January 9, 2025

Last year, the From Below Microcinema had a great time showing the John Woo/John Travolta/Nic Cage classic *Face/Off. *This week, we follow that up by presents a new program of short films: FACE/ON: CINEMATIC EXPERIMENTS ON THE FACE, on Thursday, January 9nd, at 7 pm.

Here is the link to reserve a seat. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’re starting the movie at 7:10!

Ingmar Bergman was quoted as saying, “for me, the human face is the most important subject of the cinema.” We are testing that assertion with this week’s eclectic collection of face studies. What does it mean to look through the magic mirror of the cinema screen at another’s face? What roles do masks provide? How does looking at another’s face rearrange our own sense of subjectivity, and can they look back at us?

There will be a wild array of different approaches presented, from delightful and uncanny animations from the likes of Bill Plympton and Marie Losier, to hyperreal moving portraiture by Andy Warhol and Tsai Ming-Liang, from psychotronic flicker films by Paul Sharits and Toshio Matsumoto, to absurdist comedy from a collaboration between Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton, plus many more.

We’ve been devising this program for several months now (face studies, as it turns out, is a bit contagious) and we are extremely excited to share this one-of-a-kind program with you. So, to paraphrase David Bowie, we invite you to turn and face the strange f-f-f-f-faces.

FACE/ON* is part of a two week program that we will be following up next week with one of our favorite, and as of yet, fairly underseen 2024 films: A Different Man (directed by Aaron Schimberg), which explores facial disfigurement and inner selfhood in unexpected and beguiling ways. Keep an eye out for that next week!*