Nightletter is a screening series and venue for moving image art.
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Water and Power 1989
Pat O’Neill’s rarely-screened masterpiece of West Coast cinema is a dazzling synthesis of fast motion and superimposition, appropriated footage and time lapse photography, chroma keying and long exposures. Water and Power layers images drawn from urban Los Angeles, its water source in the Owens Valley, and an otherworldly interior space in increasingly complex permutations. What results is a fractured history, not just of California and its environment but of the cinematic imagination. Through subtitles O’Neill also weaves a story of…
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The Cold Eye (My Darling, Be Careful) 1980
By the time Babette Mangolte began work on The Cold Eye (My Darling Be Careful), her first overtly fictional narrative film, she was already deeply enmeshed in the artistic vanguard of two continents. She had served as the cinematographer for the early groundbreaking films by Chantal Akerman and Yvonne Rainer, photographed and filmed the development of postmodern theater and dance, and directed her own experimental works. With The Cold Eye seeing Mangolte operate in a semi-autobiographical mode, how then would…
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The Golden Boat 1990
Over the course of a half century long career, Chilean-born Raúl Ruiz established himself as cinema’s greatest surrealist this side of Luis Buñuel. And like Buñuel, Ruiz was a vagabond, making films wherever funds were available. After the establishment of Chile’s military junta under Augusto Pinochet in 1973, Ruiz fled to Paris, making films in France, Portugal, The Netherlands, among other locales. The Golden Boat brought him to the U.S. for the first time while the director hones in on…
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The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough 1981
“The idea of seeing several moments at once from a higher perspective is a natural one. But the precipitating event, dare I say it, was an experience of altered consciousness I had in 1965, during which I looked into a napkin and saw thousands of Japanese couples making love in each of the interstices between the weaves of the fabric...I vowed to find a way to capture the form (but not necessarily the content) of the image.” — Peter Rose…