Wednesday, April 9 @ 7:30 PM / NEIU — The Auditorium at NEIU — 3701 W Bryn Mawr Ave
Tickets: $10 at the door
SPRING NIGHT SUMMER NIGHT
Directed by J. L. Anderson • 1967
Long known simply as the co-author (with Donald Richie) of the seminal 1959 survey The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, Joseph L. Anderson had a brief, exhilarating, and heartbreaking career in filmmaking, too. His first and only feature, Spring Night Summer Night, was made while he was teaching at the Ohio University in Athens, where the availability of the Ohio Bobcats football team’s 16mm cameras and processing equipment had birthed an accidental film department. Anderson began making experiments with his students, culminating in this feature, shot with community theater actors and an all-volunteer student crew in the summer of 1965. (Former student Franklin L. Miller served as co-writer, co-producer, and co-editor alongside Anderson.) Inspired by Ermano Olmi’s I fidanzati and other European art films, the crew applied a lyrical, observational style to potentially lurid material. In the vanishing light of a hollowed-out coal town called Canaan, there’s nothing much for young folks to do but curse, carouse, amble around, and hurl themselves at one another. Trapped in a dead-end marriage, miner’s son Carl (Ted Heimerdinger) lusts after Jessie (Larue Hall), who may or may not be his half-sister. After an ill-fated tryst, Carl splits for Columbus, leaving behind a pregnant Jessie. But before long, Carl is back in town, impelled by desires that he and Jessie dare not speak. Despite the support of documentary filmmaker and MoMA curator Willard Van Dyke, Spring Night Summer Night failed to find a distributor worthy of its artistry. Released under the drive-in-friendly title of Miss Jessica Is Pregnant by exploitation maven Joseph Brenner, Anderson’s film all but disappeared. When the film first resurfaced in 2005 on a dodgy DVD, Rob Nelson celebrated it in the Village Voice as “like a slow swig of Blatz on a dusty road – and maybe the missing link between Shadows and The Last Picture Show.” (KW)
82 min • Triskele, Ltd. • 35mm courtesy of the byNWR Collection at the Academy Film Archive
NEXT UP: THE DRAGON PAINTER on Sunday, April 13 at Music Box