Anthology Film Archives 32 Second Avenue New York, NY 10003
(212) 505-5181April 29 – May 5, 2011
DROP EDGES OF YONDER: THE FILMS OF RUDY WURLITZERWith special guests alongside Wurlitzer, in person!
Will Oldham on April 29
and
Robert Downey Sr. on April 30Novelist Rudy Wurlitzer has long been revered by lovers of experimental literature – he has only five novels to his name, but these books are among the strangest and most deeply original in contemporary American literature. With NOG, FLATS, QUAKE, SLOW FADE, and THE DROP EDGE OF YONDER, Wurlitzer almost single-handedly pioneered a homegrown equivalent of European experimental existentialism, translating the profound innovations of Samuel Beckett and others into a uniquely American idiom. These remarkable novels (as well as a non-fiction work, HARD TRAVEL TO SACRED PLACES) have established Wurlitzer as a national treasure.
While none of his novels have been adapted into movies (for better or for worse), Wurlitzer has tried his hand at filmmaking on several occasions, and in collaboration with some of the most gifted directors in American cinema. His screenplay for Monte Hellman’s TWO-LANE BLACKTOP is probably his best-known cinematic contribution, but there’s far more where that came from, including Sam Peckinpah’s PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID, Alex Cox’s WALKER, several collaborations with iconoclastic photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank, and Jim McBride’s brilliant, woefully under-appreciated post-apocalyptic tour-de-force GLEN AND RANDA, perhaps the clearest filmic manifestation of Wurlitzer’s unique sensibility.
SPECIAL GUESTS ALONGSIDE RUDY WURLITZER: WILL OLDHAM AND ROBERT DOWNEY SR.:
Anthology is honored to present this tribute to Rudy Wurlitzer’s film work, and to welcome Wurlitzer himself for two evenings, alongside two very special guests:– On Friday, April 29, he will appear along with Will Oldham for a reading and conversation to mark the release of Oldham’s recent audio book version of SLOW FADE (Drag City). With musical accompaniment by Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance) and photographs by Lynn Davis.
– And on Saturday, April 30, he will be here for a dialogue with friend and colleague Robert Downey Sr. after the 8:00 screening of GLEN AND RANDA.
Screening Schedule:
Sam Peckinpah
PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID
1973, 122 minutes, 35mm. With James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, and Bob Dylan.“May be the most beautiful and ambitious film that Peckinpah ever made. The time is 1881. Powerful interests want New Mexico tamed for their brand of progress, and Sheriff Pat Garrett (Coburn) is commissioned to rid the territory of his old gunfighting comrades. He serves fair notice to William Bonney – Billy the Kid (Kristofferson) – and his Fort Sumter cronies, but it’s not in their nature, or his, to go quietly. Peckinpah’s theme, more than ever, is the closing of the frontier and the nature of the loss that that entails. But this time his vision takes him beyond genre convention, beyondhistory and legend, to the bleeding heart of myth – and surely of himself. This is one strange and original movie.” –Richard T. Jameson
–Friday, April 29 at 7:30, Sunday, May 1 at 4:30, and Wednesday, May 4 at 9:00.
Monte Hellman
TWO-LANE BLACKTOP
1971, 102 minutes, 35mm. With James Taylor, Dennis Wilson, and Warren Oates.“[An] exciting existentialist road movie by Monte Hellman, with a swell script by Wurlitzer and Will Corry and my favorite Warren Oates performance …. Taylor and Wilson are the drivers of a supercharged ’55 Chevy, and Oates is the owner of a new GTO (these nameless characters are in fact identified only by the cars they drive); they meet and agree to race from New Mexico to the east coast, though an assortment of side interests periodically distracts them, including various hitchhikers (among them Laurie Bird). (GTO hilariously assumes a new persona every time he picks up a new passenger, rather like the amorphous narrator in Wurlitzer’s novel NOG.) The movie starts off as a narrative but gradually grows into something much more abstract – it’s unsettling but also beautiful.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER
–Saturday, April 30 at 5:30 and Monday, May 2 at 7:00.
Jim McBride
GLEN AND RANDA
1971, 93 minutes, 35mm. Co-written by Rudy Wurlitzer.Jim McBride’s first commercial film portrays the odyssey undertaken by the last bewildered survivors of an atomic holocaust, as they stumble through the wreckage of a vanished civilization. Neither moralizing sci-fi nor melodrama, despite its fanciful premise, the film is rather like a cinéma vérité doomsday documentary – a parable in newsreel form. Of all the films Wurlitzer was involved with, GLEN AND RANDA most closely resembles the tone and spirit of his own novels.
“Unaccountably disregarded by critics, this is a poisoned idyll of two young people in an America destroyed by atomic war…. A paraphrase of the counterculture’s sensibilities, the film’s subversive potential lies in its straightforward acceptance and naturalistic portrayal of the destructability of eternal American symbols: a destroyed Howard Johnsonrestaurant is more difficult to take than newspaper articles warning about the dangers of atomic war.” –Amos Vogel, FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART–Saturday, April 30 at 8:00, Monday, May 2 at 9:15, and Wednesday, May 4 at 7:00.
Robert Frank & Rudy Wurlitzer
KEEP BUSY(1975, 30 minutes, 16mm, b&w. Print courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.)
An improvised story about a group of people (including Richard Serra, Joan Jonas and Joanne Akalaitis) living on an island off Nova Scotia. Obsessed with daily aspects of their lives and the cycles of nature, the group is subjugated by a lighthouse keeper and his messenger, who have access to the only radio and therefore control the news.
&
Robert Frank, Rudy Wurlitzer, and Gary Hill
ENERGY AND HOW TO GET IT(1981, 28 minutes, 16mm, b&w. Print courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.)
What began as a film about Robert Golka, an engineer who was experimenting with ball lightning and the development of fusion as an energy force, was turned into a spoof on the documentary form,inserting fictional characters into the story such as the Energy Czar (William Burroughs) and a Hollywood agent (filmmaker Robert Downey Sr.).
&
BIRTH OF THE FLAG PARTS I AND II
(1965/74, 38 minutes, 16mm-to-video, b&w, silent. Photographed by Stan VanDerBeek, Diane Rochlin, and Sheldon Rochlin. Produced by Rudy Wurlitzer and Richard Wexler. Screened courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.)
This two-part film documents one of artist Claes Oldenburg’s legendary Happenings, this one taking place in upstate New York and, unlike most of his performance pieces, designed specifically to be filmed, without the presence of a live audience. Total running time: ca. 100 minutes.
–Sunday, May 1 at 7:00 and Thursday, May 5 at 7:00.
Alex Cox
WALKER
1987, 94 minutes, 35mm. With Ed Harris and Peter Boyle; written by Rudy Wurlitzer.An hallucinatory biopic that breaks all cinematic conventions, WALKER tells the story of nineteenth-century American adventurer William Walker, who abandoned a series of careers in law, politics, journalism, and medicine to become a soldier of fortune, and for several years dictator of Nicaragua. Made with mad abandon and political acuity – and the support of the Sandinista army and government during the Contra war – the film uses this true tale as a satirical attack on American ultrapatriotism and a freewheeling condemnation of ‘manifest destiny.’
–Sunday, May 1 at 9:15 and Tuesday, May 3 at 7:00.
Robert Frank & Rudy Wurlitzer
CANDY MOUNTAIN
1988, 91 minutes, 35mm. With Kevin J. O’Connor, Harris Yulin, Tom Waits, Bulle Ogier, Roberts Blossom, Jim Jarmusch, David Johansen, Arto Lindsay, Joe Strummer, Rockets Redglare. Print courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.“Autumnal, verging on wintry, CANDY MOUNTAIN is a film of off-putting attitude and unobtrusive splendor. This Robert Frank/Rudy Wurlitzer collaboration resurrects the ghost of beatnik aspiration – it’s as mocking and elegiac as befits the testament of two reclusive counter-culture heroes. … As beautiful as it is mannered, as sad as it is funny, [this] is a film about the end of the road, the end of America, the end of Endsville. Incandescently nondescript, this may be the first movie to make Canada seemuncanny.” – J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE
–Tuesday, May 3 at 9:00 and Thursday, May 5 at 9:15.
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Directions:Anthology is at 32 Second Ave. at 2nd St. Subway: F to 2nd Ave; 6 to Bleecker. Tickets: $9 general; $8 Essential Cinema (free for members); $7 for students, seniors, & children (12 & under); $6 AFA members.
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http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/series/37182
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