Kathy Acker

I am so endlessly alone. Whats my illusions, whats my odds, and illusions have to be killed, I don't have more time to destroy. Is my loneliness real and is my longing about what? Then who are this people?

A young woman becomes obsessed with pornography and the mysterious rich patrons of the Times Square porn theater where she works selling tickets.

A short film based on the literary work of author Kathy Acker. Set in the 60's and 70's, a young female writer explores her identity through sex and writing.

Inspired in form by American police TV shows and soap operas, The Golden Boat is a madcap, surreal dash through the streets of New York city, telling the mysterious and often hilarious story of an aged street-person named Austin, a comically compulsive assassin, as he joins up with a young rock critic and philosophy student named Israel Williams. In the course of their adventures, Austin pursues his object of desire - a Mexican soap opera star - and along the way engages a host of TV characters and bit players, whose repartee range from gangsterish insults to the question of God's existence.

"Blood and Guts in High School" features actress Stephanie Vella in a series of video installations that re-imagine punk-feminist icon Kathy Acker’s book of the same title. The book received noteriety from 1978-1982 during the rise of Reagan republicanism and the emergence of punk rock. In Parnes’ interpretation, each video-chapter presents a typical scene in the life of Janie bracketed by US news events from the time period in which the book was written. These events saturate the character's daily experience, informing her adolescent, nihilistic worldview and her desire for rebellion. As the viewer looks back at pivotal historical events (Jonestown Massacre, Moral Majority, Three Mile Island etc.) connections are drawn in relation to our current political situation.

How to play a melody? A magic moment, unrepeatable. Life is just a bowl of cherries. Film as art as life as film.

The day after recording the video piece that has come to be known as BLUE TAPE (but which was never intended to have a title), Sondheim and Acker made a second, related tape. Commenting on and structured after the first, it similarly documents a charged intellectual and sexual encounter but with Sondheim and Acker’s roles reversed. Screened only once, in the UK, this film was presented for the first time in the U.S. at Anthology Film Archives on March 6th, 2023. 1974, 33 min, video.

Kathy Acker talks about being 14, hanging out at the New York Filmmakers Cooperative with Jack Smith, Stan Brakhage, and boyfriend P. Adams Sitney. She speaks to the theft of language, narrative versus myth, and digging herself out of hell. The interview was shot on Halloween night, 1996.