MAKE A FACE (1971) with filmmaker Karen Sperling

MAKE A FACE (Karen Sperling, 1971, 90 min, DCP) - New digital transfer!

In New York in the fall of 1969, writer-producer-director Karen Sperling began shooting MAKE A FACE, a 35mm feature in which she plays the leading role of Nina, a young artist plagued by hallucinations of a handsome intruder and coming up against an unrelenting father figure. Filmed largely inside her own New York City apartment, MAKE A FACE is a defiantly dissociative psychodrama, in which a woman confronts intimations of exploitation and her own fears mirroring a backdrop of cultural collapse. Though Sperling grew up in the milieu of the movie business as a member of the Warner family, MAKE A FACE rejects classical Hollywood models of narrative cohesion and realism. Instead, the film makes boldly expressive use of production design, split-screens, and superimpositions to realize a subjective vision of cinema in which a character’s dreams, fantasies, and daily realities have equal expression and value. 

Released in 1971, MAKE A FACE appeared at major international film festivals and premiered at The Carnegie Hall Cinema in New York, where Sperling and the film were the subject of numerous profiles and reviews in the New York Times, Village Voice and international media. Advancing her vision of film as an expression of deeply subjective storytelling, Sperling independently wrote, produced and directed her landmark second film, THE WAITING ROOM (1973), with an all-woman crew. Her uncompromising commitment to her experiential filmic perspective as a woman artist met with resistance and indifference, experiences that informed her subsequent books and screenplays profiling unique women in American history.

Over the decades, the original 35mm prints and negatives were lost and discarded, leaving only video transfers and a single 16mm reduction print extant. Working with Karen Sperling, Block Cinema has created a new digital transfer of the last remaining film print, which will screen for the first time in five decades.

Filmmaker Karen Sperling in attendance for a post-screening conversation.

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