Low Down

A portrait of three remarkable women who were once celebrated figures in the German cultural scene: film star Dolly Haas, dancer Lotte Goslar and artist Maria Ley, Erwin Piscator's widow.

Rosa von Praunheim follows the lives and existential struggles of three contrasting German emigrant women in New York City. The protagonists not only tell of their exciting lives in the hectic metropolis, but many dramatic events also take place during filming.

Documentary about jazz great Chet Baker that intercuts footage from the 1950s, when he was part of West Coast Cool, and from his last years. We see the young Baker, he of the beautiful face, in California and in Italy, where he appeared in at least one movie and at least one jail cell (for drug possession). And, we see the aged Baker, detached, indifferent, his face a ruin. Includes interviews with his children and ex-wife, women companions, and musicians.

Down-and-out jukebox operator Macabee Cohn wanders the cheap tenements, dive bars, and derelict streets of the East Village in search of a mysterious woman in a striped dress.

Photographer Bruce Weber profiles boxer Andy Minsker, including his pro career and family relations, and the boys' boxing club Minsker runs.

A quickfire portrait of the New York City ballroom scene in the ‘80s.

Turned while visiting New York, down-on-her-luck Neue Deutsche Welle vampire Sylvana struggles to get by in 1980s West Berlin when she realizes none of her friends want to be bitten.

Young mattress salesman Brian decides to adopt a baby from China but is distracted when he forms a relationship with quirky, wealthy Harriet whom he meets at his mattress store. As their relationship flourishes, unbeknownst to them, a hitman is trying to kill Brian.

Presented in five vignettes, and starring the brothers of Matt Dillon. The Beauty Brothers offers-up the romance, desire, dreamscapes and frustrations of youth. Part I: Junk Food Conversation, 2:44; Part II: Bedroom Bongos, 2:37; Part III: Dream Wheels, 2:39; Part IV: Poolhopping, 1:47; Part V: Runaway, 2:39

Preiss had the rare chance to salvage a selection of 8mm reeled from his archive; 30 years after it was first shot, this lovingly refashioned material returns as…a luminescent ode to the friends, filmmakers and artists with whom Preiss lived and worked during this time.

“[This video was made while] both Guagnini and Preiss were undergoing and studying Reichian therapy; developed by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, this form of therapy is used to attenuate tension (and therefore, trauma) through very quick breath and eye movements. Preiss’s sharp editing is key in embodying Reichian techniques through film, while much of the repressed trauma informing Guagnini’s performance references a history of the dictatorship in his native Argentina in the 1970s and 80s.” –MISHKIN GALLERY

A celebration of Ken Jacobs' work at 80WSE.

Distilled from 2,500 100-ft rolls of 16mm film shot between 1995 and 2011 – organized sequentially by numbered lab rolls of camera negative into four half-hour parts.

An experimental portrait of the New York gallerist and publisher Christine Burgin told through her Borgesian library of strange and visionary books by such eclectic figures as Dinshah Ghadiali, Eva Carrière, Charles Ford, Richard Shaver, and Wilhelm Reich. Seen through 16mm film, VHS tape, 35mm slide sources as well as the full spectrum of visible color, The Secret World invites us into a self-contained universe of mystical, even crackpot thinking and imagining, as Burgin's longtime friends and "documentarians" Jeff Preiss and Josiah McElheny leaf through "images of lost Atlantis found in a rock, perpetual motion machines or manifested ectoplasm in historic performances." – Museum of Modern Art