Strong Medicine

Avant garde film from 1978, by playwright and filmmaker Richard Foreman.

Set in postwar America, a man watches his seemingly perfect life fall apart as his daughter's new political affiliation threatens to destroy their family.

Since the late 1960s, the almost annual productions of Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater have been among New York’s artistic highlights. A legend of the avant-garde theater, Foreman is also a passionate film fan, whose taste ranges from American avant-garde to Manoel de Oliveira. ONCE EVERY DAY marks his first foray into feature filmmaking in 35 years. Highly visual, complexly edited and without a traditional narrative, the film zeroes in on a group of 25 people acting out a series of semi-ritualistic behavior patterns. But their eccentric impulses are aborted in unpredictable ways with each attempt at action or development. According to the director, “The film slowly evolves a time-mosaic of reformatted consciousness.” Longtime admirers of Foreman’s work will see an intriguing adaptation of his unique theatrical style to the cinema. And for everyone else: Welcome to the extraordinary world of Richard Foreman.

An architect, a security chief, a parapsychologist and an exorcist face evil in a Barcelona skyscraper.

The 29-minute experimental film Christmas on Earth caused a sensation when it first screened in New York City in 1964. Its orgy scenes, double projections and overlapping images shattered artistic conventions and announced a powerful new voice in the city's underground film scene. All the more remarkable, that vision belonged to a teenager, 18-year-old Barbara Rubin. A Zelig of the '60s, she introduced Andy Warhol to the Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan to Kabbalah and bewitched Allen Ginsberg. The same unbridled creativity that inspired her to make films when women simply didn't, saw her breach yet another male domain, Orthodox Judaism, before her mysterious death at 35. Lifelong friend Jonas Mekas saved all her letters, creating a rich archive that filmmaker Chuck Smith carefully sculpts into this fascinating portrait of a nearly forgotten artist. An avante-garde maverick, a rebel in a man's world, Barbara Rubin regains her rightful place in film history.

Experimental documentary in which Foreman presents his way of looking at different issues.

A filmed play by Richard Foreman.

A young woman stands by a car while scenes from metropolitan life flash by.

Quite possibly Foreman’s strongest digital video, NOW YOU SEE IT NOW YOU DON’T brings together a variety of different elements, including excerpts from Foreman’s own public talks about his work, a 1984 sound recording of his French-language theatrical adaptation of Kathy Acker’s "My Life My Death by Pier Paolo Pasolini," text from Leo Charney’s book “Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity, and Drift”, and music from John Zorn and John Cage. These materials are integrated into a typically dense and confounding aural, linguistic, and visual web, one that’s in many ways like a filmic analogue of his theater work. But NOW YOU SEE IT NOW YOU DON’T is distinguished by the addition of various kinds of image processing, a liberal and eccentric use of onscreen text, and an uncharacteristically personal, reflective tone

Foreman spent the early months of 1979 rehearsing a play called Madness and Tranquility (My Head Was a Sledgehammer), which he abruptly cancelled very shortly before its scheduled opening. Film critic and longtime CalArts professor Berenice Reynaud documented those rehearsals and used the footage in this rarely screened essay film, which had long been considered lost. Miraculously, Anthology has recently rediscovered the original 16mm elements and has digitally restored the film for this occasion. A truly exciting find that presents the only known footage of an important, albeit lost, Foreman work.

"The whole film are non-art portraits of people in which they do what they want with this hat – and therefore, act or stand in front of my camera. It’s only love: therefore it can’t harm you". Joyce Wieland.

What to Wear is a raucous, bitingly funny post-rock opera from avant-garde theater icon Richard Foreman and celebrated composer Michael Gordon. In Foreman’s signature style, What to Wear is a surreal extravaganza of operatic tableaux come to disturbing, hallucinatory life. A pageant of seductiveness gone wrong — as everyone on stage turns less and less beautiful, something more ecstatic that beauty slowly reveals its awesome 21st-century face.

A "young woman who finds herself surrounded by the relics of Western culture" is the subject of Richard Foreman's formal tableaux. The narration centers on a young woman's struggle to find a relation between her body and her self as mediated by language. The text is a poetry of formal relations that carries personal and historical implications, including the desires of the woman paradoxically voiced by a male narrator. The title suggests the vivid virtuality of dreaming; scenes repeatedly refer to both reading and sleeping.

Foreman’s longtime friend Ken Jacobs situated himself in the audience of the legendary Ontological-Hysteric theater space at 491 Broadway to shoot this whiplash-inducing single-frame study of a dynamic play filled with frantic action, full frontal nudity, and so much more. Newly digitized from the camera roll discovered in Foreman’s archives.

An opera by John Zorn and Richard Foreman