The Film Society of Lincoln Center to host
An Evening with Tom McCarthy

The author will introduce and discuss
Johan Grimonprez’s Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y and Antony Balch and
William S. Burroughs’s Towers Open Fire

New York, NY (January 12, 2015) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center will host An Evening with Tom McCarthy on Wednesday, February 25 at 7:00PM at the Walter Reade Theater. On the occasion of the publication of his latest novel, Satin Island, McCarthy will introduce and discuss a double bill of Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), Johan Grimonprez’s essay film on the history of airplane hijackings, and Antony Balch and William S. Burroughs’s seminal collage film Towers Open Fire (1963). Tickets will go on sale Friday, February 6, visit filmlinc.com for more information.

Tom McCarthy says of Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y and Towers Open Fire: “Both these films fascinate me. I’ve been lucky enough to know and work with the director of one of them; of the other’s I’ve been a fan since as long as I can remember. Key landmarks in the history of a collage aesthetic (mutating at exponentially increasing speed and by definition self-consuming) running from Situationist cinema through MTV and on to YouTube, they navigate a hybrid zone formed from the overlay of essay and fiction, anthropology and poetry and politics. They understand that media is itself a site of struggle, and that all art either incubates or keeps at bay (or both) a type of violence. Most fascinating of all, they send the writer, as a cultural agent, down a path whose trajectory runs parallel with that of the terrorist, eyes madly fixed on the infinity-horizon where these two lines meet.”

As the author of some of the most acclaimed and intellectually provocative books of recent years, McCarthy bridges the worlds of literature, art, and cinema as few others do today, blurring the distinctions between conceptual art, philosophy, and the avant-garde novel.

McCarthy’s work has been translated into more than 20 languages. Remainder, which deals with questions of trauma and repetition, won the 2008 Believer Book Award and is currently being adapted for cinema. His third, C, which explores the relationship between melancholia and technological media, was a finalist for the 2010 Booker Prize. McCarthy is also author of the 2006 nonfiction book Tintin and the Secret of Literature, an exploration of the themes and patterns of Hergé’s comic books; of the novel Men in Space, set in a Central Europe rapidly disintegrating after the collapse of communism; and of numerous essays that have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, the London Review of Books, Harper’s, and Artforum. In addition, he is founder and General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi-fictitious avant-garde network of writers, philosophers, and artists whose work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Palais de Tokyo, Paris and Tate Britain. He is also the writer of Johan Grimonprez’s 2009 film Double Take, in which a fictitious version of Alfred Hitchcock encounters his double during the making of The Birds. McCarthy’s new novel, Satin Island, published in February 2015, concerns a corporate ethnographer compiling a “Great Report” on the contemporary moment.In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction by Yale University.

Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y
Johan Grimonprez, Belgium, 1997, digital projection, 68m
Archival footage of aircraft takeovers and passages from Don DeLillo’s Mao II commingle to form a dialogue between a writer and a terrorist in this provocative comment on image saturation and the media as the ultimate hijacker.

Screening with:

Towers Open Fire
Antony Balch, UK, 1963, 35mm, 10m
Written by William S. Burroughs in the style of his Dadaist cut-up novels and edited in like fashion, Towers Open Fire presents a collage of chemical and visual hallucinogens to the tune of Burroughs’s own croaking ruminations.
Wednesday, February 25 at 7:00PM
Tom McCarthy will introduce and then participate in a post-screening Q&A.

Special thanks to the British Council for travel support.

FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER
Founded in 1969 to celebrate American and international cinema, the Film Society of Lincoln Center works to recognize established and emerging filmmakers, support important new work, and to enhance the awareness, accessibility, and understanding of the moving image. The Film Society produces the renowned New York Film Festival, a curated selection of the year’s most significant new film work, and presents or collaborates on other annual New York City festivals including Dance on Camera, Film Comment Selects, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, NewFest, New York African Film Festival, New York Asian Film Festival, New York Jewish Film Festival, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema and Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. In addition to publishing the award-winning Film Comment magazine, the Film Society recognizes an artist's unique achievement in film with the prestigious Chaplin Award, whose 2015 recipient is Robert Redford. The Film Society’s state-of-the-art Walter Reade Theater and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, located at Lincoln Center, provide a home for year-round programs and the New York City film community.

The Film Society receives generous, year-round support from Royal Bank of Canada, Jaeger-LeCoultre, American Airlines, The New York Times, HBO, Stella Artois, The Kobal Collection, Variety, Trump International Hotel and Tower, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

For more information, visit www.filmlinc.com, follow @filmlinc on Twitter, and download the FREE Film Society app, now available for iOS (iPhone and iPad) and Android devices.

For Media specific inquiries, please contact:
Film Society of Lincoln Center:
John Wildman, (212) 875-5419
[email protected]

David Ninh, (212) 875-5423
[email protected]