Fritz Lang’s science-fiction masterpiece Metropolis is a Vamps and Virgins Live Sound Cinema event with a live score by Black Lodge.
The utopian society of Metropolis unravels when the son of the city’s main planner realizes there is an entire network of underground workers/slaves. Subsequently, he falls in love with the leader of the underground workers movement in society “Maria” who prophetically claims a savior will come to send the class war. Helm masterfully portrays a double role of “virgin” and “vamp” in Metropolis as the angelic “Maria” who is a prophet/mother to her followers with elements of both the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist. Helm also plays the false Maria, a robot whose role is to destroy Maria’s revolution. The false Maria is nothing less than the “Whore of Babylon”, the apocalyptic figure of Revelation, rousing the workers into acts of violent sabotage.
Providing the live score to Metropolis is Black Lodge.
Metropolis is part of Nitehawk Cinema’s Vamps and Virgins series that explores the two sides of the leading lady spectrum in silent film.
An abused waifish woman finds solace in the arms of an immigrant to tragic consequences in Broken Blossoms; part of our Live Sound Cinema Vamps and Virgins series featuring a live score by Gersh/Reed.
Before the Jazz Age, it was the dark ages for women. In D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms Lillian Gish plays a girl living in poverty with a violent and abusive father. Seemingly her only escape is the questionable freedom of a life of prostitution or the squalor and slavery is in the form of a loveless marriage. She discovers a middle path through a chance meeting with an outsider: Cheng, a Chinese immigrant shopkeeper. But she is a white, virginal and underage. Their relationship is impossible in the time and place they live. There love is an illicit and tragic but because of this it is also transcendent and beautiful.
Broken Blossoms is part of Nitehawk Cinema’s Vamps and Virgins series that explores the two sides of the leading lady spectrum in silent film.
Bradford Reed & Geoff Gersh have been collaborating together for almost 20 years. During that time, there have been many performances together with various bands as well as working together on projects for dance and film. They have been accompanying silent films at Nitehawk Cinema on a regular basis since July 2012.
The second film in Nitehawk’s Vamps and Virgins silent film series is based on the most famous martyr in history, Joan of Arc. This LIVE SOUND CINEMA event features a live score by Guizot.
A landmark of cinema featuring one of the best performances in film history by Renée Jeanne Falconetti, The Passion of Joan of Arc is based on the actual trial record of the infamous Joan of Arc (1412-1431). It depicts her trial, imprisonment, torture, and execution by the English after refusing to recant her belief that’s she is on a mission from God to drive England out of France. Some believe she’s a saint while others, well, you know. Hailed as a masterpiece even immediately after its release, it’s just an impressive today and is one to certainly see on the big screen with a live band.
From the Vamps and Virgins series text…The Passion of Joan of Arc has Maria Falconetti acting without makeup or artifice; as “Joan” she is a defiant fortress of will. Such a terrible and tearful portrait of uncompromising virgin purity driven into martyrdom is a subject rarely experienced in contemporary cinema.
The Passion of Joan of Arc is part of Nitehawk Cinema’s Vamps and Virgins series that explores the two sides of the leading lady spectrum in silent film.
Room 237 is a subjective documentary that explores the numerous theories about the hidden meanings within Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining (1980).
If Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) taught us one thing, it was not to go into Room 237. But yet, here we are, entering into a portal of conspiracy theories, intense scrutinization, and the supposed hidden meanings embedded within the horror masterpiece through the eyes of uber fans. Consider IFC’s Room 237 as a code to unlocking all the mysteries you considered along with all the things you never even noticed in The Shining and other Kubrick films. Through voice overs, film clips, animation and dramatic reenactments, five obsessive film fans take us on an elaborate journey through the Outlook Hotel where we discover there is, indeed, no way out.
Danger Diabolik is a Live Sound Cinema event featuring a live soundtrack by Morricone Youth.
He robs from the rich and gives to the girls.
Mario Bava’s film adaptation of the popular Diabolik Italian comic books is a stunning visual experience that epitomizes the swinging style of the late 1960s. Danger Diabolik is a mysterious man, thin and dressed in black and armed with his beautiful woman cohort Eva, who manages to outsmart, outrun, and outdrive all the European bad guys he encounters. Money and jewels are his game, and he’ll kill to get them. Bava’s scenic design and cinematography are at his innovative best in Danger Diabolik, particularly in our hero’s underground psychedelic crystal lair where he and Eva make magic happen…on top of money!
Providing the live score to Danger Diabolik is Morricone Youth.
Nitehawk Nasties invites you to find out if cannibalism still exists with CANNIBAL FEROX (a 35mm presentation).
A bona-fide Video Nasty (as decreed by the British Board of Film Classification in the 1980s), Cannibal Ferox is the trashier sister to Cannibal Holocaust but still full of adventurous youth, needless animal torture, and gruesome special effects. Three young anthropologists head down to Columbia to prove the cannibalism no longer exists and was, in fact, a story concocted by greedy European colonizers. After meeting two New York-based drug dealers who have wreaked havoc on the Columbian village, most of them wind up proving this theory with their lives. Turns out, violent killing and cannibalistic urges do come about when prompted. Hungry for more?
Part of the 2016 Nitehawk Nasties I EAT CANNIBALS program.
Introduction by director Douglas Buck on Saturday night!
Family Portraits: a Trilogy of America consists of three short horror films – Cutting Moments, Home, and Prologue – that unearth and expose the disturbing secrets of three “ordinary” families.
Unflinchingly and violently taking apart the facade of the American familial utopia, Douglas Buck’s trilogy of shorts comprising Family Portraits: a Trilogy of America is both a physical and psychology undoing. The first, Cutting Moments (1997), shows a small family of three who house a disturbing secret of sexual abuse and abandonment through the eyes of the mother; it’s when this truth surfaces that the brutal self-inflicted punishment begins. Home (1998) is a pseudo-sequel/remake of Cutting Moments where the focus shifts to the father’s perspective; more psychological but no less damaging. And lastly, Prologue, shows us the violent return of a young maimed woman to seek revenge on her attacker one year previously.
“…this is the sort of filmmaking the world desperately needs more of – uncompromisingly honest works designed not to entertain an audience but to destroy them.” – Mitch Davis, Flesh and Blood Magazine
Nitehawk’s June ART SEEN shows love for the Los Angeles art world with the documentary The Cool School and The Black and White Tapes (1970-1975) by Paul McCarthy. Introduction on Saturday by Rebecca Taylor from MoMA PS1.
Amidst the city’s sprawling landscape, vast highways, warm weather, and cheap rents, the artists that make Los Angeles their home are like no other artists in the world. 2008’s The Cool School documents the birth of modern art in LA with the beginning of the eponymous Ferus Gallery in the late 1950s, showing the renegade artists and curators who built that scene from almost nothing. Ed Kienholz, Larry Bell, Ed Moses, John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, Dennis Hopper, Irving Blum, Walter Hopps are but some of the notable names you find in The Cool School’s look at the most unique art scene in the world (then and now).
Showing before The Cool School will be a screening of seminal Los Angeles artist Paul McCarthy’s The Black and White Tapes (1970-1975). A mixture of subtlety and confrontation, the artist’s body and formal play with objects, light, and shadow, this compilation of thirteen early black and white performance tapes from the 1970s reveals the nascent development of the themes, the raw physicality, and the performance personae that mark McCarthy’s well-known later works.
We will also show artist works by Kelly Kleinschrodt, Alexa Garrity, and Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman’s A Brief History of John Baldessari.
Screening includes Q&A with Ben Shapiro, the Director of Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters.
The cinematic and contemporary art collide in this unparalleled view into the creation of acclaimed photographer Gregory Crewdson’s haunting imagery.
Acclaimed photographer Gregory Crewdson doesn’t just “take” his images, he creates them, through elaborate days and weeks of invention, design, and set-up. The epic production of these movie-like images is both intensely personal and highly public: they begin in Crewdson’s deepest desires and memories, but come to life on streets and soundstages in the hills towns of Western Massachusetts. In his decade-long project “Beneath the Roses” he uses light, color and character to conjure arresting images, managing a crew of 60 amidst seemingly countless logistical and creative obstacles. The documentary (filmed for over a decade, beginning in 2000) also reveals the life-story behind the work—through frank reflections on his life and career, including the formative influences of his psychologist father and his childhood fascination with the work of Diane Arbus.
Screening before Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters is our The Artist Film Club featuring Rä di Martino (guest curated by Hannah Gruy of White Cube) and Tommy Turner’s Simonland (1984) as selected from our partnership with the Moving Image Contemporary Art Video Fair (thanks to P.P.O.W. Gallery).
Nitehawk and Noisey present May’s Music Driven Hit So Hard, a documentary in which the highs and lows 1990s Seattle’s alternative music scene are told through the life of Hole drummer, Patty Schemel.
Much more than a documentary focusing on the life of one person, Hit So Hard expands upon Patty Schemel’s personal narrative as the drummer for Hole into the tumultuous landscape of the 1990s Seattle music scene. The film includes personal revelations from Patty about drug use, sexuality, extreme loss, fame, and the passionate desire to create music. Consisting of many moments captured on home-video by Schemel, what’s truly touching are the intimate home videos of a young Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love at home with their baby Francis Bean; not to mention the captured crazy moments on tour. Dealing with how women in rock-n-roll navigate the waters so often dominated by straight men, the heart of Hit So Hard is within the struggles and successes of its subject, Patty Schemel.
Presented with our media partner, Noisey.
