Speakeasy Cinema

Overview

Who says you can make a film festival out of just three films? But, on the other hand, who says you can’t? Presented as part of the Anode independent arts festival, Speakeasy Cinema celebrates the influence of the contrary and controversial on all forms of culture through a series of documentary films.

The first of Speakeasy’s selections will be Beautiful Losers: Making Something From Nothing. “Urban art” can be so hit and miss these days, so when Aaron Rose of New York’s iconic Alleged Gallery wanted to make a film about art and design in 1990s New York as he understood it, the first people he looked to were his friends. These include filmmaker Harmony Korine, skateboarder and artist Ed Templeton and his wife, photographer Deanna Templeton, graphic artist Mike Mills and other key figures in New York’s art and design world. Beautiful Losers shows us what art is to the people who make it, what it means to be a creative and genuinely “counterculture”, and the impact this can have on the rest of the world.

Next up is Obscene: A Portrait of Barney Rosset. After founding Grove Press in 1951, Rosset published Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Jean Genet, among others, and was integral in helping to distribute the works of the Beats; Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso et al. It is worth mentioning this first off, as the film focuses predominantly on Rosset’s crusade against censorship or, as his son rightly suggests, hypocrisy. This is a man who possessed a similar visionary genius to his greatest writers, and almost single-handedly restored an author’s right to shock a jaded public into awareness. If you’ve ever waffled on about creative integrity and the importance of free expression, you don’t know the extent of your argument until you know about Barney Rosset.

Speakeasy will finish with a screening of The Universe of Keith Haring. Directed by Christina Clausen, the film reflects on the life of influential pop artist Haring. True to its title, the film splits open Haring’s universe; his motivations, his success and failure and the stellar coincidence of being, as Haring says, “in New York at the right time”. That time being, of course, one that centred on Grace Jones, Madonna and other fiercely visual icons with whom Haring eventually worked. Interviews with Haring’s family and many acquaintances, famous and non, are interspersed with clips of Haring himself, affording some significant insights into what the man behind the radiant baby was really about.

These films will screen across two days and, if you’ve ever had an interest in art, books or creativity in general, this weekend could be one of the most informative and inspiring of your life.

Image: Keith Haring in 1987, Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.