June 15, 7:30 pm
The first, dirt-cheap and truly great film by Frank Henenlotter, likely the world’s principal connoisseur, collector and all round fan of not just “bad”, but genuinely horrific and monstrous films to be shown in the renowned grindhouse movie theatres. In the late Soviet period you could also find “42nd Streets” where you could watch anything, including Basket Case and, if you were lucky, the films that inspired it.
Stanislav F. Rostotsky will explain why this “trash” production is important and of value to the history of film, why a repellant movie about separated Siamese twins can be seen not only as trash-horror but also as poignant melodrama, and perhaps most importantly, as a guide to a world which for obvious reasons the last Soviet generation could not get close to, even though deep down they really wanted to.
Stanislav F. Rostotsky (Moscow) is a film-critic and one of Russia’s foremost specialists in genre-cinema. He has worked as a reviewer for the New Weekly Newspaper, reviewer and video editor for Premiere magazine, and since 2000 has been a correspondent for News Time, as well as a regular contributor to Afisha magazine with articles also published in Séance and Colta.ru and one of the writers for the Afisha cinema guide. At the beginning of the 1990s he ran viewings in video-theatries and in 2015 he worked as programme director for the Video-theatre at the New Museum exhibition (curators — Polina Zaslavskaya and Konstantin Shavlovsky).
Curator: Aleksey Artamonov, film critic.
For participants 18 years and older. Admission is free of charge. The number of participants is limited. Please register in advance.
Hidden, Film Club:
As part of the program, Hidden, film critics and film historians will showcase important films that have, for whatever reasons, remained in the shadows of the official canon, explaining their significance and what makes them extraordinary. But Hidden isn’t limited to the marginal, the forgotten or lost. It also explores the underbelly of films we thought we knew. By choice, the guests of these lectures on films will attempt to uncover these contradictions, leading us down into the depths of the human psyche and political systems, past and present. The speakers of this particular program include: Mikhail Ratgauz, Boris Nelepo, Vasily Koretsky, Mikhail Trofimenkov and many others, including one of Great Britain’s most preeminent film critics, Neil Young, and the renowned German media theorist Thomas Elsaesser. All of the films will be screened with subtitles.
