. Hammer utilized the available footage, tinting, layering, and more, to create one of her masterworks, a humorous and pensive meditation on the human body, its fragility and resilience.

F. Percy Smith, working with Mary Field, was a key innovator in microcinematography and time-lapse photography, creating phenomenal close-up images of plants, insects, molds, and more, used in educational films distributed in the United Kingdom in the first half of the 20th century. *Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith*, made by Stuart A. Staples of the band tindersticks (whom also score the film with Christine Ott) removes the wry educational narration of Smith’s original films and combines excerpts in new ways to create a sense of wonder at the camerawork while also rending the living things in the films into near abstract yet fantastic forms.

Curated by Adam Hyman.

For more information: www.lafilmforum.org

~

*Experimentations: Imag(In)ing Knowledge in Film* is Filmforum’s expansive film series and upcoming publication that investigates the ways that experimental and scientific films produce and question the visualization of the world. Combining artist films utilizing scientific imagery, science and natural history films, and films of indigenous and traditional knowledge, the series examines how science, nature, and technology films shape our understanding of humans, nature, gender, knowledge, and progress. The multi-venue public screening series presents analog and digital time-based media incorporating diverse scientific and experimental film traditions from across the globe. The series will include eighteen screenings between September 2024 and February 2025, with films and digital works from 1874 to today from around the world, multiple guests, panels and wonderful collaborations that will reveal the possibilities and circumstances of cinema in this realm.

LA Filmforum: Beautiful Science – Science Film & Film Art

Driven by Paul Newman’s bold performance, John Huston’s anarchic Western comedy questions the very ideas of law and order on a landscape founded in lawlessness.

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean in 35mm

Giant Robots!: Johnny Sokko, Voyage Into Space and Gigantor

PUNK ROCK VEGAN MOVIE

West Side Story

Kiss Me Deadly

In a World…

VIDEOCYBERNOIRVEMBER: KAMIKAZE '89 (1982)

The third animated feature released by Disney is still considered the studio’s most experimental work. In Fantasia, a series of eight vignettes set to classical music demonstrate the remarkable potential of feature film animation.

Fantasia

“Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington, DC (1980-90)” examines the early DIY punk scene in the Nation’s Capital. It was a decade when seminal bands like Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Government Issue, Scream, Void, Faith, Rites of Spring, Marginal Man, Fugazi, and others released their own records and booked their own shows-without major record label constraints or mainstream media scrutiny. Contextually, it was a cultural watershed that predated the alternative music explosion of the 1990s (and the industry’s subsequent implosion). Thirty years later, DC’s original DIY punk spirit serves as a reminder of the hopefulness of youth, the power of community and the strength of conviction.

Please note that this screening is not eligible for Brain Dead Studios membership discounts, and tickets must be purchased separately.

Trust Records Presents: Salad Days (2024)

REVENGE OF THE DEAD

THE LOVE WITCH

From Beyond the Grave/The Skull

Cemented by 1955 as a leading lady, Sophia Loren made the unexpected choice to take a supporting role to Franca Valeri. The women play polar-opposite cousins Cesira and Agnese, both unlucky in love in their own unique ways. 

The Sign of Venus (Il segno di Venere)

Cinematic Void Presents THE HAUNTING

The Graduates

Three Colors: Blue

Mezzanine presents *Candy Mountain*, directed by Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer. 1987, Switzerland/Canada/France, 97m, DCP

West Coast premiere of a new restoration, courtesy of Film Movement.

~

A collaboration between legendary photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank (*Cocksucker Blues*) and writer Rudy Wurlitzer (*Two-Lane Blacktop*) yielded this ineffably laid-back road movie, featuring music and performances by Joe Strummer, Tom Waits, David Johansen and Dr. John. In some ways a distinctly Beat Generation take on 1980s music industry burnout and its surviving traces of Americana, *Candy Mountain* follows a lone-wolf musician (Kevin J. O’Connor) who is hired to track down a legendary guitar maker, and hitchhikes from New York City to east Canada, while running into a series of outsiders and eccentrics (played by, among others, Bulle Ogier, Laurie Metcalf and Mary Margaret O’Hara). On the occasion of Robert Frank’s centennial in 2024, we’re thrilled to present a new restoration of his stirring ode to the open road.

Special thanks to Erin Farrell (Film Movement) and Alec Moeller.

“Robert Frank is, to me, the godfather of so many different things.” -Jim Jarmusch

“A quintessential road movie... Ambling along like a wry, laid-back *Heart of Darkness*, this likable and touching film makes good use of Frank’s remarkable photographic eye and Wurlitzer’s witty, acerbic, and quasi-mystical handling of myth that has served him well in his novels. The results are a resonant reflection on the music business and a memorable ode to wanderlust—with lots of good music (by Dr. John, Joe Strummer, David Johansen, Tom Waits, and others) on the sound track.” -Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

“In a way, this shaggy-dog hipster road film is Frank’s ultimate work—evoking the end of the road and even the end of Endsville—but he has persevered.” -J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

Mezzanine: Robert Frank's CANDY MOUNTAIN

Director Asif Kapadia (Senna) and producer James Gay-Rees (Exit through the Gift Shop) won the Documentary Feature Oscar for this thorough and moving look at the art and tragically short life of singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse (1983–2011)

Introduction by director Asif Kapadia.
Selected by the Documentary Branch.

Konkombe: The Nigerian Pop Music Scene

Lightstruck presents: *Betzy Bromberg: A 3-show 16mm Retrospective*

November 14: Program 2 – Radiating Space (1981-1987)

Betzy Bromberg in person

~

Lightstruck is overjoyed to present its first ever artist-in-person retrospective, with three different programs – November 7, 14, and 21 – of all-16mm work by one of our favorite filmmakers, the truly singular Betzy Bromberg. Unparalleled film artist, inspiring educator, and even erstwhile optical effects wizard, Bromberg has been making work almost exclusively on 16mm since the mid-1970s, first in New York and then in her adoptive home of Los Angeles. In recent years, we’ve thrilled at her rapturously expressive abstract feature-length films, and this three-program retrospective aims in part to chart the genesis of those works by focusing on Bromberg’s rich spectrum of filmmaking between 1977-1996. ~

Program 2 of 3: Responding in part to the alien landscape of her new West Coast home and the looming ideologies of Reagan-era America, Bromberg further activates the film medium through the use of radical image and sound manipulation that expresses an anxious, dark psychedelia. A heightened material subjectivity marks the two films in this program, exploring the fraught imbalance between humans and the natural world that heals/harms us, palpably under the shadowy threat of ecological and nuclear peril. Bromberg’s lush and pyrotechnic Tom Waits promo film for his song “Temptation” will close this program as an extended moment of magical fancy.

All three evenings will feature a conversation following the films with Betzy Bromberg in person! This trio of programs also offers a rare opportunity to follow the thrilling trajectory of her early body of work as she defined an evolving sensibility through her revelatory and intensely creative engagement with the 16mm film medium. We think the sum experience of all three programs will reaffirm Bromberg’s status as a film artist of exquisite sensorial ingenuity, uncommon empathic intimacy, and as one of the great alchemist-poets of the medium.

Screening length = approximately 65 minutes.

Program curated by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano. Notes by Mark Toscano. Huge thanks to Betzy Bromberg.

Lightstruck: Betzy Bromberg program 2 (1981-1987)

Vittorio De Sica, Sophia Loren, and Marcello Mastroianni reunite for a tryptic of stories that saw wild box office success (over $8 million in 1963) and resulted in the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 37th Oscars ceremony. 

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Ieri, oggi, domani) in 4K preceded by Human Voice (Voce umana)

The MOCA Artist Film Series, presented by The Edward F. Limato Foundation, is an active and dynamic platform for the presentation of artist films. Inspired by film and video works in MOCA’s renowned collection, these programs explore the critical issues of our time and place and focus on experiments in long-form, narrative, and feature-length films. With ongoing presentations in the Ahmanson Auditorium, all screenings feature artists in dialogue with fellow artists, historians, and critics.

In the story told by La Noche Eterna, a poet and a young Evangelical man from the countryside, who have both recently arrived at the prison, meet an older actor who had been imprisoned after he was accused of trying to assassinate Fidel Castro. The actor ushers them into the social world of the prisoners, showing them how to resist the authorities’ attempt to re-educate them. To enliven the prisoners’ evenings, he convinces the warden that screening films would be a more effective means of teaching inmates about the benefits of socialism and creates a cinema inside the prison.

La Noche Eterna is based on the true story of Cuban writer and former political prisoner Néstor Díaz de Villegas. In 1974, Díaz de Villegas was sentenced to six years in prison at the age of 18 for writing a poem. Prior to his imprisonment he had already been subjected to censure several times for his nonconformist attitudes, which were deemed by the revolutionary government to be “ideologically divergent.” “Ideological diversionism,” a term introduced by Raúl Castro in the early 1970s, functioned as a legal and moral category that criminalized dissent. It was applied to Cuban citizens considered to be too intellectual, to youths who showed interest in American popular culture and music, to those presumed to be gay or lesbian, and to religious people whose faith prevented them from performing political obedience.

Fusco will be present for a post-screening conversation with novelist, art critic, and scholar Pablo Baler, Professor of Latin-American Literature, Visual Arts, and Creative Writing at California State University, Los Angeles

Coco Fusco (b. 1960, New York) lives and works in New York. Fusco was the feature of the retrospective Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island (2023) at the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin, which will travel to the MACBA, Barcelona in 2025. The artist’s performances and videos have been presented at the 56th Venice Biennale, three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008, and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Whitney Museum, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. She is a recipient of a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award, a 2021 Latinx Artist Fellowship, a 2021 Anonymous Was a Woman award, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, and a 2003 Herp Albert Award, among others. Fusco is a Professor at the Cooper Union School of Art and author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015); English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995); The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001); and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999); and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). She is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and numerous art publications.

Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Pablo Baler is a novelist, theorist, and art critic as well as professor of Latin American Literature at California State University, Los Angeles. His research interests focus on the intersection of Visual Arts, Literature, and Philosophy. Among other books, he is the author of the novels Circa (1999), Chabrancán (2020), and El lejano desoriente (2022), as well as the essay Latin-American Neo-Baroque: Senses of Distortion (2016). Baler is also the editor of the anthology The Next Thing: Art in the Twenty-First Century (2013).

MOCA Artist Film Series is organized by José Luis Blondet, Senior Curator with Alitzah Oros, Public Programming Associate, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

MOCA Artist Film Series is presented by The Edward F. Limato Foundation.

MOCA Artist Film Series: Coco Fusco – La Noche Eterna (The Eternal Night)

Seeing Is Not Believing: Tribulation 99 / Save the Green Planet!

THE GRADUATES

Y Tu Mamá También

Stop Making Sense

Six decades after the release of the classic Fantasia (1940), Walt Disney Studios assembled a top team of visual artists to create a new assortment of animated vignettes inspired by classic works of music. 

Fantasia/2000 in 35mm

Too Bad She’s Bad (Peccato che sia una canaglia) in 4K with Poverty and Nobility (Miseria e nobiltà)

Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe

Beauty and the Beast

A loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, Paul Thomas Anderson’s dark character study of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), a prospector turned ruthless oil man

There Will Be Blood in 35mm

Chasing Coral

One Nite in Mongkok

Vaudeville on Film

Charlotte’s Web

The Manchurian Candidate

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

This sweeping tragicomedy of a woman’s singular pursuit of familial stability marks another successful reteaming for stars Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni and filmmaker Vittorio De Sica, which resulted in a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Loren.

Marriage Italian Style (Matrimonio all’italiana) in 4K

Cinematic Void Presents REPULSION

A Star Is Born

They Came Together

Charles Schnee won an Oscar for his original screenplay about a talented but manipulative film producer (Kirk Douglas) and his relationships with a star (Lana Turner), a screenwriter (Dick Powell), and a director (Barry Sullivan).

The Bad and the Beautiful

In this “visually ravishing masterpiece” (BFI), real-life dancer Moira Shearer makes her film debut in this adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale as Vicky Page

The Red Shoes in 35mm

DUNE: PART TWO in 70mm

Aero Theatre

Husband and wife Gabe and Adelaide Wilson take their kids to their beach house expecting to unplug and unwind with friends. But as night descends, their serenity turns to tension and chaos when some shocking visitors arrive uninvited.

THE RED VIRGIN

Egyptian Theatre

Screening of PREY (2022), the first feature film dubbed in Comanche, followed by a discussion with producer Jhane Myers, scholar Dr. Eric Tippeconnic, and artist Virgil Ortiz. The discussion will explore Indigenous storytelling, language preservation, and science fiction.

Halloween at Getty: PREY Screening and Discussion

Getty Center

High Art

Fleischer Halloween Toons

THE LINE

Freddy vs. Jason

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

From Dusk Till Dawn

Aspiring actor Edward (Sebastian Stan) undergoes a radical medical procedure to drastically transform his appearance. But his new dream face quickly turns into a nightmare, as he loses out on the role he was born to play and becomes obsessed with reclaiming what was lost.

A Different Man

Donnie Darko

Revenge

Poltergeist

Tales from the Hood

Evil Dead II

RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985) Presented by SPIKE “Mistress of the Park”

Lightstruck presents: *Betzy Bromberg: A 3-show 16mm Retrospective*

November 21: Program 3 – Divinity Gratis (1989-1996)

Betzy Bromberg in person

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Lightstruck is overjoyed to present its first ever artist-in-person retrospective, with three different programs – November 7, 14, and 21 – of all-16mm work by one of our favorite filmmakers, the truly singular Betzy Bromberg. Unparalleled film artist, inspiring educator, and even erstwhile optical effects wizard, Bromberg has been making work almost exclusively on 16mm since the mid-1970s, first in New York and then in her adoptive home of Los Angeles. In recent years, we’ve thrilled at her rapturously expressive abstract feature-length films, and this three-program retrospective aims in part to chart the genesis of those works by focusing on Bromberg’s rich spectrum of filmmaking between 1977-1996. ~

Program 3 of 3: Bromberg’s first feature-length work *Divinity Gratis* concludes the retrospective, with so many of her interests, passions, and obsessions in filmic and thematic expression coming to their apotheosis. Seven years in the making, *Divinity Gratis* tackles no less than the cosmic history of human existence through a funhouse mirror of prismatic associations, vividly tinted by the hopes and fears of the atomic age. Audiovisually daring and unabashedly sensual, *Divinity Gratis* is both a culmination of Bromberg’s earlier explorations and a thrilling gateway to the elemental mysticism of her current cinematic journey.

All three evenings will feature a conversation following the films with Betzy Bromberg in person! This trio of programs also offers a rare opportunity to follow the thrilling trajectory of her early body of work as she defined an evolving sensibility through her revelatory and intensely creative engagement with the 16mm film medium. We think the sum experience of all three programs will reaffirm Bromberg’s status as a film artist of exquisite sensorial ingenuity, uncommon empathic intimacy, and as one of the great alchemist-poets of the medium.

Screening length = approximately 60 minutes.

Lightstruck: Betzy Bromberg program 3 (1989-1996)

Douglas Fairbanks—who portrays a nobleman posing as the “Black Pirate” to seek justice for his father’s death—took a daring and adventurous route by designing the production for color cinematography in the 1920s.

The Black Pirate in 4K

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Five-time Academy Award-nominated actress Annette Bening joins us to share her relationship with The More the Merrier before the screening, presented in a beautiful 4K restoration

The George Stevens Lecture on Directing presents The More the Merrier in 4K

Q&A with filmmaker Danis Goulet moderated by author and UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television Professor Kathleen McHugh.

Dystopian Futures: Night Raiders

Gonzo is contacted by aliens from his home planet. Kermit, Miss Piggy, and Gonzo’s other loyal friends must rescue him from the clutches of the top secret government agency C.O.V.N.E.T. so he can reunite with his long-lost relatives. 

Muppets from Space

Co-written by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, The Women delivers a cast of 135 women, each with a speaking role, to the total exclusion of men.

The Women

A slight redux of filmmaker Stanley Donen’s earlier Charade (1963), this time pairing Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren for a thrilling England-set, internationally minded mystery. 

Tuesday, 10/22

Brain Dead Studios

Rap World

8:00 PM, 10:00 PM

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Los Feliz Theatre

WHIP IT

7:00 PM

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THIS NIGHT I’LL POSSESS YOUR CORPSE

10:00 PM

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New Beverly Cinema

Longlegs

The First Omen

7:30 PM

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Now Instant Image Hall

Fresh Kill

7:00 PM

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Vidiots

Darla in Space

7:00 PM

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Nosferatu the Vampyre

7:30 PM

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Vista Theatre

Troll 2

2:00 PM

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Saturday Night

4:30 PM, 8:00 PM

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Tuesday, 10/22