Harpur Cinema

Programmed by Assistant Professor Kenneth White (Cinema) and Associate Professor Brian Wall (Cinema).

Friday, September 24 and Sunday, September 26:
BISBEE ’17 (Robert Greene, 2018, 112 min)
Radically combining collaborative documentary, western, and musical elements, the new film by Robert Greene (Kate Plays Christine) follows several members of a close-knit community as they attempt to reckon with their town’s darkest hour. In 1917, nearly two-thousand immigrant miners, on strike for better wages and safer working conditions, were violently rounded up by their armed neighbors, herded onto cattle cars, shipped to the middle of the New Mexican desert, and left there to die. This long-buried and largely forgotten event came to be known as the Bisbee Deportation. Bisbee ’17 documents locals as they play characters and stage dramatic scenes from the controversial story, culminating in a large scale recreation of the deportation itself on the exact day of its 100th anniversary. These dramatized scenes are based on subjective versions of the story and offer conflicting views of the event, underscoring the difficulty of collective memory, while confronting the current political predicaments of immigration, unionization, environmental damage, and corporate corruption with direct, haunting messages about solidarity and struggle.

Friday, October 1 and Sunday, October 3:
SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS (Lisa Rovner, 2020, 86 min)
The remarkable untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers, composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly transform how we produce and listen to music today. The film maps a new history of electronic music through the visionary women whose radical experimentations with machines redefined the boundaries of music, including Clara Rockmore, Daphne Oram, Bebe Barron, Pauline Oliveros, Delia Derbyshire, Maryanne Amacher, Eliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani, and Laurie Spiegel. With the wider social, political and cultural context of the 20th century as our backdrop, this all archival documentary reveals a unique emancipation struggle, restoring the central role of women in the history of music and society at large. With Laurie Anderson as our narrator, we’ll embark on a fascinating journey through the evolution of electronic music. We’ll learn how new devices opened music to the entire field of sound, how electronic music not only changed the modes of production but in its wide-ranging effects also transformed the very terms of musical thought. Sisters with Transistors is more than just the history of a music genre: it's the story of how we hear and the critical but little-known role female pioneers play in that story.

Friday, October 22 and Sunday, October 24:
REPO MAN (Alex Cox, 1984, 92 min)
It’s 4 A.M. Do you know where your car is? An out-of-work rocker accepts a cash offer to drive a car out of a seedy part of town. Unbeknownst to him, he is the one repossessing the vehicle! He teams up with the real repo man, but then a $20,000 reward is offered for a repo'd Chevy. A quintessential cult film of the 1980s, Alex Cox’s singular sci-fi comedy Repo Man stars the always captivating Harry Dean Stanton as a weathered repo man in a desolate Los Angeles, and Emilio Estevez as the nihilistic middle-class punk he takes under his wing. The job becomes more than either of them bargained for when they get involved in repossessing a mysterious—and otherworldly—Chevy Malibu with a hefty reward attached to it. Featuring the ultimate early eighties L.A. punk soundtrack, this grungily hilarious odyssey is also a politically trenchant take on President Reagan’s domestic and foreign policies. The program on Friday, October 22, features a conversation with Professor Brian Wall (Cinema) and Claire Kovacs (Curator, Binghamton University Art Museum). This program is a special presentation in coordination with the exhibition “Now form a band”: A punk exhibition in 3 chords on view at the Binghamton University Art Museum from September 10—December 11, 2021. For more information, visit: Binghamton University Art Museum

Friday, October 29 and Sunday, October 31:
AGAINST THE MAINSTREAM: SHORT FILMS BY SADIE BENNING, BETZY BROMBERG, ABIGAIL CHILD, AND LESLIE THORNTON
PETIT MAL (Betzy Bromberg, 1977, 18 min) 
PEGGY AND FRED IN HELL: THE PROLOGUE (Leslie Thornton, 1988, 19 min)
MAYHEM (Abigail Child, 20 min, 1987)
IT WASN’T LOVE (Sadie Benning, 1992, 20 min)
The program consists of low-budget, self-produced short films by female artists, which were shot or recorded in their homes and neighbors, featuring their friends and acquaintances. Any of them may not express a political message but an attitude against the norms established by the society or the film industry. Although it has been decades since these films were produced, they are still influential on film and video artists today. Programmed by Professor Tomonari Nishikawa (Cinema). This program is a special presentation in coordination with the exhibition “Now form a band”: A punk exhibition in 3 chords on view at the Binghamton Art Museum from September 10—December 11, 2021. For more information, visit: www.binghamton.edu/art-museum/.

Friday, November 5 and Sunday, November 7:
DARK NIGHT (Tim Sutton, 2016, 86 min)
A haunting, artfully understated critique of American gun culture, Tim Sutton’s third feature is loosely based around the 2012 massacre in Aurora, Colorado that took place during a multiplex screening of The Dark Knight Rises. Employing a mesmerizing documentary-style technique and a cast of non-professional actors, Dark Night follows the activities of six strangers over the course of one day, from sunrise to midnight, the shooter among them. Shot in Sarasota, Florida and lensed by veteran French DP Hélène Louvart (Pina, The Beaches of Agnès), the dream-like visuals articulate both Sutton’s carefully crafted landscapes and the characters’ sense of alienation and suburban malaise. Winner of the Lanterna Magica Award at the Venice Film Festival following its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, Dark Night is essential viewing, not only for art-house filmgoers, but for anyone invested in the debate over gun violence in America as well.

Friday, November 12 and Sunday, November 14:
LIFE AND NOTHING MORE (Antonio Méndez Esparza, 2017, 114 min)
In his remarkable second feature—winner of the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award—Spanish-born filmmaker Antonio Méndez Esparza follows-up his debut drama Aquí y allá with another sensitive portrait of a struggling family. Stressed by her job in a diner, single mother Regina (Regina Williams) is raising her two children in northern Florida. When her 14-year-old son Andrew (Andrew Bleechington) has another brush with the law, she worries he’ll wind up in prison like his father. Méndez Esparza employs documentary-style realism in this snapshot of race, class and the bonds of family in contemporary America.

Friday, November 19 and Sunday, November 21:
THE WOMAN WHO RAN (Hong Sangsoo, 2020, 77 min)
The 24th feature from Hong Sangsoo, The Woman Who Ran follows Gamhee (Kim Minhee), who has three separate encounters with friends while her husband is on a business trip. Youngsoon (Seo Youngwha) is divorced, has given up meat and likes to garden in her backyard. Suyoung (Song Seonmi) has a crush on her architect neighbor and is being hounded by a young poet she met at the bar. Woojin (Kim Saebyuk) works for a movie theater. Their meeting is polite, but strained. Before long, their shared history bubbles to the surface. With characteristic humor and grace, Hong takes a simple premise and spins a web of interconnecting philosophies and coincidences. The Woman Who Ran is a subtle, powerful look at dramas small and large faced by women everywhere.