2014 / 109 minutes / Spanish/Danish with English subtitles / Color
Directed by: Lisandro Alonso

Please join Cultivate Cinema Circle and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center as we present a year-long series entitled Post-Colonialisms: World Cinema and Human Consequence.

An astonishingly beautiful Western starring Viggo Mortensen, Jauja (pronounced how-ha) begins in a remote outpost in Patagonia during the "Conquest of the Desert" in the late 1800s. Captain Gunnar Dinesen has come from Denmark with his fifteen year-old daughter to take an engineering job with the Argentine army. Being the only female in the area, Ingeborg creates quite a stir among the men. She falls in love with a young soldier, and one night they run away together. When Dinesen realizes what has happened, he decides to venture into enemy territory, against his men's wishes, to find the young couple. Featuring a superb performance from Mortensen, Jauja is the story of a man's desperate search for his daughter, a solitary quest that takes him to a place beyond time, where the past vanishes and the future has no meaning.

The Legend:
The Ancient Ones said that 'Jauja' was a fabled city of riches and happiness. Many expeditions tried to find this place. With time, the legend grew disproportionately. People were undoubtedly exaggerating, as they usually do. The only thing that is known for certain is that all who tried to find this earthly paradise got lost on the way.

 

94 minutes / directed by Stuart Swezey

Starring Perry Farrell, Thurston Moore, Mike Watt, Blixa Bargeld, Lee Ranaldo, Curt & Cris Kirkwood, Steven & Jeff McDonald, Mark Pauline

Desolation Center is the previously untold story of a series of Reagan-era guerrilla music and art performance happenings in Southern California that are recognized to have paved the way for Burning Man, Lollapalooza and Coachella, collective experiences that have become crucial parts of alternative culture in the 21st century. The feature documentary splices interviews and rare performance footage of Sonic Youth, Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Swans, Redd Kross, Einstürzende Neubauten, Survival Research Laboratories, Savage Republic and more, documenting a time when pushing the boundaries of music, art, and performance felt like an unspoken obligation.

Directed by Stuart Swezey, the creator and principal organizer of the events, Desolation Center demonstrates how the risky, and at times even reckless, actions of a few outsiders can unintentionally lead to seismic cultural shifts. Combining Swezey's exclusive access to never-before-seen archival video, live audio recordings, and stills woven together with new cinematically shot interviews, verité footage and animated sequences, Desolation Center captures the spirit of the turbulent times from which these events emerged. The timeless power of DIY—do-it-yourself culture—is a recurrent theme throughout the film, spotlighting the true diversity of LA's early punk scene, where alienated young people—white, Latino, black, Asian, LGBTQ—joined together against the militarized police repression of the Reagan-era LAPD that was the backdrop of the film's events ... continue reading >>

 

(1969, 105 min.)

Written and directed by Susan Sontag

"The cannibals are a middle-aged radical German political activist and the theoretician, Bauer—Hans Erborg—living with his young Italian wife Francesca—Miss Asti—in Sweden. Their victims are a young Swede who goes to work as Bauer's secretary, and his mistress, who eventually finds herself working as the Bauers's cook and companion. For all the movie tells us, Bauer's credentials are real enough (down to a chrome-plated cigarette lighter—gift of Bertolt Brecht), but everything in his present life partakes of fraud calculated to intrigue, upset, and entrap his assistant.

"His erratic and violent behavior, the temptation palpably and leeringly offered of his beautiful young wife, eventually the intellectual challenge of what move he will make next, engage the young man and put him repeatedly off balance.

"Before it is all over the girl is at work too, making love to the master, accepting advances from the mistress, feeding and being fed by both of them, and lying between them in their connubial bed.

"There are too many insane people in the world, comments the young hero after he is attacked by a madman on a city street, and of course he includes the Bauers, who also attack—and win—because they try anything and stand by nothing.

"Nevertheless, I don't think Duet for Cannibals means to be a parable about the power of the insane over the sane, or the strong over the weak, or even the inventively absurd over the rational and passionate ... continue reading >>