|
Films Charas was in some ways very much like the Beck. Tuesday nights. Both series picked Tuesdays so as not to be in conflict with everything else happening in the city, which is, of course, an impossibility. Once you pick Tuesday for something, everything else starts happening on Tuesday. Films Charas also operated as a film series out of a larger institution, the Charas Community Center, in much the same way that the Collective hosts the Beck. A different sort of thing in other ways. Films Charas ran only in the summers. A simple explanation for this. No one could afford to heat the theater in the winter. Different too was the programming. There were local filmmakers, some of whom did experimental work. But the local work was just one of the ingredients. Films Charas also showed documentaries, classic feature films, the revival-house type classics, and Roger Corman films would turn up too. The first time I went to Films Charas it was for their all night Halloween show, which included Corman’s “Bucket of Blood” and ended at daybreak with Toby Hooper’s “Fun House.” The curating of Films Charas didn’t have a straightforward agenda.
The Beck has an agenda (and rightly so!) – avant-garde and subversive art as practiced today and as defined by those who make it. Even when we show old 16mm educational films it’s in order to take a subversive read on those cultural relics. The Quad and Cinema Village have an agenda – mid-level independent feature films released by the smaller distributors. Film Forum and Walter Reade have an agenda –revival theater films, often programmed as a comprehensive series of thematic shows. The old revival houses had an agenda too – a few silent films and a great many classics of European cinema. The Charas agenda was more eclectic. It was a little of everything. Perhaps Ocularis in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, comes closest nowadays. One week it would be a revival house, the next week social issue documentary, the next week local indie feature film, the next week campy exploitation flick, the week after Rudy Burkhardt films, the week after that something else you couldn’t pin down just based on last week’s show. Short films were always paired with features. Double features were not uncommon. In fact, if two films didn’t quite go together, but for whatever perverse reason made sense in some illogical way afterwards, it was what Kevin Duggan liked to call “a ‘Films Charas’ double feature.” That phrase really captures the spirit of the programming. I recall Doris Kornish once saying that films were occasionally picked from the New Yorker Films catalogue not because anyone had seen them, but because these enticing films were unavailable otherwise. No one had seen them. Programming the films was just about the only way to get to see them. So programming was sometimes a shared adventure for both the curator and the audience.
Charas had formerly been a public school building, and the theater had formerly been the gym. A big concrete box, painted black. On the floor were black and green schoolroom tiles, and a few empty patches where they had come away. The room, with all the concrete, was terrible for sound. Not at all ideal for a screening room, and when little shoestring independent films, that had bad sound to begin with, screened there all you heard over the speakers was a sort of garbled muck, you’d have to strain your ears to tell it was sound at all. The filmmakers might be upset. But most people didn’t mind this much. It was, after all, a community film program, not the Lowes Cinemaplex. There was apparent too in the bar off to the side, with Christmas lights strung up (there was always a small crisis every week as whoever was volunteering at the bar had to grope around to find where the Christmas lights were plugged in and unplug them as the films started). You could get a Rolling Rock for $2 from the old fridge that looked like it had been made in the 50s. Now try to imagine beer at your local movie theater concession stand. Not long ago someone at the Beck asked me, “Would it be alright if we went out and snuck a beer back in?” “This is the Beck,” I explained, “you can go out and bring a beer back in.” No ushers with flashlights at either place (although it might be fun to do some sort of screening where we did harass the audience with performance artist ushers. What do you say, Bradley?)
This sense of Films Charas as a homegrown local venue was made all the more apparent, not only by the schoolroom chairs that sat the audience, but by the two couches – that’s the dragged-in-off-the-street type couches – that served as the front row. I remember finding it really quite charming, the couches. More such places need couches to seat the audience. When Maohla Dargis described Films Charas as a “nuked-out suburban den” she meant this as a wholehearted compliment. And the couches certainly contributed to this. One summer my girlfriend Alyssa and I found ourselves with fleabites. Where did we get fleabites? It seems the Charas couches had had a family of fleas take up residence. Next summer the couches had disappeared.
But perhaps the fleas were not the highlight of the Charas interlopers to those who’d been around a little longer than me. I remember Sheila Keenan saying to the rest of the Films Charas folks, “Do you remember the rats ?” When a story begins “do you remember the rats?” you’ve got people’s attention.
In the old days, Films Charas used to serve popcorn, for that real moviehouse experience. There was, and still continued to be a bar, behind which they kept the little brown bags of popcorn, a big trash barrel, and such. On a couple of occasions Sheila heard some sort of sound from behind the bar as the screening was going on. It was the sound of rustling popcorn bags. But in true “the show must go on” spirit, rather than worry about the presence of the rats rustling around the discarded popcorn bags, she worried about the audience finding out about the presence of the rats. And so the folks at the bar started to try and make little rustling noises themselves with their own popcorn bags and whatever else was handy, so that anyone else who noticed the sound of the rats would think it was just the Films Charas folks inconsiderately fidgeting with things during the screening. There were no rats by the time I was helping out at Films Charas, and also no popcorn.
The booth at Films Charas was an adventurous place to be a projectionist. There was one big, wide window. The projectors were locked away in a closet downstairs and had to be carried up this set of wooden steps with no railing – very much like the Collective’s booth in that respect, now that I think about it, with its wooden ladder of 2x6s. So far I have not killed myself on either. The booth itself was relatively roomy. The green old grumpy 16mm Bell & Howell auto-load projectors were set up with torn up bits of old announcement cards under the rubber feet to get them level. As the equipment was locked away the sound needed to be hooked up each time. Sound was always a terrible problem at Films Charas, in that great big cement cube. At one time it was thought to hang fabric. The huge bolt of fabric someone got for this purpose was so pitifully small in that space. Two or three lengths and it was all used up, and judging from its coverage, Films Charas acoustics were now about 3% improved. A second set of speakers was set up one summer, hanging half-way-back so that the people in the back didn’t have to hear the sound coming all the way from the front, and presumably picking up a good deal of echo along the way. Did this improve things? It’s hard to say. It certainly did when Tessa Hughes-Freeland and Ela Troyano did a Jean Genet inspired multiple projection-performance there. The sound was on CD, with hard stereo; as the speakers were set up with left for the front and right for the back (after all, it didn’t matter much for the mono 16mm optical tracks), you had the feeling, with the sound coming from in front and behind you, that you were in some amazing Dolby surround theater. It helped too that their multi-projection piece was quite wonderful. However, the little amplifier that was the Films Charas sound system didn’t seem to like the second set of speakers. It began to heat up. In fact the poor thing would get outrageously hot. You could fry and egg on it, if you so chose, while you were projecting up there.
Features on several reels were not uncommon, and I will never understand how Kevin Duggan coaxed those two clunky, green 16mm Bell & Howell auto-loads into a smooth changeover from one reel to the next. It was always a small disaster when I tried. He would offer some encouragement “You have to try and . . .” but whatever it was those projectors just didn’t want to do it. One of them was no good at rewinding. It was taken to be fixed and came back just as if it hadn’t been touched.
Sometimes you’d have a slightly shrunken film, and this would cause uneven movement around the sound drum giving you a wobbly off-key sound. You could remedy this by putting your finger against the film as it came to the sound drum. And there would be entire feature films where you would have to project with one finger on the projector, like the fabled Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, for the entire hour and a half. I remember a print of “The Wicker Man” was like that. On three reels. As ridiculous as that experience might be, it did make you feel that as projectionist you were really doing something to make a good screening happen, not just pushing a button and taking a nap, but having to call up some esoteric skill to remedy the situation.
One summer, back when Kevin was still projectionist, Films Charas devoted the greater part of its season to a wildly ambitious series: “The Film-Makers’ Cooperative from A to Z.” The original plan for this was to show every single film in the Film-Makers’ Cooperative. But how long would it take to screen all umpteen thousand films? Serra said that Larry Gottheim, when he was actively involved with the Coop, once calculated how long it would take to screen every work in the Cooperative, and it was some staggering number . . . something like three years. So the original plan was put aside, and “The Film-Makers’ Cooperative from A to Z” took the form of showing film by every filmmaker in the Coop, that is, the shortest film by every member of the Coop. The films would be shown in the same format as the catalog, in alphabetical order by filmmaker, starting with “A” in late May and ending with “Z” in early October. I remember there was something quite wonderful about this grab-bag series – it was like the Poetry Project’s New Years Day Marathon, but with films instead of poets. What was most memorable was how, by chance of alphabet, the filmmakers and their works jumped quirkily from one to the next, established, unknown, serious, mirthful, formalist, personal, straightforward, mystic, plain off-kilter. I remember seeing films that certainly didn’t screen all that often – if at all – which felt like exciting discoveries: Rosalind Schneider’s double exposed erotica called “ON,” and Andrej Zdravic’s “Phenix,” featuring patients in a burn center which, I remember being very beautiful and moving, in spite of the fact that you had to watch it while covering your eyes the whole time. Bill Brand was surprised recently to learn that I had seen “Tree,” his first film. “You saw ‘Tree’? Where did you see it?” he asked. It was there in “The Film-Makers’ Cooperative from A to Z.” MM Serra, for several summers running, did the wonderful series known as “X-Rated Films By Women Artists” which not only sold out, but on at least one occasion so many people turned up that a great many had to be turned away.
Something that I suppose would best be forgotten, but somewhat fondly remembered: Films Charas has the dubious honor of being one of those struggling arts organizations that was actually able to throw a benefit for itself where the benefit lost money. Dubious yes, but an achievement like this has to be thought of as an honor nonetheless. It happened to have been a wonderful show. There was a good attendance. But it illustrates too just how, for any struggling arts organization, what’s worth doing as art, curating, appreciating, is not always what will put the books in the black.
Films Charas did have a membership program to help raise money. As a member you got a Films Charas tee shirt. Every filmmaker whose work was shown there got one too. Some of the early ones featured a praying mantis. One of the last – a white shirt with a stark graphic in black, yellow and orange – was of a burning trashcan. What image is more emblematic of the East Village than a burning trashcan? Well, at the time it was.
There was a community of Films Charas folks, people who were regulars, the audience, but also filmmakers, and the whole Films Charas crew, who would donate their time: Doris Kornish, Kevin Duggan, Sheila Keenan and Sheila McManus, Greg Masters, Karen, Rob Massie, Tina Kacandes. Tom Doran, and many others. There was a plan at one time for a book of Tom Doran’s photos of filmmakers who came in person to Charas. Perhaps it will still happen.
And now Films Charas and the Beck share more in common than being offbeat Tuesday night film societies. Both are casualties of the flux of art space and the real estate market. While Films Charas is gone, Doris now runs the Pioneer Cinema. The Beck will be moving to Participant. Still, one wonders about the loss of something. When I interviewed MM Serra for the film about the Film-Maker’s Coop losing their old space, this was the point she made:
I don’t believe it’s like “Oh it’s survival of the fittest,” because you know who the ideal and who the fittest are. Like the Collective for Living Cinema was a really important place for me when I came to New York. Because the Collective for Living Cinema, I remember when they started having trouble and moved into a space that was three times their old rent. It was such a wonderful organization, ’cause Collective for Living Cinema showed experimental film every day. And it was wonderfully programmed. But it was just the idea that you could go, you could see things. And when they lost their space they disappeared. And they're not really replaced. You don’t replace the energy. Also there was a place called Rap Arts Center on 4th Street. They were a multimedia place. “Bang on a Can” was there, and they disappeared. The Gas Station, which was wonderful. Now what is it? It's condos. The East Village used to have 200 galleries, and where are they?
Charas is now facing the possibility of becoming NYU dorms. The landlord of 145 Ludlow is trying to get a permit to have the building torn down. If arts will survive here it will be as the weed that grows in the crack in the cement. This was almost going to be the final image of the short film “Weimar” before I decided that such an image would be unforgivably cliché – and so we have the burning bouquet instead. But for Charas perhaps the image of the burning trashcan said it all, a relic of an East Village that once was.
The shrewd graffitist has written: “Lower your rent – mug someone.” So perhaps, as an act of public service, when you leave the screening tonight, and as the Collective finds itself priced out of the new Lower East Side, you could do us a favor and mug someone. And when you refuse your victim’s wallet, and are given a questioning look – what mugger would refuse a person’s wallet? – and are asked in trepidation what it is you want, you might then answer, “Nostalgia.”
|
