Tuesday, September 6, 2016 at 7:30pm
Eric Saks's Forevermore: Biography of a Leach Lord
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn
Introduced by Mike S. Ryan
Forevermore: Biography of a Leach Lord, Eric Saks, 1989, 16mm, 82 mins
"Influenced by faux-docs like Buñuel's Las Hurdes and Jim McBride's David Holzman’s Diary, as well as James Benning's American Dreams, Eric Saks's eco-paranoid docudiary film first had a theatrical run as a double bill with Craig Baldwin's Tribulation 99 at the Collective for Living Cinema, which also marked its last screening in New York City. Saks is an artist who has long moved between the worlds of narrative and non-narrative filmmaking, finding dramatic inspiration from the grey area between truth and fiction. Forevermore was made in a time before the commercial independent film business as we know it today was established, and when a low-budget feature was still an oddity. It was a fertile era for truly experimental narratives, before the indie spirit was commodified, a moment when alternative film form was still flourishing downtown in theaters like the Collective, Anthology, and Millennium Film Workshop." - MSR
"A highly distinctive pseudodocumentary by Eric Saks, an environmentalist based in Los Angeles. At once novelistic and poetic, this achronological collage of diary entries between the 1940s and 1990s by a fictional toxic-waste dumper named Isaac Hudak—the different stages of his life are played by three actors, including Saks—creates a haunting portrait of an alienated drifter’s existence that comprises the underside of our national heritage. Behind the dry recitation of ecological facts in the narration, there is a powerful overall sense of the poetics of waste (a register that recalls Thomas Pynchon), with writers as diverse as E.M. Cioran and Peter Handke used to flesh out some of the diary entries. Highly original in its form, its subject, its funereal tone, and its ghostly sensibility, this is a remarkable and memorable first feature, full of haunting ideas and eerie aftereffects." - Jonathan Rosenbaum
Mike S. Ryan is the producer behind such films as Rick Alverson's The Comedy, Phil Morrison's Junebug, Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy and Meek's Cutoff, and Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse, among many others.
Tickets - $8, available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm.