Wednesday, November 2, 2016

11/2/16 You Are Not I

Films by Sara Driver and Kenneth Anger

Program:
YOU ARE NOT I (1981) 48 min. 16mm b&w with sound
Directed by SARA DRIVER, Cinematography by Jim Jarmusch
A haunting adaptation of a 1948 short story by Paul Bowles about a woman who escapes from an asylum, You Are Not I played widely in the international film festival circuit in the early Eighties. Then, a leak in a New Jersey warehouse destroyed the negative, leaving director Sara Driver with only a battered, unprojectable copy. Miraculously, a print was found among the holdings of Paul Bowles in 2009, and now the film has been restored and is available once again. Undoubtedly one of the most impressive works to emerge from the post-punk downtown scene, the film was beautifully shot by Jim Jarmusch (who also co-wrote the screenplay) and features Suzanne Fletcher, Nan Goldin and Luc Sante. - Film Society at Lincoln Center
EAUX D'ARTIFICE (1953) 12 min. 16mm, b/w and color
Directed by Kenneth Anger.
While traveling with experimental filmmaker Marie Menken in Europe, Anger was inspired by the elaborate fountains of Villa d’Este in Tivoli to design this meticulously structured musical celebration of baroque excess.

bios
Sara Driver (born December 15, 1955) is an American independent filmmaker from Westfield, New Jersey. A participant in the independent film scene that flourished in lower Manhattan from the late 1970s through the 1990s, she gained initial recognition as producer of two early films by Jim Jarmusch,Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984). Driver has directed two feature films,Sleepwalk (1986) and When Pigs Fly (1993), as well as a notable short film, You Are Not I (1981). She served on the juries of various film festivals throughout the 2000s.

Kenneth Anger (Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer; born February 3, 1927) is an American underground experimental filmmaker, actor and author. Working exclusively in short films, he has produced almost forty works since 1937, nine of which have been grouped together as the "Magick Lantern Cycle". His films variously merge surrealism with homoeroticism and the occult, and have been described as containing "elements of erotica, documentary, psychodrama, and spectacle". Anger himself has been described as "one of America's first openly gay filmmakers, and certainly the first whose work addressed homosexuality in an undisguised, self-implicating manner", and his "role in rendering gay culture visible within American cinema, commercial or otherwise, is impossible to overestimate",with several being released prior to the legalization of homosexuality in the United States. He has also focused upon occult themes in many of his films, being fascinated by the English poet and mystic Aleister Crowley, and is an adherent of Thelema, the religion Crowley founded.

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