UCLA AMIA Student Chapter Takeover! Reenactment
- This is a past program
This program is presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Part of the screening series Archive Treasures: UCLA AMIA Student Chapter Takeover!
In person: Introduction by UCLA AMIA Student Chapter Programmer Noah Brockman.
This program explores how reenactment exposes cinema’s inherent nature to simultaneously depict, reconstruct and reinterpret. In these films, our subjects perform their own stories, exploring the productive tensions between reality, art and representation on-screen.
Hats Off to Hollywood (1972)
Penelope Spheeris’ 1972 UCLA thesis film features Jennifer Michaels and Dana Reuben in Warholian docufiction. Fascinated by society’s degenerates, Spheeris employs loosely scripted reenactment as critique. Turning tricks, seducing trade and performing gender, Michaels and Reuben mock straight culture from its fringes. Michaels, an iconic trans actress who worked with Pat Rocco on Sex and the Single Gay (1970) and starred in Changes (1970), lends a particularly notable performance. The film was preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Academy Film Archive in 2012.
Director: Penelope Spheeris. With: Dana Reuben, Jennifer Michaels.
A Little Stiff (1991)
A Little Stiff doesn’t end where it begins so much as it ends where it’s conceived. In this precursor to Caveh Zahedi’s later autobiographical present-tense documentaries, the cast play themselves as they reenact roughly the same unrequited infatuation between Zahedi and McKim that led to the film’s own production. As Zahedi wanders around UCLA’s Arts building, feeds peanuts to squirrels with his friend Greg Watkins, and plunges himself further into a state of longing, we observe the mundanities and ecstatic moments of Zahedi’s spiral through intensely naturalistic performances. Shot on a shoestring budget, A Little Stiff feels like a mumblecore The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Directors: Greg Watkins, Caveh Zahedi. Screenwriters: Greg Watkins, Caveh Zahedi. With: Caveh Zahedi, Erin McKim, Greg Watkins.
The UCLA Film & Television Archive is a division of UCLA Library, and presents its public programs in the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer, among other venues. For more information about the Archive, visit cinema.ucla.edu.
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