Instagram story viewer> @2220arts> Posts

2220 Arts + Archives

@2220arts

33.5K

followers

966

following

LA-based cultural center featuring
adventurous film, literature, music & performing arts
@ 2220 Beverly Blvd. ( "twenty-two twenty" )

POSTS STORIES REELS

This week at 2220: two nights of uncommon art song, two days of performance lecture speaking to the complex history of the avocado, and a Sunday night fundraiser for our beloved Bureau, which has brought free poetry readings to LA for over 25 years. by @2220arts

Los Angeles Filmforum presents a three-part screening retrospective on the documentary works of Sara Gómez, recently restored by the Vulnerable Media Lab in Canada. Beginning with a matinee featuring 6 short films — on 11/15 at 1pm at @2220arts !

Program 1 will be an introduction to her history and her relationship to ICAIC (the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry), while Screenings 2 and 3 will be followed by facilitated group discussions with the audience.

Guests before the screening include an introduction from Susan Lord, the co-editor of the 2022 book The Cinema of Sara Gomez: Reframing a Revolution and one of the key figures in the restoration of the films, and a short presentation by National Network On Cuba organizers from the Harriet Tubman Center that will connect the films with current efforts aiding Cuba’s current embargo crisis. Curated by Jorge Ravelo.

Gómez was a pioneering Afro-Cuban filmmaker of the revolutionary era from 1962-1974 who, in her tragically short lifetime, created confrontational and educational shorts concerning childcare, racism, labor, music history, and geography, leading up to her seminal docu-fiction feature De cierta manera.

The Criterion Collection will soon be releasing an Eclipse Box of the her films, and we are grateful to Janus Films for making the films available to us for this preview screening. by @2220arts

Late Breakfast is proud to present an evening of artists exploring memory and sensation at @2220arts , featuring New Mexico’s @diatom.deli, multimedia artist @_and.cs, and the duo of Emma Palm + Marc Merza (@notranslation.wav + @marchaelmerza).

Tickets available now on DICE - 🔗 in bio by @2220arts

Just announced! 📣

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi presents: Opening Night + All of a Sudden

On Nov 15 @2220arts, we welcome Ryûsuke Hamaguchi for a double bill of the Japanese director’s latest feature, ALL OF A SUDDEN, and one of its key inspirations, John Cassavetes’s 1977 classic OPENING NIGHT. This event will also include an interactive conversation with Hamaguchi featuring clips from his movies in which the director will discuss his unique approach to working with actors.

Co-presented by the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities. Special thanks to Neon, Janus Films, and Divergent PR.

See our bio link for tickets. 🎟️

About the program:
Opening Night (Dir. John Cassavetes, 1977, 144 min) | 5:00pm
While in the midst of rehearsals for her latest play, Broadway actor Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) witnesses the accidental death of an adoring young fan, after which she begins to confront the chaos of her own life. Headlined by a virtuoso performance by Rowlands, John Cassavetes’s Opening Night lays bare the drama of a performer who, at great personal cost, makes a part her own, and it functions as a metaphor for the director’s singular, wrenched-from-the-heart creative method. A Janus Films release.

Conversation with Ryûsuke Hamaguchi | 7:30pm
In this interactive talk, the Japanese director will discuss his unique approach to working with actors and present clips from his films illustrating how he incorporates multiple disciplines into his sweeping dramas.

All of a Sudden (Dir. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, 2026, 197 min) | 8:00pm
Director of a care facility for the elderly, Marie-Lou (Virginie Efiira) strives to introduce an innovative care philosophy based on listening and respecting residents’ dignity, despite resistance from part of her staff. Her encounter with Mari (Tao Okamoto), a Japanese theater director battling cancer, will profoundly reshape her path. By forming a deep, supportive friendship, the two women join forces in a shared struggle to make the impossible possible. A Neon release.

TRT: 341 min
In person: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi by @2220arts

FRIDAY OCTOBER 30 at 2220 ARTS & ARCHIVES! Experience the new 4K restoration of E. Elias Merhige’s BEGOTTEN (1989), followed by DIN OF CELESTIAL BIRDS (2006) and POLIA & BLASTEMA: A COSMIC OPERA (2022)—the first-ever LA presentation of the complete BEGOTTEN CYCLE.

••Exciting Addition: filmmaker E. Elias Merhige will join us in person, joined by creative director & VFX supervisor David Wexler and composer Gavin Gamboa, to introduce and discuss the films!••

The Philosophical Research Society’s 7th House returns to 2220 ARTS + ARCHIVES for an exceedingly rare presentation of Merhige’s visionary trilogy, beginning with his legendary experimental feature Begotten in a new 4K restoration.

Hailed by Susan Sontag as “one of the most important films of modern times” and by Amos Vogel as “obsessional, nightmarish, flamboyantly unsettling,” Begotten is a primal, wordless creation myth. A god destroys himself, giving rise to Mother Earth and an offspring condemned to suffering, death, and rebirth. Its visceral images of violence and ritual seem unearthed from an ancient, unknowable civilization.

Shot in black and white on 16mm reversal film, Begotten was painstakingly rephotographed frame by frame through neutral-density filters—a four-year process requiring some ten hours of work per finished minute. The new 4K restoration at last reveals the weight of its blacks, the force of its whites, and the atmosphere of its grain.

Seventeen years later, Merhige returned to this cosmology with the rarely screened Din of Celestial Birds, tracing the formation of matter, evolution, and consciousness. The cycle culminates in Polia & Blastema, a Gnostic creation myth and cinematic opera with original music and sound design by Gavin Gamboa.

A momentous occasion: the complete Begotten Cycle, three decades in the making, presented together in Los Angeles for the first time.

Tickets and event information via DICE and at 2220arts.org. by @2220arts

ON SALE NOW in Celebration of @dexterstory album T’SOM out Oct 30 @soundwayrecords   KCRW & Worlds Alive present An Evening with @dexterstory performing music from T’SOM, on 11.11 with a live 11-piece band minimum + special guests @2220arts (Link in bio)

Working with frequent collaborators Carlos Niño, Sudan Archives, Kamasi Washington, Jimetta Rose, Georgia Anne Muldrow and Kibrom Birhane, T’som touches on themes of reflection, inner poise and a quest for deeper connections, bound by explorations of traditional rhythms from the Horn of Africa.

“It’s a rich, collaborative statement from an artist who continues to build bridges between Los Angeles’s jazz scene and the sounds of the African diaspora.” QWEST

T’som (pronounced sawm), is a deeply personal work inspired by the spiritual practice of fasting and Story has created a timeless album that reflects on devotion, transformation and the power of letting go.

@kcrw @dexterstory @kibrombirhaine @kahlilc33 @alanlightnermusic @mmmalvidrezzz @rfisher89 @aankhaneal #carlosniño Mike McTaggart. Photo @farahsosa by @2220arts

What does it mean to have a “superfood” available year-round at the grocery store, and what does that convenience cost the people and land from which it comes?

Bajo la Huerta (Beneath the Orchard), a newly commissioned performance lecture by artist Eva Aguila, traces the hidden costs of the avocado trade. Moving between a multi-layered regional story and its global consequences, Aguila examines how far removed we’ve become from the origins of our food, holding the tension between extraction and erasure on one hand, and land, memory, and belonging on the other.

The artist’s personal research includes this collection of images, which looks back at the avocado’s longer history, from a Florida postcard depicting the “alligator pear,” to Mesoamerican depictions, to the giant ground sloths said to have spread its seeds.

Saturday, November 7: doors 7 PM, program 7:30 PM
Sunday, November 8: doors 2 PM, program 2:30 PM

at 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles

Tickets at the link in bio! 🥑

—
Bajo la Huerta is a commission of Active Cultures. Major support provided by the Angeles Art Fund and Teiger Foundation.
—

Slide 6: Figure 4 from “Avocado Cultivation in Michoacan and Archaeological Heritage: Application of LiDAR in Tingambato, Mexico” by Dr. José Luis Punzo Díaz. by @2220arts

Genevieve Yue presents: Richard Fleischer’s THE NARROW MARGIN + Abbas Kiarostami’s TICKETS

Tuesday November 24
@2220arts

book signing: 7:30
film: 8:00

On the occasion of the publication of film scholar and critic Genevieve Yue’s new book TRAINS—part of @fordham_press’s Cutaways series, in which writers trace a single device or theme across an idiosyncratic selection of films—we present a short-and-feature pairing curated and introduced by Yue, preceded by a book signing.

Post-screening reception brought to you by @lamaterialnews, with open bar for Ciné-Club and L.A. Material members. Copies of Trains will be available for purchase courtesy of @storiesbooksandcafe.

Special thanks to Adam Piron, Pauline Kraatz, ellie sunlight moon and Alexandra Jade.

THE NARROW MARGIN
directed by Richard Fleischer
1952, 71m, U.S., DCP

In this taut, white-knuckle thriller from master journeyman Richard Fleischer, an LAPD officer (Charles McGraw) is assigned to protect a witness (Marie Windsor) from gangsters on a cramped, fast-moving train from Chicago to Los Angeles. Shot guerilla-style without permits at Union Station, the film was infamously shelved for two years by Howard Hughes (then the head of RKO Pictures) who wanted to remake it with A-list actors; yet the film is an ideal example of a gritty genre movie with raw, hardboiled chemistry between its then-unknown two leads.

“A nearly perfect B picture.” -Jonathan Rosenbaum

TICKETS (excerpt, 2005)
directed by Abbas Kiarostami
2005, 30m, Italy/Austria, digital

Abbas Kiarostami collaborated with Ermanno Olmi and Ken Loach on the little-seen 2005 anthology film TICKETS, with each filmmaker contributing a short film about European passengers on the same train from Innsbruck to Rome. Kiarostami’s deceptively simple segment follows several conversations between strangers across various social and class divisions, including a man who insists that a stranger is calling on his cell-phone without his permission, and two men who insist on being seated in their reserved seats occupied by other passengers. by @2220arts

This Sunday, Francisco Romero joins us for Local Reconstructions - World and California Premieres!

Place as evidence. Memory as archive. Autobiography as criticism.

Portraits of memory, small victories, quiet defeats, fiction, autobiography, essay, documentary fragments, landscapes, archival footage, interviews, texts, personal memories, imprisonment by geography, language, labor, migration, assimilation, race, place, memory, and belonging.

11/1 - 7:30pm at @2220arts by @2220arts

This Thursday, in our @lightstruckfilm Jan Švankmajer program 3 @2220arts , we are thrilled to be screening his RAREST film of all, one which not only does NOT circulate online, but which Mr. Švankmajer’s studio, Athanor, didn’t even have a copy of (though now they do!). Man and Technology is a short film made as a submission for the “Man and his World” exhibition at Expo 67 in Montreal, but despite being a brilliantly succinct and very satisfyingly Švankmajerian collage animation, it is by far the least known and least seen film of his entire career. For those who’ve investigated the listing for this film on letterboxd or elsewhere online, essentially all reviews/descriptions of the film thus far are of a completely different film by another Czech filmmaker (Josef Vágner) which happens to have a similar title and some (fairly simplistic) stop motion animation, hence its misidentification. But we’re happy to share a still image and the film’s main titlecards here for the first time, so you have a tiny idea of what you’ll be in for this Thursday! We’re so grateful to the Cinémathèque Québécoise for providing this incredible rarity! Program 3 will also feature iconic and beloved classics like Dimensions of Dialogue, Meat Love, and Virile Games, along with lesser known masterworks like Don Juan, Picnic with Weismann, and Game with Stones. Hope to see you there! by @2220arts

Last year, I met Tommy Peltier walking through parking lot in the blazing midday heat carrying a Fuzz pedal. A few days before I had read about his album that @dragcityrecords released and was curious to check out the music. These strange synchronicities in my life always happen. I invited him into the cool shade of my rehearsal space to sip some lemonade and then we got to talking about LA music in the 60s. I was thrilled when he reached out to me wanting to do a show. So, very pleased to announce NOV 13 @2220arts, I will be playing with Superconsciousness band supporting this true LEGEND. Tix in bio. by @2220arts

This week at 2220 is sure to rattle your chains!

Six ghostly visitations, six pagan variations, six witchy celebrations...well, you can see where this is going. Open your boo-bags wide – wild treats await! by @2220arts