Gary Indiana

A documentary on serial killer films.

Germany, right after the re-unification. The people are out of control, blind hatred towards immigrants is common sense. In this time, a social-worker, with the mission to bring a Polish family to their destination (an immigration camp in a little provincial town called Rassau), gets kidnapped just as the family. Chief inspector Koern and his girl-friend start to investigate in this matter in Rassau, exploring a world of obsessive sex, mislead lust and an over-whelming irrational love to the German nation, infiltrating anyone's mind. Rascism doesn't start with shaved hair and boots but rather in the middle of society itself...

A comedy about New York and its eccentric inhabitants. A French filmmaker comes to New York to show her film at MOMA. Fascinated by the city, she decides to stay.

In this entrancing documentary on performance artist, photographer and underground filmmaker Jack Smith, photographs and rare clips of Smith's performances and films punctuate interviews with artists, critics, friends and foes to create an engaging portrait of the artist. Widely known for his banned queer erotica film Flaming Creatures, Smith was an innovator and firebrand who influenced artists such as Andy Warhol and John Waters.

The final installment in Ulrike Ottinger’s Berlin Trilogy (following TICKET OF NO RETURN and FREAK ORLANDO) casts Delphine Seyrig as the nefarious Fritz Lang supervillain Dr. Mabuse, here the head of a powerful media empire that seeks to create headlines by manufacturing (and then publicly destroying) its own celebrity: the wealthy, handsome playboy Dorian Gray.

When Jill Godmilow’s movie Roy Cohn/Jack Smith premiered at the 1994 Toronto International Film Festival, the number of AIDS-related deaths was reaching an all-time high in the United States (over 270,000). In New York City, the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic, many artists and filmmakers were grappling with the disease. While Broadway was hosting the second part of Tony Kushner’s award-winning play Angels in America, downtown New Yorkers were fondly recalling another recent production, Ron Vawter’s one-man show Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, in which the actor, who died of AIDS in April 1994, performed two monologues, first as Cohn, the conservative lawyer, and secondly, as Smith, the flamboyant experimental filmmaker—both of whom died of AIDS-related causes in the late 1980s.

New Cinema cofounder Becky Johnston recently described this little-seen feature as “an East Village reinvention of the Otto Preminger movie *Laura*” that plays “fast and loose with the noir detective genre.”

A Nietzschian parable on the fate of innocence, THE TRAP DOOR follows the mishaps of Jeremy (John Ahearn) as he is fired by his boss (Jenny Holzer), gets laughed out of court by Judge Gary Indiana, loses his girlfriend to sleazy Richard Prince, is hustled by prospective employer (Bill Rice) and mauled by predatory bird-women. Finally, he seeks the help of a shrink (the legendary Jack Smith) who turns out to be the most demented of all.

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A woman, Nadja, searches for her sister's murderer. This search goes through differing moments of reality, or unreality, that overlap within facets of a broken-up time sense. In this emulation of film noir, the investigative structure does not create suspense; the dialectic murderer/victim does not exist. The crime is fabricated bit by bit, like the staging of a spectacle, and it is in the traditional tools of seduction (the spiked heels) that the weapons will be hidden. Ultimately, the crime Nadja achieves makes her neither a triumphant heroine nor a victim.

In this ostensible murder mystery, the genre elements are merely a pretext for the series of haunting (if inconclusive and only mildly erotic) homo-social encounters he stages. Starting with the familiar premise of the absent woman, so popular with Downtown filmmakers, Vogl drains his storytelling of any hints of noir stylization. Instead of nighttime scenes, slick streets, and dark alleys, he shoots documentary-style on the nondescript, sunlit streets of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and City Island in a manner that casually references the art-film angst of Michelangelo Antonioni.

“Inspired by the prose poem by Francis Ponge, SOAP is a series of monologues and stories concerning an object to which everyone has a relationship. Through the vehicle of soap, the actors talk about a variety of other subjects: family relationships, childhood, AIDS, World War II, love. With Alex Melamid, Walter Steding, Laura Cottingham, Bill Rice, Leslie Singer, Stephen Prina, and others.” –PARTICIPANT INC

Shot in Sausalito in 1969 and released in 1970, it is subtitled ‘The Story of Bonnie and Hyde’, and is the story of a nymphomaniac who meets an exhibitionist. It’s a creative and humorous madcap romp, and features entertaining artwork by Roger Brand. It also features a sexual encounter between the film’s star Grinda Pupic and a coke bottle.

Autobiographical film about Loulou (Jackie Raynal) who seeks a job as an editor on Broadway, shares a loft in Soho and marries an entrepreneur.

Seduced by the country, in which German director Dieter Schidor saw a decadent tropical charm, he brought together a varied group of people and involved them in the production.

“PLUTOT LA VIE is one of many ‘scratch films’ made specifically to be shown at Cabaret RAF, a vaudeville and variety show presented at irregular intervals at Passerby at Gavin Brown Space and Participant, Inc between 2004-05. PLUTOT LA VIE accompanied an evening of hypnosis demonstrations and performances by a fakir and a fire artist. Assembled from degraded prints of BLONDE VENUS, M, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, CRIMINAL LOVERS, DEAD OF NIGHT, TRIUMPH OF THE WILL and THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE, PLUTOT LA VIE is a meditation on the society of the spectacle and mass hypnosis.” –PARTICIPANT INC

This short video portrait of the great East Village painter, writer, and actor Bill Rice – made by his friend and colleague Tom Jarmusch – also features a memorable appearance from Gary Indiana.

“SEDUCTION OF PATRICK is a satire about unrequited love. A flirting Patrick becomes the object of Gary’s desire. Later rejected and rebuffed by Patrick, Gary talks with friends who help him attempt to figure out where Patrick’s sexuality lies.” –“Michel Auder: Selected Video Works 1970-1991” (Anthology Film Archives)

Re-scanned TV footage of George Bush’s inauguration narrated in real-time by Gary Indiana, Viva, Alex Auder, and Nick Nehez’s grandmother.

“UNFINISHED STORY is an episodic video collaboration between Gary Indiana and the photographer Lynn Davis, a series of conversations and readings of works-in-progress shot in the artist’s apartment over the course of a difficult year.” –PARTICIPANT INC