BILL, ELEVEN MINUTES, THE DEAD ROOM BEGIN EXCLUSIVE ENGAGEMENTS AT ARENA CINEMA HOLLYWOOD ON APRIL 15
Bill.Directed by Richard Bracewell. Written by Laurence Rickard and Ben Willbond. Produced by Richard Bracewell, Tony Bracewell, Alasdair Flind and Charles Steel. From BBC Films. Color, 2016, U/.K., 94 minutes, not rated. Family. Starring Mathew Baynton, Damian Lewis, Helen McCrory, Jim Howick, Simon Farnaby and Martha Howe-Douglas.
BILL tells the story of what really happened during Shakespeare's 'Lost Years' - how hopeless lute player Bill Shakespeare leaves his family and home to follow his dream. It's a tale of murderous kings, spies, lost loves, and a plot to blow up Queen Elizabeth!
"Performed with infectious gusto."---Movie Talk
11 Minutes. Directed and written by Jerzy Skolimowski. Produced by Skolimowski and Ewa Piaskowska. From Sundance Selects. Color, 2016, Poland/Ireland, 81 minutes, not rated. Thriller. Starring Richard Dormer, Paulina Chapko, Wojciech, Mecwaldowski, Andrzej Chrya, Dawid Ogrodnikand Agata Buzek. A jealous husband out of control, his sexy actress wife, a sleazy Hollywood director, a reckless drug messenger, a disoriented young woman, an ex-con hot dog vendor, a troubled student on a mysterious mission, a high-rise window cleaner on an illicit break, an elderly sketch artist, a hectic paramedics team and a group of hungry nuns. A crosssection of contemporary urbanites whose lives and loves intertwine. They live in an unsure world where anything could happen at any time. An unexpected chain of events can seal many fates in a mere 11 minutes.
Winner: Polish Film Festival; Venice Film Festival; Lisbon & Estoril Film Festival.
"Audacious visual storytelling...Thrilling."---The Skinny
The Dead Room.Directed by Jason Stutter. Written by Stutter and Kevin Stevens. From IFC Midnight. Color, 2016, New Zealand, 80 minutes, not rated. Horror/Thriller. Starring Laura Petersen, Jed Brophy and Jeffrey Thomas. When a terrified family flees a desolate southern New Zealand farmhouse, two cynical scientists and a young psychic are sent to investigate their claims of a haunting. There they encounter a powerful spirit that will protect the house's secrets at all costs.
April 15- 21, 2016. Contact venue for show times. Admission: $12 each feature. Information:
(323) 306-0676. Online ticketing:
http://arenascreen.com
At Arena Cinema Hollywood, 1625 N. Las Palmas Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90028. Discounted parking is available with validation at lots adjacent to the venue and across the street. Arena Cinema is Hollywood's new home for independent films, powered by Voltaire Media. Ranked among Top 5 Indie Movie Theatres in Los Angeles by CBS2.
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What: Saul Levine: Notes of the World
Saul Levine in person!
When: Sunday, April 17, 2016, 7:30pm
Where: At the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90028
Tickets: $10 general, $6 students/seniors; free for Filmforum members.
or at the door.
More details: www.lafilmforum.org or 323-377-7238
"Saul Levine is the foremost dissenting filmmaker in America. With about 35 years of consistent production behind him, and no signs of fatigue, he can show us the shape of a life passionately and uncompromisingly devoted to filmmaking. His works are high-energy messages of friendship, records of sexual love and political activism, radiated by humor, prophetic anger, loneliness and even though rarely, representing repose. His incessant, chaotic outpouring of political energy seems less geared to a naïve notion of bettering the world than to a perpetual pressure to keep it from getting worse." - P. Adams Sitney.
There will be two additional and different screenings with Saul Levine while he is in Los Angeles.
Saturday April 16, 8:00 pm, at the Echo Park Film Center:
http://www.echoparkfilmcenter.org/events/three-by-saul-levine-new-works-salon-xxxii-special-super-8-edition/
Monday April 18, 8:30 pm at REDCAT:
http://www.redcat.org/event/radical-intimacies-8mm-cinema-saul-levine
Special thanks to Steve Anker.
Screening:
All films by Saul Levine; silent; originally filmed on s8 or regular 8mm and blown up to 16mm by Mr. Levine.
The Big Stick (1967-73, b/w 10m)
"[The film] intercut[s] two Charlie Chaplin shorts centering on policemen with newsreel footage of police crowd control and street fighting. Levine questioned the social implications of media, not only by making temporal, aesthetic and contextual comparisons of his sources, but by presenting this discomfortingragout in a film gauge whose cost, availability and mobility make simply working it an intrinsically political gesture. Levine also understood how to use very fast cutting in old-style 8mm, a difficult task in that the splice is in the middle of the frame. A cut is therefore void of illusion, and in fact threatens to obliterate a weak image [...] Levine's adroit use of graphic action from the newsreels and close-ups from the shorts changed the rapid cuts from awkward stumbles to almost profound superimpositions." - James Irwin, Artweek
New Left Note (1968-1982, 27 min.)
"Levine's rapid fire cutting has never found a more appropriate subject than in NEW LEFT NOTE, his film on the anti-war, anti-racist, and women's liberation movements of the early 1970s in America. NEW LEFT NOTE represents a synthesis of ideas that Levine sought to inject into a much-divided movement. The 'Free Bobby Seale' demonstrations in New Haven (Levine's home town) in 1970 is put intocontext through the editing .... At the time of shooting, Levine was the editor of New Left Notes, the national newspaper of SDS (Students for a DemocraticSociety). He was unilaterally committed to the movements he filmed but beleaguered by the leadership of the organization for his non-sectarian views. ... [NEW LEFT NOTE] is a study of radical politics in radical film form." -- Marjorie Keller
"The life he records is a jumble of demonstrations, fused with the kaleidoscopicfury of memory; its brief reprises include a catnap in the back of a car and a glimpse of a zoo. His incessant, chaotic outpouring of political energy seems less geared to a naive notion of bettering the world than to a perpetual pressure to keep it from getting worse." -- P. Adams Sitney, The Village Voice
Whole Note (1999-2000, 10 min.) Los Angeles premiere!
WHOLE NOTE is mainly a portrait of my father Julius Levine in the last days of his life. My aunts Francis and Belle Cohen also appear. "Nothing is as whole as a broken heart" (a Hasidic saying).
Light Lick: By the Waters of Babylon: I Want to Paint It Black (2011, 12 min.)
Los Angeles premiere!
LIGHT LICKS are a series of films, which are made frame by frame often by flooding the camerawith enough light to spill beyond the gate into the frame left unexposed. LIGHT LICKS are ecstatic flicker films inspired by jazz and mystic visionary practice.
BY THE WATERS OFBABYLON is a sub series within the LIGHT LICKS, inspired by Psalm 137, a meditation on the experience of forced exile. I WANT TO PAINT IT BLACK I spent the week of Thanksgiving 2010 in Prague; I had never been to Europe before and as a Jew born in the 2nd World War, I had a strong association of central Europe with the Holocaust. I found Prague to be an extremely charming and beautiful city, an architectural palimpsest as it hadn't been bombed. In this LIGHT LICK I responded to the city in the present tense but kept being drawn into its past. The grave of Rabbi Judah Lowe the alleged maker of the Golemalleged descendent of King David and certainly one of the great Jewish scholars and mystics of his time, the absence of a contemporary Jewish community and the wonderful statues bridges and buildings led me to make this dark Gothic reflection of 21st century Prague. - Saul Levine
Light Lick: By the Waters of Babylon: This May Be the Last Time (2011, 7 min.) Los Angeles premiere!
"This film was shot right before Dwayne's stopped processing Kodachrome and the last time I shot Kodachrome for a LIGHT LICK. It was right after Thanksgiving weekend and the light is very much late November right before the Winter Solstice. Existence equals thin ice." - Saul Levine
Light Lick: By the Waters of Babylon: Night Time Is the Right Time (2014, 3 min.) Los Angeles premiere!
PARDES is ancient Persian for walled garden. In Hebrew and Aramaic - paradise, heaven, the garden of Eden, the peak or terminus of ecstatic visionary, trance flight NIGHT TIME IS THE RIGHT TIME moon play light garden be loved - Saul Levine