Best of Spectacle 2025: INTERCAT

In 1969, Pola Chapelle founded INTERCAT: The First International Cat Film Festival, which began as a five-hour program of films about cats that played at New York City’s Elgin Theatre. Through 1976, INTERCAT reappeared intermittently and toured Boston, Philadelphia, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Sydney, and Winnipeg. Among the numerous feline flicks that screened at INTERCAT in those years were the kitten sequence from François Truffaut’s DAY FOR NIGHT (1973) and Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s collaboration made three years after MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON, titled THE PRIVATE LIFE OF A CAT (1946). In 2016, the festival was briefly revived at Bard College. 56 years after its original incarnation, Spectacle is cat-atonic with excitement to host the Film-Makers’ Cooperative to bring INTERCAT back to New York City.

INTERCAT’s appeal is immediate: a festival devoted entirely to films about cats is catnip for any cat lover. Moreover, with INTERCAT, Chapelle forecasted the ubiquity of cat images and videos in the digital age. Dubbed by Thought Catalog as the “unofficial mascot of the Internet,” cats are easily the most-viewed and shared domesticated animal on the net. From the widespread proliferation of cat memes and TikTok videos, to viral feline celebs like Grumpy Cat and Lil Bub, there’s no denying cats’ domination of visual media on the World Wide Web in the 21st century. This phenomenon has even been the subject of the book How to Make your Cat an Internet Celebrity: A Guide to Financial Freedom, the Museum of the Moving Image’s 2015 exhibition How Cats Took Over the Internet, and the annual Internet Cat Video Festival (of which INTERCAT is an obvious progenitor).

Program:

How to Draw a Cat
Dir. Pola Chapelle, 1973.
United States. 3 min. 16mm.

Fishes in Screaming Water
1969. United States.
6 min. 16mm.

Nightcats
Dir. Stan Brakhage, 1956.
United States. 8 min. 16mm.

Max
2002. United States.
4 min. 16mm.

Ophelia / The Cat Lady
Dir. Tom Chomont, 1969.
United States. 3 min. Digital.

My Cat Gets an Aura Reading
Dir. Peggy Ahwesh, 2011.
United States. 1 min. Digital.

Catfood
Dir. Joyce Wieland, 1968.
United States. 13 min. 16mm.

The White Cat
Dir. Mary Ann Spencer, 1969.
United States. 2 min. 16mm.

The Neighborhood Cat
Dir. Sarah Jane Lapp, 1999.
United States. 2 min. 16mm.

Meow, Meow
Dir. Yvonne Andersen, 1970.
United States. 7 min. 16mm.

INTERCATMISSION

Curly's Thanksgiving
Dir. Bill Morrison, 2020.
United States. 12 min. Digital.

If This Ain't Heaven
Dir. Roberta Cantow, 1984.
United States. 27 min. 16mm.

Presented on 16mm.

Co-programming and text co-written by Matt McKinzie and Robert Schneider (the Film-makers’ Cooperative). Special thanks to Roberta Cantow, Mackenzie Lukenbill, Will Hair, Stephanie Monohan, and Nate Dorr.

Originally screened in May 2025.