From the late 1950s through the mid-1980s, many workaday directors tasked with exposing film for the workplace and classrooms moonlit in cemeteries, bayous, and basements lensing brilliant genre pieces and prurient trash for drive-ins and grindhouses. Archivist and programmer Jon Dieringer will present on some of the best known examples, including George Romero and Herk Harvey, along with more obscure figures, such as the Satantic sexploitation filmmaker who made piston-pumping films for oil companies; a duo from Detroit who parlayed an independently made anti-drug PSA into an opportunity to make a gory biker revenge flick; and more. We’ll consider how quasi-documentary tropes and regional myth were appropriated within lurid, fantastic, and terrifying narratives; and reciprocally, how wry bits of the macabre livened up training and educational films. Dieringer will also discuss adapting his research into a series at Anthology Film Archives.
Jon Dieringer is a writer, film programmer, and media art conservator. He’s the founder of Screen Slate, a resource for listings and commentary of repertory, microcinema, and gallery screenings and exhibitions in New York City. At media arts nonprofit Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), Dieringer oversees the preservation video art and experimental films. And as a programmer, he has worked most prolifically at daily Brooklyn microcinema Spectacle and additionally curated programs and series at 92YTribeca, Anthology Film Archives, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, The Lightbox Film Center, and the Museum of Arts and Design. Many of these artist-focused series have focused on correspondences between archives and obsolete or overlooked media, including horror-themed series “Industrial Terror” and “The Medium is the Massacre.” He’s also one of the regular rotating hosts of Alamo Brooklyn’s Terror Tuesday/Weird Wednesday screenings.
