December 3, 2024

In honor of Stefan’s birthday and the approaching new year, the From Below Microcinema is offering two screenings this week in the form of two visions of the future: Flaming Ears **(1992), on *Tuesday, 12/3, *at 7pm, which you can RSVP for here, and *Running Man (1987), *on *Thursday, 12/5, *also at *7pm, *which you can RSVP for here.

Doors will be at* 6:50* and we’re starting the movies at 7:10!

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*Flaming Ears *is an Austrian no-budget, trans-lesbian sci-fi experimental film shot on 8mm. The “plot” sets the movie in 2700 in a burned out city, Asche, where a pyromaniac, a vermin-eating alien dressed in red latex, their friends, and their enemies, meander around in the rubble. Much more than the plot, the charm of this film lives in the grainy, hand-made beauty that only reveals itself when creative, over-ambitious people team up to make a movie with very few resources. The costumes are incredible, there’s interspersed stop animation, a throbbing no-wave soundtrack, and (always a quick way to my heart) an impeccable use of miniatures for special effects and establishing shots. 1991-92 was a key watershed moment for queer avant-garde film, when an underground that had been toiling away broke through in major ways. Flaming Ears is one corner of that cultural mood that has now come to be called “new queer cinema” or “queer new wave.”

Then we have *Running Man, *an action film that plausibly could have been lifted straight from Giorgio Agamben’s theories on sovereignty and violence, but in actuality was penned by none other than Stephen King under the pseudonym “Richard Bachmann.” This movie is a bright, brash, neon mess, a violent Reagan-era dystopia. It stars two future state governors, a hall-of-fame football player, the original host of Family Feud, dancers choreographed by Paula Abdul, a whole stable of pro-wrestlers and powerlifters, and, at last, you have Mick Fleetwood and Dweezil Zappa teaming up to lead the underground insurrectionary resistance to a fascist media company. Clap if you love Dynamo!