BETH B
MARCH 10, 2023 - A Wide-Reaching Retrospective of the Downtown NYC Filmmaking Legend BETH B. Includes A Selection Of Shorts & Features Playing In Theater And On Metrograph AtHome. Beth B in attendance for select screenings and special guests. Tickets on sale: https://metrograph.com/category/bethb/
The Pioneering Work of the Legendary Artist and Filmmaker, BETH B, celebrated by The Museum of Modern Art. Beth B is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient. Her archives have been purchased by NYU Fales Library. MoMA website
LYDIA LUNCH: THE WAR IS NEVER OVER by Beth B is the first career-spanning documentary retrospective of Lydia Lunch’s confrontational, acerbic, and always electric artistry. As New York City’s preeminent No Wave icon from the late ’70s, Lunch has forged a lifetime of music and spoken word performance devoted to the utter right of any woman to indulge, seek pleasure, and to raise voice in a rage as loud as any man. The film frames Lunch’s work through the lens of the various philosophical themes that have obsessed her for years to enlighten and empower women to voice the unheard and to break the cycle of violence toward women throughout the world. Lydia Lunch is the psychosexual transgressive who revoked patriarchal expectations of what a female performer might mean while forging a vocabulary of rare emotional honesty, philosophy, and humor.
Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over includes interviews with Lydia Lunch and longtime collaborators and colleagues including Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth; performance artist Kembra Pfahler; Teenage Jesus bass player, Jim Sclavunos; Donita Sparks from L7; famed DJ and musician Nicolas Jaar; Art Critic Carlo McCormick; Filmmaker Richard Kern and a long list of other groundbreaking artists connected to Lunch’s past and present.
Howl! Happening is pleased to present Beth B’s Voyeur, an installation of video, photography and sculpture that explores the varied perceptions of the female and male gaze. The exhibition enlists the viewer's implicit participation with transgressive imagery and invites each person to examine their own boundaries and preconceptions regarding sexuality and gender. A new Beth B publication, NUDES, will be published by Howl! to coincide with the exhibition.
CALL HER APPLEBROOG is a poignant and intimate portrait of the renowned artist, Ida Applebroog, who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household with an immigrant father who only wanted to have sons; instead, there were three girls. It is a cathartic story of self-realization and the act of art-making as a lifesaving parachute. The film reveals Applebroog’s groundbreaking artwork that has been a sustained enquiry into the polemics of human relations, but more intimately, it is about her dramatic struggle to overcome adversity. Her story is one that Beth knows well—Ida is her mother.
EXPOSED profiles eight female and male artists who use their nakedness to transport us beyond the last sexual and social taboos.
These cutting edge performers -- operating on the far edge of burlesque – combine politics, satire, and physical comedy to question the very concept of "normal." Through them, we get to examine our own inhibitions. The film creates a unique perspective, taking the audience into the clubs and other hidden spaces where these artists perform.