Saturday, February 25, 2023 at 7:30pm
Henri Plaat's Fashion from New York + John McGreevy's R.D. Laing's Glasgow
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Introduced by Luke Fowler
Fashion from New York, Henri Plaat, 1980, digital projection, 8 mins
R.D. Laing’s Glasgow, John McGreevy, 1979, 16mm, 50 mins
The artist Luke Fowler visits New York this week for the American premiere of his new film, Being in a Place: A Portrait of Margaret Tait, screening as part of MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight. While he’s in town he’ll be stopping by Light Industry to present his personal 16mm print of R.D. Laing’s Glasgow. The film, produced by the CBC as part of a series of city portraits, is a fascinating look at an urban environment in the midst of a dramatic redevelopment. As Laing ambles across the “Paris of the North,” the viewer is offered a chance to tour Glasgow’s tenement blocks, take in the atavistic rituals of the football stadium, admire the harmonies of a Charles Rennie Mackintosh design, and visit with the poet Hugh MacDiarmid. The study is inflected throughout with the perspective of our guide, who by this point had become an icon of the New Left for his radical ideas about the medicalization of mental illness. Laing himself has also been a subject of sustained interest to Fowler, whose 2011 film All Divided Selves is an extraordinary collage of the psychiatrist’s numerous media appearances.
The Glasgow documentary is here paired with a film by Henri Plaat, whose work (freshly restored by the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam) is a recent favorite of Fowler’s. Fashion from New York proceeds as a kind of late city symphony, a montage organized around the second movement of Beethoven’s Fourth that contrasts striking angles of Gotham’s architecture with voluptuous, and slightly unreal, interior tableaux. It’s as if Manhatta had been remade by Jack Smith.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.