16MM RUN is a one-year-long experimental film programme in collaboration with MACRO where the physicality of film and cinema can be relived in the true sense of the word. A selection of feature and short films will be screened on a monthly basis in their original 16mm format.16MM RUN is conceived to present a selection of authors and titles out of the mainstream circuits, not easily available or that have rarely been screened in Italy. The programme includes mostly avant-garde and experimental films from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s without following a specific thematic focus. It is a hymn to the physicality of film in a time driven by digital.The screenings will take place in the Sala Cinema at MACRO. Entry at Via Nizza 138, Rome. Free entrance until capacity reached.With the support of Fondazione Dino ed Ernesta Santarelli.
STORM DE HIRSCH – CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN17 December 2021, 7pmThe 16MM RUN programme begins on December 17 with the screening of four short films of two essential female figures in the artistic and cinematographic panorama of the last century. These are Storm de Hirsch and Carolee Schneemann.Storm de Hirsch (1912-2000) was an American poet and director, a key figure in the New York avant-garde film scene of the 1960s and a founding member of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, founded in 1962 to distribute avant-garde, experimental and underground films as an alternative to the commercial films on view at the time. Her work has a strong abstract component and makes use of experimental and sophisticated composition techniques.Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) was an American artist active in the fields of performance, body art and video. Using the body as the prevalent material of her art, she situates women as both the creator and an active part of the creation itself, with a strong feminist imprint that refused the idea of body as an object, considering it instead as a primal, archaic force which could unify energies. Her work is direct, sexual, liberating and autobiographical. Through painting, filmmaking, video art and performance, Schneemann re-writes her personal history of art, refusing the idea of an “his-tory” narrated exclusively from the male point of view.Below are the films scheduled for the first screening.
Divinations by Storm de Hirsch, 1964, 10'
Divinations is the first chapter of Storm de Hirsch’s 1960s trilogy, The Color of Ritual, the Color of Thought. In an interview with Jonas Mekas in which she reflects on the making of Divinations, Storm de Hirsch said: “I wanted badly to make an animated short and had no camera available. I did have some old, unused film stock and several rolls of 16mm sound tape. So I used that—plus a variety of discarded surgical instruments and the sharp edge of a screwdriver—by cutting, etching, and painting directly on both film and [sound] tape”. The result is a hallucinatory, dizzying, and meditative collage of image and sound which attests the artist’s interest in form, color, and process, as well as myth, ritual, and mysticism.
Peyote Queen by Storm de Hirsch, 1965, 10'
Peyote Queen is the second and best-known chapter of the trilogy The Color of Ritual, the Color of Thought. Conceived as a journey through the underworld of sensory derangement, the film’s imagery is abstract, consisting of both live action footage and animated sequences which de Hirsch created by painting and etching directly on the 16mm film stock. Split screens, kaleidoscopic lenses, and abstract animations are used to create a psychedelic effect. The soundtrack consists of African drumming and singing interspersed with American pop music.
In 1963 the US government imposed the legendary Living Theatre in New York to close after missed tax payments during the run of their controversial production The Brig. Jonas Mekas decided to make a film of the production to preserve its brilliance and in-depth dynamism. This took place one night when actors and the rest of the crew broke into the locked theatre which still had inside it all of its confiscated materials. It was on this occasion that Storm De Hirsch made this short newsreel: not only was she able to capture a study of Mekas while he was filming, but she also captured a tension and apprehension of the moment, as well as a sense of panic at the possibility of not being able to finish the film.
This is a silent film of collaged and painted sequences of lovemaking between Schneemann and her then partner, composer James Tenney, from the point of view of her/their cat, Kitch. Her attempt was to reproduce the whole visual and tactile experience of sex as a subjective phenomenon: “I wanted to see if the experience of what I saw would have any correspondence to what I felt, the intimacy of the lovemaking… And I wanted to put into that materiality of film the energies of the body, so that the film itself dissolves and recombines and is transparent and dense, as one feels during lovemaking… It is different from any pornographic work that you’ve ever seen, that’s why people are still looking at it! And there’s no objectification or fetishization of the woman”.
JACK SMITH18 February 2022, 7pmNormal Love by Jack Smith, 1963, 120'
Courtesy of Jack Smith Archive and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.The event appointment of the programme offers a screening of the experimental film project Normal Love, shot in 1963 by the American filmmaker and artist Jack Smith (1932 – 1989), an unconventional artist who provocatively spanned the territory between the world of Hollywood and underground culture.Made by Smith after the censorship of his film Flaming Creatures, which caused scandal due to its sexual content, Normal Love is a highly experimental work whose production was supported by Jonas Mekas. The film became a source of inspiration for other creators such as Federico Fellini, who mentioned it as an influence on his Satyricon.Taking the genre of horror films from the 1930s and 1940s as a reference point, Smith set Normal Love in a fantasy world, an Atlantis packed with pink and green pastel hues. “Rubens. Arabian Nights. Chinese masters. Monet”, Mekas remarked after seeing the first rushes.Shot on elaborate, evocative and dreamy sets, including a giant cake designed by the artist Claes Oldenburg, Normal Love is a riotous combination of Dionysian debauchery and kitsch horror. In the universe of Normal Love we see a variety of exotic creatures, portrayed by personalities and friends from the artist’s entourage, in a sort of “fantasy-reality” that captures freedom of imagination: from the mermaid played by Mario Montez, whose stage name is a tribute to the Dominican actress Maria Montez, to the mummy played by Angus MacLise, drummer of the Velvet Underground. The cast of the film, in addition to Smith as a magician, includes Diana Bacchus, David Sachs, Beverly Grant, Naomi Levie, Francis Francine, Tony Conrad, Tiny Tim, Sheila Bick, Eliot Cukor, John Vaccaro, John Adler, Diane Di Prima, Arnold Rockwood, Teddy Howard, Johnny Foster, Stanley Alboum, Alain Marlowe, Pat Oldenburg e Andy Warhol.The film was left intentionally unfinished by the artist: its editing was left open as an act of rebellion against the commodification of art, preventing any form of censorship. Smith showed the film in different forms, often in performative screenings that required his presence, during which he varied the musical accompaniment, utilizing records from his collection.
JOSÉ RODRÍGUEZ-SOLTERO29 April 2022, 7pmLupe by José Rodríguez-Soltero, 1966, 49
Courtesy of The Film-Makers' Cooperative, New York
The third event presents a screening of José Rodríguez-Soltero’s Lupe (1966), an underground classic of the stature of Flaming Creatures, Scorpio Rising, Hold me While I’m Naked, or The Chelsea Girls.Strangely neglected for way too long, the film is ostensibly a biopic of Lupe Velez inspired by Kenneth Anger’s sketch of the “Mexican spitfire” in Hollywood Babylon and, stylistically, by Von Sternberg’s Marlene Dietrich vehicles.Rodríguez-Soltero takes some liberties with the facts and produces a color-saturated, gorgeous dime-store baroque that tells of Lupe’s rise from whoredom to stardom, her fall into fractured romance and suicide, and her ascension into the spirit world. It is consistently inventive and surprising, and wrapped in a dense soundtrack that combines, Elvis, Cuban boleros, Spanish flamenco, The Supremes, and Vivaldi. It features some of the main players of the Ridiculous Theatrical Playhouse (Charles Ludlam plays a keen lesbian seducer and Lola Pashalinsky, Lupe’s maid). Mario Montez never looked better; no wonder this was his favorite film. Whether they know it or not, Pedro Almodavar, Vivienne Dick, and Bruce LaBruce have a grandfather in Jose Rodriguez Soltero. –Juan Suarez.
JAMES BENNING27 May 2022, 7pm11 x 14 by James Benning, 1976, 83'
Courtesy Canyon Cinema, San Francisco, US
The fourth event presents a screening of 11 x 14 shot in 1976 by James Benning, establishing him as an important contributor to American independent cinema and as a representative of the “New Narrative Movement”. 11 x 14 is Benning’s first feature-length film announcing the arrival of a radical new voice in the evolution of moving image art, and remains a landmark of the American avant-garde. Composed of 65 beautifully framed shots of provincial life and suburban domesticity, this 16mm-shot travelogue of the Midwestern United States advanced notions of structuralist cinema while forming a visual tapestry of the American heartland in all its rugged glory.The film captures the iconography of this region through repeated images and sounds of trucks and interstate highways, billboards and elevated trains, and silos and bales of hay. Protagonists frequently interact in the background of the image and their dialogue is deliberately muffled so that their motivations are obscured. 11 x 14 points toward the creation of a new, nonliterary but populist cinema.In films like 11 x 14 and One Way Boogie Woogie, Benning combines the structural analysis of image, sound and narrative with auto-biographical traces, as well as with an almost “classical” interest in composition, color, light and landscape.The places in Benning’s early films were midwestern, he himself grew up in Milwaukee; this gave notice that the so-called cinematic flyover zone—the territory between the centers of film production in New York and California—could not only be the focus of interesting work but nurtured an important avant-garde filmmaker. Later, Benning would move to New York City and then on to California (where he began teaching at CalArts in 1987), expanding his horizons while continuing to make a film every year or two. Given the considerable body of work he has created and the intense focus on place in so many of his best films—including 13 Lakes (2004), Ten Skies (2004), and RR (2007)—it now seems fair to say that Benning has become the foremost filmmaker of the American landscape.
His work has always been challenging. 11 x 14 and One Way Boogie Woogie were made in the aftermath of Andy Warhol’s long slow films and of the “structural films” that followed. Warhol and Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Ernie Gehr, J. J. Murphy, and others used extended duration and repetitive structures to contest not only the commercial cinema and its reliance on conventional narrative but also the various forms of personally expressive cinema that had dominated the 1950s and early ’60s film avant-garde—most obviously, the work of Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, and Jack Smith. Benning’s roots in structural film have remained evident throughout his career and have informed his filmmaking in a variety of ways.The screening will take place in the Sala Cinema at MACRO.No booking required.Free entrance until capacity reached.Access will be permitted exclusively to visitors with FFP2 mask.
