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Model Shop After the back-to-back successes of his French-language musicals The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), Varda’s husband Jacques Demy (1931–1990) was beckoned to Hollywood by a sweetheart deal from Columbia Pictures to make his first English- language feature. By way of leads Gary Lockwood and Anouk Aimée, Model Shop quietly encapsulates the death knell of the hippie movement. Said Demy of his trip to the Southland in a later interview: “I came here for a vacation, not to make a movie. But I fell in love with L.A. … [it] has the perfect proportions for film.” DIRECTED BY: Jacques Demy. WRITTEN BY: Jacques Demy, Adrien Joyce. WITH: Anouk Aimée, Gary Lockwood, Alexandra Hay, Carol Cole. 1969. 97 min. USA. Color. English. Rated PG. 35mm.
DIRECTED BY: Duane Kubo. WITH: Dan Kuramoto, June Kuramoto, Johnny Mori. 1975. 24 min. USA. Color. English. HD file. This print was preserved thanks to the support from funders of the Visual Communications Archives (Aratani Foundation, California Civil Liberties Public Education Program, California Humanities, Haynes Foundation, and Mellon Foundation). Remnants of the Watts Festival Los Angeles native Ulysses Jenkins, a Black video and performance artist who for over fifty years has used home video equipment as his primary conduit for artmaking, brought his Portapak camera to the Watts Summer Festivals in 1972 and 1973. Left unfinished until 1980 due to his inability to access editing equipment, the immediacy of this black-and-white video not only commemorates anniversaries of the Watts Rebellion of 1965 but also actively critiques the dominant image-production industry—it’s notable that white filmmaker Mel Stuart also shot his own glossy, highly produced film documenting the Wattstax benefit concert in 1972, financed by Columbia Pictures. DIRECTED BY: Ulysses Jenkins. 1980. 60 min. USA. Color. English. DCP.
Cisco Pike Sat, Jan 28 | 7:30pm | TMT
Womanhouse Womanhouse is the most comprehensive document of artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro’s feminist project and performance space, which took shape in early 1972 in an abandoned Hollywood mansion off North Mariposa Avenue as a space for the CalArts Feminist Art Program to explore their praxis. Filmed documentation of live performances staged within Womanhouse , including The Birth Trilogy , Maintenance pieces Scrubbing and Ironing , and Three Women , are interspersed between snapshots of installations within the former Victorian home’s rooms, such as the Menstruation Bathroom , the Bridal Staircase , and the Linen Closet , within which a bisected mannequin is eternally confined, hopelessly reaching out for help to escape. DIRECTED BY: Johanna Demetrakas. WITH: Beth Bachenheimer, Sherry Brody, Judy Chicago, Nika Elkins. 1974. 47 min. USA. Color. English. 16mm. Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.
“Cisco Pike is a man of the West...West L.A.!” proclaims the release poster for this grimy, sunbaked flick that turns its back on the peace-and-love ’60s to confront the mean 1970s. A corrupt cop (Gene Hackman) forces a former drug dealer and struggling musician (Kris Kristofferson in his film debut) to sell 100 kilograms of marijuana in a single weekend. The events unfold over the canals of Venice Beach, then an affordable haven for the decade’s starving artists. A standout for its location photography, Cisco Pike receives bonus points for featuring Lions Love (…and Lies) ’s Viva as a professional groupie. DIRECTED BY: Bill Norton. WRITTEN BY: Bill Norton. WITH: Kris Kristofferson, Karen Black, Gene Hackman, Harry Dean Stanton. 1971. 94 min. USA. Color. English. Rated R. 35mm. The Murals of East Los Angeles: (A Museum Without Walls) with Mur murs Sat, Feb 11 | 3pm | TMT The Murals of East Los Angeles: (A Museum Without Walls) Featuring many of the same public artworks elegiacally showcased in Agnès Varda’s Mur murs four years later, Rivera’s short documentary points a markedly Chicanx lens toward the artists creating largescale murals in Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights neighborhood. Featuring interviews with and artwork by Latinx artists Carlos Almaraz, Judy Baca, Richard Ruiz, and Eduardo Ortiz, this meticulous film proffers appreciation for this culture’s experiences and expressions in the decade following the Chicano Moratorium and the subsequent increased empowerment of Los Angeles’s Latinx community. DIRECTED BY: Humberto R. Rivera. WITH: Richard Ruiz, Humberto Rivera, David Botello, Eduardo Ortiz, Judy Baca. 1977. 37 min. USA. Color. English, Spanish. DCP. Courtesy of USC HMH Foundation Moving Image Archive. Mur murs One of the finest examples of a documentary that aesthetically complements its subject, Varda’s prismatic monumentalization of the largescale public artworks that cover the walls and buildings of the Southland is peppered with gorgeous 16mm photography and a dash of Varda’s characteristic wit. Shot in the late ’70s upon her return to the West Coast after completing One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977), Mur murs features artworks spanning from Venice to Watts by many of the Chicanx artists from Rivera’s documentary, as well as artist Kent Twitchell, muralist Richard Wyatt Jr., and the late street artist Terry Schoonhoven. DIRECTED BY: Agnès Varda. WRITTEN BY: Agnès Varda. WITH: Juliet Berto, Agnès Varda, Judy Baca, Terry Schoonhoven. 1981. 85 min. USA. Color. English, French. DCP.
Documenteur with Play It As It Lays Sat, Feb 25 | 3pm | TMT Documenteur
Opening with the same image that closes Mur murs , Documenteur is considered Varda’s second film in the unofficial diptych, abutting her iridescent document of Los Angeles’s vibrant murals and the artists who made them. Casting her own son Mathieu to play the child of wandering heroine Emilie (played by Sabine Mamou, who also edited both films and later cut The Beaches of Agnès (2008)), Varda follows the mother-son duo on their quest for housing in a quiet, pensive work that would anticipate her interest in seekers as evidenced in her later films Vagabond (1985) and The Gleaners and I (2000). DIRECTED BY: Agnès Varda. WRITTEN BY: Agnès Varda. WITH: Sabine Mamou, Mathieu Demy, Lisa Blok-Linson, Tina Odom. 1981. 65 min. USA. Color. English. DCP. Play It As It Lays Based on Joan Didion’s novel of the same name, Frank Perry’s filmed version was adapted by the novel’s author with the help of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Depicting a lifestyle of soulless mansion pool parties and arid desert escapes, it’s Tuesday Weld’s and Anthony Perkins’s empathic performances within this Lost Angeles landscape that give this fiercely independent film its strange shape and deep pathos. Didion was allegedly a friend of Varda when each was alive; as pointed out by filmmaker and writer Courtney Stephens in a 2022 Film Comment newsletter, “Varda’s astringent, lyrical fiction film Documenteur ….also feels distinctly Didionesque.” DIRECTED BY: Frank Perry. WRITTEN BY: Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne. WITH: Tuesday Weld, Anthony Perkins, Tammy Grimes, Adam Roarke. 1972. 99 min. USA. Color. English. Rated R. 35mm.
Pat Rocco
Pat Rocco’s Signs of Queer Life Thu, Jan 26 | 7:30pm | TMT
The Decline of Western Civilization
Trailblazing Los Angeles-based filmmaker and gay rights advocate Pat Rocco (1934–2018) began his moviemaking efforts as a creator of queer male erotica in the late 1960s. When the public’s appetite shifted to hardcore, Rocco pivoted to documenting moments of LGBTQ protest and collective joy in his adopted city, often appearing on camera as an always gracious (and meticulously coiffed) interviewer of his many subjects. Whether out in the streets capturing a demonstration of Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood against their defamatory anti-gay signage ( Signs of Protest ), on the scene of an escalating situation with law enforcement at a gay bar ( Meat Market Arrest ), or capturing LA’s energetic early Pride parades ( We Were There ), Rocco’s films always culminate in moments of hope and a spirit of liberation that feel akin to Varda’s own joyful yet always inquisitive Weltanschauung. All films directed by Pat Rocco. Digital presentation courtesy of the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project.
The Decline of Western Civilization Sat, Feb 18 | 3pm | TMT In person: Penelope Spheeris.
For her first feature-length effort, Penelope Spheeris chronicles the burgeoning punk music scene bursting out of small Los Angeles venues at the dawn of the 1980s. Interviews with and concert footage of emerging groups including Black Flag, Germs, Circle Jerks, X, and Fear, then barely known outside of local zines and rabid fans, helped bring broader visibility to bands now considered household names of the genre. Always aware of Varda but never crossing paths with her, Spheeris’s instincts to embed herself within this hyperlocal scene are reminiscent of Varda’s fascination with SoCal hippies and Bay Area Black Panthers. DIRECTED BY: Penelope Spheeris. WITH: Alice Bag Band, Black Flag, Catholic Discipline, Circle Jerks. 1981. 100 min. USA. Color. English. DCP. Cruisin’ J-Town with Remnants of the Watts Festival Thu, Feb 23 | 4pm | TMT Cruisin’ J-Town Much more than a short profile of jazz fusion band Hiroshima, Duane Kubo’s documentary dives into the group’s influences and roots in Asian American culture, at the time a newly coined identification gaining prominence throughout the Asian and Pacific Island diaspora across the United States. Kubo had by 1970 founded the non-profit Visual Communications, a media arts organization with deep roots in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo neighborhood, for which Cruisin’ J-Town was an early production.
Please note: this program contains nudity. Signs of Protest 1970. 21 min. USA. Color. English. DCP. Please note: this film contains culturally offensive slurs and language. Meat Market Arrest 1970. 21 min. USA. Color. English. DCP. We Were There 1976. 21 min. USA. Color. English. DCP.
The Mom Tapes with Womanhouse Thu, Feb 16 | 4pm | TMT The Mom Tapes
A touching tribute for a mother by her daughter. A hilarious piece of performance art. A matter-of-fact portrait of a frustrated, bourgeois housewife. Artist Ilene Segalove’s four-year video project dedicated to documenting her mother is an endearing chronicle of a young artist turning a curious lens on her familial privilege, with the city of Beverly Hills serving as the backdrop. DIRECTED BY: Ilene Segalove. 1974–78. 27 min. USA. Color. English. HD file.
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