History as Nightmare: The 1960s
Curated by film critic/author J. Hoberman, this series highlights seminal films shaped by the culture of the 1960s, as discussed in his new book The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties.

Wild In the Streets (1968) 94min
Mon, Oct 27 at 4:30, 6:50*, 9:10pm
*Introduced by and booksigning with film critic/author J. Hoberman
Directed by Barry Shear
With Christopher Jones, Shelley Winter, Richard Pryor
Drive-in studio AIP imagined a Jim Morrison-like pop star president who puts everyone over 30 in psychedelic concentration camps. Released during the 1968 primary season, this insolent satire allegorizes everything from Yippie fantasies and Wallacite nightmares, to student uprisings, the McCarthy and Kennedy campaigns, and the chaos of the Democratic Convention.

Night of the Living Dead (1968) 96min
Mon, Nov 3 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:10pm
Directed by George Romero
With Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea
Social breakdown was never more luridly visualized than in this independent cheapster, shot in rural Pennsylvania during the spring of ‘68. Romero’s verité-style cannibal nightmare brought the Vietnam War home with a vengeance, offering the most literal possible image of America devouring itself—in a farmhouse besieged by ordinary Americans transformed into mindlessly marauding zombies.

Zabriskie Point (1970) 110min
Mon, Nov 10 at 7pm only!
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
With Mark Frechette, Daria Halprin, Rod Taylor
Invited by MGM, Antonioni went in search of America in the most anticipated (and reviled) of youthsploitation films. Filming in LA, Berkeley, and Death Valley, the maestro was accused of desecrating the RFK assassination site, fomenting a campus riot, and violating the Mann Act. And his star, chosen after 1300 hopefuls mobbed an open call at the Electric Circus on St. Marks Place, trumped his film performance by robbing a bank.

Joe (1970) 107min
Mon, Nov 17 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:10pm
Directed by John Avildsen
With Peter Boyle, Susan Sarandon
A middle-aged ad man kills his daughter's hippie boyfriend, then joins forces with Peter Boyle’s loudmouthed embodiment of Silent Majority resentment. Released two months after Kent State and a battle between pro- and anti-war demonstrators in Manhattan, this independently produced film was an immediate sensation. (Sneaking into a 2am showing at a Broadway theater, Boyle was scared to find people “screaming at the screen.”)

High Plains Drifter (1973) 105min
Mon, Nov 24 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:10pm
Directed by Clint Eastwood
With Clint Eastwood
Appointed by President Nixon to the National Council on the Arts, “Dirty Harry” directed himself as a laconic avenger in a desolate western town as dangerous as any inner city. The spectacle of a quasi-divine retribution visited against a gutless, guilty frontier town that hires—or, rather, drafts—men to do its dirty work, was released even as the last 25,000 American troops and 600 POWs returned from Vietnam.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) 122min
Mon, Dec 1 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:10pm
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
With James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan
Sam Peckinpah claimed to be brooding over Nixon's crimes when he shot his melancholic, studio-butchered masterpiece. Originally an attempt to rework the Billy the Kid scenario in rock 'n roll terms, this is the most elegiac of hippie westerns. The counter culture and the Righteous Outlaw are both, as Dylan's song has it, “Knockin' on Heaven's Door.”