Anticipation of the Night marked a major breakthrough for Stan Brakhage, a shift away from recognizable narrative toward a purely subjective cinema that defies description. Roughly moving from the exuberant perspectives of children to the subjective experience of a suicidal artist, this silent film offers a poetic flow of images. As film scholar P. Adams Sitney wrote, its “great achievement is the distillation of an intense and complex interior crisis into an orchestration of sights and associations which cohere in a new formal rhetoric of camera movement and montage.” The Film-Makers’ Cooperative was formed in part to enable the distribution of this film. While the Coop focused on distribution, Millennium Film Workshop was created to foster the production and exhibition of personal cinema. Bronx-born underground film legend Mike Kuchar was a mainstay at Millenium Film workshop for many years, working as a projectionist, teaching filmmaking workshops, and presenting his films. Green Desire, a rare color film for Kuchar, is a sexual-coming-of-age narrative shot “in breast-high grasslands and yellow meadows,” as Kuchar described it. Kuchar will participate in a post-screening conversation with Andrew Lampert, former archivist at Anthology Film Archives, who oversaw its restoration of Green Desire.
Anticipation of the Night. 1959. USA. Directed by Stan Brakhage. Courtesy Harvard Film Archive. 16mm. Silent. 40 min.
Green Desire. 1966. USA. Directed by Mike Kuchar. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. 16mm. 20 min.
Program approx. 60 min.