I Can Hear the Guitar: Selected by Olivier Assayas
Aug 26—Sep 16
“Violence, subversion, soundtracks: cinema is a vehicle of the counter-culture.” BAMcinématek presents this sixteen-film series featuring the favorite soundtracks and cinematic representations of counter-culture aesthetics of director Olivier Assayas, including his own Cold Water. Here Assayas draws parallels between the emergence of punk and horror, rock n roll and road movies, and more than anything, underscores the immeasurable influence music has had in film in the past forty years. Perhaps more than any other working filmmaker, Assayas imbues his films with music and engages himself and the audience in a continuing dialogue with his soundtracks. Assayas' films have been scored by artists such as John Cale (Paris at Dawn) and Sonic Youth (demonlover), and rock and pop songs abound in his work

Scorpio Rising (1963) 30min
Followed by Vinyl (1965) 66min
Thu, Aug 26 at 6:45, 9pm
“Anger and Warhol start again from zero as if American Cinema never existed before them.” —Assayas. This series launches with a pairing that posits the first of many theories by Assayas regarding music on screen: film scores are a representation of, and window into, the counter-culture. Scorpio Rising, directed by Kenneth Anger, is one of the most influential films ever made (referenced recently in School of Rock’s title sequence) and a homoerotic montage of Brooklyn motorcyclists, fetishizing Wild One-era Brando, set to wall-to-wall pop songs. Vinyl, produced by Andy Warhol, is an adaptation of A Clockwork Orange with Gerard Malanga dancing to a repeating “Nowhere to Run.”

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) 92min
Fri, Aug 27 at 2, 4:30, 6:45, 9pm
Directed by John Carpenter
A street gang wages war on an almost abandoned police station, and the cops and criminals must band together to survive. Renaissance man Carpenter wrote his own electronic music for this suspense classic.

Last House on the Left (1972) 91min
Sat, Aug 28 at 2, 6:45pm
Directed by Wes Craven
“When I first heard The Sex Pistols or The Clash, in 1976, I had the feeling that something was changing, that from then on nothing would be the same. So I naturally asked myself the question: where, in cinema, could be found the equivalent of punk, this spirit, this innovation? I found it in the new horror films. These young filmmakers made, with very limited means, genre films (because they didn’t have access to anything else), with an anger, an intensity and a transgressive freedom which corresponded to that of punk.” —Assayas. In Craven’s first horror film—inspired by Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, convicts murder two girls, and then end up at one of the girl’s parents’ house by mistake.

The Hills Have Eyes (1977) 89min
Sat, Aug 28 at 4:30, 9pm
Directed by Wes Craven
A true masterpiece of mayhem, as an average American family is hunted by backwoods cannibals in the desert.

Videodrome (1982) 89min
Sun, Aug 29 at 2, 4:30, 6:45, 9pm
Free pre-release raffle of Criterion's Videodrome DVD at all screenings!
Directed by David Cronenberg
With James Woods, Deborah Harry
Woods plays a TV programmer who becomes obsessed with mysterious signals over the airwaves. Things get creepy as Cronenberg indulges his techno-fetish, with a big assist from Howard Shore’s superb proto-industrial score. “One of the great films of the modern world.”—Assayas.

One Plus One (Sympathy for the Devil) (1968) 101min
Mon, Aug 30 at 4:30, 6:45, 9pm
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
With the Rolling Stones
Godard catches the Stones in the studio recording “Sympathy for the Devil,” and juxtaposes it with his own scenes of Marxist revolution acted out by the Black Panthers and new-wife Anne Wiazemsky. A fascinating artifact of its day, and an impossible combination of talents working together. “London then is a city at full boil, one of the capitals of the counter-culture. One Plus One is the film which best captures this ambient fever.”—Assayas

Two Lane Blacktop (1971) 102min
Tue, Aug 31 at 4:30, 6:45, 9pm
Wed, Sep 1 at 4:30, 6:45, 9pm Added screening!
Directed by Monte Hellman
With James Taylor, Warren Oates, Dennis Wilson
Beginning with Easy Rider, there has long been a connection between rock n’ roll and the American “road” film. This film (along with Electra Glide in Blue and Vanishing Point) continue that tradition and “represent the first wave of the American independent cinema.” —Assayas. The best of the 70s existential car chase movies (and the subject of its own tribute album, You Can Never Go Fast Enough), Two Lane Blacktop stars singer Taylor as a laconic driver devoted only to his car and to the endless pursuit of speed.

Gummo (1997) 89min
Thu, Sep 2 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Harmony Korine
With Jacob Reynolds, Chloe Sevigny
After scripting Kids, Korine directed Gummo at the tender age of 23, making it the rare film about disaffected youth actually made by a disaffected youth. Korine spares none of the dark details of growing up in Xenia, Ohio, but his esoteric visual sense and eclectic choice of music (from black metal to avant-garde) gives the movie a unique style.

Cold Water (1994) 92min
Fri, Sep 3 at 2, 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Olivier Assayas
With Cyprien Fouquet, Virginie Ledoyen
Made as part of a series produced by French television depicting autobiographical stories of filmmakers at age 16, Assayas’ contribution takes place in 1972. Young lovers Gilles and Christine are separated after she gets caught during a robbery attempt. She is committed and he drifts aimlessly, until a rendezvous at a party in the country. Cold Water features the most celebrated sequence in any Assayas film, an astounding set piece scored to 60s rock-n-roll playing, and often repeating mid-song, from a turntable.

Rude Boy (1980) 135min Original and restored edition!
Sat, Sept 4 at 3, 6, 9pm
Directed by Jack Hazan, David Mingay
“London’s burning with boredom now…” Part-time roadie for The Clash Ray Gange slinks about London, seeing club gigs and a huge outdoor anti-Nazi league rally. This is a portrait of London on the social brink, loaded with performance and rehearsal footage of The Clash, as the band mixes with their fans. Screening dedicated to Joe Strummer.

Casino (1995) 178min
Mon, Sep 6 at 2, 5:30, 9pm
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Slightly misunderstood on release when violent American cinema was on the rise, Scorsese’s blistering ode to blind ambition is absolutely ripe for reconsideration. With a soundtrack featuring what may very well be the most obsessive use of pop music ever in a commercial film. Scorsese creates, “his own personal juke-box, in a kind of continuous commentary on the images.”—Assayas

Electra Glide in Blue (1973) 114min
Tue, Sep 7 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by James William Guercio
Directed by the former manager of Chicago, this fantastic oddity stars Robert Blake as a diminutive highway patrolman. As the original ads had described it: “He’s a Good Cop. On a Big Bike. On a Bad Road.” Cinematography by the late, great Conrad Hall.

Blue Velvet (1986) 120min
Mon, Sep 13 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by David Lynch
The story: small town, a lost ear, a young boy, a closet hide-out, Pabst Blue Ribbon, trouble. Assayas asks us to pay attention to the sound design: “Lynch invents an entirely new language. He entirely renewed the borders of what was allowed and what was not, of what was thinkable and what was not. I’m not speaking of his uses of pieces of music, but rather the way in which he makes use of various layers of sound montage as if they were so many instruments.”

Vanishing Point (1971) 108min
Tue, Sep 14 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Dir. Richard C. Sarafian
Renegade driver Kowalski (Newman) bets that he can drive a Dodge Challenger from Denver to Frisco in fifteen hours! Full of symbolism and 60s-era political discontent, this is one of the best road films ever, made sweeter by the sounds laid down by Cleavon Little’s DJ Super Soul.

Downtown 81 (1981) 71min
Thu, Sep 16 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Dir. Edo Bertoglio
Jean Michel Basquiat plays himself in this surreal day-in- the-life of a homeless street artist in the East Village, wandering into bars and punk rock clubs, trying to find a girl to spend the night with. On the way he encounters a virtual who’s-who of the 80s downtown music and art scene, including Debbie Harry, Amos Poe, Vincent Gallo, and John Lurie.

Photo: One Plus One, courtesy of Photofest