Charles Atlas From An Island Summer and Hail the New Puritan CCA 28 September, 2016
CCA
Wed 28 September 2016
8pm, £3 + £1 booking fee, Cinema
All ages
Book online / 0141 352 4900

This two-part screening dedicated to American video artist Charles Atlas focusses on his collaboration with Karole Armitage and Michael Clark, two befriended postmodern dancers, who shared an affiliation with (post-)punk culture.
From An Island Summer
Dir. Charles Atlas 1983-84 13:04 min US
From an Island Summer is part of what Charles Atlas at that time conceived of as “time capsules”. Shot on Coney Island, in the streets of Times Square and a studio on lower Broadway in “guerilla style”, this video offers not just a quasi-documentary of dancer Karole Armitage, the so called “punk princess of the downtown scene” in New York; it also turns editing into a choreography itself, combined with samba rhythms and punk-inspired music.
Hail the New Puritan
Dir. Charles Atlas 1985-86 84:47 min UK
“Just exaggerate who you are”, was what Charles Atlas told everyone who appeared in this video dedicated to the “enfant terrible” in the 1980s dance world, Michael Clark. Produced for Channel 4’s series of art documentaries, this soon turned into something else – an anti-documentary, as Atlas put it, where everything is fake. Hail the New Puritan fictitiously portrays one day in the life of Clark, his dance rehearsals as well as private encounters, and thereby draws the viewer deep into London’s nightlife and subculture of that time, with appearances of now cult-figures like Leigh Bowery and music by Glenn Branca, The Fall, Bruce Gilbert and Jeffrey Hinton.
The screening will be introduced by Berlin based art historian and writer Fiona McGovern.
Centre for Contemporary Arts
350 Sauchiehall Street
Glasgow G2 3JD
This section: Cinema, What's On Glasgow West End: cinema, clubs, theatre, music, events, festivals, community and more
Related Pages
- Scotland’s first Stained Glass museum to be opened in lasting tribute to the works of Alf Webster
- Unveiling Nelson Mandela Statue in Glasgow
- Sleepy Hollow Screening at Arlington Baths
- Water Here, Water There
- Turn A Different Corner at Cottiers
- Giant Bubble Show at Cottiers
- Music Night with Freedom From Torture and H4TH
- Woodlands Anti-Racist Film Club – Dreamers (2025)
- The Old Oak, Screening Maryhill Burgh Halls
- “Murder, murder, polis, three stairs up!” An Evening in Taggart’s Glasgow
- Take 2: Flushed Away at GFT
- Carlton Jug Band – Avant Garde
- Author Talk With Ian Rankin
- Caroline Walker In Conversation at The Hunterian
- Anti-Racist Community Library – Woodlands Community Black History Month 2026
- CRER Black History Walking Tour – Black History Month October 2026
- Black History Month October 2026
- Specialist Tour | Black History Month: African Women, Myth and Material Memory
- Best Shot: How to Get Published with Sheila Wakefield
- Rip it Up at GFT
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.