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Light Industry

@lightindustry

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Light Industry is a venue for cinema in all its forms, overseen by @edhalter and Thomas Beard.
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4 years ago
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Alfred E. Green’s Four Faces West + André de Toth’s Ramrod Presented by @narrowmarginmag Tuesday, October 13, 2026, 7pm Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn 7pm Four Faces West, Alfred E. Green, 16mm, 1948, 90 mins 9pm Ramrod, André de Toth, 16mm, 1947, 95 mins To mark the release of the fourth issue of Narrow Margin, its editors will present two rarely-screened westerns starring Joel McCrea: Four Faces West, directed by Alfred E. Green, and Ramrod, directed by André de Toth. Issue four, The Western: From B-Z, is dedicated to westerns made at the margins, produced with little means and made from the scraps of the studio system: cheap programmers of Poverty Row, seventy-minute features of cowboys with guns ablaze on the backlot. At once popular and peripheral, these westerns were the morass upon which American cinema was built, the crude oil that fueled an empire. However, they also exist in another lineage, one that includes the films of Luc Moullet, Paul Vecchiali, and any other filmmaker who made art with a poverty of means. With meager resources at their disposal, the filmmakers of these minor westerns discovered that simplicity is often the most honest attitude toward all that is criminal and beautiful in cinema’s Wild West. * Ramrod and Four Faces West not only star Joel McCrea, one of the horse opera’s most cherished stars during the 1940s and 50s; both were also photographed by Russell Harlan, who would go on to shoot Red River, Lust for Life and Hatari!. Just from this partial filmography, Harlan’s sensitivity to the landscape and its inhabitants is obvious: the shrublands traversed by thousands of cattle in Red River; the grasslands filled with giraffes, elephants, and rhinos in Hatari!; the pastoral landscapes of Auvers-sur-Oise and Arles in Lust for Life. Shot on location in Zion National Park, de Toth’s Ramrod is especially sensitive to the life of the desert landscape… - John Winn (continued at lightindustry.org/narrow-westerns) Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door. One ticket good for both shows. taken in Light Industry by @lightindustry
2
6 days ago
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Love is Strong as Death: The Antioquian Cinema of Luis Alberto Álvarez and Víctor Gaviria Sunday, October 18, 2026 at 5pm Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn Presented by the Theater of the Matters and Archipelago Books The Theater of the Matters and Archipelago Books present an evening dedicated to Luis Alberto Álvarez (1945-1996), the late Claretian priest and film critic from the city of Medellín, Colombia. Throughout the 70s and 90s, Álvarez was a galvanizing force in Colombian cinema, a figure akin to André Bazin in the Paris of the 50s. With his prolific writing in El Colombiano and Kinetoscopio, the film journal he co-founded in 1990, Álvarez shaped the ethics and aesthetics of a devoted circle of followers in Medellín, a city far from the center of the national film industry in Bogotá. Guided by a Catholic love for being and for reality, and a belief that “where sin abounds, love abounds much more,” Álvarez was a strong opponent of the placeless tendencies of mainstream Colombian moviemaking, advocating instead for an authentic, regional cinema grounded in the place, people, and tongue of the country, particularly the poor of the Antioquia region and the street youth of his city. An erudite writer on opera and classical music as well, Álvarez found in cinema the “splendor of order”: an art of looking at the world in all its disordered beauty and ugliness and organizing it into a splendid, emotional form. To honor Álvarez’s legacy, we present a chronological selection of films by his friend and student, poet and filmmaker Víctor Gaviria. In Álvarez’s eyes, Gaviria was his country’s first auteur, whose films both observe and transfigure reality on the margins of society, showing a Colombia at once familiar and invisible. This four-film program is organized for the release of Aside From My Heart, All is Well, a novel by Héctor Abad based on the life and times of Álvarez, published in a new English translation by Archipelago Books... - TM Full announcement: lightindustry.org/theater-archipelago taken in Light Industry by @lightindustry
0
16 days ago
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The Machine That Kills Bad People Monday, October 5, 2026 at 7pm Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn Anybody's Woman, Bette Gordon, 1981, digital projection, 24 mins Merrily We Go to Hell, Dorothy Arzner, 1932, digital projection, 83 mins The Machine that Kills Bad People is, of course, the cinema—a medium that is so often and so visibly in service of a crushing status quo but which, in the right hands, is a fatal instrument of beauty, contestation, wonder, politics, poetry, new visions, testimonies, histories, dreams. It is also a film club devoted to showing work—“mainstream” and experimental, known and unknown, historical and contemporary—that takes up this task. Programmed by Erika Balsom, Beatrice Gibson, Maria Palacios Cruz, and Ben Rivers, The Machine that Kills Bad People showed double bills at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts on a bimonthly basis between 2018 and 2026. June of this year brought an end to our regular slot but also marked the publication of a book assembling 39 of the essays commissioned to accompany our screenings. To celebrate this collection, published by The Visible Press, we’re presenting Merrily We Go to Hell and Anybody’s Woman. The first is a pre-Code feature by Dorothy Arzner, full of marital woes, alcohol, and adultery. The second is Bette Gordon’s Super 8 precursor to Variety (1983), featuring Wooster Group members Spalding Gray and Nancy Reilly discussing pornography and fantasy against the backdrop of Arzner’s filmmaking and the Variety theater. - MTKBP Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door. Copies of the book will be available for sale at the snack bar. Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served, except for members subscribed at $8/month or more, who may reserve a seat by emailing information@lightindustry.org at least two hours prior to showtime. Box office opens at 6:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show. taken in Light Industry by @lightindustry
3
17 days ago
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Erika Balsom on A.A.A. Offresi Tuesday, October 6, 2026 at 7pm Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn On the eve of the Berlusconi era, when social mores were changing and Italian television was beginning its rapid transformation into a private enterprise, a feminist collective under contract to public broadcaster RAI2 made an experimental video work that became a national scandal. In 1981, Maria Grazia Belmonti, Anna Carini, Rony Daopoulo, Paola De Martiis, Annabella Miscuglio, and Loredana Rotondo used hidden cameras to observe the interactions of French sex worker Véronique Lacroix and her clients in a Roman apartment—unbeknownst to the men involved. When asked about their use of this technique, they responded, “It’s profoundly dishonest. But everything that relates to the image is always dishonest.” They called their film A.A.A. Offresi; roughly translatable as “A.A.A. Services Offered,” the title recalled a classified ad for sex work, with the three A’s at the start ensuring a good position in alphabetical order. The documentary premiered without incident at the Berlin International Film Festival in February, in what would turn out to be nearly its only official public screenings. On the day it was scheduled to air on Italian television a few weeks later, it was censored. Politicians who had never seen the film were certain it was assault on morality, even though it showed almost no sex and instead focused on discussions before and after, mostly about money. The public weighed in from the left and the right, with one letter-writer going so far as to threaten to blow up a cinema or poison the water supply to the RAI offices if it went on air. Soon, the collective faced criminal charges for the facilitation of prostitution and the invasion of privacy, even though they took care not to show any of the men’s faces. The subsequent trial ended in a full acquittal, but the judge ordered that A.A.A. Offresi remain under indefinite sequestration owing to its use of non-consensual recording. This illustrated talk will tell the story of this controversial film, long presumed to be lost. - EB FREE taken in Light Industry by @lightindustry
0
18 days ago
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First program announcement! The Portal is thrilled to co-present a Chick Strand retrospective with our good friends at @lightindustry to take place this December in San Francisco and New York. This retrospective was the first thing we put in the calendar when we signed the lease and something we have been dreaming about doing with Light Industry for years. Thank you to @canyoncinema for working with us on this program. More details about this series will be announced in the coming weeks and more details on our inaugural calendar will be announced in the coming days. by @lightindustry
14
18 days ago
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The Train Rolls On, Chris Marker, 1971, 32 mins + Happiness, Alexander Medvedkin, 1934, 66 mins Tuesday, September 22, 2026 at 7pm Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn “Just now—today—I have seen our laughter on the screen. And for the second time in just five days I am driven to exclaim with enthusiasm over yet another achievement of our cinema. Today I saw Medvedkin’s comedy, Happiness, and to use the common expression, I cannot remain silent. Today I saw how a Bolshevik laughs. One may begin a comedy with the declaration that Chaplin has no part in it. And it will indeed turn out that Chaplin has no part in it. But one may also make a comedy without thinking about Charlie, and it will turn out that he is in it. Not Chaplin himself, or something borrowed from him. But Chaplin as an indication of magnitude, as a basis for reference, as something profoundly specific. Chaplin ‘in a new quality.’” So begins Sergei Eisenstein’s 1935 review of Alexander Medvedkin’s Happiness, one of the very last silent films made in the Soviet Union. Eisenstein’s excitement for this “new quality,” a kind of communist slapstick, was not, unfortunately, shared by all his contemporaries, and the film was quickly suppressed. Virtually forgotten, Happiness was thought lost until its rediscovery by Jacques Ledoux of the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique in Brussels, who screened it at a 1961 retrospective of Soviet film attended by Ledoux’s friend, Chris Marker. An astonished Marker then became obsessed with finding the film’s creator. In 1967, he participated in the formation of les groupes Medvedkines—filmmaking collectives formed among striking textile and auto workers—and eventually interviewed Medvedkin on-camera for the SLON production The Train Rolls On. Soon after, Marker helped re-release Happiness to cinemas in 1971, preceded by the SLON film for its French run. Happiness is a movie about the misadventures of a peasant (“the last lazybones of the collective farm,” as Medvedkin puts it), who feels out of place in both the old, pre-revolutionary order and the new... Full announcement: lightindustry.org/marker-medvedk taken in Light Industry by @lightindustry
0
18 days ago
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The Theater of the Matters & Archipelago Books present… LOVE IS STRONG AS DEATH: LUIS ALBERTO ALVAREZ & VÍCTOR GAVIRIA October 18 at @lightindustry. One-night-only. An evening dedicated to Luis Alberto Alvarez, the late Claretian priest and film critic of the city of Medellín, Colombia. With films by his friend and student, poet-filmmaker Víctor Gaviria. Organized for the release of ‘Aside From My Heart, All is Well,’ a novel based on the life of Alvarez, written by Héctor Abad. Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean. Published by @archipelagobooks. Guided by a Catholic fascination with being, for reality, and a belief that “where sin abounds, grace abounds much more,” Alvarez and Gaviria sought an authentically Colombian cinema grounded in the place, people, and tongue of the oppressed classes of Antioquia and the street youth of their home city, Medellín. Program details to be announced soon. taken in Light Industry by @lightindustry
2
a month ago
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Three by Anne Haugsgjerd Monday, September 14, 2026 at 7pm Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn Organized by Mike Sperlinger (PRISMS) Life in Frogner, Anne Haugsgjerd, 1986, 21 mins Good Girl...Sit Down!, Anne Haugsgjerd, 1991, 17 mins More Woman More Cry, Anne Haugsgjerd, 2021, 24 mins Anne Haugsgjerd (b. 1944) is a filmmaker for whom the obstacles to success have become subject matter. She has been making short films since the 1980s, but for a long time received little recognition, either in Norway’s relatively conservative (and chauvinist) film world or beyond. Undeterred, she has continued to produce an uncategorizable body of films—she herself calls them “bastards.” What they have in common is how Haugsgjerd transforms real filmmaking dilemmas into self-reflexive vignettes full of self-deprecating humor and, increasingly, a wry acknowledgment of her own aging. The nearest comparison is perhaps the much-loved British artist John Smith, but Haugsgjerd’s films return more insistently to the paradoxical impossibility of their own making. Educated as an a graphic designer at the Norwegian School of Crafts and Design, Haugsgjerd only began working with film around 1980, initially as an assistant editor, before directing her first short, Life in Frogner. Haugsgjerd was stuck trying to edit footage she had shot of a well-to-do area of west Oslo when she came across the work of Swedish experimental filmmaker Eric M. Nilsson; a subsequent exchange with Nilsson became the inspiration for the film’s extraordinary voiceover, in which it becomes clear that (to paraphrase John Lennon) a film is what happens when the filmmaker is busy making other plans. Typically for Haugsgjerd’s career, the film won the public prize from the Norwegian short film festival in 1986 only after having been rejected for the same festival’s official program. Her next film, Good Girl...Sit Down!, came similarly out of an editing impasse: what to do with footage from a dog show. Overcome by the ridiculousness of the spectacle, Haugsgjerd made her own ambivalence the film’s red thread... - MS Full announcement: lightindustry.org/haugsgjerd taken in Light Industry by @lightindustry
4
a month ago
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Marie Menken's Wrestling + Raoul Walsh's Gentleman Jim Tuesday, September 8, 2026 at 7pm Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn Wrestling, Marie Menken, 1964, 16mm, 8 mins Gentleman Jim, Raoul Walsh, 1942, 16mm, 104 mins The turn-of-the-century prizefighter James J. Corbett was a natural subject for a Hollywood biopic. He cast the mold for the athlete-as-showman, and was one of cinema’s earliest attractions, lacing up his gloves at Edison’s Black Maria in 1894 for Corbett and Courtney Before the Kinetograph. The film of his 1897 match with Bob Fitzsimmons, clocking in at over 100 minutes, was the longest of its day and, as Dan Streible has noted, “one of the earliest individual productions to sustain public commentary on the cinema.” In Gentleman Jim, our feature this evening, Errol Flynn is perfectly cast as Corbett, a total embodiment of the boxer’s vulpine charisma. Raoul Walsh charts a rake’s progress from modest origins to the height of celebrity. What Corbett brought to the fight game was a “scientific” approach, discerning patterns and with them strategies from a bout’s violent swirl of motion, and Walsh’s art is to bring his own kind of formal order to the chaos. Here as elsewhere in his filmography, deep focus is used to exquisite effect. This orientation, Dave Kehr wrote, “suggests the extension of the world beyond the camera’s range, and even behind it: space is captured whole, unsectioned by planes of focus or composition restrictions. There is seldom a sense of ‘background’ in a Walsh shot: the lines of perspective are almost always allowed to extend, explicitly or implicitly, to the horizon line.” Marie Menken, who opens our program, assumes a rather different posture toward the spectacle of the ring. She described this film, one of her best yet least-seen, as “TV concrète.” Its images are all shot off a television set broadcasting a pro wrestling match, variously distorted by the jerks of handheld camera movement and the compression of the montage. The cathode scene, already lo-res, is abstracted still further—a silent, biomorphic blur. Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door. taken in Light Industry by @lightindustry
0
a month ago
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Double Lunar Dogs, Joan Jonas, 1984, 24 mins + Destination Moon, Irving Pichel, 1950, 91 mins Tuesday, August 18, 2026 at 7pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn Robert A. Heinlein’s significance, his influence on the ambitions of speculative fiction (a term he coined) is hard to overstate. He is remembered not only for his prolific output and formal sophistication, but also his outspoken and unconventional politics, which veered from socialism to libertarianism over the course of his life, but always resisted easy categorization. A Heinlein tale might seem to celebrate military service, free love, or both. In Samuel Delany’s study of the elder author, he observed that “modern critics attempting to wrestle with that influence find themselves dealing with an object rather like a sky or ocean. In many respects, Heinlein’s limits are the horizons of science fiction.” This evening, we present two very different translations of Heinlein’s work to the screen: George Pal’s 1950 Hollywood spectacular Destination Moon and Joan Jonas’s gnomic 1984 video Double Lunar Dogs. Co-written by Heinlein himself, Destination Moon was one of American cinema’s earliest attempts to make a serious, big-budget sci-fi film, and the first such production from animation and practical-effects legend George Pal, who would continue to push the genre forward with later titles such as When Worlds Collide, The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. The screenplay collages elements from Heinlein’s postwar juvenile Rocket Ship Galileo and his novel The Man Who Sold the Moon, envisioning a US lunar mission almost two decades before it became reality, here as a Cold War defence project led by a charismatic titan of private industry. (Today its scenario, J. Hoberman noted, seems “far more concerned with geopolitical danger than extraterrestrial exploration.”) As chronicled in a behind-the-scenes report written by Heinlein for the July 1950 issue of Astounding, the author was an active presence on set as technical advisor… Full announcement: lightindustry.org/doubledestination taken in Light Industry by @lightindustry
1
2 months ago
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Double Lunar Dogs, Joan Jonas, 1984, 24 mins + Destination Moon, Irving Pichel, 1950, 91 mins Tuesday, August 18, 2026 at 7pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn Robert A. Heinlein’s significance, his influence on the ambitions of speculative fiction (a term he coined) is hard to overstate. He is remembered not only for his prolific output and formal sophistication, but also his outspoken and unconventional politics, which veered from socialism to libertarianism over the course of his life, but always resisted easy categorization. A Heinlein tale might seem to celebrate military service, free love, or both. In Samuel Delany’s study of the elder author, he observed that “modern critics attempting to wrestle with that influence find themselves dealing with an object rather like a sky or ocean. In many respects, Heinlein’s limits are the horizons of science fiction.” This evening, we present two very different translations of Heinlein’s work to the screen: George Pal’s 1950 Hollywood spectacular Destination Moon and Joan Jonas’s gnomic 1984 video Double Lunar Dogs. Co-written by Heinlein himself, Destination Moon was one of American cinema’s earliest attempts to make a serious, big-budget sci-fi film, and the first such production from animation and practical-effects legend George Pal, who would continue to push the genre forward with later titles such as When Worlds Collide, The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. The screenplay collages elements from Heinlein’s postwar juvenile Rocket Ship Galileo and his novel The Man Who Sold the Moon, envisioning a US lunar mission almost two decades before it became reality, here as a Cold War defence project led by a charismatic titan of private industry. (Today its scenario, J. Hoberman noted, seems “far more concerned with geopolitical danger than extraterrestrial exploration.”) As chronicled in a behind-the-scenes report written by Heinlein for the July 1950 issue of Astounding, the author was an active presence on set as technical advisor… Full announcement: lightindustry.org/doubledestination taken in Light Industry by @lightindustry
0
2 months ago
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