UCLA AMIA Student Chapter Takeover! Reenactment

Free admission. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.

In person: Introduction by UCLA AMIA Student Chapter Programmer Noah Brockman.

This program explores how reenactment exposes cinema’s inherent nature to simultaneously depict, reconstruct and reinterpret. In these films, our subjects perform their own stories, exploring the productive tensions between reality, art and representation on-screen.

Programmed by Noah Brockman.

Screening 1 of 2

Hats Off to Hollywood

Year: 1972
Country: U.S.
Language: English
Runtime: 22 min.
16mm. Color.

Penelope Spheeris’ 1972 UCLA thesis film features Jennifer Michaels and Dana Reuben in Warholian docufiction. Fascinated by society’s degenerates, Spheeris employs loosely scripted reenactment as critique. Turning tricks, seducing trade and performing gender, Michaels and Reuben mock straight culture from its fringes. Michaels, an iconic trans actress who worked with Pat Rocco on Sex and the Single Gay (1970) and starred in Changes(opens in a new tab)(opens in a new tab) (1970), lends a particularly notable performance. The film was preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Academy Film Archive in 2012.—Wilde Davis

Director: Penelope Spheeris. With: Dana Reuben, Jennifer Michaels.

Screening 2 of 2

A Little Stiff

Year: 1991
Country: U.S.
Language: English
Runtime: 86 min.
Digital. B&W.

A Little Stiff doesn’t end where it begins so much as it ends where it’s conceived. In this precursor to Caveh Zahedi’s later autobiographical present-tense documentaries, the cast play themselves as they reenact roughly the same unrequited infatuation between Zahedi and McKim that led to the film’s own production. As Zahedi wanders around UCLA’s Arts building, feeds peanuts to squirrels with his friend Greg Watkins, and plunges himself further into a state of longing, we observe the mundanities and ecstatic moments of Zahedi’s spiral through intensely naturalistic performances. Shot on a shoestring budget, A Little Stiff feels like a mumblecore The Sorrows of Young Werther.—Noah Brockman

Directors: Greg Watkins, Caveh Zahedi. Screenwriters: Greg Watkins, Caveh Zahedi. With: Caveh Zahedi, Erin McKim, Greg Watkins.

DCP courtesy of the Sundance Collection at the UCLA Film & Television Archive.