At the end of the 1960s, the Argentine artist Leandro Katz took part of the Theatre of the Ridiculous company, an eccentric group connected to the New York queer underground. Between 1970 and 1976, he took photographs, assisted with lighting, and created experimental works on film. Today, from his dimly lit apartment in Buenos Aires, Katz revisits his materials: images of the deceased, photographic records, slides, negatives, films and video. This film essay moves between archives, testimonies, and specters of the past that interrogate the present, interweaving materials to approach, at least in brief flashes, that mythical past and unfold questions about time, art, sexuality, death, and cinema.
Country
ArgentinaYear
2025Length
88'
Category
DocumentaryPremiere
Italian
Screenplay
Fermín Eloy AcostaCinematography
Gustavo SchiaffinoEditing
Manuel EmbalseMusic
Catriel NievasSound
Luciana FoglioProduction
Ramiro Pavón, Pablo Ingercher, Fermín Eloy AcostaDistribution
Compañía de cine – Paulina PortelaSynopsis
Biography
Fermín Eloy Acosta is a screenwriter, writer and director. He directed the film Implantación (2016), alongside Sol Bolloqui and Lucía Salas. In 2023, he participated in the Berlinale Talent Campus Buenos Aires. He has received the Alec Oxenford Foundation Scholarship and the National Arts Fund Grant. In 2019, he won the Bienal de Arte Joven with the novel Bajo lluvia, relámpago o trueno. In 2024, he won the Hebe Uhart Novel Prize for Las visiones venenosas. Museum of the Night is his first solo film.
Statement
Museum of the Night combines archives, photographs, film, and video. I have a special attraction to the past and to people who serve as the last witnesses of a disappearing era or of worlds that no longer exist, like that queer scene in late 1960s New York that I recount in this film. I strongly believe in the power to gather fragments of history, to work archaeologically and patiently with those materials and archives, and to weave together a testimony that is not only Leandro Katz’s but also that of a large group of artists. That is why Museo de la noche is, above all, a complex research project. Personally, for those of us who were trained in cinema, the American experimental film movement of the 1960s (Jonas Mekas, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs)—the excessive and irreverent cinema of the sixties and seventies—functioned as a parallel school for ways of filming outside academic norms on one hand, and on the other, as a way of understanding audiovisual work as a way of life.
— Fermín Eloy Acosta
Archival materials
Photographs, films and video from Leandro Katz’s personal archive; Charles Ludlam’s diary and pictures of the Theater of the Ridiculous; Fales Library at New York University; Billy Rose Theater Division of the New York Public Library.
Screenings
