A startlingly assured feature debut from director Kane Parsons, Backrooms bends the liminal spaces that have haunted the internet for years into a horror film that's as mesmerizing as it is terrifying.

Breathing new life into silent cinema, The Silent Light—Michael Formanski (guitar, electronics) and Matt Hardy (drums)—crafts live scores inspired by black metal, doom metal, and experimental sound, reframing classic films through overwhelming sonic intensity.

TOPOS presents the duo’s live soundtrack to Japanese director Teinosuke Kinugasa’s 1926 silent masterpiece A Page of Madness. An unsettling story of a family torn apart by violence and mental illness, Kinugasa’s feverish and visually radical film—renowned for its superimpositions, stark lighting, close-ups, quick pans, distorted perspectives, and dreamlike sequences—remains one of the defining works of avant-garde silent cinema.

Unlike many silent films, surviving prints of A Page of Madness contain no intertitles, and contemporary audiences no longer experience the live benshi narration that originally accompanied screenings in 1926. That absence opens a space for sound itself to take on a narrative role. The Silent Light’s vigorous and muscular score operates not as accompaniment, but as a destabilizing and distinctly contemporary psychological force—moving alongside the film like a spectral presence haunting both the onscreen world and the theater itself.

As image and sound collide in parallel dissonance, subjective and objective realities begin to unravel. What emerges is both brutal and deeply sensitive: A disquieting and exhilarating meditation on madness, memory, and perception.

Join us before the performance for a reception in Evelyn's café starting at 5PM.

Commissioned by The Warburg Institute in London, filmmaker, writer, broadcaster, and musician Edward George’s Black Atlas explores the “Image of the Black” archive—a collection of over 30,000 images documenting representations of people of African descent from antiquity through the civil rights era. The American premiere of Black Atlas is presented in partnership with The Sanctuary for Independent Media (Troy, NY) and RPI Arts Department’s iEAR Presents.

Drawing from the archive, George creates a new film that reanimates historical imagery through narration, sound, and montage. Accompanied by an evocative score by Seymour Wright and Crystabel Efemena Riley, Black Atlas unfolds as a meditation on time, place, and presence—considering art as a medium of transcendence, a technology of power, and an affirmation of a humanist, anti-racist project.

In revisiting and recontextualizing these images, the film approaches the archive as both a site of cultural memory and a tool for speculative thinking: What might it mean to encounter the archive not as a fixed record of the past, but as a living structure through which histories can be reimagined?

The screening will be followed by a conversation between George and author, scholar, and NYU professor Fred Moten.

From Academy Award®-nominated director Robert Stone, a New York Times Critics Pick documentary. In this meditative, intergalactic biopic, we follow Gentry Lee, Chief Engineer for Planetary Exploration at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and sci-fi writer, on his journey through space and on Earth. From the Viking and Voyager missions to co-authoring the future with Arthur C. Clarke, Lee’s life has been spent with his head in the stars and his feet on the ground. The octogenarian Starman reflects on decades of space exploration alongside friends like Carl Sagan.

Following the screening, Director Robert Stone will sit down for a live Q&A moderated by Dr. William Gibbons, School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.   

Reception to follow with a selection of bites and refreshments. Seats are limited. RSVP required. 

As part of the lively experimental music and performance downtown scene of the 80’s, Ericka Beckman has made acclaimed works across Super-8mm, 16mm, and expanded cinema formats since the 1980’s. Engaging live-action choreographed sequences, as well as handcrafted layered animation, and face paced soundtrack, Beckman transforms the cultural norms communicated through common-place material such as fairytales and games.

Beckman is highly revered by contemporaneous peers and collaborators. She has influenced the generations that follow her in numerous ways, especially in  relationship to what she describes as “the performance of the image”.

This screening and discussion will draw on Beckman’s longstanding exploration of how physical action, and our memory of it, constructs cultural images and influences both our behavior and perception of reality.