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Play, download and edit the free video DOOMED LOVE (Andrew Horn, 1984).

DOOMED LOVE
dir. Andrew Horn, 1984
72 mins. United States.
In English.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14 – 7:30 PM w/actress Rosemary Moore for Q&A
(This event is $10.)
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 17 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 29 – MIDNIGHT

Made in piecemeal payments while Andrew Horn worked as a graphic artist in Koch-era Manhattan, DOOMED LOVE is a delectable hunk of sunken downtown treasure. Painter Bill Rice (SUBWAY RIDERS, THE VINEYARD) stars as Andre, an aging professor of romantic literature who decides, in the film’s doleful introductory passage, to commit suicide after losing the love of his life. Andre is tragicomically unsuccessful, but the attempt leads to a new acquaintance with a psychiatric nurse named Lois (Rosemary Moore), with whom he uncorks a kind of under-acknowledged romance of the soul. Whatever margins that once separated Andre’s work as an academic and his reasons for going on (or not) have completely dissolved; Rice’s monologues – scripted by the great playwright and longtime Horn collaborator Jim Neu – set a tone of deadpan monotony and piercing repetition.

“Life goes on, so to speak:” Horn’s vignettes from Andre and Lois’ – trapped in a state of paralyzing reverie, and newly married to Bob (Allen Frame), respectively – play against jawdropping 2-D backdrops mounted in the Lower East Side’s Millennium Film Workshop where DOOMED LOVE was filmed. Amy Sillman and Pamela Wilson’s muslin and cardboard “sets” make Horn’s film a dour-yet-sweet exercise in epic theatre buttressed by an sparkling minimalist score from Evan Lurie (of The Lounge Lizards), with original songs by Lenny Pickett. At every opportunity – but especially this month, commemorating our annual ANTI-VALENTINE’S program as well as celebrating Andy’s rich body of work – Spectacle is pleased to resuscitate this no-wave classic.

“DOOMED LOVE was my first feature film. It was made in the midst of what was then New Wave Cinema, but instead of the East Village I was taking my cues from Daniel Schmid and Werner Schroeder. I wanted to make an opera – without much knowledge of what opera was – and it became a musical. I wanted to make something mythic and only later discovered just how personal it was. I wanted it to be on a grand scale, which could only play out in a confined and artificial space. In those days we perversely wanted to alienate the audience and dare them to leave. In that I (thankfully) failed miserably.” – Andrew Horn

We were deeply saddened by the death this past August of our friend Andrew Horn (1952-2019), director of the longtime Spectacle classic DOOMED LOVE as well as the seminal 2004 documentary THE NOMI SONG, which Andy presented alongside DOOMED LOVE and his last completed work, WE ARE TWISTED FUCKING SISTER! when he last visited New York City just a year before. At that time, Andy was working on a documentary about artist Robert Wilson’s 1970s performance enclave known as the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds – of which he was a member, an experience which laid the groundwork for a dazzlingly rich career in the downtown scene over subsequent decades before he relocated to Berlin in 1989. Andy was relentless: beyond his exhaustively researched documentaries and Brechtian dramatic features, he was a dancer, a punctilious craftsman, a tenacious researcher, graphic designer and journalist. In the words of his longtime collaborator John Meaney, Andy had a fascination with kitsch and an admiration for Hollywood melodramas, with little interest in “realism”. A curious mixture of baroque sensibility and radical aesthetics marked his style. Andy’s love of ritual and artifice was used in his films as an acute reflection on art, and its illusions.

While Andy’s films reveal a droll and exacting mind, they’re also inseparable from a close circle of collaborators, including painters Amy Sillman and Pamela Wilson (who made the muslin backdrops of DOOMED LOVE), musicians Evan and John Lurie (of The Lounge Lizards), filmmakers Robyn Brentano and John Meaney, dancer-choreographers Kenneth King and Andrew deGroat, composer Michael Galasso (IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE) and songwriter Lenny Pickett (Tower of Power) as well as performance artist and playwright Jim Neu, who wrote DOOMED LOVE and the 1988 noir followup THE BIG BLUE. We’re thrilled to present both films as a memorial tribute, alongside a collection of newly unearthed short form works straddling Andy’s careers in black-box theatre, dance cinema and video art.

“You can say what you want about the past / I think that’s true / But, not to pay attention is not to be immune / I think that’s true / It may be finished / But it isn’t over…”

This retrospective is possible thanks to Hisami Kuroiwa, Chris Horn, Robyn Brentano, John Meaney, Cindy Banach and Carol Mullins. Special thanks to Cindy Banach (PALM Pictures) and Yoram Mandel (producer of THE BIG BLUE).

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