#lafilmscene

[iandeleonwrites]

A little Fassbinder...

Fassbinder Screening Intro_07.20.24

Hello everyone and welcome to Whammy! Before we get into Fassbinder, a little housekeeping.

My name is Ian and I am a volunteer for TAPE Los Angeles - we are a nonprofit dedicated to Teaching, Archiving, Preserving, and Exhibiting analog media.

Along with collectively programming film and video titles, as is the case with tonight’s screening, we offer low-cost to FREE digital transfers for VHS tapes and other common formats.

Become a member with us today for just $5 a month, and you will have access to our equipment rental library which includes 16mm Bolex cameras, Super 8 cameras, CRT TVs, VCRs, VHS Camcorders and more, along with access to our FREE rental library of VHS tapes.

So please consider your tax-deductible donation tonight, find Jessica or Erik after the show for our Paypal donation link. Any amount helps - we are currently fundraising for multiple new equipment purchases as well as a series of hands-on workshops in order to provide smooth and affordable access of film and video equipment to our local community of artists, professionals, and enthusiasts.

Please help us out by silencing or turning off your phone, and not taking photos of the screen (with one exception, which we’ll talk about shortly). There is a restroom by the entrance which is our only exit.

And now... Who was Rainer Werner Fassbinder?

A German, Gemini, Bisexual, Libertine, Terrorist, Tyrant. A Genius.

My very first Fassbinder was his last, Querelle, which you’ve just watched the trailer for. Herr Fassbinder was 37 years old, the age I am now. He had already made over 40 feature films, one motion picture every hundred days for the past 13 years. He died in June, most likely from a tragic combination of poor health, a drug overdose, and suicidal ideation. In February he had won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival with Veronika Voss, he hoped Querelle would take the Golden Palm at Cannes, and planned for his next picture to take the Golden Lion at Venice -- a “hat trick” that would culminate in an Oscar and the cover of TIME magazine.

“Grow ugly and work. Then, and only then, let them come. I want to be ugly on the cover of Time-- it’ll happen and I’m glad about it and I admit it--when ugliness has finally

reclaimed all beauty. That is luxury.”

He was planning a biopic about Rosa Luxembourg, which would eventually be made by Margarethe von Trotta. He wanted to do a remake of Joan Crawford’s Possessed. He had a slate of films ready to go.

Tracing Rainer’s influences during childhood can be just as dizzying a task to get a hold on as is his filmography. He had been named for the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. As a child he wrote a theater piece about flowers falling in love. He went to a Rudolf Steiner school, brought up by anthroposophists, he watched hundreds of movies, many American ones, he had murderous fantasies toward his mother and was often surrounded by pimps and sex workers. He and Udo Kier would later become a pimp-prostitute pair (i’ll let you guess which was which). Rainer seduced where he could not strong-arm. He inserted himself into scenes and gathered collaborators around him the way Andy Warhol was doing at the Factory, in service of one unifying vision--his own. All of this despite Rainer’s crippling shyness, even around Warhol himself, who Rainer referred to as Andreas. He had a way of making people his though, getting them to change their allegiances. His Action Theater group’s headquarters was bombed out by a member of the Baader/Meinhof gang, but not for any political reason, it was personal. The man’s wife had left him to go live with Rainer and another one of the director’s revolving cast of actor-come-lovers. He renamed most of his male friends, often giving them women’s names. For Rainer, the women in his life were all surrogates for different parts of himself. His pictures abound with female characters, and he told his own stories through them. He loved women, and men, sometimes simultaneously, though he made statements such as Love is Colder Than Death. Much was made of the suicides of Rainer’s former lovers, the bouts of violence, his cool, promiscuous indifference, the long periods of melancholy. “The feeling was mutual. They said that I exploited them and I said that they exploited me...I reproached them for having made me do so much, simply because I was the only one ready to do it.” Rainer’s relationship to his growing cast of friends, lovers and film surrogates became monarchical, some would say even tyrannical, but others remember him gently, the boy who would not come down from the altar. The boy who would quote Thomas Mann’s “I am often weary to death of portraying humanity without participating in what is human.” Rainer made a choice early on, that his work, his stories, were the most important thing to him. It cost him everything, and those around him plenty, but for their efforts we have Lola, The Marriage of Maria Braun, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Effie Briest, Martha, and World on a Wire.

Without further ado, here is Fassbinder’s 1966 short A Little Chaos, followed by the 1982’s A Man Like Eva, with Eva Mattes playing EVA, aka RWFassbinder.

[Presented as an introduction to a night of films I programmed at Whammy Analog in Los Angeles, July 2024]

[kellimaroney]

Your last chance to see The Deep Ones in a real movie theater, @laemmleNoHo7 L.A., is tomorrow at 4 and 7 PM. https://laemmle.com/theater/noho-7 The Film Review: https://dropthespotlight.com/the-deep-ones-film-review/… via @Dropthespotlig1 Thank you for the article!! @SKATD

[iandeleonwrites]

HOSTILE SPACES: MALL MADNESS

Welcome to the first in a programmatic series I’m calling 

HOSTILE SPACES. This is MALL MADNESS:

Liminal environments at the intersection of consumer culture and the uncanny, just down the escalator from the food court.

So, what is a mall? For me, my local mall was an adolescent playground. 

Growing up in Miami, Florida, my mall of choice was Aventura, Spanish for adventure. Aventura is where I bought my first book, first CD, stole my first book and CD. It’s where I had my first kiss, tried my first orange chicken on a stick. I was chased by bullies, and mall cops. I would play tag, the teen version of hide and seek, with my friends between the clothing racks of JC Penny. My mall had a pet store, a dentist’s office, a hot topic, a movie theater, a Johnny Rocket’s, a Rainforest Cafe. Aventura had everything: awe, wonder, spectacle, temptation, drama, humor, and lust. And sometimes, when we were least expecting it, our mall had offered other things: anxiety, disillusion, abandonment, and fear. 

Joan Didion said:

“They float on the landscape like pyramids to the boom years, all of those Plazas and Malls and Esplanades. All those Squares and Fairs. All those Towns and Dales, all those Villages, all those Forests and Parks and Lands. Stonestown. Hillsdale. Valley Fair, Mayfair, Northgate, Southgate, Eastgate, Westgate. Gulfgate. They are toy garden cities in which no one lives but everyone consumes, profound equalizers, the perfect fusion of the profit motive and the egalitarian ideal, and to hear their names is to recall words and phrases no longer quite current.”

The shopping mall was created as an environment of idealized hyperreality, a sense of safety communicated through an over-planned feeling of disorienting familiarity. One steps into a mall and becomes delighted, overwhelmed, forgetting why we came inside. It is not the place for the casual purchaser, the one-item grocery store run. Rather, it is the promenade of the beguiled, impressionable consumer. Don’t worry where the exits are, you’ll be just fine as long as you keep shopping. 

Imagine yourself standing at the dim edge of a beautiful, expansive atrium, with wings extending like arteries from a central Consumerist core. It’s difficult to tell the time. There’s no one else around. The shop windows aren’t boarded up, but they’re not beckoning open either. There’s a strange, recycled stillness in the air, upon which a slowed-down version of mall singer Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now” floats over to you in an infinite wave as the overhead fluorescents buzz and pop out of existence, suddenly plunging the mall into an unreal darkness. 

The filmmakers tonight give us a glimpse into the afterlife of these shopping centers, when they cease to function as originally intended and become “dead malls”, vacant of their once glittering dream-projections, but lugubriously repopulated and reanimated with the nostalgic reflecting pools of our formerly limitless belief in the power of products and capital to push civilization forward. 

These new zombie malls are the crypts and the cemeteries of ideological innocence, the centers of fiscal forensics. They are the buy-rial grounds, and mall-soleums of our sense of personal freedom and independence. It is we that have become artificial, and the mall itself that is intelligent, sentient. The mall is now a place where people come to mourn, to pay their respects by revisiting, remembering, or to take (as in a souvenir — looting, grave robbing) what they once gave so willingly, throwing loose change into the fountain, a supreme example of our confidence, our trust, in these urban-designed safe spaces that honed and channeled our aspirations while forming a bulwark against our xenophobic fears. 

We return, almost unaware that the shops have all closed, or moved out of town. Ruefully surprised to find that the shelves are now empty, the gates are now closed, not realizing that the avenues and hallways around the fountain remain stocked with resources: US. 

“They come out of some sort of instinct. A memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.” - Dawn of the Dead 1978

Prepare yourselves to Mallhard with multimedia artist Cecelia Condit’s 1983 murder musical, queer love, based-on-a-true, story POSSIBLY IN MICHIGAN (shot on 3/4-inch U-matic and Super 8mm film)

AND

Backrooms filmmaker / wunderkind Kane “Pixels” Parsons’ 2023 chat room sensation The Rolling Giant (The Oldest View Part 3), which was made entirely on the computer graphics software Blender, based on photographs and layouts of an actual abandoned mall in Texas, for which he has been offered a development deal with A24.  

Thank you to Whammy!, Erik, Jessica, our wonderful volunteers, Cecelia Condit, Austin Wolf-Sothern for the supercut “Shopping is A Feeling”, D.J. McHale creator of AYAOTD, my camera brother Jonny for showing me Kane’s film, Micah Gottlieb of Mezzanine for his advice, my witch sister Claire Kill for designing some posters, the Abandoned America photo project, Addie Rae for the inspiring chats, the TAPE programming workgroup for their support, all of you for coming out, and my parents for allowing me to lose myself, as often as I found myself in our local malls. 

This one is for: Aventura, Dolphin Mall, Dadeland, Sawgrass Mills, CocoWalk, The Falls, and Sunset Place. 

Enjoy the show.

[Presented as an introduction to a night of films I programmed at Whammy Analog in Los Angeles, August 2024]