Starring: Richard Brewster, Winifred Cushing, Jay Williams
Little Fugitive is a Live Sound Cinema event featuring a live score by Reel Orchestrette.
Joey is a young boy in Brooklyn who, after being tricked into believing he has killed his older brother while his mother is away, escapes to Coney Island. Collecting glass bottles in exchange for money to spend on amusement park rides, Joey forgets his troubles in the wash of amusement park excitement only to return home to find his mother and brother there! Little Fugitive is a landmark film featuring naturalist style and nonprofessional actors that considerably influenced the French New Wave movement.
Little Fugitive was filmed on location in Coney Island and other Brooklyn locations.
The Tom Stathes Cartoon Carnival: SCHOOL BELLS. ALL 16mm FILM SHOW!
An assortment of rare, bizarre, funny and quirky 16mm cartoons from the 1910s thru the 40s that you’ll be sure to enjoy.
School bells are ringing! It’s time to get back to class and learn a thing or two, Cartoon Carnival style. Tom Stathes has hand-selected a group of weird, wacky, funny and obscure 16mm cartoons and educational films from the 1910s thru the 1940s that take place in the classroom or are educational in nature. There will be a couple well-known classic cartoon favorites, obscure curiosities and stop-motion wonders; all shown in actual vintage film prints. Pass a note to your classmates and tell them to attend –there’ll be no excuses for playing hooky this time!
Tom Stathes is a “Cartoon Cryptozoologist” with a rare film print collection comprised of over 1,000 shorts. His archive consists of pivotal series like Farmer Alfalfa, Felix the Cat, Out of the Inkwell, and many more. A native-New Yorker and lifelong cartoon fan, Stathes turned his passion for the city’s early animation legacy into a preservation mission. Tom’s long term goal has been to acquire and preserve early animated films as well as reintroduce them to the public. For more information about this historic undertaking, check out cartoonsonfilm.com and brayanimation.weebly.com.
A story about greed, politics and the land grab of the century, ZIPPER chronicles the battle over an American cultural icon. Q&A with Director Amy Nicholson and guest receive one complimentary Coney Island beer!
Small-time ride operator Eddie Miranda proudly operates a carnival contraption called the Zipper in the heart of Coney Island’s gritty amusement district. When his rented lot is snatched up by a real estate mogul, Eddie and his ride become casualties of a power struggle between the developer and the City of New York over the future of the world-famous destination. Be it an affront to history or simply the path of progress, the spirit of Coney Island is at stake. In an increasingly corporate landscape, where authenticity is often sacrificed for economic growth, the Zipper may be just the beginning of what is lost.
Join Director Bill Cody and Black Lips band members (Jared Swilley, Ian Saint Pé, Joe Bradley, Cole Alexander,Ben Eberbaugh, Jack Hines, Richie Hayes) for a special screening of Kids Like You and Me: A Middle East Tour Film at Nitehawk!
In 2009, The Black Lips started investigating the possibility of a bridge building tour of the Middle East with stops throughout the region. After two years of planning, several uprisings, a civil war the tour finally came to fruition in the fall of 2012. It wasn’t easy either. Promoters in Jordan and Alexandria, Egypt backed out at the last minute because the band had played shows in Israel and a show in Erbil, Iraq had to be changed when an explicit video of the band was viewed by a government official. It all worked out in the end though and the shows in Alexandria and Erbil turned out to be highlights of the tour.
Kids Like You and Me: A Middle East Tour Film documents this journey through one of the most exciting regions in the world including three groundbreaking stops in Egypt. (The last known American rock band to play Egypt being The Grateful Dead in 1978!) Get on the bus with The Black Lips and their good friends, Lebanese indie rockers, Lazzy Lung. See the people of the Middle East the way they really are. Shopkeepers and restaurant owners. Skaters, graffiti artists and musicians. Revolutionaries and dreamers. Kids like you and me. You’ll never look at the Middle East the same way after seeing this film.
Starring: Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Billy Chapin, Sally Jane Bruce, Peter Graves
An initially overlooked film that’s now considered a classic, The Night of the Hunter is a tightly composed tale of “good versus evil” told through innocent farm kids and the sociopath preacher who is stalking them.
Bringing Davis Grubb’s novel to the big screen, actor Charles Laughton made his only directorial feature with The Night of the Hunter. All shadows and light, the film is a beautiful juxtaposition of love and hate, quiet moment with bursts of violence, and at its most fundamental, a representation of the struggle between good and evil. And evil enters into the world of a desperate family in the form of the religious fanatic with sociopathic tendencies Harry Powell (played to eery perfection by Robert Mitchum). A serial murderer who marries for money and then kills his brides, he marries a gullible widow (Shelley Winters) for the $10,000 her deceased husband stole. His plan gets complicated when neither of her two children will disclose the whereabouts of the fortune, they head up river to escape the preacher…but he’s always close behind.
The Night of the Hunter is haunting mixture of stark realism and German Expressionism that’s both inspiring and horrifying. Walter Schumman’s score and the cinematography of Stanley Cortez and fundamental to the feel of the film, which is one of a poetic struggle.
Part of the VICE Presents: The Film Foundation Screening Series at Nitehawk Cinema. Two for the Road is a late 1960s British comedy/drama that tracks the winding road of life taken by a couple through their decade-long marriage. Includes a recorded introduction by Schawn Belston from Fox who restored Two for the Road.
While very literally set amongst the travels of destined couple Joanna and Mark Wallace, Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road is a metaphor for the journey taken by two people who, despite all the trials and triumphs, truly love each other. Through time-shifting vignettes, Two for the Road tracks the ebb and flow of the Wallace’’s ten year marriage: from their mismatched courtship after meeting on a road trip to their subsequent marriage to the birth of their children to the periodic infidelity. The film revels equally in the desire to have a partner in life as much as it does the sheer inevitability of people’s needs shifting over time.
Stanley Donen’s (Singing in the Rain) abandonment of a non-linear narrative troubled people upon release but its influence was not hampered. The scene in which Mark and Joanna first meet (he settles for her after losing out on beautiful music student played by Jacqueline Bisset) inspired the film-within-a-film motif in Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973). But it’s ultimately Two for the Road’s embracement of the problematics of love rather than the unrealistic depictions ubiquitous in cinema that truly makes it an timeless classic. The movie ends ambiguously by showing the beginning of the Wallace’s relationship; perhaps a signifier that real relationships are on a continuous cycle of evolvement.
*A portion of each ticket sale goes towards The Film Foundation. Tickets also include complimentary Larceny Bourbon drinks at an after-party in Nitehawk’s downstairs bar!
TWO FOR THE ROAD (1957, dir. Stanley Donen)
Restored by Twentieth Century Fox in collaboration with The Film Foundation.
Print courtesy of The Film Foundation Conservation Collection at the Academy Film Archive and Twentieth Century Fox.
Starring: Barbara Steele, John Richardson, Andrea Checchi
1960 saw the release of three of horror’s best films: Alfred Hitchock’s Psycho, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, and Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (originally La maschera del demonio or The Mask of Satan). While the others deal with real horrors, Bava’s story is about a vengeful witch whose pact with Satan carries over centuries, long after her execution. In fact, her death is so brutally depicted in the film’s opening sequence that caused the film to be banned in the UK. When she’s awakened by the blood of a traveling doctor, the witch and her minion haunt the cursed family that killed her with the ever-stunning Barbara Steele playing both the witch and the family’s young daughter. As you get with Bava, the film is all contrast, lights and darks, scenery with depth and innovative cinematography.
Contemporary art and street culture collide to create this influential and inspiration group of Beautiful Losers. Playing before the documentary is Cheryl Dunn’s Back Worlds for Words (1999).
Stemming from the DIY culture of the early 1990s (punk, skateboarding, graffiti), the works created by artists like Barry McGee, Harmony Korine, and Margaret Kilgallen changed the landscape of contemporary art. As a documentary, Beautiful Losers profiles these influential artists who have taken their own subcultural inspirations to bridge the gap between public and private, general and art audiences, painting to film, east and west coasts. At the core of this story, like Ferus Gallery in The Cool School, is Aaron Rose’s Alleged Gallery and the home that it became to foster life-long friendships between these connected yet individual artists.
Artist Film Club: Playing before Beautiful Losers is Cheryl Dunn‘s Back Worlds for Words, a 1999 documentation of a skateboard ballet, choreographed and performed by artist and skateboard legend Mark Gonzales at the Stadtisches Museum in Monchengladbach, Germany.
Part of Nitehawk’s Art Seen signature series.
Sign Painters, the first anecdotal history of the craft, features the stories of more than two dozen sign painters working in cities throughout the United States. Filmmakers in person for a Q&A!
There was a time, as recently as the 1980s, when storefronts, murals, banners, barn signs, billboards, and even street signs were all hand-lettered with brush and paint. But, like many skilled trades, the sign industry has been overrun by the techno-fueled promise of quicker and cheaper. The resulting proliferation of computer-designed, die-cut vinyl lettering and inkjet printers has ushered a creeping sameness into our landscape. Fortunately, there is a growing trend to seek out traditional sign painters and a renaissance in the trade.
The documentary and book by filmmakers Faythe Levine and Sam Macon profiles sign painters young and old, from the new vanguard working solo to collaborative shops such as San Francisco’s New Bohemia Signs and New York’s Colossal Media’s Sky High Murals.
Back by popular demand…A BAND CALLED DEATH returns for another weekend midnite run!
Before Bad Brains, the Sex Pistols or even the Ramones, there was a band called Death.
Punk before punk existed, three teenage brothers in the early ’70s formed a band in their spare bedroom, began playing a few local gigs and even pressed a single in the hopes of getting signed. But this was the era of Motown and emerging disco. Record companies found Death’s music— and band name—too intimidating, and the group were never given a fair shot, disbanding before they even completed one album. Equal parts electrifying rockumentary and epic family love story, A Band Called Death chronicles the incredible fairy-tale journey of what happened almost three decades later, when a dusty 1974 demo tape made its way out of the attic and found an audience several generations younger. Playing music impossibly ahead of its time, Death is now being credited as the first black punk band (hell…the first punk band!), and are finally receiving their long overdue recognition as true rock pioneers.
