An Evening with The Last Thing I Saw
Tuesday, March 18, 2025 at 7pm
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Presented by Nicolas Rapold
Light Industry hosts a double bill with one of our favorite film podcasts, The Last Thing I Saw, which features two works related to conversations with guests of the show.
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7pm
Fate, Fred Kelemen, 1994, digital projection, 79 mins
9pm
Elegant Beast, Yūzō Kawashima, 1962, digital projection, 96 mins
Filmed in the margins of grotty post-reunification Berlin, Fred Kelemen’s 1994 debut feature is a dual portrait taking place over the course of a dark night and a way-too-bright morning. Beginning with an urban fugue, its simmering long takes follow a Russian accordionist (Valerij Fedorenko) and then his estranged girlfriend (Sanja Spengler), at times bearing resemblance to the drifting denizens of Earth in Béla Tarr’s work. Kelemen shot Tarr’s The Turin Horse and The Man From London, but he hones a harsher edge that keeps pushing seedy romanticism into a theater of abjection and exploitation that’s closer to the 1990s wastelands of Sarunas Bartas. Though a precise technician of shadowy black-and-white photography, Kelemen puts his images here through the ringer by shooting on Hi-8 video and then transferring to 16mm. (Kelemen is discussed on an early episode of The Last Thing I Saw, introduced by Amy Taubin, who wrote early about his 1990s features.)
Also known as Graceful Brute, Yuzo Kawashima’s blistering 1962 satire likewise takes place over 24 hours but lives with a curdling family unit, in which traditional parents deal with the debts of their freewheeling son and daughter against a single-set backdrop of apparent modern luxury. But the fraudulence and hypocrisy run deeper and wider than expected in this steel-trap of venal relations, written with dark humor by Kaneto Shindo (who also directed Onibaba and scripted for Mizoguchi, Ichikawa, Kinoshita, Suzuki, and Yoshimura). Shindo’s genius for incisive drama pairs well with Japanese New Wave forerunner Kawashima, who died only a year after Elegant Beast’s release. (This selection is inspired by a conversation with Bruce Bennett about Devil’s Temple and Killer Whale, both written by Kaneto Shindo.)
- NR
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door. One ticket is good for both screenings.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 6:30pm, and again shortly before the second feature. No entry 10 minutes after the start of each screening.