Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, 1969)

Sunday 8 May 2022, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, 1969), 111 minutes. In English with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:00, film starts at 20:30.

This is Haskell Wexler’s legendary movie documenting the explosive course of events in America during the 60s. In 1968 Haskell Wexler was one of the world’s best cameramen, and he had lensed films like One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But the film industry was changing fast, and he became disillusioned with the commercialization of American cinema, so he decided to direct his own low-budget film about racism and the inherent violence in the US. His plan was to take a fictional story with actors, and mix it with documentary situations… and therefore blur the line between a feature film and documentary. He wanted to create a new kind of cinema, one that was more grounded in real everyday life.

His plan was to finish the film by taking his crew to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. This real-life event ended up turning into an apocalyptic “police riot”, with officers beating anyone they could get their hands on. Suddenly the director and the crew were engulfed in a fierce battle, with tear gas flying all around them… as they attempted to still film the actors amidst all the swinging police clubs.

Besides its innovative approach to filmmaking, the movie is also important as a sharp analysis of the mass media in general, and how it was being used to manipulate audience opinions. An incredible time capsule of the social unrest of the late 60s with a soundtrack by Mike Bloomfield (Dylan’s guitarist… Like a Rolling Stone), The Mothers of Invention (Zappa), and Love.

“A definitive document of the political tumult in late-1960s America.”

This will be a high-definition screening.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Acción mutante (Álex de la Iglesia, 1993)

Sunday 2 April 2022, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Acción mutante (Álex de la Iglesia, 1993), 97 minutes. In Spanish with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:00, film starts at 20:30.

This was the debut feature movie of director Alex de la Iglesia, who would later become a staple in Spanish cinema. It was produced by queer arthouse provocateur Pedro Almodóvar who went out on a limb to give this first time filmmaker a chance, a completely unknown cartoon-drawing geek with a punky attitude who had almost no filmmaking experience. Although Pedro was supposed to only produce it, he couldn’t keep himself from interfering with the creative side of the project—exactly the behaviour he despised in other overbearing producers that tried to control his own films. Pedro did however bring in his colourful entourage of off-beat celebrities to help out with the acting—for example, transgender legend Bibi Andersen, or the unforgettable bizarre-faced model Rosy de Palma.

This is a sort of sci-fi horror film, but one with a lot of low-budget imagination. The film plunges us into a world in the future, a fully European paradise where everyone is beautiful and glamorous. But unrest is festering in this future Eden, when society is confronted with an uprising of terrorists battling for the rights of ugly people. This movie was a game-changer in many ways. Since there were no Spanish special effects crews back in the early 90s, some had to be brought in from France. Since director Alex de la Iglesia was busy as a comic book illustrator, he brought that entire zaniness into his futuristic vision. With its wild set decors, bizarre futuristic costumes, bold cinematography, and a dynamite concept, this flick splashed into the counterculture scene in Spain, breaking the doors open for a new kind of cinema. It was an intoxicating cinematic cocktail—equal parts comic book, sci-fi, black comedy, and a colourful version of steampunk. The punchy theme song is by Def Con Dos, one of the earliest hip hop duos in Spanish history.

This will be a high-definition screening.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Die endlose Nacht (Will Tremper, 1963)

Sunday 20 March 2022, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Die endlose Nacht (Will Tremper, 1963), 83 minutes. In German with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:00, film starts at 20:30.

There is thick fog over Berlin-Tempelhof Airport, and an announcement is made that all flights to West Germany are canceled. Since the airport is in East Germany, many people are not allowed outside and so they are left stranded, hoping in the morning things will clear up.

This film follows six of the people who are caught up in the building, walking aimlessly through the near empty airport. The film is made up of their encounters, and their attempts to make something interesting happen. In some ways, it has a bit of the mood of the pandemic and all the lockdowns… suddenly thrown into a void, a bit lost, with plenty of time to kill, and not knowing how long it will take.

The people who are drifting around are from both sides of the Iron Curtain, and therefore meeting each other for the first time, both suspicious of the other side. To further this East-West connection, the theme song is a tune by the Andrzej Trzaskowskí Quintet, a wicked Polish jazz band featuring the vocals of Wanda Warska.

This will be a high-definition screening.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Gundermann (Andreas Dresen)

Sunday 6 February 2022, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Gundermann (Andreas Dresen), 118 minutes. In German with English subtitles. Doors open at 19:30, Film starts at 20:00.

This is a biopic about the DDR singer-songwriter Gerhard Gundermann (1955-1998). It is directed by Andreas Dresen, one of the very few East German filmmakers that was allowed to make movies after the fall of the Berlin wall. I love his films because he always sees things from a different angle than West German filmmakers. There is a kind of humanitarianism in Dresen’s films that is missing from West German because they try to be too sensational, too ‘cool’, too controversial or overly sentimental. For Dresen cinema is never a commercial trick or a gimmick.

Our main character Gerhard Gundermann had a job as a crane operator in an excavation site. It’s 1970s and during the day he digs for coal, but at night he was forming rock bands to play music. His songs were thoughtful, touching, rebellious, and hopeful. But after the Berlin wall fell, it turned out he had a contradictory past, and had a secret life working undercover. So what emerges in this flick is a complex portrait of a highly unusual character. Although we like to see the world in black-and-white terms, things are not always so easy… usually reality is in shades.

This film shifts back and forth in time – into the seventies, to the fall of the Berlin wall in the late 80s, and the reunification of the 90s… showing how Gundermann dealt with his double life in his later years.

This will be a high-definition screening.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Romuald et Juliette (Coline Serreau, 1988)

Sunday 14 november 2021, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Romuald et Juliette (Coline Serreau, 1988), 107 minutes. In French with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:00, Film starts at 20:30.

Coline Serreau (La belle verte) is an oddball and marginalized filmmaker, even within French cinema. Despite having quite a series of films, she has never gotten the recognition she deserves. Brilliantly determined, she refuses to tackle hard social problems with bitterness, but instead creates a brazen breeze of surreal humor that instantly reveals how absurd our modern world is. She embraced all the topics that were too hot to handle back in the 1980s… racism, gender inequality, monogamy, queerness.

In this flick we have Daniel Auteuil as a corporate businessman who gets wrapped up in a scandal when he attempts to cut costs in his factories. But then there is a twist… a woman who he always took for granted – the black woman who cleans his office every night – is suddenly able to help him. I won’t say more about the plot, since these broad narrative strokes aren’t what this movie is about anyway. It is about the details, the incredible humor, the beautiful twists and turns, and the sense of humanity that shines in this flick. Director Coline Serreau has a skill for a kind of magic that far surpasses any Hollywood product despite all the money they spend.

This is a sharp, simple, tender film that “does the right thing”. Cinema can be a negative cultural force that encourages fear, hatred, or in the modern sense, passive consumerism. But it once (in the 60s, 70s and 80s) was often used as a positive cultural force, that simply re-evaluated our society and shifted it towards something more humane. If there is any meaning to the word progress, it only makes sense if we end up living a more profound existence. And that is what this flick is about… how we get caught up in a crazy prefabricated world, and end up losing our sense of meaning.

A movie shining with social critique, humor and brilliance.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Tout va bien (Jean-Luc Godard, 1972)

Sunday 24 october 2021, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Tout va bien (Everything’s All Right), directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1972, 96 minutes. In French with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:00, Film starts at 20:30.

Directly after the ground-breaking historical events that occurred in May ’68 in France, director Jean-Luc Godard went into a crisis. He was famous internationally, but the revolution shook him so deeply that he realized that such fame was a fraud and actually undemocratic! So Godard went into collective filmmaking, and this film was the major result of this period. These collaborations are known as the Dziga-Vertov films.
Because he had two major stars signed for the project – Jane Fonda and Yves Montand – he was able to make a big-budget experimental film that follows the journey of a filmmaker and a reporter caught up in a worker’s take-over of a sausage factory. So there is an intimate love story, but this film also steps back and looks at the bigger picture. By approaching the situation in this way, Godard, together with Jean-Pierre Gorin, are able to analyze the movie industry, society in general, how news is reported by the mass media, along with structurally undemocratic hierarchies inherent in factories and most places of work.
Certainly a bewildering movie, there is nothing else quite like it. Mid-way through the film you see the look on actor Yves Montand’s face, something like “What the fuck is going on? How did I get mixed up in this!” It is a crazy film, with a lot of humor, but also despair. There is a thoughtful and melancholy mood that hangs over this innovative flick, as Godard stubbornly continues the battle when most others have already given up, ditched the ship, and gone for the cash in post-May ’68 France. This is the kind of film you need to watch if you want to explore, understand the world around you… and also to grasp the untapped possibilities of cinema.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978)

Sunday 19 September 2021, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978), 126 minutes, in English with English subtitles. High-definition screening. Free admission. Doors open at 20:00, Film starts at 20:30

Directed by one of American’s greatest filmmakers Hal Ashby, this was a groundbreaking film when it hit the cinemas… and it’s another of those films whose message is even more relevant today than when it was made. Some films fade over time, and others get richer.

Coming Home stars a young Jon Voight (Midnight Cowboy), Bruce Dern (Nebraska) and Jane Fonda. It should be remembered that Jane Fonda had made a lot of enemies around the time when this film was made. She had gone to Vietnam during the war in 1972 and made pictures with the so-called “enemies”. She said the American bombings of Vietnam constituted a war crime, and denounced American soldiers as war criminals. Many Americans of course couldn’t see her point… there was a smear campaign built against her in the States; they called her “Hanoi Jane” and clamored for her neck, saying she should be tried for treason. Many would have lynched her if they had the chance.

Coming Home is based on Jane’s friendship with Ron Kovic, whose autobiographical book Born on the Fourth of July would later be made into a film by Oliver Stone. This movie came out roughly at the same time as a few other films that dealt with the effects of the war at home in America…. of the damaged soldiers who were returning. But where the other films, like The Deer Hunter, relied on “flashbacks” of the war to show its violence and horror, this film was far more intelligent… not showing any violence at all, only the devastating emotional impact.

The soundtrack is made of the music of the times (Rolling Stones, Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, etc.), but it’s especially the music of Tim Buckley (the father of Jeff) which captures better than anything else director Hal Ashby’s mood and scorching sentiment. Winner of three Academy Awards (best actress, actor and script) back in the days when the Academy sometimes took risks.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: El pico II (cine quinqui retrospective)

Sunday December 1st 2019, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: El pico II (1984) by Eloy de la Iglesia, 122 minutes. In Spanish with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:00, Film starts at 20:30

El pico II is a stunning sequel that can be watched on its own, even if you haven’t seen Eloy’s smash film El pico, made just one year earlier. This time the action is set in Madrid, in the infamous Carabanchel jail, which became cine quinqui’s ‘actor’s studio’ since so many of the performers in these movies were real life criminals. Although the follow-up is less gritty, it remains true to El pico’s mix between denunciation essay and action thriller. Because Eloy was, in a way, an unrefined version of the Greek director Costa Gavras, with the added intensity of a filmmaker who was not just a self-declared communist, but also openly gay and addicted to heroin.

And heroin is indeed at the heart of this story. Our junkie heroes, Manzano and Pirri, play two cell mates – a posh kid and a working class quinqui – who help each other navigate the prison’s informal power structures, including some pretty unsavoury gay and transgender characters. El pico II deals blow after blow to different aspects of the new Spain: private addiction clinics, the prison system, class privileges, ETA, the press, the Guardia Civil. It goes in-depth into the corruption of the courts and legal system. It exposes the abject sociology of the prison – how it pits prisoners against each other, how it uses hardcore prisoners to punish ‘soft’ ones.

All this with the added bonus of a glorious flamenco soundtrack and two of the best knife-fight scenes of the whole cine quinqui era.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net