The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, August 31-September 6
Now (1973)
Directed by Lynda Benglis
In this twelve-minute video, the celebrated visual artist and video-maker Benglis faces her reflection in front of a monitor and tells herself to start recording. She repeats the command along with other directives (“Go back”, “Now”, “Let’s run that through and see how it is”) and questions (“Do you wish to direct me?”). The sticking out of one’s tongue becomes an act of great importance, and the noisy static of the video monitor is overtaken by strange calls and the sounds of echoing laughter. “It was intended as a mockery,” says Benglis says about Now. “I was mocking my own position on camera and my facing the camera or not facing it, with the monitor being present throughout. I was interested in the fact that I was both the subject and the director. No one was directing me. I was directing myself. I was both object and viewer. I was also interested in the kind of streaming time that was intrinsic to video as opposed to the frame time of film. I was ‘reframing’ the streaming time. In Now, I wanted to play with the layers of that particular sequence.” Now will screen at Anthology together with three other short pieces (directed by Hannah Wilke, Hermine Freed, and Andy Warhol) about surveillance and self-observation. Aaron Cutler (September 3, 7:15pm; September 4, 8:30pm as part of a shorts program within Anthology Film Archives’s “Voyeurism, Surveillance and Identity in the Cinema”)