Karen Sperling's MAKE A FACE (1971) - LA Restoration Premiere!

Co-Writer, Producer, Director, and Star Karen Sperling in Person!

In collaboration with Vidiots, 7th House presents the Los Angeles premiere of the newly restored debut feature from Karen Sperling, MAKE A FACE (1971). Co-written, directed, produced, and starring its filmmaker at a time when exceedingly few women were afforded such an opportunity, this singular and striking work that was all but lost for more than half a century is now rescued and ready to take its place as a major rediscovery of 1970s American independent cinema. Only 25 when she began the film, she came to underground filmmaking from an unlikely lineage: the granddaughter of Warner Bros. co-founder Harry Warner and daughter of producer Milton Sperling, Make A Face could not be further removed from classical Hollywood.

The filmmaker stars as Nina, a young Manhattan artist caught between the material pressures of money, property, an overbearing father, a deepening sense of isolation, and an increasingly unstable interior world. Alone in her apartment, an alluring stranger begins appearing without explanation, introducing a simmering sensual tension, while the unshakeable sense that she is being watched begins to permeate her surroundings. As fantasy, dreams, and waking life increasingly bleed together, the boundaries separating Nina’s inner and outer worlds steadily dissolve. An easy comparison for the film’s claustrophobic psychodrama would be Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, but Sperling follows her own, more elusive path, drawing on the radical theories of psychiatrist R. D. Laing to construct a world in which dreams, fantasy, and reality exist on equal footing.

Describing herself not as a storyteller but an “experiential expressionist,” Sperling continually searches for ways to render the simultaneous layers of consciousness onscreen. Handmade split-screens allow conversations, memories, fantasies, and visions to occupy the frame at once, while an ever-present radio carries news of political turmoil and war into Nina’s apartment, underscoring how the unrest of the exterior world can bleed into the interior. Shot largely inside her own apartment in the infamous Dakota, shadows and shifting light transform familiar domestic space into something unstable and unknowable.

Long unavailable after its original 35mm prints and negatives were lost or discarded, Make A Face survived through a single 16mm reduction print before its recent rediscovery and digital restoration. Following the screening, Sperling will appear in person for a conversation, joined by Michael Metzger, Academic Curator for Cinema and Media Arts at the Block Museum of Art, who spearheaded the restoration of both of her feature films—the latter of which, THE WAITING ROOM (1973), a hallucinatory exploration of love, marriage, gender, and female psychological experience credited as the first narrative feature made with an all-woman crew, will screen at Vidiots on Tuesday, September 15, continuing this collaborative presentation of Sperling’s vastly underseen work.

Dir. Karen Sperling, 1971, 90 mins, United States, English, Unrated, Digital.

Tickets: $10 (All Screenings Are In Person Only)

Please email events@prs.org or phone 323-663-2167 with any questions.