Visionaries

 

During the month of August and as part of its new extended programming, Filmatique presents Visionaries, a collection of works by groundbreaking filmmakers such as Miklós Jancsó, István Szabó, Ken Jacobs, Deborah Shaffer, Jonas Mekas, and Derek Jarman.

 
 

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The creator of a unique film language rooted in his mastery of the tracking shot, Jancsó was the first internationally recognized representative of modern Hungarian filmmaking, his extraordinary works examining oppressive authority and the mechanics of power. Restored from their original camera negatives by the National Film Institute Hungary – Film Archive, six classic features are now available to watch on Filmatique.

Electra, My Love is Jancsó’s richly inventive adaptation of the two-thousand-year-old Greek myth; wartime thriller Red Psalm won Best Director at Cannes 1972. Jancsó’s first color film The Confrontation is a virtuoso display by a director at the peak of his powers, eloquently exploring the complex issues and inherent problems of revolutionary democracy, while The Red and the White is haunting, powerful film about the absurdity and evil of war. Jancsó’s most renowned work The Round Up depicts a prison camp in the aftermath of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution, the camera in constant, hypnotic motion, absorbing the developing dynamics and antagonisms between the prisoners and their captors; Winter Wind consists largely of twelve fluid long takes, some as long as ten minutes, and each a completely mapped-out sequence.

 
 
 
 

István Szabó was the first Hungarian director to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. His oeuvre offers a powerful vision of human experiences across two world wars, interweaving deeply personal stories against the larger tapestry of European history.

Screening here in stunning new restorations from the Hungarian National Film Archive are Confidence, a tale of love and deceit in World War II; Mephisto, the first Hungarian film to win the Oscar; and Colonel Redl, Szabó's Cannes Grand Jury Prize-winning film that charts the rise of a closeted colonel to head of counterintelligence of the Austro-Hungarian Army.

 
 
 
 

One of the most wildly creative and influential film artists in the medium's history, Ken Jacobs studied Abstract Expressionism with Hans Hofmann before turning to filmmaking. He became a prolific member of the underground scene, along with contemporaries Jonas Mekas, Jack Smith, and Stan Brakhage. Jacobs's early films use New York City as a poetic landscape (Orchard Street) and as a setting for Smith's carnivalesque performances (Little Stabs at Happiness and Blonde Cobra—both preserved by Anthology Film Archives). Jacobs then started experimenting with found footage, expanding a five-minute fragment of Billy Bitzer's Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son to feature length (restored in 2K by Museum of Modern Art), and went on to embrace digital tools—using stroboscopic effects to turn silent shorts and Victorian stereoscopic photographs into mind-expanding 3D investigations (Capitalism: Child Labor).

Jacobs continues to push the boundaries of the art form, as with his hypnotically abstract Movie That Invites Pausing (2021). In addition to his landmark films—which have been honored by the American Film Institute, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation—Jacobs and his wife Flo founded the free film school Millennium Film Workshop, and also helped create SUNY Binghamton's experimental Department of Cinema in 1969, where he became a Distinguished Professor and influenced generations of artists and scholars.

 
 
 
 

Two pioneering works from Jonas Mekas, considered the godfather of American avant-garde filmmaking, are currently streaming on Filmatique. Culled from fourteen years of footage, Lost Lost Lost documents Mekas's early years in New York as he and his brother Adolfas build their new life in America, discovering the city and the burgeoning film and arts community of the 1950 and 60s downtown scene. In the highly influential Walden, a 27-year-old Lithuanian émigré sets out to film his life as it unfolds in several chapters—including the 1960s New York arts scene, featuring many of the filmmaker’s friends: Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, John Lennon, Yoko Ono and the Velvet Underground.

 
 
 
 

Academy Award-winning female filmmaker Deborah Shaffer is noted for her documentaries tackling social issues, war and peace, and American imperialism. Examining Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship, Dance of Hope documents the courageous collective struggle of the wives, mothers and sisters of Chile’s disappeared in their pursuit of truth and justice; Witness to War traces Dr. Charlie Clements journey of conscience from Asia to Latin America. Comprised of archival footage and interviews with former workers, The Wobblies pays tribute to the legacy of the Industrial Workers of the World, who took to organizing unskilled workers into one big union and thus changed the course of American history. Following the lives of three Bronx teenagers, To Be Heard celebrates the value of poetry, devoted teachers, and the power that comes from writing one's own life story.

 
 
 
 

Filmatique is streaming seven films by British enfant terrible and queer icon Derek Jarman.

A soldier becomes the object of his commander's desire in Sebastiane, a milestone of British independent film and a pioneering work of queer cinema. Shot on location at the ancient and ghostly Stoneleigh Abbey, and recalling the innocent homoeroticism of Pasolini classic adaptations, The Tempest is a study of sexual and political power in the guise of a fairy tale. Starring Tilda Swinton in her screen debut, Berlin Silver Bear-winning Caravaggio is Jarman's most profound reflection on art, sexuality, and identity. Also starring Swinton and Laurence Olivier in his final screen appearance, War Requiem boldly combines archival footage of war's devastation with Jarman's keen and gifted eye for both the theatrical and the political. Half waking dream and half fiery polemic, The Garden was born of director Derek Jarman’s rage over continued anti-gay discrimination and the delayed response to the AIDS crisis; in his final—and most daring—cinematic statement Blue, Jarman the romantic meets Jarman the iconoclast in a lush soundscape pulsing against a purely blue screen. Laying bare his physical and spiritual state, Jarman narrates about his life, his struggle with AIDS, and his encroaching blindness.

 
 

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Curation by Ursula Grisham
Head Curator, Filmatique

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