Film Love presents Big Screen 2: Return to Reason — Historic Psychedelia, Animation and Avant-Garde Films in Large Format at the Plaza Theatre
May 14 @ 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm
$20
In 2025, Film Love’s screening of artists’ films in 35mm was greeted with overwhelming audience response, selling out the Plaza Theatre. On May 14, 2026, Film Love founder Andy Ditzler and scholar of handmade cinema Gregory Zinman return with another evening of spectacular visions made manifest on the Plaza’s glorious big screen.
While much of cinema’s avant-garde is associated with “small-gauge” formats – 8mm and 16mm film, videocassettes, and phone cameras – there is a lesser known history of artists using 35mm and 70mm film and even IMAX. This will be an extremely rare opportunity to see these historic and contemporary large-format visions presented at full cinematic scale. This screening is unique to The Plaza Theatre and will be presented only once.
To source these films, the curators have scoured archives in the U.S., the Czech Republic, Poland, Canada, France, and New Zealand. Several will be projected in glorious 35mm film prints and even one in widescreen Cinemascope, alongside new 4k digital restorations of classic films. Highlights include:
• Historic films from the 1930s to the 1970s by masters of animation: Len Lye’s glorious Rainbow Dance, Norman McLaren’s Begone Dull Care (hand-drawn to the rhythms of Oscar Peterson’s lightning-fast jazz piano), and the memorable, camera-less post-psychedelia of Poland’s Julian Antonisz
• Contemporary works made with scientific cameras, or by applying substances directly to 70mm filmstrips or burying film negative underground overnight, show how artists have extended avant-garde film into the present
• Peter Tscherkassky’s virtuosic widescreen film Dream Work (For Man Ray) is paired with its 1923 inspiration, Return to Reason by the key 20th-century Dada artist Man Ray
• A new digital restoration of Broadway By Light, William Klein’s ecstatic study of the neon universe of 1950s Times Square – a work which Orson Welles called “the first film I’ve seen in which color was absolutely necessary”
Rainbow Dance (Len Lye, 1935, 3 min)
Adebar (Peter Kubelka, 1957, 2 min) projected in 35mm
Broadway by Light (William Klein, 1958, 12 minutes) new 4k digital restoration
Hardcore Committed Film (Ostry Film zaangażowany) (Julian Antonisz, 1979, 8 min)
Athyrium filix-femina (Kelly Egan, 2016, 5 min) projected in 35mm
Chevelle (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2012, 8 min)
Hra bublinek (Bubbles Game) (Karel Dodal and Irena Dodalová, 1936, 2 min)
Impressions of the Upper Atmosphere: double screen version positive/negative (José Antonio Sistiaga, 1989, 7 min)
I ♥ Neutrinos: You Cant See Them but They are Everywhere (Jennifer West , 2011, 1 min)
Le retour à la raison (Return to Reason) (Man Ray, 1923, 2 min) new 4k digital restoration
sound of a million insects, light of a thousand stars (Tomonari Nishikawa, 2014, 2 min)
Dream Work (for Man Ray) (Peter Tscherkassky, 2001, 11 min) projected in 35mm Cinemascope
1734 (Joel Schlemowitz, 1997, 2 min) projected in 35mm
Begone Dull Care (Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart, 1949, 7 min)
