A big screen moment for rarely seen experimental films

Film Love returns to the Plaza for a program of groundbreaking avant-garde shorts seldom seen on theater screens.

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After taking a break from curating post-pandemic, Film Love programmer Andy Ditzler was pleasantly surprised when he received a call from the Plaza Atlanta offering him the opportunity to present again. A few years away and in a new era, he wasn’t sure what was possible. Along with colleague Gregory Zinman, though, he’s been able to return with more of his patented rare screenings.

Film Love’s The Big Screen: Classic Psychedelia, Animation, & Avant-Garde, screening on May 29, features 10 short works, including hand-painted projects, a 115-year-old scientific film and one Cinemascope screening. It’s the first of four events, held on the last Thursday of the month.

The evening features two films by Stan Brakhage, one of which is 1987’s The Dante Quartet, a six-minute film with no volume, hand-painted on IMAX, 70 mm and 35 mm film. “It’s an explosion of color and movement on the screen,” says Ditzler. 1909’s Spirochaeta Pallida (Agent de la Syphilis), directed by Jean Comandon, is a four-minute scientific film shot through a microscope. Ditzler calls it “an incredibly important moment in the history of the moving image.”

Other selections include 1985’s Calculated Movement, an experimental CGI film simulating computer graphics from that era, directed by Larry Cuba (who also worked on Star Wars), and 1969’s Our Lady of the Sphere, a collage animation piece featuring cutouts of Victorian-era imagery, created by Lawrence Jordan.

Film Love has long been about showcasing hard-to-find work. Ditzler’s first program in 2003 was Robert Frank’s Pull My Daisy, a beat film from the late ’50s starring Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Plotwise, it was mostly the artists romping around a loft in New York, being themselves. “That was an example of a film you could not see,” Ditzler says. He reached out, was able to get a print and decided to make it an event. 150 enthused patrons showed up. “I am not a projectionist and was so beside myself but excited. The response kept me going for a long time. I have been able to do this for 20 years because there is an audience.”

The Film Love program has been Ditzler’s education in film. He’s been going to movies his whole life, and curating the series has helped him get more acquainted with arthouse cinema, the French New Wave, Scorsese, queer cinema, avant-garde fare and documentaries. “I am an audience member as much as anybody,” he says.

He assumes that most attendees have not seen the films in each lineup, but he does ask at the beginning to see who is in the audience. His talk backs are informative and often fascinating. “A fair amount (of those attending) are just curious and not aware that this kind of film even exists. That is a great opportunity to explain that it does, and there are movies that do not conform to the narrative of the feature-length film.”

Ditzler met Zinman when he came to Atlanta in 2012.  He was happy to see someone else showing the kind of work he was passionate about — experimental and avant-garde. “We’ve been able to talk to each other with ease and enjoyment for a long time, and it was natural for us to work together,” says Ditzler. “Coming back from a hiatus, it’s great to do this as a collaboration.”

Zinman is an associate professor of film and media at Emory University, working largely in experimental fare and doing frequent curatorial work. He has an ongoing program on the Beltline called Off the Wall that uses an eight-story building across from Ponce City Market as a screen. It’s the largest movie screen in the Southeast.

When he first attended Film Love, he knew he was home.  “Nerds find nerds,” he says. “I was coming from a pretty crowded experimental media space in Brooklyn to Atlanta, where there were fewer programming initiatives. There was not much of an infrastructure for showing or developing media art, and Andy was the leading light with his Film Love program. I was immediately struck by the quality and care of his programming.”

Zinman had the idea for this program some time, realizing that he had taught most of the films and screened some of them. Yet he doesn’t recall any of them projected in their native formats. “These films are in their own way spectacular and benefit from being seen on the big screen. Some are very well known, but many have never been screened in Atlanta. When Andy and I were talking about how you get people excited about this kind of programming, you have to bring them something that is going to make an impression. I think these films will dazzle.” 

As part of the series, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică’s Videograms of a Revolution about Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu screens June 26, and D. A. Pennebaker’s 1965 documentary Dont Look Back, chronicling Bob Dylan’s 1965 acoustic tour of England, bows on July 31. The film has been voted one of history’s 10 greatest documentary films in a Sight and Sound poll. The fourth and final installment of Ditzler’s series will be announced later this summer.

Ditzler feels the movies Film Love screens are intense — and audiences are likely to be impacted in different ways. Yet that is part of why he does this. “One of the best parts of a screening is being in the room when a film is happening and seeing how (audience members) react and then hearing from them afterwards. That is the part that builds community. We share this event, and that is the only time this group of people are ever going to have this experience together.”   

Where & When

Film Love’s The Big Screen: Classic Psychedelia, Animation & Avant-Garde happens at 7:30 p.m. May 29. $20. The Plaza Theatre, 1049 Ponce De Leon Ave. NE. 470-410-1939. plazaatlanta.com.

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Jim Farmer is the recipient of the 2022 National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Award for Best Theatre Feature and a nominee for Online Journalist of the Year. A member of five national critics’ organizations, he covers theater and film for ArtsATL. A graduate of the University of Georgia, he has written about the arts for 30-plus years. Jim is the festival director of Out on Film, Atlanta’s LGBTQ film festival, and lives in Avondale Estates with his husband, Craig.