Thursday, May 24

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From Beyond at 92Y

What’s Showing Today? Thursday, May 24
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Featured Screening: From Beyond at 92YTribeca

Tonight gorehounds are offered a 35mm screening of Stuart Gordon‘s 1986 cult classic From Beyond, which reunites key cast and crew of the preceding year’s Re-Animator, including Gordon, star Jeffrey Combs and producer/writer Brian Yuzna and writer Dennis Paoli for another H.P. Lovecraft adaptation.

Despite over 100 screen adaptations, no one has quite surpassed Gordon’s Lovecraft adaptations, which also include Castle Freak, Dagon and Dreams in the Witch-House. One reason may be the knowing irreverence to the source material. Though Lovecraft is more lurid and pulpy than influences including Lord Dunsany, Edgar Allan Poe, Alergnon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, his writing is rather self-serious, and the web of gods, elder gods and recurring characters and objects that compose the so-called “Cthulhu mythos” running through much of his work inspires a likeminded ardent devotion among many of his greatest fans. Yet the difficulty of a literal visual adaptation is Lovecraft’s greatest strength is his evoking of what might quaintly be described as “liminal states” or “the void”, but in his words taken to abject, hysterical extremes. With Gordon, the pornography of the unknown is replaced by buckets of Grand Guignol gore and slimy special effects, and the humbling tremble of one face-to-face with things beyond understanding makes way for risible humor. Indeed, few of Lovecraft’s stories are as difficult to imagine literally as “From Beyond,” in which a scientist’s experiments resonance waves alters his pineal gland in a way that makes him increasingly aware of an alternate reality of translucent creatures that has been co-existing with our own outside the spectrum of normal human perception. In Gordon’s film, as multiple people are exposed to the resonance waves, the planes begin to overlap physically, and eventually the beings from either side themselves begin to merge—and, being that this is a 80s horror movie, so too do the waves awaken naughty sexual impulses within their subjects. Though by no means as impossibly cool and inventive as its predecessor, From Beyond is a most worthy follow-up—no one plays over-the-top ghastliness as well as Re-Animator‘s Combs, and Ted Sorel is a wonderfully sadistic villain. Beyond that, though not as transgressive in its content, it’s arguably the more subversive movie for its simultaneous insistence and impudence toward altered states.

From Beyond runs tonight at 7:30 pm, and star Barbara Crampton will be joining via brief telephone call.

Also Noted

Tonight at Williamsburg’s Interference Archive, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times runs alongside The Idea by Berthold Bartosch. Bartosch was an Austrian animator who collaborated with Lotte Reiniger on a number of her early silhouette animations. The cutout technique, along with an amazing array of other optical and physical special effects, takes center stage in The Idea, based on a series of woodcuts by Frans Masereel. Arthur Honegger‘s remarkable score is allegedly the very first incorporating an electronic instrument—the truly stunning and little-known ondes Martenot, a rare, delicate instrument that is sort of a much more versatile contemporary of the theremin.

Musician Ben von Wildenhaus and video collaborative House Plants team up for a performance at Rabbithole that prefaces a screening of Aki Kaurismäki‘s The Leningrad Cowboys Go America. The show begins at 8:00 pm with a $10 open bar.

Sex change comedy Myra Breckinridge runs at Chelsea Clearview with an introduction by drag queen Hedda Lettuce at 7:30 pm. The movie only repeats at 9:30 pm.

And Filmwax‘s ongoing retrospective of Brooklyn husband-and-wife filmmaking duo Michael Galinsky & Suki Hawley continues with Code 33, an acclaimed procedural documentary with intimate access to the Miami-Dade County police department. It’s often referred to as a real-life CSI.

Today

An Auteurist History of Film at MoMA
Series Details

  • The Young and the Passionate (Federico Fellini). Details. 1953. 104 min. 1:30 pm.

Werner Schroeter at MoMA
Series Details

  • The Black Angel and Wolf Wondratschek: Laudatio auf Werner Schroeter. Details. 1974/2010. 92 min. 4:30 pm.
  • Willow Springs and Dietrich Kuhlbrodt im Gespräch mit Werner Schroeter. Details. 1973/2010. 86 min. 7:30 pm.

Argentos: il cinema nel sangue at Museum of Arts and Design
Series Details

  • The Last Mistress (Catherine Breillat). Details. 35mm. 2007. 104 min. 7:00 pm.

Feminizing Film Praxis: Radical Feminist Film at Spectacle
Series Details

  • The All-Around Reduced Personality (Helke Sander). Details. Digital. 1979. 98 min. 7:30 pm.
  • Be Pretty and Shut Up (Delphine Seyrig). Details. Digital. 1981. 115 min. 9:30 pm.

Whitney Biennial 2012: Kevin Jerome Everson at The Whitney Museum
Series Details • Through May 27

  • Quality Control. Details. 16mm. 2011. 70 min. Noon, 2:00 and 4:00 pm.

From Beyond (Stuart Gordon) at 92YTribeca. Details. 35mm. 1986. 86 min. 7:30 pm.
Three Short Films by Ateyyat El Abnoudy at Anthology Film Archives. Details. 16mm-to-video. 1971-1975. 60 min. 7:30 pm.
Code 33 (A Rumur Film) (Michael Galinsky & Suki Hawley) at Brooklyn Heights Cinema. Details. Presented by Filmwax. 35mm. 2005. 8:30 pm.
Myra Breckinridge (Michael Sarne) at Chelsea Clearview. Details. Early show introduced by drag queen Hedda Lettuce. 1970. 94 min. 7:00 and 9:30 pm.
Insuring Your Films at DCTV. Details. Panelists Emily Gray and Jean Ann Douglass of Fractured Atlas. 7:30 pm.
Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin) and The Idea (Berthold Bartosch) at Interference Archive. Details. 1936/1932. 112 min. 8:00 pm.
Player Hating: A Love Story (Maggie Hadleigh-West) at LaunchPad. Details. 2010. 95 min. 7:00 pm. FREE.
Cuban Roots/Bronx Stories (Pam Sporn) at  Longwood Art Gallery, Bronx. Details. Q&A with Sporn. 56 min. 7:00 pm.
Leningrad Cowboys Go to America (Aki Kaurismäki) at Rabbithole. Details. Ben Von Wildenhaus & House Plants play at 8:00 pm. $10 open bar. 1989. Doors 7:30 pm.

Ongoing

The Color Wheel (Alex Ross Perry) at BAMCinématek. 35mm. 2012. 83 min. 4:30,6:50 and 9:15 pm.
Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev) at Film Forum. Details. 2011. 109 min. 1:00, 3:15, 5:40, 8:00 and 10:00 pm.
Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir) at Film Forum. Details. 35mm of 4K restoration. 1937. 114 min. 1:00, 3:15, 5:30, 7:45 and 10:00 pm.
Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger) at Film Forum. Details. DCP. 1958. 94 min. 4:35 and 6:30 pm.
Céline and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette) at Film Forum. Details. 35mm. 1974. 193 min. 1:00 and 8:20 pm.
The Connection (Shirley Clarke) at IFC Center. Details. 1963. 110 min. 10:50 am.
Marley (Kevin Macdonald) at Maysles Cinema.Details. 2012. 145 min. 7:30 pm.
The Woman in the Septic Tank (Marlon N. Rivera) at MoMA. Details. 2011. 87 min. 4:00 pm.
Freak Dance (Matt Besser & Neil Mahoney) at UCB East. Details. 11:00 pm.

Galleries

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Downtown

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