Towards A Fortean Cinema /  by melinda shopsin

Anthology Film Archives
May 14-21, 2026

A committed skeptic who balked at so-called facts and assumed knowledge, Charles Fort (1874-1932) was the preeminent chronicler of inexplicable natural phenomena in the early twentieth century. Guest curators Peggy Ahwesh and Andrew Lampert present a sampler of favorite films and videos that both speak to Fort’s contrarian ideas and take baby steps towards addressing the unanswerable mysteries of our universe. Included are eclectic works dealing with aliens, ghosts, the cosmos, technology, magic, and other Fortean topics, as well as two popular 1980s features concerning young girls with psychic powers, or as Fort called them “wild talents,” that trigger chaos and destruction around them.

Special thanks to Christine Burgin; Canyon Cinema; National Film Board of Canada; Park Circus; Sony Pictures; Universal Pictures; and Video Data Bank.

The Whole Shebang: Celebrating Ken & Flo Jacobs /  by melinda shopsin

Spanning all of April, The Whole Shebang is a fourteen-venue expanded cinema(s) salute to two of experimental cinema's most beloved icons. Ken (1933–2025) and Flo (1941–2025) were inseparable sweethearts and creative partners from the day they met in 1962, and while their passing last year leaves us bereft, it also provides a welcome opportunity to survey their enormous and extraordinary film and digital oeuvre.

This sweeping festival represents an unprecedented aligning of venues across the city, all of whom presented and championed the Jacobs' uncompromising output during the last six-plus decades. Featuring key works, many theatrical and world premieres, and plenty of deep cuts, The Whole Shebang serves as both a remembrance and an introduction to the duo's remarkable achievements and impossible-to-categorize genius.

Organized by Andrew Lampert, each venue has created its own unique program, and works will not repeat between theaters. Screenings will happen at MoMA, Light Industry, Anthology Film Archives, Metrograph, Roxy Cinema, BAM, L’Alliance New York, Spectacle Theater, Film at Lincoln Center, The Rockaway Film Festival, MoMI, Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and Millennium Film Workshop.

Amy Taubin article
J, Hoberman article

Saturday Salon Reading @ Chocolate Factory /  by melinda shopsin

7pm, March 7, 2026
The Chocolate Factory Theater
38-33 24th Street, Long Island City.

In the spirit of the unfinished, the unformed, and the untamed, the Saturday Salons bring together visual artists, writers, musicians, composers, performers, and others to present selections from works-in-process. The rougher the ideas—the more unexpected and outlandish the projects—the better.

Participants: Andrew Lampert, Amy O’Neill, Lauren O’Neill-Butler, Sukhdev Sandhu.

Curated by writer-critic Jennifer Krasinski.

Richard Foreman Film & Video Retrospective /  by melinda shopsin

Astronome by Henry Hills

HIS HEAD WAS A SLEDGEHAMMER: RICHARD FOREMAN IN RETROSPECT

May 21 - 28 @ Anthology Film Archives. Guest-programmed by Andrew Lampert. The retrospective is co-presented by New York University Special Collections, home to the Richard Foreman and Kate Manheim Papers, and The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance.

The term “iconoclast” gets thrown around all too much, but in the case of Richard Foreman (1937-2025) there is hardly a more appropriate synonym to describe him. An unparalleled writer and director who ranks among the premier theater artists of the twentieth century, Foreman was also a local legend whose electrifying work greatly shaped the artistic landscape of downtown New York. The founder and director of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater company, Foreman staged eighty-plus astounding plays in a career that spanned over forty-five years, and most of them were presented here in the neighborhood. Foreman’s brazen avant-garde aesthetic was deeply rooted in his early involvement with Jonas Mekas and the 1960s underground film movement. His very first play, Angelface, was performed in 1968 at Mekas’s Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, one of the organizations that preceded Anthology.

This retrospective both memorializes Foreman, who passed away in January, and celebrates the publication of No Title, his posthumous new book just published by The Further Reading Library. Organized in roughly chronological order, the series includes Foreman’s own films and videos alongside an array of performance documentation, documentaries, and portraits. Foreman retired from the theater in 2013 to focus on filmmaking, and the series includes his final digital videos, many of which have never been publicly screened. In addition to this sweeping survey, we are presenting a sidebar program featuring a handful of Foreman’s most cherished films. Some are the movies that inspired him early on, and others are works that he talked about on a regular basis

THE SHAVER MYSTERY @ Light Industry /  by melinda shopsin

May 8, 2025 @ Light Industry

A book launch event for The Further Reading Library and Richard Sharpe Shaver: Some Stones Are Ancient Books. Featuring chapter 5 from the 1935 serial The Phantom Empire starring Gene Autry, The Passion Pot (2003) by George Kuchar, and a reading by Matt Mullican.


Richard Foreman Lecture @ NYU /  by melinda shopsin

Artists’ Talk with Jennifer Krasinski and Andrew Lampert
Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024, 6:30 PM — 8:00 PM

Krasinski and Andrew Lampert will share aspects of their ongoing research into Richard Foreman. Working together, they have uncovered a plethora of documentation and unstaged material that will be featured in a forthcoming exhibition dedicated to Foreman and his collaborators in the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. They will discuss their process and consider the question of what it means to transmit experience. Foreman's iconoclastic productions are largely irreproducible, and yet they must always be performed anew in order to be seen. What is involved in authentically staging the work of a theater artist who insists that others must not interpret or imitate him when performing his plays? Reception to follow.

Co-moderated by Rye Gentleman and Helen Shaw. Co-sponsored by the Department of Performance Studies and the Division of Libraries. Presented as part of NYU's "Archives Onstage" series, Richard Foreman Wants You to Wake Up.

Conversation on Jordan Belson /  by melinda shopsin

Jordan Belson: Hidden Formations
Curator Raymond Foye and artist Andrew Lampert join Rail contributor Charles Stein for a conversation.
The Brooklny Rail, New Social Environment #1072
Recorded on Wednesday, May 22, 2024 at 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

My Harry @ The Whitney Museum of American Art /  by melinda shopsin

December 8-10, 2023
Whitney Museum of American Art.

I organized a 3-day festival as the public programming component of the exhibition Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith. Carol Bove, co-curator of the exhibit, and I had a conversation on the first evening.

The New Yorker story

https://whitney.org/my-harry

Paper Airplane contest judge Bradley Eros and contestants

Peter Stampfel

Raymond Foye and Charles Stein

James Inoli Murphy

KEN JACOBS: BOOK OF ETERNALISMS @ Corbett Vs. Dempsey /  by melinda shopsin

Ken Jacobs: Book of Eternalisms
March 17 - April 29, 2023
Corbett Vs. Dempsey, Chicago

In celebration of the artist's 90th birthday, Corbett vs. Dempsey excitedly presents a bewildering suite of new works by moving image pioneer Ken Jacobs. A native New Yorker, Jacobs began his artistic career as a painting student of Hans Hofmann in the 1950s, however he quickly concentrated on a more flexible canvas – cinema. A foremost figure in the underground film movement of the 1960s, Jacobs’ decades of restless output include more than forty motion pictures and dozens of expanded cinema performances made with both his self-invented double 16mm “Nervous System” projection apparatus and his nearly indescribable, almost intergalactic “Nervous Magic Lantern.” Since embracing video in 1999, Jacobs has produced well over 150 space-, time-, and perception-bending pieces that transpose his formal and 3D explorations into the digital dimension.

The six-part Book of Eternalisms series from 2022 is composed of the GIF-like digital works that Jacobs has been producing in recent years. Hovering somewhere between street photography and abstract expressionism, these strobing images present once static shots of a Manhattan in perpetual 3D motion. Jacobs writes that: “The word eternalism is meant to suggest a movement in time and deep space -seen without special screens or glasses- that stays, doesn't repeat, but keeps happening and can be seen in illusionary depth by both eyes or a single eye. Decades ago my wife Flo and I got into live projection, which is when we first found the eternalism. There was and is no way to seek it out, or even to imagine it. The eternalism befell us while we were performing with two side by side stop-motion 16 mm projectors. We were investigating close frames on two simultaneously projected prints of the same film, using a spinning shutter upfront to alternate and visually meld the images. The resulting illusion of 3D depth could be recorded and played back, but only after switching to video and digital did the precise construction of eternalisms become possible. The momentary blackness created by the spinning shutter in our film performances is now replaced by an interval of opposite colors on the color wheel. Instead of projecting adjacent film-frames, my videos are based on the left and right frames of a twin-lens stereo still-camera. I hire young people, Antoine Catala and Viktor Timofeev, artists in their own right, to actually create eternalisms on the computer as I look on and make requests. They do the formerly impossible! combining perspectives. Moments! that do not repeat as much as prolong, eternalisms, a name to trip over."

(Andrew Lampert)

This program of Ken Jacobs works has been curated by Andrew Lampert for CvsD

Ken Jacobs: Up The Illusion /  by melinda shopsin

Ken Jacobs: Up The Illusion
April 15 - November 26, 2023 @ Broadway Windows gallery

I curated this seven month, 24/7 exhibit for 80WSE gallery in the Broadway Windows space on the corner of 10th St. & Broadway. The exhibit had three cycles, each of which lasted around two and a half months. Seventy-plus titles were exhibited, and they were also made available for online viewing. Drawing and other elements were also included in the windows.

NY TIMES review by Travis Diehl
ARTFORUM review by Amy Taubin