Ballroom Marfa
- 21 Mar
- 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
- Admission
- Free
Space Sightings
9 Mar – 25 May
Space Sightings
Seven Sundays of cosmic cinema
Curated by Vance Knowles, Ballroom Marfa Creative Director, and Ralph McKay, Ballroom Marfa Film Programmer
Free to all
6 PM at Crowley Theater
98 S Austin St
Marfa, TX
Ballroom Marfa’s exhibition Elemental Currents, on view March 7-June 8, expands with the film program Space Sightings. Over seven Sunday evenings at 6 PM new and classic films focused on outer, inner and cyber space will screen free at the Crowley Theater in Marfa, TX. Included will be a singular live performance by visiting artist Jeanne Liotta.
“Movies about Space pinpoint something about being distant, like Marfa. Let’s see it on the big screen at full volume.” —Ralph McKay, Ballroom Film Programmer
Schedule
EMPTY RIDER | 2025 | Switzerland/UK | Lawrence Lek | 15 minutes
Lawrence LEK (1982, Frankfurt) is a London-based Malaysian Chinese artist and filmmaker known for advancing the concept of Sinofuturism with immersive installations that explore existential dilemmas through the lens of science fiction. In EMPTY RIDER sentient self-driving car Vanguard-3181 stands trial for attempting to murder their parent company’s CEO.
FOR ALL MANKIND | 1989 | USA | Al Reinert | 80 minutes
Simply the most radical, dazzling work of cinema made about the earthshaking first landing on the moon in July 1969. Narrated in the drawling Texas accents of the early astronauts and covered in a blanket of sonic vibrations by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois the film features original NASA footage.
FLASH GORDON | 1980 | USA/UK/NL/Italy | Mike Hodges | 110 minutes
A Dino De Laurentiis production, made for 22 million Earth dollars, finds Emperor Ming (Max von Sydow) bored with life in the universe. He decides to pick on Earth by sending the moon spinning down toward the planet. Cheerfully pop and phony with music by Queen and a lot of energy it is totally devoid of the pseudo-meaningful baggage of the Force and Trekkie Power.
SPACE IS THE PLACE | 1974 | USA | John Coney | 85 minutes
A self-proclaimed alien from space on a mission to promote peace, and a pioneer of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra led the musical collective The Arkestra for forty soul-expanding years. When the Arkestra mothership lands in San Franscico it is just the moment when hippies, Oakland activists, psychedelia, funk and glam rock swirled together. It all comes to a head and just maybe the mystery of the Marfa Lights is solved.
PATH OF TOTALITY | JEANNE LIOTTA | Selected shorts & live performance
Midstream in Space Sightings the appropriately pivotal artist JEANNE LIOTTA revisits Marfa after two residencies at McDonald Observatory. For over three decades Liotta has made films, moving image installations, projector performances and other lens-based works. Operating at the lively intersection of art, science and natural philosophy her work has earned prestigious international awards and best-of lists. Images made under our Dark Skies will come home for the first time. The evening concludes with PATH OF TOTALITY, a live projector performance restaging the August 2017 solar eclipse and bringing the cosmic into the confines of a projection Space.
11 May 2025 | Sunday 6 PM | *encore matinee May 25 at 3 PM
WE ARE ALIENS | 2024 | Japan | Kenichi Ugana | 93 minutes
A rising star of Japanese genre film for ten years, the prolific Kenichi Ugana arrives with WE ARE ALIENS (2024) which is currently burning up international festivals. One day Seiya is calling strangers on the phone to tell them “It’s me, thank you” when a creature with emerald-blue fur, something he had never seen before, descends from the sky. This wise little furry, along with his companions, has come to exterminate the human race. A surprisingly sweet alien apocalypse movie with a subversive attitude that embraces otherness and strangeness. No to extermination!
IKARIE XB 1 | 1963 | Czechoslovakia | Jindřich Polák | 83 minutes
A stellar space epic came rushing in from behind the Iron Curtain in 1963. Pioneering and much-imitated, IKARIE XB 1 is one of the cornerstones of contemporary sci-fi cinema. This Czech gem predates STAR TREK and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. It was clearly an influence on both and remains one of the few sci-fi films of unsanctioned optimism.
25 May 2025 | Sunday 6 PM | *WE ARE ALIENS encore matinee at 3 PM
VISITORS – COMPLETE EDITION | 2023 | Japan | Kenichi Ugana | 61 minutes
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and the monsters are clearly having a blast. Zombie alien apocalypse is seldom this fun. A trio of friends have driven in search of their incommunicado bandmate only to find themselves in the middle of a demonic outbreak. Puerile, scrappy and infected with deadpan humor, this is about as far as you can get from arthouse horror. Boomboxes not bombs!