Dennis Cooper Carte Blanche
On the occasion of the premiere of their new feature film, Permanent Green Light, we invited Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley to program two films they had on their minds while making it.
Acclaimed writer and artist Dennis Cooper will join the Film Society’s Director of Programming Dennis Lim for an extended onstage discussion exploring his singular body of work, his rich relationship with cinema, and his new feature film, the tense and metaphysical Permanent Green Light (co-directed by artist Zac Farley), which screens on Wednesday, September 5.
Dennis Cooper
2018|
France|
91 minutes|
French with English subtitles
In Cooper and Farley’s tense new feature set in the French suburbs, a young man wishes to blow himself up in public for no reason other than the sheer spectacle of the act.
Philippe Grandrieux
2008|
France|
90 minutes|
French with English subtitles
In Grandrieux’s fable-like tale, a family ekes out a primitive existence deep in the middle of a forest, until one day a mysterious stranger arrives. Blurry, desaturated landscape photography evokes Gerhard Richter and Casper David Friedrich.
James Benning
1986|
USA|
92 minutes
For his career-long excavation of the American national character, James Benning found two of his most striking case studies in Bernadette Protti and Ed Gein, a pair of murderers whose crimes took place 30 years and more than half the country apart.
On the occasion of the premiere of their new feature film, Permanent Green Light, we invited Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley to program two films they had on their minds while making it. The works they selected share their own film’s aesthetic concerns and eerie atmosphere of political indeterminacy: Philippe Grandrieux’s transfixing Un lac and James Benning’s anti-psychological take on “true crime,” Landscape Suicide. Cooper and Farley will introduce both films, elaborating on the connections between these haunting works and Permanent Green Light.
