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. I don't know what it does mean to be, and I am content for a while to rest with its moods and its complicated, often funny motions."

 — Roger Greenspun, New York Times, 1969continue reading >>

 

(2019, 134 minutes)

"The most beautiful film Barney has made"
— Sebastien Smee, Washington Post

"Conjures a magisterial world similarly balanced between the natural and the supernatural."
— Jeffrey Kastner, 4Columns

"A visual equivalent of a tone poem. Has a graceful fluidity, enhanced by an aurally mesmerizing score by Jonathan Bepler, Barney's long-time collaborator…recalls the laconic, enigmatic dreaminess of Terrence Malick."
— Clayton Press, Forbes

"Barney paints a cinematic picture of the American West, trading his familiar baroque visuals for the straightforward sublimity of the landscape and the ineffable strangeness of its inhabitants."
— Catherine Taft, Artforum

Redoubt loosely adapts the classical myth of Diana, goddess of the hunt and of nature, and Actaeon, a hunter who trespasses on her privacy and is punished. Both protector of the natural world and a predator within it, ​Redoubt's​ Diana (Anette Wachter) is a present-day sharpshooter hunting game in the Idaho wilderness.

Accompanied by her attendants, the Calling Virgin (Eleanor Bauer) and the Tracking Virgin (Laura Stokes), Diana traverses the mountain terrain in pursuit of the elusive wolf. An Engraver (Matthew Barney) happens upon the hunting outfit in the forest and begins stalking the trio, furtively documenting their actions in a series of copper engravings. The Engraver and Diana engage in a series of confrontations, as he transgresses with the act of drawing and she responds by turning her gun on his engraved images ... continue reading >>