Complementing recent work with the Roxy Cinema and BAM, I’ve begun a monthly screening series at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research. It’s called Amnesiascope and somewhat unique: a “blindfold” program wherein I pick the (rare, out-of-print) film and you learn what it is during my introduction. A gamble, perhaps, but if you’re reading the third sentence of this article I can presume you have sufficient interest in my taste and inclinations to take chance, or at least despise me enough that you’re willing to show up and heckle. Incontestable bonus: the brilliant playwright (and Center co-founder) Matthew Gasda is on-site making mixed drinks that come far cheaper than anything in the Greenpoint neighborhood.
After last month’s inaugural smash-hit screening, the Brooklyn Center will host my second event on Friday, April 12 (that’s nine days from now). If I can’t yet reveal the film in question, we hope you’ll take a chance on it––a non-pareil New York odyssey in the key of After Hours that’s also an odd object from one of the greatest filmmakers to ever live.
You can buy tickets here and find the official event description below.
The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research is proud to present AMNESIASCOPE, a series of rare and remarkable films curated by Nick Newman. Our next screening is a surreal-beyond-compare comedy by one of the greatest filmmakers to ever live, who visited New York at the sunset of its No Wave era and shot the city with an outsider’s eye that begets some lovechild of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and Spanish soap operas. Brimming with images and sensibilities unlike anything you’ve seen or heard and starring a sui generis cast of downtown theater actors, the film lovingly satirizes a long-gone time when New York was the city for artists, lowlifes, killers, streetwise philosophers, and whoever might knock on your door. (90 minutes)