U P C O M I N G
Control stands apart from most music biopics because it refuses to turn Curtis into a simple icon or legend. Instead of building toward a triumphant performance or a tidy moral, the film lingers on the small spaces where Curtis’s life actually unfolded–small homes, rehearsal rooms, backstage hallways, and hospitals.
Kenneth Anger considered cinema not as storytelling but as an act of Magick in the tradition of Aleister Crowley’s “art and science of causing change in accordance with one’s will.” The film is not meant to explain itself. Its creator believed that meaning, like ritual, is experiential; it is something the viewer feels, not interprets.
Ondi Timoner has a singular talent for capturing lighting in a bottle. Her body of work is full of indelible portraits of figures who capture a moment in time, and often they are characters that no one else would have thought to follow, or could endure following.
It’s a miracle that someone like Wadleigh wound up in charge of the massive enterprise of Woodstock, and it endures because it is the work of someone with a romantic poet’s sensibility, rather than Hollywood or Madison Avenue.
The Hi-Desert Cultural Center is proud to present a special screening of ENO, the first-ever generative documentary film in a one-night-only event featuring an introduction by Orian Williams, one of the revolutionary film’s producers.
Elvis, the award-winning 2022 musical spectacle by master showman Baz Luhrmann, remains fresh and vital in 2025. Looking back at the criticism of the film, high praise as well as dim dismissal, everyone seems to have undersold the theme of the artist as chattel in the entertainment industry, which has only become more urgent in the two years since.
All films publicly presented through special licensing with SWANK Motion Pictures, Inc.