The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, May 4-10
The Flicker (1966)
Directed by Tony Conrad
The recently deceased experimental musician and filmmaker Conrad’s first film unfolds literally as an alternation between light and dark. This half-hour-long work begins with a warning to viewers “to remain in the theatre only at your own risk,” and with a note for a physician to be on hand. From there, white and black exchange places onscreen while a soundscape characterized by Conrad as “homemade electronic music” plays. Although Conrad did not record images of any human figures for The Flicker, it is easy for a spectator to sense myriad, variously shaped beings emerging before one’s eyes. “The film is messing with me!” this critic wrote in a notepad during a screening of The Flicker; “The film is really messing with me!” was then noted later on. It is to Conrad’s credit that many of The Flicker’s viewers have had similar reactions to a work that, in its way, presents the essence of cinema: A seemingly blank canvas with the power to encompass whole worlds. The Flicker will screen at Anthology Film Archives in a preserved 16mm print together with three short films directed by fellow Essential Cinema filmmaker Bruce Conner. Aaron Cutler (May 7, 5:30pm at Anthology Film Archives’s “Essential Cinema”)