Multimedia artist One9’s documentary NAS: TIME IS ILLMATIC follows the trajectory of Nas’ 1994 landmark debut album, Illmatic, one of the most important and revolutionary albums in hip hop.
Even 20 years after its release, Illmatic is widely recognized as a hip-hop benchmark that captured the sociopolitical outlook, enduring spirit and collective angst of a generation of young artists searching for their voice in America.
Tracing Nas’s influences from the music of his jazz musician father, Olu Dara, to the burgeoning hip-hop scene in his native Queensbridge, Nas: Time is Illmatic describes the almost insurmountable obstacles he faced in creating his opus, providing an authentic and passionate account of Nas’s personal journey from a young street poet to a visionary MC. -Cara Cusumano
A two-hour feast of zombie film footage and pop culture commentary.
Comedian Kevin Maher and filmmaker Matt Glasson present an obsessive look at zombies, from White Zombie to World War Z. The hosts explore pre-Romero voodoo zombies, Night of the Living Dead rip-offs, the recurring theme of Nazi Zombies in film, and the recent run of zombies overtaking pop culture. The two-hour show features dozens of clips including zombie film highlights from Italian, Asian, British and Mexican filmmakers.
With special guest presentations by Heather Buckley (Fangoria, Dread Central), Brian Solomon (The Vault of Horror), Daan Van Versendaal (The Netherlands Institute of Neuroscience), Doug Sakmann (Special FX Artist) and Captain Cruella (Village Invasion Zombie Crawl). Plus trivia prizes and zombie snack foods!
Kevin and Matt are excited to bring their humorous, terrifying, quite unforgettable video variety show to Nitehawk Cinema. From casual filmgoers to die-hard zombie fanatics, it’s an evening of guaranteed zombie fun for everyone!
Nitehawk and Noisey present two special midnite screenings of KILL YOUR IDOLS with post screening Q&A with director Scott Crary. Also expected to attend: members of Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Liars, Foetus, SWANS, Black Dice, Flux Information Sciences and other surprise guests
Scott Crary’s documentary Kill Your Idols is a sweeping look at New York’s No wave and art punk movements, and starts in the 1970s with acts like Suicide and DNA and goes all the way up to the early 2000’s with young acts like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars and Black Dice. Through clever editing, Crary tells the story of this difficult (for some!) style with clarity and wit, and features interviews from members of Sonic Youth, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Swans, Gogol Bordello and more. No Wave bands have the best names, don’t they?
Music Driven is presented in partnership with Noisey. Featuring Absolut Vodka cocktails.
Part of the 2014 Nitehawk Shorts Festival, Nitehawk’s ART SEEN presents a special one-night screening of works by artist Aldo Tambellini. Includes a live performance by Alyse Lamb.
Black is the beginning. It is birth, the oneness of all, the expansion of consciousness in all directions – Aldo Tambellini
Iconoclastic and experimental artist Aldo Tambellini was among the first artists in the early 1960s to explore new technologies as an art medium. Tambellini combined slide projections, film, performance, and music into sensorial experiences that he aptly called “Electromedia.” Such work informed Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable and Woody and Steina Vasulka’s The Kitchen. With the rediscovery of this material, Tambellini’s work has become the subject of great interest for early new media. Nitehawk is thrilled to screen a selection of his works (1965-2005) and introduce his films to new audiences.
Alyse Lamb (EULA and Parlor Walls) will perform a live original score to Aldo Tambellini’s new work NO NAME FILM 1.
ALDO TAMBELLINI PROGRAM
SoundBlack (1968) – U.S. Premiere
Black Is (1965)
Blackout (1966)
Listen (2005)
Black Plus (1966)
Black Trip Two (1967)
No Name Film 1 (1960s)
Special thank you to Joe Ketner, Anna Salamone, and Aldo Tambellini.
Starring: David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, John Castle, Jane Birkin
When the talented but bored and cocky fashion photographer Thomas takes pictures of a couple in a desolate park, he unwittingly embarks on a strange journey of captured infidelity and possible murder. Blow-Up is set in the swinging mid-1960s London and it evokes all the mod style and sensibility style of the time period. Importantly through Antonioni’s own camera, the film examines the power and potential of the photographic medium during a period when its boundaries to depict reality were truly being tested. Although this is Antonioni’s first English language film, as with most of the director’s work, Blow-Up shares in the lone figure faced with a problem of his/her own making, their journey marked amongst a vast landscape.
Icelandic artist, Björk, performs songs from her eighth album with evocative visuals provided by designers from around the world.
Biophilia Live is a concert film by Nick Fenton and Peter Strickland that captures the human element of Björk’s multi-disciplinary multimedia project: Biophilia. Recorded live at Björk’s show at London’s Alexandra Palace in 2013, the film features Björk and her band performing every song on Biophilia and more using a broad variety of instruments – some digital, some traditional and some completely unclassifiable.
Six men are coming to town….one’s getting divorced….but they’re all in the DOGHOUSE!
In the tradition of other great UK comedy horror films like Shaun of the Dead and Severance comes Jack West’s Doghouse. Six men with mid-life anxiety set out for a weekend in the country in an attempt to reconnect with their masculinity. What they find is a catastrophe so horrible and bizarre that a mid-life crisis turns out to be exactly what they need to survive it. The battle of the sexes just got bloody!
Part of Nitehawk’s November UK MODERN HORROR midnite series.
Director Ben Wheatley brings us the mind-blowing genre film KILL LIST.
A brilliant blend of family drama, hitman action-thriller and terrifying psychological horror film, KILL LIST tells the story of an ex-soldier turned contract killer who is plunged into the heart of human darkness. Eight months after a disastrous hit job in Kiev left him physically and mentally scarred, Jay is pressured by his partner Gal, into taking a new assignment. As they descend into the bizarre, disturbing world of the contract, Jay’s world begins to unravel until fear and paranoia sending him reeling towards a horrifying point of no return.
Part of Nitehawk’s November UK MODERN HORROR midnite series.
Nitehawk’s LIVE SOUND CINEMA presents a special one-nite pre-Halloween screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s silent film THE LODGER with a live score by MORRICONE YOUTH!
A Jack-the-Ripper type murderer called “The Avenger” is terrorizing London by targeting young blond women. How Hitchcockian! At the same time of these attacks, a mysterious man takes a room at the a family-owned boarding house and strikes up a relationship with the proprietor’s pretty blonde daughter. To thicken the plot, she’s engaged to a policeman hot on the trail of “The Avenger” who thinks her Lodger lover is the serial killer! Part of the restored newly restored “Hitchcock Nine” by the British Film Institute, The Lodger is considered the “first true Hitchcock film” and is, obviously, a thrilling way to kick start your Halloween.
Morricone Youth is a New York City band formed in 1999 dedicated to performing and recording old film and television soundtrack and library production music.
Starring: Kevin Van Hentenryck, Terri Susan Smith, Beverly Bonner, Robert Vogel
What’s in the basket? Well, it certainly isn’t a bushel of kittens. When country kid Duane Bradley arrives in New York with only his mysterious basket, he peaks the curiosity of everyone he meets and this intrigue kills. It actually contains his deformed siamese twin whom he’s on a pack to kill all those who considered him inhuman when born. Duh! As always, a lady comes into the picture and complicates things while the freak twin escapes to wreak havoc on, well, everyone. Basket Case is low budget and high gore, just how we like it.
