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.
Nitehawk’s May Country Brunchin’ presents John Wayne in The Searchers with a live pre-show serenade by Tatters and Rags.
The Searchers is an essential part of the western genre’s cinematic dialogue on the complicated foundation of North America. Three years after the Civil War, an ex-Confederate soldier (John Wayne) lands on his brother’s Texas farm just in time to find most of his family slaughtered and two of his nieces missing. After finding the eldest dead, he searches for five years for his other kidnapped niece, Debbie. And when he does ultimately finds her, his motives are seriously questionable. The Searchers really isn’t one of your feel-good westerns. Instead, it portrays racial issues between the “cowboys and Indians” as well as a rather ugly view towards women. Still, beautiful in scope and in Technicolor dreams, this epic film is one to not miss on the big screen.
Surprisingly, this is our first Country Brunchin’ film to feature the western genre’s man main, The Duke.
Tatters and Rags are at times a drone post-punk folk band, other times being a sweaty, whiskey-fueled electric honky-tonk band. Fans of the band state that their eclecticism is part of their charm, and it’s always accompanied by a frenetic energy that makes them one of the most exciting live bands in New York City.
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.
Complimentary cocktails and small bites are available in our downstairs bar beginning at 8:30pm. Guests can then take the cocktails up to the theaters when seating begins!
Come see how New Yorkers rediscovered their Manhattans at the premiere screening of the documentary Spirit Guides: The Return of Craft Bartending in New York at Nitehawk.
The event at Nitehawk includes a pre-screening reception and guest bartenders (members of the cast) who will be mixing up signature cocktails for guests before and during the screening. There will also be a Q&A with the director and members of the cast like Q&A panelist: Julie Reiner (Clover Club, Flatiron Lounge), Jim Meehan (PDT), Jesse White (Director of Spirit Guides), as well as an after-party with cocktails (by more guest bartenders!) with small bites.
Shot at some of the most exclusive bars in New York, Spirit Guides: The Return of Craft Bartending features commentary from the industry’s most respected bartenders including Dale DeGroff, Julie Reiner, Audrey Saunders, Jim Meehan, and Brian Miller. Experience how a small group of bartenders rediscovered the lost history of classic cocktails, and how a new generation of bartenders is using this history to define the role of bartending today.
Guest Bartenders:
Meaghan Dorman (Raines Law Room and Lantern’s Keep)
Rob Krueger (Employees Only, Extra Fancy)
Eryn Reece (Death + Co., Mayahuel)
Jim Kearns (Prime Meats)
Joaquin Simo (Pouring Ribbons)
Lynnette Marrero (co-founder Speed Rack)
This is but one of the many tempting and titillating events of the 2013 Manhattan Cocktail Classic, taking place May 17 to May 21 in and around New York City. For a complete list of all the fabulous parties, pairings, seminars, and soirées taking place, and to snag tickets, go to www.manhattancocktailclassic.com.
Love and dreams of stardom in 1930s Hollywood come crashing down in this sensational film adaptation of the Nathanael West novel. Part of our mini-retrospective series, THE WORKS: KAREN BLACK.
The Day of the Locust uses Hollywood and its locusts (aka the mass of people who arrive to make it big, the sycophants) as a metaphor for 1930s America as it moved out of the depression-era into war-time. Focusing on a love-triangle between three people: Tod Hackett as the east-coast transplant looking to become a screenwriter who becomes obsessed with Faye Greener, an aspiring actress played by Karen Black who is incapable of true feelings but interested in using the dopey Homer Simpson (yes, that’s where the name came from) for money. Add in aspiring child actors and waning vaudeville stars, and The Day of the Locust becomes a surrealist vision of the apocalypse. In the end, things come crashing down in one of the more violent, bizarre, and over-the-top scenes in film history.
In the role of Faye, Karen Black takes the emotionally unavailable, fame hungry, dreamy aspiring actress into The Day of the Locusts’ realm of insanity at the highest level.
Nitehawk Cinema and Noisey present MUSIC DRIVEN, a new monthly music-centric film series. The debut screening is A Skin Too Few: the Days of Nick Drake featuring an introduction by Joe Boyd, the legendary American record producer who discovered Nick Drake.
A Skin Too Few: the Days of Nick Drake is a mostly chronological study of the life of musician Nick Drake (1948 – 1974) as told through the his family and friends. Eleven recordings featuring his quiet folk style are the film’s soundtrack as we see where he lived and died at the young age of 26.
Joe Boyd, Nick Drake’s discoverer and producer introduces a rare US screening of the film acclaimed as the best ever made about the mysterious figure of Nick Drake, A Skin Too Few. Boyd will also provide a sneak preview of his forthcoming tribute album “Way To Blue” (which features Lisa Hannigan, Green Gartside, Teddy Thompson, Robyn Hitchcock, Vashti Bunyan, Danny Thompson and many others.) He will also discuss his work with Nick Drake and read from the Drake chapters in “White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s.” A special guest will sing a Nick Drake song and there will be a short Q&A between Joe Boyd and Noisey Editor, Ben Shapiro.
Starring: Kyle MacLachlan, Sting, Francesca Annis, Max von Sydow, Sean Young, Virginia Madsen, José Ferrer
Come celebrate the 40th anniversary of one of the wildest blockbusters ever committed to celluloid! Author Max Evry will be on hand to intro the film and sell/sign copies of his book A Masterpiece in Disarray.
David Lynch brought Frank Herbert’s wildly popular science-fiction novel Dune to the big screen in 1984 and it’s been a trip-tastic go-to-movie ever since. Set in the year 10,191 when the universe is dependent on a spice called Melange that can extend life and can fold time, a Duke’s son (Kyle MacLachlan) leads the enslaved desert warriors on the spice-producing planet Arrakis in an epic battle with the evil Emperor. In the tradition of futuristic space worlds like Star Wars and The Matrix, Dune is about a young man deemed the messiah rising up and trying to make things better for the people. Time, space, telepathy, monsters, madness, love, and righteousness – long live the fighters!
The Friday, May 31st screening includes a special introduction by Alan Cumming!
The unthinkable happens when a small plane collides into a 747 and a flight attendant has to take captain’s seat. Luckily, Karen Black and Charlton Heston are there to save the day!
Bound for Los Angeles, the Columbia Airlines’ Flight 409 is full of interesting passengers (you’ll can see them parodied in the 1980 spoof Airplane!) including an aging film star, a sick little girl, and a guitar-singing nun. Things take off fine at first but when a man has a heart attack while flying his small plane and then crashing into Flight 409, things take a disastrous turn. After all pilots are either sucked out or dying, flight attendant Nancy Pryor played by Karen Black takes charge of the plane that is miraculously still in the air but the only problem is that she can’t land it. Enter – literally onto the plane via helicopter – Nancy’s man-friend Captain Murdock (Charlton Heston, naturally) to help get everyone back down safely on the ground.
Part of The Works: Karen Black retrospective series.
A brilliant film about escaping your past, hating your present, and being fearful of the future while attempting to embrace life to the fullest.
Introduction for the Friday night screening by artist and filmmaker, Aïda Ruilova.
Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Robert in Five Easy Pieces, an upper class man who has left it all behind for a working class existence, is uncomfortable, riveting, and a bit devastating. His constant struggle to distract himself with who he is and where he might be going (whether with girls, booze, or working in an oil field) makes him one mean fellow. Scenes such as the infamous diner order or the intimate conversation with his father make him relatable but that all comes crashing down at the end.
Stand by your man. Karen Black plays Robert’s beautiful but overly eager girlfriend Rayette, an aspiring singer who begs her man to love her when she probably shouldn’t.
Part of The Works: Karen Black retrospective series.
