MUSIC RIGHTS IN FILMMAKING WITH THE VOLUNTEER LAWYERS FOR THE ARTS
FREE for NSF18 filmmakers, $25 for students, $35 all others

Securing permission for the use of music in film can feel daunting. This class will provide an overview of music copyrights, including ownership and fair use, and explain the basics of music clearances for the use of music in film.

Established in 1969, Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (VLA) is the leading legal aid and education organization dedicated to New York artists and its arts and cultural organizations (ACOs). VLA strives to protect the artistic community’s livelihoods, businesses, and creative works through access to dedicated legal representation and focused education programs.

Presented by NSF sponsor, Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts.

In this comedic thriller, a trio of crooks relentlessly pursue a young American, played by Audrey Hepburn in gorgeous Givenchy, through Paris in an attempt to recover the fortune her dead husband stole from them. The only person she can trust is Cary Grant’s suave, mysterious stranger. Director Stanley Donen goes deliciously dark for Charade, a glittering emblem of sixties style and macabre wit. – Criterion

BLOOD AND STEEL: CEDAR CREST COUNTRY CLUB is a feature documentary that tells the story of East Coast punk and skateboard history; one that’s untold to this day – recounted by the very pioneers from the D.C. hardcore punk music and skateboarding scene that created it. Cedar Crest was a ramp, but not just any ramp. It was a place of unadulterated freedom where cutting edge skateboarding and punk rock music collided and made history. The film takes the audience on a journey through the roots of east coast D-I-Y culture with the athletes, artists, bands and the characters that were there. It features notables such as Ian MacKaye (Fugazi), GWAR, and Tony Hawk as well as a long list of skateboarding legends.

It’s the story of a small town gorilla, Sylvio, who is stuck in his job at a debt collection agency. Deep down he just wants to express himself with his hand puppet, Herbert Herpels, and his puppet show that highlights the quiet moments of life. He accidentally joins a local TV program and a series of on-air mishaps threaten to shatter his identity, sending him on a journey of self-discovery.

Starring: Vincent Price, Jane Asher, Hazel Court, David Weston

Out of the eight film adaptations he did, The Masque of the Red Death is one of Roger Corman’s more faithful renderings of an Edgar Allen Poe story.

Based on the 1842 short story of the same name with a slight incorporation of a sub-plot on Poe’s other tale, “Hop Frog,” the film is a vivid visual odyssey into madness, sadism, and death. Starring Vincent Price, The Masque of the Red Death takes place during the 12th century when a plague known as “The Red Death” was spreading across Europe, decimating the population. In the midst of this, Prince Prospero (Price) has cloistered himself with a select group of aristocrats in his castle fortress where he worships Satan. To pass the time, they play decadent parlor games which usually involve the victimization and torture of some unfortunate peasants. Prospero’s most recent act of cruelty involves forcing a local villager Francesca to choose between sparing the life of her father or her fiance. Meanwhile, a mysterious cloaked figure journeys toward Prospero’s castle for a fateful meeting.

In this bold, genre-defying horror-musical mashup —  the playful and confident debut of Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska — a pair of carnivorous mermaid sisters are drawn ashore in an alternate ’80s Poland to explore the wonders and temptations of life on land. Their tantalizing siren songs and otherworldly aura make them overnight sensations as nightclub singers in the half-glam, half-decrepit fantasy world of Smoczynska’s imagining. In a visceral twist on Hans Christian Andersen’s original Little Mermaid tale, one sister falls for a human, and as the bonds of sisterhood are tested, the lines between love and survival get blurred. A savage coming-of-age fairytale with a catchy new-wave soundtrack, lavishly grimy sets, and outrageous musical numbers, THE LURE explores its themes of sexuality, exploitation, and the compromises of adulthood with energy and originality.

Nitehawk’s LIVE SOUND CINEMA presents Robert Wiene’s silent horror masterpiece THE CABINET OF DOCTOR CALIGARI with a live score by PARLOR WALLS.

One of cinema’s first horror films as well as a German Expressionist film masterpiece, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari creates a vivid and dreamlike world. Werner Krauss stars as a doctor with a carnival attraction, a “somnambulist” (Conrad Veidt) who predicts people’s deaths and, under his master’s control, often causes those deaths. There’s no better way to start off the Halloween film season than at the beginning; The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari is a true original with its angled architectural props, dynamic costumes, touch of surrealist dreamlike state, and psychological twist of an ending.

Providing the live score to The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari is Parlor Walls, an experimental duo formed by singer/guitarist Alyse Lamb (EULA) and drummer/keyboardist Chris Mulligan. Sonic artist Jason Shelton will be joining Parlor Walls for the live score to this screening.

Part of Nitehawk’s March COMMITTED brunch series. 

In relation to the February release of the major motion picture Monuments Men, ART SEEN presents a screening of the incredible documentary that documents their efforts and the role art played in WWII, The Rape of Europa. Screening before the film is frieze video: Divine Violence. 

Based on a book of the same name, The Rape of Europa tells the epic story of the systematic theft, deliberate destruction and miraculous survival of Europe’s art treasures during the Third Reich and the Second World War. In a journey through seven countries, the film takes the audience into the violent whirlwind of fanaticism, greed, and warfare that threatened to wipe out the artistic heritage of Europe. For twelve long years, the Nazis looted and destroyed art on a scale unprecedented in history. But young art professionals as well as ordinary heroes, from truck drivers to department store clerks, fought back with an extraordinary effort to safeguard, rescue and return the millions of lost, hidden and stolen treasures.

The documentary begins and ends with the story of artist Gustav Klimt’s famed Gold Portrait, stolen from Viennese Jews in 1938 and now the most expensive painting ever sold. Today, more than sixty years later, the legacy of this tragic history continues to play out as families of looted collectors recover major works of art, conservators repair battle damage, and nations fight over the fate of ill-gotten spoils of war. Joan Allen narrates this breathtaking chronicle about the battle over the very survival of centuries of western culture.

About the frieze video: Divine Violence: Deutsche Börse prize-winners Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin discuss their new publication, ‘Holy Bible’.

ART SEEN is in partnership with

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Go on a trip of a lifetime with Nitehawk Nasties to see the most controversial film ever made, CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (a 35mm presentation).

Italian courts, and the rest of the world, might have found Cannibal Holocaust to be distasteful upon its release but this film-within-a-film ignited what we now know as the found-footage genre. In fact, so convincing was Ruggero Deodato’s faux-documentary about New York anthropologist Professor Harold Monroe’s journey ill-fated journey to South America, that audiences believed what they saw to be fact. Ahead of its flesh-eating time, Cannibal Holocaust is two layered. On the one hand, the film shows Monroe’s recon mission to find out what happened to a missing documentary crew who were filming about primitive cannibal tribes in 1979. Then, there’s the only thing that remains of the crew: their film reels that reveal their shockingly brutal fate. Watch this movie and decide who the real cannibals are.

Part of the 2016 Nitehawk Nasties I EAT CANNIBALS program.

Spending the night in a haunted mansion with The Cat and the Canary and live music by Guizot, part of Nitehawk’s Live Sound Cinema Vamps and Virgins series.

A staple of the “old dark house” genre films in the 1930s-1950s, Paul Leni’s version of The Cat and the Canary is a blended expression of humor with horror. Annabelle (Laura La Plante) inherits her uncle’s fortune twenty-years after his death but when she and her family spend the night in his haunted mansion, a mysterious figure stalks them. Could it be the escaped asylum lunatic “the Cat” hiding amongst them? La Plante’s virginal Annabelle faces these unseen horrors with only her honor to project her. For the audience, it’s fun watching these shield of virginity battle against the forces of hell…and win!

Providing the live score to The Cat and the Canary is Guizot.

The Cat and the Canary is part of Nitehawk Cinema’s Vamps and Virgins series that explores the two sides of the leading lady spectrum in silent film.