Cinema 16 at Starr Space really hit the spot this past Friday. It was a cozy refuge from the cold, a good deal ($7 entry included bottles of delicious Raderberger Pilsner) and a compact night of interesting film and appropriate musical accompaniment.

Things kicked off with one an abstract animation by American renaissance man Harry Smith, who painted and physically manipulated frames to create wonderful psychedelic films well before the age of psychedelia. Brooklyn’s Artanker Convoy accompanied the morphing colors and shapes with a fitting propulsive jam.

Next came Robert Enrico’s An Occurrence at Owlcreek Bridge, a Cannes-winning French film about a man during the American Civil War who imagines his triumphant escape during the moments before being hanged. Artanker Convoy hit the mark once again, providing great themes and shifts in sound to emphasize the film’s dramatic and aesthetic moments. (Interesting note: The film appeared on “The Twilight Zone” a couple years after it was released.)

Nights like this can easily become painfully long, regardless of the content’s quality, but, with the screening wrapping up around 10pm, it provided a brief but satisfying beginning to the weekend. Sadly, curator Molly Surno announced that Cinema 16 is taking off the month of December, so we’ll have to wait until 2009 to get more of this goodness.